Stuck in the middle again

Dammit. Now I'm caught up on three different trilogies and am facing a wait of at least a year on each. I guess it's good news that each of the middle installments made me even more eager for the third.

The first was Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel, sequel to her Booker Prize-winning Wolf Hall. And the sequel just made the longlist for this year's Booker; how cool would that be? The second was Shadow of Night by Deborah Harkness, second in her All Souls trilogy about star-crossed witch Diana Bishop and vampire Matthew de Clermont. I liked that one so much I went and re-read the first book, A Discovery of Witches, and liked it way better on a second read. The third middle book was The Twelve, the follow-up to Justin Cronin's bestseller The Passage, a post-apocalyptic vampire epic. (Note to Twilight/All Souls/True Blood fans: These are not sexy kind of vampires.) The Twelve one doesn't publish until October but I got an advanced review copy and devoured it in four days. Three of which I was working for eight of my waking hours.

It's funny but reading, and liking very much, Cronin's work doesn't make me want to go out and get Stephen King's The Stand, the book to which it is frequently compared. I'd be more inclined to check out other dystopias except we've had a lot of that with the recent Key West Literary Seminar and all. If anything the books remind me most of George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire, just for their masterful plotting and command of huge casts of characters and multiple settings. In Cronin's case that even includes jumping around in time quite a bit and he still pulls it off. At several points in this book he would start with a whole new time, place and group of people and my initial thought would be, come on! I want to know what's going on with Peter and Lish, and how am I supposed to keep all these people, places and times straight? And then found myself getting totally absorbed anyway. Definitely the mark of a good storyteller. Now if only he (and our friend Martin) would write faster.

Why this image for this blog post? Well, there are, appropriately, TWO reasons. Anyone want to take a guess what they are?

It's that time of year

I'm a sucker for those year-end best books lists. Sometimes they make me mad; often they make me feel like I need to broaden my reading horizons. I decided to come up with my own best-of-the-year list and conducted a highly unscientific poll among readers of my acquaintance. Here are the results (in my poll, it doesn't have to be a book published this year; just read this year): My best reads of the year came down to one work of fiction and one work of nonfiction. The novel was Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, winner of last year's Man Booker. I had a feeling I'd love it -- I had read and greatly admired Mantel's historical novel about the French Revolution, A Place of Greater Safety, and I am of course, obsessed with all things Tudor. So when I heard she'd written a novel about Thomas Cromwell, I figured she had written it just for me.

The work of nonfiction is Cleopatra, the new biography by Stacy Schiff. If you think you know the facts about this woman's remarkable life, think again. Schiff does a wonderful job rescuing Cleopatra from the millenium-long trashing of her reputation, conducted by men who 1) never knew her and 2) had very strong motives to portray her as an evil seductress. A great read even if you're not all that into ancient Roman or Egyptian history.

Here are the results from my unscientific sampling:

Connie, newspaper books editor: "The best book I read all year was Jonathan Franzen's 'Freedom.' Yes, I know it is popular to bash this book, or say there were too many white people in it, or that it was "unrealistic" or that the characters were unlikable (what, you want to read about boring people???) But I loved it unreservedly. I could not put it down, and I loved every minute I was reading it. And aside from being funny and insightful and brilliant, it also reflects my entirely cynical worldview: we are hopelessly doomed, not just as a species, but from ever doing anything truly selfless!

"My second favorite was Jennifer Egan's 'A Visit from the Goon Squad,' which is ostensibly about the shifting music industry but really about a lot more. Clever, funny and hopefully not TOO prescient..."
Arlo, poet and literary seminar media director: "I also liked Egan's "A Visit from the Goon Squad," a novel-in-stories filled with brilliant off-to-the-side-insights into relationships between friends and lovers and clear-headed commentary on the time we're living in. The PowerPoint chapter is a special treat. 

"I finally finished Richard Ford's masterful Frank Bascombe trilogy-- I'd been putting off 'The Lay of the Land' ever since it came out however many years back because I didn't want to live in a world without more Bascombe to look forward to. It's probably the sloppiest of the the three ("The Sportswriter" and "Independence Day" are the others), but I couldn't be sure that didn't make it the best.

Oh, and Charlie Smith's 'Three Delays' just plain knocked me down."

Bob, bookbinder and bookstore manager: "Orhan Pamuk's Museum of Innocence."

My mom: "The book I'm reading right now is easily my best of the year: Daniel Patrick Moynihan: a Portrait in Letters of an American Visionary, by Steven R. Weisman, published in 2010.

"You should read it to understand a lot of things about America in the 20th century.  Moynihan had a unique perspective and personal history. The Senate  is a much poorer place without him (and Teddy)."

Best of the best

I'm a sucker for those Best Books and various awards -- and wouldn't you know the fine folks at the Williamsburg (Va.) Regional Library, in their really impressive blog, Blogging For A Good Book, have created a megalist of the best of the best. Check it out -- and if you're in Key West you can check out a lot of them from the library. I'm not going to go through and figure out exactly which of these titles we have but most of them look mighty familiar. I can tell you for sure that we have the top fiction title, Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, and the top nonfiction book, Zeitoun by Dave Eggers. One of the real pleasures of my job is coming across blogs like this -- it's so great to see there are librarians -- and readers in general -- out there who love books, love reading, and love sharing what they know.