2010 has been a great year for Wrapped Up In Books so far, with more pageviews, more participants, more terrific user contributions, and more lively livechats than ever before. We're having a blast and we hope you are too. So here's fair warning of what we'll be up to for the next couple of months, so you can get on your reading wagons early. Note that the schedule had to slide a little once we postponed Master And Commander by a week…
The week beginning Monday, March 29, we'll be talking about Stephen Dobyns’ certifiably odd 1993 novel The Wrestler’s Cruel Study, which mixes fairy-tale mythos, Nietzsche quotations, and the World Wrestling Federation into the modern-day story of a New York wrestler searching for his kidnapped fiancée. (Leonard Pierce’s pick.)
And beginning Monday, April 26, we'll be picking apart Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker (Todd VanDerWerff's pick.) Todd describes it as "a post-apocalyptic novel with moments of jaw-dropping beauty, written entirely in a devolved form of English." It's from an author with a broad reach, from the children's picture-books Bedtime For Frances and Bread And Jam For Frances to young-adult fantasies like The Mouse And His Child to adult books like Turtle Diary and Her Name Was Lola. (He also wrote Emmet Otter's Jugband Christmas, which Jim Henson adapted for a holiday special, as some of you may recall from your youth.)
And there's more to come in the months ahead…