Omnivoracious

Revolution 2.0 Comes to Amazon: A Conversation with Wael Ghonim

Wael Ghonim is a true historical figure. He is also the author of Revolution 2.0: The Power of the People Is Greater Than the People in Power: A Memoir.

In the summer of 2010, Wael Ghonim was a little-known, thirty-year-old Google executive when he anonymously launched a Facebook page to protest the death of one Egyptian man at the hands of security forces. The page’s following expanded quickly and moved from online protests to a nonconfrontational movement.

The youth of Egypt made history: they used social media to schedule a revolution. The call went out to more than a million Egyptians online, and on January 25, 2011, Cairo’s Tahrir Square resounded with calls for change. Yet just as the revolution began in earnest, Ghonim was captured and held for twelve days of brutal interrogation. After he was released, he gave a tearful speech on national television, and the protests grew more intense. Four days later, the president of Egypt was gone.

 

A Conversation Between Gregory Maguire and Madeline Miller, Author of "The Song of Achilles"

Gregory Maguire, author of Wicked and Out of Oz, interviews Madeline Miller on the forthcoming publication of her magnificent first novel, The Song of Achilles. (Spoiler Alert: It's a bit of a lovefest between these two authors.)

Gregory Maguire: Ms. Miller, you write with the confidence of the zealously inspired, taking as your material one of the great foundation texts of world literature. In three millennia or so, The Iliad has garnered somewhat wider attention than The Wizard of Oz, with which I have played, so I have to ask in admiration and in real curiosity: where do you get the noive? I would almost be tempted to bandy about the word “hubris,” just to prove some point about not having lost my notes from tenth grade World Civ, but really, you handle the material so alertly, so respectfully, that hubris doesn’t enter into it. But nerve does. How did you come to dare to take on such a daunting task, and for your first book? And without training wheels?

Madeline Miller: A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and in my case it was just dangerous enough to get me started writing. If I had stopped to ponder, I think I might have been too intimidated. But I had a few things working for me, which included the fact that Patroclus is such an underdog. Giving him voice felt a little like standing up for him, like some kind of Lorax of ancient Greek mythology. I had been intensely frustrated by a number of articles I had read that kept side-stepping the love between him and Achilles, which to me felt so obviously at the story’s heart. There was even one article—I’ve repressed who wrote it—that kept commenting that Achilles’ grief and anger at Patroclus’ death was out of character, and they couldn’t understand why he was so upset. So partially I was propelled by a desire to set the record straight, as I saw it.

The other thing that helped me, I think, was the fact that I never imagined the book as re-writing Homer. Instead, I made the Iliad a fixed point on the horizon and wrote towards it. I knew what Achilles and Patroclus became; I wanted to describe how they got there, and what went on between them in the scenes that Homer doesn’t show.

I will say that at some point a friend of mine—let’s be honest, an ex-boyfriend—referred to the story as “Homeric fan fiction.” That was fairly dampening. But I decided: so be it. If it’s fan fiction, it’s fan fiction. I’m still going to write it.

2011 Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalists announced

The Oscars aren't the only thing creating buzz in LA this week. Here are the 2011 Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalists. It's an eclectic mix of excellent books. Congratulations to all the finalists, and good luck on April 20th when they announce the winners!

Biography

Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned by John A. Farrell (Doubleday)

Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention by Manning Marable (Viking)

Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman by Robert K. Massie (Random House)

Reading My Father: A Memoir by Alexandra Styron (Scribner)

My Long Trip Home by Mark Whitaker (Simon & Schuster)

 

Current Interest

Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything by David Bellos (Faber & Faber/Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

El Narco: Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgency by Ioan Grillo (Bloomsbury Press)

Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Pakistan: A Hard Country by Anatol Lieven (PublicAffairs)

The Panic Virus: A True Story of Medicine, Science and Fear by Seth Mnookin (Simon & Schuster)

 

Fiction

Ghost Light by Joseph O'Connor (Frances Coady Book/Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

The Cat's Table by Michael Ondaatje (Knopf)

The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka (Knopf)

Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories by Edith Pearlman (Lookout Books/University of North Carolina Wilmington)

Luminarium by Alex Shakar (SoHo Press)

J.J. Abrams on Creativity and The Mystery Box

J.J. Abrams has created some big, albeit occasionally frustrating, hits (I'm talking to you, LOST). Here he is at TED talking about the creative process. It's an oldie but a goodie. And for people who care about stories and story creation, it's a pleasure to watch.

Media Monday - Presidents Day Edition

Today is George Washington's birthday, also known as Presidents Day, and I hope you got the day off. A mid-February holiday has to be about the best time to sit down and enjoy a good book-- you've got the day to yourself, the winter months are dragging on, and spring is still at least a month away. Here's what the media had to say about books over the weekend.

Bonus Question: What is it with all the dark covers this week?

 

The New York Times

• 

  We start off with some sad news. Anthony Shadid of The New York Times died in Syria last week of an apparent asthma attack. The paper points out that he faced many dangers while on recent assignment in Syria, "not the least of which was discovery by the pro-government authorities in Syria." He had sneaked into the country across the Turkish border, at a point where the two countries were only separated by barbed wire. According to the Times, "Mr. Hicks (a photographer traveling with Shadid) said they squeezed through the fence’s lower portion by pulling the wires apart, and guides on horseback met them on the other side. It was on that first night, Mr. Hicks said, that Mr. Shadid suffered an initial bout of asthma, apparently set off by an allergy to the horses, but he recovered after resting." A week later, on return to the border, he collapsed and died.

  Shadid is the author of House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East, which is scheduled to be published on March 27th. You can listen to an NPR interview with him here.

• Stacy Schiff has a review of Nathan Englander's excellent new collection of short stories What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank. Schiff compares this new collection to his 1999 debut collection For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, writing that both are "poised at the trapdoor between spiritual thirst and physical hunger." The final sentence of Schiff's review simply states, "Terrific collection," and I would second that. Englander visited Amazon last week for an interview, so look for that on Omnivoracious in the coming weeks.

• Another author who we recently interviewed (again, the interview will be on Omni soon) is the journalist Jodi Kantor. She is the author of The Obamas, of which the Times states, "call it chick nonfiction, if you will; this book is not about politics, it’s about marriage, or at least one marriage, and a notably successful one at that. This is a couple who listen to each other, and no one believes more in America’s 44th president than his wife." You may recall hearing some controversy around this title, but it's mostly overblown. In fact, the review calls it "a dimly controversial palace intrigue that attempts to explain how the first couple’s marriage works," and states later that, "taken as a whole, The Obamas is more valentine than vitriol," and that's true. But it's also a fascinating account of a very successful, yet in many ways very normal marriage. It was a unique, and in many ways, more real, look at the White House. And it's a book that's difficult to put down.

Saladin Ahmed and “The Throne of the Crescent Moon”

A finalist for the Nebula Award for his short fiction, Saladin Ahmed has ventured into novel-length works with Throne of the Crescent Moon, out this month from DAW Books. The novel is a lovely blend of adventure and intrigue, with a definite element of the horrific. In a land of djenn and ghuls, holy warriors and heretics, the Khalif and a mysterious master thief are engaged in a power struggle suddenly overshadowed by a series of brutal supernatural murders. Doctor Adoulla Makhslood, “the last real ghul hunter in the great city of Dhamsawaat” is retired from his days of hunting monsters. But the killings bring him out of retirement, assisted by a holy warrior named Raseed. When they encounter a tribeswoman who is also on the path of killers, the plot of Throne of the Crescent Moon kicks into high gear, with ever more intricate layers of complication.

New York Times Bestseller Kevin J. Anderson called the novel “Colorful, magical, exciting, and moving,” while Hugo winner Elizabeth Bear wrote that it “offers a glimpse of a dusty and wonderful fantasy city through the eyes of three engaging, unconventional protagonists.” Throne has already garnered starred reviews from the library journals, as well.

Ahmed has been “writing little stories (often SF/F/Superhero-themed) pretty much since I can remember. But as an adult, I started writing poetry, and that was my focus for many years.” He published “poetry in obscure venues for years,” but his first fiction sale was to the excellent magazine of “literary adventure fantasy,” Beneath Ceaseless Skies. That online short story serves as “a sort of prelude to Throne of the Crescent Moon.” Omnivoracious caught up with Ahmed via email at “Biggby Coffee on Woodward Avenue in Detroit” to find out more about his influences and his novel.

Amazon.com: What kinds of books do you remember being part of your childhood?

Sean Parnell, Author of "Outlaw Platoon," Talks About Combat

Outlaw Platoon by Sean Parnell and John Bruning, is a vivid account of the U.S. Army's legendary 10th Mountain Division and its heroic stand in the mountains of Afghanistan, an action-packed and highly emotional true story about the extraordinary bonds forged in battle.

Author Brad Thor had this to say about it:

"Two of the grittiest, most intense tales of courage and camaraderie under fire that I own are Black Hawk Down and Lone Survivor. Now I have a third: Outlaw Platoon. It’s the Black Hawk Down for the 21st Century."

 

Recently, Brad Thor talked to Sean Parnell about his personal experiences of war and events behind the book.

Brad Thor: What was your first day like on the ground in Afghanistan’s eastern frontier?

Sean Parnell: We landed at Forward Operating Base Bermel by helicopter—it was far too remote a place to be able to drive there. I had not even put my bags in my room when the insurgents attacked the base with rocket fire. They missed the FOB, but one of the rockets exploded inside a local village, killing and wounding a number of children. The villagers rushed their bleeding kids to our front gate, and I ran down to help. Our troops wanted to help all of the children at the same time, but the Afghan fathers argued with us and insisted that the boys be treated first. I grabbed a little girl and sprinted for the aid station. She bled out in my arms as I ran, drenching my uniform from her wound—really the stump that was left of one of her legs. I walked her back to her parents, handed her body to them, and watched as they carried her limp form back out the front gate.

That was my introduction to combat. All I was, all I had been, changed in that horrifying instant.

Eleanor Brown Talks to Alex George About His New Novel "A Good American."

 

Eleanor Brown, best-selling author of The Weird Sisters, interviews Alex George about A Good American

 

Eleanor Brown: My crack investigative skills (and your charming British accent) tell me you’re not from the United States. How does an Englishman living in Missouri come to write a book titled A Good American?

Alex George: So it’s true what they say about novelists and their highly developed observational skills! The title comes from a conversation that takes place early in the book, just after the grandparents of the immigrant family, Frederick and Jette Meisenheimer, arrive in America, when one of the first people they meet encourages them to be “good Americans.” I decided to tell an immigration tale soon after I moved to the United States myself. Writers are often told, “Write what you know.” It struck me that the experience of packing up my life and moving to another country, with no expectation that I would ever return home, was something worth writing about. And almost all people in America have a story similar to this one somewhere in their past.

Continue reading "Eleanor Brown Talks to Alex George About His New Novel "A Good American." " »

Hello, and welcome to Media Monday. Judging by the time at which I'm posting this, there's a good chance you're reading it on Tuesday, so let me be the first to wish you Happy Valentine's Day. On second thought, I hope I wasn't the first. And hopefully I won't be the last today either. Happy Valentine's Day.

Here's some book news...

The New York Times

• The Sunday Book Review has a long review of Katherine Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers, which was the spotlight pick for our February Best Books of the Month list. The Times states that it is an "extraordinary first book, which describes a few months in the life of a young garbage trader, Abdul, and his friends and family." Boo, who won a Pulitzer for social service when she was at the Washington Post, spent year researching, and often living among, denizens of a slum called Annawadi, near Mumbai’s airport, and she writes about them with rare intimate knowledge. Suffice it to say, this is not "Slumdog Millionaires," for as we know, reality is generally much harsher than the movies. As the review draws to a close, reviewer Pankaj Mishra begins to sum up the ultimate value behind Boo's book: "'The poor,' she explains further, 'blame one another for the choices of governments and markets, and we who are not poor are ready to blame the poor just as harshly.' Meanwhile, only 'the faintest ripple' is created 'in the fabric of the society at large,' for in places like Mumbai, 'the gates of the rich . . . remained un­breached, . . . the poor took down one another, and the world’s great, unequal cities soldiered on in relative peace.' In its own quiet way, Behind the Beautiful For­evers disturbs this peace more effectively than many works of polemic and theory."

• 

  Why do we need introverts? According to Judith Warner's review of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain, "Unchecked extroversion— a personality trait Cain ties to ebullience, excitability, dominance, risk-taking, thick skin, boldness and a tendency toward quick thinking and thoughtless action — has actually, she argues, come to pose a real menace of late. The outsize reward-seeking tendencies of the hopelessly ­outer-directed helped bring us the bank meltdown of 2008 as well as disasters like Enron, she claims. With our economy now in ruins, Cain writes, it’s time to establish 'a greater balance of power' between those who rush to speak and do and those who sit back and think."

• Norumbega Park: A Novel gets a strong review. "Anthony Giardina’s new novel begins on a country road in Massachusetts in 1969, with 39-year-old Richie Palumbo and his family — his son, daughter and wife — out for a drive near their home in Waltham. At twilight, they happen upon the seemingly idyllic WASPy town of Norumbega. Slowing down, Richie spots a house that he’s instantly drawn to, one he decides is meant to be his home." Which raises a natural question: "Can the Italian-American Palumbos rise above their social station?" Palumbo gets his home at great cost, but as you can imagine, that alone will not raise him above his social station. "As Giardina’s novel sorts this out, it delves into what is hidden — the dreams, the shame, the faith — in the complex folds of one family’s life."

Fans across the world are celebrating the birthday of one of the greatest writers of all time, Charles Dickens. The father of such classic characters as Oliver Twist and Scrooge, of such famous lines as "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times," his work captures something about hope and the human condition that seems timeless. He was also just a really entertaining writer.

Here's a timeline of some of his more famous books--

1837-39 - Oliver Twist

1838-39 - The Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby

1843 - A Christmas Carol

1849-50 - David Copperfield

1852-53 - Bleak House

1859 - A Tale of Two Cities

1860-61 - Great Expectations

If you're interested in owning a collection of great works by Dickens, there's Major Works of Charles Dickens, and if you're interested in more about his life, his works, and what experts have to say about him, you should take a look at The Oxford Companion to Charles Dickens: Anniversary edition.

If you happen to own a Kindle, his collected works are practically free.

Finally, here's the full first sentence of A Tale of Two Cities:

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only."

 

I was talking to another Amazon editor today about the February Best Books of the Month list, when he said to me, "You know, that book really made me think." That got me thinking about other books that have made me think.

Here's a short list:

1. Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain. This book will almost come as a relief to half the population (and maybe a larger percentage of readers). It's about the importance of introverts, exploring the value of the careful listeners and reflective thinkers in a world that seems full of extroverts.

The 2012 Oscar nominations for Best Picture revealed the importance of books in driving the story industry. In a previous Omni post, we pointed out that 6 out of 9 Best Picture nominees originated as books. The nominees are:

"The Artist"

"The Descendants"

"Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close"

"The Help"

"Hugo"

"Midnight in Paris"

"Moneyball"

"The Tree of Life"

"War Horse"

 

Was 2011 an anomaly? Not at all. The coming year offers a particularly stellar line-up of movies that first blossomed on the page. Here are some standouts:

We now bring you another edition of Media Monday. There are lots of good books to talk about, so I won't tarry.

New York Times

• Jeanette Winterson reviews Renegade: Henry Miller and the Making of "Tropic of Cancer" by Frederick Turner. Turner is in good company, as none other than George Orwell, Norman Mailer, Kate Millet, and Erica Jong have taken on the subject of Henry Miller and his seminal book (a book that reviewer Winterson calls "so great that it takes the world nearly 30 years to face up to it"). Reporting on such a controversial and brilliant novel almost assures that the key messages will change over time. Winterson notes that "Turner cleverly places Miller in a line of American folklore heroes, real and invented, like Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett, Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. Like Huck Finn, Miller the man wants to avoid growing up. Like Mark Twain, Miller the writer wants the flavor and feel of 'brawlers, outlaws, gamblers . . . whores.'” But she feels Turner has ignored the more unsavory parts of Miller and his novel in an effort to create this mythos, particularly the frequent misogyny of Miller's prose and of the time in which he was writing it.

• As reviewer, Sarah Wheeler points out in her review of Alec Wilkinson's The Ice Balloon: S. A. Andree and the Heroic Age of Arctic Exploration, "The history of 19th-century Arctic exploration is gruesome. Ice floes throttle creaky ships, men vanish into the white silence, and the North Pole remains elusive." In other words, people died, and they died grisly deaths. "Then a Swedish aeronaut had a new idea. Approaches by sledge and ship had failed, so why not fly to the pole?" Thus, follows the story of Salomon August Andrée, told by Wilkinson (a New Yorker staffwriter), in a "prose style (that) suits the spare polar landscape, making his occasional poetic touches even more effective. (He describes, for example, the men rowing over the icy sea 'as if already in the afterlife.')"

  You can read more about author Alec Wilkinson in this recent interview conducted by our own Neal Thompson.

Author Paulo Coelho has made a series of videos on writing. Here's the first one:

 

On Monday, January 30th, John Green is coming to Amazon for an interview. Needless to say, we're excited to talk to him-- but we've been talking amongst ourselves, and he's got such a vibrant and involved fan base, we thought we'd ask our readers a question first: what question would you like to ask John Green?

Leave a question (or two, or three) in the comments below. We'll collect them and ask as many as we can. Then we'll put the video up on Omnivoracious a week or so later. Please, don't be shy. How many chances do you get to interact with a bestselling, beloved author?

(Be sure to sign your first name, so we can credit you on the video.)

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences should tack a couple more words onto that mildly pretentious name of theirs... The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and books. This morning, the Academy announced their nominees for the Oscars, and books were well-represented. In fact, many of the nominated movies started out as books.

Take a look at the Best Picture category alone. Here's the full list of Best Picture nominees - movies that started out as books are in bold.

 

"The Artist"

"The Descendants"

"Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close"

"The Help"

"Hugo"

"Midnight in Paris"

"Moneyball"

"The Tree of Life"

"War Horse"

 

That's 6 out of 9, a whopping two-thirds. And that's just Best Picture. Below is a full tally of Oscar-nominated movies that originated from books (links to the books provided; let me know in the comments if I missed anything). These books are drawing A-level talent-- George Clooney, Meryl Streep, Brad Pitt, and Martin Scorcese to name a few. Be proud, book lovers.

The National Book Critics Circle and the American Library Association both had book award events this week-- one to name their shortlists, the other to name their winners. Those lists can be found elsewhere on this blog. In the meantime, there is a lot of other books media to talk about.

 

New York Times

• Charlies Isherwood reviews Ben Jonson: A Life by Ian Donaldson, about Shakespeare's more famous (at the time they were alive, anyway) fellow writer and compatriot. In his review, Isherwood points out "Jonson was the more celebrated and multifariously accomplished figure during his time and in the years immediately after his death in 1637, but his plays are produced relatively rarely today — only 'Volpone' and 'The Alchemist' are widely known — and his poetry is read more rarely still. Shakespeare has emerged as the great genius of the age, the author of plays that will hold the stage as long as there are stages to hold, and a cycle of sonnets that are almost equally prized." Mark a point for posterity. Today you might only be a shy, fairly famous and prolific poet and playwright, but be assured that hundreds of years from now you may be celebrated as a genius. But if Shakespeare's the genius and Jonson earns murmurs and whispers that he was overrated during his time, why should we read about Ben Jonson today? For starters, Isherwood calls the book "deeply researched but happily readable." Two, Jonson-- who was and remains a literary giant in his own right (not overrated, just overshadowed)-- led a life that was worlds more interesting than Shakespeare's, whose "comparative invisibility during his lifetime has certainly posed intractable problems in the centuries since his death, as the eternal and tedious arguments over the authorship of his plays illustrate. Had he the foresight to make himself the colorful and combative public figure Jonson was — jailed several times, famed for insobriety, sometime friend and sometime foe of the mighty names of his age — we would not be plagued by the rankling theories of the Oxfordians that still clamor today." And finally, this behavior helped to establish the writer as a presence in English life-- Jonson was "Britain’s first literary celebrity.”

• After pointing out that Ben Marcus has only written four books in his 20-year career, reviewer J. Robert Lennon describes Marcus's work as having "earned him critical praise and a small army of devoted fans," and as having, until now, "forsaken the conventional trappings of narrative." But, Lennon tells us, "The Flame Alphabet, his first new book in a decade, has the feel of an event. And though it is recognizably by the same author, it is also something of a surprise. It has a plot, and a protagonist, and at times it even threatens to become a thriller."

• A book that will most certainly be subject to personal taste is That's Disgusting: Unraveling the Mysteries of Repulsion by Rachel Herz. Why would anybody want to read that? you might ask. Reviewer Robin Marantz Henig gives the following analysis: "Disgust, Herz writes, is one of 'the six basic human emotions' (along with happiness, sadness, anger, fear and surprise) that any healthy adult 'can experience and recognize.' She says emotional disgust is the only one, among living creatures, that’s unique to humans, and the only one that has to be learned." Rather than list all the disgusting things in this book, I will give you a link to the review, in which you may peruse the various disgusting foods, etc. yourself. For those brave (or just curious) enough to read the review, they may find these gross details generate a reaction that's deeper than they'd anticipated. As the review puts it, disgusting is in the eye of the beholder, and "disgust is not an automatic reaction, like fear; it’s 'an unfolding and cognitive emotion.'”

Finalists for the 2012 National Book Critics Circle awards were announced today at Artists Space in New York.

Among this year’s presenters were recent NBCC finalists and winners Jennifer Egan (fiction), Siddhartha Mukherjee (nonfiction), Elif Batuman (criticism), Kathleen Graber (poetry), Yunte Huang (biography), Darin Strauss (autobiography), and Parul Sehgal (Nona Balakian Citation).

 

Fiction

• Stone Arabia: A Novel by Dana Spiotta
• Open City: A Novel by Teju Cole
• The Marriage Plot: A Novel by Jeffrey Eugenides
• The Stranger's Child by Alan Hollinghurst
• Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories by Edith Pearlman

 

Nonfiction

• Pulphead: Essays by John Jeremiah Sullivan
• Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World by Maya Jasanoff
• The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick
• To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 by Adam Hochschild
• A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War by Amanda Foreman

 

Criticism

• Is That a Fish in Your Ear?: Translation and the Meaning of Everything by David Bellos
• Otherwise Known as the Human Condition: Selected Essays and Reviews by Geoff Dyer
• The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, Etc. by Jonathan Lethem
• Karaoke Culture: Essays by Dubravka Ugresic by
• Out of the Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis on Rock Music by Ellen Willis

 

Today I stumbled across the Amazon Books customer discussions at the bottom of the Amazon.com Books page. I decided to read a few of the comments and quickly realized that there are some really interesting and insightful discussions going on.

One of the posts read: "I'm looking for books for my husband. He read, and enjoyed, the Eric Larson Books, Lost in Shangri-La, the Horatio Hornblower and Patrick Obrian Aubrey Maturin series, Unbroken,... he likes books that read close enough like fiction, but also have something he can learn. He doesn't really like mystery and is a little tired of WW2. Any ideas? Thanks!"

I know some guy books, I thought. So I put up a quick list. But now I have a creeping suspicion that it wasn't quite the right list for this person. Maybe I jumped the gun and should have given it more thought.

Another customer offerered a better (and shorter) list:

It's only the second week of the year, and it already seems like last week's books have been replaced by a whole new cast of fiction and nonfiction. It's an embarrassment of riches, and every media outlet seems to be featuring something different. What follows is my attempt to keep up with it all.

 

New York Times

• The cover of this weekend's Sunday Book Review features William Gibson's collection of essays titled Distrust That Particular Flavor. Gibson writes science fiction and is well-known for inventing the term "cyber-space." To view life through his essays is to get swept up into his unique vision and brilliance. As reviewer Pagan Kennedy puts it, "Such is the power of his prose that when I glanced up from the pages of this book and surveyed the street-side around me, I felt as if I were wearing Gibson-glasses. Cars lumbered past like ponderous elephants of rusty steel, not so different from the cars of 30 years ago, and seemed not to belong in the same world as the tattooed kid punching code into his laptop nearby. Under the spell of this book, I suddenly understood my surroundings not as a discrete contemporary tableau but as a hodgepodge of 1910, 1980, 2011 and 2020."

• There's a not-entirely-positive review of the Amazon Best of the Month Spotlight pick, Adam Johnson's The Orphan Master's Son, which states in part "Johnson’s novel, far from being too labyrinthine, is an ingeniously plotted adventure that feels much shorter than its roughly 450 pages and offers the reader a tremendous amount of fun" But, the review continues, "This isn’t entirely a compliment. Should 'fun' really be the first word to describe a novel about one of the worst places on earth?" I guess you can be the judge of that. I loved the book, and so did a lot of other people at Amazon (and elsewhere).

Media Monday - A Valentine to Books

Hello, and welcome to Media Monday. Judging by the time at which I'm posting this, there's a good chance you're reading it on Tuesday, so let me be the first to wish you Happy Valentine's Day. On second thought, I hope I wasn't the first. And hopefully I won't be the last today either. Happy Valentine's Day.

Here's some book news...

The New York Times

• The Sunday Book Review has a long review of Katherine Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers, which was the spotlight pick for our February Best Books of the Month list. The Times states that it is an "extraordinary first book, which describes a few months in the life of a young garbage trader, Abdul, and his friends and family." Boo, who won a Pulitzer for social service when she was at the Washington Post, spent year researching, and often living among, denizens of a slum called Annawadi, near Mumbai’s airport, and she writes about them with rare intimate knowledge. Suffice it to say, this is not "Slumdog Millionaires," for as we know, reality is generally much harsher than the movies. As the review draws to a close, reviewer Pankaj Mishra begins to sum up the ultimate value behind Boo's book: "'The poor,' she explains further, 'blame one another for the choices of governments and markets, and we who are not poor are ready to blame the poor just as harshly.' Meanwhile, only 'the faintest ripple' is created 'in the fabric of the society at large,' for in places like Mumbai, 'the gates of the rich . . . remained un­breached, . . . the poor took down one another, and the world’s great, unequal cities soldiered on in relative peace.' In its own quiet way, Behind the Beautiful For­evers disturbs this peace more effectively than many works of polemic and theory."

• 

  Why do we need introverts? According to Judith Warner's review of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain, "Unchecked extroversion— a personality trait Cain ties to ebullience, excitability, dominance, risk-taking, thick skin, boldness and a tendency toward quick thinking and thoughtless action — has actually, she argues, come to pose a real menace of late. The outsize reward-seeking tendencies of the hopelessly ­outer-directed helped bring us the bank meltdown of 2008 as well as disasters like Enron, she claims. With our economy now in ruins, Cain writes, it’s time to establish 'a greater balance of power' between those who rush to speak and do and those who sit back and think."

• Norumbega Park: A Novel gets a strong review. "Anthony Giardina’s new novel begins on a country road in Massachusetts in 1969, with 39-year-old Richie Palumbo and his family — his son, daughter and wife — out for a drive near their home in Waltham. At twilight, they happen upon the seemingly idyllic WASPy town of Norumbega. Slowing down, Richie spots a house that he’s instantly drawn to, one he decides is meant to be his home." Which raises a natural question: "Can the Italian-American Palumbos rise above their social station?" Palumbo gets his home at great cost, but as you can imagine, that alone will not raise him above his social station. "As Giardina’s novel sorts this out, it delves into what is hidden — the dreams, the shame, the faith — in the complex folds of one family’s life."

Happy 200th Birthday, Charles Dickens

Fans across the world are celebrating the birthday of one of the greatest writers of all time, Charles Dickens. The father of such classic characters as Oliver Twist and Scrooge, of such famous lines as "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times," his work captures something about hope and the human condition that seems timeless. He was also just a really entertaining writer.

Here's a timeline of some of his more famous books--

1837-39 - Oliver Twist

1838-39 - The Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby

1843 - A Christmas Carol

1849-50 - David Copperfield

1852-53 - Bleak House

1859 - A Tale of Two Cities

1860-61 - Great Expectations

If you're interested in owning a collection of great works by Dickens, there's Major Works of Charles Dickens, and if you're interested in more about his life, his works, and what experts have to say about him, you should take a look at The Oxford Companion to Charles Dickens: Anniversary edition.

If you happen to own a Kindle, his collected works are practically free.

Finally, here's the full first sentence of A Tale of Two Cities:

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only."

 

Five Great Nonfiction Books to Make You Think (About How We Think)

I was talking to another Amazon editor today about the February Best Books of the Month list, when he said to me, "You know, that book really made me think." That got me thinking about other books that have made me think.

Here's a short list:

1. Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain. This book will almost come as a relief to half the population (and maybe a larger percentage of readers). It's about the importance of introverts, exploring the value of the careful listeners and reflective thinkers in a world that seems full of extroverts.

Read It Before You See It - Books to Movies

The 2012 Oscar nominations for Best Picture revealed the importance of books in driving the story industry. In a previous Omni post, we pointed out that 6 out of 9 Best Picture nominees originated as books. The nominees are:

"The Artist"

"The Descendants"

"Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close"

"The Help"

"Hugo"

"Midnight in Paris"

"Moneyball"

"The Tree of Life"

"War Horse"

 

Was 2011 an anomaly? Not at all. The coming year offers a particularly stellar line-up of movies that first blossomed on the page. Here are some standouts:

Media Monday

We now bring you another edition of Media Monday. There are lots of good books to talk about, so I won't tarry.

New York Times

• Jeanette Winterson reviews Renegade: Henry Miller and the Making of "Tropic of Cancer" by Frederick Turner. Turner is in good company, as none other than George Orwell, Norman Mailer, Kate Millet, and Erica Jong have taken on the subject of Henry Miller and his seminal book (a book that reviewer Winterson calls "so great that it takes the world nearly 30 years to face up to it"). Reporting on such a controversial and brilliant novel almost assures that the key messages will change over time. Winterson notes that "Turner cleverly places Miller in a line of American folklore heroes, real and invented, like Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett, Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. Like Huck Finn, Miller the man wants to avoid growing up. Like Mark Twain, Miller the writer wants the flavor and feel of 'brawlers, outlaws, gamblers . . . whores.'” But she feels Turner has ignored the more unsavory parts of Miller and his novel in an effort to create this mythos, particularly the frequent misogyny of Miller's prose and of the time in which he was writing it.

• As reviewer, Sarah Wheeler points out in her review of Alec Wilkinson's The Ice Balloon: S. A. Andree and the Heroic Age of Arctic Exploration, "The history of 19th-century Arctic exploration is gruesome. Ice floes throttle creaky ships, men vanish into the white silence, and the North Pole remains elusive." In other words, people died, and they died grisly deaths. "Then a Swedish aeronaut had a new idea. Approaches by sledge and ship had failed, so why not fly to the pole?" Thus, follows the story of Salomon August Andrée, told by Wilkinson (a New Yorker staffwriter), in a "prose style (that) suits the spare polar landscape, making his occasional poetic touches even more effective. (He describes, for example, the men rowing over the icy sea 'as if already in the afterlife.')"

  You can read more about author Alec Wilkinson in this recent interview conducted by our own Neal Thompson.

Paulo Coelho on Writing

Author Paulo Coelho has made a series of videos on writing. Here's the first one:

 

What Question Would You Ask John Green?

On Monday, January 30th, John Green is coming to Amazon for an interview. Needless to say, we're excited to talk to him-- but we've been talking amongst ourselves, and he's got such a vibrant and involved fan base, we thought we'd ask our readers a question first: what question would you like to ask John Green?

Leave a question (or two, or three) in the comments below. We'll collect them and ask as many as we can. Then we'll put the video up on Omnivoracious a week or so later. Please, don't be shy. How many chances do you get to interact with a bestselling, beloved author?

(Be sure to sign your first name, so we can credit you on the video.)

The Books Behind the 2012 Academy Awards

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences should tack a couple more words onto that mildly pretentious name of theirs... The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and books. This morning, the Academy announced their nominees for the Oscars, and books were well-represented. In fact, many of the nominated movies started out as books.

Take a look at the Best Picture category alone. Here's the full list of Best Picture nominees - movies that started out as books are in bold.

 

"The Artist"

"The Descendants"

"Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close"

"The Help"

"Hugo"

"Midnight in Paris"

"Moneyball"

"The Tree of Life"

"War Horse"

 

That's 6 out of 9, a whopping two-thirds. And that's just Best Picture. Below is a full tally of Oscar-nominated movies that originated from books (links to the books provided; let me know in the comments if I missed anything). These books are drawing A-level talent-- George Clooney, Meryl Streep, Brad Pitt, and Martin Scorcese to name a few. Be proud, book lovers.

Media Monday

The National Book Critics Circle and the American Library Association both had book award events this week-- one to name their shortlists, the other to name their winners. Those lists can be found elsewhere on this blog. In the meantime, there is a lot of other books media to talk about.

 

New York Times

• Charlies Isherwood reviews Ben Jonson: A Life by Ian Donaldson, about Shakespeare's more famous (at the time they were alive, anyway) fellow writer and compatriot. In his review, Isherwood points out "Jonson was the more celebrated and multifariously accomplished figure during his time and in the years immediately after his death in 1637, but his plays are produced relatively rarely today — only 'Volpone' and 'The Alchemist' are widely known — and his poetry is read more rarely still. Shakespeare has emerged as the great genius of the age, the author of plays that will hold the stage as long as there are stages to hold, and a cycle of sonnets that are almost equally prized." Mark a point for posterity. Today you might only be a shy, fairly famous and prolific poet and playwright, but be assured that hundreds of years from now you may be celebrated as a genius. But if Shakespeare's the genius and Jonson earns murmurs and whispers that he was overrated during his time, why should we read about Ben Jonson today? For starters, Isherwood calls the book "deeply researched but happily readable." Two, Jonson-- who was and remains a literary giant in his own right (not overrated, just overshadowed)-- led a life that was worlds more interesting than Shakespeare's, whose "comparative invisibility during his lifetime has certainly posed intractable problems in the centuries since his death, as the eternal and tedious arguments over the authorship of his plays illustrate. Had he the foresight to make himself the colorful and combative public figure Jonson was — jailed several times, famed for insobriety, sometime friend and sometime foe of the mighty names of his age — we would not be plagued by the rankling theories of the Oxfordians that still clamor today." And finally, this behavior helped to establish the writer as a presence in English life-- Jonson was "Britain’s first literary celebrity.”

• After pointing out that Ben Marcus has only written four books in his 20-year career, reviewer J. Robert Lennon describes Marcus's work as having "earned him critical praise and a small army of devoted fans," and as having, until now, "forsaken the conventional trappings of narrative." But, Lennon tells us, "The Flame Alphabet, his first new book in a decade, has the feel of an event. And though it is recognizably by the same author, it is also something of a surprise. It has a plot, and a protagonist, and at times it even threatens to become a thriller."

• A book that will most certainly be subject to personal taste is That's Disgusting: Unraveling the Mysteries of Repulsion by Rachel Herz. Why would anybody want to read that? you might ask. Reviewer Robin Marantz Henig gives the following analysis: "Disgust, Herz writes, is one of 'the six basic human emotions' (along with happiness, sadness, anger, fear and surprise) that any healthy adult 'can experience and recognize.' She says emotional disgust is the only one, among living creatures, that’s unique to humans, and the only one that has to be learned." Rather than list all the disgusting things in this book, I will give you a link to the review, in which you may peruse the various disgusting foods, etc. yourself. For those brave (or just curious) enough to read the review, they may find these gross details generate a reaction that's deeper than they'd anticipated. As the review puts it, disgusting is in the eye of the beholder, and "disgust is not an automatic reaction, like fear; it’s 'an unfolding and cognitive emotion.'”

Finalists Announced for the National Book Critics Circle Awards

Finalists for the 2012 National Book Critics Circle awards were announced today at Artists Space in New York.

Among this year’s presenters were recent NBCC finalists and winners Jennifer Egan (fiction), Siddhartha Mukherjee (nonfiction), Elif Batuman (criticism), Kathleen Graber (poetry), Yunte Huang (biography), Darin Strauss (autobiography), and Parul Sehgal (Nona Balakian Citation).

 

Fiction

• Stone Arabia: A Novel by Dana Spiotta
• Open City: A Novel by Teju Cole
• The Marriage Plot: A Novel by Jeffrey Eugenides
• The Stranger's Child by Alan Hollinghurst
• Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories by Edith Pearlman

 

Nonfiction

• Pulphead: Essays by John Jeremiah Sullivan
• Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World by Maya Jasanoff
• The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick
• To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 by Adam Hochschild
• A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War by Amanda Foreman

 

Criticism

• Is That a Fish in Your Ear?: Translation and the Meaning of Everything by David Bellos
• Otherwise Known as the Human Condition: Selected Essays and Reviews by Geoff Dyer
• The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, Etc. by Jonathan Lethem
• Karaoke Culture: Essays by Dubravka Ugresic by
• Out of the Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis on Rock Music by Ellen Willis

 

Help an Amazon Customer Out - Books for Men

Today I stumbled across the Amazon Books customer discussions at the bottom of the Amazon.com Books page. I decided to read a few of the comments and quickly realized that there are some really interesting and insightful discussions going on.

One of the posts read: "I'm looking for books for my husband. He read, and enjoyed, the Eric Larson Books, Lost in Shangri-La, the Horatio Hornblower and Patrick Obrian Aubrey Maturin series, Unbroken,... he likes books that read close enough like fiction, but also have something he can learn. He doesn't really like mystery and is a little tired of WW2. Any ideas? Thanks!"

I know some guy books, I thought. So I put up a quick list. But now I have a creeping suspicion that it wasn't quite the right list for this person. Maybe I jumped the gun and should have given it more thought.

Another customer offerered a better (and shorter) list:

Media Monday

It's only the second week of the year, and it already seems like last week's books have been replaced by a whole new cast of fiction and nonfiction. It's an embarrassment of riches, and every media outlet seems to be featuring something different. What follows is my attempt to keep up with it all.

 

New York Times

• The cover of this weekend's Sunday Book Review features William Gibson's collection of essays titled Distrust That Particular Flavor. Gibson writes science fiction and is well-known for inventing the term "cyber-space." To view life through his essays is to get swept up into his unique vision and brilliance. As reviewer Pagan Kennedy puts it, "Such is the power of his prose that when I glanced up from the pages of this book and surveyed the street-side around me, I felt as if I were wearing Gibson-glasses. Cars lumbered past like ponderous elephants of rusty steel, not so different from the cars of 30 years ago, and seemed not to belong in the same world as the tattooed kid punching code into his laptop nearby. Under the spell of this book, I suddenly understood my surroundings not as a discrete contemporary tableau but as a hodgepodge of 1910, 1980, 2011 and 2020."

• There's a not-entirely-positive review of the Amazon Best of the Month Spotlight pick, Adam Johnson's The Orphan Master's Son, which states in part "Johnson’s novel, far from being too labyrinthine, is an ingeniously plotted adventure that feels much shorter than its roughly 450 pages and offers the reader a tremendous amount of fun" But, the review continues, "This isn’t entirely a compliment. Should 'fun' really be the first word to describe a novel about one of the worst places on earth?" I guess you can be the judge of that. I loved the book, and so did a lot of other people at Amazon (and elsewhere).