Mark Zuckerberg has tapped a science fiction book as his next Facebook book club pick. According to a post on Facebbook, Iain M. Banks’ sci-fi novel The Player of Games will be at the center of the group’s next discussion. Zuckerberg has been choosing a new book every two weeks since the beginning of the year.
This one is a little bit of a departure for the A Year of Books list as it’s not a straight up business/community improvement/social science book. The selections started with Moisés Naím’s The End of Power and Harai’s Sapiens was the latest and 12th pick (which the book discussion on Facebook looked pretty interesting).
But The Player of Games seems fitting all the same.
This book is Book Two in Banks’ ten-book “The Culture” series which technology (thanks to aliens) is accelerated with the help of creative folks to ideally serve mankind way off in year 2083. I have not read this series yet, but am certainly familiar with them, as it was started in the late 1980’s. But from the conversations I’ve heard, the plot lines are very well thought out and you wind up having meaningful debates about what it means to be human, the pros/cons of technology on us and of course – aliens.
I’ve never participated in any of the previous A Year of Books discussions, but this one may very well be fun to follow. No doubt the talking points will be far and wide, which is great, especially when they are focused on serving others and improving things. Of course, I haven’t read the books… maybe it all crashes and burns. We’ll see.
Title: The Little Paris Bookshop Author:Nina George Publisher: Crown, 2015 Where I heard about this book: I received this book directly from the publisher
What first drew me to Nina George’s The Little Paris Bookshop was all the “books about books” chatter accompanying its launch. An area it certainly delivered in. But while books play a central part in The Little Paris Bookshop it is ultimately about loss and the consequences of our choices. All of which is peppered with the food and landscape of France.
The book follows Jean Perdu, book prescriber, bookseller and captain of the Literary Apothecary, a book barge moored along the Seine and overflowing with books and . The first third of the book is filled with thoughts and talk of books, literature and book buyers as Perdu will not allow his customers to buy any old book they want – it must be the “right” book.
“There are books that are suitable for a million people, others for only a hundred. There are even remedies—I mean books—that were written for one person only…A book is both medic and medicine at once. It makes a diagnosis as well as offering therapy. Putting the right novels to the appropriate ailments: that’s how I sell books.” –Monsieur Jean Perdu
This self-imposed hermit bookman displays a knack for sizing up a customer and prescribing just the right book to cure what ails them. But Perdu is suffering from his own pains and deeper issues as well. So he and a best-selling-author neighbor cast the lines ashore and take off down the river, in the book barge, to deal with Perdu’s past choices head on. More literary-minded characters come on board along the way as lives unravel and are laid bare.
Once the journey starts, George really starts to focus on loss, the choices we make in life and the stages of grief. Oh my goodness does Perdu spend time becoming self-aware. A lot of time. Towards the end there’s lots of yelling at the sea and pounding on tables as he comes to grips of lost love, growing older, re-connecting with himself and those around him.
The book is much more of a romance than I was first expecting. There was a lot more pining away and emotional anguish than I planned on. But the jacket designer, for the U.S. edition, nailed it. Just know that the sense you get from the cover is exactly what’s inside.
All of the book talk made it worth it for me though. Lots of Harry Potter and classic literature references to feed your inner bibliophile. And I would be selling it short if I didn’t mention the food and the river scenery. I was ready to set sail and eat my way through France by the time I turned the final page. The book even has a few recipes in the back from meals that were enjoyed in the book. Ultimately this book is filled with folks that I’d love to have over for a dinner party.
I give The Little Paris Bookshop three out of five stars and I’m recommending this book to friends I already know read romance books. But again it was worth it to me, just for all of the bookish discussions and characters.
I think it’s interesting that Joël Dickers’ next book is set in America, again. Dickers is Swiss and not even 30-years-old yet and I thought his next book would be set closer to his European home. But maybe he feels like he’s found another sold thread of a story. We’ll see.
The Book of Baltimore will be Dickers’ third book. His first was titled The Last Days of Our Fathers (according to Google Translate) and was a WWII story. I haven’t seen an American translation if there is one.
As long as he stays close to what he knows and enjoys writing about it’s one I am looking forward to picking up.
Just after World War I things were changing at a rapid pace here in Birmingham, AL. It was against this hasty backdrop of industrialization, cosmopolitan awareness and a sense of “popping up overnight” that the Magic City got its nickname and its first official working writers workshop – The Loafers.
I ran across this entry on BhamWiki.com and had to know more. So I trotted off to the Linn Henley Library and found the bound archived April 1977 issue of The Alabama Review. After reading the article I was blown away at the velocity with which The Loafers cranked out their articles, books, plays, screenplays, essays and short stories.
Made up mostly of newspaper folks, almost all of the original dozen or so members had pieces published in Harper’s, Munsey’s Magazine, The Saturday Evening Post and they even had a couple of O.Henry Prize winners among their ranks.
Roster and occupations of the first members of The Loafers.
The group was founded, in the late 19-teens and early 20’s, by journalist Octavus Roy Cohen, who also wrote fiction, plays, and scripts for Hollywood. He wrote about black life in Birmingham, but one of most popular books was The Crimson Alibi, a detective novel that also made it onto Broadway as a play.
In the 1920’s, Cohen lived in the Diane Apts. on 21st St. South and writers flocked to his place. During gatherings of the literary club / writers workshop, writers would review, critique and edit each others work. As well as cheer and jeer rejection slips, reviews and sales of their books.
I was hoping to list all of the books and works that this group churned out, but it’s just too much. No doubt – they called themselves “The Loafers” as some kind of tongue-in-cheek joke. In fact, in one mention in the January 1922 Writer’s Monthly journal , the reporter states,
“. . .the annual income from the work of the group runs well over the hundred-thousand-dollar mark yearly. . .these twelve men write seven or eight novels a year, usually about one hundred short-stories, besides poems, plays and articles.”
Adjusted for inflation that comes to more than $1.4 million dollars a year this writers workshop was bringing home.
The second generation of The Loafers was lead by Jack Bethea who was another newspaperman and the first editor of the Birmingham Post way back in 1921 when the paper was founded by Scripps-Howard. His group and the dozens after his were just as prolific as the first members.
What I haven’t been able to find is an approximate date of when The Loafers quit meeting and why. Birmingham has been flush with colorful story tellers ever since and we certainly have the setting and history to craft compelling fiction. I wonder why it disbanded. Or better yet – I wonder who would be on the roster if The Loafers was still going strong in Birmingham today?
It’s worth your while to make it down to the Linn-Henley to read the full 8 pages over a lunch break. It’s very interesting ending the April 1977 article with:
“The Civil War had provided an aura for the South’s fiction writers for half a century,. . . World War I and its swift succession of social and economic changes left little room for nostalgia and the gentler scenes it evoked. These Birmingham authors who mockingly called themselves “The Loafers” were alert to the fast-paced life around them and sensitive to human values. Whether in hot indignation at social injustices or with a small at human foibles and fantasies, they wrote perceptively of their own times.”
This book is Book Two in Banks’ ten-book “The Culture” series which technology (thanks to aliens) is accelerated with the help of creative folks to ideally serve mankind way off in year 2083. I have not read this series yet, but am certainly familiar with them, as it was started in the late 1980’s. But from the conversations I’ve heard, the plot lines are very well thought out and you wind up having meaningful debates about what it means to be human, the pros/cons of technology on us and of course – aliens.
