• I’m proud to present a site that focuses on reading locally–Meeting House: A Journal of New England Fiction. This week they present an interview with Ron Currie, Jr., the author of God is Dead, the story about God returning to Earth in the form of a Dinka woman. It’s been on my TBR pile for a while now. I might have to move it to the top.
• For those who love memoirs, read Judith Jones’s The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food. It’s truly wonderful. Knopf has posted an interview with Jones for your enjoyment. As you can see from the schedule, she’ll be reading at my store on November 13th. I’m quite excited to meet her.
• I wish Dumbledore had Troy McClure’s sexual proclivities (you may remember him from some of the funniest episodes of the Simpsons). It would be so much more interesting. I find myself not really caring.

• Lucky Ed interviews Oliver Sacks in the latest Time Out New York.
  

  He smiles and selects a track on his stereo to offer an example, finding a cover of “Shooby Dooin’ ” performed by Woody Geist, a patient who has suffered from Alzheimer’s for decades but who sings with the polish of a suave ballroom crooner. “You can have profoundly demented people, like Woody here, who are still able to sing beautifully,” Sacks says. “But if you asked him if he knew this particular song, he might not recognize the title or the question or be able to answer.”

• Ed also has just posted his most recent spate of interviews. It’s an impressive list including James Lipton, Naomi Wolf, and Steven Pinker.
• The LA Times loves Benjamin Percy’s Refresh, Refresh as much as I do. It’s the best book you haven’t heard of, one of my favorite books this year.
• Local boy makes good. Scott McLemee interviews Joshua Glenn, co-author of Taking Things Seriously. Glenn writes for the Boston Globe‘s Ideas section, one of the sections that still makes it worth subscribing to.
• The National Book Foundation has interviews with all of the NBA Award Finalists up on their website. They obviously sent out the same email to all of the fiction finalists, but their answers are pretty interesting.
• Mark Sarvas interviews via email Jane Gardam, author of the gem Old Filth as well as numerous other books.
• Critical Mass has posted John Freeman’s longish interview with John Updike. I like his dig at Roth when asked why he writes reviews: “I am too much of a professional to want to be locked in entirely with one novel after another. Roth does it that way, Styron did it. I like the mix.” I have a confession to make: I’ve never read any of Updike’s novels.
• Cat Fight. This regards a review of Tom Perrotta’s most recent novel The Abstinence Teacher, which I happened to have read a weekend or two ago. This was my first foray into Perrotta’s work. He’s local (lives in Belmont, which is two towns over) and a popular author with my co-workers. I found this book to be gripping in parts but oddly flat at the end.
• The Millions posts the Top Ten Most Anticipated Books.

It’s been a long week. Working on the Holiiday Hundred (books that my store features for the holidays, usually what we consider the best books of the year) and staying up late to watch the Red Sox. I find that I’m too anxious to watch the games directly so I’ll read while in front of the television. Of course, this ends up with some really half ass reading.

I’ve hit a reading dead zone anyway. I’ve got piles and shelves of books, but none are screaming out to me “read me!” right now. Perhaps I need to read some non-fiction. I’ve got Steven Johnson’s Ghost Map about the cholera outbreak in 1854 and Mary Beard’s Roman Triumph. Aside from having a gorgeous cover, Beard’s book will fulfill my nerdy need to keep up with classics. Is anyone out there reading anything good?

Finished another couple of books over the weekend. I seem to be in this mode of picking books that I know I can read quickly. There’s something satisfying about that for me right now. Perhaps because work is getting so crazy. I’m never done it seems. We’re starting to plan for the holidays—I have to start picking the one hundred books which we feature starting around Thanksgiving this week! So I keep grabbing these books that don’t take too long to read, hoping for a satisfying read nonetheless. Can one find deepness in a quick read novel?

• The Curse of the Spellmans by Lisa Lutz– The second in this new series finds the Spellmans as dysfunctional as ever. There’s some nice character development as well as some hilarious escapades. This is just a fun series.
• The Kept Man by Jami Attenberg– Jarvis Miller’s famous painter husband has been in a coma for six years. Jarvis seems to be in one herself, not quite growing or changing. While parts of the plot seem a bit forced, the descriptions of Jarvis’s longing for her husband seem so genuine.
• The Eye of Jade by Dian Wei Liang– Set in present day Beijing, this first in a new detective series features Mei Wang, a modern, independent woman. She owns her own apartment and car and runs her own business, complete with a male secretary. Asked to find a Han dynasty jade of great value, she searches high and low through the city, delving into China’s history as well as her own family’s dark past. The mystery itself seemed only as a screen to write about the horrors of the cultural revolution. I liked the scenes of the back alleys, hutongs and noodle bars best.
• The Farther Shore by Matthew Eck– A small unit of American soldiers is separated from their command in a nameless city. Left to fend for themselves, the narrator Joshua Stantz recounts their wanderings, depicting the hopelessness of a city torn apart by war. The author’s own experiences give the story authenticity, making the slim novel feel like an epic.

Ann Enright has won the 2007 Man Booker Prize for her novel The Gathering.

The Washington Post Book Review has started a bookblog cleverly called Short Stack.

I woke up this morning bright and early to learn that Doris Lessing has won the Nobel Prize for Literature. I’m both shocked and delighted. None of the articles I’ve read discussing possible winners mentioned her. She’s had a long career as an author and she didn’t even finish high school!

• The Nobel Prize in Literature will be awarded tomorrow at 1pm Stockholm time. Bloomberg news has a rundown of the current contenders, which include Syrian-born poet and critic Adonis, South Korean author Ko Un, and Philip Roth.
• Speaking of awards, the National Book Award Finalists were announced today. I’m posting the Fiction and Non-Fiction, which I think are good lists. Look at the list here to see the Children’s and Poetry:
  Fiction

  Mischa Berlinski, Fieldwork (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
  Lydia Davis, Varieties of Disturbance (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
  Joshua Ferris, Then We Came to the End (Little, Brown & Company)
  Denis Johnson, Tree of Smoke (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
  Jim Shepard, Like You’d Understand, Anyway (Alfred A. Knopf)

  Fiction judges: Francine Prose (chair), Andrew Sean Greer,
  Walter Kirn, David Means, and Joy Williams.

  Non-Fiction

  Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I’m Dying (Alfred A. Knopf)
  Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (Twelve/Hachette Book Group USA)
  Woody Holton, Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution
  (Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
  Arnold Rampersad, Ralph Ellison: A Biography (Alfred A. Knopf)
  Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (Doubleday)

  Nonfiction judges: David Shields (chair), Deborah Blum,
  Caroline Elkins, Annette Gordon-Reed, and James Shapiro.

• Yay! Self-Promotion. Rather, store promotion. A customer told us that Ellen Pompeo, of the show Grey’s Anatomy, mentioned my store as one of her favorites in a recent profile in AmericanWay.
• More self-promtion: I wrote an article on the NEIBA trade show for Bookselling This Week. It’s my first piece of paid journalism!
• Bostonist interviews Shalom Auslander, who will be appearing at Brookline Booksmith tomorrow evening at 7 pm. Yes, I’m promoting another store’s event, mainly because I like this book so much. I’ll be there and still be a square.

Update: I fixed the link on the article I wrote. Should work now.