Me: Yes, I'm looking for a book by Jim Shepard.
Fully Booked: Okay, ma'am, let me just check our database. Can you please hold on for one minute?
Me: Oh, sure.

Almost ten minutes later...

Fully Booked: Ma'am?
Me: Yes?
Fully Booked: Yes, ma'am. We're still checking if we have any available titles by Shepard, Jim.
Me: Oh. Okay. Why is it taking so long? What does your database say?
Fully Booked: Would you like to leave your name and contact number, ma'am? We'll call you right back after a few minutes. We just need to confirm the available titles.
Me: Oh, okay, sure.

I leave them my name and my home phone number but they don't call back. I left for work in the afternoon and as soon as I get to my office I give them a call again.

Me: Yes, hi. I called earlier this morning? I left my name and my number but no one got back to me? About the Jim Shepard titles?
Fully Booked: Yes, ma'am, let me just check our database. Can you please hold on for a minute?
Me: Uhm. Okay.

Almost twelve minutes later...

Fully Booked: Ma'am?
Me: Yes, I'm still here. Did you find anything?
Fully Booked: No, ma'am, I'm sorry. We don't have any titles by Jim Shefard.
Me: Oh no, no, that's Shepard with a p.
Fully Booked: Yes, ma'am, Shefard with fee.
Me: Uhm...oookay. What about your other branches?
Fully Booked: Okay, ma'am. I'll just check. Can you -
Me: (exasperated sigh) Hold on for a minute, yes, I know.

After another seven minutes...

Fully Booked: Ma'am?
Me: Still here.
Fully Booked: I'm sorry, ma'am, we have no available titles.

A few days later, I get a text from Phil who happened to be at Fully Booked at High Street. He found a copy of Jim Shepard's Like You'd Understand, Anyway and Love and Hydrogen. Sigh. I wish our local bookstores would keep better records.

I bought myself a copy of Oakley Hall's Warlock the other week - I've finally made it halfway. I haven't made it very far because every time something happens I have to stop, close the book, flail and run around the room like a crazy person, yelling something like "The McQuown Boys are back in town!" or "Look out, Marshall! That no good, yellow belly backshooter is out to get you!"

I read this book many years ago and I remember liking it, but coming back to it now I cannot believe just how amazing it really is. The book only has 470 pages, but it is a long 470 pages; filled with characters, places and events that just take you right in and keep you there. Never mind that it's set in the tough and dusty Wild Arizonian West of 1880 but filled with details that are interesting and even relevant - it's just the most exciting book I have ever read. Ever.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'll have to get back to it. Marshall Clay Blaisedell is due for trial.

When I was in high school, our teacher gave us the task of writing a paper about a novel. He had a list of forty novels we could choose from. No one could choose the same title twice. My classmates fought for the more familiar titles. Pride and Prejudice, Of Love and Other Demons, The Great Gatsby, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, even The Picture of Dorian Gray were claimed immediately. By the time I got to the list I had three choices left; Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann and Finnegans Wake by James Joyce. I had read Brave New World before and was, incidentally, in the middle of reading The Magic Mountain.

My English teacher (who was my favorite teacher) readily warned me, as soon as I made my way up to his desk. "Don't pick Finnegans Wake." He said it so worriedly, so urgently, and I was heavily intrigued. "Why not?" I asked.

"Because it's impossible." he answered. "It's unreadable. Don't do it."

Unreadable? I didn't understand. How could a book be unreadable? Difficult, certainly, maybe demanding, but surely there was no such thing as an unreadable book!

"Sir? If it's so impossible then why is it even on the list?"

"It shouldn't be. I only never got around to removing it from the list because none of my students ever think about picking it. They never even look at that title. They skip right away to the next one. But you..." he said, starting with a loaded tone of voice, but not finishing. "The Magic Mountain. It's a good novel. I think you'll really enjoy it."

It smelled like a challenge. "I'll do my report on James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, please." I declared, then proudly walked back to my seat.

Of course, my teacher was right. I had barely read through Book I when I started to feel as if my brain was bleeding. The one thing I had in my favor was that no one could ever really say what the book was saying. The only thing people agree on is how unreadable it is. At least I could write my paper about anything and no one could say I was wrong.  The most anyone could tell me that mine was a  different interpretation.

Mr. Olea - that's his name, by the way; I must have really liked him if I can still remember his name - he was smiling at me, rather slyly, when I submitted my paper weeks later. "Ano, kamusta ang paper?" (trans. And? How did your paper turn out?) Sanctified mother of crime. Did he set me up?

"It was...fine." I said, still not ready to admit defeat, at least in such direct terms. He laughed, but kindly. He was on to me. "It was much more difficult than I thought it would be. Much more." I said again. I left out the part where I tried reading the book three times over, started my paper five different ways and that one time I went to sleep  and had a dream of walking into a local pub, looking for James Joyce to ask him what the hell the book was really all about.

I still have that dream sometimes.

From Authors@Google: Aimee Bender, reading her story, Fruit and Words, from her collection Willful Creatures. The story is stunning. Quite possibly one of the best stories I've ever heard read. You can also stick around for the Q&A about writing and short stories.

Is there such a thing as a perfect novel? There was an article on the Paper Cuts blog asking this question about a week ago, and I find that I'm still mulling it over.

Quite a number of people have said no, there is no such thing: Art can never be perfect. Many people have said, yes, kinda. It depends. Perfection can be subjective - which is a strange thing to say, considering perfection involves a (mathematical) universal standard. But I guess in this case, it might be true. No two novels are the same (although plenty of writers try their best to copy, ahem, I mean emulate, their favorite authors) and each novel, in the process of trying to tell its story, creates its own elements. So, maybe, a novel can be judged by the standard it has set itself. Maybe we can call a novel perfect if it brings it all back and paints a full circle - if there is not a hair out of place in the entire thing. The article suggests F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby. Lots of people seem to agree. Many who have commented have suggested Pride and Prejudice or The Brothers Karamazov. Only one ever mention of Joyce's Ulysses.

Or maybe perfection, for a novel, can mean an entirely different thing. Can we mean a novel is "perfect" for a specific reader? What one reader enjoys may not go down very well with the next. What do you think? Can a novel be perfect? Are there any that have come close?

For my money, you can always count on Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five for some kind of strange perfection. Ditto for Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. And maybe for Lethem's The Fortress of Solitude, too.

Note to self: Dear Lizzy, you know how you are trying to set aside a certain amount of money for necessary spending and "Emergencies Only"? Yeah. I'm not so sure that "Books You Haven't Read Yet But Have Finally Appeared on the Shelves or Have Just Gone on Sale" count.

In the future, maybe a little more self-control? Okay? Okay. Thank you.

How do you feel about buying second-hand books? It's getting easier to find good previously owned books nowadays, what with the likes of Amazon marketplace, eBay and, last but not least, Booksale. Ah, good old Booksale - where you might be lucky enough to find some really, really good books if you're just patient enough to dive through their haphazardly arranged shelves. But I guess that's really part of the fun of the whole thing. You've got to be able to dive right in there and dig. Really dig and look over the titles, one by one, if you have to. Sooner or later, you'll find something.

You still have to be really careful though. The downside is, because they have been used before, not all are in very good condition. Some books are really, really old. Some books have damaged covers. And some books are even missing pages. I know someone who bought a copy of Dashiel Hammett's The Thin Man at a Booksale. She thought it was a great steal at forty-five pesos, since it was in very good condition, until she went home and found it was missing pages twenty-two and twenty-three. Some books have earmarks, coffee stains, notes, highlighted portions and who knows what else. An old friend of mine once told me about the time she bought a Tom Sharpe book from some shop in a high street. She went home and happily, proudly, started reading her book when she noticed some kind of smear across one of the pages. Her brother came up behind her and said, "Oh, hey. That looks like a dried bugger." Lovely.

Earlier this evening, I was able to buy second-hand copies of Anthony Bourdain's The Bobby Gold Stories (70 pesos) and Bill Murray's Cinderella Story: My Life in Golf (60 pesos). I am happy to report that both books are hardcovers and in very good condition. I've started reading Bill Murray's book. I don't like golf - I don't get golf. But I like Bill Murray. And this book, I find, isn't so much about golf but his experience of it. So yes, it is disjointed and odd at times but terribly charming. Funny, too. Light touches everywhere. It is easy to imagine him telling you the stories himself. It wasn't until I got about to page twenty-five of the book when I accidentally realized that there was a dedication written on the first page of it. It says:

`99 Dear Jeff, Happy Father's Day! Well you've been a father for only one year and yet you have proven to be a natural. I so love to watch your interaction with Brooke and to see how she lights up when you walk into the room. Keep up the good work. Love, Mom and Dad

Oh, well. At least it wasn't a dried-up bogey.

I've just finished The Mystery Guest by Gregoire Bouillier. It's an account of sorts of the events that followed one Sunday afternoon, when he received an unexpected call from the woman who had left him some five years ago, without so much as a word or note. She didn't call to apologize or to explain - she called to invite him to be the mystery guest at someone else's birthday party.

He decides to go and ends up pondering a lot about the Deeper Meaning of such things. Now tell me, how French is that? The trouble with stories like this is, sooner or later, it starts to feel like tedious self-obsessing, but this book is just short enough (140 pages) to keep things from becoming tiresome. It also helps a great deal that Bouillier seems to be viewing these events with just enough distance and willingness to poke fun at himself. He doesn't paint himself a heartbroken victim. He's smart and funny, but also kind of a whinger. Yeah, he could be great, but you can also see why someone would dump him.

And just when you think there's nothing left for him (or his readers) at this strange, nightmare of a party but a parade of awkwardness and self-abasement, something really nice happens. Unlikely, at first glance, but more and more lovely and serendipitous when you think about it. I think at one point or another this has probably happened to all of us. Just when we thought everything was pointless, random and completely meaningless, something comes along and reminds us that even though the cosmos works in funny ways, it's always good to keep hoping. Especially when it comes to matters of the heart.

Hey! What have you been reading?

A very, very late night online conversation:

sentimentalizzy: what's up?
femmefatalistic: i can't sleep. i keep tossing and turning. i couldn't sleep so i tried reading.
sentimentalizzy: i guess it isn't working.
femmefatalistic: nope.
sentimentalizzy: what are you reading?
femmefatalistic: enchantress of florence. the new book by rushdie. it's not making me sleepy but it is tiring me.
sentimentalizzy: you don't like it?
femmefatalistic: i could barely get through the first paragraph! already he's talking about glowing lakes and cities of palaces and seas of gold and sunsets in paradise and mermaids and serpents and great horizons yadda yadda.
sentimentalizzy: well that sounds grandiose.
femmefatalistic: his main character grates my nerves! he's a hero! an artist! he dreams in different languages! ugh
sentimentalizzy: too much?
femmefatalistic: exactly! i'm lost and bored. all this marvelousness is tedious! hasn't anybody told him that we're all modern and post-modern now? great things come in small packages! we're much much more interested in the drama of everyday things!
sentimentalizzy: wait. let's re-cap. the marvelous is tedious and the tedious is marvelous?
femmefatalistic: yes. just ask samuel beckett.
sentimentalizzy: you try waiting and waiting for some guy who doesn't show. that might cure your sleeping problem.

So the New York Times has an article about how the Sci Fi Channel is doing well with a broader audience.  But Michael Capobianco isn't happy:

The network’s more expansive definition of science fiction does not sit well with some purists.

“Generally speaking, the feeling within the science fiction community is that a lot of the shows on the Sci Fi Channel are watered-down versions of the real thing,” said Michael Capobianco, the president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.

Mr. Capobianco said the success of science fiction on television and at the movies has not been matched by similar success for writers. “One of the things we’ve discussed is, ‘Should our books resemble the media works that are out there?’ ” he said. “Should they be dumbed down or watered down to appeal to a wider audience?”

Talk about handling things the wrong way. Here's a prime example of How Not to Say Something. I'm not arguing with the fact that there is a tendency for tv shows and movies to water down a lot of things. A lot of what makes it on to the Sci Fi channel isn't good. But strictly speaking, not all sci fi books are all great either.

I don't know how much of Capobianco's statements were taken out of context - but how much misinterpretation could “Should they be dumbed down or watered down to appeal to a wider audience?” have? It sounds to me like instead of appealing to the broader audience's better judgement, he decided to insult and alienate them.

If you're given a chance to reach out and encourage people who aren't familiar with but might be interested in your so called "hard" or "real" sci fi, you could have said something like "Well, if you like these shows, you could check out the work some of our writers do because they deal with the same themes or issues." What you probably shouldn't say is something along the lines of "Yeah, the stuff you like? Not really sci fi. You haven't got a clue. Our stuff might be too sophisticated for you."

Over at the New York Times is a fun and interesting read on literary tastes and how they affect a romantic relationship :

We’ve all been there. Or some of us have. Anyone who cares about books has at some point confronted the Pushkin problem: when a missed — or misguided — literary reference makes it chillingly clear that a romance is going nowhere fast. At least since Dante’s Paolo and Francesca fell in love over tales of Lancelot, literary taste has been a good shorthand for gauging compatibility. These days, thanks to social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, listing your favorite books and authors is a crucial, if risky, part of self-branding. When it comes to online dating, even casual references can turn into deal breakers. Sussing out a date’s taste in books is “actually a pretty good way — as a sort of first pass — of getting a sense of someone,” said Anna Fels, a Manhattan psychiatrist and the author of “Necessary Dreams: Ambition in Women’s Changing Lives.” “It’s a bit of a Rorschach test.” To Fels (who happens to be married to the literary publisher and writer James Atlas), reading habits can be a rough indicator of other qualities. “It tells something about ... their level of intellectual curiosity, what their style is,” Fels said. “It speaks to class, educational level.”

Pity the would-be Romeo who earnestly confesses middlebrow tastes: sometimes, it’s the Howard Roark problem as much as the Pushkin one. “I did have to break up with one guy because he was very keen on Ayn Rand,” said Laura Miller, a book critic for Salon. “He was sweet and incredibly decent despite all the grandiosely heartless ‘philosophy’ he espoused, but it wasn’t even the ideology that did it. I just thought Rand was a hilariously bad writer, and past a certain point I couldn’t hide my amusement.”

excerpt From It's Not You, It's Your Books by Rachel Donado
read the rest here

It is an issue, for me, personally, because I like to read - and having someone to talk to about what I read would be really great. Quality time, after all, is great for exchanging ideas. In between sex and all that. Although, the article also raises an interesting question: is this a gender issue? I've heard many women consider a man's literary tastes - but rare is the man who "would throw a pretty girl out of bed for revealing her imperfect taste in books". What do you think?

For the record, I also cannot see dating anyone too keen on Ayn Rand. Or Paulo Coelho. Plus points for anyone who has read (and loved) Vonnegut, especially Breakfast of Champions.

What are your literary deal breakers?

Just last week, I finished reading The Gun Seller by Hugh Laurie. It is quite possibly one of the most entertaining books I have read in my entire life. The fact that it's hilarious from start to finish doesn't at all interfere with it being sharply insightful. Thomas Lang, may be one of the most charming fictional characters ever. I'd like to write a letter to the dear, brilliant man: Dear Hugh Laurie, I know you're a very, very, very busy man nowadays, but if it's not too much trouble, could you, maybe, possibly, write another novel, some time soon? Only if it's not a bother. You're a dear and brilliant man. Cheers.

Anyway, now that I've finished the book, I can put it on my shelf (I only put books on my shelf once I've finished reading them. All books to be read are piled up on a table). Now, like a lot of bookworms, I get a particular joy and satisfaction when I place a new book on my shelf - but this time I am even more elated. Mostly because I have placed Hugh Laurie's book right next to my Stephen Fry books. This means, of course, that all my previous attempts of alphabetical organization have become completely and utterly useless, but I don't care.

Me: Eeeeee!!!
My sister: What?
Me: Look! Look!
My sister: What? What?
Me: (points to the bookshelf) I have...(giggle) A Bit of Fry and Laurie on my bookshelf!
My sister: ...You're a dork.

What have you been reading?

Over at Paper Cuts, Bob Harris lists the Seven Deadly Words of Book Reviewing. Yes, the words that you've seen time and time again, in full reviews or book blurbs, in attempt to lure you and make you pick up a certain book, but in reality might be so over-used that all they really want to do it make you want to poke your eyes out. Some of the words that make the list: lyrical, intriguing, eschew, and -my favorite- poignant. The comments are also worth a read, with readers adding in some of their own picks.

Personally, if I never again hear anyone describe a novel's style as "Dickensian" I'll be a happy girl. What about you?

There still seems to be a number of people who love the idea of meeting someone at the bookstore. It's still a pervasive fantasy, like meeting someone on the long train ride or having to share an umbrella with a lovely, gracious stranger on a rainy afternoon. I like to think it's because a bookstore encounter has the promise of an almost cosmic connection; if you can meet someone you can exchange ideas with, especially if they're about books you love and books you recognize a lot of yourself in, you feel like you have met someone who is your perfect match. It feels like a meeting of the minds and of the core, of the very molecules that make up your essence. You can't tell other people this because they will think you're weird or corny, but here with this person, you can speak freely because they "get" you. It's a nice thought and, well, really, let's face it - it's the kind of nice thought people who hang out at bookstores want to entertain.

I don't know how well it all holds up in real life, though. Have you ever gone out with someone you met at a bookstore?

And for the record, I did. Sort of. It was, as they say, a long time ago and I was very young. He was pretty and odd, and he saw me reading A Season in Hell by Arthur Rimbaud. Alas, it was not meant to be. There was coffee, there was kissing and there were lots of angry letters afterward. Sigh. You'd think that a cheesy and tenuous connection through mutual love of angry French poetry would have been more than enough warning. Quel désastre! I should have known better.

To all tita's and ninang's and well-wishing lovelies who asked:

Yes, my birthday is coming up in a few weeks.Thank you for remembering. Most of all, thank you for being kind and asking what I would like as presents. It is quite lovely of you. Now, I've thought about it and I've realized that the polite "Oh no, please, you shouldn't bother." response wouldn't necessarily stop you from getting me something - it'd just probably increase the likelihood that I will get me something I have absolutely no want or use for. Please, no more fancy bath soaps. No more candles. No more really expensive pairs of shoes that I will never ever wear. Here, instead, is a list of things that I would very much like to receive. Since you're asking. Notice, they are all books. That's because books are great. They are, quite possibly, the best kind of cultural experience we have around. Books are great. They are, as people on the television are so fond of saying, the gifts that keep on giving. Below are just a few titles from the very, very, very long book wishlist I keep with me. This wishlist grows every year, and honestly, I feel at times that I am never ever going to complete it in my lifetime. You can imagine just how overwhelming it feels to think this way. Any help, therefore, will be greatly appreciated.

And hey, cash and gift certificates are also acceptable, just in case you don't have the time to scour the bookstores to look for these particular titles. Since you're asking.






Wonderful. Thank you. I will get you something extra nice on your birthdays, too. I promise.

much love and chocolate-strawberries,
Lizzy

Happy World Book Day! Let's talk about books.

Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union is a great book. A little tricky to talk about without really giving anything away. Read the blurbs if you want - just know that there is so much more in this book than can ever be summarized. It is all, at once, a novel about history and alternate history, a love story, a crime novel with Chandleresque leanings (although it may even be said that he does Chandler one better), and a study of human beings tendency to sin and need to be redeemed. The elements in this book - concept, language, characters - should be familiar but are also completely new, thanks to Chabon's extraordinary gift of wrecking and blending and rebuilding with words. Every once in a while, I hear people talk about a book that cuts through to its reader - it shocks you, makes you laugh, makes you think, takes you away from your world and into another, only to find something of you in these strange places and people hundreds of thousands of miles away. And before you know it, the story has gone the long, slow and steady crawl to your heart. I think this is one of those books. The Yiddish Policemen's Union is an extraordinary book that only Michael Chabon could have written. You can go here to watch a reading. And if you get the chance, pick up the book if you haven't yet.

Okay. What have you been reading lately? What book/s do you love?

I'm starting to think that Jonathan Lethem can write about anything. Chandleresque detective stories. Drugs, cryogenic prisons and kangaroos. Post-apocalyptic futures. A physics researcher who falls in love with a spatial anomaly. "Dead" men and women who keep going back and forth from here and hell. Teenagers who find magic rings that turn them into superheroes. Bob Dylan. Anything, I tell you, anything.

In his novel You Don't Love Me Yet, he tries something different again. It's probably his most playful work yet. It also feels like his most youthful. The blurbs will tell you that it's about a young bass player who falls in love with a strange man she calls "the complainer" - but it's much, much more than that. He writes about songs and dreams and L.A. and secrets. He writes about music and art and commodity. He writes about how some people can destroy with their "monster eyes" - how they can find one thing they don't like about you and focus on it until it becomes enormous. He even writes about happiness - the nature of it, how it works. He does it beautifully, too, clearly, and that's not an easy thing to do. Sadness is easy. People make careers out of making gutter theatricals out of stubbing their toes. It takes something else to write about happiness and not sound trite.

As far as I'm concerned, Jonathan Lethem is the king of sentences.

Operating perhaps on the premise that less is more, the book Not Quite What I Was Planning is a collection of short memoirs. Very, very short memoirs. Six word memoirs, to be exact. It started out as a reader contest at SMITH magazine. Almost immediately, they were flooded with responses - sometimes going up to five hundred submissions a day. After all, everyone has a story.

Some of the more famous contributors include the likes of Jonathan Lethem - "Eat mutate aura amateur auteur true", Aimee Mann - "Couldn't cope so I wrote songs" and even Stephen Colbert - "Well I thought it was funny". Legend has it that even Ernest Hemmingway wrote his own sixer once - "For sale: baby shoes, never worn." Concise but heartbreaking.

What would your six words be?

Vladimir Nabokov's last novel lies in a bank vault somewhere in Switzerland. That's where it's been for the last thirty years. The very few who have been able to read it have hailed it as his masterpiece. However, on his deathbed, he asked his wife Vera and his son Dmitri to burn the manuscript (Nabokov used to write everything on index cards). Dmitri hasn't acted on his father's dying wish yet - but now, perhaps because of his own advancing age, he is thinking more about this piece of divisive and unfinished business. Go here for the rest of the fascinating story. What should a son do? What would you do?

And hey, which literary figure would you like to have as a father?

Further proof that the Universe likes me:

For their next collaboration, the writing/directing team of Joel and Ethan Coen and producer Scott Rudin will transfer the bestselling Michael Chabon novel The Yiddish Policemen's Union to film. More details here.

Am I allowed to get super excited about this already?