Weeding Fun

I just pulled a book from the shelves of my library called Varmint Hunter's Digest: The How-To Book for Varminters. I do believe that this is the first time I've ever encountered the word varmint used in correct context, and it is certainly the first time I've come across the noun varminter. Fan-tastic!

p.s. Even the Blogspot spell-check doesn't recognize varminter...

New Ivan Doig

I read the first 100 or so pages of The Eleventh Man last night, and am, as usual, in awe of Doig's ability to create using the English language. More folks from back east should read this man.

Romance novel, my ass

Davidson's debut, The Gargoyle, is frequently referred to as a romance novel or a love story. I'll buy the latter, but the wonder of such an engaging story is the infusion of Dante's Inferno, both as a plot point and as a structural device. This is a great book, with a new favorite quote about the existence of God: "I can no more believe in God than I can believe an invisible monkey lives in my ass; however, I would believe in both if they could be scientifically proven." I'm working that baby into every conversation I can!

More Cain

Sweetheart, Chelsea Cain's followup to Heartsick came out last Tuesday. It's always fun to read novels that take place in areas you know well, and I know just enough about Portland to follow the action in Gretchen Lowell's world. This sequel is solid, if a little too linear for my tastes. Though the characters are well established, I kinda felt like there should have been more insight into why Archie continues to blindly follow his psychopathic crush... That said, I still stayed up late turning the pages.

I'm not dead, yet...

Three books worth noting:

Exit Music by Ian Rankin. Apparently a fan pointed out to Ranking that Rebus should now be 60 and therefore at retirement age, so this marks the end for the greatest single-malt swilling inspector from Edinburgh. Sniffle (wait, that's from my cold, really!).

Bit of a Blur by Alex James. I'm often suprised at how good these bios are from the British Indie bands, so I just may check this one out. If nothing else, one should be sure to check out In Search of the La's by Matthew Macefield. Fantastic look by a fan.



Rugby. World politics. HOLY @#$%-ing shit! A BOOK ABOUT RUGBY AND WORLD POLITICS!

I should know better...

than to make a promise to post every day. Pneumonia knocked me flat for almost two weeks, so I'm back to 'whenever the hell i feel like it' as far as this silly thing goes. I did just start Empire Falls by Richard Russo. I haven't read anything of his, but based on what I hear, I'll most likely have to tear through them all as I did with Larry Brown and Jon Irving.

Apologies...

varied/non-existant readers. Been out yesterday and today with a fever pushing 103. BIG FUN! I'll resume posting on Monday when I BETTER be able to go back to work.

Specifically for MTR

There are a billion coffee shops in the PNW, as you may know. I've had drinks at most of those in Eugene, but I had a severe flashback the other day when picking up a cold mocha drink for Jen. I tasted it on the way home, and it was as close as you'll ever get to a Dog Street Chill. Memories...

Tarnation...

Saw this trailer the other day and was shamed into pulling out the copy of Saramago's book that I've been meaning to read now for many years. I've heard incredible things about his writing, but somehow never traveled far enough down the stack to read Blindness. Always hard to tell from a trailer, but this film looks fantastic.

Olympic Huh?

Normally, I'm a huge fan of Algonquin, but I'm not so sure about this one. I just can't see people caring about this guy enough to read the book, and I used to swim competitively myself. When I first saw the pre-pub info on the book, I thought it sounded much more like a magazine article than a book, and sure enough it originated as a piece for Outside. Craig, if you're out there, you gotta sell me on this one...

Olympic Reads

I am giddy at the thought of watching the summer Olympics. Yes, TV coverage has sucked ass since 1984, but at least I can watch some of it in HD this time around. I hope to squeeze this book into my brain before the games are over. The Olympics in Rome mark the transition from the games as we see them in Chariots of Fire to the corporate juggernaut circus that they have become. And yet, I'll still watch as much as I can get away with...

Cell Stupidity

I am continually amazed and chagrined at the number of people each day who answer their cell phone in the library only to say to the caller: "I can't talk, I'm in the library."

Bowerman

I only skimmed this when it was up for a PNBA award, knowing that it wasn't going to work its way to the top six, but after watching the majority of the Olympic track and field trials here in Eugene, I have picked it up again and jumped right in. The writing is nothing spectacular, but it gets the job done. What IS spectacular is the insight Kenny Moore brings having been around Bowerman and the Oregon track community for most of his life. Incidentally, if you find yourself watching Tequila Sunrise, look for Moore playing the harbor patrol officer...

Yes, yes, I should read Zinn

... but I just may check this out first when it pubs in October. I was a history minor at VT, which means I took just enough classes to have a working knowledge of completely different time periods in areas and countries separated by thousands of miles. Perhaps a major would have filled in the gaps?! Ah well, I've been sliding again back toward non-fiction, and some US History might be the ticket.

LOL

This, from Library Journal, in the 'prepub alert' section regarding the next Richard Paul Evans novel:

No hints yet on the plot, but you know it will be filled with love, hope, and Christmas.

That made me ACTUALLY laugh out loud, which is hard to do when it comes to [Untitled] books that libraries and bookstores are expected to purchase just because it is 'next' from a BS author. I find such practices anathema.

Anyhow, I'm back at work after a week off, and will attempt to post every workday until the end of August. After finishing the the Butte to Butte 10K on the 4th, I feel I have the stamina for such an amazing feat.

On Running

I went up to Olympia last week to run in a 5K with a friend of mine. The race was a fundraiser for the library at Evergreen State College. How great to participate in a run that benefits a library! Here is a picture of my sad self right before my friend Coker stepped in front of me at the finish line (let's just say I'm an idiot, and leave the story at that...).


Coker is coming down in a few weeks and we'll be jogging in the Butte to Butte race here in Eugene. I ran this last year, and if you pay attention, you'll see me go by in an orange shirt and blue sunglasses at the :53 second mark.


With the race this year falling smack dab in the middle of the Track and Field Olympic Trials over at the Univ. of Oregon, I expect there will be even more than the 6,000 or so who ran it last year. It's not a small event!

Now, as always, I will tie in a book so I can pretend this site is more than a way for me to send out stuff to my friends rather than use e-mail. All this talk of races reminds me of one of my favorite running titles (literally, favorite title. I haven't read the book, and I suspect there are other running BOOKS I'd rather read...). Anyhow, here it is:

Oh, Happy Day!

Bigfoot is Back! If you can read Roumieu's Bigfoot books without laughing out loud, you are dead inside.

Life in Alaska

Seth Kantner was at the Eugene Public Library last night, and my old bookstore was there selling the JUST-printed finished copies of Shopping for Porcupine. A thoughtful balance of text and photos, this book provides a unique look into a disappearing land... one that is about to be ripped apart even further in our quest for cheap gas.

Mmmmmmm.... Pi

From Richard Preston's new book Panic in Level 4:

"What is the point of computing pi... since an expansion of pi to only forty-seven decimal places would be sufficiently precise to inscribe a circle around the visible universe that doesn't deviate from perfect circularity by more than the distance across a single proton."

Preston's ability to put concepts like pi into terms that even a dolt like me can understand is why his books are so readable.

Another Dave Mallett gem from YouTube

Times they change, sort of

Check out this article from the June 2, 1980 Time. I was sorting a pile of local history for cataloging here at the library, and couldn't resist leafing through this magazine with a cover story about Mt. St. Helens (The Big Blowup). You could literally change the price of gas from $1.20 to $4.00 and re-run this article today. The only real difference is that we are now on the downslope of the 'peak,' so things won't ease up as they did in the mid 80's...

Farewell, Sweet Reference

The OED will likely never be printed again. Makes sense from a business standpoint, but still this is sad news. Thanks again to my Uncle Terry for footing the bill for my own set. Here is a nice lament from the New York Times Magazine.

Always a pleasure

...to remove The Lost Grizzlies by Rick Bass from the building I work in. As of today, I've been able to do so three different times. Especially gratifying was that it showed up on a weeding list because it hadn't been checked out in over 4 years.

Old or Grown-up?

Either way, two things happened yesterday that made me think it's one or the other. First, I was approached by two mormons while doing some yardwork. Not only was I polite to them, but I didn't go with my usual response, which is to tell them I'd be happy to chat with them if they would come in and have a beer with me. Maybe I can chalk this up to the fact that I work in a public library now... you know, I had on my reference desk face.

Second, and perhaps more distressingly, while driving Keegan and Griffin back from watching the Eugene Marathon go by at the park, I failed to turn off the radio or change the channel when Hootie's Only Wanna Be With You came on. I wasn't singing along or anything, but for the first time since 1994 or so that it didn't trip my gag-reflex. Yikes.

Interesting Exercise

Stolen from a blog where it was borrowed from another blog...
Humbling to realize I haven't read nearly as much as I like to think I have.

What we have here is the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish. Here's the twist: add (*) beside the ones you liked and would (or did) read again or recommend. Even if you read 'em for school in the first place."



The Aeneid
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay*
American Gods*
Anansi Boys*
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir*
Angels & Demons
Anna Karenina
Atlas Shrugged
Beloved
The Blind Assassin
Brave New World
The Brothers Karamazov
The Canterbury Tales
The Catcher in the Rye
Catch-22
A Clockwork Orange
Cloud Atlas
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
A Confederacy of Dunces
The Confusion
The Corrections
The Count of Monte Cristo
Crime and Punishment
Cryptonomicon*
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time*
David Copperfield
Don Quixote
Dracula
Dubliners
Dune
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
Emma
Foucault’s Pendulum
The Fountainhead
Frankenstein
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
The God of Small Things*
The Grapes of Wrath
Gravity’s Rainbow
Great Expectations
Gulliver’s Travels
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
The Historian : a novel
The Hobbit*
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
The Iliad
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
The Inferno
Jane Eyre
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell *
The Kite Runner
Les Misérables
Life of Pi : a novel
Lolita
Love in the Time of Cholera
Madame Bovary
Mansfield Park
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlemarch
Middlesex*
Mrs. Dalloway
The Mists of Avalon
Moby Dick
The Name of the Rose*
Neverwhere
1984*
Northanger Abbey
The Odyssey
Oliver Twist
The Once and Future King*
One Hundred Years of Solitude
On the Road
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Oryx and Crake : a novel
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Persuasion
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel*
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Pride and Prejudice
The Prince
Quicksilver*
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
The Satanic Verses
The Scarlet Letter
Sense and Sensibility
A Short History of Nearly Everything
The Silmarillion
Slaughterhouse-five
The Sound and the Fury
A Tale of Two Cities
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
The Time Traveler’s Wife
To the Lighthouse
Treasure Island
The Three Musketeers
Ulysses
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Vanity Fair
War and Peace
Watership Down*
White Teeth
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
Wuthering Heights
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values

More Millar

Millar is great fun, and the blurbs he gets on his books are incredible. How can you NOT want to read his stuff?!

Dave Mallett in 1967

Who doesn't love YouTube?!

The Taint of Corporate Caffeine

Please please please don't ignore Garth Stein's new book just because it will be staring at you from every Target, Wal-Mart, and liquor store in the wake of the news that Starbucks has picked it to be their next big 'sell.' The book is wonderful. Really. Read it.

Mo Willems Rocks

I bought a copy of Don't Let the Pigeon Stay Up Late for Griffin whilst last in Powell's. The G-man loves it, along with all of Mo's books. For parents who have to read the same book three times a day for weeks on end, you can do no wrong with the Pigeon and the Knuffle.

More Audio

Listening to The Shining (remember, limited selection... though really, I think I last read the book in 1987, so it's damn near new to me), and I gotta give high marks to Campbell Scott for the narration. He also read Into the Wild, and his gravitas almost killed the whole story, but he is perfect for Mr. The King.

Photo by S. Alexie

A picture taken in front of the lending library at the Heathman Hotel. From left, Jay, Steve and I served as consultants to Chris, on the end, in setting up this one-of-a-kind hotel collection. The books are signed copies left by the authors that have stayed in the hotel over the last two decades. The collection is now available to browse on-line, thanks to Jay's tech savvy.

The best part about this photo though, is that it was taken by Sherman Alexie...

Judging Books By... Well, Their Covers

As tedious as it can be to see publishers pump out stab after stab at replicating the latest bestseller, it can be equally fun to watch them try to be 'subtle.' Check out these covers, and tell me the similarity is mere coincidence. Yeah, uh-huh. Ironically, Publishers Weekly hated the original...

A Good Character

The FRL has a small but growing collection of CD audio books, so I am a bit limited in what I can throw on during my commute. These items, however, HAVE reacquainted me with a writer I previously gave up on. Daniel Silva wrote a great debut spy thriller about a decade ago called The Unlikely Spy -- a crusty but crafty old British academic, the Enigma machine, Natzi's... a good ride. His next book, though, didn't last three chapters in my stack.

And yet, I listened to his newest, The Secret Servant, and enjoyed it enough to backtrack and begin to trail the franchise character, Gabriel Allon through Silva's fiction. Allon, an Israeli spy trained as a world-class art restorer, has a history that goes back to the hunt for the members of Black September. Having recently watched Spielberg's haunting Munich, I felt like I was jumping right back in with the story.

In the words of Pvt. Hudson, 'We're all gonna die, man!'

My dad sent this link out recently, and it is about as depressing as you can get. Certainly there appears to be a bit of a pessimism involved, but the fact that these are the words of a guy whose predictions have been largely correct, despite being branded as a bit of a loon, is more than a little frightening (especially for those of us with kids...)



On that happy note, I think I'm going to read Kunstler's new novel, World Made By Hand, because even his predictions about the end of oil and the environment as we know it suddenly seem optimistic!

Book Report

I've started writing the occasional book review for the small rural paper here in Veneta. This be my inagural one...

Library News for Thursday, Feb 28th
by Colin Rea, Director

February Book Review – Duma Key by Stephen King; published by Scribner Book Company.

Yes, it’s true. I still read the occasional Stephen King novel. Without jumping into a discussion of his ‘literary merit,’ I will say that no matter your position on his writing, Mr. King is one heck of a storyteller. This particular story follows Edgar Freemantle to the Florida Keys, where he begins a new life after a horrific construction accident that takes both his arm and his marriage. The move, undertaken as a ‘geographic cure,’ awakens a newfound artistic talent, and perhaps something else on the Duma Key, an island with a handful of rental properties and one grand estate. This estate crumbles around an elderly matron of the arts, Elizabeth Eastlake and her caregiver, Wireman, even as an old evil awakens and reaches out to the inhabitants of the island.

Duma Key is King’s best novel since his own accident in 1999. Like much of what he’s written since an encounter with a Dodge Caravan on a rural road in Maine, his own experience in rehab and recovery appears to be woven into the story. The characters drawn around Edgar are vivid and real, given just enough depth to support their involvement in the narrative. The supernatural element in Duma Key is left to be just that, supernatural. As Hermione Granger might tell you, putting a name to evil serves to give it substance and lessen the terror, and King increasingly leaves it to his reader to fill in the nasty details.

King is at his best when his novels build like a snowball rolling downhill, and Duma Key does just that. It may not be the apocalyptic epic that is The Stand, or the brilliant homage to youth that is It, but I like this one just fine.

LIS 508 Follow Up

Must to read soon...

So, I'm Reading...

the new Stephen King. With about 150 pages to go, I'm impressed. I think it's his best since his accident, and, like much of what he's written after his encounter with that van, the experience is all over the novel. I'm at the point where the story has begun the 'snowball roll' to the end. Here's hoping it finishes well.



Speaking of finishing, this single malt doesn't start OR finish well. Disappointing, altogether.

597.8 -- It's the DDC for frogs. Just so's you know...

Apologies for the Green

That was one week of a near migraine, wasn't it?!

Now that I'm off the below-mentioned committee, it's great to have all parameters removed from my reading list. After randomly choosing two books with related titles and themes to listen to on my commute, I've decided to pick up the string and follow it. I just finished Darwin's Radio by Greg Bear (good, not great... ending was disappointing, I guessed the mutation, and the sex scenes were awful), and just started The Darwin Conspiracy by John Darnton. Now I've pulled down the bio Darwin: a life in science by White and Gribbin, and will actually follow all of this up with The Origin of the Species and The Voyage of the Beagle. Oh, and I may even re-read Darwin's Shooter, which was just re-published by PGW.

Awards Announced

This is the press release for the 2008 PNBA Award Winners. I'm putting this up here 'cause it's a great list, and because it's the last of my three years on the committee. I'd love to report that leaving behind this responsibility meant I would be able to read more of whatever it was I wanted, but I'm still not back to a full reading schedule since my job switch. D'oh! In any event, if any of this sounds familiar, it may have to do with the fact that anywhere a quote is attributed to the committee, it was really my words...

PNBA Announces

2008 Pacific Northwest Book Awards

Eugene, Oregon - January 4, 2008 - The Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association is proud to announce the winners of its 2008 Book Awards, which were selected by a committee of independent booksellers from Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana and Alaska. The committee chose the following six books from nearly 200 nominees, all of which were written by Northwest authors and published in 2007.

About the Award-winning Books

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie
In his first young adult novel, Sherman Alexie hilariously and heartbreakingly chronicles the contemporary adolescence of one unlucky but resilient boy trying to rise above the life everyone expects him to live on the Spokane Indian Reservation.

Returning To Earth by Jim Harrison
"Life and death; family and friends; past and future -- Returning to Earth covers the full range of human experience as the reader shares a journey with a Michigan man of Finnish and Native American ancestry. Told as four stories, each with a different central character, Jim Harrison deftly explores how we all search for redemption." --PNBA Awards Committee

Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson
"Instantly compelling, Tree of Smoke is, at its core, a novel about the Vietnam War and the people, places, and history that were forever changed because of it. Like the war itself, the storylines dart and weave and are only truly understood as they connect themselves in the end." --PNBA Awards Committee

Dancing With Rose: Finding Life in the Land of Alzheimer's by Lauren Kessler
"Lauren Kessler confronts the confounding disease that took her mother as only a journalist could -- she becomes a caregiver at an Alzheimer's facility. By turns brutally honest, compassionate, and instructive, Kessler finds grace, humor and unexpected connections with the patients and the caregivers." --PNBA Awards Committee

The God of Animals by Aryn Kyle
A breathtaking debut novel about a girl growing up amid a dying way of life on a horse ranch in small-town Colorado, The God of Animals beautifully captures familiar themes of the West: families, horses, love, death, class and weather. As novelist Andrew Sean Greer says, it's "a perfect read."

Bad Monkeys by Matt Ruff
Matt Ruff wins his second PNBA Award with this page-turning, psychological thriller full of funhouse twists and turns. Bad Monkeys is, as Neal Stephenson says, "Fast. Wicked. Scarily clever and equally fun for those who like thrillers and those who don't."