Tuesday, September 01, 2009
Gregory Maguire: Books On, In and Under the Nightstand
Listing the books on a nightstand presupposes one can find a nightstand under the books. What a fascinating problem: the disappearance of furniture in the reading household. Still, working a slight variety to the question, what books have been brought into my office in the past three or four months and have, as yet, neither been shelved or in some instances, read? Perhaps this list might be thought of as a localized sociological study.
In the order they appear from the keyboard at 4 a.m. this particular sleepless night, the first ten books my eye falls upon:
MRS. SOMEBODY SOMEBODY by Tracy Winn. (Southern Methodist University Press.) Tracy is a neighbor and friend but I have the book mostly because of the fine review in The Boston Globe.
A PASSION FOR LIFE: FRAGMENTS OF THE FACE OF GOD by Joan Chittister (Orbis Books). An old friend with whom I traveled once to Nicaragua to do peace work sent this for us and our kids: it is a portfolio of modern-day icons of traditional saints and contemporary heroes who might qualify as saints.
MATCHLESS: A CHRISTMAS STORY (Morrow). This is my own book, my first effort at illustrating as well as writing a story, here fanned out in galley pages prepared to discuss with my editor tomorrow. It comes out in the fall.
MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN by Salman Rushdie (Random House). I have the privilege and the terror of interviewing Salman Rushdie at a conference in a couple of months, and I am boning up on his oeuvre. I haven't read this book yet. We have, I understand, a mutual fascination for The Wizard of Oz.
THE SELECTED WORKS OF T. S. SPIVET, a novel by Reif Larsen. (Penguin.) This book got a decent review in The Globe recently, but the story on the front-page concentrated on his $900,000 advance. Since he has done little scratchy drawings for his book, maybe I can go back to Morrow and retroactively up my own advance for MATCHLESS, mentioned above. After all, I did my own drawings, too.
JEFF IN VENICE, DEATH IN VARANASI, Geoff Dyer (Pantheon). A novel that received a glowing review in The Times – by Pico Iyer, was it? – I forget – the kind of review one hopes to get once in one's life. The cover photograph of candles centered in some sort of orange blossom and sent floating on a sacred Indian river is the kind of image that sells books. (We do, it seems, judge a book by its cover quite frequently. Or I do.)
A LITTLE BIT WICKED, Kristin Chenoweth (Touchstone). As Kristin Chenoweth is a distant sort of friend, what with the WICKED connection, I am glad to have her autobiography. It's signed to me as "my inspiration.” She's mine too, for various amendments to the life of Glinda in my two Oz books that to date have followed WICKED . Last week I met violinist Joshua Bell at a fundraiser for the Gardner Museum – he was playing and I was speaking, though not simultaneously – and in more social moments we realized we had Kristin in common, in that he dated her for several years. I hadn't known that. But he had her as a girlfriend, while I had her on stage. There's a difference.
THE INGENIOUS EDGAR JONES, Elizabeth Garner (Crown). I have pretty much sworn off blurbing books but I agreed to look at this one because Elizabeth's father, the noted English fantasist Alan Garner, is a friend. The book is dazzling, a tour-de-force – again with a brilliant cover of Oxford's dreaming spires lit in impossibly dazzling moonlight. Anyone whose love of Oxford was reignited in the early sections of Philip Pullman's THE GOLDEN COMPASS should rush to find THE INGENIOUS EDGAR JONES.
THE NAPOLEON OF NOTTING HILL, G. K. Chesterton (Capuchin Classics). This only because I haven't read enough Chesterton to have formed a decent opinion of him. A recent New Yorker piece about him reminded me of my duties. But the book is still a cipher to me, and it could be months or years before I crack it. It's a paperback; maybe I'll bring it on holiday this year.
FINDING OZ by Evan Schwartz (Houghton Mifflin). This is a book I read in galley, but I am happy to have a hardcover copy at last. Schwartz's persistence at uncovering an almost month-by-month iteration of L. Frank Baum's life and the various details that might have gone into his composition of Oz – its physical attributes as well as the moral meaning of the Oz fable, the Oz mythos – is a worthy addition to earlier biographies of Baum, and taught me much I didn't know.
Gregory Maguire is the author of numerous books including the runaway bestsellers, Wicked and Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister. His work as a consultant in creative writing for children has taken him to speaking engagements across the United States and abroad. He is a founder and co-director of Children's Literature New England, Incorporated, a non-profit educational charity established in 1987.