A former lawyer turned used bookstore owner shares some nuggets of wisdom. Some of my favorites:

1.  People are getting rid of bookshelves.  Treat the money you budgeted for shelving as found money.  Go to garage sales and cruise the curbs.

2.  While you’re drafting that business plan, cut your projected profits in half.  People are getting rid of bookshelves.

23.  Everyone has a little Nancy Drew in them.  Stock up on the mysteries.

Dubravka Ugresic’s Karaoke Culture is nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Awards

From Open Letter’s (the publisher’s) press release:

…we’re proud to announced that one of our titles—Karaoke Cultureby Dubravka Ugresic—is one of the five finalists in the “Criticism” category.

Since this is the first major American book award that Open Letter has a finalist in, we’re absolutely ecstatic. And it’s especially fitting that this is happening to Dubravka, since her last collection, Nobody’s Home, was the first book that Open Letter ever published.

I reviewed Karaoke Culture for The L last year–it’s a great collection, and I’d be delighted for it to win an award from NBCC this year. My previous post, with a link to the review is here. You can also read one of the collection’s more talked-about essays, “Assault on the Mini-Bar” on The Paris Review website here. (This actually wasn’t one of my favorites in the collection–but it’s gotten some really positive responses.)

I’m also pleased to see David Bellos’ Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything on the list of nominees for criticism, along with Ugresic. I’ve been meaning to read that book since it came out, and this gave me a little added encouragement. It’s fascinating so far.

Guidebooks to Babylon (Tony Perrottet for The New York Times)

Mr. Perrottet, author of The Sinner’s Grand Tour: A Journey Through the Historical Underbelly of Europe, takes a delightful look at the “guides to local harlots” that were produced for the benefit of gentlemen traveling from Paris, France to Kansas City, Missouri. His unnecessary first-line dig at librarians notwithstanding (after all, I know plenty of librarians who would be delighted with the premise of his research), here are some of the article’s more hilarious highlights:

To the uninitiated, these clandestine directories make the most dubious of all literary subgenres. They were created, of course, to provide practical information for gentlemen travelers venturing through a city’s demimonde, and so have titles that range from mildly risqué (“The Pretty Women of Paris,” “Directory to the Seraglios”) to unashamedly coarse (“A Catalogue of Jilts, Cracks and Prostitutes, Nightwalkers, Whores, She-Friends, Kind Women and Others of the Linnen-Lifting Tribe”).

…

The genre took a leap forward in the carnal free-for-all of 18th-century London with “Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies,” a best-­selling annual published each Christmas season from 1757 to 1795 under the name of the era’s most notorious pimp, Jack Harris. Each edition offered Zagat-style reviews of London belles, including their figures, tastes, complexions and personal hygiene (and a pre-modern-dentistry obsession with the condition of their teeth).

…

When it comes to American guides, the available examples are far less colorful…An exception to the rule is “The Little Black Book,” produced in the 1890s in the “Paris of the Plains” — Kansas City, Mo. In between generic ads (Emma Williams, “Abundance of Beauty,” and Julia Lewis, “Fit for the Gods”) are pages of rhyming verse, poems that spell out naughty words and tales of lusty nuns.

Although he is much lauded in Canada and France, Poulin is not (as far as I can tell) well known outside of either country (and honestly, the one Quebecer I asked about  Poulin’s work had never heard of him, either), so I’ll direct your attention to his bio in The Canadian Encyclopedia. According to the entry, he “is among the most widely read Québécois novelists of his generation and the most respected by critics”; additionally, his novel Spring Tides (also available in an English translation published by Archipelago Books), is said to be “one of the most profound Québécois novels.”

Poulin’s most recent novel to be translated into English, Mister Blue, didn’t appeal to me quite as much as Translation is a Love Affair, but it was still a very affecting, empathetic, and quirky story and emphasized many of the the themes that were raised in TiaLA. It also opens with one of the best poems I have read in a really long time, by Jean Tardieu (from The Hidden River):

CONVERSATION
(amiably, standing in the doorway)

How are things on earth?

-Fine, fine, very fine.

Are the little dogs flourishing?

-Oh my goodness, yes, indeed they are.

What about the clouds?

-Drifting.

And the volcanoes?

-Simmering.

And the rivers?

-Floating.

Time?

-Unwinding.

And your soul?

-Sick

the springtime was too green
my soul ate too much salad.

My full review is below, or you can read it on Three Percent here.

***

The fictional world of Québécois novelist Jacques Poulin can, poetically speaking, be likened to a snow globe: a minutely-detailed landscape peppered with characters who appear to be frozen in one lovely, continuous moment. Mister Blue, recently published in a new English translation, captures this timelessness in a fluid and deceptively simple story about the complex bonds that can develop between completely unlike people, if only they are allowed to.

Brooklyn’s Archipelago Books has previously released two Poulin novels—Spring Tides and Translation is a Love Affair—both of which share some basic fundamentals with Mister Blue. Each of these slender novels feature reclusive literary types (authors and translators), their beloved cats (all with names worthy of T.S. Eliot’s Practical Cats: Matousalem, Mr. Blue, Charade, Vitamin), and enigmatic strangers who quickly insinuate themselves into the lives and imaginations of the aforementioned writers. But although Poulin frequently returns to the same themes, the same hyper-specific scenarios and characters in his work, each of his novels retain a freshness and idiosyncratic sweetness that reward readers with small revelations and happy coincidences.

Mister Blue opens on Jim, “the slowest writer in Quebec,” a former Hemingway scholar turned full-time novelist who now summers in his dilapidated childhood home, a ramshackle cottage in a quiet, uninhabited bay on the Ile d’Orleans. Jim’s daily writing follows a quiet routine with little to punctuate it other than semi-regular tennis matches with his brother, feeding and tending to his cats and the scrappy strays that invite themselves into his home, and solitary walks on the beach in front of his home. It is on just such a walk that Jim discovers footprints in the sand leading to a cave where someone has been camping. Finding a copy of The Arabian Nights in the cave with the name “Marie K.” written on the flyleaf, Jim becomes instantly besotted with this mysterious unseen stranger, whom he nicknames Marika.

Here, as in Translation is a Love Affair, real life quickly begins to intermingle with fiction and vice-versa. For Poulin’s characters, life itself is a process of composition, improvised and redrafted as unforeseen events take place. As Jim struggles to write a love story, he becomes convinced that his authorial problems can all be chalked up to the fact that he has ignored Hemingway’s rule: “a writer must stick to the subject he knows best.” He surmises that his story has stalled because “I was trying to write a love story without being in love myself.” Ergo, he whimsically decides, he must “take a closer interest in that person named Marika.”

But matters of the heart, much like matters of fiction, are not so easily constructed. Instead of meeting Marika, he meets a woman named Bungalow, a former housewife who left her “gilded cage” to run a shelter for young women in Old Quebec, and La Petite, who lives at the shelter but increasingly becomes a regular visitor at Jim’s cottage. The arrival of these two women takes both Jim’s fictional and real life love stories off course: the mysterious Marika continues to elude him, and obstinately, his fictional characters become friends instead of lovers, despite his frequent attempts to revise their relationship. The romantic story that he set out to write (and to live) gives way, ever so slowly, to a gentler, more protective, tender kind of love—that between himself and the curious, lovable, but often volatile La Petite—the love between a parent and child.

In simple, clean prose (musically rendered in Sheila Fischman’s translation) Poulin delivers his bittersweet tale with a restraint that belies true joy, the dogged optimism that complete strangers from totally different backgrounds and circumstances can find in each other real empathy and kindness. That such connections are right there in front of us, if only we trouble to look for them.

“What matters are the emotional ties that connect people and form a vast, invisible web without which the world would crumble,” Jim realizes. “Everything else to which people devote the greater part of their time, looking very serious as they do so, is of only minor importance.”

Review originally published on

Although Nordic crime fiction has gained an incredible prominence on the world stage, Denmark has never been at the forefront of this movement. Among countless others in the field, Sweden has its Henning Mankell, Stig Larsson, and Sjöwall & Wahlöö; Norway its Jo Nesbø and Helene Tursten; Finland its Matti Yrjänä Joensuu; and Iceland its Arnaldur Indridason and Yrsa Sigurdadottir, but contemporary crime authors from Denmark have yet to gain renown as part of this current wave. One could speculate, however, that Danish authors are having their moment now: 2011 has seen the publication of English translations of The Boy in the Suitcase by writing team Lene Kaaerbøl and Agnete Friis, The Keeper of Lost Causes by Jussi Adler-Olsen, and Call Me Princess by Denmark’s “crime queen” Sara Blaedel.

Call Me Princess finds its tough, sailor-swearing, workaholic police detective Louise Rick tracking down a brutal serial rapist who targets women he meets through online dating websites. Having gained his victim’s trust after weeks of email correspondence, the rapist sets up what appear to be a perfectly chivalrous date. After a long, fancy dinner, the perpetrator returns to the woman’s apartment, where he then subjects her to mental and physical abuse. When Call Me Princess opens, one of this man’s victims has reported the crime. Just a few weeks later, the perpetrator murders his second victim, making it even more pressing that Louise and her colleagues make an arrest.

The story itself clips along at a reasonable speed, interspersing scenes of the ongoing investigation and its myriad dead-ends with short interludes in Louise’s daily life—her close friendship with ambitious crime beat reporter Camilla Lind (who ever so conveniently has started dating someone she met online) and Louise’s failing relationship with her live-in boyfriend Peter. The dialog sounds a bit tinny and the characters are by-and-large rather flat, but as Barbara Fister remarks in her review of the novel on this site, in its efficient-but-shallow approach, reading Call Me Princess is much “like watching an episode of a fairly entertaining television mystery.”

Unfortunately, there are two significant problems that loom over the story. For one, the plot is pervaded with head-smacking coincidences and the kind of farcical investigative ploys that anyone who has watched a few episodes of Law and Order will recognize as completely unworkable. For instance, police detectives don’t take civilian crime victims to help stake-out their attackers mere weeks after a crime has taken place. The most obvious reason is that this sort of situation would be dangerous for both the police officers and the victim. Moreover, this kind of set-up is completely devoid of empathy towards a person who has just endured a serious trauma.

This latter point brings us to the other, more disheartening problem about Call Me Princess. This is a novel written by a female author, about a female police officer who is investigating a string of heinous crimes against women. Given this, one might expect a substantial level of empathy throughout the book. But while Blaedel does attempt to make the reader feel for the victims—for instance, by relating both of the rape episodes from the women’s perspectives—her detective Rick is one of the more emotionally tone-deaf agents of the law that I’ve read in quite a long time.

Louise gestures towards compassion when dealing with rape victims—stiffly noting in one instance that the woman has “been through a terrifying experience”—but is unaccountably upset when the victim involved can’t render a full description of her rapist or articulate a full account of events just hours after she’s been attacked. There’s an explanation for this: we’re told that Louise avoids “…empathizing too much with other people’s sorrows and emotions,” in order to keep her work separate from her personal life. This makes sense, certainly. But Louise’s struggle to be understanding towards others bleeds into her personal life as well: into her relationship with her boyfriend, and also with her best friend Camilla. Struggling to be compassionate seems to be a major part of Louise’s character development in this series, so perhaps this weakness is meant to align her with the typical police detectives that abound in the genre: married to their work, solitary, unyielding in their morals and motivations. But more often than not, it just makes Louise Rick a difficult detective to root for.

Stop-Motion Bookstore Dance-a-Thon

This stop-motion video, “The Joy of Books,” is making its way around the internet. The (unnamed?) couple who made the video staged this after-hours book dance-a-thon in Toronto’s Type bookstore, which gives me yet another reason to go back to Toronto.

Nancy Pearl Gets Her Own Book Line

The inimitable Nancy Pearl, librarian for the masses, is partnering with Amazon to kick off her own line of reissued books: Book Lust Rediscoveries. The line, which will release six of Pearl’s “favorite, presently out-of-print books” every year, has already announced its first two titles: A Gay and Melancholy Sound by Merle Miller and After Life by Rhian Ellis. (The latter sounds particularly good to me.) Nancy has blogged about her “Reissues Wish List” before now–maybe we can guess what some of her future titles will be from this 2009 list. This is another example of Amazon using its new publishing power for good–I’m really looking forward to these (re)releases.

“Canada Water Library — Review” (Rowan Moore, Guardian Architecture section, December 3, 2011)

Like libraries? Apparently, the Southwark neighborhood of London is the place for you. Not only have the    good people of Southwark decided to maintain all twelve of their existing libraries (it would be interesting to know what the size of the population that uses these libraries is), they upped the ante and decided to build a brand new one in the heart of a former shipping district, called Canada Water, within the old Surrey Commercial Docks area. “Ever since the 1980s, the intention has been to regenerate [the area], both to bring business and create something like a town centre.”

The article has a lot to say about this flagging process of regeneration and some of the features around the new Canada Water library, as well as about the building itself. Some highlights:

The best form for a reading room is wide and horizontal, but there was not enough space for this at ground level, squeezed between the tube exit and the waterside. So the reading room is at the top, with the building widening as it ascends to make space for it, with the added benefit that the most important part of the building is placed high up – if not in the clouds, at least sufficiently far from the ground to feel removed and a little dreamy, as a library should.

Raised, it makes occasion for the spiral staircase, which in turn makes the business of going somewhere for a book into a little event or ceremony, rather than a sideways drift such as you might make into a supermarket.

From a practical question – how to put a library on a site too small for it – comes the pleasure of the architecture. Within the ample volume of the reading room, zigzagging shelves create more intimate places in a way almost reminiscent of the great Finnish architect Alvar Aalto.

But while it doesn’t, apparently, “achieve Scandinavian levels of craftsmanship,” says Moore, “…the important thing about the Canada Water library is that a new public place has been created, where the architecture contributes to and expands the experience of using it.”

“The Library Phantom Returns!” (Robert Krulwich, NPR, November 30, 2011)

In September 2011, I posted about an anonymous book-loving book artist who was leaving incredibly intricate, beautiful sculpture tributes in libraries and literary organizations all over Scotland. After a bit of a hiatus, the artist left three more amazing creations in the Scottish Poetry Museum, the National Museum of Scotland, and the Robert Louis Stevenson Room at the Writer’s Museum. These will apparently be the last of the mystery sculptures (there have been ten in all). Said the artist (in a short, third-person statement): “It’s important that a story is not too long………does not become tedious……….”You need to know when to end a story,” she thought.”

The statement also indicates that the artist is not a professional–”this was the first time she had dissected books and used them simply because they seemed fitting.” Which makes these creations all the more fabulous. (I also just love her sense of humor–the T-Rex bursting out of The Lost World.) She called these sculptures “a tiny gesture.”

This was an atypical year for me, reading wise, on several counts. For one, I read more books this year than I probably ever have–72 total, or 6 books a month. (To be clear, I’m including some graphic novels, novellas, and YA fiction in my count–not just 400+ page works of canonical literature. But still.) This was also a very English year for me, both in terms of the language many of the books I read were written in, and in terms of nationality. I also read several series and/or several books written by the same author. During the first part of the year I was interning at a public library in Manhattan and programming a artist panel and comic art competition for teens, so with the advice of a well-versed friend, started dipping my toe into the immense pond of Graphic Novels. Regardless of the motivations, all of these are fairly unusual reading selections for me, given my typical predilections.

So, here goes: my 2011, chronologically (oldest to most recent), in books:

1. The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them: Elif Batuman
   • The first book I read in 2011 and by far one of the best, most illuminating, and funniest books I read all year. As a creative writer (essayist, novelist) who moonlighted as an academic in a Comparative Literature Ph.D. program at Berkeley for seven years, Batuman manages to lampoon academia while still making an earnest, credible case for the value of studying something that you love (such as Russian literature) in depth for nearly a decade, even if it means flying in the face of practicality. Also, being a Turkish-American who grew up speaking Turkish (she was born in New Jersey, to Turkish immigrants), she both understands and articulates the many reasons that studying something just because it is part of your direct heritage or ancestry is completely irrelevant. I loved this book. I will probably re-read it in 2012.
2. Sleepover Sleuths (Nancy Drew and the Clue Crew #1): Carolyn Keene
   
   • Knowing that I love mysteries–and was once a devoted Nancy Drew fan–my nine year old sister gave me this first installment in yet another Nancy Drew spin off series. Here, Nancy solves mysteries as a kid–her first case is to find a lost, American Girl sort of doll that disappeared at a sleep over.
3. Real Murders: Charlaine Harris
   
   • A reissue of the first installment in Harris’ Aurora Teagarden series, which caught my eye because the main character is a public librarian. One of the worst books I read all year, hands down. (Link above to review.)
4. Fables (Deluxe Edition, Book 1): Bill Willingham
   
   • My first successful foray into graphic fiction was with this series, in which all of the world’s most well-known fairy tale creatures, characters, and legends have been driven out of their homeland by some nameless evil power and forced to live undercover in New York City.
5. Talking About Detective Fiction: P.D. James
   
   • I was thrilled to read James’ nonfiction exploration of the mystery/detective genre, even if it was–as she freely admitted–almost completely biased toward a particular (Golden) era of British writing. She can be harsh with her opinions, but always in context. And it gave me a lot of classic British mystery authors to write down for future reading.
6. Fables (Deluxe Edition, Book 2): Bill Willingham
   
7. Dark Entries: Ian Rankin
   
   • Another graphic novel, recommended by the same friend who recommended Fables. I was interested particularly because I’ve been meaning to read some of Rankin’s Inspector Rebus novels set in Edinburgh. The horror/occult plot here was really thin, though, and didn’t work for me.
8. Strictly Murder! A Writer’s Guide to Criminal Homicide: Martin Roth
   • Strictly terrible. Picked up while shelving–thought it might have some good procedural sort of tips for a mystery novel I was kicking around some ideas for. Hilarious mini chapter on female murderers which float “Hormonal changes/premenstrual syndrome or post-partum depression” as some of the most common reasons that women commit murders.
9. The Monsters of Templeton: Lauren Groff
   
   • A contemporary American novel set in a fictionalized version of Cooperstown, New York. I was looking for something with a magical realist/East Coast MFA vibe and this fit the bill nicely.
10. Fair Play: Tove Jansson, Trans. Thomas Teal
    
    • Another brilliant novel by Jansson, reissued by the New York Review of Books. My favorite Jansson book thus far, hands down, and another of the best I read last year. (Link to review.)
11. Fables: March of the Wooden Soldiers (Vol. 4): Bill Willingham
    
12. Fables: The Mean Seasons (Vol. 5): Bill Willingham
    
13. Fables: Homelands (Vol. 6): Bill Willingham
14. The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains: Nicholas Carr
    
    • Reading selection for the New York Librarians Book Club
15. Bad Nature, or With Elvis in Mexico: Javier Marias, Trans. Esther Allen
    
    • I wish I had written about this when I read it, because I don’t remember enough about it now. But it was a wonderful, breathless, and frantic novella and I do remember that much of the plot line is dependent on an unassuming interpreter getting himself into all sorts of chaos because of the way he interprets a conversation between two parties. The sort of scene I would have gotten at least a ten page paper out of in college.
16. The Girl in the Green Raincoat: Laura Lippman
    
    • Serialized mystery with a great sense of place (Baltimore), character, and more Rear Window references than you can shake a stick at. Really fun. (Link to review.)
17. Frozen Assets: Quentin Bates
    
    • Bates (British) tackles a mystery set in rural Iceland, starring a Fargo-esque female detective. Another good one for armchair travel. (Link to review.)
18. The Adults: Alison Espach
    
    • This book–written by a young Brooklyn author who lives in my neighborhood–has a truly fantastic beginning. All downhill from there.
19. The Last Kingdom: Bernard Cornwell
    
    • My mother of all people recommended this to me. Epic mayhem and manly honor in the viking age. An Englishman is kidnapped and adopted by Danes and then spends the next several decades of his life battling both for and against them (sometimes with King Alfred the Great). Great on the historical details/rituals/context; was unfortunately not in an epic enough mood for this at the time I read it.
20. Love in a Cold Climate: Nancy Mitford
    
    • I am so sorry it took me so long to find Nancy Mitford. Wit and eccentricity and gossip: the lives and loves and missteps of the British upperclass, as observed by someone near to, but outside of, the whole mess.
21. Plain Kate: Erin Bow
    
    • YA novel, gifted to me by a dear friend. Eerie, medieval alterna-verse, in which cats can talk and young women really do have an awful time of it.
22. Translation is a Love Affair: Jacques Poulin, Trans. Sheila Fischman
    
    • A lovely, multi-layered story by a little known (or at least, little known here) Quebecois author which says more about human relationships in its thin volume than many more showy books do in double the page count.
23. Baltimore Blues: Laura Lippman
    
    • I so enjoyed The Girl in the Green Raincoat that I decided to go back and begin at the beginning. This is the first in Lippman’s Tess Monaghan series. Baltimore is still one of the main characters, and it was good, if a little uneven.
24. Stitches: David Small
    
    • Graphic novel memoir–not for the faint of heart–about a man’s childhood struggle with cancer and troubles at home with his withholding/domineering parents.
25. Bone: Out from Boneville (vol. 1): Jeff Smith
    
    • A classic of the graphic novel genre–addicting, and hard to put your finger on. A mix of fantasy, adventure, satire, and really classic storytelling. Great art–very clean and simple, but gets a lot across in each panel.
26. SideScrollers: Matthew Loux
    
    • Loux was one of the panelists at my comic event at the public library I interned for. This graphic novel of his was widely acclaimed and very successful when it was released. Sort of a Scott Pilgrim meets Clerks vibe.
27. Northanger Abbey: Jane Austen
    
    • Having finally accepted the fact that I do actually like reading Austen (it took me awhile to get there), I started working on reading some of her lesser-read works. Very much enjoyed this one. Could be retitled Frenemies in Regency England and be successfully repackaged as a chick-lit novel, I think.
28. Beasts of Burden: Evan Dorkin
    
    • Graphic novel: animals solve mysteries about animals.
29. Jane Eyre: Charlotte Brontë
    
    • My first time reading the novel, admittedly after I saw the movie. What a character! What writing! I was reading this while on vacation with some friends and it was all I could do not to ignore them the whole time and stay stashed away in a back bedroom reading this. I spent the entire time wishing that I had read this when I was in high school. It would have meant a lot to me then–probably something a lot different than it did when I read it this time.
30. Apartment Gardening: Plants, Projects, and Recipes for Growing Food in Your Urban Home: Amy Pennington
    
    • This book corresponded quite neatly with the dawn of my urban-prairie wife phase. I joined a community garden, got doubly serious about my canning endeavors, and started sewing–all in one season. And although Pennington isn’t so much talking about gardening in an apartment on the East Coast (she’s actually got a whole deck to work with in the Pacific Northwest), I got a lot out of this anecdotal, DIY book.
31. Happy Birthday, Turk! : Jakob Arjouni, Trans. Anselm Hollo
    
    • I reviewed four of Arjouni’s newly reissued crime novels set in Germany and starring a German detective of Turkish descent, Kemal Kanyankaya. This installment (the first) is pretty great–some of the others belabor (important) issues of racism, immigrant rights, and cultural assimilation to the point of farce. (Review of series and the Melville International Crime imprint via link above.)
32. Bone: The Great Cow Race (Vol. 2): Jeff Smith
    
33. The Imperfectionists: Tom Rachman
    
    • Sometimes you find some great surprises on your own bookshelf. (I wrote a fairly extensive, though informal, review of this book which I posted on the blog. Review via the link above.)
34. Bone: Eyes of the Storm (Vol. 3): Jeff Smith
    
35. The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake: Aimee
    • I found this book while I was shelving at my library internship and picked it up because I liked the cover. It gave me a serious craving for lemon cake (this was around my birthday, it bears noting) and was a wonderful spontaneous, unexpected find. Very much out of my usual aesthetic.
36. The Brutal Telling: Louise Penny
    
    • Another ‘novel of place,’ this one set in a small snowy village in Quebec. I actually read this book (the 5th in Penny’s Inspector Gamche series) because I really wanted to read the following book, Bury Your Dead. I had it on good advice that Bury Your Dead absolutely depended on plot points in the prior novel, which intrigued me. It’s not often that a plot line will carry across two (crime) novels. I ended up liking this one a lot better than its successor, even though there are some red herrings at the end that are a bit unnecessary. But great characterization and tone, and it definitely made me want to visit Quebec (again).
37. Under the Bright Lights (The Bayou Trilogy 1): Daniel Woodrell
    
    • I had been very interested to read one of Woodrell’s “country noir” novels, after seeing and enjoying the movie adaptation of Winter’s Bone. His “Bayou Trilogy” set in St. Bruno, Louisiana starring police detective Rene Shade have some qualities to recommend them–he’s got a great ear for dialog, for one–but overall, these didn’t totally light my fire. (Review of all three in the series via link.)
38. Muscle for the Wing (The Bayou Trilogy #2): Daniel Woodrell
39. The Ones You Do (The Bayou Trilogy #3): Daniel Woodrell
40. Bury Your Dead: Louise Penny
    
41. One Man, One Murder: Jakob Arjouni, Trans. Anselm Hollo
42. Uglies: Scott Westerfeld
    
    • I had had this YA title on my shelf for some time and, loving Westerfeld’s “Midnighters” series and his one-off novel Peeps, was expecting to love the post-apocalyptic world of Uglies. It really didn’t work for me, but I’m certainly not giving up on Westerfeld for future reads.
43. The Unfinished Clue: Georgette Heyer
    
    • Thus began my foray into the plentiful oeuvre of Georgette Heyer. I went to a talk hosted by the Jane Austen society of New York at which an academic discussed the parallels between Austen’s work and many of Heyer’s regency romances. Heyer was a dedicated Austenite, a prolific researcher who stressed incredible historical accuracy in her work, and the author of 50+ novels (both romance and crime novels) which were incredibly successful in their time. (She wrote from roughly the 1930s to the 1960s.) I was going to write a piece on Heyer that didn’t end up coming to fruition, but I did have a very fruitful run reading four of her novels last year.
44. Tender at the Bone: Ruth Reichel
    
    • A very spontaneous read that definitely changed my previously disparaging opinion of food-themed memoirs. Reichel is a wonderful prose writer and her reflections on food are just as interesting as the life she’s led.
45. The Year of Secret Assignments: Jaclyn Moriarty
    
    • A spontaneous YA read (I found it on a book list somewhere). I think it will suffice to quote the Goodreads blurb I wrote at the time, which read: “A million times fun. With the pranks, and the cleverness, and the epistolary format, and the wonderful friendship shared by the three female protagonists, I am sold, sold, sold.”
46. More Beer: Jakob Arjouni, Trans. Anselm Hollo
    
47. Borkmann’s Point: Håkan Nesser, Trans. Laurie Thompson
    
    • Inspired by a summer screening series at the Scandinavia House of the Swedish TV show based on Nesser’s Van Veeteren series. Neither version–the book or the TV adaptation–worked for me, and I wrote about both here (link above).
48. The Best of Everything: Rona Jaffe
    
    • A working-girls-in-the-late-50s novel cited by Mad Men and apparently quite scandalous at the time for its portrayal of women’s sex lives, abortions, etc. Jaffe takes a sympathetic insider’s view of the typing pool and the romantic misadventures of her young female protagonists, but I couldn’t help feeling that not only did it go on too long, but I was somewhat disappointed to find that the dream closest to each young woman’s heart (even those who become successful in the publishing world) seems to be to find a man and settle down. Still, many of the characters really have stuck with me, and it’s a great ensemble portrait of an era that seems entirely of the past, and yet really wasn’t that long ago.
49. Ruined: Paula Morris
    
    • A post-Katrina gothic YA most memorable to me for the fact that the ghostly character on the front cover (white, blondish) is, quite pointedly, a black girl in the novel. Arg. You’d think we were past such whitewashing (see here for an incident in 2009 which got a lot of coverage), but we’re not.
50. Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion?: Johan Harstad, Trans. Deborah Dawkin
    
    • I wish I had written about this when I read it, because I loved it. It’s a great book–quirky, meandering, emotional (but not in a gimmicky way) and makes brilliant use of its Faroe Island setting and, more importantly, many, many Cardigans songs. About a young, aimless Norwegian man who allows himself to be carried along by a series of unusual events (many of which he can’t remember at the outset) until he’s making tourist-baiting souvenirs at a sort of permanent half-way house for people with mental and emotional issues on the Faroe Islands. There is an emotionally redemptive Thor Heyerdahl-esque boat journey to the Caribbean, too. It’s really great.
51. Aiding and Abetting: Muriel Spark
    
    • I was considering a trip to Scotland and so decided that I should give Dame Spark a try. This book (and Spark’s prose style/narrative approach/and perhaps her social positions as well) is not without its issues, but overall, I loved it. The momentum reading this one took me to one of her others: Loitering with Intent. This book also features one of my new favorite quotes: “She wasn’t a person to whom things happen. She did all the happenings.” (Informal review of book linked above.)
52. The Little Book of Icelanders: Alda Sigmundsdóttir
    • Could also be called “fun facts about Icelanders!” And it is. By one of my favorite Icelandic bloggers. (Linked review above.)
53. Egil’s Saga: Trans. Bernard Scudder
    
    • I have a deluxe Penguin edition of The Sagas of Icelanders that I’ve been trying to make myself read for probably two or three years. It’s not that I’m not interested–it’s honestly that the book is really rather huge and difficult to take on the subway (no e-version as of yet, I don’t think). Nevertheless, I took my first real trip to Iceland this year and couldn’t go without reading at least one saga.
54. Snobs: Julian Fellowes
    
    • What can I say? Fellowes hooked me with Gosford Park and Downton Abbey and so I went in search of his first novel. It’s much harder to care about the marital troubles of a young woman who marries for money and is stifled by life in the country when the book is set in the 1990s and said female character refused to go to college. However, I liked the POV–the narrator is a friend of the main characters and observes on all from the sidelines.
55. The Headhunters: Jo Nesbø, Trans. Don Bartlett
    
    • I was really sold on the back story of this novel–that Nesbø was donating all proceeds (from the book, all its translations, and also its movie adaptation) to a charity he set up to fund world literacy projects–but the book is simply not for me. Nesbø is hit and miss for me, but this book made me really miss Harry Hole.
56. Wonderstruck: Brian Selznick
    
    • A simultaneous feat of illustration and narrative. Recommended by my mother and little sister. (Informal review linked above.)
57. Season to Taste: How I Lost My Sense of Smell and Found My Way: Molly Birnbaum
    
    • Since I had done well with one food memoir last year, I thought I’d try Birnbaum’s–not the least because I too love to cook and have a very limited sense of smell. But this was way too self-pitying for me, particularly because Birnbaum had access to amazing people (which she seemed pretty ungrateful for) and after all her whining, got almost all of her sense of smell back. Didn’t finish this whole book, but rather, aggressively skimmed for quotes that would frustrate me.
58. The Masqueraders: Georgette Heyer
    
    • One day, I’ll write a long piece about this book and its amazing gender subversion, ironical inner logic regarding manners and propriety, and the myriad delights of a swashbuckling masquerade. This book is (if you go for such things) pure enjoyment, well wrought.
59. Karaoke Culture: Dubravka Ugrešić
    
    • Reading this book is, I’ll quote myself–forgive me, “like sitting with a highly caffeinated intellectual over tea.” My first exposure to Ugrešić, but not my last.
60. Night Watch: Sergei Lukyanenko, Trans. Andrew Bromfield
    
    • Some thematic reading around Halloween.
61. Mr. Fox: Helen Oyeyemi
    • Another rewarding challenge to my usual literary sensibilities.
62. The Greenhouse: Auður A. Ólafsdóttir, Trans. Brian FitzGibbon
    
    • Another one of the best books I read all year. Also the first of ten Icelandic translations into English being published by Amazon’s new imprint, AmazonCrossing, in the coming year.
63. The Vegan Slow Cooker: 150 Recipes for Intensely Flavorful, Fuss-Free Fare Everyone (Vegan or Not!) Will Devour: Kathy Hester
    
    • One of my best cookbook purchases of all time, and (although I’m not a vegan) it’s become a really integral reference for me. Hester actually makes use of fake meat in her recipes, which adds some nice variety; the collection has a broad range of unique recipes (not just the regular stews and soups, but baked goods in a crock pot?! + lots of Indian-inspired dishes); all the recipes are broken down into what needs to be done the night before and what’s done day of; and lastly, there is just an abundance of practical tips. I haven’t tried a recipe yet that I didn’t like.
64. Cotillion: Georgette Heyer
    
    • Another Heyer. For fun, I started inter-library loaning these (rather difficult to track down in local branches) through the NYU library. Never failed to give me a kick to pick up a pink, Harlequin paperback with a very official inter-library loan sticker from an academic library.
65. Loitering with Intent: Muriel Spark
66. These Old Shades: Georgette Heyer
    
    • I convinced a friend of mine who is a real devotee of romance novels to read this one with me. My least favorite of the Heyer books I’ve read thus far. Very little romance, and way too much inter-generational paternalizing for my taste.
67. The Invention of Hugo Cabret: Brian Selznick
    
    • Not as good as Wonderstruck, but worth it for the automaton and the film lesson.
68. Call Me Princess: Sara Blaedel, Trans. Erick J. Macki and Tara F. Chance (no cover credit)
    
    • Blaedel is supposed to be “Danish Queen of Crime,” but this was just awful. Took me three starts and I only finished because I was months late on a review I’d promised.
69. Tales of the City: Armistad Maupin
    
    • Serialized in a San Francisco paper originally, reading these stories is much like watching a TV show (it was adapted later). Bubbly and just salacious enough with a fun ensemble cast.
70. Mister Blue: Jacques Poulin, Trans. Sheila Fischman
    
    • Not as good as Translation is a Love Affair, but in keeping with the same tones and themes.
71. A Study in Scarlet: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
    
    • A return to an unread classic, which I dipped into while sitting on an afghan on the couch over Christmas. Kind of a strange little tale, but very funny in places, and ideal for the moment in which I read it.
72. Innocent Blood: P.D. James
    
    • I stalled out on James’ A Taste for Death while visiting my family in Arizona over the winter holidays and so picked up this title from a local used bookstore chain instead. It has much of what makes James’ work so enjoyable: complex plotting and deeply realized characters. Also, a lot of the sort of twisted relational scenarios that pepper her stories. But it wasn’t really a mystery–at least in the way the cover sold it–and it didn’t really work for me. So I turned my attention to a mixed bag of short stories (Capote’s “A Christmas Memory,” most notably) to close my year.

And that’s it! 2011, chronologically, in books.

In addition to authoring three novels, Auður is a full-time art historian and lecturer in art history at the University of Iceland. (She expressed a refreshingly pragmatic point of view on working full time while being a novelist in a Q&A published by AmazonCrossing (link below): “I think the main impact of working full-time as an art historian is that there’s a longer gap between books.”)

The Greenhouse has garnered a great deal of praise prior to its translation into English–the French translation in particular has won two awards: the Canadian Prix des libraires du Québec award for best of best foreign novel this year and the Prix de Page in 2010 for  “Best European Novel.”

For further reading on Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir and The Greenhouse, see:

• Her bio on the “Fabulous Iceland” website (Frankfurt Book Fair)
• Q&A with Auður via AmazonCrossing
• Review of The Greenhouse on NPR’s “All Things Considered” (both in text/audio)
• Review of The Greenhouse on The Complete Review

***

2011 has been a banner year for Icelandic literature on the international stage. “Fabulous Iceland” was this year’s guest of honor at the Frankfurt Book Fair, and in August, UNESCO named Reykjavík as one of its five Cities of Literature—the only such city where English is not the native language. Perhaps even more notable for American readers, however, was the recent announcement that Amazon’s new publishing imprint, AmazonCrossing, will release an astounding ten Icelandic titles in new English translations over the next year. Judging by the press’ first Icelandic selection, The Greenhouse by Audur Ava Olafsdottir, English-readers can look forward to a catalog of remarkable Icelandic titles in the coming months.

At once wryly observant and sweetly comic, The Greenhouse is a meditation on such sweeping themes as sex, death, becoming a parent, manhood, and finding a place for oneself in the world which doesn’t once fall prey to cloying generalizations or cliche. Rather, through the eyes of twenty-two year old Arnljótur Thórir—or Lobbi, as his elderly father affectionately calls him—author Audur Ava Olafsdottir breathes a freshness and sincerity into her subject matter which is as charming as it is insightful.

The novel opens with a birth and a death. Having lost his mother in a car accident just a year earlier, Lobbi is also adjusting to his unexpected new role as father. His first child, Flóra Sól, is the product of the unlikely indiscretion of “one quarter of a night, not even, a fifth, more like it.” His mother’s death and the birth of his daughter both take place on the same day, which also happens to be his mother’s birthday. Lobbi’s father ascribes this confluence to “some intricate system,” while his son dismisses the coincidences as meaningless chance. “In my experience,” he sagely remarks, “as soon as you think you’ve got one thing figured out, something completely different happens.”

This statement ends up being wiser than Lobbi could imagine, as all of his best laid plans and worldviews are systematically upended throughout the novel. Feeling himself to be somewhat superfluous in the life of his daughter, and at loose ends with his father and autistic twin brother at home, Lobbi decides that rather than go to college, he will travel to a remote (unnamed) village monastery abroad to work as an gardener. Although he is generally indecisive and frequently unsure of himself, the decision is not a difficult one. Lobbi was “more or less brought up in a greenhouse” by his mother, who shared with her son a knack for cultivating tomatoes, flowers, and roses where once had only been “a flat stretch of barren land with rocks surrounded by wind-scattered pebbles.”

Lobbi is not even out of Reykjavík when his plans begin to go awry. He falls ill on the plane and must be hospitalized upon landing. Once recovered, he rents a car and begins his long journey, only to find himself lost in a deep forest and unexpectedly transporting an inn-keeper’s daughter to her drama class, 350 kilometers out of his way. Finally arriving at his destination, he finds solace in the monastery garden and a mentor in a monk with a love of dessert liqueurs and art house cinema. But he has not been working at the garden long when he is contacted by the mother of his child, an aspiring geneticist who would like Lobbi to “bear [his] part of the responsibility” and help her look after Flóra Sól while she completes her thesis. Thus, in very short order, Lobbi finds himself living with a woman, raising a daughter, learning to cook, and hopefully, figuring out what he wants to do with his life.

The Greenhouse is a meandering novel and although there are quite a few happenings throughout the narrative, not much actually “happens” per se, and nor does it need to. Lobbi’s daily negotiations of quotidian responsibilities are so sweetly related that something as simple as making dinner can become a rich, humorous, and illustrative moment. From Brian FitzGibbon’s seamless translation, it is clear that Audur Ava is a beautiful prose stylist who uses simple and straightforward language and imagery to convey complex emotions and observations. Interspersing scenes from Lobbi’s daily life with reflective moments from his past—the last conversation he had with his mother, sitting up and watching his daughter sleep the night that she was born—Audur Ava creates a fully realized portrait of a young man coming into himself without even really being aware of his own transformation.

The Greenhouse is a novel about finding beauty in the everyday, in simple moments and acts—in making dinner, and planting roses, and helping a child learn to walk. It is a story of creating meaning in one’s own life, especially in the face of chance and coincidence.

I’ll forgo preamble for the book, but a quick side note: While preparing my review, I read one of Ugresic’s essays in a book called Writing Europe: What Is European About the Literatures of Europe?  Her entry in the collection, “European Literature as a Eurovision Song Contest,” is masterful: she discusses nationality, nationalism, identity, authorship, and more both imaginatively and incisively. It’s a short essay–if you have any interest in any of the topics above, I highly recommend you read it–and it also provides useful a context/parallel for many of themes she picks up in Karaoke Culture. One of my favorite excerpts from the piece:

“Some ten years ago I had an elegant Yugoslav passport with a soft, flexible, dark red cover. I was a Yugoslav writer. Then the war came and–without asking me–the Croats thrust into my hand a blue Croatian passport…The new Croatian authorities expected from their citizens a prompt transformation of identity, as though the passport itself was a magic pill…With my new Croatian passport I abandoned my newly acquired “homeland” and set off into the world. Out there, with the gaiety of Eurovision Song Contest fans, I was immediately identified as a Croatian writer. I became the literary representative of a milieu that did not want me any more and which I did not want any more either. But still the label Croatian writer remained with me, like a permanent tattoo.

At this moment I possess a passport with a red cover, Dutch. I continue to wear the label of the literary representative of a country to which I am not connected even by a passport. Will my new passport make me a Dutch writer? I doubt it. Will my Dutch passport ever make it possible for me to reintegrate in Croatian literary ranks? I doubt it.”

But without further ado: you’ll find my review of Karaoke Culture below. You can read the original piece on The L website here. (I can’t take credit for the witty title they gave me–that was all my esteemed book editor.)

***

For the uninitiated, Karaoke Culture, the forthcoming essay collection by Dubravka Ugresic, provides an emblematic, if occasionally disjointed, snapshot of the author’s notable body of work. Available now just a year after its initial publication (very unusual for a translated work), Karaoke Culture is a timely collection whose essays run the gamut from the rise of participatory culture and “the anonymous artist” (the title essay), the preferred nomenclature and adopted personas of third wave feminists (“Bitches”), the “psychopathology” of reflexively loving a homeland you didn’t choose (“No Country for Old Women”), and a personal reflection on the vicious media harassment which led Ugresic to emigrate from the newly-formed Croatian state to The Netherlands in 1993 (“A Question of Perspective”).

Reading Karaoke Culture is—in the best way possible—much like sitting with a highly caffeinated intellectual over tea. Ugresic is a conversational writer; the zig-zagging structure of her essays suggests a fluid writing process that hews close to the author’s thoughts as she works from each initial observation to a final, incisive epiphany. Her cultural touch-points are restricted neither by country nor time nor genre: within the collection she makes easy reference to everything from Gone with the Wind and IKEA, to Bulgarian Idol and Henry Darger. When these disparate references cohere within one essay, the effect is luminous. Only rarely within the dense collection does Ugresic’s eliptical logic-dart miss her mark, leaving a few of the essays feeling somewhat over-determined.

The 22 essays in Karaoke Culture read fast–several are only two or three pages–but the collection rewards rumination. On first reading, it might appear that Ugresic is herself ‘channel-surfing,’ hopping among divergent topics to simply cover as much ground as possible. But so much the better. Here she diagnoses contemporary culture in all its facets, underlying the parallels between ideologies and societies that have long understood themselves to be diametrically opposed.

Throughout the collection, Ugresic’s outspoken, absurdist humor paired with her genuinely global perspective, shines through. Karaoke Culture is a rarity: a thoughtful, personal, and informative work of socio-cultural critique that doesn’t take itself too seriously.

There’s a great write-up of the novel at The Complete Review here. Benjamin Anastas also wrote a really nice piece for Bookforum about it in 2002, which doubles as a truly comprehensive take-down of Ian McEwan’s Antonement. His piece is called “Rejoice, Stupid: The Novels of Muriel Spark,” which I’ll quote briefly:

“Woe to the writer with only hundreds of words at his disposal to describe the wonders, the wit, the seriousness of purpose applied with feather-light touch to be savored in Spark’s finest work…“

Duly noted. My own, less comprehensive review is below.

***

Loitering with Intent is a delightful, effervescent sort of story, but hard to put your finger on. For one thing, (and here I’m generalizing on the basis of just two of her books) Spark is at once an extremely exacting author–with sharp observations about characters and situations and a really well-defined sense of narrative and prose rhythms–while also seeming to be a rather carefree one. She reuses phrases that catch her fancy to excess (the “English Rose” designation gets really tired out in Loitering) and seems to have no interest in maintaining narrative suspense, but rather drops in summary paragraphs mid-way through the book which reveal how everything is going to turn out in the end. (I actually rather like the latter quality, being a big skip-to-the-end-so-I-can-see-if-I-guessed-right sort of reader, myself, but it’s unusual for an author, to be sure.)

Loitering also flirts a little bit with po-mo narrative tropes without ever really following through on them (which I also appreciate). Fleur, the struggling but lighthearted author-heroine of the story, finds that after taking a job as a secretary of a private Autobiographical Association, the people she meets and the events of her life begin more and more to resemble things that she’s written in her novel. For much of the book, she maintains that any similarity between her life and her art is coincidental, until finally demurring,

“…even if I had invented the characters after, not before, I had gone to work at Sir Quentin’s–even if I had been moved to portray those poor people in fictional form, they would not have been recognizable, even to themselves…Such as I am, I’m an artist, not a reporter.”

Nevertheless, this overlap complicates things: Fleur’s book is stolen by her employer who begins quoting lines to her that her characters have said. He steals passages and writes them into the memoirs of his association members, as well as using her as a character in the invented sordid affairs that he includes in these “biographies” as well. In a late scene, Fleur’s employer tricks her in the same way that a character in her novel is tricked, and although she has an inkling of the connection, she doesn’t believe it: “It seemed quite unlikely that my own novel could be entering into my life to such an extent.”

Overall, however, what’s actually unusual about Loitering with Intent is how much fun it is. A lot happens–a lot of dramatic, heavy sorts of events and twists which in the hands of another author could have taken on an entirely different tone. Try out this summary: In the wake of World War II, a young, single, impoverished female author writes a promising novel, only to have it stolen by her devious employer who tries to use its very words and plot against her and ruin her chances at success.

It sounds grim, right? But it’s not. Spark makes this story an adventure, and even tells the reader intermittently that the bad guy is going to get what he deserves, that the heroine will triumph, and that above all, there will be joy. “What a wonderful thing it was to be a woman and an artist in the twentieth century,” Fleur notes several times, even in the midst of all her troubles. It’s all just so exciting to her: “I do dearly love a turn of events.”

But if there’s any one quote that will really give you the take-away of this book, it’s Fleur’s own catchphrase: “I go on my way rejoicing.” And so might we all.

Oyeyemi is a consummate storyteller and so even though metafictional, post-modern literary experiments are often not my thing, I found myself steadily sucked into the complex, fantastical, and often eerily disturbing stories and fictional platforms that are created within Mr.Fox. This was my first Oyeyemi novel, but I’ll definitely be reading more of hers in the future.

Mr. Fox has received quite a few rave reviews. See author Aimee Bender’s piece in The New York Times Book Review here; Liz Coville wrote about the book for NPR Books here.

My own review of Mr. Fox was published on The Second Pass. Read it on that website here, or see the full text below.

***

“You have to change. . . . You kill women. You’re a serial killer. Can you grasp that?” So says Mary Foxe, the fictional creation and erstwhile muse of St. John (S.J.) Fox, a 1930s-era author with a penchant for subjecting his female characters to grisly (he says “meaningful”) deaths and dismemberments. A quick survey: a bride saws off her limbs and bleeds to death at the altar; a housewife hangs herself over a ruined dinner; a husband beheads his wife, thinking he would “replace her head when he wished for her to speak.” Tired of being subjected to such fates herself, Mary Foxe — apparently unbound by the pages of the books in which she has existed — casually appears in S.J.’s study and challenges her progenitor to enter a fictional world of her own making, one where he just might find himself the victim for a change.

As those who are well-versed in European folkloric traditions will have guessed, Mr. Fox, the fourth novel by 26-year-old Helen Oyeyemi, takes its inspiration from the myriad fairy tales and traditional narratives about murderous men luring attractive young women to their deaths. Oyeyemi’s novel references Bluebeard and the famous French character based on the 15th century soldier/serial killer Gilles de Rais, and also draws from the Grimm Brothers’ tale “Fitcher’s Bird,” a Victorian ballad about a werefox named Reynardine, the German folk character of the Robber Bridegroom, and, of course, the English fairy tale “Mister Fox.”

The heroine of “Mister Fox” (which coined the refrain “Be bold, be bold, but not too bold”) is Lady Mary, who witnesses her dashing suitor, Mr. Fox, chopping off the hand of a young woman before dragging her to certain death in his castle’s “bloody chamber.” The stalwart Mary escapes with the young woman’s hand, and later reveals Mr. Fox as the villain he is by telling the “dream” she had of the young woman’s murder and furnishing the hand as evidence. Bluebeard mythology includes several tales in which the female characters safely escape in the end, but in the context of Oyeyemi’s novel, “Mister Fox” is all the more noteworthy because the heroine bests her would-be murderer with her storytelling.

While this framework provides a rich context (most of the aforementioned murderers and heroines make appearances within the book), Oyeyemi’s novel is not a simple retelling of the Bluebeard legend or a bland metafictional exercise in which author becomes character and vice versa. There are no exact parallels or allegorical stand-ins. Through S.J. and Mary’s dueling narratives, Mr. Fox submerses us in a series of inventive, complex worlds, each uniquely voiced and easily standing on its own. Within one story, a young governess and writer enters into a troubling correspondence with a famous author; in another, a Yoruba woman barters with a mysterious man named Reynardine to recover her dead lover. “Hide, Seek” is about an Egyptian boy and his adoptive mother, who are building a woman piece by piece with art works they find all over the world. “Some Foxes” tells of a fox and a young woman who fall in love. The result is nothing short of pyrotechnic: this is classical, magical storytelling at its finest.

S.J. and Mary’s fantastical tales are juxtaposed with real-life scenes from the marriage of S.J. and his wife Daphne, blurring fiction and reality until it’s difficult to distinguish one from the other. The often dangerous fusion of fact and fiction, reality and text, is a recurrent concern in the novel. For S.J., there is no harm in routinely victimizing women in his stories because “[i]t’s not real . . . It’s all just a lot of games.” For Mary, this sets a dangerous precedent. “What you’re doing is building a horrible kind of logic,” she says.

People read what you write and they say, “Yes, he is talking about things that really happen,” and they keep reading, and it makes sense to them. You’re explaining things that can’t be defended, and the explanations themselves are mad, just bizarre — but you offer them with such confidence. It was because she kept the chain on the door; it was because he needed to let off steam after a hard day’s scraping and bowing at work; it was because she was irritating and stupid; it was because she lied to him, made a fool of him; it was because she had to die, she just had to, it makes dramatic sense; it was because “nothing is more poetic than the death of a beautiful woman”; it was because of this, it was because of that. It’s obscene to make such things reasonable.

It’s possible to read in Mary’s impassioned speech the sort of logic that guides Parental Advisory labels, but it becomes clear that Oyeyemi is making the case that the very act of creation, of storytelling and writing, has the potential to be violent and dangerous. The storyteller must understand the gravity of this process, because in creating a story, one is, in a sense, creating him- or herself. We see this repeated several times in Mr. Fox: an abusive father forcibly writes text all over the body of his wife until she leaps about chirping, “Am I in the poem? Or is the poem in me?” In one chilling scene, Mr. Fox himself “remembers” deliberately killing Mary Foxe, only to figure out that he’s recalling a story he once wrote about a jilted lover.

Oyeyemi raises this theme of authorial responsibility without offering any well-defined conclusions. But she is a masterful storyteller, and fearless in creating tales whose conclusions are never as straightforward as “The End.”

At a meeting in Mr. Stringer’s office [the Manhattan Borough President], the college agreed to reduce the store’s rent to about $17,500 a month from about $20,000 for one year, and to forgive $7,000 in debt. The school will also provide student help with revising the store’s business plan.

This is interesting, of course, in that if significant changes aren’t made, the bookshop might be back in the same place next year. The owners themselves admit as much. And I wonder whether they were glad or a little offended that Cooper Union will be sending students to help with their business model. I’ll admit that I have often thought that St. Mark’s website could make it a little easier to buy books online–they do have some books for sale (a good selection of remainders, autographed copies, and even some DVDs), but the general stock isn’t browseable, which seems to be a misstep to me. Also, although St. Mark’s has partnered with Google Books to sell ebooks on their website, they have not necessarily done much to promote or grow this aspect of their business.

In the face of their temporary respite, I hope that St. Mark’s takes the initiative to explore more successful business models so that their store cannot only stay open, but actually flourish. I think that a great model to follow would be Greenlight Books in Ft. Greene. Greenlight opened a few years ago (brave souls!) and has really impressed with their ability to provide a locally-relevant stock, host exciting (often local, again) author events and readings, and create a website which makes online ordering and the purchasing of ebooks really easy. Greenlight has quickly become a neighborhood institution in Ft. Greene, much like St. Mark’s has been (and will hopefully continue to be) in the East Village. There are, of course, other bookstores in the city which have also been successful at creatively working with their communities and broadening their scopes without ever losing the feel of a comfortable neighborhood bookstore. So hopefully, St. Mark’s will take note. I look forward to seeing what the next year has in store for them.