swimming freestyle

Salon's Summer Reading List

Salon recommends the following summer reads:



"Hold Tight" by Harlan Coben


 

                                           "The Forgery of Venus" by Michael Gruber







 "Child 44" by Tom Rob Smith



                                                         "Obedience" by Will Lavender    
                                                                                                        





"Losing You" by Nicci French

The Pulitzers

The Pulitzer Prizes for Letters, Drama and Music were announced today.

HISTORY: DANIEL WALKER HOWE
"What Hath God Wrought: the Transformation of America, 1815-1848"
FINALISTS "Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power" by Robert Dallek and "The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War" by the late David Halberstam.

BIOGRAPHY: JOHN MATTESON
"Eden's Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father"
FINALISTS "The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein" by Martin Duberman and "The Life of Kingsley Amis" by Zachary Leader.

FICTION: JUNOT DIAZ
"The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao"
FINALISTS "Tree of Smoke" by Denis Johnson and "Shakespeare’s Kitchen" by Lore Segal.

GENERAL NONFICTION: SAUL FRIEDLANDER
"The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945"
FINALISTS "The Cigarette Century" by Allan Brandt and "The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century" by Alex Ross.

DRAMA: TRACY LETTS
"August: Osage County"
FINALISTS "Yellow Face" by David Henry Hwang and "Dying City" by Christopher Shinn.

POETRY: ROBERT HASS AND PHILIP SCHULTZ
"Time and Materials," by Robert Hass and "Failure," by Philip Schultz
FINALIST "Messenger: New and Selected Poems, 1976-2006" by Ellen Bryant Voigt.

MUSIC: DAVID LANG
"The Little Match Girl Passion"
FINALISTS "Meanwhile" by Stephen Hartke and "Concerto for Viola" by Roberto Sierra.

SPECIAL CITATIONS: BOB DYLAN

The Omnivores Dilemma Redux

Absolutely, the most influential book I've read in the last several years is Michael Pollan's "The Omnivores Dilemma".  The book, published in 2006, was a study of America's industrial food systems.  But things are already changing:

The first third of "Omnivore" explains how the American way of food is linked to the historic steady decline (with a couple of upward blips) in corn prices over the last century. Farmers have been caught in a remorseless bind. Whenever the price of corn declines, they are forced to grow even more to pay their bills, which in turn only depresses prices further. Add to that mix the Nixon-era rejiggering of corn subsidies that de facto encouraged farmers to produce even more, while further depressing corn prices, and you end up with a society overwhelmed with far more corn than it knows what to do with. But American food capitalists are nothing if not innovative. So: high fructose corn syrup, ethanol, cattle feed. Corn, broken down into scores of chemical constituents, became a primary building block for processed food of all descriptions. If one had to choose one sentence to sum up "Omnivore," it might be: Our diet sucks, because corn is too cheap.

Except, of course, now corn isn't cheap at all -- it's $5 a bushel (up from $2 at the beginning of 2006). Livestock owners are outraged, and food security in the developing world is the new rallying cry for activists of all persuasions. The price of food is once again a political issue. In the space of barely 18 months we've gone from a scenario in which American farmers routinely overproduced to one in which they can't possibly produce enough to satisfy demand. The prospect of this coming to pass is never even hinted at by Pollan. Indeed, one could almost imagine him applauding, if he had been told when "Omnivore" was originally published that two years later the beef industry would be screaming bloody murder about how ethanol had forced the cost of cattle feed sky-high. Fantastic news! Cows were never designed to eat corn! High fructose corn syrup isn't healthy!. Make corn more expensive, and maybe Americans will be a little less obese.

Salon's Best Books of 2007

Fiction:
"The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" by Junot Díaz
"Sacred Games" by Vikram Chandra"
"Then We Came to the End" by Joshua Ferris
"Tree of Smoke" by Denis Johnson
"The Yiddish Policeman's Union" by Michael Chabon

Nonfiction:
"The Father of All Things" by Tom Bissell
"Gertrude Bell: Queen of the Desert, Shaper of Nations" by Georgina Howell
"Legacy of Ashes: A History of the CIA" by Tim Weiner
"The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved" by Judith Freeman
"The World Without Us" by Alan Weisman

Amazon's Best Books of 2007

1.  "A Thousand Splendid Suns"  Khaled Hosseini
2.  "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao"  Junot Diaz
3.  "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows"  J.K. Rowling
4.  "The World Without Us"  Alan Weisman
5.  "The Dangerous Book for Boys"  Conn Iggulden
6.  "Heartsick"  Chelsea Cain
7.  "Tree of Smoke"  Denis Johnson
8.  "A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier"  Ishmael Beah
9.  "Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance"  Atul Gawande
10. "I Am America (And So Can You!)  Stephen Colbert

The Fun Begins

I love lists, particularly Top Ten Lists. 

New York Times Top Ten Books of 2007:

Fiction:
     - "Man Gone Down"  Michael Thomas
     - "Out Stealing Horses"  Per Petterson
     - "The Savage Detectives"  Roberto Bolano
     - "Then We Came To The End"  Joshua Ferris
     - "Tree Of Smoke"  Denis Johnson

Nonfiction:
     - "Imperical Life In The Emerald City"  Rajiv Chandrasekaran
     - "Little Heathens"  Mildred Armstrong Kalish
     - "The Nine"  Jeffrey Toobin
     - "The Ordeal Of Elizabeth Marsh"  Linda Colley
     - "The Rest Is Noise"  Alex Ross

National Book Awards 2007

I would like to expand the blog.  To that end, the following are the winners of the recently announced 2007 National Book Awards:

FICTION

WINNER: Denis Johnson, Tree of Smoke (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) - Interview Mischa Berlinski, Fieldwork (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) - Interview Lydia Davis, Varieties of Disturbance (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) - Interview Joshua Ferris, Then We Came to the End (Little, Brown & Company) - Interview Denis Johnson, Tree of Smoke (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) - Interview Jim Shepard, Like You’d Understand, Anyway (Alfred A. Knopf) - Interview Fiction judges: Francine Prose (chair), Andrew Sean Greer, Walter Kirn, David Means, and Joy Williams.

NONFICTION

WINNER: Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (Doubleday) - Interview Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I’m Dying (Alfred A. Knopf) - Interview Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (Twelve/Hachette Book Group USA) - Interview Woody Holton, Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution (Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux) - Interview Arnold Rampersad, Ralph Ellison: A Biography (Alfred A. Knopf) - Interview Nonfiction judges: David Shields (chair), Deborah Blum, Caroline Elkins, Annette Gordon-Reed, and James Shapiro.

POETRY

WINNER: Robert Hass, Time and Materials (Ecco/HarperCollins) - Interview Linda Gregerson, Magnetic North (Houghton Mifflin Company) - Interview David Kirby, The House on Boulevard St. (Louisiana State University Press) - Interview Stanley Plumly, Old Heart (W.W. Norton & Company) - Interview Ellen Bryant Voigt, Messenger: New and Selected Poems 1976-2006 (W.W. Norton & Company) - Interview Poetry Judges: Charles Simic (chair), Linda Bierds, David St. John, Vijay Seshadri, and Natasha Trethewey.

YOUNG PEOPLE'S LITERATURE

WINNER: Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (Little, Brown & Company) - Interview Kathleen Duey, Skin Hunger: A Resurrection of Magic, Book One (Atheneum Books for Young Readers) - Interview M. Sindy Felin, Touching Snow (Atheneum Books for Young Readers) - Interview Brian Selznick, The Invention of Hugo Cabret (Scholastic Press) - Interview Sara Zarr, Story of a Girl (Little, Brown & Company) - Interview Young People’s Literature Judges: Elizabeth Partridge (chair), Pete Hautman, James Howe, Patricia McCormick, and Scott Westerfeld.