So, I was dawdling in the book aisle at Target this weekend while my kids were salivating in Electronics, and I noticed that every other book cover in the Bestsellers section had a photograph of a woman or child with her (I think they were all of the female persuasion) back to camera.

Is this some new trend? Do people identify more with a character in a novel if they can’t see her face? Just wondering.

And now, like an annoying song your co-worker sings that you can’t get out of your head, you’re going to be noticing this trend every time you look at a display of popular books…

Have there always been numbers in book titles? Recently, every 10th book that arrives from a publisher seems to be a list. There are the “1,000 Places to See Before You Die” books, the latest, confined to spots in the USA and Canada (Workman, $20), a threat that this series is just beginning. Even the author, Patricia Schultz, acknowledges how irritating her project is in the introduction to the new one. “My previous book,” she writes, “was already keeping folks awake at night.” This seems to be just a scheme to round up the usual suspects. Where does Schultz send people who come to Memphis on their don’t-die-before mission? Graceland, the Beale Street Music Festival, the National Civil Rights Museum and two “places” called “The Memphis Music Scene” and “Memphis Barbecue.”
 I much prefer the aesthetic of National Geographic’s “The 100 Best Worldwide Vacations to Enrich Your Life” ($20). I opened it up to “Earn your elephant driver’s license,” which explains an elephant wrangling course at a camp in Thailand’s Golden Triangle. There are chapters on trekking the Sahara Desert with a camel caravan, ballooning over the Swiss Alps, walking in the footsteps of Alexander the Great in Turkey. And each section provides information about getting in touch with the people who run the services and how much they cost. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve already read my Book Club book for this month, so I’d thought I’d squeeze in a short classic that was somehow left out of my years of formal education. I’m not going to review ”The Bridge of San Luis Rey” by Thornton Wilder because apparently I’m one of only a few people on the planet who hadn’t read the book. I will say this: As soon as I finished reading it, I wanted to read it again. And my friend Melissa says it’s one of the most perfect books ever.

In the back of my Perennial Classics edition, the author says in an interview that “in the whole of the world’s literature there are only seven or eight great subjects” or themes, and that “there is nothing new that a writer can hope to bring except a certain way of looking at life.”

That reminded me of the old fruitcake theory — that only one Christmas fruitcake (well, in this case, seven or eight) exists and it is just passed on from one recipient to the next. I thought about the books I’ve read and their themes: Unrequited or impossible or unattainable love is a big one, greed for money or power, the aftermath of tragedy, atoning for one’s sins or mistakes, searching for the meaning of life, being misunderstood, overcoming personal challenges, or those foisted upon us unfairly…

Wilder uttered the words in 1928. Do you think the same could be said in 2008, after a whole world has opened up to us on the Web, and the publishing world has become so high tech? Are authors just giving us the same fruitcakes packed in different tins?

It’s nice to know Tennessee Williams’ power to shock survives him. When the latest Broadway production of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” previewed in February, audiences were distressed that that four-letter word had been imposed on the dialogue of the 1950s-vintage drama. This version, with an all-black-cast, has James Earl Jones waxing obscene as Big Daddy, but a little research by theater writers turned up the news that the words were in fact Williams’ own, added during his 1973 revision of the play. Or possibly the word ‘restored’ should be used instead of ‘added,’ since the playwright’s first ‘Cat’ used sham words like ‘rutting’ and ‘ducking’ where now that four-letter word prevails.  And surely sounds more natural and Big Daddy-esque.

Folks in Memphis who need a Tennessee Williams fix can find “Night of the Iguana” on stage at Theatre Memphis until March 30. It brings back some veterans of TM’s 2004 “Streetcar Named Desire,” including director Jerry Chipman, and actors Christina Wellford Scott and Greg Boller. (We’ll quote our theater critic Jon W. Sparks’ review of the earlier show on the playwright’s Memphis connection: ”His first play was produced at a residence here in the mid-1930s, and while ‘Cairo! Shanghai! Bombay!’ didn’t set the theatrical world afire, it did give Tom Williams the urge to keep at it and to start using the ‘Tennessee’ moniker.”)

Meantime, if your longing for Williams’ way with words can’t be satisfied by one local play production, the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival starts March 26. This year it’s called “A Weekend Named Desire,” sort of an awkward title for a collection of literary panels, random master classes on the art of writing, and  performances such as “Camino Real” and ”Ignatius on Stage” (essentially just readings from “A Confederacy of Dunces”). And there’s a panel called “Sweet Word of Youth,” for young writers to read from their work in creative writing programs.

 Go to tennesseewilliams.net for more information.    

I confess I hardly ever pick up an uncelebrated book or author unless I’ve done some research. There are so many good books to be read, I don’t want to waste my time on the potentially bad ones. But I read something last night that made me think I’m missing out on some hidden gems.

Over at Critical Mass, the book blog of the National Book Critics Circle, Molly Giles talks about what it was like to judge the 2008 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.

Excited at first about all the books she was going to read (”Free books! New ones! Hardbacks!”), she soon realized what she’d gotten herself into, and dreaded seeing a new brown box filled with books waiting by the back door. She and two other judges together read some 350 books before deciding on this year’s prize, “The Great Man” by Kate Christensen.

After all that reading, here is some of what Giles learned about American fiction:

Read the rest of this entry »

Here are a few choices to curl up with in front of the fireplace today.

For the little kids, when they come in from throwing snowballs, making snow angels and maybe building their first snowman (or snowwoman): “Dream Snow”by Eric Carle, because, you know, it’s Eric Carle… “The Snowy Day,” the beautiful, simple classic by Ezra Jack Keats, and “Snow”by Uri Shulevitz, about children wishing for snow in a city that only gets a few flakes that soon melt – but then, snow happens in a big way. Sound familiar?

For the bigger kids, and some adults (I’m still a Calvin and Hobbes fan), “Attack of the Deranged Monster Killer Snow Goons”by Bill Watterson. If I can get my son to sit down long enough to read, this is what he’ll grab. For a twist on a classic, try Eileen Kernaghan’s reworking of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen.”

For the adults: “Snow”by Orhan Pamuk, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006. The story blends politics and poetry in the author’s country of Turkey.  “Dr. Zhivago” by Boris Pasternak. True, it doesn’t have the word in the title, but it always reminds me of snow. (Who can forget Julie Christie dressed in fur gliding through the snow in the sleigh. And Omar Sharif. Swoon. OK, just skip the book, and rent the movie.) A little closer to home, is “Snow Falling on Cedars”by David Guterson. The story, set in Washington state, is a murder mystery/post-war/culture clash/romance, but the real draw is Guterson’s descriptive writing.

What are your favorite books to read on a cold winter’s night?

OK, I was going to write about how book sales were up 1 percent last year (thanks to a bump from the last book in the Harry Potter series), and how Steve Jobs, even though he’s a techno god and makes these impossibly cool iThings and looks good in a black mock turtleneck, was just plain WRONG when he said people don’t read anymore.

I was going to write that, and it was going to be a good, insightful, witty, fact-based, take-that! kind of thing.

I was going to write that … but I went online to check a fact, and I came across this piece on nytimes.com by the great Timothy Egan, who says it way better than I ever could. So, take that! Mr. Apple man, um, what he said…