Oh dear. I’m tardy again. Apologies - this time ALA Midwinter blindsided me. It never ends, this thing called life; knockin’ us about like a wee baby pebble in a rushing river current. Alas.

 Xpress Reviews for Week of Jan. 23rd, 2007

FICTION
Davis, Jill A. Ask Again Later. Ecco: HarperCollins.

Raybourn, Deanna. Silent in the Grave. Mira: Harlequin.

NONFICTION
Hirshey, Gerri. Nowhere To Run: The Story of Soul Music. Southbank, dist. by Trafalgar Square.

Reading 24: TV Against the Clock. Tauris, dist. by St. Martin’s.

Xpress Reviews for Week of Jan. 16th, 2007
[This is on the same webpage as Jan. 23 - you will have to scroll down past Jan. 23rd’s reviews to get to it - Sorry!]

FICTION
Kinsella, Sophie. Shopaholic & Baby. Dial: Random.

Palmer, Michael. The Fifth Vial. St. Martin’s.

Stone, David. The Echelon Vendetta. Putnam.

NONFICTION
Iversen, Portia. Strange Son: Two Mothers, Two Sons and the Quest To Unlock the Hidden World of Autism. Riverhead: Putnam.

Latreille, Francis. White Paradise. Abrams.

GRAPHIC NOVELS
Arakawa, Hiromu. Fullmetal Alchemist. Vol. 11. Viz Media.

BIBLOS. J-Boy. Vol. 1. June: Digital Manga.

Hagiwara, Kazushi. Bastard!! Vol. 14. Viz Media.

Hashiguchi, Takashi. Yakitate!! Japan. Vol. 3. Viz Media.

Hatori, Bisco. Ouran High School Host Club. Vol. 8. Viz Media.

Kanno, Aya. Soul Rescue. Vol. 1. Tokyopop.

Kim, Yeon-Joo. Little Queen. Vol. 1. Tokyopop.

Kishimoto, Masashi. Naruto. Vol. 12. Viz Media.

Oba, Tsugumi (text) & Takeshi Obata (illus.). Death Note. Vol. 9. Viz Media.

Oda, Eiichiro. One Piece. Vol. 13: It’s All Right! Viz Media.

Pruett, Joe (text) & John Kissee & Chris Dreier (illus.). Untouchables. Image Comics.

Reed, Gary (text) & Ron McCain (illus.). Deadworld: The Dead Killer. Image Comics.

Sanbe, Kei. Kamiyadori. Vol. 1. Tokyopop.

Shinohara, Chie. Red River. Vol. 16. Viz Media.

Takahashi, Rumiko. InuYasha. Vol. 28. Viz Media.

Takei, Hiroyuki. Shaman King. Vol. 11: Blood and Pompadours. Viz Media.

Tanemura, Arina. Full Moon Sagashite. Vol. 7. Viz Media.

Yoshida, Akimi. Banana Fish. Vol. 17. Viz Media.

The literary awards season continued as the National Book Critics Circle, a nonprofit organization of more than 700 book reviewers, announced its  finalists for the 33rd annual NBCC awards. For the third year, the announcements were made January 20 at a festive Soho gathering graciously hosted by Housing Works Used Books Cafe. The first year I attended there was a raging blizzard, which failed to dampen spirits; unfortunately, cold weather and a bad case of the flu kept me housebound this year, but you can check out the goings-on at Critical Mass, the NBCC blog.

Nonfiction

• Patrick Cockburn, The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq (Verso)
• Anne Fessler, The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe V. Wade (Penguin Press)
• Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (Penguin Press)
• Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution (Ecco)
• Sandy Tolan, The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew and the Heart of the Middle East (Bloomsbury)

Fiction

• Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun (Knopf)
• Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss (Grove/Atlantic)
• Dave Eggers, What is the What (McSweeney’s)
• Richard Ford, The Lay of the Land (Knopf)
• Cormac McCarthy, The Road (Knopf)

Memoir/Autobiography

• Donald Antrim, The Afterlife (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Alison Bechdel, Fun Home (Houghton Mifflin)
• Alexander Masters, Stuart: A Life Backwards (Delacorte)
• Daniel Mendelsohn, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (HarperCollins)
• Teri Jentz, Strange Piece of Paradise (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Poetry

• Daisy Fried, My Brother is Getting Arrested Again. (University of Pittsburgh Press)
• Troy Jollimore, Tom Thomson in Purgatory. (Margie/Intuit House)
• Miltos Sachtouris, Poems (1945-1971) (Archipelego Books)
• Frederick Seidel, Ooga-Booga (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• W.D. Snodrass, Not for Specialists: New and Selected Poems (BOA Editions)

Criticism

• Bruce Bawer: While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the WestFrom Within (Doubleday)
• Frederick Crews, Follies of the Wise: Dissenting Essays (Shoemaker & Hoard)
• Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion As A Natural Phenomenon(Viking)
• Lia Purpura, On Looking: Essays (Sarabande Books)
• Lawrence Wechsler, Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences(McSweeney’s)

Biography

• Debby Applegate: The Most Famous Man in Amerca: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher (Doubleday)
• Taylor Branch, At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-1968 (Simon& Schuster)
• Frederick Brown, Flaubert: A Biography (Little, Brown)
• Julie Phillips, James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon (St.Martin’s Press)
• Jason Roberts, A Sense of the World: How a Blind Man Became History’s Greatest Traveler (HarperCollins)

The 13th floor of 360 Park Avenue South (that is, LJ, PW, and Criticas) held our first grand free-books giveaway for other employees in our building last Wednesday. Now, before you balk and scream “Fairfax Library!” note that we’ve tried to donate them, but we’ve tried for years, in the meantime accumulating hundreds of mostly paperback and picked over books. (An editor with a Paris travel guide from 2003 in hand asked whether I thought much had changed there since then.) 

But the point is, as I was cleaning out what was left over after a day of passive weeding on our part and one of active acquisition on the part of others, I was struck by what was left: mass-market alien books and a lot of poetry.

So, with all that is ignored, what kind of poetry do people want?  A poetry best seller list that ran in the April 1, 2006 issue showed big names Billy Collins, Ted Kooser, and Mary Oliver; musicians/poets Patti Smith, Tupac Shakur, and Saul Williams; old classics Beowulf and The Odyssey; and, of course, a couple of anthologies edited by Garrison Keillor.

Check out Barbara Hoffert’s last best-poetry roundup—and look for the ‘06 list coming this spring—in which she encourages forming a poetry reading group. I was happy to see an overlap of poets Ted Kooser, W.S. Merwin, Wislawa Szymborska, and Jane Kenyon on Barbara’s list of the best and on the best seller list. 

So, poets and readers, be optimistic. Even if many books of verse are off to book heaven at a young age, the “best” are diverse and thriving. And start a poetry book club to save the new poetry! (Or we could work on reviving the consumption of alien mass-market books if you prefer.)  I’d love to hear how your poetry sections fare.

Speaking of mysteries, today is the 198th birthday of the strange genius considered to be the father of the detective story and crime fiction. Rather than leave a bottle of cognac and three roses on Edgar Allan Poe’s Baltimore grave like the city’s famous and mysterious Poe Toaster (memorably depicted in Laura Lippman’s In a Strange City), the Mystery Writers of America chose to commemorate the day by announcing their nominees for the 2007 Edgar Allen Poe Awards, honoring the best in mystery fiction and nonfiction published in 2006. 

Best novel nominees include:

The nominees for a Best First Novel by An American Author are:

Sarah Weinman’s mystery blog, Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind, offers an insightful analysis of what the nominations mean, pointing out that ” If there’s a trend, it’s toward intelligent fiction from outside our normal boundaries, be it historical, cultural or psychological”. Indeed of three of the best novel nominees—literary novelist Louis Bayard, Chocolat author Joanne Harris, and travel writer Jason Goodwin— would not be considered  mystery authors in the traditional sense. Maybe the  strict barriers that have placed genre fiction like mystery in a literary ghetto are starting to break down. Maybe like Edgar Allen Poe, mysteries can finally be judged on their own literary merits as fiction worthy of serious attention. 

The popularity of mystery books never ceases to amaze this peripheral admirer of the genre (read last year’s Book Buying Survey and catch the latest coming in the Feb. 15 issue). I say “peripheral admirer” because I quite literally have never read a contemporary mystery—unless I can count the several volumes in the “Choose Your Own Adventure” series I devoured in the mid- to late 1980s—and yet I love the idea of murder as formula. Oh, the gruesome possibilites! Oh, the intrigue!

Strangely enough, my reading habits aren’t so unique. Yesterday, I ate pizza with two co-workers who are avid readers yet have never consumed a modern mystery to their knowledge either (!!). When we tried to get to the bottom of why, no one cited poor literary breeding. Mysteries, we well know from reading LJ’s Mystery Column, can be very accomplished and intellectually stimulating. Check P.D. James and Walter Mosley, favorites of our own Francine Fialkoff and Michael Rogers, respectively.

One of us did, however, make the point that mysteries can seem almost demanding. There’s quite literally a case to crack, and her brain balks at that kind of a challenge. I can relate to that point, but I would augment it by saying mystery readers seem like a slightly scary gang. What if I don’t fit in? Will I get a pair of cement shoes if I don’t lap up the gory details? What if I don’t “get” the mystery even at the end (this happens to me with mystery movies all the time)? I hate feeling stupid after having indebted myself to Uncle Sam for tens of thousands of dollars for grad school.

For the record, I don’t want to remain a nonmystery reader forever. My brain could use a good stretching and blood splattering, and I might as well start with the best of last year as determined by LJ’s Jo Ann Vicarel. 

Like Spanish dictator Francisco Franco’s excruciatingly prolonged death in 1975 (”Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead!), the Judith Regan soap opera continues apparently with no end in sight. PW reports today that HarperCollins announced the closure of the Los Angeles office of the fired publisher’s ReganMedia imprint. While the company expects to publish most of the titles Regan acquired, it has canceled the publication of 7, Peter Golenbock’s controversial novel about MIckey Mantle. Ooops! Unfortunately we have just closed our February 1 issue in which our review of this steamy book is running. Too late for us to pull. Oh well, at least my reviewer has the consolation of owning a now-valuable galley. And I don’t doubt that Golenbock will find another publisher, despite the tawdry nature of his novel. It definitely lacks the radioactive toxicity of O.J. Simpson’s If I Did It.    

In my seventh year of handling self-help books, I’ve turned a corner that I didn’t know existed in publishing. Back before my eyes turned into computer-singed black holes, I couldn’t help but slam some of the genre’s offerings. “Who in her right mind,” I wanted to know, “dubs herself a ‘Tantric sex guru, motorcycle enthusiast, and life coach’?” Self-help, to an outsider, often seems like a pathetic and ridiculous alternate reality where people are incapable of figuring out anything for themselves. I kept waiting for a self-help guide to surviving self-help books.

Thankfully, I’m older, wiser, and blinder. Perverse self-marketing and shoddy writing suddenly don’t irk or amuse me in this new year. Self-help is what is, a formula that is often repeated with zero original twists. I’ve finally accepted that—only to have to readjust my view thanks to some singular surprises.

Take these starred books from the January 15th Self-Help Column by Deborah Bigelow: Melissa Kirsch’s The Girl’s Guide to Absolutely Everything, Steven Solomon & Lori Teagno’s Intimacy After Infidelity, and H. Norman Wright & Sheryl Wright Macauley’s Making Peace with Your Mom. There are even more goodies in the February 15th installment: Jane Isay’s Walking on Eggshells, Varla Ventura’s Wild Women Talk About Love, and Kenneth Adams’s When He’s Married to Mom.

What’s it all mean? Can self-help actually serve a meaningful, practical purpose and not just gaze into its shallow navel? Having just taken my first successful dip into the genre (see This Girl’s Guide to Absolutely Everything), I’d have to say yes, but I don’t kid myself. A self-help golden age this probably ain’t (though 2005 had its moments, too—see the best of the genre here). There’s a tidal wave of crap coming any second now, and I’ll be there to soak it up with my new, improved Zen-like attitude.

So I take it all back (see Staying alive a la biography). Elvis fans have a King-sized new publication to look forward to in August (which will mark the 30th anniversary of his death): Adam Victor’s Elvis Encyclopedia (Overlook Press). For $60, you get 420 pages of A-to-Z entries, complete with 250 full-color and 150 black-and-white images. The blad I have offers a sneak peak of the A’s, including info on former Vice President Spiro T. Agnew, whom Elvis met in 1970 and gave ”a gold-inlaid .357 Magnum revolver.” And under “Aging,” we learn that Elvis “became more openly interested in spirituality” as he neared 30.

Victor’s book represents what I think will become a trend in reference publishing: semischolarly (i.e., often opinionated, “voice”-heavy) studies of popular music icons. Last year, Michael Gray gave us the excellent Bob Dylan Encyclopedia (Continuum), and tomes on the Beatles and Rolling Stones can’t be far behind.

Those bands and more will no doubt warrant coverage in the fourth edition of Oxford’s The Encyclopedia of Popular Music (its 1998 incarnation earned a star). Colin Larkin returns as editor of some 27,000 entries that span the gamut. Hellbent for leather? The EOPM doesn’t just delve into heavy metal, but its wimpier, pale-faced stepbrother, emo. For a complete review, check out the March 1 issue.

Hi folks,

I got a special double whammy for you today…because I forgot to post last week’s Xpress Review titles! The New Year sort of snuck up on me, whomped me on the side of the head, and inflicted some minor brain damage. I’m sure some of you can empathize. So here are the titles reviewed in our web-only, freely-accessible Xpress Reviews section.

Xpress Reviews for Week of Jan. 9th, 2007

NONFICTION
Carter, Jimmy. Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. S. & S.

Doody, Margaret. Tropic of Venice. Univ. of Pennsylvania.

Hellmann, Claudia & Claudine Weber-Hof. On Location: Cities of the World in Film. Prestel.

Sedgwick, John. In My Blood: Six Generations of Madness and Desire in an American Family. HarperCollins.

Song: The World’s Best Songwriters on Creating the Music That Moves Us. Writer’s Digest: F&W Publications.

Walsh, David. NO: Why Kids—of All Ages—Need To Hear It and Ways Parents Can Say It. Free Pr: S. & S.

GRAPHIC NOVELS
Andersson, Max & Lars Sjunnesson. Bosnian Flat Dog. Fantagraphics.

Arai, Kiyoko. Beauty Pop. Vol. 2. Viz Media.

Dedini, Eldon. An Orgy of Playboy’s Eldon Dedini. Fantagraphics.

Deitch, Kim. Shadowland. Fantagraphics.

Emond, Steve. Emo Boy. Vol. 1: Nobody Cares About Anything Anyway, So Why Don’t We All Just Die? SLG.

Fukuchi, Tsubasa. The Law of Ueki. Vol. 3. Viz Media.

Hanuka, Tomer. The Placebo Man. Alternative Comics.

Hernandez, Gilbert. Luba: Three Daughters. Fantagraphics.

Kurata, Hideyuki (text) & Shutaro Yamada (illus.). R.O.D: Read or Die. Vol. 4. Viz Media.

Kusumoto, Maki. Dolis. Vol. 1. Tokyopop.

Meathaüs. Vol. 8: Headgames. Alternative Comics.

Xpress Reviews for Week of Jan. 2, 2007
[This is on the same webpage as Jan. 9 - you will have to scroll down past Jan. 9’s reviews to get to it - Sorry!]

NONFICTION
About What Was Lost: 20 Writers on Miscarriage, Healing, and Hope. Plume: Penguin Group (USA).

Colbert, Don, M.D., with Mary Colbert. The Seven Pillars of Health: The Natural Way to Better Health for Life. Siloam: Strang.

Judd, Naomi. Naomi’s Guide to Aging Gratefully: Facts, Myths, and Good News for Boomers. S. & S.

Powell, Helena Frith. All You Need To Be Impossibly French: A Witty Investigation into the Lives, Lusts, and Little Secrets of French Women. Plume: Penguin Group (USA).

White, Ganga. Yoga Beyond Belief: Insights to Awaken and Deepen Your Practice. North Atlantic.

GRAPHIC NOVELS
Higuchi, Daisuke. Whistle! Vol. 15: One. Viz Media.

Matsumoto, Tomo. Beauty Is the Beast. Vol. 5. Viz Media.

Nakajo, Hisaya. Hana-Kimi. Vol. 15. Viz Media.

Parker, Jeff (text) & Manuel Garcia (illus.). Marvel Adventures The Avengers. Vol. 1: Heroes Assembled. Marvel.

Another year means another call for new book reviewers. And while we welcome all kinds of librarians (as well as academics and professional writers), I am personally interested in reaching out to the young bloods, those in and just out of library science programs looking to orienate themselves in the field.

My reasons are not rooted in ageism—it’s just obvious to me that incoming professionals need help understanding their realm and their potential place in it. Reviewing for LJ may smack of “collection development” and therefore not appeal to, say, a student leaning toward technological services, but I’m here to say hokum. Information is information, and all librarians love the stuff and want to see it used by people.

Signing up with one of our editors means that you can contribute to the dissemination of that information. You, in effect, are keeping America’s hungry minds fed—and jazzing up your resume in the process so that you can land that hot gig and build your very own mansion on the hill in suburban Michigan. So stop your hemming and hawing. Click here to fill out an application and contract, and we’ll send you a book faster than you can say, “Where the jobs at?” Looking for testimonals? Want to know if it’s worth it? Last year, I signed up nearly ten young bloods, and I can think of a few who’d probably be up for counting the ways that reviewing rocks their little casbahs. As John Berry says, “More later…”