The Weekly Shelf Talker: The Klondike Fever

The Weekly Shelf Talker is our Friday column, in which a Vroman's employee recommends a great book, new or old, fiction or not, for you to enjoy. This week's Shelf Talker is from Anne Edkins, who recommends The Klondike Fever:


A few years ago, my husband and I took an Alaskan cruise, lured to the Great White North by tales of the 1898 gold rush. But when we disembarked in Skagway, one of the two gateways to the Klondike gold fields, we were dismayed to see virtually all of our fellow passengers head straight to the discount tourist traps that line the wharf. Where was the rush to Soapy Smith’s Parlor? Or the cabin of Capt. William Moore, the luckless founder of the town? Everyone seemed determined to get a bargain; only the two of us, out of hundreds and hundreds of passengers, seemed interested in the area’s history. At least we didn’t have to wait in any lines.

The Alaskan gold rush parallels California’s in some ways: the discovery of gold in a remote, nearly unpopulated area, followed by a frenzied stampede by prospectors (most completely unprepared for the experience) from all over the world. But the Alaskan gold rush was in many ways unique: the Dead Horse Trail, the famed “Golden Staircase” of the Chilkoot Pass, the 500-mile boat trip in homemade crafts down the rapids towards the gold fields, and the stranglehold of Jefferson “Soapy” Smith over Skagway were unlike anything the California gold rush had to offer. Pierre Berton’s masterful book, The Klondike Fever: The Life and Death of the Last Great Gold Rush, is a fascinating and always entertaining history of that brief frenzy, chock full of anecdotes about this mostly unknown – and certainly underappreciated – bit of North American history. First published in 1958, it remains the definitive account of this singular event.

Berton, who died in 2004, was a Canadian journalist whose parents met in the decaying boom town of Dawson City not long after the gold rush had petered out. He grew up with tales of prospectors and schemers and fortunes found and lost. Hundreds of stories crowd the pages of The Klondike Fever, such as this account of the mania the mere word “Klondike” inspired during the early days of gold fever:

Almost anything was salable if it had the name “Klondike” attached to it. Optometrists sold Klondike glasses, rubber manufacturers hawked Klondike boots, drugstores peddled Klondike medicine chests, restaurants dispensed Klondike soup; everything from stoves to blankets suddenly bore the necromantic name. It had become a magic word, a synonym for sudden and glorious wealth, a universal panacea, a sort of voodoo incantation which, whispered, shouted, chanted, or sung, worked its own subtle witchery. The papers talked of “Klondicitis,” and the phrase was apt. A New York printer named William Miller, suffering from Klondicitis in the first week of the stampede, tried to raise five hundred dollars from his friends to make the trip north. When he failed to get enough money he lost his reason and the police had to be called to prevent mayhem.

The Klondike Fever covers everything from Alaska’s early days, when the odd prospector might have a bit of luck panning in an inland river, though the gold rush’s meteoric rise and fall. All of the gold rush’s colorful characters, from enterprising businessmen to con artists to gamblers to the inevitable “working girls,” populate tales that are, by turns, amusing, infuriating, and heartbreaking. Throughout, Berton manages to convey both the excitement and the weirdness of the stampede, such as the fact that nearly all the men who made the sea journey to Alaska, hiked over the mountains carrying the required ton of supplies, spent a winter building a river-worthy craft, and then sailed 500 miles down the Yukon River to Dawson City, the jumping-off spot to the gold fields, never made it past that point, as if getting to the mouth of the gold fields, rather than the gold itself, had been the whole point of the journey. The Klondike Fever is a superb account of that last great opportunity for humanity to dream big and seek adventure in an unknown land.

Anne Edkins, Vroman's Visual Merchandising Manager, has worked off and on (mostly on) for Vroman's since 1985. Her many areas of reading interest include fiction, US history, and the occasional biography.

Dan Kennedy: The Interview

Dan Kennedy is the author of Loser Goes First: My Thirty-Something Years of Dumb Luck and Minor Humiliation and is a frequent contributor to McSweeney's. Dan will be reading from and signing his new book, Rock On: An Office Power Ballad at Vroman's on Saturday, March 1 (that's this Saturday, folks) at 3 pm. Dan was good enough to answer for me some questions I'm sure he's answered many times before.

Who, in their infinite wisdom, scheduled you to fly to and from Australia in a span of, like, 5 days? Have you even begun to recover?

Once again, I believe the genius was me. The good folks promoting the festival tried their best to talk some sense into me and were gracious to invite me to stay longer, but I wanted to get back to finish the book tour here in the states. If you want to know the sick truth, Australia wasn't the only place I ducked out to between ROCK ON reading dates. Between New York and Boston readings I jumped on a plane and went to Honduras. I think I've started to recover from all of it, but I had a meeting with my agent today in L.A. and I think I might have been acting like a stupid zombie about some pretty great things coming our way with the book. Which I hope she forgives, since I see her maybe once a year and she's always incredibly sweet to me.
Anyway, 15 cities in 4 countries on 3 continents in 30 days makes for a funny reading but a brain dead meeting.

In Australia, you were hosting an event for “The Moth.” How did you first get involved with “The Moth?”

Eight years ago I was oddly and randomly lucky enough to have called then Executive Director Joey Xanders and she called me back. I later learned that the reason she called me back was because she had a stack of 200 phone messages she never had the time to return and her therapist told her to take the step of returning just one to see how that felt. Lucky. Period.

Wasn’t anybody else in on the joke at Atlantic? Did nobody else find this stuff as ridiculous as you? Didn’t anybody ever say, “I know this is lame, but there’s this Phil Collins album coming out?” Did any of the people in the office seem hip or were they really just blatant trend-chasers?

Almost all of the assistants were hip. But, no, you know...nobody ever really says that they think something feels weird or ridiculous. Which is good, really -- I mean, you're there, you're professional, you do the gig. I mean, what would it be like if your dentist picked up the drill, asked you to open wide, and on his way in said, "Jesus. Another filling. I'm so sick of drilling these things -- I could do this with my eyes closed. When do I get to start doing the cool stuff like reconstructive dentistry, man?" Also, there's been a lot of talk about Phil Collins in this book. In the name of full disclosure, let me say that ABACAB and TURN IT ON are both great songs and both on my iPhone. Not too mention the entire Genesis album "and then there were three".

A lot of your work, both in the book and on McSweeney’s, is about workplace manners, jobs, careers, corporate culture. What is it that interests you about that subject?

The versions of ourselves that we become when we're in the middle of it. I mean, as a writer I've sat in front of pages for years trying to be as open and honest to my work as possible: "Am I really being myself here? Is this line really an authentic line? Is this joke trying to hard because I'm afraid to write it the real way? Am I afraid to sacrifice my vanity here and is that a rip-off for the reader?" But put me in a job interview or in a corporate work environment and I'm like, "Screw the truth, who do I have to convince these guys I am to fit in here and how can I do it? Take up golf? Cut my hair? Bring donuts in on Friday?" I don't think that's unique. I think we all try be someone or something entirely other than ourselves in these jobs -- how can one NOT find that fascinating and strange.

What’s the best job you’ve ever had, and what’s the worst? Would the Atlantic gig be the worst or did the pay bump it up the scale a little bit?

Worst job I ever had was carpeting The Tacoma Dome for a home and garden trade show. It was maybe three days after U2 played there with The Pixies opening, and it was like such a lame time, hoisting these huge rolls of carpet with guys and taping it all down and the whole time you're like, "Wow. The people who were here three days ago are living the dream. Me? Not so much, really." The best job was probably Atlantic -- I hope I don't give the impression otherwise simply because I happened to write a two hundred page comedy of lunacy, greed, heartbreak, soul pimp meltdowns, morally bankrupt go-getters, and delusional basket cases wearing sunglasses indoors and calling co- workers "Baby".

Why do you think it was so hard for the music business to grasp the importance or the potential of online distribution?

I guess they like the idea of people having to pay 18.99 for the CD in order to get the single. A buck a song is fair and brilliant but it ain't gonna float the 2,200 square foot loft in Manhattan, the house in the Hamptons, the place in Los Angeles, and the one in London. That's what they're wrestling with, I think.

Something that’s particularly brilliant about the book is that, although it’s this rock and roll company you were working for, it seems like every office I’ve ever worked in. The scene in which you listen to the newly-signed act perform next to the fax machine struck me as particularly accurate. We were just listening to the Once soundtrack in the office, and that’s some pretty heavy stuff. It was nice, but I think I would’ve felt differently if they were sitting in the office, playing these songs for me for the first time. Work is such sterile, sanitized environment that any kind of genuine emotion seems thoroughly out of place. Did you find this to be more the case at Atlantic, or was it no different than anywhere else you’ve worked?

I guess that the thing making it more surreal than other jobs to me was that, you know, it was as you say, it was just like any office you've ever worked in. But then, out of nowhere, there are these weird little Spinal Tap moments. I mean, it's just like every other office you've worked in and then: hey, who's the guy in the bright pink jumpsuit with the flames tattooed all over his crotch? And why is he talking to Connie from Accounts Payable?

How is being a writer better than working in an office? And how is it worse?

Some days it isn't. I mean, some days you're thinking, "This is the only thing I love doing, the only thing that matters to me, and the only thing I'm good at. I can't believe I get paid." And other days, you're thinking, "Christ, what was I thinking?"

Let’s talk about the book trailer. It was really good, sort of like the book version of I’m Trying to Break Your Heart, the Wilco documentary. Have you checked out any other book trailers?

Thanks. I've not checked out any others, mostly because I just kind of find myself thinking, "The ROCK ON one has deer, a gong, sparkle effects shooting into my eyes, and if you listen closely you can hear some TV newscaster on a monitor in Seatac Airport saying the phrase:
"Take all the Miss America contestants, put them in the room with a live rattlesnake, and what do you get?" I think that's about as much bang for my buck as I'm going to find, personally."

I heard a rumor that there was a period in your life in which you wore bicycle shorts even when not riding a bicycle. Care to comment on that?

All I will tell you is this: if you ever find yourself traveling with another man in the Midwest, and you find yourself at a Bennigan's next to the interstate someplace outside of Grand Rapids at 3AM, and you engage in some kind of game that involves admitting your most embarrassing secret, you need to do one thing: say goodnight and go back across the parking lot to the Hampton Inn you're staying in.

Especially if the man you're playing the Embarrassing Secret Game with knows every bookseller across the nation, and every journalist from here to Asia. Having said that, ask Craig about his teenage years spent collecting porcelain figurines. That's right Popelars, I might've worn spandex hoping to look like Stipe on the Green tour, but you've got your past as well, my friend. A cute, miniature, porcelain village of a past, sir.


Thanks, Dan. Dan Kennedy will be presenting the hilarious Rock On at Vroman's at 3pm this Saturday. Be there.

The Tournament of Books is Back

The Morning News has its annual Tournament of Books happening again this March, but as The Millions has noted, no office pool. Darn. I still need to make back all the money I lost in my Oscar pool (screw you, people who didn't vote for Paul Thomas Anderson) and plan to lose in my NCAA Tournament pool. Judges include Mark Sarvas, Nick Hornby, and others.

Buckley Q&A at the NY Times

As has been noted elsewhere today, William F. Buckley Jr. has passed away. I appreciated this Q&A with NY Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus, who happens to be writing a biography of Buckely. Amongst the discussed: Did Buckley recant his opposition to the civil rights movement, who were his major influences, and did he call Gore Vidal a "queer"?

What Amazon Misses with Its Recommendations

As a bookseller, one of the best methods for recommending a book to someone is to ask him what he last read that he really liked, then recommend something similar. This strategy works much of the time, as it isn't that hard to say "Oh, you liked Fight Club. Have you read The Subject Steve?" Where this tactic falls short is that it reduces a person to a measure of his tastes along one axis - literature - and with no real analysis of why the reader liked the first book in question. Maybe it was the language of Fight Club that turned him on. Maybe it was the thematic matter. Maybe it was the plot. A good bookseller will try to determine why the reader liked the book, then find a book that fits roughly the same bill.

But a person is much more than a composite of his literary tastes, isn't he? This is something that's always frustrated me about Amazon's "Customers who bought this item also bought..." feature. It should be cooler than it is. Invariably, if I enter something like Fight Club, for instance, Amazon lets me know that customers who bought Fight Club also bought...a whole bunch of other Chuck Palahniuk books. And then, if I dig deep enough, some well-known books by other authors, like A Clockwork Orange and American Psycho (clearly, Amazon has homed in on the violence in Fight Club and decided that that is what I like, or rather, that the others who have bought Fight Club were looking for similarly violent books about societal decay). In short, it gives me a list of books. Wouldn't it be interesting to know what music or movies (other than the film version of Fight Club people who bought Fight Club bought? I think it would.

Certain novels or stories evoke albums in my mind, almost immediately, and the reverse is also true. It isn't the case with every book; I'm not sure exactly what album Underworld by Don DeLillo conjures up (although it wouldn't be something by Underworld, I don't think). But some things spring right to mind. Wouldn't it be cool if there were some kind of machine that could tell us that if we like Nick Drake, The Battle of Algiers, "Weeds," and Wired Magazine, we'll love...whatever? I think it would. At the very least it would be fun to play around with. I thought I'd offer a few quick inter-media recommendations to see how they work. Most of the time, I think I'm just finding a common mood, or feeling. Feel free to add your own in the comments section:


If you like Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, by Neko Case, you'll love The End of Vandalism, by Tom Drury. They both capture that prairie-in-winter, small-town-aimlessness. Both the album and the novel have that delicate mix of humor and sadness, of familiarity and otherworldliness, that's so difficult to properly execute. Case and Drury both write with a stunning, dazzling nonchalance that's difficult to describe.


If you like the song "In a Future Age," by Wilco, you'll love In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, by William H. Gass. It would've been easier to connect this book of long short stories with the first Loose Fur album, since Jeff Tweedy borrowed some of its prose for his lyrics, but for some reason, I've always felt that this song, older by several years than the Loose Fur stuff, captures more fully the quotidian wonderment that lurks in Gass' writing. I think it's the last stanza of the song that summons what I'm thinking of: "High above/The sea of cars/And barking dogs/In fenced in yards."

If you like Wes Anderson movies, you'll love Nine Stories, by JD Salinger. An easy one, I know, as both feature families of precocious kids, but what's interesting to me about this pairing is the difference in tone between the two. Anderson, to my eye, casts an ironic gaze on much of what happens in his movies, while Salinger plays it entirely straight. Or am I missing something? It's been years since I read the Salinger stories, so it's possible I'm forgetting their tone.

If you like Anthony Bourdain, in all his print and televised glory, you'll love The Epicure's Lament, by Kate Christensen. Christensen's novel, about a man dying only because he refuses to quit smoking, is full of references to MFK Fisher, recipes for whipped up Shrimp Newburg, and tales of revelry involving cigarettes, whiskey, and women. If that doesn't sound Bourdainian, then I don't know what does.

Dutton's Brentwood to Close

My Monday morning inbox was packed with news of Dutton's Brentwood's closing on April 30. The Elegant Variation has suggested a customer-supported bail out, ala Kepler's Books in Menlo Park. Ron Hogan, writing at Galley Cat has a very nice eulogy, which is fitting, since he got his start in the book business at Dutton's. Dutton's is one of the few independent bookstores in Los Angeles that I haven't worked at, but as anyone who's worked in the book business here in LA can attest, we all know each other. You can't work in this business without bumping into folks from the other stores at author dinners, the LA Times Festival of Books, or other events. When I worked at Book Soup, if we didn't have a book, Dutton's was the first place I recommended the customer try. Doug Dutton, owner of the store, left the door open to reopening in either the same or a new location. Here's hoping that happens soon.

The Weekly Shelf Talker: Lady Macbeth

The Weekly Shelf Talker is our weekly column, in which a Vroman's employee recommends a great book, new or old, fiction or not, for you to enjoy. This week's Shelf Talker is from Lee Kelley. She recommends Lady Macbeth, by Susan Fraser King.

This is definitely not Shakespeare’s Macbeth! This is a wondrous tale of eleventh-century Scotland and the last female descendant of that country’s oldest and most royal line; not just a queen, but a warrior queen.

Gruadh was allowed to learn the sword by her loving father, but still had to bow to his wishes when it came to marriage. When her husband is killed and she is forced to become wife to Macbeth, who was responsible for her husband’s death, she finds ways to stay alive and to make certain her son inherits what is rightfully his. Even as her respect for Macbeth grows, her fears continue to haunt her. The Vikings are too close, and her husband has been seen dealing with them. He also seems to be more than ready to take the throne of Scotland should there be a way to do it. Her current king is leading them into chaos and too many warriors are dying.

This is an exciting tale of a ‘small Queen’ who became a true Queen in every sense of the word. Shakespeare only told a very small part of the tale. Here is the rest of it; revel in it.

Lee Kelley happily works in the Accounting Dept. at Vroman’s. She’s an avid reader of science fiction and psychological mysteries but will read nearly anything – including aspirin bottle labels if that’s all that’s handy! Fortunately for her, she works at Vroman’s!

I Predict the Oscars!

The Academy Awards are airing this Sunday, complete with jokes about Obama ("Barack Obama's won so many contests in a row, he's now the favorite to win Best Sound Effects Editing!"), McCain, the writers' strike, Facebook, and every other a la moment bit of hackery the newly contracted writers can cook up. Everybody has their own system for predicting the winners. Most of them include a blindfold, a dartboard, and a bottle of scotch. I have a system that works. Patrick's Algorithm is a complicated mathematical process that produces shockingly accurate results 35% of the time. It successfully predicted the victory of Paul Haggis' Crash in 2006, and it guarantees some results, every time!

Patrick's Algorithm is as follows: In the major categories, I think about which nominee is most deserving and assign that film, actor, writer, or director a numerical score of 1. I then proceed down the list of nominees in descending order of worthiness until I arrive at the film, actor, writer or director I deem least worthy of winning the award. I assign that nominee a numerical score of 5. I then look at whichever nominee has the highest score, and, sometimes, theres' the winner. Let's apply Patrick's Algorithm to this year's nominees. Best Actor? Johnny Depp for Sweeney Todd. Mark it down. Best Actress? The usually stellar Cate Blanchett for Elizabeth: The Golden Years (didn't she already win an Oscar for this movie?). As you can see, I'm swimming against the stream here.

So what will win Best Picture? My complicated system has produced...Atonement? Is that right? Let me check my math...yep, Atonement. Well, who would've guessed it? As for the more obscure categories, I rely on the names. For instance, Best Short Film - Animated, is there anyway that a film called Madame Tutli-Putli loses this thing? I don't think so.

Anyway, there you have it. Patrick's Algorithm will predict a winner. In at least one category this year. For sure.

[Disclaimer: Gambling is illegal and you shouldn't do it. If you do decide to gamble, do not use Patrick's Algorithm. In fact, if you find yourself reading blogs for the purposes of finding gambling tips, you may want to go to Bettors Anonymous.]

Scott Rudin has read books you don't even know about yet

Today's LA Times features a profile of despotic super producer Scott Rudin, who owns the film rights to basically every novel of note to come out in the last five years. How does he do it? The article offers a window into his methods:

A voracious reader who is famous for acquiring books before anyone else knows they are on the market, Rudin was the first to read Cormac McCarthy's novel. In fact, ICM's Ron Bernstein, who represented the book, hadn't even sent it out when he began getting calls from Rudin. "It was still in manuscript," Bernstein recalls. "He started badgering me over the weekend to buy it. I said, 'Wait a minute, do you mind if I finish reading it first?' But that's Scott. When he loves a piece of material, he's relentless. I couldn't beat him away."

Like all pieces on Rudin, there is the obligatory paragraph about how many assistants he's had and how he likes to throw things -- tantrums and phones, mostly.

I'm only partially joking when I say that Rudin has the rights to every book. He doesn't own them all, only the one's worth making into movies.

Short Stories Enjoy the Spotlight at The Millions

The Millions will be running Short Story Week this week, taking a look at the state of the art form, predicting the future of the short story, and recommending a few great collections and stories themselves. Additionally, I wanted to point everyone to the Vroman's GoodReads page, where I've started a discussion, inspired by the Millions, about your favorite story. Period. Not collections, not a long list, just numero uno. Come have a peek!

Bill Moyers Gets Recommendations for the Next President

Bill Moyers ran a piece on his show asking viewers what books they think the next president should read. He got a lot of responses. A lot. People recommended a diverse selection of texts, including Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand, An Inconvenient Truth, by Al Gore, Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson, The Bible, The Art of War, Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom, and A People's History of the United States, by Howard Zinn. Loyal readers of this blog may recall that I had a similar idea and generated a list of my own for the presidential candidates to read. My list generated significantly less heat than Bill Moyers' did. Sure, just because he worked for Lyndon Johnson everybody comments on his blog. Well, I read books about Lyndon Johnson. Three of them, as a matter of fact.

The Weekly Shelf Talker: Lucky Jim

This is the first in what will hopefully be a long-running series of recommendations from Vroman's booksellers. This is a chance to discover new books that may have slipped past you, or to rediscover a classic you haven't thought about since high school. Think of them as internet versions of the "recommended reads" cards you see hanging from your local independent bookstore. The first in the series is by your's truly, and it is about Kingsley Amis' Lucky Jim:

Roughly a quarter of the way through Lucky Jim is the single greatest description of a hangover ever penned:

"The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he'd somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad."

Paragraphs like this abound in this perfect, slender novel by one of the 20th century's great writers, but I dare say this isn't the reason I love this book so much. There's something about the protagonist, the hapless, put-upon Jim Dixon, that I find to be so close to home. This probably isn't a good thing, since Dixon, as he's called throughout the book, isn't a particularly good person. Indeed, if this novel had been forced at its publication to squeeze past the phalanx of Amazon reviewers, with their demands for sympathetic characters and uplifting stories, I doubt it would have found the audience it did (As it is, the Amazon critics tend to approve of the book, although a few people just don't "get it").

Dixon is a newly minted associate professor at a small college in postwar England, where he relates to his students with equal parts disinterest and disdain (except, of course, for the attractive female students) and to his bore of a boss with unequivocal and yet always silent hatred. Nobody describes faces better than Amis, who lets Dixon's features tell the story of his agony:

"Mentally, however, he was making a different face and promising himself he'd make it actually when next alone. He'd draw his lower lip in under his top teeth and by degrees retract his chin as far as possible, all this while dilating his eyes and nostrils. By these means he would, he was confident, cause a deep dangerous flush to suffuse his face."

The story begins when Dixon's phenomenally boring superior Welch invites him to his country home for the weekend. There Dixon drunkenly incinerates his bedclothes, develops an instantaneous blood feud with Welch's son Bertrand, and falls for Bertrand's girl Christine.

Considering that Lucky Jim is a relatively short comic novel, its plot is remarkably complicated, the work of a master storyteller as well as humorist. Amis shoves Dixon into so many traps, humiliates him in so many ways, that one inevitably feels Dixon's anger mounting steadily and incessantly. It's Dixon's hatred -- hatred for his surroundings, his station, and ultimately, I think, himself -- that gives the book its undeniable charm. From the opening paragraph, when forced, along with Dixon, to listen to the welterweight champion of boring speeches, the reader is with him, warts and all.

And Dixon has his share of warts. For a professor, he's not much of an academic. He's been struggling for some time now with an essay entitled "The Economic Influence of the Developments of Shipbuilding Techniques, 1450-1485." As Christopher Hitchens points out in his stellar Atlantic review of the book, Dixon's failure to engage with the very subject matter he's chosen to study is "Hilarious, but somewhat sobering." I laugh at the absurdity of Dixon's essay, his miserable life's work, but then I remember what I've been doing for the last eight hours, and suddenly, it's not so funny. And this, for me, is the key to Lucky Jim. The more Dixon struggles with his position in life, the more I find myself staring back at me. And I don't think I'm alone. How many people can see themselves in the following paragraph, arguably the funniest in the book:

"If Welch didn't speak in the next five seconds, he'd do something to get himself flung out without question -- not the things he'd often dreamed of when sitting next door pretending to work. He no longer wanted, for example, to inscribe on the departmental timetable a short account, well tricked-out with obscenities, of his views on the Professor of History, the Department of History, medieval history, history, and Margaret and hang it out of the window for the information of passing students and lecturers, nor did he, on the whole, now intend to tie Welch up in his chair and beat him about the head and shoulders with a bottle until he disclosed why, without being French himself, he'd given his sons French names, nor..."

What I see when I read this passage is a man trapped by his own inability to change his life. The anger, the sheer bile of this passage makes me laugh, but the helplessness underlying it all makes it a slightly uneasy laugh. The pleasure of Lucky Jim lies in watching Dixon rise up against his oppressors -- the college, the department, his superiors -- and eventually conquering them all, in a way.

Lucky Jim is the one book I have to stop myself from rereading over and over again. It's my favorite book, and one that I recommend to anyone who can take a joke. It won't take you three days to read it. Why not try it this weekend?

Vroman's Events Getting Some Love Online

Several authors who will be coming to Vroman's in the next few weeks have received nice write ups around the various blogs. David Shields, who will be discussing his memoir The Thing About Life is That One Day You'll Be Dead at Vroman's on March 2, had his book recommended by the critic Chris Watson on the NBCC blog:

Brilliantly conceived, researched and executed, "The Thing About Life is That One Day You'll be Dead" shows how human emotions often direct our search for knowledge. The science is fascinating. But what keeps us reading is Shield's warmth.
When he writes that "Adulthood didn't turn out to have quite as much shimmer as we thought it would" and proceeds to eat Rice Krispie treats at least twice a week, we become his confidante and he ours.

In my haste to criticize the NBCC list a week or so ago, I forgot to mention that Toby Barlow's novel in verse Sharp Teeth was among the recommendations in poetry. Toby will be at Vroman's on Febrary 23. The Elegant Variation points out that Gawker, ever magnanimous regarding the success of others, had some very nice things to say about Charles Bock's Beautiful Children:

A while back, we gently ribbed first-time novelist Bock for boasting about taking ten years to write the book, which is about living, being lost, and runaways in Vegas. Was it civilized, we wondered? In conclusion: Yes! Take as much time with that next novel as you need, man. We'll be waiting.

Charles will be at Vroman's on February 22 (and he'll be giving away a lot of cool stuff, too).

You'll Never Go Broke Throwing Stones at the American Publishing Industry

This morning's Pasadena Star News features an essay by Diana E. Sheets, a novelist and critic who writes at the website Literary Gulag (As an aside, why is it acceptable to use the word 'gulag' with impunity? Nobody would accept a website called "Literary Concentration Camp" nor should they, yet for some reason 'gulag' gets a pass). The essay bemoans the demise of that elusive beast, "the Great American novel." Ms. Sheets' argument goes something like this: American publishing companies, owned at an increasing rate by foreign conglomerates like Bertelsmann, News Corp., and Hachette, have lost sight of the American marketplace, with its inherent craving for great literature that tells of the "American experience," and have instead foisted an increasing amount of "literary tofu" on said market.

Early in the essay, Ms. Sheets makes it clear what she considers to be great American literature:

By the 1980s, fiction that was meaningfully engaged with America had all but disappeared. Yes, there are a few writers in their seventies and eighties today still committed to storytelling with its finger on the pulse of society - think of Tom Wolfe and Philip Roth. But is this departure from telling the American story because readers of great literature have declined or have publishers simply decided that audience is not worth pursuing? Or to pose the question differently, do publishers really have a sense of our national marketplace or have their global predilections for "literary tofu" dramatically altered story selections, thereby ignoring the desires of readers hungry for truth or excellence to be found in American exceptionalism? And, most important of all, have these misguided selections contributed to the demise of the great American novel?

First of all, I resent the implication that tofu is somehow fake or phony. Maybe if she had referred to this new literature as "literary meat substitute," I might have tolerated it...but I digress. Sheets' continues on to point out that five multinational conglomerates control 54.3 % of the publishing market. She argues that the global character of these companies prevent them from fully vetted the greatness of American literature. In her words, "Profit is paramount, American exceptionalism of little consequence." Consequently, "innovative novels presenting the American story have all but died. They have been replaced by feminized "virtue" and sanctimonious mulit-culturalism devoid of truth or excellence."

There's no doubt that the consolidation of power into fewer and fewer companies is a dangerous thing. This is true in every industry, from books to software to food production. Diversity is a great thing, a vital thing, and having more avenues for publication accepting a more diverse range of material would be a good thing. Beyond that point, however, I'm afraid Ms. Sheets loses me. Let's start first with her argument that publishers publish more "literary tofu," as she calls it, than ever before. The titles she mentions by name are, not surprisingly, A Million Little Pieces and If I Did It. (The mention of the James Frey title leads Sheets to a non-nonsensical argument about "ethics" in publishing.) I don't have statistics on this, but these types of books -- trashy, sensationalist or whatever you like to call them -- have been around roughly since man began putting words on paper. Publishers publish these books because they sell. Regardless, they certainly haven't been published at the expense of literary fiction. Are there too many books published? Yes, there almost certainly are, and that can make it difficult to find the truly great books, but they are in fact out there.

Ms. Sheets states that no great American fiction has been published in recent years. "Under these circumstances, no great American novel can be published." This simply isn't true. Has Ms. Sheets read a novel published in the last ten years? Has she read The Corrections or Tree of Smoke or The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao or The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay or What is the What or The Known World or Gilead or The Echo Maker or Everything is Illuminated? These books, American books and winners of awards or bestsellers all, are merely the "big" books that have been published in the last few years. I'm not suggesting that these books are all terrific or the equal of everything Saul Bellow wrote, but they can't be dismissed as "literary tofu." And I haven't even begun to list the dozens of books by authors who don't have quite the profile of these titans, authors like Tom Drury, Kate Christensen, Sam Lipsyte, Lydia Millet, Kathryn Davis, and Nicole Krauss. To suggest that American fiction is in decline, pushed aside by feminist concerns or mulitculturalism, is so wrong as to be offensive (In fact, if one looks at the list of "big" books I conjured off the top of my head, one will notice a certain monochromatic male quality to it, no? Maybe this says more about my literary consciousness than the country's, but considering that I work in the book trade and live with a female fiction writer, I doubt it. No, I would say we need a little more multiculturalism, not less.).

Part of the problem is this talismanic quality she ascribes to the "American novel." As she says at one point, "The reader...no longer has the inclination or the palette to recognize, let alone savor, innovative fiction engaged in telling our story." Whose story? I love Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, but all I have in common with them is that I'm American, I have a penis, and I spent a fair amount of time at the University of Chicago. Otherwise, their experience isn't my experience. I enjoy their books anyway. To insinuate that there is only one American experience (and to further insinuate that said experience is male and white) is silly. The greatness of American literature resides in its diversity. How different is a book written by a white man from Mississippi than one written by an Asian woman from California? This is what gives American literature its vitality. Maybe the answer is to stop looking for the "great American novel."

Ms. Sheets, herself a fiction writer, seems bitter to me. A quick search of the Book Sense catalog produces no listing for either of books The Cusp of Dreams or American Suite. So the argument, I suppose, is simple -- her books aren't published, therefore the American publishing business is broken. While wailing against the lack of avenues for new writers like herself, she overlooks a venue she's already using -- the internet. More and more bloggers and authors known for their web presence have begun getting publishing contracts. Perhaps the same will now happen for Ms. Sheets. I applaud her for putting her opinion out there to be read, and I think she's right to take matters into her own hands, so to speak, but I'm afraid I can't agree with her polemic.

Excellent Stuff from the New Yorker

My wife has a subscription to The New Yorker, which means I have a subscription to The New Yorker. I have to confess that I read the magazine less than I should. I usually try to read anything by Malcolm Gladwell or Roger Angell, and I'll usually browse the reviews, particularly Anthony Lane (I never see eye to eye with David Denby, except when he's writing about the Arclight, the greatest movie theater ever built by man). Frankly, The New Yorker's presence in my apartment feels a little oppressive. I have so much to read for work and for pleasure that I rarely have the time to read anything from the magazine beyond the occasional movie review. Yet there it sits, taking up valuable real estate on the coffee table, taunting me with its presence.

Yesterday, however, I sat down to eat breakfast and couldn't get the tiny paperback I was reading to sit open on the table. Consequently, I turned to the New Yorker, which flopped open fortuitously to David Grann's "Letter from Poland" piece called "True Crime." The article tells the story of the murder of Dariusz Janiszewski, a Polish businessman whose body turned up in a river in rural Poland, bound and with a noose around his head. The twists of the article, which I don't want to completely ruin, are the stuff of a great crime drama. The detective who investigates the murder connects it, circuitously, to the Polish author Krystian Bala. Bala is the author of the book Amok, a novel in the vein of Michel Houellebecq. Amok, which has yet to be translated into English, centers on the character Chris, a misanthropic philosophy student who, in a fit of Raskolnakovian fury, kills his girlfriend. As the investigator began examining the book, he noticed certain chilling parallels between the murder in the book and the killing of Janiszewski. I don't want to give anything more of the story away, but I wanted to recommend to everyone that they read this fascinating article. It's worth taking the time from whatever you happen to be reading to check it out.

Sorry for the Silence

As you've probably noticed, there haven't been a ton of posts the past few days. In fact, there's only been one. This is for several reasons, but the major one is that I've spent the past few days posting our upcoming events to the Vroman's website. All of our events for March and April are now up. We have some amazing authors coming through, including but not limited to Isabel Allende, Andrew Foster Altschul, David Shields, and Dan Kennedy. Check out the full schedule online now.

Next week there will an abundance of posts. I promise.

Enjoy your weekends, fair readers!

A Tip from Your Local Bookseller

In lieu of a real post today, I think I'll just direct folks to the comments from a couple of earlier posts about the NBCC's "Good Reads," where a great discussion of the merits of the list has broken out. Additionally, I offer a recommendation of my own:

J.F. Powers is an author that few people read anymore, and that's a shame. He won the National Book Award in 1962 for his novel Morte D'Urban, and has been held in high regard by many writers for years, but I don't think he's ever found the readership he deserves. His books have made a small comeback, thanks to the New York Review of Books Press, which has given them hip new covers and put them back in print. (God bless the New York Review of Books for bringing so many books back from the dead.) Powers' subject matter -- the lives of Catholic priests in the Midwest in 50s and 60s -- won't appeal to everyone (it didn't appeal to me much when I found the books for the first time) -- but those with an open mind will find beautifully written stories, full of wry humor and plenty of pathos.


I discovered Wheat That Springeth Green, Powers' last novel, years ago in the tiny bookshop my friend runs. It's a bildungsroman of sorts, telling the tale of Joe, a star athlete in high school who, full of spiritual fervor, becomes a priest only to discover that it's not the life he thought it to be. Powers' dry sense of humor is on display throughout -- when an older priest at the seminary confronts Joe about stealing his hair shirt; when Joe can't remember the name of the new hippie priest the archdiocese has sent to his parish even after said hippie priest arrives (Joe's solution: to get the police to run the new priest's license plates); when the local defense contractor wants their new line of missiles blessed. Powers writes about priests the way Michael Connelly or David Simon writes about cops. Joe is a burned out, chain-smoking, borderline alcoholic who struggles throughout the book to rediscover the passion that drove him to the job to begin with. Powers' ability to render the quotidian details of this very specific culture is rare indeed. Rarer still that he's able to do it with such charm and grace.

Writerly Gratification

It must be an odd feeling to see someone reading your book in public, to know that they're using a bit of their time to care about the characters you created, the story you took the time to write. With that in mind, imagine how Jay Asher, author of Thirteen Reasons Why, must have felt when he visited a local school and a young woman showed him her journal, "in which she’d copied a handful of her favorite passages from [his] book." That's got to be a good feeling.

Asher, whose book has been a staff favorite here at Vroman's since it first came out, presented his book here last night at a very successful event. He spoke about his book and about the long road to meeting his many fans:

It was my first time speaking to a group where the majority of people had already read my book, which added a cool dimension to the presentation. And the Q&A was a ton of fun. It even got a little silly when someone asked me to describe some of my earlier books. It became obvious, very quickly, why those books never sold.

Super Tuesday!

Super Tuesday is like Thanksgiving if Thanksgiving only happened once every four years and involved voting instead of eating. So vote. I care not who you vote for or on what you base that decision (although if one more person says they're voting for Mitt Romney because he "looks presidential" I'm going to flip out and move to Panama. What does this phrase mean? That he looks like a middle age white guy who looks good in a suit? So do hundreds of character actors. Sam Waterston looks presidential. William Hurt looks presidential. Fred Thompson looks...er, never mind. Look, I have no problem with you voting for Mitt Romney, but at least come up with a better reason than that). I voted this morning. It was fun, it was easy, and it felt like I did something good. It was a little like giving blood, only without the needle or the little cookie afterwards.

I realize this has little to do with books...OK, nothing to do with books. To redirect a bit, Stephen King (book-related enough for you?) believes the WGA strike has turned the elections into a reality show. Right, like the news networks weren't going to do that anyway?

NBCC Good Reads Winter List

The National Book Critics Circle has their "Good Reads" Winter List out this morning. It looks a lot like their Fall 2007 list, which I already derided last week. There was a major shakeup atop the fiction list, where Junot Diaz and Denis Johnson switched places. It's generated some chatter from bloggers, much of it negative. Galley Cat questioned the validity of a list with no blurbs and how that list compares to the recommendation of a friend, even a digital one: "And that, in a nutshell, is the battle between the new, participatory media which provides top-to-bottom opportunities for consumer engagement, and the old school media which relies upon experts and arbiters to explain what's what." The Millions thinks that naming the list "Good Reads" "smacks of cluelessness." But The Elegant Variation would rather light a candle than curse the glare, offering up detailed recommendations from specific contributors to the list. More in-depth write-ups of books that didn't make the final list are also available at the NBCC blog as well. Now, I might be biased, but I would say if you're really searching for something to read (and you already read a lot), head down to your local independent bookstore (or maybe its digital outpost).

New Hipster Book Club

It's February, and that means we get a new edition of the Hipster Book Club, an interesting site full of reviews and columns on books great and small. Something I love about the HBC (they totally stole Helena Bonham Carter's acronym, by the way) is that they have a good mix of new and noteworthy books as well as stuff that might have slipped past you, in the rush of new titles. This month's issue features reviews of The Delivery Man, by Joe McGinniss Jr. (that would be the other Las Vegas novel everyone is talking about), You Must Be This Happy to Enter, by Elizabeth Crane, The Book of Other People, edited by Zadie Smith, and Julie Doucet's 365 Days. Best of all is a column called "The Influence of Anxiety," which this month features this fine paragraph:

Then there was David Foster Wallace and Mary Karr. My contentious opinion of Mary Karr's memoir, The Liar's Club, has been documented previously in this column. Let's not get into that again! I'm sure it was tough having a suicidal mother, but why did she devote entire chapters to not getting a pony and how they got to the hotel too late for her to go swimming? These are the big events of her childhood? I know a girl who was kicked out of school because her mother would call at least once a week and say, "Send Ellen home, please—I'm going to kill myself." There was not even a theoretical pony for Ellen. All Ellen wished for was for her mother not to vacuum at two in the morning. (OK, I lied. I got into it again. I can't help it!)

Sometimes you just find the perfect thing, and it makes your whole morning, you know?

The Delicate Art of Recommending a Book

The National Book Critics Circle has come out with a list of recommended reads, or "Good Reads," as they call their list (not be confused with the literary social networking site Good Reads, a problem many people have had, judging from the comments left on the NBCC blog yesterday after the name change went into effect). I want to be perfectly clear about something up front -- I love the National Book Critics Circle. Their annual awards "get it right" (at least in my opinion) far more often than the National Book Award or the Pulitzer (the Gold Glove of literary awards). Their criticism and poetry awards bring attention to books that often don't have much of a home in the marketplace, and for this, I thank them.

That being said, their recommended list leaves a bit to be desired. It's not that the books on the list aren't good -- they are -- it's that they're, well, a little obvious. My friend Cory, blogger at Skylight Books in LA, pointed out that Philip Roth made the list. Looking at the fiction list, I feel a little like Jack Black's character in High Fidelity, "Philip Roth? Not obvious. No, not obvious at all. Come on, NBCC, couldn't you make it easier? What about Hemingway? How about William Shakespeare? Why not recommend Hamlet?" I don't mean to hammer on Philip Roth, who I love, but come on. Does he really need the readers? Other books on the fiction list represent some of the major books of the year, including Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke and Junot Diaz' The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. The one quasi-obscure title on the list is Per Petterson's Out Stealing Horses, a book that comes in at #35 on the New York Times bestseller list, one spot behind Diaz' title. The non-fiction list offers little in the way of "off-the-beaten" path recommendations, either, with NBCC Award nominees Legacy of Ashes, The World Without Us, and Brother, I'm Dying all making the list.

Some of the blame should go to the methodology of how these lists are compiled. According to the NBCC, "Polling our nearly 800 members, as well as all the former finalists and winners of our book prize, we asked, What 2007 books have you read that you have truly loved?" By casting such a wide net, the sample size becomes so large that only the truly well-known rise to the top (The list of every book receiving multiple votes is available in each category). That's not a problem, except that it raises the question of who the list serves? If I've already heard of every book on the list, what good is the list? Is it aimed at people who haven't read a book in years?

I applaud the NBCC for stimulating literary discussion, and obviously every one of the books on these lists is a good book, worthy of being read far and wide. I would hope, however, that the NBCC would use its position in the literary vanguard to promote some books that maybe aren't getting the readership they deserve. That would be a list people could actually use.

(The NBCC will have an event at Skylight Books this Tuesday (2/5), when Mark Sarvas will lead a panel discussion of exactly how this list came to be).