Reading and rejection

Perhaps I should catalog what I've read recently. Just yesterday I finished In Caddis Wood by Mary Francois Rockcastle, which was part of a two-person book club I am part of. It's a novel about tragedy and redemption set in a Wisconsin forest. While it's well-written and very evocative, it's not the type of book I normally read, and therefore I was left feeling kind of blasé about it.

I had another rejection in my inbox today. The email began "Dear Author," and when that's the case, you know right away which direction the message is headed.

Uuuuuugh

I'm nursing a sore throat which causes me to moan this post's title every five minutes. A brownie sundae was unsuccessful in soothing the pain. I usually get mildly sick at least once a year, but almost never to an extent that I have to skip work or school. There are two recent exceptions: my senior years of both high school and college.

The second-to-last week of high school I fell extremely ill for the first time since middle school. I will spare you the details. That sickness I blamed on a tainted dice that was passed around during a Monopoly game in my AP Government class.

Senior year of college I got sick three times. The first was during the Swine Flu pandemic, when some dorms actually had their basements quarantined so that students with the Pig Virus could be sequestered there. Brave volunteers (for at least a half a credit, one can assume) were to deliver lunch and dinner to this leper colony. I wish I remembered if anyone was exiled to these rooms--not me, because I think I only caught Swine Flu Lite.

I also got sick a week or so later as I was having a conversation about how everyone was getting sick. I started coughing in the middle of my sentence and I wasn't well for a week. I think the cause was psychosomatic.

My third and final time getting sick arrived inexplicably, as always. I remember being in bed coughing from midnight until around 3am. How I got to sleep I don't know, but I emailed my professor that morning saying I would be missing Critical Literary Theory (a rare occurrence).

As bad as I felt today, I still wrote 500 words or so and I still went into work. Yet again everyone wanted The Hunger Games, which I was only asked about twice today. It was a slow day.

Illustration by Ollie Crafoord

The Best Books of 2011

Most book reviewers, whether in newspapers or on websites, tend to pick their top ten out of books that were published during the previous twelve months. This makes sense for professionals, but not for a private reviewer such as myself. I read whatever book strikes my fancy, from whatever decade. From my own count, I read 54 books in 2011. Of these, 23 were fiction, which is the same percentage of fiction (42%) that I read last year. That follows the national trend of people preferring nonfiction to novels.

The following are the ten most enjoyable, fascinating, or thought-provoking books I read in 2011. Enjoy!

1.) The Borrowed Years by Richard M. Ketchum
2.) Hitch-22 by Christopher Hitchens
3.) Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
4.) The Spies of Warsaw by Alan Furst
5.) A Kidnapping in Milan by Steve Hendricks
6.) The Men Who Would Be King by Nicole LaPorte
7.) A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson
8.) Refuge by Terry Tempest Williams
9.) The Golden Spruce by John Vaillant
10.) Dogsbody by Diana Wynne Jones

But there are many honorable mentions, including Eaters of the Dead (Michael Crichton), Farm Boys (Will Fellows), Life Itself (Roger Ebert), and The Unlikely Disciple (Kevin Roose). UFOs by Leslie Kean kept me thinking for weeks, and Zeitoun by Dave Eggers inspired a lot of outrage from me. Persepolis would rank up there in the top 10 if I chose to count graphic novels.

This year I look forward to reading just as many books, and am anticipating greatly The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, The Day of the Locust, The Hunger Games, and Undaunted Courage.

Overheard at the bookstore

Pre-teen girl today, carrying a heavy armful of books from the cash register:

"Oof! I think I read too much."

Novel stuff

Last month I sent out queries to about a dozen agents, hoping they might be interested in my 400-page novel. I didn't hear anything from most of them--one said they were not accepting anything from new authors at the moment, and another said they were not interested in my work.

A few days ago, an assistant from a fairly well-known agency asked to look at the first 50 pages of my manuscript. My first partial! I barely had a weekend to ride high off this validation before I was contacted again by the agency and asked to submit the full manuscript.

Wow! I'm starting to think those six months of writing will actually pay off. Stay tuned to this blog for further updates.

The Airbrushing of Tom Wolfe

When the world of books and movies collide, the lawyers step in!

While researching Focus Features' new movie Beginners, I noticed something interesting about two of their promotional stills. In this image, you can see Christopher Plummer and Ewan McGregor browsing a bookstore. Plummer clearly has a copy of Tom Wolfe's A Man in Full in his hands. Yet in another duplicate still found on some websites, Wolfe's 742-page epic has been blurred. I guess Focus Features was worried about unauthorized product placement.

I am not outraged or surprised by this -- it probably happens all the time and we just don't notice. I just thought it was something cool to point out.

Wuthering Wyler

The other day someone came into the bookstore and asked where we would have Wuthering Heights. I told her we'd shelve it under plain old Fiction. She thanked me and then checked her smartphone.

"That was Wyler, right? The author?" she asked. "Bronte," I said. She looked at me skeptically then went away to the stacks.

It hit me later that she was probably referring to William Wyler, who directed a 1939 version of the classic novel. Her fancy smartphone must've told her Wyler was the author, though I can't imagine how she Googled herself to that mistake or which app deceived her.

No, I've never read it.

Above: a wuthering height.

Spring multitasking

It was an exceptionally nice day today, with highs near the 50's. I'd say it counted as the first day of spring. To celebrate, I took two walks, and on my second one noticed a peculiar sight.

There was a young man walking down the sidewalk in the opposite direction. He wore sunglasses and a backward baseball cap, and was engaging in several complicated tasks at once. There was an iPod plugged into his ears and with his left hand he was trying to light a cigarette dangling from his mouth. But that wasn't the most interesting part--in his right hand he was holding Tom Clancy's latest 900-page behemoth. Talk about your sensory overload!

I don't think I've ever seen anyone taking a jaunty stroll while reading a hardback novel, much less something as thick as "Dead or Alive." But I can't knock the guy for wanting to be out on a day like today. There must've been so many things he had to do, and it would've been a waste of nice weather to do them inside.

Have a nice nay

Random observations at the bookstore:

--I think it's a common problem among retail workers to mix up the time of day in that familiar parting expression. If I worked at the register one night, then again the very next morning, I tend to confuse the two and sometimes end up with the combination in the title of the blog post. And wow, Wikipedia has a whole freakin' article dedicated to the phrase. I guess if they have one for toilet paper orientation...

--Laser discs, records, and CDs may all be collectible items, but VHS tapes will never be. They're simply too bulky, and the tapes tend to fall out of the bottom of the box when you pull it off the shelf. HOWEVER -- I am volunteering an ingenious solution for the problem of the world's excess tapes: use them for home decoration! Many bookstores offer a bulk amount of "neutral" books to make customer's home/work libraries look prestigious: Reader's Digest Condensed Books, for example, or bland law textbooks. I see no reason why film professors of the future can't have shelves of multicolored, uniformly-shaped boxes in their office.

--For about two minutes today I wondered why Theodore Dreiser's novels were so radically different from his more well-known works, like Green Eggs and Ham.

--Sometimes a spine can be confusing. Is it Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome or Ethan Frome's Edith Wharton?

The Revolution Will Be Tweeted

Google tells me that Bono said something similar to this post title last week, so he obviously has been reading my thoughts. I'll have to think of some wicked new song ideas.

I'm reading Mike Rapport's 1848: Year of Revolution at the moment. I took it out of the library after being inspired by the Egyptian revolution and was struck by the similarities between that year and 2011. The Arab world is ruled by iron-fisted autocrats in power for decades, just like 19th-century Europe, and while the leaders enjoy untold luxury, large swathes of the population are unemployed and longing for basic freedoms.

When popular protests erupted in 1848, as in 2011, the governments promised superficial reforms. In reading Rapport's book, I was struck by how similar France and Austria's responses to the protesters demands mirrored, for example, Hosni Mubarak's: they fired an unpopular minister, or shuffled the cabinet, or announced from balconies that the people were "children" who needed to be protected by a strong leader. As you can imagine, the rabble wasn't too happy about all this patronizing. When France went, the dominoes fell, and the continent erupted just as the Middle East and North Africa are doing right now.

Anyway, there has been much discussion in the press about social media like Twitter and Facebook being responsible for the Arab revolutions. I think they are important players in the protests, but it's important to remember that those are tools and not the sparks of change. Twitter and Facebook have simply replaced pamphlets, telegrams, and horse-carried messages as the staples of revolution.

Yes, I am on Twitter, but I have a paltry three followers. That doesn't really bother me too much -- most of my friends aren't even on Twitter and I don't think they care that I've had a peanut butter sandwich for lunch. The reason I joined Twitter was so I could follow breaking news events as they happened. So far, it's come in handy when I wanted to follow protests in Iran, Thailand, and now Egypt and beyond. It's like a front-row seat to history.

End-of-the-month distraction!

One week ago I started my bookstore job. It's been marvelous so far, and I wish I could relate to you all the cool stuff I've learned, but (a) there's far too much to tell and (b) the handbook warns us against disclosing store procedures and policy. So until my blog posts have worked their way through both Corporate and my lawyer, I'm going to be pretty mum about my job. I will try to keep my faithful readers occupied, however, starting with this picture of a cat with a Far Side mug:



If there's anything the Internet needed, it's more pictures of cats.

Requiem for the Zoo

When I restarted this blog in June, I figured I'd be writing about my experiences at the zoo through August. October, at the very most. Somewhere around Halloween, when I was still scooping ice cream at the dairy store, I resigned myself to the fact that I would be at the zoo indefinitely, possibly through the summer of 2011.

All that's changed. After being called off from work on account of weather one too many times, I decided to search for another job...and found one. At a bookstore.

I handed my application in and was called on the very same day to schedule an interview. Two days later, after the interview, I was told to expect to wait two weeks or so to hear if I'd been given the position. Just 48 hours later, I got a call offering me the job. Now that's turnaround!

Next Monday I start at the bookstore. I will be doing an assortment of tasks, including working the cash register, restocking the shelves, and sorting the used books customers want to sell. I've always considered books my passion and looked on my high school library job as an ideal workplace for someone with my tastes. Perhaps this job will be even more meaningful, because customers at a bookstore want to keep what they find for much longer than three weeks.

So: "Wandering As A Cloud" is undergoing its third thematic shift in as many years. From England, to the zoo, and now to a bookstore. I will keep you updated.

Note: the picture is a rare look inside the Beloit College Library stacks. It's the only photo of bookshelves I own, but I knew I took it for a reason.

The Best Books of 2010

Happy New Year!

According to Shelfari, which I use to keep track of my reading, I read 45 books last year (holy crap!). In recognition of this fact, I am going to move away from the zoo for just a moment and list my favorite books of 2010. These are not necessarily books that came out in 2010, but books I read in the calendar year:

1.) The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon. (Incidentally, the book that convinced me to write my own novel)
2.) Seven Years in Tibet by Heinrich Harrer.
3.) Monster of God by David Quammen.
4.) The Tenth Parallel by Eliza Griswold.
5.) The Monster of Florence by Douglas Preston and Mario Spezi.
6.) The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz.
7.) Lady Sings the Blues by Billie Holiday.
8.) Apples Are From Kazakhstan by Christopher Robbins.
9.) Polio: An American Story by David M. Oshinsky.
10.) The Spy Who Died of Boredom by George Mikes.

And now, for a little reading analysis: of those books, only three are fiction (Chabon, Diaz, and Mikes). This is roughly in line with my own reading habits, which involves mainly nonfiction (especially history). According to Shelfari, I read 19 fiction books and 26 nonfiction books.

I think this also aligns with the American public as a whole, which tends to favor nonfiction. I'm not sure what the reason for this is, but I think it has to do with people preferring subjects they already know something about, and not having to get invested in a book with unfamiliar characters, plot, and symbolic imagery.