Good reads

This afternoon, a change of pace: a few of our recommended reads this Summer.

Tolly: In Defense of Food! I was inspired to read it after seeing "Food, Inc.," which released a few weeks ago. Michael Pollan does such a great job of restoring the relationship between food and people: I can't stop thinking about this one line where he's talking about a berry ("so this berry walks into a bar"....heh), saying it tells us when it wants us to eat it. When it gets a bright, deep hue, it's saying: "I'm ready for you to spread my genes now." I love that. I love it when berries talk to me. I'm still not an angel when it comes to food, but I'm 50x more conscious about what I buy, and am determined to plant a garden when Texas returns to sub-surface-of-the-sun temperatures. Thanks Michael.

Rusty: Reminisces of a Stock Operator by Edwin Lefevre, originally published in 1923. I like it because it's more about the market's mentality than gimmicks, stock picks or trends (which are often outdated or played out before the book is published). It's timeless for that reason and most brokers will tell you it's still their favorite book on investing.

Merritt: The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenberger. I am both fascinated and dumbfounded by the concept of time travel, but Clare and Henry's love story is intoxicating (I might have a literary crush on Henry DeTamble). Next up, The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich. I am excited to get the full scoop on the founding of Facebook. Why it is a good summer read? The front cover has a picture of a red bra and a lipstick-stained martini glass. Enough said.

Stephanie: My bookshelf skews toward stories that are introspective and ones that take me to another place, hence my obession with travel memoirs, foodie books, and other firsthand accounts that show us the limitlessness of possibility. My latest read happens to also be a shameless plug for a book we're working on, Halfway to Each Other by Susan Pohlman. Unfortunately, the masses won't find it in stores until September, but pre-order on Amazon now. The book is the true story of how Susan and her husband rescusitated their marriage by moving the whole family to Italy for a year. Cozy up with some vino as you are whisked to the dolce vita and soon you'll be unplugging your TV, putting down your iPhone and booking the next flight to the Italian Riviera.

Kelly: The Septembers of Shiraz by Dalia Sofer. It's the fictional story of a family that's torn apart when the father is accused of being a spy during the Iranian Revolution. The story is told from each family member's perspective: the father, the mother, the daughter and the son in America. The book is loosely based on the author's own life- she fled Iran when she was ten. In the biography section of the book, she talks about what it was like as a little girl to leave her house. For the longest time she wondered if anyone moved the toys in her room. When writing this story, Sofer paid the same amount of attention to details. It's beautifully written. Also Patrick Rosal's My American Kundiman. He's a former bboy turned poet who understands sounds so well that his poetry flows off the page like a hip-hop track. Seriously. Poems range in this book from subdued and wistful to in-your-face-confident.

Now go read a book.

The buzz is building for the Texas Book Festival

From the Austin City Limits Music Festival to SXSW, Austin is known for hosting volumes of festivals throughout the year. Lucky for us, we don’t have to travel very far this Fall as Austin is also home to one of the biggest book festivals in the country, The Texas Book Festival. Established in 1995 by First Lady Laura Bush, the festival’s purpose is to increase awareness of authors and literature and to raise money for Texas public libraries. The Texas Book Festival is held in the state capitol building and offers open sessions to visitors and book signings.

Following the common philosophy that “everything’s bigger in Texas,” the Texas Book Festival is certainly no exception. Visitors from across the country flock to the state’s capitol to rub elbows with the heavyweights of the literary world. Past guests include Angela’s Ashes author Frank McCourt, The Audacity of Hope author and current presidential candidate Barack Obama, and hundreds of others. This year is sure to be equally as impressive, with featured authors including:

- Monica Brown, author of the upcoming Butterflies on Carmen Street/Mariposas en la Calle Carmen. Brown’s Latino, European and Jewish heritage shines through the novel, with it’s text in both English and Spanish. Brown has written a number of biographies of famous members of the Latino community (Celia Cruz and Gabriel Garcia Marquez are examples) aimed at young children.

- Roz Chast, cartoonist whose drawings of the neurotic among us have been appearing in New Yorker Magazine since 1978. Her drawings offer a hint of light-heartedness to the often stuffy magazine. I liked her 2006 collection, Theories of Everything: Selected, Collected, and Health-Inspected Cartoons.

- David Talbot, author who ushered in online journalism with his founding of Salon.com in 1995. He’s written a book called Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years that sheds light on JFK’s administration and assassination and his brother Robert’s reaction to it all.

- Kristin Gore (Al’s daughter,) Jenna Bush (W’s daughter) and John Leake will also be making appearances.

Mark your calendars: November 3rd & 4th at the State Capitol Building.

Is getting banned good for your book? It could be.

One of my favorite books of all time is J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, which also happens to rank high up on the American Library Association’s list of 100 Most Challenged Books from 1990 to 2000. Although the somewhat-controversial book wasn’t included in the curriculum of my high school’s English department in Middle Of Nowhere, Texas, that didn’t stop me from reading it.

With the ALA’s 26th Annual Banned Books Week next month, the organization has started building buzz again for its list of most challenged books of 2006. At the top of the list is And Tango Makes Three by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell. The children’s book covers the true story of two male penguins living in the New York Zoo who partnered up to raise a baby penguin after the egg was abandoned by its original parents. The book received a total of 546 written challenges last year. According to the ALA, a challenge is “an attempt to remove or restrict materials, based upon the objections of a person or group. A banning is the removal of those materials.” Other books on the 2006 list include Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Beloved, Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower and Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War. The ALA carefully noted that The Catcher in the Rye, which annually holds a top spot on the list, didn’t make the cut this year. I guess people aren’t so offended by Holden Caulfield anymore.

It bodes well for the PR industry that, excuse the cliché, “there’s no such thing as bad publicity.” Challenged and banned books are way more interesting to the media and the public than the books that are easily accepted into schools and libraries without a second thought.

Controversy, when packaged correctly, can be a very good thing for book sales and a great thing for your publicist.

Do you have a favorite banned book? Are there any books you’d like to see banned from libraries, Amazon and any other retail outlets, just because? Apparently B&N has reneged on its plan to ban O.J.’s book (so much for the moral stance).

I’ll go first. I'd like to ban Paris Hilton’s Confessions of an Heiress, just because it’s Paris Hilton.

Where have all the book people gone?

I’m a self-professed book worm. I always have been and always will be. My love affair with books began as early as pre-school. I have vivid memories of my father reading to me from the pages of Shel Silverstein’s Where the Sidewalk Ends and The Missing Piece, Ludwig Bemelmans’s Madeline and Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are. When I was 6, I named my first dog Teeny Tiny (which seemed fitting as she was a miniature dachshund) after one of my literary obsessions, The Teeny-Tiny Woman by Paul Galdone.

I guess it’s no surprise that my passion for books led to a career in publishing, more specifically, in literary PR. But what does surprise me, is that I stand virtually alone in the U.S. as an avid book reader (particularly one in her mid-20s). I recently read an article that I found disconcerting. According to an Associated Press-Ipsos poll released Tuesday, one in four Americans read no books last year!

Since January, I’ve read nine books, not including the ones I’ve promoted since then (which would make the grand total of books read this year 23.) In an effort to save books from collecting dust on the night-stands everywhere and to motivate others to feed their brains – imagination not excluded – I took a survey of my fellow P&P staffers to find this year’s top picks from their reading-for-pleasure lists (clients not eligible). Here are some of our recommendations:

Amber Childres
1. East of Eden by John Steinbeck (Penguin)
2. Devil in the White City by Erik Larson (Vintage)
3. Water for Elephants: A Novel by Sara Gruen (Algonquin)

Amy Currie
1. The Road by Cormac McCarthy (Vintage)
2. The Fool’s Tale: A Novel by Nicole Galland (Harper)
3. The Crystal Cave (The Arthurian Saga, Book I) by Mary Stewart (Eos)

Elizabeth Peppers
1. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini (Riverhead)
2. Deception Point by Dan Brown (Pocket)

3. Living History by Hillary Rodham Clinton (Scribner)

Tolly Moseley
1. The Buddha of Suburbia by Hanif Kureishi (Viking)
2. Geek Love by Katherine Dunn (Vintage)
3. Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise by Ruth Reichl (Penguin)

Rusty Shelton
1. 11 Days in December: Christmas at the Bulge, 1944, by Stanley Weintraub (Free Press)
2. The Corporate Coach by James B. Miller (HarperBusiness)
3. Castaway Kid by R.B. Mitchell (Tyndale)

Stephanie Mayabb
1. Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert (Penguin)

2. The Last American Man by Elizabeth Gilbert (Penguin)

3. Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh (Pantheon)

Katie Andrews
1. How to Hepburn: Lessons on Living from Kate the Great by Karen Karbo (Bloomsbury)
2. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Vintage)
3. Wittgenstein's Mistress by David Markson (Dalkey Archive)