BiblioAddict The First Step on the Road to Recovery

On book trailers and reading queues:

Adam Haslett’s Union Atlantic is definitely a novel that’s shot to the top of my covet list the past week or so. The queue for it at the library is ridiculously long, but then so is my personal reading queue so the jury is still on whether I’ll buy or borrow it.  Either way, I expect it’ll be a good read whenever I do.  This trailer doesn’t do anything to convince me otherwise either.

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Happy reading, all.

Popularity: 3% [?]

On a dangerous kiss (or three), fruit out of season, a deadly beautiful voice, and the gift of humanity:

I suppose I should feel kinda sorta bad for not posting for almost two weeks, but what started out as an accident of circumstance (busy, busy, busy…) turned into a little experiment.  I wanted to see just how much reading I could get done when I focused on reading rather than spending time talking about it.  It’s no secret, I bet, that the less I blog the more I read.  At least, it’s something I always assumed was the truth based on my memory of past experiences.  Now, ten days and three finished books later, I know for a fact it’s true.

The first book I finished after completing Sarah Waters’ gripping The Little Stranger, was Lips Touch: Three Times by Liani Taylor.  I picked up this book the week of Valentine’s Day, and I have to say it’s one of the better choices I’ve made in a long time.  Lips Touch is a young adult collection three short stories, each about how life-changing, momentous, and downright dangerous a first kiss can be.  Not only that, but these stories are fantasies – dark fantasies teeming with nefarious goblins, plotting demons, and soulless witches.

The first story is probably by far my favorite, “Goblin Fruit.”  The story’s protagonist is a witty and smart though socially outcast girl named Kizzy.  Though the story is set in present-day, Kizzy’s family is an oddity.  Kizzy lives in a shack with her extended family just outside of town.  Unlike most modern-day families, Kizzy’s family has no television (they tell stories around the fire), they hunt their own food (rather than purchasing it from the supermarket), and bury their dead kin with almonds to eat, coins for bribery, and weapons for protection in the afterlife.  They also believe in werewolves, vampires, and, of course, goblins.  Naturally, Kizzy thinks her family is an embarrassment.  And, despite the warnings of her deceased grandmother, Kizzy finds it hard to believe that anything so dangerously fantastical as goblins could ever find their way to the little podunk town where Kizzy lives.  Until, that is, a handsome and charming new boy named Jack Husk arrives at Kizzy’s high school and all-but promises to give Kizzy her first kiss.  But, at what price?

I loved this story, not only because I could more than relate to Kizzy’s feelings and status in high school, but because it was beautifully written.  Taylor perfectly captures what it’s like when you’re young and you’re yearning and yearning for someone special to give you your very first kiss.  She also perfectly captures what it’s like to be young and to lack the perspective to appreciate those differences that will make you beautiful, unique, and attractive when you get older.  The story begins thusly:

There is a certain kind of girl the goblins crave. You could walk across a high school campus and point them out: not her, not her, her. The pert, lovely ones with butterfly tattoos in secret places, sitting on their boyfriends’ laps? No, not them. The girls watching the lovely ones sitting on their boyfriends’ laps? Yes.

Them.

The goblins want girls who dream so hard about being pretty their yearning leaves a palpable trail, a scent goblins can follow like sharks on a soft bloom of blood. The girls with hungry eyes who pray each night to wake up as someone else. Urgent, unkissed, wishful girls.

Like Kizzy.

And somewhere later in the story, Taylor writes:

Staring at her face, she began to fancy her outer layer had begun to melt away while she wasn’t paying attention, and something – some new skeleton – was emerging beneath the softness of her accustomed self.  With a deep, visceral ache, she wished her true fom might prove to be a sleek and shining one, like a stiletto blade slicing free of an ungainly sheath.  Like a bird of prey losing its hatchling fluff to hunt in cold, magnificent skies.  That she might become something glittering, something startling, something dangerous.

Kizzy wanted to be a woman who would dive off the prow of a sailbooat into the sea, who would fall back in a tangle of sheets, laughing, and who could dance a tango , lazily stroke a leopard with her bare foot, freeze an enemy’s blood with her eyes, make promises she couldn’t possibly keep, and then shift the world to keep them.  She wanted to write memoirs and autograph them in a tiny bookshop in Rome, with a line of admirers snaking down a pink-lit alley.  She wanted to make love on a balcony, ruin someone, trade in esoteric knowledge, watch strangers as cooly as a cat.  She wanted to be inscrutable, have a drink named after her, a love song written for her, and a handsome adventurer’s small airplane, champagne-christened Kizzy, which would vanish one day in a windstorm in Arabia so that shoud would have to mount a rescue operation involving camels, and wear an indigo veil against the stinging sand, just like the nomads.

Kizzy wanted.

I’ll let you read to find out whether Kizzy gets what she wants in the end.  You might be surprised.

I enjoyed the second story, “Spicy Little Curses Such as These,” almost as much as the first.  It’s a sweet yet dangerous love story about a girl who, as a baby, was cursed by an old woman (at the behest of a demon – don’t ask) with a beautiful voice that would kill everyone within hearing distance if she ever used it.  The girl grows up believing the curse and never speaks a word.  Her resolve is unshakable until she meets a handsome soldier who falls in love with her, but who is far too practical to believe in curses.  How will this love story end, then?  Will the girl and the soldier live happily-ever-after or will the girl speak only to loose everything and everyone that truly matters to her?  With Taylor, one soon becomes to realize, you never know.

Which brings me to the final tale, “Hatchling,” which I didn’t like as much as the first two but was just as creative and unpredictable.  ”Hatchling” is the story of Mab and her daughter, Esme who are on the run from an immortal race of creatures named Druj.  Fourteen years ago, Mab stole something very precious to the Druj and they’ve been hunting her ever since to get it back.  Just as they are about to be recaptured, Mihai, an outcast Druj, comes to their rescue, and Mab and Esme soon learn that the story isn’t really about them, after all.  It’s about Mihai and the woman he fell in love with a long, long time ago.  A woman he’s been trying to save for the last fourteen years…

Again, I may have not have liked this story as much as the other two, but it’s all relative, and as a whole Lips Touch: Three Times is definitely a book you don’t want to miss.  Finally, I won’t have written properly of this book if I don’t mention the illustrations by Jim Di Bartolo.  The cover, I know, isn’t really anything to get excited about (I took the jacket off of my copy), but the illustrations before each story are some kind of wonderful.  A taste:

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The great thing about the the three or four pages of illustrations the preface every story isn’t just that they’re beautifully rendered, but that they tell a story as well.  They truly preface the stories in that they illustrate what happened before the narrative action of the story begins.

All in all, despite my reservations about the cover, I thought this book was beautiful from the front pages to the illustrations to the text.  If you love fantasies or fairy tales with a dark but imaginative twist, good writing, or simply a well-told story, then you’re going to love Lips Touch: Thee Times.  Highly recommended.

I meant to post this on or around Valentine’s Day, but as you can see I was distracted by an enormity of good reading.  Lips Touch isn’t the only good thing I’ve read the past ten days, and between today and tomorrow I hope the share the rest of it with you.  I can’t promise that I’ll post over the course of the week, because too much good reading is taking up far too much of my time and I’m loving every single, blissful minute of it.

Happy reading, everyone.

Popularity: 3% [?]

On strangers, haunted houses, and delightfully creepy novels:

Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger is set in the 1940s rural town of Warwichshire, and is narrated by the county physician, Dr. Faraday.  One summers day, Dr. Faraday is called to Hundreds Hall, an old and large estate, to attend to a young maid pretending to be sick.  The Hall is the residence of the Ayres family: one older woman, and her two grown children, Caroline and Rodrick.  On the first day of his visit, Faraday is shocked to discover that the hall is slowly crumbling, and is a mere shadow of the once beautiful estate he remembered from his childhood.

Defeated by the war and the new government, the Ayres are just barely keeping the house from falling down around their ears.  Life for the old, genteel families has changed, and Dr. Faraday who’s the son of a maid, eventually befriends the family and becomes intimately concerned with their changing lives.  It soon becomes apparent, however, that there’s more going on here than the decline of the genteel class.  There’s something dreadfully wrong with Hundreds Hall.  Something or someone is haunting it, and life at Hundreds Hall is about to become even more dangerously precarious that it was before.

I’m writing this post after having finished The Little Stranger less than ten minutes ago.  I am well and truly impressed.  I don’t think I’ve read a haunted house story as carefully crafted and ultimately satisfying as The Little Stranger.  I was a little disappointed at first with how slowly the plot was moving, and I had my doubts as to whether this was a “true” haunted house story and not a modern take on the haunted house tradition in which the house turns out to not, of course, to be haunted at all.  Then around page 50 things started to pick up, and I thought Wait a minute. I’m really liking this right now.

There were scenes in this book that were wonderfully and delightfully creepy.  I think the fact that Waters took such care in building the story made the strange happenings even more affecting than they might have been otherwise.  In fact, the slow care that Waters takes in building the story was one of the things that I really appreciated about The Little Stranger.  The story wasn’t just about Hundreds Hall.  It was about class and, as it turns out, a psychological study of our narrator Dr. Faraday.  As the story progresses to its shocking conclusion, you begin to question Faraday’s motives for befriending the family in the first place.  Could it be that his motives aren’t as altruistic as they seem?

That’s another thing that I liked about The Little Stranger: the mystery at the heart of it.  Is Hundreds Hall really haunted, or are all those strange happenings merely figments of a deranged family’s imagination?  If Hundreds Hall is haunted, who or what is haunting it and why?  Waters rather cleverly answers most of these questions by the end of the novel, but she leaves just enough open for there to be some question as to what exactly was going on and why.  Waters also redefines what it means to haunt a house.  Desire, it seems, can lead to a haunting just as much as fury or other “unfinished” business can.

Then there’s the fact that all of this could easily be seen as a metaphor for the changing class structure in England after World War II.  The genteel families suffered through a dying way of life after the war; they were forced to break up their large estates in order to survive and engage in activities they would have found horrifying even thirty years before – like living with only one maid and making their own tea.  The world, it seemed, had risen up against them, determined to eject them – much in the same way Hundreds Hall seems determined to eject the Ayres.

All in all, I thoroughly enjoyed The Little Stranger.  The influence of writers like M.R. James, Edgar Allen Poe, and Henry James is more than evident, but this is definitely Waters’ story.  I liked this – dare I say it? – even more than Fingersmith.  Perhaps because I wasn’t expecting to be as impressed as I ultimately was.  It’s always nice when a book exceeds your expectations, and The Little Stranger did that by a long shot.  I found it immensely readable, and if I liked Sarah Waters after reading Fingersmith, I love her after reading The Little Stranger.

Honestly, if my reading continues to be as good as this, I might end of having a heart attack.  I guess that wouldn’t be so bad.  After all, at least I’d die happy.  Highly recommended.

“The subliminal mind has many dark, unhappy corners, after all.  Imagine something loosening itself from one of those corners.  Let’s call it a – a germ.  And let’s say conditions prove right for that germ to develop – to grow, like a child in the womb.  What would this little stranger grow into?  A sort of shadow-self, perhaps: a Caliban, a Mr Hyde.  A creature motivated by all the nasty impulses and hungers the conscious mind had hoped to keep hidden away: things like envy, and malice, and frustration…” – page 353

The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters
Riverheard Hardcover / April 2009
$26.95 / 490 pages

Popularity: 7% [?]

On booking through Thursday and winter reading:

Today’s Booking Through Thursday:

The northern hemisphere, at least, is socked in by winter right now… So, on a cold, wintry day, when you want nothing more than to curl up with a good book on the couch … what kind of reading do you want to do?

There’s something about reading in the winter and, for that matter, autumn that I really love.  Honestly, I like reading almost anything in the winter, but there are some books I particularly enjoy reading in the season of cold.  For instance, I tend to enjoy reading Gothic or horror novels towards the end of the year.  The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters and Northwest Passages by Barbara Roden, which I plan to read as soon as I’ve finished Waters’ book, fit this bill perfectly.  I also enjoy reading books about winter like Bill Streever’s excellent nonfiction book Cold: Adventures in the World’s Frozen Places, or set in extremely cold climates like Dan Simmons’ delicious horror novel The Terror, set in Anarctica.  Gil Adamson’s lyrical novel The Outlander was also a wonderful winter read, set as it is in the nineteenth century cold lands of northern Canada.

British mysteries are also a favorite of mine.  Nothing quite puts me in the mind of curling up by the fire with a good book than a nice British mystery.  I love reading Sherlock Holmes in the winter, as well as Wilkie Collins when I can.  I think a novel like Collins’ The Woman in White is a perfect winter read.  Quiet, contemplative novels like Jane Austen’s Persuasion are also books I enjoy reading in the grip of winter. (Although, I think it’s safe to say I enjoy reading Austen any time of the year.)  Generally speaking, I think of winter as the season of quiet, and my reading often reflects that sentiment.

Of course, none of these preferences are hard and fast rules.  At the moment, I’m also reading The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon by David Grann, which is about as far away from the season of cold as you can get.  *shrug* What can I say?  Good reading is good reading no matter the season.

And, you?  What do you prefer to read in the winter?

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Today’s Teaser Tuesday is taken from Nick Flynn’s essay “The Ticking is the Bomb,” which is included in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2009:

This black-and-white photograph in my hand is an image of my unborn daughter. This is what I’m told. It is actually a series of photographs, folded one upon the other, like a tiny accordion. I was there when the doctor or the technician or whoever he was made it with his little wand of sound. I sat beside him, looked into the screen as he pointed into the shadows –Can you see her nose, can you see her hand? Can you see her foot, right here, next to her ear? I was there when each shot was taken, yet in some ways, still, it is all deeply unreal — it’s as if I were holding a photograph of a dream, a dream sleeping inside the body of the woman I love, this woman now walking through the world with two hearts beating inside her. — page 142

The full essay can also be found here.  ”The Ticking is the Bomb” is also the title of Nick Flynn’s newest book which I’ve added to my TBR list.  Naturally.

*Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly meme hosted by Miz B at Should Be Reading.

Popularity: 5% [?]

On work, woman, Waters, and Wells:

Oy, did last week do a number on me.  I travelled, I trained, I worked, and worked, and then worked some more.  Somewhere in there I managed to eat and sleep, but only just barely.  I think I’m juggling entirely too many balls, which I have just taken a step toward rectifying.  I’m hoping to begin posting more than once or twice a week.  We’ll see how that goes, but as usual I make no promises especially since I was just promoted to a new position that might keep me after hours several nights a week.

I’m still reading when I can, though.  Though I should have finished it weeks ago, I finally polished off Natalie Angier’s Woman: An Intimate Geography.  I hope to have my post up some time this week, but if it takes me a while to get to it, suffice it to say that I would not be surprised if Woman turns out to be the best thing I read in 2010.  It was that good.  I’m tempted to say that the second-to-last chapter that debunks the popular old trope that “men hunt and women nest,” courtesy of evolutionary psychologists, is the best one in the book.  That would be a lie, however.  Everything about this book is wonderful and enlightening and, frankly, empowering.  Last year, I read Angier’s The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science which I also loved.  It was my favorite nonfiction book of 2009, and I found it hard to believe that it could get any better.  I was wrong.  I loved, loved, loved Woman.  As a matter of fact, if I didn’t have books due back at the library in a few days, I’d be reading it again.

Speaking of library books, since polishing off Woman I’ve been devoting some time to Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger since it’s due back at the library in, oh… three days.  And I’m only on page 147 of 463, and I refuse to return it until I’ve finished it because it’s finally getting good darn it.  I confess I was a little at a loss with where Waters was going with this story.  I purposefully didn’t read detailed reviews of this book since I wanted to come to it as fresh as possible, though I knew enough to know it had something to do with a haunted house.  Yet, there I was – a hundred pages in and I didn’t know nothin’ about no haunted house.  Then about twenty-five pages ago things started to pick up, and ten pages ago things got delightfully creepy.  Now I’m very intrigued and refuse to put it down.

Still, I’d better do some speed reading in the next few days.  I really want to finish The Little Stranger, but there are other people waiting on this and I’d hate to hold up the queue.  Sigh.  Library deadlines get me every time.  I’m entirely too slow a reader for a two week deadline.  Unless I want to be inundated with fees and library patron guilt, I end up rushing to get to the end.  Me, I prefer to savor.  But, it is what it is.  Besides, it was free, wasn’t it?  There are few things quite as wonderful as reading a new hardback while keeping $25 bucks in my pocket.

Don’t get me wrong, I love buying books.  But I have finally been forced to admit that I just can’t afford it anymore.  And I’m proud to say that I haven’t bought a book since the beginning of the year.  I’m pretty sure that’s a record for me.  I’m even more sure that the fact that I was next door to a bookstore four times in two weeks and didn’t go in is even more of a record.  Not only did I not go in, but I wasn’t even tempted to.  Progress!  I know the book business needs all the money they can get these days, but the rate at which I was buying books, you’d think I was trying to save bookstores with my measly pocketbook.  It would be nice if I could, but I can’t and this gal needed to learn to prioritize.

Of course, it’s not all that hard to make the switch from buyer to borrower when I can patronize the NY Public Library, which has arguably the best collection in the country.  I’ve learned that it’s dangerous for me to browse, though.  In bookstores, I’m (usually) restrained by the amount of money I’m willing or able to spend.  Usually, I’m not walking out of there with any more than three books.  But the library.  Oh, the library.  I can check-out twenty-five books, you say?  For free?  For real?  *rubbing hands together* Nevermind that it would be impossible for me to read them all before the due date.  That is neither here nor there. So nowadays I go in with a plan.  As a matter of fact, I go in when my books are placed on hold.  I go in, get them, and try to look around as little as possible.  Looking around is the road to madness.

I also started Wells Tower’s collection of short stories Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned.  This book has been lauded up one side and down the other, and I must say that after reading the first story, “The Brown Coast,” I’m suitably impressed.  It is indeed, “electric” as one reviewer described it.  It’s energetic and bounces off the page like a caffeine addict.  I’m very interested to see if the middle stories live up to the promise of the first one.  I also hope that Wells Tower is his real name.  For some reason, I think it’s very cool.  When I first heard it, I just knew he was a famous author.  Lo and behold this is his debut book, though if his writing is as good the critics say I suppose fame is not too far off after all. Well, back to reading I go.  I have a novel to devour.  Oh, the things I do for pleasure…

Popularity: 6% [?]

On Northwestern passages, crazy laughter, and awe and terror:

This Teaser Tuesdays post is a little late (when is it not?), but I haven’t done it in a while and I’m always a little sad when I miss out on the fun of Teaser Tuesdays.  In keeping with the plan I made a while ago, this teaser isn’t from a book I’m reading right now, but rather something from my TBR shelf.  I figure, if I’m going to tease someone, why not tease both you and I?  This teaser is taken from Northwest Passages by Barbara Roden:

She looked at him for a moment, and then laughter rose up, unbidden, at the suggestion that a cup of tea would be sufficient to restore her.  She saw Peter smile, and then as the laughter continued to spill out of her she saw his face change into something wary, almost frightened, and she wondered for a moment what he could  be frightened of, before she realized that it was her; or rather her laughter, which had a cracked, brittle sound even to her own ears.  That look sobered her in an instant.  She forced herself to stop and draw a few ragged breaths while the echo of her laughter was caught by the wind and whirled away to dance across the prairie. — page 121, “The Wide, Wide Sea”

I’m very excited to read this.  I can’t recall exactly how I heard about this book, but I think it was the fact that Roden has been compared to M.R. James, Poe, and Doyle may have had something to do with it.  Publisher’s Weekly wrote:

Readers with a taste for deftly executed tales of subtle horror will welcome Roden’s fine debut story collection. Out and Back tells of an abandoned amusement park whose attractions are sinister snares set to entrap unwary thrill seekers. In The Palace, a skeleton crew working the night shift at a luxury hotel finds the premises haunted by the ghosts of a serial killer’s victims. Both the title story and The Wide, Wide Sea are set in Canadian wildernesses, where the alienated mingle freely with the ghostly. Roden is a copublisher of the classic ghost story imprint Ash Tree Press, and her fiction resonates with echoes of Poe, Conan Doyle, Coleridge, Dickens and other masters of antiquarian horror. This yields powerful expressions of the supernatural in the book’s two tales of 19th-century Antarctic exploration, Endless Night and The Brink of Eternity, whose carefully crafted old-fashioned style lends atmosphere to depictions of a terra incognita rich with awe and terror.

Yup. Can’t wait.

**Teaser Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by Miz B at Should Be Reading.

Popularity: 6% [?]

On ghosts, Die Hard, and my favorite wizard detective:

Jim Butcher’s Grave Peril starts off with a bang – very much in medias res – and doesn’t let up until the final page.  The opening pages of Grave Peril has Harry Dresden, our heroic wizard, speeding in his car with his knight friend Michael, on his way to stop a ghost who’s materialized in the maternity ward of the local hospital.  Something has disturbed the barrier between the real world and Nevernever, the world of ghosts, fairies and other beings, and dangerous ghosts have been crossing over causing havoc and harm.  Meanwhile, the vampires of Chicago are throwing a suspicious shindig to which Harry has been invited and something called The Nightmare is targeting Harry and his friends.

This is the third book in the Desden series and Butcher has not failed to surprise me.  After Fool Moon I was sure there was no way Dresden could find himself in a situation worse than trying to fend off super werewolves weak and alone.  I underestimate Butcher.  There were parts in Grave Peril that made me so afraid for Harry that I had to either 1) put it down and come back to it later or 2) continue reading until I was sure he was going to be alright.  Of course, I know he’s going to be alright – there are eight more books in the series so far, after all – but I never know how alright he’s going to be.  Reading Dresden’s books is like watching Bruce Willis in the Die Hard movies: by the end of it, he’s all bloody and beat up, which is terrible to watch, yet somehow the small, brave guy always beats the big, bad villains. (This is excepting last Die Hard movie, “Live Free, Die Hard,” in which Willis’ character was more of a superhero than some poor dude who’s “in the wrong place at the wrong time.”)

Now… where was I?  Ah, Dresden.  For me, the fact that I never know how Harry is going to get himself out of his harrowing situations is one of the best things about the Dresden books.  Honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever read a character who’s as skilled at getting himself into and out of trouble as Harry.  On top of that, of the three books I think this had the most difficult mystery to unravel.  The plot was incredibly convoluted, and had I not read the first book Storm Front I might have been hopelessly lost.  As it is, all of the pieces fit perfectly well together and the end was immensely satisfying.  Then, of course, there’s Harry’s irreverent humor which makes reading Dresden’s books both thrilling and fun.  I love that he carries his ghost-hunting gear in Scooby-Doo lunch box and that he has the audacity to attend a vampire party dressed in a cheap Dracula Halloween costume.  I chuckled more than a few times during Grave Peril, though sometimes I think Harry talks too much for his own good.

Grave Peril was an excellent addition to the Dresden Files series.  It was just as good as the first two, and if the following books are similarly good, I know I’m in for some excellent reading.  I highly recommend Grave Peril, though I suggest you go ahead and start from the beginning if this is your first Harry encounter.  If you like urban fantasy fiction and hard-boiled detective novels, then you’re going to love Harry.  I can almost guarantee it.

There are reasons I hate to drive fast… Tonight was an exception to the rule.

Grave Peril by Jim Butcher
Roc / Sept. 2001
$7.99 / 384. ppgs.

Popularity: 7% [?]

On difficult questions, complicated answers, being conscious of what you read, and the wonder of stories:

I had plans to write about something completely different today.  In fact, I was going to post about my very first Library Loot (!).  I picked up a great pile of books and I couldn’t wait to share them with you all.  However, as I was looking for the Library Loot button to paste with my post, I came across Eva’s “Reading in Colour” post from this weekend.  See! This is why I hate hitting the “Read All” button in my Google Reader for fear I’d miss something like this.  Before I go on, I should say that if you haven’t read Eva’s post (and really, judging by the number of comments, who hasn’t?), you should.  I think the post drew some pretty heated comments (I skipped most of them), but while discord in our friendly blogging community is never a fun thing, it’s often necessary to get us to think about the difficult questions many of us would rather avoid or ignore.

I agree wholeheartedly with everything Eva says.  Are there people of color out there writing amazing books?  You bet.  Are we, bloggers, reading as many novels by authors of color as we could or should?  Probably not.  But right now I don’t want to talk about what every one else is or should be reading.  I want to talk about my reading.  And I think what I have to say might bring an interesting perspective to this discussion.

So first let me say that most of the authors I read are white authors, although lately I’ve been branching out and reading novels by authors of different ethnicities.  At the moment I have several books by Indian authors, Mexican authors, South American authors, and Middle Eastern authors sitting on my TBR shelf.  And I have maybe two books by African-American authors.  I like to think of myself as an eclectic reader, but a glimpse at the books I read last year shows quite clearly that most of the authors I read are white.

However, here’s something I never talk about on BiblioAddict: I’m a person of color.  Both of my parents are African-American, though my father – and therefore I – have a little Native American blood running through our veins.  So, how and why is it – and I’ve been asked this often – that I read more books by white authors than I do by authors of my own ethnicity?  I can’t tell you what an agonizing question this has been for me over the years.  There’s a measure of guilt attached to the fact that I read mostly white authors which is hard to explain, but I’ll see if I can do my best.  There’s always this guilt or this question that maybe I have self-esteem issues (Am I reading so many novels by white authors because I secretly want to be white?) or that I’m not doing enough to support black authors.  As an African-American reader, I feel almost duty-bound to read books by people of color because well, if authors of color can’t rely on other people of color to read their books, who can they rely on?

And, I want to see authors of color succeed, because I think the stories they tell are important and a necessary addition to the world of literature.  I also think authors of color don’t get the publication or the readership they deserve, and those that do get published get the short end of the stick from publication all the way to the placement of their book in bookstores. (side rant: I hate the African-American section in bookstores and I don’t see the point of them.  It makes a distinction between African-American books and everything else that simply doesn’t exist.  Writers of other ethnicities are placed on the shelves with everything else. Only African-American books have their own little ghetto often in the back of the store – and I say ‘ghetto’ purposefully because the section hardly ever seems as well-kept as the rest of the store.  It also hurts readers because it reinforces the idea that books with black characters are for black people and books about every one else is for, well everyone else.  You wouldn’t put Stephen King and F. Scott Fitzgerald in the same section just because they’re white, would you? Would you?  Why do it to Zane and Zora Neal Hurston?)

So, why don’t I read more novels by authors of color, one might reasonably ask.  The answer is… complicated, and the first essay in Zadie Smith’s most recent book, Changing My Mind, discusses this subject more eloquently than I ever could (another must-read if you haven’t already).  One of those answers is that I’ve always felt it was expected of me, which I’ve always resented.  I went into a bookstore once and was stopped by an employee who asked me if she could help me with anything.  I told her I was looking for a good mystery, and she then took me to the African-American book section and dropped me off.  I resented that.  I resented the assumption that because I’m black, the only books I must have been interested in reading were books by other black people.  I don’t think she was being racist; I’m sure was sincerely trying to be helpful.  It was her assumption about what I would like based solely on the color of my skin that simply bothered me.  I don’t like people to assume they know me until they know me.

I also resent that as far as many African-Americans are concerned, I should be reading books by black authors because I need to support my community.  I don’t have a problem with supporting my community, but I do have a problem with being told what I should do and how I should go about it.  Besides that, I’m a contrary person.  Telling me what I should do is a good way to get me to do something else.  I like defying expectations, and many white and black people alike expect that as a black person I must (and should, in some cases) read books by black authors.

Popularity: 14% [?]

One the magnificent world of cold:

The end of Cold: Adventures in the World’s Coldest Places by Bill Streever is probably the best, most affecting part of this wonderful book.  In his final chapter, “June” (each chapter is a month in the progression of a year), Streever briefly discusses global warming and its complicity in the gradual disappearance of his favorite element: cold.  He writes of melting glaciers, of under-snow habitats washed away by warming temperatures, of birds that migrate too soon or too late, and of cold-dependent animals that will go the way of the dire wolf and the sabertooth when the cold disappears.

It’s a sad litany not because Steever  adamantly advocates against global warming (he doesn’t, really), but because he spends most of the book celebrating cold.  Cold, he writes, is a powerful and sometimes frightening force, but while we’re hunkered in our homes around a warm fire, beautiful things are happening in the world of cold.  Animals are freezing and unfreezing themselves, trees are changing to suit heavy snowfall and blowing wind, and people are building warm huts made of ice and snow.  In addition, the scientific and sometimes mercenary exploration of how and why cold is has given us many things for which we aren’t often appreciative, namely refrigeration and air-conditioning, the great escape from excessive heat.

With his meandering, almost stream-of-consciousness prose, Streever dives into the history of Arctic explorers and the Children’s Blizzard of 1888, as well as the development of the weather prediction system and the physics of absolute zero.  It’s an enlightening journey and Steever’s writing makes it a pleasure to read every step of the way.  Streever’s prose is quite simply beautiful, and in some places, poetic.  It’s is also intimate and reads like a private journal or a letter to a friend.  Like any great narrator, Streever is personable, humorous, and thoughtful.  By the end of the book, I was as sad to see Streever go as I was the cold that might one day disappear.

Some reviewers have expressed a little frustration that Streever doesn’t tackle global warming more directly.  In fact, the prelude and the final chapter are almost the only places where he does mention it.  Yet, though I would have liked to hear more of Streever’s thoughts on global warming, I wasn’t bothered that he didn’t include those thoughts in Cold.  I appreciated the fact that he resolutely kept the book about cold rather than about global warming, which are really two different subjects despite the fact that lately they’re often interrelated.  Cold is a celebration of all things cold and a quiet rumination on how cold has shaped the way we view and interact with our world.  It’s an encyclopedia of knowledge on all things cold, and it’s a book that you won’t soon forget, especially when the days get shorter and the temperature drops.  Highly recommended.

The world warms, awash in greenhouse gases, but forty below remains forty below. Thirty degrees with sleet blowing sideways is still thirty degrees with sleet blowing sideways. Cold is a part of day-to-day life, but we often isolate ourselves from it, hiding in overheated houses and retreating to overheated climates, all without understanding what we so eagerly avoid.

We fail to see cold for what it is: the absence of heat, the slowing of molecular motion, a sensation, a perception, a driving force. Cold freezes the nostrils and assaults the lungs. Its presence shapes landscapes. It sculpts forests and herds animals along migration routes or forces them to dig in for the winter or evolve fur and heat-conserving networks of veins. It changes soils. It preserves food. It carries with it a history of polar exploration, but also a history of farming and fishing and the invention of the bicycle and the creation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. It preserves the faithful in vats of liquid nitrogen from which they hope one day to be resurrected.

….

It is time to enjoy an occasional shiver as we worry about a newly emerging climate likely to melt our ice caps, devour our glaciers, and force us into air-conditioned rooms. It is time to embrace and understand the natural and human history of cold. Even in a warming world, a world choked by carbon dioxide and methane, cold persists, biting my lungs and at the same time leaving me invigorated, alive and well on an Arctic spring afternoon with the sun hovering low over an ice-covered horizon and the thermometer at forty below.

* A NPR interview with Steever about his book can be found here along with an excerpt.

** Streever is currently working on his next book, which is tentatively called… Heat: A Natural and Unnatural History.  He has another interesting interview over at Paper Cuts here.

Other reviews:

Things Mean A Lot
Pages247

Cold: Adventures in the World’s Frozen Places by Bill Streever
Little Brown & Company / July 2009
$24.99 / 292 pgs.
(Purchased with my own moolah.)

Popularity: 8% [?]