Books That Saved My Life

Yesterday Neil Giaman won a Newberry Award for his young adult novel The Graveyard Book.  Gaiman says he was inspired by Rudyard Kipling (of Jungle Book fame) to write a story about a young boy whose parents are killed and who, instead of being raised by animals, is raised by ghosts.  Gaiman heralded the launch of the book with an extensive speaking tour, reading one chapter of the book on each leg of the trip until the whole book was available (a live audio-book type thing) read by the author online.  Last October, the book hit #1 on the NYT Bestseller list and I have to think that many of the readers were adults.  True to Gaiman’s dark sensibility the book is anything but feelgood, but at the same time he displays his enormous talent for making you care desperately about his characters.  On NPR this morning Gaiman puts the award in perspective, saying that the Newberry is like winning the Nobel Prize, it’s the one thing that all but guarantees your book will be on library shelves after you die.

Here’s Gaiman’s own thoughts on the honor.

Just finished reading Annie Dillard’s essay “Total Eclipse” about watching a full eclipse of the sun in Washington (the next of which I assumed would happen after I was dead). It surprised the hell out of me. I’ve never read Dillard, always thought of her as somewhat of a sentimental naturalist writer of the sort my parents were always suggesting I read (as a kid in Boulder, CO I spent most of my time inside rather than out doing the various outside things for which Boulder is famous). Maybe it was the title “Teaching a Stone to Talk” that put me off my lunch, I mean, what teenager would be caught dead reading something with that title, might as well carry around your copy of “Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret” and get the whole messy business over with. Anyway, so I read the Dillard and was magicked. I carried my “Next American Essays” tome up the subway stairs still grasping for those last words, not wanting to wait ’till I was home to finish it. It had me wandering around in a daze, noticing the sunset light on the side of the ever-under-construction condominiums at the corner of Montague and Atlantic, made me stand like an idiot in below-freezing weather and stare up at how the light climbed the fire escape:

“This was the universe about which we have read so much and never before felt: the universe as a clockwork of loose spheres flung at stupefying, unauthorized speeds. How could anything moving so fast not crash, not veer from its orbit amok like a car out of control on a turn?” -Dillard, etc…

Then I come home and read this:

“I can’t help but feel the greatness of God,” she said, as fellow onlookers applauded and then fell silent. “Anyone who passed up this opportunity, really missed out.”

The next total eclipse will be July 22, 2009, and will be visible in India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Myanmar, China and some Japanese islands.
See you in Myanmar.

Just found this fantastic excerpt from Julio Cortazar’s Autonauts of the Causeway on Fiction Magazine’s website.  Swofford mentioned Cortazar’s book Hopscotch as one of the books that were formative in his development as a writer…that and the smokin’ hot cover of the Vintage edition.

The writing here is hilarious, smart and just “off” enough to make it tickle my funny bone.  Now I really do have to read more of his work, sometimes authors keep popping into your life for a reason & you don’t know why until you read their work and feel like you’ve found some long-lost Uncle (or aunt) who is just like you and suddenly you think you might not be an alien baby after all.

This section of Autonauts is about a motoring trip that takes on the dimensions of an expedition.

An excerpt of the excerpt:

The plan becomes concrete

In the autumn of 1978, the basic idea of the expedition had been established, with the following rules of the game:

1. Complete the journey from Paris to Marseilles without once leaving the autoroute.

2. Explore each one of the rest areas, at the rate of two per day, spending the night in the second one without exception.

3. Carry out scientific topographical studies of each rest area, taking note of all pertinent observations.

4. Taking our inspiration from the travel tales of the great explorers of the past, write the book of the expedition (methods to be determined).

By common agreement, and given that neither of us is a masochist, we decided that we will also be allowed to take full advantage of anything we can find along the freeway: restaurants, shops, hotels, etc.

Focus Features has a great article here titled Neil Gaiman: How Comics Saved This Writer’s Life.  It’s a nicely-written and fairly comprehensive biography about the cult favorite turned bestselling author. Here’s a little excerpt in reference to Gaiman’s remarkable graphic novel series Sandman:

Sandman ran for seven years and was an incredible success. It was (and still is) the only ever comic to win the World Fantasy Award and was called “a comic book for intellectuals” by the late Norman Mailer. The series was repackaged in ten volumes, and subsequently appeared on the New York Times bestseller list. Despite its cerebral nature, it had massive appeal and by the end of its 75-issue run in 1996 was outselling DC’s flagship franchise, Superman. Even more startling was its audience: Moving beyond the traditional teen fanboy base, Sandman was picked up by women and college educated twentysomethings. (Plans to bring Sandman to the screen with Pulp Fiction co-writer Roger Avary attached, have so far stalled in development.)…

For even more Gaiman madness check out his regularly updated author blog, or the newly released book Prince of Stories, which delves deep into Neil Gaiman’s intricate mythologies, easter-eggs, inside jokes–the “history and impact of the complete works of Neil Gaiman in film, fiction, music, comic books, and beyond”(Powells.com).