23 February 2010

A Room Stuffed with Books

I live in a room stuffed with books. Many of you do as well.

From where I sit I can see trees, a squirrel, the odd passing cat or flock of turkeys. That’s the window view. Everywhere else I look it’s books, books, books.

On my right: A complete 20-volume set of the “The New Grove Dictionary of Music & Musicians” copyright 1980.

Also: Guidebooks to various computer programs; travel books that don’t fit on the other travel book shelves in this room; a 1907 set of “The Life & Works of Abraham Lincoln,” commemorative edition, partially bound in red leather; a boxed set in the original French of “A la Recherche du Temps Perdu” by Marcel Proust, some Boswell, a bit of Dostoyevsky, “The Fundamentals of Musical Art, Volume 10" which was a gift signed by two friends in 1990.

Those titles cover maybe 20 feet of shelves. There are 14 more eight foot-high cabinets in this small study. I admit it is lovely to be so surrounded. As if I had read even half these books. As if I ever will read most of them.

On her book blog this week Barbara Vey asks, “To Keep or Not to Keep?”

“...What benefit do I get from titles staring me down? Why daily expose my conscious brain to Kafka and Chekhov randomly placed next to Annie Dillard, Louise Erdrich, and Aldo Leopold? I’ll never read those books again. (Will I?) Just because they came into my possession doesn’t mean I have to keep them. ‘Possession’! I loved that book by A. S. Byatt. Where did I put my copy? Don’t tell me I got rid of it!” she writes.

I know that feeling so well that recently I purchased a hand-held scanner and the software to go along with it so I may catalog my collection, and find out how many duplicate copies I have and where my books are in the first place.

What prevents me from carrying out this plan is the certain knowledge that before entering all these books into a database I must organize them so the computer can guide me to a title it thinks I own.

How to make sense of such a crazily diverse group of books? Maybe I will label the shelves One Two Three and so on. Then the computer can report that “Photo Retouching & Restoration For Dummies” has a spot on shelf three, cabinet four. Or worse yet, physically move these books into categories... Do historical novels shelve with Fiction or History? Is it all Fiction? Should Dickens sit next to Dick? Cornwell near Calvino, Chaucer on the same shelf as Churchill?

As someone once asked in the bookstore, “Where is your NON-fiction section?” I had to think about that for a minute.

Right now I get along on memory and intuition. I remember holding a monograph on the ant. I was over by that chair, and the book had a blue cover. I’m pretty sure it’s still there, if I didn’t move it.

Gliding along a wall of multi-hued books I randomly pick out an advance uncorrected proof of “The Myth of Solid Ground: Earthquakes, Prediction, & the Fault Line Between Reason & Faith” by David L. Ulin.

Back when I was an active bookseller, I probably said to a sales person, “Could you send me a copy of that earthquake book? Even though I’m not going to buy it for the store, maybe I’ll do a Words of Books on it.” That was six years ago. I really should dust more often.

Blogger Barbara Vey asks what should we do with books we may never read, or never read again? The first problem, for me, starts with the fact these are BOOKS, not week-old newspapers or burrito wrappers.

I could give some to friends, or swap with strangers on the Internet, but I’d just be exchanging one unread book for another. I offered a look-see to a used book dealer, but he turned me down. He has too many books, too.

I could give books to a local thrift store, but I’d probably end up buying some of them back, and anyway, could they possibly use them, or would they end up one-cent-sale-ing them into a box in the rain? It’s horrible to contemplate.

In the meantime, I live in a room stuffed with books. A few are valuable first editions, some so useless they really should go out with the burrito wrappers.

Taken together, I admit, these books provoke in me a quiet joy. They are silent friends, ready to speak in their many voices, never insisting on being heard. Eyes and hands will find them again one day.


NOTES:

Barbara Vey’s blog at Publishers Weekly got me thinking about all this.

An excellent software source for cataloging books, music, your just-about-anything you have a lot of...

A national directory of thrift stores.

A recent list of “The 10 Best Websites To Swap Books, Movies, Games & CDs”

18 February 2010

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo Who Played with Fire and Kicked the Dragon's Nest

Last week we praised the writer John Biggins. This week Steig Larsson. I am so fickle, and in fact, so uninformed.

Steig Larsson’s three thrillers have been world-wide best sellers, and his first novel, “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” also is a movie soon to be released in this country. In 2008 (it is reported) the author was the second best-selling author in the world. How did we miss this?

It took a slight nudge from a friend of mine who works in a bookstore for me to pick up the first of Larsson’s books and give it a look. I now have joined those who clamor for this intriguing author.

Six years ago Steig Larsson died unexpectedly at age 50 of a heart attack. He had just delivered three manuscripts to his Swedish publisher. Like one of his lead characters, Larsson was a crusading left-wing journalist. He was “a leading expert on antidemocratic right-wing extremist and Nazi organizations,” all of which is reflected in his novels as well as the subject of his journalistic work.

When a Swedish labor-union leader was murdered in his home by neo-Nazis in 1999, the police discovered photos of Larsson in the murderer's apartment.

For reasons of personal safety Larsson and long-time girl friend Eva Gabrielsson never married despite a decades-long relationship. To do so would have required public disclosure of their home address.

There is no evidence that Larsson’s death was anything but natural. Yet he wrote thrillers about dark forces hiding in plain sight. His readers naturally have to wonder...

“Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” gets off to a leisurely start that some have said is due to lax editing. No explosions, no assassinations, just a gradual build that introduces the main characters and themes of the novel. You soon discover that it’s not only residents of Mendocino who drink way too much coffee and live in an isolated village. The Swedes have their coffee pots and their secrets, too.

It’s amazing to me that such a book, that reads in many places like sitting through the slow parts of Ingmar Bergman movies, could become such a popular sensation. It’s a compliment to readers everywhere, and should give hope to more literate writers, very much including John Biggins, who was praised here last week.

Despite Larsson’s icy Nordic-ness, by the middle of the book I was enthralled, entranced, enraptured, captured, intrigued, glued. I read this book last thing at night and first thing in the morning. Even in a small mass market edition it runs well over 600 pages.

There are rumors that Larsson may have left a fourth manuscript, and at least the outlines of further books, and that he planned a series of ten novels. He has become so posthumously successful that I would not be surprised to hear another writer will be commissioned to carry on the series, as was done, for example, to Robert Ludlum after his death.

“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” currently is selling well in the US; “The Girl Who Played with Fire” will be available in March, and in June “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest.”

To discuss plot points would risk spoiling the book for future readers. But I should note that there are very strong females in this tale. It was originally titled “Men Who Hate Women” and that is a big hint on the theme of this engaging thriller.

Writers of a more literary bent with books of a less commercial nature will ponder Larsson’s posthumous success with wonderment. Money and fame seem to be handed out by the mysterious hand of fate, not a panel of Olympian judges.

NOTES:

Stieg Larsson is on line here and here.

An excellent recent BBC piece on the author...

All three of Stieg Larsson’s books are available in various editions. If you’d like to read them in their least expensive format ($7.99 mass market editions) the first is available now; the next two will be published in March, and June, 2010, respectively.

(Available now)
“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard) ISBN 9780307473479.

(Due March, 2010)
“The Girl Who Played with Fire” (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard) ISBN 9780307476159.

(Due June, 2010)
“The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest” (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard) ISBN 9780307739964.

11 February 2010

John Biggins is Back... and so is Frans Michielszoon van Raveyck

I read recently that more than the usual number of bookstores in the United Kingdom have closed over the past year. The Guardian counts (almost) two a week, for a total of 102 shops closed in 2009, leaving just 1,289 in business.

Yes, that small store in the Cotswolds, the one you consulted for the name of a particular insect you saw the previous week in France, that store. It’s gone now along with “...the UK's only specialist crime bookshop, Murder One... Lancashire's award-winning Kaydee Bookshop... south London independent Crockatt & Powell” and all the others.

Perhaps for related reasons and the sorry state of publishing, the redoubtable British author John Biggins is planning to self-publish his next novel, “The Surgeon’s Apprentice.”

Due to a long-lasting, long-distance acquaintance with the author, I was privileged this week to read the not-yet-published Chapter 11, no financial irony intended. Mr Biggins’ dedicated readers, who have had nothing new from him for at least a decade and a half, can now anticipate further wonderful adventures among the feeble-brained and half-witted, in other words commanders, lords, and others in authority.

You may have read Mr Biggins’ previous novels. If you are not so fortunate, do treat yourself to one of the four paperback books. You likely will join many other readers who not only cherish and recommend these novels, but also suffer from the so far unfulfilled longing for more. Fans live on a forlorn island surrounded by the sea of lesser works, waiting to be rescued by just one more book from this author.

I continue to receive fan mail addressed to the author because previous WOBs I wrote on Mr Biggins live forever as searchable Internet space nuggets. For example, the the most recent, from Greg Coultis, in Brisbane, Australia:

“I have just finished reading the entire.. ‘Otto Prohaska’ series by the author John Biggins. What an entertaining read! The author has a wonderful style and I found the ‘historical’ side very engaging. I would love to read more of his adventures if the author is willing and a publisher can be found. True gems lying in the dust! I will be recommending these to all my friends.”

Biggins’ hero in the earlier books was a lieutenant in the land-locked Austro-Hungarian Navy, a navy consisting of one submarine and perhaps a few rowboats as World War One began. In the new series (yes, more than one ms. already has been drafted) the hero’s name will be much harder to pronounce: Frans Michielszoon van Raveyck, but he is likely to be just as unlikely a hero as Otto Prohaska. Van Raveyck is a surgeon’s apprentice serving in the Dutch navy in 1625.

In Chapter 11, “Frans, thanks to his knowledge of English and his ability to write shorthand, is sent by the admiral of the Dutch flotilla to take a note of Viscount Wimbledon’s council of war aboard his flagship off the coast of southern Spain... the fleet having arrived there after a fortnight at sea without any very clear notion of what it intends doing next. In the end nothing very much is decided: so when the fleet arrives before Cadiz the following day matters drift somewhat for lack of firm direction…”

In an email Mr Biggins wrote, “I've just finished the final edit and I have to say that I like the book and have enjoyed writing it, which is always a good sign. It's another cheerful canter through the limitless badlands of human folly, wickedness and self-deception with occasional halts to admire the things that we've accidentally created in the process of robbing and oppressing one another, like science and art.

“These aren't seafaring yarns even to the extent that the Prohaska books were, though the hero does spend quite a lot of time at sea and also ends up doing things like being the first European to explore Australia, thanks to his ship having piled up on the coast as the result of the flotilla admiral miscalculating their longitude and making the turn north for Java rather too late.

“Really they're about the world of the baroque and the very beginnings of science. But I'm sure you'll enjoy them even so. They're certainly not for stupid people or those who wish to be told only what they know already.”

John Biggins’ new web site will be online soon, his book will be available for purchase later this year, and his many fans should start placing nickels, or shillings, in the cookie jar in anticipation.

Biggins is writing again. Great news for smart readers everywhere!

NOTES:

The Guardian article...

“A Sailor of Austria: In Which, Without Really Intending To, Otto Prohaska Becomes Official War Hero No. 27 of the Habsburg Empire” by John Biggins. McBooks Press paperback $16.95. ISBN 9781590131077

“The Emperor's Coloured Coat: In Which Otto Prohaska, Future Hero of the Habsburg Empire, Has an Unexpectedly Interesting Time...” by John Biggins. McBooks Press paperback $16.95 ISBN 9781590131084.

“The Two-Headed Eagle: In Which Otto Prohaska Takes a Break as the Habsburg Empire's Leading U-Boat Ace and Does Something Even More Thankless” by John Biggins. McBooks Press paperback $16.95 ISBN 9781590131091.

“Tomorrow the World: In Which Cadet Otto Prohaska Carries the Habsburg Empire's Civilizing Mission to the Entirely Unreceptive Peoples of Africa & Oceania.” by John Biggins. McBooks Press paperback $16.95 ISBN 9781590131107.

(A current note from Alice Whitehead-Chan apropos of nothing above, but funny nevertheless) “The English are feeling the pinch in relation to recent terrorist threats and have raised their security level from ‘Miffed’ to ‘Peeved.’ Soon, though, security levels may be raised yet again to ‘Irritated’ or even ‘A Bit Cross.’ The English have not been ‘A Bit Cross’ since the blitz in 1940 when tea supplies all but ran out. Terrorists have been re-categorized from ‘Tiresome’ to a ‘Bloody Nuisance.’ The last time the British issued a ‘Bloody Nuisance’ warning level was in 1588 when threatened by the Spanish Armada.”

Who is John Biggins? Now we know!

(from the author...)

John Biggins was born in October 1949 in the town of Bromley; then in Kent but now an outer suburb of London and notable only as the birthplace of H.G.Wells and the deathplace of the Emperor Napoleon III. The son of an electrician and part-time Communist Party activist, his childhood was sickly and his schooling intermittent; though he made up for this with a great deal of precocious reading while lying ill in bed. In 1961 he moved with his family to South Wales, his father having in the meantime abandoned the Dictatorship of the Proletariat to become a steelworks engineer, and decided from then on that he would no longer waste time being ill. After attending Chepstow Secondary and Lydney Grammar Schools, then reading history at the University of Wales in Swansea from 1968 to 1971, he went to then-Soviet Bloc Poland and remained there for the next four years studying for a Ph.D. This experience gave him an enduring fascination with institutional dysfunction and the pathology of decaying empires; as did his subsequent four years of unemployment in the now-abolished Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food where one of his tasks was to write a history of the 1974 Cheese Subsidy in such a way as to show his then-boss in the best possible light: a job which he undertook with such creative relish that he was soon moved to another department.

After being advised politely but firmly to leave the Civil Service in 1980 he turned to journalism to support his wife and two children, then to technical authorship in the burgeoning IT industry of the mid-1980s, then to writing fiction in 1987 largely in order to amuse himself and without much expectation that what he wrote would ever be published. So it was with some surprise two years later that he found his first novel, “A Sailor of Austria”, being taken up by the first publisher who had a sight of it. In later years his day-job, by now largely in medical engineering, took him to France, Scandinavia and the Netherlands where he occupied his evenings with reading in the local languages in an effort to try and understand what was going on around him. Later on, two years spent writing and teaching an English course for Polish doctors also allowed him to develop a long-standing interest in medical history and led indirectly to his latest series of novels.

Despite advancing years he remains as neurotically active as ever, tirelessly roaming the landscape of whichever country fate has deposited him in with a map in his hand as though other people’s word wasn’t good enough for him and he really expects to discover lost temples or hitherto unknown tribes amid the flat waterlogged fields and motorway junctions of the Rhine-Meuse delta. An inveterate cyclist, he is currently much engaged in reviving the bicycle as a mass means of transport in Great Britain.

As he looks back on a bright future his greatest satisfactions in life – apart from the novels, obviously – are to have known the love of a good woman (the same one all the time) and never to have taken part in any organised sport, for which he retains the profoundest of blind spots. Quite good at a lot of things but not outstandingly good at anything, his epitaph will probably be “he was clever but not wise”.

He has double-jointed thumbs.

04 February 2010

Words on Books readers and listeners have sent in their answers to a group of interesting questions about books. Last week, I had time to report what books you have on your nightstand, and mention a few favorite first lines.

This week, I’ve mixed and matched the remaining most interesting replies to questions usually posed to “Book Brahmins” by the Shelf Awareness newsletter.

Here are some of your responses.

Your top five authors... At least a hundred authors were named. Surprisingly, very few were mentioned more than once. You have very wide-ranging taste, you WOBers, you. Four persons rated Charles Dickens an all-time favorite. Barbara Kingsolver received three mentions. There were two votes each for Ursula LeGuin, Jane Austen, and Michael Chabon.

If I were Michael Chabon I’d faint from the company I’m keeping.

Book you've faked reading... Many people refused to answer this one. One person said, “How odd to imagine...” another “Oh golly, how embarrassing!” Another said, “I wouldn’t know where to begin.” Paul Takushi said, “As a bookseller, there are WAY too many to mention.” Elizabeth Morrison: “I know I have done this...”

A note from Michael Grady: “I had to write a report in 9th grade about an epic. I chose the heroic Celtic tale about Cuchulain, but just couldn't get it up to read it. We had to produce a written report and answer a set of prescribed questions. I eventually went to the “Encyclopedia Americana,” read the synopsis, and fashioned a report based on what I found there. The old English schoolmarm read my paper out loud as an example of what she wanted. My friends were later outraged when I told them I hadn't actually read the book. Perhaps it was my handwriting that was so exemplary...”

Book you're an evangelist for... John Fremont named “‘God Is Not Great,’ by Christopher Hitchens and asked, ‘Can one be an evangelical for atheism?’” Other readers recommended: “By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept” by Elizabeth Smart, “The Book of Ebenezer le Page” by G.B. Edwards; “The Trial of Socrates” by I. F. Stone; “Shadow Country” by Peter Matthiessen; “Three Cups of Tea” by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin was named twice; There were many others.

Book you've bought for the cover... Joel Crockett purchased a hardcover copy of “Workin' Man Blues” by Gerald Haslam because “My dad, uncles, an aunt and grandparents are on the cover.”

Final question: A book that changed your life...  "Marjorie Morningstar" by Herman Wouk and “The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency” by Alexander McCall Smith were two surprising answers. Charles Grady wrote, “For me, Hugo's ‘Les Miserables’ was a life-changer; it made me a liberal in a conservative family and ultra-conservative town.”

Paul McHugh named “Visions of Cody” by Jack Kerouac. Russ Harvey named “Catch-22" and added, “My 7th grade biology teacher busted me reading it behind my text book. I just couldn't put it down. I knew then that life would never be fair but would frequently be funny.” Katy Tahja named “The Secret Garden” and said, “I was a handicapped child of the 1950's... there were NO other books about a handicapped kid.”

Other books that have changed lives: “Be Here Now” by Ram Dass. “The Moonstone” by Wilkie Collins. “Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me” by Richard Farina. “The Greeks” by H.D.F, Kitto. “The Critical Path” by Buckminster Fuller.

Thanks to everyone who responded, and to those who gave it some thought but never sent in answers, thanks to you as well. It was an interesting experiment, and you may have noticed by quoting everyone else I never had to answer these questions myself.

I would say, if you asked, that “The Boy’s First Book of Electricity” did not change my life, exactly, but definitely alerted me to the amazing Army Surplus Store on Market Street.

My best friend and I rigged up a telegraph line, complete with clicking keypads, between our bedroom windows. The fact we never did get a signal to pass down the tiny copper wires may have had something to do with resistance of materials, but I’ll never know, because “The Boy’s First Book of Electricity” did not turn me into an engineer.

It was a total failure on that score, but it was fun to build electric things. I do remember that.


NOTES:

The newsletter that started all this...

The complete list of favorite authors:  Jane Austen, Edith Wharton, Henry James, Phillip Roth, TC Boyle, Tom Wolfe, Alexander McCall Smith, Agatha Christie, Wendell Berry, Stephanie Cowell, Michael Chabon  Ursula Hegi, Colin Cotterill, Rudolfo Anaya, Barbara Kingsolver,  William S. Burroughs (“He and John LeCarre and C.S. Forester are not ‘Great’" but their soothing celebrations of the eternal alienated loner and outsider send me back to their words over and over,” said Michael Grady). Richard Feynmann,  Charles Dickens, Victor Hugo, Anthony Trollope, Peter Matthiessen, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Jack Kerouac, Aldous Huxley, John C. Gardner, John Irving, Eric Larson, Simon Winchester, Brian Greene, John Updike, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Shakespeare, Terry Pratchett, Chris Moore. “Today. I have always felt that this is not a fair question.”  Bertolt Brecht, Charles Dickens, Ursula Le Guin, MFK Fisher, Emily Dickinson... “this pantheon is mutable, save for Brecht,” Franz Kafka, Elias Canetti, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Malcolm Lowry, Yeats, George R. Stewart, Ivan Doig, Sarah Andrews, Peter Bowen, Gretel Ehrlich, Robert Heinlein, Robert Pirsig, Ursula LeGuin, Alan Watts, Jim Dodge, Arthur Conan Doyle, Barbara Kingsolver, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Dave Barry, Raymond Chandler, Michael Chabon, James Salter, John Irving, John LeCarre, William Langewische, Malcolm Gladwell, Gene Yang, Bill Bryson, Cormac McCarthy, Rudyard Kipling, D.H. Lawrence, Rachel Ingalls, Rainer Maria Rilke, Dante Alghieri,  Barbara Kingsolver, James Thurber, E.B. White, Geraldine Brooks, Marcel Proust, Shakespeare, Miguel Cervantes, Heinrich Böll, Thomas Mann. Whew.

Questions I should have asked:

Your favorite book when you were 60.

Book you couldn’t finish (in fact, you threw it across the room).

Book you stole.

Book you stopped someone from stealing.

Book you had no idea what the author was trying to say.

Book in a language you don’t read.

Book with unexpected blank pages, pages printed upside down, backwards, missing, on fire.

Book you dreamed about last night.

Book you totally forgot once you put it down.

Book you recommended to someone knowing they’d hate it but you recommended it anyway.

Book you faked reading, but actually you did read it.

Book (or author) you’d never, ever, read, especially if anyone could see you doing it.