If I had been on another planet for the last year and deprived of books, and had just arrived on earth, and someone were to ask me, “Nan, if I were to give you a book for each day of the 12 Days of Christmas, what would you want to read?”–then I would quickly and happily comprise a list!

And on that list would be a book for each of the Twelve Days of Christmas……………………

One the first Day of Christmas………..The Forgotten Garden by Australian writer Kate Morton, made famous last year by House at Riverton, is set on the cliffs of England, explores a century of three women of the same family, and features a walled garden, a fairy tale writer, a mystery, and one beautiful read!

One the second day of Christmas………………..The Woodsburner by John Pipkin offers an interesting, unique novel based on the incident in the life of Henry David Thoreau in which the famous writer accidentally set fire to the woods outside of Concord.

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On the third day of Christmas ……………….Noted North Carolina literary writer Ron Rash weaves a mesmerizing story titled Serena, which is set in the Appalachian Mountains during the Depression years in a logging community, and which involves a powerful married couple, initially very much in love, but who eventually turn against each other in a life or death mystery.

On the fourth day of Christmas…………….Little Bee by Chris Cleave focuses on a native Nigerian woman, named “Little Bee,” who immigrates to London to reunite with a London couple with whom she shares the memory of a horrific event which occurred on the beaches of Nigeria a few years before.

On the fifth day of Christmas…………..Well known Louisiana writer Tim Gautreaux pens a page turner in The Missing which is set on the Mississippi River during the glorious days of the steamboat era in which the main character searches for the kidnapper of a precious “Shirley Temple” type singing wonder.

On the sixth day of Christmas………..Ernest Hemingway’s original A Moveable Feast, which depicts the renowned author’s colorful time in Paris in the 1920s, where he interacted with F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda, as well as other greats such as Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein, has been re-released by Hemingway’s son and grandson to include never before read additions and notes which the author intended to be included in his biography of these infamous years of his life, but which was removed by Hemingway’s first wife.

On the seventh day of Christmas………..The Help by Kathryn Stockett, a Jackson, Mississippi natitve, depicts in honest, colorful,disturbing, but often humorous language, the life of a Jackson, Mississippi, African American woman who is befriended by a socially secure white young woman in the tumultuous 1960s.

On the eighth day of Christmas………..In Hell, Pulitizer Prize winner Robert Olen Butler has created a painfully real, but extremely humorous “hell” filled with earthly characters we all know such as Richard Nixon, Bill and Hillary, J. Edgar Hoover, and George Bush, among others, who are all at a loss to answer the question posed by the protagonist, “Why are you here”?

On  the ninth day of Christmas………..Jhumpa Lahiri, made famous by her novel The Namesake which became “movie-bound”, writes in this notable collection of short stories, called The Unaccustomed Earth, about second generation Indian children who have assumed the characteristics of American customs and mores, but who are still invested in strict Indian customs because of their parents, thus creating a challenging and often disarrayed life.

On the tenth day of Christmas………..The Year of the Flood by prolific writer Margaret Atwood offers loyal readers another dystopic novel set in the not too distant future where gene splicing creates the “wolf-sheep” with purple hair, and where  an antibiotic resistant virus  rapidly swirls through the world leaving only the great and strong to ponder life’s meaning.

On the eleventh day of Christmas………..In the Sanctuary of Outcasts, a non-fiction masterpiece by former Mississippi journalist Neil White, who served time in a Louisiana prison in the early 1990s for check kiting, offers an up-close look at the unique  federal facility, which housed not only prisoners, but also those people afflicted with Hansen’s Disease, most commonly know as leprosy.

On the twelfth day of Christmas………..A top five finalist for the National Book Award in 2009 for Lark and Termite by Jayne Anne Phillips, this “Faulkner-like” book, in character similar to The Sound and the Fury, offers a literary gem which involves the loving relationship between a sister, named Lark, and her mentally and physically challenged younger brother, named “Termite.”

-Nan

Free: The Future of a Radical Price

by Chris Anderson

(Hyperion, 2009)

Anderson proposes that “new free” goes beyond any marketing gimmick and sets the table for the growth of reputation economy with new methods of generating the power of free. He emphasizes ideas for competition when your competitors are giving away what you are trying to sell. Being an independent bookseller and facing the current $8.99 price war of bestsellers, it’s easy to understand why I picked this book up.

“New free” is not about “when you hear the word free, you reach for your wallet mentally.” “New free” is about providing an authentic service in a free way that might lead the customer to spend money indirectly.

Example: Lemuria Blog is a free information tool to help our readers to find the right book to read. Adding to our customer service, we hopefully lead our readers to the right reads. Using the Lemuria Blog can save wasted reading time, improve reading choices, and prevent misspent book-buying dollars. Being hypnotized by cheaply priced books may waste valuable reading time that can’t be replaced.

Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail and editor in chief of Wired magazine, relates what he observes now and predicts for the future in a most readable way. He understands the origins of free and how recent marketing has been used to produce business growth.

Free is a a useful book for anyone with an interest in the small business.

“A Staggering Work of Heartbreaking Reality” is the way one critic referred to Dave Eggers’ book about the Kafkaesque “trials” of a Syrian immigrant caught up in the chaotic  and often brutal aftermath of Katrina. This work of nonfiction is entitled Zeitoun (pronounced “zay-toon”) and came out in July of 2009.

Before Katrina hit, Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a Syrian-American with a wife and four children, is living the American dream.  The owner of a successful painting and contracting business in New Orleans, he is well-liked and respected by both his neighbors and his customers.  When the storm comes and the flooding begins he sends his wife and children to stay with relatives in Baton Rouge.  But he himself decides to stay behind to protect his home and rental properties and to help out as best he can.  And for the first few days, paddling through the city in his second-hand canoe, he does just that—lending a hand to neighbors, rescuing some stranded souls, even feeding some pets left behind by their owners.  Then things take an ominous and ultimately horrific turn.  He is arrested by armed officers in one of his own rental houses and taken to a make-shift jail in the old Greyhound Bus Station where he is locked in an outdoor cage.  The guards there are both brutal and sadistic.  But his surreal nightmare is just beginning.  He is not allowed a phone call nor given any real explanation for his arrest, though at one point he is told that he is suspected of being an al Qaeda terrorist, principally, it would appear, because of his ethnic background.  Eventually he is transferred to a maximum security prison, still without being allowed any access to the outside world.  Meanwhile, his wife Kathy’s experience is as harrowing in its own way as Zeitoun’s.  With no word from him for days, which eventually stretch into weeks, and after many failed and frantic attempts to secure information, she fears the worse.  Even when Kathy is finally able to locate him their ordeal is far from over.

At several points during his experience Zeitoun asks himself—how can this be happening in America—and the reader is likely to ask himself the same question.  It seems that the magnitude of the catastrophe, the fragility and ineptitude of our response system and the post 911 atmosphere all came together into a perfect storm, which swept into its vortex a totally innocent man.

This is a story that could easily have descended into pure melodrama.  But Eggers manages to escape such a fate by allowing the story to virtually tell itself—no flourishes, no gimmicks–just clear, measured, unadorned prose. His tale is, in many ways, an intimate and narrowly focused work—the story of Katrina through the eyes of one man and his family.  Yet it is this approach that gives the catastrophe an immediacy and a poignancy that more sweeping accounts cannot hope to achieve.  All in all it makes for a powerful and gripping read.

-Billie

Kings of Tort: The True Story of Dickie Scruggs, Paul Minor and Two Decades of Political and Legal Manipulation in Mississippi

By Alan Lange and Tom Dawson

For almost 20 years, we’ve opened our morning newspapers and followed the saga of asbestos and cigarette lawsuits, Katrina insurance mess, and bribery of legal and judiciary officials. These stories, with the ongoing civil rights reporting of Jerry Mitchell, have made these issues of our time most interesting to follow.

The Dickie Scruggs news has produced much confusion for the observer:

Good guy or bad guy?

Brilliant for sure, we thought!

Powerful, no doubt, but lots of money usually gives one power and influence

Always these questions have led to the overall big question of ethics. Over these years the pieces of this jigsaw puzzle have been turned over. Kings now fits the pieces together for the reader to get a clear picture of the sequence of events.

Kings starts in the late 80s and traces Scruggs’ rise and fall path, along the way culprits come and go. Lange and Dawson weave together this story in a compelling fashion to give the reader insight and a clear time line.

Kings reads with all the characteristics of a novel, yet it is not. It seems truthful without too much author grandstanding and personal agenda. Leanly written, without too much flowery embellishment, reading takes on the fast pace of a thriller.

For me, Kings is a cross of Jack Nelson’s fine Terror in the Night and an early Grisham legal thriller.

This is a must-read for inquiring Mississippians.

Alan Lange and Tom Dawson will be at Lemuria Thursday afternoon at 4:00 p.m.

I was just sitting down to write, not quite sure of what I wanted to write about, and in the box of books to be shelved today I see some books wrapped in plastic which can mean it to be something special or simply an annoyance.

Unwrapping it, I see that it is a previously unpublished and unfinished work of Vladimir Nabokov.

From the jacket, I read:

When Vladimir Nabokov died in 1977, he left instructions for his heirs to burn the 138 handwritten index cards that made up the rough draft of his final and unfinished novel, The Original Laura. But Nabokov’s wife, Vera, could not bear to destroy her husband’s last work, and when she died, the fate of the manuscript fell to her son. Dmitri Nabokov, now seventy-five–the Russian novelist’s only surviving heir, and translator of his many books–has wrestled for three decades with the decision of whether to honor his father’s wish or preserve for posterity the last piece of writing of one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. His decision finally to allow publication of the fragmented narrative–dark yet playful, preoccupied with mortality–affords us one last experience of Nabokov’s magnificent creativity, the quintessence of his unparalleled body of work.

Opening with an introduction by Vladimir’s son, Dmitri, the book elegantly compiles the 138 reproduced handwritten note cards with a type-written text below. The image above is the hardcover without the jacket.

I’m too curious to resist. I’ll be reading it on this rainy night. I certainly do wonder what Vladimir would think about his note cards now reproduced in a glorious book format designed by Chip Kidd.

I’ll try to get back here after I finish reading . . .

Update: I finished reading The Original of Laura. My recommendation for reading this work is to finish it in a couple of sittings. It is indeed an unfinished work and a little disconcerting at times. But stick with it! There is a conclusion to Laura and the characters will linger in your mind long after you finish it. I thought that the Nabokov’s notes on the hard cover must have to do with his wishes that the unfinished work be destroyed upon his death. However, you will discover the intended meaning of the words once you finish Laura: “efface expunge erase delete . . . ” become a bit haunting. I think it is beneficial to read the introduction prior to Laura as it is a charming and sometimes humorous explanation of why Dimitri decided to publish his father’s work. On a somber note, I also learned of the somewhat sad circumstances under which Vladimir Nabokov passed away. I look forward to sitting down with this beautiful book again sometime, and I recommend it highly.