The Olive Reader

Squirrel underpants now available!

Help a squirrel hide his nuts for winter.

I wonder if they can be used on squittens?

They’ve all been banned! It’s Banned Books Week, which celebrates the freedom to choose or the freedom to express one’s opinion even if that opinion might be considered unorthodox or unpopular and stresses the importance of ensuring the availability of those unorthodox or unpopular viewpoints to all who wish to read them. Basically, we can read whatever the heck we want and no one has the right to tell us we can’t.

I’d also like to take the occasion of Banned Books Week to give a shout-out to my mom, who always let me read whatever I wanted, who refused to sign the petition the other parents circulated trying to ban Heather Has Two Mommies when I was a kid, and who, when another mom called to tell her I was spreading smut around the fifth grade (smut being a dog-eared copy of Judy Blume’s Forever), said “so what?”

Check out this site for a list of Banned Books Week events all over the country.

Find this and other equally frightening images at Kitty Wigs.

Cyanide & Happiness @ Explosm.net

This list of ten books not to read before you die is hilarious (and very tongue-in-cheek.) My favorite was the reason not to read Proust:

“Yes, yes, he tasted a biscuit that made him think of childhood, we’ve all done that. If I want to remember my childhood I look at some photographs.”

Hemingway, Joyce, Tolstoy, and some lesser-known writers also make their appearances. I have read none of the books on the list, so I guess so far I’m a success.

Today is National Punctuation Day! I will celebrate by using all semi-colons and dashes properly. However, I don’t think I will be making any punctuation meat loaf.

It’s almost lunchtime here at the Harper Perennial offices, and since I left the book I’m reading (State by State, see yesterday’s post for all sorts of cool info on that one) at home, that means I have to pick a new book for my lunchtime reading. I’m thinking it’s going to be Who By Fire, which just went on sale yesterday. To sum it up very, VERY quickly, it’s about a family where the younger daughter disappears and years later the son moves to Israel to become an Orthodox Jew and the older daughter messes up her own relationships. And when the younger daughter’s remains are finally found, the older daughter goes to Israel to bring her brother home.

Anyway, I decided to pick it up today after reading this interview with author Diana Spechler. She’s also the subject of the latest Harper Perennial podcast and, as I discovered at our party at Word a few weeks ago, a good friend of a high school acquaintance of mine.

I’ve never been on a true, honest to goodness road trip. And since I don’t have a driver’s license, I don’t know if I ever will (please play the world’s tiniest violin for me now). But maybe that’s why I’m so into State by State, just released last week by our good friends at Ecco. In the preface, Matt Weiland (who edited the book with Sean Wilsey) states that their goal was to produce “a road trip in book form,” and I think they’ve succeeded, at least based on what I imagine a road trip to be like—learning not everything about a place but something small and true and unique, something like the secret liberal past of Alabama, which I read about in the first chapter.

Holding the book in my hands it reminds me of nothing more than the old World Book encyclopedias I used to have in my bedroom as a kid, the ones that had been passed down from my grandma’s house, the ones that were really great for historical stuff but couldn’t tell me anything that had happened after 1966, when they had been published. Even after we got a newer encyclopedia, I always returned to the World Book. There was something about it that seemed more authentic, more descriptive, more trustworthy than any other book. So far, State by State gives me the same feeling. It’s about “the half-dead towns too alive to be ghosts, the rusting historical markers buried in the weeds, the anonymous bits of land with their own hidden histories and surprising beauties and grace.”

If I haven’t convinced you of the awesomeness of State by State, be sure to check out the Facebook page, where you can read excerpts from the essays, the trailer for the Out of the Book film about the book (which is currently screening across America), or my very favorite State by State-related link, the interview with Matt and Sean on Omnivoracious, Amazon’s book blog. Seems State by State has inspired a whole series of blog posts over there, one for each of the 50 states, listing the books that most evoke the feel of that state. I’m so excited to check those out (after I finish all the essays in State by State, of course.)

Lit Soup is a cool blog run by agent Jenny Rappaport of the L. Perkins Agency. In the latest edition of her column “Book Block,” she’s featuring Inside Out Girl, out recently from Harper Perennial. You can read about Tish’s inspiration (she met a young girl with NLD, an Asperger’s-like disorder that the main character in IOG suffers from), and do check out the rest of Jenny’s blog as well.

Esquire posted a list of 75 books every man should read. Though it says right up front that the list is “unranked, incomplete, [and] utterly biased,” Jezebel.com still took issue with the fact that there are just four non-white men and just one woman on the list. They’ve posted their own list, starting with 20 books and leaving the other 55 up for debate in the comments.

Love the fact that the Esquire list has pithy little descriptions (well, if pithy is the right word. The one for Grapes of Wrath is “because it’s all about the titty,” but some of the others are great), love that Jezebel is asking for readers’ input. How many have you read?

(For me, it’s seven of the Esquire list, with having read short stories from five more, and having tried to read two more and given up, and seven of the Jezebel list, with having read short stories from one more. Funny that it’s the same number on both.)

I love The Superest.

“The Superest is a continually running game of My Team, Your Team. The rules are simple: Player 1 draws a character with a power. Player 2 then draws a character whose power cancels the power of that previous character. Repeat.”

I think my favorite is The Decicorn.

A Woman Dreams of Opening a Bookstore, and Defying the Trends
A cool article in the New York Times about Jessica Stockton Bagnulo, a current bookstore employee (at McNally Jackson, a great store here in nyc) who hopes to someday soon open her own bookstore in Fort Greene, a neighborhood in Brooklyn where, according to a survey, 75% of residents would like an independent bookstore. It’s certainly a nice counterpoint to that article in New York this week about the end of book publishing as we know it, don’t you think?

You can also check out Jessica’s staff picks on the McNally Jackson website.

Marc Hauser, the author of Perennial’s Moral Minds, has a fascinating piece in this week’s Newsweek on morality. The part that struck me (maybe because I’m currently reading HeartSick, a book where a psychopath plays a central role) was:

“Another example of the role that emotions have on our actions comes from recent studies of psychopaths. Take the villains portrayed by Heath Ledger and Javier Bardem, respectively, in “The Dark Knight” and “No Country for Old Men.” Do such psychopathic killers know right from wrong? New, preliminary studies suggest that clinically diagnosed psychopaths do recognize right from wrong, as evidenced by their responses to moral dilemmas. What is different is their behavior. While all of us can become angry and have violent thoughts, our emotions typically restrain our violent tendencies. In contrast, psychopaths are free of such emotional restraints. They act violently even though they know it is wrong because they are without remorse, guilt or shame.”

Check out Marc’s book for more insights into morality and the way it is formed.

From the New York Times:

This entertaining novel is “something of a science-fiction ‘Catcher in the Rye,’” Jonathan Ames wrote in the Book Review, and Ruff’s protagonist
is “a female Holden Caulfield, except she kills criminals with the equivalent of a ray gun.” Ruff throws in a little Philip K. Dick and Thomas Pynchon for good measure.

Check out Bad Monkeys here:

Tomorrow!
Tomorrow’s the New York premiere of the State by State film, the third in Powell’s Out of the Book film series. State by State, which just went on sale yesterday, features insightful essays on each of the 50 states. After the premiere, there’ll be a panel discussion with editors Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey and the producer of the film as well as some of the featured authors, including Will Blythe, Charles Bock, Joshua Ferris, Myla Goldberg, Rick Moody, David Rakoff, Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, Ellery Washington, and others. Best of all, it’s free! And if you don’t live in New York, go here to find out when it’s coming to your town.

Tuesday, September 23
Kiran Desai, Siri Hustvedt, Orhan Pamuk, Salman Rushdie, and other esteemed writers will participate in Reading Burma: A Benefit for Cyclone Relief and Freedom of Expression in Burma/Myanmar at Cooper Union. We were tipped off to this one by none other than Francine Prose, so it’s sure to be worthwhile.

Thursday, September 25
Michael Chabon has said “There are some people—and I’m one of them—for whom life consists only of passing time between novels by John Crowley.” Crowley will read from his new novel, Four Freedoms, out next spring from William Morrow, at the 92nd Street Y. Get your tickets here. They’re only $10 if you’re under 35!