So glad I picked The Time Traveler's Wife to be my first beach book this summer! I've been reading it ever since I had packed it for the Virginia Beach trip a few weeks ago. I'm totally intrigued by the two main characters and their unique love story and so I wasn't surprised to hear that Hollywood is making the movie now starring Rachel McAdams and Eric Bana. This is one good read!
It's been a while since I last found a blog I love. So when I stumbled upon Orangette today, I knew it had to be a special day. I first listened to Molly Wizenberg on NPR when she was being interviewed for her new book A Homemade Life which coincidentally is now on my Amazon list and I can't wait for it to arrive in the mail soon! As to her blog, it will enchant you! That much I'm sure of. So ... happy reading!
Can you believe this? You can swap paperbacks (and hardcovers too) for free! Here's how it works: you post the books you have available to swap; you pick the books you want to read, order them, and voila! In a few days, they'll be at your doorstep ready for your reading pleasure ... at absolutely no cost! And when someone orders one of your books, you send it to that person and pay for the shipping cost (usually $1.48 or so).
If you're a reader and bookworm like me, you'll love love www.paperbackswap.com. What a wonderful, economical way to catch-up on all your reading, don't you think?! Sign up and swap some great books today!
Have you ever wondered what some of your favorite authors are reading?! I do all the time! I recently just rented "The Shining" to watch again since The Shining was one of those page-turner books that kept me up at night when I first read it in the 80s.
So why not check on Mr. King's most recent favorite books then, I thought.
And here they are ... Stephen King's favorite reads in 2006 ... written by none other than the amazing Stephen King himself (as published on ew.com). Coincidentally, the #1 spot belongs to a book that's currently also on Oprah's Book Club's list ... The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I haven't read it yet, but I'm working on getting there. Just like I'm working on building up enough gumption to read (and watch) Schindler's List.
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Have I told you about the Columnist's Credo I had to sign — in blood, at midnight — in the offices of ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY when I started writing these columns? Well, Uncle Stevie had to make lots of promises, and one was that I would never, ever promote my own stuff. So I'm forbidden to say that I have a new book out (Lisey's Story), or that copies make wonderful presents this holiday season. And I absolutely can't say that some people might even like to receive two (even three). I can tell you that I just got back from a tour where I flogged this wonderful book endlessly and shamelessly, and where one question cropped up again and again: Do I believe books have any real future as entertainment in a world stuffed with so much good TV, so many loaded DVDs, and such a bumper crop of big-budget movies?
The answer is you bet. Books are still very much a part of the total entertainment picture. They're portable, commercial-free, recyclable, and use no batteries. Also — unlike your Nintendo Game Boy — a book will rarely be taken away if you're discovered with one in study hall or even in the back row of math class. You can always claim it was for an assignment. Try getting away with that if discovered playing Grand Theft Auto. And finally, as Anthony Powell pointed out in 1971 (and the observation was not new with him), books do furnish a room.
Here are the best ones I read in 2006...and as always, please keep in mind that doesn't mean they were published in 2006. This is just my list of the ones that best furnished my interior room this past year.
10. Dispatch, Bentley Little
Little is the horror poet of ordinary things. In this surreal novel, a lonely young man discovers his letters to the editor — and to the famous — bring actual results. Of course he eventually finds out he's working in Satan's own office pool, but that's the fun of the damned thing.
9. The Egyptologist, Arthur Phillips
Pathological liar of dubious identity goes bonkers while looking for a hidden tomb in the Egyptian desert after World War I. Tragic, pathetic, blackly funny...and with a strange, growing undercurrent of horror. You have never read a novel like it.
8. Night Mowing, Chard deNiord
This is a slim book of poems, mostly pastoral. There's little narrative clarity, but deNiord evokes rural scenes with undertones of violence and a breathless, calm clarity that's close to déjà vu.
7. The People's Act of Love, James Meek
Samarin is an escaped Russian political prisoner who turns up in the village of Yazyk during the Russian Revolution, only to discover he's fallen into a deadly struggle between religious fanatics (the men have all castrated themselves), a lost troop of Czech legionnaires, and an officer descending into homicidal mania. The narrative drive is amazing. So is the cold clarity of Meek's imagination.
6. Crooked River Burning, Mark Winegardner
A great American novel about...Cleveland? Yes, children, this is the real deal — by the man who has revived Mario Puzo's Godfather characters with such wit and élan.
5. The Ruins, Scott Smith
Americans caught in an escalating nightmare on a Mexican hilltop in the best horror novel of the new century.
4. The Night Gardener, George Pelecanos
Pelecanos, best known for his work on HBO's The Wire, is perhaps the greatest living American crime writer. He proves it again in this story of how 20 years changes three cops when an old serial killer of teens seems to become active again. The ending is guaranteed to tear your heart out.
3. One Mississippi, Mark Childress
Great novels of adolescence should provide belly laughs and tragedy. This story, in which young Daniel Musgrove moves to Mississippi from Indiana in 1973 (his salesman father is transferred), delivers both. It also provides a priceless picture of the '70s and why we must never go there again. Suffice it to say that the high school's first black prom queen is hit by a car and wakes up thinking she's white, and the local church puts on a play called Christ! The Musical!
2. American Pastoral, Philip Roth
I keep thinking I must have seen all of Roth's talent, and I keep being wrong. This 1997 novel of an essentially simple, good-hearted man (Swede Levov) and his desperate attempt to understand how the radical movement of the late 1960s has seduced his daughter into madness and murder is probably Roth's finest book. There are no answers here, only a great story winding its way into the heart of American darkness.
1. The Road, Cormac McCarthy
Simple, stripped to the bare bones, this story of a man's effort to keep his son alive and to find any place of refuge in the wake of a great disaster is the finest achievement of McCarthy's career. I thought it was almost the perfect narrative — spare in its beauty and constantly driven forward by its own interior urgency. Impossible to put down, in other words.
These are only the best ones. As always, I'm haunted by the thought of the ones that got away. I tell myself there's always next year for them, but the older I get, the less consolation that seems to be. But it will have to do. And in the meantime, even unread books furnish a room.
I found an interesting book in the library today! It's a southern gothic novel and I haven't read one of those in years so I had to snatch this one up before someone else got their hands on it. What caught my eye even more was that the author Cherie Priest has a "popular blog" online at http://www.cheriepriest.com/.
Now we all love to read a good blog, yes?! :) My favorite from the blog is the "about" section where we learn all about the artist and how she got started and when she knew writing was what she wanted to do. That always fascinates me, being a late bloomer that I am.
I'll let you know how the book turns out as soon as I get a chance to read it!
I woke up this morning to Matt Lauer's interview of Annie Leibowitz on her new book A Photographer's Life 1990-2005. A very personal book to the photographer since it includes many of her intimate family photographs as well as her famous celebrity portraits. After watching the interview, I decided to google Ms. Leibowitz. Below is a recent Newsweek article on her and her new book.
Annie Leibovitz is tired and nursing a cold, and she' s just flown back to New York on the red-eye from Los Angeles, where she spent two days shooting Angelina Jolie for Vogue. Like so many of her photo sessions, there was nothing simple about it. "I talked with Angelina before the shoot," says Leibovitz, who's famous for her preparation. "She felt like she was coming back from having the baby and she felt very sexy and ready to go." Jolie, a pilot, suggested shooting on an old airfield near the desert, with motorcycles and small planes among the props. (She flew herself to the location and the next day, Brad Pitt buzzed up in his plane.) They also spent a day shooting in the dunes near Death Valley, where the mercury hit 104, and the wind whipped so hard that everyone was peppered with sand. There were 50 people on the set, and racks of clothes from the New York spring collections to be tried and styled. It was as if Leibovitz were directing a small movie.
Even for America's foremost celebrity photographer, it's been a busy couple of months—starting with the interruption of her August vacation to shoot that elusive Hollywood infant, Suri Cruise, for the cover of Vanity Fair. You might think, after a career spent photographing divas and presidents, that taking pictures of a cute little baby would be a ... snap. But no. "It's very hard when the baby is that small," says Leibovitz. "It's being held by the parents all the time. It's not really connecting to anything else." She spent the better part of two weeks capturing 3-month-old Suri's waking moments with Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, at Cruise's homes in L.A. and Telluride, Colo. Though Leibovitz had less control over her tiny subject than she's used to, she did manage to direct the now ubiquitous cover shot of Suri, inspired by Linda McCartney's famous picture of Paul with their firstborn wrapped in his jacket—which she calls "one of my favorite pictures of a father holding a baby."
A nice homage—but it's usually Leibovitz who's inventing the iconic shot. What other contemporary photographer has produced as many indelible images of American pop culture? You know these pictures, from Whoopi Goldberg in the milk bath, to a nude and very pregnant Demi Moore, to the most famous picture of all: John Lennon, bare as a baby, curled around Yoko Ono, taken hours before he was killed. (The American Society of Magazine Editors recently voted the Lennon and Moore covers, which graced Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair respectively, the No. 1 and 2 magazine images of the past 40 years.) Leibovitz has become the master of the highly theatrical portrait, carefully staged in elaborate settings with witty props—pictures that have often come to define the image of her sitters.
While manipulating this world of polished glamour, Leibovitz has mostly remained hidden; the camera, she has said, is a protection. Now, in a surprising new collection of her work, "A Photographer's Life: 1990-2005," Leibovitz, 56, is getting personal. Interspersed among the famous subjects are pictures of her extended family (she is one of six siblings), her own three young children and the person she was closest to for that decade and a half—the late writer and critic Susan Sontag. Here's a photographer with an uncanny knack for getting people to take off their clothes, finally going naked herself—not just literally, but in throwing open a window on her private life. Her fans may be astonished both by the range of the work and the unstudied, everyday quality of some of the images—a family day at the beach, a newborn in the delivery room. She occasionally presents a grid of four pictures from the same sequence—some shots even out of focus—to show us a sliver of life on the move, rather than a moment of frozen perfection. "It's so much more than what a single picture can say," she maintains—a notion that's the antithesis of what the great French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson famously called "the decisive moment."
What may be the most controversial aspect of Leibovitz's book is the intimate pictures from her relationship with Sontag, and particularly the painful images of the writer when she was seriously ill with cancer. The two first met in the late '80s, when Leibovitz photographed her for a book jacket. They never lived together, though they each had an apartment within view of the other's. But their many trips—to Paris, Venice, Capri, the Nile, the ruins of Petra in Jordan—are recorded here. Sontag, the author of the award-winning book of criticism "On Photography," wasn't easy on Leibovitz: "She thought I was good—and that I could be better. And I wanted to be a better photographer. She sort of raised the bar and made me feel I needed to take control." Because of Sontag, Leibowitz went to Sarajevo during the Bosnian war, where she shot such powerful pictures as that of a child's bike lying in a road smeared with blood. But Sontag also loved pop culture. When Tina Brown, then editor of Vanity Fair, seemed to hesitate over printing the pregnant Demi Moore pictures, Sontag called her to say how great they were. "Susan was so entrenched in life, I couldn't keep up with her," says Leibovitz. "She was just bigger than everything."
Sitting in her Greenwich Village office, wearing jeans and sneakers, Leibovitz explains how Sontag's death in December 2004—followed only weeks later by the death of Leibovitz's father—propelled her to make this book. "It totally came out of a moment," she says. "I had already done some looking at photographs of Susan—that was very hard—for a little memorial book. I had never taken the time to see what I had, really." She would weep and pin the pictures up on the long walls of an old barn at her country place in upstate New York. "And then, I got very excited, trying to look from 1990 to 2005, as if Susan was standing behind me." Leibovitz tears up and reaches for a box of tissues.
She struggled over whether to publish the few photos from Sontag's last weeks of life. "They are very tough pictures," she says. "People have said it's important to publish them because so much is masked from us about what the end really is." Leibovitz starts to choke up again. "I think Susan would really be proud of those pictures—but she's dead. Now if she were alive, she would not want them published. It's really a difference. It's really strange." Later, collecting her thoughts, she says, "I've been through everything mentally and emotionally, and I'm very comfortable with them. This book is me."
Most powerful may be the image of Sontag in death, a photograph that evokes a 19th-century memento mori. In counterpoint are the pictures of Leibovitz's own children. She gave birth as a single mother to her daughter Sarah just after 9/11. Then, a few months after Sontag and Leibovitz's father died, her twin girls were born, via a surrogate mother. She named one Susan and the other Samuelle, after her dad. "I saw my life with Susan, my life with my family, I saw the birth of my children," she recalls of looking at all the pictures together. "I was mesmerized by the personal stuff. I just loved it."
Leibovitz's book also provides a comprehensive view of the public side of a photographer of legendary ambition and tenacity. Her well-known subjects describe her as a perfectionist who will do almost anything to get the picture she wants. "She has this kind of burning focus," says Roseanne Cash, who's been photographed by Leibovitz several times—once on a beach in Maine in December when it was 3 degrees below zero. "She arrives at a shoot with all these people," says Mikhail Baryshnikov. "It's very intense—absolutely intense!" If time allowed, Leibovitz would spend two or three days around a portrait subject first, just getting ideas. Despite the meticulous planning, the perfect image can come out of the blue. Take Leibovitz's Jack Nicholson picture. Whenever she was busy setting up a shot inside his Mulholland Drive house, he'd disappear out back to drive golf balls—and that became the photograph. And believe it or not, she didn't intend to shoot Bill Gates at his computer—but it was where she found him when he wandered away from her lights.
It may be her perfectionism that makes Leibovitz question her own work. "I'm not a great studio portraitist," she says in the book's introduction. That accolade she reserves for such photographers as Richard Avedon. "His work is a great reminder about trying to be simple and strong," she says. Avedon knew how to talk to his subjects and "get them animated, or thinking about anything but having their picture taken."
Leibovitz, on the other hand, likes to look rather than converse. "I'm still learning how to make the portrait more alive," she says. Early in her career—she started working for Rolling Stone back when it was based in San Francisco—she might spend days or weeks on the road with a band, taking pictures behind the scenes; but the more formal shots for the magazine's cover were different. "It wasn't like life as it was happening—my portraits started to feel like after the decisive moment," she says, laughing. "I made myself feel a little better by saying it's the studied moment." As her magazine work has become more elaborate, Leibovitz seems to long for the feeling of reportage. "It would be nice once in a while to do some Life Magazine real-world imagery instead of making it up all the time," she says. She cites a favorite recent shoot with Anderson Cooper in New Orleans after Katrina. "I do work for one of the largest magazine conglomerates in the world [Condé Nast, publisher of Vanity Fair and Vogue], and they have an agenda for me," she notes. "I'm trying to work within that and still try to do good work." In the end, what matters to her most is not any individual picture. "I've always thought the strength of my work has been in the body of the work."
Thanks to that success as a documentarian of our culture, Leibovitz has had the means to become a serious collector of photographs—by Robert Frank, Nan Goldin and of course Avedon. But the very first photograph she bought was by Cartier-Bresson, the famous image "On the Banks of the Marne." Yes, it's a beautiful composition—a decisive moment. But it also reflects what's perhaps an ideal for a photographer so associated with the artifice of celebrity: a picture of an anonymous family on a riverbank, having a picnic. What it looks like most is life as it's happening.
With Jac Chebatoris
"A Photographer's Life: 1990-2005" By Annie Leibovitz. To be published by Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc. © 2006 by Annie Leibovitz.
The movie is 100x more entertaining than the book! After all ... it has Brad & Angie!
