Omnivoracious

100 Books Every Child Should Read, UK-style

In mid-January, Telegraph.co.uk published a list of the "100 books every child should read." Like many must-read lists, it includes expected stalwarts such as Where the Wild Things Are, Charlotte's Web, The Chronicles of Narnia, and To Kill a Mockingbird. But this Brit list focuses on stories that are exciting to read (vs. books that teach you things you ought to know) and it actually has some titles I haven't seen on American recommended book lists.

I'm adding a sampling here, but I recommend clicking through to the actual list for the thoughtful introduction by author Michael Morpurgo about kids and stories, as well as fun thumbnail reviews like "A stirring tale," "No reader remains untouched," and my favorite: "Runcible." 

Early and Middle Years

The Tiger Who Came To Tea, Judith Kerr
Quoting their blurb:
"[The BBC's] Newsnight's Emily Maitlis has a theory that this book is an allegory about sex. Most children understand it as the story of a tiger that eats its hosts out of house and home. Debate continues."
If you're unfamiliar with this book, you can enjoy a lovely reading here.

Roald Dahl has five books on the list: The Twits, Danny, the Champion of the World, George's Marvelous Medicine, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and The BFG. (Notable exclusion: American favorite James and the Giant Peach.)

Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, T.S. Eliot
I was surprised to find poetry on a general reading list. Maybe that's not so surprising in Britain, I don't know. I started reading these poems to my son based on a tip from my ex-hippie uncle who read them to his kids--and I love reading them aloud--but I have been afraid he might grow up unknowingly quoting lyrics from Cats. (Although, let's face it, quoting T.S. Eliot could be equally dorky.)

Comet in Moominland, Tove Jansson
A new discovery in our family, though very popular in Europe ("the Mickey Mouse of Finland.")

Early Teens

Frenchman's Creek, Daphne Du Maurier
"A swashbuckling love affair," chosen over her potentially more familiar titles, Rebecca and My Cousin Rachel.

Junk, Melvin Burgess
A "clear-eyed story of heroin addiction." This winner of the Guardian Fiction Award and the American Library Association's Carnegie Medal appears on a number of UK teen book review websites, though little seems to have been written about it in the U.S. (A more extensive review is available at Amazon.co.uk.)

The Rattle Bag, edited by Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes
More poetry(!), recommended for the "higgledy-piggledy mix of glories within."

The American Library Association's website and Book Crush, by Nancy Pearl, contain similar lists focused for young American readers in case you want to compare. --Heidi

Getting Lost in Strange Museums

The Museum Vaults is the second in a series of four graphic novels published through an arrangement between the Louvre in Paris and New York-based publisher Nantier Beall Minoustchine. Written and illustrated by French artist, Marc-Antoine Mathieu, the graphic novel describes an art appraiser's descent into the depths of a strange, apparently limitless museum. Rendered in rich sepia tones, his journey takes on a Magritte-like quality, enhanced by several large panels, such as the one reproduced below the cut, that give a dizzying sense of space and perspective. According to the publisher, Mathieu has "managed to bite the hand that feeds him" with The Museum Vaults, by sending up "the pomposity of art history and of such museums as the Louvre...each chapter an additional exercise in the absurd aspects of organizing, showing, and critiquing art." This may or may not be true, but the overall effect shares more in common with the luminous sense of unease found in the work of Franz Kafka, combined with the spatial manipulation common to the stories of J.G. Ballard. As the reader descends into the museum along with the narrator, the sense of being plunged into a subtle and surreal adventure becomes ever more heightened until you find yourself almost literally lost in the book.

The Museum Vaults is fully the equal of the first book in the series, the extremely talented Nicolas De Crecy's Glacial Period, which describes the efforts of archaeologists thousands of years from now to dig up the ruins of the Louvre. It's a brilliant mirroring concept, since they're digging up not only the ruins of the museum, but the ruins preserved within the museum.

Before I visited the Louvre late last year I would have thought a graphic novel collaboration to perhaps be out of keeping with the museum's image. But the Louvre, like any great museum, is really just an assortment of odd objects created by often eccentric craftspeople and geniuses organized by scientists in love with the past to look as if said objects are, in fact, quite normal. That is the charm and mystique of a museum, along with, especially in the most venerable institutions, their use of space and light--both of which are masterful in The Museum Vaults.

The Latest from Oprah

Earlier today, talk show host and FOB (Friend of Books) Oprah Winfrey announced that Eckhart Tolle's A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose is her latest Oprah’s Book Club® pick. A #1 New York Times bestseller, A New Earth is a life-affirming look at how to achieve peace and purpose in your everyday life. "Being able to share this material with you is a gift and a part of the fulfillment of my life’s purpose,” she told her Oprah audience on Wednesday. "It was an awakening for me that I want for you, too."

Most notably, her enthusiasm has also spawned a new endeavor, as she and Tolle will host a weekly A New Earth online discussion with readers starting March 3.  Comprising ten sessions corresponding with each of the book's ten chapters, this free interactive classroom is a first for Oprah's Book Club® and a new way for members to connect. 

To pre-register for the class, log on to www.oprah.com/anewearth.

Locus Online: The Best SF and Fantasy of 2007

Recently I contributed a year's best SF/Fantasy article to Locus Online that I think will interest book-hungry Amazon readers. If you're unfamiliar with Mark Kelly's Locus Online, it is perhaps the best internet source for all things genre, and the electronic presence of the hardcopy magazine.

My article includes several titles familiar to readers from the Amazon Best SF/Fantasy list posted last year. However, it also includes many book not on that list, all of which are linked to Amazon. You'll find novel, first novel, anthology, reprint, and graphic novel recommendations galore. And, for your immediate reading pleasure, I've turned the spotlight on four recommended titles below. (In addition to my article, also take a look at Claude Lalumiere's recommended reading.)

Liar's Diary Blog Day

In the space of just a few days, we've heard from many directions about a remarkable online organizing effort known as Liar's Diary Blog Day. Patry Francis is a debut author whose thriller, The Liar's Diary (apologies--I had this as "Liar's Day" yesterday), releases today in paperback. But after years of writing towards the day that every writer dreams about, she got hit by a ton of bricks. I'll let one of the organizers of LDBD, Susan Henderson at LitPark, explain:

What if you worked for years as a waitress and then went home at the end of the day to your husband and four kids, and in those rare minutes of free time, you dared to dream that one day you might write a book? This is the story of my friend, Patry - a story that leaves out years of false starts, revisions, and rejection slips. It's a story that writers know intimately, though the details are different. Every one of us is well acquainted with the struggle of getting a story on paper, of honing it and believing in it enough to send it out, only to receive rejection, or worse, silence for our efforts.

Imagine, after many years, you beat the odds. You finish that book. You find that agent who sells your manuscript. Your dream is about to become a reality. But just as your book is due to be released, you discover you have an aggressive form of cancer.

Since Patry has to focus on getting well and not getting out to introduce people to her book, a remarkable network of authors and other friends has formed to spread the word. Over 300 writers, including Khaled Hosseini, Jennifer Weiner, Neil Gaiman, and many more, have blogged yesterday and today about Patry Francis and The Liar's Diary, which Booklist has called "a disturbing portrait of a hollow family done in by secrets and lies," and we're happy to join them. See more details at organizer Laura Benedict's blog, and see a complete list of participating bloggers at LitPark. Here's Patry's own blog, Simply Wait, and here's a video trailer for the book created by another friend:

--Tom

Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers

New York Times:

• Sunday Book Review cover: Geoffrey C. Ward on This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War by Drew Gilpin Faust: "'The work of death was Civil War America’s most fundamental and most demanding undertaking,' [Gilpin writes]. Her account of how that work was done, much of it gleaned from the letters of those who found themselves forced to do it, is too richly detailed and covers too much ground to be summarized easily. She overlooks nothing — from the unsettling enthusiasm some men showed for killing to the near-universal struggle for an answer to the question posed by the Confederate poet Sidney Lanier: 'How does God have the heart to allow it?'"
• Ken Kalfus on All Shall Be Well; All Shall Be Well; and All Manner of Things Shall Be Well by Tod Wodicka: "Although Wodicka turns up a provocative thought here and there, this musing, typical of Burt’s grief-laden vaporousness, serves also to illustrate the artless, wordy and underarticulated writing that makes 'All Shall Be Well' such a Black Death of a chore to read. Wodicka has chosen a narrative voice too depressive and portentous to manifest his ingenuity." On Thursday, though, Maslin called ASBWASBWAMTSBW "this tender, oddball book, one that performs a deft balancing act as it hides love, yearning and regret behind the mouthful of medieval incantation in its title."
• Kakutani on The Reserve by Russell Banks: "The plot of 'The Reserve,' which takes place in the Adirondacks in the summer of 1936, moves not with the swift, sharklike momentum of his best fiction but in a hokey, herky-jerky fashion that never lets the reader forget that Mr. Banks is standing there behind the proscenium, pulling the characters’ strings. Even the language he uses is weirdly secondhand: a bizarre mélange of Hemingwayesque action prose and romance-novel clichés that manages to feel faux macho and sickly sweet at the same time."
• Maslin on The Appeal by John Grisham: "Building a remarkable degree of suspense into the all too familiar ploys described here, Mr. Grisham delivers his savviest book in years. His extended vacation from hard-hitting fiction is over.... It barely matters that the characters in 'The Appeal' are essentially stick figures. What works for Mr. Grisham is his patient, lawyerly, inexorable way of dramatizing urgent moral issues."

Washington Post:

• Mindy Aloff on The Mitfords: Letters Between Six SIsters, edited by Charlotte Mosley: "The Mitfords could have been an operatic group biography on an epic scale: Instead, thanks to its editor's taste and discretion, it is chamber music with symphonic longings. Ironically, as the sororal voices drop away owing to irreparable feuds or lost letters or death, the surviving sisters become more serious and open. Tragedy and aging lead them to wisdom, or something very like it."

Los Angeles Times:

• Sven Birkerts on Banks's The Reserve: "Banks works with a vast palette and a sure stylistic command. 'The Reserve' gratifies page by page. But when the pages are gathered together, held in retrospect, there is the sense of an echo still awaited, some deeper gratification promised in the meditative pose of the mysterious, beautiful woman on the first page."
• Richard Schickel on An Ordinary Spy by Joseph Weisberg: "At a certain point, the reader begins to wonder whether 'An Ordinary Spy' might possibly be an extraordinary act of disinformation. Might its author still be a CIA employee, charged with portraying the agency in a benign light -- not exactly bumbling, but incapable of, say, water-boarding or extraordinary rendition? To hear Weisberg tell it, an American secret agent's chief concern seems to be defending his retirement package."

Globe & Mail:

• Catherine Bush on How the Dead Dream by Lydia Millet: "It's hard, in fact, to convey how invigorating Millet's fiction is, how intelligent and thematically rich, how processes of thought are themselves made urgent and lively through the specificity of her observations and sentences that offer startlement, small and large. This isn't fiction that tells us how to live. Instead, it dramatizes the power of attentiveness to an expanded, if terribly flawed and potentially dying, world, attentiveness being a kind of tenderness, which is a kind of love."

The Guardian:

• Christopher Taylor on The Second Plane by Martin Amis: "'If September 11 had to happen,' he says in the introduction to The Second Plane, 'then I am not at all sorry that it happened in my lifetime.' His fans might not feel the same way. To some extent, the heavily self-parodic aspects of the enterprise - at one point he reports on treating Tony Blair to a disquisition on the Shia, whom he compared to 'nut-rissole artists' - make the crazy-uncle outbursts less alarming."

The New Yorker:

• Joan Acocella on God's Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215 by David Levering Lewis: "The Muslims came to Europe, he writes, as 'the forward wave of civilization that was, by comparison with that of its enemies, an organic marvel of coordinated kingdoms, cultures, and technologies in service of a politico-cultural agenda incomparably superior' to that of the primitive people they encountered there. They did Europe a favor by invading. This is not a new idea, but Lewis takes it further: he clearly regrets that the Arabs did not go on to conquer the rest of Europe. The halting of their advance was instrumental, he writes, in creating 'an economically retarded, balkanized, and fratricidal Europe that . . . made virtues out of hereditary aristocracy, persecutory religious intolerance, cultural particularism, and perpetual war.' It was 'one of the most significant losses in world history and certainly the most consequential since the fall of the Roman Empire.' This is a bold hypothesis."

--Tom

It's Tom's Seattle... We Just Eat Here

James Beard Award-winning Seattle chef Tom Douglas is a man whose name is synonymous with Pacific Northwest cuisine. Through five of Seattle's most creative and exciting restaurants, Tom and his wife and business partner, Jackie Cross, have helped define the Seattle food scene. Tom is also the author of three cookbooks, including the award-winning Tom Douglas' Seattle Kitchen, and oversees a line of specialty food products sold nationwide. I've been lucky enough to get to know Tom since I moved to Seattle in '99 and his Palace Kitchen practically serves as a second home for me. Tom has been kind enough to have me as a regular guest on his weekly radio show to talk about cookbooks, but this was the first time I had the opportunity to interview him about about celebrity chefs, getting your kids involved in the kitchen, bloggers, his undying love of Seattle, and much more. Highlights from our talk are below. You can read the entire interview or listen to a podcast of the interview on Amazon Wire (gentle readers, please note: I was at the peak of a severe cold when we recorded this so I sound a bit like Lauren Bacall).

--BTP

Amazon.com: First of all, how would you define Pacific Northwest cuisine?

Douglas:   That's a cheap question.

Amazon.com: Too easy?

Douglas: [Laughs] Well, I've only been asked it for 25 years now and it's still a hard one to come by. I think it's in the context of a restaurant and for me restaurants are so much more than just their cuisine. I think the Seattle restaurant scene is a really fun--really up and down the Pacific Northwest coast. Portland's the same way... Vancouver. There's a certain sense of approachability. A certain sense of product. A celebration of the amazing bounty that we have here. Pacific Northwest cuisine is really about--kind of the same regionality that every other region has--things that come from here. I think the best way to explain to somebody from "the outside" is to use the salmon explanation.

When you are a chef in New York City or in Florida or in Dallas and you want salmon on your menu tonight you call your fish broker and you order salmon. You have some fresh salmon? Yeah? I'll take some salmon tonight. In Seattle, when you want salmon on your menu you call your fish guy and you say, What kind of salmon do you have tonight? Coho? King? Silvers? Keta? Where was it caught? What river? Campbell River? Yukon River? Copper River? Columbia River? Who caught it? Was it brought up right on the boat? Was it troll-caught? Gill-netted? Pursing caught? How was it bled? Did they bleed it right there on the boat or did they wait till they got to the dock and take it to the dockhouse and then take care of all the fish at one time? Or, as that fish was brought up, did somebody stop, bleed it, and pack its belly with ice and put it in the hold and go back three hours later to the shore and that afternoon put it on an Alaska Airlines jet down to Seattle? Oh, I'll take that one! I'll take that salmon that was King, troll-caught, boat-bled, caught this morning, on a plane this afternoon. That's the fish that I want!

Hunter's Run Explored: An Interview with Daniel Abraham, Gardner Dozois, and George R.R. Martin

(The US, special limited, and UK editions of Hunter's Run.)

What do you get when three stellar writers team up on a high-octane SF novel? You get Hunter's Run, which has been described as "Predator meets Camus' The Stranger". Out from Eos this month, it is the brainchild of NYT Bestseller George R.R. Martin, Hugo and Nebula Award-winning writer and editor Gardner Dozois, and critically acclaimed writer Daniel Abraham, one of the best of the next generation of fantasists. Hunter's Run mixes action and suspense with fascinating characters. Ramon Espejo comes up on the wrong side of the Enye, rulers of the planet of Sao Paulo. As Espejo tries to make sense of his fragmented memories, the stakes rise in a battle between powerful and ruthless species. Fans of all three writers should enjoy this well-crafted novel and, as with the best examples of synergy, it's difficult to tell who wrote what. (Completists may wish to check out the novella version still archived on Ellen Datlow's SciFiction.)

Now, collaborations between two writers are common. Collaborations between three writers are not. In part to satisfy my own curiosity, I recently conducted the following interview with Abraham, Dozois, and Martin, who talked about the process of creating the novel.

Amazon.com: Who came up with the idea for Hunter’s Run and how did the collaboration come to be?

George R.R. Martin: The story started with Gardner. The first time I read it, it was an untitled novella fragment that Gardner had submitted to a writer's workshop in Iowa in 1977. After a strong start, he had gotten stuck on it, and I suppose he was hoping that getting some comments and suggestions from other writers would help get him going again. I don't recall what suggestions I made, but I do remember liking the story...so much so that a couple of years later, when Gardner asked me if I'd like to collaborate with him on the still-untitled, still-unfinished novella, I was glad to jump in. I can claim credit for being the first to suggest that the story should be a novel. It took a couple more decades and another collaborator to accomplish that, but the idea was sound.

Amazon.com: What was the process of collaboration like? Layering, taking separate sections as your own, or...? And how did you resolve any disagreements?

Gardner Dozois: There were a lot of layers here, since it consisted of George overwriting me, Daniel overwriting both of us, and then me overwriting everyone else for the final draft. The major problem was keeping the voice as consistent a possible from section to section, since we didn't want a particular section to stand out in a "Oh, this must be the part Dozois put in" kind of a way. This was occasionally difficult, since, as a good modernist, Daniel prefers things to be as stark and minimalistic as possible, where a lot of the effect of my work and George's depends on color and the richness of the detail and the emotionality of the prose (making it either "evocative" or "purple," depending on your tastes). I handled this by putting back in a lot of the color and detail work that Daniel had cut as unnecessary to the plot, and also by adding paragraphs rich with color and detail early on in the novel as well, so that there'd be a consistency of tone from beginning to end. As the one who was doing the smoothing draft, I got the final say most of the time, although, of course, I consulted George and Daniel on controversial points.

Amazon.com: Daniel, I assume when you were growing up, you always imagined you would be collaborating on a novel with Gardner Dozois and George R.R. Martin. Am I right?

Daniel Abraham: Of course, but I always imagined it more as a regency romance with overtones of William S. Burroughs. Seriously, it never entered my mind as a possibility until George made the proposal. But I read over the draft they had and the outlined notes for how to move forward with it, and it was a good looking project. Plus it was Gardner and George. All very Marlon Brando offer-you-can't-refuse.

Secret Knowledge the Whole World Knows: Questions for David Goldblatt

As I've burnt out (somewhat) on what was my full-blown youthful sports nutdom, trying to put a little distance between myself and the 24-7 coverage of the endless American sports calendar, international soccer has seemed to me like a breath of fresh air, a secret transmission that, until cable and the internet brought the Premiership and Serie A into immediate electronic reach, you could only access via 2 am viewings at English pubs and imported magazines. The irony, of course, is that for the rest of the world soccer, or rather football, _is_ the ever-hyped, multi-zillion-dollar story, and these secret heroes who would only surface on our screens every four years at World Cup time, the Ballacks and Henrys and Kluiverts and Batistutas, were household names to billions. But even now, with Beckham playing (or least being paid) in L.A. and the Fox Soccer Channel piped into my very own home, reading about soccer still feels like samizdat, like underground knowledge.

Which is why I immediately grabbed David Goldblatt's The Ball Is Round: A Global History of Soccer, and carved out enough time to read it, 992 pages and all. What I was hoping for was the vast backstory that I, steeped in no soccer culture beyond seeing Pele and the New York Cosmos play the Washington "Dips" in 1975 and playing years of youth soccer like every other suburban kid, had never gotten. But I got that and much more from The Ball Is Round, which is a global history as much as a soccer history, giving as much attention to the politics and culture surrounding the game as to the matches on the pitch (without ignoring those either), and teaching me, I'm embarrassed to admit, more about South American politics in the 20th century than I've ever picked up from any other source. With its style, its vastly informed ambition, and its balance between the political and the poetic, it's every bit the equivalent of Alex Ross's recent brainiac survey of 20th-century music, The Rest Is Noise. And like The Rest Is Noise, it sent me to the 'net for examples of the artists that its pages evoked so well (for example, Brazil's tragic star from the 50s, Garrincha, or this half-field shot from Pele I couldn't believe until I had seen it for myself--at 0:24, but try not to watch the next 8 minutes too, especially the glorious last goal, at 6:50). I asked David Goldblatt, its well-traveled author, a few questions about his book (which was, of course, subtitled A Global History of Football in its original UK version):

Amazon.com: There's a sentence in the middle of The Ball Is Round that to me sums up a great deal of the culture of football. After noting that Pelé had scored nearly a goal a game in over 1,300 professional matches--the sort of stat that would be on every page in a history of one of the major American sports but that is very rare in this one--you write, "This of course tells us nothing about all the goals he made." What stories do football fans tell about their sport and their stars?

Goldblatt: Well, in America not only would you be banging on about Pele's goal to game ratio but you would have been collecting statistics in a rational organized manner about his assists--a concept that had only entered soccer statistics in the last few years. The state of Brazilian football statistics during Pelé's career would not pass muster in Cooperstown in can tell you. Bill James would have a nervous breakdown with hopeless state of the data base. Soccer fans tell a lot the same stories that Americans tell themselves, sagas, epics, heroic tasks, near misses, dramatic comebacks, tales of curious individualists and unshakeable teams, but they are told in a the idioms, genres, vocabulary, and head space of hundreds of different cultures.

Amazon.com: I have to ask the inevitable question: why hasn't football--rather, soccer--ever taken hold in the United States (despite generations now who grow up playing it)? (And does the rest of the world care if it ever does?) I was fascinated by your comment in the American foreword that you recovered from finishing the book by ignoring soccer for half a year and only watching American sports. What did you notice?

Goldblatt: Contrary to the received wisdom I would say that soccer has taken hold in the US, if we look at participation figures amongst women and the young, and while MLS isn't about to challenge the premiership or Serie A for money or glamour it looks like it is now established on a firm footing. If the game can just tap into the rising Latino communities of America it could be pushing hockey for fourth sport.

That said it would still be just number 4. Baseball, football, and basketball have now had over a century's head start on soccer and between them created a wider sports culture--of expectations, tastes, and pleasures--that I think sometimes finds soccer incomprehensible ( what's with the draws?) or distasteful (all that diving). Soccer had its chance in the USA in the 1920s and 30s when East Coast professional leagues were drawing big crowds but a combination of bureaucratic infighting, the Wall Street crash, and the lingering ethnic associations of the game killed it for two generations.

The Three Potentially Offensive Pigs

I'll huff, and I'll puff, and I'll blow down your shoddily constructed...

Shoo-fly publishing's The Three Little Cowboy Builders is circulating the blogosphere as the latest casualty of eager political correctness. The digital pop-up book based on the classic story, The Three Little Pigs, was not shortlisted for the first annual (British government-backed) BETT Awards because, according to the panel of educator-judges, "the use of pigs raises cultural issues."

Today's BBC News report elaborated on the panel's judgment. Apparently, the use of pigs in the story was considered potentially offensive to Muslims. And Asians. And, well, construction workers:

The judges criticised the stereotyping in the story of the unfortunate pigs: "Is it true that all builders are cowboys, builders get their work blown down, and builders are like pigs?"

(Examples of judges' comments must have been released by someone associated with the book, because they are not reflected at all in this vague public statement, which essentially says that the book just wasn't good enough.)

Looking for some kind of response from any of the potentially offended communities, I found this Daily Mail article from March 2007, about a church school that renamed their Three Pigs musical "The Three Little Puppies." It includes a statement from Shaykh Ibrahim Mogra of the Muslim Council of Britain who said, "The vast majority of Muslims have no problem whatsoever with the Three Little Pigs. There's an issue about the eating of pork, which is forbidden, but there is no prohibition about reading stories about pigs."

No comment so far from the builders. Bob?

For the oft-maligned wolf's perspective, you can also check out children's laureate Jon Scieszka's The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs! --Heidi

Quantum of Huh?

...Which is what many James Bond fans are asking this morning, now that the next Bond film's title has been announced.

But Quantum of Solace is a good choice, though the movie's plot sounds totally unrelated to the harrowing (and action-free) Fleming story that it references, in which a colonial civil servant tells Bond the story of a colleague's disintegrating marriage. It is one of two great, minimalist stories in the collection For Your Eyes Only, the other being "From a View to a Kill", also completely unrelated to the film of that title. I read both of these as a teenage Bond fan, and both have stayed with me--as has the phrase "quantum of solace" itself, which describes the minimal amount of comfort one needs to remain in a dispiriting job, disintegrating marriage, or the like.

Could be a hard sell as a movie title, though.

A Costa, but not a killer

The Costa Book Awards, one of the second-rank British book awards (behind the Booker but still pretty big), announced their Book of the Year Tuesday: A.L. Kennedy's novel Day, about an RAF tailgunner reliving the war as a movie extra five years later, which just came out in the U.S. this month. Just a refresher for those scoring at home: the Costas (known until 2006 as the Whitbreads, when they were taken over by the coffeeshop chain, Costa Coffee--I'm not even sure what a Whitbread was or is) are given in five categories (First Novel, Novel, Biography, Poetry, and Children's Book), and then, among these five, one is chosen a few weeks later as the Book of the Year. Here's this year's winners (and our list of winners for the past five years):

• First Novel: What Was Lost by Catherine O'Flynn
• Novel: Day by A.L. Kennedy
• Biography: Young Stalin by Simon Sebag Montefiore
• Poetry: Tilt by Jean Sprackland
• Children's Book: The Bower Bird by Ann Kelley

Which gives us an opportunity to link further on A.L. Kennedy (who ranks very high on my embarrassing/enticing list of people I've never read who I really, really want to), specifically to Maud Newton's delicious post today about the email she got from ALK about how everyone who meets her seems to expect she'll be "homicidal," after Newton blogged about how "terrified" she had been to meet her. She quotes Kennedy's note at length, and I am sorely tempted to do the same because there really is hardly a stretch of more than three words in it that doesn't make me laugh. But here's how it begins:

Every time I meet strangers, it tends to go…

Them: Oh my God, you’re you.

Me: Yes. I am. I think.

Them: And you haven’t killed me with an axe.

Me: I don’t have an axe.

Them: I brought one with me just in case. So you wouldn’t get annoyed and kill me with a chair leg which would take longer and therefore be more painful.

Read on--you'll have an idea of why Kennedy these days is identified as "author and stand-up comic." --Tom

Guest Bookshelf: John Lawton

Up top on Omni this week is a very focused bookshelf from John Lawton, currently of northern New Jersey but Detroit born-and-bred. For many years, John was our sales rep from Penguin and though we were miserable to see him move to other, grander duties at the home office last year, we're glad he still stops by Omnivoracious to say hello. One of the pleasures of working with John (and I'm sure one of the pleasures for him of working for Penguin) is his great enthusiasm for one of his top authors, William Gibson (a favorite of mine too). Among his many accomplishments: he helped get the father of cyberspace online (wouldn't you love to be able to say that?), by setting up williamgibsonbooks.com, where Mr. Gibson still blogs with some regularity. Here's John's note on the books above:

There are two spinal eyes on my shelf, staring out at me.  They are the eyes of Rei Toei, the virtual star of IDORU.  All of William Gibson's novels intrigue me, but like most completists, I feel the need to select a "lesser" work as a favorite.  So - the three versions of that one, all present.  Fan boy, employee at his publisher, and the webmaster of www.williamgibsonbooks.com.  Lucky me.  Those other books showing up here? Some I like (Drown).  Some are signed by the author (Plan B).  Some I have absolutely no explanation for at all (Retribution).

--Tom

The Wind in the Willows: Papercutz Resurrects Classics Illustrated

For those who may have grown up with the original Classics Illustrated (1941 to 1971), Papercutz's decision to resurrect the series, starting with a wonderful version of The Wind in the Willows, will be welcome news. Adapted by Michel Plessix, this edition (originally published in 1998 independent of the CI series) features painstakingly detailed panels while preserving the best parts of Kenneth Grahame's original book. I have to admit I was skeptical at first because the original is a childhood favorite of mine, but Plessix understands both the playfulness and the soulfulness of Grahame and his adaptation is a sheer delight from cover to cover. The greatest pleasure for me was being able to experience all of Grahame's characters in this new light, as an adult.

Albert Kanter was the visionary publisher behind the original Classics Illustrated, which ranged from titles like The Corsican Brothers to Don Quixote. I remember many of these quite clearly from my reading in the mid-1970s, the comics so worn that I no longer have them. It was my first introduction to many of these classic, canonical books--and a very entertaining one, which made me want to read the original texts.

Upcoming volumes in both the Classics Illustrated and Classics Illustrated Deluxe series include Tales from the Brothers Grimm, Great Expectations, and The Invisible Man.

Here's a full-page reproduction from Plessix's The Wind in the Willows.

Hari Kunzru's Bookshelf: Researching the Revolution

I wrote last week about My Revolutions, Hari Kunzru's new novel, which is my January pick for our Significant Seven. And when poking around to learn more about him and the book, I came across his bare-bones home page, which features a larger version of the lovely bookshelf photo above, filled with what must have been his research materials for My Revolutions. I'm always fascinated by the process of research in writing fiction (how much to do it, when to stop and let imagination take over, etc.), but I nearly always despise those lengthy acknowledgments that often appear these days at the end (or worse, the beginning) of novels, explaining all the research materials used and thanking all those involved. It breaks the spell of the tale. My Revolutions does include such a note at the end, but it's written with some style and manages to still leave a great deal of mystery, so I didn't mind it. But even better is to see this jumbled shelf, raw and unexplained, as a hint of the sourcework that went into the story: the mystery of creation is for me not only retained, but deepened. And so in the spirit of the Omnivoracious annotated bookshelf, a partial listing of the books I can find in the photo (a treasure trove of Leftist theory and Sixties history) appears after the jump. --Tom

Science Fiction and Fantasy Links for a Lazy Tuesday

For SF/Fantasy fans just recovering from a long weekend, here's a links roundup for your Tuesday reading pleasure!

Read the prologue to space opera genius Iain M. Banks' new Culture novel, Matter: "A screen flicked into existence a couple of metres in front of the woman, filling half her field of view.  It showed, from a point a hundred metres above and in front of its leading edge, an army of men--some mounted, most on foot--marching along another section of the desert highway, all raising dust which piled into the air and drifted slowly away to the south-east. Sunlight glittered off the edges of raised spears and pikes."

Download bestselling fantasist Robin Hobb's Shaman's Crossing as part of Eos celebrating their ten-year anniversary: "Eos is 10 years old! To kick-off our yearlong anniversary party, we're giving away free e-books!  Every two months for 2008, we'll give away a new free e-book."

Wired Magazine weighs in on the role of the philosophical in SF: "If you want to read books that tackle profound philosophical questions, then the best--and perhaps only--place to turn these days is sci-fi. Science fiction is the last great literature of ideas."

SF Site lists the best science fiction and fantasy of 2007: "All in all, I'd say 2007 was a very good year, good enough so that the main problem was not in finding enough titles to make the list, but instead the problem was cutting titles that in many other years would have been automatic inclusions."

Sample J.G. Ballard's forthcoming autobiography: "I slipped out of the hotel and began to walk the street. The pavements were already crowded with food vendors, porters steering new photocopiers into office entrances, smartly dressed young secretaries shaking their heads at a plump and sweating 60-year-old European out on some dishevelled errand.

Duo Howard Waldrop and Lawrence Person's split review of Cloverfield: "When I first heard about Cloverfield, I was pretty lukewarm about the whole idea. After all, a great deal of the fun of a monster movie is seeing the monster. The other problem was the nature of the protagonists: When it comes to monsters eating club-hoping 20-something yuppie Manhattanites, right off the bat I'm rooting for the monster."

Techropolis attempts to parse what makes for a good SF movie: "Ah, the question that burns like a fire in the soul of every science fiction fan. Finally we shall know the answer."

And, finally--drum roll!--the top five celebrities zombies would avoid eating:  "5) Keith Richards--Zombies consider it bad form to turn on one of their own. They’re not cannibals, for goodness sake."

Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers

New York Times:

• William Logan on A Treatise of Civil Power by Geoffrey Hill: "It’s dangerous for a poet to believe that gloom is the precondition for seriousness. If poetry for Hill is a 'mode of moral life' ('charred prayers / spiralling godwards on intense thermals'), the evidence here lies more in design than example — the morals are in lieu of, not on behalf. Poetry provides a moral life the way that standing on a pillar in the desert provides salvation — fine if you have a pillar, and a desert, and a terrific sense of balance; and if not, not."
• Ann Hodgman on The Jew of Home Depot and Other Stories by Max Apple: "One of the pleasures of this book is that Apple makes you feel he knows everything about everything — or at least everything you know nothing about: shot-putting, running a liquor store or a car-salvage operation, Chinese gymnastics, what it’s like to try to sell 600,000 plastic laser swords. Nothing about the Upper East Side! Nothing about rich suburbs or the entertainment industry! Thank you, Mr. Apple!"
• Maslin on Duma Key by Stephen King: "Given this combination of author and setting, it’s inevitable that something terribly undead will show up before the book is over. But Mr. King’s use of horror is not what it used to be. It may still be the impetus for his stories, but it is no longer the foremost reason they’re interesting. Sure, he can still use supernatural effects to scare the wits out of you. But lately he also shows off other interests. In the wake of the 1999 roadside accident that permanently altered his consciousness, he has turned the evanescence of health and sanity into his books’ most disturbing source of fear."
• Maslin on Against the Machine by Lee Siegel: "Though Mr. Siegel is hardly the first observer to deem this a sinister side of Internet culture, he turns out to be an impressively tough, cogent and furious one. His diatribe would bring to mind the prescient haranguing style of Pauline Kael, even if Mr. Siegel, who does not treat his own reputation lightly, were not trumpeting the phrase 'Pauline Kael of the Internet' himself."

Washington Post:

• John Burdett on Beautiful Children by Charles Bock: "Las Vegas is the expression, in glitter and concrete, of America's brittle and mutating id. This is not the argument of Charles Bock's exceptional Beautiful Children, so much as the starting point from which he explores the survival strategies -- usually doomed -- of the citizen-mutants themselves. He proves an expert guide, being a native of the city with an encyclopedic knowledge of every perverted nook and narcissistic cranny. His ability to share a deep understanding of America's million or so lost street kids and their tormented parents gives the book a whiff of greatness."
• Mr. Jeff VanderMeer on Laura Warholic by Alexander Theroux: "It soon becomes clear that Theroux is using his amazing powers of grotesquery and caricature to make almost everyone look morally, ethically and intellectually ugly. As a result, the reader's delight at Theroux's descriptive powers quickly changes to disgust at the unrelenting brutishness of these characters, and that disgust, finally, is transformed into boredom as the barrage of details and constant repetitions begin to seem not only gratuitous but insulting to the reader."

Los Angeles Times:

• Donna Seaman on The Jewish Messiah by Arnon Grunberg: "Grunberg has as much talent as chutzpah and, beneath the absurdist vamping, a longing for justice, integrity and hope. With more books in line to be translated into English and more in the works, Grunberg, nearly past the bad-boy phase, will remain a caustic, goading and vital literary force if, as seems likely, he moves beyond puerile shock tactics and creates books of deeper resonance and more profound empathy."

Globe & Mail:

• Jason Anderson on Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste by Carl Wilson: "Wilson's [Celine] Dion distaste becomes the basis for a wide-ranging book, one predicated on the possibility that what repels us may say more about us than what attracts us. As he writes, 'What unpleasant truths might we learn from looking closer at our musical fears and loathings, at what we consider 'bad taste'?'"

The Guardian:

• Ursula K. LeGuin on People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks: "Full of action but with no leavening of humour, no psychological revelations, no vivid language to focus description, the chapters grind on. Most unhappily for a historical novel, there is little sensitivity to the local colour of thought and emotion, that openness to human difference which brings the past alive."

The New Yorker:

• Jill Lepore on The Way to Wealth by Benjamin Franklin: "This year marks the two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of 'The Way to Wealth,' among the most famous pieces of American writing ever, and one of the most willfully misunderstood. A lay sermon about how industry begets riches (No Gains, without Pains), 'The Way to Wealth' has been taken for Benjamin Franklin’s—and even America’s—creed, and there’s a line or two of truth in that, but not a whole page. 'The Way to Wealth' is also a parody, stitched and bound between the covers of a sham."

--Tom

Remembering Dr. King

As we remember the work of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. today, it's comforting to know that his legacy has been preserved for future generations thanks to the thousands of incredible books on his life and dream of equality.  Like many Americans, I first learned about Dr. King thanks to grade school curriculum, but don't believe I was properly introduced to this great leader until I read Let the Trumpet Sound by Stephen B. Oates.  In my opinion, few titles better capture the anguish, fortitude, and significance of the Civil Rights movement in our country's history.   Oates masterfully describes Dr. King as a very real and very driven leader who is guided by an unshakable belief in liberty, justice, and the notion of a world in which  "little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls and walk together as sisters and brothers."  Simply put, it is a timeless read that reminds us that even a single voice of change can alter the course of history.

--Dave