Well, it's officially November now and our stores are starting to get stocked up with lots and lots of books. There's an awful lot of good stuff out there right now. I've been putting together our Holiday Gift Guide so I've been revisiting all the best books of the year and looking at the ones that are just coming out now. It's a pretty great list this year! Maybe next week I'll give a sneak preview of some of this year's selections. As for today, something a little lighter:

Where do bad cartoons go when they die? I don't know. Where do really funny but totally inappropriate for mass circulation cartoons go when they are rejected? The Rejection Collection. That's where. Matthew Diffee, one of the stable of contributors to everyone's favorite part of The New Yorker, set out to collect the very best of the unfit for publication. He rounded up the funniest rejects from the regular cartoonists and put them in print. If you ever wondered how the cartoon selection process works at The New Yorker, well, here's your chance. The first volume came out last fall and now we get The Rejection Collection Vol. 2: The Cream of the Crap. The new volume has a whole new cartoonist questionnaire and three Appendices including one that explains just how rejection works. And of course loads of hilarious and slightly edgy cartoons.

I just finished Shalom Auslander's memoir Foreskin's Lament, which I mentioned earlier this year. I'd started it some time ago, but like so many, it got pushed aside for some shiny, new book that likely suffered the same fate just days later. This one resurfaced and I am glad that it did. Foreskin’s Lament is not a Hitchens-ian screed against God, but a very personal story about growing up in a strict Orthodox Jewish community. Auslander chronicles his rebellion against his place and against the God that he was taught to believe in, one who was angry and vengeful and aware of every transgression no matter how small. However while Auslander notes that he is no longer observant, he has been unsuccessful in ridding himself of his fundamental belief in God. He's bitingly funny, frighteningly angry, and painfully self-aware.

I’m not sure what to read next. There is certainly plenty out there to choose from. I think I might stick with non-fiction for a bit. I started What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815 – 1848 by Daniel Walker Howe just last night and I found it captivating and really readable. It’s the latest in the Oxford History of the United States series and a mighty tome at that! This is a pretty action-packed and exciting time in American history and Howe’s objective is to cover these events; the massive territorial expansion, the growing industrialization, the religious and patriotic movements, with a fresh perspective and a strong focus on the cultural shifts and growths going on throughout these decades. Howe’s writing is engaging and he creates a compelling narrative that I’ve so far found approachable in spite of the enormous arc of his topic.

Well, the buzz this week is another Man Booker Prize upset. Anne Enright won for her novel The Gathering. Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach was the heavy, but late in the game odds were moving towards Lloyd Jones’ Mr. Pip. So Enright’s win came as a bit of a surprise. Booker judge Howard Davies took the opportunity to chastise book reviewers for being too reverential when writing about the works of established authors and overlooking the works of relatively unknown authors such as Enright and the other shortlisted author Indra Sinha, whose novel Animal’s People has not yet been published in the US.

I haven’t had a chance to read The Gathering yet, but have heard very good things about it. The story of a dysfunctional Irish family congregating at the death of one of the children, it has been called “exhilaratingly bleak.” We’ve got a few left in stock and the publisher will have a reprint back in stores in about a week and a half.

As for what I've been reading... well, I just finished Per Petterson's Out Stealing Horses and I absolutely loved it. It is a short, quiet novel that tells the story of Trond Sander as he gets situated in a sort of self-imposed exile in a little cabin on the eastern edge of Norway. This exemption and the interruption by an all too familiar neighbor take him on a journey to the summer of 1948. His reflections begin with the exciting, youthful delinquency of Trond and his friend Jon as they go out for a pre-dawn joy-ride on the neighboring farm’s horses, but turn to loss and cruelty that is further explored in the parallel stories of this transformative summer of his youth and his current encroachment on winter.

The literary news of the day is that Doris Lessing won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her name has been bandied about for years in reference to the prize. Lessing’s own story is one of defiance and will in the face of the very limited role women were allowed. In response to the charge that her portrayal of Anna Wulf in The Golden Notebook was “unfeminine,” she noted "Apparently what many women were thinking, feeling, experiencing came as a great surprise." I remember reading The Golden Notebook a number of years ago and feeling that excitement of discovery that I had when I first read Virginia Woolf.

The Nobel Prize isn’t the only buzz of the week, though. The finalists for The National Book Award were announced as well. They are a varied bunch of authors and works, but all worthy contenders. Among the fiction selections is Tree of Smoke, the Denis Johnson marvel that I wrote about a couple of weeks back. Also, Joshua Ferris’ Then We Came to the End and Mischa Berlinski’s Fieldwork are nominated. In addition, two story collections are in the mix: Lydia Davis’ Varieties of Disturbance and Jim Shepard’s Like You’d Understand, Anyway.

I took Davis’ book on my recent trip to Los Angeles and read a few of the stories. I’m a great fan of the short story and Lydia Davis’ are quite elegant. Though they are short and sometimes seem almost flip in tone, they congregate together and form larger themes of angst and recrimination.

Although recent temperatures are not a good indicator, fall is here. The last day of summer was almost two weeks ago and we've had a turn or two of cool weather. Apple season is starting again (The Washington Post had a nice little article on apple varietals just yesterday) and I can’t wait for the brief but delicious Stayman Winesap window. And most importantly the fall books are starting to pour in. Our bestseller list last week was overrun with the likes of Richard Russo, Ann Patchett, Garrison Keillor, Steven Pinker, and David Halberstam.

Some notable books that are on the fringe of the list are Junot Diaz’s The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and The Indian Clerk by David Leavitt. One of my personal favorites of the season The Arsonist’s Guide to Writer’s Homes in New England by Brock Clarke continues to burn up the charts (yes, I just wrote that).

The big book next week is Stephen Colbert’s I am America (And So Can You). It goes on sale next Tuesday, October 9th. I believe that simply by purchasing the book one can become up to 25% more patriotic, which is really a pretty good deal when you think about it. We’re pretty excited about this book at Olsson’s. We loved John Stewart’s America: The Book – A Guide to Democracy Inaction and have been chomping at the bit for a little political satire, especially as the unrelenting drum beat of another election cycle bears down.