Nicola Griffith (author of the awesome Always among many other books) is taking the publishing bull by the horns and starting a "creative cooperative" to go way outside the box and get words to the people who want to read them. Go catch up on what she is thinking and contribute your own thoughts to this fledgling project.

Bust loved The Wordy Shipmates, which is not such a big surprise as Bust loves Sarah Vowell. Here's a bit: "Vowell's reverence for musty Massachusetts Bay Colony Governor John Winthrop, and her textual analysis of his metaphor of the "city upon a hill", sits next to a visit to a Mayflower-themed waterslide - a marriage of earnestness and irony that she seems to have mastered, along with an eye for esoteric detail."

Sarah Vowell is so my hero.

Oh - and Jenny D.? Also totally my globe trotting hero.

Bust also recommends Randa Jarrar's A Map of Home, new YA from Other Press which PW reviewed thusly: "Jarrar's sparkling debut about an audacious Muslim girl growing up in Kuwait, Egypt and Texas is intimate, perceptive and very, very funny. And there's Ms Hempl Chronicles by Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum (author of Madeleine is Sleeping). PW also liked it: "Though there isn't much in the way of plot, Bynum's sympathy for her protagonist runs deep, and even the slightest of events comes across as achingly real and, sometimes, even profound. Bynum writes with great acuity, and the emotional undercurrents in this sharp take on coming-of-age and growing up will move readers in unexpected ways."

The Bedside Book of Birds by Graeme Gibson sounds impressive. Words thrown around like "beautiful" and "spectacular" combined with a review that includes from The Calgary Herald: "a superb gift, a compulsive must-have, for the bird-lover, the storyteller, and the anthropologist in the family. As a collection it is exemplary of how fascination can re-order the world. Readers will be thinking feathered thoughts for days and they will be happier.”

George Orwell's diaries from seventy yeas ago are online real time - and will continuously update through 2012. Some days not so exciting ("Two eggs." That's all for December 11th and 13th.) But set in 1938 with the war looming large, there is already discussion of North Africa and France and Britain. Orwell intrigues me a lot (Roger Deakin wrote about his remote life in Waterlog after his wife's death - I had no idea.) (I wonder why teachers can't tell you fascinating bits about about what authors were doing when they wrote certain books - like how Fitzgerald was fighting alcohol and Zelda or Hemingway's issues with his mother or that Orwell and his three year old son were in the absolute British boonies while writing Nineteen Eighty-Four. It would be very helpful in keeping students awake.), so I plan to continue visiting this site.

Booklist has found a new, more dangerous, Amelia Peabody in Suzanne Arruda's The Leopard's Prey:

Jade shoots, twirls a lariat, pilots a plane, and rides a motorcycle better than most of the men she encounters in the British protectorate where she lives—and she routinely uses all of those skills to solve the mysteries that come her way. This time, it’s murder, and it’s the romantic interest in Jade’s life, mustachioed American Sam Featherstone, who is in trouble. A local merchant with a dubious reputation has been murdered, and Sam was seen arguing with him. Jade knows Sam is innocent, but on the way to proving it, she manages to crash-land a plane, find a missing woman, and come face-to-face with a very angry leopard. Can such a superwoman be tamed? Sam wants to try, but is Jade ready?

PW refers to Jade as "spunky" which is pretty much fatal in terms of literary comparison but I'm willing to forgive it because she flies and maybe PW just doesn't know that spunky should never be used for heroines past the age of thirteen.

Someone really ought to let them know that.

Two recent books from Persephone Books that sound lovely: The Crowded Street by Winifred Holtby and Daddy's Gone A-Hunting by Penelope Mortimer. Brief descriptions of each (The Crowded Street first):

The theme of The Crowded Street, 1924, is one that is familiar from other Persephone novels: it was then assumed that young women would stay at home while looking for a husband. Muriel, who believes that ‘men do as they like’ whereas women ‘wait to see what they will do’, lives in a town in Yorkshire waiting – for what? She tries to conform to the values of her snobbish, socially ambitious mother; she tries to be ‘attractive’ to men; eventually she is rescued, by her friend Delia, a young woman who is in some ways a portrait of Vera Brittain.

Pause to swoon over the image of Vera Brittain (who as it happens was a former roommate of Holtby). Okay, a bit more:

Although Muriel goes away to school, most of the novel describes her life waiting for life to begin, waiting for a husband. The Crowded Street is thus about the need to withstand the tyranny of ‘sex success. Turn and twist how you will, it comes to that in the end.’ The book’s conclusion is that ‘the thing that matters is to take your life into your own hands and live it, accepting responsibility for failure or success. The really fatal thing to do is to let other people make your choices for you, and then to blame them if your schemes should fail and they despise you for the failure.’

Daddy's Gone A-Hunting is set a few decades later but covers the same inner conflict between women raised to be good wives who nevertheless find themselves wanting something more:

Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting, a 1958 novel by Penelope Mortimer, is about the expectations of women, about a house-bound mother reluctantly (desperately) at home all day, in contrast to her daughter who has escaped, to university and then, we can assume, to a job.

And this:

In Ruth Whiting’s commuter-belt village ‘the wives conform to a certain standard of dress, they run their houses along the same lines, bring their children up in the same way; all prefer coffee to tea, all drive cars, play bridge, own at least one valuable piece of jewellery and are moderately good-looking.’ Yet Ruth is on the verge of going mad. A ‘nervous breakdown’ would be a politer phrase, but really she is being driven mad by her life and her madness is exacerbated by everyone’s indifference to her plight.

Persephone is a truly wonderful publisher and in times like these, it's an endeavor to be supported.

Oh - and speaking of the poor economy - buy books from Powells. We're all in this together, remember?