Jenna Woginrich is a web designer who works in an office during the day and homesteads in her spare time. She has taught herself how to bake, spin, sew, raise chickens, grow vegetables, and play the fiddle and mountain dulcimer. She shares her home in Sandgate, Vermont, with Jazz and Annie, two exuberant huskies.
Peter Wild is the editor of a series of fiction anthologies based on the songs of rock and pop bands. His articles and fiction have appeared in The Independent (London), The Guardian (London), The Big Issue, Word Riot, NOÖ Journal, and 3: AM magazine.
Obama Reads Here: Even if I weren't an unabashed Obama supporter, I suspect the novelty of reading about a book-loving president would thrill me to no end, especially after the Illiteracy Zone that's plagued the White House for the past eight years.
But since I am an Obama-lovin' lunatic, it thrills me to no end to read this:
At 57th Street Books, a cooperative store that has counted the Obamas as co-owners since the 1980s, manager Laura Prail said she is sad that they may stop coming in.
"They're a great book family," she said, adding that Barack Obama would spend hours looking for mystery thrillers and nonfiction titles in the wood-shelved nooks and crannies of her cozy, brick-walled basement shop. "Early in the campaign, there was a picture in the New York Times of him standing on a tarmac with a book in his hand, Fareed Zakaria's The Post-American World. I looked it up, and he bought it here."
Prail said she hopes the president-elect calls with orders to ship to the White House. But she added, only half-joking, "I'm a little jealous of Politics and Prose," the independent Washington bookstore.
I'm a little jealous, too. In fact, I'm so jealous that I am personally extending an offer of lifelong free shipping to President Obama anytime he orders from us. (Never mind how — I'll take up a collection in the office, or something.)
Mr. President, we carry a lot of used and new mystery thrillers and nonfiction titles...
First Lady Places Last: Meanwhile, as I mentioned yesterday, the only member of the outgoing First Family whom publishers (and readers) are even remotely interested in reading about, First Lady Laura Bush, sold her memoirs.
Gawker points out that, despite speculation that her payday would put Hillary Clinton's $8 million advance to shame, Mrs. Bush appears to have gotten quite a bit less. In fact, it's possible that the previous First Lady Bush made more money with a book about her friggin' dog than Laura will get for her life story.
Keith Kelly reports today that Laura got $1.6 million, which is not only a mere one-fifth of what Hillary got, it's even less than Nancy Reagan and Barbara Bush got. And they were way back in the day, remember!
We attribute this to the fact that everyone knows this book will suck big balls and the only people you can expect to read it all the way through are fundamentalist Christian Republican Texas knitting circle members.
Gawker said it, not me! Don't kill the messenger.
The Costa Winning: Last night the winners of this year's Costa Book Awards were announced in their individual categories.
Sebastian Barry won the Costa Novel Award for The Secret Scripture, while the prize for first novel went to Sadie Jones's The Outcast, and the biography award went to Diana Athill for her memoir Somewhere Towards the End. Adam Foulds picked up the poetry prize for The Broken Word and Michelle Magorian snagged the children's book award for Just Henry.
Each takes home £5,000 ($7,442 USD) en route to competing for the 2008 Costa Book of the Year award, which comes with a purse of £25,000 ($37,196 USD). The winner will be announced on January 27th — and you just know it will be here for you to read.
Where the New Books are: Both the London Times and the Guardian offer their picks for some of the most exciting books coming in 2009. Some highlights:
Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby
Fans of Hornby's High Fidelity will doubtless be delighted to learn that his next novel takes him back into the music world, though nowhere near the north London of Fever Pitch. His protagonist is a reclusive 80s rock star who is forced out of isolation when the re-release of his most famous album brings him into contact with some of his most passionate fans. Set in America and Lincolnshire, the novel tell the story of two lonely people finding each other across decades and continents.
Where the Wild Things Are by Dave Eggers
A new book from Eggers is always an event, and here he attempts a novelisation of Maurice Sendak's children's classic Where the Wild Things Are, in a collaboration with the film-maker Spike Jonze. Max is now an eight-year-old with an absent father, an older sister who's leaving home and a mother who has trouble maintaining a work-life balance. Time for poor, troubled Max to take to his boat and head off for the island of the wild things. Being a bit of a wild thing himself — a little bit scary but basically benign — Eggers would seem the perfect custodian for Sendak's uproarious fable. So, let the wild rumpus begin...
The Little Strangerby Sarah Waters
Anyone who has followed Waters's career — from her trilogy of Victorian lesbian romps to her moving, back-to-front account of wartime London — will be desperate to know where she'll take them next. Her latest novel is set in 1940 in rural Warwickshire, where a doctor is called to minister to a patient in a crumbling stately pile with the clock permanently fixed at twenty to nine. Yes, it's a ghost story, and if her previous record is anything to go by, you're unlikely to find a chillier or more haunting one this year.
Keep in mind that both papers are based in London, and U.K. books don't always come out at the same time in the U.S. — if ever. The above books, I'm sure we'll see on these shores. The rest are anyone's guess.
We all have our own personal telltale signs of spring. For some, it's really specific. Something slightly weird but still uniquely their own — like the smell of Pledge simonizing the house or some hideous pastel-dyed, coffee-inspired foodstuff back on the board at Starbucks. Whatever it is, we have them. They are the wonky (but endearing) annual reminders that things are a-changing. For me, the reigning sign of spring has become sharing my bathroom with a box of chickens. No joke.
Spring is when hatcheries ship chicks to us small farmers. For the past few years, my Aprils and Mays have included a brooder box in my bathroom where said day-old birds reside. For about seven weeks, those little birds stay indoors with me while they grow up into ugly pre-teen poultry. They're stationed in the loo because it's always the one room in the house that has spare electrical outlets for heat lamps and a door that separates it from the rest of the house. (When you share your place with Siberian huskies, you learn about chicken security the hard way...) So, around the same time other people ...
Robert Clifton Weaver and the American City: The Life and Times of an Urban Reformer by Wendell E. Pritchett
Reviewed by Kim Phillips-Fein
The Nation
In July 2000 a ceremony was held to commemorate the renaming of the headquarters of the Department of Housing and Urban Development in Washington, a modular phalanx of concrete and glass designed by Marcel Breuer and completed in 1968. Democratic luminaries such as Andrew Cuomo, Charles Rangel and Daniel Patrick Moynihan gathered to celebrate the dedicatee's life; he was, in Cuomo's words, a "pioneer who broke through barriers of racism again and again, to build a life of extraordinary achievement and public service." The praise was richly deserved, for Robert Clifton Weaver had been a prominent economist, a longtime advocate of fair-housing laws and a member of the country's black intellectual elite ever since the days before the end of segregation. President Lyndon Johnson had appointed Weaver to head HUD after the agency was founded in 1965, making him the first black cabinet official in American history. And it was ...
In fact, the guy who designed the squirrel image — that'd be Trent — winnowed 414 entries to a dozen. I trimmed his list down to four. And finally the folks here voted.
Nancy, our winner, who claims the $100 prize, had supplied this explanation with her submission:
After spending every day of the first 18 years of my life waiting for the school bus in the rain (or so it seemed), I left Portland 47 years ago. But the city is part of who I am, and I visit family there often. The Morrison Street bridge was my favorite of all Portland's bridges, so I selected the name Morrison for the squirrel.
Look, it's not my favorite bridge — that'd be the Hawthorne, or maybe St. John's — but Morrison is one heck of a name for a Portland squirrel. We interviewed hundreds of squirrels this week. Every single one ...
After I read an advanced copy of this book, the anticipation of its release seemed almost unbearable. And, apparently, I was not alone: soon after the book came out, customers started leaving notes in our stock, urging other people to read it! John Green has set a new standard for young adult literature, and it's always a pleasure to read his books in all of their quixotic glory.
Jill Saginario is a children's bookseller at Powell's, and has possibly the largest Margaret Wise Brown collection in the world. She can't believe how much she loves pickles.
"A wovel is a Web novel," Blake says. "There's an installment every Monday. At the end of every installment, there's a binary plot branch point with a vote button at the end."
Programmer Pollack describes the wovel format as reminiscent of the old "Choose Your Own Adventure" books, with a high-tech twist: "allowing the readers to ... choose their way through and decide on integral changes in the plot."
We wuve wovels. We hated the name at first, because it makes them sound wike some kind of chiwdwen's toy version of a novew, wike Teddy Wuxpin weads it to you. ...
I live two completely different lives. One is my farm life. I live that version up a steep hollow, in the Green Mountains of southern Vermont. I rent this little cabin in a clearing with six acres and a few loud streams running through it. There I live with my two sled dogs, and raise chickens, geese, sheep, rabbits, and a hive of bees. I bake bread, plant organic vegetables, and play Civil War tunes on my fiddle by the fireplace. It's everything corny and cliché about country living and I adore it. The plan is to someday, somehow, make my home life my whole life, and work full-time on my own homestead raising sustainable food for fine people like you and writing about it. It's good to want things.
However, my other life is one of offices, meetings, and computers. I'm a corporate graphic designer, and 40 hours a week you'll find me in my little workspace with my headphones on, making the cash to pay the bills. Yeah, it's a stressful way to spend my daylight, but ...
The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World by Niall Ferguson
Reviewed by Robert Skidelsky
New York Review of Books
1.
The historian Alan Taylor used to say, mischievously, that the only point of history is history. The idea that one could use it to predict the future, still more to avoid past mistakes, was pure illusion. Niall Ferguson's The Ascent of Money, a history of financial innovation written as a television documentary as well as a book, offers a neat test of Taylor's theory. Ferguson can claim some powers of anticipation. History convinced him in 2006 that the good times could not last "indefinitely." This was an insight to which the Nobel Prize–winning mathematical economists who devised the Black-Scholes formula -- the complicated model for pricing share options used by the highly leveraged firm Long-Term Capital Management, which famously crashed in 1998 -- were oblivious. Their formula persuaded them that a massive sell-off could occur only once in four million years.
History has alerted Ferguson to the perils of the state relying on the bond market for
Beyond the Hoax: Science, Philosophy and Culture by Alan Sokal
Reviewed by Michael Bérubé
American Scientist
In 1996, physicist Alan Sokal played an elaborate trick on some unsuspecting humanists and social scientists -- namely, the editors of the leftist journal Social Text -- by submitting an essay filled with at least six kinds of nonsense. The editors didn't catch (or were willing to countenance) the nonsense and published the essay. In response, humanists and social scientists embarrassed (or outraged) by Sokal's hoax lashed out, sometimes in ways that made them look even worse than the editors; and Sokal found himself hailed by legions of fans and supporters who credited him with finally exposing the vacuity of (a) cultural studies, (b) literary theory, (c) postmodernism, (d) obscurantist jargon, (e) science studies, (f) people who write about disciplines they don't know much about, and (g) all of the above. Over the past 12 years, accordingly, I've met a number of colleagues who spit and curse at the very sound of Sokal's name -- and a much larger number of colleagues, journalists and general readers who ...
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Peter Wild
Book News for Tuesday, January 6, 2009
Obama Reads Here: Even if I weren't an unabashed Obama supporter, I suspect the novelty of reading about a book-loving president would thrill me to no end, especially after the Illiteracy Zone that's plagued the White House for the past eight years.
"They're a great book family," she said, adding that Barack Obama would spend hours looking for mystery thrillers and nonfiction titles in the wood-shelved nooks and crannies of her cozy, brick-walled basement shop. "Early in the campaign, there was a picture in the New York Times of him standing on a tarmac with a book in his hand, Fareed Zakaria's The Post-American World. I looked it up, and he bought it here." 
First Lady Places Last: Meanwhile, as I mentioned yesterday, the only member of the outgoing First Family whom publishers (and readers) are even remotely interested in reading about, First Lady Laura Bush, sold her memoirs.
The Costa Winning: Last night the winners of this year's Costa Book Awards were announced in their individual categories.
Where the New Books are: Both the London Times and the Guardian offer their picks for some of the most exciting books coming in 2009. Some highlights:
In all, 414 people entered 
