Category: The Stone Loves the World

Steward of chipmunks

Posted on by Brian Hall

Back when there was no internet, and therefore no AbeBooks or Amazon or all the other bookselling entities that Jeff Bezos owns, there was Edward R. Hamilton. Hamilton’s catalog showed up in my mail every few weeks. It was tabloid size, thick, maybe 36 or 48 pages, printed on cheap newsprint, unless it was toilet paper. Scores of discount books were crowded on each page, with postage-stamp-sized black-and-white reproductions of the covers and thumbnail descriptions of the contents in microscopic type. The organization was nuts—books were herded into categories, but the categories stopped and restarted in big chunks and tiny bits, seemingly randomly from page to page. I would read it all the way through, looking for the $5.98 and $2.98 deals.

One of the books I saw on offer was a Smithsonian Nature Book by someone named Lawrence Wishner, titled Eastern Chipmunks: Secrets of Their Solitary Lives. I didn’t buy it. Sure, chipmunks were adorable, but would I ever read it? Continue reading “Steward of chipmunks”

The Curious Man podcast

Posted on by Brian Hall

Last week I had a phone conversation with the engaging and omni-curious Matt Crawford, whose podcast is appropriately titled The Curious Man’s Podcast.  We talked about the personal sources of my new novel, family dysfunction, loneliness, fiction vs. nonfiction, E. M. Forster, Rodney King, teenage readers, video game voice acting, Mass Effect‘s awesome Jennifer Hale, the Beethoven late string quartets, astronomy, and a bunch of other stuff.  Toward the end, even FDR and Churchill get in there, somehow.  Matt posted the podcast today, and you can listen to it here.

Lit Hub piece on science and art in The Stone Loves the World

Posted on by Brian Hall

I’ve written a piece for Literary Hub about what C. P. Snow called “The Two Cultures,” scientific knowledge vs. the literary arts—how my family turned them into a quiet but sustained battle, how I straddled them in my life and in my new novel, The Stone Loves the World. You can check it out here.

Lauren Wilkinson and I at Buffalo Street Books, Ithaca, on June 10

Posted on by Brian Hall

Well, not physically there, but we’ll be crowdcast (crowdcasted? is it a verb?) at 7pm Eastern Daylight Time, having a conversation about The Stone Loves the World. Here’s a link to the event.

Lauren is the author of a way better first novel than I ever wrote, American Spy, which came out in 2019 from Random House.

It’s a literary thriller with an international political angle inspired by historical events; it’s also a smart and moving story about a family. I won’t say more because personally I don’t like to know much—or really anything—about novels before I read them, so I’ll extend the same courtesy.

I’ve never met Lauren in person, but she read The Saskiad when she was 14 and had the sort of intense experience that teen-aged readers can have when they come across a book that speaks to them. She kindly wrote a note to me about that, and I asked her if she was willing to do this Buffalo Street Books event with me, and she even more kindly said yes.

Lauren Wilkinson’s author photo by Niqui Carter

Bathing with thunder lizard

Posted on by Brian Hall

Back when I and my two siblings were small enough to share a bathtub, our parents bought each of us a dinosaur-shaped bar of soap. I got a Brontosaurus, my older brother got a Tyrannosaurus rex, and my younger sister got a Triceratops. There was probably nothing random about this. My parents considered my older brother aggressive, my younger sister defensive, and me placid. My visual memory of that slate-blue bar of soap is still vivid. As I used it (sparingly, to preserve it as long as I could) the pleasing round smoothness of the neck, tail and legs just kept getting rounder and smoother and more pleasing.

Had I already loved and identified with Brontosaurus? It wouldn’t surprise me if my attachment began right then, as I placidly accepted the designation my parents assigned me. But then again, loads of kids love Brontosaurus; way more than Diplodocus or Apatosaurus, who look basically the same. I assume it’s because the meaning of Brontosaurus, which books always mentioned—“Thunder Lizard”—is way cooler than “Deceptive Lizard” (Apatosaurus) or “Double-Beamed” (Diplodocus), which has something to do with the shape of the tail vertebrae, but really, who could care. Continue reading “Bathing with thunder lizard”

Driving Matchbox cars responsibly

Posted on by Brian Hall

In 1965, when I was six, my parents started giving me Matchbox cars. I would get two or three on each birthday and another two or three at Christmas. I began to save my fifteen-cent-a-week allowance for them. One car cost fifty cents at the Woolworth’s, a ten-minute walk from my house. For my eighth birthday I got an Official Matchbox Collector’s Case that could hold 48 cars. Two years later I got an Official Deluxe Collector’s Case that could hold 72 cars.

I did the usual things: I drove them down the lanes of the pine floor boards in my bedroom; I lifted and dropped a blanket on my bed to create humps and folds that became hills and hill roads; I combined them with an HO train set and HO scale model houses I’d built from kits, turning left and right on notional streets, crossing the tracks safely after the train went by. I never caused them to crash down the stairs, and I always put them away in the two cases when I was done. Continue reading “Driving Matchbox cars responsibly”