The Reading Life

The "Oink" Heard 'Round the World: food52's Tournament of Cookbooks came to a close last night as Francis Mallmann and Peter Kaminksy's Seven Fires toppled Christopher Hirsheimer and Melissa Hamilton's bracket buster, Canal House Cooking, to take home the coveted Piglet trophy.

No Kindle Required: Now you can read Kindle books on your computer with Kindle for PC.

Food List Fever: Publishers Weekly reveals their list of the Best Food Books of 2009.

Show Biz Dish: The LA Times' Jacket Copy has some video of Paul Shaffer holding court at the Beverly Hills Four Seasons talking about his memoir, We'll Be Here for the Rest of Our Lives.

Moving and Shaking: A recent Today Show appearance keeps Food Network's Ellie Krieger's So Easy: Luscious, Healthy Recipes for Every Meal of the Week in our Movers & Shakers.

--BTP

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

The Case for AC/DC:  Jacket Copy reviews Why AC/DC Matters, a "trim but meaty" book from rock writer Anthony Bozza which explores the Australian band's staying power.

Bozza finds the answer to AC/DC's popularity in the band being true to themselves, which explains both their static sound and the fact that this book is mostly an inwardly focused band biography.

Frequent Flier: Social media guru Gary Vaynerchuk has launched a mini-book tour today that will take him to six airport bookstores in two days. For those flying the friendly skies this week, Gary will be signing at LGA, ORD, DFW, DEN, LAX, and EWR.

Riordan Returns:  Young readers rejoice - author Rick Riordan has announced the launch of his new series this morning.

On May 4, 2010, the eagerly-awaited new series from Disney Book Group`s Disney-Hyperion imprint launches with The Kane Chronicles, Book One: The Red Pyramid and a simultaneously released audio edition. When a magical accident unleashes the Egyptian gods on the modern world, siblings Carter and Sadie Kane discover that they are the only ones who can put things right. As descendants of the greatest Egyptian magicians, they must find a way to defeat the evil god Set before he can destroy them.

What a Year:  We've just announced our Best of 2009 lists today, led by Colum McCann's stunning novel, Let the Great World Spin.

Moving and Shaking:  Thanks to some love from the Hungry Girl Monday Newsletter, Nutrition at Your Fingertips is currently #1 on our Movers & Shakers list this AM.

Love is a litany of things to a multitude of people*, but when you come right down to it, love is a story, and Love Is a Mix Tape is one of the best books I've read about love as it happens. Not as you want it to happen, not as you wish it could have been, but incontrovertibly as it is. This is not a hard, lonely memoir about a man who lost his wife. It is a searching, and at times searingly funny, story of Rob Sheffield and his wife, Renée, who gave each other just what they needed. Music, of course, accounts for much of what brought them together, and there are wonderful stories of their early years, living hand-to-mouth as students and fledgling writers, taking road trips, seeing shows, making tapes. The mix tapes that kick off every chapter are total time-capsule candy for anyone who grew up with, say, Duran Duran and U2 and grew into the indie-era of Pavement and Superchunk and others (in fact, many others: the mixes are delightfully mixy and eclectic, criss-crossing time and genre: you'll quickly understand why he listens to them over and over). And keep in mind you're in the hands of a die-hard fan here: there's no shortage of bits on songs and bands that only a writer for Rolling Stone could do justice:

I've always dreamed of a new wave girl to stand up front and be shameless and lippy, to take the heat, teach me her tricks, teach me to brave like her. I needed someone with a quicker wit than mine. The new wave girl was brazen and scarlet. She would take me under her wing and teach me to join the human race, the way Bananarama did with their "Shy Boy." She would pick me out and shake me up and turn me around, turn me into someone new.

This may be one of the best--and, the more that I look at, most bittersweet--passages to convey what Renée meant to him, how she changed his life, and how music was their conduit to each other and their emblem. It wasn't all wine and roses: they disagreed, they raged, they misunderstood each other, they struggled to make ends meet and figure out their version of husband and wife. There are songs for all of that, too, but as important as music is to this story, it really is only the soundtrack. He's as honest about their shared victories as he is about their failings: their love is the refrain, the thing they always come back to, and this is ultimately what gives the story its staying power and--in the face of tragedy--its sense of hope. --Anne

Recommended for fans of The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead, Our Noise, or Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs

*Particularly to songwriters: see very last paragraph of LIaMT for evidence of this.

I love a good historical novel, especially a historical mystery that takes me (with as little mental friction as possible) into the world of a long-lost era. I admire writers who are capable of doing this because they've single-handledly pulled off two very difficult tasks: 1)devising a great storyline and 2) creating a seductive texture of period details and color based on serious historical research.  They've managed to work their way through the strata of endnotes and bibliographies without losing their storytelling energy. Author Louis Bayard deserves high honors for his ability to tell a historically convincing and thrilling tale, and make it look incredibly easy. He does both in his most recent work, The Black Tower, now available in paperback. For about the cost of a movie ticket, you can enjoy quite a few more hours of thrilling, cinematic entertainment. 

Bayard's novel takes us into the streets, homes, and marketplaces of Restoration-era Paris, just as the medieval neighborhoods are giving way to Baron Haussmann's wide boulevards.  In the city's back alleys we meet Vidocq--the first hard-boiled homicide detective of the nineteenth-century.  He's a master of disguise, a man of huge appetites, and unconventional ideas, who thinks nothing of bending the law to catch a criminal. Much to his chagrin, Vidocq finds he must rely upon a hapless young physician named Hector Carpentier to solve a puzzling torture-murder having to do with Carpentier's father--also a physician, who secretly treated the imprisoned heir to the French throne, none other than Louis Charles, the son of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette. The odd couple of Vidocq and Carpentier must work quickly to catch the murderer, before the young doc becomes the next victim.   

--Lauren

This historical whodunit is too good to miss, and recommended for fans of The Last Dickens by Matthew Pearl and A Beautiful Blue Death by Charles Finch. 

When You Wish Upon a Kindle: Amazon's 10th Anniversary Wish List Sweepstakes continues with a "Kindle Love Prize List."

Natalie Portman Book Club?: Over at the HuffingtonPost, actress Natalie Portman says that Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals changed her "from a twenty-year vegetarian to a vegan activist."

That Not-Yet-Famous Book by Nabokov: On November 16 Martin Amis, Chip Kidd, and biographer Brian Boyd will host the first public reading of Vladimir Nabokov's The Original of Laura at New York's 92nd St. Y.

Moving and Shaking: David Chang demonstrating how to make kimchi on the Today Show helped send his debut cookbook, Momofuku, onto our Movers & Shakers list.

--BTP

Bill Simmons is kinda cute. And foul-mouthed. And hysterical. (This might be the first sports book I read.)

Stephen King is vahmpire. Anne Rice may think angels are the new vampires, but with Stephen King pumping new blood into a genre that shows no signs of slowing down, the future of paranormal fiction is anyone's guess.

"We can't say, 'God, you shouldn't do that.'" Vanity Fair's profile of R. Crumb's The Book of Genesis Illustrated is good (but--warning--colorfully composed).

Who you gonna call? A History of Ghosts ascends our daily movers & shakers list today to #2. --Anne

Philip Roth is still dirty, brilliant, and funny: And so prolific lately that he must spend his waking life at his keyboard, doubled over flying fingers. Over at The Daily Beast, Tina Brown talks to the great American novelist about The Humbling, the fear of not finding the next idea, writing about sex (typically frank, gentle readers), and the future of the novel.

I'll take thinly veiled metaphors for a thousand: Test your knowledge of rampaging, hedonistic poets and their rampaging, hedonistic, monsters with The Guardian's "How well do you know gothic fiction" quiz.

Books that made a difference to John Cusack: Alright, why not? (Oprah.com)

Moving and Shaking: According to NPR, Jane Gardam is "the best contemporary British writer you probably haven't heard of." And now her 12th novel, Old Filth, has risen 11,605% to the top of the Movers & Shakers list.

--Jon

A rare honor I could still earn: Tongue sorta in cheek, Slate names their annual "80 Over 80" list of the "most powerful octogenarians in America." Among the writers on the list: Noam Chomsky (80, #5), Mary Higgins Clark (81, #9), Maurice Sendak (81, #13), Edward Albee (81, #16), Stan Lee (86, #45), Maya Angelou (81, #48), W.S. Merwin (82, #52), Gore Vidal (84, #57), Louis Auchincloss (92, #61), Cynthia Ozick (81, #64), Elie Wiesel (81, #64). My first reaction: Cynthia Ozick's 81?!? (Via TNC)

Everyone's an author: Everybody's writing; is anybody reading? In Seed, Denis G. Pelli and Charles Bigelow chart our path toward universal authorship. (Via Second Pass)

Crumb and Chick: Maud Newton says R. Crumb's new Book of Genesis sends her back to the "frightening, ill-reasoned, and weirdly campy" Jack Chick tracts of her fundamentalist youth. (For more on the Chick phenomenon, see the second issue of Daniel Raeburn's excellent comics-criticism occasional, The Imp.)

Moving and shaking: Our own Jeff VanderMeer's new guide to the writing life, Booklife, surfaces at #6 in Movers & Shakers (and #352 overall), thanks to--well, I'm not sure. Something's working for you, Jeff--what is it?

--Tom

"You're telling me that, in a popularity contest, my book about Walt Whitman beat out Stephenie Meyer's book about hot vampires?"

The remaining 2009 Teens Top Ten:

2. Breaking Dawn, Stephenie Meyer

3. The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins

4. City of Ashes, Cassandra Clare

5. Identical, Ellen Hopkins

6. The Graveyard Book, Neil Gaiman

7. Wake, Lisa McMann

8. Untamed, P.C. and Kristin Cast

9. The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, E. Lockhart

10. Graceling, Kristin Cashore

Quick links...
School Library Journal remembers Norma Fox Mazer, author of The Missing Girl, After the Rain and Up in Seth's Room.

Bookninja ponders the real motivations behind the vampire craze, "a quiet but profound sexual revolution and a new acceptance of freakiness in mainstream American life."

In The New Yorker, Rebecca Mead takes readers inside an editorial pitch meeting at Alloy Entertainment, home of Gossip Girl, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, and The Vampire Diaries, which, incidentally, was first pitched way back in 1989 as "Anne Rice for teens."

Speaking of vampires, the next installment in P.C. and Kristin Cast's House of Night series, Tempted comes out next week. Happy reading.--Heidi