• The National Book Critics Circle has announced the finalists for its 2009 awards.  Among the finalists for the fiction prize are NBA finalists Bonnie Jo Campbell (American Salvage) and Jayne Anne Phillips (Lark and Termite), as well as local author and Vroman’s favorite Michelle Huneven.  Finally, her excellent novel Blame gets some much deserved recognition.  The other two nominees are Marlon James (The Book of Night Women) and Hilary Mantel (Wolf Hall).  Congratulations to all the finalists.  I’m also excited that one of my favorite poets, the great D.A. Powell, received a nomination for his collection Chronic.  Click here to see the full list of finalists in all categories.

• At The Millions, Max Magee  interviews a “book pirate.” “One thing that will definitely not change anyone’s mind or inspire [pirates] to stop are polemics from people like Mark Helprin and Harlan Ellison – attitudes like that ensure that all of their works are available online all of the time.”

• This piece by Emily Bazelon at Slate is interesting for a number of reasons.  It’s a parenting article about why she and her husband don’t allow their children to receive birthday presents from their friends and instead set up a book swap in which each child leaves with a book to read.  While I’m all in favor of the book swap idea, what I find interesting about the article lies in this quote:  “Paul quietly explained that this was our family’s way of drawing a line against consumption and excess.”  The idea here is that books are outside the culture of consumption and excess.  While I think I agree with this, I’m not entirely sure it’s true.  Certainly not all books are outside consumer culture, are they?

• I’m only about partway through this NY Times Magazine article about James Patterson, but I highly recommend it.  It’s a glimpse into the atypical world of an author who breaks many of publishing’s rules (for instance, don’t publish too many books) and sells books at a rate that none can rival.

• Lastly, why sell the books when you can give them away for free and become a “bestseller?”  This strategy works, of course, when there’s a physical object to sell.  Give away digital downloads to sell physical books.  What if the physical book went away?  What then?  I still don’t see a solution there.

Michelle Huneven’s Blame is an excellent novel that takes place largely in the Pasadena/Altadena/La Canada-Flintridge area.  The story of Patsy McLamore is one of pain and redemption.  After killing a pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses in a blacked out drunk driving accident, Patsy lands in state prison.  A white collar academic, she’s not prepared for the realities of prison life upon arrival, but soon finds herself adapting and surviving.  In prison, she gets sober, gets transferred to a work camp, and fights wildfires in the Malibu hills.  Upon release, Patsy finds comfort in the local AA scene (and it is a scene), where she meets the elder statesman of  San Gabriel Valley alcoholics, Cal.  Eventually, they fall in love and marry.

And then, years later, her sobriety more or less a given, her life back together and thriving, Patsy discovers that she may not have killed anybody after all.  There was another person in the car with her that night, a person she could never have known about.  How does this change things for Patsy?  Does it change things?  These are the central questions of the book, and I have considered them long after finishing the novel.

I have only one complain about the book.  It isn’t with Huneven, either, but with her publishing company.  When I was reading the book, I was enthralled with the early sections of the book, with Patsy’s prison time and her early years of sobriety, but then I felt the book went into a bit of a lull.  It was less focused on Patsy’s recovery and its relationship to the accident and more to do with her marriage and its inevitable ups and downs.  This is fine; novels can change midstream and still succeed.  But then the revelation of Patsy’s innocence happens, and the entire novel takes on a whole new dimension.  That “lull” seems incredibly necessary.  In short, the ending makes the novel.  But FSG went and revealed that a big twist ending was coming up (That’s why I suggested that people skip the flap copy and just read the book).  Why would they do that?  Did they worry that a novel about an alcoholic who goes to prison and gets sober wouldn’t be enough for some people?   I never read the flap of a book before reading it, but I realize that I’m in the minority.  The question remains, though:  how much is too much to give away in jacket copy?

Click here to view the embedded video.

All of these wildfires (and the crews assigned to fight them) have me thinking of one of the best new books of the season, Michelle Huneven’s Blame.  Blame was lovingly written about by one of our buyers, Sherri Gallentine, in the latest issue of The Essential (Again, if you’re not getting The Essential, feel free to sign up at any time).  I’m also a big fan of the book, which performs a narrative trick I haven’t seen before.  What’s the trick?  Well, read the book.

As the novel opens, Patsy MacLemoore finds herself arrested for killing two people while driving drunk.  Through some legal technicalities, she gets the charges reduced, but she still finds herself in prison.  Huneven describes the tension, the boredom and the humiliation of incarceration in great detail, yet never slips into sensationalism.  After a year of good behavior, Patsy succeeds in getting transferred to a special camp where she can work outdoors.  The work, it turns out, is fighting wildfires in the hills of the Angeles National Forrest.  Here she describes getting caught in a sudden flare up:

This is when we die, she thought with unnatural calm, here are the superheated fumes that melt my lungs.  She was curiously unafraid and very interested.  Death by fire, she’d heard, was not like drowning or asthma.  With fused lungs, there was no convulsive struggle and not much pain.  You could think to the end.  She found Antonia, grabbed her, and held on.

After Patsy’s release from prison, she spends a while kicking around Pasadena, Altadena and environs, but she ends up settling in, you guessed it, La Canada-Flintridge.  If you haven’t read this book, now is really the perfect time to read it. (Also, Huneven will be at Vroman’s on September 10 to discuss Blame.)

Have a great weekend, everybody.  We hope you survive the fires intact.