Sarah Vowell: "Why do people want Hawaii to be fun?"

Yesterday I went to see Sarah Vowell speak at the central location of the Brooklyn Public Library. I had joked about the huge crowds that would be waiting for the author of THE PARTLY CLOUDY PATRIOT, ASSASSINATION VACATION, the "Incredibles" voiceover actress and frequent "This American Life" contributor, but it turned out most of the mass of people assembled outside the BPL were only waiting for it to open, a very cheering sight on a number of levels. It was a standing-room-only crowd in the end, but much more intimate in scope than the last time I saw her.

I was disappointed in UNFAMILIAR FISHES, an opinion that hurt me more than it hurt her (well, that's probably true anyway) -- but it wasn't the kind of disappointment that would cause me to give her up for good. And as with all her books I was impressed at the level of research she put into it; she told Leonard Lopate, who moderated, that this was a body of knowledge where she had started practically with no background and worked up from there over several years. "The point of what I do is learning -- that's when I'm happiest," she said, adding that she believed the nonfiction writer shouldn't be having fun throughout the writing process in order to produce the best book. For Vowell, the most fun part of writing is working over the second and further draft(s), which in this case she did after shaking the sand of Hawaii out of her shoes back in Manhattan where she lives. To that end, she spent most of her trips to Hawaii "as one would imagine, wearing a cardigan sweater going through archives." (Someone in the audience referred to a Wall Street Journal article she'd written describing herself as "the only person dressed like Lou Reed" wherever she went in the state.)

Most of the audience hadn't read UNFAMILIAR FISHES (by a show of hands) so Vowell gamely recapped many of the book's main points -- the missionaries who brought literacy and religion to Hawaii, but also capitalism and greed; the troubled ruling families who were already struggling with their own traditions when Westerners arrived; the unpacked analogy of President Obama attending the missionary-founded Punahou school and inviting its band to play at his inauguration. She seemed comfortable, not bored discussing the book; the only off note was struck when she said that because of Western-harbored disease, 85 to 90 percent of native Hawaiians "were dead within 100 years" of the missionaries' arrival (I mean, they would be anyway -- it got a little garbled there). She even diplomatically handled the comment -- not really a question -- from a man whose movement is trying to end Western land ownership in Hawaii by returning to pre-statehood land laws ("Basically, their lease is up," he said), putting in "I think you have a case, and good luck with that."

Vowell didn't give any clues as to her next project but preemptively shot down my secret private idea for her, which was that she should go to Europe and spend a few years writing about corrupt aristocrats and leading families to cleanse her palate from all the Puritans. Okay, I didn't actually tell her that, but she was pretty open in this interview about her distaste for royal families, even though in UNFAMILIAR FISHES she comes to sympathize with the rulers of Hawaii, being cast out of their own kingdom as authors of a revolution they never would have pulled off anyway. I still think it would make a spectacular next project, but American history is her terrain, and for all my differences with UNFAMILIAR FISHES I can't wait to see what she tackles next.

A few other choice Vowell bon mots I couldn't work in anywhere else:

• "When you believe cleanliness is next to godliness, you have a lot of laundry to do."
• On MOBY DICK, one of her favorite books: "There's all this violence and bloodshed and it's all pretty disgusting. Killing animals is disgusting. Men living on a boat for two years is disgusting."
• On the sons of the original missionaries in Hawaii: "While they were mostly Christians, they weren't so hardcore about it." 
• Characterizing herself as "a certain kind of Northeastern killjoy" and her fellow Montanans as outdoorsy to the extreme of "9-day backcountry treks with nothing but a granola bar and a knife."

Indie bookstore hopping: Washington D.C.

This past weekend I went to Washington D.C.'s famous independent bookstore Politics and Prose for the first time. Several visits later my grasp on D.C. geography is still not stellar, so I can only place P&P in a neighborhood called "not near the monuments and close to the Maryland border without going over" -- but its reputation so precedes it that you can probably just ask for directions by name. 

P&P has been in the news lately because its owners put it up for sale last year, but happily it was recently purchased by the ghostwriter of Hillary Clinton's LIVING HISTORY and her husband. The store doesn't specialize in reads for policy wonks, but instead offers the full range of fiction and nonfiction, including handsome shelves of local bestsellers in the front window and tables of recent paperback fiction in a side room. I appreciated the table of authors who had appeared on "This American Life" (including signed copies of Sarah Vowell's latest, UNFAMILIAR FISHES); that's a clever idea.

The basement holds a coffeehouse, the children's books (including a nook with a beanbag perfect for hiding out and reading -- check under the stairs!) and a fairly good bargain section, although there aren't any crazy deals. If you like audiobooks and biographies/memoirs, you'll probably be most pleased at it. I ended up walking away with a used copy of A TRAGIC HONESTY: THE LIFE AND WORK OF RICHARD YATES myself. There was a panel going on about the new Smithsonian jazz anthology, but it was too sunny for us to linger and eavesdrop. 

Photo: notbrucelee

"Unfamiliar Fishes" trailer

Your move, Crosley.

Stuff We Love: Goodreads "New Books by Authors You've Read" Newsletter

If you're not already on Goodreads, either you're missing out on a bundle of social networking fun or you likely don't have a desk job (or both).

I can't remember when they started doing this, but I've been getting a newsletter at the beginning of every month featuring books by authors whose books I've listed before. Okay, so I knew Sarah Vowell had a new book out but not about John Elder Robison's second book, nor Mike Daisey's ROUGH MAGIC. I consider myself pretty well steeped in book news but this just goes to show, some things would still slip through the cracks otherwise. Kudos!

I found this out so late I thought I had dreamed it

Sarah Vowell's next book, UNFAMILIAR FISHES, will be released next March 22. As she promised, it's about Hawaii.

We're all going to read and discuss it, right?

Once, when Amy and I were fourteen, the three of us were getting out of the car after a trip to the mall. The neighbor woman, who was out watering her yard, saw the shopping bags and asked what we'd bought. Amy showed off her new candy-colored sweater and her hoop earrings and hot pink pants. The woman congratulated Amy. She then turned to me, pointing at the rectangular bulge protruding from the small brown bag in my hand. I reluctantly pulled out my single purchase -- a hardback of THE GRAPES OF WRATH. My mother looked at the neighbor, rolled her eyes in my direction, and stage-whispered, "We're going through a book phase."

It's such a hopeful, almost utopian word, that word "phase." As if any minute "we" would suffer some sort of Joad overload, come to "our" senses, and for heaven's sake, do something about our godforsaken shoes. But the book phase never ended.

--Sarah Vowell, "American Goth" (from TAKE THE CANNOLI)

Shakespeare Wrote For Money

...is the title of the new Nick Hornby collection of essays about reading, his third and final collection from the magazine "The Believer." "Stuff I've Been Reading," Hornby's now-defunct column, was my favorite part of "The Believer," but at least we have THE POLYSYLLABIC SPREE, HOUSEKEEPING VERSUS THE DIRT and now SHAKESPEARE WROTE FOR MONEY which I have just preordered. Read Sarah Vowell's introduction to the book at McSweeney's.

I just saw Sarah Vowell read, but I'm going to see her again next month at the New School's "State By State" reading along with Jonathan Franzen and Alexander Payne. Hopefully I will have finished STATE BY STATE by then, although I already know it's one of those books I want to linger over.

Book club: Notes for next time.

I survived my first book club pick. I'm pretty happy at how it turned out, although I could've done better -- the discussion lagged a little bit and I take responsibility for that. Here's what I want to do differently next time:

• Arrive with more questions. Procrastination got the best of me and I had 7 or 8, but we could have used a lot more. (And it's neither here nor there, but I found the provided [SPOILERRIFIC] reader's guide questions to be incredibly lame in that they all boiled down to, "How do you feel?")
  

• Focus on asking better follow-ups for people who are speaking. I was determined not to be the kind of book group leader who interrupts people when they're mid-sentence, but I think I forgot sometimes that I was steering.

• Read about the critical opinion to the book, not so I could parrot those points but so they could inspire some discussion. I personally like to know what other critics are saying about what I'm reading (although if I'm reviewing something, I'll hold off until after I turn my piece in to see what the consensus is).
  

Anyway, the consensus was that THE POST-BIRTHDAY WORLD is worth reading, if you were interested. Next month: Sarah Vowell's THE WORDY SHIPMATES, which wasn't even my idea but is going to be awesome.

"An Exciting Journey Through Sermons": Sarah Vowell Makes Everything Funny

Title is Vowell's own description of her book, THE WORDY SHIPMATES.

On her way up to the stage, on the very first stop of her tour for her new book THE WORDY SHIPMATES, Sarah Vowell was flanked by no less than nine people. (Among them was, I believe, Riverhead publisher Geoff Kloske; I didn't recognize the others.) This wasn't as humorous as it was puzzling; the crowd at the Union Square B&N here in New York didn't seem like the acting-up type, and clearly they were already big fans of Vowell, the "This American Life" contributor and professional history buff with the voice of a Pixar superheroine. As the bookstore liaison described her as "one of the coolest, funniest smart chicks around," I saw a segment of a smile -- perhaps a quarter -- creep up her cheek.

So maybe Sarah Vowell doesn't crack herself up as much as she does the rest of us. In a sense, that makes her work a public service: Not only did I learn more about Garfield from her last book ASSASSINATION VACATION than I ever did in history class, I got a good chuckle out of it! THE WORDY SHIPMATES tackles the subject of the Puritans, who are not known for their giggle-inducing exploits, and Vowell read an excerpt about John Winthrop's sermon which coined the term "City on a Hill." (This phrase was mistakenly attributed to Ronald Reagan during the recent vice-presidential debate.) She describes Winthrop's text ("A Model of Christian Charity") as describing "an America that might have been" as well as "a teetering stack of self-congratulatory Biblical comparisons" -- only to cleverly undercut the trenchant analysis with, "Of course, this America does exist. It's called Canada."

It's pretty clear why Vowell chose the Puritans as the subject of this book, which is "more head trip than road trip," and just as clear that Vowell is tired of explaining those reasons. (Need a hint? Watch her recent appearance on "The Daily Show." Need it all explained to you? Check her interview with DCist.) She'd rather "go all grandpa" on the Bible book 2nd Samuel ("King David's serial-killer years"), Winthrop's own personal journal entries about the relationship between the colony and its disapproving mother country, or the amazing cast she's lined up for the audio version of SHIPMATES -- for which she promised John Slattery, Catherine Keener, Campbell Scott and John Oliver, among others. But I have no doubt that THE WORDY SHIPMATES will make me laugh -- and if writing it didn't make her at least smile, hopefully her next book, a history of Hawaii, will.

CONSONANT WITH VOWELL*

• Another person from my reading notes: Don't ask about Showtime or "The Incredibles 2"!
• I can't wait to read her contribution to the STATE BY STATE anthology, which I just bought. (She represents longtime home state of Montana.)
  
• Is Sarah Vowell coming to your city soon? She's in Brookline and Cambridge, Mass., tonight and tomorrow and heads to the West Coast next week (Wednesday night in LA, Hank!) before looping back through the Midwest and the South (Oct. 28 in Austin). Check out the full lineup at BookTour.com
  

*Sarah, I am so, so sorry. It's Friday and I couldn't help myself.