Staff Pick: Out of Sheer Rage

Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D.H. Lawrence by Geoff Dyer

Out of Sheer Rage takes its title and epigraph from a letter penned by D.H. Lawrence in 1914. “Out of sheer rage,” he wrote, “I've begun my book on Thomas Hardy. It will be about anything but Thomas Hardy I am afraid -- queer stuff -- but not bad.''

Like his subject before him, Geoff Dyer wrote a book on Lawrence that is not really about Lawrence. If anything, it is a book about Dyer’s inability to write a book about Lawrence. Not only is it not bad, it’s very smart and very funny.

Out of Sheer Rage seamlessly and quite discursively mixes travelogue, literary criticism, biography, memoir, and cultural commentary. As Dyer and his “almost wife” Laura embark on a series of trips to former homes and haunts of Lawrence, he holds forth on topics as diverse as the limits of contemporary fiction and his own bad knees. In the end, the book offers some well-earned lessons about the practice of daily life and the roles and possibilities of art. The reader will also learn a little about D. H. Lawrence.

Jacob - Adult Services

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Have You Read...Haruki Murakami?

Quirky, surreal, bizarre, ironic, and completely original are all adjectives used to describe Japanese author Haruki Murakami's fiction. Acclaimed by critics world-wide, he writes about themes of modern life, especially the alienation that comes from an increasingly technological society. His works often center on a young, modern man who approaches the bizarre circumstances he finds himself in with a dry, deadpan perspective. Although they almost always take place in Japan, his stories and novels are full of references to American popular culture and could almost take place anywhere. If you are looking for a fresh voice and a unique point of view, check out one of Murakami's books. We recommend the following:

	The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle In a Tokyo suburb a young man named Toru Okada searches for his wife's missing cat. Soon he finds himself looking for his wife as well in a netherworld that lies beneath the placid surface of Tokyo. As these searches intersect, Okada encounters a bizarre group of allies and antagonists: a psychic prostitute; a malevolent yet mediagenic politician; a cheerfully morbid sixteen-year-old-girl; and an aging war veteran who has been permanently changed by the hideous things he witnessed during Japan's forgotten campaign in Manchuria. - Publisher Description More about the book
	A Wild Sheep Chase It begins simply enough: A twenty-something advertising executive receives a postcard from a friend, and casually appropriates the image for an insurance company's advertisement. What he doesn’t realize is that included in the pastoral scene is a mutant sheep with a star on its back, and in using this photo he has unwittingly captured the attention of a man in black who offers a menacing ultimatum: find the sheep or face dire consequences. Thus begins a surreal and elaborate quest that takes our hero from the urban haunts of Tokyo to the remote and snowy mountains of northern Japan, where he confronts not only the mythological sheep, but the confines of tradition and the demons deep within himself. - Publisher Description More about the book
	Norwegian Wood Toru, a quiet and preternaturally serious young college student in Tokyo, is devoted to Naoko, a beautiful and introspective young woman, but their mutual passion is marked by the tragic death of their best friend years before. Toru begins to adapt to campus life and the loneliness and isolation he faces there, but Naoko finds the pressures and responsibilities of life unbearable. As she retreats further into her own world, Toru finds himself reaching out to others and drawn to a fiercely independent and sexually liberated young woman. - Publisher Description More about the book
	Kafka on the Shore Kafka on the Shore is powered by two remarkable characters: a teenage boy, Kafka Tamura, who runs away from home either to escape a gruesome oedipal prophecy or to search for his long-missing mother and sister; and an aging simpleton called Nakata, who never recovered from a wartime affliction and now is drawn toward Kafka for reasons that, like the most basic activities of daily life, he cannot fathom. As their paths converge, and the reasons for that convergence become clear, Murakami enfolds readers in a world where cats talk, fish fall from the sky, and spirits slip out of their bodies to make love or commit murder. - Publisher Description More about the book

Have You Read...Penelope Fitzgerald?

British author Penelope Fitzgerald penned her first book at age 58, after a career as a teacher, bookseller, and mother. The winner of England's prestigious Booker Prize and the first non-American to win the National Book Critics Circle Award, she is known for a spare writing style applied to intricate plots and deft characterizations. Though her novels rarely exceed 200 pages, they are as satisfying as a longer yarn because of their attention to detail, distinct settings, and the complex moral situations her characters confront. Many of her novels were based very loosely on her own life experiences. Fitzgerald died in 2000, at the age of 83. If you're interested in trying one of her novels, we recommend one of these:

	The Blue Flower Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. In eighteenth-century Germany, the impetuous student of philosophy who will later gain fame as the Romantic poet Novalis seeks his father's permission to wed his true philosophy -- a plain, simple child named Sophie. The attachment shocks his family and friends. This brilliant young man, betrothed to a twelve-year-old dullard! How can it be? -Publisher Description More about the book
	Offshore Winner of the Booker Prize. On the Battersea Reach of the Thames, a mixed bag of eccentrics live in houseboats. Belonging to neither land nor sea, they belong to one another. There is Maurice, a homosexual prostitute; Richard, a buttoned-up ex-navy man; but most of all there's Nenna, the struggling mother of two wild little girls. How each of their lives complicates the others is the stuff of this perfect little novel. -Publisher Description More about the book
	The Bookshop In 1959 Florence Green, a kindhearted widow with a small inheritance, risks everything to open a bookshop - the only bookshop - in the seaside town of Hardborough. By making a success of a business so impractical, she invites the hostility of the town's less prosperous shopkeepers. By daring to enlarge her neighbors' lives, she crosses Mrs. Gamart, the local arts doyenne. Florence's warehouse leaks, her cellar seeps, and the shop is apparently haunted. Only too late does she begin to suspect the truth: a town that lacks a bookshop isn't always a town that wants one. -Publisher Description More about the book
	Human Voices When British listeners tuned in to the BBC's Nine O'Clock News in the middle of 1940, they had no idea what human dramas-and follies-were unfolding behind the scenes. Targeted by enemy bombers, the BBC had turned its concert hall into a dormitory for both sexes, and personal chaos rivaled the political. The tense relationship between two departmental directors is at the center of Human Voices, as is Annie, a sixteen-year-old assistant who falls hopelessly in love with the monstrously selfish one. Reading this intimate glimpse behind the scenes of the BBC in its heyday, "one is left with the sensation," William Boyd wrote in London Magazine, "that this is what is was really like." -Publisher Description More about the book

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