August 27, 2008
I was scrolling through one of my favorite book blogs, Bookroomreviews when I stumbled onto the fact that one of the books published by my press has been nominated for a Dayton Literary Peace Prize. This is unbelievably, fabulously cool. The Literary Peace Prize is part of the Dayton Peace Prize, founded in the aftermath of the peace accords that ended the Bosnian War.
Wow…this is seriously cool.
August 18, 2008
Sometimes I lose my way when it comes to reading. For me, reading is like swimming is for Michael Phelps. I hate to go a day without it. It feels natural to have my nose in a book (so much so that I sometimes run into things on the sidewalk because I can’t help but read and talk at the same time). There’s no other thing I enjoy more. It’s not hard, it’s not work. It’s just the simple act of being transported to a different place.
Every once in a while though, something goes wrong. I lose my way. I pick up a book, dig in, and then lose steam. I figure it’s the book. I start another. The same thing happens. It’s like I’m stuck in some parallel universe where reading is hard and I’ve got to fight to finish a book. Normally I try to make myself read slower so that I don’t finish the book too quickly. The past few weeks have been like that for me. I haven’t been totally lost but I have been unable to stick with one book long enough to finish. I’ve been jumping back and forth like the book will start to lose it’s brilliance if I read it for too long.
I was at a loss. And so, ever so typically, I went back to my roots and I found out why I loved reading so much in the first place. I have a deep love of the cheesy sort of high school teen dramas written by women like Meg Cabot and Anne Brashares. It’s slightly an offshoot of my love for chick lit (which has waned in the past year) but I think it’s also an outlet for me. I never really had the typical teenage life so I need to immerse myself in them whatever way I can. I don’t want to feel like I’ve missed and if reading is the closest I am going to get then I’d rather have at least that.
So for the past week I’ve been on a tear trying to read as much of those books of my teen years as I can. And here’s the amazing part. It’s brought me back to the stories I love now for their maturity and complexity. Somehow, these books about frivolous things have made me love the books about important things. I’m always constantly surprised when that happens. I fall in love with reading all over again.
August 13, 2008
I am completely obsessed with the Olympics. I’m on this kind of overdrive where I can’t miss a minute of the swimming or the gymnastics. It’s crazy and I love it. But there is one (one?) unfortunate side effect of this obsession—I’ve been reading a lot less. Don’t get me wrong. I’m still slogging through at least 50 pages a day (accumulated over more than one book). But my torrid pace has slowed to a trickle. And this blog has become about my fascination with Michael Phelps. For that, I am sorry and I offer a brief respite from those who have a more literary persuasion.
One of the things I’m reading at the moment (nearly finished) is the manuscript of ones the books that will be published by the press I work for. The book is about sports injuries in minors and then lengths we go to make our kids the best athletes in the world. (well, not me, considering I have no kids, but you knew what I meant) It’s part cultural deconstruction and part memoir, infused with the kind of perspective you can only get by going through the things you want to write about.
When I first got into writing, I desperately wanted to be a sportswriter and so this book speaks to me in a lot of ways. I also was a three sport varsity athlete my senior year of high school (which totally weird because I’m not at all athletic but I went to a school that required us to play three sports a year and it kind of stuck). So I know a little bit about the drive and fire of wanting to be the best, wanting to succeed. I know what Michael Phelps’s couch is talking about when he describes practices but I went through a similar thing (though much scaled down) when I was on the swim team.
I hope this book gets a lot of attention when it comes out. It’s fabulously written, well reported and it hits a critical issue that is too much ignored in our search for guts and glory.
August 6, 2008
It took me longer than normal to get through this book, which I consider both a gift and an emotional roller coaster. This is my second time through this book, a year or so older than the first time, and I don’t know if it’s just a part of me but I think I loved this book even more than the first time.
I’m a rather large sucker for the f-ed up person memoirs. In the grand scheme of things I love hearing how people dealt with the stuff that came up in their lives while still managing to remain remarkably sane. Dave Eggers is a master storyteller and an expert in the art of stream of consciousness writing. Even with all his faults you forgive him. How could you not? I don’t know how I could possibly manage to raise my little brother or sister (if they existed that is) when I was barely an adult myself.
Eggers, who founded McSweeney’s, is the literary equivalent of a nervous breakdown in this book. It’s emotional, raw, powerful, and both profoundly sad and funny at the same time. His trip from semi-adult/parent/brother to adult/parent/brother/friend is an astonishing testament of how love can manage to fill the void when the world comes crashing, with speed and vigor, around your ears.
For some people, I could see how this book could drive you insane. It’s chronological, in a sense at least, but it sways back and forth between the present and the past and has no straight narrative style throughout. It’s a story in pieces and parts, written by someone with an urge to both lay their soul bare and conceal it from the outside world.
Fall into this book. It’s really all you can do. Like the scenes on beaches that are interspersed in the book, it will wash over you and make you whole. It will make you think. It will make you love.
July 31, 2008
July 30, 2008
I just finished reading The Spy Who Came In from the Cold and oh my, it is fantastic. I’ve been a fan of Bond and other spy-type things for years so it seems only natural that I’m finally getting around to reading John Le Carre. The book, which takes place in Cold War Europe in the 1960s is fascinating and underlaid with fabulous plot lines that only erupt in the last twenty or so minutes of the book and bring into focus the nature right and wrong, good versus evil, and how we define those things when everything our country has put at stake is on the line.
The book was fantastic. It’s a political thriller, a spy novel, a love story, and a fantastically spun tale of the world as it was. For those of us who grew up in a post-Cold War world, free of the threat of Russia bearing down on us with promises of nuclear destruction, it’s an interesting tale that paints the world in which we never lived. The stories of the spy agencies, so unlike the modern tales of spies in TV shows like Alias, are fought on such a personal level. Allies are taken down, men go into situations in which their lives will almost surely be lost, and spies are treated as above the simples mores of right and wrong.
This is fiction at its most tense. Read this book now. It is a lesson in a culture of our world.
July 18, 2008
I’m rereading A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius at the moment. It’s such an absolutely wonderful and powerful memoir. It’s not the first memoir I ever read but it is the most chaotic, I think. (Sean Wilsey’s Oh the Glory of It All may have it beat but not by much…I haven’t finished it yet.) I can’t quite tell if I love the book madly or if it freaks the hell out of me. Eggers is so intense in the book, sprawling through life with little to no supervision, all the while trying to live the best years of his life and be a full-time parent to his younger brother. I don’t know what I would do in the same situation.
The first 30-odd pages of the book (before the story even starts) are some of the most inventive and crazy I’ve ever been privilege to read. They’re almost a mini-story in advance of the novel, easing you into the wackiness in a more subtle way than the harshness of his true story can. I absolutely love this book. It makes sense of things that have no sound or sense. I am lost in the words that are laid down on the page.
July 15, 2008
I’ve been reading Eclipse the past few days in preparation for the release of Breaking Dawn in a few weeks. I had been holding off because I didn’t want to finish the book too quickly before the next one came out but now I realize that I’ll be lucky to finish it by the end of the week. I’m having a hard time reading it, not because it’s of any less quality than the first two books in the series, but because it uneasily parallels a fight I’m having with myself in my own life. Every time Stephanie Meyer edges close to the subtle decision underlying the whole book I start to mentally twitch at the thought of having to make a decision in my own life. The first two books were unbelievably moving and I identified emotionally with them as well. But they didn’t drive to the core of the most fundamental decision I’ve had to make in a long time and annoy the fuck out of me by bringing it up every 20 goddamn pages.
Don’t get me wrong. I still love the book. It’s pure poetry compared to some of the things I’ve read in the past few weeks and I feel so lucky to have discovered the series. I’m just annoyed at being stuck up on the same fence as the character, waiting as she does in the book to get an answer. Because, at least right now, I don’t want to have to decide. I want everything to be glorious. I want to be like Bella. Just without the massive choices. Can I get an oy vey?
July 10, 2008
One of my all-time favorite columnists is Nick Hornby. I know being a columnist isn’t what he’s fabulously famous for but I can never get enough of his wonderful and thrilling “Stuff I’ve Been Reading” columns in the Believer. He’s absolutely fabulous and righteously funny. If you don’t feel like trying to track down back issues of the Believer his columns have been collected into two volumes (so far).
And so in the great tradition of all great writers, I’m going to sort of borrow his concept here. To write a post on every single book I read would be exhausting-for you and me. I simply read too fast and too much. But! There is hope. So here goes.
I was reading Entertainment Weekly at work today and in their 1000th issue they have the 100 best books of the past 25 years. I have to say that I was pretty happy with the selections overall. It also gave me a lot of ideas for reading. I can tell you that my reading queue at the library will be increasing after today.
I love the library. I haven’t lived in a place with a fabulous library in a long time. When I was in school I never much enjoyed the library at school and I didn’t take advantage of the wonderful resource of the Boston Public Library because for some reason two stops on the T (that’s we call the subway here for all you folks not from the Northeast) seemed a long walk (despite the fact that I did this walk often on my own for fun.)
Even when I moved to my own apartment in the city I wasn’t particularly interested in the library until I moved to a small neighborhood that was around the corner from a library. The best thing about the Boston Public Library is that it’s a network of libraries throughout the neighborhoods of Boston and beyond that collectively make up one of the most awesome libraries I’ve been privy too. It doesn’t exactly have anything on the Library of Congress but it’s still quite extensive and wonderful all the same. Because of the networked design of the system I can borrow a book that is in any one of the libraries and they’ll whisk it to my closest library so that I don’t have to tramp all over the city to get it. The existence of this library system has greatly, greatly increased my reading.
I’ve been trying (and often failing) to cut down on my buying of books and the library has been a help. My recent discovery of the Twilight series, which I’ve written about before, was due to the fact that I got the book from the local library. At any other point in my life I may or may not have bothered to get the book for years because of funds but the ease of the library system got me the book quickly and for free. I’ve since bought the two following books and I’m happy with my purchases. But it all started with the library.
somehow I’m in the middle of two series at the moment. I just finished Pretties, the second novel in Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies trilogy, series, whatever you want to call it. I have the final two books at home with me at the moment, itching to be red. What amazes me about these books is the strength of the female character routinely giving up everything she’s worked to attain for the betterment of others. She’s not a perfect hero, but she is a hero nonetheless. I’ve been somewhat disappointed by some of the plot twists, but there were logical at least if not completely satisfying.
I’m also reading the third book in the aforementioned Twilight series, Eclipse. I just started it today so I’m not very far along yet but I’m waiting for the central conflict of the book to start. Like New Moon, its predecessor, this book starts off fairly tamely. I know that in the next forty pages or so our main character will once again be in a battle for her life, fighting to save the man she loves, and trying to be a somewhat normal teenager-girl?-all at the same time. I’m anxious to see what happens but I also like the quiet periods of the book. The dramatic shift in New Moon was so heart-wrenching, I don’t know if I’m quite ready to have my heart torn apart for these characters just yet.
Until we meet again, go to the library. Seriously folks, free books.
July 9, 2008
I finished New Moon and boy does it pack all the emotions in the spectrum into those 500+ pages. I don’t know if I’ve ever read a book that was more tense, except possibly Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows which had me on the edge of my seat for the entire 22 hours or so it took me to read it. (I tried to stretch it out but I just had to know the end.) The twists and turns and the heartrending inaction of the second book of the Twilight series almost puts Harry Potter to shame. Almost.
In the second book, all your favorite characters are back and it seems almost like a kind of peaceful existence has settled on the life of Bella Swan, our enigmatic main character. Right, because that’s why the book is over 500 pages long. The magic of this story is that it leaves you feeling like the main character, torn in two, searching endlessly to make herself whole.
It’s a story about love, far more than the first book. It shows how love can break a person and make them whole; more importantly, it shows how every new chance at love can weave back the threads of a broken heart. I was moved, angry, annoyed, frustrated and eventually bowled over by the passion and love in this book. I could not put it down for the simple reason that I had to know what was going to happen. I had to heal my broken heart along with Bella’s. This is a story in tandem: the character’s and yours.
