Fully booked

A selection of top titles for the winter doldrums

by JULIET WATERS

Last night a snowstorm dumped a half-hour of shovelling on my uncovered front porch. Eventually I’ll get to it, but first I’m going to try and put a positive spin on the situation with my first book of the year, Bob Eckstein’s delightfully weird The History of the Snowman. The Snowman does have his dark side. There’s a nice sized chapter on the Snowman’s white trash years, including a significant slasher movie phase.

But the eternally melting man is known mostly for the good times. Eckstein does a remarkable job of tracing the Snowman’s evolutionary origins, given the near—okay, total—absence of fossilized snow. I discovered this book over the holidays while reading Eckstein’s sad but hilarious blog post, “The Sad State of Publishing: My Disastrous Holiday Book Tour” (just Google Bob Eckstein’s blog). Granted, the mid-December ice storm had something to do with his misery. But last Christmas recorded some of the lowest sales figures in publishing history.

No one is buying or reading books these days, yet everyone seems to be a writer or a critic. With the just published Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging on my lap, I took a serious extended cruise through the blogosphere, which I will be reporting on sometime later in the month. Stay Tuned.

Though dark days for big publishers, there seem to be bright days ahead for at least one underground publisher. New York based Soft Skull Press has been turning out consistently great titles over the last few years, and one of their authors is poised on the precipice of serious cult status. Michael Muhammad Knight is already the J.D. Salinger of young Muslim punk rockers. His self-published The Taqwacores is about to be re-released by Soft Skull in the next few months, along with four other books by Knight. Watch out for an indie film based on the book sometime in the next year.

Fans of more mainstream Muslim literature will be happy to know that Azar Nafisi will be reading at Concordia in February as part of the Blue Metropolis series. Best known for her huge bestseller, Reading Lolita in Tehran, Nafisi will be reading from her recently published memoir, Things I’ve Been Silent About. This is largely about her complicated relationship with her ambitious, psychologically brutal mother. How brutal? Here’s the opening sentence: “Most men cheat on their wives to have mistresses. My father cheated on my mother to have a happy family life.”

Goldstein on the Bible

Meanwhile on the other branch of Abraham’s family tree…Oh you didn’t know that Muslims, Jews and Christians are all, at least metaphorically, related to Abraham? Isn’t it about time you learned? You’ll get your chance with Jonathan Goldstein’s riff on favourite bible hits, Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bible. You may have already heard some of these on CBC radio’s Wiretap or NPR’s This American Life. Goldstein revisits Old Testament standards while prodding such eternal mysteries as “wouldn’t a person get bored living inside a whale” and “how did Joseph explain Mary’s pregnancy to the guys at work?”

Keep an eye out for The Leisure Seeker, a quirky road trip novel by Michael Zadoorian. While the exploits of a senior citizen couple hitting the road for the last time may not, at first glance, get your mental circulation boiling, the buzz on this book looks really good. Raves from writers as diverse as Pagan Kennedy and Elmore Leonard (with an actual OMG from Leonard). I like this Kirkus review: “A bittersweet fable of the golden years likely to offer consolation to readers who’ve ever known anyone old, or have plans to get old themselves.” Not you, I’m sure. But maybe someone you know.

The many fans of Montreal writer Colin McAdam will be happy to learn of a new book. Fall takes place in an elite Canadian boarding school, which seems to bear more than a passing resemblance to Bishops. Sounds like a dark, somewhat meditative novel about adolescent sexual obsession, or, hopefully, a Canadian version of Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep. Speaking of school set literature, though not confirmed, there is talk of a Montreal reading by British writer Zoë Heller (Notes on a Scandal.) Her new novel, The Believers, is a comi-tragedy about faith.

And finally, hardcore political junkies, and I’m guessing only they, will be thrilled to learn Michael Ignatieff will be touring what appears to be his Obama book (i.e. a well-timed bestseller as we head into YET ANOTHER pre-election cycle), True Patriot Love: Four Generations in Search of Canada.