Category Archives: Links

Read and understand: Doris Lessing on books

December 17, 2007 By in Books, Links Tags: , , , ,

Doris Lessing‘s Nobel Lecture is up at The Guardian:

Some much-publicised new writers haven’t written again, or haven’t written what they wanted to, meant to. And we, the old ones, want to whisper into those innocent ears: “Have you still got your space? Your soul, your own and necessary place where your own voices may speak to you, you alone, where you may dream. Oh, hold on to it, don’t let it go.”

This would also be a good time to go back to Orhan Pamuk, Seamus Heaney, and J.M. Coetzee’s Nobel lectures. Notice the four have in common: a reverence and love for books, and their underlying power, knowledge.

(Hat tip to The Elegant Variation.)

These are the best?

December 11, 2007 By in Books, Culture, Links Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

I’ve looked at the New York Times‘ 100 Notable Books of 2007 with special attention to the fiction and can’t help but wonder if this is the best we’ve got. I discussed The Abstinence Teacher here and here, but Perrotta was better live than in print. The Bad Girl never lived at all; Harry Potter might have improved with age but I’m not about to find out. House of Meetings was better as history and essay than novel and The Savage Detectives overrated. I read five pages of Tree of Smoke in a bookstore and suspect B.R. Myers‘ slam is probably deserved. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union was likable but not lovable.

Of the books listed, On Chesil Beach deserved its place, as did The Indian Clerk (more on that in the next few days). Of the ones I discussed in the paragraph above, a few were outright bad, but most were as The Indian Clerk says of the novels of Henry James: “[…] I admire them yet I cannot love them” (italics in original). So I feel about most picks from The New York Times, which, even if I admire them, I can’t really see how they would inspire love.

That brings us to the New York Times‘ 10 best books, with two fiction books of limited interest to me, two already discussed, and one that I actually plan to read: Joshua Ferris’ Then We Came to the End. The nonfiction was better, with Jeffrey Toobin’s The Nine and Alex Ross’ The Rest is Noise, a book en route after I read a chapter online.

These year end lists—there are too many to bother linking to most—remind me how important the Everyman’s Library and Library of America are, as both feature excellent quality in thought and production; I suspect that I, like many others, will return to the books in their catalogs long after most copies of Harry Potter have been pulped and resurrected as grocery bags.

EDIT: Added a link to The Indian Clerk.

A better press corps?

December 7, 2007 By in Books, Culture, Links Tags: , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

Two days ago I posted about CEOs’ libraries, which included one quote apparently made up by the reporter, Harriet Rubin: “Ken Lopez, a bookseller in Hadley, Mass., says it is impossible to put together a serious library on almost any subject for less than several hundred thousand dollars.” Mr. Lopez quickly responded to an e-mail query about the subject, and I’m copying his note in full:

That was a very controversial statement in that article and it’s only somewhat incidental that I never actually said it. What I said went more or less along the lines of this:

She: [After we had talked for a half an hour or so about books, book collecting, and book collectors…] So how much does it cost to put together a book collection, anyway?

Me: That’s an impossible question to answer. There are too many variables.

She: Right. I understand. So how much does it cost to put a book collection together?

Me: [sigh] There’s no way to say. All collections are different. [Now thinking of a bone I can throw her, even though it’s a stupid question…] Well, in a lot of collections, if the field is not too narrow, you find the following characteristics: there are a large number of books that pertain to the field that are relatively easy to acquire and therefore not very expensive. But there are a lot of them. Then there is also a much smaller number of books that are very scarce, very important or desirable, and very expensive. If you try to assemble a collection in a field where there are a lot of books, and you try to get all or almost all of the relatively accessible and not-very-expensive books, and you also try to get all or most of the not-easily-accessible and much-more-expensive books, you could very easily end up spending a couple of hundred thousand dollars or more.

She: Thank you. [Hangs up.]

I wouldn’t swear that that’s a verbatim transcript, but that’s pretty much how it went.

By the time the quote appeared (and I was in the boondocks of northwestern Argentina when article was printed and the controversy about that supposed statement erupted), I barely remembered talking to her. The giveaway, though, was “my” use of the word “impossible”: I doubt I’ve used that word once in the last 40 years. I just don’t talk, write, or think that way. So I took a lot of grief for having supposedly said that, but it was just another case of a writer getting what she (thought she) needed to make her story “work.” Joan Didion said it in “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” that writers are always selling somebody out. She may not have been talking about misquoting per se, but it certainly fits this case.

A very reasonable response! The situation Mr. Lopez describes makes sense, and I apologize for my snarky comment yesterday: “How does Mr. Lopez define ‘serious?’ The answer might in part be ‘expensive,’ judging from his line of business: ‘We deal in rare books, specializing in modern literary first editions.'” That was undeserved, and I’m doubly impressed for the allusion to Joan Didion.

This incident relates to the bad- and wrong-press phenomenon I’ve seen covered elsewhere. Language Log has been finding misquotes and misstatements since I began reading it a few years ago, and they’re particularly keen on misused studies. Econoblogger and Economics Professor Brad DeLong has long (sorry, I couldn’t resist) been asking, “Why Oh Why Can’t We Have A Better Press Corps?” It’s a good if rhetorical question, and he’s compiled too many examples of professional journalist foolishness. The misquotes and bad science are particularly strange these days, because an army of interconnected bloggers can now point out examples of press speciousness or outright mendacity. When something doesn’t smell right, as happened with the fake quote attributed to Mr. Lopez, it’s relatively easy to find the truth.

To be sure, newspapers and magazines do an admirable job of getting most stories right most of the time, but it makes obviously ludicrous statements like the one attributed to Mr. Lopez all the more galling because I want to trust the media. When I can’t, I’m disappointed, and more likely to be skeptical next time.

On crime fiction

December 6, 2007 By in Books, Culture, Links Tags: , , , , , ,

Perhaps C.E.O libraries contain more crime fiction than they used to, as James Fallows writes today what many readers have probably thought:

Like most people who enjoy spy novels and crime fiction, I feel vaguely guilty about this interest. I realize that crime fiction is classy now, and has taken over part of the describing-modern-life job that high-toned novelists abdicated when they moved into the universities. My friend Patrick Anderson*, who has reviewed mysteries for years at the Washington Post, recently published a very good book to this effect: The Triumph of the Thriller. Still, you feel a little cheesy when you see a stack of lurid mystery covers sitting next to the bed.

So I’ve figured out a way to tell the books I can feel good about reading from the ones I should wean myself from. The test is: can I remember something from the book a month later — or, better, six months or a year on. This is the test I apply to “real” fiction too: surprisingly often, a great book is great because it presents a character, a mood, a facet of society, a predicament that you hadn’t thought of before reading the book but that stays with you afterwards.

I’ve never loved crime fiction but respect the best of it. The idea of genre fiction has always seemed suspect to me, as my fundamental test of a novel regardless of the section of the bookstore in which it sits is, “Does it move me?” The definition of “move” has many entries, but if it achieves this fundamental task I don’t care what’s on its cover.

Fallows is depressingly accurate with his barb about “high-toned novelists abdicated when they moved into the universities,” although I’m well aware of exceptions to this comment, which echoes some the issues raised by A Reader’s Manifesto. He goes on to list a number of his favorites, none of which I’ve read except for A Simple Plan, an excellent novel I highly recommend. It spawned the eponymous movie, which is also excellent and forgotten.

CEO libraries

December 5, 2007 By in Books, Life, Links Tags: , , , ,

I normally expect to find book discussions in the Books or Arts sections of The New York Times, but last July they ran an article in the Business section called “C.E.O. Libraries Reveal Keys to Success.” A friend reminded me of it and by extension its most ludicrous assertion: “Ken Lopez, a bookseller in Hadley, Mass., says it is impossible to put together a serious library on almost any subject for less than several hundred thousand dollars.” What? Several hundred thousand dollars? How does Mr. Lopez define “serious?” The answer might in part be “expensive,” judging from his line of business: “We deal in rare books, specializing in modern literary first editions.”

I sent him a link to this post and my query about his definition, and if I hear back I’ll post his response.

UPDATE: I posted Mr. Lopez’s response here, and, as too often happens, things are not as they appeared.

Charles Taylor on A Reader’s Manifesto

December 2, 2007 By in Books, Links Tags: , , , ,

Charles Taylor not only likes A Reader’s Manifesto—he thinks it is an essential part of a critic’s library:

A Reader’s Manifesto by B.R. Myers — It says something about the blood drawn by Myers’ argument for lucidity in literary prose that the writers who attacked it found it necessary to falsify it to make their (rigged) points. Not one of them has explained why, if Myers is arguing for dumbed-down prose, he extols Conrad, Woolf, Faulkner, and Joyce. Though their insularity does make a pretty good argument for how easily literature could go the way of the spinnet in the parlor.

Charles Taylor on A Reader's Manifesto

December 2, 2007 By in Books, Links Tags: , , , ,

Charles Taylor not only likes A Reader’s Manifesto—he thinks it is an essential part of a critic’s library:

A Reader’s Manifesto by B.R. Myers — It says something about the blood drawn by Myers’ argument for lucidity in literary prose that the writers who attacked it found it necessary to falsify it to make their (rigged) points. Not one of them has explained why, if Myers is arguing for dumbed-down prose, he extols Conrad, Woolf, Faulkner, and Joyce. Though their insularity does make a pretty good argument for how easily literature could go the way of the spinnet in the parlor.

Stoner

November 29, 2007 By in Books, Links Tags: , , , , ,

I read John Williams’ Stoner after learning of it from a nook in the web I’ve since forgotten. Like many of the New York Review of Books Press editions, it has a small, ardent following that I don’t care to join. Only The Dud Avocado is so marvelous that I need to frequently remind others of its virtues.

Now Stephen Elliott writes the post on Stoner that I considered writing, although I didn’t love Stoner as Elliott does. But I respect and admire it, especially because of the love it inspires from the people who show how much passion they, like the protagonist, have for literature. Check out this summary for more examples. I don’t perceive the redemptive aspects of Stoner some critics have observed, yet it was also clear and cold and strong, like vodka from the freezer, and there is no mistaking the sensation of having experienced a book. Distinct memories of the sensation it inspired remain with me when other works I remembering liking better have become fuzzy and gray over time.

The cave

November 13, 2007 By in Links, Tools Tags: , , , ,

My cave is where I work and play, and this description of a nerd’s desired habitat is the best I’ve read:

My Cave is my intellectual home. My kitchen is where I eat, my bed is where I sleep, and my Cave is where I think. Everyone has some sort of Cave; just follow them around their house. It might be a garage full of tools or a kitchen full of cookware, but there is a Cave stashed somewhere in the house.

(The link came from Daring Fireball.)

You’ve probably seen my cave: I posted it here, in writing space, although the linked picture is an old one. Follow its links if you want to see where other book nerds operate. I’ll get around to taking a picture of my more recent setup, as the new version is cleaner, faster, less cluttered, features a bigger screen, and cost half as much as the old one. The common elements attributed to the cave are still present, however, as accouterments alone do not make the cave.

A Reader’s Manifesto — B.R. Myers

November 12, 2007 By in Books, Culture, Links Tags: , , , , , , , 5 Comments

I read and loved B.R. Myers’ A Reader’s Manifesto: An Attack on the Growing Pretentiousness in American Literary Prose, an essay decrying the literary and critical tendency toward, respectively, writing and praising mushy “self-conscious, writerly prose,” that lacks artistry, coherence, and story. The same Myers wrote an article about Elmore Leonard I derided in The Prisoner of Convention, but as much as that was misguided A Reader’s Manifesto is dead on target. Both first appeared in The Atlantic, though chopped to a smaller, shriller form. A short version of A Reader’s Manifesto is ungated, but the whole, unexpurgated book form shows more examples of what Myers perceives to be good prose, providing more balance. The printed version also rebuts many of the retorts, which often misstate Myers’ argument, to A Reader’s Manifesto. It’s easily to parodied: many critics write that Myers argues against experimentation, or demands conformity, or lacks the acuity to understand modern literature. He preemptively deals with such points, and my single sentence pop summary doesn’t contain the essay’s nuances, which are subtle and important enough to merit reading everything.

Despite my praise, you see can see precursors to A Reader’s Manifesto in Tom Wolfe’s, Stalking the Billion-footed Beast: a Literary Manifesto for the New Social Novel and in others who echo Wolfe, like Dan Simmons in this Salon interview.

None of the three directly address one of the harder problems for the average reader: deciding what to read, especially if one should not trust many critics. I doubt most readers follow the debate among mandarin book reviews and the like. As Robert Towers writes in The Flap over Tom Wolfe: How Real is the Retreat from Realism?, “The overwhelming impression one gets is that Mr. Wolfe has read very little of the fiction of the last 30 years – the period during which, he laments, realism became hopelessly old-hat, practiced chiefly by such antiquated figures as Saul Bellow, Robert Stone (born six years after Mr. Wolfe) and John Updike (one year younger than Mr. Wolfe), who ”found it hard to give up realism” (as if they ever tried!).” Wolfe and Myers infight, and are in danger of ignoring the vast corpus of modern fiction, the operative word being vast: I, for one, hesitate to make too many generalizations given the sheer number of titles published. You can find good fiction of the kind Wolfe says is no longer written, and of the kind Myers says is too-often ignored by prize committees.

To be fair, Myers never says that strong, important writing has utterly disappeared—he only laments that so many mediocre or bad writers receive so much adulation. I agree and try to defend the writers worth defending, deflate those not, and remind others of the great but forgotten, or underloved, or poorly publicized authors who deserve notice–most notably Robertson Davies. In doing so, I try to avoid the hype machines manufacture hype and reputations. A Reader’s Manifesto is a useful corrective to the hyperbolic claims of much bad modern literature, especially after trying Don DeLillo’s bizarre soporifics White Noise and Underworld. The person I love to hate most is critical sensation Jonathan Safran Foer, whose two best-known novels are so awful that it takes restraint not to write off the entire taste in books of any devotee. Skip Foer and DeLillo, and take up Myers: he is willing to say that the emperor has no clothes.

EDIT: This post also covers A Reader’s Manifesto.