Everyday I Write the Book

"Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth" by Xiaolu Guo

I've seen lots of reviews lately for a new coming-of-age book set in China called Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth, by Xiaolu Guo. It's about Fenfang, a young Chinese woman who moves from her rural town to make her life in Beijing. The book's publisher calls it "at once wry and moving," and sayd that it "gives us a clear-eyed glimpse into the precarious and fragile state of China’s new identity and asserts Xiaolu Guo as her generation’s voice of modern China."

Booking Mama reviewed Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth earlier this month and enjoyed it a great deal.

Entertainment Weekly gave the book an A- and calls it "an engrossing portrait of a charmingly chaotic young woman".

The Chicago Sun-Times says, "Twenty Fragments resembles a Chekhov story in containing, under its brief, chatty surface, an enormous world. Here is modern China, struggling to belong to the 21st century while still tied to fascism and Communism. And here is a universal story of a young woman figuring out who she is, and deciding, despite the machinations of bad boyfriends and noisy neighbors, what she really wants. It's a little book that's so moving, you'll want to read it twice."

I'd guess that this book is enjoying a nice spike after the summer Olympics. Can anyone else weigh in?

Last Reminder To Vote for BBAW

Sunday 8/31 is the last day to vote for the Book Blogger Appreciation Awards. If you would like to nominate your favorite blogs for an award, send an e-mail to BbawawardsATgmailDOTcom with your choices. Please note that you DO NOT have to have a blog to make a nomination.  

The categories for the Book Blogger Appreciation Week Awards 2008 are:

Best General Book Blog
Best Kidlit Blog
Best Christian/Inspirational Fiction Blog
Best Literary Fiction Blog
Best Book Club Blog
Best Romance Blog
Best Thrillers/Mystery/Suspense Blog
Best Non-fiction Blog
Best Young Adult Lit Blog
Best Book/Publishing Industry Blog
Best Challenge Host
Best Community Builder
Best Cookbook Blog
Best History/Historical Fiction Blog
Best Design
Most Chatty
Most Concise
Most Eclectic Taste
Best Name for a Blog
Best Published Author Blog
Best Book published in 2008
Best Meme/Carnival/Event
Most Extravagant Giveaways
Best Book Community site
Most Altruistic Blog
Funniest/Most Humorous Blog
Best Sci-fi/fantasy/horror/spec-fic blog
Best Commenter/commentator

"Don't You Forget About Me" by Jancee Dunn

Here's a book that might only appeal to a certain cross-section of EDIWTB readers - those in their late 30s with complicated feelings about high school. I have to say, I am dying to read it.

It's called Don't You Forget About Me by Jancee Dunn. Here's the Amazon description:

At thirty-eight, Lillian Curtis is content with her life. She enjoys her routine as a producer for a talk show in New York City starring showbiz veteran Vi (“short for vibrant”) Barbour, a spirited senior. Lillian’s relationship with her husband is pleasant if no longer exciting. Most nights she is more than happy to come home to her apartment and crawl into her pajamas. Then she’s hit with a piece of shocking news: Her husband wants a divorce.

Blindsided, Lillian takes a leave of absence and moves back to her parents’ home in suburban New Jersey. Nestled in her childhood bedroom, where Duran Duran and Squeeze posters still cover the walls, she finds high school memories a healing salve to her troubles. She hurtles backward into her teen years, driving too fast, digging up mix tapes, and tentatively reconciling with Dawn, a childhood friend she once betrayed. Punctuating her stroll down memory lane is an invitation to the Bethel Memorial High School class of 1988 twenty-year reunion. It just might be Lillian’s chance to reconnect with her long-lost boyfriend, Christian Somers, who is expected to attend. Will it be just like heaven?

Lillian discovers, as we all must, the pitfalls of glorifying the glory days, the mortification of failing as a thirtysomething adult, and the impossibility of fully recapturing the past. Don’t You Forget About Me is for anyone who looks back and wonders: What if?

Here is a positive review from the L.A. Times.

While looking for reviews of Don't You Forget About Me I came across this amazing site: Cassette From My Ex. It's a blog about old mix tapes made by exes, with posts written by the recipient of old mixes about the significance of the tape and the relationship. There's also a corresponding audioo playlist for each one. So cool! I want to go dig up my old mixes (god, I had so many) and submit them to the site. Jancee Dunn's is the most recent entry, about a tape she one received titled "Hey Babe".

Has anyone out there read this? Jill from Breaking the Spine - did you end up reading this on vacation?

PS Please don't forget to vote for EDIWTB and all of your other favorite book blogs for the Book Blogger Appreciation Week Awards!

Book Blogger Appreciation Week

Amy over at My Friend Amy blog is holding a Book Blogger Appreciation Week from September 15-19. According to Amy, here's the purpose:

Acknowledging the hard work of book bloggers and their growing impact on book marketing and their essential contribution to book buzz in general, I am excited to announce the first Book Blogger Appreciation Week. Think of it as a retreat for book bloggers and a chance for us to totally nerd out over books together. And of course, shower each other with love and appreciation.

 

This isn't just for bloggers - it's meant for readers too. Amy's going to have daily giveaways at her blog, and is also compiling a directory of book bloggers, so be sure to visit her site to enter the giveaways and to find other great book blogs. There are a lot of them out there!

Also, if you're so inclined, vote for your favorite book blogs in her Book Blogger Appreciation Awards.  From her site: "Listed below are the categories of awards. There are many. You may not have a nomination for each award. It doesn't matter. Nominate up to two blogs per category and send an email to BbawawardsATgmailDOTcom with your choices. You DO NOT have to have a blog to make nominations. Each category will be narrowed to the top five blogs by number of nominations received, so don't be shy!!! Support your favorite blogs and bloggers! Nominations will close on August 31st."

And the categories for the Book Blogger Appreciation Week Awards 2008 are:

Best General Book Blog
Best Kidlit Blog
Best Christian/Inspirational Fiction Blog
Best Literary Fiction Blog
Best Book Club Blog
Best Romance Blog
Best Thrillers/Mystery/Suspense Blog
Best Non-fiction Blog
Best Young Adult Lit Blog
Best Book/Publishing Industry Blog
Best Challenge Host
Best Community Builder
Best Cookbook Blog
Best History/Historical Fiction Blog
Best Design
Most Chatty
Most Concise
Most Eclectic Taste
Best Name for a Blog
Best Published Author Blog
Best Book published in 2008
Best Meme/Carnival/Event
Most Extravagant Giveaways
Best Book Community site

Thanks!

"Nice To Come Home To" by Rebecca Flowers

Back in May, I went to a book reading by Rebecca Flowers, author of Nice To Come Home To. I blogged about it here. I just finished the book, which is the story of Prudence, a single 36 year-old woman in Washington, DC and her search for love and purpose in her life.

It sounds like the dreaded chick lit, I know - single woman surrounded by quirky friends and family and her quest for husbandcareerkids. But Nice To Come Home To was surprisingly rich and compelling. I love Flowers' writing, her eye for detail, and her descriptions of Pru's emotions. I love the fact that this book was set in D.C., as I could picture where everything was taking place. And most of all, I liked Pru, the heroine. She was totally relatable - I feel like I would have acted exactly like her in the same situations.

A few scenes were especially memorable to me. At one point, Pru ends up going hiking with the man she may or not be falling for, and they end up stranded in the mountains in his broken down van. They are forced to stay overnight in back of the chilly van, and Flowers describes perfectly one of those endless, surreal nights we've all experienced, and the oddly intimate conversations that often ensue.  She also perfectly narrates the cycle of a D.C. snowstorm - the initial excitement and anxiety, the hours of quiet during the snowfall, the novelty and beauty of the urban transformation to white stillness, the cabin fever and the unexpected camaraderie that arises among the snowed-in citizens.

Beyond the writing - I enjoyed the pace and the unexpected twists and turns that kept me turning the pages.

Here is a review of Nice To Come Home To from The Written Word blog, who learned about the book from me. How exciting!

I really liked this book. Entertaining, well-written, satisfying, all with a realistic  heroine. This was Flowers' first book and I am looking forward to more.

September Online Book Club: "Run" by Ann Patchett

I am happy to announce the next EDIWTB book club pick: Run, by Ann Patchett. I read (and adored) Bel Canto, so I am curious about her next book. Here's a description from the Barnes and Noble site:

It's a winter evening in Boston and the temperature has drastically dropped as a blizzard approaches the city. On this fateful night, Bernard Doyle plans to meet his two adopted sons, Tip the older, and more serious and Teddy, the affectionate dreamer, at a Harvard auditorium to hear a speech given by Jesse Jackson. Doyle, an Irish Catholic and former Boston mayor, has done his best to keep his two sons interested in politics, from the day he and his now deceased wife became their parents, through their childhoods, and now in their lives as college students. Though the two boys are African-American, the bonds of the family's love have never been tested. But as the snow begins to falls, an accident triggers into motion a series of events that will forever change their lives.

This is at its very center, a novel about what truly defines family and the lengths we will go to protect our children. As she did in her bestselling novel Bel Canto, Patchett beautifully weaves together seemingly disparate lives to show how intimately humans can connect. Stunning and powerful, Run is sure to engage any Patchett fan and bring her even more admirers.

Thanks again to the generous publicity department at HarperCollins, we have a number of review copies available for EDIWTB readers who would like to participate in the book club. Depending on when the books go out, the discussion will take place here on this blog sometime in late September. 

HarperCollins also sent over some cool links about the book - a look inside, as well as a discussion with Ann Patchett about writing a book about race and politics during the early months of the Obama candidacy.

If you would like to participate, please send me an email at gweiswasser@gmail.com with the following information in this format:

Name
Mailing Address
Mailing Address
Email Address

Thanks! I will be back in touch later with the date of the online discussion.

Rachel Donadio in NYT Book Review on Blurbs

Another interesting article in the book reviews yesterday - this one from the NYT Book Review by Rachel Donadio about the business of book blurbing, or providing endorsements for books that get printed on the dust jacket or promo materials. I know I take these blurbs into accunt when I am evaluating a book - but now that I know more about the process, maybe I won't. This essay explores the politics behind blurbing - being asked, how to decline, etc. I especially liked the section about "blurbing down" and "blurbing up":

For the most famous writers, blurbing is often a matter of noblesse oblige. Many authors blurb down, endorsing former students (Joyce Carol Oates on Jonathan Safran Foer), less celebrated writers working in a similar vein or up-and-comers who validate the blurbers’ own influence without challenging their supremacy (Salman Rushdie on Zadie Smith’s “White Teeth” and Kiran Desai’s “Inheritance of Loss”; Chinua Achebe on Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “Half of a Yellow Sun”). Major authors like John Updike or Philip Roth often forgo blurbs for their own books, preferring to trumpet critical praise for earlier works.

Contemporary authors can also associate themselves with greatness by blurbing up — by endorsing a reissued classic, for instance, as when Rick Moody plugged “The Recognitions” by William Gaddis, or by blurbing the safely dead, as when Nicole Krauss plugged “The Savage Detectives,” Roberto Bolaño’s posthumous best seller (“an ark bearing all the strange salvage of poetry and youth from catastrophes past and those yet to come”).

Then there’s the great churning mass of lateral blurbing, where patterns are harder to discern and dangerous rivalries might lurk, with hard feelings existing among the blurbers themselves. “One has to be especially careful about the mix,” Robert Weil, an editor at W. W. Norton & Company, said in an e-mail message. “Even though two separate blurbers may both greatly admire the author, they may be sworn enemies to one another and would refuse to provide a quote if they knew that the other person was weighing in.”

Fascinating!

Chris Bohjalian on Online Reviewers

Really interesting column in the Washington Post Book Review today by author Chris Bohjalian about reading online comments about his books. I've never read any of his work - Midwives, The Double Bind, etc. - but I've always followed his career. Many many years ago I worked with his brother at an ad agency in NY and I guess I've taken an interest in him in part due to that. He's very successful - his books have been Oprah picks and made into movies.

In the article, Bohjalian talks about the pitfalls of reading user reviews on Amazon and that the intimacy that Web 2.0 affords between writer and reader can be a double-edged sword. As a hobby book blogger, I read this column with great interest. I am aware that my words are ofen read by the authors I am discussing (several of them have emailed me after reading what I wrote), and I can't deny that this does in some way temper what I write. I might hold back a little on a negative review or even on gently criticizing a book I otherwise liked because I am worried about offending the author. It was interesting to read about it from the author's perspective.

Here's a short bio of Bohjalian that ran alongside the column.

"Those Who Save Us" by Jenna Blum

I recently learned about Those Who Save Us by Jenna Blum (I can't remember how - Page-A-Day Calendar? a blog?) and I am surprised I hadn't heard of it before. Sounds like it's a pretty well-known book, and it has gotten great reviews.

From Amazon (and Booklist):

Family secrets of Nazi Germany are at the core of this powerful first novel told in two narratives that alternate between New Heidelberg, Minnesota, in the present, and the small town of Weimar near Buchenwald during World War II. Trudy is a professor of German history in Minnesota, where she's teaching a seminar on women's roles in Nazi Germany and conducting interviews with Germans about how they're dealing with what they did during the war. But her mother, Anna, won't talk about it, not even to her own daughter. Trudy knows, she remembers, that Anna was mistress to a big Nazi camp officer. Why did she do it? Was he Trudy's father? The interviews are a plot contrivance to introduce a range of attitudes, from blatant racism to crippling survivor guilt. But the characters, then and now, are drawn with rare complexity, including a brave, gloomy, unlucky rescuer and a wheeler-dealer survivor. Anna's story is a gripping mystery in a page-turner that raises universal questions of shame, guilt, and personal responsibility.

The Wrinkled Page blog says, "The story was riveting, at turns touching and beautiful and horrifying. It is the story of what people do to survive, what they come to feel for those who save them, and how they come to terms with the after-effects of their decisions."

Such a Pretty Face blog says she "read this 479 page book in 2 days."

Murphy's Law blog has an interview with Jenna Blum here.

This sounds like a book worth reading. EDIWTB readers - can anyone weigh in?

"The Condition" by Jennifer Haigh

Finally. FINALLY. The kind of book I can sink into, get lost in, miss when I am not reading. I just finished Jennifer Haigh's The Condition, which I discussed earlier on the blog here.

I loved this book. It's about The McKotches, a New England family of five with a daughter, Gwen, who has Turner's Syndrome. The book opens at the family beach house on the Cape when the girl is young, and hasn't yet been diagnosed. Shortly after, her parents begin to suspect there is something wrong with her (she never goes through puberty), and their own disagreement about how to handle her treatment contributes in part to the breakup of their marriage.

The next section of the book picks up about twenty years later. The oldest son, Billly, is living a closeted life in NY. Gwen is also living a hermetic, antisocial life in Pittsburgh, working in the basement of a museum. Scott, the youngest, is unhappily married with kids and teaching at a second-rate prep school. The parents - Paulette and Frank - are divorced and each lonely and somewhat dissatisfied with where their lives have gone. Haigh takes each character in turn, examining their lives, their unhappiness, and their relationships with each other.

Gwen chooses to go on vacation to the Caribbean, and what transpires there sets into motion a series of events that causes each member of the family to evaluate their relationships with each other. Haigh's ability to get into their heads and understand the motivations and desires of these diverse characters is very impressive. I was struck, over and over, by how believable and sympathetic these characters were. They had legitimate issues with and anger toward each other, but no one was villainous or one-dimensional. I loved Haigh's dissection of family dynamics, her gentle analysis and rehabilitation of these wounded characters.

I don't want to give too much away here. The ending is a little pat for me (yes, I know, I always criticize endings), but I'll take it. This was the best book I've read in a while, and I heartily recommend it to anyone looking for a meaty, satisfying family drama.