In my wanderings through the audio landscape, I've spent a fair amount of time at KQED in San Francisco, where I revently had the privilege of meeting the one and only Ian Shoales.
Téa Obreht is as bustling with words and power as her novel, 'The Tiger's Wife,' but she smiles a lot more than the novel does, and she is positively bursting with creative joy. I spoke to her upstairs at Bookshop Santa Cruz — after she had driven directly up from Los Angeles. I had actually made the exact same journey the day before, and I can assure readers that I was bristling with nothing other than backache.
Of course, Téa had taken the scenic route, which makes perfect sense, given the feel and style of her novel. She had stopped at Hearst Castle, where she noted that William Randolph Hearst had imported a ceiling from Europe that was older than this country. This makes perfect sense if you read her book. Téa Obreht has a very unique vision of the world around her.
She also has enough energy to write such a novel, and the empathy to worry that my standard-issue coughing fit was somehow her fault. And she lives up to her cover-girl beauty shot. And she's just about a year older than my son, which makes her the youngest author to win the prestigious Orange Prize.
01-17-12 UPDATE:Podcast Update: Time to Read, Episode 27: John Lescroart, 'The Hunter'
Click image for audio link.
Here's the twenty-seventh episode of my new series of podcasts, which I'm calling Time to Read. The podcasts/radio broadcasts will be of books worth your valuable reading time. I'll try to keep the reports under four minutes, for a radio-friendly format. If you want to run them on your show or podcast, let me know.
My hope is that in under four minutes I can offer readers a concise review and an opportunity to hear the author read from or speak about the work. I'm hoping to offer a new one every week.
The twenty-seventh episode is a look at John Lescroart and his new book, 'The Hunter'.
"I started flashing things left and right field ..."
—Michael Gazzaniga
I was partway through Michael Gazzaniga's book 'Who's in Charge? Free Will and the Science of the Mind' when I realized just who he was. In my travels through popular neuroscience, I'd read of his experiments in David Eagleman's 'Incognito.' It dawned on me that I was reading the work of the man who initiated all our understanding of the left-right brain split with a series of simple experiments that used logic to deduce, essentially, who humans were and how our minds worked. He is a living legend in neuroscience.
Not surprisingly, he is a fine writer as well. 'Who's in Charge?' is based on his series of Gifford Lectures, which are available on Youtube.com here: One, Two, Three, Four, Five and Six. When we sat down to speak, I wanted to cover not just his experiments, but his writing process as well. It is one thing to compose a series of speeches given to an audience with the help of slides and one's own resonant voice. It's another to create a reading experience that communicates the same information in the same lively manner, which he has done impeccably.
Of course, we also spent a large amount of time talking about his work in free will and teasing out the upshot of his thoughts and discoveries. What fascinates me is Gazzaniga's methods. We live in a tech-heavy world of neuroscience, where we can aim all sorts of imaging devices at the brain and get some sense of what is happening and where it is happening. But Gazzanga's lab work is more on the level of logic problems; and much of his work happens somewhere between his own mind and his writing. Ultimately, we're looking at a language barrier. We will literally have to create new words, or add new definitions to old words to describe ourselves accurately.
02-14-12: Commentary : Archive Reviews: Jeffrey E. Barlough Awakens 'Dark Sleeper' and 'The House in the High Wood' :Bold, Unique, Horrific, Enchanting
02-08-12: Commentary : Thrity Umrigar Reveals 'The World We Found' : Slow-Burning Loss of Control
Agony Column Podcast News Report: A 2012 Interview with Thrity Umrigar : "...I walked away from that meeting in 2008 with an old friend of mine and literally saw at least the outline of the book in front of my eyes..."
02-06-12: Commentary : Eric Weiner Posts 'Man Seeks God' : Religious Pilgrimmage and Mordant Wit
Agony Column Podcast News Report: A 2012 Interview with Eric Weiner : "...by the end, given all the amazing people I met out there, I've changed my views about that."
02-01-12: Commentary : Stan Lee Splashes 'Stan Lee's How to Write Comics' and 'Stan Lee's How to Draw Comics' : Lessons in the Form, From the Master
01-23-12: Commentary : Sara Paretsky Nails 'Breakdown' : The Machine Stops
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2012 Interview with Sara Paretsky : "Everything in a courtroom is a story; it's not justice, it's combating narratives."
01-18-12: Commentary : Téa Obreht Conjures 'The Tiger's Wife' : The Grammar of Vision
01-13-12: Commentary : Hard Case Subterranean Block : Not from Bob's Basement Tapes
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2012 Phone Interview with Lisa Randall : "...there seems to be some evidence, especially from one of the experiments."
01-10-12: Commentary : Archive Review: Terry D'Auray Catches Lawrence Block and 'The Burglar on the Prowl' : "A show well worth the price of a ticket."
12-15-11:Agony Column Podcast News Report : The Agony Column Live with Lisa Goldstein and Ayize Jama-Everett, and music by Fenyang Smith, December 10, 2011 : "... let's look at what happens if people have abilities that other people don't have ..."
11-28-11: Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2011 Interview with Scott Wallace : "Within months of first contact, these groups experience a huge die-off."
11-22-11: Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2011 Interview with Charles Frazier, Part Two : "It's not me telling you, there's this storyteller voice."
11-21-11: Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2011 Interview with Charles Frazier : "If we're going in the wrong direction, we could turn around and go back."
11-17-11: Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2011 Interview with Gianni Mola : "The only way you can learn, I told them, is to watch me cook it."
11-11-11: Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2011 Interview with Karl Marlantes : "...the way I "think" about things, with quotes around think, is I tend to write them down..."
10-31-11: Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2011 Interview with Colson Whitehead : "In the Apocalypse, somebody's gonna have to do the grunt work..."
10-17-11: Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2011 Interview with Russell Banks : "They are in a sense, permanently marked and thrown into this darkness..."
