Moomins!

Found this article on The Daily Beast today by John Garth. Enjoy!

Tove Jansson, Queen of the Moomins

There is a Moomin theme park, museum, Moomin T-shirts, even a Moomin movie. On the centenary of her birth, we celebrate the globally popular trolls’ Finnish creator.

The international children’s laureate of disaster and displacement, Tove Jansson, was born one hundred years ago, on August 9, 1914, just as Europe was going to war. She is most famous for creating the Moomins, a family of hospitable and adventuresome trolls who vaguely resemble tubby two-legged hippos. Today, there is a thriving Moomin-industry around them: a theme park, a museum, a movie is on its way.

The Moomins emerged fully in a story written in 1939 during the attempted Soviet invasion of her Finnish homeland, Moomin and the Great Flood. At the end of that book, the reunited Moomin family find a house “like a tall stove” in a beautiful valley where “they spent the whole of their lives, apart from a few times when they left it and travelled for a change.”

The last phrase turned out to be misleading. Jansson still had catastrophes to get out of her system. In the next book, Moomintroll and friends undertake an epic quest to save the world from a comet, at one point memorably stilt-walking across a dried-up sea.

Upcoming Events @ Last Word Books for July 2014

We have two events just around the corner that you should check out. Also, you can come in and see our new location if you haven't already. We have a long ways to go, but we're quite proud of what we have managed to scrape together.

The first event is "In Spite of Repression: Fighting for Liberation Under Surveillance" with scot crow & Leslie James Pickering. We'll be hosting Scot & Leslie at 111 Cherry St NE at 7pm Wednesday July 2nd. scot has visited us before at our old location and his return will be welcome.

The second event is the following day with Sean Davis, author of "The Wax Bullet War: Chronicles of a Soldier & Artist." 

from Sean's website:

Sean Davis is a veteran of the Iraq war, a talented artist, and a gifted writer with an interesting story. He attended art school before earning his bachelor’s degree in English from Portland State University and an MFA in Writing from Pacific University. He published the novel Motivation and Toleration under the name Ian Avi and has contributed to numerous publications including the Willamette Week, Nailed Magazine, and The Good Men Project. He has also appeared on 60 Minutes and is cofounder of A Rock or Something Productions in Portland.

Found this gem of a list on...listverse. Give it the once-over.

10 Of The Most Bizarre Books Ever Written

ANDREW HANDLEY MARCH 30, 2014

If literary history teaches us one thing, it’s that people were just as confused and immature in the Middle Ages as they are now. From unsolvable codes to 13th-century penis doodles in the margins of bibles, history is like an all-encompassing high school cliche that never comes to an end. These books span the course of written history, and they’re all utterly bizarre.

10Codex Seraphinianus

Photo credit: Parigi Books

Written in a language that no one understands and filled with illustrations of surreal, impossible things, Codex Seraphinianus is possibly the strangest encyclopedia in the world. When Italian architect Luigi Serafini published the book in 1981, he presented it as a factual, scientific work. One look at the outlandish potpourri of images, however, reveals that Codex Seraphinianus is anything but scientific.

The entire book is handwritten, and the illustrations are all hand drawn and colored by Serafini himself, a task that he labored over for two years. Scholars have spent years trying to decipher the book, but the only thing we’ve figured out is that “Seraphinianus” is just a variation of Serafini’s name. As for the book’s language, the “alphabet” has about two dozen characters, and relates to absolutely nothing else humanity has ever created.

Interesting New Title

We recently ordered copies of The Last Policeman by Ben Winters after reading the following review by Mark Frauenfelder on boingboing.net. We'll let you know how it goes, but if you're interested there'll be a couple extra copies down here at the store.

The Last Policeman: solving a murder before an asteroid wipes out life on Earth

Mark Frauenfelder at 4:28 pm Sat, Nov 10

Last year I read Bedbugs, Ben Winters' psychological thriller/horror novel about a woman who was certain that her apartment was filled with bedbugs, while her husband was telling her that she was imagining them. It reminded me of Rosemary's Baby, one of my favorite movies.

The Last Policeman is Ben Winters' third novel (he also wrote Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters , which I have not read), and I enjoyed it even more than Bedbugs. It's a noir-ish whodunit that opens with New Hampshire police detective Hank Palace (who narrates the story) standing inside a McDonald's restroom, examining the body of a dead man. All of the evidence points to suicide, but Palace has a hunch the man was murdered and that the murderer had set the corpse up in the restroom to make it look like he'd hung himself. Palace wants to pursue the murder angle, But the other police officers and the assistant district attorney on the scene don't seem to care one way or the other what happened. As I read this part, I wondered why no one but Palace was interested in learning the truth.

A few pages later I learned that the world of The Last Policeman was very different than our world. Palace says:

I follow Michelson’s gaze to the counter and the red-faced proprietor of the McDonald’s, who stares back at us, his unyielding gaze made mildly ridiculous by the bright yellow shirt and ketchup-colored vest. Every minute of police presence is a minute of lost profits... I scowl and turn my back on the owner. Let him stew. It’s not even a real McDonald’s. There are no more real McDonald’s. The company folded in August of last year, ninety-four percent of its value having evaporated in three weeks of market panic, leaving behind hundreds of thousands of brightly colored empty storefronts. Many of these, like the one we’re now standing in, on Concord’s Main Street, have subsequently been transformed into pirate restaurants: owned and operated by enterprising locals like my new best friend over there, doing a bustling business in comfort food and no need to sweat the franchise fee. There are no more real 7-Eleven’s, either, and no more real Dunkin’ Donuts.

The Bookstore Brain

Here's a fun article from The New Yorker about the fantasy bookstore league (FBL! FBL!). The part I like best is the opening quote of the third paragraph, "...the quixotically determined few..." That's us in a nutshell.

If you could create a bookstore, what would you put in it? What would you exclude? Would you specialize in any particular genre? Would your organizing principle be quantity or quality, or would you devise a way to have both?

Nearly all bibliophiles—that peculiar breed of people who feel more at home in bookstores than in their actual homes—have at some point posed such questions and daydreamed about the utopian store they would construct in answer to them, the store that would smoothly combine expertise and aesthetic preference with comfort and commercial viability.

Except for the quixotically determined few who actually open a store, most book lovers must be content to tend to the garden of their own libraries. But for a few years, I had the chance to put speculation into practice. I worked at Housing Works Bookstore, one of the retail arms of the venerable New York H.I.V./AIDS nonprofit that was started in the nineteen-eighties by members of ACT UP. Like the organization’s thrift stores, the bookstore is run largely by volunteers and receives its stock entirely from donations. So at any given time, crowded under the steam pipes of the store’s basement and sub-basement, are scores of boxes of books—from publishers or magazines getting rid of their overflow, from the apartments of lifelong readers who have died, or simply from the shelves of New Yorkers who need to clear space. In those boxes is the raw material to make a bookstore. My job was to sift their contents, relying on my tastes and book-floor experience to select the stock. And influenced by the same fond madness that allows booksellers to continue to believe, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that the book-buying public still wants their guidance, I am certain that you will be interested in reading an essay about book sorting.

There are no faster or firmer friendships than those formed between people who love the same books. Irving Stone

Irving Stone (born Tannenbaum, July 14, 1903, San Francisco, California – August 26, 1989, Los Angeles, California) was an American writer known for hisbiographical novels of famous historical personalities, including Lust for Life, a biographical novel about the life of Vincent van Gogh, and The Agony and the Ecstasy, a biographical novel about Michelangelo.

Sexual Violence and Myth-Making in ‘Game of Thrones’

Thinkprogress.org has a fantastic piece by Alyssa Rosenberg about 'Game of Thrones' worth reading. Just the way Martin creates characters, both "good" and "bad," is interesting enough. The depth of character is fantastic and leads you to reevaluate your feelings for each character and the environments that created them. This is especially true of Cersei Lannister and her twin brother Jamie, who are both typical, reprehensible villains until Martin delves into their lives and the very human reactions they have to their environment.

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Jun 25, 2012 at 2:06 pm

I’ve mentioned Beyond the Wall, a collection of essays about George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, to which I am a contributor, which isavailable on Amazon now and in stores tomorrow. I’ve got an excerpt of my essay, which explores sexual assault as a critical element in Westeros’s understanding of monstrosity, here (WARNING: WITH HEAVY SPOILERS FOR A DANCE WITH DRAGONS):

The first thing we know about Ramsay Bolton, born a bastard but legitimated by his father, is that he abuses his wife. After he is recognized by his father, Ramsay marries Lady Hornwood to gain control of her ancestral house, then leaves her to starve to death in a tower cell…the Bastard of the Dreadfort takes up the unpleasant habit of hunting down women in whom he’s interested: “When Ramsay catches them he rapes them, flays them, feeds their corpses to his dogs, and brings their skins back to the Dreadfort as trophies. If they have given him good sport, he slits their throats before he skins them. Elsewise, t’other way around” (A Dance with Dragons)…When Theon Greyjoy falls under Ramsay’s control, the sadist gelds him, partially flays him, and forces Theon to participate in sexual assaults, most notably on a servant who is impersonating the late Ned Stark’s younger daughter, Arya. So while women are not Ramsay’s only victims, his crimes sooner or later seem to involve them.

Eventually we learn that the Bastard of the Dreadfort is, himself, the product of sexual violence. Roose Bolton raped Ramsay’s mother in an exercise of his first night rights, a story he relates in A Dance with Dragons with a casualness that’s chilling: