Gil Scott-Heron was a unique voice during America's turbulent years of social upheaval in the 1970's. Musically, he was way ahead of his time. In the year 1970 he released his debut album, Small Talk at 125th and Lennox, which contained the song The Revolution Will Not be Televised - cited by many people as the first rap song ever recorded. Scott-Heron has been called "The Godfather of Rap" and when he passed away in 2011 pop superstar Usher, among many others, cited him as a major figure in 20th Century music.

So why wasn't he more famous? Part of the answer may be that a drug problem he developed in the seventies made him difficult for promoters, record companies, and other musicians to handle. He went through several configurations of band mates before his record company, Arista, dropped him in the mid-eighties. His strong opinions about politics and civil rights hardly made him a mainstream media darling - in short he was probably just "to hot to handle" for AM radio, which dominated what the public listened to in those times. Despite all of that his music has stood up remarkably well, and I am glad to see that several of his CDs are available for you to check out from the Calgary Public Library.

Also available from the library is "The Last Holiday: A Memoir", a biography that focuses on the time he spent on Stevie Wonder's Hotter Than July tour - a time when Wonder was the strongest voice speaking out for a holiday to commemorate the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King. It is an amazing book that will fascinate anyone remotely interested in the social changes that happened through the seventies and early eighties.

So today, Martin Luther King Day, why not check out the words and music of a man who did his part in making this holiday come to pass? Oh, and it wouldn't hurt to listen to some Stevie Wonder or read the words of Dr. King himself. While this may not be a holiday here in Canada, I think we can all agree that the example Dr. King set has had a great positive effect that does not stop at the borders of the United States.

When I was young and insecure I used to pretend to have read books I hadn't. It started in university in attempts to impress cute English majors and carried over when I started selling books. I felt customers wouldn't respect my opinion unless I could give them my first hand impressions. What a fool I was. Luckily I quickly caught on that people didn't care about what I had or had not read - they just wanted a book they would like. I learned to listen to what friends, co-workers and customers had to say about books and authors I had not read, and soon I was confidently recommending books based on this information.

If I were a bookseller today, I'd be selling bucket-fulls of a novel called Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, by Robin Sloan. Two weeks ago a friend of mine told me that it was the most enjoyable book he'd read in years, then last week another friend recommended it, saying that she really liked all the plot twists and suspense. I trust the taste of both of these friends - they are avid readers who will not recommend something unless it really stands out. They are smart people, so anything they like has got to be well written and if they both praise a book while using terms like "suspenseful" and "accessible", then I know I'm looking at book with wide appeal. It also seems that the public buzz about this particular book is getting stronger - at this moment there are thirty two holds for the copies we have in the library. The last time I remember this much positive word-of-mouth over a book it was shortly afterThe Sister's Brothers was published, and I think this one might even appeal to wider range of people.

What is behind all this interest? The publisher's blurb reads as follows: A gleeful and exhilarating tale of global conspiracy, complex code-breaking, high-tech data visualization, young love, rollicking adventure, and the secret to eternal life—mostly set in a hole-in-the-wall San Francisco bookstore. Sounds like The Da Vinci Code crossed with the kind of hip writing that fans of Jonathan Letham or David Mitchell have come to love. The names of other authors have been mentioned in comparison as well: Eco, Murakami, Calvino. The adjectives I most commonly hear applied are quirky, smart and (most importantly) fun.

Of couse few, if any, books appeal to everyone, and since I don't know you (you being whoever may read this blog) I can't guarantee this will be your next favourite book. But if you are a book nerd (and if you are reading this I have to assume you are a bit of a book nerd) the chances are pretty good you will like this a lot. So get a copy - ask for it should anyone pester you for last second gift suggestions. Or check it out from the library; just make sure to get your name on the hold list right away. That list is only going to get longer, I suspect.

One of the great things about being a snob is that you get to discover things way before the general public, or even the culturati in general, catch on. Yes it is lonely being so far ahead of the crowd but that is just the burden a snob like me has to bear. This loneliness is more than offset once the world catches up to you, and you can then proudly say you were into R.E.M. after their debut album and you read Haruki Murakami's first novel to be translated into English when it was still only available in hardcover. Yes I know some people will mutter under their breath that you are an insufferable bore, but I'm sure that deep down they admire your genius for recognizing the genius of others.

I say all this as a preamble to my latest book-snobbish pronouncement: Etgar Keret is the most important writer in the world.

Now I realize you may have no idea who Etgar Keret is, so let me fill you in. Etgar Keret is a forty-five year old Isreali writer who has published five collections of short stories. Five books? you say How can I claim to have discovered this guy when he has already written five books? Calm down. He is still in that "cult following" stage, so as long as you claim him as your own before he becomes a household name (which could be in five years or sometime next week) then you get all the hipster points. Take it as a good sign that currently only two of his books are available from the library. You may want to even buy (gasp!) one of his books, so then you can leave it lying around your apartment to be noticed by friends.

Why is he important?

Glad you asked.

Every great new writer stakes out uncharted territory - and this is exactly what Keret does. He writes very short stories - which is perfect for the age we live in. Let's face it, the internet has reduced our collective attention span down to the level of fruit bats. While other authors attempt to fight this reality - writing longer works in the vain hopes we will exercise our brains back to Tolstoy strength - Keret knows you can't fight evolution. Or is it devolution? Whatever - the point is Keret can deliver a beautiful story that illuminates a profound truth about the human condition and he can do it in about four pages. His stories are absurd, which probably puts the serious literature folks off. I say we live in absurd times and that calls for absurd literature. So what if his stories feature talking fish and cute girls that transform into fat harry men once the sun goes down? This is the new mythology that make sense of the early twenty first century. Eighty years ago nobody understood why a story about a guy turning into a cockroach was important. But more important than form is the style Keret uses: part Kurt Vonnegut, part Coen brothers, part Lenny Bruce, part Bugs Bunny, part Sigmund Freud....Keret has a voice that is quitessentially "now". Oh, and another thing - Keret has some things to say about being a human and trying to have some dignity in a world where dignity is rare. This alone makes him important.

The big knock against Keret is that he is not politically correct. He offends some people. In his native Isreal he has pulled off the impossible trick of being both the most popular writer and the least popular writer at the same time! If that is not a sign of genius, I don't know what is.

So go get yourself an Etgar Keret book. You will find it is as great as it is hard to find.

People are often surprised to find that a self-proclaimed book snob like myself sometimes reads a juvenile fiction book. Why on earth wouldn't I? Good books are good books and it doesn't matter to me if it is a juvenile, young adult or adult book.

Wonderstruck, by Brian Selznick, is a very good book indeed. It is both the story of Ben, a boy who goes off to New York City on his own in the year 1977, and the story of Rose, a girl who goes off to New York City on her own in the year 1927. There are many parallels between the stories of Ben and Rose, but one very big difference is in the way that their separate stories are told. Rose's story is told entirely in pictures while Ben's story is told in text. There is a good reason for the different techniques - one that I can't reveal without spoiling a plot twist - and what might seem at first to be just a gimmick makes a great deal of sense at the end. In fact much of Wonderstruck is about how, with courage and curiosity, sense can be made out of accidents and tragedies.

The ending of the book answers the reader's questions about Ben and Rose, but what I like about Wonderstruck is that it plants as many questions in the mind of the reader as it goes along. I can easily imagine this book will inspire many kids to find out more about a varity of topics; meteors, wolves, sign language, model making, silent movies....

A Beautiful and inspiring book that will captivate kids and adults alike.

Today I noticed the headline on the front page of the Globe and Mail: "What We Talk About When We Talk About Cottages." What grabbed my attention, aside from the fact that such a calm and inward-looking piece should be front page material, was that the "What We Talk About When We Talk About" schtick has become so ubiquitous that a national newspaper could reference it on the front page. The unspoken message seems to be "If you get the Raymond Carver reference you are going to like this article." This seemed an improbable idea to me at first but the more I thought about it the more fascinated I found it to think of the journey this quirky sequence of words has taken in the last three decades. I simply had to explore the question: How has the title of a Raymond Carver collection of short stories published over thirty years ago managed to become a recognizable turn of phrase?

It all began back in 1981 when Raymond Carver, the acknowledged living master of the American short story, (a title which, alas, brings about as much fame and fortune to the one it is bestowed upon as does the title of World's Greatest Fooseball Player) wrote a story called "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love." Undoubtedly this would have made no impression on the general public except that the collection in which this story appeared also bore the same name. There is something so good about this title - the rhythm is almost hypnotic and it forces the reader to slow down and really think about the meaning of the sentence: that we are going to get to the truthful heart of the subject that we have, until now, only been talking around. That the subject is love makes it all the more compelling. It is an undeniably great title and one that sticks in the mind for a long time.

Carver wrote in a style often labeled "minimalist" or "realist" or, if you are really into labels, "minimal realism". In short, he has a writer who didn't use two words where one word would suffice and this produced an effect that everything in the story mattered—there is a concentration in the style that demands the concentration of the reader. He was also a remarkably consistent writer—the level of excellence in his early stories was pretty much equal to his later work. You can pick up any of his books and find yourself reading superior fiction. There are no bad Carver books but if you are looking for a place to start why not check out the book we are talking about?

Carver was a critic's darling and his work was much admired by other writers and students who wanted to impress people with the quality of fiction they read (I was just such a student in the 1980's) but he didn't make a deep impression on the general public. His books sold moderately well, but his chosen form—the short story—was terribly out of fashion. It still is. He made a great impression on the generation of writers to follow not only in America but all over the world. One such writer who openly sites Carver as a model is the superstar of world literature Haruki Murakami. At first glance the surrealistic fiction of Murakami bears little resemblance to the realism of Carver, but Murakami was a very impressed with the obvious craftsmanship of Carver's writing. In fact Murakami was such a big fan of Carver that he felt compelled to translate some of his idol's stories into Japanese. In 2008, when Murakami needed to come up with a title for his non-fiction book about running it seemed natural that he should settle upon "What I Talk About When I Talk About Running." The Murakami title not only pays homage to Carver but it hints at the connection between running and writing and this connection is the main theme of the book. In fact you don't have to be a runner at all to enjoy this excellent book.

Last year Nathan Englander released a collection of short stories titled "What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank." This title neatly sums up a lot about Nathan Englander; he is both an "intellectual" (hence the Carver allusion) and a smarty pants (hence the way he uses the allusion). Nathan Englander is not afraid to offend and is willing to be controversial to make a point. Not only does he borrow Carver's title, he follows the plot of the Carver story in his own version. In the original Carver story two couples are disscussing the topic of love while drinking gin. As they all get increasingly less inhibited (drunk) they let more and more deeply gaurded thoughts and feelings escape until, inevitably, it goes too far. In the Englander version the two couples are Jews living in Florida and the topic is not love but who among their Christian friends would save them if there was an American Holocaust. I confess I have not read this collection yet but I did read his earlier short story collection, "For the Relief of Unbearable Urges" and can recommend it to anyone who is not easily offended.

Just last month saw the release of a book By Noah Richler called "What We Talk About When We Talk About War." I have not read this book yet, but it seems to me that the title is meant to be completely un-ironic. Like the original Carver title, it is simply meant to imply a "cutting through the bologna" and getting to the heart of the matter. In this case Richler is examining the long held idea that Canadian troops are "peace keepers" rather than "war makers."

This "straight up" use of the Carver title signals that the whole phrase is now part of the common lexicon we all use. Don't be surprised to hear people start saying "What are we talking about when we talk about hockey?" or "books" or "freedom" or just about any topic in which we need to cut through all the noise and get to the truth.

Last Wednesday night Calgary's literary community was treated to a very special evening as Billy Collins read from his work to a very intimate audience of about five hundred people at the University of Calgary. If you are unfamiliar with Billy Collins, the library carries the majority of his published work. His poems are usually disarmingly straight-forward and funny. Think of a cross between Robert Frost and Woody Allen. For a more complete background on the man, and samples of his work, you can go on-line to the Poetry Foundation website. Go there now! I can wait. Be sure to read the one called "Introduction to Poetry" and I also really like the one called "Workshop" - but maybe that's just me.

Are you back yet? Good. Aren't those poems great? And you thought poetry was just a bunch of fluffy word games egg-heads play to make themselves feel smarter than you! Not so! Read some more Billy Collins and then some other poets, like say, Stephen Dunn, and pretty soon you'll be remembering that sad time in your life before poetry came along.

The truth is that there are as many different kinds of poetry as there are different kinds of music. In fact a lot of the music you already love probably already contains poetry. I'm not just talking Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan (who, rumour has it, was on the short-list for the Nobel Prize in Literature) but rappers and rockers often draw inspiration from poetry - and the lyrics they write are some of our best poetry. I distinctly remember in high school reading the lyrics to "Sympathy for the Devil" and realizing this too was poetry.

Today Calgary named its first ever Poet Laureate - local songwriter Kris Demeanor. In an interview with the CBC, Demeanor said that "part of my goal is to try and find fun, creative and interesting ways to get people into the enjoyment of language that aren't there yet" Perhaps, he means you! The Calgary Public Library has a number of Kris Demeanor CD's in our collection. So why not check one out and get an ear full of the cities new cultural ambassador.

And don't worry if neither Collins or Demeanor turn out to be the poet that changes your life. That poet is waiting for you somewhere in our collection - you just have to find her (or him).

You know what happens when you sit on the couch all day, day after day, watching re-runs of Freinds and eating ice cream and Cheetos? Not a pretty picture is it? So why do you treat your intellect in a way that you would never treat your body? Read the books I recommend and in no time you will be an intelectual hottie!

These are just a few of the books I gaurantee will bulk-up your cultural biceps and give you a literary six-pack:

Moby Dick by Herman Melville

The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano

Silas Marner by George Eliot

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy (Comes with an extreme violence warning)

The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinky (Ditto)

A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter (Comes with a sexual content warning)

Stoner by John Williams (Comes with the warning that you will love it so much you will want to force everyone you know to read it, which may make some people very annoyed with you because you are so insistent. Try to keep your cool.)

Embers by Sandor Marai

Underworld by Don DeLillo

Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler

The Man Who Was Thursday by G. K. Chesterton

Check out my display of books (next to the Lazy Reader's picks - I think you'll know whose books are whose) for these and other titles to reading muscles burn!

1985 was the worst year of my life. I was a deeply depressed eighteen year old. My parents tried their best to help me. For my mom this meant finding me the best counselling possible, and for my dad this meant showing me that the world itself was crazy and I was quite right to feel alienated from it. He opened up to me in a way he never had before. He confided to being depressed himself in his youth and even having to be hospitalized for his depression. One of the things I remember vividly is my father telling me how when he was my age he read the novel Catch-22 and that it deeply affected him. He talked about how it showed how absurd the world was and how one needed to see the humour in things to survive. The truth be told, I can't remember my dad ever mentioning having read another novel. As far as I know, Catch-22 might be the only novel he ever read - or maybe it was the only novel he needed to read.

So I read it, and it said everything I needed to hear. It said "you're not crazy, they are". It said "don't buy in to what you are told is right without thinking it through." It said "you are not alone."

Catch-22 was one of the books that got me through that terrible year. It convinced me that fiction itself was important and was a big reason why I changed from a chemistry major to an English major and went to work in bookstores and, finally, at the Calgary Public Library.

Thanks dad.

Sometimes fiction follows a logic of its own. Sometimes this fictional logic explains the world in clearer terms than a purely “realistic” story ever could. Sometimes an author subtly injects metaphor into a narrative to illustrate a point, but occasionally the entire narrative is itself metaphorical. Take, for example, The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka in which the protagonist wakes up one morning to discover he has been turn into a big cockroach. This is not realism. If we reject the story because we do not believe such a scenario could occur in the real world, we are missing the point.

Strangely, this concept is one that adults struggle with but children accept as natural. If, in a child’s book, a cat talks it is accepted without comment. A child is a perfect reader! A child knows full well that cats do not talk – but a child instinctively knows that this is irrelevant to the truth that the book is using the talking cat to illustrate.

Let’s look at Hop on Pop, by Dr. Seuss. There are several impossibilities that occur over the books’ sixty-four pages; A mouse carries a house on it’s back and fish laze about in a tree. Do we worry that this book is teaching our young incorrect facts about the nature of mice and fish? Do we furthermore fret that this book is teaching our children to jump on their elders? We do not. Children are smart enough to distinguish between what is real and what is not. They allow a fish in a tree to exist in order to learn the concept of “in” as it relates to the fish and the tree. The fish and the tree are entertaining distracters (red herrings, if you will) that allow the child to enter a playful state of mind where learning can be achieved.

Why, as adults, do we stop reading like children? Why do some of us demand our fiction to be “believable” – that is without a taint of implausibility? All books define their own rules of existence – if we limit ourselves to realism in the belief that truth is found only there, then we are like children who will not learn the difference between up and down because we know that dogs don’t drive cars.

When I was a bookseller a friend of mine insisted I read a novel called So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell. It was, and still is, one of the most beautifully written books I have ever read. I am amazed that his name is not more widely known among the general reading public. I suppose he is one of those "writer's writers" - a craftsman whose works are appreciated most by other people who know how difficult it is to make writing that looks this easy. Many of the novels he wrote dealt with childhood and adolescence. I remember listening to a interview with Michael Ondaatje in which he was asked what he felt was a great example of a novel of youth. He replied that while many people thought The Catcher in the Rye is the great novel of this type, he personally felt So Long, See You Tomorrow was a far superior. I couldn't agree more.

So Long, See You Tomorrow is a story told by a man looking back on his childhood. A lonely and introverted boy coming to terms with the death of his mother. He takes the first tentative steps toward friendship with another boy named Cletus Smith. But the friendship ends abruptly by an act of violence involving Cletus's father- and coming to terms with this violent act becomes the obsession of the adult narrator. When newspaper accounts and court records prove unsatisfactory and misleading, the narrator imagines the events that led up to the tragic act. Jealousy, longing, impotent rage; all the unseemly human emotions that lived just beneath the skin of the quiet Midwestern farming community are brought forth and the loss is made understandable, if not acceptable. The story is made more real for the author's constant reminders that it is not real. Truth is not always found in the reportage of events - sometimes it is somewhere else. And sometimes it is the work of the artist rather than the reporter to take us there.

I don't know about you, but I find that my favorite book by an author is often the first one I read by him or her. I think So Long, See You Tomorrow will always be my favourite William Maxwell work, but it is a book he wrote over forty years earlier, They Came Like Swallows, that many contend is his greatest work. It is hard to argue. The story revolves around an eight-year-old boy living in a small mid-western farming community when the 1918 influenza epidemic hits, taking the lives of many including the child's mother. This book has soo much raw emotion in it, and yet the writing is so firmly controlled that the resulting tension is unbelievable. I do not believe anyone can read this novella an not be deeply moved. No doubt the book derives much of its power from the fact that it is largely autobiographical. Maxwell was only ten when his mother died of influenza.

Besides being the author of six novels spread over nearly fifty years of his career, he was the long serving fiction editor at The New Yorker magazine, and as such was the editor for such writers as Vladimir Nabokov, Mavis Gallant and J. D. Salinger. He was an accomplished short story writer himself, and the Calgary Public Library carries several of his collections of short fiction. My personal favourite is The Old Man at the Railroad Crossing and Other Tales. Written between 1957 and 1966, these short stories are remarkably different from what one might expect from William Maxwell. Maxwell's novels are highly realistic, internal investigations wherein the smallest shades of emotion are examined with precision and care. The stories in this book are, by contrast, almost flights of fancy - folktales and fables that have no firm setting in time or place, and the "truth" these stories try to get at is illuminated more by circumstances than by feeling. There are morals to these stories, but often they are not the morals you would expect. Sometimes you are left with the sensation of being told a truth that you can not define.

The power these stories have may well come from some sort of primal source Maxwell tapped into while writing them. In his own words, "I didn't so much write them as do my best to keep out of the way of their writing themselves". The result is a collection of stories that the reader will be an active participant in the creation of meaning. I can not imagine anybody not finding a story in this collection that they would feel had been written specifically for them, and I would particularly recommend it to those who are cynical about the practical value of fiction.

William Keepers Maxwell passed away in July 2000, just a few weeks shy of his Ninety-Second birthday. In the few short years since his passing it seems that more and more people in the general public have discovered what writers like Ondaatje have always known - that he was one of the best writers of his generation.