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 Weekly Words about Books
April 6, 2014
Hot Off the Paperback Presses and On Indie Shelves

Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity by Katherine Boo. This unflinching documentation of poverty in India is also a book loaded with humanity and gorgeous writing. Boo is a staff writer at The New Yorker and a former reporter and editor for The Washington Post whose reporting has earned her both  a Pulitzer Prize and a MacArthur Genius grant. This is her first book, and what a wallop her debut provides. She casts her keen reporter's eye on the stark lives of the inhabitants of Annawadi, a slum across from Mumbai's Sahar Airport, to
reveal the wrenching inequality and urban poverty still endemic in India's democracy. Among the myriad reviewer raves last year when the book was published in hardcover was this in The New York Times:
 "[An] exquisitely accomplished first book. Novelists dream of defining characters this swiftly and beautifully, but Ms. Boo is not a novelist. She is one of those rare, deep-digging journalists who can make truth surpass fiction, a documentarian with a superb sense of human drama. She makes it very easy to forget that this book is the work of a reporter. . . . Comparison to Dickens is not unwarranted."
- Janet Maslin, The New York Times


The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer. The summer that Nixon resigns, six teenagers at a summer camp for the arts become inseparable and, with purposeful irony, dub themselves The Interestings. Decades later the bond  remains powerful, but so much else has changed. Wolitzer follows these New York-based friends from the height of youth through middle age, as their talents, fortunes, and degrees of satisfaction diverge. She knows how to tell a good story, to be sure, but Wolitzer's real gift is in creating contemporary characters that are real and believable - both as teenagers and grown adults. For fans of Jonathan Franzen and Jefferey Eugenides, whose writings Wolitzer's have been favorably compared to, this should be a literary treat.


The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England
by Dan Jones. This made a somewhat surprising appearance on the national independent bestseller list in its first week out in paperback, proving that British royalty and English history continue to have wide appeal. The powerful Plantagenets aren't as well-known to most as, say, the Tudors, but they were the longest-reigning English royal dynasty, ruling for more than two centuries. Through noted historian Jones, readers meet the captivating Eleanor of Aquitaine, twice queen and the most famous woman in Christendom; her son, Richard the Lionheart, and King John, a tyrant who was forced to sign Magna Carta, which formed the basis of our own Bill of Rights.
The Plantagenet reign, which stretched 300 years, covered some of the most tumultuous and fascinating periods of British history, including the Crusades, the Black Death, and the Hundred Years War, and Jones brings it to life in entertaining and accessible fashion.
The Funny Business
Of Cartoons  
How About Never - Is Never Good for You?: My Life in Cartoons by Bob Mankoff. The cartoon editor at The New Yorker (since 1997), and himself a cartoonist, Mankoff offers up a memorable backstage pass to the inner workings of the magazine and his role in selecting a handful of funny captioned drawings from the 1000 or so submitted each week. He also describes his own beginnings as a cartoonist and the struggle to break into the big time. Mankoff studied psychology before devoting his life to humor, and he devotes some time in the book to analyzing what makes people laugh - and what doesn't.

I'm no shrink, but believe me, this memoir will make you laugh - and you don't have to be a New Yorker reader to enjoy it, although a sense of humor is probably a good idea. By the way, the book's title is taken from what Mankoff considers his most popular creation - a businessman talking into a telephone while looking at his appointment book, who says, "No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?"


WHERE TO FIND 
AN INDEPENDENT BOOKSTORE
Many of you already have a favorite local bookstore, but for those of you without such a relationship, this link will take you to a list of Northern California indie bookstores by region.
 
If you live or work elsewhere, you can click here to find the nearest indie bookstore by simply entering your postal code. 

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A LITTLE BIT ABOUT ME
My name is Hut Landon. I'm a former bookstore owner who now runs the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association (NCIBA) in San Francisco.

My goal with this newsletter is to keep readers up to date about new books hitting the shelves, share what booksellers are recommending in their stores, and pass on occasional news about the book world.

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