Looking for Some Great Reads from 2010?

Earlier this month, Shelf Awareness published a list of ten of my favorite books from 2010, including some novels by authors I’d had a chance to tell you about on Beatrice before, like Lauren Grodstein and Paul Murray. (And I’m seeing now, as I look those links up, that Grodstein’s A Friend of the Family was actually released in late 2009, but luckily Shelf Awareness was flexible on the whole publication date thing anyway. So it’s all good!) There were also some titles I hadn’t said much about here, like Cory Doctorow’s For the Win or Victoria Dahl’s A Little Bit Wild. But there was also a whole other category of books I left off that list, so I wouldn’t have to keep writing variants of “Full disclosure: So-and-so is a friend of mine” over and over. (It’s sort of a gray area, because some of the authors who did make the list I know well enough to say hi to in a friendly manner, but I did my best to approach the task fairly.)

Here, though, I can just tell you: My friends wrote some fabulous books in 2010, and I’m going to tell you about some of them, but I’m writing this on the fly the night before New Year’s Even, so I’m probably going to miss a bunch, so if you thought for sure you were going to see your book mentioned in this post and it winds up not being here, it’s not intended to be a knock, I promise!

First, it was a productive year for my co-hosts at Lady Jane’s Salon, the monthly romance reading series we run at Madame X in Manhattan: Hope Tarr published The Tutor, Maya Rodale came out with A Groom of One’s Own, and Leanna Renee Hieber released The Darkly Luminous Fight For Persephone Parker. We had some fantastic readers at the Salon, too, like Sarah MacLean, who released both Nine Rules to Break When Romancing a Rake and Ten Ways to Be Adored When Landing a Lord this year; Lauren Willig also had two novels out in 2010, The Betrayal of the Bloody Lily and The Mischief of the Mistletoe.

(more…)

31 December 2010 | uncategorized |

Pelso Is Like So

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been dipping into Listen to This, a collection of Alex Ross’s essays for The New Yorker—I had read several of them when they first appeared in the magazine, but my memory had faded just enough that they were able to re-surprise me all over again, and too I had just attended a panel discussion with modern classical composer John Luther Adams (about which I’ll write more in a little while) so it was a good time to revisit that chapter… Oh! And one of the essays spurred me to do something about an early music itch I’d been meaning to scratch, so I downloaded a bunch of Hespèrion XXI albums I’d been meaning to check out, starting with Ostinato. I highly recommend them, and I may return to this topic, too, at some point, but that’s not why I’m writing this post.

What spurred this post was another FSG book that arrived recently, a retrospective collection of Nadine Gordimer short stories called Life Times which, as you can see, deploys the same cover design strategy. I checked the dust jackets, and they’re unsurprisingly the work of the same art director, Charlotte Strick, who is also the art editor of The Paris Review. I’ve since learned that the name of the typeface Strick used on these two covers is Pelso, and that it was created seven years ago by Hungarian type designer Gábor Kóthay, who’s also behind one of the most recognized titles of this young century: The Twilight covers make use of his Zephyr typeface.

I haven’t had a chance to start with the Gordimer stories yet, but I will soon—and I can honestly say this is one case where the cover has definitely drawn me in.

29 November 2010 | uncategorized |