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I can't be arsed writing some lengthy tribute to To Kill a Mockingbird, although it certainly would deserve it, but you can google it and get every man and his book reading dog honouring the work faster than it takes to read this and certainly for me to write it. But there are things that intrigue me as we hit half century on one of the most influential works of the English language, let alone American literature.
Here's a book that has as often been banned or burned as it and the author has been awarded the highest honours for literature and for battling ignorance and bigotry, and all in the same country throughout its 50 year life. Perhaps no other book, except Catcher in the Rye, has shown up the insane contradictions of a religious and rational nation.
Harper Lee herself has only on few occasions involved herself in that madness (great letter she wrote to a school board on her Wikipedia entry) and in fact she has refrained from much comment at all.
Often the media refer to such people as recluses, which is an utterly shallow reaction toward people who prefer to drink with their own mates than fortune seeking journos and fame touching fans (authors like Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon or Tim Winton).
Harper Lee is no recluse but she obviously enjoys a private life. Perhaps partly due to bearing witness to what happened to her attention-seeking friend Truman Capote, but I think more because she's simply wiser than many.
Harper Lee only wrote the one novel and indeed it is also her only major work. It is considered semi-autobiographical and may explain that she has always thought of herself as more of a journalist than as a novelist, even though she can happily wear the label of novelist on just the one novel (a testament to the power of Mockingbird).
Perhaps an important reason for her reticence to be interviewed or talk about the book is that she firmly believes the book can and should talk for itself. I don't think she wants the book and herself to be inseparably intertwined in the public consciousness as how both In Cold Blood and Catcher are often perceived.
Certainly I feel that the 84 year old Harper Lee (34 when she wrote Mockingbird) does not want herself to be the subject rather than the ideas she puts forward. Indeed, this may well have contributed to the book's power 50 years on.
And that I spent more time talking about her than the book probably wouldn't impress Harper Lee at all.
Best Book Covers for May
Though I use layout design combined with the execution of the art, be it photography or illustration, as to judge the quality of the final product I still pretty much just go with what I like.
Eh, what ya gonna do?
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Star Wars Sequel Anyone?
I almost forgot that on May 21st 1980, The Empire Strikes Back was released to an anxious audience. No need to tell everyone it remains the most liked of the Star Wars movies and often referred to as an example of a sequel that improves on the original (I prefer to think it builds on the first). It was a film that introduced the cinematic cliffhanger to a new generation and was the first downbeat ending that teenagers had encountered. That satisfied but still yerning feeling in the stomach when the credits went up was a new sensation for millions. And 30 years on it remains the best space adventure film. And the hand animated snowwalker battle on Hoth sequence is still superior to almost all since (yes, I'm thinking Avatar).
It remains a kick-arse adventure. Gotta be impressed.
Here's the trailer to remind you.
Oops, wrong trailer.
Eh, what ya gonna do?
Here's my choices of best book covers for April.
Well, actually, I cheated with the top three. Yes, Windup Girl is a paperback release for April, but the cover art is idenitical to last years hardcover release but I somehow missed it. Incidently, Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi is fast being considered one of the hottest novels around and already slated to take numerous awards. Looks nicely po-mo which is always a bonus for me. Same with Mind Over Ship, I skipped the hardcover and also this paperback edition is a couple of months old. And oops regarding Pinion. This is the third book in Jay Lake's Clockwork Earth series and somehow I missed ordering it till April instead of March.
You probably have already guessed I'm a sucker for futuristic cityscapes and a penchant for the fantastic, so many covers usually come from genre titles. There are five graphic novels here as well. There's usually one, maybe two, but I'm seeing a growing trend by comic publishers to have the art direction more explorative. For the last three months there has been a cover by the publication house Vertigo and for April there are two, Area 10 and Luna Park.
And I assure you that the three covers with skulls is coincidence and not an indication that I have a thing for brain cases.
... with a couple of Jan and maybe one from Dec.
In the past I've called this segment "Fav Covers". But screw it, I only called it my favourites cause I didn't want to come off as a tosser announcing what is superior design and art when I have no qualifications to do so. Then I realised that those who are "qualified" are simply people other people have allowed to be qualified as "qualified". So if you allow me, here are my best selects for the season.
And click on the pics to get a better scrut.
Here's the ten favourite books to come out in 2009 as picked by the Planet Books crew. It's not intended as a ten best list and not everyone's choices could be fitted in but it's still an interesting list all the same. It's in no intended order, just the way I threw it together.
Ransom
by David Malouf
With learning worn lightly and in his own lyrical language, David Malouf revisits Homer's ILIAD. Focusing on the unbreakable bonds between men - Priam and Hector, Patroclus and Achilles, Priam and the cart-driver hired to retrieve Hector's body. Pride, grief, brutality, love and neighbourliness are explored.
Boilerplate : History's Mechanical Marvel
by Paul Guinan & Anina Bennett
Designed by Professor Archibald Campion in 1893 as a prototype, for the self-proclaimed purpose of "preventing the deaths of men in the conflicts of nations". Campion and his robot also circled the planet with the U.S. Navy, trekked to the South Pole, made silent movies, and hobnobbed with the likes of Mark Twain and Nikola Tesla. [Expect me to write more about this fellow]
Miss Herbert
by Adam Thirlwell
As Flaubert finished Madame Bovary, Miss Herbert, his niece's governess, translated the novel into English. But this translation has since been lost. This book is not a novel, but an inside-out novel - with novelists as characters. It demonstrates a new way of reading internationally - complete with maps, illustrations, and helpful diagrams.
The Tree Show
by Mark Ryden
Never reluctant to freight his work with layers of reference that range from Renaissance landscape and Neoclassic portrait painting to occultism and literature, in his latest works Ryden combines the arcane with popular cultural images as ground from which to make his carefully executed leaps into fantasy. [I did a piece on Mark Ryden last year]
Dog Boy
by Eva Hornung
Extraordinary tale of a latter-day Mowgli in post-perestroika Russia is a devastating story of childhood, survival, family and life on the harsh edges of society.
There Was An Old Lady
by Jeremy Holmes
There was an old lady who swallowed a fly...a bird...a cat...a dog...a snake...a cow...and a horse. Do you know what happened to her? Of course you do! But with his distinct art style and a clever format, acclaimed graphic designer Jeremy Holmes has given the universal rhyme a unique makeover that is clever, funny, and unexpected.
Sum : Forty Tales from the Afterlives
by David Eagleman
Sum is a dazzling exploration of funny and unexpected afterlives that have never been considered-each presented as a vignette that offers us a stunning lens through which to see ourselves here and now.
These wonderfully imagined tale-at once funny, wistful, and unsettling-are rooted in science and romance and awe at our mysterious existence: a mixture of death, hope, computers, immortality, love, biology, and desire that exposes radiant new facets of our humanity.
Gentlemen of Bacongo
by Daniele Tamagni
Daniele Tamagni's wonderful pictorial essay brilliantly manages to capture the ebullience of sapeur culture at its source in Bacongo, a sprawling suburb of Brazzaville in The Congo. The sapeur style and relationship to clothes is unique - a throwback to a lost world of pre-colonial elegance and decadence and at the same time it is futuristic. [This reminded me of The Sartorialist. Perhaps Gentlemen of Bacongo deserves similar treatment]
The Window Seat
by Archie Weller
The Window Seat is a collection of his best short fiction - some award-winning and some previously unpublished. These stories are honest, brutal and often moving. In 'The Window Seat', we witness an old woman's final journey home and the view of the reluctant white traveller who sits beside her; in 'Stolen Car', a young Aboriginal man learns his first lesson in rough justice; and in 'Dead Dingo', we see another rallying against what his friends, life and fate are offering him.
How We Cheat Each Other
by Odd Nerdrum
A textbook on human deceit, as narrated by Odd Nerdrum. It consists of six short stories in dialogue form, drawing on Nerdrum's experiences in Iceland, Sweden, Norway, Russia and Germany, and spanning "The Last Days of Immanuel Kant" in the eighteenth century through to our time, and into the future. [Mr. Nerdrum sounds like a guy to write about in the future]
Here's my favourite book covers for titles that have arrived in Planet Books during November picked for design and execution. Two titles actually came in October but I had overlooked them at the time. I didn't think anyone would mind.
