Radio, radio

Hey did you hear? Diana Nyad set a world record Monday, swimming from Cuba to Key West, unassisted, achieving at age 64 a goal she first attempted in 1978.

If you heard it on NPR you might have heard it from me. No, really! For a couple of months now my house has been custodian of an Edirol, a nice little professional recording device a couple steps up from your average digital voice recorder, thanks to the good folks at WLRN. Who woke up Monday morning like everybody else on the planet to realize Holy sh*t, she's still swimming! She might actually make it this time! And started scrambling for coverage.

Which in this case meant me. And suddenly I was not only WLRN's reporter on the scene, I was NPR's reporter on the scene. Holy sh*t is right. Not only are my reporting muscles woefully out of shape but I am terrified of relying on technology and in radio, you can't take notes by hand. I haven't played seriously in years and suddenly they call me for the Show?

Fortunately technology has improved an awful lot since the days of acoustic coupler uploads and crappy hand-me-down Toshiba laptops that required reloading the software EVERY TIME YOU TURNED IT ON so I mostly concentrated on making sure the recorder was really recording, that the levels weren't blasting beyond fixability and that I wasn't running down my cellphone battery. As Nyad reached the beach and the crowd got out of hand, I mostly concentrated on not dropping the recorder or my cellphone while simulatenously trying to record and photograph the arrival. I didn't drop either, though most of what I recorded and photographed were the shoulders and backs of the heads of all the people shoving to try to get their own cellphone pictures and videos of Nyad.

Later, when she was on a gurney hooked up to an IV, I joined the scrum around here and did manage to capture a little audio of her, which you can hear in my piece for WLRN. See that guy in the blue button down shirt? That's Kerry Sanders from NBC. See that hand just to Sanders' left, holding out a recorder? That's me! And I managed to restrain myself from elbowing Sanders in the gut, even though I have been waiting for just such an opportunity since about 1997. I think he was still with the NBC affiliate in Miami then and I was with the Herald. We were both covering a University of Miami scientist's work on coral spawning off Key Largo. We were in a small boat. It was kind of a rough night. The boat stayed in the same place for a long time. I am prone to seasickness. By the time we were actually in the water, I was puking in my snorkel. I do not recommend this experience. We finally got back on the boat. We were ready to get underway. Then Sanders decided he just had to have one more shot of himself jumping into the water. This required his cameraman to suit back up in all his scuba gear and get the camera's water housing all back together. Then Sanders had to suit back up in all his scuba gear. And jump into the water again. Which he'd already done, on camera.

In the meantime, I was dry heaving over the side of the boat with one thing going through my head: I hate TV.

Being on the big NPR, talking with Siegel, was kind of terrifying -- so terrifying that I actually don't really remember it and I haven't been able to bring myself to listen to it yet. But I'm told it sounded OK and that Siegel even managed to pronounce Klingener. I returned to my real life the next day, checking in moldy library books and giving out coupons for Internet access. But it was kind of fun to return, just for an afternoon, to that mix of terror and adrenaline rush of finding yourself on a big story with way less preparation than you'd like and little idea what you're doing -- and you go ahead and do it anyway.

I give up

I almost never give up on a book once I start reading it. But I'm trying to change my ways. Most recently I made this decision with a book that I would have thought was written with me in mind -- historical crime, set in Victorian England with a literary bent (Thomas de Quincey is a character as well as the inspiration for the title).* And yet ... as I found myself struggling to get through this book, looking for reasons to read something else and realized I had met superlibrarian Nancy Pearl's Rule of 50 -- I decided the hell with it. And returned the book to the library. And I feel much better!

I'm not sure why I'm so averse to quitting a book even when I'm not enjoying it -- something of the contrarian "this book is not going to defeat me just because I dislike it," something of the Protestant "you must finish what you started" ethos, I suppose. And there are those rare cases when your experience changes radically during the reading itself ("The Shipping News" by Annie Proulx is probably the best example I can think of offhand). And there are cases where you're just not in the right frame of mind to read a particular book -- quitting means you can go back and start afresh. Sometimes it seems like a whole different book. I recently had this experience with "Gods of Gotham" by Lyndsay Faye -- the first time I tried to read it, the period jargon drove me nuts. I went back because friends and literary sources I trust said it was good -- and I loved it. Go figure.

I should quit more books, and I'm going to try to do just that. I work in a library so I borrow or get free advanced copies of way more books than I buy. This way, maybe I'll take more flyers, get deeper into the backlist of the writers at the upcoming Key West Literary Seminar. I'll have more time to walk the dog, go to the gym, clean the house, prepare elaborate meals.

Or maybe I'll just watch more baseball and bad TV crime shows. Either way, I see it as an improvement to my quality of life.

* One reason I may NOT return to this book -- and I'm serious -- is because the chapters that detail the actions of De Quincey are entirely in italics. I realize this was intended to set those sections of the book apart. But there's a reason italics are generally used sparingly in print. Because it's annoying to read in long stretches. Maybe I'm just getting old and cranky. But when the first section popped up -- and I realized it was going to be more than a page or two -- I found myself seriously irritated. And when I realized that this experience would be repeated throughout the book, that was another persuasive reason to just quit reading.

Carnegie Medals: In which I (almost) make a literary prize reading deadline

[gallery type="slideshow" ids="1576,1575,1574,1573,1571,1572"] Every year when the shortlists for various literary prizes -- Booker, Pulitzer, National Book Award -- are announced, I think hey wouldn't it be cool to read all the finalists and compare my judgment with the judges? But I never do. This year, however, I had no excuse when the finalists were announced for the Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction. This is the second year for this prize, given by the American Library Association -- and I would be attending the annual conference in Chicago. I bought tickets to the ceremony and started reading -- there were only six books total, three fiction and three nonfiction.

Neither of my top choices -- The Round House by Louise Erdrich and The Mansion of Happiness by Jill Lepore (with a serious caveat I'll get to below) -- were the ones chosen by the judges. The winners were Canada by Richard Ford and Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher by Timothy Egan. All six were excellent reads; I highly recommend them and I'm glad I did this. I'll probably do it again next year. And then maybe take on another project: reading the winners of the various big contests and comparing them to each other.

A couple things I learned along the way:

* I've been neglecting my literary fiction -- for the last couple years I've been on an extended genre jag. Which is cool ... but means I'm missing out on some great books. It was good to have a reason to read some of the best current fiction. Canada was probably my least favorite of the three but it was an absorbing, if grim, read. It did feature a few fantastic lines like this one about spending the day at the movies in Mississippi:

"We'd emerge at four out of the cool, back into the hot, salty, breathless Gulf Coast afternoon, sun-blind and queasy and speechless from wasting the day with nothing to show for it."

And that is EXACTLY what it's like after you go to the early show at the Regal.

* After reading This is How You Lose Her, I didn't at all buy the argument that it was misogynistic or otherwise hostile towards women -- if anything, Junot Diaz goes out of his way to show what an idiot Yunior is for repeatedly screwing up relationships with smart, cool women. Hence, the title.

* I liked Spillover and I feel kind of guilty for it not being my favorite in the nonfiction category -- in fact, it was probably my least favorite of the three -- but I'd just like to take the opportunity here to say that David Quammen is an amazing science writer for nonscientists and if you haven't read The Song of the Dodo, his masterpiece about island biogeography, go do it RIGHT NOW. It's one of the books I'd grab if my house were on fire. Seriously.

* There wasn't a theme at all to the choices, but the fiction titles were all coming of age stories, which is interesting since Erdrich and Ford are in the double digits, bookwise. And even more interesting, all three were celebrations of geekdom -- Canada's young hero is seriously into beekeeping, Yunior is a comics geek and Joe and his buddies in The Round House are obsessed with Star Trek: The Next Generation. I liked that about all of them.

* The Mansion of Happiness was the easiest going down of the nonfiction titles and I was glad to see it here since it didn't seem to make a lot of other year's best lists, and I admire and respect Jill Lepore as one of those top-notch academics who writes for humans (she's a Harvard professor AND a New Yorker staff writer). But the book felt more like a compilation of great New Yorker pieces than a cohesive book. I'd already read most of them in the magazine and I still enjoyed reading them again -- it was full of fun facts about board games and attitudes toward breast-feeding (like the book called Spiritual Milk for Boston Babes, Drawn out of the Breasts of Both Testaments, published in 1646), the history of library children's rooms and the publication of Stuart Little, sex education and eugenics (including the fact that the guy behind the Ladies' Home Journal column "Can This Marriage Be Saved" was a hardcore eugenicist. Lovely).

* This little project helped clarify for me the role of ebooks and ereaders in my life. Obviously they're great for immediate gratification and convenience and I have no intention of giving them up. But I think I'll try to limit my use of them on my genre reading, which is really focused on plot and character, and not for nonfiction and literary fiction, where I need to focused in a different way. I bought Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher as an ebook shortly after it came out -- but when it came to reading it, I had a difficult time. Which also could have been due to other events in my life at the time. I didn't finish it before the awards ceremony, which made me feel bad -- I was so close to actually meeting my deadline. But I bought a couple print copies at ALA -- they were reduced price! And we didn't have it in the library collection! -- and found my reading was much easier when I switched formats. This is not a judgment on the quality or value of different types of books -- just an observation of my own reading experience. And means, as I had suspected and hoped, that there will be a continuing role for print for many of us even as ereaders and ebooks find their place in what one marketing dude at ALA called "the reading ecosystem."

Summer reading recs: English court intrigue, Papal court intrigue, dragons meet Napoleon in Russia and literary noir close to home

[gallery type="slideshow" ids="1552,1550,1555,1551"] Four novels, all set to be published this summer. All four are probably not to most people's reading taste but they all were to mine.

Queen's Gambit is the story of Katherine Parr, the final and surviving wife of Henry VIII. She's got an interesting story and it's told well both from her perspective and that of a servant, Dot, whom she brings from her own household to serve her when Katherine (reluctantly) becomes Queen. Even if you think you've read or watched everything you need to about the Tudors, this is worth a read, especially since it covers a relatively unexamined person and part of the story. Its perspective on Elizabeth is especially interesting, both from Katherine's view and from Dot's. As everyone who knows anything about Elizabeth knows, she and her final stepmother were close -- until Katherine caught her last husband, the ambitious, vain Thomas Seymour, playing some sort of naughty bed game with the young adolescent Elizabeth. While Katherine was pregnant with his child. I was dreading that part of the story even though I knew it was coming -- but Fremantle handles it with an interesting approach. A debut novel by Elizabeth Fremantle, who appears to be a worthy addition to the Tudor-writing historical fiction ranks. The book is scheduled for release on Aug. 6.

Blood & Beauty is about the Borgias, another telegenic Renaissance-era family (also the subject of a pay-cable drama from the same folks who brought us The Tudors). Sarah Dunant sets her books in medieval and Renaissance Italy and the Borgias offer incredible scope. I knew little about them, beyond their historical reputation as a bunch of depraved poisoners -- this book provided a much better rounded portrait especially of Lucrezia, daughter of the ambitious Rodrigo Borgia (Pope Alexander VI). Even her ruthless brother Cesare is understandable, if not necessarily sympathetic. I enjoyed it thoroughly and look forward to the next installment -- though it led me to some confusion over the dramatic choices in the Showtime series. But hey, I knew from watching the Tudors that the guy behind those shows is not all that concerned with historical accuracy so I'm going to assume Sarah Dunant's sticking closer to the record until I learn otherwise. Dunant is probably best known for In the Company of the Courtesan; she may go stratospheric (into Philippa Gregory-like sales levels) with this one. Blood & Beauty publishes July 16.

Blood of Tyrants is speculative/alternative/fantastic historical fiction -- the latest and apparently penultimate volume in Naomi Novik's Temeraire series. I've blogged about this series before -- the previous entry, Crucible of Gold was one of my favorite books from last year -- and this is a worthy successor. As it opens, our hero Will Laurence has been shipwrecked on the shores of Japan and has amnesia. So even though most of his shipmates and fellow aviators think he's dead and "his" dragon, Temeraire, desperately wants to find him, Laurence thinks he's still an officer in the British Navy and has no memory of the last eight years, ie. the time he's spent with Temeraire and learned a hell of a lot about dragons (and encountered Napoleon personally, and been court-martialed, and been made a prince in China and nearly died in both Africa and Australia and ...  well these are adventure books, OK?). The series is often described as Patrick O'Brian with dragons and that works -- it's set in the British military during the Napoleonic wars. And it is cool to imagine military aviation coming into play a few centuries before it actually did, and how that might have altered things and worked in the culture of the time (few know it outside of the aviation corps, but there are a number of female officers because one particularly valuable breed of dragon, the poison-fanged Longwings, will only abide women as their captains). But the true appeal of the series, for me, is the way it fulfills an animal lover's fantasy of bonding with intelligent, emotional beings who can, in this world, speak and express their opinons, sometimes irrational as they may seem (all dragons covet treasure and want to see their humans kitted covered in the Regency-era equivalent of bling whenever possible). I found myself, when reading this book, thinking of the relationship I've had with dogs and horses and how it often feels like you are holding conversations with them -- and how you feel a responsibility for their care and happiness that goes far beyond mere ownership. It will be interesting to see how Novik winds up the series -- this book ends with Napoleon on the march in Russia but she has previously shown no problem with materially altering history (Napoleon is currently married to an Incan princess) and kudos to her for the last line, which I won't spoil here but which has to be a nod to that other dragon-loving fantasy writer, George R.R. Martin. Blood of Tyrants publishes on Aug. 13 -- if you haven't read the previous seven entries in the series, that would make an excellent --and fun! -- summer reading project. I will be sorry to see this series end but will try to view it as I do my favorite TV shows when they go away after a few seasons -- better to go out with quality than trail on forever just because someone is willing to pay you to do so.

One of these books is not like the others, as the old Sesame Street ditty goes. Men in Miami Hotels is a contemporary noir, set in Key West but it's a wholly different creature from the usual subtropical mystery/detective novel -- it has more in common with the work of Thomas McGuane than Carl Hiaasen or James Hall. Cot Sims is a journeyman gangster for a Miami crime lord. He returns to his hometown of Key West to help his mother, who has been kicked out of her hurricane-damaged home by code enforcers and is camped out underneath. It is recognizably Key West in a lot of keenly observed ways, though a smaller less transient -- and more violent -- island than the real one (it appears to be a Key West inhabited entirely by Conchs and visiting Miami gangsters). Sims quickly gets himself into serious trouble by stealing a bunch of emeralds from his Miami crime boss and is basically on the lam from then on, throughout Key West, mainland South Florida and eventually Havana. I particularly liked the action in the cemetery, where Cot spends some time hiding out in a friend's family crypt. I'll admit that I admired this book but didn't find it captivating the way some crime fiction that is considered genre can captivate me (most recently, Lyndsay Faye's Gods of Gotham). But for those who prefer their crime with a more literary approach, or who read in order to admire language, this is a great read and I hope it finds its audience. It deserves to. Men in Miami Hotels will be released July 2.

Write Down the Title and Read This Book

The great children's book writer E.L. Konigsburg died over the weekend, a piece of news I barely noticed in all the emotional tumult of the news from Boston. Like millions of other book-loving kids, I loved From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler -- it described exactly the sort of running away experience I wished I were cool and smart enough to pull off. She won the Newbery Medal for that book and again in 1997 for The View from Saturday. But the book of hers that I love the most -- and recommend to readers both young and not-so-much to this day -- is A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver. I am so very glad it is in the collection of the library where I work so I can read it again every couple of years. The only bad thing I have to say about this book is that its title is impossible to remember. And I still don't even know what miniver is. How Konigsburg got away with her long and obscure titles beats me (her first book is called Jennifer, Hecate, MacBeth, William McKinley and me, Elizabeth). It must have been before marketing departments had much sway in publishing houses.

But write the title down and get hold of this book if you have the slightest interest in history, medieval history, women's history any of that. This is the story of Eleanor of Acquitaine. And what a premise -- it is recounted by Eleanor herself, along with several people she knew during various periods of her life. They're in heaven, waiting to see if her second husband, Henry II of England, will be allowed out of purgatory to join them. It was the origin of my lifelong fascination with Eleanor -- any woman who had been Queen of France, then run away with a younger man to become Queen of England -- had my attention. Her other adventures along the way -- like joining her first husband on a Crusade, or joining her sons in rebellion against her second husband -- just added to the allure. Plus all that cool medieval stuff. It's just brilliant.