TOM MCCARTHY news

Not only is a movie adaptation of Tom McCarthy's "Remainder" coming out this year, but there is also a new McCarthy novel due out February 17. Feast your eyes on the cover for SATIN ISLAND, about a "corporate ethnographer" trying to write the definitive history of the era. I wasn't a huge fan of C, McCarthy's last novel, but excited to give this one a try. The movie is a British production starring Tom Sturridge (of "Pirate Radio," we are informed) and directed by Israeli video director Omer Fast.

Not near a windmill

After a nine-month search, Spanish investigators believe they have identified the remains of Miguel de Cervantes, inexplicably chilling in a Madrid convent just three blocks from the Prado for hundreds of years. Will wonders never cease! 

Tournament of Books 2015: Evie Wyld, ALL THE BIRDS, SINGING

In British-Australian author Evie Wyld's second novel, an Australian woman running from the trauma of her past finds it more difficult than she could imagine to get along without the help she doesn't want. 

When we first meet Jake, she is tending to a sheep flock on her own, distressed at the unseen predator who keeps picking them off. How she got to be a lone stakeholder, resistant even to the farm's old owner's offers of help without strings, is revealed in successive chapters that move backward in time from her last post as the only female sheep shearer, all the way back to what caused her to leave home -- alternating with her search for the sheep killer and the arrival, on her farm, of a mysterious drifter.

I credit the Tournament of Books for connecting me to this book, which didn't grab me at first but steadily drilled into my soul and made it excruciating to look away from. In the end, one reason I liked this book was, not to play misery Olympics here, but when I talk and read about the ordinary perils of sexism, I am not considering situations as drastic as Jake finds herself in through the course of the book. The perspective offered by having to put myself in Jake's shoes, which sometimes was nerve-wracking along the scale of a horror movie, was part of the experience of reading, and now I need to find someone else who has read this book to talk about its ending. (I found it puzzling but somehow fitting?)

Transit trouble

If you are an adult human who would willingly get on a flight of, let's say, more than an hour without anything to occupy you, please explain to me your life because I do not get it.

I started writing this post in my head after the latest such encounter, on a 3-hour flight that ended up closer to 4. I happily tucked in to Michael Cunningham's BY NIGHTFALL (the construction of it, micro and macro, is just a beauty). The man next to me dozed for a while, then started reading over my shoulder when I switched to the New Yorker and from there to my Kindle. Later, desperately, he opened the in-flight magazine and started tracing the routes with a finger. No wonder when the doors opened he practically pole-vaulted over me to try and get out faster (which, because we were in row 24, was useless).

At least this guy in his mental meanderings, whatever they were, didn't decide that I was his source of entertainment -- as seems to happen to me more and more, particularly with men slightly older than my father who are cheerfully blind to my open book and abnormally curious about my marital status.

I'm probably preaching to the choir on this one, but I for one enjoy the enforced stillness and lack of distraction that modern flying can provide to a reader. It's less so now that many flights have WiFi, but still, not all of them do. I neither feared nor dreaded this flight, except for what delays could do to it on either end. (On that account, I was lucky.)

How to Bust TBR Guilt

Here's Amanda Nelson of Book Riot on how to absolve yourself for owning too many books you haven't read. Some excellent points. (That said I am running out of space, so at least on that case I have some work to be done.)

Sit back without your wife and kids, open a liter of substandard beer and read Casey Cep's encounter with a Karl Ove Knausgaard truther. Despite only being 2 books in, I feel greatly in danger of one day becoming that guy. They are the kind of memoirs that lead one to madness.

One-Star Revue: WILD

One of the less-megaphoned, but (to me) major slights of last week's Oscar nominations was the Academy voters not giving "Wild" the nod for Best Adapted Screenplay. The Nick Hornby-penned (yup, that Nick Hornby) adaptation of Cheryl Strayed's memoir about the time she hiked the Pacific Crest Trail and changed her life is the rare film that can be appreciated in tandem with its source material. Director Jean-Marc Vallee took full advantage of the visual medium of film to show us the weird and lonely places on the trail where Strayed wrestled with her demons, while employing voiceover to retain the author's voice in her own story. Watching "Wild" made me want to go back and read WILD, and can you wish for more from a movie adaptation? (See also "Inherent Vice.")

WILD has been out for a while, though, and not everyone feels the same way I do. A particular flashpoint for these reviewers is the popularity of the book after its selection for "Oprah's Book Club 2.0" (is this still happening? I forget!) Normally I disdain the explanation that anyone who dislikes a popular thing is "just jealous," but in a few cases here, it's a close call. I can only think that these people are just missing out on something:

• "This book is just further proof that it is sex, drugs & rock 'n' roll that sells. If it had ACTUALLY been about the PCT, Oprah never would have read it."
• "I've been through a number of similar traumas to Strayed. What I didn't do to recover was libel my entire immediate family... or wallow in self-pity for YEARS."
• "The parts about the hike I did read were good, but I just kept waiting for something to gross me out or make me sad and then decided it wasn't worth it."
• "There was not enough hiking and true self discovery for me to take this book seriously."
• "Nearly everyone gets blisters on these long-distance hikes - but complaining about them incessantly is obnoxious."
• "Strayed includes a list titled "Books Burned on the PCT" - not "Books Read on the PCT"... It's almost as if she's proud of having consigned Faulkner, Nabokov, and Joyce to the flames. So casually does Strayed admit to destroying so much that is beautiful, I'm shocked she actually managed to hike over a thousand miles without starting a forest fire."
• "I'll admit it right off the bat, I'm not sure this genre is my cup of tea."

P.S. Just for argument's sake, I'd probably bump "The Imitation Game" from its adapted screenplay spot. Such a traditional (boring) biopic for such an extraordinary story. How frustrating.

Tournament of Books 11: The shortlist arrives

Have at it:

Jesse Ball, SILENCE ONCE BEGUN
Will Chancellor, A BRAVE MAN SEVEN STOREYS TALL
Anthony Doerr, ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE
Elena Ferrante, THOSE WHO LEAVE AND THOSE WHO STAY **3rd book in a series
Roxane Gay, AN UNTAMED STATE (I've read and reviewed this)
Lars Iyer, WITTGENSTEIN JR
Marlon James, A BRIEF HISTORY OF SEVEN KILLINGS
Phil Klay, REDEPLOYMENT
Emily St. John Mandel, STATION ELEVEN (I've read this)
David Mitchell, THE BONE CLOCKS (I've read part of this)
Celeste Ng, EVERYTHING I NEVER TOLD YOU
Jenny Offill, DEPT OF SPECULATION
Ariel Schrag, ADAM
Sarah Waters, THE PAYING GUESTS
Jeff VanderMeer, ANNIHILATION **trilogy
Evie Wyld, ALL THE BIRDS, SINGING

I was 8/16 in my predictions, which is as expected. Also, there's no round-robin for a spot, which I did not get correctly.

"Amazing Amy stands for a newer creation: lovely girls, expensively educated to seize success for themselves (Amy has diplomas from Harvard and Yale), and yet still groomed for the dream of a beautiful dress and a white cake. As Nick puts it in the novel, 'Of course Amy can cook French cuisine and speak fluent Spanish and garden and knit and run marathons and day-trade stocks and fly a plane and look like a runway model doing it.'

"If no longer vital to a woman’s status as a human being, marriage is still understood as her crowning success, the event without which her life won’t be truly complete. When Amazing Amy grows up, she can’t not get married. The world is still no place for single women. They are regularly bombarded -- and I say this, let’s face it, from experience -- by both well- and ill-intentioned comments about their inability to find that special man."

--from Elif Batuman's terrific though spoilery essay on GONE GIRL, "Marriage Is An Abduction," for the New Yorker.

One-Star Revue: Tom Rath, STRENGTHS FINDER 2.0

If we learned one thing from 2014, it was that the haters are going to hate, hate, hate, hate, hate. It's just their core capacity! So today we're taking a look at the 1-star reviews on Amazon's top-selling book of 2014, Tom Rath's STRENGTHS FINDER 2.0.

This is kind of a cheat because I'm not overly familiar with Rath's work; I only know friends who have been through his training sessions (career/ talent related), and what I've heard has been positive. So I'm not in the best place to defend his organizational work, but I think we can all agree that no one deserves inanities like this:

• "After over 6 months of failed attempts to get the online quiz to work, I have to label this book a BUST!"
• "You buy this sort of thing to get uplifted, not descend into cubicle-think hell."
• "Why name the themes Achiever, Adaptability, Belief, and Command? What would have been wrong with revising these to be Achiever, Adaptor, Believer, Commander? This seems symptomatic of some really sloppy thinking."
• "Knowing what your strengths are is not rocket science."
• "On the back cover of the book, there's an advertisement for Tom Rath's new book. What does that tell you about the type of book this is... Enough said."
• "The first book has over 247 pages that are nearly twice the size of the 174 pages of 2.0 which has much smaller pages as it is more of a handbook size than a traditional book size."
• "I had more accuracy with a free online astrological chart."

(By the way, the top-selling Kindle book of 2014 was THE FAULT IN OUR STARS, which we've already covered in One-Star Revue. Not that it wouldn't be fun to do so again.)

Books I didn't finish in 2014 and am dragging with me into 2015

Maybe they're emblematic! But probably not.

Ruth Ozeki, A TALE FOR THE TIME BEING -- I really enjoyed this book up until the funeral (I hope that's vague enough to avoid all spoilers), a scene I found so upsetting that it was difficult for me to focus on everything that happened after. I'll probably finish it eventually, I just feel averse.
Jaimy Gordon, LORD OF MISRULE - someone left this National Book Award winner on the free shelf at work, making it easier for me to give it 10 pages before (as previously) I had rejected it as "not for me." I was fairly captivated -- but I was traveling somewhere, and it was a hardcover, so I set it down. As one does.
Sara Paretsky, BLACKLIST (no relation to the James Spader hamfest of the same name) -- started when I was at home over Christmas because my mom is a fan. Honestly, I should probably bump this one up so I don't forget all the clues in the mystery.
Gillian Flynn, DARK PLACES -- my library loan unexpectedly came up on Dec. 30 for this earlier novel by the author of GONE GIRL. So far it's even darker and bleaker -- fun! This is also an upcoming movie

My New Year's Resolution

Update this blog more now that the first draft of my novel is done.