I seem to be fast designating myself as the resident hip-hop book reviewer. Look for a review of Newsweek reporter Alison Samuels’ Off the Record (Amistad) in the Nov. 1 issue. I recently snapped up the galley of Total Chaos, a book of essays on the art and culture of hip-hop edited by Jeff Chang, author of the popular Can’t Stop Won’t Stop. 

Also on my shelf are Making Beats, a book on sampling by Joseph Schloss, Russell Simmons’ Life and Def, and Heather’s copy of Never Drank the Kool-Aid. (On an unrelated side-note, look for Simmons’ (estranged?) wife’s book, Fabulosity, on our Nov. 1 self-help bestsellers list.)

The hip-hop library that was being established before I was reading about hip-hop is pretty well endowed, too. LJ called It’s Not About a Salary by Brian Cross, published in 1994 and focusing on LA, “the best available work on a music genre that’s here to stay.”  With Tricia Rose’s Black Noise, we have what LJ considered “the first detailed exploration of rap music within its social, cultural, and artistic contexts,” published in 1994 as well.  Another formative text is Hip Hop America (1998) by the prominent critic Nelson George.

What hip-hop books are coming in and going out of your library?

My home bookshelves have runneth over since I started working at LJ in 1998. This, as many of my friends and relatives have pointed out, is one of those good problems to have: what to do with tens of pounds of beauteous converted pulp, all lovingly stockpiled under, on top of, and around my desk. The cons: My books don’t always fit so well in my Brooklyn apartment; sometimes, a poorly placed tome has come close to causing a serious accident (broken ankles, anyone?). My cat, Cleo, however, loves the bounty. A fat dictionary doubles as a kind of scratching post and a bed. Of course, I always have something excellent to read when I’m burned out on a book (see Half Reads Nearly Finished) or a trashy women’s magazine. Just last night, I couldn’t help but congratulate my bad self on the holdings of the shelf that sits next to my bed. This is where the music literature is at, from Michael Azerrad’s Our Band Could Be Your Life and Henry Rollins’s Get in the Van to Alyn Shipton’s A New History of Jazz and Toure’s Never Drank the Kool-Aid. I wasn’t that surprised to realize that I hadn’t read about a quarter of the titles. Will this force me to refrain from acquiring more free booty from my job? I think you know the answer, and the proof is in my work cabinet, freshly stuffed with, among other hardcovers, Zadie Smith’s On Beauty.

Chick lit is the Rodney Dangerfield of fiction; no matter how hard its proponents argue its popular appeal or hitch its literary merits to Jane Austen’s high-falutin’ skirts, it gets no respect, at least among the bespectacled, Brooklyn-residing hipster set who prefer novels by young male authors whose first name is Jonathan. Like the old chicken and egg argument, the chick lit debate will probably never be resolved. In the meantime, the battle continues with the recent salvo launched by editor Elizabeth Merrick’s anthology This Is Not Chick Lit. Note the snobby subtitle: Original Stories by America’s Best Women Writers, implying that the contributing authors to the responding volume edited by Lauren Baratz-Logstead, This Is Chick Lit, are talentless hacks. (This reminds me of one of my all-time favorite teen flics, Mean Girls, with Merrick and her ilk as the screen villainesses). While I would prefer to this debate to be resolved with a mud-wrestling competition at Madison Square Garden, Booklust blogger and cartoonist Patricia Storms’s latest “Art Imitating Lit” strip offers her own hiliarious take on the literary controversy: “The Stepford Jonathans”. Enjoy!–Wilda Williams 

The rumor mill in my adopted home of Brooklyn, NY, is churning all about the final show at legendary punk club CBGBs (see So Long, CBs; Hello, Punk New Wave). A few nights ago, word was punk poet/activist Patti Smith would rule the stage—a superlative choice considering her long history with the beloved Bowery dive (she was one of the earliest performers to make the place home base). Funny then that my colleague Mirela recently passed me Frank Stefanko’s copper-hue jacketed Patti Smith: American Artist (Palace Press International, October), a gripping collection of 150 black-and-white photos chronicling Smith’s evolution from penniless female Keith Richards fan girl to near superstar. Smith herself contributes the foreword, and her longtime cohort and guitarist Lenny Kaye penned the intro. That this is a photographic capsule is important—looking at Smith circa 1970 with 21st-century eyes, one can easily forget that the piercing, “masculine” appearance she cultivated was absolutely daring and unique. Today in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, I pass dozens of limp lookalikes in the street, but this is the Original Urban Warrior, in all her strutting, inky-black romantic glory. An excellent companion to Smith’s very library-friendly Patti Smith Complete: Lyrics, Reflections, and Notes for the Future (Anchor).

Nothing makes my Friday like a cheap Indian dinner and a good book sighting. Just this morning on the Q train from Brooklyn, I was lucky enough to spy a contender for LJ’s Best Book list in 2004: Orhan Pamuk’s Snow (it didn’t make the cut, though it was stiff year, what with David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas). It was enough to remind me that we’re verging on book award season: the Quill Awards are Oct. 11, and the National Book Awards are Nov. 15.

Coincidentally, today we Book Review editors held our annual hammering-out-the-details meeting for Best Books, LJ’s always rich and eclectic list of the year’s best fiction and nonfiction. Though I can’t drop the names of any strong hopefuls (OK, OK, Simon Callow’s Orson Welles), I can shed light on the selection process for the curious. Whereas in the golden 1990s (oh, youth!), we used a grueling and often rewarding committee voting system, today there’s no time for such intellectual pursuit. Today, an individual editor chooses nominees based on LJ reviews, personal preferences, and other evaluative sources (from the New York Times to more regional papers to even Joe Blow Book Reader on the Street). It’s not as fun or as brain-crushing as the Old Way, but I still think it works as long as an editor operates under the assumption that the list should reflect the shelves of American libraries, public and academic. Give the people their pop fiction, their military history, their consumer health—and don’t you dare skimp on the self-help! Our list reeks of democracy, and I mean that in the best way. Let the reading (skimming?) begin.

My colleague Wilda Williams recently sent the book review department an article in which the editor of Bookslut.com writes about the mail: Jessa Crispin Will Happily Accept Your Cash. It may sound dull to you, but, as one who opens the mail for a book review, it sparked my interest. Although I haven’t gotten any cash yet, I recently passed a box of BBQ sauce to our cookery editor, Ann Burns. We also got a small box of cheerios with a book, which I ate myself.  Heather McCormack told me of one of her days in the bookroom when she shared a bag of homemade cookies with coworkers as they all munched away and wondered just how safe it was to eat food that came in with the mail.

Although Crispin doesn’t seem to think t-shirts, bags, stress balls, or food make for particularly effective publicity campaigns, I appreciate anything that catches my attention. A unique cover or straightforward title will nestle into my memory, and it certainly makes my job easier when I answer “Did you receive this galley I sent three weeks ago?” queries. 

All in all, if part of one’s job is opening hundreds of packages that come in the mail each day, one is pretty lucky if it’s hundreds of books coming in months before they’ll be in bookstores.  Food is just an added bonus–it’s hard work tearing through those jiffy mailers, and a quick burst of sugar energy may spark my mind up, if only for long enough to shelve a book.  

At the risk of being too wordy about the mail, I can’t help adding that just this minute I heard Wilda Williams call, “You forgot your pen!” after receiving a submission for the Christian Fiction column from Bette-Lee Fox, our Romance reviews editor, who responded, ”They sent the pen along with the book.  Enjoy it.  Write yourself Christian Fiction letters.”

This weekend was high time for me to get to New Haven to see “Searching for Shakespeare,” which traveled to the Yale Center for British Art from the National Portrait Gallery in London. No one ever promised it would stick around for ever and a day! This is the short and long of it: it closed yesterday! If you couldn’t get there, you’re not in a pickle. As good luck would have it, you can simply get the companion volume, published by Yale University Press. It is glorious, and essential for any Shakespeare collection. It will allow you to scrutinize intimately many of the most lustrous items in the exhibit, including some that were not permitted to travel to the U.S.

The book also conveys the joys of studying Shakespeare through its very focus on his face, his biography, and the material culture of the era, whereas a book of lit. crit. might serve to impede and set your teeth on edge! This way, readers might move on to contributor James Shapiro’s A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599,  which is great for placing WS firmly within the politics, wars, and court intrigues of his era. Then readers, their qualms vanishing into thin air, may venture to Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World, which enchants from its first sentence to its last, never losing a reader on the journey.

Regardless of all the scholarship above, some critics have not been  disheartened from proposing other figures as the actual writer of Shakespeare’s works. Wherever you come down on that topic (or even if you feel equivocal), it can be fun to read the books they write. At first glance, you can find yourself persuaded by arguments that are in fact flawed, circumstantial, even zany!. A good overview is John F. Mitchell’s Who Wrote Shakespeare. The newest gossip in the debate is in Brenda James and William Rubenstein’s The Truth Will Out: Unmasking the Real Shakespeare, due out in October, about Sir Henry Neville, politician and diplomat and distant relative of Shakespeare, who, they claim, didn’t want to besmirch his court career by writing under his own name.

As you’ve leapfrogged through this piece, have you wondered about the parts in bold, where I seem to lay it on with a trowel? They are words and phrases coined by Shakespeare. Where would we be without him — whoever he was! 

Ten years ago this week, doe-eyed rapper Tupac Shakur died from gunshot wounds sustained from a drive-by-shooting. Like many other celebrities who check out too soon, he has become a double threat, adding to his resume publishing superstar. It seems every year the anniversary of his murder rolls around, another tribute appears in my stacks, and this year is no different. Writer/director/activist Jamal Joseph offers up the most lavish treatment in Tupac Shakur Legacy (Atria), an authorized biography modeled after the highly successful Bob Dylan Scrapbook. Pac’s many fans can pore over 20 facsimiles of handwritten lyrics, notebook entries on a video shoot, and pages from a movie script. There are photos aplenty (100 in full color and black and white) and even an audio CD of selected interviews. At $45, it’s a bit of an indulgence for a library, and no doubt the fascimiles would go missing, but this book is guaranteed to pull in armies of young patrons. If you don’t have them already, you should also order Shakur’s own The Rose That Grew Through Concrete (a poetry collection) and Darrin Keith Bastfield’s Back in the Day: My Life and Times with Tupac Shakur. 

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, The Age of Innocence, The Great Gatsby, Catcher in the Rye, Pride and Prejudice—what do all of these novels have in common? They’re classics, of course, but that answer isn’t going to get you cool points In the Bookroom. More important to this blog, I’ve read each of them at least three times and am bound to return to them yet again to escape a mystifiying slice of magical realism (see my Half Reads Nearly Finished and Anna Katterjohn’s Half Reads in Accord). For lack of a better term, let’s call these books multireads, and while we’re at it, let’s count the ways in which they rock our cerebrums. For a book to make my multiread list, it’s got to have style—prose style—and F. Scott Fitzgerald, a Minnesota boy no less, had it in his spit. J.D. Salinger, not the most eloquent sentence-stringer, I know, but Holden Caulfield still slays me with his angst-ridden voice, the literary equivalent of James Dean’s Jim Stark from Rebel Without a Cause. I’d like to go on, but it’s Friday, and my brains are the consistency of medieval gruel. Speak, dear readers, or forever hold your Hemingways and mojitos.

After discovering the wacky coincidence that I am, at the same time as Heather, making my way slowly through White Teeth, I thought I should add my thoughts. Judging by the receipt sticking out of the copy I saw laying on her desk, I’d say my green Shakespeare & Co. bookmark is a little further in. I wouldn’t call it a half-read (or a quarter-read) for me, but I’ve been reading it in segments of about 10 pages at a time on my commute, which might make authors and literature connoisseurs everywhere cringe. I won’t spoil it, and I don’t know how the plot resolves, but everything does seem to be spiraling out of control as Heather fears. Only, much of the trouble is caused by those characters that do have more in common than Archie and Samad–their children, born and raised together in London (and Samad’s are twins), and other middle-class British citizens.

Not as much of a half-reader as Heather or Joe Queenan (as he revealed in an essay in the New York Times book review), I tend to be a plan-to-reader. The stacks of books on my nightstand aren’t yet started (like Smith’s second, On Beauty, reviewed in LJ more than one year ago), but I look at them fondly, read the jacket, and can’t wait to start them, once I finish… But now I’m working on finishing White Teeth, planning to get back to Programming the Universe, and starting a new one for LJ. This job may turn me into a half-reader yet, and perhaps all of you who have resorted to marking your page with receipts and other odd scraps of paper–all of your bookmarks occupied marking pages in 10 different books–have the better of readers’ ailments.