Monthly Archives: April 2008

Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

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.

My Worst Nightmare

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.

Archipelagos of Arrogance

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.

Wednesday Miscellany

  • 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.

Work Overload: Short Reviews

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.

Guest Post: You Consume What You Are

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.

Wednesday Miscellany

  • 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.