Heading out the door recently for a workout session, I paused to grab some reading material—the July/August 2008 issue of The Atlantic magazine with its intriguing cover headline: “Is Google Making Us Stoopid?” Good thing I was stuck in one place while perusing the text, because my ability to focus on a single topic for long has been rather challenged of late.

Nicholas Carr’s article has a subtitle: “What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains.”

A quick Google search turns up all the information a researcher, whether casual or professional, could hope for, without the traditional trawling through archives or leafing through indices. Carr discusses the fact that with the ability to access nonstop information 24/7, habitual Internet users are developing a unique method of dealing with the overflow. Classic journalism theory holds (so I’m told) that a newspaper reporter tends to put the most compelling information in the first paragraph, since few readers will finish a longer article. On the Internet, with constant links leading deeper into the rabbit hole, readers seldom return to a web site to finish an article or blog post once a link takes them away. Even a particularly enticing first paragraph is not be enough to focus the jaded surfer’s attention.

With constant headlines flashing past our eyes and distracting advertisements extolling the latest IQ test or makeover strategy, we’re losing the ability to concentrate on reading for more than a few moments before our brains demand a subject change.

Carr writes, “Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory.” He goes on to say that reading literature or even a full length magazine article is becoming more difficult even for academics who previously devoured works like War and Peace.

Is this really the future of reading? Losing the ability to sit down and read a full chapter of a biography or finally reach the end of that novel? I felt good about managing to reach the end of Carr’s cover story. If you made it to the end of this blog post, there may be hope for us yet.

—Lara Killian

Sir Salman Rushdie’s latest work of fiction, The Enchantress of Florence, is another sumptuous feat of storytelling. The author layers story upon story in a muddled palimpsest that meanders through time and jumps geographically so that the reader cannot completely follow the chronology of events or pin down the relationships between characters. It always feels like an accomplishment to finish a Rushdie novel, but the effort is well worth it.

The center of the universe in this novel is a woman named Qara Köz, the “hidden princess” of India in the Middle Ages. She is constantly choosing her own destiny in a world where men usually make the rules, and she uses the people around her to achieve her goals. Qara Köz is a woman capable of entrancing all who cross her path, all who see her, even those who only imagine her existence. Her magic is like a whirlpool, drawing in the men and women in her periphery and merely casting them aside when their purpose has been served if they are lucky; the unfortunate are destroyed.

Piece by piece, the princess’ story is revealed to her distant relative, King Akbar, who struggles with his place in history, wondering what will be come of his dynasty, and curious about the workings of the world as well as arrogant about his power to control it. Three Florentine childhood friends play key roles in the travels of the princess, and the descendant of one of them is the storyteller who enlightens the emperor in his capital city of Sikri. After hearing the conclusion of the tale, Akbar muses,

No woman in the history of the world had made a journey like hers. He loved her for it and admired her too, but he was also sure that her journey across the Ocean Sea was a kind of dying, a death before death, because death too was a sailing away from the known into the unknown.

The life of The Enchantress of Florence is a fascinating one, and Rushdie admits that this, of all his works, is the best researched. Though some may find his writing overwrought, I always enjoy it, and look forward to his future efforts.

—Lara Killian

In case you were in any doubt, it pays to be on good terms with your local librarian.

Mine publishes a short weekly column in the local newspaper updating patrons (and potential patrons) on what’s new in the library this week. About a month ago I saw that Salman Rushdie’s latest novel, The Enchantress of Florence, had been received. I’ve read most of his work and really enjoy it, so I stopped in to peruse the new fiction shelf. I was disappointed to see that it was absent; I assumed it was already checked out.

I always have a stack of books waiting for my schedule to clear so I wasn’t too put out. However, when someone at the circulation desk asked if I was looking for something, I mentioned the book. She looked it up in the computer and frowned because it should have been on the shelf. After a bit of looking around in likely locations for misplaced volumes, I took some alternative reading and headed on my way. I didn’t bother placing a hold on the book as it wasn’t checked out in the first place, so the computer wouldn’t have known what to do with my request.

It was pretty surprising when I visited the library a couple of weeks later to return something, and there was The Enchantress of Florence, sitting on the shelf behind the circulation desk with my name tucked inside – waiting for me to either drop by or for someone to give me a call! It had turned up randomly and the librarian had remembered that I was looking for it.

As she said, there aren’t too many likely Rushdie readers in our small town of 6000 or so, so perhaps my request really stood out from the crowd. That said, I felt pretty gratified to know that the librarians are paying attention and doing their best to help patrons get what they’re looking for. What more could you ask for?

And although I’m smack in the middle of the book, I can say that it’s pretty good so far. Have you read any Rushdie lately? I’d recommend the Man Booker Prize winning Midnight’s Children (1981) as a great starting point.

—Lara Killian

One thing I love to keep an eye out for in the summer is a good book sale. Not only do brick-and-mortar bookstores tend to put out more sale items in sunny weather to get window shoppers to pause in their strolling, many libraries choose this time to raise funds and shed excess inventory or donations.

After the cold months of shopping online for books, the tactile experience of picking up books and flipping through them at random, weighing the heft of them in your hand, finding a hidden gem at the bottom of a pile—there’s nothing like it in the Internet book-selling world.

Not all book sales are created equal. Last week I went to two library book sales in my county; these events often take place around the US Independence Day holiday, the first long weekend in July. I hit the first book sale late in the day, and as it was clear that the porch of the library contained many tables piled high with books and there was also a gazebo filled with children’s books, plus a separate tent with hardcovers on the lawn, I hoped to find some good deals.

I was stunned to find that the library wanted $2.50 for a used hardcover and $1.00 for trashy romance and sci-fi paperbacks.At a yard sale I would expect to find the latter for a quarter. I should mention this public library is one town over, in a very touristy area, but I wondered as I wandered, does everything have to be expensive here? I quickly gravitated to the $1.50 ‘large paperback’ table and tarp-covered fringe piles, as these were for the most part recent releases, and in good condition—like airport reads that were enjoyed once on the journey and donated upon their temporary owner’s return.

With three copies of Snow Falling on Cedars in plain view, it was even possible to be choosey about the condition of some books, which made the buck fifty a little easier to swallow. I ended up with quite a good pile and was glad I had enough cash with me to bring them home.

I was delighted to pick up a copy of Carl Honoré’s In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed (2005). I swooped upon a copy of A.S. Byatt’s Possession (1990) which looks as though it has never been opened—I always look at the spine of a paperback to see if it has been ‘broken.’ A hardcover copy of Byatt’s book was located on another table, but it was in poor shape and cost almost twice as much, so I stayed with the paperback version. A pristine copy of Umberto Eco’s In the Name of the Rose flew into my hands (with an uncreased spine as well), and for a bit of fun, The Sex Lives of Cannibals (2004) by J. Maarten Troost. All in all, I think I came home with about a dozen books, and all the money goes to the upkeep of the public library, so there’s a sense of supporting that venerable institution as well.

A few days later I stumbled upon another book sale of sorts, or the remnants of it. My local public library had a sale going on in the beginning of July and once the piles had been picked over, they moved the remnants to the side of the lawn closest to the parking lot, covered the lot with several tarps, and left it all outside for anyone to take whatever they wanted, gratis. Granted, there didn’t seem to be much left that was worth hanging on to (the library no longer wanted to store these leftovers, so ultimately the majority of these titles were destined for recycling).

Naturally I couldn’t resist checking things over, just in case. A respectable copy of Gabriel García Márquez’s The General in His Labyrinth (1991) turned up, and a paperback copy of Thomas Harris’ The Silence of the Lambs (1988) that I couldn’t allow to be consigned to pulp. A beautiful navy blue copy of Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh, embossed with gilt, also joined my small pile of rescued books.

Now if only I could find time to read each of my new treasures. Have you found any good summer book sales this year? Keep your eyes open, and let me know what you find. 

—Lara Killian

Many of us are excited about Stephenie Meyer’s upcoming Breaking Dawn. Her Twilight series is Harry Potter huge—even if the latest cover of Entertainment magazine was slightly unnerving. Does Robert Pattinson really need to look so pale in order to play Edward Cullen?

This week I’d like to mention another author whose latest work always gets me excited—and which always gets purchased as soon as it’s available: Haruki Murakami, possibly the best known Japanese writer of fiction here in North America.

Recently I finished his 2007 work, After Dark. (PopMatter’s review is here.) It’s more like a novella than a fully fleshed out Murakami novel. I enjoy his magical realism style, and the fact that he always surprises me. I can never tell what is going to happen because much of the action is illogical, or completely bizarre. Elements of the supernatural, and unlikely coincidences of connection are par for the course.

After Dark takes place in the middle of the night in Tokyo, when most people are safely ensconced in their homes, sleeping quietly in preparation for a new day, and unaware of the frequent strangeness of the nighttime hours. The book presents a community of those who are more at ease when day turns into night; their stories are loosely interconnected. Here, Murakami writes as though he perceives the action as a screenplay. The narrative voice is like a camera, moving about the scenes, cutting from location to location, deliberately including some angles and excluding other portions of the set.

An initially unremarkable young woman, Mari, spends her nighttime hours avoiding company and reading in a fast food restaurant, while her sleeping beauty sister, Eri, lies at home in perfect repose—which has lasted for two months. Mari is asked by a complete stranger who has heard she speaks Chinese to come to a love-hotel and translate for a Chinese prostitute who has been attacked by a client who conforms to every stereotype of the typical hardworking Japanese businessman, except for his tendency to savage violence. Meanwhile, in Eri’s room, tidy and austere but for the lovely girl sound asleep in the bed, some sort of electric energy has entered the chamber and the accompanying current threatens to either disturb her unfathomable sleep, or to harm her as she lies innocently at peace.

After Dark, things are not as they seem, and Murakami never offers an explanation for the strangeness of the Tokyo night, as these stories are loosely interwoven.

Kafka on the Shore which was published in translation in 2006, was my first and remains my favorite Murakami novel. Since a friend lent me The Elephant Vanishes, a short story collection from 1994, I have been totally hooked and read just about everything Murakami has written that is available in English.

Who is your favorite foreign-language author?

—Lara Killian

It looks bigger than it actually is, if that’s physically possible. A 720-page tome that lands with an imposing, Tolstey-esque thud on any surface it might happen to be dropped upon, Dash Shaw’s Bottomless Belly Button (Fantagraphics, June 2008, $29.95) is a serious brick of a thing, which may actually work against it. As Shaw notes on the title page (after identifying the work to follow as “not for children"), the book that follows is divided into three parts, and readers should “take breaks from reading between them.” Given the propensity of the reading public to avoid most things this hefty that aren’t the Bible, it might have made sense to split Shaw’s work into three, less-imposing volumes. It’s fortunate, though, that they didn’t, because—Shaw’s admonition to the contrary—no breaks are necessary or even desired while reading Bottomless Belly Button; he’s right, though, that it’s not for children.

While Shaw’s novel gives off the first appearance of something culled from the darker fringes of the graphic novel universe, where magical realism and nonsensical happenstance are the rule of the day, its root story is a well-examined dissection of the family, in extremis; in other words, the bread and butter of American fiction. The Loony family (it’s an admittedly weak joke, almost saved by its pointed obviousness) is a four-decade-old amalgamation of dissatisfied children and quietly seething parents, the latter of whom have just announced that they are getting a divorce. Shaw builds to the ramifications of this decision after laying out the family history and current situation in a series of flashbacks and diagrams, even including some helpful piecharts. It’s a pointedly scientific beginning to what promises to be a disagreeable mess of a meltdown.

Arriving at the family’s beachside house to deal with the ramifications of the divorce, the Loonys face their several grown children, none of whom seem to have any ability to function in the world they’ve long since decamped for. The oldest, Dennis, is a blowhard with a wife who seems on the verge of leaving. Claire is divorced herself, with a teenage daughter, sullen behind goggle-like glasses. The youngest sibling is Peter, a slacker pothead of a filmmaker who seems disengaged from most human activity, until he falls for a beautiful woman living further down the beach. (In one of the book’s only nods to comic surreality, Peter is drawn as a human with a frog’s face, the reason for which is only revealed in a couple of frames much later in the book.) In the finest tradition of dysfunctional family fiction, the Loony spends most of the book sniping at each other, coming to grips with their parents (whose blasé announcement and blank reactions to it only add fuel to the fire), and occasionally digging up long-buried secrets (the house has a secret compartment, always handy in these situations).

Shaw’s story is bereft in many ways of forward momentum, instead hanging about in the fraught spaces between these people, so alike in their dissimilar miseries, and peeling back the layers of sadness and disappointment. While his art bears some resemblance to the bristly realism of Jeffery Brown, Shaw has a cleaner style, displaying the nonpicturesque realities of life (runny noses, hairy backs, flopping genitalia) while still looking outward to reveal some unfathomable beauties. It’s an invigorating mix, one sure to win over at least a few fans from the non-comic-reading side of the aisle. Big, but not daunting, funny and sad without being either slapstick or tragic, Bottomless Belly Button is sensuous and grounded graphic fiction of the highest order.

—Chris Barsanti