• Happy Thanksgiving! #
• Praying for the people in Mumbai, India. #
• Michael Pollan’s ‘The Omnivore’s Dilemma’ is on my mind as I consider my contributions to tomorrow’s Thanksgiving meal. #
• Same store sales off significantly at Borders, Waldenbooks: http://is.gd/92Sf Yeesh. #
• Houghton Mifflin to new authors: No new submissions pls, kthxbye. http://is.gd/8Zwo Yikes. #
• @tayari That’s wonderful! Take plenty of pictures. in reply to tayari #
• Also, oh yeah: I’ve been looking through themes and have found a new look for WriteBlack. http://is.gd/8Kau Still tinkering. #
• John Legend is always tolerable when he’s on Stephen Colbert. Laughing at his song about nutmeg. #
• Jennifer Aniston on the cover of The New York Times Magazine? Was that really necessary? #
• Considering new design for the site. Tired of the black background… #

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Over at The New York Times‘ “Papercuts” blog, Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus speaks with Toni Morrison (video).

Morrison is the Times‘ most super-favoritest person this week: a review of A Mercy leads the whole Sunday Book Review.

The Review also takes a look at Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers.

A Mercy

Toni Morrison

Alfred A. Knopf/Random House

2008

Everyone in the universe (even some of you) has already reviewed Toni Morrison’s newest, A Mercy. I figure that there isn’t a lot I can add to the discussion.

So I’ll just give some brief impressions.

The good:

1. It’s totally short! Only 167 pages.
2. It’s Toni Morrison. Like Isabel Allende, her writing is so beautiful that you can sing her words (seriously, try it).
3. Once again, Morrison chooses an underexplored era to tell a story about how similar people are despite our superficial differences, and how people are so resilient that we can cobble together what are effectively operative family units even after being fragmented by the most devastating traumas.
4. I keep thinking about this book in the context of the U.S. presidential election. This is truly the story of how some of America’s greatest birth defects (TM Condoleezza Rice) — racism, sexism, classism, etc. — came to be.
5. A Mercy is much, much better than the piping hot mess that was Love or the annoyance that was Paradise.

More after the jump.

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The New York Times has put together its list of the 100 Notable Books of 2008.

Books by black authors or focused on black subjects that may be of interest:

• Fanon, by John Edgar Wideman
• A Mercy, by Toni Morrison
• Capitol Men: The Epic Story of Reconstruction Through the Lives of the First Black Congressmen, by Philip Dray
• Condoleezza Rice. An American Life: A Biography, by Elisabeth Bumiller
• Delta Blues: The Life and Times of the Mississippi Masters Who Revolutionized American Music, by Ted Gioia
• The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, by Annette Gordon-Reed
• The House at Sugar Beach: In Search of a Lost African Childhood, by Helene Cooper
• The Race Card: How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse, by Richard Thompson Ford

Were these the most notable? Did they miss something?

This is a quick, short review of Forever and a Day, by Dyanne Davis; Release Me, by Farrah Rochon; and Cajun Moon by Gigi Gunn. All three are set largely in post-Katrina Louisiana, so I grouped them together. And yes, two of the three actually grapple a bit with the ways life has changed since the storm for people in the Bayou State.

Not as much detail here as I’d give in a written review, but I think you’ll get the point.

New Orleans from WriteBlack on Vimeo.

If you have trouble watching the Vimeo version of this, you also can see it on YouTube.

I got tired of the old theme.

Still tinkering to make sure everything that was there before is in place now.

• New post: Michelle Obama, comic-book star: http://is.gd/7Epf #
• I’d planned to begin T. Morrison’s ‘A Mercy’ today, but it didn’t happen. Oh well. #
• #
• Finished @rebeccawalker’s ‘One Big Happy Family’ last night. Will write review tonight. #
• New post: New L.A. Banks/Tananarive Due/Brandon Massey suspense novel http://is.gd/878S #
• New post: Review: One Big Happy Family, edited by @rebeccawalker http://is.gd/8hCh #
• @rawdawgbuffalo How to get me to review a book: http://is.gd/8j2r Also, read my ‘About’ pages. I admit to trending mostly to female authors. in reply to rawdawgbuffalo #
• New post: Friday file of book world odds and ends http://is.gd/8qdC #
• @afrobella I’m with you. Everybody’s ready to party, indeed. in reply to afrobella #
• OK, I’m taking perverse recommendations: Twitter, what was the WORST book you read this year? #
• Reviews say it’s just fair-to-middling, but I’ll still get the new Malcolm Gladwell sometime this weekend. #

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• I keep forgetting about this: Buy a T-shirt from Neighborhoodies and support the Carl Brandon Society, which highlights and tries to increase ethnic diversity in the world of science fiction
• Michiko Kakutani does not like Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers. No, she does not.
• Rich Watson over at Glyphs has some of the Best News Ever: Jeremy Love’s Webcomic Bayou will get print distribution in ‘09
• Annette Gordon Reed’s The Hemingses of Monticello, about Thomas Jefferson’s black family members, wins the National Book Award for Nonfiction
• A teaser from the werewolf ‘verse of Natalie Dunbar/Monique Lamont/J.M. Jeffries/Seressia Glass soon(?)-to-hit-stores Vegas Bites: Three of a Kind
• Romance novel clinch covers serve a purpose and ain’t going away soon
• Because I keep watching the trailer (see below) and hoping that eventually it’ll appear in theaters and be a huge worldwide hit, a reminder about Invisible Universe, the documentary about the black presence in speculative fiction

One Big Happy Family: 18 Writers Talk About Polyamory, Open Adoption, Mixed Marriage, Househusbandry, Single Motherhood, and Other Realities of Truly Modern Love

Edited and with introduction by Rebecca Walker

Riverhead Books/Penguin Group

2009

Ah, the personal essay.

Other than the tortured-artist memoir, is there anything like it to make you feel so completely judgy and sure of your own righteousness? When you’re feeling a little low, an anthology of personal essays is like Christmas and your birthday at the same time, because no matter how unconventional you are and how deeply disturbing your own upbringing, there’s nothing like looking at the inner workings of someone else’s life to make you feel better.

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Tananarive Due, one of the hardest-working women in popular literature, informs that her new book, The Ancestors, comes out Nov. 25.

It’s a collection of novellas by horrormeisters Due, L.A. Banks and Brandon Massey. All of the stories are about ghosts.

The Ancestors also apparently is the Essence Book Club pick for this coming January (of course, that doesn’t mean much, given the crappy nature of many of the books Essence has been highlighting lately).