On Thursday, November 17th at 7:30 p.m. ET, Rebecca Joines Schinsky and I will be hosting the first-ever FridayReads Live event. We will be discussing a new title from Crown Publishing: Enjoy Every Sandwich: Living Each Day As If It Were Your Lastby Lee Lipsenthal, MD.  It doesn’t matter if you’ve read the book, or not–come join us!

If you’re able to join us in person, come to Housing Works Bookstore at 126 Crosby Street (just south of Houston) between 7pm and 9pm, where Rebecca and I will be on our computers to host a Twitter Book Tour chat. Thanks to the good folks at Crown Publishing, we will have wine, beer, and sandwiches available. Meet me, Rebecca Schinsky, Iris Blasi, Erin Cox, and others as we chat, quaff, nibble…and tweet.

If you’re able to join us online, please connect with us online via Twitter by using the hashtag #EverySandwich. The easiest way to do this is to go to Tweetchat.com and log in using your Twitter name. Then enter the hashtag in the empty field at the top of the page and start reading and/or tweeting. (Tweetchat automatically adds the hashtag for you, so there’s no need to worry about watching the length of your tweets. If you “go over,” it will tell you “Too Long.”) If you don’t have a Twitter account, you should be able to track the #EverySandwich via Twitter’s search function here: https://twitter.com/?lang=en&logged_out=1#!/search/%23everysandwich

Before the chat, we encourage you to view the trailer for the book http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UIFbOfWwYE. We’ll be publishing a new blog post tomorrow with some suggested questions about the book/things to consider/bits of inspiration, so please watch for that, too.

If you have any questions at all, please email me: TheBookMaven at gmail dot com.

I really want FridayReads to hit 8K this week.

IF WE HIT 8K–and only if we do–I will give away three extra prizes.

Here they are:

1. A set of three slipcased, signed Indiespensables titles: Turn of Mind by Alice LaPlante, State of Wonder by Ann Patchett, and The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern.

2. One $150 gift certificate to One More Page bookstore, my local indie. Don’t worry, they’ll be happy to take your online or phone order, wherever you live. They will special order anything you like.

3. A mega-set of Boots the Chemist bath goodies from Target, all full-size products, including three bath milks, three body butters, three body washes, and three hand lotions, plus an assortment of sponges, scrubbers, and other treats.

Interested in winning one of these prizes? Share YOUR FridayReads on Twitter or Facebook or tumblr–and tell a friend or three! Everyone who shares is eligible. For more information about FridayReads, check out our web site.

Thanks for your time and help, readers!

First, five of you have won “bundles” from Hachette Book Group USA. Each bundle includes a paper book and an audiobook. The titles will be given out grab-bag style, but they all come the Hachette Book Group Holiday Gift Guide. Not a lemon on this lot!

The five winners are:

1. JJMcGaffey

2. debenedettos

3. msbookjunkie

4. MartiniReading

5. funkychick301

Once you’ve seen your name up here in lights, please send your snailmail addy to me: TheBookMaven at gmail dot com. Giveaway prizes must be claimed within two weeks or the prizes revert to our swag stash…

Congrats to the winners, and thanks, everyone, for another great #FridayReads!

You are:

1. Grainsnmore

2. Histifchick

3. BayBitch

4. esaevian

5. toadacious1

6. JohnGuild

7. lmsoft

8. LizzieVance

9. SteenaHomes

10. yoyology

Email your snailmail addresses to me: TheBookMaven at gmail dot com. I’ll make sure the delightful folks at Other Press get your prizes out to you quickly.

Congrats, and thanks for participating in #FridayReads!

@cris0521

@lawschoolninja

@SakuraChica

@Johnny_Pistols

@catacoma

@baisebeige

@MystNoir

@jocemiller

@Janet_Tait

@waityourarobot

@NeilSnowdon

Once you’ve seen your name here, please email me with your full snailmail address: TheBookMaven at gmail dot com. I’ll send your info on to Harper Perennial and they’ll get your goodies sent off quickly. 

Thank you all so much for your support of #FridayReads. Remember, tell your friends about our FridayReads Facebook page, because there’s a giveaway over there IF we reach a certain number…

Thus I was a bit loath to follow my post about Maira Kalman’s “And the Pursuit of Happiness” with one on “The Memory Chalet” by Tony Judt, since both are from The Penguin Press. However, as will become clear in a moment, I have personal reasons for doing so that have nothing whatsoever to do with publisher favoritism.

I wince, now, for is there any phrase more abjured in book reviewing than “personal reasons?” None of us really wants to read a long paragraph about how the critic’s experience at last week’s book party puts her in mind of the author’s amusing anecdote about X. I hope you’ll forgive me in this instance, and I’ll try to get my “personal reasons” out of the way quickly so that I can tell you more about Judt’s remarkable collection of what he calls feuilletons.

The historian and author Tony Judt died in August 2010. He had what the English call “motor neuron disease” and what we call “Lou Gehrig’s Disease:” Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, or ALS. (Many people know about ALS because the acclaimed British scientist Stephen Hawking has suffered from it for decades.) As Judt notes in his opening piece, this is a disease unusually cruel in its progress, because it leaves the mind entirely clear and functioning but bit by bit deprives the victim of any and all means of communication. While the course of ALS varies, in the end the person afflicted will most likely have lost the use of legs, arms, hands and fingers, mouth and speech, and often facial muscles as well. The disease is a cruel inversion of “mens sana in corpore sano,” with a “mens sana” imprisoned in a very, very ill and dysfunctional “corpore.”

I know more than a little about ALS because four years ago my own father died of a disease called Multiple System Atrophy, which is most easily described as a combination of ALS and Parkinson’s Disease. I don’t plan to dwell here on the various indignities my father endured. The “personal reasons” I’d like to share are about how, like Judt, my father began gathering conversations, memories, and information eagerly during the all-too-brief and fast months of his decline. He longed for visitors to talk with because we all knew, from research (we are nothing if not avid information gatherers in my family), that he might not be able to talk forever. My mother bought him a laptop with large keys and screen so that as long as his arms and fingers were able to, he could email and surf the web.

He was creating a sort of internal scrapbook, mining as deep as possible for things to pore over in his mind.

My father was a mechanical engineer who loved to learn but held a certain skepticism towards the humanities, believing that they could not illuminate the truths of the universe like his beloved sciences. I wish he had known Tony Judt, whose own education gifted him with the concept of the “memory palace,” a sort of brain-as-database method used by Renaissance scholars to retain huge blocks of information, from complicated grammatical systems to botanical species to mathematical theorems. When Judt was diagnosed two years ago at age sixty with ALS, his academician’s mind quickly turned to how he might cope the loss of communication to come:

“I realized, some months into the disease, that I was writing whole stories in my head in the course of the night. Doubtless I was seeking oblivion, replacing galumphing sheep with narrative complexity to comparable effect. But in the course of these little exercises, I realized that I was reconstructing — LEGO-like — interwoven segments of my own past which I had never previously thought of as related.”

Judt also realizes he has no need of a “memory palace,” but as his thoughts meander often to a particular Swiss vacation in which he was contented, he thinks: “…why not a memory chalet?” Over the course of several months, he dictated these reflections on his childhood, education, and career after turning them over at night, often sleepless in his unmoving physical state, yet free to roam through the past and make new connections between its sometimes patchy sections. 

My little attempt at writing a review of “The Memory Chalet” is already running on longer than web-savvy readers might like, and I’ll admit that I am lazy about adding pages to blog entries, but please bear with me for just a few paragraphs more so that I can share why this book is more than just a Paul Harvey-esque “The Rest of the Story” sort of thing. One of my favorite of Judt’s pieces in the book is titled “Mimetic Desire,” and it perfectly captures the way I have always felt about trains:

“As a child, I always felt uneasy and a little constrained about people, my family in particular. Solitude was bliss, but not easily obtained. Being always felt stressful — wherever I was there was something to do, someone to please, a duty to be completed, a role inadequately fulfilled, something amiss. Becoming, on the hand, was relief. I was never so happy as when I was going somewhere on my own, and the longer it took to get there, the better. Walking was pleasurable, cycling enjoyable, bus journeys fun. But the train was very heaven.”

I’d marked “Mimetic Desire” as a piece to read again — and was both pleased and moved by its connections to the final “Envoi” titled “Magic Mountains.” I won’t spoil anything more, because Judt has managed, in the midst of facing his own mortality, to help us all see something new about our humanity. That his capacious and sympathetic intellect is no longer with us is a real loss, but in constructing his “memory chalet” Tony Judt demonstrates that there is more to be discovered even when there is no more to be experienced.

That brought me up short. I’d just finished Kalman’s book and had absolutely loved it, yet never once thought of it as a graphic novel (or “GN,” as many book lovers refer to these illustrated narratives). 

Why not? The book is lavishly illustrated and has a clear arc. However, Kalman is not a comic-book artist, and her pages do not reflect the sort of cell-driven storytelling that so many GNs rely on, hearkening back to their comic-book roots. “And the Pursuit of Happiness” feels more like a romp in the author’s psyche, more like a Victorian collage scrapbook, than anything “graphic.” 

Before I further discuss this book’s delightful and unpredictable contents, however, I’d like to discuss its heft. That’s right, I said “heft.” In an age of e-books and digital publishing and terrible groundwood-laden pages (shoutout to my homegirl @PermanentPaper!) and flimsy bindings, it is a rare and unexpected pleasure to receive and handle a modern tome that feels heavy, has deliciously thick pages that are easily turned, and smells (even more deliciously) of ink and rag paper and libraries…

Ah, libraries. They’re represented in “And the Pursuit of Happiness,” (p. 35), as are: TV dinners. The Soldier’s Creed. A Jell-O light bulb. Thomas Jefferson’s coat lined with socks, “for warmth.” Sludge containers in Manhattan. A portrait of the Capitol Building’s tram operator, sporting “a spiffy yellow hat.” There is so much of the minutiae of the United States contained within these pages — in the hands of a lesser author and artist, it might remain that way, simply a collection of witty apercus.

But Kalman uses pen and paintbrush (not to mention camera) to tie all of her observations together into a heartfelt paean to what makes our country great. She doesn’t ignore sludge, or war, or homely meals, or small corners. She includes a double-truck spread of a primitive-style  painting of a bobby pin along with the same of a perfect room designed by Thomas Jefferson, yet gives each proper importance (not the same, but proper). 

How did she decide when to include a photo and when to include a sketch, when to write 100 words and when to write just five? This is Kalman’s particular genius. Like any good novelist, she knows when to “go wide” and when to hone in on a tiny detail. She also knows that providing structure to a form as free-form as her own is essentail, so she divides the book by twelve months of the year as well as by themes for each month, which vary from Washingtoniana (our first president on a lollipop!) to thoughtful eating (the organic pizzas look a heck of a lot better than the McGriddles) to urban planning (hence the sludge containers).

Of course, Kalman is not, in this instance, truly a novelist because her book is nonfiction. This is why I wish we had a different name for GNs that are based on reality. How about “graphic narratives?” Yes! Maira Kalman’s “And the Pursuit of Happiness” is a graphic narrative, and one that you should read quickly, before relatives marauding your house during the upcoming holiday season hog it all to themselves. Better yet, buy a copy or three to give away. I cannot think of a home of any size that would not be enriched by this idiosyncratic take on how individuals from Thomas Edison to contemporary schoolchildren make our nation a place where this title is possible.

You MIGHT notice that we hit 3,000 participants this week. Thus we have extra giveaway treats. More on those in a moment!

The winner of @JulieKlam’s INSCRIBED copy of “You Had Me at Woof” is…

@LBinBH20!

There are SIX WINNERS of “You Had Me at Woof,” and Julie Klam has graciously offered to sign these copies:

@TerraceBooks

@sarahfparsons

@eclair111

@lenahuxley

@Gripemaster

@mamawordnerd

Email me: thebookmaven at gmail dot com — Send your snailmail address. Riverhead Books will get your copies out asap!

Now, the winner of #FridayReads M&Ms, courtesy of @ErinFaye…

Remember, this is one I got to pick, rather than using Random.org…

Yes, it’s @adamslisa!

Lisa Bonchek Adams has been a tireless supporter of #FridayReads for MONTHS. 

Now, there is still a fabulous prize to give away, and it is being given away w/Random.org — that’s the $100 worth of free books from @NovelBooks and his lovely Maryland shop Novel Places. 

The winner is….

@rebeccakross!

I promised a $25 prize at 750, a $50 prize at 1500, and so on…of course, we never made it to 2250, so there’s no $75 prize..

EXCEPT. There is! Long story, but someone chose not to claim a $75 prize from a previous giveaway, so I’m going to give it away today to say THANK YOU to all of you. Remember, I always choose giveaway recipients randomly, using Random.org

Winner of the $25 worth of free books: @craigtimes

Winner of the $50 worth of free books: @kmgovier

Winner of the $75 worth of free books: @megveglibrarian

Email me: thebookmaven at gmail dot com — and we’ll make arrangements! Congrats to all of the winners and many many thanks to all of you who make each Friday to much fun for me and other readers on Twitter via #FridayReads.