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Published February 3, 2016

Jeff Shotts: Artful and Enduring Experiences

citizen

At Literary Hub,  Jeff Shotts discusses his work an editor at Minneapolis-based publisher Graywolf Press with Kerri Arsenault:

At Graywolf, we choose what we choose because these books deal with uncomfortable issues. Sometimes we need comfort, but what comforts us as readers, when so much of the rest of the world is hard at work to comfort us? I am made more uncomfortable by passivity, invisibility, and perfection. And readers want books like Citizen, which directly confronts race, or’On Immunity, which takes on vaccination and cultural fear, or D. A. Powell’s exquisite, lyrical trilogy collected in Repast, on illness and HIV, or Solmaz Sharif’s upcoming Look, which describes the casualties of war, one of which is our language.

All of these books we choose because of the issues they confront, yes, and also because of how they confront them. The language, style, and form of the books Graywolf publishes are meant to challenge you, provoke you, keep you reading, immerse you in experiences that you can’t shake off after you look up from their pages. Not all these experiences are loud or ugly, and many of them are also subtle, internal, joyous, and beautiful. But we hope all these experiences are artful and enduring…

…It’s a risk in this climate to publish the kinds of books we do—poetry and translations, essays and short stories, works of social justice and artful language. But we continue to recognize that many, many people are excited by these kinds of books: they want to read them, share them, hand-sell them, download them, review them, teach them, study them, engage with them, maybe throw them across the room. As an independent, nonprofit, mission-driven publisher, Graywolf and our titles exist in the same marketplace as countless, more commercial publishers and their titles, and these books have to compete for attention, review coverage, bookstore placement, online positioning, distribution, sales, awards, event listings, and on and on and on. It’s a risk in most every way, but given the extraordinary success many titles have had in these last few years, I think more and more people inside and outside the industry are giving Graywolf books an extra look and an additional boost.

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Published January 25, 2016

David Bowie’s Forgotten Non-Fiction Books

David Bowie Non-Fiction Tom Gauld

Tom Gauld for The Guardian.

(And, on a related note, if you are looking for Bowie links, Daniel Benneworth-Gray is compiling a list)

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Published January 20, 2015

Ladybird by Design

ladybird-by-design-4

The Guardian‘s Kathryn Hughes visits Ladybird By Design, an exhibition of over 200 original illustrations from the golden age of Ladybird Books:

To enter Ladybird’s world again is to relearn a universe that is both strange yet uncannily familiar. Inevitably the books express the values of their times. In the Peter and Jane series (aka Key Words Reading Scheme), Peter tends to hang out with Daddy in the garage, while Jane helps Mummy get the tea. Fair-haired and blue-eyed, every one in the children’s world looks exactly like them, apart from Pat the dog.

Still, if Ladybird books were conservative on gender and race, they were positively brisk on class. The world of Peter and Jane – and all the other children who appear in the Ladybird universe doing magic tricks, going to the shops, taking batteries apart or learning to swim – is both modern and modest. As illustrated by Berry, Wingfield and Martin Aitchison, the children appear to live in one of the postwar new towns. Their home is probably privately owned but it could conceivably be a newly built council house. Their adventures involve going on a train or to the beach with Mummy and Daddy. There are no prep-school japes here, no solving of improbable mysteries or clifftop rescues.

Perhaps this achievable utopia was a compensatory fantasy for the illustrators who, born around 1920, had mostly known childhoods far harder than this. Busy providing a safe, stable environment for their own little Peters and Janes, men such as Berry and Wingfield showed a world where things were, on the whole, getting better. Modernity increasingly presses into the frame: Jane and Peter eat off a table that looks like knock-off Habitat, Mummy wears slacks and Daddy even starts to help with the washing-up. More disruptive changes, though, are kept at a safe distance. Carnaby Street, with all its troubling freedoms, has no place in the Ladybird world, nor does the cold war or Vietnam.

For those of you who didn’t grow up in the UK, Ladybird Books were slim illustrated hardcover books for children. They were educational, or at least ‘improving’, and so creepy that I think they’ve actually scarred the national psyche. If you are of certain age, the books trigger a shiver of queasy nostalgia — without Ladybird Books the horrifying weird of The League of Gentleman or Scarfolk is just inconceivable — and yet I still think of them fondly. Sort of.
9780723293927
The exhibition, which opens later this week, takes its title from a forthcoming Penguin book called Ladybird by Design. Written by Lawrence Zeegen, Professor of Illustration and Dean of the School of Design at the London College of Communication, the book celebrates 100 years of Ladybird, and examines the social and design history of the publisher. It is sure to be smashing.

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Published August 21, 2014

It Kills Everything It Touches

sheer-rage

At the LA Review of Books, Daniel Mark Janes discusses last month’s curious conference at Birkbeck College (University of London) about the author Geoff Dyer:

Anyone who has written about Geoff Dyer will have been tempted to emulate his style, particularly his tendency to digress: “I planned to write about Geoff Dyer but instead I got distracted/stoned/fell asleep.” (Of those who resist this urge, most feel obliged to describe this temptation.) However, the point of works like ‘Out of Sheer Rage’ and ‘Zona’ is not just that Dyer chronicles his experiences; it is that, for all of the tangents, we still at the end find ourselves closer to Lawrence, closer to Tarkovsky. Personal reminiscence alone did not necessarily make us closer to Dyer — but it was still welcome in shaping the tone. Amid the ’ism’s and ’otic’s of traditional academic papers, humanity can often be lacking — yet Dyer’s work is all flesh and bone, united by a persona that is profoundly, playfully human.

And on a related note, Philip Maughan also spoke to Dyer about the conference for the New Statesman:

“I’m one of the people who seem to have licensed the ‘I’m meant to write about this book but I’m just going to write how I got stoned instead’ essay – but it only works for certain subjects. It has to lead you into a deeper appreciation of the subject than could have been attained in a more direct way. It’s like those legal highs,” he said. “Some of them can get you pretty messed up. Really they ought to be proscribed.”

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Published May 6, 2011

Something for the Weekend

A distinctively typographic cover by David Pearson for Vault by David Rose, new from Salt Publishing.

Giving Up Irony — John Self reviews Edward St. Aubyn’s At Last:

The author’s background, like Patrick’s, is of inherited wealth; perhaps it is this which enables him to treat his characters mockingly and sympathetically at the same time. His brittle, witty prose evokes comparisons with Evelyn Waugh, whose snobbish attraction to the upper classes, looking in on them from without, contrasts with St Aubyn’s cool-eyed appraisal. The phrase “a handful of dust”, quietly slipped into At Last, could be an acknowledgement of the similarities and contrasts.

Patrick is like his creator, not just in his background, but in his stylistic weaknesses:

“It’s the hardest addiction of all. Forget heroin. Just try giving up irony, that deep down need to mean two things at once, to be in two places at once, not to be there for the catastrophe of a fixed meaning.”

The Architecture of the Secret Lair — Mark Lamster for Design Observer:

The Bin Laden compound makes an interesting contrast with the secret modern lairs created for Bond villains by the legendary production designer Ken Adam. These have routinely been described as unrealistic, insofar as they could never be built without drawing attention. It’s curious now, in retrospect, to think that it was fear that kept the local population from Dr. No’s island hideaway (which was just off British and American territory). Though Bond films make us think of visual extravagance, the most visually arresting set from the film was the rather raw interrogation room, with its cross-beam, ocular ceiling. What was in Osama’s basement?

Notting Hill Editions, a new publishing imprint devoted to the essay, launches this month with books by from John Berger, Georges Perec and Roland Barthes among others. The typographic covers were designed by Garvin Hirst at Berlin-based design consultancy Flok.

And finally…

The Burden of Entertainment — Woody Allen discusses five books that still resonate with him:

The Catcher in the Rye has always had special meaning for me because I read it when I was young – eighteen or so. It resonated with my fantasies about Manhattan, the Upper East Side and New York City in general.

It was such a relief from the other books I was reading at the time, which all had a quality of homework to them. For me, reading Middlemarch or Sentimental Education was work, whereas reading The Catcher in the Rye was pure pleasure. The burden of entertainment is on the author. Salinger fulfils that obligation from the first sentence on.

Reading and pleasure didn’t go together for me when I was younger. Reading was something you did for school, something you did for obligation, something you did if you wanted to take out a certain kind of woman. It wasn’t something I did for fun. But Catcher in the Rye was different. It was amusing, it was in my vernacular, and the atmosphere held great emotional resonance for me. I reread it on a few occasions and I always get a kick out of it.

new publishing imprint launching in May, which is dedicated to revitalising and celebrating the essay.
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Published April 20, 2011

Midweek Miscellany

How Much Is It Worth? — Ivan Brunetti on teaching, and his book Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice, at The Comics Journal:

To me, art is not about talent, it’s about hard work. It’s about developing one’s intelligence, thoughtfulness, and sensitivity. To some degree, the potential for these things seems to vary, implying they are perhaps innate, but I think anything can be nurtured (or neglected). Something might not come easy, but it can be learned. It’s matter of will, desire, determination, and hard work. How much is it worth to you? The definition of what is considered “talent” or “skill” keeps changing. I say if one develops him or herself as a human being, then art can follow. If no adequate form exists, the artist will create a new one.

The Attention Age — More from Peter Osnos at The Atlantic, this time on book reviews:

The challenge for authors and publishers — as with so much else in our information and entertainment environment — is to catch the attention of the people at all these enterprises who choose among the cascade of books that arrive every day. I am reminded of hearing Esther Dyson observe over a decade ago that we no longer live in the information age, we live in the attention age. The notion that merit alone assures acclaim was never really valid, especially in non-fiction, but it is certainly not true today.

Getting Pregnant — Film critic Roger Ebert on being “well-read”:

At the end of the day, some authors will endure and most, including some very good ones, will not. Why do I think reading is important? It is such an effective medium between mind and mind. We think largely in words. A medium made only of words doesn’t impose the barrier of any other medium. It is naked and unprotected communication. That’s how you get pregnant. May you always be so.

Contempt — David Simon, creator of The Wire, interviewed by Bill Moyers for Guernica:

[T]he guys who are running newspapers over the last twenty or thirty years have to be singular in the manner in which they destroyed their own industry. It’s even more profound than Detroit in 1973 making Chevy Vegas and Pacers and Gremlins and believing that no self-respecting American would buy a Japanese car. Except it’s not analogous, in that a Nissan is a pretty good car and a Toyota is a pretty good car. The Internet, while it’s great for commentary and froth, doesn’t do very much first-generation reporting at all. The economic model can’t sustain that kind of reporting. They had contempt for their own product, these people… [F]or twenty years, they looked upon the copy as being the stuff that went around the ads. The ads were God. And then all of a sudden the ads were not there, and the copy they had contempt for. They had actually marginalized themselves.

And I love this response to being called “the angriest man in television”:

It doesn’t really mean much. The second-angriest guy is, you know, by a kidney-shaped pool in L.A. screaming into his cell phone because his DVD points aren’t enough. But I don’t mind being called that. I just don’t think it means anything. How can you have lived through the last ten years in American culture and not be? How can you not look at what happened on Wall Street, at this gamesmanship that was the mortgage bubble, that was just selling crap and calling it gold? Or watch a city school system suffer for twenty, twenty-five years? Isn’t anger the appropriate response? What is the appropriate response? Ennui? Alienation? Buying into the great-man theory of history—that if we only elect the right guy? This stuff is systemic. This is how an empire is eaten from within.

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Published April 7, 2011

The French Connection | Critics’ Pick

The New York Times movie critic A. O. Scott looks at the enduring appeal of The French Connection:

William Friedkin’s 1971 film was a fictionalized adaptation of the nonfiction book The French Connection: A True Account of Cops, Narcotics, and International Conspiracy by Robin Moore, first published in 1969.

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Published December 31, 2010

Favourite New Books of 2010

Ducking in just under the wire, here is my list of favourite of new books of the year. It’s not meant to represent the “best” of 2010. Rather, it’s a completely unscientific, very subjective list of books (arranged in alphabetical order) that I enjoyed. As I mentioned in my previous post, I found compiling the list a bit of a challenge and yet, for all that, there’s an air of withering predictability about the selections. There are no surprises. But even if this wasn’t a particular stellar year for reading, there were still lots of books I was excited about and that can only be a good thing.

I should also mention, for the sake of disclosure and all that, the top 10 includes one book distributed by Raincoast Books in Canada, and the list of honourable mentions refers to a couple of other titles I have helped promote in some minor capacity. They’re included here because I actually like them, not for any nefarious marketing reasons, but I guess you’ll just have to take my word for that. In any case, all these titles are identified with an asterisk…

And with that out of the way, on to the list!

Born Modern: The Life and Work of Alvin Lustig*
Elaine Cohen Lustig & Steven Heller
Chronicle Books
ISBN 9780811861274

I am a little embarrassed to start this list with a title distributed by Raincoast, but it comes first alphabetically and, I can honestly say tat Born Modern was the book I was most looking forward to this year. And I was not the only person excited about the book. When I tweeted about it from the Raincoast sales conference, the response was immediate. Almost every North American book designer I’ve ever spoken to cites Lustig — who designed covers for New Directions Press in the 1950’s — as an influence. The book designer’s book designer, then… A must-have.

C
Tom McCarthy
Knopf
ISBN 9780307593337

Tom McCarthy’s C was, as mentioned previously, one of the defining books of the year for me, standing — perhaps unfairly — opposite the ubiquitous Freedom. If I am honest though, I liked it less than McCarthy’s previous novel, the starkly compact Remainder (one of my favourite books of the last 10 years). At times, the sprawling, crawling C felt like it was held together with the sticky-tape of McCarthy’s singular intellect (a thought reaffirmed by seeing him in conversation with Douglas Coupland in Toronto). But somehow, in the end,  it still works in some sort of baffling, gorgeous way.

The book was also perfect excuse to finally talk to Knopf cover designer Peter Mendelsund for the blog. The Q & A with Peter and Tom about C is here.


The City and the City
China Miéville
Del Rey
ISBN 9780345497529

I am cheating a little by including The City and the City because it was first published in 2009. It was, however, published in paperback in 2010, and as that’s how a lot of us still buy our fiction, I’m bending the rules to include it.

The novel itself is essentially a detective story, but what lifts out of the ordinary is the imaginary space in which it takes place. Architecture, geography and maps are clearly important to Miéville, but where, for example, Perdido Street Station creates a fantastically baroque city of ghettos and towering alien architecture, The City and the City is only slightly off-kilter — familiar but unsettling — and the book is even better for it.

Joy Division
Kevin Cummins
Rizzoli
ISBN 9780847834815

This was my Christmas present (thank you Mrs C.O.!) and it is — pretty obviously I would think — for fans only. Still, I’m guessing there’s quite a few out there. In any case, the book is a collection of beautiful black and white photographs of Joy Division and the late Ian Curtis by Manchester-born photographer Kevin Cummins. It includes Cummins’ iconic pictures for the NME of the band standing on a snowy bridge in Hulme, Manchester, as well as photographs of live performances and the band back stage. The book was stylishly designed — with more than a whiff of Peter Saville — by London design agency Farrow.

Just Kids
Patti Smith
Ecco
ISBN 9780060936228

Other than owing a copy of Horses,  I can’t say that I’m particularly familiar with the work of Patti Smith, or Robert Mapplethorpe for that matter (other than the sort of stuff must people know about his art, and that he was connected to Sam Wagstaff, no relation). But, it doesn’t really matter. Smith’s memoir about her relationship with Mapplethorpe is a touching and self-deprecating look at their early years together in New York and their adventures in the art/music scene of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s.

Memories of the Future
Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, translated by Joanne Turnbull
NYRB
ISBN 9781590173190

I am definitely cheating by including this in the list as it was published in 2009. That said, it was published late in 2009, I missed it, and it’s too good not to be in this year’s top 10.

The book itself  is a collection of seven short stories written between 1922 and Krzhizhanovsky’s death in 1950,  all of which were suppressed by Soviet censors. The stories are reminiscent of Gogol’s short fiction and Bulgakov’s novellas, and suffice to say, they’re all bonkers. But in a good way. I loved the story Quadraturin about the man who gets lost in his black, ever-expanding apartment, and the strange time travel title story which concludes the book.

Penguin 75: Designers, Authors, Commentary (the Good, the Bad…)
Paul Buckley
Penguin
ISBN 9780143117629

Seeing as I spend so much time talking about cover design, I would be remiss if I didn’t include Penguin 75 in my top 10. Released to celebrate Penguin’s 75th anniversary, it’s a surprisingly diverse and candid look at the recent cover designs from Penguin’s US outpost in New York.  I talked about Penguin 75 with art director Paul Buckley and book designer Christopher Brand here.

Parker: The Outfit
Darwyn Cooke
IDW
ISBN 9781600107627

The previous book in Darwyn Cooke’s Richard Stark adaptations, The Hunter, was on last year’s list, so perhaps it is hardly surprising that the sequel, which I think is better,  is in this year’s top 10 as well. In new book, the formidable Parker — now with a new face — turns the tables on ‘the Outfit’, who quickly wish that they’d let sleeping dogs lie. Cooke seems in more confident form with this adaptation and the result is a stylish and fast-paced noir that looks incredibly cool. My pithier Advent Book Blog pitch for The Outfit is here.

The Shallows
Nicholas Carr
W.W. Norton & Co.
ISBN 9780393072228

I had a frisson of recognition reading Carr’s description of internet affected attention spans and I doubt I was the only one who thought “oh god, that’s happening to me” while reading The Shallows. The book is too long — a shorter book would’ve been even more effective — but it is still compelling. Carr doesn’t say technology is wrong, but reminds us that for all its benefits, we should be mindful of the consequences and what we might be losing.

Werewolves of Montpelier
Jason
Fantagraphics
ISBN 9781606993590

I wrote about my love for Jason’s comics when Werewolves of Montpellier was about to be released earlier this year, and the book itself didn’t disappoint. Ostensibly the book is about a thief called Sven who disguises himself as werewolf to rob people’s apartments and incurs the wrath of the town’s actual werewolves. It is, however, as much about friendship, identity, loneliness, and, ultimately, Sven’s unrequited love for his neighbour Audrey. In a lovely one-page scene, Audrey stands behind Sven, hugging his shoulders.  “Do women come from another planet?” she asks. “Yes, women come from another planet,” Sven replies. The whole book is achingly brief, but Werewolves of Montpellier is possibly my favourite Jason book to date.

Honourable Mentions

American Trademarks edited by Eric Baker and Tyler Blick*
Footnotes In Gaza by Joe Sacco (December 2009)
I.O.U.: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay by John Lanchester (published in the UK as Whoops!)
KENK by Richard Poplak and Nick Marinkovich*
Large Scale: Fabricating Sculpture in the 1960’s and 1970’s by Jonathan Lippincott*
The Lost Rolling Stones Photographs: The Bob Bonis Archive, 1964-1966 by Larry Marrion
The Rocketeer: The Complete Collection by Dave Stevens (December 2009)
Shirley Craven and Hull Traders: Revolutionary Fabrics and Furniture 1957-1980 by Lesley Jackson (October 2009)

So there you go. If  this hasn’t met your requirements, Largehearted Boy is aggregating every online “best of 2010” book list he can find, and Fimoculous is aggregating all of the lists related to 2010 in categories ranging from ‘Advertising’ through to ‘Words’. That should keep you busy…

Happy New Year!

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Published December 24, 2010

A Year in Reading 2010

2010 was a year of losing battles and one of the first casualties was time for personal reading. The moments I did have were snatched on the subway and, if I could keep my eyes open, last thing at night. I often found myself unwittingly rereading chapters I had read the previous day, or worse, that very morning. The difficulty this week of compiling a list of my favourite books of the year — and the predictability of that list (to be posted soon) — made it very clear that not only did I read less than previous years, I rarely strayed off the beaten path.

The year was thus defined, for better or worse, by two big novels that were in some senses polar opposites: C by Tom McCarthy and Freedom by Jonathan Franzen. If C was modern experimental novel masquerading as an early 20th century bildungsroman, Freedom was a Victorian drama in modern dress. It felt like “Two Paths for the Novel” all over again.

Someone cleverer than me observed C “was surrounded by the sort of buzz and static which it contained and described.” But while the buzz amplified C to the Booker shortlist, the hype around Freedom and Franzen seemed to diminish the book. It was so ludicrously overpraised, and subsequently criticized and shunned, that it was almost impossible to evaluate fairly.

OTHER FICTION

Like just about everyone else, I started 2010 reading Stieg Larsson, but now, with 2011 just around the corner, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest remains unfinished, my bookmark at Chapter 6.

I loved the architecture and weird psycho-geography at the heart of the mysterious The City and the City (published in paperback this year) and went on to read China Miéville’s earlier, equally architectural, novel Perdido Street Station.

I was also happy to belatedly discover that Phillip Kerr had resurrected his Bernie Gunther Berlin Noir detective series. Better late than never…

Sadly neither The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman nor Zero History by William Gibson really added up to more than the sum of their (occasionally really quite good) parts.

I simply abandoned Justin Cronin’s clunker The Passage.

Better was Canal, Lee Rourke’s L’Étranger in London. I wasn’t entirely convinced by it, but an off-beat novel about urban ennui and existential violence was a welcome change of pace. Rourke is no doubt an author to watch.

Canal had the added virtue of being short, something of  a rare and undervalued quality these days. In fact almost all of the fiction I enjoyed the most this year — the icily beautiful The True Deceiver by Tove Jansson, the bonkers Memories of the Future by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, and the lyrical The Blue Fox by Sjon — were short. And not actually published in 2010.

Colony by Hugo Wilcken, also short and published in 2007, was unquestionably my favourite novel of the year. Drawing its title from Kafka’s The Penal Colony (and, in turn, Joy Division’s song Colony), the book seemed to me more like a post-modern Conrad, or perhaps Camus trying his hand at a Boy’s Own Adventure. Needless to say, I’m looking forward to Wilcken’s next novel…

NONFICTION

I waited too long to read Patti Smith’s wistful and self-depreciating memoir Just Kids, but I was charmed by it nonetheless. I was less enthralled with Bob Dylan in America by Sean Wilentz. I was not, I suspect, the target audience however…

Jared Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto and Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows both raised intelligent concerns about development of the internet. I was less convinced by Lanier’s polemic than Carr’s tweedier defense of long-form reading, but neither were as reactionary as they were sometimes characterized, and both offered interesting insights whether one agreed with them or not.

The subjective magazine-style reportage of War by Sebastian Junger and the gossipy Game Change by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin were both signals of what we can expect from nonfiction in future.  But both were troubling, especially War, which felt both narcissistic and yet, at the same time, voyeuristic and exploitative. Neither book properly addressed the complications of embedded insider journalism.

Both War and Game Change were, at least, entertaining. That cannot be said of Bob Woodward’s less than electrifying Obama’s Wars. There is something to be said for detailing events in chronological order, but that doesn’t make it any more readable. Worse, perhaps, I didn’t gain any greater insight into what had happened.

COMICS

Even though Dan Clowes is the godfather of the miserable asshole, it is now such a common trope in indie comics that despite his undeniable virtuosity I was somewhat disappointed by the uncompromising Wilson. It was, however, unfair of me to expect Clowes to be anyone other than Clowes, and just about everyone whose opinion I respect tells me I am wrong about this book, so don’t take my word for it.

KENK took up a lot of my professional time this year so I was glad to see it get such a positive critical response and I’m hopeful that it will finally see a US release in 2011.

Having a short attention span, I enjoyed the latest installment of Hellboy, and its gothic spin off Sir Edward Grey Witchfinder, but continued to be underwhelmed by Mignola’s plodding BPRD series.

Like just about every other nerd in Toronto I read the 6th and final installment of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim series (now handily available as a box set). I also finally read Jeff Smith’s epic Bone from cover to cover and revisited The Rocketeer stories by the late Dave Stevens, which were collected, at long last, in a slim hardcover edition at the end of last year.

I loved The Outfit, the latest installment of Darwyn Cooke’s adaptations of Richard Stark’s Parker stories (my Advent Book Blog recommendation this year), and Jason’s strange and delightful Werewolves of Montpelier.

Footnotes In Gaza (published late in 2009) left me depressed, but thoroughly in awe of Joe Sacco.

THE ONES I DIDN’T GET TO (BUT MEANT TO)

The list of new books that I had every intention of reading this year but didn’t is far, far, too long. Here, however, are a few of the books (in no particular order) that I intend to get to sooner rather than later: Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes, Our Tragic Universe by Scarlett Thomas, Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Sheyngart, A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada,  Boxer, Beetle by Ned Beauman, Kraken by China Miéville, What Ever Happened to Modernism? by Gabriel Josipovici, The Hare With Amber Eyes by Edmund Dewaal, A History of the World in 100 Objects by Neil MacGregor, Just My Type: A Book About Fonts by Simon Garfield, Set to Sea by Drew Weing and H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness adapted by Ian Culbard. There are no doubt many, many more… I would love to hear what you read and enjoyed this year and what I should add to the list of books for 2011…

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