Connect
Sponsors
Currently Reading
-
Terms
The Book Lady's Blog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Reviews and articles posted here are property of The Book Lady's Blog and are not to be posted elsewhere without permission. Please contact me if you wish to post any of my work, or any excerpt thereof, in any other location or format.
Miscellaneous
Meet Bookrageous!
Technical Stuff
Design Credits
Jan
19
Mark Your Calendars for IN ONE PERSON
2012 at 5am Posted by Rebecca Schinsky
Cue up the Sister Act 2 Oh, Happy Day video, it’s time to celebrate! Or, it will be on May 8, when new books from John Irving (the original #pantyworthy author) AND Toni Morrison hit the shelves. I’ll be taking the day off to observe what is essentially a literary holiday (employers: consider yourselves warned), but I couldn’t wait to start talking about the Irving, In One Person.
When the galley arrived last week, I entertained the thought of waiting until closer to the release date to read it for approximately 3.8 seconds. But who am I kidding? I love John Irving, and after the disappointing embarrassment of Until I Find You and the almost-there-but-not-quite Last Night In Twisted River, I needed to be sure we weren’t looking at a “three strikes, you’re out” situation. I don’t like to break up with authors, but I’d rather quit while I’m ahead and can preserve the good memories than force myself to continue reading them after the magic is gone. Good news, ladies and gents: the magic is not gone.
In One Person is about Billy Abbott, a bisexual man who grew up on the campus of an all-boys boarding school in the late 50s and early 60s and discovered at a young age his tendency to have crushes on “the wrong people.” The narrative follows him into an adulthood marked by loneliness (straight women don’t trust him; gay men suspect him of being a fraud) and loss (in true Irving style, Billy’s father is absent and his mother dies tragically) and through the horrors of the AIDS crisis of the early 1980s. Many of the Irving hallmarks are present–wrestling, chief among them–and they fit naturally into the story (as opposed to the shoehorn-them-all-into-one-scene-ness of Twisted River). Notably, the only bears are of the hirsute gay male variety. However, adults making questionable decisions abound! And no one loses a limb!
Just as The Cider House Rules is Irving’s abortion book, In One Person is his sexual diversity book. Characters do not hesitate to express their distaste for rigidly conventional people–admittedly, the proportion of characters who are sexually unconventional is far from realistic, but that’s what Irving does, right, quirks writ large? And he has a point–everyone has *some* taboo desire, however repressed–and the sooner we acknowledge that and accept each other, the better off we’ll be. Irving avoids most of the pitfalls that make politically motivated fiction so often problematic, though In One Person has a distinct “preaching to the choir” feel at times. Will he change minds with this book? Maybe. Is the book a wash if he doesn’t? Not at all. With In One Person, Irving presents an affecting story with timeless themes about a very specific time in American culture. It’s what he does best, and I, for one, am glad he’s back.
Talking ZONE ONE with Colson Whitehead
2012 at 5am Posted by Rebecca Schinsky
If you’d told me a year ago that not only would I be reading a zombie novel, I would be loving it, co-hosting a book club podcast about it, AND interviewing the author, I don’t think I’d have believed you. But such is the beauty of collaborative projects that breed comfort-zone-expanding recommendations, and I couldn’t be happier. Zone One was awesome; Josh, Jenn, and I had a fun conversation about it; and Colson Whitehead was a terrific guest.
There’s an embedded player for your listening pleasure below. Enjoy, subscribe, and join us for the next Bookrageous Book Club: Swamplandia!
Ruth Reichl and the Joys of Reading, Eating, and Reading About Eating
2012 at 5am Posted by Rebecca Schinsky
One of the great pleasures of working in the book industry has been discovering how many book people are also food people. I’ve eaten some of the best meals of my life with fellow bibliophiles who love food almost (or even equally) as much as they love books. So it came as a total surprise to me when I realized, while perusing the shelves of the Blue Bicycle Books on a trip to Charleston, SC last week, that–cookbooks aside–I had never read a book about a food. This troubled me so much that I made charts for you! (Pie charts, natch.)
Before the trip, my reading-and-eating life looked like this:
Charleston is an incredible town for eating, and I didn’t plan to do much reading on the trip, but when I spied a copy of Ruth Reichl’s Tender at the Bone, I just couldn’t say no. I mean, I must have been high when I packed two longish novels for a trip whose itinerary was basically eat, walk, shop, walk, eat, nap, eat, walk, eat. (Or maybe I was too busy fantasizing about Husk’s pork fat-infused butter, so good it made my pal Emily declare that Jesus himself must have been out back churning it.) But essays? About food? Perfection. And now my graph looks like this!
Hooray for the tiny purple sliver! Read more
Should we have required reading for the world?
2012 at 5am Posted by Rebecca Schinsky
Maybe it’s my I-took-a-lot-of-English-classes Stockholm syndrome talking, but I think we should. I’m over at Book Riot this week proposing diplomacy by literature, and I’d love to hear about the books that would make your “if everyone read this, the world would be a better place” list. Put practicality, logistics, and translation issues aside and join me for a moment of idealism!
Required reading…for everybody?
What do you think?
The Bare Necessities–Kayt Sukel (DIRTY MINDS: HOW OUR BRAINS INFLUENCE LOVE, SEX, AND RELATIONSHIPS)
2012 at 5am Posted by Rebecca Schinsky
The Bare Necessities is a series in which authors and book industry professionals share annotated reading lists of books they love.
Kayt Sukel is a freelance science and travel writer as well as the author of Dirty Minds: How Our Brains Influence Love, Sex and Relationships, out now from Free Press (my review here). She shares how literature, particularly love stories, helped scientists figure out that love had a biological basis—and how some of her favorite novels mesh with the latest and greatest findings concerning the neurobiology of love and sex.
Think about it: how often have you read a poem or book passage about love and thought it could have been written about you and your intended? (Or at least wished it had been—I’m still waiting for the boy who will quote me a Rumi poem). How can certain song lyrics, movie scenes and book excerpts inspire us to cry, rejoice and feel? If you are a reader, you understand that the feeling of love is beautifully, painfully captured in so many books—some written hundreds of years ago, some just this week. And Zeki and his colleague, Andreas Bartel, were inspired to try to find and measure love use a neuroimaging technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) because so many of us recognize and relate to those descriptions—it suggests there is something common about love and other emotions inside of us, something that is an intrinsic, biological part of our natures, passed from generation to generation, that allows us to both recognize and share in the emotional experiences transcribed to the printed page. Turns out, Zeki and Bartels were right.
It’s probably no surprise that many of the books I count among my favorites made the list just because they capture some aspect of love so well. Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind is known for its fiery main character, Scarlett O’Hara—but what has always struck me is how Mitchell describes where Scarlett’s affections lie. Scarlett spends the bulk of the book obsessing about her beloved Ashley, but Mitchell makes sure that we readers are well aware of how much Rhett affects her physically and emotionally, even if she isn’t as quick to pick up on it. While we may never know for certain just who Kurban Said is, this author captured a sweet and poignant love between his Ali and Nino—a relationship that transcends culture, faithlessness and war. Said captures love as it should be. Even, perhaps, if it can’t stand up in the face of real life. Of course, one of the best recognized books about love has to be Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It captures it all—attachment, romantic love and, of course, desire. And I’d dare say Susan Minot’s Evening and Anne Tyler’s The Accidental Tourist manage to keep up with Marquez on that front. Read more
