Category: Reading and Books

Today the tour cruises into California for a stop at Booboolina.com. Site owner Kristin Garrity will be providing her thoughts.

In VBT news: The tour was mentioned at Boing Boing! which is like a nod from Oprah in weblogistan. Thanks to tour member Heath Row for the tip-off.

Also, tour info has been amended to include a contact address (duh) and to illuminate a bit the origins of the idea. I was inspired by Ben Brown and Greg Knauss at So New Media, an excellent micropress based in Austin. Greg did this for his first book. I later invited Ben to sit on a panel with me at SXSWi on the interaction of web and book culture. I then borrowed liberally from Ben and Greg’s idea and decided to try in a smaller concentrated way and with the New York publishing industry aware of what were were up to and the possibilities it contained.

So, in sum, my VBT was an amplification and a rejiggering of theirs, which would make me kinda like Elvis to Ben and Greg’s James Brown.

Tomorrow, the tour pulls into New York City for a stop at Carrie Bickner’s Rogue Librarian.com. Oh and if you’re curious about Stiff or what you’ve read about it, why not pick up a copy?

Today’s Stop: Mike’s impressions of Stiff at Barking Moose.com in Philadelphia.

Tomorrow: The tour heads across the country to Booboolina.com.

In the spirit of the fine work done at So New Media and my interest in the web as a useful tool to connect readers with great books, I present The Virtual Book Tour, where a selected author appears at 10 weblogs over a two week period to raise awareness of their book and promote a quality work of contemporary literature without leaving their living room.

Our first touring author is Mary Roach, author of the new book Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers (W.W. Norton, 224 pp.). Mary is a columnist for Reader’s Digest and a contributing editor to Discover. Her work has appeared in Salon.com, GQ, Vogue and The New York Times Magazine.

Mary will be appearing at a different weblog each working day this week and next week either in the form of an excerpt from the book, a review by the resident blogger, an interivew or Mary taking over that weblog for a day. You can follow the tour on this map.

I’m really excited about the possibilities of this. I’ve outlined my goals for the tour on my new professional site and you can follow the tour on this map put together by tour member and mad talent, Erik Benson and here as well.

First up: Mike Cavalho’s Barking Moose.com. I know Mike from the last two years at SXSWi and have been looking for a project to include him in.

This week’s theme: Work schwag.

Every now and then, one of the many in the pile of books I’d like to read and some work related project or event intersect. It happened a few weeks ago when I got a call from Drawn & Quarterly, an excellent graphic novel publisher based in Montreal, and asked me to do an onstage conversation at the Booksmith bookstore in Haight Ashbury with Adrian Tomine, the creator of the fantastic comic, Optic Nerve. Adrian was promoting the paperback release of Summer Blonde, his latest collection of stories based on the comic, and being a huge fan, I agreed.

Sumer Blonde contains issues 4-8 of Optic Nerve and is the perfect graphic novel if right now you’re saying to yourself “I have no interest in comics or graphic novels.” Called “the Raymond Carver of comics” Tomine creates worlds of thwarted romances, lonliness and youth seen as a curse as well as a blessing. It’s a quick but enormously satisfying read and a solid introduction to this growing, fascinating segment of contemporary literature.

Summer Blonde by Adrian Tomine
(Drawn & Quarterly, $16.95 in paperback, 132 pp.)

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Okay, who remembers the last issue where I couldn’t stop hooting about Random Family by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc? Well I finished last night and my enthusiasm was justified. This is a stunningly beautiful, sad book about 2 sets of teenagers becoming adults amidst the poverty, violence and addiction of the South Bronx. LeBlanc, who spent ten years with her subjects, writes in a straighforward, journalistic style that treats Coco, Jessica, Cesar and the other members of this family not as sympathy cases, not as poster children for larger social issues, but simply as human beings. And strangly then, it becomes both the story of these people’s lives and a devastating look at the last twenty years of war on the poor of urban America.

I don’t typically cheerlead for any one book because I come in contact with too many of them and I’m a bit of a skeptic. This is different. This is one book you cannot afford to miss. Please do yourself and your reading life a favor by getting a copy of Random Family.

Random Family by Adrian Nicole LeBlance
(Scribner, 25$ in hardcover, 408 pages)

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Before books became my career, I used to take a break after finishing a book by reading essays, short stories, poems, magazine articles, something shorter and lighter before plunging into the next book. I got this idea from the prologue of John Barth’s Further Fridays, a collection of essays and lectures that I received as a gift while a student at Johns Hopkins where Barth tought until he retired. Barth spent weekday mornings working on his novels then held seminars in the afternoons. After his Thursday class, he and his wife split for their country home on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Friday morning, he would recharge his batteries by writing a light essay, preparing a lecture or a quick missive on some topic that had been bothering him. He took the weekend off.

I love this idea of shifting gears, gently but with purpose, in your work, instead of slamming on the breaks on Friday night and then passing out from the whiplash. I used to do this regularly in my reading but have felt in such a hurry this year to finish books that haven’t paused for so much as a breath before finishing one and starting another.

I’m going to change that. For the next week, I’m going to clean out my reading pipes by dabbling in reading essays, short fiction and magazines I’ve let pile up. Next week’s Smoke Signal will be dedicated to the places I go. But I’ll probably start at the source. Therefore…

Further Fridays: Essays, Lectures and other Nonfiction 1984-1994
By John Barth (Little, Brown, 392 pages).

I’ve tried to write a post three times about the 50th anniversary of City Lights books, arguably the world’s most famous bookstore. But I’ve deleted it or forgotten to save it enough times to be annoyed to hell. So here are the basics.

City Lights turning 50: Yay!

San Francisco Chronicle doing stories about it: Good for them.

Events going on all month: Free cheese.

Kevin’s memories of City Lights: Dusty.

That is all. Thanks for listening. You may sing Happy Birthday if you like. I plan to.

I wrapped up reading Tim O’Brien’s July July, a recommended book from last week via a longish in-bed read on a beautiful Sunday afternoon. I can’t recommend it enough. The story of a class reunion of sixties college friends thirty years later might leave you cold if, well, the 60’s do. But like O’Brien’s seminal book The Things They Carried, this one easily outdistances its demographic and deftly becomes more about capital letter themes like Aging, Memory, and The Passage of Time. The characters won’t become your best friends but there’s enough about them to hook you in. By the end, you’re weeping for all of them and anyone you’ve ever known who gave up on life way before it gave up on them.

July, July by Tim O’Brien (Houghton Mifflin, $26 in Hardcover, 322 pp.)

July, July also whet my appetize for more novels built on brisk, confident storytelling. As I do every few months, I then turned to mystery writer Laura Lippman, whose career I’ve been following in a freaky, stalkerish way since we worked together at the Baltimore Sun about 8 years ago and her dad was a professor of mine at Johns Hopkins. Laura had just begun work on her first mystery, Baltimore Blues.

Since then, Laura’s written 6 novels each better than the one before. Her heroine is Tess Monaghan, a private eye with a quick mind, a propensity for rowing, and a quiet cynicism for most of humanity. All of Tess adventures are set in Baltimore, where her dad is a liquor license inspector, her flirtatious aunt runs a feminist bookstore and her boyfriend Crow is a local musician.

Since I’m only an amateur mystery reader, I tend to stick to books that have a great sense of setting and a protagonist whom, even if I don’t like, I’m intrigued by. Tess I probably have an out-and-out crush on, even though I know she’d be terrible for me. And I went to college in Baltimore, the wackiest city on the east coast, so I love its trivia and lore.

These things might mean nothing to you but I’d recommend Laura Lippman’s books anyway. They’re fun, intelligents reads, bordering on literary, but swift of plot enough to head your fingers clinched around their covers. The latest, The Last Place is on my night table now.

The Last Place by Laura Lippman
(William Morrow, $23.95 in Hardcover, 341 pp.)

During my sick week, I had to cancel appointments and events all over tarnation but I was most disappointed by missing Douglass Rushkoff’s tour stops in San Francisco. Rushkoff, a respected technology author and critic, is the author of the new book Nothing Sacred: The Truth About Judaism, which just hit the shelves. In it, Rushkoff has written the book that I wanted to someday and has probably done it better.

Nothing Sacred accuses contemporary Judaism of losing its focus on spirituality in favor for an obsession with combating inter-marriage and raising money. It’s a criticism long overdue. Rushkoff also presents bibliolical and halahahic (according to Jewish Law) evidence why this is a patently unjewish mode of thinking and offers alternative he calls Open Source Judaism. In Open Source Judaism, Judaism’s sacred texts are constantly evolving based on the commtenary, thoughts and ideas of those make them part of their spiritual life.

Though I haven’t dived yet and can’t quite imagine how Rushkoff’s ideas will work in practice, I’m fascinated by the project itself. And we are more than ready of a thorough reevaluation of what it means to be an American Jew. Bravo to Doug Rushkoff for his courage and conviction.

Nothing Sacred: The Truth About Judaism by Douglass Rushkoff
(Crown Books, $24.95 in Hardcover, 242 pp.)

The citizenry of Pamie.com just conducted a drive of books, cash and goodwill for the Okland Public Library system which is in danger of closed branches and reduced hours and services if the city’s proposed budget cuts go through.

I got two warm feelings from reading this:

1) The web is a trememdous way to mobilize people quickly and efficiently for doing good. All you need is a high traffic site, a loyal readership and a pursuasive leader like Pamie with an itch. Also, the OPL made good use of their own web sites to indicate to members and concerned parties how they could best help out as well.

2) People love libraries but often take them for granted. On the one hand, have you ever met anyone who said “Eh, get rid of the libraries. I’d rather my tax dollars went to pothole repair?” I haven’t either. But, of that same group, how many of us actually set foot in your local library branch? Regularly? Me neither.

I discovered recently that the San Francisco Public Library will not only rent me classic movies for a week at no charge but will ship any book, movie or CD I want from any of the city’s branch to my branch, the one 3 blocks from my house. I’ve tried to get in the pattern lately of alternating between reading books I’ve got at home (and there are tons, with more arriving every week) and checking something out from the library. I may even start checking out books I own already. Its relatively painless and active library branches are harder to see as dispensible.

When did you last visit your library?

Red Dirt Revival: A Poetic Memoir in Six Breaths by Tim’m West
(Poz’Trophy Publishing, $14.25 in paperback, 113 p. Available from www.reddirt.biz)

I’ve been lucky to get to know Tim’m West in the last few months when he sat on a panel I hosted on the Spoken Word movement here in the Bay Area. A poet, scholar, and MC with the hip hop group, Deep Dickollective, his first collection of poems, essays and letters is a linguisitic treat: visual, sharp, potent. West begins with his youth in rural Arkansas (where he remembered the old women digging up red clay to chew like tobacco), up through his education and studies in race, gender and the politics of language, arriving at his understanding of himself as a black gay man and an artist. It’s a quick, tough, ultimately redemptive read. You’ll be glad you did.

Red Dirt Revival is available through Tim’m’s web site

July, July by Tim O’Brien
(Houghton Mifflin, $26 in Hardcover, 322 pp.)

I was finally able to get my greedy mitts on Tim O’Brien’s new novel and started reading it right away. I’ve been a fan of his work since someone gave me a copy of The Things They Carried (to my mind, the 20th century’s single best book about war) for my birthday, although I’ve never managed to read any of his others. Now, I’m about a third of the way through July, July and am remembering why I like his work so much.

The setting is once again the late 1960’s, the characters soldiers, activists and college kids each effected by the war raging in Vietnam. However this time, O’Brien structures the story around a 30 year class reunion in July of 2000. Characters, have married, ignited old affairs and wept at the erosion of their dreams.

It sounded a little too much like The Big Chill in print but I’d forgotten what a master at structure O’Brien is. Instead of nostolgic, July, July feels almost preordained. If you never grow up, you’ll just be an 18 year old with middle-aged responsibilities. And while his prose can seem overly functional at times, here it’s perfect for keeping the large cast and their stories straight.

I’ve been reading this one during my illness, before bed. It’s helped a lot.

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach
(W.W. Norton, $23.95 in Hardcover, 292 pp.)

This probably wasn’t a smart choice for a week when I too felt like a corpse. But Mary is a friend and I figured I had stalled long enough on reading her book. I’m almost done now and it’s terrific. A lot of science yes, but Stiff still moves along and a good clip and with a great sense of humor. I’ll hopefully finish it up today and then think about who I want to give it to as a gift? Should it be someone a little sick who would laugh? Or someone a bit timid who I could shock? You tell me.

NOTE: I’m fed up with the Amazon affiliate pogram and have switched my allegiance to Powell’s. Powell’s is a legendary independent bookstore in Portland with a respected online business. Should you be interested in purchasing the books I mention here, Powells will handling your needs as well as Amazon.

Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem
( Vintage, $13 in paperback, 311 pp.)

I recommended this one not too long ago because friends and people I admired had been raving. I finally promised a couple of them that I would read MB in exchange for them shipping a boxload of used books I had picked up on my last trip to Baltimore (you see how the addiction feeds itself…).

I finished it up a few days ago and while I can’t say reading it was unfettered joy, it is nonetheless, funny, sweet, brilliantly conceived, and way way worth it. My friend who recommended it finished reading it in a day. It took me longer (as it always does) but you might rip right though.

The premise: Private detective with Tourette’s Syndrome investigating the murder of his mobster mentor who took him in as an orphan. Think Raymond Chandler remade by the guy behind Welcome to the Dollhouse.

I’ve been told by more than friend that this is an unabashed “guys book”, if that sort of thing matters to you–guns, hoods, late nights and flinty one liners. Decide for yourself. It’s a great ride.

Red Ant House by Ann Cummins
(Mariner Books, $12 in paperback, 179 pp.)

I was assigned this debut short story collection for review and finished it pretty quickly while in New York. Cummins has had a bunch of stories published in McSweeney’s. Dave Eggers is an admirer.

Her stuff is mostly set in the blanched out Southwest, on Indian resevations and in boarded-up mining towns. Most of the narrators are kids, who seem better at living than the adults. It reminded me a little of a magnificant film called George Washington which deals with these same themes and you get on DVD at most good video stores.

There’s a few rocky patches in this one (as in Motherless Brooklyn…A theme!) but I never feel too bad about skimming in a short story collection. Overall, Cummins writes with a kind of simplicity that only gestures toward the rather large stockpile of creativity she seems to have at her disposal. The wierdness of the stories (and there is plenty) is played straight , which makes this a mature read as well as a fun one. Put another way, the weirdness made me want to read more instead of groan.

The Dive From Clauson’s Pier by Ann Packer
(Vintage, $14 in paperback)

Packer’s book set the lands on fire when in came out last year, winning over critics and readers alike. One of the morning chat shows made it a book club pick. It was a New York Times Notable Book of 2002. Now it’s out in paperback which makes it the ideal time to pick it up since the hardcover, while well designed, was simply massive and cost a pretty nickel.

Carrie Bell, the protagonist, is 23 and has led a stable existence in Wisconsin as in engaged to Mike, her first boyfriend. After Mike is paralyzed in an accident, she begins to question the choices she made and what she owes those her life versus what she owes herself.

I haven’t read this one although I’m mighty curious, even after just writing this little summary. Low plot/high character novels like this stand or fall on their execution. How much to you care about the characters and if the answer is “not much” then how intrigued are you by them? I’m not super familar with Packer’s work but those one is sitting on a table in my living room, tempting me. I have faith it won’t let me down.

As opposed to Motherless Brooklyn, DFCP would probably be considered a “girl’s book,” having a female protagonist, being about character and lacking in much gunplay. I find those descriptions pretty silly and point to the cover of any fiction book before I begin with one command “Tell me a good story.” This looks like a good story.

Los Angeles: People. Places, and the Castle on the Hill
by A.M. Homes
(21.95$ in hardcover, National Geographic Directions, 176 pp.)

A longish essay that won’t teach you much about L.A. except that A) the Chateau Marmont is a really cool hotel and that B) A.M. Homes is a grumpy, funny, world weary as day-old-coffee writer who I want to read more of. Her collection “The Safety of Objects” is the basis of a film being released by IFC this month so I might start there. Oh and the Chateau is known the world over as a favorite hotel for writers, actors and creative types of all kinds. It’s also where John Belushi croaked.

National Geographic Directions has been doing these little books (send famous writer somewhere and have them write about it) for a few years now. I love series lihe this and would recommend getting them all but NGD is doing such a piss-pour job of promoting them, I can’t. They’re scarely mentioned on National Geographic’s web site and I can’t seem to find them indexed at Amazon either. These sorts of practices are tantamount to open hostility towards readers and I just do go for that.

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
by Mary Roach ($23.95 in Hardcover, W.W. Norton, 224 pp.)

I don’t have much interest in death, not even my own, but these facts are just plain neat….

Did you know that the human head is about the size of a roast chicken? And that Diego Rivera once fed his students human meat? And that anatomy classes will have memorial services for some of the dead bodies?

It’s all in this pretty damn funny book by Mary Roach, who used to be a columnist for Salon.com and does a humor gig for Reader’s Digest. The first line goes something like this.

“The way I see it, being dead is not terribly far off from being on a cruise ship. Most of the time is spent lying on your back.”

I’m so there…

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
($27.00 in Hardcover, FSG, 544 pp.)

Boy gets reborn as girl. 80 years of wild family history in Southeast Michigan. Eugenides went to the same high school as my dad. And just won the Pulitzer Prize for this one. ‘Nuff said.