Events & Literary News

One of our favorite writers, Lee Smith, will be inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame (affectionately known as the LHOF, and no, that isn't pronounced "laugh"!) this year. A no brainer, of course. The only question really is "what took them so long?"  The other two inductees are the poet James Applewhite and the historian William S. Powell.  The North Carolina Writers' Network calls us "the writingest state", which seems evident, when you look at previous LHOF honorees.

Books by Lee Smith
Books by James Applewhite
Books by William S. Powell

More events information here

(click on a jacket to read about the book)

From Joan:

Hillary Jordan's new book Mudbound (22.95) will not surprise anyone with its plot.  Most of you who have read any literary southern fiction will be able to surmise what's going to happen and to whom pretty early on.  So, pick up this novel for the amazing characters who take turns telling the story, and for the writing that so perfectly captures the world of 1940's Mississippi.  Jordan's muddy delta farm engulfs you from the get go. . .as one of the lead characters prepares to move there with her family, I think I wanted to resist it as much as she did.  Racism, sexism, and the
after-effects of war all make for a heady mixture.  It's funny, I finished this a few days ago, but I still have that feeling of damp, red mud under my fingernails. . .it is that kind of book with characters you won't forget anytime soon.

I really enjoyed Joshua Ferris' Then We Came to the End (13.99).  His take on the inner workings at an ad agency that's about to close its doors is both hilarious and tragic.  The anxiety level is high as co-workers wonder who will be next to get the pink slip, and as we all know, anxiety can drive people to do some crazy things.  Karen Woo, account executive, presents an ad campaign for a healthy cookie that contains no lastive acid.  When confronted about the fact that there is no such thing, Karen mumbles that she was thinking outside the box.  When fired copywriter Tom Mota returns to the office in a clown outfit armed with a gun, I literally held my breath wondering which way this would go. . .from the bizarre battles over office furniture to the constant denial of gossip even as they gossip, these are familiar characters that would make for a fun, forgettable read, but Ferris gives them meaning when he steps away from the collective "we" that he uses throughout.  You get sick alone; you get fired alone. . .even if you're a "we" for eight hours a day.  It's a good book!

Every now and then someone comes up to me and tells me about a book that they absolutely love. . .that they say is a transformative experience.  Of course, I've got to check that out!  My friend Jill felt that way about Life of the Skies by Jonathan Rosen ($24).  This is a book about bird-watching, but it's a lot more than that.  Rosen came to bird-watching in the big city, as a way of connecting with a nature that he was feeling more and more disconnected from.  His chapters touch on a wide range of topics from the history of bird watching (which has a big connection to NC!) to the environment to religion and philosophy.  His sense that birds are the only wildlife that a lot of us see anymore is especially telling. . .and that so much of what we've created to enable us to "experience" wildlife in general is also destroying it.  I'm thinking of writers like Annie Dillard, Barry Lopez, and Edward Abbey as I start this, writers who felt that desperate pull of nature running through their veins. . .and I'm thinking Jill is right about how special this book is. ---Joan

From Nicki:

So I recently read on the blog The Grove Project that if you leave your computer on 24 hours a day it could be responsible for releasing up to 1,500 pounds of CO2 into the atmosphere every year.

Uh oh.

Those of you who know me can now blame me for personally hastening the rate of global warming. Apparently, though, I'm not the only geeky environmentalist out there. The post also goes on to talk about how to use your computer to help track and predict climate change through a software program that runs in the background while your computer is on. I wonder if it will conflict with the program I've already got running that is looking for alien life in the universe?

On the theory that if you can't be completely green you can at least read about it, here is what's on my bedside table these days:

Natural Acts: A Sidelong View of Science & Nature by David Quammen ($24.95)

"The consensus among conscientious biologists is that we're headed into another mass extinction, a vale of biological impoverishment commensurate with the big five. Many experts remain hopeful that we can brake that descent, but my own view is that we're likely to go all the way down." David Quammen,"A Planet of Weeds"

Natural Acts, Quammen's latest book, is a reissue of his first book-which seems ironically apropos for a man whose specialty is evolutionary biology.  It is an expanded collection of essays, many of which first appeared in his popular column "Natural Acts" in Outside magazine augmented by other more recent columns, including the above-quoted "A Planet of Weeds" which ran in Harper's Magazine ten years ago and was a very readable-if controversial-explanation as to why cockroaches will inherit the earth. 

I love Quammen's writing, which is erudite but not over my head, pragmatic but not dogmatic, and is generally infused with a kind of joy and wonder for the world before his eyes. This is a great introduction to his work, easily digested (although some of the implications of what he says may not be.)

American Chestnut: The Life, Death, and Rebirth of a Perfect Tree by Susan Freinkel ($27.50)

In one of my favorite novels, The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter, Nora Bonesteel-an Appalachian woman rumored to have "the sight" spends several paragraphs musing on a young sapling she is carefully tending in her windswept mountainside yard.  It is an American Chestnut, often called "the perfect tree", a majestic species that once spread from Georgia to Maine, until an exotic blight in the early 1900s nearly wiped it out.  Nora is part of an environmental project to attempt to re-establish the species, lest it become extinct altogether. The obvious parallel between the fate of the tree and the fate of Nora's own Appalachian culture is not lost on the reader.

History is full of extinction stories-of the skies no black with flocks of passenger pigeons, of the seas no longer teeming with whales or dolphin.  It is full of conservation stories-of frantic, desperate attempts to save bald eagles and venus fly traps before their diminishing numbers reach that critical level where the population won't be able to recover.

"The chestnut, on the other hand, was a country tree. Its life in the forest and its dramatic demise took place in view of relatively few human witnesses.  Those who did bear witness to the tree's disappearance-those to whom the chestnut tree was most important-were the rural poor, people whose stories were passed down through oral rthaer than written accounts. Such stories endure only so long as they are told, one person to another, until they pass into legend. . . or oblivion."-Susan Freinkel, The American Chestnut  

The American Chestnut, the subject of Susan Freinkel's lovely and fascinating book, is rather worse off than the bald eagle. In the 1950s there were about 400 nesting pairs of bald eagles, now there are over 100,000.  In the 1930s there were about three billion American Chestnuts. Now there are probably less than 100 mature trees-and those were planted by people like Nora Bonesteel.  Freinkel chronicles the truly heroic efforts of conservation and rescue groups to save the chestnut-as significant an icon of America as the bald eagle.  It is both an agonizing and inspiring account of mankind's attempt "to make things right" on a grand scale.  A cautionary tale, but also a visionary one.

--Nicki Leone

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard
Rising from the Plains by John McPhee
Ecology of a Cracker Childhood by Janisse Ray
Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez
A Sand Country Almanac by Aldo Leopold
Tree Where Man Was Born by Peter Matthiessen
Woman and Nature by Susan Griffin
Edge of the Sea by Rachel Carson
Red by Terry Tempest Williams
The Practice of the Wild by Gary Snyder

In Depth: Editions & Impressions by Nicholas Basbanes

A little over twenty years ago, I stood nervously in front of a young woman who managed a mall bookstore in Boston suburb and told her she should give me a job because "I really love to read." She shrugged, made sure I could count back change, and hired me. It was a landmark moment. It was the beginning of my career in books.

At the same time, a reporter named Nicholas Basbanes wrote an article called "In Search of Great Books" for Bostonia magazine about the development of some of the great literary archives in the city residents referred to as "the Hub" (". . . of the universe" being unspoken, but understood). The piece was lengthy for a periodical, although tantalizingly brief for the scope it had set itself-touching on the creation of the Widener, one of ninety-five buildings in Harvard devoted to libraries or archives; the rare-book room at the Boston Public Library; the extremely rarified Boston Athenaeum (which houses, ironically enough, the greatest collection of Confederate papers in the country); the Mugar Memorial Library at Boston University (where I spent many hours studying) and its twentieth-century archives; and even the creation of the John J. Burns Library of rare books at my own alma mater, Boston College. The Bostonia article was a landmark moment. It was the beginning of Basbanes' career in books.

It would take seven or eight years, but Basbanes eventually expanded that original article into a lengthy, fascinating and gorgeously-designed account of the eccentric world of book collectors and book collecting called A Gentle Madness. The book was an instant hit among book people, and not just for its rich, gold foil-embossed jacket, and made the author almost overnight the acknowledged expert in the subject of books about books. A somewhat rarified pursuit, perhaps, but a gratifying one for the writer, who has gone on to pen thousands of articles and six more books, the most recent of which has just been published: Editions & Impressions: Twenty Years on the Book Beat (Fine Books Press; $27.95)

The John J. Burns Library was dedicated in 1986. I was there by the grace of a work-study program to defray the costs of my tuition. I think I was serving canapés. I suppose Nicholas Basbanes may have been present as well, although he doesn't say so, so there is no telling whether I may have handed him a hors d'oeuvre. For the next two decades I would float from bookstore to bookstore, selling the newly published, while somewhere else in the world Basbanes would wander from story to story, writing about the pursuit of the very old and out of print.

Editions & Impressions is a collection of some of the pieces Basbanes wrote that have not yet made it into other books. In most cases, they were published in magazines or periodicals, and have been expanded or annotated for this volume. It is meant to be, as the subtitle suggests, an overview of some of the highlights of the author's life covering stories about books and the people who are so gently mad for them. The book is divided into three parts-Book Culture, Book People, and Book Places. The pieces themselves often only loosely fall into these categories, but as an overall structure, the division seems to work. Book Culture concentrates on the nature of book collecting-the rise of the great American archives and private collections, the tense atmosphere of the auction houses, the casual delights of the community book fair, wherever, really, one might go hunting for books. Book People is a series of portraits and profile pieces; these are about the collectors, not their collections, and about the people who make their living with books-the writing of them (author Tom Wolfe), the designing of them (designer/artist Chip Kidd), the selling of them (Miami bookseller Mitch Kaplan), the reading of them (writer-reader Anne Fadiman), the collecting and even the constructing of them (one of the most interesting portraits being that of Robert Sabuda, the "paper engineer" who designs spectacular pop up books). Book Places is the shortest section with two of the six pieces about New York City-an indulgence that is easily justified. 

Taken altogether, the collection is like a sampler platter of a life devoted to books. Each piece offers tantalizing glimpses of miscellanea, from the founding of Harvard's acclaimed Widener Library by a survivor of the Titanic (in memory of her book-collecting son who was not so fortunate), to the creation and founding of the new library at Camp Anaconda, the sprawling base of operations for the US military in Iraq (and a spot that boasted a movie theater, two swimming pools and a gym before anyone got around to thinking about including a library).  Editions & Impressions is a nostalgic book, each article infused with incredible affection for its subject-the collectors, librarians, archivists and bookshop owners all possessed of these literary obsessions. Naturally, book people will love it. . .(Read the full review at Bibliobuffet.com)

--Nicki