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!