Laila Lalami

So we leave town tomorrow and, after a brief stopover in the Bay Area to spend New Year’s Eve at my sister’s (and help her celebrate her birthday), we arrive in Portland by the weekend. If you have a book group or a writers’ group and wouldn’t mind an extra member, I’d love to join.

A few writers signed with Berkeley publisher Creative Books only to find out that their books had minuscule print runs, no marketing, and no promotion.

Tom Tomorrow riffs on the notion that Dean Can’t Win. See the cartoon here.

There are certain news cycles I try to avoid completely, either because they’re uninteresting (Paris Hilton) or boring (Bennifer) or just plain weird (Michael Jackson.) But the latest news from the Michael Jackson debacle caught my attention: First came the claims, then the denials, that Michael Jackson had joined the Nation of Islam. Now there are further reports that NOI is indeed involved with the gloved one, at least in providing security for him. What annoyed me about this round was the complete lack of contextualization. For example, this AP article has one line on the organization, and doesn’t make the rather important point that NOI members believe in a separate prophet/messiah, a belief that would be considered heretical in the Muslim world. One comes away from this article and others feeling that an accused child molester is protected by Muslims. But I suppose amalgamations are the name of the game when it comes to the Other.

I was going to comment on the poor coverage of the Iran quake (notable exception: PBS and NPR) but Ed pretty much said everything I had to say.

I didn’t much care for some of what’s been written about 9/11 (no, not even by You Know Who’s story in the New Yorker), but “Good to Hear You” came as a refreshing surprise. Holiday Reinhorn’s opening paragraph pulled me in and I left my dinner to burn while I finished reading the essay.

On the morning two commercial airliners crash into the Twin Towers of The World Trade Center in New York City, my father wakes up in his bed in Memphis, Tennessee. Unaware of the disaster now in progress, he turns on the shower in the adjoining bathroom to awaken Laurie, his second wife who is still asleep, then shuffles into the kitchen to turn on the coffee machine and feed the cat. In the kitchen alone, my father lights his first cigarette and watches the cat, a skinny stray he found hiding in the barbecue recently, systematically wolf her food. It looks more like backwards vomiting than eating, he thinks, but my father watches the meatballs he has prepared for Littleslip (whom he also calls Lovebird sometimes, or Ki Ki) disappear with rapt appreciation. If he could, my father imagines, he would live with thousands of cats–thousands, if Laurie wasn’t allergic, but it is nice enough of her to even put up with this one, he reminds himself. Laurie (and it almost brings tears to his eyes to think of it) is a very generous young person.
Just after 9:30, Laurie appears in the kitchen in her business suit and the two leave their house at 7095 Ivy Leaf Circle. They step over the newspaper lying on the doormat and get into my father’s 1989 Honda two-door coupe. My father is behind the wheel in Bermuda shorts, T-shirt and Italian dress shoes. Laurie is beside him with her open briefcase in her lap, paging through computer forms that will become vitally necessary to her life in the hours ahead.

LCGR continues to impress me with the kind of stories its editors publish. It’ll be at the top of my list of subscription renewals this year.

The Guardian’s Justine Jordan has an article about the year ahead in fiction. It seems that Hari Kunzru will have a new novel coming out in the Spring:

Impressionist author and scourge of the Mail on Sunday Hari Kunzru adopts a global canvas for Transmission (Hamish Hamilton, May), in which an Indian man who forsakes Bombay for an IT job in Washington, only to get fired, unleashes a computer virus on the world in revenge. The novel roams through Bollywood, London and the Scottish Highlands as well as cyberspace.

But that’s just the beginning. There’s plenty more to expect in 2004, including new books by Orhan Pamuk, Haruki Murakami, VS Naipaul, etc. It’s kind of fun to compare the Guardian’s selections with these, from the Scotsman.

As the year draws to a close, everyone’s offering their notable books of the year. In honor of the upcoming move to Portland, here is a list of the top ten Northwest books. It’s unclear whether they mean best, or best-selling, and they mix fiction and non-fiction pell-mell. Then there’s this list of the forty notable books of the year. I liked that they included three collections of short stories (ZZ Packer, Julie Orringer, Sherman Alexie). Or there’s also this rundown of books about Asia or by Asians. It lists one of my favorites this year, Julie Otsuka’s When the Emperor Was Divine, but misses Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, even though the novel is set in Afghanistan.

We spent the Christmas holiday eating Chinese, watching movies, and making the final few arrangements for the impending move. I’m drowning in lists: To-do list, contact list, shopping list, etc. Might be time for a list of lists.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. An assistant at a media company writes a thinly veiled critique of her former boss and gets a huge book deal. Yeah, yeah. The only twist in this story is that Rachel Pine’s novel, which is about a dysfunctional boutique studio oddly reminiscent of Miramax, was bought by Miramax Books.

In addition to the Weinsteins, there are a host of easily identifiable doppelgangers, including Steven Seagal, Billy Bob Thornton, Gwyneth Paltrow, Woody Allen, Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, John Ritter, Larry Flynt, Woody Harrelson, Charlize Theron, David Schwimmer and Anna Wintour. Just as she has changed real people’s names ever so slightly (Thornton is called Jimmy-Joe Hawthorne), Pine also has altered several movie titles, but the ersatz replacements are hardly deceptive. “The English Patient” has become “The Foreign Pilot.” “Sling Blade” is known as “HackSaw.” “The Pallbearer” has been changed to “The Gravedigger,” “Scream” is now called “Shriek,” and “The Postman” is “The Milkman.”

The article quotes Harvey Weinstein as saying, “Contrary to popular belief, we do have a sense of humor about ourselves.” Hmmm. I’ll wait to see what he does with the movie.