Category: Books

In the Beginning

Jenny4 Comments

What makes you decide to read a certain book? Is it the cover (whether or not you should judge a book by its cover, many do), the flap copy, a friend’s recommendation, familiarity with the author? Something else?

Friends’ recommendations are important to me, and sometimes I’ll look at reviews as well. I always read the flap copy (on the back of a paperback or the inside front flap of a hardcover), but often what clinches it is the first sentence. Am I hooked after the first sentence? After the first page? I figure the author must put as much or equal thought and effort into the first sentence as any other in the book, the first sentence being the equivalent of a first impression.

Here are a few memorable first sentences:

“Leon Trotsky is trying to kill me.” –The Autobiography of Joseph Stalin: A Novel, Richard Lourie

“I had this friend, you see, that everyone loved.
(My name is Sid Halley.)
I had this friend that everyone loved, and I put him on trial.” –Come to Grief, Dick Francis

“It was a dark and stormy night.” –A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L’Engle

“Lyra and her daemon moved through the darkening hall, taking care to keep to one side, out of sight of the kitchen.” –The Golden Compass, Philip Pullman

“If you are not here, then why are you everywhere?” –Love Begins in Winter, Simon Van Booy (epigraph)

What are your favorite beginnings, most memorable first sentences?

What You Read When You Don’t Have To

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Someone I know is leaving soon to take a job in a foreign country. He will be away for a long time, and wanted to stock up on books (ebooks, actually, on his Kindle) before leaving. I did a little reader’s advisory interview, and he said he had read and enjoyed fantasy and sci-fi in the past but wasn’t much of a reader otherwise and was looking to expand. Here’s what I recommended, with occasional genre/subject/additional works notes in parentheses (forgive me for not putting each title into italics):

Classic dystopia
1984, George Orwell
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
Anthem, Ayn Rand
The Giver, Lois Lowry (and sequels Gathering Blue and Messenger; YA)
The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood
Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood

Classic fantasy/sci-fi
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
His Dark Materials (trilogy: The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, The Amber Spyglass), Philip Pullman (YA)
A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L’Engle (also: A Wind in the Door, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, Many Waters; YA)
Neverwhere, Neil Gaiman (fantasy)

Contemporary Literary Fiction
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon (comic books, history; Pulitzer Prize)
High Fidelity, Nick Hornby (music)
The Prince of Tides (and/or The Lords of Discipline), Pat Conroy (the South, violence, families)
The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, David Wroblewski (dogs)
The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver (missionary family in Africa)
The Brothers K, David James Duncan (brothers, baseball)
Faithful Place, Tana French (mystery/suspense)
This Is Where I Leave You, Jonathan Tropper (crazy families, funny)
A Thousand Splendid Suns, Khaled Hosseini (Afghanistan)
Edited to add (4/13/12): Life of Pi, Yann Martel
Edited to add (4/13/12): The Septembers of Shiraz, Dalia Sofer (Iran)

Classic American Literature
East of Eden, John Steinbeck
Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov (though English was the author’s third language)
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway
Ordinary People, Judith Guest

Nonfiction
Science/Environment
The Ghost Map, Steven Johnson
The World Without Us, Alan Weisman
A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot
In Defense of Food, Michael Pollan

History
The Professor and the Madman, Simon Winchester
Under the Banner of Heaven, Jon Krakauer (also Into the Wild and Into Thin Air)
Unbroken, Laura Hillenbrand (also Seabiscuit)
In Cold Blood, Truman Capote (true crime)
How the Irish Saved Civilization, Thomas Cahill
The Wordy Shipmates, Sarah Vowell (Massachusetts Bay Colony)
In the Garden of Beasts, Erik Larson (American family in Germany, pre-WWII)

Popular Psychology
The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell
How We Decide, Jonah Lehrer

Biography/Memoir
The Happiness Project, Gretchen Rubin
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, Haruki Murakami
On Writing, Stephen King
Charles & Emma, Deborah Heiligman (YA)

Essays
Manhood for Amateurs, Michael Chabon
How To Be Alone, Jonathan Franzen
The Polysyllabic Spree, Nick Hornby (books/music)
-anything you can find by Ann Patchett, including The Getaway Car and This is the Story of a Happy Marriage

The title of this post borrows from an Oscar Wilde quote, “It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.” Feel free to add additional recommendations in the comments.

Sticklers Unite!

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I just finished reading Lynn Truss’ excellent book, Eats, Shoots & Leaves. “Bestselling grammar book” is not a phrase you hear often, but this one is, and for a reason: in an impassioned, intellectual, and often quite humorous way, Truss makes her case for the importance of grammar and punctuation. The title comes from a joke whose punchline highlights the difference between “eats, shoots and leaves” (not a dinner guest you want in your house) and “eats shoots and leaves” (a panda).

Lynn Truss is probably at the forefront of the small subset of society that cares deeply and perhaps disproportionately about correct grammar, punctuation, and spelling. I too am part of this subset, and nodded along in complete agreement when I read, “To those who care about punctuation, a sentence such as “Thank God its Friday” (without the apostrophe) rouses feelings not only of despair but of violence.”

Perhaps the best argument Truss makes for punctuation is that its function in written communication and in literature is crucial; see the above example about the panda. One comma changes the meaning of the sentence entirely. Likewise, “You’re home” and “Your home” also have completely different meanings (in the former, you are at home; in the latter, the home in question belongs to you).

Those who rely on spellcheck to catch these errors are sunk; as this Slate article points out, spellcheck software is great at catching “nonword” errors, like “hte” instead of “the”; however, it doesn’t understand context, so it won’t stop you from using “complement” when you mean “compliment.” Web browsers, for the moment, have surpassed some spellcheck software; in the past five years, according to the Slate article, “Web browsers have become better at spelling than most humans.” What a thought: maybe the next Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader? will be Are You Smarter Than Your Browser? Someone call Ken Jennings.

Let Us Now Praise Libraries, Librarians

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An article in the Boston Sunday Globe caught my eye this morning, with the headline “Let Us Now Praise Libraries, Librarians.” (A true librarian would have titled it “Let Us Now Praise Librar*”; hats off to you if you get the joke.) The article’s author, Anthony Doerr, writes about his childhood reading, “Here’s what I think about now: No one ever told me no. Not Mom, not the prim librarians stamping return dates onto slip after slip. No one ever said: This book is outside your age range; this book is too complicated.”

I had a similar childhood experience, reading far ahead of my “age appropriate reading level” and not coming to any harm. I’ve thought about this topic before (see the last three paragraphs of the post “Whose Common Sense?“), and I’m glad to see a similar attitude in print. Doerr writes, “…I worry that we are presenting reading to our kids as a labor to suffer through for which a reward can be earned at the end….The message to young people is obvious: Books are good for you. What’s missing, however, is the idea that sustained reading is magic, a kind of magic that can be wildly addictive, even dangerous.”

He then goes on to create a fantastic analogy, based on the fact that when the brain is stimulated (“when a person is thinking imaginatively and creatively”), it produces endorphins: “Great books are like drugs, readers [are] like junkies, and, yes, to stretch the analogy into absurdity, good librarians [are] like drug dealers.” He finishes, “So, to all you beautiful librarians out there, with National Library Week in the offing….Keep on putting books in the hands of readers, because as every good dealer knows, all it takes is one fix and your patrons are hooked.”

One of the most magical, engaging, imaginative, creative books I can think of is Nick Bantock’s Griffin & Sabine, which is the first of six books (all equally magical) detailing the correspondence between Griffin and Sabine. It’s not your typical epistolary novel (see The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, also an excellent book), because each postcard and letter Griffin and Sabine exchange is rendered with “their” artwork and handwriting; the reader pulls actual letters out of actual envelopes. (For this reason, my first encounter with the books was in Special Collections at the Mount Holyoke College library.) If you can find these, I highly recommend them; you will find yourself immersed and filled with wonder. “Sustained reading is magic,” indeed.

Anne Fadiman: “Never Do That To A Book”

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Anne Fadiman, author of Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader (and other books), spoke at the Main Branch of the Cambridge Public Library on April 1 as part of Harvard University’s 375th Anniversary. In her talk she revisited the subject she addressed in one of the essays in Ex Libris, “Never Do That To A Book”: in short, she identified two different types of book lovers, the “courtly” and the “carnal.” Courtly lovers treat the book as a sacred object; carnal lovers have a more physical relationship with books – folding down pages, underlining, highlighting, and writing marginalia, and in the odd case, using bacon for bookmarks.

Though Fadiman was most likely correct to say that “Everyone in this room loves books, but not in the same way,” most of the audience identified themselves as somewhere in the middle of the courtly/carnal scale. Fadiman is, by her own admission, a carnal lover of books, believing that marginalia is “a way of turning a monologue into a dialogue.” Reading, she believes, “is a relationship like any other.”

Fadiman also said, early in her talk,”The story of our lives is the story of our books,” which reminded me of a fragment of a poem (“Improvisations of the Caprisian Winter”) by Rainer Maria Rilke (translated by Franz Wright):

So many things lie torn open
by rash hands that arrived too late,
in search of you: they wanted to know.

And sometimes in an old book
an incomprehensible passage is underlined.
You were there, once. What has become of you?

I am also somewhere in the middle of the courtly/carnal book lover scale; in books that I own, I have written and underlined (but only in pencil). I have folded down the corners of pages (but only until I finish the book – then I write down all the quotes I wanted from the dog-eared pages and un-dog-ear them). I do not splay books face-down; I do not highlight; I do not sleep with them under my pillow (though there is a stack on the nightstand and another stack on the floor).

And of course, whether the book was my own or belonged to the library, I would never use bacon for a bookmark.

Bring back the midlist!

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There’s a great blog post on YARN (Young Adult Review Network) about the danger of the blockbuster mentality in the publishing world, and about the value of the fast-disappearing “midlist” – books that neither sold millions of copies nor flopped, by authors who had talent and the potential and promise to keep writing good quality books.

We can all identify the blockbusters – The Hunger Games, Twilight, Harry Potter are the obvious ones in YA, and all of those had crossover appeal, which helped them sell even more. There are adult blockbusters too – just look at The New York Times bestseller list. Again, nothing against reading popular books, but let’s brainstorm our favorite off-the-beaten path books – fiction or nonfiction, YA or adult. Here are a few of mine:

Overture by Yael Goldstein

All My Friends Are Superheroes by Andrew Kaufman

The China Garden by Liz Berry

The Good People of New York by Thisbe Nissen

The Stolen Child by Keith Donohue

A Pigeon and a Boy by Meir Shalev

The Various and Celandine by Steve Augarde

Lucky Girls: Stories by Nell Freudenberger

Love Begins in Winter: Stories, Simon Van Booy

What about you? Books that maybe haven’t hit the bestseller list or been heaped with literary awards or prizes, books that haven’t received much publicity buzz from publishers or reviewers, but good books nevertheless. Share your favorites in the comments!

Booktalk

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A booktalk is exactly what it sounds like: a talk about books. Earlier this month, I gave a booktalk to the Wilmington Women’s Club at the library; it was a lot of fun picking the books, writing up a booklet ahead of time, and giving the talk.

Right before the talk, I pulled all of the books I could find from the shelves and created this display. Some of the books were out, of course, but most are here, and in some cases I included the authors’ other books, if s/he had any.

From left to right: Ursula, Under by Ingrid Hill; State of Wonder, The Magician’s Assistant, The Patron Saint of Liars, and Bel Canto by Ann Patchett; How to Talk to A Widower and Then We Came to the End by Jonathan Tropper; Summer Reading by Hilma Wolitzer (An Available Man wasn’t available); Alan Bradley’s Flavia de Luce books (The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie is the first); Commitment by Elizabeth Gilbert; The Widower’s Tale, Three Junes, The Whole World Over, and I See You Everywhere by Julia Glass; The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights by Joan Didion; Good to the Grain by Kim Boyce; and The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch and Jeffrey Zaslow (author of The Girls From Ames).

Not pictured (fiction): Her Fearful Symmetry and The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger; Wayward Saints by Suzzy Roche; The Flight of Gemma Hardy by Margot Livesey; The Tea Rose by Jennifer Donnelly; The Paris Wife by Paula McLain; I Married You for Happiness by Lily Tuck

Not pictured (YA): The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins; The Fault in Our Stars by John Green

Not pictured (biography/memoir): Bossypants, Tina Fey; The Happiness Project, Gretchen Rubin; My Life in France, Julia Child and Alex Prudhomme; An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination, Elizabeth McCracken

Not pictured (nonfiction): The Girls From Ames: A Story of Women and Friendship by Jeffrey Zaslow; The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman; The Girls Who Went Away by Ann Fessler; The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson

Hopefully, there’s something for everyone!

Do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollars: Apple and the publishers vs. Amazon?

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Do you buy e-books? Did you feel surprised, taken aback, betrayed, indignant, outraged when the average e-book price suddenly jumped from $9.99 to $12-15? Now: have you thought about why those prices changed?

First, it’s important to understand that $9.99 is not the actual cost of an e-book: Amazon set that price point, and they were taking a loss on every e-book sale, in the hopes of luring more and more customers to buy their Kindle e-reader. Amazon was able to set e-book prices because they bought the books from publishers on the “wholesale” model: Amazon paid the publishers about half the cover price of the book, then set its own price for its customers.

A quick note about the real cost of a book: just because it’s a digital version – an e-book – rather than a book printed on paper doesn’t mean it was free to produce. Authors, editors, publicists and marketing people still had to be paid, offices still had to have lights on and computers running. The cost of paper and printing is somewhere in the neighborhood of $3 for a hardcover, less for a paperback.

So with the wholesale model, publishers could not set their own prices for books. With the “agency” model, however, they could: when Apple entered the e-book market, it allowed publishers to set their own prices and take 70% (Apple taking the remaining 30%). Apple also “reportedly stipulated” that publishers who used the agency model couldn’t sell their books for less to anyone else; thus, no more selling to Amazon on the wholesale model. The price change across the board is what drew the attention of both consumers and of the Justice Department, which is threatening Apple and five of the “big six” publishers with “allegedly colluding to raise prices.” (Never mind when airlines change their prices and policies one suspiciously close to the other. And do not get me started on cable companies. Or Amtrak.)

However, Washington Post columnist Steven Pearlstein advises the long view in this situation. True, when Apple broke up Amazon’s de facto monopoly, prices for consumers went up, not down; but, he points out, “What looked to consumers like a great bargain at $9.99 a book looked to others in the industry suspiciously like predatory pricing, or selling below cost today in order to gain a monopoly and raise prices in the future.” Which is better, he asks, “a market in which Amazon uses low prices to maintain its e-book monopoly and drive brick-and-mortar bookstores out of business, or one in which the major book publishers, in tacit collusion with Apple, break Amazon’s monopoly and raise prices?”

When you think about it that way, maybe paying an extra few dollars for your e-books is worth it.

Internet Archive

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After having written about the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) recently, it’s only fair that I should write about the Internet Archive as well. (Brewster Kahle, founder of Digital Librarian of the Internet Archive, is actually on the DPLA Steering Committee, so the two organizations are linked.) The Internet Archive is, quite simply, an Internet library. It is a nonprofit and was founded in 1996, so it’s been around for some time now.

One of its cool features is the “Wayback Machine,” which allows you to plug in a URL and pick a date to see what a given website looked like, say, ten years ago (if it was around then).

Amazon.com was around in 2002; let’s see what it looked like, shall we?

A little different than it looks today.

So the Wayback Machine is fun to play with (also, useful). And the Internet Archive’s digital library is a great project; but just in case digital copies aren’t enough, Kahle is also building a physical library (or, as The New York Times poetically puts it, an ark). “In case of digital disaster,” the article states, Kahle’s goal is to collect one copy of every book. Kahle said, “We must keep the past even as we’re inventing a new future. If the Library of Alexandria had made a copy of every book and sent it to India or China, we’d have the other works of Aristotle, the other plays of Euripides. One copy in one institution is not good enough.”

Considering how many various file formats and digital storage options we have already gone through in the past few decades, keeping one hard copy of every book isn’t a bad idea. Think about it: if you have some files on a floppy drive from 1998, can you still access them? And if you can’t access them, do they really exist, practically speaking? Whereas a book printed at the birth of the printing press hundreds of years ago can still be read by pretty much anyone (well, anyone patient enough to make their way through a whole variety of spellings).

Bookstores and Libraries

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The Boston Globe ran an article yesterday about bookstores connected with libraries. The Book Store Next Door, run by the Friends of the Wilmington Memorial Library, is cited as an example. TBSND brings in funds for the library, and it’s a great place for community members to pick up cheap used books as well. Plus it’s in a charming little house – definitely worth a visit if you’re in the area!

Photo courtesy of the Wilmington Memorial Library.

A longer post about the process of weeding in libraries – i.e. getting rid of books – is in the pipeline.