Category: Books & Writers

Are we there yet?

NewMexiKen is taking the day off. Even so, if I see things I think you should read, I’ll list them here.

You can begin with Tanya at Dinner without Crayons.

Karen went Walking On The Moon, a must read. Views like that — and chiles — are why I stay a New Mexican, Karen.

As The King’s Speech moves toward its coronation by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences on the 27th, you might want to read The King’s Speech: good movie, very bad history by Christopher Hitchens.

And a best line from Krugman:

“[A]s far as right-wing politicians are concerned: for the most part they know that Obama was born here, that he isn’t a socialist, that there are no death panels, and so on, but feel compelled to pretend to be crazy as a career move.”

Last night after finishing Iris Chang’s important The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II, I read Sarah Vowell’s Radio On: A Listener’s Diary. As the subtitle implies, Vowell annotated her radio listening — for a year (1995). It’s dated, and not equal to her more recent work, but it has its moments. Today I am into Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History by S.C. Gwynne. I read the free Kindle sample of this book in January and have been eager to read the whole book but wanted a dead tree edition. UPS delivered it last Friday, the day after I ordered it, but to the vacant house across the street. The painter working at the house over the weekend took it inside — go figure — but fortunately the owner dropped by yesterday and had sense enough to walk it across the street.

Best line of the day

“Termites don’t team with Orkin.”

Michael Norris, analyst for Simba Information, in news story about Borders’ bankruptcy. He is referring to Borders decision to contract it’s electronic sales to Amazon in 2001.

Borders is named for Tom and Louis Borders, brothers who started selling used books in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1971. Kmart bought the company in 1992, united it with Waldenbooks, then spun it off as a separate company in 1995.

The Wall Street Journal Online has a sortable list of the stores being closed (including one in Albuquerque and one in Santa Fe).

Man, one of my favorite pastimes used to be to browse Borders or Tower Records.

The Rape of Nanking

After finishing Cleopatra, and as UPS delivered the book I ordered last week to the wrong address — or so it seems, because it sure isn’t here — I decided to read a book I’d heard much about over the past dozen years and that a friend had just given me. It’s The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II by Iris Chang, published in 1997. The book is in two parts: the massacre and the coverup. I’ve finished the first.

The Japanese assault on the capital of China late in 1937 is one of history’s most deplorable bloodbaths. In just a few weeks 300,000 or more Chinese non-combatants were killed by Japanese soldiers. Tens of thousands of women, from young girls to the elderly, were raped and mutilated and killed. The atrocities were so extreme that a German national Nazi party leader in Nanking wrote to Hitler to ask the Führer to get the Japanese government to end the massacre.

It’s an important book, horrific but not horrifying, and worthy of your time.

Iris Chang committed suicide in 2004. She was 36.

Best line of the day

“She seemed determined to conjure a display so stunning it would propel Plutarch to Shakespearean heights, as it would elicit from Shakespeare his richest poetry. And she succeeded. In the annals of indelible entrances—the wooden horse into Troy; Christ into Jerusalem; Benjamin Franklin into Philadelphia; Henry IV, Charles Lindbergh, Charles DeGaulle, into Paris; Howard Carter into King Tut’s tomb; the Beatles onto Ed Sullivan’s stage—Cleopatra’s alone lifts off the page in iridescent color, amid inexhaustible, expensive clouds of incense, a sensational, simultaneous assault on every sense.”

From Stacy Schiff’s fascinating biography of Cleopatra. She is describing the queen of Egypt’s arrival at Tarsus in the late summer of 41 B.C. to meet Mark Antony.

As Plutarch told the story 1900 years ago:

She had faith in her own attractions, which, having formerly recommended her to Caesar and the young Pompey, she did not doubt might prove yet more successful with Antony. Their acquaintance was with her when a girl, young, and ignorant of the world, but she was to meet Antony in the time of life when women’s beauty is most splendid, and their intellects are in full maturity. She made great preparations for her journey, of money, gifts, and ornaments of value, such as so wealthy a kingdom might afford, but she brought with her her surest hopes in her own magic arts and charms.

…she came sailing up the river Cydnus in a barge with gilded stern and outspread sails of purple, while oars of silver beat time to the music of flutes and fifes and harps. She herself lay all along, under a canopy of cloth of gold, dressed as Venus in a picture, and beautiful young boys, like painted Cupids, stood on each side to fan her. Her maids were dressed like Sea Nymphs and Graces, some steering at the rudder, some working at the ropes.

…perfumes diffused themselves from the vessel to the shore, which was covered with multitudes, part following the galley up the river on either bank, part running out of the city to see the sight. The market place was quite emptied, and Antony at last was left alone sitting upon the tribunal; while the word went .through all the multitude, that Venus was come to feast with Bacchus for the common good of Asia.

On her arrival, Antony sent to invite her to supper. She thought it fitter he should come to her; so, willing to show his good humor and courtesy, he complied, and went. He found the preparations to receive him magnificent beyond expression, but nothing so admirable as the great number of lights; for on a sudden there was let down altogether so great a number of branches with lights in them so ingeniously disposed, some in squares, and some in circles, that the whole thing was a spectacle that has seldom been equaled for beauty.

It has been estimated that in modern terms, Cleopatra’s wealth was around $100 billion. She was 27 when she met Mark Antony. He was 42.

Books for the President and First Family

On Thursday, January 20, the ABA Board of Directors met with President Obama in the Oval Office for the presentation of the ABA White House Library, a selection of current titles given to each presidential administration since 1929, for the reading pleasure of the First Family.

ABA Presents Books to President for White House Library

Books presented to the President, including YA titles for his daughters, were:

  • Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms, and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories, by Simon Winchester (Harper); presented by ABA President Michael Tucker, Books Inc., San Francisco, California
  • A Nest for Celeste: A Story About Art, Inspiration, and the Meaning of Home, by Henry Cole (Katherine Tegen Books); The Candymakers, by Wendy Mass (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers); and Out of My Mind, by Sharon Draper (Atheneum); presented by ABA Vice President Becky Anderson, Anderson’s Bookshops, Naperville, Illinois
  • Colonel Roosevelt, by Edmund Morris (Random House): presented by Barbara Meade, Politics and Prose, Washington, D.C.
  • Cutting for Stone, by Abraham Verghese (Knopf); the winner of the 2010 Indies Choice Book Award for Fiction, presented on behalf of the entire group
  • Doctor Zhivago, by Boris Pasternak: A new translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (Pantheon); presented by Sarah Bagby, Watermark Books and Cafe, Wichita, Kansas
  • Foreign Bodies, by Cynthia Ozick (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt); presented by Betsy Burton, The King’s English Bookshop, Salt Lake City, Utah
  • Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America, by Matt Taibbi (Spiegel & Grau); presented by Tom Campbell, The Regulator Bookshop, Durham, North Carolina
  • Song of Myself: And Other Poems by Walt Whitman, selected and introduced by Robert Hass (Counterpoint); presented by Ken White, San Francisco State University Bookstore, San Francisco, California
  • Storyteller, by Patricia Reilly Giff (Wendy Lamb Books) and The Danger Box, by Blue Balliett (Scholastic Press); presented by Beth Puffer, Bank Street Bookstore, New York, New York
  • Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption, by Laura Hillenbrand (Random House); presented by Dan Chartrand, Water Street Bookstore, Exeter, New Hampshire
  • Washington: A Life, by Ron Chernow (Penguin Press); presented by ABA CEO Oren Teicher, Tarrytown, New York

Good books

S.C. Gwynne, Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American.

Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer.

Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration.

The above are three of the finalists in the nonfiction category for the National Book Critics Circle 2010 Awards.

I mention the three, and Thomas Powers, The Killing of Crazy Horse, a finalist in biography, because I have read the beginnings of these four and found them all exceptionally engrossing. I just haven’t decided whether to continue with them as e-books or in hardbacks (and I have other books to read ahead of them, so no hurry).

Follow the link above to see all the finalists in fiction, biography, autobiography, criticism, nonfiction and poetry. The winners will be announced March 10th.

January 2nd is the hottie birthday

Tia Carrere, 44.

Cuba Gooding Jr., 43.

Christy Turlington, 42.

Taye Diggs, 40.

Paz Vega, 35.

Kate Bosworth, 28.

Sally Rand was born on this date in 1904. Ms. Rand was a burlesque dancer, famed for her feather fan and bubble dances. She was portrayed in the movie The Right Stuff, shown performing for the Mercury Astronauts in 1962 when she was 58. Ms. Rand died in 1979.

Issac Asimov was born in Petrovichi, Russia, on this date in 1920. The Writer’s Almanac profile in 2009 included this:

He published his first story when he was 18, and published 30 more stories in the next three years. At age 21, he wrote his most famous story after a conversation with his friend and editor John Campbell. Campbell had been reading Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature, which includes the passage, “If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which has been shown!” Asimov went home and wrote the story “Nightfall” (1941), about a planet with six suns that has a sunset once every 2,049 years. It’s been anthologized over and over, and many people still consider it the best science fiction short story ever written.

Asimov died in 1992.

Apsley Cherry-Garrard was born in Bedford, England on this date in 1886. From The Writer’s Almanac in 2003:

He’s the author of the Antarctic travelogue, The Worst Journey in the World (1922). His book is about a search for the eggs of the Emperor Penguin in 1912. He and his two companions traveled in near total darkness and temperatures that reached negative 77.5 degrees Fahrenheit. He wrote, “Polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised.”

And, as discussed in The 25 (Essential) Books for the Well-Read Explorer, where Cherry-Garrard’s tale is listed second:

Cherry-Garrard’s first-person account of this infamous sufferfest is a chilling testimonial to what happens when things really go south. Many have proven better at negotiating such epic treks than Scott, Cherry, and his crew, but none have written about it more honestly and compassionately than Cherry. “The horrors of that return journey are blurred to my memory and I know they were blurred to my body at the time. I think this applies to all of us, for we were much weakened and callous. The day we got down to the penguins I had not cared whether I fell into a crevasse or not.”

The top 12 Civil War books ever written

A discussion of the top 12 Civil War books ever written — “here are a dozen books that, for me, tell the story of the Civil War with literary elegance, intellectual gusto and enormous flair.”

I own and have read half of the 12. Professor LaFantasie’s choices seem sound, if subjective. I like his suggestion to read one a month in 2011, the 150th anniversary of the first year of the war. I intend to try that, even re-reading the six.

I also recommend The Killer Angels as the best Civil War novel.

Glenn LaFantasie was a colleague of mine at the U.S. Department of State.

Best Posnanski line of today

“It seems so silly to say this because it has been said so often, but J.K. Rowling is a marvel. She conjured up this complete world that is like ours and unlike ours, and as a writer I am awed by how her mind works.”

Joe Posnanski in a blog post about re-reading the books with his daughter and going to The Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Studios in Orlando. Know anyone going there anytime soon?

Best line of the day about books

“For her latest book club selection Oprah Winfrey decided to go ‘old school,’ she said on Monday. Ms. Winfrey has selected two Charles Dickens novels, ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ and ‘Great Expectations,’ both announced on her show on Monday, both books that she had never read before.”

Arts Beat

And both available free just about any electronic reader you might prefer.

Redux link of the day

Every day that I blog I go back through the seven years I’ve been doing this and see what I’ve posted.

Five years ago today I posted a link to a short story published in 2003 in The New Yorker by Sherman Alexie, “What You Pawn I Will Redeem”.

I said then that it was “an absolutely first-rate short story.”

I just read it again. I was wrong. It’s much better than that.

Staggering genius

A remarkable and fascinating interview with and about Dave Eggers, From ‘staggering genius’ to America’s conscience.

The article features Zeitoun, Eggers nonfiction book about the aftermath of Katrina for one family. If you have read Zeitoun, I think you will particularly enjoy this essay.

If you haven’t read Zeitoun, put down what you are doing, get a copy, and read it now.

Eggers is equally or more famous for A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. It too is an absolute must.

What Is the What is Eggers’ other gem.

But you may begin with the article From ‘staggering genius’ to America’s conscience.

National Book Award Winners

Young People’s Literarture

In Caitlin’s world, everything is black or white. Things are good or bad. Anything in between is confusing. That’s the stuff Caitlin’s older brother, Devon, has always explained. But now Devon’s dead and Dad is no help at all. Caitlin wants to get over it, but as an eleven-year-old girl with Asperger’s, she doesn’t know how. When she reads the definition of closure, she realizes that is what she needs. In her search for it, Caitlin discovers that not everything is black and white—the world is full of colors—messy and beautiful.

Poetry

In his fourth collection, Terrance Hayes investigates how we construct experience. With one foot firmly grounded in the everyday and the other hovering in the air, his poems braid dream and reality into a poetry that is both dark and buoyant. Cultural icons as diverse as Fela Kuti, Harriet Tubman, and Wallace Stevens appear with meditations on desire and history. We see Hayes testing the line between story and song in a series of stunning poems inspired by the Pecha Kucha, a Japanese presenta tion format. This innovative collection presents the light- headedness of a mind trying to pull against gravity and time. Fueled by an imagination that enlightens, delights, and ignites, Lighthead leaves us illuminated and scorched.

Nonfiction

In Just Kids, Patti Smith’s first book of prose, the legendary American artist offers a never-before-seen glimpse of her remarkable relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe in the epochal days of New York City and the Chelsea Hotel in the late sixties and seventies. An honest and moving story of youth and friendship, Smith brings the same unique, lyrical quality to Just Kids as she has to the rest of her formidable body of work—from her influential 1975 album Horses to her visual art and poetry.

Fiction

At the rock-bottom end of the sport of kings sits the ruthless and often violent world of cheap horse racing, where trainers and jockeys, grooms and hotwalkers, loan sharks and touts all struggle to take an edge, or prove their luck, or just survive. Lord of Misrule follows five characters—scarred and lonely dreamers in the American grain—through a year and four races at Indian Mound Downs, downriver from Wheeling, West Virginia.

Horseman Tommy Hansel has a scheme to rescue his failing stable: He’ll ship four unknown but ready horses to Indian Mound Downs, run them in cheap claiming races at long odds, and then get out fast before anyone notices. The problem is, at this rundown riverfront half-mile racetrack in the Northern Panhandle, everybody notices—veteran groom Medicine Ed, Kidstuff the blacksmith, old lady “gyp” Deucey Gifford, stall superintendent Suitcase Smithers, eventually even the ruled-off “racetrack financier” Two-Tie and the ominous leading trainer, Joe Dale Bigg. But no one bothers to factor in Tommy Hansel’s go-fer girlfriend, Maggie Koderer. Like the beautiful, used-up, tragic horses she comes to love, Maggie has just enough heart to wire everyone’s flagging hopes back to the source of all luck.

Best book line of the day

“The ultimate Western is not Blood Meridian, it’s Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man, and right behind it is Lonesome Dove.

Allen Barra in a review essay, “Cormac McCarthy vs. Larry McMurtry: Best Western Novelist”

The essay is well worth any reader’s time, but the booklist is invaluable too.

The roundup of serious writers who have written Westerns over this span is impressive: E.L. Doctorow’s amusing revisionist take on the pulp Western, Welcome to Hard Times (1960), Thomas Berger’s epic Little Big Man (1964), Charles Portis’s True Grit (1968), which is soon to appear as a Coen Brothers’ film for Christmas release, Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970), Ron Hansen’s Desperadoes (1979) and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (1983), Pete Dexter’s elegiac twilight-of-the-gods account of Wild Bill Hickok’s last days, Deadwood (1986), Daniel Woodrell’s Woe to Live On (1987), made into Ang Lee’s film Ride With the Devil, Susan Dodd’s heartrending fictional biography of Jesse James’s mother, Mamaw (1988), N. Scott Momaday’s juxtaposing of the legend of a young Kiowa boy with that of Billy the Kid, The Ancient Child (1989), David Thomson’s witty and original Silver Light (1990), which straddles the lines between fiction, film and history by mingling the destinies of real-life Westerners with film characters, Robert Coover’s phantasmagorical Ghost Town (1998), Philip Kimball’s sweet, sad and savage Liar’s Moon (1999), and, this year, Deep Creek by Dana Hand (pen name of Anne Matthews and Will Howarth), a grim and fascinating fictional account of the actual slaughter of Chinese miners in 1870s Idaho.

The magic moment

Author Pat Conroy is 65 today. Conroy has written several bestselling novels, most notably The Water Is Wide, The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline and The Prince of Tides. Byron, one of two official sons-in-law of NewMexiKen, sent me this story about Conroy in 2004 (in part because the tale it tells concerns Byron’s own high school alma mater).

Mr. Conroy’s latest book, ”My Losing Season,” published this month by Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, is ostensibly a memoir of his senior year playing basketball at the Citadel.

But the book’s most gripping moment, for those readers interested in education, may be the three and a half pages set inside Room 2A, the classroom of Joseph A. Monte at Gonzaga High School, a Jesuit institution in Washington, D.C.

Mr. Monte was Mr. Conroy’s sophomore-year English instructor, and in describing how Mr. Monte taught him to read Faulkner that year, Mr. Conroy has provided a bonus for all those devoted teachers in his audience: he has captured that elusive moment when a teacher succeeds in firing the imagination of a student.

Mr. Monte’s mantra was: ”Read the great books, gentlemen, just the great ones. Ignore the others. There’s not enough time.” To that end, in November 1960, Mr. Conroy received a personal assignment to read ”The Sound and the Fury.”

After studying the first 90 pages, Mr. Conroy said he felt as if he was ”reading the book underwater.” Even after rereading those 90 pages, he did not understand a word.

When Mr. Conroy approached his teacher in the cafeteria to tell him of his despair, Mr. Monte sent him scurrying in a different direction: the scene in ”Macbeth” when Macbeth learns of the death of his queen.

”There you will find the key to your dilemma,” the future novelist was told, ”if, Mr. Conroy, you’re the student I think you are.”

The critical passage, Mr. Conroy discovered, was when Macbeth says, ”It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Mr. Conroy realized that ”The Sound and the Fury” was also told by an ”idiot,” Benjy.

”That’s why I was confused,” Mr. Conroy writes in his new book. ”It was surfaces and shadows and what Benjy thought he was seeing. Faulkner was writing through Benjy’s eyes . . . through an idiot’s eyes.”

The lesson, according to Mr. Monte: ”Sometimes literature is direct and straightforward. Sometimes it makes you work.”

For his trouble, Mr. Conroy received an ”A+, double credit” in Mr. Monte’s ever-present grade book.

”This is a good moment in the life of your mind,” Mr. Conroy recalls his teacher saying. ”It’s a good moment in my life as a teacher. We should both cherish it.”

The article by Jacques Steinberg originally appeared in The New York Times in 2002.

‘Run, Don’t Walk’ Books

Via Paper Cuts a list of must reads from Junot Díaz, including Texaco: A Novel by Patrick Chamoiseau.

For my part I am currently reading the initial chapters of Ron Chernow’s Washington: A Life via the free sample from Kindle. Chernow is always good; I’ve got Washington up to age 20 and so far it moves well.

Am about to begin Sara Gruen’s Water for Elephants: A Novel, which comes to me highly recommended, as does Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance. It was one of Oprah’s.

Oh, and in my backpack is Jon Krakauer’s Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman, updated.