“World War Z,” by Max Brooks. Read by a full cast. Abridged, 6 hours. Random House Audio. $29.95.
Author: Michael Janairo
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New York State Writers Institute Spring Schedule
The New York State Writers Institute at the University at Albany announces its Spring 2007 schedule of visiting writers. The big names include Richard Ford, Leslie Marmon Silko, Elizabeth Kolbert, Michael Kammen, Edward P. Jones, Norman Mailer and Sara Paretsky. Click more below for more details.
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What was your favorite book of 2006?
Biblio Files columnist Donna Liquori weighs in on her 2006 favorite:
“The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel” tops the list of my favorite
books of 2006. The stories date from her first collection, published in 1985, to more recent works and display her breadth as one of the finest short story writers around.As noted by Rick Moody in the introduction, Hempel’s sentences are wonderful. Hempel doesn’t waste a single word, and each sentence is ripe with meaning and emotion. Another 2006 book I loved was “The Whole World Over” by Julia Glass.
This holiday week, I’m enjoying one of my Christmas presents to myself — Bill Buford’s “Heat” about his experience working as a “kitchen slave” at the three-star restaurant Babbo in New York.
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Happy New Year
The Books Blog is back in action for 2007. An update on my previous post: I had four books I planned to read over my vacation, but I only finished one — “On Truth” — and started another — “Religious Literacy.” It was a slow end to 2006. Oh, well.
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Travel reading
I’ll be taking some time off for the next week or so, and I’ll of course be toting too many books for me to actually finish. This is what I’ll try to be reading:
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Early word on New York State Writers Institute Spring schedule
A quick heads up: Just heard that the guests to UAlbany in the next few months are likely to include Richard Ford and Norman Mailer, among many, many others.
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Small world
So this past weekend, I was picking my wife up from the Millay Colony (in Austerlitz, NY), and after we loaded up the van with her supplies, I nosed around a bit and checked out the library of books published by former residents of the artists colony and came upon Janet Desnaulniers’ “What You’ve Been Missing,” the Iowa Short Fiction Award winner from 2004. As you may know from an earlier post, it was something Desnaulnier had said when I was an undergrad in the 1980s that gave me the idea to call this blog “a conspiracy of smart people.”
Small world? Maybe it is a conspiracy…
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What was your favorite book of 2006?
Poet and publisher Erik Sweet weighs in with his top read of the past year: Nawal El Saadawi’s Woman At Point Zero“No book I read this year made more of an impact on me than Nawal El Saadawi’s Woman At Point Zero, an Egyptian novel first published in 1975. This slim volume tells the story of an Egyptian woman, who due to the oppression of the individuals around her is never given a taste of true freedom. The author, Nawal El Saadawi, a writer, feminist, and physician, based the main character Firdaus on a woman she encountered at a woman’s prison in Egypt. Though brief in length, Saadawi’s novel pulls readers deep into the evolution of Firdaus, a woman penned within the confines of a world that does not value independent women.
