Winter Institute, Here I Come

I'm off to Salt Lake City, Utah, where I'll be participating in the ABA's fourth annual Winter Institute. I'm looking forward to mingling with my fellow booksellers and hopefully getting some great new ideas to share with all of you.

If I can secure some WiFi, I will post blog updates (I may even Jott them to the blog, cause I'm 21st Century like that), but if I don't, you can follow what I'm doing on Twitter. And if you're a bookseller heading to WI, please hit me up on Twitter. We'll hang.

An Updike Round-Up

Lots of posts about John Updike are popping up at the moment, as you would expect. I thought I'd provide a link to a few of them that are truly worthwhile.

• Ed Champion's interview with John Updike on Episode 50 of the Bat Segundo Show.

• The full text of Updike's famous essay "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu," about Ted Williams' final game at Fenway Park.

• A link to the Google Books version of Conversations with Updike, in which he says "we are a death-foreseeing animal and animal of mental appetite..." (via @maudnewton on Twitter)

• The AP obituary, via the Los Angeles Times.

• Updike's essay for the "This I Believe" series on NPR.

• Updike on Charlie Rose (second segment is Updike).

• Updike on dinosaurs for National Geographic. Weird. (via @sarahw on Twitter)

• An excellent, heartfelt memory of Updike, focusing on his essays, by Sam Anderson at NY Mag's Vulture blog (which, by the way, is among the best designed blogs on the web).
  

I'll update the post as more come in. Feel free to post your own in the comments or email them to me at pbrown@vromansbookstore.com.

John Updike, RIP

According to the New York Times, John Updike has passed away. He was 76. He was a towering figure in American literature, and better eulogies than this are forthcoming. I will say that Updike wrote several stories had a massive impact on me. When I read his short story "The Christian Roommates," about two dissimilar roommates at Harvard, is among my favorite short stories, and sets a literary tone that I've searched for in every bit of campus literature I've read since. And of course "A&P," taught in every writing class on the planet, is a masterwork.

Of his novels, I've only read Rabbit, Run, but others have been on my eternally growing to-read list. If any of you have a particular recommendation or any thoughts about Updike and his passing, I'd love to hear them in the comments.

NBCC Finalists, Newbery and Caldecott Awards, and More

It's a busy Monday in the book world, and we're here to cover it all.

The National Book Critics Circle announced its finalists on Saturday. You can read the full list here, but the fiction and non fiction finalists are as follows:

Fiction

• 2666, by Roberto Bolano
• Home, by Marilynne Robinson
• The Lazarus Project, by Aleksandar Hemon
• The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart, by M. Glenn Taylor
• Olive Kitteridge, by Elizabeth Strout

Non-fiction

• The Forever War, by Dexter Filkins
• The Republic of Suffering: Death and the Civil War, by Drew Gilpin Faust
• The Dark Side, by Jane Meyer
• White Protestant Nation, by Allan Lichtman
• From Colony to Superpower: US Foreign Relations Since 1776, by George C. Herring

The real surprises here, obviously, are the university press titles, by Taylor in fiction and Herring in non-fiction. Trenchmouth is about "the oldest living man in West Viriginia," the titular Taggart, so named for a lifelong oral affliction. Sounds interesting. If I had to predict the winners, I would go with The Lazarus Project in fiction (just a hunch), and The Republic of Suffering in non-fiction. I don't have a reason for picking either, other than a vague hunch, so don't go running to the Flamingo with this (Does the Flamingo still exist?).

In other awards news, the Newbery and Caldecott winners were announced this morning. The Newberry went to Neil Gaiman for his book The Graveyard Book. The Newbery is awarded for "the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children." You can keep up with Gaiman by following his Twitter feed (@neilhimself), where his reaction has been, well, kind of awesome.

The Caldecott went to a book of poetry, The House in the Night, illustrated by Beth Krommes, written by Susan Marie Swanson.

Local writers were well represented in the ALA's two awards, as Kadir Nelson won the Koretta Scott King Award for We Are the Ship, and Marla Frazee was a Caldecott Honor for A Couple of Boys Have the Best Week Ever. Congratulations to them for their acheivements. Both are books that deserve to be recognized.

It wasn't all wine and roses in the publishing world today, though, as Publishers Weekly parent company Reed Business laid off PW editor-in-chief Sara Nelson. Read David Ulin's reaction here.

And since it comes from a memoir, we must pass along Joe Torre's confirmation of what we all knew already: Alex Rodriguez is really weird and is obsessed with Derek Jeter. Good times.

Vroman's Trivia Winners Announced!

Okay, so it's not quite the National Book Critics Circle Award (more on that later) but congratulations are due to E, who took home first place in the first annual Vroman's Trivia Contest with 13 points. He won a $10 gift card to Vroman's Bookstore. Efren took second place with 7 points, and as such, will receive two free Advanced Reading Copies of his choosing from my own personal secret stash. Keith finished third with 6 points and will receive a complimentary advanced reading copy.

Thanks to all who played. If nothing else, perhaps you found a good book to read. For a recap, here are the books featured in the contest:

• The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood
• Bel Canto, by Ann Patchett
• Portnoy's Complaint, by Philip Roth
• No Country for Old Men, by Cormac McCarthy
• White Noise, by Don DeLillo
  
• Gravity's Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon

And of course Friday's clue was from Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. The line was spoken by Rorschach. All of these books are available right now at Vroman's Bookstore and at www.vromansbookstore.com.

Thanks again for playing.

Reading for the Weekend

To go with your hot toddy, a few interesting articles and items of note.

• This was pointed out earlier today on Twitter by @sarahw, but take a look at the New York Times Paperback Bestsellers list. The number one book is a fifty year-old novel (and a good one, at that).
  

• I'm not sure how everyone felt about Elizabeth Alexander's inaugural poem, but the text is here. It will be available at Vroman's, via the excellent Graywolf Press, on February 3.

• Tomorrow night at 7 p.m., the National Book Critics Circle will announce the finalists for its annual awards. They'll be live-blogging the event. I'll be guessing the winners in various categories again. I did okay last year. Or rather, I got the fiction one right.

• And finally, if ever there was a book cover that made me want to read a book, this is it (via You'll Eat it and You'll Like it):

Vroman's Trivia Day 7: The End

Yesterday's quote was, of course, one of the famous "Rocket Limericks" from Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, the longest, most bizarre Marx Brothers novel ever written. A hint was the diagram of a rocket that I tried to put in the background. My wife told me that this in fact looked like a sunny side up egg. EPIC FAIL on my part. Sorry.

Congratulations to Efren, who took first place with 3 points, E who continued his string of dominance with 2 points, and Don, who snuck in there for a single point.

For today's clue, let's try something a touch different. I think the quote is pretty easy, so you have to tell me the book it comes from, the author (or authors of the book), and the character who said it. Tall order, I know, but come on, it's the last day. Leave it all on the blog.


Email your guesses to pbrown@vromansbookstore.com. Thanks for playing, and good luck to all. The winner of the contest will be announced Monday.

Vroman's Trivia Day 6

As several of you correctly surmised, yesterday's quote was from White Noise, by Don DeLillo. The few of you who answered "The Metaphysics of Death," I'm hip to you. That was the first reference that came up on Google. Gotcha!

E once again got first place. He is now well ahead, but I believe there are still a few people who can catch him by sweeping the next two days. Alison took second place and received 2 points. Third place went to the mysterious "Pairoline." One point for them. On to today's quote.

What book is this quote from (And remember, it is a novel)? Clues abound, so you really shouldn't be Googling today's clue.

Oscar Notes and Other Thoughts

Academy Award nominations are out today, and bookish films again led the pack. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, adapted from a F. Scott Fitzgerald novella, received 13 nominations. Adaptations The Reader and Slumdog Millionaire were also nominated for Best Picture, as was the adaptation of the stage play Frost Nixon. There seems to be a sizable contingent of people angry that The Dark Knight wasn't nominated for Best Picture (Heath Ledger was nominated for Supporting Actor). I suspect a Facebook group has already been started.

The big loser this year seems to be Revolutionary Road, adapted from Richard Yates' excellent novel. It received only one major nomination, Michael Shannon for Best Supporting Actor. It always seemed like an 'un-filmable' novel to me, and perhaps, ultimately, it was.

But the Oscars aren't everything, and the internet never stops humming. With that in mind, a few other links of note today:

• If you're an author and you're building a website, you ought to read this excellent post from The 26th Story. Among the sites they cite (ha!) as good examples is Sloane Crosley's site. If you recall, I liked her book trailer very much.

• Via The Elegant Variation comes this SF Chronicle article about the excellent indie Greywolf Press, publisher of daring fiction and "the most important, interesting and rich poetry list of any press anywhere."

• At Good, Anne Trubek tells us "Why We Need to Paint Books Now." Interesting take, although I'm dubious of anyone proclaiming the death of printed books. Egon Spengler was wrong, print is most assuredly not dead.

Trivia coming up in just a bit. Sharpen your thinking caps!

Vroman's Trivia Day 5

Yesterday's was tough. We had a lot of very smart guesses, including one of the Ripley books, and The Savage Detectives, but the correct answer was No Country for Old Men, by Cormac McCarthy. E took first place and is now in the lead overall with 7 points. Keith grabbed second place and is currently in second overall with 4 points. For those of you who haven't scored yet, there is still plenty of time to win, place, or show, so don't get discouraged.

I think today's clue is very easy, but I've been wrong before. What book is this quote from?



Remember, email your guesses to pbrown@vromansbookstore.com. Good luck, and thanks for playing.

Vroman's Trivia Day 4

Yesterday's clue was an easy one, if you'd read the book, and probably pretty easy if you hadn't. The quote was from Portnoy's Complaint, by Philip Roth. E took first place yesterday and is now in the lead with 4 points. Kim took second, and Efren grabbed a single point for third. Let's see how you do with today's quote.

What book is this quote from?


Email your guesses to pbrown@vromansbookstore.com. Good luck.

Harry W. Schwartz Bookshops to Close

The City of Milwaukee is about to get a lot less interesting, with the announcement that Harry W. Schwartz Bookshops will close at the end of March after 80 plus years in existence. I've never been to their stores, as I've never had the pleasure of visiting Milwaukee, but on the surface, it isn't hard to see the similarities between Schwartz and Vroman's. Both are old by today's retail standards. Both have given a lot of money to local charities through our Gives Back programs (In fact, the numbers are remarkably similar). Both have pretty great blogs (or at least Schwartz does).

I hate eulogizing indie bookstores, but I'll probably have to for awhile, with the economy listing badly. I found this heartfelt blog post, by bookseller Justin Riley, via the excellent, excellent blog The Inside Flap. I thought I'd excerpt a paragraph or two:

But then again, the prices on Amazon are so cheap. Why, you can save six whole dollars on that twenty dollar book. All it costs in return is the erosion of individuality and the closing of four bookstores (today; more to come) filled with a resource that you don't miss until it's gone.

So, there's no way you can stop this. There's no wand to wave and keep my bookshop open. What there is, however, is the choice (losing substance daily) to support the worthwhile endeavor of community and dialogue. I'd ask that every time you see a book for sale online, you question why the reviewer doesn't have a link to BookSense [note: now Indiebound] (a collection of independent booksellers in America). When an author says "You can get my book on Amazon.", ask them where else you can get it. Ask them if they plan on going on a book tour sponsored by Amazon. Ask them what other books their latest is bundled with on a website that tracks sales but not content or style.

Lance Fensterman, writing at the Medium at Large blog, had the following observation:

I was at the mall with the Editor-in-Chief yesterday looking to spend a gift card and I tuned to her and asked her how many of these chains will be out of business or in Chapter 11 by the end of this year. To take that a step further, how many people will care when they do close? Was there an outpouring from communities across the country when Linen's N Things closed? What about Circuit City? Were little league teams wondering who will buy their jersey's this year or schools wondering who will support them with fundraising voucher sales?

I suppose this is the cold comfort for the booksellers. At least they outlasted Circuit City. I think of this often when I hear of big box retailers going belly-up. They came and went, and we're still here. It reminds me a bit of a section of David James Duncan's The Brothers K. One of the Chance brothers, Everett, is living in exile in a tiny coastal town in British Columbia. The town bears a native name, but its dominant feature is a long dead paper mill, built by white people. Everett remarks that the natives had lived in that area for 10,000 years. They lived in harmony with nature -- fishing, hunting, and logging. The area changed little, but it gave them what they needed to live. Then the white man came, built a paper mill and a town to go with it. Logged the area until it could no longer sustain it, then shut down the mill, packed up and left. All in the span of less than 200 years.

My coworker just remarked that the Harry W. Schwartz people were her favorite booksellers to see at bookseller gatherings like BEA and the ABA's Winter Institute. They were fun and hip, and they were always doing something innovative. I'm not going to try to find all the times I linked to them on this blog because I did so frequently. I hope they continue writing The Inside Flap in some capacity. I hope the people there find jobs that fit their interests and talents. And I hope the people of Milwaukee realize what they are losing.

A Feast of Links

People have already rocked today's trivia clue. I'll reveal the answer tomorrow, but in the meantime, I've got a few links to pass along.

• The new issue of Avery Anthology will be at Vroman's soon. It features stories by Hannah Tinti, Kevin Canty, Edan Lepucki and others. I recommend you pick it up. It will be in the literary anthology area, over by hardcover fiction. You will know it by its trail of awesomeness.

• The LA Times has a clip of John Krasinski's adaptation of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. It's always good to see Josh Charles getting work. (via Jacket Copy)
  

• From BoingBoing, a Scrabble keyboard.

• Is The Washington Post eliminating Book World, its weekly book section?

• Molly Young on Playboy at n+1. (Safe for work, by the way.)

  The first thing that strike the casual reader is the anatomical variety among bunnies. Nipples, for one thing. Some are as big as cupcakes, others are the size of a penny. They are occasionally erect and come in a range of colors as varied as drugstore lipsticks. Pubic hair is another delight to behold, appearing first in 1971 and thriving until 1997.

Vroman's Trivia: Day 3

Okay, so nobody (except Edan, who isn't eligible to win) got last week's trivia quote, which was from Ann Patchett's Bel Canto. Perhaps it was because of the copious typos. Anyway, no points were given out, so the standings are the same.

To make up for Friday's uber-difficult clue, today's is laughably easy. It's Google-able, but if you have to Google it, turn in your reading light. And put down that bookmark, too.

What book is this quote from?


Email the answer to pbrown@vromansbookstore.com.

Vroman's Trivia: Day 2

Yesterday's quote was from Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. Congratulations to Lee, who received 3 points for being the first to answer. Keith took second place and received 2 points. E came in third, and got a single point. And now on to today's quote.

What book is this quote from?


Good luck, and remember email your answers to pbrown@vromansbookstore.com.

Edit: It was brought to my attention that clarification only has three "i"s in it, not four. In the book, the word is spelled correctly. It is not a quirk of the writer's style or anything like that.

Vroman's Trivia: Day 1

Before we start, a couple of announcements: Vroman's employees and relatives of employees are ineligible to win, but are encouraged to email me their guesses anyway. Please don't answer the question in the comments. This will ruin it for the rest of us. Anyone posting the answer in the comments will receive -3 points and my undying scorn. Remember, email me your guesses. (pbrown@vromansbookstore.com)

Good luck. This first one is tough. They might get easier. Or not.

What book is this quote from?

Vroman's Trivia

Things feel a bit slow on the internet today, so I thought I'd introduce something new. Starting tomorrow, we will be playing Vroman's Trivia! The way it works is quite simple. I will post a little graphic quote (Just something I've thrown together in Photoshop), and you will have to guess what book it comes from. The first person to email me (pbrown@vromansbookstore.com) the correct title of the book will receive 3 points. The second person will get 2, and the third will get 1. Fourth place is you're fired.

We'll run the contest from tomorrow through next Friday, meaning that there will be seven quotes. At the end of the contest, I will announce the three top finishers, and each of them will get a fabulous prize.

What's that you say? You require a hint as to what kinds of books we'll be quoting? Okay. The quotes will all come from new-ish classics. Books from the last forty years or so, but books that you will have heard of. Hopefully. For your sake.

You need a sample? Really? Okay, fine. What book is this quote from?


Anybody?

The correct answer is Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris. Now wasn't that easy? (It will be harder next time, since I won't name the image after the title of the book.)

I will give the answer to the previous day's quote when I give the new quote. Good luck, everyone!

Links in the Afternoon

For the discerning reader:

• Why do ebooks cost so much? I mean, it's not like they need to print them, right?
  

• R. Crumb is publishing a literal adaptation of the Book of Genesis.

• It's Rooster time again. The Morning News' annual Tournament of Books is about to begin. You can check out the contenders here. More to come later, but there are a few obvious favorites (although last year's debacle with The Remainder should remind everyone that upsets do happen).

• Have any of you read the 33 1/3 series? I really enjoyed John Darnielle's Master of Reality, and now I'm about half-way through Amanda Petrusich's Pink Moon. Really good stuff. Are there any others I should check out? I hear good things about the Celine Dion.
  

The New You Project and The Speed of the Machine

Lauren Cerand is a publicist who works in the book world. She writes The Smart Set, a weekly rundown of cultural happenings in New York, for Maud Newton, and she has her own blog, Lux Lotus, where she writes about art, culture, and politics.

I follow Lauren on Twitter, where her posts run the gamut from work-related happenings in the book world to travel plans to style tips. A little after the new year, she posted a link to something called The New You Project. In short, the New You Project is a creative effort to bring some attention and love to Jonathan Baumbach's novel You or The Invention of Memory. Baumbach, known to you movie fans out there as the father of filmmaker Noah Baumbach (He had a cameo in The Squid and the Whale), was one of the founders of Fiction Collective (not to be confused with Animal Collective) in the 1970s.

You came out last January, received one review, and then saw its publishing company close shop, taking whatever marketing budget existed with it. Lauren met with Jonathan a few months ago, and decided to try something with the book:

And we met and hit it off instantly, and I read the book, and started, quite uncharacteristically, marking it up and bending down corners and reading passages to friends over the phone and so I said that if he was willing to take a risk, well then, so was I. Hence, “The New You Project.” The afore-mentioned review ran in The Los Angeles Times last January and YOU or The Invention of Memory promptly slid off the map. Or did it? Here’s how it works: email me (correspondence at laurencerand dot com) between now and February 14 to request a free copy of the book (limited to the first 365 requests) and I will send it to you in the mail. Free. You can read it. You can give it away. You can sell it to the Strand or Powell’s, depending on your coast. Whatever. The point is, this is a book that I believe in. I believe it belongs in the world. I believe it belongs with you.

I thought it was an interesting idea, a last-ditch effort to save a book before it fell into the abyss that, frankly, 90% of all the books published fall into, that dead space of silence where there are no readers. But as I've thought about the idea, the more I think it has the potential to be something even bigger than that.

Last February, you may remember a conversation between myself, Mark Sarvas, and John Freeman about the NBCC Good Reads list of recommended reads. I had made the point that the list of recommended books, which included Tree of Smoke, was too obvious, too easy, and that the same titles showed up over and over again. He had countered with the idea that a book like Tree of Smoke, which took a decade to write, deserved more than its one month status as "the hot book."

I'm not terribly worried, though, about giving very good books another shot at reaching readers. I'm more worried about the speed with which we're supposed to metabolize books now. Johnson's novel was out in September, won an award in November, and I feel by December we're all supposed to have moved on because it's had 'success.' It's a big book, which took him a decade or more to write, and raises some very serious issues -- I think reviews have just scratched the surface. I don't think readers who wander into the store are on that speeded up schedule and the critical world (and publishing world) does them a disservice by our restlessness.

I suppose you could say that there are a lot of other books waiting for their turn, and I agree. There are far too many books being published now than a culture can possibly devour (and we're not even very good at translating books!). It's good to spread the wealth. But I also believe that the discussion about books shouldn't be driven by a desire to help out small presses or new authors -- worthy as those impulses are -- but simply to find the best, even if it is obvious choice, while keeping an eye on the institutional or structural impediments against getting books which are very good (like say Geoffrey O'Brien's poems, Sleeping and Waking, or Dinaw Mengestu's novel Children of the Revolution) their fair due.

Freeman was right. Tree of Smoke did deserve more time. It needed time to be read, discussed, debated, digested, and appreciated. So, too, does You need more time than the one week it was given.

In short, books need time. They simply can't be forced into the same hyper-fast time frame of hype that surrounds film and music releases. Yet many major publishing houses try to do just that. This point was made eloquently by Eric Obenauf, of Two Dollar Radio, on the New You Project blog:

The large houses direct the industry by sheer size. By flooding the market with books that have the shelf-life of a bruised tomato, mainstream publishers impact how all books are received and treated by booksellers (or, at least, chain bookstores).

You, or The Invention of Memory was published in hardcover, which probably didn’t allow the book much time to find an audience. Being somewhat familiar with Jonathan Baumbach’s work, I feel comfortable attesting to his startlingly original vision and style. I’m fairly certain that this is not something that a sales representative would like to hear and would more than likely never repeat aloud.

This past month has brought on an onslaught of lists and articles about what the best book of the year was and what the ten best books were and then, quickly, what we're all looking forward to for next year. These are well and good. It's fun to look back at the year, and the internet, we all know, was invented for lists. But maybe the machine needs to be slowed down. A lot. Looking at the staggering number of books that appeared on people's best-of lists, I'm struck by how many of the books I haven't gotten around to yet. And it's my job to get around to them. That's one of the reasons I love the way The Millions handles its annual Year in Reading series. It's the best book you read in 2008, not the best book published in 2008. As a reader, I sometimes feel that I'm constantly under attack by a relentless stream of new books, new books, new books.

Newness is great, newness is fun, newness is necessary. But let's slow down for a second. The New You project could help us all do that. A copy of Baumbach's novel is on its way to me. I'm going to read it, hype machine be damned.

You can follow the progress of the New You Project and share your thoughts about You or The Invention of Memory here.

More Web Articles of Note

I think this Internet thing is going to catch on in a big, big way this year. It's really going to take off. Look what I found there today:

• Beatrice on the cover art for a limited edition of the new Dan Simmons novel Drood:

  It’s the Victorian-askew look of the latter that came to mind this morning when I got a look at Picacio’s artwork for a limited edition of Drood, the new Dan Simmons novel that asks the question, “Did the famous and loveable and honourable Charles Dickens plot to murder an innocent person and dissolve away his flesh in a pit of caustic lime and secretly inter what was left of him, mere bones and a skull, in the crypt of an ancient cathedral that was an important part of Dicken’s own childhood?”

  Dan Simmons will be at Vroman's on February 22 to sign copies of Drood.

• Sarah Weinman, who is a terrific Twitterer (or tweeter or whatever), read 462 books last year. You thought you were so mighty with your 35. Loser.
  

• Norah Vincent, who will be at Vroman's next Thursday, is the guest for the newest Bat Segundo podcast.
  

• Ariel Swartley reviews two books by authors visiting Vroman's this month - Nancy Spiller's Entertaining Disasters (she was here last night, and was very cool) and Charlie Huston's The Mystic Arts of Removing All Signs of Death in Los Angeles magazine.

• As if bookselling weren't tough enough already, the new Child Safety Act has vague and potentially catastrophic implications for children's publishing. This is the law that was passed in response to the recalls of Chinese-made toys that contained lead. Right. So instead of, I don't know, buying more locally made toys (maybe even handmade toys) or rethinking the value of outsourcing toy production, we instead pass a bunch of restrictions with broad-strokes implications on all sorts of industries that weren't at fault to begin with. Won't someone please think of the children's booksellers!

• On a happier note, the excellent Inkwell Bookstore blog features this priceless artifact of 1990s culture: The Kids in the Hall Dr. Suess Bible.

• And finally Maud Newton just pointed out that the city of New York has passed budget cuts to nullify arts grants that were awarded but not paid. The city still found enough money to pay the Yankees $370 million for their new stadium. The same Yankees who just spent a cool $450 million on three players.
  

Oh Man, These Are Good Links

Seriously, I don't know what's gotten into the internet today, but it's brimming with pleasure-inducing goodies. Here are a few:

• My friend Steve has alerted me to this informative review of The Secret on the world's most insidious retailer. Since there are a million comments already, I'm guessing you might have heard of this.
  

• The Book Cover Archive is a new website devoted to, yes, book covers. It's beautiful to look at. Do so now. (Via Kottke)

• Speaking of great cover design, I love the look of the new edition of Avery Anthology. Of course, I'm kind of biased, since this issue features a story by Vroman's Ed teacher and Millions blogger (and wife) Edan Lepucki.

• If there's a bookseller in the world not reading Ann Kingman's Booksellers Blog...what are you waiting for? It's indispensable, and right now, the blog I most look forward to reading each morning.
  

• Next time you get a book from the library, be sure to check for bacon.
  

Just Under the Wire

A few quick things before I head for home:

• The Millions has its annual "Most Anticipated Books" post up. To quote the Walkmen, "It's gonna be a good year."

• New adventures in plagiarism: the Conversations with God author posted an essay that wasn't his. Does this mean he didn't really have a conversation with God? (I kid, I kid.)

• Make a Jackson Pollock just by moving your mouse.
  

My 2008

I held off on writing this giant summation post for a couple of reasons. Others have done it better than I, and I had to see if I could finish 2666 by December 31 (I finished it on December 30, sucka). But now I feel the need to look back and remember the year in reading for me. I thought about going about this a bunch of different ways, from recounting everything I read (I can't, as I didn't write everything down, I'm ashamed to admit) to focusing on books published in 2008 exclusively, to listing the best books, etc. In the end, in keeping with the intimacy of the blog, I thought I'd just talk about what I was into this year, what books I loved, what interested me. Maybe that's useful to some people, and maybe it isn't. Either way, I'm taking the plunge.

For a little bit of structure, let's split the titles into fiction and non-fiction.

Fiction:

I think, if pressed, the book that most impressed me that I read this year was actually the first book that I read this year (or one of them), The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz. Not a terribly original pick, I know, but I just loved this book. Funny and heartbreaking, with the most original voice I'd read in a long time, it's a book that I still think about a year later, and that says something. One of the best books of the last five years, and a great book to kick off a year with (A not-so-subtle hint to those of you looking for something to read right now).

Speaking of original voices, I found Joshua Ferris' Then We Came to the End to be so entertaining, so funny, and also so, so sad that I can't recommend it enough. I read it as I was just starting in my new job, and this paragraph about starting a new job jumped off the page at me:

"All those new faces and names to memorize, the strange coffee pots and unfamiliar toilet seats. We had new W-4s to fill out and never knew if it was zero or one that would give us more money back. HR was there to assist, but they were never as good as our old HR. We spent the first two or three weeks, and some of us more like a month or two, in isolation and anonymity. For an unbearable spell, lunch was a solitary affair. Only slowly did we get folded into the mix, only slowly did the new political realities start to dawn."

Man, that takes me back.

Another incredible book I read this year was Tom Drury's The End of Vandalism. Drury might just be the most underrated author in America today, and this novel is a little miracle. Here's what I wrote about it on my Goodreads page:

"There's no good reason it should be as wonderful as it is. The plot meanders all over the place. It jumps from character to character with little reason, and it has what would be described as "tone problems" if we were all sitting around workshopping it. Yet it's perfect. I can't decide whether it's the funniest sad book I've ever read or the saddest funny book...Just read this guy already."

And I still believe that. I've now read three of his novels (The Driftless Area would also be in my 2008 top 10), and loved every one of them. I haven't read The Black Brook yet, and I'm trying to hold off, the way you try to make the candy last all movie long. We'll see how long that lasts.

The Brothers K, by David James Duncan, was always one of those books that I saw in bookstores and wondered about, but never really heard anyone talking about. But then my friend Robert gave me a copy of it, and I read it on my trip to snowy Ohio, and I completely fell in love with it. It tells the story of the Chance brothers and their father, a onetime baseball prodigy turned mill worker in Washington. The term 'page-turner' gets thrown around a lot; here's one instance where it actually applies. I couldn't stop reading this book, and I highly recommend it.

I think I've said plenty about Kate Christensen on this blog, so I'll just remind everyone that they should read The Great Man, another of the best novels I read this year.

The same goes for City of Thieves, which I read in a heartbeat and haven't stopped thinking about since. For more on City of Thieves, listen to my interview with David Benioff.

Other great works of fiction I enjoyed in 2008:

The Coast of Chicago, by Stuart Dybek
Look at Me, by Jennifer Egan
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, by John Le Carre
Girl Factory, by Jim Krusoe
The Driftless Area, by Tom Drury
Black Sabbath's Master of Reality (33 1/3 series), by John Darnielle
The Baum Plan for Financial Independence, by John Kessel
Blood Kin, by Ceridwen Dovey

And of course, 2666 by Roberto Bolano. What to make of this enormous, mutli-generational, multi-continental tome? I think The Inside Flap had some good things to say about the strange readability and urgency of the book, especially the first 200 pages when it isn't obvious yet what the story will be about. I absolutely tore through the first half of this book.

Then I hit "The Part About the Crimes," and everything slowed down. The violence was too much for me to take (I've read some Cormac McCarthy, and I've never read anything like this), and at times, I wanted to stop reading. It's not that I don't see the point of this section of the book. On the contrary, I don't think the book could exist without this. It's the moral center of the book. A never-ending series of murders in the desert, so gruesome that it turns the stomach, and the people of the city are powerless to stop it. But the reader, numbed from rape after rape, murder after murder, starts to tune out...or at least I did. While narratives emerge, they lacked the urgency of the other sections of the book. While I remember the grizzly ends the women met with, I couldn't, if pressed, remember a single one of their names. That's the point of the book, I think, and it's well-made, although hardly pleasant.

But the brilliance of putting it into a larger narrative about literature, the role of the artist, and the role of the critic. That's what makes 2666 so memorable, and, in its own way, so confounding. I'm not done thinking or writing about this book, but for now, I've got to stop. I'm curious to hear what other people have thought of it. On to the non-fiction.

Non-fiction:

I've probably lost all credibility when discussing Julie Klam's memoir Please Excuse My Daughter, as I've been flogging it for months on this blog, but I will flog it once more, regardless. I don't think there was a book I enjoyed reading more than Klam's hilarious and poignant memoir about being smart and a little bit lost in the years between college and adulthood. Listen to our interview, read her very funny blog (now with even more cute dog photos), and read her book already.

Tim Wiener's Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA is well worth your time, and provides plenty of insight into the sorry present-day state of the agency. I'm kind of an intelligence junky, but I think it's a book that the casual reader can enjoy as well.

As something more than a casual fan of Sonic Youth, I'd been thrilled to get a copy of David Browne's Goodbye 20th Century: A Biography of Sonic Youth. There are so many interesting stories in this book, and a fine biography that manages to avoid seemingly like a tombstone to a band that continues to evolve and to challenge.

The award for the weirdest book I read this year was a hard fought battle between Jim Krusoe's Girl Factory (a man discovers that there are women floating in a bacteria solution underneath his frozen yogurt shop), The Driftless Area by Tom Drury (what starts off as a whimsical love story turns into something like No Country for Old Men like that) and The Mystery Guest, by Gregoire Bouillier. In the end, I think this one wins. The Mystery Guest begins with a phone call from an ex-lover, inviting the author to a party. What ensues is the strangest story I read this year. The book is only about 125 pages, so I don't want to give anything away, but suffice to say that it involves an expensive bottle of wine, a famous artist, some literature, and turtlenecks. Yes, turtlenecks.

Speaking of turtlenecks, Dan Kennedy's Rock On is the funniest book I've read in many years. I think I actually read it in late 2007, but it was so long ago and this post is rambling on so long that I'm just going to lump it in with 2008. Kennedy, author of Loser Goes First, gets a job as a big shot marketing guy at Atlantic Records, just in time for the demise of the record business. It's kind of like a good episode of The Office, one where there are cameos by Simon Le Bon, Jimmy Page, and Ice T, but, you know, they all fit and make perfect sense.


If I forgot anyone, I apologize. It was a long year. And an incredible year. I talked to David Sedaris and the Booker Prize winner on the phone, wrote 273 blog posts, hung out with James Frey and a bunch of crazy metal kids, had my chart read for the first time, discovered Twitter, and met so many great people at BEA. For 2009, I think I'm going to try to read more books in translation and a couple of books by dead authors. Don't worry, I'll keep you posted.

Glenn Goldman, RIP

Glenn Goldman, owner of Book Soup on Sunset Boulevard, passed away on Saturday from complications with pancreatic cancer. He was 58 years old.

I worked at Book Soup for five years. It's where I met my wife, where I met so many friends and discovered so many authors. Glenn's death leaves a big hole in the bookselling community, not just in Los Angeles, but across the country. It's been amazing to watch the remembrances of Glenn come pouring in - from Max and Edan at The Millions, from Mark at The Elegant Variation, from Andy Ross of Cody's Books fame, from David Ulin, from Patt Morrison. It's clear that he touched a lot of people's lives, and that he will be missed.

Glenn was a character. I mean that in the best way possible. He had a terrific, if odd, sense of humor (I remember standing outside the store with him before some huge author signing about six months after 9/11. Watching the line snake around the corner he said, "Do you think we're at risk of becoming an Al Qaeda target?") and he was curious about the world. As a businessman, he was ambitious and daring, constantly reevaluating the role of a bookseller.

I wouldn't be working in books if not for the time I spent in his amazing, unique store. Even now, years later, I occasionally answer the phone "Book Soup..." The store lives on as a perfect testament to his dedication and his talents. It has a great staff, it's still teeming with books, and it still hosts hundreds of events. And it all started with Glenn 30 years ago on the Sunset Strip.

Everyone at Vroman's extends their condolences to Glenn's family and to everyone at Book Soup.