RSSBlack Swan Green makes Book Sense for me
The May 2006 Book Sense Picks list is out and (as is usual) the recommended reads are a delightful mix of authors and titles, both familiar and obscure. Poring over the list is one of my favorite beginning-of-month pastimes. The recommendations from independent booksellers around the country are just eclectic enough to keep me feeling that I’ve discovered something off the beaten literary path and just familiar enough to make me feel that new discoveries would keep good company with old favorites.
What’s going on my wishlist from the Book Sense Picks this month? Black Swan Green by David Mitchell for one. I’d prefer not to wait too long to read Mitchell’s follow-up to the Booker-nominated Cloud Atlas, even given the quirky little Hardcover Confessional over at MetaxuCafe, in which one blogger complains that despite a love for Mitchell’s writing he’ll wait to finish until it comes out in paperback: “I just get a real sour feeling with a hardcover—too clunky, too unwieldy, the damn paper cover slides all around/rips, if you take it off it’s not the same (I know) … Anyone else out there have similar feelings?” No!
Mitchell’s been on book tour this month, drawing in crowds of fellow authors who want to know how he does that (write so well, I mean). “There wasn’t a single writer in the room who could decide between hugging Mitchell and strangling him. It only took about two pages of Black Swan Green to realize that while on the surface it seems pretty different from his prior three novels, damnit, it’s just as good,” writes Krissa Corbett Cavouras in Gothamist (about Mitchell’s New York appearance). Those British authors just keep piquing my interest.
Also on the Book Sense list: new offerings from Sebastian Junger and Laura Esquivel, and The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade by Ann Fessler, a title that reminds me of the importance of independent bookstores in today’s political climate.