Michael Janairo

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Category: Reading

  • What was your favorite book of 2006?

    Eleanor Skinner at Flights of Fantasy, an independent science fiction and fantasy bookstore with a large gaming section and two lovely cats, weighs in with her favorites of last year:

    I will limit myself to books I read this year that were actually published in 2006. I would have to say my utter favorites of the year were The Virtu, by Sarah Monette; To Ride A Rathorn, by PC Hodgell; and The Empty Chair, a Star Trek novel by Diane Duane. All three of them had the long-awaited sequel effect going for them. They are books 2, 4, and 5 of their respective series.

    the_virtu.jpgrathorn.jpgemptychair.jpg Sarah Monette is the author of the beautifully-written fantasy series beginning with Melusine and continuing with The Mirador in August 2007. It’s about two half-brothers separated at
    birth, both abused children, one a wizard and the other a former thief and assassin. They find themselves embroiled in a maze of court politics, conspiracies, dead religions, and ancient magics.

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  • A note about Haruki Murakami

    If you’ve followed my book reviews, you’ll know that I have an interest in Japanese literature, so here’ a link to an interesting article published in Japan reflects on the importance of Haruki Murakami’s work in East Asia. The article is here. (A tip of the hat to the literary blog The Elegant Variation for pointing it out.) Here’s an excerpt:

    “Resonating with the thoughts of the times, Murakami is challenging universal issues of mankind such as history and morality, and is expected to increase his presence in an East Asian region in transition.”

  • 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 hempel.jpgbooks 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.

  • 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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  • 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…

  • What was your favorite book of 2006?

    point-zero.jpgPoet 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.

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  • The New York Times best of 2006 list

    A lot of publications have been running best of lists, and when it is done by one person, it seems they should include a disclaimer that lists all the books that one person read over the year.
    The NYTimes, though, attributes the list to “editors” and it is listed below. Of all ten books, I read one this past year — Richard Ford’s Lay of the Land. My review of it is here. What I don’t get is that one reviewer for the Times panned the book, and the other wrote more about Ford’s place in American letters than the book itself. Yet there it is on the list, which is below:

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  • What were your favorite books of 2006?

    In a twist on the question above, I thought I’d write about the books that I’ve talked about the most with people who have asked me for reading recommendations. In a way, these two books are the ones that have stayed in my mind longest after reading and have seemed appropriate to the people I was speaking with. Both books are challenging and have distinct , fully realized aesthetics, and they share a kind of spirit that questions commonly accepted realities.
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  • What were your favorite books of 2006?

    Check out this North Haven, Conn., bloggers best of for 2006 by going to:
    http://dhamel.typepad.com/book_blog/2006/12/bookblogs_best_.html
    Of interest to me is that I’ve only read one of the books on her list, Scott Smith’s “Ruins,” and I wouldn’t rate that as one of the best of 2006.