Omnivoracious

Holiday Gift Books for the Petaholic in Your Life

We all know one. That person in our life whose holiday cards feature Fido wearing a tartan sweater. Whose Facebook wall hosts photo after photo of that furry pal. Whose homes are a veritable cat playground of scratching posts, climbing walls, and felted mice. The Petaholic.

Luckily at Amazon we have no shortage of four-legged admirers, and our Editors have created this handy list of books sure to satisfy the Cat Lady in your life.

Topping the list are Susan Orlean's** Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend, and Bret Witter's Until Tuesday: A Wounded Warrior and the Golden Retriever Who Saved Him. With plenty of animal heroics and heartwarming bonding, these stories are sure make any pet owner swoon.

Give the animal philanthropist the gift of Betty & Friends: My Life at the Zoo, Betty White's "love letter" to her favorite zoos and animals in her many years of animal advocacy work.

Want to remind your petaholic of her favorite faces 365 days a year? Try these ridiculously cute cat calendars: 365 Cats Page-a-Day 2012 Calendar and Bad Cat 2012 Page-a-Day Calendar.

 

See more of our hand-picked gift ideas for pet owners: 

The Eighty-Dollar Champion, by Elizabeth Letts

Following Atticus, by Tom Ryan

The Puppy Diaries, by Jill Abramson

The Puppy That Came for Christmas by Megan Rix

   For more gift book ideas, check out our Editors’ Gift Picks in the Holiday Gift Store.

   **Learn more  through our recent interviews with Susan Orlean.

Best of the Month: April 2011

1. 22 Britannia Road by Amanda Hodgkinson

By the end of World War II, Silvana is a ghost of the wife Janusz once had. She and their 7-year-old son Aurek travel from Poland to England to reunite their family--a family that has been separated for 6 years. That's where 22 Britannia Road, Amanda Hodgkinson's stunning debut novel, begins.

As the past unfolds from multiple points of view, it becomes clear that despite their determination to make a fresh start, the hidden secrets of the past threaten to destroy Silvana and Janusz's dreams of becoming a family once again. The irreversible events that passed during their years of separation still linger, including the horrors of war, Janusz's betrayal by a love affair with another woman, and the devastating secret that Silvana will do anything to conceal. Hodgkinson's poetic voice is impossible to forget, and the shocking and hopeful ending of her remarkable historical novel will leave readers reeling--and satisfied. --Miriam Landis

2. Galore by Michael Crummey

Out of the belly of a whale, Michael Crummey's Galore pulls the marvelous story of Paradise Deep, a remote settlement on the northern Newfoundland coast, a place "too severe and formidable, too provocative, too extravagant and singular and harrowing to be real," teeming with fierce rivalries, affections, and loyalties spanning five intertwined generations. His tale opens in a hungry winter, when a beached humpback arrives as an unexpected gift and the town convenes to claim their piece. From a slit in its gut spills a man--white, mute, and eerily alive--who assumes a central role in the lineage of the Divine family. Alternately feared as a devil and revered as a healer, Judah fathers a fish-scented son with the raven-haired Mary Tryphena. Their family comprises the heart of the town's marvelous mythology--its ghosts, mermaid trysts, strange accidents and miraculous babies, impossible loves, rendered in language so gorgeously raw, it will transport you to a land whose sky is "alive with the northern lights, the roiling seines of green and red like some eerily silent music to accompany the suffering below." --Mari Malcolm

Omni Daily News

Spartacus sparks more reviews:  The praise keeps coming for TLS editor Peter Strothard's The Spartacus Road, a history of the great gladiator-turned legendary leader of a Roman slave rebellion. Michael Korda in a review for The Daily Beast, adds his praise of to that of earlier reviewers in The Telegraph and The Wall Street Journal.

Top authors at TED: To mark the annual TED conference/mind meld of inspiring pioneers (in what I think used to be called "the Arts & Sciences"), The Huffington Post has posted a mini video archive of author talks from this week's TED conference in Oxford, England as well as ringers from years past. Watch clips of Malcolm Gladwell on spaghetti sauce, Chimamanda Adichie on "the danger of a single story," Emily Pilloton on the design revolution, and Matt Ridley on "how ideas have sex."

Please call her Shirley:  Does the publication of Shirley Jackson: Novels and Stories in the iconic Library of America series ensure that the late great author of The Lottery, among other masterpieces, is now a member of the pantheon of America's literary gods?  Laura Miller of Salon.com considers Shirley Jackson's legacy and weighs in on "The Literary Greatness Sweepstakes."

Setting sail for readers: To promote the paperback release of Border Songs, author Jim Lynch has jettisoned the traditional landlubbing tour in favor of a tour-by-sea. According to The Wall Street Journal, he has hoisted the sails of his boat "Shibumi" (named after the novel by Trevanian) and embarked on a book tour powered by the winds of the Puget Sound. 

Moving and shaking:  No surprises here--The Power, the just-announced sequel to The Secret, hits today's Movers & Shakers list.

Omni Daily News

The "Summer of Genji":  The ambitious and curious readers at The Quarterly Conversation and Open Letters Monthly have joined forces and selected one big summer read for 2010.  It's a grand one in every sense of the word: The Tale of Genji [Genji Monogatari] by Lady Murasaki Shikibu of the eleventh-century Heian court.  Episodes from the story have been the subject of countless Japanese screen and scroll paintings over the past millennium.  The QC and Open Letters Monthly editors are calling it "The Summer of Genji" and are inviting readers to join the conversation in this summer long book club event.  According to the reading schedule they're recommending 90 pages per week. That seems do-able, and still allows readers ample time to devour Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy.

Stead reaches another milestone:  Rebecca Stead's When You Reach Me has just been named the winner of the 2010 Boston Globe-Horn Book Award in the Fiction category.  Stead's outstanding middle-grade fiction novel also topped this year's list of Newbery winners. Check out all of the Horn winners:

Fiction and Poetry: 

• When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead  (Winner!)
• The Dreamer by Pam Muñoz Ryan, illustrated by Peter Sís
• A Conspiracy of Kings by Megan Whalen Turner

Nonfiction:

• Marching for Freedom by Elizabeth Partridge  (Winner!)
• Anne Frank: Her Life in Words and Pictures by Menno Metselaar and Ruud van der Rol
• Smile by Raina Telgemeier

Picture Books: 

• I Know Here by Laurel Croza, illustrated by Matt James (Winner!)
• It’s a Secret! by John Burningham
• The Lion & the Mouse by Jerry Pinkney

Moving and shaking:  Pandora's Seed tops today's Movers and Shakers on the heels of author-geneticist Spencer Wells's chat with Jon Stewart of The Daily Show.

Omni Daily Crush: "Bloodroot" by Amy Greene

Bloodroot isn't exactly an old-fashioned story, but it reads like one, and that's a large part of its allure for me. I suspect in part it's because there's a timelessness to its place, deep in Tennessee's Appalachian mountains. The novel spans most of the 20th century, but there's little attention to the passage of time, which rolls quietly forward as her characters--especially Myra Lamb, who for most of the novel is a central figure--come into focus. We come to know Myra largely through tandem voices: her story begins with her grandmother, Byrdie--easily my favorite narrator, she's at once feisty and wise and full of charm--and Doug Cotter, a childhood friend of Myra's who grew to love her, and then moves on to her twin children, Johnny and Laura Odom. Myra herself doesn't speak until the final quarter of the book (which is concluded, to my surprise much less darkly, by her once-vicious husband), and by that point the aura around her strikes you as mystic and nearly legendary. It's a technique that serves the plot well, as it's in Myra's lone chapter that we're able to see where all the nerves of her life--and of the lives of her family--connect.

Amy Greene is a talented stylist, and I found myself thinking that there's something of William Faulkner to the way she's constructed a story that spans generations, particularly when those generations are so tied to a place where nature rules as much as nurture. (Fortunately, there is less Faulkner in her language, which is not a slight to either of them: I'm fairly convinced that no one can use language like he did.) Her prose is thoughtful and restrained, and there's a lightness to it--even in the bleakest moments--that lets her characters develop in their own good time, with little cost to the novel's pace. I read this as if it were a drug (that's a good thing) and selected it as one of our Best Books of the Month in January. There is no voice in this novel that doesn't know how to tell a story, and perhaps that is the quality that makes me describe Bloodroot as old-fashioned: it's the kind of book that draws you in to a place you've never been but that feels intimate. The more I think about this book, the more I like it, and that in itself makes me happy. It's good to be reminded of the fact that a well-told story stays with you, demonstrating its own uncanny magic. --Anne

Recommended for fans of Carson McCullers and Myla Goldberg

Oprah's New Pick: Gorgeous Horror Stories in Children's Voices

Oprah took a risk in making Uwem Akpan's Say You're One of Them the new Oprah's Book Club pick. It's a collection of short fiction, which some readers still regard with suspicion. Much of the dialogue is a mélange of French, African languages, and English, so it requires that you pay attention. And it's intense--so intense, in fact, that when it was first published, I only made it through two stories before I had to put it down. Even after seeing all the raves it drew from critics and customers, I couldn't bring myself to open it again until Oprah gave me a reason. Now I'm through it, and I know why I was afraid to finish. But I'm so glad I did.

The stories in Say You're One of Them are told in the voices of children from five of Africa's most troubled regions. It's hard not to sound hyperbolic in describing them. Akpan renders the casual brutality of these children's lives unflinchingly, and their fragility in these worlds where poverty and evil have the upper hand is terrifying. His unexpected metaphors and vivid imagery turn the previously unimaginable into the indelible, mixing gorgeous scenes with the grotesque; I'd like to forget images like a child's severed foot "dangling on strings, like a shoe tied to the clothesline by its lace," but I don't expect I soon will. As if in a twisted fairy tale, some of these kids find their home turned into a prison where they're fattened to be sold into slavery by relatives. A Rwandan girl sees the walls leak blood from bodies stacked in the attic, while an 8-year-old boy in a Kenyan slum has hallucinations of school while sniffing glue to suppress his hunger pangs on Christmas Eve. Even when they escape these immediate perils, their ears ring with the screams of the siblings they left behind. Through every horror, hope feeds their resilience. But survival requires outrageous sacrifices.

You'll want to know these children, but they will haunt you. If you give yourself over to these stories, it will be impossible not to feel more grateful for whatever you have. You'll also likely decide you need to do something more to ease the unreasonable burden on poor children before you can sleep easily again. That must be exactly Oprah's intention--to spark our recognition of the power we have to transform the lives of children stuck in cycles of extreme poverty and violence, even if we have to do it one child at a time. They deserve more safety, more kindness, more opportunity than this. I feel this intensely. --Mari Malcolm

Omni Daily News

Did you know that Oprah has a book club? Well, she does. Today she announced the latest selection, Uwem Akpan's Say You're One of Them, a collection of five tales of conflict and poverty across Africa, told from the perspectives of five different children.

But wait, there's more: 10 minutes of the program was devoted to Mariah Carey and Precious (originally titled Push), Sapphire's debut novel of one girl's horrific abuse and ultimate redemption. Carey stars in the film adaptation scheduled for wide release on 11/20. 

Weird guy gets TV show: Sunday marks the debut of Bored to Death, an HBO series based upon Jonathan Ames's short story of the same title (featured in the collection The Double Life Is Twice as Good). Jason Schwartzman plays writer who poses as a private investigator (ineptly, in the Chandler style) in an attempt to inject a little excitement into his moribund existence. I'm not sure how the show will play out, but the original starts cute and funny, and then launches a swift and violent toboggan ride of a descent. Ames and Ted Danson co-star. Ames has also done some music writing, and the book features entertaining pieces on Lenny Kravitz and Marilyn Manson, as well as hilariously frank autobiographical bits. Think Chuck Klosterman, if Klosterman were profane, occasionally pornographic, and deeply depraved.

Moving and Shaking: Insomniacs rejoice. I Can Make You Sleep, Paul McKenna's solution for chronic sleep trouble, hits the five spot on our Movers and Shakers list. If widely adopted, we may see vastly improved blog posts everywhere.

--Jon

Vulture Feeds on Wetlands

New York magazine, which has one of the zippiest book sections around, along with their I-wish-they-posted-on-books-more Vulture blog, launched their first Vulture Reading Room book discussion. Did they start with typical book-group fare like Eat, Pray, Love or A Thousand Splendid Suns? Nope, they went right down in the muck with Wetlands, Charlotte Roche's gleefully smutty debut novel, which was a publishing phenomenon in her native Germany but seems to be turning out more midlisty in translation here in the States. Along with their excellent book critic, Sam Anderson, and their writer Adam Sternbergh, they've roped in novelists Ayelet Waldman and Kate Christensen and Bookslut honcho Jessa Crispin. The verdict: nearly unanimous. Some of the only mildly family-unfriendly quotes:

• Anderson: "There were moments ... when I was 100 percent sure that this was the worst thing I'd ever read."
• Waldman: "So, cards on the table. I thought this was a loathsome little turd of a novel."
• Crispin: "So what if Wetlands is a total failure as a novel? I didn’t care about the parents, and no one in the book is slightly believable.... Honestly, I’m very glad Wetlands exists."
• Sternbergh: "Oh, and did I mention, IT’S SO BORING. Because it’s really, really boring. I had several weeks to finish this slim volume and carried it with me everywhere, yet reopening it filled me with dread every time. I mourned the hours lost during which I could have been reading better books."
• Christensen: "How did you guys all manage to read the whole thing? This book bums me out. I wanted to find it hilarious, transgressive, honest, and interesting, but I can barely force myself to go on reading it. I'm stuck on page 141. Not because I'm squeamish, which I am not in any way, but because it's so searingly awful, as you've all already and very eloquently and hilariously pointed out: tawdry, pointless, boring, badly written ... eccch."

But then Anderson, despite the moments he mentions above, decided, either from an authentic contrarian spirit or from the necessity of keeping the conversation going for another round, to mount a defense of the book:

This is a genre novel. The genre is: a crazy book that might shock you into thinking about your life differently. Like all genre novels (except the amazingly great ones, which then cease to be genre novels), Wetlands sacrifices "literary" texture and gravitas and subtlety in order to achieve some other end. It wasn't written for people who relish the sophisticated moment-by-moment pleasures of Philip Roth. It was written by an admitted non-reader to (a) make people laugh and then (b) to start, on the wave of that laughter, a big giant global conversation about our totally messed-up relationships with our bodies.

How will that gambit go over? Well, here's the first response, from Waldman:

How dare you insult genre writers? Raymond Chandler is a genre writer. Ursula LeGuin is a genre writer. What genre are you talking about? Scuz-porn?

Regardless of the outcome, may the Vulture return to feed again. --Tom