Bookdwarf

• I am a fan of Anthony Bourdain. I’m still pissed that missed meeting him at BEA three years ago at a dinner thrown by Bloomsbury. Good for him that Ecco, one of my favorite publishers, have picked up his next three books:
  

  The first book, Cooks, is a follow up to Kitchen Confidential, in which Bourdain explores how the industry he loves - and the people in it - have changed (if they’ve changed) since his years in the kitchen, and tracks the bizarre changes in his own life, along with more frank observations on dining, cuisine and the grim/glamorous business of cooking. “More about WHO is cooking in America than WHAT’S cooking,” says Bourdain.

• *Yawn* The NBCC has announced their Spring Good Reads list. The best part of the list is the discussion in the comments about how their list really does echo the mainstream. I’m not trying to bash the NBCC—it’s great that they’re trying something different. It’s just disappointing that 825 people came up with this list. I’m sure there is some sort of mathematical probability thing that explains it all.
• Vote for the best of the Booker, “a one-off celebratory award to mark the 40th anniversary of the Booker Prize”. I voted for JG Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur. Truly an awesome book about Anglo-Indian relations in the 19th century.
• David Sedaris’s take on the truth of memoirs brouhaha:
  

  “What’s interesting to me,” he says, “is that we live in a time when our government is telling us some pretty profound lies. And then James Frey writes a book and it turns out some of it’s not true. No one asked for their vote back, but everyone wanted back the money they’d spent on that book. We’re in the shadow of huge lies and getting angry about the small ones.”

  Of course his publisher is smart, putting a disclaimer in his forthcoming book. With Sedaris, I doubt people will care. We sold out of premium tickets in the first hour for his upcoming event at my store on June 6th.

• I didn’t know that the Believer had a book award. It’s a good list, lots of books that I don’t remember seeing anywhere else.
• Now I have to go to a very late meeting.

The  most exciting things always happen when I’m out of town. Watch this video about a grad student who lost his Amazon order to a thief. Harvard Book Store manages to save the day and gain a new loyal customer. I’d embed the video, but my skills don’t go that far. Don’t worry, it’s only a few minutes long and has a happy ending.

I’m in Atlanta visiting my parents with my sister. It’s nice to get away for a long weekend somewhere hot. It was over 80 yesterday! I finished the Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson earlier in the week. I’ve been trying to think about what to say about the three books. They’re so complicated, but so good. I’m onto another book by Robinson, The Years of Rice and Salt. I have the feeling that I’m going to have to read all of his books. I read a few things in between which I’ll post about next week, one involving dragons and one involving the Greek gods. Can you guess what they are? See you all next week!

• The LA Times interviews Mark Sarvas.
• Terry Teachout reports that Elaine Dundy, author of The Dud Avocado, has died.
• Guess who won second place in Narrative Magazine’s Love Story contest? One of my all time favorite bloggers.
• My pal Mike interviews Askold Melnyczuk over at the Meeting House.
• The May issue of Boldtype is available. It includes an interview with A.M. Homes.

Perhaps it’s the current political climate or the fact that I’m starting another whirlwind buying season (I ordered a book for January 2009 last week), but I really just want to bury my head in a book. That’s why I picked up Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson the other day. It’s the first in a trilogy about colonizing Mars. I thought it would be a fun romp on another planet but it turned out to be quite serious—in a good way. In the early 21st century, the first 100 people are sent to Mars to make way for more people to follow. Factions form as they try to figure out how to treat Mars. Things on Earth get pretty nasty and the various powers look at Mars as nothing more than a source for cash. The book begins with an assassination, then moves backward to explain the cause, and then moves past it. With good characters (well-written I mean. Some are not very nice at all), and great descriptions of the politics and environment, this is a great beginning. I already started reading the second book Green Mars on my lunch break.

This article by John Flinn about being on a 16 hour flight with no reading material made me shudder. I go everywhere with a book. Mr. Bookdwarf makes fun of me. If we’re just going for a walk, I actually decide whether to take one with me or not. What if we get stuck somewhere? Given a few extra minutes, I’ll whip my book out. I even read while brushing my teeth. I can’t remember a day having gone by where I didn’t read anything. I’m a book-a-holic.

What a lovely phrased coined by Rebecca Solnit in this quite powerful essay called Men Who Explain Things. There’s more to it than the title suggests of course.

Men explain things to me, and to other women, whether or not they know what they’re talking about. Some men. Every woman knows what I mean. It’s the presumption that makes it hard, at times, for any woman in any field; that keeps women from speaking up and from being heard when they dare; that crushes young women into silence by indicating, the way harassment on the street does, that this is not their world. It trains us in self-doubt and self-limitation just as it exercises men’s unsupported overconfidence.

The best part is when you’re trying to defend yourself and no matter how calm you remain, they still tell you to settle down and then stop taking you seriously. If they even did in the first place. It’s odd that I work in an industry with many powerful women. Many bookstores, publishing houses, and agencies in the US are run by women. Yet we most often see men winning the prizes, men reviewed in the book pages. I just did a rough count going through stacks of the New York Times Book Review in  my office:

• Seven cover reviews in the last 33 weeks were written by women, two by Liesl Schillinger and two by Kathryn Harrison.
• In the current week of the NYTBR, of the 15 reviews plus five mentioned in the crime roundup, four were books written by women.
• Last week’s NYTBR, four of 16 books were written by women.
• The week before, three of 14 books were written by women.
• In this year’s Pulitzer Prizes, only two women won in any category and none in the Letters, Drama, Music section.
• In this year’s National Book Awards, no women won any of the prizes.

That’s just a quick and dirty search. I’m sure people will come back saying, well, women aren’t writing as many books, or they’re not writing the kinds of books that might be nominated for prizes, or some such thing. Men still seem to dominate the conversation in the book world. Perhaps I need to speak up more.

Children of Men by PD James, which was adapted into a pretty good movie last year, is now being adapted for a television program, i09 reports. David Eick, who is the one adapting, also wrote for Battlestar Galactica, which I love. Maybe it won’t be so bad?

Go see the full cartoon at pictures for sad children.

• Granta has a fancy new website. Oooh.
• If you live in NYC, head over to the NYPL on May 13th for a program called Periodically Speaking: Literary Magazine Editors Introducing Emerging Writers. The Library is kind enough to host a little reception afterward, which is open to all who attend the reading. At 6 PM on Tuesday, May 13th, editors Hannah Tinti from One Story, Paul Foster Johnson from Aufgabe, and Willard Cook from Epiphany will introduce an emerging fiction writer, poet, and nonfiction writer, respectively.
• In honor of tax day, awesome Small Beer Press has released John Kessel’s new collection of short stories…for free! That’s right, for free you can read The Baum Plan for Financial Independence. You can download it here.
• One of my favorite sales reps has started a blog with one of his colleagues called Books on the Nightstand. They’re posting some podcasts too.
• Speaking of podcast, Ed Champion has posted his 200th interview today. I think it’s fitting that it’s a conversation between Ed and Mark Sarvas. Two bloggers who have done great literary things in the past few years. Mark’s book Harry, Revised came out just this week.

Alex Green opened his store 3 years ago in nearby Waltham, MA. He’s had ups and downs but he’s still there. I think it’s a testament to his determination. Congratulations on your three year anniversary Alex!

I’ve read a couple of good books lately and I wish I had more time to tell you all about them. Here’s brief summary:

• Black Flies by Shannon Burke: This is the story of paramedic Ollie Cross and his first year on the job in Harlem. Expect to read about the worst of people in dark, spare language. To be a paramedic is to lose empathy. Cross and his partner cross some lines making a great read.
• Confessions of a Former Child: A Therapist’s Memoir by Daniel Tomasulo: Another good Graywolf book, Tomasulo writes linked essays about his life. Some are better than others. I absolutely hate the expression laugh-out-loud funny for some reason, but yet I did laugh at a few of the essays, particularly the one about accidentally beheading his daughter’s Ken doll in the car window on a roadtrip. Priceless.
• The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson: This is one of Knopf’s big books of the Fall. Apparently it was a huge international success, another of those Scandinavian mysteries that have become so popular. Too bad the author died after turning in three manuscripts. This one gets pretty good after the first few chapters where you’re not quite sure how the stories connect. There are a lot of twists and turns, some that I couldn’t foresee. It ended so maddeningly that I was glad to learn that it’s the first book in a trilogy. I’ll definitely being reading the next one.

The following is an essay written by Mr. Bookdwarf:

Rob Walker’s Buying In: The Secret Dialog Between What We Buy And Who We Are might not seem, at first, to have much in common with a book about Celine Dion. But when that book is Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey To The End Of Taste by Carl Wilson, it really does.

Buying In is about the ways that people assign meaning to consumer objects and use them to define themselves - and whether the phenomenon of consumerist identity is a good thing. Let’s Talk About Love is about Celine Dion, yes, but it’s about the ways that people assign meaning to Celine Dion, and what those meanings are, and whether any one of them is universally correct.

Celine Dion is widely disliked but also widely loved. Schmaltzy, kitschy, commercial and soulless? Beautiful, pure, and filled with love? Both? It wouldn’t hurt to have a chapter about her in “Buying In,” right next to the discussion of skateboard culture and the rise of Timberland work boots among hip-hop fans.

At different points and en route to different destinations, both books make the same point: People want to be regarded as individuals and also they want to feel like they’re part of something larger than themselves. Various kinds of consumer behavior sate those apparently contradictory needs, often at the same time. I tend to think of it as sort of a tribal behavior: I’m a skateboarder, not a preppie. I listen to Neko Case, not Celine Dion. You get the idea.

One of Wilson’s point major points is that regardless of her actual merits, Celine Dion comes in for a lot more criticism than she would otherwise, because people want to distinguish themselves from people they see as being Celine fans. He covers a lot of ground getting there: The philosophy of aesthetics and taste the evolution of contemporary pop music from 19th century music halls, the origins of pop-music criticism, the Quebecoise culture that formed the background for Celine’s rise to popularity, and more. But ultimately, he’s just trying to step back and give Celine a listen and see what it is that other people love about her. He doesn’t quite manage to like the material himself, but he at least gains some understanding for the tribe of Celine.

Meanwhile, Walker’s interest is the way marketers try to get people to buy things, and whether they have any idea why people actually are buying what they do. He, too, covers a lot of ground: BzzAgent and the Word Of Mouth Marketing association, case studies of Scion and Red Bull and skateboarder culture, the history of advertising and the belief that “kids today are immune to advertising,” which seems to have been in effect since at least the 1900s. The ongoing focus, though, is the way that buyers determine the meaning of what they buy at least as much as sellers do. He talks about how brands like Timberland and Pabst have been the beneficiaries of consumer-driven rebranding that’s turned them into consumable meaning, and how they’ve played along with it rather than resist it. And he talks about how Red Bull and Scion have latched on to existing communities to try and build themselves credibility with different groups.

There are plenty of great anecdotes and at least a couple lessons anyone in sales, marketing, or product development should learn, but he’s got one big point at the end. He says that products may symbolize individuation and community, but they don’t create them. The goal of marketing (or murketing, as Walker calls the latest devious and confusing marketing techniques) is to convince people that a product will provide those emotional needs. But it can’t.

Walker doesn’t think it’s possible or necessary for people to stop imbuing consumer objects with meaning, but he wants people to be aware of how and why they do it, and to understand that a symbolic purchase isn’t a substitute for actually having your own identity or being part of a community.

In both cases, we’ve got an examination of our unexamined consumer preferences turning out to be moral choices - and often not very good moral choices. Both books remind us to look carefully at what we consume, and whether we consume it at all, and how we position that consumption as a signal to other people.

• A rare interview with Jorie Graham.
• One of my friends food blogs La Tartine Gourmande is mentioned in this article in the Washington Post. She’s turned her obsessive food photography into quite a career, contributing articles and recipes to the Globe on a regular basis. It’s also quite cool that many of her recipes are gluten free for the gluten intolerant.
• Robert Fagles died last week.
• Bookstream, a cool indie book distributor, has a new website. It’s not surprising how nice it is considering they used to employ Jessica Stockton Bagnulo, aka The Written Nerd.
• This isn’t a link, more a quick mention of a book I finished a few days ago, Missy by Chris Hannan. I love westerns, so the fact that it features a opium addicted flash gal traveling the wagon trail from San Francisco to the silver mines in the Sierra Nevadas had me hooked. There’s lots of wordplay and fun slang plus some good characters.

Having trouble organizing my thoughts today. I suppose it might just be that the weather switches back and forth almost hourly it seems. One hour it’s warm, the next it’s raining and cold. Here are a few things that have kept my mind busy today:

• Salman Rushdie was crushed when Padma Lakshmi left him and almost didn’t finish writing The Enchantress of Florence, according to this interview in the Guardian.
• I agree with David Mehegan that author bios are getting a little too cutesy.
  

  Since time out of mind, biographical sketches of authors have appeared on the inside back flap of book jackets: what they have written, what they have done, marital status and number of kids, where they live. In recent years, I have noticed the exceedingly odd custom of including, and enumerating, pets and animals.

• This article on the big box stores vs. small independents doesn’t say anything that new, but it’s still worth reading.
• I should say something important about Harper Collins new, big bright publishing plan, but I can’t muster up anything to say right now. I’ll believe it when I see it work.

The Pulitzers were announced today. Junot Diaz picked up the Fiction award for The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Mao, one of my favorite books of last year. Newsweek has a nice interview with the author in which he discusses the burden of expectation and at the end says some accurate things about the current political climate:

With that caveat aside, we’re in the fifth year of the most expensive war in human history. We’re devouring an entire generation of our young people, both directly in the war or with the long-term consequences, and yet the country wants to get obsessed with immigration. Like this is the exact right time to have this conversation? I wonder if we’re not trying to distract ourselves. You know, I love that image from “Moby Dick,” because we’re like the ship. We’re the Pequod. We’re this nation on this ship, and we’re on this insane quest being directed by a madman. But what’s really interesting is that Captain Ahab wasn’t taking his foreign workers and making them walk the plank. He understood the value of diversity through his dream. We’re even crazier than Ahab. We’re chasing this white whale called terrorism, but our captain is saying, “You know what, I don’t think some of us really belong here. They should walk the plank.” I never thought there would be a day where the United States would be crazier than its metaphor, the Pequod. But we’re there. We’re there. Ahab is now a moderate.

I’ve got to get our calendar orders done today, so no lengthy tirades about anything. Usually we meander through the calendar catalogs, spending time picking the absolute best Monet wall calendar (trust me when I say that there are many many Monet calendars out there), but due to some unforeseen circumstances, I’ve got to get them done by tomorrow. And I’m working on them alone for the first time ever. So if you come into the store and wonder who the hell ordered these lousy calendars, that’s me. Meanwhile, here’s some stuff to occupy your free moments:

• Margaret Howe at Bookslut has put together a list of all the magazine articles available online which were nominated for the National Magazine Awards. I was very interested in Peter Hessler’s article for National Geographic on China’s rapid growth:
  

  But Wenzhou had the priceless capital of native instinct. Families opened tiny workshops, often with fewer than a dozen workers, and they produced simple goods. Over time, workshops blossomed into full-scale factories, and Wenzhou came to dominate certain low-tech industries. Today, one-quarter of all shoes bought in China come from Wenzhou. The city makes 70 percent of the world’s cigarette lighters. Over 90 percent of Wenzhou’s economy is private.

• Here’s the new issue of Boldtype: #54 Sounds.
  
• Robert Birnbaum speaks with well-known book designer and author Chip Kidd.
  
• In honor of April being National Poetry Month, FSG has started up their poetry blog again this year.
  
• Yuval Levin discovers a disturbing sales pitch in the press release of a subsidiary of Amazon.com.
• The Tournament of Books is over. Two books enter, one book left. I love Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. On a side note, I once knew a guy who said he would marry the girl who could answer the question, “Who run Bartertown?” Surprisingly, I heard he got married last year.

I’m still coughing and finally went to the doctor after 8 nights of interrupted, cough-ridden sleep. I’ve been given some drugs which hopefully will help. Meanwhile, I flipped through Ingram’s Advance Magazine. Mostly it’s a list of books coming out that month, but the first 10 pages or so have some good interviews and whatnot. The New Voices column, written by Amy Cox Williams (I met her last year at BEA. She’s really nice) is about Tom Rob Smith and his debut novel Child 44. I read this book and wrote about it a few weeks ago. Now I learn that it’s set to become a movie directed by Ridley Scott. And guess who is writing the screenplay? Richard Price. I can’t find confirmation anywhere just doing a lazy google search and the article isn’t available online. So you’ll have to take my word for it. Also Smith is at work on a follow up, set a couple of years after the end of the book and features some of the main characters.

I’ve got an assortment of links here:

• The Fourth Annual New York Round Table Writers’ Conference will be on Friday April 11th and Saturday April 12th. The line up looks great–Charles Bock, Alice Hoffman, Joshua Ferris just to name a few.
• Also the PEN World Voices conference will be from April 20th to May 4th. This year’s theme is Public Lives/Private Lives. The list of participants is outstanding. I’m very excited about Umberto Eco, Salman Rushdie, and Mario Vargas Llosa reuniting on stage. I’d pay money to see that.
• Speaking of Salman Rushdie, he’ll be appearing at my store this summer, on Monday July 14th. We’ve got some great folks coming in the next few months: Richard Price on April 17th, Tony Horowitz on May 5th, Armistead Maupin on May 30th, David Sedaris on June 6th, Lewis Black on June 7th.
• Terry Teachout discusses The Ten Cent Plague by David Hajdu over at Commentary magazine. My store is also hosting an event with him next week at the Brattle Theater.
• Great interview with Jon Banville in the Village Voice. Have I gushed yet over Silver Swan, the second of Benjamin Black’s books? It’s even better than his first book.
• John Freeman, flip flopper. Last year he loved book reviews, the world was getting enough. Now he’s off them. Book reviews are like fad diets. They’re the carbs of our book world perhaps?
• Finally, I leave you with the 7 deadly words of book reviewing: poignant, compelling, intriguing, eschew, craft, muse, and lyrical. I’m sure I’m guilty of using all of these. I mused long and hard on crafting the perfect compelling sentence about eschewing the use of these poignant words.

Winter must have heard I was talking trash because I’ve developed a cold in the last few days. That’s okay with me because it gives me a chance to do some reading. I’ve read two interesting books that I don’t know quite what to make of yet.

The first book is The Secret History of Moscow by Ekaterina Sedia. The book follows several characters in 1990s Moscow as they search for missing people who might have turned into birds. There’s a secret, magic underground beneath Moscow where the old myths and archetypes live. Galina, whose sister is one of the missing, Yakov, a policeman investigating the disappearances, and Fyodor, an alcoholic street artist, make their way into this hidden area. I enjoyed reading it, but am not sure what to make of it all. It’s supposed to be a commentary of Russian society. Perhaps it’s the Dayquil that prevented me from getting to the depths of the story.

The second book is even weirder than the first. I tried describing Girl Factory to Mr. Bookdwarf last night. He definitely thought I had taken too much Dayquil. First I have to congratulate whoever designed the cover:

It’s certainly eye-catching. Here is the back of the book description: “There’s a disturbing secret in the basement of a strip mall yogurt parlor. Jonathan, the mostly clueless clerk who works there, just wants to fix things once and for all, but beginning with an encounter at an animal shelter that leaves three dead, things don’t work out quite the way Jonathan intends . . . or do they? Beneath its picaresque surface, “Girl Factory” raises unsettling questions about storytelling, the nature of freedom, and the ubiquitous objectification of women.” It’s starts out with Jonathan visiting a dog pound to break out a super intelligent dog slated to be put down. He discovers the dog playing chess, specifically Boris Spassky’s losing game against Anatoly Karpov in 1973. Yeah. He breaks the dog out, doesn’t get caught, and eventually goes back to work at Mister Twisty, a yogurt purveyor. Turns out his boss Spinner has several women in jars preserved in special yogurt concoction. I’m going to leave the plot there. Lets just say, Jonathan spends the rest of the book trying to revive the women. I’ve got no words for this book. It’s enjoyable for sure, but trying to describe or explain it? I’m going to go back to coughing and blowing my nose for now.