Thursday, August 28, 2008

Brian Greene is a Smart Guy

Brian Greene writes about physics, superstring theory, and other subjects that confuse many of us....Okay, they confuse me. Vroman's is hosting him at Cal Tech's Beckman Auditorium next Tuesday, September 9 at 8 pm. He'll be presenting ideas from his new book Icarus at the Edge of Time, which is about black holes. The event is free, and as you can see from this, it will be fascinating:

Labels: , ,

Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Have You Read This Book?


In an essay on the Good Magazine website, Anne Trubek wonders aloud why high school teachers continue to put The Catcher in the Rye on their syllabi:
Why is The Catcher in the Rye still a rite of high school English? Sure, J.D. Salinger’s novel was edgy and controversial when teachers first put it on their syllabi. But that was 50 years ago. Today, Salinger’s novel lacks the currency or shock value it once had, and has lost some of its critical cachet. But it is still ubiquitously taught even though many newer novels of adolescence are available.
She goes on to recommend some updated options for teachers looking to fill the "adolescent novel" slot on their reading list, including The Virgin Suicides by Jeffery Eugenides, Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson, and Drown by Junot Diaz.

In the comments, people are (mostly) upbraiding her for being either irrelevant (arguing that nobody teaches Salinger anymore) or just plain wrong. I'm curious to hear where Vroman's readers are on the subject. I haven't read The Catcher in the Rye since high school, but I will gladly cop to being a big Salinger fan back in the day. I preferred his short stories to his novels, but I had a high opinion of The Catcher in the Rye at the time, for sure. But then I hadn't read so many of the books I would call my favorites yet, either.

It seems to me that The Catcher in the Rye was a carrot in high school, something to get you moving as a reader, a gateway drug, so to speak (In this analogy, I suppose something like Tess of the D'Urbervilles would be the "stick"). I wonder if it still serves its purpose today. Something that Trubek didn't address in her essay is the rise of young adult literature as a powerful force. With Harry Potter, Twilight, the Inheritance series, and other popular books making major inroads with young readers at an age before they might encounter it, do we still need The Catcher in the Rye to hook readers? I realize that young adult literature, in the form of Robert Cormier and others, existed before Harry Potter, but it wasn't the same. Sure, you could dig a library-bound paperback of The Chocolate War out of the shelves at your school library (if it wasn't banned), but I don't remember anybody camping out outside a bookstore to buy it.

I'm not terribly interested in whether people think Salinger's novel is good or not--I'm too far removed to make any kind of real judgement--but I am intersted in hearing from teachers, school librarians, and fellow readers about what books should be taught in high school these days. Is Trubek right or does The Catcher in the Rye still have a place in the American high school syllabus?

Labels: ,

Monday, August 25, 2008

Vroman's is Best in Pasadena

Vroman's has been named Best Bookstore in Pasadena by the US Local Business Association. It's a great honor to win an award from an organization dedicated to promoting local businesses. From their press release:
The USLBA "Best of Local Business" Award Program recognizes outstanding local businesses throughout the country. Each year, the USLBA identifies companies that they believe have achieved exceptional marketing success in their local community and business category. These are local companies that enhance the positive image of small business through service to their customers and community.
Thanks for the recognition, and thanks to our many wonderful customers, of course.

Labels:

It Was Monday When He Posted the Links

No more Olympics. I heard it was grand:

  • In Pitchfork today is an excerpt of the new book It Still Moves by Pitchfork staffer Amanda Petrusich. I'm excited about this book, as it seems to be about exactly the kind of music I like.
  • The CIA is pissed about Ron Suskind's new book, The Way of the World. Suskind asserts that the CIA, on orders from the President, fabricated "a letter describing a level of cooperation between Saddam Hussein and al-Qa’ida that simply did not exist." They go on to say, "To assert, as Suskind does, that the White House would request such a document, and that the Agency would accept such a task, says something about him and nothing about us. It did not happen." Not to make a joke about something so serious, but CIA lingo is simply awesome. I love that they call the people they report to in government their "customers."
  • Emma at Avery has a great post about how wonderful TV is. Well, not all TV. She doesn't mention "The Hills," though that is undoubtedly wonderful. She does mention "Friday Night Lights," the best, most addictive show on TV now that "The Wire" is gone. As I've noted a few times on this blog, I no longer have cable, and my TV gets no reception, meaning I can't watch the new season of "Friday Night Lights." This makes me sad. No Tyra.

Labels: , ,

Friday, August 22, 2008

The Podcast Is Working!

After some mysterious difficulties yesterday, the third Vroman's podcast is up and running. Listen to it today, and tell your friends! Yay!

Labels:

Thursday, August 21, 2008

More Notes on the Obama Book Controversy

Yesterday I wrote that "I really don't care" that Chelsea Green is making their new Obama bio available exclusively on Amazon for the initial weeks of its release. Pinky was good enough to give me a nod for it, too. I just wanted to point out that what I meant was that I don't really care about this one particular Obama bio (or, really, any Obama bio. Sorry.). I do think the idea of a publisher making a book - any book - exclusively available on Amazon is a major problem, and in certain ways, a misstep. Sure, they're getting a lot more publicity on this book than they would have (there is zero chance I would've mentioned it on this blog if not for the controversy), but is it really a good idea to alienate all the independent bookstores? Are indies going to get behind this book and recommend it to customers once it's made available? I guess we'll find out.

In the meantime, I encourage everyone to read Gayle Shanks', president of the American Booksellers Association, eloquent letter on the subject:
One of my core beliefs as a bookseller is that a free society depends on a diverse marketplace of ideas, and that closed markets, exclusive agreements, and tactics designed to achieve a short-term victory at the expense of core values are both short-sighted and counter productive. The issue of exclusivity works to the detriment of independent businesses; open markets encourage the free flow of ideas. Ironically, Chelsea Green's actions come in a campaign season where the clarion call by the candidate who is the subject of their book has been for meaningful change -- especially to change politics from an enterprise monopolized by a privileged few making decisions behind closed doors to one in which a diverse society participates in an open process.

Labels: ,

Vroman's Podcast 3: Debra Ginsberg



Vroman's Podcast 3 is up. This time Debra Ginsberg is in the hot seat, as we discuss her new book The Grift. Before the interview, Debra read my astrological chart, which was an illuminating experience. It turns out I have a lot of Scorpio in my chart. She was pretty damn accurate, too. She noted that I am intense yet like to pass myself off as easygoing (true), that I often need time to myself to regroup (also true), and that women find me very charming (well...).

Debra will be appearing at Vroman's on Wednesday, August 27 at 7 pm. Everybody buying a book that night will be entered to win a free astrological reading from Debra. Be there.

[Click here to download the podcast to your computer. As you can see on our fancy new player, the running time is a shade over 31 minutes.]

[UPDATE: It looks like the site that hosts the podcast is experiencing technical difficulties. The podcast should appear in a little while, so check back later. Sorry for the inconvenience.]

Labels: , , ,

Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Links, Bookish and Non

Something for everyone...as long as you're just like me:
  • For the record, I really don't care that Chelsea Green is only selling its fawning Obama bio on Amazon. I guess I fail to see how it's any different from the others. Nice marketing decision on their part, though.
  • After reading this amazing story in last week's T Magazine (God, that's an awful name. It's so desperate to be hip...), I have to say I'm jealous of these tween fashion bloggers. When I was twelve I had just decided that it was no longer acceptable to wear pants with an elastic waist to school.
  • Speaking of fashion, I'm about three years late to this party, but drool over the fabulousness of The Sartorialist.
  • Since I seem to be all about clothes this morning, I'll plug Dana Thomas' excellent Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster, out in paperback. If you're so interested, you can read my lengthy review of it here.
  • The Walkmen are a good band. Their album You & Me just got a good review from Pitchfork, for what it's worth. If you download their album here it is only $5, and all of that money goes to the Memorial Sloane-Kettering Cancer Center, where a young friend of the band is a patient. Buy the CD and support a worthy cause.

Labels: , ,

Friday, August 15, 2008

Night of the Gun


David Carr's Night of the Gun is getting a ton of buzz this summer, with some claiming his reportage-style approach to the memoir is the perfect response to the recent "fictional memoir" phenomenon. For those not familiar with Carr's story, check out his really sharp website. [Authors, publicists, and web designers take note: this is how book sites should be done.]

Carr's story is pretty remarkable: he was an abusive junkie and small-time drug dealer who eventually turned around his life, raised twin daughters on his own, and became a columnist for the New York Times. He'll be at Vroman's on Tuesday night. Be there, fool.

Labels: , ,

More Close-Up Covers

After yesterday's post, Nikki in the book department pointed out the new Lolita cover. It's lip-licious:

And then, of course, there's the cover of Stephenie Meyer's The Host, which is indeed an ECU (as they say in the biz), but it somehow lacks the sensual realism of the other covers:

Labels: ,

Thursday, August 14, 2008

Fiction Ready for Its (Extreme) Close-Up



Three covers makes a trend, right? This one is better than the women's legs and men's shoes trends that overwhelmed contemporary fiction five years ago. Let's just hope they don't start showing close-ups of men. Nobody needs that...because men are ugly.

Labels: ,

Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Coolest Blog Ever?

Yeah, I'd say so. Those people at Skylight know how to party.

Labels: , ,

What Got it Going?

At The Millions, the contributors are answering the question "What was the book that started it all for you?" Since I used to be a contributor there (those were the days...), I'll offer my own answer here. I have three: when I was in middle school, I sought out and special ordered a biography of John Coltrane called Chasing the Train, and read it greedily. It wasn't written like other biographies, as it combined "re-enactments" (little sections that imagined moments in Coltrane's life) along with elements of an oral history, and some straightforward narratives of Coltrane's life. I absolutely loved it, and it continues to be a favorite book of mine. It's the first book I remember seeking out like that, although maybe my parents remember earlier books.

The other two are more recent, and I always think of them together. When I was in college, I did a lot of reading, but none of it was for pleasure. I read a lot of great novels like Ulysses, The Sorrows of Young Werther, The Iguana, Temple of the Golden Pavilion...but I didn't choose to read any of them. They were required for classes, and they were written, for the most part, by dead people. The first two books I remember reading by choice, after a long time of no pleasure reading, were Don DeLillo's White Noise and Martin Amis' Dead Babies. These books, which I picked up after hearing my friends discuss them in bars (most of my meaningful discussions at that time happened at Jimmy's Woodlawn Tap), introduced me to the world of contemporary fiction. In their wake came all the incredible contemporary novels I've read since. Although neither book seems great in retrospect (White Noise seems like a stylistic cliche, although this may be because it's so often imitated, while Dead Babies seems like drunken ramblings next to the better Amis books like The Information), they hold a special place in my heart for introducing me to a world of books that's still alive and thriving.

Bravo to The Millions for covering such a cool topic.

Labels: ,

Monday, August 11, 2008

Monday Links

I think I'm the only person left in the world who isn't watching the Olympics. The world without TV is a strange and terrifying place, not unlike Utica, NY. On to the links:
  • Edan interviews Nam Le at the Millions, where they talk about colon exams, Provincetown, and Friday Night Lights.

Labels: , , ,

Friday, August 08, 2008

"Butovo: Field of Repressed Memory" A Guest Essay by Daniel Silva


Daniel Silva is the author of eleven bestselling novels, including The Confessor, The Secret Servant, and A Death in Vienna. He will be at Vroman's on Wednesday, August 13 at 7 pm to discuss and sign his new book Moscow Rules. What follows is an essay Mr. Silva wrote about a recent trip to Russia.

Butovo: Field of Repressed Memory

By Daniel Silva

I noticed the article in the New York Times while I was preparing to head to Russia to begin researching my new novel, Moscow Rules. Butovo, one of Stalin’s killing grounds during the Great Terror, had been turned into a memorial and was now open to the public. We contacted our guide and told him we wanted to visit the site during our stay in Moscow. He agreed to take us there but later admitted that he had been quite surprised by the request. No American had ever asked to be taken to Butovo. In fact, he himself had never been there.

It had been a village once. Now it was a leafy Moscow suburb and a beehive of real estate development. To reach it, we headed south from the center of Moscow, down the thunderous Leninsky Prospekt, which is lined with the largest apartment blocks I have ever seen. As I wrote near the climax of Moscow Rules, “It was as if the masters of the Communist Party, in all their infinite wisdom, had decided to uproot the entire population of the world’s biggest country and resettle it here, along a few wretched miles of the Leninsky Prospekt.”

Eventually, the apartment blocks gave way to warehouses and factories, and soon we even began to see small dachas in the woods along the road. When finally we arrived in Butovo, it took us several minutes to actually find the old killing ground. It had recently been entrusted to the Russian Orthodox Church; a young priest had agreed to give us a tour. I cannot recall his name, but I will never forget his appearance. He was an elfin figure, thin as a reed, with a shirt collar two inches too big and an old-fashioned flat cap perched on his narrow head. He spoke no English; our Russian guide, a former schoolteacher and Communist Party member, provided simultaneous translation.

He led us first to a small wooden church that had been erected in the center of the field. Next to the church were several display boards covered with police photographs of the soon-to-be-dead. The images were haunting; I had the distinct impression that the victims knew what fate awaited them. Next to the photos was a macabre chart that showed the pace of executions on a month-by-month basis. The NKVD had called this place Butovsky Poligon—literally, the Butovo Shooting Range. Night after night, from August 1937 to October 1938, Stalin’s executioners killed opponents of the regime, real or imagined, and dumped their bodies in long trenches dug by earthmovers. At least twenty thousand were murdered at Butovo, only a tiny fraction of the more than seven hundred thousand Soviet citizens believed to have been executed during the wild orgy of killing known as the Great Terror. But Butovo is significant for another reason: it is one of the few places in the New Russia where one can pay tribute to the victims of the Soviet regime.

We did not speak much as we filed past the burial trenches, and when we did it was usually in a whisper. Small groups of Russians followed after us—the elderly, the middle-aged, the young—nearly all in tears. No one knows where individuals are buried at Butovo. The only way to walk past the remains of a loved one is to walk past them all. And even then, one cannot be absolutely certain of having been in close proximity to the bones of a family member or a loved one. The priest told us that there were almost surely more mass graves in the adjoining woods and meadows.

I had been to such places before—while researching A Death in Vienna, I visited the Treblinka extermination camp in eastern Poland and walked alone past its terrible cremation pits—but there was something about Butovo that troubled me deeply. It was not the Russian state that tended this patch of sacred ground but the Orthodox Church. You see, the rulers of the New Russia aren’t much interested in exposing the sins of the Soviet past. In fact, they are engaged in a carefully orchestrated endeavor to airbrush away its most repulsive aspects. One can understand their motives. The NKVD, which ran the killing operation at Butovo, was the forerunner of the KGB. And former officers of the KGB, including Vladimir Putin himself, are now running Russia. I wrote of this attempt to sanitize the past, and the reasons behind it, in Moscow Rules:

Now, in the minds of the New Russians, the murderous crimes of the Bolsheviks were but a way station on the road to an era of Russian greatness. The gulags, the cruelty, the untold millions who were starved to death or “repressed”—they were only unpleasant details. No one had ever been called to account for his actions. No one had ever been punished for his sins.


There is a danger in this sort of historical myopia: the danger that it might happen again. The truth is, it is already happening. The new regime has revived the practice of sending its critics to psychiatric hospitals for “treatment.” And, in a few instances, it is even killing its critics or allowing them to be killed by others. The Russian people seem not to mind. Quite the opposite: most support harsh measures against opponents of the government. One wonders whether they would be so accommodating if their rulers allowed a full and frank exploration of the horrors that lie buried in the not-so-distant Russian past.


Our tour ended where it began, next to the little wooden church. The faces of the dead gazed silently at us as we bade good-bye to the priest and filed into our minibus. During the drive back to central Moscow, our Russian guide was in tears. He said the visit to Butovo had been one of the most moving experiences of his life. And had it not been for a request from an American novelist, he would never have gone. That, too, is a Russian tragedy.



Labels: , ,

Thursday, August 07, 2008

Summer Reading: A Report from the Trenches

Round these parts, we talk a lot about summer reading -- what makes a book a good "beach read," whether summer is the time to tackle a classic or the perfect time for guiltier fare. Most blogs and book review sections (and at the LA Times, the two are getting harder and harder to tell apart) offer summer reading lists, which are often nothing more than lists of what books are being published this summer. Well I thought I'd do something different. This past week, I took it upon myself to travel to Kauai, the Garden Isle of Hawaii, to see what people were reading in the airports and airplanes, at the beaches and by the pools this summer in America's 50th state.

The results, to the say the least, were intriguing. There were lots of thrillers and mysteries out there on the sandy shores. Lots of Clive Cussler and Brad Meltzer, but always in paperback. The author whose books I saw most frequently was without a doubt Jodi Picoult. I spotted one young lady reading Emily Giffin's Love the One You're With while another sunbather had a closed copy of Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones resting beside her. I spotted copies of Loving Frank, Netherland, One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Autobiography of Malcom X, Water for Elephants, The Princes of Ireland, Eat Pray Love, The Mystery Guest, The Story of a Marriage, and even Pete Sampras' autobiography. I saw kids reading Marley & Me and grown men reading Harry Potter. And near the end of the trip, I saw a couple sitting poolside with matching Kindles.

On Saturday, I started seeing Breaking Dawn appearing at the pool. I saw three copies of it, all told, and a couple of Twilight as well. So what did I learn on my journey? If you're near water, you're not likely to read terribly ambitious literature (although you might be), but you are likely to be reading. Nobody was trucking Gravity's Rainbow down to the pool every morning, but just about everybody was reading something.

Including me. I managed to get about 2/3 of the way through Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, an iconic summer read if ever there was one. I returned home tired, sore, and not nearly tan enough for a person who spent six days reading by a pool in the tropical sun. I learned a lot about myself (I have trouble reading around lots of people in bathing suits), a little about others (dangly belly button piercings are still de rigeur in some parts of the US), and a little about what people like to read (books, mainly paperback). All in all, it was a good trip. Next year, Fiji (I'm working my way across the Pacific).

Labels: ,

Friday, August 01, 2008

Two Book Recommendations from Vroman's Book Buyer Marie Du Vaure

Marie Du Vaure is Vroman's head book buyer. She offers a couple of recommendations of what to read right now:

The Diving Pool, by Yoko Ogawa
A perfectly disturbing trio of novellas. These unsettling stories get under your skin and won't let go. Ogawa disrupts every reference to normalcy from the inside out, to the point that readers find themselves actually responding to the call for cruelty! Quite an experience...

Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Founding of the US Navy, by Ian Toll
This is a lively and wholly absorbing narrative that will please both history buffs and readers who love a good yarn laced with solid research. I am not particularly drawn to books about early American history, but I thought I would just read the first few pages, curious as I was about how such a great institution did start. I was hooked right away. The writing is colorful, clear, and full of energy. As a young country, the United States had no real navy to speak of after the Revolution, but constant threats from the British and the French, and attacks from the Barbary pirates made the issue of a maritime force a hot topic of debate among the Founding Fathers. In 1974, Congress finally approved the building of 6 heavy frigates (smaller than a battleship and bigger than a sloop, it was of an innovative design that combined power and speed). Thus began the campaign against Tripoli, and the book continues to the War of 1812. Ian Toll does a marvelous job of evoking that era: the places, the battles, the smells, the mercantile activities, the diplomatic world. A great find, and it should sit prominently on any history shelf!

Thanks, Marie!

Labels: ,