Just a quick column this week–a lot of the publishing world, and those shrinking book sections in the back of major newspaper weekend editions, have been preoccupied this week with the release of Sarah Palin’s memoir ‘Going Rogue’.  That makes it a rough week for me to peruse the funnypages, as political memoirs are probably my least favorite type of book out there.

It’s not that surprising that the big political memoirs often get a lot of attention, but I’d argue that, even if you’re passionate about the individual who wrote the book, they’re still, as a genre, a bit of a drag. Why? Because they’re written for the moment, often by politicians and/or ghostwriters who are trying to get a certain message across in the moment, aimed at that figure’s base. As one gets further away from the moment of their publication, they become less and less relevant except as historical artifacts, what some famous person wanted to attach their name to when they were gathering money for a presidential run, or how they felt about their first term, or why they wanted to insert a plank for health care into their party platform, or why they were as shocked as anybody when they found out there were no WMD’s.

I’ve always kind of imagined books as a sort of time capsule of ideas. Open the cover, the story’s there. Close the cover, the story goes back to sleep, waiting for someone to come along and find it, down the road. Good stories transcend time and space. Don Quixote. Lord of the Rings. Watership Down. Cosmos. A Tale of Two Cities. Walden. They may be anchored in time, but they transmit someone’s ideas of what it was like, there for a moment, to readers who are separated by time and space, by fate and chance. A book that’s written, or co-written by a politician, aimed at a very specific audience has none of that power–and most of them have very short shelf lives.  That being said, the reviews that are popping up, both positive and negative, of Sarah Palin’s book are interesting, and provide a pretty wide spectrum of how people relate to her public figurehood.  I guess that’s the silver lining.

We all have our biases, after all (I even know a person who only reads cookbooks!) What’s your least favorite genre?

There’s been a bit of controversy in the book world the last few days, courtesy of Publisher’s Weekly. Apparently, they published their ‘best of the year’ list a couple of weeks ago (or, more aptly, the top ten of the ‘best one hundred’ was leaked to USA Today), and the list itself made a lot of people upset, because there weren’t any women on the list. Ten books, ten writers, all men. They were INTERESTING books to be sure (a cursory glance made me notice how little fiction there seemed to be—a lot of history and biography/memoir) but none were penned by women. Given that there’s a lot of good female writers out there, it seems odd that there wasn’t at least one book written by a woman that they felt merited inclusion on the list. So my first response was a bit of a curled lip.

My SECOND response though, was to think about what my own list of books I read this year would look like. Lists are an organizational tool, after all. A lot of the significance and weight we assign to them, especially the endless ‘best of the year’ lists is entirely arbitrary, and often says much about our own attentions and priorities. I’ve read a lot of books this year—was surprised to find the total was up around eighty. (This is why I don’t have time to write more columns, heh heh). Of those eighty books, a lot less then half were written by women. This has been an ongoing issue lately—I’ve been quite conscious that I seem to be reading a lot more male authors than normal, and I’m trying to get back into a place where it feels like I’m reading tomes penned by members of both sexes. One book written by a female author that I finally sat down and read, (and I’m glad I did ) was Margaret Atwood’s ORYX AND CRAKE.

Oryx and Crake is the tale of a doomed love triangle in the near future, set against a backdrop of corporate intrigue and bio-engineered environmental apocalypse. It’s about our civilization being wiped out and replaced with something new. It’s narrated by a character named Snowman, who seems sympathetic, although he’s a bit of a wet blanket. Atwood seems to be using Snowman to explore where stories and myths come from, as Snowman cares for a colony of strange green survivors of the plague (a specially engineered virus that took out the humans and left their crossbreed pets). The green people are called ‘Crakers’ and as the novel jumps back and forth in time, the reader finds out they get that name from their ‘father’, a brilliant scientist named Crake who was also our intrepid narrator’s lifelong friend. His assistant, Oryx, a female presence who appears to have been lovers with both males also features as a visitor in Snowman’s thoughts.

A good chunk of the novel deals with Snowman’s existential despair and his frustration at his old, pre-plague life (from his guarded childhood, when he was called ‘Jimmy’, and the events leading up to his meeting-and losing, Oryx), but at the same time, it’s hard to avoid the itching sensation that the future society Atwood describes is not so very far removed from our own. Furthmore, about halfway through the book, the reader (this reader, at least) starts to feel that the future society, filled with corporate ‘gated communities’ and multi-player games that are half-a step removed from daily experience, kind of deserves what it gets. Crake, in the flashback scenes, begins to develop into a figure who appears unfeeling, but also seems to be the only one who’s genuinely interested in making society more peaceful or equitable. This, of course, leads to the apocalypse, which is played as almost a pitch-black joke. As a cautionary tale, Atwood’s ‘future history’ is vividly, powerfully written and although there is a cliffhanger ending that may cause some frustration (Though to be fair, it shouldn’t be any greater frustration than the ending of Cormac McCarthy’s THE ROAD) the novel is actually the first of a trilogy—the second, called THE YEAR OF THE FLOOD was just released in hardcover. An excellent and disturbing story, well-told. Glad I read it. Now I just need to read another dozen or so books written by women in the last eight weeks of this year and the scales will feel balanced. I have no strength to mock Publisher’s Weekly—I’m too busy with the mote in my own eye on this issue.

(And yes, I’m aware ORYX AND CRAKE is not actually a book published in 2009. What can I say? I’m really behind.)

I had some genuine things I wanted to say about Robert Silverberg’s landmark Science Fiction novel Dying Inside, honest to dog I did, but they’ll have to wait another week. Last week was a bit rough for your humble scribe for reasons not connected to the internet, and at one point, something happened that caught me off-guard. I’d like to share it with you, in case you have any thoughts on it.

See, for one reason or another, as I was having a very busy, somewhat rough week, I found myself in a public waiting room. The kind without music, where everyone’s doing their best to ignore each other. Maybe a few toys in the corner for kids, if they’re lucky, but other than that. And so, as I thought I was going to be there for a while, I browsed the magazines for adults. Nothing. Golf Weekly, 100 High-Fiber Recipes, Estonian Geographic, magazines like that. I checked the children’s section, and they had some books, including an abridged version of L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz. Now, I haven’t read the novel in a while, but when I was a pre-pubescent, I was a big Oz-nick. Had the map of Oz and surrounding environs on my wall. Even tried to read most of the Ruth Plumly Thompson books, which were pretty good. Hey, I still think Return to Oz is an underrated children’s film. So I picked up the book and took it back to my chair, thinking I might be a while. I was halfway to the Emerald City when a lady came in, sat down in a chair close to mine, looked over at what I was reading, and gave me this stare of something akin to raw horror.

Look, uh, I’m not that frightning, honest I’m not. I wasn’t wearing a torn raincoat or a clown costume or a black robe. Just a normal guy, picked up a kid’s book because the alternative was reading about 20 great ways to defeat the sand trap. I thought, post-Harry Potter, post-Lord of the Rings and all that, that there was less of a stigma with adults reading children’s books, and/or fantasy in public.

Going by the evil eye the woman was making, I may have been a little naive. It’s strictly anecdotal, so there’s no proof, but I’m tempted to perform an experiment: Take a full-color illustrated version of Wizard of Oz, find a public bench somewhere–a bus stop, maybe, or a train station, and sit there for an hour or two, when I have the time, reading it conspicuously, and making silent note of the reaction of bystanders. Because it can’t be that awful for a grown man in a public place to be browsing a beloved classic children’s novel, can it? It’s not as though I was reading Flowers of Evil or some such, is it? I’m hoping the woman was just having a bad day, and there was something about my manner that bothered her. The alternative is kind of a downer to contemplate.

Maybe if I’d been reading The Lost Symbol, that wouldn’t have been as traumatic for her. In truth, I’ve had the red flags that books can raise on my mind, the last few days. I’d like to talk about that a little more, next time, as well as Silverberg’s remarkable novel, and some of the points surrounding it.

I was originally going to talk about one or two of the books I’d read over the past month here, but I’m going to push that back to the next column. Instead, I’d like to talk a little bit about something that’s been gnawing at me, and you can tell me if I’m off-base or not in thinking of it as a good idea.

One thing I’ve run into, increasingly, as someone who lives in a relatively small apartment and enjoys the tactile qualities of books, is space. This is something that I’m sure a lot of people run up against–there’s even been a term coined–’shelf porn’ to describe showing off pictures of your bookshelves with other people over the internet! However, I find that while I have about enough space to comfortably shelve about three quarters of my books, I’m left keeping the other twenty-five percent in storage, and have no breathing room–whenever I’m at a secondhand bookstore or the library, I get those guilty urges where I’ve the sense that I really shouldn’t add to the pile of books that may one day bury me. And on top of that, the odds are I won’t spend the rest of my life in the same apartment, so how do I address that when dealing with books–when it comes to possessions, and moving, books and bookshelves are often one of the more unwieldy things to deal with, somewhere just below grand pianos and garden gnomes on the scale.

One obvious solution in the past has been to give away, or get rid of, books that I don’t want or am pretty sure I won’t read again, that I know some people might enjoy more than I do. Sending books in the mail can often be cost-prohibitive though, and as the circle of friends I have grows more and more geographically diverse, it’s harder and harder to just drop by someone’s front door and say ‘hey, I’ve got this great mystery novel you’d really enjoy, I think.’ For a little while, I was leaving books in random places (phone booths, bus stops, etc) for people to find, (Why not read about the Spanish Armada while you’re waiting for your train?), but that can be time-consuming as well, and there’s always the uncertainty factor of whether or not the book will find a home or whether it will simply be eaten by a passing dog.

And then there are some books it’s simply difficult to give away. No, I am not sure how I ended up with those X-Files tie-in novels, but they sure are difficult, ten years after the show’s popularity peaked, to interest people in reading. A lot of the time these are the books that you see on the shelves of the local Salvation Army or March of Dimes charity store–the books people couldn’t figure out what to do with, so they tried to fob off on strangers with a clear conscience.

It is the horns of a dilemma I’m on, anyway — I could definitely get rid of a few piles of books, and I will let you know, gentle reader, if I figure out a way to do so. In the meantime, if anyone has any good ideas, feel free to let me know.