Back to Africa with Alexandra Fuller

I think a lot of people will be rejoicing at the announcement of another installment in the Alexandra Fuller canon. Penguin Press is calling Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness both a sequel and a prequel to Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight. And it is simply fantastic. Fans of Don't Let's may find this hard to believe, but Cocktail Hour is Fuller at the absolute top of her game.

She continues on the subject of her family's life in Africa in the same riveting, deeply personal, highly accomplished style readers came to love in Don't Let's. And if Don't Lets was Bobo's story, her explanation for her love of Africa, then Cocktail Hour is her parents' story. She thoroughly interviews both of them and tells the stories of their parents and their grandparents. From Nicola's fiercely Scottish ancestors to Tim's bucolic family farm in England, we get a better picture of why they value land so highly, why owning a farm in Africa was their life's pursuit. Fuller captures both of her parents' voices so perfectly, allowing them to tell their stories (including their reactions to the publication of Don't Let's, what Nicola calls the "Awful Book.") in their own inimitable style. Perhaps through these interviews, and perhaps through an additional ten years of ruminating on the subject, Fuller seems to have come to a deeper understanding of what her parents experienced and what it all meant--living through wars, constantly moving, losing three children, and battling manic depression, all while desperately loving Africa and being unwilling to leave.

Fuller seems to have closed the loop that she left open with Don't Let's in an honest and satisfying way. You can feel how deeply healing the book must have been for her--not just the desperation to tell her story, like in the first go-around, but also the peace that comes with understanding your family and where you came from.

Coming in August from Penguin. While you wait, try Fuller's The Legend of Colton H. Bryant. It's amazing. One of my favorites.

Bonnie Jo Campbell's Once Upon a River

I have a feeling that Once Upon a River by Bonnie Jo Campbell is going to be for me this year what Anthropology of an American Girl was last year: a book I read in March that remained my favorite book of the year, my favorite to talk about, obsess about, and wholeheartedly recommend, for the whole damn year.

Once again, the main character is a young girl and the writing is beautiful and breathtaking, but the similarities end there. Margo, the protagonist of Once Upon a River, is a beautiful, striking-looking tomboy of 15 when we first meet her. She is twisting up like a weed from childhood to adulthood, curious about her power over men while also longing for her mother who abandoned her. After several deeply traumatic events, Margo is left alone, on the river she loves in rural Michigan. In her grandfather's teak wood boat, she takes off upriver in search of her mother, in search of somewhere to belong. Realizing that she can't survive alone, she uses the men she meets for protection and companionship. Though she has the gun skills and guts of her hero, Annie Oakley, Margo is still a little girl in the end, needing a home and a love that won't ask questions and won't leave her.

I knew from the first page that Bonnie Jo Campbell's writing was exquisite, her cadence melodic and language deliberate:

"Margo, named Margaret Louise, and her cousins knew the muddy water and the brisk current, knew the sand and silt between their toes, scooped it into plastic cottage cheese tubs and sherbet buckets and dribbled it through their fingers to build sagging stalagmites and soggy castles. They hollowed out the riverbanks, cut through soil and roots to create collapsing caves and tunnels...They built rafts from driftwood and baling twine. They learned to read upon the surface of the water evidence of distress below."

And after a few more pages, I was hooked on Margo. Just hooked.

Coming in July from W. W. Norton.

Welcome to the Year of the Tiger

Okay, so technically, this isn't the year of the tiger. That was last year, Chinese-New-Year-wise. This year is actually the Year of the Rabbit. But if you're aware at all of new books coming out, you must have noticed the tiger trend. Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, Tiger in the Kitchen: A Memoir of Food and Family, Tiger, Tiger: A Memoir, The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival (okay, fine, that last one came out in 2010).

Maybe this tiger thing has been a slow build for a while now. While reading Tea Obreht's The Tiger's Wife recently, my boyfriend's friend said, in utter seriousness, "Is that a book by Tiger Woods' wife?"

I look forward to a slew of books next year about rabbits. The Rabbit's Father, When I Married a Rabbit, My Mother, the Rabbit.

Or maybe I won't have to wait that long. When God Was a Rabbit, coming in May 2011 from Bloomsbury USA.

And yet, another reason physical books are better than e-books

Imagine this scenario on (insert holiday morning of your choice). Instead of handing your loved one a beautifully wrapped rectangular package, you instruct them to open an email. I guarantee that this is how it will come off to them:

I love you so much and think you're so amazing and interesting that I downloaded this book for you. Here, let's look through it together under the (insert holiday decoration of your choice). We can turn the pages with this little clicky thing and look at how wonderful and beautiful the pixels are. I bet you can see how wonderful this book is and how much it means to me by looking at this desensitized, sterile, robot-like digital copy. It must make you feel so special that I spent $9.99 to download it for you while sitting on my ass on my couch.

Another reason physical books are better than e-books:

If you're reading a book and you really hate it and you want to express how much you hate it, in a way that will make you feel better for all the time and/or money you spent on it while also making a physical statement of your very high yet appropriate aesthetic standards, you can throw it across the room. You could even break something with it, which would probably just make you hate the book even more. Either way, you can throw it and leave it on the floor where it landed flattened open with the spine breaking and the pages folding in a very ugly manner (if you have never done this because you are much tidier and/or mature than me, trust me, it's very cathartic).

What the hell do you do with an e-book you desperately hate? Delete it? Click and drag it into a trash bin? Sounds lame.

Dana Jennings answers our Top Five

Dana Jennings is an author and assistant editor of the Arts & Leisure section of the New York Times, where he has most recently been blogging about his experience with prostate cancer. His new book, What a Difference a Dog Makes: Big Lessons on Life, Love, and Healing from a Small Pooch tells about the healing power of living with and loving his dog, Bijou. Originally from New Hampshire, Dana will be reading at Water Street Bookstore on Thursday, November 18th at 7pm.

1. What's on your nightstand right now?

I tend to listen to music in bed -- with my two golden retrievers, Moxie & Harry -- and i've been listening to a Starbucks collection called "Heading West: Songs for the Open Road." The artists include Patty Griffin, the Shins, Calexico, Old Crow Medicine Show, and other bands like that. This morning on the bus to work, I was re-reading a wonderful collection of poetry by Jim Harrison and Ted Kooser called "Braided Creek." It's a genuine conversation in empigrammatic poems.

2. How do you write?

I write in the morning. When I'm really focused on a book, I work at the dining-room table. If I'm just dreaming & doodling, I write at my local Starbucks. I write my first drafts in longhand, using Pilot's Precise V5 Extra Fine pen, and a range of Moleskine notebooks. I'm addicted to beautiful papers and leathers. After I write, I head off to my job at The New York Times, where I'm the asst. editor of the Sunday Arts & Leisure section. I also write for the paper.

3. Name the first time or moment you realized you were a writer.

It was in third grade. A fourth grader named Cindy Clark, who now lives in East Kingston, showed my teacher, Mrs. Consentino, a story she had written. I watched this play out, and said to myself, 'I can write a story.' I went home that afternoon and started my "first novel": The Cannon Twins in the Robbery Mystery.

4. What are you working on now?

I'm doodling on a book called "Redneck Jew: My (Ahem) Spiritual Journey." It's about how a working-class hick -- me -- improbably converted to Judaism in his late 40s. And, yes, there will be Redneck Jew jokes in the book.

5. Favorite recent find?

Two music videos that I absolutely love that I constantly watch over & over on YouTube: "Wagon Wheel" by Old Crow Medicine Show [reminds me of the Kingston carnival when I was a kid] and "White Winter Hymnal" by Fleet Foxes. Can't get that song out of my head.

What I loved about FREEDOM:

This sentence:

"But [Jocelyn Zorn] had a fine, unsettling cool, an unflappability suggestive of irony, and was the sort of bitter salad green for which Walter ordinarily had a fondness."

This is an excellent sentence, and I like the idea of describing someone as a salad green. That's it.