Happy 200th Birthday, Pride and Prejudice!

Thanks to Unputdownables for posting this on Facebook!

The first edition of Pride and Prejudice was published on January 28th, 1813, and it has been diverting readers excessively ever since. :) I can't even recall the first time I read it--most likely in my late teens or early twenties--but it's one of the few books that I return to regularly.

People use books for so many different purposes--entertainment, information, growth, enlightenment. Especially when my finances or responsibilities don't allow me to travel, I use books as a way to be a tourist in other countries and cultures. If I can't GO somewhere my heart is pulling me, I'll read about it, obsessively in some cases. P&P was one of the books that showed me how literature could allow me to travel through time as well as geography. Whenever I pick it up, I'm sucked into 19th century small-town England. By the time Elizabeth is visiting the Lake Country with her relatives, I usually feel like I've been refreshed by a vacation of my own.

Happy birthday to one of my very favorite books, and in case you're wondering about the Hey Girl quote, it comes from Chapter 8. Loosely rephrased. :)

"A woman must have a thorough knowledge of music, singing, drawing, dancing, and the modern languages, to deserve the word; and besides all this, she must possess a certain something in her air and manner of walking, the tone of her voice, her address and expressions, or the word will be but half deserved." [Caroline Bingley]

"All this she must possess," added Darcy, "and to all this she must yet add something more substantial, in the improvement of her mind by extensive reading." 

That is one of the reasons why generations of women have found Mr. Darcy so dreamy. :)

2013 Countdown: Book #1, Slaughterhouse Five, ***

Last week I kicked off the 2013 literary challenge reading Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut. Somehow it was my very first Vonnegut--I can't figure out why it took me so long to give him a try--and even though it wasn't the best novel I've read recently, I liked it enough that I'll probably check out some of his other books in the future. Slaughterhouse Five was inventive, thought-provoking, and often entertaining. On the other hand, Vonnegut delivered his message with a sledgehammer, and he dressed it up in a story so outlandish that I was tempted several times to put the book down.

For those of you unfamiliar with Slaughterhouse Five, it's about Billy Pilgrim, a young American GI in Germany during World War II who, owing to an alien abduction, experiences his life non-sequentially, bouncing randomly from the war to his childhood, his later years, and his time with the aliens of Tralfamadore, and back again. One of his core experiences was surviving the American firebombing of Dresden, sheltered in a slaughterhouse that had been repurposed into a POW camp.

Some books tell great stories, some books deliver powerful messages, and some books do both. For me, this was a message book: its plot was so farfetched and farcical that it felt grasping and awkward. Vonnegut dreamed up the whole alien abduction storyline to give himself a platform on which to opine about free will, but I caught myself rolling my eyes more than once. No question, this is purely a matter of taste: some people clearly love that kind of thing, chief among them book critics. Modern Library ranked Slaughterhouse Five as the 18th greatest English language novel of the 20th century. And I can see why they did it; I'm totally willing to concede to them on all matters related to literary merit. But enjoyment of a book is subjective and personal, and I enjoyed this book moderately. Just moderately.

Setting aside the absurdity of the plot, however, Vonnegut has an undeniable knack for sentences and phrases that stick in the mind. I appreciated two quotes in particular. The first passage comes in the first chapter, when the narrator is describing what he did before traveling to Europe to begin work on his book about Dresden:

The two little girls and I crossed the Delaware River where George Washington had crossed it, the next morning. We went to the New York World's Fair, saw what the past had been like, according to the Ford Motor Company and Walt Disney, saw what the future would be like, according to General Motors. And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.

The second quote was about an ancillary character, a fellow prisoner of war who had been a hobo prior to the war:

Those boots were almost all he owned in this world. They were his home.

I'm glad I read it and I did enjoy it well enough, but I won't be in a hurry to pick it up again soon. Three stars. So it goes.

T+L's Best Bookstores in America

This month, Travel + Leisure magazine is running an article naming what they consider to be the best bookstores in America. They chose some absolute gems--I've been to half of the 14 shops they picked, in cities as diverse as Miami, San Francisco, Denver, and DC (local favorite Politics and Prose is featured!). Overall, it was a solid lineup, although it's shocking that the Strand in New York City didn't make the cut and that the authors overlooked Boston altogether. Still, I love that a magazine aimed at travel chose to focus on indie bookstores. The more I think about it, the more sense it makes to me.

Nothing against national chain bookstores--they fill a need, and I spend more time in Barnes & Noble than most. But they offer a cookie-cutter shopping experience from one end of the country to the other. Almost all Barnes & Nobles share the same off-yellow walls, green carpet, dark brown shelves, orange and white signs, and scent of Starbucks coffee wafting over from the cafe. Except for the content of the Local History shelf, you'd be hard pressed to tell whether you were in Minnesota or Louisiana. It's great if you're just looking for a book, but if you're out of town, there's no special reason to seek one out because the one in the city you're visiting will be just like the one at home.

But if you were dropped blindfolded into an independent bookstore somewhere in the country, you could probably make a pretty good guess about where you were. Great indies are the furthest thing from interchangeable--their atmosphere, stock, clientele, and sellers are all precisely suited to that specific place. If independent bookstores aren't intimately attuned to their communities, they don't survive.

For me, poking through an unfamiliar city's flagship indie book haunt can be as illuminating as exploring its museums and landmarks. If you want to meet Portland, Oregon, it's fine to visit its famous rose garden (with other out-of-towners), but you'll gain a lot more insight about why that community is special if you go to Powell's, get lost in the rooms, and spend a few minutes chatting with the bookseller in your favorite department. That bookstore might be my favorite city block on Planet Earth, but it just wouldn't be possible to run someplace like that in DC. Powell's store is almost 70,000 square feet and has more than a million volumes, which is far beyond what DC is capable of supporting, despite the fact that the two cities are almost exactly the same size. That says something cool and interesting about Portland, don't you think?

You can get a sense of place by trying to put your finger on what makes each one of these stores unique. Our beloved shops in Washington--Politics and Prose and Kramerbooks--are only a fraction of the size of Powell's, but they offer exceptionally extensive collections of current affairs, policy, and history. P&P's clientele is noticeably older than the indies in most other cities, and there are way more suited-up after-work types in DC. Even though DC has a thriving arts community, a store like New York's Rizzoli Bookstore, which specializes in high-end design, art, photography, and foreign-language collections, would never survive here.

Rizzoli Bookstore, New York City

Last year, I was chatting with the bookseller ringing me up at Housing Works, a fantastic used bookstore in New York City. He noticed that I had bought something from the New York Review Books reissue series and mentioned that he hadn't yet encountered a book in that series that he hadn't loved. I said that I generally agreed, except that I hadn't enjoyed one in particular called My Dog Tulip by J.R. Ackerley. Incredibly, he had read it too. !!! That would never have happened in DC, at least when it comes to literary fiction that doesn't show up on a bestseller list. Political biographies, sure, but not a six decade-old, treacly essay by a gay British journalist about how much he loved his ill-behaved German Shepherd. In my 20 years in DC, nothing like that has ever happened. I think that says something cool and interesting about New York.

Housing Works, New York City

In any case, I have to applaud T+L for turning people on to some wonderful shops. If it were my list, I would have added these places:

 

Idlewild Books in New York City, near Union Square. Idlewild is a tiny jewel. It's a beautifully curated second-floor shop dedicated exclusively to travel reading--it's my own personal nirvana. :) They shelve all their books according to destination, so if you're planning a trip (or are just fantasizing about one) to Switzerland or South Africa or El Salvador, you'll find the guidebooks grouped with nonfiction and novels relevant to each area. Every item in the store is lovingly handpicked, and the staff know the books inside and out. It might be the only bookstore I've ever visited where I could close my eyes, pull any book off the shelf at random, and always end up with something I'm interested in reading.

Harvard Book Store, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Harvard Book Store in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I love it when bookstores sell both new and used books, like Harvard Book Store does. Best of both worlds, right? They've got a terrific selection of new books upstairs, and downstairs they have an extensive selection of remaindered books, many from university presses, as well as a large collection of interesting used books. One thing about Cambridge--the people there are readers, and its used bookstores are treasure troves. Because of all the universities around, you really never know what you'll find. I just wish they had a little more room so that they could sell you a cup of coffee and let you relax at a table with a stack of possibilities before making final purchase decisions. But it's Boston and people want their Dunkin' Donuts coffee anyway, I guess. :)

McNally Jackson in New York. Another NYC bookstore that has it all: great selection, cool ambiance, knowledgeable staff, a serviceable cafe, and seats scattered throughout so you can take a load off and make purchasing decisions in a leisurely fashion. Like Idlewild, McNally Jackson shelves its fiction according to the nationality of the author, which is fun if you're interested in modern Germany, say, or are looking for your next big fat Russian novel.

Strand Bookstore, New York

The Strand. I'm dumbfounded that this wasn't on T+L's list. "18 Miles of new, used, and rare books. Since 1927." In Manhattan, for crying out loud. Really, what else needs to be said?

What did T+L and I miss? What are your favorite bookstores? Share your favorites in the comments below!

Wow, 366 books in a year?

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2012/12/new_year_s_resolutions_reading_a_book_every_day.single.html 

A Slate article posted earlier this week by Jeff Ryan describes his experiences carrying out a 2012 New Year's resolution: reading a book a day for the entire year. I was totally impressed when Nina Sankovich successfully completed the same project a few years ago, and I loved the book she later wrote about it, Tolstoy and the Purple Chair.

Unlike Nina, who took the year off from paid employment (though she still had kids at home), Jeff somehow sandwiched all of his reading in between a full-time job and his family responsibilities.

Jeff happily admits that he read lots of literary junk food over the course of the year. He revealed his secret: "capes. Superheroes have saved me so many times I might as well be Lois Lane. I can start and finish a six-issue collection of Captain America or Green Lantern comics in less than an hour. That's a book, or at least it is under my definition of 'something printed that costs about $20.' Don't blame me, blame Marvel Comics."

But even setting aside the books that he clearly just read for fun (and there is nothing wrong with that!), he found the time to tackle some really substantive material too. His reading list included Umberto Eco, Sarah Vowell, Nick Hornby, James Baldwin, Jonathan Letham, Tracy Kidder, Ray Bradbury, Michael Chabon, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Boo, Gore Vidal, and Don DeLillo. He even read Tolstoy and the Purple Chair. Not too shabby!

While I admire both of these readers for completing a challenge requiring so much focus and endurance, I can't envision doing anything similar myself. I'd resent the pressure to shy away from longer books, and occasionally I do like to do something other than read.

But what I love and ultimately find so inspiring about both of their stories is the reminder that we all have a lot more free time than we think we do. We just need to harness it more effectively. Jeff fulfilled his resolution using what he called "the crumbs of time found in [his] life," reading during his lunch hours, listening to audio books while mowing the lawn, deciding it wasn't that important to take the car in for yet another oil change. If he and Nina can find enough time to read a book each day, surely with a little effort I can better manage my own time and open up more room to read too.

HuffPo Preview of Books to Be Published in 2013

Best Books Of 2013? Our Picks For The Year's Biggest Reads

Earlier this afternoon, Huffington Post posted a preview of the most eagerly-anticipated books set to be published this year, and my to-read list just got a little longer. At this rate, I'd better be immortal or I'll never get through it all.

This past Monday, Jared Diamond released The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? It's nearly unforgivable that I haven't yet read either of his bestsellers, Guns, Germs, and Steel or Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. I've been meaning to for years: they are just exactly the kind of books that I usually enjoy reading, and I have no good excuse for not having done so by now. I even own copies of both books, which have been silently judging me from the shelf for some time now. I did watch National Geographic's documentary based on Guns, Germs, and Steel (which, by the way, is streaming on Netflix) and found it fascinating, so I think the time has come. I'm going to start with his older books, though, and chances are good that I won't catch up to The World Until Yesterday until sometime in early 2018, but it's nice to know that it will be there waiting for me when I'm ready for it. ;)

Lawrence Wright's The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, about the September 11th plot and the counterintelligence operation designed to prevent it, was one of the best works of narrative nonfiction that I have ever read. It provides a compelling and masterful explanation of jihad mobilization and the bureaucratic snafus that culminated in the attacks. If you haven't read it, I cannot recommend it highly enough--it's one of those books that will help you better understand why America is the way it is in the new century. (In fact, if you look to the upper right corner of this page, you'll see a array of covers of my favorite books, and The Looming Tower is among them.)

For that reason, I am absolutely perplexed at his choice of subject matter in his latest book, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief, due January 17th. Honestly, I'm a bit disappointed that he focused his considerable talents on a topic that, at least on the face of it, seems so trivial compared with his previous work. He's such a strong writer that I'd follow him pretty far afield from my usual reading interests, but Scientology and Hollywood is probably stretching it a bit too far. I'm sure that there must be quite a story to tell if he chose to tell it, but I'm just not very interested.

In June, Colum McCann (author of Let the Great World Spin) will publish Transatlantic, a novel that weaves together the lives of Frederick Douglass, Alcock and Brown (the British pilots who completed the first transatlantic flight in 1919), and former Senator George Mitchell (D-ME). McCann is a great storyteller, and I'm curious to see why he chose to focus on Senator Mitchell, the former Senate Majority Leader and roving diplomat who has assisted with peace talks in Northern Ireland and the Middle East. I work in politics and have met the senator in passing a couple of times, and I think this book will probably mark the first time when I will read a novel featuring a character that I have met. If it were nonfiction, it wouldn't be so strange, but in a novel it seems both kind of bizarre and cool, don't you think?

In any case, HuffPo also mentioned books forthcoming from David Sedaris, Stephen King, Maurice Sendak, E.O. Wilson, Dan Savage, Lionel Shriver, and Chuck Todd. And in March, readers in the U.S. will have their first opportunity to get a copy of The Tragedy of Mr Morn, an early play by Nabokov. Buckle up, kids--there's a busy year ahead!

2012 Book List

These are the books I finished in 2012, grouped loosely according to how much I liked them. The links will take you to each book's page on goodreads for a summary, reviews, and other information. If you've read any of these and would like to share an opinion or if you have questions about any of them, I'd love to hear from you in a comment.

Five Stars
1. In Europe by Geert Mak
2. Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 by Tony Judt
3. Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo
4. The End of Your Life Book Club by Will Schwalbe
5. The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
6. The Memory Chalet by Tony Judt

Four Stars
7. Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China by Leslie Chang
8. Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain
9. Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing
10.  When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present by Gail Collins
11. The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald
12. Fall of Giants by Ken Follett
13. Fire in the Ashes: Twenty-Five Years Among the Poorest Children in America by Jonathan Kozol
14. Let Me Go by Helga Schneider
15. Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
16. The Paris Wife by Paula McLain
17. Cannery Row by John Steinbeck
18. As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning by Laurie Lee
19. More Baths, Less Talking by Nick Hornby
20. The Lost Wife by Alyson Richman
21. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
22. Winter of the World by Ken Follett
23. The Borrower by Rebecca Makkai
24. Cooking with Fernet Branca by James Hamilton-Paterson

Three Stars
25. The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes
26. A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
27. Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
28. Get Me Out of Here by Henry Sutton
29. Agent Garbo: The Brilliant, Eccentric Secret Agent Who Tricked Hitler and Saved D-Day by Stephan Talty
30. The Descendants by Kaui Hart Hemmings
31. The Girl Who Fell from the Sky by Heidi Durrow
32. The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender
33. The Informationist by Taylor Stevens
34. My Berlin Kitchen by Luisa Weiss
35. The Longest Way Home: One Man's Quest for the Courage to Settle Down by Andrew McCarthy
36. The Expats by Chris Pavone
37. Rip Tide by Stella Rimington
38. I Don't Know How She Does It: The Life of Kate Reddy, Working Mother by Allison Pearson
39. One Day by David Nicholls
40. The Privileges by Jonathan Dee
41. The Fear Index by Robert Harris
42. Enigma by Robert Harris
43. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis
44. How Reading Changed My Life by Anna Quindlen
45. The Broker by John Grisham

Two Stars
46. Twilight by Stephanie Meyer
47. Spy: The Inside Story of How the FBI's Robert Hanssen Betrayed America by David Wise
48. The Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante
49. Life Goes On by Hans Keilson
50. After the Wall: Confessions from an East German Childhood and the Life that Came Next by Jana Hensel
51. Watermark by Joseph Brodsky

A Book Blog Is Born

Relief sculpture at St. Simon the Tanner Coptic Church, Cairo, Egypt

I love to read. Every year since 2007, I have resolved to read at least 50 books per year, and it is the only New Year's resolution that I always keep. By mid-February, my visits to the gym are spaced wider and wider apart, I'm drinking too much soda again, and when it's really cold, I'm not dragging my dog outside for her daily walk. But I'm still eagerly attacking my stacks of books, surfing goodreads for new recommendations, and digging through my neighborhood bookstore.

For me, reading is an entertaining way to help satisfy my curiosity about life, other people, other cultures, and history. A good novel gives me the opportunity to inhabit someone else's life, to see how the world looks through somebody else's eyes. I reach for nonfiction to answer questions about why the world is the way it is and how it got this way. I spent five months traveling through Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East last year, and I've spent most of the year since I returned reading to try to better understand what I saw and experienced there.

Usually I enjoy the solitude that books can provide, but books are capable of creating instant community. When I read a passage that really moves me, I am distressed--almost physically uncomfortable--if there is no friend nearby to read it to. Sometimes I can't stop myself and actually type the quote into Facebook (I know. I'm sorry, friends). Ironically, the more I enjoy a book, the more anxious I am to give it away the instant I'm finished with it, pressing it into the hands of the first friend I see. (Is there any other possession that has that effect on people? My new shoes are amazing--you must wear them home! This is the best car I've ever driven--here are the keys.)

Even strangers aren't safe. I will admit it, if I'm in a bookstore and see you examining a book that I love, I will overcome my introvert tendencies to beg you to buy yourself the book. I hope you will do the same for me. That's more or less the purpose of this blog: to create space to tell people about books they shouldn't miss, and to invite others to do the same. Happy reading, and please don't be shy with recommendations and comments!

--Peg