Review This Online

As you may have noticed, the banner photo at the top of Omnivoracious is not just a generic bookshelf but, as you can see from the link below it on the right, mine. You can click through there (or here) to see an almost complete list of the books on the shelf. And better yet, you can submit your own bookshelf photo for us to feature in a coming week: just send the jpg to banner@omnivoracious.com.

But back to me--it's still my turn at the top! I picked this shelf not so much because of the books on it but because a) it's right by a window and gets the best light in my house, and b) it demonstrates, imperfectly, my bibliographic system, of which I am quite proud. How do you sort your books at home? I've tried plenty of systems (by author, by date of publication (cool but a pain to maintain), by color (big mistake--I put all the reds together and made myself queasy with all the colors that just barely didn't match)--but the basic one I've settled on for years is alphabetical by title. It's simple but capable of surprises. You always know where to file a book, and usually where to find one (unless you forget the title), but there's still a nice mix of randomness to the arrangement that makes me feel in control but not too oppressed by order. I especially like the juxtapositions that pop up by chance or by affinity: The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas next to The Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie, Middlemarch next to Middlesex.

This shelf finds us at the beginning of S, with a typical mix of books from my time as our Amazon.ca editor (Sacre Blues, The Shadow Boxer, Shooting the Stars), leftovers from grad school (A Short History of Reconstruction, The Signifying Monkey) and undergrad--both mine (Shame, Seven Plays, Rhinoceros) and my wife's (Showings, Sir Gawain)--and just general acquisitions, both read (Rock Springs, The Shipping News, The Secret Lives of Citizens, The Slave), half-read (Scratches, Sixty Stories) and not-yet-read (Secrets, The Shell Collector, Slaves in the Family). And one that didn't get linked to on the shelf list because it's not available on Amazon.com (or any other Amazon site): Il sistema periodico, the original Italian version of Primo Levi's The Periodic Table. I haphazardly collect foreign language editions of favorite books, so the few times I've been out of the country I've come home with a stack of books I can't read.

What's missing are my very favorite books, a few hundred of which I moved into a room of their own when I reclaimed a small room off our bedroom from my ex-infants. Some books that got promoted from this alphabetical section: Mavis Gallant's Selected Stories, William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity (love that cover!), Hermann Broch's The Sleepwalkers. What does it say about me that I put the last two in the favorites room without having read them? I don't think I'm showing off (except maybe to myself), since nobody else goes in that room. I guess they are books that I love because I haven't read them yet, but like to imagine having a spare month to, some time. Don't you have books like that?  I'm sure this guy does.

Meanwhile, what are my favorites of the ones that got left on this shelf? I'd pick Eric Foner's A Short History of Reconstruction, which I read at the beginning of grad school and which turned a empty patch in my knowledge of American history into the period I spent most of the next six years trying to figure out, and also I.B. Singer's The Slave, which I read so long ago I remember almost nothing about it except how much I liked it, and Steven Heighton's The Shadow Boxer, a Canadian novel that impressed me most for making the very very familiar writer-coming-of-age story into something fresh.

We'd love to see your shelves, and hear your stories about them, so please send photos from home or office (or some vacation house or friend's apartment--the bookshelves are always the first place I gravitate when I enter someplace new). I'm not sure there's anything book-geekier than comparing filing systems, but I'll cop to that pleasure in a second. We have a few more in-house shelves lined up to post, but if we run out and don't get any from you, I'm afraid we'll just have to move on to the Ts, and you've already heard way too much from me already... --Tom

New York Times:

• Sunday Book Review cover ("The Music Issue"): Geoff Dyer on The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century by Alex Ross: "'The Rest Is Noise' is a work of immense scope and ambition. The idea is not simply to conduct a survey of 20th-century classical composition but to come up with a history of that century as refracted through its music.... With its key figures reappearing like motifs in a symphony, 'The Rest Is Noise' is a considerable feat of orchestration and arrangement. So much so that at times history itself seems bent on playing into Ross's hands."
• Stephen King on Clapton: An Autobiography by Eric Clapton: "Most A.A. meetings begin with the chairman offering his qualifications at the head table next to the coffee maker. This qualification is more commonly known in the program as the drunkalogue. It's a good word, with its suggestions of inebriated travel, and it certainly fits Eric Clapton's account of his life. 'Clapton' is nothing so literary as a memoir, but its dry, flat-stare honesty makes it a welcome antidote to the macho fantasies of recovery served up by James Frey in 'A Million Little Pieces.'"
• Stephanie Zacharek on Wonderful Tonight: George Harrison, Eric Clapton, and Me by Pattie Boyd: "'Wonderful Tonight' ... is a charming, lively and seductive book... Boyd seems like a real person who happened to be lucky enough to live shoulder to shoulder with rock deities. The prose is clear and unpretentious, and although she writes candidly about the pain her husbands' infidelities caused her ... this isn't a bitter tell-all screed."
• Jennifer Egan on Matrimony by Joshua Henkin: "Where coming-of-age novels tend to wave goodbye as their protagonists sally over the threshold to adulthood, Henkin hangs in long after that, tracking his characters for almost 20 years, into their mid-30s, when the weight of their adulthood can be truly felt. It's a coming-of-middle-age novel."
• Janet Maslin on The Snake Stone by Jason Goodwin: "To Mr. Goodwin's credit he manages to develop such a large and exotic cast of characters that the human intrigue in the series trumps its much-flaunted expertise. As it revels in Istanbul as a place 'positively overrun with mountebanks, schemers and dealers of every nationality, and none,' this sinuous novel corrals as many of these operators as it can and then sets them to work hoodwinking one another."

Washington Post:

• Michael Dirda on War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy: "'Some day,' nearly all serious readers say to themselves, 'I really should sit down and start War and Peace.' For many of us, though, that day never quite comes.... But a fine new translation, especially one by the widely acclaimed team of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, offers an opportunity to see this great classic afresh, to approach it not as a monument (or mausoleum) but rather as a deeply touching story about our contradictory human hearts."

Los Angeles Times:

• Heller McAlpin on The Principles of Uncertainty by Maira Kalman: "'The Principles of Uncertainty' is an irresistible book, a graphic diary full of whimsy, worries, philosophical probing, offbeat observations and life-affirming enthusiasms.... Her paintbrush reveals as much agility as her mind, ranging from the flattened, childlike primitives of her dozen children's books to Matissean pink-infused still lifes and penetrating portraiture. Her draftsmanship is remarkable; she captures architectural interiors with the panache of a set designer."

Globe & Mail:

• Melanie Little on The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History by Katherine Ashenburg: "Rather than strangle the meaning from her anecdotes and examples the way my grandmother could wring every last droplet from a washcloth, Ashenburg is content to let the rich material she's amassed speak for itself. Reading this book, as a result, feels more like participating in a stimulating conversation than attending a lecture. And who doesn't like talking about the strange, telling hygiene habits of others?"

Times Literary Supplement:

• Carolyne Larrington on The Death of Socrates by Emily Wilson: "Wilson has written a sprightly and illuminating account of the events surrounding Socrates' execution by means of a self-administered drink of hemlock.... Wilson shows very clearly how Socrates' strangeness, his notorious ugliness, and his practice of a profession normally associated with foreigners, all combined to make him a troubling figure for the ordinary Athenian."

The New Yorker:

• Elizabeth Kolbert on Zoom: The Global Race to Fuel the Car of the Future by Iain Carson and Vijay V. Vaitheeswaran: "Carson ... and Vaitheeswaran ... are 'techno-optimists,' as opposed to the 'eco-pessimists' they sometimes deride. Yet their argument rests on an account of global trends that is nothing short of terrifying.... Were China and India to increase their rates of car ownership to the point where per-capita oil consumption reached just half of American levels, the two countries would burn through a hundred million additional barrels a day. (Currently, total global oil use is eighty-six million barrels a day.)"

--Tom

New York Times Bestseller George R.R. Martin's Dreamsongs, consisting of collected fiction with copious story notes, is being published by Bantam in two volumes, the first now and the second in late November. Well before the success of his current heroic fantasy series, Martin was known for classic tales like "Sandkings," "Night Flyers," and "The Pear-Shaped Man." Having a selection of his stories in this two-volume set is an over-abundance of treasures. Fans and new readers alike should enjoy these sometimes horrific, sometimes moving, and always intelligent fictions. Recently, Martin took time out of his busy schedule to talk to me about Dreamsongs.

Amazon.com: How do you think you’ve changed as a short story writer over the years?

George R.R. Martin: Like any writer, I'd like to think I've gotten better. I know I've gotten longer.  In the early part of my career, I wrote nothing but short stories.  A novella like "A Song for Lya" seemed like an immensely long work to me, and I was so intimidated by novels that I did not complete one until six years into my career.  The me of 1972 would be astonished by these massive tomes that the me of 2007 is writing. Longer stories allow for more complex plots, deeper characterization, more nuanced examinations of the themes you're wrestling with, etc.  But there is something to be said for the clean, sweet simplicity of a good short story.  I wish I had the time to do more.

Amazon.com: Is this all of your published short fiction or did you leave some pieces out?

George R.R. Martin: This collection was intended as a retrospective of my career, so I wanted to include samples of all the different sorts of things I've written--SF, fantasy, horror, various hybrids of same, my Tuf series and my Wild Cards series, some teleplays from my Hollywood years, even some juvenilia from my days as a high school kid writing superhero "text stories" for the fanzines.  And of course it has all my award winners, and most of my award losers.  All of which makes it a huge collection, which is why Bantam is publishing it in two volumes.  Even so, we had to leave lots of stuff out. 

Amazon.com: “Sand Kings” was a huge influence on me as a young writer voraciously wolfing down story collections and fiction anthologies. It’s also clearly a classic story by this point. Did you have a sense when writing it that it was going to be something special?

George R.R. Martin: Heh.  Actually, no, not at all.  I talk about this in the commentary in Dreamsongs.  At the time I wrote "Sandkings" I was teaching at a small Catholic girl's college in Dubuque, Iowa. I did most of my writing over summer vacations, and during the Christmas and spring breaks.  The winter break in 1978-79 was especially productive for me, and I finished three stories in three weeks--"The Ice Dragon," "The Way of Cross and Dragon," and "Sandkings." If you had visited me the week after I completed the last of those, I would have told you that "Sandkings" was the weakest of the three.  I mean, I thought it was okay, mind you... but it was "The Ice Dragon" that I felt was really special. All three stories have done very well for me over the years, mind you, but "Sandkings" has become far and away the most successful short story I ever wrote.  It has earned me more than several of my novels, and until A Song of Fire and Ice it was the single thing that I was best known for.  So maybe it's true that an author is the worst judge of his work.

Amazon.com: Do you have a personal favorite or favorites in the collection?

George R.R. Martin: A bunch of them, for different reasons.  "Second Kind of Loneliness" was a breakthrough story for me, both personally and commercially.  "A Song for Lya" was my first novella, my first Hugo winner, the most ambitious story I had attempted to that point.  The aforementioned "Ice Dragon," which I still feel is one of my best crafted stories.  "The Hedge Knight," which introduced Dunk & Egg.  And "Portraits of His Children," which comes last in the book for good reason.

Amazon.com: Are you currently working on any short fiction?

George R.R. Martin: The third Dunk & Egg novella... although I've had to put that aside for the moment while I try to finish A Dance With Dragons.  I do intent to contribute a Dying Earth story to the Vance anthology [I'm co-editing], of course, and I have been noodling a few ideas for that one.

--Jeff