Between the Covers

What I read on my spring vacation

Back to the grind - I mean, back to the job I love more than anything in this wide world - so it must be time to blog again. Saw many great sights in the wilds of Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument, including this waterfall at Lower Calf's Creek, which my companion offered me ten bucks to stand under, but even I am not that poor yet. Another great sight: the VACANCY sign in a motel window on the night it snowed, an evening on which I got quite a bit of reading done, since I was not huddling in a tent or by a roaring fire trying to pretend I was warm.

About that reading: I finished Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, thus completing one of my reading resolutions for 2009 (you're next, Roberto Bolano). I thought Gilead - written as a letter from a dying Congregational minister to his young son - was lovely, and I have to admit I wept when I finished it. I'll surely have to find time to read Home, which is not exactly a sequel but the same story from a different perspective (or so I believe, anyway).

And then, in an even greater feat, I read David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, even though I had the galley of the new Lee Child thriller with me. Child is surely more vacation and airplane friendly. But Cloud Atlas is really something.

To say this wild, fat, almost psychotically ambitious novel is mind-boggling doesn't even begin to do it justice. I'd attempt to summarize for you, but I find I simply can't do it. There's just too much there.

Cloud Atlas - which is allegedly being turned into a movie, and don't even ASK me what crazy person would take on that challenge - features a series of narratives across time and the globe, all of which link in a tenuous but hypnotic manner. (Honestly, a little more tenuously than I'd hoped.) I'd been warned that the first segment was the hardest to read, but I disagree. I struggled with a later narrative in dialect, which was thrilling enough adventurewise, but the dialect frustrated me at times; I wanted to get on to the other stories.

Still, I admire Mitchell's bravado, and I really couldn't wait to get back to the book every time I'd put it down. Of course, that may have been because I had to haul myself up and down a bunch of rocks, but I give Mr. Mitchell more credit than that.

TIme for a break

It's vacation time here at Between the Covers...I'll be back March 31 for more book fun (or so I hope, anyway). Meanwhile, I'll be out here somewhere. Happy reading.

How to be a bad bookstore customer

It's nice to believe that all bookstore customers - who presumably are, you know, readers and thus a cut above the rest of the riffraff, or so we snotty book lovers would love to think - are wonderful, but a very funny blog item over at Publisher's Weekly begs to differ. Read the comments and you'll note that the biggest complaint seems to be customers letting their kids trash the place. Imagine! Poorly behaved kids in this day and age!

Pride and Prejudice: The Comic

Maybe it's not as revolutionary as Twittering one's novel, but Marvel Comics has quite a trick up its sleeve, according to a story by Bill Radford in The (Colorado Springs) Gazette: On April 1, it's allegedly releasing a five-part adaptation of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice.

I say "allegedly" because that April 1 date makes me nervous, but Radford writes that Nancy Butler is writing the adaptation and was the one who suggested a more girl-friendly comic. (Marvel has previously released adaptations of Treasure Island, The Last of the Mohicans and The Three Musketeers.) Check out the full story if you're curious.

I confess: I will absolutely read this. What about you?

George W. Bush book due out in 2010

The Associated Press reports that former President Bush is writing a book about making decisions, due out in 2010 from Crown Publishing.

AP quotes him as saying "I want people to understand the environment in which I was making decisions. I want people to get a sense of how decisions were made and I want people to understand the options that were placed before me,'' in a telephone interview from his office in Dallas.

Tentatively titled Decision Points, the book is not an autobiography but a look at choices Bush made, from giving up drinking to naming Dick Cheney VP.

I guess Jon Stewart was right when he called the former prez "The Decider." 

Read a novel on Twitter! No, really.

It was only a matter of time, wasn't it?: Faber author R.N. Morris is serializing his 2007 crime novel A Gentle Axe via Twitter, according to Bookseller.com.

Morris has around 200 followers on Twitter, the story says, adding that he updates his account a couple of times a day. His followers send him questions about the book, and he responds.

Oh, the temptation to just start raging about the idiocy of new technology is strong. Must...not...sound...like...an...old...geezer. Now, if you'll just get outta my yahd, everything will be fine.

What are you reading now?

``Shadow Country [by Peter Matthiessen]. It's absolutely brilliant. It is so lyrical yet clean. As a writer i aspire to that. I know Peter so well; I've been with him on his research trips. It's amazing how thoroughly this book was researched. If anyone in this country wins a Nobel Prize, it should be him.''

RANDY WAYNE WHITE, author of Dead Silence

Recession helps libraries

Interesting story in the New York Times on how people are turning to their local libraries for their reading (and viewing, since libraries carry DVDs these days) needs. Sounds great, doesn't it? But there's a catch - like every other organization/business/whatever, they're facing cutbacks.

National Book Critics Circle winners

Former Miami Herald/current New York Times writer Dexter Filkins won The National Book Critics Circle Award for general nonfiction for The Forever War, his book about covering the war in Iraq.

The late Chilean author Roberto Bolano earned fiction honors for his meaty 2666 (yes, yes, I'm going to read it one of these days), which has earned high praise from just about every critic, writer and reader in the land.

Other winners:

Autobiography: Ariel Sabar, My Father's Paradise

Biography: Patrick French, The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul

Poetry: Juan Felipe Herrera, Half the World in Light and August Kleinzahler, Sleeping it Off in Rapid City

Criticism: Seth Lehrer, Children's Literature: A Reader's History from Aesop to Harry Potter

Annette Gordon-Reed on the Hemings family

Here's my story on the extremely interesting Annette Gordon-Reed, who won the National Book Award for nonfiction for The Hemingses of Monticello, which intricately traces the family tree of Sally Hemings, the enslaved woman who bore seven children for Thomas Jefferson.

Gordon-Reed is one of 20-odd authors appearing Saturday at Lit LIVE!, the Broward County Library Foundation event that features discussions, panels and book signings. Another notable author who will appear is suspense writer Laura Lippman, whose latest standalone novel Life Sentences once again deftly stretches the genre. Don't miss it (or Lippman, either, for that matter).

For more information, click here.