Book clubs grow up
Readers get together in groups, at conferences or online to talk about works.

by Courtenay Edelhart
courtenay.edelhart@indystar.com
April 14, 2003

Book club meetings tend to be informal affairs. Friends agree to read a book and then gather at somebody's house to discuss it over lunch.

That's still how a lot of book clubs operate, but a growing number are far more sophisticated. Members of the Sophia book club in Indianapolis, for instance, pay dues and elect a board. A few times a year, their discussions include the book's author, and this summer, a handful of members will attend a national conference in Atlanta.

Bolstered by the success of "One Book, One City" and Oprah Winfrey, who is bringing back her club with a new focus on the classics, local clubs throughout the country are flexing newfound muscle.

Some of the larger, more organized groups have the clout to lure out-of-state authors, negotiate book discounts and receive a heads-up when new titles are close to release.

Indianapolis-area Borders stores take 20 percent off the month's selection when club members agree to meet at a store. Many Waldenbooks locations display area club selections.

That's not the only proof that book clubs are growing up. If you don't have time to visit a club in person, there are now virtual clubs online. Barnes & Noble last month launched a book-club section on its site (www .barnesandnoble.com), and the Indianapolis-Marion County Public Library operates a Chapter a Day book club in which members receive chapters via email (www.imcpl.org).

It's good business to cater to book clubs, said Borders spokeswoman Emily Swan. "They've just exploded, so we try to keep their books in stock when we know about them."

Indianapolis author LaTina Tunstall, 34, estimates she's been to about 15 book club meetings to promote her 2002 novel, "Different Shades Friends Come In" (First Books, $14.95), and she'll do the same for "Financing a Dream" (First Books, $14.95), a novel coming out this year.

Most of the clubs Tunstall has visited have been local, but not all. She's traveled to Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and Virginia to discuss her work with readers.

Tunstall prefers visiting book clubs to signing books at stores, where people haven't necessarily read her work.

"You're just sitting at a table," she said, "and somebody wanders by to ask what your book's about and you try to give them a one-minute synopsis."

At book club meetings, people have read the book and ask thoughtful questions that ultimately improve her craft, Tunstall said.

Reader-writer gathering

Curtis Bunn, 41, is a sports reporter for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution who writes novels on the side. He's promoted his work at more than two dozen book club meetings and found them so invigorating that, in August, he'll hold a conference in Atlanta for readers and writers of black literature.

It's Bunn's first time organizing a conference, but he's already got about 150 people from 21 states registered. There are 20 authors coming, including big names like E. Lynn Harris and Walter Moseley.

"The response has been phenomenal," said Bunn, author of "Baggage Check" (A&B Publishers, $21) and the forthcoming "Book Club" (A&B Publishing, $21), a collection of short stories about book club members.

People have loved books for centuries, so it's natural to want to gather and talk about them, Bunn said.

"I found myself leaving book club meetings feeling like I felt when I left church -- revived and stimulated," he said.

Still, there are drawbacks to the evolution of book clubs into, well, small businesses. Once you reach the level of 50 members or more, it's hard to get a word in edgewise. And forget about choosing next month's book. Your turn may not come for years.

Some like it simpler

That's why Kent Kollman, a 70-year-old retired insurance executive, prefers the small, informal group he participates in at the Irvington branch library on the Eastside.

"Nobody's asking me to volunteer for any committees or anything," Kollman said. "I just read and come when I feel like it."

But Danielle Walker, a 37-year-old human resources executive, said there are perks to participating in a group like Sophia. Dues are minimal at $5 a month, and the money goes for a good cause.

Members get gift certificates on their birthdays, and presents on special occasions such as the birth of a child. The group also gives gift baskets to disadvantaged families at Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Mainly, though, Walker likes meeting the authors.

"It really helps to be able to dialogue back and forth with the writer about why they wrote a certain scene the way they did, or how they developed a character," she said. "You get a lot of 'ohs' and 'ahs.' "


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National Book Club Conference

• What: For readers and writers of black literature.
• When: Aug. 1-3; deadline for registration is June 30.
• Where: Atlanta.
• Cost: $230 each, or $200 each for groups of 5 or more.
• Information: National Book Club Conference or 1-888-406-6222.

Janet Evanovich
Interviewed by Eve Tan Gee

Visions of Sugar Plums is my latest book and probably my favourite. I had fun writing it and I think people will have fun reading it and you just can't get any better than that. It's a Plum book but it features a new character (Diesel) that I've been holding in my head for a couple years now. Diesel is actually a superhero and I loved that I could take the existing world of Plum and drop this sort of super guy into it. The defining moment in the book for me is when Stephanie Plum admits that she'd like to think there really are super heroes on the planet. Isn't that a wish we all have? That a superhero will walk among us and save us from ourselves? I mean, where's Superman now? And wouldn't you like to know the guy who could fill Batman's codpiece?

There were two early influences on my work. The first would have to be Carl Barks. When I was a kid I read Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge comics and I developed a love for the adventure story. The second would have to be Robert B. Parker. When I made the decision to move from romance to crime I read all the Parker books and decided I wanted to be just like him when I grew up. He's such an incredible technician. He makes reading easy.

My early unpublished stuff was pretty far out there. My favourite was about a sort of porno fairy who lived in a fairy forest in Pennsylvania. Probably the world still isn't ready for that one.

Sadly, I do very little reading of other authors these days. I used to read when I flew but flying has become so obnoxious that I do it only under the threat of death or the promise of big money… so my reading time has been severely cut back. When I'm working on a book I find I need to go to bed with the book in my head. If I'm reading someone else I'm going to bed with the wrong book. And these days I'm ALWAYS writing a book. That said, I do find it hard to pass up a new Amanda Quick regency romance or a new Junie B. Jones. Yes, I was Junie B. Jones in a previous life.

I write very broad humour and I think humour can get tedious if it's relentless. So I feel it necessary to raise the stakes for the reader periodically. One of the ways to do this is to insert a violent scene. My rules are that the violence needs to be necessary and moves the story forward. I never kill cats or dogs. And all horrible violence takes place off stage. When it comes to sexuality I think writers need to do what's appropriate for their own voice. Some writers opt for frankness, some for discretion. I opt for funny. Okay, no comments about my sex life!

I don't think it's necessary for a book to make a political statement but all contemporary books reflect the author's view on a wide variety of social conditions. On a strictly personal level, I feel my first obligation to the reader is to entertain in a positive manner. Beyond that, I address issues such as family, women's rights, minorities, and violence if they arise as a natural component of the story.

I'm always working! I usually write seven days a week for a minimum of four hours a day -- sometimes I'm at the computer from five in the morning until ten at night, eating Cheez Doodles, drinking Coke, wishing I was someone else… Nora Roberts, maybe. I have an office at the end of my house with windows that look out over the Connecticut River valley. When I'm in the Cheez Doodle mode I close the blinds so I'm not distracted. I begin a book with a short outline which is actually a timeline of action. Then I follow my writing progress on a large white board, recording chapter by chapter, sort of like a movie story board.

I think my books make people happy and that's my principal appeal. I make people laugh. And I allow people to feel good about themselves. If Stephanie Plum can make it through the day, so can my reader. And I give people hope. My characters are incredibly average and yet they can be heroic if necessary. I keep my books relatively short and the structure is linear because a lot of people are busy these days and I don't want my reader to have to work hard to get through the story.
Music and films are all part of the mix that goes into my head. Everything I do and see and hear and smell ends up in the pot. I don't think a writer needs to stay abreast of the latest film, or the latest bestseller, or be a news junkie, but I do think a writer should live and suck in what's around him. I need quiet when I write so I don't use music to spur inspiration. But when I'm on the treadmill I need a LOT of music!

I write a series, so the characters are already there, waiting for a new plot, but the truth is, my books are character driven and the plot is simply necessary structure to tell the character story. That said, if I didn't have a half-way decent plot the whole thing would be damn boring.

I love New York and Chicago and Boston and London but my creative juices flow best in New Hampshire. If I'm going to get a book done I need a lot of quiet and no possibility to shop.

My relationships with my publishers and editors have all been excellent. No author, no matter how amazing, can achieve large scale success on his own. Only a publisher (and Oprah) can make an author a star.

I write for my reader. I have four unpublished books sitting in a dresser drawer. I wrote the books for myself, wasn't able to get them published, and found the whole experience to be flat. For me, writing is all about connecting, communicating, entertaining.

Reading will always be important. It's entertainment and it's communication and it allows the consumer to mentally participate. What we need to realise is that reading fits into a larger picture, competing with and complimenting film, television, internet and live entertainment. I love the super stores that combine books and music and coffee bars. And I love the small mystery stores that give the consumer a personal and maybe mystery mood experience. I think buying the book should be as much fun as reading the book.

There are times when I'm writing when I'm behind deadline and I really need to be left alone to get the job done. Just slide the Snickers bars under the door, thank you. When I'm not behind deadline I find I need lots of stuff coming into my head to compensate for what gets pulled out.

It seems to me religion is just another one of those life influences that goes into the pot. Childhood experiences, love affairs, dogs gone to heaven, visits to Disneyland and religion are all part of the creative glop that becomes a book.

I feel very comfortable to be a commodity that's packaged and sold by my publisher. Truth is, my books are product and my readers are consumers. Deal with it.

The book I'm writing now is number nine in the Plum series. It's late, of course! And that's about all I'm prepared to say!! Doncha love surprises?

Janet Evanovich lives in New Hampshire but grew up in New Jersey. She is the author of eight best-selling Stephanie Plum novels, including One For The Money, which won the CWA's John Creasey Award, Two For The Dough, which won the CWA Last Laugh Award and Three To Get Deadly, which was awarded the CWA Silver Dagger for 1997.

From Crime Time

T. Jefferson Parker, interviewed by Harlan Coben

Over the years, the NorCal East Bay chapter of Mystery Readers International has had many "At Homes" -- intimate evenings with favorite mystery writers. We've hosted Anne Perry, Lawrence Block, Sue Grafton, Elizabeth George, Janet LaPierre, Sharan Newman, Laurie King, Rochelle Krich, Carolyn Hart, James Ellroy, Steven Saylor, Janet Evanovich, Eddie Muller, Taffy Cannon, and many others.

These events are held in private homes, and they're similar to Literary Salons. Since so many of our cyber members and friends aren't able to attend these intimate evenings, I thought it would be fun to have a "visiting" author each month interviewed by another "visiting" author. This month we feature T. Jefferson Parker interviewed by Harlan Coben.

T. Jefferson Parker was born in Los Angeles and has lived all of his life in Southern California. Parker received his bachelor's degree in English from the University of California, Irvine, in 1976, and began his writing career in 1978, as a cub reporter on the weekly newspaper The Newport Ensign. After covering police, city hall and cultural stories for the Ensign, Parker moved on to the Daily Pilot newspaper, where he won three Orange County Press Club awards for his articles. All the while, he was tucking away stories and information that he would use in his first book.

Laguna Heat, written on evenings and weekends while he worked as a journalist, was published to rave reviews and made into an HBO movie starring Harry Hamlin, Jason Robards and Rip Torn. The paperback made the New York Times Bestseller list in 1986. Nine other novels have followed, including the Edgar Award-winning Silent Joe and his most recent book, Black Water (2002). In April 2003, his eleventh book, Cold Pursuit, will be published. Booklist has called it "another wonderful mystery from one of the very best."

--Janet Rudolph



Harlan Coben: Let's start with the chicken-'n-egg question. You're starting a novel. Which comes first: Plot or character? What I'm mostly interested in is that "moment," if you will. The seed that grows into the book. Where does that come from?

T. Jefferson Parker: It's the characters first, then what happens to them. The first moment of a book is always kind of interesting. Sometimes it's something that just happens to you and the story lands in your lap. I remember many years ago when I'd finished Laguna Heat and I was hanging out, trying to play heads-up ball, looking for a story. I'm in a liquor store and the guy in line in front of me is an American Vietnam war vet. The clerk is a Vietnamese woman. I got curious about their histories so I eavesdropped on their mercantile transaction. I wondered -- could they have crossed each other's paths in Vietnam? Could her father or mother have fought with this ex-soldier, or against him? So, before the vet can say anything, the clerk reaches up and takes a pack of Lucky Strikes out of the overhead rack and sets it on the counter. He says, how did you know that's what I wanted? She says, Some things I just know. That blew my hair back. I knew I had a Vietnam mystery on my hands.

HC: Give me an idea of your writing routine, Jeff. Are you a morning or evening guy? How many hours? Are you consistent? Do you count words or pages? Do you play music or do you prefer silence? In the house or at your local coffee bar? Details, man, details!

TJP: I start early, around 6:30 and quit around 5 p.m. It's not always all writing, but sometimes it is. I set a daily page count for each book. Usually 5 or 6 pages per day. Then there's the weekly count. If I'm ahead I feel smug; if I'm behind I sense panic. I go through all these labyrinthine calcs every morning to see where my stock is. It's really kind of funny.

HC: I'd like to steal your question to Jan Burke from last month. What would you like to see more of, and less of, in crime writing these days?

TJP: I think the Achilles heel of mystery/crime writing is character. You have to have good characters and sometimes I think mystery writers rely to heavily on plot and velocity of plot at the expense of characters. This leads to the question of what is a good character, and that's up for interpretation. Certainly a character who is passionate. One who is more than just competent. I think the best mysteries are the ones where you've got an outer mystery and an inner one going on together and these two stories compete and collide and finally become one. Another thing I really enjoy is a story that zooms off in directions you're not expecting. It's difficult to work within the confines of the genre and make that happen.

HC: You've written critically acclaimed, award-winning stand-alones and series books. Is one harder to write than the other? Is the process different when you're doing a stand-alone or series -- or is writing a book, er, writing a book?

TJP: Harlan, that's a coin-toss for me. The stand-alones are harder because you have a whole world to create. But the series books are harder because you can't create a whole world. Somehow, for me, the whole thing boils down to the emotion behind the story. My new book, Cold Pursuit, was the most difficult one to write since Laguna Heat. And that wasn't because it was any larger or more complex than the others, it's because I started working on it on September 12 of 2001. My emotions toward writing fiction at that point were almost completely dead. But back to series or stand-alones, I'm beginning to believe that the stand-alones are easier. I'm working on one now, and I've never felt such joy and enthusiasm for a book.

HC: The old Batman TV show, the one with Adam West and Burt Ward. Who was your favorite villain and why? (If you didn't watch the show, you can skip this question but hang your head in shame).

TJP: Harlan, I was sort of a tough nut as a kid. Not really violent or hateful, but... impatient. I honestly wanted Batman and Robin to get slaughtered by one of the villains. I couldn't stand them, those asinine costumes. And so I hardly ever watched. I know this is perverse, and I do feel shame...

HC: Okay, Jeff, this is a variation on the Hemingway saying that the best way to become a writer was to have an unhappy childhood. Give me an event, preferably in your childhood but we can go up until you were, say, twenty-one, that I can see in your work today. In other words, what happened to you that made you write what you write?

TJP: Now you're getting me back for hating that TV show. Tough question. I actually had a very chipper childhood -- suburban Tustin, good parents and brother and sister, a little church, Little League, bodysurfing, a red family Country Squire station wagon with the wood-look paneling on the side. Lots of fun. So, if you try to trace my somewhat darkish fiction back to that, I guess the answer is that when I saw that childhood breaking up -- when I became aware of myself becoming a young man -- suddenly the whole bubble burst. That's an ugly sentence. Let me try again. It was like one day I was a crew-cut, buck-toothed boy looking for snakes in orange groves, and the next thing I knew there were seriously weird people taking huges doses of LSD, calling the cops pigs and trying to bring down the country. At that point I think I was just left standing gape-jawed at what was happening. I'm talking about 1963 to 1966, say. I'm writing about that period now.

HC: One of my favorite writing quotes comes from E.L. Doctorow: "Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way." Do you agree with this? Start with this: Do you know the ending of the book before you begin?

TJP: That's a really nice quote. Very true, I think. I usually know the ending before I start, but not always. The thing is, it's a long way from page one to page 500, so just knowing the ending doesn't mean the whole thing writes itself. You reach a point in a story, especially a mystery, where you've got to choose which story you're really telling. You can see, say, three different ways the story could go, and all three of them look tempting. It's a matter of going with the one that feels best. Here's an example. At the end of Silent Joe I had to reveal Joe's true father. Well, since he'd been adopted very early in life, and because he'd come from a rather evil past, lots of men could have been his father. I picked the one I thought would work best in the story. Some people liked the choice I made and others didn't. In the end, sometimes all you have to call on is instinct.

HC: You're one of our top writers and you've learned a lot during your remarkable career. Could you give me one piece of advice you wish someone had given you when you were first starting out?

TJP: I wish someone would have encouraged me to work harder. That sounds odd, but really, I spent a great many of my younger professional years just goofing off and not getting much done. When Laguna Heat was published so successfully and the HBO movie came out, I was so dumb I thought people would love me forever. Three years later when Little Saigon came out I think a lot of readers had forgotten who I was. I wish an editor would have said, look, Parker, write us a book a year for a few years and we'll get you a nice big audience. But I let another three years go by before Pacific Beat was finished. By then my personal life was in near shambles and it took me two more years to write Summer of Fear.

HC: Your new book, Cold Pursuit, is set in San Diego, a first for you. Why the move away from Orange County? Can you tell us a little about the story?

TJP: I moved down here to San Diego County three years ago, so writing about San Diego was just about inevitable. I really like the city. It's got a whole different feel and history and look than Orange County or Los Angeles. I'll tell you, Harlan, it was a little daunting to grab my old reporter's notebook and camera and drive into this new, "foreign" city and try to get a feel for it. Cold Pursuit is a straightforward whodunit that involves feuding families, forbidden love and a cop caught in the middle of things. It was interesting to see how the San Diego PD works homicides -- very different than most other departments, because they use five-person teams. When I first discovered that, I thought, oh damn -- now I have to write a book with five protagonists. But I worked around the problem okay, I think.

HC: I know the T in T. Jefferson Parker stands for nothing, but what's up with that? Give us the down low.

TJP: True story: my mother told me that she and dad put the T. there because it would look good on the president's door. But they got a mystery writer instead of a statesman.

HC: How much does your writing life bleed into your personal life? Are you grumpy when the writing muse is not paying extended visits, or can you keep the personal and artistic separate?

TJP: I really can't separate too well. When the writing is going well, it shows in everything I do. When it's going poorly, that shows, too. The worst time is always between books, when I'm trying to start. It's hard on my wife and family sometimes. But I've been lucky in my career. Especially when it comes to writing what I want to write. I've yet to sit down and write a certain book because I have to. I've always written the book I wanted, for better or worse. So, even if it's not going real well, I always know that it can go well. If I can just get the story to come out of those strong, mysterious emotions that make you write in the first place. At some point a story takes on a life of its own. It kind of draws you into its world. One good sentence leads to another, one good page leads to the next. When it's going well, like that, you start to really trust your instincts. You get confident, downright brave. It's like stepping into the batter's box, knowing you can hit this guy. You know it, and you do.

From Mystery Readers International

The Pulitzer Prizes:

For fiction: Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

For biography: Master of the Senate by Robert A. Caro. This is the third volume of Caro's biography of Lyndon Johnson and is Caro's second Pulitzer. He won in 1975 for The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York.

For history: An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942-1943 by Rick Atkinson

For general nonfiction: 'A Problem From Hell': America and the Age of Genocide by Samantha Power

For poetry: Moy Sand and Gravel by Paul Muldoon

Los Angeles Times, March 30, 2003 pA-6
WAR WITH IRAQ / AIR AND GROUND
Combat's Lull a Pain in the Leatherneck; Marines who had been in the thick of battle find themselves fighting tedium, repairing equipment and catching up on their reading.
COPYRIGHT 2003 The Times Mirror Company

Byline: Tony Perry; Times Staff Writer

WITH THE U.S. MARINES IN CENTRAL IRAQ -- Nobody likes an MRE, until you're told you can't have one.

The military-issued food packet (MRE stands for "meal, ready to eat") has been in short supply lately. With the U.S. march to Baghdad stalled and supply lines stretched and under attack from Iraqi guerrillas, Marines in the 1st Division, Headquarters Battalion, were rationed to one MRE a day last week.

Now that supply trucks have arrived from Kuwait, the quota has been boosted to two.

"Oh no, the four fingers of death!" groaned one Marine as he opened his MRE to find four frankfurters in hot sauce -- not a favorite.

At this sprawling makeshift camp in the Iraqi desert, thousands of Marines assigned to Headquarters Battalion are fighting not Saddam Hussein and the Republican Guard but dust, flies, primitive conditions and even ennui.

By nature, Marines are an impatient lot and lack of movement does not sit easily with them. Just a few days ago, they led the headlong dash from Kuwait along the Euphrates River toward Baghdad. They battled Iraqi fighters for days to secure two bridges over the river and guarantee a supply corridor that will eventually extend some 400 miles.

Since Wednesday, however, they've been stuck.

"We're starting to call it Operation Enduring Boredom," said Staff Sgt. Jason Kirby, 33.

Marines are repairing vehicles ravaged by sandstorms, keeping supplies moving to more forward troops, digging "fighting holes" (only the Army digs foxholes), and tending to the minor chores that take on major significance when all other comforts are denied.

They are such chores as washing, shaving -- and picking just the right MRE. When there is time, they read. The Marine Corps is the only military service with a reading list. And books are everywhere -- books about Marine history, books by Robert Ludlum and Tom Clancy, and a few that surprise.

A supply officer is reading "Uncle Tom's Cabin." An artillery spotter is working his way through Chaucer's "The Canterbury Tales." So far, he's finished "The Miller's Tale."

And Staff Sgt. Taryne Williams, 25, of Grand Rapids, Mich., is reading "The Spiral Path" by Mary Jo Putney, because "it's as trashy a novel as I could find, but it keeps my mind totally off the fact I'm in Iraq."

Living in tents, denied any chance for a real shower and subject to clouds of dust kicked up by the helicopters that land and take off at all hours, Marines here are on the prowl for diversions. Chess, spades ("the thinking man's poker," said one Marine) and dominoes are big. GameBoys are popular with younger grunts. A few of the troops keep journals.

In their flak-jacket pockets, Marines stash small articles of significance to their daily lives: good luck talismans, lip balm and tiny bottles of Tabasco sauce (rescued from their MREs).

When Marines are on the move, there is little time for thinking of anything but the mission. When the pace slows, the mood changes. They dwell on their fears, what they miss, what they've seen and their own lack of activity.

"When you get like this, it gives Marines time to think about stuff," said Staff Sgt. Brad Faulkner, 25, of Glasgow, Ky. "Right now we're here because the freakin' Army needs to catch up and be resupplied."

Few of these Marines, especially the young enlisted men, have ever seen action. And they know that whatever they have experienced so far is only a prelude of what is to come.

"We are all pretty young here and we've never been to war," said Lance Cpl. Christopher Somrek of Chicago. "This is all pretty new. Every time we go out we know we probably will get in a more dangerous situation. It gets you thinking: Is my gear good? Is my stuff good? Am I ready?"

In this downtime, before the final push to Baghdad, one thing Marines think about is whether the American public supports the war that has brought them here from Marine camps around the country. They often ask reporters assigned to the troops whether the U.S. public supports the war.

Although they are too young to have seen it firsthand, many have heard stories about servicemen returning from Vietnam to a hostile or indifferent nation.

"When you go back, you want people to know why you went over and served your country," said Sgt. David Vanuch, 24, of Springfield, Ohio.

Work starts early in this camp -- only a slacker is still in his sleeping bag at 7 a.m. -- but ends early as well. With sundown, all activity ceases.

Lights out is strictly enforced after sunset. To deter attackers, no lights are permitted outside tents and are allowed inside only if the window flaps are securely fastened. Flares attached to trip wires are positioned around the camp to warn of intruders. Some have been set off by wild dogs, leading to a swift and armed response from the "react squad."

There are morale boosters, though, at this undisclosed location, which, with its flat terrain and ashy soil, could pass for the California desert.

There is, for example, recently installed telephone service that allows calls back home for those with credit cards or relatives willing to accept the calls collect. The limit is five minutes.

But if there is a No. 1 booster, it probably comes in the form of the outdoor toilets, holes in the ground with box seats and camouflage netting for a bit of privacy. In the beginning of the move north, there were only trenches and bushes. Toilet paper is hoarded by Marines and shared only with best buddies.

"We're spoiled here," said Navy Petty Officer Kathryn Fauss, 22, of Rapid City, S.D., who assists the camp chaplains. "We've got toilets."

Here's a real page-turner
Nevada City and Grass Valley's story? More bookstores than anywhere else Adair Lara, Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, April 6, 2003
©2003 San Francisco Chronicle

Nevada City -- "It took me almost a year to discover I'd moved to a writer's idea of heaven," said poet Molly Fisk, who moved from Stinson Beach seven years ago when she fell in love. "Even though I'm extremely small potatoes in the writing world, when I step out onto Broad Street headed for the store to buy a lightbulb, people smile and wave and ask what I'm working on."

Where is she? Bloomsbury? Greenwich Village?

Nope. Nevada City.

Located in the Sierra Nevada foothills, just below the snow line about 30 miles off Highway 80 near Auburn, it's a typical little mountain town in many ways, with the usual hippies, busted dot-commers, rednecks with flag decals on their trucks, coupon clippers and right-wingers. Exhausted gold mines dot the countryside. But as Fisk found out, it's different.

It's literary. Nevada County voters, no fonder of tax increases than people in any other struggling rural community, overwhelmingly voted to triple the library budget five years ago. The local paper has a literary page. There are book fairs, classical music festivals and literary festivals. Fisk, along with bookstore owner Eric Tomb, hosts a radio show called "BookTown" on Monday afternoons on KVMR, a mountain version of Berkeley's KPFA.

And between Nevada City and the neighboring town of Grass Valley, with a combined population of about 15,000 people, there are 23 booksellers. Seventeen of them have stores, and the five others sell from their garages or on the Internet, including John Hardy, a former San Francisco trial lawyer.

Nevada City is, in fact, officially a book town. The term comes from a European idea for reviving little villages by concentrating booksellers there. This notion was dreamed up by an Englishman named John Booth in 1961 in Hay-on- Wye in Wales, when he inherited a castle and turned it into a used-book store. Then he bought up the rest of the town's buildings and turned them into bookstores, too. Today, the hamlet has more than 30 bookshops, which draw half a million visitors each year.

Gary Stollery, owner of Brigadoon Books in Nevada City, went to Hay in 1996 and came back determined to transform Nevada City and Grass Valley into a California version of Hay-on-Wye. A year later, Booth himself came over to attend a banquet for book dealers and local politicos that formally named the two towns as the Gold Cities Book Town.

According to Stollery, there are only two other book towns in the country. "Stillwater (Colo.) tried to get something going, and Larry McMurtry started something like it down in Archer City, Texas, where he runs a used-book shop spread over four buildings," Stollery said. "But Stillwater only has three or four (bookstores), and McMurtry's is a one-man operation, which is like cheating."

Admittedly, some of the Nevada City-Grass Valley bookstores are teeny. Nine of them are in one co-op building in Grass Valley called Booktown Books. In fact, when informed that she lived in a book town, the bartender in a downtown hotel looked puzzled. "There are a lot of funky little bookstores here," she allowed.

None of them are chains, and the booksellers work together. They have a common newsletter and gladly refer customers to one another, as two side-by- side used-book stores may not have a single title in common. "A book scout can hit a lot of shops without having to go a lot of miles," said Stollery. Ames Bookstore, with more than 300,000 volumes sprawling over five storefronts, is considered one of the best used-book stores in the state.

And where you find books, you also find readers. "I tried to join a book group and found out that all of the groups that meet regularly were filled," Fisk said. "Some are of such long standing that my brother-in-law Tom, who was born and raised here, inherited his mother's slot when she died."

And you find writers. Novelist Louis B. Jones ("California's Over") has been here eight years. "Our little house in Mill Valley purchased a lot of comfort up here," Jones said.

"People started moving up here in the late '50s, early '60s, partly because of Gary Snyder having come here. (Snyder, one of the original Beat poets, lives up on the San Juan Ridge above town.) But a lot of leftist, educated people moved up and stayed. So, it's small, but there are a lot of deep pockets of cultural stuff."

Jones has two kids in the local schools, which got the second-highest scores in the state, after Marin County. "It's quiet. It's beautiful. What Mill Valley used to be. We have a kitchen garden and a lot of space," he says. Jones, 49, is growing a beard and fantasizes about getting a job clearing brush. "It's sort of little Provencal. Good food, good people."

And where you find writers, you find artists. Elizabeth Dorbad, 32, a visual artist who lives on 90 acres outside town and works in a bookstore, says artists have followed the bookish types here.

"They are of like mind and interest. The literary scene influences all the arts." Fisk's co-host on the radio show, Tomb, 57, who started the first bookstore here in 1973, says Nevada City right now has a lively bohemian feel, like the art scene in Carmel at the turn of the century. He worries, though, that people are always talking about what a cultural center it is. He says Nevada City is in danger of becoming "a little too pleased with itself, like the Carmel of today."

It is a cultural center, but it is also still a rural small town. When he first moved up here, Jones worried he'd run into "a certain kind of small-town meanness. A resentment of people who think they're smart." In some ways, he says, the residents do live uneasily with each other. "There's a polarity up here. Collier and Snyder are the poles of that polarity." Peter Collier, who wrote for a left-wing paper, was a thorn in the side of the Johnson-Nixon administrations and is now writing for William F. Buckley, lives in Nevada City. "There's an interesting counterculture scene involving Wobblies and peace movements."

But Jones found his own views broadened by the locals. "I've met a lot of really smart conservatives up here." The local Foothill Theatre, in which his sister-in-law, novelist Sands Hall, is active, did a production of David Mamet's "Oleanna," a play about a professor who inappropriately touches a female student and sees his career unravel. Jones urged his wife (Brett Hall Jones, director of Squaw Valley Community of Writers) to sit near the door so they could escape the planned after-performance public discussion, but found he was glad he stayed to hear it. "All these country people had come in to see this play. The discussion was so much franker and braver than it would have been in Marin County, where people are unable to say how they feel anymore. It gave me a fresher faith in how neighborhood discourse can happen."

Fisk says that since she's moved to Nevada City, new words have made it into her poetry -- "granite," "heat" and "sugar pine." "But mostly I write about love," she says, "which got me here, to this little Victorian picture postcard built by miners and then reawakened by words."



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A literary treasure trove in the Gold Country
Here are some of the bookstores in Nevada City and Grass Valley. For a complete list, call Nevada City Chamber of Commerce at (800) 655-6569.


AMES BOOKSTORE
309 Neal St., Grass Valley

Sprawling over five buildings, Ames has more than 300,000 used books, including sections on puppetry, heraldry and castles (if they don't have a section for a book, they create one). Hours: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday and Thursday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Sunday. (530) 273-9261.


THE BOOKSELLER
107 Mill St., Grass Valley

This store has about 75,000 volumes and prides itself on special orders. It also features an entire floor of children's books called the Children's Cellar.

Hours: 9:30 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday through Friday, 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Saturday, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sunday. (530) 272-2131.


HARMONY BOOKS
231 Broad St., Nevada City

General store specializing in metaphysics and local history. Hours: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Thursday, 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 10 a. m to 5 p.m. Sunday. (530) 265-9564.


TOAD HALL BOOKS AND BRIGADOON BOOKS
108 N. Pine St., Nevada City

These stores offer children's classics, novels, books on Scotland and Californiana and Western Americana. Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday, noon to 5 p.m. Sunday. (530) 265-2216.


MOUNTAIN HOUSE BOOKS
418 Broad St., Nevada City

Specializes in Californiana, Mark Twain and the West, and offers rare and out-of-print editions. Hours: noon to 5 p.m. Friday through Monday. (530) 265- 0241.


BOOKTOWN BOOKS
11671 Maltman Drive No. 2, Grass Valley

This bookstore co-op houses nine stores. Among them are Lost Horse Books (books on horses) and Eric Tomb's Tomes Bookstore (philosophy, history, literature). Hours: 7:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Monday through Saturday. (530) 273- 4002.

2003 - 2004 Reading Group Suggestions Book Sense 76 Top Ten
Mar 27, 2003
This week, Book Sense This Week is publishing the top ten of the 2003 - 2004 Reading Group Suggestions 76, with bookseller quotes. Next week, BTW will feature the full listing, also with quotes.

The Reading Group Suggestions 76 was a great idea from stores, and many, many thanks to all those who gave so much help throughout the nomination process! It's our hope that this 76 will extend the reach of the program into the backlist and also provide you an effective new resource to market to all those great book buyers in reading groups. Stores will be receiving copies of the 2003 - 2004 Reading Group Suggestions 76 in the April white box.

For more information about this -- or any of the upcoming 76 lists, e-mail Dan Cullen at dan@booksense.com.

2003 - 2004 Reading Group Suggestions Top Ten

1. THE POISONWOOD BIBLE, by Barbara Kingsolver (Perennial, $15, 0060930535) "Kingsolver transports the reader to the Congo in 1960, as a Baptist minister and his family try to convert Africans while dealing with the explosive dynamics within the country's political situation and within their own family. Book groups especially enjoy the distinct points of view of the mother and the four daughters, which Kingsolver masterfully crafts and develops throughout the book." --Kathy Schultenover, Joseph-Beth Booksellers, Cincinnati, OH

2. THE RED TENT, by Anita Diamant (Picador, $14.95, 0312195516) "This richly detailed story of a family caught between two cultures, matriarchal and patriarchal, is told by Dinah, daughter of the Biblical Jacob. The Red Tent offers reading groups the opportunity to discuss women's history and families struggling with conflict." --Rita Moran, Apple Valley Bookshop, Winthrop, ME

3. GIRL WITH A PEARL EARRING, by Tracy Chevalier (Plume, $13, 0452282152) "A young servant is asked to model for Vermeer against the wishes of the artist's wife and family. You'll find intrigue, jealousy, and an extraordinary look into the life and work of the artist from the young woman's point of view." --Donna DeLacy, Portrait of a Bookstore, Studio City, CA

4. HOUSE OF SAND AND FOG, by Andre Dubus III (Vintage, $14, 0375727345) "More than a riveting story of two people -- a formerly wealthy Iranian immigrant and a troubled young American woman -- fighting to own the same house, it is also a story of the clash of two cultures. It's an especially relevant book for discussion today, providing readers with insights into both the Muslim and American mind-sets." --Jeanne Morris, Bethany Beach Books, Bethany Beach, DE

5. MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA, by Arthur Golden (Vintage, $14.95, 0679781587) "Book groups will enjoy discussing the gender issues, including that the author is a man and an American and the story is told in the voice of a famous geisha. Golden convincingly portrays this exotic, mysterious side of 20th century Japan." --Margie Skinner, Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza, Albany, NY

6. THE SPARROW, by Mary Doria Russell (Fawcett, $12.95, 0449912558) "A vivid, believable tale of space exploration and first contact, seamlessly woven into a story with ethical and religious overtones. Even if you're the type to avoid science fiction, do not miss The Sparrow! It is an engrossing, intelligent recount of a mission gone horribly wrong despite all the right intentions." --Rosemary Pugliese, Quail Ridge Books & Music, Raleigh, NC

7. THE HOURS, by Michael Cunningham (Picador, $13, 0312243022) "This Pulitzer Prize-winning novel makes brilliant use of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway to interpolate the stories of three women--two set in contemporary America, the third that of Woolf herself. Beautifully written and totally engaging, we watch as the characters' lives come together and illuminate each other. It's no wonder that The Hours is a book group favorite." --Karl Kilian, Brazos Bookshop, Houston, TX

8. ANGLE OF REPOSE, by Wallace Stegner (Penguin, $13.95, 014016930X) "This book epitomizes the difference in viewpoints in America between East and West 150 years ago. A young New Englander marries a mining engineer and settles in a small town in Colorado. This Pulitzer Prize-winning novel raises age-old questions about how free women are to lead their own lives and what happens to marriage when partners cannot compromise." --Carla Cohen, Politics & Prose, Washington, DC

9. TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, by Harper Lee (Warner, $6.99, 0446310786; Perennial, $11.95, 0060935464) "A classic that everyone should read. Two children's exposure to racism, prejudice, friendship, and loss is tempered through the loving guidance of their father." --Liz Morgan and Jean Brandt-Lietzau, Village Bookstore, Menomonee Falls, WI

10. PLAINSONG, by Kent Haruf (Vintage, $13, 0375705856) "A 17-year-old girl, pregnant and with nowhere else to turn, is persuaded to live with the two old McPherons brothers, bachelors who know far more about cattle than teenage girls. The deceptively 'plain' language and structure of this novel mask its complex view of what we owe, and what we can give, to each other. How the characters' lives are changed and their trajectories beyond the novel's close are questions you'll ponder long after you're finished reading." --Russ Lawrence, Chapter One Book Store, Hamilton MT

Web filters at libraries are overdue

By Alex Beam, Globe Columnist, 4/1/2003

I once wrote that ''librarians are indeed the unacknowledged legislators of the universe,'' and I meant it. Their pay stinks, their working conditions are worse than at the post office, but they bring the world to us. Now librarians are caught up in a dramatic First Amendment imbroglio over the recently adopted Children's Internet Protection Act. The case, US v. American Library Association et al., has reached the Supreme Court, with the ALA and the American Civil Liberties Union aligned against the government. The government's position is: We provide $200 million annually to public libraries for computer-related programs. As a condition of this aid, we demand that you filter out Internet pornography, especially for juvenile users.

The ALA and ACLU oppose the law on more or less classic First Amendment grounds, arguing that libraries' Internet terminals are ''public forums'' where the government may not restrict speech. They feel strongly that filters or ''blocking'' technologies end up weeding out legitimate sites -- e.g., the Flesh Public Library in Piqua, Ohio -- along with the illegal child pornography and the garden-variety smut clogging up the Internet.

Well, we're all against censorship -- or are we? While the ACLU and the usual band of First Amendment zealots are demanding let-it-all-hang-out Internet access in libraries, some resistance has arisen from an unexpected constituency: librarians. In Minneapolis last week, 12 librarians sued their employer in federal court, charging that the library's three-year-old Internet sites displayed ''virtually every imaginable kind of human sexual conduct,'' contributing to an ''intimidating, hostile and offensive workplace.'' ''We were living in hell, and they were unwilling to acknowledge the problem,'' plaintiff Wendy Adamson told the Minneapolis Star Tribune. In Toronto -- admittedly a city that won't be affected by the Supreme Court's decision -- a group of unruly teenagers chased a librarian out of her building when she shut off their Internet porn connection. A police officer told The Toronto Sun that teenagers consider the library better than an amusement arcade because the latter doesn't allow them free, unfettered access to all kinds of pornography.

When writer Chris Rodell interviewed librarians for a column posted on the literary website mobylives.com, none wanted to question the ALA/ACLU First Amendment party line, at least not for attribution. ''This is happening in libraries all across the country,'' one unidentified librarian told Rodell. ''Some of these children tell their parents, `Mom, I'm going to the library,' and the parents feel proud. But then some of these same kids and many adults will spend hours watching pornographic web sites right out in the open. It's very upsetting to some of our older librarians. But it's a First Amendment issue and there's not a thing we can do about it.''

That's not quite true. We can do several things. One is to accept the limitations of the much-derided filters and use them anyway. The government argues, convincingly, that when libraries use the filters, ''They are simply declining to put on their computer screens the same content they have traditionally excluded from their bookshelves.'' A second possibility is the so-called ''Boston solution,'' adopted several years ago in Copley Square by the nation's oldest public library.

At the Boston Public Library, president Bernard Margolis explains, the children's and teenagers' rooms have Internet terminals that filter out porn. The grown-ups use different computers and can visit the Flesh Public Library or order the Flesh Gordon video. If a person under 18 wants access to the wider world of Web wonders, he or she can get it, with signed permission from a parent. ''That puts the decision with the parent, where it belongs, and not with us,'' Margolis says.

I know where I stand on this. I'm behind the government and I'm tired of First Amendment shilly-shallying that fills my children's Hotmail screens with dozens of porn come-ons every day. But I will defer to Justice David Souter's eventual opinion in US v. ALA, (1) because he cares about the First Amendment in an intelligent way, and (2) because it was once said of him, correctly, that ''he regards Boston as the center of the civilized world.''

Alex Beam is a Globe columnist.

His e-dress is beam@globe.com.

This story ran on page E1 of the Boston Globe on 4/1/2003.
© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.

NEW YORK TIMES
March 31, 2003
Two Identities, but One Compulsion
By JONATHAN KELLERMAN


In the fall of 1959 Rosalie Silver, a teacher at the Yeshiva of Central Queens in Jamaica, informed her fourth-grade class that poetry didn't have to rhyme. Mrs. Silver encouraged her students to experiment with words and drilled them in the fundamentals of grammar. I sat in that class and began writing fiction. I've continued to do so, compulsively, since that autumn.

That same year I found a volume of short stories by the great social realist James T. Farrell on my parents' bookshelves. Farrell's take upon urban life was raw, morose, assertively sexual. The book was completely inappropriate for a 9-year-old. I read it under the covers by flashlight and was astonished by the author's forging of a brutal yet strangely sanctified world. A fantasy seeded: it would be great to do this.

Still, I saw writing as release, not a career possibility. I loved to paint, too, but the notion of art as a job was remote. I decided I was going to become some sort of scientist.

In 1966 I entered U.C.L.A., having graduated from a private high school with a senior class of 21. Now I was sitting in lecture halls with 600 fellow freshmen. My niche was the student newspaper where for four years I drew five editorial cartoons a week, wrote arts reviews, tried straight reporting and ended up as an editor.

In my senior year I was co-writer of an allegedly comic novel that won a Samuel Goldwyn Creative Writing Award. Film agents called me into their offices and barked, "Well, kid, what do you wanna do?" I had no desire to write movies and told them I was planning to get a Ph.D. in psychology. They stared at me as if I were psychotic and shooed me out. What I did want to do was write books, and when a New York literary agent agreed to take me on as a client, I wondered if I could make a living fooling with words. A prize, an agent: I was hot stuff at 21.

That was 1971. My first novel, "When the Bough Breaks," was published in 1985.

For 14 years I was a failed writer with a really good day job. I married, had kids, earned that Ph.D., got a medical school professorship and a job at a pediatric hospital. I specialized in childhood trauma and augmented my academician's salary by treating private patients after hours.

For 14 years I typed away from 11 p.m. to 1 a.m. in a spider-infested garage, churning out a slew of novels that earned me enough rejection slips to paper my house.

During that time, creating fiction remained catharsis rather than profession. I wrote but didn't rewrite, assiduously neglecting the basics of story structure.

More damaging, I segregated my identity as a psychologist from my writing, partly out of concerns about patient confidentiality but mostly due to cowardice: I was afraid of revealing anything about myself and conjured tales that bore no semblance to my reality or anyone else's.

Stripped of the life I lived as a psychologist, I had nothing to say.

By day I treated thousands of children afflicted by tragedy, deformity, disease. Rather than finding all of this depressing, I got hooked on adrenaline and was buoyed by what I learned about the resilience of the human spirit.

During the 1970's I happened to be the psychologist who treated several children who were sexually molested by a day-care operator. As I helped my patients deal with the emotional fallout, I found myself, atypically, shocked. Knowledge about sexual crimes against children was so skimpy back then that when a colleague attended a seminar on incest, the rest of us were puzzled why she'd want to learn about something so arcane.

The children who'd been molested responded well to treatment, but their ordeal continued to resonate. This was a betrayal of innocence so profound that even I, who thought I'd seen everything, couldn't put it out of my mind.

I quit my hospital job and expanded my private practice to full time, determined to attempt yet another novel. My practice booked up quickly, and I continued to type away from 11 p.m. to 1 a.m. in the spider-infested garage.

This time I outlined meticulously, dreamed about my characters, gave myself headaches nailing down the twists and turns of my story. Confidentiality remained sacrosanct, and I took pains to avoid exploiting real patients. Instead I stretched the "what if?" and concocted a tale of perversity, deceit and multiple murder set in the third world colony where I live — Los Angeles.

I plunged in and created a psychologist protagonist who bore similarities to myself. Alex Delaware evolved as a troubled, restless man, overwhelmed by horror. He emerged braver, thinner and better looking than I was: a Walter Mitty fantasy sprung to literary life.

Though I was less concerned with solving mysterious puzzles than in exploring human behavior under extreme conditions, this was shaping up as a crime novel. I needed a cop.

I created a gay homicide detective because I wanted to avoid clichés, and a gay officer was a revolutionary concept. But Milo Sturgis's homosexuality would not be glossed over. Being an outsider in a paramilitary organization that one Los Angeles police detective had described to me as "devoted to destroying the individual" would provide great dramatic tension. Milo was created out of whole cloth, as are all the characters in my novels.

"Bough" was a hard sell. Publishers praised my style, but were repelled by the subject matter. Finally, three years after submission, the manuscript was accepted. Violating everyone's expectations, including my publisher's, the book won the Edgar and the Anthony awards and became a word-of-mouth best seller.

I said, "Well, as long as they've let me in the club, I'll try another." The dark tone and childhood cancer subplot of my second novel, "Blood Test," seemed to preclude fat sales. It, too, became a best seller.

Since 1985 I've published 18 novels, including 16 Delaware books, translated into a couple dozen languages. I'm not frustrated by writing a series. Alex Delaware is a terrific vehicle for telling a certain type of story, one that explores the unpredictability of human nature. A series imposes limits, and I do my best to test them. Delaware and Sturgis go through life changes, including the aging process, though their maturation occurs in mercifully slow time.

As a psychologist I attempted to construct rules about human behavior. As a novelist I'm obsessed by the exceptions.

I love my job, look forward to the blank computer screen every morning. Protracted periods of no writing leave me grumpy. I outline in fine detail; an editor who worked with me, a man with a background in literary fiction, told me our relationship gave him a new appreciation for "the architecture of writing," and I believe that to be a perfect description of skillful story construction.

I write for myself, never for an audience, but I do strive for entertainment as well as erudition. The crime novel employs an abhorrent act to catalyze the human chess game, but I believe all good fiction is mystery writing; the reader must be compelled to find out what happens next.

I have never combed my patient rolls for characters, and virtue has been much more than its own reward. Too much reliance upon reality stiffens and cripples fiction. The roman à clef is an inferior art form.

Professional ethics forced me to imagine, and that made me a better writer. The reading public has been very kind to me. I'm thrilled but puzzled because my tastes are not commercial: movies I admire usually bomb, the music I listen to rarely makes the charts. No complaints; this beats honest labor.

NEW YORK TIMES
March 25, 2003
Iraq: A Reading List

This list includes books about Iraq, the 1991 war and recent events in the Persian Gulf. The books are linked to their original New York Times reviews. The books are arranged in order of date, beginning with the most recent.

Jarhead: A Marine's Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles (2003)
By ANTHONY SWOFFORD
Out of the 1991 war against Iraq comes Anthony Swofford, a Marine sniper, to say in his book that he had a ball.

Saddam: King of Terror (2002)
By CON COUGHLIN
The journalist Con Coughlin's account of Saddam Hussein's career is a swift, grisly read, but it's light on analysis, especially about Iraq's ties to Al Qaeda.

The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq (2002)
By KENNETH M. POLLACK
An experienced analyst sees no realistic alternative to removing Saddam Hussein, and not on the cheap either.

The Reckoning: Iraq and the Legacy of Saddam Hussein (2002)
By SANDRA MACKEY
Sandra Mackey has written an accessible history of a country made by Britain, broken by nationalists, taken by a dictator, beaten in war, still rolling along.

Study of Revenge: The First World Trade Center Attack and Saddam Hussein's War Against America (2001)
By LAURIE MYLROIE
Saddam Hussein, argues Laurie Mylroie, driven by a desire for revenge following the gulf war, is the single greatest terrorist threat to the United States.

Saddam's Bombmaker: The Terrifying Inside Story of the Iraqi Nuclear and Biological Weapons Agenda (2000)
By KHIDHIR HAMZA with JEFF STEIN
A physicist who defected describes Saddam Hussein's quest for the bomb.

The Greatest Threat: Iraq, Weapons of Mass Destruction, and the Crisis of Global Security (2000)
By RICHARD BUTLER
The executive director of the Unscom mission describes its failure and the larger implications.

Out of the Ashes: The Resurrection of Saddam Hussein (1999)
By ANDREW COCKBURN and PATRICK COCKBURN
This sober yet intrigue-filled book by Irish-born brothers and veteran Middle East journalists asks how Saddam Hussein has consistently defied predictions of demise.

Endgame: Solving the Iraq Problem -- Once and for All (1999)
By SCOTT RITTER
A former arms inspector in Iraq reports on the mission's failure.

A World Transformed (1998)
By GEORGE BUSH and BRENT SCOWCROFT
This book by the first President Bush and his national security adviser deals with the four major foreign policy challenges that they confronted.

Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History (1998)
By SUSAN MEISELAS
A profusely illustrated book on the Kurds serves as the family album of a stateless people.

After Such Knowledge, What Forgiveness? My Encounters With Kurdistan (1997)
By JONATHAN C. RANDAL
A reporter has spent 30 years trying to understand one of the Middle East's most enigmatic minorities.

A Modern History of the Kurds (1996)
By DAVID McDOWALL
David McDowall tries to account for the extraordinary failure of the Kurds to build a national movement that succeeded in bringing them security.

My American Journey (1995)
By COLIN L. POWELL with JOSEPH E. PERSICO
Genial and moderate, Colin L. Powell remains, even after more than 600 pages, maddeningly elusive.

The Generals' War: The Inside Story of the Conflict in the Gulf (1995)
By MICHAEL R. GORDON and BERNARD E. TRAINOR
The chief Pentagon correspondent for The New York Times a retired Marine Corps general have joined forces to provide the "inside story" of the allied side of the first gulf war.

Live From the Battlefield. From Vietnam to Baghdad: 35 Years in the World's War Zones (1994)
By PETER ARNETT
Peter Arnett has constructed an engrossing memoir of reporters and war, lean and clear in its narrative, rich in anecdote, redolent in its description.

Cruelty and Silence: War, Tyranny, Uprising, and the Arab World (1993)
By KANAN MAKIYA
A prominent Iraqi dissident has written provocative book on the savagery of Saddam Hussein's regime and the wider failings of Arab political culture.

A Woman at War: Storming Kuwait With the U.S. Marines (1993)
By MOLLY MOORE
Anyone who ever wanted a front-row seat in a war theater will find it in Molly Moore's tense first-person chronology of Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm.

It Doesn't Take a Hero (1992)
By Gen. H. NORMAN SCHWARZKOPF, written with PETER PETRE
A first draft of history, a serviceable but incomplete story of a complex coalition war by a professional soldier, a Patton with a conscience.

Live From Baghdad: Gathering News at Ground Zero (1992)
By ROBERT WIENER
CNN's former executive producer in Baghdad gives us a candid memoir, hammered out in picaresque detail, of the organized hysteria of television news coverage in Baghdad.

In the Eye of the Storm: The Life of Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf (1991)
By ROGER COHEN and CLAUDIO GATTI
This book by two journalists aims to chronicle the life story of the world's most popular general and much else besides.

The Outlaw State: Saddam Hussein's Quest for Power and the Gulf Crisis (1991)
By ELAINE SCIOLINO
A reporter for The Times has written a popular history of the Iraqi state, the rise to power and methods of control of Saddam Hussein and the relations between the United States and Iraq.

The Commanders (1991)
By BOB WOODWARD
Bob Woodward provides some of the first tantalizing glimpses of the first President Bush's war councils.

Baghdad Without a Map: And Other Misadventures in Arabia (1991)
By TONY HORWITZ
Out of his wacky, often hair-raising, experiences as a Middle Eastern correspondent, Tony Horwitz has fashioned a very funny and frequently insightful look at the world's most combustible region.

Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf (1990)
By JUDITH MILLER and LAURIE MYLROIE
The authors document how Saddam Hussein used the state's instruments of repression to destroy utterly his internal rivals while imposing a reign of terror on the entire country.

Republic of Fear: The Inside Story of Saddam's Iraq (1990)
By SAMIR AL-KHALIL
Samir al-Khalil's study of Iraqi politics is definitely required reading for anyone with a serious interest in Iraq or in the political dynamics of dictatorship.

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GUEST REVIEW
THE BLACK BOOK by Ian Rankin: Labeled the "king of tartan noir" by James Ellroy, Rankin is the hottest British crime writer on the scene. He pounds out a slick plot and compelling and intense characters, and his dark and moody series with Inspector John Rebus has gained him solid reviews from the critics and a host of satisfied readers. Rankin's BLACK BOOK, published in 1993, continues the successful Rebus series. Rebus's girlfriend has kicked him out of her house and he can't go back to his place because he has rented it to a group of college students. He hates his job, his drug dealing brother is looking for a place to stay, and the tax people are hinting that he has undeclared income from renting his flat. Amidst the ruins of his personal life, he learns that his friend has been beaten into a coma. An investigation leads back to a mysterious fire that brought down a seedy Edinburgh hotel five years earlier and an unidentified body found in the ashes. And now, thrown from the force for using desperate measures, Rebus doggedly pursues a truth that nobody wants revealed. 

James Ellroy and Raymond Chandler are two of Rankin's favorite authors, and their influence is reflected in his writing. THE BLACK BOOK parallels much of Ellroy's work with an oppressive darkness cast by an all-consuming blanket of corruption, crime, and graft. There is a sense of the world gone terribly wrong. But whereas in Ellroy's work the degeneracy generally touches everyone and everything, Rebus is the unflinching and noble knight in tarnished armor, a modern day protégé to Chandler's Marlowe. Rankin has done a fine job of breathing new life into the old cliché of the lone crusader struggling against the world in order to expose the truth and invoke justice. 

Chandler was noted for his superb ability to use descriptive scenes from the city to complement the mood of the story, and Rankin's ability to evoke Edinburgh is strongly reminiscent of Chandler's portrayal of Los Angeles. A quote from the Sunday Telegraph notes this: "Rankin captures like no one else, that strangeness that is Scotland at the end of the twentieth century." Rankin spoke on the appropriateness of Edinburgh: 

"Edinburgh is the perfect setting for crime writing. It has a split personality - on the one hand it is the city of history and museums and royalty, but at the same time there is this feeling that behind the thick walls of those Georgian townhouses there are all sorts of terrible things happening." 

It is a testament to Rankin's writing skills that he can pull off the grim and dark atmosphere while avoiding graphic and gory descriptions. Rankin's comment on this is: "I don't think you need to be graphic. In fact, I feel graphic violence is both lazy and salacious. You can allude to horror without sticking people's noses in it." Although an aversion to graphic scenes is a common attitude with many authors, it is not universal. Other authors, such as Derek Raymond and Joe Gores, have no qualms about using explicit violence, blood, and gore. Some, seeing the dark and brooding world that Rebus inhabits, would perhaps sense irony in Rankin's hesitance to depict the ugly scenes that must necessarily be a part of the detective's daily life. 

Ian Rankin, born in the Scottish town of Cardenden in 1960, has been a dedicated writer since he was 12 years old and wrote his own comic books and lyrics for an imaginary rock band. The lyrics were later morphed into prize winning poetry. At the University of Edinburgh he turned to short stories and continued to win awards. After obtaining an MA in English Literature, specializing in U.S. Literature, and while supposedly working towards a doctorate on the modern Scottish Novel from 1983 to 1986, he churned out three novels. The first one remains unpublished, but the second one was published in 1986 as THE FLOOD. 

The third one, published in 1987, is KNOTS AND CROSSES, and is the first in the popular Inspector John Rebus series. It's interesting to note that he did not consider KNOTS AND CROSSES a crime novel until he found the book in the mystery section of a bookstore and the Crime Writers' Association asked him if he wanted to join. At the time he wrote the book he was heavily into the literary theory of semiotics and deconstruction and he saw literature as being a puzzle or game between the reader and the author, but not a mystery. The book was not well-received and Rankin abandoned Rebus to write THE WATCHMAN (1990), a spy novel. 

He married in 1986 and moved to London, where his wife worked as a civil servant and Ian worked his way up in the well-known magazine Hi-Fi Review. Ian continued to write in his spare time, shuffling through the various genres like a deck of cards. He moved to France for a while but has since moved back to Edinburgh. He eventually worked his way back to the Rebus character, and has now produced over ten in the series. 

In 1992 Rankin won the Chandler-Fulbright Award, a prestigious prize for detective fiction funded by Raymond Chandler's estate. He came to the United States to accept the award and travelled over 14,000 in an old Volkswagon bus, visiting Seattle, San Francisco, Las Vegas, New Orleans, and New York City. In 1997 he won the Gold Dagger for his highly-praised novel BLACK AND BLUE, and in 1999 eight of the top ten Scottish bestsellers were his.

This review contributed by Michael Robison, AKA miker zspider, who is a contributing member of the 4MA group on Yahoo. 

The esteemed Oxford English Dictionary has validated the world of Harry Potter by adding a new definition of the word Muggle to online edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (www.OED.com) along with more than 2,200 new and revised entries. The definition reads:

Muggle, n. In the fiction of J. K. Rowling: a person who possesses no magical powers. Hence in allusive and extended uses: a person who lacks a particular skill or skills, or who is regarded as inferior in some way

Other definitions of muggle include those from the 12th Century ("A tail resembling that of a fish") through the 1930s ("a marijuana cigarette; a joint").

. . . And Lingo Was Their Game-O
To the Verbal Go the Spoils at Neologism Boot Camp

By J.J. McCoy
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 13, 2003; Page C10

In a spartanly furnished classroom three stories below the National Mall, conspirators are hard at work.

They're conjuring up words. They'd like nothing better than to invent them, then sit back and listen to the rest of us use them. They want this so much that each has given up five hours of a Saturday and paid upward of $120 to hear Erin McKean, the 31-year-old senior editor for Oxford University Press's American English dictionaries, talk about the life and death of language. She discusses the birth of "bling-bling," "soccer moms" and "reality TV," just a few of the phrases that have slipped into American vernacular in recent years.

She talks about staying power and burnout -- take "cyberspace," for example, a word coined by author William Gibson in 1984 and now securely entrenched, compared with "information superhighway," which also has its place in the dictionary but seems to be slipping into obsolescence.

"The dictionary is not a dictator, it's a mirror of what people do," she tells the 27 academics, bureaucrats, lawyers, retirees and writers who've signed on as cadets in this Smithsonian-sponsored "Word-Lover's Boot Camp." The best dictionary, McKean continues, is merely a record of the written expressions of a culture and language. Hence Oxford's listing of "hopefully," Homer Simpson's "D'oh!" and the use of "fellowship" as a verb (a usage dating from at least 1374, more than 600 years before cinema-goers fellowshipped in watching "The Lord of the Rings").

And at risk of scrambling the sensibilities of Scrabble devotees, McKean gets even more subversive: "You don't have to be in the dictionary to be a word [any more than] you don't have to be a purebred to be a dog." It's a particularly antithetical notion coming from one whose employer ambitiously aspires to include every English word in general usage since 1700 (plus any leftovers among the complete works of Shakespeare, Milton and the King James Bible).

The 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary is considered the most comprehensive reference for the English language. The company's two-volume Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (SOED), released last fall, saw fit to include 3,500 new words by using its "5 by 5 by 5" rule: five examples in five printed sources over five years.

By McKean's standards, the cadets' new constructions -- including "catagram" (a word without an anagram) and "homofication" (adoption of a gay lifestyle by someone who has recently come out of the closet) -- share the legitimacy of, say, an old word that seems to have renewed relevance, such as "woofits" (a gloomy mood, from the World War I era). Not yet in the dictionary but on Oxford's shortlist is "9/11," not soon to be forgotten, and "reality TV," which might best be.

Sometimes meaning is decided before orthography; we're still figuring out whether the word for online correspondence should be rendered as "E-mail," "e-mail" or "email."

At ages 76 and 73, respectively, Roy and Carol Thomas of Montgomery County share a mutual interest in language and opsimathy (from 1656, learning acquired late in life). A retired high school librarian who teaches English as a second language at Montgomery College, Carol is driven to bruxism (grinding of teeth) at the thought of the word "tasked," cited by Oxford back in 1828.

Conversely, allocthonous (non-native) poet and author Sheree Fitch, 46, transplanted to the District from Ottawa while her husband finishes a two-year work assignment, simply "loves words, the taste of them, the lip-slipperiness of them," and prefers poetic license to precision.

Philosophical differences are bound to arise where authoritarianism abuts artistry.

The dynamics in the room aren't anywhere near the scale of the war over words in, say, Bhutan, where the Dzongkha Development Commission of the Royal Government is finalizing a new grammar, and devising an entire new dictionary, in hopes of defending the Himalayan country's traditional language from outside influences. Tej K. Bhatia, a professor of languages and linguistics at Syracuse University, explains that the mountain folk are in for an uphill battle: Successes among state-mandated languages have been spotty.

As McKean has been impressing upon her class, Bhatia explains, "the most important thing is that the vocabulary you create must be accepted by its users. There are piles of created dictionaries that just sit on closet shelves. The users are going to select a word that has utility, that will give them some mileage."

That's the real key to a language's survival, finding a word with juice. When it comes to new words, as McKean notes, "there are more and more words all the time. . . . We're not slowing down at all, which I think is a great thing."

John Metcalfe came out on top at the boot camp. His "Gallogophasia" (the gratuitous insertion of French words into general conversation) was the favorite among his classmates and earned the 23-year-old editorial intern a copy of the SOED.

Gallogophasia may have won the prize, but the word of the day may actually have been "sinefine" -- defined by Polish immigrant-cum-West Virginia artist and boot-camp cadet Paul Wyszkoski as "an unending task," like language itself. For McKean and her fellow logophiles, that's -- to use English's most widely understood word -- okay.

The 2003 PEN/Faulkner Award Nominees

The finalists for the 2003 PEN/Faulkner award are:

The City of Your Final Destination by Peter Cameron (FSG)
Roscoe by William Kennedy (Viking)
The Ecstatic by Victor LaValle (Crown)
The Caprices by Sabina Murray (Mariner)
Little Casino by Gilbert Sorrentino (Coffee House Press)

America's Biggest Readers
An obsessively omnivorous polymath, a speed-reading insomniac, an incomparably prolific reviewer and just some regular folks—here are our favorite people who read more than you do.
by Jesse Oxfeld

Americans buy more than two and a half billion books per year—about nine each for every man, woman and child in the country. Most Book readers are bigger book readers than that, but what about those impressive few who read way, way more? They're the folks we sought out for our first list of America's Biggest Readers. We canvassed libraries and bookstores and publishing professionals and our friends, and we found ten people (well, eleven, really—you'll see) who plow through more books more quickly than just about anyone we know. It's a cross section of big-reading Americans, some of whom are absolutely the country's most voracious readers—we'd be nuts not to include them—while others are quirkier choices. Think you read more than than this crowd? Then maybe we'll see you here next time.
America's Biggest Readers: Jules Arens, James Billington, Timothy Dickinson, Elsa Engelhardt, Mary Alice Horne, John Jordan & Marianne Zerbe, Harriet Klausner - No. 1 Reader in America, Kristin Mueller, Albert Murray, Ronald Yanagihar

Jules Arens
Location: Monroe, Neb.
Age: 32
Books per week: 2
Claim to fame: Reading her library's entire fiction collection, from A to Z
The problem with reading a lot is that you're constantly trying to figure out what to read next. Jules Arens had been dealing with that all her life. "I would read instead of play at recess," she recalls. "And I had two little brothers I didn't like, so I read instead of being tormented."Eventually, she says, "I was tired of trying to pick stuff out, so I decided to start at the beginning." For the last five years, she's been reading her way alphabetically through the fiction department of the public library in Columbus, Nebraska, where she works as a veterinarian. It's slow going because she's often waylaid by other reading, like when she buys a box of used books. Her typical rate was three or four books per week, but it's slowed down since she and her husband adopted a baby girl. "Now, if I'm lucky, it's one or two," she says. She's working on building little Josie into a big reader, too. "We read together as often as she'll let me," Arens says. For her in-order project, she's up to the Bs— "I'm at B-o-v, actually," she says—and she realizes just how slow that is. "It's going to take me until I'm ninety," she acknowledges with a laugh, "but that's okay."

James Billington
Location: McLean, Va.
Age: 73
Books per week: 8
Claim to fame: Runs the Library of Congress, still finds time to devour books
The Library of Congress is the largest library in the world, with more than eighteen million books. Its annual budget is more than $500 million, it has a staff of four thousand and the Librarian of Congress, essentially the CEO, oversees the entire operation. James Billington, a Russian-history scholar, is the current Librarian, and, despite all the administrative duties of running this behemoth, he still finds the time to read copiously. "That's what I really enjoy," he says. "I'd much rather be reading than watching television." There's no clear line between his work reading and his pleasure reading, because his job requires a good deal of pleasure-type reading. He picks the poet laureate each year, he selects fellows to study at the Library, and he will oversee a new major prize, a sort of Nobel for the humanities. "In order to choose the right people," he says, "I have to read a lot of books." He reads plays and poetry and religious writing and the occasional mystery. Plus lots of books on Russia—which brings it all full circle. "My first great reading project was War and Peace," he recalls. "That's what got me hooked."

Timothy Dickinson
Location: Washington, D.C.
Age: 60
Books per week: 12 completely, plus "a penumbra" of others skimmed, reread, glanced at
Claim to fame: Knows everything about everything
You might call Timothy Dickinson a consultant. When pressed, he says his job is "giving advice to people, on things from books to Japanese trade." He's likely the best-read, most-informed person you'll ever meet, and he makes his living putting that vast store of knowledge at the service of others. He's thanked in many books' acknowledgments for helping their authors with ideas; he advises international lawyers, providing them with analyses of the regions they're working on; at previous times, he allegedly supplied the occasional mot juste or historical quote to the famously erudite columnists Lewis Lapham and George F. Will; and he volunteers his time to fact-check The Washington Monthly. "I've never met anyone who knows more than he does about anything," says Nicholas Thompson, who worked with Dickinson at the Monthly. "And that comes from reading everything." Born in England, Dickinson has read omnivorously all his life; he read "a score or more a week" as a student at Oxford, he says. All those books add up. He keeps several thousand in storage and yet still has problems with landlords worried that the overflowing collection in his apartment might be a fire hazard. "There's a geometric problem," Dickinson notes wryly. "You can only get so much on a wall."

Elsa Engelhardt
Location: Los Alamos, N.M.
Age: 64
Books per week: 2
Claim to fame: Reads constantly, in at least three languages
Librarians and library regulars are of course some of the biggest readers around. But at the Mesa Public Library, in Los Alamos, New Mexico, librarian Elsa Engelhardt particularly stands out. "Elsa reads all the time, in all these different languages," says Bernadine Goldman, the reference manager. "She really hates to miss a book—I think she looks at every one that comes in." Engelhardt reads in three languages—English, French and Polish—and, though she won't cop to it, Goldman suggests she can get by in Hebrew, too. (When the library's book club read Amos Oz, Engelhardt, as Goldman recalls, was wistful for his untranslated text.) Engelhardt is generally modest, insisting that she's too busy these days to read as much as she used to. "For about two or three decades," Engelhardt says, "I read a lot—any leisure time that I had." She lived in Quebec for many years and makes an effort to seek out Canadian literature—Crow Lake by Mary Lawson is a recent favorite—but she credits her love of books to her childhood in Warsaw, Poland, where she first learned to read at age seven, after the war. "I was so deprived of books as a child that they're still special to me now," she says. "I've always felt, even if I were widowed, destitute, living in a room someplace, I could never be completely unhappy as long as I still had books to read."

Mary Alice Horne
Location: Warrensville Heights, Ohio
Age: 78
Books per week: 13
Claim to fame: Keeps a log of the 700-ish books she reads each year
Elderly or homebound patrons in the Cleveland, Ohio, suburbs can have books delivered to them by their local library. Mary Alice Horne loves the program, but there's just one problem: A person can take out only fifty books at a time. "There are times when I'll have fifty books in the house," says Horne, who last year read 675 books, "and my daughter will get some, too, so I'll have enough." For the last dozen years, Horne has kept a record of every book she borrows and reads, and in each one of those years she has read more than six hundred books —in every genre except romance ("I'm past that point in my life") and science fiction ("I never got into that"). The year 1999 was her best, with 729 volumes completed. "My mom read to me when I was small," Horne says, "so I've always enjoyed it." Then, in high school, she went through an experimental speed-reading program. "Some people don't like being alone," Horne says, "but I don't mind, because I like reading so much." And insomnia doesn't hurt either. "Quite often I can't sleep," she says, "so I just read all night."

John Jordan & Marianne Zerbe
Location: Houston, Minn.
Age: 54 & 54
Books per week: 3 each
Claim to fame: Read early in the morning or late at night, and farm all day in between
Organic farmer John Jordan has a congenital love of reading: He likes to repeat his father's story of hiding books around the farm as a kid "so he'd have stuff to read while he was mowing hay." And, fortunately, Jordan also found a wife who reads as much as he does, each about three books a week. But they don't necessarily read together. "I get up really early, so my M.O. is to read for a few hours in the morning" before heading out to work the farm, Jordan reports. But his wife, Marianne Zerbe, an artist, "is very much a nighttime person," he reports. "So we're opposites that way." And in other ways too. While Jordan gravitates toward history (he'd just finished Doris Kearns Goodwin's No Ordinary Time the morning he spoke to Book), biography (he's working on Jane Smiley's Charles Dickens bio from the Penguin Lives series) and science books, Zerbe confesses she reads "a lot of fluff." "I like to read junk books," she says. "They're my popcorn." But they do recommend books to each other, and their combination has been powerful: Together, they've accumulated nearly ten thousand books. "We have a library chock-full of books," Jordan says. "Plus there's some in every room. And we have a mobile home that works as the farm office—there's a thousand more in there."

No. 1 Reader in America
Harriet Klausner
Location: Morrow, Ga.
Age: 50
Books per week: 20
Claim to fame: Amazon.com's No. 1 reviewer
Faster than a speeding bullet—or at least faster than your average fast reader—Harriet Klausner calls herself a "super speed reader": "It's like some sort of freak talent," she says. She can plow through a book in just an hour or two—and she typically reads two or three a day—so when she worked at a Pennsylvania library in the '70s, she started writing brief reviews of all the new books for the library's newsletter. The habit stuck, and she's been writing brief book reviews ever since. A few years ago, Amazon.com started allowing people to submit reviews to the site, and suddenly Klausner found herself labeled the No. 1 reviewer. "It totally happened on its own," she says. "I didn't do it for the numbers." Rather, Klausner just wants to introduce people to lesser-known authors. She confesses her own favorite is Patricia Cornwell, but goes on to name Kathy Reichs and Jan Burke as smaller names she discovered and liked. "I figured if I could show there's good books out there by unknown authors, it's worthwhile," she says. Klausner has posted more than 4,100 book reviews on Amazon, and there's a guy who's trying hard to beat her. Which wouldn't trouble her at all. "Number one is nice," Klausner says. "But it's not that be-all and end-all of everything."

Kristin Mueller
Location: Portland, Ore.
Age: 25
Books per week: 5
Claim to fame: Was already a speed reader by the first grade
When Kristin Mueller was in first grade, the teacher informed her mother that she didn't read correctly. Of course not. Kristin, without really realizing it, had taught herself to be a speed reader. "I've always read like that," she says. "I think I read in chunks." She graduated from college in December 2001, and she's hoping to start a graduate program this fall in—what else?—literature, but for now she's working full time at a medical supply company, which cuts into her reading opportunities. "I get up really early in the morning now, to read, and then I read at lunch and on all my breaks," she explains. "You'd be surprised how much time you can find." At a book or so a day, she reads just about anything she can find—almost always fiction, but in lots of varieties, from trash to classics. "If I had my way," she says, "I'd just work part time, so then I could read for the rest of the day."

Albert Murray
Location: New York, N.Y.
Age: 86
Books per week: 1
Claim to fame: Among the best customers of the famous Strand Book Store
The Harlem apartment Albert Murray and his wife have shared for forty years boasts views of Riverside Church and the George Washington Bridge to the west, the Triborough Bridge to the east and nearly all of Manhattan to the south. Except for those windows, the apartment's walls are covered with the noted cultural critic, novelist, biographer and poet's enormous collection of books. He still writes full time—on jazz, on literature, on American identity—and that's why he's got so many books around. "You're constantly referring to these things," he says. There are new books and beautiful old first editions, novels and biographies and classics and reference works and art books. They're all carefully organized: poetry on an upper shelf along one wall, literary criticism outside the kitchen, friends' books in the bedroom. An octogenarian, Murray is a bit worn by age, but he's still an avid book shopper, regularly making the 120-block trip down to the Strand Book Store, with its famous eight miles of books. "I used to get down there two or three times every week," he says. "Now I'm lucky to get down there a few times a month." he says. And he's always going back through his big collection. "Some people collect books because they're studying something, or because they're getting a degree," he says. "My thing is, I have a constant and professional need for these, because I use them for everything I do."

Ronald Yanagihara
Location: Gilroy, Calif.
Age: 57
Books per week: 2+
Claim to fame: Fits his reading in with a full-time oncology practice
If we've learned anything from ER, it's that doctors are incredibly busy people. Dr. Ronald Yanagihara, an oncologist, is no exception, with a bustling practice treating cancer patients. But it's tough to imagine Noah Wyle's Dr. Carter doing what Yanagihara does: finish at least two books each week, often complicated, serious literary novels by authors like V.S. Naipaul and Rohinton Mistry. "I think of my nonmedical reading as a treat to look forward to," Yanagihara says, adding that he likes to read for a while each night before he goes to bed. And his nonfiction choices are weighty, too: He likes to read about the "history and personalities" of physics. "When the paragraph is well done, I feel like I can almost apprehend the inherent beauty of it all," he says. "But in the next instant I couldn't begin to explain it to someone else."

Biggest-Reading Writer
Nicholas Sparks
Six bestselling novels in six years—Message in a Bottle, A Walk to Remember and the new Nights in Rodanthe among them—make Nicholas Sparks an extremely prolific writer. Turns out he's an even more prolific reader, finishing about 125 books a year. "I love to relax with a good read," he says, and he focuses his attention on fiction—mostly commercial fiction—plus the occasional history or biography. Also, he says, "I love classic literature, whether it's a 'new' classic or an 'old' classic."

Fastest Reader in the World
Howard Stephen Berg
When Howard Berg appeared on Live With Regis and Kathie Lee years ago, the hosts gave him twenty minutes to read a 240-page book. They then brought out a surprise guest: the author, who quizzed Berg on what he'd just speed read. "I scored 100," Berg proudly reports. Guinness-certified in 1989 as the world's fastest reader (the category has since been dropped from the book), Berg can read eighty pages per minute. He doesn't read constantly, and he doesn't always speed read. "But when I want to learn about something," he says, "I learn it really quickly and really well."

Biggest Reader in the White House
Condoleezza Rice
Just imagine, to start with, all the briefing books and policy memos. The president's national security adviser is his gatekeeper on foreign policy issues, the person who mediates among the so-called "principals"—the secretaries of state and defense and so forth—and funnels their advice to the boss. So Condoleezza Rice must be bombarded with things to read, all day long. But in an administration not known for its appreciation of intellectualism—"conspicuous intelligence seemed actively unwelcome in the Bush White House," writes former presidential speechwriter David Frum in his new The Right Man, an ultimately hagiographic memoir of his time working for Bush—Rice, a tenure-track Stanford professor at age twenty-eight, stands out as a thinker. She's often spotted toting historical works around Washington, and her family has spoken of her childhood requirement to read a book a day. Before the September 11 attacks, she reportedly set aside an hour or two each day to read journal articles and the like. And as a classically trained pianist, she appreciates the music of fine literature. "I actually read War and Peace in the Russian," she told an interviewer. "It's really quite beautiful."

Know someone who puts these Big Readers to shame? E-mail your suggestions for our next list: bigreaders@bookmagazine.com