Rocky Mountain News favorite books of 2006

Several books in the "page 69" series earned a listing among the Rocky Mountain News favorite books of 2006, including:

Augusta Locke, by William Haywood Henderson
Set in the early 1900s, Henderson's emminently readable tale revolves around Gussie Locke, who leaves her Greeley home as a young girl, becomes pregnant and raises her daughter on the Western plains in a hard-scrabble existence.

The Good, Good Pig: The Extraordinary Life of Christopher Hogwood, by Sy Montgomery
A heartwarming account of the 14 years Montgomery spent raising her pet pig, Christopher Hogwood, from runt to 700- pound local celebrity.

Breach of Faith: Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City, by Jed Horne
An editor of The (New Orleans) Times-Picayune offers an epic look at the destruction that Hurricane Katrina wrought on New Orleans and paints a devastating picture of governmental breach of faith.

Who Are You People?: A Personal Journey Into the Heart of Fanatical Passion in America, by Shari Caudron
This funny, insightful book explores the lives of Barbie-doll collectors, tornado chasers, board-game aficionados and other fanatics, offering a peek into these unusual worlds and revealing a subset of folks who are simply looking for a place to belong.

Among the many other titles which caught my eye:

Anonymous Lawyer, by Jeremy Blachman
Harvard law grad Blachman skewers his profession with slash-and-burn ferocity in his often hilarious first novel, told through the anonymous blog and emails of a lawyer at a prestigious law firm who exposes the miserable realities of day-to-day life at the top and confesses his many, many sins.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: "The Phony Marine"

Jim Lehrer, who served as a Marine Corps infantry officer in the 1950s, is the author of sixteen novels, two memoirs and three plays. He is the executive editor and anchor of The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on PBS.

His latest novel is The Phony Marine, which he put to the "page 69 test" and came up with the following:

Page 69 of The Phony Marine is as representative of the book as it could ever get.

"It might have been almost funny if not for the guy with the agent's machine gun." That's the first sentence at the top of the page.

Then, two sentences later, there's this:

"Here now, ready or not, Hugo's moment had come."

Hugo's moments as a phony U.S. Marine are what the novel is all about. He's a men's clothing salesman in Washington posing as a hero who won the Silver Star as a Marine infantry officer in Vietnam. He does so by wearing the small pin replica of the Silver Star ribbon in the lapel of his suitcoat. The pin was part of a set that included the medal itself and a ribbon. He purchased them--almost unintentionally--in an E-bay auction for eighty-five dollars.

He is now--on page 69--caught in the trap of the expectations wearing that pin has raised. He is discovering that if you wear the badge of a hero for all to see then you will be expected to act like a hero by all to see if, and when, a need for a hero arises.

Such needs arise in Hugo's new invented life. Those are his moments.

And they change him and his life forever.

Many thanks to Jim for the input.

To read an excerpt from The Phony Marine, click here.

For a synopsis and to read early reviews of The Phony Marine, click here; for the Bookreporter.com review, click here.

Click here to listen to Lehrer discuss the book with WNYC's Leonard Lopate.

Lehrer spoke of his time in the Marines at the dedication of the National Museum of the Marine Corps in Quantico, Va., on the 231st anniversary of the corps; click here to listen to his speech or read a transcript.

Last month he sat down with IdahoPTV host Marcia Franklin for a dialogue; click here to view the interview and an extra web-only clip.

Previous "page 69 tests:"
Julie Phillips, James Tiptree, Jr.
Debra Ginsberg, Blind Submission
Sarah Katherine Lewis, Indecent
Peter Orner, The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo
William Easterly, The White Man's Burden
Danielle Trussoni, Falling Through the Earth
Andrew Blechman, Pigeons
Anne Perry, A Christmas Secret
Elaine Showalter, Faculty Towers
Kat Richardson, Greywalker
Michael Bess, Choices Under Fire
Masha Hamilton, The Camel Bookmobile
Alex Beam, Gracefully Insane
Nicholas Lemann, Redemption
Jason Sokol, There Goes My Everything
Wendy Steiner, Venus in Exile
Josh Chafetz, Democracy’s Privileged Few
Anne Frasier, Pale Immortal
Michael Lewis, The Blind Side
David A. Bell, The First Total War
Brett Ellen Block, The Lightning Rule
Rosanna Hertz, Single by Chance, Mothers by Choice
Jason Starr, Lights Out
Robert Vitalis, America's Kingdom
Stephen Elliott, My Girlfriend Comes To The City And Beats Me Up
Colin McGinn, The Power of Movies
Sean Chercover, Big City, Bad Blood
Sigrid Nunez, The Last of Her Kind
Stanley Fish, How Milton Works
James Longenbach, The Resistance to Poetry
Margaret Lowrie Robertson, Season of Betrayal
Sy Montgomery, The Good Good Pig
Allison Burnett, The House Beautiful
Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, A History
Ed Lynskey, The Dirt-Brown Derby
Cindy Dyson, And She Was
Simon Blackburn, Truth
Brian Freeman, Stripped
Alyson M. Cole, The Cult of True Victimhood
Jeff Biggers, In the Sierra Madre
Jeff Broadwater, George Mason, Forgotten Founder
Alicia Steimberg, Andrea Labinger (trans.), The Rainforest
Michael Grunwald, The Swamp
Darrin McMahon, Happiness: A History
Leo Braudy, From Chivalry to Terrorism
David Nasaw, Andrew Carnegie
Leah Hager Cohen, Train Go Sorry
Chris Grabenstein, Slay Ride
David Helvarg, Blue Frontier
Marina Warner, Phantasmagoria
Bill Crider, A Mammoth Murder
Robert W. Bennett, Taming the Electoral College
Nicholas Stern et al, Stern Review Report
Kerry Emanuel, Divine Wind
Adam Langer, The Washington Story
Michael Scott Moore, Too Much of Nothing
Frank Schaeffer, Baby Jack
Wyn Cooper, Postcards from the Interior
Ivan Goncharov, Oblomov
Maureen Ogle, Ambitious Brew
Cass Sunstein, Infotopia
Paul W. Kahn, Out of Eden
Paul Lewis, Cracking Up
Pagan Kennedy, Confessions of a Memory Eater
David Greenberg, Nixon's Shadow
Duane Swierczynski, The Wheelman
George Levine, Darwin Loves You
John Barlow, Intoxicated
Alicia Steimberg, The Rainforest
Alan Wolfe, Does American Democracy Still Work?
John Dickerson, On Her Trail
Marcus Sakey, The Blade Itself
Randy Boyagoda, Governor of the Northern Province
John Gittings, The Changing Face of China
Rachel Kadish, Tolstoy Lied
Eric Rauchway, Blessed Among Nations
Tim Brookes, Guitar and other books
Ruth Padel, Tigers in Red Weather
William Haywood Henderson, Augusta Locke
Jed Horne, Breach of Faith
Robert Greer, The Fourth Perspective
David Plotz, The Genius Factory
Michael Allen Dymmoch, White Tiger
Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, Civilizing the Enemy
Tom Lutz, Doing Nothing
Libby Fischer Hellmann, A Shot To Die For
Nelson Algren, The Man With the Golden Arm
Bob Harris, Prisoner of Trebekistan
Elaine Flinn, Deadly Collection
Louise Welsh, The Bullet Trick
Gregg Hurwitz, Last Shot
Martha Powers, Death Angel
N.M. Kelby, Whale Season
Mario Acevedo, The Nymphos of Rocky Flats
Dominic Smith, The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre
Simon Blackburn, Lust
Linda L. Richards, Calculated Loss
Kevin Guilfoile, Cast of Shadows
Ronlyn Domingue, The Mercy of Thin Air
Shari Caudron, Who Are You People?
Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics
John Sutherland, How to Read a Novel
Steven Miles, Oath Betrayed
Alan Brown, Audrey Hepburn's Neck
Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor's Tale

--Marshal Zeringue

The Village Voice's top 25 of 2006

Tis the season for favorite/best/notable book lists. The Village Voice's favorite 25 books of 2006 included a couple I reviewed at Spot-on (The Road and One Good Turn) as well as two books that are part of the blog's "page 69 series": James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon by Julie Phillips and The Last Of Her Kind by Sigrid Nunez.

Among the other titles on the Voice list that caught my eye:

American Genius, A Comedy
By Lynne Tillman

Helen, the protagonist of Lynne Tillman's fifth novel, suffers from the rare disorder dermatographia, in which the slightest caress might erupt into "white lines...which resemble writing on the skin." As she sojourns in an unnamed institution--a mysterious amalgam of sanatorium and artist's colony--Helen reveals a psyche that's equally sensitive. In this canny, elliptical novel, the smallest sensation or suggestion sends her into a paroxysm of recall and digression--on Eames chairs, time pieces, household pets, and all manner of skin ailments.

Click here to see all 25 books tagged by the Voice.

--Marshal Zeringue

"New Yorker" writers' bedside reading

Contributors to the New Yorker's Winter Fiction Issue weighed in with books that they particularly enjoyed in 2006.

One entry:

Louise Erdrich

“The Hard Life,” by Flann O’Brien, is one of my very favorite short comic novels. The Aubrey/Maturin novels, by Patrick O’Brian, are so addictive that after I finish one I have to hide the next from myself for a little while in order to do anything else but read. I also suggest “Bangkok 8” by John Burdett, if after too much of the usual holiday cheer you need a thriller about jade, the sex trade, deadly snakes, and interesting forms of corruption in this life and the next. I like to read Barbara Pym in January, and look forward to my little pile of her books. Finally, “Strange Empire,” by Joseph Kinsey Howard, is the classic history of the grand and doomed attempt to form a Métis nation in North America—it’s full of marvellous detail and devastating portraits of Louis Riel, Poundmaker, Wandering Spirit, Gabriel Dumont, the action at Batoche, in Saskatchewan, and the saga of the Gatling gun.

Click here to see the books mentioned by Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes, and Paul Theroux.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: "James Tiptree, Jr."

I heard Julie Phillips talking about her new book on NPR last month and immediately knew I'd like to feature an item about the biography here on the blog.

So of course I invited her to put the book to the "page 69 test" and was well pleased when she accepted. Here's what Julie reported:

James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon is a biography of a woman, Alice Bradley Sheldon (1915-1987), who wrote under a man’s name for ten years. Tiptree became in effect a persona who did Sheldon’s writing for her, corresponded, often quite intimately, with colleagues, and allowed her to say things she couldn’t say as herself.

Page 69 is partly about Alice’s sleeping habits. It’s 1934, she’s 18, she’s a freshman at Sarah Lawrence College, she’s beautiful and popular, and she’s getting into trouble. She’s the most talented artist in the school but never works, and the college president has just written her parents, “Her habits of eating and sleeping are exceedingly erratic. [...] We have found it quite impossible to persuade her to lead a normal life.”

So p. 69 starts:

Alice was impatient with sleep, and when she was caught up in work that excited her got as little of it as possible. Lack of sleep in turn exacerbated her moods, making her even more vulnerable to ups and downs. Yet, like her mother, she loved working at night. It suited her natural rhythm. Later, writing as Tiptree, Alice explained, “I fling myself down and let sleep iron it all out, and then get up at some private hour, sometimes like 2:30 or 3, when the world is magical, and work then.” She used to do all her work at night “and leave it on the professor’s desk in the morning, like the elves.” The night was for her another safe, secret space.

Secretly I was convinced that all Alice Sheldon’s problems—depression, ill health—came from lack of sleep, but then I think everyone’s problems come from lack of sleep. In fact, she was probably bipolar, and sleeplessness could as easily have been a symptom as a cause.

One reviewer pointed out that getting up at 3 a.m. doesn’t make Alice a night owl but a very early morning person. I stand corrected.

The rest of the page is kind of a lecture, which isn’t typical for the book at all but is important for understanding why a talented, privileged, sophisticated woman couldn’t take advantage of her education, didn’t start publishing fiction until she was 51, and even then could only do it under a man’s name.

The post-suffragist thirties were a difficult time for young women. They were told that they could do anything they wanted, that the future lay before them like an open highway. Then they were handed, not the keys to a fast car, but the handle of a shovel, and saw that they would first have to build the roads themselves. For one thing, it was hard for a woman alone to support herself; to do so at anything above a subsistence level required a professional education and extreme dedication to a career. For another, careers for women seemed to rule out Life, as defined by passion, boys, sex, and later marriage and a family. The threat of ending up an old maid was dire, the pressure to have children very strong. The women who succeeded were the ones who from the start knew exactly what they wanted. A woman seldom got the freedom to make mistakes or go on a Wanderjahr.

Alice was so determined not to be found out as different that she too gave in to the pressures. She didn’t work hard at her career. She later observed that a classmate, one of her “followers,” had become a successful editor at a woman’s magazine. But that girl had been neither pretty nor popular, so the school stars [like Alice] could learn nothing from her example. And yet Alice hated what her shallowness made her. Being stuck in traditional roles for women was one of the great sources of Alice’s anger.

The sex scene, alas, is on p. 70.

Many thanks to Julie for the input.

Click here and here to read excerpts from the book.

Good reviews for getting up to speed on James Tiptree, Jr. are in Bookforum, on Sci.Fi.com, on Bookslut, and in the Seattle Times.

Among the considerable acclaim for the biography:

• one of Salon's five best nonfiction books of 2006. They also did an interview.
• a New York Times notable book for 2006.
• one of Publisher’s Weekly’s, the Kansas City Star’s, the Seattle Times's, the Washington Post's, and the Times Literary Supplement's best books of the year.
• a BookSense Picks highlight of the year.
• "the best book I have read this year. Phillips’s sympathetic understanding of Tiptree and the worlds she inhabited—and imagined—seems almost miraculous, her narrative as compelling as a novel."—Lisa Tuttle, The Times

Andi Shechter praised the biography in January Magazine.

Click here for further reading and more links about the book--including a link to the NPR interview I mentioned at the start of this item.

Visit Julie Phillips official website.

Previous "page 69 tests:"
Debra Ginsberg, Blind Submission
Sarah Katherine Lewis, Indecent
Peter Orner, The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo
William Easterly, The White Man's Burden
Danielle Trussoni, Falling Through the Earth
Andrew Blechman, Pigeons
Anne Perry, A Christmas Secret
Elaine Showalter, Faculty Towers
Kat Richardson, Greywalker
Michael Bess, Choices Under Fire
Masha Hamilton, The Camel Bookmobile
Alex Beam, Gracefully Insane
Nicholas Lemann, Redemption
Jason Sokol, There Goes My Everything
Wendy Steiner, Venus in Exile
Josh Chafetz, Democracy’s Privileged Few
Anne Frasier, Pale Immortal
Michael Lewis, The Blind Side
David A. Bell, The First Total War
Brett Ellen Block, The Lightning Rule
Rosanna Hertz, Single by Chance, Mothers by Choice
Jason Starr, Lights Out
Robert Vitalis, America's Kingdom
Stephen Elliott, My Girlfriend Comes To The City And Beats Me Up
Colin McGinn, The Power of Movies
Sean Chercover, Big City, Bad Blood
Sigrid Nunez, The Last of Her Kind
Stanley Fish, How Milton Works
James Longenbach, The Resistance to Poetry
Margaret Lowrie Robertson, Season of Betrayal
Sy Montgomery, The Good Good Pig
Allison Burnett, The House Beautiful
Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, A History
Ed Lynskey, The Dirt-Brown Derby
Cindy Dyson, And She Was
Simon Blackburn, Truth
Brian Freeman, Stripped
Alyson M. Cole, The Cult of True Victimhood
Jeff Biggers, In the Sierra Madre
Jeff Broadwater, George Mason, Forgotten Founder
Alicia Steimberg, Andrea Labinger (trans.), The Rainforest
Michael Grunwald, The Swamp
Darrin McMahon, Happiness: A History
Leo Braudy, From Chivalry to Terrorism
David Nasaw, Andrew Carnegie
Leah Hager Cohen, Train Go Sorry
Chris Grabenstein, Slay Ride
David Helvarg, Blue Frontier
Marina Warner, Phantasmagoria
Bill Crider, A Mammoth Murder
Robert W. Bennett, Taming the Electoral College
Nicholas Stern et al, Stern Review Report
Kerry Emanuel, Divine Wind
Adam Langer, The Washington Story
Michael Scott Moore, Too Much of Nothing
Frank Schaeffer, Baby Jack
Wyn Cooper, Postcards from the Interior
Ivan Goncharov, Oblomov
Maureen Ogle, Ambitious Brew
Cass Sunstein, Infotopia
Paul W. Kahn, Out of Eden
Paul Lewis, Cracking Up
Pagan Kennedy, Confessions of a Memory Eater
David Greenberg, Nixon's Shadow
Duane Swierczynski, The Wheelman
George Levine, Darwin Loves You
John Barlow, Intoxicated
Alicia Steimberg, The Rainforest
Alan Wolfe, Does American Democracy Still Work?
John Dickerson, On Her Trail
Marcus Sakey, The Blade Itself
Randy Boyagoda, Governor of the Northern Province
John Gittings, The Changing Face of China
Rachel Kadish, Tolstoy Lied
Eric Rauchway, Blessed Among Nations
Tim Brookes, Guitar and other books
Ruth Padel, Tigers in Red Weather
William Haywood Henderson, Augusta Locke
Jed Horne, Breach of Faith
Robert Greer, The Fourth Perspective
David Plotz, The Genius Factory
Michael Allen Dymmoch, White Tiger
Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, Civilizing the Enemy
Tom Lutz, Doing Nothing
Libby Fischer Hellmann, A Shot To Die For
Nelson Algren, The Man With the Golden Arm
Bob Harris, Prisoner of Trebekistan
Elaine Flinn, Deadly Collection
Louise Welsh, The Bullet Trick
Gregg Hurwitz, Last Shot
Martha Powers, Death Angel
N.M. Kelby, Whale Season
Mario Acevedo, The Nymphos of Rocky Flats
Dominic Smith, The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre
Simon Blackburn, Lust
Linda L. Richards, Calculated Loss
Kevin Guilfoile, Cast of Shadows
Ronlyn Domingue, The Mercy of Thin Air
Shari Caudron, Who Are You People?
Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics
John Sutherland, How to Read a Novel
Steven Miles, Oath Betrayed
Alan Brown, Audrey Hepburn's Neck
Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor's Tale

--Marshal Zeringue

Essential books for understanding Christianity

George Weigel, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and the author, most recently, of God's Choice: Pope Benedict XVI and the Future of the Catholic Church, named five "essential books for understanding Christianity" for Opinion Journal, including:

The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri, translated by Dorothy L. Sayers (Penguin Classics, 1949, 1955, 1957).

Dorothy L. Sayers was far more than the mystery writer who created Lord Peter Wimsey. Her Dante remains among the best, both for the elegance of the translations of the "Inferno," "Purgatorio" and "Paradiso" (this last completed by Barbara Reynolds after Miss Sayers's death in 1957) and for the subtle theological intelligence of her introductory commentaries and notes on this greatest of Christian poems, a complex allegory of the breadth of human experience and yearning. At a time when it is frequently suggested that nature--humanity included--is an accident of galactic biochemistry, Sayers's "Divine Comedy" offers a genuinely humanistic alternative: a glimpse (to cite the last phrase of Dante's masterwork) of "the love that moves the sun and the other stars."

Click here for Weigel's four remaining recommendations.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Carl Hiaasen reading?

The bestselling author Carl Hiaasen recently talked to the Christian Science Monitor about what he was listening to and viewing for entertainment.

And reading:

I'm reading a book called What Was Asked of Us [by Trish Wood and Bobby Muller]. It's a collection of first-person accounts of the Iraq war from war veterans. [The authors] let them talk about what they were told, what they believed, and what happened. They are some of the most moving, heartbreaking, and infuriating things you'll ever read. These are just men and women who went over to do a job - real, true heroes - and they had no idea what they were getting into. One example is a guy in the Army talking about rolling into Baghdad and how they were begging and begging for armor for their Humvees, and for vests once the IEDs [improvised explosive devices] started. In this guy's case, it never came. It just gives you chills.

Click here to read about what Hiaasen is watching and listening to.

--Marshal Zeringue

The page 69 test: 100 authors...and counting

I wasn't keeping track of how many authors have supported the blog by putting their books to the page 69 test, but Linda L. Richards was. On Monday she posted an item at the January Magazine blog marking the 100th entry.

Linda is not only one of the first authors to help the series get started--read her entry for Calculated Loss here--but her sites January Magazine and its sibling The Rap Sheet are responsible for leads to many of the other books that have appeared in the series.

Thanks to Linda for the note on the 100th entry in the page 69 series, and to all the participants who have put their books to the test.

See the current list at the end of the 103rd entry.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: "Blind Submission"

Debra Ginsberg is the author of the memoirs Waiting: The True Confessions of a Waitress, Raising Blaze: Bringing Up an Extraordinary Son in an Ordinary World, and About My Sisters.

Blind Submission, her first novel, was published last month.

I asked Debra to put her book to the "page 69 test," and here is what she reported:

Part of the challenge in writing Blind Submission was to highlight the shades of gray between the poles of black and white, good and evil, fiction and reality. My protagonist, Angel Robinson, is the assistant to Lucy Fiamma, one of the country’s most successful literary agents. Lucy hasn’t achieved her success by being nice – or even decent – to her employees and her reputation as a dragon-lady is well deserved. Yet Lucy is far from one-dimensionally wicked. She is also very, very good at what she does. And part of what she does is to create that most elusive and desired of literary qualities: buzz. Sometimes this involves blurring the aforementioned lines between fiction and reality in some very creative ways. Sometimes it involves an innate entrepreneurial spirit and keen business sense. And sometimes it involves all of the above. Lucy’s ability to manufacture desire and to cajole editors into spending large sums of money on her projects is what makes her agency the hottest ticket in town, even while her personality often leaves them cold.

Page 69 describes how Lucy prepares to auction a manuscript by a sexy (she hopes) Italian author whose work has arrived over the transom, been given Angel’s stamp of approval, and is now generating quite a bit of heat among publishers who are always hungry for the next big thing. The following scene illustrates how well Lucy knows her territory and how expertly she plays her game.

From p. 69:

Lucy gave the ten editors less than a week to prepare for the auction (“Have to keep it fresh,” she said, “so that they stay ravenous”), during which time she debated endlessly whether of not to throw a few more into the mix. “I’m just wondering if Susie Parker might not just love this book,” she’d say. And, “You know, we haven’t tried Nadia Fiori. She is Italian.” Ultimately, she hooked three additional editors, with more frantic overnight deliveries, to make a baker’s dozen. I was sure that had she wanted to, Lucy could have involved half the editors in New York, along with many heads of houses. Gordon Hart was among those heads, and he called a few times during the course of that next week, never once actually speaking to Lucy on the phone, but managing to communicate with her through me.

“Are you still working there?” he asked every time I answered his call. “This has got to be a new record for her.” That was another thing about Gordon Hart: He never referred to her as Lucy; it was always she or her.

Many thanks to Debra for the input.

Click here or here to read an excerpt from Blind Submission.

Among the praise for the novel:

“Wicked fun and suspense from a talented new writer with an original, clever voice.”
--Lisa Scottoline

“If you’ve ever considered a career in publishing, read Blind Submission, a ‘boss from hell’ story that’s as funny as it is frightening. It will make you love your job.”
--Harley Jane Kozak, author of Dating Dead Men and Dating Is Murder

“A wonderful read from start to finish. Ginsberg’s writing is clever and seductive as she spins this tale of psychological peril and illumination.”
--T. Jefferson Parker, author of The Fallen

“Ginsberg brings a fresh voice to her offbeat fiction debut, a novel about novels and the novelists who write them. It’s a taut, fun, complex tale that will keep you guessing till the last page.”
--Patricia Gaffney, author of The Saving Graces

To read reviews from the Washington Post, USA Today, the Boston Globe, and other major newspaper and book reviews, click here.

Click here, here, and here to listen to Debra's commentaries on National Public Radio.

In Salon, Debra explained why never to take a waitressing job that requires you to wear a sari, in "Slinging Curry."

Want to win a consultation with a top New York literary agent? Then click here.

Previous "page 69 tests:"
Sarah Katherine Lewis, Indecent
Peter Orner, The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo
William Easterly, The White Man's Burden
Danielle Trussoni, Falling Through the Earth
Andrew Blechman, Pigeons
Anne Perry, A Christmas Secret
Elaine Showalter, Faculty Towers
Kat Richardson, Greywalker
Michael Bess, Choices Under Fire
Masha Hamilton, The Camel Bookmobile
Alex Beam, Gracefully Insane
Nicholas Lemann, Redemption
Jason Sokol, There Goes My Everything
Wendy Steiner, Venus in Exile
Josh Chafetz, Democracy’s Privileged Few
Anne Frasier, Pale Immortal
Michael Lewis, The Blind Side
David A. Bell, The First Total War
Brett Ellen Block, The Lightning Rule
Rosanna Hertz, Single by Chance, Mothers by Choice
Jason Starr, Lights Out
Robert Vitalis, America's Kingdom
Stephen Elliott, My Girlfriend Comes To The City And Beats Me Up
Colin McGinn, The Power of Movies
Sean Chercover, Big City, Bad Blood
Sigrid Nunez, The Last of Her Kind
Stanley Fish, How Milton Works
James Longenbach, The Resistance to Poetry
Margaret Lowrie Robertson, Season of Betrayal
Sy Montgomery, The Good Good Pig
Allison Burnett, The House Beautiful
Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, A History
Ed Lynskey, The Dirt-Brown Derby
Cindy Dyson, And She Was
Simon Blackburn, Truth
Brian Freeman, Stripped
Alyson M. Cole, The Cult of True Victimhood
Jeff Biggers, In the Sierra Madre
Jeff Broadwater, George Mason, Forgotten Founder
Alicia Steimberg, Andrea Labinger (trans.), The Rainforest
Michael Grunwald, The Swamp
Darrin McMahon, Happiness: A History
Leo Braudy, From Chivalry to Terrorism
David Nasaw, Andrew Carnegie
Leah Hager Cohen, Train Go Sorry
Chris Grabenstein, Slay Ride
David Helvarg, Blue Frontier
Marina Warner, Phantasmagoria
Bill Crider, A Mammoth Murder
Robert W. Bennett, Taming the Electoral College
Nicholas Stern et al, Stern Review Report
Kerry Emanuel, Divine Wind
Adam Langer, The Washington Story
Michael Scott Moore, Too Much of Nothing
Frank Schaeffer, Baby Jack
Wyn Cooper, Postcards from the Interior
Ivan Goncharov, Oblomov
Maureen Ogle, Ambitious Brew
Cass Sunstein, Infotopia
Paul W. Kahn, Out of Eden
Paul Lewis, Cracking Up
Pagan Kennedy, Confessions of a Memory Eater
David Greenberg, Nixon's Shadow
Duane Swierczynski, The Wheelman
George Levine, Darwin Loves You
John Barlow, Intoxicated
Alicia Steimberg, The Rainforest
Alan Wolfe, Does American Democracy Still Work?
John Dickerson, On Her Trail
Marcus Sakey, The Blade Itself
Randy Boyagoda, Governor of the Northern Province
John Gittings, The Changing Face of China
Rachel Kadish, Tolstoy Lied
Eric Rauchway, Blessed Among Nations
Tim Brookes, Guitar and other books
Ruth Padel, Tigers in Red Weather
William Haywood Henderson, Augusta Locke
Jed Horne, Breach of Faith
Robert Greer, The Fourth Perspective
David Plotz, The Genius Factory
Michael Allen Dymmoch, White Tiger
Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, Civilizing the Enemy
Tom Lutz, Doing Nothing
Libby Fischer Hellmann, A Shot To Die For
Nelson Algren, The Man With the Golden Arm
Bob Harris, Prisoner of Trebekistan
Elaine Flinn, Deadly Collection
Louise Welsh, The Bullet Trick
Gregg Hurwitz, Last Shot
Martha Powers, Death Angel
N.M. Kelby, Whale Season
Mario Acevedo, The Nymphos of Rocky Flats
Dominic Smith, The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre
Simon Blackburn, Lust
Linda L. Richards, Calculated Loss
Kevin Guilfoile, Cast of Shadows
Ronlyn Domingue, The Mercy of Thin Air
Shari Caudron, Who Are You People?
Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics
John Sutherland, How to Read a Novel
Steven Miles, Oath Betrayed
Alan Brown, Audrey Hepburn's Neck
Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor's Tale

--Marshal Zeringue

Susan Cheever's favorite books

Susan Cheever, author of American Bloomsbury: The Lives of Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry David Thoreau in Concord, Massachusetts from 1840 to 1868 and My Name Is Bill: Bill Wilson--His Life and the Creation of Alcoholics Anonymous, lists her 20 favorite books at her website.

Here are the first four titles:

Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen
A book suffused with longing for the lost world of adulthood.

Father and Son by Edmund Gosse
A model for writing about a parent.

Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov
A book suffused with longing for the lost world of childhood.

In Pharoah's Army by Tobias Wolff
Elegant and electrifying book about the war in Vietnam and the war in our hearts.

Click here to read the rest of the list and read an early review of Cheever's new book, American Bloomsbury.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: "Indecent"

Acclaimed author Stephen Elliott cited Indecent by Sarah Katherine Lewis as one of his favorite books of 2006.

So of course I invited her to put the book to the "page 69 test" and was delighted when she accepted. Here she first provides part of the text from page 69, then explains how it fits in with the book:

I lifted my hips up from the couch and slid my panties off.

"You wanna fingerbang me?" I cooed. "Let's mess around."

I reached down and held my labia open, butterflying my pussy back against my inner thighs. I'd shaved that morning. My skin felt soft. Hair grows back so fast: less than a day after shaving, you can always feel stubble. But now, no--I was smooth, with only a strip of hair on the top of my mons veneris, like an arrow pointing down to my hole.

Roderick zoomed in, and stayed zoomed.

I thought I heard him breathing a little harder as he stayed squatting between my legs with the handheld.
*****
On page 69 I'm doing my first porn shoot for Roderick Saxon, a local pornographer. I'm dirty-talking the camera while I fake-masturbate, performing as a "hot, horny amateur" for one of his popular DVD series. On this page I realize that doing porn is more boring and uncomfortable than it is exciting, discovering that while in the midst of contrived auto-erotic activity for the camera, "...[i]t was like my emotions were wrapped in bath towels." On subsequent pages I finish the shoot and get paid $250--the extra fifty for anally penetrating myself with a pacifier-shaped buttplug.

This page is fairly representative of my book. Throughout Indecent: How I Make It and Fake It As A Girl For Hire I try to de-glamorize the adult industry, describing how it feels to be a stripper, a dominatrix, a porn star, and a happy-ending masseuse. None of these jobs function as true expressions of my erotic nature--but they're almost always better than flipping burgers, and they keep my rent paid. As a chubby metalhead pretending to be a fantasy girl, I am alternately horrified and amused by my customers' depth of belief in my paid performances.

Many thanks to Sarah Katherine for the input.

Click here to visit Radio Blowfish and listen to a podcast featuring Lewis talking about her book.

Stephen Elliott praised Indecent here.

Writing at MSNBC, Paige Newman called Indecent "an honest, graphic, hilarious and poignant look at life as a stripper, erotic masseuse and adult-video star."

From the Seattle Post-Intelligencer review:

Lewis' new memoir is a brutally frank and graphic recounting of what it's like to work in massage parlors, porn films, strip clubs and other seedy way stations in this shadow economy.

But what truly distinguishes "Indecent" is Lewis' cutting and sarcastic sense of humor. No matter what she does, Lewis never seems to lose her finely honed sense of the ludicrous and ridiculous, two quantities never in short supply when sex is being provided for sizable bucks.

"Indecent" follows the familiar format for such sex memoirs -- the innocent pilgrim's progress into a strange and forbidding world. But Lewis is a pilgrim with a decided edge, a feisty, independent feminist with a high school degree who enters the sex business at age 24 after eight years of poverty-level employment in food service, including a stint as a barista at an unnamed franchise coffee place where she was fired for "insubordination." [click here to read the review]

Click here (and scroll down) for more reviews.

Title your book Indecent and there's a good chance the organizers of Northern Kentucky University's Indecent Day will invite you to headline the event.

In 2004, NPR's Noah Adams aired "a series on low-wage jobs with a look at writers in Seattle who can only dream of quitting their day job to dedicate themselves to their art," and yes, Sarah Katherine Lewis was featured.

Visit her blog here.

Previous "page 69 tests":
Peter Orner, The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo
William Easterly, The White Man's Burden
Danielle Trussoni, Falling Through the Earth
Andrew Blechman, Pigeons
Anne Perry, A Christmas Secret
Elaine Showalter, Faculty Towers
Kat Richardson, Greywalker
Michael Bess, Choices Under Fire
Masha Hamilton, The Camel Bookmobile
Alex Beam, Gracefully Insane
Nicholas Lemann, Redemption
Jason Sokol, There Goes My Everything
Wendy Steiner, Venus in Exile
Josh Chafetz, Democracy’s Privileged Few
Anne Frasier, Pale Immortal
Michael Lewis, The Blind Side
David A. Bell, The First Total War
Brett Ellen Block, The Lightning Rule
Rosanna Hertz, Single by Chance, Mothers by Choice
Jason Starr, Lights Out
Robert Vitalis, America's Kingdom
Stephen Elliott, My Girlfriend Comes To The City And Beats Me Up
Colin McGinn, The Power of Movies
Sean Chercover, Big City, Bad Blood
Sigrid Nunez, The Last of Her Kind
Stanley Fish, How Milton Works
James Longenbach, The Resistance to Poetry
Margaret Lowrie Robertson, Season of Betrayal
Sy Montgomery, The Good Good Pig
Allison Burnett, The House Beautiful
Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, A History
Ed Lynskey, The Dirt-Brown Derby
Cindy Dyson, And She Was
Simon Blackburn, Truth
Brian Freeman, Stripped
Alyson M. Cole, The Cult of True Victimhood
Jeff Biggers, In the Sierra Madre
Jeff Broadwater, George Mason, Forgotten Founder
Alicia Steimberg, Andrea Labinger (trans.), The Rainforest
Michael Grunwald, The Swamp
Darrin McMahon, Happiness: A History
Leo Braudy, From Chivalry to Terrorism
David Nasaw, Andrew Carnegie
Leah Hager Cohen, Train Go Sorry
Chris Grabenstein, Slay Ride
David Helvarg, Blue Frontier
Marina Warner, Phantasmagoria
Bill Crider, A Mammoth Murder
Robert W. Bennett, Taming the Electoral College
Nicholas Stern et al, Stern Review Report
Kerry Emanuel, Divine Wind
Adam Langer, The Washington Story
Michael Scott Moore, Too Much of Nothing
Frank Schaeffer, Baby Jack
Wyn Cooper, Postcards from the Interior
Ivan Goncharov, Oblomov
Maureen Ogle, Ambitious Brew
Cass Sunstein, Infotopia
Paul W. Kahn, Out of Eden
Paul Lewis, Cracking Up
Pagan Kennedy, Confessions of a Memory Eater
David Greenberg, Nixon's Shadow
Duane Swierczynski, The Wheelman
George Levine, Darwin Loves You
John Barlow, Intoxicated
Alicia Steimberg, The Rainforest
Alan Wolfe, Does American Democracy Still Work?
John Dickerson, On Her Trail
Marcus Sakey, The Blade Itself
Randy Boyagoda, Governor of the Northern Province
John Gittings, The Changing Face of China
Rachel Kadish, Tolstoy Lied
Eric Rauchway, Blessed Among Nations
Tim Brookes, Guitar and other books
Ruth Padel, Tigers in Red Weather
William Haywood Henderson, Augusta Locke
Jed Horne, Breach of Faith
Robert Greer, The Fourth Perspective
David Plotz, The Genius Factory
Michael Allen Dymmoch, White Tiger
Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, Civilizing the Enemy
Tom Lutz, Doing Nothing
Libby Fischer Hellmann, A Shot To Die For
Nelson Algren, The Man With the Golden Arm
Bob Harris, Prisoner of Trebekistan
Elaine Flinn, Deadly Collection
Louise Welsh, The Bullet Trick
Gregg Hurwitz, Last Shot
Martha Powers, Death Angel
N.M. Kelby, Whale Season
Mario Acevedo, The Nymphos of Rocky Flats
Dominic Smith, The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre
Simon Blackburn, Lust
Linda L. Richards, Calculated Loss
Kevin Guilfoile, Cast of Shadows
Ronlyn Domingue, The Mercy of Thin Air
Shari Caudron, Who Are You People?
Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics
John Sutherland, How to Read a Novel
Steven Miles, Oath Betrayed
Alan Brown, Audrey Hepburn's Neck
Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor's Tale

--Marshal Zeringue