New York Times Most Notable Books

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NYT Critics' Picks

The New York Times lists of top ten books from their book critics and reviewers, and the Times' Book Review's List of 2010 Notable Books.

A special congratulations to Lee Child and Tana French, Crime Fiction Writers who made the list this year.  You do us all proud. 

From Michiko Kakutani:

Nonfiction

LIFE by Keith Richards with James Fox

CLEOPATRA: A LIFE by Stacy Schiff

LETTERS by Saul Bellow. Edited by Benjamin Taylor

FRANK: THE VOICE by James Kaplan

CRISIS ECONOMICS: A CRASH COURSE IN THE FUTURE OF FINANCE by Nouriel Roubini and Stephen Mihm

YOU ARE NOT A GADGET: A MANIFESTO by Jaron Lanier

Fiction

SUPER SAD TRUE LOVE STORY by Gary Shteyngart

FREEDOM by Jonathan Franzen

THE LOST BOOKS OF THE ODYSSEY by Zachary Mason

THE THOUSAND AUTUMNS OF JACOB DE ZOET by David Mitchell

From Janet Maslin:

Nonfiction

JUST KIDS by Patti Smith

A GREAT UNRECORDED HISTORY: A NEW LIFE OF E. M. FORSTER by Wendy Moffat

FIFTH AVENUE, 5. A.M.: AUDREY HEPBURN, BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY'S, AND THE DAWN OF THE MODERN WOMAN by Sam Wasson

THE WARMTH OF OTHER SUNS: THE EPIC STORY OF AMERICA'S GREAT MIGRATION by Isabel Wilkerson

THE DEATH OF AMERICAN VIRTUE: CLINTON VS. STARR by Ken Gormley

Fiction

THE IMPERFECTIONISTS by Tom Rachman

SAVAGES by Don Winslow

FAITHFUL PLACE by Tana French

61 HOURS by Lee Child

MAJOR PETTIGREW'S LAST STAND by Helen Simonson

From Dwight Garner:

Poetry

THE BEST OF IT: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS by Kay Ryan

Nonfiction

HITCH-22: A MEMOIR by Christopher Hitchens

THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS by Rebecca Skloot

SIMON WIESENTHAL: THE LIFE AND LEGENDS by Tom Segev

MOURNING DIARY by Roland Barthes

THE LAST HERO: A LIFE OF HENRY AARON by Howard Bryant

I.O.U.: WHY EVERYONE OWES EVERYONE AND NO ONE CAN PAY by John Lanchester

THE POSSESSED: ADVENTURES WITH RUSSIAN BOOKS AND THE PEOPLE WHO READ THEM by Elif Batuman

OPERATION MINCEMEAT: HOW A DEAD MAN AND A BIZARRE PLAN FOOLED THE NAZIS AND ASSURED AN ALLIED VICTORY by Ben Macintyre

PARISIANS: AN ADVENTURE HISTORY OF PARIS by Graham Robb.

Dwight Garner's Books

Most Notable Books  

King and Kingsolver

The first thing I do on Sunday morning besides drink coffee is read the New York Times Book Review. This week I got Stephen King's On Writing from the library and began reading it last night. A real mashup of happy and sad and poigant and pithy. I laughed out loud at his hijinx with the high school newspaper, because it reminded me so much of my younger self.

The book review featured King's new novel, a 1000+ page behemoth that sounded intriguing and readable. (Under the Dome). The Times' also reviewed a new novel by Barbara Kingsolver. (The Lacuna). I discovered Kingsolver when she was writing about Arizona and what a great writer she has become! The Poisonwood Bible was just terrific. So I can't wait to read the new book, much of which takes place in Mexico with Kahlo, Trotsky and Diego Rivera. We saw the movie recently and enjoyed it immensely. They were all larger than life characters.

Just reading the reviews I had a couple ideas for my WIP, In Flight, and even my California book, not yet written. I'm wondering if that is the book I should plow into and not stop until finished, writing in a fine but unburnished passion, permitting myself to write the "shitty first draft."

It was so heartening to see King leave poverty behind with the paperback sale of Carrie. I hope he made another bundle on the movie. And what a loyal wife who is herself a find poet and writer.

Did I mention Kingsolver's non-fiction? Also great.

Hat's off and raise your glass to Stephen King and Barbara Kingsolver. Let fiction reign.

http://www.nytimes.com/pages/books/index.html

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An Alert Reader

An alert reader wrote:
You took the Hy-Line, the movie theater was razed, and the last movie was the Poseidon Adventure.

Apropos Nantucket. Did I misspell Traffik? See the cars, avoid the cars. Watch the cars trying to go up the one-way streets the WRONG way. Look at the blond women on their cell phones. Run fast!

I try to be meticulous in my novels, but not so much in the blog. Ye gods, who knows? Maybe literary agents are combing it for typos as a reason to reject.

Lots of interesting books reviewed in the NY Times today. No doldrums this August.

Smoked salmon (wasn't sure about the spelling of "lox") and bagels for breakfast today in honor of the houseguests. Me, I'm an Eastern Colorado girl who would just have soon have white toast and jelly.

The girl can't help it.

Some good thoughts for my novel's plot today. Sometimes a bit of down time is a good thing.

So sad, yesterday, at Kate's Mystery Bookstore, when all the authors that Kate has supported over the years arrived to help back. The famous and like moi, the not-so-famous. Kate has a generous heart and will sorely be missed by readers of the genre as well as us scribblers. Alas, alas.

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In Samuel Becket's Words

I "discovered" Samuel Becket as an undergraduate, and recall driving to the University of Houston from the Rice campus to see "Krapp's Last Tape" and "Waiting for Godot." In the intervening years, we saw Beckett produced at the ART in Cambridge, a controversial performance that outraged Beckett. Water over the dam.

This morning, still feeling the sting of the last rejection of Festival Madness, I was trolling through the New York Times Book Review and in the ending essay found Geoff Nicholson's musings on being prolific. That would not be me, since I write at the rate of a book every three years, an unpublished book. They keep accumulating.

This is what Samuel Becket said:
"Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better."

Fail better. I like that.

Happy Sunday. I just made a pot of curried cauliflower soup and tonight we're celebrating the Chinese New Year belatedly with chicken and vegetables in lettuce cups. Sounds good. Ethnic food rocks.

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Salade Niçoise

We had company this weekend and due to working around a theater curtain time, etc., I decided to make a Salade niçoise, I chose the salad in Julia Child's The Way to Cook as my recipe.

Now we all know that Julia is not the short-cut queen, no recipes in 30 minutes from the French Chef, so I was prepared for a bit of work. My only "shortcut" if indeed it was, was to cook the small Yukon Gold potatoes whole and peel them. I also omitted anchovies since I don't like anchovies and when you are the cook you can do what you damn well please.

O.K. second substitution was to buy three small beautiful tuna steaks and grill them. I made Julia's potato salad, cooked the beans, S.O. grilled the tuna, and I boiled some eggs, and pounced upon a beautiful red tomato, capers, black olives, lettuce, the works all laid out beautifully on a big ceramic platter.

The dressing was a lemon-garlic affair, with both lemon peel and lemon juice and raw garlic pounded to a paste. A bit of work but well worth it. The whole was greater than the sum of its parts and we had a feast.

At the other end of the spectrum was dessert. I know our friend likes strawberries, so a strawberry dessert seemed optimal. I recalled back in the first years of marriage I had been on a Bavarian cream kick, making various flavors of a French dessert called Bavarian cream.

I looked in the old New York Times cookbook and lo, there is was, but it was the shortcut version--Julia would have disapproved big time. I measured out all the ingredients including a heaping cup of chipped ice and dumped them into the blender in the prescribed order, and blended the prescibed number of second, and lo, strawberry Bavarian cream in less than a minute, no cooking. Raw eggs, too. My bad. I licked the spoon to test whether the eggs were safe and I guess they were.

We ate it with sliced strawberries from Wards Berry Farm, altogether lucious with no hard white centers, but red berry all the way through.

So this was yin and yang of meals, but lovely.

As for lovely, the garden looks and smells lovely. The white carnations bloomed and have sent a fragrance over the yard and now into the house as I picked a few and added the sage blossoms, favored by the bumble bees.

The tomatoes, heirloom beets, pepper and herbs are growing apace, and the flowers are blooming, even the new white lupine, and the clematis has huge purple blossoms. The hummingbirds come to the feeder regularly and one looked at us in the window this morning. We had a fantastically large butterfly, all yellow and black, and of course the dragon flies swoop and land on the flowers. So life is good on the edge of the slough.

Big goldfinch battle yesterday. They are territorial little guys. Catbirds have discovered how to get into the suet feeder for small birds.

We had a good rain this morning and everything is lush. Looking at the garden puts me into a good mood, which is a good thing, because Festival Madness has two more rejections. We looked at the beginning again, and it read pretty good.

The New York Times Book Review today had many of the same books as the WSJ. Not my cuppa tea. The Globe's list is more literate, but Boston readers are obviously not typical.

Tonight I'll do a few more pages of the new book. I really need a working title.

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Best Selling Books

Normally, I look at the New York Times Bestsellers everyweek in the Sunday NY Times Book Review section. Today I took a look at the Wall Street Journal's list and said, "huh?"

I didn't know most of the authors. How can this be? O.K. Lee Child is a given, and apparently his new book is really good. I came from Colorado and so I'm anxious to try to figure out where the book is set.

Lucky Stephanie Meyer has 3 books on the list. I googled her and she writes vampire/romance stuff which isn't on my radar. Wow! Three books. Must be doing something write, I mean right.

Didn't recognize Emily Griffin either. Looks like chic lit or mom lit or baby lit. Probably cute.
Laurel K. Hamilton was another writer I drew a blank on. Sci-Fi Romance. Jeez, vampire romance, sci-fi romance, mommy romance. Hmmmm. Lauren Weisburger I had heard of, but I saw the movie, didn't read The Devil Wears Prada. Maybe I should.

Dean Koontz, sure, a perennial best seller, as is James Patterson and whoever he's writing with. Steve Martini, another new one for me, writes legal thrillers.

Chuck Palahniuk has a new book. Snuff. Eeeww. Nuff said.

Patricia Cornwall. Yup!

Sebasian Faulks didn't ring a bell, but he is writing the new James Bond books, which I did read about. Shaken not stirred.

W.E. B. Griffin and a co-author are writing military adventures, that kind of thing. Sounded kind of like Clancy, but I am just doing a quick Google on all these people.

So: maybe a vampire, chic-lit romance with elements of law and some army adventures? I dunno. Nothing I will be writing soon.

Onward.

Snarky Reviews: Sunday New York Times

Zowie! With a couple exceptions the book reviews in today's (1/27/08) New York Times are downers. Drew Gilpin Fault's This Republic of Suffering:Death and the American Civil War gets a rave from Geoffrey Ward,. Don't know if I'm up for 346 pages of Death and Suffering.

All Shall Be well; And All Shall Be Well; And All Manner of Things Shall Be Well by Tod Wodicka, which got a rave in another publication was slammed. Sounds like an interesting book.

A Golden Age by Tahmima Anan, a novel about the birth of Bngladesh gets off to a "muddy start," but redeems itself. Another tempting book.

Riding Toward Everywhere by William T. Vollmann was panned by J.R. Moehringer. This, too, is a book I look forward to reading because some of my relatives went "on the bum" during the Great Depression and rode the rails. One of them later became an entrepreneur and made a lot of money, lived an interesting life in a tiny Kansas town and became a world traveller, even learned Spanish late in life.

Ezra Pound: Poet, receives an even review from Charles McGrath. Of course Pound's life is so odd and interesting and controversial that reviewers (not this one) always tend to review the man and not his biographer's work.

Ellington Boulevard by Adam Langer, not just a novel but a New York novel, is again, more of a mixed review but basically positive. I've been visiting New York since I was a young bride (is there ever an "old bride"?) but have never felt there was a novel in these visits, or even a short story. Wonder why. No drama, no conflict? Note to self: dig deeper, you fool.

I don't read horror, so I skipped the review of20th Century Ghosts. Also skipped the review of Patrick Buchanan's book, since I figured I wouldn't read it either.

Still to read; The Cure Within, another book I wouldn't be inclined to read but the review might be interesting. Ditto, Alfred Kazin, a Biography.

Pat Barker's new novel, Life Class, got a basically panning review. She was put down for not writing a novel like her other novels. What's a writer to do? This was apparently too romantic. I was particularly interested because the book is about painters and World War I, and I am getting into a novel about (among other things) a painter and some research let to an idea for yet another novel.

News on the Trade Fiction vs. Mass-Market Fiction lists. Atonement is #1 in Trade and #5 in Mass-Market. The movie and then the Academy Award nominations have really helped this book. Hooray for tie-ins. Must gladden Ewan McEwan's heart and portmonnaie.

Pillars of Earth is #3 in Trade and #15 in Mass-Market, a surprising, to me, reversal. I Am Legend is #10 in TB and # 7 in MM. (I just hit a forbidden key and lost this post, BUT, due to total paranoia I had already submitted it a couple times. Ha ha. Blogger!)

A note about the hard-cover list: Janet Evanovich zoomed to the top with Plum Lucky. I love Stephanie Plum and that series. Both Evanovich and Sue Grafton, #8 with T is for Tresspass,
are excellent writers and storytellers and deserve all the success they have achieved. Both are dead serious about their writing and craft. Sisters in Crime!

Happy reading. Stay tuned for another food post. Hey, eating and reading some of the best parts of the day, n'est pas?

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Cross Pollination of Best Seller Lists

Again this week, Atonement and Ken Follett's book are both on the Trade paperback and the Mass-Market paperback lists. Why haven't I seen this mentioned?

I finished Donald Maass' "Breakout Novel" book, which has so much great advice in it, and I even discovered what kind of book I am going to write. How cool is that?

The last cookie is gone, the decorations are as far as boxes on the living room floor, as are the extra blankets which need to return to the cedar closet. This Christmas business sure is a lot of work, and I am wondering how it did it when I worked 50 hours a week. There was always the suspense of would everything actually get done on time, which is the kind of suspense one can do without. Definitely.

We had fed the Scottish Highland Cattle bags and bags of fruit and vegetable scraps lately. The newest baby comes charging up to the fence with her (his?) mom, Maggie, just like she knows what's going on. Maggie is very relaxed and the calf seems quite independent by now. The weather has warmed up again.

Our guests had a gruelling day yesterday, with a 3 hour delay in Baltimore, and an arrival in Reno in a snowstorm, plus a trip to Gerlach through flooded Fernley. Who takes a trip can tell a tale, and usually it's not about wonderful food and great accommodations, althought this is possible once in a while.

How can it be that the delete key is no longer working? Always and forever more ways than one to skin a cat. Onward, although probably not upward.

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A Virtual Party

Last night we stayed in and watched the marathon of old Pink Panther movies, and after New Year's we watched an old Peter Sellers movie (1968) called "The Party." If you haven't seen it and wonder what the 60's were about, esp. the 60's in California, here is your film. I've seen this three times and I still laughed until I cried. Peter Sellers was a comic genius.

Our young guest was allowed to stay up until midnight. She began to flag around 11:30, but kept away until the New Year. I had one glass of wine and nobody else drank anything. So why do I have a headache? Must be the late hour.

O.K. I owe you soon news apropos the New York Times Sunday Book Review. Yesterday for the first time I noticed something new. The book review began separating trade paperback from mass market paperback (think bigger versus small physical books) some time ago. The Hard Cover list is still another animal.

What I noticed Sunday was that Atonement was #3 in "Trade Fiction", which being a literary novel, one would expect, just as one would expect it to go round again with the movie (quite watchable, by the way). But HARK! Atonement is #7 ont he Mass-Market Fiction list!
And that's not all! The Pillars of the Earth, by Ken Follet, which I would expect to find on the Mass-Market fiction list, is in Trade Fiction, hardly literary, although Follett is a good writer who spins a compelling tale. And The Pillars of the Earth is also #5 on the Mass-Market Fiction paperbacks. What gives?

Publishers must be hedging all bets and printing both in Trade Fiction and Mass-Market once the novel leaves the hard cover printing. Mass-Market used to be all genre fiction, just as Trade Fiction was mostly literary fiction.

Comments on the Best Seller List: Sue Grafton, whom I love is number one if "T is for Tresspass." Grafton is a good writer, and her descriptions of weather and old people are really so well done. She is funny, too. "A Thousand Splendid Suns" is the only Literary book on the list, and there are several "general fiction" as well as much genre. No fantasy for a change. Otherwise, about what one would expect.

Normally, I wouldn't bother to point the miscengenation between Trade Fiction and Mass-Market, but I haven't seen it blurbed anywhere. Was I baking or shopping or wrapping when the rest of the world was commenting? I never know. Try to keep up on things, but it's hard.

New Calendars today. We have the usual odd assortment, from Islands to art deco to the Farmer's Almanac, a European business weekly and the Boston events calendar.

Last night we had stuffed shells for dinner, my own recipe, in which the shells are baked in a basic tomato sauce. Stuffing was low-fat ricotta, an egg, garlic, parsley, spices, wheat germ (non-sweetened), Monterrey Jack cheese with a bit of pepperoni diced into the mix. Quite yummy. With a big green salad and homemade garlic bread, it couldn't be beat. Sometimes, simple is best. Tonight we're having a dish made with cauliflower and pasta and that, too, is simple and good.

Diet starts on Sunday, in case you want to know. South Beach diet has the best recipes, but Weight Watchers has a few good ones, too, although you have to watch both of them for non-natural foods like egg-substitute and (yech, yuck) non-fat half and half, a misnomer is there ever was one.

Make a resolution to read all the ingredients in everything you buy, and if it has weird stuff that you don't use in your kitchen and can't buy in the store, eschew it. Too much sodium? Find another brand. Eat healthy, eat hearty. Bake bread and make soup.

The extent of all my wisdom for the day, maybe the year.

Oh, and do rent "The Party."

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The Trial

Today I take the train into town to the new Federal Courthouse to view a civil trial. Since I know or know of the plaintiffs and those being sued and have a lot of knowledge of the business and how it was run and why things happened, I have a real insider knowledge, and I am curious to know whether the trial will skew the facts as I know them. It takes all morning to select the jury, 45 people who looked as though they were collared for jury duty while mowing the lawn or washing the car. Not even a sport coat among them, hell, barely a shirt with a collar. Out of a pool of 45, they barely got 12 due to all the preemptory challanges and so forth.

Result being, I had lots of time to read, and since I had schleepped the NY Times along, I read the interview (Michael Kimmelman) with Tina Brown about her "Diana" book. Ms. Brown used a lot of cool words and phrases, some of which I wrote down, thinking a good word is (sometimes) hard to find and maybe some of these will be useful in Festival Madness, which I am on a marathon to revise.

Remember, you read it here first, the coolest new word everyone is using is "hubris." Was all over the Times today. So remember hubris and use it daily in a sentence ever so often until it is not only a part of your active vocabulary, but rolling off your lips like a scholar of ancient greek tragedies. You don't need hubris to use hubris.

Some other cool words and phrases: valedictory, revisiting, crystallized, naval-gazing, candor, notational subject, panache, gloss, marginalized, griefathon (apropos of Diana) festival of inclusion, fever of the moment, dot.com moment (whatever the hell that is) and best of all, "I drank the Kool-Aid."

More on the trial anon. Of course I don't want to name names or reveal who what or where. These people are dreadfully litiginous. Hey, that's another good word. I'll tamp down my hubris and see ya tomorrow.

Ladies Who Read

The wonderful sentence I mentioned in yesterday's blog is from a review of Summer Reading in Sunday's (6/3/07) New York Times Book Review. Anne Mendelson wrote the review. She is a freelance writer and editor.

"The clank of narrative machinery being hauled into place is rather too audible at the outset, before the three dovetailing plots take on a graceful momentum of their own."

It's really hard to begin a book. There are a gazillion rules - no backstory too early; no flashbacks too early; ditch the prologue; don't intoduce too many characters at once; make sure the reader knows what the book is "about" in the first few pages; stick in lots of reasonance, with appeals to all five senses; start with actions, not driving or on an airplane; don't begin with a cliched phone call. These are rules for genre fiction, at least mystery-suspense genre, and if you're fabulous, you can break the rules, but a beginning writer better not. So the"clank of narrative machinery," aka the setup, being hauled into place is often heard. I definitely see it in Promiscuous Mode and also in World of Mirrors. As long as it's not too 'pat,' one hopes the reader is enthused, because that is what tells her what the book will be about. Can't win for losing.

Apropos of seeing the name "Wolizer," I thought of a high school teacher of Spanish and English, Miss Walters. A spinster, as they were then called, she taught English and Spanish in a tiny town out west. She cared for an aging mother, which must have been why she got stuck there. No men suitable for a phi beta kappa English major within 90 miles. I remembered her as homely, but when I looked at the yearbook photo, she wasn't. I owe her an apology for thinking her dorky, for thinking of her as a loser, for thinking she was old and ugly. God, did she teach us to diagram the hell out of sentences, to do a bang-up job on a research paper. We laughed at her Castillian accent, which sounded so phoney among all the Latino Spanish. I can still hear her voice asking, "Quien falta?" Who's absent? So, sorry Miss Walters, wherever you are. You were a cool lady.

Today I print all 500+ pages (Courier 12) of World of Mirrors to send to the agent. It's not a question of will be like it, but will he think he can sell it? Maybe he has contacts in Germany. I wouldn't care where it was sold. It would be fun to do a signing in the cute bookstore on the island of Hiddensee, where there are a couple scenes in the book.

Now I will hie myself into the kichen to make the food processor bread. When we were newly weds, I used the word "hie" in a scrabble game and S.O. had never heard of it. Ha ha . Do YOU know it? I think my grandma used it.

With flour up to her elbows,

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