Every now and then, PWxyz likes to let the staff around here talk about books, because that’s all we secretly want to do. Previously, the PW staff has Fixed the Modern Library 100 Novels List, named some favorite short stories, and picked the best books read in 2011 and 2012. Here, we asked: What’s the first book you read that really made you love books? Let us know yours in the comments!

Andrew Albanese, senior writer: The Great Brain series by John D. Fitzgerald

Easy…

For me, it was The Great Brain series, by John Dennis Fitzgerald. In the mid-1970s, while I was in elementary school, my family began spending winters at my grandparents home on Oneida Lake, in upstate New York, so we could care for my great grandmother while my grandparents wintered in Florida. The move meant a special, 45-minute bus ride to school every day, with kids I didn’t know and who apparently were predisposed to not liking new kids. Or, maybe they just didn’t like me. So, there I was. 10 years old, in a rural lake house, in winter, no smartphones or Internet, of course, and only three blurry channels on TV, when the signal could penetrate the lake effect snow. But whatever, I never watched TV, I had to go to bed early every night so I could wake up at the crack of dawn to catch that snakepit of a bus to school. And then one day, our school librarian took pity on my brother and me, and sent us home with The Great Brain books. I have to admit, I can’t remember many details of the books today—but I’ll never forget my brother and I staying up late into the night reading the books together with a flashlight. Continue reading →

The following is an excerpt from Matthew Kahn’s project 100 Years, 94 Books–to review the bestselling books of the last 100 years and study what made them essential to their cultural moment.

 Who?

Herbert George Wells (1866-1946) remains popular to this day, and is best known for his work as one of the fathers of science fiction. Wells was born in the county of Kent in England.  Growing up, his family had considerable financial trouble resulting in Wells’s placement in various harsh apprenticeship programs as a child and teenager, giving him experiences which lent themselves to some of his novels (e.g. Kipps).  He later became a teacher and, in 1895, wrote his first (and possibly most famous) novel, The Time Machine.  Between 1895 and 1901, Wells published three non-fiction books and eight more novels, including The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898), and The First Men in the Moon (1901).

Wells wrote prolifically about social and economic issues, and put forth many volumes on better ways to organize the world.  He wrote extensively on the subject of utopias and authored many non-fiction works on popular history. Yet he is remembered for little else than his science fiction, despite having published over fifty novels at the time of his death, and even more non-fiction books.  Wells passed away due to undetermined medical causes in 1946.

So what’s this book about?

Mr. Britling Sees It Through can be best explained by this passage from the novel itself:

“This story is essentially the history of the opening and of the realisation of the Great War as it happened to one small group of people in Essex, and more particularly, as it happened to one human brain” (216).

The titular Mr. Britling is a writer primarily of essays and non-fiction books on social issues of the day and larger aspects of human nature. The novel begins with the arrival of Mr. Direck, an American who has come to ask Mr. Britling to give a lecture in Massachusetts.  Mr. Direck stays at Mr. Britling’s home in Matching’s Easy, along with Mrs. Britling, Mr. Britling’s secretary Teddy, his wife Letty and sister-in-law Cecily (whom Mr. Direck immediately falls for), Herr Heinrich (a German student), the Britlings’ two young sons, and Hugh Britling (Mr. Britling’s older son from his first marriage). The first section of the novel establishes these characters and focuses on the British attitude leading up to the outbreak of World War One. The rest of the novel focuses on how life and attitudes changed (or refused to change) while some characters left for war.

Read the full post on Kahn’s blog.

The following is an excerpt from Matthew Kahn’s project 100 Years, 94 Books–to review the bestselling books of the last 100 years and study what made them essential to their cultural moment.

PW has already named its Best Books of 2012, but since readers rarely get to see the faces behind the scenes, we thought we’d let our staff share the best book they read in 2012, because deep down, we’re all just book nerds. Here are our staff picks. Let us know your favorite book you read this year in the comments!

Peter Cannon, senior reviews editor:

When I was a college senior, I gave Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1972, as a house present to a friend’s mother. At the time, I had no interest whatsoever in reading a long, serious contemporary novel, focused as I was on studying classic American literature at the same university where Stegner was in charge of the creative writing program. Forty years later, having broadened my literary range, I finally read Stegner’s masterpiece. I’m glad I waited.  At my current mature age, I can better appreciate the struggles of a mismatched couple in the post-Civil War American west, framed by the narrative of the couple’s cranky, crippled 58-year-old grandson, a retired history professor who tries to make sense of their story as he pieces it together. His fulminations against the hippie counterculture of his own day add to the fun. A brutally honest, unsentimental book.

Jessamine Chan, reviews editor:

I still have 400 pages to go, but at the halfway mark, Anna Karenina (the translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky) is definitely my favorite this year. Every hour that I can devote to it has been immensely rewarding. I’m not a big fan of the disaffected, post-post-emotion trend in contemporary fiction, so I love that these characters just feel so many feelings. Levin seems always on the verge of a meltdown, and the women sigh and weep for pages and pages. That is my kind of book. Last week, I missed my subway stop because of one of Vronsky’s big scenes. I wish all books could command my attention and inspire my devotion the way this one does.

Michael Coffey, co-editorial director:

One topic, jazz, served marvelously by two books this year: Ted Gioia’s The Jazz Standards (Oxford University Press), and Marc Myers’s Why Jazz Happened (Univ. of California Press). When read together, Myers’s book offers an explanation (as much as there can be one) of how the culture produced the 250 standards of the jazz repertoire that Gioia lovingly details. While Gioia makes a fascinating connection between how Broadway show tunes and the popularity of strong singers like Frank Sinatra and Billie Holliday fed and fed off the development (and commercial success for a time) of the jazz form, Myers, who covers music for the Wall Street Journal and writes the popular blog, JazzWax, explores how migration, the depression, the advent of radio, the evolution of recording technology (including the concomitant rise of juke boxes), and the battle between musicians’ unions and record companies directly influenced the direction of American jazz. Both books make for lively accompaniments to listening. Continue reading →

Last week, we picked E.L. James as 2012′s Publishing Person of the Year, and responses were…strong. Ron Charles over at The Washington Post is the latest to weigh in, posting this video:

Amazon has marked its 5th birthday by releasing the bestselling Kindle e-books from the first five years. They are:

Top 5 Best-Selling Kindle Books Ever

1. Fifty Shades of Grey
2. The Hunger Games
3. Catching Fire
4. Mockingjay
5. Fifty Shades Darker

Top Selling Kindle Books By Year

1. The Complete User’s Guide To the Amazing Amazon Kindle (2008)
2. The Lost Symbol (2009)
3. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (2010)
4. The Help (2011)
5. Fifty Shades of Grey (2012)

The great thing about PWxyz asking PW Staff for their reading recommendations is that they’ll always tell us and they’ll do it for free! We have tricked them. This time, we bamboozled them all for their all-time favorite short stories. And we’d like you to tell us your favorite short story in the comments. We promise–it’s not a trick.

Adam Boretz, reviews editor:

“The Depressed Person” by David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace’s wending prose perfectly captures the skewed thinking of the depressed (and anxious) person with one awful, self-conscious — and wickedly funny — mental spiral after another. Readers in the midst of a crack-up of their own may, of course, find this story less entertaining and more, well…depressing.

Peter Cannon, senior reviews editor:

“Honeysuckle Cottage” by P.G. Wodehouse

In P. G. Wodehouse’s “Honeysuckle Cottage,” one of the English humorist’s funniest stories, a hardboiled mystery novelist must stay for six months in a cottage once inhabited by his late aunt, a romance novelist, in order to gain an inheritance. The haunted atmosphere of the house soon has a sentimental effect on our hero—and his prose.

Jessamine Chan, reviews editor:

“The Great Divorce” by Kelly Link

A few summers ago, while teaching an undergrad fiction workshop, I found myself fielding complaints that my assigned reading was “too dark,” and that all the stories were about people being incredibly mean to each other. “But that’s called conflict!” I said. What turned the class around was having them read “The Great Divorce.” Here, the dead can marry the living. Problems ensue when they want to get divorced. I love how Link whimsically transforms the classic miserable married people premise. My summary does not do justice to this delightful, rich, and surprising story. Just go read it. I’m sure you will find yourself, as I did, seeking out all of her books.

Continue reading →