It’s not easy, being a 19-year-old bookseller. I can’t remember a time when the book industry wasn’t on the brink of a potentially catastrophic restructuring, nor can I recall an era before the rise of the internet and ubiquitous cell-phone usage. I am constantly fighting to reconcile my generational ties to the digital age with my deep affection for the old-fashioned brick-and-mortar world of bookselling. While I am very much aware of my contradictory position, I rarely consider the effects that the last twenty years or so have had on the content of the very books I care about so much.

Until now, I’ve taken for granted the fact that cutting-edge digital technology and stories about storytelling rarely co-exist. I’d always found that there was an unspoken rule against combining high-tech plots with stories about the power of books. Even the most forward-looking sci-fi novels exist in the same media as our oldest written narratives, something which their authors seem loath to acknowledge. 

In the past few weeks, though, I read two stories that made me pause. Times, it seems, are changing, and maybe there’s hope for those of us who are young enough to spend much of our lives online yet broad-minded or nostalgic enough to wonder about what is lost in the digital age. That is, members of the Harry Potter generation, riddled with a hipster longing for the analog and accustomed to displaying our ironically low-fi lives on Instagram and Facebook.

The book that first prompted this train of thought was Robin Sloan’s Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. In this debut novel by a relatively young author, a centuries-old cult of readers devoted to the search for immortality meets the brand-new cult of Google employees. Sloan deftly melds a hyper-current information-age sensibility with a bibliophile nostalgia for real-world adventure, mystery, and the smell of aging books. Delightful and unusual as Penumbra was, it wasn’t until I finished G. Willow Wilson’s Alif the Unseen that I decided this combination of myth and modernity was more a trend than a pleasant fluke. Wilson seamlessly intertwines cutting-edge digital technology, ancient Islamic storytelling, and contemporary political struggles into a tightly-paced, high-action tale. A story about information, power, and language, Alif is full of dazzling moments of intersection between a past long forgotten and a future about to emerge.

Both books are relatively unassuming: light, smart pieces of entertainment for people who just want a good story. It’s not spoiling much to say that both include an endearingly predictable romantic adventure, a wealthy-but-hopeless sidekick, and a wise, elderly mentor who helps the hero go through a little bit of obligatory maturation. In both cases the writing is good, but not revolutionary. Alif takes itself seriously where Penumbra is satirical, the former being a relatively conventional sci-fi/fantasy hybrid while the latter relies heavily on a surprising plot designed to tug at the heartstrings of young, techie readers.

What’s striking about Penumbra and Alif is the way in which they embrace books, storytelling, and the information-age reality of the internet as part of an unbroken continuum. In both, ancient tomes and futuristic coding are portrayed as two equally important and complementary ways of approaching the problems facing their respective protagonists. By effortlessly blending seemingly contradictory traditions, the authors create stories well-poised to quell the fears of those who believe modernity is inherently at odds with narrative. Alongside texting and high-speed internet connections, myth and magic still exist.

—Emma

As I tried to reclaim a reading life leading up to and right after the birth of my twins, a friend recommended I stick to reading young adult fiction. Perhaps in an attempt to regress to my own childhood, I picked up a book I remembered fondly: The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George Speare.

The New England witch hunts endure as a fascinating piece of history, and before I graduated to The Crucible,  The Witch of Blackbird Pond whet my appetite for fiction about the era. Set in the late 1800s, this coming-of-age story follows the orphan Kit from her home in Barbados to a Puritan community in Connecticut. The death of her beloved father and a distasteful suitor have forced her to go to America, and Kit is grudgingly taken into her aunt’s family as something of a Cinderella. Although her aunt and one of the sisters are kind to Kit, her fiery uncle and other competitive cousin make her life particularly difficult. Kit’s loneliness prompts her into a friendship with an older widow, Hannah Tupper, who the community believes to be a witch.

For readers who enjoy portraits of everyday life in a different time period, like Civil War era New England in Little Women or the American frontier in Little House on the Prairie, this glimpse of 17th century New England will be a good fit. Alongside Kit’s individual story, Speare brings the political and religious issues of the time to light by using the community’s persecution of Hannah Tupper as a specific example of how the Puritan settlers persecuted the Quakers. Kit’s uncle, Matthew, is deeply involved in early American politics. His passionate commitment to the right of Americans to govern themselves and his desire to break free from England foreshadows the American Revolution.

The most powerful reason this story resonates is the fact that both Kit and Hannah are outsiders in a community where everyone is expected to conform. The Puritans go to church every Sunday and live a life of hard labor, and they persecute and ostracize anyone who wants to live outside that rigid structure. No matter the time period or specifics, the outsider story endures and appeals to most children and teens.

By the end of the book, both Kit and Hannah find a place in the world that finally makes sense and allows them to pursue their own versions of happiness. It’s a hopeful ending that promises good things can come after the struggles of coming of age. As my husband and I welcomed our babies into the world after a difficult twin pregnancy, I found renewal in The Witch of Blackbird Pond in a completely different way than when I read it as a teenager. We’re all still growing up, no matter how old we get.

—Miriam

The first book of Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time introduces us to narrator Nicholas Jenkins and a handful of his friends and relations. We meet Stringham and Templer, his roommates at school, and then their officious headmaster Le Bas, who becomes the subject of a prank orchestrated by Stringham. As the young men leave school and head into adulthood, they start to move in different directions, with the cynical Templer taking a finance job in the City. Jenkins summers in France, where he dabbles in unrequited romance and re-encounters another fellow student, the dogged but inelegant Widmerpool. Jenkins returns to England to take a place at university alongside Stringham, who quickly grows disenchanted with academic life and enters the business world with the encouragement of his glamorous mother, brusque stepfather, and Sillery, a don more interested in establishing social and political connections than in teaching. The novel closes as it began, with the appearance of Jenkins’ itinerant Uncle Giles, as ever obsessed with the imagined injustice he suffers at his family’s hands.

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Well, what did you think of it, fellow readers? Hope you liked it—I did. This is intended to be a forum for voices other than my own, so I don’t want to monopolize opinion, but I’ll get us started by sharing a few thoughts I had as I turned the pages.

The newest season of Downton Abbey began airing in the US just as I was reading the book, and it coincidentally takes place at almost the exact same historical moment that A Question of Upbringing does, the first years of the 1920s. The twin subjects of the television show are society’s elite and the servants who support them, so it was interesting that Powell’s novel mainly covered the experiences of the more middling classes, relatively speaking. It occurred to me that Jenkins, the narrator of QU, comes from approximately the same milieu as Downton’s Matthew Crawley. Before the latter inherits vast wealth and a title, of course.

One of the things I most enjoyed about the book was Powell’s understated humor, as on page 21 when the narrator says, “I spoke more about Stringham, but Uncle Giles had come to the end of his faculty for absorbing statements about other people.” Such an apt, devastating way to sum up Giles’ solipsism. Even though QU is full of meditative insight about human psychology, it also contains many scenes of what could be played as broad, even slapstick, comedy, as when Jenkins misdirects a declaration of love toward his landlady instead of the sweet young thing he’s had his eye on. As Powell handles it, the description is dry and self-mocking, and all the more hilarious.

I’ll be curious to see how the series develops from here, and how many of the characters we meet in the first book reappear in Jenkins’ life. Clearly, some relatively minor figures will, and others who briefly play vivid, seemingly important roles won’t. That’s a very lifelike quality, I find. The odd, inscrutable Widmerpool will certainly be seen again. After he leads the Scandinavian tennis opponents to rapprochement for motives that are unclear to Jenkins, the narrator says, “Even then I did not recognise the quest for power,” and I noted, “More of Widmerpool anon.”

Jenkins himself is probably the most fascinating figure in the book despite how little we really learn about him. He’s at the center of all the action without taking the center of the stage, and is almost staunchly noncommittal in attitude throughout. He seems to have a chameleon-like ability to convince others he’s on their side even when their points of view are diametrically opposed. Is he of Stringham’s party or Templer’s? Or neither? Does he laugh along when Stripling concocts plots to torment Farebrother or frown? It’s hard for us to tell, and it’s hard to tell whether Jenkins knows his own mind about these things.

For me, the narrator’s most emblematic moment of detachment occurs on page 57, when he and Stringham discuss Templer’s suitability for domestic life. Stringham asserts that Templer has none, and asks, “You agree?” to which Jenkins merely replies, “I see what you mean.” It’s a very non-confrontational, Seattle-style response. Sympathy for everyone is ideal in a fictional narrator, but I suspect it’s a detriment in the real world.

But enough of what I think. It’s your turn. Do you agree or disagree? Don’t just say, “I see what you mean.” You can react to what I’ve said or raise a topic of your own. (Those of you who read these posts in your email will want to click the headline at the top of the message to go to our blog site where you can leave a comment.) As an incentive for you to participate, the generous people at University of Chicago Press have agreed to donate some copies of the subsequent volumes in the series. I’ll be randomly choosing winners from among the comments, so if you’d like a FREE BOOK, speak up. Comments will remain open until our next Dance to the Music of Time post (and beyond, if you want to keep talking), so keep the conversation going.

Next up: A Buyer’s Market on February 29th. Available as part of First Movement or separately as an ebook.

—James

Photo from Channel 4’s 1997 TV adaptation of A Dance to the Music of Time.

Whether you’re a fan of John Green or not, I suggest you peruse this New York Times piece from January 16th. It’s startling to discover that authors are taking over more than just the internet. They’re taking over Carnegie Hall. As in, the Carnegie Hall that serves as legendary concert venue to artists such as Yo-Yo Ma and Joshua Bell. A new era for writers has arrived, and I’m not talking about the age of ebooks.

It was just a year ago that I cheered for Green on this blog, and he’s continued taking over the world. An Evening of Awesome, a variety show celebrating the one-year anniversary of publication for John Green’s bestseller, The Fault in Our Stars, played Carnegie Hall to a sold-out house last week. The show starred John Green and his brother Hank, his VLog partner. Besides their riffing, the night included two readings from John Green’s books: the section of the kiss in Anne Frank’s house from The Fault in Our Stars and later, a selection from Paper Towns. In the middle were surprise guest appearances (the Mountain Goats band and author Neil Gaiman), Hank’s songs, including his original Harry Potter hit that made them a YouTube sensation back in 2007 (“I couldn’t care more about Harry Potter / than if Hogwarts was my alma mater…”), and Twitter questions from the audience (predominantly female teenagers). The questions ranged from inane (“Who’s your favorite Power Ranger?) to obvious (“What advice would you give aspiring writers?”). My favorite answer was when Green suggested hopeful authors tell their friends stories and notice when they get bored.

It’s obvious from John Green’s Tumblr that this guy has interests pulling him in all kinds of directions. His fans get to connect with him like no other author out there. But don’t short-change him because of his youthful and spirited persona. He’s the real deal and his books are just as good as their hype. He’s got the writing chops. And he can sell out Carnegie Hall with nothing more than a low-key variety show.

Now that’s talent.

—Miriam

The twentieth century will be American. American thought will dominate it. American progress will give it color and direction. American deeds will make it illustrious.

—Senator Albert Beveridge (1862-1927)

Even if you’re not much of a reader, chances are you’ve heard of The Da Vinci Code and The Kite Runner. They were movies too, after all. But it’s been a few years. No one’s been talking about Dan Brown or Khaled Hosseini in a long time, despite the fact that Brown has sold over two hundred million copies of his six novels and Hosseini has sold thirty-eight million copies of his two books. Well, let the whispering and speculation begin, because these guys are back with new novels in 2013.

Here’s what we know so far: Dan Brown’s new novel, Inferno, is another Robert Langdon adventure, this time returning to Italy (where Angels & Demons took place) and centering around a great piece of literature, Dante’s Inferno. Let me guess—there will be a secret code embedded in the poem. General readers will love the revelations, and scholars will go nuts trying to convince the public that the book is fiction. Religious leaders were beside themselves over the assertions about Christ in The Da Vinci Code, so the Christianity-laced text of Inferno will likely cause as much of an uproar. An obscure author is bound to sue Dan Brown for stealing his idea. And Brown’s love for puzzles and symbols will engage readers once again.

Khaled Hosseini will be offering up his first book in six years with And the Mountains Echoed. The description floating around is so vague it could be about anything. The clearest hints I’ve heard about this one are “multi-generational novel, the surprising actions of those closest to us, lives and loves and choices around the globe.” Let’s hope the book jacket has a little more detail once the publication date approaches, but suffice it to say this will be another tearjerker.

Crotchety readers often sigh when they hear blockbuster authors have another book on the way. “It’s the same old formula,” they complain, or, “his prose wasn’t that good,” or “that last book was so overrated.” Perhaps they fancy themselves another Michiko Kakutani harshly critiquing for the New York Times.

I’ll make an argument for those who only have time to read a few books a year. Sometimes, people want to read what everyone else is reading. Maybe they want to be entertained rather than impressed. A formula that works can be a good thing. There’s something to be said for authors who have the ability to speak to such a broad audience, even if their character development or plot structure isn’t perfect.

Stop by the store in May to inspect the new Dan Brown or Khaled Hosseini (and smell the books—you can’t do that online). We know people will flock towards these obvious choices, even though we love to steer customers to our more obscure favorites peppering the shelves. Booksellers anticipate the big books too, and not just for the guaranteed sales. Whether Brown and Hosseini’s latest turn out to be enjoyable or not, we love seeing customers excited about reading. These authors motivate people who don’t always read to tackle a book, and for that, we thank them.

—Miriam

Writer Evan Connell died last week at his home in Santa Fe. He was 88 years old, and had for decades been peripherally famous in literary circles. His bestselling work was non-fictional, a meticulously researched history of the Battle of Little Bighorn and character study of of General George Custer called Son of the Morning Star, but he was primarily a creative author whose stories took many forms and wore many different styles. There was meditative, philosophical book-length poetry of a kind that’s rarely been seen since the days of ancient Greece and Rome (Notes from a Bottle Found on the Beach at Carmel), a sprawling novel about the Crusades (Deus Lo Volt!), a taut psychological examination of societal and personal degradation in the 1960s (The Diary of a Rapist), a fictitious notebook of medieval science (Alchymic Journals), and…well, that should give you the idea. He had a remarkable career by any standard, with only his refusal to repeat himself or subject himself to categorization keeping him from even wider renown.

Connell’s most acclaimed books were published about ten years apart, in 1958 and 1969. Mrs. Bridge and Mr. Bridge together tell the story of an upper-class Kansas City couple whose superficially secure and comfortable marriage has its foundations shaken by repressed emotion and an inability to cope with change. The novels were adapted into a moderately successful film starring Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, but it didn’t capture the full depth of characterization that’s present in the books. They’re marvels of economy and understatement that have impressed authors from Dorothy Parker to James Patterson. Told from different points of view, the novels are excellent on their own, but read in conjunction they inform and enrich each other dramatically.

Writers frequently employ multiple perspectives in a single book, of course, and they extend a single story across multiple books almost as frequently, but it’s rare for someone to publish a stand-alone novel and then write another that casts the same topic in a completely new light. Or so I believe. Connell’s death got me thinking about this approach, but I couldn’t figure out what to call it or come up with more than a handful of examples.

The first may already be familiar to regulars here. Jane Gardam’s veddy British novels Old Filth and The Man in the Wooden Hat came out in 2004 and 2009 respectively, and they remain popular choices at Island Books. The first of them tells the story of Sir Edward Feathers, a Raj orphan who struggles through an English childhood before heading to the Far East and becoming a prominent jurist—his nickname “Old Filth” is an acronym for “Failed In London, Try Hong Kong.” The following volume, from the point of view of the eventual Mrs. Feathers, reveals many details about their life that her husband keeps hidden when he tells his story, and it shows her to be a far more complicated figure than the one he introduces to us.

Maile Meloy, an American author, published Liars and Saints a decade ago, a novel that depicts four generations of the fervently Catholic but frequently sinning Santerre family. She followed that up with A Family Daughter, in which we find we must unlearn much of what we thought we knew about the characters. According to the latter book, Liars and Saints is an autobiographical novel written not by Meloy, but by one of the younger Santerres. She’s tinkered with family history for the sake of her fiction, and the true version is told in A Family Daughter. I mean, the “true” version. Here, let Meloy explain:

I wrote Liars and Saints first, with no thought of writing another novel about the Santerre family. I really thought I was finished with them.  It wasn’t until after Liars and Saints came out that I started thinking about writing a book about someone who’s written a novel, and about the way people wonder what’s true in it. Then it seemed interesting to have one of the secret-keeping Santerres write one, so that A Family Daughter would seem to be the bigger, messier, less-streamlined source material that Liars and Saints came from.

Asking around uncovered some other pairs that seemed to fit, notably Ender’s Game and Ender’s Shadow by Orson Scott Card and Interview with the Vampire and The Vampire Lestat by Anne Rice. I’m not sure how many other examples are out there, but it seems likely that most of them would be found in the speculative genres. I suspect that’s because SF, fantasy, and horror emphasize world-building in a way that so-called literary fiction doesn’t, and this technique creates a special kind of external reality. As I see it, anyway.

Look: a single novel is like a painting, beautiful, flat, and complete. Two novels that call each other’s narratives into question are more like two mirrors that reflect the same object, each from its own angle and each with its individual distortions. You can never see the object except through the mirrors, but their differing perspectives not only suggest its existence, but that it has more dimension than a single view can capture. The sense of reality is thereby heightened.

So now that we know how some writers make stories feel realer than real by writing them twice, what do we say they’ve done when they’ve done it? We can’t talk knowledgeably about this phenomenon in our college classes or at our book club meetings without a fancy name. Intersecting duologies? Novels of co-dependency? My favorite suggestion isn’t actually all that fancy, and it came from a friend: Stereo lit. Reading one book is great, but it’s even better when you multitrack your mind. Turn up the volume and read two.

—James

It’s the middle of January, which means that the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association has just handed out its annual book awards. We’re always very interested in the results, as these prizes are given to books nominated by independent bookstores across our region. That is, by real people who know and love Northwest books and authors. People like us, and like you.

There are six winners for 2013:

• Blasphemy by Sherman Alexie
• The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving by Jonathan Evison
• The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey
• On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths by Lucia Perillo
• Wild by Cheryl Strayed
• Alif the Unseen by G. Willow Wilson

Three novels, one book of poetry, one collection of short stories, and one memoir, written by four women and two men. Descriptions of each book can be read on the PNBA Awards site, but we can tell you right here that they’re all excellent choices.

All of them were staff picks by at least one member of the Island Books crew during 2012, and a couple of them, Wild and The Snow Child, were on our top ten lists for last year. Sherman Alexie needs no introduction to most Northwest audiences, and Jonathan Evison is on a roll, with this year’s award being his second in a row. As such, we’ll take just a little bit of space to highlight the authors we haven’t talked much about before, Perillo and Wilson.

On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths features sumptuous cover art taken from Giotto’s Last Judgment, but the interior is even richer. There’s a meaty interview with Perillo at NW Book Lovers that suggests how much this poet and essayist has to offer. From her poem “Again, the Body”:

When you spend many hours alone in a room
you have more than the usual chances to disgust yourself—
this is the problem of the body, not that it is mortal
but that it is mortifying. When we were young they taught us
do not touch it, but who can keep from touching it,
from scratching off the juicy scab?

Her writing creates a similar itch.

Wilson’s novel is an up-to-the-minute adventure that’s all the more impressive when you remember how much time books take to write. This author was well ahead of the curve with her plotting and her themes, as she explains on her own website:

The titular character is a[n activist computer hacker] in an unnamed emirate who battles shadowy, oppressive state security forces using methods both digital and arcane. (There are jinn involved, and ancient texts that are supposed to be hoaxes but aren’t. And at least one car chase.) While I was writing, even I thought I was maybe overdoing it just a little, and assigning too much importance to hackers and Internet junkies in the Middle East. But I was fresh off a visit to Cairo, where a group of guys I’d met through Twitter organized a signing for me at a bookstore that was packed to the gills. We talked about comics and politics and the media, and I walked away with my heart pounding, thinking “this is really going to work.” I wasn’t even sure what “this” was.

Five months later, those same kids were overthrowing the government. I finished Alif the Unseen just as Mubarak left office, Tunisia was under new management, and uprisings had begun in Libya and Syria, in what would come to be called the Arab Spring.

Message in a Bottle is sponsoring a short story contest! You can read more of the details at the main Island Books site, but the most important are these:

• There are prizes!
• The deadline is March 17, 2013.
• Stories should be 1000 words or fewer.

That’s basically it. We’d love to read your submissions, so drop them off in person at Island Books, or email them to us at info@mercerislandbooks.com with the subject line THE SHORT VERSION.

To inspire you, we’re offering a little fiction of our own. We hope you enjoy it and then outdo it many times over.

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Communion

The word that opened the Book of Genesis and therefore the course of study in Sister Dymphna’s Old Testament class, at least in the footnoted transliteration from the Hebrew provided by the New American Bible for Catholics, was bereshit. Which predictably led to burblings of adolescent laughter and sophomoric mutterings that ended with the phrase “in the woods.” The sagacious sister was too respectful of the nameless linguists who had chosen that perverse orthography for excellent, if abstrusely academic, reasons to handle the situation with anything but aplomb. After a mercifully brief fifty-five minute period marred by intermittent witticisms that allowed her to digress briefly on the important difference between scatology and eschatology, the occasion was quickly forgotten by nearly everyone.

Memories of the hour proved to linger, though, with one member of the class, a boy who was as forgettable to his peers as the lesson itself. If asked today, few of them could bring to mind his name, and fewer still his features. Some might vaguely recollect a sense of spectacles and snot and a trepidatious silence in the halls, but certainly none remembered his impressions of the day, or even that he had any. In short, he was part of that unenviable demographic cohort barred from the kingdom of cool by an excess of brains and self-consciousness. I’d describe him further, but he’d probably slip your mind as soon as you turned the page.

Our unlikely hero didn’t join the general hilarity of that afternoon. Oh, the humor of the situation wasn’t completely lost on him. He appreciated it as well as anyone, though his amusement didn’t derive from scandal but from the punning quality of the joke. He smiled inside at the the idea that the word could be at once so sacred and profane. Whoever first sat down to write at God’s personal request, sucking on a quill or whatever they used back then, fingers all atremble with the grandeur of the moment, looking for the perfect, portentous way to start the whole snowball of monotheism and Mariolatry rolling—the guy had no idea how badly he’d screwed up. Instead of instilling his readers with divine awe, he’d set them all to chuckling. It was a serious misstep. With a start like that, no wonder all that stuff about foreskins and covenants and who begat whom seemed silly. “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife.” That made some sense, but the bodies all around him wearing plaid skirts that uniformly violated dress codes by two inches worth of thigh hadn’t taken any vows. They were unattached and fairly radiating estrogen. He couldn’t help but covet them.

His attention wandered to the various clumps of gigglers scattered around the room, their heads tilted toward each other conspiratorially. For a moment the invisible wall between the sexes was breached by frivolity. He admired the detente the class had temporarily achieved and wished he could share in it, but it was just too simple-minded to be funny. God’s love was supposed to be universal, but apparently gags at His expense weren’t.

As his eyes hopscotched over his less malcontent classmates, his glance was interrupted by a pair of shoulders heaving with a sigh. Two desks away, pale blue oxford cloth strained imperceptibly as a girl—a particular girl—expressed some dissatisfaction. Her function in the story is emblematic enough that we might name her with the single letter K., but that would be too downbeat for her, and besides, her name was Catherine. Her hair was honey-gold, or dark brunette, or auburn if that’s what works for you. I don’t want to pin her down any more than I do our thoughtful lad. The only physical detail that matters here is the open bit of skin between the collar points of her button-down. It was exquisite, and it caught his eye.

His first thought was of the gulf that separated them. She was a creature untaxonomized, a blank spot on a map marked “Here Be Dragons.” As far as he could tell, there wasn’t any need for a biblical injunction to prevent them from consorting; they had no common ground on which to meet. His second thought was less a cogitation than a fight-or-flight reaction to a packet of adrenaline released into his veins. Before his head caught on, his body realized that she was looking back at him. She rolled her eyes with the uttermost contempt a teen can muster, which we all know is a lot. The shame he felt rolling up his face to the roots of his hair was arrested by a gesture as unexpected as it was minutely graceful. With the subtlest of motions—was it a shrug or a toss of her hair?—she indicated the target of her opprobrium. It wasn’t him. It was those chortling goblins all around, those cattle, those buffoons, those…children who didn’t even know they’d sinned and been chastised by a goddess in her righteous wrath. Not only had he alone escaped to tell the tale, he had been privileged with access to her inner mind and seen it worked like his. He in that moment knew the meaning of epiphany.

And after that? They never even spoke. She probably doesn’t think of herself as a seraphic presence; I’m sure she had her own problems then and later. As for our boy, he still spent too much time with books, but his acne eventually cleared, and he went to college and found out how to talk to people without sweating through his shirt, and he met some girls who let him glimpse more than just their souls. And when they weren’t around there were Beatrice and Hester Prynne and Molly Bloom and all the black marks on a page that make these moments and their stories possible. In the Beginning was the Word, and the Word was made Flesh, and of that faith he remains the humblest acolyte.

—James

New Mysteries…

We haven’t talked about crime fiction for a while. Why not? It’s a mystery. Let’s rectify the omission by running down some recent Message in a Bottle favorites from the realm of the who-, how-, and whydunit.

First up is Death in Breslau by Marek Krajewski. It’s set in a city now known as Wrocław in Poland, but in the early 1930s it was part of Germany and a stronghold of the rising Nazi party. It’s there that Krajewski has set his story, which features investigator Eberhard Mock attempting to uncover the truth behind the murder of two young woman on a train. An indecipherable note found nearby points to occultic motives, as do the live scorpions accompanying the corpses, but in a place run by the Gestapo and riddled with corruption, anti-Semitism, and conspiracy, first impressions aren’t to be trusted. With its atmospheric scenes and a detective trying to do the right thing in an impossible situation, this is as noirish as a novel can get.

Followers of Scandinavian mystery (and they are legion these days) will appreciate the latest installment in Karin Fossum’s Inspector Sejer series, Caller. She’s been plying her dark trade for many years, and has become one of the best in the business, referred to by many as the “queen of crime.” Nordiphiles will also want to keep their eyes peeled for Jo Nesbø’s Phantom and Jussi Adler-Olsen’s The Absent One.

On January 15th, you’ll be able to pick up the latest from one of Scotland’s masters, Ian Rankin. Hero John Rebus returns in Standing in Another Man’s Grave, seeking to connect the cases of three seemingly unrelated victims who disappeared at different times from the same lonely road. He’s now a retired civilian working as a consultant, but he’s as apt as ever to stir up trouble in his pursuit of justice.

If you’re looking for something that’s a little less gritty, Alan Bradley’s your man. Speaking from Among the Bones (due January 29th) is the latest adventure for his distinctive heroine, Flavia de Luce. She’s an ambitious, insanely smart eleven-year-old with insufferable sisters and a knack for digging up clues, and now she has to figure out why there’s a new body in a church crypt that’s half a millennium old. Flavia is an unforgettable character, and she has fans of all ages. Bradley’s books are geared for adults, but at Island Books we also like to put them in the hands of eager young readers similar to Flavia herself.

…and an update for your Dance card

Some of you will remember a proposal we made a few weeks ago in which we suggested a group reading of Anthony Powell’s novel sequence A Dance to the Music of Time. Your response to that suggestion was excellent, so we’re definitely forging ahead. Don’t worry if this is the first you’re hearing of it, because it’s not too late to get on board. You can read more details about the project in our earlier post.

We’ll be reading this massive (and massively entertaining) work one section at a time, starting off with part one. It can be found in the First Movement paperback, along with parts two and three, or you ebook readers can buy it separately as A Question of Upbringing. Get started now, because on January 31st we’ll post again to give you our impressions and give you a chance to share yours. You’ll be able to leave comments on our blog and help start an ongoing discussion. No details yet, but we’re going to figure out some kind of treat for those who participate in our brand-new virtual book club.

Happy reading, and hope to hear from you at the end of the month!

—James

It’s always been tough for a writer to get published, but it’s getting increasingly tougher to get published again. If your debut novel wasn’t a blockbuster, your track record works against you. Sold 5,000 copies? Too bad. Instead of taking the time to figure out how to grow that number, many publishers would rather buy a lottery ticket by taking a chance on an unknown. It makes promotion easier. Hey, did you hear that this NEW author might sell 100,000 books? Or a million? She’s NEW, you know!

This is why we see so many of these Top 20 Under 40 lists and so few that feature Best Middle-Agers. Promise is often more attractive than performance. The ultimate expression of this attitude may be an article posted at The American Reader called “10 Under 10: Writers to Watch.” It purports to catalog the leading literary voices of the generation after the next generation. Some highlights from these interviews:

C.C. Lewis (age 7)
author of “What the Unicorns Forgot”

How long did it take you to write your first book?

Two years. I changed a lot in the process. I grew with my characters. 

Did you ever consider not becoming a writer?

Last week I thought about being a nurse.

Owen Tinder (age 6)
author of “My Driveway”

What was the inspiration for the piece included in the “10 Under 10” series?

“My Driveway” was really tied to the advice to “Write what you know.” I knew that I could write the best piece of fiction about what I was deeply familiar with. I think that’s what gave the book that deep sense of intimacy, especially the now-infamous gravel scene. I find it helpful to limit myself to a subject or an area and work within those boundaries. It’s too hard to just sit down and say, “I want to write about Teaneck.” It’s just too broad a subject. Imposing those limits, from the garage door to the end of the curb, is what inspired the novel and allowed it to function. In the end, the fact that I’m not allowed to cross the street by myself turned out to be completely inspirational.

There’s a lot more, including quotes from other precocious tots such as “Of course I adore Cheever” and “I’m under contract with Picador for a new work—part memoir, part fictive Borgesian penseé. I don’t think I’m allowed to say much more than that.” Pitch-perfect satire and sheer deadpan hilarity.

The piece immediately reminded me of a legitimately great work of fiction on the same topic that first saw print in 1972. The novel Edwin Mullhouse carries an explanatory subtitle: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943-1954 by Jeffrey Cartwright. It was in fact written by Steven Millhauser (yes, Millhauser’s Mullhouse—surely we’re supposed to confuse the names), and it’s an extraordinarily layered story of childhood concerns and adult obsessions. The Jeffrey character relates a biography of the abbreviated life of his friend and classmate Edwin, proclaiming him an unsung genius of letters, but it’s clear from the start that the subject is a perfectly ordinary boy. Jeffrey, somehow speaking as an adult though a child himself, is the real focus of the account, and it’s his desire for acclaim that drives the book and Edwin’s career to a conclusion. 

Millhauser is unmatched in his ability to evoke feeling through detail. When he describes a teacher’s frilly handkerchief or the sensation of peeling a candy dot off a strip of paper, it’s as though he’s slowed time itself so that the reader can finally appreciate what each moment means. When you view that rich, descriptive texture through the controlled distortion of a lens held by an untrustworthy narrator, you have a Nabokovian masterpiece in your hands, a kind of Pale Fire, Jr.

I don’t know if Steven Millhauser appeared on any lists of up-and-comers thirty-five years ago, but I do know he’s still working at the top of his game. We Others, a collection of new and selected stories, appeared just recently. In them, as critic Russell Potter said, “mechanical cowboys at penny arcades come to life; curious amusement parks, museums, or catacombs beckon with secret passageways and walking automata; dreamers dream and children fly out their windows at night on magic carpets.” The work proves that imagination can be youthful at any age.

—James

Gene Wolfe was born in 1931 in upstate New York and grew up in Houston, Texas reading pulp science fiction and fantasy. He attended Texas A&M University, dropped out, joined the Army and served in Korea. When he got back he returned to college, got married, and became an industrial engineer for Proctor & Gamble, where his most noted accomplishment was helping to create the machinery that manufactures Pringles.

He started writing short stories, sold a few, then in 1970 published a straight SF novel that he later decided wasn’t any good. Two years later he published The Fifth Head of Cerberus, a very good book that’s either a novel or a collection of three novellas, depending on who you ask. Each piece in the book can stand alone, but read together they enrich and complicate each other in remarkable ways. Fifth Head is set light years from earth and includes robots and shape-shifting aliens, but it also contains echoes of Proust, a series of unreliable narrators, and a deep enough treatment of contemporary post-colonial issues to satisfy Edward Said.

Having admirably flexed his literary chops while wading in the tributary waters of genre, Wolfe then stepped into the mainstream for his 1975 novel Peace. On the surface it’s a realistic portrait of an old man, Alden Dennis Weer, who sifts haphazardly through memories of life in a small Midwestern town. The storytelling of this kindly figure is a mite confusing, as he tends to move on to the next anecdote before he’s finished with the first, but it’s still easy to enjoy the novel as a wholesome slice of American pie. Except that there’s a lingering aftertaste to every bite. Why are Weer’s successes so closely associated with the failures of others? Why do so many of his anecdotes take a turn into carnivalesque weirdness? Even a casual reader begins to realize there’s a darkness in Weer’s heart, and a truly attentive one will see that the stakes of the novel are far higher than they appear. “Life and death” doesn’t begin to cover it.

Peace, a subtle, inverted version of Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus reset in Winesburg, Ohio, was appreciated by the cognoscenti, but the wider public didn’t embrace it. Wolfe gave up his bid for “literary” stardom (although he did eventually get a story published in the New Yorker) and returned to his roots in SF and fantasy. Over the past thirty years he’s continued to produce intricate and erudite narratives that are mostly ignored by people who think books about sorcery or interstellar travel can’t have lasting value. Among those who know better, he’s been acclaimed in the highest terms. Fellow traveler Michael Swanwick has written, “Gene Wolfe is the greatest writer in the English language alive today. Let me repeat that: Gene Wolfe is the greatest writer in the English language alive today! … [A]mong living writers, there is nobody who can even approach Gene Wolfe for brilliance of prose, clarity of thought, and depth in meaning.” Ursula Le Guin, no slouch herself as a stylist and no stranger to the malignancy of literary labeling, has claimed him for the tribe of genre writers by saying, “Wolfe is our Melville.”

The guy who wrote Moby-Dick was dead for thirty years before anyone realized he’d written the first Great American Novel. Wolfe is still around, but he’s 81. Luckily for all of us, Orb Books has just re-released Peace, giving it (finally!) a decent cover and another chance to find the audience it deserves. Get a jump on posterity and read it now.

—James

This piece originally appeared on the blog of the web magazine Full Stop.

This is my mother’s coat. She wore it for more than five decades walking in the woods on damp fall days in Vermont.

Both my parents grew up during the Depression and as so many others of that era they held thrift up as the ultimate virtue. You wore clothes until they wore out. This coat is buckskin so it may never wear out and now belongs to her granddaughter, my daughter Emma.

But for my parents, books and education were not something to scrimp on. In the pre-screen days they believed there was nothing more illuminating. Wear the old coat, buy the new book. Give the gift of story and light.

—Roger

For the past couple days, I’ve been inexplicably drawn to one particular item in the children’s section, namely the Prairie House Block Set from Froebel USA.

Sixty-eight carefully proportioned wooden blocks that can be used to construct…anything you want, really. The set is inspired by the architectural designs of Frank Lloyd Wright, as may be obvious when you look at the low-slung elegance that can result from some simple stacking.

The less obvious but more important influence behind the product is the man who invented kindergarten. Yes, the man, singular. I know it sounds strange, but the system of organized preschool education that’s almost universal today sprang almost entirely from the imagination of one person, Friedrich Froebel, who in 1837 launched a school in Germany in which he encouraged children to grow and develop like plants. Hence, a children’s garden.

He recognized that the very young have special needs and talents for learning, and his methods, which quickly spread internationally (the first US kindergarten sprouted in Wisconsin in 1856), included the use of teaching tools of his own devising. Well, pedagogues call them tools—kids call them toys. Made of natural materials (mostly wood) they introduce children to concepts of color, shape, number, and more. Froebel was a scientist, but was lyrical enough to refer to his creations as “gifts,” because they were given freely to his students and because they revealed the innate human gifts each child possesses from birth.

Frank Lloyd Wright was an early American kindergarten attendee, and he wrote in later life about the lasting lessons he learned there:  “For several years I sat at the little Kindergarten table-top…and played…with the cube, the sphere and the triangle—these smooth wooden maple blocks…All are in my fingers to this day.” Helen Keller was a prominent advocate, and Paul Klee, Vassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, and many other notables were either educated in or taught in Froebel’s kindergartens. 

Artist and historian Norman Brosterman wrote a book about Froebel and the legacy he left to 20th-century art and architecture. It’s called Inventing Kindergarten and is unfortunately out of print, but you can hear him discussing the topic in a recording made at the Chicago Humanities Festival. He calls the development of kindergarten “one of the biggest things that’s ever happened in the world.” I don’t think he’s wrong.

I said above that this week I’d been inexplicably drawn to these simple but profound toys, but that’s not true. I know exactly why. I want every child I know to have a chance to play, learn, and grow, and I want to use these blocks to build a fortress around them all.

—James

Another year, another top ten list (or two). We at Island Books have released our picks for the best fiction and nonfiction of 2012, and as always, there are many books that might have made the cut but didn’t. If we’d compiled our lists on a different day, or we’d been in a different mood, or if a butterfly had flapped a little harder in Brazil, some other titles would have received the laurels. It’s worth taking a look at some of the so-called also-rans, which often outshine their alleged betters as the years go by. Without further ado, the best of the rest:

• The Loss Library and Other Unfinished Stories: You wouldn’t think failed stories would be published at all, let alone turn up on a top ten list. But South African writer Ivan Vladislavic makes them positively gripping. In Loss Library, he assembles a dozen fictional projects that never got off the ground and explains how and why they stayed earthbound. It’s a fascinating glimpse at the artistic process and how much work and thought goes into even a tantalizing snippet. Your imagination will turn these short works into much more than can be read on the page. The production of the book itself deserves mention, too—text aside, it’s a gorgeous, artistic object. We blathered rhapsodically about the book earlier in the year.
• The Patrick Melrose Novels: Edward St. Aubyn has been chronicling the misadventures of the fading English aristocracy in fiction for decades, using the character of Patrick Melrose as his alter ego. 2012 saw the release of the concluding novel in his series, At Last, and accompanying it was this one-volume paperback edition of the first four books. Together they delineate Melrose’s privileged but abusive childhood, his descent into addiction, his hard-won sobriety, and his struggle to overcome his peculiar family history when he becomes a father himself. For sharp observation, exquisite language, and decadent (though often amusing) cruelty, they simply can’t be beat. 
• The Old Ways: “In this exquisitely written book, Robert Macfarlane sets off from his Cambridge, England, home to follow the ancient tracks, holloways, drove roads, and sea paths that crisscross both the British landscape and its waters and territories beyond. The result is an immersive, enthralling exploration of the ghosts and voices that haunt old paths, of the stories our tracks keep and tell, and of pilgrimage and ritual.” Sometimes a book’s own promotional material does such a good job of describing it that even hardened booksellers want to steal it for their own use. So we just did. We’ll just add that what at first seems to be a rambling account of unconnected journeys proves by the end to be a carefully structured meditation on the human relationship to place, time, and mortality. It’s quietly riveting.
• When I Was a Child I Read Books: Some writers achieve status through continual production, churning out reams of opinion on every topic of the day. Others take the opposite approach, restricting their output so that their books become events when they appear. Marilynne Robinson is one of the latter types. She let a quarter century go by between her award-winning novels Housekeeping and Gilead, and has become only slightly more prolific since then. When she speaks, in other words, you know she has something worthwhile to say. In her latest collection of essays, she says much worth listening to about politics, faith, and many of the other themes she’s treated throughout her career. Reading this book is like paying a visit to an oracle.

—James