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Powell's Staff:
Five Book Friday: In Memoriam
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Every year, the booksellers at Powell’s submit their Top Fives: their five favorite books that were released in 2023. It’s a list that, when put together, shows just how varied and interesting the book tastes of Powell’s booksellers are. I highly recommend digging into the recommendations — we would never lead you astray — but today...
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Brontez Purnell:
Powell’s Q&A: Brontez Purnell, author of ‘Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt’
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Rachael P.:
Starter Pack: Where to Begin with Ursula K. Le Guin
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Customer Comments
postgeoff has commented on (8) products
How Not to Be Wrong The Power of Mathematical Thinking
by
Jordan Ellenberg
postgeoff
, October 24, 2014
When my dental hygienist saw this book, she said, 'You're reading a textbook.' Why does math always mean work? In reality, the title doesn't promise to make a better mathematician of you. It promises to show you how math, whether you do it yourself or follow the work of others, can help you think more clearly in order not to be wrong throughout your (presumably non-mathematical) life. Way too often, the right answer is paradoxical to the way we think. Correctly understanding the workings of basic rules like the Law of Large Numbers can help avoid costly mistakes. Once you truly get why it's futile to put armor plate where the bullet holes are, your understanding will improve and so will your life.
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Assholes a Theory
by
Aaron James
postgeoff
, October 24, 2014
Just as students of the phenomenon of celebrity are pondering the contrasting responses of, say, Jennifer Lawrence and Kaley Cuoco-Sweeting to the nude photo release and what it means for their future character development, along comes Aaron James with ‘Assholes: a theory,’ a credible attempt to penetrate and comprehend this ubiquitous phenomenon. James has the philosophical chops to do the work, plus the light hand and humorous manner to keep it real. Anyone who wonders, ‘Who are these guys?’ and ‘Could I be one, too?’ should get this book and keep it handy.
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Exiles Return
by
Elisabeth De Waal, Edmund De Waal
postgeoff
, January 05, 2014
Thomas Wolfe’s ‘You Can’t Go Home Again’ concerns a novelist who attempts to return to the place he wrote about, only to be rejected by his outraged subjects. Elisabeth de Waal never permanently returned to Vienna, which she and her family fled in 1938, and never published the novel in which she speculated about how such a return might have gone. ‘The Exiles Return’ uses the stories of repatriation after the upheaval of World War 2 to showcase the city the author lost and to show how despite its survival and restoration, the strands of history were permanently rewoven by events, no precise return being possible. Professor Adler finds that, in fleeing for his life, he permanently surrendered the professional seniority that should have been his. Resi, who was born abroad, feels a comforting familiarity in the place where her ancestors thrived, but is unable to find a footing within it. The familiar names of returning nobles guarantee them a place at the table, but with their fortunes largely gone, they must find new ways to pay their keep. On the other hand, Kanakis, who had money, and made even more abroad during the war, faces the limits of this new form of power. One theme of the novel recalls the Red and Black: a young socialist, his activism truncated by the Nazis, discovers that their displacement did not, in a crucial way, mean their defeat, while a Jesuit priest steps confidently into the stream of events, only to be forced to swim to stay afloat. Edmund de Wall, author of ‘The Hare With the Amber Eyes,’ contributes an introduction to his grandmother and her extraordinary novel��"one of five she wrote without finding a publisher. He identifies her great theme as the heartbreak of returning: the small details that can cause ‘incommensurate grief.’ We who read the book in English, one of de Waal’s many languages, will encounter echoes of another sort. Although she writes in English, her native German lends it the perfection of expression that few writers today can still manage. Like W.G. Sebald’s long, flawlessly subordinated compound sentences, her words spin out in elaborate flights that come down exactly where she means them to. It is never necessary to reread a sentence in search of its intention, and yet her observations are discerning and the implications sophisticated.This is writing from another time, from the middle of the twentieth century, that survives to represent a lost impulse: the literature that might have been written had the German and English speaking worlds not gone to war with each other. It’s not hard to see why de Waal’s novels failed to find publishers. Instead of fighting Martin Amis’s ‘War Against Cliche,’ she works within the traditions she inherited. Her characters are subtle creations, but the events she invents for them feel inevitable, rather than revolutionary. It may be a novel that would reward reading in a group, where the necessarily private experiences of its isolated characters could be teased open and discussed, so that Elisabeth de Waal’s gifts can be better seen and appreciated.
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Gravity Hill
by
Maximilian Werner
postgeoff
, April 15, 2013
For an essayist and fishing enthusiast, popular U of U writing professor Maximilian Werner’s didn’t do badly with Crooked Creek, his first novel. Nominated for the Utah Book Award, it went up against In This Light, a collection of short stories by Melanie Rae Thon, his colleague at the U and one of Utah’s more distinguished living authors. That two such worthy books came along in time to compete with each other speaks to the strength of the local writing community at a time when literature itself is said to be in crisis. Placing Werner’s secular worldview beside Thon’s more spiritual vision also brought his view of life into high relief. It’s no secret that Utah has been a place of insiders and outsiders since its beginnings a century and a half ago, but it’ never been entirely clear who fits in which group. If Crooked Creek shows a diverse immigrant population that began winnowing itself from the beginning, Gravity Hill, Werner’s new memoir, reveals that the fault line cuts deeper, while running in more and different directions, than the simplistic, popular image would have us believe. To chart so many fractures requires a variety of maps, or in this case, voices. Werner opens, closes, and paces Gravity Hill in the present, when he is a husband, father, and as fully enrolled in those tasks as any conventional family advocate. In those moments, his musings are literate and philosophical: ‘The sound of parenthood is the sigh,’ he reflects while attending a sleepless baby. But the timeline is complex, drawn by the gravity of memory to return in seemingly desultory fashion to those moments that, if not exactly traumatic, are troubling: moments he would as soon forget, but cannot. The voice shifts with the narrator’s age, adopting a conversational tone appropriate to a teenager. At times demotic, soaring, elegiac, street, the shift can be disorienting, as the audible surface of this elegant man-of-letters in his forties suddenly dissolves and the 16-year-old horny, thirsty boy steps forward to continue his story, frequently needing to prove himself by cursing in a rough, but finally harmless way. Rude speech is accompanied by direct description of carnal acts, reproof to anyone who thinks vague, allusive writing is somehow ‘poetic’ when, in reality, it is only vague and allusive. Any man who writes a memoir must have in mind his background and education, how and perhaps why he came to some place in time. Maximilian Werner’s Gravity Hill offers such a record, tuned to the precise details of adolescence in Utah, though complete with excursions to distant places that variegate his experience. The book is also, in keeping with recent trends in memoir, a potentially universal, possibly inspirational tale of one young man’s descent into self-medication and substance abuse, followed by, if not the secret of his recovery, at least the facts of his survival. But there is something larger here: something that makes this book indispensable for anyone in Utah who is not LDS, and equally so for anyone who is. Gravity Hill may well be the first book to recollect in tranquility, without an agenda, the ongoing encounter between two peoples who still refer to each other by incidentally disparaging names: Mormons and Gentiles. Werner tells of living alongside a powerful yet defensive group of people he views neither as angels nor demons, but mostly as his neighbors. This may be the first time two groups who demonize each other in print and speech, though mildly by world standards, will see depicted how they behave together in actual practice. But first, Max Werner is a boy from a broken home, one of two sons and a daughter being raised by their mother in the suburban towns of Salt Lake, loosely scattered around a basin closed in by rugged mountains and harsh deserts, where secrets are hard to keep and the great western ethic, the right to be left alone, long ago succumbed to the fundamentalist practice of minding one another’s business. Culture, as he discovers when he encounters ways different from his own, doesn't change people, nor really form them. What culture does is preserve the enduring��"if not just intractable��"values of a group. What recent immigrants to Utah like Werner find themselves facing is not a community created by revelation. In fact, as he points out, the Saints’ command of theology looks shaky to non-believers, and the LDS Church plays no direct part in Gravity Hill. What young Werner finds instead is a strongly bonded, distinctively rural culture that is conservative in the old-fashioned sense: like common folk the world over, Latter Day Saints are devoted to maintaining the norms and mores that have preserved them far longer than the relatively brief history of their church. Having survived the enclosures of their hereditary lands, migration into the industrial revolution, and captivation in the urban slums of Europe, these pilgrims came to Zion in a desperate gamble to recover their own lost paradise. The last thing they wanted was to share it with the kind of losers they had barely escaped becoming themselves. Young Max arrives on the scene with troubles of his own. His original family was not only broken, but the shards were twisted in ways that makes them difficult to see clearly. What connected his parents remains a mystery: his early memories find them already estranged, and most of his connection with his father occurs while shuttling back and forth between his mother’s domain in Utah and his father’s haunts in New York. Visiting his father brings him to Fire Island, revealed in some of the book’s most evocative and compelling passages: scenes too brief to satisfy the curious, but too suggestive for more cautious readers. Returning to his high school years in Salt Lake, he reveals himself to have been, like so many talented but poorly-directed youth, an indifferent student. The contrast between him and the future missionaries he encounter daily is at its strongest here: Werner and his friends fecklessly adrift, the young saints certain and self-confident. This is surely not where Gravity Hill will make trouble between Werner and his neighbors. What may cause offense is his insistence that adolescence, though a moveable feast, is none the less inescapable: that those assured young men and women on their way to elaborate weddings and large families are, beneath a cosmetic projection, just as much its creatures as are his friends. The desperate desire of returning missionaries to get married, an endlessly celebrated source of ribald humor in their community, may be disguised, but is no different in his eyes from the ceaseless cruising for sexual opportunities among their unchurched peers. Consider Faux, caught in conflict between her church and her peers, including an eager suitor Max considers hopeless: Faux had reassessed and reasserted her commitment to all things Mormon. All her life she had been a tough crack to nut, and by God she would be so again. Thus there would be no more spreading of legs and she would surround herself with her own kind: the beautiful and visibly uncomplicated Mormon boys and girls. Of course Sport was not privy to any of this knowledge, and even if he were it would not have stopped him because it has never stopped anyone. He was a bee at work in the cherry blossoms. If sexuality is the engine that drives Werner’s peers no matter their social standing, cars offer them a hazardous, demonstrably life-threatening independence. What cars don’t provide is that staple of earlier generations, the mobile bedroom. Among his friends, a room is never that hard to borrow. The draw for the rootless is Gravity Hill, a favorite spot to take a date or just to hang out. Here, in their four-wheel parlors, beneath the luminous State Capitol, yet on the edge of wilderness, they drink and talk��"or more often, drink and sit silent��"connect and separate again, and try to create the community that failed them in their home lives. The title refers to a section of road where an optical illusion makes a coasting car seem to accelerate uphill. Here Gravity Hill becomes a sublime metaphor, one that Werner sets up but does not belabor, for the way young adult men and women appear to be accelerating as they reach for marriage, families of their own, careers, and an apotheosis of accomplishment. The truth, of course, visible from some topographically objective vantage point, is that their primes are already past. Most, in reality, are actually rolling down into depths where they will be caught as if by gravity, trapped for the duration of life. Nor is there any reason to believe that, despite the superficial differences, the fate of the faithful will ultimately be any different. When the warmish wind died we would look up again and gaze to the south, as if we expected to see something other than the black shapes of the rising mountains. We could see Bay and Brody silhouetted against the northern sky and their bodies were stiff and serious. Bay’s arms were folded. I think everyone knew they wouldn’t last. It wasn’t just them, though. We all had potential, but we lost most of it to the drugs and booze and to the resulting mistakes, which made me feel like I was always in the hole. Add that to the normal difficulty of interacting with other humans, and how any of us got and stayed together with anyone could be counted as one of life’s mysteries. And yet some of them, as Maximilian Werner proves here, will come together and make it work. The flip side of young Werner’s insistence that his LDS classmates are just as addled by the onset of sex and mature society is his tacit admission that they had the right answer all along: sex within a union isn’t just necessary for successful reproduction; it provides the best template for living as well. Utah confounds outsiders, who don’t expect to find pre-Civil War values still practiced by politicians, financiers, civic leaders, intellectuals, teachers, editors, publishers, and writers of serious literature. But surely some of them will be just as bewildered to find the lost, intoxicated teen-ager they wrote off now representing them in a bid for earthly eternity. Gravity Hill argues no one has a patent on the truth, not insiders any more than the excluded, and nothing is what it looks like on TV. Werner promises no external help. He sees the lie that no one is ever tested beyond endurance for what it is. If the view is bleak, it’s one well-rooted in observable, and closely-observed, matters of fact.
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Sense of an Ending
by
Julian Barnes
postgeoff
, January 02, 2013
IN an era when the author's cleverness is primarily what's on offer, and the payoff for reading rarely includes any genuine human fellow-feeling, Julian Barnes, a somewhat old-fashioned writer, has written a book that masterfully fulfills the somewhat old-fashioned virtues. We recognize his narrator and identify with his struggles, short-comings, and failures in life, along with his tepid satisfactions. His inability to find the route to greatness, to notoriety and the respect and admiration of his peers is the realistic reverse of the fantasy/celebrity story so many best-sellers invite us to escape into. Instead, we enter with Tony Webster into a labyrinth of desire and misunderstanding. Over the decades of his life, we see how the goals we set are replaced eventually by something less -- the desire simply to understand what we wanted and what prevented us from achieving it. And then, when even that eludes us, just to feel we got a grip on what actually happened. When Tony finally understands, the discovery is devastating, and his shock and dismay crystalize the many smaller, less dramatic discoveries--the actualities that take the place in our lives of what we wished for and thought we had. It's not about disappointment; god knows we see enough of that. Barnes has dug into disappointment and found not just a lack of something, but the presence of something far more terrible. Of all the books I read this year, this one has stuck with me as the closest to the things I found in the literature of the past -- the things that keep me reading, hoping to find those rewards in something written in my time.
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Loser
by
Thomas Bernhard
postgeoff
, September 09, 2012
In the land of Mozart, three talented music students become life-long friends. One, Glenn Gould, becomes the most famous pianist of his time. Another, on realizing that his skills are not what he hoped for, gives away his piano and becomes a writer. In fact, he becomes the narrator of this book. The third never resolves any of his conflicts, and eventually kills himself. He is the Loser, and in this meditation on success, Austrian author Thomas Bernhard counterintuitively makes that failure the more compelling story. Some writers start with historical facts and apply a veneer of fiction; Bernhard forges deep fictional truths and paints them with a trompe l’oeil of actual names, dates, and places. Unlike the ‘stream of consciousness’ that dominated 20th century literature, he brilliantly captures the way we tell ourselves stories: backtracking, obsessively retracing events, dissecting, all while seeking the shape of it. Pessimistic and scathingly funny by turns, Thomas Bernhard’s writing is among the most powerful revelations of modern life and literature.
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Twelve Rooms of the Nile
by
Enid Shomer
postgeoff
, September 02, 2012
Some literary critics resisted the relatively recent introduction of historical characters into fiction, while others cited such auspicious precedents as Napoleon’s appearance in War and Peace in its defense. The fictional purists lost the battle, and a trickle of novels like E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, in which Harry Houdini and Emma Goldman appeared beside completely made-up characters, became a flood in the era of Post-modernism. Eventually, literary figures old enough to be out of copyright were lifted too, so that the lives of beloved characters��"suspended by their creators so that readers could imagine their own endings to the story��"were spelled out for an audience that had lost its power to dream. In time, everyone from Elizabeth Bennet to Abraham Lincoln was busy fighting vampires, werewolves, or zombies. The perfectly-timed rise of the Internet, like the earlier invention of the camera, lowered the bar to the point where even books still in copyright became raw material for lesser writers to re-imagine, a trend that climaxed in the 50 Shades Trilogy, wherein the thinly disguised Twilight novels have their missing erotic dimension restored. Such Mannerist characteristics as parody and rapid progress through genres have historically indicated the end of an era, a time when less ripe examples of the trend struggle for attention. That may explain the relative lack of attention for a far more interesting venture, Enid Shomer’s Twelve Rooms of the Nile. Based on a handful of Victorian journals and such surviving records as early Baedeker’s and similar primitive travel guidebooks, this novel imagines what might have happened during simultaneous forays among the antiquities lining the Nile River that were actually undertaken in 1850 by Florence Nightingale and Gustave Flaubert. Where books that hijack fictional characters can change their stories any way they want, these events, early in two of the better-known 19th century lives, face far tighter strictures. The dates and itineraries of both are known, as are some events and details, but while nothing documents their encounter, neither does the record prohibit their having shared an adventure. The challenge for Shomer was to craft a story that fits the known facts and, instead of reconfiguring what these two remarkable figures subsequently achieved, sheds light on how they became who we know them to have been. At first glance, Nightingale, the virginal icon of feminine service, and Flaubert, one of the most notorious libertines in a place noted for sexual indulgence, are an unlikely pair, and to her credit Shomer pulls no punches in presenting them. Flaubert, recently under the influence of a shallow spirituality, has spent years writing a book about St. Anthony that his friends consider so bad he should burn it, not rewrite it. His response has been to throw himself into sensuality as if there were no tomorrow. Nightingale, convinced of God’s plan for her, has declined to marry and spends her considerable energy seeking something that looks enough like a calling. Even their encounter, on a choked road, points up their differences: when a pair of intoxicated Frenchmen open fire on birds from a busy road, terrifying their fellow travelers, the quintessential English maiden censures them. Thus their story begins. Ah, but our author sees these two young, talented persons more accurately than the iconic images that have come down to us. Just how they might appeal to each other, and what each brings to the table that the other is lacking to be great, and why their collision has remained secret, are the business of this story, ornamented with a meticulous reconstruction of Egypt at the dawn of its rediscovery, just as the Rosetta Stone was enabling the lost culture of the ancients to finally be understood. Clearly, Enid Shomer has written Twelve Rooms of the Nile as another kind of Rosetta Stone, to enable reconstruction of two remarkable persons who, no less than the civilization of Egypt, have been lost to us through a century of admiration for what they achieved.
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Skios
by
Michael Frayn
postgeoff
, July 29, 2012
From the Renaissance on, the theme of history has been expansion: the Age of Exploration carrying adventurers and map-makers to every corner of the globe; the Reformation replacing a monolithic church with religious diversity; philosophy yielding to ideology; capitalism finding the price of everything while liberating us from obligation to its value. This expansion seemed on course to go on forever, like the post-Big Bang universe. But lately, one thing has begun to shrink. That would be us. Now every day brings news of scientific breakthroughs that diminish nature’s only witness. Our senses don’t reliably inform us, nor do we wait on them as we thought we did for the wherewithal to make choices. How could we ever really know each other, when we don’t know ourselves? Michael Frayn is the poet laureate of this collapse. Or perhaps its ‘clown prince.’ A number of literary authors have taken on themes like the mind’s preference for a good story instead of reason, and how those stories are undermined by narrative unreliability. But no one else handles the impact of technology on the scaffolding of knowledge and the human desire for certainly with Frayn’s scathing humor. Most of us like to laugh; all of us need to. Some prefer to laugh at things falling about, while others require the witty insight that eviscerates appearances. Frayne offers it all in generous helpings. Those who enjoy stage farce��"mistaken doors and misplaced assignations��"may remember Frayn from ‘Noises Off,’ the best-known of his fifteen stage plays and the masterpiece and template of these juggling acts, in which any number of characters, plots, and subplots are kept suspended in chaotic misadventures. Those who prefer an art-historical context, whether Donna Leon’s Venice or Steve Martin’s Soho, might recall ‘Headlong,’ one of Frayn’s ten novels, where he unspools a solution to one of the most exquisite mysteries in all art. It’s a mark of his skill that Frayn, almost alone among writers, is at the top of his class both on stage and between pages. In ‘Skios,’ he’s merged his genres and their antithetical strengths. Readers watch the action play out before them as if on stage, but are privy to the characters’ intentions, confusion, and false certainties. More, we are granted insight into alternative possibilities: roads not taken that branch out even beyond the spaghetti bowl of conflicting motives and snarled misunderstandings. Skios is a Greek island (not a collection of Swiss sports enthusiasts) to which the Fred Toppler Foundation invites intellectuals, culturati, magnates, and their various accompanists. It’s a stew that turns even the most hardened professional amateur on some level. The guest of honor at the Foundation’s annual gathering has gone astray, lost like checked luggage, and been replaced by someone hoping to escape his life’s consequences and start over. But old consequences trail him, and new ones defeat all efforts to sort out the confusion. Frayn’s x-ray vision lights the way down to the level of actual luggage, passports, and the indispensables we take for granted. But nothing can be taken for granted in ‘Skios,‘ amid an ensemble of faked ruins concealing a greater, un-ruined truth that could easily be lost to the foibles of those who set themselves up as its defenders.
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