Thomas Mullen's Blog, page 4
November 29, 2010
Favorite Books of the Year, part 1: Thoughts on Serena and There Will Be Blood
Wow, it's already that time of year. As I haven't been a very good blogger over the last few months, I thought I'd post about some of the books I most loved this year. Of course, these aren't necessarily my "Best Books of 2010" because most of them were written in years past -- these are just "Best Books Tom Happened to Read in 2010."
Before getting to that, in case anyone's curious, here's what I've been spending my time on during the last few months, since The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers was published:
--Writing, putting aside with discouragement, then picking back up again with renewed excitement, and writing the living hell out of, my upcoming third novel, The Revisionists, which will be published in fall of 2011.
--Putting the finishing touches on what I think is a young adult novel crossed with a murder mystery, called Fast Food Noir.
--Experimenting with the fine art of screenwriting by turning my first novel, The Last Town on Earth, into a screenplay. No, there is no film deal to report as yet, but it's been fun to write in a different form.
--Writing some short stories during breaks in my longer works.
--Visiting some institutes of higher learning that have assigned Last Town to their incoming freshmen.
--Helping plan and throw the Decatur Book Festival, the coolest book festival in the country.
--Performing copious amounts of research, and doing a not insignificant amount of writing, for what I think will be my fourth novel, about which I'm not divulging anything quite yet, other than to say that I love it.
But back to my Best Books of 2010. Ever since graduating college in 1996, I've written down the name of every book I read, and if I found it especially wonderful, I've put an asterik beside it. This is ridiculously anal, I know, but now that I've been doing it for 14 years I don't dare stop. Also, this way, when someone asks me to recommend a great read, all I have to do is look up the asteriked titles and name one. (This is also why, when I'm giving a lecture and someone asks me to name my favorite writers or books, I completely blank out and mutter something unintelligible -- if only I carried the list with me!)
Anyway. As I look over which books I've asteriked this year, I see:
Serena by Ron Rash. An astonishing book. It earned a spot on many real critics' Best of 2009 lists, and deservedly so, but I didn't get around to reading it until this year. I have a great fondness for the western Carolina mountains, which comprise the setting of this amazing and beautiful book. It's set during the Great Depression, in a logging community, thus it has a weird kinship with both of my first two novels. I will admit with shame that Mr. Rash does a much finer job of describing the depredations and arduous beauty of being a logger in the early 20th century than I did in The Last Town on Earth. His book also won raves for its unique spin on the MacBeth story (the first Shakespeare play I really loved, back in sophomore year of high school); here, playing the role of Lady MacBeth is Serena, the bride of a young timber baron. To call her ruthless is an understatement. Indeed, one of things I admired most about this book, in addition to its poetic language, its unashamed use of a great plot to power the narrative, and its fine dialogue, is the way Mr. Rash dared to imagine such a horrifically evil character.
I found myself reminded of the film There Will Be Blood by P.T. Anderson. I thought that movie was very well made but it didn't quite move me the way it did many critics. What I particularly didn't buy was its treatment, at the end, of the oil tycoon played by Daniel Day-Lewis. Always driven (and blinded) by greed, to the point of ignoring his suffering son (which totally broke my heart), he is shown at film's end to be an empty, lonely, broken man. This struck me as too much the liberal fantasy, that all those super-rich tycoons are, at heart, empty and miserable people. It seems to me that what would be really terrifying, what would truly shock us as viewers (or readers), is to imagine a character like that -- cutthroat, bloodthirsty, trampling other people according to profit-minded whim -- as being not empty and sad but triumphant and quite pleased with himself. Retiring to luxury, with a trophy spouse, laughing at the rest of us. Isn't THAT the really horrible truth, that such people get away with it? And live happily ever after? In Serena, Ron Rash dared to imagine such a vengeful creature, with zero attempts to pyschoanalyze her or make her palatable to our sensibilities. That took guts, and it's part of what makes his book so brilliant and disturbing.
More on my faves from 2010 in the days ahead...
Go To Post
Before getting to that, in case anyone's curious, here's what I've been spending my time on during the last few months, since The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers was published:
--Writing, putting aside with discouragement, then picking back up again with renewed excitement, and writing the living hell out of, my upcoming third novel, The Revisionists, which will be published in fall of 2011.
--Putting the finishing touches on what I think is a young adult novel crossed with a murder mystery, called Fast Food Noir.
--Experimenting with the fine art of screenwriting by turning my first novel, The Last Town on Earth, into a screenplay. No, there is no film deal to report as yet, but it's been fun to write in a different form.
--Writing some short stories during breaks in my longer works.
--Visiting some institutes of higher learning that have assigned Last Town to their incoming freshmen.
--Helping plan and throw the Decatur Book Festival, the coolest book festival in the country.
--Performing copious amounts of research, and doing a not insignificant amount of writing, for what I think will be my fourth novel, about which I'm not divulging anything quite yet, other than to say that I love it.
But back to my Best Books of 2010. Ever since graduating college in 1996, I've written down the name of every book I read, and if I found it especially wonderful, I've put an asterik beside it. This is ridiculously anal, I know, but now that I've been doing it for 14 years I don't dare stop. Also, this way, when someone asks me to recommend a great read, all I have to do is look up the asteriked titles and name one. (This is also why, when I'm giving a lecture and someone asks me to name my favorite writers or books, I completely blank out and mutter something unintelligible -- if only I carried the list with me!)
Anyway. As I look over which books I've asteriked this year, I see:
Serena by Ron Rash. An astonishing book. It earned a spot on many real critics' Best of 2009 lists, and deservedly so, but I didn't get around to reading it until this year. I have a great fondness for the western Carolina mountains, which comprise the setting of this amazing and beautiful book. It's set during the Great Depression, in a logging community, thus it has a weird kinship with both of my first two novels. I will admit with shame that Mr. Rash does a much finer job of describing the depredations and arduous beauty of being a logger in the early 20th century than I did in The Last Town on Earth. His book also won raves for its unique spin on the MacBeth story (the first Shakespeare play I really loved, back in sophomore year of high school); here, playing the role of Lady MacBeth is Serena, the bride of a young timber baron. To call her ruthless is an understatement. Indeed, one of things I admired most about this book, in addition to its poetic language, its unashamed use of a great plot to power the narrative, and its fine dialogue, is the way Mr. Rash dared to imagine such a horrifically evil character.
I found myself reminded of the film There Will Be Blood by P.T. Anderson. I thought that movie was very well made but it didn't quite move me the way it did many critics. What I particularly didn't buy was its treatment, at the end, of the oil tycoon played by Daniel Day-Lewis. Always driven (and blinded) by greed, to the point of ignoring his suffering son (which totally broke my heart), he is shown at film's end to be an empty, lonely, broken man. This struck me as too much the liberal fantasy, that all those super-rich tycoons are, at heart, empty and miserable people. It seems to me that what would be really terrifying, what would truly shock us as viewers (or readers), is to imagine a character like that -- cutthroat, bloodthirsty, trampling other people according to profit-minded whim -- as being not empty and sad but triumphant and quite pleased with himself. Retiring to luxury, with a trophy spouse, laughing at the rest of us. Isn't THAT the really horrible truth, that such people get away with it? And live happily ever after? In Serena, Ron Rash dared to imagine such a vengeful creature, with zero attempts to pyschoanalyze her or make her palatable to our sensibilities. That took guts, and it's part of what makes his book so brilliant and disturbing.
More on my faves from 2010 in the days ahead...
Go To Post
October 21, 2010
That Facebook "15 Albums That Changed Your Life" Thing
A friend hit me with this Facebook thing where you're supposed to list 15 albums that changed your life. The instructions dictate that you list the albums "without thinking about it too long." This was more than a year ago, and I let it slide, but now again another friend has sent me the link, like some Internet version of an old chain letter.
OK, two issues here. One: as a writer, I tend not to write things unless I do think about them too long. So I am totally and unashamedly violating the spirit of the Facebook thing.
And instead of putting it on Facebook and sending tags to my pals, which I honestly don't know how to do anyway, I'm posting it here, for anyone to see.
But also: 15 "life-changing" albums? Seriously? Can your life truly change 15 times before the age of 37? If you're not schizophrenic?
Rating albums by life-changingness automatically favors albums you listened to when you were younger, and were trying on different personalities, and discovering everything anew, all those aspects of this world still untouched and shimmery. Now I'm a staid 36-year-old; I've loved plenty of new albums over the last five or six years, but have any of them actually changed my life? As much as I dig Interpol and Spoon and Franz Ferdinand and the Detroit Cobras and the Kills, am I a different person as a result?
So, with that in mind, here are, not necessarily my favorite albums, but the most life-changing ones, in chronological order (as in, when I bought them, not when they were released). I'm also violating another rule by listing 16, not 15. Take that, Facebook!
1. Kiss, Destroyer, because I was like 6, and my friends and I spent hours drawing potential Kiss album covers, inventing cool song titles (what I wouldn't give for one of those old sheets of paper; maybe our Moms saved them?) and painting our faces like Gene and Paul and Ace.
2. Phil Collins, No Jacket Required, because I think it was the first cassette (remember those?) I ever bought with my own money (you don't even want to know what the second was).
3. U2, The Joshua Tree, which I despised when it came out and everyone and their big sister was listening to it and talking about how deep and serious and important it was, and then three years later during their post-Rattle and Hum quiet period I secretly started listening to it and realized, wow, all those people and their sisters were right, every single one of them. It's that good. And so I became a Bono acolyte for a good 10 years, even growing my hair Bono-style in college, and also really loving their sadly overlooked Pop album, and remaining a huge, huge fan until that awful Things You Can't Etc album came out.
4. Midnight Oil, Blue Sky Mining, which convinced me at age 15 that only music with important political themes was worth listening to (which I wouldn't outgrow for two or three really pretentious years).
5. Led Zeppelin, because in high school I hated them so, so much, and I so hated the high school guys who always listened to them, that it became completely impossible for me to appreciate anything remotely "classic rock" until my Beatles phase hit in the late 1990s. I now dig this album, and lots of other classic rock, but my hatred for it throughout my teen years was pretty life-changing, or at least life-defining.
6. Miles Davis, Kind of Blue, and
7. Wayne Shorter, Adams Apple, both of which got me into jazz, and I went out and bought all their albums and then all the albums by all their side players, and then the side players' side players, etc, sort of like a musical precursor to social networking. A great way to learn about an unfamiliar genre of music. (Though as a result I now have way too many Blue Note albums and not enough older stuff, like swing or big band.)
8. Pearl Jam, Ten. Just forget about all that later stuff. This album brought me such joy for at least five hugely important years, age 17-21. Coolness points: Me and some friends saw them in October of 1991, a totally obscure band opening for Red Hot Chili Peppers and the Smashing Pumpkins, a couple of weeks after their first album came out. Hardly anyone had even heard of Nirvana yet. It was a tiny club (my first show at a club), before even "Under the Bridge" was out, and RHCP were still an underground thing, let alone the Pumpkins. It was our somewhat terrifying introduction to moshing and crowd surfing. Someone actually kicked me in the head during "Once." An amazing, amazing night. Long live grunge, and plaid shirts, and long unwashed hair. I would love to go back in time and relisten to that concert; God only knows how many hours I spent listening to their stuff over the ensuring years.
9. Smashing Pumpkins, Siamese Dream. See above, even though they actually sucked the night of that concert (and this album wouldn't come out for a couple more years, but when it did, wow).
10. The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Orange, because it helped me realize that all that dark grunge stuff wasn't going to last much longer if there were people out there making rock music that was this MFing fun. And because the time I saw them play at the Roxy in Boston in May '97 really did change my life, in some indefinable way.
11. Soundtrack for The Commitments, which is so much less cool than putting an album by Sam Cooke or Al Green, but, in truth, this was the album that made me discover soul music. During the dead period between grunge and the indie revival, I bought this CD (of soul covers by an Irish band, from the movie based on Roddy Doyle's absolutely exhilarating first novel). I then made it a mission to find the original version of every song on it, thus discovering all the greats, such as:
12. Sam Cooke, Live at the Harlem Square Club
13. Al Green, Greatest Hits
14. Marvin Gaye, What's Going On
15. The Old 97s, Too Far To Care, because they're the first band that my wife and I discovered together and have seen many, many times together. Their song about proposing (on a later album) came out right around when I proposed to her.
16. The White Stripes, White Blood Cells. Because I liked them before they were popular, goddamnit. And Jack White's my favorite musician, still putting out great material on a near-annual basis. And they're the only band I've seen on consecutive nights in different cities. I'm not the type to follow a band around the country and all that, but I do think it's cool that I've seen them play seven times in five different states, with many of my best friends (and the missus).
Honorable mention: Beck's Mellow Gold and Odelay, R.E.M.'s Out of Time and Green, The Beatles' White Album, James Brown Live at the Apollo, anything by Elvis (it pains me that he didn't make the above list; I must have done something wrong), my 1950s Rockabilly Box Set, The Rapture's Pieces of the People You Love, Interpol's Turn on the Bright Lights, the Pixies' Doolittle, Otis Redding's Greatest Hits, Curtis Mayfield's Superfly.
Go To Post
OK, two issues here. One: as a writer, I tend not to write things unless I do think about them too long. So I am totally and unashamedly violating the spirit of the Facebook thing.
And instead of putting it on Facebook and sending tags to my pals, which I honestly don't know how to do anyway, I'm posting it here, for anyone to see.
But also: 15 "life-changing" albums? Seriously? Can your life truly change 15 times before the age of 37? If you're not schizophrenic?
Rating albums by life-changingness automatically favors albums you listened to when you were younger, and were trying on different personalities, and discovering everything anew, all those aspects of this world still untouched and shimmery. Now I'm a staid 36-year-old; I've loved plenty of new albums over the last five or six years, but have any of them actually changed my life? As much as I dig Interpol and Spoon and Franz Ferdinand and the Detroit Cobras and the Kills, am I a different person as a result?
So, with that in mind, here are, not necessarily my favorite albums, but the most life-changing ones, in chronological order (as in, when I bought them, not when they were released). I'm also violating another rule by listing 16, not 15. Take that, Facebook!
1. Kiss, Destroyer, because I was like 6, and my friends and I spent hours drawing potential Kiss album covers, inventing cool song titles (what I wouldn't give for one of those old sheets of paper; maybe our Moms saved them?) and painting our faces like Gene and Paul and Ace.
2. Phil Collins, No Jacket Required, because I think it was the first cassette (remember those?) I ever bought with my own money (you don't even want to know what the second was).
3. U2, The Joshua Tree, which I despised when it came out and everyone and their big sister was listening to it and talking about how deep and serious and important it was, and then three years later during their post-Rattle and Hum quiet period I secretly started listening to it and realized, wow, all those people and their sisters were right, every single one of them. It's that good. And so I became a Bono acolyte for a good 10 years, even growing my hair Bono-style in college, and also really loving their sadly overlooked Pop album, and remaining a huge, huge fan until that awful Things You Can't Etc album came out.
4. Midnight Oil, Blue Sky Mining, which convinced me at age 15 that only music with important political themes was worth listening to (which I wouldn't outgrow for two or three really pretentious years).
5. Led Zeppelin, because in high school I hated them so, so much, and I so hated the high school guys who always listened to them, that it became completely impossible for me to appreciate anything remotely "classic rock" until my Beatles phase hit in the late 1990s. I now dig this album, and lots of other classic rock, but my hatred for it throughout my teen years was pretty life-changing, or at least life-defining.
6. Miles Davis, Kind of Blue, and
7. Wayne Shorter, Adams Apple, both of which got me into jazz, and I went out and bought all their albums and then all the albums by all their side players, and then the side players' side players, etc, sort of like a musical precursor to social networking. A great way to learn about an unfamiliar genre of music. (Though as a result I now have way too many Blue Note albums and not enough older stuff, like swing or big band.)
8. Pearl Jam, Ten. Just forget about all that later stuff. This album brought me such joy for at least five hugely important years, age 17-21. Coolness points: Me and some friends saw them in October of 1991, a totally obscure band opening for Red Hot Chili Peppers and the Smashing Pumpkins, a couple of weeks after their first album came out. Hardly anyone had even heard of Nirvana yet. It was a tiny club (my first show at a club), before even "Under the Bridge" was out, and RHCP were still an underground thing, let alone the Pumpkins. It was our somewhat terrifying introduction to moshing and crowd surfing. Someone actually kicked me in the head during "Once." An amazing, amazing night. Long live grunge, and plaid shirts, and long unwashed hair. I would love to go back in time and relisten to that concert; God only knows how many hours I spent listening to their stuff over the ensuring years.
9. Smashing Pumpkins, Siamese Dream. See above, even though they actually sucked the night of that concert (and this album wouldn't come out for a couple more years, but when it did, wow).
10. The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Orange, because it helped me realize that all that dark grunge stuff wasn't going to last much longer if there were people out there making rock music that was this MFing fun. And because the time I saw them play at the Roxy in Boston in May '97 really did change my life, in some indefinable way.
11. Soundtrack for The Commitments, which is so much less cool than putting an album by Sam Cooke or Al Green, but, in truth, this was the album that made me discover soul music. During the dead period between grunge and the indie revival, I bought this CD (of soul covers by an Irish band, from the movie based on Roddy Doyle's absolutely exhilarating first novel). I then made it a mission to find the original version of every song on it, thus discovering all the greats, such as:
12. Sam Cooke, Live at the Harlem Square Club
13. Al Green, Greatest Hits
14. Marvin Gaye, What's Going On
15. The Old 97s, Too Far To Care, because they're the first band that my wife and I discovered together and have seen many, many times together. Their song about proposing (on a later album) came out right around when I proposed to her.
16. The White Stripes, White Blood Cells. Because I liked them before they were popular, goddamnit. And Jack White's my favorite musician, still putting out great material on a near-annual basis. And they're the only band I've seen on consecutive nights in different cities. I'm not the type to follow a band around the country and all that, but I do think it's cool that I've seen them play seven times in five different states, with many of my best friends (and the missus).
Honorable mention: Beck's Mellow Gold and Odelay, R.E.M.'s Out of Time and Green, The Beatles' White Album, James Brown Live at the Apollo, anything by Elvis (it pains me that he didn't make the above list; I must have done something wrong), my 1950s Rockabilly Box Set, The Rapture's Pieces of the People You Love, Interpol's Turn on the Bright Lights, the Pixies' Doolittle, Otis Redding's Greatest Hits, Curtis Mayfield's Superfly.
Go To Post
October 8, 2010
Me and Jess Walter on Crime, Class, and Genre
I've already gone on and on about the amazing work of Jess Walter elsewhere on my blog, so I won't repeat myself here.
BUT I wanted to let people know that the Web site of my new publisher, Mulholland Books (a brand-new imprint of Little, Brown) just posted an online interview I did with Jess. It's more of a back-and-forth exchange between the two of us, and there's a few hints about my upcoming third novel as well.
He also mentions a bunch of great new books I intend on checking out soon...
Go To Post
BUT I wanted to let people know that the Web site of my new publisher, Mulholland Books (a brand-new imprint of Little, Brown) just posted an online interview I did with Jess. It's more of a back-and-forth exchange between the two of us, and there's a few hints about my upcoming third novel as well.
He also mentions a bunch of great new books I intend on checking out soon...
Go To Post
April 5, 2010
Most "Rollicking" Book of the Year?
Two months out, and good reviews are still coming, which is great to see. Yesterday the Boston Globe, home of the nation's finest Sports section, gave the book a strong review. (No idea whether they deliberately waited for Easter Sunday to run their review of a book about resurrections. But it makes you wonder.)
Interestingly, one of the adjectives the Globe used in the first paragraph of the review was "rollicking." This is at least the fourth review to call the book rollicking. It's a cool...
Interestingly, one of the adjectives the Globe used in the first paragraph of the review was "rollicking." This is at least the fourth review to call the book rollicking. It's a cool...
March 9, 2010
Multimedia Mullen
While on my book tour I had the pleasure of doing a number of radio and even television interviews to promote The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers. A few of the interviews can be seen or heard online, so I'm posting the links below.
Here in Atlanta I spoke to Valerie Jackson for her awesome books program "Between The Lines." I saw a list of all the great authors she'd interviewed in the past (such as Toni Morrison) and I asked her, after the interview, "So am I sitting in the same seat To...
Here in Atlanta I spoke to Valerie Jackson for her awesome books program "Between The Lines." I saw a list of all the great authors she'd interviewed in the past (such as Toni Morrison) and I asked her, after the interview, "So am I sitting in the same seat To...
February 23, 2010
Yet Another Thought About Literature and Death
I'm trying to catch up with that wild and crazy "social marketing" thing, and I was just updating my author profile on Goodreads.com. It asks for basic biographical detail on the author: first it asked for my city of birth, then my date of birth. And then it asked for my date of death. Whoa. OK, I guess I understand that this is intended for all sorts of authors, living and dead. Nonetheless: how to answer? Should I predict when I'll die? Make something up?
I chose to leave it blank for now....
I chose to leave it blank for now....
Book Tour Report, Part 1
Just returned from trips to Seattle and Denver. Seattle is always fun to visit because a) it rocks, b) it has lots of great coffeeshop for me to work in, and get entirely too caffeinated in, c) I have had uncommonly good luck with weather there -- once again, it was spectacularly beautiful during my stay, and "the mountains were out," and d) because my first novel was set in Washington state, people seem to like me there. I had a great time meeting bookstore folks and readers, many of whom ha...
February 11, 2010
Two Scary Thoughts About Literature and Death
I was in a bookstore a few days ago and I saw my book on display in between "new" books by Vladimir Nabokov (died, 1977) and Kurt Vonnegut (died, 2007). Flattering, absolutely. But also: hmmm, a novel about two characters who die but come back to life sandwiched between two newly published books by writers who are actually dead.
Which brings up a related observation: I've noticed that The New Yorker, exemplar of fine writing, has rather enjoyed publishing dead novelists of late. Off the top ...
Which brings up a related observation: I've noticed that The New Yorker, exemplar of fine writing, has rather enjoyed publishing dead novelists of late. Off the top ...
If a Review Falls in a Forest and No One Sees It...
It seems I've been slightly victimized by the incredibly shrinking newspaper and its microscopically shrinking books section. The good news is that my adopted hometown newspaper, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, gave my new book a smashing review, calling it "riveting" and "a complex brain-teaser of a literary novel," among other bold and exclamatory phrases. Which is awesome. The bad news is that the AJC, which has shrunk at least twice in the sixteen months that I've lived here in the Peac...
January 26, 2010
Happy Pub Day!
January 26 -- my pub date -- is finally here, and the Firefly Brothers are on the loose. They're lurking, fedoras pulled low, at your favorite bookstore; they're zooming along from wireless device to wireless device in their newest stolen car, maybe a '33 Ford or a '34 Terraplane; and they're (hopefully) making their way into the hands of some readers. They have traveled a long and winding road, beginning as mere figments of my imagination, with no idea where they were going or how their stor...
