My Take of the NY Times Book Review 4/8/07

Every Sunday when the Times comes, and I open the book review section, feeling like a kid with her nosed pressed against the glass display counter at the candy store. It's not that I want to have all the books, although there are many I would like, but it's the wistfulness of wanting publication and validation for my writing. So who am I to judge the other writers? A reader, an omnivous reader, always playing catch up. An opinionated reader. Can't be helped.

Not much to inspire this week, but the review of Derek Walcott's Select Poems was edifying. We are all "poets of exile," are we not?

The novel, Seizure, by Erica Wagner promises to be a good read. Wagner is the literary editor of the Times of London, so of course her first novel would be reviewed in major publications. She also has a book of stories out. The novel has a real plot and will go high on my TBR (to be read) list. Right now, I am reading Three Trapped Tigers, re-reading Proust ( the third time), starting The Warlord's Son, and another mystery with "blood" in the title. The mountain of books on my nightstand always grows, never shrinks, sometimes topples, scaring the hell out of me and the cat.

Naturally a super model's novel would get a big review, and Paulina Porizkova's did. A Model Summer. Sounds rather autobiographical. Not on my list, but probably a worthy beach read.

Ian Rankin has been getting tons of press about The Naming of the Dead. Have to confess I still haven't read him. Always playing catch up on the books in my genre. Bad. He has a conflicted character, Rebus, and it sounds nice and meaty. Meaty is good.

Clive James has a non-fiction book reviewed. He just recently crossed my radar with a rather snide article on crime fiction in the New Yorker. I was thrilled to see a serious article about the subject, but he actually panned crime fiction, or rather damned with faint praise.

Chain Reaction, by Nora Gallaher, set in New Mexico in the 1940's will also make my list. I have deep feelings about the southwest, and anything that combines those thrilling landscapes with atomic energy and a bit of skullduggery has my attention. Cool title, too.

Now we come to the hard cover best seller list. Jodi Picoult is another author I haven't read yet, but Nineteen Minutes sounds riveting. I suppose any well-written high school shoot up would be. Recalling high school, I'm surprised there aren't more, really. Shootings, not novels.

Lovely to see a fine crime writer, Laura Lippman at #10 on the list. She just keeps getting better and better. What the Dead Know has garnered beaucoup excellent reviews.

Maybe I need to take a year off from writing and read. On the paperback list, nothing to remark upon except that Jodi Picoult has hit that list, too. The Kite Runner has been on there 112 weeks, another novel on my TBR list.

I bogged down in The Warlord's Son, mostly because I absolutely didn't want to read any blood and gore in the cardiac waiting room. Somehow the first chapter seemed more riveting than the second. The American journalist is not terribly likeable, and there's already a lot of back story. It's so important to get on with the plot and fill the back story in later. Hard to do.

What has become crystal clear is that in spite of a dynamite plot kernel, there is no way I can write an Afghanistan book without a co-author, and the one I maybe had is a) back in Iraq, and b) kind of crazy, and c) probably never got within 100 miles of the borderlands. So whatcha gonna do?

I am gonna start the rewrite of Festival Madness. Today I kicked the broken IE 7 off my machine and reinstalled. This one actually works, and now I can think about redoing my web site. All of this sounds like work. In the meantime, this week I'm going to give a speech on threshing wheat in Kansas. Will the topic have the New Englanders and the foreign-born on the edge of their seats?

Stay tuned.

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