Book Report: Wordstock serves readers feast

About 80 authors slated to appear at annual book event

Find your favorite reading glasses, Portland. There are stacks of books to read if you hope to stay ahead of Wordstock, Portland’s biggest book event fast-approaching on Nov. 5 in and around the Portland Art Museum.

To accommodate last year’s enthusiastic and, well, pushy crowds, Literary Arts has expanded this year to include five new venues in the nearby South Park Blocks, doubling the event’s seating capacity.

As recently announced, more than 80 authors from all over, including many from our region, will converge at Wordstock to eat, sleep and breathe books during this highly compressed, one-day annual event.

Wordstock details: 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 5, Portland Art Museum and nearby venues, literary-arts.org, $15 advance tickets, $18 day of event, age 17-under free. For a complete of authors attending and more information, see www.literary-arts.org.

For Type A types who like pre-planning and being intentional, we’ve sketched out a few points of interest with a snippet from books — hardly comprehensive. If random encounters with new writers is more your jam, then just wander by yourself and find an open seat.

For your reading pleasure:

• Eugene-based schoolteacher and New York Times bestselling author William Ritter presents his latest novel for middle readers, “Ghostly Echoes.” It’s the third in Ritter’s “Jacoby” series, in which Sherlockian detective R.F. Jacoby and his grounded assistant, Abigail Rook, sleuth out supernatural capers. This time, they’ve been hired by the landlady who haunts Jacoby’s own flat to get behind a very personal murder: her own.

It begins:

“Mr. Jacoby’s cluttered office spun around me. Leaning heavily on the desk, I caught my breath in shuddering gulps. My head was throbbing, as though a shard of ice had pierced through one temple and out the other, but the sensation was gradually subsiding. I opened my eyes.”

• Cue up “Nadia’s Theme.” Mystery writer Megan Abbott’s newest book, “You Will Know Me,” was published in July and earned her the nickname “queen of the heebie-jeebies” from the New York Times. Her latest book is set in the highly mannered and obsessive world of competitive girls’ gymnastics. A psychological thriller about one family’s desire to transcend the trappings of an average life through the aerial feats of their gifted child, this book lurks around long after the reading is done.

Its opening pages ...

“The vinyl banners rippled from the air vent, the restaurant roiling with parents, the bobbing of gymnast heads, music gushing from the weighty speakers keeled on the window ledges.

“Slung around Devon’s neck were three medals, two silver and one gold, her first regional-champion title on the vault. ‘I’m so proud of you, sweetie,’ Katie whispered in her daughter’s ear. ‘You can do anything.’”

• There is a lot of buzz around Sunil Yapa, author of “Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist,” a book Colum McCann calls “a literary

Molotov cocktail.”

It begins...

“The match struck and sputtered. Victor tried again. He put match head to phosphate strip with the gentle pressure of one long finger and the thing sparked and caught and for the briefest of moments he held a yellow flame. Victor — curled into himself like a question mark, a joint hanging from his mouth; Victor with his hair natural in two thick braids, a red bandana folded and knotted to tie them back; Victor — with his dark eyes and his thin shoulders and his cafecito con leche skin, wearing a pair of classic Air Jordans, the leather so white it glowed — imagine him how you will because he hardly knew how to see himself.”

• Diana Abu-Jaber, one of Portland’s best culinary and literary writers, talks about her latest book, “Life Without a Recipe.” Abu-Jaber fans know she writes warmly about her upbringing as the daughter of a Jordanian father and American mother in her books, “Crescent” and “Arabian Jazz.” Here, she turns to family again — grief over losing her grandmother and joy at becoming a mother. Like all of her books, this one will have readers hauling out the flour sifter, hand mixer and cookie cutters in a binge of domesticity.

Its opening pages ...

“Her small hands curve like eggshell: satin skin, round fingers, dimples in place of knuckles. The brown egg echoes her holding hand. My breath is there, too, inside the curve of her holding, waiting for the crack.”

• Martha Grover’s lugubrious stories mine the personal, revolving around dead-end jobs, OkCupid dates with dubious strangers, and job-shadowing as a private investigator for insurance companies. In “The End of My Career,” published by Perfect Day Publishing, Grover’s at her best when she writes about her family, which consists of five sisters. One of them, a bartender aboard a cruise line, pays for a trip Grover and her dad take together. Here’s hoping that all the crappy jobs and people Grover meets along the way continue to feed her funny, trenchant writing.

It begins:

“The circumstances under which I started cleaning Jack’s house seemed a little like an intervention; a woman I met at a literary event emailed me in the late spring and asked if I was still taking new housecleaning clients. Her friend Jack was a ‘total bachelor slob’ and ‘he knew he needed help.’ I guess that’s the first step ... knowing you need help. She wondered if she could give him my email.”

• Listen to the lyrical run-on sentences of Portland writer Brian Doyle, whose latest novel, “Chicago,” is a paean to youth, potential, and the wisdom of dogs.

Its opening pages ...

“On the last day of summer, in the year I graduated from college, I moved to Chicago, that rough and wild and burly city in the middle of America, that middle knuckle in our national fist, and rented a small apartment on the north side of the city, on the lake. I wanted to be as near the lake as possible, for Lake Michigan is no lake at all but a tremendous inland sea, and something about its vast blue sheen, and tumultuous waters, and the faraway moan of huge invisible tankers and barges, and its occasional startling surf after storms, appealed to me greatly; also then I was young and supple and restless, and I wanted to run for miles along the beaches and seawalls, trying to dream myself into being a man, a remote frontier for me then and now; maturity turns out to be a question you can never answer with confidence, despite advanced age and wage.”

• Could this be the year I actually get through a Richard Russo novel? “Everybody’s Fool,” Russo’s latest, takes off where “Nobody’s Fool” left off, with our protagonist, Sully, 10 years older.

It begins:

“Hillsdale Cemetery in North Bath was cleaved right down the middle, its Hill and Dale sections divided by a two-lane macadam road, originally a colonial cart path. Death was not a thing unknown to the town’s first hearty residents, but they seem to have badly misjudged how much of it there’d be, how much ground would be needed to accommodate those lost to harsh winters, violent encounters with savages and all manner of illnesses.”