Telegraph Avenue

I do not “read” a lot of audio books, maybe six or seven a year, but I have long believed that the “reader” of an audio book is the most influential factor in determining whether the experience will be an enjoyable one – or not.  No matter the author or the quality of the writing, an audiobook’s narrator still has the ultimate power to make it or break it.  I have, in fact, on a few occasions, junked an audio book in favor of a printed copy because I had grown bored with the voice droning on and on for what started to seem like forever (remember, some audio books total more than 20 CDs and require close to 25 hours listening time). 

This being the case, audio book publishers should be lining up at the door of Clarke Peters because, as he proves with Michael Chabon’s Telegraph Avenue, this man is good.  Peters has such a way of breathing life into characters, varying voices and accents, and making it all sound so alive, that I hated to see the book end – despite it being almost 19 hours long.

Telegraph Avenue is as much about a place, the Brokeland neighborhood between Berkeley and Oakland, as it is about the people who live there.  It is the summer of 2004, and things are about to change for the book’s central characters.  Archy Stallings and Nat Jaffe, one of them black, the other white, are best friends and business partners who run Brokeland Records, one of a dying breed of record shops that still specialize in reselling classic vinyl record albums from the past.  The record store, being as much a neighborhood hangout as a business, attracts a regular crowd of hipsters, amateur philosophers, local politicians, and old men who remember when the building was home to the best barbershop around.   But now, the business, already on shaky financial ground, is being threatened by a former NFL great who hopes to open one of his Dogpile megastores just up the street from Brokeland Records – an event that the record shop cannot hope to survive.

Clarke Peters Doing His Magic

Brokeland Records is not a business that will ever make its owners rich, so Archy and Nat depend on their wives, Gwen and Aviva, to help make ends meet.  The women are midwives in a respected, and successful, partnership of their own that they call Berkeley Birth Partners.  Gwen and Aviva love what they do and have no shortage of clients, but they are suffering a professional crisis of their own and the future of Berkeley Birth Partners is in jeopardy.

Telegraph Avenue is a big book, one filled with numerous supporting characters with stories of their own.  Among them are Archy’s father, a former blaxploitation film star on the hustle; Titus Joyner, the son Archy did not know existed before he showed up on Archy’s doorstep; Julius Jaffe, Nat’s sometimes gay, sometimes not-gay son; Gibson Goode, ex-NFL superstar quarterback and “fifth-richest black man in America; and a famous jazz musician whose wake is held in the record shop, open casket and all.  There is a lot going on here, so much that readers might be distracted from the main storyline at times, but it is one hell of a story – especially if you let Clarke Peters read it to you.

Death's Door

I have read as often, and as quickly, as I can for more than five decades now, but I realize that I am only scratching the surface of what is being published every year.  Keeping up is an impossible task – I know that.  How could I not when writers like James R. Benn come along every month or so to remind me how much good stuff is slipping through the cracks while I’m looking the other way?

Death’s Door is Benn’s seventh Billy Boyle WWII detective novel – seventh, and I am just now discovering the series and its author.  Thankfully, Death’s Door does work very well as a standalone for first-timers like me, although I imagine that readers of A Mortal Terror, the book immediately preceding this one, will have a big head start on those who have not read it.

Because Lieutenant Billy Boyle was a Boston cop when the war started, he is often called upon to solve crimes involving U.S. military personnel within the European Theater of Operations.  It does not hurt that he is the nephew of General Dwight D. Eisenhower and serves at Ike’s direction.  But this time around, Billy has a personal stake in the investigation.  His lover, British spy Diana Seaton, has been captured by the Germans and imprisoned in Rome’s infamous Regina Coeli prison.  Although Billy fears that she may have already been tortured and killed, he is determined to rescue her – or die trying.

As the book opens, Billy and his partner, Kaz (Lieutenant Piotr Augustus Kazimierz of the Polish Army in Exile), are desperately trying to get to the Vatican to begin their investigation of the murder of an American monsignor.  Because Regina Coeli is within walking distance of the Vatican, the murder investigation also gives Billy the perfect opportunity to rescue Diana if she is still alive.  The problem is that he has been given a direct order to stay away from the prison so as not to risk exposing the underground rescue efforts being conducted within Vatican walls. 

James R. Benn

Death’s Door is a good mystery, but it works even better as a piece of historical fiction.  The Vatican’s efforts to save the lives of Jews during WWII has often been criticized, and is a “gray area” of the war’s history even today.  Author Benn places Billy and Kaz inside a highly politicized environment in which little is what it first seems to be.  Some within the Vatican are pro-Allies, others pro-Nazi, and a few are really and truly neutral.  Unfortunately, it is not always easy to tell which are which. 

Complicating matters, the Vatican is officially a tiny piece of neutral territory surrounded by German-occupied Rome and the Pope fears anything that might give the Germans the excuse they need to enter the Vatican and remove him to “protective custody” somewhere in Germany.  Disguised as an Irish priest, Billy comes precariously close to giving the Germans that very excuse.

Part thriller, part mystery, part historical novel, Death’s Door is quite a well-written package.  Fans of those genres should not miss this one.

(Review Copy provided by Publisher)

Book Trailer of the Week - "My Ideal Bookshelf"

In addition to my book, music, and sports addictions, I have to confess to being somewhat of a political junkie.  So this is a big night for me - sort of the Super Bowl of my whole political season.  Maybe even bigger, because this "Super Bowl" comes around every two years instead of every January.

Already, I am being distracted by all the "talking heads" on the news channels, but before I disappear for the long evening ahead, I want to share the latest in my "Book Trailer of the Week" series.  This one is a very clever way to publicize a new coffee table book called My Ideal Bookshelf.  The book is a collection of the "ideal bookshelves" of 100 cultural figures consisting of the books they most love and have been influenced by over their lifetimes.

So, take a look at the book trailer and, if you like what you see, keep in mind that you can order up a unique painting of your own:


Painting an Ideal Bookshelf from Jane Mount on Vimeo.

14th Book Trailer of the week in a continuing series of unusual and memorable book trailers spotted by Book Chase

The People of Forever Are Not Afraid

Simply put, Shani Boianjiu is one hell of a writer and she proves it in her debut novel, The People of Forever Are Not Afraid.  What makes the book especially remarkable is that Boianjiu is still not much older than the three young women whose coming-of-age stories are at the heart of this story.  In 2011, in fact, Boianjiu, at age twenty-four, became the youngest ever National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” honoree.

Avishag, Yael, and Leah are three high school girls living in a small Northern Galilee town where everyone, almost by necessity, knows everyone else.  The students, like young people in small towns everywhere, are bored with their lives and are already dreaming of life after high school.  The big difference for these particular students is that, as they turn 18 and leave high school, all of them will be required to serve two years in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). 

The girls, when it is their turn, enter the IDF at different times and have very different assignments and experiences.  Avishag becomes a guard responsible for keeping refugees on their side of barbed-wire fencing, Yael spends her days turning recruits into marksmen, and Leah becomes a checkpoint guard where she must be on constant alert for would-be suicide bombers.  Typically, the girls will spend more time fighting boredom than directly confronting the dangers of terrorism, but each will be aged (if not necessarily matured) and changed in more subtle ways by their two years of military service.

Shani Boianjiu

Boianjiu allows her three central characters a first person voice to tell their own stories but, because the voices are not always distinct, this sometimes leaves the reader unsure which of the three girls is doing the speaking.  Using a series of flashbacks and back stories, she intertwines their lives over a number of years as the young women struggle to maintain friendships that were strained even before they left home for the military.

The People of Forever Are Not Afraid was originally conceived and published in short story format.  The incident in which three protesters openly request that border guards meet them with escalating levels of resistance for publicity purposes (perhaps my favorite story in the book) is, in fact, one I remember reading in The New Yorker magazine some time back.  That the book was originally written as a series of standalone stories is both a strong point and a weak point.  On the one hand, the incidents, considered separately, provide enlightening glimpses inside Israeli military structure from a female point-of-view.  On the other,  this kind of narrative structure, when combined with three indistinct first-person voices, makes it difficult to follow the larger story being told. 

All that said, it is obvious that Shani Boianjiu is a talented writer, and I look forward to a more conventionally structured novel from her next time out.  She has a very bright future.

(Review Copy provided by Publisher)

Pat Conroy as Celebrated by South Carolina Hall of Fame

Like most of you, there are a handful of novelists whose new work I anticipate with varying degrees of patience.  Some of my favorites make me wait what seems like forever before they publish a new novel (Pat Conroy), some write so quickly that I can barely keep up with their output (Joyce Carol Oates), and others produce a steady book or two per year (James Lee Burke).  Whatever the pace, I feel like a kid in a toy store when I first get my hands on one of their new books.

The authors I mention are, in fact, such favorites that I also greatly enjoy reading about them.  And, even better is hearing them speak about their books, their work habits, their influences, etc.  So, when I find something new on YouTube like this South Carolina Hall of Fame video celebrating Pat Conroy, it's a good day, and I have to share it with my likeminded friends (this video was first posted to YouTube in August 2012):

Texas Bookmobiles - New and Old

The First Bookmobile in Texas (1930, Jefferson County)

Bookmobiles have a long and proud history in this country, but I can only recall ever seeing one of them on a regular basis.  That was in the early 1980s when the Harris County Library sent a bookmobile to our neighborhood on a regular, monthly schedule - which, now that I think about it, is a little strange because we were only six or seven miles from a library branch.  The bookmobile seemed to appeal mostly to children, so it was probably an excellent way to introduce kids to regular public library visits and to get them excited about reading.

As it turns out, the first bookmobile in the entire state of Texas appeared in Jefferson County (my home county, although, frankly, I was happy to see it in my rearview mirror) way back in 1930.  The rig was paid for by W.C. Tyrrell, a Beaumont philanthropist and was associated with the city's Tyrrell Public Library.  The bookmobile was ingeniously designed with shelves on both the inside and the outside and was capable of carrying a rather surprising total of 14,000 books. 

Bookmobiles are almost a thing of the past in Texas and across the U.S. but two librarians in Houston plan to add one to the Texas fleet (of only eight) in early 2013.  They are calling it The Billy Pilgrim Traveling Library and will be driving it back from its Gallipolis, Ohio, pick-up point later this month.  On their way home, they plan stops in Louisville, Nashville, Memphis, and Little Rock where they hope to gather donations to help them add to their book collection - making the trip a literal "book drive."

Take a look at their website for all the details about the big plans for the bookmobile and, if you see them on the road this month as they make their way back to Houston, consider stopping by and donating to a great cause.  I can't wait to see them in action.