The Cats of Ulthar, by H. P. Lovecraft

Till human voices wake us...

What's the difference between reading a book and listening to a book? If you've listened to a book, can you say you've read it? Or do you have to say, “Oh yeah, I've listened to that.” The words themselves don't change, but your consumption of them is different.

I've been listening to audiobooks ever since I can remember, when they came on cassette tapes in giant cases from the library, or sat atop their accompanying books, encased in plastic, hanging from racks in bookstores (remember those?). My favorites were Roald Dahl books, especially Matilda (read by Jean Marsh) and The Fantastic Mr. Fox (read by the author), but I also had a tape of traditional Scandinavian folk tales which were sometimes too creepy but did the trick in a pinch. After my parents stopped reading to me every night, I would put on a tape and drift off. I dreaded the jarring sound of the big black play button snapping up at the end of the cassette, and learned to anticipate it and stop the tape just in time. Listening to stories by myself, over and over again became a habit long before I began to appreciate music or movies or TV. Remember the list of books that Matilda reads (at age 4) when she first starts going to the library?

Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens
Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
Gone to Earth by Mary Webb
Kim by Rudyard Kipling
The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells
The Old Man and the Sea by Earnest Hemingway
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
The Good Companion by J.B. Priestly
Brighton Rock by Graham Greene
Animal Farm by George Orwell

I will always love how Jean Marsh read that list; as though she was repeating the names of her own children. (Trivia tangent: Jean Marsh played Mombi in Return to Oz, one of my first film obsessions.)

Now I've always got an audiobook in my regular reading rotation. The last one I finished, Room by Emma Donoghue, was read by four people, including an uncanny imitator of a five year-old boy. That's my recommendation for a strangely riveting listening experience. I still haven't finished Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese, because every chapter is like its own wonderful short story, and I can't stand to hear it end. My roommate came home one day to find me listening to Geek Love by Katherine Dunn. Fortunately, nothing shocks her. I finished a lot of chores while listening to Steig Larsson's Millenium trilogy, and was enthralled by Geraldine Brooks' Year of Wonders. My first encounter with Neil Gaiman happened last year, while listening to his Graveyard Book, which he narrates beautifully. And did you know that Sissy Spacek reads To Kill a Mockingbird? It took me a while to recover from hearing her read, “You can pet him, Mr. Arthur. He's asleep.”

The thing about audiobooks is this: either you're hooked or you're not. My addiction seems to be particularly advanced. If I know I'm going to be taking a long drive, I start to worry about finding the right audiobook for the trip. Podcasts sometimes satisfy, if there aren't too many dishes to do or clothes to fold, but what happens when Ira Glass or Dan Savage or Jonathan Goldstein start wrapping things up too soon? Despair. I don't advise this level of dependence, but why not mix it up a bit? For the next book on your must-read list, give your eyes a break. The pleasures of being read to are not lost. Now who has my next audiobook recommendation!?!!?

--Seija

Wave after Wave of Staff Faves!

It's November, and that means all of us in General Books are choosing our Holiday Staff Picks! And even though books are gifts that just never! stop! giving! picking our holiday favorites is not just about gift-giving. It's about that cozy feeling; that increased inclination to hunker down and bundle up in your favorite chaise lounge/cave/tree house and get some solid reading done.

But what will you choose? We here at the bookstore have approximately 50 recommendations for you, your dad, your grandmother, and your dog (seriously, your dog will directly benefit from some of these picks). Name a section in the bookstore and we will pull a winner off the shelf. We will be featuring lots of great selections over the next two months, starting today!
--Seija

Here's a pick from Pam:

Maira Kalman, artist extraordinaire, has hit the equivalent of a grand slam in the book publishing world. This fall, she has not one, not two, but three new books out. (Okay, one of them came out this past May--so sue me). I am perhaps one of her greatest fans and, although I am not a stalker and have never written her a letter, she is one of my imaginary best friends.

Which brings me to And the Pursuit of Happiness, a book based on a blog she penned for the New York Times. (If you were lucky, you read her first blog-to-book, Principles of Uncertainty, but if you somehow missed it, you can get it in paperback which is just as lovely and not as heavy as it was in hardcover).

In And the Pursuit of Happiness, Maira Kalman writes and paints about her visit to our capital during Barack Obama's inauguration where she encounters the history, art, architecture, and fashion of the White House. She later meets Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, and promptly drops Jane Austen as her imaginary best friend in favor of Ruth, whose favorite artist is Matisse.

She becomes fascinated by our founding fathers (Benjamin Franklin is the dapper man on the cover of the book) and sets the record straight about their accomplishments. For instance, Thomas Jefferson invented triple sash windows, and Benjamin Franklin invented the lightning rod and swim fins. The breadth of her curiosity is astounding and enlightening and takes you into completely unexpected places; she presents us with a non-linear riff on what is good and hopeful about America's past, present and future.

Her goofy, wonderful, witty and joyful gouache paintings make you want to get up right now off your sofa to get a set of brushes and some good non-toxic paint to try and reproduce the happiness you feel just by looking at her colorful "do try this at home" art.

13 Words, written by Lemony Snicket (yes! he wrote a Series of Unfortunate Events) and illustrated by (you guessed it) Maira Kalman, is a hilarious picture book for anyone with a pulse. Take a look at the book trailer:



And last, Various Illuminations (of a Crazy World) would be my favorite if I had one. It is an exhibition catalog of Maira's work, including drawings, paintings, and embroideries. Please pick it up--you will not be disappointed.

--Pam

Meet the Bloggers

Remember our Meet the Bloggers series? Today we are going to spend some "getting-to-know-you" time with Seija Emerson.

  

Seija encourages all of us to write recommendations for our favorite books and she is the one displaying them and keeping the whole section tidy. She also makes the art and architecture section shine. Besides being a whiz on the sales floor, Seija has a certain knack for skepticism and well-chosen adjectives.

What are 3 books that will always be on your bookshelf and why?

1984 by George Orwell, because when I read it at age 14 it was the first book that disturbed me on a deep, psychological level.  At the end of the novel, when O'Brien tortures Winston into betraying Julia, I started to realize that novels can help us understand human nature.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, because it's just a great story perfectly told.  Also it made me confront my feelings about feminism and Christianity in an unexpected way.  To balance it out, though, I have to put Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea next to it so that I don't get too carried away in all the naive romance.

Sophie's Choice by William Styron.  I think I've already said enough about that one.  

How do you choose your books? Recommendations? Reading Reviews? A long running list of titles that stand out?
I don't read a lot of new fiction.  I'm stuck in the first half of the 20th century.  Although I'm really getting into fiction from the 70's.  I like to alternate between books that are plot-driven and books that are idea-driven.  In other words, quick reads and slow reads.  I love getting YA recommendations from Anna, Kitri and Caitlin in Kids Books!  

Every reader has their favorite spot, where do you read and what do you need to have around you when you read?
Ideally, in bed with my cat, but more likely in a cafe.  The dangerous thing about reading in public is that I can't help but listen to other people's conversations, so the book has to be able to hold its own with those kinds of distractions.

What makes good fiction really good?
It's the same with music and food: you have to try everything to see what works for you.  I want to be challenged in some way by fiction.  I hate it when novels have no internal logic, or when an author's voice comes across as affected.  I like fiction that is unsentimental; I want to be shown original characters, narratives and philosophies.  Also I think good fiction has to make you feel a little uncomfortable.

Who is the creepiest character you've ever read?
Muldrow, the main character in James Dickey's To the White Sea.  From the very beginning, you're rooting for him and hoping he survives, and then as the novel progresses, you start to understand that you're not on the right side.  He's a xenophobic, ruthless murderer and you kind of like him.
Also, Jerzy Kosinski writes some truly creepy characters.

You can see all of Seija's posts here.

That Teenage Feeling

August has arrived! If you're like me, you're deep into a summer reading groove. This time of year is perfect for indulging my imagination-- unlike fall or winter, when I have more patience and fewer distractions, and feel a certain propensity towards weightier tomes. Classic “hard” books that are perpetually on my shelf sometimes get their spines cracked in summer, but they usually end up back on the shelf with a bookmark placed around page 28.

My go-to genre for summer reading is Young Adult. I'm nowhere near the level of expertise as our awesome Kids Books staff, but I have definitely dabbled in my share of YA. When I was a teenager, just about the only age-appropriate books I read were by Christopher Pike. I liked them because they were a break from my usual fare (all Stephen King, all the time!) but also because their pulpy covers disguised some surprisingly heavy material; teenagers were always murdering each other and having angsty trysts with aliens and time travelers and such. It's too bad most of those mid-nineties books are out of print; they could serve as a fun throwback for the Twilight set. 

Two great YA trilogies are wrapping up in the next few months. Suzanne Collins' addictive Hunger Games trilogy comes to a close with Mockingjay, and we bookstore folks will be celebrating with a midnight release party on August 23^rd. If you haven't yet jumped into the nightmarish, action-packed world of Katniss, Peeta and Gale, do it! These books are so engrossing, they're like Steig Larsson lite.

In September, the third book in Patrick Ness' Chaos Walking trilogy, Monsters of Men, will be released. In the first book, The Knife of Never Letting Go, we meet Todd, a 12 year-old boy who was born on a recently colonized planet. Todd lives in a town where women are mysteriously absent, and weirder still, it is immediately revealed that men can hear each other's thoughts. Todd doesn't see anything strange in all this. He's used to the lack of privacy, and used to the reign of the tyrannical mayor and the zealous preacher who run the town. We the reader know that the other shoe is about to drop; Todd will begin to question everything when he meets a girl for the first time. Patrick Ness has done some magic here with his writing. He plays with font size and style and invents new word spellings and dialects to create a totally original voice for Todd and his talking dog (not annoying, I promise!).

If you're desperate for more, may I suggest a return to the ultimate YA trilogy, His Dark Materials by Phillip Pullman. The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass tap into what I think is one of the most ubiquitous questions raised throughout YA lit; what would you do if you realized that your parents, your teachers, your culture, your world was oppressive and corrupt? Would you be brave enough to challenge the status quo, even if it meant sacrificing everything? Phillip Pullman's books are pure brain candy; he takes our instinctive emotional reaction to injustice and grounds it with real-world references and a pervasive, positive message of humanism, critical thinking and scientific inquiry.

This genre has become a cultural force. Popular YA novels are transformed into movies, TV shows and graphic novels, and they thrive online. The majority of these books are so visual that they are easily branded and marketed, and it's difficult, when recalling your first read-through, to distinguish your own imagining of these fictional worlds from the inevitable celluloid versions. But I think there is another factor at work here: we just love these characters. They are hyper-real, beyond relatable, and they live in worlds where emotions are boiled down to their most pure and powerful essence.

What is your favorite YA book or series? Why do you think they're so affecting and addictive? Discuss!

Styron: so good it hurts.

The time has come, blog readers, for me to sing the praises of my favorite author. The task is daunting, to put it mildly, since the discovery of this literary powerhouse marks one of those profound occasions that shape the lives of book fanatics like myself. If also, like myself, you were inspired (foolish? idealistic?) enough to study writing, you will surely understand the bitter paradox inherent in such discovery: the knowledge that your own writing will never be as good becomes more and more acute as you desperately seek out all the author's published work, devouring it, never really satisfied because you know each book must come to an end.

My first exposure to William Styron was listening to the audiobook of Sophie's Choice in the car while driving from Seattle to Bellingham. A few days and 26 CDs later, I knew I was doomed. On the page, Sophie's Choice is already a rich, incredibly layered story, but read aloud by a narrator with a gift for accents (Southern, New York, Polish, German) it transcends its own form. Like many novels that have been made into films and entered the pop culture lexicon, Sophie's Choice has become synonymous with the Holocaust. Little did I know that crippling topic makes up only about a third of the plot, and that Sophie isn't even the main character. Instead, we are introduced to Stingo, a charming, if somewhat bewildered 20 year-old Virginian living in Brooklyn in 1947. He moves into a boarding house to write his first novel and soon meets his upstairs neighbors, Sophie and Nathan. I'm not going to give anything else away, because there are so many surprises within, including descriptions of some of the most hilarious, disastrous sexual trysts I've ever read.

I despaired at the possibility that I had begun with Styron's best (much like how I feel about Paul Auster and The New York Trilogy), but when next I read Set this House on Fire and then The Confessions of Nat Turner, I was relieved to find that both were satisfying in different ways.

Styron's memoir of his experience with depression, Darkness Visible, helped me understand how he writes with such uncanny compassion for his characters, especially when they're in the cruel grasp of mental illness themselves.

Recently I was vehemently defending Styron in a conversation about The Confessions of Nat Turner, which has inspired much criticism both before and since its Pulitzer Prize win in 1968. I see it as an amazingly rich character study, not a “slavery” novel (in the same way I don't see Sophie's Choice as a “holocaust” novel), and it is made all the more fascinating when you learn that Styron was a liberal atheist descended from slave-owning grandparents.

I decided to write this post because I just finished Havanas in Camelot, Styron's posthumously released collection of essays. The title essay refers to Styron's experience smoking cigars with JFK at a party for authors at the White House (Obama, take note).

He writes with gleeful outrage about his stint in the VD ward in a military hospital at the end of WWII, and with reverence about one of his literary heroes and contemporaries, Truman Capote. While reading his essays, I kept thinking, damn, we really would've gotten along. And isn't that the best, if bittersweet, kind of thought to have while reading? Are there any other Styron fans out there? I don't run into many, but maybe you'll pick up one of his books and become one.

And now, from the land of the midnight sun...

I've just finished reading Purge, a novel by Finnish-Estonian author Sofi Oksanen, winner of the 2008 Finlandia prize (Finland's top literary honor), and featured at this year's PEN World Voices Festival (she was supposed to appear at Elliot Bay with Sherman Alexie, but was held up by the Icelandic volcano eruption.)

Despite my Finnish heritage, this is only my second foray into that country's fiction (though Purge is set in Estonia, it was written in Finnish). Norway and Sweden seem to hold a monopoly on chilly, violent thrillers (just browse the mystery section for proof) and many past winners of the Finlandia prize have yet to be translated to English. Oksanen's Purge may stand out because of its emotional and historic scope: how the fifty-year Soviet occupation of Estonia warps one family; how the devastating similarities of sexual slavery and political oppression affect women; how abandonment can ruin human beings and whole countries alike.

In the summer of 2007, I traveled to Estonia for 24 hours. I was on a post-college trip to Finland to discover my roots; actually, the language and culture program I was enrolled in turned out to be part of a recruitment campaign. Since Finland's population is declining, people of Finnish descent are in high demand. Return to your glorious motherland in the summer! Experience 20 hours of sunlight in a day! Try not to think of what that will mean in winter! Now move here and procreate! After several weeks of incomprehensible language classes, a few friends and I were ready for an unchaperoned adventure, so we bought tickets to travel to Tallinn, Estonia by ferry. Only 2 hours from Helsinki harbor, Tallinn boasts an intact, walled Medieval town. Combine that with the draw of low, non-Euro prices, and this tiny Baltic capital turns out to be quite the tourist attraction. I was traveling with two friends, one a Finnish-Egyptian and the other a Finnish-Canadian.

We spent the day wandering the labyrinthine passageways of the old town, taking pictures of the crumbling walls and the restored churches. Near the entrance to the old town there is a new shopping mall with a bookstore on the top level; between that and the waterfront, dirty alleys separate abandoned buildings, all broken glass and graffiti.
I wish I could've read Purge before that trip. It would've helped me understand the strange atmosphere created between the disparate parts of the city; the very old and the very new, with those abandoned buildings in between.
If you like authors with unique writing styles, or enjoy historical fiction that's a little more obscure, I highly recommend Purge. Oksanen is obsessed with the minutiae of her characters; everyone has a smell, tiny sounds are amplified, and physical sensations are made painfully real. See what you think. Maybe, like me, you'll be curious to read more.

--Seija

Here's what's next on my Baltic reading list:

The Year of the Hare by Arto Paasilinna

Troll: A Love Story by Johanna Sinisalo

The Summer Book by Tove Jansson

Insectopedia-Travel Essay and Field Guide

There is nothing better suited than a list of fears to get me thinking about childhood. On Thursday night I listened to author Hugh Raffles read this passage from his new book, Insectopedia:

“There is the nightmare of fecundity and the nightmare of the multitude. There is the nightmare of uncontrolled bodies and the nightmare of inside our bodies and all over our bodies. There is the nightmare of unguarded orifices and the nightmare of unguarded places. There is the nightmare of foreign bodies in our bloodstream and the nightmare of foreign bodies in our ears and our eyes and under the surface of our skin. There is the nightmare of swarming and the nightmare of crawling. There is the nightmare of burrowing and the nightmare of being seen in the dark. There is the nightmare of turning the overhead light on just as the carpet scatters. There is the nightmare of beings without reason and the nightmare of being unable to communicate. There is the nightmare of them being out to get us.”

The book falls into a sort of genre twilight zone—a combination of sociology, anthropology and entomology, organized into 26 chapters corresponding to the letters of the alphabet. This excerpt is, naturally, from the chapter, “My Nightmares.” Think of it as a book of short nonfiction; wildly diverse and populated with strange characters, human and insect alike.

Mr. Raffles' breadth of imagination is obvious, and the passages he selected made me realize how much my attitude toward insects has changed as I've aged. As I listened to the author read, I wondered, what forces this change in human beings? What transforms curiosity into fear? My summer vacations from elementary school were always full of interaction with the natural world: hunched over by the fence in my backyard, watching a spider gracefully kill whatever lower order of insect was trapped in its web, digging a deep hole to find earthworms, collecting potato bugs in jars, feeding them to the spiders. It seems as though this disgust I've acquired in adulthood is a terrible virus for which there is no cure. I believe there is something in that nightmare passage that rings true for everyone. I was so irrationally disturbed to find ants in the kitchen of my last apartment that searching for them became a paranoid obsession; every speck on the linoleum was an emergency.

But maybe I can separate my primal squeamishness from my detached scientific curiosity. Maybe a vicarious relationship to insects is enough. Many people at the event got up to ask questions, and those questions often turned into anecdotes. There was a beekeeper who spoke about the concept of individuality in bees, and an entomologist who told the story of the bug that flew into his ear and stayed there until it died. People were weirdly excited to talk about their insect experiences; almost like a roomful of kids trying to top each others stories.

Books like Insectopedia bridge an important literary gap; between the field guide and the travel essay there is a whole world of observation, of reawakened curiosity and memory waiting to be tapped into. And it seems like many authors are doing just that.

Seija, General Books

A bookseller talks about her favorites.

I have this thing about favorites. Movies, paintings, cities, songs, types of food—hardly anything is excused from judgment. These lists are subjective and impermanent. For instance, I don’t think my favorite movie is the best movie ever made, it’s just the best for me. It aligns with my emotions and my narrative ideals. Other categories rely even more on subjective experiences. I’m sure some people love going to Tijuana, for instance, but because I went with my dad when I was fourteen and ate some bad enchiladas, I will most likely never return. I try not to focus on my least favorite things. Doing so negates the purpose of making these temporary lists, which is to seek out and eagerly anticipate new experiences.

With that said, I thought I’d start my first blog for the bookstore with a list of my five (technically six) favorite novels, in no particular order. I hope to elaborate on these in future posts.

Sophie’s Choice by William Styron
The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster
The Hours by Michael Cunnigham
Deliverance/To The White Sea (Irrevocably tied, blame James Dickey)
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

When I read, I’m chasing that feeling I had in my early teens when I first read Orwell’s 1984. I had picked up a badly used copy somewhere—the cover font was nearly identical to that used in the “Schoolhouse Rock” logo—and someone had underlined whole pages worth of text in thick blue marker. I stayed up late one night to finish it, and it wasn’t a pleasant experience. Finishing that book made me feel like I had been through the same psychological warfare as Winston Smith, especially in that last climactic, unbearable scene of betrayal. It was the first time I had been through such an emotional literary workout, and I loved it.

New favorites stacked up quickly after that. I was lucky to attend a school with a brilliantly run Humanities department with a broad reading list. Hefty classics (The Grapes of Wrath, The Scarlet Letter, A Tale of Two Cities) mingled with less predictable picks (A Confederacy of Dunces, A Clockwork Orange, Darkness at Noon) and soon I was awash in great books. Coming from a family of readers helps as well; my mom seems to draw only from the new fiction cart at the library, while an uncle of mine is addicted to audio books. One of my cousins often reads books in their original Spanish, while another is just starting to get excited about his totally awesome 9th grade sci-fi lit class. I love talking to my family and friends about books, and there is something particularly thrilling about discussing my favorites. They have each changed me a little; in the way I think about writing, history, relationships, religion, and most of all, about people.

—Seija