Mailbox Monday

So...this is actually my first time participating in Mailbox Monday, but I wanted to get one last blog post in before I head out for vacation and this seemed like as good a way of doing that as any.  My bags are packed, our house & pet sitter is all set up in our guestroom, our kitchen is stocked with her favorite foods, and my husband and I are beside ourselves with anticipation of getting to Anguilla.

The good news is that one of the books I wanted to read arrived just in the nick of time.  I had requested from my Penguin sales rep a copy of Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt's new book of stories called Concerto to the Memory of an Angel, published by Europa, and it was sitting here waiting for me at work today.  Yay!  I can't decide whether to take it for my flight or save it to read on the beach.  I've read his two previous collections of stories on my two previous summer vacations, so I'm happy to be able to keep up with my own tradition. 

And though I already picked up a copy at BEA, the good folks at Algonquin sent me another ARC of Hillary Jordan's forthcoming novel, When She Woke (which I reviewed here, if you're interested).  Glad to have a second copy to share with somebody 'cause this is a really quick read and a major departure from Jordan's first book. 

And last but not least, I also received a comp copy from the publisher of book three of Sarah Rees Brennan's excellent trilogy, The Demon's Surrender.  Her books are good, and though I still prefer her fanfiction, this book will probably also make its way to Anguilla.  

June is Audio Book Month! Part Deux

Most of the audio books that I listen to on my daily commute (and longer drives, too, when I take them) are fiction.  I need a strong narrative to pull me in and keep me interested, but as with so many other things in my life, Bill Bryson is an exception to that rule.  Bill Bryson is my hero.  I adore his books, to be sure, but I adore his audio books even more.  (If you'd like to read about the wonderful day that I got to meet Mr. Bryson himself, check out this blog post from last fall.)  My first encounter with his books was the audio version of A Walk in the Woods, his wondrously engaging tale of hiking the Appalachian Trail, and after that I was smitten enough to seek out the rest of his published works. 

Bryson happens to read his own audiobooks.  I do not usually condone the author's reading of his or her own work, as I find it more often than not disastrous (cue: Toni Morrison reading anything).  But he is simply wonderful--he hits all the right notes ranging from wry humor to righteous outrage and everything in between.  Moreover, he is as enlightening as he is entertaining.  I'm constantly amazed at the random factual tidbits that I am able to work into conversation, of which his books are the source of my knowledge.

For longer trips, I tend to prefer Bryson's material that has a stronger internal narrative, which would be all of his travel books, but his most recent work, At Home, is great for shorter drives like my daily commute.  I'm hard-pressed to choose between the aforementioned Walk and his book about Australia called In a Sunburned Country, as my favorite.  I've listened to both of them multiple times and am, in fact, currently listening to Sunburned again this week. 

I think if there were one writer whose style I'd most like to emulate, it would be Bryson's.  It's the perfect blend of humor, information, and personal anecdote, with both understatement and overstatement used to great effect.  His audio books are even better.  You come away smarter and more thoughtful about the world than you were before, and you feel as if you've somehow made a friend along the way. 

June is Audio Book Month!

Unusually for me, I did not do a single post in May for National Short Story Month, but now that my coworker, Marika McCoola, has alerted me to this month's national book affiliation, I will blog my little heart out.  Like Marika, I am another Odyssey staffer who lives for audio books, and I've got some great recommendations for you.  

Unlike a conventional book, with an audio book, it's the performer who makes or breaks the book.  I don't care how wonderful a novel is when you curl up in bed to read it, if it has bad or even just a mediocre audio performance, it's difficult for the story to rise above the performance.  Conversely, a great audio performance will enhance a poor or mediocre book, disguising its flaws and keeping you on the edge of your car seat (or wherever you happen to be listening). 

Here is my first of a few solid recommendations for GREAT audio performances that you can take to the bank.  Check 'em out of your local library or pop in to your nearest brick & mortar bookstore to pick 'em up.

The Help by Kathryn Stockett, read by Bahni Turpin, Octavia Spencer, and Jenna Lemia, with one "journalistic" chapter read by Cassandra Campbell. These women represent Aibileen, Minnie, and Skeeter, respectively.  Aibileen and Minnie are two black maids working in Jackson, MS, in the early 1960s and Skeeter is the young white woman who wants to tell their story.  Much of the narration and dialogue is written in quasi-dialect, which might challenge some readers of the conventional book, but with these three outstanding performances, you'll soon melt into their voices and picture yourself in the Deep South.  I grew up in Mississippi and spent much of my adult life living in Jackson in particular, and I have to say that these folks do an outstanding job with the Southern accent.   (There are a couple of notable mispronunciations, such as the family name of Van Devender.) You'll laugh and cry along with these unforgettable women and the stories they have to tell, some shocking, some painful, and even a few that are heartwarming, but you won't easily forget them.  I listened to this audio book three times over the last two years.  Unabridged, this audio runs just over 18 hours.  (Incidentally, I think this might be one of those instances where the audio version eclipses the written one!)

Books & the Beach: My upcoming vacation reads

Leaving soon for two weeks in Anguilla.  Packing is a cinch: snorkel & mask, bathing suits, t-shirts, cute tops, capris, one sundress and a couple pairs of sandals.  I could pack in my sleep,  or blindfolded, or with one arm tied behind my back, or with whatever cliched hamper comes to mind.  But, oh the agony of choosing which books to pack!

These are the ones that mostly, sorta-kinda final.  I may have room to add a few more.  Yes, I mean physical books.  I do have an e-reader but it's not actually my preferred method of reading.  They're fine for planes, trains, and automobiles, but I find I prefer the physical book when I've got lots of time on my hands to indulge in my favorite activity.  So, here are the books.  Mostly fiction.  Mostly ARCs.  One classic.  Some heavier stuff, some very light.  So far I only have one non-fiction on my list, so I'm open to more suggestions if you have any!

 

 1. The Sweetness of Tears by Nafisa Haji.  (novel)
2. Ladies & Gentlemen by Adam Ross (stories)
3. Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs (novel)
4. The Comedians by Graham Greene (classic--selected for its locale)
5. The Three Weissmanns of Westport by Cathleen Schine (nice & light!)
6. The Paris Wife by Paula McLain (also nice & light)
7. The Goat Woman of Largo Bay by Gillian Royes (the only mystery on my list--it's set in the Caribbean, so I grabbed it)

 8. The Postmistress by Sarah Blake (medium weight)
9. The Wettest County in the World by Matt Bondurant (at the behest of my husband)
10. Damned by Chuck Palahniuk
11. The Dovekeepers by Alice Hoffman (possible FEC selection for the fall)
12. The Leftovers by Tom Perrotta (about the Rapture.  Yes, please!)
13. The Coffins of Little Hope by Timothy Schaffert (this one is just a maybe)
14. Minding Ben by Victoria Brown (about a Trinidadian woman who becomes a nanny in NYC--also not sure about this one)
15. Lost on Planet China by J. Maarten Troost (this is my only non-fiction so far)
16. the new novel by Jim Harrison, whose title eludes me at the moment

This leaves me a little wiggle room.  I've requested Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt's new collection of short stories from Penguin but it hasn't arrived yet, and there might be more books waiting for me at work that arrived yesterday, or books yet to come early in the week before I depart.  But it looks like a pretty good mix, no?

So...I usually take a good YA book with me and so far I don't have one.  I'm thinking maybe Will Grayson, Will Grayson from all of the great things I've heard about it.  I've love to get suggestions from y'all for nonfiction (strong narrative is necessary), YA, and maybe 1-2 more literary novels.  What say you?

Ann Patchett Smokes Crack? What?!

Okay, no, not really! But read on to understand what made me say that...

There are many reasons that I love my job, but one of them is the opportunity it provides to spend time with fabulous authors.  Today I drove out to Arlington, MA, to the NEIBA offices to meet up with Diana, my coworker; Anne DeCourcey, my Harper sales rep; and Ann Patchett, an Orange Prize winner and the author of State of Wonder, which released just three days ago in the US. 

Diana and I, along with a few other people on the Odyssey staff, read Patchett's book months ago and simply fell in love with it and unanimously decided to make it our June selection for our signed First Editions Club (you can see what I wrote earlier about it here).  Which is why, then, Diana and I spent the day in Arlington getting books signed.  Ann signed books for us for about an hour, then she signed books for other indie bookstores for another hour or so, and during the course of signing those 700+ books, the four of us chatted about all kinds of things: travel, the demise of Gourmet magazine, opening a new bookstore in Nashville, crack...and the more arduous aspects of conducting her Stone Cold Sober Book Tour.

Never a big drinker to begin with (she confessed that anything more than a single glass of wine would leave her asleep at the dinner table), she recently has developed a rather serious alcohol allergy.  As in anaphylactic shock allergy.  As in "carry an epi-pen or trache me with a steak knife," to use Ann's own, somewhat more colorful phase.  This particular leg of her tour lasts another three weeks, visiting a different city each night.  A daunting prospect, to be sure, but all the more so without any kind of alcohol.  So somewhere along the line we collectively decided that perhaps crack should be her drug of choice, and Ann allowed that it might be good for morphing her reputation as a gracious and mild-mannered writer into something else entirely.  It was decreed that Anne DeCourcey shall tweet it, Diana shall Facebook it, and I shall blog it.  I wonder how long before it goes viral?

Anyway, enough of crack.  Ann is lovely--she's one of those bright and sophisticated and incredibly talented writers who could be very intimidating if they weren't so personable.  And she's passionate.  Passionate about her dog, her family, other writers, Gourmet magazine.  My husband, who has been a long time friend of Ann's, was roundly sorry that he couldn't join us for the day, but I suppose his ears were burning from time time, as he was an intermittent topic of conversation.  The story of how my husband met Ann is a good one, but alas, not one for me to tell here. 

The lovely Ann Patchett

Literary Blog Hop: No book is an island

This week's Literary Blog Hop, sponsored by The Blue Bookcase, asks an interesting question: What other outside influences affect your reading experience? Do you think these influences enhance or detract from the experience?   

Well, no book is an island, but neither is a reader.  This isn't meant to be a cop-out, but when I come to a book,  I think that I, like most readers, bring everything I have experienced in my life to the reading of it.  Sometimes there's not much in my experience that speaks to any given book, it's true. But when I'm reading a book about bullying (like last year's By the Time You Read This, I'll Be Dead),  parts of the book reduce me to a shivering mess, having been on both sides of the bully equation. When I'm reading a book like The Help, set in the very city which I called home for a long time, I seem to settle even more deeply into a book and find it harder to shake the sense of loss I feel when the book ends.  Knowing something personal about an author, or a location where a book is set, or having professional knowledge of a subject (or just an interest in) an author is writing about--all of these things contribute to my interpretation of a book, certainly, but on the most elemental level, they are what make me read or not read something to begin with. 

I think it's the same reason why books affect us differently at different times in our lives--it's because we're essentially different people at different times of reading.  

I also think that just as often, books can be the outside influence on other aspects in my life.  For example, I can't imagine how my vacation on Prince Edward Island would have felt if I hadn't been immersed in the lore of L. M. Montgomery's books, but since I was, for every place I went on the island I felt as if I were seeing it from Anne's point of view (or, to a lesser degree, Emily's).  I felt an actual thrill when I laid eyes on The Lake of Shining Waters.  It would have been just another pretty pond in any other location. 

So basically, our life experiences shapes our books and our reading shapes our life experience and it goes ever, ever on. 

Top Ten Tuesday: Dishing up some great locations in literarture

This week's Top Ten Tuesday post is a particularly fun one for me.  Sponsored each week by The Broke and the Bookish, the list this week asks us to name ten favorite book settings.  

In the fantasy categories, I would love to visit Middle Earth from Tolkien's peerless masterpiece, The Lord of the Rings; Narnia from C. S. Lewis' The Chronicles of Narnia, and Hogwarts from J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series.  These are wondrous worlds, beautifully realized (though in descending order in terms of the realization & development).

Green Gables, Avonlea, Prince Edward Island from L. M. Montgomery's Anne series.

The deserted island from Walter Farley's The Black Stallion.  Wouldn't want to get stuck there for long, but in the film version it was so incredibly beautiful that I still see it sometimes in my dreams. 

Again, I wouldn't want to live in an age where women are still chattel, but I would love to visit the parlor world that Jane Austen so fabulously created in most of her works.  And if I got a glimpse of Mr. Darcy, so much the better.  I guess I'll claim Pride & Prejudice if I need to tie it to one particular book. 

As for some modern, realistic settings, I would love to visit the world of Frances Mayes' Under a Tuscan Sun, the Botswana of Alexander McCall Smith's No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series, the shadowy Barcelona underworld from Carlos Ruiz Zafon's novels, and the London of Nick Hornby's novels.

N. B. You'd be surprised how naughty the Google images get when you're searching for "Black Stallion film." Or at least I was.

Book Review: The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating

May I confess something?  I only picked this book up last month for three reasons: (1) it was published by Algonquin, one of my favorite publishing houses, and (2) it looked short enough for me to read while on the train to BEA, thus bumping my monthly reading up by one notch, and (3) it's non fiction, and I like to make sure I read at least one nonfiction book each month.  So yeah, basically I was reading this book to make my stats look better.  I'm a little bit ashamed because it was *really* good, and despite all of my cunning, I did not finish it in the month of May, so it's going towards my June stats anyway.  Since June is the month I take my summer vacation, it's the last month in the year in which my reading stats need any boosting whatsoever.  So I reckon it just serves me right.

Anyway, this delightful bit of nonfiction by Elisabeth Tova Bailey was far more interesting than I bargained for.  On a vacation in Italy, the author encounters a virulent strain of influenza that wreaks havoc on her body and her immune system.  Very soon after returning home she becomes bedridden, then hospitalized.  Somehow her mitochondria become compromised (I'm sure I'm not the only reader who envisioned Madeleine L'Engle's A Wind in the Door at this point) and she needs to move out of her farmhouse and into a studio apartment where she needs extensive daily care, if not quite round-the-clock care.  

It's at this point in her life that a friend brings her a snail she found when rambling in the woods, and against all odds, this snail becomes Bailey's constant companion.  She follows its movements avidly and researches with just as much gusto what the proper care and feeding of a snail might entail.  I was surprised just how engaging this narrative would be--just as surprised, in fact, as I was about how interesting these molluscs, these gastropods (from the Latin for mouth-foot) could be. 

As Bailey learns to deal with her circumscribed life, she observes this single snail, eventually  creating a terrarium for it.  The snail is frequently her only diversion in the long hours of daylight she spends alone, and at night she devotes countless hours to imagining its inner life.  Each chapter is punctuated with excerpts from naturalists like E. O. Wilson, and poets like Elizabeth Bishop, who were all fascinated by the common snail.  Along the way I learned a lot of natural history, such as found on page 87: 

"Three and a half billion years ago, when life on earth began, the snail and I shared a common ancestor, some kind of simple worm that over time evolved into two animal groups.  The protostomes, which in the embryotic stage develop a mouth first and then an anus, branched off into gastropods...And the Deuterostomes, which develop the same characteristics, though somewhat embarrassingly in reverse order, anus first and then a mouth, branched off into mammals, including Homo sapiens."

Other interesting facts I gleaned include the new development in colonoscopies, which mimics the movement of the snail to increase the patient's comfort, to develop a  small robot that "can travel snail-like through the mucus-coated intestines of humans."  And did you know that snails have over 2,500 teeth?  (Tell me you didn't know-this was the first fact in the book that completely astonished me!)  Yes, they have 80 or more rows of teeth with 33 teeth per row.  With that many teeth, it's no wonder how Bailey came up with the title of this book!

And yet sometimes the narrative would take a poignant turn.  It's easy to forget that Bailey was an invalid during the course of this book, unable to leave her bed even to walk to the kitchen to pour herself a glass of water.  It's a wonder she didn't become more melancholy that she did.  One of her thoughts that rather pierced my heart: 

There is a certain depth of illness that is piercing in its isolation; the only rule of existence is uncertainty, and the only movement is the passage of time.  One cannot bear to live through another loss of function, and sometimes friends and family cannot bear to watch.  An unspoken, unbridgeable divide may widen.  Even if you are still who you were, you cannot actually fully be who you are.  Sometimes the people you know well withdraw, and then even the person you know as yourself begins to change (131).

If that is not a clear reason for despair, I do not know what is, and yet I never got the feeling that Bailey despaired of much.  Her fortitude, derived almost entirely from the snail, according to this narrative, is something to behold.  Clearly there is far more to this book than I initially imagined.   I would encourage anyone with an interest in good, literary narrative non-fiction to take a look at it, too. 

NB: The publisher sent me a finished hardcover copy of this book last year when it was published, but I am just now getting around to reading it. As of this writing I do not know when it is slated for a paperback release. 

Book Blogger Hop: Favorite Post from the Past Month

This week's Book Blogger Hop, sponsored by Crazy for Books, is more self-referential than usual: Share your favorite post from the last month and tell us why it's close to your heart. Somehow this feels more difficult to answer, more self-aggrandizing than merely sharing our opinions on other topics.  But then again, I suppose none of us would be blogging if we didn't think we had *something* worth sharing.

I guess my favorite post from last month is my review of The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern, which pubs in September from Doubleday.  I found it a difficult review to write because I loved the book so much, and I was incredibly gratified and touched when the author contacted me and told me that though she had read many positive reviews about her book so far, mine was the first one to make her weep.  Uh, in a good way, that is. 

Book (P)review: When She Woke by Hillary Jordan

There are a few people in publishing whose opinions I respect so well that when they ask me to read a manuscript for them the response is an instant and unwavering "yes."  Such was the case with Hillary Jordan's new book, When She Woke (formerly called Red), forthcoming from Algonquin Books this October.  Craig Popelars, the best damned marketing director in the business, shot me an email a few months ago asking me to read Jordan's new manuscript, and it was one of those "Jump! How high?" scenarios turned into "Read!/How fast?"  Forty eight hours later, this is the blurb that I sent back to him:

"In a nation ruled with a theocratic iron fist, where criminals’ very skin is dyed bright colors in lieu of incarceration, Hannah has committed the worst crime of all—she has had an abortion and refuses to name either the abortionist or the father.  With her skin dyed a brilliant crimson, she must make her way from Texas to the Canadian border, never knowing whom she can trust. This book left me gobsmacked, riveting me to my seat from page one, onward.  This novel is the perfect amalgamation of The Scarlet Letter, The Handmaid’s Tale, and The Fugitive that feels eerily close to being realized—there are some seriously scary political parallels that reverberated with me as I read.  A bold follow-up to Jordan’s auspicious literary debut, Mudbound."

One of the catch phrases of this novel is "it's personal."  After finishing the manuscript, all I can say is you bet your ass it's personal!  During time I was reading this book back in March, there was talk in the South Dakota legislature to eliminate the charge of murder for people convicted of killing doctors who perform abortions.   

Jordan is a very good writer and in When She Woke, she takes her pacing to the next level, but I never really thought of her as a particularly funny writer.  However, my favorite line from the book made me snort coffee.  Quoting it out of context won't make as much sense here, but it's too good not to share: "Ruthless vigilantes don't make pesto."  

This novel is not perfect (there are precious few that would earn that kind of praise from me), but it IS riveting.  You'll be left wanting to know a lot more about a lot of things, but sometimes that's a smart way for the author to play it, leaving the reader wanting more.  There's only one more thing for me to add, and that's a comment on the very provocative cover art.  You cannot tell it here in cyberspace, but  it has an almost otherworldly glow when you see it in person, a slight sheen with a satiny finish that makes it feel alive in your hands.  If that's not a reason for buying the physical book instead of the e-book, I don't know what is!