Blind Side review

I wrote a review of Blind Side by Michael Lewis for the SPT. Read it here. I blogged about the book previously here.

Best of Lists

I love the "best of" lists that come out at the end of the year. And this year's seem like a diverse bunch. Here are links with notations of what I've read and would like to read. Suffice to say, all these books seem pretty darn good. Here's my round-up and comments on some of the lists. Or you can save yourself precious minutes and go straight to Metacritic's ultimate best books of 2006 page.

The New York Times Ten Best Books of 2006.
I've read The Looming Tower; I'd like to read The Places in Between, by Rory Stewart, about travels through Afghanistan.

The Washington Post Top Ten Best of the Year.
Again The Looming Tower; would like to read Fiasco, an accounting of the Iraq War by Washington Post writer Thomas Ricks.

The Atlantic Monthly Books of the Year. (Subscription required, I believe.)
I haven't read *any* of these. (Shame!) I would like to read Twilight of the Superheroes: Stories by Deborah Eisenberg and All Aunt Hagar's Children by Edward P. Jones.

The Los Angeles Times has two fairly long lists: Favorite Fiction and Poetry of 2006 and Favorite Nonfiction of 2006.
I'm overwhelmed by the number of pics here. The nonfiction list is more interesting. I'd like to read The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million by Daniel Mendelsohn and The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl by Timothy Egan.

The Seattle Times admits its Best Books of 2006 list is longish.
At least they break it up into multiple categories. I'd like to read The Echo Maker. It includes sandhill cranes, and I adore sandhill cranes. This book made a lot of the other lists too.

My subjective perusal of the above lists tells me that a lot of people love Claire Messud's The Emperor's Children and Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma.
But Metacritic's more scientific approach says the best reviewed books of 2006 are Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky for fiction and (ta da!) The Looming Tower for nonfiction. Everyone loves The Looming Tower, and so do I.

Ooof, I feel tired now! So many books to consider reading ...

A Christmas Carol

Robyn Blumner of the St. Petersburg Times (my employer) has a marvelous column on the enduring appeal of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. She mentions one of the best parts of the story, the visit from the Ghost of Christmas Present. It's the exact opposite of sugary sweet, and I'll quote from it slightly more extensively here:

The chimes were ringing the three quarters past eleven at that moment.

``Forgive me if I am not justified in what I ask,'' said Scrooge, looking intently at the Spirit's robe, ``but I see something strange, and not belonging to yourself, protruding from your skirts. Is it a foot or a claw!''

``It might be a claw, for the flesh there is upon it,'' was the Spirit's sorrowful reply. ``Look here.''

From the foldings of its robe, it brought two children; wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable. They knelt down at its feet, and clung upon the outside of its garment.

``Oh, Man! look here. Look, look, down here!'' exclaimed the Ghost.

They were a boy and girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. No change, no degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any grade, through all the mysteries of wonderful creation, has monsters half so horrible and dread.

Scrooge started back, appalled. Having them shown to him in this way, he tried to say they were fine children, but the words choked themselves, rather than be parties to a lie of such enormous magnitude.

``Spirit! are they yours?'' Scrooge could say no more.

``They are Man's,'' said the Spirit, looking down upon them. ``And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased. Deny it!'' cried the Spirit, stretching out its hand towards the city. ``Slander those who tell it ye! Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse! And bide the end!''

``Have they no refuge or resource?'' cried Scrooge.

``Are there no prisons?'' said the Spirit, turning on him for the last time with his own words. ``Are there no workhouses?''

The bell struck twelve.

Read her column here.

The final installment of Harry Potter

The name of the next Harry Potter book was revealed this week: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. J.K. Rowling revealed it through a fun little puzzle on her web site, jkrowling.com. (I always read the little cheat sheets floating around the 'net; I can't imagine how actual kids figure out the complex games she sets up.)

So what does the name mean? Like most of her previous books, nobody knows. Most of the HP titles refer to new themes that haven't been introduced before, and that's the case here. I'm going to hazard my own guess though. "Hallows" can mean holy ones, as in All Hallow's Eve (aka The Eve of All Saints, aka Halloween). I think the Deathly Hallows are the spirits of Harry's family and friends who have died, and they will have a role to play in helping Harry defeat Voldemort. Another clue is from Order of the Phoenix, when Harry heard whispering "behind the veil" in the Department of Mysteries. The veil symbolized death. My hypothesis is the people whispering were those who have died.
Now I don't think it will be like Obi Wan Kenobi in Return of the Jedi, where they come back as regular characters, just, y'know, dead. I think they will be more like friendly spirits, the way Harry's parents appear as part of the Phoenix Effect at the end of HP and the Goblet of Fire.
If I remember correctly, JRK said we hadn't seen the last of Sirius, so that fits in well with my theory, too. I'll see if I can dig up the reference.
I realize this doesn't make much sense unless you've read the books. But so many people have, and in fact one of my favorite things about the books is that they have created a huge reading community. HP lovers unite!

UPDATE: Check the comments for JKR's hints on Sirius and future books.

Best uses for LibraryThing

I've been wrestling with a dilemma only a book geek could understand: How to best use LibraryThing, a cool web site lets you catalog your books. (Catalog is library-speak for "make a list of and categorize.") They're responsible for the little books display on the right-hand side of my blog.
At first I thought I would enter only the books I physically have in my home -- logical, eh? The wrench in the works is LibraryThing recommends other books you might like based on your collection, and I've been getting recommendations for books I've already read (I just don't own a copy right now.) This seems to defeat the purpose of a very cool aspect of LibraryThing.
Since it's a virtual catalog, why not use it to catalog every book I've ever read? Then I could just tag them with "Owned" or "Unowned" or whatever. (Tags are little subject headings LibraryThing and some blogs use to group information by subject.)
My other issue is that I've been buying a lot more books than I'm able to read lately. For instance, I bought 21 (!) books at a charity book sale at work this year. And I have seven unread books from the 2005 book sale. I could catalog these in LibraryThing with the tag "Unread."
Have I mentioned lately that I love tags? And now that I've upgraded to the new Blogger, I can start tagging my blog, as you'll see at the bottom of this post. (Blogger calls them labels for some reason.) Meanwhile, check out my gorgeous tag cloud from LibraryThing here. I belong to the I heart metadata discussion group, which betakate founded with the description, " Let's get together, you and me, baby, and develop a folksonomy. And we'll float away on a tag cloud of love."

Hemingway, the Bible, Burroughs

A round-up of my recent reading...
The Washington Post has a delightful feature called Second Reads where they reconsider neglected or notable books. This week's installment was on Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast. The critic Jonathan Yardley says the book is great but Hemingway was cruel to some of his friends in it. I definitely agree with the first part, not so much the second, though. I don't buy F. Scott Fitzgerald as some poor innocent thing.
The New Yorker has a fun take-out on the perennial best-seller, the Bible. There's even one version designed to look like Teen Magazine. Who knew?
Vanity Fair looks at the real-life family behind Augusten Burroughs' memoir Running with Scissors. They're suing, of course, because Burroughs' book made them look like the king freaks of the century. The story is not online, but Burroughs fanatics should check it out. It makes you feel bad for the grown kids, aka the Finches, to have their personal lives put on display. But frighteningly, it sounds like much of Burroughs' story is true.

Books on the Radio

Some of the best books coverage these days is being done on the radio. National Public Radio is consistently interesting, everything from cookbooks to the classics. Best of all they have a books channel on their web page, so it's easy to check in on what they're doing if you miss it on the air.

I also check in on The Bob Edwards Show, which is on XM Radio. Last night I heard him interview Arthur Brooks, an academic who studies charitable giving. Brooks found that conservatives really do give more than liberals, but not because of their political leanings per se. Rather, people who are skeptical of government tend to donate more to charity. It's hard to do justice to his nuanced arguments, but his book is called Who Really Cares: America's Charity Divide: Who Gives, Who Doesn't, and Why It Matters, and you can excerpt here.

Another radio show with great books coverage is Tom Ashbrook's On Point from WBUR. I hear this on XM, too, but anyone can listen to it for free on the Web or via Podcast. (The show's archives are here.) He interviews everyone from zany entertainment doyenne Amy Sedaris to postfeminist provocateur Camille Paglia. (That Paglia interview is super good.) He also does lots of politics and current events, with authors like Tom Ricks (Fiasco) and Lawrence Wright (The Looming Tower).

Severance Review and Q-A

I reviewed Severance, the book of short stories of people who have been beheaded, and I got to interview the author.

Decapitation hardly seems like a suitable theme for a collection of elegant short stories, but Robert Olen Butler transcends morbidity while excavating the final thoughts from the lives of the beheaded. John the Baptist recalls the way Jesus smelled at his baptism. Marie Antoinette remembers her parents' royal titles. Nicole Brown Simpson sees O.J. in the faces of her children. And a barnyard chicken dreams of a great white clucking mother: "this at last is the hen who fills the sky, and I am rushing now along the path and the clucking is for me and it is very loud and a great wide road is suddenly before me and she is beyond and I cross."

Read the review here; the interview here.

Hannibal Rising

I loved the novel Silence of the Lambs. But it's not taking anything away from that to say I found its sequel, Hannibal, to be bad. Not just bad, but laughably, Oh, C'mon, bad. Why I found it laughable is a major spoiler, so I will put in that in the comments. Read at your own risk!
Now there's a new Thomas Harris book out, called Hannibal Rising, a prequel that detailsHannibal's origins. Apparently Harris has not managed to stop his books' fall-off, according to the Los Angeles Times. Their headline is "Hannibal, we hardly knew ye — and we liked that."

Garry Wills' What Paul Meant

I got to interview Garry Wills for the St. Petersburg Times.

Even Garry Wills isn't sure exactly how many books he has written. It's more than 30, the result of a daily routine of writing and researching, even when he goes on vacation.

That output has made him many things to many people: To progressive Catholics, he is America's foremost Catholic intellectual. Vatican loyalists, on the other hand, see the traitor who wrote Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit. Political junkies know his writing on the Nixon, Reagan and Bush administrations, and history buffs love his Pulitzer Prize winner, Lincoln at Gettysburg.

Read the whole interview here.

Harper Lee biography

I feel a little guilty for reading the Harper Lee biography Mockingbird. I saw the author, Charles J. Shields, speak at the Festival of Reading here. He was wonderful and seemed like a true gentleman. But he freely admitted that Harper Lee asked him not to publish the book. She hates media attention.
On the other hand, I truly believe that To Kill a Mockingbird is one of the most important books of the 20th century. A good biography of its author will serve history and posterity well. And Mockingbird is an excellent book, it captures the fascinating literary milieu of New York in the 1950s and 1960s.
One part of the book that sticks in my mind is Harper Lee's refusal of an interview with a television crew: "Not just no, but hell no." How emphatic she is!

Library 2.0 Manifesto

I ran across this Librarians's 2.0 manifesto. It's great! Favorite passages:

• I will avoid requiring users to see things in librarians' terms but rather will shape services to reflect users' preferences and expectations.
• I will lobby for an open catalog that provides personalized, interactive features that users expect in online information environments.
• I will let go of previous practices if there is a better way to do things now, even if these practices once seemed so great.
• I will lobby for an open catalog that provides personalized, interactive features that users expect in online information environments.

Read the whole thing here.

Today spoonreader; tomorrow -- Oprah!

So I was thumbing through the most recent issue of O, The Oprah Magazine. (Yes, I am a proud reader!) And what do I find but David Foster Wallace's compelling commencement address that I blogged about back in January! At the time, I opined, "I fervently hope David Foster Wallace finds a way to get it published as an essay. It's about the importance of what we choose to think about. It's great, great stuff."
The new Oprah issue isn't yet on her web site, I will update this post when it is.
To quote from his essay again:

Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliche about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliche about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.
This, like many cliches, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.
And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out.

UPDATE: The essay is not on the Oprah web site, but you can see more about the December issue here.

Little Children, the movie

I don't usually write about movies, even when they're based on books. First, there are too many; it would turn this book blog into a movie blog. Second, books are usually better than the movie, and there's no sense in repeating that over and over. But I'm optimistic about the movie of Little Children, based on the book by Tom Perrotta. I thought the book was a compelling little novel mining rare territory -- boredom and self-obsession in contemporary suburban family life. Movies are pretty comfortable with this landscape (see American Beauty, Edward Scissorhands and The Truman Show, to name but a few). So it will be interesting to see what results.
Here's a bit from a review in the Los Angeles Times. The reviewer seems to differ from me and agree with me in a few ways:

"Little Children" is one of those rare films that transcends its source material. Firmly rooted in the present and in our current frame of mind -- a time and frame of mind that few artists have shown interest in really exploring--— the movie is one of the few films I can think of that examines the baffling combination of smugness, self-abnegation, ceremonial deference and status anxiety that characterizes middle-class Gen X parenting, and find sheer, white-knuckled terror at its core.

Read the whole review here. Perrotta also wrote Election, which was turned into a movie -- a biting satire of the high school student council starring Matthew Broderick and Reese Witherspoon.
And while I'm going all multi-media on you, I will point out that my favorite band, The Shins, has a new website that shows the band members hanging out at the library. Cool!

The Looming Tower

The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9-11 is an exceptional book about the historical background of the 9/11 attackers. It explains in details why they did what did what they did, what their motivations were, what their strategies were, how the moved around the world and organized the attack. The main focus is on Osama bin Laden and the history of his ideology. It is marvelously concrete and detailed.
Before I read this book, Osama bin Laden always seemed to me more like a movie villain, like Darth Vader from Star Wars or Sarumaun from Lord of the Rings. Now he seems much more real, which is of course a bit scarier. The ideology these guys operate with is truly frightening.
There's a dialogue on Slate between the book's author Lawrence Wright and his fellow journalist Steve Coll. Coll summarizes the book so well I'll simply quote him here:

The book opens with an account of the influential Egyptian Islamist writer Sayid Qutb's radicalizing experiences in America during the late 1940s, when he was a young man far from home. It then develops biographical portraits of the young Ayman Zawahiri and the young Osama Bin Laden, who both read Qutb ardently. The book follows the pair to Afghanistan during the 1980s and tracks the origins and formation of al-Qaida during the anti-Soviet war. The evolution of the group after it was forced into exile in Sudan during the early 1990s, and then returned to Afghanistan, in 1996, is blended with reporting about the FBI agents who were assigned to understand and pursue al-Qaida. The book follows all these strands of narrative to Sept. 11 and then to Bin Laden's escape from Tora Bora the following December.

Read the whole dialogue here.

Severance

I heard a report on National Public Radio tonight about a new book of (very) short stories called Severance, by Robert Olen Butler. Each story is the thoughts of someone who has just had their head cut off. Each story is short, just enough to capture what they would be thinking as the blade does its work. It sounds interesting: The stories includes John the Baptist, Medusa, Robespierre and a chicken, among others.
It also reminded me of Spoon River Anthology (of course!) which also is a book of people speaking briefly and poetically about their deaths. The difference is that Spoon River's conceit is that it's everyone is in the same graveyard, as opposed to Severance's method of death.
I think I will pick up a copy of Severance soon.

Crunchy Cons

Rod Dreher is a noted conservative commentator -- his day job is opinion editor of the Dallas Morning News. But more importantly to me is that he is an alumni of my high school, the beloved Louisiana School for Math, Science and the Arts. This has motivated me to keep an eye on his career. Plus, he's a really great writer and highly readable.
He wrote a book recently called Crunchy Cons: How Birkenstocked Burkeans, Gun-Loving Organic Gardeners, Evangelical Free-Range Farmers, Hip Homeschooling Mamas, Right-Wing Nature Lovers, and Their Diverse Tribe of Countercultural Conservatives Plan to Save America (or at Least the Republican Party). I read it, and I really liked it. (It comes out in paperback next week.) It is a trenchant critique of the rampant consumerism of the culture and the knee-jerk pro-corporate stance of the mainstream Republican Party. It also has interesting insights on living a good life, advocating organic farming and the restoration of older homes. My favorite advice: Everything in your home should be either useful or beautiful -- if it's not either, get rid of it! The book also shakes up our notions of the right/left political divide, which is another one of my pet interests.
Dreher has a Crunchy Con blog on Beliefnet.com that is consistently fascinating reading. He announced recently on his blog that he is converting to Orthodoxy, and it set off a firestorm -- more than 431 comments and counting. Wow!
I just did a search to see what's the most comments I've ever had on my blog. In case you were wondering, it's four.

Banned Books Week

It's Banned Books Week, so read something shocking this week!
Need ideas? The American Library Association has its list of banned books here, while Google has a list here. The ALA's list is mostly children's books, while Google's leans toward adult classics. To Kill a Mockingbird or Ulysses, anyone? I'm fond of the outhouse scene in "Ulysses," so I'll have to read that again this week.
Thanks to Ryan F. for the links! Sorry, Ryan, no commission.

Today is J. Alfred Prufrock Day!

I almost missed it, but my trusty poem-a-day calendar reminded me that today is T.S. Eliot's birthday, which means it's J. ALFRED PRUFROCK DAY!
This is a day for me and my fellow English Lit classmates from high school to celebrate our love of poetry by reading The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.
You can read my previous posts celebrating J. Alfred Prufrock Day here, here, here and here.
So ... Do you dare to eat a peach?

New from Michael Lewis

Michael Lewis has a new book coming out next week -- The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game -- and it looks like it will be good.
The New York Times Magazine exerpted part of it this weekend; read it here while it's still free. Meanwhile, another favorite author of mine, Malcolm Gladwell, praises the book on his blog:

It's about a teenager from the poorest neighborhood in Memphis who gets adopted by a wealthy white family, and who also happens to be an extraordinarily gifted offensive lineman. Simultaneously Lewis tells the story of the emergence of the left tackle as one of the most important positions in modern day football. I thought MoneyBall was fantastic. But this is even better, and it made me wonder if we aren't enjoying a golden age of sportswriting right now. ... The Blind Side is as insightful and moving a meditation on class inequality in America as I have ever read--althought to put it that way, I realize, makes it sound deadly dull. It isn't. You should read it.

Read Gladwell's entire post here. Gladwell wrote The Tipping Point and Blink.

Cane River

I finished Cane River for my book group last week. It's an intergenerational saga of mothers and daughters who lived as slaves, survived the Civil War, and continued raising their families into the 20th Century. What makes this book different is that author Lalita Tademy based the novel on her own family tree. She used genealogy records to create the plot's outline, and then imagined the details and the motivations of her ancestors.
This book was picked for Oprah's Book Club in 2001, and it's not hard to see why. Stylistically, "Cane River" is an easy and pleasant read. It also has a strong theme of female empowerment. Finally, it deals with important issues of racism and oppression in complex and realistic ways.
I have to add that I literally could not put this book down. The last book I remember being that absorbing was Running with Scissors. That's such a TOTALLY different book (wacko mother abandons her gay teenaged son to her guru shrink), I hesitate to mention it in the same post as "Cane River." But it did have that one identical quality, where I just had to find out what happened next to these fascinating characters.

The price of higher education

The New York Times has a darkly humorous opinion piece about the cost of higher education and the expectations game:

Laudable could be cheaper, but you wouldn'’t like it. You and your parents have made it clear that you want the best. That means more spacious and comfortable student residences ("dormitories," we used to call them), gyms with professional exercise equipment, better food of all kinds, more counselors to attend to your growing emotional needs, more high-tech classrooms and campuses that are spectacularly handsome.

Our competitors provide such things, so we do too. We compete for everything: faculty, students, research dollars and prestige. The more you want us to give to you, the more we will be asking you to give to us. We aim to please, and that will cost you. It's been a long time since scholarship and teaching were carried on in monastic surroundings.

Laudable's surroundings, by the way, will remind you of where you came from. That'’s because your financial circumstances are pretty much the same as those of your classmates. More expensive schools have students from wealthier parents; less expensive schools draw students from families with fewer financial resources. More than half of the freshmen at selective colleges, public and private, come from the highest-earning quarter of households. Tell me the ZIP code and I'’ll tell you what kind of college a high-school graduate most likely attends.

Read the whole op-ed here. The author is William M. Chace, author of 100 Semesters: My Adventures as Student, Professor and University President, and What I Learned Along the Way, which I'll have to check out.

Katrina anniversary coverage: books

The Times-Picayune has a great story on all the books about Katrina that have been published in the past year -- "enough books to buckle a bookshelf," says the T-P.
Read the story here.

Katrina anniversary coverage: SPT

I'm proud of the work my employer, the St. Petersburg Times, did on Katrina and its anniversary.
You can see the Times' work via this link.
Times photographer Kathleen Flynn took the picture of Sadie James, which ended up on the cover of Time magazine last year. Flynn kept in touch with James and photographed her again recently. She also recorded James talking about her life since that photo. It's powerful. Access it here; click on Sadie James.

Katrina anniversary coverage: Times-Picayune

Here's a better link to six days worth of Times-Picayune coverage. Two more stories stand out. One is on the horror of the Convention Center as the storm hit. That's surely what I will always think of when I think of Katrina, the poor people just marooned at the convention center, desperately talking to the TV cameras but unable to get food, water, comfort.
The other is about a Metairie man who used his fishing boat to rescue people off the roofs of their flooded homes. The matter-of-fact way he went about helping them is touching and decent.

David Foster Wallace on tennis, again

David Foster Wallace wrote a new essay on his old obsession -- tennis -- for last week's New York Times. He waxed rhapsodic about Roger Federer. (Too bad, though: It looks like Wallace got bit by the correction bug, too, involving the mechanics of a Federer vs. Agassi match. The correction is appended to the story.)
In other Wallace news, The Howling Fantods, a fan site, says a 10th anniversary edition of Infinite Jest arrives later this year, with an introduction by David Eggers. The Eggers intro is a little weird to me. I like and respect Eggers (especially for his work with teaching writing to underpriviledged children), but I think Wallace is better known and more accomplished, so why is Eggers writing the intro? On the other hand, maybe Wallace asked Eggers to write the intro, because Wallace has published pieces before in Egger's literary project McSweeney's. All just speculation on my part.
I was thinking the other day how much I would like to read IJ again. Maybe the anniversary is just the occasion.

Katrina anniversary coverage: Bush's photo

Here's a case of two newspapers doing the same story with weirdly similar leads.
First, The Washington Post on Saturday. Headline: "Katrina's Damage Lingers For Bush." Lead:

For Rep. Patrick T. McHenry (R-N.C.), three images define George W. Bush's presidency: Bush throwing out the first pitch of the 2001 World Series at Yankee Stadium, Bush with a megaphone atop the rubble of the World Trade Center -- and Bush staring out the window as Air Force One traversed the Gulf Coast thousands of feet above the devastation of Hurricane Katrina.
The first two images epitomize strength and resolution, the image the Bush White House likes to cultivate. But in one year's time, the last one -- of the president as aloof, out of touch, even befuddled -- all but erased the memory of the others, according to pollsters, pundits and Republican politicians who say they have suffered in the wake of the president's decline.

Next up, The New York Times on Monday. Headline: "Years After Katrina, Bush Still Fights for 9/11 Image." Lead:

When the nation records the legacy of George W. Bush, 43rd president and self-described compassionate conservative, two competing images will help tell the tale.
The first is of Mr. Bush after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, bullhorn in hand, feet planted firmly in the rubble of the twin towers. The second is of him aboard Air Force One, on his way from Crawford, Tex., to Washington, peering out the window at the wreckage of Hurricane Katrina thousands of feet below.
If the bungled federal response to Hurricane Katrina called into question the president’s competence, that Air Force One snapshot, coupled with wrenching scenes on the ground of victims who were largely poor and black, called into question something equally important to Mr. Bush: his compassion.
A year later, he has yet to recover on either front.

Katrina Anniversary coverage: the weekend before

I'm going to blog this week about the Hurricane Katrina anniversary. I plan to highlight the news articles I find most compelling, interesting and insightful. Here's the first installment.
The Times-Picayune's story "On Their Own" takes a hard look at the local planning process and Mayor Ray Nagin's role. The big question: Should the government follow the lead of the people who return, or should it set the agenda for rebuilding? The TP shows that, so far, the local government has not set much of an agenda, and that's not a good thing.

Even with the huge infusion of federal aid on the way, it's unthinkable that all parts of the city will thrive, most observers agree.
At the neighborhood level, that will have unpleasant consequences.
Shortly after the storm, experts warned strenuously that in the absence of a carefully planned and controlled revival, New Orleans would succumb to the "jack-o'-lantern effect" -- a gap-toothed revival in which renovated homes were interspersed with blighted and abandoned structures that eventually would bring down the neighborhood.

The Washington Post decided to take a look at rebuilding on a single street, and was able to contact 15 of 18 families who before the storm lived on Beechwood Court in New Orleans East. The results of their survey aren't particularly heartening. Ten families said they were unlikely to return.

Many asked: What is there to come back to?
"We loved our neighborhood, we loved our life, we loved our home," said Denise Charbonnet, 53, a Navy contractor whose job was transferred from New Orleans to Memphis. "But it's not the same. There are no stores. There are no gas stations. They do have streetlights on the main streets, but within the communities, it's dark. Can you imagine being the only person living on a block?"

The Post also has a compelling story on Baton Rouge, which absorbed a great number of evacuees from New Orleans. At times, Baton Rouge's infrastructure seemed taxed beyond its means, and class differences emerged between the black communities of the respective cities.

Jeff LeDuff, the city's no-nonsense police chief, was credited by many with keeping order in the city. There was aggressive policing, officers rolling en masse to reports of crimes. "I'm willing to be my brother's keeper. That's what I said at the time," says LeDuff now, referring to the immediate aftermath of Katrina. "And I also said, 'While my brother is in Baton Rouge, he must behave.' "
Some assailed LeDuff, who is black, and his police force, saying they were too aggressive. But Mayor Melvin "Kip" Holden, who appointed LeDuff and who also is black, lauded his chief's stewardship of the department during the crisis.

The New York Times has a fascinating story on the big differences between the people who fled to Atlanta versus those who were evacuated to Houston. The NYT headlines the story, "Storm's Escape Routes: One Forced, One Chosen":

(T)he divergent experiences of those who went to Houston and those who went to Atlanta suggest that recovery depends on more than individual resources and demographics. Just as important are less quantifiable factors: a sense of welcome and connection, the presence of friends and family, even how narrowly they survived the disaster.

I'll be blogging more on Katrina as the week goes on. The anniversary is Tuesday, Aug. 29.

Cool Headline of the Day

I love the whimsy of this headline on a science article yesterday in the Los Angeles Times:

Round and Orbity? Must Be a Planet.

Id est (Mating)

Did you know that the common abbreviation "i.e." stands for "id est"? And that's Latin for "that is"? I guess I knew this already, but I was reminded recently by the novel Mating by Norman Rush. This was a book group pick (not mine). It is set in Botswana, and it's about an anthropology graduate student who decided to romantically pursue another academic, a man who has started a women-only commune sort of development in rural Africa. The novel is supposed to be a "comedy of manners." But it struck me as kind of being an object of amusement. The narrator keeps saying "id est" instead of i.e. Guess what? That's annoying!
On the other hand ... I was looking around for reviews of Mating, and I found this totally amusing blog post. This blogger loved "Mating," and what she has to say about it is pretty interesting:

A couple of people I recommended this book to were extremely annoyed by the writing-voice ... . I, however, LOVE the voice: cerebral, obsessively psychological, yearning, illogical -- It comes from right out of me. I relate.

Read her whole post here.

Cooking for Mr. Latte

I've been re-reading Cooking for Mr. Latte this week and really savoring it. It's so charming, so fun, I think it should be counted among the great food memoirs of our time. Or at least I think it should because it's youthful, exhuberant, romantic and (mostly) unpretentious.
The book drew on the first-person columns Ms. Hesser wrote about her courtship with the man who became her husband, Tad Friend, aka Mr. Latte. During this time she was also a food writer for The New York Times, so there's lots of talk about cooking and restaurants. Each episode ends with related recipes. Though I haven't made many of the recipes because they tend to involve exotic ingredients, i.e. goat's milk yogurt, etc.
I miss the author of Cooking for Mr. Latte ... Amanda Hesser doesn't seem to write much in the first person anymore, though she does still write about food for the NYT Magazine. In fact, I think she is the food editor for the NYT Mag now.
I have to conclude that I just like first-person food writing. Taste, literally, is such a personal thing. It makes sense to write about it in a personalized way. For instance, I just love Frank Bruni's blog, and he write mostly in the first person. He had a recent story about eating his way across Fast Food America that was just a hoot.

Important reporting on the environment

This week, the Los Angeles Times launched a major investigative series called Altered Oceans. It looks at the way humans are changing much of the ocean ecology through things like fertilizer run-off and garbage. These extremely disturbing stories paint a picture of environmental change on an almost primordial level.
This is not a terribly original thought, but I'll post it here anyway: My fear is not for the earth. In the long run, the earth will be fine. My fear is we'll change the climate so much that humans won't be able to survive.

No "Search Inside" - bleh! (Kafka on the Shore)

Ugh, it's sad how dependent I've become on Amazon's "Search Inside This Book" function. I use it all the time to grab quotes from books I want to write about in my blog, or just to look up passages I want to remember. And now it's failing me. There is no search inside function for Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore.
This novel was so different, so strange -- almost dada-esque -- but extremely touching and filled with compassion. The narrator, a Japanese teenager named Kafka, is running away from home to avoid an Oedipal prophecy. Meanwhile, Mr. Nakata, a retarded man injured in a mysterious incident during World War II, has the ability to talk with cats. Johnny Walker (yep, the man on the liquor bottle) is a malevolent manifestation who wants to create a magic flute that will let him take over the world. Then there is the transgendered hemophiliac who runs an elegant private library. All that, and it's fun to read.
The quote I was looking for said something like this: We come closest to truth through metaphor.
I'm going to have to re-read the book now. Lucky me!
UPDATE: I just remembered my other favorite quote from KotS: The present moment is the past devouring the future.

Which Dostoevsky novel should I read first?

I've never read a Dostoyevsky novel. (I have read some of his short stories.) Which one should I start with?
The most likely suspects are Crime and Punishment or The Brothers Karamazov

Hard News by Seth Mnookin

I finally picked up Hard News by Seth Mnookin off my bookshelf, and really was fascinated by his re-telling of the Jayson Blair fiasco at The New York Times. Because I work in journalism, I followed the story very closely as it was happening back in 2003, when Blair got busted for fabricating news stories for the NYT. In fact, I followed the story so closely that I thought, "There is no way Mnookin is going to be able to tell me more than I've already read about this."
Well, I was wrong. Maybe it's that time has gone by and I've forgotten details. But more likely is that Mnookin was able to distance himself from the whole mess and then write a compelling narrative of a Newspaper Gone Wrong.
I was also fascinated by Mnookin's exhaustive sourcing. He often gives credit within the text when he refers to others's reportage. Copious end notes further explain what he got from his own interviews and what came from other sources. The book's index is excellent as well. (A rant for another day: the horror of substandard indexes.) Finally, in the paperback edition I have, he lists corrections to the hardback edition. I don't think I've ever seen that; it smacks of accountability and accuracy.
I suppose some of this was a defensive necessity given the subject matter. Most of his sources are reporters and editors from the nation's preeminent newspaper. I imagine they would eat you for lunch or at least trash your reputation for all eternity if you got things wrong. But wow, it's nice for a reader like me to be able to examine the sourcing to that degree.

LibraryThing

As you can see (I hope), I've added a widget from LibraryThing to the side of this blog so you can see random books from my library.
We'll see how this thing works ... Consider it an experimental addition for the moment.
You can view the books I own at LibraryThing via this link.
What is LibraryThing?
In librarian-speak, it's cataloging software for small, private collections.
In plain English, it's a Web site where you can make a list of all the books you own.
Cool, eh?

Persuasion

I read Jane Austen's Persuasion this weekend, and I was disappointed. It did not seem nearly as sophisticated or appealling as Sense and Sensibility or Pride and Prejudice.
I suppose it's silly to expect to enjoy her less notable works as much as the more famous works. But still ...
The heroine Anne Elliot in particular struck me as -- I'm sorry, but there's no other word for it -- a ninny.
She was so passive. She didn't do anything to make Captain Wentworth pursue her. If he hadn't decided he still liked her, there would have been no story at all.
I know those are fighting words. So come on, Janeites, let's take off the gloves and throw down.

Novelization

Everybody expects books to be made into movies, but what about movies turned into books? They're called novelizations, and Slate has a fascinating article on this genre, which seems to be sadly in decline:

Disappointed by the new movie Superman Returns? Why not read the novel? For more than 70 years, movies have been turned into novelizations, and these books are how many of us relived the excitement of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom or first encountered such off-limits fare as the R-rated Alien. Novelizations are evolutionary throwbacks to the romantic days of the pulps: two-fisted tales, banged out on a deadline by writers with strong chops and bags full of tricks. In 2006, however, they are a besieged breed. They have always been written under trying circumstances: After signing a heavy-duty nondisclosure agreement, the author is handed a copy of the screenplay, which may bear little resemblance to the movie that is actually being shot. He or she is put on a tight deadline, sometimes as short as two weeks. The result is a cheap paperback that bookstores consider sellable for the month around the movie's release.

Read the whole article here.
When I was a youngster, my sister and I were crazy about the novelizations for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, both by Vonda N. McIntyre. We loved the backstory on Lt. Saavik, a small supporting character in the movies. In the books, this half-Vulcan, half-Romulan Star Fleet officer has a love affair with Capt. Kirk's long-lost son, a fascinating subplot that never appeared in the movie. Hooray for novelizations!

Microserfs

Earlier this week, Bill Gates announced his intention to leave his job at Microsoft to devote his time to philanthropy.
The news reminded me of one of my favorite novels, Microserfs by Douglas Coupland. Bill Gates is an important but unseen character. The book is about a group of low-level programmers who leave Microsoft to start their own software company. Daniel, one of the programmers, narrates the book through his diary entries. He and his friends are trying to balance their obsessive work with a desire to have fulfilling personal lives. But they're all driven to be part of the excitement of pioneering a one-point-oh piece of software, and that takes up a lot of time.
Here's how the novel begins:

Friday

This morning, just after 11:00, Michael locked himself in his office and he won't come out.

Bill (Bill!) sent Michael this totally wicked flame-mail from hell on the e-mail system - and he just wailed on a chunk of code Michael had written. Using the Bloom County-cartoons-taped-on-the-door index, Michael is certainly the most sensitive coder in Building Seven - not the type to take criticism easily. Exactly why Bill would choose Michael of all people to wail on is confusing. We figured it must have been a random quality check to keep the troops in line. Bill's so smart.

Bill is wise.
Bill is kind.
Bill is benevolent.
Bill, Be My Friend...Please!

Actually, nobody on our floor has ever been flamed by Bill personally. The episode was tinged with glamour and we were somewhat jealous. I tried to tell Michael this, but he was crushed.

Read the rest of the excerpt published in Wired magazine here.

The Observations

I reviewed The Observations by Jane Harris for the newspaper where I work. It begins:

The charming voice of Irish maid Bessy Buckley brightens this contemporary take on the intrigues of scheming servants, arrogant masters and nosy townspeople orbiting the gloomy Scottish estate of Castle Haivers. Bessy gets her position there after unwittingly revealing to her soon-to-be mistress, Arabella Reid, that she can read and write.

Read the entire review here.

Happy Bloomsday!

Today is Bloomsday! Remember last year when I blogged about Bloomsday? No? Well read that entry here.
I'm happy to report that my Ulysses book group, whittled down to a lean, mean, group of three, finished about 70 percent of the book. We drove an hour south today to have lunch with the James Joyce Society of Sarasota.
We ate, then watched actors read a scene from Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Then there was a scene that imagined Joyce having a conversation with one of his contemporaries. Then there was a trivia quiz.
It was fairly modest affair, J. said it was smaller than it had been in years past. But we still had a lot of fun and enjoyed our lit-geeky selves.
We are going to finish Ulysses then try to read Proust. I'll have to research to see if there is a date associated with Proust for us to celebrate. Somehow I doubt it.
And on a final note, The New Yorker this week published an article about the great lengths James Joyce's grandson has gone to to protect his copyright. Read it here, quick, before it disappears into their archive. The grandson seems a bit intense, but in a way that strikes me as very Irish, at least as it's portrayed in Ulysses. Read the article and decide for yourself.

Special Libraries Association in Baltimore

I got back this week from the Special Libraries Association annual conference in Baltimore. I got to hang out with lots of other news librarians. One of the keynote speakers was Gwen Ifill of Washington Week.
I blogged about my experience for the News Division blog, check it out here.
It's important to note that special librarians includes just about any librarian who does not work at a public library, a school or a university. I think it would be more appropriate to call us specialized librarians, but that's not the traditional term. At the conference, I met all kinds of different librarians, including law librarians, corporate librarians, freelance researchers, scientific librarians, etc. It's a very diverse group.

Favorite books, Men vs. Women

A friend who knows I'm fascinated by book lists sent me this item. A British study separated the genders and then asked for their favorite books. Women's No. 1 book is Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. Men's No. 1 book is Albert Camus's The Outsider, or as we know it in the U.S., The Stranger.
Making both Top 20 lists are Joseph Heller's Catch-22, Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird, Gabriel Garcia 's One Hundred Years of Solitude, and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.
I tend to think that men and women have more similarities than differences, but I still find this list kind of fun. The article characterizes the differences as men preferring angst, women preferring passion.
I'm also thrilled and amused to see that Nick Hornby's wonderful novel High Fidelity cracked the men's list at No. 15, coming in right ahead of James Joyce's Ulysses.
Read the whole list here.
Thanks to Ryan F. for the tip!

Christ Among the Partisans

On vacation last week, I read a slim little book called "What Jesus Meant" by Catholic intellectual Garry Wills. It's a highly analytical but plain-spoken reading of the New Testament's Gospels. Wills's intention is to recover the Jesus who is a radical, frightening preacher and to show that he is beyond political parties or agenda. The book is intellectually hefty but quite short. (I just love those attributes!)
Wills wrote an op-ed for The New York Times in April that highlights a lot of his book's ideas:

He was never that thing that all politicians wish to be esteemed — respectable. At various times in the Gospels, Jesus is called a devil, the devil's agent, irreligious, unclean, a mocker of Jewish law, a drunkard, a glutton, a promoter of immorality.

The institutional Jesus of the Republicans has no similarity to the Gospel figure. Neither will any institutional Jesus of the Democrats

.
Read the whole op-ed here:

Next book group pick

I selected Kafka on the Shore for my book group's next pick. And my Ulysses book group is winding up this week with discussion of the Penelope chapter, just in time for Bloomsday on June 16. I plan to blog more on my summer reading shortly!

New Collection of Recorded Poetry

A new collection of recorded poetry looks awesome. It's called Poetry on Record: 98 Poets Read Their Work (1888-2006). It's 4 CDs and 128 poems.
It has wide range of poets, too: Tennyson, Walt Whitman, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Sylvia Plath, Langston Hughes, Dylan Thomas, Gwendolyn Brooks, Charles Bukowski, Anne Sexton, Audre Lorde, Seamus Heaney, Joseph Brodsky, and more more more.
It's not too pricey either. Amazon is advertising it for about 40 bucks.
Fresh Air featured the collection this week. Listen to host Terry Gross and U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins discuss it here.
Of course I would be remiss if I did not point out that it features two poems from my favorite work, Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters. Master's reads the poems Lucinda Matlock and Emily Sparks -- both among the best poems of the anthology. You can hear snippets on Amazon, not the whole poems though.
The written word is the child of the spoken word. Recorded poetry always reminds me of that, happily.

Beloved's status

An article in Slate critiques the New York Times Book Review's selection of Beloved as the best novel of the past 25 years. Slate critic Stephen Metcalf backs into his essay by saying Beloved needs to be evaluated critically: Just how good is it anyway? It seems like a phony question since the NYT just said flat-out that it was pretty darn good. Finally, though, Metcalf comes to the heart of his appraisal:

What Beloved does feel grounded in, and firmly, is a repudiation of everything that exerts a soft but nonetheless unpleasant authority in a young person's life. In place of the need to master hard knowledge or brute facts, there is folk wisdom; in place of science, animism; in place of the strict father, the self-sufficient matriarchy ...

He concludes:

No other American novel of the past 25 years has so elegantly mapped the psychobiography of its ideal reader.

Now maybe I'm slow, but that sounds like an insult to me ... Why is he being so coy? Is he trying to avoid the dreaded accusation of snark? I don't like snark either. But I say, if you want to take down Beloved, then make your argument and take it down (or try to). I suspect he's reluctant to take on Morrison, an iconic Nobel prize winner (and, don't forget, a friend of Oprah).
Full disclosure: I do think Toni Morrison is one of the country's best writers, but I have not read Beloved. So, sadly, I cannot address the specifics of Metcalf's critique. I'm blogging this because I find public debates about literary merit to be endlessly fascinating.

RSS feed fixed

The RSS feed for this blog was screwed up, but I believe I fixed it. I think it's was messed up for quite awhile, I will try to monitor it more carefully.
RSS is software that allows you to monitor multiple web sites for updates. It's COOL. If you feel like you can't keep up with the web sites you're interested in, or if you're a big ole news junkie (like me), you should look into RSS readers. I use Bloglines. It's web-based and cool.

Book Group Picks

I love the way my book group picks its books. One member selects each book without any input from the other members. The only requirement is that no one, not even the picker, may have read the book. This accomplishes two things. First, we all come to the book fresh. Second, the selections remain eclectic becuase they don't have to appeal to the mainstream of the whole group. This way, we get to be surprised by books we probably wouldn't have read otherwise.
The group has been together about two or three years now. The most surprising pick for me as a reader was Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen. I didn't think I would like it, but I really loved it. Then I read Pride and Prejudice, which I loved even more.
Well, the months and books have gone by again, and on Thursday, I get to pick our next book. Hooray! It's so fun turning over different possibilities in my mind to arrive at the perfect book. Sometimes, I try to think of picks that would freak out my fellow members: "For our next book, we will read Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 11th Edition." But that's really just a little joke for my own amusement, I would never purposefully torture them.
This time, I've decided I'm going to pick a book from my own bookshelf that I have not read yet, and there are quite a few contenders ... I will post my pick here on Friday after I announce it to my group.

NYT's Best Work of the Last 25 Years

The New York Times has declared the best American fiction of the last 25 years, and it's Beloved, by Toni Morrison. That's a great choice, and I won't argue it.
But the rest of the finalists and runners-up are tired, tired, tired. I'm particularly bored by the preponderance of work by Philip Roth and John Updike.
Roth has a new novel out called Everyman, which is getting the expected stellar reviews, for the most part. It's about a man who's dying, and it's a chronicle of his body breaking down, kind of a like Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich (a masterful novella of a dying man's relationship with his doctors).
Frankly, though, I'm not terribly interested in Roth's work ... It's more of the old establishment authors narcistically whining that they're gonna die, and they don't believe in anything, and it's so hard to be them. I think those themes are really worn-out, especially given how the issues of terrorism, war and genocide have revived in recent years. (You can hear a radio interview of Philip Roth obsessing about himself here.) Interestingly, Updike's newest will look at the issues of the day; his latest is titled Terrorist.
Another gripe with the NYT list: Where is Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace?
Wallace himself criticizes Roth and Updike in a similar vein in his new book of essays Consider the Lobster. Just a coincidence -- OR IS IT???

Harbor

I recently read Harbor by Lorraine Adams: Young men flee Algeria's violence and joblessness to endure a hellish trip to America -- 50+ days stowed away in a ship's hold, then a desperate swim across Boston Harbor in the middle of winter. Aziz Arkoun, the main character, recovers from the physical trauma only to move on to marginal employment as a dishwasher and a gas station attendant. He meets other Algerians who might -- or might not -- be part of a nascent terrorism cell. Meanwhile, the horror of the Algerian civil war from which he fled is slowly revealed with graphic descriptions of rape, murder and dismemberment.
When this novel was published in 2004, the terrorism angle -- How do terrorists become terrorists? How do they think? -- got a lot of attention. But the novel resonates stronly with the current immigration issues as well. And in one of its sub-plots, it portrays the real-world limits of the federal government's investigatory powers. In this novel, it's frighteningly clear that the FBI doesn't know what the hell is going on.
Harbor also continued my thinking on some of the issues raised by We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda. For me, the attrocities described in both books inspire this (probably unanswerable) question: What is the nature of the human impulse toward murder and suicide? Those these two books take place in Africa, the violence seems to know few cultural or historical limitations (e.g. Nazi Germany, Cambodia, Stalin's Russia). Paul Berman discusses these issues most trenchantly in his book Terror and Liberalism, one of my favorite books. (The title refers to the classic liberalism that values human progress, not the current U.S. political stance.) Is the murder/suicide impulse truly the nature of evil? Phillip Gourevitch, author of "We Wish to Inform You," might reject the broadness of such a question as intellectually lazy. But I think he would also argue that we must think about these current events, that to turn away from them as inexplicable or inevitable is equally lazy, not to mention unjust.
Adams wrote her novel after reporting on Algerian immigrants for The Washington Post. You can read an excellent Q and A with her here; she disccusses what motivated her to switch from journalism to the novel. Read a round-up of reviews of Harbor is here via Metacritic.

Never Let Me Go & Metacritic

I finished Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro today. I liked it a lot. It was a fast read, maybe two or three days. Its genre iss literary sci-fi, and we all know there's not enough of that in the world.
It's hard to write about this book without giving away pivotal details of plot. That created an interesting conundrum for reviewers when the book came out last year. I was perusing the different reviews via my new favorite web site, Metacritic. About two-thirds of the critics gave away the story, while one-third opted to vague it up and speak in generalities.
What is Metacritic? It's a wonderful site that gathers links of reviews -- movies, music, books, tv, games -- all in one area. Then it ranks the reviews and creates a ranking so that you can compare any work to any other. It's like Siskel & Ebert meets The Wisdom of Crowds.
For an example, take a look at the page for Blink by Malcolm Gladwell, a book I really liked. Entertainment Weekly says it "kept me hooked til the final page," while Publisher's Weekly calls it "entertaining and illuminating." On the other hand, the Globe & Mail says it's "a mish-mash of half-developed ideas" and The New Republic calls it "poor in analysis." But it's also clear from the page that positive reviews outnumber the pans.
I'm going to use the power of the blog to post by my review of "Never Let Me Go" in the comments field. So don't click on the comments unless you want to see important plot details revealed!

Does this poem suck?

My poem-of-the-day calendar turned up this gem by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. I had never heard more than the famous first line. ("How do I love thee? Let me count they ways.") I was stunned by its simple eloquence:

HOW do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of every day’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with a love I seem’d to lose
With my lost saints,—I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life!—and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

So I went home all excited about this poem, looking it up in my anthology of Victorian literature. Where I received the jarring news that Elizabeth Barrett Browning is certainly not a poet "of major status." And her best-known poem Aurora Leigh is "very bad." And that the collection this poem is from, Sonnets from the Portuguese, is "quite bad too."
Hmmfph!
But then I cruised over to Amazon.com to find reviews of my mean-spirited anthology, which is The Oxford Anthology of English Literature: Victorian Prose and Poetry, edited by Lionel Trilling and Harold Bloom. Reviewer K. Elliott states:

This anthology appears to have been transported in a time machine from the 1950s. It is narrow both in its range of authors and subject matter and completely out of step with recent Victorian studies.

So ha, ha, ha!

Who is Michiko Kakutani?

Do you know who Michiko Kakutani is? Call me a latte-swilling, sushi-eating cultural elite, and I will tell you that she is the New York Times chief book critic.
Writing for the online magazine Slate, Ben Yagoda has a suprising, detailed critique of Kakutani as a stylistic bore with a thumbs up/thumbs down critical mentality. Read it here.
(I had to look up the word "dyslogistic" in the review. It means expressing disaproval.)
I've usually enjoyed Kakutani for having high standards. She's not afraid to trash a book. But I do think she's a bit stale. According to Yagoda, she's been reviewing books for the NYT for 25 years, which is probably why I think that. That's waaaaaaaaaay too long for anyone to write about a single topic, especially at a daily newspaper. I'm a big believer in beat shuffling, i.e. moving writers around to cover different topics on a regular basis. The longest someone should be on a beat is six years, or if they're really good, maybe 10 years. Giving people new challenges keeps things fresh for both the writers and the readers.
Who is this critic's critic, Mr. Yagoda? I'm not sure. The author's note says he is the author of The Sound on the Page: Style and Voice in Writing. I'm going to have to look into that book, it piques my interest already.

Rwanda

I saw the movie Hotel Rwanda a few weeks ago, and it inspired me to seek out Philip Gourevitch's We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda.
The movie is chilling -- psychologically taut and compelling. At times it feels like a horror movie, perhaps because it captures the real-life horror of genocide taking place in the world in 1994.
Gourevitch's books is an expansion of reports he wrote for The New Yorker magazine. I think he's one of the finest foreign correspondents I've read. His reporting on North Korea has been frightening but also extremely perceptive.
We Wish To Inform You, meanwhile, is just what I was wanting to read after the movie: more history, more analysis, more reportage, to try to discover more meaning from the slaughter of a million people. To call the genocide "senseless" is almost a cop-out: It lets us off the hook of trying to understand precisely what happened. Gourevitch is very sensitive to that dynamic, and he is not afraid to make value judgements based on his extensive reporting of the facts at hand.
PS Gourevitch recently became editor of the Paris Review.

Books that take place in a single day

By coincidence, the two book groups I'm in are both reading books that take place in the course of a single day. The first one is the classic Ulysses by James Joyce. The second is Saturday by Ian McEwan.
Can you think of any other novels that take place in the course of a single day? Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf is a famous one I just thought of. Any others?

Spring and the color Green

My poem-a-day calendar produced a Robert Frost work last week, "Nothing Gold Can Stay."
It's quite impressive and short, read it here. (Sorry for the link, I suspect it's still under copyright.)
Right now in Florida, everything has transformed from winter gold to spring green. It makes me think how indomitable the color green is.
It reminds me that one of my favorite David Foster Wallace short stories is "Everything is Green" in the collection Girl with Curious Hair. That story is also short -- two pages. (Can't find the text for it online, sorry about that. Check out the book from your local library.)

March 10th Spoon River

I have a calendar that features a poem or poetry-related information for every day of the year. March 10th (Happy B-day, DJ!) featured a poem from my beloved Spoon River Anthology. Here it is:

Hortense Robbins

MY name used to be in the papers daily
As having dined somewhere,
Or traveled somewhere,
Or rented a house in Paris,
Where I entertained the nobility.
I was forever eating or traveling,
Or taking the cure at Baden-Baden.
Now I am here to do honor
To Spoon River, here beside the family whence I sprang.
No one cares now where I dined,
Or lived, or whom I entertained,
Or how often I took the cure at Baden-Baden!

That poem is OK, it's frequently quoted, but it's not one of my favorites. I would have chosen this one for the calendar. (FYI, a milliner is a hatmaker):

Mrs. Williams

I WAS the milliner
Talked about, lied about,
Mother of Dora,
Whose strange disappearance
Was charged to her rearing.
My eye quick to beauty
Saw much beside ribbons
And buckles and feathers
And leghorns and felts,
To set off sweet faces,
And dark hair and gold.
One thing I will tell you
And one I will ask:
The stealers of husbands
Wear powder and trinkets,
And fashionable hats.
Wives, wear them yourselves.
Hats may make divorces—
They also prevent them.
Well now, let me ask you:
If all of the children, born here in Spoon River
Had been reared by the County, somewhere on a farm;
And the fathers and mothers had been given their freedom
To live and enjoy, change mates if they wished,
Do you think that Spoon River
Had been any the worse?

One day I might write a critical essay on Mrs. Williams, comparing her with my other favorite Spoon River entry, Lucinda Matlock. There's a lot there:

Lucinda Matlock

I WENT to the dances at Chandlerville,
And played snap-out at Winchester.
One time we changed partners,
Driving home in the moonlight of middle June,
And then I found Davis.
We were married and lived together for seventy years,
Enjoying, working, raising the twelve children,
Eight of whom we lost
Ere I had reached the age of sixty.
I spun, I wove, I kept the house, I nursed the sick,
I made the garden, and for holiday
Rambled over the fields where sang the larks,
And by Spoon River gathering many a shell,
And many a flower and medicinal weed—
Shouting to the wooded hills, singing to the green valleys.
At ninety-six I had lived enough, that is all,
And passed to a sweet repose.
What is this I hear of sorrow and weariness,
Anger, discontent and drooping hopes?
Degenerate sons and daughters,
Life is too strong for you—
It takes life to love Life.

Domestic memoir for the alternative set

I just finished reading two books by Dan Savage: The Kid: What Happened After My Boyfriend and I Decided to Go Get Pregnant and The Commitment: Love, Sex, Marriage and My Family. These memoirs are about Savage and his boyfriend adopting an infant son and then deciding whether or not they should get married (even though it would not be a legal marriage in the United States). These books were quick reads and pretty interesting. Savage is smart and political and makes compelling arguments in favor (and, in some moments, against) gay adoption and marriage. Savage is also the author of a syndicated sex column called "Savage Love." It's sometimes funny, and sometimes poignant, and sometimes really gross. But it's definitely never for the easily offended. You have been warned; read it here. Savage is a sex radical but interestingly he's also a very traditional family man, and he is not unaware of the irony. His boyfriend stays home to raise the baby while Savage is the breadwinner.
Another nonconformist domestic memoir recently published is Marion Winik's Above Us Only Sky, the title a reference to her own atheism. Winik wrote a fascinating memoir called First Comes Love, about her relationship with her gay, HIV-positive husband. She had two children with him -- amazingly, she did not contract the virus herself. He died and she raised the children on her own, chronicling those years in another book, The Lunch Box Chronicles. In the new book, she has fallen in love again and left Austin, Texas (possibly the coolest city in America) for rural Pennsylvania with her new husband and a new baby daughter. I'm looking forward to reading it; I'll post a review here when I do.

Oscar books

At last night's Academy Awards, Best Adapted Screenplay award winner Larry McMurtry gave a shout-out to book culture during his acceptance speech:

And finally I'm going to thank all the booksellers of the world. Remember, "Brokeback Mountain" was a book before it was a movie. From the humblest paperback exchange to the masters of the great bookshops of the world, all are contributors to the survival of the culture of the book -- a wonderful culture, which we mustn't lose.

McMurtry is probably most famous for being the author of novels such as Lonesome Dove and The Last Picture Show (which also became movies).
A point of clarification: "Brokeback Mountain" began its artistic life as a short story by Annie Proulx. It's part of her collection, Close Range: Wyoming Stories.

Reasonable People Can Disagree

One of my favorite sayings is: "Reasonable people can disagree." I use it at home, at work, with friends and with strangers. I use it for political arguments but also much more mundane matters (crunchy vs. smooth, peanut vs. plain, etc.).
Now I have to use it for my friend Doug who didn't like Marilynne Robinson's book Gilead as much as I did.
Read Doug's post here.
Read my praise of "Gilead" here and here.

On hearing Ulysses

To help me in my quest to read Ulysses, I've checked out an audio version from the library -- 22 CDs read aloud! I'm surprised at how illuminating the audio version is, and it's definitely helping me make better progress with the book. The key reason is that Jim Norton, who reads the book, uses different tones of voices in a highly expert way. He uses a stately clear voice for standard narration; a slightly louder, accented voice for the dialogue; and a quieter, faster voice for the characters' inner thoughts. This, to me, is what makes Ulysses so difficult: Joyce blurs the lines significantly between narration, dialogue and inner thought. The audio version helps immensely in sorting out those strands. I've borrowed the Naxos audio version of Ulysses, read by Jim Norton with Marcella Riordan. On Amazon, it costs $94.49.

Lives of the Saints

I read a good book about St. Francis of Assisi recently (Francis of Assisi: Performing the Gospel Life by Lawrence S. Cunningham). Best of all, it was short -- less than 200 pages. Despite its brevity, it included the pertinent historical facts and some interesting theology. If only all authors could achieve such economy! You can read an interesting book review of it here.
Also to be filed under saints: The New Yorker has a fascinating article about Mary Magdalene and her development over 2,000 years of Christian history. For example, there is no evidence in the Bible that she was a prostitute. You can read the article through this link for awhile.
Interesting excerpt:

Today, with so many Biblical literalists around, we have to fuss about what Scripture actually says, but in the early centuries after Christ’s death such questions were less important, because most people couldn’t read. The four Gospels, for the most part, are collections of oral traditions. Once they were written down, they served as a guide for preaching, but only as a guide. Preachers embroidered upon them freely, and artists—indeed, everyone—made their own adjustments. The English scholar Marina Warner makes this point in her book on the Virgin Mary, “Alone of All Her Sex” (1976). As Warner shows, many of the details of the Nativity so familiar to us from paintings and hymns and school pageants—“the hay and the snow and the smell of animals’ warm bodies”—are not in the New Testament. People made them up; they wanted a better story. Likewise, they made up a better Mary Magdalene.

On why Spoonreader.com is not taking over the Net

New York magazine has a big article on bloggers. (Read it here.) Apparently the hottest blogs can earn up to $2 million a year thanks to advertising. They mention a website called Gawker that includes celebrity gossip. According to the experts, the secret to a great blog is relentless, regular posting. Which, as you can see, is why spoonreader will never get beyond my 12 loyal readers. I'm back in library school this semester, too, and it cuts in to my extracurricular time.
But I'm not going away, and I will try to post something more substantial real soon! And to my dear 12 readers, please know that you are very special to me and I care deeply about each and everyone of you. Happy Valentine's Day!

Oprah Comes Correct

Since I blogged on this previously, I must now mention that dear Oprah reversed herself and took James Frey out to the woodshed for sins against the genre of memoir. You can go here to see portions of the Oprah show on it. (Her personal statement -- a formal apology -- is extraordinary.) The New York Times also put the story on page 1 the day after Oprah's show, read that story here.
And, for a delightful piece of rhetoric from one of the columnists who urged Oprah to defend the principle of truth, read this piece by Richard Cohen of The Washington Post.
It begins:

Because she has led countless billions and billions of people to the promised land of books, because she preaches self-help and self-sufficiency and not least because she has shown that even a middle-aged person can keep weight off, I must tiptoe up to the amazing Oprah and merely whisper to her that in the case of James Frey, the liar whose memoir turns out to have a good deal of fiction alongside fact, she is not only wrong but deluded. What she needs is a session with Dr. Phil.

Read the entire column here.

Top 5 Books I Want to Read but Don't Have

If there's a movie I know want to see, I try not to read reviews or look at the back of the DVD box. It's somewhat the same with books. Every so often a book comes along that I know I want to read, so I try not to read too much about it. I don't want pre-conceived notions of what the books is about. So forgive me for not providing descriptions of these books. These are the Top 5 books I want to read but don't already own.
On Beauty by Zadie Smith (2005). British author of much praised debut White Teeth. She's also funny and a fan of David Foster Wallace. "On Beauty" is supposed to examine political correctness and conservatism at American universities.
Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner (2005). Economists look at questions like, What do school teachers and sumo wrestlers have in common? and Why do drug dealers live with their moms?
Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami (2005). Reviewers call it mysterious, powerful, beautiful. The author's web site is very extensive and worth checking out. See it here. (It has sound, too.) (Also, this is a cheat -- I bought this book last week, so I do actually have it. I have not read it.)
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond (2005). Diamond looks at disappeared cultures such as the Vikings in Greenland or the Anasazi in the American Southwest, focusing on how and why scarce resources become completely depleted. Is this us?
Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson (1981). This Robinson's first novel. I read her second novel, Gilead, this year and was blown away. I want more! "Gilead," by the way, just came out in paperback.