Bookloft Staff Picks

I’ve been pondering the difference in my experience of reading fiction & nonfiction… & it’s gotten to be (the pondering) a bit more than ponderous sometimes.  Over the past few months (& years), my most enjoyable reading, & the predominant part of it, has been in nonfiction, & the fiction I’ve read (with exceptions noted below) has been mostly disappointing, for larger & smaller reasons & suppositions.  When David Shields’ book Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (Knopf) came out last month & I picked it up due to the accompanying book buzz (buzz-buzz), a lot of what he was proposing struck a chord with what I’d been feeling lately while reading.   [The nut, essentially: "What I want to do is take the banality of nonfiction (the literalness of "facts," "truth," "reality"), turn that banality inside out, and thereby make nonfiction a staging area for the investigation of any claim of facts and truth, an extremely rich theater for investigating the most serious epistemological questions. The lyric essay is the literary form that gives the writer the best opportunity for rigorous investigation, because its theater is the world (the mind contemplating the world) and offers no consoling dream-world, no exit door."]  Some of us at The Bookloft have been casting this reading disappointment, or dilemma, or disagreement (or some other duh-word), as the contrast between fiction (the novel mostly) & nonfiction (biography, memoir, essays, history, dare-I-say poetry) & in my mind’s eye I’ve dramatized it as a sort of epic contest, like a Clash of the Titans, but of course it’s not like that at all.  (Though I’ve no doubt that Monty Python could totally embody & absurdize this duality wonderfully.)  No, like most conflicts, this is most interesting as an internal one… Let me see if I can characterize it sufficiently for you.

[I'm seeing now that this'll be a multi-part blog-post, so in an effort to reduce the bloggage to just two carry-ons (so to speak), I'm going to halve the discussion & book-blurbing into its nonfiction & fiction components & post the nonf-one first.]

When I was a child, I read as a child (when I wasn’t glommed onto the teevee), that is to say I wanted to read of thrilling adventures that at the same time had a familiar reality to me.  (The Hardy Boys, anyone?)  There were the occasional Rutabaga Stories (Carl Sandburg), but mostly it was (& I was) Lost on a Mountain in Maine (Donn Fendler), reading to do a dutiful book report for school.  As I got older & dumber, I sought out books (mostly fiction, as I was told ‘that’s where it’s at’) that provided a ripping yarn & also a cursory education about a profession or group of people. (Arthur Hailey, James Michener, anyone?)  Then I got totally warped at college: James Joyce laid a whammy on me, not to mention the trance-inducing firm of Hawthorne, Emerson, Melville & Thoreau, followed by Beckett, Pynchon & the other unusual suspects. Talk about getting turned around!?…  What I think has proven the decisive factor in my fiction/nonfiction whirl has been the habit I picked up early in college of getting & reading the Sunday New York Times—there‘s the bias for my reality-based reading—followed by a stream of periodicals at the headwaters of which is The New Yorker, then music magazines, then Bookforum & the NYRoB, then McSweeney’s & latterday The Believer,  then what-have-I…  Less & less time to read a novel, it seems.

All of this as preface (I warned you it was ponderous) to a 20-volume discussion of the merits of fiction versus nonfiction, ending with a final bloviation (aka philosophical meditation) on the worth of it all.  You should recognize & know that I’m of at least two minds about this supposed fiction/nonfiction opposition & that for the purposes of this argument/book-recommending-blog I’m going to cast it as a “What do I feel is worth my time to read?” discussion.  [Because I still love a well-written made-up story or novel---a great one gives me the fresh-air-flowers-blooming-in-the-spring-life-affirming endorphin rush---& I constantly turn encountered facts into potential fiction---putting words to them does it---I'm "really" essentially a fictioneer in nonfictional clothing. Or is that a nonfictionista in fictional clothing?]

In my previous posting I praised Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Crown) as perhaps the best book I’ve read in quite some time, mostly because she wrote an involving personal/social history with a novelist’s flair.  One felt the writer’s passion for her material & I (two) responded in a dialogue with the world she was presenting; the give-&-take was lively & expansive.  This is what I’m looking for when I open a book, & I’m sure most active readers would agree that making a world come alive in a well-written narrative is what they expect the best writers to do. It can be in a ‘nonfiction novel’ like Capote’s In Cold Blood or in a fictional ‘memoir’ like Nabokov’s Lolita.  There are greater & lesser gradations of commitment to style & substance, but words with life in them is what we want & need to respond to.  Skloot really brings her story home.

So what’s the problem?  Shields is put off by most fiction’s artifice in plot-construction & the falsifying if not outright deadening effect it has in portraying the wider world, especially in the pretense of a third-person narrator.  ’She-said-He-said-They-did’ is such pre-19th century dramaturgidity & Shields wants a more recombinant (mash-up) approach to writing that is “equal to the complexity of experience, memory, and thought” & that exists on the borders of fiction & reality, sometimes straddling them.  He says the lyric essay is (one of the places) where it’s at & I agree with him there.  One of my most fondly remembered books by a favorite short-story & novel writer is Julio Cortazar’s collection of vignettes with illustrations, Around the Day in Eighty Worlds (sadly now out-of-print): essays, stories, poems, surrealism. It’s a remarkable instance of a fictionista really coming to life in a multi-genre (mash-up?) journal-like-book, imagining fleeting worlds into existence with his blue guitar.

I’m going to demanifestofy this blog post now & (as my wife would insist) cut to the chase:  the books that most concern (consume?) me now & why.  Along with Shields’ Reality Hunger, there’s a raft of zeitgeisty books about new-media art & culture & its effect on people, some of which I’ve picked up.  Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget (Knopf) is a cyberspace visionary’s argument for a humanistic technology in the face of the individual’s grappling with society’s ‘hive mind’ groupthink.   Michiko (Kakutani) had some very favorable things to say about Lanier’s manifesto, as opposed to her take on Shields’ “deeply nihilistic” one ; access it by clicking on the second highlighted buzz-link in my first paragraph.  Also I rescued from The Bookloft’s return pile a fascinating, somewhat-similar brief for a humanistic-realistic arts project, David Edwards’ interdisciplinary Artscience: Creativity in the Post-Google Generation (Harvard), which has some nicely autobiographical scenes among the tech cultural history & seems movingly inspirational to boot.  [I've saved it for you; you can buy it or any of the worthies mentioned here now in person or online at The Bookloft.]

Reboot: now for a look at some truly jazzing-to-me new nonfiction titles just teetering on the edge of my reading table.  I’m virtually chomping at them, sniffing them before eating them whole.  Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace (Broadway Books) by David Lipsky takes us along on the book tour that Wallace made for his much-vaunted novel Infinite Jest. It takes the form of a transcription from Lipsky’s tape recorder & explodes the genre of author interview into a wonderfully faithful & compassionate (dispassionate?) portrait of the late, lamented light of American fiction.  (Although I must say that I more readily responded to DFW’s nonfiction collections,  A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again & Consider the Lobster, he is truly a monster writer of whatever stripe, & I’ve been told that his Big Book is well worth the time it takes to read.)  Top o’ the heap.  Another roundtable of writers talking about their work, The Secret Miracle: The Novelist’s Handbook (Holt), edited by Daniel Alarcon, under the auspices of the McSweeneyites’ 826 National writing centers, collects the email responses of a number of fine contemporary writers—Jonathan Lethem, Edwidge Danticat, Aleksandar Hemon, Stephen King, Haruki Murakami, Shelley Jackson among them—to the most common questions of craft posed to writers.  Some surprising & lively exchanges make for a kind of mega-Paris Review interview: an inspiring look behind-the-scenes at the typical fictioneer’s struggle.  And I would be remiss if I didn’t mention a neat little gift book (graduation, anyone?) that came my way, First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process (University of Iowa Press) by Robert D. Richardson, also the author of the sturdy intellectual biography Emerson: The Mind on Fire.

Breakfast with Socrates: An Extraordinary (Philosophical) Journey Through Your Ordinary Day (Free Press) by Robert Rowland Smith looks very tasty, with bite-sized (I might say) episodes of working with Nietzsche, working out with Foucault, reading with Barthes & winding up in bed with Simone de Beauvoir.  It’s friendly (very witty) & fits in the hands nicely too, as portable as a Kindle.  Anne Carson’s NOX (New Directions) is an epitaph for her late brother, in the very interesting form of an accordion of illustrated pages—photos, letters, word origins, regrets—folded into a box.  It is at once poetry, biography & art book: beautiful & strange.  John McPhee’s Silk Parachute (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) is a more wonderful than usual collection of this paragon New Yorker writer’s essays, as it has briefer autobiographical sketches folded into its mix of pieces on geology, lacrosse, fact-checking at The New Yorker, & it just brims with life.  It sometimes reminds me of another favorite New Yorker writer’s memoir, Roger Angell’s Let Me Finish. [By the way, the current issue (#192) of the Paris Review has a really candid & enjoyable interview with McPhee on the art of nonfiction, as well as an interview with s-fictioneer & teen-fave Ray Bradbury & six poems by the incomparable Charles Simic.  All of which can be sampled by clicking on www.theparisreview.org ...]

Wendell Berry is another multifaceted writer I admire for his essays (though his fiction & poetry are equally distinguished), & he has a new collection, Imagination in Place (Counterpoint), with essay/remembrances of Wallace Stegner & Gary Snyder, among others, & ending with a group of essays “Against the Nihil of the Age.”  Very grounded & straight-seeing stuff.  A book that perhaps gets at the nub of the problem this posting started considering, the fiction/nonfiction divide (though I see now it’s better viewed as a continuum than a duality) & Shields’ & Wallace’s etc. etc. disillusion or just plain boredom with fiction’s claim on “reality” (Nabokov says it should always rightly be in quotation marks), such a book is Richard Todd’s The Thing Itself: On the Search for Authenticity (Riverhead), which essays & cuts through the big topics of history & identity & contemporary culture, politics & spin, drugs & mind, ethics & nihilism, considering the choices that make us most authentically human.  Then there is the real wild card in this bunch, The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) by Elif Batuman.  The Roz Chast cover portraits of the eccentric, possessed scholars & grad students sets us up for “one of the funniest books ever written about Russian literature or grad school,” neither of which seem to me to be even slightly humorous, & yet they are!  Several of us at The Bookloft are contending with who will be the first to read & Staff Pick this worthy, brainy, funny essay-memoir, & I have the feeling that it won’t be me (witness the pile o’ books strewn about me here) & so what?  [Parenthetically, yesterday several of us Booklofters were attempting to answer the question, which of us was that day the most neurotic, & we really couldn't decide, we were all three such strong contenders, but I have to say I won.  It was a very Roz-Chasty moment.]

I see the home stretch coming & I haven’t even mentioned the new music books that’ve caught my eye.  What first drew my eye was the cover of The Blue Moment: Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue and the Remaking of Modern Music (Norton) by Richard Williams, depicting the upturned bell of a trumpet with a blue atomic explosion coming out of it—very cool.  The book itself plays very well with the cultural history of 50′s jazz, Miles in particular, & the modal break that helped usher in everything from free jazz to New Age music.  Eno & ECM are there too, along with Bill Evans & Sun Ra (talk about a pianistic time/space continuum), so this should prove to be entertaining & expansive cultural history.  I hope to improvise upon it as a jazz-book phenomenon on some future blog-date.   Dutch writer/philosopher Sytze Steenstra has newly published his “scrupulously researched & uncannily on-the-money” Song and Circumstance: The Work of David Byrne (Continuum).  Byrne’s assessment above lends this career overview a lot of credibility & the author really delivers some keen insights into this fascinating artist’s work. [By the way, Byrne's blog/website at davidbyrne.com is always of interest & details his travels & fascinations & projects in real detail.  A lot of his newish book Bicycle Diaries (Viking) is drawn from his online journal; it's about much more than getting around by bike in cities & has a breathless, wide-eyed tone that makes me hear his voice as I read it, & it has a deadpan-hilarious author photo to boot!  He's always struck me as being admirably, artistically adventurous & authentically off-the-wall...]   I’m eagerly anticipating (with reservations) the new David Byrne / Fatboy Slim musical theatre project (without the theatre) on Imelda Marcos, titled Here Lies Love (Nonesuch).  With a 120-page book & 2 CD’s & a DVD, it promises to be an extravaganza like Byrne used to do with Robert Wilson, but with a disco beat.  Put on your dancing shoes—sorry.  [Reality Note: April 17th is Record Store Day & I hope to put on my walking shoes & support my local, independent record store (quaint retro misnomer) by picking up the Byrne/Slim piece, as well as other notable Nonesuch releases & serendipitous discoveries, at Tune Street in Great Barrington (www.tunestreetgb.com), a fine establishment & a real audio-visual experience.]

Greil Marcus is an always-interesting music critic & cultural writer; he has a spanking-new book, When That Rough God Goes Riding: Listening to Van Morrison (Public Affairs).  This brief book is at once a Van-the-man career-overview & a close-listening to his signature songs. Marcus’s approach is especially illuminating of this somewhat-hermetic-or-inscrutable musician’s world & work; he tells me things I didn’t know about a mid-period Morrison (1979) favorite, Into the Music, “And the Healing Has Begun,” & the liberating interplay he had with his virtuoso string-player Toni Marcus.  Dense & delightful, Greil Marcus always is.  Then I finally pulled out of my stack of publisher catalogs the Continuum Spring 2010 book-list, to see that Peter Mills’ Hymns to the Silence: Inside the Words and Music of Van Morrison is newly-published as a paperback original (god bless the pbo’s) & looks in-depth & fascinating.  Continuum’s music books are continuually (consistently?) top-drawer & its 33 1/3 series of ‘short books about critically acclaimed & much-loved albums of the past 40 years’—77 strong—is a music-mad reader’s dream.  I still flash occasionally on an old Staff Pick of mine, John Niven’s novelisation of The Band’s Music from Big Pink (33 1/3), as a faithful real-life novel & the way things could have happened.  Witness that among & between last year’s Brian Eno’s Another Green World by Geeta Dayal & this year’s forthcoming Van Dyke Parks’ Song Cycle by Richard Henderson, there’s still a lot of written rumination/cultural history/imagination to plump into discreet little record books.  (Have you ever thought “I could write a book” about a favorite record, like…oh, I don’t know…The Mothers of Invention’s Uncle Meat?  Me neither.)

I must stop now & regroup (as in learning how to break up these blox of text into more shall-we-say lyrical, paragraphical essays), so that I may drop the other shoe of this one-two nonfiction-vs-fiction shuffle, which I guess I’ll call Fiction vs. Nonfiction: Clash of the Titans? Part Duh.  There I will put my spin on the so-called ‘failure of fiction,’ the triumph of marketing, & my past, current & expected future experiences of the novel & my ‘expense of spirit’ & time ‘in a waste of shame,’ to quote the Bard.  It goes without saying, it’s not as great as it seems, says your somewhat worn-out Enthusiast @ The Bookloft.

[Now I put on my real shoes & hustle on down to my local independent store to show support by buying the music & books that so consume me. You may pick up any worthies mentioned here now at The Bookloft during store hours or virtually whenever online at The Bookloft.]  E@TB

It’s really wonderful when the Enthusiast can share his excitement & admiration for a book or a subject with a colleague.  It’s especially nice when, in my role as senior bookbuyer, my intuition that a forthcoming book would meet up with an enthusiastic reader on staff prompts me to get an advance copy for that coworker, who really loves the book & tells me excitedly about it, to the point that I have to read it too & end up really liking it as well.  That’s a big payoff & it really happened big-time with Linda, our science & biography reader (& so much else) at The Bookloft & The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. (Read Linda’s Staff Picks at  Linda’s Picks.)

Rebecca Skloot’s remarkable real-life story, published last month by Crown after her decade-plus spent researching & writing the book, is an amazing, emotional & eye-opening tale of the life (& immortality) of an African-American woman whose cells were taken during her cancer treatment in the early 1950′s.  What was done with her cells & how they attained immortality (& notoriety) & what was not done for her family makes for an extraordinary reading experience.  Skloot’s close involvement with the Lacks family to tell Henrietta’s & their stories has resulted in a sensitive drama told with novelistic sweep.  At the heart of the book is Henrietta’s daughter Deborah, whose turmoil & passionate curiosity about the mother she lost as an infant makes the story so poignant & drives it suspensefully forward, inspiring ‘her reporter’ Rebecca to craft this fascinating narrative.

As Linda says in her Staff Pick card, this book is written “with compassion & a thorough sense of the scientific implications” of the experimentation done in the past on patients without their informed consent, & Skloot “has brought justice to this issue” by telling the Lacks family story with such clarity & emotional sympathy.  When I read of Henrietta’s treatment & death in the ‘colored’ ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital & her family’s subsequent bereft & drifting decades, I couldn’t help thinking that her unwitting sacrifice & the development of her cells into the predominant disease research medium & a very big business, compared with her family’s poor health care & near destitution, starkly dramatized the inequalities of race & our country’s troubled health care system.  Not that her family ever had any legal claim to benefits from the HeLa cells business, but I couldn’t help thinking of moral & social-justice implications of the family situation.  Skloot fills in the backgrounds of the controversy & the (mostly lacking) legal protections of individuals in the realms of disease treatments & research; she shows that there are no easy answers.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is the standout nonfiction title of the new year.  (Buy It Now at #mce_temp_url#.)  It’s compelling reading beyond any entertainment-expectation & it’s a book with a lot of heart that makes you think seriously of the wider world.  Also, considering the realm of books & my recent novel-reading experiences (not good), it has made me weigh the relative merits of reading fiction versus nonfiction.  As I ponder this, while reading David Shields’ Reality Hunger: A Manifesto & talking with folks at the store about what their most satisfying reading experiences have been (& what the most frustrating), I’ve set myself up for a next-blog discussion of today’s fiction vs. nonfiction books: what they promise & what they deliver, authenticity & contrivance, truth & claptrap, & the entertainment value in each.

In the meantime, you may contribute your thoughts on The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks & the fiction/nonfiction divide, perhaps about a fine novel you’ve recently read; the Enthusiast @ the Bookloft is always interested to hear your responses, come what may.

I’m psyched about local artist & friend-of-the-store Walton Ford’s new edition of his PANCHA TANTRA, which has just arrived at The Bookloft.  The publisher Taschen has done a beautiful job of replicating its awesomely huge limited-edition monograph of 2 years ago in a smaller but still breathtaking hardcover.  It’s as we say a coffee-table book (11 x 14.8 in.) of 320 pages & it’s spectacular.  Walton’s bestial tableaux practically leap off the pages & the level of detail we see in the reproductions is awe-inspiring.  I remember seeing his show a few years back at the Brooklyn Museum & being absolutely blown away by the scale & color & the sheer achievement of his watercolors. The big PANCHA TANTRA edition sits like a Buddha in my home library & I think this sibling (lighter & more affordable at $70) wears its lineage equally worthily.

Walton’s agreed to come by The Bookloft to sign some copies in 2 weeks, on Friday, Sept. 25th at 7 p.m.  If you’re in Great Barrington then, you should stop by to meet the artist & see the repros of his work in the book.  (Signed copies will be in limited supply, so if you really want one & you’re unable to get here then, I’d suggest you call us at The Bookloft–413-528-1521–to order one sent to you.)  Walton’s an affable & animated guy, so it’ll be fun to have him here doing his artist-signing-his-book thing.

[I should mention another recent Taschen book of great size & importance that also landed at The Bookloft last month, namely the Artist Edition of Norman Mailer's MOONFIRE. It's limited to 1,969 copies & sells for $1000 (the dozen copies that have an actual moonrock in them are priced astronomically higher, & of course we don't have those)--the  lunar-landing-module-sized copies we have contain a plexiglass-framed, ready-to-hang, archival-quality photographic print signed by Buzz Aldrin.  The photos are from NASA's archives & are just stunning, & Mailer's text comes from his Apollo 11 reportage Of a Fire on the Moon. This commemorates one of the more important & memorable events of 40 years ago...]

Last post I said there’s an incredible number of noteworthy books by good-to-great writers coming out in the 2nd half of 2009 & to keep a lookout here for this parade under the banner of Here Comes Everybody. Now it’s started & the grand marshall is Thomas Pynchon‘s INHERENT VICE, his stoned-soul beach-read of a detective novel, published today by Penguin Press. Before I launch into blurby verbiage, you should pause to sample the promo video from the publisher (voiced by the author?) via YouTube:

(A fellow Booklofter–thank you, Rick– told me of WIRED magazine’s interactive Google-mapped web article “The Unofficial Thomas Pynchon Guide to Los Angeles” where I clicked on ‘Pynchon’s home?’ & found the Penguin Press promo ad posted today, featuring a narrator sounding awfully like the Simpson’s Pynchon of several years ago.) Intriguing… & a really cool teaser/intro to the book, even if it’s not the author acting as his main character.

INHERENT VICE finds Thomas Pynchon back in California circa 1970. It’s not a baggy monster like his masterworks, but it has the same DNA (Do Nothing Average) as those awesome adventures & forms a loose trilogy as a hybrid of the psychedelic THE CRYING OF LOT 49 & the more sinister VINELAND. ‘Doc’ Sportello is our laid-back hippie P.I. narrator, on a breezy tour of beach shacks, surf-rockers’ mansions, Mansonized paranoia (you knew it would be here, didn’t you?) & the outer-limits hallucinations of America as it skews weirder from wonderful. The plot has shaggy-dog hairs all over it, but it ostensibly deals with the search for a missing billionaire, his shady real estate developments, dopers & detectives & assistant DA’s, with the odd resurrected surf sax player thrown in. It reads like Cheech & Chong & Chandler, & sounds like a classic Firesign Theatre record, i.e. stoned wordplay, ‘What’s Up, Doc?’ cartoony characters abound, with the heady, high-low, trademark Pynchon mix spiked with even more sex, drugs & surfin’ tunes. Enough… just dig this: Pynchon’s written a great summer beach read—Far out!

The critics are weighing in on this ‘lighter fare’ genre entertainment & I must say that I found another favorite writer Louis Menand‘s review in the August 3rd NEW YORKER to be especially illuminating about the Raymond Chandler private eye’s personal code of honor & other genre conventions & how Pynchon plays with them. Other reviewers invoke the Coen brothers’ THE BIG LEBOWSKI & that seems an entirely right-on comparison to me too. I’d be interested to hear how you view this Pynchonian ‘departure’ & how you think it compares to his other California novels.

The Enthusiast @ The Bookloft

As the Enthusiast @ The Bookloft I want to let you know about not only the books we’re most enthusiastic about, our Staff Picks, but also the cultural sounds & sights that get me revved up. I’m a music-mad bibliomaniac, so I think I’ll start the blog-sans-blague with a look at the many music books that have grabbed me recently. A plethora of styles & approaches greets us in the music/book/world: fiction, biography, critical works, art & photo books, guidebooks, book-&-CD packages, you-name-it.

One of my favorite musicians Ry Cooder published a novella/linked-story-collection last year called I, Flathead in a deluxe limited edition with his 14-song accompanying CD on Nonesuch Records: some of the best work he’s ever done (and book-&-CD packages are the best). The story is a Vonnegutsy mix of late-50′s sci-fi, with California desert drag-racers, a C&W band & extraterrestrials–funny & nostalgic. The music is Texican, 4-square country & quite tasty: check out “My Dwarf Is Getting Tired” for the primo Cooder twang.

As long as I’m touting book-&-CD mixtures, let me now praise Moondog: The Viking of 6th Avenue, the authorized biography by Robert Scotto, published by Process Books a year or two back. It’s a fascinating look at a true American original, the eccentric Viking-garbed musician/composer whose music is somehow simultaneously medieval & modern. There’s a 28-track CD that gives an overfull sample of this genius music that’s been covered by folks like Janis Joplin, Philip Glass & even a car commercial.

The American composer John Adams produced a wonderful memoir last fall, Hallelujah Junction: Composing an American Life (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). I especially liked the early chapters in which he portrayed himself trying to get established in the California avant-garde music scene of the 60′s. Nonesuch Records issued a 2-CD career retrospective also titled Hallelujah Junction that gives a nice digest of both his opera & out musics.

Another fave RC published a book-&-CD collection a few years ago, R. Crumb’s Heroes of Blues, Jazz & Country, (with Harry Abrams) that is just the quintessential musicians hommage piece. Check out the drawing & bio of Gid Tanner & His Skillet Lickers or the “Mojo Strut” recorded by the Parham-Pickett Apollo Syncopators on the accompanying Yazoo Records CD. In a certain mind-frame, as they say, it doesn’t get any better than this.

In the realm of the novel, let me give a shout-out to Arthur Phillips & his fine contemporary fable The Song Is You (Random House). I Staff-Picked it this spring after devouring it in 2 bites; it’s set in today’s ‘alternative’ music world & concerns a man’s obsession with a young up-&-coming woman singer who reminds me of Neko Case. Lots of alt-music references & funny/insightful quips (& baroquely-styled sentence-paragraphs) made this my most-recent, tastiest fictional candy.

Let me blurt about some of the rest of my current & future enthusiasms in the music book world. (Doesn’t your brain just groove to the idea of ‘future enthusiasms’?) In no particular order: The Oxford American Book of Great American Music Writing features some of that magazine’s best music-issue pieces, by Roy Blount Jr., Tom Piazza & John Jeremiah Sullivan among many others. The OA’s music issue is a definite highlight of the media-year (no CD w/the book tho).

Three Wishes: An Intimate Look at Jazz Greats (Abrams Image) by Pannonica de Koenigswarter collects the patroness’s photographs & her subjects’ responses to her ‘if you could have 3 wishes’ question. Monk, Mingus, Cannonball, they’re all here.

The best in that ‘mortal imperatives’ book series is 1,000 Recordings to Hear Before You Die by Tom Moon (Workman). It’s probably the best all-genre music guidebook I’ve seen so far & makes a wonderful gift (I’ve found) for any music-mad youngster or oldster. Helpful & insightful.

Well-researched & -written biographies that I look forward to reading: Lowside of the Road: A Life of Tom Waits by Barney Hoskyns (Broadway Books); On Some Faraway Beach: The Life & Times of Brian Eno by David Sheppard (Chicago Review); Revolution in the Air: The Songs of Bob Dylan, 1957-1973 by Clinton Heylin  (a biography of the songs, also published by the Chicago Review Press); and 2 eagerly-awaited books coming this fall, Bob Dylan: Prophet, Mystic, Poet (Scribner, December) by the Berkshire’s own Seth Rogovoy and Thelonious Monk: His Story, His Song, His Times (or another ever-changing subtitle) by Robin Kelley (finally coming out this October after being announced years ago by Free Press). You will no doubt be hearing much more of these books & subjects as they embed themselves in my precious reading time.

Continuing & ending in no particular order: the great humanist & writer Oliver Sacks,  his most recent book Musicophilia: Tales of Music & the Brain (Vintage Books), the subject of a recent PBS show; another PBS show’s source, Daniel Levitin‘s This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession (Plume) & his imminent paperback The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature (Plume); and we mustn’t forget Infinity Blues, poetry by Ryan Adams (Akashic Books), or Noise: Fiction Inspired by Sonic Youth, edited by Peter Wild (Harper), or Heavy Rotation: 20 Writers on the Albums That Changed Their Lives, edited by Peter Terzian (also Harper Perennial), or Amplified: Fiction from Leading Alt-Country, Indie Rock, Blues & Folk Musicians, edited by Julie Schaper & Steven Horwitz (Melville House), or … as you can see, there is no end to the wonderful panoply of new music books … so just let me end for now with a nod to One Square Inch of Silence: One Man’s Search for Natural Silence in a Noisy World by Gordon Hempton & John Grossmann (just out from Free Press), which I hope to have the calm & presence of mind to read & listen to (it comes w/CD) this summer. The excerpt I read in Orion magazine a few issues back was very good.

Happy reading & listening. I’ll also continue this blog with non-music musings along the lines of Here Comes Everybody, indicating that virtually everybody, that is every writer of any middling-to-high repute, seems to have a book coming out before the end of the year. So there will be very much to enthuse about indeed.

 Mark O. The Enthusiast @ The Bookloft

Looking for a great read?

The Bookloft, located in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, has been a vibrant independent bookstore in the heart of New England for 35 years. Welcome to our new Staff Picks site, an integral part of our new web initiative to reach people searching for information and opinions about some of the great books being published these days. We have a staff of avid readers and our Staff Picks section has been a popular one in the store.

We, here at The Bookloft, read what we sell and love sharing our comments about particular books with our customers. A great many of you are already familiar with our Staff Picks and some of you have even found that one individual bookseller’s choice of reading has a particular appeal for you. If you are visiting the Berkshires, we hope you’ll visit the store. We’ll be happy to talk about our favorite reads (and yours!). If you can’t make it to the store, check out our ever-expanding selection of staff book reviews online.

What does our staff like?

Owner Eric: The big guy (he’s really tall), loves good fiction, often with a bent towards the gritty side of life. His favorite authors include Richard Russo, Annie Proulx, and Peter Matthiessen. His shelves at home are filled with books about the natural world (he makes maple syrup and keeps bees on his small farm). Wendell Berry is a favorite.

Co-owner Ev: Married to the big guy above, Ev is a writer herself. She reads a lot of contemporary fiction and is especially drawn to imaginatively written novels and stories that explore the far horizons of our thoughts and the complicated depths of our hearts.

Manager Mark: The literary giant in the store – as well as our musical guru. He’s as comfortable with Dylan Thomas as he is with Bob Dylan. He devours Thomas Pynchon (the subject of his Master’s thesis) and Don DeLillo. But give him Ry Cooder’s new musical/book combo or Al Kooper’s latest bio and he’s ready to rock and roll!

Assistant Manager Kat: Our children’s book buyer. She prefers reading children’s books over “grown-up” books because she feels the emotions portrayed in children’s books are more raw, more important, and closer to real life. Her adult reading preference tends towards the sciences.

Ellen: Doesn’t like to be pigeon-holed. She reads from all genres. Her only requirement – it must be well-written or she’s not going to put her stamp of approval on it!

Ellyne: Also a writer, Ellyne’s appreciates superbly crafted fiction – the stuff that creates Man Booker Prize winners. She also has a penchant for stories and history about NYC – a place she dearly loves.

Lauren: What attracts her in books are the words – words used well with a clarity and depth that push her further into life than she’s ever been before.

Linda: Our resident naturalist is most at home in her pick-up truck, arm-deep in her garden’s soil, or walking her hound in the woods. Her preferences are books on nature, animals and plants, along with a big dollop of history. She also loves a good mystery!

Rick: Our marketing guy is an enigma (especially to himself). He reads whatever strikes his fancy at the moment – that’s why he has so many books piled up on his nightstand! His only criteria for a staff pick – it’s got to make you stop and think!

With the click of your mouse, you’ll soon be able to order any of our recommended titles!