Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center

The New Yorker profiles the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, one of the largest literary archives in the world and part of my dear alma mater, the University of Texas at Austin.
It's a fascinating article -- the sheer size of some of these collections of writers' papers; the business of buying collections; the ambition of the center to be the top scholarly archive in the country; and the personality of its raconteur director Thomas F. Staley (a James Joyce scholar, no less -- the center's holdings on Joyce are remarkable). Read the article online at The New Yorker web site while it's still available here.
The story, written by D.T. Max, fills me with admiration for archives and what they mean to literary history and heritage. It also makes me want to read more Don DeLillo, because of his connection Joyce and David Foster Wallace, as this excerpt shows:

One day this spring, I flew to Austin to take a look at the Don DeLillo archive. The Bronx-born writer, whose papers Staley acquired in 2004 for half a million dollars, fits into the Ransom’s collection well: for one thing, DeLillo is part of a node of expansive American fiction that goes back to Philip Roth and forward to novelists such as Jonathan Franzen, Rick Moody, and David Foster Wallace; DeLillo has corresponded with all of these writers. DeLillo counts Joyce as an influence, so he connects to the modernist node. And he has kept engaging, detailed notebooks that shed light on the intellectual foundation of his novels. Most important, he writes on a manual typewriter, producing draft after draft of his work, allowing scholars a chance to see his creative mind at work.

D.T. Max is my new favorite journalist. He also wrote a really good NYT mag piece on Happiness 101, about researchers who study true happiness.
As for the Ransom Center, it's that kind of UT effort that makes me wanna shout "Hook 'em, Horns!"

Harry Potter Read-a-thon

Here's a series of emails between me and my dear book group friend L.

L.,
I want to re-read all the Harry Potter books before No. 7 comes out in July. Do you think I should read them in order, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6? Or do you think I should read them backwards -- 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 ?

It would make sense to read them 1-6, but I was thinking I might detect more clues to the ending by reading them backwards.

What do you think?
--Angie

Angie,
I'm in the process of re-reading the last one. If you have enough time, start at the beginning. What if you burn out though and then stop reading by book 4 and then book 6 is untouched as you are in line to get the new book?

If I were intent on reading them all, I would start with 6 and then 1,2, 3, 4, 5.
--L.

L.,
I think your point about burn-out is a good one! And I hadn't thought of that before, but I think you're right.

I started Book 1 this weekend and I'm almost done. Maybe I'll do 1, 6, 2, 5, 4. Mark jokingly suggested that, but I don't think it's a bad idea!

I have a hunch that Book 2 is more important than we might think, because it has so much of Voldemort's boyhood and the diary was likely a Horcrux, etc. So I want to get that one in if I can.

What fun!
--Angie

What Writers Recommend

What do writers read? It's an interesting enough question that two summer reading news stories have recently asked that question.
In New York magazine, Benjamin Kunkel, author of the wonderful whimsical-yet-serious debut novel Indecision, recommends Mortals by Norman Rush. Mortals is a sequel to an interesting novel called Mating that my book group read last year. Both "Mating" and "Mortals" are about American intellectuals and government workers in Botswana. Kunkel's novel "Indecision" has slightly similar themes of Americans and their place in their international scene, but "Indecision" is more youthful and zany, while "Mating" was serious and a teensy bit pretentious (but kind of enjoyably so). The whole New York package on summer reading is pretty interesting and worth looking at.
Meanwhile, the NYT has a big roundup of what famous authors are reading. I was pleased to see Stephen King recommend Then We Came To The End. I loved that book, I think it deserves a wider audience.

Presumed Innocent sequel

A news report says Scott Turow is working on a sequel to Presumed Innocent, one of my favorite novels:

"I got the idea a couple of years ago when I was working on a serialized book for The New York Times," explained Turow at the Jacob Javits Convention Center. "I had this image of a man sitting on a bed, near the body of a dead woman. And then I realized, 'Wait a minute, that guy on the bed is Rusty Sabich!' And that's how I began the new book." ...

"I've gotten a lot of correspondence saying that `Presumed Innocent' was an epochal event in the reader's life," Turow said, adding that the new novel, currently untitled, would probably not come out before the summer of 2009.

Read the whole news report here.

I would quibble that Burden of Proof was a sequel to "Presumed Innocent." "Burden" is about Sandy Stern, Rusty Sabich's defense attorney, who was so memorably portrayed by Raul Julia in the movie of the novel. I loved that one two. Every couple of years I re-read those novels, just for fun.

Cheever's "The Swimmer"

My spouse wrote a news story about swimming the city's public pools in a single day. (Read it here.) He mentions the short story "The Swimmer," by John Cheever in the beginning. I'd never heard of this short story before the spouse started talking about it, but it's terrific. Neddy Merrill is at a friend's house when he decides to swim home, going from pool to pool in his affluent neighbors' backyards. As he swims he realizes that something isn't right, that his world is changing as he goes along.
The story isn't online, but there's an interesting tribute to it written by Michael Chabon (author of The Yiddish Policemen's Union and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay) in Salon. Read it here. It starts:

I read "The Swimmer" for the first time on my bed in the Maryland suburbs, one winter afternoon when I was sixteen or seventeen. I'd been skimming through a battered paperback anthology my grandfather had passed along to me -- "100 Stories Ruined by English Teachers," I think it was called -- starting one after another worn-out old chestnut, quickly moving on, when I reached the famous, classic, puzzling first paragraph that begins, "It was one of those midsummer Sundays when everyone sits around saying, 'I drank too much last night.'"

Chabon talks about how the story meditates on the inevitability of life's end. That's true, but I think it's also about the isolation of addiction. There's a lot going on there.
I can't find the story to link to; it's still under copyright. So go to your local library to find it; it's well worth reading.

The Moleskine talks back

Here's a quick piece from McSweeney's on what your abandoned journal might say.

It starts:

You say things are "hectic." Then you add that you "don't want to talk about it." And that's all? Nothing else happened to you on April 22, 2007? Well, if I'm to believe that, then my name isn't Moleskine.

Read the rest here

Then We Came to the End

I really adored the book, Then We Came to the End, by Joshua Ferris.
Funny and touching and deeply serious, "Then We Came to the End" is what happens at a Chicago ad agency as the dot-com bubble bursts and the lay-offs begin.
And it's written in first-person plural! (For the most part.) How cool is that?
Because I'm an office worker myself, this book reminded me that there's so much drama and poignancy in everyday life. This point has been made before (most notably by James Joyce's Ulysses), and maybe it's an easy, obvious point. But I still find the phenomenon to be emotionally moving and almost miraculous. Such is the artistry of the novel.
I interviewed Joshua Ferris for the newspaper, which was great. Some authors I've interviewed don't like talking about their work, but Ferris was very articulate, especially about the different characters in his book.
Read my interview with Joshua Ferris here.
Read the first chapter of Then We Came to the End here.
Here's the opening:

WE WERE FRACTIOUS AND overpaid. Our mornings lacked promise. At least those of us who smoked had something to look forward to at ten-fifteen. Most of us liked most everyone, a few of us hated specific individuals, one or two people loved everyone and everything. Those who loved everyone were unanimously reviled. We loved free bagels in the morning. They happened all too infrequently. Our benefits were astonishing in comprehensiveness and quality of care. Sometimes we questioned whether they were worth it. We thought moving to India might be better, or going back to nursing school. Doing something with the handicapped or working with our hands. No one ever acted on these impulses, despite their daily, sometimes hourly contractions. Instead we met in conference rooms to discuss the issues of the day.

What I'm Reading Now

I'm reading The Annotated Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austin, annotated by David M. Shapard. P&P is a classic, but I read it for the first time only a year or two ago. Now I love it, this is maybe my fourth time reading it. The annotated edition has lots of interesting insights about how Jane Austen moves her plot along almost entirely through dialogue -- very interesting. It also explains nuances of vocabulary that might slip by the modern reader, i.e. amiable: "a common term of praise. It had a broader meaning then, signifying general kindness and friendliness."
I'm also reading The Untouched Minutes by Donald Morrill. It's a fascinating memoir by an English professor about how he and his wife were victims of a home invasion. It's kind of a slim book, I would describe it as a literary essay. The home invasion happened around the same time as 9/11 and the murders of Half and Susanne Zantop, two professors at Dartmouth. Morrill weaves those events into his narrative to create a meditation on violence and experience. So far, it's excellent.

My strategic borrowing

If I'm browsing the stacks at a library and I run across a book I like but might not have time to read, I will check it out anyway with the idea that it will improve the book's library survival. Books that don't get checked out for years tend to lose their place on the shelves and end up on the book sale tables, and this is my little way of forestalling that.

But it's hard to tell sometimes when the last time a book was checked out. It used to be, you could flip to the back of the book and check the date due stamp. With the advent of computerized check-out, though, the dates don't always get stamped. So I ask the librarian. They usually can tell me.

Example: I recently checked out a copy of Flannery O'Connor's collected works. The stamp said the last check out date was 1995. But I asked the library assistant to look it up, and the last actual check out date was 2005.

Author letters

Reader No.7 sent me this fascinating link about 300 letters written by Flannery O'Connor that were made available to the public for the first time last week:

By outward appearances, Betty Hester was an unremarkable woman. She never married or had children, living instead with an aunt in a Midtown apartment. She rarely went out for fun. She took the bus each day to work as a file clerk for a credit bureau in downtown Atlanta.

Few people knew that Hester — an avid and insightful reader — was a close friend and confidante of the world-renowned Georgia author Flannery O'Connor, although the two rarely met in person. Over the course of nine years, though, from 1955 until O'Connor's death in 1964, they wrote to each other nearly every week, discussing everything from Catholicism to current events in wide-ranging letters that were "the most personal" of O'Connor's correspondence, according to Bill Sessions, Hester's literary executor.

In an event highly anticipated by O'Connor scholars and fans, her nearly 300 letters to Hester will be opened to the public Saturday at Emory University, where, at Hester's request, they have been kept under seal for 20 years.

The article is mostly about O'Connor, but it also notes that there is a sizable trove of letters by T.S. Eliot that are under seal -- 1,200 letters that will be opened in 2020.

Then there's a follow-up to the O'Connor story, about what happend on the day the letters were released:

Maybe it was just too sunny a day to be spent in the archives on the 10th floor of the Robert W. Woodruff Library on Emory's campus. By 2 o'clock — five hours after the correspondence in two large folders was made public — only five people had signed in and perused the collection of letters written between 1955 and the author's death in 1964.

Larry Hammond, 65, an insurance salesman from Atlanta, was the first to thumb through the stack. "I took a literature class a few years ago and read about this and I was just interested," he said. "I was real surprised by the language — and all the typos."

A closer inspection by O'Connor scholars may yet find great gravity in the missives.

The Movie of Us

I recently reviewed The Movie of Us, a collection of poetry by Kevin Jeffery Clark. The book has an interesting back story; I wrote about it here.
Excerpt:

The Movie of Us captures a cinematic landscape of language. The poems are scenes sketched out in the cool blues and grays of a lake photographed just after sunset or just before dawn.

I attended a poetry reading last night; Clark's brother, Michael Klein, read his poems. It was quite touching.

The Glass Castle and The Road

I read The Glass Castle right before I read The Road, so that's two books about pitiful starving children in a row. Meanwhile, the next book group pick is Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

I also can't stop thinking about a bit from Cormac McCarthy's NYT interview, which I blogged about yesterday:

McCarthy's style owes much to Faulkner's -- in its recondite vocabulary, punctuation, portentous rhetoric, use of dialect and concrete sense of the world -- a debt McCarthy doesn't dispute. "The ugly fact is books are made out of books," he says. "The novel depends for its life on the novels that have been written." His list of those whom he calls the "good writers" -- Melville, Dostoyevsky, Faulkner -- precludes anyone who doesn't "deal with issues of life and death." Proust and Henry James don't make the cut. "I don't understand them," he says. "To me, that's not literature. A lot of writers who are considered good I consider strange."

His is a very purist view of writing. I admire his view, but I'm not sure I share it. It's a great point for debate, though.

More on The Road

So today The Road wins the Pulitzer Prize when I was just blogging about it yesterday. I did some more research on the book today, one interesting piece was from The Chicago Tribune about Oprah picking the The Road for her book club. The writer, Julia Keller, calls Oprah and author Cormac McCarthy "one of the oddest and most unlikely cultural pairings since Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe." She also reports on McCarthy's notorious aversion to the press:

Whatever McCarthy's motivation for agreeing to be on the show, it isn't money, say longtime observers of McCarthy's work. He turns down speeches, awards, teaching gigs and other familiar trappings of the contemporary writer's life, preferring to live in the desert Southwest and do his work. Like literary recluses such as J.D. Salinger and Thomas Pynchon, McCarthy is more familiar through his absence than his presence.

Read the whole article here.

I also found this longer, more definitive profile of McCarthy from when he gave a rare interview to the New York Times in 1992. You can find it via the previous link or on the NYT's Cormac McCarthy page here.

Oprah's Pic: The Road

I read Oprah Winfrey's current book club pic this weekend: The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. I can't remember the last time I read a book this disturbing. A man and his young son are on the road, traversing a post-apocalyptic landscape (nuclear war? meteor strike?) and hiding out from other survivors bent on rape, murder and cannibalism.
If that sounds austere, it certainly is, but the writing is elegant and convincing. I can't get some of the grimmer scenes out of my head.
I would say the pick is out of character for Ms. Oprah, but one of the things I like about Oprah (and I do like her) is that she usually has a surprise up her sleeve. So it's not out of character in that sense.
The Oprah web site says that Cormac McCarthy is going to give her his first television interview. I'm sure the chance to reach the massive Oprah audience is to tempting to pass up. (Only one author ever did, I think.)
Maybe I'll think of something more profound to say upon further reflection, but right now all I can do is shake my head in disbelief over the power of The Road.

Kurt Vonnegut, RIP

Slaughterhouse-Five is one of the great anti-war novels, maybe the best in American literature. My eighth grade English teacher used the book to teach World War II to us Catholic school girls, which seems smartly subversive to me now. I need to find a copy and re-read it.
It begins like this:

Listen: Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck in time.

Then it tells about Billy's serving in World War II and surviving the bombing of Dresden; his postwar life in the suburbs; his capture by aliens and being taken to another planet.
After reading that book, I went ahead and read all the rest of his books before I graduated high school; I loved them. He was the first adult author who I read pretty much all of his work. The obits (read the NYT one here) have been mentioning Cat's Cradle and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater as his major works, but I always preferred Breakfast of Champions, which has sly illustrations of human anatomy and features the trials of his alter-ego, science fiction writer named Kilgore Trout.
Later in life, Vonnegut defended civil liberties and librarians.
Kurt Vonnegut died yesterday. So it goes.

The dreaded "twee" appellation

My book group is preparing to discuss Eat, Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia by Elizabeth Gilbert. I really liked it -- I've been a fan of Gilbert's ever since I came across her distinctive chatty-but-smart magazine stories in GQ years ago. This book is a memoir Gilbert's emotional recovery from a painful divorce. Her solution is to seek pleasure worldwide by eating in Italy, praying in India and finding balance in Indonesia. It's a clever premise, and in the end the book moves beyond her divorce to her spiritual maturation as a complete woman. Her writing is a joy -- breezy, funny and modern. And I really liked the way she documented the hard-to-describe feelings of silent meditation.
But I fear my dear book group compatriot J. is not going to like it. I can hear her now, she will tag it with the dreaded "twee" appellation. What is twee? Twee is anything that J. considers too cutesy or precious or sweet or clever for it's own good. It's the opposite of J.'s most complimentary adjectives, which are -- can you guess? -- "ironic" and "dark" (and sometimes "sarcastic"). Other books we have read that J. said were twee are Winkie by Clifford Chase (a satirical memoir in which a teddy bear becomes ensnared in a terrorist plot) and The World to Come by Dara Horn (a cross-generational love story celebrating Jewish art and literature, hinged around a stolen Marc Chagall painting).
So I'm thinking up my twee counterarguments now.

Seth Compton

I get new comments on one of my earliest posts, Why Spoonreader?, every so often, which is great. I hope it means that people interested in Spoon River Anthology are finding this blog. One commenter recently pointed out a poem that had never really made an impression on me before, which is kind of funny, since it's about libraries. You'd think I would have remembered it.
Then later, my friend RF and I were talking about our mixed feelings about small towns, and growing up in small towns. (He grew up in Mansfield, population 5,582. I grew up in Patterson, population 5,130.) Calling it a love-hate relationship vastly oversimplifies it. It's more of a combination of nostalgia, affection, respect, frustration, revulsion and rage. It brought that same poem back to mind.
Anyway, here's the Spoon River poem that gets at all that. Thanks, Naomi!

SETH COMPTON

WHEN I died, the circulating library
Which I built up for Spoon River,
And managed for the good of inquiring minds,
Was sold at auction on the public square,
As if to destroy the last vestige
Of my memory and influence.
For those of you who could not see the virtue
Of knowing Volney’s “Ruins” as well as Butler’s “Analogy”
And “Faust” as well as “Evangeline,”
Were really the power in the village,
And often you asked me,
“What is the use of knowing the evil in the world?”
I am out of your way now, Spoon River,
Choose your own good and call it good.
For I could never make you see
That no one knows what is good
Who knows not what is evil;
And no one knows what is true
Who knows not what is false.

'80s Books and Food

I read a poignant, fun memoir of growing up Vietnamese in the '80s in Michigigan, and eating lots of junk food: Stealing Buddha's Dinner, by Bich Minh Nguyen. (Check out the short interview and excerpt I wrote here.) I have a real weakness for '80s culture, since that's the decade I grew up in. This memoir reminded me a lot of a Judy Blume book. In fact, Judy Blume wrote a blurb for the back of the book: "Only a truly gifted writer could make me long for the Kool-Aid, Rice-A-Roni, and Kit Kats celebrated in Stealing Buddha's Dinnner. In this charming, funny, original memoir about growing up as an outsider in America, Bich Nguyen takes you on a journey you won't forget. I can hardly wait for what comes next."
Just in case you possibly don't know who Judy Blume is: She wrote '80s teen classics such as "Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret" (which actually was published in 1970).
Nguyen's working on a novel called "Short Girls" that I'll be interested in reading.

Quality of Reading

After reading interviews with Zadie Smith and essays by her, and being impressed with how sharp and interesting she is, I finally -- finally -- got around to reading On Beauty. I liked it very much; this novel has sophistication and depth. It is the story of two black families -- one mostly American and one British; one liberal, one mostly conservative -- who intersect at a small liberal arts college near Boston. The book takes on the culture wars, black identity, class issues, love and fidelity, and, of course, beauty.
Playing alongside the novel for me, though, has been Smith's essay on the importance of reading. Her analogy of a violinist playing a composer's work haunts me, because I play the violin, and I know there are diligent ways to practice and sloppy ways to practice. It makes me wonder, am I reading sloppily? Am I doing justice to the work I'm reading?
I've often thought that I sometimes read books too fast to really enjoy and even digest them. Books that I find to be clearly and simply written are books that I read fast -- books like Harry Potter and authors like John Grisham and Anne Rice. With Harry Potter, I've noticed myself reading about half of each sentence, getting the gist of where it's going, and skipping to the next sentence. (I suspect that's what most speed readers do.) But even books that are written with a more complex style, sometimes I tear through those, too. So lately I've been trying to consciously slow down, to read a little slower, to savor the language more.
But what else do I do that's bad? How about stopping in the middle of the chapter, or even worse, in mid-sentence? I certainly do that sometimes. Isn't that doing harm to the reading of the work to stop at an unnatural stopping point?
So I've been trying to be more respectful in my reading -- not reading right before bed when I'm exhausted, or when I don't have enough time to finish a chapter. It's definitely slowing me down. But hopefully it's making me a better reader, too.

Harry Potter in 2007

I know I'm super late on posting this, but I am so thrilled that the last Harry Potter book will be published this year on July 21, less than 150 days away as of this writing. (You can check the countdown on mighty Mugglenet's homepage.) I was really worried that it wouldn't come out until 2008.
These books are fanciful and funny, and impossible to put down. Each chapter ends in a way specially designed to irresistibly (literally!) lure you on, until you've fin shed the whole darn thing. In some ways, they are like literary heroin. They get a powerful grip on you.
I made a pact with myself after seeing the third Harry Potter movie (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, which was quite good) that I wouldn't watch anymore of the movies until I had finished reading the whole series. I don't like the movie images in my head when I read the books. So far, so good.

Flannery O'Connor Pilgrimage

The New York Times has a marvelous travel story about visiting the birth place of Flannery O'Connor. It's very much worth reading if like her. Hurray for the writer, Lawrence Downes! I love the way he encapsulates the O'Connor body of work. He writes:

O’Connor’s short stories and novels are set in a rural South where people know their places, mind their manners and do horrible things to one another. It’s a place that somehow hovers outside of time, where both the New Deal and the New Testament feel like recent history. It’s soaked in violence and humor, in sin and in God. He may have fled the modern world, but in O’Connor’s he sticks around, in the sun hanging over the tree line, in the trees and farm beasts, and in the characters who roost in the memory like gargoyles. It’s a land haunted by Christ — not your friendly hug-me Jesus, but a ragged figure who moves from tree to tree in the back of the mind, pursuing the unwilling.
Many people — me for instance — are in turn haunted by O’Connor. Her doctrinally strict, mordantly funny stories and novels are as close to perfect as writing gets. Her language is so spare and efficient, her images and character’s speech so vivid, they burn into the mind. Her strange Southern landscape was one I knew viscerally but, until this trip, had never set foot in. I had wondered how her fictional terrain and characters, so bizarre yet so blindingly real, might compare with the real places and people she lived among and wrote about.

I also got a real kick out of how my friend L. sent me an email about the story, noting that it included our friend J.'s favorite line from a Flannery O'Connor story. She didn't even have to include the line. I knew exactly which one she meant: “She would of been a good woman,” the Misfit said, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”
Read the whole NYT story here.

Introduction to IJ's 10th Anniversary

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

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

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

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

Zadie Smith on the Novel

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

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

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

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

Poems for a weekend at home

Here are some good poems for a weekend at home.

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

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

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

Oh Joy

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

Best Books of 2006

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

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

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

Blind Side review

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

Best of Lists

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Christmas Carol

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The bell struck twelve.

Read her column here.

The final installment of Harry Potter

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

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

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

Best uses for LibraryThing

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

Hemingway, the Bible, Burroughs

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

Books on the Radio

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

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

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

Severance Review and Q-A

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

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

Read the review here; the interview here.

Hannibal Rising

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

Garry Wills' What Paul Meant

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

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

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

Read the whole interview here.

Harper Lee biography

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

Library 2.0 Manifesto

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

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

Read the whole thing here.

Today spoonreader; tomorrow -- Oprah!

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

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

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

Little Children, the movie

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

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

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

The Looming Tower

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

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

Read the whole dialogue here.

Severance

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

Crunchy Cons

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

Banned Books Week

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

Today is J. Alfred Prufrock Day!

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

New from Michael Lewis

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

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

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

Cane River

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

The price of higher education

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

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

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

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

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

Katrina anniversary coverage: books

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

Katrina anniversary coverage: SPT

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

Katrina anniversary coverage: Times-Picayune

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

David Foster Wallace on tennis, again

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

Katrina anniversary coverage: Bush's photo

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

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

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

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

Katrina Anniversary coverage: the weekend before

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cool Headline of the Day

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

Round and Orbity? Must Be a Planet.

Id est (Mating)

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

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

Read her whole post here.

Cooking for Mr. Latte

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

Important reporting on the environment

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

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

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

Which Dostoevsky novel should I read first?

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

Hard News by Seth Mnookin

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

LibraryThing

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

Persuasion

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

Novelization

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

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

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