The Written Nerd

Here are all the books I read (that I know of) in 2010, in crude alphabetical order. This doesn't include children's picture books, cookbooks, single-issue comics, magazines, or uh, the Internet. My own personal Best of the Year are highlighted in bold. And thanks to the superquick book search on greenlightbookstore.com (where, ahem, you can purchase any and all of these titles), you get pictures! The call for ideas is at the end. A. D.: New Orleans After the Deluge by Jo sh Neufeld ( reviewed ) Agents of Atlas by Jeff Parker and Leonard Kirk ( reviewed ) Air, Volume 2: Flying Machine by G. Willow Wilson & M.K. Parker (reviewed) Arrow Pointing Nowhere by Elizabeth Daly (reviewed) Batwoman: Elegy by Greg Rucka, J. H. Williams, and Dave Stewart (reviewed) The Box of Delights by John Masefield: A Christmas book, quintessentially English in a Narnia kind of way, dreamy and eccentric and magical and stiff-upper-lip. Practically perfect. Co wboy Ninja Viking Volume 1...

If I wrote these things more often I wouldn't have to cram multiples into one post, but my blogging is falling so far behind my reading I need to diminish the stack a bit. And I realize I've had a number of great YA reading experiences lately -- it's a category I don't read super-often, but that I tend to enjoy (if perhaps with an occasional smirk of superiority/relief that I am no longer a teen.) Folly by Marthe Jocelyn (Wendy Lamb Books, May 2010) This book and the following one I read "on assignment" -- I was asked to take part in a YA brainstorming conference call by our inimitable Random House children's book rep Lillian Penchansky, and these two books were our homework for the call. It was kind of a delight to plunge into something that I could read in a day, and the two works, while both historical fiction, were very different. Marthe Jocelyn's Folly was the better of the two -- the story of a 19th century British servant girl who gets knock...

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (Knopf, June 9, 2010) Shop Indie Bookstores Reading this book was a little like starting a conversation out of general politeness, and discovering that you're talking to someone you passionately want for a best friend. Jennifer Egan -- full disclosure -- is a friend and customer of Greenlight Bookstore. I'd hosted her before for events at other stores, and chatted with her and her kids at Greenlight, but to my own detriment I had never actually read any of her fiction. (Even though, as often seems to happen, it seems in retrospect like obviously the sort of thing I would like: the smart but not overtly political feminism of Look At Me , the Gothic nested stories of The Keep , etc. -- good storytelling in the service of big ideas, or vice versa, without sacrificing the one for the other.) It seemed like now would be the time to pick her up, though, since we're hosting her launch party for the book on Wednesday . So I opened th...

Tomorrow is Free Comic Book Day , when fine comic shops nationwide will be giving out samples of the good stuff to all comers. In its honor, today's post is a flying tour of the comics/graphic novels I've been reading in the last few weeks and months. Y: The Last Man, Volume 7: Paper Dolls by Brian K. Vaughan (writer) and Pia Guerra (artist) I've been working my way through Vaughan's magnum opus slowly for a while now. By Volume 7 the plague that killed (almost) every male mammal on earth is old news, and the implications of a women-only society are playing out in unpredictable ways, while Our Hero Yorick Brown tries to find his girlfriend and help find out how to bring back the other half of the species. Despite the occasionally annoying fact that in an all-women world the hero of the comic is still a dude, Vaughan's writing and Guerra's art always make for good adventure storytelling, and a bit of food for thought afterward. Imagine the implications for Is...

The Sheriff of Yrnameer by Michael Rubens (Pantheon, August 2009) Shop Indie Bookstores In a bit of a cheat today (come on, I've got to get outside in the sun!), I'm pasting this review in its entirety from an email I sent to a colleague in the book industry. I read it more or less concurrently with Old Mr. Flood , and it provided an entirely different set of pleasures. I read The Sheriff of Yrnameer on my lunch break at the bookstore over the course of several weeks. To be honest, I picked it up because I eat lunch in the back room with the galleys, and it had that funny name and a brightly-colored cover. Lucky me that I picked up the one book from the piles likely to keep me enthralled in small doses for so long (and sometimes the lunch break ran long if I was at a particularly exciting bit.) The Sheriff of Yrnameer reads like The Magnificent Seven as written by Douglas Adams, with Han Solo as the hero. It punches all the right buttons for a space opera / romantic co...

Old Mr. Flood by Joseph Mitchell Foreword by Charles McGrath (MacAdam Cage hardcover edition, April 2005) Shop Indie Bookstores A wise bookseller once taught me that right after reading something really, especially good, it's a good idea to read something completely different, as a sort of palate cleanser. After The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet and The Passage , I felt the need to read something that was definitively not a big fat novel of an unfamiliar world. Luckily, my hand trailing over the unread riches of my bookshelves landed on Old Mr. Flood . As a small collection of three short semi-nonfictional pieces about a downtown New Yorker, it was exactly what I had been wanting. For some inexcusable reason I had never read Joseph Mitchell before, though he's one of those authors you feel you know all about without reading him (the same way I thought, mistakenly, that I knew what Michaelangelo's David looked like before I saw the real thing). Apparently he is the...

The Passage by Justin Cronin (Ballantine, June 2010) Shop Indie Bookstores Reading Justin Cronin's The Passage was a wonderfully weird experience in so many ways. For one thing, there had been foreshadowing for weeks: my business partner, my Twitter friends, fellow booksellers, the Winter Institute buildup, EVERYTHING and everyone seemed to be telling me to read this book. Not only was it being read by everyone whose tastes I share, it sounded like just the sort of thing I would like. Literary adventure with a soupçon of the supernatural? Yes please thankyou. Weirder though, I'd read Justin Cronin's previous book The Summer Guest -- way back when, when I was young and poor enough to need the $45 they could pay me, I even reviewed it for Publishers Weekly (login required, sorry). I loved that novel, a piercing but gentle story of a family and its secrets over a summer at a fish camp. But it was a leetle hard to picture that rather quiet literary writer penning somet...

Arrow Pointing Nowhere by Elizabeth Daly (Felony & Mayhem, May 2009) Shop Indie Bookstores As I mentioned in the previous post, a large part of the charm of the "Vintage" mysteries published by Felony & Mayhem is the immersion in the past. For a sense of the Agatha-Christie-only-more-so appeal, I can't say it better than F&M's modern back cover copy from Arrow Pointing Nowhere , part of the Henry Gamadge series: "Take one grand house, stuff it with staff, and make it home to several generations. If they send their sons to Oxford and occasionally knock each other off, you've got a country-house murder mystery, that classic of English crime fiction. But if the boys are at Yale, odds are that you're reading a New York mansion mystery -- a genre largely invented and perfected by Elizabeth Daly." Yep, only the boys go to college, and all kinds of extended family share the mansion with the servants -- it's a whole different world. But...

Part II: Engage! I didn't necessarily read all the escapist books first and all the inspiring/engaging books after that (and certainly most of the books I read over the 12 Days of Christmas had elements of both). But as I enjoyed the comforts of fantasy and adventure, I also found myself getting a bit fired up about interesting ideas. Since I had been a little worried that end-of-the-year letdown and disappointments would leave me lethargic and apathetic, I was willing enough to let these next books work their magic. Shop Indie Bookstores Berlin, City of Stones and Shop Indie Bookstores Berlin: City of Smoke by Jason Lutes Jason Lutes' Berlin series is one of those graphic novels that the ALP has been telling me I should read for ages, while I was more interested in the flashy superhero stuff (Green Arrow, for example). During the cold, quiet days of the year's end, I finally felt inclined to pick up the first volume, and within pages was immersed in a vision of 1929 Be...

Part I: Escape! I didn't actually get much Christmas vacation: one day off for Christmas, half a day off for New Year's Eve and the same for New Year's Day. I admit I was a bit jealous of my publishing friends, none of whom seemed to be anywhere near the office from the 24th to the 5th. But I made the choice to stick around the store this year, and hopefully I'll take a couple days in the dismal months of February and March to make up for it. Still, it felt like a time out from the usual working year, and I chose my reading accordingly. The books I read during the 12 Days of Christmas (that's the 25th to the 6th, as the Inklings Bookstore was humorously reminded ) felt like a separate entity, separating the old year from the new year. It's also been a time when I've been struggling a bit against hopelessness and despair (which seems to hit me around this time of year, if last year's post is any indication). It's been a great year in terms of pr...

Ah, the Friday after Thanksgiving... lucky for me I have the day off, and no shopping to do (all my Christmas gifts come from the bookstore), and can bask in the indolence of it all. It's a good day to catch up a little and think ahead a little, and some of the best-of lists have made me want to take a look at my own reading for the year. The New York Times has done a clever thing : in addition to their usual "official" lists of the Top 100 and the Top 10 Books of 2008, they 've had their regular book reviewers pick their favorite books of the year. Michiko Kakutani and Janet Maslin both list their own personal top 10 here -- the only thing I wish is that they'd talk about why they loved these, rather than just including clips from their Times review. I recently took a look at various lists of my own reading (our store staff picks, my little notebook, my Goodreads page, etc.) and compiled them, and somehow I seem to have read over 75 books so far this year. ...

I've been thinking for a long time I'd like to do more talking about books around here, as well as talking about the book industry. I have the perfect place to start this week, as my buddy Steve at W. W. Norton asked if I would write about one of the best novels I've read recently. Below is what I sent to him -- perhaps less a review than a love letter for one of my very favorite contemporary authors. The Size of the World goes on sale today, and you can see Joan Silber reading at McNally Robinson on June 17. * * * THE SIZE OF THE WORLD By Joan Silber (W. W. Norton, June 2008, $23.95 hardcover) I honestly think Joan Silber is one of the most under-rated writers in America (even after her National Book Award finalist nod). Perhaps her voice is both too calm and too ambitious for critics accustomed to histrionic Great (Male) Novelists… but don’t quote me on that. To tell not just one life story, but over half a dozen, in first-person voices both precisely distinct and unive...