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With the passing yesterday of Bobby Fischer, often recognized as the world's greatest chess player and one of its all-time eccentric, paranoid geniuses, I'd point you to the book I know best on the subject, Bobby Fischer Goes to War, by the team of David Edmonds and John Eidinow. Edmonds and Eidinow have carved out a wonderful niche for themselves of writing brainy and fun histories (Wittgenstein's Poker, Rousseau's Dog) that use a bizarre episode to open a window on an intellectual and cultural world (see the Grownup School list they selected for us on The Enlightenment), and for their second book they chose one of the weirdest and most compelling events in the 20th century, when the equally intricate game theories of the Cold War and international chess intersected in Reykjavik, Iceland, for the 1972 world championship chess match between Fischer and the Soviet Union's Boris Spassky. The drama and sheer nuttiness of that showdown can hardly be underestimated, and Edmonds and Eidinow do a sharp job of balancing the global public story with mundane and idiosyncratic personal details, especially those of life around a brilliant and demanding lunatic. My main memories of the book, in fact, are less of Fischer himself--as memorable as his talents and his behavior were--than of those around him, particularly the gentlemanly Spassky and the patient and forgiving Icelanders who befriended Fischer (and who were perhaps the reason he returned there to live before his death). --Tom

As part of a new feature, I'll be checking in on various writers and asking what's currently on their minds. Think of it as a literary ambush, Amazon-style. Today, it's critically acclaimed fantasy author Sarah Monette, whose creepy-cool The Bone Key features linked stories about a museum archivist who can see ghosts, ghouls, and incubi--a delightful combination of M.R. James and H.P. Lovecraft. She recently collaborated with Elizabeth Bear on A Companion to Wolves. Monette has also written a series of highly praised novels set in the milieu of the strange city of Melusine: Melusine, The Virtu, The Mirador, and the forthcoming Corambis. Her short fiction has been collected in several year's best anthologies. Monette has been thinking about the definition of heroism:

"I just finished reading Ordeal by Hunger: The Story of the Donner Party by George R. Stewart, so I've been thinking a lot about definitions of heroism. Who's eligible to be a 'hero' and why? For Stewart, writing in 1936, action is heroic, and so he focuses on the men and on the relief parties which struggled to cross (and recross) the pass. But what stands out to me, reading his account, is the heroism of the women, especially Tamsen Donner, who died at Donner Lake but could have gotten safely to California if she had been willing to abandon her dying husband. And also the heroism of the children. Half of the Donner Party were under eighteen, and those children's suffering and courage is every bit as real and admirable and tragic as the suffering and courage of the adults. But it's harder to see, because it isn't the heroism of action; it's the heroism of endurance. And action makes for a better story."

It's sure a roundabout way to read about one of your fellow bloggers (although we do live in opposite corners of the country), but via BoingBoing and GalleyCat today I found our own Jeff VanderMeer's lessons-learned from his latest writing project, a commissioned Predator novel (not his usual gig), filed under How to Write a Novel in Two Months. (I should note that he thinks it turned out pretty well). Among my favorite pieces of his eminently practical advice (some learned on the fly, some the fruit of the years of novel-writing that led up to this full-on sprint):

Make sure you support your efforts with sound process decisions. Most of the time, I wrote new scenes in the mornings, revised existing scenes in the afternoons, and spent my evenings on line-edits and rewrites of individual paragraphs here and there. By structuring my time this way, I made better progress than if I’d just focused on doing new scenes all day until the novel was done. Because by the time I’d finished writing the new scenes, most everything up to that point had already then been through a second or even third revision.

Base at least some of your main characters on people you know and really like, BUT make sure they are not people you have spent a lot of time with. I know it sounds paradoxical, but it turned out to be a very effective way for me to generate depth of character, almost like having some of the work done for me, but not all of it. Let me explain. In the novel, there is a character named Horia Ursu, the same name as one of my Romanian editors. Horia is a dear, dear friend who I correspond with via email and who Ann and I have met twice. We have spent perhaps a total of seven days together. I feel very close to him, I admire him greatly, but I don’t know him in the way I know Eric Schaller, for example, who illustrated City of Saints & Madmen. I’ve known Eric for more than a decade and we’ve spent a lot more time together. I could never use “Eric Schaller” as a name to animate a character quickly because I know too many details about his life. With Horia, there is a space there, a lack of knowledge in certain ways, that allowed me to create a very entertaining character in the novel by riffing off of what I did know and then filling in and making up details.

Meanwhile, if you do a little research on Omni you'll see that Jeff hardly disappeared from these pages during the last two months--I'm not sure how he managed to squeeze us in, but glad he did... --Tom

We've introduced, somewhat quietly, a newish feature on the Amazon books pages called Best of the Month. It's an expanded version of the Significant Seven, the monthly editors' picks we started last spring, with more of our favorites highlighted (in the Seven on the Side), former editors' picks now out in paperback, leaderboards for the bestsellers of the month so far, and a very quiet (so far) discussion board (maybe I should say something about Ron Paul there and get things rolling...). We're planning to add a lot more features to the page in coming months: more of our editors' recommendations, but also ways to feature the busiest and most helpful customer reviews and discussions alongside our own. If you have anything you'd like to see on that page, please let us know, either in the discussion board on the page, or right here. We'd like it to become a one-stop shop where you can quickly get a look at the best books being released right now, and the best customer discussion going on on the site now too.

My pick for the Significant Seven this month was Hari Kunzru's My Revolutions.  I'll crib from my comments on the discussion board to say a little about why:

It wasn't the kind of book that I had in mind for months ahead of time (unlike, say, Richard Price's Lush Life, which has been a contender for next month for me since way back in the fall), but I put it in my vacation pile on a whim and it ended up being the one I got caught up in with great pleasure. That made curious my I hadn't heard more about it, since it had been out in the UK for months and Kunzru's first book, The Impressionist, made a giant splash over there. No awards shortlists, not much buzz for this one. And it's not a flashy book, unlike his others (apparently--this is the first of his I've read). But I just found it incredibly well made--nearly every scene and character given their individual, idiosyncratic due. It seems a very grownup book to me--Kunzru is willing to step back and do some old-fashioned realist storytelling and follow character and circumstance where they lead, even in the middle of a flashy tale-of-a-generation plot. It's the kind of story (60s radical reckons with past) that's been told a hundred times recently, but it seemed fresh and authentic to me.

It's not out yet in the US, but if anyone has seen an advance version or read it when it came out in the UK--or has read any of his other work--I'd love to hear what you think. I looked up the UK reviews for it: some thought it was too familiar a story, some felt like I did. David Mattin's rave in The Independent came the closest to my own thinking.

Meanwhile, I also nominated two books for Seven on the Side: Sudhir Venkatesh's Gang Leader for the Day and David Goldblatt's The Ball Is Round: A Global History of Soccer. Venkatesh is the sociologist profiled in one of the best-known chapters in Freakonomics (about the economics of crack dealing)--as a grad student at the University of Chicago, he began spending time at the Robert Taylor Homes, one of Chicago's giant housing projects that have since been leveled, much of it by the side of "JT," the local-leader of a crack-dealing gang called the Black Kings. He's written more academic books about his research into the urban underground economy (like last year's Off the Books), but this is a very non-academic memoir of his seven years of research, and all the political and personal complications it caused. It's in many ways a Chicago version of the Baltimore stories in The Wire, except that Venkatesh comes across as wide-eyed and almost willfully naive compared to David Simon's proud cynicism. (It's as if Det. Pryzbylewski went into academia.)

The Ball Is Round, meanwhile, is a gigantic and fascinating history of a subject that deserves (but has never gotten) such a thing. I expect to be posting a Q&A with the author here before too long, so I'll save further commentary until then.

January was a good month for books, but I think February is looking even better. I'm taking home an armload of candidates for the next Best of the Month tonight: we'll see... --Tom

Michael Moorcock, recently named one of the top 50 British writers of the post-war era, has written just about every kind of fiction you can imagine. That includes cross-temporal detective fiction. Say what? That's right. Cross-temporal detective fiction. In Moorcock's latest, The Metatemporal Detective, Seaton Begg and his constant companion, pathologist Dr “Taffy” Sinclair, both head the secret British Home Office section of the Metatemporal Investigation Department. As the book's dust jacket reveals, "Begg's cases cover a multitude of crimes in dozens of alternate worlds, generally where transport is run by electricity, where the internal combustion engine is unknown, and where giant airships are the chief form of international carrier." But the story is much richer and deeper than that. For example, who is the mysterious Sexton Blake? And why is Zenith the Albino such a compelling character? To get to the bottom of it all, I recently interrogated Mr. Moorcock...

Amazon.com: Why do you persist in mixing genres and ideas and milieus? Why can’t you just stand still every once in awhile?
Michael Moorcock: I'm easily bored. For that reason I usually don't read much genre fiction. I like fiction which precedes genre or when it has begun to parody or otherwise question the tropes.

(The marvelous cover of The Metatemporal Detective, by John Picacio, side-by-side with the original art.)

Amazon.com: Which of the following best describes your metatemporal detective, Seaton Begg (and why): “time-drunk slave to his insatiable appetites”, “linear successor to the hardboiled eccentrics of Dashiell Hammett,” “debonair ladies man who hardly has time out of the sack to solve crimes.”
All of them.

Amazon.com: Does Begg usually get his man, and what’s his relationship to Dr. “Taffy” Sinclair?
Michael Moorcock: Always. Pinocchio to Jiminy Cricket.

Amazon.com: Just why is Zenith the Albino so evil?
Michael Moorcock: He is in no way evil. He is merely misunderstood. Indeed, if you read between the lines, it's obvious that only Zenith could have stopped Hitler's career in many areas of the multiverse. Few know, moreover, that every Christmas Zenith volunteers as Santa Claus and helps many impoverished children. He is usually to be found in a mall in Columbus, Mississippi, which is also where Santa goes to get his catfish dinner before flying back to the North Pole the day after Christmas.

Amazon.com: Tell us a little bit about Sexton Blake, an influence on this book--why was he a boyhood hero?
Michael Moorcock: Blake is the longest-running series detective in publishing history. He appeared in his own weekly magazine (originally called The Union Jack, later Detective Weekly) and from the early 1900s had up to six novel-length stories published a month in The Sexton Blake Library. Other novels appeared in other series from the same publisher and other adventures were serialized in several other weeklies. His adventures also ran as a comic strip for many years in yet another weekly. There were movies and radio serials produced into the 60s and TV series into the 70s. Many famous British writers have had a hand in telling his adventures since the 1880s and Blake stories are still being written. Check out the Blakiana website for more information.

Blake wasn't really a boyhood hero but I loved some of the writers who used him--their writing and their own characters made those stories good (I also read their non-Blake fiction). He was a pretty cardboard character (again, except in certain hands) but Zenith the Albino, Waldo the Wonderman, Huxton Rymer, Mademoiselle Julie, Roxanne, RSV Purvale and various other characters (both heroes and villains) were great...The villains were the ones I liked. This was also true of other juvenile fiction such as Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. Gollum was the only character I liked. I liked the Mervyn Peake Titus trilogy most because of its grotesques and villains, such as Steerpike. That said, the stories in The Metatemporal Detective also include homages to Dashiell Hammett, Clarence E. Mulford (Hopalong Cassidy author), Georges Simenon (creator of Maigret) and Honore de Balzac.

Amazon.com: Is there anything you’ve held back from the book that you’d like to reveal now, to all of those book-hungry Amazon readers?
Michael Moorcock: The strong sexual passion Sir Seaton holds for Rose von Bek and a similar sexual obsession Taffy Sinclair holds for Mrs Una Persson. The clues and "secret stories" are there for the discerning reader to find. But only mature readers will understand what's going on. And I've still to reveal the real name of The Masked Buckaroo. His wonder horse, however, is really called Geoffrey.

For more on these and other topics, you'll just have to pick up the book. --Jeff

Feeding our kids should be simple, right? We've been feeding ourselves for years. How hard can it be to whip up some oatmeal and crush a banana? But everywhere you turn, there's an edict on what they can eat and when (yogurt and cheese at nine months, but no milk until one year--huh?), or how they should drink water (regular cup vs. sippie-cup), or how we need to make sure meal time is enjoyable so the kids don't grow up with food issues.

Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto speaks to one of my biggest anxieties as a new parent--feeding my child.

Talk about food issues, Pollan highlights the pitfalls (or pratfalls) of our culture's obsession with healthy eating. Expanding on his indictment of "nutritionism" from the January 28, 2007 New York Times Magazine, he presents tidbits of recent studies and statistics that range from the absurd (like how lobbyists manage to keep the acceptable level of free sugars in the U.S. diet at 25 percent of daily calories, despite the World Health Organization's recommended limit of 10 percent) to the downright embarrassing, like this statement from a 2001 study: "It has now been recognized that the low-fat campaign has been based on little scientific evidence and may have caused unintended health consequences." Oops.

Such factoids are entertaining (or disturbing, depending on what you've been eating), but what really comes in handy is Pollan's list of easy-to-remember guidelines like, "Avoid food products that make healthy claims" and "Don't eat anything that your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food." It's a great philosophical companion to helpful yet overwhelmingly detailed parenting staples like Super Baby Food.

Will In Defense of Food do for the local food movement what An Inconvenient Truth did for environmentalism? Maybe. I don't know. I do know that this book that never once mentions parenting or children is one of the best parenting guides I've found so far on the subject of food.

(For a quick NYT Book Review excerpt, see Old Media Monday, January 8.)--Heidi