…because I picked up Justin Cronin’s The Passage. When both Joe and Maggie recommend a book this strongly, you can be confident there’s something there worth reading. I had a few other books stacked up on the nightstand, but after reading nearly 300 pages in the first 3 evenings I realized that this wasn’t a book that would share my reading time politely — it required my full attention. There’s a fantastic quality to the story that reminds me of Michael Crichton’s writing — the sense that the characters are truly overwhelmed by their plight, and the story builds with such unrelenting pace that it’s nearly impossible to find the page you are willing to stop on.

Books like these can be difficult to explain — it’s unfair to say that it’s sci-fi, or a thriller, or a literary novel, or any single genre. To do so immediately limits what the author is trying to do. I thought for a while last night about how I could summarize this book, in one sentence, if I had to, especially with other literary references (because that’s often the easiest way to explain a book)…and this is what I came up with:

It’s Cormac McCarthy’s The Road crossed with Max Brook’s World War Z.

That’s it.

Okay, that doesn’t really cover all of it, but that’s the best I’ve got. Just know that if you start it, it’s going to get under your skin like a virus.

Hello, friends.  I am one of the newest additions to the Lemuria staff, and this is my first time to ever post on our lovely blog. I thought I’d start out with a little introductory post about some of my current favorite reads.

At the top of my list is Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. This book is the story of  precocious nine year old Oskar Schnell who,after the death of his father in the September 11th attacks, searches the five boroughs of New York City to find the purpose of a key that his father left behind.  I laughed, I cried, and then I promptly started giving this book out as a gift to all of my friends who hadn’t read it.  If you’ve never read anything by Jonathan Safran Foer, give this one a try.  He has, after all, recently been named one of The New Yorker’s writers to watch in their “20 Under 40” summer fiction issue.

Besides quirky contemporary fiction, I also have a love for science fiction.  Neil Gaiman, Ursula Le Guin, and even C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy all have their places on my bookshelf.  My most recent venture into the science fiction genre has been Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves. The story is about a young family,who after moving into a new house, finds that it is bigger on the inside than the outside. It is completely without boundaries.  The fun of this book though is just flipping through it.  Danielewski’s composition, like the mysterious house, is unconventional and completely without boundaries.  Throughout the novel readers are given several narrators,  photographs, codes, and references to mysterious books that don’t exist.  I’m still working my way through it all, but if you’ve got some spare time on your hands, I’d definitely recommend picking up a copy and going along for the ride.

And finally I have to mention my adoration of children’s literature.  I may be  22 years old and a recent college graduate, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t still enjoy Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth. One of my favorites since elementary school, The Phantom Tollbooth is the story of young Milo who finds himself magically transported to an unusual land in which he learns the importance of letters and numbers.  This book is witty, fun, and illustrated by the wonderful Jules Feiffer.

-Kaycie

I like reading philosophy. Though it can be intimidating, reading the works of the great philosophers is often rewarding. Since philosophy provides a basis for how we function in our cultures, I’ve decided lately to try and gain a better grasp of postmodern thought. It is a fairly daunting task. I have only read a few selected writings and feel I have only scratched the surface. The subject is disregarded among many as trite; although in my limited reading it seems that these thinkers have very important things to say. They seem to be reading humanity and the climate of thought in a very broad and deep level, but they go about it in a way that is outside the scope of the tradition. For my first trek, I grabbed Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things. A historical work from the mid sixties in France; it investigates and brings into question the very practices that, we think, are used to communicate and hold together our perception of living.

But before jumping with both feet into a very deep pool, I decided to build up. I picked up in the mid 19^th century with one of the fathers of Existentialism, Soren Kierkegaard. He was a christian philosopher that is regarded as one of the centuries best thinkers. I am about a quarter of the way through his Works of Love, but I only had to go the first couple of pages before I knew I was in for a stretch. I’ve been told that this work is holds both his theological mind and his philosophical mind better than his others. He speaks boldly and extensively about what he sees in our interactions with God, people and the rest of the world through love. Love seems to be one of those words that has now almost lost all definition, so it is refreshing to have a respectable chunk of pages give it some parameters.

-John P.

by Kelly Pickerill

My summer vacation will be spent at the beach, though only because my family happens to live there. I hail from Vero Beach, Florida, and I’ll be going home for a long overdue visit this weekend. It will be great to spend time with my mom, dad, two sisters, brother and sister-in-law, but I’m especially excited to see my niece, Madison.  She is three and is changing and growing so quickly that she’s a completely different person every time I visit. Last time I was home, I told her I work in a bookstore and asked her if she knew what a bookstore was.  She said yes, so I asked what was in a bookstore.  She replied, “You know, books, dragons, silly things, stuff like that.” I told her she was right on the money. As a good aunt, I’m going to bring her some books to read while I’m home, especially Junie B. Jones books, because of our great Oz event a few days ago. I may not be able to fit any dragons in my carry-on, though.

My dad’s a huge mystery fan, and while I’ve covered my Father’s Day gift for him already by sending him a copy of the new Steig Larsson book the day it came out, as a double whammy his birthday is Monday, so I’ve got a signed first edition of (shush, don’t tell) Lee Child’s 61 Hours tucked away in my suitcase.  I’m also going to introduce him to Olen Steinhauer, whose new book, The Nearest Exit, is the highly anticipated follow-up to The Tourist.

But the books that will take up the most room in my carry-on are the ones for me to escape into when I’m looking to avoid my dearly beloved. I love my family, but after an evening of visiting the day I fly in, I’m sure I’ll be ready to dive in to those books I’m in the middle of, but also some I’ve been putting off reading, felt too overwhelmed to read, or never got around to reading.

The book I’m in the middle of:

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan. I haven’t read anything by Egan before, though I’ve always wanted to. This one has such a great cover and title that I couldn’t pass it up. I am about halfway through and really love it. It reminds me a bit of The Imperfectionists because each chapter focuses on a different character, yet each is also set in a different time. We meet Sasha at the height of her kleptomania in the first chapter, but in the next she’s years younger and a successful assistant to Bennie, chapter two’s focus, at a record company. I’m looking forward to discovering how Egan will tie together all of the stories and lives she’s interwoven.

The book I’ve been putting off:

Reality Hunger by David Shields. This book caught my eye when it first came out but I just haven’t picked it up yet. Shields’ book is made up of passages about the directions art and literature are going, but most of his argument is constructed of improperly cited quotes from everyone from Emerson to Vonnegut. While flipping through it I came across a reference to Dave Eggers’ novel-memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and since it’s one of those books I never got around to reading, I read it instead. I hope to be able to talk about Reality Hunger and my spin-off reads in an upcoming blog; this topic is really interesting to me.

The book I’ve been too busy to read:

The Passage (signed!) by Justin Cronin. This book is just so long that I haven’t cracked it open yet. From what I’ve heard from Maggie and Joe, though, I shouldn’t let the length intimidate me, so while I’m frying on the beach for hours I’m going to escape to Cronin’s world of mutants and government experiments gone awry.

The book I never got around to reading:

Less Than Zero (first edition!) by Bret Easton Ellis. Because his new book, Imperial Bedrooms, is the sequel, it’s about time I read this novel that helped define a generation.

I love to see what other bookstores are up to online and see if they have a bookstore blog. How lucky was I when I ran across “The Green Apple Core”, the bookstore blog for The Green Apple Bookstore in San Francisco. On their blog I found a delightful series of videos done by the bookstore staff entitled “The Book vs. The Kindle”. I think there are about 10 rounds. The one below is Round 3 and it’s about sharing.

Want more? Check our their blog! I recently featured another one of their videos on our blog about The Invisible Bridge from The Book of the Month series. Thanks to Green Apple for kindly sharing with us!

I was born on Father’s Day, 1968, in Springfield, Missouri. When I hear someone nowadays cry–“Oh, who would want to bring a child into this world?”–I marvel at what my then 28-year-old Dad, Carl Yates, faced bringing a son into 1968:
Vietnam was raging. The Tet offensive had just shaken the nation and flared again that May.

In April Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, and seven days before my birth, authorities arrested and charged James Earl Ray, a fugitive from a Missouri prison at London’s Heathrow Airport. That April, people in Kansas City, Missouri, rioted, looted, and burned their own neighborhoods in fury. And twelve days before that Father’s Day, Senator Robert F. Kennedy was shot and killed, the second Kennedy Dad had supported and lost not to a ballot but a bullet, to violence and hate.

History’s mayhem, mere anarchy loosed on the world. Study history from newspapers, any period, any place, and you will find the light and hope of new birth always glittering beside the blood-dimmed tide of Armageddon. Matter ever wins out over antimatter by the least margin of victory.

Having written and published Morkan’s Quarry, a novel about a father’s love for his son and that son’s loyalty in return during that old American catastrophe, the Civil War, I got questions from reporters about me and Dad. What was that relationship like? What in the book has to do with a father and son in real life?

Saint Paul gives me the best answer, “Show me the son whom the father chastiseth not.”

We are two willful, very verbal men. Dad is the son of an auctioneer prodigy, my late grandfather Roma Yates, famous in Dallas County for conducting major auctions when he was but a child of eleven years. Dad still practices law in the Ozarks. And he had long hoped one of us children, especially his son, would carry on that tradition in the law firm he headed: Yates, Mauck, Bohrer, and Elliff.

Dad’s jaw dropped when I told this story; I was answering some needling uncle’s question: “Why did you become a writer and not a lawyer?”

Well, Dad wrote speeches for a former governor of Missouri, and ran “Walking” Joe Teasdale’s first campaign. I would have been four then. And my father was pulled every which way—he had just left a sure thing to start his own law firm; the airport board was wooing him; he was embroiled in politics. He was becoming somebody. Yet he stole every minute he could with his son. He came home in a rush, grabbed a yellow legal pad and pencil, and said, “Troup, come here. Sit on my lap, and we need to write this speech for Joe.”

Any time with my busy father, any activity, I was thrilled. I remember his block letters—neither of us write in cursive. And then he would stop and read aloud what he was writing, that booming, deep voice in my ears, and the feel of his heart-and-lung power against the curve of my spine. I have no memory of substance, but I do know the speeches were endowed with that Baptist hill preacher’s rise, the son of an auctioneer’s sense of rhythm and repeat, of pause, of quiet, of reason, enticement, then crescendo. And the light in his eyes as he wrote, as the spark fired his mind and singed the page in those graphite letters, precise as if burned into stone.

How could a child leave that loving embrace and not feel sure that what a boy did when he became a full-grown man was to write?

Poor Dad! He had hoped to blame his son’s writing ailment on Mother, maybe, who took me to every museum in St. Louis and Springfield, and entrusted me to the Brentwood Library so many afternoons, I could help patrons down the Dewey decimal trail.

He came to grips with my pathway, though, when the writing program at University of Arkansas admitted me and I had the same admission and opportunity at the writing program at Dad’s law school alma mater, Washington University in St. Louis. Mystified but pleased, he advised me to take Arkansas’s package because Ellen Gilchrist studied at Fayetteville and U of A had a university press that published her.

Dad followed my publications with enthusiasm and hope, but with heartbreak and empathy when publishers didn’t want the novel, my story of a father’s love for his son, and didn’t want the story of civilians in a maelstrom in the Ozarks. Publishers wanted everyone to fall in love, babes with beaus, and wanted the war to be rousing and heroic, and maybe set somewhere famous, please.

Matter wins over antimatter. Ever against the blood-dimmed tide is the cry of birth, the pencil and block letters scratching into the blank page, and the sentences rising there, crying hope, shouting rise up to victory.

When the package came to our old home place, luckily my Sissy was there in from New York with her young daughter. Sissy had the phone with a camera and snapped this picture. Dad has just cut my novel free of its mailer. Sissy says he stood silenced and trembling with joy, trembling, for a full five minutes, his hand on the book his son wrote. And then he held up his son’s first novel, and she snapped this picture. Victory! Victory!

Don’t tell my publisher. Don’t tell booksellers. Please don’t even tell my wife. I have this picture and need no other good fortune to make me feel this book succeeded beyond any dream. Victory!
Happy Father’s Day, Dad.

*    *    *

Steve Yates’s novel Morkan’s Quarry is new from Moon City Press. He lives in Flowood, with his wife Tammy and is assistant director / marketing director at University Press of Mississippi in Jackson. He’ll sign Morkan’s Quarry at Lemuria, Saturday, June 12 at 1 p.m. But on Father’s Day, he will be working for the Press at meetings in Salt Lake City. And that’s what his Dad would want as well!

It’s June!  Joe was right.  It’s very hot.  It’s very hot but, for the most part, our air conditioning works in Lemuria, making the store the perfect place for you to shop for…Father’s Day presents!  Father’s Day is on June 20th this year and so I’ve gone and picked – fathers in mind – some new books that have been doing well.

This first book, Parisians, is number one on my blog because I want to read it.  Badly.  It got such a good review in the New York Times a few weeks ago and if that doesn’t do it for you, then the sub-title of “An Adventure History of Paris” should.  I get the impression that it’s this very readable, exciting account of all sorts of characters who lived in Paris at various points in the city’s history – Napoleon, Marie Antoinette, Hitler, Proust, Zola, Charles de Gaulle…It’s like a people’s history of Paris.  It looks great.  From the review:

“Robb is no stranger here. The acclaimed British author of biographies of Hugo, Balzac and Rimbaud, he first experienced the city as a boy, when his parents treated him to a week’s holiday as a birthday present. But, as Robb learned, Paris is too volatile and complicated, too historically dynamic, to be illuminated by any one person’s life. His solution: to write, as he explains it, “a history of Paris recounted by many different voices,” a series of character studies arranged to commemorate the shifting streets and sundry plot lines that give meaning to the city.”

Book number two has also been selling well: Winston’s War, by Max Hastings.  It also got a good review in the New York Times.  There are so many books about Churchill out there – he’s got his own shelf in the history section – that it can be overwhelming.  This book is a portrait of the man exclusively during World War 2 (it begins in 1940), glorious moments and awful blunders and all.  Hastings “rejects the traditional Churchill hagiography”, and, as the review puts it, presents some interesting food for thought:

“In the end, the war went well for freedom and the survival of civilization, and for that we must ever after thank the Winston Churchill of 1940. Had Churchill died in January of that year, Hitler might not have been defeated at all. Is it possible that, if Churchill had died in January 1942, Germany might have been defeated sooner?”

Book three is a brand new book on the Hoover Dam that’s already being compared to work by David McCullough, who has written books about other feats of mankind such as the Panama Canal and the Brooklyn Bridge.  Colossus, written by Pulitzer-Prize winner Michael Hiltzik, is a grand saga of the dam’s conception, design, and construction – it is also, by default, an account of the effect the Depression had on American culture.  The Wall Street Journal, in their review, said:

“Mr. Hiltzik clearly explains the technological and physical difficulties posed by the dam project, but he also fixes the endeavor in its time and captures the personalities of the people involved. … With the U.S. lately facing ever more difficult challenges and the can-do spirit apparently on hold, “Colossus” may inspire in readers a longing for a new building project on the Hoover’s scale, something that will summon up once again America’s famous self-confidence and daring.”

The last book I’ll mention is by Nathaniel Philbrick, whose name might be familiar because he wrote Mayflower, which did (and continues to do) really well.  The Last Stand is about the Battle of the Little Bighorn, and promises to be just as readable as Philbrick’s other works.  He’s a good storyteller, it’s a fascinating story, and it promises to be an interesting read.

There are, of course, many many other good Father’s Day gift ideas: Matterhorn, The Pacific, The Passage, The Imperfectionists, The Marrowbone Marble Company… come in and have a look!

Susie

Summer time right? Summer reading – sweaty outside reading, cold beverages, sticky kids putting their hands on your book. They spray the water hose on you. The dogs are panting in the shade. They shed everywhere. Then you get the kids cleaned up and in bed and maybe you get to read for a little while. Bugs on the porch buzzing around the light. Maybe you have a ceiling fan. Try not to kill the bugs with your book. Good times right? Maybe another beverage, or a third. Here’s what I’m reading:

The Passage by Justin Cronin

I’ve written about this before. It was the big book at BEA in New York. And Maggie wrote a full blog on it a few days ago. This is a great big summer book. The kind where there is no hesitation about the size. You want it to be big so it never ends. Maybe it lasts all summer. I mean this in a really complimentary way – it’s like when you were in high school and you read a big Stephen King novel or a maybe a couple in a row. I remember one summer I read Misery at the beach. Couldn’t put it down. Anyway, this is like that – a great big book that you read and read. And yes it does have vampires. It’s out today.

The Reversal by Michael Connelly

This is kind of cheating but you know booksellers get to read books before they come out. I’m obsessed with Michael Connelly’s fiction. Two summers ago we scheduled him for a books signing for The Brass Verdict. Between June and November of 2008 I read every one of Michael’s books. Some writers have a niche – and some get lucky – maybe Connelly has both, but if he wasn’t a really good writer – a hard working writer, then I don’t think I could have read every book back to back. It’s like one huge novel to me. This book is like The Brass Verdict as it features two of Connelly’s regular characters. Harry Bosch and his half-brother Mickey Haller. I finished it in just a few days – now Wendy is reading it and I’ve promised it to Mark as soon as she’s done. It’s nice to have a few fellow addicts.

Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin

Raise your hand if you’ve read Tom Franklin. If your hand isn’t up then you don’t really like Southern Lit. Maybe you say you do – lip service. This is what’s going on in Modern Southern Lit. Poachers is a classic. I liked Hell at the Breach. I loved Smonk so much that I was reading passages out loud to Wendy in the hospital the day that Harper was born. (If you’ve read it then you know what kind of sick dude I am.) Anyway, this may be his best book yet. I’m dead in the middle and I can’t wait to get home and read. It’s like a suspense novel. This is a Mississippi book – duh Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter. Please come see Tom in September – if you have a soul that is.

The Fall of the House of Zeus by Curtis Wilkie

This book will be getting a lot of attention here and elsewhere this fall. I got my hands on it today and will be starting it tonight. It’s the new book about Dickie Scruggs. Last fall we had Kings of Tort by Alan Lange and Tom Dawson. These books are going to be like companion pieces. Two different books with different perspectives and goals, but on the same subject. You have to read to find out what that means.

This year, Kate DiCamillo was honored with the 2010 Indies Choice Award “Most Engaging Author.” I personally voted for her and I was pretty excited to hear that she had won. I love The Magician’s Elephant and The Tale of Despereaux. I also love showing them to new readers everyday. In her acceptance speech, Kate praised booksellers and the wonder of handselling. It kind of made me tear up, so I thought I would share it with y’all.