The Maltese Falcon Returns

As you may recall, one of the original falcon statues used in the movie The Maltese Falcon was stolen from the San Francisco restaurant John's Grill earlier this year. Well, according to an article on SFGate.com, the falcon, albeit a new & improved version, has returned to its roost.

Maltese Falcon rules roost at John's Grill

The bird is back and it's bigger than ever.

Nine months after someone snatched a replica of the Maltese Falcon from its perch on the second floor of San Francisco landmark John's Grill, owner John Konstin and 90 bird and mystery lovers welcomed a new replica of the fowl made famous by Dashiell Hammett's 1930 novel and Humphrey Bogart's 1941 film noir classic.

"The falcon's going back upstairs, but this time it's going to be bolted down, locked in its case with security cameras, the whole thing," said Konstin, who kept a nervous eye on the new bird throughout the Friday afternoon unveiling. (Link to full article.)

National Book Award Winners

The 2007 National Book Award Winners were announced today, November 15. The winning titles with publisher descriptions are listed below. Click on any title to see if it's available at the library.

I've not read any of these books yet, but have read quite a number of terrific reviews about the fiction winner Tree of Smoke. Maybe a good read for the Roundtable once it comes out in paperback.

Fiction Winner
Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson

This is the story of Skip Sands—spy-in-training, engaged in Psychological Operations against the Vietcong—and the disasters that befall him thanks to his famous uncle, a war hero known in intelligence circles simply as the Colonel. This is also the story of the Houston brothers, Bill and James, young men who drift out of the Arizona desert into a war in which the line between disinformation and delusion has blurred away. In its vision of human folly, and its gritty, sympathetic portraits of men and women desperate for an end to their loneliness, whether in sex or death or by the grace of God, this is a story like nothing in our literature.
---------------------------------

** According to an SFGate.com article, Denis Johnson is a resident playwright for the San Francisco theater group Campo Santo.

Non-Fiction Winner
Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA by Tim Weiner
For the last sixty years, the CIA has managed to maintain a formidable reputation in spite of its terrible record, burying its blunders in top-secret archives. Its mission was to know the world. When it did not succeed, it set out to change the world. Its failures have handed us, in the words of President Eisenhower, “a legacy of ashes.”

Now Pulitzer Prize–winning author Tim Weiner offers the first definitive history of the CIA—and everything is on the record. LEGACY OF ASHES is based on more than 50,000 documents, primarily from the archives of the CIA itself, and hundreds of interviews with CIA veterans, including ten Directors of Central Intelligence. It takes the CIA from its creation after World War II, through its battles in the cold war and the war on terror, to its near-collapse after 9/ll.

Poetry Winner
Time and Materials by Robert Hass
(On Order. You can place a hold.)
The poems in Robert Hass's new collection—his first to appear in a decade—are grounded in the beauty and energy of the physical world, and in the bafflement of the present moment in American culture. This work is breathtakingly immediate, stylistically varied, redemptive, and wise.

His familiar landscapes are here—San Francisco, the Northern California coast, the Sierra high country—in addition to some of his oft-explored themes: art; the natural world; the nature of desire; the violence of history; the power and limits of language; and, as in his other books, domestic life and the conversation between men and women. New themes emerge as well, perhaps: the essence of memory and of time.
----------------------------------------

** According to an SFGate.com article, Robert Hass is a U.C. Berkeley professor and served as a U.S. poet laureate. On a personal note, Hass has written some of my all-time favorite poems. Here's one I love for it's humor and emotional punch:

Forty Something
She says to him, musing, 'If you ever leave me, and marry a younger woman and have another baby, I'll put a knife in your heart.' They are in bed, so she climbs onto his chest, and looks directly down into his eyes. 'You understand? Your heart.'

Young People's Literature Winner
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian by Sherman Alexie (On Order. You can place a hold.)

In his first book for young adults, bestselling author Sherman Alexie tells the story of Junior, a budding cartoonist growing up on the Spokane Indian Reservation. Determined to take his future into his own hands, Junior leaves his troubled school on the rez to attend an all-white farm town high school where the only other Indian is the school mascot. Heartbreaking, funny, and beautifully written, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, which is based on the author's own experiences, coupled with poignant drawings by acclaimed artist Ellen Forney, that reflect the character's art, chronicles the contemporary adolescence of one Native American boy as he attempts to break away from the life he was destined to live.

The March book is in

Copies of The Thirteenth Tale, the book for the March 2008 book discussion, have arrived. Now, the Main Library is stocked with all three books for the January to March meetings. You can register for any or all of these meetings at the Information/Reference Desk. It's only $10 per meeting and you'll get a free copy of the book.

Jan '08 - Special Topics in Calamity Physics
Feb '08 - Philadelphia Fire
Mar '08 - Thirteenth Tale

NYTimes Article: Gaelic Slang

Today's New York Times (11/9) has a swell (sóúil) article about American slang words that evolved out of Irish Gaelic.

Humdinger of a Project: Tracing Slang to Ireland
By COREY KILGANNON

Growing up Irish in Queens and on Long Island, Daniel Cassidy was nicknamed Glom.

“I used to ask my mother, ‘Why Glom?’ and she’d say, ‘Because you’re always grabbing, always taking things,’” he said, imitating his mother’s accent and limited patience, shaped by a lifetime in Irish neighborhoods in New York City.

It was not exactly an etymological explanation, and Mr. Cassidy’s curiosity about the working-class Irish vernacular he grew up with kept growing. Some years back, leafing through a pocket Gaelic dictionary, he began looking for phonetic equivalents of the terms, which English dictionaries described as having “unknown origin.”

“Glom” seemed to come from the Irish word “glam,” meaning to grab or to snatch.
Link to article.

Flash Fiction

The book blog titled "The story as one-liner" in today's Guardian newspaper talks about a literary form that's new to me: Flash Fiction. It's basically a very, very short story of 2,000 words or less...sometimes much, much less. Here's a example pulled from the article.

Untitled by Ernest Hemingway
For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

Flash fiction is nothing new, but in this age of distraction, it's becoming more popular. What differentiates it from poetry or even a joke isn't always clear to me:

My Father by Mike Topp
My father was a snowman.
He got depressed and blew his brains out with a hair dryer.

Obviously, it takes some skill to write effective Flash Fiction. If you want to learn more about it, checkout the Wikipedia entry, which also has several links to websites and articles.

February Discussion Book

After being on backorder for several weeks, the book for the February discussion, Philadephia Fire, has finally arrived. You can pick up a copy at the Main Library's reference desk if you want to read ahead.

I also ordered the March book, The Thirteenth Tale. That should be in by next week.

I'll also bring both titles to the January meeting as usual.

-Lori

Book Discussion: Slaughterhouse-Five

Readers Roundtable will be meeting tomorrow, Saturday November 3 at 2:00 p.m. to discuss Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughter-House Five.

Elizabeth has been doing a bit of research on the firebombing of Dresden and kindly forwarded me this message with some fascinating weblinks.

Kurt Vonnegut may be the best known writer to survive the firebombing of Dresden, but as you would expect, he is not the only one.

For the last year or so, I have been working my way through the diaries of Victor Klemperer, who escaped deportation by the Nazis and survived the firebombing of Dresden (rather, he survived because of the firebombing of Dresden).

I am only as far as the summer of 1943 in my reading of the diaries, but here’s a link to an article in Der Spiegel which excerpts from his diary.

About the time I started rereading Slaughterhouse Five, I found an online gallery of old photos and drawings of pre-war Dresden, but I failed to bookmark the page, and now I can’t find it again. I wanted to get some mental picture of the city that looked like “Oz” to Vonnegut. I’ll keep looking, and if I find it, I’ll send you the link.

Elizabeth

PS: During the Hitler years, in addition to his diaries, Victor Klemperer produce a study of the language of the Third Reich and how the National Socialists changed the German language, redefining old words and creating new ones for propaganda purposes (similar to “Newspeak” in 1984).

Boo!

What literary character scared you the most?

Abebooks.com polled its customers to find out who they thought were the scariest characters in literature. Nineteen Eight-Four's Big Brother was voted the scariest while author Stephen King has the distinction of having two of his characters make the top ten. Check to see if your favorite monster is on the list.

BTW: As an adolescent, Dracula scared me the most. As an adult though, Big Brother is definitely my worst nightmare.

Anne Enright, Essayist

Today's New York Times book blog Papercuts mentions that Anne Enright, winner of the 2007 Booker Prize, is a frequent essayist for the London Review of Books.

Her current column (as of 10/18) is about her obsession with the McCann missing child case. The opening paragraph alone is very compelling and discusses in some detail the risks of sedating a child.

It is very difficult to kill a child by giving it sedatives, even if killing it is what you might want to do. I asked a doctor about this, one who is also a mother. It was a casual, not a professional conversation, but like every other parent in the Western world, she had thought the whole business through. (Link to full column.)

Winner of Booker Prize 2007 Announced

Anne Enright wins Man Booker Prize for Fiction

LONDON (AP) -- Irish writer Anne Enright won the Man Booker fiction prize Tuesday for "The Gathering," an uncompromising portrait of a troubled family.

She is the second Irish writer to win the prize in the past three years, after John Banville's "The Sea" in 2005.

Enright had been considered a long-shot to take Britain's most prestigious, and contentious, literary trophy. The award, which carries a prize of $100,000, was bestowed during a ceremony at London's medieval Guildhall. Link to full article.

Link to Man Booker website.

Link to San Leandro Library catalog record of The Gathering in case you want to check out the book or put a hold on it.

Photo: Andy Rain/European Pressphoto Agency