Category Archives: favorites

January 22, 2010   DG&B   favorites, Lauren, opinion  
7

Get drunk militantly

by Lauren

Because it is Friday and the short weeks always somehow feel longest, today seems like a nice day for a slideshow of literary drunks and junkies.  Life magazine put this together, complete with not-so-fun facts about the authors’ addictions.  It is both troubling and somehow understandable that we almost instinctually feel genius and addiction go hand in hand–though undeniably tragic, what clearer manifestation of mental struggle than to spend your life at the bottom of a bottle?  If nothing else, the slideshow taught me some things:  in spite of my love for Little Women, I know little about Louisa May Alcott and had no idea she was an opium addict.  Also, F. Scott Fitzgerald, who I swear I must’ve seen pictures of before but somehow hadn’t noticed–pretty hot!

I’m not equipped to judge the seeming correlation between genius and addiction (and not entirely sure whether there’s actually a relationship–what percentage of brilliant artists of all stripes are perfectly sane and sober?  What percentage of addicts have no discernible artistic ability?).  But if we assume for a moment there is one, I wonder how many of these authors would have taken the trade of sobriety for a lack of a legacy.

(via Book Bench)

January 15, 2010   DG&B   audio, favorites, fun, Rachel  
1

Famous voices

by Rachel

I’m excited by the wonders of the audio book world–just the fact that I can listen to Stephen Fry narrate The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy makes me giddy with literary happiness. So, I thought I’d share this fun link that reads like a senior superlatives page in a high school yearbook, only this time matching celebrities to the novels they’ve narrated.

After reading this, it made me wonder who I’d really like to see narrating my favorite book. I’m going to go with Isabella Rossellini reading East of Eden by John Steinbeck–an interesting combination to say the least, but amazing nonetheless. Is there a particular celebrity you’d like to hear reading your favorite book? Or a celebrity that just doesn’t make a good fit for a particular audio book?

January 08, 2010   DG&B   favorites, fun, Jessica, Lauren, reading  
13

Books I will hate

by Lauren

Yesterday, Jessica discussed Laura Miller’s book on CS Lewis, and today I bring you more of her wisdom, this time from Salon. Earlier this week, Miller recommended we all try something new in 2010: read a book we think we won’t like. I’ll admit that while I’ve grown much more open since I began working in publishing, with my personal reading, I invariably leap for the same sorts of books I’ve always loved. My “free time” reading piles at home have the same general character as the ones that were in my college dorm rooms. When taking the luxury of reading purely for my own enjoyment, I rarely think it’s worth reading trying something I’m not naturally excited about. But I know from my professional experience that sometimes wonderful books are hiding in categories we hesitate to touch or under plots that seem at first glance unappealing.

I’m not generally one for New Year’s resolutions (as it’s universally acknowledged that those are merely things we pretend we’re going to do or else we’d have begun them when we decided they were important rather than arbitrarily on January 1st…er, 7th…oh, by early February at the latest), but I’ll take Miller’s suggestion on in 2010: I will read, for my personal reading, at least one book I’m convinced I will hate.

Since I’m the naturally contrary sort, it shouldn’t be too hard to find something wonderful that I’d normally shove aside. And hey, if I do hate it, I might’ve wasted my time, but I’ll also feel totally vindicated.

Is anyone else prepared to take on this challenge? And does anyone have ground rules about what’s unreadable as delightful and random as Miller’s? If anyone has a graphic novel about 20-something magicians living on a ranch in Prague while working in the silent movie business and feeling disenchanted with their relationships with rabbis, they may want to suggest their publicist steer clear of Miller’s desk at review time. (But they should probably send that manuscript to me, because I bet it’s amazing!)

January 07, 2010   DG&B   favorites, fun, Jessica, lists, reading  
10

The Magician’s Book

by Jessica

Over the holidays, I gave myself the gift of a bit of pleasure reading; one of the books on the NYT’s year end best list, Laura Miller’s The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia. It is essentially a work of literary criticism devoted to C.S. Lewis’s beloved series. Miller, who adored the Narnia series, nevertheless felt bitterly tricked when she discovered they were a Christian allegory. Kids, she argues, are literalists, and as heavy handed as the religious symbolism may be, they lack the general knowledge to see the similarities between a story about a magical lion and the Christian messiah. Years later, Miller returned to the books to examine them as an adult. Hers is a smart and fairly serious undertaking, one that I’ve enjoyed in part because her childhood experience so closely mirrors my own. One idea in particular has really stuck with me. She posits that most avid readers, folks who love books (most of you, I imagine), are forever in search of the purity and pleasure of that first book (or books) that so enchanted us. That as adults, we can never quite recapture that absolute delight when our critical faculties were not yet developed, and our immersion in fiction was complete. That we read, now, in some sense, in an effort to get back to the garden.

For me, the books were, in fact the Chronicles (hence my interest in Miller’s book). But I’ve not reread the series as a grown-up precisely because I fear finding them wanting, hollow, devoid of the pleasure they once afforded me. I’m curious to know what your touchstone book was, and if you’ve ventured to read it now that you can, perhaps, see its shortcomings, peek behind the curtain.

December 09, 2009   DG&B   favorites, fun, Jim, lists, Stacey  
4

Best of the decade

by Stacey

As we’re coming up on the new year and end of a very tumultuous decade, and looking at lots of book lists, like Jim’s recent post, this piece from this week’s New York magazine made me think about my favorite novel of the past 10 years. The book that popped into my head was Little Children by Tom Perrotta. Loved that book (a lot better than the movie version). It’s a very compelling and real look at serious suburban dysfunction. It’s funny, but also achingly sad, and the seemingly simple plot unfolds in surprising ways that subtly suggest this book is not, nor was it ever, going to have a fairy tale ending. Perrotta is a talented and versatile writer who I am always eager to read something new from. What’s your favorite book of the last decade?

December 04, 2009   DG&B   about us, book club, Chasya, favorites, fun, great books, Jane, Jessica, Jim, Lauren, Michael, Miriam, Rachel, reading, Stacey  
3

Book Clubbing at DGLM

by Rachel

 
This week, the DGLM office talked more books, as another book club meeting was held around the all-purposes back office table.

The book club is a little different to any I’ve been involved with before because, for starters, we don’t all read the same book. The DGLM book club usually involves all of us reading a different book–this time we chose novels from the great books lists that were compiled over the summer by staff and interns. Another thing that makes this book club different is that we’re not only evaluating books as readers, but as people in the publishing industry. The reports we give involve ways we would pitch the book, offering our real opinions (some in praise, some…not so much in praise), and then talking about how they performed and whether we’d have picked them out of slush.

This time around, here is what we read:

  • Jane read The Giant’s House by Elizabeth McCracken
  • Miriam read Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
  • Chasya read The Shipping News by Annie Proulx
  • Jessica read What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver
  • Jim read The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
  • Lauren read The Secret History by Donna Tartt
  • Stacey read Ordinary People by Judith Guest
  • I read After All These Years by Susan Isaacs

Following the DGLM book club this week, a few of us were eager to get our hands on books others had reported on, so the idea of a book club where everyone reads a different book is especially great because it allows us to hear about books we might not have heard of or seen in bookstores, and it also introduces us to amazing new authors. I really like this concept because bookstores can sometimes be overwhelming with all those titles on display, and it can be difficult to know what or who to start reading.

  

And, believe it or not, we’ve already chosen books to read for our next book club meeting next month. This time we’ll be reading books from the New York Times Notable Books of 2009, which Jim wrote about recently. I’m excited about this because I’ll be reading from an author I’ve never heard of, and discovering new writers is a passion of mine. Have you discovered amazing authors from book clubs? 

December 02, 2009   DG&B   Chasya, DGLM Recommends, favorites, fun, Jane, Jessica, Jim, Lauren, lists, Michael, Miriam, our website, Rachel, reading, Stacey  
0

DGLM Recommends

by DGLM

Just in time for the holidays, new staff recommendations from us here at DGLM to add to your shopping or wish lists!  Check ’em out!

November 20, 2009   DG&B   favorites, Rachel, reading, short stories  
9

For the love of short stories

by Rachel

In an interview in today’s Wall Street Journal, Alice Munro talks about why she’s attracted to writing short fiction. “I used to write novels and I didn’t get anywhere,” she says. She then goes on to say that she’s now writing “some halfway in between sort of thing.”

Well, I love those halfway in between sort of things Munro writes. I’ve always been enthusiastic about reading short fiction because the author has to get down to business right away in developing the story, there’s no time to waffle on about unnecessary things and spend pages setting up elaborate scenes. I remember taking a short story class in college and finishing the course being amazed at how much effort actually goes into writing short fiction. So, short story writers are kind of like heroes to me. I always like to keep a collection of short stories on the side while I’m reading a novel–I have to keep my reading options open!

So, having said that, any suggestions for Thanksgiving short story reading?

November 19, 2009   DG&B   favorites, fun, Jessica, reading  
10

Roark and Baggins

by Jessica

Two recently published biographies of Ayn Rand have been getting a good deal of attention recently. It’s unusual that two so similar books have been published more or less simultaneously, and the net effect is to make it seem as if we are in the middle of a Rand resurgence. Thomas Mallon writes in the New Yorker that “most readers make their first and last pilgrimage to Galt’s Gulch….sometime between leaving for Middle Earth and packing for college.” Another reviewer (who it was, and the precise words he used, I can not now remember) said that Rand’s books have made it on to the mysteriously constituted but broadly understood unofficial reading list of adolescence. Both observations made me laugh, in large part because they seemed spot on. I read both The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged in early high school; who recommended them to me, I can’t, for the life of me, recall. Certainly not my parents, though they noted my choice of reading with some bemusement. I wasn’t in search of a political philosophy, and I emerged from my sojourn in Galt Gulch with no die-hard allegiance to Objectivism or snappy habit of wearing a cape. Ditto Middle Earth. I do, now wonder, where this unofficial reading list came from: for me in addition to Rand and Tolkien, it included generous helpings of Daphne DuMaurier (where is the gothic novel today, I ask?); Gone With the Wind; The Hitchhiker’s Guide; The Princess Bride; Down and Out in Paris and in London; Look Homeward, Angel; Lost Horizon. Note that I’m leaving off the books that were part of the official curriculum, such as Hiroshima, Death be Not Proud, A Separate Peace and assorted other death-related tales that I now suspect compose the reading-list-approach to undermining the adolescent sense of invincibility.

But I wonder what made it on to your unofficial list of adolescence? Did you read Rand? And what do Howard Roark and Bilbo Baggins have in common? Also, if anyone can tell me what article I’m paraphrasing, I’d be grateful.

November 17, 2009   DG&B   about us, Chasya, favorites, fun, interns, optimism, reading, why we are agents  
11

Why I Am An Agent (Chasya)

by Chasya

Sick and confined to bed this weekend, I gazed aimlessly at the television during the few short hours I managed to stay awake hoping for some distraction from the painful knot in my throat. At some point I switched away from TLC’s Cake Boss marathon for a second, only to catch Jeremy Piven’s Ari Gold screeching at someone or another (Kevin Connolly, maybe? I’m not really sure, in my Theraflu-induced haze I wasn’t processing much). Which gets me thinking, now that I’m less fuzzy-brained, about agents and why, despite the stress of it all–particularly during a difficult and uncertain time for this business–I became one myself.

First things first, let me dispel the myth that agents are screeching Ari Gold-like banshees. Obviously he’s a caricature of an agent (even if he is based on a real person). But aside from that, we in publishing like to think that the industry is a bit more genteel than Hollywood.

So if I don’t get to yell at people on the phone all day long, you ask, why did I become an agent? Well, it just started with an old-fashioned case of wide-eyed idealism and took off from there. As with many of the people you’ll find populating publishing, some of the most memorable moments of my life involved books. Those moments led me to define myself as an ardent book-lover. For instance, when I was five my neighbors would come over to my house, and I would feel very important as I read to them all aloud. We went through the entire Disney series that my mother had been purchasing one by one at the grocery store. When I was in the fourth grade and trying to plow through as many books as I could in Mrs. Rosen’s library, I was reading one afternoon on the bus ride home and was so absorbed that I kept on reading despite intense motion sickness and had to get off at another kid’s stop just to puke. I got back on after the driver nearly pulled away and resumed reading. When I first read Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal in junior high it almost made my head spin and fall off. I was enamored. I wanted to marry Jonathan Swift. Who would think an essay about eating babies could do that to a person? There are a multitude of these small, seemingly unimportant moments, but I won’t embarrass myself further by trying to relay them in any earnest sort of way. All I can say is that now, for many, many tiny reasons, I really love books.

And that love affair blossomed into a so-called useless degree in English literature. One that many students pursue, wondering “What am I supposed to do with this?”

I knew I wanted to do something practical. I knew I wanted to work in publishing and be a cog in the great machine that produced those things I was so impressed by. So I did what you do when you start out in publishing–I got an internship.

The business turned out to be far more complex and fascinating than I could have ever imagined and led me to want to stick around. Especially now, as it undergoes significant changes, it will be interesting to see how things progress. The things I wouldn’t really say aloud anymore (but appear to have less of a problem putting in print) are still there. But now what drives me is the added bonus of helping clients pursue their goals and guide them through the process. It’s rewarding and fun, even if it’s challenging.

But I can’t be the only one with these types of memories–and I certainly shouldn’t be the only one to admit them! What small moments led to your love of books?

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