Blind Side review

I wrote a review of Blind Side by Michael Lewis for the SPT. Read it here. I blogged about the book previously here.

Best of Lists

I love the "best of" lists that come out at the end of the year. And this year's seem like a diverse bunch. Here are links with notations of what I've read and would like to read. Suffice to say, all these books seem pretty darn good. Here's my round-up and comments on some of the lists. Or you can save yourself precious minutes and go straight to Metacritic's ultimate best books of 2006 page.

The New York Times Ten Best Books of 2006.
I've read The Looming Tower; I'd like to read The Places in Between, by Rory Stewart, about travels through Afghanistan.

The Washington Post Top Ten Best of the Year.
Again The Looming Tower; would like to read Fiasco, an accounting of the Iraq War by Washington Post writer Thomas Ricks.

The Atlantic Monthly Books of the Year. (Subscription required, I believe.)
I haven't read *any* of these. (Shame!) I would like to read Twilight of the Superheroes: Stories by Deborah Eisenberg and All Aunt Hagar's Children by Edward P. Jones.

The Los Angeles Times has two fairly long lists: Favorite Fiction and Poetry of 2006 and Favorite Nonfiction of 2006.
I'm overwhelmed by the number of pics here. The nonfiction list is more interesting. I'd like to read The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million by Daniel Mendelsohn and The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl by Timothy Egan.

The Seattle Times admits its Best Books of 2006 list is longish.
At least they break it up into multiple categories. I'd like to read The Echo Maker. It includes sandhill cranes, and I adore sandhill cranes. This book made a lot of the other lists too.

My subjective perusal of the above lists tells me that a lot of people love Claire Messud's The Emperor's Children and Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma.
But Metacritic's more scientific approach says the best reviewed books of 2006 are Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky for fiction and (ta da!) The Looming Tower for nonfiction. Everyone loves The Looming Tower, and so do I.

Ooof, I feel tired now! So many books to consider reading ...

A Christmas Carol

Robyn Blumner of the St. Petersburg Times (my employer) has a marvelous column on the enduring appeal of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. She mentions one of the best parts of the story, the visit from the Ghost of Christmas Present. It's the exact opposite of sugary sweet, and I'll quote from it slightly more extensively here:

The chimes were ringing the three quarters past eleven at that moment.

``Forgive me if I am not justified in what I ask,'' said Scrooge, looking intently at the Spirit's robe, ``but I see something strange, and not belonging to yourself, protruding from your skirts. Is it a foot or a claw!''

``It might be a claw, for the flesh there is upon it,'' was the Spirit's sorrowful reply. ``Look here.''

From the foldings of its robe, it brought two children; wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable. They knelt down at its feet, and clung upon the outside of its garment.

``Oh, Man! look here. Look, look, down here!'' exclaimed the Ghost.

They were a boy and girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. No change, no degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any grade, through all the mysteries of wonderful creation, has monsters half so horrible and dread.

Scrooge started back, appalled. Having them shown to him in this way, he tried to say they were fine children, but the words choked themselves, rather than be parties to a lie of such enormous magnitude.

``Spirit! are they yours?'' Scrooge could say no more.

``They are Man's,'' said the Spirit, looking down upon them. ``And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased. Deny it!'' cried the Spirit, stretching out its hand towards the city. ``Slander those who tell it ye! Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse! And bide the end!''

``Have they no refuge or resource?'' cried Scrooge.

``Are there no prisons?'' said the Spirit, turning on him for the last time with his own words. ``Are there no workhouses?''

The bell struck twelve.

Read her column here.

The final installment of Harry Potter

The name of the next Harry Potter book was revealed this week: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. J.K. Rowling revealed it through a fun little puzzle on her web site, jkrowling.com. (I always read the little cheat sheets floating around the 'net; I can't imagine how actual kids figure out the complex games she sets up.)

So what does the name mean? Like most of her previous books, nobody knows. Most of the HP titles refer to new themes that haven't been introduced before, and that's the case here. I'm going to hazard my own guess though. "Hallows" can mean holy ones, as in All Hallow's Eve (aka The Eve of All Saints, aka Halloween). I think the Deathly Hallows are the spirits of Harry's family and friends who have died, and they will have a role to play in helping Harry defeat Voldemort. Another clue is from Order of the Phoenix, when Harry heard whispering "behind the veil" in the Department of Mysteries. The veil symbolized death. My hypothesis is the people whispering were those who have died.
Now I don't think it will be like Obi Wan Kenobi in Return of the Jedi, where they come back as regular characters, just, y'know, dead. I think they will be more like friendly spirits, the way Harry's parents appear as part of the Phoenix Effect at the end of HP and the Goblet of Fire.
If I remember correctly, JRK said we hadn't seen the last of Sirius, so that fits in well with my theory, too. I'll see if I can dig up the reference.
I realize this doesn't make much sense unless you've read the books. But so many people have, and in fact one of my favorite things about the books is that they have created a huge reading community. HP lovers unite!

UPDATE: Check the comments for JKR's hints on Sirius and future books.

Best uses for LibraryThing

I've been wrestling with a dilemma only a book geek could understand: How to best use LibraryThing, a cool web site lets you catalog your books. (Catalog is library-speak for "make a list of and categorize.") They're responsible for the little books display on the right-hand side of my blog.
At first I thought I would enter only the books I physically have in my home -- logical, eh? The wrench in the works is LibraryThing recommends other books you might like based on your collection, and I've been getting recommendations for books I've already read (I just don't own a copy right now.) This seems to defeat the purpose of a very cool aspect of LibraryThing.
Since it's a virtual catalog, why not use it to catalog every book I've ever read? Then I could just tag them with "Owned" or "Unowned" or whatever. (Tags are little subject headings LibraryThing and some blogs use to group information by subject.)
My other issue is that I've been buying a lot more books than I'm able to read lately. For instance, I bought 21 (!) books at a charity book sale at work this year. And I have seven unread books from the 2005 book sale. I could catalog these in LibraryThing with the tag "Unread."
Have I mentioned lately that I love tags? And now that I've upgraded to the new Blogger, I can start tagging my blog, as you'll see at the bottom of this post. (Blogger calls them labels for some reason.) Meanwhile, check out my gorgeous tag cloud from LibraryThing here. I belong to the I heart metadata discussion group, which betakate founded with the description, " Let's get together, you and me, baby, and develop a folksonomy. And we'll float away on a tag cloud of love."

Hemingway, the Bible, Burroughs

A round-up of my recent reading...
The Washington Post has a delightful feature called Second Reads where they reconsider neglected or notable books. This week's installment was on Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast. The critic Jonathan Yardley says the book is great but Hemingway was cruel to some of his friends in it. I definitely agree with the first part, not so much the second, though. I don't buy F. Scott Fitzgerald as some poor innocent thing.
The New Yorker has a fun take-out on the perennial best-seller, the Bible. There's even one version designed to look like Teen Magazine. Who knew?
Vanity Fair looks at the real-life family behind Augusten Burroughs' memoir Running with Scissors. They're suing, of course, because Burroughs' book made them look like the king freaks of the century. The story is not online, but Burroughs fanatics should check it out. It makes you feel bad for the grown kids, aka the Finches, to have their personal lives put on display. But frighteningly, it sounds like much of Burroughs' story is true.

Books on the Radio

Some of the best books coverage these days is being done on the radio. National Public Radio is consistently interesting, everything from cookbooks to the classics. Best of all they have a books channel on their web page, so it's easy to check in on what they're doing if you miss it on the air.

I also check in on The Bob Edwards Show, which is on XM Radio. Last night I heard him interview Arthur Brooks, an academic who studies charitable giving. Brooks found that conservatives really do give more than liberals, but not because of their political leanings per se. Rather, people who are skeptical of government tend to donate more to charity. It's hard to do justice to his nuanced arguments, but his book is called Who Really Cares: America's Charity Divide: Who Gives, Who Doesn't, and Why It Matters, and you can excerpt here.

Another radio show with great books coverage is Tom Ashbrook's On Point from WBUR. I hear this on XM, too, but anyone can listen to it for free on the Web or via Podcast. (The show's archives are here.) He interviews everyone from zany entertainment doyenne Amy Sedaris to postfeminist provocateur Camille Paglia. (That Paglia interview is super good.) He also does lots of politics and current events, with authors like Tom Ricks (Fiasco) and Lawrence Wright (The Looming Tower).

Severance Review and Q-A

I reviewed Severance, the book of short stories of people who have been beheaded, and I got to interview the author.

Decapitation hardly seems like a suitable theme for a collection of elegant short stories, but Robert Olen Butler transcends morbidity while excavating the final thoughts from the lives of the beheaded. John the Baptist recalls the way Jesus smelled at his baptism. Marie Antoinette remembers her parents' royal titles. Nicole Brown Simpson sees O.J. in the faces of her children. And a barnyard chicken dreams of a great white clucking mother: "this at last is the hen who fills the sky, and I am rushing now along the path and the clucking is for me and it is very loud and a great wide road is suddenly before me and she is beyond and I cross."

Read the review here; the interview here.

Hannibal Rising

I loved the novel Silence of the Lambs. But it's not taking anything away from that to say I found its sequel, Hannibal, to be bad. Not just bad, but laughably, Oh, C'mon, bad. Why I found it laughable is a major spoiler, so I will put in that in the comments. Read at your own risk!
Now there's a new Thomas Harris book out, called Hannibal Rising, a prequel that detailsHannibal's origins. Apparently Harris has not managed to stop his books' fall-off, according to the Los Angeles Times. Their headline is "Hannibal, we hardly knew ye — and we liked that."

Garry Wills' What Paul Meant

I got to interview Garry Wills for the St. Petersburg Times.

Even Garry Wills isn't sure exactly how many books he has written. It's more than 30, the result of a daily routine of writing and researching, even when he goes on vacation.

That output has made him many things to many people: To progressive Catholics, he is America's foremost Catholic intellectual. Vatican loyalists, on the other hand, see the traitor who wrote Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit. Political junkies know his writing on the Nixon, Reagan and Bush administrations, and history buffs love his Pulitzer Prize winner, Lincoln at Gettysburg.

Read the whole interview here.

Harper Lee biography

I feel a little guilty for reading the Harper Lee biography Mockingbird. I saw the author, Charles J. Shields, speak at the Festival of Reading here. He was wonderful and seemed like a true gentleman. But he freely admitted that Harper Lee asked him not to publish the book. She hates media attention.
On the other hand, I truly believe that To Kill a Mockingbird is one of the most important books of the 20th century. A good biography of its author will serve history and posterity well. And Mockingbird is an excellent book, it captures the fascinating literary milieu of New York in the 1950s and 1960s.
One part of the book that sticks in my mind is Harper Lee's refusal of an interview with a television crew: "Not just no, but hell no." How emphatic she is!