Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

Boots!

Where would we be without boos?

Where would we be without good?

No, Timberg.

It's a rhetorical question, sir.

But where would we be without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

I have not had the privilege of speaking to the great Scottish writer James Kelman in 18 years.

He was last year when his book,

How Late It Was, How Late,

won the prestigious Booker Prize.

Now his newest novel, Mo said,

She Was Quirky, has been published by the other press,

and I'm astounded by it,

because it's easy to think of James Kelman as being the most extraordinary

realist writer imaginable until you look carefully.

His book takes place in a single day, mostly in the head of one of his characters, a woman named

Helen, a Scottish woman living in England, who works in a casino as a dealer.

But all day long, we realize that she and we think things that are not in front of us, that are parts

of discontinued memory, fragments of the past, bits of received wisdom, things we've grown

so used to saying that we're living in an echo chamber.

...