Reading Round-Up 12/8/2013

First of all, I never reported back on my Small Business Saturday book shopping experience. I loved Sherman Alexie’s Indies First idea — that authors go hang out in bookstores and act as booksellers for a day — and I wanted to take part in it as much as possible. One of my local bookstores, Byrd’s Books, hosted the author Mark Slouka, who recently published the novel Brewster, which takes place in a town not far from my home. So we stopped in the store to meet him, and I left with a signed copy of the novel. The bookstore was full of people and excitement, which was great to see. Then we headed out of town to visit Oblong Books in Rhinebeck, NY. The drive was rather lengthy, but Hobgoblin wanted to see Kelly Braffet and get signed copies of her books, and I was happy to go along. We thought perhaps her author husband, Owen King, son of Stephen King, might be there, but he wasn’t. That was fine, though. In the store, it took a minute to figure out who Kelly Braffet was, and then it took a few minutes more to figure out how to get a conversation going. But since she was hanging out by the cash register looking a little bored, I eventually just went up and asked if she was giving out book recommendations. She immediately lit up, happy that someone wanted a recommendation from her, and we headed over to the fiction section, where we spent the next 10-15 minutes looking over books and talking about ones we liked. As we talked, I realized how difficult Hobgoblin and I are as customers in bookshops; much of what Braffet recommended, we had already read. We talked about Jennifer Egan, Megan Abbott, Joe Hill, and others. Eventually, we came across Jenni Fagan’s novel The Panopticon, which neither of us had heard of, and which sounded great. Then Hobgoblin got Braffet to sign his books, we looked around a little more, and we were two happy customers.

That’s not all going on in my book world, though. Yesterday evening, my mystery book group met to discuss D.A. Mishani’s novel The Missing File. It was a lively discussion, although not because the novel is a great one. For the most part, I was enjoying myself as I read the book, but afterward when I tried to put it all together, it just didn’t work. It’s a very odd mystery novel. The detective is not very good at his job and makes several important mistakes. His colleagues do a better job conducting the investigation, but they are flawed as well. Mishani spends a lot of time with a marginally-related character who involves himself in the mystery for reasons that I never fully understood. He’s a writer, and through what I guess is writerly imagination and empathy ends up doing a better job understanding the people involved in the mystery than the detective does. But this guy is kind of creepy and doesn’t cohere as a character. I think Mishani is most interested in the ways fictional stories help but also more interestingly fail to help us understand stories in the “real” world. This is an intriguing idea, but Mishani doesn’t manage to pull his plot and themes together.

Next up for the mystery book group is Margaret Millar’s novel Beast in View, which was my choice. I became interested in Millar after reading this essay by the crime fiction critic Sarah Weinman. Sarah has come through with recommendations for me before, so I’m looking forward to seeing how this one turns out.

The only book that has come into the house since I last wrote about incoming books is Brewster. I have added a bunch of books that I’d like to investigate and perhaps add to my TBR pile at some point, though. These are by no means books that I will definitely read; they are just ones I’ve got my eye on:

• James McBride’s The Good Lord Bird, winner of the National Book Award.
• Javiar Marías’s The Infatuations, as another Marías novel to follow All Souls.
• Jane Bowles’s Two Serious Ladies. I can’t remember where I heard about this one….

These books are small press books, a category I’ve been learning more about recently as I listen to podcasts with small press authors or that champion small press books. I really have no idea if I will like these or not, but it will be fun to explore them:

• Monica Drake, The Stud Book,
• Anne Marie Wirth Cauchon, Nothing,
• Renee Gladman, Event Factory,
• Pamela Erens, The Virgins: A Novel,
• Jamie Iredell, I Was a Fat Drunk Catholic School Insomniac.

Have a good week everyone!