Games, Fires, Senses; Unburied Singing Everywhere
Carriage Return, 9/12/2017
Carriage Return is The Ribbon’s round-up of recent Literati Bookstore staff favorites, as well as an occasional place for useful links and news from around the literary web regarding upcoming events at the store.
Fall not only means major book releases, it also means the return of our Literati Presents series. Coming up, very soon (September 24th to be exact), we welcome David Lagercrantz to Ann Arbor and Zingerman’s Greyline, in support of the latest installment of Stieg Larsson’s legendary Millennium Series, The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye. Tickets to the event come with a hardcover copy of the book, and Zingerman’s will have some of their (legendary in their own right) food and drinks available for purchase.
In a recent review of The Girl who Takes an Eye for an Eye in the Washington Post, Maureen Corrigan writes:
Larsson had grand ambitions for his Millennium series, projecting a total of 10 novels. In Lagercrantz’s hands, the series is realizing grand ambitions of another sort. The Girl Who Takes an Eye for An Eye intensifies the mythic elements of Larsson’s vision. All the talk of stolen babies and a “search for origins” in this novel — along with the malevolent influence of Salander’s evil twin, Camilla — moves the series further into the realms of Star Wars and Harry Potter. A little of this legendary stuff goes a long way in Salander’s hard world. The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye is entertaining, but “the girl” at the center of this wild tale is beginning to look like somebody we readers only used to know.
Tickets are on sale now. Oh, and tickets are on sale for a pair of exciting October events as well: Jeffrey Eugenides and Welcome to Night Vale.
Recent hardcover staff picks below.
Recent Staff Favorites (in Hardcover)
Ranger Games, by Ben Blum
Throughout the course of Ben Blum’s phenomenal and transcendentally personal true crime saga, the same armed robbery of a Bank of America in Tacoma, Washington on August 7th, 2006, perpetrated in part by Ben’s cousin — kind, devoted, outgoing, and loyal Special Forces Operator Alex Blum, is recounted again and again. In detail it is fairly simple: three Army Rangers and two Canadian civilians in tactical gear and armed with automatic weapons quickly and methodically divest $53,000 from the bank in the highest profile heist in the town’s history, using Alex and his silver Audi A4 as their getaway. By the next day all five are out of state and fugitives of international interest. Each time Blum recreates the 7th of August, 2006, however, the crime is more inexplicable and bizarre than its last telling — colored as it is throughout by the seeming moral depravity of the Ranger Indoctrination Program, Alex’s complex and difficult dissociation between the civilian world and the Rangers, the murky history and psychological lineage of “brainwashing,” the specter of our still-ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, or the contradictory and tangled mind of its veteran mastermind, Luke Elliott Sommer. Blum himself, a former mathematics prodigy, abandoned his career in the personal and literary pursuit of this story, to reconcile Alex with “all we had left of him,” “a luminous emptiness defined against the shape of what was to come, a sculpture in negative space.” The result is an inquiry not just into a particular crime set against the pressures and bonds of family, friendship, caste, ideology, brotherhood, but an attempt to face that which haunts mathematicians as much as the rest of us: the limits of the quantifiable, the edges of our human ken. — John
Little Fires Everywhere, by Celeste Ng
The best books have a way of tearing us apart and piecing us back together again. The very best books render us, after this piecing together, forever a bit changed. Little Fires Everywhere is one of those very best books. The setting: 1990’s Shaker Heights, a picture-perfect suburbia that, with the help of its picture-perfect residents, adheres to the rules. Enter Mia and Pearl Warren, a mother-daughter duo with a mysterious past and personalities that spark the curiosities and obsessions of every one they meet, especially those of the Richardson clan (large, wealthy, well-connected, etc.) When Shaker Heights is beset by a crisis involving the adoption of a Chinese baby by a white family, tensions arise and the town erupts — class conflict, racial bias, well meaning white people with poor follow-through, troubled teens, art, the complexities and terrors and wonder of motherhood, running away and never looking back. In this intricate, sprawling, visceral novel, Celeste Ng has created something for the ages. A must read. — Claire
Coming to My Senses: The Making of a Counterculture Cook, by Alice Waters
Despite having read about Alice Waters for years, I only managed to eat at her famous Berkeley restaurant Chez Panisse, just once: for lunch in the cafe on May 21,1983, when she may well have no longer been working in the kitchen. (With no reservations, we waited for two hours for a table.) Her career as chef was fairly short-lived, but those of restaurateur, cookbook author, and food activist, are ongoing. Coming to My Senses is about a young person finding her way in a world where sex and politics, and the role of women was a spin of the roulette wheel. Waters takes us up to the opening of her restaurant in 1971, and not much beyond. Readers will want to compare this to Ruth Reichl’s Comfort Me With Apples and Tender at the Bone. Waters is too modest to belong in the pantheon of great memoir writers — this is more a perfect peach fondly remembered than an elaborate tasting menu — but her place in the pantheon of great Americans is assured. — Carla
Sing, Unburied, Sing, by Jesmyn Ward
My favorite book of the year. A mediation on the people, ideas, and history that haunt us. We see generation after generation of a family endure loss. Witness, not just with eyes, but with heart, the hardships of those who have come before us — how their lives reverberate in those here today. But this novel is equally adept at showing us love, not matter how subtle. We see how that love can be carried, no matter how small, and can be a tiny gem. Ward has shown, with gorgeous prose, what it is to live, to love, and to die. — Hilary
Recent Staff Favorites (in Paperback)
The Red Car, by Marcy Dermansky
The themes of this sad, hopeful, intelligent and unpredictable novel resonated strongly with me, and I believe they are of universal appeal: how easily (and often wrongly) we judge people, how we don’t often realize who our true friends are, how easy it can be to make decisions or choose partners who are wrong for us, how difficult it can be to truly like ourselves, and how oddly hard it can be to find and to recognize and appreciate those quiet moments of true happiness. For Leah, the writer protagonist, these are all issues that are triggered by her pilgrimage to attend the funeral of a former boss and friend who died behind the wheel of her red sports car. Wisely, this novel, doesn’t attempt any answers, but it cleverly leads one to ask the right questions, and that’s no easy task. This book will stick in my head for as long as I ponder these issues, and may that be a life-long process. — Jeanne
The Wrong Way to Save Your Life, by Megan Stielstra
I have a growing list of women whose writing makes me feel vulnerable and introspective and purposeful in the best way, and I was so happy to find Megan Stielstra to add to it. This is a collection of threaded essays exploring family and politics and relationships and work and community and the power of writing, difficult to pin down in its breadth and deeply thoughtful as a whole. Stielstra writes of being a person in the world with such an incredible sense of empathy that, wanting to spend more time with here, I was sorry to see this book end. — Kelsey
