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!

Library 2.0 Manifesto

I ran across this Librarians's 2.0 manifesto. It's great! Favorite passages:

• I will avoid requiring users to see things in librarians' terms but rather will shape services to reflect users' preferences and expectations.
• I will lobby for an open catalog that provides personalized, interactive features that users expect in online information environments.
• I will let go of previous practices if there is a better way to do things now, even if these practices once seemed so great.
• I will lobby for an open catalog that provides personalized, interactive features that users expect in online information environments.

Read the whole thing here.

Today spoonreader; tomorrow -- Oprah!

So I was thumbing through the most recent issue of O, The Oprah Magazine. (Yes, I am a proud reader!) And what do I find but David Foster Wallace's compelling commencement address that I blogged about back in January! At the time, I opined, "I fervently hope David Foster Wallace finds a way to get it published as an essay. It's about the importance of what we choose to think about. It's great, great stuff."
The new Oprah issue isn't yet on her web site, I will update this post when it is.
To quote from his essay again:

Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliche about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliche about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.
This, like many cliches, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.
And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out.

UPDATE: The essay is not on the Oprah web site, but you can see more about the December issue here.

Little Children, the movie

I don't usually write about movies, even when they're based on books. First, there are too many; it would turn this book blog into a movie blog. Second, books are usually better than the movie, and there's no sense in repeating that over and over. But I'm optimistic about the movie of Little Children, based on the book by Tom Perrotta. I thought the book was a compelling little novel mining rare territory -- boredom and self-obsession in contemporary suburban family life. Movies are pretty comfortable with this landscape (see American Beauty, Edward Scissorhands and The Truman Show, to name but a few). So it will be interesting to see what results.
Here's a bit from a review in the Los Angeles Times. The reviewer seems to differ from me and agree with me in a few ways:

"Little Children" is one of those rare films that transcends its source material. Firmly rooted in the present and in our current frame of mind -- a time and frame of mind that few artists have shown interest in really exploring--— the movie is one of the few films I can think of that examines the baffling combination of smugness, self-abnegation, ceremonial deference and status anxiety that characterizes middle-class Gen X parenting, and find sheer, white-knuckled terror at its core.

Read the whole review here. Perrotta also wrote Election, which was turned into a movie -- a biting satire of the high school student council starring Matthew Broderick and Reese Witherspoon.
And while I'm going all multi-media on you, I will point out that my favorite band, The Shins, has a new website that shows the band members hanging out at the library. Cool!

The Looming Tower

The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9-11 is an exceptional book about the historical background of the 9/11 attackers. It explains in details why they did what did what they did, what their motivations were, what their strategies were, how the moved around the world and organized the attack. The main focus is on Osama bin Laden and the history of his ideology. It is marvelously concrete and detailed.
Before I read this book, Osama bin Laden always seemed to me more like a movie villain, like Darth Vader from Star Wars or Sarumaun from Lord of the Rings. Now he seems much more real, which is of course a bit scarier. The ideology these guys operate with is truly frightening.
There's a dialogue on Slate between the book's author Lawrence Wright and his fellow journalist Steve Coll. Coll summarizes the book so well I'll simply quote him here:

The book opens with an account of the influential Egyptian Islamist writer Sayid Qutb's radicalizing experiences in America during the late 1940s, when he was a young man far from home. It then develops biographical portraits of the young Ayman Zawahiri and the young Osama Bin Laden, who both read Qutb ardently. The book follows the pair to Afghanistan during the 1980s and tracks the origins and formation of al-Qaida during the anti-Soviet war. The evolution of the group after it was forced into exile in Sudan during the early 1990s, and then returned to Afghanistan, in 1996, is blended with reporting about the FBI agents who were assigned to understand and pursue al-Qaida. The book follows all these strands of narrative to Sept. 11 and then to Bin Laden's escape from Tora Bora the following December.

Read the whole dialogue here.

Severance

I heard a report on National Public Radio tonight about a new book of (very) short stories called Severance, by Robert Olen Butler. Each story is the thoughts of someone who has just had their head cut off. Each story is short, just enough to capture what they would be thinking as the blade does its work. It sounds interesting: The stories includes John the Baptist, Medusa, Robespierre and a chicken, among others.
It also reminded me of Spoon River Anthology (of course!) which also is a book of people speaking briefly and poetically about their deaths. The difference is that Spoon River's conceit is that it's everyone is in the same graveyard, as opposed to Severance's method of death.
I think I will pick up a copy of Severance soon.

Crunchy Cons

Rod Dreher is a noted conservative commentator -- his day job is opinion editor of the Dallas Morning News. But more importantly to me is that he is an alumni of my high school, the beloved Louisiana School for Math, Science and the Arts. This has motivated me to keep an eye on his career. Plus, he's a really great writer and highly readable.
He wrote a book recently called Crunchy Cons: How Birkenstocked Burkeans, Gun-Loving Organic Gardeners, Evangelical Free-Range Farmers, Hip Homeschooling Mamas, Right-Wing Nature Lovers, and Their Diverse Tribe of Countercultural Conservatives Plan to Save America (or at Least the Republican Party). I read it, and I really liked it. (It comes out in paperback next week.) It is a trenchant critique of the rampant consumerism of the culture and the knee-jerk pro-corporate stance of the mainstream Republican Party. It also has interesting insights on living a good life, advocating organic farming and the restoration of older homes. My favorite advice: Everything in your home should be either useful or beautiful -- if it's not either, get rid of it! The book also shakes up our notions of the right/left political divide, which is another one of my pet interests.
Dreher has a Crunchy Con blog on Beliefnet.com that is consistently fascinating reading. He announced recently on his blog that he is converting to Orthodoxy, and it set off a firestorm -- more than 431 comments and counting. Wow!
I just did a search to see what's the most comments I've ever had on my blog. In case you were wondering, it's four.

Banned Books Week

It's Banned Books Week, so read something shocking this week!
Need ideas? The American Library Association has its list of banned books here, while Google has a list here. The ALA's list is mostly children's books, while Google's leans toward adult classics. To Kill a Mockingbird or Ulysses, anyone? I'm fond of the outhouse scene in "Ulysses," so I'll have to read that again this week.
Thanks to Ryan F. for the links! Sorry, Ryan, no commission.

Today is J. Alfred Prufrock Day!

I almost missed it, but my trusty poem-a-day calendar reminded me that today is T.S. Eliot's birthday, which means it's J. ALFRED PRUFROCK DAY!
This is a day for me and my fellow English Lit classmates from high school to celebrate our love of poetry by reading The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.
You can read my previous posts celebrating J. Alfred Prufrock Day here, here, here and here.
So ... Do you dare to eat a peach?

New from Michael Lewis

Michael Lewis has a new book coming out next week -- The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game -- and it looks like it will be good.
The New York Times Magazine exerpted part of it this weekend; read it here while it's still free. Meanwhile, another favorite author of mine, Malcolm Gladwell, praises the book on his blog:

It's about a teenager from the poorest neighborhood in Memphis who gets adopted by a wealthy white family, and who also happens to be an extraordinarily gifted offensive lineman. Simultaneously Lewis tells the story of the emergence of the left tackle as one of the most important positions in modern day football. I thought MoneyBall was fantastic. But this is even better, and it made me wonder if we aren't enjoying a golden age of sportswriting right now. ... The Blind Side is as insightful and moving a meditation on class inequality in America as I have ever read--althought to put it that way, I realize, makes it sound deadly dull. It isn't. You should read it.

Read Gladwell's entire post here. Gladwell wrote The Tipping Point and Blink.