Cookbooks and blogs have proven to have a natural affinity—a number of books have come out of foodie blogs, and even more blogs have been inspired by cookbooks in various ways. 101 Cookbooks is sort of a hybrid: part cookbook review, part cookbook in the making. It’s the work of San Francisco photographer/designer Heidi Swanson, who describes the site as a “recipe journal.”

101 Cookbooks started in early 2003 when I looked up at my huge cookbook collection one afternoon and realized that instead of exploring the different books in my collection, I was cooking the same recipes over and over. I seemed to buy a new cookbook every time I stepped out the front door—always with good intentions.

She decided to cook her way through the collection, blogging about her efforts and accompanying her posts with her own exquisite food photos. The result is one of the best blogs around—as evidenced by the numerous accolades—and in the intervening years, Swanson has published two cookbooks of her own (Cook 1.0 and Super Natural Cooking). The blog, at this point, is something of an incubator, mixing in the occasional cookbook review and/or excerpt with generous portions of whatever it is she happens to be cooking up. But whatever she may post in a given week, you’re always in for a treat.

In 1889, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court appeared. Five years after that, The Time Machine, by H.G. Wells. And ever since that wacky turn of the century, time travel has been a popular plot device in fiction, especially science fiction, allowing authors and readers alike to experience the juxtapositions of people, places and things out of normal synchronicity with each other—for social, philosophical, dramatic and often humorous effect. (As Gayla Bassham recently observed, “Wouldn’t you love to hear Ginsberg read his poem about Peter Orlovsky’s tuches to John Milton?”)

Conceptually, even classic run-of-the-mill realism defies the laws of physics, in the way a narrative arc can jump around in time—weeks, months, years and even centuries in any direction. (Hopscotch by Julio Cortazar may be the ne plus ultra example of this concept, all in one book.) Most fiction, however, tells a story from beginning to end, linearly, moving forward in time, like a clock, no technological device required. But let’s go back in time, back to 1881, to be more precise, eight years before Mark Twain’s space-time continuum-breaking work was first published, to the subject of a story by Edward Page Mitchell that appeared in the New York Sun under the title, “The Clock That Went Backward.”

Most novels include some backstory, flashbacks and intercuts—sometimes whole passages or chapters of it. And some novels move generally from the present to the past and back to the present again, especially if a prologue is used (or a first chapter that serves the same purpose). But the action, narration, and dialogue in each contingent part moves in a forward, gainful, chronological direction.

Then there are the backwards books, members of a very small club of contrarians: stories told strictly in reverse chronology. The following novels literally turn back the hands of time, if only to see what would happen.

• The Curious Case of Benjamin Button by F. Scott Fitzgerald
About a man who grows younger. Soon to be a movie starring Brad Pitt.

• The Confessions of Max Tivoli by Andrew Sean Greer
A Readerville favorite that owes a great deal of debt to its predecessor.

• Time’s Arrow by Martin Amis
The entry that gets the most value out of the device, in my opinion.

• Ray in Reverse by Daniel Wallace
Cute.

• Happy Baby by Stephen Elliott
Not cute. No, not very cute at all.

Barbara deWilde’s cover for Milk: The Surprising Story of Milk Through the Ages had me just a tiny bit unsure at first. My initial impression was that it was a slight miss—I wasn’t convinced about the curlicue typeface, and then I was unsure about how crisp that type looks. Wouldn’t it be better if the letters were, hmmm, milkier somehow ... like made out of milk? But you know what? Barbara deWilde knows a hell of a lot more about this than I do, and I finally decided it does work, and smashingly. I secretly think it’s the red cap that sends it to the head of the class, but I almost can’t take my eyes off it; it’s the blackest black and the whitest white and you can almost tell that that bottle of milk is cold to the touch. And I’m thrilled that she “grounded” the bottle on a white surface, rather than just having it float in the middle of all that black. It’s a cover even the most lactose intolerant among us can swallow.

When I started this project in January, I didn’t have a reading list. I knew, however, that I would eventually get to The Manchurian Candidate, an American political classic, and decided I would make it my August book since the climactic scene takes place at a political convention.

A blurb from the Chicago Tribune on the cover of my copy calls it “an exciting, brilliantly told story ... crammed with suspense, humor, horror, satire, sex, and intrigue.” Having now read it, I have to say that the operative word here is “crammed.” Richard Condon crams almost every style of thriller prose into his novel, from dry Time Magazine-like reportage (vintage late 1950s) to Mickey Spillane hard-boiled action, to ruminative straight fiction—resulting in a mush than had me skimming, rushing to get to the climax.

The story at its core: Raymond Shaw is the leader of a small platoon of soldiers fighting in Korea in the early 1950s. His platoon is captured by Chinese and Soviet soldiers, brainwashed, and then released—basically becoming assassin time bombs, set to go into action upon a simple signal. Shaw returns to the US and is awarded the Medal of Honor for a mission he can’t remember.

Shaw is the stepson of a senator, Johnny Iselin, but the real power in the family is wielded by Raymond’s mother, who almost always in the book is referred to as “Raymond’s mother.” She manipulates her second husband, a Joe McCarthyesque buffoon, into a position of power in the Senate, with an eye to an even higher office, while struggling to manipulate her son, who despises her. She destroys the one true relationship Raymond has with another woman, because the girl is the daughter of Iselin’s political rival. At the same time, she steers her son into an influential position at a New York City newspaper.

In the meantime, one of Shaw’s fellow soldiers, Ben Marco, comes back into Shaw’s life, initially as just a wartime buddy looking for a good time in New York City. After several debaucherous days, Marco breaks down and then moves to Washington, where he has been assigned a job with Army Intelligence. Marco suffers from a persistent nightmare: he and the other American soldiers are sitting on a stage facing a group of Chinese and Soviet officers, listening to another Chinese officer lecture them, and then one American soldier kills two others. When Marco starts receiving phone calls from another soldier suffering from similar nightmares, he starts to investigate.

The reason this book remains in print, of course, is that it is now the basis for two movies, the best of them being the 1962 version, directed by John Frankenheimer. Laurence Harvey played Raymond. Angela Lansbury, in a wickedly delicious role, played his mother. And Frank Sinatra played Marco. It was one of John F. Kennedy’s favorite movies, but because of the theme of political assassination, after Kennedy was killed, the movie was pulled out of circulation for decades. It’s not fair to write about a movie when I should be focusing on the book, but the Frankenheimer movie is a perfect example of a great movie being fashioned from a mediocre book. The best parts of the book are almost scene for scene and word for word the essence of the movie. The worst parts of the book thankfully never made it to the screen, but they weigh down the novel like a bad eggroll on a full stomach.

The term “Manchurian candidate” has come down through the years as a scare term, used by members of one political party in an attempt to describe what they fear as the true underlying motivations of the leader of another political party. In the 1950s, the feared motivation was, of course, Communism. But each generation has its own Manchurian bogeyman. The odd thing about the title is that it is somewhat of a misnomer—but then, in a book that contains such a clash of styles, it’s not surprising that, ultimately, it’s unclear which character the title refers to. In any event, as I flipped through the last pages of the book, my eyes drifted over to the DVD—a much more politically satisfying choice.

One of the common complaints about “the blogosphere” (to use my most hated coinage) is that there’s no room for good old-fashioned high-level thinking—that the very format precludes it. The best rebuttal I know to that is Sentences, the blog of Wyatt Mason, which is part of the Harper’s website. Mason is a contributing editor to Harper’s and has written for the most highly revered publications in the US and elsewhere. His literary criticism has earned him the National Book Critics Circle’s Nona Balakian Citation and a National Magazine Award. In other words, he’s a confirmed old-fashioned high-level thinker.

Sentences is a personal blog, in the sense that it’s written in the first person and is driven by his own reading and tastes, but he works in reviews, interviews, excerpts, and all sorts of musings. Fridays bring the Weekend Read, his recommendation for something else to spend some quality reading time with. What’s amazing about it all is that he has found a perfect combination of depth and length, managing to be interesting, informative and insightful within the confines of a blog post—pushing that envelope without stressing or straining it. I don’t know he does it.

When I was a freshman in high school, I made the mistake of seeking the advice of my guidance counselor—let’s call her Mrs. M. I wanted desperately to become a doctor or a veterinarian, to do a job that somehow mattered to the world. How naïve I was. I’ll never quite forget how Mrs. M bent over my records, her reading glasses near slipping from the tip of her lovely nose, her blush-red lips parted in a sympathetic smirk, and then her eyes, perfectly shadowed, gazing above those glasses. I swear they twinkled.

“I’m afraid you’re not smart enough to be a doctor,” she said.

I must have crumpled into myself then because she reached across her desk to pat my hand. “Don’t worry. We’ll have you tested to see what you can be.”

Weeks later, Mrs. M shared the results of my testing, which had confirmed her suspicions. The computer-generated analysis (we had so much faith in computers back then) also suggested I should stay far away from all literary pursuits. Far, far away. Mrs. M was a great comfort in that moment. She put her arm around me and said I would make a terrific stewardess or secretary.

But dreams never do die and my wistfulness manifests itself in my library. Come to my office and you’ll see the built-ins are overstuffed, with a case devoted to my road not taken: medical memoirs. Filled with blood and heart, each tells the story of a doctor’s greatest triumph and greatest fear.

• Singular Intimacies by Danielle Ofri
For anyone contemplating a career in medicine, or for those who simply love a good story and lush language, Dr. Ofri shares all in her account of her years as a medical student at Bellevue Hospital. Readers begin to understand what it is to know something about saving lives while not knowing quite enough, and how it feels when desperate people depend on you. We experience everything: the cacophony of various languages; the scent of anesthesia, rot, and despair. We feel the high when a life is spared, the impotence when one is lost. Dr. Ofri’s writing is intense and deeply wrought. It’s a gem of a book.

• Incidental Findings by Danielle Ofri
A follow-up to Singular Intimacies, this memoir is told with a maturity born of experience. It is a more sanguine assessment of medicine, to be sure, but Dr. Ofri is incapable of impassivity when it comes to her patients. Brutally honest, she explores what it is to dislike one’s own patient, to hold the hand of a dying woman, and what it is to become a patient at her own hospital. My only concern with this almost-series is that Dr. Ofri has become too busy with her medicine, her editorship of the Bellevue Literary Review, and her teaching to write another.

• Final Exam: A Surgeon’s Reflections on Mortality by Pauline W. Chen
Upon its publication, this book became a classic; it must have. It should be required reading for every resident, for every potential patient, ergo for each of us. How we die and how doctors help us proceed when faced with the inevitable is explored. Ultimately, Dr. Chen posits that neither doctors nor patients are willing to accept death, avoidance and denial being the more oft-chosen course. A transplant surgeon, Dr. Chen begins her story with every doctor’s first patient—the medical school cadaver—and eventually brings us along when she faces her own mortality in the form of a brain-dead donor. That chapter, where she details her eighty-third organ procurement, from a woman who strongly resembled Dr. Chen herself, may be the most magnificent piece of writing I know of.

• Complications by Atul Gawande
Dr. Gawande is a brilliant surgeon, a MacArthur fellow, staff writer for The New Yorker, brutally handsome and one of the best writers of our time. Oh, to be such a person. Though I first read Complications in 2003, the stories infiltrate my consciousness almost daily. Making a bed, my mind wanders to the last essay in the collection, “The Case of the Red Leg.” In lesser hands, this story would have been told with dramatic flair, but Dr. Gawande relays the story simply, with stunning precision, so we are left gasping with white-knuckled relief. It is a terrifying account, exemplifying the capriciousness of life. His essay collection is at once humble and deft, deeply personal yet objective too. Just as a surgeon—and a writer—should be.

• Better by Atul Gawande
The closing lines of a chapter in Dr. Gawande’s Complications are such: “… it isn’t reasonable to ask that we achieve perfection. What is reasonable is to ask that we never cease to aim for it.” That is the inspiration behind his follow-up, Better. It explores the minutiae of hand-washing in hospitals and the ramifications if medical personnel don’t become better at this practice. It’s a firsthand accounting of the uphill battle UNICEF representatives face in trying to immunize impoverished, at-risk, ill-informed communities in India. Essentially it’s a story about the simple preventative steps the medical practioners and the public can take to make care better—and the complicating factors inherent in the execution of such basic measures. It isn’t as personal a tale of a doctor’s life as I usually like, but it’s certainly an important perspective to explore.

• Last Night I Dreamed of Peace: The Diary of Dang Thuy Tram by Dang Thuy Tram
Prepare to have your heart broken. A 24-year-old doctor for the North Vietnamese during the Vietnam War, Thuy (her preferred moniker) was killed while caring for her soldier patients. Her diary was later discovered by an American G.I. charged with burning all non-relevant documents after the battle in which she died. He hid it among his things when his translator said, “Don’t burn this one ... It has fire already.” Many years later, he managed to find Thuy’s family and return a part of her to them in the form of her journal. In Thuy’s diary, we’re made to feel vulnerable with the limits of field medicine, we revisit our youth when she yearns for her unnamed lover, we sob too when she throws all pretense aside to take up the body of a young man when he dies in spite of her attempts to save him. I was so moved by Thuy, I included her as a character in my own book.

• Cancer Is a Bitch: Or, I’d Rather Be Having a Midlife Crisis by Gail Konop Baker
This is a medical memoir told from the other side of the hospital bed. A fit, suburban mom, wife of a radiologist, and a woman eager to see her words in print, Baker is diagnosed with breast cancer while writing a novel about a woman facing down a midlife crisis and a lump. Who says life doesn’t have a taste for the ironic? Though this book won’t be published until October, I was fortunate enough to read an advance copy, and it is without question one of the most powerful books I’ve read. I’ve not had the bad fortune to have had cancer (knock wood) nor have I faced down a midlife meltdown, but I found myself relating on the most primal level with Baker’s story about being a woman. She is at once frenetic, searing, vulnerable, pissed off, utterly charming and always, always honest. This will stay with me for all time.

So while I may never be a doctor in this life, I’m fortunate to have discovered others who are equally adept at saving lives and writing gorgeous accounts of the closest we humans come to omnipotence—other than being a novelist, of course.

Well this is certainly a tale of two book covers, isn’t it? I came this close to Officially Coveting the hardcover edition of Aoibheann Sweeney’s Among Other Things, I’ve Taken Up Smoking when it first came out, but other covers jumped ahead of it in the queue. But I still love it, and I regret not singling it out at the time because jeeeeezus, look what they’ve done to the poor thing for the paperback edition! It went from mysterious and clever and elegant to just plain terrible. The novel is set in Maine and New York City and is about the gulf between them, all of which gets expertly handled by the hardcover designer. The paperback designer seems to think it’s a book about, well, taking up smoking. It’s such a tired approach it almost makes me mad. Or sad. Or something. Either way, I need a cigarette myself.

At a time in the 1970s when talk at the playground was of the sex scene on page 36 of The Godfather, I was perpetually reading page 47 of The City and the Pillar by Gore Vidal. Of course, I read Mario Puzo’s wet, sticky rendering of a prenuptial encounter for comparison with the passage that had come to enthrall me. But although Vidal’s scene was vaguer, and even flirted with abstraction ("lights glittered in circles behind his closed eyelids,” “their eyes [were] shut and seeing for the first time"), it was far more realistic to me, as it involved two young men.

For months, every day after school, I would sit in a worn leather chair in the small library of my parents’ house and reread the passages about Jim Willard and Bob Ford in a book-of-the-month-club edition of the famous (infamous, to some) 1948 novel. Though I knew what happened between the teenage characters on their camping trip, I also didn’t — and so I read and reread, trying to learn how they arrived at the point of their encounter and what exactly happened. I wanted to be prepared for something as thrilling and life altering. As the protagonist, Jim Willard, realized at the moment of embrace with his friend, “This was his world and he was alive.”

A few years after I had first found and read the book, my senior-year high school English teacher gave us an assignment in which we had to assume the first person identity of someone currently in the news writing about a character that had affected their lives. My teacher was a progressive, tolerant man who didn’t wear neckties and sometimes rode his bicycle home after school with a group of students who lived in his neighborhood in Evanston, Illinois. Little could shock him. I was in the teenage phase of reckless self-revelation, testing the tolerance boundaries of friends, all in the pursuit of love at a time when it seemed as if most of my peers were attaining it.

Already, at a kind of “true confessions” session with friends one Saturday night around a rec-room pool table, I had admitted that I was “bisexual” — although both the “bi” and the “sexual” were untrue. But the sentiment that I was attracted to fellow male classmates was made understood.

In fact, I was distractedly in love with a boy named Chris who was not in the circle of my immediate friends. After I made this confession, one of my more tolerant friends said, out of genuine interest, “It’s about you and Chris — I knew it. He’s why you don’t spend as much time with us as you used to.” I let his remark stand, for it was exhilarating to have my friends, cue sticks stilled in their hands, think that Chris and I were having a physical relationship. For that to seem true meant that I was on par with some of them who had long-time steady girlfriends. So, for my English teacher’s assignment, I took on the persona of Leonard Matlovich, a prominent gay activist of the time who had been a much-decorated Vietnam veteran. The character he cited as most influential in his life was Jim Willard in The City and the Pillar.

In my voice, Matlovich became a casually talking guy for whom being gay was a natural state. Using him as my medium, I was able to talk about my love for Chris and how I schemed and planned and fantasized about having the kind of encounter Vidal’s characters had experienced. I proselytized that being gay was nothing to be ashamed of. And I insisted that being a gay male did not lead inevitably to the alcoholic, suicidal, murderous despair at the end of the novel. Indeed, Vidal’s dark rendering of the fate of gay men (of course, the term “gay” was not yet in vogue) was, I suppose, what the reading public expected. In another popular book, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex, but Were Afraid to Ask, published at the same time I had encountered Vidal’s novel, the description of gay life by author Dr. David Reuben was as judgmental as something out of the Inquisition. I remember reading in despair, from that same leather chair, his description of how gay men met and interacted almost exclusively in bowling alley restrooms! And I didn’t even like bowling.

Over time, the more I reread Vidal’s book, the more conspicuous became its flaws, which included the overly-tragic, fatalistic demise in store for homosexuals. But Vidal had written the book, his third novel, when he was only 22, and the fact that he took on the subject matter when he did makes him a visionary. In Vidal’s introduction to a 1995 emended version of the novel, he recounts an editor warning him, “You will never be forgiven for this book”; how major newspapers, including The New York Times, refused to review it; and that as late as 1975, a copy of the book was confiscated, for reasons of obscenity, from a man at an airport.

But, upon publication in 1948, it quickly became a bestseller and has remained in publication since. Vidal’s emended version features a less black ending but, much to my dismay, also includes a neutered version of the events I had read on page 47 of my edition. (Plus, it’s now on a different page.) Had I read this less sensual version of Jim and Bob’s consummation as a teenager, I wonder if the book would have been as affecting.

While I may not admire Vidal’s current style of venomous and withering social commentary, I will always admire him for giving me page 47 of The City and the Pillar. He articulated a kind of love and an expression of it that I needed at that time.

I saw a mention not long ago, on Michelle Richmond’s blog, about something called Rex Parker Does the NYT Crossword Puzzle. What’s that about, I wondered, assuming the title was not to be taken literally. But verily, what one finds at Rex Parker Does the NYT Crossword Puzzle is the extensive notes of Rex Parker — or someone on the Rex Parker team — about that day’s NYT crossword puzzle. That can’t possibly be interesting, you’re thinking, unless you’ve already been there, read it, had a good laugh, and found yourself addicted. And I don’t even do crossword puzzles! (Not since that one winter in Austin anyway ...)

They record the day and date, the relative level of difficulty, how long it took them to do it, and what the day’s theme is. Then (I’m not kidding) they go through and write out their thought process, clue by clue. Whether they got each one right or wrong, whether they knew it or guessed it, whether they cheated and Googled — the whole nine yards. And they critique the puzzle along the way. Don’t get me wrong: you’re not laughing at them for doing this; these people are entertaining. You even get ironic photo accompaniments and the occasional meta note from Rex or whomever might be editing the latest guest puzzler. It’s priceless.

Go look. You’ll see.

“Geezer” here refers to those in the latter third of life, rather than the first two-thirds of same, so to speak. These novels embrace and inform age in all its manifestations together with not a few malefactions, satisfactions, unexpected as well as predictable outcomes. Finest kind books, all of them. 

• Old Filth by Jane Gardam
A widowed expat who has spent decades in Hong Kong returns to the English countryside where he finds his neighbor is a Hong Kong compatriot who might have had an affair with his dead wife. Subversively and perfectly wonderful.

• Mistler’s Exit by Louis Begley
A dying man of wealth and station, still in pretty good shape and not all that sad, returns to Venice in a solitary pilgrimage. A gem.

• Afternoon of a Good Woman by Nina Bawden
A woman who has spent her life embodying goodness in all her roles, finds herself challenged by the thin line between good and bad. Irony and wit fairly fly off the pages.

• Staying On by Paul Scott
An elderly English couple, longtime members of the colonial community in India’s highlands, decide to “stay on” after Independence. Rich, funny and good reading.

• Corrigan by Caroline Blackwood
The Widow Blunt has very little to look forward to but the modest unpleasantries of her housekeeper and the neglect of her daughter, until an outrageous Irishman in a wheelchair rolls up to her door. Hilariously droll and mordant.

• Rules for Old Men Waiting by Peter Pouncey
An old man, sequestering himself in a cabin in the woods after his wife’s death, formulates the Commandments for Old Men Waiting. Brilliant.

• Amongst Women by John McGahern
An aging hero of the Troubles, Michael Moran is obsessed with and ruled by his past. In his decline, he is surrounded by his worried and devoted daughters, but his sons, driven away by his brutality during their childhood, are absent.

• Remnant Population by Elizabeth Moon
Never, ever underestimate the power of an old woman to fix the world. Terrific read.

• Jumping the Queue by Mary Wesley
Matilda has chosen to avoid old age but she is sidetracked in her plans by an encounter with a most unusual but charming man. Secrets abound. Social comedy at its best.

• Not that Sort of Girl by Mary Wesley
More social comedy as Rose Peel embarks on her new life as a well, happy widow. Neither marriage nor widowhood are what they’re cracked up to be in this gratifying novel.

• Paradise News by David Lodge
Old English codger is escorted on a trip to Hawaii by his ex-priest son. Both are unprepared for the various and often hysterical adventures in store.

• Quartet in Autumn by Barbara Pym
Four women who have kept pace and company as office colleagues are older now and facing retirement. What happens highlights Pym’s penchant for unsentimental storytelling — an exquisite cocktail of equal parts wit, pathos and an affection for these ordinary women, it will bring readers to their knees.

• Islands by Marta Randall
This is the story of the last geezer in the world, and it’s a doozy. Imaginative and enthralling.

Not only is this the third Coveted in a row from yours truly, but here I go again with my signature rant: pretty stock photo + white letterspaced all-caps title + scrolly stuff and/or label borders = genre formula, literary fiction division. I really am profoundly eager for us to evolve away from this, so why am I writing about Tethered for Most Coveted Covers? Look at that photo! When was the last time you saw an image so alarmingly beautiful and deliciously creepy at the same time? It’s obviously reminiscent of Eva Moves the Furniture but this is the opposite side of that coin, in several ways. Shot from below, that incredible light, the question of whether this woman is breathing, that disturbing murk in the pool. (I mean, what has gone on in that pool?) I started to say I only wish designer Whitney Cookman had done something more original with the type and ornament, but in fact I can’t imagine a more perfect complement to the image. So it’s official: Whitney Cookman wins the category. Time for everyone else to try something new.

Even when Muslims are not violently objecting to the publication of a book, we are treated as if we are and blamed anyway. It doesn’t seem quite fair to me.  When I first started writing my new book, The Muslim Next Door: the Qur’an, the Media, and that Veil Thing, my non-Muslim friends warned me to beware of death threats. “But there’s nothing offensive in my book,” I protested, “it’s just a fun-to-read introduction to Islam filled with stories and anecdotes.” That made no difference to my friends’ warnings. The sole fact of my writing about Islam was enough, they assumed, to warrant death threats.

I couldn’t really blame them, given news coverage of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses and the Danish cartoons of Muhammad. Never mind that Khomeini’s death sentence against Rushdie was unsupported by Islamic law. The fact that any Muslims had violently protested these publications (and much to my frustration, of course they had) was enough to tarnish the rest of us.

This month added another chapter to the saga. Random House was due to publish Sherry Jones’ novel about Aisha, the wife of Muhammad. But in May, Random House aborted the book’s publication and terminated their contract with Jones, stating that “publication of this book might be offensive to some in the Muslim community, but also that it could incite acts of violence by a small, radical segment.” According to The Wall Street Journal‘s Asra Nomani, one (non-Muslim) professor of Islamic history, Denise Spellberg, read an advance copy of Jones’ novel and deemed it to be an “ugly” book that turned sacred history into “soft-core pornography.”

If this description of the book is true, then when it is eventually published, I — as a Muslim — probably won’t put it on my Amazon wish list. But I won’t object to its publication, either, because I believe in freedom of expression and because nothing in Islam suffocates free speech. I have the right not to read it. I have the right not to buy it. That is enough for me and for most of the Muslims in the world.

How can I speak for most Muslims in the world? In the 2006 World Gallup Poll, a substantial majority of Muslims, more than 90% in many Muslim countries, said they would guarantee freedom of expression if they could. This statistic — coupled with the fact that there are 1.5 billion Muslims in the world and only a minuscule percentage of those resorted to violence in the cases of Rushdie and the Danish cartoons — makes me think I can.

But what particularly saddens me about the Jones episode is this: it didn’t involve “radical Islam” at all, but it’s being blamed on Muslims anyway. There haven’t been any violent protests. There haven’t been protests at all. It wasn’t Muslims who demanded that Random House abort publication of the book. Although Nomani’s article about this incident implies a mass online Muslim movement opposing the book’s publication, the only real evidence she presents is one non-Muslim professor’s suggestion that the book was offensive. Even Sherry Jones read the Muslim online discussion and wrote, “I was impressed. ... Nobody was saying it was time for a fatwa. ... It didn’t feel violent to me.” Random House didn’t “surrender to Muslim radicalism,” as one article implies, but rather made the decision after consulting with Professor Spellberg.

(Incidentally, I am touched that Spellberg is culturally sensitive and wishes to avoid offense to Muslims; it’s rare enough that anyone does.)

The Random House incident also illustrates the tendency to portray all Muslims in black-and-white terms. Consider that countless books, articles, sound bites and quotations savagely denigrate Islam and Muhammad — after all, Western writers have been denigrating the Prophet of Islam for thirteen centuries — including books in virtually every mainstream bookstore in the United States. Yet, Muslims don’t burn these books and bomb these bookstores. The overwhelming majority of these books don’t result in protests and violence.

There is nothing wrong with non-violent protests against writing or media that is irresponsibly hateful. Significantly, the Danish publisher of the Muhammad cartoons had previously refused to publish cartoons of Jesus because they were too offensive and he feared an “outcry” from his readers. Many more examples come to mind: Germany has made denial of the Holocaust illegal; in the 1990s, Britain banned “Visions of Ecstasy,” a film that depicted Christ as the object of St. Theresa’s sexual desires; Jews protested for months Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ”; African Americans, Jews, Native Americans, and other ethnic and religious groups protested for years against the derogatory and racist television portrayals of their groups — with the result that those portrayals decreased in frequency.

It is because of this recognition that freedom of speech is not absolute that 57% of Britons and 45% of French reported in the World Gallup Poll that derogatory cartoons of Muhammad should not be published. In addition, 86% in both countries said that newspapers shouldn’t be allowed to print racial slurs. The French and English believe in free speech. But they understand that it comes with responsibility.

This is really the point. With the luxury of freedom of expression — which we all want — comes both the responsibility to allow others to wield it freely and also the responsibility to not wield it ourselves in a way that destroys the multicultural understanding that’s necessary in our increasingly shrinking world. It’s about time that both the Muslim and non-Muslim sides of this equation begin to live up to this responsibility.

It seems this week that George Orwell is everywhere — inspiring Cory Doctorow, being conflated with Evelyn Waugh, even providing content for a new blog. Last Saturday, the organizers of the Orwell Prize launched Orwell Diaries. (No doubt inspired by the success of The Pepys’ Diary.) An unsigned letter of introduction states, “From 9th August 2008, you will be able to gather your own impression of Orwell’s face from reading his most strongly individual piece of writing: his diaries. ... [T]o mark the 70th anniversary of the diaries, each diary entry will be published on this blog exactly seventy years after it was written, allowing you to follow Orwell’s recuperation in Morocco, his return to the UK, and his opinions on the descent of Europe into war in real time.” Unless your name is Tina Brown (who, coincidentally, is taking the name for her blog from that Orwell twin, Evelyn Waugh), it’s no small feat to launch a blog in 2008 and have the world take notice, but this one’s been widely covered and commented on. Blake Wilson says ”you don’t need to read every word of Orwell. ... And a good place to start not reading would be” the blog. Sonja Drimmer finds the impulse worthy but the presentation uninspired. Countless others have raved. What impression will you gather? 

About two years ago, I found myself buying books about math. When my mother saw my bookshelf, she feared I was suffering a midlife crisis. After all, she remembered how, during my final semester of college, I saved my skin in a lower-level math class I was failing — a class that threatened to keep me from graduating — by answering a single question for my professor, who decided to offer me a one-shot gamble. Answer a literature-related question correctly and I would pass. Answer it incorrectly and I’d be stuck with the F I’d earned, with no possibility of mercy. “Who wrote For Whom the Bell Tolled?” he asked, leaning back somberly in his big chair. I sighed with relief and started planning my graduation party. “It’s Tolls,” I said. “And it’s Hemingway.” So it was that I passed out of academia and into the world, where math, I believed, would hold no sway over me.

Alas, fifteen years later, my bookshelf began to succumb to the weight of numbers. One of the characters in my new novel, No One You Know, had been a math prodigy at Stanford. Lila died young, at the tail end of the eighties. The book takes place in the present, and she has been dead for twenty years. Yet Lila’s absence, which continues to haunt her surviving sister, Ellie, is at the center of the book. Ellie’s search for the true story of her sister’s life is what propels the novel forward. While Ellie is as unversed in math as I am, the book could not be written without my knowing a little bit about it. And thus, the subject of my Odd Shelf, a subject that has struck in me a lifelong fear and loathing: math.

• A Mathematician’s Apology by G.H. Hardy
In clear, precise language, Hardy defends the field of pure mathematics, emphasizing the beauty of math for math’s sake. He eloquently touches on his own passion for mathematics, while stressing the fact that it is a young man’s game. Hardy’s admission that his advanced age has rendered him relatively powerless as a mathematician is stated without self-pity. A slim, sad, brilliant book.

• Fantasia Mathematica by Clifton Fadiman
An anthology of stories “and oddiments” compiled by a writer and critic who also happens to be the father of Anne Fadiman, from whose writings the term “odd shelf” is borrowed. “The stories are suitable not for mathematicians,” Fadiman writes in his introduction, “who will be bored by their naiveté, but for non-mathematicians capable of being amused or surprised by the devious connections between the imagination and what would appear to be a discipline of the utmost rigor.” Included herein are works by Aldous Huxley, H.G. Wells, Plato and Edgar Allen Poe, among others.

• The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan by Robert Kanigel
A biography of an eccentric genius from India who died at the age of thirty-two, leaving behind a labyrinthine collection of notebooks and jottings which have formed the basis of many important mathematical discoveries.

• The Math Instinct: Why You’re a Mathematical Genius (Along with Lobsters, Birds, Cats, and Dogs) by Keith Devlin
A highly readable and accessible volume, in which NPR’s “Math Guy” argues that there are two kinds of math — “the hard kind and the easy kind” — and that a basic understanding of the “easy kind” of math is innate to all citizens of the animal kingdom, including humans.

• Fermat’s Enigma: The Epic Quest to Solve the World’s Greatest Mathematical Problem by Simon Singh
The story begins with Pierre de Fermat, a 17th century Frenchman who created one of the most famous unsolved theorums in the history of mathematics: “If an integer n is greater than 2, then the equation an + bn = cn has no solutions in non-zero integers a, b, and c.” The book follows the twists and turns of “Fermat’s last theorum” all the way to a man named Andrew Wiles, who made worldwide headlines in 1995 by claiming to have found a proof. While the numbers are at times numbing, the narrative is swashbuckling.

I do like a good words-only cover, whether that means a thing like this or like this. And so I’m naturally taken with British designer-artist Daniel Eatock’s cover for his own new monograph, appropriately titled Imprint. Inspired by a fellow student’s work from his art school days — a response to an assignment to do a typographic self-portrait — he’s taken the requisite “statement of purpose” and organized it into a thumbprint, scaled to fit the front of the oversized book. It’s a smart solution, as presence of hand is a big part of the book’s concept, packaging and promotion: bound randomly into each volume is a sheet of paper on which Eatock has hand-drawn a circle (he’s on a quest to create the perfect hand-drawn circle), and he also stood in the warehouse with an ink pad and made a thumbprint on each and every spine. Get it? Every one is unique.

Is it all a bit much? Yes. In fact, there’s a lot more I won’t go into. But I admire his wish for every reader to get a book on which he’s made a mark, given his way of being in and responding to the world, and I admire how distilled the finished cover is.

In 1997, I stumbled across a glowing account by Jay Parini, in The New York Times Book Review, of a posthumous story collection that had just been published by Houghton Mifflin. The book was The Springs of Affection, by Irish-born author Maeve Brennan. Over the years I had searched used book shops in hunt of unknown or forgotten Irish and Irish-American authors, bagging treasures by the likes of Jack Dunphy, Edward McSorley and J.F. Powers, but I had never seen anything by Brennan. Intrigued by the review, I purchased a copy of what Parini described as, “a book full of small miracles presented in elegant but simple prose.” When, in 2004, Hurricane Charlie ripped across Florida, ultimately tearing off part of my roof and leaving a pile of water-logged books in his wake, I made a hasty, last-minute evacuation. The Springs of Affection was the first book I rescued off my shelves.

As a staff writer at The New Yorker for more than three decades, Maeve Brennan was well-known and widely read in the mid-20th century. During that time she was a glamorous figure on the New York literary and social scene. Revered for her beauty, wit and charm, the enchanting Maeve had countless admirers, among them Edward Albee and theater critic Thomas Quinn Curtiss. Her short stories displayed a mastery of the New Yorker house style, but soared to an even higher level when she wrote from personal experience. Her writing was so impressive that many at The New Yorker considered her the greatest living short-story writer at the time. Additionally, over a period of fifteen years, Brennan published in “The Talk of the Town” what were presented as “communications from our friend the long-winded lady,” pieces full of descriptive grace about the ordinary, everyday life of New York City:

The little side streets that live off Broadway also live in the shadow of Broadway, and there are times, looking from the windows of the hotel where I live at present, on West Forty-ninth Street, when I think that my hotel and all of us here on this street are behind the world instead of in it. ... It was a gray morning and the afternoon was gray, but tonight is very dark, and when I walked out of the hotel into the withering cold of this black-and-white night, West Forty-ninth Street seemed more than ever like an outpost, or a frontier street, or a one-street town that has been thrown together in excitement — a gold rush or an oil gush — and that will tumble into ruin when the excitement ends.

Despite the critical claim of her work, after her death scant people in the US or Ireland knew who Maeve Brennan was. So why was it that the lady who wrote the story “The Springs of Affection,” which William Maxwell called one of the great stories of the 20th century, had been totally forgotten until Christopher Carduff, an editor at Houghton Mifflin, rescued her from obscurity?

Although she treasured anonymity during her literary life, the answer might be found in what happened in her later years. She started showing signs of mental illness as early as the 1960s, while producing her best work for The New Yorker, and later suffered a nervous breakdown from which she would never recover. She let her famously groomed appearance go, and grew increasingly eccentric and paranoid. An alcoholic, she was living in seedy hotels bordering on Times Square when not setting up house in the ladies’ room at The New Yorker.  At one point she had a valuable library of Irish writers that she would pawn whenever she found herself in need of money. The books were rescued several times by a colleague before disappearing for good. For a time, it was The New Yorker that kept Brennan from destitution by paying for her food, clothing and shelter, but in the end there wasn’t anybody or anything that could save her from herself. She ended her days in abject obscurity, penniless, and died in a nursing home in 1993. It was a terrible end to what was once a glamorous life.

Although she was suffering terribly from mental illness and depression near the end of her life, and the letters she wrote to her editor and friend, William Maxwell, were dark and pessimistic, she still had the ability to write a shining piece. The last thing she wrote for The New Yorker, in 1981, recounted a childhood New Year’s Eve on Cherryfield Avenue in Dublin:

What happened that New Year’s Eve was that in the late afternoon word went around from house to house that a minute or so before midnight we would all step out into our front gardens, or even into the street, leaving the front doors open, so that the light streamed out after us, and there we would wait to hear the bells ringing in the New Year. I nearly went mad with excitement and happiness. I know I jumped for joy.

The joy that little girl failed to find in her latter years makes for one of literature’s most tragic and compelling stories.

Books by Maeve Brennan:
The Visitor (2000)
The Rose Garden (2000)
The Springs of Affection (1997)
Christmas Eve: 13 stories (1974)
In and out of Never-Never Land: 22 stories (1969)
The Long-Winded Lady: Notes from the New Yorker (1969)

See also:
Maeve Brennan: Homesick at the New Yorker by Angela Bourke

When I started my year-long quest to read 12 novels about politics, stretching out over the past 12 decades, I didn’t realize how difficult the task would be. Part of it was my fault — I was only planning to read novels I hadn’t read before, which ruled out a number of classics. (All The King’s Men), (Advise and Consent, The Last Hurrah.)

The American novel on politics is a distinct creature from the American political novel. There are a lot of options when it comes to political novels because, as the ’60s taught us, “the personal is the political.” You can google “American political novel” and get hits on almost anyone who has written in the American vernacular for the last 232 years — from James Fenimore Cooper to Edith Wharton to Ernest Hemingway to Judy Blume to Stephen King. (OK, maybe not King.) The American novel on politics, however, is a rarer and more recent breed. It’s difficult to find an American novel about campaigns before 1946’s All the King’s Men. In recent years, however, they’ve become abundant.

When looking for a novel to read for July, I went to the library and typed “political campaign, fiction” into the online catalog. I got more than 20 hits — and every novel listed was published this decade. (You’ll find the full list below.) I looked over a few of them and, while many looked intriguing, I decided on the one book that was most unlike the others: Joan Bauer’s Newberry Award-winning Hope Was Here. Its distinguishing feature was that is was the only YA novel in the bunch. The label proved unimportant, as I was soon engrossed in this story of politics at the most grassroots level.

Hope Yancey, age 16, and her aunt Addie move from Brooklyn to the small Wisconsin town of Mulhoney, where Addie is going to manage Welcome Stairs, the town’s diner. Addie has raised Hope since Hope was a baby, Hope’s mother having decided she had better things to do than be a mom. Hope, who narrates the tale, says, “My mom, Deena, left me with two things. One I kept — her gift of waitressing; the other I threw away — the name she gave me at birth which, I swear, was Tulip.” Addie has big plans to bring her “revolutionary comfort food” to dairy land. Hope is convinced she will be miserable so far away from skyscrapers, dim sum, street bands and museums.

Mulhoney is in the middle of a mayoral election, although it’s not much of an election — Eli Millstone is running unopposed for his third term. That is, until G.T Stoop, owner of the Welcome Stairs, decides to enter the race. Stoop has a few things going against him: he’s never run for political office, he has little money to campaign on, and he is undergoing treatment for leukemia.

Stoop’s campaign is simple: he wants the Real Fresh Dairy, the biggest employer in town and his opponent’s biggest financial supporter, to pay all of its unpaid back taxes. His biggest obstacle: convincing voters that a man dealing with cancer has the stamina to run for office.

Hope watches the campaign unfold, mostly from the vantage point of a waitress at the Welcome stairs. Stoop gathers a rag-tag team of campaign workers, mainly Hope and some friends, who make up for being too young to vote with their relentless enthusiasm for campaigning. Hope also steps cautiously toward a first romance with Braverman (the line chef), endures a surprise visit from her birth mother, and nurtures a neverending hope that her father will come back into her life.

The book soothes the heart of the political junkie/novel reader, even as it stokes the reader’s appetite with references to the foods that Addie introduces to the townspeople: tomato and leek breakfast pizzas, homemade corned-beef hash, maple cornbread, a potato, onion and herb frittata (renamed an “egg casserole” by Stoop to appease the locals), “life changing” hash browns, butterscotch cream pie. I was ready to drive to Wisconsin to find the Welcome Stairs diner before I finished reading.

In the end, the politics of Mulhoney turn out to be just as dirty as the politics of Chicago or Florida or Washington, DC. The one thing the town has for sure at the end, however, is Hope.

Twenty or So Other Novels About American Politics From the 21st Century
Owen Noone and the Marauder by Douglas Cowie
Thirteen Albatrosses: or, Falling Off the Mountain by Donald Harington
Put a Lid On It by Donald E. Westlake
Shadow of Death by William G. Tapply
Black Sunshine by S.V. Date
Up in Smoke by Charlene Weir
Flash by L.E. Modesitt, Jr.
Political Animal by David Mizner
Hartsburg, USA by David Mizner
Any Place I Hang My Hat by Susan Isaacs
Wonderdog by Inman Majors
The Power Broker by Stephen Frey
The Librarian by Larry Beinhart
The President’s Assassin by Brian Haig
Strawman’s Hammock by Darryl Wimberley
The Summer We Got Saved by Pat Cunningham Devoto
Dog Days by Ana Marie Cox
Pretty Girl Gone by David Housewright
Deja Demon: The Days and Nights of a Demon-Hunting Soccer Mom by Julie Kenner
National Nancys by Fred Hunter
Kissing Babies at the Piggly Wiggly by Robert Dalby
Dead Heat by Joel C. Rosenberg

For this installment we take a slightly different view of the phrase “blog of the week.” I think it’s safe to say that the book blog that saw the biggest bump in notoriety this week was Booksaga. What was it that brought sudden exposure to a fledgling, mild-mannered blog about “adventures in the book trade”? Well, sex and scandal, of course. Perry Falwell is a bookseller in Georgia who makes a sort of half-hearted attempt to keep his details private: He buys up books to sell online and some of his sources might frown on that. (Or, conversely, want to get in on the action.) He recently bought a cache of books from a widow, more as a kindness to her than anything else, only to find later that the husband had converted many of them to book boxes, in which he had stored pornographic Polaroids. Falwell blogged about it (complete with a photo of the find), uber-blogger Jason Kottke linked to it (as did countless others, including a link in our forum) and Falwell found himself with an instant audience of gawkers. Those who lingered long enough to peruse the rest of the blog will have found (not quite two dozen) faintly-genteel posts about life combing thrift stores and library sales, which could be either charming or deathly dull, but Falwell takes a bemused and writerly approach, and his sense of humor can be seen instantly in his categories list. It may well prove worth sticking around for.

When this cover popped up in our Judging a Book discussion last week, I’m pretty sure I let out a little gasp. Without a clue what it was about, I was immediately seduced by the orderly rows of patterned scrap, arranged on a piece of notebook paper and accented with a little bird. So pretty. As it turns out, I’m coveting it for more reasons than just Jill Shimabukuro’s lovely design. “I am a collector, something a lot of people can understand. My being a collector of nothing will require explanation,” writes William Davies King in the opening passage of Collections of Nothing. What he collects is more everything than nothing, but the sorts of things many people would think of as nothing (or certainly nothing collectible). The book is described as “part memoir, part reflection on the mania of acquisition” on the publisher’s website, where you’ll also find an excerpt and an essay by the author. If the book is half as good as it promises — or half as good as its cover — I’ll be thrilled.

Over the last few months, as I’ve looked at 120 years of novels about American politics, I’ve been surprised how often American writers have filtered their experiences of the political process into dystopian novels. The combination of a charismatic politician, shadowy advisers and a rabid collection of supporters are often grist for a plot that ultimately points to the downfall of the American way.

Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here (1935) is one of the best known of these types of novels. It chronicles the rise to the presidency of Sen. Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip, a folksy politician from a western state with a devoted following of bitter, unemployed or underemployed men. Although Windrip’s ascendancy shares similarities with what was happening in Italy and Germany in the 1930s, Lewis was likely also thinking of homegrown politicians like Louisiana senator Huey Long when he wrote the book. 

Windrip defeats Franklin Delano Roosevelt at the 1936 Democratic convention, then defeats the Republican candidate and several third party candidates — including Roosevelt — to win the election in November. His rise to power is the result of pitch-perfect behind-the-scenes maneuvering by his confidante, ghostwriter and chief strategist, Lee Sarason; the support of a widely popular radio preacher, the Rev. Paul Peter Prang; and the unwavering dedication of thousands of disaffected men — the League of Forgotten Men.

Windrip mobilizes this League by capitalizing on the great economic trauma that many faced at the height of the Great Depression. His platform includes nationalizing all banks and labor unions, freedom of religion (except for atheists and Jews), a guaranteed national income (but with a constantly shifting dollar amount) along with a cap on total net worth of any individual, a military that is equal in size to any other nation’s, a sharp curtailing of the rights of both women and minorities, limits on acceptable political speech, and a subjection of the power of Congress to the power of the president. 

The novel is seen primarily from the viewpoint of Doremus Jessup, editor and publisher of a small-town Vermont newspaper. Doremus looks at the election and early days of the Windrip administration with the expected detached bemusement of a journalist. “He simply did not believe that this comic tyranny could endure.” But endure it does, as Windrip and his League, transformed into white-shirted “Minute Men,” use simple terror to get the populace to conform, and establish concentration camps as the final destination of anyone who doesn’t conform. (There also is an odd and understated gay subtext to the behind-the-throne power of Lee Sarason and the Minute Men which, in Lewis’ eyes, adds an extra layer of menace to their abuse of power.)

As the Windrip administration starts ruthlessly to carry out its agenda, Doremus tries to remain a dispassionate observer. At first he is reluctant to participate in any organized protest, but he becomes radicalized when he himself is imprisoned after writing an editorial critical of the new administration and is forced to give up control of his newspaper. In his jail cell, he realizes that his “own timid soul and drowsy mind” — and the timidity and drowsiness of so many others — is responsible for this new American dictatorship.

Freed from prison but now editing his newspaper only under the watchful eye of one of many of Windrip’s minions, Doremus still holds to his beliefs that reason will eventually triumph over despotism. He is enticed to join the Communists in attempting to overthrow the Windrip regime, but he sees little difference in the ideas and tactics of the elected fascist regime and the Communist underground. As more and more friends and acquaintances are either brutally murdered by the state or swept into concentration camps, however, Doremus sees no choice but to finally join a different underground movement (run by the ex-Republican candidate for president, now living in exile in Canada). Eventually, Doremus himself is arrested and sent to a concentration camp.

Amidst the sudden loss of livelihood and liberty, after being unjustly arrested and tried, after weeks of torture, Doremus still holds to his ideals — that “the Liberal, the Tolerant, might in the long run preserve some of the arts of civilization, no matter which brand of tyranny should finally dominate the world.”

In his novel, Lewis is concerned about what happens when a candidate creates an emotional response with voters, tapping into their fears and disaffection, and, yes, even raising their hopes. Lewis writes that the “conspicuous fault” of Windrip’s opposition in the 1936 election “was that it represented integrity and reason, in a year when the electorate hungered for frisky emotions ... all the primitive sensations which they thought they found in ... Buzz Windrip.”

It Can’t Happen Here has gone in and out of print over the last 70 years. The writers of the introductions to each new edition of the book can’t help but look at it through the prism of their own decade’s politics. The introduction to the 1993 edition, for example, compares Windrip’s folksiness and the rabid support of the League of Forgotten Men to events in the recently ended Reagan administration. The introduction to the 2005 edition concludes that in the post-9/11 world, discerning readers of all political persuasions will find the book a “revealing and disturbing read.”

As an experiment, I Googled “It Can’t Happen Here” and “Obama” — and discovered more than a few blogs and articles that raised concerns that the Obama campaign, with its message of hope and thousands of devoted supporters who sometimes refer to him in messianic terms, was the next incarnation of Buzz Windrip. Um, no. I don’t think so. There’s no denying, however, that Lewis has created a chilling, and obviously enduring, image of a US voting itself into dictatorship. It’s not likely to happen here, especially if we not only vote but also constantly remind our elected officials who’s really in charge.

It’s mid-Monday morning, the 23rd, as I’m typing this. It’s been all of ten minutes since I stumbled into a blog called if:book and already I’m so rapt I can hardly stand to wait until Saturday to post this. “A Project of The Institute for the Future of the Book,” a literary think tank, the blog has been “the daily record of [their] inquiry into a wide range of topics, all in some way fitting into the techno-cultural puzzle that is the future of reading and writing.” In other words, it’s about the intersection of books and technology. That can mean following issues like fair use, digitization, archiving and the aggregation of metadata, or it can mean showcasing remarkable and amusing things like this, or even inventing new technologies for reading and remarking on books. They’re currently asking some existential questions about the blog itself and apparently working on a redesign, but whatever happens going forward, it’s easy to imagine spending hours and hours with just the existing archives. 

I enjoy reading about gardens nearly as much as I enjoy gardening; which is to say, immensely. I’m as big a voyeur about gardens as I am about homes, so I love a big, glossy picture book. (Bonus points if it has multiple shots per garden.) But I am also drawn to essay collections, memoirs, how-to, you name it. Though gardens are year-round entities where I live, the first week of summer is high garden time, and, as such, a prime opportunity to share some of my favorites from a very long shelf.

• Old Herbaceous: A Novel of the Garden by Reginald Arkell
A bagatelle, but worth the few hours it takes to read simply because how often do you run across a novel with a professional gardener as its protagonist?

• The Garden Primer by Barbara Damrosch
Largely a reference book and almost entirely about vegetable gardening. Damrosch is a good teacher. (Mine’s the 1988 edition!)

• We Made a Garden by Margery Fish
I find a first-hand account of a garden like this more enjoyable and ultimately far more helpful than most how-to books. An extremely charming book.

• French Dirt: The Story of a Garden in the South of France by Richard Goodman
Another memoir of a garden, this one in rural France. It was the first such book I read, I believe, in 1993, so it holds a special place.

• This Organic Life: Confessions of a Suburban Homesteader by Joan Dye Gussow
A remarkably thought-provoking, personal tale about the making of a vegetable garden — and, even more so, about rethinking the way we eat. A precursor to the many books now out on the subject, but the best of its kind.

• The Jewel Box Garden by Thomas Hobbs
Hobbs has great taste in gardens and is an opinionated tour guide (the best kind).

• A Book of Gardening: Ideas Methods Designs by Penelope Hobhouse
Rather dry, but lots of good info. If some of these books are ice cream, this one is fiber. (Hobhouse is a legend and I’ve enjoyed her elsewhere.)

• Sharp Gardening by Christopher Holliday
I like a crazy, dense, spiky, Mediterranean garden, and that’s what this book is packed with from cover to cover — photos and plant info alike. I’d have happily paid the cover price just for the pics of the last garden included.

• In a Mexican Garden by Gina Hyams
I don’t imagine I’ll ever have a courtyard, no matter how much I might want one, but they feature prominently in this lovely collection of Mexican gardens. A girl can dream.

• Great Gardens in Small Spaces by Melba Levick
Kind of a mixed bag of gardens, but lots of them. One of them literally changed my idea of what a “garden” even is. Plus it includes many of my favorite gardens.

• Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education by Michael Pollan
A wildly informative book — on everything from the history of the suburban lawn to the origins of certain roses. The only thing that would have made it better is if he’d actually shared more about the specific decisions he made in his own garden. I want to know more!

• A Garden Story by Leon Whiteson
Whiteson’s story of recovering his own backyard (when he was meant to writing) was hugely motivational for me when we first got our own run-down patch of dirt to tend. I’ve read it a couple of times but it’s been a few years — time for a reread.

• The Sunset Western Garden Book
An invaluable reference and starting point for plant info.

Publishing my first novel several years ago meant arranging in-store appearances, printing up postcards and compiling mailing lists, of the snail-mail variety — with the occasional dip into online promotion. With my new novel, The Wednesday Sisters, it’s more about the book trailer.

If you don’t know what a book trailer is, think movie trailer for the printed word: one to three minutes of video meant to find its way around the Internet, enticing people to rush out and buy the book. Like many authors, my initial reaction was Of course! It’ll go viral, and the next thing you know I’ll be seeing my name in The New York Times. The truth, though, is as complicated as the truth tends to be.

I did some poking around to see what a book trailer (or book video) was, exactly, before I put any money on the line. It turns out many are little more than blurbs strung together to a stock-music beat. Some include footage of authors reading or speaking — sometimes with the benefit of camera-ready makeup, flattering lighting and a professional cameraman, but often without those benefits. Higher-end versions might feature original footage, paid actors and swanky video techniques, trying to mimic their more sophisticated movie-trailer cousins, although generally coming up short.

One big difference between movie trailers and book videos is the starting point: Movie-trailer producers start with hours of footage of professional actors, along with soundtracks and film editors who can splice it all together professionally. A book-trailer producer starts with, well, not much or nothing at all. His or her idea of the book is often gained from a short synopsis rather than an actual read; it takes hours to read a book, and time is money. In an industry where a single New York Times Book Review ad equates to pulling out the stops, it’s hard to spend money just for the read. Then there is the issue of distribution: Most movie trailers are developed with expensive big-screen real estate and popcorn-munching movie-goers (a captive audience) in mind. Book trailers must rely on YouTube, publisher and author websites, and a smattering of other destinations at which one can post video.

The great hope for book trailers is, in fact, that original reaction of mine: that a trailer will go viral and cause sales to soar. However, that requires that the trailer keep watchers interested every second — that little close-the-window box at the top of the screen looms large in today’s impatient world — and leave them delighted at the end.

My publisher, Ballantine Books, arranged for a beautifully done video-interview of me, to use in pitching for media coverage, but no one imagines that footage of me talking and reading — even made-up and well-lit, with interesting images tossed into the mix — will spread from inbox to inbox like virtual wildfire. And yet, after taking a look at what else was out there in book videos, I found it hard imagine the additional benefit of a high-cost trailer, or that it was worth a toss of the dice. Of those I saw, there were none I would pass along — although, admittedly, I’m not as pass-alongish as some.

Still, it was hard to just ignore this new rage. And I happen to have an enormously talented stepdaughter, Ashley Clayton, who gets paid a healthy wage to edit video, and who acts, and whom I’ve seen in action creating and directing plays on considerably less than a shoestring. She’d never done a book trailer — or even heard the term — but after a little arm-twisting over the kitchen table one evening, she agreed to give it a try. She read The Wednesday Sisters from cover to cover, and so she had the spirit of the novel firmly in mind when she set out.

Still, to say I was bowled over by what she created is the understatement of the year.

I sent the trailer off to my agent without so much as a whisper about who’d done it, not wanting anyone to dismiss it before viewing it. My agent was so thrilled she asked me to send it to the folks at Ballantine, and before long we were having a conference call to brainstorm how we might use it and what changes might be made to enhance its effectiveness. The result of that conversation was a somewhat shorter trailer — along with an endless refrain of “Your stepdaughter did this? Wow!” after I disclosed, finally, who the trailer’s producer, writer, actor, film editor, camera man and best boy was.

Will it go viral, spiriting us both onto Oprah’s stage? Who knows. It’s definitely a gamble. But it’s made a wonderful shared experience in any event, our two separate works of art making their way together out into the world: my novel and Ashley Clayton’s brilliant presentation of its spirit in internet-friendly video. Which is, actually, the heart of the Wednesday Sisters story we are each telling in our own medium: friends supporting each other as we dip our little piggy toes into the creative world.

John Gall’s cover for Shelley Jackson’s The Melancholy of Anatomy presses a lot of my personal design buttons: medical illustration, images turned sideways, type on a label, and a combination of a sans-serif typeface and a serif one. What I like best about it is that there’s a whole lot of possible creepy going on (the disembodied eyeballs on the spine would probably be a dealbreaker for a lot of people) but Gall somehow reins it all in so that it looks more like a museum display than a horror show. I think it’s the label that does it, and the slightly modern sans-serif typeface used for Stories and the author’s name. I would have been tempted to slide that author name over to line up with the right end of Stories, but Gall keeps it modern and throws off your expectation by aligning those two elements differently, centering Jackson’s name beneath the label. It’s an unusual, subtle choice, and it pays off. The whole package is a winner.

Redemption Falls is the second installment in Joseph O’Connor’s planned trilogy of the Irish immigrant experience in 19th-century America. It’s the follow-up to the hugely successful and critically acclaimed Star of the Sea. At times heartbreaking, bawdy, cruel and exciting, and told in lush prose with authentic, unforgettable voices, it is no Far and Away cliché but a rich and deeply rewarding reading experience. In conjunction with its US paperback release this month, the author generously participated in the following email exchange.

First off, welcome to Readerville, and thank you for taking the time. Before we get to Redemption Falls, I’d like to talk about your youthful Sandinista experience, if you don’t mind. I find this part of your background fascinating — not only because as a nineteen-year-old, I lived in the Mexican hills outside of Cholula among a colorful community of international students and Vietnam Vets, but also because of its topicality. Could you talk a little bit about that experience, and whether it has informed your perception of today’s current affairs?

On a Sunday morning in February 1985 my mother was killed in a car accident. I was twenty-one that year, a student at university.  Her departure, so sudden, so violent in its nature, meant all kinds of things could never happen now. Our family had not been happy; my parents’ marriage had ended some years previously. Her death left unanswered questions. 

My student friends and I were interested in politics, especially in the situation in Latin America. We would congregate in the university bar on a Friday night and talk about Nicaragua, where the Sandinista Revolution had occurred in 1979. It was said to be a new kind of third-world society. Democracy had been introduced, some form of it anyway. There had been no executions; torture had been banned. The revolutionaries were teaching people to read and write. They didn’t get hung up on ideology.

My friends and I would drink and talk about these things. We were lefty radicals, but in a rather undergraduate way. “Free Nelson Mandela” was written on our t-shirts, but “Fight for the Right to Party” was written on our hearts. Late in the evening, with a few beers on board, and The Clash and The Specials blasting from the jukebox, we would tell each other we would visit Nicaragua one day. We knew, at least I felt so, that we had no intention of doing such a thing. It was only something you said in the pub.

And then my mother died. And everything changed. Grief comes to us in many forms, some of them strange. The way it affected me was that I wanted to go away. There was help on offer from family and friends. I was lucky to be offered it, and I was deeply grateful. But for some reason I wanted to be by myself, a haven where I could be totally alone.

That was how I ended up, in the summer of 1985, flying to Nicaragua by myself. I spoke no Spanish, was totally unprepared, knew nobody at all in the whole troubled country, which was at that time in the grip of a terrible civil war in which many thousands would be injured or killed. I had not even had the required inoculations. (Wuss that I was, I was afraid of injections.) These were administered to me on the plane by the Swedish doctor I happened to be sitting beside, and who warned me, if I entered Nicaragua without having had them, I would find myself in intensive care “or the morgue” within a week.

When I think about it these days, I am absolutely astounded that I went. I wouldn’t do it now without a personal physician, a bodyguard, an interpreter and a wallet full of credit cards. But you do foolish things when you’re twenty-one. It’s amazing that any of us survives youth.

I found a room with a family in the capital, Managua, a city that been wrecked by an earthquake in 1972 and never rebuilt by the dictatorship. Only the Cathedral and the Bank of America had survived: proof, some said, of whose side God is on.  But the people were extraordinarily welcoming and warm. They were curious, intelligent and tough. I would often go into a supermarket and see no food at all — the United States Government was blockading the country — but somehow they contended with appalling circumstances, rarely losing compassion or humour. “Aero Nica” was the name of their inefficient national airline. Its nickname was ‘Aero Nunca’: Air Never.

I travelled all over the country, wrote a couple of long articles. These were published back home, which encouraged me greatly. I was realizing I wanted to be a novelist one day. My first proper attempts at fiction were written in Nicaragua. The beauty of the landscape was stunning and heartbreaking. You’d see volcanoes, banana plantations, enormous lakes. Once-glorious haciendas, now burnt to their skeletons; tiny cardboard hovels adorned with portraits of Che Guevara. Everywhere there was music: the joyous strut of salsa. Ragged children playing baseball by the headlights of Jeeps. Death was all around: the newspapers were full of it. But somehow the people refused to let it win. 

I came home a changed person. It was the summer I grew up. I learned all sorts of things, some little, some big. Rum gives you the worst hangover you are ever going to get. Spanish, not English, is the most expressive language for poetry, and also, bizarrely enough, for cursing. Nicaraguan girls are the loveliest in all the world. Politics is not about spouting slogans, nor even a matter of right and left, but ultimately a question of right and wrong. And I learnt that the only things really worth achieving are accomplished when people combine their efforts, to make things better for one another. It was half my life ago, and I’m sure I was naïve. But the main thing I learned, I try to remember once a day. If you have enough to eat, and a safe place to sleep, and nobody wants to kill you or take you from your family, you are among the most fortunate people on the face of the earth, and you should never forget your sheer luck. 

The Readerville community is comprised of a bunch of savvy writers and readers. While most are probably familiar with Star of the Sea and Redemption Falls, I don’t think your earlier works are as well known. If I’m not mistaken, Desperadoes was a direct result of your Nicaraguan experience. Would you describe that book for our readers?

Sure. It’s the story of two estranged middle-aged Irish parents who visit Nicaragua in 1985 to collect the body of their teenage son who has been reported accidentally killed in the Civil War. But when they get to Managua and to the mortuary, they find the body is not him. So then the real journey begins. The book hasn’t ever been published in the United States, but maybe it will be some time.

I’ve read that you cite J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye as an e