Cane River

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

The price of higher education

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

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

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

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

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

Katrina anniversary coverage: books

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

Katrina anniversary coverage: SPT

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

Katrina anniversary coverage: Times-Picayune

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

David Foster Wallace on tennis, again

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

Katrina anniversary coverage: Bush's photo

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

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

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

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

Katrina Anniversary coverage: the weekend before

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cool Headline of the Day

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

Round and Orbity? Must Be a Planet.

Id est (Mating)

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

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

Read her whole post here.

Cooking for Mr. Latte

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

Important reporting on the environment

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

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

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

Which Dostoevsky novel should I read first?

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

Hard News by Seth Mnookin

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

LibraryThing

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

Persuasion

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

Novelization

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

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

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

Microserfs

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

Friday

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

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

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

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

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

The Observations

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

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

Read the entire review here.

Happy Bloomsday!

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

Special Libraries Association in Baltimore

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

Favorite books, Men vs. Women

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

Christ Among the Partisans

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

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

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

.
Read the whole op-ed here:

Next book group pick

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

New Collection of Recorded Poetry

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

Beloved's status

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

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

He concludes:

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

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

RSS feed fixed

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

Book Group Picks

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

NYT's Best Work of the Last 25 Years

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

Harbor

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

Never Let Me Go & Metacritic

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

Does this poem suck?

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

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

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

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

So ha, ha, ha!

Who is Michiko Kakutani?

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

Rwanda

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

Books that take place in a single day

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

Spring and the color Green

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

March 10th Spoon River

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

Hortense Robbins

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

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

Mrs. Williams

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

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

Lucinda Matlock

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

Domestic memoir for the alternative set

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

Oscar books

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

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

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

Reasonable People Can Disagree

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

On hearing Ulysses

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

Lives of the Saints

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

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

On why Spoonreader.com is not taking over the Net

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

Oprah Comes Correct

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

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

Read the entire column here.

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

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

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.