Omnivoracious' Amazon Blog

New York Times:

• Sunday Book Review cover: James Parker on Under the Dome by Stephen King: "King has always produced at pulp speed. 'Nov. 22, 2007 - March 14, 2009' proclaims the final page of “Under the Dome”: that’s 1,100 pages in 480 days. We shouldn’t be too squeamish about the odd half-baked simile or lapse into B-movie dialogue, is my point. Writing flat-out keeps him close to his story, close to his source. It seems to magnetize his imagination: by the final third of this novel King is effortlessly drawing in T.S. Eliot and the Book of Revelation, the patient etherized upon a table and the Star Wormwood."
• Kakutani jumps the gun on The Original of Laura by Vladimir Nabokov: "In many respects, the release of a rudimentary version of his last novel does a disservice to a writer who deeply cherished precision and was practiced in the art of revision. Just as 'The Enchanter,' a precursor to 'Lolita' that was written in 1939 and published after his death, reads like a crude, often flat-footed version of its famous descendant, so these fragments of 'Laura' — so cryptic and sketchy — represent an incomplete, fetal rendering of whatever it was that Nabokov held within his imagination. Yet, at the same time, these bits and pieces of 'Laura' will beckon and beguile Nabokov fans, who will find many of the author’s perennial themes and obsessions percolating through the story of Philip, an 'enormously fat creature' with 'ridiculously small feet,' and his wildly promiscuous wife, Flora."
• Maslin on Open by Andre Agassi: "Given the anticlimactic nature of these revelations, what exactly keeps 'Open' going? Somebody on the memoir team has great gifts for heart-tugging drama.... Mr. Agassi does not easily forgive, and his book is larded with extremely backhanded compliments for those who have crossed him.... 'Open' devotes a lot of space to thumbnail descriptions of matches and opponents, a litany that would drone on without dynamic, writerly flourishes."
• Liesl Schillinger on The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver: "'The Lacuna' can be enjoyed sheerly for the music of its passages on nature, archaeology, food and friendship; or for its portraits of real and invented people; or for its harmonious choir of voices. But the fuller value of Kingsolver’s novel lies in its call to conscience and connection. She has mined Shepherd’s richly imagined history to create a tableau vivant of epochs and people that time has transformed almost past recognition. Yet it’s a tableau vivant whose story line resonates in the present day, albeit with different players."
• Garner on The Last Empress by Hannah Pakula: "Mme. Chiang led a long, vastly complicated life, one that is richly detailed in 'The Last Empress,' Hannah Pakula’s long, vastly complicated new biography. Ms. Pakula’s book is a yeoman work of historical research, with fact grinding against fact. It is also a monotonous piece of storytelling, one that has little pliancy or narrative push. Its 681 pages of text are at times as grueling as a forced march across the Mongolian steppe."
• Kate Christensen on Mennonite in a Little Black Dress by Rhoda Janzen: "Readers may suspect that an academic poet’s memoir about failed marriage, debilitating pain and a strict religious upbringing would be dry, self-­pitying and overly earnest. But 'Mennonite in a Little Black Dress' is snort-up-your-coffee funny, breezy yet profound, and poetic without trying. In fact, the whole book reads as if Janzen had dictated it to her best non-Menno friend, in her bathrobe, over cups of tea."

Washington Post:

• Charles on Kingsolver's The Lacuna: "Barbara Kingsolver's new novel, 'The Lacuna,' is the most mature and ambitious one she's written during her celebrated 20-year career, but it's also her most demanding.... The sweetness that leavened 'The Bean Trees' and 'Animal Dreams' has been burned away, and the lurid melodrama that enlivened 'The Poisonwood Bible' has been replaced by the cool realism of a narrator who feels permanently alienated from the world."
• Michael Mewshaw on Agassi's Open: "Presented to the public as clean family fun, an upscale entertainment for the country-club set, top-level tennis is actually played by the physical and emotional mutants of a misery machine that leaves them too ill-educated or psychically damaged to understand what has happened to their lives. Like most victims of abuse, they'd rather not talk about it. So it's both astonishing and a pleasure to report that Andre Agassi, who was castigated for an ad campaign saying 'Image is everything,' has produced an honest, substantive, insightful autobiography."

Los Angeles Times:

• Jedediah Berry on King's Under the Dome: "Born-again Big Jim never utters a curse word ... but he has the darkest of secrets to protect, as well as an insatiable hunger for power and control that needs only a nudge -- or in this case, the isolation afforded by an inexplicable force field -- to be kicked into high gear. When that happens, and when a resistance rises up in opposition to his power grab, the result is a vivid and harrowing tale, expertly constructed, intensely moral and often thrilling, related with the masterful ease we have come to expect from its author."
• Samantha Dunn on Lit by Mary Karr: "Karr could tell you what's on her grocery list, and its humor would make you bust a gut, its unexpected insights would make you think and her pitch-perfect command of our American vernacular might even take your breath away. The closest relative to the memoir form is poetry, because the subject of the story doesn't matter as much as the self-awareness and craft of the writer telling it. In this, the Guggenheim Fellow in poetry holds the position of grande dame memoirista."

The Globe and Mail:

• J.C. Sutcliffe on The Ice Lovers by Jean McNeil: "Like the ice of its subject, the writing in the novel hides great complexities with surface simplicity and clarity. McNeil has a sure hand and a deft touch with prose, and an ability to blend, for each character, profound inner experience with the awkwardnesses of social interactions. A disconcerting mix of hysteria and calm adaptation is another of McNeil's great achievements, bringing to life a near future devastated by disease and natural disaster, yet despite the fear and the panic, the characters – whether in London, the Falklands or the Antarctic – just keep on going about their daily business, since it turns out that there is no other option."
• Keith Garebian on All of Me by Anne Murray: "It is warm, straightforward and candid, and Posner has wisely dimmed his own stylistic light in order to let her voice come through. And it does, sometimes with low-key, self-deprecating humour and surprising honesty, and always with a lack of pretentiousness. Rather like her singing, which communicates both lyric and melody effortlessly, and with an alto range that spans two and a half octaves."

The Guardian:

• Geoff Dyer on Agassi's Open: "The problem with JR, Andre's book coach, is that he makes Writing Easy. His hand is too obviously dab. It's not that Open reads as if it's been written with a view to a lucrative serial deal (normal enough); it reads as if it's already a serialisation of itself with potential headlines (Agassi took crystal meth!) and pull quotes ("I always hated tennis") thrown in. Perhaps this is why, strangely, it rings least true at moments of maximum declared honesty.... Here is the not entirely unexpected irony of Open. For all the lurid revelations, despite the overarching story of personal growth and the struggle for self-awareness, the most enthralling parts of the book are all about… tennis."
• Christopher Tayler on Blood's a Rover by James Ellroy: "In its serious aspects, then, Blood's a Rover can be mildly silly in comparison with the tightly controlled American Tabloid. But the serious aspects are only intermittently what's serious about Ellroy's achievement in these books. Slyly knowing about the fantasies he trades in, funny when you least expect it, and a master of private languages, he isn't in any way a conventional historical novelist. At his best – when the strong internal logic of his books takes over the history he's exploiting – he gives you the sense of being plugged directly into an entire culture's unsavoury dream life, its boasts and self-reproaches and arguments with itself."

The New Yorker:

• Elizabeth Kolbert on SuperFreakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner: "But what’s most troubling about 'SuperFreakonomics' isn’t the authors’ many blunders; it’s the whole spirit of the enterprise. Though climate change is a grave problem, Levitt and Dubner treat it mainly as an opportunity to show how clever they are. Leaving aside the question of whether geoengineering, as it is known in scientific circles, is even possible—have you ever tried sending an eighteen-mile-long hose into the stratosphere?—their analysis is terrifyingly cavalier."

The Atlantic:

• Sandra Tsing Loh on Bad Mother by Ayelet Waldman: "I am bad not in that fluttery, anxious, 21st-century way educated middle-class mothers consider themselves 'failures' because they snap when they are tired, because they occasionally feed their kids McNuggets, because as they journal they soulfully question whether they’re mindfully attaining a proper daily work/life balance. No, I am bad because after a domestic partnership of 20 years, when my kids were still elementary-school-age, I fell in love, had an affair, admitted it, and quite deservedly got tossed out of the house on my ass. Currently between homes (my earthly belongings reside in a 10-by-10-foot windowless U-Haul storage unit whilst I alternately house-sit, pool-sit, and cat-sit), I furtively park at the curb of my former home for an extra few minutes after dropping my kids off and, with my laptop, I steal wireless. Approaching 50, I am living a life that is less sunlit Waldman/Chabon than tattered Charles Bukowski."
• Hitch on Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic by Michael Scammell: "I cannot recall a book title that was less well-shaped to its subject. Far from being a 'skeptic,' Arthur Koestler was a man not merely convinced but actively enthused by practically any intellectual or political or mental scheme that came his way. When he was in the throes of an allegiance, he positively abhorred doubt, which he sometimes called 'bellyaching.' If he was ever dubious about anything, one could say in his defense, it was at least about himself."

In late September, the Canadian contingent of the Amazon Books team traveled (or travelled, as they say north of the border) to Toronto to help celebrate the five fantastic finalists of the 38th Annual Amazon.ca First Novel Award, and to honor(/honour) the winner.

Let me pause here to acknowledge that you may be wondering how it could have been the 38th Annual Amazon.ca First Novel Award. There isn't room in this post to explain (gotta keep it tight), so I'll just say it's an award with an illustrious history and impressive previous winners (like Michael Ondaatje, Rohinton Mistry, and--most recently--the amazing Gil Adamson), and we feel very honoured to have been involved since we first opened our virtual Canadian bookstore. You can find out more here--and keep an eye out for the 39th Annual winner, who will be announced in April of 2010.

I wasn't a judge for this award, but I was thrilled when I heard their unanimously enthusiastic verdict: Joan Thomas for Reading by Lightning, which has the markings of a real classic (and not just a classic of CanLit). I felt real affection for her vibrant heroine, Lily Piper, born on the dust-covered Prairie in the first quarter of the 20th century to a devout family who thought she might be flirting with the Devil. Her sudden departure/escape for England as a young woman, the onset of World War II, her mad love for her kooky, hot, brilliant adopted (adopted, so it's not weird!) cousin George, her bouts of wild grief, and the strange dynamic with her mom that only gets stranger--it all feels true to the time and Lil's character, but contemporary and totally absorbing. Plus, Thomas's writing is often crystaline.

I notice the novel's official description calls it a bildungsroman, which seems like a pretentious word for such an everygirl story--but come to think of it, Lily isn't really an everygirl. She's imaginative and amazing, and she had a fascinating life. Though I finished this book almost 3 months ago, I can pull myself back to the final scene at will, and though I don't remember the exact line, the memory still does something warm and interesting in my chest. (I'm a very sensory reader--I have to feel a book somewhere in my torso to really like it.)

At this point, you might like to get one for yourself from Amazon.ca or Amazon.com Books, or for your Kindle. Excellent idea. But first, read on--because I have this special bonus Q&A!

Amazon.com/.ca: Lily Piper is one of the most fully alive heroines I've ever encountered. Was she your own invention, or were you inspired by someone?

Joan Thomas: I had the spine of a true story to start with. When my aunt was 16, her father took her out of school and sent her to England to look after his mother. All on her own, she took the train two thousand miles to Montreal and boarded a ship, and went to live with people she had never met. I was amazed when I heard about this.

Yet my aunt never talked about her excellent England adventure. None of my older relatives talk much about the past—they’re actually a little suspicious of people who dramatize their experiences or dwell on their feelings! So I had to make sense of this story with my imagination. I sent Lily to a different part of England than my aunt had visited, and I invented her experiences there. Lily is the result of my desire to create a character I could understand and relate to, one who experienced adolescence with the intensity that I experienced it. I think of her as a contemporary character living in the past. As a first-time novelist, I had no idea whether I could pull this off, but by the end Lily was so real to me that the final chapter pretty much wrote itself.

Amazon.com/.ca: The story of the Isaac Barr's ill-fated Canadian prairie colony is a fascinating historical component of the story. Did your family have a personal connection, or was this just a story that captured your imagination?

Joan Thomas: I never knew my grandfather, but I was told growing up that he had come from England with the Barr Colonists, so I read what I could find about that movement. I went to the archives and poured over the passenger lists, where the names of everyone arriving in Canada by ship in any year are written in ink in someone’s crabbed handwriting. I never found my grandfather’s name. But by then I was hooked by the story of the Barr Colonists, the megalomaniac Isaac Barr and the naïve immigrants who were so sure their English superiority would carry them through.

Amazon.com/.ca: There's irony in how the aspiring paleontologist George "tried, finally, to evolve, to fit into a different world, but couldn't do it fast enough," while Lily, raised in an evangelical Christian community with a mother who's powerfully fearful of change (especially changes in Lily's body), undergoes dramatic personal transformation before she finally feels at home in her world. Your next novel, Curiosity, due out next spring, also has evolution at its center: an intact skeletal fossil of a prehistoric dolphin-like creature, the first discovery of its kind, is unearthed by a 12-year-old cabinet-maker's daughter, who goes on to become a paleontologist well before Darwin publishes The Origin of Species.

What makes the scientific story of evolution such a potent metaphor for exploring the lives of your characters, as well as the evolving relationship between science and our concept of ourselves?

Joan Thomas: I never studied science but I’m intrigued by fossils, those millions-year-old bits of the past. My decision to send George to Dorset for field school turned out to be a fateful one (for me—if not for George!). It was while I was researching the Dorset coast for Reading by Lightning that I discovered Mary Anning, the amazing young woman you mention, who found huge fossil remains at Lyme Regis back when no one had any sense of what these creatures were. I've since made three research trips to Lyme Regis, and have had a fantastic time walking that coast and writing a novel about Mary Anning and her sidekick, the geologist Henry de la Beche.

So evolution (in a literal sense) is more at the centre of Curiosity than it is of Reading by Lightning. When Mary Anning found the first ichthyosaurus in 1811, the townspeople thought she’d dug up a dragon, and the scientists coming down from Oxford thought it was the bones of a creature drowned in Noah’s flood. Mary Anning’s fossil finds were a huge challenge to their beliefs about nature and humanity’s place in it. Ideas of extinction and an old earth, concepts so important to evolution, were in the air.

Evolution is on my mind at the moment because of the crisis we face on the planet. Whether we can transform fast enough to avoid full blown ecological disaster—I see this as the major question of our age. As a novelist you approach such big ideas with caution. You’re writing stories, not political discourse. With Curiosity, I was really happy to have stumbled upon a story that, although it’s set in the early 19th century, raises ideas that are so timely.

As you suggest, I did see evolution as a metaphor for how the characters in both books develop. Fiction loves those moments when a character sees that the way she thought about herself and her world is faulty. As the title of Reading by Lightning implies, this awareness may come the way a lightning bolt illuminates the landscape in a storm, although the process of actually transforming the way you act in the world is often slower and subtler, as it was with Lily. As for George, his changes hurt me as I was writing them, because I really like George. He was so open and in love with the world, and he becomes less optimistic, more cynical. It was an evolution forced by brutal circumstances, and maybe it’s just as well that we don’t see what the war would have made of him in the end.

Recommended for fans of The Forgotten Garden, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, and Helen Humphreys.

History in the cards: James McManus charts America's rise to wealth and power by looking at our most practiced poker players in an interview with NPR about Cowboys Full: The Story of Poker (one of our Best Books of the Month).

Temps perdu, indeed: Now, if someone could just take Middlemarch down next, I'd be eternally grateful.

If you've noticed there are no empty seats in your coffee shop lately... It may be a byproduct of NaNoWriMo, or of the just-announced (and seemingly much more doable) Fall 2009 Story Contest,  sponsored by Narrative Magazine. Deadline for submissions--"works with a strong narrative drive, with characters we can respond to as human beings, and with effects of language, situation, and insight that are intense and total"--is November 30. [via The Millions]

Comic Strip Superstar, we know who you are: Congratulations to Dana Simpson of Kent, Washington, Grand Prize winner of the inaugural Comic Strip Superstar contest for her strip entitled "Girl." Dana's prizes include a publishing contract with Andrews McMeel Publishing, a development contract with Universal Uclick and syndication on Gocomics.

Selling books is good for the soul: Today we find both the audiobook and hardcover of bestselling author and healer Dr. Sha's Divine Soul Mind Body Healing and Transmission System leading our Movers & Shakers list. --Anne

NYT: Best Illustrated Children’s Books of 2009. Every year, the New York Times pulls together a list of their ten favorite illustrated kids' books. Adam Gopnik (King in the Window) was one of this year's judges, and the NYT site has a great slideshow of the winners.

Riordan goes to Egypt. The man behind the Percy Jackson and the Olympians phenomenon has announced his next series, due in May 2010: The Kane Chronicles, based on Egyptian mythology, and revolving around (according to Cynopsis Kids) "what happens when a magical accident unleashes the Egyptian gods on the modern world, and siblings Carter and Sadie Kane discover that they are descendants of the greatest Egyptian magicians and thus the only ones who can put things right." Read more details at Publishers Weekly.

Publishers Weekly: Best of 2009. Speaking of PW, they just released their list of Best Children's Books of 2009, 30 titles in all, "from accounts of civil rights heroes, to harrowing (and hopeful) stories about contemporary teenagers, to picture books that perfectly capture friendship, curiosity, or flights of fancy."

Amazon: Best of 2009. Not to miss out on the fun, we also released our best kids' books of the year, as part of our big ol', not-to-be-missed Best of 2009 store. You'll find Top 10 Middle Readers as well as Top 10 Picture Books. (And as Heidi noted in YA Wednesday, you'll also find the Top 10 Books: Teens.)

"Running Wild with Michael Morpurgo." School Library Journal has a new interview with former Children's Laureate Michael Morpurgo, in which he talks about his upcoming book Running Wild. He also talks about getting kids involved in reading: "If boys don't want to read it's notoriously difficult to make them. The best way to get them interested in books and stories is for parents to read to them and share stories with them at every opportunity and try lots of different genres—classic adventure stories, fantasy, and funny stories. Hopefully, they will soon find something that appeals to them and that they will want to read themselves."

The Horn Book's best new holiday books. The Horn Book has pulled together a helpful list of their top picks for new holiday books, including What’s Coming for Christmas?, A Piñata in a Pine Tree: A Latino Twelve Days of Christmas, and The Gingerbread Pirates. ("On Christmas Eve, a pirate captain gingerbread man (with a toothpick for a peg leg) refuses to accept his crew’s fate on the plate of the season’s most notorious cookie eater, Santa....")

"How to Draw a Bear." A fun (and educational!) video from the illustrator behind The Terrible Plop:

(found via Fuse #8) --Paul

This year was an invigorating one for Comics & Graphic Novels, marked, notably, by the debut of a New York Times Bestseller list for the medium. All of a sudden, comics went legit, extending beyond True Believers and into mainstream literary circles. Our editors' picks for 2009's Best of Comics and Graphic Novels showcase the wide spectrum of critical darlings and sleeper favorites that made this year a rewarding one for comics readers.

Kicking off our list is David Small's graphic memoir, Stitches, which recently caught a few eyes thanks to a National Book Award nomination. Amazon editor Anne Bartholomew, however, was an early fan and picked it as her Best of the Month selection for September. Stitches marks the first time an original graphic novel has ever cracked the Top 10 of Amazon's Best Books of the Year.

The medium, however, received no greater love letters than our No. #2 and #3 picks: Seth's George Sprott:(1894-1975) and David Mazzucchelli's Asterios Polyp. Utilizing intricate and dizzying panel layouts as well as painstaking design--not to mention stories filled with heartbreak and challenging concepts, these are the graphic novelist's graphic novels.

This isn't to say that comics forgot where they came from, and 2009 had its share of superhero stories, including Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's end to their multiple Eisner-award winning run on All Star Superman. Together, they proved a Man of Steel can go home again.

But back on Earth, R. Crumb, underground comix extraordinaire, chose an auspicious subject for what many assumed would be his trademark ire: The Book of Genesis. What the project blossomed into, however, is a fairly straight-faced approach for Crumb, although it's told through his signature pencils. The Book of Genesis never looked so indie, yet it stays true to The Good Book's dense and complex storytelling. 

But our bookshelf runneth over. The Best of 2009 Store contains more graphic novels that made this a banner year for the medium, plus plenty of other top picks to explore.

Editors' Top Ten Picks in Comics & Graphic Novels

1. Stitches: A Memoir
2. George Sprott:(1894-1975)
3. Asterios Polyp
4. All Star Superman, Vol. 2
5. The Umbrella Academy: Dallas
6. Locas II: Maggie, Hopey, & Ray
7. The Photographer: Into War-torn Afghanistan with Doctors Without Borders
8. A Drifting Life
9. The Book of Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb
10. Masterpiece Comics

Customer Favorites in Comics & Graphic Novels

1. Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Last Straw
2. Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dog Days
3. The Book of Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb
4. Mercy Thompson: Homecoming
5. Star Trek: Countdown
6. Time of Your Life (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 8, Vol. 4)
7. Asterios Polyp
8. Batman: R.I.P.
9. Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth
10. The Walking Dead, Vol. 9: Here We Remain

(found via abebooks)

and Jacob doll

which you can carry around in your Edward backpack, so he's always watching.

And if you've had just about enough of Twilight hype, you can find refuge in Nightlight, the Harvard Lampoon's spoofy version of book 1:

Pale and klutzy, Belle arrives in Switchblade, Oregon looking for adventure, or at least an undead classmate. She soon discovers Edwart, a super-hot computer nerd with zero interest in girls. After witnessing a number of strange events–Edwart leaves his tater tots untouched at lunch! Edwart saves her from a flying snowball!–Belle has a dramatic revelation: Edwart is a vampire. But how can she convince Edwart to bite her and transform her into his eternal bride, especially when he seems to find girls so repulsive?

Complete with romance, danger, insufficient parental guardianship, creepy stalker-like behavior, and a vampire prom, Nightlight is the uproarious tale of a vampire-obsessed girl, looking for love in all the wrong places.

/Film reports that Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck (Half Nelson) have cast the film version of Ned Vizzini's It's Kind of a Funny Story.

(Thanks, KidsLit for the news on both these films!)

School Library Journal honors Esther Hautzig, author of Endless Steppe, who died this week at 79.

At Bookslut Kati Nolfi calls Going Bovine a departure for Libba Bray, "a contemporary dark comedy with supernatural elements ... no ringlet-haired girls and Victorian bodices are on the cover of this book."

Justine Larbalestier is giving young would-be writers tips on how to get through this year's NaNoWriMo: "The world will not end if you don’t meet your daily word count. Nor will it end if you don’t have 50,000 words at the end of November." So is Maureen Johnson (Day 3: Points of view).

Meg Cabot plugs the new Glee Cast Album. She's also doing NaNoWriMo.

This week, the Amazon editors posted their Best of 2009 top 10 picks for teens, and the top 10 customer picks. What book do they have in common? (No surprise!) Catching Fire.

Happy reading!--Heidi

I mentioned the death of Claude Levi-Strauss in the Daily News this morning, and I'd love to be able to add a lot more to the story, but mainly I'll just link to some people who know him better than I. The Literary Saloon points to a few of the substantial obituaries that have already appeared, e.g. the LA Times, the Telegraph, and the WSJ. And Rob(ert) Mackey at the NYT's The Lede (who happens to be a great old friend who I'm still beholden to for, among other things, turning me on to Flann O'Brien), links to Edward Rothstein's NYT obit (which I think is the best of all these, if you're reading just one), as well as a number of French-language tributes and video clips. Here's a short snippet from Rothstein's piece:

“French society, and especially Parisian, is gluttonous,” Mr. Lévi-Strauss responded. “Every five years or so, it needs to stuff something new in its mouth. And so five years ago it was structuralism, and now it is something else. I practically don’t dare use the word ‘structuralist’ anymore, since it has been so badly deformed. I am certainly not the father of structuralism.”

But Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s version of structuralism may end up surviving poststructuralism, just as he survived most of its proponents. His monumental work “Mythologiques” may even ensure his legacy, as a creator of mythologies if not their explicator.

And here, for what it's worth, is my experience of C. L-S. Somehow I never took that anthropology course where you hear about his ideas and maybe even read his books, and in six years of grad school I managed to pretty much ignore the whole structuralism/post-structuralism debate (or, as it was assumed, progression) that his name was tied to. But after all that was done, I finally ended up with a copy of Tristes Tropiques and opened it up and was immediately gripped by a brilliantly barbed and detailed storytelling mind that had nothing to do with what I had assumed the great theorist Claude Levi-Strauss was like. I read the first 10 or 20 pages standing up right wherever I was. I still haven't gone further (it's an enormous book, and perhaps I've been afraid to break the spell of that great opening), but I've read those opening pages many times since. Whatever lasting theoretical contributions he may or may or may not have contributed, I do know one thing: that guy could write. Rob has already quoted the justly famous opening paragraph, which begins, "I hate traveling and explorers," and which, really, can hold its own with the opening of Moby-Dick and all the rest of them. So I'll quote instead a passage from the second page, which is nearly the opening's equal. Levi-Strauss has just discussed, with contempt, the recent vogue for traveler's illustrated lectures, but says it was not always so:

Twenty years ago or so, people travelled very little and it was not halls like the Salle Pleyel, filled to capacity five or six days running, which extended a welcome to tellers of tales. The only place in Paris which catered for this kind of thing was a small, gloomy, icy, and dilapidated amphitheatre in an ancient building at the far end of the Jardin des Plantes. There, the Societe des Amis du Museum held--and perhaps still holds--weekly lectures on the natural sciences.

The projector, which was fitted with inadequate bulbs, threw faint images on to an over-large screen, and the lecturer, however closely he peered, could hardly discern their outlines,  while for the public they were scarcely distinguishable from the damp stains on the walls. A quarter of an hour after the advertised starting-time, the lecturer would still be desperately wondering if there would be any audience, apart from the regular attenders scattered here and there among the tiered rows. Just when he was about to abandon hope, the lecture-room would fill up to half-capacity with children accompanied by their mothers or nursemaids, some eager for a free change of scene, others weary of the dust and noise outside. To this mixture of moth-eaten ghosts and restless infants the lecturer was privileged--as the supreme reward for so much effort, care and hard work--to reveal his precious store of memories, which were permanently affected by the chill of the occasion, and which, as he spoke in the semi-darkness, he felt slipping away from him and falling one by one like pebbles to the bottom of a well.

--Tom

Isn't the world ending in 2012?: On the day after an off-year election day, Marc Ambinder notes that the top three GOP frontrunners for 2012 all have books (and big book tours) on the way in the next six months: Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, and Mitt Romney.

Speaking for all PWBJHTPMMATOK?s: At the NYT, novelist/ironist Colson Whitehead celebrates the one-year anniversary of Obama's election (and the apparent end of all racism forever) by offering to be the first secretary of postracial affairs: "Some changes will be minor. In television, 'Diff’rent Strokes' and 'What’s Happening!!' will now be known as 'Different Strokes' and 'What Is Happening?'"

You think our Top 100 is long...: The longlist for the 2010 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award was announced yesterday. The award is notable both for offering the "world’s most valuable annual literary prize for a single work of fiction published in English" (€100,000), and for having the longest longlist imaginable (156 titles, based on nominations from libraries worldwide). 2008 Booker winner The White Tiger received the most library nominations.

Trois livres puissantes: The big literary prize week in France continues, following the awarding of the Prix Goncourt to Marie NDiaye's Trois femmes puissantes, with the Prix Médicis prizes given to two North American writers: Haitian-Canadian Dany Laférriere for L'énigme du retour (available on Amazon.ca) and American Dave Eggers for the translation of What Is the What. (Interested Francophones can check out Amazon.fr's literary prizes page for more.)

Moving and shaking: The death at age 100 of anthropology and cultural theory titan Claude Lévi-Strauss (more on that later) sends his books Tristes Tropiques and The Savage Mind to the top of our Movers & Shakers list this morning.

Cherie Priest is a rising star of smart, textured cross-genre fantasy whose latest novel, Boneshaker may be her best yet. She'll be appearing with Cat Rambo and me at the University Bookstore in Seattle tomorrow night at 7pm., as I kick off the northwest leg of my book tour. Here Priest explains why it was necessary to, erm, do bad things to Seattle. -- Jeff VanderMeer

“Why I destroyed Seattle for the sake of Steampunk”
Cherie Priest

As you may be aware, Amazon.com is headquartered in Seattle, Washington. As you are somewhat less likely to be aware, I kind of, sort of, completely demolished this city in my most recent novel, Boneshaker. So at Jeff VanderMeer’s suggestion (and invitation), I thought I’d take a moment and offer some heartfelt apologies and explanations for myself, here on one of Amazon’s exceptional blogs.

You see, it wasn’t personal; it was only convenient. By my tenth or twelfth time on the Underground Tour, I was getting some nasty ideas about the interesting ways this city could host a zombie horde and some very tall tales for my book.  I wanted a wild place with wacky local history, and some persistently gloomy weather, and maybe a rough-and-tumble nineteenth century population from which to draw. And with a checklist like that, where else could I begin?

So Seattleites, please take this as a public and formal apology for my warping of your origin story and the fictional obliteration of your fine city. 

Please understand, I had to move the Klondike gold rush up by a few decades—otherwise, how could I get tens of thousands of residents to torment by the 1860s?  Likewise, it was absolutely necessary for an “accident” involving mining equipment to tear open a vein of yellow-tinged gas that turns people into zombies. 

The subsequent wall that went up around the infected quarters did a very fine job of protecting your surviving population in the “Outskirts.” Though yes, this same wall also transformed your downtown blocks into a veritable dungeon-crawl of poor visibility, acid rain, chaotic-neutral crows, and shambling undead.  It’s a good thing most of your residents had the good sense to stay the hell out of the walled up nightmare town.

Of course...the most interesting and clever—and sometimes the cruelest and most unsavory—of survivors always find a way; and in my version of events, Seattle’s stragglers either stayed inside and let the walls go up around them, or went back to start a new life right in the thick of it.

All it took to survive was a gas mask, some heavy-duty air filters, and a whole lot of ammunition.

Well, come to think of it, there was a criminal overlord, Dr. Minnericht. You had to keep him happy if you wanted to live longer than a flea on a dog’s behind. And you’d also find pirates who came and went, docking their dirigibles at the Smith Tower as they conducted their illicit business deals under cloak of Blight gas and night.  Never mind the food and water shortages, the vicious politicking, and the bizarre weapons created by a mad scientist.

Really, I suppose, I made a mess of things.

But I was confident that even in a bizarre alternate-history version of the 19th century, your hardy pioneer founders would be up to the challenge. And I think I was right! In fact, I borrowed a few of those real life settlers and their contemporaries for this novel, including a few crooks, a few saints, and Chief Seattle’s daughter—the Duwamish princess Angeline.

So again, I offer you my sincerest regrets that I treated your city so roughly. But if you pick up a copy of Boneshaker and give it a read, I hope you’ll take some pride in the pirate-fighting, zombie-killing, kid-rescuing, dirigible-piloting, one-hundred-percent weapons-grade badasses your city has inspired. And maybe then you’ll forget (or at least forgive) all the horrible things I’ve done to my new home town.

New York Times:

• Sunday Book Review cover: Adam Kirsch on Ayn Rand and the World She Made by Anne C. Heller: "Yet while Rand took to wearing a dollar-sign pin to advertise her love of capitalism, Heller makes clear that the author had no real affection for dollars themselves. Giving up her royalties to preserve her vision is something that no genuine capitalist, and few popular novelists, would have done. It is the act of an intellectual, of someone who believes that ideas matter more than lucre. In fact, as Heller shows, Rand had no more reverence for the actual businessmen she met than most intellectuals do. The problem was that, according to her own theories, the executives were supposed to be as creative and admirable as any artist or thinker."
• Alan Furst on Enemies of the People by Kati Marton: "'Enemies of the People,' Kati Marton’s seventh book, [is] a powerful and absolutely absorbing narrative of her parents’ journey — a series of escapes, from Hitler, from Stalin, eventually to America.... [S]ome years after the collapse of the Soviet empire in 1989, when the records of secret police operations in Hungary became available, Marton knew she had to read the file (one of the biggest, it turned out) on herself and her family. It was, after years of concern for the victims of totalitarian states, her turn. And what came next, 'Enemies of the People,' has all the magnetism and, yes, the excitement, of the very best spy fiction. But would that it were fiction."
• Dave Eggers on Look at the Birdie by Kurt Vonnegut: "In the era of the 'slicks' — weekly and monthly magazines that would pay decently for fiction — a writer had to have a feel for what would sell. The 14 stories in 'Look at the Birdie,' none of them afraid to entertain, dabble in whodunnitry, science fiction and commanding fables of good versus evil. Why these stories went unpublished is hard to answer. They’re polished, they’re relentlessly fun to read, and every last one of them comes to a neat and satisfying end. For transmittal of moral instruction, they are incredibly efficient delivery devices."
• Maria Russo on The Hidden by Tobias Hill: "'The Hidden' is Hill’s fourth novel — in addition to a story collection and three volumes of poetry — and like his previous novels, it’s an unusual, exhilarating hybrid of high-stakes, propulsive narrative; erudite yet breezy summations of specialized historical data; and strikingly evocative language. He excels at the rendering of place, often freezing a scene to make it a charged tableau of wonder and menace."
• Tony Horwitz on The Big Burn by Timothy Egan: "Egan weaves his account of the Big Burn with the creation story of the United States Forest Service. This might seem a dull, bureaucratic yarn, but Egan tells it as the stirring tale of a very odd couple: the irrepressible Teddy Roosevelt, who 'burned 2,000 calories before noon and drank his coffee with seven lumps of sugar,' and his chief forester, Gifford Pinchot, an ascetic loner who sometimes slept on a wooden pillow and for 20 years mystically clung to his deceased fiancée."

Washington Post:

• Charles on Last Night in Twisted River by John Irving: "Everything that makes John Irving such a wonderful writer is on display in the opening section of his 12th novel, 'Last Night in Twisted River.' And everything that makes him such a maddening one is evident in the 450 rambling pages that follow. It's like signing on for a week's vacation after a great first date only to discover that now you're trapped in a small hotel room. For. Seven. Long. Days."
• Yardley on The Man in the Wooden Hat by Jane Gardam: "As to Gardam's pair of novels, what the old song says about love and marriage must be said about them: You can't have one without the other. They are a set, his and hers. To my taste, they are absolutely wonderful, and I would find it impossible to choose one over the other. While 'Old Filth' is principally about the man, his dark boyhood at the mercy of a distant, unfeeling father, with the wife a rather shadowy character in the background, 'The Man in the Wooden Hat' fills in her side of the story, in the process revealing itself to be an astute, subtle depiction of marriage, with all its shared experiences and separate secrets."

Los Angeles Times:

• Richard Rayner on The Humbling by Philip Roth: "On the one hand, Roth's 30th book deals with themes that his work, especially his recent work, has made familiar. On the other, it's direct and urgent, a taut and controlled fever-dream that demands to be experienced at a single sitting. 'The Humbling' is divided into three chapters, three acts almost, and near the end the name of Chekhov is invoked, reminding us that a gun that's been shown at the beginning of the tale is likely to go off by the end. And the gun duly does, leaving the reader with feelings of terror and exhilaration in equal measure."
• Denise Hamilton on The Gates by John Connolly: "My 13-year old called it 'a cross between Eoin Colfer and Terry Pratchett,' and I'm stealing his description because he got it exactly right.... There has long been a cornucopia of Halloween-themed picture books for young children. With its endearing protagonist, rollicking plot, and dollops of weird but mostly true science, 'The Gates' has a shot at becoming a middle-school Halloween classic."
• Susan Salter Reynolds on Baddies by David Stromberg: "David Stromberg has created a cozy little planet of alter egos and parallel lives, urban marginals with vaguely Eastern European names. The drawings are a cross between George Grosz and Gahan Wilson, with a touch of 'Beavis & Butt-Head.' The humor is Roz Chast; dry commentary on inside-out characters. Fantastic."

The Globe and Mail:

• William Kowalski on Irving's Last Night at Twisted River: "In Last Night in Twisted River, Irving's 12th novel, his style is anything but cute. Throughout the 1970s and '80s, the old Irving played with language the way a kitten plays with yarn, but the 21st-century Irving uses it to weave a serious yet colourful tapestry of love, guilty consciences, broken hearts and triumphant survival. The result is a flawed but mature work by one of our most accomplished writers."
• Stephen Smith on Gretzky's Tears by Stephen Brunt: "As there was in the excellent Searching for Bobby Orr, there's plenty more here to dispirit even the most heavily Cooperall'd true north patriot love of the game. Gretzky's Tears is as penetrating a book, and as sure in its navigation of hockey's cultural currents, even if it isn't so much a biography as an annotated receipt of sale. It's a book about assets and bottom lines, market forces and bank frauds, wheelers and dealers, a story played out in Ford dealerships and the offices of public relations executives rather than Gretzky's familiar on-ice suite, behind the net, waiting for Jari Kurri to swoop into the slot."

The Guardian:

• Robert Irwin on The Arabs: A History by Eugene Rogan: "Today, Arab fear of the west and resentment at the humiliating and socially damaging effects of westernisation fuels Islamism and the spread of terrorism. How have we come to this pass? Rogan answers this question by tracing the history of Arab hopes and ultimate disappointments from the early 16th century, when the Ottomans conquered most of the Arab world, to the present day.... Rogan was a student of Albert Hourani, the author of A History of the Arab Peoples, an eloquent and predominantly upbeat account of Arab achievements over the centuries. Rogan's version, hard-nosed and sadder, is no less eloquent, and compulsively readable."
• Jerome Boyd Maunsell on Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives by Brian Dillon: "Boiling biographical subjects down to their symptoms, and life down to health, is potentially a reductive and morbid task. What Dillon has written, though, is a brilliant series of portraits that recalls the original spirit of the literary essay. He never belittles his subjects or their work, while drawing out the pathos and humour of their hypersensitivities."

The New Yorker:

• Elizabeth Kolbert on Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer: "'Eating Animals' closes with a turkey-less Thanksgiving. As a holiday, it doesn’t sound like a lot of fun. But this is Foer’s point. We are, he suggests, defined not just by what we do; we are defined by what we are willing to do without. Vegetarianism requires the renunciation of real and irreplaceable pleasures. To Foer’s credit, he is not embarrassed to ask this of us."
• Jill Lepore on American Homicide by Randolph Roth: "As a discussion of the available data, 'American Homicide' is rich, fascinating, and unrivalled. As an explanation, though, it gets dubious. Roth’s work involves three steps: first, he uses his database to count murders (he’s primarily interested in homicides among unrelated adults); then, using surviving censuses to count people, he calculates the homicide rate; finally, he attempts to explain what factors correlate with that rate, across four centuries. It’s the last step that’s the most wobbly."

New York Review of Books:

• Pico Iyer on The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk: "In the many pages describing how Kemal collects 4,213 of Füsun's cigarette butts, visits her family's home for supper over 2,864 days, and recalls their early afternoons together, Pamuk unfolds a classic, spacious love story a little like a Nabokovian version of Love in the Time of Cholera (other books are so much a part of his sensibility that one finds oneself reaching for such comparisons). But for most readers, I suspect, what will bring the long, slow romance to life is the much more particular love story hidden within it, of the author's real passion, for Istanbul. The engaging and somewhat awkward Kemal and his beloved, out of 'old Persian miniatures,' sometimes feel like archetypes; the uncertain, semi-cosmopolitan Istanbul of Pamuk's upbringing is so specific, it comes to seem universal."
• Jonathan Raban on Dorothea Lange by Linda Gordon and Daring to Look by Ann Whiston Spirn: "Linda Gordon's substantial, cradle-to-grave biography of Lange is usefully complemented by Anne Whiston Spirn's careful documentation of one year—1939—in Lange's working life. Both books have their flaws, but between them they add up to a satisfyingly binocular portrait of the photographer as she traveled the ambiguous and shifting frontier between art, journalism, social science, and propaganda. Lange's work is much harder to place than that of, say, Walker Evans, and so is her personality. If neither Gordon nor Spirn quite succeeds in bringing her to life on the page, they do convey her complex and mercurial elusiveness."