Anna

Favorite books: 1066 and All That; Bats at the Library; Bloom County; D'Aulaires' Books of Greek and Norse Myths; the Dave Robicheaux novels; the Deptford trilogy; Dinnertime; Dreamhouse; Gaudy Night; The Golden Notebook; The Good Soldier; Great War & Modern Memory; Great War British poetry; The Group; The Heart of the Matter; The Housekeeper & the Professor; How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone; Kristin Lavransdatter; Mysteries of Udolpho; Nancy Drew; Prisoner of Azkaban; Prisoner of Zenda; Rats, Lice, and History; The Second Sex; Snow Crash; Someday This Pain Will Be Useful To You; A Swiftly Tilting Planet, Tristram Shandy; The Westing Game; White Teeth

Favorite authors in alphabetical order: Francesca Lia Block, Graham Greene, H. Rider Haggard, Thomas Hardy, Alice Hoffman, Randall Jarrell, Philip Larkin, Kelly Link, Haruki Murakami, Kenzaburo Oe, Dorothy Parker, Anne Sexton, Evelyn Waugh, Nathanael West, Mo Willems, Connie Willis, Virginia Woolf

Staff picks:

Elegies for the Brokenhearted, Christie Hodgen
Knocked my socks off. It's a first-person novel told in second-person looks back at five significant people she's lost: a life told in deaths.Hodgen's writing spins out dependent clauses like carefully controlled ripples of language.

Angus, Thongs, & Full-Frontal Snogging, Louise Rennison
So many ways a book can be great: this one's all voice, immediately engaging, funny, and unique. Going to have to read the other nine in the series now. Also, will try to use the term "nuddy-pants" as often as possible.

The City of Your Final Destination, Peter Cameron
A reread spurred by the recent film adaptation (which hasn't gotten great reviews, and I think they stuck Laura Linney and Charlotte Gainsbourg in the exact opposite roles they should have had). This novel (about a KU doctoral student, his preternaturally capable girlfriend, and the executors of the late German-Uruguayan novelist about whom he's trying to write his dissertation) has simply some of the best, most elegant and fluidly created characterization I've ever read, and perhaps the most well-recorded, naturalistic dialogue.

The Boneshaker, Kate Milford
Middle-grade steampunk FTW! Full of creepy automatons, snake oil salesmen, and deals with the Devil, with an appropriately plucky heroine. Loved it.

Stories, edited by Neil Gaiman & Al Sarrantonio
Gaiman says in his introduction that the four words that drive storytelling for him are "and then what happened?"; the ensuing collection is a fine, fine narrative salmagundi of page-turners of many stripes, blurring the line between genre and lit-fic with aplomb.

One Bloody Thing After Another, Joey Comeau
Great, twisted, blackest-humor read, about a girl with a suddenly-flesh-craving mother, her lesbian best friend, and an old man with the world's dumbest dog and an annoying headless ghost who's trying to tell him something. Fine holiday fun.

Lowboy, John Wray
The sometimes terrifying but always sympathetic story of a sixteen-year-old schizophrenic loose in the MTA system. Read it on the subway!

Lips Touch Three Times, Laini Taylor, illustrations by Jim Di Bartolo 
Three lushly written novellas about demons, darkness, longing and first kisses. With pictures!

The Children's Book, A.S. Byatt
While I was reading this, I didn't want to be doing anything else: not eating, not sleeping, not working. I just wanted to be left alone to read my book. It's a family saga, brief history of Victorian radical politics, meditation on the artist's role in society. Relentlessly compelling.

The Magician's Elephant, Kate DiCamillo
DiCamillo's a latter-day E. Nesbit: her books feel like rediscovered, sepia-toned classics, with loyal orphans, matter-of-fact magic, and an undercurrent of tragedy.

Sense & Sensibility & Sea Monsters, Jane Austen & Ben H. Winters
Grave-rolling-over-in aside, this mash-up is glorious, silly fun. The biggest laughs come from the author's twists on Austen's original language. And poor Colonel Brandon, instead of being just old (at 35!), has been cursed by a sea witch and possesses a tentacled Lovecraftian nightmare of a face.

Stitches: A Memoir, David Small
I'm not big on unhappy-childhood memoirs in general, but Small's beautifully drawn tale of family secrets and madness won me over. His illustration reminds me somewhat of Jules Feiffer's for The Phantom Tollbooth: loose-jointed, often suggestive instead of precise, by turns whimsical and haunting.

Vile Bodies, Evelyn Waugh
A vicious satire of the Bright Young People (ancestral hipsters!)--one of my favorites, only improved by my learning how many of the characters were based on Waugh's real-life friends. Apparently they really did talk like this!

The Scenic Route, Binnie Kirshenbaum
Heartwrenching, without being manipulative. I don't know how she does it.

Oddly specific genres I'm into lately: paranormal Jane Austen sequels (Mr. Darcy, Vampyre), sex-positive YA vampire fiction (Cynthia Leitich Smith!), stranger-than-fiction history (Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure, K Blows Top, Cranioklepty), books about Brooklyn

Bookseller crush (book): Sips & Apps, Kathy Casey--an all cocktail-and-appetizer cookbook. Bacon cookies!
Bookseller crush (fictional characters): Henry Tilney (Northanger Abbey), Jude (the obscure)
Bookseller crush (author): Sasa Stanisic (How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone. Best novel of 2008. Also, adorable.)

Bloggity blog blog: museathighwayspeeds.blogspot.com