Freaks!

I just finished Hubert's Freaks: The Rare Book Dealer, the Times Square Talker, and the Lost Photos of Diane Arbus by Gregory Gibson. It was a fun and fast read, although I would grade it a B overall.
Hubert's Freaks is part biography, bouncing back and forth between the photographer Diane Arbus (who committed suicide in 1971), Bob Langmuir (a rare-book dealer who comes across what he thinks is photos taken by Diane Arbus) and Charlie Lucus (the manager of a permanent side show act in NYC called Hubert's, which is where Diane took many of her photos). The best parts of the book is when Bob finds and researches the photos - are they really by Diane Arbus? How will the Met, the estate of Diane Arbus and art galleries react? How much are they worth? However, I felt like too much of the book lingered on Bob's biography: his mental instability, his marriages, his lengthy divorce. Although I was rooting for Bob as the photo drama unfolded, I didn't find Bob to be a very sympathetic character.
As we join Bob in his quest, we learn about the emergence of photography as an art, the ups and downs of the art trade and the history of freak shows like Hubert's. Photos as smattered throughout the book, but it seems that the author could not get permission for many of Diane Arbus' prints. For that, I checked out a copy of Diane Arbus: Revelations. It is a big, beautiful book with nearly every photo mentioned in Hubert's Freaks.
Overall, for anyone interested in "weird America" and it's sideshows, photography, or the excitment of finding undiscovered treasures, this book will hit the spot.

I just finished a book recommended to me by my friend Heidi. It's called The Man Who Fell In Love With The Moon by Tom Spanbauer and it's quite a journey. It is not a book I would normally pick up and during the first couple of pages I kept thinking, "How am I going to tell Heidi that I just can't finish this strange book?" But then it sucked me in. The writing is not only stream-of-conciousness, but it is coming from a charector with a limited vocabulary, so it is hard to read at first. Once you get in the groove, in the guys head, it becomes easier. It's hard to classify - it is set in 1890-1900s Idaho, mostly in a brothel, with the main charector being a "half-Indian" bisexual. I guess I would say it felt like Tom Robbins was writing Tipping the Velvet. I'm so glad she made me read it*.


*I must be careful recommending this book, however. It is VERY sexual - be warned. The cover should have a "explicit language" sticker!

Great Blog!

Elizabeth, our head of reference, sent me a link to this blog. It's amazing! And it has a link to Nancy Pearl, superlibrarian. Check it out.

Reality TV leads to more memoirs?

Ever since James Frey's A Million Little Pieces, the memoir/fiction line has been scrutinized. You would think this would lead readers to be skeptical of memoirs but it seems to have had no negative effect on thier popularity. This article from CNN.com reports "Current memoirs in the top 10 of The New York Times' hardcover list include Julie Andrews' "Home," David Sheff's "Beautiful Boy," Jose Canseco's "Vindicated," Tori Spelling's "Stori Telling" and Valerie Bertinelli's "Losing It." The top two books on the Times' paperback nonfiction list are also memoirs -- Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin's "Three Cups of Tea" and Elizabeth Gilbert's "Eat, Pray, Love." Both have been on the Times list for more than a year." Even more interesting, "in 2007, more memoirs were accepted by publishers than debut novels, according to Michael Cader's Publishers Lunch newsletter, reported USA Today," a fact CNN connects to the popularity of reality TV.
If you click on the link for A Million Little Pieces, notice that while some Suffolk County Libraries kept the book in biography and some in non-fiction, other libraries moved it to fiction. I feel like a book labeled "biography" or "autobiography" is at one end of the "fact" spectrum, while a "fiction" book is at the opposite end. A "memoir" (the word is from the Latin memoria, meaning "memory") is a collection of the author's recollections. And we all know how reliable one's memory can be. "Memoirs" are somewhere between the two extreams of fiction/non-fiction.

For National Poetry Month

Book Love
by Jerome Stern

I have just come from an exhibition
that told me that books
will be replaced by
electronic libraries,
talking videos,
interactive computers,
cd-roms with thousands of volumes,
gigabytes of memory dancing on
pixillated screens
at which we will blearily stare into eternity.

And so, in the face of the future,
I must sing the song of the book.

Nothing more voluptuous do I know
than sitting with bright pictures,
fat upon my lap,
and turning glossy pages of
giraffes and Gauguins,
penguins and pyramids.

I love wide atlases delineating
the rise and fall of empires,
the trade routes from Kashgar to Samarkand.

I love heavy dictionaries,
their tiny pictures,
complicated columns,
minute definitions of incarnative
and laniary, hagboat and fopdoodle.

I love the texture of pages,
the highgloss slickness of magazines
as slippery as oiled eels,
the soft nubble of old books,
delicate india paper,
so thin my hands tremble
trying to turn the fluttering dry leaves,
and the yellow cheap, coarse paper
of mystery novels so gripping that
I don't care that the plane circles Atlanta forever,
because it is a full moon
and I am stalking in the Arizona desert
a malevolent shape-shifter.

I love the feel of ink on the paper,
the shiny varnishes,
the silky lacquers,
the satiny mattes.

I love the press of letters in thick paper,
the roughness sizzles my fingers
with centuries of craft embedded in pulped old rags,
my hands caress the leather of old bindings
crumbling like ancient gentlemen.

The books I hold for their heft,
to riff their pages,
to smell their smoky dustiness,
the rise of time in my nostrils.

I love bookstores,
a perfect madness of opportunity,
a lavish feast eaten by walking up aisles,
and as fast as my hand reaches out,
I reveal books' intimate innards,
a doleful engraving of Charlotte Corday who murdered Marat,
a drawing of the 1914 T-head Stutz Bearcat
whose owners shouted at rivals,
"There never was a car worser than the Mercer."

I sing these pleasures of white paper and black ink,
of the small jab of the hard cover corner
at the edge of my diaphragm,
of the look of type,
of the flip of a page,
the sinful abandon of the turned down corner,
the reckless possessiveness of my marginal scrawl,
the cover picture-as much a part of the book
as the contents itself,
like Holden Caulfield his red cap turned backwards,
staring away from us,
at what we all thought
we should become.

And I also love those great fat Bibles evangelists wave like otter pelts,
the long graying sets of unreadable authors,
the tall books of babyhood enthusiastically crayoned,
the embossed covers of adolescence,
the tiny poetry anthologies you could slip in your pocket,
and the yellowing cookbooks of recipes
for glace blanche dupont and Argentine mocha toast,
their stains and spots souvenirs
of long evenings full of love and argument,
and the talk, like as not,
of books, books, books.

The Angel Has Redeemed Itself

I'm getting near the end of The Third Angel. I'll have a full review later, but this section so perfectly describes the strong, strange love I (and many others) have for London.

“As Lucy stared up at the chaos of Euston Station, she felt the way some people did when they fell in love. London had won her over despite herself. She actually felt a quickening of her blood. Outside it was even better – darker and more bustling. The streetlights were yellow and Lucy felt she was in a dream. She could vanish into the hustle of London and yet still be herself. There were probably thousands – no, millions – of books she hadn’t yet read in this city. There were bookshops and libraries and bookstalls and publishers and guided tours of places where writers had made up whole other worlds out of nothing but words” pg. 205

Don't judge books by their matching covers...

So Pat, who is my friend/patron, is patiently waiting for me to finish The Third Angel by Alice Hoffman. She is on reserve for the book, which she will recieve as soon as I return it. In the meantime, she somehow realized that this book has a long lost twin.





Crazy, right? I suppose the two publishers purchased the same photo from an outside company. Absolution, published in November of 2007, technically had the cover first; The Third Angel was just published this month.

As I finish Hoffman's lastest book (which is covered in starred reviews and raves from Amy Tan to Jodi Picoult), I can summerize my impression in one word:
eh.

We Love Chang-Rae!

Our Long Island Reads event on Saturday was a smashing success. Mr. Lee was a wonderful speaker and we had a lively audience asking lots of great questions. Here are some pictures from the event:






Aloft is a beautiful book that so perfectly shares Long Island - the good and the bad - with the rest of the world. It was a pleasure to hear the author read from it in his own voice. Now for next year's pick!

HELP! I'm Drowning in Hardcovers!

I think I'm so smart.
One of the (many) privileges of being a librarian is hearing about new books before they are published. We go through a number of professional journals and preorder books on a weekly basis. Then, you can request these books on your personal library card so you are usually first on the list when they arrive. Smart, right?

This is how I end up with 5 books, all due in 7 days, that I desperately want to read.

I was only on page 18 of People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks when The Third Angel by Alice Hoffman arrived in my inbox. Meanwhile, The Lady Elizabeth by Alison Weir is on it's way, along with Quakeland by Francesca Lia Block. It's very exciting to have all these amazing authors publishing, but do they have to all do it within the same month??

Last night was our monthly book discussion. As part of Long Island Reads, we discussed Aloft by Chang-rae Lee. It was a fabulous discussion, with some members loving the book and others not liking it much at all. That always makes for the best debates. The author event is Saturday, at Farmingdale Public Library. If anyone on Long Island or elsewhere wants to hear Chang-rae Lee speak and get your book signed, I have extra tickets!

After the event, the Long Island Reads Committee will be compiling a list of books for next year's pick. If anyone knows a great Long Island author or a book that would represent our whole island, send along the suggestions!

I'm off to read now.