I do miss independent bookstores. But I’m also lucky because I live on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and the Barnes and Nobles up here are awfully good ones. Still, a person misses a person’s local little bookstore. And a person often ends up ordering books on line. Especially old out-of-print books. And a person sometimes guiltily orders used books that are still in print, thereby cheating the publisher and, much worse, the author!!! of royalties. SO! Now I have discovered a site at which you can order on line to your heart’s content, assuage your royalty guilt, and actually do some good in the world. It is called betterworld.com. They give part of their profits to literacy programs, they rescue books before they end up as landfill, they have free shipping and they also offer carbon-offset shipping. For example, I just ordered Author, Author by David Lodge and it cost me $3.75, free shipping, another 4 cents for the carbon offset shipping. I recently gave away about 100 books to make room for new ones, which is good because I foresee a lot of them appearing on my doorstep in the near future. Go to betterworld.com!

Midnight’s Children won the 2008 Booker of Bookers Prize.(click here) I was thinking of Midnight’s Children, on eof my most beloved novels, yesterday as I watched Ghandi on TV. Reading it, all those many years ago, was a revelation, not just about India, but about novels. Reading Rushdie for the first time was like reading Dickens for the first time: Look what you can do! I was also happy to see that Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda was on the list, although I think his other Booker winner, The True Adventures of the Kelly Gang, is perhaps even better. Carey was a recent discovery for me, and a thrilling one. The others on the short list were JM Coetzee’s Disgrace, Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road, Nadine Gordimer’s The Conservationist and J G Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur. None of which have I read. The shame of it. And the delight. Four new books! Four writers to experience for the first time!

I did a reading in San Francisco that was a fundraiser for a group called Rocketdog. Rocketdog takes older, less obviously adoptable dogs and finds homes for them. The Booksmith is one of the country’s few remaining independent bookstores. Her is a picture of my handsome, attentive, gracious Rocketdog host, Sinbad, in this wonderful bookstore.

A while ago Verlyn Klinkenborg wrote about Angela Thirkell in his column and I was jealous that he liked her so much because I had tried to read her stuff years ago and found it annoying and twee. But my friend Jeanette recently hunted up a bunch of the novels and passed them on to Janet and me and…they’re so good. One of the things I love that I could not appreciate twenty years ago are the sons. There are so many sons in their early twenties. They come home, leave their tennis rackets and hiking boots and clothes and books everywhere, immediately get on the phone to their friends, disappear after bestowing a distracted kiss on the parental forehead, stay out late, then jump on the back of a friend’s motorcycle and leave. And the mother? She is in ecstasy, gazing at the clothes strewn everywhere with deep, motherly happiness. So on mother’s day, I recommend Angela Thirkell, who understood a lot.

Also, I have discovered a glorious site to buy her books and every other English novel you might might to get your hands on. Anglophilebooks.net

Happy Mother’s Day!

I was staying at a friend’s house when someone emailed me about an article she was translating from Italian into English which quoted some parts of Rameau’s Niece. The translator asked me to check some passages so that she would not be translating back into English from the Italian what had already been translated from English into Italian, if you follow me. Luckily, there was a copy of the paperback of Rameau’s Niece in my friend’s bookcase. When I opened it up, I was able to find not only the requested passages, but also the traces of real book worms. I like it when the basis of a metaphorical phrase turns up. And I found the holes in the book strangely moving. Here are some blurry iphone pictures of their tunnels, which look very cozy.

I love that this is from a book published in 1889 called “The Home Manual. Everybody’s Guide in Social, Domestic, and Business Life.” Obviously this drawing is illustrating Business Life.

Here is an artist who really understands what is to love a book, to get lost in a book, and how books follow us around. See more of her work by clicking here
(Thanks, design*sponge!)

One of the best books of the last decade (two of the best books, I should say–there was Persepolis and there was Persepolis II) have been made into a film.

The artist and author, Marjane Satrapi, is the director along with Vincent Paronnaud, so I can only believe that the crisp emotion and dry drama of the those deeply moving graphic novels of great comic intelligence will be right up there on the screen. And Catherine Deneuve plays her mother, And Danielle Darrieux plays the grandmother. I interviewed both of them twenty-five years ago for a piece I did for Vogue about the French actress after forty, and the fact that there wereFrench actresses after forty in France. I spoke to Derrieux in her dressing room after a play she was starring in. I can’t remember where I met Deneuve. Hmm. Maybe I’m making the Deneuve part up. My favorite was Jean Moreau. I went to her apartment for breakfast. She had barrettes in her hair, no makeup, and gave me croissants and jam and coffee. Pretty much the highlight of my short celebrity profiling life. Except maybe Roger Tory Peterson. And of course Tim McCarver. Vogue was very eclectic in those days.
Back to Persepolis: If you haven’t read these graphic novels, I insist that you do. You will not be sorry. And I insist that I see the movie. It opened today. I will go tomorrow. Sometimes the personal is not only not the political, it is the best way to see how alien the political is. My grammar aside, go see it.
Here is something Satrapy said in a CNN interview:
The use of the humor is something that was very amazing to me. Because to me, humor is the height of understanding. Anywhere in the world we cry for the same reason. We cry because our father is dead, or our mother is sick. We don’t laugh for the same reason. If we laugh together, it’s as if we’ve touched each other’s spirit. We showed this movie in Japan, and people laugh at the same time as the French do, as the Americans do, as the Swiss, as in Germany. … It gives me some hope actually. click here for more
This passage struck me because I had just been thinking about the scene in Sullivan’s Travels when the hobos were all laughing and watching cartoons. I think this woman does have a touch of Preston Sturgis to her! That’s my highest compliment.
Here is a page from the book:

I was reading this really good piece in Slate by Joshua Glenn about The Amabassadors and toothpicks, which made me go to his blog for The Boston Globe called Brainiac, which talked about this brilliant translation of The Wasteland into that wonderful, silly LOLcat talk… “april hates u, makes lilacs, u no can has…”
Go read all these things!

I think this is the Polish cover for She is Me. I have never actually seen the edition, but during some masochistic/narcissistic late night self-googling a year or so ago, I found this and saved it in an obscure folder that, in a procrastination extravaganza, I just opened tonight. So…I’m sorry, but, is that a tutu?!?

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