A Dead Man’s Books: Jennifer Spiegel’s Library

Reader:  Jennifer Spiegel
Location:  Phoenix, Arizona
Collection Size:  No real clue.
The one book I'd run back into a burning building to rescue:  None. See below. That doesn’t mean that I don’t love them.
Favorite book from childhood:  I actually saved a ton for my kids, but my favorites are the Oz Books by L. Frank Baum. I’m pretty sure they changed my life. I love them so much.
Guilty pleasure book:  Maybe The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins. I’ve also been known to read a zombie novel or two, though I think I’ve met my quota and I’m done. Oh, and I like political memoirs. And U2 coffee table books. I see a coffee table book next to me, and it’s about Tiny Houses.


I love my nonsensical, random collection of books. My shelves cannot purport to be a library. That’s too noble. I do, however, have a house full of books.

I had a sobering moment in 2015. In the late spring of that year, I helped my mom pack up and officially downsize. She’d been a widow since 2002, and she had lived in the same house since the seventies. Both of my parents were avid readers (though I spent a great deal of time making fun of my dad’s James Michener habit and all of those Cold War thrillers that were turned into Cold War movies). She was moving to a guest house, and she’d hold onto a handful of books collected over a lifetime.

She picked out her keepers. I scavenged and pulled out a few, like Leon Uris’s QB VII, William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice, and Herman Wouk’s The Winds of War. And then I took boxes and boxes and boxes to sell at a used bookstore. It wasn’t because we didn’t love them; it was because we had no room for them. I must’ve had that Sybil book in there (Flora Rheta Schreiber), and Alex Haley’s Roots. James Clavell’s Shogun. Ken Follett, Mario Puzo, Norman Mailer, John Le Carré, too. Maybe one woman: The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough. All of these books, these special and beloved books, these demarcations of eras and these veritable points on a map. A lot of my father.

I packed them in boxes.

I loaded them into my car.

I drove to a bookstore.

And they gave me a couple of bucks for them.

That was my sobering moment.

You Can’t Take It With You.

I still keep my books. Most of them, anyway. I still believe in houses full of books. Shelves runneth-ing over. But—and I do not say this lightly—I might value them a little less than I once did. (I might be crying as I write this.)

I will, though, still say this boldly, brazenly: Shame on you if you do not own books.

So, in lieu of a library, I offer you this vision of my shelves.

My beloved travel books, disorganized, with a smattering of others like a Rolling Stone picture book and the scripts to sex, lies, and videotape and Do The Right Thing. That Let’s Go Europe book is from 1990, and readers of my new novel might note its treasured role.

Selected Books-I-Must-Save. Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Salman Rushdie’s Fury and Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment and B.J. Novak’s One More Thing. Please note that Ta-nehisi Coates is next to Rick Springfield. I think that Coates’ book is the definitive book on the Obama years. I can’t explain Rick Springfield (we go back) except to say this:

These are mostly my kids’ books: Harry Potter, Little House on the Prairie, and Oz. Below that are the textbooks from my MA program in International Relations, from my defunct politics days.

And these are books that I will undoubtedly make my kids read. Many classics. A lot of Hemingway. Bleak House. Cry, The Beloved Country. Catch-22. The Good Earth. Wait! And what’s that I see? Mockingjay? (And a little stack of my books.)

My kids. I do not have an Allegiant-thing. Sesame Street, yes. Allegiant, no.

You have the Childcraft books, right? I mean, we all do, yeah?

Miscellaneous! Because sometimes you want poetry and sometimes you want Disney and sometimes you want Leaves of Grass, the Bible, and U2.

I fill shelves. Some of my shelves are from Ikea. Some are from friends who were getting rid of them. Some are nice. We even have a secret door in our house, a passageway.

But when I die, you can take my books. They are yours.

Jennifer Spiegel is mostly a fiction writer with three books and a miscellany of short publications, though she also teaches English and creative writing. She is part of Snotty Literati, a book-reviewing gig, with Lara Smith. She lives with her family in Arizona. More information is available at www.jenniferspiegel.com. And So We Die, Having First Slept, a new novel, is about marriage, youth, middle-age, Gen X, and fidelity. Currently, Spiegel is working on a memoir, Cancer, I'll Give You One Year: A Non-Informative Guide To Breast Cancer, or Cancer, I'll Give You One Year: How To Get Your Ba-Da-Bing Boobies On The House!

My Library is an intimate look at personal book collections.  Readers are encouraged to send high-resolution photos of their home libraries or bookshelves, along with a description of particular shelving challenges, quirks in sorting (alphabetically? by color?), number of books in the collection, and particular titles which are in the To-Be-Read pile.  Email thequiveringpen@gmail.com for more information.

Giving Thanks for Books

At this uncertain and unsteady Thanksgiving, I am grateful for many things: family, health, a stable job, and the food I’m about to eat in T-minus two hours. Somewhere on that list, though, are the thousands of books which line my basement walls. They are my comfort, my inspiration, and my escape hatch (down which I frequently find myself sliding these days). Where would we be without the music of words?

Bookish recently asked several authors (including yours truly) to name the one book for which they’re thankful. I could have plucked any number of books from my shelf. I mean, just a casual perusal yields this harvest of books which have comforted, inspired, etc. over the years: A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor, The Collected Stories of Raymond Carver, Rabbit, Run by John Updike, Jimmy Corrigan by Chris Ware, Rock Springs by Richard Ford, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer, and The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien. I could go on and on, but Bookish demanded a single book and so I tried to narrow it down as best I could. My response:

Just one book? Impossible. Narrowing it down to just one shelf of my nearly 40 shelves? Next to impossible. Maybe I could pick just one author out of the dozens who’ve held sway over my imagination for 50 years? Doable, but still difficult. Okay, okay, okay… (takes deep breath, stares long and hard at his library) I’ll choose… David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. I could have easily picked ten others from my Dickens shelf (one of the longest in my library), but I’ll settle on this bursting-at-the-seams bildungsroman about a thinly-disguised C.D. as D.C. who makes his way from abused waif to accomplished author over the course of three inches of pressed and bound pages. I am particularly thankful for Dickens’ masterful marriage of plot and character whose happy union always sharpens both my imagination and my pen—never more so than in the personages of Betsey Trotwood, Steerforth, all the Peggotties, Mr. Micawber, Dora, David and, oh, the shudder-worthy Uriah Heep. David Copperfield is a triumph! And God bless us, everyone! Oh wait, that’s from another favorite of mine.

Click here to read the picks from my fellow authors

What books are on your most-thankful list? Let me know in the comments section below.

Trailer Park Tuesday: The Remedy for Love by Bill Roorbach

Welcome to Trailer Park Tuesday, a showcase of new book trailers and, in a few cases, previews of book-related movies.

On the Richter scale of my book love, the needle swings wildly, scribbling in wide arcs across the paper, when it comes to Bill Roorbach's new novel The Remedy for Love.  My feelings for this book run so deep and strong that they rumble bedrock, crack the earth, topple buildings.  If you think that's some unchecked Overpraise, then just wait until you read The Remedy for Love for yourself and see if you don't feel the same way.  Seven months ago, I was lucky and privileged to read an advance copy of the book and offered up a few words on its behalf to the publisher:

Take two strangers—Eric, a small-town lawyer, and Danielle, a former schoolteacher turned homeless squatter—put them in a cabin in the Maine woods, spice it up with a little romantic tension, stir in the wreckage of past love affairs, sprinkle liberally with sharp, funny dialogue, then add the Storm of the Century which buries the cabin in huge drifts of snow, and—voila!—you've got The Remedy for Love, one of the best novels of this or any year. I'm not a doctor, but I'll be prescribing Bill Roorbach's novel to readers sick of blase, cliched love stories that follow worn-out formulas. What we have here is a flat-out funny, sexy, and poignant romantic thriller.

I meant every word when I wrote the blurb half a year ago, and I'd say the same thing if you were to ask me today.

The book trailer--handmade by the author himself--gives you a good feel for what's inside the front cover: fast-falling snow, howling winds, and the rich warmth of Roorbach's prose as he narrates the opening paragraphs of Chapter 2 when Eric makes the fateful decision to give Danielle a lift home as the storm approaches.

I can count on one hand the number of books I've re-read in my life--Catch-22, the Bible, Dombey and Son, the works of Flannery O'Connor and Raymond Carver--and now I'll add The Remedy for Love to that list (twice in one year, no less!).  I think I'll wait until the snow starts to fall (which could be any day now here in Butte, Montana)--you know, just to lend a little verisimilitude to this love story between two blizzard-bound characters.  I can feel that happy rumble starting deep inside my chest already.

Soup and Salad: Lin Enger's Closet, Hangovers & Fake-Reads, Experimental Novels, The Reel Catch-22, 50 Favorite Covers of 2013, Secret Bookcase Doors, Do Women Write Better Than Men?, The Care-and-Feeding Guide for Your Dictionary, Breathtaking Book Sculptures, Previously Unknown Chapters of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Subway Readers and Their Imagined Lives, Big Hair & Baseball, Bonnie ZoBell Finds Her Teacher's Pantyhose

On today's menu:

1.  At Amazon's Omnivoracious blog, Lin Enger describes the writing process for his latest novel, The High Divide (which is high in my TBR pile):

Not exactly by choice, I wrote most of this novel in a four-by-five closet, standing up. Sitting for any length of time wrecks my lower back, and so I resorted to using for my desk the top of a four-drawer file cabinet I kept in the closet of my study. Why didn’t I move the cabinet into the study itself? Because the isolation of standing in a small, windowless room helped me disappear into the northern plains of 1886. I also wrote in other places: coffee shops, libraries, hotel rooms, anywhere. Writing a novel is such an immersion experience--you have to take it with you; it refuses to be left at home. Since finishing the book, my wife and I have downsized into a smaller house, and I recently acquired a standing desk (salvaged from a library) that I’ve placed along the empty east wall of our bedroom. That’s where I’m writing the next book.

And boy, oh boy, can I relate to these words of Enger's: "I have this terrible inclination, as soon as the writing starts going well, to push away from the desk, notebook, or laptop, and go do something absolutely unnecessary--make something to eat or mow the lawn.  It’s like some part of my self doesn’t want the writer part to see the project through.  So I have to be constantly on guard against this urge."


2.  I'm a long-time reader of Shelf Awareness and the Book Brahmin feature in particular, in which writers list what's on their nightstand, what they'd most like to read again for the first time, favorite lines from book, etc.  Brian Hart's recent post might be the first time, however, that I've seen alcohol blamed on "fake-reading a book."


3.  Flavorwire has a good list of novels they label "experimental."  I'll cop to not having read any of them--though several are long-time residents of To-Be-Read-land....and once, as a teenager, I stood in the adult section of the Teton County Library in Jackson, Wyoming, and tried to read William Gaddis' JR.  I was on the library payroll at the time and I was supposed to be dusting the shelves, but, like Flavorwire says of JR, "This novel is brilliant and will suck you in and keep you forever."  And it did.  At least until the head librarian got suspicious and started looking for me.

4.  Reason #75 to Open My Email: my friend Lisa Peet sent me the link to a recently-published post at the National Archives blog about Joseph Heller's World War Two training as a bombardier.  In "The Reel Catch-22," Burton Blume, a brand consultant/creative strategist based in Tokyo, describes how he and archivists stumbled upon footage for a film called "Training in Combat" shot by his father, a cameraman with the Army Air Forces 9th Combat Camera Unit:

Earlier this year, the team at (National Archives and Records Administration) struck gold. They found nine reels of unedited footage from Training During Combat that was shot by my father. The combined running time of this footage is nearly 73 minutes. Of this, over eight minutes contain scenes showing Joseph Heller in uniform....The story follows the activities of a replacement crew that have just arrived at the forward base at Alesani and follows their progress as they go through the indoctrination and technical training needed to perform their missions. There are two protagonists in this film: a pilot named “Bob” and a bombardier named “Pete.” Photogenic young Joe Heller plays Pete."

As I wrote back to Lisa, "This is just the COOLEST!"  To see a skinny young Heller living the life of Catch-22's characters is extremely interesting.  I found myself staring at that forehead beneath the tipped-back cap, trying to see the words lining up in satiric formation.  Watch for yourself:



5.  The Design Observer Group has announced its 50 favorite covers of 2013.  I like many of them, but This might be my favorite:

6.  Calling Scooby-Doo!


7.  Grammar-checker website Grammarly conducted a study with more than 3,000 participants at its site to settle a question that has been plaguing mankind for centuries: “Which gender has the better writers?”  Here's the infographic they came up with:

If that's a little hard for you to read, you can also find the results at The Daily Beast.  By the way, I take no sides in this question.  I'm a bisexual reader.


8.  Check out this care-and-feeding guide for your unabridged Merriam-Webster dictionary, as found at The Strand bookstore's Tumblr.

9.  I still cringe a little inside when I see people taking chainsaws to perfectly good books.  However, there's no denying these book-sculptures, as highlighted at Book Riot, are true works of art.

10.  The reliably-funny Tom Gauld reveals "Previously Unknown Chapters of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory."


11.  Novelist Ben Dolnick (At the Bottom of Everything) spent a week of watching people on the NYC subway, casting surreptitious glances and pretending to tie his shoes just so he could document what commuters were reading.  He shares his results at The Awl, along with some fabricated "Assumptions" on the backstory to the subway books:

     Wednesday, 4:15PM, Church Avenue-bound G train, Hoyt-Schermerhorn:
     Facts: Thirty-something white man, talking to himself while holding a battered (and, for the moment, closed) Oxford World’s Classics edition of Middlemarch. A black backpack rests between his feet; he wears khaki shorts and a blue polo shirt, made of some athletic wicking material. He appears (hand-chopping motions, etc.) to be rehearsing a difficult conversation. When he resumes reading, his face assumes the grim expression of someone in the last seconds of a wall-sit.
     Assumptions: He, Keith, is from Tulsa, Oklahoma, where his girlfriend broke up with him six months ago after finding porn in his browser history. (It was “not normal stuff, but like real sick stuff, totally degrading. Who even thinks about whether girls have pigtails or not?”) Soon afterward, she moved to New York to take a nannying job. One night, in grief and bewilderment, he Googled “how to understand women better” and he came upon Middlemarch, which he has been reading now for five months. He plans to to show up at the door of his girlfriend’s apartment, lay the battered thing down before her and tell her just how much he’s changed, then burst into tears. He has a week’s worth of clothes in his backpack, just in case this works.

12.  Do you have a fondness for big hair, polyester, and 70's-era baseball?  Then you would do well to read Bill Morris' recent contribution to The Millions:

      You meet the strangest people on a book tour. One of the strangest – in the good sense – that I’ve met so far on my current tour was standing in a crowded Detroit bar sporting a 1970s Detroit Tigers jersey, a pair of bushy muttonchops and a cumulus cloud of curly hair that made him look like the drummer in a heavy metal band. I recognized the guy instantly. Our pictures were side-by-side in the front window of Nicola’s Books in Ann Arbor, where we had just given readings from our new books on successive nights.
      “Excuse me,” I said. “Are you Dan Epstein?”
      “That’s me,” he said, smiling as he shook my hand. “And you’re Bill!”
      I admitted I was, and a writerly friendship was born.

13.  I loved this essay by Bonnie ZoBell at Bloom on the importance of writers' Day Jobs.  Here's how it begins:

      Explaining to a writing student who’s just said she’s going to be on the bestseller list next year that it’s a little tougher than that isn’t one of my favorite jobs. Do I tell her that, no matter how well-known she becomes, she will inevitably have many more jobs in her life, and that this isn’t a bad thing? That the internet quotes anywhere from 300 to 2,500 people who actually make a living at writing in the U.S.? Probably one of the most important points I could make is that the jobs writers have along the way are actually a goldmine of writing material.
      Even babysitting has its perks. Let us not forget Robert Coover’s exquisitely creepy “The Babysitter,” one of his most memorable stories. I was quite the voyeur as a babysitter. Even then, I wanted to know what made people tick. I looked through closets, under beds, trying to discover folks’ secrets, who they really were. Were other families more normal than mine? I was absolutely stunned the summer I lived with my middle school math teacher and took care of her children. My parents were splitting up, and my mom had already sold our house, but our new one wasn’t ready yet, so she planned to camp with us kids all summer. I wasn’t handling it well. Imagine my surprise when, looking through my teacher’s dresser, I found some sheer pink panties with a hole in them right there and colorful embroidered letters alongside: “19th Hole!” My math teacher had sex? She enjoyed it?

You know you want to keep reading the rest.

War, Death, Laughter: Vassar Students React to Fobbit

Midway through writing my debut novel, Fobbit, I started to feel uneasy about what was making its way from my head to the page.

On the one hand, I had a well-meaning buffoon named Captain Abe Shrinkle who, despite his years of Army training, found himself in one scene giving way "completely to the dread and terror of close-order combat and releasing the clench on his bowels."  This, during a stand-off with a suicide bomber, could be construed as funny....or the gallows humor could go completely awry in a scene which was, at heart, deadly serious.  I mean, we're talking about suicide bombing here--the kind of attacks which came all too frequently during my year in Iraq.

Looking at my journal, I saw that on June 1, 2005, I wrote this:

In Kirkuk, a bomber plows his car into a U.S. consulate convoy. Two Iraqis die and 12 are hurt. A few hours, a New York Times reporter will write in an article that “Suicide bombings have surged to become the Iraqi insurgency's weapon of choice, with a staggering 90 attacks accounting for most of last month's 750 deaths at the militants' hands. Suicide attacks outpaced car bombings almost 2-to-1 in May, according to figures compiled by the U.S. military, The Times and other media outlets. In April, there were 69 suicide attacks, more than in the entire year preceding the June 28, 2004, hand-over of sovereignty. The frequency of suicide bombings here is unprecedented, exceeding that of Palestinian attacks against Israel and of other militant insurgencies, such as the Chechen rebellion in Russia. Baghdad saw five suicide bombings in a six-hour span Sunday.”

And there I am with my clown, Captain Shrinkle, drawing chuckles from readers in Chapter 2.  Could I, should I, make people laugh at war?  Fobbit has scenes in which people are killed in the most awful ways imaginable during a war that seemed to be nothing but a cycle of frustrations and setbacks.  But yet, at one point, I have a now-disgraced Shrinkle low-crawling through the post exchange, a bag of potato chips crushed against his chest, in an effort to avoid being seen by his former soldiers.  Screwball comedy during a war in which people, Allies and Iraqis alike, were killed by bombs made of screws and explosives.  How dare I?

I dared.

For starters, I remembered the legacy of Joseph Heller's novel Catch-22 which abounds with grim laughter.  And then there were the hours I spent in front of the television as a kid, laughing without constraint or conscience at M*A*S*H's doctors cracking jokes while elbow-deep in gore or Hogan's Heroes which treated the Holocaust like it was a caustic circus.  If they could pull it off, then maybe I could.  After nearly 10 years of depressing headlines, it felt like it might be time to start (cautiously at first) laughing at and with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

This idea of using humor as one way to engage readers with serious subjects like death and war came up during a recent Skype session I conducted with an American Studies class at Vassar.  I'd been beamed electronically into the classroom at the invitation of instructor Peter Molin (of the fantastic Time Now blog) and Professor Maria Hohn (herself the author of a study about race, nationality and the military called GIs and Frauleins: the German-American Encounter in 1950s West Germany).  In the hour I spent with the students, I was impressed by their thoughtful questions and how they held me accountable for my art.  It's a rare delight for a writer to encounter deep readers like those I found at Vassar.

Professor Hohn was kind enough to share some of the students' written reactions to Fobbit and, with everyone's permission, I'm going to post two of them here--not for self-gratification (though I am truly grateful for these insightful reviews) but because Clyff Young and Sarah Warmbein articulate the humor-sobriety argument so much better than I've just attempted with my flailing words.  So, here we go--Clyff's response first, then Sarah's.

Warning: There be spoilers ahead.

*     *     *     *

I watch two political dramas on TV.  One of them is House of Cards.  The other is Veep.  House of Cards tells the story of Francis J. Underwood, a supremely ambitious, intelligent, and sociopathic politician whose tactical and manipulative genius is unmatched in all of Washington D.C.  Veep is about a struggling vice president who, like her staff and everyone else is D.C., is useless and incompetent.  Hilarity ensues.  Washington’s image wants to be that of House of Cards—the best and brightest cutthroat talent the nation has to offer.  To me (but what do I really know?) Washington is more like Veep.  Point being that the news media paints the military’s public portrait as a professional entity comprised of the cream of the crop, and Fobbit, like Veep, underscores a possible reality that, like in the world of politics, the army is rife with the ineffectual and inept, and constantly making a mess of things.

In the spirit of David Abrams, I think it is safe to use unsavory language in describing his work.  Fuckity fuck, Fobbit was amazing.  I faced one uniform moral conundrum throughout the book: Am I allowed to laugh at what is happening?  The characters may be fictional, and the situations—like Abe Shrinkle blowing up the fuel truck and “barbequing” an innocent “Local National” in the process—are, probably out of legal necessity, imagined, but everything seems so real.  From widespread incompetence to Duret’s headaches, the sense that what is happening is an account and not a novel is pervasive.  So when Lumley fires on the suicide bomber whose car is stuck underneath an Abrams tank and Shrinkle soils his underwear, what does it is say about me and the way that the war has affected the average civilian (me) when I can’t help but giggle?  Further, what about that passage, and others like it, is making me laugh?  Certainly, the language is clever and vulgar, which lends a humorous air to the book.  But behind the swearing and the army witticisms that an immature college sophomore find funny is real death.  Hundreds have been killed and maimed in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001 due to suicide IED attacks like the one Abrams depicts.  I’ve seen it, we’ve all seen it, on the televised news, in magazines, and in newspapers, many times coming in the form of high-definition photos or videos.  I didn’t laugh then, but I am now, even though the violence in Fobbit is commensurate to the actual news coming out of Iraq and rendered in equally harrowing detail.

What separates Fobbit from reality, and in turn what makes it a hilarious read, is its humanity.  Every character, regardless of rank, has his or her eccentricities, the little things that are getting them through the war.  The American public doesn’t get to see the human interplay and individual complexity of the war.  All we get to see are well-oiled “Armies of One” constituting a “Global Force for Good.”  The “Moneymakers” appearing on CNN are robotic, ever-conscious of their impact on public opinion and promulgation of the military as America’s ultimate human resource.  Letting the public in on the average needs and qualms of the soldiers, their tics and fears, would perhaps make it easier to relate to the war.  But if that was the way it were, Fobbit wouldn’t be quirky and comic—it would just be sad, which isn’t to say that it is particularly uplifting (at all) to begin with.

I am not sure how I feel about how hard I laughed.  Is Fobbit funny because it is satirical, mocking the military?  Or is it funny because it is true?  How I read the novel hinged on those questions.  Sometimes I was disgusted at the obvious disconnect between the Iraq war and me.  Sometimes I felt relieved I didn’t have to be there.  And that might be the ultimate point: that Abrams’ fictional soldiers don’t know what to think of the war, to laugh or cry, and neither does the reader.  In any case, Fobbit is brilliant.  It is Slaughterhouse-Five for those who grew up with the Global War on Terror, showing the confused, ambiguous, ill-advised, and stupid nature of war and conflict with an effortless human touch shining through the brutality.

*     *     *     *

I was impressed and also taken aback at David Abrams’ Fobbit.  When I learned that the novel was a satire, I didn’t quite know what to expect in terms of how the author would use humor to deal with something as grim as the Iraq War.  At times I was pleasantly surprised, but at others I questioned Abrams’ use of the absurd.  For example, I found the names of the characters absolutely brilliant.  They each seemed to highlight (for me at least) the characters’ quirks and flaws: Shrinkle, the idiot coward; Lumley, disinterested and somewhat bland; Gooding, the goodie two-shoes; and Duret, an ambitious commander whose fortunes have taken a turn for the worse (I’m pretty sure the choice of making his name French was no accident).  However, some of the situations depicted in the book made me question whether or not humor is an appropriate tool to explore war, such as when Shrinkle shot the mentally-disabled Iraqi.  That whole incident was strange, the description of and reaction to the man’s snow pants and jester’s hat made me want to laugh (because he really did get it right, who sells snow pants in Baghdad?) but the man’s death and the lack of consequences for Shrinkle’s actions infuriated me.  I think it would have been useful in that instance to explore more deeply each character’s inner monologue after that death, but instead the reader is just left with a description of two elderly women weeping over the loss of someone they loved.  The only hint of anger against Shrinkle we see is from Duret much later and only after Shrinkle killed another civilian.

On the other hand however, I wonder if my questioning Abrams’ absurdity is only proof of Fobbit’s effectiveness.  As someone who has read more than her fair share about war and violence and genocide over the years, the fact that Abrams could make my stomach turn says something, although if I’m being honest I’m not entirely sure what.  One thing is certain though, Abrams managed to get beyond my own cynicism and numbness to the realities of war.  Fobbit was emotionally difficult, and I’m pretty sure I’m going to be wrestling with the novel for a long time to come.

Soup and Salad: Harlan Ellison's Haircut, Reading Women, Loving and Hating Jess Walter, Fair Warning on JKT and DFW Auction Lots, Novel Research, Edith Wharton's Curtains, Reading on the Way to Mars, Beautiful Fake Book Covers

On today's menu:

1.  If you're in L.A. this Saturday, you should stop by Sweeney Todd's Barber Shop (4639 Hollywood Blvd.) at 2 p.m.  That's where you'll be able to watch Harlan Ellison get a haircut from "coif king" Sween Lahman.  Using switchblade combs, Sween will cut Mr. Ellison's hair in a specially designed pompadour.  Afterward, leather-clad bodyguards will escort Ellison down Hollywood Boulevard to a benefit reading for Kicks Books, whose Red Hook warehouse was submerged in floodwaters from Hurricane Sandy last October.  In this rare personal appearance (with special guest Patton Oswalt), Ellison will read--for the first time in history--from his pseudonymous and scarce 1959 street fiction, collected now by Kicks Books in two "hip pocket paperbacks" titled Pulling A Train and Getting in the Wind.  Afterwards, Ellison will sign both Kicks Books which will be available for purchase along with commemorative perfumes called Sex Gang and Sin Time, created by Kicks Books' founder Miriam Linna.   I can't think of the last author reading event which began with a haircut and ended with perfume, can you?  File this one under "Not To Be Missed."


2.  Jason Rice, one of the founders of 3 Guys 1 Book, writes about how he emerged from a nearly all-male-writers diet to find that he was equally stimulated and enlightened by female authors:

Right around this time, someone forced Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children on me, and I couldn’t care less.  I was trying—and struggling—to read Richard Price’s latest.  Claire Messud poured cold water down the front of my pants.  This book was the gateway drug to female writers.  Messud made me realize that you only have one life, and you should read this story about this family.  The main characters are both exciting and compelling in a way that makes you want to find them and move into their house.

Rice goes on to read works by Zadie Smith, Jennifer Egan, Emily St. John Mandel, Eliot Holt and others.  And he is a better man for it.


3.  Ann K. Ryles had me at the first line of a recent interview at The Rumpus: "I didn’t want to like Jess Walter."  Having gotten to know Jess a little bit over the past year (we've done a couple of book festival panels together), I knew exactly what Ryles meant.  Jess Walter is super-talented AND he's a super-nice guy.  The bastard.  Don't you just hate a winning combo like that?   Read Ryles' interview and you might just want to go leave flaming bags of dog shit on Walter's front porch.  Either that or you'll be stalking him on the interwebs and promising to give him your first-born children if he'll just be your new BFF.  Or maybe that's just me.


4.  On the auction block: a photocopy of John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces manuscript and a photo sell for $31,000.... Letters and manuscripts by David Foster Wallace go for $125,000.


5.  At her blog, Cathy Day (The Circus in Winter) offers a peek behind the writer's curtain, describing how in researching her new novel one thing leads to another:

      So, the other day, I was writing those scenes.  Linda in Chicago at this divorce trial.  March of 1902.
      I decided to have her stay at the famed Palmer House.  Why?  Well, I stayed at the Palmer House for AWP 2012, and so this way, I can write off some of my expenses.
      Also, it’s gorgeous.
      While I was staying there, I grabbed a flyer about the history of the Palmer House and gleaned two great details:
      * The floor of the barber shop was tiled in silver dollars.
      * The owner was so sure that his hotel was “The World’s Only Fire-Proof Hotel,” he promised that if any of his guests were willing to pay to remodel and replace their room’s furnishings, they could set their hotel suite on fire and close the door.  Potter Palmer vowed the fire wouldn’t spread, and he was willing to prove it.
      When I saw those details, I knew my character’s rich, bad-boy husband wouldn’t be able to resist setting his hotel room on fire, and that he’d want to show her that floor tiled in silver dollars.

Silver-dollar floors and hotel fires?  Man, I can't wait to read Day's book!   (But of course I'll have to bide my time since she's still in the middle of writing it.)


6.  How would you like the job of re-creating Edith Wharton's curtains?


7.  This has always been my kind of dream scenario: stranded in isolation for 520 days with nothing to do but read.  Some people think of deserted islands (I love coconuts, but I'm sure I'd get permanently sick of them along about Day 241), others pretend a prison sentence would be a good thing (okay, except for the shower-rape episodes), and then there's always a long hospital stay (yes, but what if you got a roommate who only wanted to watch Wheel of Fortune all the time?).  Engineer Diego Urbina had a different opportunity for a read-a-thon:

      On June 3, 2010, six men filed through the weedy, Soviet-era campus of the Institute of Biomedical Problems, in Moscow.  They made their way past friends, family, scientists, well-wishers and a bronze-toned, gigantic statue of the astronaut Yuri Gagarin before entering a vaulted hall that contained a mock-up of the type of spacecraft that could one day ferry humans to Mars.  The men climbed aboard.  Behind them, the hatch sealed shut.  They didn’t come out for a year and a half.
      The Mars500 expedition was the world’s first full-length test of what it would be like for astronauts to travel to and from Mars, which is much farther from Earth than the moon.  For five hundred and twenty days, the international crew—three members came from the Russian space agency, two from the European space agency, and one from the Chinese space agency—lived as if they were in flight, eating Russian space food, moving through the capsule’s diminutive rooms via tube-shaped metal hallways, performing scientific experiments to see what was happening to their bodies and their minds, sometimes losing contact with mission control, and only occasionally getting word from their families.
      Like real space travellers, they also had lots and lots of downtime.

Urbina, who said he likes books but doesn't normally have a lot of time to read, decided to pack his bags for the faux-Mars trip with a small library of novels by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

      While he expected to like Márquez, in the weeks following “takeoff,” Urbina, who recently turned thirty, began to find that the stories were helping him in ways he hadn’t anticipated.  “The themes Gabriel García Márquez writes about were very similar to what we were going through,” said Urbina.  “He’s talking about loneliness, his stories take place over long periods of time.  I felt so identified with the characters.”

8.  I just stumbled across these absolutely riveting fake covers for well-known books.  Levente Szabó is a graphic designer worked in Brussels, and currently he’s redesigning the covers for some of his favorite books.  You can find links to the galleries here at The Millions.  There were so many I loved, I just decided to post all of my favorites:

And my favorite:

Fobbit's going global!

Something I haven't talked about here at the blog is the fact that Fobbit is about to leave the shores of America and head over to Great Britain.  I'm pleased to announce that Harvill Secker will release Fobbit (in hardcover!) in the UK on April 4.  Harvill Secker is an imprint of Vintage Books (which is itself a division of Random House) and, in its various incarnations over the years, has published George Orwell, Günter Grass, J.M. Coetzee, José Saramago, Haruki Murakami,  Richard Ford, Peter Matthiessen, and Raymond Carver.  Heady company, indeed!

I'm especially fond of the UK cover with its sly humor (the "I [heart] Powerpoint" button) and its direct homage to M*A*S*H. Thank you, Harvill Secker, for putting my book in such a beautiful package!

Earlier this week, the Guardian was kind enough to mention Fobbit in a podcast about books to watch for in 2013.  Click here to hear that podcast (Fobbit gets its mention around the 7:00 mark).

And speaking of the UK....British audiobook rights to Fobbit recently sold to AudioGo.  No word on whether or not they'll record a new version or use the one from Tantor Audio (of which AudioFile advised: "Don’t listen to this novel while driving.  Abrams’s laugh-out-loud satire of the war in Iraq will have you putting your life and license in jeopardy.  David Drummond’s voicing is superb, down to the lousy faux-British accent adopted by one of the American officers.")

I'm also pleased to announce that Italian publisher Bompiani has made an offer to buy rights to Fobbit.  What's especially cool is that Bompiani previously published Catch-22 (translated by Remo Ceserani).  In Italy, Joseph Heller's novel was called Comma 22.

I'm very keen to see how the rest of the world receives Staff Sergeant Chance Gooding, Captain Abe Shrinkle and Lieutenant Colonel Eustace Harkleroad.  This should be a fun year!

Soup and Salad: Novel T-Shirts, Literary Flyovers, The Word-Drunk Ghosts of Manhattan, Chad Simpson's Eureka Moment, Ron Hansen's Christmas Pageant, Book Ads--Modern and Vintage, Ben Schrank Paddles a Canoe, Silas House and the Art of Being Still

On today's menu:

1. You probably had some pretty nifty gifts under the Christmas tree, didn't you?  But did you get the ultimate cool literary apparel from Novel-Ts?  I'm wearing one right now--the Joseph Heller shirt--and I can assure you I feel infinitely smarter having a big "22" on my back.  Novel-Ts blend the sports jersey look with bookish smarts--the Edgar Allan Poe shirt, for instance, has a tell-tale heart on the front and a huge "13" on the back.  Other authors on the team include Louisa May Alcott, Kurt Vonnegut, Herman Melville, Douglas Adams, Jane Austen, Dorothy Parker, and many more.  Check out the full line-up here.


2.  At the Tin House blog, Roxane Gay has an appreciation of writers living outside the insular epicenter of the book world (aka New York City).  Gay, who lives "in a rural town...in the middle of somewhere that is probably nowhere you know" (aka eastern Illinois), says there's plenty of literary value to be found in the flyover states:

At times I envy writers who live in the city, always going to book parties and benefits and other fancy events and knowing, seemingly, everything about everyone in publishing. Not being in the middle of that, however, and only joining in when I choose, is a luxury. I live in the middle of nowhere but there’s no pressure to perform the role of writer. No one around me gives a fraction of a damn about the latest publishing deal or whatever we’re all gossiping about on Twitter. I have time, enormous stretches of time with very little to do but read and write. I’m not sure this is entirely healthy but I get to actually be a writer with very little distraction. I try, though I don’t always succeed, to not take such luxury for granted.

Roxane's novel, An Untamed State, will be published by Grove/Atlantic in early 2014.  Consider this your early advance notice to clear a little space on your to-be-read shelf.


3.  Meanwhile, Dwight Garner takes us on an entertaining jaunt through the epicenter: "A Critic's Tour of Literary Manhattan" in the New York Times:

Is Manhattan’s literary night life, along with its literary infrastructure (certain bars, hotels, restaurants and bookstores) fading away? Not long ago I installed myself at the Algonquin, the Midtown hotel where Dorothy Parker, Alexander Woollcott and others once traded juniper-infused barbs, and used it as a launching pad to crisscross the island for a few days, looking to see what’s left. I made several more nighttime crawls after that. At the very least, I thought, I could inhale the essence of some cranky and word-drunk old ghosts.

4.  At The Story Prize blog, Chad Simpson (Tell Everyone I Said Hi) has a Eureka Moment.  It involves Michael Chabon and dead daffodils on church lawns.


5.  Also at The Story Prize blog (is my love for this blog showing yet?), Ron Hansen admits his love of writing started during a long-ago Christmas pageant:

[W]hen I was in kindergarten I was the narrator for a Christmas pageant and recited from memory the nativity story from the gospel of Luke. I stood there in front of a hundred people, mostly parents, and watched them pay strict and serious attention to what I was saying, even though words and phrases like "manger" and "swaddling clothes" and "the time of her confinement" were like gobbledygook, an absolute mystery to me. The power of language took root in me, and over the years I realized that storytelling, at least on paper, was something I enjoyed doing enough that I did it voluntarily.

6.  Buzzfeed rounds up some "brilliant book ads"--which, even though they've been around awhile, are still pretty cool.  Check out these panel truck ads designed by the Johnson County Library in Kansas City:

7.  Retronaut also has some book ads on display--this time, from 19th-century France, starring Victor Hugo and Emile Zola (this blog's namesake):

8.  Christmas Eve brought a bounty of advance reading copies from publishers to my front porch.  As I ripped open the envelopes, I was overjoyed to find a novel I'd been looking forward to reading: Love Is a Canoe by Ben Schrank.  At the FSG blog, Schrank writes about the book's long, meandering road to publication:

Writing a novel should be fun. At the beginning, meander. Don’t be afraid to play around. Get lost. Fall down. Get dirty. The stakes aren’t high because whatever is written will be tossed, ideally without fret or regret. When I began to write Love Is a Canoe I thought I wanted to write about a girl who gets advice from her grandfather while paddling around in a canoe. I meandered for over a year before that girl turned into a boy. I wrote additional narratives that wandered far afield of the novel I would eventually complete, built complex lives at a country inn and indulged in pages of imagery and then, when I found characters I believed in (a senior publishing executive who had disappeared into her persona, an unhappy young married couple, a writer who wrote a popular book of advice on marriage) I wound their stories together. But on the way there, Peter Herman, the character who wrote the book within my book, Marriage is a Canoe, officiated at marriages and then got horribly drunk at them. He was attacked in his house by an unhappy married couple. He started work on a novel. I had a wild time at that wedding, was shocked at the violence an unhappy couple can inflict, and I plotted and wrote a lot of Peter Herman’s dirty, indulgent novel. Then I tossed it all.

9.  I'll leave you today with this wise, beautiful essay by Silas House called "The Art of Being Still"--advice I myself need to heed:

      Many of the aspiring writers I know talk about writing more than they actually write. Instead of setting free the novel or short story or essay that is sizzling at the ends of their fingers, desperate to set fire to the world, they fret about writer’s block or about never having the time to write.
      Yet as they complain, they spend a whole lot of that precious time posting cartoons about writing on Facebook or putting up statuses about how if they only had more free time they just know they could get their novels written. They read books about writing and attend conferences, workshops and classes where they talk ad nauseam about writing. However, they spend very little time alone, thinking, much less hunkering down somewhere and actually putting words on the page.
      The problem is, too many writers today are afraid to be still.

Fobbit Tour: Barnes & Noble in Edina, MN

This is the One With All the Friends.

Looking out into audience who came for the Fobbit reading at the Barnes and Noble in Edina, Minnesota, I spotted two e-friends I'd known for years but was meeting in person for the first time.  And then there were Joe and Pam, real-life friends I hadn't seen in 25 years (but who had been e-friends for years in the interim).  While I appreciate each and every person who comes to the readings on this tour, there's a special frisson of delight that fizzes through the veins when you have these unexpected personal connections along the way.  So, it was great to see Joe and Pam, and Cindy and her husband Mark and their son Bee, and novelist Peter Geye who made the special trip to Edina on the night before his own novel, The Lighthouse Road, is officially released.  (Peter writes about chilly northern winters, Norwegian immigrants, lumberjacks, a boy named Odd, and ship-building.  Do yourself a favor: GO GET IT.)  Thanks to everyone for coming out to support me!

Look at all those pens!  B&N made sure I didn't run out of ink.

This is the One With the Tribute to Catch-22.

I began the reading by saying, "Welcome to Banned Books Week."  Shortly before I walked over to the Barnes and Noble from my hotel next door, I realized we were at the start of the annual observance of books which have been banned and/or challenged by that small, pale race of creatures known as Those Who Are Afraid of Words.  The motto for this week is: "Freadom: Celebrate the Right to Read."  Some of our best books have been the victims of the Squelchers--books like The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak. Of course, one of my favorite "subversive" novels is Catch-22 by Joseph Heller.  So, as soon as I arrived at the bookstore, I hunted down a copy of the book and then opened tonight's Fobbit event by reading the first paragraph of Chapter 19:

Colonel Cathcart was a slick, successful, slipshod, unhappy man of thirty-six who lumbered when he walked and wanted to be a general. He was dashing and dejected, poised and chagrined. He was complacent and insecure, daring in the administrative stratagems he employed to bring himself to the attention of his superiors and craven in his concern that his schemes might all backfire. He was handsome and unattractive, a swashbuckling, beefy, conceited man who was putting on fat and was tormented chronically by prolonged seizures of apprehension. Colonel Cathcart was conceited because he was a full colonel with a combat command at the age of only thirty-six; and Colonel Cathcart was dejected because although he was already thirty-six he was still only a full colonel.

Now I ask you, why would anyone want to smother such delicious writing as that?


This is the One With the Banner.

I won't lie: there is something undeniably ego-stroking about seeing your name, face and book cover stretched across the railing above the store's escalators.  It's not quite a billboard in Times Square (See Also: Jeffrey Eugenides' Vest), but it's very flattering and red carpet-y for this debut novelist from a small town in Montana.  Lin Salisbury and the staff at the Edina B&N went out of their way to make me feel welcome--from the stacks of Fobbits pyramided at the front entrance to the "Attention Barnes and Noble shoppers..." intercom announcements just prior to the reading.

I know what my wife is thinking:
"I should have been there to iron his shirt."
Me: "I should have worn a vest."

This is the One With the Pre-Event Jitters Soothed by the Washington Post's Thumbs-Up Review.

It always seems to happen just before I head out the door to a reading/signing: a Google News Alert pops into my inbox, telling me a new review of Fobbit has just been posted to the web somewhere.  When I see the email, I tell myself I shouldn't open it, I shouldn't read it just before I step behind the microphone and face another audience, I shouldn't risk the possibility of it being a bad or mixed review which could momentarily derail my mood.  (Yes, I'm one of those writers who reads all his reviews, both good and not-so-good; and no, I don't plan to stop...at least not until it gets really bad and unbearable.)  I was nervous when I clicked the link for the Washington Post review, fearing the worst.  (Yes, I'm a bar-set-low kind of guy who's always listening for the thud of the second shoe to drop.)  What a relief, then, to find the Nation's Newspaper liked the book:

      Though absurd, these Dickensian characters are all so skillfully wrought that we quickly accept their idiosyncrasies. The language alternates between comic ranting and serious description, especially in the division between Gooding’s inner voice and that of his diary, which contains some of the novel’s most undisguised personal fieldnotes from the author. We know Abrams is speaking to us when Gooding writes, “This time, Don Quixote is in my hands. I’m in the midst of highlighting a passage with a neon-yellow pen — Fictional tales are better and more enjoyable the nearer they approach the truth or the semblance of the truth.”
      What’s most intriguing about this work is that, at its center, it is both a clever study in anxiety and an unsettling expose of how the military tells its truths. “Fobbit” traces how “the Army story” is crafted, the dead washed of their blood, words scrutinized, and success applied to disasters. “The Fobbits, watching from their sterile distance, struggled to make sense of it,” Abrams writes. “They tried to separate truth from fiction, rumor from confirmed reports.”

Click here to read the full review