My book review on I Heart My In-Laws by Dina Koutas Poch is up on PopMatters.

When I read I Heart My In-Laws by Dina Koutas Poch, I was a little worried that my mother-in-law would see the book lying around and think I had some unspoken issues with her. I’ve heard stories about other people’s in-laws that range from horrible to downright nightmarish, so I didn’t want to do anything to suggest there are any lurking problems. Even in a healthy relationship, it’s not good to rock the boat.

But I needn’t have worried. Poch’s book has as much for those who like their in-laws as those who don’t. After all, any time two families mesh, there’s bound to be some friction, even if it’s just when getting to know each other.

More here

Read To Them.

Now I saved you $13.

We spent several restful days in Louisville visiting friends and family and touring the Locust Grove mansion, which is a three-story colonial mansion where revolutionary war hero George Rogers Clark lived. I learned that the reason we use the word “linen” to describe sheets because they used to weave flax into linen, which was used for the sheets on the beds. History!

From there, it was on to Hannibal, Missouri. By now, you know I am a literary nerd, and yes, this was where Mark Twain grew up and where his most famous books Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn are set.

The town is full of empty wide streets and dusty brick buildings, many of which have fallen into disrepair. We stayed at the Robard Mansion Bed and Breakfast on Millionaire Row, a street full of slightly rundown mansions. It’s owned by a nice old couple, Leon and Nedra. We got the Bonnie Blue room, a large suite on the second floor of the mansion. At first, I was a bit bummed we didn’t get the Gone With the Wind room, but then I found out that Mark Twain visited in the Bonnie Blue room once. Apparently, Robard was Mark Twain’s friend and Twain visited the house when Robard’s daughter was dying. So yes, I stayed in a room where a little girl died 100 years ago and also where Mark Twain visited her. I did not see her ghost.

So, Mayberry? It still exists. Although some of Hannibal’s small town feel is self-conscious–it calls itself America’s Hometown, after all–much of it is sincere too. People were sitting around talking to each other everywhere we went. We were maybe the youngest people in the town, however, which weirded me out a bit.

Naturally, I toured Twain boyhood home and museum. The museum was entertaining because it was all in Twain’s own words, which are always a delight to read. I was surprised by how often Twain encountered death as a child. People were drowning in the river, he saw a dead body in an office, he watched a bum burn up alive once, etc. Life was very dramatic in Hannibal in those days. Afterwards, Kyle and I did wholesome things like walk up to the lighthouse to look at the river and eat ice cream.

Me with Hannibal in the background

That night, we took the Mark Twain Dinner Cruise, a deal at $35 per person. We went on a white paddleboat and toured up and down the Mississippi River while eating. The Mississippi is exactly how Twain described it, even down to the islands of thickets that Huck and Jim camped out on. I was impressed. I think one of the signs of a brilliant writer is the ability to make you see what they see.

The dinner cruise was one of the best things we’ve done so far. It was romantic and fun. We had a buffet dinner and watched a man who looks like Col. Sanders play banjo and harmonica and sing sentimental songs about rivers and moons. Old people danced and two little girls kept running up and singing the songs into the microphone.

Later, Kyle and I went up to the top deck of the boat–which we had all to ourselves–and watched the sun set on the river, turning the water all sorts of colors. Then a huge golden moon rose and sat above the treetops, sending a shimmery path onto the water that almost seemed to touch the boat.

The next day, Leon took us on a personalized tour of the Robard Mansion. He and his wife have owned the house for 11 years and fixed it up quite a bit. We heard all about his life as a former pig farmer in Missouri. He and Nedra have been together since he was 12 and she was 9! At the top of the mansion is a glass lookout that let us see all of Hannibal. I was immediately jealous and wanted my own lookout that I could write in and look out on Petaluma.

At the end, we thanked Leon for the tour and explained how we were going to try to get all the way through Kansas that day. Leon told us which highway to take to avoid the small towns.

“You don’t want to speed in these small towns,” he said. “Not long ago, a police officer pulled me over and gave me a $88 ticket for going three miles over the speed limit.”

“Wow,” I said. “I would fight that one.”

“No point,” Leon said. “He’s not only the police officer, he’s also the judge.”

Oh America. You can be so adorable sometimes.

I was wondering why book people were so interested in the career move of James Wood from book critic at The New Republic to staff writer at The New Yorker, until this article explained it to me. In his time at The New Republic, Wood has criticized many of the writers who are held up as the pinnacle of today’s literature by esteemed institutions–writers like Philip Roth, John Updike, Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, and Don DeLillo.

[Wood] is not indirect in his criticisms. The Nobel Laureate Morrison’s novel Paradise, Wood pronounced a few years back, “is a novel babyishly cradled in magic. It is sentimental, evasive, and cloudy.” DeLillo’s Underworld, he has written, “proves, once and for all, or so I must hope, the incompatibility of the political paranoid vision with great fiction.”

Apparently, Wood doesn’t like “‘hysterical realism,’ his coinage for books that attempt to convey the raucousness of contemporary life through outlandish proliferating plots, allegory, bizarre coincidence, and high irony”–so pretty much all the books that are held up by the establishment as important literature of our day.

And here’s why the move to The New Yorker is so interesting to folks:

Even his detractors concede that such takedowns are the fruits of a love for the novel — of a certain sort. But what does it mean that the most storied magazine in American history has aligned itself with a critic who essentially rejects the premises of a broad swath of contemporary American fiction?

That’s a good question. Here’s a person who doesn’t seem to like the aesthetics of major writers like, say, John Updike, taking a job at a magazine that Updike writes for. In other words, here’s a person who regularly points out faults of a certain kind of fiction getting to point them out to the audience of a magazine that helped legitimize that very same style of writing in the first place. What if Wood, gasp, actually changes the status quo here?

Well, sometimes the status quo needs challenging. While I like individual books by people like Pynchon/Roth/Morrison–no one can deny they are great writers–their work is often over-hyped. It’s as if critics have decided that these are the writers who will make up the next chapter of the Norton Anthology of Literature, the chapter English majors of the future will read to understand the literature of today. Someone, somewhere, decided that these are the people leading the aesthetic movement of our time, and therefore when one of these writers puts out a book, it is much more likely to get the attention, the good reviews, the awards, the top of lists, etc.

Of course, many brilliant writers are ignored in the process. But more interestingly, there are problems with the assumption that the highly ironic, jammed-packed, complex books these writers write are reflections of modern America. As the article puts it, “a messy, sprawling country demands comparable novels.” That may be true, in part, but America has to be demanding other kinds of novels by now as well. How much can really be said about consumerism and paranoia and alienation in America at this point? It seems like we covered those topics pretty thoroughly in the 1970s. Nothing has changed in the last 30-odd years?

If, like me, you believe the role of art is to reveal and reflect life, some of these books can come off as a little too cartoonish, a little too much like the writer is showing off. Of course, that doesn’t mean they aren’t still good books, but as Wood himself says in the article, “people are still dying around us, having children, making friends. Without wanting to make fiction domestic in a dreary, writing-workshop way, you do feel a lack of these experiences in fiction.”

Maybe that’s why books like Gilead, about religion and the love between a father and son, feel like such a breath of fresh air to me. Maybe that’s why Didion’s memoir The Year of Magical Thinking, about death and grief, did so well. The human experience is a poignant thing, as anyone who has lived any of it can tell you, and it is a continual consternation to writers that language can never fully cover those experiences. I think writers are scared of topics like love/death/friendship/etc. because it’s so hard to say anything new or concrete about them, so they escape into acrobatics and vivid imagery and wordplay. But without the meaning underneath, these tricks can ring hollow. As Wood said in the article: “If you love Bellow, you love exuberance and stylistic showing off. That is exactly my complaint against someone like Rushdie. It’s not style, it’s all noise.”

And if Wood can reasonably point out the difference in his new post at The New Yorker, then more power to him.

Link via Bookslut.

… reading the last Harry Potter.

It was worth it. It’s an extremely satisfying ending. She gives you everything you want, ties everything together, and makes you feel like you’re leaving the characters in a good place.

It’s a remarkable accomplishment, really–especially considering the high expectations for the end of the series. Imagine having the whole world speculating about your book like that. It would be hard to get all those voices out of your head. Many writers would have buckled under the pressure.

I think these books will hold up over time. They are good.

The ending didn’t make me cry though.

Poet Sekou Sundiata died last night from heart failure. Sad, man. He was a good poet and so very cool. NPR has some interviews with Sundiata here.

Kate also has one of his poems up and a YouTube video of him performing.

Ever wonder what would happen if great works of literature were disguised and submitted to publishers today? In today’s market-driven advertising-controlled literary world, would the great writers of yesteryear be rejected along with the rest of us?

Turns out, the answer is yes. Writer David Lassman sent typed chapters of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice to 18 literary agents and publishers, changing only the titles and character names.

He got 12 rejection. No one offered him a book contract. Only one of them recognized Austen’s work.

Penguin, which republished Pride and Prejudice last year, described the work as a “really original and interesting read” but not right for them.

The literary agent Christopher Little, who represents JK Rowling, said it was “not confident placing this material with a publisher”.

These people are not doing their jobs. They don’t recognize Jane Austen? Even more troubling, they can’t recognize brilliant writing when they see it? Makes you wonder what else are they missing.

Thanks to Marcia for the link.

The Guardian has an article by Sarah Crown talking about her experience judging a poetry contest. In it, she discusses what it feels like to read nothing but poetry for three weeks. Because I’m in the process of judging a contest myself, I related to this article, particularly this part:

About halfway through the fortnight I ventured, blinking, from my house to visit the supermarket for supplies and, without consciously intending it, found myself in a bookshop, where I feverishly bought a stack of novels. I placed them on the corner of my coffee table where they sat taunting me.

I am not reading poetry. I’m reading self-published juvenile fiction and adult literary fiction. Overall it is fun and I am enjoying the process. However, reading a bunch of books I normally wouldn’t have picked is also making me a little antsy–especially since right before I got the books to judge, I bought several new ones that I want to read. Now the new books are taunting me, all shiny and untouched on my bookshelf. I keep stealing a paragraph here and there of my forbidden book and then putting it down and sighing and picking up the book I’m supposed to be reading. And then doing it all over again. And again. And again.

It reminds me of being an English major.

Last year I saw Sara Gruen speak at a Book Expo about her novel Water for Elephants. I remember how she described forcing herself to overcome procrastination to write the book. She put a desk in a closet, put on earphones to block noise, and then just sat there until she got the thing written. That impressed me so much it helped me to focus more on my own novel.

Well, the NYTimes is reporting that Gruen’s novel is outselling everybody–even the Oprah picks.

Despite the presence of not one but two Oprah Winfrey selections in bookstores, it is a sleeper hit from last year that has muscled its way to being a big paperback read this summer.

The continuing success of “Water for Elephants,” a novel by Sara Gruen, is helping Spiegel & Grau, the author’s new publisher, rationalize its decision in November to pay more than $5 million for Ms. Gruen’s next two books.

Very cool. What every novelist dreams for.

I guess I am still naive about the book industry, because this surprised me. The The London Times has an article talking about what large bookstores (in this case Waterstone in England) charge publishers to put books in the front section of the stores.

The reader may imagine that merit alone has inspired the country’s largest book chain to champion the volume now resting in their hands. The truth is a little less romantic.

In a confidential letter to publishers seen by The Times, Waterstone’s has set out what it expects them to pay if they want their books to be well promoted in its network of more than 300 stores this Christmas.

The most expensive package, available for only six books and designed to “maximise the potential of the biggest titles for Christmas”, costs £45,000 per title.

That’s right, they charge to put a book out on the tables in front–and if a publisher doesn’t want to do it, the store reduces its order of the book and practically refuses to carry it.

Anthony Cheetham, the chairman of Quercus books, a small independent publisher, said: “It’s not a system you can opt out of. If Smith’s offer you one of these slots and you say no, their order doesn’t go down from 1,000 copies to 500 copies. It goes down to 20 copies.”

You might think that if you buy the book recommended by the staff or by school children, you are getting some sort of authentic representation of a book people like. The answer is, sort of.

At Borders, bookshop staff vote to decide the book of the month, while schools are polled to find the children’s book of the month. But the publishers still have to pay an undisclosed fee for the chosen book to be awarded the accolade.

This is so creepy to me. As much as my local independent chain Copperfield’s lets me down by rarely having what I want, I doubt this kind of thing goes on. At least, I hope not. Maybe I should ask.

What Waterstone charges for the honor of putting a book on a table: