I just learned that Powell’s is offering free economy shipping through this Sunday, no coupon needed.  Time to grab a last few titles for my summer reading stack!  I think I still have some credit there, too, after selling some used books to them last year (you should try that if you haven’t yet — they buy lots of great stuff).

Has anyone joined The Rumpus Bookclub?  For 25 bucks a month, you get a book and a whole community of folks committed to reading and discussing it along with you.  Then there’s an online chat with the author, the opportunity to submit your written review to The Rumpus, etc.  I can buy my own books, interview authors, and review on my own — but these are books that haven’t released yet.  I like the idea of reading it before the media buzz starts suggesting how I should react to it.  It’s hard to ignore the chatter once it’s out there, right?

Today I received my first installment of a new monthly enews from FSG called Work in Progress.  What’s not to like about interviews, audio archives, and book giveaways?

How can I fit this awesome bookcase in my little bungalow?!  The interweb has been gaga about this for the last few days, but it was Kate who first directed me to it via Twitter (she also has a great blog!).

And this discovery made Tuesday has nothing to do with books, but I think it’s way cool.  Part of me still wants to be an archaeologist when I grow up.

The latest issue of Poets & Writers has arrived!  Seems all I have done for weeks is work at the office, work in the gardens, work in the house.  But I keep telling myself that summer is here, and if I don’t make time for writing, I have only myself to blame.  So I have instituted some new mini-goals to keep my book research going.  And this weekend, I’ll be giving myself permission to lie in my newly-furnished guest room, overlooking my newly-constructed perennial border, and soak in the pages of a favorite periodical!

What are you all doing this summer?  Any progress on the writing projects and TBR stacks?

The Singer’s Gun is Emily St. John Mandel’s second novel.  Her first, Last Night in Montreal, came out last year just after I first encountered her on Twitter.  Her answers to questions in an online chat piqued my interest, and she was gracious to everyone with whom I watched her interact.  That, plus my long-running infatuation with first novels, led me to seek out a copy at an independent bookstore while vacationing in northern Michigan.  Having given it a good review, I was eager to read her second one, also published by Unbridled Books (which, I have to say, does a lovely job with covers and layout).  Lucky for me, my local library had a brand new copy (have I mentioned what smart buyers our librarians are?) and once I got started, I knew I would not be needing the three weeks of checkout time.

Anton Waker, around whom the action in The Singer’s Gun revolves, is a young reformed crook whose dream it is to marry a nice girl and become a successful middle manager in a quiet New York office tower.  But everyone he has ever known has a secret (or two or three) and their conflicting “truths” begin to undo one another, from Anton’s hard-working and shady parents and his commitophobic bride back in New York, to his former secretary Elena and last-minute business partner David in self-imposed exile on the Italian isle of Ischia.  I can say no more about the plot without spoiling it.

But the delightful thing about both of Mandel’s novels is not the plots—though they are psychologically complex and multiculturally gritty and walk the tightrope between the familiarity you relate to and the fantastical that beckons you into the glittering unknown—but the pacing.  She teases out simultaneous trails of present and past that reveal in small gasps, and without timeline confusion, the major and minor twists of the story (and there are many).  These forays into past and present are lengthier at the beginning, giving the reader time to test theories about the characters, but begin to alternate with more speed until near the end they are rapid-fire, prescient glimpses of the final page.  This attention to structure now has me studying it for the benefit of my own writing.

Characters come and go in these books, and I found I identified with the players of The Singer’s Gun more so than I did with those of Last Night in Montreal.  But all of them have stayed with me, despite the other novels and stories I have read since.  Memorable characters are perhaps harder to write than likable characters, and Mandel reminds us that they are not always the same.

Another point in her favor: beautiful passages appear without warning.  The writing is emotional without sentimentality and evocative without excess.

This is a smart novel, better than her first (which, as I said, I enjoyed), and getting some well-deserved critical acclaim, such as this recent review by The Washington Post.   Recommended for mystery and crime lovers, fans of indie publishing, those who enjoy a good character study, or anyone seeking smarter-than-usual summer reading.

Despite spending most of my recent “off” hours digging up sod, laying in a new perennial border, and planting my vegetable and herb garden, I have managed to read several books in the last couple weeks, all of which I hope to review here soon.  For now, I just wanted to state for the record how much I love living 2 blocks from an award-winning library!  The Way Public Library recently was ranked #6 nationwide in its class, and I say, congratulations to all of its patrons!  It’s rare when they don’t have what I’m looking for, and the convenience of logging in from home, putting books on reserve for myself, and walking down to pick them up is making it very hard to be “reasonable” about my TBR stack.  I just returned Nadine Gordimer’s Beethoven was One-Sixteenth Black and Other Stories and James Shapiro’s A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, am currently reading Rivka Galchen’s Atmospheric Disturbances, and just got an email notice that the copy I reserved of Emily St. John Mandel’s The Singer’s Gun is ready for me to pick up!  I am definitely a multiple-book-source girl (a copy of Laura Lippman’s What the Dead Know arrived via BookMooch yesterday), but I see the balance tilting in favor of the library, now that I live just down the street.

How much do you use your local library?  How does that compare to your other book sources?  And what makes your local library unique?