Beyond Rivalry

(I'm posting this simultaneously at Worth Reading)

USA Today's 10 Talkers, offered with publication date, 'talking points' and a tiny excerpt each, includes books by Wally Lamb, Bob Woodward (The War Within: A Secret White House History 2006-2008), Toni Morrison, Candace Bushnell, actor Alec Baldwin (A Promise to Ourselves: A Journey through Fatherhood and Divorce), the Laura Bush novel American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld, TV talk show host Bill O'Reilly (A Bold, Fresh Piece of Humanity -- a memoir), Philippa Gregory, New York Times reporter Helene Cooper (a memoir of growing up aristocratic in Liberia), and Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers: Why Some People Succeed and Some Don't.

Bloomburg's Muse Arts notes that "It's going to take a big novel to compete with the U.S. election this fall, and publishers are eager to supply one. Three of the most heavily garlanded American writers -- Toni Morrison, Philip Roth and John Updike -- are leading the charge on bookstores." Others on the list include late Chilean-Mexican novelist Roberto Bolaño, John le Carre, Julia Glass, Kathleen Kent and Candace Bushnell.

The Washington Post previews 116 fiction and non-fiction fall books, with month of release and short summary.

New York Magazine offers several articles about various forthcoming titles, including  Toni Morrison's A Mercy, about slavery; new novels by Philip Roth and John Updike; The Good Thief, a 'semi-Gothic' by Hannah Tinti; Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies, short-listed for the Booker Prize; Roberto Bolaño's posthumously published 2666; 3 books about addiction or mental illness; Marilynne Robinson's Home; and a quick rundown of about 25 more books due out in Sept., Oct. and Nov.

Hillel Italie's Fall Books Preview (AP) offers a few titles that presidential candidates Obama and McCain might enjoy, plus a scantily annotated list of other new books that might be big this season, including Case Histories, a new literary crime thriller by Kate Atkinson; E. Annie Proulx's new story collection, Fine Just the Way It Is; Christopher Buckley's Supreme Courtship, "a satire of the judicial branch;" Sister Souljah's sequel to The Coldest Winter Ever; Anne Rice's memoir about her Christian faith, Called Out of Darkness; Barack Obama's Change We Can Believe In, "a policy book and collection of speeches;" Thom Friedman's Hot, Flat and Crowded; several books about Abraham Lincoln; a new children's series 'The 39 Clues,' with "10 planned novels by 10 different authors, packaged with multimedia games, contests and trading cards, enhanced by a movie deal with Steven Spielberg;" Christopher Paolini's Brisingr in the 'Inheritance' fantasy series.

Carla Maria Lucchetta in the Ottawa Citizen lists lots of books by Canadian authors and publishers for the fall, including books by Austin Clarke, Rohinton Mistry, Nino Ricci, Miriam Toews, former PM Paul Martin (political memoir), Margaret Atwood (not fiction but rather Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, "which looks at debt as a central motif in religion, literature and society"), Farley Mowat (writing in Otherwise about "the beginnings of his environmental activism, between 1937 and 1948"), Brian McKillop (the first biography of the writer-journalist Pierre Berton), Joan Barfoot, Andrew Pyper (The Killing Circle, "a literary thriller about a serial killer who strangely resembles a character out of the imagination of a member of a Toronto writer's group"), Danielle Younge-Ullman, Neil Bissoondath, Alice Munro (stories), Shani Mootoo, Donna Morrissey (What They Wanted, set again in a small Newfoundland village), Mary Henley Rubio (The Gift of Wings, the life of Lucy Maud Montgomery), David Suzuki (his Green Guide), more.

Oscar Villalon at the SF Chronicle, in a column that strangely mixes books and sports, lists forthcoming fiction and non-fiction by month of publication, suggesting that Roberto Bolaño's 2666 is "the most eagerly anticipated novel this fall." He also highlights books by Philip Roth, Marilynne Robinson, Elizabeth McCracken (memoir), Michael Greenberg, Diane Johnson, John Updike, Walter Mosley, John Barthes, and Amitav Ghosh.

Buzz Sugar offers a Falls Books Slideshow, within which is featured This Must Be the Place, a debut novel by Anna Winger; The Longest Trip Home by John Grogan (who wrote Marley & Me); Wally Lamb's new novel, The Hour I First Believed; Supreme Courtship by Christopher Buckley; In the Land of No Right Angles by Daphne Beal, another debut novel; The Other Queen by Philippa Gregory, focusing on Mary, Queen of Scots; It Still Moves by Amanda Petrusich, about America and its music; Toni Morrison's new novel, A Mercy; The Good Thief by Hannah Tinti; and A Map of Home by Randa Jarrar, a "coming-of-age story about a Muslim girl growing up in Kuwait, Egypt, and Texas."

North Jersey.com's Fall Books List is a simple list of fiction and non-fiction titles. Some that don't appear on many other lists are David Baldacci's Divine Justice, Just After Sunset by Stephen King (short stories), Dennis Lehane's The Given Day, A Lion Among Men by Gregory Maguire (Wicked), The World Is What It Is by Patrick French (the authorized biography of Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul), Here's the Story by Brady Bunch actress Maureen McCormick, Tried by War by James M. McPherson (reviewing the military leadership of Abraham Lincoln), Mike's Election Guide 2008 by Michael Moore, an 800-page biography of John Lennon by Philip Norman, an authorized biography of Warren Buffett by Alice Schroeder, and Ted Turner's memoir.

Newsweek's Guide to the Fall's Hottest Reads name, among others, Reagan in Hollywood by Marc Eliot; Goldengrove, fiction by Francine Prose; The Irregulars by Jennet Conan about Roald Dahl as a British WW II spy; The Hemingses Of Monticello, Jefferson-related biography by Annette Gordon-Reed; Chicago, a novel by Alaa al Aswany about Egyptian expats after 9/11; George, Being George, oral reminiscences about longtime Paris Review editor George Plimpton.

The Wall Street Journal has an online 'pullout' of the heaviest hitters this fall, which include 4 titles in contemporary fiction, 3 in historical fiction, 1 in crime/mystery (Michael Connelly's Brass Verdict), 2 in fantasy/sci fi, and 5 non-fiction titles.

EarlyWord has spreadsheets of fiction and non-fiction fall titles. They make note of Patricia Cornwell's Scarpetta, coming out in December, as well as Rizzoli's All the World’s Birds and Tom Gjelten's Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba: The Biography of a Cause.

Who knew that NOAA has a list of fictional books, plays, and movies that have been written involving tropical cyclones and hurricanes? I found out accidentally today, looking for the title of a mystery, written decades ago, set in Palm Beach featuring a nurse and tycoon! (Haven't found it yet.)  The list of about 65 works is chronological and starts with Shakespeare's The Tempest (1611), ends with Hurricane: a novel (2008) by Terry Trueman, about Hurricane Mitch in the Honduras.

Tom Shone, in Intelligent Life's Summer 2008 issue, laments bestsellers lists in the UK and the U.S.  The NYT bestsellers list looks pretty erudite compared with the UK's top sellers, which consist mostly of books by celebrities and reality-show has-beens, until we realise that the NYT shunted off the self-help and advice books to a separate list more than 20 years ago. When those are merged back in, the U.S. non-fiction bestsellers list is littered with books such as Stop Whining Start Living, Does This Clutter Make My Butt Look Fat?, How Come That Idiot's Rich and I'm Not?, and books with "you" in the title, such as Become a Better You, You: Staying Young: The Owner's Manual for Extending Your Warranty, Are You Ready! To Take Charge, Lose Weight, Get in Shape and Change Your Life Forever. Then there's the wildly popular The Secret, whose main message is to think positively. ("To those who object that they have been thinking positively ever since Norman Vincent Peale's The Power of Positive Thinking in 1952, you haven't really been trying. Really concentrate: 'Look at the back of your hands, right now. Really look at the back of your hands: the colour of your skin, the freckles, the blood vessels, the rings, the fingernails. Take in all those details. Right before you close your eyes, see those hands, your fingers, wrapping around the steering wheel of your brand new car...'")

(This article was written a couple of months ago. Now topping the NYT bestsellers lists are two books decrying presidential candidate Barack Obama as an extreme leftist, at least three books decrying the Bush Administration as liars and killers, a book about actress Tori Spelling by Tori Spelling, a book about Madonna by her brother, a John Grisham book, another "you" book -- Just Who Will You Be? by celebrity Maria Shriver, and of course, The Secret.)

Noting the celebrity-heavy UK list, Shone suggests that narrative fiction can no longer hold a candle to reality and the squalid details of real life. He speaks of "the weakened power of fictional story lines to hold the public's attention," contrasting story and storybook characters with the punch-power of in-your-face life and death: "Say what you like about someone whose first instinct on seeing her dead grandmother is to whip out her camera-phone and take a picture of her in the casket, she certainly registers more vividly than the wan lawyers and downy movie stars who troop through the fiction of John Grisham and Danielle Steele."  For those of us who get lost in some works of fiction, I'm not sure this is true.

... you might like these books, suggested by members of various library listservs.

The query I sent out was:

I'm looking for fiction that will appeal to someone who likes the FOX TV show, House MD, starring Hugh Laurie. The appeal factors could include medical diagnostics or medical mystery, interesting dynamics among medical professionals, cynical smart doctors, close co-dependent friendships between male doctors or men generally, an underlying belief that 'everyone lies,' and so on.

 

Here are the suggested authors, series, and titles.  I haven't read any yet. I'd love additions, and comments if you have read them:

Ariana Franklin (pseudonym for Diana Norman). New historical thriller series set in the 12th century about cynical, smart female physician Adelia Aguilar who is brought to England to solve murder mysteries for King Henry II. She's a coroner. First in the series: Mistress in the Art of Death (2007). Last (and second): The Serpent's Tale (2008).

Eileen Dreyer. Standalone medical mystery thrillers featuring cynical, world-weary nurses and EMTs. Also writes a series featuring Molly Burke, forensic nurse and death investigator in St. Louis, MO. First in series: Bad Medicine (1995). Last: Head Games (2005).

Sequence (2006) and The Silent Assassin (2007) by Lori Andrews, medical thrillers featuring geneticist and forensic specialist Dr. Alexandra Blake, described as smart and edgy. (Reviews compare the books to the popular TV series NCIS).

CL Grace's series featuring Kathyrn Swinbrooke, a female doctor in medieval times when only men could be doctors. Titles: 1. A Shrine of Murders (1992); 2. The Eye of God (1994); 3. The Merchant of Death (1995); 4. The Book of Shadows (1996); 5. Saintly Murders (2001); 6. A Maze of Murders (2003); and 7. A Feast of Poisons (2004). Some romance. (Grace is a pseudonym for writer P.C. Doherty.)

Echo Heron's medical thriller series featuring nurse Adele Monsarrat, who has a quirky sense of humor. Titles are Pulse (1998), Panic (1998), Paradox (1998) and Fatal Diagnosis (2000).

Lifelines (2008) by C. J. Lyons. Set in a Pittsburgh hospital, involves the new attending physician whose first night doesn't go well. When she's accused of negligence in the death of the son of the Chief of Neurosurgery, she starts investigating to save her career.

The Bugman novels by Tim Downs: 1. Shoofly Pie, 2. Chop Shop, and 3. First the Dead. The main character, Dr. Nick Polchak, is a forensic entomologist in North Carolina who helps solve crimes based on what the bugs say. He has a wry sense of humor. The books are marketed as Christian fiction but are not preachy; values are implicit, not explicit. 

I'll be back to posting soon. For now, I'm spending most of my computer time updating booklists -- recently finished adult crime fiction, children's historical fiction, children's bibliotherapy, and now only about 30 more lists to go! 

Don't forget to feed an animal today, and if you want more reason to care for critters, read this elephant rescue story.

And watch out for barking spiders! :-) 

The Guardian is going on a Spanish literature tour for the next month (India and Pakistan were last month). Read other people's recommendations for the best in Spanish fiction, drama, or poetry, or make your own reading suggestions.

So far:

Javier Cercas's Soldiers of Salamis

Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote

Arturo Pérez-Reverte's Captain Alatriste; Territorio Comanche

Miguel de Unamuno: Niebla (Mist); La tia Tula

Carmen Martin Gaite's The Back Room; Caperucita Roja (modern day version of Little Red Riding Hood)

Javier Marias: A Heart So White; Tomorrow In the Battle Think On Me; Todas las Almas (All Souls); Dark Back of Time

Juan Marse: Lizard Tails; Ultimas tardes con Teresa; Si te dicen que caí; El amante biligüe; El Embrujo de Shangai

Federico García Lorca: Blood Wedding; The House of Bernarda Alba; 'El Romancero Gitano'; Yerma

Camilo José Cela's La familia de Pascual Duarte; La Colmena

Ramon Llull's The Book of Blanquerna

Ramon J Sender's Requiem for a Spanish Peasant; Nancy's Thesis

Benito Perez Galdos's Torquemada; Jacinta and Fortunata

Antonio Gala's Pasion Turca

Napoleon Ponce de Leon's Five Black Ships

Manuel Pimentel Silves' El Librero del Atlantida

Miguel Ruiz Trigueros' La Noche de Arcilla

Carloz Ruiz Zafon's The shadow of the wind [bleah]

Calderon de la Barca's La vida es sueno (Life is a Dream)

Juan José Millas' El desorden de tu nombre; El orden alfabético; Dos mujeres en Praga

Armando Lopez Salinas' The Mine Rafael

Sanchez Ferlosio's Alfanhui

Emilia Pardo Bazan's Los Pasos de Ulloa

Juan Ramon Jimenez's Platero and I

Luis de Castresana's The Other Tree of Guernica

Gonzalo Torrente Ballester's The 'Los gozos y las sombras' trilogy

Leopoldo Alas' La Regenta

Francisco Umbral's Trilogia de Madrid

Juan Goytisolo's Count Julian (a 'hate-letter to Spain written in a stream of consciousness.')

Miguel Delibes' The Path; Los Santos Inocentes (The Holy Innocents); Cinco Horas con Mario; The Heretic

Ramón María del Valle Inclan's Lights of Bohemia

Antonio Munoz Molina's Sepharad; El jinete polaco; Plenilunio

Manuel Vázquez Montalbán's 'Carvalho' series

Luis Sepulveda's Mundo del fin del mundo (The World at the End of the World); Un viejo que leía novelas de amor (The Old Man Who Read Love Stories)

poetry of Gustavo Adolfo Becquer

poetry of Antonio Machado

Benardo Atxaga's Obabakoak; Esos Cielos

Joan Martorell's Tirant lo Blanc

Gabriel Aresti's Harri eta Herri

Luis Landero's Juegos de la Edad Tardía

Almudena Grandes Los Aires Dificiles

Enrique Vila Matas' Bartleby & Co

Rafael Reig's Blood in the Saddle

José Carlos Llop's El mensajero de Argel; La cámara de ámbar; La oración de Mr. Hyde

This week I seem to be trying to do too much at once, and not getting much done. Today I'd planned to work most of the day on my new library booklists site -- moving, reformatting, and link-checking a bunch of booklists to a new website -- and study French.

Instead, I added a new feature to that new website and added new content to that feature; I've read a lot of interesting articles online (more on that below); I pruned the wisteria to within an inch of its life, cut back the bleeding hearts which are finally yellowing, cut out some dying raspberry canes, and cut new arrangements for inside the house -- mostly hosta leaves and other foliage, as my garden is primarily shade and the local groundhog eats most of what flowers; swept the house and porch and did some spot-cleaning; took photos of a small beige-coloured frog that was clutching onto the wisteria; played with the dog; did some library blogging; made some phone calls; and updated the checkbook.

Some days I seem more able to stick to a to-do list (even if it's only in my head) than others. Lately, I have been on a de-cluttering adventure that seems to trump all other work and play. Yesterday, after going to Eucharist and having lunch with a friend, I cleaned out the kitchen pantry, tossing perishable food items (like flours and vitamins) brought with us to this house in 2002; cleaned up and re-defined the kitchen junk drawers and cubby holes; moved items off the countertops; and tossed old OTC and prescription medications -- some for the previous canine members of the family, who died in 2003 and 2004. Later, I enjoyed spending time with a college friend's son and his girlfriend who were driving through town. And I did cover a whole French lesson ("Entertainment') before hitting the hay last night.

So here's what I'm reading online and thinking about today:

>> Scott's blog entry on victims, another look at resentment (though he doesn't use the word)

>> An article in the WSJ, Waiting for the End: When Loved Ones Are Lost in Limbo by Jeff Zaslow. Apropos, as a friend's friend is in day 20 of a coma due to a hemorrhage.

"'We're prolonging life, but we're also prolonging dying,' says Mercedes Bern-Klug, an end-of-life researcher at the University of Iowa, who studies what she terms 'ambiguous dying syndrome.' Hundreds of thousands of people are surviving longer with advanced dementia or traumatic brain injuries, or in coma states. For their loved ones, 'coping with the ambiguity creates a unique type of stress,' says Dr. Bern-Klug. 'It's a form of angst we don't even have a name for in our culture.'"

>> Things I Talk Too Much About: 6 Annoying Fetishes at ZenHabits: "Here are 6 things I obsess over and am way too proud of and talk way too much about, annoyingly." His are coffee, Macs, Gmail, Firefox, Veganism, and Simplicity. Mine, off the top of my head, are Girardian ideas, dogs, Flickr, Google, and blogging. Others?

>> A Sense of Proportion at Everyday Wonderland:

"When there is something on the horizon in your life situation that you either want desperately to avoid or to acquire, in essence if there is a possibility of a future event with high stakes of some kind, a situation of gain or loss, the mind goes hyper with trying to do something about it. If there is something you want to avoid, the mind will either focus on it almost constantly, reasoning that remembering it gives you a certain level of control over the situation; or the mind will resort to boredom, which is little more than a tactic to cover up thoughts you want to avoid rising to the surface.  Behind the stream of compulsive thinking that goes on in most people’s minds, day in and day out, is a deep seated belief that the thinking is a way of staying in control."

>> In Defense of Dangerous Ideas by Steven Pinker at Edge, reprinted in the Chicago Sun-Times. He asks questions that tend to appall, anger, shock, disgust, and incite people. He asks questions that get at "dangerous ideas" -- "ideas that are denounced not because they are self-evidently false, nor because they advocate harmful action, but because they are thought to corrode the prevailing moral order." These are "statements of fact or policy that are defended with evidence and argument by serious scientists and thinkers but which are felt to challenge the collective decency of an age." First I wondered why he didn't present these as statements rather than questions, but I think it's because even to ask the question and broach a conversation about it is too unthinkable for many people.

Examples:

• Has the state of the environment improved in the last 50 years?
• Do most victims of sexual abuse suffer no lifelong damage?
• Did Native Americans engage in genocide and despoil the landscape?
• Did the crime rate go down in the 1990s because two decades earlier poor women aborted children who would have been prone to violence?
• Is homosexuality the symptom of an infectious disease?
• Have religions killed a greater proportion of people than Nazism?
• Would Africa have a better chance of rising out of poverty if it hosted more polluting industries or accepted Europe's nuclear waste?
  

>> A couple of Readers' Advisory articles, which I micro-blogged at librarybooklists.

Guy Dammann in the Guardian Book Blog opines about "abandoning" books midway through, the guilt this might evoke in us (he refers to the common "notion that unfinished and unread books are objects of shame"), and how to decide whether and how far into a book to read.

I like Rebecca's response to the column, including the Reader's Comment she culled:

"Squatting on my top shelf, 3 paperback volumes of the unabridged Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, about 1500 pages each, the first volume creased on its spine about a fifth of the way in, the rest of volume and the other two spines immaculate. A message screamed out to the perceptive observer, 'Here is a man who likes to be seen buying impressive books but whose pygmy intellect cannot cope with any book that hasn't had a murder and a rooftop chase by page 100'."

Like Rebecca, I read a fair number of of crime novels, probably 5 or 10 for every non-fiction title I read, and I can spend a year reading one non-fiction book, if it hurts my brain and also inspires me to think, wonder, synthesise, make synapse connections.

I tend to be a much less adventurous book reader than I used to be, preferring now to re-read fiction titles by some authors, to read crime novels in series, and generally not even picking up and thumbing through most books -- fiction or non-fiction -- other than field guides and garden books that are mostly pictures. The main reason I'm in a bookgroup is to read 12 books each year that I wouldn't read otherwise and I've skipped one already this year on the grounds that life is too short to read The Grapes of Wrath again.

Now I'm thinking I should start a blog just to record and do link maps for books I'm reading.

Girardian Anthropology and Mimetic Theory

Due to length, my current, idiosyncratic notes on Girardian anthropology and mimetic theory have been moved here.