There are more books to contemplate than stars in a night on the high seas. In this immensity, how is a reader to find his personal constellation, those books that will put his life in communication with the universe?

--Gabriel Zaid

Fiction and poetry are the only way one can stop time and give an account of an experience and nail it down so that it lasts for ever.

--Rebecca West

No longer an Amazon associate

Amazon has closed all North Carolina associates accounts effective today. Amazon has taken this action in anticipation of the North Carolina General Assembly's budget bill, which may or may not contain a provision to try to collect sales tax from those who have bought items via click-throughs from Amazon associates in North Carolina, and which may or may not be passed today or at some point closer to September if North Carolina history is to be a guide.

I linked to Amazon prior to signing on as an associate simply because it seemed THE easiest way for readers to obtain the necessary info on a book--from ISBN to publishing date to an array of reader and professional reviews--no matter how they intended to obtain a book I'd mentioned that they wished to read, but I'm going to be rethinking that practice in the coming days.

Thank you to all of you who have purchased items through click-throughs here on the site. In addition to providing me with a bit of extra money to spend on books myself, I have enjoyed getting a glimpse at the other items people have ordered--from oatmeal to exercise bikes--and I was particularly amused when someone bought Montana Gothic for a penny (remember, this was a book I warned people about) and then returned it for a full refund.

Edited to add: Amazon cuts off North Carolina commissions

Booking Through Thursday - Hot!

Now that summer is here (in the northern hemisphere, anyway), what is the most “Summery” book you can think of? The one that captures the essence of summer for you?

(I’m not asking for you to list your ideal “beach reading,” you understand, but the book that you can read at any time of year but that evokes “summer.”)

Growing up, I associated summer with cousins. I had cousins next door, living with their parents and my grandfather, and ten million cousins throughout the county, but the summer before fourth grade my cousin from Ireland came over to stay with us (and would live with us year-round once we got to high school) and my cousin from Alexandria came down to stay next door, and thereafter summer meant cousins (and horses and bikes and checkers and rummy and everyone. whatever their age, sitting outside in my grandfather's yard in the evenings trying to stay cool).

So when I had to read Anne Tyler's Searching for Caleb in a contemporary fiction class my freshman year at college, I felt a strong sense of kinship with Justine who loved her summers with her cousins:

In the evening they all went home. The four houses gave to illusion of belonging
to four separate families. But after supper they came out again and sat on
Great-Grandma's lawn, the men in their shirtsleeves and the women in fresh print
dresses. The children grew overexcited rolling down the slope together. They
quarreled and were threatened with an early bedtime, and finally they had to
come sit with the grownups until they had calmed down. Sweaty and panting,
choking back giggles, itchy from the grass blades that stuck to their skin, they
dropped to the ground beside their parents and looked up at the stars while low
measured voices murmered all around them. The oldest cousin, Uncle Mark's
daughter Esther, held her little brother Richard on her lap and tickled him
secretly with a dandelion clock. Nearby, Esther's twin sisters, Alice and Sally,
were curled together like puppies with Justine in the middle because she was new
and special. And Uncle Two's boys, Claude and Duncan, wrestled without a sound
and without a perceptible movement so they wouldn't be caught and sent to bed.
Not that the grownups really cared. They were piecing together some memory now,
each contributing his own little patch and then sitting back to see how it would
turn out. Long after the children had grown calm and loose and dropped off to
sleep, one by one, the grownups were still weaving family history in the
darkness.

and despite the fact that I was raised Southern Baptist and was supposed to keep my distance from fortune-tellers (Justine's chosen career) and the like (e.g., my aunt had me trained to freak out at the mere sight of a Ouija board box there for awhile), I threw in with Justine and have lived happily on the dark side ever after. And that is what summer means to me, the end.

Booking Through Thursday

Same bunny, front yard and back

Latest batch of books

I ordered Dawn Powell's Dance Night last week for the Slaves of Golconda group read at the end of August and it hasn't arrived yet; otherwise, I'm not expecting any book packages until the new Lorrie Moore's published in September.

Paul Yoon's Once the Shore. (My favorite cover and one that squares perfectly with Lisa at Mappa Mundi's terrifically moving last Readerville the-sky-is-the-new-shoes post: Still Looking Up.)

Kay Boyle's Plagued by the Nightingale. (My last Readerville-inspired purchase. Sniff.)

Michael Dirda's Classics for Pleasure. (Because the libraries around here incredibly enough don't have it.)

The Writer's Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House (A review copy including the likes of Rick Bass, Dorothy Allison, Antonya Nelson, Chris Offutt, etc. I was very happy to receive this.)

Alice Munro's Selected Stories (Took a risk bringing this home from the used bookstore, but there's less overlap with the Munro I already owned than I expected, so yay.)

Russell H. Greenan's It Happened in Boston?. (Recommened by N., who is a big Greenan fan. Plus, Anne Tyler blurbed it.)

Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine. (Because I didn't already own it, and should have.)

Cees Nooteboom's In the Dutch Mountains (Because the last Nooteboom I read was gloriously weird.)

Alasdair Gray's Lanark (Because the people who read this usually just rave about it.)

Kate Atkinson's Behind the Scenes at the Museum (Because I didn't already own it, and should have.)

Nina Vida's The Texicans (A review copy that I'm very much looking forward to.)

Tess Callahan's April and Oliver (More shore than horizon on the cover of this one, but still lovely.)

Carlos Ruiz Zafon's The Angel's Game. (An ARC, reviewed last week)

And freshly loaded on the Kindle:

Kate Walbert's A Short History of Women (Lots of excitement for this one in the Book Balloon forums.)

and

Ninni Holmqvist's The Unit (Because of all the buzz on the blogs already about this one.)

Reading, that Great American Pin-Up Activity

I'm not quite sure how my daughter came into possession of The Great American Pin-Up by Charles G. Martignette and Louis K. Meisel (her last trip to Germany? a friend's last trip to Germany?), but I though I'd amuse myself the other evening by flipping through its pages to find all the illustrations of women caught in the act of looking sexy while reading.

And fellow readers, I am sorry to report that pin-up artists don't appear to have been greatly inspired by the sight of a woman with reading material at the ready. There's a sexy teacher or two in the collection, but no sexy librarians.

There's the Edward Runci used by Trish at Hey Lady! Whatcha Readin'? seen above, and down below, three works by Edward D'Ancona, and singular paintings by Vaughan Alden Bass, Art Frahm and Gil Elvgren.

That's it.

I'm sure there's a moral or two to this somewhere. Please feel free to leave your suggestions of any that occur to you in the comments.

I usually make a summer reading list and have it ready in May, but this year I'm behind schedule. I tried to work on the list yesterday afternoon, realized I had too many library books on my holds list that would become available over the course of the summer, leaving me little opportunity to read anything from my Fill in the Gaps list or any of the other books that I own and might take a notion to read. I stewed over this fact for a few hours, compared the number of books I'd read this year from my own stacks to those from the library, despaired particularly over how few books I'd read from the stockpiles I've managed to purchase just this year, and then I summoned the wherewithal last night to inactivate all the books on the holds list.

It still isn't pleasant to dwell on how scuffy and cloudy all those Brodart covers are going to be if I'm not going to be one of the first to get my hands on the books, but otherwise I feel good about my decision. I'm reading A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book to discuss with a friend (and it's soooo good) and I can decide once finished what I'm in the mood for without worrying whether I'll have time to read it before its due date.

It seems a pleasant way to live.



And I would like to say thank you to Jeane at DogEar Diary for giving me the Lemonade Award during the time that I was Not Blogging for showing "great attitude or gratitude"--rest assured that getting this award is saving the rest of you from a long-winded, whiny post on why I've not been blogging, and trust me, some things are better not whined about in public.

The Angel's Game: It's at your own expense

It's Great Expectations! It's Faust! It's a whole slew of other books and then it's Dorian Gray! It's the encore to the enormously popular The Shadow of the Wind, that's what The Angel's Game is, and I haven't had the refrain "This is stupid" running through my mind so many times since The Da Vinci Code. Not that I think author Carlos Ruiz Zafon is at all stupid, he's obviously exceedingly clever and well-read. But when the smart stuff in a book is only a McGuffinly means of getting the sensationalistic hoohah in motion, then I know someone's jerking me around instead of giving me anything meaningful. And I resent it. There's no reason for postmodernism to devolve into a mere amusement park ride if the reader's expectations have been raised to expect something more. Shouldn't a book that's so blatantly bookish do more than bombard us with thrills and chills?

Pip, er, David Martin starts out writing serialized melodramas for the newspaper in Barcelona at the age of 17. His father, an uneducated war veteran, had been the night watchman there before he was gunned down in the street outside the newspaper office's doors. Martin continues working there, as a gofer and an assistant to the owner's son, Don Pedro Vidal, a writer of thrillers himself, before Vidal encourages the editor to give his fiction a chance. Martin's work is so popular that his co-workers scorn him and Vidal then conspires to have him fired so that he can sign a contract to write penny dreadfuls under a pen name for a pair of unscrupulous publishers.

Martin is in love with Cristina, who convinces Martin to rewrite one of Vidal's manuscripts behind his back after Vidal's talent deserts him. Cristina then marries Vidal after the book is published to high regard and popular success. A serious novel Martin publishes under his own name fails, and he buries a copy in the Cemetery of Lost Books. And a doctor confirms that Martin's ill health and headaches are caused by a brain tumor that will kill him within a year. . .

And then Martin enters into a real contract with the devil instead of a mere metaphoric one with the greedy publishers, a contract that offers him riches and eternal life in exchange for writing a book that will create a religion, "a story for which men and women would live and die," and takes on a delightful young assistant named Isabella.

I am at the height of my liking the novel at this point because of all the witty dialogue and religious and writing discussions, and if Ruiz Zafon had continued in this vein I would have thought the book fabulous. Instead, after that enjoyable interlude, the book underscores again and again that it's a mystery/thriller, my "This is stupid" mental refrain kicks into high gear, and I spend the last two hours of reading wishing I were watching a movie so that I could take an extended pop corn/restroom break at the beginning of a chase scene and come back to my seat to have my daughter whisper, "You didn't miss a thing."

My reading tastes are outside the mainstream enough for me to realize that The Angel's Game is going to be as hugely successful as the novel Martin rewrote for Vidal turned out to be, but I regret spending my time on the latest Faustian fare when I could have been reading Mann's version or The Master and Margarita. I won't go so far as to say I sold my soul for an advanced reading copy, but I certainly could have made better use of my time.

RIP, Readerville

I'm stunned. Absolutely stunned. Readerville has closed its doors.

The internet will never be the same.

Third Annual Southern Reading Challenge

Even in a year when I'm keeping my distance from reading challenges, I'll be a happy participant in Maggie's Southern Reading Challenge.

Three Southern novels between May 15 and August 15. Weekly contests and drawings; I'll be the one most interested in noting the state of any mules that meander through the pages from the possibilities below:

The Hamlet. William Faulkner

Losing Battles. Eudora Welty

City of Refuge. Tom Piazza

Serena. Ron Rash

The Scarlet Thread. Doris Betts

Off For the Sweet Hereafter. T. R. Pearson

The Wettest County in the World. Matt Bondurant

The New Valley. Josh Weil

The only thing that never fails

"The best thing for being sad," replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then--to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the thing for you. Look at what a lot of things there are to learn--pure science, the only purity there is. You can learn astronomy in a lifetime, natural history in three, literature in six. And then, after you have exhausted a milliard lifetimes to biology and medicine and theocriticism and geography and history and economics--why, you can start to make a cartwheel out of the appropriate wood, or spend fifty years learning to begin to learn to beat your adversary at fencing. After that you can start again on mathematics, until it is time to learn to plough."


--T.H. White, The Once and Future King

Act as you would like to be

Certainly if there is any worldly talent worth cultivating, it's a sense of humor. To possess a cheerful outlook may be the greatest gift of the gods, the distant second best being a taste for irony. Such temperaments allow one to step back from painful situations and view them with a little detachment. Why else do we live, concluded Jane Austen, but "to make sport for our neighbors and laugh at them in return"? To the genial-spirited anything that happens can be shrugged off as yet another part of "life's rich pageant."

But how can one acquire such an upbeat attitude? In the same way we acquire all our habits--through practice. Psychologist William James discovered that if one pretended to be happy, this "going through the motions" would by itself lead to an improved mood. In other words: Act as you would like to be. It pays to picture the sort of character you present to the world. Do you want to be regarded as a whiner, a self-pitying hypochondriac, a man without backbone, a woman without pride? We all admire those who can control themselves, who--to use cliches--look on the bright side or possess a sunny disposition. The world, it's said, may be a tragedy for those who feel, but it can be a comedy, or at least of comedy of errors, for those who think.

--Michael Dirda, Book by Book: Notes of Reading and Life

What Makes Us Happy?

Joshua Wolf Shenk has a fascinating article on a longitudinal study directed by George Vaillant in June's Atlantic.

A few of the highlights from What Makes Us Happy?:

At the bottom of the pile are the unhealthiest, or “psychotic,” adaptations—like paranoia, hallucination, or megalomania—which, while they can serve to make reality tolerable for the person employing them, seem crazy to anyone else. One level up are the “immature” adaptations, which include acting out, passive aggression, hypochondria, projection, and fantasy. These aren’t as isolating as psychotic adaptations, but they impede intimacy. “Neurotic” defenses are common in “normal” people. These include intellectualization (mutating the primal stuff of life into objects of formal thought); dissociation (intense, often brief, removal from one’s feelings); and repression, which, Vaillant says, can involve “seemingly inexplicable naïveté, memory lapse, or failure to acknowledge input from a selected sense organ.” The healthiest, or “mature,” adaptations include altruism, humor, anticipation (looking ahead and planning for future discomfort), suppression (a conscious decision to postpone attention to an impulse or conflict, to be addressed in good time), and sublimation (finding outlets for feelings, like putting aggression into sport, or lust into courtship).

~~~

“Much of what is labeled mental illness,” Vaillant writes, “simply reflects our ‘unwise’ deployment of defense mechanisms. If we use defenses well, we are deemed mentally healthy, conscientious, funny, creative, and altruistic. If we use them badly, the psychiatrist diagnoses us ill, our neighbors label us unpleasant, and society brands us immoral.”

~~~


He also found that personality traits assigned by the psychiatrists in the initial interviews largely predicted who would become Democrats (descriptions included “sensitive,” “cultural,” and “introspective”) and Republicans (“pragmatic” and “organized”).

~~~

In fact, Vaillant went on, positive emotions make us more vulnerable than negative ones. One reason is that they’re future-oriented. Fear and sadness have immediate payoffs—protecting us from attack or attracting resources at times of distress. Gratitude and joy, over time, will yield better health and deeper connections—but in the short term actually put us at risk. That’s because, while negative emotions tend to be insulating, positive emotions expose us to the common elements of rejection and heartbreak.

Booking Through Thursday - Gluttony

Mariel suggested this week’s question:

Book Gluttony! Are your eyes bigger than your book belly? Do you have a habit of buying up books far quicker than you could possibly read them? Have you had to curb your book buying habits until you can catch up with yourself? Or are you a controlled buyer, only purchasing books when you have run out of things to read?

See previous post Stockpiled! if you want pictorial proof of my book gluttony. I have been buying books at a careening clip ever since we paid off the house, but with my husband's contract expiring at the end of May--after receiving a one-month extension at the end of April--I am being confronted with the impossibility of continuing on as I have been. I'll need to read what I already own or can obtain from the library in the days to come.

Booking Through Thursday

Stockpile!

If only I were reading as quickly as I'm accumulating. . .

Julia Strachey's Cheerful Weather for the Wedding

Elif Shafak's The Flea Palace

Snorri Sturluson's The Prose Edda

Ivy Compton-Burnett's Manservant and Maidservant (one of Iliana's suggestions for Slaves; we selected Patrick Hamilton's The Slaves of Solitude for discussion at the end of May)

Caroline Blackwood's Great Granny Webster

Winifred Peck's House-Bound

Jocelyn Playfair's A House in the Country

A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book

Reif Larsen's The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet (review copy)

Hilary Mantel's Learning to Talk

John Wyndham's The Chrysalids

Hilda Bernstein's The World That Was Ours

Elizabeth Taylor's At Mrs. Lippincote's

Dorothy Whipple's The Priory

Dorothy Whipple's They Were Sisters

Bernard Beckett's Genesis (review copy)

Ian McDonald's Cyberabad Days

Christina Sunley's The Tricking of Freya (review copy)

Marcelle Pick's The Core Balance Diet

And purchased for the Kindle:

Christian Moerk's Darling Jim

Michael Dirda's Book by Book

E.M. Delafield's Diary of a Provincial Lady (because of MFS and Danielle)

Janet Malcolm's Reading Chekhov (because of Dorothy)

W. Somerset Maugham's The Magician

Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (because of its incorporation into Andrew Crumey's Sputnik Caledonia)

Squee to the nth degree!

It's been twentysomething years since Hope and Michael and Nancy and Elliot and Melissa and Gary first graced my tv screen, but thirtysomething is finally being released to the video market. LA Times reports all four seasons will be released at a rate of one every six months or so beginning in August, and the music for the series is all intact.

Now is the powers-that-be would just release Season Two and Three to Alias Smith and Jones already. . .

Become who you are

"Become who you are" went an ancient adage. Learning should lead to an independence of mind built on solid knowledge and a capacity for critical thinking. Unfortunately, ours is a society where doing well on examinations and standardized tests has grown so overemphasized that we have forgotten the importance for a young person to simply flounder about, try out various daydreams, make and learn from mistakes. "It is a rule of God's Providence," said John Henry Newman, "that we succeed by failure." Certainly the motto for any school, for any student of whatever age, should be Samuel Beckett's noble paradox: "Try again. Fail again. Fail better."

--Michael Dirda, Book by Book: Notes of Reading and Life

Showing a bit of solidarity with Kirstyjane this afternoon with a Kristofferson favorite.

We swang into the saddle slick as breathing
And slapped 'em once for pleasure with the reins
The horses snorted frosty in the moonlight
Somethin' dark was singing in my veins
Older than the voices in my brain.

Good stuff.

Fun with an old, old meme times three

(Why yes, I am a very lazy blogger this week.)

1. Take five (random!) books off your bookshelf.
2. Book #1 -- first sentence
3. Book #2 -- last sentence on page fifty
4. Book #3 -- second sentence on page one hundred
5. Book #4 -- next to the last sentence on page one hundred fifty
6. Book #5 -- final sentence of the book
7. Make the five sentences into a paragraph:

When my nose finally stops bleeding and I've disposed of the bloody paper towel, Teddy Barnes insists on driving me home in his ancient Honda Civic, a car that refuses to die and that Teddy, cheap as he is, refuses to trade in. And the sun was warming the top of Justine's head right through her hat, and the dexterous twist of the baseball glove as it rose to meet the ball and the slap of leather on leather lulled her into a trance. Sally wasn't home when I got back, but there was a letter in my mailbox from Emma Horton, and one from my editor. We would bury him tomorrow and so bury our sorrow, then resume our lives and forget him. "Because I never found My audience," said God and annihilated, as Mother Mary and Christ and Lesefario and Flanoy and Quiz in their Y.M.C.A. seafront room in Piraeus and all Hell's troubled sighed, everything.

1. Straight Man. Richard Russo
2. Searching for Caleb. Anne Tyler
3. All My Friends Are Going to be Strangers. Larry McMurtry
4. A Book of Reasons. John Vernon
5. The Living End. Stanley Elkin

~~~

My parents seemed to believe in letting everyone do whatever they wanted until they became very good at it or died. "I'm having a beer," Mona declared. How awful other people's families are, yawned Eliza. Nurses are almost always like that. We all sat in the sun, warming ourselves, eating cookies, watching the giraffes and the clouds.

1. Nola. Robin Hemley
2. Living to Tell. Antonya Nelson
3. Human Croquet. Kate Atkinson
4. April Witch. Majgull Axelsson
5. A Primate's Memoir. Robert M. Sapolsky

~~~

The weekend that Helly brought her new boyfriend down to meet Clare, Clare's younger brother, Toby, was also staying with them, following them round with his video camera, making a documentary about the family for his college course. I met Sils halfway, in the dining room, already coming in, and I grabbed her jacket cuff, turned, and led her back into my room. "But we always have a fire in the evening, if we can bear it; and you especially require one in this cold house and dreary room." It's the failings people want to hear. But now I must sleep.

1. Accidents in the Home. Tessa Hadley
2. Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? Lorrie Moore
3. Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Anne Bronte
4. Crooked Hearts. Robert Boswell
5. Atonement. Ian McEwan

Symbolic? Or not?

Question suggested by Barbara H:

My husband is not an avid reader, and he used to get very frustrated in college when teachers would insist discussing symbolism in a literary work when there didn’t seem to him to be any. He felt that writers often just wrote the story for the story’s sake and other people read symbolism into it.

It does seem like modern fiction just “tells the story” without much symbolism. Is symbolism an older literary device, like excessive description, that is not used much any more? Do you think there was as much symbolism as English teachers seemed to think? What are some examples of symbolism from your reading?

Well, when I was in college, we had a teacher who actually cautioned us not to go too far in foisting symbolic mass upon constructions not built to withstand their weight--sometimes "The Heaven of Animals" is precisely what the title says it is--but I do agree that some teachers are so desperate to have the literal-minded make any kind of association that they succeed in scaring them away from literary works for good. Which, of course, doesn't allow the literal-minded to live a life free of symbols, not at all. How well we function in life has a great deal to do with how adept we are in interpreting the ways we communicate with one another symbolically.

I don't agree that symbolism is a literary device that's fallen out of use. I've been mulling over a symbolic aspect of Reif Larsen's The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet for a week now. T.S. goes on a journey (and we all know how symbolic journeys are) and at one point unexpectedly travels through a wormhole. T.S. is a cartographer who draws maps and diagrams of everything, but the wormhole is something that defies visual representation. It was only at the end of the book, when T.S. enters into another unmappable region, that I felt I understood the symbolic relevance of the earlier wormhole.

Granted, most of us don't mention symbolism when we're trying to convince someone else to read a book we've enjoyed--plot and character are much bigger draws--but that doesn't mean symbols aren't there, that we don't pick up on a great many of them without consciously thinking "Oh, look! Symbol!" They're just there, an undercurrent of understood meaning that helps move us along. (Remember the Under Toad, as mentioned in another work with a protagonist named T.S.)

Likewise, I suspect most writers focus first on the characters and the plot, the same way readers do, seeding their works organically with material, images and events, that only in later drafts will be seen by the writer as the appropriate little plants to be taken to full symbolic bloom. But to say that symbols are not a part of the intended finished story, but are instead strictly manifestations of the reader, particularly the reader who doesn't want to think about symbols at all, strikes me as an attempt to shut down conversation and thought, not continue it.

Booking Through Thursday

Diversity in Reading Meme

This is depressing. I'd somehow convinced myself that my reading was quite diverse this year--books written by New Zealanders! Germans! books set in Australia! Korea! Krishnapur! parallel universes and Iceland!--but this meme exposes just how white bread my reading actually is.

1. Name the last book by a female author that you've read.

Great Granny Webster by Caroline Blackwood. On Sunday.

2. Name the last book by an African or African-American author that you've read.

A Quiet Storm, Rachel Howzell Hall's story of a young woman dealing with her bi-polar sister in California, is the most recent. Before that, Voluptuous Delights of Peanut Butter and Jam by Rhodesian Lauren Liebenberg, which probably ought not to count since she's white, and Half of a Yellow Sun by Nigerian Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. And Obama's memoir. All last year.

3. Name one from a Latino/a author.

I have a copy of 2666 on hand, but of course I haven't read it. I read Cristina Garcia's
Dreaming in Cuban with the Slaves last spring.

4. How about one from an Asian country or Asian-American?

This is where it really gets shameful. If I count Kazuo Ishiguro, I still have to go back to 2005--further than that to find a Gish Jen or an Amy Tan.

5. What about a GLBT writer?

Jeanette Winterson's Sexing the Cherry in January and Peter Cameron's Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You last summer.

6. Why not name an Israeli/Arab/Turk/Persian writer, if you're feeling lucky?

Orhan Pamuk's Snow in 2004, but I bought Elif Shafak's The Flea Palace a couple weeks back.

7. Any other "marginalized" authors you've read lately?

Afraid not.

(via Reading the Leaves)

Escape

Books offer an escape, but it is an escape into something larger, not from something larger; it is an escape into hazard, not from hazard. A dictator escapes not by fleeing into a library, but by a midnight flight to the Dominican Republic.

--Harry Golden