Top Ten Books Read (August 2010 – April 2011)

Top Ten Books (Read in the Past Year, and in No Particular Order.  Subject to Change):

• Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Infidel
• J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace
• Joshua Ferris’ Then We Came to the End
• Peter Godwin’s When a Crocodile Eats the Sun
• Ryszard Kapuscinski’s Travels with Herodotus
• Antonio Muñoz Molina’s Sepharad
• Christine Montrose’s Body of Work:  Meditations on Mortality From the Human Anatomy Lab
• Orlando Figes’s Natasha’s Dance:  A Cultural History of Russia
• Karin Fossum’s The Indian Bride
• Ben Macintyre’s Agent Zigzag

Stay tuned, dear blog readers.  Stay tuned.

American Booksellers Association Indie Choice Awards

From the ABA website:

The winners of the 2011 Indies Choice Book Awards reflect the spirit of independent bookstores nationwide and the IndieBound movement. Book of the Year winners and Honor Award recipients are all titles nominated by ABA member booksellers to the 2010 Indie Next List.

The 2011 winners are:

Adult Fiction: Emma Donoghue’s Room
Adult Nonfiction: Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken
Adult Debut Book of the Year: Karl Malantes’ Matterhorn
Young Adult Book of the Year: Jennifer Donnelly’s Revolution
E. B. White Read-Aloud Award – Middle Reader: Tom Angleberger’s The Strange Case of Origami Yoda
E. B. White Read-Aloud Award – Picture Book: Peter Brown’s Children Make Terrible Pets

The prize for “Most Engaging Author” went to Laurie Halse Anderson, “for her exceptional involvement and responsiveness during in-store appearances and for having a strong sense of the importance of indie booksellers to their local communities.”

Runners-Up for Adult Fiction:

• Nicole Krauss’ Great House
• Dinaw Mengestu’s How to Read the Air
• Chang-rae Lee’s The Surrendered
• David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
• Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad

Runners-Up for Adult Nonfiction:

• Bill Bryson’s At Home
• Stacy Schiff’s Cleopatra:  A Life
• Gail Caldwell’s Let’s Take the Long Way Home
• John Vaillant’s The Tiger
• Susan Casey’s The Wave

Late last night, self finished Ben Macintyre’s (absolutely fab) Agent Zigzag and began Laurence Bergreen’s Marco Polo:  From Venice to Xanadu.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers.  Stay tuned.

The Art of the Double Cross

As regular readers of this blog well know, self has been reading Ben Macintyre’s World War II espionage saga, Agent Zigzag (There is a fantastic blurb by John Le Carré on the front cover.  But, even without this blurb, self would have known Macintyre would deliver a ripping good yarn.  His poignant The Englishman’s Daughter is still one of her favorite nonfiction books of all time).  Here, on p. 133 of Agent Zigzag is a succinct elaboration of what makes a “double agent” succeed.  Self loves this passage because it contains the word “verisimilitude.”

It was an article of faith among the double cross team that a double agent should, as far as possible, live the life the Germans believed he was living, and do the things he claimed to be doing.  Masterman called this “the principle of verisimilitude, the imperative necessity of making the agent actually experience all that he professes to have done.”  It is far easier, under interrogation, to tell part of the truth than to sustain a latticework of pure lies.  If Chapman was going to pretend to have blown up the De Havilland factory,then he must go and case the joint, precisely as he would if he were genuinely bent on sabotage.

P. S.  The De Havilland Mosquito was an aircraft built entirely of balsa wood that was capable of carrying up to 4,000 lbs. of ordinance from Britain to Berlin.  It was a particular thorn in the side of Commander of the Luftwaffe Herman Goring.  It appears that Goring was reviewing a military parade in Berlin when the occasion was hastily interrupted by the arrival of Mosquitos from the 105th. Thus, the De Havilland factory was a prime target of Germany’s ace spies.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers.  Stay tuned.

Regimes of Neurosis

Brian Komei Dempster’s anthology, Making Home From War:  Stories of Japanese American Exile and Resettlement, just out from Heyday Books, reminds self that war creates the most awful neurosis.  And this neurosis seeps into daily lives as insidiously as an infection.

America was not the only country that succumbed to the spy hysteria, as self discovers this afternoon, while reading Ben Macintyre’s fascinating Agent Zigzag.  Here’s a look at Britain in the aftermath of the Nazi blitzkrieg:

Robert Baden-Powell, the original scoutmaster, insisted you could spot a German spy from the way he walked.  Anyone and everyone might be a spy.  Evelyn Waugh lampooned the frenzy:  “Suspect everyone —  the vicar, the village grocer, the farmer whose family have lived here for a hundred years, all the most unlikely people.”  The spies were said to be spreading newspaper on the ground to give secret signals to airborne Germans, poisoning chocolate, infiltrating the police, recruiting lunatics from asylums to act in a suicide squad, and sending out murderous agents into the British countryside disguised as female hitchhikers.

Vast energy and resources was devoted to following up the reports, with a complete lack of success.  The most grievous outcome of the panic was the internment of twenty-seven thousand German Italians, and other “enemy aliens,” most of whom were not only innocent, but strongly opposed to Nazism.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers.  Stay tuned.

Randomly Remembered: A Book List

Books That Self Can Remember Reading With More than the Usual Enjoyment (Within the Last Two Years:  Some of these are repeat readings, of course, like “The Metamorphosis” — !):

P. S.  Self asterisked her favorites in each category

Fiction

• Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee * (Shattering)
• A Sudden Country, by Karen Fisher (Innovative, especially towards the end)
• Veronica, by Mary Gaitskill
• The Divine Husband, by Francisco Goldman (Convent girlhood meets its muse!)
• Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro (The chilly tone was initially off-putting, but eventually self got into it)
• The Known World, by Edward P. Jones * (Self swooned at the language)
• The Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka (Kafka is an enduring love)
• The Emperor’s Children, by Claire Messud
• Sepharad, by Antonio Muñoz Molina *
• Suite Francaise, by Irene Nemirovsky *
• The Cave, by Jose Saramago
• Love and Other Impossible Pursuits, by Ayelet Waldman

Mysteries

• Bangkok 8 and Bangkok Haunts by John Burdett
• Jar City and Silence of the Grave, by Arnaldur Indridason
• Half Broken Things, by Morag Joss * (Absolutely the best mystery self has ever read)

Memoirs

• Infidel, by Ayaan Hirsi Ali
• Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, by Alexandra Fuller *
• When a Crocodile Eats the Sun:  A Memoir of Africa, by Peter Godwin *
• Falling Through the Earth:  A Memoir, by Danielle Trussoni

Classics

• Virgil’s The Aeneid, translated by Robert Fagles

History & Nonfiction

• The Great War and Modern Memory, by Paul Fussell *
• Vera Atkins and The Missing Agents of World War II, by Sarah Helm *
• Dunkirk:  Fight to the Last Man, by Hugh Sebag-Montefiore
• Body of Work:  Meditations on Mortality From the Human Anatomy Lab, by Christine Montross *
• History of the Peloponnesian War, by Thucydides

From Christine Montross’ BODY OF WORK: All About the Resurrection Trade

A few pages earlier — sometime last night — self read a passage in Body of Work:  Meditations on Morality From the Human Anatomy Lab, in which the author interviews two foreign-born pathologists:  one from Nigeria and another from Iraq.  The Iraqi pathologist tells Montross that “none of the corpses in his medical school were native Iraqis.”  Instead, all of the bodies brought to labs for dissection appeared to be “Southeast Asian.”  This truly gave self a lurch.  The man continued by saying that he thought they might be  from Vietnam or Cambodia.

Know what self was thinking?  She was thinking that Vietnamese do not show up in Iraq in sizable enough numbers to make the above situation even remotely plausible.  Self was thinking:  Those bodies are most likely Filipinos.  Only no one knows what we are and when they look at us they think:  Vietnamese.

It is Tuesday morning.  The long weekend is over.  Self got two-and-a-half hours sleep because hubby kept coughing.  Not just the “clearing my throat” kind of stuff.  Self means honest to goodness explosions.  (That’ll be quite enough, self.  One of your New Year’s resolutions might be to stop being such a Drama Queen.)

At least, bleary-eyed though she is, self can still read.

Here’s a passage from Body of Work that self read only a few minutes ago:

As communities grew more vigilant in watching their burial grounds and fending off body snatchers, the demand for bodies nonetheless continued to grow.  As a result the resurrection trade became an import-export trade, with cities like Dublin, nearer to rural areas, shipping bodies across the sea to London.

It’s not difficult to conjure the unpleasantries that must have been associated with the transportation of decomposing bodies over long distances in a ship’s unrefrigerated cargo hold.  The inevitable shipping errors also occurred, sending packages of dry goods and foodstuffs to medical college and thus presumably delivering the intended cadavers to unfortunate, unsuspecting recipients.

Self sincerely hopes that the above excerpt does not interfere with dear blog readers’ breakfast.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers.  Stay tuned.

Calling Borders (University Avenue, Downtown Palo Alto)

Late last night, self placed a call to Borders, the one on University Avenue in downtown Palo Alto.

She learned Wednesday, from a special edition of Publisher’s Lunch, that Borders had declared bankruptcy.  There was also a list, somewhere in the same missive, of Borders creditors.

Right after self read the news, she called Borders.  It was almost midnight, so of course self didn’t expect anyone to pick up.  She was wondering if she’d get a message machine with some kind of announcement, but the phone rang endlessly and self could just picture the sound in that cavernous space …

This morning, around 7:30 a.m., she tried again, and lo and behold, a man answered.

“Ahh, ahhh,” self said.  “Was just wondering what time you open today?”

“9 a.m.,” the man said.

So, around 9:20 a.m., self called again, and a friendly staff member helped her locate a book by James Barron, something she’d been looking for, for a long time:  Piano:  The Making of a Steinway Concert Grand.

Why this particular book?

Because self grew up with two Steinways in her house in Manila, that’s why!

Because Dearest Mum is a classically trained pianist!

Because self always knew that anything less than a Steinway was simply not to be taken seriously!

(Well, maybe a Bosendorfer is acceptable)

Certainly not anything as pedestrian as a Kawai!

This is just information she knew from about the age of 3!

And even though she should not be all that concerned about the fate of Borders (not as concerned, anyway, as she should be about the news that Powell’s has been laying off staff), she knows she will actually grieve if the Borders in downtown Palo Alto closes.  Because this is her idea of a perfect afternoon:

• movie at Aquarius (an indie movie, something like the Argentine weepie “The Secret in Their Eyes” or British weepie “Never Let Me Go”.  OK, let’s just put it this way:  anything that will make her eyes swell to the size of golf balls, that will give her tear ducts a truly cathartic cleansing and ensure that everything is still in good working order)
• an enormous serving of green tea and lychee gelato from Gelato Classico, across the street from Aquarius
• strolling down University Avenue to Borders, there to lose herself in the fiction stacks for an hour or so

Anyhoo, it looks like self will not have to revise this picture of a perfect Palo Alto afternoon.  Not in the immediate future, at any rate.

Stay tuned.

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Self’s (Almost Complete) 2010 Reading List

Books Self Read in 2010:  So close, so close to the end now!

1. A Simple Plan, by Scott Smith
2. Norwegian Wood, by Haruki Murakami
3. The Annals of Imperial Rome, by Tacitus
4. Brief Encounters with Che Guevarra: Stories, by Ben Fountain
5. Grayson, by Lynne Cox
6. In the Name of Friendship, by Marilyn French
7. Before the Frost, by Henning Mankell
8. Missing Mom, by Joyce Carol Oates
9. All Aunt Hagar’s Children, by Edward P. Jones
10. Half Broken Things, by Morag Joss
11. Puccini’s Ghosts, by Morag Joss
12. The Elephant Vanishes, by Haruki Murakami
13. After the Quake, by Haruki Murakami
14. The Meaning of Night, a Confession, by Michael Cox
15. The Emperor’s Children, by Claire Messud
16. Special Topics in Calamity Physics, by Marisha Pessl
17. Falling Through the Earth, by Danielle Trussoni
18. Virgil’s The Aeneid, translated by Robert Fagles
19. The Great War and Modern Memory, by Paul Fussell
20. The Inheritance of Loss, by Kiran Desai
21. The Ghost Map, by Steven Johnson
22. Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War by Nathaniel Philbrick

io9 Announces Environmental Writing Contest

io9 is going to pay $2000 each to two people who write the best stories about environmental disaster.  The contest is for science fiction and non-fiction.

Here’s an abbreviated version of the official announcement:

io9 is looking for stories that deal with environmental disaster, whether caused by random asteroid impacts or oil drilling accidents.  We believe that the first step to solving planet-scale problems is to assess, honestly and critically, what it would mean to experience such a disaster.  We need mental models that can help policy-makers, researchers, and individuals prepare for the kinds of cataclysmic events that have occurred regularly throughout Earth’s history.

*  *  *

Our awesome team of judges includes Elizabeth Kolbert (The New Yorker‘s environment reporter), Paolo Bacigalupi (author of Ship Breaker and Windup Girl) and Jonathan Strahan (editor of the Eclipse anthologies), as well as others to be announced.

GUIDELINES:

• Story should be between 3,000 to 5,000 words.  It must be an original story that has not been published elsewhere.
• The contest has two categories:  science fiction and non-fiction.  There will be one winner in each category.
• You may submit only one story.  E-mail your submission as a .doc or .rtf attachment:  environmentalwriting@io9.com

DEADLINE:   Dec. 11, 2010

For more information, go to io9.