Last Month in Review: October 2011

As I sit here on this, the 29th day of October, to compile my list of books read (or listened to) this month, there's a wild storm a-raging outside my window.  The light has almost failed outside and we've had three inches of snow in just as many hours.  It may prove to be dangerous, too, since most of the leaves are still on the trees and we've already had two branches break in our yard--hopefully none will break over the driveway or our power lines! Since moving to New England I've grown accustomed to (but very weary of) these 5-month-long winters of ours, but this is unusual even for here.

I've got a total of 16 books read this time 'round, and not a single work of online fanfiction, which is a bit out of character for me as of late.  Four books of non-fiction, which raises my monthly average by a factor of two, five works of YA, which is also higher than usual, and two audio books, one of which doubles as a non-fiction read.

1. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov.  This book was very hard for me to read but I relished writing the review, found here.

2. Dead to You by Lisa McMann.  This is one of my YA books, read in ARC form.  I'll at least do a blurb/shelftalker for it, but probably won't do a full review.

3. Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim by David Sedaris.  Ahh, David Sedaris.  This was my multi-tasking nonfic/audio book of the month.  He's such a good reader!

4. Matched by Allie Condie.  This has been reviewed everywhere, so I probably won't do one for myself. First book in a YA trilogy that I bought & read on vacation.

5. Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller.  I also bought and read this on vacation.  Good  memoir, but I preferred her recent release that I reviewed here.

6. The Possessed by Elif Batuman.  Another work of non-fiction, which I bought & read on vacation and reviewed here.

7. What Would Mr. Darcy Do by Abigail Reynolds.  That's right--a published work of fanfiction that picks up in Pride & Prejudice at the point where Darcy comes about Miss Elizabeth in the inn at Lambton, and after she confesses what has happened to Lydia, he takes her in his arms, where they are caught out by the Gardiners.  Good times ensue.  Won't review it, but it was a fun airplane read.

8. The Lola Quartet by Emily St. John Mandel.  I'm a BIG fan of her work and this, her third novel, did not disappoint.  Review forthcoming, as is the book itself.

9. Crossed by Ally Condie.  The sequel to Matched, and while I probably will not review it, I will say that once I got over the dual narrative (I hate multi-person narrators), I found it among the better of the "Book Twos" that I've read.  More like The Empire Strikes Back (my favorite of the original three Star Wars films) than Catching Fire (the weak book two of The Hunger Games franchise).

10. The Midwife of Venice by Robert Rich.  Reviewed here.

11. The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt by Caroline Preston.  Reviewed here.

12. Fool by Christopher Moore.  This was the second audio book of the month, and while I thought that the reader was simply outstanding, I wasn't entirely enamored with the story.  Comic and graphically crude retelling of Shakespeare's King Lear, with good doses of MacBeth thrown in.

13. The Name of the Star by Maureen Johnson.  Another YA, reviewed here.  This one pretty much scared the pants off of me.

14. Glow by Amy Kathleen Ryan.  Another YA, which I might review.

15. The Taste of Salt by Martha Southgate.  I met Martha at NEIBA at the Algonquin author dinner and then she came to my bookstore this past week.  She's nifty!

I am deeply smitten with this writer (Verghese)

16.  The Tennis Partner by Abraham Verghese.  Verghese has written my favorite (and I think the best) book of this century so far -- Cutting for Stone.  This book, his second memoir, is about his time living in El Paso, working at Texas Tech teaching hospital, and the friendship he developed with the young man he was mentoring at the time--and the frustrations when that young doctor started shooting up again after a year and half of sobriety.  This is definitely the best book I've read this month and Verghese convinced me once again that his prose towers over that of the so-called grand masters of American letters. 

Literary Blog Hop: Is Literature a Sentimental Journey?

This week's Literary Blog Hop, sponsored by The Blue Bookcase, asks us to discuss our thoughts on sentimentality in literature.  When is emotion in literature effective and when is it superfluous?  Use examples.  

Good question.  And by good question, I mostly mean hard to answer. Ingrid's answer on The Blue Bookcase was really more of an essay, comparing (perhaps unfairly) Lady Chatterly's Lover and Twilight.  In my book, one of those is a work of literature and one is a piece of pulp fiction, and thus I have very different sets of expectations for them.  

I generally prefer books that make me feel and think, as opposed to just one or the other, and I do not think that a book has to be written for an adult audience to do both.  I also have to become emotionally engaged with at least one character to come away loving a book as opposed to just respecting it. And anytime an author is able to call upon my empathy and make me emotionally engage with a character who shares nothing in common with me, it's a good thing.  Part of the importance of literature is to be able to live somebody else's experience.  But when the emotions are out there on the surface, all the time, and make me feel like I am a teenager again--when every feeling, whether it is love or betrayal or jealousy or joy, is heightened to the  point of making me exhausted just reading it, it loses its effect.  Same thing when an author resorts to emotional manipulation of a reader. 

So what examples shall I use?  How about Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese, which is one of my favorite books of the last five years, Miss New India by Bharati Mukherjee, which I recently reviewed here, and Catfish Alley by Lynne Bryant, which I recently reviewed here.  The Verghese book is a masterpiece, spanning decades and continents, world events and the particulars of one family, in a way that was heartbreaking, energizing, and inspiring by turn.  The main characters were of different cultural, political, educational, and religious backgrounds but not once did I consider myself as other, separate from them. With the Mukherjee book, however, with nearly identical differences (how's that for oxymoron?) separating me from the main character, there were few moments when I felt moved at all.  And yet with Bryant's book, with whose main character I share a similarity of class, gender, race, and even place, I didn't so much over-identify with the woman as feel like the story was emotionally manipulating me to get a response. 

I can see now why Ingrid felt moved to write an essay on this subject rather than just a quick blog post!  There's no way that I am going to take the time to finish a more complete defense of my position--not when I could be outside reading in the hammock--so I will just have to let it rest here.  

Literary Blog Hop: Under-appreciated books

This week's Literary Blog Hop question, sponsored by The Blue Bookcase, is this: What literary title (fiction or nonfiction) do you love that has been under-appreciated? ... What quiet masterpiece do you want more readers to know?

For recent publications, I'm an ardent proselytizer advocate for Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese, which has everything a serious reader could want: it's epic in size and scope, beautifully written, and full of grand tragedy & passion.  All set against the background of important world events, it's the story of one family's struggles with betrayal and abandonment and trust, especially between brothers.  It's also peppered throughout with a good bit of medical philosophy & ethics.  It's well-paced, fully developed, and moves from India to Ethiopia to the United States and back again.  It is almost the perfect novel, and for my money it's the best English-language novel published in the last five years, possibly the last decade. 


 I have a long list of 20th century-or-earlier publications that I don't feel have received the attention they deserve, whether they're books overshadowed by an author's more famous title, or whether the author himself or herself is mostly overlooked. Among them are Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, Jim Harrison's The Legends of the Fall, L. M. Montgomery's Emily series, Ron Hansen's The Chess Garden, Eudora Welty's One Writer's Beginnings, David James Duncan's The River Why, Cormac McCarthy's Outer Dark, Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye.  I really could go on, but since I need to head to work, I think I'll end it there.  


What about y'all?  

It's a black Friday, Book Blogger Hop!

This week's book hop from Crazy-for-Books is a discussion of what is your favorite book cover.  As a bookseller, I'm inundated with dust jacket images on a daily basis.  And I don't trust people who say they have never bought a book for its cover.  That, my friends, is bulls#it.  It may not be the only, or even the primary, reason you've bought a book.  But unless you only ever walk into a bookstore with a specific title in mind, and then you walk out again having bought that book and only that book, you've bought a book for its cover.  It would be impossible to choose a single book jacket that is my favorite, so I'll launch into a mini-discussion of jacket art instead.

Because I'm a bookseller and thus am usually reading books months before their publication date, over half of the books I read have a non-pictorial cover, or "plain wraps" as we say in the book collecting bidness.  Some galleys (paperback uncorrected proof copies of the forthcoming book) have the finished art printed on their wraps, though, and some are a work in progress, so it's always interesting to see how the art direction has changed on any given title.   One example from a couple of years ago is the imcomparable Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese.  This extraordinary novel had me in thrall from chapter one. It's a rare author who can plumb the horrors of civil war and the operating theatre one moment, the vagaries of the human heart the next moment, all with equal deftness, but Verghese rises to the challenge with grace. With surgical precision he limns his characters, treating even their flaws with compassion and a true generosity of spirit, adroitly weaving medical techniques and philosophy into this sweeping story of family & fatherland, love & loyaly.  It is, without a doubt, one of the best books I've read in the last decade.

The copy I read from 2008 was bound in plain salmon-colored wraps--truly a galley copy.  When I raved about it to our publisher's sales rep (Ann Kingman from Knopf), she sent more copies to our store for other readers, but they were the Advanced Reading Copy with decorated wraps that mimicked the final jacket art on the hardcover.  Compare the early 2009 hardcover jacket art with the 2010 paperback art below, left and right, respectively:

     

It will be difficult to discuss the appropriateness of each cover without talking about the plots and story arcs of this book, but I trust that it's not a spoiler when I saw that much of this book takes place in Ethiopia and that much of the drama involves a set of twins.  I love the cloth dust jacket art.  To me, it speaks of something epic and grand, with the boys and their dog silhouetted against a sky that is, at least to me, ambiguous.  Is it sunrise or sunset?  Or could it be something else entirely?  Could those fiery colors in the sky and the scorched black of the ground symbolize something else instead?  (Okay, so I actually don't like the term "symbolize" but the jacket art reminds me of the first time I saw the movie Gone With the Wind. I was quite young, not quite preteen, and watching the movie with my mom, probably on Turner Classics.  In the scene where Atlanta is supposed to be burning, to my young eyes it looked more like a sunset at first.).  So this jacket art simultaneously suggests beginnings and endings, hope and destruction, and in doing so, it is completely fitting for this novel.

Now, I've never been to Ethiopia, and while there's nothing in the book to suggest the lushness of this forested meadow on the paperback edition, I have it on good authority (Mr. Verghese himself, among others) that the country is not without verdure.  But I'm still puzzled why the dramatic change in cover art.  Sales were fairly robust nationwide for a first novel in hardcover, so it's not like the marketing department had to reinvent the book as a palate cleanser so that customers would think is an all-new, never-before-seen novel.  The solitary figure works well enough, I suppose, for the twin who eventually leaves Ethiopia for New York City, but again, I'm puzzled with the green "world between the worlds" aspect (cf: C. S. Lewis's The Magician's Nephew) of the paperback cover. 

For me, though I think both covers are attractive, the hands-down winner for the better, more expressive jacket is the hardcover one.  For those of you reading, which one do you think is better, and why?

Some debut novels I recently read & enjoyed

A Thread of Sky by Deanna Fei. Lin Yulan, a revolutionary leader of the Chinese feminist movement, reluctantly returns to her homeland after years of self-imposed exile for a guided tour of "the new China" with her two daughters and three granddaughters in an effort for the nearly estranged women to reconnect. Each woman arrives in China with her own agenda, and each discovers that some shameful secrets are simply too heavy to bear alone. This powerful, intricately woven first novel is a meditation on grief & recovery, strength & vulnerability, and the urgency to leave one's mark on the world. A very promising debut.

The author graduated from Amherst College, just down the road from our bookstore, and she very graciously stopped by our store one day to sign stock while she was visiting her alma mater. The sales rep had emailed her the above blurb that I wrote for their publicity department and she was very appreciative--there are so many first time writers whose works get overlooked that she seemd grateful for our store's efforts to promote her book. I really look forward to her future work. Penguin published this book new in hardcover in the spring and I hope by the time it's released in paper that it will find the audience it deserves! It would be a very good book group selection.

Beneath the Lion's Gaze by Maaze Mengiste is a debut novel set in the writer's homeland of Ethiopia during the 1974 military overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie. As famine, chaos, and suspicion sweep the nation, one family becomes wrapped up in chaos of its own. When the matriarch dies, father becomes pitted against sons, brother against brother, and husband against wife, each deciding where his or her loyalties lie, both within the family and in the context of the political turmoil exploding around them. This moving book takes the intimate story of one family's struggle to survive a new regime and places it against the backdrop of important world events.

This book puts me very much in mind of my favorite novel of the last several years--Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese. And not just because it's the story of one man's personal loss echoed in the devastations of his country--there are some absolutely beautiful phrases and startling insights about this famine-stricken nation, "a desolate valley, the sun too bright for shadows of death." Published by Norton in January 2010.

Smitten. Or, How the Mountain Went to Muhammad

The title about sums it up.  I met a literary hero of mine today, the man who wrote the best book out of the last couple hundred or so that I've read.  I am in deep smit, as a friend of mine says.  My colleagues, Joan and Emily, and I traveled with about 300 books to Boston today so that we could get them signed for our First Editions Club (FEC).  Abraham Verghese wrote an amazing first novel (he's written two previous memoirs), but beg and plead as we did, we weren't able to schedule a reading at our store.  His book is a big to-do this season and every major bookstore was clamoring for him.  Being off the beaten Boston-NYC-Washington, DC path as we are, we didn't really stand a chance.

Well, if Muhammad can't come to the mountain, the mountain must find a way to go to Muhammad.  Hence packing up the car and making the roadtrip today, meeting up with two sales reps from Random House, and getting Commonwealth Hotel security to help us maneuver two flatbeds' worth of books up to Verghese's hotel room.  The day was just about perfect as far as I'm concerned: a few hours of booktalk, a nice lunch, a visit to a really nice bookstore for the first time (the Wellesley Booksmith), and, of course, going all fangirl over meeting Mr. Verghese.  He was as lovely as can be, gracious and engaging, soft-spokenly charming.  In a word, delightful.  He also happened to mention that somebody at Knopf had shown him my earlier blog post in which I gushed about his book, and he even joked that he had taken extra care getting a close shave this morning before meeting his fan.  

You know how every once in a while you read a book that you want to tell everybody about? Cutting for Stone is like that for me.  It's really everything that a great epic novel should be, with incredibly sharp observations on the human condition, realistic and complicated characters and their inter-personal relationships, all set against the wider background of important world events, with nuanced social commentary as a constant undercurrent.  I loved it.  And I have the feeling that it's a book I may turn to again & again.  

 Here's the photo of us after the books were signed.  L-R: me, Verghese, Emily RM, Joan.  Hotel security has just come in to help us get the 30 boxes back down to the loading dock.