Reading Notes: David Ebershoff Book Tour

I turned the last page of David Ebershoff’s historical novel The 19th Wife today, a book with two narratives that interweave Ann Eliza Young’s crusade against polygamy in Church of Latter Day Saints and a modern day murder in a polygamous society. My review is scheduled to be posted on Wednesday, May 20, as I’ll be hosting the virtual book tour. If you haven’t done so, check out the complete book tour schedule at TLC Book Tours. You will find many other great books on tour, including an upcoming read in my pile, The Painter from Shanghai by Jennifer Cody Epstein.

The virtual book tour celebrates the paperback release on June 2. From the TLC Book Tour website:

About David

David Ebershoff is the author of three novels, The 19th Wife, Pasadena, and The Danish Girl, and a short story collection, The Rose City. His fiction has won a number of awards, including the Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Lambda Literary Award, and has been translated into ten languages to critical acclaim. Random House published his third novel, The 19th Wife, on August 5, 2008, to much acclaim. It immediately hit a number of bestseller lists including that of The New York Times. The novel is about one of Brigham Young’s plural wives, Ann Eliza young, as well as polygamy in the United States today. Publisher’s Weekly called it “an exquisite tour-de-force” and Kirkus Reviews said it was “reminiscent of Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose in scope and ambition”, while the Los Angeles Times praised it by saying “it does that thing all good novels do: it entertains us.” Ebershoff has taught creative writing at New York University and Princeton and currently teaches in the graduate writing program at Columbia University. For many years he was the publishing director of the Modern Library and now is an editor-at-large at Random House. He lives in New York City. For more information, visit David’s website.

San Francisco Bay Area Tour Information:
June 2     7:30 pm     Copperfield’s Books       2316 Montgomery Dr., Santa Rosa
June 3     11:30 am   Towne Center Books      515 Main St., Pleasanton
June 3     7:00 pm     Books Inc. Opera Plaza 601 Van Ness Ave., San Francisco
June 4     12 noon     Rakestraw Books            522 Hartz Ave., Dublin

Reading Notes: It’s All About Women

If you haven’t checked out TLC Book Tours you should because you’ll be in for a treat. It is a virtual book tour site. Virtual book tours are a promotional tool for authors to connect with readers via well-read book blogs and specialty blogs. On May 20, I’ll be hosting David Ebershoff in celebration of the paperback release of The 19th Wife. Many of you have read and reviewed the novel, which is not something that I usually pick up to read. I trust the taste of Lisa, who asked me to host a virtual tour stop for David, as his live book tour will take him to the San Francisco Bay Area in early June. The novel explores America’s polygamous history in late 19th century and pulls readers into the mysteries of love and faith.I will start the book tomorrow, allowing a week to read and to ruminate my thoughts before the tour date. Many other books are also on tour, so you’ll find something that will add to your TBR pile!

I finally grabbed a copy of The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins. Danielle originally blogged and recommended the book to me, which is a late-19th century mystery thriller. Collins is considered the father of detective novel. He was keen on exposing social injustices at the time. The book is written in an epistolary form. A poor art master, Walter Hartright, is employed to teach two young women in Cumberland, and falls in love with one of them, Laura. His feelings are returned, but she is already engaged to another. They are parted and she marries, but she and Marian, her resourceful half-sister, are then caught up in her new husband’s plot to steal her fortune and identity. A great classics for summer reading.

[158] Capote in Kansas – Kim Powers

3rd Stop of the TLC Book Tour
Publisher: Perseus Publishing
254 pp
Kim Powers website
Paperback October 4, 2008

“She still believed what some nearly extinct tribal cultures had professed when they first saw cameras: that every photograph taken of you robbed you of a bit of your soul. And these pictures, inside and outside of the box, had taken away a large portion of hers.” [61]

Capote in Kansas draws on scattered events of truman Capote and Harper Lee’s childhood in Monroeville, Alabama and their reunion over two decades later in Kansas. Almost twenty five years after they conducted research on the murder of the Clutters, the best friends stop talking to each other. The novel, a fantasy that combines documented events and Powers’ imagination, seeks to answer the question of what might have caused the rift in their friendship.

It begins with Capote’s death-bed confession in the form of a phone call to Lee in the middle of the night. It’s a S.O.S. call to his friend that the ghosts of the Clutters come back to seek revenge for the human rights they lost when the murder case piqued him to write In Cold Blood. As much as the book claims to be a ghost story, this is about all the actions of the spirits. The ghosts, be they real apparitions or hallucinations, do not actually advance the plot of the novel. They revive memories of the past that the writers have banished from their thoughts.

As much of a mess Truman Capote has become—consumed by drugs and alcohol—he manages to send Harper Lee these creepy messages in cardboard boxes that demonstrate not only effort of artistry but also the burning desire to get squared. The series of sinister packages with occasional gruesome contents along with the ghost talk, rather than spooking her, lead her to question Capote’s intentions. I would go as far to assert that, being entrapped by painful memories of their meeting in Kansas, they have estranged one another. They are themselves the ghosts who linger on and have unfinished business with one another. The strength of the novel is how Powers adroitly nails the best of Harper Lee’s bitterness and insecurities because of Capote’s sabotage of her novel. What Truman had sone to her, out of his self-inflated ego, made her doubt if she actually wrote “The Book” herself.

ow could two people, once best friends, once soul mates, be so different: Nelle had published one book, and then deliberately faded into woodwork; Truman didn’t even wait for one to come out, and had already started planning the guest list.” [205]

Lee’s insecurity is also underpinned by her sister’s sneaking around the attic to look for proof of authorship. Why didn’t she write another book for twenty five years? The doubt that has hovered on the edge of her sister’s consciousness is exactly what Lee communicates to her dead brother in the letters. So much that the Capote in Kansas professes to be a ghost story, it’s more of a tale about friendship, regret, reconciliation and coming to terms to self. It doesn’t add to what we already know of the writers; but the well-written book, full of imaginary scenes, is still worthy of perusal.

About the author: Kim Powers is an Emmy- and Peabody-winning writer who’s worked at both ABC’s Good Morning America and Primetime. He lives in New York City. He can be reached at his website: kimpowersbooks.com

Official TLC Book Tours blog.
Also Hosting Kim Powers:

Wednesday, Oct. 1st: Bookgirl’s Nightstand
Friday, Oct. 3rd: Book Room Reviews
Monday, Oct. 6th: A Guy’s Moleskin Notebook
Wednesday, Oct. 8th: Tripping Toward Lucidity
Friday, Oct. 10th: book-a-rama
Monday, Oct. 13th: Ready When You Are, C.B.
Wednesday, Oct. 15th: Bibliolatry
Friday, Oct. 17th: Books and Movies
Monday, Oct. 20th: Booking Mama
Wednesday, Oct. 22nd: Diary of an Eccentric
Thursday, Oct. 23rd: Maw Books
Friday, Oct. 24th: Book Club Classics
Monday, Oct. 27th: Books and Cooks
Tuesday, Oct. 28th: Devourer of Books
Wednesday, Oct. 29th: Literate Housewife

Reading Update; Grammar Books

The mysterious quote on Monday’s post is from Capote in Kansas by Kim Powers, which I will host on October 6 for the TLC Book Tour. I finished reading it yesterday and wrote the review, which is post-dated for the tour date, over coffee this morning. In the meantime,  I began reading a book about a 16-years-old girl who has gone missing and is found drowned in the desert outside Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. The writing is intriguing:

“Nouf’s head was facing Mecca by the precise calculations of the GPS system that the builders had used to construct the mosque. The entire room jutted at an awkward northeasterly angle from the house, but the builders had promised that the room was in perfect alignment with the Kaaba in the Holy Mosque, some hundred kilometers distant.” [25]

I cannot yet categorize Finding Nouf, by Zoe Ferraris, as literature or mystery, could be both. I always feel a stab of excitement when a novel opens with a death, and this one involves someone who belongs to one of the most rigidly segregated of societies. Laws and religious creeds govern their lives and the way they present themselves. I cannot wait to find out what really happened to her.

“A family buries a woman with her back to Mecca only when she carries a baby in her belly, a baby whose face, in death, must be turned in the direction of the Holy Mosque.” [27}

On break yesterday I stopped by the campus general bookstore and this book caught my attention: The Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips to Clean Up Your Writing by the Grammar Girl Mignon Fogarty. She says, “The average person seems to have become more desensitized to poor grammar, but language lovers seem to be tormented by the flood of mutilated e-mail and text messages—at least a lot of the people I hear from seem to be tormented.” I thought it would be helpful to compose a list of grammar help titles:

When Bad Grammar Happens to Good People, Anne Batko
Common Errors in English Usage, Paul Brians
Painless Grammar (Painless Series), Rebecca Elliott Ph.D.
Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing, Mignon Fogarty
The Curious Case of the Misplaced Modifier: How to Solve the Mysteries of Weak Writing, Bonnie Tenga
The Most Common Mistakes in English Usage, Thomas Elliot Berry

TLC Book Tour: Capote in Kansas

A copy of Capote in Kansas by Kim Powers was in the mail yesterday. Lisa e-mailed me and asked if I’d be interested in hosting a TLC Book Tour stop in October, as the novel is due out in paperback on Oct 4. It’s a fictionalized account of Truman Capote (In Cold Blood) meeting Harper Lee (To Kill A Mockingbird). The blurb writes:

“He was Truman Capote; she was Harper Lee. They would reunite in Kansas to create In Cold Blood, one of the most riveting works of mystery and true crime ever written. And they would start talk of an even greater, unspoken mystery and crime: What happened between them—and who really wrote To Kill a Mockingbird? How did two innocents from a backwoods Southern town go on to become two of the most celebrated writers of the twentieth century, and why—just a few years later—did they stop speaking to one another? Or did they?…

Not only that this is a literary fiction, as befit to the month of Halloween, the book, which is secondarily titled A Ghost Story, will be a perfect choice for haunting read. I’m really excited to host a stop on Oct 6, the day on which the review will be posted. If you haven’t heard of the TLC Book Tour, I strongly recommend you to check out the blog. I am looking forward to reading the novel, and comparing notes with many of my book blogger friends.

Kim Powers’ TLC Book Tours TOUR STOPS:

Wednesday, Oct. 1st:  Bookgirl’s Nightstand

Friday, Oct. 3rd: Book Room Reviews

Monday, Oct. 6th: A Guy’s Moleskin Notebook

Wednesday, Oct. 8th: Tripping Toward Lucidity

Friday, Oct. 10th:  book-a-rama

Monday, Oct. 13th: Ready When You Are, C.B.

Wednesday, Oct. 15th: Bibliolatry

Friday, Oct. 17th:  Books and Movies

Monday, Oct. 20th: Booking Mama

Wednesday, Oct. 22nd: Diary of an Eccentric

Thursday, Oct. 23rd:  Maw Books

Friday, Oct. 24th: Book Club Classics

Monday, Oct. 27th: Books and Cooks

Tuesday, Oct. 28th:  Devourer of Books

Wednesday, Oct. 29th: Literate Housewife