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.

A good Lear reference

I love a good Shakespearean reference, so I was pleased to see a somewhat tongue-in-cheek mention of King Lear in a recent column by The New York Times' David Brooks. He writes about Sen. Joe Biden's tendency to bloviate at hearings for Supreme Court nominees:

I rise to defend Joe Biden, who is being attacked for his verbosity during the Alito confirmation hearings. Some have concluded that Biden is a blowhard, though I assert he is thoughtful, just at Wagnerian length.
After years of study, I have come to recognize that it is wrong to regard Biden's committee room interventions as questions. They are senatorial arias of immense emotional range. At times he will ascend to heights of rage and contempt; at other times he will wander like Lear through the desolation of undesirable policies.

Read the column here. (Sorry, you will need to be a TimesSelect subscriber to see it.)
My favorite Lear quotes: "Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow!" and "How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is/To have a thankless child." (The latter I will use to hilarious effect whenever my mom and I have some trivial disagreement. At least I think it's to hilarious effect.)

Scandal! Scandal! Scandal!

Oprah's last book club pick was harrowing memoir of addiction recovery called A Million Little Pieces by James Frey. On Sunday, The Smoking Gun posted a highly convincing expose (read it here) that debunks a lot of the criminal exploits Frey describes in his novel. It may take awhile for this to shake out -- Frey issued an initial terse statement of denial -- but things don't look very good for his credibility. The Smoking Gun knows their public records, and they're well-known for posting original mug shots, police reports, etc. (If you don't feel like reading the lengthy expose, read a news story about it here.)
Meanwhile, the New York Times this week went after about another druggie memoirist, this one a young man named JT Leroy. The story implies that a 40-year-old woman wrote Leroy's books about homeless child prostitutes and then got her sister-in-law to crossdress as Leroy in public. Read the story here. I'd never even heard of JT Leroy until I read this story, apparently his(?) best-known book is called The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things.
Finally, writer Neil Pollack has a hilarious, R-rated send-up of all this in his blog, in which he reveals he's not everything you may have thought.

My loyal readers. I've decided to tell all after these many years of pretending to be something that I'm not. My role as father, husband, and semi-employed reformed literary hipster is a lie, a cover for the terrible reality of my actual self. Writers, after all, must always tell the truth about themselves. The truth.
I may be a father, but I am also a murderer of children. Several thousand of them have died on my watch, some in secret government-sponsored air raids in foreign countries that no longer exist. But it's more depraved than that. I killed all those children while addicted to crack, and weed, and heroin. That was very hard to do because I couldn't see very well due to the massive quantities of blood that were streaming from the always-open wound in my forehead ... .

Read the whole thing here.

New stuff on David Foster Wallace

I started working on this post about David Foster Wallace (a longtime favorite author of mine), and as I was looking for interesting links, I discovered even more interesting news and miscellaneous about Mr. Wallace. This is a just another example of how I get so much out of writing this blog -- much more, I'm sure than the 12 people who read it.
So here we go:
The good folks at literary magazine n + 1 have posted an essay from their first issue on Wallace's fiction, particularly his last collection of short stories, Oblivion. I have "Oblivion" but have not yet read it -- But now I think I will use the n + 1 essay, which is by Chad Harbach, as a mini-reading guide for "Oblivion." I think I will like very much.
The essay explores what Wallace has accomplished with his fiction and where he might go next. Harbach writes:

(Wallace) is fascinated by the way corporations use psychological cunning and sophisticated observation to discover their constituents'’ most basic needs and fears, to find the salient detail that will grant them access to a soul. It is, ultimately, a novelist's work, turned to sinister purpose. Wallace knows this
well, and he knows how to pass his fascination along to readers. The narrator of "Mr. Squishy," for instance, spends dozens of pages dissecting the intellectual underpinnings of an ad campaign for an upscale Ding-Dong. Even though the consequences for plot and character are scant, it'’s riveting stuff.

This insight gets at part of what I find so compelling about Wallace. He writes about the way consumerism leaches the meaning out of our lives, commodifying and commercializing every kind or cruel impulse we have. I am not against markets, but it seems we are living in a period of hypercapitalism, when the civilizing force of the market has reached the proverbial tipping point and become a brutalizing, inhuman force. This is arguably the most important issue of our day, and Wallace is very much in touch with that.
Wallace is at his best in his novel Infinite Jest when he is writing about his characters' search for meaning in a consumerist world. A lot of people who write about IJ concentrate on the tennis prodigy Hal Incandenza, but I think the more compelling character is ex-thief Don Gately and his quest for sobriety at a Boston halfway house. Gately looks into the dark yawning maw of insatiable desire -- in this case, desire for a substance -- and turns away, and he finds a community to help him do that. Gately's observations are so compelling.
You may have heard that Wallace has a new book out, Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays. This is a collection of his funny, usually penetrating journalistic work. Most, maybe all of it, has been published in other magazines. I read the title essay about the morality of boiling lobsters in Gourmet magazine last year.
This is a really fun bit of multimedia that his publisher Little, Brown has put up on the web for the book release. It's called "VidLit," and features Wallace reading from "Consider the Lobster" to an animated short. I love Wallace's voice, and the music is really cool, too. Check it out here. (Warning if you're reading at work: It has sound.)
Finally, I found this on the web: Wallace commencement speech at Kenyon College in May. It's posted on a blog, apparently transcribed by a fan, and I did a bit of checking just to make sure that Wallace did indeed give a commencement address at Kenyon this year. (You can't be too careful about these things on the web.) But he did indeed give the address, and I'm going to go ahead and believe this is the actual speech. It sounds just like him, and the little joke it starts with is straight out of "Infinite Jest."
If you don't read any other link associated with this post, please read this speech. It is so worthwhile and important, and 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.
Sample passage:

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.

Read the whole speech here.

Willa Cather and the MLA

Here's an interesting argument: Are English professors totally out of touch or not? A Washington Times columnist beats up on the frivolity on display at the annual Modern Language Association (MLA) conference. Then a libertarian blogger beats up on said columnist.
Here's a choice excerpt from the blogger's take-down:

So Fields [the columnist] bitches and moans about the "queering" of, among others, good old-fashioned American authors such as Willa Cather. Here's a news flash: During her college days at Univ. of Nebraska, Cather dressed as a man for a while and even took to calling herself "William"; she also had several long-time intimate relationships with women. That sort of long-suppressed biography makes Cather a particularly strong candidate for reappraisal from a queer studies perspective. As important, Cather's treatment by queer studies critics represents the best hope that she will continue to be read.

Read the columnist here; the blogger here. Thanks to Ryan F. for the links!
By the way, I I dearly loved Cather's My Antonia, and I aspire to read Death Comes for the Archbishop.

Top 5 Plus 1 Unread Books on my Shelf

Here are the Top 5 books (plus 1) that I currently own and really, really, really want to read this year. (I have not read them yet.) A holiday book sale in December beefed up this list nicely.

• Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (2005). The author of "The Remains of the Day" takes us into a creepy boarding school where the students live to serve a privileged upper-class.
• Harbor by Lorraine Adams (2004). Fiction by a former Washington Post reporter; this debut novel tells the story of Arab immigrants in the U.S. and their response to Islamic extremism.
• The Ha-Ha by Dave King (2005). A mute veteran becomes the guardian of a young boy. King has been praised for his beautiful writing written from the perspective of a narrator who does not speak.
• The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon (2000). Comic books, Harry Houdini and the Holocaust combine in a quasi-epic novel by the author of Wonder Boys and The Mysteries of Pittsburgh.
• Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (2000). A literary novel of gender issues, personified by our first person narrator, a transsexual. I don't know much more and don't want to know because I've heard so many good things about this book.
  

Plus One:
(I've labeled this book "plus one" to keep my Top 5 motif going, and because the above books are novels and this is nonfiction.)
The Anarchist in the Library by Siva Vaidhyanathan. Isn't that the best title? In the author's own words:

The anarchist is a specter. It's a symbol of an imagined threat. There are powerful forces trying to close up our information worlds so they can control its flows and charge admission. To accomplish their goals, they raise fears about "anarchists in libraries," uncontrollable, dangerous forces threatening us from within. The library is a metaphor for our information ecosystems. I argue we should be as careful with our information ecosystems as we should be with our real ecosystems. Small changes can have huge effects.

Good reading, eh? This list also might be a sign that I should stop buying more books. Yes, I have a mild addiction to buying books -- worse than some but not as bad as others (hello Gerry!). Well, this list should take me through at least June, I'm thinking. And I've already started "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay."

Elements of Style -- Illustrated!!!

I already own a copy of The Elements of Style by the immortal authors William Strunk and E.B. White. But I couldn't resist the new edition, The Elements of Style (illustrated). Artist Maira Kalman has added fabulous color drawings to the famous work on grammar, mechanics and style. "Somebody else's umbrella" illustrates how to properly form possessives. A red-haired boy in his PJs demonstrates dashes: "His first thought on getting out of bed -- if he had any thought at all -- was to get back in again." You can see some of the illustrations on Kalman's web site; check them out here.

Honorable Mentions of 2005

Here are three books I read this year that were really excellent, not quite Top Five, but definitely my honorable mentions for 2005

• Indecision by Benjamin Kunkel (2005). Calling this book a "coming of age" novel is literally accurate, but it doesn't quite convey the eccentric delights of narrator Dwight Wilmerding, slacker and searcher in contemporary Manhattan. Dwight is looking for meaning, but his funny voice and social conscience make stand out. I read another short story by Kunkel in the literary magazine n +1 (Issue 3, it does not appear to be online), and was very impressed with that too.
• Too Late to Die Young by Harriet McBryde Johnson (2005). I can identify with Ms. Johnson as a smart woman and a Southerner, and then she takes me a little farther down the narrative road with her, and I can imagine what life is like as a disability rights activist who uses a wheelchair. Her memoir is funny and sharp, and it takes apart of lot stereotypes and preconceptions about ability and disability.
• How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie (1936). I read this for a library science class this year and immediately put it to work on my friends and family. It promotes the fiendish idea of getting people to do what you want by being really polite and nice to them, and by making them feel good about themselves (insert evil cackling laughter here).

Spoonreader's Top 5 Books of 2005

In the wonderful novel High Fidelity, the narrator Rob Fleming compulsively compiles Top 5 lists of everything from his favorite pop songs to his worst break-ups. In tribute to that book, I will be unveiling several Top 5 lists between now and the end of the year. My Top 5 lists, of course, will deal with books, read and unread.

Here are the Top 5 books I read this year. Not all of them were published in 2005, but I read 'em all this year, so here we go. They are in ranked in order.

• No. 5: Pretty Birds, by Scott Simon (2005). Irena and her family live in cosmopolitan, multicultural Sarajevo when it comes under siege during the Yugoslav war of the 1990s. The family, along with their talking African Grey parrot Pretty Bird, survive without electricity or water in a city transformed by sniper fire and violence. By turns tragic, funny and realistic, this important novel captures the atrocity of warfare unleashed on the modern city. Its author is National Public Radio host Scott Simon, who based the novel on his reporting and direct observations from war-torn Sarajevo.
• No. 4: A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories, by Flannery O'Connor (1955). Through her biting, incisive portraits of Southern mores and manners, O'Connor gets at the very essence of life: the loneliness of physical existence, the fragility of genuine emotional connection and the transcendent hope that there is a world beyond the mere physical senses. My favorite story was "Good Country People," in which an angry, educated spinster unexpectedly meets her match in a traveling Bible salesman. O'Connor truly deserves the title "master of the short story."
• No. 3: The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage, by Paul Elie (2003). This book is about the art of literature and life. It's also about poverty, about peace activism, about the 1960s, about the Catholic church in the 20th century, and about the elusive nature of moral authority. It's also a beautifully written biography of four Catholic writers who were contemporaries: Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Flannery O'Connor (see above) and Walker Percy.
• No. 2: Break Blow Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-three of the World's Best Poems (2005). Feminist outlier Camille Paglia takes a break from the culture wars to make an analytical, insightful tour of the world's best poetry. She tackles the likes of Shakespeare, John Donne, William Blake, Emily Dickinson, and William Butler Yeats as well as a few newbies like comedian Wanda Coleman and folk singer Joni Mitchell. It's a fun English lit class with its feet on the ground and its mind on the sublime.
  
• No. 1: Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson (2004). I wrote about this book -- a novel in the form of a letter written by a country pastor to his young son -- just recently, so I won't add much now. (You can read my previous post here.) Aside from being beautifully written, it also includes an important story of spiritual and social justice.
  

On the ephemerality of rankings

I picked up a copy of Kazuo Ichiguro's novel, Never Let Me Go at a charity book sale this week. You'll remember (from my previous posting) that Time magazine put this book on its best 100 novels since 1923 list, even though the book came out just this year. Personally, I think it takes awhile to draw a true conclusion on the merits of any particular novel, and a book should be out for at least a year before I would include it on my top 100 novels list.
Meanwhile, The New York Times doesn't think "Never Let Me Go" is good enough to make its 10 best books of 2005 list (though they did grant the novel a place on their list of 100 notable books of this year).
I bring this up just to emphasize the point that I think "best of" lists are really interesting conversation starters, but not the end-all and be-all of good taste.
I will let you know what I think of "Never Let Me Go," probably sometime in '06.
Finally, I'm contemplating my own best of list for 2005, but it will be best books I personally read in 2005. I'm not fast enough to keep up with all the interesting books published in a given year! More on this topic later.

2005 Best Books list, part I

It's that wonderful time of year again, when magazines and newspapers start publishing their best of the year lists.
The New York Times published their Top 10 list today, with five places for fiction and five places for non-fiction. The list includes links to the reviews and, in some cases, the first chapter. Yeah!
The whole list is here.
You'll also find links on this page to the NYT's 100 notable books of the year and links to previous years' lists.

There is a Balm in Gilead

When I read the reviews of Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson, I remember thinking to myself, That sounds boring. The books is a letter written by a preacher anticipating his own death. He's writing about his life to his young son. I just thought that sounded sentimental and hokey. Fortunately for me, a friend recommended Gilead as something she thought I personally would really like. Oh, the power of the personal recommendation! I'm so glad she did, because this book is marvelous. Its writing style is plain and clean and beautiful, like an Iowa sunset. (The book is set in Gilead, Iowa.) And there's a lot of gentle humor and some interesting Civil War history. Robinson also wrote Housekeeping, a completely different novel that is also well-loved by many people. I read that book in college (the class was a literature class called "Work and Gender") but I barely remember it. I will have to go back and read it again.

The Spirituality of Writing

It took me a year to read The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage, by Paul Elie. It is a sizable biography of four writers: Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy. They were Catholic and writing at the same time (primarily the 1950s and '60s) and aware of each other's work.
This book is beautifully written, but it's also dense. I would pick it up, read a little, put it down and then pick it back up again. I really got going after I started reading Flannery O'Connor's short story collection, A Good Man is Hard to Find. (Read the excellent short story the books is named after here.)
Elie's compelling theme is that these writers were all on spiritual pilgrimage via their writing. The writers themselves are fascinating:

• Dorothy Day: pacifist, journalist, war protester, founder of The Catholic Worker movement.
• Thomas Merton: A Trappist monk and writer who explored Buddhism and other forms of Eastern spirituality.
• Flannery O'Connor: the master of the short story, a wary member of New York literary society who was exiled by debilitating illness to her Georgia farm.
• Walker Percy: a Louisiana gentleman with a strong interest in medicine and science.

Most of the reviews of this book say it is hard to categorize because it is rich and complicated, and I completely agree. All these writers were vibrant contrarians, and Elie admires and accentuates their differences. At the same time, he sees them all as master communicators and even concilitators. In an interesting interview, Elie says he respects them because they had vibrant, complex messages to convey through their writing.

One of the main traits I champion in the people in my book is their ability to write about matters of faith in terms the nonbeliever can appreciate. The ability of Merton or Dorothy Day to maintain a dialogue with the modern world--as Vatican II urged Catholics to do--is just profound. They stayed in touch with the average middle-class person who thinks religion is bosh.
Those who undertook the later protests against the Vietnam War don't seem interested in dialogue. They don't seem to have met those who supported the war with mutual respect. Dialogue wasn't really attempted. That was Merton's objection to them. He said nobody's mind was changed through those symbolic actions.

Read the whole interview here.

Anne Rice & Jesus Christ

I love Anne Rice's vampire and witch novels, and I love her newest novel about Jesus Christ.
Isn't that a funny sentence?

On Reading: Good news/bad news

I read two articles this week that really resonated with me about reading.

First the bad news. Why does the concept of the general reader seem to be in decline? This article hypothesizes that students are forced to specialize their education for a job, so much so that reading for general knowledge has disappeared. Check out the opening anecdote:

Over dinner a few weeks ago, the novelist Lawrence Naumoff told a troubling story. He asked students in his introduction to creative writing course at UNC-Chapel Hill if they had read Jack Kerouac. Nobody raised a hand. Then he asked if anyone had ever heard of Jack Kerouac. More blank expressions.
Naumoff began describing the legend of the literary wild man. One student offered that he had a teacher who was just as crazy. Naumoff asked the professor's name. The student said he didn't know. Naumoff then asked this oblivious scholar, "Do you know my name?"
After a long pause, the young man replied, "No."
"I guess I've always known that many students are just taking my course to get a requirement out of the way," Naumoff said. "But it was disheartening to see that some couldn't even go to the trouble of finding out the name of the person teaching the course."

Read the whole article here.

Now for the good news. A woman in New Mexico who loves to read has purchased the entire Penguin Classic collection. That's 1,082 books for roughly 8000 bucks.

Ms. Gursky's collection arrived in mid-September packed in 25 boxes, shrink-wrapped on a pallet and weighing nearly 700 pounds. Since then, Ms. Gursky has spent countless hours unpacking, shelving, categorizing, alphabetizing and rearranging the books. Oh, yes - and reading; she said she had completed more than 30 of the books in the last eight weeks. Even at that rather remarkable pace, it would take her about six years to make her way through the entire collection.

Read all about it here.

Yann Martel's next novel

Canada's Globe and Mail reports that "Life of Pi" author Yann Martel is working on a new novel about the Holocaust. He recently read excerpts from the unfinished novel in a cafe in Jerusalem.
Their story says Martel knows he it is a difficult subject:

"I'm sure people will say that it trivializes the Holocaust," he said, adding that the other danger in discussing the Holocaust "is universalizing it in way that removes its Jewishness."
But he believes the end is worth the risk.
"The Holocaust has to become part of the rough and tumble of everyday discourse -- as much as that might hurt the survivors," he said, adding quickly,"And I don't mean that as disrespect to them. But you have to realize that those discussing it are trying to find a way to understand it better so that it won't happen again."

Read the whole story here while it's still available on the open Web.

Meanwhile, I recently picked up a copy of "The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios," Martel's short story collection. I've read the first story of the collection. It was very different from "Life of Pi," but has the same compassionate voice.
There's a beautiful passage where he talks about discovering his desire to write and what motivated his storytelling:

My developing sense was that the foundation of a story is an emotional foundation. If a story does not work emotionally, it does not work at all. The emotion in question is not the point; be it love, envy or apathy, so long as it is conveyed in a convincing manner, then the story will come alive. But the story must also stimulate the mind if it does not want to fade from memory. Intellect rooted in emotion, emotion structured by intellect -- in other words a good idea that moves -- that was my lofty aim. When such an emotive idea came to me, when the spark of inspiration lit up my mind like a bonfire, the charge was like nothing I'd ever felt.

Read an excerpt here.

Scott Turow's new novel

Scott Turow has a new novel out, it's called "Ordinary Heroes." The Los Angeles Times had a positive review of it. It's about a reporter who uncovers a mystery about his late father's actions during World War II.
Here's an excerpt from the review talking about Turow's novels:

It's been easy to classify — as we have a great tendency to do —these novels as legal thrillers, part of the avalanche that arrived in the time of John Grisham because the tales were spun in and around the law.

It is clear now that's a mistake and always has been. What Turow wrestles with is of a deeper and more complex nature. The correct category for Turow is rather that of a major American novelist rising from the tradition of the Midwest,such as Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis and James T. Farrell.

Read the whole review here while it's still available on the open Web.

Reading Ulysses blog

My friend Jill took me up on my carping about never having read Ulysses, by James Joyce. The first meeting of our Ulysses book group is set for Saturday. I've started a new blog for the effort, here's the link.

A Short Story for Halloween

I like to find cool, spooky things to read at Halloween -- stories more in the vein of folklore than horror. Last year, I checked out Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, which I had mixed opinions on. (Read that post here.) This year, I think I've found something much better.
I got to thinking about the role of the Devil in literature: Old Scratch, Beelzebub, the Dark Man, the Stranger. Probably the Devil's first appearance in literature is Biblical: The temptation in the garden in the book of Genesis, but even more prominently in the Book of Job -- the devil is the instigator for the troubles that beset kindly Job. Then there's the devil as anti-hero in John Milton's Paradise Lost. More recently, there Stephen King's The Stand -- the devil comes to earth after a killer flu wipes out most of the world's population. Even the country music song "The Devil Went Down to Georgia" has its lyrical moments:

The devil went down to Georgia
He was looking for a soul to steal
He was in a bind 'cause he was way behind
And he was willing to make a deal

But I digress! (Read all the lyrics here.)
This year, spoonreader presents, for your Halloween reading pleasure, the short story "The Devil and Daniel Webster," by Stephen Vincent Benet. Webster was an actual historical figure, a noted lawyer and orator, and a proud unionist (though he died before the Civil War started). In this story, the farmer Jabez Stone makes a deal with the devil in exchange for bountiful crops and worldly gain. When it's time to pay up, Stone loses his nerve, and turns to his friend Webster to save him from the bad deal he's made. In this scene, the Devil has returned and informed Webster that he intends to collect on the soul of Mr. Stone. Webster responds to the contrary:

Dan'l Webster's brow looked dark as a thundercloud. "Pressed or not, you shall not have this man!" he thundered. "Mr. Stone is an American citizen, and no American citizen may be forced into the service of a foreign prince. We fought England for that in '12 and we'll fight all hell for it again!"
"Foreign?" said the stranger. "And who calls me a foreigner?"
"Well, I never yet heard of the dev -- of your claiming American citizenship," said Dan'l Webster with surprise.
"And who with better right?" said the stranger, with one of his terrible smiles. "When the first wrong was done to the first Indian, I was there. When the first slaver put out for the Congo, I stood on her deck. Am I not in your books and stories and beliefs, from the first settlements on? Am I not spoken of, still, in every church in New England? 'Tis true the North claims me for a Southerner, and the South for a Northerner, but I am neither. I am merely an honest American like yourself - and of the best descent - for, to tell the truth, Mr. Webster,though I don't like to boast of it, my name is older in this country than yours."
"Aha!" said Dan'l Webster, with the veins standing out in his forehead. "Then I stand on the Constitution! I demand a trial for my client!"

And thus Daniel Webster goes to court against the Devil. Read the whole of "The Devil and Daniel Webster" here -- The University of Texas Tarlton Law Library has posted a fine copy with illustrations at their web site.

Zadie Smith on David Foster Wallace

British author Zadie Smith is very high on my must-read list. She's been in the media quite a bit lately with the release of her new book, "On Beauty." (Listen to radio interviews with her here and here.) I love what she has to say about literature and writing. Last month, she was in O, the Oprah magazine, where she wrote about what literature means to her and picked out her favorite books. (This is a regular feature in O -- just about every month a celebrity picks out their favorite books and why. It's usually fascinating.)
So one of Smith's favorite books was David Foster Wallace's "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men." Smith writes:

Wallace is not for everyone, but he is for me. My blind spot in my own work is "the evil that men do." I think I know a thing or two about the way people love, but I don't know anything about hatred, psychosis, cruelty. Or maybe I don't have the guts to admit that I do. Wallace writes brilliantly about hideous men and hideous women and the hideous culture that produces them.

Read the rest of her take on Wallace here and read about her philosophy of literature here.
Her take on that book is interesting because I've been feeling a bit guilty about my recent post on "Brief Interviews" where I wrote "the characters were horrible, and I felt like Wallace was mocking them." (Read the full post here. ) I'll be the first to admit that might be a misreading the stories. Not all writing should be about love, happiness, etc. As readers, we have to grapple with the ugly, the cruel and the unjust without insisting on black-and-white moral certitude or sentimental mawkishness. Maybe I should go back and re-read "Brief Interviews." It's certainly rich enough to merit a second read and a re-thinking.
On the other hand, if I do that, when will I ever get to Wallace's "Oblivion"? I need more time to read!

Time's Top 100 Novels

Time magazine has published a list of the best English-language novels since 1923, the year Time published its first issue. I love lists, they're fun conversation-starters -- the nay-sayers who claim lists are too reductive need to lighten up.
Time's list has interesting caveats. Because it starts in 1923, that disqualifies perennial favorite Ulysses, written by James Joyce in 1922. It only includes novels (knocking out of contention my beloved Spoon River Anthology, a volume of poetry). And it includes works written in English from all over the world, not just American novels.
Here's my quick riff on the list:

• Books I absolutely agree with: The Catcher in the Rye, A Clockwork Orange, The Grapes of Wrath, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Infinite Jest, Slaughterhouse-Five, The Sun Also Rises, To Kill a Mockingbird, Watchmen.
• Books I haven't read but really want to: All the King's Men, Death Comes for the Archbishop, At Swim-Two-Birds, Lolita, The Moviegoer, The Sound and the Fury, White Teeth
• A book that shouldn't be on the list: Possession by A.S. Byatt -- I just don't think it's that good.
• A book that seems too recently published to have made the list: Never Let Me Down by Kazuo Ishiguro -- Didn't that just come out in 2005???
• Books on the list that I have never heard of, not even in passing, not even heard of their authors: Appointment in Samarra, The Assistant, Call It Sleep, A Dance to the Music of Time, Loving, The Man who Loved Children, The Recognitions, Red Harvest, Revolutionary Road, Snow Crash, The Sportswriter. Boy do I feel ignorant now.

Lest you think the list was created after exhaustive study and massive polling, you should know that apparently Time's two book critics merely put together their lists of favorite books and then hashed out small areas of disagreement. Not that I'm criticizing that -- the great novels are art, and there are limitations to how objectively you can quantify them.
Read the whole list here. (And thanks to my friend Ryan F. for telling me about it!)

Baseball fever

I don't get much reading done in October because I'm busy watching post-season baseball. It means late night games and mornings spent devouring the sports section. To add to the excitement, our local team the Tampa Bay Devil Rays have new owners and hopes are hesitantly but joyfully higher for the 2006 season. (Read all about it here.)
Meanwhile, my spouse and I are deciding on a baseball book to read together when Spring Training starts.
Here are some of the books in contention:

• Three Nights in August, by Buzz Bissinger. A relatively new book. Bissinger had total access to St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony LaRussa (a Tampa native, by the way). Read an excerpt herehere.
• Ball 4, by Jim Bouton. A library colleague heartily recommends this one; it's one of baseball's first real insider's accounts. Bouton wrote a memoir about trying to resecitate his career with the elusive knuckleball pitch during the '69 season.
• The Curious Case of Sidd Finch, by George Plimpton. It started as an April Fool's joke: Sports Illustrated "reports" on a Zen mystic with 100 mph+ pitch hiding out in the Mets' Spring Training camp in St. Petersburg, Fla. (right across the bay from Tampa). The story was a prank, but it got so much attention it was later expanded into a book. I love the original article's lead (how a newspaper story starts). Here it is:

The secret cannot be kept much longer. Questions are being asked, and sooner rather than later the New York Mets management will have to produce a statement.

Read the original magazine story here.

A note on copyright and spoonreader

Unlike most people, I find copyright fascinating. It's as old as our country and mentioned in the U.S. Constitution (Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8) as one of the rights of Congress: To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
For a library science class, I wrote a paper on the problem of orphan works -- what do you do when you want to preserve or copy something, but cannot locate the copyright holder to seek permission or compensate them? It's a knotty problem, hardly promoting progress. Read more about the orphan works problem here and here.
I quote from a lot of books on this blog. I believe the quotations I use are permissible as a fair use under copyright law -- I'm commenting on the work, and I don't believe my quoting of the works undermines the commercial prospects of the books about which I write. In fact, just the opposite; I hope people will be inspired by my blog to purchase them or borrow them from a library. (Read more about copyright and fair use here.)
I also make a good faith effort not to link to works that I suspect have been posted to the Internet without permission from the copyright holder.
Copyright is a funny thing: If there's not enough, people don't have much incentive to create. Too much, though, and it stifles creativity by preventing people from building on the works of others. (This is a particular problem for popular music like hip-hop and techno.) My favorite book on this topic is Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity, by Siva Vaidhyanathan. Nancy Kranich, former president of the American Library Association, says of his book (and I agree):

Siva Vaidhyanathan has done a big favor for the academic and library communities. In this book, he has spelled out in clear, understandable language what's at stake in the battles over the nation's intellectual property. The issues brought forward are critical to the future of scholarship and creativity. Librarians and academics are wise to purchase this book and add it to their 'must read' lists.

If you have any questions or concerns about copyright and this blog, feel free to contact me: spoonreader [at] gmail [dot] com.

What I'm Reading Now,

I prefer to read one book at a time. But that's the ideal -- the reality is that often I am reading several books at once. Usually this is because I have to read a certain book for book group or some other obligation, or because a book is boring me at that moment but I may be willing to come back to it later. So I'm going to start posting from time to time a list of the books I'm reading and the books I want to read next.
What I'm reading now:

• Shock Wave by James O. Born. A fast-paced Florida crime novel. Born will appear at the St. Petersburg Times Festival of Reading on Oct. 29.
• Couples by John Updike. This books reeks of 1960s overpriviledged suburban malaise -- a major theme is adultery as self-actualizing quest. The Amazon reviews are diverse and fascinating -- read 'em here. I don't like the characters, but it's hard not to wonder what these awful people will do next. A few friends who are older than I am say that was just the nature of the era. The philandering couples in this book would be about 75 today.
  
• The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage by Paul Elie. This is a fairly dense biography of four American Catholic authors writing at about the same time: Dorothy Day, Flannery O'Connor, Thomas Merton and Walker Percy. Elie's style is languid and thematic, well-suited for his exploration of the writers' ideas and intellectual milieu.

What I want to read next:

• "A Good Man is Hard to Find," by Flannery O'Connor. I picked this short story collection for my book group because I knew I might not read it otherwise, and it would probably be really good.
• The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, by Michael Chabon. This novel won the Pulitzer a few years back. Subject matter includes the Holocaust, comic books and Harry Houdini. I have high hopes for this one.
• "Oblivion" by David Foster Wallace. I love David Foster Wallace on a very visceral, non-logical level. Having said that, I found his short story collection "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men" to be very sad -- the characters were horrible, and I felt like Wallace was mocking them. I don't think is really typical of him -- his book Infinite Jest is one of the kindest novels I can this of. So I have some trepidation about reading his most recent work, Oblivion. You can find a couple of (mixed) reviews of Oblivion here, here, and here.

Kunkel's Indecision

I finished an endearing first novel today, Indecision, by Benjamin Kunkel. I liked it very much. His hero, Dwight Wilmerding, is an overeducated, underemployed twenty-ish Manhattanite trying to figure out what to do with his life. The answer involves psychoanalysis from his sister, a trip to Ecuador and democratic socialism.
I love Dwight's voice -- it's complicated, ironic, sincere and funny. Sample passage:

The train pulled out of another quiet white-painted town and recovered that slack regular ratcheting sound of all trains. I was on my way to see dad, to play some golf, to sip some scotch, and then in the end, or somewhere in the middle, at an opportune moment, before it slipped past, or maybe, on the other hand, right away, the minute I saw him, first things being first, and just in order to get it over with -- anyway I was on my way to ask dad for some money. I had every intention of telling him I had lost my job, and in the context of my resulting penuriousness I would request a loan. Or ask him to take me in for a while once I got back from Ecuador. Or both things, actually. That would make the most sense from an economic point of view, at least if I could deal with the psychic cost of living with him for the first time in fourteen years, and without mom and Alice around to parry him and distribute throughout the household their various counterpointing moods. It would be interesting to see what I decided to do, always assuming I did decide, which I shouldn't necessarily do.

Kunkel reminds me somewhat of David Foster Wallace, or at least informed by some of the themes that Wallace tries to deal with in his writing -- the self-consciousness of art, the problem of nihilistic irony, and the possibility of sincere emotional connection between author and reader. For more on this topic, or if you have a passion for contemporary fiction, I strongly recommend Wallace's essay, "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction," from his collection of essays and journalism, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again.
But more than these emotive/aesthetic types of questions, "Indecision" is very much concerned with the inequalities of global capitalism and the appropriate response to the relative abundance of upper-class America. I'm very much looking forward to more books by Benjamin Kunkel.

The End

A rainy Sunday afternoon makes me think of the inevitable: death. Here's Shakespeare's Hamlet on the topic. (The lyricism of the passage is quite comforting.)

If it be now,
'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be
now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the
readiness is all: since no man has aught of what he
leaves, what is't to leave betimes?

The full text of Hamlet is online; read it here. Shakespeare's complete works are here.

The "sponsored" archive

Advertising for the new film Capote has created an interesting nexus between journalism, archiving and literature. The marketing of the movie includes a "sponsored archive" at the newspapers web site. The url is -- note the "ads" -- http://www.nytimes.com/ads/capote/ .
The web page includes articles from The New York Times about Truman Capote, his star-studded private life, his great "nonfiction novel" In Cold Blood, and even his obituary. It has a timeline, too, with lots of photos. All in all, it's a beautifully done archive showcasing a great writer. And of course, there are prominent links to the official movie site.
A note at the top reads "The reprinting of these articles was paid for by Sony Pictures Classics. The Times was not involved in the selection of these articles or the production of this archive." If there was Times article saying "In Cold Blood" is a boring waste of time, I'll assume we won't see it here. I'll also assume that such a hypothetical article does not exist -- the book is a true classic.
Does it bother me that the Times is letting its content be used this way? Nope. The purists may balk, but the newspaper holds the rights to its own work. It is free to accept or reject such advertising solely at its discretion. On the positive side, the archive opens up a lot of free content for anyone to read.
My favorite bit is from Conrad Knickerbocker's review of "In Cold Blood," published Jan. 16, 1966. Knickerbocker begins by referencing an interview with Capote printed in the same day's paper:

As (Capote) says in his interview with George Plimpton, he wrote "In Cold Blood" without mechanical aids -- tape recorder or shorthand book. He memorized the event and its dialogues so thoroughly, and so totally committed a large piece of his life to it, that he was able to write it as a novel. Yet it is difficult to imagine such a work appearing at a time other than the electronic age. The sound of the book creates the illusion of tape. Its taut cross-cutting is cinematic. Tape and film, documentaries, instant news, have sensitized us to the glare of surfaces and close-ups. He gratifies our electronically induced appetite for massive quantities of detail, but at the same time, like an ironic magician, he shows that appearances are nothing.

Merry Michaelmas!

Today is day all Jane Austen fans should mark -- it's Michaelmas!
Michaelmas, the feast day of St. Michael, is a holiday regularly remarked upon in Austen novels. It's pronounced "Mickle-mus" -- kinda rhymes with "nickel bus" -- to sound like "Christmas".
There's a wonderful full-text copy of "Pride and Prejudice" on the web. Find it here.
Here are the references to Michaelmas in the novel.

Mrs. Bennet to Mr. Bennet, referring to the eligible bachelor Mr. Bingley.

``Why, my dear, you must know, Mrs. Long says that Netherfield is taken by a young man of large fortune from the north of England; that he came down on Monday in a chaise and four to see the place, and was so much delighted with it that he agreed with Mr. Morris immediately; that he is to take possession before Michaelmas, and some of his servants are to be in the house by the end of next week.''

and, much later, Mrs. Bennet to Mr. Bingley.

``I began to be afraid you would never come back again. People did say you meant to quit the place entirely at Michaelmas; but, however, I hope it is not true. A great many changes have happened in the neighbourhood, since you went away. Miss Lucas is married and settled. And one of my own daughters. I suppose you have heard of it; indeed, you must have seen it in the papers. It was in the Times and the Courier, I know; though it was not put in as it ought to be. It was only said, "Lately, George Wickham, Esq. to Miss Lydia Bennet," without there being a syllable said of her father, or the place where she lived, or any thing. It was my brother Gardiner's drawing up too, and I wonder how he came to make such an awkward business of it. Did you see it?''

Happy J. Alfred Prufrock Day!

Why pick the poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" to base a mock holiday around? The short answer is that my friends and I loved this poem in high school, and it's a locus around which we reminesce about our emotionally intense early exposure to literature. But Prufrock has a number of virtues that I think anyone could appreciate.
On first reading, Prufrock sounds good. It's that simple: its words please the ear. Its hip-hop cadences promise comradery ("Let us go then, you and I"), adventure ("through certain half-deserted streets,/ The muttering retreats/ Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels") and yet-to-be-revealed secrets ("Oh, do not ask, 'What is it?'"). There's the chanted "decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse", the lament "I grow old ... I grow old ... I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled" and the great question, a balanced scale of alliteration and assonance: "Do I dare to eat a peach?"
The poem's themes allude to unease and isolation, disappointing romance, and the damnable, inescapable interiority of the mind ("That is not it at all. That is not what I meant, at all.") Yes, alientated teenagers like this sort of thing (I did), but as adults we learn the disturbing, gnawing truth behind the cool styling: We die alone.
Most critics will say that Eliot's greatest poem is "The Waste Land," and I agree with that. But I think Prufrock remains a great work in its own right. The Waste Land is vast; Prufrock is personal. The Waste Land is bankrupt society, Prufrock is the depressed iritability of an evening alone.
Over the past few weeks I've been thinking a lot about sadness: the hurricanes, a devastated New Orleans, the lingering horror of 9-11, the poisoned partisanship of our politics, and a far-off war. Then I've thought about Eliot's poetry and felt strangely comforted.
Today is the 117th anniversary of Eliot's birth. This is my salute.

Freedom to Read

Banned Books Week, promoted by the American Library Association, begins this week. It's worth taking time to think about the price of intellectual freedom. I have to confess that I am the sort of person who, when hearing of a book that someone wants banned, will say to myself, "Hmm, I want to read that and see what it's all about."
Here are the top 10 most challenged books of 2004, according to the ALA.

• "The Chocolate War" for sexual content, offensive language, religious viewpoint, being unsuited to age group and violence

• "Fallen Angels" by Walter Dean Myers, for racism, offensive language and violence

• "Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture" by Michael A. Bellesiles, for inaccuracy and political viewpoint

• Captain Underpants series by Dav Pilkey, for offensive language and modeling bad behavior

• "The Perks of Being a Wallflower" by Stephen Chbosky, for homosexuality, sexual content and offensive language

• "What My Mother Doesn't Know" by Sonya Sones, for sexual content and offensive language

• "In the Night Kitchen" by Maurice Sendak, for nudity and offensive language

• "King & King" by Linda de Haan and Stern Nijland, for homosexuality

• "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" by Maya Angelou, for racism, homosexuality, sexual content, offensive language and unsuited to age group

• "Of Mice and Men" by John Steinbeck, for racism, offensive language and violence

Read more about Banned Books Week here.

Eliot reads Prufrock

Listen to a recording of T.S. Eliot reading "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" via this link.
It is very cool.
I love the way he says the long I in "time."
It works for me only when I click on Download: MP3.
For some reason, when I click on Stream: Real Time, I keep getting an error message.
I particularly invite you to comment on this recording.

Who is T.S. Eliot?

I've searched for short but rigorous biographies of Eliot on the web.
The most extensive one is here, from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Sample passage:

In a period less engaged with politics and ideology than the 1980s and early 1990s, the lasting strengths of his poetic technique will likely reassert themselves. Already the strong affinities of Eliot's postsymbolist style with currently more influential poets like Wallace Stevens (Eliot's contemporary at Harvard and a fellow student of Santayana) have been reassessed, as has the tough philosophical skepticism of his prose. A master of poetic syntax, a poet who shuddered to repeat himself, a dramatist of the terrors of the inner life (and of the evasions of conscience), Eliot remains one of the twentieth century's major poets.

For a much shorter bio, check out Who2.com via this link. Who2 calls Eliot's The Waste Land "the most famous English poem of the 20th century."

Help with a Tough Read

Meghan O'Rourke has a charming article about reading William Faulkner with Oprah's Book Club. It sounds like a stimulating and useful experience. I'm kicking myself for not joining in on this one. (I read John Steinbeck's East of Eden with Oprah's Book Club and was quite pleased.)
O'Rourke writes:

It looked like one of the oddest pairings around, and yet Oprah-meets-Faulkner turned out, in a curious way, to be an inspired match. It's easy to forget just how radical a writer Faulkner still is, because he's been so thoroughly absorbed into the canon: a process by which, as one critic once put it, "the idiosyncratic is distorted into the normative." Faulkner is anything but normative. Figuring out what is going on in a book like The Sound and the Fury is so hard—and demands such a leap of faith—that every reader struggles in similar ways.

Read the whole story here.

Anticipating Prufrock

Every year, a few friends and I quietly celebrate J. Alfred Prufrock Day. It is Sept. 26, which is the birthday of T.S. Eliot. Eliot wrote "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"; it was published in 1917.
I'll be blogging about Eliot and the Love Song this week in anticipation of the great day. I will also explain why I celebrate J. Alfred Prufrock, and what it is about the poem that so appeals.
To kick things off, why not read the poem via the Bartelby web site? (Bartelby.com is a great source for full-text copies of great literature.)
The poem is here: http://www.bartleby.com/198/1.html
It begins:

LET us go then, you and I, ...

High Fidelity

I recently read Nick Hornby's new novel "A Long Way Down." It's sarcastic, generous and insightful, much like his famous debut High Fidelity. If you haven't read "High Fidelity," I would start with that first.
In "High Fidelity," Rob, a record shop owner, is breaking up with his girlfriend. The book is essentially his thoughts on pop music, girls, sex, love and growing older. It's one of those books that didn't seem all that remarkable to me when I first read it, but it has aged so well that about once a year I read it again. (See other books I have re-read here.)
A favorite passage:

A while back, when Dick and Barry and I agreed that what really matters is what you like, not what you are like, Barry proposed the idea of a questionnaire for prospective partners, a two- or three-page multiple-choice document that covered all the music/film/TV/book bases. It was intended a) to dispense with awkward conversation, and b) to prevent a chap from leaping into bed with someone who might, at a later date, turn out to have every Julio Iglesias record ever made. It amused us at the time, although Barry, being Barry, went one stage further: he compiled the questionnaire and presented it to some poor woman he was interested in, and she hit him with it. But there was an important and essential truth contained in the idea, and the truth was that these things matter, and it'’s no good pretending that any relationship has a future if your record collections disagree violently, or if your favorite films wouldn'’t even speak to each other if they met at a party.

Interestingly, I disagree with the gist of that passage, and in the book Rob learns not to be such a culture snob. I still think it's an amusing sentiment with a little bit of truth in it.

Dry, a recovery memoir

I feel like I've been wading around in the muck with my reading the past few weeks. I've read all the news reports I can about Katrina -- very depressing. I've also been slogging through parts of Disneywar (previous posts here and here) and the novel "Couples" by John Updike. (I'll post more about Updike soon.)
Then last night, most fortuitously, I received in the mail from my friend Lanore W. a copy of Dry, a memoir, by Augusten Burroughs. I've read about half of it -- it's about his attempt to recover from alcoholism. This book, like his first memoir, Running with Scissors, is so compulsively readable I have a hard time putting it down. It's dark, but funny. His subject matter, in both books, is his own troubled life. He writes about child abuse, alcoholism, and depressingly anonymous sexual encounters. Yet I'm of the opinion that his writing is suffused with an underlying moral clarity that affirms the value and uniqueness of every living person.
Having given this ringing endorsement of Burroughs, I have to add that he is not for everyone. Many will find his writing grotesque and disturbing -- but not me! I expect to finish Dry in the next day or two.

Reading about the storm

To be honest, I've spent most of the past week reading every scrap of coverage I can find about Hurricane Katrina. I was born and raised in rural Louisiana. Like many people who live in the state but outside the city, I love New Orleans and visited it often. Its sophistication, its debauchery, its fun, its grittiness -- New Orleans is a fascinating, cosmopolitan beacon rising out of the swamps. (I can't bring myself to write "was." It is and will be again.)
At any rate, the media coverage has been amazing. It sadly seems reporters realized the magnitude of the problem much faster than the federal government.
I could link to lots of coverage of the storm and its aftermath, but I will content myself to link to only one item: An editorial written as an open letter to the President in New Orleans' great newspaper, the Times-Picayune.
It reads, in part in part:

We're angry, Mr. President, and we'll be angry long after our beloved city and surrounding parishes have been pumped dry. Our people deserved rescuing. Many who could have been were not. That's to the government's shame. ...
Every official at the Federal Emergency Management Agency should be fired, Director Michael Brown especially. ...
We, who are from New Orleans, are no less American than those who live on the Great Plains or along the Atlantic Seaboard. We're no less important than those from the Pacific Northwest or Appalachia. Our people deserved to be rescued.

Read the whole editorial here at Nola.com or here via the Editor & Publisher web site.

There is no B-list

A friend of mine recently read I, Fatty, a novel about silent film star Fatty Arbuckle. Should I read it?, I asked. I don't know, he said, it was OK. Maybe you could put it on your B list.
Ahhh, I said, but there is no B list. The A list is full up. If it's not great, I can't spare the time for it, I said.
And that's so true. There are too many good books and too little time. In fact, I might stop reading a book I'm in the middle of: Disneywar, a nonfiction account of Michael Eisner's rise and fall as head of Walt Disney. It's not holding my interest, and I had such high hopes for it. It's too much a story of neurotic Hollywood powerbrokers maneuvering for position. That's too bad, because I usually love James B. Stewart's work. His book Blind Eye: The Terrifying Story Of A Doctor Who Got Away With Murder is excellent.