Between the Covers

Monsters redux

I wrote last week that I had started this debut novel and liked it. Fortunately, unlike far too many other debut novels I've started, The Monsters of Templeton was entertaining throughout, and its engaging narrator Willie Upton is someone about whom I could read much, much more.

It's not a horror novel, though there are monsters and ghosts. Mostly it's about family and identity and perserverance and how we survive many dreadful things as a species.

You can check out my review here if you want to read more. And why wouldn't you want to read more? Surely by now you trust my impeccable taste in literature.

By the way, isn't this a great jacket cover? If you were judging this book by its cover, you would be pretty satisfied, I think.

Live naked authors!

Well...they're not really naked except metaphorically speaking. But if you have a fondness for writerly blogging, check out nakedauthors.com, where James O. Born, James Grippando, Jacqueline Winspear (that's her over at the right), Paul Levine, Cornelia Reed and Patricia Smiley weigh in on literary thoughts large and small (and some other stuff besides).

With six writers - you may know the two Jims are local literary heroes - the blog stays fresh and interesting, even though everybody keeps their clothes on. An excellent way to spend your time when, say, you have a deadline looming.

Miami - write it like a native

Tom Wolfe isn't the only novelist working on a Miami book. Russell Banks, who's in town Tuesday to talk about his new novel The Reserve, is also turning his attention to South Florida.

"I'm gathering material for a book set in Miami," says Banks, who lives in the Adirondacks with his poet wife Chase Twichell but also owns an apartment in Miami. Then he jokes that the notoriously slow Wolfe could end up beating him to the punch.

Florida was one of the main settings of Banks' Pulitzer Prize finalist Continental Drift - some say it's his best work - which followed the intersecting lives of a New Hampshire repairman and a Haitian immigrant, both searching for refuge in Florida. The Reserve is a '30s noir-style mystery, set in the Adirondacks.

Banks appears at 8 p.m. Tuesday at Books & Books in Coral Gables.

Strippers, terrorists and Florida

The Garden of Last Days, the new novel by Andre Dubus III, comes our way in June.  This one is set on Florida's Gulf Coast in early September 2001, when a stripper at the Puma Club for Men meets an arrogant, foreign young man who's awfully free with his cash. Normally this is a good thing for a stripper. But this guy, named Bassam, has business elsewhere in early September that will change history, which means nobody who comes in contact with him is going to be the same.

The novel is based on a real-life visit by 9/11 hijackers to a strip club, and you have to believe Dubus - a National Book Award finalist for House of Sand and Fog, which was made into a movie starring Ben Kingsley - is going to make the most of this intriguing premise. Count me in. This is the sort of summer reading to which you can really look forward.

Am I the only one...

...who reads in bed in the morning?

Lots of people read in bed at night. I have finally reached an age at which that is just about impossible. I have between 5 and 10 minutes before I fall unconscious. But in the morning, I can get up, feed the dogs, pour a cup of coffee (if I've had the foresight to set the timer the night before, not a given if I've been into the pinot noir) and get back under the covers to read before having to sit upright.

I do read the paper every day, but not in bed. That has to be read at the dining room table, preferably over breakfast. Bed reading is for books only. Which explains why the stack of New Yorkers just keeps getting bigger every day.

Oprah's just doing her thing

We may gripe about her from time to time, but there's no denying that Oprah has quite an effect on reading habits. The Associated Press reports that  more than a million copies of Suze Ormon's Women & Money was downloaded since it was made available for free download on www.oprah.com last week.

According to AP, 19,000 copies were downloaded in Spanish. And apparently the free download hasn't hurt sales of the hard copy: the book was no. 6 on amazon.com as of Saturday.

Ormon said in a statement that Women & Money is "the most important book I've ever written."  Judging from the size of my credit card bill, I might want to put down the fiction and read it.

Add to your list of new discoveries

Two good reviews in Sunday's Miami Herald:

Herald staff writer Amy Driscoll is impressed with the new short story collection by Debra Dean, who teaches at the University of Miami.

Herald reviewer Charles Gershman is intrigued with Jonathan Rosen's nonfiction work The Life of the Skies: Birding at the End of Nature, which explores the relationship between birds and man.

Death mistress lives

Ariana Franklin, I am happy to report, suffers no sophomore slump with The Serpent's Tale, the second book in her historical mystery series featuring Dr. Vesuvia Adelia Rache Ortese Aguilar, the medieval forensic doctor ridding England of its killers, one murderer at a time.

In The Serpent's Tale, she's trying to solve the poisoning of one of Henry II's mistresses. Here's the really bad news: the prime suspect is Henry's wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine.

I think I still liked the first book, Mistress of the Art of Death, best, due to the sheer novelty of it. But if you enjoyed that, you'll like The Serpent's Tale as well. Click here to read my review.

My telltale heart beats for suspense

Reading the new Peter Robinson book Friend of the Devil got me to thinking: What suspense novels were nominated for an Edgar Award this year?

Here's the list: Priest, Ken Bruen; Christine Falls, Benjamin Black; The Yiddish Policemen's Union, Michael Chabon; Soul Patch by Reed Farrell Coleman; and Down River, John Hart.

I've read two of them, the Chabon, which I loved, and Priest, the fourth in Bruen's Jack Taylor series, which was also good. Bruen cuts through all the blarney about the magic and beauty of Ireland and drags you right down into the ugly, muddy soul of Galway. If you like your suspense hard-boiled and noir, light on procedural antics, he's worth a look.

Benjamin Black is the pseudonym of Irish writer John Banville, who won the Booker Prize in 2005 for The Sea; Christine Falls is the first book under the Black name. I've heard good things about Down River - Olive Cogdill of the S-S named it one of her best mysteries of the year - but Soul Patch I've never heard of. Clearly I need to get cracking.

The Edgars - named after that nice fella Poe up above - will be announced on May 1. For a glimpse of the other categories, click here.

Hee hee hee

FSU puts itself on probation.

Some blog just items write themselves.

http://www.miamiherald.com/603/story/420190.html