Lobsters and Songs

My daily email with book stuff arrived today with a mini interview with Stewart O'Nan. I love Last Night at the Lobster and I can't wait to read his new book, Songs For the Missing. The interview is from Shelf Awareness Daily News.



Book Brahmin: Stewart O'Nan
Stewart O'Nan was born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pa., and worked as an aerospace engineer before turning to writing. He is the author of a dozen novels, including Snow Angels, A Prayer for the Dying, The Good Wife and Last Night at the Lobster. His latest novel, Songs for the Missing, is being published this month by Viking and has been praised by Dennis Lehane as the "best novel I've read all year."

On my nightstand now:

Alice Munro's Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage. Next up, Woolf's To the Lighthouse, then Evan S. Connell's Mrs. Bridge. And then Alice Munro's Selected Stories, because you can't have enough Alice Munro.

Favorite book when you were a child:

Alfred Hitchcock's The Three Investigators and the Mystery of the Green Ghost. Three boys, led by the roly-poly Jupiter Jones, run a makeshift detective agency out of an old trailer buried in a scrapyard.

Your top five authors:

Shakespeare, Chekhov, Tolstoy, Ray Bradbury, Stephen King.

Book you've faked reading:

Does skimming count? In that case, Pynchon's Mason & Dixon.

Book you're an evangelist for:

The True Detective by Theodore Weesner. An unsettling yet moving story of a kidnapping in Portsmouth, N.H.

Book you've bought for the cover:

The movie tie-in paperback of Breakfast at Tiffany's with Audrey Hepburn on it.

Book that changed your life:

So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell.

Favorite line from a book:

"The reason life is so strange is that so often people have no choice."--William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow.

Book you most want to read again for the first time:

The Stand by Stephen King.

Ghosts of Southampton

The New York Times article that Lily Koppel researched at the library and at the Southampton Historical Society is here. It is very well done and perfectly spooky!

Motherhood

I cannot read two books at once for the same reasons I could not have two children.

I always have a book on CD going in my car, but for some reason that doesn't count. I do make sure that my CD book and my "real" book are very different genres or topics but I think reading a "real" book invades my mind more completely than listening to someone else read to me. Whatever bound pages I am carrying around is what I consider the "book" I am reading.

Well, I thought I would reread The Grapes of Wrath (in preparation for the first Winter Discussion Group of 2008) while also reading Obscene In The Extreme: The Burning and Banning of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. Both books are fabulous. That is the problem.

Whenever I am reading one book, I am wondering about the other. Have I read both equally today? Am I getting more ahead in one? Does the other book feel neglected? Am I paying attention to what I am reading right now? My god, imagine if these were children! I would be counting hugs and timing conversations.

I only have one dog and I will only have one child and from now on I'm a one book at a time girl.

Post script: Jodi from circulation brought me a cookie in the shape of a shoe. It was beautiful and I was going to take a picture or scan it for the blog but I was hungry and I ate it. It was delicious.

I love to meet authors....

...especially at my library!

I was excited when the New York Times called the other day for help with a story. I was thrilled when I learned that I was speaking to Lily Koppel, young and amazing New York Times reporter and author of The Red Leather Diary.



I loved the book and was giddy to do some research for Ms. Koppel. We exchanged emails and today she came into the library. Of course, I asked her to sign my book.



She was very sweet and we even discussed her doing a book talk here at the library.

I can't say it enough: I have the best job in the world.

What is the article about? Check this weekend's New York Times!

Lily Koppel's website is here and an interview/reading with her is here.

Awww, shucks

I received staff recognition for November/December at my library! It was very nice and very embarrassing. Not only do I get a prime parking space, but the staff does a little write up about me for the newsletter. Being the newsletter compiler and editor, it was a little funny to edit my own blurb.

And of course they mentioned my fabulous taste in shoes. Because of this, all of the patrons who read it come up to congratulate me then go into their own shoe woes. One lady was forbidden by her family to buy any more shoes. But (she whispered) she had just gone to T.J. Maxx and bought 4 pairs.

You can see the newsletter here.

Photo contest

The Suffolk County Clerk is compiling a calendar to celebrate Long Island archives. She asked for photo submissions showcasing local collections. Terry and I took a hundred (ok, more like 10) photos today but they just didn't show how pretty our local history room really is! Finally, we decided the picture needed a person to make it come alive. I was selected for my pretty pink attire. Too bad you can't see the shoes. I'll let you know if we get in the calendar! I hope I am Miss December!

The Good, The Bad and The Disappointing

I have been listening to The Other Queen, Philippa Gregory's new historical fiction, and I have to say that I am very disappointed. The narrators are great but the book itself was not what I expected and I find my mind wandering.

I am a fan of The Other Boleyn Girl and The Constant Princess but the things I like best about these books (the dialog, the historical detail of dress and royal tradition) I do not see in The Other Queen. I think I will return the book on cd, as there are a number of holds on it, and take out something entirely different: World War Z. Maybe Halloween is getting me in the mood for zombie stories.

I am also reading The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton. I cannot link this book to our catalog because it does not come out until April, 2009. Morton's first book, The House at Riverton, is a great read. It is part historical fiction, part modern fiction, and beautifully written (I have reviewed this book here). The Forgotten Garden is just as great! I am happy that Morton is not a one-book wonder. Her mysteries are complex and have satisfying endings, her books are literary genre-mixers that keep the twists coming and the pages turning.

By the Book

If you just can't get enough of my reading tastes here at BethanyTheLibrarian than you can check out a new blog I am part of. It is called By the Book and it is the Rogers Memorial Library blog, available through the library website. Book reviews, recommendations, comparisons and general book blog blabber will be posted by RML Librarians. So, it's like BethanyTheLibrarian only with less pink and fewer spelling and grammatical errors. Check it out! I'm off to blog there now ....

Ouch.

Are Americans stupid? Are our writers second rate? Would we recognize literature if it stomped on our toe?

My feathers are ruffled ... yet it has a ring of truth ...

DIC.TION.ARY

I love the dictionary. I have a big, fat, brown one at home that my mom bought me one Christmas (yes! I was excited!) and I run into my library, plop it on the floor, kneel down and put my nose against the small type as often as I can. Usually, my dog is there sniffing the book and wondering why I am crouched on the floor and not playing with him.

Anyway, I just started Fun Home by Alison Bechdel. Alison will be in NYC this November and I am very excited to finally meet her. I have only just started the book because my good friends Heidi and Sascha bought a house in Syracuse and moved away with my copy! They were good enough to mail it back to me. So in reading Fun Home, I came across a fun word that I didn't know: legerdemain. Great word, right? But in looking it up, the pages of the dictionary behind the Reference Desk fell open and the word in the upper right hand corner was floccinaucinhilipilfication. Wowzers! What a word!

The more you read, the more you have to read! And if you want to know what either of those words mean, go to you dictionary ... or your local library.

Emma Donoghue at Oscar Wilde in NYC

On Friday I drove into the city to see a wonderful author, Emma Donoghue at Oscar Wilde Bookshop. She is the author of Slammerkin (Born to poverty in eighteenth-century London, Mary Saunders' love of fine clothes and a dream of a better life take her from the world of prostitution to life as a household seamstress in Monmouth to a search for true freedom) The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits (Donoghue finds her inspiration for these wry, robust tales in obscure scraps of historical records: an engraving of a woman giving birth to rabbits; a plague ballad; surgical case notes; theological pamphlets; an articulated skeleton. Here kings, surgeons, soldiers, and ladies of leisure rub shoulders with cross-dressers, cult leaders, poisoners, and arsonists) and the brand new Sealed Letter (Emily "Fido" Faithfull, a spinster pioneer in the British women's movement, is distracted from her cause by the details of her friend's failing marriage and affair with a young army officer, in this drama of friends, lovers, and divorce, Victorian style). She read from the Sealed Letter with a lovely Irish accent and a dramatic flair. After, the audience asked her the ususal questions: Who do you like to read? (Terry Pratchet, Sarah Waters). Are you writing something new? (Yes) What do you prefer, contemporary fiction or historical fiction? ("I have two woman in my life ... genre-wise"). Will you sign my book? (Yes!)

Other than the fact that Emma is a wonderful writer, what I love most about her is that she uses these strange little nuggets from history and creates entire books around them. The Sealed Letter is based on an actual Victorian divorce case that was in all the newspapers and was quite shocking for the time. She also sprinkles her books with fabulous words from the period (hugger-mugger, pettifoggery, chicanery) that adds an authentic feel to the drama.

Emma is back in Canada now, hopefully working hard on her next book. Until then, pick up one of her novels, short story collections, retold fairy tales, plays or literary histories and anthologies.