I have no memory of the first time I read Ursula K. Le Guin. It must have been sometime in the mid-seventies, when I was a kid indiscriminately devouring piles of tatty SF paperbacks. Her Earthsea books were in wide circulation, and I know she popped up in an anthology or two. I’m pretty sure I had some other titles of hers on my shelf, such as The Lathe of Heaven, about dreams that alter reality. I can’t recall many details of it, and I may in fact be remembering the low-budget TV movie version, which was short on effects but strong on atmosphere. I think it was shown during school for some unfathomable reason. The story is no more than a wispy presence to me, and I don’t know why, but to this day I often confuse it with Ray Bradbury’s “All Summer in a Day.”  If you charted my reading life on a timeline, she’d have a prominent spot in the prehistorical period, a foundational figure warmly appreciated but little understood.

The announcement that Small Beer Press would be releasing a two-volume retrospective of her short fiction at the end of November seemed like the perfect opportunity to engage in some literary anthropology, as it were. I requested advance copies of both books and started in on them right away. Best idea I’ve had in a while. As I should have known by the work that Le Guin continues to produce and the acclaim that accrues to it, she’s no quaint relic. Her older stories hold up under contemporary scrutiny, and her newer pieces stand with the older ones. The collection covers fifty years of writing and the full range of her style, as its title indicates. The Unreal and the Real comprises fantastical and mundane fiction, chosen and sorted by Le Guin herself. Volume One, subtitled Where on Earth, contains stories with a locatable setting, either an actual place or at least a possible one, while Volume Two, Outer Space, Inner Lands, contains her favorite nonrealistic tales. It’s a method of organization that highlights how blurry categories can be where an author like this is concerned—everyday events can sometimes read like fables, and the characters in a magical kingdom can be as rich and real as the people you meet on the street.

Whether she’s updating Native American myth for modern times, depicting a fractured family bickering over drinks in the suburbs, or setting in motion an extraterrestrial mining disaster, there’s a strong moral dimension to Le Guin’s work. How do we react to change and the unknown, to new technologies, new faces, new ideas? Better yet, how should we? She’s an idealist, but not a utopian, as illustrated by her parable “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.” In four short pages she lays out the challenges of achieving social justice as well as anyone ever has.

I was particularly taken with a sequence of related stories set in the imaginary country of Orsinia, a place that blends aspects of several real European nations. We catch glimpses of Orsinia in many ages, as a feudal land transitioning from paganism into Christianity, and as a puppet state struggling to part an iron curtain. By focusing on the day-to-day concerns of kings, commoners, and comrades alike, Le Guin makes us feel what it is to be moved by the inexorable tides of history and politics. A wealth of perfectly chosen detail creates a reality for this fictitious landscape that goes beyond the bounds of the page. A construction site will often be hidden by a fence; each Orsinian tale is like those small windows that provide a peek at the grand edifice being built on the other side.

So fired up was I about these stories that I went in search of more. There are several that aren’t included in this latest collection, comprehensive as it is, and there’s even an out-of-print Orsinian novel about 19th-century revolutionaries called Malafrena. I hunted down a used copy and tore through it with equal alacrity and enjoyment. When I turned page forty-eight of the time-scorched paperback, a slip of paper fell out. It was a receipt from the original purchase, priced at $1.95 and dated October 29, 1977. It had served faithfully as a bookmark for almost exactly thirty-five years, waiting for someone to come along and finish the story. I don’t think it started out on my childhood shelf and found its way back to me after all these decades, but it’s nice to pretend that it did.

—James

As the skies grow grayer and blander, it’s time to turn to interior landscapes in a search for beauty. In aid of that, we present another installment in our continuing series on literary art.

First up, we have the work of unlikely artist Robert The. In an article for the Quarterly Conversation, he describes how he was derailed from his path during college:

I kinda blew a fuse in my senior year—something very strange happened—and I lost my ability to read for a period of a month or two. This sharpened my interest regarding what was actually going on with the symbols that convey meaning on a concrete level. It also unsettled my nerves and undermined my passion to continue with my studies in that particular direction.

He turned away from math and philosophy into painting and then sculpture, and now produces a wide variety of art that calls language itself into question. With great precision, he cuts books into forms that compel the viewer to reinterpret the meaning those books originally transmitted. Everyday objects and animals take on new, suggestive roles when they’re made from the stuff of thought.

You can see more of his art at his own website, which is evocatively named bookdust.com.

Federico Pietrella is an Italian artist whose preferred tool isn’t a brush or camera, but the old-fashioned library date stamp. His portraits, still lives, and street scenes are photorealist from a distance, but up close can be seen as the painstaking accretions they are.

As can be seen in the detail image, each day that Pietrella works is recorded in each piece. Time itself becomes the hidden subject of them all. He shares more of his work on his website, and there’s a good video of his process at bookpatrol.net.

John Sokol’s approach is similar—he pens portraits of writers using their own words. His Eudora Welty is composed from the text of her short story “Powerhouse,” while his Jorge Luis Borges is is made from his story “The Secret Miracle.”

Given his interest in writing, it’s not entirely surprising that Sokol is a poet as well as a visual artist. His word portraits and other work can be found at his website.

Jonathan Wolstenholme is a surrealist, but a friendly sort, to judge by his paintings. His watercolors are traditionally figurative, though his figures aren’t people but books. His subjects are just as personable and active as their observers are, and his brushwork is so clear that the text is legible on the pages he paints. If only the human beings around us were as easy to read.

There’s an excellent gallery of Wolstenholme’s work at Tartuffe’s Folly, and a brief bio at the Portal Painters website.

If you’re a purist who wants to see art in books rather than art made of books, you might want to test drive the new volume Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars. It encompasses the entire Western artistic tradition by closely examining over two dozen representative examples, including classical sculpture, pop paintings, and contemporary digital forms. Most such art historical surveys are dominated by the pictures, as they should be, but the author of this one is professional provocateur (provocateuse?) Camille Paglia, so her analysis and opinion get equal billing. Glittering Images is worth reading just to find out who she taps as our greatest living artist. Hint: It’s not who you’re thinking of. Paglia’s the kind of writer who can find disagreement everywhere, but at least she’s never boring.

—James

It was with a certain amount of trepidation that I purchased The Casual Vacancy on the morning of its release. As I stood in the bookstore, a young woman sprinted through the door and grabbed a copy, panting as she explained to the cashier that she had risked missing her train in order to have the novel for her commute that morning. I smiled ruefully as I handed over my cash, joking about the book’s magnetic attraction. The woman working at the counter smiled and said, of author J.K. Rowling, “I guess she’s earned it!”

Those words echoed in my head as I made my way through this “big novel about a small town.” Has she really “earned it?” And what exactly is it that she’s earned? Consumer popularity? Critical respect? The chance to be judged on the merits of her writing and not the cultural phenomenon which she began with Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone? I lean towards the former. Rowling will always be assured of a dedicated readership made up of the generation she introduced to reading. Although it’s impossible to completely disengage from that knowledge while reading The Casual Vacancy, in truth it may not even be necessary. The novel is arguably strongest where it echoes the Harry Potter series, and weakest when it seems to be making an obvious effort to distance itself from the author’s previous work.

Stripped of her familiar characters and settings, Rowling flounders a bit. Her prose ranges from awkward to serviceable, and is on occasion unintentionally hilarious. Describing a teenage protagonist as he listens to one of his abusive father’s tirades, she writes: “Andrew ate his Weetabix and burned with hatred.” It’s not obvious initially whether she means the book to have darkly comic undertones, but that issue is quickly resolved. There is nothing funny about the darkness she portrays. The general impression is of a tiny place, full of people whose actions are simultaneously inconsequential and vicious. The many characters are remarkable primarily for their unpleasantness, and the minutiae of local politics around which the story revolves are revoltingly petty. All of this, it seems, is the point. The only character or institution without a debilitating moral flaw is a man named Barry Fairbrother, who dies on page five. The black hole left in the community of Pagford by his premature demise is filled with the greed, malice, and blundering ineptitude of all those who survived him. The unpleasantness spirals rapidly towards tragedy, ending in one of the most brutally depressing and hopeless series of events imaginable.

After the initial shock of Rowling’s deeply familiar voice baldly discussing topics such as rape, addiction, and self-harm wears off, some of her strengths begin to emerge. Her many characters may not all be completely developed individuals, but the intricate web of relationships in which they are embroiled is fully formed and elastic enough to give the novel energy. She is very good at tracking the ripples that spread through the community of Pagford after the smallest of incidents, and it’s this skill that keeps the pettiness from translating into boredom on the part of the reader. She treats adolescent pain as painstakingly and seriously as she does adult struggles, and it is when she writes about young people that the she has the most to say. Her adults are depraved, disgusting, and deeply, hopelessly selfish. The teenagers are slightly less despicable and far more pitiable. Tolstoy’s famous comment about unhappy families echoes throughout The Casual Vacancy. The true tragedy of the novel is that these children are on their way to becoming their parents, as the choices they make close off paths of escape that may have once existed.

Ultimately, The Casual Vacancy is just OK. It shows that Rowling is capable of writing something other than Harry Potter without completely embarrassing herself, but not much else. It will be interesting to see if, over the coming years, she finds a way to access the genius which produced those earlier works as she develops her voice as an adult author. As the woman at the bookstore pointed out, she’s earned our attention. It will take more than one novel to know whether or not she still deserves it.

—Emma Page is the daughter of bookshop owners and part of the J.K. Rowling generation. She’s currently a student at Wellesley College and a clerk at Wellesley Books.

To the surprise of absolutely no one, Hilary Mantel took home her second Booker Prize this week. She’s only the third person to win the award twice, after Peter Carey and J.M. Coetzee. Even before the list of nominations was released, pundits tipped her as the probable victor, and their confidence only increased thereafter. The group of nominees was widely seen as a bowl of semi-rotten fruit with one shiny, ripe apple at at the top, and the Booker judges picked carefully this time.

The novel that earned the laurels for Mantel was Bring Up the Bodies, the middle volume in a projected three-book series about the life of Thomas Cromwell, advisor to King Henry VIII. (Don’t mix up your Cromwells, now—Thomas was a staunch monarchist of the 16th century whose sister became the great-great-grandmother of 17th-century Oliver Cromwell, best known for establishing the primacy of Parliament and lopping off royal heads.) Mantel introduced her hero in 2009’s Wolf Hall, which was her other Booker winner. Together the books recount his rise to power as he guides the king through the uncharted waters of royal divorce and the creation of a new state religion.

Most historical accounts have favored Cromwell’s antagonist, Thomas More, painting the former as a conniving politician and the latter as a model of upright behavior for his refusal to countenance Henry’s plans, but Mantel casts Cromwell in a new light. In her version More is a rigid fanatic, while Cromwell is a far-seeing visionary. One of her great achievements is that she doesn’t need to alter the record in making her case. She speculates to fill in gaps, but she’s scrupulous in adhering to whatever facts are known. The result is historical fiction of the very best kind, rich in detail and able to capture both the strangeness and the familiarity of another time. Unlike some literary prize winners, this is crowd-pleasing stuff, a meaty character- and plot-driven story that’s been a favorite choice for book clubs and scholars since publication.

In terms of quality and content, the best comparison for these novels might come from Hollywood. In the early 1970s, The Godfather and The Godfather Part II became the first prequel/sequel pair to win Best Picture Oscars. The movies are still dissected in film schools and loved by fans all over the world. Mantel’s similarly deep, similarly entertaining depiction of greed, politics, and family should prove at least as lasting. She’s already hard at work on The Mirror and the Light, the third and concluding volume in the series. I can’t see that turning into a debacle like Godfather III, so she’s already a front-runner in a future Booker race and the odds-on favorite to become the first triple winner in the history of the award.

—James

And so China finally has its Nobel Prize for Literature. There were already a couple of them, the first given to Sai Zhenzhu (better known as Pearl S. Buck) in 1938 and the second in the hands of Gao Xingjian since 2000. Those didn’t count, though. Buck was a westerner with a loving but patronizing attitude toward the Middle Kingdom who wrote in English, and although Gao at least writes in Chinese, he’s a quasi-dissident émigré who became a French citizen years before becoming a laureate. It took until last week for a country with a literary tradition that goes back eons to take home a trophy it could feel comfortable calling its own.

Mo Yan, who won the latest Nobel on October 11th, carries an invisible, if not enthusiastic, stamp of approval from the Chinese government. He’s a resident of the country who shows no signs of pulling up stakes and isn’t overtly critical of the regime. That is, he’s never publicly objected to its politics and remains an official Communist Party member. On the other hand, he’s never publicly expressed much favor for the government either. Some observers feel that he’s too cozy with the powers that be, while others consider him too radical—he must be doing something right politically if he’s upsetting both sides. (Albanian writer Ismail Kadare, who was my pet Nobel pick from last year, has walked this same fine line his whole career.) Careful readers of Mo’s work seem to agree that it does contain subversive elements, though, as this quote from the New York Times indicates:

Eric Abrahamsen, a literary translator and publishing consultant in Beijing, noted that many of [Mo’s] richly detailed stories are subversive in their depiction of Chinese officialdom, even if couched in the outlandish magical realism that has become his trademark style. “He doesn’t keep bashing himself against the wall by writing about forbidden topics but most of what he has written is critical of party politics,” Mr. Abrahamsen said. “His work is essentially a chronicle of how the Communist Party has messed up China.”

That the name “Mo Yan” is a pseudonym meaning “don’t speak” may go even farther toward explaining the author’s sardonic views on Chinese censorship. His real name is the less provocative Guan Moye.

Politics aside, the pseudonym also displays a welcome sense of humor. While we might expect a Nobel laureate to be a stuffy, high-minded type, Mo isn’t afraid to be silly or even scatological. The Nobel Committee cited him as a writer “who with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history, and the contemporary,” and his novels often put their protagonists into absurd situations as they struggle against an entrenched bureaucracy in an almost Kafkan way. All his books raise serious issues, but they can also be a great deal of fun to read, as some of his titles suggest:

• Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out
• Red Sorghum (adapted as an award-winning movie)
• Big Breasts and Wide Hips
• Shifu, You’ll Do Anything for a Laugh
• Change
• The Republic of Wine
• The Garlic Ballads

His newest novel was scheduled to come out early next year from the marvelous international publisher Seagull Books, but it’s being rushed into print in the wake of the prize announcement and should be available very soon. It’s called Pow! and it sounds like classic Mo Yan: “[A] benign old monk listens to a prospective novice’s tale of depravity, violence, and carnivorous excess while a nice little family drama—in which nearly everyone dies—unfurls. But in this tale of sharp hatchets, bad water, and a rusty WWII mortar, we can’t help but laugh.” I was looking forward to it even before last week’s announcement, but Pow! has now moved right to the top of my queue.

—James

If you’re reading this, you’re already familiar with the idea that books can inspire a blog. You may not know that blogs can in turn inspire books. OK, so you’re living in the 21st century and using the internet every day, so you probably do already know that, but you might not realize how many popular blogs have spun off bound versions of themselves.

The best examples are probably drawn from the world of food. Take the book A Homemade Life by Seattleite Molly Wizenberg. It describes the journey she took as an aspiring writer that led to marriage and restaurant ownership. She created the Orangette blog in 2004 to force herself to write regularly, in the hope that she could establish a career as a freelance food writer. Her plan became a resounding success, as the blog proved extremely popular. One avid reader from New York was particularly devoted to Orangette and its author—their correspondence fostered a long-distance relationship, a cross-country move, a wedding, and recently, a baby. The couple today runs Delancey, an outstanding pizzeria in Ballard, and the adjoining bar, Essex. A second book is on the way, too, set to release in early 2013.

Katie Quinn Davies is another foodie turned author. Born in Dublin, Ireland and currently living in Sydney, Australia, she’s just released What Katie Ate: Recipes and Other Bits and Pieces. It’s one of those beautiful cookbooks that’s also eminently useful. Davies has a distinctive design sense and her photography makes her meals look great, but her recipes actually work, which is what counts in the end. You can get a look at what she’s up to at her blog, which is full of opulent images, but better that you take home a copy of her cookbook to taste for yourself.

The Smitten Kitchen is Deb Perelman’s name for the forty-two-square-foot room in a New York City apartment where she prepares meals for her family and shares them with the world via her blog. The results hit hardcover on October 30th as The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook. This is another pretty but practical volume that updates American comfort food and abjures fussiness and pretentious ingredients. Despite the lack of truffle oil, these aren’t just Tuesday night quickies—an entire weekend dinner party can come from these pages. Ninety percent of the content is new to the book, and one measure of how well Perelman knows her stuff is that ingredient amounts are given in weights as well as cups and spoons. That’s serious attention to detail.

If you’re thinking that family life doesn’t leave time for meals that involve more than a microwave, Jenny Rosenstrach has the book (and the blog) for you. Dinner: A Love Story is the name of both, and in neither will you find a hard sell about how your kids won’t grow up right without organic vegetables. She doesn’t promise you’ll be able to come up with fantastic dinners from scratch in five easy steps, either. She says, “The only thing I will ask you to do is to stay in the game. Family dinner is a mindset, and once you get comfortable with the idea of not doing it, the harder it becomes to make it happen. But the more you force yourself to make meals for your children, the more it will become second-nature, and the more addicted you’ll get to all the pleasures and dividends a family meal can yield.”

Last but not least, there’s Savory Sweet Life. The book features one hundred recipes for all occasions—there are chapters for holidays, birthdays, potlucks, etc.—and then some. Author Alice Currah steps outside the kitchen from time to time. Right now she’s in Ethiopia with Bono’s humanitarian organization ONE, listening to the stories of African families and writing about them on her blog. She’ll be back in the US before the end of the month, and here at Island Books on November 4th. Blog, book, and author all in one—a triple treat.

—James

photo by Deb Perelman of the Smitten Kitchen

The list of twins in the corpus of classical literature is long and distinguished. Romulus and Remus. Castor and Pollux. Zan and Jayna. The Bobbsey Twins.

Now we can add to that storied group the names Stephen and Lynne Landis, offspring of our own Message in a Bottle blogger Miriam Landis and her husband Daniel. Tipping the scales at just over and just under five pounds respectively, the two tiny titans entered this world on September 21st, bringing a double handful of joy to their parents and vicariously to us at Island Books. The now-supersized family is doing well, and we’ll hear more from the happy mom herself when she gets a chance—perhaps when the kids head off to college?

It’s wonderful to meet you, Stephen and Lynne, and congratulations to you, Miriam and Daniel!

—James

Sometimes I forget how spoiled we Puget Sounders are where reading is concerned. A yearly study conducted by Central Connecticut State University ranks the nation’s cities based on six indicators of literacy: newspaper circulation, number of bookstores, library resources, periodical publishing resources, educational attainment, and Internet resources. Seattle consistently finishes in second place (behind Washington D.C.) in that horse race, but those criteria just scratch the surface. Our metropolis has plenty more to offer literary scenesters.

For example, this week I wanted to see poet Dean Young at Benaroya Hall. Young is a writer who addresses the eternal themes of life, love, and mortality in a deceptively bantering tone:

The sword’s hilt glints, the daffodils bow down,   

all is temporary as a perfect haircut, a kitten   

in the lap, yet sitting here with you, my darling,   

waiting for a tuna melt and side of slaw   

seems all eternity I’ll ever need   

and all eternity needs of me.

That’s from a poem called “Bronzed.” His latest collection, his tenth, is Fall Higher, and he’s also recently released a provocative book about poetry, The Art of Recklessness.

I asked a friend if he wanted to join me, but he was already planning to see another poet at Richard Hugo House that same night. Sociability and the lure of the unknown drew me into his camp, so I ended up seeing James Arthur instead. Arthur is an alumnus of the University of Washington’s MFA program and a current fellow at Princeton who’s on tour promoting his debut book from Copper Canyon Press, Charms Against Lightning. I wasn’t familiar with his work before, but really enjoyed his reading. I should rather say his recitation, since he presented his poems from memory. They were careful, thoughtful things, clear enough to entertain on a first hearing, and knotty enough that I was happy to buy a copy of his book for later perusal. He signed it and added a note thanking me for choosing him over Dean Young, at least for that night. I was admiring the way he’d properly deployed some complicated punctuation in his inscription when my friend pointed out that the book contains a poem called “In Defense of the Semicolon.” For me, that title alone was worth the full cover price.

There were writers in the crowd at Hugo House as well as on stage. One of them was Peter Mountford, another UW alum and author of the Washington State Book Award-winning novel A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism. Alongside him were other published poets, a memoirist with a book under contract, and several more authors still hoping to climb out of the slush pile. With so much of the audience in the same line of work, the atmosphere was strongly supportive and more than mildly competitive. I listened to conversations filled with sincere congratulations, but also gossip about which big-name writers in the news were the biggest jerks in their personal lives. Even Chaucer and Cervantes had their reputations taken down a peg. If you were looking to immerse yourself in literature, you couldn’t have picked a better place to be.

If you feel like you missed out, don’t worry—this kind of thing goes on all the time around here. You probably already know that we regularly host authors ourselves, but in the coming days there are dozens of similar events taking place elsewhere. Some highlights:

• Saturday, October 6th, noon: Michael Robotham, crime novelist extraordinaire, will be reading and signing in downtown Seattle.
• Monday, October 8th, 7pm: A. M. Homes and Sherman Alexie will make separate appearances at area bookstores.
• Tuesday, October 9th, 7:30pm: David Quammen, a titan of science and nature writing, will be at Town Hall to discuss his new book Spillover.
• Wednesday, October 10th, 7pm: Legal expert Jeffrey Toobin will come to Benaroya to talk about the relationship between the Supreme Court and the Obama administration.
• Thursday, October 11th, 7pm: Ursula K. Le Guin, one of the most lauded fiction writers at work today, will share Finding My Elegy, a collection of her poetry that spans half a century.
• Monday, October 15th, 7:30pm: Louise Erdrich will be at UW’s Meany Hall to read from her new novel The Round House.

The following weeks might be even more loaded. Check the literary listings online or in your local paper for all the details, and do yourself a favor by seeing in person why this is such a great book town.

—James

Did I ever tell you about the time I sang on national TV? It was the summer before my first bookstore job started, and I was in Quebec, at the far end of an aimless car trip across the continent. Sitting on the edge of a sunny plaza, I watched a camera crew and interviewer approaching people and asking them if they knew any Leonard Cohen songs. There, in the heart of Montreal, Cohen’s birthplace, no one did. I watched dozens turn the interviewer down before I accepted that it was up to me to defend the honor of the Godfather of Gloom and stepped up to the mike. As a singer I’m a heck of a bookseller, but nonetheless I fearlessly croaked out a snatch of “Sisters of Mercy.”

And you won’t make me jealous if I hear that they’ve sweetened your night
We weren’t lovers like that and besides it would still be all right

Turns out that Montreal is the home of a month-long comedy festival every year, and a British comedian was part of it that summer, performing a Leonard Cohen parody. The TV crew was filming for a half-hour show that aired nightly across Canada highlighting the festival, and so my musical career was launched. Luckily for all of us, it lasted less than a minute.

Ever since, I’ve had a special fondness for Cohen, which is why I picked up the brand-new biography by Sylvie Simmons called I’m Your Man. It’s a great read, even if you haven’t embarrassed yourself with his songs in public. As a musician, he’s had a notable career, authoring such often-covered classics as “Suzanne,” “Everybody Knows,” and “Hallelujah,” which has become so iconic that it’s soon to be the subject of its own book, The Holy or the Broken, due to be released in December. If you can think of the name of an artist of the past fifty years, it likely appears between the covers of I’m Your Man as someone who worked with or was influenced by Cohen—Judy Collins, Janis Joplin, Charlie Daniels, the Velvet Underground, Bob Dylan, and many more.

That’s just the beginning, though. One of my favorite things about the book is the coverage it gives Cohen’s other careers and interests. Before he was an acclaimed songwriter he was an award-winning author of poetry and prose (Thomas Pynchon was allegedly a devotee of the novel Beautiful Losers) who combined Beat sensibilities with classical technique. He grew up in a wealthy, traditionally Jewish family but spent his entire adult life hopping across the globe (he was in Havana during the Bay of Pigs invasion and in Israel during the Yom Kippur War) from one cheap hotel to another while exploring Buddhism, Christianity, and alternative spirituality. And he was an inveterate ladies man. There’s no entry in the index for “Cohen, Leonard: romantic partners,” probably because it would lead to every page in the biography.

In recent years, Cohen had virtually retired, spending much of his time in monastic seclusion, but a dishonest manager wiped out his life savings, forcing him back into the limelight. His latest recordings have received some of the most favorable notices of his career, and a recent live album has been a top seller right here at Island Books. At the age of 78, he’s out on tour yet again, and will be making a stop at Seattle’s Key Arena on November 9th. If I can’t get a ticket, I may just sing along at home.

—James

Salman Rushdie was already an acclaimed writer when he published his fourth novel, which means he was probably a little less recognizable than the last guy on the bench of the last-place team in the Canadian Football League. He became as famous as a movie star in an instant, though, on February 14th, 1989, when the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, called for Rushdie’s death on account of that novel. It was, of course, The Satanic Verses, a name that’s known to millions who’ve never read the book. With a multimillion dollar bounty on his head, Rushdie went into hiding under the protection of the British government and didn’t surface for years. His life was targeted on several occasions, and the translators and publishers of his book were also attacked. Bookstores were bombed in the US and England, riots broke out across the globe, and all told, over fifty people died in violence related to the fatwā.

The fatal edict remains officially in force, although Rushdie has continued to write and publish, and in recent years has resumed a very public life. His dark years underground are described in his latest book, a memoir called Joseph Anton—the title is the alias he employed at the behest of police. In conjunction with the release of the book, Rushdie published the following open letter:

In February 1989, my novel The Satanic Verses was published in the United States a few days after the Khomeini fatwā; in the eye of the storm, in other words. What happened in the months that followed was something I will never forget. American writers gathered together in a show of almost complete unity to defend freedom of speech. Thousands of ordinary Americans wore “I am Salman Rushdie” buttons to express their solidarity. The independent booksellers of America put the book in windows, mounted special displays, and courageously stood up for freedom against censorship, refusing to allow the choices of American readers to be limited by the threats of an angry despotic cleric far away. The bravery of independent booksellers influenced other stores to follow their lead, and in the end a key battle for free expression was won—not by politicians who, as usual, arrived cautiously and tardily at the battlefield, but by the determination of ordinary people that it not be lost. I have never ceased to be grateful for what the independent booksellers of America did in 1989 and, now that I have finally been able to tell the full story of that battle, I’m glad to be able to honor your courage and give you all your due, both in the pages of my book and in what I will say about it when it is published. This is just to thank you personally. It was a privilege to be defended by you, and I have been trying, and will continue to try, to be worthy of that defense.

Island Books was one of the independent stores that kept The Satanic Verses on the shelf, selling it nervously and proudly. A crucial principle was at stake, and given the tumult, the nervousness wasn’t abstract. In many ways, it’s still there. Rushdie has spoken about how his book might never have seen the light if it had come out in today’s fearful climate. The former proprietor of Cody’s Books in Berkeley has written movingly about the importance of free speech and how concrete the fear really was back then. We’d love to know if anyone on the other side of our counter has similar memories of those days to share.

—James

The paperback edition of Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot is fresh from the publisher, having come out last Tuesday. Most of the big media outlets included the novel on their year’s best lists when it was in hardcover, and I liked it too. It provides a picture of over-educated 1980s college kids careering into adulthood, their heads and hearts at odds over which will hold the wheel, that feels alarmingly real. Alarming to this reporter, anyway, who is himself a product of the same environment. Was I inspired to dig out my old yearbooks and mix-tapes after reading it? Maybe.

Personal connections aside, there’s a lot to like here. Any nits to pick? Just two, and only one is fair. The engine of the story is a love triangle, with a young woman at the apex choosing between two male suitors, one a depressive but brilliant student of science and philosophy, the other a more stolid, spiritually minded sort. While all three are equally vivid figures, the “dutiful English major” Madeleine Hannah drifts toward passivity as the book goes on and the boys take over the show. She lacks some measure of agency, as we used to say in the classroom. My unfair complaint is that the book doesn’t have the scope I’d hoped for after a nine-year wait. The wide-ranging saga of Middlesex appeared in 2002, and I fantasized that the follow-up would be even bigger and broader. That’s on me, though, not Eugenides. He’s a careful observer, and he simply doesn’t write bad sentences (I’ve commented before on his excellent opening lines), which makes The Marriage Plot an easy book to enjoy. Page by page, it will satisfy almost any reader.

So why does it annoy me more than any book in recent memory? The reasons are—forgive the jargon—extra-textual. To wit: The would-be do-gooder who competes for Madeleine in the book has a Greek surname (like Eugenides), grew up in Detroit and went to Brown (see above), and has the same curly hair Eugenides once did (sorry if that’s a sore subject, Jeff). Nothing wrong with an author putting himself into a story—so far so good. But the other suitor, who entrances the heroine before nearly ruining her life, is a clear portrait of another writer. He’s the bandanna-wearing, tobacco-chewing, spitting image of the notoriously post-postmodernist David Foster Wallace. What on the surface is a love triangle is subtextually a battle between traditional and experimental narrative styles, with the winner determined by what kind of book the struggle produces. Regardless of who Madeleine chooses, The Marriage Plot itself declares a victory, and—all hail the virtues of good old-fashioned storytelling—it doesn’t go to DFW. Again, fair play. Authors have been playing Punch and Judy with each other for centuries. The problem is that Eugenides won’t admit that’s what he’s doing.

Even before publication, many noticed the similarities between The Marriage Plot’s Leonard Bankhead and David Foster Wallace, but when asked about the subject, Eugenides categorically denied any relation between the two: “I think they’re reading too much into the bandanna. I was thinking of Guns ‘n’ Roses and heavy metal guys, but what can you do?” Subsequent readings (not just my own) show how disingenuous that denial was. Though the character is not identical to the person, Bankhead shares far more than costume with Wallace. They espouse the same views on life and literature, have the same concerns and preoccupations, and even make the same jokes. Eugenides could have said from the start, “Of course Wallace was a partial inspiration, but the character is a composite,” and not raised any flags. That he didn’t do so shows how strong the anxiety of influence is, and how big a shadow DFW casts over his contemporaries even after his death.

Eugenides isn’t alone in his anxiety. Jonathan Franzen has likewise written and spoken with an increasingly critical voice about Wallace and his work in recent years, all but accusing him of having traveled down a dead-end road his whole career. The two were close friends (and friendly competitors), so surely some of the negativity arises from a personal sense of disappointment and loss, but those things shouldn’t impinge on professional judgment. A writer who’s truly comfortable that his literary talents outshine another author’s, especially one who isn’t around to write any more books, would simply remain silent, follow his own muse, and let history prove him right. It’s as though Franzen and Eugenides are still racing against a shadow, insisting that Wallace’s suicide proves that they’re the faster runners.

All this reminds me of nothing so much as another book, written shortly before any of these authors were born. Its narrator reminisces about his experiences at an eastern prep school during the early days of World War II, emphasizing his friendship with his golden, perfect roommate. Gene and Phineas are closer than brothers, though the latter is the unquestioned leader, and the novel climaxes when they prepare to make a final dive before graduation, climbing into the majestic tree whose branches overhang the water:

He had never been jealous of me for a second. Now I knew that there never was and never could have been any rivalry between us. I was not of the same quality as he. I couldn’t stand this…  Holding firmly to the trunk, I took a step toward him, and then my knees bent and I jounced the limb. Finny, his balance gone, swung his head around to look at me for an instant with extreme interest, and then he tumbled sideways, broke through the little branches below and hit the bank with a sickening, unnatural thud.

That’s from A Separate Peace by John Knowles. Gene forever regrets his moment of impulsive, fatal envy; I wonder if Eugenides and Franzen will come to rue the pettier but more considered way they’ve shaken the tree.

—James

We’ve all heard of the Nobel, the Booker, and the Pulitzer, but have you ever heard of the H. W. Wilson Award? It’s a yearly prize for the book with the best index. Who knew? I was pleased to see that A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake: Unlocking James Joyce’s Masterwork is a past winner. It took the brilliance of Joseph Campbell to make sense of Joyce, but it took the quiet efforts of the far less famous Charlee Trantino to make sense of Campbell.

The American Society of Indexers has high standards. When no index cuts the mustard, as seems to be the case in 2012, no prize is awarded. You have to respect that kind of seriousness—the ASI isn’t out to make news about themselves, they’re trying to honor good work. Out of respect for their mission, and as a way of drawing attention to the humble, helpful bit at the back of the book that too few of us acknowledge, I found professional indexer Gina Guilinger and asked for her indexing insights.

—James

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When people find out I am a book indexer, the response I often get is, “I thought computers did that.” Most indexers do use dedicated indexing software, which is useful and powerful for alphabetizing, sorting, and other mechanical functions of creating an index. But all of the term selection is a result of the indexer actually reading the text and discerning thematic relationships. A computer-generated list of words that appear in a text is more properly called a concordance—a user has no sense of how those words may be interconnected or even relevant.

With the growing popularity of eBooks, the question arises: Why is an index necessary when one can use a search function? The most basic reason is that the terms and phrases one finds in an index will lead the reader to relevant information. Search will lead a reader to every instance of a term or phrase, but not always to information that is practical. Additionally, an indexer is able to gather all references to a subject under one heading whereas a reader relying solely on a search function will need knowledge of a wide variety of search terms to locate all of the references relevant to the query. For example, if one was reading a book about the American West and wanted to find mentions of Buffalo Bill, a search function would only direct the reader to instances where the author specifically used that name. In an index, the reader might look up Buffalo Bill and be directed to an entry for “Cody, William Frederick (Buffalo Bill).” If the reader was not already familiar with Buffalo Bill’s full name, a search function would miss many useful references.

As another example, in the index for a recent book I worked on, the reader will find an entry for “racial attitudes” and a variety of sub-entries directing the reader to information about the topic. Because the subject of the book was a former slave and because of the time period she lived and worked in, race is an important part of her story. If a reader is interested in finding references to race and/or racism in her life, a keyword search would be a cumbersome and time-consuming process. The reader would have to search “race,” “racism,” and “racial,” and still wouldn’t find all the instances in the book where race is discussed. The indexer can tie the nuances of the author’s words to the theme of the author’s writing, while a computer has no regard for context or meaning.

It’s tricky work, and it’s usually the very last part of a book to be completed. The indexer must work with final page proofs, meaning that page numbering has been determined and will (hopefully!) not be changed, so that the locators lead to the correct page. Depending on the length of the book and the depth of indexing required, the indexer, typically a freelancer contracted by the publisher or the author, has 2-4 weeks to complete the assignment, on average. The most time-consuming task is the editing. The indexer needs to make sure all entries are spelled correctly and that there is consistency in the phrasing of headings and subheadings. A multitude of cross-references, indicated by “see” or “see also,” must also be checked for consistency and to make sure they don’t point to a non-existent entry. When everything is finished, the index is shipped off to the client as either a .doc or .rtf file and the typesetters format the index file for printing of the book.

When it’s done right, an index enhances the value of the text for the reader. Nancy Mulvany, author of Indexing Books, sums up the job best: “The indexer is constantly balancing the words of the author with the needs of the reader.” So the next time you flip to the back of your favorite cookbook to find that cake recipe or turn to your computer manual when your screen goes blank, take a moment to silently thank the indexer who led you to the information you were seeking.

—Gina Guilinger was an independent bookseller for 15 years who currently owns and operates Weight of the Word Indexing Service. A version of this post also appears on the blog At Least We’re Here.

No high-falutin’ philosophizing today, just a rundown of some new releases you should definitely know about.

Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon: The Pulitzer Prize board and I don’t often see eye to eye, but I couldn’t fault them when they rewarded The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. Chabon is often awesome and always interesting; even when he released an excerpt of a failed, unfinished novel I wanted to read it. His latest fiction relates the saga of Brokeland Records, “a kingdom of used vinyl located in the borderlands of Berkeley and Oakland.” The opening of a new mega-store threatens the shop and its longtime owners, but are they really the best arbiters of neighborhood values? How does a community that prides itself on its progressiveness deal with change when it comes? Telegraph Avenue is a 21st-century social novel that stands with the greats of ages past.

NW by Zadie Smith: Smith published her first novel, White Teeth, back in 2000, and I’ve liked her work ever since, despite that she’s a good deal younger and more talented than I am. That first book was referred to by the critic James Wood as an example of “hysterical realism,” a term he coined to describe fiction that pursues “vitality at all costs” and consequently “knows a thousand things but does not know a single human being.” I’m not sure how valid that criticism was then, but it’s certainly not now—Smith employs a more mature, less frantic voice these days, but she’s still one of the best at depicting life in a modern metropolis. Her characters are of all colors and classes, and she makes them collide oh-so-creatively. NW follows four childhood friends as they forge adult lives outside of the subsidized housing block where they grew up, and it’s one of the novels I’ve been anticipating most this September.

This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Díaz: Here’s another Pulitzer Prize-winner that I didn’t hate. Díaz won in 2008 for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, but his literary triumph was offset by a disastrous breakup in his personal life. That catastrophe proved to be the impetus for this collection of stories, all about the travails of relationships. This is not an author who cries quietly into his coffee cup, though. He’s more likely to rage and sling Dominican-inflected profanity about the page. Raw though the book is, it’s never just a screed. Díaz has an insider’s understanding of the machismo that often traps his characters, and he’s remarkably frank and self-lacerating about the costs that mentality inflicts. There’s more real insight here than in a hundred self-help books.

Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story by D.T. Max: It’s not fiction, but a biography of the most iconic fiction writer of this generation. David Foster Wallace enjoyed success from a very young age as the author of many acclaimed works, including his magnum opus, Infinite Jest, but his personal life was rife with troubles, from addiction to crippling depression. He killed himself in 2008 at the age of 46 after having tried to wean himself (with his doctor’s approval) off medication. Wallace was public about his struggles, but never romanticized them the way many of his peers and forebears did theirs. He was rigidly opposed to the myth of the tortured artist and long before his death had become a model and mentor to countless other writers and fans, making his death feel particularly tragic. As a writer, Max can’t compete with Wallace’s style (few could) but this is an essential read for anyone with any interest in Wallace’s once-in-a-generation voice.

All of the above books are out now or will be within the week. Coming later in September are others I’ve got my eye on. The Story of My Assassins by Indian writer Tarun Tejpal is based on real events—it tells the story of a journalist who begins to investigate the five hitmen who’ve been arrested on their way to kill him. It’s a crime novel with considerable depth, and it’s from Melville House, one of my favorite publishers.

The Casual Vacancy by J.K. Rowling needs little introduction. This is the first adult novel from the woman who brought us Harry Potter, and I’m eager to find out what kind of literary chops she’s got when her canvas is an ordinary English town instead of an imaginary landscape filled with horcruxes and sorting hats.

In Sunlight and in Shadow is by Mark Helprin, the author of the beloved (by me and many others) Winter’s Tale, and his latest novel seems to be a return to that earlier book’s setting in a phantasmagoric version of New York. A soldier returning from World War II catches sight of a beautiful young woman on a ferry and a romance is instantly sparked that will play out across time and the city. Perhaps it was inspired by one of my favorite scenes from the great film Citizen Kane. I won’t quote the speech to you now, but I remember it as well as that old man remembered his lady in white.

—James

Those of you who’ve been following our bottled messages for a while may already know that the writer who normally occupies this time slot has been involved in a project far grander than blogging. For those who don’t know, let me be the first to tell you: She’s pregnant! Like, really pregnant. Approaching the finish line at the end of term kind of pregnant. With twins. I have to sit down when I think about that, and I’m just a bystander.

As much of an over-achiever as our Miriam is, even she knows when to throw in the towel. She’ll be taking a hiatus to focus on the bigger picture, so even though we’re going to bring in a guest blogger or two, our publication schedule will likely be lighter than usual over the next few months. We’ve always wanted this to be a forum for our customers, too, so if you’ve ever wanted to share your thoughts on books and bookishness, now’s a perfect occasion to send them our way.

Join me in wishing my colleague the best as this new chapter (see what I did there?) of her life is about to open. Happy days, Miriam, and we’ll see you—and yours—when you get back.

—James

(continued from part one)

Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter was published to acclaim in 1979, winning the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction and the National Book Award for science; it hasn’t been out of print since and is popular enough to be known by its initials, GEB. If you know the book already, you probably love it, and if you don’t, I despair of being able to properly describe it. The central conceit is the thematic overlap in the work of the mathematical, artistic, and musical geniuses who give the book its title. Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, Escher’s drawings of hands drawing hands, and the endlessly rising tones of Bach’s canons are all demonstrations of self-reference and self-consciousness, which Hofstadter posits as the root of mental activity—thought isn’t thought without an awareness of itself. With that in mind, patterns of recursion and reflection start to appear not just in mathematics, art, and music, but everywhere, from computer science, formal logic, and philosophy, to physics, foreign languages, and cellular reproduction.

So many topics are treated that it may be easier to ask what the book isn’t about than what it is. It’s almost unbelievable that Hofstadter can hold all these concepts together as his book spins faster and faster, widening in scope as it goes, but he does. Though it may seem sprawling, at its core GEB tries to answer the most fundamental questions there are. In the preface to the twentieth anniversary edition, the author says his book “is a very personal attempt to say how it is that animate beings can come out of inanimate matter. What is a self, and how can a self come out of stuff that is as selfless as a stone or a puddle?” That may sound like heavy going, but reading GEB is a surprisingly uplifting experience, probably because its author’s tone is unrelentingly enthusiastic, even amazed by the rich complexity of his material.

The wonder of the book is that it doesn’t just present ideas, it embodies them. When Hofstadter wants to make a point about physical or intellectual systems that circle back on themselves, taking the output they produce and using it as their next input, he does so in a chapter that circles back on itself, ending in the same way that it began. Discussion of the intricacies of language and the alphabet abounds with palindromes, acrostics, and other wordplay. The fine points of applied philosophy are addressed through miniature dramas enacted by the figures from Zeno’s classic paradox, Achilles and the Tortoise. At every stage, the argument of the book is integrally bound up with its form. I don’t know another non-fiction book—in fact, I can’t imagine one—that’s more deeply (and properly) concerned with style. For me, this kind of literary sensibility, where ideas and their expression productively entwine, is essential in a science book if it’s to be considered among the best of its breed, truly noble in reason.

A book has just come out that’s making a fair bid to join that group (it’s what set in motion the train of thought that resulted in my last couple of posts). Phi: A Voyage from the Brain to the Soul was written by Giulio Tononi, an Italian-born neuroscientist and psychologist at the University of Wisconsin, and it lays out his theory of human consciousness, a subject that he began exploring through extensive study of the mystery of sleep. How do we lose awareness each night and regain it in the morning? Tononi’s distinctive take on the problem eliminates the binary nature of awareness. Rather than determining whether consciousness is on or off, he argues that it’s possible to quantify different levels of consciousness, and he uses the twenty-first letter of the Greek alphabet to refer to that quantity. Increasing it is more complicated than just adding neurons, of course. From a New York Times article:

How the parts of a network are wired together has a big effect on phi. If a network is made up of isolated parts, phi is low, because the parts cannot share information. But simply linking all the parts in every possible way does not raise phi much…Networks gain the highest phi possible if their parts are organized into separate clusters, which are then joined.

Our brains are organized in just such a way. Actually measuring phi in humans is so far theoretical, since there are far too many neurons to track all their interactions, but in simpler creatures, Tononi has had some lab-verified success in at least approximating their phi. With the publication of his latest book, he’s well on his way to successfully seizing the popular imagination, too.

Just picking Phi up is enough to make its ambition clear. It’s literally weightier than a normal volume its size, printed on the slick, substantial paper that’s used in the finest art books. And there’s art galore within it. Almost every page includes a glorious image, ranging from intracranial scans to architectural photographs to Renaissance paintings and beyond. These accompany a text that elucidates Tononi’s thinking in narrative form, depicting an allegorical journey undertaken by one of the forefathers of science, Galileo Galilei. Three famous figures guide the bearded sage along the way—with Francis Crick, discoverer of DNA, he examines the morphology of the brain; with artificial intelligence pioneer Alan Turing he learns about integrated information and its relation to consciousness; and with Charles Darwin he ponders the ever-evolving role of self-awareness in history and culture. With the mind itself as the subject of their investigations, no topic or area of human endeavor is out of bounds, and they allude to law, poetry, religion, cosmology, matters of life and death, and more.

As is the case for Hofstadter’s GEB, no synopsis can do full justice to the range of ideas Phi expresses, certainly not mine. I’ve only had the book in my hands for a few days, not nearly enough time for it all to soak in. Fortunately, Giulio Tononi will be visiting Seattle on September 12th and available to answer all my questions, so I’m sure after that I’ll be able to integrate all the information and raise my phi higher than ever.

—James