Remember Me Like This

Remember Me Like This has, for some reason, the feel of a thriller. Maybe it’s the pace of the writing or the fact that I didn’t want put it down (I read it in two sittings). But, it’s not a really a thriller and it certainly isn’t a typical guilty pleasure that we sometimes look forward to blowing through over a weekend and then promptly forget about the next day. No, Bret Anthony Johnston has written a beautiful, pitch perfect novel that will stay with you for a long time.

Four years after Justin’s disappearance from a small Texas town he is reunited with his family. There have been plenty of books written about this topic but they usually stop here where the family is reunited, the book is tied up neatly with a clear happy ending.  But Remember Me Like This essentially begins with the return of a 16 year old boy to his family. Johnson takes us beyond that typical happy ending and we see that this is only the beginning for this family. Complicating matters(and this is not a spoiler), Justin has been living only miles away the entire four years, a fact that haunts not only his parents but Justin as well. 

I loved this book because it never really takes the easy way out and  the author respects the reader enough to know we don't need everything spelled out for us, and like life, the endings aren't tidy. I highly recommend this for your book group. 

Summer Reading: Waiting for Columbus

It's not a sales conference dinner without
dozens of glasses on the table at the end of the night.

(Liz) As I mentioned in my last post, I spent last week attending sales conference at the Random House offices in New York.  One of the cooler things about conference is a dinner with reps and editors.  For nerdy book types, editors can become celebrities themselves.  You know what a Steven Spielberg movie is, and a Martin Scorsese, and a Christopher Nolan, and a Penny Marshall, right?  I know what a Robin Desser book is, and I tend to read, for example, Robin Desser new books because I've previously loved the books she's edited.  (There's a good chance you know what a Robin Desser book is, too, and you just don't know it.  She's edited Cutting for Stone, The Emperor's Children, Please Look After Mom, Wild.  She's edited Jhumpa Lahiri, David Guterson, A.S. Byatt, Jane Smiley, and Sandra Cisneros.)  Editors are the directors of the book world and their tastes emerge in the books they choose to champion.

So last week I sat at a table with Gerry Howard who edits Fight Club author Chuck Pahlaniuk, and Jenny Jackson who bought us Maine by J. Courtney Sullivan and the forthcoming (and amazing) Dog Stars by Peter Heller, and Allison Callahan who edited Ann Patchett before coming to Doubleday and The Night Circus, one of our favorite books of 2011.  While talking to Alison Callahan, I mentioned one of my favorite books she edited, Thomas Trofimuk's Waiting for Columbus.  This book came out a couple of years ago during a fall season with some huge books by authors like Margaret Atwood and Jonathan Lethem.  Alison was and remains passionate about this book, and I know that many of my colleagues loved it too.

Night Circus author Erin Morgenstern
and editor Alison Callahan

One of the frustrating parts of our jobs is that we necessarily have to focus on new books.  We strategize for months on the best ways to position new books when selling them to our bookstore buyers.  We don't, however, have as much time to focus on the thousands of older books that deserve reader love.  If there were any justice in book sales, Waiting for Columbus would sit atop the paperback bestseller lists next to Cutting for Stone and The Kite Runner and every book group in the country would add it to their reading lists, and Alison Callahan, who is a lovely person and great lover of books, would have a belated but worthy bestseller to celebrate.  This pick for summer reading, therefore, is my feeble attempt to begin to spread the word about this great book that almost no one read.

Waiting for Columbus is the story of Christopher Columbus, a man who washes up on shore near Barcelona on the Spanish coast.  He's naked...and he's claiming to be Columbus the explorer even though it's the 21st Century.  Unsurprisingly, Columbus finds himself in a Barcelona mental institution, where he refuses to engage with his psychiatrist and also, well, refuses to wear clothes.  (There's some humor here, see?)  One of the nurses, Consuela, takes a special interest in Columbus because he tells her his stories of wooing the queen in order to fund his expedition to the new world.  Obviously this man isn't the real Christopher Columbus, but who he is and how he ended up inside this asylum is a great mystery that engages Consuela and the reader alike.  Madness, identity, history, the treatment of mental health patients, the bond between nurse and patient, family, nudity (heh), and memory--this is a great book that begs for great conversations.

Holy crap, I love this book.  Have you read it?  Do so, and then let me know what you think.  Spread the word, too.  We have the power to make a bestseller; crazier things have happened.  And then keep an eye out for the next Alison Callahan book.  She edits some terrific ones.

Summer Reading 2012: Gone Girl

(Gianna)
I know you. You are just like Liz when it comes to your summer reading. You want love: you want a bit of sex, wrapped in a bit more violence, with just a touch of regret, and a few tears. And if it’s a weekend…you want a vampire thrown in for good measure (and you know what I mean by good measure, right ladies!). [Is she talking about another Liz here? I just read a novel about an old man dying of cancer and coping with his regrets. I don't remember any vampires.] And you know, we can suggest books like that by the truckload [no we can't], but for fun we thought this summer we would suggest some books a bit higher on the literary ladder.

I am going to start with what I think is going to be the book of the season, and the one book you really will not be able to put down.  Yep, Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn will be the best book you read this summer, I promise. It has everything that our beloved Liz likes in her books: sex, lies, twists, and turns, and plenty of vampires. Okay no vampires, but you don’t really want vampires anyway. Stop saying you do, you don’t! [Gianna has pneumonia right now.  She may be delirious.]

Author Gillian Flynn. There's a twisted mind inside
that head.  Excellent.

Gone Girl is incredibly well written (fans of Dan Chaon and Kate Atkinson alike will not be disappointed), and while Dark Places was fantastic, and Sharp Objects was truly original…this one is better. This is it; this is the book you want to have your summer affair with. But you know, treat it right, and bring it to the beach or home for the weekend to meet your parents.  

One last thing; you will want to talk about this book to anyone who will listen, but you sort of can’t lest you spoil it. My advice is to buy two copies, one for you and one for the person who will ditch a day of work with you to dissect this read.  You should always have a friend like that. 

[I loved this book too. It's the Scott Peterson trial mixed with Double Indemnity.  And Gillian Flynn owns a fat cat and likes to write about twisted, dark women.  My kind of author.]

Your Mission, Should You Choose to Accept It...

It's summer reading season, and we're going to be featuring some of our top recommendations though out the month.  As far as we're concerned summer reading should be: A) engaging, sink-into-a-story reading, and B) cheap.  If you're taking a book to a beach, you don't want to risk getting sand in the binding of the autographed, first edition of Proust.  I'm pretty sure that Gianna rubs all beach books in the sea life that washes onto shore just for the hell of it.  This is why I don't go to the beach with her.

First up, Ready Player One by Ernie Cline.  It's new in paperback this week, and the book is just plain fun.  Ernie is the biggest geek you'll ever meet, and he's happy to talk to any and everyone about 80's pop trivia and classic video games.  He loves them.  Ernie's love is evident in his novel, too.

A futuristic tale with a decidedly retro twist, Ready Player One is the story of Wade, an overweight, unattractive, poor kid who spends all of his free time looking for the Easter Eggs left by the eccentric, Bill Gates-esque, billionaire who passed away.  For the undorky, Easter Eggs are hidden clues buried in games that take you to special features, places, etc, within the game.  The billionaire in Ready Player One was obsessed with 80's lore, so amid the virtual reality worlds he created are send-ups to his favorite 80's games, movies, and culture.  You'll never watch War Games the same way again, I promise.  Find the Easter Eggs and beat the challenges, win the money.  Years go by, though, and the scoreboard remains blank until the day that Wade finds the first clue....

Ernie and his car

Ready Player One is a book that sucks you in, the same way that the original Legend of Zelda hooked us long ago, when it was too hot to play outside.  I still have my original NES and all of the games, and when I bought a Wii a couple of years ago, one of the first things I did was purchase a bunch of classic games--Super Mario Bros 1-3, Zelda, Galaga, Rygar, Final Fantasy I.  If you ever wished for a quest along the lines of The Neverending Story, or dreamed of playing "Thermonuclear War" with JOSHUA from War Games, or loved your Atari, you are going to love this book.

Need an added incentive to read it?  Okay.  Here's the bonus.  Ernie Cline bought a DeLorean with his advance money from Ready Player One.  Now he's revealed that he hid an Easter Egg in the print versions of his book (both hardcover and paperback), and the person who finds the egg and successfully completes his/her own quest will also win a DeLorean.  You can drive 88 mph and just dare a cop to pull you over.  I recommend doing so on Gianna's street, since there are always cops over there.  Win the car and I'll give you Gianna's address.

Ernie's car, Ecto88

And while I have no idea if the Easter Egg is buried in the audio edition, I want to give a shout out to it as well.  If you've got a book this jubilantly geeky, is there any question whatsoever who should read the audio book should be?  That's right--Wil Wheaton.  Love him.  This was one of two favorite audio books from last year (the other was Tina Fey's Bossypants).  Wil Wheaton was destined to read this book.  It's delightful.

Here's the video of Ernie explaining his Easter Egg contest:

Great Books Coming Soon

[Liz writing:]  So my life has been a little crazy with the Gianna leaving Random House and then the travel season leading me to tornado zones...and flood zones...and fire zones (my territory butts up to the gates of hell), and yet still 238 people visited our little blog last month.  It begs the question, "How bored are the various web-surfers of the world???"  Anyway, we're getting back into the swing of things and I'm sure that we'll have more Gianna antics soon since it's too hot in Texas to wear proper clothing right now.  Since we haven't posted anything lately, though, we thought we'd catch you up some of the new releases just out or coming soon.

The Devil All the Time is one of the most disturbing books I've ever read...and I loved it.  Donald Ray Pollock burst onto the literary scene a few years ago with his short story collection Knockemstiff, and his new novel traverses the same down-on-its-luck landscape.  Fans of Dan Chaon's Await Your Reply, Flannery O'Connor, and Cormac McCarthy should love this story of religious zealots and serial killers and one boy maneuvering between a moral life and the life to which he seems destined when his mother dies despite his father's ritual sacrifices.  If you're intrigued by a the image of a man and his son kneeling at a prayer log in the woods night and day, surrounded by crosses and the ground covered in the blood sacrifices they've offered God, praying for a miracle to save the boy's mother, this book is for you.  It's not for the feint of heart, but I loved every page.  The Devil All the Time goes on sale July 12th.

Summer is blockbuster season in the book world as well as Hollywood.  This year the Robopocalypse is coming.  Think about it--EVERYTHING in our modern world is controlled by computers, and in Daniel Wilson's thriller, the end of the world is upon us when a scientist crosses the threshold from smart technology to thinking technology and a computer named ARCHOS begins to take over the world.  A computer virus goes out to all of those phones and cars and computers and toasters out there and no one is safe.  Imagine you're driving down the highway in your Prius and suddenly the computer in your car steers you into a wall.  And that computer in the air traffic control tower?  It decides that smacking planes into each other would be a great way to dispose of a few hundred humans.  And you receive a call on your cell phone telling you to rush home because your child is sick...except that the call is computer-generated and luring you toward an untimely end.  A group of intrepid humans begin to fight back.... If you liked The Matrix and the movie version of Minority Report, you'll welcome the Robopocalypse; in fact, Steven Spielberg optioned the rights to the robo-thriller before Daniel Wilson had even finished writing his novel.

[And now a word from Gianna....]

I left Random House a few months ago to work for UT Press so I won't be writing about Random House books anymore trust me! Except …. this one time.

Vaclav and Lena by Haley Tanner: I don’t want to over sell this but, if you miss reading this novel… well you will end up ruining your summer. Seriously. No, wait…I will ruin your summer (threats are better).

This is an amazing love story about two young Russian immigrants living in Brooklyn--Vaclav dreams of becoming a famous magician and Lena will be his lovely assistant--and then she is taken away, suddenly and without warning. The story is filled with an almost fairy tale quality, the writing is so pitch perfect (and by pitch perfect please just pick the book up and read the first few pages of the grade school Vaclav and Lena going through their magic routine…the Russian accents are wonderful). It really is a perfect book.

Okay so one more Random House book and that’s it, seriously –

The Storm at the Door by Stefan Merrill Block

I am not going to make a huge deal about this book. I am not going to make a fool of myself like I did with Story of Forgetting. I mean I really think people thought I lost my mind I talked about that book so much (by the way I totally lost my mind because of that book)[She's right; she's crazy. And she never shut up about that book]. Okay. Story of Forgetting was very good. It was excellent. This book is better. It’s more mature and the writing is better. It’s heartbreaking, in fact. Like Stefan’s first book this novel is based in part on his family (his grandparents' marriage) which makes it all the more interesting. Think Revolutionary Road. Yes, it is that good. He will be at BookPeople on July 12th. Give him some love – he is amazing.

So that’s it for me and Random House. I won’t be writing about RH titles anymore! Was that more or less believable than Congressman Weiner’s “certitude” comment? [Less.  And Gianna has sent me some incriminating pics in her time....]

Bright’s Passage by Josh Ritter

I love this fucking book. (And let that be a quote on any jacket – it's called class). I read this book in a fury of passion. I would not put it down; everything else could wait. The story of Henry Bright (and what can only be described as his journey) is so vivid, beautiful, funny, and passionate…ahhh I sound crazy already. Anyway it will stay with you long after the novel ends. It is as haunting as it is luminous (and Liz…. I never say that about a book do I? In fact when someone calls a book luminous I run, but don’t run because I never use that word!) [We make fun of people who use the word 'luminous' to describe books.  Does it glow in the dark?  Doubtful.  This is a very good book though.] This small book has so much going for it: set during the First World War, a battle between good and evil, it's only $22, and of course it's a love story. It’s a first novel to be sure, but my God what a wonderful novel. [I think I am Gianna's God.] Oh and be on the look out – Ritter is on tour (hint hint).

These 3 books will appear on my year end list…I just know it….damn lists.