Books

Henry Farrell has posted a fascinating email exchange with China Mieville about Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which I bought ages ago but haven’t gotten to yet. A snippet:

CM – It’ll be interesting to see where he goes next. It’ll be quite hard to step back from this, back to another pre-Apocalypse moment, however conceived. Perhaps a drawing-room comedy…

I mean, didn’t you think the roasted baby was just, y’know, a little bit camp?

Go there for the more serious parts of the discussion. (Via Niall.)

Check out the 2007 American Library Association award winners in all the children’s/YA categories at YALSA (or the ALA has now updated their site). The Printz went to Gene Yang’s American Born Chinese (with honorable mentions to S&S favorites M.T. Anderson, John Green, Marcus Zusak and Sonya Hartnett). It’s nice to see a graphic novel win the top honor, so I won’t even carp about how Anderson was robbed.

Oh, and congratulations to Cynthia Lord for her Newbery Honor and Schneider Award!

See also:

Reaction from Kelly at Big A little a
and from winner Cynthia
and J.L. Bell on serious themes in the honored books
and John Green jumping up and down (not at all like a little girl)
and Maureen Johnson cracks hilariously wise

to Ellen Klages (emcee extraordinaire) on winning the 2007 Scott O’Dell Prize for Historical Fiction for children and young adults for her debut novel The Green Glass Sea!

Unrelatedly but not wholly, I was buying an issue of F&SF from the early ’70s in one of Montpelier’s fine used bookshops yesterday because it featured James Tiptree, Jr., on the cover, and the owner says to me, "That was the last thing I expected you to buy." At which point, I schooled him.

Well, that was a stupid pledge to make. Let’s see how I did, behind the cut:

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75 Books Update, The LastRead More »

Christopher and Emma took a walk yesterday and found … a discarded tombstone for Walter Tevis (and a disturbingly-named pet groomer). Go see. (Clicky the photos to enlarge.)

The second issue of the Fairy Tale Review arrived the other day and I just got a chance to look it over. It contains lots of excellent-looking stuff and THE FIRST CHAPTER OF A NOVEL BY STACEY RICHTER. The novel is apparently called Fairyland and the portion included is so fine it will blow your head off. And, yet, there is no mention of this novel anywhere on the web or reference to if it’s finished, when it might surface, etc.

And now I want to read it very badly. Anyone have any insider scoop on this one?

See also: My review of the first issue of FTR.

Did y’all know that Mark Twain dictated a post-mortem novel and two short stories by Ouija board to a lady in Missouri between 1915 and 1917? Me neither. Jason Offutt at From the Shadows has the story:

Emily Grant Hutchings, a struggling novelist, teacher and writer for St. Louis newspapers, claimed Twain dictated his last novel and two short stories – “Daughter of Mars” and “Up the Furrow to Fortune” – to her one letter at a time between 1915 and 1917 through a Ouija board.

…

The book, “Jap Herron,” was published by Mitchell Kennerley in 1917 as “a novel written from the Ouija board – Mark Twain via Emily Grant Hutchings.” Harper & Brothers, owners of the copyright on the pen name “Mark Twain,” sued Kennerley in 1918.

You can find a PDF of the novel here. (Via the one and only Andy Duncan, who’s on a roll this week.)

Jeff Bryant has masterminded the Underrated Writers 2006, the second annual collection of writers some litbloggers have recommended as deserving more love. I sent mine in under the wire, or no doubt I’d have gushed even more. My picks this year were: Joyce Ballou Gregorian (dead), Jeff VanderMeer (alive), Caitlin Kiernan (alive), and Elizabeth Hand (alive). Three out of four living ain’t bad.

Ursula Le Guin has a truly phenomenal essay about fantasy and children’s literature in the New Statesman. I highly encourage you to read the entire piece. The conclusion:

The Harry Potter phenomenon, a fantasy aimed at sub-teenagers becoming a great best-seller among adults, confirmed that fantasy builds a two-way bridge across the generation gaps. Adults trying to explain their enthusiasm told me: "I haven’t read anything like that since I was ten!" And I think this was simply true. Discouraged by critical prejudice, rigid segregation of books by age and genre, and unconscious maturismo, many people literally hadn’t read any imaginative literature since childhood. Rapid, immense success made this book respectable, indeed obligatory, reading. So they read it, and rediscovered the pleasure of reading fantasy – which may be inferior only to the pleasure of rereading it.

(Via Maud.)

I’ve been thinking about this question of things you’d have been embarrassed to be noticed reading as a kid or a teenager from another direction. Are there any books I read/loved/obsessed over back then that I am embarrassed for my younger self for reading looking back? And I find that there are.*

I would have to say that the two Jim Morrison poetry collections LEAP immediately to mind, toted proudly for several months.** I have a strong memory of falling asleep on the bus to a basketball game with Wilderness in my lap.

In general, I’m still okay with my taste in high school. It being mainly Latin American fiction and Jeanette Winterson and Salmon Rushdie. But I also read a lot of questionable serialized novels when I was younger; Sweet Valley High, anyone?

You guys have any of these?

(Mr. Rowe, we all know about your novelization problem, so ‘fess up.)

*Not that I would take any of them back, because they’re now part of my readerly and writerly DNA, which I’m pretty much happy with.
**I feel positively cleansed by this admission. And yet also shamed.