Short Story Wednesday: In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried

This one is a bit depressing, but the writing is so spare and beautiful that it's worth reading even on a sunny summer day: Amy Hempel's In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried.

Friday's Catch on Wednesday

Joshilyn Jackson chats with Anne Napolitano about A Good Hard Look.

Teenagers preserving "near-dead" languages through texting?

The man who inherited Goodnight Moon.

The L.A. Times lays off all freelance book reviewers. Sad times for writers AND readers.

Will Indies benefit from Borders' bust? I hope so.

Writers are happier than ever, but is that good for their art?

Great Civil War Novels That Aren't Gone With the Wind

For those of you who don't keep up with such things, it's the 150th anniversary of the Civil War. I doubt folks are paying much attention to this elsewhere, but there's quite a to-do about it down here. This year also happens to be the 75th anniversary of the publication of Gone With the Wind. For many, GWTW has become synonymous with the Civil War, but why stop there? Here is a short list of other great Civil War novels that will sweep you off your feet.

1. Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain - a National Book Award-winning Civil War tale loosely based on the Odyssey - has become a classic that many refer to as the second best Civil War novel ever written. Inman risks peril and death when he deserts the Confederate army and begins his journey home to his beloved Ada. Ada, desperately awaiting Inman's return, experiences her own journey as she evolves from a pampered girl to a woman capable of running a farm and taking care of herself.

2. Dara Horn's All Other Nights is a riveting, delightful book that didn't get as much attention as it should have when it came out. Horn's exploration of the Jewish experience during the Civil War proves that there are still untold stories from this bloody chapter in our history. Southern and Jewish, Jacob Rappaport escapes family expectations when he flees an arranged engagement and enlists in the Union Army. After refusing to murder his uncle, a man involved with the Confederate government, on Passover night, the Union army commands him to marry beautiful Confederate spy Eugenia Levy instead. What begins as an attempt to uncover espionage, turns into something quite different.

3. Robert Hicks' The Widow of the South tells the story of real-life Carrie McGovack, a lonely Southern woman who had the misfortune to own the land upon which the bloody Battle of Franklin was fought. Her house had already been commandeered as a field hospital but rather than fleeing the scene (like I would have), she commits herself to burying the hundreds of Confederate dead that dot her front yard. She maintains the cemetery for the rest of her life.

4. I have to be honest: I have yet to read My Name is Mary Sutter by Robin Oliveira, but that has nothing to do with its quality. This has been on my TBR list for a while, so I felt comfortable including it in my list. This highly-acclaimed novel follows the adventures of a young mid-wife, who takes full advantage of the carnage of the Civil War to learn the art of practicing medicine.

5. I would be remiss if I did not include The North and South trilogy, mainly because I loved them so much when I read them as a teenager. (I read as many John Jakes novels as I could get my chubby hands on when I was 13. I still remember the uproar in my 7th grade math class when I whipped out The Bastard after I had finished (failing) a test. Too funny.) This isn't high literature, friends, but these novels are very entertaining. Good for the beach, actually. Anyway, the trilogy follows the Mains and the Hazzards - one family Southern, the other Northern - whose close ties are tested by the devastating war. (The mini-series is fun, too.)

6. Alright. We'll add ONE Gone With the Wind spin-off. Donald McCaig's Rhett Butler's People was a satisfying extenuation of GWTW, and the only novel to get the seal of approval from the Margaret Mitchell estate. Though it is called a sequel, it's best described as a re-telling of GWTW from Rhett's perspective. It's safe to say that this isn't what Margaret would have written, but it's a fun glimpse at the "tomorrow" cliffhanger at the novel's conclusion and is sure to delight GWTW fans.

Do you have others you think should be added? I'm always in the mood for a good Civil War novel. Leave your reccs in the comments.

Friday's Catch...on Saturday

Beware Vampire Lestat, a classy werewolf might steal your fans.

For reviewers: thoughts for your next review.

Reject e-books until they respect our freedom?

More thoughts about why Borders folded.

Short Story Wednesday

Sibling rivalry, babies born out of wedlock, and cross-dressing uncles in "Why I Live at the P.O." by Eudora Welty.

Welty reads an excerpt of her story at the Washington Post.

Pandora for Books, The Next Big Thing, and Best Books that aren't the Best

As bookstores become less and less of a force in our lives (so sorry about Borders), folks will turn to the internet to find books. Amazon's search feature is helpful, but few other sites have figured out how to generate decent recommendations for books based on the searcher's criteria. BookLamp may have found something. Similar to Pandora, the site purports to be able to find books based on a book's "DNA."

Are we ready for another YA book to sweep us off our feet? I'm hesitant to get excited, but some people think Marie Lu's novel Legend, the first of a planned trilogy, will be the next big thing. Half Les Miserables half Blade Runner (oh Lord), it's already been optioned for a movie and has started to gather teen fans. The novel debuts November 29.

Lastly, some thought is paid to whether or not well-known authors are best known for their best books. The Guardian wonders if some of the better books have been unfairly sidelined by other, more poorly-executed novels. I haven't read enough of the examples to agree with all of the suggestions, but come to think of it Steinbeck's East of Eden is much better than The Grapes of Wrath, Wharton's House of Mirth is more interesting than An Age of Innocence, and I still don't understand how in the world Cather's My Antonia is considered to be a more solid read than O Pioneers!. Someone had the audacity to suggest that Tender is the Night was better than The Great Gatsby, to which I had to scoff. No book, dear friends, is better than The Great Gatsby.

Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out

(Be wary of plot spoilers.)

The Voyage Out is Woolf's first novel, and it is not brilliant. Indebted to Jane Austen, Forster, and other social realists, this novel attempts to analyze the marriage plot. Unfortunately, Woolf punts the opportunity, creating an uneven story and an aggravating ending. It begins beautifully with scenes of departure from London and intimations of great adventure aboard a stylish yacht bound for South America, but the plot soon takes a jaunt down hill. Rachel, a motherless young woman, is a boring spinster. She has no lust for life, no interest in the workings of the world, no talent for conversation, nothing bright about her personality, and no dreams. In other words, she's a far cry from Elizabeth Bennett and the Schlegal sisters. Perhaps Woolf wanted her to be the opposite of Elizabeth, Margaret and Helen, but the scenarios imposed upon herwould have been far more interesting - for us and for her - if she were more like them and less like a sour-faced bore.

In standard marriage plots, the heroine meets the hero, scuffles ensue, and it all ends well with marriage, but Woolf aims to subvert the plot and show that marriage is unnecessary. Rather than creating a woman who can function on her own, support herself, or at least has the relationship with her father to be able to resist the financial comfort of marriage, Woolf creates a dithering woman with no strength of character and few friends. If Rachel had been more like Elizabeth Bennett, perhaps the aim could have been accomplished. As Rachel stands, however, the only way to get her out of marriage is to have her die - very suddenly - of fever. When I got to that point, I almost pitched the book across the room. What a cop out! What a disappointment! I understand the challenges during this time of creating a heroine who can exist outside of marriage, but did Woolf have to kill her? At the very least, have the novel conclude in ambiguity so that the reader can speculate, to their comfort, on how it ended. It was upsetting and a waste of a good exposition.

Friday's Catch...on Saturday

Who knew that A.S Byatt and Margaret Drabble were sisters?

More efforts to mechanize reading.

Top 100 Nonfiction Books, according to the Guardian.

Corny? (Sorry.)

I love this.

Memorial to Lord Byron found in Georgia.

Do we really need to read these?

Books Before Movies or Vice Versa?

An article in the WSJ got me thinking about whether books should be read before or after watching the film version. In general, I like to read the book first. I'm a visual person, and don't watch much TV, so images from screens tend to stick in my brain for long periods. Watching a movie first will color my reading experience, and I find this irksome.

A thought occurred to me a while ago, though, that seems to offer a third way of looking at the question. Occasionally, book and movie versions can stand along side each other, with the movie offering a different way of seeing the book that isn't worse or better - it's just different. Take Gone With the Wind, for example. First of all, in the book, Scarlett isn't beautiful. Mitchell tells you that in the first paragraph. Could you imagine the movie-version of Scarlett O'Hara as anyone other than Vivien Leigh? Me neither. She becomes her own Scarlett, a character related to the original but different, and not to be confused, in my opinion, with the first. Then, there's the bit about Scarlett having children with all of her husbands, not just Rhett. (Sorry if you didn't know that.) Clearly, the choice to just have Bonnie in the movie focuses the importance of her relationship with Rhett and raises that marriage above the others. In the book, it's realistic that she would have had all those children and it makes within the context of the novel.

I don't ever compare GWTW the book to GWTW the movie, because, well, they're just different. I put the Harry Potter series, The Great Gatsby, Rebecca, and Sense and Sensibility in the same category.

Alice Ozma's The Reading Promise

This is a charming memoir about the power of reading and the roles that stories - and the ways that they are shared - shape relationships. Alice Ozma and her father have differing versions of the event that precipitated the 'Streak,' or the multi-year period that her father read to her everyday for at least ten minutes - but, regardless of origin, it grew into quite a tradition. The Streak saw Alice through her teen years and her parents separation, it helped her father maintain a lifeline to his daughter during the breakdown of his marriage, and it created a mighty bond between two avid readers. They read everything from self-help books to The Wizard of Oz. Reading together helped them to stick together, communicate, laugh, and heal.

This is a simple story with a powerful message, one that I strongly believe: read to your children. Alice's father was a children's librarian at an elementary school, and perhaps the most heartbreaking part of the book was when he retired because books were being replaced by computers. He was asked "not to read to the children" anymore, a request that shattered him. He soon found a new audience at a local old person's home. The macro and micro messages of this story are powerful, and Ozma illustrates the importance of reading not only for the parent-child bond but also for the good of society. It is a message that is all too often lost in the noise of Twitter updates, Facebook messages, and cellphones.

Random Items

A link to the Best College Libraries in the World, which happens to, and very deservedly, include Duke Libraries.

Who doesn't love a good metaphor?

Something fun: