Amazon Ranking = Crack

My friend Jack wrote two memoirs, Home Ice and Open Ice, both well-received, along with the novel, Saved, a book that found a large readership among women hockey players. All of them are wonderful books in which Jack's voice and his warmth are forever preserved. In the weeks following each release, I could always look forward to receiving emails from him that would contain his ranking in fantasy hockey as well as his ranking on Amazon.com.

In fact, he would sometimes break down the ranking for handy analysis. It always made me smile to learn that he was at 26,783 overall, but number 6 among hockey books and number 50 among sports books.

Now I know he was practicing restraint. The amazon page just sits open on my computer so I can refresh it every few minutes. In this way, I read a new meaningless number and have a new emotion about it. Micro elation if it goes up slightly, micro panic if it goes down. And all the while, there's bright sunshine outside. Someone down the street is mowing a lawn. Larry and the kids have gone off to the pool. I'm supposed to be preparing to teach tonight. This is crazy, far crazier than the phone call I got from my co-author yesterday announcing that he couldn't find the book in any bookstores. The store owners were insisting that the book hadn't come out yet, or they said they had it but couldn't find it. Hey, at least my co-author was outside, doing something active. We've both gone mad.

It's Out

The summer is almost over and the release date (different from the pub date for reasons no one will explain) is here. The Way of Boys is available to purchase. You can buy it in hardback, or in electronic versions for the Kindle or the Sony reader thingy. And I think you can get it in installments on a cell phone. (And why would anyone do that? Again, no explanations are available.) When I started writing here the project was a quasi proposal, each draft of which was greeted by our agent with the same tepid response.

Somehow, during this summer I've lost the urge to write here--or anywhere. The only cure for dry spells is reading, so here is a list of books to read when you're wallowing in fear and self-loathing.

1. Tender at the Bone. Ruth Reichl's memoir about growing up with food against the backdrop of growing up with a crazy mother. I read Garlic & Sapphires first, which is much lighter, a fun account of being the NYT food writer. This one is better, a bit darker, as it must be and readable in one sitting. Plus, there are recipes. What strikes me about Reichl is her ability to be so generous toward the people in her past. I've now read all of her books this summer and may make a class prompt based on her work.

2. The Horned Man, by James Lasdun. He has a new book of short stories out (It's Beginning to Hurt) that I'll be reading this fall. It's selling really well in hardback, which is all you need to know about his popularity. In this bizarre and dark novel, Lasdun takes his unreliable narrator all the way to the edge and then pushes him over. The high point of the book comes about 130 pages in when the narrator describes an anecdote about spending time with his step-sister at an exclusive club to which he doesn't belong. He thinks he's getting along beautifully with her and her tony friends, and he's not. It's so beautifully told, with so much restraint, and it's so haunting (and creepy and sad).

3. The Time of Your Life. Okay, it's a play by William Saroyan, and not a book. But it's a lot of fun. Written in that little slice of time between the great depression and WWII, it is a play about a group of regulars at a bar, and the main character, Joe, is trying to help everybody with his money and this kind of New Agey optimism, and all the while despair keeps creeping in. The Broadway Theater Archive has a version of this with a very young Kevin Kline as the longshoreman, available on Netflix.

4. Twin Study. These stories by Stacey Richter have been a kind of lifeline during the past month. They are surreal and funny and cool, and I love almost all of them, which I can't normally say about a story collection. They have served as great inspiration.

Out Stealing Horses

I'm reading this book right now (in English, of course, I just love the original cover) and it's lovely. 

In other book news, a Grubbie friend is sending me her book, newly in paperback (French Women Don't Sleep Alone) so I'll be writing about that here soon. It promises to be a hoot, but an instructive one.

I'm also all set to read another Grubbie friend's novel (Tethered) this summer and will write about that one here, too. She just had her first rave review in a German newspaper, which is highly inspiring.

Summer Reading

What's funny about vacation and reading on vacation is that it's supposed to be so different from the reading done during the rest of the year, and yet it isn't.

This past week, I started and finished a little novel called In the Shadow of Gotham, which purported to be one of those literary historical fiction novels and just didn't quite make it. The history in it seemed a bit thin, and the chosen time period, 1905, had very little relevance to the plot, and yet it was really very readable. Characters? I wish they'd had more emotional depth. Dialog? Stilted, although not quite as bad as what I read in another historical novel, one that was a runaway best-seller. Plot? Not quite as clever as I'd hoped. Yet, I'm not complaining. Or rather, none of these complaints stopped me from reading the book. Perhaps the only thing required of summer reading is that it can be snatched up and finished inside of 48 hours and it was. This makes me wonder what readability is made of. This book will probably be a success and I see great things in this author, who, if she can solve the problems of characterization, plot and research, will shine mightily. This might seem mean, but it isn't. These are small matters when you have readability on your side.

What's even more interesting is that my husband is now reading this book, and I keep stealing it from him, literally waiting for him to take off to make himself a sandwich so that I can quickly read a few pages. And yet it's a baseball book, and I have no use for baseball. My favorite line about televised baseball is that it's excellent background noise for napping. I've never understood the passion that some people have for it, for the history behind it. We have taken the kids to ballparks because that is a great cultural experience, one you really only need once. Jack and I used to go to Fenway once a year or so when you could still get tickets, which was some time ago. I don't understand the reverence for the players who are punks, nearly every one of them, punks in the rawest sense of the word. Ask anyone who has worked as a sportswriter and he will confirm this. And yet I crave this book. This is summer reading. It's the book you don't want to read, shouldn't read, hate reading, and frankly, can't put down.

The Book Video

This is a video the publisher made to promote the boy book. I'm not sure how it will be used or where it will appear, but it's really cool. I love the boy they picked for this.

She Reads!

So, S came home from kindergarten orientation the other day and she was very excited about going to school. She said, "I want to learn to read."

I was all warm inside at the thought of this and I said, "Well, honey, that's exactly what you're going to learn next year."

She was having none of that. "Now," she said. "I want to know now." I stammered and explained but she wouldn't give in. Off I went in search of these literacy books we bought the G-man when he was gearing up for kindergarten. He wanted nothing to do with them, of course and so we sort of forgot about them. After some frantic searching, I found the Bob's Books carton, empty of course. Then more searching yielded the first of several small paperbacks with little three letter words strung together in simple sentences. 

S snatched them out of my hands and set to studying them. We went over the basics of sounding out words. After a few minutes, she had it. She read, "Mat sat. Sam sat. Mat sat on Sam." She read the book and was very pleased with herself. That night I found her clutching the books in bed. That's what she really wants. She wants to read by the night light like her brother does. 

Finding a new reader is always a miracle.

Words to Write By

I'm taking a writing class and the instructor likes to post inspirational quotes for us to read. My friend Jack used to do this when he taught writing classes. He would get to class early and write something on the board. I loved those quotes, but I never understood why he used them. I didn't really think that the students cared about them.

Now I'm clinging to these quotes. 

One recent one came from poet Nikki Giovanni:

"Writers don't write from experience, although many are hesitant to admit that they don't. ...If you wrote from experience, you'd get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy."

And yet I like this statement of hers even better:

"A lot of people refuse to do things because they don't want to go naked, don't want to go without a guarantee. But that's what's got to happen. You go naked until you die."