Spokane Books Blog

Whitworth Writing Rally (Pre-K to 6th Grade)

2012-02-12T12:36:00.001-08:00

Whitworth University is hosting its annual writing rally early this year — March 17, to be exact.

The Whitworth Writing Rally is for families with children who are attending preschool through the sixth grade. The event will start with a presentation by a well-known author (in this year's case, Tony Abbott; more on him below). Afterwards, participating families will have the opportunity to workshop with local teachers and Whitworth students to create an original illustrated book by hand or on a computer.

It's a great chance to hobnob with at least one star of the young adult genre, get professional guidance in developing reading and writing skills, and engage in what looks to be a fun family-oriented creative project.

The person who drew my attention to the WWR had this to say:

I took my son when he was 5 (he is now 8), and we met author David Shannon. He did a slideshow of his books, talked about writing and illustrating. Then they did break out groups by age, and he made a paper plate "book" that hooked together with brads. It was quite fun.

When it comes to featured authors, Tony Abbott is quite a pull. He's the author of an impressive number of books — The Secrets of Droon series, Firegirl, Kringle, and the Underworlds series, to name a few — and his name will have a certain amount of celebrity cachet among young readers.

The cost of the event is $18 per child, and it will take place in two sessions. The first session will start at 8:30am, and the second at 11am. Both will be held at Whitworth, although I'm not sure where on the campus exactly.

Click here to register, or click here to download the PDF brochure (which, I'm afraid, won't give you any more info than this blog post).

Questions? E-mail coordinator Kathryn Picanco at writingrally@whitworth.edu or call her on (509) 777-3459 for more information.

Frank Zafiro Profiled on KXLY

2012-02-08T11:33:00.001-08:00

Yesterday evening KXLY ran a four-minute profile on local author Frank Zafiro (aka Major Frank Scalise of the Spokane Police Department).

I'm not exactly sure how much sleuthing the reporter had to do to "uncover" Zafiro, since he's one of the most veteran authors on the Gray Dog Press roster, he was spotlighted by the Spokesman back in 2010, and his most recent book, And Every Man Has to Die, was reviewed (by me, as it happens) last year in the Inlander. But any local author profile on the 6 o'clock news is a welcome one, and Scalise's cop by day/writer by night story is certainly one worth telling.

As a companion piece to the video, KXLY web producer and photographer Nicole Hensley has put together a photo profile on the KXLY blog.

If all that local fanfare has piqued your interest, don't forget that Zafiro will be one of the featured authors at this year's Get Lit! Festival. He'll be reading from And Every Man Has to Die on Saturday, April 14 at 10am, and later that day he'll take part in a panel discussion from 1:45 to 3:15pm. I can't find any definitive information on where the reading will be held, but the discussion will take place at the Phase 1 building of EWU's Riverpoint Campus here in Spokane. I'll be compiling all the essentials of Get Lit! 2012 and posting them in due course.

Gertrude Berg's Memoirs on KPBX's The Bookshelf

2012-02-04T13:11:00.001-08:00

It gets frighteningly little publicity outside of the station's program guide, but KPBX (91.1 FM) has a radio program called The Bookshelf that features community volunteers reading from a variety of literary works.

Last month, for example, was an encore broadcast of Shaela Connor's reading of Winter: Notes from Montana by Rick Bass in 2007. This month on The Bookshelf, Elaine Bartlett Martin will read Gertrude Berg's 1961 memoir Molly and Me.

Fitting that the book should be read via the medium with which Berg was so closely associated. She was the creator, writer, producer, and star of The Rise of the Goldbergs (later shortened to just The Goldbergs), a popular radio serial "dramedy" that ran from 1929 to 1946. Berg's character was Molly Goldberg (hence the title of her memoir), who was described in the show's intro as "a woman with a place in every heart and a finger in every pie." The series was later adapted for TV and ran in one form or another from 1949 to 1956. Quite cleverly, the show undermined Jewish stereotypes by co-opting them.

The Bookshelf airs Monday through Thursday from 6:30 to 7pm. Martin's reading of Molly and Me begins Monday, February 6. The KPBX website seems to indicate that broadcasts of The Bookshelf are available as podcasts, but I can't find any live links or more than an open-ended "coming soon" announcement. I have no idea how long they've been soon to come.

Just finding out about this at 6:29pm on February 6? Don't panic. No need to break out your transistor radio. Click here to listen live to KPBX (requires Flash).

In a non-book-related aside, don't forget that KPBX's annual Recordings and Videos sale is scheduled for Saturday and Sunday, February 18 and 19 at the Masonic Temple. I took home armfuls of good-condition vinyl last year, and it's also a great way to pick up AV components on a budget.

Corbin Senior Center February Book Club

2012-01-30T10:17:00.001-08:00

For their upcoming February meeting, the Corbin Senior Center Book Club will be reading the classic novel Middlemarch by George Eliot.

Usually I provide a plot summary, but I think (hope?) that I can safely skip this one.

The event will take place at the Corbin Senior Activity Center [map] on Tuesday, February 7 at 3pm in the building's dining room. Suzi Hokonson will host as usual.

Although any used bookstore in the area will likely have a a few copies of the novel to hand, you don't have to leave your seat to start reading. PlanetPDF offers a barebones PDF-format eBook of Middlemarch for free, and Project Gutenberg has free HTML, ePub, Kindle, and plain text versions of the novel. Google Books offers the choice of several (also free) editions, although some like this one are haphazardly scanned from rather interesting originals.

LitLovers, my new go-to site for this sort of thing, has a summary of the novel, a list of characters, and discussion questions. The 1994 BBC television adaptation (IMDB page) is streaming on Netflix too — great if you're fiending for a period drama fix between episodes of Downton Abbey.

The CSCBC is open to anyone over the age of 18, and it's not necessary to have read the book to attend the discussion.

Making the Zine

2012-01-27T22:02:00.001-08:00

Despite being profiled in the Inlander about a year ago and also in the Spokesman-Review nearly a year before that, it's possible that you might have missed the news that Spokane has an ambitious zine lending library called Bird's Nest.

Come to think of it, I suspect more people know (or care) about Bird's Nest than this blog, but let's proceed along those earlier lines for the sake of a convenient intro.

Bird's Nest is located at Merlyn's [map], having moved last June from its previous spot on the third floor of the Community Building a few doors down. Its opening hours changed at the start of 2012 and are now Monday 1-4pm, Wednesday 3-6pm, and Saturday 3-6pm.

The most recent description of the library's collection that I could find says their catalogue includes "300 zine titles from across the United States, including 30 titles from Spokane" and dates back "to the early 1990s."

Its zine subjects range, as they ought to, from art and fiction to feminism and politics, and the library welcomes donations from your personal archives as well as new, fresh-off-the-photocopier issues. You can browse what's currently on offer at Bird's Nest's LibraryThing page.

Tomorrow — that is, Saturday, January 28 — Bird's Nest will be hosting the first of its Make-Your-Own-Zine workshops from 3 to 6pm. Future workshops will take place on the last Saturday of each month. The staff is all volunteer, incidentally, and they're actively soliciting new members.

Based on a recent post on RiverSpeak (from which this post's photo was kindly lifted), a new website for Bird's Nest is in the works (can we hope for a searchable inventory and profiles of new arrivals?) and a "fun event for the spring." So changes are afoot that bode well for Bird's Nest's accessibility and involvement.

In the meantime, you can connect with Bird's Nest on Facebook or via e-mail at birdsnestzinelibrary@gmail.com.

Apple Education Event: iBooks 2 and iBooks Author

2012-01-19T09:52:00.001-08:00

Apologies for shifting the focus away from Spokane, but this is fairly big news and potentially of interest to writers and educators here and elsewhere.

Apple held a media event today at New York's Guggenheim Museum in which the company announced a new digital education initiative that centers on Apple's iBooks application. There's no video of the event, apparently [edit: video has just been posted at Apple's site], but live coverage recaps have already appeared.

The main points:

iBooks 2, the second version of the free iBooks app for iOS, will allow for interactive textbooks. Under the "interactive" umbrella falls note-taking, live image rotation (i.e., pinch and zoom for, say, 3D models), videos, and optimized full-screen and portrait/landscape views.

New interactive high-school textbooks from McGraw-Hill and other large education publishers are already available for $14.99. The important thing is that students get to keep their textbooks (that is to say, this isn't a rental scheme; they own the books outright) and the books can be updated automatically as they are revised.

I'm still skeptical about what ownership actually means in an all-digital context (can you lend it to a friend, for example, without removing the DRM?), but it's a strong, end-user-focused start. This accessibility and affordability may have ramifications for home-schoolers too.

iBooks Author, an iWork-style application for Mac OS, is the equivalent of GarageBand for eBooks. Or, if GarageBand is an esoteric analogy, think of a word processor designed for professional book layout. It allows the creation of these interactive textbooks through templates, autoformatting, and simple drag-and-drop methods. Here are some example screenshots:

The number of possibilities that this opens up for literature is mind-boggling, and for better or worse, I think this marks the start of a long decline for books that consist solely of text (which makes the word "textbooks" anachronistic, but that's a separate semantic debate). Yes, truly multimedia books like Al Gore's Our Choice have been available for some time, but they required at the very least intermediate coding skills. iBooks Author — again, for better or worse — lowers that minimum requirement to basic computer skills.

Here's Apple's official page on the iBooks initiative (along with some very interesting stuff about iTunes U, favorite of technophilic autodidacts everywhere). AppleInsider has broken down news from the event into three short articles: iBooks 2, iBooks Author, and e-textbooks. There will be a lot more news and commentary to follow throughout the day, I'm sure.

Miles Athey & Sarah Jio at Auntie's on Jan 21

2012-01-18T11:56:00.001-08:00

[EDIT: The Sarah Jio reading has been cancelled on account of the snow. If and when any info appears about rescheduling, I'll pass it on.]

Seattle-based writer Sarah Jio will be at Auntie's on Saturday, January 21 at 2pm to read from her new novel The Bungalow.

The Bungalow tells the story of Army nurse Anne Calloway, who is stationed on the island of Bora-Bora during WWII. There she meets a handsome soldier named Westry (who the author says bears a close resemblance to Ryan Gosling), and together they discover an abandoned bungalow that contains artwork in the style of Paul Gauguin. Read what people are saying about the book on Amazon, watch the official book trailer, or check out a Q&A with the author followed by suggested discussion questions.

The author's recently published novel has echoes of her previous one, The Violets of March, in which down-and-out writer Emily Wilson discovers a WWII-era diary during her stay on Bainbridge Island. Insiders are saying that Jio's next novel will be set on Corfu, and it will recount how a pretty young woman discovers the lost cave paintings of a dashing Neanderthal.

Based on what I can make out from Auntie's recent newsletter, the newly established Light & Easy Ladies Book Group has recently read The Bungalow and/or is reading it in anticipation of their next gathering on Sunday, February 19 at 1:30pm.

The new group intends to meet regularly at Auntie's on the third Sunday of each month from 1 to 2pm, but this doesn't explain the half-hour time discrepancy with the next announced meeting. Anyone interested in attending is urged to e-mail linda@auntiesbooks.com to cut through the conflicting info. The SBB will have more info on all of Auntie's new book clubs for 2012 as soon as I know more myself.

Don't forget that you can turn Saturday's event into a literary double-header. Immediately before Sarah Jio's appearance, author Miles Athey from Ritzville, WA will be signing Crab Creek Chronicles: The Beginning. It's his debut novel and is set in the towns of Ritzvillle and Spokane Falls in the year 1882. He'll be on hand at Auntie's from 1 to 3pm.

History Buffs' February Read Announced

2012-01-05T11:34:00.001-08:00

The History Buffs Book Club, which meets on the first and third Tuesday of each month from 10:30 to 11:30am at Shadle Library [map], will be reading Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln this month in anticipation of discussing it at the February meetings.

Team of Rivals won the inaugural American History Book Prize awarded by the New- York Historical Society in 2005. In the same year it also garnered its author the Lincoln Prize awarded by Gettysburg College and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. In 2006, Team of Rivals picked up the Lincoln Group of New York Award of Achievement.

The book's Wikipedia page provides a very concise summary of its scope and also links to reviews from the New York Times, the Washington Post, and HistoryNet. For a slightly more detailed breakdown, a blog called the Team of Rivals One-Stop discusses the book in a one-chapter-per-post format.

Summaries and reading guides are available from LitLovers (an excellent resource; the reader-submitted questions are worth keeping in mind when reading) and SeniorLearn (another fine set of questions; see the corresponding forum discussion too).

The History Buffs' next meeting will take place on January 17; Patrick Leigh Fermor's meandering travel memoir A Time of Gifts is still under discussion. Theoretically, the second meeting of the month is when other books are introduced for consideration, but this practice encroached on the last meeting on January 3, when books like Smedley Butler's War Is a Racket, Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, The German Genius by Peter Watson, and Lincoln by David Herbert Donald were suggested.

Shrinking Violets' January Read Announced

2011-12-31T12:07:00.001-08:00

For their January meeting, the Shrinking Violets' Book Group will be discussing Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin. The event will take place at Luxe Coffee House [map] on Thursday, January 6 from 6-8pm.

McCann's novel, praised by Esquire as "the first great 9/11 novel", pivots around Philippe Petit's high-wire feat (for more on that, see the outstanding documentary Man on Wire, which is streaming on Netflix, no less) between the Twin Towers in 1974. Petit's deliriously mad stunt 1,368 feet above the New York streets links several disparate characters — "an Irish monk living in the housing projects, a Park Aveneu [sic] mother of a Vietnam vet/computer expert, a 38-year-old hooker in the Bronx, an errant artist who has lost her way, a subway tagger and so on," in McCann's own words.

You can find a Q&A with the author at his site as well as a PDF excerpt from the book. There's also a YouTube video of McCann describing the inspiration behind the novel. For a from-one-writer-to-another conversation, The Believer has a dialogue between McCann and Aleksandar Hemon. You can find another Q&A with him in the pages of O, The Oprah Magazine too.

And if it's a critical (which isn't to say negative) perspective you're after, there's a review of the book in the New York Times from 2009, and another one in The Observer from the same year.

If the advance notice about this meeting didn't come soon enough, you can start preparing for the February and March reading selections: The Help by Kathryn Stockett (Feb) and All Over Creation by Ruth Ozeki.

Corbin Senior Center January Book Club

2011-12-30T21:07:00.001-08:00

The Daughter's Walk by Jane Kirkpatrick is the selected read for next month's Corbin Senior Center Book Club. Participants will be meeting with host Suzi Hokonson at the Corbin Senior Activity Center [map] on Tuesday, January 3 at 3pm in the venue's dining room to discuss it.

This particular book has a local hook: It's based on Helga Estby's 3500-mile walk from Spokane to New York City in 1896 to save her family farm in nearby Mica Creek, which had been bankrupted in the financial panic of 1893. Estby brought her daughter, 19-year-old Clara, on the walk with her. They managed to make their destination under the contest deadline, but the sponsor refused to award the $10,000 prize. Two of her children died of diphtheria during her absence.

Kirkpatrick's novel is a historical fiction account of Clara's life following her return to Mica Creek — and her subsequent 20-year exile.

There's no end of info about The Daughter's Walk on the Web, but you might choose to concentrate on a brief Q&A with the author, a reading group guide with suggested topics for discussion, and for the truly skeptical (or those who want to bluff their way through the discussion) a free download of the novel's first chapter.

As always, the CSCBC stresses that you don't need to have read the novel (or bluff about having done so) to take part. And don't be frightened by the word "senior" in the club's name: anyone over the age of 18 can attend.

How Do You Arrange Your Bookshelves?

2011-12-26T12:59:00.001-08:00

Now that all sorts of literary goodies have been gifted to eager readers everywhere, the next step is finding space on your bookshelves for the new arrivals.

Where should they be placed? In a "to-read" pile by the side of your bed? Or willy nilly among the existing read and unread copies on your shelves? Will they take their place according to color? Height? Publisher? Genre? Alphabetically by author or title?

Alexander McCall Smith, author of The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series, appeared on the BBC Today program a little while ago to talk about the response to a tweet of his asking that same thing (audio below).

Some of the responses "from the wacky to the mundane" were catalogued in The Telegraph. And The Guardian instead chose to tie in with Unpacking My Library: Writers and Their Books, a new book by Leah Price that gives us a voyeuristic glimpse into the "candid anality" of Jonathan Lethem or "stoical acceptance by Philip Pullman that entropy is inevitable."

Above is one small portion of my own bookshelves — the tidiest portion, where I let my fussy side, the one that loves groups and color codes and collections, run wild (if "run wild" is the right phrase, given that my fussy side is far too prim and organized to engage in something so uninhibited). The many shelves that aren't pictured are about as haphazard as you can get. They're a banana republic for books, where horizontal and vertical physical constraints are the only determinant of placement, and height is the only loosely applied method of order. Nice-looking hardcovers tend to get pride of place in the wall of vitrines in the front room, but there's not much else separating them from complete disarray. My fussy side is, of course, constantly appalled; giving it its own garden to tend seems to assuage it.

What about your bookshelves? Are they clutter and chaos or organization and order? Or somewhere in between?

Inlander Short Fiction Contest 2011 Winners

2011-12-23T20:56:00.001-08:00

The Inlander has announced its Short Fiction Contest winners for 2011.

There were a total of seven winning pieces (one more than last year) out of 56 entries (twenty-four more than last year). Those numbers seem rather small overall but respectable in comparison, since it represents 75% growth year on year. Keep in mind too that the contest took a hiatus in 2009, and it usually takes a while to build momentum after such a break.

The top three print winners are:

"Her Daughter" by Mari Hunt
"The Debt Men" by Shann Ray
"A Good Investment" by David Skies

And the Web-only pieces are:

"Don's Baby" by J.P. Vallieres
"Coffee and Toast" by Rick Boal
"The Winter with Cowboy and the Mongrels of Purgatory" by Mike Dragan
"Untitled" by Jordan Hartt

There's some respectable writing to be found in all of them, though the claim that Mari Hunt's "Her Daughter" is "a master class" on observational detail smacks of justificatory hyperbole. In the first two grafs Hunt commits the cardinal sin of brand-name-dropping, which rarely works as cultural shorthand without feeling labored. There's an influential school of thought that maintains that conspicuous references to iPods and Google and Britney Spears capture the essence of the zeitgeist; I find it artificial and alienating. Then again, maybe artifice and alienation are the essence of the zeitgeist.

Hunt's prose also reads rather like nuts-and-bolts newspaper journalism. Note the monotonous matter-of-factness of the sentences: "She settled.... He leaned... There are... He wanted... He wanted.... She must... Everyone did... She was... She had...." And later: "He knew... He knew... He knew... He knew... He guessed..." The text is tidy and well pruned, but one expects the same qualities of a privet hedge. Combine that with tepid bourgeois drama and the succession of interpretive hoops one has to jump through to connect it to this year's theme, debt, and it's tough to see why it placed as highly as it did.

Shann Ray's "The Debt Men" has "debt" in the title, which preempts any thematic hunt. Normally I'm not viscerally averse to Ray's writing (nor am I a huge champion of it), but his "The Debt Men" reads like a parody of creative writing contest winners. The pretentious repetition of fatuous dichotomies:

The debt men owned all, they owned nothing. Everything borrowed, nothing gained. Everything risked, nothing attained. [...] They were hungry. They were glutted. Full of life. Half-dead. [...] Men borrowed desperation, self-degradation. They borrowed gratitude. They borrowed grace.

along with the dull introductory quotes, the indulgent sentimentality, the pandering setting in Spokane, the tired divorce trope that it shares with "Her Daughter" — if I weren't so sure it was written in earnest, I'd suspect it was being subversive.

Still, there are lines in "The Debt Men" that shouldn't be dismissed. When Phil Silven buys a giant South Hill house on the ridge's edge "so the lights of the city graced the home at night like a sky not above but below and filled with a glassy multitude of stars" (though the qualifier "not above but below" is superfluous and trips up the rhythm), for instance; or the ace-in-the-hole final sentence that closes with Phil kissing his ex-wife with "the love we knew when we all started, alone and alive in this world."

"A Good Investment" by David Skies cleverly shifts from crime fiction to magical realism in one line (of Lithuanian): "'Pabusti, blusos, pabusti. Darbo laikas, blusos.'" The pacing of the piece is smart, the prose is natural, and its underworld cast is expertly sketched. It had the half-whimsical, half-sinister air of a Jean-Pierre Jeunet film. My only reservation is the ending, when the magical realist element goes one step too far. That said, I'm at a loss for suggestions on how Skies might have concluded it otherwise.

Rick Boal's "Coffee and Toast" is perhaps characterized by its unevenness. Would a rough-and-tumble narrator who unelegantly describes a "zit-clustered forehead" also say someone's fingers were "defined by their inky mascara curves"? The opening altercation unfolds credibly, albeit predictably. Its kicker is amusing but is telegraphed several grafs before it arrives; it's also delivered with a barely concealed glee on the author's part. However, the story's take on debt was one of the most myriad of all the entries, capturing something like the German word schuldig, which means both to be indebted to someone and to be guilty.

"The practical matter of resurrection" is how J.P. Vallieres' "Don's Baby" is billed, which is as neatly epigrammatic as one can get. Of the seven winning submissions on offer, it ought to have been the frontrunner. It deals in a Lynchian way with faith and magic, ignorance and epiphanies, grief and elation, and of course debt, all rendered in an unostentatious, measured prose: the group of Misfits, who "looked like one big food stamp run through the dryer multiple times;" the bums and "their crummy change;" the counting of raviolis, which at first glance seems so trite but would in fact be a point of childish pride. There's a disquieting ambiguity, too, that allows the reader to inhabit and dream in all the interstitial spaces between what is written and what is left unsaid.

"The Winter with Cowboy and the Mongrels of Purgatory" by Mike Dragan is a good idea left unfulfilled. It starts promisingly, builds characters while retaining their enigma ("Everyone who knew him believed his madness was ephemeral and necessary"), establishes evocative scenes ("The frozen air turned everything to lead.") — and then fizzles into name-calling and a timid conclusion. In the end it lacks the flair and originality heralded by its intriguing title.

The least conventional piece is the untitled one by Jordan Hartt. No full stops, few capitals, a minimum of paragraph breaks, it's meant to be read as it's narrated, in one breathless, druggy rush of memory. Like the river to which it constantly refers, it is a violent torrent of poetic prose — "swollen river the color of rushing pennies," "slow thunder crumbling the copper-tasting air," "an RV with rusted axles mounted on cinder blocks the weight of tires holding the roof down the other trailers like mud-spattered boulders" — that picks the reader up and sweeps him along until depositing him at a scene of hope and wonder that has already been undermined. Its link to debt is tenuous at best, but it's such an assured and beautiful piece, meticulously crafted despite its overt lack of formal structure, that it's easy to forgive.

For the statistical-minded, thirteen percent of all submissions wound up with a spot on the podium. From those, the two stories that I'd rate the highest were consigned to the Web. (And it's important to add that I don't rate those stories highly simply in relation to the others, but as works of literary fiction in their own right.) Two of the three entries rewarded with print publication were noteworthy only for being so lackluster. Five dealt openly with the theme of debt; two had more nebulous (or nonexistent) takes. Two ran over the 2,000-word limit. All authors appeared to have some creative writing/published writing background.

Monkeyboy Books

2011-12-17T17:17:00.001-08:00

"Where is human nature so weak as in a bookstore?" asked the 19th-century social reformer Henry Ward Beecher. And while I find this is more or less true of all bookstores, it's truer for some than others.

Like Monkeyboy Books, for example. The selection isn't as vast as, say, 2nd Look Books, and it isn't as charmingly hole-in-the-wall as Pilot Books (which has now moved into the antiques racket, apparently), but it has the warmth and personality that Auntie's at the Square sorely lacks and a cozy intimacy that neatly averts the frequent feeling of being overwhelmed when confronted with the sheer number of spines standing upright on the shelves. There's an unspoken invitation to spend the day just idly browsing, and a sense that, yes, you might just manage to scan every single title on offer.

Jerry Thrift, who you'll invariably find sitting at an iMac behind a semicircular barricade of shelves at the back of the store, runs Monkeyboy as a labor of love. It was a business he conducted out of his home until his wife suggested that he spend a few hours a day in a place that, well, wasn't their house.

For a short while he and his book collection found a safe haven below Europa in the basement level of the classic Atrium Building. Not long after that, Monkeyboy moved to its current location on the first floor.

Although Jerry has romantic (and I should say perfectly valid) notions about why bookstores need to exist outside of the cold laws of supply and demand, he's no rank amateur. He headed Auntie's used books section back when that section occupied the entire second floor of the Liberty Building, and he's got a good sense of what used-book buyers are looking for. He admits to buying certain titles from other used bookstores just to put them on his own shelves. And he's avoided the seedy bargain basement feel by stocking Monkeyboy with the more lasting sorts of literature: classics, contemporary fiction, quality history and biography, and enduring children's books.

To give some idea of what's to be had, I left with John le Carré's The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963 hardcover) and Tinker Tailor Solider Spy (pocket paperback), Walter Isaacson's Benjamin Franklin (paperback; Isaacson's most recent work is the best-selling Steve Jobs bio, by the way), and for the kids (who were amazingly content in Monkeyboy's children's nook) two Roald Dahl books and BrainQuest. The best part about it was that Jerry was able to comment on his own impressions of the le Carré novels and make some incidental remarks about other Ben Franklin biographies he'd recently sold. That sort of thing is the icing on the cake. This isn't someone who'd be equally happy selling power tools or healing stones. Jerry is a reader and bibliophile catering to likeminded folks.

Believe it or not, Jerry's apparently caught flack for the name of his bookstore, which leaves me sad that human evolution hasn't been swift or selective enough to extinguish the radical strain in our species who would be so blinkered as to deny its existence. But that opinion is mine and mine alone, and Monkeyboy is in no way intended to be a social or political statement. Jerry says it's a reference to his major in college, no more, no less.

The only place I'd fault Monkeyboy is on the online accessibility of its inventory. Given the manageable size of the store and its contents, I see little reason why incoming and outgoing titles can't be scanned (even using something like Delicious Library) and published to a semi-current online database. Monkeyboy has the casual browsing experience down pat, and while there's a lot be said for Jerry's impressive familiarity with his stock, a searchable inventory would benefit the more purpose-driven book buyers.

Qualifications and quibbles aside, Monkeyboy is a gem of a bookstore. Visit and visit often.

Monkeyboy Books. 123 S Wall St., Spokane, WA 99201. Tel: (509) 838-0179. Open 11am to 5:30pm Tuesday through Saturday.

History Buffs Book Club

2011-12-09T17:54:00.001-08:00

The newest addition to Spokane's book club roster is the History Buffs Book Club, which meets every first and third Tuesday of each month in the Shadle Park Library conference room from 10:30 to 11:30am.

Cindy, the buff-in-chief, spoke with me yesterday about the ambitions of the HBBC and its own brief history.

The HBBC had its first meeting in October, during which Thunder at Twilight: Vienna 1913/1914, Frederic Morton's study of Vienna on the eve of the First World War, was selected for reading.

"It looks at the political landscape in Vienna up to the point of Archduke Franz Ferdinand's assassination," she explains.

Discussion about that book has been ongoing rather arriving at a tidy end, and therefore a second book, Patrick Leigh Fermor's A Time of Gifts: On Foot to Constantinople: From the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube, was recently selected by the HBBC for reading and discussion throughout December.

Cindy notes that the subsequent book was chosen based on feedback from the club's participants.

"It's not a purist history book. It's about a 19-year-old in 1934 who walked the Rhine River down through Germany and into the Balkans and relayed his travels."

Both Thunder at Twilight and A Time of Gifts get high marks over at Goodreads. The New York Review of Books offers a reading guide (PDF link) for A Time of Gifts.

The rough format of the monthly HBBC meetings is that books are chosen on the first Tuesday, and the meeting on the third Tuesday is used to bring previous absentees up to speed or discuss off-topic subjects and literature. There's a bit of wiggle room in the criteria for what books can be chosen, as illustrated by Fermor's travelogue, but they must be nonfiction.

Although she hasn't encountered any logistical problems so far, Cindy is open to the possibility of changing the meeting times to better accommodate those with work or school schedules. She's also mulled over the idea of creating an online arm at Google Groups, but she doesn't want it to supplant the "human exchange" of the face-to-face meetings.

Anyone interested in attending the HBBC should make the next meeting on Tuesday, December 20 or call Cindy on (509) 847-3753.

Gonzaga Visiting Writers Series 2011-12 (a Belated Preview)

2011-12-08T12:02:00.001-08:00

Under the rock where I live, it takes quite a while for news to reach me. This is why I only just found out today about Rick Steves' visit to Gonzaga University yesterday evening to discuss his book Travel as a Political Act (watch the video from his 2010 visit here), and why it's taken me about six months to stumble across the impressive 2011-12 lineup for the ongoing Gonzaga Visiting Writers Series.

The September, October, and November events that featured poets James Galvin and Dora Malech, Patricia Henley, and Antonya Nelson, respectively, have been and gone, unfortunately, but there are still three more to come in the next few months.

January 31 will bring Jennifer Egan (pictured), winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for her novel A Visit from the Goon Squad, which also took home the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and the LA Times Book Prize. Egan's bio notes that she is also the author of The Invisible Circus, a novel that was validated by being made into a feature film that starred the Ninth Doctor.

Robert Pinsky will appear on February 28 to read, I'm assuming, from his recently published anthology Selected Poems. He served as US Poet Laureate for an unprecedented three terms (1997-2000), and his new translation of Dante's Inferno, which received the LA Times Book Award in poetry and the Howard Morton Landon Prize for translation when it was first published in 1996, consistently earns top marks from critics and casual readers alike.

Spokane's own Shann Ray will read from American Masculine, his award-winning first collection of short stories, and other works on April 4. Ray, in his alter ego as Shann Ferch, recently won a $25,000 Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

All events are free (yep, free) and start at 7:30pm. They're held in the Cataldo Globe Room [map]. A bit more detail about the series is provided in this press release.

David Sedaris Back in Spokane Tomorrow (Dec 1)

2011-11-30T11:54:00.001-08:00

David Sedaris will be back in Spokane tomorrow, December 1, for a reading/signing event at Auntie's Books. (Devotees will recall that he was here just last year in May for an appearance at the Martin Woldson Theater.)

If you purchase a Sedaris print or audiobook from Auntie's, you'll receive a ticket for admission, which will in turn net you a reserved seat. Reserved seats are limited, naturally, and when they sell out it'll be standing room only. Standing room still costs the price of a ticket, though, so the moral of the story is to get a ticket for a reserved seat. The fact that this announcement is appearing here the day before the event itself probably won't help you nab one of those precious reserved seats, but we remain resolutely optimistic.

Doors are at 6pm; Sedaris makes his royal entrance at 7. Those who can't attend the reading can still snag an autograph — the line will open to the general public three hours later at 10pm , although the folks fortunate enough to have tickets (I believe they represent the 1% against which the Occupy movement is protesting) will be given priority.

Call (509) 838-0206 for tickets or more info.

Corbin Senior Center December Book Club

2011-11-30T11:21:00.001-08:00

The Corbin Senior Center Book Club will meet on Tuesday, December 6 at 3pm at the Corbin Senior Activity Center [map] to discuss Free Food for Millionaires by Min Jin Lee. Suzi Hokonson will host.

The CSC Book Club stresses that anyone over the age of 18 is welcome to attend. You also don't need to have read the book, just be up for relaxed discussion and socialization.

Free Food for Millionaires made a few "editors' choice" lists (viz. SF Chronicle, look for it buried on p3; and NY Times, with further link to a review) when it appeared in 2007. A brief — and I mean really brief — excerpt can be found in USA Today's archives, and the excellent Narrative magazine has a video of Lee herself reading from the novel (free login required). If you want to spur conversation at the event, some reading group discussion questions are available here.

SCBWI Conference: "Unleashing the Power of Social Media"

2011-11-03T22:48:00.001-07:00

The local chapter of the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators, which is the only organization kind enough to send me info unsolicited instead of making me plead for it, will be hosting a conference titled "Unleashing the Power of Social Media" on November 19 from 10:30am to 3:30pm at Moran Prairie Library.

Poet and author Greg Pincus will head the conference/workshop:

Greg will show how to cut through the "noise" of this ever-changing technology and keep it working for you. Using case studies and exercises, he hones in on the clear steps you take to develop concrete, reachable goals and a strategy particular to your strengths and circumstances. Plus you'll learn that yes, it is possible to use social media effectively and efficiently and still have time for writing/illustrating, and living.

There will also be a consultation portion of the conference in which Greg will provide one-on-one analysis and advice for an additional fee. To take part in that, you'll need to decide in advance and submit your website, blog, Twitter account, and Facebook page along with a short Q&A form.

The cost to attend is $45 for SCBWI members, $55 for non-members. Individual consultations cost $35/$40. Coffee, tea, water, and an afternoon snack will be provided. Attendees may bring a sack lunch or order a sandwich ($8 turkey or veg).

Click here to download the registration form. See their events page for more info on this and other upcoming events.

Spoke Call for Submissions

2011-10-31T11:53:00.001-07:00

Spoke, the quarterly lit/arts publication from Spokane Is, has issued a call for submissions.

This is the first any of us at Gobias Industries have heard about Spokane Is, but it appears to be a website-less nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting Spoke.

Spoke itself aims to encourage "the open exchange of ideas about what it means to be an artist" in the Inland Northwest. That seems both unduly limiting and unnecessarily vague, but I suppose quality dialogue on any subject is welcome.

As part of its submissions call, works of art and literature are sought, particularly "cross-genre and non-traditional mediums" from dilettantes and professionals alike. Each quarterly issue is themed as follows (deadlines in parentheses):

Place / Displaced (Nov 15)
Form / Content (Jan 28, 2012)
Signal / Noise (May 1)
Make / Erase (July 17)

You can submit your work via e-mail (multiple submissions are okay) at spokesubmissions@gmail.com, but be sure to include your name, contact info, and the title of your work. Bonus points are awarded for a cover letter and bio. They say you can expect a response within three weeks of submission.

Review: All You Can Eat by Richard H. Miller

2011-10-28T16:22:00.001-07:00

All You Can Eat
Richard H. Miller
Gray Dog Press
$15.95 ($6.99 Kindle)

In writing, as in pretty much everything else, timing is as essential to success as quality. Timing can help your story about young wizards become a multibillion-dollar global phenomenon. Or it can mean that your work is virtually unknown outside of a small circle of literati until you happen to be fêted by critics just six weeks before your death.

Imagine, then, the despair and delight that Richard H. Miller must have felt when he took a tired, stale subgenre like the vampire novel and began reworking it for what would become All You Can Eat — only to watch the Twilight franchise explode in fiction and film as he was partway through. Despair because Twilight stole the thunder from any author who had dreams of definitively reworking the vampire novel. Delight because vampire novels would quickly become the hottest thing since Harry Potter.

Not that All You Can Eat wears its vampire creds on its sleeve. Rather, it prides itself on the opposite. "No cloaks. No fangs. No V-word," proclaims the back cover of the review copy, and every word of that is true. Without such coy hints, the reader likely wouldn't even begin to suspect that the novel's victims are fodder for a coterie of blood-sucking undead until chapter four, when Darius, the suave albeit slightly anachronistic protagonist, begins grumbling to himself about the unfair treatment he and his ilk get from art and folklore.

Movies, magazines, books cashed in by demonizing him, or, worse, trivializing him with teen-idol actors [...] They turned him into a romantic figure for twelve-year-old girls. That, actually, wasn't so horrible. Much better than the dreary guy with the cape and slicked-back hair [...] No wonder his self-esteem suffered. Anyone's would.

Self-esteem, however, is not Darius' most pressing problem; he is beginning to be plagued by existential doubts. He's settled into a routine of grooming his female victims through an online dating service, selecting one with few to say she's missed or missing, and then making the cross-state drive from Spokane to Seattle to wine her and dine her. And then dine on her.

But the monotony and loneliness and meaninglessness of such a life are taking their toll, and despite Darius being a rather staid creature of habit, he exhibits a clear longing for something else. Normalcy, perhaps. Or even death.

Along comes Susan, a smart, feisty Seattleite who flouts the conventional online courting ritual and pierces through to Darius' long-suppressed humanity. His date with her ends as any good first date might, and as a temporary reprieve from potential complications (both emotional and dietary), he heads east with his buddy Luke on an odd-couple-type road trip to a hippie festival, which is being organized by sinister Dmitri and his sly assistant Tomas for reasons obvious to other vampires. Unfortunately and somewhat predictably, Susan will be drawn to the same festival, which will knock Darius out of his centuries-old complacency.

Some of this is familiar territory. Buffy's Spike and Angel, Eli from Let the Right One In (aka Abby in the American cinematic remake, which was abbreviated to Let Me In), and, yes, even Twilight's Edward Cullen have all been attempts to both humanize and modernize the vampire. But Miller's approach is far less reverent. Where some see fixed and inviolable rules of the game, he sees boring stereotypes. The only familiar traits his vampires retain are their nocturnal habits and vulnerability to wooden stakes. That means they aren't repulsed by garlic. They don't sleep in coffins. They don't fly or transmogrify into bats. They enter houses uninvited. They reflect.

And they don't stop reflecting, long after they've parted company with the fogged bathroom mirror. Nor is this propensity to ponder limited to Miller's vampires. The whole cast of All You Can Eat, whether alive or undead, ruminates on everything from pecan pie to bad TV sitcoms, to roses, to penguins, to cashews, to gay pornos. Each new backdrop often introduces an object that occasions an extended bout of droll chin-stroking. Take the opening of a bottle of wine:

One bottle wouldn't be enough. [...] Two, at least. Then the release. Like the documentary on the Nature Channel last month. Salmon blast out of an explosion of foam, soar over the waterfall, and they fly—impossibly they fly—through a rainbow of droplets around their green-speckled flanks: release, epiphany, the sudden shocking exhilarating view of a new world below, yet the faint tug of regret as gills chuff against an unsustaining sky.

That must be one hell of a vintage.

If these philosophical interludes were somehow relevant to the plot, if they exposed some hidden and significant part of the characters' psyches, they might serve to pull us deeper into story. As it stands, they have an opposite, alienating effect, because the hand of the writer refuses to leave the page.

This is an issue that carries over — perhaps most egregiously — into the dialogue, where the characters become mouthpieces for pet theories and observations, bits of trivia and amusing factoids, such as when Darius meets a peripatetic mobile-home bachelor during his road trip with Luke:

"I've been over in Rapid City. Never made it to Rushmore. But I've seen Borglum's work in D.C."

"Gutzon Borglum? Really? I was just telling a friend about him. How famous he is. At Rushmore, he gave Lincoln a twenty-foot nose."

"[...] Strange thing about Lincoln's nose. Ever go to his tomb? Springfield, Illinois. Right outside is a brass statue of his head. That's by Borglum too. Strong face, full of sorrow, like he was thinking of all the deaths in the Civil War — sixty thousand, seventy thousand, something like that. [...] People there think it's good luck to rub Lincoln's nose. They did it for years and wore down the finish. [...] A very shiny nose, just like Rudolph."

"Rudolph? Giuliani?"

"Rudolph the reindeer. Though they were both great leaders. Lincoln, that is, and the reindeer."

The rapid-fire immaculacy of it all, down to the cute misunderstandings and deliberate uncertainties, rings false — an author in perfectly crafted conversation with himself. As All You Can Eat progresses, it begins to seem like every exchange, spoken or e-mailed, is a quip in search of a cabaret sting. The factoids and tidy repartees are there to fulfill two respectable ends: to inject a bit of propulsive levity and to imbue the characters with substance, but it frequently backfires and belies an insecurity on the part of the author that the narrative itself isn't enough to sustain the reader's interest.

Miller's act of collecting, magpie-like, curiosities and incidental details from the non-fictional world is a common shortcut. Call it significance by association, for want of a better phrase, whereby proper nouns — in the case of All You Can Eat, this means brand names, landmarks, websites, historical figures — are employed as totems. Miller actually pokes fun at the idea as Darius recalls the real-estate brochure promoting his condominium in downtown Spokane:

Dine at a quaint restaurant down the block, have drinks at an elegant bar. Shopping opportunities at charming boutiques, world-class performers appearing at the Fox Theater or the Bing or The Met. All steps from the spectacular waterfalls in Riverfront Park, hope of the 1974 World's Fair, Neighbor Day, Pig Out in the Park [...] [O]nce a year, the Lilac Festival parade…

But Darius' wry recollection has the dual purpose of allowing the author to sketch the urban backdrop, and the problem arises here and elsewhere when these totems fail to carry their intended cachet. What do the Bing or Pig Out in the Park signify to anyone outside of Spokane? What happens when Cheers, Golden Girls, and all the other sitcoms mentioned by name lie buried under the cumulative scrap heap of pop culture? What about when Tomas' following statement

"I have about twenty profiles on MySpace and Facebook, and pictures on Phototopia. They link to YouTube and the Tribal website. I'm not using Twitter, but I'm looking at a smart-phone app. The problem is bandwidth. The uploads through this satellite Internet are almost as bad as dial-up."

doesn't highlight a generational gap, but is just an incomprehensible pastiche of lingo and forgotten relics of the early Internet Age?

Inclusion of cultural touchstones such as these is one thing — how many of Shakespeare's references are lost on contemporary audiences, and how little does that matter? — but relying on in-jokes and literary shorthand to function as integral building blocks practically puts a sell-by date on the novel. Instead of augmenting the work, they ultimately constrain and cheapen it.

This is disappointing, because it diminishes the clever central conceit of All You Can Eat as well as some bursts of strong writing. After a bungled feeding on a rain-soaked night, Darius' waterlogged shoe "squishe[s] like wet flatulence." There is the "hollow glug" as he pours a bottle of wine. A crumpled towel — though the metaphor goes a bit too far — becomes a "mountain range seen from an airplane, dusted with snow, perilous ravines softened into welcoming folds." And the extended flashback that relates Darius' conversion and his first encounter with Luke, although more solemn than the present-day story, is poignantly told. The lingering impression is that in this darkly comic novel, the dark aspects and the comedic aspects are at odds with one another. The iffy quality of the latter undermines the consistent strength of the former.

In the wider context of being Gray Dog Press' "revamp" (pun half-intended) novel, All You Can Eat is a good find. Miller is already one of the most talented writers in their expanding lineup, and provided word gets out in sufficient force, there's no reason why his book shouldn't prove to have a popular appeal that extends far beyond the Inland Empire. Part of that has to do with the core of the novel being sound despite certain reservations about the prose; and part of it has to do with the vampire vogue still having some life in it yet.

Populism vs. Elitism in Literary Prizes

2011-10-17T11:43:00.001-07:00

On the eve of the announcement of the 2011 Man Booker Prize (by the way, doesn't it always seem that we're in the run-up to the Man Booker?), there's a great deal of controversy. And, of course, controversy about the controversy — that controversy being literary prizes' debt to either the casual reader or the connoisseur, and beyond that, whether rewarding popularity or obscurity best fulfills that debt.

Yes, we've been here before, but it's such a delicious debate.
Jury for the 2011 Man Booker Prize.

Here's former UK poet laureate Andrew Motion writing in the Guardian on the subject.

And here's John Self in the same paper arguing that "[t]he 2011 jury's prioritisation of 'readability' squanders the award's prestige and is actually putting some readers off." (The comments do a lot to round out the debate, in particular Stephen Mitchelmore's comment about Kafka's notion that a book ought to "wake us up with a blow on the head." On that note, I have yet to find a local book group that revels in taking an axe to the frozen sea.)

Former Booker judge Alex Clark also weighs in (in the Guardian once again) by arguing that "the panel's philistine attacks on literary fiction have devalued their award."

Writing in Salon, Laura Miller probes the same populism/elitism dichotomy with regards to the National Book Award, which recently announced its shortlist. She grumbles about the shortlist being "an assortment low-profile and/or small-press offerings," but then appears to give a halfhearted measure of support to the NBA's "fading ability to get anyone to read them (the overlooked gems)." Miller rarely allows clarity of thought to trump her snide, self-involved arrogance, so the comments provide some welcome balance.

If all that reading sounds like a drag, congratulations! You might very well take Chris 'Zipalong' Mullin's spot on next year's Man Booker panel. For a cursory overview of all the commentary, have a gander at Molly Driscoll's piece in the Christian Science Monitor.

Rock & Sling Lit Journal Solicits Submissions

2011-10-15T09:26:00.001-07:00

Rock & Sling, Whitworth University's literary journal, has put out a call for website submissions.

In addition to the usual fiction and poetry, the editors are open to suggestions that might include reviews, criticism and essays, as well as multimedia (e.g., videos, digital animation, graphic arts, music).

If you detect an overt biblical significance in the name you wouldn't be wrong, but R&S emphasizes that "submissions do not have to be faith-based." In fact, they are actively seeking quality writing that "seeks beauty and excellence" and "embrac[es] broad differences in experience—spiritual, cultural, or political"—under the premise that "[a]ll creative work is an act of faith."

I'm not completely hip to the journal's full history, but it seems that R&S was resurrected about two years ago, and this particular submissions call is part of an ongoing growth process that will see a regularly updated website and a biannual print publication. Financial compensation isn't something they can entertain at the moment, although publication would mean having your work featured in a "rapidly expanding literary journal" that recently included fiction by the likes of Shann Ray.

Hopefuls are encouraged to submit their work in any number of formats via R&S's submissions page, from whence the editors will judge the quick and the dead. You can also contact or follow Rock & Sling on Twitter for more info.

Corbin Senior Center November Book Club

2011-10-14T10:10:00.001-07:00

The Corbin Senior Center [map] Book Club will meet Tuesday, November 1 at 3pm in the CSC dining room. Suzi Hokonson will host.

For their November meeting, the CSC Book Club will be discussing Charles Kuralt's America by — you guessed it — Charles Kuralt. They stress that participants need not have read the book to attend the discussion, though I'd bet it certainly would help.

For Charles Kuralt's America, the former CBS newscaster, who died in 1997 from complications with lupus, revisited some of his favorite American towns and regions in their most favorable seasons. He'd first discovered many of these places during the two decades he spent creating "On the Road" segments for The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite.

The book has an average rating of average rating of 3.91 on Goodreads, where one reviewer describes it as "bittesweet [sic], nostalgic, humorous," and it has a majority of 4-star ratings on Google Books.

Also keep in mind that, despite the location, this event isn't limited to senior citizens. Anyone over the age of 18 can attend.

Shrinking Violets' November Read Announced

2011-10-13T10:14:00.001-07:00

The Shrinking Violets will be reading The Geography of Bliss by Eric Weiner for their November book group.

The meeting will take place at Luxe Coffee House [map] on Thursday, November 3 from 6-8pm.

Weiner's travelogue/memoir/rumination gets a majority of four-star reviews on its Google Books page (where it's available for $10 download, though you can give Auntie's a kickback by buying the eBook through them), and its Goodreads rating of 3.74 out of 5 suggests a pretty uniform consensus. The book was borne out of the author's desire to find happy places around the globe, as opposed to the post-disaster and mid-conflict hotspots on which the media usually focuses.

You can listen to a 2008 interview with the author on NPR's Weekend Edition (Weiner, incidentally, is a longtime foreign correspondent for NPR).

A review titled "Why Is That Land Smiling?" by Pamela Paul appeared in the New York Times' Sunday Book Review back in 2007. Paul calls Weiner's style an "attempted amalgam of Paul Theroux’s bleak humor, P. J. O’Rourke’s caustic wit and David Sedaris’s appreciation of the absurd." I'm guessing a lot hangs on that word "attempted."

The Guardian and Psychology Today also offer takes on The Geography of Bliss, both of them resoundingly positive.

The Shrinking Violets' upcoming reads are The Life of Pi by Yann Martel (December), Let the Great World Spin by Colum Mccann (January), and The Help by Kathryn Stocket (February).

The Violets are also on Goodreads as both a profile and a group, so there are now more ways to connect, keep up to date, and join in the discussion.

The Dead Roads

2011-09-27T11:39:00.001-07:00

Not sure why this year's BBC National Short Story Award should merit more notice than any other, but I must confess that dramatic headlines like "Jon McGregor and MJ Hyland beaten to writing prize by PhD student" nabbed my attention, and so I found myself following the results with more interest than usual.

If we're looking for a closer-to-home angle, then let's put it this way: the winner of the £15,000 (plus prestige) award is D.W. Wilson, who grew up in British Columbia's Kootenay Valley, not far to our north here in Spokane.

In his winning story, "The Dead Roads," Wilson apparently writes what he knows — or at least sets the action in a familiar place, like the rest of his debut short story collection Once You Break a Knuckle (review here; sorry, not available yet from Auntie's, Powell's or Amazon.com), from which "The Dead Roads" is taken.

The chair of the judging panel, Sue MacGregor, said: "[It's] a beautifully crafted and involving tale set in the Canadian Rockies. His offbeat, slightly wayward quartet of characters stays with you long after your first reading. The plot is tightly controlled and builds the tension perfectly. A rattling good read."

The Guardian has posted "The Dead Roads" in full here.

Prefer your iPod? You can listen to Trevor White read the story aloud by downloading the MP3 on this page. You have a little over two weeks from today to download it. After that the file will no longer be available.

Anyone have any strong opinions on the story?

Julian Guthrie Book Reading/Q&A

2011-09-15T10:16:00.001-07:00

Julian Guthrie — erstwhile Spokanite, reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, and author of the newly published The Grace of Everyday Saints — is going to be reading and signing the book down at Auntie's this Saturday, September 18 at 2pm.

The Grace of Everyday Saints is Guthrie's narrative retelling of an earlier journalistic series of hers for the Chronicle. That series focused on a small, determined band of parishioners from St. Brigid, who found themselves in a David-and-Goliath battle versus the entire Catholic Church hierarchy to keep their church open in the wake of cost-cutting measures.

The kicker is that those cost-cutting measures, as gradually became widely known, were necessary to pay off victims of clergy sexual abuse. Meaning that the Catholic Church punished parishioners to protect pedophiles. And they wonder why they've had such a PR problem over the last couple of years.

My Q&A with Guthrie about the book is in the Inlander this week.

The Book Booth

2011-09-13T10:24:00.001-07:00

Yesterday the HuffPo featured a short, colorful Q&A with Claudia Cooley, whose co-brainchild (along with and Terry Sennett) is The Book Booth (aka "America's littlest library") in Clinton Corners, New York.

The satellite library is housed in a solar-powered, repurposed British telephone booth. It's filled with as many books as will fit; there are no locks, so their continued availability to readers relies on the honor system.

It also functions as a less formal book exchange. Readers can write down individual requests on a clipboard in the hopes of having them filled by books from other readers' personal libraries.

All in all, it's a clever, unique, useful idea, and my thoughts invariably drift to how something along these lines might (or might not) work here in Spokane.

I especially love this description of Cooley's:

"It really is beautiful at night, part Hopperesque in its lighting effect and part book vending machine."

The Book Booth also has its own Facebook page. [EDIT: And its own Twitter account.]

Every Dog Has Its Day

2011-08-25T17:16:00.001-07:00

In case you missed it, the print arm of the Spokane Books Blog, otherwise known as The Inlander, features a profile of local publisher Gray Dog Press this week by yours truly. The typos make it extra special.

The GDP website is here. I've got an advance copy of their All You Can Eat by Richard H. Miller (due in October); I'll be reviewing it here or elsewhere closer to publication.

BooksIntoCash.com. And While We're on the Subject, Spokane's Lack of Marketing Savvy

2011-08-19T12:00:00.001-07:00

The short version:

A man named David Roseta (this guy, I think, whose name appears to be trademarked) e-mailed me yesterday to ask if I'd received his earlier e-mail. I hadn't.

His earlier e-mail was about his website BooksIntoCash.com, which allows students and faculty to sell their used college textbooks. Turns out it's operated from right here in Spokane. It even had the dubious honor of being featured on KREM about a year ago after someone drove a car into it in the middle of the night.

David pointed me to the Better Business Bureau page for BooksIntoCash.com, where the site holds an A+ rating and shows zero complaints over its ten-year history. The only other third-party info I could dig up was this thread from 2005, in which a few different people give BooksIntoCash.com an enthusiastic thumbs-up and vouch for its legitimacy.

So if you've got textbooks to sell, you might give BooksIntoCash.com a try. It's one instance where using the Internet would actually mean helping the local economy.

The long, tangential version:

A website that claims to convert anything into cash immediately sets off alarm bells, and so I did a round of Google searches before I replied to David. The few user experiences I came up with (linked above) seemed to suggest that the site was not only legit but one of the better in its category.

But, I thought to myself, how many other people will have the same initial reaction if I mention this on the SBB?

So I proposed to David that he give me a short tour of the BooksIntoCash.com facilities for a behind-the-scenes look at a "______ into Cash" website. Even if it's just a guy and a computer and piles of books, I wrote, it would be interesting to see what goes on. Because even the dullest scenario still raises a ton of questions: Where do most of his textbooks come from? How many does he receive each day? What does he do with them once he gets them? What sort of logistics are involved? What happens to the books he can't re-sell?

David didn't take me up on the offer. Didn't even acknowledge it directly, in fact. He just pointed me to the BBB page and the KREM car-crash story, as if that were all the press kit anyone might need.

Though it's tempting to read this anecdote as a suggestion that David is being furtive, it's not about that at all. I actually think BooksIntoCash.com appears pretty credible. To me, the larger and more important issue is one of marketing and publicity and, based on my limited experience, local businesses' lack of appreciation for it.

If I may — in the nicest, kindest, most well-intentioned way possible — use BooksIntoCash.com as a proxy for all the local businesses who continue to underestimate the power of publicity:

Getting your name in print is a small coup, but a story about a car crashing into a business is not the same as a story on the business itself.

When a business operates alongside some fairly dodgy counterparts, almost any Google-able move to slough off that stigma (for example, inviting a local blogger around to chat and inspect the joint) is a good one. Sure, in the case of BooksIntoCash.com, sales have been sufficient to sustain the business for the past ten years. But how many college students across the US don't even know the site exists or what exactly it does? How many potential sellers take other routes to offload their used textbooks when they can't dig up any background on BooksIntoCash.com other than a BBB rating and a six-year-old forum thread?

Also keep in mind that a professional presentation doesn't hurt. A website that looks like it dates from the Netscape Navigator era doesn't quite put its best foot forward. There are a ton of design firms here in Spokane that would leap at the opportunity to spruce it up.

Let me re-emphasize here that I'm not trying dump on BooksIntoCash.com specifically or Spokane's small-business owners in general. Those small-business owners are essential to the local economy (not to mention highly preferable to faceless megacorporations) and they have the potential to keep the economic engine running as the behemoths close up shop. But to truly benefit and realize their full potential, those small-business owners are going to have to practice some promotional savvy and meet the economy halfway.

Shrinking Violets September Read Announced

2011-08-10T10:05:00.001-07:00

The Shrinking Violets are going to be reading Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky for their September book group.

The book gets quite a few thumbs up on Goodreads and Amazon.com. If you're even loosely familiar with Kurlansky's previous book, Cod, you'll have a good gauge for the premise of Salt: a wide-ranging collection of little-known facts, anecdotes, and background about an item whose ubiquity belies its storied history.

The book group will take place on September 1 at Andy's [map] from 6 to 8pm.

Looking bit further ahead, the Violets' October read is going to be The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz, which belongs to the Mad Lib subgenre known as "The [adjective] [adjective] [noun] of [comical name]" that was trendy in fiction a couple of years ago.

For the record, 2nd Look Books has a copy of Cod in stock but doesn't appear to have Salt on its shelves.

Google eBooks for 99¢ via Auntie's (Sort of)

2011-08-09T10:16:00.001-07:00

Via Auntie's website, I discovered that Google eBooks is offering a number of Harper Perennial titles for 99¢ throughout the month of August. Some of them look like the digital equivalent of bargain-bin remainders. The better-reviewed ones are:

Diary of a Very Bad Year: Confessions of an Anonymous Hedge Fund Manager by Keith Gessen.

Dan Fante's 86'd: A Novel (not to be confused with Spokane's own 86 the poet).

A Common Pornography: A Memoir by Kevin Sampsell, who has roots in nearby Kennewick, WA.

Unfortunately, the sale announcement on Auntie's homepage is just a lazy assortment of static images. No hyperlinks, nothing. I clicked on covers of the individual titles, expecting to be whisked away to the product page, and ended up having to squint at the images to discern the titles, which I then had to type into Auntie's search field. On the search results page, I then had to click on "Other Editions of this Title" to finally be taken to the sale book.

Of course, this eBook sale isn't limited to Auntie's. Powell's has news of the sale, too, and there the selected titles are arranged clearly and informatively. It'd be hard to blame people for gravitating to Powell's when the online shopping experience is so much simpler.

[UPDATE Aug 10: Either someone at Auntie's got wind of my above comments and quietly put A HREF codes around the images, or they got around to doing what they intended to do in first place. At any rate, the images are no longer static and will take you directly to the discounted Google eBook version of the title.]

Midsummer Update

2011-08-01T11:22:00.001-07:00

Has it really been the better part of a month since I blogged? Where on earth does the time go?

Although, outside of the Auntie's events calendar, I haven't seen a lot of local lit-related news come down the pipe. You could blame it on the summer doldrums, I guess, but that's only part of it.

The other contributing factor is that I've been engaged in pretty much everything besides regular blogging: reading (I'm in the middle of Harper's and TLS back issues as well as The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt), remodeling the basement, day trips with my family (Mt. Spokane last week, and even more recently Palisades Park), photography (of the aforementioned day trips), time-consuming freelance gigs, watching movies (I can recommend Man on Wire and Exit through the Gift Shop (even if it is a hoax); also addicted to Twin Peaks, especially the second season, which is about cinematic as TV gets), catching up on podcasts (still plugging through the January episodes of Mark Kermode's film reviews), and so on, and so on.

I had a chance to visit the local Border's to check the closeout sales. Though I feel for anyone who's now unemployed due to the chain's bankruptcy, I can't say it's a surprise that it went under. The "closeout" prices were more than double what I've seen online, and the selection was mostly mainstream pap. It was a bookstore for consumers, not readers, and consumers are a fickle lot. The only section with a respectable discount was — no surprise — philosophy, which had a meager total of maybe five three-foot-wide shelves, from which I picked up William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience, Marc Hauser's Moral Minds, and Michel Foucault's History of Madness.

On the subject of giant chain bookstores, I've also been hounding Barnes & Noble to allow one of their employees to represent the Nook as part of my proposed eReader roundtable. The fact that two phone calls and one in-store visit have met with no response suggests to me that B&N doesn't have enough faith in the Nook to have it discussed casually and candidly in the context of other eReaders. The whole reason I had to approach B&N myself was that no other Nook users stepped forward, either — an overwhelming lack of enthusiasm that leads to similarly depressing conclusions.

So the call goes out once again: Nook and Android tablet users, stand up and be counted! Show your eReading device some love. Or hate. I don't care. Just be willing to talk about it over a cup of coffee or two. Maybe then I'll have something to blog about besides the lack of things to blog about.

Fiction Improves Social Understanding

2011-07-08T10:24:00.001-07:00

Does reading fiction make you more empathetic?

Following his research along those lines at Toronto University, cognitive psychologist and novelist Keith Oatley compares novels and short stories to a flight simulator, where "you would encounter a whole lot more situations in different ways."

It boils down to this: "The more time you spend [reading], the better you are at understanding other people."

I wish there had been more meat to the above interview than a restatement of the findings, but that's often the most you get out of BBC Today's snippets. More detail of the study will no doubt be provided in Oatley's forthcoming book, Such Stuff as Dreams: The Psychology of Fiction, an excerpt of which is available here.

Oatley also contributes to OnFiction, an online maga-blog that delves a bit deeper into some of these interesting psycho-literary strands.

July Events at Auntie's

2011-06-30T12:51:00.001-07:00

Auntie's has just posted its July event listings.

Although most indoor activities tend to hit a lull over the summer, Auntie's calendar looks to have something scheduled every few days. Some highlights include Maureen McCabe (July 6 at 7pm), who has written Moon Over Vaudeville, a historical account of her father's career on the Vaudeville circuit; the Literary Freedom Book Group (July 9 at 2pm), which will be discussing Homer's Odyssey: How I Learned About Love and Life with a Blind Wonder Cat; The Pixie Chicks (July 16 at 2pm), a group of Idaho-based writers who will present their poetry/essay/fiction anthology, An Eclectic Collage; and Donald Gardner Stacy (July 27 at 7pm), a retired teacher of English and mathematics at a technical college in China (now a Spokanite) and author of After Nightfall & Other Stories and Cliffside Drive.

Plus both Auntie's stores are offering 15% off travel books (20% off for Auntie's card holders) throughout the month of July.

eReader Roundtable Proposal

2011-06-27T13:33:00.001-07:00

The various eReaders that are available have long been the subject of many posts here on the SBB, and for equally as long I've intended to assess their respective merits. But now that I've got an iPad, I can honestly say that I have no intention of shopping for a Kindle, Nook, or Android tablet. The only way one of those devices will come into my possession is if I win one in a raffle, and past indications of my luck suggest that's a long shot.

So what I'm proposing is this: an eReader roundtable. We get one iPad owner (me), one Kindle owner (Marcus Corder), one Nook owner, and an Android tablet owner. We sit down at a local coffee shop (Chairs, perhaps?), pass the devices around, talk about what makes them great as eReaders and where they fall short, and then convey that conversation to the Web in some fashion. Maybe as a Harper's-style verbatim transcription. Maybe as audio or video. Maybe as a brief summary — our impressions and arguments pre- and post-roundtable — penned by each of the participants.

That seems to me a fairer, more comprehensive, and less expensive way to review these devices.

Anyone game?

The Absolutely True Story of a Half-Witted Book Ban

2011-06-25T12:27:00.001-07:00

From the Spokesman-Review's regurgitation of the AP news wire:

The Richland [WA] School Board voted 3-2 this week to prohibit use of “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian” by Sherman Alexie in classrooms of any grade level.

Heartening, though, that almost every single comment on the story is one of outrage or disbelief. At least one person notes that Jesuit-run Gonzaga Prep apparently has no banned books, unlike the ostensibly secular public schools.

Many people will admonish the Richland School Board on this matter, I'm fairly sure, and for that I'm grateful. For my part, instead I'd like to address parents (and, by way of association, intelligent young students) who despair over decisions like these: There will always be puritanical, Pecksniffian types in positions of authority who are frightened by things that challenge the narrow, self-serving worldview they have worked so hard to construct and maintain, and, usually in the name of supposedly unassailable abstractions like God and Country, they react to that fear by attempting to destroy or drive out whatever causes it (which is usually not the root cause, but a proxy thereof), an act that in turn denies and disadvantages others.

So when your child is of an appropriate age — and I emphasize that: of an appropriate age — read these "challenged" and controversial books with him or her. Pick up where your local school system leaves off or simply refuses to go. Assess and discuss the strengths and shortcomings of a work of literature on its own merits. Because there is such a thing as gratuitous profanity and frivolous, self-indulgent passages about sex or drugs, but the standard by which that should be determined often comes down to the individual reader, not those acting on his or her behalf several times removed.

Banville Bricolage-terview

2011-06-22T10:51:00.001-07:00

There's a great bricolage-terview (in other words, a collection of YouTube clips arranged to resemble an interview) with John Banville over at one of my favorite local litblogs, Bark.

I mention it here because Banville is one of the few living writers who merits his own shelf in my library. I reviewed his Eclipse more than ten years ago for Rain Taxi, and although there are a few trite phrases in that review that make me wince in re-reading it, I still think I nailed one thing well: that Banville's novels tend to be "static," which is to say, the physical action is kept to a minimum and any momentum is of a more abstract variety. It takes a special sort of writing to sustain that kind of momentum, to make the ruminative into something dynamic and enveloping.

Incidentally, Banville (along with William Boyd et al) recently offered a few words on his best vacation reading, and even more recently he reflected briefly on a trip to California in 1968. He writes in his intro:

The sun shines differently in California – it just does, especially for a person accustomed to the pewter glow and kingfisher-flash of Irish weather. It was the thing that struck me first and most forcefully when I landed on the sunny side of America, the steady and somehow enormous blue-and-gold light that the natives took for granted, but that for me suggested something of the archaic radiance of Arcady. Had I come to be among gods?

Get Nook-y with Barnes & Noble

2011-06-19T11:15:00.001-07:00

Barnes & Noble in the Northtown Mall [map] is hosting a Nook Night on Tuesday, June 21 from 4 to 5pm.

The invite asks you to come "experience" the Nook and Nook Color, although I'm still not entirely sure what exactly that act of experiencing will entail. It also promises "hands-on tips for reading, apps, email, & more from expert NOOKsellers."

My guess is that it all boils down to a demo of the Nook Color and its diminutive monochrome counterpart.

At any rate, it ought to be a good opportunity for the tech-curious to see one of the options in the eReader market firsthand. To brush up on the competition and context, see my earlier Nook-related post before you go.

Call for Child and Teenage Book Reviewers

2011-06-17T13:54:00.001-07:00

There's been a regular ad on Craigslist by Ayesha Reviews that calls for "talented young bloggers (between the ages of 7-17) to share their views about children's books they have read".

According to this page, the gig pays between 50¢ and $2.50 per 50- to 250-word review. Applicants are asked to submit a sample review of Bob Frey's Guide to Seldom Seen Animals, which the site will apparently provide for free.

Requisite disclaimer: This is only an FYI. I have absolutely no affiliation whatsoever with Ayesha Reviews and can't vouch for the legitimacy of the site in any way. Based on my own cursory examination of the website, it seems to be on the up-and-up (although in need of some HTML tidying and a style guide), not to mention a halfway decent opportunity for young readers. But do keep in mind that it's up to you to exercise your own discretion.

Today Is Bloomsday. No, Really

2011-06-16T09:50:00.001-07:00

Despite its literary origins, Spokane's Bloomsday run doesn't quite fall anywhere near the more widely recognized (dare I say "real"?) Bloomsday, which is today.

A lot has happened in the 107 years since Leopold Bloom perambulated around Dublin. We went to the moon. The Soviet Union broke up. Plenty of wars. People inexplicably took to watching American Idol. Twitter was born.

And Twitter is the place where you'll catch — fittingly for our times — Ulysses being tweeted in 140-character bursts over the next couple of hours (it started at 8am Dublin time and will continue for 24 hours from then). Instead of reposting the novel in its entirely, the tweeters are translating it for the medium. It's called a "tweading."

From the press release:

This is not an attempt to tweet mindlessly the entire contents of Ulysses, word-for-word, 140 characters at a time. That would be dull and impossible. What is proposed here is a recasting or a reimagining of the reading experience of this novel, start to finish, within the confines of a day-long series of tweets from a global volunteer army of Joyce-sodden tweeps.

Follow @11ysses on Twitter for the "tweading," and check out the related blog for more on the original book, its author, and this imaginative event.

Trent Reedy Q&A at Get Lit!

2011-06-11T14:20:00.001-07:00

The Get Lit! blog recently posted a mid-length Q&A with Spokane author Trent Reedy in addition to some supplementary links about him and his work.

Reedy is the author of Words in the Dust, a YA novel based on his soldiering experiences in Afghanistan. He was profiled here briefly back in February prior to his reading at Tinman Too, and another local author, Meghan Nuttall Sayres, posted a review-type recap of the book on her blog at the start of the year.

He's apparently also been making the national interview/talk show rounds, so his popularity looks to be spreading beyond the comfy confines of Spokane. Is it too early to start fretting about his inevitable move to Portland or Seattle?

The Great eReader Debate Continues

2011-06-06T09:35:00.001-07:00

Marco Arment, creator of Instapaper, reviews the Barnes & Noble's Nook Simple Touch versus Amazon's Kindle:

Barnes & Noble has copied so many facets of the Kindle that they clearly want consumers to think that this is a Kindle. They're unquestionably trying to cause confusion in the market, presumably to increase their chances. I'm not a fan of this approach to competition; there's enough potential differentiation that the runner-up needn't outright copy the market leader so blatantly. (This is also the problem I have with the HP TouchPad's hardware.) All parties, especially consumers, are better off when competing products move beyond knockoffs and become meaningful alternatives.

His conclusion is worth reading, because it seems like his thoughts would apply to many of the available eReaders based on the above state of affairs.

For my own part, I just picked up an iPad 2, so I'll be weighing in on its suitability as an eReader as soon as a) my workload diminishes (today was supposed to be The Day of Rest, but more urgent stuff came in before the "whoosh" sound of sent e-mail had died away) and b) I stop marveling at the device long enough to get down to using it.

A Slight Return

2011-05-22T11:22:00.001-07:00

After a few weeks of semi-regular blogging between late March and mid-April, I had little choice but to drop off the radar again. A couple big projects arrived all at once and in fact are still ongoing, which has meant that the recreational stuff has had to take a backseat to the stuff that actually pays bills.

During these periods of blog silence, I'm not necessarily entirely quiet on the subject of books. My byline will occasionally appear above a lit-related article in the Inlander. Like this review of Frank Zafiro's And Every Man Has to Die. It's the fourth novel in the local author's River City crime series and is issued by equally local publisher Gray Dog Press.

The Shrinking Violets are back, too, after taking some time away to rethink and regroup. (They're still soliciting feedback and suggestions through an online survey.)

Their June read is Dave Eggers' Zeitoun. The upcoming discussion on June 2 between 6 and 8pm will incorporate the first of their changes, namely, moving the regular meeting date from the third Sunday afternoon to the first Thursday evening of each month to better accommodate all the people who are usually busy on the third Sunday.

The Violets are "still looking for a more quiet venue to hang out at where we can drink adult beverages," so the venue is TBA. Anyone with suggestions can submit them via the blog post linked above or on the dedicated Facebook event page. There's something deeply saddening about the challenge of finding a local venue that meets those modest requirements.

Zeitoun, incidentally, is Eggers' nonfiction account of Syrian-born Abdulrahman Zeitoun, who, as a resident of New Orleans in 2005, bore the brunt of the Bush Administration's policies toward Hurricane Katrina and the War on Terror. A synopsis of the book with free discussion questions is available here. More reader comments and resources are available from Goodreads.

Looking a bit further ahead, the Violets' July and August reads are, respectively, Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Journey to Change the World... One Child at a Time by Greg Mortenson and Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn.

The Things They Read and Discussed

2011-04-17T22:42:00.001-07:00

Author Tim O'Brien and poet Brian Turner read to a packed house at the Bing last night in the last major evening event of the 2011 Get Lit! festival.

The event began with a short film that presented clips of about a half-dozen veterans describing their wartime experiences. It was created by eight area high-school students involved with the Tincan program and under the auspices of The Veteran Voices Project. The subjects shared candidly about their tours and their lives since. Some encountered prejudice, some dealt with feelings of betrayal, some felt too acutely the loss of the bonds they had forged in battle. All were still haunted by the horrors they had witnessed.

Brian Turner — a name unfamiliar to me until very recently — then took the stage to read selected poems, each one concluded with a pensive grunt, from Here, Bullet (2005) and Phantom Noise (2010), both published by Alice James Books.

Turner's poetry on the page is one thing; his reading of it is quite another. Here's a video of him reading aloud from Here, Bullet in 2005.

His delivery has only become more polished and more weighted in the six years since.

To file Tuner's work under war poetry would be too reductive. It's poetry about war, yes, but it's about far more than that, and one shouldn't mistake the talk of bullets and bombs for thematic confinement.

O'Brien came to the podium and read one chapter, "Ambush," from The Things They Carried. He followed it with the first chapter of a work in progress. It was a letter to his eldest son, still in diapers at the time, written by a man acutely aware of his own mortality. O'Brien has always channeled autobiography into his work, albeit under the banner of "verisimilitude"; you could say that the last time his heart was worn this visibly on his sleeve was in his Vietnam memoir If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home. He likened the appreciation for the imminence of death one acquires in combat to the experience one has upon becoming a parent.

Following O'Brien's reading, he and Turner took the stage for a question-and-answer session. The questions were good on the whole, and some came from very personal places, though there was at least one eye-rolling ramble (there always is) that was only masquerading as a question.

During this Q&A there was a palpable tension throughout the room; or maybe it was only palpable where I was sitting. O'Brien openly objected to the futility of war, and Turner, though slightly more guarded, appeared to share this opinion. Neither had anything positive to say about the cavalier flag-wavers who are so quick to send others into battle, and this clearly didn't sit well with the man in the seat in front of me, who gave me disapproving looks when I heartily applauded this sentiment (my sincere apologies for not wanting to see people die in vain) and who grumbled that O'Brien was politicizing the issue. Nevermind that war is almost always a political issue, and that wars often have their origins in bad politics.

On a much less contentious note, Turner encouraged the audience to look into Books for Soldiers, a gifting website that bills itself as "care packages for the mind." It allows registered users to anonymously donate items on soldiers' literary wishlists. Because the forums there are members-only, I haven't been able to sate my curiosity as to how many requests there are for either Turner's or O'Brien's books.

"Local libraries are gateways."

2011-04-16T09:26:00.001-07:00

Spokane isn't the only place that's having trouble funding its libraries and proposing outright closure as a solution. Around 450 British libraries are facing closure, much to the displeasure of that small subset of the population known as readers.

Zadie Smith had this to say a few weeks back:

There's a counterargument, sure, but she makes a strong case for the defense.

Keen on Kean

2011-04-15T11:34:00.001-07:00

Sam Kean was at the Bing last night to read from his book The Disappearing Spoon as part of the Get Lit! festival.

The venue was surprisingly full — but then, maybe the level of attendance shouldn't come as a surprise at all. There's nary a word to be found against Kean's best-selling book on the periodic table, which puts elements like the rather obscure and semi-unpronounceable molybdenum into a historical and cultural context. Instead of a sterile block of squares with abstract letter codes that don't quite match their English names (Hg for mercury? Pb for lead? W for tungsten?), Kean offers a tangible (well, in most cases) object that's now part of a more memorable narrative.

"Narrative" was a word Kean emphasized throughout the evening, and for good reason. We tend to retain information better when it's part of a story. Although it wasn't mentioned, I couldn't help but think that the strength of its narrative accounts for organized religion's continued appeal in our scientific age. Perhaps if writerly boffins like Kean can continue to present the story of these otherwise cold or complex concepts in an accessible, popularizing way (without, of course, compromising their accuracy), science will have a story to compete with the intrigue and fantasy and general insanity of the divine soap opera found in the holy books.

The event itself was near perfect in every respect. It ran just the right amount of time (about an hour).Kean interspersed his straight-from-book reading with a slideshow presentation that included supplemental information and personal background. The audience posed thoughtful questions during the Q&A without the typical descent into free-for-all inanity. The evening was handled smoothly and professionally by the Get Lit! staff: a punctual start, seamless intros and handovers, and a friendly and relaxed atmosphere. The only caveat was ticket price: $15 seems a bit steep for the average (i.e., non-military, non-student) attendee. A cost two-thirds of that might have enabled even more folks to attend; for a couple with young children (a marginalized demographic?), ticket price plus babysitter and parking/bus easily makes it a $50 evening.

Kean also mentioned that his next book would focus on the Human Genome Project and its related significance, mystery, and drama.

An audio interview with Kean, some of which covers ground that he covered last night, can be found here. And here's just one blogger's take on The Disappearing Spoon.

Tracts of Inlander

2011-04-14T12:24:00.001-07:00

On account of a strange confluence of events, I've wound up with three articles in the Inlander this week, all of which are related to things I've covered here on the SBB.

The first is a review of Craig Goodwin's Year of Plenty. I've been letting incidental teasers for this review slip for this for the past month, but the blog-destined review that I was teasing ultimately morphed into the one you now see in print.

But I'm not finished mulling over Year of Plenty, and if you check back here within the next few days, you'll find something along the lines of an extended director's cut of the review. It'll address all the nuance and tangents that get lost when context and analysis have to be compressed into 350 words. That glorious absence of limits, incidentally, is both the saving grace and Achilles heel of cyberspace.

Next is a DVD review of Any Human Heart (the online version is especially capitalization-challenged), the Channel 4 (UK) miniseries that made its way across the Atlantic to PBS stations and then to physical media in record time. The miniseries has received its fair share of mentions here after the novel was the focus of a spectacularly unenthusiastic Shrinking Violets Book Club meeting; I was keen to watch it myself and see how the author translated his work from one medium to another.

Once again I had to let some detail fall by the wayside for the sake of print constraints, but my basic point was made: even though the novel is inherently unfilmable, the adaptation was still quite satisfying. That said, I'm not sure how it would fare if it existed without the novel.

One thing that I would've liked to stress is that the miniseries, by operating at one remove from the text, actually made some aspects of the novel clearer — that is, that the meagerness of Logan's public literary output was offset by the private writing he did in his journals, which perhaps offer a better means of capturing the completeness of a life ("the last word about any human heart") than any novel might. Where it gets meta is when you consider that Logan's journals are in fact a novel.

Another thing that I left out of the DVD review is that the Any Human Heart miniseries is already available for streaming on Netflix. Which means you don't even have to get off your couch to start watching it. Almost makes reviewing DVDs seem passé, no?

Lastly, there's my interview-type profile of poet Matthew Dickman, who'll be here in Spokane on Sunday, April 17 as part of this year's Get Lit! festival (which appears to be growing into a prominent feather in Spokane's cap). His collection All-American Poem is worth checking out, though I have to confess to a lingering personal ambivalence toward pop culture references. You can preview some of Dickman's work around the Web and through this audio clip courtesy of KCRW's Bookworm.

There was quite a bit of extra material from my Q&A exchange with Dickman, and I'm contemplating posting it either here or under the "Salvaged" portion of my personal blog. Probably the latter.

Anyone attending Dickman's reading or any other Get Lit! event?

Challenged Books, Challenged Readers

2011-04-13T18:00:00.001-07:00

According to this story in The Atlantic, Sherman Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, a novel that won the National Book Award for Young People's Literature when it debuted in 2007, is the American Library Association's second most challenged book of 2010.

Note that it's "challenged" and not "challenging." The ALA defines a challenge as "a formal, written complaint filed with a library or school requesting that a book or other material be restricted or removed because of its content or appropriateness."

My guess is that challenges most often grow out of priggish, indignant reactions like this one by S. Cook in regards to Alexie's novel on Amazon:

I am very upset this book is being recommended for children-I bought it for my son because of the "glowing reviews". I read it after he did and was appalled to find the "f"word in the book and lots of talk of masturbating!!! I will throw it in the trash just to be sure no other child gets his hands on it!

I'm assuming that Portnoy's Complaint is therefore not to be found in S. Cook's home library.

Also on the 2010 list is And Tango Makes Three, a book about a same-sex penguin couple and its adopted baby, and Stephenie Meyer's Twilight — no big surprise with either of them. It was, however, a surprise to see Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich's decade-old nonfiction account of the American working-class, but only because I doubt that the challengers objected to the same things I did. Namely, Ehrenreich's sanctimoniousness and egotism.

While it's easy to despair about the warped thinking behind a formal complaint about a century-old vision of dystopia and chalk it up to the American penchant for misguided moralizing, keep in mind that there were only 348 official challenges last year.(For a bit more context and folly, here are the challengers' all-time favorite targets.)

86'd

2011-04-07T12:31:00.001-07:00

A poet calling himself Eighty-Six has popped up to say

I've just published something new and different on Smashwords. Cathartes Aura and the Apocalypse Zoo is a post-apocalyptic novel-in-verse about a zoo on the day no one showed up, narrated by a captive turkey vulture. One thousand lines long. Written in 10 by 10 format. I'll be at Aunties on the 17th for the open read.

... which reminds me that, among other things, I really ought to condense and pass on Auntie's packed calendar for April. The community reading is just one of many great events — both festival-related and otherwise — taking place this month.

Eighty-Six has published the first forty lines of Cathartes Aura on his blog as a teaser. The first verse runs:

Off day at the zoo. No one came to work.
The gates were not unchained. No tourists tapped
At the glass, grackled, squawked, mimicked the birds.
And we were never fed. Three times a day
They liked to throw us parts: legs furred with hooves,
Hindquarters with the tail, heads with antlers
Or horns attached. Every beak grab a gland
And tug, twist, flap with all your appetite.
Get your gutful before they pull the corpse.
End of show. But the gawkers, they loved it.

I don't know if Eighty-Six's pseudonym has anything to do with his life spent in foodservice, but I am sure from my own extended stint as a waiter that 86 is restaurant lingo for "no longer available." As in, Waiter: "That table of obnoxious, pimply 15-year-olds who are probably going to stiff me just ordered bacon cheese fries." Line chef: "Sorry, bacon cheese fries are 86'd. Suggest the bacon cheese broccoli instead." Eighty-six's focus on post-apocalyptic scenarios would make sense in this context — 86-ing on a planetary scale.

Meghan Nuttall Sayres at Tinman Too

2011-03-31T12:13:00.001-07:00

Meghan Nuttall Sayres, the Spokane-based author of Anahita's Woven Riddle, is going to be at the Tinman Too children's bookstore [map] on Saturday, April 9 from 1 to 2pm.

Sayres has traveled the Middle East doing research for her books, and this event will give young readers the opportunity to talk to her and learn about the people she has met along the way. Some of those people include Bedouin children in Syria, tapestry weavers in Turkey, art students in Qatar, children's book writers in Iran, and Sufi poets in Uzbekistan.

With literature in translation often getting short shrift here in the US, it's at least reassuring to know that other countries don't presume that the republic of letters is resolutely monoglot. Anahita's Woven Riddle has been translated into Arabic, Hebrew, and Italian since it appeared in 2006, and the Turkish edition will debut next month. The book is a historical novel set in nineteenth-century Iran; its protagonist thinks of a clever way to get out of an arranged marriage.

For a bit more background on this particular novel, you can check out its page on Amazon.com, a short blog review from late February of this year, a slightly longer one from last September, an enthusiastic preview from a shortlived book blog, or a longer blog review from 2007. And when you're done you can look at pictures of Justin Bieber's head photoshopped onto different stock images.

More info about Sayres is available on her website as well as her blog. The recent entry on book censorship in Iran and the US is particularly interesting and relevant to my comments lamenting the lack of inbound translation. See also her post on Trent Reedy, who was briefly profiled here when he spoke at the same bookstore back in February.

Sayres' appearance is sponsored by The Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators along with Tinman Too.

Incidentally, if anyone is interested in appraising some of these young adult novels from local authors, I'd be happy to help source review copies and post the reviews here. Maybe there's a younger reader out there who's looking to try his or her hand at criticism?

Get Lit! Online Festival Guide

2011-03-27T12:38:00.001-07:00

The guide for this year's Get Lit! festival is online and accessible as a PDF or in a Flash-based format. There's also a festival calendar that would be handy if only it didn't consist of black print on a dark blue background and white headlines, an unholy visual combination that makes my eyes water.

An informative interview with Danielle Ward, the Get Lit! Programs coordinator, has also been posted on the blog for The Big Read. For the first time since the festival began in 1998, Get Lit! is participating in The Big Read with a series of pre-festival events related to Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, which, according to Ward, is the book that "exemplified this year's festival theme, 'Telling the American Story'."

More info on those Big Read events can be found here. My apologies that I didn't make the announcement in early March when it kicked off.

The Big Read, incidentally, is no small potatoes. It's a nationwide reading initiative backed by the NEA — you know, one of the many arts-oriented organizations that our elected representatives don't think we really need anymore because we're already so cultured and educated, and besides, we blew most of the pot on bankers and soldiers (now there's an American story for you). It's great to see Get Lit! tying in with a larger, nationally renowned venture and perhaps bringing more attention to the annual festival. Is it too much to hope for that it'll grow into the Inland Empire's own Hay Festival?

Plenty of News on Year of Plenty

2011-03-26T11:58:00.001-07:00

Nearly one month to the day after my "Not Dead, Just Resting" post, I'm marking my return to regular SBB blogging by rounding up and passing on all the latest Year of Plenty news.

For those in need of a bit of background: Year of Plenty is the book that grew out of the Year of Plenty blog, which itself grew out of local pastor Craig Goodwin's one-year experiment "of consuming everything local, used, homegrown or homemade."

The resulting book carries the de rigueur extended subtitle: "One Suburban Family, Four Rules, and 365 Days of Homegrown Adventure in Pursuit of Christian Living." The sudden mention of "Christian Living" at the end (and, as it turns out, the central role that it came to assume in the text) has the potential to alienate some readers, but it might also pique the interest of others who'd like to see these two powerful forces — that is, religion and green-minded activism — united. That, along with other issues the book raises, is something I plan to address in my forthcoming review of the book.

At the moment you can pick up copies of Year of Plenty online at Amazon or Auntie's, or from Auntie's brick-and-mortar location and Sun People Dry Goods in downtown Spokane. Over in Goodwin's stomping ground of Millwood, the Corner Door Bookstore has copies of the book in stock.

Goodwin will be appearing at Auntie's on April 2 at 2pm as part of the store's Spring Gardening Celebration. Second Harvest and Spokane Community Gardens will also be there with activities for both adults and children. Goodwin will take part in a Q&A and will be on hand to sign books.

On April 9 at 11am, the author will be at Barnes & Noble in Spokane Valley for an encore performance of the Auntie's spring gardening event. His blog mentions the possibility that there might also be a bookfair to benefit Second Harvest, but no confirmation of that so far.

There will also be a discussion and reading at 7pm on April 28 at the Book Parlor, a local institution with a faith-based environmental focus that mirrors Goodwin's own. This event will apparently be more focused on the Inland Northwest. A Facebook event page has been set up to make it easy to RSVP.

In between book signings and publicity rounds, Goodwin has also been making note of books (for example, here and here) that "share Christian perspectives on God, Green, and consumption." Some, like Jonathan Merritt's Green Like God, have even received longer contemplation. I've been meaning to direct SBB readers' attention to these particular posts of his for weeks.

Not Dead, Just Resting

2011-02-27T23:36:00.001-08:00

Yes, the SBB has been dormant for most of February and, no, it will not stay that way. I've been separated from my desktop for long stretches as we renovate two rooms simultaneously and I set up a home cinema system, so the time usually allotted to blogging/Twitter/Web trawling has been cut to zero.

There are plenty of book-related events on the horizon (event horizon?), though, and I plan to resume posting shortly. There will be news and reviews of the soon-to-be-published Year of Plenty book, The Pacific North-west Reader, the upcoming Get Lit! festival, local book clubs, and more. Just give me some time to finish caulking, wiring, and painting.

Oh, and before I forget: KSPS has been broadcasting the Any Human Heart miniseries for the past few Sundays (it's also viewable online). I wish I'd been more timely in making that particular announcement, but I see the Shrinking Violets have helped pick up the slack.

Imminent Author Reading: Trent Reedy

2011-02-11T23:21:00.001-08:00

This one's a bit late in coming, but I hope someone is able to spot this in time to catch Trent Reedy's reading tomorrow, February 12, at Tinman Too children's bookstore.

Reedy is the author of Words in the Dust, a young adult novel about an Afghan girl who hopes the surgery offered to her by an American soldier will correct her cleft lip and solve all her other problems. Some of the novel is based on Reedy's own experiences in Afghanistan, where he was stationed from 2004-05 with the Iowa Army National Guard in support of Operation Enduring Freedom. Words in the Dust is his literary debut, and it's already received quite a positive reception on Amazon.com and Goodreads since its release in January.

A longer review of Words in the Dust can be found here, and an interview with Reedy can be found here — though you might not need to watch the interview if you're going to see him in person. Oh, and his book's got a Facebook page.

The reading takes place tomorrow, February 12 from 1 to 2pm at the Tinman Too, which is located at 811 West Garland Ave here in Spokane [map]. I'm fairly sure that Reedy's officially a Local Author (note the caps); if anyone can confirm this, I'll add him to the Valhalla.

SPOKE(a)N(e) Goes Quarterly, Mourns Empyrean

2011-01-29T13:02:00.001-08:00

A week ago, SPOKE(a)N(e) made the announcement that it was moving to a quarterly publication beginning with its Winter 2010 issue.

That most recent issue features an interview with Spokane poet Mark Anderson. Anderson grew up in Mica, attended EWU under its Running Start program, and has since gone on to attend two individual World Poetry Slam (iWPS) events and be a part of the team Spokane sent to the National Poetry Slam in 2010 — the first time the city was represented there. (From what little I can dig up, the Spokane team didn't fare particularly well last year. The recent closure of the Empyrean, which hosted the Spokane Poetry Slam, probably won't help the city's chances in 2011.)

The Empyrean's closing, incidentally, is the subject of After Words, a new regular feature in SPOKE(a)N(e). Michael McMullen, executive editor of the magazine and, I assume, author of the editorial-type piece, writes: "I am sad to say, while I always imagined myself [enjoying the atmosphere of the Empyrean], I never did. I have no excuses. It was close to my home, I am downtown often, and I loved the venue. I just—never went."

I have quite a few nebulous thoughts on this larger subject — that is, the bad habit of just not going — because, based on some experiences I've had since moving here nearly one year ago, it's prompted me to ask some friends and colleagues if Spokane suffers from a contagion of apathy. And, slightly more worrying, it's a contagion from which I haven't been altogether immune despite my best efforts to remain otherwise. There were perfectly good shows that I also could have caught at the Empyrean and didn't.

But I'll let those thoughts gestate for a bit longer in the hopes that something coherent and useful comes out of them. In the meantime I'll put the question out there for anyone who can muster the energy and inclination to respond: Does Spokane have an apathy problem?

Retracing Sebald's Saturnine Steps

2011-01-27T20:53:00.001-08:00

When W.G. Sebald's Rings of Saturn fell under discussion last December during the Shrinking Violets' book club, the general unfamiliarity with the Suffolk coast — a location that not only backdrops the book but also concatenates its episodic forays into memory and history — was cited as a barrier to enjoyment.

Grant Gee, who released a documentary on Joy Division four years ago, has created a new film called Patience (After Sebald) that is based on Sebald's 1992 novel. The film will debut tomorrow, in more than enough time to commemorate the decade that has passed since the author's death.

Writing in the Guardian, Stuart Jeffries recounts his trip with Gee to the Suffolk coast. Even better, there's an accompanying video of their wakling tour, albeit brief.

While there, the pair visits some of the landmarks that Sebald mentions: the Crown Hotel, the sailors' reading room, "the old railway bridge between Southwold and Halesworth, the one Sebald claims carried the Chinese imperial train" — "claims" being the operative word.

Jeffries closes the article in an irritatingly trite fashion by remarking on his surprise that he wasn't "depressed" by Sebald's "unremittingly miserable" pages. Calling Sebald miserable is like calling The Smiths miserable; it belies an incredibly shaky grasp of the work. But for readers (like me) who haven't seen the Suffolk coast firsthand, Jeffries' cursory visual and textual summary of his visit offers a quick and easy way to do some armchair traveling.

Shrinking Violets February Book Club Announced

2011-01-23T11:23:00.001-08:00

The Shrinking Violets Book Club apparently had a great turnout last week with Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen and are hoping to continue that success with their February read, Ursula Hegi's Stones from the River, which Hegi wrote while living here in Spokane.

And there's an even more specific link: Hegi lived in the house where the February book club will be hosted. In fact, she may have even written Stones from the River there.

When the novel first appeared in 1994, Michael Dorris writing in the Los Angeles Times praised it as "epic, daring, magnificent, the product of a defining and mesmerizing vision," and three years later it would go on to become an Oprah Book Club pick.

More info about the novel can be found on its Wikipedia page, and the New York Times review of the book from 1994 is still accessible, though not particularly pretty. Enotes offers a bite-sized synopsis, and the dedicated Google Books page has ratings, reviews, and library/purchase information. Some potential reading and discussion questions are available here.

The book club will take place on February 20 and run from 1-3pm. It will be held at Carolyn's house — the same location as January; e-mail Becky at beckyhuss [at] gmail [dot] com or Hilary at hilwhitt [at] hotmail [dot] com for directions. The Violets ask that you bring a food or drink to share as well as any books you want to recommend.

As always, if you're on Facebook, you can RSVP on the Facebook page the Violets have created for the February event.

Write Here, Write There: Contest/Submission Roundup

2011-01-22T13:29:00.001-08:00

Five submissions calls — one of which already had its deadline come and go by the time it was mentioned, making it more like four — have caught my eye on local blogs recently, and they offer an unusual amount of variety for writers of all sorts. Here they are in order of deadline:

Poets

Floating Bridge Press is a nonprofit literary arts organization with a mission to recognize and promote the work of Washington State poets. The organization is currently holding its 16th Annual Poetry Chapbook Competition for current residents of Washington State. (Spokane teacher and poet Laura Read was the winner of last year's Chapbook Award with The Chewbacca on Hollywood Boulevard Reminds Me of You. Read some of Read here.)

For a $12 entry fee, you can submit a chapbook manuscript of up to 24 pages of poetry. The winner will receive $500, a Seattle reading at Richard Hugo House in September, fifteen copies of the prizewinning chapbook, and local promotion and distribution of that chapbook. Three or four finalists receive $50 and will also be featured at the winner's reading.

What's more, Floating Bridge Press considers all individual poems for inclusion in their annual journal, Floating Bridge Review.

The deadline for the Floating Bridge Press Annual Poetry Chapbook Award is February 16, 2011. Detailed submission guidelines can be found here on their website.

Authors

High Desert Journal has announced its 2011 Obsidian Prize in Fiction "for writers working in or inspired by the West, Big Sky or big city." The prize offers a cash award of $1,000 plus publication.

The judge for this competition is Gretel Ehrlich, author of This Cold Heaven: Seven Seasons in Greenland, The Solace of Open Spaces, and Heart Mountain among many other works. Deadline for submissions is February 18, 2011. There is a $15 entry fee. Entries will be accepted online through SubmishMash but must not exceed 6,000 words.

Incidentally, High Desert Journal publishes print issues in October and April and accepts submissions for those biannual publications year-round. More info on rules and procedure can be found on the journal's submissions page.

Playwrights

Play-Makers Spokane is seeking comedy scripts for its Hit & Run V event, a staged reading of new plays. If your scripts is selected, it will receive a rehearsed staged reading in Spokane in November, 2011.

Script requirements are: Ten- and fifteen-minute comedy plays not longer than 20 pages, with a maximum of two submissions per author. It's fine if they've been previously produced, and there are no geographical restrictions on where the author is based, but the script must be in English. Bear in mind that solo plays, monologues, musicals, and plays for children are not eligible. There is no entry fee, nor is there a cash award for winning.

The deadline is June 1, 2011. To submit your short comedy play, e-mail a cover letter and script with character breakdown and production history as a Word or PDF document to playmakersspokane@gmail.com.

If you still have questions, e-mail Hit & Run coordinator Sandra Hosking at sandrahosking@hotmail.com.

Novelists

Further afield is Engine Books, a brand new boutique publisher operating out of Indianapolis, IN. Its emphasis is on literary storytelling rather than "safe" literature and big profit margins: about four high-quality titles per year, each rigorously edited and elegantly designed, with at least half of those titles authored by women. None of their books will be abandoned for want of popularity and sales; they'll be promoted as good books ought to be. As a bonus, Engine Books has a great logo that will delight muscle-car and Dukes of Hazzard fans.

This new publisher is looking for story collections, novels, collected novellas, and books related to the writing and reading of fiction. The website lays out the following caveats:

Though the press has no specific allegiance to any particular form or style of fiction, the work we publish falls squarely into the category of "literary," which the press defines generally as "everyday life made worthy of art." In the case of "genre" work—crime fiction, romance, sci-fi, etc.—manuscripts should rise beyond the usually formulaic nature of the genre.

The press asks that you send a query e-mail (without attachments!) to Victoria Barrett at queries@enginebooks.org before you submit your MS. In the body of that e-mail, please include a description of the book, your qualifications, and either one of the stories in the collection or the first 10-20 pages of your manuscript. Simultaneous submissions are welcome, but reading and evaluating takes time, so don't expect an immediate reply.

If your own publication is holding a contest, or if you hear of one and don't want to keep it a secret in the selfish hope of bettering your odds of winning, please get in touch with details so the SBB can help get the word out.

Best/Worst of 2010, Most Anticipated of 2011

2011-01-16T15:00:00.001-08:00

2010 is well and truly over. I know this because I've stopped accidentally dating checks with the previous year.

That makes it as good a time as any to review what the critics and wider reading public thought represented the best and worst of 2010 — and to look ahead at what has them flush with anticipation.

The routinely overhyped Man Booker Prize this year went to The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson, a choice that was not at all unanimously lauded, but the award's shortlist is, as always, a good place to dig for some of the best books of the preceding 365.25 days.

The winner of the Man Asian Literary Prize hasn't yet been announced; that will take place in March. In the meantime, you can consult the ten-book longlist, which includes books like — I love this title — Monkey-man by Usha K.R. and Bi Feiyu's Three Sisters. The latter "explores the difficult lives of women in Communist China in the 1970s and 80s," in the same way as, I suppose, Jung Chang's excellent Wild Swans.

In early December the Christian Science Monitor published its eleven best books of 2010. At the top of the list was 36 Arguments for the Existence of God by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein. At number five was Peter Carey's Parrot and Olivier in America, which also made the Man Booker shortlist (linked above).

Literature in translation gets the short shrift all too often, so it's great that BookTrust's highly distilled list of its 2010 books of the year began making the rounds not long after it was posted. It includes An Awkward Age by Anna Starobinets and Vasily Grossman's The Road (a book of essays not to be confused with Cormac McCarthy's bleak novel of the same name).

Here's a list from the New York Times that doesn't limit itself to a measly ten or twenty: 100 Notable Books of 2010. There are some of the usual suspects, like Stieg Larsson's The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, Ian McEwan's Solar, or David Remnick's Obama pre-presidency bio The Bridge (Remnick's 1997 book Resurrection: The Struggle for a New Russia was one that I really enjoyed back in the day, and I don't think its information will have aged much since). There are also some lesser-known worthwhile reads, such as Big Girls Don't Cry: The Election That Changed Everything for American Women by Rebecca Traister and Zachary Mason's The Lost Books of the Odyssey.

The New Yorker provided a lengthy list of its reviewers' favorites for 2010. Diarmaid MacCulloch's sweeping history of Christianity is on there, as is Sam Lipsyte's post-financial-meltdown satire The Ask, which made more than one of these "best of" lists.

If a deluge of brevity is your thing, you can see which books the Powell's bookstore staff chose as their top fives for 2010. Just the number-one choices are summarized on this page of bullet-pointed lists — forty-five of them in all. Out of curiosity, did (or does) Auntie's do anything along these lines?

NPR avoided adding its voice to the din of the popular and overpublicized and opted instead to reveal 2010's hidden gems. There's Shane Jones' Light Boxes — "technically a novel, but it reads more like an extended fable" — and You Lost Me There by Rosecrans Baldwin, an author who compiler Rachel Syme feels is deserving of more praise.

But enough positivity. The Guardian (by the way, don't forget to check out their 2010 First Book Award to peek at up-and-coming authors) profiled some of "2010's worst offences against literature" — Tony Blair and George W. are mentioned; no surprises there — and called upon readers to do the same. And, boy, did they.

The Daily Beast, which holds the opinion that the past is passé, looked ahead to the coming year with its most anticipated books of 2011. Ron Reagan's memoir My Father at 100, due out February 6, gets a mention (in the meantime full reviews have appeared elsewhere), as does David Foster Wallace's posthumous unfinished novel The Pale King, slated for publication in April.

And, finally, along with its "15 promising titles for early 2011" the Christian Science Monitor reappears for its "8 noteworthy biographies coming in early 2011," among which you'll find Geoffrey Dunn's The Lies of Sarah Palin, a book that might as well have been a biography, and The Alice Behind Wonderland by Simon Winchester, a book I'm personally keen to read after whetting my Carrollian appetite with Morton N. Cohen's biography of Dodgson.

What literary highs (and lows) did you experience in 2010? Anything you're looking forward to in 2011?

William Kenower Hosts "Tuning Your Inner Ear"

2011-01-15T10:08:00.001-08:00

William Kenower, author of the novel One Year In Jeopardy and editor-in-chief of Author e-zine, will be hosting a talk titled "Tuning Your Inner Ear: The key to literary and artistic life" on Saturday, January 22 at 1pm.

The promo flyer has this to say about the talk: "Once you've made the commitment to writing or art, learning to live the literary or artistic life becomes more important than punchy openings or studying the market. What it takes to write the book you most want to write or create the art you most want to create, is what it takes to lead the life you most want to lead. Join local writers and artists for an afternoon of wisdom and inspiration."

The event, which is sponsored by the Society of Children's Book Writers & Illustrators and the Gonzaga University English Department, will take place at College Hall 101 at Gonzaga University [rough map]. Admission is $10 at the door.

To RSVP to the event or discuss it beforehand, visit the Facebook event page. For more information on Bill Kenower, take a look at his blog or watch a short YouTube video of him speaking to a writing conference in Seattle.

Willow Springs 2011 Fiction Prize Reminder

2011-01-14T10:27:00.001-08:00

After an extended holiday- and work-induced hiatus, what better way to return to the fray than with a reminder of the impending Willow Springs' annual Fiction Prize?

This particular contest holds the possibility of a $2000 prize plus, of course, publication in Willow Springs' excellent literary journal.

All entrants who submit their original, unpublished, typed (as in, non-handwritten) work accompanied by the entry fee by March 1, 2011 walk away with a one-year subscription to Willow Springs at the very least.

Please note that there's a $15 entry fee ($20 if you happen to live outside of the US). If you don't include your entry fee, your work will not be judged. There is no maximum word count.

To submit a hard copy, send to the following address:

The Willow Springs Fiction Prize
Willow Springs
501 N Riverpoint Blvd, Ste 425
Spokane, WA 99202

You can also submit your work and payment online.

My earlier announcement with a full list of guidelines is here, and Willow Springs' official contest page is here.

Inlander 2010 Short Fiction Contest Winners

2010-12-23T15:23:00.001-08:00

The winning stories in The Inlander's 2010 Short Fiction contest (the topic was redemption, loose interpretations encouraged) have been published in the current issue, out today. The top slot went to Robert Salsbury's "Resource Management," with "A New Mexico Story" by Ryan Weech and "Alive and Well" by Susan Lagsdin in second and third places, respectively. In addition, there were three Web-only runner-up selections: "Rose Blossoms at Midnight" by Matthew Blake Cardenas, my own "Beauty Everlasting," and yet another by Salsbury, this one titled "On the Road: The Story of Jimi Snakeskin."

Under different circumstances I would have run through the pieces individually and offered brief critiques and assessments, but my role as a distanced, lit-centric observer could be said to have been compromised (this is becoming a theme of late) by my consolation prize, and I'd rather not open my commentary to the possibility of being colored by personal bias, whether actual or perceived. Discussion in the comments is, however, as welcome as ever.

Shrinking Violets December Book Club Wrap-Up

2010-12-22T21:44:00.001-08:00

The December meeting of the Shrinking Violets' Book Club took place this past weekend at my house, and since both the location and the reading (W.G. Sebald's Rings of Saturn) originated with my suggestion, it seems a bit self-serving to go into too much detail. I'll just summarize the event by saying that Sebald's genre-mixing novel was well received by the few who attended, and it sparked a considerable amount of discussion both directly and loosely related to the reading, which seems somehow fitting given the nature of Sebald's writing.

Next month's read is Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen.

From Ass to Zine: New Riverspeak Opportunities

2010-12-18T23:01:00.000-08:00

As promised, here are the details on two new Riverspeak-related writing opportunities.

First up: Ink My Butt, which doesn't mince words. Your writing (or drawing or painting) will be tattooed on Allen Duffy's rearend if it's selected.

In addition to the prime placement on Allen's behind, the winner will receive two 11"x14" prints from the Series of Authors I’ve Never Read Before (sorry, couldn't find a link), two copies of Runners High, a handful of copies of Country Bum-Kins Go... customized Duffy Allen Comic stickers and an original hand-drawn tattooed naked running man. The top two runners-up will win an autographed copy of Runners High and Country Bum-Kins Go... Resources permitting, participant ribbons will come in the form of an autographed copy of Country Bum-Kins Go....

Affordability and size (6"x6") are the only two criteria. Submissions can be made via e-mail, your or his blog, or postal mail:

Allen Duffy
1921 First Street PMB 109
Cheney, WA 99004

Be sure to include contact information along with your submission. Deadline is Saturday, January 1, 2011, and winners will be announced shortly thereafter.

More conventionally, there's RiverLit, the new literary zine from Riverspeak. They've put out a call for submissions [Facebook] of all types: poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and comics.

There is no theme for this issue, which leaves things way, way open. Maximum word count is 2,000. Comics are limited to eight pages (on 8.5"x11" paper). The good news? There's no limit to how many submissions you can send, so you can send your 12-volume magnum opus divided into 2,000-word chapters. Direct all submissions to riverlit.zine@gmail.com in a common file format like .doc or .txt. No word on how comics might be submitted, but I'd assume all standard image formats (.png, .tiff, .jpeg) would be okay. The deadline is January 8, 2011.

If I've understood correctly, there will be a separate call for cover art submissions on the Riverspeak website and on its Facebook page.

Mid-December Update and News Roundup

2010-12-17T15:55:00.001-08:00

This month I've been forced to spend far less time on the SBB than usual, which is mildly disappointing because, to help establish some sort of regularity and momentum, I'd made it a private monthly goal to write more posts than the previous month throughout 2010. Content warranting, of course.

But as a freelancer, I don't always have the luxury of maintaining an exquisitely balanced workload, and generally speaking, the more work the better. I'm quite fortunate to be able to close out the year — and begin the next — on such a high note work-wise.

It's also been pretty quiet on the local literary front. The Inlander staff accepted the last submissions for their short fiction contest on November 30, the headliner announcements for next spring's Get Lit! festival have all been made, and things seem to be slowly winding down for the year.

But even the snow couldn't bring things to a complete standstill, no matter how few roads the city deemed worthy of plowing.

The first piece of news, only loosely lit-related but incredibly disheartening nonetheless, was governor Christine Gregoire's proposed closure of the Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture due to state budget concerns [Spokesman-Review report, press release]. This strikes me as so fundamentally wrong that I've begun to suspect that I'm an unwitting participant in a large-scale, carefully orchestrated farce.

Spokane has how many public fine art museums? One? And she's looking to shut its doors to the public? Why not just have the city burn its library books to save on heating costs?

The only thing that might be effective in saving the MAC is grassroots action. To that end, you can pester your local and state political representatives, as well as become a MAC member. Here's a factsheet on the MAC if you need some rhetorical ammunition.

On a more positive note, the new issue of Out There is indeed out there and free for the taking in shops throughout Spokane. It features two book reviews, one of Transport Revolutions: Moving People and Freight Without Oil by Richard Gilbert and Anthony Perl, and the other of The Stonemasters: California Rock Climbers in the Seventies by John Long and Dean Fidelman. Both reviewers recommend their respective books, though not unequivocally.

Beyond Spokane — Minneapolis, to be precise — the winter print edition of Rain Taxi has been brought forth, and with it book reviews of works by Lynda Barry, Dave Eggers, Aleister Crowley, August Strindberg, Eileen Myles et al. Browse the table of contents to see if anything strikes your fancy.

Rain Taxi is also currently running its annual benefit auction. There's a ton of autographed, rare, and collectible stuff to be had by a roll call of authors that includes William T. Vollman, Neil Gaiman, Lewis Hyde, Paul Auster, Eileen Myles, Susan Howe, and many more.

A bit closer to home, Riverspeak has put out a submissions request for two very different forms of publication. The first is for Riverlit, a new quarterly literary 'zine, due to make its inaugural appearance in February; the second is for Ink My Butt, which seems rather crass and misguided but certainly keeps things interesting. You can follow the links I've provided, or you can check back here tomorrow for my post summarizing their guidelines, due dates, and objectives.

Google Brings Sebald to the iPhone

2010-12-08T21:28:00.001-08:00

I've been asked on various occasions and in various capacities to write or summarize in 140 characters a comparative review of the various eReaders (e.g., Amazon's Kindle, Barnes & Noble's Nook, Apple's iPad, the latter of which, incidentally, is currently being offered for a Special Limited Time Price) and describe the more general experience of eReading eBooks. This is a tough thing to have asked of you when you're a starry-eyed technophile (or "gadgetophile," rather) without said gadgets and no immediate means of procuring them. Which isn't to say that I have no experience whatsoever with eBooks, just not the broader (and bigger-screen) experience I'd like.

In the past I've attempted to compensate for this shortcoming in a number of ways, and I'll attempt to do so once again by pointing e-curious readers in the direction of this very timely post, which manages to combine a few of my favorite things: W.G. Sebald, Apple devices, and eBooks.

The author describes in detail his experience reading the novel that brought Sebald a much wider level of fame, Austerlitz, as downloaded from Google's new eBookstore (in case you missed it, I helped to disseminate the notice of its arrival in a tweet), on his iPhone.

His assessment? He likes the font/brightness/justification customization options — which, it's worth noting, are available in one form or another on every iOS eReader app I've ever downloaded — and the ability to search the entire text. But he points out that there are differences of formatting between the print and electronic versions that could prove difficult to reconcile. Google's eBook app for iOS also lacks notetaking and copy-and-paste functions, thereby negating some of the benefits of eReading. Instead of delivering a a firm conclusion about the app and the larger eBook experience, the author, in a somewhat Sebaldian fashion, ends on more ambiguous note by posing some necessary questions about the the accuracy and integrity of eBooks.

Riverspeak Promulgates the SBB

2010-11-30T13:51:00.001-08:00

Riverspeak has been kind enough to syndicate the SBB's posts among the aggregated feeds on its website, which also include content from local blogs, organizations, and publications like Ugly Yellow, Get Lit!, Spoken, and Sporadicus. There are categories for visual art, photography, music, performing arts, and literature. Unsurprisingly, the SBB can be found under the latter.

For those unfamiliar with Riverspeak, and I should think that there are few arts-minded people in the area who are, its broad mission is to provide both a platform and a forum for the local arts scene. It's an excellent resource for those looking for opportunities to show, sell, submit, or share their work, and to get in touch with likeminded folks from the community. More about that (in their own words) can be found here.

Holiday Book Deals

2010-11-29T10:07:00.001-08:00

Just a reminder to keep an eye on the SBB's Twitter feed if you've got a shopping itch you're looking to scratch. I'll be tweeting holiday book deals as I come across them. So far there have been three for Cyber Monday:

Cyber Monday (i.e., today) sale at Auntie's with 25% of eBooks and 20% off very un-cyber print books. The discount is automatically applied during checkout.
Today only, 16% off at Powell's with the promo code SAVE16. You can use that atop the already discounted holiday selections.
Today's local Groupon is $20 for $40 worth of books at Simon and Schuster's online store.

These are all significant savings and a great way to stock up on books without the residual guilt of the havoc it's wreaking on your wallet. In fact, Auntie's was so excited about the sale that they forgot how to spell "regularly."

If you come across a book deal that I've overlooked, please be sure to pass it along.

Powell's Holiday Gift Guide 2010

2010-11-28T10:07:00.001-08:00

Powell's has just posted its 2010 Holiday Gift Guide. You can browse it in a clever Flash-based magazine-style format (I'd have preferred a plain old PDF) as well as a more conventional HTML layout. All of the titles — which include Mark Twain's autobiography, Keith Richards' new bio (The Guardian's wry "digested read" is here), a classy box set of the Hunger Games trilogy, Jonathan Franzen's Freedom, Carol Sklenicka's literary bio of Raymond Carver, and dozens more — come with 30% discounts off the cover price, and an order of $50 or more will waive shipping costs.

Even if you don't intend to make a purchase at Powell's, their gift guide might leave you with a idea or two about what your fellow readers might be hankering after this yuletide season.

I have no idea if Auntie's will be running a similar kind of holiday promotion, but it would be awfully good to see one.

December Shrinking Violets Book Club Announced

2010-11-27T21:13:00.001-08:00

Three Shrinking Violets posts in a row. Lest someone accuse me of favoritism, please note that they haven't been without friction.

The December book club read, which was formally announced just before Thanksgiving, is The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald (Google Books link). It will take place at my house from 1-3pm on Sunday, December 19.

Auntie's can probably have the book for you in a few days; or if you want to try your luck with holiday season mail order, check out this or this price comparison site as well as ABEbooks directly (where coupon code CHLEM will net you an additional 10% off for a little while longer). To RSVP, visit the event page on Facebook or get in touch with Hilary or Becky, who've helpfully provided their e-mail addresses at the bottom of the announcement post linked above. You can e-mail them (or me, of course) for the address and directions.

I would have liked at this point to add a few words about Sebald, but quite honestly, I wouldn't know where to begin. One of the reasons I gladly emigrated to Germany in 2001 was to be able to learn to read his work in the original. His is the name I search out in every bookstore I visit for the first time so that I can make a spot judgement about its selection and clientele. Nearly everything he wrote, though some of it has met with its share of criticism (in particular his historical essays collected in On the Natural History of Destruction), has repeatedly managed to reach a soul-deep spot within me that no other author reached before or since.

If the work seems meandering (it is and yet it isn't) or overly academic (it is and yet it isn't) or somber (it is and yet it isn't) and humorless (it isn't), I'd urge you to take a look at the discussion his work has spawned, the critical reactions, or the hybridized genre he helped to cultivate. My own review of the posthumous collection Campo Santo put his work in as much of a nutshell as I could muster. Will Self's lecture from earlier this year titled Sebald, the good German? and his previous Sebald-inspired travelogue are easy places to pick up some wider background, the Shelfari group on Sebald will provide a bit more depth and many points of view, and Vertigo: Collecting Sebald will attest to the author's lasting direct or indirect influence.

Shrinking Violets November Addendum: Matthew Derby

2010-11-26T14:43:00.001-08:00

If you were both intrigued and disappointed by James Kaelan's We're Getting On, or if you thought it was excellent and wanted more in a similar vein, I'd recommend another debut novel, this one called Super Flat Times (Google Books link) by Matthew Derby. It's been the better part of a decade since I last read Super Flat Times, but Kaelan's novel had the effect of making me want to return to it sooner rather than later.

Derby's collection of stories has an equally vague dystopian setting, and his narratives likewise often rest on the foolishness and futility of his characters' lives, but he's a dab hand at the absurd, counterbalancing humor that is much rarer in Kaelan's work (Sam being rolled limply down the hill in the final story is the only one of these moments that stands out in my mind). For that reason, Derby's characters don't seem to be the sinister or spineless objects of contempt that Kaelan's characters are.

Here's the Bookslut review of Super Flat Times from when it first appeared. To get a feel for Derby's writing, you can read his short story "Behavior Pilot" here.

Shrinking Violets November Book Club Wrap-Up

2010-11-26T13:05:00.001-08:00

The Shrinking Violets met last Sunday to discuss James Kaelan's We're Getting On. More on that in a moment.

The big news from the meetup was that the Violets are partnering in a sense with the forthcoming Get Lit! festival (see my preview here), and therefore the ~~April~~ March book club will feature The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien, who just happens to be on the bill for the headlining author event. In return, Get Lit! will try to spread the word about the Violets and all their local lit-related activities like creative writing workshops and book discussions. It's a nice symbiotic-type arrangement. Spokane could use more of them.

Another order of business was the availability of the Violets' selected reads. We're Getting On had been especially difficult to find for a reasonable price, but this, it seems, was a fresh exception that got treated as the rule. In an era when most everything can be had in a few mouseclicks, I'm kind of amazed that anyone would gripe about general availability of literature of any sort. Gripes about protracted shipping times for books I can understand; but then again, it's not as if most of the Violets' titles aren't announced several months in advance. The only legitimate concern in all this is one of cost, with which I can fully empathize, but the vast majority of the time there's an easy solution for that too. Copies of the December book, Rings of Saturn, start from $1.97 at ABEbooks, and coupon code CHLEM will give you an additional 10% off at checkout until December 7.

As for the actual reading of We're Getting On, reactions to the book varied from mild enjoyment to mild dislike. No one stepped forward to either praise or bury it outright. We all agreed that its shallow, self-consumed, unlikable characters were intentionally so, and that the novel was a bleak send-up of what you might (oxymoronically?) call "extreme hipsterism," when misguided ideology becomes more like a hollow lifestyle choice. Or perhaps the reverse.

However, proceeding on the basis of a review of the book at Pank and the critic/author discussion that grew out of it, the themes and ideas that Kaelan attributes to his work were more substantial in theory than in execution, and the author's own cultural and political name-dropping, particularly in the opening story, seemed to make him complicit in the very thing he was attempting to satirize. The prose in the "You Must've Heard Something" section, which depicts two apartment-bound people separated by an alley, was widely regarded as the most memorable and involving — I'd wager the story's thread of romance amid desperation and adversity had something to do with it — yet on the whole most readers were largely unimpressed by Kaelan's writing. Some of his metaphors were award-winningly awful, and his overcooked prose often felt like thesaurus-assisted vocabulary crammed into his characters' mouths. The deliberate omission of detail in his dystopian world, on the other hand, was almost unanimously commended.

Speaking only for myself, I walked away with a better opinion of the book than the one I went in with. Our discussion revealed additional layers of complexity, such as the fact that the world of the novel, generally regarded as "post-apocalyptic," could easily be our own. I also came to appreciate the degree of interconnectedness of the four individual stories, which wasn't as superficial as I'd initially thought. If ever proof were needed of the value of a book club like the Shrinking Violets, that would be it.

The Three Faces of Logan Mountstuart

2010-11-21T09:57:00.001-08:00

I know I ought to lay the subject of William Boyd's Any Human Heart to rest, but it's hard when The Observer is running such an excellent supplement alongside the televisual adaptation of the novel, which begins airing today at 9pm (1pm PST) on Channel 4 in the UK.

Last last night there appeared an interview with the three actors who'll be playing Logan Mountstuart over the span of his life: Sam Claflin gets "his early, randy years;" Matthew Macfadyen the tumultuous middle years; and Jim Broadbent the twilight years that see a "tapering libido, the extreme penury that requires him to eat dog food to get by, the gloomy discussions with heart doctors."

It's interesting (and dismaying) to see what had to be left out, even with the running time offered by a serial film:

All actors express disappointment — jokingly — at favourite sequences of the novel being excised from the screenplay, adapted by Boyd himself. Claflin misses early scenes that involved Logan becoming a suicidally enthusiastic rugby blue as part of a dare. Broadbent liked a later bit in which Logan (adopting yet another identity) became a lecturer in Nigeria, a sequence excised regretfully by Boyd for lack of time.

It would be great to — at the very least — see some teaser clips from the film, but unfortunately Channel 4's video player informs me, "The video you are trying to watch cannot be viewed from your current country or location," when I try to play the scene of Logan meeting Land or Ernest Hemingway. On the plus side, the Q&A with William Boyd isn't dogged by licensing restrictions, nor is the much shorter audio clip of him musing on a hypothetical sequel to Any Human Heart, which would include "AIDS, the internet, and 'grotesque wealth'."

Get Lit! Goes Patriotic

2010-11-18T23:04:00.000-08:00

EWU has announced the theme and headliners for its 2011 Get Lit! festival (lucky number 13). Everything will fall under the umbrella of "Telling the American Story," which involves

looking at the American story from multiple perspectives, including the oral traditions of the Native Americans, the heroic and often tragic tales of the military, the classics as seen from a feminine perspective, the different-colored lens that fine arts can add to a story, as well as a look at the Grand Coulee Dam and water-related environmental issues.

In addition to author readings and presentations, the festival will include participatory events like workshops and open mics that address this theme. The dates for the festival are April 13 to 17.

The breadth of the theme — second only in scope to Life, The Universe, and Everything — means there's quite an assortment of headlining authors. Tim O'Brien will be on hand to talk about The Things They Carried, his collection of stories about the Vietnam War, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. Sena Jeter Naslund (Ahab's Wife; or, the Star-Gazer) and Matthew Dickman (All American Poem) will respectively round out the fiction and poetry categories.

In the nonfiction corner, there's Maude Barlow, author of Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water, who was apparently in a lengthy subtitle competition with another headlining author, Sam Kean, author of the New York Times bestseller The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements.

Young readers can look forward to hearing from Louise Borden (The Journey That Saved Curious George: The True Wartime Escape of Margret and H.A. Rey, Fly High!: The Story of Bessie Coleman, and dozens more); Suzanne Morgan Williams (Bull Rider) and Michael Harmon (Skate, The Last Exit to Normal, and Brutal).

A more comprehensive list of authors can be found here. Ani DiFranco will be the music headliner and, judging by the ticket prices, the big festival draw.

Festival passes are already on sale for $45 (or a steep $60 if you want to see Ani DiFranco too). The $45 pass will give you admission to Sam Kean on April 14, Sena Jeter Naslund (with Nancy Rawles) on April 15, Tim O'Brien (with Brian Turner) on April 16, and Matthew Dickman on April 17. If you buy the pricier "Ani" pass, keep in mind that you'll have to forgo Sena Jeter Naslund on April 15. Pick the passes up at TicketsWest or by calling 1-800-325-SEAT. The pass offers a fairly hefty savings of $20-25 off the individual ticket prices.

Students luck out with free admission to the headlining events (DiFranco being the exception) provided they show a current high school or college ID. Student tickets are available at the door (resources permitting) or the area's college bookstores.

A Final Word on SPL Compatibility with Library Books

2010-11-12T20:26:00.001-08:00

Harold Chu, the developer of Library Books for the iPhone (and other iOS devices), was kind enough to gift me the application so I could test the newly implemented Spokane Public Library preset. And, as it turns out, it's 100% compatible. Here's the visual proof:

All you have to do is select Spokane Public Library from the available choices under the Settings tab, type in your library card number and your four-digit PIN, and tap refresh. You'll then be able to track your holds and loans from your Apple mobile device — and get nudged when the due date is approaching. The cost of the app will quickly compensate for whatever you might have dished out in late fees.

Update on Library Books App

2010-11-07T12:59:00.001-08:00

About two months ago, I wrote about how to set up the Library Books Mac desktop app for the Spokane Public Library system. Well, those days of DIY self-sufficiency were fun while they lasted, but the developer has now implemented built-in support for our local library as of beta version number 61 (it's now at version 64).

This also suggests (emphasis on suggests, not confirms) that the companion iOS app for devices like the iPad and iPhone now supports the Spokane Public Library as well. One helpful commenter pointed out in the comments to the last post that compatibility with the Spokane Public Library system was still missing from the app. That's potentially great news for lil' ol' Spokane; I'll send an e-mail to the developer and see if he can confirm one way or the other. [Confirmed: click here.]

Now all we have to do is hope the Spokane public libraries remain open long enough [video] for us to make use of this great piece of software.

November Shrinking Violets Book Club Announced

2010-11-06T10:26:00.001-07:00

No doubt the members of the Shrinking Violets Book Club are all making their way through James Kaelan's We're Getting On, and no doubt quicker than they thought possible on account of its GIANT TYPEFACE (for a book that prides itself on zero emissions, that 600-point font doesn't exactly conserve paper), and no doubt they're all eager to discuss it.

Good thing the whereabouts of the November meeting have now been announced. It will be taking place at Coffee Social on November 21 from 1 to 3pm.

Although the Shrinking Violets' own website has yet to be updated to accommodate the three-week-old news, the event announcement on Facebook has some additional orders of business thrown in, namely, some soul-searching questions as to why last month's turnout was just a tad underwhelming. Those questions include:

Were you less than excited about the book chosen?
Is the location out of the way for you?
Is the time inconvenient?
Should we promptly update the website to reflect new information instead of neglecting it in favor of Facebook's creepy Web-within-the-Web?
Any other factors that inspired you to pass this month?

Add your two cents via e-mail or through a comment to the Violets; contact info is available on the website or event page linked above.

Upon that night, when fairies light

2010-10-31T12:01:00.001-07:00

Let's briefly forsake the local this Halloween and take an armchair journey to Scotland, where the holiday that took its name from a lazily truncated form of All Hallows Evening has centuries of rather peculiar tradition. Historically, they preferred carving faces on the noblest of all vegetables, the turnip, to the pumpkin. And they were well aware of the scientific fact that if you sit in a dimly lit room on Halloween night and gaze into a mirror while eating an apple, the reflection either your lover or a skull will appear behind you to signify either marriage or old maidenhood. It's likely, however, that they gave us that wonderful and universally adopted route to free candy, known there as guising, even if the associated catchphrase may have been a Canadian cultural contribution.

In addition to their strange Halloween rituals, the Scots also love their Robert Burns. Every January 25, they celebrate the poet, who celebrated haggis, by celebrating his poem celebrating haggis. And on Halloween they have another opportunity to celebrate Burns by reading his eponymous poem that catalogues more than a few peculiarities along the lines of turnip carving and apple prophesies.

Here's the text of Burns' poem Halloween in full along with an echt Scots reading by Ralph Riach. If that proves too daunting, you can go here to hear it read in an American accent by the "Suburban Banshee" Maureen S. O'Brien, not to be confused with Liverpudlian actress Maureen O'Brien.

Have fun this night.

Willow Springs 2011 Fiction Prize

2010-10-30T11:44:00.001-07:00

You've got until the first day of March, 2011 to cobble together a winning fiction entry for the Willow Springs Fiction Prize (not to be confused with the Spokane Prize for Short Fiction), which will net you $2000 in addition to publication in Willow Springs.

A quick rundown of the submission guidelines:

There's a $15 entry fee, which rises to $20 for international submissions. No entry fee, no eligibility.
Only one story allowed per submission.
Check or money order only, payable to Willow Springs. Hard cash is only acceptable for the bribe portion of the contest, as it's less traceable.
Typed submissions only, even if it's on an ancient Olivetti with a missing S. If you send in a handwritten MS, your entry fee will be kept as punishment for your failure to follow directions.
There is no word limit. This means you can finally submit your epic 900,000-word, six-volume fantasy novel.
No online submissions. Hard copy only. One has to throw the USPS a bone every now and again.
Give your name, address, phone number, and e-mail address, as well as a short bio in a cover letter included with your submission. I suppose you could always embellish your bio and make that your fiction entry.
When it comes to the MS itself, keep your identity hidden. Pretend you're a literary superhero.
Submit only original, unpublished work. That's tough if you only have one story in you, but them's the breaks.
Do not send an SASE. For confirmation that your work has been received, include a self-addressed, stamped postcard instead. Preferably one from an exotic location.
Manuscripts will not be returned, so send a copy, not the sole original.
Entries must be postmarked by March 1, 2011.

For a more straightforward rendering of these rules, head to the contest page (linked above).

Entries should be sent to:

The Willow Springs Fiction Prize
Willow Springs
501 N Riverpoint Blvd, Ste 425
Spokane, WA 99202

The good news is that, even if you don't win, your entry fee will go to a one-year subscription to Willow Springs, to include the issue that contains the winning entry. And the best news of all is that, if you win, word of your achievement will gradually filter its way down to the Spokane Books Blog, which will post a belated announcement of it that will link back to Willow Springs' original announcement. There's no surer sign that you've arrived.

2nd Look Books

2010-10-24T16:15:00.001-07:00

Tucked away in one of the nicer-looking strip malls on the South Hill is 2nd Look Books. So tucked away, in fact, that I would never have come across it if I hadn't needed one specific item that only Rite-Aid carried; and the only reason I was even visiting this particular out-of-the-way Rite-Aid is because the barista at The Shop happened to mention it as a less busy alternative to the other Rite-Aid branch down 29th Street.

Thus I found myself at 2nd Look Books. Camera-less, as it happens, because the detour was, like many detours, unanticipated. Which accounts for the unfortunate lack of photos to accompany this post. If I go back — and there's really no question that I will — I'll try to collect some photographic evidence and append it belatedly.

2nd Look Books has been going for 28 years. It began as three spindles of paperbacks in the back of a South Hill laundromat and transferred to the ground floor of its current location a few years later. Its popularity and increasing stock then led it to expand into the basement level, which now houses books on history, media, cooking, gardening, and more, as well as biographies and classics. The classics section also doubles as an alluringly cozy reading room. Upstairs you'll find general fiction, which includes mystery and sci-fi in addition to literary and popular fiction.

2LB operates entirely on an exchange policy, the ins and outs of which are here. Bring in your old books and receive a percentage of the current market value as store credit. The folks who keep the place in business are those who have extreme difficulty parting with their old books when adding new titles to their library and/or those who can't limit their purchases to their 2LB store credit alone.

The great thing about 2LB is that it's wholly unlike the other local bookstores I've managed to visit so far — the ramshackle but colorful Pilot Books, the charmless Auntie's at the Square, and the mundane Rae's Book Exchange — and that, I think, is an encouraging sign of the diversity of Spokane's rather modest pool of bookstores.

There's a pervasive feeling of reverence for the book here. They aren't simply items at one end of a commercial transaction. They're meant to be found, discovered, held, savored, perused, adored, mentally ingested. The shelves are tidy enough to make casual browsing and targeted hunting easy, yet there's just enough peripheral disarray to curb that cold, regimented quality that comes when all the volumes are standing, spines stiff and upright, like obedient soldiers.

It's more testament to the readerly atmosphere of 2LB than my own compulsive book-buying that I went in for a quick glimpse and walked out with two nonfiction books, Niall Ferguson's The War of the World and Daniel J. Boorstin's The Americans: The Democratic Experience, plus one novel, Europe Central by frequent Harper's contributor William T. Vollman (his Rising Up and Rising Down: Some Thoughts on Violence, Freedom and Urgent Means, incidentally, is a worthy, albeit imperfect, meditation on the subjects of its subtitle). The total for these two hardcovers and one paperback came to just over $42, which sits on the pricey side of things, but somehow didn't seem as extortionate as my shop at Rae's. Again, chalk it up to better selection — in both quantitative and qualitative terms — and atmosphere.

Directly next door there's an attractive little café called Forza – one of a small Washington-based chain — with Wi-Fi access and an enticing interior in which to spend some time with your new reading material. Time constraints pulled me away, but it gets consistently high reviews and positive comments across the Web.

I was also going to point out that, for anyone who's participating in the Shrinking Violets' December book club, 2LB has a one copy of W.G. Sebald's Rings of Saturn for sale. But in the two days since I was there, it looks like it's been scooped up. An encouraging sign.

Any Human Heart: The Telenovelization

2010-10-21T10:17:00.001-07:00

Claire Armitstead, The Guardian's literary editor, had this to say today:

which I thought was eerily coincidental given the Shrinking Violets' selected read for last month. It looks like Jim Broadbent will play LMS in his twilight years, and Kim Cattrall and Gillian Anderson will have major roles as well in the four-part adaptation of Any Human Heart.

The page for the Channel 4 (UK) miniseries is here. Unfortunately, if the past is any indication of the present and future state of affairs, it will probably be a while before it comes to US screens — if it makes it across the Atlantic at all.

Hulu, however, has been surprisingly good about picking up UK programs (or programmes, rather) such as Spaced (the director of which, incidentally, later went on to make Shaun of the Dead and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World), so the wait to see the screen version of Any Human Heart might not be as protracted as one might fear.

What's Happening!! What's Happening Now!!

2010-10-19T22:14:00.001-07:00

Earlier this evening I came across a blog called "@Spokane," which is as near a name as I can make out. There's not much in the way of content — four posts over three sporadic days since late September — but it hosts what surely must be The Mother of All Spokane Events Calendars in Downloadable Form (read on before clicking this link).

This calendar includes a what's what of happenings in the Lilac City. LGBT book groups? Check. Pub trivia? Check. The 39 Steps? Check. Buddy? It's there. Inland NW Writers Guild? That's there too.

For months I've dreamed of having all this info to hand on my desktop and mobile devices but was utterly daunted by even the vaguest idea of what the task entailed. And then I find that someone has sourced and compiled and processed and streamlined it all already. No, it's not quite as comprehensive as the Inlander's offerings, but the Inlander's events list doesn't download to my desktop and mobile calendars.

That parenthetical link above, which you weren't supposed to click on until you've read all the way down here, is an .ics file that most certainly works in Apple's iCal, Google Calendar, and Evolution on Linux, and will probably be compatible with newer versions of Microsoft Outlook. Although the temptation to download and double-click on the resulting file is there, you'll be better off subscribing to it, because you'll then be able to refresh it automatically when any changes are made.

How's that done?

To do it in iCal, launch the app, click on "Calendar" in the menubar, and select "Subscribe." Then enter the above URL (which you can copy and paste by right-clicking on the hyperlinked text I've provided above) in the field that appears in the drop-down menu.

In Google Calendar, go to "Other Calendars" on the left sidebar. Click on "Add" and select "Add by URL" from the choices that appear. Enter the URL in the field that pops up and, finally, click "Add Calendar."

Linux users, because they're running Linux, probably won't need a walk-through. But here it is anyway: If you're using Evolution on Ubuntu, choose "File" > "New" > "Calendar" and then select "On the Web" from the available choices (Google is the default on Lucid Lynx). Delete the "webcal//:" prefix and paste the URL in the appropriate field.

In Microsoft Outlook, if it even supports .ics files natively, it's probably some convoluted hidden option that you'll have to hunt through three different settings panes to find. And if you do manage to make it work, it will display incorrectly and/or bring down Outlook along with the entire Office suite. But that's just a rough guess. Windows users can feel free to make anachronistic jokes about the Mac's one-button mouse and contribute their solutions below if IE doesn't crash before they can finish two-finger typing their comment.

Now there's no excuse for not knowing exactly what's going on at any given minute in every corner of Spokane. Which may or may not be a good thing.

Shrinking Violets October Book Club Wrap-Up

2010-10-17T20:09:00.001-07:00

For years, nay, decades to come, people will speak of the October 2010 Shrinking Violets book club meetup as a hallowed, landmark event. Who knew that so many readers existed in Spokane? Who could have predicted that they would brave the city's autumnal chill and roads in mid-renovation to discuss a 500-page novel with such fervor and insight? Who would have thought that so many fulfilling tangential conversations would arise out of a debate of the merits and shortcomings of a journal-style work of fiction?

"I was amazed by the way the author deftly insinuated his protagonist into events throughout the twentieth century," said Deborah as soon as we were all seated and had coffees in front of us. "Occasionally it felt like name-dropping, but most of the time the way he allowed Logan to rub elbows with cultural or historic figures added more realism and depth to what could have smacked of artificiality."

"That's a good point," said Kim. "Did anyone forget after awhile that Logan wasn't real?"

I said I did.

"I didn't. I found him very difficult to relate to," said Phoebe.

"Why?" someone asked. "Because he was British? Because his mindset — his attitude toward women in particular — was very much a product of a bygone era?"

"Because he was a talentless snob who was overly obsessed with his libido," she answered. "If I wanted to read about a priapic old man who doesn't seem to do much of anything, I'd tuck into Hugh Hefner's autobiography." Laughs all around. Phoebe appeared to have modeled herself on Dorothy Parker.

"I suppose you'd rather challenge yourself with yet another young-woman-coming-of-age story," snickered Ted, who, in a unique turn of events, was one of several lit-minded men to attend this Shrinking Violets book club meetup. (Spokane, as it turns out, is teeming with men under 40 who would rather discuss literature than, say, drive through residential zones at fifty miles an hour in cars with windows that rattle from excessive bass.) "Isn't it a bit narcissistic and craven to only want to read stories that mirror your own life experience?"

"Isn't a bit smug and presumptuous to assume that's the only reason I might want to read those stories? Besides, if I thought there were anything to gain from five hundred repetitive pages on a self-styled writer who chases skirts and doesn't actually write much of anything, I think I could muster the courage to broaden my horizons."

"But didn't you find Boyd's prose — always disguised as Logan's jottings — to be worth the effort?" I asked her.

"No," answered Lucy instead. "I'm with Phoebe. I found LMS to be such an aimless, unlikeable, unwittingly misogynistic human being that even the most exquisite prose in the world couldn't compensate. Sure, there were some new vocabulary words to be learned, but I can do that on Free Rice and donate to the hungry while I'm at it."

"I wasn't too bothered about whether or not Logan was a nice guy or not. I was more impressed by the idea behind the book itself and its execution. I was just in awe of the effortlessness of it all — despite all the personalities and dates and events and coincidences that Boyd had to juggle," said Jim. "Plus it was fiendishly clever to have a cameo from Nat Tate too."

On that note, Madeline directed our attention to the final assessment of The Complete Review: "The case for this story, told in this form, is never convincingly made." Even those of us who had relished the novel all agreed that there was some truth in that.

"But if verisimilitude were Boyd's highest aim," someone said, "doesn't that mean he succeeded? Wouldn't that sentiment apply in some way to the lives of everyone gathered around this table?"

....

Well, no, it didn't happen like that at all. It was a bust. Only two people — Hilary and me — showed and we spent the time wondering why no one else bothered to come.

On the plus side, The Little Garden Café provided a pleasant atmosphere in which to be stood up by the 618 nominal members of the Shrinking Violet Society.

Book Price Comparison Sites

2010-10-16T23:46:00.001-07:00

I'm a sucker for a commemorative pint glass. That's why I ordered the three used books necessary to get one yesterday during Powells.com's sixteenth birthday celebration. And since you need to reach $50 to get free shipping, I tacked on a few more for good measure. Why put toward postage what you can put toward books instead?

My haul, incidentally: The Teapot Dome Scandal by Laton McCartney, two Jess Walter novels, Niall Ferguson's The Ascent of Money, Sara Gruen's Water for Elephants (for an upcoming Shrinking Violets book club read), and the out-of-print Pimp by Iceberg Slim.

Normally I'm not so profligate with my book spending. I'm the online equivalent of the folks who show up at 7:30am for a yard sale that's scheduled to start at 8am in the hopes that they'll get to nose around and won't be shooed away while everything is still being pulled out of boxes and set up on the folding table. That is to say, I like a bargain as much as I like commemorative pint glasses.

And when pint glasses aren't being used as bait, I like to hit up book price comparison sites for the book in the best shape at the best price. Here are four that I've found to be quite useful.

BooksPrice

This offers the cleanest layout of all the price comparison sites I've used and has some helpful features to boot. It highlights the lowest "sticker" price and lowest price with shipping. Next to some entries, there will be a little price tag icon — this indicates that there is a coupon that can be used at checkout, and the initial price will be struck through and the post-coupon price provided below it. You can also enter your membership details (for example, Barnes & Noble or Amazon Prime) so that its engine can take into account any perks you might enjoy from those.

Even if it stopped there, BooksPrice would be pretty much a shoe-in for best book price comparison site despite the twee little photos of smiling people propped up on books that get in the way of my shopping. But there's quite a bit more on offer. You can set price alerts for a given book, track the price via RSS, tweet the price, and shop for more than one book at a time without opening new browser windows or tabs because BooksPrice has its own tabbed interface. And there's an automated comparison feature that integrates with your Amazon wishlist. And it does CDs and DVDs too.

BookFinder

After BooksPrice, BookFinder looks pretty stodgy. With options for signed copies or first editions, the search feature (which looks like it was cooked up during the heyday of Netscape Navigator) is slightly more robust. The results page is about as old school as it gets, too, although the basic table layout provides a bit more at-a-glance information about the physical condition of the book (BooksPrice does offer this, but it requires a mouseover) and the whereabouts of the seller.

In a few random trials, I found that BooksPrice managed to deliver some lower prices than BooksFinder, which costs it another couple of points. Speaking from my own personal experience, in the recent past I haven't had much need for BooksFinder, though in its early days (ca. 1997) I used it a great deal. What you get here that you don't get with any of the other comparison engines is the personal touch. This is a site run by bibliophiles for bibliophiles, replete with topical blog entries and an international network of sister sites.

AddAll

I can recall also visiting AddAll routinely in years gone by, and I can't really pinpoint a time when I began using it less often than I once did. No, it's not as sleek at BooksPrice, and it didn't always find the lowest price in my random trials. The search is extremely rudimentary and almost always involves a second step of picking from a much longer list, many of which are duplicate entries with slightly different wording (for instance, some include translator's names or foreign-language versions). Its results table is similar to BooksPrice, though, and manages to fit quite a bit of information (e.g., shipping, ship time, tax, used/new status, etc) in the same amount of space. However, like BookFinder, its search results also included transatlantic sellers, the one area in which BooksPrice seems to come up short.

AllBookstores

Until my discovery of BooksPrice, AllBookstores was my go-to comparison site, and I still invariably check it alongside the BooksPrice results. The overall layout is easy(ish) on the eye, it loads incredibly quickly, it culls offers from international sellers, it has a standalone wishlist (which is sometimes better than Amazon wishlist integration and sometimes isn't), and the results table provides just as much information as the best of the others — including coupon codes. The only thing about AllBookstores that would make the bells and whistles of BooksPrice seem less significant is the membership feature, which, as I mentioned, takes into account your rewards and perks cards at some major retailers.

Because all the comparison sites generally hit up the same booksellers (Alibris, Abebooks, Amazon, Powell's, Half.com, Overstock, and so on) and calculate for tax and shipping (some better than others), the low prices have usually been within a few cents of one another. So, really, choosing any one of the above when book shopping online is going to save some money. But if aesthetics and features count — and they should — then AllBookstores or BooksPrice are worth a look if you haven't discovered them already.

What book price comparison sites, if any, do you use? Is there one that trumps all four that I've mentioned?

Gimme Fiction

2010-10-13T22:39:00.001-07:00

Get Lit! beat me to passing on this news, but only because I've been sidetracked, and when I haven't been sidetracked I've been procrastinating.

There are two autumn writing contests that have just been announced and may be of particular interest to Spokanites: The Inlander's 2010 Short Fiction Contest and Narrative Magazine's Fall 2010 Short Story Contest.

For The Inlander, you can submit between 800 and 1500 words of unpublished fiction on the theme of redemption, which itself is open to interpretation. All submissions must be done via e-mail (to michael@inlander.com with the subject "Fiction Contest Entry"), and the deadline is Tuesday, November 30 at 2pm. They'll be publishing up to three winners in the December 23 issue, and if the quality of the entries warrant it, more online. Their blog entry on the subject has a few more details and direction.

Narrative Magazine, on the other hand, is asking you to part with twenty of your hard-earned dollars to take part in their contest, but the rewards are more (*ahem*) pecuniary than those of The Inlander. Your work — unpublished "short shorts, short stories, essays, memoirs, photo essays, graphic stories, all forms of literary nonfiction, and excerpts from longer works of both fiction and nonfiction" (<15,000 words), according to their announcement — will be vying for a $3250 first prize, $1500 second prize, $750 third prize, or ten runner-up prizes of $100 each.

Their deadline is also November 30, but you've got until midnight PST. Incidentally, litgeeks might find it particularly cutting-edge that Narrative has a free iOS app for pocket-sized reading.

Rae's Book Exchange

2010-10-08T00:32:00.001-07:00

Since moving to Spokane, every time I've driven up N Division I've seen the sign for Rae's Book Exchange. And each time I've seen the sign, I've felt guilty for not being able to muster sufficient curiosity to stop in. But there was a quality the place was sorely lacking — a charm, an allure, a distinctiveness — and so, until that day when my growing guilt and curiosity managed to coincide with some time to kill between appointments, there was little to compel me to turn into that vast expanse of parking lot.

It's fitting, not least from a thematic standpoint, to keep in mind the old axiom that a book shouldn't be judged by its cover. The bookstore's façade isn't a pretty one: a faded sign, the letters weathered and peeling, some odd cellophane hanging in the window like it's there to keep out feeble draughts. The store itself is one tiny anonymous sliver among a seedy, sprawling, strip mall, bookended to the north by the poor man's Macy's, aka K-mart, and to the south by the really poor man's dollar store, aka the Dollar Tree.

But is it pretty on the inside?

First, some history. If I can recall without too much distortion the details related by the guarded but generally amiable assistant, it runs like this. Twenty-five years ago, the Book Exchange was opened by a local couple, and the N Division location was one of a trio of Book Exchange stores throughout Spokane. Ten years ago, the couple closed two of the shops, sold the third to another bookseller (Rae, presumably), and decamped to Montana (Butte? Billings? I'm not sure if I was told the city or have simply forgotten it), taking their surplus stock and using it to establish a new bookstore in The Treasure State. In the decade since, Rae's has pottered along and weathered all the period's economic storms, taking used books at a certain fraction of their cover price and selling them at a higher fraction of the cover price.

Fine, but is it pretty on the inside?

In a word, no.

Nor is it in any other way remarkable. The selection of books was modest and ordinary, the usual secondhand bookstore fare of crime thrillers, overhyped/overstocked trendy fiction, a revolving display of $1 Dover Thrift Editions, Kitty Kelley biographies, and old (in the sense of being faded and outdated rather than antique) versions of popular classics: Dickens, Austen, Dostoyevsky (Constance Garnett's translations, if that's any indication), and the like.

Slightly larger were the gardening and cooking sections; there would, I imagine, be plenty on offer for those interested in either of these genres. But what I found was that, for literary fiction, history, and biography, the store wasn't conducive to either of my two modes of book shopping: hunting for specific titles or aimless browsing with the hopes of a thrilling discovery. It was more like a collection of runners-up and second-bests, books that you kind of maybe halfheartedly wanted to read at one point in the distant past and might as well buy since you're here and don't want to leave empty-handed because, after all, you did make the effort to turn into the expanse of parking lot. This may be one category of books that's omitted from If on a Winter's Night a Traveller.

In the end we took home two books of children's fairy tales — one of which was bound upside down, so that the book opened from the back cover — and a well-used copy of a Bloom County anthology called Classics of Western Literature, which only duplicated the strips that were published in other collections that I already own. It was a completist's impulse buy. All told it cost $28, which, for a used bookstore, seems on the pricey side.

On the way out, a woman stopped me in the parking lot and urged me to visit the Book Traders on Garland Avenue. So many books you could barely pass through the front door, she said. Having just walked out of a bookstore, that image shouldn't have sounded as enticing as it did.

Main Market Co-Op October Book Group

2010-10-03T10:55:00.001-07:00

Once the Shrinking Violets' October book group is done and dusted, you can head down to the Main Market Co-Op for more lit-related discussion. On October 20 from 7-8:30pm, the co-op will host a book discussion, one of its four annual book club meetups.

This quarter's co-op book selection is Plenty: Eating Locally on the 100-Mile Diet (Google Books link) by Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon. As the subtitle suggests, the two authors pledged to a full year of eating food that was sourced within one hundred miles of their Vancouver, BC apartment. This type of experiment sounds suspiciously like Spokane's own Craig Goodwin's book, the forthcoming Year of Plenty, not to be confused with the year of Plenty, which, incidentally, is one of the many US titles of the book (along with Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally), because the original Canadian title, The 100-Mile Diet, clearly lacked the requisite pizzazz.

Kyle West, who sits on the co-op's board of directors, and Jennifer Hall, who helped to launch the co-op, will lead the book club discussion. You can ask them why US publishers often think it's necessary to change the title to something condescendingly upbeat to appeal to domestic audiences, even though a book as ideologically motivated as this would already seem to have a preexisting readership.

If you're interested in a bit more background on the book and the 100-mile diet, Powell's has a collection of review excerpts, the book has a a Wikipedia entry, the diet — all 100 miles of it — has its own website, and there's a Q&A with the authors at the CBC.

Admission to the discussion on October 20 is free, but to help in planning the co-op is asking those interested in attending to e-mail wholeplateinfo[at]gmail[dot]com with an RSVP by October 18. I suppose you could always get in touch via Facebook as well.

Shrinking Violets October Book Club Announced

2010-10-02T10:12:00.001-07:00

THE Shrinking Violet Society has announced the details of the October book club meeting, which will take place on October 17 from 1-3pm.

The book — William Boyd's Any Human Heart — was already known; what was still up in the air was the venue. But that's now settled: it's the Little Garden Cafe near Audubon Park (directions and further info here). Additional info is in their blog post on the subject, and the Facebook event page offers the opportunity to RSVP.

On a side note, the recent eerie hush at the SBB owes itself to that killer trio of illness, work, and a DIY project that ballooned into something twice its planned size. There's a backlog of posts that ought to see the light of day fairly soon, so stay tuned.

Year of Plenty Book Due March 2011

2010-09-22T13:38:00.001-07:00

Craig Goodwin, author of the Year of Plenty blog (and forthcoming book), posted today to announce that the MS was finished and has been passed on to the publisher, Sparkhouse Press, "an independent division of Augsburg Fortress Publishers, the publishing house of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America."

"The book," writes Goodwin, "shares the story of our experiences in 2008 consuming everything local, used, homegrown and homemade and reflects on the ways that our Christian faith intersects with those experiences." It promises to be "a good introduction to Wendell Berry," something I'm less in need of ever since YoP prompted me to pick up Berry's What Matters? Economics for a Renewed Commonwealth, a book that is presently vying with a collection of high-falutin' critical studies on The Big Lebowski for my reading attention.

In his post, Goodwin mentions that he hopes that the book "will be accessible beyond the Christian/Church market." If it maintains the style of his blog posts, it seems to me that it'll be as catholic — small "c" — as anything by Michael Pollan, Eric Schlosser, or indeed Wendell Berry. It's scheduled to appear on shelves (and perhaps Kindles and iPads too?) in March 2011.

Shrinking Violets September Book Club Wrap-Up

2010-09-20T08:10:00.001-07:00

Worried that the book club might attract participants, the Shrinking Violets' administrative staff made a last-minute venue change from the Little Garden Café to the Empyrean Coffee House. There were, however, still indications that some potential attendees would neither be shaken nor deterred, so a last-last-minute change to the Satellite Diner was effected. Word went out on a piece of notebook paper duct-taped to the door of the Empyrean.

But the Violets are a tenacious and resourceful group, and the turnout threatened to triple that of August.

A focused discussion began rather quickly after the food had been ordered; there was repeated input from most everyone present. A rough summation of the group's opinion would be that Atomic Farmgirl was a multifariously flawed memoir with some redeeming qualities if one looked really, really hard. It didn't quite measure up as activist memoir, which is how the genre to which it aspired—in subtitle, at least—loosely came to be called, but on the plus side, it did offer an extended account of life in a tiny Palouse town and was therefore valuable for its small contribution to local history.

Some examples of quality "activist memoir" (or perhaps it should be "activism memoir") that were thrown out included David James Duncan's My Story as Told by Water, Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals, and Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, the latter of which I'd personally classify more as activist reportage than activist memoir. One pertinent addition to this list that slipped my mind at the time is Stuart Christie's highly engaging Granny Made Me an Anarchist.

One suggestion for future reading was the novel Water for Elephants by Sarah Gruen. With three books already in the pipeline, it will probably be the January book selection.

Pending any last- or last-last-minute changes, next month's read is still Any Human Heart by William Boyd. Several possible locations for the meetup were put forward, but their Sunday opening hours (or lack thereof) might rule them out. So the place remains TBA.

Toward the end of the session, the departing waitress offered her thanks to the Violets for bringing an air of sophistication to the Satellite. Naturally. We done thanked the broad in return.

Hedgebrook Writers in Residence

2010-09-19T10:00:00.001-07:00

Are you female? Enjoy communal dinners in a farmhouse kitchen? Would you like your own private cottage on Whidbey Island? Do you have time in the next 80 hours to fill out an application?

The Hedgebrook Writers in Residence program is accepting applications for its 2011 retreat, which runs from February to November. The catch is that the applications have to be postmarked by September 23.

The Get Lit! blog has a few more details, as does the Hedgebrook website.

Library Books App for OS X and iPhone

2010-09-17T11:31:00.001-07:00

There's a great — and free — application for the Mac called, fittingly, Library Books. It does something wonderful: it keeps tabs on your holds and loans at your local library. It only takes a click to double-check your due dates, and you can easily jump to your account to manage holds.

Although Library Books is fully compatible with the Spokane Public Library system, it doesn't come with a built-in preset. So for those who aren't especially technically inclined, or for those who are but would rather that someone else do the trial-and-error work for them, I've come up with a step-by-step guide for installing Library Books on your Mac and setting it up to work with the Spokane Public Library.

1. Download the Library Books application for OS X. It's safe to choose the "Library Books 3 βeta" option rather than "Library Books 2," which is a version that is no longer being actively developed.

However, to use the beta version you'll need to be running the latest version of OS X (i.e., Snow Leopard, 10.6.x). If you're still running the previous version of OS X (i.e., Leopard, 10.5.x), you'll have to download Library Books 2. These instructions might or might not work for version 2; your mileage may vary.

2. Install the application as you would any other: by placing it in your Applications folder. Then double-click on the icon to launch it. Because the beta version is still in development, it uses a generic app icon instead of the more aesthetically pleasing icon from version 2.

3. Click on the book icon that has just appeared in your menubar. Select "Preferences" at the bottom of the drop-down menu.

4. Under the "Library Cards" tab, click on "+ Add Library Card".

5. Move down to the "Generic Libraries" heading and then click on "Horizon" from that submenu.

6. You'll now be presented with some fields to fill out. For "Display Name," type something like, "Spokane Public Library," or, "That place in Spokane filled with lots of books that isn't Auntie's."

7. For "Barcode," enter your library card number. For "PIN," enter your four-digit PIN code.

8. When you're done, click on the "Catalogue Settings" chiclet.

9. Now, go to your Web browser (e.g., Safari, Firefox) and log in to your Spokane Library account.

10. Look to the upper right and click on the "My List" link.

11. Once you're on the "My List" page, copy the full URL that appears in the browser's address bar.

12. Paste that URL into the "Catalogue URL" field. The date format option beneath it should be set to "Month Day Year" if it isn't already.

Finally, click the "Save" button and you're all set.

Keep in mind that Library Books has a companion iPhone app, which, since we're not always sitting with our desktops or laptops, might be more practical for the mobility-minded, but you pay $2.99 for that practicality. That cost does offset some of the time and labor that go into the free OS X version.

Let me know if any of the above is unclear, or if you encounter any problems during setup. And if anyone knows of an equivalent program for Windows, please feel free to mention it below in the comments.

What's your local source for literary recommendations?

2010-09-16T22:25:00.001-07:00

Many questions have been posed here (and here and here) on the SBB, none of which has ever received an answer.

So, out of stubbornness and curiosity, I'll throw another one out and see if it resonates with someone, anyone:

Where do you turn locally to get your literary recommendations? Friends? A book/reading group? The "staff picks" table at Auntie's? The book review o' the week in The Inlander? Or someplace I've overlooked?

Meet Tyler Tullis

2010-09-15T11:48:00.001-07:00

Jess Walter gets a disproportionate amount of coverage here — or perhaps it's proportionate to his standing in the wider literary world — but let's not forget that there are other, lesser-known writers toiling away in Spokane. The SBB was engendered in part to help introduce them to readers outside their group of Facebook friends, and if they would only shed their introversion and modesty, just briefly, and engage in a bit of self-promotion like Tyler Tullis did, it would make my self-appointed task a lot easier.

Tullis is a recent graduate of Gonzaga, where he majored in public relations and advertising (which might explain the knack for self-promotion). His day job is with local PR/marketing firm Desautel Hege Communications, but he moonlights as a partner of Wingmaster Enterprises, a small business he co-runs with his father to manage and market his growing body of work, which includes the Tales of Iairia fantasy trilogy. In his own words:

I began my writing career by independently publishing a trilogy of fantasy novels, Tales of Iairia, during my high school and college years. Each book follows a generation of heroes from the Tieloc family working to establish elemental order in a mythical fantasy world. Having written the first book when I was 16, Shards of Destiny is a traditional adventure following a young hero in a quest to find the pieces of an all powerful talisman. Trial of a Maven is the second book featuring a mercenary charged with protecting a daughter of the Tieloc family as she travels to quell a dark twin lurking inside her in time to stop a war. The final installment, Ashes of Ascension, begins with the destruction of Iairia at the hands of the Ancients that forged it, leaving a Tieloc from the third generation to reverse the damage by gathering a new group of Elemental Warriors to repel the beasts.

For his second cycle, he's shifted away from fantasy toward sci-fi with a trilogy he's called Sophie.

His synopsis of the recently published first book, the aptly titled Sophie:

Ethan Collins is an aspiring musician, a college student, and the sole witness of a meteorite impact beside the freeway late one night. Rushing from his car to inspect the downed object, he discovers a damaged craft of unfathomable technology and foreign design.

Inside he finds a beautiful young woman with no memory of who she is or where she came from.

Taking in the mysterious girl he comes to call Sophie, Ethan pieces together clues while helping her adjust to her new world. But while the two grow closer, danger from Sophie's past arrives behind her. To protect everything they hold dear, the two must find a way to recover the secret buried in Sophie's lost memories before it is too late.

The Sophie series begins with exhilarating action, burgeoning romance, and a deepening mystery. Though revealing an astonishing truth about humanity's origins, this enthralling science-fiction tale remains grounded on the relationship between a rescuer and the rescued; a college student and a guardian angel; a boy and a girl.

The entire series is driven by Ethan and Sophie's relationship but features elements of space opera, superheroism and mystery. The series is targeted at younger demographics from middle school to college level but I try to incorporate elements from several genres to make the story appeal to various age and interest groups. [...] I'm almost finished with the second book in the series called Sophie: Harbinger.

If any of the above strikes your fancy, you're in luck. Tullis will be holding a presentation and book signing at Auntie's on Wednesday, September 22 from 7pm to 9pm. In addition to the meet-and-greet session, he'll talk about his personal history, past work, future plans, and writing process.

Heads Up: Change of Venue for the Violets

2010-09-14T20:27:00.001-07:00

The Shrinking Violets have announced a last-minute change of venue for their book club meetup this coming Sunday, September 19. It will still take place from 1pm to 3pm, but it will be at the Empyrean Coffee House and not the Little Garden Café across from Audubon Park.

The reason for the change is that Empyrean is hosting the Particles on the Wall exhibition (more info here), which deals directly and indirectly with Hanford and therefore dovetails nicely with the subject matter of Atomic Farmgirl.

I'm looking forward to seeing you all there and hearing your thoughts on this dull-as-dirt, narcissistic memoir.

FoL's End of Summer Book Sale

2010-09-14T11:10:00.001-07:00

The Friends of the Library are holding their End of Summer book sale on Saturday, September 25 at Shadle Library (map). It will run from 10am to 3pm.

Keep in mind that the FoL are always open to donations as well as new volunteers. You can also support them by shopping at the permanent bookstore (open 12-4pm, dependent on available staff) at the Downtown Library branch or by becoming a member. Individual memberships are $10 annually, and family memberships are $15 annually.

Questions? Call (509) 444-5307.

Spokane Is Reading. But what? When? And why?

2010-09-13T18:41:00.001-07:00

How many books have you read this year?

That's not a rhetorical question. It was posed with the aim of eliciting a response.

Now, how many of those books have you read as part of a book club like the Shrinking Violets or Spokane Is Reading? Does participation in those activities encourage you to read more than you would otherwise, or does it pressure you to read prescribed selections and leave little time for you to take up books of your own choosing (or make you feel guilty for doing so)? If the latter, is it some consolation that the prescribed books are those you wouldn't normally have chosen?

As you tally those figures and formulate your lengthy replies, allow me to segue into the announcement that the aforementioned Spokane Is Reading will be holding its annual (really? just annual?) community read on Thursday, October 7. The book for 2010 is Timothy Egan's The Big Burn, "the unforgettable story of America's worst inferno and Teddy Roosevelt's triumphant struggle to save the American forest" (their hyperbole, not mine), which was started by Mrs. O'Leary's cow and contemporaneously documented by Samuel Pepys. For a bit more legitimate background, the Wikipedia page on the natural disaster can be found here.

There are two times and locations for the event:

During those time slots, Egan will present his work and answer questions, followed by a book signing. There are no tickets: seating is unreserved but limited.

Although I'd like to see at least biannual — as in, twice a year, not once every two years — Spokane Is Reading events, their website is valuable in that it offers an excellent "additional reading" section with direct links to the books (as well as their audio versions) in the Spokane County Library District and Spokane Public Library. In that way, Spokane Is Reading deserves kudos for encouraging reading above and beyond the one prescribed book.

Light Reading

2010-08-26T10:33:00.001-07:00

JoAnn's Fabrics over on Francis (here's the Google place page) has the OttLite 25W Hyde Park Floor Lamp for $75 (not the $90 featured on the linked product page), marked down from the original $150. I don't know what accounts for the price drop (discontinuation? sympathy during these difficult economic times?) other than that it's a "clearance" item; JoAnn's looks like the only place that sells this model.

At any rate, it's a great price for a great reading lamp. There's a whole "Reader's HD" gimmick slapped onto this OttLite model, because High Definition seems to be the "New and Improved!" unit-shifter sticker for the 21st century, but the type of illumination from the included bulb —"a precise blend of wavelengths," gushes the box blurb — really does make a difference relative to ordinary bulbs. It's a cooler, brighter, whiter light than the usual warm, yellow light, and it makes text appear much more crisp on the page.

I wouldn't say that the specialized light is particularly conducive to more casual activities such as Web surfing or chatting with company, so it's not an all-purpose standing lamp. But for a dedicated reading spot, the OttLite is ideal. I read for a solid hour yesterday evening and quite enjoyed the change and the contrast.

Of course, if the reading-specific light doesn't suit you, the bulb can always be swapped out for a different one and you've still got yourself a nice, classic-looking lamp for a reasonable price.

I'm not sure how long the sale on this item at JoAnn's is going to last. I seem to recall August 28 as the final date, which only leaves 48 hours to hotfoot it over there. If anyone picks one up, I'd be interested to hear their take on it.

Moveable Type: RiverSpeak Calls for Submissions

2010-08-24T10:32:00.001-07:00

RiverSpeak (aka RiVerSpeAK and Riverspeak) isn't just in need of a house style. It's also in need of submissions for its Kinetic visual arts tour and accompanying 'zine. The tour will be taking place on October 1 and 2, and the theme, as the title would indicate, is based around motion.

The call for writing submissions comes in addition to those for display art, illustrations, and music. RiverSpeak is accepting all forms of literature — poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and heartwarming tales of a beloved family member who fought a terrible disease and lost, which inspired you to overcome your vices/handicaps/circumstances and write a memoir — and asks only that it have something to do with kinesis.

The limit is 1500 words or two poems per person; pieces can be illustrated but it must be noted and submitted accordingly. Acceptable file types: .doc, .rtf, and .txt, but none of that newfangled .docx, which Microsoft still hasn't been able to get the general public to adopt en masse. Maybe they should team up with Facebook.

All submissions can be uploaded here. The deadline is Saturday, September 11.

Shrinking Violets News: September Meetup & More

2010-08-23T11:09:00.001-07:00

Here I sat, drumming my fingers and waiting for the announcement of the whens, whys, and wherefores of the Shrinking Violets' September book club meeting to appear in my inbox (or in their website's RSS feed) for posting on the SBB.

Then I came to the depressing realization that no one uses e-mail or visits ordinary Web pages anymore; everything takes place within the dystopian cocoon Facebook, and the details of the September meetup were posted there nearly a week ago. Good thing the SBB now has a Facebook page to be a part of all the action. Now if only I could divine anything useful from the muddle of text and pictures and comments and events that Facebook calls a "Wall."

The September read, as mentioned several times before, is Teri Hein's Atomic Farmgirl, and the event will take place at the Little Garden Cafe near Audubon Park (directions and further info here) on Sunday, September 19. It'll start at 1pm and, if last month's meeting is anything to go by, will run until about 3:30 and will involve talk of Red Lobster.

In my recent summary of the August book club meetup, I didn't want to jump the gun on the announcement of future reads, but the Violets have now made them public, so they're fair game:

October: Any Human Heart by William Boyd
November: We're Getting On by James Kaelin
December: The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald

If you're interested in adding your two cents to how the book club operates — that is, monthly meetings with a new book each month — the September meetup will be a good time to do so. RSVP on their Facebook event page.

Also, this weekend the Shrinking Violets will be focusing on creating rather than consuming. Budding authors and moonlighting poets are encouraged to head down to Coffee Social on Sunday, August 29 at 11am for the Shrinking Violets Creative Writing Group. Advice, constructive criticism, feedback, idle chatter, and writing exercises are planned; they only ask that attendees bring a laptop and/or a notebook and writing implement.

More about the event, including contact info, is here (on Facebook, where else?). Please let me know if any of the Facebook links require a login or are somehow inaccessible and I'll report any missing details here.