Lemuria Bookstore Blog

Point Omega by Don DeLillo.  I talked to Nan about it on Saturday, and she said that along with Coetzee’s new one, Summertime, she considers Point Omega to be one of the most important novels she’s read in some time.

Excerpted from the New York Times Book Review article, “A Wrinkle in Time,” by Geoff Dyer:

The book begins and ends with Douglas Gordon’s film project “24 Hour Psycho ” (installed at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan in 2006), in which the 109-­minute Hitchcock original is slowed so that it takes a full day and night to twitch by. DeLillo conveys with haunting lucidity the uncanny beauty of “the actor’s eyes in slow transit across his bony sockets,” “Janet Leigh in the detailed process of not knowing what is about to happen to her.” Of course, DeLillo being DeLillo, it’s the deeper implications of the piece — what it reveals about the nature of film, perception and time — that detain him. As an unidentified spectator, DeLillo is mesmerized by the “radically altered plane of time”: “The less there was to see, the harder he looked, the more he saw.”

Illustration by John Ritter; photograph from Paramount Pictures

Within the more circumscribed realm of literature, this is where DeLillo has staked his mighty claim. He has reconfigured things, or our perception of them, to such an extent that DeLillo is now implied in the things themselves. While photographers and filmmakers routinely remake the world in their images of it, this is something only a few novelists (Hemingway was one) ever manage. Like Hemingway, DeLillo has imprinted his syntax on reality and — such is the blow-back reward of the Omega Point Scheme for Stylistic Distinction — become a hostage to the habit of “gyrate exaggerations” (the phrase is in “The Body Artist”) and the signature patterns of “demolished logic.” “Point Omega” starts out by contemplating a reprojection of a famous film. It’s barely had time to get going before it ends up reflecting on the oeuvre of which it’s the latest increment and echo: a “last flare” that — we’ve been here before, too — may not be the last after all.

you just never know what’s gonna happen up here at lemuria…

Steve Yarbrough, a Mississippi native, already has a following; now after the recent publication of Safe from the Neighbors, he will have a larger one! I read this new novel, set in the Mississippi Delta, as most of his novels are, over the weekend, and even when I did not have it in my hand, I was thinking about it and could not wait to pick it up again.

Yes, it is readable! Yes, the characters are true Delta figures of the 1960s! Yes, the tumultuous Civil Rights time rises to the surface, but in a meaningful way! During the other time period, a present day protagonist, a history teacher at a local high school, whose wife teaches writing at Delta State, spends half of his time reflecting on his poverty stricken childhood and his uneducated, farmer father, while at the same time trying unsuccessfully to keep his slowly dissolving marriage intact. The unexpected entry of a  previous childhood friend as a newly hired teacher at the high school, who has now grown up to be a tempting  seductress, throws a spark into the picture; in addition, the lives of their parents intertwined closely.

Having just read Richard Russo ’s new novel That Old Cape Magic, I became strangely aware of the very similar writing styles. In fact, if I had closed my eyes, not having read either one, it would have been hard to differentiate. So, if  you like Russo’s writing, you’ll like Yarbrough’s. But, that is where the similarity ends. I did like That Old Cape Magic, BUT I liked Yarbrough’s Safe from the Neighbors MORE!  Why????? Because I like a novel to give me some profound insights about either life, people, or events. Yarbrough’s last chapter did that for me! I am richer for having read Safe from the Neighbors. Those of us who grew up in the confusing and upsetting ’60s in Mississippi will forever be looking for new ways to interpret and understand our complex experiences. Yes, I had many questions then as I still do now. I will always have questions and also few answers. Kathryn Stockett’s smash hit The Help posed the same questions for me. Yarbrough’s new novel answered some of those questions for me in its last chapter, and that is what sets it above some others for me.

I look forward to Steve Yarbrough’s reading next Thursday, February 11, at 5 p.m. at Lemuria’s dotcom building. If you have never heard Yarbrough read, then for sure come. I remember with satisfaction the excellent reading of his last novel The End of California in the summer of 2006.

Nan

The Housing Boom and Bust by Thomas Sowell

Basic Books (2009)

While recently reading 2010 articles on how Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are attempting to avoid strangulation, I’m reflecting on Sowell’s eye-opening book I read last summer. Sowell’s wisdom is a reliable cornerstone of stability among all the babble on economic solutions spewing from Washington.

Housing Boom is a plain English explanation of how we got into the current economic disaster that developed out of the housing markets. Sowell explains the evolution of the boom, pulling no punches when discussing the political culprits of either party, the financial damages they created or the BS used to escape their own responsibility for what happened.

Reading The Housing Boom and Bust has helped me have a defrosted view on how to better interpret the facts and lies flowing out of Washington, 2010. (Whatever that means is up to me.) However, I feel the more informed we are the more likely we are to put forth the right business decisions in our own little worlds.

Awareness as a whole could prevent us from being blindly led to dysfunction. Thomas Sowell’s easy-to-read book is a step in the right direction.

The Atlantis Book Club discussing The Piano Teacher by Janice Lee. March’s book is The Outlander by Gil Adamson. In April, they’ll discuss City of Refuge by Tom Piazza. See Nan’s last blog posting on the book club.

A Million Shades of Gray by Cynthia Kadohata, author of Cracker and Newbery winner for Kira Kira

Thirteen-year-old Y’Tin wants to be an elephant trainer more than anything in the world. His father has given him permission to train Lady, a wild elephant living with his Dega tribe in the Central Highlands of South Vietnam. Not long after Y’Tin begins training Lady, the North Vietnamese attack this village. Y’Tin’s world is shattered, the peaceful countryside as he knew it is gone, he must now face the dangerous situations of living in the jungle, and make decisions on his own. Through all of this Y’Tin is determined to keep his dream alive. (Young Adult, ages 10 and up)

First I will confess…..I have not started this book. I am very soon though!! The problem is that we can’t seem to keep it in stock!! As soon as we get some in, they fly off the front counter. I DO know that my mother loved it and my mother-in-law is reading it and it is becoming somewhat of a phenomenon. It’s cracking the best sellers lists and is a book that is hot all over the country.

An intriguing part of this story is the author herself. Leila Meacham, a retired teacher from San Antonio.

Publishers Weekly interviewed Meacham:

“The epic novel Roses isn’t the first outing for author Leila Meacham. In the mid-1980s, Meacham wrote and published a handful of romance novels. But it wasn’t a process she enjoyed much. At the time, she was teaching English, and the solitary process of writing took her away from preparing lesson plans, learning about new techniques and enjoying hobbies like gardening. After retiring, Meacham ran through her list of retirement goals. She and her husband traveled. Thirteen years into retirement, at age 65, she was left with a question: Now what?”

“The answer was Roses.”

“One day I was in bed, drinking my cup of coffee, and I just thought to myself, ‘I’ve got so much to offer somebody somewhere or something. I just don’t know what to do with the rest of my life,’” Meacham recalls. “I will defend this to my dying day: A voice in my head said, ‘You will get down Roses and you will finish Roses.’ I like to believe that’s a divine inspiration.”

“Meacham had begun the novel in 1985, when a bad case of pneumonia forced her to temporarily resign from teaching. As years passed, the typewritten pages of the novel were stored in a box in a closet, almost abandoned as Meacham and her husband moved from one house to another.” Six years ago, his suspicions proved accurate as Meacham pulled the box off the shelf and resumed writing.”

“The novel traces nearly 70 years in the history of the Toliver family, owners of a cotton plantation in a fictional Texas town. When patriarch Vernon Toliver dies, he entrusts the land to his daughter, Mary, because he knows she will love and care for it. His wife and son are outraged.”

“That decision and the stubborn love that motivated it determine the course of Mary Toliver’s life. She’s unwilling to compromise anything that would negatively affect her beloved Somerset plantation, whether it means sacrificing her fair complexion to work in the field or the man she loves because he won’t settle for second place in her heart. The decisions Mary makes, and the lies that accompany them, alter the history of the Toliver clan and its relationships with the town’s other founding families, the department store-owning DuMonts and timber magnates the Warwicks.”

“It’s only appropriate that this 600-page epic took Meacham five years to write. The narrative sprawls across geography as much as time, stretching from the fictional Texas burg of Howbutker to Lubbock, Dallas and points between.” (’The two together—cotton and timber—you don’t find that in the same state’ anywhere but Texas, Meacham says.)

“Now the 71-year-old Meacham is not only anticipating book signings to support the book, she’s also hard at work on another epic novel, this time with a more modern focus. So what happened to the woman who so disliked the solitary nature of writing?”

“I didn’t like the confinement, the frustration of trying to get your thoughts on paper,” Meacham recalls. “Oddly enough, I’m happiest when I’m writing now. And I’m all by myself and anything in the world can come out on the page.”

“What this has done for me has made me aware that I can write. Now, I don’t know if you’ll agree with me. But I feel that I can write. I can tell a story.”

Pretty cool, huh?  It’s next in my stack, so y’all start it, too, and let’s talk about it!

“Once or twice a year, I pick up a novel and just know it’s gonna be big. I had that feeling with Kathryn Stockett’s The Help as well as The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski. This year, watch out for young and gifted Amy Greene. Bloodroot (Knopf, $24.95) is her first novel, but Greene’s prose makes you feel like she’s been at it for decades.” read the rest of JC Patterson’s review here

Don’t miss the readings with Elizabeth Kostova and Amy Greene in February. Maggie has read The Swan Thieves and many of us have read Bloodroot and we love them both!

Bloodroot is our First Edition Club pick for February; Amy Greene will be here on February 10 at 5:00 for a signing and reading.

The Swan Thieves is our First Edition Club pick for March; Elizabeth Kostova will be here on February 17 at 5:00 for a signing and reading.

Malcolm Jones will be at Lemuria to sign and read from his memoir, Little Boy Blues, tomorrow night (Tuesday the 2nd) starting at 5pm.

Jones’s childhood in North Carolina wasn’t idyllic; he didn’t see much of his father, who was drunk much of the time he was around, and, while his mother was a bigger presence in Jones’s life, she was more often than not nitpicking her son or railing about one relative or another.  His book, however, doesn’t read like many of the “poor young me” memoirs that have been pervasive the past few years.  I enjoyed reading about Jones’s childhood so much because the stories he tells are not meant to shock the reader or reprove his relatives; rather, they are glimpses into a little boy’s joys and tribulations.

There’s a chapter devoted to Jones’s childhood affinity for marionettes, where the shouting matches between Jones’s parents fall into the background while he struggles to deal with his simultaneous feelings of excitement and shame because so many peers and respected adults think he may be “funny” for “playing with dolls.”  And there’s a wonderful passage about the summer he was best friends with the cinema owner’s son — a summer he wiled away the sweltering days in the cool of a movie theatre and learned “the esthetics of pleasure, of savoring something for its own sake.”  Through racial and religious bigotry, dysfunction and instability, there’s discovery and wonderment and the delights of being young.

Read the LA Times review by Susan Salter Reynolds