In need of a little more fiction, circa 2009? The Reader's annual fiction issue is now online, featuring stories by Stephen Markley, Natalie Edwards and Robert Cass. If you find yourself in need of some more reads, you can always check out the Reader's archive which houses their fiction issues dating back to 2000.
— Veronica Bond / Comments (0)
Newcity has listed their Top 5 books of 2009, but instead of including books from all over the globe, they've also set aside two lists specifically for local reads. I wouldn't necessarily agree with all of their picks, but the local nod is always a nice thing.
— Veronica Bond / Comments (0)
The Unnamed, Book Club selection author Joshua Ferris's upcoming novel, is getting some heavy pre-publication press. Catch a glimpse of the new work in this lengthy excerpt in Granta:
Coffee and a powdered doughnut sat on his desk, the morning offering. He might have thought to get something more substantial but he didn't care to interrupt the flow of work. Night after night, he sat at this desk just as a sphere of oil sits suspended in dark vinegar - everything blotted out but his own source of light. To save on energy costs, Troyer, Barr and Atkins LLP had installed motion sensors on the overhead lights. From six in the morning until ten at night, the lights burned continuously; after ten, the sensors took over. He worked past ten most nights, and most nights found him sufficiently absorbed in something that required only the turn of a page or the click of a mouse - too little activity for the sensors to register. The lights frequently switched off on him. He'd look up, surprised again - not just by the darkened office. By his re-entry into the physical world. Self-awareness. Himself as something more than mind thinking. He'd have to stand, a little amused by the crude technology, and wave his arms around, jump up and down, walk over and fan the door, sometimes all three, before the lights would return.
That was happiness.
— Veronica Bond / Comments (0)
As we celebrate the anniversary of Rod Blagojevich's arrest, take a moment to laugh while reading GalleyCat's list of the "worst moments in publishing in 2009." In at #4: Blago's book deal.
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Chicago's own Aleksandar Hemon is the editor of this year's Best European Fiction anthology and was recently interviewed in the New York Times books blog about the process. Here's Hemon on how his work on the anthology reminded him about some major differences between American and European fiction writing:
Q. What was the biggest surprise for you, editing the collection?
A. It was less of a surprise than a reminder: how unabashedly comfortable many of the writers are to engage with literary forms that would be perceived as experimental or avant-garde here. In turn, I was reminded how deeply conservative contemporary American literature is in terms of form. And that conservative bent is a recent development, I believe. The European form flexibility is not a consequence of some snotty, elitist aesthetic but rather of the fact that there are many stories to be told and many traditions to draw from.
In other Hemon news, over at Booklist Daniel Kraus takes the trailer for Hemon's The Lazarus Project to task, finding that it doesn't so much make him want to read the book as it makes him want to go back and read fellow Booklist writer Donna Seaman's review of it.
— Veronica Bond / Comments (0)
Pop Matters examines where an author's "previously unpublished" posthumous works come from, those of Kurt Vonnegut in his recent Look at the Birdie in this case:
Vonnegut was no hack, but he needed to make a living, and so he became a staple of these publications (in good company that included the likes of Louis L'Amour and Elmore Leonard, among others). In a 1951 letter included in this book, Vonnegut observes: " . . . of course, if you appear in the Atlantic or Harper's or the New Yorker, by God, you must be a writer, because everybody says so. This is poor competition for the fat checks from the slicks. For want of anything more tempting, I'll stick with money."
— Veronica Bond / Comments (1)
The University of Chicago Press is currently in the midst of their annual sale which can now be taken advantage of online. You can get scores of award-winning, scholarly and general interest books for up to 85% off the original price by entering promo code AD9256 when you check out. Learn more about William Blake with William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s, get schooled on A Natural History of the Chicago Region or indulge the thinker in you with Creative Understanding. The sale will run through February 26, or until stock is depleted.
— Veronica Bond / Comments (0)
As is customary this time of year, publications are coming out with their "best of" lists, but with this year bringing the end of the decade near, there have been a slew of "best books of the decade lists" on which our current Book Club selection, The Corrections, features prominently. Back in September The Millions placed the book at #1 on their Best of the Millennium list (to some disagreement to their readers). Here, the Guardian reviews all those publishing smash hits and past Book Club selection author Joshua Ferris discusses what makes The Corrections so great:
It was merciless, it was skewering, the family at its heart full of bicker, betrayal, and many other varieties of familial sport - but the artist assembling and synthesising it all for the pleasure of the reader was possessed, thank God, of a voracious emotional intelligence, capable of mollifying all that was ugly and unlikable in his individual characters with empathy and humour. Oh, it's compulsive reading! The copy I have is a hardback containing 568 pages, and not one of them flags. The sentences are rollicking flickers of genius, one brilliant-dense paragraph meeting another, narratives vectoring into the outlandish and the unexpected while remaining ever committed to the realist's agenda. We might have forgotten, by the time the book landed, that a literary doorstopper of the first order of seriousness could also be unabashed entertainment. More likely Franzen simply knew that all comedy is deadly serious, and that the fraudulent online sale of post-Soviet Lithuania, for example, or a stolen salmon fillet sliding down the hero's underpants, was the low-brow fallout, the comic carryover, of a writer dividing the sadness of a declining family by the sadness of a declining culture. The book was a howl: against greed, against selfishness, against the axiom of American happiness, finally against the tyranny of family holidays.
Find out what else Johsua Ferris has been reading in his contribution to The Millions's Year in Reading.
— Veronica Bond / Comments (0)
Over at The Week Behind, Donald G. Evans discusses why Chicago needs a Literary Hall of Fame, writing "Saying nice things about Chicago's literary heroes should be a civic responsibility warmly and naturally embraced, big sloppy kisses rather than gratuitous cheek pecks on the way out the door. Like with any loved one, you want to show your appreciation, express love and gratitude, and in ways small and big cherish what you have." One of the major forces behind the project to create our Literary Hall of Fame, Evans recounts other promoters of Chicago literature, giving the Book Club a nice mention, in effort to show the vibrant literary community that already exists here. Where Evans feels having a Hall of Fame could do most good is to bring attention to such works on a greater scale, not just in the minds of the already literary conscious but in the greater Chicago community, if not the world. It is a lofty goal, indeed, but one that I can certainly stand behind. Find out more about the burgeoning Chicago Literary Hall of Fame on its facebook page.
— Veronica Bond / Comments (0)
Claire Zulkey interviews Tribune critic Julia Keller about her new young adult novel, Back Home, and her non-fiction book, Mr. Gatling's Terrible Marvel: The Gun that Changed Everything and the Misunderstood Genius Who Invented It. Says Keller on how she came to choose Gatling as a subject:
I came across his life story in the course of research on another topic, was astonished to find there was no major biography, and set to work. Gatling was a brilliant inventor and a thoughtful individual, a man who embodied the American Dream as it was manifested in the 19th Century: One worked hard, dreamed big, and one's fortunes rose or fell according to one's own talents and efforts -- not charity, not handouts, not shortcuts or good PR. The Gatling Gun represented an intellectual shift as well as a change in armaments. For the first time, one could kill an enemy en masse, not one at a time. The Gatling ushered in a period of terrible destructiveness -- but also signaled to the world that the United States was a new world force to be reckoned with. And it all began in the mind of a man with no formal education, no training, a farmer's son who stepped forth into the world in the 1840s, determined to make his mark. And did.
— Veronica Bond / Comments (0)
The Onion AV Club interviews Superfreakonomics author and University of Chicago professor Steven D. Levitt, questioning him on the book's controversial chapter on global warming and taking him to task on other claims, such as the effects of terrorism and the size of Indian men's, um, body parts. Says Levitt in answer to the first topic:
Our chapter does not deny the existence of global warming. What we do is, we say that the current solution people are proposing is one that involves reducing carbon emissions dramatically. The problem with that solution is, it's incredibly expensive. The economists who have looked at it think it will cost trillions of dollars in reduced economic output to accomplish it. Also, it requires everyone in the world to get together and suddenly become allies and friends to try and change their behavior, to moderate how much they produce. And even if we do it, because carbon dioxide stays in the air for so long, it will take 50 years to really feel the benefits, or even know if we are getting benefits. So we take a very different approach, which says, "Let's just say the earth got too hot and we wanted to make it cooler, would reducing carbon emissions be the right way to go?" And we think the answer is no.
— Veronica Bond / Comments (0)
I could do this all day and not stop laughing--it's the Make Your Own Academic Sentence tool from the University of Chicago. Pick four hoity-toity sounding phrases and the tool will work them into a sentence for you. Here's mine: "The epistemology of consumption fuctions as the conceptual frame for the legitmation of agency." Hilarious, no? Why didn't this exist when I was writing papers there? This could have saved me a lot of work! [via]
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Yeah, of course you do. The University of Chicago Press has just announced that they will begin offering one free e-book each month, starting today. This month's book of choice is the 2,000-some-year-old The Birthday Book by Roman scholar Censorinus. As described by the London Review of Books, The Birthday Book "distills the wisdom of several strains of philosophy, extracting whatever seems to have any bearing on births, days and birthdays: theories of the origin of the human species, the formation of the individual foetus, the principles of astrology, the ages of man, the nature of time, eons, centuries, years, months, days and hours." In other words, a nice, light read for your daily commute. (Oh, come on. This is the U of C. Did you really think it would be something you can buy at the airport?) Check back in December to see which gem of academia will be offered up gratis next.
— Veronica Bond / Comments (0)
Adam Langer, author of our own July 2005 selection Crossing California, gets some love in Booklist's Book Group blog where Neil Hollands calls him an author "who more people should be reading." Hollands gives a brief description of each of Langer's novels and his recent father-focused memoir, saying that his work is "easy to access, full of laughter, but worthy of careful examination as well." Having included Langer's work in our own Book Club, I wholeheartedly agree.
— Veronica Bond / Comments (0)
National Novel Writing Month is upon us again and ChiWriMo, the Chicago chapter of the month-long novel writing spree, has got you covered with write-ins scheduled throughout the city every day of the month. If you can't make it to the write-ins in person, fret not as the website's online forums provide plenty of support at your convenience and their resources give much needed direction for the gigantic task. At the end of the month, head over to the Open Books space at 213 W. Institute Pl. for a 14 hour writing frenzy, complete with baked goods. Good luck to all of our local aspiring novelists this month!
— Veronica Bond / Comments (0)
Over at the Guardian, Dave Eggers talks about novelizing a children's classic, how his version of The Wild Things diverges from the film adaptation and his love for Maurice Sendak:
So the book, I thought, would be a place where I could explore these and other ideas, and where I could bend the story toward my own interests a bit (the movie is much more Spike's than mine). Along the way the novel diverged significantly from the movie, and from Maurice's book, but all three share a basic outline - boy is confused about a home and world out of control, boy acts out, boy leaves home and becomes king of a herd of sentient beasts. And all three benefit from the pure, uncompromised vision of childhood that Maurice Sendak espoused and put on paper, again and again, in a stunning body of work that becomes more impressive and singular with every passing decade. He is the greatest living writer and illustrator of books for or about children, period, bar none, end of discussion. He also has a dog named Herman.
Continue reading the article for an excerpt from Eggers's novel and go here for the Guardian's analytical and thought-provoking review of the book.
— Veronica Bond / Comments (0)
Speaking of getting freaky, do you ever stop to wonder just how much those Newberry librarians go through to bring you an awesome book fair each year? What kinds of crazy reads they're forced to sort into one of their numerous categories? And how many of them are sex guides? Here, a librarian describes some favorite donations: "One is still in print, and can be purchased as a book alone, or in a deluxe set with book, video, and tube of massage oil. I have read the book and I have watched the video...[a]nd I can tell you something about sex you may not have known. People who have sex have very large hands, and they always spread them out flat right HERE, at waist level, whether it's a still photo or a scene in the video. Oh, and people having sex always stand, sit, or loll at a side angle to a camera, so their hands can stay just HERE. Sex, apparently, is a matter of getting really close and then holding your hands out flat just HERE." My question is, who's donating these kinds books? And why? Perhaps I don't want to know.
— Veronica Bond / Comments (0)
Granta continues their coverage of all things Chicago by asking 57th Street Books about their top five Chicago reads. Some famous names are on that list and two of the reads have been past Book Club selections.
— Veronica Bond / Comments (1)
Booklist's Book Group blog directs us to Shelf Renewal, a blog by two Chicago-area librarians dedicated to shining a light on not-so-new books instead of giving more attention to upcoming books that are already getting plenty of publicity. Blog posts so far include a list of books centered around eating habits, dysfunctional families and, inspired by the show Glee, high school novels. Part of the blog's goal is to help other librarians recommend good reads to their patrons, but for readers in general, the blog looks like it will certainly do well to branch out into lesser known books on topics of their interest. (After all, do we really need to know another person's opinion on the latest Dan Brown?) I look forward to seeing which books the pair dig up in future posts.
— Veronica Bond / Comments (1)
Not only is Granta giving our city love with their all-Chicago issue, but they're also shining the spotlight on local bookstores by asking them for their top five Chicago reads. This week it's Quimby's. Check back each week to find out a new store's favorite Chicago-related books.
— Veronica Bond / Comments (0)
Today in Silly Quizzes, can you tell the difference between Behind the Bell, Dustin Diamond's Saved by the Bell tell-all memoir, and Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls? Or, more importantly, would you admit it if you couldn't?
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File this one under "Um...okay...": In anticipation of the Spike Jonze/Dave Eggers Where the Wild Things Are adaptation, Opening Ceremony has a number of Wild Things inspired costumes that you can purchase just in time for Halloween. If you have an extra $600 lying around. (If I had an extra $600 to spend expressly on Halloween, I would spend it on Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. I would pile them in my living room, then climb onto one of my bookshelves to dive into them, à la Scrooge McDuck and his golden coins. But I digress.) Assuming you do have that kind of cash, you'd probably want to get more than one wear out of your costume and the AV Club has some great ideas on where such apparel might be appropriate.
(Seriously, that guy looks ridiculous, but doesn't he also look toasty? Imagine wearing that on a mid-February morning at the El station. You'd be the envy of CTA riders everywhere.)
— Veronica Bond / Comments (1)
Boing Boing is holding a poetry contest, the prize for which is a copy of Dave Eggers's Zeitoun. All you have to do is compose a haiku on why you deserve to win and enter it in the comments section of the post. The contest ends on Saturday, but there are already over 200 posts so get crackin'!
Some of my favorites so far:
#2
I choose to spend time
remembering what went wrong
to prevent repeat.
#156
Some books rot on shelves,
but were made for many reads.
We practice sharing
#224
I like Dave Eggers
Cute girls see this on my shelf
Everybody wins
(Kind of true, #224. Kind of true.)
[via]
— Veronica Bond / Comments (2)
Interested in which songs inspired Stephanie Kuehnert when she was writing Ballads of Suburbia? The author provides a soundtrack for her book as part of Largehearted Boy's Book Notes series. Not surprisingly there's some Johnny Cash on the list (his music plays somewhat of a role in the novel) and the combination of songs serves as a good look into how music helped shape the stories of a bunch of punk suburban kids.
— Veronica Bond / Comments (0)
Banning books is hard work. Deciding which books to keep is difficult when you can find something to disagree with in so many of them. Just ask these puppets from the American Library Association:
On a serious note though, this map shows how pervasive book censorship continues to be. Keep in mind that this shows only book bans and challenges that have been reported; many more surely slip quietly past the news radar. Banned Books Week starts tomorrow and with it we are reminded to take a moment to be grateful for our undeniable right to read.
— Veronica Bond / Comments (0)
The National Book Awards remembers Richard Powers's The Echo Maker, our September Book Club selection.
Um...perhaps Harold Augenbraum, Executive Director of the National Book Foundation, has some sort of memory issues as well. According to his description of the book, the protagonist is named "Jack"*: "He has what? Capgras syndrome, identified by Joseph Capgras in 1923. And this precipitates not only one but two family dramas, and a questioning of not only of how the mind works but what effect do changes in any natural environment have on the individual and that individual's place in the human ecology. The book's readers believe Karin is his sister, but the protagonist Jack does not. He thinks that for some reason 'an actress' has been brought in to play his sister. And even a dog that resembles his own has been found to visit him at the rehab facility. And we as readers believe he is Jack's dog even though Jack does not. They bring in the neuroscientist Weber, who resembles Oliver Sacks--at least to me, but that would make him a sort of imposter (or he may be related in some way to Ernst Weber, the psychophysicist). As much as he tries to help Jack, he ends up damaging his own marriage. He tries to decipher the case and ends up recognizing (and I use that word advisedly) his own alienation from his wife back east. I mean, this is a man who, when he writes case studies, in order to protect the patient's identity, makes up names for them. So they become imposters in their own cases. And then he develops a fascination for Jack's rehab aide, so he becomes an imposter in his previous life. And then you remember that none of these people are real, so they are all imposters, puppets, with Richard Powers the grand puppenmeister convincing you of their reality."
*Mark Schluter, not Jack, is the man afflicted with Capgras in this story.
As of Sunday, the National Book Foundation finished their salute to past winners and voting is now open for the best National Book Awards Fiction. The shortlist includes John Cheever, William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, Thomas Pynchon and University of Chicago visiting professor Ralph Ellison. Cast your vote here and your email address will be entered to a win two tickets to the 60th National Book Awards ceremony on November 18.
— Veronica Bond / Comments (1)
Stuart Dybek will be at the Harold Washington Library tonight to discuss his contribution to Granta, but if you can't make it to his talk, here's a video of him with Aleksandar Hemon discussing "the energy and inspiration of their home town."
— Veronica Bond / Comments (0)
This past week, the National Book Awards remembered two past winners with ties to the University of Chicago.
Says Ed Portor, contributor to this year's Best American New Voices anthology, on the 1995 winner, Philip Roth's Sabbath Theater: "Underneath all the sex and bad behavior, Sabbath's Theater is an investigation of grief--inconsolable, unsupportable grief, for the dead, and for oneself. The scene that I can never get out of my head (and I'm not alone in this) is that of Sabbath masturbating on the fresh grave of his lover Drenka, and then finding out to his horror that he's not alone in the practice. It's an outrageous scene, but its porno-slapstick is infused with terrible pain."
On Susan Sontag's In America, the 2000 winner, Columbia University graduate Elizabeth Yale has this to say: "In America is the story of a woman--a diva--and of the idea that we create ourselves by rebelling against our fate. But of the idealistic immigrants in Sontag's story, it is ultimately only the actress--the paragon of mutability--who truly achieves this self-actualized transformation. For the others, shades of their former selves inexorably seep through. The actress, practiced in performance, can achieve what the rest of us cannot because her life transpires on the stage. Maryna or Marina, the diva has no singular self; she transforms with each rise and fall of the curtain, her identity a costume she dons before every performance. The experience of reading In America is of having an intimate, visceral encounter with an actress in possession of this transformative power, of being seduced by her elusive charisma, and ultimately of being eluded by her."
— Veronica Bond / Comments (0)
Goodreads is interviewing Audrey Niffenegger for their October newsletter and they're soliciting questions from fans. If you have a question for the author about her writing or about writing or, as they say, life in general, post it on the Goodreads page and maybe yours will be selected.
— Veronica Bond / Comments (0)
Today Granta brings us a new short story by Audrey Niffenegger:
The night sky was orange then. There was no real Chicago night in the early 1980s; what with the light pollution and the sprawl, the city threw up a massive unhealthy glow. The streets were bathed in artificial light, safe-light yellow as though motorists might need to develop film while driving. Nothing had been gentrified yet, the aluminium-sided houses stood blank and sullen in unbroken rows along glass-strewn sidewalks. Darkness pooled in the alleys and collected under the el. It was a good decade in which to get mugged.
— Veronica Bond / Comments (0)
You have got to read this hilarious, rediscovered interview with Shel Silverstein in a 1961 issue of The Realist.
Shel on having a beard:
I just have the beard because I think I look better with it, and I feel better with it. It makes me look older; I don't know if that's good or bad. But it's not done out of any rebellion or anything. It's not done, I hope, to attract attention. So finally, now, when people ask, I look sort of sad and I say, "It covers the scar." It's a very romantic thing to say, isn't it? But, you know, one thing it is, it's a good conversation-starter. People who might want to talk to you normally, a stranger, and who can't - you know, people are pretty shy and reserved, mostly - they don't want to take a chance on being cut down by somebody, so they might not come up to you without an excuse; whereas, if you've got some lemon meringue pie on your shoulder, or if your fly's open, they've got an excuse to talk to you. They can say, you know, "Your fly's open," or "You've got some lemon meringue pie on your shoulder."
[via]
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More from Granta, this time from Roger Ebert on the personalities to be found in the past in a North Ave. bar, telling Neil Steinberg, "you had to be there":
O'Rourke's was our stage, and we displayed our personas there nightly. It was a shabby street-corner tavern on a dicey stretch of North Avenue, a block after Chicago's Old Town stopped being a tourist haven. In its early days it was heated by a wood-burning pot-bellied stove, and ice formed on the insides of the windows. One night a kid from the street barged in, whacked a customer in the front booth with a baseball bat, and ran out again. When a roomer who lived upstairs died, his body was not discovered until maggots started to drop through the ceiling and on to the bar. A man nobody knew was shot dead one night behind the building. From the day it opened on December 30, 1966 until the day I stopped drinking in 1979, I drank there more or less every night when I was in town. So did a lot of people.
— Veronica Bond / Comments (0)
Largehearted Boy turns its focus to Claire Zulkey who provides a soundtrack to her young adult novel, An Off Year. The listing is shorter than most, but there are definitely some, um, interesting choices on there.
— Veronica Bond / Comments (0)
Many of the futuristic things Ray Bradbury has written about have come to be true (iPod, anyone?), but have you ever wondered about the plausibility of a colony of book people, as written in Fahrenheit 451? The Guardian asks several people, most of whom believe memorizing and reciting entire books could be done with sufficient practice. I have to go with the last entry, though, and admit that I too find it difficult to remember basic plots of the books I've read, let alone every word of them. I might not last so long in that colony.
— Veronica Bond / Comments (0)
Stephen Elliott's The Adderall Diaries is the latest book to get the Book Notes treatment over at Largehearted Boy. The pieces that compose the soundtrack to the book are, um, interesting..."embarrassing" is the word Elliott uses, but you'll have to judge for yourself.
— Veronica Bond / Comments (0)
Audrey Niffenegger talks about her upcoming novel, Her Fearful Symmetry, cemeteries, the theme of loss and her choice of London as a setting:
[via]
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Have you ever wondered what the first meeting between Nelson Algren and Simone de Beauvoir was like? The Reader gives us a sneak peek from a new biography of Jean-Paul Sartre and de Beauvoir.
— Veronica Bond / Comments (1)
Daniel Kraus, who gave an intriguing reading along with his Brothers Delacorte at the Book Cellar last night, talks to Largehearted Boy about his debut novel, The Monster Variations, and provides a soundtrack for the read. With a list of pieces that starts with Iron and Wine and ends with the Who's the Boss? theme song, you can't help wanting to know just a little bit more about this dark young adult story. I know I do.
— Veronica Bond / Comments (0)
As reported on the main page, for today only you can get a limited edition t-shirt with a Chris Ware designed print. Proceeds of the shirt benefit 826Michigan, one of the sister organizations of our own 826CHI.
— Veronica Bond / Comments (0)
Obviously we can't have a YouTube video of Shel Silverstein reading his own work, but we can have a video of Silverstein's buddy Larry Moyers reading one of his poems. The poem is titled, "The Perfect High," and, as you might infer, is a bit different from the kid-friendly Shel we grew up with:
You can also read the text of the poem here. [via]
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The Millions does double duty by pointing us to a book trailer for Dan Chaon's new novel, Await Your Reply, and giving us a really in-depth interview with the author. Says Chaon of the books he loves and the audience for whom he writes:
As a writer, I feel like I'm always in conversation with the books that I've read. Occasionally, an interviewer will ask: "Who are you writing for? Who is your audience?" And in many ways the answer is that I'm writing for those authors I've loved, and the books I've loved. If you're an avid reader, and a book gets under your skin, it can affect you as intensely as a real human relationship, it lingers with you for your whole life, and there is always this desire to re-experience that amazing sense of connection you get from "your books." I understand completely why people want to write fan fiction. To me, I guess, all fiction is fan fiction at a certain level, just as it always has an element of identity theft.
— Veronica Bond / Comments (0)
Jennifer Sampson's comment in this post reminds me that registration is currently open for the Newberry Library's Fall Seminars. Explore the themes of Toni Morrison's Beloved, take an academic stab at The Graphic Novel, learn more about Writing and Selling a Novel, brush up on your Food Writing skills or take Jennifer's own class and learn How to Read Like a Victorian. Registration for all classes can be done online; classes start in September and October. (Thanks, Jennifer!)
— Veronica Bond / Comments (0)
Jacket Copy brings attention to the Reading in Public project taking place in San Luis Obispo. The purpose of the project is to celebrate reading by way of performance in public places, similar to Open Books's Get Caught Reading that took place earlier this year. There is an accompanying Flickr group where people all over the world can submit pictures of people reading in public, but I'm dismayed to see that there is yet to be anything tagged Chicago. Surely we're just as publically literary as any other city, right? Submit your pictures to the group and make our presence known!
— Veronica Bond / Comments (0)
Audrey Niffenegger has written a nice piece for the Guardian on her love of Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone, giving us an idea of what and how she reads:
It would be delightful to be able to read a book as its original readers did, to have the impact of the experience without knowing what would come after. Wilkie Collins's masterpiece, The Moonstone, must have seemed especially strange and new to its first readers. It was the first detective novel written in English. There are whole sections of bookstores, vast swaths of ISBNs devoted to The Moonstone's progeny. I happened to read it after the Sherlock Holmes stories, after Dracula, after Lord Peter Wimsey and Nero Wolfe and Philip Marlowe. But its first audience read it as a serial in Charles Dickens's weekly magazine All the Year Round. I suppose we could recreate this experience by reading one chapter each week and firmly putting the book away in the intervals, but I am much too impatient for that, myself.
— Veronica Bond / Comments (1)
Northwestern grad Dan Chaon has never blogged before, but gives it a shot in effort to discuss his latest book, Await Your Reply. In the process, he discusses some of the fantasy and thriller reads that influenced him as a kid, how those grew to help him appreciate character-driven works and why the difference between "genre" and "literary" fiction can be so confusing. [via]
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The New Yorker's books blog holds a weekly covers contest and Book Club members might have a slight advantage identifying at least one of this week's covers:
If you know all four, email them at bookbench[at]gmail[dot]com to win a prize.
UPDATE: The answers.
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After unexpectedly seeing The Time Traveler's Wife this weekend (I was really planning on waiting until the DVD release, but found myself at the theater with a friend trying to decide on a movie for the afternoon), I find this review of the movie fitting: Not Bad. Which is to say, not as horrible as I was expecting it to be, but not great either. It was a passable, bare-bones version of a fantastic book, told in a far more linear manner, which I don't think was necessarily beneficial. Having said that, I'm forced to think back on my lit theory class where we learned that one of the bases of feminist theory is the idea that men tell stories linearly - going down a straight line until they come to a point, not unlike certain parts of their bodies - while women tell stories circularly - going around and around (think of Mrs. Dalloway for a prime example). I'm not much of a proponent of that particular theory, but it strikes me that it does seem applicable here, what with the book written in a circular manner by a woman and the movie directed in a linear manner by a man. In a story about time travel, the circularity is just more interesting. I won't review the movie in depth (I'll let our movie columnist Steve do that here, where he hits nicely on its faults and attributes), but I will say that, unlike Steve, I was emotionally touched. Ridiculously so. I have never cried during a movie while watching it in the theater (and only once before in front of another person at all), but halfway through I remembered exactly what was going to happen and how it was going to happen and I must admit that I shed some tears. I really think that had much more to do with having read the book, but in any case, that movie is freakin' sad. And while it's not nearly as great as its progenitor, it's not bad either.
In other news, the novel may be appearing as a TV show in the not too distant future.
— Veronica Bond / Comments (1)
Looking to catch to some Aleksandar Hemon today? You've got two opportunities to do so: you can listen to NPR's interview with Hemon about his latest short story collection, Love and Obstacles, and read an excerpt from one of the stories, then you can head over to the Guardian and listen to Hemon reading from the first story in the book, "Stairway to Heaven."
— Veronica Bond / Comments (0)
To brighten up your Monday afternoon, I present to you (actually, the New Yorker presents to you) an interview with Dave Eggers and an excerpt of The Wild Things:
Max knew that a bunk bed was the perfect structure to use when building an indoor fort. First of all, bunk beds have a roof, and a roof is essential if you're going to have an observation tower. And you need an observation tower if you're going to spot invading armies before they breach your walls and overtake your kingdom. Anyone without a bunk bed would have a much harder time maintaining a security perimeter, and if you can't do that you don't stand a chance.
— Veronica Bond / Comments (0)
Jacket Copy offers a look at the furry cover of Dave Eggers's upcoming The Wild Things, the novelized version of Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are. The verdict on the book's appearance? "[M]atted. And kind of creepy." Kind of true, but I also can't wait to get my hands on one. Literally.
— Veronica Bond / Comments (0)
Or, What Would Barack Obama Read? The Daily Beast collects all of the books that the President has been seen with since the campaign, saying that the list reveals a "predilection for presidential profiles, a weakness for explain-it-all bestsellers, and the occasional hankering for literary fiction." Some homeland notables on his shelf: What is the What by Dave Eggers and Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer by Fred Kaplan.
Also, the New York Times looks at how Obama is influencing pop culture creation and consumption.
— Veronica Bond / Comments (0)
I've never considered how being Jewish and a writer makes one a "Jewish writer," but it seems that Adam Langer, author of our July 2005 selection Crossing California, is asked about that very thing and is forced to wonder what that really means:
You'll offer that you were born Jewish and you've been a writer for eons, so sure, you're a Jewish writer by definition, but that's just one fact of your life. Like you're five-foot-eight or you moved out of Chicago but still enjoy double cheese dogs from Wolfy's Red Hots.
If you're feeling erudite, you'll quote Saul Bellow, an author you don't enjoy as much as people sometimes assume: "I'm well aware of being Jewish and also of being American and of being a writer. But I'm also a hockey fan, a fact which nobody ever mentions."
You'll say when you were a kid, you liked hockey too.
The rest of Langer's essay at Tablet Magazine reads as a great and amusing contemplation not just on the Jewish-ness of a writer who happens to be Jewish, but on the assumption of racial and ethnic stereotypes on the artist.
— Veronica Bond / Comments (1)
Book Club selection author (and FoBC) Wendy McClure (I'm Not the New Me) has been travelling throughout the Midwest for work on a new book about Laura Ingalls Wilder and her childhood obsession with the Little House books. Salon wonders how our culture became obsessed with Wilder's stories yet remained almost ignorant of her ambitious daughter Rose Wilder Lane. (As someone who read all the Little House books as a kid, I must admit I know nothing of Laura's daughter either.) Wendy tells Salon:
The popular conception of Laura is that she was a naturally talented late bloomer with pure intentions to simply write down her memories -- the kind of writer a lot of people think they want to be (or even think women should be). Rose, though, is the 'other' kind of writer -- ambitious, constantly concerned with money and career stuff, often ghostwriting or cranking out stuff that she wasn't proud of, so there's a pervasive belief that she was just too hard-edged to have had anything to do with the Little House books. But she did.
On her site, Wendy invites all to share their memories and experiences of Laura Ingalls Wilder with her, from the books, the actual homes and even the TV show. And if you've never seen any of Laura's homes, check out Wendy's flickr stream of her enviable research excursions.
— Veronica Bond / Comments (0)
Rebecca of The Book Lady's Blog was graced with an advance copy of Audrey Niffenegger's forthcoming novel Her Fearful Symmetry. Her immediate opinions? Yes, it does live up to the hype and it has all the great things we loved about The Time Traveler's Wife while going in a completely different direction. Color me excited.
Meanwhile, I remain trepedatious about the upcoming Time Traveler's Wife film and these articles, one saying the movie isn't science fiction but an "epic love story" and the other explaining why it was necessary to change the ending in the film, do little to calm my reservations. Sure, the story is about love, but generally "epic love story" translates to "cheese" in the movies and there's nothing I hate in movies more than cheesy, ridiculous, maudlin love. Also, I hate unnecessary ending changes, so I'm pretty much guaranteed to dislike this movie. (I also suspect that the director's insistence that this is a love story and not science fiction is in effort to draw in the female audience, which irks me because that assumes that females aren't interested in science fiction and are only interested in love. But that's another rant for another day.)
— Veronica Bond / Comments (4)
Anne Elizabeth Moore, series editor of the Best American Comics and former GB Sky in Five columnist, talks to Bitch Magazine's Pages Turned blog about the influence of Julie Doucet's Dirty Plotte comic books. Says Moore of the comics:
These were the things Dirty Plotte was about: the isolation of being a driven female creative; the jealousy in personal relationships that come out of that; the ever-present push from the outside to be maternal and nurturing, but the absolute interior knowledge that that is not your way; and the incredibly shifting sense of gender that a strong, smart woman must feel in order to move about in the world. These were all very important themes, and they still resonate with me when I get into frustrating situations.
— Veronica Bond / Comments (0)
The Washington Post reports that Amazon customers are tagging Rod Blagojevich's forthcoming book, The Governor derisively. Tags include "moron," "delusional," "crook" and "weasel," among others. My favorite? "Captain Hair." (I wonder if the underwear would be on the outside of the tights for that superhero costume...) Read the whole list of tags here and do Chicago proud by adding your own!
— Veronica Bond / Comments (0)
The Guardian's summer short story special issue is up and Dave Eggers has one of his, titled "A Fork Brought Along," included:
Edward has long been a successful man, a gentle and happy man liked by most everyone, but now he has a fork in his pocket. Blessed by good health and vast family, married 40 years, with five children, 11 grandchildren, two great-great-grandchildren on the way, Edward has considered himself lucky to be enjoying his retirement and twilight years without care or controversy. But now he is at a wedding reception, and he has a fork in his pocket, and this is threatening to undo everything. He first noticed it a second ago, when he put his hands in his pockets, looking for a mint, and instead found the sharp prongs of the fork. He quickly pulled his hand away, smarting from the pain. And then it dawned on him: there was a fork in his pocket.
— Veronica Bond / Comments (0)
Robert Duffer of the Chicago Examiner posted a lovely little piece on the significance of moving and reorganizing one's books. The categories into which Duffer divides his books will be familiar to any bibliophile faced with gathering his or her collection and deciding what will go where on the shelves in the new digs. There are those books you keep because they meant something to you at some point, even if you're not sure you'd be able to read them again with the same zest; those books you keep because you conquered them and want proof of your feat; those books you keep because you're hoping that someday you will like them (when, too, will I read East of Eden? Before or after I reread Jane Eyre?)...etc., etc. Duffer's post is a wonderfully thoughtful look at one's life in books.
— Veronica Bond / Comments (2)
Wendy McClure, author of our November 2005 selection I'm Not the New Me, writes for Penguin about the inhumanity of having your book analyzed by an introductory English college class and the perils of writing in the present tense. On the first subject, I can't even imagine, given how I'm prone to doling out harsh criticism myself in English classes (though I hope it's thoughtful harsh criticism I'm doling out and not simply ragging on the marginal), having my own book deconstructed by a group of first years. I think I'd run away and hide, so kudos to Wendy for having the guts to read what the kids wrote about her. And on the second subject...what a perfectly sweet ending to her ongoing story.
— Veronica Bond / Comments (0)
The National Book Awards remembers their 1971 winner, and the third and final win for Saul Bellow, Mr. Sammler's Planet.
Says Craig Morgan Teicher, poet and member of the board of the National Book Critics Circle: "It's impossible not to see a bit of oneself in Artur Sammler, a Holocaust survivor living out the end of his life--he's in his 70s when we meet him--uptown in New York City, where the subways are intolerable and the buses only a bit better, until a confrontation with a pickpocket makes the buses impossible as well.He lives with his grown daughter, an eccentric, irresponsible, unmarried woman, and tries to find what good he can in a world that has more than proved its evil.
"It's impossible, too, not to recognize how alone Sammler is, and how his aloneness is something we all have in common. A book like this--and it's a narrow shelf indeed that can hold it and its small company--may be the only way we can share that deep solitude."
— Veronica Bond / Comments (0)
Open Books stayed up all night on Saturday, blogging every half hour to raise money for their Buddies program. They didn't make their goal of $2,500 in sponsorships, however you can always donate to their literacy causes here. Here are some of the highly amusing literary classics Mad Libs you may have missed:
The First Post, featuring A Tale of Two Cities: It was the best of SCISSORS, it was the worst of CAPES, it was the age of FRUIT FLIES, it was the age of PRETZELS, it was the epoch of ROLLER SKATES, it was the epoch of THIMBLES, it was the season of KITES, it was the season of PUNCHING BAGS, it was the spring of NEEDLES, it was the winter of CLOTHESPINS, we had SOCCER BALLS before us, we had CUPS before us, we were all going direct to ZANZIBAR, we were all going direct the other way - in short, the period was so far like the present TEACHER, that some of its POINTY authorities RAN on its being CRIED, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
11:34am, featuring The Hound of the Baskervilles: "Mr. Sherlock Holmes, who was usually very GROTESQUE in the mornings, save upon those not infrequent occasions when he was BROKEN all night, was seated at the breakfast SPIKE."
2:32pm, featuring Jane Eyre: "There was no possibility of taking a PARAKEET that day. We had been CONVULSING, indeed, in the FUZZY PANTIES an hour in the morning; but since dinner (Mrs. Reed, when there was no BATHTUB, HARMONIZING early) the cold winter FLYING BUTTRESS had brought with it QTIPS so sombre, and a NINJA so BOISTEROUS, that further out-door CEMENTING was now out of the question."
4:32pm, featuring Dracula: "3 May. Bistritz. --SLEPT Munich at 8:35 P.M., on 1st May, POURING at Vienna early next morning; should have CLIMBED at 6:46, but COBB SALAD was an hour late. Buda-Pesth seems a SNARKY COCONUT, from the glimpse which I got of it from the LAMP and the little I could BITE through the MANATEES."
10:30pm, featuring Don Quixote: "In a village of La Mancha, the COCKPIT of which I have no desire to call to mind, there lived not long since one of those GRIZZLY BEARS that keep a PAGODA in the lance-rack, an UNSINKABLE buckler, a FIERY GRAVEROBBER, and a BOTTLE for FISHING."
The Penultimate Post, featuring Ulysses: "FRIED, plump Buck Mulligan came from the LESBIAN, BRUSHING a KITTY of lather on which a PIGEON and a CASE lay crossed."
Check out their blog to read the rest of the Mad Libs and learn more about Open Books's programs. And if you've ever wondered why programs such as this and other literacy organizations are so important to our city, take a look at these harrowing statistics.
— Veronica Bond / Comments (0)
University of Chicago faculty member Thornton Wilder was awarded the National Book Award in 1969 for his novel The Eighth Day.
Here, the National Book Foundation's Executive Director, Harold Augenbraum, remembers the honored work: "Without revealing too much, I will tell you--as Wilder does in the first chapter, with that wonderfully American literary structure of historifying in which the writer relates the most exciting event first and then fades back into the past and then rushes past the first event toward the narrative's events that come afterwards--though everything, of course, is still in the past, you're made to feel as if you are reading about the future--faceless riders from Coaltown, including a cloudy-faced minister, rescue the murderer, Ashley. Is he a murderer? Read it and you tell me."
— Veronica Bond / Comments (0)
Lydia Kiesling of The Millions writes about her first failed and second successful attempts at reading Richard Wright's Native Son, the Book Club's September 2008 selection. She writes that she quit the novel early on the first time around because she felt "dispirited" and didn't want to read about the horrible acts Bigger Thomas commits with Mary Dalton's body after having accidentally murdered her. She later felt like a fraud at her ability to read other violent novels while letting this classic work offend her. Having successfully made it through the book the second time around, she realized that part of her discomfort stemmed from the fact that:
...Native Son is not a novel that wants to hold anybody's hand. Native Son does not want to tuck you into bed at night and reassure you that you are with it. Wright, starting as he did with a hugely unlovable character, dares you to face certain realities. Namely, that discussions of oppression are infinitely more comfortable when members of the oppressed race in question are doing things like passively resisting, writing monumental novels, and being elected president by a majority of the country so that one can say "My goodness, we've come a long way!" But that's stupid. The reason that institutionalized racism is despicable is because it takes away humanity. Obviously it makes the oppressor ugly; but it can make its victims ugly too. Ugliness breeds ugliness. Why should a book about something ugly be made palatable so that I, a white lady, can feel uplifted?
That's as true of an assessment of the book as I can imagine. The book does not want to hold your hand. It is not about reassuring you that racism and oppression is past us, but forcing you to understand how horribly present it is, both in Wright's time and today. What's shocking about this novel, which the Book Club members at that meeting commented on and which I realize each time I read the book, is that it is just as relevant today as it was the more-than-half a century ago that it was written.
Kiesling points out another irony -- that of reading the book during the hubbub surrounding the racially toned arrest of African-American scholar and Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. My, what a long way we've come, indeed.
— Veronica Bond / Comments (1)
Want to know more about Frank Lloyd Wright, both the truth and the fiction? Booklist's Book Group blogger Neil Hollands, having spent some time in the city for the ALA conference, was inspired to find out more about one of our most notable architects. Here are his recommendations for anyone wishing to read up on Wright.
— Veronica Bond / Comments (0)
American Fiction Notes is excited to read Richard Power's Generosity: An Enhancement, one of the status galleys of the year. Here he points to a University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign literay journal that produced short films on Powers's novels, all except for one featuring the author's own narration. Be sure to check out the beautifully done video for The Echo Maker, the Book Club's September selection. Also of note -- the final video in the series features Audrey Niffenegger talking about her visual art.
— Veronica Bond / Comments (0)
Jacket Copy ponders what makes a book postmodern, then lists the 61 essential postmodern reads, annotating each title with the attributes it contains, such as "author is a character", "comments on its own bookishness" and "more than 1,000 pages." The list includes Chicago-related authors Philip K. Dick, Dave Eggers (no postmodern list would be complete without good ol' Dave), Aleksandar Hemon, Philip Roth and Kurt Vonnegut.
— Veronica Bond / Comments (2)
Okay, not the real Neil Gaiman, per se. Fueling his ongoing "feud" with the award-winning author, local author James Kennedy (The Order of Odd-Fish) donned pirate garb, complete with missing tooth, to challenge a faux-Gaiman at the American Library Association Conference. James forgoes the usual conference speech to assert himself as the rightful winner of the Newbery Award he lost to Gaiman earlier this year. Insanity - complete with grown men rolling around on the ground, the Cube of Trials and human sacrifice - ensues. The results, as you might imagine if you've ever seen James in action, must be seen to be believed. The video below is just the beginning of the Kennedy-Gaiman Challenge; find the rest of the hilarious scuffle on James's website.
— Veronica Bond / Comments (0)
Two of our past Book Club selections will soon come to a television set near you (provided you have HBO): Joshua Ferris's Then We Came to the End as a movie and Jeffrey Eugenides's Middlesex as a series. Mentioned in the Gawker-related post below, this New York Entertainment post confirms it with Ferris himself. Meanwhile, The Millions wonders feverishly how Middlesex will translate to the small screen: "How will they pace it? How many seasons?...What of Lina, and Jimmy Zizmo, and Marius Wyxzewizard Challouehliczilczese Grimes? Who will play the Obscure Object? Will she have freckles and heavy thighs? Who will play Apollonian Calliope? And then Dionysian Calliope? And who will play Cal?" I'm curious about the Middlesex series, myself. Done right it could be as amazing a contribution to TV as it is to literature. Done wrong, well, that would just be heartbreaking.
— Veronica Bond / Comments (0)
In their continuing celebration of their past 77 winners, the National Book Award blog offers thoughts on the 1953 winner, University of Chicago visiting professor Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, and the 1954 winner, Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March.
Writes Charles Johnson, past National Book Award winner and chair of the National Book Awards Fiction Panel, on the continuing relevance of Invisible Man: "As our understanding of liberty, equality, and this nation's ideals grows and evolves, our experience of Invisible Man deepens, achieving ever greater subtlety, nuance, and prescience...While black Americans are certainly more 'visible' today, especially after Barack Obama became this nation's first African American president, it is nevertheless true that so many other groups--- Hispanics, Asians, Pacific Islanders, new African immigrants to America, and native Americans to name just a few---can make a case for still being 'invisible' men and women in contemporary America. Well might they argue that 'on the lower frequencies,' Invisible Man speaks to their daily, lived experience."
On The Adventures of Augie March, The Paris Review editor National Rich says of Bellow's prose : "The Adventures of Augie March is for me the great creation myth of twentieth century American literature. It marks the emergence of a new literary hero, the working-class Jewish quester; a new novelistic form, one based entirely on character instead of, and even to the expense of, plot; and most significantly, a new language. An urban Jewish Midwestern argot that is both vividly realistic yet completely of Bellow's own invention. It is a language that one must learn by immersion, as in a Berlitz course. Some readers complain that the first forty or fifty pages are slow. The truth is that it takes time to get used to the arrhythmic canter and the slingshot energy of Bellow's prose."
— Veronica Bond / Comments (0)
— Veronica Bond / Comments (0)
...since reading The Time Traveler's Wife. With the success of Audrey Niffenegger's novel, the good people at the Newberry Library seem to have gotten a lot of questions about what in the story is fact and what is fiction. Here they offer some answers to some of the more pressing questions posed by the book, like "Does the Newberry really own a book bound in human skin?" (The answer is...um...not definitively "no.")
— Veronica Bond / Comments (0)
ADVERTISEMENT
The Stone Diaries is the fictionalized autobiography of Daisy Goodwill Flett, tracing an ordinary life from birth to death through the 20th century. A winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Canada's Governor General's Award.
Join us at The Book Cellar at 4736-38 N. Lincoln Ave. (map) to discuss the book. We'll meet on Monday, February 8, at 7:30pm. New members are always welcome!
February 8
The Stone Diaries
by Carol Shields
March 8
Red Azalea
by Anchee Min
April 12
Gang Leader for a Day
by Sudhir Venkatesh
May 10
The Order of Odd-Fish
by James Kennedy
June 14
Jimmy Corrigan
by Chris Ware
July 12
The Wild Things
by Dave Eggers
August 9
Loving Frank
by Nancy Horan
September 13
Young Lonigan
by James T. Farrell
October 11
Chicago: A Novel
by Alaa Al Aswany
November 8
The Cradle
by Patrick Somerville
January 11
The Corrections
by Jonathan Franzen
~*~
Tue Feb 9 2010
Funny Ha-Ha @ Hideout
Wed Feb 10 2010
Colt Noble & the Megalords Launch Party @ Challengers Comics
Sat Feb 13 2010
Strange Tales Saturday @ Challengers Comics
The Gapers Block Book Club is a reading group dedicated to reading fiction by Chicago area authors and nonfiction works about our city. We read a new book every month, and new members are always welcome.
In Person
The book club meets on the second Monday of the month at The Book Cellar bookstore in Lincoln Square (map).
By Email
Sign up for the book club mailing list to receive reminders about upcoming meetings and other special announcements.
Editors: Alice Maggio & Veronica Bond, bookclub@gapersblock.com
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