Introduction to IJ's 10th Anniversary

While I was working on a review of What is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng, by Dave Eggers, I was surfing around the Internet looking for stuff about Eggers. One of the things I found online was the introduction he wrote for the tenth anniversary edition of Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace.
I really love the introduction. It begins:

In recent years, there have been a few literary dustups — how insane is it that such a thing exists in a world at war? — about readability in contemporary fiction. In essence, there are some people who feel that fiction should be easy to read, that it’s a popular medium that should communicate on a somewhat conversational wavelength. On the other hand, there are those who feel that fiction can be challenging, generally and thematically, and even on a sentence-by-sentence basis — that it’s okay if a person needs to work a bit while reading, for the rewards can be that much greater when one’s mind has been exercised and thus (presumably) expanded.

Much in the way that would-be civilized debates are polarized by extreme thinkers on either side, this debate has been made to seem like an either/or proposition, that the world has room for only one kind of fiction, and that the other kind should be banned and its proponents hunted down and, why not, dismembered.

Read the whole introduction here. (And you really should!)

Zadie Smith on the Novel

Zadie Smith has authored a truly wonderful essay on writing novels in the Guardian. She asks what makes a good writer and responds to T.S. Eliot's famous essay, "Tradition and the Individual Talent."
My favorite part of the essay is where she talks about the role of the reader:

A novel is a two-way street, in which the labour required on either side is, in the end, equal. Reading, done properly, is every bit as tough as writing - I really believe that. As for those people who align reading with the essentially passive experience of watching television, they only wish to debase reading and readers. The more accurate analogy is that of the amateur musician placing her sheet music on the stand and preparing to play. She must use her own, hard-won, skills to play this piece of music. The greater the skill, the greater the gift she gives the composer and the composer gives her.

This is a conception of "reading" we rarely hear now. And yet, when you practise reading, when you spend time with a book, the old moral of effort and reward is undeniable. Reading is a skill and an art and readers should take pride in their abilities and have no shame in cultivating them if for no other reason than the fact that writers need you.

Read the whole essay here.
(Thanks to Gangrey for the link.)

Poems for a weekend at home

Here are some good poems for a weekend at home.

For when you need an exterminator:
Me up at does
by e.e. cummings

For when you eat your loved one's snacks:
This Is Just To Say
by William Carlos Williams

For tending tomato plants in the garden:
Hornworm: Autumn Lamentation
by Stanley Kunitz

Oh Joy

One of my favorite things about being a graduate student at the University of South Florida is that when I check books out of the library, I get them for a whole semester. That is just cool.

Best Books of 2006

In the spirit of High Fidelity, here's my Top 5 all-time best books of 2006 (in order):
1. What is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng by Dave Eggers
Eggers stuns again with an astounding tale of children surviving the civil war in Sudan. Valentino is as compelling a child narrator as any from Charles Dickens.
2. The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright
New Yorker staff writer Lawrence Wright makes the world of Islamic fundamentalists frighteningly understandable for American readers, with additional insights on the U.S. intelligence community. A must-read for anyone who cares about the global war on terror.
3. What Jesus Meant by Garry Wills
A refreshing and much-needed intellectual approach to the New Testament Gospels. Wills refutes literalists and argues for a Christianity that is a compassionate religion of the heart.
4. Severance: Stories by Robert Olen Butler
Beautiful prose-poems on the unlikely theme of decapitation. Moving, gruesome and thoughtful.
5. A Spot of Bother by Mark Haddon
Haddon takes the life of a semi-dysfunctional British family and infuses itwith drama and redemption. This was the very different second novel from the author of best-seller Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime. I can't wait to read what he writes next.

Honorable Mentions:
Blind Side: Evolution of a Game by Michael Lewis
A poor black kid from inner city Memphis attends a wealthy evangelical Christian high school. He gets adopted by a white family and becomes the most sought after football prospect in the state. With meaningful thoughts on the business of sports, the evolution of the NFL and the nature of familial love. (Whew!)
Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee by Charles J. Shields
Shields unpacks the life of the reclusive (and still living) Harper Lee, author of To Kill A Mockingbird. Paints a great you-are-there picture of the New York literary scene for southern writers in the 1960s.

Three great books I read in 2006 that were not written in 2006:
Kafka on the Shore (2005) by Haruki Murakami
Simultaneously trippy and realistic, this is a grand adventure story where a boy named Kafka saves the world from evil incarnate that takes the form of the guy Johnnie Walker liquor bottle.
We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda (1998) by Philip Gourevitch
Gourevitch explains the unexplainable: the 1994 genocide in Africa.
Harbor (2004) by Lorraine Adams
A former Washington Post reporter writes a first novel about Algerian immigrants in the U.S. today.