It’s October.  With only three months left in the year, it’s about the time to start gathering the books that I’m going to close the year out with.  I like to choose my books with a certain rhythm in mind.  For example, when a group of musicians decide to put together a great album, they have to keep in mind the progression of the songs.  The songs have to fit together individually, as well as within the structure of the album.  When choosing what to read, I try to do the same thing.  This is my soundtrack based on the year as told through books.

(meta disclaimer.  this blog will use describe books and music interchangeably.)

January

Track 1. Intro (Moby Dick): Kicking things off at the start of the album is the Intro.  Many people choose to read classics at this time to get them in the right mindset for a year of reading.  As far as releases go, publishers aren’t going to release the big name books at this time of year.  With the start of the year being so dry (let’s face it, that backlist is not going to ever be read) this is the perfect time to read Infinite Jest, Moby Dick, Brave New World, or Dracula.  I chose to take things easy and read the one book everyone lies about having read; Moby Dick.  I did not finish it.  Much like the intro on most albums, I got about a quarter of the way through, realized that better stuff was hiding behind this prerequisite, and pressed next.

February

Track 2. A Marker to Measure Drift:  The first song on the album is often the best.  Alexander Maksik’s novel fits this role quite nicely.  The book is packed with mystery and intrigue.  It builds suspense in a way that many authors try, but end up flailing.  Like a duck.  Or a flail.  Anyway, A Marker is a winter read, despite it taking place mostly on a beach.  Go figure.

March

Track 3. The Martian:  The first radio hit single!  The second song needs to have that reliable hook/gimmick to get people excited about the album (year in reading).  This is the pivot point and for many, their entire memory of the album will be anchored with this song. Andy Weir’s brilliant first effort in The Martian is the 1901 of books.  FOLDING, FOLDING, FOLDING readers onto mars with Mark Watney.  This book is that anytime book that builds itself a little nostalgia house before you’ve finished.  It accomplishes  deja entendu while feeling fresh all the same.  The perfect song(book) to turn your headphones all the way up (down) and get lost in the music (words).

April

Track 4. Communion Town by Sam Thompson:  Well, they can’t all be winners.  Communion Town is that song you just keep waiting to be great.  Remember the 2008 VMAs when Kanye West came on stage and the DU DOO DU DOOM started.  I was wild with anticipation but just like in the song, this book forgot to climax.  It just kept going and DU DOO DU DOOMing.  It’s the book you should skip the first time you listen to it.

May

Track 5. Interlude (My Brief History):  After the garlic breath equivalent of books is in your mind, it’s nice to have something heartwarming and light.  It is at this point, that most albums begin to fade.  You’ve already heard the song everyone has been talking about and now you can’t get it out of your head.  The last one was a complete hype vacuum.  The best thing to do at this point is slow things down and lead the reader into the next phase of the album.  The swing is up next and you need a sure-fire melody to restore your faith in the page.  This past year, I chose Stephen Hawkins to play that part.  My Brief History is the perfect interlude.  The book is a short autobiography of the brilliant scientist’s life.  It’s the first nonfiction book of the year and provides the introductory change of pace for the next song.

June

Track 6.  The Answer to the Riddle is Me by David Maclean:  Every great album has the halftime ballad and The Answer to the Riddle is Me gave me a great feeling after reading it.  I still have that happy, “wow the human race is amazing” feeling months after shelving it.  Now hear me out: the book is about taking malaria medication, developing amnesia and “waking up” on a train in India.  I understand how terrifying that may sound, but the book is really about the kindness of strangeness and the lengths our love-ones would go through to get us back home.

Well, your drive to work is only so far.  You have to get out of the car at some point.  If you’re anything like me, you probably sit in your car with the book in your hands squeezing those last few paragraphs our before you have to walk inside.  Let’s be responsible here people.  Take those keys out of the ignition and turn the album off.  There’s always the drive home.

Written by Andre

About a dozen years ago, my book pal Katherine Walton introduced me to the fine work of Tim Duffy. His first book, Music Makers, was nearing publication and she wanted us to become friends. I loved Tim’s first book so much that Lemuria kept it in our blues section until it went out of print. The effort in that first book was special; and it was my introduction to the music of Willie King of Macon, MS. Willie’s music is inspiring to me personally, and fortunately I was able to develop a friendship with him before he passed in 2009.

We Are the Music Makers is Tim’s new effort, put together with his lovely wife Denise, to celebrate the last 20 years of the Music Maker Relief Foundation and it’s work. Together they have helped over 300 musicians, arranged over 9.693 grants for artists, and have promoted 4,384 performances. They have produced CD’s and have released 1,996 songs by 365 partner artists. (A companion CD set is included in the new book)

On October 11 of this year, Music Makers had a fun-filled music weekend in North Caroline to celebrate their 20th year of work. I had the good fortune to attend and hear over 50 Music Makers musicians share their stories and tunes for 2 days.

Over the years with Music Makers, Tim has helped many Mississippi artists including Othar and Sharde Turner, Jack Owens, Joe Lee Cole, Como Mamas, Ironing Board Sam (of 930 Blues Cafe fame) and Willie King. Music Maker support continues, and two of their new artists are some of my favorites: New Orleans bluesman Ernie Vincent and my pal Willie James Williams, Willie King’s great juke joint drummer.

Another way Music Makers is celebrating 20 years is in their traveling photo exhibit, which will be stopped at the B.B. King museum in Indianola from October 23 to November 30. I was able to experience this exhibit while in North Carolina and it is reflective of Tim’s amazing contributions to music today.

On Wednesday, October 14 at 5:00, Tim will be at Lemuria to sign We Are the Music Makers. If you love the blues, come meet Tim and become a friend of Music Makers. I think it would be great fun for Mississippi to have more support for and with this fine organization.

We Are the Music Makers: Preserving the Soul of America’s Music                                                               Pictures and stories by Denise and Timothy Duffy                                                                                   Nautilus Press, 2014                                                                                                                                       $38

The Bone Clocks is Mitchell’s best yet. The characters are labyrinthine, loving and hating. The plot is ridiculously well done. This book seems to have oozed from the psyche like some bathybic mythocreature. Its prints will be on my mind for a long time.

This is the blurb I sent in to our Random House reps after reading this book:

William O’Connor of The Daily Beast reviewed David Mitchell’s latest book writing: “One of the best novelists alive, Mitchell probably couldn’t write a truly bad book, but while his latest effort is always entertaining, nothing about it sticks with you.”

Several months away from the book, I have to disagree with Mr. O’Connor.

Instead of stiffly trying to refute point by point the aforementioned review I’m just going to tell you what I loved about this book, why I think it worked, and why I liked it better than Cloud Atlas.

Or, without shitting around, let’s just get to the heart of the problem. No one is going to contest  David Mitchell’s ability to craft characters; If someone has a problem with this book, it’s most likely to do with the plot. To map out the plot of this book would be both annoying and pointless to readers. I’ll relate like this: where there seem to be holes, there are, and they are there for a purpose. And instead of the word holes, we should use the term voids. These voids create the cerebral and abstract situation necessary to capture the torrent that is the inner experience where the conscious and the unconscious meet. It’s essential to this book, and not an inconsistency. It’s like talking about a David Lynch film. If you need things to be reasonable, you probably just shouldn’t watch any Lynch films. Same thing with the other David. I personally found the story incredible, as opposed to credible, and thought it was spectacular. If I wanted to read a story about a middle aged man wasting away in a cubicle for three hundred pages I wouldn’t read David Mitchell. But, if you want to read something incredible, do it.

Most of The Bone Clocks detractors have a nostalgia complex. You loved Cloud Atlas so much that when you now read any of of his works it is accompanied by this sentimental longing for the past. Whenever you read about Timothy Cavendish or Luisa Rey in the new novel, you’re struck with that excitement only a long lost friend can conjure – feeling that disparate warmth reserved for the familiar, but you slowly come to realize Tim and Luisa have changed somehow, slightly, but enough to be untrustworthy, enough to be lulled out of your reverie in the clouds. Mitchell’s characters change just as they should, just like we do. For all of you experiencing this nostalgia complex, take one from Gregory House, M.D., “people never change” (at least not substantially).

Here is a subtle example of this complex from Mr. O’Connors piece:

And where are the clever insights so prevalent in Cloud Atlas, e.g., “If war’s first victim is truth, its second is clerical efficiency.” Or, “all revolutions are fantasy until they happen, then they are historical inevitabilities.”

O’Connor, not one paragraph before, writes:

The observations are witty, and Hershey’s self-destructive wallowing is as addictive as the best reality show. The next chapter, on the Horologist Marinus, allows Mitchell to dazzle us with his seemingly endless random knowledge of people and global history.

His willingness to praise Mitchell’s prose as witty and then immediately disavow it to ask ‘where is the wit we once saw in Cloud Atlas?’ is at once disturbing and telling. Despite their similar form, this latest novel is not supposed to be an iteration of the “masterpiece”. It’s an elegant, chaotic enrichment to the masterpiece that is being made.

If you have this complex, go see a psychoanalyst, because there is never going to be a Bone Atlas.

Written by Austen

There are books that are markers, books that you read at the exact moment when you needed to read them, books that ask the questions you are still trying to form into words, books that change your course.

Seven years ago I picked up Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead for the first time. Seven years ago I wrote my first poem. I just completed my MFA in poetry this summer.

Marilynne Robinson shouldn’t be able to do what she does. It seems impossible to create characters shrouded in mystery yet full of life, characters in doubt and love and life. It is like they grew from the same Iowa soil they seek to tame.

Lila, Robinson’s newest addition to her books set in the small town of Gilead, Iowa (Gilead and Home being the previous) is the best yet. Lila, the Reverend John Ames’ wife, has been a reliable sidekick, a foil to fill in the shadows of other characters of the books. But here, in her own book, an itinerant woman living in a shack outside of Gilead, she is lovely. Whereas the Reverend opened his memories up to us in the pages of Gilead, Lila keeps us in the shadows, slowly unspooling her past as she attempts to sew herself into something new.

If you have never had the pleasure to read Marilynne Robinson, do it now. Although her novels are interwoven, they stand alone. I promise that she reads like nobody you have ever read before.

Written by Matthew Guinn, a Jackson native and author of the Edgar Allen nominated book The Ressurrectionist. The following selection is a part of an upcoming essay collection titled 601. 

I came to Mississippi hoping to be a writer. I was just out of the University of Georgia, where I had read Larry Brown and been floored by his lyrical naturalism, and of course I was aware of the others—that grand pantheon running back to Faulkner and kept alive in that present day of 1992 by the likes of Larry, Barry, Steve Yarbrough, Richard Ford. Eudora Welty and Shelby Foote were still alive, and there were others to come: Tom Franklin, Cynthia Shearer, Donna Tartt. The concentration of literary talent was incredible.

Athens, Georgia, had that kind of artistic brilliance, but in music. The B-52s and R.E.M. had put the town on the map, and Widespread Panic was building its momentum; we used to go see them monthly at the Georgia Theater. I remember when ticket prices went up, from $3.50 to $4, some suspected that Panic had sold out.

It wasn’t too uncommon to cross paths with these musicians. Kate Pierson and Michael Stipe still lived in Athens then, and you might pass them on a streetcorner downtown, or shopping in Wuxtry Records, where the guitarist for Guadalcanal Diary worked. But Athens had a code regarding its celebrities: it was absolutely verboten to approach them. It was understood that you could perhaps nod in passing, but to speak would be a breach of decorum, and to engage one of these luminous talents in conversation would be downright gauche.

So perhaps you can imagine how I felt when, in the fall of ’92, in Jackson for the first time, with my soon-to-be fiancée and in-laws, eating at the Mayflower, I realized that the man at the table behind ours was Willie Morris. There, with a female companion and a brown-bagged bottle on the table, sat the former editor of Harper’s, the man who wrote North Toward Home and The Courting of Marcus Dupree. Eating broiled redfish like the rest of us.

“Don’t look,” I said, “but Willie Morris is at the next table.”

My future father-in-law looked over his shoulder—brazenly—at the table. Willie caught his eye and the two nodded to one another. “You should go talk to him,” my future in-law said. “Since you want to be a writer.”

I didn’t. Could not bring myself to interrupt his meal, to barge in, to impose on his time. I wouldn’t have in Athens and didn’t think I could in this new locale.

What I didn’t realize at the time was just what it meant that Willie was a Mississippian, and a Jacksonian to boot. I hadn’t yet come to understand that in this new, strange terrain—with its flat vistas and searing temperatures—good manners took precedence over all else, that Mississippi holds itself to a higher standard of social graciousness than anywhere else. That Willie would have obliged me with a few minutes of his time—would likely even have asked me a few questions about myself.

I’ve come to suspect over the years—this has been my fourteenth Mississippi summer—that the heat has something to do with it. That manners do indeed, as Flannery O’Connor said, save us from ourselves. As though without them to hold us in check, we’d all snap from the heat index come July and August. And by September, we’d be down to the last Jacksonian standing.

God knows how much I could have learned from Willie Morris, how much a single conversation might have helped me with craft, tone, rhythm. In time, in Oxford, I would come to know Larry Brown. And find that he was a kind and generous man who made time to advise and help younger, struggling writers. That some unspoken standard obliged him to do it. I know now that Willie held himself to the same standard.

But I would never get to know Willie. Years later I was on a flight to Jackson from Atlanta with my squalling infant son on my lap, crying the entire trip. I’d shaken William Styron’s hand in the aisle when we boarded. I was thinking the entire flight, I hope Styron doesn’t put me together with this crying—I have aspirations to a writing career. Then, when we landed, I met Richard Ford at the baggage claim. From the same flight. Incredible. Staggering. Jackson.

They were flying in for Willie’s funeral. Too late to introduce myself, as I should have, that night in ’92, in the Mayflower. I could have. But I did not realize it at the time. Did not know, then, that Mississippi is that kind of place, that Jackson is that kind of a town.

Jackson: photographs by Ken Murphy is available now for purchase. To order a copy, call Lemuria Books at 601.366.7619 or visit us online at lemuriabooks.com.