Two New Books I Really Like (With Pictures)

It's been a bit of a whirlwind day/week/month here at Green Apple, and sort of in my life, too. So perhaps it's in search of some simplicity that now, sitting down to blog, all I want to do is tell you all about two of my favorite new books, and to show you what beautiful pictures they have. Don't be fooled, though -- though both of these books are heavily illustrated in some form, they are Very Serious (but oh so delightful) Books. 

The first is Antigonick, the hotly anticipated (er, hotly anticipated by me) new translation/interpretation of  Sophocles' tragedy by the incomparable Anne Carson (and published, beautifully, by New Directions). Re-working a classic tale is nothing new for Carson, a classical scholar whose work often either references, re-tells, or analyzes ancient Greek literature, but her particular style of translation is so unique, poetic and adaptive that it must be read as poetry all its own (creative liberties included -- as in her previous work, Carson often alters the spellings of characters' names and broadens the restrictions of space and time, allowing her, in this case, to reference to Samuel Beckett and Virginia Woolf in the first five pages of a story from 440 BCE.) What really makes this book a lovely object to leaf through, though, is Bianca Stone's beautiful accompanying illustrations, done on translucent pages that overlap Carson's handwritten text. Turning each page feels something like dusting off a relic. 

Despite its modern voice, its wit and its aesthetic charm, Carson is not one to make the tragedy of Antigone easy on the casual reader. And in case you're not familiar, it's a doozy. If you are familiar with Greek tragedy at all (SPOILER ALERT for every Greek tragedy), it won't surprise you to know that pretty much everybody kills themselves by the end, while the Chorus doth protest and mourn and hem and haw. It's great, in a way best summed up by this page:

As Simon Critchley once wrote, "tragedy is like Guinness. It's not supposed to be good for you."

My other favorite book of late is my new kids' "staff favorite", and has been nearly impossible for me to talk about without forcing whatever patient listener I've tricked into listening into full-blown story time mode -- every picture must be shown, every detail of the adventure recounted. Its debatable classification as a kids book aside, this beautifully (and not particularly briefly) written book also has its roots in the oldest of stories, a journey fit for its own Joseph Campbell PBS special. The book is Taka-Chan and I, originally published in 1967 and now in a re-issued edition by the NYRB Children's Collection. It's narrated by Runcible, a Weimerarmer who, according to his author bio, is a firm believer in broadening international understanding ("The world would be a better place if more dogs would travel", Runcible says.) He knows, because, according to this story, he once dug a hole all the way from his home on the beaches of Cape Cod to Japan, where he met a little girl named Taka-Chan. This and all of the adventures that follow are documented in the stunning photography of Eiko Hosoe, and, well, c'mon. Look at this pair and just try not to be charmed to smithereens. 

 

       

Turns out, Taka-Chan is being held captive by a fearsome sea dragon. In order to free her, Runcible must find the most loyal creature in all of Japan and lay a flower at his feet. The challenge is accepted, the quest begins. 

I won't give away the ending, but let's just say this is a hero's journey, not a Sophoclean tragedy. No reader will close this book with a heart un-warmed. I can't recommend this highly enough for anyone, of any age, with two feet or four. 

"Whose Real?": An Interview with Miranda Mellis

I first discovered Miranda Mellis through her novella The Revisionist -- a poetic, unsettling, gorgeously illustrated tale, and one of those one-sitting reads whose imagery lingers and rattles around the mind for many sittings (walkings, dreamings) thereafter. So I was delighted to pick up her newest collection of similarly fantastic short stories, None of This is Real, and to see that it was published by the tiny local Sidebrow Books, and even more excited to frantically phone in an order for every copy in stock in order to get it in the hands of our Apple-a-Month Club subscribers for April. 

Long story short, a tentative but effusive email correspondence ensued, and thanks to Miranda's kindness, local-ness, and professed love for Green Apple, last month we were able to send subscribers an extra special package, which included signed copies of None of This is Real as well as a three page interview with the author herself. Subscribers got first dibs on the hard copy, but here is the interview in its entirety. Welcome to the world of Miranda Mellis -- here lost souls grow strange appendages, a line for coffee becomes a sort of quotidian purgatory, children must contend and compete with the both the failures and the mysticism of their ancestors, and every word is at once startling and perfect. Enjoy. 

Green Apple: Hi! What are you reading now?

Miranda Mellis: Right now I am reading The Weather in Proust by Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick; Ugly Feelings by Sianne Ngai; A Year From Monday by John Cage; Debt by David Graeber; The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead; Best European Fiction 2012 edited by Aleksander Hemon; Culture of One by Alice Notley; The Ravickians by Renee Gladman; and Satan’s Stones by Moniru Ravanipur. 

GAB: What were you reading while writing the stories in None Of This Is Real?

MM: I probably can’t do this question justice as the process of finishing these stories unfolded over several years and the reading list would be too long and hard to compile. I will mention a book that is definitely an influence on None of This Is Real and that is Touba and the Meaning of the Night by Iranian author-in-exile Shahrnush Parsipur, who is one of the world’s greatest living novelists but somewhat unknown outside of Iran. Touba, the main character in the novel, is an Iranian woman who longs to become a scholar and mystic but is hampered at every turn by gender oppression. The book spans over 150 years of Iranian history. This book really taught me something I’ll never forget about prophesy, knowledge and power. I urge everyone to seek her out and read her work. Other authors whose work has definitely had an influence on this book are Robert Walser, Bob Glück, and Thalia Field. Kafka, Beckett, and John Cage are constant touchstones. 

GAB: Do you bookmark or dog-ear?

MM: I bookmark, dog-ear, annotate, highlight, pencil, pen, sticky and post-it all over my books! They get very collage-d. The day after I got my copy of Ugly Feelings a few weeks ago it was accidentally submerged in a puddle of tea and it immediately swelled up. It was softened by its spill; now it feels more like fabric than paper to the touch. It’s all stained and bloated which seems perfect for what it is exploring, ugly feelings! 

GAB: In None of This is Real, the characters are grounded in realistic circumstances which are then turned on their head (or slightly tilted) by the fantastic or surreal. Do you start with the real and imagine ways to undo it or do you approach reality through the lens of the fantastic? Or does your process unfold in a different way?

MM: One definition of the real is that it is a delimitation of that which is legible and perceptible to a given being. That said, perhaps an absurd, extreme, surprising, or improbable metaphor, if it is apt, can work on multiple levels in a way that a more readily expected one may not. {Main character} O’s painful, confusing fin in {the titular story in} None of This Is Real, for example. The fin is real for the protagonist. I imagined the fin as both an adaptation and the onset of a premature reincarnation, and I committed to that conceit, and to that double-meaning, in the writing. 

For me, the fact that O can only discover what he is becoming by means of occultists {in the story, O visits a palm reader} describes an epistemological crisis and a kind of political paralysis in the face of the incredible gaps and the outrageously disproportionate distributions of knowledge and agency in a class-based society that protects the rich, and exploits and disenfranchises the rest. The fantastical, or absurd, is in this sense the real, or the everyday, in that our everyday lives are outrageously pressurized in ways that we become habituated to, that become invisible, and then rear up in all sorts of painful intensifications, symptoms and so forth. Forms of magic – magical thinking, magical transformations, and magical actions – represent reachable, alternative forms of agency and knowledge in lieu of political power for the disenfranchised, abandoned, and oppressed, and this often includes children and youth, on whom the stories in this collection are most focused. 

By the way, I’m not recommending magical thinking in this book! I’m just trying to think why it becomes a tool and how magic/magical thinking itself in all its complicated manifestations, from manic self-delusions of grandeur, to the clairvoyant, the synchronistic, the Gnostic, and the pagan, becomes useful. I feel dream logic and magic at work in the world, and there is a reason why O gets his information from psychics and books. But it is complicated isn’t it? People turn to prophecy when they feel out of control, when they feel they can’t understand or have a say in their future. What is the difference between seeking prophetic knowledge and seeking political agency?  I use the fantastical, the absurd, and the surreal to try to explore the contradictions there.

To your initial question about my approach to the interplay between the fantastical and the real, I can say that I don’t feel bound or beholden by any one genre, but see genre as a tool. What sorts of genres, or time frames, are available to contemporary storytellers to describe the utterly crazy-making conundrums of being a person? For my part, the purely imaginary is part of the real; it seems to me there are many realisms. One can always ask, Whose real? Which one? 

GAB: You co-edit a really cool thing called The Encyclopedia Project, described on its website as “part reference book, part literary journal {in the} form of the encyclopedia-from general layout to cross-referencing-as a venue for publishing new, innovative literary works.” What is interesting to you about the form of the encyclopedia, and what do you think is its importance and relevance in what is, for lack of a better/smarter-sounding term for this particular information age, the age of Wikipedia?

MM: The etymology of encyclopedia has to do with expanding circles of knowledge. We’re interested in doing that, and in the idea that a reliable source of information about a given term could come in the form of a story, a lyric essay, a hybrid cross-genre text, or a piece of art, and not solely from scientific, taxonomic, academic lexicons. We’re playing with ideas about canon, knowledge, and expertise, emphasizing the poetic, subjective aesthetics of the encyclopedic form as an expression of knowledge formation. We see the encyclopedia as a horizontal, community art form and knowledge itself as something collectively formed. Pluralism is at the heart of what we’re up to. Wikipedia is also a community-based form for knowledge sharing and acquisition, but our emphasis is on literary art and we’re committed to the print book not just as a fetish (though there is that!) but as an analog, affordable and accessible object that doesn’t rely upon electricity (after its been produced) to be read. 

GAB: What encyclopedia entry (one word or phrase) that could go in the upcoming installment of The Encyclopedia Project (which is the letters L-P) would best sum up your current state of mind? 

MM: Purposiveness without purpose.

GAB: Everyone´s hollering about the doomed state of the print book these days. Do you buy it? Are these the end times, or just the changing times, and if it´s the latter, what do you think is changing for the kind of writing and publishing you do?

MM: My understanding is that there are more books in print now then ever before. Perhaps over a million books a year are printed. But are there fewer readers? I don’t know. I think the kind of writing and publishing I do is likely to remain marginal, regardless the state of the book, but who knows? Perhaps I’ll accidentally write something popular some day.

GAB: Favorite food in the Inner Richmond?

MM: Burma Superstar!

GAB: If you could have a “staff favorite” on display at Green Apple, what would it be? 

MM: I’d vote for the recent reissue of another edition and translation of Women Without Men: A Novel of Modern Iran by Shahrnush Parsipur.

(Note: Thanks to Miranda, we’ve now got both of the Parispur books mentioned in this interview on order for our shelves.)

We are also pleased to be hosting Miranda for a reading along with the incomparable Anna Joy Springer (author of The Vicious Red Relic, Love) at Green Apple on Friday, May 25th at 7:30 PM. Hope to see you there!

My Secret Least-Favorite Writer

(The writer in question is NOT Malcom Gladwell, I just needed a picture for this post and thought it was a good opportunity to point out the pretty funny Malcom Gladwell Book Generator.)

There is a contemporary author who pretty much everybody thinks is great who I think is not so great, and I'm not going to tell you who it is because I might get fired or killed.

Of course, I'm being a tad dramatic there, but the fear is real -- I've toyed with the idea of writing a scathing (or at least snarky) blog post about this author many times before, and every time, the potential consequences of my unpopular opinion seem to outweigh the satisfaction I would gain and the fun I would have doing it. But what are those consequences, really? And why, you may ask, would I hold back criticism if I feel that it's warranted and that voicing that criticism would help readers make a decision informed by at least one more opinion? It's not like I've been one to bite my tongue before, and I didn't get canned for that one.

In part, it's because the difference between my opinions on V.S. Naipul (linked to above) and my opinions about this author is that I've never read a book by V.S. Naipul, nor would I tell anyone else not to. My comment there was on a ridiculous thing that he said, not on the quality of his writing, and I can, as readers have long been accustomed to doing given the long history of, um, unsympathetic writers, separate the two. The difference is that I think that this one author, the one everyone seems to like who I don't like, just isn't as good as they get credit for being. And, as such, putting a criticism of such an author in a forum like this would be akin to saying "stop buying these books". And that's a statement that gives me some unease, not just as a bookseller, but as a book lover.

I think most booksellers would agree that there are books one sells somewhat reluctantly. Something you'd rather see fade into obscurity because for whatever reason it's bad enough that you wish it wouldn't exist (I've never entertained any hope of that in this case -- this author is here to stay.) Still, this is somewhat of a taboo subject in a literary and publishing culture that is so often considered to be under threat, in which the most commonly expressed opinion is that anyone buying a book, any book, is a good thing, and one that we shouldn't criticize too harshly or it will all just go away and there won't be books anymore.

This, then, is part of the reason why I don't want to name this author: because it feels irresponsible of me as a bookseller to dissuade people from reading anything. But this also isn't just anything: this author is respected, beloved even. Their works are not "popular fiction", they're literature. They are neither "trashy" nor intellectually snobby. If you are reading this blog, I'd bet the odds are that either you've read one of this author's books or been recommended one. I myself have both read a few of this author's books and have recommended them to customers and even friends, if I think it's something that the person will like. Nevertheless, I feel very strongly that there are some fundamental problems with the writing -- laziness with offensive implications, mainly -- for which this author should be criticized.

But I'm not going to do it here. Not because I don't think that there's a merit to literary criticism that is critical, though some have that view. But because my ideal that states that it's a good thing for people to buy and read literature is stronger than my ideal that states that this author contributes, at best, lame things to the popular consciousness.

Am I at peace with that decision? Obviously, not really. I still felt a need to write about it, which is what I do with things I'm not at peace with. What do you think, readers?

February's Apple-a-Month Club selection, or, the trouble with fiction

As our Apple-a-Month subscription service enters its fifth month, we've started to get a few more questions about what our criteria for an Apple-a-Month Club book is. Luckily, there's the vaguely composed something like a mission statement from the website behind which to dodge the question.

Our Apple-a-Month Club selections have very few guidelines: new, paperback fiction is the main criteria, and we endeavor to share something you might not pick up or hear about anywhere else. Other than that, you can expect a variety of literary genres and styles.

The most important part of that, to us, being something you might not pick up or hear about anywhere else. That's both because 1. we don't want to send you something you've already got and 2. we think (and hope) that part of the trust you've placed in us to select a novel a month for you comes from a curiosity about what you might be missing from the world of literature, a desire to try something new.

That said, we thought that the biggest challenges in this new endeavor would be drumming up subscriptions (not a problem, but keep 'em coming) or staying on top of new releases. While the latter has been a by-the-seat-of-our-pants operation to be sure, surprisingly (to me, at least), it's the "fiction" part that sometimes presents a problem.

The problem with fiction, for these purposes, lies in trying to find a fictional world with something approaching universality. While most novels deal with the same Big Stuff, many of the popular contemporary variety tend to anchor themselves in realities -- like "college", "war", or "Iowa" -- that a reader simply likes and relates to or does not. It is, perhaps, for this reason that our small list of past Apple-a-Month club books has so far tended towards the inner life, a subject matter that is just so vague and strange as to almost require a less than linear approach.

In Red concerned itself with the magical humming beneath the surface of a mythical Polish town. Leaving the Atocha Station's primary drama lies in a poet's struggle to find his voice and sense of place. And Invitation to a Voyage peeked into the delicate inner workings of the human search for a home and a purpose, timeless themes in fiction, in a manner both intimate and specific. All of these have been at least somewhat non-traditional, storytelling wise, but in each case that seems to be a response to the very problem we have in selecting recommendations: that fiction must simultaneously conjure a novel world and touch on something true. Trying to come up with books that do this for a few dozen people I've never met has been an unexpected and interesting challenge, one that has made me think about what makes fiction good and relevant in a way that I perhaps never would have otherwise.

February's book, then, epitomized and answered this challenge. It's a genre the author herself would describe as autofiction -- a term that is gaining some literary popularity in its original French to describe a sort of melding of the genres of memoir and fiction. In the case of trying to find a fiction book with a sense of universality to it, this is something of a dream -- because what is it about another's deepest personal experiences and responses that prompts a reader to peer into their own?

Here's our February Apple-a-Month pick: Gwenaelle Aubry's No One, and the accompanying shelf-talker, which more concisely explains its apt-ness and beauty than this long-winded musing I've stumbled into. Read it, buy it, subscribe, and join us in this strange experiment in how to recommend fiction to everyone.

Gwenealle Aubry's No One is a genre-straddling work of tremendous power. In attempting to come to grips with her father's descent into madness, Aubry breaks the boundaries of the traditional fiction/non-fiction divide, creating in the process a blend of memoir and novel. Constructed as a fragmented dictionary -- from Artaud to Woody Allen's Zelig -- this lyrical and heartbreaking work will challenge each reader to examine the ties that bind us to our family, to what it means to love someone who we may never understand.

Ivan Vladislavic's The Loss Library and Other Unfinished Stories

I'd been waiting for Ivan Vladislavic's The Loss Library and Other Unfinished Stories somewhat anxiously since discovering that it would exist. I say anxiously in part because that waiting also entailed hoping that it would, in fact, be what I hoped it would be, though I didn't know quite what that was. (This can be a thrilling but somewhat stomach-tightening process in discovering a book that seems to be just what you were looking for -- I've left a book unopened for a while simply because I'm afraid that it won't speak to me as directly as its title does, or that it won't end up being about what I want it to be about). What I do know is that lately, I've had somewhat of an insatiable appetite for books that are in a roundabout way about writing -- to get at some sort of truth about process, perhaps, or simply to understand what writing is better.

The Loss Library, as lovely a thing open as it is closed with its accompanying illustrations, did not disappoint.

Ivan Vladislavic describes this collection of stories he hasn't written (plus the completed titular story that deals in books his predecessors haven't written) as a gathering of "unsettled accounts" or "case studies of failure". But while I appreciate the soul-baring nature of such statements and can relate to the sentiment, as reader, I felt nothing akin to failure or unsettledness. I would instead describe the collection as being an account of circling things -- ideas, characters, research, inspiration -- in a way that brings them into such a clear focus that, in the end, the fictionalized version needn't exist at all. What exists instead is something I find much more interesting: a map of sorts through the formation of the idea itself.

In The Last Walk, he begins with an idea to write about a writer who dies while walking to his favorite vista in a winter landscape -- a thought inspired by the famous photograph of Robert Walser dead in the snow on his own such walk. In preparing to write the story, he instead finds himself "preoccupied with hats", preoccupied with how a photograph documents a moment (quoting Geoff Dyer), and disappointed to discover a photograph of the same scene from a different vantage point that alters some of the enigma that drew him to the image in the first place. In Gravity Addict, a story idea of a woman who is writing a book called The Art of Falling instead becomes a thought about Don Delillo's account of the World Trade Center collapse. In Mrs. B, his research for a fictionalized account of the Burden Expedition in search of the Komodo dragon leads him to dislike the real people involved so strongly he can't see fit to continue with the project -- leading, then, to this strange and dismal thought:

In a gloomy corner of hell reserved for readers, the damned clutch copies of the books they dislike most. The masters of scholarly misunderstanding and the critics who turned a profit on review copies fight over the armchairs in which no one may sit. Instead, they crouch in the corners, where a little light lingers, trying to decipher the notes on the backs of their hands. Sometimes they open the books they carry and gaze dumbfounded at the space between the lines. The room is lined with shelves and the shelves are crammed with books, more books than you could read if you lived to be two hundred years old, but the damned, who have all the time in the world, are not allowed to touch.

To which I can only say: yeesh.

The more wonderful aspect of this image, though, approaches what is wonderful about this collection of essays as a whole: that image of a room lined with more books than you could read if you lived to be two hundred years old. Doesn't that line make your heart leap a little bit at how much knowledge there is in the world? When you think about that, don't you kind of panic, want to simultaneously absorb everything you can and also move on to the next thing because OH MY GOD THERE'S SO LITTLE TIME FOR ALL THIS STUFF? That's how I feel. That, at its most heartfelt and poetic and urgent moments, is how this book feels. And it is, I think, an honest, lovely, and heartbreaking way to think about not only writing but also reading -- always an expedition, always something of a race against the clock, always an attempt at something, often a desperate one. But nothing beats that feeling when the thing you're trying to trying to describe gets drawn close enough that you no longer feel a need to describe it. The Loss Library is an account of that, over and over. The word "failure" has no place here at all.

On Not Reading

To be with the one I love and to think of something else: this is how I have my best ideas, how I best invent what is necessary to my work. Likewise for the text: it produces, in me, the best pleasure if it manages to make itself heard indirectly; if, reading it, I am led to look up often, to listen to something else. I am not necessarily captivated by the text of pleasure; it can be an act that is slight, complex, tenuous, almost scatterbrained: a sudden movement of the head like a bird who understands nothing of what we hear, who hears what we do not understand.

Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text

For being an easily distracted person, I've always sought out somewhat distracting environments in which to read. Some of this impulse is nostalgic -- reading to the sound of a football game on TV or clattering dishes, for example, are comforts from childhood -- and sometimes it feels necessary to have the extraneous noise to tune out to give me incentive to narrow my focus.

Last night, though, while reading what is so far a very good book in such an environment, I suddenly sat up straighter with a startled feeling, like I'd just come around a corner in my own brain and caught myself doing something that always makes me feel guilty. People don't often admit to this, but they do it too, right? I realized that for at least a few pages, I hadn't really been reading.

The practice that I'm referring to is different from drifting off while reading, staring at the page thinking other thoughts. I was, actually, moving my eyes from line to line. Probably every sixth sentence entered my brain in a real, resonating way. I turned the pages at my regular pace. I wasn't really listening to anything going on around me. I wasn't thinking about anything else in particular, just occasional thoughts coming and going, like they always are. I was simply reading without reading.

I'll be honest: this happens a lot.

This confession would probably confuse some of the people who think of me as a reader. I've often been told how absorbed I appear by books, how specifically and passionately I speak about them, how much I seem to enjoy reading, and it's true -- there are few things in the world I like more. But, just like sometimes we read to escape, sometimes to learn, sometimes to entertain, I think we must admit that sometimes we read just to be reading, and that this sort of reading is not an exclusive mental activity. There is shame in this, like we're doing it wrong, right? But is this kind of reading less valuable than any other? I enjoyed the experience, I felt satisfied with my progress in my book (which, no, I will not name, lest I recommend it here sometime in the future and, despite my pleas that you understand this phenomenon, you think that I'm a faker and the book must be boring) and put it down with a desire to pick it up again soon. I'm not going to re-read those sentences I missed. I didn't need them. The ones I did need found their way in. Am I alone here? Or is this what reading is, and the part that I've been doing wrong is feeling like I'm always supposed to be doing it better?

The Best Books We Read 2011

2011 was, for whatever reason, a year of literary obsessions for me. On a few occasions this took the form of re-reading the same book over and over (which I did with this one, this one, and this one. Don't ask.) Themes have also taken hold, like my current curiosity about the mythology and impact of the Brontes, which has resulted in a reading stack consisting of this, this, and this.

But the most surprising and wonderful literary fixation I developed this year hadn't happened to me for quite some time: I discovered and developed a voracious appetite for the works of a single author, and for a few months straight, every time I put down one of her books, my fingers itched for another. I would entertain the idea of reading something different, pull a book from the shelf and place it next to my bed with the best of intentions, but when it came time to open one I'd find myself grasping for that distinctively orange Penguin spine. For this is the year I became an Angela Carter addict.

I'd been reading around Carter for a while, despite knowing that she was up my alley. Then one day I finally picked up the short story collection Saints and Strangers and, leaning against a shelf at Red Hill Books, read the opening paragraph of the opening story: a description of the oppressively humid summer weather which some say resulted in the famous Lizzie Borden axe murders. The subject matter alone hooked me, but it was the breathtaking sentences, each one draped atop the previous in a featherlight perfection that downright chills even as it makes you sweat, that really made me weak in the knees. And so my summer of Angela began.

Those that I loved most were her short stories, some collections of which have gone out of print but are all available in Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories of Angela Carter. If this body of work has a theme, I could only describe it as hauntings. In The Bloody Chamber, the eeriest qualities of fairy tales are expounded upon to the point where they resonate with an uncanny familiarity that is nothing like the Beauty and the Beast you consciously know. My two favorite collections, Saints and Strangers and American Ghosts and Old World Wonders, echo with distinctively American mythologies of tragedy, piousness, fate and ruin -- a particularly unruly set of ghosts to pin down. Even the collection Fireworks, unique in the fact that most of the stories therein are narrated in the first person by a contemporary voice that could be Carter's own, wrestles with the phantoms of self -perception and the narratives constructed in day-to-day loneliness. What's truly remarkable is that despite the familiar terrain of her subjects -- fairy tales, well-known lores, and the most basic struggles with personhood -- almost every sentence in this book astounds.

Having devoured Burning Your Boats, I moved on to her novels, which feature writing just as impeccable as their immersive, magnificent plots. My favorite of these was Wise Children, the story of stage sensations Dora and Nora Chance and a hilarious and clever nod to good old Shakespearean comedy ("tragedy that happens to other people"), which probably contained hundreds of winks to the Bard of which I understood like four. But that was okay, because I like books that make me want to be smarter (why else read?) and because the story has every great premise and lives up to them all: fiercely independent and quick-witted old ladies, multiple generations of twins, cases of mistaken identity, paternity mishaps, a real wedding, a fake wedding, revenge, a donkey costume, births, deaths, and everything in between -- and it all takes place in one day (with many a dive into murky memory). It was Carter's last novel before her death in 1992, and it's the literary equivalent of high-kicking off the stage to a fireworks show, hook and fat lady be damned.

I can think of no better end to a hell of a year than on that note.

On Reading, Recommending, and Being in a Room With Joan Didion

When I was fifteen years old and a reluctant new resident of California, my favorite teacher put a warm photocopy of Joan Didion's essay Los Angeles Notebook in my hands. The essay is Didion's psychological inquiry into the phenomenon that is the Santa Ana winds, which were blowing (wafting, careening) through Southern California at the time. The piece, in stunning, precise, aching language, stated something that I deeply felt: these winds make people totally nuts. But it meant something more to me, too -- that this place that seemed like an amorphous sprawl of cloudless 70 degree days did in fact have some extremity to its climate, a collective lore, and for lack of a better term, a soul. I wrote an essay about that essay, probably pretending to do so begrudgingly but secretly thrilled and electrified by the opportunity to pick up and examine each piece of the language. My relationships with the winds, with California, with reading and with writing were never quite the same.

Ten years later, nearly to the week, I was lucky enough to hear Didion speak as part of the City Arts and Lectures series at the Herbst Theater on Tuesday night. I had read more of Didion's writing in the last 10 years -- mostly her essays, though I also spent a strange weekend with The Year of Magical Thinking, her memoir about the sudden and unrelated losses of both her husband and daughter (a difficult book to make it through, though I didn't realize quite why until she offered one explanation to the theater the other night -- "the sentences in that book don't track" she said, an effect she said was inadvertent and makes it hard for her to read them herself now, but which of course mirrors the way dealing with grief is like a constant strain to get from one feeling to the next, a clumsy armful of moments). But I hadn't given a whole lot of thought to the significance of her early influence on my reading, writing, and psyche until on a whim I gave my brother a copy of Slouching Towards Bethlehem -- the collection that houses Los Angeles Notebook -- for Christmas last year. He was 18, had just moved away from California. It seemed timely. Since then, at the wise suggestion of a coworker who found me huddled in a corner re-reading the book when I was supposed to be shelving it, I've put Slouching Towards Bethlehem on our Staff Picks display -- and every time I see it sold, I hope it's been given as a gift.

(An equally timely digression: one of the best things about giving a beloved book as a gift is that the recipient is sort of obligated to have a conversation with you about it at some point, so the book is given back to you in the form of their re-telling. In this case, I was pleasantly surprised to get the call from my brother expressly to say that he loved it, and even more surprised that the essay he had latched on to -- On Self Respect -- was one I had practically forgotten was in the collection. I re-read it immediately, tickled and a little humbled by the rediscovery and the fact that it was my kid brother who'd pointed me to it.)

When Didion walked on stage at the Herbst theater, it all seemed to come together: that stapled printer paper that both justified my California malaise and forced me to examine it, the satisfaction of putting it in someone's hands to whom it might matter, the culmination of a decade of reading and writing in California that wouldn't have been the same without the tiny person on the stage below (she's really tiny).

Now that I've come to the part where I intended to recount key points of the talk, I feel it slipping from my grasp. Which is fitting: when talking about why she had turned down a request to do an interview for a blog speculating about the political future of our state earlier that day, she said that, not having written speculatively on the subject before, she feared it would be an incomplete thought -- "but that," she said "is the nature of a blog, I suppose" (zing!). In addition to reading from and speaking to her newest book, Blue Nights, she spoke matter-of-factly about when she doubts her own abilities as a writer ("every day") what makes a good relationship with an editor ("they think you're just wonderful") and ended every answer during the Q&A portion with the wry challenge "anyone else?"

But the part that stood out the most to me was her response to a question about what she hopes students get out of her work when assigned to read it in class. I scooted to the edge of my seat. "I don't know what they get out of it," she said. "I hope they get a sense of the possibility of language to tell the story all by itself."

Yup, Joan. That's what I got.

"Anyone else?"

Life Lessons

The last week has brought in some exciting new-in-paperback releases (like this one), one of which is Storyteller: The Authorized Biography of Roald Dahl. I haven't read beyond the first couple of pages, and I must admit that I'm not sure if I will any time soon -- my current "to read" stack is piled just high enough that I can put off learning any more about the writer I grew up reading voraciously for now.

That lack of expertise fully disclosed, I've heard plenty of things about the man second-hand, rumors which this biography verifies on its jacket copy alone. I've heard that, while spinning his delectable worlds of joy and whimsy, he was also, albeit in good company, a rather vocal racist, extremely anti-semetic, and an unabashed misogynist. I also read, as a child, his autobiography (which is (hardly) for children), revealing the dark and often abusive environment in which he was raised which no doubt hardened him into a person who doesn't think that people are very good.

These can be rather sad realizations to have about the writer who propelled my sense of wonder through my early chapter book reading years when I devoured every Dahl book I could get my hands on at the school library, the old hardcovers with the plastic-encased dust jackets, with the slightly orange pages and their slippery heft. However, these biographical facts are also not particularly surprising when I think about the important things Roald Dahl actually taught me about the world in those years, which are 1. the world, and the people in it, can be horrible. and 2. there is always the possibility, even in the most horrible and banal of lives (categories into which most lives fit for most of their duration) that magical things will happen.

To illustrate this, and because it was fun, I've put together a brief list of:

Things I Learned From Roald Dahl Books
In honor of the recent release of his biography in paperback.

1. How to poach a pheasant from your landlord

"First of all, you dig a little hole in the ground. Then you twist a piece of paper into the shape of a cone and you fit this into the hole, hollow end up, like a cup. Then you smear the inside of the paper cup with glue and drop in a few raisins. At the same time, you lay a trail of raisins along the ground leading up to it. Now the old pheasant comes pecking along the trail, and when he gets to the hole he pops his head inside to gobble up the raisins and the next thing he knows he's got a paper hat stuck over his eyes and he can't see a thing. Isn't that a fantastic idea, Danny? My dad called it The Sticky Hat."

-from Danny the Champion of the World

2. Lying works really well and sometimes gets you hitched.

Dahl's characters lie their asses off and are met with brilliant success all the time. But here I'm thinking of the plot of Esio Trot, in which an old man who is in love with his old lady neighbor wins her affections by realizing her heart's desire, which is for her smaller-than-average pet tortoise to grow. He claims to do so with a magic spell, but in fact does so by gradually replacing her tortoise with other larger and larger tortoises from the pet store. She's thrilled. They get married. The original tortoise ends up living on a farm with some other girl. This story has no moral. It ends quite happily.

3. It's okay to make your grandmother disappear if she's really unpleasant.

"By then, Grandma was the size of a matchstick and still shrinking fast. A moment later she was no bigger than a pin...then a pumpkin seed...then...then...

'She's gone! She's disappeared completely!'

'That's what happens to you if you're grumpy and bad-tempered,' said Mr. Kranky. 'Great medicine of yours, George.' "

-From George's Marvelous Medicine


4. Never let your guard down around an adult with power and a sharp object.

or: How to stop someone from snoring

"None of us dared to sit up in bed, but all eyes were on The Matron now, watching to see what she would do next. She always had a pair of scissors hanging by a white tape on her wrist, and with this she began shaving thin slivers of soap into the palm of one hand. Then she went over to where the wretched Tweedie lay and very carefully dropped these little soap flakes into his open mouth. She had a whole handful of them and I thought she was never going to stop."

or: How tonsils are removed without anesthesia (or: what doctors mean when they say they "want to look at your nose")

"The tiny blade flashed in the bright light and disappeared into my mouth, and the hand that held the blade gave four or five very quick little twists and the next moment, out of my mouth came tumbling a whole mass of flesh and blood.

'Those were your adenoids,' I heard the doctor saying."

-Both from (the autobiographical) Boy


5. In the very unlikely event that your parents are kind and wonderful people, expect the worst.

"Then one day, James's mother and father went into London to do some shopping, and there both of them got eaten up by an enormous angry rhinoceros which had escaped from the London Zoo."

-from the first paragraph of James and the Giant Peach

6. ?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!????

I don't even know what to say about this one, but it seems worth noting that in The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More there is a short story called The Swan, in which a bully gets a gun for his birthday and forces a boy named Peter who likes birdwatching use it to shoot a swan in the heart, and then the bully cuts off the swan's wings and ties them to Peter's arms, and Peter, horrified at the atrocity he would commit to save himself and completely bereft, tries to fly out of a tree, and then his mother comes and cuts the wings off of him, THE END.

What do you have to say to that, guy who takes a rainbow and mixes it with love and makes the world taste good?


7. If you're a little girl who reads a lot and your family doesn't understand you, you definitely have magic powers.


I'm still waiting.

Maybe How to Live

(Where we will begin.)

I recently had an experience that, if being completely honest, most booksellers would call at the very least wince-inducing: the request for a book recommendation to serve as a gift, and a gift-giver who seems to know absolutely nothing of the recipient except for their age. "I'm looking for a book for a guy who's turning 34", for example. And there the information well seems to run dry. It's like when you would go to company barbeques with your parents and someone would say "Oh, the Whatzitfaces have a son your age, you'll have someone to play with." Except you're a girl and you're 9 and boy children are gross bizarre aliens to you and it turns out that Junior is actually 7 which is a GIANT difference and you both have to sit in the backyard and guess at everything to find anything at all in common with this other life form. Didn't you hate that? These moments can be sort of like that.

The nice thing is that sometimes they can take a turn for the thoughtful. This customer (shopping for a recent high school grad) did have some vague parameters for the book she was looking for, and they were as follows: "Nice", "something that will teach {the reader} something, maybe how to live", "with some pretty pictures or something", and "not a stupid book" (the latter was repeated many times).

She did not say: inspirational, motivational, uplifting.

She did (essentially) say: smart.

I liked that.

Sometimes I think that, particularly in this season of graduations, transitions, and new beginnings, it's easy to default to words like "inspirational", when what we are really looking for out of the world is "intelligent with joy". One is prescriptive, the other descriptive -- one kind of book tells you how to be, the other shows ways that people are and, perhaps most illuminating and comforting, how people have been before you. Of course, books intended to motivate and inspire can serve a wonderful purpose, and sometimes that sort of finger-wagging "just do it, damnit" tone is exactly what one needs to do some bootstrap lifting when life inevitably is very hard. But in general, I am of the opinion that a book that makes your world bigger is better for you than a book that makes it smaller and more about you.

And this is how my vague and tight-lipped gift-giving customer and her could-be-anyone invisible gift-givee have ended up with a copy of Maira Kalman's The Principles of Uncertainty. I recommended this with complete confidence in its ability to meet her parameters.

It's nice:

It has pretty pictures:

It will teach the reader something (maybe how to live):

And it's not stupid. It's smart:

But not, you know, too smart:

And (last but not not least appealing) about we've got it in hardcover for a mere $12.98 (not listed on our website, as it is a remainder, but we've got plenty of copies. Just give us a call).

Intelligent with joy. Off you go, could-be-anyone. This is good for you.

Really?

From The Guardian:

"In an interview at the Royal Geographic Society on Tuesday about his career, V.S Naipaul, who has been described as the 'greatest living writer of English prose', was asked if he considered any woman writer his literary match. He replied: 'I don't think so.'

The author, who was born in Trinidad, said this was because of women's "sentimentality, the narrow view of the world. And inevitably for a woman, she is not a complete master of a house, so that comes over in her writing too," he said.

'I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not. I think [it is] unequal to me.' "

Funny, even with my narrow view of the world I can tell from just one sentence if something was written by an asshole.

You asked for it.

Anyone who's ever visited our website knows that it's a simple creature -- you can read a little about our history, buy (most) (new) books, buy ebooks, learn about events, and probably do a lot of scrolling and squinting. Although a fancier website is on the long to-do list, as is typical of independent bookstores, our website is not the focus of our store. The books on the shelves are, and all their accompanying dust and creaks and whatnots.

But in an effort to have an internet presence that reflects some of the character of our store (and in response to requests from many of you), we are now pleased to announce that our legendary Staff Favorites (both from the main store display and a new case in the fiction annex) are now on the website. Click on a Green Appler's image to see a list of their favorite books and what they have to say about 'em. We add to/change these up regularly, so check back often.

My Emily Dickinson (and a book by the same title)

My dad took me to see Emily Dickinson's grave one day. I remember the wet chill of morning in western Massachusetts in early April and crunching icy mud under my high-tops. The car was a rental. I was a teenager and we were visiting the town in which I was born, which borders the town in which Dickinson was born, which is the town in which she died. She hardly left.

Map of Hampshire County Massachusetts, 1854

I just read and loved My Emily Dickinson by Susan Howe, a poet's book about the life and work of a fellow poet. And "fellow poets" is, fittingly, one of the themes of the book. Through her examination of Dickinson's influence and correspondence -- largely through the lens of one of her best-known poems, My Life had stood a Loaded Gun -- Howe reveals Dickinson to have been astutely aware of the literary community and tradition in which she wrote, even though she famously did so from the confines of her room. While her reclusive habits were likely a result of severe agoraphobia, Dickinson's failure to publish during her life was not, as the story goes, a result of timid self-doubt, lack of awareness of the possibilities of the outside world, or a socially crippling side effect of her spinsterdom. It was, Howe argues, a result of the Calvinist values Dickinson deeply held, learned from her readings and her circles (which, being from a wealthy and well-connected family, she certainly had without having to leave the house). She sent her poems and countless letters to friends, many of whom encouraged her to publish, which she refused on the grounds that fame is an earthly reward and therefore a sin. She was just one of many terrified and freezing New Englanders saving their tokens to cash in in the next realm. But the most interesting point here, as I see it, is this: Emily Dickinson knew quite well that she was a poet. To my understanding of her mythology, this revelation was huge.

It's not an easy book. Howe writes both as a scholar and as a poet herself, her essay style being a cross between densely academic and windy in its transitions between thoughts, brimming with allusions and citations to the point where even the most footnote-conscious reader eventually has to let go of the treasure hunt therein and let text be text. The biggest trouble I had with the book at first, though, was in its often cold treatment of its subject -- for a book called My Emily Dickinson, Howe's is startlingly lacking in the first person. In fact, there is hardly an "I" statement in the entire book, and only the most intellectual sentimentality.



Until now, I hadn't much thought about my own E.D sentimentality. As a reader growing up near her home, I didn't have to think much about Emily to feel like she was just around, enshrined in brick libraries, a field trip destination, wafting spookily past the icicle-laden windows behind which I read. But upon reading this account of the practiced and self-aware craft she refined indoors but with plenty of company, I realized that the Emily Dickinson distinction lies at the crux of something I've struggled with personally for years: is one a writer simply because one writes? Or, in this case, was Emily Dickinson a poet before she died and was immortalized as one? And, if so, is that because she wrote poems, or because she endeavored to be and identified as a poet? Susan Howe's account was revelatory in a way that I didn't realize would unearth my own interest in Dickinson's ghosts.

In my frustration with the lack of an equally personal story in the book, I realized the power, deliberate of course, of its title. Dickinson fits a lot of the criteria for mythologized writers -- a woman in a difficult time to be one, posthumous fame, mental instability, a museum, not to mention the Puritanical tendencies of small New England towns to preserve and be haunted by their centuries-old claims to fame. Because of all this mystery about and evidence of her existence, and because we hardly see proof of her having lived as the person we now know her to be (a poet), definitions of Emily Dickinson are both pervasive and difficult to pin down-- and so, like any myth, they become our own. What's common, perhaps, is that anyone who encounters her has had blanks to fill in, narratives to believe or make up. Even the book's cover reflects this: one of the only and most famous images of our heroine, with her face cut out of it, reduced to the hands she wrote with. It's both inarguably and hardly her, and, perhaps, the only thing that my Emily Dickinson and Susan Howe's have in common.

Emily Dickinson, 1830-1886

That, and this. I'm glad to have been there. I'm glad to have read this book about her. We turned back to the car and left her that day right where she actually is, in the ground.

What becomes

of fear and wonder on a long late night in the annex.

{from http://scimaps.org}

An eUpdate from the eWorld of eBooks

If you're at all a regular reader of this blog (and we know you're out there. Right? Hello?) it can't possibly have escaped your notice that we now carry Google eBooks through our website.

Our transition into this market has been deliberately gradual -- we wanted to make sure the staff was fully trained to help you with any questions you may have before renting the 20 foot banner advertising our new product (for example), and, just as importantly, we've been slowly building an ebook shopping experience for you that almost sort of comes close to approximating the things you love about Green Apple, minus the creaky floors.

This has been getting a little bit easier, as more of the major publishing houses adopt the agency model of eBook sales, which allows us to sell our ebooks at the same price as a (wealthier) entity such as Google. This is great news for us, and for you, as it allows you to still support real live independent bookstores while filling your e-library. And as more ebook options open up and we're able to offer them at competitive prices, we're doing our best to suggest titles to you that are the same ones we recommend
in our store.

For example, if you check out the old (new) Green Apple eBooks Staff Picks section, you'll see an ever-growing list of titles that represent Green Apple's real book taste in ebook form. Click on any of the cover art in this here post for a Green Appler's review (all of which are also available as "real" books with "real" shelf-talkers written by "real" employees of our "real" store.)

I must mention, however, as the person who has spent hours plugging our favorite books into the search bar, that this task has proved to be both occasionally frustrating and a source of pride in Green Apple at the same time. While we're happy to offer bestsellers, local favorites, and books with rightful mass appeal, we are also proud champions of small presses, translated literature, and, frankly, some pretty arcane stuff -- what's more, so are our customers. Unfortunately, though not surprisingly, many of these great and important works are not available as ebooks. As the ebook market is becoming an inevitability and a necessity in the publishing world, many small presses will likely start to offer their titles in this form as well. But to ensure that they're around long enough to adapt to this changing market, we hope you'll continue to check out our recommendations in the store itself, so that you don't miss out on things like this and this and this.

(P.S -- thanks to our ebook customers who've given us feedback on the purchasing process, many of whom suggested some website layout changes. We hear ya. Stay tuned.)