If I sound a little jaded, well, I am.  During the early nineties, I took a break from school and lived in Denver during the height of the Vampire Lestat fad.  I took a job waiting tables at the Perkins on Colfax Avenue - third shift.  After my first week, I was about ready to drive a coffee spoon through the heart of the next pasty kid with makeup, false fangs and a penchant for dirty black clothes who answered “What can I get for you?” by hissing at me.

Anyhow I really feel for the poor waiters and waitresses of Forks, Washington, and hope at least that teenage vampire table manners have improved over the past 15 years, if not their taste.

Never in all of the years I’ve been in business have I seen a worse outlook for the economy. And never in all my years as a bookseller have I seen a retail climate as poor as the one we are in. Nothing even close.

He goes on to put his note through a couple of stanzas of spin, seeking to land on a happy note.  If I worked for Barnes & Noble, I think I’d still be singin’ the blues, though.  For a CEO to even dream of making such a statement to staff generally belies an outlook at least two or three octaves grimmer than what he/she states.

Trust me, we CEO-types live by C and G majors, not E minor 7ths.

I know for me to sing that type of dirge, I’d not have to only know the company was collapsing, but that earth was being invaded by mean, green little men, and that the world’s supply of coffee was all but used up.  Even then, I’d likely hold a straight minor key, and chase the blues scale away.

One does wonder what it would mean for independent bookstores if all the chains dried up.  Could they survive?  What would it mean for customers?  Michael Lieberman has some thoughts over at Book Patrol worth checking out…

Adiga, who lives in Mumbai, was born in India. He studied at Columbia and Oxford and is a former correspondent for Time magazine in India. He is the second youngest writer to win the award, as well as the second Indian writer to win the prize.

The Man Booker Prize 2008 shortlisted novels also include:

Aravind Adiga The White Tiger (Atlantic)
Sebastian Barry The Secret Scripture (Faber and Faber)
Amitav Ghosh Sea of Poppies (John Murray)
Linda Grant  The Clothes on Their Backs (Virago)
Philip Hensher Northern Clemency (Fourth Estate)
Steve Toltz  A Fraction of the Whole (Hamish Hamilton)

This year’s panel of judges was chaired by Michael Portillo former MP and Cabinet Minister. He is joined by Alex Clark, editor of Granta; Louise Doughty, novelist; James Heneage, founder of Ottakar’s bookshops and Hardeep Singh Kohli, TV and radio broadcaster.

For more information, visit the Booker Prize website.

For me, this is so much more exciting than those silly Olympic Games–check out the announcement tomorrow for the winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize for literature.

Watch the live webcast from the Swedish Academy, Stockholm, Sweden, on Thursday, October 9, 1:00 p.m. CET, 11:00 a.m. GMT, at the earliest. Following the announcement, an interview will be held with Horace Engdahl, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, about the 2008 Nobel Laureate in Literature.

I love Stephenson: I’ve been a fan since Snow Crash, and dedged up Zodiac and The Big U, and have read pretty much everything since. He’s a sharp writer, but (like many of the sharp folks I know) has some flaws. In the beginning, Neal Stephenson could not write an ending. The books had a tendency to end quite abruptly, in my humble opinion. It was like sitting down to a favorite meal, and having your plate taken away after three bites. “But, but, what happened to…?” Even in Cryptonomicon, which I regard highly, the ending fell flat.

Like most writers I admire, Mr. Stephenson has changed and grown. The last few books have shown increasing sophistication (and length!). After 2600 pages, I thought the Baroque Cycle had a quite satisfactory ending. It also had some of the most entertaining prose I’ve ever read (mixed in with several passages that nearly drove me off) and some great characters. I know he’s a smart guy, and he works hard researching his novels. But really, it’s a stretch to give me too many details about mercury mining in the Harz mountains in the seventeenth century. “More than I wanted to know” kicks in after the second page. A good friend told me I was whining, it really wasn’t that bad, but I think the point remains: Neal’s writing can be very uneven, and with an average page count of 900 over the last four volumes, I’m starting to think he needs a meaner editor.

On the other hand, the interesting life of the Vagabond King is one terrific tale. The elephant battle made me actually guffaw out loud, and the IQ test is priceless. His intelligent worldview, geek humor, and fun yarn spinning are a rare combination. So, with these bona fides out of the way…

Anathem is set on another world, similar to our own in many ways, but with a much different history. The main characters are what we would consider monks, living lives of scholarship is cloisters removed from the secular world. The cloisters are categorized by how often the open their doors to the public: once a year, once a decade, once a century, or once a millenium. Obviously, these monks (or avout, as they refer to themselves) take a longer view of history. Their culture has been technological for much longer than ours, and the monasteries (or concents) exist through the ebb and fall of governments and nations with explicit exemption from secular laws and concerns.

Developing this setting takes around 150 pages. The prose is good, not brilliant, and it runs to the expository, which is to say, a trifle dull. My initial reaction was, “My good, in learning how to write an ending, Neal has forgotten how to write a beginning!” Once the story took off, I came to the opinion that the story really needed this complex setting. The book as a whole is a fine tale well told, but it does tend to wander off into philosophical tangents on a regular basis. This is good and bad: the history of philosophy is mapped onto an entirely different culture, including new names for the same idea. I can’t think of a single writer besides Neal Stephenson who would have a prayer of pulling this off. “Occam’s Razor” becomes “Gardan’s Steelyard.” Some of the mapping is immediately recognizable, but significant chunks of it are above my pay grade.

I’m not a spoiler kind of guy, so I won’t go into the plot. The avout become involved in secular affairs, and our protagonist is in the center of it. Frau Erasmus is a likeable, believable character, and we follow him through a very eventful period in his life. He changes, learns, and grows straight out of Joseph Campbell’s Hero’ Journey. Many of the rest of the characters in the book come off a bit flat in contrast.

Surprisingly, a quick rehash of western philosophy up to quantum theory doesn’t kill the book, though at least for me, it leaves a few bruises. If you like metaphysics with your action, or action with your metaphysics, this book is for you. It is thoughtful, intelligent, and well crafted. Most folks will leave it with a deeper appreciation of quantum theory, scholarship, and a long view of human affairs. They will also leave it entertained. I give it four and a half spheres (out of five) with an asterisk.

The Duchess (opened in theaters September 19)

Starring Keira Knightley, Ralph Feinnes, Charlotte Rampling, Dominic Cooper, Hayley Atwell, Simon McBurney, this film is oozing talent, gorgeous sets and costumes and of course, a dramatic story. Based on Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire by Amanda Foreman, Knightley stars as the title character who was one of the founding leaders of the Whig Party, as well as a social sensation.

Blindness (September 26)

Jose Saramago’s masterpiece Blindness is now a Brazilian film starring Julianne Moore as the only woman who can see in a city devastated by blindness. After the “white sickness” spreads throughout the city, people who are blind are rounded up and hauled off to an asylum to “quarantine” the victims. One woman pretends to be blind in order to remain close to her husband who is in the asylum, and she helps seven people escape–but how will they survive, and is there a cure? From Nobel Prize-winning author Saramago and director Fernando Meirelles comes the story of humanity in the grip of an epidemic. Also starring Mark Ruffalo, Alice Braga and Gael Garcia Bernal.

Choke (September 26)
If you liked Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk, you’ll love Choke, which looks to be a promising movie adaptation, too. Victor Mancini is a sex-addicted med-school dropout who keeps his increasingly deranged mother, Ida, in an expensive private medical hospital by playing an Irish indentured servant in a colonial-era theme park. At night Victor runs a scam by deliberately choking in upscale restaurants to form parasitic relationships with the wealthy patrons who “save” him. When, in a rare lucid movement, Ida reveals that she has withheld the shocking truth of his father’s identity, Victor enlists the aid of his best friend, Danny, and his mother’s beautiful physician, Dr. Paige Marshall, to solve the mystery before the truth of his possibly divine parentage is lost forever.

Miracle at St. Anna (September 26)

A cast of virtual unknowns (Derek Luke, Michael Ealy, Laz Alonso, Omar Benson Miller and Matteo Sciabordi), this adaptation from the book of the same name by James McBride is directed by Spike Lee. It chronicles the story of four black American soldiers who are members of the U.S. Army as part of the all-black 92nd “Buffalo Soldier” Division stationed in Tuscany, Italy during World War II. Hints of “Saving Private Ryan” appear as the group of soldiers are separated from their division when one of them goes on a mission to protect a young Italian boy.

Nights in Rodanthe (September 26)

In the romantic drama Nights in Rodanthe, Adrienne (Diane Lane), a woman with her life in chaos, retreats to the tiny coastal town of Rodanthe, in the outer banks of North Carolina, to tend to a friend’s inn for the weekend. A storm blows in, as well as a handsome doctor (Richard Gere). It’s a romance that only author Nicholas Sparks (The Notebook) can conjure on the silver screen.

The Road (November 26)

Last year, Cormac McCarthy saw his novel The Road stamped by Oprah’s Book Club, and get optioned for a feature film. In the meantime, his other book No Country for Old Men was released on theatre screens across the country, and became widely popular. The movie adaptation of The Road is here with John HIllcoat (The Proposition) directing. The movie definitely has a great cast (Viggo Mortensen and Charlize Theron) and a provocative (if depressing) subject: the end of the world.

Revolutionary Road (December 26)

Based on the classic 1960s novel by Richard Yates and directed by “American Beauty” genius Sam Mendes , Revolutionary Road is about a young married couple who are unhappy despite living seemingly picture-perfect lives in the suburbs. The book was nominated for the 1962 National Book Award) and stars Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio, partnering together for a second time since their roles in “Titanic” eleven years ago.

I read Haruki Murakami’s A Wild Sheep Chase a few months ago and the striking images and unsettling moods evoked by this novel have continued coming to mind ever since. Like one of the characters from the novel who develops a strange obsession with sheep, I can’t seem to shake this book. I learned a new word: ’sheeped’.  Seems to have the original meaning of a stupefying affliction developed by some shepherds after a long season with their sheep, the effect of which is to make one both sheep-like in affect and strangely drawn to to he herd. Murakami stretches this notion to a metaphysical level and slowly, page by page, tears down the ontological barrier between human and sheep.

That unexpected foray into the world of the deeply sheeped and the protagonist’s strange obsession with ears made the book a bit difficult for me to get into at first, but it slowly took hold of me.  The ending left me utterly perplexed in a way that no book has done in years. Now months after putting it down, it is still whispering in my ear.  What more could one ask of a novel?

I think I have to read it again.