May 13, 2013 at 1:32 pm (Books, Links, Lists, Recommended, Women Writers)
Tags: book lists, interviews, lists, Mondays, novel, Publisher's Weekly, reviews, The NYTBR
Isn’t it wonderful how self keeps finding NYTBR issues from last year?
Here’s one that isn’t too long ago: it’s from September 2012.
In this issue, the “By the Book” interview is With Michael Chabon, who just happens to be reading Moonraker, by Ian Fleming (written 1955). He also mentions Cloud Atlas, and Ben Marcus (author of The Flame Alphabet) and three of what he thinks are classics of “genre fiction”: The Turn of the Screw, Heart of Darkness, and Blood Meridian. Next on his reading list: Beyond Black, by Hilary Mantel, and Diamonds are Forever.
There is a review of Love Bomb, a novel by Lisa Zeidner, that refers to a previous novel by Ayelet Waldman, Red Hook Road (which self will try and read).
Finally, there is a review by Christian Bauman (who served with the United States Army in Somalia and Haiti) of Fobbit, by David Abrams, a novel whose hero is assigned to a public affairs team in a “Forward Operating Base,” or FOB, in Iraq. (“Dead soldiers,” according to Abrams’ hero, “were now little more than objects to be loaded onto the back of C-130s somewhere and delivered like pizzas to the United States.”)
Interesting.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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May 5, 2013 at 3:49 pm (Artists and Writers, Books, Links, Lists, Recommended, Sundays)
Tags: biographies, book lists, hist, Just published, poetry, reviews, Sundays, Vietnam, war literature, writing process
Below are the books self is interested in reading after perusing the 7 March 2013 issue of The New York Review of Books. Her choices are nothing if not idiosyncratic:
Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy, by Douglas Smith: reviewed by Michael Scammell (Self admires the title of this book tremendously; she, too, has felt, many times, like a “former people.”)
Now All Roads Lead to France: A Life of Edward Thomas, by Matthew Hollis: reviewed by Helen Vendler. In a nutshell: “Thomas meets Frost in London in 1913, begins (for the first time since Oxford) to write poetry, feels guilty (in complex ways, including the fear of cowardice) about watching others die while he remains at home, decides to enlist, trains as an officer (in part for the higher pay), volunteers for the front, and courts death. When the death arrives (from a bomb blast in Arras) it is both shocking and unsurprising.” Tragic.
Several books about General David Petraeus, reviewed by Thomas Powers:
- The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War, by Fred Kaplan
- The Fourth Star: Four Generals and the Epic Struggle for the Future of the United States Army, by David Cloud and Greg Jaffe
In the course of the review, Powers cites three other fascinating books:
- The Centurions, a novel by Jean Lartéguy, about the lessons learned by French army officers captured by the Vietminh at Dien Bien Phu (“You’ve got to have people on your side . . . if you want to win a war.”)
- Street Without Joy, a “history of the long French failure in Vietnam,” by the French writer Bernard B. Fall
- Hell in a Very Small Place, also by Bernard B. Fall, about “a set-piece battle at Dien Bien Phu in 1954.”
And now, self must get going if she wants to catch the Menlo Park Farmers Market.
Arrivederci, dear ones.
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May 1, 2013 at 8:42 am (Books, Lists)
Tags: biographies, book lists, novel, travel
The bookshelf is directly over her bed.
The writing beckons now. Stronger than ever. When self is writing, she feels almost invincible.
Today, Trieste is overcast.
Self is making great headway with her book (Still the one she was reading when she arrived in Venice, almost two weeks ago: Per Petterson’s Out Stealing Horses). This book is a wonder, a narrative of truly gripping power. At dinner in the Antico Convento last night, over pork with porcini, she read the scene with the poor old man who shows up at the farm, dressed only in a thin suit and “summer shoes,” and about the German soldiers who are after him (The book is told in flashback, and the events of World War II blend almost seamlessly into the present). Self must have read 50 pages in the restaurant.
Afterwards, she spent the rest of the evening watching “Mississippi Burning” in Italian.
Self has decided that she will list all the books on the shelf above her bed in this little apartamento. She may not finish listing all today, but here goes:
- La Vie de Cézanne, by Henri Perruchot
- Das Monstrum, by Stephen King
- La Ragazza in Blu, by Susan Vreeland
- L’Ombra del Vento, by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
- Sol Levante, by Michael Crichton
- Die folgenschwere Ermordung Ihrer Majestat Konigin Elisabeth I, by Keith Roberts
- Maggie: Una Ragazza Di Strada, by Stephen Crane
- Come Fratello E Sorella, by Sandra Petrignani
- Uscita per L’Inferno, by Stephen King (writing as Richard Bachman)
- Lady Chatterley’s Lover, by D. H. Lawrence
And now, to write.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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April 17, 2013 at 5:40 am (Books, Links, Lists, Recommended, Traveling, Venice)
Tags: book lists, coffee, destinations, essays, indecision, novel, plans, reading lists, travel, travel books
There are things she has to decide:
- Should she bring a pound of Peet’s coffee, because Margarita said it would be nice to be able to make coffee in the apartment and her supply is getting low?
- Should she forget toting along a few of her favorite magazines: One Story and The New Yorker?
- Should she bring along Traveler’s Tales: Italy?
Here are the books she is definitely bringing with her:
- Alexei J. Cohen’s Moon Handbook of Italy
- DK Eyewitness Guide to Venice
- Per Petterson’s Out Stealing Horses (She began it last night: yes, she did indeed read to the very last page of Don Quijote)
- Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm in the Great Depression, by Mildred Armstrong Kalish (The book title is almost as long as the book!)
She’s also bringing a print-out of all the movie locations used in the Nicolas Roeg movie Don’t Look Now (Just to show you the difference in approach: Margarita’s all-important print-out is of the walks taken by Donna Leon’s Inspector Bruni!)
There are the directions to the apartment where Margarita will be waiting: Vaporetto to San Toma, Stop # 2. At end of calle, make a right. Continue towards Campiello S. Toma. Pass a bar (Ciak Uno). Pass a little bridge. Pass Casa Goldoni. Pass Nomboli Café. Follow calle all the way down to the water, then make a right. Look for apartment. (Margarita’s directions read, verbatim: “There is a right turn that needs to be made after the Casa Goldoni, but no street appears on the map, so the line running through the map just ends on the street Goldoni is on – but there’s a right turn there somewhere!”)
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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April 15, 2013 at 5:08 am (Books, Links, Lists, Recommended, Traveling, Venice)
Tags: book lists, lists, plans, reading lists, Sundays, travel, Venice
Old Navy pea coat (red). Three pairs of jeans. 1 black cardigan. 1 black turtleneck. 1 very old elastic-waist skirt (mid-calf length, old lady-ish). Favorite (loose) top: green plaid with pintucks. 2 favorite sweaters (black and blush pink). 3 pairs of thick socks. Thermal leggings. Journal. Diary. 2 Rolling Ball V5 black pens. 2 boxes of Thermacare Shoulder Wraps. Toothbrush. Dental Floss. Toothpaste. L’Fisher Chalet complimentary bar of soap. Passport. Grey sweatpants. Nikon Coolpix. MacBook Air. 1 library copy of Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady. 1 library copy of Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression (Self knows not how she can focus on a book about Iowa while in La Serenissima, but she never, ever reads the books on her reading list out of order). Moon Handbooks: Italy, by Alexei J. Cohen. DK Eyewitness Guide to Venice. 1 pair of REALLY OLD sneakers. Print-out of directions to the apartment in Calle Whatever off Campo Where? Reservation for Tour of the Doge’s Palace. 1 Scarf. Benadryl. Maybe a couple of New Yorkers. Print-out of film locations used in the movie Don’t Look Now. Shades.
Thank you. Stay tuned.
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April 10, 2013 at 2:02 am (Artists and Writers, Books, Lists, Recommended, The Economist)
Tags: art, book lists, inspirations, Iraq, Just published, nonfiction, novel, reviews, The Economist
Self has Don Quijote so much on the brain (it’s overdue at the Library: she better hurry up) that she even sees a theme in the latest book list: it seems to be a list of Quijotic Endeavours. After you read the capsule descriptions, see if you don’t agree, dear blog readers:
- A first novel, Ghana Must Go, by Talye Selasi (Penguin Press): A brilliant medical student from Ghana becomes the scapegoat in the death of a 77-year-old “Boston socialite, wife, mother, grandmother and alcoholic.”
- The “agony” of Iraq, described by Toby Dodge in Iraq: From War to a New Authoritarianism: “The collapse of the Iraqi state” allowed ‘ethnic entrepreneurs’ — “political manipulators of sectarian fears – to flourish.”
- An artist talks about his process in The Lost Carving: A Journey to the Heart of Making, by David Esterly (Viking): Esterly’s medium is wood. His inspiration was a 17th century woodcarver who went by the name Grinling Gibbons. When “a fire at Hampton Court Palace damaged a series of Gibbon carvings . . . Mr. Esterly was chosen to recreate” one of them, a “seven-foot-long cascade of fruit and flowers . . . This book is the story of the year it took him to do it.”
And, from The New York Review of Books of 27 September 2012, two very interesting reviews: the first by Jerome Groopman, reviewing God’s Hotel: A Doctor, A Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine by Victoria Sweet (Riverhead) and the second by Ezra Klein, reviewing The Obamas, by Jodi Kantor.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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March 14, 2013 at 7:17 pm (Books, Lists, Recommended, short story collections, Women Writers)
Tags: book lists, history, interviews, Just published, novel, reviews, short story collections, The NYTBR
The “By the Book” interview is with Garry Wills. In keeping with his stature as a heavyweight intellectual, his recommended tomes are mostly tremendously serious books, for example: Through the Eye of a Needle, by Peter Brown; David Balfour, by Robert Louis Stevenson; and The Acts and Monuments, about the upheavals of Reformation England, by John Foxe.
The Fun Parts, a collection of short stories by Sam Lipsyte, endorsed by Currently Famous Short Story Writer Ben Fountain
Schroder, a novel by Amity Gaige (Self realizes she’s already read a chapter of this novel; it was in One Story)
A couple of novels by chick-lit writer Lucinda Rosenfeld, including the just-published The Pretty One: A Novel About Sisters. According to reviewer Emily Cooke, “None of the women have the lives they once envisioned, and they won’t let one another forget it.”
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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February 25, 2013 at 3:34 pm (anthologies, Books, Lists, Personal Bookshelf, Recommended, Women Writers, Zack)
Tags: Asian American Writers, book lists, essays, Filipino writers, Mondays, novel, poetry, science fiction, short story, speculative fiction, travel
Self still lost in the thickets of son’s room. But the end is in sight!
The number of books on the 2nd shelf above son’s desk: 47
1079 + 47 = 1126 Total Books Counted Thus Far
Some of the titles: The Father, a poetry collection by Sharon Olds; 50 Stories From Israel: An Anthology, edited by Zisi Stavi; The 48 Laws of Power, by Robert Greene; 100 Cases That Every Scots Law Student Needs to Know, edited by W. Green; Drive-By Vigils, by R. Zamora Linmark; Pinoy Capital: The Filipino Nation in Daly City, by Benito M. Vergara, Jr.; The Best American Travel Writing 2011, edited by Sloane Crosley (“Treason only matters when it is committed by trusted men.”); Word Painting: A Guide to Writing More Descriptively, by Rebecca McClanahan; Winterbirth: The Godless World, Book One, by Brian Ruckley (This one self picked up in a bookstore in Edinburgh); If I Write You This Poem, Will You Make It Fly: Poems, by Simeon Dumdum, Jr.
Here’s a short passage from Winterbirth:
The great column was led by a hundred or more mounted warriors. Many bore wounds, still fresh from the lost battle on the fields by Kan Avor; all bore, in their red-rimmed eyes and wan skin, the marks of exhaustion. Behind them came the multitude: women, children and men, though fewest of the last. Thousands of widows had been made that year.
It was a punishing exodus. Their way was paved with hard rock and sharp stones that cut feet and turned ankles. There could be no pause. Any who fell ill were seized by those who came behind, hauled upright with shouts of encouragement, as if noise alone could put strength back into their legs. If they could not rise, they were left. There were already dozens of buzzards and ravens drifting lazily above the column. Some had followed it all the way up the Glas valley from the south; others were residents of the mountains, drawn from their lofty perches by the promise of carrion.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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February 21, 2013 at 1:37 am (Artists and Writers, Books, Recommended, short story collections, Women Writers)
Tags: book lists, essays, humor, interviews, Just published, memoir, novel, reviews, short story collections, The NYTBR
Short list, because self has to cook dinner tonight! Oh, what to do, what to cook, when to start, how much time to devote to standing before stove, etc etc
The cover of this issue of the NYTBR is a review of Karen Russell’s new collection of short stories, Vampires in the Lemon Grove. Self hates Karen Russell. She and her publisher always come up with the best titles. It’s not fair! Reviewer Joy Williams extols collection to High Heaven. OK, OK, self will read.
Katherine Boo is interviewed in “By the Book,” and she has recently read the following:
- Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (Self will overlook how much she detests that title, simply because, after all – well, a recommendation by Katherine Boo. Self means, come on!)
- Junot Diaz’s This Is How You Lose Her (Self also has problems with this title, but – Self! CUT IT OUT!)
- Cheryl Strayed’s Wild (Self’s been itching to read this for several months, and not just because of the title)
- Jeet Thayil’s Narcopolis (What’s this book about, self wonders? She loves the title)
There are other books, many others, self wants to read, but since she is TOTALLY OUT OF TIME, the last books she will mention are two by David Shields: How Literature Saved My Life and Reality Hunger (She likes the titles of both). The reviewer, Mark O’Connell, declares: “Shields seems interested in only those things – works of art, people, ideas – in which he can see himself. This, of course, is as much a device for literary self-representation as it is an advanced form of narcissism” which makes him seem, according to O’Connel, like a “high-functioning solipsist.” Since self doesn’t have time to look up solipsist, but assumes it’s not a favorable thing, she now really wants to read Shields’ books.
Alas! Farewell for the next couple of hours, dear blog readers!
Stay tuned.
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February 19, 2013 at 4:05 pm (Books, Links, Lists, Recommended, short story collections, Women Writers)
Tags: biographies, book lists, Chinese writers, nonfiction, novel, reviews, short story collections, The NYTBR, translation
That date (not today’s date, which is the 19th, but the date of the NYTBR issue) happens to be Dear Departed Dad’s death anniversary. Oh Dear Departed Dad, don’t think of Second Daughter too unkindly: all she’s done has been produce a couple of short story collections and one novella! While perfecting her reading and cooking skills! Not to mention gardening!
Now to the NYTBR. Following, a lits of books self is interested in perusing:
- Two translations of Mo Yan, both by Howard Goldblatt: Sandalwood Death and Pow! The review is by Ian Buruma, who says of Mo Yan: “There is nothing mandarin, or even urbane, about Mo Yan’s work. He has retained the earthy character of rural Shandong, where he grew up in a farming family.”
- Recommended by humorist Dave Barry: Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals, The Code of the Woosters (Wodehouse, self presumes), and A Confederacy of Dunces
- I, Hogarth, by Michael Dean. Self is a sucker for English biographies, they follow such an arc (usually, slicing through class divisions)
- Tenth of December: Stories, by George Saunders. Self would read anything by George Saunders. Anything. Even if the entire book consisted of just one page.
- The Lady and Her Monsters: A Tale of Dissections, Real-Life Dr. Frankensteins, and the Creation of Mary Shelley’s Masterpiece, by Roseanne Montillo. Three reasons to read this book: (1) Mary Shelley herself is a masterpiece. (2) It’s about science and literature. (3) The review by Deborah Blum is so beguiling.
- Another biography! Self is absolutely delirious with happiness! The Pinecone: The Story of Sarah Losh, Forgotten Romantic Heroine – Antiquarian, Architect, and Visionary, by Jenny Uglow
- Another short story collection! By a writer self has never heard of before! The News From Spain: Seven Variations on a Love Story, by Joan Wickersham
And now, self must get dressed to drop off stuff at the post office.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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