wednesday january 30
I’m partly through this new book and I just noticed that it has two front covers, two editors, two tables of contents, two introductions, and two sub-subtitles. On one side, it’s called The Ends of the Earth: An Anthology of the Finest Writing on the Arctic and the Antarctic: The Arctic, edited by Elizabeth Kolbert. On the other side it’s called The Ends of the Earth: An Anthology of the Finest Writing on the Arctic and the Antarctic: The Antarctic, edited by Francis Spufford.
Okay, so the publishers will be disappointed that I missed the clever upside-down, half-and-half presentation, but they should be pleased how much I’m enjoying the first inside half.
I started with the Antarctic, since as you may remember I’m a big fan of Beryl Bainbridge’s The Birthday Boys.
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wednesday january 23
I read Peter Carey's Jack Maggs years ago. That great, fiendishly ebullient Dickensian riff is still my favorite of his many splendid novels, but here's another one that will grab you by the throat, slam you in your seat, and keep you there cover to cover.
Theft: A Love Story is the tale of Michael "Butcher" Bones, a brilliant painter who has sabotaged his own career by his drinking, his scorching impatience with the Australian art scene, and a short stint in jail for ignoring the divorce court orders that keep him from his son and turned his works into his ex-wife's property.
Now Butcher is living in a patron's backcountry house, reducing it to a shambles as he works, and looking after his big, thick brother, Hugh. Into their lives walks gorgeous Marlene, who is attempting to reach the house on the next farm, where there's a painting by her father-in-law, the late, great Jacques Liebovitz.
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monday january 21
In college, my major was graphic design, but by my senior year I discovered (or should have realized all along) that librarianship was my true calling. Even so, when I went to bookstores, I would naturally pick up books with interesting covers and check the back flaps to see who designed them. One name kept appearing again and again: Chip Kidd.
You’re already familiar with Chip Kidd if you’ve read some of my earlier blogs, because he designed the covers for An Anthropologist on Mars, Schulz and Peanuts, and my all-time favorite cover, The Secret History. But Kidd has designed many more (mostly for publisher Alfred A. Knopf), and you can see a 400-page retrospective of his work in The Chip Kidd Album: Book One: Work, 1986-2006.
Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, David Sedaris’ Naked and Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, and Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy (All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and Cities of the Plain) are well-known Chip Kidd covers included here.
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saturday january 19
Plum Island is usually described as "porkchop shaped," which is ironic, because Plum Island porkchops could be even more unhealthy than salmon from China. Indeed, the main thing Plum Island has in common with a sanitary modern slaughterhouse is that the animals that go in don't come out alive.
Except that sometimes they do--or might--and the consequences could be bad, since, as everyone who has watched The Silence of the Lambs knows, Plum Island is home to the United States's Animal Disease Control Center. Michael Christopher Carroll's Lab 257 tells the story of the Island, focusing on decades of inept management, which led to serious maintenance and safety problems on the island, which is just a few miles from Connecticut and Long Island.
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friday january 18
Winter...sheer and utter cold, thoughts rising sluggishly like sap through the veins of a maple. What a great time to read a poem and let the images in it dance over the surface of your nearly hibernating brain! John Ashbery is a favorite of mine for cold days like these. His strange peekaboo glimpses of image after image make even familiar items and ideas seem strange and new. Beyond that, I've got a special kind of respect for a poet who can write a sestina about Popeye.
On the new books shelf recently, I noticed an Ashbery collection I'd not yet seen. Notes from the Air is a selection of poems from the last 20 years of Ashbery's work, mostly written during his middle-age and beyond. Perhaps that's part of what makes this collection so suitable for my winter days. Like all Ashbery poems there's a certain surreal confusion to the style, however, when one lets the images flow past, there's a sense of longing, disconnection and regret in many of the poems that speaks to the season.
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wednesday january 16
I have to confess that I have become completely addicted to our new New Arrivals service. If you don't know, it's a part of our website that lists every new title we receive. You can look at it whenever you're in the mood for something new, or you can subscribe to all or parts of it as an RSS feed so that you can make sure you never miss a thing in the categories you're interested in. Still better, you can put holds on anything that tempts your fancy. Some of the entries include reviews, and some of them include cover images.
That's of course why I put a hold on this book, Ellen Highsmith Silver's Floorquilts! Fabric Decoupaged Floorcloths--No-Sew Fun. The cover is gorgeous, showing a floor covering that looks like a quilt. Silver describes the process with which she treats artist's canvas and decoupages fabric onto it, using traditional quilt fabrics and design principles, for colorful and durable floorcloths. It seems like a very do-able project, though time-consuming.
Now, will I ever actually make one of these? Maybe not. (Well, to be more accurate, very, very probably not.) But I love the fact that I know this book is in our collection and that if I ever get inspired to get out the fabric scraps, I know exactly where to find my inspiration.
monday january 14
The American Library Association (ALA) today announced the top books, video and audiobooks for children and young adults - including the Caldecott, King, Newbery, and Printz awards - at its Midwinter Meeting in Philadelphia.
The following is a list of all ALA Youth Media Awards for 2008:
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