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Just Read It: THE NOBODIES ALBUM by Carolyn Parkhurst
2011 at 5am Posted by Rebecca Schinsky
I came very close to never reading this book, all because the cover didn’t interest me. I’m rarely the right audience for books with watery covers featuring lost children (or women holding hands). I’ve tried enough of them to figure out that the book-reader fit doesn’t usually work. It’s not a value judgment, it’s just a Thing I Know About Myself. More on that another day.
The Nobodies Album had been on my radar for a while, ever since Random House rep and podcaster extraordinaire Ann Kingman recommended it to me well before it’s 2010 publication. Despite the fact that Ann has never done me wrong, I couldn’t get interested enough to find out what it was about. But I bought a copy anyway and figured I might come around because, again, Ann has never done me wrong, then I saw Parkhurst speak at the Virginia Festival of the Book this past March, and she sold the hell out of it. I decided to give it a shot….someday.
Someday came last week when I picked the first books of my annual backlist binge and packed my bag for Thanksgiving travel. I hunkered down on my in-laws’ couch Wednesday and basically refused to talk to anyone until I finished it. YOU GUYS, this book is so good! And it’s totally not the kind of book the cover implies it is! Doubleday, I love ya, but what were you thinking?
When The Nobodies Album opens, bestselling author Octavia Frost is in New York to turn in the manuscript for her next book, in which she rewrites the endings to her seven previous novels. Great premise, right? I can think of a dozen writers I’d like to see do this for reals right off the bat, and there’s enough material in this idea alone to keep a novel going. But Parkhurst has more! On her way to the meeting, Octavia finds out that her son Milo–whom she hasn’t spoken to in 4 years and who happens to be a pretty famous rock star–has been accused of killing his girlfriend. So off she goes to San Francisco to do, well, she doesn’t really know what, but she hopes she can see Milo and find a way to help him. Read more
A Long Conversation about Short Stories [Bookrageous Episode 29]
2011 at 5am Posted by Rebecca Schinsky
In this extra-long and super-recommendation-filled episode, Josh, Jenn, and I welcome Adam Ross, our first author guest, to the show. It seems fitting that the winner of last year’s Book We Talked About the Most Award (henceforth referred to as the Adam Ross Award) should be our first author guest, and Adam did not disappoint. We discussed our favorite short story collections, the craft of writing short fiction, and, yes, Adam’s own collection Ladies and Gentlemen (which I loved and was just named to Kirkus’s Best of 2011 list).
Enjoy, subscribe, and don’t forget to order your copy of Zone One by Colson Whitehead from WORD Brooklyn for our first Bookrageous Book Club show, to be recorded in early December. Save 10% when you put BOOKRAGEOUS in the comments of your order.
Show notes, including all books discussed, after the jump. Read more
Thankful.
2011 at 6am Posted by Rebecca Schinsky
I hope you’re spending the day in a warm, happy place surrounded by people you love…or at least those you tolerate because biology says you’re required to. When I’ve inhaled enough side dishes (Thanksgiving is all about the side dishes for me) and pie to make me incapable of staying upright, I’ll be crashing on the couch with a book and thinking about the things I love in my life. This year, I’m thankful for:
- A happy, healthy family, one that grew this year with the birth of my (beautiful, perfect, certainly brilliant) nephew
- Finally feeling truly at home in Richmond, knowing that I have found “my people”
- Vibrant literary communities, online and off
- Opportunities–however unpleasant at the time–to discover who my true friends are…and even better opportunities to celebrate them
- The unique and inviolable pleasure of entire days spent reading without interruption
- Exciting, challenging work opportunities and the flexibility to take a leap and go for them
- Friends who get it and are happy to spend hours together in silence
- Creative collaborations that inspire, restore, and entertain
- A fun and supportive partner who endures endless elbowing and “Hey, did you know?” when I’m reading nonfiction
- The embarrassment of riches known as my TRB pile
Just Read It: EVERYBODY SEES THE ANTS by A.S. King
2011 at 5am Posted by Rebecca Schinsky
Published October 2011 by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Imma just get this out of the way and tell you straight up that I have a mad crush on A.S. King’s writing. Please Ignore Vera Dietz was made of awesome, and if more YA were like it and King’s latest, Everybody Sees the Ants, there’d be more YA up in my reading life, no doubt.
(Okay, so there very well might be YA like A.S. King’s that I don’t know about, and I’m more than happy to acknowledge that. This is just to say that for the last couple years, her books have been the only YA books I’ve really felt compelled to pick up, and I’m never sorry.)
Anywho. Where Vera Dietz is about a teenage girl coping with grief and facing issues of the sex-and-drugs-and-bad-decisions variety, Everybody Sees the Ants takes on the being-bullied-and-feeling-misunderstood-and-thinking-you’re-never-going-to-get-to-kiss-a-girl-and-dealing-with-the-idea-of-suicide portion of teen angst.
Main character Lucky Linderman is no stranger to being uncomfortable, but life goes to a whole new level of hellacious when a survey he creates for his social studies class lands him the hottest of hot water. The assignment is to conduct a survey and chart the results. Lucky, who feels his peers’ emotional pain acutely, asks students to state what they would do if they were going to kill themselves. The administration misreads Lucky’s intentions and totally misses the point (and the opportunity to identify several students who really are at risk), and when Lucky reports that the question originated in a conversation he had with the bully who has tortured him since grade school, Nader McMillan, the adults again miss the cry for help, punishing Lucky rather than investigating his accusations of bullying. Read more
