As we mentioned last week, Michael and I are at a week-long sales meeting, hearing about all of the wonderful books Random House will be publishing this fall, so we’re happy to turn this podcast over to you, our listeners. Here is the first of two episodes filled with your recommendations of Big Books. We’ll run the rest of these within the next month or so.

• Barbara from Reading Group Choices recommends An Instance of the Fingerpost by Ian Pears
• Vera Baker recommends Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada
• Stephen loves The Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan, and he sneaks in a vote from his wife for The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley
• Beth Rinaldi from Chicago’s favorite big book is Underworld by Don Delillo
• Vickie  raves about Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett, which is also a Books on the Nightstand favorite.
• Eric from Wisconsin loves big books, and recommends Insomnia by Stephen King, which features Eric’s favorite character from all of literature.
• Pam from Minnesota recommends The Terror by Dan Simmons. (This is on my reading list too, and I know Michael loved it!)
• Annie Frank calls in her vote for George RR Martin’s saga A Song of Ice and Fire, which begins with Game of Thrones.
• Lorraine  from Mohegan Lake, NY gives a second vote for Ken Follet’s Pillars of the Earth and is looking forward to reading Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel.
• Ashley mentions that some of her favorite big books are The Lord of the Rings trilogy and the Harry Potter series, but she also tells about her favorite reading experience: trying to recreate the Victorian way of reading by reading classic novels in their original, serialized form. Pretty cool!
• An anonymous caller says that I Know This Much is True by Wally Lamb is “the shortest 901 page book that I’ve ever read”!
• Robin gives a third vote for Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett, and a second nod to Wally Lamb’s I Know This Much is True. She also sneaks in a rave for The Book Thief. Robin calls back to tell us about Before You Know Kindness by Chris Bohjalian, even though it isn’t a long book.
• Lisa from Albuquerque NM recommends Shantaram by David Roberts

Thanks to all of you who called. I hope it was a good experience. The contest to win copies of The Passage is now over (and we’ll pick winners as soon as we’re back in our offices), but we’d like to encourage all of you to call us, any time, with a book recommendation that we can share with our listeners.

Embarrassed to dog-ear

It’s true: in segment 1, I confess to turning down the corners of books to mark my place, especially on advanced reading copies. Michael and I talk about various ways to mark a page in a book, and it appears that we have different rules for different types of books. What do you do?

No Bookmark Required for these (05:10)

We love big fat books, but sometimes short books are just the thing needed at a particular moment. Of course we have some recommendations:  Michael likes The Clothes They Stood Up In by Alan Bennett, a novel about a middle-aged couple in London who discover that they have been robbed and that everything they own has been taken except for the clothes on their back. He also recommends You’re an Animal, Viskovitz, by Alessandro Boffa, which is a collection of short stories featuring the character Viskovitz, who in each story is a different animal.

Since I can’t pass up an opportunity to gush about Ian McEwan, my choice for short book is The Comfort of Strangers. This is a a brilliant, dark, psychological novel that could be considered a horror novel in a sense, though there are no monsters or zombies.

One Book We Can’t Wait for you to Read (Outsourced edition) (14:15)

Michael and I both loved Howard Frank Mosher’s early novel, A Stranger in the Kingdom, and we both wanted to talk Howard’s latest novel, Walking to Gatlinburg. But truly, nobody talks about a Howard Frank Mosher novel better than our colleague Ron Koltnow. So we asked Ron to call in and be our guest recommender for this segment.  I hope you enjoy hearing a different voice this week!

And we’re off!

Michael and I will be gone next week at a company sales meeting, hearing about books that will be published in the Fall of 2010. So we’re going to turn next week’s show over to our listeners. Many of you called in recommendations for your favorite “big” books, and have the chance to win a copy of The Passage. Next week we’ll play some of those calls. I hope you enjoy it!

photo credit: :Day 53: A Kind of Miracle by quinn.anya via Flickr

Ann discusses the Percy Jackson movie and shares her daughter’s opinion on how it compared to the book. But there’s more news for Rick Riordan fans: the first book in his new series, The Kane Chronicles, comes out on May 4, 2010. Click on the link to read an excerpt.

Next, we discuss books that have been made into movies that are just out, or due out soon: The Last Station, a look at Tolstoy’s final year; Thinking in Pictures, the basis for HBO’s Temple Grandin; Creation a new movie about Charles Darwin, might lead moviegoers back to The Origin of Species; the new HBO miniseries The Pacific drew inspiration from both Helmet for my Pillow and With the Old Breed; the non-fiction book Imperial Life in the Emerald City is the basis for Matt Damon’s new movie The Green Zone. Michael ends the segment with a look at two comics series. One has been made into a movie, The Losers, and one is the basis for the Fox TV show Human Target.

In segment three, Michael recommends Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, the story of an unlikely friendship in a small English village. It was recently reviewed – glowingly – in the New York Times. Ann tells us about Henning Mankell’s latest novel, The Man from Beijing. Mankell is best known for his Kurt Wallander mysteries set in Sweden, and while this book does begin with a Swedish mystery, the story also travels to 19th-century California and to Africa. (Click here to listen to an NPR story about the book and to read an excerpt.)

movie theater image by katstan

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Many thanks to Rebecca Skloot for her audio endorsement that runs at the beginning of today’s episode. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is hitting bestseller lists all over the country, including The New York Times and The Boston Globe. Congratulations, Rebecca!

More parts of a book, explained:

Thanks for the wonderful comments so many of you have left on the first Books on the Nightstand video! In it, Michael described some of the many production techniques publishers use to make books stand out. In this segment of the podcast we talk about two more: deckle edges and french flaps.

The Books We’re Cooking from Most:

Michael recommends Mad Hungry: Feeding Men and Boys, a cookbook even his wife loves to cook from. Michael’s also very excited about Everyday Food: Fresh Flavor Fast, the sequel to Everyday Food: Great Food Fast, which he discussed in our first cookbook podcast. Ann’s recommendations lean a little more toward “high-end” cooking, but are still made for the home chef: Ad Hoc at Home and Momofuku.

One Very Special Book We Can’t Wait for you to Read (PLUS, a Giveaway!):

This time around, both Ann and Michael rave about one book: The Passage by Justin Cronin. This is a book that doesn’t come out until 6.8.10, but it has been generating an unprecedented amount of buzz, so we wanted you to know about it now. Readers of all ages, genders and reading tastes have been amazed by this book. It has earned comparisons to The Lord of the Rings, The Historian and The Stand (in fact, Stephen King is an early and ardent fan). It has kept many folks up late into the night, saying, “Just one more chapter.” The great news is that the book is over 700 pages long and it’s the first of a trilogy, so there’s a lot to love.

I know June seems a long way off, but don’t despair. Thanks to the folks at Ballantine Books, we have 10 copies of a special 120-page preview excerpt to give away, along with one copy of the full book. Here’s how you can enter to win: just call our voicemail line (209.867.READ) and tell us about your favorite “big” book. Something with a ton of pages that you couldn’t turn fast enough. We’ll use a random number generator to pick our 11 winners. Just make sure to get your voicemail to us by the end of the day on Saturday March 6.

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Come talk with us:

We want to hang out with you online! Whether you are a new listener or have been with us from the beginning, we want to talk books with you. It’s been awhile since we “advertised” all of the places that you can find us online, so we thought we’d use this episode to lay them all out for you. Here are all of the places online that you can connect with us.

Goodreads – we have a pretty active discussion forum at Goodreads, made up of people who love to talk about books. Goodreads is free to join, but you do have to be a member to participate in discussions there.

Facebook – Our ‘fan’ page has been a lot of fun to set up and see who joins, but we’d love to encourage more discussion there as well. If you don’t want to join Goodreads, and are already on Facebook, it’s an easy place to come hang out with us. We do have a discussion board set up there, but most people seem to just write on our wall, and we respond there. I guess the discussion board there is a bit redundant.

Twitter – It appears that many people use twitter as a means to let them know when a new blog post or podcast episode is up, so we’ve set up a Books on the Nightstand twitter account. It’s mostly just automated posts, and “official” BOTNS announcements. If you want to talk with us individually, please follow our personal twitter feeds: @AnnKingman and @MKindness. If you follow us, please send us an @ message telling us you’re a BOTNS reader or listener, so that we can be sure to follow you back.

And then of course, we very much encourage comments on our various blog posts here, and calls to our voicemail line.

Sherlockian Pastiche:

Sarah called in from Gainesville, Florida to recommend Dust and Shadow by Lyndsay Faye, a novel about Sherlock Holmes’s investigation of the Jack the Ripper murders. Sarah’s call prompted us to think about other books that have Sherlock Holmes at the center.  A Publisher’s Weekly article titled “The Return of Sherlock Holmes” talks about many of those books, and Michael and I tell you about some of our favorites. We’ve listed all of the titles below, so that you can check them out at your leisure. In preparation for today’s episode, Michael started reading the first Sherlock Holmes mystery, A Study in Scarlet, and he’s enjoying it quite a lot.

Two Books We Can’t Wait for you to Read:

I tell you about The Routes of Man, a discussion of how roads are transforming cultures around the world, for both good and bad. Michael talks about The Secret History of the Mongol Queens, the lost history of the women who were the heirs to Genghis Khan.

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We encourage you to write down or print out the title information and shop at your local bookstore. Titles link to LibraryThing, a social networking site that allows you to catalog your home library. LibraryThing also links to various online purchasing options. Here are the books from this post:

Dust and Shadow by Lyndsay Faye

The Seven Per-Cent Solution by Nicholas Meyer

Sherlock Holmes’s War of the Worlds by Manley Wade Wellman and Wade Wellman

A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle

The Beekeeper’s Apprentice by Laurie R. King

The God of the Hive by Laurie R. King  (May, 2010)

A Slight Trick of the Mind by Mitch Cullin

The Routes of Man by Ted Conover

Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford

The Secret History of the Mongol Queens by Jack by Jack Weatherford (February 16, 2010)

(all information is for the U.S. editions)

photo credit: Grace by chrisdonia

It’s an abbreviated episode this week as Michael is winding down his sabbatical and spending time at home with 4-month-old Finn. Finn provided his own contribution to this week’s podcast, as you will hear. In an unplanned moment, Ann asks Michael how his plan of reading nothing but graphic novels is working out. If you have children of your own, you will likely not be surprised by Michael’s response.

We want to know: if you had a month off from work, with pay, how would you spend it? Would you plan to read more? Let us know, in the comments or via voicemail.

We do still have two books we can’t wait for you to read: Michael talks about Secrets of Eden by Chris Bohjalian. Chris is a favorite at Books on the Nightstand (you may remember us talking about Skeletons at the Feast) and we love this book. It’s vintage Bohjalian, perfect for fans of his earlier books Midwives and The Double Bind.

I have been waiting to tell you about Things We Didn’t See Coming, a collection of connected stories by Steven Amsterdam. Last fall, I wrote a blog post titled, “What do you say when a book haunts you?”, and it was in response to my reading of this book. Over the few days I was reading this book, I could not stop thinking about the stories, the setting and what was happening between each story. It’s a unique collection of postapocalyptic stories, some may call it dystopic, but I think it’s much gentler than The Road.

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We encourage you to write down or print out the title information and shop at your local bookstore. Titles link to LibraryThing, a social networking site that allows you to catalog your home library. LibraryThing also links to various online purchasing options. Here are the books from this post:

Secrets of Eden by Chris Bohjalian by Shaye Arehart Books hardcover
Things We Didn’t See Coming by Steven Amsterdam, Knopf hardcover

photo credit: Chillaxin' by DrewVigal

We begin today’s podcast hearing from three of our listeners. Shannon, from Ohio, called our voice mail line to weigh in on some of Ann’s E-book comments from episode 60, and to share a favorite novel inspired by a classic. Nicky from Bicester, England wrote to tell us about a book group she started for people with fibromyalgia, a condition that can often make it hard to finish a book. And finally, Kerry told us about two things she’d like to hear more of on Books on the Nightstand: listener recommendations and listener stories (who you are, where you live, what you do, etc.). We’d love to be able to incorporate more of these things into the podcast or blog. Please send us your recommendations for books and tell us a little about yourself while you’re at it! You can use our voice mail line, contact us via e-mail or leave a message in the comments here.

Next up, we discuss books in translation. Through no plan of our own, we seem to have discussed several translated books over the last year, including The Unit, The Girl with The Dragon Tattoo, The Glass Room and The Patience Stone.  (Edited: Stuart Allen reminded me that in fact The Glass Room was not translated, but was instead written in English. I knew that, but for some reason think of it as a work in translation, perhaps because those have been my favorite reads of late. Mea culpa, and thank you Stuart.)

A recent article at The Chronicle of Higher Education discusses the difficulties translators have being properly recognized in academia. (Unfortunately, the article is now only available online to subscribers.) Michael mentions A Void by Georges Perec, written in French without using the letter “e” and then translated into English also without that integral letter. Ann fondly remembers Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual which recently came out  in a new translation. Ann also mentions The Elegance of the Hedgehog, the hugely popular book originally written in French.  Other online resources mentioned, both from the University of Rochester: Open Letter, a publishing program that specializes in works in translation; and Three Percent, a resource for international literature.

It’s a very special segment three. Both Michael and Ann have been waiting months to talk about these books. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloottells the previously unknown true story of a poor, African-American woman in the 1950’s whose cells have been the basis for many of the scientific breakthroughs of the past 50 years. (Check out this graphic for a visual representation of their impact.) Ann tries to make sense while conveying her love of Union Atlantic by Adam Haslett, a novel that may well be one of the literary highlights of 2010 — consider yourself forewarned.

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We begin our episode with a discussion of the recent Moby Dick Marathon that took place at the New Bedford Whaling Museum. Several of the marathon readers read from a Nook, Barnes & Noble’s e-reader. E-readers were also big at the recent Consumer Electronics Show, where several new models debuted.

Segment one of today’s podcast was inspired by an article about the discovery of a lost civilization in the Amazon. When Michael first saw the headlines, he immediately thought of The Lost City of Z, a book by David Grann that we’ve loved and recommended.  It’s wonderful when something that you’ve read makes you take notice of news and events beyond the pages of the book. This often happens to us with nonfiction, and often changes our level of interest in a topic.

In segment 2, we discuss some great books that were inspired by classic literature. Ann tells how a phobia interfered with her reading of Mary Reilly, a great novel by Valerie Martin that retells the story of Dr. Jekyll and Mister Hyde, through the eyes of a servant girl in Dr. Jekyll’s household. Michael talks about Dreamhouse, a novel set in current-day but with many parallels to Alice in Wonderland.

The classically-inspired theme carries through to segment 3, Two Books We Can’t Wait For You To Read. Michael talks about Alice I Have Been by Melanie Benjamin, and Ann calls Bloodroot by Amy Greene “an Appalachian Wuthering Heights.”

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(all information is for the U.S. editions).

BOTNS #59: We Hereby Resolve - click to listen or download

Actually, the first resolution is to try and use words other than “fantastic” to describe the books we love. Michelle Kerns at Examiner.com wrote an article titled, “The top 20 most annoying book reviewer cliches and how to use them all in one meaningless review“. It’s a funny article, but also one that we take caution from. We’ll try to watch what we say, and make it meaningful.

By now you’ve likely noticed the changes here at the Books on the Nightstand website. One of the changes that we are most excited about is the Index of all of the books we’ve talked about or written about since the blog was founded. The index is the most-frequently requested feature from our readers and listeners, and I’m thrilled that we have been able to put it together. This would not have been possible without our team of volunteers at the Books on the Nightstand Goodreads group — a huge thank you to Eric, Linda,  Sidweena, Suzanne, Tanya and Trish.

If you have anything you’d like to see here at Books on the Nightstand, please let us know. We can’t promise we’ll be able to do everything, but we will try where possible. As always, you can contact us through the commenting here on the blog, through our voicemail number, or via email.

If your New Year’s resolution is to save money, we can help with that: in segment 2 we focus on great books that will be published in paperback this month. Some of our favorites are here, but also one or two books that you haven’t yet heard us talk about. The dates we’ve listed below are the dates the books will be in US bookstores, and I’m sure that your favorite local bookstore will happily take a pre-order now.

• Mistress of the Monarchy by Alison Weir (January 5th)
• The Unwritten by Mike Carey and Peter Gross (January 12th)
• Lark and Termite by Jayne Anne Phillips (January 12th)
• The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley (January 19th)
• Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese (January 26th)
• The Lost City of Z by David Grann (January 26th)

Today’s episode marks the return of one of your favorite segments, Two Books We Can’t Wait For You to Read.  Ann talks about Noah’s Compass, the new novel from Anne Tyler, a novel about the connections between people and the strange relationships that we often have with those around us. Michael tells us about The Privileges by Jonathan Dee, a wonderfully-written novel with very real characters that Michael could not stop reading.

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