Welcome to the July 2014 State of the Thing! My apologies to those of you who received this month's newsletter twice—the first message went out with an incorrect Early Reviewers deadline. I'll keep this one short and sweet, so you can get back to your summer reading. This month, LibraryThing has some new faces, Legacy Libraries pulled together the Marquis de Sade's library, and we have author interviews with Matthew Thomas and Maximillian Potter.
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Meet LT's Summer Interns
You'll see these two helping Loranne with member support—answering your emails and troubleshooting, as well as shipping out CueCats and other LT swag. They're also getting some programming lessons from Tim, in the copious free time they have this summer. Welcome aboard, gentlemen!
Legacy Library: Marquis de Sade
The (in)famous 18th century French author Marquis de Sade's library was completed on the auspicious date of July 14, 2014 (France's National Holiday, also known as Bastille Day). Surprising perhaps a few, the Marquis's most popular tag is "illegal", and the books he owned feature prominently on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. Wondering just how depraved your library is? Compare notes—or, rather, books—on his profile, and join us on Talk!
Talk of the Thing
Why Do You Read? Who are we? Where are we going? What is the meaning of life, the universe, and everything? While this thread won't give you any answers to all the Big Questions in life, it is a pretty neat look at why our fellow book lovers read. Why do you read? Tell us all about it.
Favorite Fictional Detectives. Are you a Sherlock Holmes loyalist? Is Miss Marple the only gumshoe for you? See LT favorites and add yours here!
Famous Disappointments. Maybe for some The Sun didn't really rise to the occasion. Did Gone Girl fall flat? Or, perhaps, like Loranne, you think the true Heart of Darkness was in Conrad's chest. Sometimes books just don't live up to the hype. LT folks tell us about well-loved classics and best-sellers alike that let them down. What were your famous disappointments?
Interview with Matthew Thomas
We also have 25 copies of We Are Not Ourselves up for grabs in this month's batch of Early Reviewers. Request yours here!
LibraryThing staffer KJ Gormley caught up with Matthew to discuss We Are Not Ourselves.
I could frame your book as everything from "immigrant story" to "big American Dream novel": In your own words, can you briefly sum up what you think We Are Not Ourselves is about?
It's the story of Eileen Tumulty growing up in post-World War II Queens as the only daughter of Irish immigrants and deciding from an early age that she wants a better life than the one she knows. The book chronicles her journey toward that life and the obstacles she encounters on the way, especially in her marriage to her beloved husband Ed Leary. The second half is the story of how Eileen and Ed handle adversity together.
I tried, through telling the story of this one family, to tell some of the story of the middle class in America—their hopes and fears, dreams and disappointments, and quiet achievements over the course of the twentieth century. I wanted to explore the enduring appeal of the American Dream and examine its viability in an environment that is squeezing out the middle class. In the end, I wanted to see what residual deposits might be left in the spirit when a person achieves that elusive dream at any cost.
The novel is told through the interchanging points of view of Eileen Leary and her son, Connell. Why did you choose these view-points and not that of Ed Leary, the husband and father in the family at the heart of the book?
I wanted the reader to feel palpably the absence of Ed's point of view, and I hoped to provoke the reader to thought by leaving it out. In omitting such a focal character's point of view, I wanted to capture some of the essence of Ed's own isolating experience of dealing with the calamity that befalls him. There is a sense in which those on the other side of Alzheimer's, even the closest of family members, find the experience of the sufferer inscrutable, almost ineffable. And from a dramatic perspective, I was interested in telling the story of how each of the people closest to Ed, including extended family and friends, responds to Ed's disease in his or her own way. Ed became a fulcrum around which all the characters revolved, and his illness became a backdrop for a series of character studies and explorations into human nature. I tried to take my cues from the characters themselves in presenting a range of possible reactions that might capture the manifold ways people handle bad news.
»Read the full interview here.
Interview with Maximillian Potter
We have 10 copies of Shadows in the Vineyard up for grabs in this month's batch of Early Reviewers. Request yours here!
Loranne caught up with Maximillian this month to discuss the crime, the writing process, and, of course, wine.
For those who have yet to read Shadows in the Vineyard, could you give us the nutshell version of the book?
The narrative engine of the book is the story of an unprecedented crime that was committed against the most highly regarded and storied winery in the world, the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti. Located in the heart of France's Burgundy region, the DRC (in wine-speak) produces seven of the world's finest and—go figure—most expensive wines, including La Tâche, Richebourg, and arguably the most coveted wine on the planet, Romanée-Conti, which, in the unlikely event you could find it available for purchase, is likely selling for north of $10,000. The French government regards the DRC as something of a national landmark. Think of the winery as something akin to America's Liberty Bell, only it produces wine.
In January 2010, the co-owner of the Domaine, Monsieur Aubert de Villaine, received a note informing him that a small piece of his winery's most prestigious vineyard, Romanée-Conti, had been poisoned and most of the rest of the vines in that parcel would be killed unless De Villaine paid a one million euro ransom. A substantial part of the book deals with the criminal investigation, the investigators, the sting operation that caught the bad guys, and the unlikely and tragic end of the investigation.
Shadows is about about a crime, wine, family, obsession and love.
You first brought this story of wine, intrigue, and sabotage to the public in a Vanity Fair piece in 2011. What drew you to this particular story, so much that you decided to expand it into a book? What was the most challenging part of bringing the tale to life in a longer format?
I sensed there was a book to be written not long after I first arrived in Burgundy to report the Vanity Fair story. I'd been doing magazine stories for the better part of 20 years and this was one of the three times in all of that time when I'd felt that there was so much rich material it ached for a book. In this case, I first started thinking of a book during my very first meeting with Monsieur Aubert de Villaine. Before I'd met Aubert, in my mind's eye, I pictured him as a soft-palmed, ascot-wearing French aristocrat who charged way too much for a bottle of wine and probably had whatever happened to his vines coming. Within hours of talking with him, I began to realize how ignorant my image of him had been.
»Read the full interview here.
Free Books: Early Reviewers
Early Reviewers offers free books to members—about 100 titles a month! Since 2007, we've given out over 160,000 books. The catch? Publishes want your honest review. How you review a book won't help or hurt your chances of winning books in the future, but not reviewing your winning will.
The July batch of Early Reviewers books contains 3,782 copies of 122 different titles, including the debuts from both of the authors we've interviewed this month—Shadows in the Vineyard by Maximillian Potter and We Are Not Ourselves by Matthew Thomas! The deadline to request a free book is July 28th at 6pm Eastern. Look for the August batch around the 4th.
The most requested books so far from the July batch:
More free books: Member Giveaways
Hot titles this month
- The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd
- Orphan Train by Christina Baker Kline
- The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
- Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell
- The Husband's Secret by Liane Moriarty
- The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion
- Allegiant by Veronica Roth
- The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker
- Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell
- The Circle by Dave Eggers
That's it for this month! I'll see you in August.
Questions, comments, ideas? Send them my way.
—Loranne (loranne@librarything.com)
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