And now for something completely different.

Looking for a successful post-9/11 novel, Adam Kirsch finds one in the 19th century: Dostoyevsky’s Demons (”Demons Inner and Outer,” New York Sun). He asks:

Why is it that our novelists, despite their best efforts, cannot write a politically informed, psychologically convincing book about Islamic terrorism? Why is it so difficult to bring such a terrorist to life on the page?

He answers:

If contemporary novelists have not produced a comparable book about the terrorists we face today, the reason may be that the variety of evil that confronts us is so unalluring. There is hardly an American of any political persuasion who sympathizes with Al Qaeda’s vision of Islamic theocracy. Dostoyevsky’s lesson is that it is when evil comes to us wearing the mask of goodness — as it has so often in the past, and certainly will again the future — that we have to be most on our guard.

But you should read the parts in between, too.

Sunday, June 29, the morning of the Booklist Adult Books Readers’ Advisory Forum: Post-9/11 Fiction (that’s the short title; I’d give you the longer version but we’d have to change this blog’s hosting plan to include more bandwidth), I thought I’d look over my remarks one more time while I ate breakfast. So, I went downstairs, got a table for one, and, as I tucked into my Denver omelet, I turned my mind once more to the dark day of September 11, 2001. Then I heard a voice. It was singing.

If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands.

The voice was coming from the speakers in the ceiling. It was distracting but, after a sip of my fresh-squeezed orange juice, I refocused my attention on the paper in front of me.

A gang of white-aproned waiters surrounded the table next to me, clapping their hands and singing:

Zip-a-dee-doo-dah, zip-a-dee-ay
My, oh my, what a wonderful day
Plenty of sunshine headin’ my way
Zip-a-dee-doo-dah, zip-a-dee-ay

More challenging, but I tried to tune it out. After all, I’m a professional. I read with even greater ferocity, amending my words here and there for improved flow.

I finally gave up when a six-foot-tall chipmunk–I’m not sure whether it was Chip or Dale–walked up to my table.

Yes, Disneyland’s a strange place to talk about September 11.

The panel went very well. Our allotted two hours flew by, and I know I’m not the only one who could have stayed longer–several people told me the same thing. Carolyn See, Janette Turner Hospital, and Ellen Gilchrist, despite the similar themes of their most recent novels, all have such different personalities and speaking styles, and all of them had very rich food for thought.

Carolyn See spoke powerfully and honestly about grief, about writing There Will Never Be another You near the bed where her life partner lay dying. On September 11, she said, she saw the nation mourning for strangers and thought (I hope I’m getting this line right–I didn’t write it down), “You people know nothing of grief!” She echoed this intensely personal reaction later, when she said:

I’m unable to see the larger picture because I don’t believe the larger picture.

and

The only way for this woman to understand things is to bring it down to a personal level.

She also said, speaking of the ”war on terror”:

This is a fight with clouds. 

(She also said, “Communism went the way of green jell-o,” but I don’t think I can recreate the moment enough so you’ll understand why it was so wonderful.)

In a way, quoting her out of context seems unfair, because the horror of September 11 causes some people to get angry with people who don’t react in the “appropriate” way. But I love Carolyn See for her honesty. I have to say, it was just amazing to meet her and hear her. Regular readers know I’m not given to this sort of statement, but she struck me as being what they on the Left Coast call a “wise soul.” Gracious, funny, self-deprecating, and unafraid to speak her mind.

Janette Turner Hospital spoke at length about her previous book, Due Preparations for the Plague, and its origins in Boccaccio’s Decameron. Though it’s often interpreted as a take on September 11, she said she had written all but the last 50 pages when September 11 happened. She stopped writing for months, but returned to the book and gave it a new ending, different because of what had happened.

After that, she said, the last thing she wanted to write about was terrorism. Inspired by the street musicians who play in Boston’s subway stations, she planned to cast one in a love story. But that book, Orpheus Lost, ended up being about terrorism, too. Such are the times.

Hospital was so gracious and refined, and despite saying “I’ve been told I have a mind like the floor of a birdcage,” she showed her experience in the classroom by weaving a fascinating talk together on the fly. She also said that after reading all of our books in a “binge,” she had been inspired to assign them to her students this fall. I think a mark of a great writer is that, despite her own considerable accomplishments, she is always ready to welcome something new, to try change, to avoid repeating herself. And Hospital is truly a great writer.

Ellen Gilchrist was breezy and conversational, occasionally interrupting the other speakers to ask a question, and when she spoke, she referred to the notes she’d been making throughout. She talked at length about A Dangerous Age’s origins in something that happened to her pilates instructor and the National Guardsman who does her landscaping, and she talked about the idea of genre, making some funny remarks that of course I couldn’t write down fast enough.

But essentially, she said, genre was a bunch of people taking on the same thing. With Vietnam, she said, serious writers were tackling it, and then Tim O’Brien nailed it (with The Things They Carried), “and every writer worth his salt was not jealous. We thought, ‘It’s done.’” And then “we all began to write post-apocalyptic books, and then Cormac McCarthy wrote The Road.’”

(Incidentally, Gilchrist also said, “I wrote The Road, only I called it “Black Winter”–referring to a long, bleak short story that she was repeatedly advised not to publish.)

But why do writers turn to these bleak subjects?

We’re trying to take charge of this catastrophe and make it have a better ending.

I’ve been meaning to take a look at BookLamp for awhile, a site that describes itself as being like Pandora for books. Where LibraryThing helps readers find books based on similarity of taste, BookLamp takes a more technical approach, scanning the books and, well, here it is in their words:

So the first thing that we did was that we scanned a book. We built a program that automatically breaks that book up into scenes. From there, we had the program go through and identify all the different words in the scene. So adjectives, nouns, adverbs, comma usage, things of that sort. Then we sat down and we searched that information for patterns. English is a very self-descriptive language. Adjectives describe things. Verbs are action. And I believed, that by looking at the types of words that made up a scene, you could make some educated guesses about what kind of content was in the scene, without a human ever actually reading it.

BookLamp analyzes text for the ways that density, pacing, action, dialog, and description can be mathematically expressed, then creates charts for the books and looks for books with similar charts. Despite the claim that “there is no doubt that we’re tracking stylistic consistencies between authors,” I have to wonder if it would be possible to game the system by adding the works of authors who use prose in truly unconventional ways, like Beckett, Burroughs, and Borges.

To be fair, even human readers’ advisors can struggle with unconventional works. But the skeptic in me imagines that a computer program that focuses on formulas might miss some of the harder-to-express nuances that make recommendations good. And what is the ultimate goal? To give readers books that deliver the exact same reading experience each time? Or to broaden readers’ experience by giving them books that have some elements they like and some that are new to them? Although, again, that might happen with BookLamp, too: two books with the same arcs of action might have completely different characters and settings.

Right now, BookLamp is still in the beta stage. It has only analyzed 179 books, all of them sf or fantasy, so it’s hard to get a sense of how well this will work on a wider scale. It would be fun to see what non-sf recommendations it might make for a sf title, or vice versa, or to see what read-alikes it suggests for Beckett, Burroughs, and Borges.

What do you think? Would this be a fun thing to play with, like Pandora? Or does the phrase “without a human ever actually reading it” chill your bones?

Watch this video for an overview:

I’ve been enjoying the posts at Book Group Buzz. Yesterday, Misha Stone’s “When Fiction and Reality Collide” addressed–well, you’re probably one step ahead of me on that one. Says Stone:

As a Fiction Librarian, I often get a little annoyed when patrons distinguish the difference between fiction and non-fiction as "fake" versus "real."

As a fiction reviewer, writer, and made-up person, I, too, get annoyed when I meet someone (usually at a cocktail party where the non-profit and for-profit worlds collide) who informs me that they don’t like to read novels because they like to “learn things.” Nothing wrong with simply preferring nonfiction to fiction, of course, but those who dismiss fiction out-of-hand usually strike me as being people who don’t know what to do with the facts they have. Facts are important, but what good are facts without insight? Fiction plays free with the facts in order to investigate even deeper matters.

This topic must be in the Booklist zeitgeist, as Joyce Saricks’ soon-to-be-published column, “Reading to Learn and Learning as We Read,” confirms. She begins:

A few months ago, I came across a comment that got me thinking: readers read nonfiction to learn something. Though seemingly innocuous, the remark, in context, implied that one doesn’t learn from fiction. I confess it got my dander up: Is nonfiction essentially superior because it offers information, the opportunity to learn something? And is it true that we don’t learn from fiction? 

How does she conclude? I’ll add a link on Monday, when her column goes live, so you can read for yourself.

This is all to say nothing of the real-versus-fake issue facing memoir, about which enough has been said already to last us until 2009.

(Unless I think of something really, really clever. Then I won’t be able to help myself.)

Update: Here’s the link to Joyce Saricks’ latest column, “Reading to Learn and Learning as We Read.”

Just one post today–to let you know about the launch of Booklist Online’s second blog, Book Group Buzz. We had some interesting conversations at the old Booklist Book Club, but what people kept telling us was that what they really wanted were resources to help them with their in-person (I disdain the digirati’s use of “meatspace”) book groups. And, by golly, that’s what we intend to give them.

Mary Ellen Quinn, Booklist Online’s managing editor, has recruited a crack team of contributors, including:

• Amanda Blau, Children’s Services Program Coordinator for the Downers Grove Public Library
• Kaite Mediatore Stover, Booklist columnist and Head of Readers’ Services for Kansas City Public Library
• Misha Stone, Readers’ Advisory Librarian at Seattle Public Library
• Nick DiMartino, author, playwright, blogger, and bookseller extraordinaire

We’re just getting started, so please pardon our sawdust. But the bloggers have already been busy with posts about biographies, book groups, and more. Please read, comment, and help spread the word. We welcome both your feedback and participation–with your help, we can make Book Group Buzz the place to go for book-group tips, reading guides, news, and helpful links.

I’m on my way over right now.

Two books to consider:

Rengen by Patricia Martin

Natural Born Charmer by Susan Elizabeth Phillips

Besides having a flat-out fantastic name, Patricia Martin’s book explores a very interesting idea about a cultural shift in America: the creation, rise, and influence of a cultural consumer.

… individuals who are hungry for innovative ideas and ways to express them… a cultural movement that is being created by the confluence of art, science, education, popular entertainment, and business.

You can see her theory echoing on college campuses, in libraries and bookstores, and on public TV and public radio. You can see it in practice with Apple products and Google’s ever expanding suite of applications. It is fascinating reading.

In Natural Born Charmer, Susan Elizabeth Phillips has written a near perfect romance novel. Fans of the genre will be enchanted with the story of Blue Bailey and Dean Robillard and their sweetly sexy courtship. Filled with strong secondary characters who grow more appealing on every page, nice details about restoring and decorating a house, and a plot that simmers along with huge doses of humor and tenderness, the novel is simply delightful. Readers who want to try romance should look no further for a contemporary novel to try. Chick-lit fans should discover Ms. Phillips (as well as Jennifer Crusie - start with Bet Me) and those romance fans who have somehow missed her, should head out the library and put on hold the other books in this loosely connected series: It Had to be You, Heaven, Texas, Nobody’s Baby but Mine, Dream a Little Dream, This Heart of Mine, and Match Me if You Can.

In my readers’ advisory (RA) class, I often include an assignment that asks students to visit any book store they wish and look around. What I hope they will see are examples of RA in action - in a different setting than their library. The Regulator Bookshop in Durham, N.C. offers some great RA moments for their readers - in ways that invite participation and in ways that create serendipitous discovery opportunities. Behold:

In addition to readings and author visits, The Regulator provides its reading community a chance to suggest books to both the staff and other readers. The comments are typed up and posted in a display called Book Love. Fans of Harry Potter got a chance to offer up odds on what might happen in the last book and the staff posted the list of ideas right over the checkout counter. Readers can match their interests against those of the community by tracking The Regulator bestseller display - which includes both expected titles and many surprises. While none of this is necessarily new, all of it is well done (and I will say that I have not heard of the Harry Potter prediction list as of yet appearing in any library), and it shows that a place that makes money off of its ability to invite and engage readers, thinks in terms of RA all the time - even if they would not call it that. So if you are ever in Durham, N.C. check out The Regulator on Ninth street and the next time you visit your local library or bookstore - see what RA features surround you.

It is hot here and thunderstorms are brewing - which makes it the perfect time to escape into a story.

The Religion by Tim Willocks is a nice way to disappear for a while. The first of an expected trilogy, The Religion chronicles the escapades of Mattias Tannhauser, a truly resourceful man. He is set loose in sixteenth-century Malta, caught between two women, loyal friends, an Inquisitor, the Knights of Saint John the Baptist, an almost endless army of Turks, and a truly horrific stream of battles.

The pace of the story and its epic but uncomplicated plot suits the lazy feel of August very nicely - when almost all of us just want to watch the summer wind down. The story itself, a mix of historic romp and adventure, is flat-out hard-core battle re-imagined with a gloss of romantic vision, the stuff of Errol Flynn movies and the background material that makes the The Princess Bride possible. Despite the vivid descriptions of war and methods of the Inquisition, readers who enjoy titles that are big and juicy and like to retreat into a fully realized world should find that the wartime saga has much to offer.

If you enjoy it, try a read-alike suggestion and dip into the Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon which shares the same weight of language and pacing but which offers more romance, the Richard Sharpe books by Bernard Cornwell which also recount in vivid detail the wartime adventures of a resourceful man, or Napoleon’s Pyramids by William Dietrich, a glorious historical adventure.

Another good August book to consider, and off on a different path than The Religion, is Mistress of the Art of Death by Ariana Franklin. A fabulously told historic thriller, it offers a lovely counterbalance to Willocks as it mixes early CSI methods with well wrought characters and a story that is pitch perfect (and features a fabulous trial and cameo by a disgruntled king).

I think we’ve been outed.

Pierre Bayard has blatantly stated what we librarians only whisper to each other in dark corners of conferences, confess in encrypted emails to our closest pals, grudgingly admit over the fourth or fifth bookardi and cola at Librarian’s Anonymous meetings.

We haven’t read everything.

In his soon-to-be published treatise, How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, Bayard not only condones not reading everything (and logically points out the impossibility of this endeavor), he encourages the practice.

“Being culturally literate means being able to get your bearings quickly in a book, which does not require reading the book in its entirety–quite the opposite, in fact. One might even argue that the greater your abilities in this area, the less it will be necessary to read any book in particular.”

In the first section of his book, Bayard is not dismissing reading altogether, merely pointing out that choosing what to read also means choosing what not to read. These are choices readers must make with every book plucked off a shelf. For Readers’ Advisors, who are already well aware of all the choices available, this is an agonizing truth. The proficiency of a Readers’ Advisor lies in the ability to glean as much as possible from as many books as possible, place them in cultural context, and maintain perspective regarding the relationship of one book to another. In this way “anyone who truly cares about books…masters all of them at once.” 

  Interesting theories to chew on.

Di Herald’s kick-ass readalike on Kick Ass Heroines reminded me of why I wanted to play striker for Manchester United and use a meter maid for goal practice this morning. I wasn’t parked more than ten minutes! It wasn’t even 8 a.m.! And she saw me coming to move my car!

But the more I think about it, the more I realized I’m not really in the mood to mess up someone’s day. I’m in the mood to mess with someone’s world. Which probably explains my recent fascination with insomnia-inducing, adrenaline-riddled, conspiracy theorist novels.

Derek Armstrong’s The Game had me up all night trying to figure out who was killing all the contestants locked in a remote haunted mansion serving as the latest setting for a trendy reality television show. Enter the world’s most gleefully abhorrent detective, equipped with misanthropic ripostes, claustrophobia and a pill-popping habit. Anyone who loathes reality television will wish that Top Chef had their very own Detective Alban Bane wielding a knife in the kitchen.

 I turned next to Bad Monkeys by Matt Ruff. This futuristic conspiracy-twisted thriller takes off like a rocket. Jane works for “Bad Monkeys” a division of “The Organization” that takes directives from the “Cost Benefits” division. Their mission? Take out those humans who are deemed a drain on society while alive and less so when, well, terminated. Unfortunately, an untimely termination leads to Jane’s arrest, and she is now telling her wildly unbelievable, but oh-so-realistic, tale to a prison shrink as she calmly acknowledges that, yes, she killed a man, but no, he probably didn’t “need” it, not like the other bad monkeys.

Of course, if you really have time to kill between the hours of 1 a.m. and 5 a.m., then you need Crooked Little Vein by Warren Ellis. Think Da Vinci Code on hallucinogens with a strong dose of Advanced Placement American History and you will be traveling the underground railroad of the “secondary” Constitution with Mike McGill and punky academic Trix.

These books won’t soothe the insomnia or the agita. But they will make you glad you stayed up for it and you’ll be ready to kick more than your caffeine in morning.