With 2008 fast approaching, we're marking our calendars for some
excellent entertainment options. By Jenna Schnuer
and John Ross
Books We Can't Wait to Read
1
THE BOOK:Trail of
Crumbs: Hunger, Love, and the Search for Home by Kim
Sunée (Grand Central Publishing, $25)
WHAT IT'S ABOUT: One of the most graceful
memoirs to come along in recent memory,
Trail of
Crumbs takes readers along on the author's search for her
identity after her mother left her sitting on a park bench in South
Korea when she was just three years old.
DON'T READ IT WHEN YOU'RE HUNGRY: When
Sunée, an accomplished cook, writes about the food she serves to
the people in her life, you can almost feel the warmth of her
kitchen.
WHEN YOU'LL FIND IT: In January
2
THE BOOK: The
Invention of Everything Else by Samantha Hunt
(Houghton Mifflin, $24)
WHAT IT'S ABOUT: This may be one of the
most buzzed-about books of the winter season. With her father about
to zip off in a time machine (stick with us here), Louisa, a
chambermaid at the Hotel New Yorker in 1943, befriends inventor
Nikola Tesla. Apparently, they both have a love for pigeons. The
book follows their friendship as well as that whole time-traveling
thing.
NO, YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE A GEEK TO GET IT: It would be
tempting to shrug it all off as sci-fi foolishness, except that the
author has published and presented some stellar fiction in the
New Yorker and
McSweeney's and on public radio's
This
American Life.
WHEN YOU'LL FIND IT: In February
3THE BOOK: American Photobooth
by Näkki Goranin (W.W. Norton and Company, $30)
WHAT IT'S ABOUT: Photobooths. No, really.
It's a photo book about photobooths. And why not? There's just
something about a photobooth, isn't there? The little half curtain
that serves up a small dose of privacy in the midst of a busy spot,
the strip of pictures, the captured moment in time.…
A GOOD REASON TO LOOK AT PICTURES OF
STRANGERS: Goranin, a collector of historic photos, delivers
plenty of strips that showcase how other people have spent their
minute in the booth. But she also focuses on the history of
photobooths - where they came from, how they've changed - and shows
why, in the age of the camera phone, we still love them.
WHEN YOU'LL FIND IT: In February
4
THE BOOK:The Ten-
Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed
America by David Hajdu (Farrar, Straus and Giroux;
$26)
WHAT IT'S ABOUT: Before Elvis was swiveling
his hips on Ed Sullivan, parents and kids were clashing over a
different pop-culture phenomenon: the sensational and bloody breed
of comics some felt was too adult for children. So shocking and
graphic was the content that some comics were burned in public
bonfires and banned by local governments. The stir reached national
proportions when Congress held hearings on the matter.
ELLINGTON AT NEWPORT SEEMS
LIKE FITTING READING MUSIC: Hajdu, a journalism professor at
Columbia University, knows something about pop culture and
controversy - he's also written biographies of Bob Dylan and Duke
Ellington's composer, Billy Strayhorn.
WHEN YOU'LL FIND IT: In March