By Cindy Orr
New This Week
I think I may have mentioned before (possibly several times–sorry about that), but this is a great fall season for big books. This week we have Book of the Dead by Patricia Cornwell (Kay Scarpetta #15), A Lick of Frost (Meredith Gentry #6) by Laurell K. Hamilton, and Now and Then by Robert B. Parker (the 35th Spenser title).
As we near Halloween, it’s not so surprising to find a couple of books called Ghost. Alan Lightman’s is more in the spirit of the season, with a protagonist who, when sacked from his job, takes a position in a mortuary. Donna Seaman gave it a starred review in Booklist. Robert Harris wrote The Ghost, which is actually a thriller in which the ghost is a ghostwriter who discovers more secrets than the politician who hired him expects. Kyle Mills has a new thriller about his FBI agent Mark Beamon, and this one received starred reviews in Publishers Weekly and Booklist.
In the nonfiction arena, we have the last book by Molly Ivins, who sadly passed away this year, and The Tenth Muse by Judith Jones, which also received a starred Booklist review. Jones, a senior vice-president at Knopf, a literary fiction editor, has also been responsible for many of the best cookbooks published in the past few decades, including those of Julia Child.
Redacted to the Point of Unreadable
Then there’s Valerie Plame Wilson’s book Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House, which was embargoed until Tuesday. Publishers Weekly has an exclusive review, which says it is nearly impossible to read because so much of it was redacted by the CIA.
Click here to see the complete New This Week list of notable titles scheduled to hit the shelves in the next seven days.
Dumbledore Was Gay
Okay, it probably doesn’t make any difference to most of us, but you should know about this, as it’s the big news of the week. J. K. Rowling, at a reading at Carnegie Hall Friday, answered an audience question this way:
“Did Dumbledore, who believed in the prevailing power of love, ever fall in love himself?”
“My truthful answer to you…I always thought of Dumbledore as gay.” According to The Guardian, the audience was silent for a second, then “erupted into prolonged applause.”
Rowling continued: “Dumbledore fell in love with Grindelwald, and that added to his horror when Grindelwald showed himself to be what he was. To an extent, do we say it excused Dumbledore a little more because falling in love can blind us to an extent, but he met someone as brilliant as he was and, rather like Bellatrix, he was very drawn to this brilliant person and horribly, terribly let down by him.”
Other Bestseller Lists
Publishers Weekly’s Religion Bookline has the October Christian Marketplace Bestsellers. Max Lucado has two of the top ten hardcovers without even counting his brand new 3:16 (a million copy printing), and Karen Kingsbury has three of the top ten paperbacks, while Joyce Meyer has one title on each list.
Did Poe Die of a Brain Tumor?
Matthew Pearl, author of The Poe Shadow discusses old newspaper accounts of Poe’s exhumation with a coroner who comes up with a fascinating possibility. Articles on the appearance of Poe’s brain 25 years after his death were found in the Enoch Pratt Public Library.
Interesting Author Interviews
Robert B. Parker -
“Spenser loves to cook. He’s a pretty neat guy – likes to look nice and keep in shape. He almost sounds like the early stages of the metrosexual.”
“You said metrosexual. I’m going to hunt you down.”
Scott Simon interviews Sebastian Faulks on NPR.
Marjane Satrapi (The most amusing interviewee in literature) on the movie version of Persepolis.
Oliver Sacks in the pages of the Wall Street Journal.
Susan Faludi on The Terror Dream.
Norman Mailer is in the hospital, but the Mailer Review has been published.
Margaret Atwood interviews Ian Rankin.
Ann Enright on winning the Booker Prize.
Quote of the Week
“When Doris Lessing won the Nobel Prize for literature last week, my first thought was: What a victory for science fiction!”
–M. G. Lord in the LA Times
Signing off from New York, where I just saw Wicked. I hate to say it, but the musical is much better than the book. Highly recommended.
Next week’s Run Down will come from California. Happy reading!
