My Daemon

Has it come to this???

Really? REALLY? Surely there are some real cowboys out there ready to bring some frontier justice to this fella...

Does this make me a curmudgeon or a skeptic?

I've been too much a news junkie this week, reading newspapers online and watching the cable news networks, which have provided coverage both horrific and horrible. In any event, I haven't been reading many books. I did, however, start A Good and Happy Child by Justin Evans, which holds promise (even 35 pages in the story has yet to really begin.)

So what to write about if I haven't been reading books? Their covers, of course. I just shelved the paperback edition of Sebastian Junger's A death in Belmont. The cover has this quote: "Riveting... a worthy sequel to The Perfect Storm." -New York Times Book Review. This bothers me because the word sequel is abused here two-fold. The book is not a continuation of the story in Storm, nor is it the book published directly after Storm. Sequel? I think not.

I did read A Death in Belmont, and while it is well written and exciting, Junger cops out at the end and refuses to make any judgement call about the veracity of his assumptions. One is better off re-reading Storm.

How Book Sales Explain Sibling Rivalry

I just sent an e-mail to the New Republic, hoping it makes it's way through to editor Franklin Foer. Every month I marvel at the number of copies we sell of How Soccer Explains the World, and was amazed that I had never made the name connection to brother Jonathan Safran Foer. Here is the e-mail:

Dunno if this will get through to Franklin, but I had to share this morning. How Soccer has been one of our bestselling books over the last year, as I have hand-sold it time and time again. Somehow I JUST realized the familial connection to Jonathan. Because I know I’d be keeping score, here are two numbers from our sales reports:


Total sales for How Soccer Explains the World in paper: 180

Total sales for Everything is Illuminated AND Incredibly Loud… in paper: 42


Ps. MSI Rules (or, it did in the late 70’s and early 80’s anyway!)

No books today

I had hoped to spend time writing about books today, but that must wait as I try to absorb the horrific news from Blacksburg, where I went to school and lived for a decade. For those of you who know that my brother still teaches at Virginia Tech, please know that he is ok and at home.

A couple of things

Fall catalogs are raining down upon my desk. Before I stack them on the shelves above my computer that will, one day, most likely break and cause me to be 'trapped under something heavy,' I flip through them looking for familiar names and titles. I admit I was fairly surprised to see that Ken Follett is writing a sequel to Pillars of the Earth. Pillars is a classic (even with the really poorly written sex scenes), precisely because Follett was telling a story that centered around something he himself is passionate about -- the building of a cathedral. For 10 seconds, I was excited by the prospect of a sequel. Then I realized that this story, set 200 years after Pillars, will lack the subplot that made the first book so fantastic. Ah well, at least I can write a shelf-talker for the updated paperback edition of Pillars that the new book will bring...

To wrap up a couple of books mentioned below... Rankin's The Naming of the Dead was fun, but my brother was right in saying that it didn't end well. It just sort of petered out. There is a review in last week's NY Review of Books that explains why: "But while that factual fidelity lends authenticity to his books, it also accounts for their unweildy structure and overburdened narratives." Again, though, as my brother says, Rankin is always worth a throw.

Frost's Second Objective was fun to read right after finishing a Rebus novel, because he takes a bit of WWII history that even I remembered from my history classes, Operation Grief and the Battle of the Bulge, and throws down a character very similar to Rebus. Frost doesn't bog down in the historical part of 'historical fiction,' and this book reads like the adventure ride it is meant to be.


Finally, yesterday I read Flight, the first novel from Sherman Alexie in a decade. To be fair, this is really a novella, and could almost have been the 10th story in his short story collection Ten Little Indians. A coworker yesterday mentioned all the things that she likes fiction to do for her -- make her laugh, make her think, and make her cry. In 180 pages, Alexie does all of this better than almost anyone. Read this book.

Making Money

My stack of Harper Collins catalogs arrived for the fall list, and said stack is becoming dangerously high (not quite a challenge to the tower that comes from Random, but certainly on the way...). I'm quite happy to report, however, that we'll see Terry Pratchett's 4,493rd(give or take) novel in October, and that Moist von Lipwig is once again at the center of things.

Store Name

When I win the lottery, I'm opening a bookstore that sells great fiction and single malt scotch whisky. This has been an idea of mine for almost a decade. My three year old provided the store name last night. When asked what he needed for bed time, he replied: Books and a Bottle.

Perfection.

Rebus is back!

After a few good but not great stand alone novels, Ian Rankin has brought Inspector Rebus back and put him in the middle of the G8 summit held a few years ago in Scotland. The use of real events of global significance and rememberance makes this one of the best Rebus mysteries in years. Rebus' brush with the noxious weed in the White House is brilliant!