Q. What are you reading now?

I recently finished reading Andrea Hairston’s new book, “The Archangels of Funk.” It’s a brilliant, fun, hopeful take on the slow apocalypse, with AI and magic and aliens and lovely engaging characters. Now I’m reading Sharon Shinn’s new novel, “Whispering Wood,” set in her Elemental Blessings series. She’s my favorite romantic fantasy writer and it’s so good to have a new book in this series.

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Q. How do you decide what to read next?

It’s pretty random, just whatever catches my attention. Sometimes I plan to read something, then get a new book and look at the first few pages, and end up reading that instead.

Q. Do you remember the first book that made an impact on you?

I don’t know if it’s the first book, but it’s one I read very early, really too early, and I still remember it vividly. It’s “Malevil” by Robert Merle. My parents had a lot of Reader’s Digest volumes of abridged and somewhat bowdlerized novels, and I read “Malevil” first in this abridged version and then got the real version from the library. I was probably in middle school, and it was very much a book intended for adults. It’s an SF story set in the ‘70s, of post-apocalyptic survival by a small group of people in a restored French castle. It’s in first person, but there’s a second narrator who makes later notes and additions, adding his version of the parts the first narrator left out. There was a lot of technique in it, like an unreliable-to-a-certain-extent narrator, that very much influenced me.

Q. Do you have any favorite book covers?

The cover for “A Wizard of Earthsea,” by Ursula Le Guin, the 1975 Bantam edition, the art by Pauline Ellison with the dragon winding through the island city. I found it in a bookstore in a mall and it completely captured my imagination. The Earthsea trilogy had a big influence on me, too.

Q. Do you have a favorite book or books?

I really love the “Rivers of London” series by Ben Aaronovitch. It’s a fantasy series set in modern-day London about wizards who deal with supernatural crime. It combines a lot of my favorite things, fantasy, mystery, an appreciation of the history of the place the characters occupy and how that history and past affects the present. Characters being smart, caring about each other, figuring out how their magic works using scientific methods, a vast and detailed world. The books really reward re-reading, too, with little details that become important later.

Q. Which books do you plan, or hope, to read next?

That’s a good question. Right now I’m trying to decide between S.L. Huang’s “The Water Outlaws,” Brent Lambert’s “A Necessary Chaos,” and “Silver Nitrate” by Sylvia Moreno-Garcia. They’re all very different books and I’m looking forward to all of them and it’s tough deciding which one to start next. I’m also very much looking forward to whatever N.K. Jemisin writes next, and Kate Elliott’s next book in her space opera trilogy. I loved the most recent one, “Furious Heaven.”

Q. What’s a memorable book experience – good or bad – you’re willing to share?

I read Nnedi Okorafor’s novella “Remote Control” during the snow and ice storms that caused the massive failure of the Texas power grid in February of 2021. Our house at the time was built in 1967 and had very little insulation, so without heat, it was in the low 30s to high 20s inside. We were going for 12-hour stretches without power, and we were in danger of hypothermia. That book was a lifeline for me. It gave me time I could mentally step out of the situation I was in, which is the best thing a book can do for you. I also love her other work, particularly the “Akata Witch” books.

More books, authors and bestsellers

Ordered thoughts

Sheila Heti spent nearly 14 years on new book “Alphabetical Diaries.” Here’s why. READ MORE

• • •

Miles to go

Quincy Troupe nearly punched Miles Davis. Then he co-wrote the jazz icon’s biography. READ MORE

• • •

Women in war

Why Kristin Hannah decided to write about Vietnam War nurses in “The Women.” READ MORE

• • •

The week’s bestsellers

The top-selling books at your local independent bookstores. READ MORE

And while I’ve had plenty of Super Sundays watching the game with friends and family, I’ve spent others enjoying the quiet that comes over the city (minus the shouts and groans you hear after big plays) as the freeways get a little freer and the bookstores, museums and other favorite places get a little less crowded.

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One year as a big game played, we got a docent tour of the Huntington Library from my wife’s godfather, George, and I remain grateful for that time, especially now that he – one of the most hilarious storytellers I’ve ever encountered and a kind, lovely man, too – is no longer with us.

So whatever you do on Sunday, I hope it’s something you enjoy. If it’s reading, which is a safe bet if you’ve made it to this paragraph, I was thinking about football books and one of the best is “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk,” which takes place during a Dallas Cowboys game on Thanksgiving as a group of Iraq War vets are being honored for acts of bravery. (It also has a connection to this year’s big game if you need a bit of trivia: The 2016 Ang Lee film adaption starred the actor Joe Alwyn, Taylor Swift’s beau in the pre-Travis Kelce days.)

Another recent football novel about a guy named Billy is Eli Cranor’s Edgar-winning “Don’t Know Tough,” a hard-hitting noir about a high school football player in Arkansas, Billy Lowe, a newly transplanted coach from California and we’ll leave it at that to avoid spoilers. But it’s good.

There are plenty of other football books I’ve been meaning to read – “Friday Night Lights,” “North Dallas Forty,” “Black Sunday” and “Brian’s Song,” to name a few. And while I can recall endless middle school page-turners about the big game, maybe my favorite football book of my youth was a pricey, photo-heavy tome I saved up to buy when I was a kid. With its dramatic cover featuring former Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Terry Bradshaw, I believed the book was a more grown-up item than my football cards, showing the worldly sophistication of a boy who had a coffee table book despite not yet owning a coffee table.

Was it a great book? I’m guessing probably not, but every young reader has a book or two that holds a kind of sway over them that far outstrips what’s inside the pages. Another one for me was a kid’s oversize novelization of Disney’s “Robin Hood.” Was that one any good? I have managed to hold onto my big, battered copy, so I could go and check for you. But I’d rather not know.

My chief memory of the “Robin Hood” book is my dear mother reaching the words, “The end,” with a kind of palpable relief – and even as the words still hung limply in the air, I said: “Read. It. Again.” I can remember the weariness on her face, but I’m pretty sure she turned back to page 1 and started again.

I’ve thought of that moment whenever my kids said the same thing – whether it was for more of a lovely picture book by Oliver Jeffers or a barely-coherent line of “Scooby-Doo” paperbacks we somehow acquired  – and I’ve done as she would have: I read the damn thing again.

Side note: Some movie tie-in books are frankly terrible, and so there were nights when I would practice my editing as I read them, trimming a clumsy half-page description down to one line of polished prose as I read it aloud. Not only did it help keep me awake, but it offered a bonus challenge: I had to remember these mental edits when the child asked me to read it again.

In short, we all want compelling stories, whether on the football field or off, so I’m going to direct you to some more worthy ones below. And coming up, I have an author interview to share with you and an excellent new book that we’ll be talking about soon.

So whatever you choose to do this weekend – watch football or hit a bookstore or, I don’t know, read a delightful interview about the 14-year odyssey of “Alphabetical Diaries” author Sheila Heti that isn’t afraid to also mention her dog, Feldman – I hope you have a great weekend.

More stories

Writer Emily St. Martin wrote about “Eat the Mouth That Feeds You” author Carribean Fragoza and the South El Monte Arts Posse’s efforts to open a free lending library in El Monte’s Zamora Park. Read more

Old Town Monrovia’s Underdog Bookstore, the LGBTQ-owned bookstore I wrote about last year, has been subjected to repeated racist and homophobic  outbursts, according to the store staff. I saw the Instagram reel about the situation, and my colleague Victoria Ivie went out to get the story. Read more

A controversial city policy has librarians at Huntington Beach Central Library pulling children’s books from its shelves for reevaluation. The policy, according to Michael Slaten’s story, says no city library should allow children “ready access” to books that contain content of a sexual nature. Among those pulled? “Everybody Poops.” Read more

More books, authors and bestsellers

Ordered thoughts

Sheila Heti spent nearly 14 years on new book “Alphabetical Diaries.” Here’s why. READ MORE

• • •

Miles to go

Quincy Troupe nearly punched Miles Davis. Then he co-wrote the jazz icon’s biography. READ MORE

• • •

Women in war

Why Kristin Hannah decided to write about Vietnam War nurses in “The Women.” READ MORE

• • •

The week’s bestsellers

The top-selling books at your local independent bookstores. READ MORE

Next on ‘Bookish’

The next installment is Feb. 16, at 5 p.m., as hosts Sandra Tsing Loh and Samantha Dunn talk about upcoming books. Sign up for free now.

• • •

Read any books that you want to tell people about? Email epedersen@scng.com with “ERIK’S BOOK PAGES” in the subject line and I may include your comments in an upcoming newsletter.

And if you enjoy this free newsletter, please consider sharing it with someone who likes books or getting a digital subscription to support local coverage.

Thanks, as always, for reading.

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“I’ve been telling that in many ways, I’ve been writing this book since I was 9 years old,” the University of Southern California professor says. “Before I knew I was writing it, I was writing it.”

Boyd turned 9 in 1973, the year generally accepted as the birth of rap, and that’s where “Rapper’s Deluxe” begins, at an apartment party in the Bronx, where a DJ named Kool Herc showed a new way of spinning records.

The book ends, neatly, if not entirely by intent, 50 years later, when hip-hop culture had reached a peak far from its underground origins, a handful of its biggest stars playing the halftime show at the Super Bowl, a sign of the music’s dominance of the culture.

“The fact that coincides with the anniversary is one thing,” says Boyd, the Katherine and Frank Price Endowed Chair for the Study of Race and Popular Culture, and a professor at its School of Cinema and Media Studies. “But I think it’s a story that unfolded from the ’70s to the present. I needed all that time in order to tell the story.

“Ten years ago, 20 years ago, this book couldn’t have been written,” he says. “It could only have been written now. One of the main reasons is because you needed all that time for this to kind of fully unfold and reveal itself. And that’s where I came along.

“As I was watching that Super Bowl halftime performance that I ended the book with – at SoFi Stadium with Dr. Dre and Snoop and Kendrick Lamar and that group – I realized, you know, this is it,” Boyd says. “This is the most mainstream stage in American culture. And, you know, 30 years ago, there’s no way possible that Dre and Snoop would have been performing at the halftime show of the Super Bowl.

“When you get to that Super Bowl stage, it’s a strong indication that you’ve reached the sort of center of mainstream society. And you can talk about things happening afterward, but the sort of larger point has been made.”

‘Root to the fruit’

“Rapper’s Deluxe” traces the evolution of rap music and hip-hop culture with chapters organized by decades, each packed with photos around Boyd’s essays on artists, trends, history and pop culture.

Its name is a play on “Rapper’s Delight,” the 1979 Sugar Hill Gang track that’s credited as the first rap single. But Boyd makes clear that while its success put rap on the radio and exposed its new sounds to listeners far from its birthplace in New York City, there was a whole lot more going on that decade behind the music.

“The point I was trying to make in that ’70s chapter was we’ve had examples of, if not rap specifically, hop-hop culture for a long time before a lot of people even knew it,” he says. “The seeds for what we would later call rap music were being planted. And if you use that metaphor, you know, you plant seeds, they don’t grow right away. That takes time.

“So listening to Muhammad Ali rhyme before his fights to me is part of what would later be identified as hop-hop culture,” Boyd says. “Listening to Richard Pryor on his comedy albums. Watching blaxploitation movies.”

“Rapper’s Delight” is a historical marker, he says. But the groundwork was laid in communities where Ali and Pryor and “Super Fly” and “Shaft” were popular, neighborhoods where Black veterans came home changed by Vietnam and Black Panthers and activists such as Angela Davis had support.

“I like to say we go from the root to the fruit,” Boyd says. “The seeds were planted and eventually those seeds bore fruit. All of those things were happening in the ’70s. Later, they’re very visible in hip-hop.

“I start the ’70s chapter with that story about the week that DJ Kool Herc threw the sort of legendary party,” he says. “The No. 1 movie at the box office that week is Pam Grier’s film ‘Coffy.’

“Twenty years later, there’s a rapper named Foxy Brown” – after the Pam Grier title role in the 1974 blaxploitation film of the same name – “and Quentin Tarantino is making ‘Jackie Brown’ starring Pam Grier,” Boyd says. “There’s a connection there that nobody anticipated in 1973, but you can see the influence of that by the time you get to the ’90s.”

‘Suburbs to the hood’

Rap, like many musical genres before it, experienced growing pains on its way to its worldwide popularity. But throughout the ’80s, Boyd writes that a combination of factors, including the rise of hip-hop-themed movies, fashion, and art, as well as rap’s appeal to celebrities and sports figures and their fans, helped it burst into the mainstream in unprecedented ways.

Unlike earlier Black American music such as blues and jazz, rap had freer access, and an unlikely ally, as it reached young listeners in every corner of the country, Boyd says. Rap emerged from the Black community, and soon spread far and wide.

“Historically, there were barriers to the expression of some of those older genres of music,” he says. “In spite of that, they still found loyal White fan bases who would be influenced by that music. But it didn’t have the same sort of free form of expression and access that would be available for rap music by the 1980s.

“Which is why I talk about the role of MTV,” Boyd says. “Which, of course, originally was hostile in terms of playing Black music, but by the late ’80s, ‘Yo MTV Raps,’ a hugely popular show, is what allows the music to spread throughout the country, whether or not the people listening to it had any direct connection to that experience or not.

“It didn’t matter,” he says. “Everybody was watching MTV whether you’re in an urban area, a suburban area, a rural area. If you had cable and you got MTV you could look at ‘Yo MTV Raps.’”

Rap music, like many genres before it, was a way for younger listeners to rebel against the tastes of their parents’ generation, he writes. Where early rock and roll saw White performers co-opt Black artists and find huge commercial success, rap was largely impervious to that kind of appropriation.

“When you get to rap music, so much of this is about lived experience,” Boyd says. “So as the music becomes more personal, a White person can’t come and claim that this is their own. They can listen to it and appreciate it and celebrate it. But it becomes kind of a minstrel show if you’re saying this is my life.”

A White rap star such as Eminem succeeded because he didn’t appropriate hip-hop culture as much as become part of it, something recognized by his early mentor Dr. Dre, which gave him credibility that a rapper like Vanilla Ice couldn’t touch.

“Eminem is the anti-Vanilla Ice,” Boyd says. “I think it speaks to just how things changed from, say, the time that Elvis was popular as someone appropriating Black music, and Eminem, who came along and said, ‘I want to be part of this culture. I want to be in it.’

“So when Jay-Z says we didn’t crossover, I think it’s important,” he says, referencing the line “I ain’t crossover I brought the suburbs to the hood’ in 1999’s “Come and Get Me.” “When you think about the ’80s, it’s the era of crossover, from Michael Jackson, Prince and Tina Turner. Whitney Houston.

“Hip-hop didn’t cross over. Instead, people outside the culture came to hip-hop.”

‘Evolution of the culture’

The latter chapters in “Rapper’s Deluxe” move through the ways in which rap and hip-hop sent deeper roots into every aspect of American and global culture.

The ’90s trace the rise of influential artists such as NWA, Jay-Z, Tupac Shakur, and the Notorious B.I.G., as well as chapters on offshoots of rap such as the Dirty South and trap music. It looks at artists such as Outkast and Three 6 Mafia – the latter of whom became the first rappers to win an Oscar – T.I. and Lil Wayne.

In the 2000s and 2010s, the book doesn’t focus so much on artists as impacts: the election of President Barack Obama, the shift of rappers into other businesses such as fashion and art, and finally, that landmark Super Bowl halftime show, produced for the NFL by Jay-Z’s entertainment company.

“I was not trying to write hip-hop’s greatest hits,” Boyd says. “I was not trying to write, ‘These are the new important rappers.’ Honestly, to me, once Obama gets elected? I mean, you want to talk about cultural influence? What is a better demonstration of hip-hop’s influence than the election of a president?”

In the final chapter, Boyd says he was more interested in spotlighting the unexpected ways in which rap and hip-hop have fully joined the larger culture.

“So, you know, the National Symphony with Nas performing ‘Illmatic,’” he says. “Or Kendrick Lamar winning a Pulitzer Prize. Or Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys’ art collection, the Dean Collection. Jay-Z’s connection to Basquiat and more broadly contemporary art. “Rappers talking about their art collection the way they used to talk about their cars and their sneakers? To me that’s major.

“People can decide for themselves who the hot new artists are; we’ve covered that,” Boyd says. “That’s almost not as significant. What is significant, however, we can talk about hip-hop going into these previously elite White cultural spaces, and dominating in those spaces, because it speaks to the full evolution of the culture in ways that maybe pointing out who the hot new rapper is doesn’t address as significantly.”

Todd Boyd in conversation with Chuck D

What: Author Todd Boyd will be in conversation with Chuck D of Public Enemy, as well as signing his new book, “Rapper’s Deluxe: How Hip Hop Made The World.”

When: 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 7

Where: Oculus Hall at The Broad, 221 S. Grand Ave., Los Angeles

How much: Tickets are with reservation.

For more: See Thebroad.org/events for information and to reserve tickets

HARDCOVER FICTION

1. House of Flame and Shadow: Sarah J. Maas

2. North Woods: Daniel Mason

3. The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store: James McBride

4. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow: Gabrielle Zevin

5. Martyr!: Kaveh Akbar

6. Remarkably Bright Creatures: Shelby Van Pelt

7. Come and Get It: Kiley Reid

8. Iron Flame: Rebecca Yarros

9. Fourth Wing: Rebecca Yarros

10. Demon Copperhead: Barbara Kingsolver

HARDCOVER NONFICTION

1. The Creative Act: A Way of Being: Rick Rubin

2. How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen: David Brooks

3. Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones: James Clear

4. Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism: Rachel Maddow

5. The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder: David Grann

6. Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning: Liz Cheney

7. The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession: Michael Finkel

8. Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity: Peter Attia, M.D., Bill Gifford

9. More Is More: Get Loose in the Kitchen: A Cookbook: Molly Baz

10. A Hitch in Time: Reflections Ready for Reconsideration: Christopher Hitchens

MASS MARKET

1. 1984: George Orwell

2. Rich Dad Poor Dad: Robert T. Kiyosaki

3. The Ocean at the End of the Lane: Neil Gaiman

4. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: Douglas Adams

5. Slaughterhouse-Five: Kurt Vonnegut

6. Dune: Frank Herbert

7. In the Company of Witches: Auralee Wallace

8. Animal Farm: George Orwell

9. Dune Messiah: Frank Herbert

10. And Then There Were None: Agatha Christie

TRADE PAPERBACK FICTION

1. A Court of Thorns and Roses: Sarah J. Maas

2. Trust: Hernan Diaz

3. A Little Life: Hanya Yanagihara

4. The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo: Taylor Jenkins Reid

5. Circe: Madeline Miller

6. A Court of Mist and Fury: Sarah J. Maas

7. The Midnight Library: Matt Haig

8. Pedro Páramo: Juan Rulfo

9. The Thursday Murder Club: Richard Osman

10. House of Earth and Blood: Sarah J. Maas

As Sheila Heti discusses her new book, “Alphabetical Diaries,” during a Zoom call from her home in Toronto, her dog Feldman can be seen onscreen in the background, his head resting on the arm of the couch, watching her and waiting to go for a walk. Four thousand miles away in Southern California, my own dog is doing the same thing. 

“The man’s best friend thing? When I used to hear that I’d think, I guess that’s just what people say. But when you have a dog, you’re like, Oh, it’s actually just the truth; they’re your best friend in this way that no human could ever be. Like, who would ever be sitting there like this?” says Heti about Feldman, who occasionally emits a mournful sigh during our conversation.

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The author of acclaimed books that include “Motherhood,” “Pure Colour,” “How Should a Person Be?” and more, Heti created her latest book, which arrives in stores Feb. 6, by extracting lines from 10 years of her diaries and arranging them in alphabetical, rather than chronological or contextual, order to create a unique and compelling reading experience.

“It really did take me a decade to figure out,” she says. “I started to see that, with certain kinds of edits, I was starting to create a world the same way there is one in a novel.

“I was able to see this as a separate fictional world in which a person is living and thinking and moving rather than earlier in the process when it just felt like it was my diaries,” she says.  

So is it a novel or a diary or memoir? “At one point, I wanted to call it a memoir, but I think it’s closest to a novel because I don’t feel like it’s confessional,” she says. “I feel like it’s a portrait of a person.”

This conversation has been edited for length, clarity and to reduce how much we talked about our dogs.

Q. Why did you decide to alphabetize your diary in the first place?

I don’t know honestly, I just remember one day I was putting the sentences into Excel and alphabetizing them. I can come up with all sorts of reasons after the fact, but I honestly don’t know what the spark of that idea was.

Q. You got a book idea while using an Excel spreadsheet?

I use Excel a lot. [laughs] I use it to keep track of how many words I’ve written in a day or how many words I’ve cut or just tracking progress. Yeah, I like it. I like Excel very much.

Q. These are actual diary entries. Were you thinking, I have all this writing already – maybe I could put it to use?

Yeah, I’d just finished “How Should a Person Be?” and it was such a huge project – like seven years writing – that I knew was going to be a long time before I had anything else to work on, before I had a lot of material to edit, which is my favorite part of the process. It was like, ‘I have a lot of writing; maybe I can just start working because I like working and I suddenly had nothing to work on. So I think I was like, ‘Here’s this archive – what happens if I start playing with it?’ 

‘How Should a Person Be?’ was sort of about my life, but this was about my life in a much more real way because ‘How Should a Person Be?’ was this fiction whereas with this, once I pulled all the words together, there was no fiction. It was at first just a diary.

Q. The people and names you mention are fictionalized?

I didn’t write any [new] sentences, but I made composite characters out of the sentences … they were like archetypes of the people that I did encounter over the 10 years. But nobody who was in my life would be able to track any of the characters because they are recombined from sentences about lots of different people turned into one character.

Q. I can imagine that could have been awkward if someone said, Hey, is this me?

I didn’t want anyone to know what I thought about them! [laughs] That was a real puzzle – how would I publish this and not reveal that? And that was the solution.

Q. Typically, people put locks on their diaries and guard them. What’s it like publishing yours as a book for people to read?

I published it in the New York Times last year. I wasn’t scared publishing this book, but I was really scared publishing those excerpts in the Times – they were in a slightly different form, but that was the first time it was really available to such a large audience. And I was really scared. I did think, what kind of person is coming across in these? I couldn’t really tell. 

I don’t feel like anyone can judge me for my fiction because those are characters. But this is not a character so much, you know? I was nervous to have friends and my boyfriend read it and I’m just thinking, ‘Am I revealing a self that they don’t know? Am I revealing a self that they’re not going to like?’ None of that seemed to happen, but it was a real fear.

Q. One of the compelling elements of “Alphabetical Diaries” is that the reader starts to build a narrative out of all of these individual lines from your life. 

I come from theater. To me, it’s like theater – the audience and the actors, all in a room together, make something. That’s what I think I always want to keep from the world of the theater that I love so much – you make something in tandem with other people who are there with you in the present. 

Books are less like that. But there’s a way I’m trying to, I think, make books like that, where you feel like you’re creating a moment with the reader rather than just, ‘Well, here’s the thing I created and now you can experience it.’ 

Q. You edited out 90% of your diaries to get to its final form. Were there things you left in that you weren’t sure whether you wanted to? 

I really had to resist that impulse. There were a lot of things where I felt embarrassed. And I just thought, Well, you have to have a better reason for cutting it than that. There’s a kind of discipline in it, like, it’s just a sentence, you know?

Q. As well as being confessional or confiding, diaries can be where we demand self-improvement, saying things like, “Start eating kale!” or “Make more money!” You call these “injunctions” – why do people use that voice when writing to themselves?

That is one of the diary voices, for sure. I think a diary is a place where you organize yourself, where you try and get your thoughts in order and try to get yourself in order … and put all the pieces of yourself in some coherent form. I think a lot of those injunctions are about that.

At least for me, when I write in my diary, there’s some kind of fantasy of like, I’m going to put everything in its place and then afterward I’ll be able to live. I think it does work for like a day … and then it’s revealed as the fantasy it was.

Q. I read the book, and I also listened to the audiobook read by Kate Berlant, which is fantastic. I loved how much she brought to the work, making each line burst with feeling and emotion. How did she come to narrate the book? 

Kate’s a friend of mine and I just thought she’d be perfect. I saw her one-woman show in New York. I love her voice. She’s so intelligent. I just felt like she would just bring the perfect sensibility to it. And she absolutely did. I showed her a draft of it years ago. So she’s also known about the project for a very long time, which is fun. It’s kind of like a one-woman show or something listening to it. 

Q. You recently co-wrote a story with a chatbot for The New Yorker. People tend to be afraid of AI rather than wanting to work with it.

I understand people who don’t know anything about it feeling like that and I understand people who know a ton about it a feeling like that. It’s not crazy. But for me, I think of it as a tool, a human tool. It’s us in a different form. I find it really fascinating, actually. I like this thing that has access to all of world literature and all of one’s Facebook conversations and all of the Enron emails and just like everything and what comes out of that, because no human can sort of digest that much. So it’s like this new kind of mind, made up of all the text we’ve ever created, or that’s the ambition anyways. I think it’s sort of beautiful and godlike and dumb and wrong and right, and it’s all those things at once.

Q. Going back to the diaries, there are some tough moments when you describe some questionable behavior directed at you. While it could be upsetting, it’s also interesting to note that you chose to include these moments in your book.

Yeah, you always get the last word as a writer. 

Sheila Heti and Michelle Tea

When: 7 p.m., Feb. 13

Where: Los Angeles Central Library’s Mark Taper Auditorium, 630 W. Fifth Street, Los Angeles

Information: https://lfla.org/event/alphabetical-diaries/

From the 1950s to the 1990s, book designer Janet Halverson created covers for an array of authors and titles: Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” Jack Kerouac’s “Big Sur,” Leonard Gardner’s “Fat City” and Susan Sontag’s “The Benefactor,” among them.

And it’s her work in the 1960s and 1970s that might be the most indelible – especially her iconic cover design for Joan Didion’s “Play It As It Lays.”

“The world is filled with so much noise,” says Michael Russem, a book designer and owner of Katherine Small Gallery, which is located north of Boston. “So when you see something that is clear and quiet, it pops out. And I think that’s what a lot of Janet’s covers do.”

So who is Janet Halverson? That’s something of a mystery. Not much is known about her aside from her work, says Russem, who, full disclosure, is a friend. So after years of trying to learn more about Halverson, he put together an exhibit, Janet Halverson: An Introduction, at the gallery to show off her book covers.

“She was a book designer. She mostly worked on covers in the ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘70s and into the ‘90s. She was the art director at Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. She worked on all sorts of notable books and notable authors. So she was trusted to do really important books,” says Russem, who adds that she ran in the same circles as celebrated graphic designers Milton Glaser and Paul Rand.

Still, Russem says he repeatedly came up empty when trying to learn more.

“There’s nothing about her anywhere. There are all sorts of magazine articles about these other guys, but nothing about her,” he says. “Graphic designers … all recognize her work and recognize it as being good. But she just went unnoticed, which is true of all the women of her generation. There are no magazine articles about any of them.”

“This is something I’ve been working on for years,” he says. “I wanted to tell a story for myself, and then I knew that people were interested so I wanted to share that story with others.”

Finally, Russem figured, rather than wait any longer, he’d gather what he had and put it up for all to see.

“I wanted to share that story with others because she’s someone that designers have questions about, but we don’t have any answers,” he says. “I don’t know what she thought about anything, and I think that’s a disappointment for me.”

The surprising thing is, Russem believes Halverson may still be alive and living in New Jersey, though his efforts to make contact haven’t paid off.

“I believe she just turned 98 on Monday [Jan. 29]. I don’t know what she’s doing presently,” says Russem.

It’s too soon to say whether the exhibition, which closes on Feb. 17, will stir up fresh interest, but Russem says another website has already picked up his images and writing about her.

“That’s what publishing is: It’s about sharing and getting information out into the world,” he says. “So it’s not my information. It’s for everyone. And I think that is happening, whether or not anything productive comes of it.”

Russem, who designs exhibition catalogs and university press books, has a quiet sense of humor that runs through everything from the store’s outdoor sandwich board messages and Instagram posts to his beautifully printed “A Complete Checklist & Map of Brick & Mortar Typography & Graphic Design Bookshops in & Around Boston,” which is as comprehensive as it is concise. (There is only one.)

Even Katherine Small Gallery’s seemingly staid name isn’t exactly what it seems.

“Katherine was my dog,” he says, “and this place is small.”

But Russem is serious about using the space to introduce people to good design.

“It’s a bookstore and gallery dedicated to graphic design, and the shows here are meant to encourage affordable collecting,” he says. “You can come here and not feel guilty about not buying anything in the shows.”

If that sounds like a questionable business plan, that’s by design.

“I’m a book designer, and I have a graphic design bookstore. I make all my money designing books,” he says. “And I lose it all selling books.”

For more information about the exhibit and catalogue, visit the website. 

The bookstore that looms large in Manjula Martin’s mind

Manjula Martin coauthored the award-winning “Fruit Trees for Every Garden” with her father, Orin Martin, and her nonfiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Cut and more. Formerly the managing editor of Francis Ford Coppola’s literary magazine, Zoetrope: All-Story, she’s worked in both the nonprofit and publishing sectors. She lives in West Sonoma County and is the author of “The Last Fire Season: A Personal and Pyronatural Memoir.” She spoke with Michael Schaub and took the Book Pages Q&A.

Q. What are you reading now?

I just started “The Parisian,” a novel by Isabella Hammad. So far it’s gorgeous.

Q. How do you decide what to read next?

Honestly, it’s often whichever one of my holds the local library decides to give me next! Or, I’m guided by the mood of whatever writing project I’m working on—usually over the course of a project I’ll accumulate a small stack of books that are aspirational peers to mine, or books that are instructive in style, topic, or temperament.

Q. Is there a book you’re nervous to read?

I’m usually afraid of reading contemporary novels that are very widely lauded as “the best ever,” because they’re often not.

Q. Do you have any favorite book covers?

I love the cover design and typesetting for poet and essayist Mary Ruefle’s books, which are all published by Wave Books. A particular favorite is “Madness, Rack, and Honey,” which is just a bold type treatment on a white background, with the type pushing against the boundaries of the cover space. It’s so simple, but summons such curiosity in me as a reader.

Q. Which books do you plan, or hope, to read next?

Currently on my coffee table: “White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination” by Jess Row, “Enter Ghost” by Isabella Hammad, “Our Wives Under the Sea” by Julia Armfield, and “Ordinary Notes” by Christina Sharpe. Fellow 2024 releases that I’m looking forward to reading are “Feeding Ghosts,” a haunting graphic memoir by artist Tessa Hulls, and Lauren Markham’s “A Map of Future Ruins: On Borders and Belonging.”

Q. Is there a person who made an impact on your reading life – a teacher, a parent, a librarian or someone else?

Both my parents are avid readers and lovers of literature. But probably what most shaped my reading life was a place — the used bookstore where I worked in high school (shoutout to Logos Books & Records, in Santa Cruz). It’s no longer around, but it still looms large in my mind as a place where I was encouraged to form my own identity as a reader.

Q. What’s a memorable book experience – good or bad – you’re willing to share? 

I first read “Moby-Dick” in high school, in an Honors English class. The teacher had us read only one chapter a week (the chapters are short), and in class we dissected at length any and every hint of “symbolism.” We were also assigned to skip all the “whaling bits”—the interstitial chapters about whale anatomy, the whaling industry, and other far-out marine fictions. I hated every moment of the experience, and demoted myself from Honors English after that semester. I didn’t revisit “Moby-Dick” until I was in my thirties, at which point I realized I love it. It’s a truly excellent novel written in smart, funny, audaciously modern English. This is why I am a fan of re-reading books at different times in one’s life. Things change!

More books, authors and bestsellers

Women in war

Why Kristin Hannah decided to write about Vietnam War nurses in “The Women.” READ MORE

• • •

Unfinished business

Flannery O’Connor didn’t complete her final novel. So a Pepperdine scholar tried. READ MORE

• • •

Power of ‘Sweetgrass’

How Robin Wall Kimmerer’s ‘Braiding Sweetgrass’ became a phenomenon 10 years on. READ MORE

• • •

The week’s bestsellers

The top-selling books at your local independent bookstores. READ MORE

• • •

Next on ‘Bookish’

The next installment is Feb. 16, at 5 p.m., as hosts Sandra Tsing Loh and Samantha Dunn talk about upcoming books. Sign up for free now.

• • •

El Monte book event

The Libros Monte Launch Party at C.A.S.A. Zamora is next week, Feb. 10, from noon to 3 p.m. The event will feature readings from El Monte authors including Carribean Fragoza, Michael Jaime-Becerra, Mirlanda Robles, Sesshu Foster and Steve Valenzuela.

As well, attendees will get an introduction to the Libros Monte Lending Library and the opportunity to sign up for a free library card.

Location: Zamora Park, 3820 Penmar Ave., El Monte

For more information, go to South El Monte Arts Posse Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/semartsposse

• • •

Read any books that you want to tell people about? Email epedersen@scng.com with “ERIK’S BOOK PAGES” in the subject line and I may include your comments in an upcoming newsletter.

And if you enjoy this free newsletter, please consider sharing it with someone who likes books or getting a digital subscription to support local coverage.

Thanks, as always, for reading.

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• Miss last week’s newsletter? Find past editions here
• Dive into all of our books coverage

The writing? Not so much.

“The Vietnam War was such a shadow across my childhood,” Hannah says of her earliest inspiration for her new novel, “The Women.” “My friends’ fathers were serving, and in fact, my best friend’s father was shot down and lost.

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“I didn’t understand all of the complexities, but I knew that the country was angry and divided,” she says. “You know, we were watching the aftermath and what was happening in the war on a nightly basis. So it just made a really big impact on me.”

So around 1996, after half a dozen or so novels, Hannah decided to base her next book on women who served in the war.

And then: “The truth was, I just wasn’t a good enough writer at that point,” she says. “Because I knew this story was really important, or at least I felt it was important. and I really wanted to be able to write it to the best of my ability.”

She was a new mother at the time, too, so when her editor urged her to set it aside until she felt ready to write it, she did. And there it sat, surfacing occasionally for new beginnings, only to be put aside again until 2020 when the pandemic arrived.

“I had turned in ‘The Four Winds,’ actually the week that Seattle went on lockdown,” says Hannah, who lives on Bainbridge Island in Washington, referring to her previous novel. “Here we are, trapped in our homes for quite some period of time. And I was watching the nurses and the doctors in the medical community, and the price that was being exacted on them by this pandemic.

“Somehow this confluence of being trapped and being reliant on the medical community, and seeing the cost that they were paying to help us, led me back to the Vietnam female nurses,” she says. “I thought, ‘OK, I can’t go anywhere. There is no excuse for me not to write this book now, because it feels even more relevant. Our country is divided once again, and so it all felt very familiar.”

“The Women,” which has already been optioned by Warner Bros. for development as a movie, arrives in bookstores on Tuesday, Feb. 6, one day after Hannah appears at the Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall in Costa Mesa.

They also served

The protagonist of “The Women” is Frances “Frankie” McGrath, a 20-year-old Southern California nurse who in 1966 decides to follow her older brother Finley to Vietnam.

She arrives naively thinking she’ll be safely stationed far from the front only to be thrown into the visceral reality of the 36th Evacuation Hospital where wounded troops and civilians flood the operating rooms during frequent mass casualty events. She’s mentored by her bunkmates Barb and Ethel, nurses who’ve been there a few months longer.

Frankie comes to flourish despite the hard work and heartache she experiences in Vietnam. After signing up for a second tour of duty, and a transfer to the 71st Evacuation Hospital closer to the fighting, she comes home and finds that her reintroduction into civilian life is anything but easy.

“It wasn’t solely nurses in the beginning,” Hannah says of her earliest idea for the novel. “Then, once I read the memoirs of these women and understood what they had lived through, and how heroic and tragic their stories are, I just thought, I cannot believe that this story hasn’t really been told.”

The decision to focus on Frankie, a daughter of privilege from Coronado Island off San Diego, rather than Ethel, a farm girl from Virginia, or Barb, a young Black woman from the South, came partly because the Southern California background matched the early life of Hannah, who was born in Garden Grove.

“I felt comfortable with that world, Southern California,” she says. “I sort of understood it, and I understood the naivete that comes from a bubble world like Coronado. You know, I live on an island in Washington. And I wanted this nurse to go over as starry-eyed and naive as possible.

“In terms of the research, the lion’s share of the memoirs I read were very much young women who had just finished their nursing degree and went over for adventure or patriotism. Or following someone,” Hannah says. “Because they volunteered. They couldn’t be made to go and so they chose to go.

“And so I wanted the kind of woman where it made sense that she would be, I guess, naive enough to think, Oh, I’ll go to the war. That’ll be OK. I’ll be far from the front. I’ll be fine.’”

Those real-life accounts, whether written or told directly to Hannah by former nurses she met along the way, also included key details of the difficulties of returning home from the war.

In addition to the PTSD the women experienced from their time face-to-face with the horrific damage the machines of war could do to a human body, many back home discounted their service, saying to their faces, as Frankie experiences in the book, that there were no women in Vietnam.

“She’s constantly told, ‘No, there were no women. No, we don’t have help for you; you don’t belong here,’” Hannah says of the resistance Frankie faces whether seeking services at a VA hospital or attending a Vietnam veteran’s march. “I thought to myself, that really can’t be true. It can’t be true with the VA. It can’t be true among Vietnam vets – male Vietnam vets.

“Yet when I began speaking to the women who had been there, they all had memories of being told by people who ought to know better, that there were no women there,” she says. “And their response was very much, ‘Well, if you didn’t [come into contact with the nurses serving there] then you were lucky.’ Meaning you weren’t in one of these hospitals, you weren’t in these places.”

Bringing them home

In the novel, after a march by Vietnam Veterans Against the War in Washington D.C., Frankie comes across two volunteers for the League of POW/MIA Families, and ends up buying a silver cuff bracelet on which the name of a missing soldier and the date of his disappearance are engraved: “Maj. Robert Welch 1-16-1967.”

If you were alive during the Vietnam War, you might remember these. They were sold to keep alive the memories of the missing and to raise money to advocate to find and bring them home.

For Hannah, this part is personal.

“I think I got (mine) when I was probably about 10 or 11 years old,” she says. “It was Robert Welch, and he was my good friend’s father. The idea was we wear these until he comes home. Of course, as a young girl, it never occurred to me that he wasn’t going to be coming home.

“Here’s this silver bracelet that I wore all through high school, through college,” Hannah says. “At some point, it disappeared. I don’t know what happened. I was able to order another one years ago.”

In “The Women,” the bracelet, and eventually going to work as an advocate for POW/MIA families, and later, for women who served in Vietnam and are struggling at home, helps Frankie regain her balance in life.

For Hannah, the bracelet served as a constant reminder of the war she remembered from childhood, as well as a way to reconnect years later with the story its simple inscription suggested.

“The minute the internet came to being and suddenly we all were connected, interestingly, one of the first things I did was go online to see if he ever came back,” Hannah says. “And he didn’t.

“In the writing of this book, I wanted to find out about him specifically, so that I could put it in the afterword because his story and his family’s story was very much also inspirational in the writing of this,” she says. “So through the internet, I reconnected with my old childhood girlfriend, who it turns out lives five miles from my house.

“We were able to get together and have a cup of coffee and talk about this,” Hannah says. “In fact, this year she went to Vietnam for the first time, just trying to look for and reconnect with her missing father.”

A generation of men was devastated by the war in Vietnam. A smaller number of women who served came home with their own traumas. All of them, as Hannah writes in “The Women” and underscores in conversation, deserved all the help they needed, and often didn’t get, once home.

“That is something that I just want to be front and center on people’s minds all the time,” she says. “Because I think if we ask our military people to go to war, we have to care for them when they get home.”

Kristin Hannah book event

What: Hannah will be in conversation with Julia Whelan, who reads the audiobook of her new book ‘The Women.’

When: 8 p.m. Monday, Feb. 5

Where: Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall, 600 Town Center Dr., Costa Mesa.

How much: $39 to $99 which includes a signed copy of ‘The Women’ for the first 1,000 people. Additional books will be available for purchase on site.

For more: See scfta.org/events/2024/kristin-hannah for tickets and more information.

“I said I’d like to write about Miles Davis,” Troupe, 83, says on a recent phone call from his home in New York City. “Because he’s from East St. Louis, I’m from St. Louis. He played in my cousin’s band in St. Louis. So I would really like to write about him.”

Soon after, Troupe found himself on the legendary jazz trumpeter’s doorstep.

“When I walked in, he looked at me and he said in that voice he had, ‘You know, you’re a strange-looking (fellow). Boy, you’re weird,’” Troupe says in an excellent impression of Davis’s hoarse whisper.

“I said, ‘You’re weird-lookin’ yourself.’ I told him just like that.

“He said … ‘Man, you better shut up. I’ll hit you in your mouth,’” Troupe continues. “And I said, ‘Miles, you look at yourself recently? I’m 6’2″ I weigh 200 pounds. You’re 5’7″, 5’8” and you weigh 150 pounds. I’ll hurt you. I’ll hit you in your mouth; you’ll never play again.’

“I said, ‘Don’t threaten me, man. I’m from St. Louis, you’re from East St. Louis. You should know better.’”

(For the record, this is neither standard nor recommended interview practice in journalism.)

Once Davis learned that Troupe was the cousin of a former bandmate, all was well, Troupe says. “He kind of smiled and said, ‘Don’t sit there like a knot on a log. Ask me a question.’

“I had all these questions mapped out, including about his style and his clothes,” Troupe says. “He liked my shoes. I had these great shoes. He said, ‘Them’s some great shoes you got on.’ And that’s how it started, just like that.”

Troupe asked a lot of questions, first for an in-depth, two-part Spin article, and a few years later, as co-writer of “Miles: The Autobiography,” which won an American Book Award after its publication in 1989.

Troupe was a member of the Watts Writers Workshop in the mid-’60s, and taught at the University of California, San Diego for a dozen years in the ’80s and early ’00s. He was appointed California’s first official poet laureate in 2002, resigning when it came to light he had attended, but not graduated, from Grambling College. In 2006, he collaborated with Chris Gardner on “The Pursuit of Happyness,” which was turned into a Will Smith film.

Now Troupe is taking a break from work on a memoir to return to Southern California as one of three 2024 recipients of the LA Review of Books – UCR Department of Creative Writing Lifetime Achievement Award.

“I’ve had many awards in the past, but this has made me really happy because it’s a lifetime achievement award,” Troupe says. “I used to live in California, so coming back out there, it’s very good.”

He and fellow honorees Dave Eggers and Rigoberto González will be honored during the 47th annual UCR Writers Week Festival, held Feb. 10 and Feb. 12-16 at the University of California, Riverside.

In an interview edited for length and clarity, Troupe talked about how he embraced poetry while playing basketball in France, befriended Miles Davis, joined the Watts Writers Workshop in the ’60s, and more.

Q: I want to ask you about when you started taking your first steps toward becoming a writer.

A: My mother always had books around the house because she was a big reader. My father was a great baseball player, so I wasn’t thinking about being a writer at first because I was an athlete. I went to Grambling College on an athletic scholarship, a baseball and basketball scholarship. Then I went into the Army and played basketball in Europe on the Army team until I wrecked my knee.

I started writing poems. I went to France and I met this young woman over there. She was at the Sorbonne. Then I started to write these poems. I don’t know why I started, because I never thought about writing poetry. It just happened. It’s hard to explain.

Q: What kinds of poems were they? Do you remember the first poems you wrote?

A: Somehow when I was over there I got a book by Pablo Neruda and (also Federico) Garcia Lorca. They really, really influenced me a lot. I didn’t know anything about Chile and I had been to Spain when I was playing basketball. I just loved the way the Latin poets wrote, and so I started to imitate them when I was over there. And T.S. Eliot because I found out he was from St. Louis.

Q: Talk about the influence of music, jazz and Miles Davis in particular, had on you as a writer.

A: My mother really liked jazz. She was married to a musician and she always had music around the house. And so I started listening to Miles Davis’s music, and I really loved the music. I had no idea he was going to influence me as a poet. I also didn’t know I was ever going to meet him. I just loved his music,

At one time, I wanted to learn how to play trumpet. My brother was a drummer, played drums for Lou Rawls. So I was in kind of a musical situation, being with my brother and listening to music all the time.

Q: Let’s jump ahead to the late ’80s: How did the Spin magazine articles lead you to writing ‘Miles: The Autobiography’?

A: You know, he picked me. Everybody thought he’s gonna pick Leonard Feather or some other jazz writer he knew. So when they asked him who he wanted to write his book, he said, ‘I want Quincy Troupe.’ They said, ‘But he’s a poet.’ He said, ‘You didn’t ask me what he was. You asked me who I wanted to write my book,’ and the guy says, ‘Oh, yeah, OK, OK.

I was sitting in my apartment, phone call came in. I can’t think of his name now, because I’m getting older and I’m forgetting names. He said, ‘Miles Davis just gave you first’ – he was from Simon & Schuster, the editor – ‘first right of refusal to write his life story.’

I said, ‘Are you kidding? He asked for me to write his life story?’ and they said, ‘Yeah.’ I said, ‘Of course, I’d like to write his life story. How much money is it, man? I have kids.’ And he laughed, he laughed. He said, ‘That’s funny.’ I said, ‘Sure, I’d love to.’

Q: That must have taken a lot of conversations to get all the stories for the autobiography.

A: At the time, Miles was living in Malibu. So I flew out there, got a car, and drove out to his house. He was sitting – I’ll never forget it – he was sitting on his veranda, and his house was looking right at the ocean. His butler let me in and I walked out there. I remember when I walked in, he looked at me, and he says, ‘Yeah, yeah, I got you a gig, (mister). A real good gig.’

I said, ‘Yeah, well, thanks, man; thank you very much. He said, ‘Sit down, sit down. What you wanna know? I had all these questions ready. He said, ‘Why’d you ask me that?’ I said, ‘Because you picked me to write the book. I gotta know all this stuff.’ And he just laughed.

And so we just hit off. I guess it was that I was from St. Louis and he was from East St. Louis and he trusted me. He liked the way I wrote, and I didn’t take anything off of him. As much as I loved him, I wasn’t gonna let him mess me over. He knew that I was gonna tell him the truth about everything.

Q: I want to ask about the Watts Writers Workshop, which must have been a fertile creative community of writers in L.A. in the ’60s. 

A: Well, it was a remarkable thing. When I moved to California, I was with this lady from St. Louis. We broke up at a certain point and I joined the Watts Writers Workshop because I wanted to get in with a group of writers. And they all lived out there in this house called the House of Respect. When I went out there, there was Ojenke, Cleveland Sims, and this woman I was going with at the time, Pamela Donegan.

So I asked Ojenke, ‘You think I can move out here,’ and they said, ‘Yeah.’ I lived in this one room, right behind the driveway. Cleveland Sims had the biggest room. Ojenke had a room, but he also stayed with his parents. Leumas Sirrah came by, whose name was Samuel Harris spelled backwards. He would sit up on the roof and write poems and I just thought he was the weirdest person I had ever seen.

It was really interesting to walk around Watts and run into everybody there and just hang out. Then we would have these conversations at night, and everybody would critique everybody’s poetry. My friend Cleveland Sims, I read this poem, and he said, ‘Let me see it.’ So I gave it to him, and Cleveland – he was a tall, dark guy, crazy as hell – he threw my poem out the window.

I said, ‘What? What did you do?’ He said, ‘This is a ridiculous poem.’ And I jumped up. I said, ‘Man, hey, don’t mess me with like that.’ He said, ‘What are you gonna do?’ I said, ‘We can go down, I don’t be taking no stupid stuff of nobody, man.’ He just laughed. He said, ‘Aw, sit down, man, we don’t have to fight over the thing.’ I said, “I wasn’t thinking about fighting. I was thinking about hurting you, man.’

He just laughed. Ojenke started laughing, everybody was laughing.

HARDCOVER FICTION

1. The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store: James McBride

2. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow: Gabrielle Zevin

3. Iron Flame: Rebecca Yarros

4. North Woods: Daniel Mason

5. Tom Lake: Ann Patchett

6. Martyr!: Kaveh Akbar

7. Fourth Wing: Rebecca Yarros

8. The Fury: Alex Michaelides

9. The Covenant of Water: Abraham Verghese

10. The Bee Sting: Paul Murray

HARDCOVER NONFICTION

1. The Creative Act: A Way of Being: Rick Rubin

2. How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen: David Brooks

3. Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones: James Clear

4. Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning: Liz Cheney

5. The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession: Michael Finkel

6. The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder: David Grann

7. The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism: Tim Alberta

8. The Amen Effect: Ancient Wisdom to Mend Our Broken Hearts and World: Sharon Brous

9. Cool Food: Erasing Your Carbon Footprint One Bite at a Time: Robert Downey, Jr., Thomas Kostigen

10. Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity: Peter Attia M.D., Bill Gifford

MASS MARKET

1. Jurassic Park: Michael Crichton

2. The Shining: Stephen King

3. 1984: George Orwell

4. Women Who Run With the Wolves: Clarissa Pinkola Estés

5. The Brothers Karamazov: Fyodor Dostoyevsky

6. And Then There Were None: Agatha Christie

7. The Illustrated Man: Ray Bradbury

8. The Lies of Locke Lamora: Scott Lynch

9. The Way of Kings: Brandon Sanderson

10. Stardust: Neil Gaiman

TRADE PAPERBACK FICTION

1. Trust: Hernan Diaz

2. A Little Life: Hanya Yanagihara

3. Horse: Geraldine Brooks

4. A Court of Wings and Ruin: Sarah J. Maas

5. A Court of Thorns and Roses: Sarah J. Maas

6. The Song of Achilles: Madeline Miller

7. A Court of Mist and Fury: Sarah J. Maas

8. The Midnight Library: Matt Haig

9. It Ends with Us: Colleen Hoover

10. The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo: Taylor Jenkins Reid

I came to that realization while reading “You Dreamed of Empires,” Álvaro Enrigue’s excellent new novel (translated by Natasha Wimmer) about the 1519 meeting between the Aztec emperor Moctezuma and Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés in Tenochtitlan – today’s Mexico City.

As I got caught up in Enrigue’s book, it occurred to me that I wasn’t all that clear on the details of this incredibly significant encounter, one of the most momentous in all human history.

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Instead of facts, my understanding seemed to be a patchy mix of pop culture references, Werner Herzog’s “Aguirre, the Wrath of God,” and Neil Young’s song “Cortez the Killer.” But I’d long understood that what I’d been taught as a child – especially compared to stories of English and European history – had been an extremely oversimplified and sanitized version of events that played down both the horrors of colonial genocide, slavery and sexual predation and the richness of the indigenous cultures, societies and traditions.

Enrigue, a professor of 16th and 17th century literature, not only knows the scholarship surrounding the meeting, but he also deploys his strengths as a novelist to create an urgency to the story that feels immediate.

By the time I’d finished reading the novel, I wanted to know more. Thankfully, Enrigue led me to some good recent books – and this being 2024 – a podcast, too.

In the acknowledgments, Enrigue recommends the work of several historians, which is where I learned about Matthew Restall’s 2018 book “When Montezuma Met Cortés: The True Story of the Meeting That Changed History” and Camilla Townsend’s “Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs.” Both are excellent and explore the story in different ways.

Restall has no patience for allowing centuries of falsehoods or made-up “facts” to stand; he scrapes away at built-up myths to get down to what is more accurate, more truthful and, often, more interesting – especially as he writes about Cortés and his pre-expedition life. Aiming to discern what is fact and what is not, Restall does battle with B.S. and the reader is the winner.

“Note that this book is not a synthesis of previous accounts, another telling of the tale albeit from a different angle,” Restall writes in his introduction. “Rather, it is a reevaluation of previous accounts stretching from the 1520s to the present; an examination not just of the events of the Conquest story but of their half-millennium afterlife; an argument for seeing the traditional narrative of the ‘Conquest of Mexico’ as one of human history’s great lies, whose exposure requires us to better grasp both what really happened at the time and why the traditional narrative has prospered.”

Townsend, who based her work on Nahuatl-language annals or histories, aims to course-correct our understanding with a comprehensive study of the culture and civilization of the Aztec, or Mexica, people.

“The Aztecs would never recognize themselves in the picture of their world that exists in the books and movies we have made,” she writes.

She describes an a-ha moment that she experienced 15 years ago, offering up a particularly vivid account of library usage here.

“Libraries are generally though to be very quiet places, whether they shelter stacks of rare, leather-bound books or rows of computers. Another way to think of a library, however, is as a world of frozen voices, captured and rendered accessible forever by one of the most powerful human developments of all time – the act of writing. From that perspective, a library suddenly becomes a very noisy place,” Townsend writes.

Both books have been excellent companions to Enrigue’s novel and would be excellent reads on their own, but I also added another sideproject: The podcast “The Rest Is History,” which recently presented an 8-part series on the meeting of Cortés and Montezuma. Hosts Tom Holland (no, not that one) and Dominic Sandbrook are knowledgeable, sometimes irreverent guides who provide an informative introduction to the story, its variations and more.

So that’s how I got here. I’d been attracted to “You Dreamed of Empires” because it’s a slim book on a fascinating topic, one I knew little about. While I thought it would be a quick, informative read, it’s opened me up to so much more – including possibly “Not Even the Dead,” a 2023 novel about a Spanish conquistador by Juan Gomez Barcena (translated by Katie Whittemore) that I’ve had my eye on.

But I know I’m not the only one who does this, so I’d love to hear about your own deep dives for a possible future column.

Prudence Peiffer on the secret life of the text

Prudence Peiffer, whose work has appeared in the New York Times, New York Review of Books and Bookforum, is the author of “The Slip: The New York City Street That Changed American Art Forever,” which was longlisted for the National Book Award. Peiffer, who earned a PhD from Harvard University and a postdoctorate fellowship at Columbia University, was senior editor at Artforum and is now managing editor of the creative team at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. She took the Book Pages Q&A.

Q. What are you reading now?

I’m currently reading Justin Torres’s “Blackouts” and Anne Enright’s “Wren, Wren.” And for another project, related to some of the themes in “The Slip” around solitude and creativity, I just read James Baldwin’s essay on the creative process, which is a quick, powerful gut punch.

Q. How do you decide what to read next?

I was attempting to read all my fellow longlisters for the National Book Award this year in various genres, but that proved a little too ambitious. But everything I’ve read off that list has been a revelation. Usually, one book leads to another. I also post the books I’ve read on my Instagram, and friends will say, “Oh you have to read this related book” or “I think you’d like x book,” and that will lead me to my next book. And I read a lot of reviews and recommendations from writers I admire, including my sister, Siobhan Phillips. The more you read the more you realize you haven’t read.

Q. Do you remember the first book that made an impact on you?

I grew up in a house without television (or heat), so books were a central part of my childhood. I have a vivid memory of my parents reading “The Incredible Journey” out loud to me and my siblings at bedtime and my father started crying at the ending, where the animals are returning, and my mother had to take over, and then she started crying, too. It was one of the rare times I saw my father cry in childhood and it made a huge impression on me – that a book could move you in that way, that it was OK to be so moved. I also thought a lot about “Farmer Boy” as a kid, from the Laura Ingalls Wilder series. His life was difficult and disciplined, full of so many chores, and yet somehow there’s joy and wonder about growing up in the telling too. That stayed with me as a young reader, I think because it also put my own life in perspective.

Q. What’s something – a fact, a bit of dialogue or something else – that has stayed with you from a recent reading?

My mind is filled with visceral animal facts from “Ranger Rick” magazine and other books my 6-year-old is reading, such as that a frog swallows with help from its eyeball. Other things that have stayed with me hit closer to home. I recently read Annie Ernaux’s “Getting Lost,” and a quote from a profile of Ernaux by another great writer, Rachel Cusk, in the New York Times stuck with me: “If it remains difficult for women to make art about their own lives, it is because femininity still has no stable place in culture.”

Q. Do you have any favorite book covers?

Sheila Heti’s “Pure Colour” has a near-perfect book cover. That wabi-sabi deliciously green Ellsworth Kelly form!

Q. Is there a genre or type of book you read the most – and what would you like to read more of?

I read a lot of novels. I also really love writers’ journals, especially to pick up and dip into on occasion. In high school, I got into the notebooks of Albert Camus (as one does – ha). His novels never moved me but I found sections of his notebooks to be extraordinary – about art, suffering, money. I still quote them often. Anne Truitt’s “Day Book” is an exceptional, honest journal of a working artist and I also return to sections of it often.

Q. What do you find the most appealing in a book: the plot, the language, the cover, a recommendation? Do you have any examples?

Always the characters and their setting, so it’s probably not such a big surprise that place plays such an important role in “The Slip.” The obscure little street in downtown New York is as much a character as the artists who lived on it, and I wanted that kind of reciprocal relationship so you got a sense of what their life was really like there. It’s a challenge writing nonfiction, but I was very lucky that so many of the artists kept journals or wrote letters with colorful details of their time at Coenties Slip.

I often cannot remember the plot of books I loved, but I always remember the mood that they conjured, where they took me. A recent novel that had such a terrific sense of setting was “The Children’s Bible” by Lydia Millet, as well as Claire Keegan’s “Small Things Like These” and Tove Ditlevsen’s “The Copenhagen Trilogy.” In all of these stories, the people and the setting are what moved me most and kind of scrambled present reality for a little while after I put the book down. Poetry does that for me too.

Q. What’s something about your book that no one knows?

I had to buy a lot of books while I was researching and writing “The Slip” because in the deep pandemic all the libraries and research archives were closed. (Even as, pretty early on, the New York and Brooklyn Public Libraries were incredible at allowing you to request books for pick up.) I found a rare book about a supporting character in “The Slip” – it was one of those things where I wasn’t sure if it would be helpful or not but I just went for it and ordered it from an obscure historical website because sometimes these wild goose chases lead to the most wonderful, strange detail to include. In any case, the book never showed up; my follow-up emails went unanswered. And I couldn’t find any other copies of the book anywhere. So that was just a lost story. It would have been a tangent anyway, so I let it go, but I do still wonder who ended up reading that book, or if it ever even existed.

Also, because I had three kids during “The Slip”’s own gestation, I think about all the life that happened just outside of the page that only I knew about. Like: kids playing at my feet (or having meltdowns); the nursing breaks or sections edited with a sleeping baby in my arms; the paragraphs interrupted by bouts of sickness. It’s the secret life of the text, which becomes something apart from you, bigger, more resilient, thank god, but hopefully, in the case of “The Slip,” still full of another kind of truth about making something.

More books, authors and bestsellers

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Dog days

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Season’s readings

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The week’s bestsellers

The top-selling books at your local independent bookstores. READ MORE

Read any books that you want to tell people about? Email epedersen@scng.com with “ERIK’S BOOK PAGES” in the subject line and I may include your comments in an upcoming newsletter.

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Next on ‘Bookish’

The next installment is Feb. 16, at 5 p.m., as hosts Sandra Tsing Loh and Samantha Dunn talk about upcoming books. Sign up for free now.