Monday, February 28th, 2011
This week’s issue of The New Yorker features an excerpt from The Pale King
, the posthumous novel by David Foster Wallace that will be published in April. The excerpt starts like this:
Every whole person has ambitions, objectives, initiatives, goals. This one particular boy’s goal was to be able to press his lips to every square inch of his own body.
His arms to the shoulders and most of his legs beneath the knee were child’s play. After these areas of his body, however, the difficulty increased with the abruptness of a coastal shelf. The boy came to understand that unimaginable challenges lay ahead of him. He was six.
Monday, February 28th, 2011
A weekly roundup of noteworthy reviews from other sources.
Michael Dirda reaches early and often for the top-shelf bag of references in praising We, the Drowned, Carsten Jensen’s novel about a century in the life of a Danish port city. He compares it to One Hundred Years of Solitude, Buddenbrooks, and Blood Meridian, and its author to Hamlet and Kierkegaard. So, yeah, maybe this one deserves a shot. Dirda concludes that it “isn’t just a book about Danish sailors, it’s a novel about what one must call — and forgive the grandiose phrase — the sorrowful human condition.” . . . Malcolm Jones is spellbound by a new Library of America collection of primary sources from the Civil War: “As the testimony accumulates, a profound portrait of a nation in crisis emerges, conjuring the epic quality of the conflict and its consequences as almost nothing before it. It is both mesmerizing and deeply troubling, and it will forever deepen the way you see this central chapter in our history.” . . . Thomas Mallon reviews the letters of Bruce Chatwin: “Throughout the letters he mailed from Kabul and Kenya and Katmandu, one can find fast, sharp renderings of misadventures and mores: ‘I’m afraid that most traditional Russian hospitality is a deep-seated desire to see foreigners drunk.’ And yet, this great traveler was probably too much on the move to become one of the great letter-writers.” . . . Rupert Thomson reviews an “eccentric, candid,” “riotously funny,” “profoundly moving,” and “quintessentially — and unashamedly — English” book about two brothers that might or might not blend fiction with its facts. “Barrow has a wonderfully restrained or concealed tone — often tongue-in-cheek, but never arch. His use of anecdote is both masterly and thriftless; he takes episodes around which less skillful writers would have built entire chapters and delivers them in a few perfectly weighted sentences.” . . . Raymond Tallis reviews the latest in books about consciousness: “[T]hese two books have greater merits than many contenders in an overcrowded field, though they fail to give a coherent neurological account of even the most basic elements of consciousness.” . . . Adam Kirsch reviews a book about the different ways Jews and Christians approach and interpret the Bible, and the “disparity between Americans’ absolute faith in the Bible and their evident ignorance of it.” . . . The always incisive Jim Holt considers at length Nicholas Carr’s book about how the Internet may be reshaping our brains for the worse: “He fails to clinch his case that the computer is making us stupider. Can he convince us that it is making us less happy?”
Tuesday, February 22nd, 2011
The short list of finalists for the Diagram Prize for the Oddest Book Title of 2010 has been announced. For those of you unfamiliar with the UK-based prize, which has been around since 1978, past winners include timeless gems like Oral Sadism and the Vegetarian Personality, Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice, Developments in Dairy Cow Breeding: New Opportunities to Widen the Use of Straw, and The Big Book of Lesbian Horse Stories.
I can’t say any of this year’s finalists please me as much as my favorite of last year, Governing Lethal Behavior in Autonomous Robots. Here are the six titles on the short list:
8th International Friction Stir Welding Symposium Proceedings
The Generosity of the Dead
The Italian’s One-night Love Child
Managing a Dental Practice the Genghis Khan Way
Myth of the Social Volcano
What Color Is Your Dog?
You can vote here. Genghis Khan has what looks like an insurmountable lead (depending on how many people have voted already), but I think Welding Symposium is more in keeping with the award’s spirit.
Monday, February 21st, 2011
OK, this is getting serious. The Tournament of Books (for which I’m lucky enough to be a judge this year) tips off on March 7, and a poster of the brackets with first-round match-ups is now available. Begin your office pools now. . . . Salon recently named the winners of its first Good Sex Awards. As Laura Miller once wrote, “It doesn’t take much nerve to stand up in front of a boozy crowd and read sex passages from other people’s books in a mocking tone of voice while everybody sneers and groans. Doing the opposite, however, amounts to admitting that you’ve found something arousing, and thereby risking the British equivalent of the ninth circle of hell: embarrassment.” True enough. The four judges (Miller, Maud Newton, Walter Kirn, and Louis Bayard) discuss the process here, and you can find the first-place excerpt here. . . . At the Guardian, William Skidelsky profiles historian Niall Ferguson, who seems intent on ruffling the feathers of those who would read the Guardian: “Something that’s seldom appreciated about me is that I am in sympathy with a great deal of what Marx wrote, except that I’m on the side of the bourgeoisie.” . . . A month’s worth of literary facts from the Reading Ape. An example: “Leather ball beats leatherbound: the total revenue for the NFL was $8 billion in 2009. The total book market in 2009 was $5.1 billion.” . . . Carlene Bauer talks to Joyce Carol Oates about Oates’ new memoir, about the death of her husband, and situates Oates among this country’s female writers: “In the book’s unashamed display of feelings, sometimes so strong that they may not make sense to anyone else, in her insistence on the exclamation point, she reminds us that very few American women fiction writers have been acclaimed for making outsize emotions their terrain.” . . . D.G. Myers considers Nicole Krauss’ Great House and its vision of the Jew as “the symbol of man’s unhappiness, his estrangement from a world that (only recently) he has discovered is monstrous and bitter.” . . . A new site asks acclaimed designers to list the books they find “personally important, meaningful, and formative — books that have shaped their values, their worldview, and their ideas about design.” . . . Alexander Nazaryan says the bankruptcy of Borders is just a larger publishing bill coming due: “If there is hope for publishing, it is with modest presses and modest books, putting out titles for small but loyal audiences. But that’s not something that’s going to warm the heart of Penguin’s CEO.”
Wednesday, February 16th, 2011
FSG’s Work in Progress site is featuring an excerpt from Geoff Dyer’s forthcoming book of essays and reviews. It concerns his diminished reading habits as he ages. A piece:
[M]y declining ability to read is itself the product of having read a fair bit. If reading heightens your responses, shapes your idea of the world, gives you a sense of the purpose of life, then it is not surprising if, over time, reading should come to play a proportionately smaller role in the context of the myriad possibilities it has opened up. The more thoroughly we have absorbed its lessons, the less frequently we need to refer to the user’s manual. After a certain point subjective inwardness becomes self-rather than textually generated. Of course there is more to learn, more to read, but whereas, when I was a teenager, each new book represented an almost overwhelming addition to what I knew and felt, each new book now adds a smaller increment to the sum of knowledge.
(Via The Millions)
Tuesday, February 15th, 2011
A weekly roundup of noteworthy reviews from other sources.
Dwight Garner reviews three new volumes of work by Elizabeth Bishop, published to coincide with the centenary of her birth, including a volume of letters between her and her editors at The New Yorker: “It is repetitive, filled with dreary bookkeeping details and overly polite give-and-take. At the same time, there are those — and, full disclosure, I am among them — for whom this kind of shop talk from an adored poet and her serious editors is uncut catnip.” . . . Manjit Kumar reviews Philip Ball’s Unnatural, “a fascinating and impressive cultural history of anthropoeia — the centuries of myths and tales about the artificial creation of people. Ball explores what these fables reveal about contemporary views on life, humanity and technology as modern science has turned the fantasy of making people into reality.” . . . Damon Linker says a new book that explains religion through its ancestral origins is “an example of evolutionary psychology at its very worst: shifting abruptly between experimental data about modern civilized human beings and groundless speculation about our evolutionary ancestors; and reducing all human motivation to the desire to get laid; and presupposing what it seeks to prove.” . . . Arnold Hunt considers the history of the King James Bible. . . . Tom Shone reviews a “swift, smart, scrupulous” biography of Humphrey Bogart. . . . Diane Johnson assesses T.C. Boyle’s new novel about endangered species in California: “Though he’s been writing for a long time about America’s problems, Boyle usually does so more covertly, in a comic voice with comedy’s concealed agenda. Here, though, there’s the note of the preacher in despair that has surfaced sometimes in past novels.” . . . Matthew Hunte reviews Justin Taylor’s new novel, which concerns an anarchist commune that founds a new religion.
Wednesday, February 9th, 2011
Laura Miller writes about the recent resurgence of the debate about the representation of women in books and book reviews:
There’s really no hard data on how many books by male authors are read by women readers and vice versa, nor are we likely to ever see any. But try this: Ask six bookish friends — three men and three women — to list their favorite authors or favorite books, without explaining your motivation. Then see how many male authors the women list and whether the men list any female authors at all. . . .
Conventional wisdom among professionals in the children’s book business is that while girls will read books about either boys or girls, boys only want to read about boys. Could it be that this bias extends into adulthood, with the preference among boys for male characters evolving into the preference among men for male authors? Or it could be that many male readers simply doubt that women have anything interesting to say.
It’s true that a list of my favorite writers is male-dominated, but it’s also true that there are female writers I love, and I certainly don’t doubt women have anything interesting to say. In any case, how people say things is often as important to me as what they say, this being writing and all.
I have further thoughts about all this, but they need more examination and some research. Perhaps I’ll do some of the anecdotal investigating Miller recommends and report back.
