Omnivoracious

Grace McCleen on Her "Land of Decoration" and Finding Music in Words

This spring, I became captivated by The Land of Decoration, a debut that made our list of the Top 10 Best Books of April. Grace McCleen's visionary novel (widely compared to Emma Donoghue's Room) grapples with immortal questions, especially for children raised in religious doctrines at odds with mainstream belief: how do you feel your way to the truth when faith blurs with madness, when pious parents may be oblivious to your pain, when your sense of Divine control dissolves? As I've watched the customer reviews roll in, it's been fascinating to see how the book resonates with readers on different levels, depending on their own childhood experience and beliefs.

Judith, a bright 10-year-old in a poor Welsh valley, gets bullied for her faith in the impending End Times, and her life with her devout widower father feels oppressively quiet. So (almost as an act of creative self-defense) she makes an intricate replica of her town within her room, expanding and populating a world made from candy wrappers, shoe laces, sticks, and other cast-off bits. Then she discovers that her actions in her miniature world give her miraculous abilities (to save or destroy) in the real one, and what seemed like the voice of God may be something more sinister.

McCleen's writing felt so visceral that I believed it must spring from an intensely imaginative spirit or the power of personal experience. Now I know it's the result of some miraculous combination of the two--and a rare talent.

Her website offered clues into the remarkable scope of her creativity, including beautiful paintings and sculpture, and a village of 140 little people she made "when I wasn't well and awake at night a lot." Her bio says she's "interested in sound, in the spiritual dimension, in miniature, and the natural world," all forces she unleashes in this book. I also found myself beguiled by her songs, amazed by her note that at the time she recorded them, "I thought I was going to lose my speech," a circumstance that makes her vocal poise all the more remarkable. The haunting "Preacher's Daughter" thematically overlaps The Land of Decoration.

I reached out to Grace to find out more about her experience with writing the book, and how her art and music inspire her writing, and vice versa. Here are the highlights.

 How did you first hear Judith’s voice—or did her story arise in part from your own life?

 The passage opening The Land of Decoration came from a long unworkable novel, out of the blue one day, and I asked myself who would be speaking, what their environment might be. I was very ill at the time, and every paragraph and page was a feat in itself. I think that struggle reveals itself in the depth of the emotion in places (which perhaps verges on the melodramatic), and the pedestrian, 'numb' prose in others, as I was feeling either numb or very great emotion.

Recommended Reads for "Downton Abbey" Fans

After I finally gave into the hype and devoured both seasons of the Emmy® Award-winning Masterpiece Classic series Downton Abbey in a string of immersive evenings, I had intense withdrawal pangs, not just missing the characters--their strenuously repressed emotions, social and romantic machinations and passionate eruptions--but their whole fascinating, sumptuous, and fragile world.

Downton Abbey has inspired a genuine cultural obsession not just for Edwardian fashion, but for its intensely personal dramatization of in that transformative epoch, when the strictures of class and morality that had held (more or less) for centuries crumbled under the social upheaval and barbarism of the first Great War and its aftermath--when class lines blurred and the still-living members of what Hemingway famously called the Lost Generation embraced the hedonistic social freedoms of the '20s. Season two leaves servants, nobles, and viewers on the precipice of that world, and we know that life will only become more surprising, complex, and thrilling at Downton.

If you can't wait, these terrific fiction and nonfiction books will once again immerse you in the world of great English houses, the lives of their occupants and servants, Edwardian style and culture, and the historical forces of history that will transmute them.

See all our recommended reads for Downton Abbey fans. --Mari Malcolm

 

Magic in the Air: How a Romantic Getaway Inspired Lisa Kleypas to Write "Rainshadow Road"

In the spirit of Valentine's Day, we asked bestselling romance writer Lisa Kleypas to share how a trip to Washington State's San Juan Islands inspired her latest novel, Rainshadow Road.

When I'm writing a novel, I start with the setting, getting a sense of how it will look, smell, feel. People absorb their surroundings until the places they live become part of who they are. Here's how I know if I've done it right in a novel: if I tried to transplant the characters and plot into another setting, the story couldn't be told the same way.

A few years ago, my husband Greg insisted on taking me and our two children to San Juan Island, which is part of an archipelago off the coast of Washington state. I'll confess, I was reluctant to go anywhere because I had a lot of work to do. But as soon as we docked at the port of Friday Harbor and stepped off the ferry, I felt like we were in another world.

There is something mystical in the air on San Juan Island. The morning sky is pearly blue. At sunset, it turns the color of blood oranges.

I think the otherworldly feeling has something to do with the island's location, sheltered by the rainshadow of the Olympic Mountain range, which buffers much of the gray drizzle associated with the Pacific Northwest. And the variety of landscape is amazing--tall quiet forests, cliffs overlooking rough-pebbled beaches, open meadows nearly choked with wildflowers. Sometimes you can hear the thunderous slap of an orca's flipper against the surface of the water, or the ragged cries of bald eagles flying in pairs. (The San Juans are the largest breeding ground for bald eagles in the lower 48 states, proving that eagles know a great romantic getaway when they see one.)

Show Us Your Nightstand Reads

I know it's terrible sleep hygiene, but I love reading in bed. As an editor on the Amazon Books team, it's a delightful (and sometimes overwhelming) part of my mission to tear through several books a week to uncover the next month's gems, so most nights find me reading after work until my eyes water and the words blur--then often reading in bed until noon on weekends.

This was my nightstand last week, as I madly finished up my February reading, including many of our picks for the Best Books of the Month--Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Delicacy, Defending Jacob, The Art of Hearing Heartbeats, The Snow Child, Flatscreen (my favorite), and A Good American--plus others that came months or years ago and never migrated to my larger shelves, mostly becuase I just like having them there.

So what's on your nightstand? Are you all ebook these days, or do you still make space for ink and paper? And when do you make time to read?

Snap a picture of your nightstand and post it on the Amazon Books Facebook page with a note about what you like to read in bed. We'll collect our favorites in a Facebook album and share them with our fans. --Mari Malcolm

 

 

Why "The Orphan Master’s Son" Tops Our List of January’s Best Books

When we heard in late December that Kim Jong-il had died, the news reports felt like an intrusion by the fictional world that many of us at the Amazon Books editorial office had been compulsively descending into each night, a reminder that the surreal, brutal universe Adam Johnson evokes in The Orphan Master’s Son continues to unfold just across the Pacific.

Some of us had devoured the book in the same week, and mornings we'd crane our necks over our cubicle walls to compare progress, discuss the lines that rang in our ears (“If a man and his story are in conflict, it is the man who must change”) and favorite characters: beyond the surreptitious audacity of protagonist Jun Do, I was fascinated by his interrogator-torturer who believed himself to be a “biographer,” while Chris was taken with film actress Sun Moon's lovely sadness. When it came time for our "smackdown" meeting and vote on the top 10 Best Books of the Month for January, it was nearly upstaged by the irreverent humor and life-affirming wallop of John Green's hugely anticipated The Fault in Our Stars, but in the end, Johnson's novel edged it out for the spotlight slot.

As any 30 Rock or Team America fan knows, the grand delusions of North Korea’s Dear Leader were ripe for parody, and Johnson almost went that way—until he read the heart-wrenching, emotionally lobotomized testimony of gulag survivors and felt seized by a need to tell the average citizen's story.

Martha Beck on the Rebirth of Nature, Human and Wild

Few books get to linger too long in my bedside bookcase, but I haven't let Martha Beck's Steering by Starlight: Find Your Right Life, No Matter What get out of my sleepy arm's reach since it arrived three years ago. A monthly columnist for O: The Oprah Magazine, Beck is America's best-known life coach, and she speaks with a disarming blend of personal honesty and gobsmacking intelligence (the products of her own fascinating, turbulent life and a Ph.D. in sociology from Harvard) that make her simultaneously accessible and awe-inspiring.

Her new book, Finding Your Way in a Wild New World, is bolder, stranger, and more powerful than anything she's written before, and I finished it with a scrawled page of urgent questions, which I put to her over email and am delighted to share with you.

Mari Malcolm: More than 20 years after Bill McKibben published The End of Nature, your new book, Finding Your Way in a Wild New World, proposes new methods with ancient roots for the wayfinders among us--the growing number of people who feel the pull of the shaman archetype--to thrive in a world that's deeply in need of healing. You say that for many (if not all) people, the rebirth of our true nature is deeply entwined with restoring the natural world and reconnecting with wild animals, an idea that began as a personal epiphany when you had a close encounter with a rhino. When did you realize that the implications of that moment reverberated so far beyond the boundaries of your own life?

Amazon.com's Best-Selling Books of 2011

This morning, we announced this year's top 10 best-selling books at Amazon.com across formats, along with the top 100 best sellers in Kindle and print books. In keeping with the conventions of our editorially selected Best Books of 2011 lists, we included only books published in 2011 as first editions and considered only paid units. After a year of reading and recommending our favorites, it's fascinating to see what really resonated with Amazon's customers. We're especially impressed that a book released in late October topped the overall top 10 list, while Kindle Direct Publishing authors took the top two spots on the Kindle books list.

Our Top 10 Best-Selling Books of 2011:

1. Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
2. Bossypants by Tina Fey
3. A Stolen Life by Jaycee Dugard
4. The Mill River Recluse by Darcie Chan
5. In the Garden of the Beasts by Erik Larsen
6. A Dance with Dragons by George R.R. Martin
7. The Paris Wife by Paula McLain
8. The Litigators by John Grisham
9. The Abbey by Chris Culver
10. Inheritance by Christopher Paolini

See more about Amazon.com's best-selling books of 2011 here.

 

The Best Books of 2011 in Home & Garden

Over the past seven years, Grace Bonney's Design*Sponge blog has grown from a celebration of Brooklyn's fast-evolving style scene to a thriving online hub that showcases inspired design, from intriguing objects to revamped interiors and the people who create them. Bonney and her ultra-talented cohorts have infused Design*Sponge at Home--the top pick on our Best Home & Garden Books of 2011 list--with the same spirit of discovery, DIY passion, and unsnobby community that makes their blog so welcoming and endlessly exciting. Sneak peeks into fascinating (sometimes fantastical) interiors come with practical advice from their creators. A DIY Basics section illuminates essential skills like rewiring lamps and stripping furniture, while the DIY projects, floral designs, and Before & After furniture revamps have real creative range and timeless style. It's the bible of a new generation of designers and crafty people.

Among the rest of the books on our list, these were my favorites:

• The Edible Front Yard by Ivette Soler, a.k.a The Germinatrix, enthusiastically embraces edibles--and complementary ornamentals--as the ultimate in curb appeal, a claim backed up by luscious photos and bountiful design advice. In a year when a Michigan woman was almost jailed for 3 months for growing veggies in her own front yard, Soler's message is timely and revolutionary.
• Garden Up!, a collaboration of Susan Morrison and Rebecca Sweet, offers ingenious strategies and projects for enlivening vertical elements with plants, from adding arbors and trellises to hiding an ugly utility pole to creating an oasis on a skinny urban balcony.
• Terrarium Craft, by Artemisia's magical naturalist, Amy Bryant Aiello, is a gorgeous example of a welcome new trend for all of us who want to turn a new generation on to plants: gardening books with major appeal for the crafty set. In Aiello's world, sparkling crystals, shells, and strange sand figure as prominently in the design as air plants, succulents, and moss.

For more of the best new books on nesting and planting, browse our full list of the 10 Best Home & Garden Books of 2011, and don't miss the rest of our picks for the Best Books of 2011. --Mari Malcolm

Hunger Games Trailer Blows Fans Away

Fans (including the many on the Amazon Books team) got their first look at the official trailer for The Hunger Games movie this morning. Based on the first book of Suzanne Collins's beloved trilogy, the film--which hits the big screen March 23, 2012--still has to deliver on some major expectations, staying faithful to a world and characters that command a fanbase as fiercely devoted as any vampire hearthrob's.

Judging by the YouTube comments, fan reaction so far can be summed up as a collective "OMG!" and an ecstatic sigh of relief that they seem to have gotten it right: as xoannaox89 put it, "Holy cheese and crackers, it's almost the EXACT same thing as I imagined it to be!" One minute in, as Prim was called as the tribute and Katniss took her place, I got my first wave of chills and tears. My teammate JoVon concurred: "I started crying at 1:18 and had to turn it off to watch later (with more Kleenex)." Kevin divided us with his declaration that "we can all agree that Peeta is cuter than Gale right?" I agreed, while Upneet said that "Peeta looks like an ol' wuss." Ali expressed confusion over why the trailer appears to start in the 1800s and then goes all sci-fi. We expressed confusion over why she hadn't yet read these books, all three of which can be consumed in one awesome weekend.

Watch the trailer and let us know--does it live up to your expectations? Is this a premiere that demands costumes? And (most importantly) camp Peeta or camp Gale? --Mari Malcolm

 

Ask the Editors: Books for a New Alzheimer's Patient Who Loves Angels

Today's Ask the Editors request comes from Sue Terrell. She wants ideas for her mother-in-law, who was recently diagnosed with Alzheimer's, loves reading about angels, and (coincidentally?) spent most of her life teaching and caring for other people:

My mom in law is in an assisted living facility with the fairly new diagnosis of alzheimers disease that she is unaware of and would vehemently deny if you asked her! :-) She is 89 years old, a retired school teacher, and was very active in college organizations, church organizations and volunteered at the hospital gift shop right up to about two years ago. She taught home ec and English. She loves angels and has probably read a lot of angel books over the years but nothing recent. Of course, I don't want to limit the search to just angels! Any thoughts?

Sue, your request made remember how much my grandparents loved reading--even as their memory slipped--during the years they spent in an assisted living facility. Curious about how Alzheimer's impacts the experience of reading, I did a little research and came across this terrific article from the New York Times: "Alzheimer's Patients Find Comfort in Books". The upshot is that in the early stages, most people enjoy reading pretty much what they’ve always enjoyed, though large print is very helpful for those with older eyes. Any former English teacher has surely read plenty of great books over the years, and Lynette notes that "Pride and Prejudice, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and many other classics are available in large print. And, because it sounds your mother-in-law might enjoy an inspiring real life story, I’d recommend Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken (also available in large print)."

Seira suggests that "she might enjoy some beautiful art books about angels. This pop-up book looks like it could be pretty special, or try The Glory of Angels, a coffee table book with fold-out pages and beautiful images, along with essays and historical references which she could read in bits, or have someone else read to her."

Because the scope of your world can shrink when you're in an assisted living facility, she might also enjoy a gorgeous photo book with images from all over the world, like the new National Geographic Simply Beautiful Photographs. It could be heavy for her to handle herself, but visitors could lift it into her lap, and it could provide good conversational stimulus.

Omni reader Meg C asks, "Would The Sweet By and By by Todd Johnson be too 'on-the-nose' for your mother-in-law? This was my favorite book of the year (so far). A three-hankie book, but also warm and funny."

In the later stages of Alzheimer's, it helps if people are read to, and the interaction with the reader can help them stay engaged and stimulate memories. Next Christmas, you might look into Lydia Burdick's books for memory-challenged adults: The Sunshine on My Face, Wishing on a Star, and Happy New Year to You. You can also find activity books--like Through the Seasons, by the Johns Hopkins University Press--that could be good to keep in mind as things progress.

For yourself and others caring for family members with severe memory loss, I recommend Meg Federico's frank, moving, and hilarious Welcome to the Departure Lounge: Adventures in Mothering Mother (because when you're dealing with Alzheimer's, humor is an essential survival tool). You may also be intrigued by Anthony Doerr's Memory Wall, a collection that grew from writing about his grandmother's "descent into dementia" but became a series of fictional stories that (in Tom's words) "circle around the central pull of memory, both the struggle against memory's loss and the weight of memories that remain." 

Sue, we hope some wonderful books bring your mom-in-law and your family joy during the holidays and into the new year!

--Mari