The Minnesota Book Awards took place last Saturday evening. It was amazing to be part of a gathering of nearly one thousand writers and other book people—I was struck by what a strong literary community our state has. I thought it might be fun to highlight a few of the winning books. For the full list, see here. Continue reading First Monday Book Day: MN Book Awards Edition
Category Archives: First Monday Book Day
First Monday Book Day: It’s Not Just for Mondays Anymore
Pepper posted a couple months ago "I want to be a person who reads poetry, but the truth is that I'm not." and I can kind of identify with that. I like to occasionally pick up a poetry collection, but I find that it takes a different kind of appreciation than novels or even short stories. In most collections I've read, there's two or three poems that stick out but I find it hard to take in the book as a whole. When I read poetry I'm reminded of a quote from this article about people's responses to a live poetry reading.
We’re introduced to poetry as it relates to the concept of the rhyme at a young age. We all read and loved Shel Silverstein and Dr. Seuss and to us, that’s what poetry was. Then, when we encounter it later in high school or college, we learn that rhyming is bad and so are clichés. This new poetry is hard to understand, and we still love Shell Silverstein.
I like that idea and the thought behind it.
With all that said, this past month I read Brink a collection by Shannah Compton. And while I think I still ran up against the same issues that I usually do when reading poetry, I enjoyed a lot of the poems and a lot of the lines within those poems. My favorite was "Critical Animal Studies", in particular the last four lines.
Critical Animal Studies
Let us creep apart from them.
Let us be eternal cynics who despise
things like polo and expatriate accents.
Except, I will continue to say dishabille
as scantily as I envision it, whatever rules
we make, alluding again and again
to the porcelain lamp I flick on and off
in my elliptical dream. Let us welcome
the wounding of our structures, their division
into parcels of turned-away desire.
Then let us take down all the fences,
position the floodlights to capture
the glory of the dark procession
as our creatures stumble free.
Share what you've been reading this month below, or maybe share a poem you've enjoyed.
First Monday Book Day: Food for Thought
Late last year I admitted to myself that I was in a reading rut. I'd been reading history almost exclusively for two years as I plowed my way through coursework. I had read a ton of great books, but had ceased enjoying them. I was overdue for a change of pace before I burnt myself out. So I wrote a Book of Face post asking for suggestions of good graphic novels or comic book series, thinking those were about as far removed from academic history as possible. I hadn't picked up a work in either genre since I read Persepolis in 2007 or so, and it seemed like time was ripe. I got a ton of good suggestions, made up a list, and started reading. Not everything I've read has been great, but one book emulsified a hilarious concept and captivating execution without breaking: Chew, Vol. 1: Taster's Choice, which collects the first five issues of the comic book series of the same name.
The premise of Chew is brilliant: Tony Chu is a detective, but not just any detective. Chu has a special power: he is a cibopath, a taste psychic. Give Chu something to eat and he knows, from soup to nuts, everything about it (provided the evidence is fresh enough). As you might expect, this rapidly becomes a source of great humor and (for unseasoned readers) more than a little queasiness.
Thanks to a deadly avian flu pandemic, chicken has been outlawed in Tony Chu's America. Because nothing tastes like chicken, a healthy black market for the real thing springs up. Chu quickly rises beyond his initial assignment, finding himself drafted into the FDA's special crimes unit, an agency with (near as I can tell), the combined powers of the FBI, DEA, and Homeland Security. The mystery Chu is investigating quickly goes pear-shaped when his brother (a chef) becomes entangled.
Sometimes great concepts only enjoy half-baked execution, but the world of Chew is consistently crisp. The artwork is effervescent, but smoothly shifts to a darker register when things get unsavory. Chu's partner is described as "the love child of Orson Welles and a grizzly bear," and displays infectious zest for his work.
I've read several other reviews of this book, and not one has mentioned the character names. A small thing, perhaps, but they amuse.
Like Malört, Chew might not be to every reader's taste. Some might find the humor cloying, or might find the premise too gut-churning to continue. To me, however, Chew is positively rib-tickling.
What books have you been devouring?
First Monday Bookday: Baby It’s Cold In Space
Mailing it in, kids. Yes, I read a book (almost two!).
Alastair Reynolds is best known for his Revelation Space space-operatic universe of books. I wasn't ready to invest myself in that fully, so I opted to dip my toe in instead with a paperback collection of short stories, Galactic North.
This was just right for my current attention span, and the techno-babble content was intriguing. Reynolds' Conjoiners reminded me vaguely of both the Borg and Joe Haldeman's Forever Peace. Lots of interesting themes. But the most striking part of this set of stories is their horror aspects. Make no mistake, Alastair Reynolds is an accomplished horror writer. One story ("Grafenwalder's Bestiary") was very Poe-esque in its vibe, for example (think: "Tell-Tale Heart").
So I scratched two itches at once, getting some worthy scifi juju and some righteous macabre wrapped in a single package.
What are you reading?
Not First Monday Book Day: Maker-Breakers
[copied and pasted from the Cuppa, per CH's pleadings]
also, and I know it's not First Monday, so I should probably save this for another three weeks for when I don't have a book post to offer, but I've seen this floating around the Bookface and it looks fun.
Books That Made You Who You Are ~
Instructions: In your status line, list 10 books that have stayed with you in some way. Don't take more than a few minutes and don't think too hard - they don't have to be ‘right’ or ‘great’ works, just the ones that have touched you.
First Monday Book Day: A Pox On Me
I just finished a week off, for which I'm appropriately thankful. I can't wait to see what kind of mess the office is in.... Nah, I'm sure everything is fine. I work for the gubmint, after all.
Even with the week off, I didn't get much reading done. I blame HBO's free weekend, or something. Truth be told, I'm still trying to finish The Black Count (highly recommended).
But for the sake of this feature, I started something new last night: Jennifer Lee Carrell's The Speckled Monster: A Historical Tale of Battling Smallpox.
I'm only a chapter in, so it is a bit premature to be assessing. My main fear is that the author is trying to hard to story-ify the history. Whereas Tom Reiss's The Black Count manages to tell an engaging story while clearly maintaining a popular historian's quasi-scholarly edge, Carrell's book (or the first chapter, at least) swings much further into literary territory, striving to read more like a novel.
That said, others have praised her book for historical and medical accuracy. So, she's got that going for her. I'll see how far I get.
What are you reading?
How do you read?
Once upon a time, a book was, to quote my friend Merriam-Webster, "a set of printed sheets of paper that are held together inside a cover." Of course now we can read books on phones, tablet computers, or dedicated e-reading devices (Kindle, Nook, Kobo, etc.). I've recently been curious about how the nation reads--both how you prefer to read and how you actually read. If you use some kind of electronic contraption for reading, do you use it for all of your reading or only some? Continue reading How do you read?
First Monday Reading Day: Links and Stories
That's right, reading day. I haven't read a book in a two months. Having all of our books still packed makes it difficult to find the few I haven't yet read and more difficult still to contribute to DG's book exchange (see, still haven't forgotten).
Instead, I have been chipping away at the 3626 pages in Tor's short story bundle. 828 pages in and I discovered one thing: I detest short stories that are actually excerpts of books. Fortunately, after reading more about each book, I found that none of them interest me much. Still, it's frustrating to pulled into a story only to have it abruptly end. For the actual short stories, they have been mostly good. I'm not used to constantly having to figure out the world in which the story is set, so that has been a bit challenging. Not a bad thing, but different from what I am used to doing.
Along with many short stories is something else I have wanted to include here previously: links to longer-form writing on the web. Unfortunately, I don't read many in a month and the ones I do read I forget to save the link. Therefore, what follows is what I did remember to record over the past year along with some notes from each. Some of these are "long" in the twitter sense; you could read them in a few minutes. I just didn't want my list to be even shorter.
Continue reading First Monday Reading Day: Links and Stories
First Monday Book Day: The First Musketeer
Going to an airport with only a few pages left on your book is a rookie mistake. Which I'm happy to have made recently. The Boy and I were flying back from the ABQ via Lost Wages, laying over for a couple hours. So I wandered into the book store and found this inviting biography of Alex Dumas, swashbuckling father of the famous novelist.
Tom Reiss's biography garnered him the 2013 Pulitzer. It's certainly a good read so far (~150 pages in). Dumas, the son of a ne'er-do-well French nobleman, the Marquis Alexandre Antoine Davy de la Pailleterie and a black slave woman, Marie-Cessette Dumas, in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (later Haiti). Davy had been sponging off his younger brother, Charles, until they had a falling out in 1748. Antoine disappeared into the wilderness with three slaves and lost all contact with his family for 30 years. Charles eventually returned to France to take over the family estate, under the presumption that Antoine had died. In 1773, both Charles and their youngest brother, Louis, died. Somehow, word of this got back to Antoine, who then apparently sold Marie-Cessette and Alex's two siblings, but took Alex with him back to France to claim the estate in 1776.
France was an odd place in the late 18th century, both racist and progressive. Alex was raised as the legitimized son of Antoine, thus earning a title of "Count" as the son of a Marquis. He ws trained as a gentleman and swordsman at the academy of Nicolas Texier de la Boëssière, learning his swordcraft from the most famous swordsman of the day, the Chevalier de Saint-George, who also happened to be a mixed-race black man from the Caribbean. But Alex, as a care-free knockabout (taking after the old man), eventually clashed with his father over money (he was spending it fast, while his old man was going broke of his own accord), and, in a huff, ran off to join the army.
Rather than pressing his case as the more-or-less legitimized son of a nobleman, and thus receiving a commission, Alex joined up as a mere enlistee under his mother's name, Dumas, in 1786, only 13 days before his newly re-married father kicked off. The old man had sold the estate and squandered the fortune, so there was only an empty title to be had anyway. Alex entered service with the Queen's Dragoons and was posted off in a provincial town, where, as luck would have it, he boarded with the family of a local inn-keeper and rising Republican. Dumas became engaged to the innkeeper's daughter and went off to serve the emerging Republic. He quickly rose through the ranks and in October 1792 accepted a commission as the second-in-command of the "Black Legion." In July 1793, he was appointed brigadier general in the Army of the North and, by September was commander-in-chief of the Army of the Western Pyrenees. These were exciting times, with French generals being denounced and executed left and right. But eventually he would win the (guarded) respect of Napoleon and be appointed commander of the cavalry for Napoleon's campaign in Egypt.
I've got a long ways to go in this book. It has some flaws -- fundamentally misinterpreting Rousseau's famous opening words from The Social Contract ("Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.") as fundamentally a commentary on slavery in the age when that quote really has almost nothing to do with the institution of slavery at all. But Reiss is an entertaining storyteller and the book is a wonderful introduction to the history of the French Caribbean, pre-revolutionary France and, of course, the Revolution, the Terror, and the rise of Napoleon. Dumas was fated to have a tragic ending -- dumped by Napoleon in Egypt, imprisoned in Taranto and all but forgotten for two years before being freed, a broken man.
Dumas' imprisonment provided much of the inspiration for his son's famed novels, such as The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers. This book helps bring the historical Dumas back into clearer focus. The book may not reach the majesty of a Robert K. Massie or the scholarly qualities of the Roommate, but I highly recommend it as a fun and informative read.
What are you reading?
First Monday Book Day: One baad Mother
I have never been a major consumer of Poul Anderson's prodigious output, but I remember with great fondness one novel of his that I read in my youth -- the masterful Tau Zero. In retrospect, that book was so great that I really can't explain why I haven't read everything he ever published.
Add to that the fact that Anderson grew up on a farm in Minnesota and earned a B.A. in physics from the U, and again, I'm surprised I haven't explored more of his oeuvre. So when I happened upon this volume on the discount rack at my local used book store, I figured I could afford 50 cents for a hardback.
Mother of Kings is much more an historical novel than a fantasy work, although the dust jacket had some blurb trying to compare it to Marion Zimmer Bradley's magnificent feminist take on the Arthurian legends in The Mists of Avalon. It centers on the life of Gunnhild, the historical "mother of kings" as wife to Eric Bloodaxe, king of Norway in the mid-10th century.
The book plays off the Icelandic Sagas of the 13th century. The first couple of hundred pages (or, how far I've gotten so far) are thick with faux-period speech and turns of phrase, and there's lots of hewing and hacking and wenching to be found. The thickness of the patois has abated somewhat as I've gotten deeper into the book, but it is a bit annoying. And with all of the familial references (soandsosson) and obscure-to-me titles (hersir, jarl, etc.), the bear grease got a little thick. But, like I said, it seems to be lightening up as I get deeper into the book.
Gunnhild is a conniving beeyatch from a tender age, determined to use whatever skills at her disposal to rise in the world (and succeeding). Some of the characters hint at being sympathetic ones, but those hints don't seem to last too long.
If you have a hankering for some Norse historical novelization, this might be up your alley. So far it has held my attention. What are you reading?