We're going to party like it's 1989

Assuming Gustav doesn't stop by and spoil the weekend, there's a party not to be missed in Key West -- especially if you're a Gen Xer and/or a book lover. For those of us who are both -- you can't ask for much more. Voltaire Books, our wonderful independent bookstore, is throwing a bash called '80s Extended, featuring D.J. Voltaire, aka Voltaire owner Christopher Kush. Word has it he's unearthed all his vinyl for this event, which will be Upstairs at Mangoes, 700 Duval St., on Sunday, Aug. 31 (it's Labor Day weekend, remember, so you can sleep in on Monday). Munchies are from 8 to 9 p.m., with dancing from 9 til 2 a.m. Tickets are $10 at the door or $8 at Voltaire Books, 330 Simonton St. The flyer promises a whole bunch of good stuff, best summed up as: Classic 12" Re-Mixes, Rarities and Guilty Pleasures. But my favorite part might be the small-type notice, which says that while this is a benefit for an excellent cause (Friends of the Key West Library), "this is really just an excuse to dance your ass off." Mea Copa, man.

The perfect storm

Reason No. 416 why working in a library beats working at a newspaper: Hurricanes mean LESS work, not MORE work! In fact, Tropical Storm Fay was the perfect storm -- a nothingburger in effect that gave us two days off work, ie. two extra days of reading time. And I took advantage of it. First, I read The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, a historical YA book about a black kid in Boston in the 1770s. He's the subject of some weird experimentation; it's a good read though I have to say I think it's a tad ... sophisticated? Not sure of the right word but I don't know how many kids would get into it. Then again, kids get into Philip Pullman and lots of other pretty complex stuff so maybe I'm selling them short. Yesterday I read Disarmed by Gregory Curtis, a history of the Venus de Milo -- what a great nonfiction read and a very interesting comparison to a book I recently read called The Linguist and the Emperor. Both dealt with antiquities unearthed by the French in the early 19th century but that's about all they have in common. The Linguist and the Emperor (which is about the deciphering of the Rosetta Stone, sort of) was a mess. Disarmed was a treat. I can't wait to read Curtis' new(er) book, The Cave Painters. He's got a real talent for making a story understandable and putting it in historical context without getting bogged down or jumping around so much that the narrative becomes incomprehensible (see: The Linguist and the Emperor).

You can go home again -- but should you?

I'm home again -- in western Massachusetts, where I grew up -- and I recently went home to the Miami Herald, with a book review in Sunday's paper. The book, called The Lizard King, is a great read -- lots of South Florida weirdness, in a telling that's appreciative without being over the top. It's the same kind of stuff that Carl Hiaasen and many others write about in fiction; I find it more compelling when you realize these people are real and these crazy capers actually happened. The book got a good review from Janet Maslin in today's New York Times, too. BTW, the famous Tom Wolfe phrase from the subject line of this blog post? Turns out he didn't make it up -- he got it from Lincoln Steffens' widow, to whom he was describing his novel in progress. But he asked her permission to use it, so we'll keep him off the list of literary no-goods for now. I learned that from an interesting book we recently added to the collection at the FKCC library -- called "Nice Guys Finish Seventh," about quotes and phrases that have been misquoted through history. The title of that is closer to the original of Leo Durocher's actual phrase, which was apparently "The nice guys are all over there -- in seventh place." Which I think is better than "nice guys finish last" but admittedly not as pithy.

catching up

I really have been reading a lot, or at least I was until we got cable and the Tour de France took over my waking, non-working hours. But I can see the end and the stack is piling up. I read Dominion by Calvin Baker, who will be appearing at the Key West Literary Seminar in January. It was a little outside my normal reading, which is the best kind (it's the reason I joined a book group years ago although that fell by the wayside when I was pursuing my master's). I read Women and Ghosts by Alison Lurie, a slim book of short stories that I think I might have read before, unless that was an effect of its eerieness. It reminded me how much I like her, and how much I need to read The Last Resort even though I have a strange fear of reading about places I know and love. (Haven't been able to make myself read Tracy Kidder's Hometown yet, either, about Northampton, Mass., where I was born.) I read Sacrifice by Eric Shanower, the second volume in his Age of Bronze series of graphic novels about the Trojan War -- it was as good as the first, though it does suffer from that effect of many of the guys looking the same; you can distinguish them by their headbands, though. Over the Fourth of July weekend, perhaps influenced by the reintroduction of cable television into my brain, I found myself craving brain candy so I read The Boleyn Inheritance by Philippa Gregory (author of The Other Boleyn Girl and numerous other works of Tudor Trash). I gulped that down in a day and a half so maybe I'm not over my Tudor thing entirely; plus it was fun to hear from/about a couple of the lesser-known Henry VIII queens (Anne of Cleves and Katherine Howard, or Nos 4 and 5 if you're counting). And just today I finished Dreaming Up America by Russell Banks, which I'll be reviewing for Solares Hill shortly. Whew.

Littoral Gets Critical (or Critical Gets Littoral)

Must be synchronicity -- or is that serendipity? -- but just a day after I point out how cool the National Book Critics Circle's blog Critical Mass is, they go and link to Littoral, the most excellent of local literary blogs (or national literary blogs for that matter). The specific item that caught their interest was Arlo Haskell's interview with Barry Unsworth, historical novelist and one of the keynote speakers at the upcoming Key West Literary Seminar. Since taking on this blog and making it his own, Arlo's really classing up the joint.