The Book Shopper

DBF 2011 Preview #3: The Fine Print

The third and final in the series...

As the big weekend approaches, I’ve been checking the fine print of my AJC-Decatur-Book-Festival-presented-by-the-Dekalb-Medical-Center newspaper insert to see if some of those little vendors, which I like to visit, have a booth in the Book Market. (Complete Book Market listings are here.)

There are a few of my favorites that are missing this year (WMLB-The Voice of the Arts and McSweeney’s) but some of the Georgia-based literary journals will be around: The Georgia Review (Booth 508), New South (Booth 259) Five Points (Booth 262) and The Chattahoochee Review (Booth 301). The Georgia Review celebrates its 65th anniversary with a special presentation on Saturday, at the Decatur Conference Center stage (details here).

Another tradition is stopping to check the offerings of the Michael C. Carlos Museum Bookshop (Booth 205 - near the Old Courthouse). First and foremost, I have to see if they have more copies of Cultural Amnesia (previous posting here) available. Even if CA is unavailable, I can expect a lot of sale books and plenty of nonfiction titles on such topics as ancient history (especially ancient Egypt, Greece & Rome), folktales, fairy tales, mythology, art, religion, archeology.

The festival is also a good place to check out different book-loving organizations ( e.g. Emory Libraries, IVY-Hall SCAD, Atlanta Fulton Public Library System.) to find out what literary events are scheduled for the fall. I’ve added a monthly calendar posting to the blog that highlights the different organizations hosting readings and exhibits. Past calendars are located at the link at the right. I’ll be posting a new September calendar early next week.

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DBF 2011 Preview #2: A Festival Strategy

The second in a series...

In order to maximize the balance between book shopping (job #1) and attending author appearances (job #3), and not getting cooked by the Georgia heat (job #2) may I suggest this strategy: If you're attending one of the programs at the Decatur High School Auditorium, be sure and stop by what I consider one of the “destination” used book stores in Atlanta – Books Again on North McDonough Street, just across the street from the high school. Sure they are a sponsor, (see Sponsor Link in the left corner) but if you are a serious book shopper you'll appreciate the wide selection of fiction especially some of the older works penned by local and regional authors (This year they will be featuring earlier works by Decatur Book Festival authors such as Robert Olen Butler, Clyde Edgerton, Melissa Fay Greene, Janisse Ray and a couple of earlier books from poets Rosemary Daniell and Natasha Trethewey). Books Again also has shelves full of military history, baseball, religion, philosophy and cookbooks. And the store is air conditioned!

Even though Decatur High School can seem a little bit of trek from the main festival (note on my pathetic, but well-intentioned, click-on-it-to-enlarge, map that it's only a long city block) its large seating capacity makes it a great venue for several festival headliners: On Saturday, Robert Olen Butler, will be reading from his new book The Small Hotel followed by theatrical excerpts from two works by Calvin Ramsey: Theatrical Outfit's “The Green Book” and the Center for Puppetry Arts' “Ruth and the Green Book.” Finishing up on late Saturday afternoon it's Write Club, with host Ian Belknap featuring Atlanta favorites Andisheh Nouraee (see posting here), Patti Callahan Henry and Jessica Handler among others. In the Write Club, teams of writers match wits and quick writing skills to produce the best prose live in front an audience. (Pretty gutsy -- writing without an editor.)

 

DBF 2011 Preview #1: UGA Press

Editor's Note: As the 2011 Labor Day Weekend Decatur Book Festival draws near, I start to become more anxious than usual. Trying to capture the pulse of all the writers, vendors, and activities that make up the festival, along with the my own anxieties of wearing a volunteer's t-shirt emblazoned with such a scary festival mascot (last year's shirt  shown here) sends my blood pressure skyrocketing. Hand me my Lisinopril. Still I am one of those persons, who at least tries to plan a few things ahead, and in a series of postings between now and the Festival. I will try to impart a few things that an energetic version of someone like myself might try to do. For a complete listing, check the DBF link at the left. Happy hunting. There is something at the festival for everyone.

University of Georgia Press

Historically, I've had good experiences with books and authors that have had a UGA Press imprint on them. In the last year three superb books that have made it to the blog: Crossroads of Conflict: A Guide to Civil War Sites in Georgia, The Southern Foodways Alliance Community Cookbook and Seriously Funny: Poems About Love, Death, Religion, Arts, Sex and Everything Else. (The links will take you to the postings). The latter book won the “uncoveted” 2010 Best Local Reading (That I Attended) Award.

This year UGA Press is located at booths #501 and #502 at corner of Ponce de Leon and Clairmont and will be launching Janisse Ray's latest book Drifting into Darien: A Personal and Natural History of Altamaha River,(Disclaimer: UGA provided me a reviewer's copy along with the photos too) which I just finished reading.

The book is divided into two parts. The first half of the book is 127 mile kayak trip Ray took with her husband and six others from the headwaters of the Altamaha River near Lumber City, Georgia to the town on Darien on the Atlantic Ocean. Along the way, Ray mixes personal anecdotes with observations about the birds, fish and trees that inhabit the region. The second half of the book is a series smaller, diverse, chapters. Ray expands on different trips that she has taken on the Altamaha over the years: the people she has met, the importance
of river stewardship, the evils of nuclear power, and additional reflections on her own life. The book includes river photographs by Nancy Marshall and resources for those who wish to be more involved with protecting and improving “Georgia's Little Amazon.” The Altamaha is a unique river because it is free flowing for 137 miles (no dams) and it drains 14,000 square miles of land, almost a quarter of Georgia's land mass.

Ray is doing a reading from her new book on Saturday (9/3) at 5:30 p.m. at Decatur Conference Center Stage. Details here.

 

The Globe Trot: Books as Transportation

by Chantal James

A good book-length narrative can do two important things, often at the same time: it can reflect familiar truths back to us, sometimes in ways we weren’t even able to recognize before they were written; and it can transport us to places we’ve never known, take us into the minds of people completely unlike us, send us far into the past and the imagined future.

When I was a bookish little kid, it was this second quality of fiction that had the most appeal for me. Like many, I was hooked by the ability of books to take me far away from myself. Enjoying novels was like living many lives at once. It was an easy escape from the mundane, from the traumatic. In a good book, even the everyday was intricately fascinating. The written word could even transform the tragic, the sorrowful, into something beautiful—much like a good blues song does.

My reading of the past few weeks—which includes Calcutta-born Amitav Ghosh’s River of Smoke (2011) and the Egyptian Nobel Lauerate Naguib Mahfouz’s Adrift on the Nile (1966)—has offered a welcome return to that early joy. Although both books reference rivers in their titles, the two books couldn’t have seemed less similar, except in their ability to sweep me away with powerful narrative current. But on reflection, more similarities begin to emerge: each book involves a much larger cast of characters than your average novel; and each story has substance use as its center— opium for Ghosh, marijuana for Mahfouz. Most relevant to my particular lens as a reader who’s interested in the inner workings of language—and of languages, plural—both of these were books whose language itself was essential to the reading experience.

River of Smoke

In River of Smoke,which will be published in the United States this fall, (after enjoying critical success in the United Kingdom), we’re allowed passage in the world of an international merchant class. Central characters are botanical painters and opium smugglers of Indian descent living in China. Ghosh's novel is the second volume of his Ibis trilogy, which began with Sea of Poppies. River of Smoke is clearly the fruit of exhaustive historical and linguistic research—though the story is never lost in its elaborate attention to factual detail. Some of the dialogue here is incredible; from the character’s mouths issue pidgins, Creoles, disobedient grammars fused from elements East and West. We are often surprised to realize we actually know what the characters are talking about, so intuitive are the rhythms of their broken speech. This is exactly the kind of meticulously researched, awe-inspiring, brick of a novel they don’t seem to publish too many of these days. I wish I could quote some of it for you, but the book is not officially released until the fall.

 

MARTA Book Club #15: When You Can't Go to the Beach and You Need a Vacation from Your Life*

“You read too, but you aren't an exhibitionist.” -- Tayari Jones, Leaving Atlanta

  For those unfamiliar with the group, the MARTA Book Club is a loose— very loose— confederation of people who read while riding the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority’s public transportation. There are no meeting times, no organizational rules, no t-shirts, and no special fares. Very convenient. The only requirement to be a member of MARTA Book Club is to read a book while riding public transportation.

Since we cannot determine the title of a book from a Kindle, they are not tabulated even though more and more electronic readers are being seen on the trains.

What We Are Reading: The list seems a little on the light side even though MARTA provides plenty of unscheduled opportunities for additional reading time. If you want to see all the past MARTA Book Club postings, just visit the MARTA Book Club link on the right side of this web page.  Here's what people are reading since our last posting:

Native Tongue by Carl Hiassen

Dragons of Eden by Carl Sagen (Thanks, John)

Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

Deception Point by Dan Brown

Freakanomics by David Leavitt and Stephen Dubner

Dance with Dragons by George R.R. Martin

Expect to Win by Carla A Harris

The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene

Compromised: Clinton, Bush and the CIA by Terry Reed

Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese

Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith

First Offense by Nancy Taylor Rosenberg

What's His is Mine by Daaimah S. Poole

The Dog of the South by Charles Portis.

Leaving Atlanta by Tayari Jones (see earlier posting)

They're Coming to Americapedia and Andisheh Nouraee Is Why

If the melodic refrains of Neil Diamond's “America” stays in my head any longer I must remember to “thank” Andisheh Nouraee, the next time I see him. Nouraee, a former columnist for Creative Loafing kicked off the local tour of his book, Americapedia: Taking the Dumb Out of Freedom, with a medley of songs about America. In front of a full house at Decatur's Eddie's Attic, Nouraee boldly sang his personal Ode to America, which included bits of “El Paso,” “California Girls,” “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” “Wichita Lineman,” the theme from the Broadway show “Oklahoma,” “Doraville,” “Jackson,” and the “America” from “West Side Story” to name but a few). The unaccompanied singing was richly apropos considering it was A Cappella Books who partnered with Eddie's Attic to host this book launch (some of the proceeds of the book sales going to the Decatur Education Foundation.)

Americapedia is actually the work of three authors: Jodi Lynn Anderson, Daniel Ehrenhaft, and Nouraee. The book is kind of a humorous junior high level civics textbook, which not only has a satirical edginess that appeals to teens, but to some adults as well. The crowd ranged from junior high students to people who say they remember the political upheaval of the sixties (but have forgotten the adage, “If you remember the sixties, you probably were not there.”). Nouraee believes that history coupled with humor can remove the confusion of how government works or doesn't work. Once that barrier is removed, says Nouraee people will be more likely to get involved. “The heart of the book is activism,” says Nouraee and part of the book (and its website) are dedicated to providing links and information to a multitude of organizations where a reader can connect to like-minded individuals.

The book is divided into seven chapters, which include topics such as economics, American dynasties (e.g., the Kennedy and the Bush families) foreign affairs, and a chapter devoted to hot topics such as religion, gay marriage and global warming. The book is a breezy read with lots of sidebars (“more sidebars than bars,” quipped Nouree) and is printed with colorful photographs and illustrations. One impressive aspect of the book is that the styles of the three writers have been melded into one consistent voice. Nouree explained (he and I chatted briefly at the bar before showtime) that even though the writers were based in different cities, (Anderson in D.C.; Ehrenhaft in New York; Nouree in Atlanta) that they edited each others' contributions, which added to the seamless quality of the book.