BookOpinion

I can still recall the first time I heard about this book. I was sitting in my fourth-grade classroom, and my teacher brought in a television to show us some program (maybe Reading Rainbow) about books. Several books were previewed, but I remember watching the preview of “A Wrinkle in Time” and thinking, “I have got to get that book.” I remember reading it the first time and becoming almost spellbound by the story and characters.

In the many years since then, I have read the book easily a dozen times. It always has been found on children’s shelves, but like so many “children’s” books, it far surpasses the mindless nothings we find in the grown-up sections of our libraries and bookstores. A few days ago, L’Engle passed away, leaving a legacy of dozens of amazing novels. I have read many, but not all. “A Wrinkle in Time” and its companion books, “A Wind in the Door” and “A Swiftly Tilting Planet” have always been my favorites. I was never a fan of fantasy or science-fiction books. I never made it beyond the second book of the Chronicles of Narnia, and never made it anywhere near Tolkien, so it surprises me to no end, that “A Wrinkle in Time” is one of my favorites.

For the uninitiated, “A Wrinkle in Time” is the story of Meg Murray, an awkard and self-conscious teen, who embarks on a journey to find her missing scientist father who has developed an enormously fast method of space and time travel and then suddenly disappears. Of his family, which includes a wife and four children, Meg seems the hardest hit by this abscence. Her youngest brother, a precocious, five-year-old named Charles Wallace introduces her to three elderly women who he says will help find their father. With the help of a newly-found friend, a schoolmate of Meg’s named Calvin O’Keefe, the three entrust the women to lead them on a journey through space and time, encountering new planets and strange creatures, and eventually leading to Meg and Charles Wallace’s father.

With skillful dialogue and engaging descriptions, L’Engle has you hooked before the first chapter is over. I had read about two pages before I realized (at the tender age of 10) that this was going to be one of those books I would love forever. My recap and description hardly do the novel justice. Meg, Charles Wallace and Calvin are some of my favorite fictional characters. I felt tears come to my eyes when I read of L’Engle’s death, but I am so thankful that she left us all with great stories that will last forever.

– Jane Leisteiner

The Quill Awards for the best books of the year in 19 different categories were announced. Below is a list of the winners. You can still vote for Book of the Year. Voting ends October 10, 2007.

Winning authors in all of the categories, plus dozens of other bestselling authors, will be seen at the Awards Program on NBC Saturday, October 27, 2007.

Here are this year’s awards:

Debut Author Of The Year
The Thirteenth Tale: A Novel
Written by Diane Setterfield
Published by Atria

General Fiction
The Road
Written by Cormac McCarthy
Published by Alfred A. Knopf

Romance
Angels Fall
Written by Nora Roberts
Published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons

Audio
To Kill a Mockingbird
Written by Harper Lee
Read by Sissy Spacek
Published by Caedmon Audio

Religion/Spirituality
Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know–And Doesn’t
Written by Stephen Prothero
Published by Harper One

Graphic Novel
Making Comics: Storytelling Secrets of Comics, Manga and Graphic Novels
Written by Scott McCloud
Published by Harper Paperbacks

Poetry
For the Confederate Dead
Written by Kevin Young
Published by Alfred A. Knopf

Cooking
Joy of Cooking: 75th Anniversary Edition - 2006
Written by Irma S. Rombauer, Marion Rombauer Becker, and Ethan Becker
Published by Scribner

Health/Self-Improvement
How Doctors Think
Written by Jerome Groopman, M.D.
Published by Houghton Mifflin

Biography/Memoir
Einstein: His Life and Universe
Written by Walter Isaacson
Published by Simon & Schuster

Sports
The Kings of New York: A Year Among the Geeks, Oddballs, and Genuises Who Make Up America’s Top HighSchool Chess Team
Written by Michael Weinreb
Published by Gotham Books

Humor
I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence
Written by Amy Sedaris
Published by Warner Books

History/Current Events/Politics
The Assault on Reason
Written by Al Gore
The Penguin Press

Business
The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t
Written by Robert I. Sutton, PhD
Published by Business Plus, Grand Central Publishing

Mystery/Suspense
What the Dead Know: A Novel
Written by Laura Lippman
Published by William Morrow

Science Fiction/Fantasy/Horror
The Name of the Wind (The Kingkiller Chronicle: Day One)
Written by Patrick Rothfuss
Published by DAW Books

Children’s Picture Books
Flotsam
Written by David Wiesner
Published by Clarion Books, Houghton Mifflin

Children’s Chapter/Middle Grade
The Invention of Hugo Cabret
Written by Brian Selznick
Published Scholastic Press

Young Adult/Teen
Sold
Written by Patricia McCormick
Published by Hyperion Books for Children

Newbery Award-winning Author Madeleine L’Engle, who’s known mostly for her novel “A Wrinkle in Time,” has died at the age of 88, her publicist said Friday.

She wrote more than 60 books, which include poetry, memoirs, fantasies and often feature spiritual themes and her Christian faith. L’Engle followed “A Wrinkle in Time” with further adventures of the Murry children, including “A Wind in the Door,” 1973; “A Swiftly Tilting Planet,” 1978, which won an American Book Award; and “Many Waters,” 1986.

The “St. James Guide to Children’s Writers” called L’Engle “one of the truly important writers of juvenile fiction in recent decades.”

The Associated Press writes:

Although L’Engle was often labeled a children’s author, she disliked that classification. In a 1993 Associated Press interview, she said she did not write down to children.

“In my dreams, I never have an age,” she said. “I never write for any age group in mind. When people do, they tend to be tolerant and condescending and they don’t write as well as they can write.

“When you underestimate your audience, you’re cutting yourself off from your best work.”

“A Wrinkle in Time” — which L’Engle said was rejected repeatedly before it found a publisher in 1962 — won the American Library Association’s 1963 Newbery Medal for best American children’s book. Her “A Ring of Endless Light” was a Newbery Honor Book, or medal runner-up, in 1981.

In 2004, President Bush awarded her a National Humanities Medal.

“Wrinkle” tells the story of adolescent Meg Murry, her genius little brother Charles Wallace, and their battle against evil as they search across the universe for their missing father, a scientist.

We have found this message from L’Engle on Amazon, talking about her writing, motivations and the questions most people ask her:

I wrote my first story when I was 5. It was about a little G-R-U-L, because that’s how I spelled “girl” when I was 5. I wrote because I wanted to know what everything was about. My father, before I was born, had been gassed in the first World War, and I wanted to know why there were wars, why people hurt each other, why we couldn’t get along together, and what made people tick. That’s why I started to write stories.

The books I read most as a child were by Lucy Maud Montgomery, who’s best known for her Anne of Green Gables stories, but I also liked Emily of New Moon. Emily was an only child, as I was. Emily lived on an island, as did I. Although Manhattan Island and Prince Edward Island are not very much alike, they are still islands. Emily’s father was dying of bad lungs, and so was mine. Emily had some dreadful relative, and so did I. She had a hard time in school, and she also understood that there’s more to life than just the things that can be explained by encyclopedias and facts. Facts alone are not adequate. I love Emily. I also read E. Nesbit, who was a nineteenth-century writer of fantasies and family stories, and I read fairy tales and the myths of all countries. And anything I could get my hands on.

As an adult, I like to read fiction. I really enjoy good murder mystery writers, usually women, frequently English, because they have a sense of what the human soul is about and why people do dark and terrible things. I also read quite a lot in the area of particle physics and quantum mechanics, because this is theology. This is about the nature of being. This is what life is all about. I try to read as widely as I possibly can.

I wrote A Wrinkle in Time when we were living in a small dairy farm village in New England. I had three small children to raise, and life was not easy. We lost four of our closest friends within two years by death–that’s a lot of death statistically. And I really wasn’t finding the answers to my big questions in the logical places. So, at the time I discovered the world of particle physics. I discovered Einstein and relativity. I read a book of Einstein’s, in which he said that anyone who’s not lost in rapturous awe at the power and glory of the mind behind the universe is as good as a burnt-out candle. And I thought, “Oh, I’ve found my theologian, what a wonderful thing.” I began to read more in that area. A Wrinkle in Time came out of these questions, and out of my discovery of the post-utopian sciences, which knocked everything we knew about science for a loop.

A Wrinkle in Time was almost never published. You can’t name a major publisher who didn’t reject it. And there were many reasons. One was that it was supposedly too hard for children. Well, my children were 7, 10, and 12 while I was writing it. I’d read to them at night what I’d written during the day, and they’d say, “Ooh, mother, go back to the typewriter!” A Wrinkle in Time” had a female protagonist in a science fiction book, and that wasn’t done. And it dealt with evil and things that you don’t find, or didn’t at that time, in children’s books. When we’d run through forty-odd publishers, my agent sent it back. We gave up. Then my mother was visiting for Christmas, and I gave her a tea party for some of her old friends. One of them happened to belong to a small writing group run by John Farrar, of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, which at that time did not have a juvenile list. She insisted that I meet John any how, and I went down with my battered manuscript. John had read my first novel and liked it, and read this book and loved it. That’s how it happened.

The most asked question that I generally receive is, “Where do you get your ideas?” That’s very easily answered. I tell a story about Johann Sebastian Bach when he was an old man. A student asked him, “Papa Bach, where do you get the ideas for all of these melodies?” And the old man said, “Why, when I get up in the morning, it’s all I can do not to trip over them.” And that’s how ideas are; they’re just everywhere. I think the least asked question is one that I got in Japan. This little girl held up her hand and said, “How tall are you?” In Japan, I am very tall.

I get over one hundred letters a week. There are always letters that stand out. There was one from a 12-year-old girl in North Carolina who wrote me many years ago, saying “I’m Jewish and most of my friends are Christian. My Christian friends told me only Christians can be saved. What do you think? Your books have made me trust you.” Well, we corresponded for about twenty years. I suggested that she go back to read some of the great Jewish writers to find out about her own tradition. Another letter asked, “We’re studying the crusades in school. Can there be such a thing as a Holy War? Is war ever right?” I mean, kids don’t hesitate to ask questions. And it’s a great honor to have the kids say, “Your books have made me trust you.”

Link to Author’s Message

For a limited time, as they say, consumers can get a free book light when they spend $75 or more at Barnes and Noble. The BookBrite Book Light clips to any book. It is compact and ultra-bright and is also great for providing tabletop illumination. 

The promotion began Sept. 4 and will last until Sept. 22.

There are surprisingly few books in print about the tenor. The two most popular sellers are the 25-year-old autobiography by Pavarotti titled “Pavarotti, My Own Story” and the more recent ”The King and I: The Uncensored Tale of Luciano Pavarotti’s Rise to Fame by His Manager, Friend and Sometime Adversary“.

No doubt, with the death of Pavarotti today, there will be more in print in the next few years. Until then, The King and I by Herbert Breslin will likely continue as the bestseller on the legend.

Washington Post describes The King and I as “both readable and entertaining in a bitchy sort of way.” That is probably as concise and to the point as you can get. More from the Post about the book:

…Breslin’s relationship with Pavarotti was the defining event of his life, and nothing in his recital of their years together remains sacred. Indeed, by the end of the book one has the sense that these two really deserved each other.

As Breslin describes the three stages of their relationship, the early years were those of closeness, collaboration and excitement. They were like family, and Pavarotti was a “dream client” with a natural gift for promotion. He loved interviews, charmed everyone.

In the second phase, the middle years, both were at the top of their respective professions, and they made each other rich. And finally the third phase — the last 10 years, featuring the Three Tenors concerts all over the world and countless more arena concerts — in which Breslin describes a very lazy divo, grossly overweight, reluctant to learn new music, willful and demanding, plus a messy, very public divorce….

…”Nobody argues that he makes beautiful music, and has a beautiful voice, and phrases the music he sings so gorgeously that your heart stops,” Breslin says. “But when it comes to things like sight-reading, or counting time so he knows when to come in, or any of the other technical things that make up the craft of musicianship, Luciano is a little bit challenged. It doesn’t help that he can’t read music.” Breslin adds that his client was not a great favorite with conductors: He always knew better and tried to correct the conductor’s tempo.

On the more positive side, Breslin repeats like a mantra that Pavarotti was the greatest tenor in the world — a statement with which some would argue. He also says that in all their years together, they never had a written contract. “Luciano was a straight arrow . . . he was a man of his word. As was I. And Adua, his wife, who looked after their financial affairs, ran a tight ship.”

Breslin also gives us a picture of the famous tenor outside the opera house — at home in Modena, Italy, where he was a great host, a man with a gargantuan appetite who loved to cook for his guests. He has a passion for horses. He loves to gamble and is a terrific poker player. He also had a healthy appetite for beautiful women. Adua, his wife of many years and the mother of three daughters, took this in her stride, but finally Nicoletta Mantovani, the singer’s secretary, caused their divorce and became Pavarotti’s second wife.

Although this excerpt touches little on Pavarotti, here is the opening from The King and I:

Here’s how not to begin your brilliant professional career. In 1957, I was thirty-three years old. I was married, with a child on the way. And I was working as a speechwriter for the Chrysler Corporation. In Detroit, Michigan.

Detroit, Michigan. Who would even want to think about it? Misery.

People suppose that to succeed in the classical music business you should be very highly directed. You should have experience as a performer, so you know what it’s like on the other side of the footlights. You should get your foot in the door early and work in a number of different areas so you get to know all sides of the performing arts. Ultimately, you’ll gather the experience you need to set up your own company and manage top-level artists.

Well, that’s all bullshit.

I came out of nowhere. I was smart. I was full of energy. And I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. All I knew was that I loved music.

How much did I love music? I’d been obsessed with opera since I was eight years old. The beauty, the glamour, the excitement, and the tremendous voices pulled me into another world. I had a huge collection of records I listened to constantly. I had scrapbooks of the performances I’d seen and the artists I loved. Whatever else was going on around me, opera served as my own private support system and gave me tremendous sustenance. So much sustenance, in fact, that it became my life.

The problem I had when I was thirty-three was that it had nothing to do with my life. Especially not my life in Detroit. There’s a little bit of music in Detroit, but nothing you would really want to seriously consider. I’m a New Yorker. I was starved for opera. I would get the New York Times and wistfully scan the cast lists at the Metropolitan Opera, which the Times used to print every Monday, for the two weeks ahead.

One week I saw that Renata Tebaldi was scheduled to sing Tosca, and I couldn’t help myself. Tebaldi was one of the greatest sopranos singing. People portrayed her as a rival of Maria Callas: Tebaldi’s pure vocal beauty against Callas’s dramatic brilliance. Myself, I liked Callas fine, but I was a fierce fan of Renata Tebaldi. Intoxicating things happened when the woman opened her mouth. It was enough to make you fly to New York. I said to my wife, Carol, “We’re going to see that Tosca,” and I bought tickets.
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Amazon has released a 10-minute podcast from the audiobook for Heartsick by Chelsea Cain. Publishers Weekly says, “A vivid literary style lifts this well above the usual run of suspense novels.”

Amazon writes: “Narrated by Carolyn McCormick (of Law & Order fame), Heartsick turns typical serial-killer fare on its head by introducing one of the most tense, titillating relationships between cop and killer since Thomas Harris introduced Clarice Starling to Hannibal Lecter. This time, it’s a woman–the devastatingly beautiful, heart-stoppingly evil Gretchen Lowell–who, in the midst of a seemingly neverending bloodbath, takes lead investigator Archie Sheridan captive, subjects him to unthinkable torture, yet allows him to live and turns herself in. Fast forward two years, when Sheridan is coaxed out of a grim, drug-addled semi-retirement to hunt down another killer…and there’s only one person who can help him. Heartsick is a huge in-house favorite at Amazon.com and one of our favorite new releases for September. Take a listen and prepare to be hooked!”

Listen to Amazon’s free podcast here.

Already among the top selling new releases based on pre-orders, “Tree of Smoke” by Denis Johnson hits bookstores this week. Johnson reportedly spent nearly two decades working on the novel. The New York Times calls it “a tremendous book.” BookOpinion has compiled reviews and an excerpt.

The New York Times summarizes the storylines in its review: “It’s mostly about a man named Skip Sands, a novice in the C.I.A, who begins the book as a young man in 1965, and makes it almost to the end, though by then it’s 1983 and he’s ancient; and his uncle, a Kurtz-like character who starts a little operation of his own, and then dies so ridiculously that no one can believe he’s actually dead; and the Houston brothers, Bill and James, who serve their country and then wander, angry and free, back to Nothing-to-Do, Arizona; and two Vietnamese military men, one from the South and one from the North, who flip this way and that; and another intelligence officer named Storm, who carries the book like the last man in a relay race, delivering it at the finish to a Canadian woman named Kathy, a Seventh-Day Adventist and aid worker, who has encompassed the whole story, who winds up bearing much of the book’s considerable grief, and who gets, as she deserves, its final pages to mourn.”

It seems many reviewers had difficulty summarizing “Tree of Smoke.” The Plain-Dealer writes, “Ambiguity permeates this novel. Conventions of plot and lead character are violated - Skip Sands disappears for more than a third of the book. Almost a dozen others spin substories, each told in a distinct prose style. The sections featuring Vietnamese are particularly impressive, Saigon’s pungent chaos growing vivid to the point of hallucination. And Johnson devotes some of the most gorgeous and desolate writing in the book to a fellow named James Houston, who escapes a marginal Arizona upbringing only to spend three combat tours so far inside the heart of darkness he achieves a horrific enlightenment. Though full of action, drama and significance, these subplots don’t really develop or resolve, despite their scrupulous architecture. Rather than move forward, characters sink down, no matter how ‘good’ or ‘bad’ their intent or action.”

The L.A. Times writes that “‘Tree of Smoke,’ however, lacks that laser sharpness, that ability to parse the distinctions between transcendence and despair. It never brings us close enough to believe that these characters matter, that there is something fundamental — lives, souls, the question of deliverance — at stake.”

In some sense, you have to wonder if that’s a consequence of the desire to produce an epic. “Tree of Smoke” is 614 pages long, and Johnson reportedly worked on it for two decades, which suggests an existential dilemma of its own. Yet in the end this is too easy, also; it’s not the book’s length that is the trouble but its approach.

“The jungle itself screamed like a mosque,” Johnson writes late in the novel, describing a staged ritual in which a former psy-ops sergeant named Jimmy Storm plays a symbolic sacrifice. “Storm lay naked on his back and watched the upward-rushing mist and smoke in the colossal firelight and waited for the clear light, for the peaceful deities, the face of the father-mother, the light from the six worlds, the dawning of hell’s smoky light and the white light of the second god, the hungry ghosts wandering in ravenous desire, the gods of knowledge and the wrathful gods, the judgment of the lord of death before the mirror of karma, the punishments of the demons, and the flight to refuge in the cave of the womb that would bear him back into this world.”

It’s beautiful writing: With Johnson, the writing is always beautiful. Still, for all that it hints at a reality in which physics and metaphysics blend together and we are transfigured by their proximity, mostly what we get here is a sense of being on the outside, which — in Johnson’s universe, anyway — has never been enough.

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The following is an excerpt from Tree of Smoke:

Last night at 3:00 a.m. President Kennedy had been killed. Seaman Houston and the other two recruits slept while the first reports traveled around the world. There was one small nightspot on the island, a dilapidated club with big revolving fans in the ceiling and one bar and one pinball game; the two marines who ran the club had come by to wake them up and tell them what had happened to the President. The two marines sat with the three sailors on the bunks in the Quonset hut for transient enlisted men, watching the air conditioner drip water into a coffee can and drinking beer. The Armed Forces Network from Subic Bay stayed on through the night, broadcasting bulletins about the unfathomable murder.

Now it was late in the morning, and Seaman Apprentice William Houston, Jr., began feeling sober again as he stalked the jungle of Grande Island carrying a borrowed .22-caliber rifle. There were supposed to be some wild boars roaming this island military resort, which was all he had seen so far of the Philippines. He didn’t know how he felt about this country. He just wanted to do some hunting in the jungle. There were supposed to be some wild boars around here.

He stepped carefully, thinking about snakes and trying to be quiet because he wanted to hear any boars before they charged him. He was aware that he was terrifically on edge. From all around came the ten thousand sounds of the jungle, as well as the cries of gulls and the far-off surf, and if he stopped dead and listened a minute, he could hear also the pulse snickering in the heat of his flesh, and the creak of sweat in his ears. If he stayed motionless only another couple of seconds, the bugs found him and whined around his head.

He propped the rifle against a stunted banana plant and removed his headband and wrung it out and wiped his face and stood there awhile, waving away the mosquitoes with the cloth and itching his crotch absent-mindedly. Nearby, a seagull seemed to be carrying on an argument with itself, a series of protesting squeaks interrupted by contradictory lower-pitched cries that sounded like, Huh! Huh! Huh! And something moving from one tree to another caught Seaman Houston’s eye.

He kept his vision on the spot where he’d seen it among the branches of a rubber tree, putting his hand out for the rifle without altering the direction of his gaze. It moved again. Now he saw that it was some sort of monkey, not much bigger than a Chihuahua dog. Not precisely a wild boar, but it presented itself as something to be looked at, clinging by its left hand and both feet to the tree’s trunk and digging at the thin rind with an air of tiny, exasperated haste. Seaman Houston took the monkey’s meager back under the rifle’s sight. He raised the barrel a few degrees and took the monkey’s head into the sight. Without really thinking about anything at all, he squeezed the trigger.

The monkey flattened itself out against the tree, spreading its arms and legs enthusiastically, and then, reaching around with both hands as if trying to scratch its back, it tumbled down to the ground. Seaman Houston was terrified to witness its convulsions there. It hoisted itself, pushing off the ground with one arm, and sat back against the tree trunk with its legs spread out before it, like somebody resting from a difficult job of labor.

Seaman Houston took himself a few steps nearer, and, from the distance of only a few yards, he saw that the monkey’s fur was very shiny and held a henna tint in the shadows and a blond tint in the light, as the leaves moved above it. It looked from side to side, its breath coming in great rapid gulps, its belly expanding tremendously with every breath like a balloon. The shot had been low, exiting from the abdomen.

Seaman Houston felt his own stomach tear itself in two. “Jesus Christ!” he shouted at the monkey, as if it might do something about its embarrassing and hateful condition. He thought his head would explode, if the forenoon kept burning into the jungle all around him and the gulls kept screaming and the monkey kept regarding its surroundings carefully, moving its head and black eyes from side to side like some-one following the progress of some kind of conversation, some kind of debate, some kind of struggle that the jungle—the morning—the moment—was having with itself. Seaman Houston walked over to the monkey and laid the rifle down beside it and lifted the animal up in his two hands, holding its buttocks in one and cradling its head with the other. With fascination, then with revulsion, he realized that the monkey was crying. Its breath came out in sobs, and tears welled out of its eyes when it blinked. It looked here and there, appearing no more interested in him than in anything else it might be seeing. “Hey,” Houston said, but the monkey didn’t seem to hear.
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