From
The Capitol Book & News Newspaper Column
Appeared Every Other Sunday In
“…and the
We have no children, so we are usually hesitant to offer much in the way of advice for raising the little darlings. But every once in a while we just can’t help ourselves, especially when we think we have stumbled onto a solution to something that clearly worries every parent, or at least the ones who frequent the bookstore, and that worry is this: What’s going to become of my child?
Did we say
solution? We meant to say possible solution, and what we really meant to say
was that we now know how to test your child to see if he is suited for one
particular career, that career being an officer in the
Here’s what you do, or better yet, get a slightly older sibling to do to the slightly younger sibling. They might have done it already, in which case do not let them try to do it again, because it only ever works once, and this we know from actual experience with our own younger siblings.
First, run about one inch of water into the bathtub. Then, give the child a cat to hold, said cat having not been informed of the water in the bathtub. Now, tell the child to give the cat a bath. What happens next is the reason we told you to get an older sibling to do this, as our experience is that children forgive their older siblings for things they never forgive their parents for.
When the fur
settles, ask the child what he learned, and when he tells you he learned that
cats really hate to be wet, then ask him the really big follow-up question. Ask
him what practical applications such knowledge might have, and if he’s
This is no joke.
The
The book is Spycraft: The Secret History of the
It will also have
you wondering how a book such as this can be published. It may not give away
every
But they did tell
it, and the
Grammar Debate Results
Say you were to write a book, and then say that book were to make bestseller lists all around the country, and if you want to, you can even say it hit Number One on the New York Times Bestseller List. And then say you don’t just say all those things, but you actually do it. If that ever happens, we will refer to you in this column as a Nationally Bestselling Author, even though that sounds awkward to us, and we’d rather refer to you as a National Bestselling Author, but the least we can do for the folks who took the trouble to vote in the Great Grammar Debate, is to abide by their decision.
If you missed our last column, the Debate was between Frazer
Dobson of Park Road Books in
The Debate was decided by a razor-thin difference of only 5
votes, or, if you’d prefer the way the winning side looks at it, the
Debate was decided by the overwhelming majority of 73% of the votes cast, and we’ll save
you the calculations: the actual vote was 8 to 3, and that is one pitiful
turnout. But many thanks to those who did vote, many apologies to those who
find grammar discussions boring or pretentious, or both, and congratulations to
Frazer Dobson up there in
2007 Did last year seem a little boring to you? Or did it at least seem an awful lot like 2006? And like 2005? Well, it did if you were in the book business, or at least in the business of keeping up with which books sell best every year, which is part of the business that the book industry magazine Publishers Weekly is in. That magazine recently reported that the same five authors have been the sales leaders for each of the past three years. Think you can name them? We’ll let you know at the end of this column. In the meantime, here are a few other interesting tidbits from last year.
The only newcomer to the bestselling fiction list (sales of
200,00 copies or more) was Donald McCaig, author of the Gone with the Wind sequel Rhett
Butler’s People. He was also the only Nationally Bestselling Author
to visit
The publisher with the most titles selling at least 100,000 copies? It was religious publisher Thomas Nelson, with 14 such titles.
The bestselling book of the year was a children’s book, and it was not just the bestselling book of 2007, but the fastest selling book of all time: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows sold 13 million copies, more than ten times the sales of its nearest competitor in the children’s category, Eclipse by Stephenie Meyer (1.1 million copies).
The bestselling adult hardcover book was a nonfiction title, The Secret by Rhonda Byrne. It sold 4.5 million copies. The bestselling hardcover fiction title was A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini, with sales of about 2.2 million copies. His The Kite Runner was the bestselling paperback fiction title (2 million copies).
The bestselling of all the trade paperbacks was a nonfiction title, Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert (4.3 million copies), and the bestselling mass market paperback was Blood Brothers by Nora Roberts (2.3 million copies). We sold lots of the first one, but not a single copy of the second!
Of the thousands of hardcover fiction titles published in 2007, only 143 sold as many as 100,000 copies. About 250 paperbacks reached that plateau. Only seven hardcover adult fiction titles topped 1 million copies in sales.
And the five adult authors who’ve lead the sales race for each of the past three years? James Patterson (5 of the top 15 sellers of 2007!), Janet Evanovich, Nicholas Sparks, Dean Koontz, and Patricia Cornwell. It would not be boring to them to see a repeat in 2008.
Chickens, A
Seven years ago, in this space, we published a column devoted mostly to suggested books for Father’s Day gifts. Of the books mentioned in that column we sold only one, and it was not the one we’d expected to sell. In fact, we’d included it mostly as a joke, thinking nobody would really want to buy a book of photographs of chickens, but somebody did, and that’s how we became one of the few stores in the country to sell a copy of The Fairest Fowl: Portraits of Championship Chickens. And that’s the last time we’d thought about that sale until the other day, when it became a part of an uneventful day at the store, a day when nothing at all happened, and almost nobody came into the store, and we sold almost nothing. We thought you might want to hear about such a day in the book business.
What Movement Did You
Say? The day started with an email plea from
And the Tower?
How many postcards, letters or emails have you gotten from friends visiting
The Great Grammar Dispute Would the day’s excitement never end? As it turned out, no. We were about to engage in a long range dispute over grammar with Frazer Dobson, a former employee of ours and now, with his wife Sally Brewster, owner of one of America’s great bookstores, Park Road Books in Charlotte.
At dispute: the phrase “National Bestselling Author,” frequently seen in publishers’ advertising blurbs. But is it correct, grammatically, or should it be “Nationally Bestselling Author?” Frazer and Thomas spent the better part of the day arguing over this, neither willing to concede anything. One believes that “Nationally” is correct, since an adverb is required to modify the adjective “Bestselling.” The other thinks that “Bestselling Author” is a compound noun, and should in fact be modified by the adjective “National.” And since our very slow day at the bookstore ended with no clear winner, we’ve decided to let you decide. Go to our website, click on the link to The Great Grammar Debate, and cast your vote. {Sorry, voting is now closed.}
And if you’re curious, yes, The Fairest Fowl: Portraits of Championship Chickens is still in print, in paperback at $14.95. We’re nominating it as the handbook for the Madison Urban Chicken Movement.
Get ‘Em Out Of the House
Our twice-yearly trips
to the dermatologist are a small price to pay for the thousands of hours we
spent outdoors back in the summers of our youth, and it makes us a little sad
these days that we so rarely see young folks outdoors just fooling around in
the summer. So we asked our children’s buyer Eleanor Lucas to recommend a
few books that might convince a child or two to get off their duffs. Here is
her report.
My husband, who for nearly 20 years has devoted his volunteer time to the Boy Scouts, read a book last year that he believes should be required reading for all adults who raise and work with children -- Richard Louv’s Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder. Louv’s assertion, backed by a growing body of research, is that as children have become more disconnected from time spent outdoors in a meaningful way, rates of childhood obesity, attention-deficit disorders, and depression have risen dramatically. These are startling conclusions, but many adults can identify with the consequences that living a pressure-cooked lifestyle has on our own quality of life.
The paperback edition of Louv’s groundbreaking book ($14.95) includes a list of 100 things parents and adults can do to help their children rediscover the pleasure in “goofing off” outside, but there are other books meant for children that can provide them with their own ideas.
The Curious Boy’s Book of Adventure: 100 Hijinks & Escapades by Sam Martin covers activities from bird-watching to building an igloo. Yes, this is an idea spun off from the phenomenally successful The Dangerous Book for Boys, but that book included subject matter well beyond this guide to hands-on activities. A quick look at the contents of Martin’s book assures me that despite the title, plenty of girls would enjoy it as well. ($15 paperback)
Peterson Field Guides has recently published The Young Birder’s Guide by Bill
Thompson, Jr. Great color photographs,
highlighted interesting facts about birds found in
Richard Louv provided the foreword for I Love Dirt! which suggests 52 activities to get parents and their children involved in nature. My favorite of these activities is #30 – create a “thinking place” which your child is allowed to visit without interruption – at the base of an old tree, a special spot on the front or back porch (remember those?) – anywhere a child can just be free from the pressure of having to do a thing but ponder and observe nature in their own way, in their own time. One other favorite is roly-poly races. I was shocked recently when I mentioned enjoying playing with this weird breed of crustacean, and the child with whom I was talking had no idea what a roly-poly was. ($12.95 paperback)
Finally, for those times when getting outside might be problematic, bring some nature inside. Sounds of the Wild: Jungle by Maurice Pledger is one of the most amazing “sound and pop-up” books we’ve ever seen or heard! Combining colorful illustrations of denizens of the rainforest with clear and accurate digital recordings, this one has provided great delight not only to our customers who open it, but to us when we see and hear them do so! ($16.95 hardcover)
With the call on all of us as citizens of the world to live a little smarter to protect our natural resources, it only makes sense that in order to care about the environment a child first needs to know what is out there worth saving. Unplugging them – and ourselves – and actually stepping into the outdoors with the expressed purpose of discovery renews the spirit, instructs the intellect, and, if Louv’s assertions are correct, may go a long way toward shoring up the emotional health of the generation we are raising.
We stayed up past
In “most of us,” we most definitely do not include Roger Angell, another longtime fiction editor of the New Yorker, the preeminent baseball writer of this generation, essayist, memoirist, and not incidentally the son of Katharine White, whom he recalls fondly in his wonderful autobiography Let Me Finish (paperback, $15), a book we should have read when it was new, but which we finally did read just recently in an attempt to sell another book, a book we’d never heard of, the television production of which we stayed up late watching on Sunday, which is why we were still awake very early on Monday morning. Oh, and local man about town Fred Lippincott is a little bit to blame for our lack of sleep, too.
For it was Fred who a few weeks ago asked us to order a book for him, only he could not remember the title of the book – he thought it was something like “Cronville” - or the author, only that he had seen a reference to the book in another book he had just finished reading, which turned out to be the aforementioned Let Me Finish. So that’s how we found ourselves reading Let Me Finish, so we could find out what book Fred was talking about.
Now, we should say this. Not infrequently people misremember things. They might think, and they might even insist, that they’ve read something in, say, Book A, when in fact it turns out, after lots of time spent searching Book A, that it was really Newspaper B where they saw it, and that’s what we thought had happened to Fred, as Cheryl read nearly to the end of Let Me Finish, and found no reference to what she now thought of as “Fred’s book.” But she didn’t mind, for what had begun as a research project had turned into one of her very favorite reads of the year, so far.
And then, on page 270, there it was. Right in the middle of
Angell’s reminiscences of visits
to various cemeteries around the globe, and then a visit to his own future
gravesite, he comes to his mother’s grave, and finds himself remembering
her from a moment near the end of her life, as she sat at the head of the table
at a family gathering thinking about….what? Angell can’t know, but
he knew his mother well enough to guess what thoughts must have filled her head
that day, one of which, he imagines, was the hope that her grandchildren “will attend a school or college where
they would ever get to learn their way around not just Midddlemarch but
(
What We Learned At
The Alabama Book Festival
Careful readers of this column have noted that each of the last four columns
has featured books and their authors who were coming to last week’s
Alabama Book Festival. The conceit of each of those columns was that you would
be so intrigued by our descriptions of certain books that you would come to the
Festival just to buy one of those books, and to meet the author of that book.
So just how do you think it makes us feel when it turns out that several of the
very most popular books at the Festival, as measured by their sales there, were
books that we never even mentioned? Well, here’s how it makes us feel:
happy, and once again confirmed in our conviction that you folks are a lot
smarter than we about books, because we went back and took a look at the
surprise bestsellers, and you know what? They’re really good books, and
we should have mentioned them before now, but since late is better than never, we’ll
just go ahead and mention them now.
A Pocketful of History by Jim Noles. A fascinating book, and a
fascinating premise. Jim Noles is a
Coal Black Horse by Robert Olmstead. When three different people come up
to you at a Book Festival, and thank you profusely for bringing a writer to the
Festival, and then tell you that his latest book is one of the great books
ever, it makes you sort of wish you’d actually read the thing. So that is
exactly what Thomas is doing right now, and you know what? This one, about a 14
year old boy dispatched by his mother to bring his father home from the Civil
War, and about his great horse, really is special. ($23.95 hardcover)
Major Crush and The Boys Next Door by Jennifer Echols. These
books are in the genre we call teenage romantic comedies, and they are perfect
for younger teenage girls, who if they’ve traveled much around Alabama
just might recognize the setting for these books, which is Alexander City, even
if it’s called something else in the book. This was the first time
we’d met Jennifer Echols, who grew up in
Ivorybill Hunters by Geoffrey Hill. A great book, about an epic
adventure, written by an
With Music and Justice for All by Frye Gaillard. This is Thomas’s
favorite kind of book. – a collection of short pieces about fascinating
people. Pick it up anytime, turn anywhere in it, and be thoroughly entertained.
Frye Gaillard has spent nearly 40 years writing about folks in the South, and
this collection must be of only his very best stuff, because it’s all top
notch. How many people do you know who actually met John T. Scopes of monkey
trial fame?
($24.95 hardcover)
Six Days
Older readers will recall the Six-Day War of 1967, the one
where
Or for creating the heavens and the earth, but that’s all it took, if the Bible is to be believed.
On the other hand, six days can sometimes seem like a long time. We are willing to bet that none of you has ever seen the movie Deadhead Miles, a bizarre trucker movie made in 1972, starring Alan Arkin, but as far as we know never actually released into theaters. Thomas saw it as part of a test audience in Nashville sometime during that year, and actually sat in the theater that day with the great country singer Dave Dudley, whose band The Roadrunners was also there, because they’d provided a good deal of the soundtrack for the movie, including the exhilaratingly heartbreaking trucker song Six Days On the Road (And I’m Gonna Make It Home Tonight.) That song makes six days seem like an eternity.
So it may seem like a long wait to some, and to some others it may feel like it’ll be here in just a wink of time, but either way six days is how long there is until the 2008 Alabama Book Festival, which will happen next Saturday, April 19, down at Old Alabama Town. We’ve written a good bit about the Festival in our last few columns, but still we’ve not even come close to mentioning all the writers and performers who’ll be there, and since there are only six days left to get it done, we thought we’d better do it today, so here’s who’s coming whom we haven’t mentioned yet:
Wildly popular (and very, very good) writer Joshilyn
Jackson. Local favorite (and cultural asset) Mary Ann Neeley. Stephen Fox,
author of Wolf of the Deep, a very good book on civil war
Admiral Raphael Semmes. Doug Phillips, the guy who tromps through the woods on
Not to mention Wayne Greenhaw, from whom we always hear
something we’ve never heard before. And young adult authors Jennifer
Echols, Loretta Ellsworth, and the very controversial R.A. Nelson. Scenes from
Wade Hall’s play Conecuh People
will be performed. Kirk Curnutt, Elizabeth Dulemba, William Drinkard ( former
It’s the
Books For Older Young Readers
Young folks are
complicated creatures, and that’s why we keep an expert on staff to deal
with their reading needs. Here are a few books our expert Eleanor Lucas thinks it
might do the younger set good to read.
Reviewing books for older juvenile readers presents some challenges. Not every book is for every child, to be sure, and so I will make you this promise: I will always read them with the eyes and heart of a parent, but also with the memory of a pre-teen/teenager who loved to read about people and places and things that were not always part of my own personal experience. Young people enjoy the same things in fiction that adult readers do: the chance to step out of your own life for a while, a chance to read about people not exactly like everyone you already know, and a chance to take the risk that you may laugh at, or cry about, or think again about things that move you.
Finding things about which to laugh isn’t hard in Meg Cabot’s Allie Finkle’s Rules for Girls: Moving Day. Allie has a growing checklist of things she needs to remember to navigate life successfully. Rule Number 4, for instance, is “If you don’t want a secret spread around, don’t tell Scott Stamphley.” When her family decides to buy a creepy old house in a neighborhood that will take her away from the friends she’s not even sure she wants to have anymore, Allie’s list takes on even greater importance. How she finds her way through the thicket of challenges she’ll face during this transition makes for funny and insightful reading. This is the first book in what should be another successful series for Cabot, author of The Princess Diary books. Hardcover, for ages 9 – 11, $15.99
Those readers with an interest in historical fiction should enjoy A Drowned Maiden’s Hair by Laura Amy Schlitz. When we meet Maud Flynn she’s been locked in an outhouse at the orphanage in which she resides as punishment for yet another infraction of the rules. She is discovered there by two mysterious sisters, Hyacinth and Judith, who adopt her forthwith. Maud is told only that she will need to remain hidden in that home for the foreseeable future, and once there she discovers that she will be part of a series of seances held by the sisters. The novel takes place during the Spiritualist period of American history, and while Maud’s role in making these seances successful at first exhilarates her she soon finds herself torn when she realizes just how much advantage is being taken of those who are grieving the loss of their loved ones. A wholly satisfying book, with exceptionally well-limned characters. For ages 10 – 12, $7.99
When I was a teenager about 37 years ago, there was one novel that none of our mothers wanted us to read, but which we all did. That was Go Ask Alice, and its harrowing “first-person” account of a typical teenager’s descent into drug abuse – resulting in her death by overdose – had a profound effect on my generation. I will not be surprised if Jay Asher’s extraordinarly moving Thirteen Reasons Why resonates just as strongly with older teens today. Hannah Baker has committed suicide, and left behind a box of cassette tapes to be listened to by the 13 people whose interactions with her laid the groundwork for that horrible decision. Each of them is instructed to listen to the tapes, and then send them to the next person mentioned. We discover them with one of those teens – Clay Jensen – who listens to Hannah’s haunting words with confusion, anger, grief, and finally a sense of personal resolution that is incredibly moving. This is an honest and frank book about a very sensitive subject, and one that deserves to find a wide readership among those 14 and up. I would be remiss not to mention that Jay Asher will be one of the authors at the Alabama Book Festival on April 19, and he deserves to have enthusiastic fans on hand to meet him. $16.99, hardcover.
Governor Patterson
The most interesting person we know is coming to the Alabama Book Festival on April 19.
Years ago, when the bookstore was downtown on
Luckily, somebody did. Warren Trest, who several years ago
wrote Wings of Denial: The Alabama Air
National Guard's Covert Role at the Bay of Pigs, has now turned his
considerable talents to writing the first authorized biography of Governor
Patterson, who not incidentally played a role in the whole
The public part of that remarkable life began, tragically,
with the assassination of Governor Patterson’s father in 1954 in
NewSouth Books is bringing another very popular writer to
the Festival this year. Rheta Grimsley Johnson, whose column in the Advertiser
must surely be the most popular feature in the whole newspaper, has written a
wonderful book about her second home, deep in the Louisiana bayou. The book is Poor Man's Provence: Finding Myself in
Cajun Louisiana, and if Festival organizers are smart they’ll have
somebody there selling boiled crawfish, for you will surely want some after
hearing Rheta talk about this book.
And not to be outdone by the local competition, Montgomery’s River City Press is also bringing a duo of Alabama writers, who’ve written two different books – one fiction, one not – about the very same grisly 1966 murder of Annie Jean Barnes down in Brewton. Suzanne Hudson wrote the critically acclaimed In a Temple of Trees, a novel about the case, back in 2004, and that book inspired her partner Joe Formichella to investigate the whole case again, which investigation has now led to the publication of his nonfiction account of the murder, Murder Creek: The "Unfortunate Incident" of Annie Jean Barnes. Believe us - we’ve heard these two talk about this one murder from two different perspectives, and it’s fascinating. You might just come away with some idea of whodunit. And you might not.
There are more great writers, and more great books, coming
to this year’s Festival than will fit into one newspaper column, or two,
or three. Which might give you some idea of what to expect to see in this space
in the weeks to come. In the meantime, just remember this: Saturday, April 19
at
The numbers keep changing, but at last count they were 70 and 150, and that’s a lot, and a lot more than last year, when the numbers were closer to 50 and 110, which seemed like a lot at the time.
Those new numbers are the approximate numbers of writers
(70), and the combined total of their book titles (150), all of which will be
brought together down at
You can meet two Pulitzer Prize winners. Rick Bragg won his
Pulitzer in 1996, not for the books (All
Over But the Shoutin’ and Ava’s
Man) which have endeared him to millions of people all over the world. but
“for his elegantly written (newspaper) stories about contemporary
The other Pulitzer winner is Natasha Trethewey, who won the
2007 award for Native Guard, her
collection of poems published in 2006, and whose previous collections Bellocq’s Ophelia and Domestic Work also won great critical
acclaim. Natasha once taught at
And here would be a good place to mention one big difference in this year’s Festival, and that’s the inclusion of lots more poets than in years past, enough poets in fact to warrant the opening of a whole new section of the Festival featuring poets Bruce Alford, Nana Lampton, Irene Latham, Sue Walker, Matthew Graham, Jeanie Thompson, Jake York, Nickole Brown, Willie James King, Doug Van Gundy, Emma Bolden, Louie Skipper, and Dan Albergotti.
You can meet one of our very favorite writers for middle grade readers. Her name is Deborah Wiles, and her books Love Ruby Lavender, Each Little Bird That Sings, and her latest, The Aurora County All-Stars, have won lots of awards, but more importantly have turned lots of kids on to reading. Every middle grade teacher should be sure her students come meet this incredible writer.
Two local writers who’ve hit the big time with their
first books will also be here. Artist Anton Haardt’s Mose T From A to Z is a beautiful memorial to
If that were the whole lineup, it would be pretty good, but of course it’s not even close to the whole lineup. It’s only about 20 of the 70 writers, and we haven’t even mentioned the many great mystery writers, adult fiction writers, nonfiction writers, and other literary folk who’ll be here. Perhaps that will be a subject for our next column.
But here’s something we need to get to in this column.
A great event like this doesn’t just happen. It takes a lot of work, and a
lot of good people, and especially a lot of volunteers for jobs like author
escort, clock watcher at readings, green room attendant, help in
children’s area, and lots of other fun jobs, none of which will require
more than 2 hours of your time. And luckily there’s still plenty of time
for YOU to volunteer to help. Just call Nancy Griggs over in
How To Cook Fish
Last year, just after we had eaten our 36,000th meal together, Cheryl finally discovered how to cook fish. Not that she couldn’t cook an awfully good fish meal before then, but one day last year she discovered a revolutionary new way to cook fish, the way you would cook fish, too, if only you knew about it, but almost nobody does know about it, and she wouldn’t know about it either, had she not discovered this method in one of the many, many cookbooks she read last year.
So, in the hope that maybe you too can discover something to change your culinary life, even if you’ve prepared 36,000 meals, or more, and think you know it all, here’s Cheryl’s short list of her favorite cookbooks of the past few months.
The talented church ladies from Trinity Episcopal Church in Wetumpka have put their best recipes together in Shall We Gather: Recipes and Remembrances of a River Town. It sprinkles bits of local history throughout, including the Coosa’s connection to Popeye and why Alabamians should be eternally grateful to Hernando Desoto. Recipes include Pasty Riley’s Vegetable Soup, She Crab Soup from Our Place, the Wetumpka restaurant “that would make any city proud,” and an Episcopalian Cake involving an orange marmalade filling and orange whipped cream frosting. (Hardcover, $22.95)
If you are like us, and have bunches of recipe clipping in disarray around the house, you can get rid of at least some of them now. Fine Cooking Annual collects the best recipes of the last year from our favorite cooking magazine into one convenient book. The short rib section alone is worth every penny. (Hardcover, $34.95)
North Carolinian Jean Anderson, author of A Love Affair with Southern Cooking: Recipes and Recollections, has produced a wonderful book full of recipes we aim to try. Want to really impress a non-Southerner? Serve ‘em some homemade Pimento Cheese. Chances are they have never tried it. Even better, make it Blue Moon Cheese, and if you don’t know what that is, we have another cookbook for you. Think there’s only one way to fix black-eyed peas? How about Black-Eyed Pea Cakes with Tomato Salsa? Or in Sausage Etouffée? Or, maybe a southern style Hummus? This cookbook is making us hungry! (Hardcover, $32.50)
Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day by Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe Francois sounds way too good to be true, but we are here to say it works! Mix it up with a spoon or your hands tonight and stick it in the refrigerator. Tomorrow you shape it into a free form loaf, let rise about 40 minutes and bake. NO KNEADING! Try it, you’ll love it. (Hardcover, $27.95)
We have really enjoyed Martha Stewart’s Everyday Food: Great Food Fast. At least six nights a week, fast is important to most folks. This cookbook is organized by season, and some of her ideas for February include Mediterranean Chicken Stew (30 minutes total) and Baked Ravioli (25 minute prep plus 25 baking). (Paper, $24.95)
One old cookbook which has become a new favorite of ours is
Patricia Wells’s Bistro Cooking,
which was named cookbook of the year in 1989.
From her favorite small family run restaurants in
Not far from these parts, in
Oh, and the revolutionary method of cooking fish? Visit our website for the recipe.
African-American
Children’s Books
Some of you have complained that we have not written enough about children’s books in this space, and we think you’re right. So from now on, every fourth column or so will feature books for the younger set, and here’s the first one. Like those to come, it’s written by our children’s book buyer Eleanor Lucas.
In 1926 Dr. Carter G. Woodson launched Negro History Week to coincide with the birthdates of President Abraham Lincoln and abolitionist Frederick Douglass. At that time, history texts gave scant recognition to contributions from our African-American population. One notable exception to this exclusion was George Washington Carver.
In 1976 the observance of Negro History Week was expanded and re-named as Black History Month, and in 2008 one of the finest new books for children is a pictorial biography about that very man.
Tanya Bolden’s fascinating George Washington Carver is written for children in elementary school, but substantive and fascinating glimpses into his life and career make it is quite satisfying for a much broader audience. Especially interesting is the inclusion of his illustrations of botanical wonders – I cannot remember ever seeing them before. Carver’s rise to national respect and prominence is a testament to the power of resiliency, intellect, and personal grace, a trinity of Carver’s many gifts effectively conveyed by Ms. Bolden. Hardcover, $18.95
In 1991 Mary Hoffman’s charming Amazing Grace hit the shelves, and became a bestseller for us. To our recollection it was the first picture book that featured an African-American child on the cover that sold across all cultural lines. (Don Freeman’s Corduroy came to mind as well, but that was before our time and the child in that book was not on the cover). Imagine how delighted we are, after all these years, that Ms. Hoffman’s equally engaging Princess Grace has been newly published. Grace wants nothing more than to be a pink-frocked princess in a school parade. Her quest to find out what a princess actually does leads her to discover that throughout history princesses have been warriors, athletes, scientists, and brave spies! Her Nana encourages her to shake the idea of all the pink fluff and pattern her costume after kente-clad African princesses. Her enthusiasm for learning about the royalty of her own culture inspires her classmates from all backgrounds to do likewise, and the class parade becomes something much more interesting and exciting for all the children – even the boys. Illustrations by Cornelius Van Wright and Ying-Hwa Hu add joy and richness to this most likable story. Hardcover, $16.99
Julian Houston’s beautifully written New Boy succeeds both as riveting
coming-of-age story and a thoughtful and understated account of one young
man’s evolution from nervous schoolboy to Civil Rights’
activist. When Rob Garrett is sent from
his home in
While doing research for this column I attempted to find the name of the first book written by an African-American author for African-American children, and while that eludes me even now I did discover that one of the first was Langston Hughes’ collection of poetry, The Dream Keeper, published in 1932, and now available in a 75th anniversary edition handsomely illustrated by African-American artist Brian Pinkney. Hardcover, $16.99
Finally, I was delighted to discover while researching Black History Month that there is a most useful website – The Brown Bookshelf - which celebrates African-American authors with a heart for children’s’ literature. There’s a link to it on our website, or just google “The Brown Bookshelf.”
Your
Favorite 2007 Reads
Here are your Favorite Reads of 2007, or at least a very small sampling of them. We can fit only about 700 words into this column, but you submitted over 15,000 words about the books you liked and didn’t like during 2007. For the whole report, visit our website.
The Yiddish
Policeman’s Union by Michael Chabon. It’s a murder mystery,
social commentary, and love story in one thought-provoking package. I
can’t stop thinking about it! (Alice Wertheim,
Pickett’s History of Alabama by Albert J. Pickett. I have read this book once a year since college graduation in 1991. (David Ward)
Wolf of the Deep
by Stephen Fox. The personal story of Raphael Semmes and his exciting, dramatic
years as captain of the ship
The Everyman’s Library Edition of History Of My Life by Giacomo Casanova. Diplomat, priest, flim flam
man, politician, gambler, investor, prisoner, escape artist, tutor, father, and
lover, Casanova was (actually) not more scandalous than most young and talented
men in 18th century
The Seasons of
The Tin Roof Blowdown
by James Lee Burke. As a resident of the
Rhett Butler’s
People by Donald McCaig ended up being quite a surprising read. The story
of Rhett Butler’s childhood and all the things he did that were not
mentioned in Gone With the Wind made
for fascinating reading. I truly loved the book, and have been recommending it
to all my friends. (Laura W.,
A book I hated was What Happened Before He Shot Her by one of my favorite writers, Elizabeth George. Not that I won’t buy her next book, however! (Sunshine Huff)
The Religion by
Tim Willocks. The protagonist, a soldier of fortune, is an adventurer and arms
dealer by trade, and agrees to help a French countess find her 10 year old son,
whom she has never seen, and whose name she doesn’t know, in the midst of
the siege of
The Fifth Woman
by Henning Mankell. If you are a mystery lover and are looking for something
different, Mankell is your man. His novels are set in and around
The Book Thief by
Markus Zusak. The tale of a German girl during World War II. Told in
mesmerizing fashion by Death himself, the characters shine brightly and tales
of bravery and humanity (even by Hitler’s staunchest followers) are an
everyday occurrence. (Amanda Cullum, Valley,
Suite Francaise
by Irene Nemirovsky is the first two
novels of what Nemirovsky planned to be a series of five on the topic of the
German occupation of
Suddenly They Heard
Footsteps: Storytelling For The Twenty-First Century by Dan Yashinsky. It
has great stories about telling stories, along with great stories. (Madelyn
Dinnerstein,
The Year
in Review
First, a true story. Unlike the major TV networks, and the
big city newspapers, and even this very newspaper, we believe that if
you’re going to do a “Year in Review” story you ought to wait
until the whole year is over, just in case something big happens right there at
the very end. So this column is being written at
For Christmas a friend gave us a whole box of fortune cookies, and since there
was no Chinese food in our dining plans for the holidays, we decided we’d
just wait and open our first fortune cookie just before midnight on New
Year’s Eve, just so we’d know what to expect in 2008, and we did,
and here’s what it said, really: “Treat yourself to a good book for
a needed rest and escape.” Now, you may say that’s more an
“advice” cookie that an actual “fortune” cookie, but
still we took it as a sign that perhaps we’re on the right path, and so
we’ve decided to keep on keeping on in the book business, and hope that all
of you will take our cookie’s advice for 2008, and beyond.
And now, a quick look back at 2007. We sold 6,072 separate titles during the
year. That sounds like a lot, and it is, but 3,641 of those titles sold only
one copy each. Our bestselling book was a David Baldacci’s Wish You
Well. We sold 942 copies of that one, but only because several cities chose
it as their Community Read of the Year, and then waited too late to order the
book, and at the last minute had to turn to us to round up as many copies as we
could find, and we found 942 of them, some as far away as Oregon.
Our bestselling nonfiction title was a cookbook, Frank Stitt’s
Southern Table. We found a special buy on that one, and gambled on a very
large purchase, and it paid off, as we sold 311 copies. And here are some other
highlights:
Most Titles Sold, One Author: Kathryn Tucker Windham, 18 titles,
including some audio.
Title Most Fun To Sell: Jaws dropped when we showed folks the
children’s book Gallop! It’s a whole new kind of book. The
pictures move!
Most Disappointing Sales: We loved the PBS series, but we just
couldn’t sell Ken Burns’s companion book The War. Runner-up:
Narnia pop-up book by the usually dependable master Robert sabuda. Also,
even though it made our Top 5 Bestseller List, Donald McCaig’s Rhett
Butler’s People was not the mega-seller we’d hoped for.
Most Surprisingly Good Sales: Lots of them this year, including Timeless
Landscape Design by Hugh and Mary Palmer Dargan, Wolf of the Deep by
Stephen Fox, and Jacob’s Ladder by Donald McCaig.
National Top 10 Books on Our Top 10 List: Only one, Harry Potter and
The Deathly Hallows.
Best Writer We Discovered. Susan Hill. Not a new writer, but new to us.
Complex, contemporary English mysteries.
Our Annual Request: Write the next column for us! Email your Favorite
and Least Favorite Reads of 2007 to capitolbook@knology.net.
The Last
Minute
Your Christmas shopping is finished, right? Well, if you suddenly remember that one last person you need something for, and if you think a book might be just the thing, there’s still time to get a good one, but not much time. Here are our very last suggestions of the year, and remember this: your favorite bookstore has these, and all the other ones we’ve recommended all year, and probably about 5,000 more! And every one of them a perfect gift for somebody.
Schott’s Miscellany 2008 This almanac is rapidly becoming Thomas’s most looked forward to book of the year. He wishes he’d been the first to say about it, “One of the oddest and most addictively readable reference books in print,” but the Boston Globe beat him to it. Sort of a World Almanac with verve and wit and a wry point of view. The perfect gift for the person who may not know everything, but yearns to. ($26.95 hardcover)
Born Standing Up Steve Martin’s look back at his days as a stand-up comedian. Very funny in places, as you’d expect, but also very moving. We actually listened to this one on CD on a drive home from a Thanksgiving trip, and were mesmerized. Anybody who grew up with Saturday Night Live would love this one. ($25 hardcover)
The Alphabet From A to Y With Bonus Letter Z! by the very same Steve Martin (and illustrated by the great Roz Chast!). Just imagine the illustration for Martin’s couplet about the letter S: Sour notes so badly sung by sopranos/Sank a seaworthy sloop that was shipping pianos. Go ahead and read this book 100 times, and on reading # 101 you’ll discover something brand new. ($17.95 hardcover)
The Dangerous Book For Dogs by Rex and Sparky. A parody of the mega-successful Dangerous Book For Boys, this one’s a surefire hit for the dog lover on your list. Non-dog people will just not get it. ($15.95 hardcover)
Lost Worlds in
The Portable Atheist An odd title for a Christmas list, we admit, but nonbelievers need something to read, too. This one comes on the heels of the great success of God Is Not Great, whose author Christopher Hitchens selected the writings for this new one, including pieces by Omar Khayyam, Percy Bysse Shelley, Mark Twain, H.P Lovecraft, Ian McEwan and 42 others. ($17.50 paperback)
Pop-Up Books Here’s a very old category of book that’s seen an explosion of popularity in recent years, and this year there are lots of them to choose from. Here are a few of the very best:
The Chronicles of Narnia by Robert Sabuda, the grand master of the pop-up book. $29.99.
600 Black Spots by David Carter. Combines his wonderful sense of humor with astonishing craftsmanship. There really are 600 black spots, but you’ll have to get a 3 year old to help you find them all. $19.99
How Many by Ron van der Meer. This one does for colors and shapes what the previous one does for black spots. $24.99.
The Night Before Christmas by Niroot Puttapipat. Beautiful! And to reward you for reading this far, we’ll tell you this: this is the book we’re giving this Christmas to all the children on our list. Please don’t tell them! $16.99
For You,
Only The Best
It’s gift-giving time, and at such a time there are two ways to shop for books in a bookstore. You can roam all over the store, poring over hundreds of books, and spend hours trying to find just the right one for everyone on your gift list, or you can head straight to the display of Houghton Mifflin’s annual “Best American” books, stand in one spot for maybe two minutes, and find the perfect gift for everybody.
Here’s a quick little recap of every book in the series.
The Best American Comics 2007 Nowhere in this book’s 346 pages of comic strips will you find Beetle Bailey or Blondie or even Doonesbury. In fact there’s not a single comic strip in here we’ve ever even heard of, but that doesn’t mean we can’t recognize the brilliance of the art and the writing in these strips. Warning: this one’s not for kids.
The Best American Spiritual Writing 2007 Thirty five of the past year’s best essays about religion and spirituality. Nobody will agree with every essay here, but with writers like Robert Bly, Adam Gopnik, Garry Wills, and John Updike you’ll not find a single one of this book’s 304 pages uninteresting. Edited by Philip Zaleski.
The Best American Mystery Stories 2007, edited by Carl Hiaasen. Know a mystery fan? Buy them this book. With stories by Lawrence Block, James Lee Burke, Louise Erdrich, William Gay, Laura Lippman, Ridley Pearson and 14 others, they’ll be in mystery hog heaven.
The Best American Short Stories 2007, edited by Stephen King. Some folks like short stories, some don’t. Find somebody who does, and thrill them with this book. The writers include Ann Beattie, Mary Gordon, Alice Munro, Richard Russo, William Gay (yes, him again), Louis Auchincloss and John Barth. These stories originally appeared in 20 different American and Canadian magazines, so it’s unlikely that your giftee will have read more than one or two of them.
The Best American Sports Writing 2007, edited by David Maraniss. Ian Frazier, Larry Brown, Michael Lewis, Bill Buford and 24 other great writers write about every sport you can imagine, and maybe one or two you can’t.
The Best American Travel Writing 2007, edited by Susan Orlean. This may be our favorite of the whole series, probably because we actually travel way less than we wish we did. Luckily, people like David Halberstam, Rick Bass, Elizabeth Gilbert, and Ann Patchett do get around, and write about it so beautifully.
The Best American Essays 2007, edited by David Foster Wallace. The word “essay’ is a little off-putting to some folks, but just think of them as nonfiction ruminations, or just think of them as very interesting long magazine articles. Or better yet, just read them. Contributors include Malcolm Gladwell, Cynthia Ozick, Moly Peacock, Louis Menand, and 18 others.
The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2007, edited by David Eggers. Stuff that fit no other category went into this volume. Fiction, nonfiction, poetry, lists, short graphic novels, etc. One entry is a list of the best life stories consisting of exactly 6 words. (“Ex-wife and contractor now have house” is one of them). Odd, offbeat stuff.
The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2007, edited by Richard Preston. Can we change something we said before? This one, not the travel one, is Thomas’s favorite, by a long shot. From the essay about the fraudulent (and possibly murderous) British ornithologist, to the question of whether all important scientific discoveries have already been made, to the fascinating essay about gryllacrididas (they’re insects) and what they tell us about our own violent natures, every essay in this collection teaches the reader a lot of new stuff, and makes him think differently about a lot of stuff he thought he already understood.
We think these books are just about the best bargains in the whole book world, and they come with one other great benefit: if you give one of these to somebody, and they love it, then your gift problem is solved forever, because there’ll always be another new one next year! Except for the Comic Strip book, which only comes in hardcover for $22, they’re all available in paperback for $14, and in hardcover for $28.
The Good
News
Serious Christmas shopping has begun, and we are here to do our part. What follows is a very little bit about a whole bunch of books, and if, while reading all this, you will just keep in mind everybody you know, we have no doubt that you will find the perfect gift for at least one of them. And if not, don’t worry. We’ll have two more columns just like this one before Christmas gets here.
Southern Belly: The Ultimate Food Lover’s Companion To The South by John T. Edge. This is a revised – and expanded – edition of an old favorite. And how can you not love a book about food written by a guy who wrote his Master’s thesis (at Ole Miss) on potlikker? . The book explores mostly hole-in-the-wall eating establishments all over the South, with as much emphasis on the people who run them as on the food they serve. ($14.95 paperback)
In The Know: The Classic Guide to Being Cultured and Cool by Nancy MacDonell. Ever feel left out of the conversation at one of those upper East Side cocktail parties? Then this may be the book for you. It’s filled with information about art and fashion and architecture and travel and music and lots more. But it’s also cheap! Only $14 in paperback.
How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read by Pierre Bayard. Nobody can read everything, so sometimes you find yourself in a conversation about a book you think everybody else has read, but you haven’t read it, and you don’t want anyone to know it. This book will guide you through that sticky situation. Give this one to someone in your book club, but only if they have a good sense of humor. ($19.95 hardcover)
With The Old Breed At
Peleliu and
Wolf of the Deep
by Stephen Fox. This one has been one of our bestsellers all year. It’s
the amazing story of Raphael Semmes and his ship
The
The Mitfords : Letters Between Six Sisters This substantial tome is edited by Charlotte Mosley, but written by Nancy, Diana, Jessica, Deborah, Pamela, and Unity Mitford, privileged British women who knew – and wrote to each other about – such diverse people as John F. Kennedy, Givenchy, Adolf Hitler, Queen Elizabeth, and Virginia Durr.
At 834 pages, it’ll keep you entertained for years. ($39.95 hardcover)
Defining Moments in Books Sometimes people ask us where we get our ideas for this column, and this book is sort of the answer. It’s 800 pages of ”the greatest books, writers, characters, passages and events that shook the literary world.” Any bibliophile would love to get this one for Christmas, and the really good news is that it’s just one of a series of books. There’s also one about movies, and one about music. ($24.95 paperback)
Math Doesn’t Suck by Danica McKellar. We argued about including this one, and Thomas only agreed after being reminded that the author once played Winnie on one of his favorite TV shows, The Wonder Years. Now she’s a world famous mathematician, and this book is her attempt to get middle school girls interested in math. ($23.95 hardcover)
The Good
News
Except for the mortgage crisis, and global warming, and
The book we’ve had the most fun selling this year has been The Dangerous Book For Boys, by Conn Iggulden. It’s chock full of stuff boys find fascinating, and so do their fathers, and every week we sell more than the week before, and no doubt it will be a big seller this Christmas. But the really big news is that, just as we suspected they would, the publishers have now produced a similar book for girls, The Daring Book For Girls, by Miriam Peskowitz, and early reaction from our customers leads us to predict that this one will be one of the big hits of Christmas. Both books are $24.95 in hardcover.
And then there’s Rhett Butler’s People, the authorized companion novel to Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind. This is one about which you’ll read a lot of divergent opinions. Most of the criticism will be about McCaig’s handling of the issues of slavery and race, but no matter how he’d handled those questions he’d come in for a lot of criticism from one direction or the other. But here’s the deal: this is a crackling good story about old Rhett, one of the truly enigmatic figures in all of American literature. Read it. You’ll love it. ($27.95 hardcover)
You’ll also love Kathryn Tucker Windham’s newly
reissued
Some people are just amazing, and Phyllis Hoffman is one of them. Publisher of eight women’s magazines, Phyllis is also an author, and her beautiful book Southern Lady: Gracious Tables has quickly become a mega-seller, and promises to remain so right through Christmas. It is an absolutely stunning guide to creating just the right “tablescape” for your party, whether it’s formal or informal. We’ve had to reorder this one three times already. ($39.95 hardcover)
And in that same vein, Bunny Williams has come through just in time for Christmas with her Bunny Williams’ Point Of View, a combination how-to manual and memoir from one of the world’s leading interior designers. Bunny has been a student of the some of the great interior designers in the whole world, and part of this book is her stories of learning from them. The rest is her telling you, and showing you, how it ought to be done. Her Affair With A House from a couple of years ago is still the most popular book in our design section, but this one’s about to take its place. ($60 hardcover)
And then there’s this: the first-ever “Scanimation” Picture Book, and don’t feel bad if you’ve never heard of scanimation, because nobody else has either, since it was invented just for this book. It’s for kids, and when you turn each page an animal runs, struts, swims, flutters, swings, soars, springs, or gallops across the page as if by magic. We say it’s for kids, but Thomas spent the better part of a recent afternoon fooling around with the book, trying to figure out how they do that. It’s called Gallop!, it’s by Rufus Butler Seder, a genius, and it’s only $12.95. That’s cheap for a miracle.
Ptahhotep and Enheduanna
You’ve probably never heard of Ptahhotep, or of Enheduanna. That just goes to show you how fleeting is fame. Ptahhotep lived in about 2350 B.C., and Enheduanna about 100 years later, and they were only the first two people in the whole world to be called literary writers, or at least they’re the earliest we know about.
Writing had been invented almost 1,000 years before
Ptahhotep’s day, but for a whole millennium it was used mostly for
commerce. Then Ptahhotep came along in
Enheduanna came along a century or so later, and has enjoyed a little resurgence of popularity in the past few years, because Enheduanna was a woman, and the study of her writings has become a staple in courses on feminism. She wrote poems and hymns, and like Ptahhotep, only a very little bit of her writing has survived the past 4,500 years.
Not too long after Enheduanna, people began to do what we think of as “literary” writing in earnest, mostly in the form of epic poems, the first of which we know about is The Epic of Gilgamesh, which you really ought to read, not because it’s important, but because it’s really good, especially if you like to read about friendship, rivalry, betrayal, lust, the doomed quest for immortality, monsters, and, for good measure, a flood which covers the entire world, a literary device to which the author of Genesis would return about 1,000 years later.
If you do decide to buy a copy of The Epic of Gilgamesh the first decision you’ll have to make is which edition to buy. There are roughly 75 different editions in print, some in verse form, some in prose. Any will do, but the reason we thought to write about Gilgamesh is that we came across it as part of a wonderful series of books published in the past year or so by Penguin, and called Penguin Epics. They’re mostly extracts of much longer works, and at about 125 pages they’re not too long, but just long enough to give you a real sense of the source work, and at least expose you to some of the stuff you’ve always meant to read, but just never got around to, like The Epic Of Gilgamesh.
There are 20 volumes in the series, and they’ve sat over in a corner of the store for some months, mostly ignored by our customers and, sad to say, by us, too. In fact, we were thinking of sending them back to the publisher the other day, but thought instead that maybe we ought to take a little closer look at them, and now we’re hooked, and don’t intend to stop until we’ve read all 20, or most of them.. Besides old Gilgamesh, we’re reading Xenophon’s The Sea, Virgil’s The Destruction of Troy, Ovid’s The Serpent’s Teeth, Apuleius’s Cupid and Psyche, and 15 more.
Well, actually 27 more, because over in that same corner of the store was another great Penguin series, this one consisting of 12 works of nonfiction, written, as Penguin says, by “the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization.” Some will be familiar to you, like Rousseau’s The Social Contract and Marx and Engels’s The Communist Manifesto, but if you’re like us you’ll really delight in some with which you may not be quite so familiar, like Baldesar Castiglione’s How To Achieve True Greatness, William Hazlitt’s The Pleasure Of Hating (“Love turns, with a little indulgence, to indifference or disgust: hatred alone is immortal.”), and Thorstein Veblen’s Conspicuous Consumption. That last one is more than 100 years old, but it is as modern and as withering a satire on modern capitalism as anything being written today.
Amazing. Over in that one little corner we found 32 books, each only $8.95 in paperback, covering nearly 5,000 years of the written word. We wouldn’t expect anybody to buy them all, but we can’t believe that anybody could look through these and not find 4 or 5 perfect reads.
We Play
Catch-Up
The faster we go the behinder we get, and even though we tried all summer to mention these books, we just never got around to it. Until now.
Amy Bloom’s new book Away has gotten universally good reviews, but we just left it sitting on the shelf until our recent book club night. Something speaker Toni Hetzel said about this one, and we can’t even remember what it was, caused us to pick it up, and once up, we did not put it down. Lillian Leyb’s journey takes her halfway around the world in a desperate search for her small daughter. It is a short book,, but encompasses dozens of fully realized characters and covers many years. It is amazing and wonderful that Bloom can make so much come alive in so few words. This one is just great.. (Hardcover, $23.95.)
Dennis McFarland’s Letter from Point Clear is the story of a family, some of whom have
left
One that we read months ago and still think about often is Warm Springs by Susan Richards Shreve. Shreve developed polio as a child, and at the age of eleven went to Warm Springs as a live-in patient. She was one of the many patients there, which included not only children, but adults and babies. Her child's eye view is straightforward, never self-pitying, and her adult understanding of the bigger picture make this unforgettable memoir about an unforgiving disease one of the most powerful and pleasurable books we will ever read. (Hardcover, $24.)
Of course we are always looking for great new mysteries, and found a few this summer that will get you out of town even when there are no more vacation days.
Elizabeth Ironside’s Death in the Garden is a classic English mystery. A group of friends gathers for a party at a country house, a death occurs and everyone is a suspect. It takes a very good writer to bring it off, and Ironside is more than up to it. (Paper, $14.95.)
Fred Vargas is the #1 bestselling author in
And finally, here’s one that we read not so long ago. Just the other day, in fact. It’s Arthur Schlesinger’s posthumous Journals: 1952-2000, and even though there’s nothing in it to disabuse us of the notion that Schlesinger might have sold a little bit of his academic soul in exchange for insider status with the Kennedys, it turns out to have been a good bargain for the reader. Schlesinger never intended this for publication, and you can tell it, as he skewers folks you might think he’d have admired, and hobnobs with folks you won’t believe. Catty, funny, name-droppy, sometimes heartbreaking and always fascinating. A must read for political junkies. (Hardcover, $40)
Lost Dogs
We’ve written before about the Law of the Dog Book,
which law holds that in any book with a picture of a dog on the cover, that dog
will die in that book. It’s the main reason we quit reading books with
dogs on the cover years ago. And it’s the main reason we were a little
concerned recently when it became obvious that we were going to have to read
not one but two books with dogs on the cover, because not one but two very well
known writers, both of whom are coming to
The newer of the two books is Cormac: The Tale of a Dog Gone Missing, by Fairhope writer, and former bookstore owner, Sonny Brewer, who is also the author of two novels very popular in these parts, The Poet of Tolstoy Park and A Sound Like Thunder. The new book is not a novel, exactly, and not nonfiction, exactly, but a tale, the book jacket informs us, “based on a true story.” Which means that Sonny did in fact own a dog, and that the dog did actually go missing during a storm in Fairhope, and that the dog did in fact end up being bounced around a series of animal shelters, and did in truth somehow end up…..well, let’s just say the dog found himself a really, really long way from Fairhope, where Sonny, in the midst of writing one of his novels, is joined in the search for the dog by the whole community. The book is Sonny’s story, not the dog’s, and if you’ve ever lost a dog, or feared that you might, and especially if it was your fault, you’ll be engrossed by this story of one man’s longshot attempt to find his friend. And you can come meet, and commiserate with, Sonny when he comes to town on October 11 to sign copies of this very moving tale. (Available in hardcover, $17, and paperback, $13)
The other dog book is another one of those books we should have known about a long time ago, but didn’t. And we only came across it now because as it happens, it was written (in 1992) by Donald McCaig, the writer we wrote about a few months ago because we discovered another of his books, Jacob’s Ladder, while researching his forthcoming Gone With the Wind sequel Rhett Butler’s People. His dog book is Nop’s Trials, and the more research we did about it, the more often did we see it called one of the great dog books, and it is. It’s a novel about Nop, a Border Collie stolen from his master in West Virginia, and what makes it great is that much of it is told through the dog’s point of view, and that point of view is pretty surprising, and at first maybe a little disturbing to anybody who thinks their lost dog would spend all his time pining away for his master. Nop turns out to be pretty adaptable to whatever circumstance he finds himself in, and not all that unhappy a lot of the time while he’s “lost.” But his owner is sure unhappy, and so will you be when it appears that all hope is lost. ($15.95 paperback)
We’d like to talk to Donald McCaig about this book, but we probably won’t get the chance, because he’s likely to be pretty busy talking about Rhett Butler’s People when he comes to Montgomery’s Huntingdon College on November 19 on one of the very early stops on his nationwide book tour for what promises to be one of the blockbuster publishing events of the year. Mark your calendar now!
Now, about the Law of the Dog Book. It’s a law which is occasionally observed in the breach, which is to say that there is some chance that the dogs in these two books – or maybe just one of them - will actually survive their ordeals. And that’s all we’ll say about that.
The Old Days - And One To Look Forward To
First, a little remembrance of things past. Then, a look forward to a really significant literary event.
We are getting close to a real milestone. Sometime last week
we celebrated our 29th anniversary as owners of Capitol Book, so if
we’re still standing this time next year that’ll make 30 years, and
that seems like a pretty long time, or at least it does to us. But not nearly
so long as 57 years, which is how long ago our mentor Victor Levine founded
Capitol Book downtown on
We cannot help thinking of Mr. Levine every year about this time, for not only did we buy the store from him in September of 1978, it was also in September that he died, in 2001, just after 9/11. He was a great friend, a great bookseller, and a great boss, and we miss him.
Happily, not all the direct links to the old bookstore are gone. Mr. Levine’s wife Gene, who worked with him in the bookstore, is in fine fettle, and we know that because we saw her not long ago at the 90th birthday party of George Browning, who spent several years as an employee of the Levines, and who stayed on to work for us for nearly 15 years, and is only the smartest, funniest, quirkiest, most cantankerous, most generous, most opinionated, sharpest tongued yet most even tempered person we’ve ever known,
But enough about the past. Let’s talk about the future, and specifically about an upcoming event you would be foolish to miss.
Elizabeth Spencer has been writing since before Capitol Book
ever existed. She published her first novel, Fire in the Morning, in 1948,
only a very few years after leaving
It’s a really brilliant little novel, in which the language barrier between the Americans and the Italians confuses and complicates an already confusing and complicated situation.
In the 45 years since the publication of The Light in the Piazza Elizabeth
Spencer has published 5 more novels and scores of short stories, mostly set in
the South. She’s also been awarded the 2007 PEN/Malamud Award for her
body of short fiction, the Award of Merit from the
And now you have a chance to meet this remarkable woman,
who’s now 86 years old and still keeps a schedule that would exhaust
someone 30 years younger, like us. She’ll be at
It’s called the Stallworth Lecture Series, and if you haven’t been going here’s a few of the folks you’ve missed: John Updike, Jane Goodall, Doug Marlette, Janet Reno, Peter Schickele, David McCullough, Dee Dee Myers, Carlos Eire, Karl Haas and about 20 more of the most interesting people in the world.
But don’t worry about what you’ve missed. Worry instead about what you will be missing if you don’t turn out on October 2 to meet Elizabeth Spencer, and then mark your calendar, and then just go. The folks at Huntingdon will be happy to answer any questions you might have. Just call Su Ofe, the lady in charge of things over there, at 833-4515.
Local Books Are The Best
The best books, or at least the ones that are the most fun to sell, are the local ones. The ones written by and/or about the folks we know and see all the time. And all of a sudden there are several really good ones to talk about.
Timothy J. Henderson lives in
After many, many years out of print, Kathryn Tucker
Windham’s Alabama: One Big Front
Porch has been reissued by
It’s football season again, and for many years around
this time we’ve done a little survey of the newly published books about
The best of the books is Auburn Man: The Life & Times Of George Petrie by Mike Jernigan.
Chances are that every person who ever attended
We were disappointed with the
They say that football is a religion in
And there’s another religious book making waves around
the store. This one is by Karl Stegall, the longtime (but now retired) senior
minister at
And there are more to come. A book about
Summertime
Mish-Mash
This week, some end of summer odds and ends:
A lawsuit filed by a very prominent
We once hosted a similar “successful debacle,” when Fannie Flagg attracted about 700 people to the bookstore. We’d badly underestimated the crowd, and sold out of books with about 500 people still in line, some of them quite unhappy. We never could figure out anybody to blame for it except us.
And there’s more litigation news in the book world,
only this time it was all settled, finally, when the lawyers were banished from
the room. According to the
All this lawyer talk boring you? Then keep reading, because it gets sexier.
We don’t know Paris Hilton, and we’ve never met
Brittany Spears, but we did recently make the acquaintance of two of the three
principals in the wackiest love triangle to hit the book word in a long time,
and so did some of you. It was back in April, at the Alabama Book Festival, and
two of the star attractions were Pulitzer prize winner Robert Olen Butler and
his wife, the accomplished novelist Elizabeth Dewberry. We enjoyed meeting them
both, and they seemed perfectly happy together, but we were pretty busy, so
maybe we missed something. It seems that
Believe it or not, Fall is just around the corner, and one
thing that means around here is that many local reading groups will be cranking
up again, and they’ll all be looking for suggestions about what to read
this year. You can get such suggestions lots of places, including from your
local bookstore, but one problem with asking the same old folks for their
suggestions is that the suggestions tend to be the same ones over and over. So
we’ve invited a reading group expert, Toni Hetzel of Random House, to
come up with some new suggestions for you. She’ll be at the bookstore on
Tuesday, August 28 at
Gone With
the Wind – Part 1
If you were the scion of a prominent family, and you had fathered an illegitimate son with an employee (well, sort of) of your father’s, and your enraged father had then arranged to have the mother married to the adopted son (well, sort of) of one of his other employees, then banished the mother and the baby (yes, banished his own grandson), and then the sister (well, sort of) of the husband in this arranged marriage went off to boarding school, where she became pregnant by, and then married, one of her teachers, but then lost the baby, and then , in defiance of the prominent father, took in the husband of the banished woman, and then….well, then the Civil War broke out, and you went off to fight in it, and so did the guy who was married to your lover, whom your father had banished along with your very own child, just exactly how do you think all of this would work out for you in the end?
Did you get all that? We hope not, and in fact we tried to make it a little vague, and a little confusing, because we hate to give away too much of any book, and especially of a great book, and especially of an epic which we’ve ignored since it was published nearly ten years ago, and which we now believe everybody ought to read, and we’d believe that even if the book, and its author, were not about to become part of the biggest publishing event of the year. Which they are.
The events we intentionally muddled up in that first paragraph form only the very beginning, the jumping off point, of Jacob’s Ladder: A Novel of Virginia During the Civil War by Donald McCaig, originally published in 1998 but ignored then by us because neither of us was particularly interested in Civil War books, whether fiction or nonfiction. What fools we were, to have dismissed this American epic, as fine and compelling a mix of Love, Hate, Sex, Race, War, Peace, Family, Duty, Honor and Country as we’ve ever read. A truly, truly great read.
And we’d still never have read it but for the executors of the estate of Margaret Mitchell, who came up with the idea that a sequel to the classic Gone With the Wind might be fun, not to mention lucrative, and commissioned Alexandra Ripley to write the universally deplored but commercially successful Scarlett in 1991. That did well enough that they decided to do another, and that’s where the real fun began.
They first hired Emma Tennant, a British novelist who was
best known for her novel Pemberley, a
sequel to Jane Austen’s Pride
& Prejudice. The executors liked the fact that she was comfortable with
tackling the classic work of others, and that she was willing to agree to their
restrictions on certain of their beloved characters’ behavior. She agreed
to the restrictions, and to the deal, and she wrote the book, which she called
The executors say the book was “too British.”
Others say that the executors were astonished to learn that Pat Conroy had
expressed an interest in writing the sequel, and they thought his version would
be a real blockbuster, so they thanked Emma Tennant very much, paid her
$250,000, and forbade her to publish
But what about the “publishing event of the year” we mentioned earlier? Well, it’s coming in November, and by now you must have guessed that it’s the long-awaited second sequel to Gone With the Wind, that Donald McCaig is writing it, that we’re really excited about it, and that there’s more to the story, and there is. But you’ll have to wait until next time.
Gone With
the Wind – Part 2
In our July 8 column, we promised to tell you the rest of the story of the selection of the author for the upcoming Gone With The Wind sequel, and here it is.
In 1926 the 26 year old Margaret Mitchell left her job as a reporter at the Atlanta Journal. The arthritis in her feet and ankles had become unbearable. She took to her bed, and spent her time reading. Soon her husband bought her a typewriter, and challenged her to write a book. She did, finishing what she entitled Tomorrow Is Another Day, featuring a heroine named Pansy, in 1929. Only two people knew of the book, her husband and her friend Lois Cole.
In 1934 Caroline Miller of
That is why Harold Latham, editor of the giant Macmillan
Publishing Company, made his way to
On
Then in 1999, 50 years after Margaret Mitchell’s
death, another automobile trip figured into this story. Hope Dellon, an editor
at St. Martins, had dropped off her daughter for her ballet lesson one Friday
afternoon in
“As I recall, the book--which would
have been newly released in paperback in the summer of 1999--was sitting on a
front table, and it caught my attention because of the People
magazine quote on the front: "Think Gone With the Wind; think
The book was Donald McCaig’s Jacob’s Ladder: A Story of
Hope Dellon remembered to pick up
her child from ballet practice, and took the book back to St. Martins. The publisher
brought the Mitchell estate folks on board, McCaig was contacted, a deal was
struck, and now, only 8 years after Hope Dellon happened to walk into that
bookstore, we are counting the days until November 6, when St. Martins will
publish Donald McCaig’s Rhett
Butler’s People.
And now you know the whole story.
Interstitial
Careful readers of this column will recall that last time we wrote about the upcoming publication of the second authorized sequel to Gone With the Wind. The book will be written by Donald McCaig, the author of Jacob’s Ladder, a Civil War novel published in 1998, ignored by us then, discovered by us when we learned of the new GWTW sequel, ands then read and loved by us. Those same careful readers will recall that we promised to tell the rest of the story of how McCaig came to be chosen for the job, a promise we do intend to keep, but not this week. We hope it’ll be next time, but there’s no way to be sure, because our request to speak to the folks who really know the inside poop is still being considered by the lawyers of the Margaret Mitchell literary estate, a cautious bunch to say the least. Stay tuned.
Absent the topic we’d counted on for today’s
column, we thought we’d just fill you in on a few odds and ends, and the
first may be bigger news than the GWTW sequel story. The great Ferrol Sams has
written a new book! The title is Down
Town: The Journal of James Aloysius Holcombe, Jr. for Ephraim Holcombe
Mookinfoos, and if you know Ferrol Sams’s works, the title alone
should have you tingling, with its promise of lots of intergenerational
rumination. The hardest we ever laughed was at a speech by Ferrol Sams twenty
years or more ago, and before that the hardest we’d ever laughed was
while reading Run With the Horsemen,
published in 1982, the first of a trilogy of books by Sams featuring himself
thinly disguised as Porter Osborne, Jr., a kid from the rural South growing up
during the Depression. The other titles in the trilogy are The Whisper of the River and When
All the World Was Young. They’re all available in paperback, and
especially if you grew up in the South these are books you really must read.
The new one,
More Good Sequel News Sebastian Faulks has been hired to write a new James Bond novel. Faulks is the author of lots of books, most notably Charlotte Gray. Faulks is brilliant English writer, and his decision to take on the James Bond brand seems to us like a real risk for his reputation. It had better be good, and we suspect it will be. Set for publication next Spring, the book is titled Devil May Care, and it’s the story of an aging James Bond recruited for what certainly ought to be his last mission in 1967.
And Speaking of 1967
You old baby boomers will remember 1967 as the Summer of Love. You can probably
still remember most of the words to most of the songs on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, but can you remember what you were reading that summer? Mostly required reading for school, but
when you, or your hopelessly out-of-it parents, went to the bookstore that
summer, the book you were buying was The
Arrangement by Elia Kazan, or, if you preferred nonfiction, you were
standing in line for The New Industrial
State by John Kenneth Galbraith. Cheryl, 14 years old at the time, and in
defiance of what surely were her mother’s wishes, read The Arrangement that summer, and also
two others on the list, Rosemary’s
Baby by Ira Levin and The King of
the Castle by Victoria Holt. Thomas read none of the bestsellers,
apparently opting for classier fare. The complete New York Times Bestseller
List for
It’s been a couple of weeks, but we couldn’t let
the untimely death of Doug Marlette go unremarked upon. The author of the
mega-bestseller The Bridge, and also
of Magic
Time, Doug seemed like an old friend the first – and only –
time we met him, when he was here in February for the Stallworth Lecture Series
at
Bibles and Big Bucks
File this one under Milestones You Almost Missed. This year marks the 550th
anniversary of the publishing business, for it was in 1457, in Mainz, Germany
that Johann Fust and Peter Schoffer became the first publishers to affix their
names to a commercially published book, the Mainz Psalter, a psalter being a
collection of Psalms. It will not come as a surprise to many modern day
publishers to learn that Fust was not really a literary guy, but a money guy,
who earned his place in publishing history by foreclosing on a mortgage
he’d made to the real literary guy, Johannes Gutenberg, he of Gutenberg
Bible fame.
Actually, the Bible was what caused the money problems, as it turned out to cost way more than Gutenberg had estimated when he first borrowed money from Fust. There was the inevitable falling out, then accusations by Fust of embezzlement by Gutenberg, then a trial in 1455. Gutenberg lost, but managed to continue a modest printing business for some years, though he never once affixed his name to any book he printed. Less self effacing was Fust. In 1457 he and his son-in-law Schoffer published the Mainz Psalter, affixed their names to it, and then ballyhooed the whole thing by promoting the amazing new printing process by which it had been produced. But since they never mentioned Gutenberg’s name in any of that publicity campaign, people may have been left with the impression that Fust himself had invented the movable type printing press. Do you think? Luckily, history has sorted itself out over the past 550 years, and we hope Gutenberg is in a position to take some satisfaction in the fact that everybody who’s reading this column can immediately identify Johannes Gutenberg, while we’d wager that not a single one of you has ever heard of Johann Fust.
By the way, some 180 copies of the Gutenberg Bible had been
printed before the court case. 48 copies are known to exist today. Only 21 are
complete copies, one of them in the Bibliotheque Mazarine in
There’s also an incomplete copy of the Bible in the
Huntington Library in
On
It ended at $50,000, and the Bible belonged to
For lots more great stories of the antiquarian book trade in
Copy, Right?
You write something, you own it, right? Yes, right. The
instant you write something down on paper, assuming that what you’ve
written is not copied from somebody else, you do in fact own it. Lock, stock,
and barrel. Nobody else can publish your words without your permission, and
that prohibition lasts until you die, and then 70 years after that. That’s
the current state of
For instance, that paragraph you just read. We wrote it, but we don’t own it. It belongs to this newspaper, and if you want to reprint it somewhere you’ll have to ask their permission, not ours. And it doesn’t matter when we die, because our columns are considered “work for hire,” and they belong to the newspaper for 95 years, which means if you’re reading this on microfilm in the year 2102, you can feel free to reprint it, even if we’re still living then. Unless the law has changed, which it will have. So be careful.
So why the greatly oversimplified little primer on copyright law? Because it’s an important part of the biggest story in the publishing business, or the biggest tempest in the publishing teapot, depending on whether you’re a writer or a publisher. It all started on May 17, when the Authors Guild issued a warning to writers that the giant publisher Simon & Schuster had removed one short provision from their standard contract with writers. But first, one more little lesson about the publishing business.
There are exceptions to everything, of course, but here’s the way things usually work when you sign a contract with a publisher. You still own the copyright to your book, but you license the publisher to print and sell copies of your copyrighted book. Forever. Or at least until the copyright expires 70 years after your death, at which time anybody can publish and sell your book. That Forever Provision is a pretty good deal for the publisher, don’t you think? Well, it’s actually not Forever. It’s Forever, or until the publisher declares your book out of print, at which time all rights revert to you.
But what does it mean to be out of print? The publishing industry has always taken a pretty sane position about this, and until now the standard book contract has provided that once the publisher is no longer selling any meaningful quantity of copies of your books, the book will be declared out of print, and you get your rights back.
But not any more, at least not at Simon & Schuster. They have removed that little provision from their contracts, and now they will in effect never return to an author his rights to peddle his work elsewhere. The reason? It’s as simple as P-O-D. Print On Demand.
It is now the 21st century, and essentially every book that is published is first digitized, which just means somebody punches the text into a computer, and POD technology makes it possible for a publisher to crank out a very few copies of a book whenever he needs to, rather than printing and warehousing many copies as they once did. Digitizing also makes it possible to publish books in nontraditional digital formats nobody’s even dreamed of yet, and while that’s sorting itself out it really does make business sense for any publisher to be very careful about linking the fate of the digitized copy of the book to the sales of the printed copy. After all, it costs a publisher essentially nothing to keep the digitized copy in a computer memory somewhere.
Does all of this really matter? Presently, only to a very few writers. Check out any bestseller list from, say, 30 years ago. Most of the books on that list – not to mention the 100,000 other books published that year - are already out of print, and will never again be published in any form, no matter who owns the rights. In most cases the writers and Simon & Schuster are haggling over something which up until now has not been worth haggling about, but nobody really knows what the digital future holds, and if we were real writers we’d fight to get these rights back, too. And if we were publishers, we’d fight to keep them.
Detour
We figured it out one time. When you count the time we actually spend waiting on customers in a typical day, it comes out to about 4 1/2 hours, and since we’re open 8 hours a day, that leaves about 4 hours for other stuff.
.
What other stuff? Well, there’s the payroll, and the accounts receivable, and the accounts payable, and the tax reporting and remitting, and the yardwork, and book salesmen to see, and the time spent figuring out what is was we sold last week, so we can figure out what might sell next week, and most weeks there’s a booksigning or two to plan. And then there’s this column to write. Which is where we bogged down last week.
We had a great idea for a column (which we won’t reveal here because we may actually want to spring it on you one Sunday soon), but it was going to take a good bit of research, which is to say a great deal of time, which normally we don’t mind since it means we can put off all the stuff in the preceding paragraph, but this particular week we fell prey to The Thief Of Time, which is to say our attention was caught by books we had never intended to write about, and by the time we’d finished those books (well, one we never did finish, and never will) they were all we wanted to think about, or talk about, or write about.
The first book has already begun to change the way we live. Really. And the premise is as old as time: You Are What You Eat.
Barbara Kingsolver’s The Bean Trees, Animal Dreams and most especially The Poisonwood Bible are novels we recommend all the time, but we’ve not been such fans of her nonfiction, until now. Her new book, Animal, Vegetable, Mineral is the story of how she and her family, disturbed by the quality of food they believed they were being provided by American agri-business, set about the task of raising all their own food for a year. And what they could not produce themselves, they were determined at least to buy locally.
The book can be disturbing, informing (as when husband Steven, a professor of environmental studies, contributes his essays about the scientific side of their experiment), and very, very funny, as when Kingsolver sets about to train her turkeys to mate, that ability having been lost by commercially raised turkeys.
Obviously not everyone can raise their own food, but this book makes such a compelling case against mass-produced, insecticide-laden food transported at high cost across huge distances that you can’t read it and help but adjust your shopping habits at least a little. We did. Just since reading the book, we now have goat cheese from Notasulga in the pantry, and Cheryl made a batch of preserves from Alabama-grown strawberries, and Thomas was even dispatched to the attic the other day to find the old yogurt maker we’ve not used in 30 years! The book is $26.95, hardcover. Read it and reap.
And the other book that stole our time? It just happens to be on a subject in which Thomas professes to have no interest, which makes it all the more unusual that he must have spent half his waking hours poring over it last week. And at over 1,600 pages, he’s barely gotten started! The book is Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, by famed Manson Family prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi, who has spent the past 20 years researching the assassination and every conspiracy theory that’s been offered to explain it.
We can’t imagine anybody’s sitting down and reading this one straight through, but if you were alive back in 1963, and even if you’ve been only peripherally interested in all the assassination theories since then, you can open this one up anywhere and instantly know what Bugliosi’s talking about, and you won’t be able to put the book down until you’ve finished his unbelievably comprehensive deconstruction of the theory. But conspiracy nuts beware: Bugliosi just may convince you that the Warren Commission was right all along. ($49.95 hardcover)
Not Dreck
One thing we’ve noticed about the book business over the past thirty years is this: the dry spells don’t last long. Oh, frequently a week, or even a month or more, will go by, and we’ll find ourselves wondering why they’re publishing all this dreck, and wonder if anything good will ever come through the door again, but something good always does, and usually it’s a whole stack of good stuff, like these books that arrived recently, just when we thought we’d seen the last of the good stuff.
The first is an odd little book, one that we’d never have published, because we’d figure that nobody except Thomas would be that interested in a whole book about the business adventures and misadventures of Mark Twain. But publish it someone did, and Ignorance, Confidence, and Filthy Rich Friends by Peter Krass actually kept Thomas awake a couple of nights. Poor old Twain lived at a time when the great fortunes were being made by Vanderbilts and Morgans and Rockefellers, and he thought he ought to be getting rich, too. Mostly, but not always, his schemes failed, but you can’t believe how much time and energy, not to mention money, he spent on non-literary pursuits. ($22.95 hardcover)
Which leads us to the most welcome sight we’ve seen come into the store in a long time. It’s been over ten years since Roy Blount published a book of essays, so it was a great thrill to receive Long Time Leaving: Dispatches From Up South the other day. In our opinion, or at least the opinion of one of us, Roy Blount is the funniest American writer ever – except for Mark Twain, and that’s pretty good company. We’ve written before of the night Thomas kept Cheryl awake all night reading in bed from Crackers, Blount’s classic little book about the Jimmy Carter years. With this new one, almost 400 pages, there won’t be a good night’s sleep around our house for at least a week. ($25 hardcover)
Few modern movies have inspired the devotion of 1980 movie “Caddyshack.” We ourselves have never played a round of golf, unless you count miniature golf, which is actually quite a bit of fun itself. Nevertheless, any movie with Bill Murray and Rodney Dangerfield and this line where Bill Murray quotes the Dalai Lama: “And he says, Oh, uh, there won't be any money, but when you die, on your deathbed, you will receive total consciousness. So I got that goin' for me, which is nice” is our kind of movie, and so good that Scott Martin actually wrote a whole book about it The Book of Caddyshack: Everything You Have Always Wanted to Know About the Greatest Movie Ever Made. (Paper, $16.95)
A nifty book which sold out too quickly last Christmas has finally been reprinted: Monkey Portraits by Jill Greenberg. Yes, it really is a book of photographs of monkeys, taken with the same care usually reserved for human portraits. Theses pictures are provocative, weird, beautiful and endlessly fascinating. You’ll swear these faces are trying to tell you something…but what? (Hardcover, $24.99)
Sorry, Moms. Today may be your
day, but the next favorite book on our list is not for you, or your daughters.
But we can heartily recommend it for some of your sons, especially those around
ten to fourteen years of age. It’s called The Dangerous Book For Boys, and if it doesn’t have
everything a boy ought to know, it has a lot, like Famous Battles, How to Make
a Battery, Secret Inks, Latin Phrases Every Boy Should Know, Books Every Boy
Should Know, and a whole chapter just about Girls. This one’s slightly,
but intentionally and humorously, politically incorrect. It’s also a huge
bestseller in
And apropos of nothing else: Write a limerick about an
Paperback Writers
Most of you will be unfamiliar with the old Beatles song Take A Back Right Turn. That’s because there never was such a song, even though for a week or so back in 1966 you could not have convinced Thomas of that, for he had heard the song himself. Then somebody pointed out that there was indeed a new Beatles song, but that it was in fact called Paperback Writer, and boy did everybody get a big laugh out of that.
But who’s laughing now? The guys who had such fun at Thomas’s expense have had to content themselves with lives as doctors, lawyers, architects, bankers and engineers, while Thomas, perhaps inspired at least in part by that little episode, has spent the past 30 years or so selling, reading, discussing and arguing about books, the majority of them paperbacks, including these, which have only recently been released in that format.
The Girls by Lori Lansens. At the start of this most unusual and affecting novel, Rose Darlen undertakes the task of writing her autobiography, and encourages her twin Ruby to join her in this endeavor. When you’ve shared – literally -- every event of your life together, wouldn’t it be interesting to know how differently the two of you experienced those shared times emotionally, spiritually, and intellectually? But there’s more. Rose and Ruby, you see, are craniopagus twins – joined at the head, and unable to be surgically separated. But by the time we finished reading this novel that had become the least important thing about them. $13.99
Suite Francaise , Irene Nemirovsky’s novel of Nazi occupation in Paris, was written in 1942, lost and then found and first published in 2006 to great acclaim.$14.95
Water For Elephants by Sara Gruen. Set in a circus during the Depression, this book just keeps selling and selling, as one reader tells the next how much they loved it. $13.95
Ida B. by Katherine Hannigan . Ida B. Applewood is a little girl who is serious about order in her universe. She has a habit of planning everything and sets firmly in her mind how she believes events will and should transpire, and how the people in her life should behave. She does not cope well when things don't work this way. But all of the things that most satisfy her need for routine are disrupted when her mother becomes quite ill and she’s forced to attend school. To make things even worse, her father soon finds it necessary to sell some of their property, including her favorite corners of it, and Ida B. has a determination not to cede a single iota of this space. A fine children’s novel about how to live in a world that doesn’t always work the way we wish it would. $5.99
White Shadow by
Ace Atkins. Amazing Ace, we call him, as he churns out one really good book
after another. This one, a noir novel
based on actual events in
Dead Center by David Rosenfelt. Rosenfelt’s wit is sharp as ever and his characters every bit as charming as in the other four books in the series (Open and Shut, First Degree, Bury the Lead, and Sudden Death), but there is an unexpected depth to this one that surprised us. If you don’t know Rosenfelt, you should, and if you like Harlan Coben, you’ll love this guy. Great beach reads. $6.99
Did somebody mention Harlan Coben? His Promise Me is another great page-turner, one that no one we know has been able to put down once picked up. $9.99
None of those sound good? Think you could write something better? Before you do, try Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer: a Guide for People who Love Books and Those Who Want to Write Them. $13.95
That’s eight great new paperbacks, one for each day of a Beatle week.
The
If you’re putting on a funeral, or a wedding, on Saturday, April 21, then you are excused from attending the Second Annual Alabama Book Festival, which will be held that day down at Old Alabama Town right here in Montgomery.
But be warned. If you’re burying somebody that day, or
marrying somebody off, you may be the topic of much very hilarious discussion
at the Festival, as the authors of the 2005 bestseller Being Dead Is No Excuse will be here that day, discussing that
mega-successful primer on how to conduct a proper Southern Funeral, and also
discussing their brand new soon-to-be mega-bestseller Somebody Is Going to Die if Lily Beth Doesn’t Catch That Bouquet,
or The Official Southern Ladies’ Guide to Hosting the Perfect Wedding. The
authors’ names are Gayden Metcalfe and Charlotte Hays, and their
first-ever appearance in
Highly controversial, but very interesting - that’s
why we are looking forward to the appearance of Brad Vice. His first collection of short stories, The Bear Bryant Funeral Train, was
published to great critical acclaim, and then almost immediately recalled (and
all the copies destroyed) by his original publisher amid charges of
plagiarism. Vice was pilloried by many,
but defended vigorously by many others.
You probably saw the big feature story in this very paper
several weeks ago, all about former Montgomerian Ravi Howard’s first
book, Like Trees,Walking. He has also
been featured in USA Today, the Atlanta Constitution, on NPR and many other
places. His book is a fictional
retelling of a true story, a lynching that took place in
Mary Saums weaves humor, politics and a little magic into Thistle & Twigg, a mystery centered
around two women, widows in their sixties, who are not exactly who they first
seem to be. Set in the
John Green has won so many awards for his first book Looking for Alaska that there is not
room to list them all here. The book is a raucous story about a high school
that is an awful lot like the one he actually attended in
A late addition to the schedule, but a very welcome one, is
Tina McElroy Ansa. She is a writer, teacher,
filmmaker and storyteller. All of her
books are set in the mythical world of
Wendy Reed and Jennifer Horne have put together a powerful book, All Out of Faith, a collection of essays by an impressive group of Southern women, all of them searching in different ways for meaning and spirituality in their lives. The two editors along with two of the best writers, Sena Jeter Naslund and Jeanie Thompson, will be part of a panel talking about their heartfelt quests.
And that’s not all, not by a long shot. We’ve
devoted several columns to the Festival, but still have barely scratched the
surface of all the great writers who’ll be here. For full details
you’ll need to visit the official website of the Festival. Just Google
“
The Hand
of Esau
You never know what’s coming around the bend, but there’s a very
early contender for our favorite book of the year in the store right now. And
it might end up not just as our favorite, but as our bestselling book of the
year, too. And no, those are not always one and the same.
The book is The Hand of Esau: Montgomery’s Jewish Community and the
Bus Boycott ($15.95 paperback), by Mary Stanton, the same woman who wrote
another
The new book is a fascinating, and we would say indispensable, book about the
three Jewish communities in
We’d never heard of Benjamin Goldstein, whose story is amazing. He
arrived in
Nor did we know of Seymour Atlas, a native of
And these are only two of scores of really fascinating stories in this book.
But the book, as entertaining and informative as we find it, has proved painful
for many of our Jewish customers. They’ve known and loved nearly
everybody in this book, and many of their parents and grandparents and friends
come in for some very pointed criticisms. Many of these customers have pointed
out to us what they see as errors of both fact and interpretation of long-ago
actions. Some of them are extremely upset, though we’d be remiss if we
didn’t point out that just as many of our Jewish customers enjoyed it as
much as we do.
And here’s the best part. Whether you’ve read it or not, or liked
it or not, you will soon have the chance to hear all about it from the author
herself. Mary Stanton will be one of the featured writers at the Alabama Book
Festival here in
A Hidden Mystery
Guess what all these books and/or their authors have in common. The answer is at the end of the column.
Architecture
critic Peter Blake wrote in 1960 that "during the 1930s, Frank Lloyd
Wright built four structures of a beauty unexcelled in
Chantel
Acevedo’s first novel, Love and
Ghost Letters, has received rave reviews all across the country, and won
the 2006 “Latino Literacy Now Award.” She is a first generation Cuban American but
this amazing book is set in her parents’ and grandparents’ world of
old
We’re always recommending Julia Spencer-Fleming’s mysteries, and have no intention of stopping now. There are five in the series, which feature a female Episcopal priest and a small town sheriff, all set in the Adirondacks. Great page-turners, great mysteries, and great books. The latest is All Mortal Flesh.
Sally Nemeth lived her earliest years in Indiana, was raised mostly in Delaware, spent a few of her high school years in Alabama before college and adult life in Chicago. Then she started writing for television and moved to L.A., but found out she really wanted to write a book and she did and it is The Heights, the Depths, and Everything in Between, a wonderful book for young adult readers,
Kali Van Baale won the Fred Bonnie Award, which means that her first novel, The Space Between Us, was published by Montgomery’s River City Publishing, because winning the Fred Bonnie Award, established in honor of the great Alabama writer and teacher who died in 2000, means in fact getting your book published by River City.
So, did you figure out the common thread? As unbelievable as it may seem, all of these books, and all of these writers, will be right here in Montgomery on April 21 for the second Annual Alabama Book Festival! And so will about 50 other great writers. And so should you.
Grandpappy, The
Auctioneer, and the Auroch
Leroy Van Dyke is a name not many readers of this column will recognize. He was a country music singer whose 1961 hit record Walk On By was for many years the most popular country song ever on the Billboard charts. But it was his 1956 record The Auctioneer that has landed him in a column about books.
The Auctioneer, sung mostly in the rapid-fire delivery of a real cattle auctioneer, tells the story of a young boy who loves listening to auctioneers, goes off to auctioneering school to learn the trade, and hits it big. It’s a story not too dissimilar from that of many auctioneers, including the best one Thomas ever knew, Tom McCord, his very own grandfather, who died 40 years ago this month. Not surprisingly, The Auctioneer was his favorite song.
Beginning when he was about 10 years old, Thomas would spend a couple of weeks each summer traveling with his grandfather, whom he called Grandpappy, to cattle auctions in Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, Kentucky and Tennessee. Thomas loved these trips, not least because his grandfather would entrust him with real responsibility, beginning with accounting for the money spent on the trip, and gradually working up over the years to be a real ring man, one of the guys who stand in front of the auctioneer, taking bids from the auction customers. On one trip together, when Thomas was only 15 years old, there were serious talks about his actually learning to be an auctioneer. But before Thomas turned 16 Grandpappy died.
Some years later, Thomas was surprised to be summoned to his grandmother’s house, there to be presented with Grandpappy’s copy of the actual 1956 recording of The Auctioneer, and the beautiful old RCA Victor console record player on which his grandfather had listened to it. It was many years after that when Thomas digitized the old recording, and put in on his computer, and that’s where it sat, only occasionally listened to, until the other night, when hearing it for the first time in a while unleashed in Thomas a flood of memories, one of them literary.
It’s a long way from an old country music record to the backroads of the rural South in the early 1960’s to the history of the cow to the ancient Lascaux cave in France to the rise of the Greek alphabet to the concept of boustrophedon, but Thomas traveled it in a flash the other night, like this:
You already know why the record reminded him of Grandpappy, and of their trips together around the South, and one feature of those trips was that they usually turned into traveling classrooms. Spelling tests, geography quizzes, Latin drills, cattle classification lessons, anything that popped into Grandpappy’s head was fair game for a lesson and, later, a test. That’s how they got to talking one day about why there were so many different breeds of cattle, and that must have been why one day Thomas was assigned the task of learning about the whole history of cattle.
What he learned was that modern cattle seem to have descended from the ancient auroch, the animal which if you visit the Lascaux cave, as we did last summer, is depicted in the cave drawings as what most people call a bull, or an ox, both of which it does resemble.
That beast had changed but little when the Greeks began to invent their alphabet, and their written language, about 12,000 years later. But by then the old auroch had been domesticated, and the Greeks used them to plow their fields, and if you’ve ever done any plowing you know to plow one row, then turn around and plow the next row in the opposite direction. The Greeks and their aurochs were so tuned into this system that they adopted the same method for their first written language. They’d write one line left to right, and then just turn the corner and wrote the next line right to left, and so on and so on. And that weird method of writing is today called boustrophedon, which the ancient Greeks would recognize as meaning “as the auroch turns.”
The best book about all this is Alpha to Omega: The Life & Times of the Greek Alphabet, by Alexander & Nicholas Hunter. And just for fun, download The Auctioneer.
February
11, 2007
Alabama
Book Festival April 21!
Almost nobody thought it would work. Last year’s inaugural Alabama Book
Festival was as much a leap of faith as it was a labor – and we do mean
labor – of love for those brave souls who conceived it, and then made it
happen. Experts told them they’d be lucky if 200 people showed up, and so
200 somehow became the magical number they hoped for. If only we can get 200
people to downtown Montgomery on a Saturday in April for a book festival,
we’ll be doing great, they told each other.
They needn’t have worried. There were 200 people there when the gates
opened in the morning, and people kept coming all day, and in spite of about
200 inevitable first-year little glitches, it only turned out to be the most
glorious day we’ve ever spent anywhere in all our years in the book
business in Alabama. We even thought of suggesting that they never do another
one, because how could it ever be as good again?
But of course we suggested no such thing, and the really good news is that
there will indeed be a Second Annual Alabama Book Festival all day on April 21
down at Old Alabama Town. And you should plan to come and spend the whole day
there, and here are a few reasons why.
50 writers. Including one Pulitzer Prize Winner, Robert Olen Butler. And
one Caldecott Award Winner: Vera B. Williams. And novelists Ron Rash, Julia
Spencer-Fleming, Carolyn Haines, Ravi Howard, and about 15 others. And Nathalie
Dupree, TV chef and author of our favorite cookbook last year, The Shrimp
and Grits Cookbook. And Gayden Metcalfe, whose Being Dead Is No Excuse
is among the top 10 sellers in our history, and whose new book about Southern
Weddings, Somebody Is Going To Die If Lily Beth Doesn’t Catch That
Bouquet, will be published just in time for the Festival. And local
favorites Wayne Greenhaw, Julia Oliver, Kirk Curnutt, Joey Brackner, and Marlin
Barton. And Brad Vice, maybe the most controversial writer of the past couple
of years, at least among the Southern literary set. And the Discovering
Alabama guy on Alabama Public Television, Doug Phillips. And lots more,
too, including Alabama’s very favorite writer Kathryn Tucker Windham.
Artists It’s the year of the arts in Alabama, so several Alabama
artists will be there, including Nall, Amos Kennedy, and a very special
appearance by the quilters of Gees Bend. Also said to be way cool is Steve
Miller with the University of Alabama Book Arts Program.
Kids’ Books Programming for the younger set in their own special
area, with readings, storytelling, special entertainers and other activities
all day.
Teachers There’s also a teacher’s workshop on the Friday
before the festival, featuring Chantel Acevedo, Janice N. Harrington and Luke
Wallin.
Books For Sale Books of every writer there will be offered for sale, and
all writers will be happy to autograph as many copies as you can place in front
of them. And yes, if you already own books by any of the featured writers, feel
free to bring them along and get them signed.
Drama Special panels with the Alabama Shakespeare Festival’s
Southern Writer Project playwrights
You This is all going to happen, but it’ll go a lot smoother if
they can get a little help from folks like you, and when we say
“help,” we mean actual help, which is to say “time.” If
you’re over 16, you’re invited to spend a couple of hours on what
we hope will be the beautiful spring day of April 21, in what we know is the
very beautiful setting of Old Alabama Town, doing stuff like escorting authors,
helping out in the children’s area, manning the gates, and just greeting
folks and pointing them in the right direction. Your shift will last about 2
hours, you’ll get a free Alabama Book Festival T-Shirt, and you’ll
have
Children’s
Books Change
If your child is
graduating from high school this year, then he or she was born the same year
our Eleanor Lucas came to work for us. That seemed hard for Eleanor to believe,
and it also got her to thinking about the changes she’s seen over those
18 years in her specialty, children’s books. So we asked her to write
about it:
I’ve been responsible for the selection and ordering of the books in our children’s room for most of my tenure with the store, and things have changed radically over that time.
In the early days of my career we were lucky if we sold a single copy of most of the newly published hardcover novels for young readers. That changed with the mind-boggling success of the Harry Potter series. It wasn’t necessarily that kids were more interested in reading – it was that parents and grandparents were no longer put off by the notion of paying hardcover prices for books their independent readers might outgrow. Generally, the only hardcover novels we sold before then were the established classics, and we mostly sold them to grandparents who thought (rightfully) that they were important for their grandchild to have in their personal library.
But by far, the most interesting shifting trend has been in the illustrated books market for younger children.
For many years, most newly published picture books seemed to be marketed to adult buyers. Gonzo, highly stylistic art appealed more to collectors than to children, and text that was often so didactic that nobody had much fun reading it became commonplace. More than once I asked a publisher representative to explain for whom one of these was actually written, and the answer was usually a shrug of the shoulders and an apologetic look on their face.
Over the past few years though, the trend has turned, and we are seeing increasing numbers of books long out of print republished, and when we get them our customers are snatching them up. In fact, of our top 15 bestselling hardcover picture books of 2006, more than half were books originally published before 1960. Some of these were classics, like Goodnight Moon, that haven’t ever been out of print, but others were re-prints, such as Eve Titus’ Anatole ($14.95) and Munro Leaf’s Noodle ($15.99). Our sales of hardcover editions of titles like Robert McCloskey’s Make Way for Ducklings ($17.99), Munro Leaf’s The Story of Ferdinand ($17.99)and Lois Lenski’s Cowboy Small ($11.95) have continued to increase steadily as well.
It is quite telling that when Random House took over
distribution of the Golden Books we all knew and loved, one of the first things
they began to do was poll their sales reps to see which titles that had dropped
out of the line-up needed to be reprinted, and as these have reentered the
marketplace they have sold like hotcakes.
The most recent of these fondly remembered titles is Baby’s First Book ($2.99), a title
one of our customers asked for three years ago.
(I hope she’s reading this column!)
Even some newly published books are getting in on the act, with a return to child-friendly illustrations and stories that teach the important values – kindness, fairness, integrity – in subtle fashion. Our bestselling picture book for 2006 was Michelle Knudson’s Library Lion ($15.99), and judging by how many times the publisher found themselves out of stock and heading back for more printings in the course of the year, it’s not a trend exclusive to our store. Everything about it has the feel of one of those tried and true classics.
Why this trend? I believe much of it has to do with sharing the gift of simply illustrated, timeless stores that hearken back to a simpler time in what is an increasingly complex world.
The reaction we hear when we feature one of these “retro” books prominently in the store is amazing. Customers have been known to launch into a story, remembering when their parents or grandparents read the book to them when they were little. There is nothing grander than sharing a book you loved as a child with a child you love, and now some of these wonderful books are part of the lives of three generations.
It’s a delightful thing.
Your
Favorite 2006 Reads
This week, in what is now a
first-column-of-the-year tradition, we are happy to turn over the writing
duties to you guys. Here is a very small number (about 5%) of the very large number
of reports you sent us when we asked you to tell us what were your Favorite
Reads of 2006. If you want to read the entire, uncut, unexpurgated list, just
visit our website. Contributors’ names follow each review.
The most captivating book I read this year was Sea of Gray by Tom Chaffin. This book takes the little boy in all of us and propels him along a path with such intrigue and adventure that it’s gard to put the book down, especially if you are a Civil War buff! (Doc Hudson)
I’m
a new convert to Jason Fforde’s Nursery
Crime series, The Fourth Bear
and The Big Over Easy, and also
loved The Eyre Affair. Just
the ticket for those of us who majored in English and had no idea what to do
with our degrees; his books are full of literary inside jokes – very
funny and challenging. (Diane L. Christy)
I
think Cormac McCarthy is the greatest living novelist, and one of the five or
six best American writers of all periods. His novel The Road is my nomination for best book of the year. Its searingly
bleak plot, situation, and theme of mankind's endless capacity for destruction
is in keeping with much of his dispassionate judgment of the human (and,
indeed, overall natural) condition… (Rick Anderson)
Francine Prose's Reading Like A Writer is a book I expect to read repeatedly. Her
writing is graceful and seeing her influences reminded me of
how much I loved reading the "classics." I went back to a few of them
and spend many happy hours with "old friends." (Pam Kingsbury,
Florence, AL)
Ashley Gordon and Cheryl turned me onto the
Elizabeth George mysteries, which I loved for the first eight or so books, but
I've had to break up with her because she has a bad mommy
complex. (Stephanie Hill)
Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild, Rory Stewart's The
Places in Between, Tracy Kidder's Mountains
Beyond Mountains, and Elizabeth Gilbert's The Last American Man. All are about highly self-sufficient young
men compelled to undergo self-conceived challenges so intense most other people
would consider them at least half-crazy. (Jim Upchurch
Sally and I have been overwhelmed by the
beauty and dramatic power of Sara Gruen's marvelous tale of an elderly man
recalling his life with a circus in the 1930s. Water For Elephants is a beautiful story, told with a poet's touch
and a journalist's eye. It is
terrific. (Wayne Greenhaw, San Miguel de Allende, Mexico)
I publicly confess to reading To Kill a Mockingbird this year for the
first time. I do hope most of you will continue to speak to me. I don’t
know how it happened I had never read it, but there is a part of me that is
glad I waited until, now, as a grown woman (if not grown-up) to experience the
amazing adventure. (Karren Pell)
The bulk of my
reading this year has been Katrina-related books. By far the best of the
growing pile is Jed Horne’s Breach
of Faith: Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City, a
careful and insightful account of the storm’s effect on New
Orleans. (Randal Woodland)
The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova:
outstanding historic fiction about the legend of Vlad the Impaler
(Dracula)! I must say I was not so interested when it was recommended to me.
Once I started it I could not stop reading. (Elizabeth Baucom, South Carolina)
The
Cabinet of Curiosities by
Preston Childs. I read it on a stormy
night, and combined with such a suspenseful tale, I was startled a few
times. It made me want to make sure the
doors were locked. (Susan Wilkinson)
A Woman in Jerusalem by A. B. Yehoshua. Set in contemporary Israel and an unnamed former Soviet republic, the novel takes a familiar fact of life in the Middle East – terrorist bombings – and strips away the politics and preconceptions to examine the human repercussions of one violent death. (Jim Carnes)
Lay of the Land by Richard Ford. Like a slow, pleasant morphine drip. (Monte Burke, New York)
“The
Year in Review”
In 1950 our mentor Victor Levine opened Capitol Book downtown on Montgomery Street. There it and he stayed for 28 years, until we bought the store from him in 1978. That was 28 years ago, which means we’ve now owned the store for as long as Mr. Levine did, which makes 2006 what we call a milestone year. Here are a few of the highlights, and lowlights, of that year.
Best Selling Book This one came out of left field, and directly from the internet. Our blockbuster of the year was SWAG, which stands for Southern Women Aging Gracefully, and which started as a blog sent from Birmingham’s Melinda Rainey Thompson to a few friends. Somebody suggested the material was good enough to be made into a book, and you know what? It was.
Best Selling Fiction Almost a tie between Judy Oliver’s Devotion, Mark Childress’s One Mississippi, and Fannie Flagg’s Can’t Wait to Get to Heaven.
Best Selling Nonfiction Taylor Branch’s At Canaan’s Edge, Carlos Eire’s Waiting For Snow in Havana, Tom Chaffin’s Sea of Gray, Glenn Lafantasie’s Gettysburg Requiem, and Clea Koff’s The Bone Woman. There’s a lesson in that list. Had it been up to us, we would likely have carried only one of those books, At Canaan’s Edge. But luckily for us, groups like Huntingdon College, Alabama State University, and The Alabama Department of Archives and History invited the other writers to town, and asked us to sell books at their events. We were so impressed by the writers and their books that we were then able to sell lots more of their books in the following weeks.
Best Selling Children’s Book Even though we were out of stock on this one for a long time at Christmas, Library Lion by Michelle Knudsen still took top honors this year.
Most Disappointing Book. The “prize” this year for disappointing sales was Thirteen Moons, the highly anticipated second novel by Charles Frazier of Cold Mountain fame. The new one just never caught on.
Other Biggest Disappointment Have we mentioned that we went to France this year? Nothing about that trip was disappointing, but when we got back home we learned that Fannie Flagg had been quoted in this very newspaper, saying she was planning to come to Montgomery in the fall for a booksigning. We must have fielded 100 calls from folks wondering exactly when she’d be here, but she never made it. She did call, though. Turns out there were problems on the set of the movie they’re making of her Redbird Christmas, and she just couldn’t get away.
Best Fallout From France Trip We read lots of books about France before our trip, and recommended lots of them in this column, but the ones that really flew off the shelves were Diane Johnson’s wonderful trio of L’Affaire, La Marriage, and Le Divorce. Only read these if you are interested in love or sex or death or travel, or all four.
Our Worst Selling Job Try as we might, we just could never get people to try Tom Franklin’s Smonk. This excerpt from Publisher’s Weekly review of the book may help explain our problem: “Fast-paced and unrelentingly violent, Franklin's western isn't for everyone, but readers looking for a strange and savage tale can't go wrong.” We have to warn folks about that sort of thing, but we should have done a better job of convincing them that the read was worth the risk. Sorry, Tom.
Happiest Surprises We sold lots more of Birds of Alabama than we thought we would. The little $14.95 field guide just kept on selling all year. Another bird book, Bird Songs, caught us completely off guard. At $45, we thought we might sell one or two of this collection of 250 bird songs, but we sold lots of it, and could have sold lots more, except the publisher sold out just before Christmas. Another surprise was The Intellectual Devotional, a secular version of the popular religious day books. Nobody who thinks they’re pretty smart should be without this one on their bedside table.
“Christmas Book Ideas”
Here are 25 of our best book ideas
for Christmas. All prices are for hardcover editions, unless otherwise noted.
We’ve started cooking our way through Nathalie Dupree’s Shrimp & Grits Cookbook. And if you think there are not enough ways of cooking these two delicacies to fill a book, you are wrong. So far every dish has been excellent. ( $21.95)
If you ever listen to NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac, you know that Garrison Keillor has the gift of making a poem speak to you. He chooses 185 of those poems in Good Poems for Hard Times. (Paper, $15)
Life Is Meals is a book of days for food lovers, with a little digression on some arcane or interesting food thought for every day of the year. With charming illustrations, a ribbon marker, a real cloth binding and printing done in many different inks, the book itself is a work of art, and that is a rarity these days. ($27.50)
Three brand new books from three masters of the page-turner. Thomas Harris explores Hannibal Lector’s youth in Hannibal Rising. ($27.95). Michael Crichton’s Next is a blend of fact and fiction that will leave you wondering and breathless. ($27.95) And Carl Hiaasen is back with his own unique blend of cheap thrills, black comedy, and philosophical punch in Nature Girl. ($25.95)
If you know a perfect hostess, she would love Carolyne Roehm’s A Passion for Parties. Flowers, linens, table settings and recipes, are all here, but most importantly, herein is style. ($50)
Two versions of Beauty and the Beast; one just like the Disney and
For fiction readers, Sara Gruen’s Water for Elephants ($23.95) is the story of a love triangle in a depression-era circus that folks have really loved. John Connolly tells a magical and very scary story of a boy’s journey into an imaginary world in The Book of Lost Things. ($23) Steve Yarbrough captures perfectly in remarkably restrained prose the thorny problems faced by a small town’s returning Golden Boy in The End of California ($23.95). Readers who raved about Phillippa Gregory’s The Other Boleyn Girl (paper, $16) will be thrilled to know its sequel, The Boleyn Inheritance ($25.95) has just come out. The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield is a wonderful gothic novel centered around a love of books. ($26)
For non-fiction aficionados, Nathaniel Philbrick’s Mayflower ($29.95) is the story of both the voyage and the founding and early years of Plymouth Colony. Donald Miller’s Masters of the Air ($35) is the story of the air war against Germany; gripping reconstructions of the bomber boys’ stories. The Blind Side ($24.95) by Michael Lewis is a study of the evolution of football’s offensive line, as well as an awe-inspiring story of how this evolution trickled down and forever changed the life of Michael Oher, currently playing football for Ole Miss.
Journey Toward Justice by Mary Stanton is a heartbreaking portrait of Juliette Morgan, the courageous woman for whom the main branch of our City-County public library was recently renamed. ($29.95)
For the first time in many years, Alabama’s best loved and best known book To Kill a Mockingbird is available in an audio version. Harper Lee’s complete and unabridged novel is read by one of our favorite actresses, Sissy Spacek and it turns out she was the perfect choice. (CD, $49.95)
Pop-Up books have taken an amazing leap forward in the last few years. They are more complicated and more beautiful and way cooler than they have ever been before. As a consequence they appeal not only to youngsters, but to almost everyone. Here are the best of the new ones for 2006: Encyclopedia Prehistorica: Sharks ($27.99) includes lots of other real sea monsters as well. Castle: Medieval Days and Knights ($19.99) is a fun introduction to the Middle Ages. One for movie buffs- Alfred Hitchcock. ($29.95) features tributes to The Birds, Psycho, Vertigo and more. And the big one for this year is Matthew Reinhart’s The Jungle Book, ($26.95) based on the Rudyard Kipling story. A huge bestseller.
“Children’s
Books – Part 2”
Eleanor Lucas
concludes her two-parter about Christmas books for children:
After a few years of rather disappointing holiday-themed titles, 2006 has yielded some that could just become staples in your family’s holiday tradition.
The Fourth King by Ted Sieger is a creative reworking of Henry van Dyke’s classic, The Story of the Other Wise Man. Just as in the original, the fourth king is delayed on his trip to Bethlehem by a series of pressing needs, but the sweetly comic addition of his camel Chamberlin makes this one a more child-friendly version. (hardcover, $15.99, ages 4 and up)
Stephen Krensky’s Hanukkah at Valley Forge is based on an old story recounted in Rabbi I. Harold Sharfman’s book Jews on the Frontier about a bitter night at Valley Forge when George Washington came across a soldier as he was observing the first night of Hanukkah. This movingly understated and timely story is enhanced perfectly by Greg Harlin’s watercolor illustrations. (hardcover, $17.99, ages 5 – 8)
Families of our deployed Armed Forces will most certainly love The Soldiers’ Night Before Christmas by Trish Holland and Christine Ford, with nostalgic cartoon illustrations by John Manders. What happens to those holiday care packages? Why, they’re delivered by Sergeant McClaus and his drivers – Cohen, Mendoza, Woslowski, McCord, with Li, Watts, Donetti, and Specialist Ford! (hardcover, $8.99, for any age)
A wise woman I know always says that there is nothing more “over” than Christmas on the 26th of December, and as in many other things she is right. But what if Christmas were NEVER over? What if every morning there was more STUFF to open, more turkey to eat, more gift wrap through which to tear? If you lived in Texmas, where it’s Christmas 364 days a year, you’d know! You’d look forward to school since it’s open only one day a year, and it would be tremendously exciting when the guy with the big sack who shows up at your door is the mailman given that it’s the only day mail is delivered. Merry UnChristmas is Mike Reiss’ reminder to all the “It’s OVER??” folks that sometimes enough is truly too much. Illustrated by David Catrow. (hardcover, $15.99, ages 3 and up)
Too much Christmas sweetness? Santa Claws is the perfect antidote. This is Christmas as celebrated in Monster Town, where “Mack and Zack, two monster boys/want gross and grisly Christmas toys…” Laura Leuck’s just creepy enough rhyme and Gris Grimly’s silly spooky illustrations are perfect for your own little Christmas monster. (hardcover, $16.95 , ages 4 and up)
Definitely worth a mention is the 50th Anniversary edition of Truman Capote’s A Christmas Memory, which comes complete with a CD narrated by Celeste Holm. (hardcover, $17.95, for the whole family)
Another re-issue with an added perk is Robert Sabuda’s 10th Anniversary edition of his glorious pop-up book The 12 Days of Christmas. This one comes with a surprise new blinking pop-up at the end and a three-dimensional ornament for your tree. (hardcover, $26.95)
Joy to the World is a collection of Christmas sermons and homilies from some of the most gifted preachers in America. Edited by Olivia M. Cloud, and including messages from diverse denominations, this would be a most appropriate gift for just about anyone from young adulthood and beyond who keeps Christmas. (hardcover, $25.00)
My pick of the Christmas books is Father and Son: A Nativity Story, by Geraldine McCaughrean. We don’t hear much about Joseph at Christmas time, but this charmingly imagined story gives him a voice. He wonders, “What games shall we play, boy, you and I? I mean, how can I rough-and-tumble with someone who pinned the ocean in place with a single, tack-headed moon?” Fabian Negrin’s illustrations are a perfect complement. I dare you to get through this one without tearing up. (hardcover, $16.99, for all ages)
After you’ve done drying your eyes, though, pick up Dave Barry’s The Shepherd, The Angel, and Walter the Christmas Miracle Dog. If you and your family read and loved Barbara Robinson’s classic The Best Christmas Pageant Ever when the kids were little, Barry’s sweetly acerbic holiday novella is sure to please, and is, I predict, going to be the best selling holiday book of the season. (hardcover, $15.95, perfect for kids and their adults from 10 to 110)
“Children’s
Books – Part 1”
Our children’s book expert Eleanor Lucas has more recommendations for the younger set than can fit in one column, so think of this as Part One of a two-part series. This week Eleanor muses about a few of her favorite children’s books of 2006. Next time it’ll be all about her favorite brand new Christmas and Hanukkah books of 2006.
Peter Pan has been a favorite for generations, and when J.M. Barrie generously gave the copyright to the Great Ormond Street Hospital Children’s Charity in 1929 he must have known they’d protect its integrity. Although other books have been written with that story in mind, the first ever authorized sequel is now out, and it’s a worthy one. After a worldwide competition, author Geraldine McCaughrean won the right to follow the characters into time. Peter Pan in Scarlet ($17.99, for ages 9 and up) is set in the late 1920’s, and Wendy and the Lost Boys are all grown up, but still drawn to Neverland. They eventually return there, and find the once glorious place a mess. If you need to refresh your memory of that original tale first, we suggest the also recently released audiobook of Barrie’s Peter Pan narrated by Jim Dale, the much ballyhooed voice of the Harry Potter books. The unabridged CD is $ 29.95.
As long as you have your CD player out, you and your family will want to stock up on the newly re-released Rabbit Ears audiobook series, which combine the best vocal actors with original music by some amazing musicians like Leo Kottke, Ravi Shankar, Van Dyke Parks, and lots more. If you have a car trip in your holiday future, you will not go wrong. As an example, the Rabbit Ears Treasury of Tall Tales includes “Johnny Appleseed,” read by Garrison Keillor, and “Paul Bunyan” read by Jonathan Winters. There are six volumes in the series, priced between $11.95 and $19.95, depending on playing time. (Ages 4-8)
As American history becomes longer and longer, there’s a real danger that some of the wonderful stories we heard growing up will be lost as others take their place. Jennifer Armstrong’s The American Story is a collection of 100 of quirky, heart-warming, heart-stopping, funny, and poignant stories from our nation’s history from the establishment of the first “American” city in 1565 (St. Augustine) to the edge of the seat election coverage of the year 2000. It’s entirely possible that serious historians will take some issue with where fact might collide with legend in some of these vignettes, but as a child’s introduction to the great tales of our nation, this one is a family keeper. ($34.95, ages 9-12)
My favorite illustrated book for children this year is Library Lion by Michelle Knudsen, illustrated by Kevin Hawkes. Mr. McBee, who works the circulation desk, is horrified when a lion saunters in one fine morning. Miss Meriwether, the librarian and a stickler for rules, decides he can stay if he doesn’t roar or run, and he soon makes himself indispensable. When an accident forces the lion to break both those rules, he banishes himself, and after much moping about by Miss Meriwether and the Story Hour lady, and the patrons, it’s up to Mr. McBee to restore things to rights. Just delightful! ($15.99, ages 4 -7)
If you have read Dr. Seuss’ ABC Book so many times you’ve committed it to memory (I did, some 20 plus years ago), G is for One Gzonk is not only a fun choice for your family, but decidedly less expensive than the years of therapy that some may require to get Seuss’ opening line, “Big A, Little A, what begins with A? Aunt Annie’s alligator. A. A. A” out of their head. Tiny Di-Terlooney (aka best selling author of the Spiderwick Chronicles Tony DiTerlizzi) offers up this tribute to Dr. Seuss and his “surgical precision with picture, wit, and rhyme” and it is a smashing success. From Angry Ack (who eats dirty clothes, with a marked preference for socks) to the Zanderiffic Zibble Zook (a dictionary lover), there’s not a page that won’t elicit a giggle. ($16.95, ages 4 and up)
“Back
On Track”
Tuesday is Election Day, so we
thought that instead of writing about books today, we’d just give you our
opinions on how you should vote.
Or perhaps not. Our foray into
neighborhood politics and real estate a couple of weeks ago struck some of you
as inappropriate for a book column, and your complaints to the higher-ups at
the newspaper have had the desired effect, at least for this week. Today,
it’s books only.
Refuge Denied. An amazing book. On May 13, 1939 the German ship St. Louis left Hamburg, Germany, bound
for Havana, Cuba. Aboard were 937 passengers, mostly German Jews fleeing the
Nazi atrocities. But the Cuban government denied entry to all but 28
passengers. Another passenger attempted suicide, and gained entrance to Cuba
only as a result of having slit his own wrists. The St. Louis and its remaining 908 passengers were sent away from Cuba on June 2, and were denied entry to the
U.S. on June 6. The ship returned to Europe, and 288 of the passengers were
lucky enough to be admitted to England.
The remaining 608 were sent to the Netherlands, Belgium and France,
where they were swallowed up by the Holocaust, their exact fates unknown. Until
now. In 1996 authors Sarah A. Ogilvie and Scott Miller took on the impossible
task of learning what happened to every one of the 937 passengers, and the
impossible turned out to take just 10 years. They tracked down every single
passenger! This book is the unbelievable story of their successful quest to
find these forgotten people. We’ve read it, and still can’t believe
it. Prepare to weep, but there are some wonderful stories of triumph, too.
($21.95 hardcover)
And one more thing. One of the
authors, Scott Miller, will be giving a talk about the book in Montgomery on
November 16 at 7 PM at Temple Beth Or on Narrow Lane Road. The public is
invited. Call 262-3314 for details.
SWAG On a different note altogether,
Birmingham’s Melinda Rainey Thompson has written the surprise bestseller
of the year, and judging from the reaction to the book in our store, the
funniest book to come down the pike in some time. “SWAG” stands for
Southern Women Aging Gracefully, and to say it’s struck a chord amongst a
certain segment of our clientele would be an understatement, and a big one.
Southern women of a certain age come into the store, pick this book up, and
within a couple of seconds they’re struggling to maintain their dignity
when all they really want to do is laugh hysterically. Some of them do actually
lose their dignity, and it’s something to see. It’s also something
to see them buy 5 or 6 copies of the book for their friends! ($14.95 paperback)
2007 Almanacs There are lots of almanacs published these days, and this one, compiled
by the New York Times, is the first to market this year. A big mistake, we
think, since all the others, by waiting, will be able to get Tuesday’s
election results into their 2007 editions. Bookstores will start getting the
other almanacs within a few weeks of the elections. Most will be in the $10.95
range.
Decca A collection of the letters of Jessica
Mitford, the author of The American Way
of Death. She was born into British aristocracy, flirted with Communism,
became a leftist political activist in America, and all the time she carried on
the most amazing correspondences with people all over the world. Including
Montgomery, where she often visited her friend Virginia Durr. We actually met
Ms. Mitford once, in the old downtown store. This book of letters will make you
wish they’d never invented email. ($35 hardcover)
Thunderbolt Kid Everybody hates the baby
boomers now, because they (we) are about to bankrupt Social Security, overwhelm
the health care industry, and make funeral directors – funeral directors!
– rich. Maybe you’ll be a bit more sympathetic
to us if you read this hilarious, and we mean screamingly hilarious, memoir
about growing up in 1950s America. It’s by Bill Bryson, the author of A Walk in the Woods, itself one of
the funniest books ever written. If
you’re about 55 years old, you will not get through a single page without
cracking up. ($25 hardcover)
“The Construction Boom
Is Breaking Up This
Old Neighborhood Of Ours”
In 1917 Eleanor Roche of Tallassee enrolled at Huntingdon College.
In 1922 Montgomery County High School first opened on East Fairview Avenue. Seven years later Lanier High School opened on Court Street, and the Montgomery County High School was renamed Cloverdale Junior High School.
In 1932 James T. Upchurch, Thomas’s grandfather and the husband of the former Eleanor Roche, moved his family to a house on Cloverdale Park. If you stand in the yard of First United Methodist Church, and look across the park, the old Upchurch house is the second house from the left. Thomas’s father grew up in that house, and many years later Thomas himself spent a good part of his young life in that house, and in the park just outside the front door, and in the surrounding neighborhood.
In about 1937, right there in Cloverdale Park, Thomas’s parents first met. They were 10 years old.
Thomas’s father graduated from Huntingdon in 1950.
In 1959, in March, the eight year old Thomas was dropped off in front of the baseball field at Cloverdale Junior High School. He was there to try out for a spot on a Little League baseball team. He made the team (and only found out many years later that the coaches were required to take at least one eight year old on each team), and spent the next five summers playing baseball on that field. Every day after practice he would stop by the old drugstore on Fairview Avenue (like his parents, he always called it “Doc East’s,” and if that’s how you remember it you go way back) and get the best limeade there ever was.
On Saturdays the neighborhood kids would bicycle up to the Clover Theater to catch the Saturday Matinee, and why not? It only cost a dime!
In 1975, when we moved back to Montgomery after college, our first house was on Woodward Avenue, just a couple of blocks behind Cloverdale Junior High. On Saturdays we would walk to Joe’s Delicatessen for lunch.
In 1996 we moved the bookstore to its present location, just across the street from Cloverdale Junior High School. You could stand at our cash register and look out the window and see the very same baseball field where Thomas had spent those very happy years. In the summer, kids still played ball there.
In May of 2002 the last classes were held at Cloverdale Junior High School. The building was sold to Huntingdon College. The baseball field was converted to a football stadium, but even so, some 84 years after it first opened, the outward appearance of the school and its grounds is essentially unchanged. So is our love for this old neighborhood, where around every corner lies a little piece of our family’s history.
But now it is all about to change. Huntingdon will soon sell a portion of the Cloverdale campus to the Lowder Companies, who will develop the property into a mix of commercial and residential buildings. Most dramatically, the green in front of the old Cloverdale Junior High School, and right across the street from us, will be built upon, altering after 84 years one of the iconic sites of the Old Cloverdale neighborhood. Not everybody is happy about it.
All over the country, small private colleges are facing enormous financial challenges, and Huntingdon is no exception. They tell us – and we believe them – that they need the kind of money that the sale of this property will generate, if they are to have a chance to do more than just survive hand to mouth. Four years ago, Huntingdon spent a lot of money they didn’t have, to buy the Cloverdale School property. Had they not done that, who is to say what would have become of that property? A gated community? An alternative school? A halfway house? A strip mall?
It is not an exaggeration to say that Huntingdon just might have saved our whole neighborhood, and if the price of that gesture turns out to be that one corner of the neighborhood is changed forever, then we think that on the whole that’s not a bad bargain. And if they do it right, fifty years from now the “new” development will be part of some other old guy’s great memories of the Old Cloverdale neighborhood.
A disclosure: Thomas’s cousin Ken Upchurch is chairman of
Huntingdon’s Board of Trustees.
“Money, Football and
Bed”
Here are a few items we thought were interesting, but none quite so interesting as to deserve a full column.
Money For Writing? Talk to any writer, except maybe those who churn out bestsellers every year or so, and they’ll all tell you the same thing: writing books is no way to get rich, and not really even a good way to earn a living wage. Just do the math. A person will spend hundreds of hours writing a book, which might sell a few thousand copies (most don’t do that well). If a writer clears $20,000 that’s an extraordinary success, and if that same author hopes to support himself, a spouse and a child, he’ll need to do that 3 or 4 times a year, and that is just not going to happen.
But it turns out that there is now a chance for one aspiring author out there to clear $100,000 on his very next book, even if it sells zero copies! And you could be that writer, even if you’ve never published a book before. In fact, only unpublished writers are eligible. Here’s how.
Sobol Literary Enterprises, an established, reputable literary agency, is accepting online submissions of novels (poetry and nonfiction are not eligible) by previously unpublished writers. You pay them $85, they hire a large group of readers and guarantee that your novel will be read at least twice by the judges. The best novel wins $100,000 and a deal for Sobol representation. Want to enter? Just go to Sobolaward.com to get all the details.
They’ll only accept the first 50,000 entries, and yes, if you do the math again you’ll see that they’re grossing a little over $4 Million on the deal, proving that there is more than one way to make a little money in the book business. This little contest, especially the entry fee, actually does raise some ethics questions, but on balance we think it’s OK, so go for it!
Another One Bites The Dust. Sadly, this is becoming what you might call a trend. Another apparently successful publisher has gone bankrupt, and it makes you wonder what’s keeping the less successful ones in business. Atlanta’s Longstreet Press, publishers of Jeff Foxworthy’s You Might Be A Redneck If…..,, and several Lewis Grizzard books, and the phenomenally successful The Millionaire Next Door, has closed its doors. The end really came in 2002, when over 70% of the books they thought they’d sold to bookstores were returned unsold, and they were never able to recover financially.
Roll Tide. We have never seen anything like this. This fall, no fewer than 10 new books on the subject of Alabama football and/or Bear Bryant have been published, and that’s a lot. Too many, actually, and inevitably some have proved more successful than others. The clear winner? It’s The Missing Ring by Keith Dunnavant, the story of the 1966 Alabama team, which despite being defending national champions, and despite compiling a perfect record in 1966 were denied that year’s championship, which went instead to Notre Dame, which had famously – or infamously – played for a tie that year in its game against Michigan State. Of the other Bama books, our favorite is Ain’t Nothin’ But A Winnner.by Barry Krauss. It’s the inside, behind the scenes, and behind the glory, story of Krauss and the famous goal line stand against Penn State in the 1979 Sugar Bowl, a play that actually did result in a national championship for the Tide.
War Eagle. Here’s where we would write about all the new Auburn football books, if there were any. But there aren’t. Auburn fans will just have to be content with the clearly better football team in 2006. Just like in 2005 and 2004 and 2003….
Oblomov. What does it say about a person if the first book he recommends to his new girlfriend is all about a guy who spends all his time in bed? Well, Oblomov, written in 1859 by Ivan Goncharov, is just such a book, and it was in fact the first book Thomas ever recommended to Cheryl. She read it, and just look what happened. And now, the first new English translation in over 50 years is being published, and we think we’ll read it again, if we can stay awake.
September 24, 2006
“So Many Links, So
Little Time”
We bought Capitol Book 28 years ago this month. Six years later, in 1984, we bought our first computer, a Sanyo computer which we used to place orders electronically to a few publishers. Over the next few years we figured out how to program the thing, and before long we’d written our own bookkeeping software, which we still use to this day to pay our bills, and bill our customers, and do our payroll. Gradually more and more publishers and wholesalers began to let our computer talk to their computer, and by 1993 nearly everything we’d done with pencil and paper was being done by the computer, and it all made our back office operations a lot easier. We thought we had arrived at Computer Nirvana, but we were wrong.
In April of 1993 the internet, until then an arcane system used mostly by academic researchers, was opened to the masses by the introduction of the Mosaic web browser. Just think about it. When Bill Clinton took office in January of 1993 there was no such thing as a website, at least not the way we think of a website today. And now? Some estimates put the current number of websites at 100 million, and lots of those are pretty cool places to visit if you’re a bookworm. People frequently come into the store and tell us about a new book site they’ve found, and today we thought we’d pass along the favor to you. So here’s a list of some of our favorite book spots on the web.
A cautionary note: It can be frustrating to type web addresses into your browser from the newspaper, so if you want to find these spots quickly, just visit our website, where you’ll find links to all these sites
The New York Public Library Digital Collection. Hands down, our favorite site. 480,000 images including illuminated manuscripts, maps, photographs, posters and, yes, books. (www.digitalgallery.nypl.org)
The New York Times Book Review. Still the gold standard for book reviews. We visit this site every week. (www.nytimes.com/pages/books/index.html)
Bookfinder.com Of the many, many sites for finding out of print books, this is our favorite, and the one we always turn to first. You can find books as cheap as a penny, or as expensive as $10,000. (www.bookfinder.com)
Bookcrossing Here’s one we probably should not be promoting, but what the heck. Let’s say you’ve read a book and don’t want to keep it. Just leave it in some public place, visit this website and let them know where the book is. Other visitors to the website can then go pick up the book from wherever you left it. You can even follow your book’s progress all over the world. At last count, there were 14 books waiting to be picked up in Montgomery! (www.bookcrossing.com)
Neglected Books. Most books are quickly forgotten, even if they’re really good. Visit this site to find a large list of such forgotten treasures. We bet you’ve never heard of 99% of the books here, but you’ll find lots to pique your interest. (www.neglectedbooks.com)
The Literature Map. A badly mis-named site, as you won’t find a map anywhere on it. Instead, enter your favorite author’s name and the site will find other authors you’re sure to like. Scott Fitzgerald may lead you to Michael Chabon who will lead you to Richard Russo. Weird, imperfect, but really lots of fun. (www.literature-map.com)
Joshilyn Jackson. Most author sites are disappointments, with little more than a list of their books and events. But Jackson, the suddenly very well known Georgia writer, fills her site with an almost daily blog that’s really, really interesting. You’ll wonder how one person can write so much good stuff every day. (www.joshilynjackson.com)
The Elegant Variation. Clearly there are thousands more websites than we can mention. This Los Angeles-based site is one way to get quickly to lots of other sites. (www.marksarvas.blogs.com)
“A Worldwide Event?”
This coming Tuesday, September 12, is going to be the biggest day of the 2006 publishing year. Or not. We’ll know in just a couple of days.
The good news is that it won’t cost you anything to find out. The bad news – for us and for every other bookseller in America – is that unless we are very smart and very lucky it certainly will cost us. Here’s what’s up.
About a month ago we received a fax from the well respected publisher William Morrow. The fax was promoting a forthcoming book, but not in the usual way, which is to inform us of details like the title of the book and the author and the subject and the price and the publication date and how many copies are in a carton et cetera et cetera. Right up near the top of this fax, though, was this unusual note: “Title and Author to be Revealed Upon Publication.” They were keeping secret the most important things there are to know about a book!
But here’s what they did say: “A world wide publishing event, this book will make headlines around the world. A shattering, provocative and mesmerizing true story, it will receive major national media attention here in the U.S. in addition to making news around the globe. This will be the must-read-tell-all book for Fall!”
Wow.
That’s big, right? Well, not so big that they couldn’t come up with
even more: “The subject matter of
this book will make news all over the world – with details and
information never-before-revealed from a proven author who will tell the story
everyone wants to hear. This is the book everyone will be talking
about!”
And then, a little bit of actual information: the book is 320 pages, price is $25.95, there are 3 8-page color inserts, and, most alarming to us, there’s what’s called a “One-Day Laydown” on September 12. That means that they will attempt to deliver the books to every bookstore in America on the same day, September 12, the day after tomorrow. That way, the theory goes, the title is kept secret until the big day, and no bookstore has the books before all bookstores have the books.
One last bit of information, and then you’ll know everything we knew when the fax arrived. On the William Morrow website, the book is listed as “Biography/Autobiography.” So the question is - How many copies would you order? Keep the following in mind as you try to decide.
This marketing ploy is tried two or three times a year. Sometimes we fall for it, sometimes not. Both decisions have turned out to be right, occasionally. So, how many to order? What would you do?
There is one correct decision, but we won’t know what it was until it’s too late to do anything about it. Nevertheless, a decision must be made, and we made it. We’re ordering 2 copies. You can call us Tuesday to find out how we did.
Update. The news got out. On Wednesday before this
column ran on Sunday, we learned that the book is just one more biography of
Princess Diana, written by her butler Paul Burrell. The title is The Way We Were: Remembering Diana, and
we’ve canceled our order for the two copies. The publisher should be
ashamed, but is probably not.
“Kick His Ass”
A few weeks ago we hosted Montgomery native Mills Thornton at a booksigning for his book Dividing Lines: Municipal Politics and the Struggle For Civil Rights in Montgomery, Birmingham and Selma ($29.95 paperback). The book was published about 4 years ago, but had just recently been issued in paperback, and that was the occasion for the booksigning, but that’s not what we’re writing about today. What we’re writing about today is the odd little sequence of events that were – in part - inspired by Professor Thornton’s appearance.
On the Saturday before Mills Thornton’s Thursday appearance, just before the store was scheduled to close, in strolled a prominent Montgomery official from the 1950s. We’ll not identify him by name. Suffice it to say this man is well known about town, and is a perfectly likable, successful and respected person who, like nearly all Montgomery civic officials of the 1950s, has found himself on the wrong side of history.
He came into the store and asked to see Mills Thornton’s book. We handed a copy to him, he thumbed through it, and we asked if he were aware that Professor Thornton would be at the store the following week. Yes, he was aware of that. Then perhaps, we asked, he’d be interested in coming to meet the Professor on Thursday, and getting a signed copy of the book? And that’s when it got interesting.
If he did come on Thursday, he said, it would not be to meet Professor Thornton, but “to kick his ass.”
By now it was 4 PM, closing time on Saturday, but you can’t close the store with a statement like that hanging in the air. And besides, our customer was just warming up, and he proceeded to locate every place in the book where his name appeared, read the entire selection, and then tell us what Professor Thornton had gotten wrong. And not just gotten wrong, but in some cases just made up out of thin air. In those cases, the newspaper references cited in the book’s footnotes did not in fact exist, he insisted. He was accusing Mills Thornton of lying, and he was really mad.
We were not unsympathetic. Anybody would be angry if they really believed they’d been lied about in a book, and we had no doubt that our customer really believed it. On the other hand, we’ve known Mills Thornton for years, and the notion that he’d just make up something, and then assert that it came from a nonexistent story in a newspaper, made no sense to us. So what to do? What to say? Not only were we caught in this conflict between two people we knew and liked, but by now it was 4:30, and we really wanted to go home!
So we made the following suggestion to our customer: Write Your Own Book. We doubt that Mills Thornton lied about anything, but over the course of 700 pages he surely got some things wrong, and maybe some really important things, and you’ll never set any of it straight by coming into a nearly empty bookstore and carping about it to us. Besides, every important insider from those days, from whichever side, has a significant story to tell, and none of them is getting any younger. Please, think about writing your own book.
But he didn’t seem too keen on the idea. He left without buying Mills Thornton’s book, and he did not come to the booksigning. But the very next week in the newspaper there was a little item about a meeting between Montgomery civil rights icon Robert Graetz and Drue Lackey, who was on the Montgomery police force during the Civil Rights days here, and eventually became chief of police. Chief Lackey, it turned out, had in fact written a book telling his side of the story, and that seemed like a bit of an omen to us, so we were happy to oblige him a few days later when he appeared at the store, asking us to sell his book, Another View of the Civil Rights Movement ($15 paperback).
And the first person to buy a copy? Our irate customer. Perhaps now he really is thinking about putting his side of the story in print. If he does, we’ll sell it.
“Blame It On The
This summer has been the worst for business we remember. It’s been
really hot, to be sure, and there’s a war or two that are getting more and
more distracting, and gas prices are said to be keeping people out of stores,
but none of those is the real problem. The real problem is that the books
published this summer – with, we hasten to add, a few wonderful
exceptions - were the worst we can remember
in a long time. Boring, boring, boring, and yet they just kept on coming into
the store at the same rate as ever, as if the publishers actually expected us
to sell the dreck. It was good news only for
It is – we think – the United States Supreme Court. Not the
one sitting today, but the one from way back in 1978. The one which –
just a few weeks after we bought the bookstore in September of 1978 –
heard the case of Thor Power Tool Company v. Commissioner of Internal
Revenue. A few months later the
decision came down – a unanimous finding in favor of the
The Thor Power Tool Company looked out at the unsold tools on hand at
the end of one year, and declared that the value of those tools was less than
it appeared, since some of the tools were obsolete. This reduced the profit
they reported, and so reduced the taxes they owed, and everything was
hunky-dory except for one thing: Thor Power Tool Company did not throw the
obsolete tools away. They kept them, and occasionally even sold some of them.
And the
Thor sued, but Thor lost, and shortly after that, it began to occur to American publishers that this might be trouble. For years publishers would look out at their inventory and if they were stuck with, say, 1,000 copies of a slow-selling title, they’d just reduce the value of those books for tax reporting, but keep the books in stock, because they knew they would in fact occasionally sell a few of them. But the Thor Power Tool Company ruling ended that, and ever since then publishers have been forced to destroy – or otherwise dispose of – their slower-moving books, if they wished to reduce their tax liability.
So just what difference does that make to us? It means that every year
thousands of books are removed from publishers’ inventories. Most are not
actually destroyed, but sold off at pennies on the dollar to companies who then
sell them to bookstores at a few more pennies on the dollar. Publishers are
then left with a much reduced catalog of titles, and the only way they can
build the catalog back up is to publish more books, and here’s what
we’ve found over the past 30 years or so: the new ones are no better than
the old ones, and frequently they’re a whole lot worse, yet the publishers
are forced into an endless, and expensive, cycle of hyping a bunch of new books
that they would never have published in the first place had they not been
forced to because of some
So what we get are summers like this one, when it seemed to us that the publishers were not so very enthusiastic about the books they were publishing. In the old days perhaps they’d just have published fewer titles and worked a little harder to sell some of the great older books they’d published over the years, books which now reside on remainder tables or, worse, as shredded pulp in some waste dump.
“Why Not To Go On
Vacation”
We recently took a little vacation, and - just as we expected – things fell apart in our absence. We can’t be sure that none of this would have happened had we been at our posts, but it can’t possibly be a coincidence that all the following things happened while we were gone.
July 5. Copyright Fees Rise Copyrighting a book is easy. So easy, in fact, that it’s automatic. You need do nothing. That is to say, anything you write is automatically copyrighted for your lifetime, plus another 50 years. But if you’re a cautious person, and you think that somebody might steal your work somewhere down the line, and you want a little extra layer of protection, it is in fact possible to register your copyright officially with the U.S. government. But that’ll now cost you $45, up from the $30 it was when we left for our vacation. Still worth it, if just for the little certificate.
July 5. We Miss a Good Thing. Some good stuff did happen while we were gone, but we weren’t here to enjoy it, and to us that qualifies as a bad thing. Chief among those this time was the release of Fannie Flagg’s new book, Can’t Wait to Get to Heaven. We’d love to have been here for Day One of that one, and to have read right here in this newspaper the surprise – to us – announcement by Fannie that she’d be coming here in the fall to do a booksigning. We already can’t wait.
July 10. Cody’s Books Closes One of America’s great landmark bookstores closed its flagship store, at the age of 50 years and one day. Cody’s Books on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, California closed after losing more than $1 million over the past few years. A rational person might have closed after, say, $500,000 in losses, but then a rational person might never get into the book business at all. This one is especially ominous, following as it does so closely the closing of another San Francisco area institution, A Clean Well Lighted Place For Books.
July 12. Multnomah Publishers Sold. Multnomah is a very good publisher of religious books, and we’re always sorry to see the quality little guys gobbled up. Ironically, their biggest selling book ever, The Prayer of Jabez, which sold 8 million copies in 2001, may have been their undoing. Things were going so well that they planned a large expansion, but sales of the book ended suddenly, and they were forced to take thousands of unsold copies back from booksellers. They’ve since reduced their staff, and now they’ve announced they’re selling out, probably to Random House. In the book business, even success can be fatal.
July 13. Triskaidekaphobia. Every book has a unique number assigned to it. This is called the International Standard Book Number, or ISBN for short, and it’s the only purely rational thing the book industry has ever done. The system is brilliant, and allows everybody in the book business to communicate with everybody else, all of them confident they’re talking about the same edition of the same book. Now they’re changing the ISBN from a 10 digit number to a 13 digit number, and confusion, of course, is rampant. Besides being unlucky (as we thought everyone knew), 13 is just too many digits to process easily, or at least it is to our old brains. We knew this was coming, but what a shock to see that our largest vendor slipped it in on us while we were gone – and on the 13th, no less!
July 18. We Return. We love you all, and we love the bookstore, and we love Montgomery, but after visiting Normandy, seeing the actual Tour de France, checking out Mont St. Michel and a few chateaux in the Loire, seeing actual 15,000 year old cave paintings in the Dordogne, watching the World Cup soccer championships with a crowd of French fans on a big screen TV in the courtyard of a 12th century church in Audrix (we dare you to find it on the map), and watching the Bastille Day parade right there on the Champs Elysées in Paris, we had to wonder just who it was who’d decided we had to stop all that and come home! Hands down, that was the worst thing that happened to us on the whole vacation.
“France
Reads”
Twenty four years ago, in 1982, we went to London for a week, almost on the spur of the moment. We were planning to go to San Francisco for a booksellers’ convention, and were on the verge of making our reservations when we noticed a little ad in the newspaper. It offered a week in London for about half of what our San Francisco trip was going to cost. So we went to London. And then three years later we went again, and we figured that one trip abroad every three years was about right, and that was 21 years ago and we’ve not left American soil since.
So you can imagine that we’re pretty excited about our upcoming trip to France, for which we’ve prepared the only way we know how, which is to say we’ve read a lot about it, and we’re not just talking about the usual travel guides, either. Travel guides are good, and necessary, but to get a really good feel for a place we think you need to read all sorts of things about it – fiction, memoirs, history, essays. And so that’s what we did, and the reading was so good that now we’re worried that the actual France may not live up to all the amazing pictures in our heads! You need not be planning a trip to France, we believe, to enjoy any of the following books, which were our favorites.
Diane Johnson’s trilogy of French manners – L’Affaire, La Mariage and Le Divorce are all excellent, and to think we only read them because we so loved her Into a Paris Quartier, which as it happens is all about the St.-Germain-des-Pres section of Paris, which as it further happens is where we’ll be spending a whole week.
In Michael Sanders’s From Here You Can’t See Paris, Sanders and his family move to the tiny southwestern village of Les Arques, to follow a year in the life of a small family owned restaurant, and come to love the people, the town, and the way of life. And, just to stay in the same general region of the country, Deadly Slipper by Michelle Wan is a great mystery which turns on one very rare orchid in the southwest of France.
We’ve discovered some other good mysteries set in France. We really like Cara Black’s hardboiled series, each set in a different Paris neighborhood. Start with Murder in the Marais. In Death From the Woods, by Brigitte Aubert, the story is told in the first person, by a Parisian woman who is a blind, mute quadriplegic. Luckily our narrator has a biting sense of humor because the story itself is chilling.
We’ll Always Have Paris : Sex and Love in the City of Light by John Baxter is not quite as provocative as the title might lead you to think…but it is pretty provocative. Put it this way – it didn’t makes us not want to go!
The most disappointing thing we found out about France is that they have now closed the famous prehistoric Lascaux Cave to visitors, so The Caves of Perigord by Michael Walker, a real good novel, was a little bittersweet.
The first place we’re going when we get to France is the Normandy Beaches, so we read D-Day by Stephen Ambrose again. It’s great, with lots of first person accounts from soldiers from both sides. But there are many, many wonderful accounts of D-Day.
The Road From the Past: Traveling Through History in France by Ina Caro (Robert’s wife) is a great combination of history and current day travel tips. We stumbled on this one late in our search, but it quickly became one of our favorites. Highly readable, but unfortunately out of print..
Paris in Mind is a great, great collection of essays by an eclectic group of writers such as Sylvia Beach, David Sedaris, Mark Twain and Alice B. Toklas. Even if you’re peeved by the French these days, this book will make you want to go to Paris.
And we finally got around to Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, his memories of ex-pat Paris of the 1920s. It is a wonderful book. That guy could really write!
So, that leaves only about 20 more books we just can’t get to in this column. If you’re really interested, you can check out the whole list on our website.
“Harper
Lee”
Here’s a warning that’s familiar to everybody in the book business:
“This is an uncorrected proof. Any quotes
for publication must be checked against the finished book.”
This little caveat, or one very similar to it, appears on all the promotional copies of books sent to us by publishers in advance of the actual publication date. We always ignore the warning, because we almost never write about a book before the finished editions are in the store anyway. But from now on we’ll take it a little more seriously.
Several months ago we received just such an advance copy of Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee, by Charles J. Shields. It’s the first biography of the author of To Kill a Mockingbird, and since we’d known for a few years that it was in the works we were excited to receive the advance copy. We thumbed through the book to see if mention was made of the booksigning Ms. Lee did at the old Capitol Book downtown, in September of 1960 – way before our time - and were pleased to see that Shields did in fact mention it. That was good.
What was not so good, we thought, were the final three paragraphs in the book, in which Bryan Stevenson, executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative of Alabama, criticizes “the strange romanticism and sentimentality around To Kill a Mockingbird.” Stevenson, who represented and ultimately exonerated Walter McMillan, a black man in Monroeville who had been wrongfully convicted of killing a white woman, feels that the characters of Atticus and Scout faced crises that paled in comparison to the one faced by Tom Robinson, and that the book glorified Atticus and Scout way too much, and Tom Robinson not nearly enough.
Agree or not, that’s an argument that would not be out of place in any serious discussion of the book, but when you’ve written a biography of a woman who’s revered for the one book she’s published so far, arguably the most loved book in America, it just seems to us not to be such a good idea to bring that biography to an end with a stinging indictment of the book. It just sort of took the wind out of the whole thing. And as the very last thing we read in the book, it was the very first thing we thought of when, once the finished book had come into the store, people asked us our opinion of it.
But we made a mistake. We forgot the warning. We did not check the finished book. We assumed those paragraphs were there in the finished book, but they weren’t. Clearly, somebody in the editorial offices of publisher Henry Holt, or perhaps Charles Shields himself, read those closing paragraphs one last time before the book went to print, found them as distracting as we did, and removed them. The book is a whole lot better for it.
But before we discuss the book, a few disclosures: we know Harper Lee, and like her a lot. Author Shields contacted us while he was writing the book, seeking information about that 1960 booksigning. We asked Ms. Lee if she would prefer that we not talk to him, and she said that’s exactly what she would prefer, and so we did not talk to him, not that we’d have had anything earthshaking to contribute. If somebody were writing a book about you, and asked us to help, we’d check with you, too, before we agreed.
All that said, we actually think that Mockingbird is a pretty good book, and a valuable resource for any admirer of Ms. Lee and her novel. Shields is a competent biographer, who’s written neither a hatchet job nor a paean. His book and his notes, including the more than 600 interviews he conducted for the book, will likely serve as the jumping off point for researchers for many years to come.
The absence of Harper Lee’s own voice in this book clearly frustrates Shields, as it does the reader. But to Shields’s great credit he never lets the frustration turn to resentment, and he’s produced a book that – despite its limitations - any Harper Lee fan will enjoy. ($25 hardcover)
“Oh,
the Moonlight So Bright”
There’s a full moon tonight, just as there is every 29.5 days or so. If the moon is full here, it’s full everywhere on Earth. Because the moon rotates on its axis at the same rate of speed that it orbits Earth, we always see the same side of the moon. This is true of every moon in the solar system, except one – Hyperion, one of the moons of Saturn. The far side of the moon gets just as much sunlight as the side we always see, so please stop calling it the “dark side.” The moon is slowly moving away from Earth, about 12 feet further away every 100 years or so. In time, this will have several very interesting effects on both the moon and Earth, but it won’t matter to you, because you will have been gone for about 500 million years.
Why the moon lesson? Because the other day, during a routine walk around the store, Cheryl noticed that lots of books had the word “moon” in the title. By the time we quit searching the store we’d found 26 of them, and that seemed like enough for a column, but if you’re going to write a column about “moon” books, you eventually get curious about the actual moon, or at least we did, and we could not justify all the time we spent researching the moon unless some of it found its way into the column, and so it did.
But what about the books? Only one of them was actually about the moon, sort of. It’s Jim Lovell’s Apollo 13: Lost Moon, the book Ron Howard’s great movie was based on. ($7.99 paperback)
Andrew Lytle was one of the famous Vanderbilt Fugitive Poets back in the 1920s, along with Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren and John Crowe Ransom. He was also an actor and a dramatist and a farmer and a teacher and, near the end of his career, he taught a short story class at Vanderbilt, where Cheryl was one of his students. For that reason we always try to keep his books here, including At the Moon’s End, a fictional account of De Soto's expedition through the southeastern United States between 1539 and 1543. (paperback, $19.95)
Comanche Moon is the prequel to Larry McMurtry’s great book Lonesome Dove. A Comanche Moon is what you think of as a harvest moon, except the Comanche Indians used the full moon in autumn to light the way for their raids into Mexico. Along with Dead Man’s Walk and The Streets of Laredo, these books tell the whole story of Woodrow Call and Gus McCrae. (All four in paperback, at various prices)
You would have to be crazy to have a baby and not have a copy of Goodnight Moon in your house. Written in 1947 by Margaret Wise Brown, it did not sell very well at the time, but it’s now among the top 10 selling children’s books of all time. No baby – and not all that many adults, either – can stay awake all the way to the end of the story, and that’s why it’s so popular! (Several editions, $6.99 - $16.99)
There are now four volumes in the Stories From the Blue Moon Café series, all edited by our friend Sonny Brewer, who used to run a bookstore down in Fairhope but wised up, and is now a very successful writer. These four volumes, we have to explain all the time, have nothing to do with Montgomery’s old Blue Moon Inn, which has nothing to do with Montgomery’s new Blue Moon Cafe. By August, all four books will be available in paperback, for $14. Great short stories.
Which brings us to The Blue Moon Revisited, only the most popular cookbook we’ll ever sell. Cecil McMillan, the last owner of Montgomery’s Blue Moon Inn, has published recipes of all of the most popular dishes from the old place. This is not modern day healthy eating. There’s a good bit of fat and sugar and cholesterol in these dishes, which is of course why they’re so good. And if you die a little early, so what? What difference will it make in 500 million years?
And by the way, a blue moon is not the second full moon in a month. It’s the third full moon in a season which has four. And here endeth the moon lesson.
“Book
Industry Update”
Did you hear they’ve made a movie of The Da Vinci Code? Well, of course you heard about that, but it’s less likely that you heard about any of several other recent developments in the book business, reported mostly by industry Bible Publishers Weekly:
Bookstore Sales Fall. This is either very bad news for us, or one of those little statistical blips that eventually prove meaningless, but the fact is that in 2005 sales at bookstores fell by nearly 2%. That may not sound like much, but when compared to overall retail sales in this country, which actually rose about 7% in 2005, it’s a pretty poor performance. And bookstore sales have lagged for more than just one year. Overall retail sales have risen about 23% since 2001, but bookstore sales have increased only 6% during the same time.
Instant Books Get a Reprieve. You’ve likely never heard of Harvey Ross. In 1990, at the age of 69, he got the idea that it ought to be possible to print and bind books economically one copy at a time. We had the same idea at about the same time, but the difference was that Harvey actually did something about it. He invented, and patented in 1995, a “System and Method of Manufacturing a Single Book Copy,” and the Print On Demand industry was born. Nearly every week now we order books that exist only on the hard drive of some computer, and in just two or three days an actual bound copy of the book comes in the mail, at a price not out of line with other books. Unbelievable. In fact, the idea was so good that it almost immediately spawned huge lawsuits, as big book wholesalers and retailers came up with similar systems, but did not pay Harvey Ross for the use of his idea. At least that’s the way Harvey Ross saw it. He (or his company, he having died in 2001) sued these guys and won a $15 million judgment in 2004, but that judgment was overturned just the other day. The impact? Print On Demand books will continue to be cheap, and one day in the not so distant future you may be able to walk up to a kiosk in any mall, tell some computer what title you want, and a few minutes later walk away with your book. And if you don’t think that scares publishers – and booksellers – you’re wrong.
Publishers Get Religion. A few months ago a French publishing conglomerate, Hachette Livre, bought the huge American publishing house Time Warner Book Group, the fifth largest American publisher. They paid $538 Million. Then, back in January, religious publisher Thomas Nelson, which has annual sales only about half that of Time Warner, fetched almost as much, $473 Million, when it was sold to InterMedia Partners. So what gives? The fact is that religious publishing, or to be more precise, Christian publishing, is the lone hot spot in American publishing these days. These guys are smart, they know their audience, and they have a certain – how shall we say?- zeal about what they do. Just recently they’ve come up with something called Biblezines, the New Testament in a splashy magazine format, aimed at young folks, who prefer that sort of thing to a traditional book. And it also does not hurt that on their best-selling title, the Bible, they owe no royalties to the author.
The ARC of the Moral Universe….. Last week we got three Advance Reader’s Copies (ARC), of Stephen King’s forthcoming novel Lisey’s Story. ARCs are generally sent to booksellers in an effort to increase the buzz about a book, but Stephen King produces his own buzz, so these ARCs came as a big surprise. They also came with a plea by the publisher, Scribner. Please, they asked, read these ARCs, give them to someone else who’ll read them, or donate them to a charity, but PLEASE do not sell them on eBay! The publisher believes - as we do – that selling ARCs in advance of the publication of the underlying book is unfair to the author and the publisher. So of course the first thing we did - to see if everybody agreed with us - was to log on to eBay, where we found that Lisey’s Story ARCs were already selling for up to $400 per copy!
“Too
Many Books, Too Little Time”
Sometimes the good books come out so fast and furious that we just can’t keep up, and this is one of those times, and so we’re breaking our “don’t write about that which you have not read” rule. Just in the space of a few days recently we received six new books, all by writers with Alabama connections, and we’re so anxious to let folks know these books are available that we’re going to write about them without actually having read them – yet. Actually, by the time you read this we probably will have read them, and if there’s a stinker in the bunch we will let you know. But we’ll be surprised if there is.
Sometimes it takes us a day or two to write this column, and since we wrote that first paragraph Cheryl actually did finish one of the six books! South Alabamian Carolyn Haines is a prolific mystery writer who just gets better and better. Fans of her “Bones” mysteries will have to wait till June for the next installment of Sarah Booth Delaney’s story, but just recently out is Penumbra. A penumbra is defined as a partial shadow, as in eclipse, also, as an area in which something exists to an uncertain degree. This Penumbra is a chilling, dark, noir-ish mystery set in the heat of Mississippi in the 1950s. We loved it and predict big success for this new series. (St. Martins, $23.95)
Howell Raines hasn’t lived in Alabama in quite some time, but since he grew up here, went to school here and spent his early newspaper career here, we choose to call him an Alabama writer, even if he does live now in Pennsylvania. Years ago he wrote Whiskey Man, a very good historical novel set in Winston County during the depression and My Soul Is Rested, one of the definitive works on the Civil Rights movement. In 1993, came Fly Fishing Through the Midlife Crisis, using fishing as a metaphor to understand life as a son, a father, a husband and a journalist. In his brand new memoir, fishing is still the metaphor. The One That Got Away is about loss, including his job at the New York Times, and aging, and most of all fishing. (Scribner, $25)
Did you read the review in this space a week ago of Tim Dorsey’s new book The Big Bamboo? The reviewer actually suggested that Dorsey’s fans were the type folks who loved Jim Carrey….and the Three Stooges! Wrong, wrong, wrong. Dorsey is funnier than those guys, and a lot smarter, too. This new book centers on Florida movies, both the ones filmed there and the ones filmed elsewhere pretending to be there. One reader just told it us it is his best yet. Dorsey’s Alabama connection? he went to Auburn, and worked for the old Alabama Journal here. (Morrow, $24.95)
Tim Dorsey’s friend, and very funny foil on the lecture circuit, former Auburn football player Ace Atkins leaves behind his popular Blues mysteries to try something new in White Shadow. The story takes place in Tampa in 1955, and involves competing Cuban and Sicilian gangsters, cigars and rum, revenge and honor. Writers always run a risk, trying something new, but we believe it is a good thing; and in the case of White Shadow so do Lee Child, George Pelecanos, Robert Crais, and Carl Hiaasen. They all loved this one. (Putnam, $24.95)
Bobby Allison, who ranks third in all time NASCAR wins, began racing in 1966. He retired in 1988 following a raceway accident that nearly killed him and did leave him fighting a brain injury for years afterward. Then he and his wife Judy lost both sons Clifford and Davey in racing-related accidents. Tragedy and triumph come together in Peter Golenbock’s book Miracle: Bobby Allison and the Saga of the Alabama Gang. (St. Martins, $24.95)
Fishing for Gold is a book about catfish farming in Alabama. In it, author Karni Perez collects oral histories from many of the early farmers, processors and Auburn researchers. It seems a combination of a temperate climate, a “gumbo” soil, plenty of rain, and the catfish’s own ability to adapt make Alabama the perfect place for aquaculture. OK. We admit it. We have no intention of reading this one, but for somebody out there this is the book they’ve been waiting for! (University of Alabama Press, $22.95)
“Wayne
Greenhaw”
What were they thinking for the past nine years? “They” being the Alabama literary pooh-bahs who have taken it upon themselves since 1998 to recognize “the lifetime achievement of a writer who was born in Alabama, or who spent his or her formative years living and writing in the state” with The Harper Lee Award for Alabama’s Distinguished Writer. How could it possibly have taken them so long to pick a writer who…..
…..was born in Sheffield, Alabama, and has spent nearly all of his 66 years in Alabama?
…..began writing as a teenager, after spending months in the hospital following spinal surgery, where he filled hundreds of hours discovering that he really loved books?
….finished writing his first novel – though it was never published - before he finished high school in Tuscaloosa?
….went to the University of Alabama, where he studied writing under the legendary Hudson Strode?
…..took up journalism after college, and became so good at it at the old Alabama Journal that he won a very prestigious Nieman Fellowship to Harvard?
….broke the story of the My Lai massacre on the front page of the Alabama Journal?
….published his first novel, The Golfer, in 1967, at the age of 27?
….published his latest book, The Thunder of Angels, in 2005, at the age of 65?
….and over the intervening 38 years, published sixteen (16!) more books and plays, six of which actually have the words Montgomery or Alabama in the title, and several others of which are set in the real or, sometimes, imagined Alabama of his youth?
You haven’t lived here very long, or if you have, you haven’t been paying attention, if you don’t recognize the writer we’re talking about. It’s Montgomery’s own Wayne Greenhaw, and it’s about time they gave him this award..
They’ve awarded this honor since 1998, and beginning that year the winners have been Albert Murray, Madison Jones, Helen Norris, Sena Jeter Naslund, Mary Ward Brown, Rodney Jones, Sonia Sanchez and Andrew Hudgins. Not a clunker in the list, and not a single one of them undeserving of the award, but also not a single one of them with anywhere near the sheer volume and breadth of Wayne’s writings. And it almost didn’t happen.
For you see, Wayne had published only three of his 18 books when, in 1978, his friend and our mentor Victor Levine, the founder of Capitol Book & News, decided that 28 years in the bookstore business was enough, a decision made easier by the fact that he and Wayne had previously agreed that in such an eventuality Wayne would buy the store. It was a done deal, but like a lot of done deals, it never happened, thank goodness.
It’s a shame that from now until the end of time nobody will ever again get to walk into the old downtown bookstore, but even those of us who loved it will admit that it could make you feel a little claustrophobic. It was only about 15 feet wide, and about 100 feet deep, and at the last minute Wayne decided he just was not cut out to spend his life quite so cooped up, and that maybe he’d be better off to keep doing what he truly loved, writing books. So Wayne and Mr. Levine called the deal off, and a few weeks later we bought the bookstore, and we, and the world, got 28 more years – and still counting - of some of the finest writing about Alabama that’s ever been done.
Now for a little confession. We have never been to the annual Alabama Writer’s Symposium, mainly because Wayne was right – running a bookstore does severely limit your mobility. But we still say everybody who loves books ought to go, and as it turns out you don’t even have to wait very long. It’s being held next weekend, May 4-6, down in Monroeville, the literary capital of Alabama, and the highlight of the whole thing, we think, will be when they finally hand Wayne Greenhaw his richly deserved Harper Lee Award!
If you do want to go, you can find out everything you need to know right there on the internet. Just visit www.ascc.edu.
“The Bone
Woman”
What would you think about a person who said the following:
“By the time I was thirteen….I was
burying dead birds in plastic bags so I could dig them up later – I was
curious how long it took them to ‘turn into’ skeletons.”
Need a little more information? Well, the same person said this:
“In Rwanda and Bosnia, the killers
made no attempt to hide their tracks or conceal what they had done –
identity cards were left on people’s bodies, the wire was still around
their hands. Yet in Kosovo, just a few years later, they tried to burn the
remains afterwards, to remove the bodies and take them to Serbia. That, to me,
is some sort of progress.”
Without even knowing who you are, we can tell you right now that one of your assumptions about the person is wrong, because you assumed it’s a man, didn’t you? But in fact the author of both quotes is a woman. Her name is Clea Koff. Her father is a second generation American of Polish and Russian descent, and her mother, although raised in England, is Tanzanian, but from what she calls a “half-Ugandan family.” But Clea Koff’s family background is not the most interesting thing about her. Not by a long shot.
Do you remember the summer of 1994? If you do, it’s probably because that was the year of O.J. Simpson, whose wife was murdered on June 12 of that year. Remember how consumed the whole country was? Remember the white Bronco? Remember how outraged you were that someone could get away with such a crime? Oh, and by the way, do you remember the 800,000 Rwandans who were slaughtered – mostly by machete - by their own government that same summer?
Clea Koff was 21 years old that summer. She’d not gotten over her youthful fascination with bones, and she was enrolled at the University of Arizona, earning her master’s degree in forensic anthropology, and working with the medical examiner’s office, learning to identify unidentified bodies. So, as she followed the reports of the Rwandan genocide that summer, she asked herself a question that never occurred to most of us: “Who’s going to go over there and identify all those bodies?”
Two years later, in 1996, the United Nations did send 16 people to Rwanda to locate, and try to identify, the dead in massacre sites all over Rwanda, and Clea Koff, at the age of 23, was the youngest one of the 16. She spent two months there, helping to identify hundreds of victims. Three months later, she returned to Rwanda for three more weeks of duty. One week after that mission ended, she was on her way to Bosnia for two more months of the same type of work
The day the Bosnian mission ended, she left for Croatia for a month, and after a break of a few years she was off to Kosovo for the first of two tours of duty there. She completed six missions to four sites of unimaginable atrocities in just over four years. At the end, she alone had identified nearly 1000 bodies, and had helped convict some 50 murderers. And no less important to her, she’d helped return hundreds of bodies to their families.
The Bone Woman is Clea Koff’s riveting, heartbreaking and uplifting story of her missions to hell on earth six times over. It’s not an easy read. On nearly every page something happens that sucks the breath right out of the reader, who does not have to wonder what it must have really been like, because Clea Koff (originally an English major!) tells it so well.
If you had a chance to meet Clea Koff, you’d surely do it, would you not? Well, your chance is here. Clea will be in town tomorrow, April 17, at Alabama State University’s John L. Buskey Auditorium, at 11 AM, when she will talk about her experiences, although how she can bring herself to speak of them we do not know. The talk is free, it’s open to the public, and you should not miss it. She’ll also be at our store tomorrow afternoon at 3 PM to sign copies of the book. ($13.95 paperback)
She’ll also be glad to explain why it’s “progress” that mass murderers are now taking pains to burn and remove the bodies of their victims.
“Index THIS!”
In July of 1972, in the desert surrounding Arches National Park in Utah, miles from any human being other than his hiking companion, at night by the campfire, Thomas began reading Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle.
Six months later that same hiking companion would introduce Thomas to Cheryl.
Thirty three years after that meeting, NewSouth Books publisher Randall Williams would manage, as any proud papa should, to work into a conversation in the bookstore the fact that his son Horace had produced the index for NewSouth’s critically acclaimed biography Hugo Black of Alabama. Which is impressive because Horace was all of sixteen years old when he did this!
That night, in what passes for pillow talk around our house these days, Thomas mentioned to Cheryl that young Horace Williams’s impressive accomplishment had given him an idea for a column, the title of which at the time he thought of as “The Book Index in Literature,” the only problem being that he couldn’t think of any instances of any reference to any book index in any literature. Could Cheryl?
Well, yes, she could, and she proceeded to recall, as if she had read it the day before (though she, too, had read it some 35 years ago!), the chapter in Cat’s Cradle about how no author should ever index his own book, because “self-indulgent” authors reveal too much of themselves when they do such a thing.
Her mention of Cat’s Cradle unleashed in Thomas a flood of memories about the summer he spent hiking around the west, and it wasn’t until about his fifth story about that summer that he realized Cheryl was asleep, or pretended to be.
Now, there are a couple of points to be made here. One, you should read Cat’s Cradle, in our opinion Kurt Vonnegut’s masterpiece, even if lots of folks prefer Slaughterhouse Five. We fear that Vonnegut is not much read these days, but his very gentle, but extreme (and extremely funny), cynicism about those in authority reads as if it were written yesterday. The good news is that he’s still writing, and published a volume of essays, A Man Without a Country, last year.
Point Number Two: Part of Point Number One is wrong! This we discovered when we invited Horace Williams and his father to tell us a little bit about the nuts and bolts of indexing a book, and why a publisher would entrust such a thing to a sixteen year old.
It turns out that even if you’re really interested in learning about book indexing, any conversation about it turns flat pretty quickly. To understand indexing, we now think, you must first index something, and really, who wants to do such a thing? So, while talking to Horace the other day and understanding nothing he was saying about indexing the Hugo Black book, we happened to mention the Cat’s Cradle thing to him, expecting to have to explain who Kurt Vonnegut was.
Wrong! Young Horace Williams came alive at the mention of the book, which he had obviously read, and he recalled and summarized almost exactly as Cheryl had done the chapter about an author’s indexing his own book. So, it turns out that some people really are still reading Vonnegut, or at least some of the really bright young folks are, and that’s exactly who ought to be reading him.
And one last thing. We did do a good bit of research into book indexing for this column, enough to be able to read an index and tell a good one from a bad one, and the one Horace Williams did for Hugo Black of Alabama is really quite good. Way more than just a list of names and events, like all the best indexes it almost stands alone as a little summary of the book.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
A Poem a Day. April is in fact National Poetry Month, and we have only just discovered the coolest poetry thing. Alfred A. Knopf Publishers has one great poetry web site, where you can listen to writers read their favorite poems, read essays by great poets, and even get a new poem emailed to you every day this month! Go to our website for a link to this wonderful poetry resource.
“Whooppee, We’re All Gonna Die!”
Today marks the seventh anniversary of this column, which means we’ve lasted as long as the famous plague, and long enough to have developed the famous itch. It all adds up to 168 columns, and 126,552 words, not counting those you’re reading now. And now, to paraphrase Ronald Reagan, here we go again….
We have noticed an odd trend in book titles the last few years. Here’s a partial list of the titles that bother us. See if you can spot the trend.
1,000 Places To See Before You Die
1,001 Movies You Must See Before You Die
Fifty Places to Fly Fish Before You Die
Fifty Places to Play Golf Before You Die
Unforgettable Things To Do Before You Die
There are in fact 42 books in print today about places to see, and things to do, before you die. Well, actually there are thousands of such books in print, but only 42 of them add the unnecessary phrase “before you die” to the title. When else are you going to do anything?
Glad you asked. There are actually 12 books in print with the words “after you die” in the title, but not a single one of them has anything to do with golf, or fishing, or traveling. They are, of course, all religious books, while only 2 or 3 of the “before you die” books actually have anything to do with dying. Or seem to. Sometimes it’s hard to tell from the title.
What
does it all mean? It’s just marketing. Nearly all the “before you
die” books are aimed at baby boomers, who have in general had things so
good that publishers now apparently feel it necessary to remind them that the
good times will in fact come to a permanent end, and not all that far in the
future, and so they’d best get started on these projects - and buy these books –
We, of course, are immune to such transparent come-ons, or we thought we were until the other day, when they finally published a “before you die” book that we decided we had to read, before we died. You might not be surprised at the title: 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (edited by Peter Boxall, hardcover, $34.95). When the book came into the store we laughed about it, and made a few jokes about it, and then each of us, while the other was not looking, actually picked it up and looked through it, and you know what? It’s a really fascinating book, notwithstanding the annoying “before you die.” And notwithstanding the really annoying “must read” in the title.
We’d have called it 1001 Books, And If You Look Through This Book You’ll Find a Few Books You’ll Want To Read, Which Otherwise You Might Not Have Thought To, And a Lot Of Other Really Interesting Books, Too. But that's just us.
It’s not really a book you read straight through, but one you will want to browse. There are short but definitive – or at least, highly opinionated – essays about the books, written by about 25 highly opinionated literary critics, and some really interesting stuff about the publishing history and career details of the authors. And the book is beautifully illustrated with reproductions of the original dust jackets.
You’ll be amazed at the books you haven’t read, and at the books you’ve never even heard of, and if you’re like us you’ll at least make a mental note of a few books to try. Actually, if you’re exactly like us, here’s how your list begins:
House of Mirth by Edith Wharton, A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry, The 13 Clocks by James Thurber, and Hallucinating Foucault by Patricia Duncker.
Not that we buy into the hype, but we do hope to get started on these before we die.
“Dickens, Wilde, Jarndyce, McCarthy and Hellman”
We hope you watched the recent adaptation of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House on PBS. It was real good, and if we were commissioned to write a column about television we’d tell you all about it. Instead, we’re going to tell you about the downfall of Oscar Wilde, which we thought of only because Bleak House started its run during the height of the James Frey A Million Little Pieces controversy, and that whole mess got us to thinking about truth and lies and fiction and nonfiction, and that reminded us of the well-known literary – and legal - tempest between Lillian Hellman and Mary McCarthy, and the circumstances of that imbroglio reminded us of Oscar Wilde’s terrible miscalculation, which led to his downfall, but which in at least one way was the exact opposite of what happened in Bleak House, which if you did see the show, or read the book, you know revolves around a court case (Jarndyce and Jarndyce) that dragged on for many years.
On October 18, 1979 Mary McCarthy taped an interview for the Dick Cavett TV show. On January 26, 1980 Lillian Hellman tuned in to the Dick Cavett Show, the one taped three months prior, featuring Mary McCarthy. What she heard that night would give rise to a lawsuit that threatened to drag on for as long as Jarndyce and Jarndyce, and might have, had not Lillian Hellman died in 1984.
What Lillian Hellman heard that night was Mary McCarthy, quoting herself from a long-ago interview in an obscure Paris literary magazine, say about Hellman, “…every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’ “
To fit a very long story into this very short column, Hellman sued McCarthy for libel, which turned out to be a mistake, because by the time Hellman died, four years later, the lawsuit had prompted McCarthy and others to examine very closely everything Hellman had ever written, in a search for untruths, which they discovered in abundance. Hellman’s reputation was ruined, or at least badly damaged. Think James Frey, except Hellman fell from a much greater height. She never should have sued.
But shooting oneself in the foot is an old tradition amongst the literary folk, and that brings us to the case of Oscar Wilde. Wilde was the literary sensation of Europe until he was offended one day, and instead of just letting it go, sought legal sanctions against his tormenter. That action backfired, and soon Wilde was in prison, his literary career ruined, and his life essentially over. Here’s what happened.
Oscar Wilde was homosexual. One of his longtime partners was thought to be Bosie, the son of the Marquess of Queensbury, the guy who wrote all the rules for boxing. The Marquess didn’t like what he thought was going on between Wilde and his son, so he decided that he’d disrupt the opening performance, on February 14, 1895, of Wilde’s new play, “The Importance of Being Earnest.”
But Wilde got wind of the plan, and had the Marquess barred from the theater that night. So several days later the Marquess went to Wilde’s club and left his calling card, which he addressed to “Oscar Wilde, posing sodomnite.” Now, “sodomnite” is not even a word, but Wilde knew what he meant, and so Wilde filed suit against the Marquess for defamation of character. Like Lillian Hellman’s lawsuit, this one should never have been filed.
Wilde withdrew the suit after three days of testimony, but so many tawdry details had come out during the trial about his dalliances with young male prostitutes that he was immediately tried for violating England’s new law against homosexuality. That trial actually ended in a mistrial, but he was retried and convicted. He was imprisoned for two years, released in 1897, moved to France, and died there in 1900 at the age of 46.
But this case differed in one important respect from the interminable Jarndyce and Jarndyce. From the day the Marquess left the calling card, over the course of three separate trials, and until the day Wilde began serving his prison sentence, only 96 days had passed!
Suggested reading:
Literary Feuds by Anthony Arthur (hardcover, $23.95)
Bleak House by Charles Dickens (paperback, $12)
Anything by Lillian Hellman and Mary McCarthy
“Herodotus”
Like many of you, we tell ourselves every four years that we have no interest in winter sports, and therefore no interest in the Winter Olympics, and then we find ourselves tuning in anyway, and then we find ourselves on the edge of our seats, cheering on somebody to slip and slide their way down some icy slope some fraction of a second faster than the last guy. There’s just something about world class competition – in anything – that is compelling.
And that which is compelling draws a crowd, and that which draws a crowd usually draws folks eager to sell something to the crowd, and as much as we – against all the evidence to the contrary – like to think of the literary pursuits as somehow just slightly above the crassly commercial, the fact is that it was the literary crowd which was the first to figure out that the Olympics sure might be a good place to advertise.
The first Olympics were staged in Greece in 776 BC, and it only took about 300 years for some author to figure out how to use the Games to sell books.
Actually it wasn’t just “some author.” It was Herodotus, and the book he was shilling wasn’t just any book – it was his history of the Persian Wars, which today we recognize as the first-ever written history. And in fact, “history” would not even be the word for it today had not Herodotus entitled his work The Histories, which to the Greeks meant something like “the questions” or “the investigations.” It was the Romans, centuries later, who recognized the importance of what Herodotus had done, and used the title of his book to name a whole academic discipline.
But nobody knew any of that in 440 BC. In fact almost nobody had even heard of Herodotus, and that was the reason he decided to go to the quadrennial Games in Olympia to promote his new book. Where else in Greece would upwards of 40,000 people gather in one place for five days? And the crowd wasn’t just big; the social and political and intellectual elite made it a point to be in Olympia, and that was the crowd most likely to buy books, or so Herodotus figured.
He was right. On Day One of the festivities, Herodotus staked himself out a spot in the Temple of Zeus, waited for folks to gather around, and then set out reciting his book to the crowd. He was a hit. By the end of the Olympics that year his readings at the Temple of Zeus were drawing crowds equal to any at the actual sporting events, and once the influential folk dispersed back to their homes all over the world, and carried word of the writer’s performance, the young Herodotus was the toast of the Greek literary world.
No good idea is left uncopied, and that was as true 2,500 years ago as it is now. In the years, and centuries, that followed, aspiring Greek writers made their way to Olympia every four years, competing for the best spot to set up shop. Literary reputations were made by good performances…..and destroyed by bad ones. The “literary Olympics” even gave rise to an early – if not the very first – literary feud. Just 20 years after Herodotus’s triumph, Thucydides published his own history, and promoted it as superior to Herodotus’s effort, citing Herodotus’s performance at Olympia as evidence that the book was merely “a prize lecture for immediate applause.” Mary McCarthy was never unkinder to Lillian Hellman than that.
A warning: everything we know about Herodotus and his triumph at the Olympics of 440 BC comes from another Greek writer, the satirist Lucian, who lived 300 years after Herodotus, and whose best known work, A True Story, contains not one single word of truth. But that is a story for another day.
And to give credit where much credit is due, we first learned of the literary connection to the Olympics two years ago, during the Athens Games, when we read Tony Perrottet’s fascinating book, The Naked Olympics: The True Story of the Ancient Games, now available as a $12.95 paperback. Most of the information in this column comes from a later essay by Perrottet in The Village Voice.
“Truth or Consequences”
If James Frey, the disgraced author of A Million Little Pieces, had it to do all over again, perhaps he would include a little something like this in a preamble to his book:
“We improve when we become fiction,
each and every one of us, and when the past becomes a novel our memories are
sharpened.”
Or this:
“If all the characters in this book
are fictional, none of them knows it yet.”
Or surely this:
“All the incidents and dialogue come
straight from God’s imagination. As does the author himself. And the
reader.”
Those little observations, and more on the subjects of fact and fiction and memory and recollection, come from the preamble, or “Preambulo,” to the very book Cheryl was reading when all the fuss erupted over Frey and his book and Oprah. If you’re one of the millions who read Frey’s book and are feeling duped, you might want to think about clearing your literary palate with this one: Waiting for Snow in Havana by Carlos Eire.
Carlos Eire was nine years old, a child in a privileged but eccentric Cuban family, when Fidel Castro came to power in 1959. Eire was “lucky” enough to be airlifted out of Cuba a few years later, but he would not see his mother again for several years after that, and he never again saw his father. This wonderful book is the amazing story of Eire’s life both in Cuba and the United States, where Eire began his new life at the bottom of the social strata, only to rise to his current position of Riggs Professor of History and Religious Studies at Yale University.
This book was good enough to win the National Book Award in 2003, but we’d likely never have read it were it not for the fact that Carlos Eire will be coming to Montgomery later this month to present the next in what has become a sizzling Stallworth Lecture Series over at Huntingdon College. We’d strongly suggest you read this remarkable memoir, and then go hear Carlos Eire himself on Tuesday, February 28 at 7:30 at Huntingdon. The book is available in hardcover for $25, and paperback for $14. Highly recommended, and a great book club choice.
Did You Miss Him? You had two chances to meet another well-known writer over the past day or so, but as usual approximately 99.5 % of Montgomerians failed to turn out. Taylor Branch was in town on Friday and Saturday talking about his new book At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years 1965-1968 (hardcover, $35). This book completes his “America in the King Years” trilogy, which began with the books Parting the Waters and Pillar of Fire.
But if you missed him you still have a chance to redeem yourself, and you won’t even have to leave your couch. Just tune in today at 11 AM to CSPAN2, and you can enjoy Taylor for 3 uninterrupted hours as he appears live on their monthly “In- Depth” program. Yes, live. He had to rush to the airport yesterday so he could be on TV today!
The Magic Bus And speaking of CSPAN, way back in the summer
of 2001 they called us and set up an appearance at the store for their touring
CSPAN School Bus. The bus was scheduled to come to the store sometime in
September, 2001, but the events of September 11 forced CSPAN to cancel that
year’s tour. They promised they’d come again, and now they are!
This time it’s not the school bus, but their fully equipped state of the
art Book-TV bus, a real television studio on wheels. It’s making two appearances
in Montgomery. On Thursday night, February 16, they’ll be down at the
Rosa Parks Museum for a meeting of the WSFA-TV “Book Bunch,”
featuring authors Donnie Williams and Wayne Greenhaw and their book The Thunder of Angels. Then, on Friday,
February 17, from 3-5 PM the bus will be at our store, where they’ll
interview several of Montgomery’s leading literary figures. You are
invited to come to either or both events, and tour this amazing bus. It’s
“The Cappys”
The awards season is upon us, so herein we present the first – and possibly last – Cappy Awards (Cappy – get it? Like Cappytol Book?). We were the nominating committee, and we had the final say on every award. In the event of a tie- and there were lots of those – we just eliminated that category entirely. But that still left plenty of unanimous winners in enough categories to fill this column, and that’s what we were really after, after all. So here are the 2005 Winners:
Book Which After Selling Hundreds of Copies During the Year, And So We Decided Not to Order Very Many For Christmas Because We Figured Everybody Had One Who Wanted One, Still Ended Up Being Our Best Selling Book At Christmas: “Being Dead Is No Excuse: The Official Southern Ladies Guide to Hosting the Perfect Funeral.” It turns out that, except for yours, all funerals are hilarious. We had to order lots more, and fast.
Book Which If You Read the Jacket Cover You’d Never Read the Book, But Which We Made Folks Read Anyway, and They Loved It: “The Kite Runner.” Two boys and their struggles growing up in Afghanistan. Sounds grim, but is luminous. Second year as the winner of this category.
Book Which is Not Really a Book At All, But Still Ended Up Just Missing Being In Our Top 10 Best Selling, Uh, “Items”: “The Quilts of Gees Bend Postcards.”
Most Despicable Book of the Year, Which Spent 25 Weeks On the National Best Seller List, Including 13 Weeks At Number One, But Which We Are Proud To Say We Sold Not One Single Copy: “Natural Cures ‘They’ Don’t Want You to Know About.” Snake oil, in hardcover. But the marketing campaign was pure genius.
Special “Education of Little Tree” non-Nonfiction Award: “A Million Little Pieces.” Author James Frey is right….the truth is elusive. But we say if it’s not fact it’s fiction.
Worst Title of Best Book:” Sowbelly.” Not that we can suggest a really catchy title about the quest for a world record largemouth bass. And we loved the book.
:
Book Which Thomas Predicted Nobody Would Buy, But Cheryl said They Would, and She Was Right: “The Illustrated Elements of Style.” The voting in this category was very, very close.
Best Selling Book For The Saddest Reason: “Rising Tide,” all about the big flood which devastated New Orleans in 1927.
Book About Montgomery Which Even Though We Sold a Lot of Copies, We Should Have Sold a Lot More, Since Everybody In Montgomery Would Love It: “Deep Family,” the very lively history of Hazel Hedge, a Montgomery landmark, and the quirky family that lived there.
Book Which Of All the Books We Can Remember Over the Years Had the Highest Expectations and Actually Exceeded Them: “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.” The Harry Potter books never disappoint, but this newest one is really, really good.
Most Returned Book To Us After Christmas: “Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln.” But in no case was it returned because the person didn’t want it, but because they’d received more than one copy.
Oldest Book At the Highest Spot on Our Bestseller List For 2005:” I Am a Bunny,” published in 1963, and Number 20 on our 2005 list.
Biggest Movie Which Resulted In the Fewest Book Sales For Us: “Star Wars.” $380 million box office, we sold maybe 4 books.
Smallest Movie Which Resulted in the Greatest Book Sales For Us: “Capote.” $12 million box office, we sold about 50 copies of “In Cold Blood,” and several copies of Gerald Clarke’s biography of Capote.
Book Which You Wouldn’t Know Would Appeal to Cheryl Unless You Knew Of Her Secret Love of The Weekly World News: “Bat Boy Lives!,” a collection of WWN weirdness. Nobody ever picked it up on their own, but Cheryl still sold a few of them. It was probably her hysterical laughter every time she picked it up.
And Finally, Just For the Record, Our Top 10 List for 2005:
1. Being Dead Is No Excuse
2. The Last Coach
3. The Kite Runner
4. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
5. The Thunder of Angels
6. gods in
7. Life With Strings Attached
8. Deep Family
9. Dancing By the River
10. Lovesick Blues
“Best of 2005”
There are more than one million books in
print. There are 365 days in the year, and only 24 hours in a day. So a lot of
books we just didn’t get to read in 2005, including the following, which
various friends of ours did get to read, and took the time to let you and us
know about. We’ve asked our friends to submit these Best Reads annually
since 2000, and all their wonderful suggestions from these past six years can
be found on our website.
My favorite
read of 2005 was Widow of the South by
Robert Hicks. Based on the Battle of Franklin, Tennessee (Civil War), a well
written, new approach to the whole bloody mess. I have a personal interest in
the material, as my husband's grandfather fought, and lived through, this
battle, but I recommend this book highly, whether or not ones relatives fought
at Franklin. (Bobbie Gamble, Greenville)
Clapton's
Guitar : Watching Wayne Henderson Build
the Perfect Instrument by Allen St. John. I
typically don’t read much non-fiction, but this title caught my fancy. I was not disappointed. The author (a sportswriter for the Wall
Street Journal – not many folks can say that!) was ready to move up to a
handcrafted guitar for his own playing pleasure…he met Wayne Henderson,
who is perhaps today’s Antonio Stradivari in the world of acoustic guitar
making. Henderson doesn’t
advertise, doesn’t have a web site, and when you call him to order a
guitar, he readily tells you that there is a back log…of ten years! St. John actually moved in with Henderson and
watched him build a guitar for Eric Clapton – but that’s just the
backdrop for the story that actually takes the reader from tree to a stringed
instrument whose wondrous sound the author struggled to describe. It was one of the few books I’ve read
that I actually slowed my reading as I neared the finish as I didn’t want
it to end. (Cleve Poole, Greenville)
The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John
Fowles: I may be the only person alive who didn’t read the book or see
the movie when they came out decades ago, but Fowles’ recent death may
inspire rereading for those who did. If
you’ve only seen the movie, read the book, as Pinter’s screenplay
does different things with Fowles’ postmodern plot juggling. Both book
and film are a lovely change of pace from the currently popular Jane Austen.
(Karen Pirnie, Montgomery)
For a trip to
Italy I took along Frances Mayes’ Under the Tuscan Sun and found it much less pretentious
than when I first read it as someone who hadn’t been to that enchanting
land. We are reading a completely enthralling memoir, The Diving Bell
and the Butterfly , a French journalist’s account of life after a
massive stroked immobilized him. Here’s to continued good reading for one
and all in the new year. (Mae Mallory Krulak, Baltimore)
The most important book I read this year was On Bullshit by Harry G. Frankfurt. This small, attractively bound volume is far from a tasteless joke, as some unenlightened reviewers have claimed. On the contrary, at a concise 64 pages, it is an astute prolegomena to an extremely worthy philosophical issue which, as Frankfurt notes, requires much further scholarly elucidation. I read it twice, outlining the second time, and now I want to write a companion volume in response titled A Phenomenology of Bullshit. Perhaps to avoid offending readers, the author adopts "humbug" as a synonym for B.S. I think this is his first error, but to explain my view would require many pages. Frankfurt's brief treatise ends triumphantly, with the revelation that--considering our all-too-human capacity for self-deception--even sincerity itself can be bullshit.
(Robert Ely, Montgomery)
James
Frey’s harrowing, yet captivating story of addiction and recovery A Million Little Pieces” was
one of my most meaningful and gripping reads of the year. (Amy Nachman, San
Francisco)
I realize in writing this that the few novels I have read (for fun) and finished this year are also somehow tied into movies, but at least they're classics: The War of the Worlds and Pride and Prejudice (which I'm finishing now, and it's a blast); that would also include a Modern Library reprint of the 1933 novelization of the original King Kong, which was surprisingly as well-written as anything by H. Rider Haggard. (Jim Gilbert, Montgomery)
“Merry Christmas”
Every seven years
Christmas falls on a Sunday, and when it does it’s not so good for us,
because it means we get exactly no days off. We worked yesterday, and
we’ll be back at work tomorrow, and we would have taken today off whether
it was Christmas or not, because we’re never open on Sunday. We’re
not complaining, exactly, we’re just asking you to understand why we did
not actually write today’s column. Instead, we thought we’d just
fill the space with some of the best Christmas quotes from all of literature.
Think of this – our “day off” - as your Christmas present to
us. And THANK YOU! And MERRY CHRISTMAS!
But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when
it has come round -- apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and
origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that -- as a good time; a
kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time: the only time I know of, in the
long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their
shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were
fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on
other journeys. And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold
or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me
good; and I say, God bless it! Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol
One by one the household emerges, looking as though they’d like to kill us both; but it&#