The Help

USA Today explains why The Help is worth the read. As I've said before, this is worth getting up from the computer screen right now (or clicking on Amazon) and getting a copy. (If you're lucky enough to be in the Atlanta-Fulton area, use the interlibrary loan system.)

Man Booker Prize Season BEGINS!

The 2009 Man Booker Prize Longlist has been announced, and I’m chomping at the bit to read each one – preferably tonight. However, since prudence must set in, and not all of them are available in the US yet, I’ll have to take them a few at a time.

In the future, check out the 2009 Booker list in the right column to chart Red Room’s progress through what is sure to be a VERY interesting Booker Prize season.

Author;lkj;lkj Title
Byatt, AS - The Children's Book
Coetzee, J M - Summertime
Foulds, Adam - The Quickening Maze
Hall, Sarah - How to paint a dead man
Harvey, Samantha - The Wilderness
Lever, James - Me Cheeta
Mantel, Hilary - Wolf Hall
Mawer, Simon - The Glass Room
O'Loughlin, Ed - Not Untrue & Not Unkind
Scudamore, James - Heliopolis
Toibin, Colm - Brooklyn
Trevor, William - Love and Summer
Waters, Sarah - The Little Stranger

Gil Adamson's The Outlander

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Poking around the bookosphere brought me to a link on Elegant Variation to an interview with Gil Adamson, author of The Outlander, one of my top picks for 2008. Great books ALWAYS deserve mention, so I thought I’d put another plug in for it.

It’s a subtle and beautifully written novel. Read my review here. Read Adamson's interview with The Morning News' Robert Birnbaum here. Most interesting to me was her point about writing a novel:

"Well, I wrote it to see if I could. I wrote it to see if I could actually write a novel. Because I didn’t put a huge amount of pressure on myself, I just decided to sort of give it a shot, it was incredibly enjoyable and so I stuck at it. In fact, when I started, I used one of my own poems as an outline. I don’t know if you’ve seen this; it’s one of the things that gets repeated…that I wrote a poem first, and then when I decided I was going to try to write something longer than a short story, I was casting about for ideas, and I remember—I’ve said this so many times I feel like I’m repeating myself—but I remember seeing Tom Stoppard interviewed on Charlie Rose, I think it was, and he was making jokes about himself and saying he has no ideas, no ideas at all, I have an impoverished imagination so what I do is that I steal from others. You know, Shakespeare, he steals from Shakespeare to write Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, and I thought, Well, I can steal from myself, that seems reasonable. So I took one of my poems and just literally used it as an outline, and obviously it very quickly departed from the poem and it had its own DNA and it had its own trajectory, and it just sort of drove itself forward."

Books for Babies?

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I’m 5 months pregnant, which is very exciting, and now that my little jumping bean has ears and is beginning to learn the sound of his/her parents’ voices, I figure it’s high time we introduce him/her to literature.

I’ve been having a lot of fun thinking of the PERFECT book to read to my little Stowaway, so called because he/she came back with us from the Caribbean. Over the course of the past few months, I’ve thought about The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but don’t want the little person to get ideas about being naughty, Great Expectations, but worry about the poor examples of female characters (Estella is awful and Miss Havisham is just odd), Little Women, but that’s too female-centric, and the Harry Potter series, but that’s just too long.

I’m thinking now that The Hobbit could fit the bill. What do you think? What would you suggest I read to my little Stowaway?

Simon Montefiore's Sashenka

When I was in 6th grade, I was assigned a beast of a social studies project. My teacher was crazy about details and creative elements, so the thing had to be beautiful and thorough. I was told to investigate whether or not Anastasia Romanov had died in 1917 like the Bolsheviks said or, as Anna Anderson would later contend, she had actually made it out alive. (At this time, they had not yet done the DNA testing proving that Anna Anderson was an impostor, so the subject was tinged with mystery.) Until this point, I had had no exposure to Russian history, but being a sucker (still am) for high intrigue, ornate architecture, and costuming, I was immediately hooked. What began then, has evolved into a life-long interest in Russian history and literature.

A few weeks ago, I came across a thick, door-stop of a novel in the library by Simon Montefiore, a Russian historian. The eponymously named Sashenka follows the life, love, and enigmatic disappearance of Sashenka, a head-strong and wealthy young woman who comes to age during Russia’s transition from Tzarist monolith to Communist titan. Sashenka grows up in a household of maids, fine clothes, but little attention from her self-centered parents. Unhappy and neglected, she turns to the fascinating and subversive teachings of her uncle, a Bolshevik revolutionary, who has ideas about how Sashenka can help the Red cause. She is soon deeply absorbed in the Revolution and eventually rises to the top of the Communist ranks. She is a premier example of Bolshevik womanhood, exemplifying the dutiful mother, devoted wife, and industrious Comrade. She marries another devotee to the cause and together they achieve the heights of popularity within the Party; Stalin even joins their dinner parties. One evening, however, she meets a young man, an artist vibrant with life, and someone unlike any she has ever known. What evolves from this first meeting will impact not only her life, but the lives of her family for generations to come.

Montefiore suffuses this absorbing plot with details from history that bring the entire landscape of danger, love, and philosophical obsession to life. The multi-generational saga allows us not only to follow Sashenka and her family, but to observe the evolution of Russian history from an intimate perspective.

This is a tour de force of a novel, one I that will read again and again.

Word!

A post on The Guardian's book blog contemplates the most hated and most loved of English words. "Cellar door," for example, is regarded as one of the most perfect of English words, whereas "discombobulating" is not. "Cellar door" became popularly known as a beautiful word due to J.R.R. Tolkien's influence. He had this to say in a 1955 essay:

"Most English-speaking people...will admit that cellar door is 'beautiful', especially if dissociated from its sense (and from its spelling). More beautiful than, say, sky, and far more beautiful than beautiful. Well then, in Welsh for me cellar doors are extraordinarily frequent, and moving to the higher dimension, the words in which there is pleasure in the contemplation of the association of form and sense are abundant." (English and Welsh, 1955, J.R.R. Tolkien)

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Other examples of favorite and not so favorite English words:

Love: lilt, miasma, oligopoly
Hate: moist, veggie, pamphlet, pasty

Which words do you love/hate?

All Hail the Independents

Thousands of books are published every month, so in an era when it is impossible to hear about all the recently published books, let alone read them, how does an author make theirs rise to the top? If you're lucky enough to have a name already, or a publisher who's willing to float a huge marketing budget, you may be able to rock out with an author tour, well-planted reviews and some blog traffic; but if you're a no name - i.e. a first time author - you've got to be creative.

I heard a few months ago of an author leaving copies of his (self)published novel at various coffee shops around the country. Anyone was invited to read the book and the only payment requested was that the reader pass the book along or share their thoughts about it with others. I don't know much more about this than that - the person who told me the story couldn't remember the man's name or the title of the book - but I was intrigued by the strategy nonetheless. I love a good grassroots literary iniative when I hear about one.

Mark Fitten, author of recently published Valeria's Last Stand from Bloomsbury, has come up with the keen idea of traveling to 100 independent bookshops around the country and chatting the booksellers up about his new book. He's even created a blog for folks to follow his travels, and he's gotten press from the likes of the New York Times. Follow his progress here.

Famous First Lines

The American Review compiles their version of the 100 Best First Lines from Novels. Melville's Moby Dick takes top rank, followed by Jane Austen's famous first line from Pride and Prejudice. Also in the Top 10, Lolita, Anna Karenina, and A Tale of Two Cities. Auspicious beginnings indeed.