Michael Janairo

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Author: Michael Janairo

  • Judging a book by its cover

    dsouza.jpgMy colleague Casey Seiler handed me this book the other day and said, “Here’s a title that is purely meant to get D’Souza on talk shows.”

    Sure, it’s just not right to judge a book by its cover. But with something like 172,000 books published last year in the U.S. (I think I saw this figure in Publishers Weekly), readers have to filter through the onslaught somehow.

    Here’s what a reviewer says about the above book in the NYTimes:

    He is a childish thinker and writer tackling subjects about which he knows little to make arguments that reek of political extremism. His book is a national disgrace, a sorry example of a publishing culture more concerned with the sensational than the sensible.

    The reviewer is Alan Wolfe, who teaches political science at Boston College and is the author of “Does American Democracy Still Work?”

  • NBCC finalists

    Here’s the list of finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Awards, to be announced in March:

    Nonfiction:
    Patrick Cockburn, The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq (Verso)
    Anne Fessler, The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe V. Wade (Penguin Press)
    Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (Penguin Press)
    Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution (Ecco)
    Sandy Tolan, The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew and the Heart of the Middle East (Bloomsbury)

    Fiction
    Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun (Knopf)
    Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss (Grove/Atlantic)
    Dave Eggers, What is the What (McSweeney’s)
    Richard Ford, The Lay of the Land (Knopf)
    Cormac McCarthy, The Road (Knopf)

    Memoir/Autobiography
    Donald Antrim, The Afterlife (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
    Alison Bechdel, Fun Home (Houghton Mifflin)
    Alexander Masters, Stuart: A Life Backwards (Delacorte)
    Daniel Mendelsohn, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (HarperCollins)
    Teri Jentz, Strange Piece of Paradise (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

    Poetry
    Daisy Fried, My Brother is Getting Arrested Again. (University of Pittsburgh Press)
    Troy Jollimore, Tom Thomson in Purgatory. (Margie/Intuit House)
    Miltos Sachtouris, Poems (1945-1971) (Archipelego Books)
    Frederick Seidel, Ooga-Booga (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
    W.D. Snodrass, Not for Specialists: New and Selected Poems (BOA Editions)

    Criticism
    Bruce Bawer: While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the WestFrom Within (Doubleday)
    Frederick Crews, Follies of the Wise: Dissenting Essays (Shoemaker & Hoard)
    Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion As A Natural Phenomenon(Viking)
    Lia Purpura, On Looking: Essays (Sarabande Books)
    Lawrence Wechsler, Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences(McSweeney’s)

    Biography
    Debby Applegate: The Most Famous Man in Amerca: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher (Doubleday)
    Taylor Branch, At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-1968 (Simon& Schuster)
    Frederick Brown, Flaubert: A Biography (Little, Brown)
    Julie Phillips, James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon (St.Martin’s Press)
    Jason Roberts, A Sense of the World: How a Blind Man Became History’s Greatest Traveler (HarperCollins)

  • Russell Banks featured in Mahmoud Darwish doc

    From a Web site calling itself IranMania:

    The documentary has a flashback to 2002 when eight internationally renowned writers, poets, and intellectuals, including American novelist Russell Banks and Nobel laureates Jose Saramago and Wole Soyinka, traveled to the West Bank and Gaza to visit Darwish and observe the state of the Palestinians living there.

    Click “more” for complete article:

    (more…)

  • Events on Monday, Jan. 22

    At the Saratoga Springs Public Library ( 49 Henry St., Saratoga Springs NY 584-7860), the reading group, Writers on Reading, welcomes Susannah Risley who will read her own work and lead a discussion of The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai. Free and open to the public.

  • Biblio Files columnist wants your help

    Donna Liquori also writes in today’s column:

    I’m looking for some examples from fellow bibliophiles for an upcoming column on books that
    have changed lives. Do you reread something every year? Is there one book that set you on a
    different path? I want to know. Drop me an e-mail and a few publishable sentences explaining
    why your particular book is so important. Also, drop me a line whenever you read something
    great. It doesn’t have to be a new book. I’m looking to broaden my recommendations throughout 2007. Thanks and Happy New Year.

    You can contact her at bilbiofiles@hotmail.com

  • The last days of print?

    From the Times of London:

    The world’s libraries are heading for the internet, says Bryan Appleyard. If this means we lose touch with real books and treat their content as ‘information’, civilisation is the loser
    ‘The majority of information,” said Jens Redmer, director of Google Book Search in Europe, “lies outside the internet.”

    Redmer was speaking last week at Unbound, an invitation-only conference at the New York Public Library (NYPL). It was a groovy, bleeding-edge-of-the-internet kind of affair. There was Chris Anderson, editor of Wired magazine and author of The Long Tail, a book about the new business economics of the net. There was Arianna Huffington, grand panjandrum of both the blogosphere and smart East Coast society. …

    Full story is here:

    http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2092-2557653,00.html

  • A perfect day for Biblio Files columnist

    The following was written by Biblio Files columnist Donna Liquori and published in today’s Times Union. Contact her at bibliofiles@hotmail.com. Seems like a good day for a lover of books:

    6:52 a.m.: Wake up. I’m late. Today’s the big day.

    7 a.m.: I down a cup of coffee and head out for a quick walk. It’s cold and rainy … the
    perfect day for what I have planned. I do a mental inventory of the books I’ve stockpiled next
    to my bed. I’ve planned this day as an antidote to a frantic holiday season that left me
    feeling, well, wilted.

    7:36 a.m.: Home. Time to banish the children and husband from the house.

    8:40 a.m.: I push them out the door with lunches, kisses and absolutely no guilt
    whatsoever.

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  • Why book awards matter

    This is from the Elegant Variation: an interview with John Freeman, the president of the National Book Critics Circle who has also published book reviews from time to time in the Times Union (and, yes, I am a member of the NBCC).

    But to get to the point of your question, we should care about awards first and foremost because they help us decide what to read. There is an obscene number of books being published every year, every month, and awards are like these giant, all-reading, all seeing friends (we hope), which can whisper in your ear and say, hey, you gotta read this.

    Morrison To stay valuable, though, they have to pick good books. They have to get it right, to put it crudely. I like to think the NBCC has got it right often enough to earn readers’ and booksellers trust. We awarded Toni Morrison long before the Nobel committee got to her, and Edward P. Jones before the Pulitzer tipped him. We awarded W.G. Sebald and John Cheever and Louise Erdrich when Love Medicine was passed over by other prizes and Frederick Seidel before he began to gather the cult following he has now. Richard Powers was a finalist four (!) times. We’re the only book prize organization to highlight the brave work of Robert Fisk or William T. Vollmann for Rising Up and Rising Down. None of our judges are paid. We do this because we love it and so the lists you see are the distillation of enormous passion and respect for the work that goes into writing a biography, a collection of poems, a novel, or, say, a 3000 page “essay” on violence.

    For the complete interview, go here.

  • Notes on Richard Ford’s visit

    ford_richard.gif“Writing novels is easy if it’s the only thing you do,” Ford said last night during the Q&A session following his reading from his latest novel “The Lay of the Land.”

    He spoke of his influences in creating the first-person present-tense narrative voice of Frank Bascombe as including “The Moviegoer” by Walker Percy; “Something Happened” by Joseph Heller (which Ford said has been unfairly overlooked); and “A Fan’s Notes,” by Frederick Exley — which also happens to be one of my all-time favorite books, and should be on the bookshelves of most New Yorkers, considering the subject matter of a sports fanatics obsession with the New York Giants.

    Doing some googling, I discover that Ford has talked about his influences before.

    That said, he probably had heard many of the same questions before but, like his writing, he was generous in his speaking, clear in articulating his ideas and patient with his audience.

    NYSWI Director Donald Faulkner asked Ford about his decision to use long sentences that convey so much without falling apart, Ford responded at length that it was a conscious decision to create a sense of an overflowing of information and ideas. Then he added, “Or maybe I’m just old” and have lost the ability to edit myself. (It was a funny moment among many last night.)

    At one point, he used the term “organic” in explaining the process of having Frank Bascombe cry at one point, and then trying to write a logical reason why — or at least a believable reason why — his character would be crying. Then he stopped himself and said that, of course, nothing in writing is organic, it is all constructed by the author and that he has the power over how you respond to his writing.

    The event was a last-minute addition to the NYSWI series, Faulkner said, crediting Susan Novotny at the Book House for putting it together. Maybe that’s why the event was held at the Campus Center, and even then the seats weren’t full. Though the audience was quite appreciative of a very entertaining evening.

    A final note, keep an eye on this site http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/olv11n2.html#journal that Donald Faulkner aims to use to give patrons of the NYSWI an inside look at what’s going on. It’s interesting stuff.