Inside Jacket

Chelsea Cain is a Bellingham native, New York Times bestselling author, and currently the humor columist for the Oregonian. She will be at Village Books on Friday, March 4, 7:00pm for her latest thriller, The Night Season.

“Do you mind getting up at four in the morning for a satellite radio tour?”

This should have been my first clue to be alarmed.

“No problem,” I said. “Of course. Absolutely.”

I had never done a satellite radio tour before. It goes like this. You sit at home on the phone and get beamed into radio stations all over the country. Many of these radio shows are on the East Coast, thus the four a.m. thing – they wanted me on during the morning commute. In New Jersey. 

Weirdly, I took this to be a thrilling development. My agent had been bringing up the possibility of a satellite radio tour to my publisher for years. Now they were doing it. That was a good sign.

But it gets worse.

I was supposed to get up for this phone call at 4 a.m. on March 1, the publication date of my new thriller, The Night Season. This is a busy day for me. I have a very big even that night. I need to be rested. But that was okay. I’d go back to bed after the phone call. “How long is this phone call?” I asked my publicist in an email.

“It’s from 4 a.m. to 10 a.m.,” he wrote back.

I was sure that was a typo.

I did the math. 4 a.m. to 10 a.m. was SIX HOURS.

No phone call could last that long.

“WHAT?!” I emailed him.

“It might go longer,” he wrote back. “Maybe seven hours. But you’ll get a five minute break every hour.”

It wasn’t a typo. They wanted me to talk on the phone for six hours. Chuck Palahniuk, author of Fight Club, is a friend of mine, and he is a pro at these tours. He gave me some advice. “Write down the names of the hosts,” he said. And then he described sitting on the floor surrounded by notes that say stuff like, “Mike and Dave, Cedar Rapids. Doug and Marty, Houston. Dick and Mark, Clinton.” One after the other, for SIX HOURS. I was never going to keep it all straight.

“These tours,” he told me, “are the only reason I still have a land line.”

A land line?

Yes.

It turns out that you need a land line for a satellite radio tour. It made sense, in retrospect. I can see why Doug and Marty in Houston would prefer not to have my cell phone drop a call on live radio. That’s probably a hassle for them. Me? A dropped call would be a relief. An extra five minute pee break. 

I emailed my publicist again. 

I need a landline, he confirmed. He suggested I get a hotel room.

You know what’s worse than a six hour phone call? A six hour phone call on a queen sized bed in a square room, with only roasted almonds and tiny bottles of vodka to get me through it.

I begged my husband to call and get our land line hooked up again. 

Because you know what?

(And this is ironic.)

I do not like to talk on the phone. I do not like to even call and order pizza.

My husband (who is used to my phone phobia) called Qwest.

They issued us a new land line and a new phone number. Suddenly we were back in 1983. I wondered if I should get an answering machine. 

Now I just have one more problem. The only landline phone we have is a cordless. Ideally, for the best reception, they like one with a cord. 

This is what Chuck has. “It’s like Serpico!” he says.

Goodwill, here I come.

Then, get this. Yesterday they came out with a study that shows that talking on a cell phone causes a measurable disruption to brain cell activity.

So, six hours on a cell phone? That’s like putting your head in a microwave.

But at least you get to walk around the house while you talk.

And isn’t that worth a brain tumor? 

Want to hear how my six hour phone call went? Come to Village Book on March 4th for my reading. I’m sure I’ll have some bitter, bitter stories.

Well, would you look at that? It’s a post! And not just any post but a book review post! It’s time to brush off the old keyboard and see  if I can still call myself a reviewer!

Whenever somebody that I know offline would ask me what my favorite read of 2010 was (surprisingly a question I hear more offline than online), I without any hesitation or doubt would say Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry.  “Really?” and a blank stare is what I would almost always get back. People, this book was AMAZING.  Every 945 pages of it. When it ended, I wished there was another 945 pages. I was not ready to let these characters go!  Lonesome Dove has deservedly been called epic. But what makes a book epic?  I think it’s just one of those things that you know it when you read it. And oh, was this book epic.

Larry McMurtry is a master storyteller.  I was a tad daunted opening that very first page and I do admit that even 200 pages into the book I wondered if anything was ever going to happen.  And even though it was off to a slow start, I wouldn’t wish it any other way. The background characterization that McMurtry gives his essential to the story.

The inside cover of my copy of the book lists the key characters with a short description of each. I loved the summary it gave so am taking the liberty of copying it here for  you.

Augustus McCrae: ex-Texas  Ranger. A fierce fighter, loyal friend, gentle lover, a boisterous spinner of colorful yarns. Gus years for adventure, and is drawn into Woodrow Call’s dream – a cattle drive to Montana, to the free and wild frontier . . .
Woodrow F. Call: Gus’s partner and friend, a driven, demanding man, a leader with no patience for weakness – and a secret sorrow of his own . . .

Jake Spoon: dashing gambler, former comrade-in-arms of Gus and Call, his passions plunge him into a terrifying fate . . .

Clara Allen: the woman of Gus’s young dreams. Out of the frontier’s cruelty and death, she forgers a life as generous, brave and unyielding as the land she learns to love . . .

Blue Duck: a renegade Indian with cunning heart of a vulture. He tortures and ills across the Plains, and savors his victim’s agony . . .

Newt: the brave, bewildered young cowboy who discovers his manhood, and his past, on the hazardous journey into Montana . . .

The Hat Creek Outfit: Jake, Deets, Pea Eye and the Boys . . .  wranglers, tracers and scouts, they follow Gus and Call into the heart of the adventure, through sandstorms, stampedes, bandits, floods and snow . . . living on in the undying legends of the great American frontier.

If you don’t know who these characters are from having read Lonesome Dove yourself, I dare you to love them.  I dare you to hate them.

I picked up this book in every spare moment of my day when I was reading it. And when I wasn’t reading it, I wanted to be reading it. I thought about it constantly.  I know I haven’t gone into all the intricacies of why Lonesome Dove is so amazing but let me tell you simply-  the characters! the story! the love! the friendships! the fighting! the determination! the devotion! the heroes! the outlaws! the whores! the Indians! the frontier! the forging ahead! the friendships again!  And it’s also laugh out loud funny with some great one-liners and some beautiful passages.  Definitely need those lighthearted and thoughtful moments between the gun slinging, the scalping, and the hangings.

Yes, my favorite book of 2010 was unabashedly a Western.  A genre I didn’t really think I read.  But did I tell you I loved this book?  Oh, how I loved Lonesome Dove. Officially one of my most favorite books.  Ever. Do you need more recommendation then that?

(I remember when the mini-series came on TV when I was little and we all watched it together as a family. MUST re-watch it now! )

Links of interest: More book  blogger reviews.
Genre: Historical Fiction, Western
Publisher: Pocket Books. 1985.
Paperback, 945 pages. ISBN 067168390X
Lonesome Dove is available from your favorite independent bookstore, Powell’s, and Amazon.

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Copyright 2010. Maw Books Blog

Maw Books has an affiliate relationship with several bookstores, including Indiebound, Powell’s, and Amazon . When you buy a product (not just books – any product), via one of my links, Maw Books earns income from the sale and as always, it’s much appreciated as all affiliate income is used to support the blog. There is no cost to you.

Village Books is starting a Young Adult Book Group that will be held every second Saturday of each month at noon in the Readings Gallery, starting March 12th!

Young adults and adults alike are welcome to join Rachel to talk about young adult literature, one of the best-selling, fastest-changing, most fondly treasured categories of books. Young adult is a broad section as it encompasses many different genres and types of books. We will talk about them all! Books that are bestsellers, award winners, fantasy, sci-fi, dystopian, historical, romance, funny, tragic, uplifting, relevant, daring, and more. Whatever the group most wants to read. 

At our first meeting in March we will select the list of books for the upcoming months. If you want to participate, bring any suggestions you might have. If you're not looking for a monthly commitment, feel free to follow what we're reading online and drop in any month that interests you.

Hope to see you there!

For more information on the Young Adult Book Group, contact Rachel: rachel@villagebooks.com

Jonathan Evison is the author of All About Lulu and his latest novel, West of Here. He will be the guest author on our February 19, 6:30pm Chuckanut Radio Hour at the Leopold's Crystal Ballroom. Click here for info.

I'm a camper. It's what I do. Between late February and mid-October, I'm usually camping. Sometimes that means hiking twelve miles and three-thousand vertical feet with forty pounds strapped to my back, and sometimes that means my ass falling asleep in a lawn chair, as I scribble mad notes in front of a campfire with a case of cold beer within arms reach. Sometimes it means parking my '76 Dodge motor home on a bluff at Kalaloch in a nasty squall, and watching the waves pound the shoreline, while the moho rocks like Jericho. These camping trips are my lifeline as a writer, and as a person. Without these trips, the wilderness of my spirit might have been tamed years ago. And probably I wouldn't be much of a writer. Most certainly, I'd be hell to live with.

My expeditions almost invariably begin by crossing the Hood Canal toward the steep leeward face of the Olympic Mountains, and driving west down the Olympic Peninsula to camp in one of the river valleys—Dungeness, or Elwha, or Sol Duc, or Hoh, or Queets, or Quinault. The interior of the Olympic Peninsula is some of the most rugged terrain in North America, and some of the most pristine wilderness you're likely to find anywhere. The Olympics were among the last unexplored mountain ranges in North America, and clearly one of the most unique. To this day, there's no passage over the mountains but by foot.

The fact is, were the interior not so rugged, it likely would have been logged into oblivion before it ever won National Park status. Everything around the edges has been decimated. For fourteen decades, the peninsula has been logged continually and heedlessly in all directions. Along the shores of the canal, the strait, and the coast, upriver through the bottomlands, and over the foothills. Perhaps the mightiest stands of Douglas Fir and Cedar and Sitka Spruce to ever take root on earth were plundered for profit. The Elwha River was dammed. The Salish Indian Tribes were displaced, and in some cases lost not only their ancestral lands, but their federal recognition. The grizzly and the wolf were all but totally eradicated. The salmon runs were fished nearly to extinction. Most anything that once flourished, perished in equal measure. But the robber barons still couldn't tame the heart of the peninsula—too rugged.

Now, in order to get anywhere near the heart of the Olympics, you've got to endure a pretty ugly drive—more of a stubbled moonscape than anything else, stretching thousands of square miles around the periphery of what is now National Park. The towns ringing the peninsula, once thriving, steaming lumber and mill hubs like Shelton, Port Angeles, Forks, and Aberdeen aren't much prettier to the untrained eye. These ragged towns hit the financial skids decades ago with the moribund timber and fishing industries. And though these towns may be reeling economically, may be a little rough around the edges, they have a lot of fight left in them in spite of the damage done.

This clash of destiny and fierce reality is the story of the Olympic Peninsula. It sounds a lot like America's story. The story of a culture haunted by its own destiny. The story of a culture forced to reckon with its own mistakes. And yet, it also the story of a culture which still manages to hope—some might argue to the point of delusion (though I'm not one of them). You'll find the root of my optimism growing somewhere on the banks of a nameless creek near the heart of the peninsula. As long as that exists, I have reason to hope.

In 2007, I set out to write a big, shaggy, egalitarian novel about my beloved Olympic Peninsula—a novel Walt Whitman might have liked. Not a historical novel, but a mythical novel about history, or more precisely, a deconstruction of what we generally call a history. Rather than employing a wide-angle lens for the task, I wanted to present a kaleidescope of perspectives, and events, and convergences, and possibilities to tell this story. After a lot of hair-pulling, I surmised the best way to frame all of this potentially overwhelming information, was to firmly plant all of  it in the place itself. That way, the reader would never lose their bearings for long, no matter which timeline or character or event I threw at them. This allowed  'place' to assume the traditional role of protagonist, enabling me to treat all the other characters democratically, and with roughly equal narrative weight. Because in my experience, too many histories favor one side of the story.

I wanted this novel be full of wonder and adventure and mystery and humor, because these are the things which sustain us. I wanted this novel to surprise and sadden and give thanks to the undying spirit of wilderness which lives inside of all of us. I wanted this novel to be as big and beautiful and complicated as the peninsula which inspired it. A tall order, but I did my best. I'll leave it to you, the reader, to decide whether West of Here fulfills any of these ambitions. Me, I'm going camping.

Yesterday I read this post at The Rumpus and found myself a little irritated at the opening line: “I hate it when people buy me books for the holidays.” What?! What a brazen statement! Of course books make great gifts, and that sentiment doesn't simply spring from my biased bookseller self. It stems from the many books I've received as gifts that have changed my life, fueled my love of books, strengthened my bond with the person who gave me the book, and I'm sure other gains that I haven't even considered. So yeah, I do believe books make great gifts.

I willed myself to read further and realized that the author wasn't saying that books were bad, but rather that book encounters should be serendipitous. But what really let my guard down was when, not more than an hour later, I read another essay on HuffPo that mirrored the “books are fate” sentiment:  "you are no longer just heading towards a book, because the books are seeking you out."

Based on my own experiences, I actually do agree with both. I’ve already yapped about how my reading life changed when my brother gave me Cat’s Cradle for Christmas when I was in my early teens. Would I have discovered Vonnegut on my own? Chances are good, but having that gift come from my brother deepened the bond we have.

A book I never would have discovered on my own that I received as a gift was Leo Buscaglia’s Love. A gorgeous book that I’ve read over and over again during some of my darkest hours. It’s a book that has brought me out of my own head when I’ve simply been unable to do it on my own. And it’s a book that I now give to people going through their own hard times.

But I’ve also experienced a book coming to me when the time was right. Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves was a book that intrigued me from the first moment I saw it spine out on the shelves of Barnes & Noble (yep, I worked there) over 8 years ago. The images of the house on the spine, overturned, slanted, at a distance, creeped the hell out of me. I’d pick the book off the shelf, puzzle over why "house" was the only word in blue, scan through the words thrown willy-nilly on many of the pages, then put it back. I did that for months until I finally forgot about the book. I simply wasn’t ready for it, and maybe the book knew it.

Three years ago I was perusing a friend’s bookshelf and saw House of Leaves, spine out, those damn houses again giving me chills. I pulled it off the shelf as I had done many times before and asked if I could borrow it. Two weeks of ignoring calls, mindlessly patting my dog’s head as she silently pleaded with me to put down the book, and enduring one really creepy episode where my lamp bulb literally popped during an especially eerie passage and brought the room to darkness, I finished the book.

I was stunned. I felt as though I was finally able to take a breath after already having held it too long. Never had a book shaken me up like House of Leaves. It was exhilarating. I knew without a doubt that if I had tried to read the book when I first saw it, I would have never experienced it in that way. I probably would’ve struggled with it, maybe appreciated the clever way the text played on the pages, but ultimately would have given up and corralled it with all the other books I assume are simply overrated and pretentious.

So yeah, I think books make great gifts, especially when a great deal of thought is put into pairing the right book with the right person. But do I want a book to find me again like House of Leaves did? More than anything.

–Lindsey