A New Year - New Books

Although I certainly haven't been writing much, I have been reading, believe me. And since it's a snowy day here today in Vancouver, BC, Canada, I'm hoping to read this day away.

What's on my side table for this weekend?

The Archivist's Story by Travis Holland (London: Bloomsbury, 2007). This is a novel set in 1939 Russia. Author Isaac Babel is in Lubyanka prison; a young archivist is assigned to incinerate Babel's last stories... Found at my favourite place for new books, and an independent book business, Black Bond Books in Surrey, BC. To be truthful, I picked this one up only because of the title; not many novels about archivists.

Click here for one brief biography of Isaac Babel at the Author's Calendar (written by Petri Liukkonen) and here for Babel's wife, Antonina Pirozhkova's, obituary (written by William Grimes; published in the New York Times, September 22, 2010). She spent much of her later life retrieving and ensuring his literary legacy.

The Nightmare: A Mystery with Mary Wollstonecraft by Nancy Means Wright (McKinleyville, California, USA: Perseverance Press, 2011).
Noticed this at Vancouver Public Library. Now how could I pass a mystery featuring Wollstonecraft up?

And for something quite different,

Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline by Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton (New York, USA: Princeton Architectural Press, 2010). According to the New York Times, this is an "eye popping" book. Certainly looks so! See a few of the book's images here as selected by the NY Times. Found on holidays in Kelowna at Mosaic Books, another great independent book shop. Look for it if you are travelling in the Okanagan this year.