Author Archives: dbcreads

Oct 26 2012
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#fridayreads

In Chicago once more, the DBC team has many fall titles left to scale. Many of them will take us plain through to 2013. Here now are just a couple selections that we’ll be previewing shortly:

Both Flesh and Not: Essays by David Foster Wallace.

Little, Brown releases 15 never-before-anthologized essays by our most revered literary genius. The titular essay on Roger Federer is held up by fans alongside Infinite Jest as Wallace’s unparalleled masterpiece (something with which Kevin wholeheartedly agrees), and we’re particularly excited to read (and re-read) his dissection of Terminator 2, which we hope will cause the same unexpected stir of emotions that his 1996 essay on David Lynch and the film Lost Highway did. Though of course, because of whom we’re talking about, it will cause the unexpected either way.

 An End to All Things: Stories by Jared Yates Sexton.

It’s exciting when DBC’s Illinois-born-and-bred contingent can read a collection rooted entirely in the Midwest. Indiana, with its contrast between vast cornfields, a storied state university, and Gary’s industrial narrative, serves as a microcosm for America as a whole. These stories chronicle a town wracked with doubt as the collapsing economy closes in — written in presumed contrast to the book’s author, earner of an MFA who has the choice to be there or not be there. It’s a dangerous thing to trust just anyone with a Midwestern voice, so likely to accidentally condescend or misconstrue as they may be. But I trust Atticus Books, and doubt they’d put their faith in anything less than the real deal.

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Sep 18 2012
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Review

Karen Elliott House’s “On Saudi Arabia: Its People, Past, Religion, Fault Lines — And Future”

Ed. Note: This is a guest review from Greg Noth. 

Karen Elliott House’s new book, On Saudi Arabia, is a good introduction to the many contradictions, problems, and issues that confront Saudi Arabia today. It is the result of thirty years of research from living in the oil producing capital of the world. House, a former editor and foreign correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, approaches her subject like one would expect a veteran journalist to—a method which has its strengths and weaknesses.

On the plus side, she uses fact after fact and interview after interview to support her case, and does a good job drawing reasonable conclusions from the information she has. On the slightly negative side, writing a book is not the same as writing a newspaper article: no one reads newspapers for pleasure. That’s not to say On Saudi Arabia reads just like a really long newspaper article, but the writing didn’t especially captivate me, and I think it has to do with the style of writing House built a successful career on.  Continue reading →

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Jul 23 2012
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Feature

The Five Best Books of 2012 (So Far!)

So last year, toward the end of December, we discussed the possibility of writing a BEST BOOKS OF 2011 list. But we didn’t come on the scene or whatever until late August, so we clearly couldn’t write with any authority about the best releases January through July. And even from August on, we didn’t review a ton of books, as we were trying to get our footing/figure out what the heck we were doing/write quality reviews.

But we’ve planned out 2012 pretty well, focusing on reviewing the most prominent/important releases. We’ve missed a few we wish we could have reviewed—books by Adam Wilson, John Green, Sheila Heti, etc.—but there’s only so much time, and so many of us.

Still, we’re pretty happy about what we’ve reviewed, about 2012 as a year in literature. So through today, a little more than halfway through this calendar year, here’s our top five—in no order, because because. Continue reading →

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May 18 2012
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Uncategorized

#fridayreads

Last night at Brookline Booksmith we saw Buzz Bissinger read from his new release, Father’s Day, a personal account of raising his developmentally challenged son. It was honest, sometimes uncomfortably so, particularly when he said point-blank that at some points throughout his son’s young life, he “just wanted to walk away.” This is a book I’m glad to see published; as one of the listeners pointed out during Q&A, you rarely see this type of parental account from the father’s perspective. We’ll have to add this one to our review roster.

Coming up much sooner, however, we’ll have a review of Jurgen Fauth’s Kino, an adventurous debut novel that melds the history of German film with modern-day Hollywood — a book that makes you want to read more books and watch many more movies.

We’ll also be telling you about the nonfiction peach Ozzie’s School of Management by Rick Morrissey, an investigation into the techniques of “baseball’s most colorful and irresponsible manager.” Colorful is a pretty diplomatic way of saying it. I expect that any direct quotes from Guillen himself will need to be censored by your DBC reviewers.

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Mar 28 2012
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Guest Post, Review

Allison Winn Scotch’s “The Song Remains the Same”

Allison Winn Scotch's "The Song Remains the Same"

NOTE: This is a debut guest review from Sami Skelton. You can expect more guest reviews from Sami in the future, and remember that you can always submit your own guest reviews for consideration to dbcreads@gmail.com.

If you looked in at your life as a clueless, third-party observer, would you like what you saw? Or would you be disappointed? Can you imagine what it would feel like to not even recognize your own face?

The Song Remains The Same follows the life of Nell Slattery, a successful art gallery owner, after she survives a devastating plane crash of which she is one of two survivors. Nell may have survived, but her memory of the past 32 years of her life did not.

The life Nell’s forgotten wasn’t a fairytale; her past life was wrought with complications and drama. All Nell has to go on in her attempt to regain her past is a not-so-fun game of he said/she said, and Nell doesn’t know who to believe. Nell’s family and friends don’t always keep her best interests in mind and each person’s version of the past differs from the next.

Continue reading →

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Jan 27 2012
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Recs

#fridayreads

It’s a busy season, winter. We’re up to our necks in upcoming reviews, and couldn’t be happier about it.  Our book pile has gone from a stack to a heap to a tower and is now wobbling precariously on its supports of Kwarteng, Hebert, and Winn Scotch, in an array whose subject matter is as far-flung as its authors.

In addition to digging into all of that, we’re trying to make our last-minute decisions on what books we should, respectively, give out on World Book Night.  (We’re running the gamut from Friday Night Lights to Oscar Wao at the moment. Any thoughts?) The deadline for requesting titles is February 1 — five days away — so don’t forget to sign up and participate in this amazing inaugural U.S. event.

Finally, a word on what we’re reading this weekend:

Ramona Ausubel’s No One is Here Except All Of Us, a haunting and beautiful debut about a tight-knit Jewish community that chooses to isolate itself as the horrors of World War II are made clear to them. Ausubel’s voice is so dense and narratively rich that readers can open to virtually any page and find passages that speak a heretofore unconsidered truth about love and the nature of war. Our review of this one is sure to carry mostly a tone of awe.

Other things that have our jaws dropping: how good Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was, and that we’ll now have to see advertisements that attach the words “Academy Award Nominee” to the name Jonah Hill.

 

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Dec 22 2011
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Feature

The Year in Stuff We Liked: Debut Novelists

This week, in lieu of a BEST OF 2011 series, we’re running five stories focused on Stuff We Liked in 2011.

There’s a different expectation entirely when reading a book that you know is someone’s first.  That is, there is at once a tabula rasa feel to it — you have no expectation of a voice you’ve never heard, after all — and a bald excitement — you could be discovering the Next Big Thing! — and a sort of apprehension — is there a reason this person is (x) years old and never published before?  When the cacophony of these competing expectations settles down to a dull roar in the back of your mind, you actually get around to reading the thing.  Thereafter, there’s not much that differs in the experience until you get to the end, whereupon you not only get to say what you thought of the book, but what you thought of this author, having just read their entire bibliography to date.

2011 was a strong time for debut novelists; it seems publishing houses were willing to take big risks on promoting the noobs this year.  Here are some notable debut novelists we turned our heads for.  Continue reading →

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Dec 20 2011
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Feature

The Year in Stuff We Liked: Quality Design

This week, in lieu of a BEST OF 2011 series, we’re running five stories focused on Stuff We Liked in 2011.

Book design: You’re not going to get much of an Inside Baseball discussion from us. We don’t know much about it. We can’t offer much in the way of judgment other than that looks cool, yuh-huh, yuh-huh. Still, we know what we like — and what we don’t like.

The Publisher’s Weekly blog PWxyz offered their favorite covers of the year. It was something of a puzzling list, as the explanations were lacking (for Helen DeWitt’s Lightning Rods, they said: “The bright blue background conveys the off-the-wall aspects of the book, and the repetition of the eyes hints at a maddening condition.” Hm.) and their number one choice — Colson Whitehead’s Zone One — baffling. Another weird explanation:

The best book cover of the year offers a glimpse of an empire, mostly obstructed, put through a filter so desaturated it’s almost black and white, making the book’s dread insidious rather than explicit. It looks like an old, important photograph, but with something unsettling, though you can’t quite put your finger on it. The zombie apocalypse has never looked so subtle or refined.

What is an “important photograph”? Jackie O. with blood on her dress?

Anyways, we’re being too critical, due in large part to how much we adored certain designs this year. Here’s a few, in no particular or-der.

Continue reading →

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Nov 29 2011
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News

Post-Thanksgiving Recovery and #TuesdayReads

Welcome back to the world, everyone. Was Thanksgiving blessed and gluttonous for you all? Your bloggers spent a long weekend indulging in just about everything the holiday has to offer besides Black Friday sales. (We weren’t really in the market for a 55″ LCD screen or 2011′s equivalent of a Digi-Dog.)

Regrettably, amidst the festivity (and its many leftovers), we weren’t doing much reading, either. So here’s what’s on tap the rest of the week:

A review of Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. This was one of the only other books my mom has ever purchased on her Kindle, with which I had my first ever encounter a couple weeks ago reading The Night Circus. (It’s tempting to discuss the correlation between people who use 21st-century-exclusive technology and those who simply purchase it, but maybe that hits too close to home for some. Not to mention that I have a few skeletons in my closet too, in the form of Palm Pilots and Nintendo Gamecubes. [Anyone want to come over for a few hours of Mario Sunshine...?])

I figured I’d test how long the battery would run on a Kindle 2, since everyone I know has been grumbling lately about the unreliable batteries in their iPhone 4s’s. And in this regard — which (mea culpa, Amazon) I neglected to notice or mention before — the Kindle has performed admirably. I couldn’t have imagined that someone who reads as slowly as I do could get through Morgenstern’s whole 400-page novel and over half of Henrietta Lacks without losing even half the battery life. That, I imagine, is a feature the Nook or the Kindle Fire won’t share with the original Kindle or the Kobo. The ink technology just isn’t as demanding of battery power…or my eyesight.

We’ll also have some thoughts this week on David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King, all 560 pages of which were the laudable result of Michael Pietsch’s reverent editing. An interesting article from the Atlantic interviews Pietsch on the subject; the editor was also the Keynote speaker at the Denver Publishing Institute this past July.

Finally, a recommendation: I don’t know if anyone else’s interest in reading is so closely tied to a love of grammar and vocabulary, but a new game at Dictionary.com is a great way for quizzing both latter. If work is still slow in the post-holiday lull, try the Word Dynamo in Beta. It not only quizzes you in a streamlined way (they even automatically take you from one word to the next after answering), but it plays like a video game where you can unlock levels of vocab words, and flatters you with a running counter of “estimated number of words you know.” Which, notably, hovers somewhere between 30,000 and 60,000.

We’re pretty bright, in other words. And, apparently, there are always lots and lots of other words.

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Nov 16 2011
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Guest Post

Defend or Refute: John Warner

Ed. note: New feature here at DBC! Instead of doing the traditional Q and A interview, we thought we’d do something slightly different. We’re approaching authors with a simple task: defend or refute this statement. Here is the first edition, featuring John Warner. His first novel, The Funny Man, was published earlier this year by Soho Press. He recently discussed that book, and writing-slash-reading in general, over at The Morning News.

Defend or refute the following statement: Post-publication is a mongrel period: it combines the sadness and vulnerability of postpartum with the crushing mood swings and emotional hollowness of post-coitum.

The French call orgasm, le petit mort, “the little death.” We recognize it as that particular empty feeling (emotional hollowness) that seems particularly cruel, since moments before, we never felt more alive. Scientists say it’s likely linked to the dumping of oxytocin into the system, and that hollowness is actually a misreading of an overwhelming calmness that’s supposed to make us feel connected to the world. It’s supposed to be a letdown, but in a good way. Continue reading →

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