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!