Bookloft Staff Picks

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!