Does anyone have any recommendations for authors I should hear at the National Book Festival this Saturday?

The authors who will be in attendance are (Bolded names include authors I have a stronger interest in seeing):

* Diane Ackerman
* Ann Amernick
* M.T. Anderson
* Maria Celeste Arrarás
* David Baldacci
* Michael Beschloss
* Holly Black
* Ashley Bryan
* Ken Burns
* Stephen L. Carter
* Cat Cora
* Deborah Crombie
* Carmen Agra Deedy
* Elizabeth Drew
* Jan Spivey Gilchrist
* Jan Crawford Greenburg
* Dr. Sanjay Gupta
* Brian Haig
* Carolyn Hart
* Francisco Hernández
* Jennifer L. Holm
* Stephen Hunter
* David Ignatius
* J. A. Jance
* Edward P. Jones
* David M. Kennedy
* Doro Bush Koch
* Gail Carson Levine
* Patricia MacLachlan
* Thomas Mallon
* Judith Martin
* Mercer Mayer
* Patricia McCormick
* Megan McDonald
* N. Scott Momaday
* Shelia P. Moses (more…)

Jenn expressed interest in hearing about the literary portion of my weekend, so I shall oblige her whilst uploading Flickr shots to illustrate future posts.

I have three bookish things of interest to share:

1. I stopped by the Olsson’s 35th anniversary sale on Sunday. I bought a number of things, many of them gifts for upcoming birthdays or Christmas. Yep, that’s right; I started my holiday shopping. Olsson’s is a small local chain and probably the bookstore I spend the most time in year-round (particularly at their two D.C. stores in Penn Quarter and Dupont Circle). They have a free membership program that rewards you for spending money, which I, of course, enjoy doing. A terrific place to hear authors read from their work, they sell books, movies, and music and now rent DVDs, as well (although I’ve yet to take advantage of that portion of their business). Thirty-five years is nothing to sniff at in any small business, but particularly in a high-rent area like D.C. and its environs. Four locations have closed since we moved down here in 2003 and one has opened. I hope that they have reached some stability with their current store locations and that these spots continue to serve them well. I look forward to spending many more hours and dollars with them in the future.

2. The Yarn Harlot is coming to Arlington on Thursday and Rudi’s agreed to go with me out to Bailey’s Crossroads. He might listen to part of her talk; he might not. But his love for me includes making sure that the highways in Virginia take me where I want to go. I swear that they shift like the stairwells in Hogwarts and that even if you start out on the right road that halfway there, you’re headed someplace else entirely different!

3. Through a forum post on Ravelry*, I have discovered DailyLit. This lovely service has collected more than 500 works of unabridged literature in the public domain and broken them down into 5-minute bits. Choose amongst their titles, which range from poetry to foreign language works to philosophy, and opt to receive a daily selection from the book via your email or RSS reader. It’s a great answer to people who claim they don’t have time to read and is eminently customizable. It’s particularly nice for me because there are so many classic novels and writers I mean to read but don’t ever pursue at the library. I’ve chosen Anthony Trollope’s Barchester Towers as my first selection. No, I’d never heard of it either. But I have heard of Trollope and thought it might be better to start with him than with Proust, who was the other author in serious contention last night.

* I’ve tried not to overmention Ravelry here because many knitters are still on the waiting list. The innovators of the community networking site recently increased the number of people they’re adding every day, so I’ve decided it’s okay to talk about now. I’m “sprite” on the site and anyone who reads the blog should feel free to add me as a friend.

Madeleine L’Engle, one of my favorite authors growing up, has died.

Her books featuring young adult heroes combined the spiritual and the scientific and played up smart, misunderstood characters negotiating the chasm between childhood and adulthood. She understood teenagers in a way that many people don’t and tried to offer some insights to help you to navigate through the mess of life.

I pulled out A Wrinkle in Time only last week. I must have felt her soul rustling in the cosmos…

I leave you with this quote from that esteemed old friend:

Mrs Whatisit: A sonnet is a very strict form of poetry is it not? There are fourteen lines, I believe, all in iambic pentameter. That’s a very strict rhythm or meter, yes? And each line has to end with a rigid rhyme pattern. And if the poet does not do it exactly this way, it is not a sonnet, is it?

Calvin: You mean you’re comparing our lives to a sonnet? A strict form, but freedom within it?

Mrs Whatsit: Yes. You’re given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself. What you say is completely up to you.

A lesson worth remembering…

This week’s Booking Through Thursday question (posted early on Deb’s blog) is one that interests me, so I thought I’d take a crack at it:

Okay, so the other day, a friend was commenting on my monthly reading list and asked when I found the time to read. In the ensuing discussion, she described herself as a “goldilocks” when it comes to reading — she needs to have everything juuuuuust right to be able to focus. This caught my attention because, first, I thought that was a charming way of describing the condition, but, two, while we’ve talked about our reading habits, this is an interesting wrinkle. I’d never really thought about it that way.

So, this is my question to you — are you a Goldilocks kind of reader? Do you need the light just right, the background noise just so loud but not too loud, the chair just right, the distractions at a minimum? Or can you open a book at any time and dip right in, whether it’s for twenty seconds, while waiting for the kettle to boil, or indefinitely, like while waiting interminably at the hospital — as long as the book is open in front of your nose, you’re happy to read?

Ha! I’m anything but a Goldilocks reader. While I sometimes can’t read a particular book at a certain moment, there’s rarely a moment when I can’t read at all.

And I’m a fully absorbed reader. Mum used to ask me to do chores and would come back an hour later to yell at me for leaving them undone. “When did you ask me to do that?” I’d complain. “I never heard you.” But, she’d point out, I’d replied, so clearly I had. Since then I’ve discovered the part of me that will talk to you while I’m reading is the same part of me that will pick up the phone in the middle of the night and converse logically and lucidly with you while the conscious part of my brain is still occupied with the task at hand (in that case, sleeping).

I read while I eat. I’m learning to read while I knit. Hell, I even read while I walk home from work. There is always a book in my bag and piles around the Burrow, just waiting for me to decide I cannot wait a second longer before opening it up and diving in.

So, no Goldilocks reading for me, thank you very much. I’m an all books all the time kind of girl.

This post is designed to make Sweetpea feel better than the last few months’ book reports have. I finished a mere three books this month and ditched the aforementioned awful one. If I want to reach my goal of 50 for the year, I’ve got to pick up the pace a bit… (more…)

It doesn’t sound significant, does it?

But it is.

I hate to turn my back on a book. This is not to say that I have finished every book I’ve ever started. That would be laughable. Ha! (See?)

You could fill my apartment with the books I’ve left unfinished. Possibly, you could fill my whole building.

But that’s different.

I read multiple books at once. What I pick up at any given moment depends on a variety of circumstances that include mood, location, and political atmosphere, as well as how much I’m enjoying something. What that also means, of course, is that I have many books that I’m not reading at any given moment.

Sometimes I have to give a book back to the library before I’ve gotten back into the right moment. Sometimes a book doesn’t fit where I am in life right then and it goes back onto the shelf for something to change. Other times, I get bored with a book, and it simply fades away with the understanding that I may change my mind someday and recall it to me.

But it takes an extraordinary book for me to intentionally decide that we must part ways.

Since I moved down to D.C. four and a half years ago, it has only happened once before. In that instance, I was reading Carolyn Parkhurst’s The Dogs of Babel. In that instance, I’d reached a remarkably stressful point in the story, a point where if the author proceeded as I suspected she was going to, we would not be able to continue having a civilized conversation. So, after much thought and angst, I asked her to leave.

Today’s decision was equally stressful, although it ought not to have been.

The Cat Who Had 60 Whiskers, one of the latest books in Lilian Jackson Braun’s mystery series, was deplorable. It was riddled with grammatical and punctuation errors, almost as if someone had shot the book through with an AK47 of bad English usage.

Flow was lacking. Not just from section to section or chapter to chapter, but from sentence to sentence. You know how when you’re exhausted, you sometimes misread things so that they make utterly no sense? Well, the book was just like that, but it didn’t seem to matter how well-rested you were when you picked it up.

The margins were about two inches wide. The book was only 208 pages or so. I stopped somewhere around page 80 and no murder had yet occurred. I consulted the book flap, thinking perhaps I’d accidentally picked up a series of vignettes, as opposed to a mystery. But no! a murder was still to happen and to be solved in the 130 remaining pages.

I almost felt like the publisher called up the author and said, “You are the only writer left on the face of the earth, and we have hordes of angry, voracious readers holding our families hostage. Please send us anything you have.”

“But I’ve only just put together notes and briefly sketched out some ideas. It’s barely 50 pages of material.”

“It doesn’t matter. Send it over now.”

“Well, maybe after I’ve written some transitions and run the grammar-check…”

“No! Please! We don’t have time for that! Lives are at stake! We’re warming up the printing presses as we speak.”

Short of a scenario like this, I can’t understand why this drivel was published. (Incidentally, neither can anyone who reviewed the book over at Amazon.)

Yet, because I am a reader and I, to a certain extent, define myself in this way, it was almost painful to decide to close the book permanently and escort it from the premises. I asked friends how long they gave a book. I mulled it over. I spent more time thinking about the decision than it would have to finish the book, but I just could not force myself to pick it up from my desk and start reading again.

Life is short, after all, and books are plentiful. I’m fighting a losing battle to keep up with everything I want to read; it would be a shame to intentionally waste an extra moment on something so unworthy of my reading time. I’ll try to keep that in mind for the next time.