Literary Comfort Food

Last weekend I wasn't feeling so great -- a summer cold was coming on -- so I curled up with some ice cream and its literary equivalent. "Mr. Darcy's Diary" by Amanda Grange. This is what I would call fan-fiction related to Jane Austen. In this case, Grange imagines the male side of the great novel Pride and Prejudice and writes from the hero's perspective, as opposed to the heroine's.
There's a lot of this kind of Jane-related fiction if you care to read it: sequels and prequels and alternate takes, all generally summed up under the category of "para-literature." I generally steer clear of this stuff because reading these impersonations of Jane Austen's inimitable style can be quite painful.
On the other hand, I really liked "Mr. Darcy's Diary." It's title explains it; the jottings of Mr. Darcy as he meets and courts P&P's Elizabeth Bennet. This was a very smart approach on the part of Ms. Grange because there's no need for her to imitate Austen's style -- Mr. Darcy's musings are appropriately masculine, plain-spoken and to the point.
Did I learn anything new from hearing Darcy's side of the story? Not really. But oh how I enjoyed it. And I soon got to feeling better.

Read an excerpt from Grange's Web site. In this scene, we find out what happens after Elizabeth's sister Lydia runs off with the scoundrel George Wickham. In P&P, Darcy sets it aright, but we never really learn details of what happens. Here's Grange's take on the meeting between Darcy and Wickham:

I met Wickham at my club and the negotiations began.
'You must marry her,' I said to him shortly.
'If I do that, I give up forever the chance of making my fortune through marriage.'
'You have ruined her,' I said. 'Does that mean nothing to you?'

Continue reading ...

1001 Books

I love lists, and really, who doesn't? So first thing, I went through the new list of "1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die," and checked off all the ones I've read. My haul was pretty pitiful. I've read 80 of the books on the list. William Grimes of The New York Times has read 300! Don't I feel inadequate.

I was also startled because if I were to divide the books I've read into categories, the number one category would probably be books I read in high school, followed by books I read with my book group. It really depresses me that I didn't read more in college. Sure, I read some, but not nearly as much as I could have. I wasted so much time in college hanging out, partying, etc. Very dumb on my part. I also read -- by my own choice -- a lot of literary theory in college that has not held up well over the years. That's a whole other post, but I think theory was useful as an analytical tool in some contexts. Now, though, I would prefer that I had had a broader exposure to the history of literature.

I hope to create a new master list of books I would like to read, and then methodically read them, to make up for lost time. But is this realistic? I work a 40-hour job and have friends and family members to attend to. I also have library school and my beloved violin lessons.

College-goers, may this sad tale be a warning to you!

Here are the 10 favorite books of the most recently published 80 books I have read:

• Kafka on the Shore – Haruki Murakami
• Life of Pi – Yann Martel
• Infinite Jest – David Foster Wallace
• Written on the Body – Jeanette Winterson
• The Temple of My Familiar – Alice Walker
• Watchmen – Alan Moore & David Gibbons
• The Color Purple – Alice Walker
• Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
• Interview With the Vampire – Anne Rice
• In Cold Blood – Truman Capote

The New Yorker on Ezra Pound

The New Yorker has a fascinating review of a new book about Ezra Pound. Ezra Pound! Has anyone touched more great literature? Friend and adviser of Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, William Butler Yeats, and James Joyce. Also the lesser lights: William Carlos Williams, H.D., Robert Lowell.
The New Yorker essay really captures the weird dynamic about Pound: While he redefined literature with his slogan "Make it new," he was also, quite literally, a treasonous, Fascist anti-Semite. What a juxtaposition. In Pound's defense, there is some evidence that he was mentally ill.
For a humorous take on Pound's political leanings, read McSweeney's The Ten Worst Films of 1942; As reviewed by Ezra Pound over Italian radio. "CAT PEOPLE: A race may civilize itself BY LANGUAGE, not film. Cat People is filth."
I'm told that Pound was the one who came up with the title of Eliot's "The Waste Land." Eliot himself wanted to call it ... (oh dear) ... "He Do the Police in Different Voices." Good lord, what a dreadful title. If that's all Pound did, he did literature a favor.
And then there's Ernest Hemingway's memoir of his Paris years, "A Moveable Feast." A really marvelous book. Hemingway writes:

Ezra was the most generous writer I have ever known and the most disinterested. He helped poets, painters, sculptors and prose writers that he believed in and he would help anyone whether he believed in them or not if they were in trouble. He worried about everyone and in the time when I first knew him he was most worried about T.S. Eliot who, Ezra told me, had to work in a bank in London and so had insufficient time and bad hours to function as a poet.

Love Papa Hemingway! That writing just jumps off the page for me with it's elegance. I especially love "insufficient time and bad hours."
If only Edgar Lee Masters had had a Pound to help him with Spoon River Anthology. He would have trimmed off the ponderous pseudo-epic-poem finale "The Spooniad." (Not kidding! That's how SRA ends.)

If I seem tense ...

An article in American Journalism Review gets at some of the difficulties facing my beloved newspaper industry right now. It discusses projections made by consultant Mark Potts that show online advertising is not increasing fast enough -- not nearly fast enough -- to make up for the declines in print advertising.

(T)he scariest problem — which Potts himself points out — is that many papers won't share in the online growth. There will be winners and losers. And even as the industry as a whole survives, we may begin seeing, pretty soon, big American
cities with no daily newspaper.
"It's going to be really bloody, incredibly devastating," Potts predicts. "And I think there are going to be a lot of major metros that don't make it."

Books and the presidential candidates

Jeffrey Goldberg interviewed John McCain about the Middle East, and one of his questions was about favorite Jewish writers. (Goldberg interviewed Obama previously, who mentioned how much he liked Philip Roth.)

JG: A final question: Senator Obama talked about how his life was influenced by Jewish writers, Philip Roth, Leon Uris. How about you?

JM: There’s Elie Wiesel, and Victor Frankl. I think about Frankl all the time. “Man’s Search for Meaning” is one of the most profound things I’ve ever read in my life. And maybe on a little lighter note, “War and Remembrance” and “Winds of War” are my two absolute favorite books. I can tell you that one of my life’s ambitions is to meet Herman Wouk. “War and Remembrance” for me, it’s the whole thing. ...

JG: Not a big Philip Roth fan?

JM: No, I’m not. Leon Uris I enjoyed. Victor Frankl, that’s important. I read it before my captivity. It made me feel a lot less sorry for myself, my friend. A fundamental difference between my experience and the Holocaust was that the Vietnamese didn’t want us to die. They viewed us as a very valuable asset at the bargaining table. It was the opposite in the Holocaust, because they wanted to exterminate you. Sometimes when I felt sorry for myself, which was very frequently, I thought, “This is nothing compared to what Victor Frankl experienced.”

The mention of Victor Frankl brought back a ton of memories for me, and McCain is absolutely right that it's an incredibly moving and thought-provoking book. Frankl was a psychiatrist who was imprisoned in Auschwitz, and Man's Search for Meaning was the book he wrote afterward based on his observations there. I still remember his articulation of "the last of the human freedoms - to choose one's own attitude in any given set of cirumstances, to choose one's own way."
I also vividly remember where and when I read this book -- when I was 13 years old and a Catholic school girl. Certainly this is a testament to Frankl's skills as a communicator (and definitely NOT to any extraordinary perception on my part) that his book resonates with people of different ages, social standings and circumstances.
Here's the summary of "Man's Search for Meaning" from Google Books:

Man's Search for Meaning tells the chilling and inspirational story of eminent psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, who was imprisoned at Auschwitz and other concentration camps for three years during the Second World War. Immersed in great suffering and loss, Frankl began to wonder why some of his fellow prisoners were able not only to survive the horrifying conditions, but to grow in the process. Frankl's conclusion - that the most basic human motivation is the will to meaning - became the basis of his groundbreaking psychological theory, logotherapy. As Nietzsche put it, "He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how". In Man's Search for Meaning, Frankl outlines the principles of logotherapy, and offers ways to help each one of us focus on finding the purpose in our lives.

Spoon River Anthology and spoonriveranthology.net

The most commented post on this blog is "Why Spoonreader?", one of my first posts that I wrote way back on Sept. 14, 2004 when I was just getting started. Recently, a student posted a question there about marriage and Spoon River Anthology. Here's our exchange:

Anonymous said...
I have to write a paper for my english class including 15 epitaphs and 20 outside sources on a spoon river theme. some possible themes are corruption, death as the great equalizer and so on. I had thought about doing something with fakenesss of marriage or along those lines, any thoughts or help?
May 13, 2008 10:40 AM

Angie said...
20 outside sources?! That sounds like a lot. I hope this is a college class.
I think marriage would be a great topic. Though I would call my paper something like "Master's Kaleidoscope of Marriage," that way you can talk about some of the poems that say good things about marriage, too. Here are some of the poems you should look at: Amanda Barker, Mrs. Pantier, Benjamin Pantier, Julia Miller, Mrs. Williams, Margaret Fuller Slack, Willard Fluke, Amos Sibley, Mrs. Sibley, Tom Merritt, Mrs. Merritt, Roscoe Purkapile, Mrs. Purkapile, Elsa Wertman. For a more positive outlook on marriage, try Lois Spears, Lucinda Matlock and William & Emily. That's just off the top of my head, there are other poems, too, I'm sure.
As for your critical sources, I can really only recommend one: the introduction to Spoon River Anthology: Annotated Edition, edited by John E. Hallwas. Please email me a copy of your paper when your done, I'd love to read it.
May 13, 2008 11:00 AM

Anonymous said...
haha yes it is a college class, the paper will surely be huge. And thats good that you cited John Hallwas because I did add him in my list of sources. I think im going to relate the theme to corruption of marriage and human nature as a sort of subtopic, thanks for the epitaph listing! It helps a lot.
May 14, 2008 2:16 PM

To dig up all those names, I used a very cool web site, www.spoonriveranthology.net The poems here are hyperlinked so you can easily see which poems talk about each other. There's also some neat analysis of words used in the different poems. You can also comment on the poems, and the comments include the gamut of responses you would expect. Because "Spoon River Anthology" is a town of people talking about each other, it's similar to a network, and the hyperlinks really draw out that aspect of it. I like the site a lot.

Poems I love, Part 2

Lately I've found it hard to concentrate on any one book. There are a bunch of half-started books littering my home, almost all of them nonfiction. Certainly this is a byproduct of stress. The newspaper industry in which my spouse and I make our livings is in severe recession and transformation. The future is unpredictable. Also I find aspects of this modern life worrisome, everyone so busy and filled with the need to acquire.
When I feel anxious about what's happening, this Wordsworth poem comes to mind:

THE WORLD IS TOO MUCH WITH US

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.--Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

I love everything about this sonnet, except perhaps the last two lines. I don't think neo-paganism will solve my problems, or Wordsworth's. And old Triton blowing his wreathed horn is a hokey image. If I were a wealthy philanthropist, I would sponsor a contest to re-write the last two lines.

Poems I love, Part 1

One of my favorite poems is "Anecdote of the Jar," by Wallace Stevens. This came up lately because my mother got two cats, and she was trying to decide what to name them. Now of course I set about trying to think of literary names. (I once knew a cat named Percy, named after Louisiana author Walker Percy, and I thought that was so cool.) These cats are Siberian cats, so I thought, why not name them after the greats of Russian literature? So I suggested Fyodor (Dostoevsky) and Leopold (Tolstoy). Well, this suggestion did not go very far for a variety of reasons, including that one of the cats is female.
Another pertinent fact about the cats is that the breeder lives in Tennessee. So I suggested Wallace and Anna. Wallace after Wallace Stevens and Anna after Tolstoy's famous heroine Anna Karenina.
Why Wallace?, mother asked. Because of "Anecdote of the Jar," I replied.

Anecdote of the Jar

I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion every where.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

What does that poem mean?, mother asked. Well, it's hard to say what a poem really means, but I think it's about architecture, roughly speaking. We build things, and those things change the way we see the natural world. And the natural world changes the way we see the built environment. In other words, the natural world and the built world influence and change each other, so we should take care of what we build.
On another level, I just love the delicious language of this poem: "Like nothing else in Tennnessee". "The jar was round upon the ground". "It took dominion everywhere".
Well, mother didn't like that suggestion either. In retrospect, I should have made one last Tennessee-related suggestion: She really should have named them Stanley and Stella, from "A Streetcar Named Desire," the play by Tennessee Williams.
But she ended up naming them Angel and Mimi, after her two children. Yep, so now I have my very own familiar ("a spirit often embodied in an animal and held to attend and serve or guard a person").
The photo above is me with Mimi.

Crunch Time!

Sorry for the light blogging, I'm in the final week of my most recent library science class, Digital Libraries, and I have a paper to finish by Thursday. (Yikes!)
For those of you keeping track at home, this is the seventh class I've finished. I have six more classes to finish the degree, so I'll be getting my MLS around 2010.
Getting the degree at this slow pace -- once class per semester --has been mostly about the satisfaction of learning for me. (I had written " for the sheer joy of learning," but that's a little too exuberant for my exhausted outlook at the moment.) Nevertheless, I look forward to each class being done in anticipation of graduation.
As for what I'm reading right now: I'm re-reading the last Harry Potter book. Our book group pick is "Mudbound," which won a big prize for literature in support of social change. I'll start that this weekend. And I'm still addicted to the RealClearPolitics site for election coverage.

Writing and Grief

I'm mostly posting this here for Howellsreader, I thought she would like it. It ran in on the front page of our paper today, and it's about a father who writes science fiction and who lost his son in the Virginia Tech shooting. It was written by my colleague Michael Kruse. It begins:

LAGRANGE, Ga. — Michael Bishop, whose son was a German instructor at Virginia Tech, sat one morning last month in a classroom at LaGrange College, ready to read one of his stories to his students in Creative Writing 3308.

"This was Jamie's idea," he told them.

Jamie Bishop left behind on his computer 10 notes. Michael Bishop, an award-winning science fiction writer, saw them and saw stories. At first he wanted to honor his son by finishing what the son could not. It was a way to keep a connection, and to cope. Keep reading here ...

What your lover reads

Some women break up with their boyfriends because said boyfriends have crappy taste in books. Thus reported the NYT Book Review recently in an essay with the snarky title, "It's Not You, It's Your Books":

Some years ago, I was awakened early one morning by a phone call from a friend. She had just broken up with a boyfriend she still loved and was desperate to justify her decision. “Can you believe it!” she shouted into the phone. “He hadn’t even heard of Pushkin!”
We’ve all been there. Or some of us have. Anyone who cares about books has at some point confronted the Pushkin problem: when a missed — or misguided — literary reference makes it chillingly clear that a romance is going nowhere fast.

It goes on to explore more salient points: Literary taste can point to important differences in education or class; and the dumpers tend to be brainy women.
I myself side with Marco Roth, an editor who's quoted in the story:

"I think sometimes it’s better if books are just books. It’s part of the romantic tragedy of our age that our partners must be seen as compatible on every level."

Who wants a romantic partner who agrees with you on everything? How boring is that? Though I must confess, my own spouse impressed me early on in our relationship when he told me his favorite book was Cannery Row.
"Cool, Steinbeck," I thought. Then I read it and thought it was just OK. It's nice, but it's not much compared with "East of Eden" or the luminous "Grapes of Wrath." And it's kind of a "guy" book.
Years later, it's pretty obvious we have very different tastes in books. He not much for fiction, but reads quirky histories about things like the Dust Bowl or the evolution of the public swimming pool.
We do bond over other reading material, though: We're total news junkies, and we're often turning each other on to different news stories or Web sites. It's been six years, and we're still reading the news together.

C'mon, America! Let's meditate!

Oprah's latest book pick is A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle. I haven't got a copy yet, but I expect I will: It's on sale at Amazon for the insanely low price of $7.70. That is so cheap it's sure to sell a bazillion copies, as if Oprah's picks don't sell a bazillion copies anyway.
The books is not fiction; it's more like self-help. (And loyal spoonreader afficionados will remember by dark secret love of self-help.) "A New Earth" sounds like handbook on mediation and its corrollary, "mindfulness." Picking this book seems to be Oprah's way of saying, "C'mon, America! Let's meditate!" Tolle himself is something of a mysterious figure; read a New York Times profile of him here.
My favorite author on meditation, though, is Pema Chodron, who has also been interviewed by Her Royal Oprah-ness. (Chodron is Buddhist and I'm not, but she writes in a way that's inclusive of a multiplicity of beliefs.) The book of hers that I'm reading now has the most marvelous title: The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times. Love that title! It begins with the Tibetan epigraph:

Confess your hidden faults.
Approach what you find repulsive.
Help those you think you cannot help.
Anything you are attached to, let it go.
Go to places that scare you.

Poetry.

Politics, Literature, and Romantic Poetry

I spent part of today selectively reading parts of The Survivor: Bill Clinton in the White House by John F. Harris. This is kind of background reading for work, but I liked it very much. Harris is a reporter, formerly of The Washington Post and now of the always-interesting politics web site Politico.
I think journalism is the ideal genre for writing about politics. Fiction, on the other hand, is best for writing about love and religion. Fiction and journalism are both good for writing about social issues, for example The Grapes of Wrath, which started as journalism and then became a novel. There are probably lots of exceptions to these overly broad generalizations, but what the heck.
Another political/literary connection that's been on my mind: Last week I read a column by Peggy Noonan in The Wall Street Journal. She's consistently interesting, too. She was reacting to Obama's speech on race, and here's just a snippet of what she said:

Near the end of the speech, Mr. Obama painted an America that didn’t summon thoughts of Faulkner but of William Blake. The bankruptcies, the dark satanic mills, the job loss and corporate corruptions.

Maybe I'm being too literal, but I really don't think William Blake is the right author to make that point. The better reference, I think, would be Charles Dickens. But maybe "Dickensian" has become an overused perjorative. I don't think Blake was concerned with corporations, but possibly I'm wrong. I'd like to hear from the Pisan Circle (former Romantic Era Poetry classmates) on this one.
Of course all this gives me an excuse to copy one of my favorite poems from Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience. This is from Songs of Innocence:

THE CHIMNEY-SWEEPER
When my mother died I was very young,
And my father sold me while yet my tongue
Could scarcely cry ‘Weep! weep! weep! weep!’
So your chimneys I sweep, and in soot I sleep.

There’s little Tom Dacre, who cried when his head,
That curled like a lamb’s back, was shaved; so I said,
‘Hush, Tom! never mind it, for, when your head’s bare,
You know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair.’

And so he was quiet, and that very night,
As Tom was a-sleeping, he had such a sight!—
That thousands of sweepers, Dick, Joe, Ned, and Jack,
Were all of them locked up in coffins of black.

And by came an angel, who had a bright key,
And he opened the coffins, and set them all free;
Then down a green plain, leaping, laughing, they run
And wash in a river, and shine in the sun.

Then naked and white, all their bags left behind,
They rise upon clouds, and sport in the wind:
And the angel told Tom, if he’d be a good boy,
He’d have God for his father, and never want joy.

And so Tom awoke, and we rose in the dark,
And got with our bags and our brushes to work.
Though the morning was cold, Tom was happy and warm:
So, if all do their duty, they need not fear harm.

Book group on The Ha-Ha

My book group met last night and we had a good discussion on The Ha-Ha. This novel begins when we meet Howard, a Vietnam vet who hasn't been able to speak since the war due to a brain injury. His addict ex-girlfriend Sylvia is being forced into rehab, and she asks him to take care of her nine-year-old son Ryan.
Lots of different reactions to Howard. When we meet him in the novel, he's basically given up on communicating with other people. Some of our group sympathized with this reaction while others felt he should have tried harder. We compared Howard's reaction to his injury to the guy who wrote The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Howard just gives up on communication, while the paralyzed author of DB&B writes a memoir by blinking out letters. So there's a tremendous range there, to say the least.
We all agreed that we hated Sylvia, though I thought she was a well-rendered, realistic portrayal of a selfish, whiny addict. J opined that Sylvia might be the biggest bitch in all of literature, but then I reminded her of Cathy from East of Eden, and she conceded the point.
The main topic of discussion was how believable were the character motivations. The novel is told from Howard's point of view, so it's interesting to try to fill in the blanks on the other characters, especially Howard's friend Laurel.
One thing I really loved about this novel was how beautiful some of the scenes between Howard and Ryan are. They are really just everyday father-and-son type interactions, but author Dave King imbues them with this really lovely tenderness. You couldn't write a whole novel just about a father who loves spending time with his son, so the plot for "The Ha-Ha" works well to reveal these same types of interactions.
This concludes my report on our book group and The Ha-Ha. Our next book is Mudbound by Hillary Jordan. More on that later.

What I read during our recent trip

A certain someone (Ryan F.) has compared me unfavorably with my pal over at Sunny Southwest, saying that I don't post as often as she does. Sad but true. In that spirit, I'm going to concentrate in April on posting and not worrying so much about links or multimedia.

We got back from a trip to Pittsburgh this week. The spouse raised his eyebrows because I brought four books on a five-day trip, but I'm glad I did.

I finished Searching for Bobby Fischer by Fred Waitzkin on the plane. This is the memoir (it became a movie) of a chess dad and how his little son became national champion. Lots of interesting stuff on where a parent's ambition ends and a child's begins. The father and son also go to Russia for an exhibition -- this is the 1980s, the Soviet era -- and there are fascinating examinations of how the Russian government viewed chess players as important symbols for the promotion of communism and thereby corrupted the game.

I finished The Web Library for my library science class "Digital Libraries." It's a guide to free, high-quality information sources on the Web. My biggest gripe about this book is that it was published in 2002 and some of it is out of date. But it had interviews with information professionals that I found useful and have blogged about previously.

I also finished The Ha-Ha on this trip, which I will blog about later as our book group is meeting tonight to discuss it. (It was very good.)

I did not get to read my fourth book, Glut: Mastering Information through the Ages, by Alex Wright. It's good and I'm about halfway through it. It starts at the beginning of human history, and I'm in the Dark Ages right about now.

So reading three out of four books is not a bad record for this trip.

More on keeping books

I'm still thinking about hoarding books versus letting them go. I ran across this interview with Michael S. Hart, founder of the very cool Project Gutenberg, where you can find many, many free e-books. If it's no longer under copyright and a volunteer entered the text, it's on Project Gutenberg.
Here's what Hart said in an interview with Nick Tomaiuolo in the book The Web Library:

Under "ye olde" system, versus under the new system, if you've got a library of 1,000 books, you're pretty cool. A personal library of 1,000 books in a room is impressive. Now you can fit 10,000 books on a DVD, and nobody knows how cool you are because the collection looks small. ... Under the "olde" system you can look cool just by displaying the books. Under the new system you actually have to read them to look cool. It's a big difference. In "ye olde" system you are defining yourself by what you own as property; in the new way you are investing in yourself by reading, not simply in possessing the physical books.

I really liked this sentiment. It's both democratic and meritocratic. It also made me feel better about purging some of the physical copies of books I've already read.
Though I do have to mention that last week author Samantha Power came up in the news, for calling Hillary Clinton a "monster." (Power is an Obama supporter; she apologized for the comment and left the campaign.) It was pretty nice to be able to stroll over to my book shelf and pull down her book A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. The book is still under copyright and not available as an e-book in the resources to which I have access.

Free Lunch by David Cay Johnston

Here's a recent book review I wrote.

It begins:

Corporations and the rich are taking this country for a ride, sucking tax breaks and subsidies from the public trough in subtle and not-so-subtle ways to avoid public outcry. That's what New York Times reporter David Cay Johnston argues in his new book, Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You With the Bill).

Whether it's jobs moved overseas, the health care system, utility deregulation or taxpayer-subsidized sports stadiums, Johnston's book documents the many ways that the middle and lower classes are supporting big business and the wealthy.

Johnston, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter, uses real-life examples and everyday people to make his case. He addresses familiar topics and obscure ones, and he presents sophisticated economic transactions in layman's terms.

Life of Pi, again

The spouse was asking me why I didn't recommend one of my favorite novels, Life of Pi, to the presidential candidates. Well, I said, "Life of Pi" is more about personal belief -- the decisions every human being has to make about what they will believe about things they can't see or prove. That includes religious belief, but it's also about what kinds of things are possible in the world, kind of metaphysical questions. I don't think a president in particular needs to consider those questions any more than anyone else. They're important questions for everyone.
Not that the question of faith can't be a political question. It clearly is, and lately you can see it in a round of quasi-political books advocating atheism: Christopher Hitchens' God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything or Sam Harris' Letter to a Christian Nation. Those books (which, to be clear, I have read only reviews of) remind me of what "Life of Pi" says about atheists. Our hero young Pi -- who is so religious he embraces Hinduism, Christianity and Islam equally -- encounters his science teacher, Mr. Kumar, at the zoo. Admiring the animals, Mr. Kumar tells Pi he is an atheist:

"When I was your age, I lived in bed, racked with polio. I asked myself every day, 'Where is God? Where is God? Where is God?' God never came. It wasn't God who saved me -- it was medicine. Reason is my prophet and it tells me that as a watch stops, so we die. It's the end. If the watch doesn't work properly, it must be fixed here and now by us. One day we will take hold of the means of production and there will be justice on earth."
This was all a bit much for me. The tone was right -- loving and brave -- but the details seemed bleak. I said nothing.

A bit later, Pi reflects:

It was my first clue that atheists are my brothers and sisters of a different faith, and every word they speak speaks of faith. Like me, they go as far as the legs of reason will carry them -- and then they leap.

Gnash, gnash

Oh the vexatious cull!
I got rid of my John McCain memoir. Gave it away or something.
What was I thinking?
I was thinking, "He's running for president, every library in the country will keep this book forever. I don't need to keep it."
Now I'm thinking, "I want to look at that book and I don't feel like dragging down to the library to get it."
Grrrr ... .

Sherman Alexie and The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

I've read several reviews and news stories about the author Sherman Alexie. I first heard of him in the '90s when he was an up-and-coming young Native American writer who had published a book of stories with the truly fabulous title of "The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven." He later wrote the screenplay to the film "Smoke Signals," a novel, and another collection of well-reviewed short stories. But Alexie was sadly on my list of Writers I Just Haven't Gotten Around to Reading Yet, Even Though I Would Like To. (I should formalize this list and post it.)
He has a young adult novel out now that is getting stellar reviews, and this week when I was at the university library, a copy was sitting on the new books table, so I snagged it.
What a great book! Hearkening back to my MLK post from last week, it's a living blend of sharply marked opposites. Funny and uplifting, sad and bleak and depressing. It's about Arnold Spirit, Jr., a teenager who decides to leave the reservation to attend the all-white high school, in hopes of improving his education and his fortunes. He also draws cartoons: "Who My Parents Would Have Been if Somebody Had Paid Attention to Their Dreams," for example, and "How to Pretend You're Not Poor."
Like many good YA (Young Adult) novels, "The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian" dwells a lot on budding sexuality and the body. In the above video clip, you'll hear how Arnold and his new friend Gordy talk about boners, in the context of getting excited about books. (It's worth listening to Alexie's reading.)
But Alexie's above reading ends before my favorite part. The scene goes on:

"I don't think you should run through life with a real erect penis. But you should approach each book -- you should approach life -- with the real possibility that you might get a metaphorical boner at any point."
"A metaphorical boner!" I shouted. "What the heck is a metaphorical boner?"
Gordy laughed.
"When I say boner, I really mean joy," he said.
"Then why didn't you say joy? You didn't have to say boner. Whenever I think about boners, I get confused."
"Boner is funnier. And more joyful."
Gordy and I laughed.
He was an extremely weird dude. But he was the smartest person I'd ever known. He would always be the smartest person I'd ever known.

Happy Birthday James Joyce

Bust of James Joyce
Originally uploaded by spoonreader

Today is the 126th anniversary of James Joyce. Happy Birthday to the master! Yes, I say yes!

Mark and Angie at Sandycove
Originally uploaded by spoonreader

And here is a photo of me and my love at the James Joyce Museum and Tower at Sandycove, near Dublin. This is from back in August.

Books and the Presidential Campaign

Katie Couric asked the presidential candiates which single book they would take with them to the White House, aside from the Bible. Read about it here.
Barack Obama and Mitt Romney cited recent history books. Obama picked Team of Rivals, a biography of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin. Mitt Romney picked John Adams by David McCullough. I was pleased by their picks, because I suspect they chose books they actually had read and enjoyed.
I was less impressed by the old safetys. John McCain named Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith. Rudy Giuliani and Hillary Clinton both wanted The Federalist Papers.
Mike Huckabee, on the other hand, picked a book I'd never heard of, called Whatever Happened to the Human Race. A little research on my part reveals that this is a serious philosophical book with a Christian orientation on life issues. Barnes and Noble says:

In this moving book, the renowned pediatric surgeon and Surgeon General of the United States, C. Everett Koop, M.D., joins with one of the leading Christian thinkers of our day, Francis A. Schaeffer, to analyze the widespread implications and frightening loss of human rights brought on by today's practices of abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia. They see the present as a crucial turning point. Choices are being made that undermine human rights at their most basic level. Practices once labeled "unthinkable" are now considered acceptable. The destruction of human life, young and old, is being sanctioned on an ever-increasing scale by the medical profession, by the courts, by parents, and by silent citizens.

Meanwhile, Bill Moyers asked his viewers which book they would recommend for the president to read. A lot of people submitted answers here. I don't see too many interesting suggestions though, and some of the answers are just silly.
What would I suggest? The first book that popped into my head was Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, which isn't about politics or history or anything like that. It's a short, lyrical novel about a country minister who is dying and writing a letter to leave to his young son. To me, the novel is about humility and the limits of knowledge, and how good-hearted people can disagree vehemently on the best way to solve problems. This was more of an intuitive choice; it's just the first thing I thought of. If I think of something more apropos, I'll post again.

When Teen Lit Geeks Grow Up

I had a wonderful couple of days visiting a dear old friend with whom I share a special love of reading. We go way back, back 20 years ago to the high school where we met. We were what I would now call Lit Geeks, using Geek in the tech sense of an astute, obsessive expert. There was nothing nerdish about us. We were COOL. Really. Our school was just that kind of place.
Anyway, she blogged so well about our old exploits that I'm going to let her post speak for itself, at least for the time being.
So if you want to read about the crashing of the faculty Christmas party, or guess which Romantic poet served as my alter ego, or even see a photo of one of our special T-shirts, check out her post here.

Martin Luther King Jr. and "Strength to Love"

Martin Luther King Jr. Day is tomorrow. I truly love a book of his sermons called "Strength to Love."

My favorite is the first one, "A Tough Mind and a Tender Heart." King talks about the need for us to combine disparate qualities, in this case using the Bible verse from Matthew where Jesus sends the Apostles out to preach, telling them, "Be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves." Whenever I turn back to this essay, I find it very difficult to put it down because the words flow along so well, building up to King's advocacy of nonviolence.

In this this passage, though, King talks about science and religion, a theme I've been thinking about this weekend. He says there may be conflicts between "softminded religionists and toughminded scientists, but not between science and religion." He goes on:

"Science investigates; religion interprets. Science gives man knowledge which is power; religion gives man wisdom which is control. Science deals mainly with facts; religion deals mainly with values. The two are not rivals. They are complementary. Science keeps religion from sinking into the valley of crippling irrationalism and paralyzing obscurantism. Religion prevents science from falling into the marsh of obsolete materialism and moral nihilism."

You can read the whole essay online here.

Bobby Fischer, R.I.P

Bobby Fischer died today (read the obit here), and it brought back a lot of memories about how much I love the game of chess. Not that I'm very good at it, but I used to spend a lot of time playing chess and particularly reading about the lives of the grandmasters. They were always these strange characters with interesting backgrounds, and I found something heroic about chess players who used their wits to triumph over those who would destroy them.

My favorite was Paul Morphy (1837-1884), the champion from my home state of Louisiana. Chess was his hobby; he was a lawyer by profession. He was supposed to have a formidable intellect; I read once that he could recite significant portions of the Louisiana civil code from memory. Apparently he became very eccentric toward the end, not unlike Bobby Fischer and Fischer's lamentable anti-Semitism.

Two books I want to read about chess:

• Searching for Bobby Fischer: The contemporary memoir of a father who discovers his son is a chess prodigy. Contains funny bits about parents who seem to take the competition more seriously than the kids do. The movie was good, too.
• The Kings of New York, subtitled A Year Among the Geeks, Oddballs, and Genuises Who Make Up America's Top High School Chess Team: Sports reporter Michael Weinreb looks at the world of competitive scholastic chess. Apparently it's about to be released in paperback under the new title "Game of Kings."

My Best Books of 2007

I've been sitting on this post for over a week now because I wanted to craft the most perfect words of praise for my favorite books of 2007. Well, it's Jan. 9, so it is what it is.

In previous years, I've done "Best Of" lists for the year. This year, there's only three books that reached the level of excellence to my way of thinking.

• The Best Fiction of 2007 goes to ...Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris. A comedic but serious novel of life-at-work: what happens when layoffs come to a Chicago advertising agency. The title is too hard to remember, but it's great. This book deserves a wider audience; I'm quite fond of it.
• Best Nonfiction of 2007 goes to ... The Braindead Megaphone by George Saunders. Essays on life, politics, and the media, all keenly observed with a sharp sense of humor and an abiding spirit of compassion. Saunders is known for his off-beat short stories; this was his first work of nonfiction, published at a nice price in paperback.
• Special Commendation for a book I read in 2007 that published previously ...The Road by Cormac McCarthy. OK, nothing funny about this one. I was an emotionally spent wreck after reading it. One of the rare books that changed the way I see the world. It's about a father and son trying to survive a post-Apocolyptic dystopian landscape; they have to head south before winter hits. Many of us look at the world and wonder why evil exists; I suspect McCarthy looks at the world and wonders just as seriously why there's good. His book shows a world of evil with a tiny speck of luminescent good that somehow, miraculously endures.

Book Buying and the Budget

For a New Year's Resolution, the spouse and I have decided that we are going to strictly budget in 2008 -- that is, keep an record by month of what we plan to spend, and then record what we actually do spend. I'm interested to how this affects my book buying. I do buy a lot of books, but in all honesty, a significant percentage of them are impulse buys -- not really considered and planned choices. I was thinking of instituting a personal rule that I have to check books out of the library or at least see if the library has them before I buy them.
I buy most of my books at my local bookstore. They're not as cheap as Amazon, but I think it's valuable to support a local business, and I value the staff's recommendations and expertise.
Now -- oh joy, oh happy day -- it's my turn to pick the book for my book group this month. We rotate pics. There are two conditions: First, you can't get input from other people in the group. This is so we get a good variety of books without any picks "by committee." Second, no one can have read the book. We all come to the book fresh as new readers.
So with the budget in mind, I'm going to pick a book that I own but that I haven't read. Here are some of the possible contenders.:

• The Tin Roof Blowdown by James Lee Burke: Burke writes mystery novels set in Louisiana. This is his latest, set in post-Katrina New Orleans. It is supposed to be excellent with a literary bent, and I've never read him before.
  
• Mothers and Sons by Colm Toibin. Short stories set in contemporary Ireland; Toibin has superb reputation as a serious fiction writer. He recently wrote a fictional life of Henry James ("The Master") that got great reviews. The only thing holding me back from picking this one is that my last pick was a contemporary Irish novel -- The Sea by John Banville. I may pick Toibin anyway.
• The Ha Ha by Dave King. This is American fiction from 2005, about a brain-damaged Vietnam vet who befriends a little boy. The man doesn't speak, yet he narrates the novel. It's supposed to be a really good and has gotten great word of mouth.

I also have the following unread titles to consider:

• Generation X by Douglas Coupland: I've never read this novel released in 1991 that gave the name to my age cohort;
• Bayou Farewell by Mike Tidwell: Pre-Katrina nonfiction about Louisiana's vanishing coast line;
• A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia by Victor Pelevin: Short stories from one of Russia's best contemporary writers;
• New Stories from the South 2007 edited by Edward P. Jones: an anthology of last year's writing from Southerners.

So you can see I have quite a few choices. Feel free to comment and let me know what you think, excluding current book group members. I think I'm going to narrow it down to three books, then read the first chapters of all three, then pick one.
Update: This post has been amended. It originally said "The Ha Ha" was "about an autistic man who befriends a little boy." See comments for details.

John B. Kean and the spirit of Christmas

One of the places I visited in Ireland back in August was the Kerry Writers Museum. The county of Kerry is an amazing place: ocean views and verdant green lushness. Some people refer to it simply as "The Kingdom." One of Kerry's best known writers is John B. Keane; he has his own room at the writers' museum.
Keane wrote a collection of stories appropriately titled Irish Stories for Christmas. The first story just tickles me with the lovely spirit of Irish Catholicism. It seems a loyal housekeeper has just said goodnight to the hardworking country priest on Christmas when there's a knock at the door. It's two brothers who say their father is dying, and the priest must come immediately to hear the old man's confession. Grudgingly, the housekeeper wakes the priest, who goes out into the snowy night and hears the old man's sins. He returns and is back in bed when the housekeeper hears another knock. The brothers are back: Their Da forgot a sin; the priest needs to come back. And it's not just any sin, it's a serious sin -- fornication!
The housekeeper decides she cares more for the priest's rest than the old man going to hell. So she says to the brothers:

"Didn't I tell ye there was no fear of him," she drew herself upwards and re-folded her arms, "for don't it say in the Catechism that hell is closed for the twelve days of Christmas and anyone who dies during that period goes direct to heaven."
The brothers exchanged dubious glances.
"Tis there in black and white," the housekeeper assured them.
The brothers turned their backs on her and consulted in whispers. After several moments they faced her secondly.
"You're sure?" the smaller asked.
"Why would I say it if it was a lie?" she countered.

The story is titled "Twelve Days of Grace." PS The old man lives.
Merry Christmas!

Books and Music

I often get tempted to blog about music and movies, but then I remind myself that what little focus this blog has is about books, and I should stick to that. So with that disclaimer out of the way ...
The NYT had authors blog about music every so often, and this entry by Joshua Ferris caught my eye -- Joshua Ferris, author of the brilliant office novel Then We Came to the End.
Ferris likes Neutral Milk Hotel. I like Neutral Milk Hotel! (And you've maybe never heard of Neutral Milk Hotel.) They were a lovely '90s band, indie and somewhat experimental. Here's a very hazy YouTube video of lead singer Jeff Mangum singing my favorite NMH song "Naomi."

Except Alex from J-school still has my copy of Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. Why don't you send that back to me, Alex? And send me my Glyn Styler live album back while your at it.
OK, music entry over. Read Joshua Ferris' whole playlist here. With reading suggestions.
(And I'm not kidding about those CDs, Alex!)

Round Up of Reading

We were talking at our book group the other night about how nothing we've been reading lately has really grabbed us -- as if there's some sort of malaise or boring spirit hanging out for the last few weeks. So here's a grab bag of what I hope will lead me out of the wilderness.

• Our next pick is White Teeth, by Zadie Smith. I really liked her more recent novel On Beauty, a comic but poignant novel about two families striving for success in Ivy League academia. So I have high hopes for her debut novel about families in multicultural contemporary London.
• I read the introduction to New Stories from the South: 2007 -- The Year's Best, edited by Edward P. Jones, who wrote the remarkable novel The Known World. As a native Louisianian living in Florida, I like to think there's still some special connection between the South and literature. My fear is the connection is tenuous and loosening; perhaps this collection will renew my hope.
  
• I picked up an annotated edition of Spoon River Anthology. The introduction is excellent, but the notes tend toward the mundane, i.e. "This poem is based on Joe B. Blow, who Master's knew when he lived in ..." . I hate reading literature as secret code to the author's biography, matching up characters to people the author knew. That's got to be the most mundane, trivial way to read literature.
  
• For Christmas, I want a copy of the photography book Atchafalaya. I grew up on the lower Atchafalaya, which we called the Bayou Teche (pronounced Tesh). Hear that, Santa?
  

What makes for a good audio book

A good audio book makes commuting significantly more pleasant. Before my trip to Ireland, I listened to the dark but funny Angela's Ashes, read by author Frank McCourt, and got a big kick out of it. Next I selected Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, by Jared Diamond. This is a sort of environmental social history, looking at how ancient and modern societies manage their limited resources and either flourish or self-destruct. But the narrator was kind of stuffy, and had this kind of Is-it-New-England-or-British-or-what? accent that made me sleepy. So I gave up on that.
Now I have the marvelous Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman. Gaiman is the master of updating ancient myth to contemporary times (see his comic book series Sandman). In Anansi Boys, we meet the two sons of the ancient god of storytelling, Anansi. There's Spider, who inherited his father's godlike powers, and then there's Fat Charlie, who didn't. Fat Charlie grows up thinking he's just an ordinary guy, until his father dies and he meets his mystical brother, who's trying to steal Fat Charlie's girlfriend. Adventure and hijinks ensue! I read that Gaiman called his book a "magical-horror-thriller-ghost-romantic-comedy-family-epic," and that seems about right.
And the audiobook is fabulous. Narrator Lenny Henry can do it all: men and women, young and old, mortal and immortal. And he really savors the language, he sounds like he's having as much fun reading it as I'm having listening.

A Good Newspaper Column on Baseball

The best written newspaper opinion columns are fine things to read -- compact, persuasive, poetic. Check out this column written by Thomas Boswell of The Washington Post about The Mitchell Report, a damning report on baseball's steroids problem that was released this week. It starts:

Now, Roger Clemens joins Barry Bonds in baseball's version of hell. It's a slow burn that lasts a lifetime, then, after death, lingers as long as the game is played and tongues can wag. In baseball, a man's triumphs and his sins are immortal. The pursuit of one often leads to the other. And those misdeeds are seldom as dark as their endless punishment.

Read the whole thing here.

House of Mirth MAJOR SPOILER

Don't read this if you want to avoid knowing the ending of House of Mirth by Edith Wharton!




A new letter by Wharton bolsters the case that Lily Bart actually did commit suicide at the end of the novel. Read about it here.
Well duh! We had this discussion at my book group.
Saying Lily Bart didn't commit suicide is like watching the movie Thelma & Louise and saying at the end, "Well, the car could have landed, and they could have just driven off. We don't really know what happens at the end."
Right!

The Unread List

Last night, I walked around the house with the laptop cataloging all my unread books into LibraryThing. I won't say I captured every book, but I got a lot of them, certainly the recent ones. You can check out my list of unread books via LibraryThing here.
There are 62 books on this list as of this writing. The oldest entry is Saint Augustine by Garry Wills, which I cataloged in July 2006 (and probably bought before that). The most recent book I bought a few weeks ago: The Gathering, a modern Irish novel by Anne Enright that won the Booker Prize that I'm about halfway through.
So I have 62 books of 392 that are unread. That means my non-read rate is about 15 percent. This is pretty good considering the number of already-read books I've given away, the already-read books still uncataloged, etc.
So I feel like I want to make some progress on this list, but it is quite long. Intuitively, I feel like I want to first read Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Sean Wilsey's Oh The Glory of It All.
I also get that very depressing but inevitable feeling of never being able to finish reading everything that I want to. I try to accept that I'll always feel that way and get over it. It's not easy.

This one is for Howellsreader!

I was at the gym on Wednesday and the woman who got on the machine next to me was reading William Dean Howells! The book in question was A Hazard of New Fortunes.
(Why I'm so excited about this is that my good pal R.E. aka Howellsreader wrote her dissertation on Howells.)
So I asked the woman, why Howells? She said it was her book group's pick, and she wasn't so excited about it at first, but now she's into it.
She also said she read the literary introduction and was totally turned off by the introduction, so she skipped to the book itself, and that was much better. (Take that, high-falutin' litscrits!)
She said she liked the book generally. But, she was frustrated by the book because people back in those days never said what they really meant. So the characters have to spend a lot of time figuring out what the other characters really mean and then communicating in code about what they mean. She concluded it was just a different era then.
But she also said it was very readable, and a nice break from "plucky woman overcomes adversity and finds true love."
What do you say, Howellsreader?

Reading for Fun -- not just a good time

The New York Times reports that student test scores have declined as reading for fun has declined.

The data also showed that students who read for fun nearly every day performed better on reading tests than those who reported reading never or hardly at all.

Read it and weep.

On Paradise Lost and Katha Pollitt

Picking up again on the Paradise Lost theme ... I've been meditating on the appeal of Milton's Satan, the ultimate rebel. I submit the literary and (film) offspring of Satan is Hannibal Lector of Silence of the Lambs fame (a great movie and a good book). It's not that we admire Hannibal or want to be his friend. I think it's that, on some dark level we don't like to think about, we want to be Hannibal. Hannibal is god-like in the way he creates his own moral universe -- a place of beauty and terror -- and lives in it. And I doubt I'm the first one to make this point.
I was thinking about these themes after hearing a Katha Pollit interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air about Pollit's book "Learning to Drive." That essay, which appeared in The New Yorker, is one of my all-time favorites. Pollit is a heterosexual feminist, and "Learning to Drive" is about her discovering that her longtime lover has been cheating on her. She dumps him and -- at long last, as a lifelong New Yorker -- has to learn to drive. The essay is funny and smart and bittersweet.
So Pollitt talked to Gross about how her lover had told her he wasn't the monogamous type, and she thought he was speaking in the abstract or whatever, certainly not about her. Terry asked her about how she reacted:

Terry Gross: That's such a staple of American popular culture, you know -- the rambler, the man who can't be tied down, who's heels are a-wandering, and so on. So how did you respond to it?

Katha Pollit: I said, `Oh, well, you know, fidelity is very important to me, and I can understand if that's not the way you want to live, but that's the way I have to live. And the person I live with will have to live like that, blah, blah, blah.' You know? And the fact is that if somebody ever says, you know, `Sometimes I feel I'm not cut out for monogamy,' you should believe them. You should believe them.
But, you know, women have this thing--I don't like to speak in generalizations about men and women, although I do it as we all do--but I do think women have this penchant for ramblers and rovers. A lot of women do. And I've thought a lot about this and I write about this in one of the stories, that part of it is you think you can tame them, and that would be so great. That would show how wonderful you are and also how intense the love must be that could conquer that, right? But I came to the conclusion that there's another reason, and that's that you want to be them. You want to be that person. You want to be that rambler and rover, but, for various reasons, you don't let yourself do that, you repress that part of yourself. But if you can be with a person who's like that, that's, in a way, a way of acquiring that characteristic. So I think that women who are attracted to men like that often have that side of themselves that they've suppressed.

Gross: Are you describing yourself?

Pollitt: Maybe. I don't know. I'll have to find out as life goes on. I'm married again, so I'd better not have that quality.

Listen to the whole interview here. A pal says it's a stretch to equate Satan and serial killers to philandering men. My point here, though, is the way we weirdly and often secretly identify with things that are totally unlike ourselves, things that we find intellectually and/or morally abhorrent. And how that identification creates a dramatic tension. I believe it's better to be aware of that phenomenon and examine it than to go along blithely pretending it doesn't exist.

Mister Pip, a book trip, and making the tough calls

I'm going out of town this weekend, so I'll get some blissful airport reading time. The book is my current book group selection, Mister Pip, by Lloyd Jones. This is about a tropical island shattered by war, where the last Westerner remaining teaches the school children by reading Charles Dickens' Great Expectations.
When I get back from this trip, I need to do a serious catalog of all the books I've bought recently that I haven't yet read. I'll admit that my book buying has momentarily gotten a little bit out of hand. I have some really good books that I need to read. Hopefully I will rank these books to help myself decide what to read next, and I'll post the list here.
I badly need to do this before the annual book sale or things will get completely out of hand and there will be books all over the floor because the book shelves are all full.

Paradise Lost the easy way

I was browsing the children's section at a local bookstore when I ran across The Tale of Paradise Lost. The cover says it's "based on the poem by John Milton; retold by Nancy Willard."
I started thumbing through it, noticing the lovely illustrations by Judy Daly. I was thinking how references to "Paradise Lost" come up often in other books, both high and low literatures. (A cutting edge example would be Neil Gaman's Sandman graphic novel series.) And yes, I studied PL in high school, but not college, and the only thing I remembered about it was that Satan was considered the hero or anti-hero of the work (and why would Milton make it that way?), and that he and his angels fell for nine days before landing in Hell.
So I figured this book would be a pleasant way to catch up on a great work. Being honest about it, I don't see myself going back to the original poem (which you can read on the Internet here) anytime soon, outside of a university class.
Reading the Tale has been interesting, but I'm not sure I'd recommend it for kids. Sample passage:

Now let me tell you about the place God prepared for them. All around them roared floods of fire and whirlwinds of flame that gave no light but made the darkness darker. And there, big as a whale, stretched out on the burning lake, lay Satan. He turned to Beelzebub, his second in command. With the light of Heaven snuffed out of Beelzebub, Satan hardly recognized him.
"All is not lost," said Satan. "We still have the power of our hatred. I shall never bow before the Lord."
"Oh, Prince and Chief, what if God left us our courage only to make us suffer more?"

Nancy Willard has also written a children's book inspired by the works of poet William Blake, one of my all-time favorites. It's called A Visit to William Blake's Inn: Poems for Innocent and Experienced Travelers. I'll probably read that alongside the original, "Songs of Innocence and Experience."

Yann Martel at Sarasota Festival of Reading

As I posted earlier, J and I found out at the last minute that Yann Martel was going to be at the Sarasota Festival of Reading, so we hopped in the car to go check it out.
The following are my notes that I typed up right after we got back. But I should add that I did not take notes *during* the talk, so these are solely my impressions of his talk as a fan. Certainly the phrasing and word choices are my own. Yann Martel was so well-spoken on his points, and this is definitely a lesser rendition of what he had to say, but oh well. If you ever have the chance to see him talk, you should go. With that disclaimer out of the way ...
Yann Martel gave a great talk. First he discussed how Tomas was selected to be the artist for the Life of Pi illustrated edition. Then Tomas talked about his creative process. He said he works with two types of media: he paints in oils, then takes photographs of the paintings and further manipulates them on computer. (You can see some of the paintings here.)
During the course of the talk, Martel said the illustrated edition was the idea one of his professional associates (I think his publisher), and Yann said he immediately like the idea. He said that illustrated books for adults were quite common in the 19th century, and it's sad that in our times illustrated books are confined mostly to children's books. He said he really loved Tomas' paintings because they are all done from Pi's point of view, so we become Pi, and we never see what Pi looks like. Pi is not described in the novel, he said, so that's for us to imagine even in the illustrated edition.
(Beware, SPOILERS AHEAD.)
Then he spoke generally about the book. He said that Life of Pi is essentially two stories. They are both about a boy who is shipwrecked. In one story there are animals, in another there are not. In the end, the reader has to decide which story to believe, which is the better story.
As we read Life of Pi, Yann said he was testing us. You begin with the premise of a boy who is shipwrecked. OK, that's believable. Then we find out the boy is trapped on a life raft with a tiger. The author makes us believe that. Kind of crazy, but we go along. Then we find the boy and the tiger are blind, and they run into a boat with another blind person. Maybe that's not so believable. By the time we get to the island of the carnivorous plants, he's really pushing us to belive the unbelievable. He said the island is the final test for the reader. If we believe the island, then we have suspended our rationality and are proceeding on faith. At the end of the book, we are forced to choose. The story with the animals is less rational, but is it the better story? Are we prepared to suspend our rationality and believe the better story?
He talked about his background as a philosophy student and pondering the big questions. He said that he felt there was a important part of life we needed to perceive that was beyond our rational powers, beyond our concrete senses. He said rationality is a powerful tool, but it is limited, and it doesn't get at that unseen world. The disciplines that help us comprehend the unseen are art and religion, but they have been diminished in contemporary times by science and capitalism.
He also talked about his newest work, which will be about the Holocaust. He said he has no personal connection to the event, except as an artist, and he was gripped by the way the Holocaust resists attempts to deal with it artistically, except for the memoir. There are exceptions (he mentioned Maus and Life is Beautiful), but even those are highly confessional. So he began to write about the Holocaust using metaphor, and the fiction work features a money and a donkey. (He remarked wryly that he would now be typecast as the writer who deals with animals.) As he was working on the fiction, he found that there were issues he couldn't deal with in fiction, so he began writing an essay, and it grew to be the length of the novel. So the essay will be included in the new work. He said it would be packaged as a flip book: On one side of the book, the novel, but if you turn the book over and upside down, that will be the essay. He said the working title is "The 21st Century Shirt," and he hoped it would be done soon.
Then he took questions, and the first woman to ask, asked about the movie. (Argh! I hate that question.) He said a movie was in the works, and he had read the script and was quite pleased. But he also said it was a difficult movie to film -- with a child star, animals and being filmed on the water -- so he wasn't sure when it would be done.
Another woman asked him how he had written Life of Pi, and he talked a little about that, especially about making Richard Parker a tiger. For awhile, he had considered an elephant or a rhinoceros, but ultimately decided he had to go with a carnivore. The idea of Pi drying sea kelp day after day for herbivores just seemed too much.
He answered a few other questions as well, but I don't recall them ...
This is my summary of his talk, but I should add that he spoke very beautifully, in complex nuanced sentences, and he had lovely manners. Some authors I've seen come off as arrogant or annoyed to have to deal with their dumb fans, but he seemed really genial and open. I went to the book signing afterward, and he and Tomas were both lovely.
It was a wonderful day at the Sarasota Festival of Reading. I'm so glad I went!

Sarasota Festival

Sarasota Festival
Originally uploaded by spoonreader

My friend J and I went to the Sarasota Festival of Reading to see Yann Martel speak about the illustrated edition of Life of Pi. I'll be writing more in depth about that soon, but meanwhile, here are some other bits from the festival.
Yann Martel was a headliner, but not the top headliner. That honor would go to CNN's Lou Dobbs and the actor Gene Wilder. (Martel was scheduled after Wilder and before Dobbs.)
Who knew Gene Wilder had so many fans? More than 1,200 people showed up to see him discuss his new novel, "My French Whore." I know it was that many because the volunteers told me that was the venue's capacity, and I watched them turn away many of his disappointed fans because the room was full. I'll say it again: Who knew?
The Dobbs scene was a circus. People wearing shirts and carrying signs that said "I love English," and "Illegal Aliens" with a red "bust" sign over it. Also peace protesters beating on drums and carrying signs that said, "No Person is Illegal," etc.
I brought my new digital camera, but I am no photojournalist. My photos of Yann Martel are pitiful. The best photos I took were of Lou Dobbs, who ended up talking to the people standing right next to me. (I did *not* chase him down for a photo. I'm not a Dobbs fan; I don't even have cable.)
So here's my mediocre photo of Lou Dobbs, for you spoonreader fans who are also avid celebrity watchers

Anne Rice on Her Body of Work

I read Anne Rice's book Interview with the Vampire when I was about 14. My sister had read it after Sting's song "Moon over Bourbon Street," which was inspired by the novel. The book made a huge impression on me, to the point that when the Queen of the Damned came out, my high school friends and I read the introduction aloud to each other, and thought we were the coolest. ("I am the Vampire Lestat," it begins. "I'm immortal. More or less. ...") I was a bit of a Goth during that period, in case you were wondering, and I've still got a good bit of Goth in me. I no longer wear black eyeliner, however.
I was thinking of all this recently because Anne Rice has a fascinating post on her website about her body of work, both pre- and post-vampires. She wrote many, many books about vampires, witches and other occult phenomena. I read a lot of them -- most but not all -- and some of them were really good. But to me, her books dropped off in quality significantly as the years went on, or maybe I just lost interest.
Recently, though, Rice went through a conversion experience, returned to her Catholic faith, and decided to devote herself to writing about the life of Christ -- in the first person. Not an easy task, I'm sure. The first book came out last year, "Christ: Out of Egypt." It was like a wonderful return to form -- gripping and interesting and moving and well-done, just like the old vampire books. So count me in as a fan of both her new and old work.
Interestingly, Anne Rice posted to her web site recently defending her "dark fiction." I'm going to point you to the site and let you read it yourself; it's worth reading in its entirety. She also discusses her conception of art, the way she views her own success, and her defense of plot and action. (Though you'll have to scroll down past her endorsement of Hillary Clinton.) Here's one her key points, to my way of thinking:

Much could be said, and has been said, about all of my works. I would like to say that the one thing which unites them is the theme of the moral and spiritual quest. A second theme, key to most of them, is the quest of the outcast for a context of meaning, whether that outcast is an 18th century castrato opera singer, or a young boy of mixed blood coming of age in ante-bellum New Orleans, or a person forced into a monstrous predatory existence like the young vampire, Lestat. For me, these themes are inherently significant and noble themes. They are worthy of exploration; they are evocative; they can and do reflect the deepest questions that humans face.

Read her entire essay here. (Warning, her web site features music that will start when you click onto her web page.)

Ferris' Then We Came to the End

Then We Came to the End was one of my favorite books this year, now it's been nominated for the National Book Award. It's a novel told in the rare first-person plural -- "we" -- about layoffs at a Chicago ad agency. It's funny and accessible, and I love how it gets at existential questions like: What does it mean to belong to a group? What do people have to sacrifice to fit into the group -- the freedom to do what they want, or to do what they think is right? And what do they gain from the group-- the top two contenders being the comfort of camaraderie and the increased power of group effort?

Ferris was interviewed by the National Book Foundation. He said a couple of things that I thought were really interesting. Read the whole interview here.

BAJ: In a country such as ours, where reading is in such a state of crisis, what is the role of the fiction writer? Does being a finalist for such a prestigious award affect how you view yourself in that role?

JF: I take a cue from Vladimir Nabokov on this question: the role of the fiction writer anywhere is to bring delight to the reader and nothing more. I can do as little—which is to say very, very little—about the country’s woeful state of reading as I can about the country’s woeful state of geopolitics. All I can do is try my best to provide the greatest amount of artistic delight for that reader or two who decides to follow me where my instinct and curiosity take me. I do right by that reader if I do right by myself, and I do that by being attentive to what’s interesting, peculiar, funny, eternal, and by being attentive to words.

I love this answer, and I think it's right on the money. It reminds me of what Flannery O'Connor used to say, that the job of the Catholic writer is to be a good writer. No one is going to attend to your writing if it isn't believable and moving in the first place, she said. (Nabokov is a hole in my literary resume; I haven't read him.) I also like that Ferris adds about doing right by the reader by doing right by himself -- kind of a literary Golden Rule -- so he's balancing the delight of the reader with his own intellectual/aesthetic engagement, which precludes writing in some kind of manipulative way to thrill the masses.

BAJ: What drew you to the story?

JF: Probably the challenge of it. Tell a story with countless characters from the point of view of a monolithic failing advertising agency—go! Also, the challenge of trying to turn an experience—I worked in advertising—into genuine fiction. Not veiled autobiography, but an honest sublimation of mundane experience into something deserving of a reader’s limited time on earth. And finally I was fascinated by the behemoth structure of a corporation—the hierarchies, the coded messages, the power struggles. I thought such a pervasive and inscrutable place merited the sustained attention a novelist has to give to his or her subject. The characters in Then We Came to the End are under the constant threat of layoffs, and that creates a specific group dynamic: the group’s unquenchable scrutiny of itself. I thought it would be fun to watch that group dynamic implode.

I love that he says "deserving of a rader's limited time on earth." I hate to sound like a snoot, but it's very depressing when I read a book and it's only marginally OK. I think, "There's two hours of my life I'll never get back." On the other hand, that doesn't mean I always want to read something ponderous and serious. I like funny books because life is funny.
I'm re-reading "Then We Came to the End" because I'm fascinated by how it handles the idea of community. I grew up in a small town in Louisiana, which I left behind many years ago, and sometimes that makes me sad and sometimes that makes me happy. I have real mixed feeling about small-town life, as a lot of people do. (My beloved Spoon River Anthology tackles the heart of this conflict; see my previous post on this topic here.) But in the modern world, the most pertinent community for educated professionals tends to be the work place, and a lot of literature either ignores that or minimizes it. I like Ferris' book because he takes on the workplace in all its weirdness.

George Saunders and "The Braindead Megaphone"

A lot of books I read are just OK, so it's like a lovely little gem when I read one I really, really love. That was the case with The Braindead Megaphone by George Saunders. Here's my short review for the books page:

Saunders' unique aesthetic carries over to his first book of journalism, The Braindead Megaphone, where he reports on illegal immigration at the U.S.-Mexico border, the awesome greed and friendliness of international tourism in Dubai, and a meditating teenager in Nepal.

Saunders writes about American fiction like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and, quixotically, the young adult classic Johnny Tremain. His conception of narrative is as complex as a difficult fiction writer like David Foster Wallace, but his own writing style is marvelously direct, much like that of Kurt Vonnegut, whom he praises as a model. He describes Vonnegut's books as a sort of black box that readers enter. "The writer gets no points just because what's inside the box bears some resemblance to 'real life.' What's important is that something undeniable and nontrivial happens to the reader between entry and exit."

The nontrivial thing that happens with Saunders is we contemplate the big question he's trying to answer, something along the lines of, How are human beings supposed to live in the world? The final piece is a tongue-in-cheek press release from the organization People Reluctant to Kill for an Abstraction: "At precisely nine in the morning, working with focus and stealth, our entire membership succeeded in simultaneously beheading no one. At nine thirty, we embarked upon Phase II, during which our entire membership simultaneously did not force a single man to simulate sex with another man. At ten, Phase III began, during which not a single one of us blew himself/herself up in a crowded public place."

He concludes: "We, in fact, outnumber you. Though you are louder, though you create a momentary ripple on the water of life, we will endure, and prevail."

I like that the book was published directly to paperback, so it's not too expensive -- $9.80 on Powell's for goodness sake!
My mom asked me recently, "What's Powell's?" Well, it's online bookseller much like Amazon. But in my opinion they are more supportive of book culture than Amazon, so I'm linking to them more. Not that there's anything bad or wrong about Amazon, I just like Powell's better. And actually, I buy most of my books at Tampa's independent bookstore, Inkwood Books. Check out their cute little bookshop here.
So I was browsing at Inkwood and ran across the Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers, featuring an interview with ... George Saunders! So I picked that up and I'm now looking forward to that too.
In fact, I'm looking forward to reading lots of the interviews. I'm surprised at how many I've read: Zadie Smith (loved On Beauty), John Banville (I picked The Sea for my book group before I left for Ireland), Ian McEwan (I read Saturday), Edward P. Jones (The Known World is probably the best American novel published in the last 10 years), Marilynne Robinson (Gilead might give "The Known World" a run for its money) and Haruki Murakami (how beautiful and trippy was Kafka on the Shore?). OK, I'll stop now. You get the picture.
Now I know what else you're thinking. Spoonreader, look at this long post you've created on a Friday morning! Well I've got a new computer with wireless, so la la la la (singing and skipping). Perhaps this will increase production here at spoonreader.com.

My personal library

Every time a new book comes into my house, an old one must go out. Why? I only have three bookshelves. And maintaining a simple, clutter-free home where I enjoy spending my time is more important to me than keeping every book I've ever read.
I accept this, but it's still hurts to say good-bye. I try to avoid it, stacking books on tabletops and even on the floor. This goes on for a month or two before I become disgusted and approach the shelves ready to purge. Which should go? Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky? Lenin's Tomb by David Remnick? Or The Quality of Life Report by Meghan Daum? (All actual books recently purged.) These are good books, so it's not a question of quality. Instead, I use two criteria to decide which books to pitch. Is the book going to be difficult to find at a local library? And do I see myself reading this book for a second time, ever? If the answer to both question is no, then out it goes.
(Obviously, I do not throw these books away. They get donated to the local library or given to friends.)
In this way, I have built my own personal canon. Which books will never be pitched? Hard to say with certainty. But off the top of my head, I would put the following random books high up on the list: East of Eden by John Steinbeck. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. Pretty Birds by Scott Simon. Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris. The Secret History by Donna Tartt. The list goes on ....

More Irish books

Between my latest library school class and writing reviews for the paper (latest one here), my efforts on poor spoonreader have been sporadic at best.
I have been reading though, making my way through some of the books I bought in Ireland.

• Irish Tales of Mystery and Magic: a spooky-funny book about the ancients warrior clans of Ireland, with whimsical illustrations.
• The Playboy of the Western World: a seminal play by John Synge that caused riots when it premiered in 1907 because of its comic treatment of patricide and its mention of women in their shifts (i.e. slips).
• Hellfire: a contemporary novel about the drug trade among working-class Irish, with a female narrator, gypsy fortune-tellers and maybe ghosts. I just started this one so I'm still getting oriented.

I'm also thinking about overhauling spoonreader, maybe changing the focus or shutting it down and starting a new blog? I've been writing this blog for three years, which is kind of hard to believe. I'd like to post more often if I'm going to keep doing it. Maybe I need to just do that. Your thoughts?

Trip to Ireland

Glendalough
Originally uploaded by spoonreader

My 10-day trip to Ireland last month was spectacular, a real book lovers' treat. I'm working on some writing about that and will let you know when I'm done. Meanwhile, email me for my Flickr link if you'd like to see all the photos.
One favorite stop was the Martello Tower at Sandycove, where James Joyce lived for a brief time and the setting for the opening scene of Ulysses. ("Stately, plump Buck Mulligan ...")
Another was Glendalough, the ruins of an ancient monastic settlement founded by St. Kevin, circa 500 A.D. (This one really had me thinking of How the Irish Saved Civiliation.) Here's my favorite photo of the trip from Glendalough.

Elvis is Titanic

Here's a link to my review of Elvis is Titanic by Ian Klaus. It begins:

Ian Klaus' slim memoir of his time in Iraq, Elvis Is Titanic, stands out as one of the few civilian memoirs to come out of the Iraq War thus far. Klaus decided to swim against the tide by going to Iraq in 2005, at age 26, to try to make a difference by teaching English. Klaus also happens to be the former boyfriend of Chelsea Clinton, a fact that is neither here nor there - or even mentioned - until the end of the book.

Read more here.