#FridayReads, August 17–‘Somebody Owes Me Money,’ Donald E. Westlake & Essays by Nicholson Baker

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#FridayReads, August 17–Somebody Owes Me Money, Donald E. Westlake’s enjoyable 1969 mystery narrated by Chet Conway, a wise-cracking cab driver. One day Chet gets an unusual tip from a fare–rather than a couple extra bucks for the ride, his customer offers a tip on a horse race: bet on Purple Pecunia to win. Chet does place a wager with his bookmaker, and the pony comes in, but when he goes to collect his winnings, the bookie’s been murdered. Chet wonders, who am I supposed collect from? Much delightful hilarity and chaos ensues, including a budding romance with Abbie, the daughter of the murdered man, and many clashes with rival gangs with an interest in the dead bookie’s clientele. A great reprint of a classic mystery, from the fun imprint Hard Case Crime.

Also reading Nicholson Baker’s new essay collection, The Way the World Works. He’s been one of my favorite writers ever since I read his first novel, The Mezzanine, in 1988. I met Baker when he won the 2001 National Book Critics Circle nonfiction award for for his book, Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper and we’ve emailed each other periodically since. His attention-grabbing funny and frankly sexual novels, such as House of Holes, are what he’s best known for nowadays, but I really relish his essays, such as the 1997 collection, The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber. Not to be overlooked is Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization, a remarkable book of aggregated content not Baker’s own that approximates a pacifist history of the decades between World War I and World War II. In the new collection Baker–always a writer fascinated with the physicality of things and the visceral and corporeal in everyday life–examines airplane wings, coins, earplugs, and ereading devices.

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Good Advice on Twitter Bios & Web IDs

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This is an excellent advice blog post by publishing and writing maven Jane Friedman, on crafting one’s Twitter bio and more broadly, your online identity. One of her most salient tips:

[A] little bit of personality is more often than not what starts a conversation on Twitter.”

Jane is an experienced and knowledgeable hand, as her full online bio attests. If you’re on Twitter and a writer, I suggest you follow her. If you wonder how she does her own Twitter bio, here it is:

@JaneFriedman
I share links on writing, publishing & tech. Web editor for @vqr + former publisher of @writersdigest. Bourbon lover & Hoosier native.
Charlottesville, VA, USA · http://janefriedman.com

I’m mulling her advice, including the point about not necessarily using a list to ID oneself, though haven’t yet made a stab at a revised Twitter bio. FWIW, here’s my current Twitter ID:

@philipsturner
Blogger, editor, reader, music lover, honorary Canadian. As publisher, I’ve done Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father & Amb Joseph Wilson’s Politics of Truth.
New York City · http://www.TheGreatGrayBridge.com/

I invite you to follow my tweets too.

My own advice? Remember to be yourself, in personal and professional realms, and allow that confident presentation of self to surface in your online IDs.

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#FridayReads, Aug. 10–“Under the Banner of Heaven,” Jon Krakauer

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#FridayReads, August 10–Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith, Jon Krakauer’s engrossing account of the blood-drenched history of Mormonism, from the Mountain Meadows massacre in 1857 to the religious murders committed by the fundamentalist Lafferty brothers in American Fork, Utah, in 1984. The paranoid machinations of the founders of this cultish movement, and its zealous adherents, is startling, as is the secrecy that has attended it in more modern decades. I recommend this book for a greater understanding of the movement that animates Mitt Romney and his co-religionists. Photos of the front and back cover are from the copy I am reading.

Also, while driving on vacation recently we listened to the audio book of Bill Bryson’s Shakespeare: The World as Stage, read by the author. It was enormously enjoyable.

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Whistleblowers on Speakerfile

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Delighted to have my recent blog essay, On the Imperative of Publishing Whistleblowers, republished today on the blog of Speakerfile, the company I consult for that connects conference organizers with authors who do public speaking. H/t Neal Maillett of Berrett-Koehler Publishers for his piece, Why We Publisher Whistleblowers, which inspired my own, and Mike Shatzkin, who alerted me to Neal’s essay. Also, thanks to Cara Posey of Speakerfile who solicited this post from me.

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#FridayReads, July 27–“Two Lives” by Vikram Seth

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#FridayReads, July 27–Two Lives, Vikram Seth’s fascinating family chronicle of the singular marriage between his Indian uncle, Shanti–an improbable, one-armed dentist–and his German-Jewish aunt, Henny Caro, a mixed couple who managed to build a life together despite the difficulties imposed by circumstance and society, amid WWII and the Holocaust. Seth begins the narrative near the end of their lives, in the 1980s, and then works his way forward and back in time, employing interviews he conducted with Shanti and documentary materials he discovers (letters, photos, school papers, etc.). This is a remarkable book, published in 2005.

N.B.: I first read and enjoyed Vikram Seth’s work years ago, when I read and at Undercover Books sold his debut, a brilliant travelogue about China and Tibet, From Heaven Lake. He went on to write a novel in verse, The Golden Gate, inspired he explains in Two Lives, by Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. He is an inventive writer, who seems to never repeat himself.

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The Latest on World Book Night 2013

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Happy to see news reported in Shelf Awareness, that World Book Night, which I had recently written about in this post when I bumped into WBN director Carl Lennertz (pictured below), is proceeding with plans for Spring 2013, to give away tens of thousands of copies of books worldwide in a unique extravaganza of social reading, as was done by the organization and thousands of volunteers on April 23, 2012. I don’t see an exact date yet for the 2013 giveaway, but will report it on this blog as soon as I get that info. Update: It will be April 23, 2013, same as the one this past year.

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#FridayReads, July 20–“Love is a Mix Tape”

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#FridayReads, July 20–Love is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time, Rob Sheffield’s wrenching account of the five-year marriage he shared with his dear wife, Renée, who died suddenly of a pulmonary embolism at age 31. Sheffield tells their tale by opening each chapter of the book by naming the playlists on the many mix tapes that he and Renée made for each other in the time they were together. Sheffield, who is an editor at Rolling Stone, narrates this heartbreak tale in a sweet and disarming voice from a world where music is always on their lips, in their ears, and coursing through their hearts.

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Robert Creamer, RIP–Babe Ruth Biographer

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The great baseball writer, Robert Creamer died this week at the age of 90. According to the NY Times obituary by Douglas Martin, I am far from the only reader to have found his biography, Babe: The Legend Comes to Life (originally published in 1974), to be among the best sports books I’ve ever read. An excerpt from a review in Sports Illustrated is printed on the cover of the Penguin Sports Library edition from 1983, the one I read: “The best biography ever written about an American sports figure.”

Two stories from the book have stayed with me all these years and I relate them here after being led to the exact page number in the book by the blog Unquiet Heart, where the proprietor is evidently also a fan of Creamer’s 1974 book. Quoting then from page 186 in my old copy of the book:

“Invited by [a] Mrs. Adler to attend a benefit she was running, Ruth dutifully put in an appearance. “Mrs. Adler, beamed on the monied throngs who gently pressed around him, and helped make the affair a smashing success.  When it was over Mrs. Adler thanked him profusely for his time and effort.  The Babe waved his hand.  ‘Oh, shit, lady, I’d do it for anybody,’ he said.
“Another time, he accompanied [baseball executive] Ford Frick to a formal dinner party.  Frick said that Babe would always move slowly at first when he was at affairs of this sort, watching, noting, finding out how you did things before doing them himself.  A rather splendid asparagus salad was served. Babe’s eyes sidled around until he saw which fork was to be used.  He casually lifted the fork, poked at the salad and then without touching it put the fork down and pushed the plate an inch or so away in dismissal.
‘Don’t you care for the salad, Mr. Ruth?’ his hostess asked.
‘Oh, it’s not that,’ he replied, his voice elegant and unctuous.  ‘It’s just that asparagus makes my urine smell'”

Creamer also wrote Stengel: His Life and Times, which I haven’t read yet, but which I hope to someday.

 

 

 

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