A sprinkler failed last Thursday evening at the library, damaging around 1,000 books and keeping staff members working all night to save the drenched volumes. This is the second flood to plague the library in the last 18 months.

Concerned patrons are beginning to wonder about the dependability of the sprinkler system and the “cosmetic approach” taken to maintain the old building. “I have nothing but admiration for the library staff. The Board of Trustees, however, have undertaken some highly questionable renovations in recent years,” said Edinburgh historian Owen Dudley Edwards.

The National Library of Scotland houses precious works by Lord Byron, Charles Dickens, Emily Brontë, and Jane Austen, plus an original manuscript of Darwin’s The Origin of Species. Complaint of the Black Knight, published in 1508 and the first printed book in Scotland, and the last letter written by Mary Queen of Scots are also part of the library collection. Thankfully, none of these were harmed in Thursday’s flood.

According to the library, damage was slight. Some books needed to be dried out using fans and dehumidifiers and will require further reconstructive work. A spokesman for the library said the accident will receive a thorough investigation.

Man, I can so relate. Right now, I have a book in the oven drying out. Thank God it’s just my copy of Vanna Speaks and not Mary Queen of Scots’s last letter.

Story Source  Times Online via Rare Book News  |  Image Source  Edinburgh Architecture

WTF???!!!??? Don’t writers actually write books anymore? Look, I’m all for reading books on politics, but c’mon! Books on and by interesting political figures are right up my alley. But what the hell is Condi going to write three books about? What could Blago possibly have to say that he hasn’t already vomited up all over the airwaves?

Well, according to his publicist, his book will be about “the dark side of politics”. Heh. Makes sense.

The book is also expected to cover how Balgojevich named President Obama’s successor in the Illinois Senate, which Blago still says he never tried to sell to the highest bidder. In fact, he’s planning on sharing with us exactly what went down, to the point that it “will at times be embarrassing to himself as well as to others.” 

Please. Like anything could be more embarassing than that hairdo.

Story Source  Yahoo  |  Image Source  College Media Network

First up, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, by Seth Grahame-Smith and (natch) Jane Austen. This one has been getting a lot of press, and it looks hysterical. I shamefully admit I’ve never read Pride and Prejudice, but I might be tempted now. Zombies make everything better!

Next we have Titanic: The Untold Story by W. Mae Kent. Since Hollywood thought it had made the quintessential Titanny project, I was happy to see someone else look at it from a different angle. This version focuses on some lesser-known passengers, including the ship’s only African-American.

Finally, we have A Lion Called Christian: The True Story of the Remarkable Bond between Two Friends and a Lion by Anthony “Ace” Bourke and John Rendall. This book tells the story of two friends who purchased a lion–yes, a lion–at Harrod’s in the 1960s, and their adventures with the big lovable cat. Now, a word of warning: this trailer had me on the floor in a puddle of tears. This, my friends, will move you. Never doubt the humanity of animals.

A1Books.com

The program automatically keeps track of customers’ points and is free to join.

A1Books CEO Shinu Gupta plans to add further incentives to the program in the near future, like chances to earn double and triple points. 

A1Books.com also sells DVDs, games, and electronics.

Cheap books? I’m there! Maybe now I can afford my copy of La Dotta Mano.

Story Source  Publishers Weekly  |  Image Source  Youth.sg

Actually, it would be more of a canoe trip. A very looooong canoe trip.

Anyhoo, the grande dame of the mystery novel, Agatha Christie, spent her summers from 1938 to 1959 at Greenway, a history-rich manor near Dartmouth in southern England. She gave the home to her daughter and grandson, who donated it to the UK’s National Trust nine years ago.

And this Saturday for the first time ever, Greenway will open its doors to we peons of the reading public. The house has been completely restored to the pristine condition it was in when Christie summered there, and the rooms remain very similar to how they were when she was in residence–filled with books, papers, chocolates, flowers.

(Did someone say chocolate?!?!? What time do they open?!?!?)

Greenway opens its doors at 10:30 Saturday morning (oh, OK), and admission is £7.45. For more information, visit the The National Trust website.

Story Source  Yahoo  |  Image Source  BBC

According to Publishers Weekly, Simon and Schuster has launched a new app (whatever the hell that is) that lets owners of the iPhone or iPod Touch play crossword puzzles for just a one-time payment of $4.95. Yup, that’s right, no subscription needed, and you get, like, a gazillion crosswords. Actually, I think you get 365 crosswords, which is good enough, since Simon and Schuster says they will update the puzzles regularly and also provide holiday and bonus crosswords.

You can download the feature at the iTunes store. The puzzles have appeared previously in Simon and Schuster-published crossword books and have been edited by John M. Samson, who created the series of Simon & Schuster Mega Crossword Puzzle Books. 

Crossword lovers more technologically-savvy than I will be able to choose puzzles by degrees of difficulty, title, or author. The iPhone/iPod “pen” or “pencil” mode (again, I have no clue, I just thought the story was cool) can be used, and players can check their answers.

Yay for digital crosswords! Woot-woot!

Story Source  Publishers Weekly  |  Image Source  The Daily Mac

First up is Thoughts from Old Walls, the debut collection of poetry by writer and artist Marianne Lloyd.

Here is Limousine, Midnight Blue: 50 Frames from the Zapruder Film by Jamey Hecht. This one looks pretty interesting. From what I can deduce, it’s a series of poems revolving around the JFK assassination.

Finally, we have Euphoric Elevation by Sonja Wilson. This is some serious hotness right here.

Before I am a snark, or a book fanatic, or even a human being, I am all about ‘da poetry. One of my new year’s resolutions this year was to incorporate more poetry collections into my reading list, and this move has proved a smart—and intensely pleasurable—one.

But reviewing poetry poses a set of challenges quite separate from those of reviewing prose. Poetry, by its very definition, is an intensely personal experience. It is a one-on-one relationship between reader and poet where the ultimate goal, arguably, is to glean personal meaning and find one’s own experience in the poem. Even more so than books, the essential aim of poetry is to make us feel less alone in this great big dung-heap of a world.

Prose, whose aims are similar but not identical, is written with a much narrower focus: the conventional give-and-take of storytelling with a beginning, middle, and end, and the human players caught up in it all. In short, while the interpretations of prose can sometimes indeed be vast, the interpretations of poetry are limitless. For as many people as there are in the world, there are that many interpretations of any given poem.

You can see the challenges faced when attempting to review poetry. Just because I experience a poem as a life-changing event, someone else might find it pure poop. And that’s how it should be; this is what makes poetry so diverse and thrilling.

So I have decided to approach my criticism from a similar angle to that which I approach my prose reviews. Concentrating on the language, the imagery, the characters (in poetry, the biggest characters are most often the poet himself/herself, we the readers, and/or humanity in general—but not always, of course), the development, and the feeling it all evokes.

I’ve read three radically different books of poetry in the last few weeks, and I will attempt to review them here.

The first is Mary Jo Bang’s popular Elegy from 2007. In a day and age when poetry doesn’t get much recognition, let alone achieve commercial success, Elegy was a rarity: it did both. This volume won awards, loads of press, and passionate readers. In the poetry world, it was considered a blockbuster.

The theme of Elegy is wrenching: the death of Ms. Bang’s adult son. Through the esoteric imagery and staccato of her prose, Bang dives deep into what turns out to be an abyss of grief. There are no easy answers, no final destination, no epiphany in these poems. And that’s okay—there doesn’t have to be. After all, she is attempting to make sense of something that is, by nature, unknowable.

But the problem I had with these poems was twofold. One, I found the images invoked to be wildly erratic without a thread of commonality; and two, the style and setup of these verses was difficult to read, preventing any sort of natural flow. For example, the first word of each line, whether or not it is a new sentence or thought, is capitalized. This capitalization was distracting; I was constantly trying to figure out if each new line was a continuation of the previous one, or the introduction of something new (there are also not many commas, colons, or semicolons, which would have made things much more decipherable).

Though the imagery jumps around to seemingly-unconnected thoughts and ideas in the span of a single poem, these images are consistently strong: by turns intense, subtle, and vivid, but always emotionally-centered—which I, of course, very much liked. Take this passage from “Enclosure”, which demonstrates a delicate imagery and a majestic depth of feeling:

One can, hypothetically, be brought back

 

In the form of an actor

 

Who gives an after the fact replication
Of text conveyed in a character’s voice.
I can no more understand the world as a stage
Of myself, mired as I am,

 

In this missing.

So in the end, what satisfied me about Elegy was the intensity of feeling Bang’s words left with me. The presentation of the words themselves just isn’t my style of poetry.

Not to say these poems are bad. They’re not. If the invoking of certain feelings was the goal, then the book is terrifically successful (though it remains unclear if Ms. Bang was able to effectively process any of her grief: by the final poem, there is a sense, and perhaps correctly, that this grief is an eternal one). If the book is meant to stand as an example of exceptional form and style, well, let’s just say I can find better examples.

One of which is Brian Turner’s Here, Bullet from 2005. Turner, a thirty-something Army vet, wrote these poems while stationed in Bosnia, and then in Iraq. They are eloquent, timely, and incisive pieces examining fearlessly the nature of war both internal and external. And all of it without a trace of politics. This, I think, is the sign of an exceptional poet: one who can be political and make a political statement without mentioning the government even once, keeping an eye focused intently on small, seemingly-insignificant people and events and their place in the great cosmic scheme of things.

Turner’s presentation is much more old-school than Bang’s, telling his stories through brief snippets of life in wartime countries, laid out in a smooth, flowing style. All of the pieces in this collection are pretty short, most only a ½ page or so, but they pack a wallop in each line. For example, the title poem:

If a body is what you want,
then here is bone and gristle and flesh.
Here is the clavicle-snapped wish,
the aorta’s opened valves, the leap
thought makes at the synaptic gap.
Here is the adrenaline rush you crave,
that inexorable flight, that insane puncture
into heat and blood. And I dare you to finish
what you’ve started. Because here, Bullet,
here is where I complete the word you bring
hissing through the air, here is where I moan
the barrel’s cold esophagus, triggering
my tongue’s explosives for the rifling I have
inside of me, each twist of the round
spun deeper, because here, Bullet,
here is where the world ends, every time.

Reading about war is a subject that does not particularly appeal to me, but the poems of Here, Bullet are so much more than songs of war. They beautifully—a few times I actually gasped out loud at both the radiant imagery and Turner’s easy elegance of language—illustrate the outer conflicts of society versus the much more complicated battles waged in the heart of every soldier. And, to an extent, in the heart of every human being.

It is not surprising that the human heart takes center-stage in Erica Jong’s new book of poetry, Love Comes First, her first new poetry collection in well over a decade. It’s also no surprise to regular BS readers that I am a huge Jong fan. Her collection Becoming Light has gotten me through some of the darkest days of my life.

And Love Comes First, though not perfect, was worth the wait. The usual terrain of poetry is explored here: love, death, life, family. But there’s also a hefty dose of pure Jong: sex, aging, mythology, folklore, witchcraft. And it’s all presented in her signature poetic style—easy, accessible reading, lush imagery, and expertly-drawn characters (ranging from the poet herself to Henry James to Aphrodite).

If I have one criticism about this collection it’s that some of the themes explored aren’t explored fully enough. I know Ms. Jong’s work like the back of my hand, and I know how capable she is of delving into the human experience, with all its quirks and anomalies. There is a lot of brave investigation going on in this book, but I would’ve welcomed even more.

As can be deduced from the book’s title, love is the one constant theme throughout all of these poems. Love’s inception, its beauty, its struggles, its end. A passage from “Talking to Aphrodite”:

Is that what I am, to you—
a soap opera?
Perhaps even less.
I would like at least
to be a long novel
layered with subplots.

Ah, Ms. Jong, I think we are all long novels layered with subplots…as is evidenced by the three diverse, interesting volumes of poetry discussed here.

Grades - Elegy: C   Here, Bullet: A-   Love Comes First: B

Titles  Elegy/Here, Bullet/Love Comes FIrst

Authors  Mary Jo Bang/Brian Turner/Erica Jong

Publishers  Graywolf Press/Alice James Books/Tarcher

Years Published  2007/2005/2009

ISBNs  155597483X/1882295552/1585426849

Snarkbytes  Here’s Erica Jong discussing poetry and reading two of the pieces included in Love Comes First.

 

The New Yorker

They also promise to choose works that will generate questions, discussion, and debate. According to The New Yorker website: “We plan to approach the books as landscapes for exploration, in which we are the park rangers, if you will, examining the flora and the fauna and fending off the occasional wild animal. (Every good book has one.)”

This month’s selection is Revolutionary Road, the brilliant 1961 novel by Richard Yates and the basis for the hit film (which was robbed of Best Actor and Actress nominations).

Pop on over to The New Yorker to register; then read and talk amongst yourselves!

Story Source  The New Yorker  |  Image Source  Team Sugar

Yup, that’s right, an obscure manuscript by the Hobbitmeister himself, J.R.R. Tolkein, will be published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in May. The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun is a retelling of ancient Norse epics and relates the story of the hero Sigurd, a dragon-slayer, and his wife Gudrun, as they seek vengeance on the Niflungs. Yeah, I’m not sure what that means either.

The entire text is in verse, and Tolkein’s son, Christopher, will provide an introduction and notes to the book.

The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun was penned in the 1920s and 30s while Tolkein was teaching at Oxford. This manuscript was written before The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings trilogy and before the author had achieved international acclaim.

Hey, as long as Viggo Mortensen plays Sigurd in the movie version, that’s all I care about.

Story Source  Yahoo, Tolkein Library  |  Image Source  Tolkein Library, The Sword