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December 2007
How literate is Atlanta?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Atlanta has fallen in a ranking of America’s most literate cities, but it’s still in the top 10, according to a recent report. The report says the city is No. 8 overall, down from No. 3 last year.
The report, from Central Connecticut State University, compiles a lot of statistics, like number of bricks-and-mortar bookstores, ordering books online, and library usage. Apparently, Atlanta is surging in Internet usage (including reading ajc.com and using online stores like amazon.com) but supposedly the number of real bookstores is declining. The figures are for City of Atlanta only.
Does this reflect your life? Are you going to real bookstores less and buying online more? Why or why not?
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Coming in 2008
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
So you got a Borders or a Barnes & Noble gift card and you’re headed out to run that baby down to zero before you lose it? Be my guest, but I thought I’d clue you in on some books coming in January, just in case any of these pique your interest. I haven’t read any of these, it’s just a list I pulled together and tried to make somewhat diverse.
“Duma Key” by Stephen King. Didn’t he retire? Seriously? A new King always has the potential to be interesting, but I worry that these books are being written on a word processor in an attic in Maine and there’s no one there!! Anyway, this one is about divorce, and is set in Florida.
“In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto” by Michael Pollan Anyone who enjoyed Pollan’s “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” will look forward to his next book, a guide to how to eat right and well in the vast, confusing food culture of false claims and pseudo-science.
“Bleeding Kansas” by Sara Peretsky. She’s mainly known for her V.I. Warshawski private eye novels, but this is a big break. It’s a saga of three families in Kansas, and how they interact and conflict today and going back to the Civil War, with a subtext of the culture wars. Good buzz.
“Creating a World Without Poverty” by Muhammad Yunus. The winner of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize writes about enlightened models of capitalism helping the poor.
“The Appeal” by John Grisham. He’s back to what he does best: A jury returns a huge defeat to a big chemical company, which appeals to the Mississippi Supreme Court.
“A Practical Guide to Racism” by C.H. Dalton. Dalton is actually a pseudonym for “Daily Show” writer Sam Means, and his practical guide is a fake book from history that is a spoof of racism. And, word has it, it’s very offensive for those who don’t get this kind of mocking humor. May stir things up.
“The Shooters” by W.E.B. Griffin. Delta Force officer Charley Castillo is back.
“People of the Book” by Geraldine Brooks. The book in question is the Sarajevo Haggadah, a priceless Jewish volume. Brooks, a Pulitzer Prize-winner, starts in the present and works her way back through the book’s history. A good early buzz.
“Living Well With Montel” by Montel Williams. They nixed the original title: “My 14 Year Old is Out of Control!” by Montel Williams.
“The Sweet Potato Queens’ Guide to Raising Children for Fun & Profit” by Jill Connor Browne. A little Sweet Potato Queen goes a long way for me, but she has her fans. She’ll be here Jan. 19 to plug the book.
Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography” by Andrew Morton. I’ll just read the headlines on TMZ.com instead.
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Who’s making bookish resolutions?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I’ve never been a big one for New Year’s resolutions. The biggest changes I’ve made in my life have taken place well outside of January, and were the result of me becoming so fed up with a given way of living that I just forced myself to reform on the spot. But my checkered past is a blog for another today.
Let’s talk about New Year’s resolutions to read more. Or read better. You know, a little more Proust and Austen, a little less Clive Cussler or Candace Bushnell. Again, I don’t normally do these, but last year I promised myself that I would keep a list of every book I read in 2007, and that I would try to surpass 100 books. I did, and I did.
But what I found was that I was choosing shorter books to read sometimes, and reading too fast at other times, to make my 100 quota. And that’s not real reading. That’s the reading equivalent of those guys who eat 40 hot dogs in 5 minutes in speed-eating contests. I didn’t read everything that way, but I read more than I should have.
So for 2008, no real reading resolutions for me. I’m gonna read what I want, although I sometimes read for book reviewing for the AJC or for writing for this blog books that I wouldn’t normally be interested in. I’m gonna enjoy my reading.
How about you? Do you have any book-related resolutions?
How to make a book
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Happy Boxing Day, one and all. I hope you got all the books you wanted yesterday.
I surprised my Well-Read Wife with a book that I made for her, through a company called Blurb. You can visit them here. You download, for free, the software to build a book. You do everything on your PC. Then you upload it back to them, they print it, and mail it to you.
I can recommend this outfit (and I’m not getting anything back from them, I promise). I thought the interface was pretty easy to use, and the quality of the finished book was everything I could want: a real hardback cover, nicely bound, a paper dust jacket, quality paper for the pages. My finished book was 11 inches by 13 inches, 64 pages, and cost me about $45 for one copy. (You can get multiple copies.)
You can do about any kind of book, too. You could write your memoirs, 100,000 words of the story of you, slap a picture of yourself on the cover, and give copies away to everyone at work. Or you could take all your vacation photos in jpg form and make a very cool and different scrapbook.
Anyway, it was a good experience. And what was my book for my Well-Read Wife? You know, not everything has to be shared in a blog.
God bless us, every one!
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
But he was early at the office next morning. Oh, he was early there. If he could only be there first, and catch Bob Cratchit coming late! That was the thing he had set his heart upon.
And he did it; yes he did! The clock struck nine. No Bob. A quarter past. No Bob. He was full eighteen minutes and a half, behind his time. Scrooge sat with his door wide open, that he might see him come into the Tank.
His hat was off, before he opened the door; his comforter too. He was on his stool in a jiffy; driving away with his pen, as if he were trying to overtake nine o’clock.
Hallo!'' growled Scrooge, in his accustomed voice, as near as he could feign it.What do you mean by coming here at this time of day.”
I am very sorry, sir,'' said Bob.I am behind my time.”
You are?'' repeated Scrooge.Yes. I think you are. Step this way, if you please.”
It's only once a year, sir,'' pleaded Bob, appearing from the Tank.It shall not be repeated. I was making rather merry yesterday, sir.”
Now, I'll tell you what, my friend,'' said Scrooge,I am not going to stand this sort of thing any longer. And therefore,” he continued, leaping from his stool, and giving Bob such a dig in the waistcoat that he staggered back into the Tank again: “and therefore I am about to raise your salary!”
Bob trembled, and got a little nearer to the ruler. He had a momentary idea of knocking Scrooge down with it; holding him, and calling to the people in the court for help and a strait-waistcoat.
A merry Christmas, Bob!'' said Scrooge, with an earnestness that could not be mistaken, as he clapped him on the back.A merrier Christmas, Bob, my good fellow, than I have given you for many a year! I’ll raise your salary, and endeavour to assist your struggling family, and we will discuss your affairs this very afternoon, over a Christmas bowl of smoking bishop, Bob! Make up the fires, and buy another coal-scuttle before you dot another i, Bob Cratchit.”
Scrooge was better than his word. He did it all, and infinitely more; and to Tiny Tim, who did not die, he was a second father. He became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old world. Some people laughed to see the alteration in him, but he let them laugh, and little heeded them; for he was wise enough to know that nothing ever happened on this globe, for good, at which some people did not have their fill of laughter in the outset; and knowing that such as these would be blind anyway, he thought it quite as well that they should wrinkle up their eyes in grins, as have the malady in less attractive forms. His own heart laughed: and that was quite enough for him.
He had no further intercourse with Spirits, but lived upon the Total Abstinence Principle, ever afterwards; and it was always said of him, that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge. May that be truly said of us, and all of us! And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God Bless Us, Every One!
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How to get your book club in the AJC
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Hi, I’m Patti Ghezzi, and I pull together the popular What We’re Reading column about book clubs that runs every Sunday in the print edition of the AJC. I often get e-mails from club members who want to be featured.
Here’s how:
Shoot me an e-mail at pattighezzi@hotmail.com requesting a book club questionnaire. I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. If you do not hear from me in a week, please re-send your e-mail. I sometimes get buried in junk and good stuff gets lost.
Once I have your questionnaire, I’ll put you in the queue. I try to feature clubs in the order received, but sometimes that doesn’t work out because two clubs are reading the same book. If I’m backlogged I’ll let you know and get back with you when I have space on my calendar. You may need to update the questionnaire when your turn comes around.
That’s it!
I look forward to hearing from you!
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Winner of the Redneck Dictionary
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I am pleased to announce that in the third contest for The Book Page, the winner is … Jeff. Yes, one of our most dependable and prolific contributors has won my copy of Jeff Foxworthy’s “Learning to Talk More Gooder Fastly: Redneck Dictionary III,” for coming up with his own definition:
Darfur: there for. Friend to a buddy, when told the buddy is going to his ex-wife’s trailer: Whatcha goin’ over darfur?
A couple of comments. Yes, this was the only entry in the contest. But it’s really a good entry, and I think it would have won even if there had been a lot of entries. Which there weren’t. Anyway, well done, Jeff.
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How to find a book club
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Greetings, Book Page. Phil’s still around, I’m just blogging here for a couple of days about book clubs.
I’m having a blast writing the What We’re Reading column about book clubs. It runs every Sunday, and hopefully you’ve seen it. As an avid reader and book club member, I love getting book ideas and hearing how book clubs got started and how they operate.
Often, I hear from book lovers looking for a club to join. I can’t give out e-mail addresses of clubs I’ve featured, but I do have this advice based on how other book clubs got started:
Call your local library branch and ask if they have any book clubs.
Visit your local bookstores and ask if they can help you connect with a club.
Send an e-mail to everyone you know asking if they know of any book clubs.
I am almost sure these three steps, especially #3, will yield several clubs from which you may choose. But if by chance you still haven’t found the best fit … start your own club!
Network with people you know and encourage them to send e-mails to people they know. Let them know exactly what type of club you are looking to form, what kind of books you want to read, whether you will meet on a weeknight, a weekday or on the weekend, how often you want to meet and whether you want the club to be women-only, men-only or co-ed etc.
Take the ball and run with it. Yes, you will be on the hook for organizing the club until it gets its sea legs. But as many of the club members I’ve featured will tell you, it’s worth it.
This is how my club got started last year. My friend Kathleen sent out an e-mail to various friends she thought might be interested. And now, many books, laughs and good times later, here we are. We still don’t have an official name, but I always refer to our club as “Six Degrees of Kathleen,” because everyone in the club is somehow connected to her, including a friend I recruited at a playgroup. “Oh, Kathleen Kelly,” she said. “I know her.” (They both have children adopted from China.)
So there’s my advice for finding a book club. Tomorrow, I’ll tell you how to get your club featured in What We’re Reading.
Does anyone have any more advice on finding or starting a book club? Things to avoid? Success stories?
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Why don’t men do book clubs?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
We’re going to do three straight entries about book clubs. This is the first, and the next two days will be posts by Patti Ghezzi. Every Sunday, free-lance writer Patti does a nice feature on the print book pages about a local book club, what they’re reading, how they meet, etc. And every Sunday, the club is all female.
Ghezzi says she’s heard of one men’s book club she will feature soon, but that they are extremely rare, and I don’t doubt it. I have a lot of great male friends, smart, interesting guys, but if I ever suggested we form a book club and meet every month to talk about a book we’ve read, they would just laugh out loud, thinking I was pulling some sort of prank to test their reaction.
So for today, two questions:
Are you or have you ever been in a men’s book club? Or a coed club. But one guy and 10 women doesn’t count.
What’s the deal with men and book clubs?
(Pictured: “The Man Show,” Comedy Central)
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Can I get a w00t?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The Merriam-Webster dictionary folks have announced their Word of the Year for 2007. It’s W00t.
Depending on who you are, I’m guessing one of two reaction: “Huh?” or “Meh.”
“W00t,” spelled with two zeroes and rhyming with “boot,” is a popular online term, mainly among gamers and young people, that means “yay” or “hooray.”
There’s some disagreement on where it comes from. Some say it’s an acronym for “We owned the other team,” others say it’s from the old song “Whoot, There It Is,” by 95 South.
The thing is, it’s been bandied around in some corners of the Internet for more than 10 years. So it’s not exactly new. And if there’s any evidence that it broke through to the mainstream this year in some major way, I’m unaware of it.
“w00t” is part of a slang system used online (and also in text-messaging) that messes with alpha-numerics and is called l33t, which means “elite,” as in “used by the elite computer folks.” l33t, like w00t, has been around for awhile if you’ve been wasting time in the wrong places.
So for people who actually use “w00t,” Merriam-Webster’s choice seems terribly dated. It’s like they chose “jiggy” as the word of the year. Those are the people saying “meh” (which is l33t for “I don’t care”). Among those who don’t use w00t, 99 percent have probably never even heard of this whole subculture, so their reaction is “huh?”
What’s your reaction? Is anybody out there saying “w00t” over this Word of the Year?
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Time for a miniature party?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Foxworthy has another book out of his “redneck defnitions,” titled “Learning to Talk More Goodly Faster: Redneck Dictionary III.”
Those Roman numerals let you know this is one class act.
I’m kidding. Foxworthy is someone I’ve talked to many times, and he’d be the first one to laugh about the Roman numerals. I interviewed him again recently, for a story that is scheduled to run Tuesday, Dec. 18, and he talked about this very popular new line of books, which has sort of overtaken his famous “You might be a redneck” bit.
At first, Foxworthy’s redneck definitions really sounded like certain kinds of dialect. But it’s now become just sort of playing with words in a punny kind of way that frequently appeals to verbal kids as well as adults.
For example:
Miniature: More than one adult male. I thought you said you there was gonna be a lot of hot miniature party.
Ferris wheel: Equitable treatment, as applied to a group. The pitcher’s daddy is the umpire, so I reckon that last call is as Ferris wheel get.”
Jeff said that just like with the redneck jokes, people now stop him in the store to give him a definition they think is original, but it’s really from one of his books.
So here’s the challenge: Care to come up with any definitions that are not in one of the books? We’ll take contributions for two days, till Wednesday, then I will declare a winner and send that person my copy of Foxworthy’s “Redneck Dictionary III” in time for Christmas.
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Paul Verhaeghen is kicking my butt
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Have you ever delved into a novel you could tell was amazing, but it was so challenging you didn’t know if you could finish it?
I felt that way about “Ulysses,” and “Gravity’s Rainbow,” and I’m currently feeling that way midway through the new book “Omega Minor,” by Georgia Tech professor Paul Verhaeghen.
It’s really good. And really hard. Verhaeghen is a cognitive psychology teacher at Ga. Tech, and originally from Belgium. He wrote “Omega Minor” in Dutch, then translated it himself into English. It just came out, and Time magazine gave it a huge rave. Read it here.
Verhaeghen will do an appearance and signing at 7 p.m. Monday Dec. 17 at A Cappella Books in Little Five Points, and he was more than willing to indulge me with an interview. The whole Q&A is scheduled to run in Saturday’s paper, and a free-lance review will run in Sunday’s Arts & Books section. I asked Verhaeghen how he would tell someone what “Omega Minor” is about, just because it’s about so much, and this is what he answered.
“It’s the story of two Jewish boys growing up in the 1920s, one escapes just in time, goes to the United States, becomes a physicist, works in the Manhattan Project, and starts having serious doubts about what is happening there with the nuclear bomb. And the second boy stays in Berlin and ends up in the Resistance and in Auschwitz and escapes. And it all comes together in 1995. … So it deals with the Holocaust, it deals with physics, it deals with the nature of the universe. If I have to sum it up in seven words, I say that it’s about the things that make life really interesting: war, love, sex, death, pigeons, food and blasphemy.
Yes, pigeons. But trust me, you’ll remember the Holocaust scenes and the sex scenes a lot more. Verhaeghen can really write, and some of his scenes are just searing.
I’m about 300 pages into “Omega Minor,” less than half way, and it’s a very engaging read in some ways, and a very tough one in other ways. I doubt if anyone here will have had much chance yet to get into it, as it’s just out, but I would encourage you to:
a. Go get a copy and dive in.
b. Talk about your own experience with tackling a challenging book that you worried might end up being too much for you. (To circle back to the beginning, and in the interest of full disclosure, I never finished “Ulysses” or “Rainbow.”) I hope I can finish “Omega Minor.”
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You can’t gripe if you don’t vote
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Entertainment Weekly has put up a series of polls you can check out on its website under the general umbrella “Vote! The Best in Books in 2007.”
We bring you the results, which are still changing as the votes pour in, as a fascinating way of viewing the reading habits of Americans.
The EW editors knew if they just asked their readers for “Best Book,” it would be Harry Potter in the kind of landslide usually found in Cuban elections. So instead they asked readers for the “Best Non-Harry Potter Novel.” Smart plan. But the results will be sort of like “Biggest Non-Michael Vick Pro Quarterback Meltdown.”
Under “Best Non-Fiction Book,” you’ll be pleased to know “The Dangerous Book for Boys” is well ahead of Walter Isaacson’s “Einstein” biography.
(Edited: I made a mistake earlier on another poll question, and feel like an idiot, so I’ve yanked it. If only all of life were like that!)
Hey, it’s an antidote to all the Top 10 novel lists we see this time of year that make us feel stupid cause we haven’t read enough of them.
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And the Band Plays On
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
We mainly pay attention to newer books here, but I’d like to raise a glass to a book celebrating its 20th anniversary: “And the Band Played On,” by the late Randy Shilts. This landmark history of the early years of the AIDS epidemic was published in 1987, when Ronald Reagan was still president. Shilts died of AIDS-related complications in 1994.
Shilts was one of the first journalists to recognize the importance of AIDS as a news story, back in the days when it didn’t even have a name yet, but was sometimes called “the gay disease.” He reported on the outbreak for the San Francisco Chronicle, and used his knowledge from the beat to write “And the Band Played On.”
“Band” was a thorough social and medical history of the disease, written with a historian’s eye but also with a great deal of passion. Shilts let his anger come through, both against President Reagan’s refusal to speak up publicly about AIDS, which could have helped public attitudes and funding, and against the promiscuous behavior of some men who helped spread the disease.
The book was back in the news recently when a study stated that AIDS probably entered the U.S. via Haiti; Shilts had tied it to a Canadian flight attendant he dubbed “Patient Zero.” If events have shown up some parts of Shilts’ history as bogus — and it’s not conclusive that’s the case, from what I can understand — this is still one of the most important books of the last 50 years.
St. Martin’s Press has issued a new 20th anniversary edition of “And the Band Played On.” Thank you, Randy Shilts.
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Lessing on literacy and life today
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Doris Lessing gave her acceptance speech last week for the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Nobel people posted a transcript on their website and I think the speech is a true thing of beauty.
Lessing’s speech is about many things, but it’s partly about her years in Africa, and what she saw there, and life for us in the West today. And the contrast between those two, and how it may relate to books and literacy and the future of literature.
Here are a few excerpts:
“What has happened to us is an amazing invention, computers and the internet and TV, a revolution. This is not the first revolution we, the human race, has dealt with. The printing revolution, which did not take place in a matter of a few decades, but took much longer, changed our minds and ways of thinking. A foolhardy lot, we accepted it all, as we always do, never asked “What is going to happen to us now, with this invention of print?” And just as we never once stopped to ask, How are we, our minds, going to change with the new internet, which has seduced a whole generation into its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging and blugging etc.”
“I have seen a teacher in a school where there was no textbooks, not even a bit of chalk for the blackboard - it was stolen - teach his class of six to eighteen year olds by moving stones in the dust, chanting “Two times two is…..” and so on. I have seen a girl, perhaps not more than twenty, similarly lacking textbooks, exercise books, biros - anything, teach the A, B, C in the dust with a stick, while the sun beat down and the dust swirled.”
“In order to write, in order to make literature, there must be a close connection with libraries, books, the Tradition.”
Your comments?
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Books at the box office
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
It was quite a weekend for people who care about books and what happens when they get made into movies.
Two big movies opened, “Atonement” and “The Golden Compass.” The first is based on the brilliant novel by Ian McEwan, and is aimed at the more Miramax-inclined portion of the movie audience. The second was based on the wonderful fantasy novel by Philip Pullman, the first in his “Dark Materials” trilogy, and was aimed at every being on the planet that draws breath.
I’m not so much interested in gathering opinions about who liked and didn’t like the movies, be it the spooky little girl who played Briony in “Atonement” or the CGI polar bears in “Compass.” I’d rather hear from people who loved these books on whether they thought the movies did justice to their sources.
“Atonement,” I thought, was an amazingly faithful adaptation that not only hit all the right notes from McEwan but found a cinematic equivalent for his style at times, such as the way the Tallis house in 1935 is suffused with repressed sexuality and foreboding, and how startling the ending is. It made me want to go back and re-read McEwan’s novel, and further ponder my first impression: That “Atonement” is one of the best adaptations of a difficult novel.
“The Golden Compass” is, of course, a bear of a different color, and a movie that has to serve more masters than “Atonement” did. New Line wants this to be the next “Lord of the Rings,” and the corporate micro-managing increases exponentially in sync with the potential profit of the merch. (I think there’s a math formula for that.) I thought the movie was pretty good, and got a lot of details right. I’m not wild about the truncated ending compared to the book, but they can make it right in the overall trilogy. I liked it, but still wish it had been better.
Fans of the novels, what did you think?
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What’s your favorite book of 2007?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Here’s a simple question that may be rather hard: What was the one book you read in 2007 that you would like to recommend to everyone here?
I was inspired to frame the year-end question this way by (read: I ripped off the idea from) Paste magazine, the excellent Decatur-based culture mag that covers music, film, books and whatnot. Instead of having book critics come up with snooze-inducing Top 10 lists, where everyone puts Philip Roth at the top, they asked various smart readers to name one book they read in 2007 that rocked them the hardest.
Dave Eggers chose “Life Laid Bare: Survivors in Rwanda Speak,” which I had never heard of. Charles McNair, Paste’s book review editor, chose “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” a brave choice when you’re being judged by other litcrits. Rosanne Cash named “The Kite Runner,” which is actually a couple years old, but she just got around to it this year.
I’m going to go with “Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches From America’s Class War,” by Joe Bangeant, a book I have mentioned previously, as the one book I read in 2007 that I would like all of you to read.
According to his blog, Bangeant is a Vietnam veteran who became a hippie, then a journalist. He moved back to his hometown of Winchester, Va., a blue-collar, economically struggling small town he loves but sees differently from the people who have always lived there and never left.
Bangeant writes about the real people in his town, whom he knows inside out, and not like a reporter who has just parachuted in for a month. They are people with serious health problems but inadequate health insurance (or none at all), who work and shop at Wal-Mart and listen to country music and love their country and don’t go in for a lot of irony or using air quotes when they talk.
These are the people that every politician tells us are the real Americans, and yet as Bangeant shows, they are getting shafted in so many ways by the government, society, the media, the Machine, whatever you want to call it. He does not spare either political party, and both liberals and conservatives, if they approach with open minds, should be squirming over how Bangeant frames the issues facing these people.
It is hilariously funny, very angry and somewhat depressing.
So here are my two calls to action: Go buy “Deer Hunting with Jesus.”
Then tell us what one book you read in 2007 (published whenever) you would recommend, and why.
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Boomer bust
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Feeling lethargic? Run down? Like you just got run over by a school bus full of hippies?
You may be another sufferer of Boomer Fatigue. This syndrome afflicts anyone, born at any time, who just gets sick of hearing about the Baby Boomers and the ’60s.
I’m a Boomer, and went through the ’60s, so this is my g-g-g-eneration we’re talkin’ ‘bout. But when I picked up Tom Brokaw’s new book, “Boom! Voices of the Sixties: Personal Reflections on the ’60s and Today,” and realized it was 662 pages long, I was overcome with Boomer Fatigue before I began. So I skimmed some big chunks of it, and read some reviews, and crossed it off my list.
The Sunday Arts & Books section will have a review of “Boom!” (Not by me.)
Brokaw is in Atlanta Thursday, Dec. 6, speaking and signing at the Atlanta History Center. Both seatings are sold out, but I’ve talked to Brokaw several times over the years and know he is a very smart guy and a marvelous raconteur, so those in attendance will not be sorry.
“Boom!” is No. 3 on The New York Times non-fiction bestseller list, and doing well on Amazon.com, but why do I think a lot of those sales are from Echo Boomers buying the book as a Christmas present for their stuck-in-the-’60s parents?
“Boom!” suffers some for being in the shadow of Brokaw’s 1998 book “The Greatest Generation.” That oral history, about the generation that came of age during the Depression and fought and won World War II, seemed to resonate for everyone. The term itself has entered the language as almost indispensable, like Tom Wolfe’s “Me Decade.” Brokaw’s reverent tone might not have been that of the detached historian, but it fit perfectly.
“Boom!,” despite a lot of effort, never felt to me like it was on any particular track. Brokaw (who worked at WSB-TV in Atlanta briefly in the mid-’60s as a young reporter) has talked to a lot of people, and not just the people who were making noise at the time. He talked to Karl Rove, for example, who was a high school student and “complete nerd” (Rove’s words), and Wall Street Journal columnist Dororthy Rabinowitz. This helps provide the needed perspective that not everyone in the ’60s was turning on and dropping out.
On reflection, maybe my problem is not so much with Brokaw’s book per se as with the whole Boomer nostalgia phenomenon. I understand completely how important the 1960s were in changing the world, and how in many ways we are still coping with the fallout, including during this Presidential election.
It’s just that there’s so much of it, from Rolling Stone’s recent endless celebration of its own 40th anniversary to what is certain to be a tsunami of media retrospectives of the crucial year of 1968. Cue up that footage yet again: Tet, King, Kennedy, Apollo 8.
Anyone else out there, of any age, suffering from Boomer Fatigue? Want to discuss symptoms? Cures?
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My Baby Loves a Bunch of Authors
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Is anyone else a fan of the song “My Baby Loves a Bunch of Authors?” It’s a proudly geeky song by Canadian pop band Moxy Fruvous that has a lot of fun making up outrageous rhymes for various authors’ names, as the singer laments that his beloved is too busy reading them all to pay attention to him.
I’d bet the rent it’s the only pop song that name-checks Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Doris Lessing and Robertson Davies. It was released in the early ’90s, and it’s available on iTunes.
To get you started, here are a couple of Youtube videos. First up we have the band’s official video, which looks like a copy of a copy.
There’s also a cute, strange fan video using anime characters in which you can hear the music better. It can’t be embedded, but here is the link.
Finally, here are the lyrics.
Anybody want to give a little love for “MBLABOA?”
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Bad Sex in Fiction Award
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Well, it was a dirty job, but somebody had to do it, so once again the Literary Review, a London magazine, has brought forth its annual Bad Sex in Fiction Awards.
I won’t keep you in suspense. This year’s winner is Norman Mailer, who died last month after a towering career and then got this.
“We are sure that he would have taken the prize in good humor,” the judges said at a ceremony last week, and, seeing as how it’s Mailer, they may be right. He was “honored” for a sex scene in “The Castle in the Forest” in which Adolf Hitler’s parents conceive the dictator.
Much of the fun of the “Bad Sex in Fiction Awards” stems from their focus on serious, frequently literary, writing from our best writers, rather than picking on cheesy soft-core porn paperbacks. On the short-list (Brit-speak for “nominees”) this year was Ian McEwan’s “On Chesil Beach,” which is about a bad wedding night, and Christopher Rush’s novel, “Will,” about Shakespeare, in which the bard rhapsodizes about his favorite aspects of Anne Hathaway with a little more specificity than we might like. Paul Theroux and John Updike have been short-listed in the past.
Sometimes, though, readers need to take the awards with so many grains of salt. Or saltpeter. Sometimes a talented novelist writes a sex scene because it’s his or her intention to evoke disgust, or make you think about what’s happening in a specific wayt. Such is the case with Gary Shteyngart’s novel “Absurdistan,” a deftly written book I highly recommend, even though the passage on the LitRev’s website is pretty gross. That’s the point. Same with McEwan’s “Chesil Beach,” and with a recent winner, Tom Wolfe’s “I Am Charlotte Simmons.”
Let’s keep this PG-rated, fellow heavy-breathers, but have you read any of the sex scenes mentioned here, and what did you think of them? How does a really detailed sex scene in a novel affect you as you’re reading it? Remember: PG-rated.
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7-Day Author Forecast for Dec. 3-9
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Dec. 3
WordFeast: Food for the Body and Soul. 7:30 p.m. at Horizon Theater. Admission $15 or 15 canned goods for Atlanta Community Food Bank. This benefit combines book signings by local authors and readings by local actors. Signing: Tina McElroy Ansa, Carmen Deedy, Jim Grimsley, Robert Earl Price and Janece Shaffer. Reading: Tom Key, Brenda Bynum, Larry Larson, more.
Frank Warren. “A Lifetime of Secrets.” 7 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. at PushPush Theater, 121 New Street, Decatur. Warren runs the website PostSecret, where people send in their secrets anonymously. He’s turned them into a couple of books, and they can vary from amusing and flip to unbelievably sad to just wonderfully human. He’s joined onstage by Davy Rothbart, editor of Found Magazine, which lives in the same sort of semi-private world as PostSecret. They’ll talk about their work, then Warren will sign books. Tickets are $20, and proceeds benefit National Hopeline Network, a suicide prevention group.
Dec. 5
Richard Mason. “The Red Scarf.” 7-10 p.m. at the New World of Coca-Cola at the Atlanta Press Club Holiday Author Party. Mason’s novel is inspired by his childhood in rural Arkansas in the ’40s, and and follows the adventures of a 12-year-old boy who wants to buy a $15 red scarf for the prettiest girl in his 7th grade class for Christmas.
Dec. 6
Nathan McCall. “Them.” 6 p.m. at Margaret Mitchell House. $10 for non-members. McCall, an Atlanta writer and scholar who currently teaches at Emory, has gotten very good reviews for his debut novel. It’s set very in contemporary reality, however, as black Atlantans in the Sweet Auburn area cope with gentrification efforts from white Atlantans.
CANCELLED. Tommy Hilfiger. “Iconic America.” 7:30 p.m. at Borders Buckhead.
Philip D. Beidler. “American Wars, American Peace.” 7:15 p.m. at the Decatur Library.
Ben Tanzler. “Lucky Man.” 7:30 p.m. at Wordsmith Books in Decatur.
Dec. 8
Jeff Foxworthy. Noon-2 p.m. at the Wal-Mart Supercenter in Loganville. Atlanta’s gift to reality TV (“Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader?”) will be signing his latest book, “Jeff Foxworthy’s Redneck Dictionary III: Learning to Talk More Gooder Fastly.”” Boy, a Wal-Mart on a Saturday before Christmas with Jeff Foxworthy inside. No crowds expected there.
Dec. 9
Mary Kay Andrews. “Blue Christmas.” 1-3 p.m. at the Holiday Market, Community Club in Avondale Estates, part of the Avondale Tour of Homes. Kathy Hogan Trocheck, a close personal friend of this blog, will be signing her books, including those she writes under the name Mary Kay Andrews. Then you can head on over to her house and tromp right through it - how often can you do that with a beloved author? Good for you for doing this, Kathy; when it’s over, I’ll buy you a drink. For more information, go to www.avondaletourofhomes.com.
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