Yep. I did it. You can chalk this one right up there with Nicholas Sparks’ The Last Song and Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol on the list of Books I Read So You Don’t Have To.

I firmly believe that you have to earn your right to have an opinion about a book–kinda like how you don’t get to bitch about the state of things if you don’t vote–and frankly, my curiosity was getting the better of me. Figuring that anything that’s fun to do alone is more fun with a partner, I asked my pal Greg Zimmerman (who also writes for Book Riot and is the brains behind The New Dork Review of Books) to come along for the ride. And he said yes!

After a series of silly emails and Twitter DMs, we got down to business. Check out the first installment (of two, or maybe three, depending on how chatty we get) of our Fifty Shades of Grey reading diary now. And if you’ve read it too, I’d love to know what you think!

No related posts.

I’ve been writing and tweeting and anticipating for months, and at last, Toni Morrison’s Home is out!

We’ve made a holiday out of it over at Book Riot, and I hope you’ll check out the full and awesome line-up, including posts, giveaways, reading guides, and quizzes.

No related posts.

After a rollicking conversation about Swamplandia!, we took a break from our regular programming to discuss our bookish origin stories–where we started and how we ended up in the bookish jobs we have now. Hope you’ll listen, enjoy, subscribe, and let us know what you’d like to hear about in the future.

No related posts.

Published March 2012 by Knopf

The son of a notorious Tommy gun-toting London gangster, Joshua Joseph Spork resolved as a young man to “have a life, not a legend” and turned down his father’s invitation into a world where “money was something you could always steal more of” in favor of following his grandfather into the decidedly less glamorous clockwork repair business. When Joe’s shady pal Billy Friend presents him with a remarkable “doodah” to fiddle with and two very intimidating men (named Titwhistle and Cummerbund, because Nick Harkaway is awesome at naming characters) show up looking for it, then Billy turns up murdered, Our Man Spork gets the distinct impression that he’s wrapped up in something bigger than he understands. And HOO BOY is he right.

Turns out, the doodah is part of a much larger contraption–one with the potential to wreak global havoc–that was designed by the brilliant Frankie Fossoyeur at the behest of evil madman Shem Shem Tsien (again with the superfantastic character names). The Apprehension Engine involves mechanical bees (yes, bees) that, when let loose, enable people to “recognise lies and deception” when they hear them. Fossoyeur’s goal when she built it was to bring about the “death of falsehood,” but Shem Shem Tsien was after godhood and world domination [insert evil laugh here]. When Joe Spork repairs the doodah, he unknowingly activates the Apprehension Engine and sets into motion the gears of mass destruction. But octogenarian former spy and Woman of Consequence (god bless Nick Harkaway for this phrase) Edie Banister smells trouble and comes out of retirement to help Joe save the world.

“It’s so odd to be a supervillain, and at her age, too.”

Harkaway’s narrative bounces between the present and past, giving readers glimpses into Mathew “Tommy Gun” Spork’s illustrious history, Edie’s days as a renowned crime fighter, and Shem Shem Tsien’s ascent into near-immortality. The story sounds crazy–I mean, mechanical bees that can end the world?–but it all makes perfect sense within the logic of the world Harkaway has created. If that’s not the mark of excellent fiction, I don’t know what is. (And for the record, at least one character questions it: “Who makes mechanical bees, for God’s sake? Who creates a superweapon or a superwhatever-it-is and makes it so bloody whimsical?”)

Angelmaker tips its hat to classic gangster noir and is filled with sly winks to the genre. As Joe Spork–accompanied by his lawyer, his supersexy girlfriend Polly, and the indomitable Ms. Banister–sheds his quiet clockmaker identity to pick up the baton (or Tommy gun, as it were) left to him by his father (in a violin case, natch) and orchestrate a “night of misrule” in which all of London’s criminals come together for a job bigger than any job they’ve heard of, Harkaway’s writing becomes unmistakably cinematic. And it’s a hell of a lot of fun to read. If I were the kind of girl who calls books “pageturners,” this is the part where I would tell you about how madly I tore through this one. And I chuckled all the way through it, too. It would be hard not to, with characters saying things like:

“And is this your henchman? Do you know, I’ve always wondered what that means. How exactly does one hench? Is there a degree in henching, or is it more of an apprenticeship?”

Joe Spork’s rise to gangsterdom will make you want to don your trenchcoat, set your fedora at a cocky angle, and go fight some baddies. Harkaway calls it “good, wholesome, old-fashioned British crime,” and Angelmaker is about that. But for my money, it’s more about “brass and swagger”–that which Joe dredges up from within himself and, more important, that which Harkaway puts on full display in this endlessly clever (but never smug) frolic through the almost-end of the world.

Related posts:

1. Book (P)review: The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway
2. Win It Before You Can Buy It: The Gone-Away World
3. Just Read It: AMERICAN MUSIC by Jane Mendelsohn

First up is The 20% Doctrine by Ryan Tate. If you’ve read much about Google in the last few years, you’ve probably heard about their “20% Time” policy, which allows all employees to spend 20% of their working hours on projects for their personal enjoyment, the assumption being that workers are happier, healthier, more innovative, and more productive in the long-term when they’re allowed to experiment, explore, and flex their creative muscles. In The 20% Doctrine, Tate investigates how other companies–both within the tech industry and well beyond it–have implemented and benefited from encouraging employees to goof off while on the clock.

And it’s really interesting! At least, it was to me, particularly in the context of my work at a start-up that exists primarily in a creative industry but is also tech-based. I have a lot of control over my days and flexibility in how they’re structured, and I’ve been playing with applying something like the 20% doctrine to my work life. (Honestly, it’s more like tacking an extra hour or two of creative time onto my workday than it is using existing work time for creative projects, but it is making me happier and more productive, regardless.) The book also fed my current obsession with workflow (ask me sometime how not checking my email first thing in the morning has changed my life!) and reminded me how valuable learning about other businesses’ best practices can be. Because I’m now the kind of person who uses phrases like “best practices.” Oy! Moving on.

**********

In Ethical Chic: The Inside Story of the Companies We Think We Love, Fran Hawthorne looks at six BIG companies that are perceived by the public as being highly ethical to find out, well, if they really are. Hawthorne hits Tom’s of Maine, Apple, Starbucks, Trader Joe’s, Timberland (Who knew they had this reputation? Not I.), and American Apparel, discussing her research about how they source materials, treat their workers, and interact with their communities. She does a nice job of pointing out the way that consumers equate “cool” with ethical–maybe it’s wishful thinking?–and the feedback loop that’s created when a company decides to make their practices more ethical in hopes of becoming hipper. There are no earth-shattering revelations here, and the writing is dry at times, but there are some fascinating bits, I appreciate that Hawthorne set out to question assumptions and look at evidence instead of accepting spin.

And now I have a question for you–because it’s a question/quibble I had during the reading–do you consider how a company prices its products to be a factor in determining how ethical it is? Maybe my capitalist spirit is showing, but I’ve never thought that high price, in and of itself, is unethical or immoral. Hawthorne, though, seems to disagree me, docking proverbial points for things like five-dollar lattes, which not everyone can afford. It’s not something I’d thought of before, and I was surprised to see it included as a criterion. What do you think?

Related posts:

1. Just Read It: I JUST LATELY STARTED BUYING WINGS by Kim Dana Kupperman
2. Book Review: Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
3. Book Review: 84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff

Spring has me in the mood to clean out closets of both the storage and psychic varieties. Here are seven of the dirty little reading secrets I’ve been carrying around for a while. What are yours?

I can’t keep Tom Wolfe and Tom Robbins straight. One of them wore a white suit, but I don’t remember which. Also, when I think of Tom Robbins, I picture Tim Robbins circa The Shawshank Redemption.

I’ve never read BRAVE NEW WORLD…and I don’t really plan to. I should feel bad about this, right? Here’s the deal: my high school had a policy that seniors who had A’s going into finals didn’t have to take exams. My AP English final was focused on Brave New World. I was caught in the powerful grip of Senioritis, and I opted out. Through some twisted logic, I decided over time that if it wasn’t important enough to merit a test we were all required to take, I didn’t need to read it. I know–it doesn’t make sense to me, either.

I dread the novella-length stories in short story collections. For SO MANY REASONS. And when the novella is the first piece in the collection? Put a fork in me.

I wouldn’t have read the Harry Potter books if not for the movies. I was one of the O.G. haters who scoffed at a kids’ book about wizards. Then a friend talked me into going to see the first movie, and much to my chagrin, I loved it. So I picked up the second book and started there. Part 2 of this secret: I’ve never gone back to read the first book.

I really didn’t like Jane Eyre. Appreciating a work’s significance is not the same as liking it. Simple as that.

I still love The Perks of Being a Wallflower. I feel like admitting this as an almost-30-year-old woman is akin to being an almost-30-year-old man whose favorite book is still The Catcher in the Rye. But I don’t care. Perks resonated with my teenage self in a way that my adult self likes to remember. And who among us can, having read this book, take a long drive on a cool night with the windows down and the music up and not think for just a second about feeling infinite?

Sometimes I lie about what I’ve read. I learned the hard way (that is, through super-awkward interactions) not to pretend I’ve read books I haven’t read, but I’m not above saying I haven’t read something I really have read if it will keep me from getting stuck in a conversation I’m not in the mood for.

Now it’s your turn…

Originally published at Book Riot

No related posts.

My adventure back through Toni Morrison’s backlist in preparation for the first Riot Reading Day on May 8 rolls on. See previous installments here.

____________________

I had grand plans to try the close-reading technique with this opening, but the foreword contains Morrison’s own close-reading of the first sentence.* And it’s not like I want to compete with that. So on we go!

10: “Solid, rumbling, likely to erupt without prior notice, Macon kept each member of his family awkward with fear. His hatred of his wife glittered and sparked in every word he spoke to her.” Morrison is three for three with male characters who direct their anger at their families and relish their contempt for women. Macon is like Cholly and BoyBoy, who came before him.

11: Ruth uses a large watermark on the table as a touchstone. Did Kathryn Stockett steal this detail, too? Wait, that was an L-shaped scratch. But still.

19: This book is the moment when Morrison goes from kinda sorta weird to full-blown crazy. And I mean that in the best possible way. Crazy looks good on her. The first reference to Pilate stringing the box containing her name through her ear is the first indication that this one is going to be full of awesome WTF.

27: We find out that Pilate’s mother died before Pilate was born and that Pilate doesn’t have a navel. Establishes her as not physically connected to anyone and possibly supernatural. On p. 39, Morrison says she “looked like a tall black tree,” the first of many references to Pilate as a tree. The phrase “ancestor figure” appears in my marginalia from my college reading of this. I think that’s a good way to think about her.

41: “What difference do it make if the thing you scared of is real or not?” LOVE.

45: Guitar is named Guitar (yes, there’s a character named Guitar) “not cause I do play. Because I wanted to.” The idea that people are defined by their desires and/or by what is denied to them is going to prove central.

64: Milkman sees his mother Ruth “as a frail woman content to do tiny things,” while his sister Magdalene called Lena (HOO BOY, I better start looking up the biblical names now) recognizes “how her mother had learned to bring her husband to a point, not of power…but of helplessness.” Important that they have such disparate reactions to witnessing the same events.

69: Macon has taught Milkman all about “the business of life, which was learning to own things.” The question of whether possessions give a man power or drag him down is also primary to this book.

75: Whereas The Bluest Eye and Sula are largely about exploring (lordy, I almost wrote “limning”) womanhood, this novel is about men, about what it means to be a man in the world, particularly a black man in a white man’s world. After Milkman hits his father to protect his mother: “Isn’t that what men did? Protected the frail and confronted the King of the Mountain?”

91: Tied up in this obsession with masculinity is the idea that real men use women for what they want and leave the rest. Milkman’s private thoughts about Hagar after years of sexual entanglement:

“She was the third beer. Not the first one, which the throat receives with almost tearful gratitude; nor the second, that confirms and extends the pleasure of the first. But the third, the one you drink because it’s there, because it can’t hurt, and because what difference does it make?”

Morrison nails this. It’s an incredible description, and I can’t decide if I want to celebrate it, or if I’m just really sad that this phenomenon exists to be described at all.

104: “Serious is just another word for miserable.” ‘Nuff said

107: “He wondered what they would do if they didn’t have black and white problems to talk about. Who would they be if they couldn’t describe the insults, violence, and oppression that their lives (and the television news) were made of? … They excused themselves for everything.”

Is this explanation? Indictment? It’s about more than the fact of their identities being formed by and in opposition to oppression. I want to know more.

114: Guitar says, “Goddam, Milk. I do believe my whole life’s geography.” Hello, geography-as-destiny and the “I’ll fly away” yearning.

155: Guitar’s explaining the Seven Days to Milkman is one of the great OMG of Morrison’s oeuvre. I continue to wonder about the significance of Guitar having Sundays.

162: “But the people living in the Great Lakes region are confused by their place on the country’s edge–an edge that is border but not coast.” I just love that sentence. “An edge that is border but not coast.” Perfect.

179: On the long list of Toni Morrison quotes that get pulled out of context and self help-ified, this is tops: “Wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.” Note to self: future post on the self help-ification of Toni Morrison. I feel like this use of her work trivializes its power.

194: We learn that Corinthians (again with the biblical names) “hated [Henry Porter] a lot for the shame she felt.” It’s interesting, after so many male characters who hate the women in their lives, to see a female character’s contempt for her partner. Morrison just put the thing down, flipped it, and reversed it. Yeah. I went there.

204: I read the scene in which Guitar and Milkman are stopped by the police for no reason–a clear example of racial profiling–on the same morning I consume dozens of articles about Trayvon Martin. A 35-year-old scene that could have been written last week, it’s so relevant. So prophetic, and so sad.

221: Milkman tells Guitar, “I just want to live my own life,” and I hear echoes of Sula’s, “I want to make myself.”

240-249: Milkman’s encounter with Circe in the falling-down house feels like a fever dream or something out of Garcia Marquez. It’s just so odd. But “so odd” is also code for “so Morrison” at this stage in the game.

250: I’m now convinced that pretty much everyone plagiarizes from Toni Morrison. Just tell me Marcy Playground didn’t write their one big hit based on “…he smelled money, although it was not a smell at all. It was like candy and sex and soft twinkling lights.”

266-270: Back onto the masculinity theme with the men in Shalimar jumping Milkman in the store after they feel he calls their manhood into question. Then they take him hunting. For coon. Oh, Toni! “Oh, man! We gonna get some coon tonight!” has multiple meanings. You know it does. Is this a little heavy-handed? I think maybe.

283: I made it nearly 300 pages into this book–a book that spends a not insignificant amount of time on the meaning of flight–without thinking about how it’s important that Pilate sounds like “pilot.” Oof.

330: Morrison does a roll call of sorts, listing “names that bear witness” to history. It’s sobering in effect and also entertaining in that dark, “look at how many crazy names she can come up with” way. Also, I still haven’t figured out why Empire State is called Empire State. Did I miss a teeny reference?

336: “If I’d a knowed more, I would a loved more.” Nobody, and I mean nobody, does dying words like ToMo does dying words.

Post-read gut check: SO MANY FEELINGS. It was nice to read a relatively linear narrative after the bounce-around-in-time-ness of the first two, and really interesting to move into a book focused on male characters and the male experience. I really adore this book. But I finished it and realized that I’m only one-third of the way through this re-read. And now I’m starting to think this project is a little crazy. But it’ll be good, right?

*Page numbers refer to the 2004 Vintage edition.

Related posts:

1. Reading Notes: THE BLUEST EYE
2. Reading Notes: SULA
3. Toni Morrison and the Problem of Multiple Reading Personalities

Published February 2012 by Random House

If you’ve taken Psych 101, you’re familiar with the basic concept: ABC–antecedent, behavior, consequence. Or, something happens, so you do something, and then you feel or experience something because of what you did. Let’s say that every day around 4pm, you start to feel sleepy (antecedent), so you go get a coffee (behavior), and then you feel more awake (consequence). Simple, elegant, and accurate, right?

Charles Duhigg calls these processes habit loops, and in The Power of Habit, he uses slightly different terms (cue, routine, reward) to analyze the way our unthinking and automatic behaviors impact our daily lives and our businesses. While the concept is simple, Duhigg’s examples–ranging from weight loss to addiction treatment to advertising–are fascinating, and each one adds something important to the mix. Which is to say, Duhigg avoids what I think of as The Malcolm Gladwell Problem, where all the good stuff is in the first 50 pages and the rest is just a piling on of illustrations to hammer it home.

This book managed to ring a bunch of my bells all at once. It’s a researched-based look at psychological principles, a bit of a social history, and just the right amount of self help. If “inspirational” sends you running for the hills, fear not. The Power of Habit is all about empiricism! And evidence! And testing your hypotheses! It left me feeling like I could kick any or all of my bad habits if I could just pay close enough attention to them, and you know what? It works. I’m currently trying to break the mid-afternoon caffeine cycle (hence the example in the first paragraph), and while I’m not sure I’ve nailed the behavior that will best replace the coffee run, I’m already seeing improvement. (And by improvement, I mean that I’m no longer lying awake at 3am cursing the cappuccino I had at 3pm.)

If you like your nonfiction with a side of “does this have practical applications?” you don’t want to miss The Power of Habit.

Related posts:

1. Book Review: SHINY OBJECTS by James A. Roberts
2. Just Read It: YOU HAD ME AT WOOF by Julie Klam
3. Book Review: Hurry Down Sunshine by Michael Greenberg

This post originally ran at Book Riot. I’ve edited & adapted it to run here because, this being my original online home, I’m most curious about my readers’ responses.

Since my colleague Bethanne Patrick and I sat on a panel about readers and social media at the Virginia Festival of the Book a few weeks ago, I’ve been thinking a lot about what first drives people to come online in search of literary communities.

Sometimes it feels like I’ve been here–blogging, tweeting, tumbling, etc.–forever and that everyone who reads books and likes to talk about them is here, too. The reality, though, is that I’ve only been at this for four years (okay, not quite–The Book Lady will turn 4 in June) and there are many, many readers (probably the majority of readers) whose literary lives remain entirely grounded in the offline world of book clubs and print media book reviews. So, what’s the difference? What’s the catalyst?

My own journey into the bookish internet began when I was working as an event planner for a big box bookstore and an author hoping to schedule an event left behind a flyer that cited a quote from a review at The Literate Housewife. I looked up the blog–the first book blog I’d ever seen–and followed a link to LibraryThing, where I discovered message boards and links to several other book blogs. I started reading them. Then I started commenting on them. Then it wasn’t enough to be able to respond to what someone else had written, I wanted to be the one starting the conversations and deciding what to talk about. So I started the first iteration of this here blog. Then came Twitter and all the rest.

And it’s been incredible. I’ve met some of my dearest friends (and most trusted book recommendation sources) on the bookish internet, and my literary community has grown exponentially. I’d probably have ended up here eventually, but I found my way in via a very specific set of circumstances.

Now I’m curious: what brought YOU here?

Related posts:

1. Introducing The Book Lady’s Community!
2. The Sunday Salon 1.22.12

This book! It made me feel ALL THE FEELINGS. Russell’s writing is rich and playful and a joy to read, and the humor in this book is phenomenal (I mean, a theme park called The World of Darkness that’s all about Hell? YES.). I had all kinds of mixed emotions about some of the events in the story, but if there’s a single flaw, it’s that Russell was too ambitious, her vision too big. As problems go–especially problems with debut novels–that’s a pretty good one to have.

I hope you’ll take a listen, and if you’ve read the book, I’d love to know about your reaction to it.

Related posts:

1. So, THE SNOW CHILD…
2. What are the best book club selections of 2009?
3. Losing my [book club] virginity…