Books

Books I’ve Read – April, 2009

Larry Burrows: Vietnam
by Larry Burrows
A classic, iconographic photography book. Burrows was a Life Magazine photographer covering the Vietnam war, and his images shot over 9 years helped shape the American public’s understanding and opinions about it. He was killed over Cambodia when his helicopter was shot down.

100 Photographs that Changed the World
by the editors of Life Magazine
Exactly what the title says; some of the most recognized and catalytic photos in human history.

Anonymous: Enigmatic Images from Unknown Photographers
by Robert Flynn Johnson and William Boyd
Another great book of photography; this one is a collection of beautiful, unusual and gorgeous “found” photos collected by the authors, gleaned from attics and estate sales.

The 13 Clocks
by James Thurber, (illust. Marc Simont, foreward by Neil Gaiman)
I checked this book out from the Ankeny public library when I was a little kid, and I’ve been looking for a copy to call my own ever since. It just recently came back into print, and I immediately ordered it.

Coraline
by Neil Gaiman
I haven’t seen the movie yet; unfortunately I missed it in 3-D, for which I heard rave reviews. The book was quite good, and I’m given what I’ve heard about the changed ending in the movie, I’m not sure I’ll like the movie as well.
Faking It
by College Humor
I’m only listing this because I read the damn thing, but I won’t link to it. It’s a misogynist piece of crap, and I’m rather ashamed it was published by our company. I’m rather shocked I read the whole thing, but I kept hoping it would get better. It’s didn’t; don’t bother.

The Unfinished Clue
by Georgette Heyer
I’ve been a huge fan of her Regency novels since I was a teen; I have almost all of them in my library and they show up on my reading lists here on the site repeatedly. But I’ve never read any of her mysteries. I’m glad I finally did; her sparkling, witty characterizations are present here, too. Light reading, but lots of fun.

I haven’t completed any of my Project Fill-in-the-gaps titles, but I’m well into two of them. And I have some unfinished reading from earlier this year that I want to complete as well. We’ll see how all that goes.

Continue ReadingBooks I’ve Read – April, 2009

Project Fill-in-the-Gaps

Project Fill-in-the-Gaps created by Moonrat on her blog Editorial Ass: fill in the gaps in your reading lists of classics and contemporary fiction. Make a list of 100 titles, give yourself 5 years to complete reading the list, and give yourself 25% “accident forgiveness” – consider the task accomplished if you achieve 75 titles in the time span. I found this via some blog or other — and sent it to Stephanie, who loves these sorts of projects and immediately put together her list.
I have some rather heavy lifting on my list (Proust!!!!!!) so I have 65 76 titles, rather than 100.

Reading Deadline: April 10, 2014

* = I own the book
Italic = I’ve started it
strikethrough = I’ve finished it

  1. Atwood: The Handmaid’s Tale *
  2. Ballard: Crash
  3. Samuel Butler: Way of All Flesh
  4. Celine: Death on the Installment Plan *
  5. Cervantes: Don Quixote *
  6. Chaucer: Canterbury Tales *
  7. Chopin: The Awakening *
  8. Clarke: Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell *
  9. Collins: The Moonstone *
  10. Connolly: The Book of Lost Things *
  11. Conrad: The Secret Agent *
  12. Danielewski: House of Leaves *
  13. Dreiser: An American Tragedy
  14. Don DeLillo: Underworld *
  15. Elliot: Middlemarch *
  16. Ellison: Juneteenth *
  17. Gibson & Sterling: The Difference Engine
  18. Golden: Memoirs of a Geisha *
  19. Highsmith: The Talented Mr. Ripley *
  20. Hilton: Lost Horizon *
  21. Ishiguro: Never Let Me Go
  22. James: The Golden Bowl *
  23. James: The Portrait of a Lady *
  24. Jerome: Three Men in a Boat
  25. Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man *
  26. Lethem: Motherless Brooklyn *
  27. Lewis: Main Street
  28. Maugham: The Razor’s Edge *
  29. McCarty: The Road *
  30. McEwan: Atonement *
  31. Melville: Moby Dick *
  32. Moore: Fool
  33. Naipaul: A House for Mr. Biswas
  34. O’Connor: A Good Man is Hard To Find *
  35. Pasternak: Doctor Zhivago
  36. Proust: (In Search of Lost Time – Vol 1) Swann’s Way *
  37. Proust: (In Search of Lost Time – Vol 2) In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower *
  38. Proust: (In Search of Lost Time – Vol 3) The Guermantes Way *
  39. Proust: (In Search of Lost Time – Vol 4) Sodom and Gomorrah *
  40. Proust: (In Search of Lost Time – Vol 5 & 6) The Prisoner & The Fugitive *
  41. Proust: (In Search of Lost Time – Vol 7) Finding Time Again *
  42. Rabelais: Gargantua and Pantagruel *
  43. Rhys: Wide Sargasso Sea *
  44. Safran Foer: Everything is Illuminated *
  45. Steinbeck: Of Mice and Men *
  46. Stendhal: The Charterhouse of Parma *
  47. Sterne: A Sentimental Journey *
  48. Stephenson: Cryptonomicon *
  49. Gene Stratton Porter: A Girl of the Limber Lost *
  50. Donna Tartt: A Secret History *
  51. Tolstoy: Anna Karenina *
  52. Updike: TBD *
  53. Verne: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea *
  54. Wallace: Infinite Jest *
  55. Wharton: The House of Mirth *
  56. Wroblewski: The Story of Edgar Sawtelle *
  57. Richard Yates: Revolutionary Road *
  58. Zusak: The Book Thief *
  59. Bloom: Shakespeare – The Invention of the Human *
  60. Bryson: A Short History of Nearly Everything *
  61. Campbell: The Hero of a Thousand Faces *
  62. Dawkins: The God Delusion *
  63. Diamond: Guns, Germs and Steel *
  64. Diamond: Collapse *
  65. Jacobs: Life and Death of Cities *
  66. Jacobs: Economy of Cities *
  67. Jacobs: Nature of Economies *
  68. Steven Johnson: The Ghost Map *
  69. Pinker: The Blank Slate *
  70. Stein: The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas *
  71. Weisman: The World Without Us *
  72. Zimbardo: The Lucifer Effect *
  73. Burroughs: Queer *
  74. Dickinson: Complete Works
  75. Plath: The Bell Jar *
  76. Whitman: Leaves of Grass *
Continue ReadingProject Fill-in-the-Gaps

Books I’ve Read – First quarter 2009

Wow, I’ve done horribly at documenting my reading for this year. Maybe I need to just give up trying to do posts for every book and just aggregate them into 1 post each quarter. Here’s what I’ve read in the first quarter of 2009:

D’Aulaires’ Book of Norse Myths
by Ingri D’Aulaire
I loved D’Aulaires’ Greek Myths as a child and bought a copy of it as an adult, but never realized they had illustrated Norse Mythology as well until I discovered this in the children’s section last year. It’s excellent; while their illustrations of the sunny Greek Gods and Heroes have always been the pictures in my mind’s eye of those iconic characters, their illustrative style is even more suited to the dark and sometimes grim Norse story telling.

The Various: Book 1 in the Touchstone Trilogy
by Steve Augarde
I picked this up at Unabridged bookstore in Boystown while we were there for the gay games. That independent bookstore has been well-known for many years for it’s staff recommendations (a technique since picked up by large bookstores around the country) and The Various was a highly recommended title in the young adult section. It was very lovely, and reminded me a lot of I Capture The Castle, although this book fits very much in the fantasy genre. I enjoyed it enough to put the second two books on my wishlist. I have to see how it all comes out.

The Limerick Trick
by Scott Corbett
I picked this up at Midland Antique Mall because Scott Corbett was the author of a childhood favorite book of mine – The Great Joke Game. This was cute, but not as exciting – a young man needing to write a poem for class invokes a spell and ends up spouting limericks unintentionally. Fortunately, none of them had anything to do with Nantucket.

The Fourth Bear: A Nursery Crime
by Jasper Fforde
I’ve been a fan of Jasper Fforde’s literary comic mysteries, and like the Tuesday Next series, the Nursery Crime series is clever and quite funny.

The Book of General Ignorance
by John Mitchinson and John Lloyd
A fun book of trivia and arcane factoids that challenge common wisdom, old wives tales and some of the rather general notions handed down in our elementary school textbooks.

The Graveyard Book
by Neil Gaiman
This year’s Newbery award winner. It’s excellent, and quite worth it. Pick it up to read.

The Eight
by Katherine Neville
I bought this thinking it was a book about a jeweled chess set that I’ve been hunting for many years. It turned out not to be the book I remember, but it was quite engaging. Katherine Neville was Dan Brown years before Dan Brown, and she was much better at it. The story of the mysterious lost chess set of Charlemagne; this book spans several centuries and continents as various players race to gather up the pieces and unlock the mystery encoded there centuries ago.

Fresh Styles for Web Designers: Eye Candy from the Underground
by Curt Cloninger
A revised edition covering more modern styles of site design; a must-own book for web designers.
Wow, practically everything I’ve managed to finish so far this year is a children’s book. Yeesh! That’s sad, right there. I know I’ve been busy, but this is pretty unprecedented, even for me. But here’s the reason why….

Books I have in progress:
I’m in another one of those stuck modes where I keep getting distracted and picking up and putting down books. Here’s what I have on my plate to work through:
The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America in its First Age of Terror
by Beverly Gage
This is a really engaging book and one that I will absolutely finish. I especially enjoy walking around saying “The day Wall Street asploded.” I am a mental five-year-old, after all.

The Writer’s Idea Book
Jack Heffron

The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life
by Twyla Tharp

The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything
by Ph.D., Ken Robinson and Lou Aronica

Cities in Civilization
by Peter Hall

The Lovecraft Lexicon: A Reader’s Guide to Persons, Places and Things in the Tales of H.P. Lovecraft
by Anthony Brainard Pearsall

H.P. Lovecraft Unabridged
by H.P. Lovecraft
I have finished quite a few of his short stories, but this is a complete set, so it’ll be awhile before I get through them all.

The Moment It Clicks: Photography secrets from one of the world’s top shooters
by Joe McNally
This is a great book for any photographer. McNally and Scott Kelby are great for people who have some experience with photography in understanding technical proficiency. However I keep picking it up, and then returning to the more technical other photography book I’m reading to fill in the gaps…

Photography (9th Edition)
by Barbara London (Author), Jim Stone (Author), John Upton (Author)
This is the best book I’ve read so far at explaining the fundamentals of how a single lens reflex camera actually works – at helping me sort out what I need to know about aperture, focal lengths, depth of field, etc. I had learned all that back in photography class in college, but in the 20 years since then, I managed to spring a leak in my brains and all those bits of data fell right out. This book has helped me put them back in again.

Castle Waiting
by Linda Medley
Publisher’s weekly explains it might better than I could – “A set of linked nouveaux fairy tales, this graphic novel extends the story of Sleeping Beauty into a modern, feminist Chaucer for happy people.”

Continue ReadingBooks I’ve Read – First quarter 2009

Praise Song For The Day

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A Poem For Barack Obama’s Presidential Inauguration
by Elizabeth Alexander
Each day we go about our business,
walking past each other, catching each other’s
eyes or not, about to speak or speaking.
All about us is noise. All about us is
noise and bramble, thorn and din, each
one of our ancestors on our tongues.
Someone is stitching up a hem, darning
a hole in a uniform, patching a tire,
repairing the things in need of repair.

Continue ReadingPraise Song For The Day

Addendum to Books I Read in 2008

I had the time to get some extra reading in over the holidays, and I managed to add a couple of books to my list at the end of the year. And good ones, too.

The Big Book Of Lesbian Horse Stories
by Alisa Surkis and Monica Nolan
No, the horses aren’t lesbians. The lesbians love horses. But not in THAT way. Very much a comedic book — the cover is filled with racy, pulp-fiction-like quotes, that that’s the closest the book actually gets to racy; it’s a collection of rather sweet, very funny short stories about girls who love other girls and who also love horses.

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
by Chip Heath and Dan Heath
A great analysis of ideas that are successfully communicated and why they are unforgettable — what it takes to make your ideas stick. If you have anything to do with marketing, this is a must-read book; as I was reading it, I found myself wanting to give copies of it to people I thought would get a lot from it.

Outliers: The Story of Success
by Malcolm Gladwell
While many people have innate talents – the people who are truly Outliers are those who come from a background that nurtures their talent and gives them opportunities to practice what they have a passion for – and thousands of hours of practice make them truly great in their field. Publishers Weekly: “Gladwell tears down the myth of individual merit to explore how culture, circumstance, timing, birth and luck account for success–and how historical legacies can hold others back despite ample individual gifts.”

Continue ReadingAddendum to Books I Read in 2008

Books I Read in 2008

It’s my 12th Annual end of the year reading recap. Grand total: 30 books. I don’t think that’s my lowest total, but it’s no 98 titles like in 1997. And boy, oh boy did I hit the genre fiction this year. It did help to have lots of fun light reading while all the wedding planning and such was going on — too much to think about during all that to be reading weighty tomes.

Maybe I’ll finally get that “year of reading Proust” started in 2009. Ha! Who am I kidding? I started Swann’s Way more than once and kept falling asleep. I should go back to it just to cure my insomnia. I have lots of other good books on my shelves, so I need to range further afield in the coming year, though.

  1. The Dangerous Book for Boys by Conn Iggulden and Hal Iggulden
  2. The Geographer’s Library by Jon Fasman
  3. Locked Rooms (Mary Russell Novels) by Laurie R. King
  4. The Art of Detection by Laurie R. King
  5. Standard Hero Behavior by John David Anderson
  6. The Best of MAKE (Make) by Mark Frauenfelder and Gareth Branwyn
  7. Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight, Volume 1: The Long Way Home by Joss Whedon, Andy Owens, Georges Jeanty, and Jo Chen
  8. Marvel 1602 by Neil Gaiman and Andy Kubert
  9. The Areas of My Expertise by John Hodgman
  10. Jane and His Lordship’s Legacy (Jane Austen Mysteries, book 8) by Stephanie Barron
  11. Justice Hall (Mary Russell Novels) by Laurie R. King
  12. The Game (Mary Russell Novels) by Laurie R. King
  13. The Somnambulist by Jonathan Barnes
  14. The Secret of Lost Things by Sheridan Hay
  15. The Archivist: A Novel by Martha Cooley
  16. The Egyptologist: A Novel by Arthur Phillips
  17. Here Lies the Librarian by Richard Peck
  18. Maps and Legends by Michael Chabon
  19. The Fencing Master by Arturo Perez-Reverte
  20. Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography by David Michaelis
  21. The Code of the Woosters by P.G. Wodehouse
  22. The Digital Photography Book by Scott Kelby
  23. Night Work (Kate Martinelli Mysteries) by Laurie R. King
  24. A Grave Talent (Kate Martinelli Mysteries) by Laurie R. King
  25. To Play The Fool (Kate Martinelli Mysteries) by Laurie R. King
  26. With Child (Kate Martinelli Mysteries) by Laurie R. King
  27. The Spice Box by Lou Jane Temple
  28. Slammerkin by Emma Donoghue
  29. Snobs by Julian Fellowes
  30. Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
Continue ReadingBooks I Read in 2008

Books I’ve Read – November and December 2008

A Grave Talent (Kate Martinelli Mysteries)
by Laurie R. King
To Play The Fool (Kate Martinelli Mysteries)
by Laurie R. King
With Child (Kate Martinelli Mysteries)
by Laurie R. King
Earlier this year, I read the fourth and fifth books in the Kate Martinelli Series. This time I circled back around and read the first three to get caught up. These aren’t terrible, but I don’t enjoy them as much as I liked King’s other series – The Mary Russell mysteries, set in Sherlock Holmes’ era. The Martinelli mysteries seem much darker and grimmer. But still interesting reading; I obviously read them all the way through and picked up others. 🙂
I actually also started but couldn’t finish another Laurie R. King novel — A Darker Place. Set in a cult – it started out too creepy for me so I couldn’t finish. Maybe I’ll pick it back up in the summertime.
The Spice Box
by Lou Jane Temple
A nicely-written mystery. I’ll look forward to reading more from this series. — “The first of a new food-themed historical series, Temple’s charming tale of New York City in the Civil War era introduces Bridget Heaney, a clever, streetwise Irish immigrant. The day Bridget starts as an assistant cook in the Manhattan household of wealthy merchant Isaac Gold, she makes a terrible discovery: the body of the family’s youngest son, Seth, who’d been missing, crammed inside a dough box.”
Slammerkin
by Emma Donoghue
“Donoghue takes scraps of the intriguing true story of Mary Saunders, a servant girl who murdered her mistress in 1763, and fashions from them an intelligent and mesmerizing historical novel.” — I just thought it was grim and upsetting. I read it on recommendation from several people who loved it. I did not feel the same.
Snobs
by Julian Fellowes
Fellowes also wrote the script for Gosford Park. Snobs is an entertaining comedic look at the snobbery of British upper class, set in the 1990s.
Bel Canto
by Ann Patchett
Invoking the first and second rules of book club.

Continue ReadingBooks I’ve Read – November and December 2008

Buy a book this weekend

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Editorial Ass has some good advice for those in the book publishing industry. Since I’m one of those people, and I’m married to one, and most of my friends have something to do with publishing, I’m going to quote quite a bit of this blog post:

Let’s talk a little bit about what happened in October.

You’ve heard about the massive layoffs at Doubleday; you’ve heard about Harper’s terrible state of profit, BNN’s worst quarter and projected year ever, and the closing of Impetus, an indie press (which, as I’ll explain below, I don’t think was Impetus’s fault even vaguely).

Yes, there’s a crisis.

However. Anyone who wants to talk about “the death of publishing” can leave the room. I’m at the beginning of my career and I plan on being an editor for a long time; a lot of you are yet-to-be-published authors and I’m sure you’re equally intent on not seeing book publishing fold (not that it’s going to; that’s ridiculous). So instead I want to talk about what’s actually causing the problem–it might help us come up with solutions for protecting what’s important to us.

I don’t think anyone’s being really straightforward about what exactly happened, and a lot of it is not very complicated.* The crux of the problem is that book publishing is a returnable industry. That means that say Big Chain Store (BCS) agrees to stock a book that my company publishes. They buy 100 copies at, say, $1 a piece (to be easy). They give me $100; I send them the books. Two months later, they didn’t sell any, so they send them back. I have to give them $100.

Keep in mind a couple of things about this system that don’t work in the publisher’s favor:

1) Shipping costs. Books are heavy.
2) Production fees incurred by the publisher (because, unfortunately, we can’t return the books to the printer).
3) Inflation. Haha.

Why do publishing companies put up with this? Yeah, it’s stupid. But it’s an industry standard, and if we don’t let BCS have the option to return books, they simply tell us they won’t stock them. They can carry CDs and calendars and greeting cards, instead.

All right, but this has been the case for awhile. So what went wrong in October?

As you MIGHT have heard by now, we’re having some kind of economic hardship (or something like that). So people spent less cash in September and October. So bookstores sold fewer copies in those two months, and were hit hard like all the other businesses in the country and in a lot of the world.

However, BCS and all its chain compatriots are counting on Christmas sales to save them. They need to stock up! They need to plump their stores with new enticing merchandise so they can convince customers to save them from foreclosure!

Where to get the cash for all the holiday books they needed to stock in October and November? Three. Guesses.
In October, bookstores returned so many books that most publishing companies had more coming into them than going out of them. For some companies, the incoming number was more than several months’ outgoing.

Although bookstores are suffering (and how), it was the publishing houses that had to absorb the cost of this cash flow creator. This is why Impetus, a relatively new indie company without the history to survive this shock, folded. Some houses lost so much money in returns in October that profits from the entire rest of 2008 have been negated. Can you imagine? Losing enough in a month to destroy your entire year? (Keep in mind that publishing is a very low profit margin enterprise in the first place; now see how if one month involves more outgoing than incoming money you can easily undo the good of an entire year or more.)

Now you can see the ripples that are happening, the layoffs, the dwindling advances, the precautions about acquiring anything in this climate. If publishing companies are shelling out money to publish books that bookstores only bother to stock for a minute and a half, we are all going to hemorrhage money until there is nothing left standing.

This would be a bad situation for more than the sake of my job or your future novel. It’s about a lot of things–education, hampered information dissemination, conglomerations swallowing mass media, censorship. Whatever. I could extenuate, but I’ll spare you. The point is, when you have a problem, the best thing to do is try to solve it.

For anyone who cares about the book publishing industry and wants to do their part, there’s one simple action step:

Buy a book this weekend.
Just buy one.

Continue ReadingBuy a book this weekend

Still I Rise

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Maya Angelou

You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I’ll rise.
Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
‘Cause I walk like I’ve got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.
Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I’ll rise.

Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops.
Weakened by my soulful cries.
Does my haughtiness offend you?
Don’t you take it awful hard
‘Cause I laugh like I’ve got gold mines
Diggin’ in my own back yard.
You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I’ll rise.

Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I’ve got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?
Out of the huts of history’s shame
I rise

Up from a past that’s rooted in pain
I rise

I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.
Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise

Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear
I rise

Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.

Continue ReadingStill I Rise