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Books for the taking
Post-BEA, we have extra copies of a bunch of books, even after counting the ones we're already giving to friends. Here's a list of everything we have extra copies of; if you want one (or two or three), claim it!
In ARC or pre-press (U.S.) editions:
Chicks with Sticks (It's a Purl Thing). Elizabeth Lenhard. September 2005. YA knitting-friendship novel. "Everything in Scottie's life is changing. Her former best friend, trust-fund princess Amanda, is just that -- her former best friend -- and her mom has become an It girl in Chicago's art world. Meanwhile, Scottie just wants to blend in. Then she discovers knitting, and it's as if she's been thrown a cashmerino lifeline...." I've read this one already -- the cover art looks like adult chick lit, so I was surprised to find it featuring sophomores in high school. It's a little too sincere for me (you could probably guess from the title), but okay if brainless. It claims to be 12+, and it would probably be better for younger folks.
The Highest Tide. Jim Lynch. September 2005. Giant Squid! Okay, it probably features things other than giant squid, but that's what I remember about it. I keep having to go back and remind myself how the giant squid fits in. And this is how: "On a moonlit night, thirteen-year-old Miles O'Malley slips out of his house, packs up his kayak, and goes exploring on the tidal flats of Puget Sound. But what begins as an ordinary hunt for starfish, snails and clams is soon transformed by an astonishing sight: a beached giant squid. As the first person ever to see a giant squid alive, the speed-reading, Rachel-Carson -obsessed insomniacs becomes a local phenomenon, shadowed on the flats by people increasingly curious as to whether Miles is just an observant boy or an unlikely prophet...."
That's the back cover; the book features a kid but appears to be adult fiction (it's being MARKETED as adult fiction, anyway). The style of the author is miles from the jacket copy: "I learned early on that if you tell people what you see at low tide they'll think you're exaggerating or lying when you're actually just explaining strange and wonderful things as clearly as you can. Most of the time I understated what I saw because I couldn't find words powerful enough, but that's the nature of marine life and the inland bays I grew up on." Looks good, but I haven't read it yet. (Also, it has a COLOPHON, which is so rare in modern books as to be nearly nonexistent, and which makes me really really happy about the quality of the editing. Plus, the graphic design is excellent, and they use my favorite Caslon, which, okay, makes me a dork, but you really can say something about books based on the typesetting.)
The Amphora Project. William Kotzwinkle. October 2005. Kotzwinkle's first book in ten years. Features space pirates. And timid botanists.
Pretty much no matter how Kotzwinkle is described, people end the sentence "... but odd." I imagine this book will be pretty much the same. Also, the jacket copy doesn't mention this, but I'm damn sure this is a parody. (Look, there's a character named Lizardo. And there's a Planet Immortal.) The first few pages are a little excessive, but it seems to calm down from there. I haven't read this, but I expect at least a giggle or two from it. Current cover art's hideous, though.
The People's Act of Love. James Meek. January 2006. He's compared to Kafka. So. OTOH, he gets positive blurbs from Philip Pullman, Irving Welsh, Jim Harrison, and Michael Faber.
The title's awful, and someone needs to thwap the copywriter who did the jacket copy. I wouldn't venture a guess on plot based on the same, but it seems to feature the conflicts? interactions? orgies? something? between a Czech military regiment, a Christian sect of some sort, a prison camp escapee, and a shaman. Some of whom may be the same people. And it's definitely set in Siberia during the Russian Revolution. The style's fun, though: "When Kyrill Ivanovich Samarin was twelve, years before he would catch, among the scent of textbooks and cologne in a girl's satchel, the distinct odor of dynamite, he demanded that his uncle let him change his second name. He didn't want to be 'Ivanovich' any more."
Cotton. Christopher Wilson. October 2005. This book is written by a consulting semiotician. A CONSULTING SEMIOTICIAN.
"Lee Cotton is a black boy born white-skinned in segregated Eureka, Mississippi, in 1950. Over the course of Lee's first twenty years, he will fall in love with the daughter of a local Klansman, get kicked senseless and left for dead on a freight train headed north, and end up in St. Louis as a white man, and be drafted into the psych-ops corps in Nevada. There, a drunken accident will separate Lee from another part of his identity and change his fate yet again. Before he returns to Mississippi, he will experience up close and personal the women's liberation movement and the dawn of the Lesbian Nation." Busy fellow. Probably part magical realism, as my quick flipping revealed rains of bullfrogs.
The Shroud of the Thwacker. Chris Elliott. October 2005. Parodies historical crime/conspiracy drama.
It took me an embarrassingly long time to work out why this book was getting such a huge marketing push. The line for autographs was MILES long for a first-time author, and it was only when we were walking the show floor later that I actually spotted Chris Elliott. He was hanging out in-booth and doing some autographing, and even so it wasn't until after I'd thanked him for a copy of the book that I went "oh. I've seen that dude before." Yup. SNL and Something About Mary Chris Elliott. Totally explains the marketing push. Jacket copy explains that "Taking hilarious swipes at Patricia Cornwell, The DaVinci Code, and Caleb Carr's mysteries, Elliott does for the historical crime genre what Douglas Adams did for science fiction in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy..." Rule one of jacket copy ought to be "never, never shalt thou compare thy author to Douglas Adams." But it does look funny. It opens: "It started innocently enough. What could have been the harm, I thought, in investigating an obscure crime that took place over a century ago? It was the year 1882, and New York City was caught in the grip of a serial murderer. His nightly forays into the shadowy streets had claimed the lives of four prostitutes, two women who looked like prostitutes, and, oddly enough, one cow (Bessie LeBlanc, who gave good milk in dark doorways for five bucks a cup). The city's top investigative team was mystified, baffled, and stymied all at the same time." Also it has funny black and white line drawings.
All the Fishes come Home to Roost. Rachel Manija Brown. October 2005. Memoir of a girl growing up on an ashram.
This is a narrative non-fiction memoir, which is totally In this year (as I said to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
m_shell, if I see one more heartbreaking memoir of loss, I may lose it). This one looks to be quite good, though, AND isn't billed as heartbreaking, and Rachel Manija Brown is funny. For example: "Parents, if you do not want your children to write tell-all memoirs when they grow up, do not name them KhrYstYll, Pebble, or Shaka Zulu." (Her parents considered naming her Arwen Evenstar before settling on Manija.) Also, she's talking about her parents moving to Baba's ashram when she was a kid, which is pretty interesting. (Baba being the fellow The Who sing about, and also the guy who said "don't worry, be happy." He was dead when they moved to India, but it was still his ashram.) The author is a fan of Emma Bull, too, which impresses me with her good sense.
Every Sunday. Peter Pezzelli. September, 2005. Pezzelli was a BookSense pick for Home to Italy.
This is fiction, but it may well be heartbreaking, or at least too cute to bear. "In Every Sunday, people look to Nick Catini when they need something. Nick is that larger-than-life personality with a quick wit, who's always been able to score tickets to the big game or fix his daughters' problems. Sundays for Nick are a time for family, and each week he presides over the family dinner. Suddenly, Nick is gone. As the family struggles to go on without him, they must also come to terms with fulfilling his last request. The challenge he's posed may well be the making of them -- or it will pull them apart forever. Funny and heartwarming..." I fear the funny and heartwarming story of a family pulling together after someone's death. I mean. But people say Pezzelli is quite good, so it may stretch beyond the genre. And the narrator is Nick, the dead guy, which is an interesting concept. *shrugs*
Pardonable Lies: A Maisie Dobbs Novel. Jacqueline Winspear. September 2005. Third Maisie Dobbs historical mystery novel. I've not read the first two, so I come to this a blank slate. Maisie Dobbs appears to work in the 1930s as an investigator-psychologist. Winspear has won a lot of awards (though, given the people who women awards for mystery novels, this isn't saying much). The writing style is fun, though I'm unsure if I'm comfortable with the detective. I've only read a bit of it, but Maisie Dobbs is a bit Mary Sue-esque so far. We'll see.
The Sisters Mortland. Sally Beauman. January 2006. The main character here is also named Maisie. What gives?
Many people really like Sally Beauman; others find her prose fun but her plots predictable. This particular novel is set in 1967-1980something in the home of three sisters (a decaying medieval abbey, which says a lot about the book right there). This is prose with epistolary part openers, and Maisie sticks the Linnean names of things after any mention of them, which is an interesting style. It opens: "When we first came to the Abbey, it rained for five days. Non-stop. I'd been warned that this could happen in England, in spring and in summer, but I hadn't believed it. Every morning, we'd sit in silence at breakfast. Gramps hid behind his newspaper; my sisters fixed their eyes on the their plates; my mother stared at air. I had to be propped up on three cushions to reach the table. Outside the windows was a wet, grieving world." You get the idea.
Widow of the South. Robert Hicks. September 2005. OMG marketing push of DOOOOM. Really. It's astonishing, especially for a first novel. They call it "destined to become a classic," which nearly every book is, but given the amount of money they're spending on it I think they actually believe it. Huh.
"In 1894 Carrie McGavock is an old woman, an old woman who has only her former slave to keep her company...and the almost 1,500 soldiers buried in her backyard. Years before, rather than let someone plow over the field where these young men had been buried, Carrie dug them up and reburied them in her own personal cemetery. Now, as she walks the rows of the dead, an old soldier appears. It is the man she met on the day of the battle that changed everything. The man who came to her house as a wounded soldier and left with her heart. He asks if the cemetery has room for one more. In an extraordinary debut novel, based on a remarkable true story, Robert Hicks draws an unforgettable, panoramic portrait of a woman who, through love and loss, found a cause." Frankly, I'm skeptical, but then I'm not a big fan of love stories that transcend time, etc. etc. If historical romance-drama is your thing, though, this is apparently going to be one of the big books of the year. Reading it early might make you feel special.
Chet Gecko's Detective Handbook (and Cookbook). Bruce Hale. September 2005. I have no idea why there's an ARC for this. It's part book, part notebook, with some recipes. And it's based, of course, on the Chet Gecko stories. It's most suitable for Chet Gecko fans (they say ages 9-12). It's supposed to teach you how to be a detective.
Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife. Mary Roach. October 2005. I have almost no interest in the subject, but Mary Roach is writing about it, so it'll be interesting. Roach wrote Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, and she's an absolutely fascinating science writer. She can make anything seem interesting.
"She begins the journey in rural India with a reincarnation researcher and ends up in a University of Virginia operating room where cardiologists have installed equipment near the ceiling to study out-of-body near-death experiences. Along the way, she enrolls in an English medium school, gets electromagnetically haunted at a university in Ontario, and visits a Duke University professor who has a plan to weigh the consciousness of a leech. Her historical wanderings unearth soul-seeking philosophers who rummaged through cadavers and calves' heads, a North Carolina lawsuit that established legal precedence for ghosts, and the last surviving sample of 'ectoplasm' in a Cambridge University archive."m_shell's favorite story in it, for example, features British researches putting on sheets and wandering around pretending to be ghosts. Apparently all the people ignored them, but the cows were fascinated. (Just to be sure, they redid the experiment in front of an XXX film. Most patrons responded that they hadn't even noticed the crazy dude in the sheet going ooogly-boogly or ooooooo at them.)
That's it for the pre-press!
In ARC or pre-press (U.S.) editions:
Chicks with Sticks (It's a Purl Thing). Elizabeth Lenhard. September 2005. YA knitting-friendship novel. "Everything in Scottie's life is changing. Her former best friend, trust-fund princess Amanda, is just that -- her former best friend -- and her mom has become an It girl in Chicago's art world. Meanwhile, Scottie just wants to blend in. Then she discovers knitting, and it's as if she's been thrown a cashmerino lifeline...." I've read this one already -- the cover art looks like adult chick lit, so I was surprised to find it featuring sophomores in high school. It's a little too sincere for me (you could probably guess from the title), but okay if brainless. It claims to be 12+, and it would probably be better for younger folks.
The Highest Tide. Jim Lynch. September 2005. Giant Squid! Okay, it probably features things other than giant squid, but that's what I remember about it. I keep having to go back and remind myself how the giant squid fits in. And this is how: "On a moonlit night, thirteen-year-old Miles O'Malley slips out of his house, packs up his kayak, and goes exploring on the tidal flats of Puget Sound. But what begins as an ordinary hunt for starfish, snails and clams is soon transformed by an astonishing sight: a beached giant squid. As the first person ever to see a giant squid alive, the speed-reading, Rachel-Carson -obsessed insomniacs becomes a local phenomenon, shadowed on the flats by people increasingly curious as to whether Miles is just an observant boy or an unlikely prophet...."
That's the back cover; the book features a kid but appears to be adult fiction (it's being MARKETED as adult fiction, anyway). The style of the author is miles from the jacket copy: "I learned early on that if you tell people what you see at low tide they'll think you're exaggerating or lying when you're actually just explaining strange and wonderful things as clearly as you can. Most of the time I understated what I saw because I couldn't find words powerful enough, but that's the nature of marine life and the inland bays I grew up on." Looks good, but I haven't read it yet. (Also, it has a COLOPHON, which is so rare in modern books as to be nearly nonexistent, and which makes me really really happy about the quality of the editing. Plus, the graphic design is excellent, and they use my favorite Caslon, which, okay, makes me a dork, but you really can say something about books based on the typesetting.)
The Amphora Project. William Kotzwinkle. October 2005. Kotzwinkle's first book in ten years. Features space pirates. And timid botanists.
Pretty much no matter how Kotzwinkle is described, people end the sentence "... but odd." I imagine this book will be pretty much the same. Also, the jacket copy doesn't mention this, but I'm damn sure this is a parody. (Look, there's a character named Lizardo. And there's a Planet Immortal.) The first few pages are a little excessive, but it seems to calm down from there. I haven't read this, but I expect at least a giggle or two from it. Current cover art's hideous, though.
The People's Act of Love. James Meek. January 2006. He's compared to Kafka. So. OTOH, he gets positive blurbs from Philip Pullman, Irving Welsh, Jim Harrison, and Michael Faber.
The title's awful, and someone needs to thwap the copywriter who did the jacket copy. I wouldn't venture a guess on plot based on the same, but it seems to feature the conflicts? interactions? orgies? something? between a Czech military regiment, a Christian sect of some sort, a prison camp escapee, and a shaman. Some of whom may be the same people. And it's definitely set in Siberia during the Russian Revolution. The style's fun, though: "When Kyrill Ivanovich Samarin was twelve, years before he would catch, among the scent of textbooks and cologne in a girl's satchel, the distinct odor of dynamite, he demanded that his uncle let him change his second name. He didn't want to be 'Ivanovich' any more."
Cotton. Christopher Wilson. October 2005. This book is written by a consulting semiotician. A CONSULTING SEMIOTICIAN.
"Lee Cotton is a black boy born white-skinned in segregated Eureka, Mississippi, in 1950. Over the course of Lee's first twenty years, he will fall in love with the daughter of a local Klansman, get kicked senseless and left for dead on a freight train headed north, and end up in St. Louis as a white man, and be drafted into the psych-ops corps in Nevada. There, a drunken accident will separate Lee from another part of his identity and change his fate yet again. Before he returns to Mississippi, he will experience up close and personal the women's liberation movement and the dawn of the Lesbian Nation." Busy fellow. Probably part magical realism, as my quick flipping revealed rains of bullfrogs.
The Shroud of the Thwacker. Chris Elliott. October 2005. Parodies historical crime/conspiracy drama.
It took me an embarrassingly long time to work out why this book was getting such a huge marketing push. The line for autographs was MILES long for a first-time author, and it was only when we were walking the show floor later that I actually spotted Chris Elliott. He was hanging out in-booth and doing some autographing, and even so it wasn't until after I'd thanked him for a copy of the book that I went "oh. I've seen that dude before." Yup. SNL and Something About Mary Chris Elliott. Totally explains the marketing push. Jacket copy explains that "Taking hilarious swipes at Patricia Cornwell, The DaVinci Code, and Caleb Carr's mysteries, Elliott does for the historical crime genre what Douglas Adams did for science fiction in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy..." Rule one of jacket copy ought to be "never, never shalt thou compare thy author to Douglas Adams." But it does look funny. It opens: "It started innocently enough. What could have been the harm, I thought, in investigating an obscure crime that took place over a century ago? It was the year 1882, and New York City was caught in the grip of a serial murderer. His nightly forays into the shadowy streets had claimed the lives of four prostitutes, two women who looked like prostitutes, and, oddly enough, one cow (Bessie LeBlanc, who gave good milk in dark doorways for five bucks a cup). The city's top investigative team was mystified, baffled, and stymied all at the same time." Also it has funny black and white line drawings.
All the Fishes come Home to Roost. Rachel Manija Brown. October 2005. Memoir of a girl growing up on an ashram.
This is a narrative non-fiction memoir, which is totally In this year (as I said to
m_shell, if I see one more heartbreaking memoir of loss, I may lose it). This one looks to be quite good, though, AND isn't billed as heartbreaking, and Rachel Manija Brown is funny. For example: "Parents, if you do not want your children to write tell-all memoirs when they grow up, do not name them KhrYstYll, Pebble, or Shaka Zulu." (Her parents considered naming her Arwen Evenstar before settling on Manija.) Also, she's talking about her parents moving to Baba's ashram when she was a kid, which is pretty interesting. (Baba being the fellow The Who sing about, and also the guy who said "don't worry, be happy." He was dead when they moved to India, but it was still his ashram.) The author is a fan of Emma Bull, too, which impresses me with her good sense. Every Sunday. Peter Pezzelli. September, 2005. Pezzelli was a BookSense pick for Home to Italy.
This is fiction, but it may well be heartbreaking, or at least too cute to bear. "In Every Sunday, people look to Nick Catini when they need something. Nick is that larger-than-life personality with a quick wit, who's always been able to score tickets to the big game or fix his daughters' problems. Sundays for Nick are a time for family, and each week he presides over the family dinner. Suddenly, Nick is gone. As the family struggles to go on without him, they must also come to terms with fulfilling his last request. The challenge he's posed may well be the making of them -- or it will pull them apart forever. Funny and heartwarming..." I fear the funny and heartwarming story of a family pulling together after someone's death. I mean. But people say Pezzelli is quite good, so it may stretch beyond the genre. And the narrator is Nick, the dead guy, which is an interesting concept. *shrugs*
Pardonable Lies: A Maisie Dobbs Novel. Jacqueline Winspear. September 2005. Third Maisie Dobbs historical mystery novel. I've not read the first two, so I come to this a blank slate. Maisie Dobbs appears to work in the 1930s as an investigator-psychologist. Winspear has won a lot of awards (though, given the people who women awards for mystery novels, this isn't saying much). The writing style is fun, though I'm unsure if I'm comfortable with the detective. I've only read a bit of it, but Maisie Dobbs is a bit Mary Sue-esque so far. We'll see.
The Sisters Mortland. Sally Beauman. January 2006. The main character here is also named Maisie. What gives?
Many people really like Sally Beauman; others find her prose fun but her plots predictable. This particular novel is set in 1967-1980something in the home of three sisters (a decaying medieval abbey, which says a lot about the book right there). This is prose with epistolary part openers, and Maisie sticks the Linnean names of things after any mention of them, which is an interesting style. It opens: "When we first came to the Abbey, it rained for five days. Non-stop. I'd been warned that this could happen in England, in spring and in summer, but I hadn't believed it. Every morning, we'd sit in silence at breakfast. Gramps hid behind his newspaper; my sisters fixed their eyes on the their plates; my mother stared at air. I had to be propped up on three cushions to reach the table. Outside the windows was a wet, grieving world." You get the idea.
Widow of the South. Robert Hicks. September 2005. OMG marketing push of DOOOOM. Really. It's astonishing, especially for a first novel. They call it "destined to become a classic," which nearly every book is, but given the amount of money they're spending on it I think they actually believe it. Huh.
"In 1894 Carrie McGavock is an old woman, an old woman who has only her former slave to keep her company...and the almost 1,500 soldiers buried in her backyard. Years before, rather than let someone plow over the field where these young men had been buried, Carrie dug them up and reburied them in her own personal cemetery. Now, as she walks the rows of the dead, an old soldier appears. It is the man she met on the day of the battle that changed everything. The man who came to her house as a wounded soldier and left with her heart. He asks if the cemetery has room for one more. In an extraordinary debut novel, based on a remarkable true story, Robert Hicks draws an unforgettable, panoramic portrait of a woman who, through love and loss, found a cause." Frankly, I'm skeptical, but then I'm not a big fan of love stories that transcend time, etc. etc. If historical romance-drama is your thing, though, this is apparently going to be one of the big books of the year. Reading it early might make you feel special.
Chet Gecko's Detective Handbook (and Cookbook). Bruce Hale. September 2005. I have no idea why there's an ARC for this. It's part book, part notebook, with some recipes. And it's based, of course, on the Chet Gecko stories. It's most suitable for Chet Gecko fans (they say ages 9-12). It's supposed to teach you how to be a detective.
Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife. Mary Roach. October 2005. I have almost no interest in the subject, but Mary Roach is writing about it, so it'll be interesting. Roach wrote Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, and she's an absolutely fascinating science writer. She can make anything seem interesting.
"She begins the journey in rural India with a reincarnation researcher and ends up in a University of Virginia operating room where cardiologists have installed equipment near the ceiling to study out-of-body near-death experiences. Along the way, she enrolls in an English medium school, gets electromagnetically haunted at a university in Ontario, and visits a Duke University professor who has a plan to weigh the consciousness of a leech. Her historical wanderings unearth soul-seeking philosophers who rummaged through cadavers and calves' heads, a North Carolina lawsuit that established legal precedence for ghosts, and the last surviving sample of 'ectoplasm' in a Cambridge University archive."
m_shell's favorite story in it, for example, features British researches putting on sheets and wandering around pretending to be ghosts. Apparently all the people ignored them, but the cows were fascinated. (Just to be sure, they redid the experiment in front of an XXX film. Most patrons responded that they hadn't even noticed the crazy dude in the sheet going ooogly-boogly or ooooooo at them.)That's it for the pre-press!
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If you've got two, I'll take the other...
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Sadly, however, I don't have a third copy of the afterlife one.
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::whimpers:: I'm gonna be able to go to BEA *someday*, right? I'll have the means and time to do so?
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Unfortunately, next year it's both at an unusual time (May 19thish) and on the east coast -- it'll be in D.C.
Also, Widow of the South is all yours!