I am an evil tease.

Where will you be on November 15th?

Okay, I'll say it: I've been in kind of a book rut recently. I was reading a lot of stuff for work that was not inspiring, and which left me too tired to read anything else besides. Isn't it hell when you can't find a good book? I just get so disillusioned with life; it seems like all the sparkle goes out. This weekend did a lot to turn that around. While traveling home -- more on that later -- I read four really good books in a row (three of which I'll talk about here) and now I feel all energized to tackle the rest of my stack.

Ted Heller, SLAB RAT. Recommended to me via Sara Nelson's SO MANY BOOKS, SO LITTLE TIME (she's the editor of Publisher's Weekly, so she should know!) A dark comedy set in the magazine world at a "Vanity Fair"-ish rag called It. The slab in question is the giant, menacing building in which protagonist Zach Post lives and works. So much of it rings true, even the zany bits. It's out of print, but go to your library and hunt it up (or get it second-hand).

Ken Jennings, BRAINIAC. I expected this one -- part memoir, part history from the world's winningest "Jeopardy!" champ -- to be good, and it was better than expected. I had read some things on Jennings' blog before, so I knew what to expect as far as his writing style -- wry, occasionally over-explained, salted with clean but occasionally lame jokes -- but I was pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed following him through his "Jeopardy!" run. The trivia questions in each chapter don't hurt either.

Laurie Graham, GONE WITH THE WINDSORS. A Whartonian history in diary form? I'm so there. Maybell is a young rich widow who goes to stay with her sister in London in the 1930s, where she reconnects with an old friend -- Wallis "Wally" Warfield Simpson, a social climber with a vengeance. Maybell is not too smart, so her diary dutifully records Wally's attempts to be introduced to the prince, but she couldn't have predicted that Wally would ever become romantically attached to the prince, or what would happen after. This reminded me of an Ann Rinaldi book I read when I was younger, IN MY FATHER'S HOUSE, which employs a Civil War coincidence (the farmer in whose fields the war began ended up providing the Appomattox house where the war ended) as the backdrop to a coming-of-age story, but subtly ensures you will never forget the historical events of the time.

I realized while sitting in Newark Airport that airports, or really any kind of transportation hub, are the best places to read. I may also enjoy reading in bed with my flashlight, but airports are so nowhere and general that anything you read feels like a specific somewhere. Plus it's much less messy than, oh, assembling scrapbooks, or knitting, or building things out of Legos. Not a lot of small pieces to a book, usually, is what I mean.

I caught a glimpse of Mark Z. Danielewski's Only Revolutions at a bookstore in Newark on my way home (killing time before the bus) and I am daunted, but want to try it. Anyone read it? The Antonia Fraser book on Marie Antoinette also caught my eye, but due to the popularity of the movie the tie-in edition, the only one in stores, costs $17 list in paperback. (I didn't love the movie, although I do love Steve Coogan.)

Sounds like heaven!

Book... fair? All I can think of is the days when Scholastic would bring all their new stock into my elementary-school gym and class by class we'd get to go and Buy! Books! Which reminds me of the time I got in trouble for ordering from the school book club, but that is another matter entirely.

My friend Brian swears by Greil Marcus, so I guess I'll add this book to all the other ones of his that are supposed to be great. Plus, everyone loves a good Laura Palmer joke. (Salon)

Not how I would have put it.

"The Book Of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered" Via reading under the covers.

Booker 2006: Kiran Desai Takes Home A 'Manny'

The envelope, please: Kiran Desai bests David Mitchell, Sarah Waters to take the Booker Prize. I requested it at my local library as soon as I heard -- did you? Meanwhile, the Nobel Prize sucks, says Salon (via Largehearted Boy). Notable sentence from that piece: Perhaps we shouldn't be so surprised when the [Nobel] blows up in our faces. (Among other things, Alfred Nobel invented dynamite. Classy.

Summer Reading Wrap-Up 2006

I haven't posted here for a long time. WHEW. But I am not leaving you! And I'm planning to post again regularly now that my off-blog life is a little bit sorted.

So while there is still sand in my swimsuit*, here are the highlights of what I read between Memorial Day and Labor Day in this, the summer of 2006:

Celebrity Death Match Books
Kaavya Viswanathan, HOW OPAL MEHTA GOT KISSED, GOT WILD, AND GOT A LIFE
Megan McCafferty, CHARMED THIRDS

Not What I Expected At All
Kazuo Ishiguro, NEVER LET YOU GO

Not What I Expected At All (But In A Good Way)
Colleen Curran, WHORES ON THE HILL

It Latched Onto My Brain And Now It Won't Let Go Oww
Jennifer Weiner, GOODNIGHT NOBODY
Meghan Daum, THE QUALITY OF LIFE REPORT

Haven't Laughed So Hard Since... The Last Time I Laughed So Hard
Carolyn Parkhurst, LOST AND FOUND
Jen Lancaster, BITTER IS THE NEW BLACK

Completely Random Reads
Chris Ayres, WAR REPORTING FOR COWARDS
Bridget Harrison, TABLOID LOVE
Jancee Dunn, BUT ENOUGH ABOUT ME

Like Taking A Miniature Trip
Edith Wharton, THE CUSTOM OF THE COUNTRY
Sara Gay Forden, THE HOUSE OF GUCCI
Joshua Zeitz, FLAPPER

Like Taking A Very, Very Long Trip
Vikram Seth, A SUITABLE BOY

Hyped and Worth It
Marisha Pessl, SPECIAL TOPICS IN CALAMITY PHYSICS

Not Sure Why I Bothered To Finish
Isabel Rose, THE J.A.P. CHRONICLES
Hilary De Vries, SO 5 MINUTES AGO
Kirstie Alley, HOW TO LOSE YOUR ASS AND REGAIN YOUR LIFE

*so to speak. Shouldn't that be a phrase? Like, "I have a bee in my bonnet," but less scary than bees?

It's Gonna Be Me (Writing the Family History)

So after reading this piece on the literary Minot family squabbling over their family history, I have to say... One thing my siblings and I have never fought about is who's going to write the family novel. I have to say, and I'm not trying to brag, that it has always been me.

It's not like my siblings are book-allergic; they all read in various quantities, from fantasy series to THE KNOW-IT-ALL, from sports almanacs to PREP. But I've never seen them show much interest in writing fiction. Claire keeps (or kept) a diary, but I can hardly describe that as fiction. (Not that I've read it, dear.) I was that writing kid. And from the NYT piece, I suppose I ought to count my blessings that we didn't end up like the Brontes.

The only really serious contender in my family for the title of Novelist is my mum, ever since her writing career took off.* Mum probably reads more novels than me during the year (or at least she has been while I've been in school), but I've never heard of her wanting to write one. So, rough life for me! No competition.

*And when I say "took off," I mean: Mum quit working in 1990 when she learned she was pregnant with her third AND fourth children, and picked up 12 years later as a financial writer and editor. She's quite good, too, and it's only through marvelously bad luck that neither of her major book projects have gotten to print yet. But that's another story.

Looks like I'm not the only one with a bunch of half-finished books in my past.

LitMath

Kazuo Ishiguro's NEVER LET ME GO = Jodi Picoult's MY SISTER'S KEEPER + Curtis Sittenfeld's PREP.

You heard it here first.

Ta-da!

I think this blog is lucky because right after I wrote this, I finished the book. All of it. And I didn't even skim the Nehru chapter!

Then I read 10 pages of the new Jay McInerney book, THE GOOD LIFE, and just couldn't seem to care. I guess I need a new mega-book. Suggestions?

My Big Pretentious Indian Novel

One thing, I'm told, that you should never do when applying for a publishing job is talk up the books you love -- if you love classics or very obscure literary novels. "Don't bring a pretentious novel into the waiting room," one editor said. "You think we don't see right through that? And if you go into your interview and talk about how much you love F. Scott Fitzgerald, that doesn't help us that much."

I have occasionally been guilty of the pretentious-novel-as-conversation-starter, although not as guilty as these anonymous examples, I suppose. But what if that seemingly pretentious novel happens to be what I'm reading?

For, dear readers, I am reading a novel that sure looks pretentious, yet I would contend my motives for reading it are not at all pretentious. I read Indian diasporic writer Vikram Seth's travel book (FROM HEAVEN LAKE) and two of his other novels (THE GOLDEN GATE and AN EQUAL MUSIC) before I was gently pushed to pick up this novel, A SUITABLE BOY, which is Tolstovian in scale, rich in irony, and... well... 1400+ pages long. (1474, exactly, and don't think I haven't checked.) But I wouldn't have it in my possession at all were it not for my mom's having already read it, gushed over it and (gradually) pushed me towards it. And while Mom's taste doesn't necessarily mirror mine -- I still don't get ANGLE OF REPOSE, for instance -- she got to me to the point that I did, in fact, want to read this obscenely long book.

I started it in the beginning of May, and at long last I have made a, shall we say, suitable dent in it. An impromptu bus trip last weekend pushed me over the 1000-page mark, and I actually got into it. Still, if I don't take it to lectures and on errands with me, I may never finish it. I know I may look pretentious standing in line at the post office with a paperback book that really requires two hands, but I'm just trying to finish it sometime this year. I already missed Mum's deadline of June 17th, and she has promised it to someone else as soon as I finish it. When I finish it. (I can't say if any more; I couldn't bear to waste all that work and put it down now.)

Pretentious or not, I am finally heading into the home stretch, and so far I actually do recommend A SUITABLE BOY -- for people who like long novels. (It's about 3.5 times more interesting than WAR AND PEACE, for example, and for only 50 extra pages!) Maybe lifting it several times a day will help me build up hand strength for the almighty business handshake. But probably I'll move onto something less pretentious, not for my prospective employers' sake, but just because I'll need a break.

Things I learned about Curtis Sittenfeld and the PREP phenomenon.

1. Curtis Sittenfeld is not Lee Fiora from PREP, even if she did go to boarding school. NB: She said she appropriated a lot of the campus architecture and institutions from Groton for PREP because it was easier that way, since she was already making up the entire book.
2. She has serious writerly chops -- it was her dream to go to the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and she did.
3. Her personal style is not so much preppy -- when a Washington Post style writer wanted to cover her style, she asked her publicist, "Can I wear sweatpants?"
4. The real way to get magazine editors to notice your book? Send it out with Moleskines, flip-flops and pink white-out attached. (This via Ms. Sittenfeld's publicist.) Anyone know where I can get some pink white-out? Or should I say, pink-out?
5. Stalker alert! She lives in Philadelphia.
6. When PREP was published she promised her ninth-grade English class that she would buy them pizza if it hit the New York Times best-seller list -- and she actually did. In this case it's probably best she didn't go to #1, because she had promised them all a trip to Hawaii.
7. She found out at 22 that she is Tony Orlando's daughter. (Oh, I made that one up. But you believed me, didn't you!)

Adam Gopnik Sez: Lost Generation Not Lost Enough

I was lucky enough to hear New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik speak last night through the Brown Friends of the Library. Gopnik talked about the American ideal of Paris in writing from Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson until... well, himself, in his book PARIS TO THE MOON about his 1995 to 2000 residence there.

Gopnik's point was that Americans see Paris as a type of idyll, in the same way they see New York, and have gone there either to be good bourgeois and study at the Sorbonne and rub shoulders with the literati, or to drink and smoke and have lots of sex and be good bohemians. (Right now in New York he does neither, although he acknowledges that most people he meets still think he lives in Paris because he lives in "the Paris of their minds.") Franklin and Jefferson were both in Paris on diplomatic missions, but Jefferson studied it like he studied his farms, while Franklin concluded "[the French] must have some way of changing the air here that we are not acquainted with."

His talk gave me a whole raft of new authors to read about the city, which I have been lucky enough to visit once. Nathaniel Parker Willis, who Gopnik said is largely forgotten today, wrote about "restaurant Paris"; Art Buchwald of the New York Herald Tribune chronicled the city in the 1940s. Henry James had an unrequited romance with the city, because he tried to live there and never really felt accepted. "No American has known Paris better" than Edith Wharton. But the Lost Generation, most often invoked in the same breath as Paris, lived a much more insulated life among fellow expats than earlier chroniclers of the city -- hence him saying they weren't lost enough. And having tackled THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ALICE B. TOKLAS, I confess I did wonder where the French were and why Stein and Toklas moved in such a small circle. In any case, he really whetted my appetite to read more about the City of Light (besides my abortive attempt earlier this semester at HAUSSMANN, OR THE DISTINCTION). Suggestions?

In other news, it appears that Starbucks is going to start selling books soon. Oh, help us all.

Sonnets from strangers, and a great way to keep mum.

In my sophomore year of college, I wrote that one of my life goals (per "As You Like It") was to find a boy willing to tie sonnets on trees for me. If I had known about these London sonnet walks, in which you are given directions from Shakespeare's Globe and random people come up to you and recite poetry, I might have given up on males in general! (But it's a good thing I didn't.)

Here's a funny interview with author/ blogginista Paperback Writer, one of my personal favorites.