Literary Blog Hop: What one book would be your solace in the midst of war?

The literary blog hop is sponsored by the good folks at The Blue Bookcase, and this week's question (from Mel U) is: If you were going off to war (or some other similarly horrific situation) and could only take one book with you, which literary book would you take and why?

My first instinct for this question is to go with The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien, which ties with Pride and Prejudice as the book I've read most often. It's got several things going for it, not least of which is length, and when you can only bring one book, it might as well be a big 'un. It offers history, philosophy, fellowship, songs, and laughter. Meditations on war and meditations on peace, and how war isn't really over even when the final battle is. It also doesn't neglect to mention how hard war is on the people left behind by those at front. Moreover, the characters have become my friends through the years, and in the darkness of war, who wouldn't want to be surrounded by comrades?

Some might object to this answer on grounds of its lack of literary merit, this being the literary blog hop after all. And if we're talking strictly the beauty of the prose, I might be inclined to agree. But I'm not sure there's a more monumental work of literature from the 20th century (certainly not in the English language, and I think it could go toe-to-toe with any work from any other language), considering its scope, its staying power, and the sheer amount of scholarship that went into creating multiple languages and mythologies and histories for Middle Earth. Frankly, I find it all a bit staggering. Plus it's thick enough to probably stop a bullet and thus save my life. So there.

Who wrote the book of love? A mini book review for Valentine's Day

I don't usually identify myself as a reader of romance novels. Every now and again I feel the urge to read a little smut, which my Harry Potter fanfiction provides in spades, but romance?  Not really.  I don't mind it as a by-product in my novels, but it's rarely what I look for as the driving force in my fiction.  Thus, I was a little surprised how swept up I was with this forthcoming book from Jojo Moyes (NB: this title has already been published in the UK and quite probably Australia, but it goes on sale for American audiences in July of this year).  People who regularly read the genre may recognize tropes that I am not familiar with, so I don't want to say this book was fresh and new, necessarily, but it was a lot of fun for me.  If you're looking for a book that celebrates love, both the grand passions and the steady, every day sort of love, this would be a good one for you.  Happy Valentine's Day!  (Or as we say in my house, Happy Valium Time's Day!)

The Last Letter from Your Lover: When journalist Ellie stumbles over a love letter in her newspaper's archives in a last-ditch attempt to save her job, she uncovers a romantic mystery for the ages.  The impassioned and articulate letter, addressed merely to "Jennifer" and signed "B," asking her to leave her husband for him, inspires Ellie to research just who this pair of lovers might be--and might even give her insight into her own doomed affair with a married man.  Meanwhile, the dual narrative introduces Jennifer, who wakes up in a London hospital in 1960 after a car crash--she is the sole survivor, but she has no memory of the events that brought her there.  This delightful, compulsively readable novel of old-fashioned grand passions, star-crossed lovers, and even of love that sneaks up on you, offers up elements of both Romeo & Juliet and An Affair to Remember, topped with its own unique dollop of modern sensibilities and style.

Book Blogger Hop: What Are You Reading Now?

This week's question at the Book Blogger Hop, sponsored each week by Crazy For Books, what book(s) are you currently reading and why?  

I'm in various stages of a few different books right now.  I'm about halfway through an ARC of The Borrower, by Rebecca Makkai, which I'm reading for fun.  It's the story of a librarian who rescues/liberates/kidnaps (depending on your point of view) a child whose parents are trying to pray the gayness right out of him and who only let him read books that have "the breath of God."  It's a fun book that my Penguin sales rep, Karl Krueger, sent to me a few weeks ago that I'm just now getting around to.  This book will be published in June.  

And as I mentioned in a previous post this week, I'm still working on the ARC of The Tiger's Wife, which I'm mostly reading for work.  Our store is interested in booking her for an author reading once her book debuts in March. 

I also just started reading the new/forthcoming memoir from Andre Dubus III called Townie.  I wasn't such a big fan of The Garden of Last Days, but I think his book The House of Sand and Fog comes about as close to Greek tragedy as modern literature can get.  His new book proves him to be a wordsmith of the highest order, and just in the first chapter he's left me suckerpunched.  The book doesn't come out for another month, so I'm reading the ARC from David Goldberg, my Norton sales rep.  Dubus will be reading at my store next month, and I have to say, if you've never had the pleasure of hearing him speak, do yourself a favor and attend one of his readings while he's on tour.  He's handsome and engaging, yes, but he is also so erudite that he peppers his talks with so many literary quotations that he's a walking-talking Bartlett's.  And what's more, he's got that intense charisma so that when he's signing your book and speaking just to you, he absolutely makes you believe that in all the universe there's nothing he would rather be doing at that moment.  

Book Reviews in Brief: Where She Went and The Weird Sisters

 Where She Went by Gayle Forman. First of all, let me preface this mini-review by saying that if you're looking for a book with the emotional weight of the If I Stay, you'll be disappointed.  This is a book about relationships and self-identity and we're getting Adam's 20-something, world-weary point of view instead of sensitive, stuck-in-between-the-worlds narration from Mia.  It's different, yes.  But I, for one, think that in this case, different is also good.  

In this sequel to the brilliant but devastating If I Stay, Forman explores tragedy’s capacity to destroy relationships.  Despite Adam’s and Mia’s rising fame as a rock star and cellist, respectively, both of them are still reeling three years later from the aftereffects of the metaphysical link they shared during Mia’s coma.  Ultimately, this sequel is a thoughtful narrative on identity and the thin line between self-preservation and self-destruction in the face of catastrophic events.

I got my advanced reading copy of Where She Went from Marika McCoola, the children's buyer our store, who probably got it from her sales rep at Penguin.  The book will be published in hardcover in March 2011.  

 The Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown. Reeling from their modestly-to-spectacularly- failed lives, Rosalind, Bianca, and Cordelia all move back home to live with their parents in the small college town in which they were raised, but each sister claims that she is there to take care of her mother, who has just been diagnosed with cancer. Getting beyond the petty sibling rivalries of their youth and not throttling their father, a renowned Shakespearean scholar who dishes out advice only in the words of the Bard, has never been so trying!  Eventually, though, all of the dark secrets seep out of the sisters one by one, and in laying bare their deepest fears, they discover a newfound loyalty and respect born out of their differences. The perfect book for anyone whose life is blessed (or cursed, depending on your own point of view) with a sister! 

Karl Krueger, my sales rep from Penguin, gave me this advance reading copy last fall and it has recently been published in hardcover.  While the book itself is enjoyable and fairly light (despite the mother's cancer), the collective first person point of view narration of the sisters was mildly irksome and not executed particularly well.  Still, Shakespeare fans will enjoy spotting the hundreds of allusions and quotations from the Bard's work.  Not sure that I qualify as a Shakespeare fan per se, but I did take a dedicated course on his work in both college and grad school, and it was fun spotting the obvious and the not-so-obvious ones.  

Literary Blog Hop: Where would you rather be right now?

I'm very pleased that my friend Robyn's question was this week's jumping-off point for book discussion.  Sponsored by The Blue Bookcase each week, today's topic is:

What setting (time or place) from a book or story would you most like to visit? Eudora Welty said that, "Being shown how to locate, to place, any account is what does most toward making us believe it...," so in what location would you most like to hang out?  

Since Welty is a favorite writer of mine and from my adoptive state of Mississippi, I thought this would be easy to answer, but I'm afraid it's not.  As a person with white skin, I could drop into many places and times and still have a relatively privileged experience--less so than a white man, certainly, but still.  Lots of people romanticize various periods of the past, but I'm not sure I'd want to visit any time period (at least not for very long) where I was still thought of as another person's chattel (or where anybody could be considered someone else's chattel, for that matter).  I'd love to visit Pasternak's Russia, Wharton's Italy, Welty's Mississippi, Tolkien's Middle Earth, Montgomery's Prince Edward Island, Austen's English countryside, Rowling's Hogwarts, Elizabeth Peters's Egypt, Alexander McCall Smith's Botswana, Bill Bryson's Australia, and so many more places.

But tonight, in the midst of a nasty snowstorm, I'm going to cut through all of the socio-economic and political ramifications of place and say that where I'd most like to be right now is on a sailboat with Ann Vanderhoof and her husband as they meander through the Caribbean.  They're a couple from Toronto who traded in their fast-paced lives to sail from Canada down to Trinidad and back.  Twice.  Their two memoirs/cookbooks track their experience and I heartily recommend them to anybody who wants to feel the warm tradewinds on her face and scent the jasmine and nutmeg on the evening air.  They're exactly where I'd like to be right now!!!  What's more, unlike most travel writers who just stick to the glossy brochure version of these mostly third-world islands, they get off the beaten path, beyond the tourist hotels and the Photoshopped beaches, to see how the other half lives.  They make friends with the locals, learning their food and their recipes and the culture.  They get down & dirty cleaning conch shells with Grenadian fishermen; they clamber over hill and dale in the Dominican Republic to catch goats (who graze on rosemary and are thus more delicious than goats who live in town) to put into a stew; they "shuffle and whine" at a Trinidadian Carnival, getting drenched in beer and sweat and possibly other bodily fluids.  If you are an armchair traveler and want to experience the Caribbean, you couldn't do better than to pick up one of these books!

Book Reviews in Brief: The Matchmaker of Perigord and Clara & Mr. Tiffany

Oh, the weather outside is frightful, but book reviews are so delightful!  Here are two mini reviews from books I've recently read.

The Matchmaker of Perigord by Julia Stuart. I've rarely encountered a novel that was as charming and fable-like as this one.  Set in the tiny French village of Amour-Sur-Belle, whose inhabitants can only charitably be described as kooky, this is the story of Guillaume, the barber-turned-matchmaker, who rather haplessly tries to bring love to Amour. If you're a fan of Chocolat and an admirer of the diversity found in even the smallest hamlets around the world but that still retain the unique flavor of their region, then this is the perfect novel for you.  


It's not as polished or ambitious as her newer book, The Tower, the Zoo, and the Tortoise, which was one of my favorite books of 2010, but it's still a good read if you enjoy that sense of whimsy.  My sales rep from Harper, Anne DeCourcey, sent me a finished copy of this backlist title at my request. 


Clara and Mr. Tiffany by Susan Vreeland. Vreeland does it again, taking a female character whom art history has relegated to a minor role and creating a wholly believable and full life for her.  Here we have Clara Driscoll, who creates beautiful and innovative glass designs for Louis Comfort Tiffany in fin de siecle New York.  I found the art process behind the making of the stained glass pieces to be endlessly fascinating!  The period detail, as well as the increasing interest in unionized labor and workers’ rights, added to my enjoyment, too.  This is a fairly light read with just enough historical substance to give it a bit of heft.  


This book was published by Random House in January, but I read it in ARC form a few months ago when my sales rep, Michael Kindness, gave me a copy.  

Last Month in Review: January 2011

I'm going to take a page from Nick Hornby's articles from The Believer and start making a list of the books I've read in any given month. I can't quite list all of the books I've received from the publisher or bought on my own 'cause that would just take more time than I'm willing to give.  I get books every day in the mail. Some of them I keep, some of them I pass on to others (if you ever want to be a recipient of these free ARCs, let me know and we can work something out). I got about 100 free books at Winter Institute alone last month.  So I'll just list the books that I read.  I used to keep a list every year of the books I'd read, but the last list I could find was from 2002, where I read 113 books.  Back then I didn't include novel-length works of fanfiction or audio books, but I plan to include them this year. 

Books read in January 2011

Open City by Teju Cole (reviewed here)

Where She Went by Gayle Forman (YA novel; I may be one of the very few readers who won't trash it in my review to come)

The Last Letter from Your Lover by Jojo Moyes (Light & fluffy & fun, but I probably won't review it)

Miss New India by Bharati Mukherjee (review to come; also qualifies for the South India Challenge that I signed up for!)

 Big Girl Small by Rachel DeWoskin (Amazing! Review to come)

Silver Sparrow by Tayari Jones (Loved it!  Review to come)

My American Unhappiness (very interesting, review to come)

What There Is To Say, We Have Said: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and William Maxwell, edited by Suzanne Marrs (excellent stuff, review to come)

Clarity by Kim Harrington (a YA novel I read for work.  Probably won't review it.)

The Matchmaker of Perigord by Julia Stuart (charming.  mini review probably forthcoming)

The Three Stages of Amazement by Carol Edgarian (very good. review forthcoming)

Eleven books.  Not bad.  But considering I had four days of travel that month and I get can get a lot of reading done on airplanes, it should have been more. 

Teaser Tuesdays: The Tiger's Wife

This is the first time that I've participated in the Teaser Tuesday meme, sponsored by Should Be Reading each week.  Usually by the time I get home from work on Tuesdays, eat dinner, clean up, head upstairs and get on my laptop, it's too late to think about blogging.  But today's blizzard is a mixed blessing; work closed early, and now I'm home early enough (and with enough energy!) to participate.

Today's tease comes from a forthcoming book from Random House called The Tiger's Wife by debut novelist Tea Obreht, whom I got to meet recently at Winter Institute.  The book releases in early March and is getting lots of buzz, mostly because young Tea was recently named to The New Yorker's 20 Under 40 list.  From the opening paragraph on p. 7:

"The forty days of the soul begin on the morning after death. That first night, before its forty days begin, the soul lies still against sweated-on pillows and watches the living fold the hands and close the eyes, choke the room with smoke and silence to keep the new soul from the doors and the windows and the cracks in the floor so that it does not run out of the house like a river.  The living know that, at daybreak, the soul will leave them and make its way to the places of its past...and sometimes this journey will carry it so far for so long that it will forget to come back. " 

NB: Usually when I do a Google Image search for a dust jacket image, it's the first thing that pops up in a search.  Not this time.  First several pages' worth were images of Tiger Woods's ex-wife. I guess it's a sad fact of life that so many more people care about her than about this wondrous new literary novel!

Book Blogger Hop: Most Anticipated Book of 2011

I have been debating whether to answer this week's Book Blogger Hop question, sponsored by Crazy for Books: what book are you most looking forward to seeing published in 2011?  Why are you anticipating that book?

As a bookseller, and more particularly as a buyer at my particular bookstore, I have access to a lot of pre-pub information that the general public doesn't have, but even so, I don't know most of the books being pubbed later than mid-summer or so.  I only work about 5-6 months ahead, so I don't know at this point what is coming down the pike for the fall, when most publishers release their heaviest hitters.  So on the one hand, it's kind of hard to say what I'm most anticipating when I only know the books from the first half of the year--it seems so unfair to eliminate the fall list from consideration!

On the other hand, I started reading 2011 books back in August and September of 2010, so while I *was* anticipating them, I can hardly say that I am still anticipating them after having read them.

And if I had a third hand, I'd probably just say that I should answer the damn question in the spirit it was meant and not sit here and agonize over my answer all day.  It's not like world peace is riding on my correct response here.  So the Anticipation Award goes to...

Ann Patchett is a beautiful writer, in that she is both a writer who is beautiful and someone who writes beautifully.  I'm not quite a completist when it comes to her work (I skipped Taft), but I've read the remainder of her novels, her memoir, her commencement address, and several magazine articles.  She is intelligent and worldly and fiercely loyal and deeply compassionate (particularly towards dogs), and she brings all of these things to bear in her writing. If this seems like a somewhat personal evaluation of her, I suppose it is.  I first met Patchett when I was a bookseller at Lemuria in Jackson, MS, and my boss had asked me to read The Magician's Assistant to see if it would be a good selection for the store's first edition club.  I did, and it was, and I got to spend a lovely afternoon in her company.  Our paths crossed a few times over the years I worked at that store, and later on, I fell in love with a man who has been her longtime friend.   

State of Wonder is slated for a June 2011 publication from Harper Collins, and I happen to be roughly three-quarters of the way through my advance reading copy.  In a word, it's stupendous.  I said it before about one of her novels, and I'll say it again: it hits the literary trifecta of gorgeous prose, compelling characters, and a well-paced plot.  Even now, I'm spacing out and shortening my reading intervals because I can't bear to let go of it.  My long-suffering husband keeps pestering me to finish it so he can have a go at it. After all, it does seem unfair that I get to read it first when she is his friend, and I can just see the mental foot stompings he must be doing over not getting his way.  

I'll end this post with the first few sentences of State of Wonder, just to tempt y'all:

The news of Anders Eckman's death came by way of Aerogram, a piece of bright blue airmail paper that served as both the stationery and, when folded over and sealed along the edges, the envelope. Who even knew they still made such things? This single sheet had traveled from Brazil to Minnesota to mark the passing of a man, a breath of tissue so insubstantial that only the stamp seemed to anchor it to this world. 

Book review in brief: House Arrest by Ellen Meeropol

This is an exciting blog post for me because it's the first time that somebody I currently work with has written a book. (I have a former coworker, Dayn Perry, who has written a few sports titles, and currently writes baseball news for Foxsports.com, but as I'm not sure I could read baseball books in their entirety and review them here, I just remember him with fondness from our good ol' days at Lemuria Bookstore in Jackson, MS, and wish him well.)

House Arrest by Ellen Meeropol, published by Red Hen Press.  

On the surface, you would not think that Pippa and Emily have much in common--Pippa is a young, pregnant cult member from the Deep South, on trial for negligence concerning the accidental death of her infant; Emily is the reserved New England-born nurse charged with overseeing Pippa's pre-natal care. Beneath their facades, however, the reader gradually comes to realize a key similarity running soul-deep in both.  Orphaned either figuratively or literally, each woman is haunted by a childhood shaped by loneliness and guilt and left  on her own to grapple with the deeds (and misdeeds) of her parents. It's a testament to Meeropol's skill that the parallel stories of Emily and Pippa unfold layer by layer as their lives become inexorably more entwined with each other, holding the reader in thrall until the very end.

Ellen and I have worked together at the Odyssey Bookshop for four years, and I count it a great privilege that she gave me the book in manuscript form to read many long months ago.  When her advanced reading copies became available, I was first in line to get one inscribed (literally--it was the very first book she signed to anyone!).  It's been fun being along for the ride and sharing in her enthusiasm during the whole process, from getting the book contract to being interviewed and getting a starred review in Publisher's Weekly.  And just a few days ago on one of the book blogs I subscribe to, I read my first full online review, bringing the process full circle.