The jungle

OK I got nothing for St. Patrick’s Day — other than a hearty recommendation that anyone near Key West stop by Finnegan’s Wake tonight on the good chance that a very good band, Skraeling, will be playing their usual St. Patrick’s Day gig there. What I do have is a link to my review in Sunday’s Miami Herald of The Lost City of Z by David Grann. It’s a great tale about the last of the great Victorian explorers, Percy Fawcett, who disappeared into the Amazon rainforest in 1925 looking for, essentially, El Dorado. Grann retraces his steps both on the ground and in the archives and does an excellent job telling the tale.

A reading list

A couple weeks ago my friend Erin asked me for some book recommendations. Since I don’t really know her taste in reading matter, I made a wide ranging and long list of everything I like that I could remember offhand. Since I haven’t posted anything here in awhile (curse you, Facebook!) I figured I might as well. So here it is:

 

A reading list for Erin

 

Not chick lit but good writing by women:

 

Lorrie Moore — especially Birds of America, a book of short stories

Alice Munro — any of her books, almost all of which are stories

Andrea Barrett — anything, though you should start with Ship Fever, also a book of stories

Jhumpa Lahiri – She has one novel, The Namesake, and two collections of stories, The Interpreter of Maladies and Unaccustomed Earth. All great.

Maggie O’Farrell — most recent: The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox

Emma Donoghue — most recent: The Sealed Letter

Kate Atkinson – she has a trilogy of mysteries, though they’re really character studies: Case Histories, One Good Turn, When Will There Be Good News

P.D. James — slightly more traditional mysteries featuring Adam Dalgleish

Dorothy Sayers — older mysteries that are good and well written, featuring Lord Peter Wimsy.

Scarlett Thomas – The End of Mr. Y – not really sure how to describe this book except that it verges on fantasy/surrealism. But I really, really liked it.

Alison Lurie – Foreign Affairs, The War Between the Tates and a couple set down here includes The Truth About Loren Jones and The Last Resort.

 

If you like mysteries, Swedish mysteries are kind of fun – I liked The Princess of Burundi by Kjell Erikssen. There are lots of others out there.

 

Narrative nonfiction

 

Ian Frazier — Great Plains, Family or On The Rez

Tony Horwitz — Confederates in the Attic, Blue Latitudes or A Voyage Long and Strange. I think Confederates is his best so far.

Sarah Vowell – best known from This American Life – her latest book, The Wordy Shipmates, is about the Puritan settlers in Massachusetts. Assassination Vacation is a historical travelogue with great interesting information about presidential assassins, especially the lesser knowns. Her other books are essay collections that deal with politics and popular culture, Take The Cannoli and The Partly Cloudy Patriot.

 

An accounting, and a warning

I wish my obsessive-compulsive tendencies were in the housecleaning vein, but unfortunately they are limited to useless tasks like carefully keeping track of what I have read. And why? Am I supposed to be earning gold stars from someone? I don’t know why I do this. But I do — and this year, I kept more careful track than ever, with each book noted by fiction vs. nonfiction, if it came from a library, whether I read it for review, etc. etc. I can only blame this on working in a library, where our job is to keep track of things, and classify them. It turns out I like cataloging.

The good news: I read almost twice as much this year as last. That, too, is probably due to my new job. Not that I read on the job — a common but mistaken belief about working in a library — but being surrounded by books all day and learning about lots of newly published books probably inspired me. Not to mention having a job that truly is limited to 40 hours a week most of the time, unlike any job in journalism.

Looking for a place to stay in DC for the inauguration?

Here’s a way to get a place in Washington for the inauguration — and support the Monroe County Library at the same time! Just received this email from Christopher at Voltaire Books:

Give the gift of history this holiday season. 
The owners of Voltaire Books are auctioning off their guest room in Washington, DC, for a lucky couple who wants to attend the Inauguration of Barack Obama as the next President of the United States (Tuesday, January 20, 2009).  100% of proceeds benefit Friends of the Key West Library.
• Washington, DC, guest room available for January 19th – January 21st   (two nights, three days, limit two people)
• Located in Chevy Chase Circle, DC, (near Military Road and Connecticut Ave., in upper NW)
• Walking distance to Friendship Heights Metro Station
• There is a golden retriever puppy in the house
• Does not include Ball tickets or reserved Mall tickets

 
• Bidding NOW OPEN at Voltaire Book (330 Simonton St. at Eaton)
• Auction closes: Monday, December 29th, 5 PM (ET)
• Bidding begins at $250
• All bids require $25 increase
• Pictures of the house are posted in the store
• Gift is not tax deductible

How do I love my local public library? Let me count the ways.

The great, smart, public spirited, hardworking people at the Monroe County Public Library aren’t letting budget blues or holiday overload get them down — instead they’re keeping up great public service, like this online display of books by writers who will appear at the upcoming Key West Literary Seminar (spaces still open for the second session! free Sunday afternoon sessions both weekends!). My man Christopher, owner of the increasingly essential Voltaire Books, just stopped by and told me they have books by all the seminar writers — what a great Christmas gift!

And if that’s not enough reason to love this library, here’s another: Saturday is the season’s first book sale in the Palm Garden. Woo hoo! Lord knows I don’t need more books in my house but these are still irresistible bargains for any bibliophile (and you never know when you might find, say, a signed first edition Elizabeth Bishop in there). It has happened. As a weekday gal, it’s also good to see these events back on Saturdays.

I’m baaaack.

Yes, yes I’ve been neglecting the blog. So sue me. Or cut my blog pay in half. Does that feel better? Besides you should really use this blog the same way I do — as a handy set of links to the more responsible bloggers in the blogroll.

That said, I have been reading — quite a bit. Not as much as I hoped over the Thanksgiving break, but something. I read “The Last Queen,” a historical novel about Juana of Spain, sometimes referred to as Juana the Mad, known to us devotees of Tudor Trash as the older sister of Katharine of Aragon, Henry VIII’s first wife. It wasn’t great art but it was a good read and provided a plausible explanation for why she never really inherited the throne she should have inherited.

But the best reading I’ve done recently has all been set in the 19th century — The Sealed Letter by Emma Donoghue, another work of historical fiction using real people as characters. The novel centers on a scandalous divorce and it pulls off a nice trick — multiple perspectives, all of them plausibly providing the individual characters’ motives and feelings.

The Sealed Letter is in the collection at the FKCC Library and they’ve got it at the Monroe County Library too.

The other thing I’ve been doing is Christmas shopping and this year I’m trying to do as much as possible at my local independent bookstore, Voltaire Books. I’m sure Amazon will get some traffic in my family — those wishlists are awfully handy for faraway relatives — but these days anything we can do to keep the remaining indies with us is well worth it.

Heading north

In today’s Miami Herald, my story about Dennis Lehane and his new book “The Given Day,” a big historical epic which I strongly recommend. It’s set in Boston in 1918-1919, leading up to the Boston Police strike — lots of real people figure, including Babe Ruth, although the main characters are fictional. It’s a big book, at 720 pages, but an absorbing read. And it gets you into the historical fiction groove, which I hope many people are already, with the upcoming Literary Seminar.

Right now, I’m reading Gore Vidal’s Burr, a book I read many years ago — closer to 20 than 10, yikes! It’s a great one, too, funny and surprising, all the stuff that made Vidal the man of letters we love (and fear). Sounds like he was on his game at the Book Fair last night; can’t wait to hear what he has to say at the Key West Literary Seminar, on the eve of Obama’s inauguration in January.

Tomorrow I’m heading up to the Book Fair, where I hope to see Lehane and many, many other writers — because, gosh, I just don’t have enough to read already.

It’s Book Fair Time!!!!

Yes, it’s that time of year — Miami Book Fair time! I don’t make it to this event every year but I always regret it when I don’t. For avid readers, it’s an amazing opportunity to hear all kinds of writers, including old favorites and new discoveries, live and in person and at an insanely reasonable cost — it used to be free; now they charge a whopping $5 for the whole weekend. Sure, there’s the cost of getting to Miami for us outlanders but gas has come way down (thanks, global recession!) and I, at least, have no shame in freeloading off friends for the sake of great literary access. Now if only I can keep the book purchases to a bare minimum …

New this year is a requirement to order tickets ahead of time for all events in the Chapman auditorium — you can find out about that and lots more at the Book Fair website, above.

Random cool book-related stuff from the web

Couple things that washed up onto my screen this morning:

MobyLives, a book blog that’s been on a two-year hiatus, according to the daily Shelf Awareness email — looks like a fun and interesting compendium of litry stuff. It’s the newest addition to our list of links and it doesn’t take long to read back through the archives of its current incarnation. Maybe it’s because I’m from Massachusetts but I particularly appreciated the blog’s inaugural post. 

The Guardian runs the results of a funny contest to recast books in bestseller genres (chick lit, fantasy etc.).

You have a little more than a day to decide whether this year is the year you’ll write a novel in November — those wacky folks at National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo) are at it again — 50,000 words, no one says they have to be great art — organized on the web with local get-togethers. More details at their website; we’re working on hosting a write-a-thon at the college library; watch here for details.

This isn’t really a web thing but if you’ve never been to the Miami Bookfair and you’re in the South Florida region and you like books — you should go. The number of writers who show up and talk is unbelievable and the street fair is like something out of a dream. Get details at their website and get yourself to Miami the weekend of Nov. 15-16.

Historical fiction … it’s hot!

This year’s National Book Award nominees have been announced — and an astounding three out of five in the fiction category are panelists who will be appearing at the Key West Literary Seminar in January. Wow. Peter Mathiessen, Marilynne Robinson and relative newcomer Rachel Kushner all made the short list. That’s impressive. And there are still spots open in the second all-star weekend, so check it out.

In other KWLS-related news, check out Littoral, the seminar’s blog, if you don’t already do so. Arlo Haskell has managed to do what many have tried and none fully pulled off before: he’s publishing a high-quality Key West-centered literary journal. Single-handed. The web is a good thing, at least when it’s being used for good and not to propagate thinly veiled racist political slander.

Update: Even as I was writing the above post, the New York Times’ excellent book blog, Paper Cuts, was linking to Littoral. Yea Arlo! Yea Key West! We’re in the big time now.