My Reading Table gets a make-over
February 27, 2010
A friend recently e-mailed me about a shake-up of her reading shelf. Her explanation for the change hit home, describing so well what can happen with a book that loses its glamour. She wrote: “I’ve been wading through my to-be-read shelves, moving out books that were a good idea at the time and starting [and then]discarding books that just aren’t worth the effort.”
And so, a reality check for My Reading Table, which I’ve been ignoring. Some of the books once were a good idea (Pete Dexter’s Paris Trout) and some aren’t worth the effort right now (Katherine Mansfield Notebooks: Complete Edition edited by Margaret Scott). They’ll likely get a spot on the table at another time, when the hunger for them returns. Meanwhile, my reading table now holds a smaller, more realistic stack of new and old books and will see action.
Below are the books moved off the reading table. They are now considered the “hopefuls,” among other unread books in my library.
- Along with Paris Trout, others once a good idea include Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar, The Rains Came: A Novel of Modern India by Louis Bromfield and Dracula by Bram Stoker, which hit the table during Halloween last year.
- Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Living by Declan Kiberd, One Matchless Time: A Life of William Faulkner by Jay Parini, Loneliness as a Way of Life by Thomas Dunn and Prague in Danger: The Years of German Occupation, 1939-45 by Peter Demetz aren’t worth the effort right now.
- Parallel Play: Growing Up With Undiagnosed Asperger’s by Tim Page got returned unread to the lender, who wanted to lend it to someone else. I ran out of time.
- Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro, Generosity by Richard Powers, The Glass Room by Simon Mawer, and The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters are new books published in 2009 that I simply have to leave behind because there are — to paraphrase a popular saying, so many new books to consider in a year, so little time. They are all highly recommended. Ones to check out if you’re searching for a good book.
- About Grace by Anthony Doer and The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger are novels that need beach or patio time (i.e., undisturbed, long, warm sunny afternoons).
- For all the others, including Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited by Vladimir Nabokov and 1940 by Jay Neugeboren, it’s just not a time.
Click on the photo above to get the list of books on My Reading Table, or go here.
Not your typical March Hare & Mad Hatter
February 20, 2010
I read Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland at an awkward age when I was too old to appreciate the nonsense and too young to get it. A Mad Hatter’s tea party? A caucus race that runs in circles? It annoyed more than entertained me those many years ago. But Jamison Odone’s whimsical and brief retelling of this 1865 classic, Stickfiguratively Speaking: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, gave me a chance to revisit the nonsense.
This time I had great fun, thanks to Odone’s quirky interpretations. Indeed, I carried the book around with me — small enough to fit in my purse and winter coat pocket — and randomly read and flipped through the pages over and over again, each time seeing something new.
Odone says in a press release, “There is really no room for the words to carry the art or vice versa—they have to all work together.” With that, he succeeds, playfully interchanging words and illustrations on the pages. Adding surprise and humor, the interior thoughts and snarky side comments of Alice, the White Rabbit, the Mad Hatter and other characters spice up the familiar oddness. To get an idea of the stick-figure style, check out Odone’s blog post Alice’s Adventures in my pad.
Odone will produce more Stickfiguratively Speaking books. The next one in the series, scheduled to be published in September 2010, is Stickfiguratively Speaking: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.
On a final note, the release date for Stickfiguratively Speaking: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is March 5, the same day Tim Burton’s movie Alice in Wonderland appears in theaters. A variation on the classic, the movie imagines 19-year-old Alice returning to a Wonderland ruled by the irrational “off with their heads!” Red Queen. Reading the former before seeing the latter is a great way to be reacquainted with the classic characters and their bizarre ways.
The zombies are back on TLC
January 26, 2010
Several months ago, I referred to Max Brooks’ Zombie Survival Guide: Recorded Attacks as rubbish in a blog post. It didn’t take long for someone to tell me to lighten up. A week later, one of my All Sides panel colleagues — an esteemed poetry professor – recommended Max Brooks’ Zombie Survival Guide on our live radio show about books. I couldn’t believe it. At that point, I had to laugh at myself and accept the message. Perhaps I do need to lighten up or, at least, see zombie publishing in another light. One person’s rubbish is another person’s treasure. Or good reading.
Zombies marched back into my periphery in a Publisher’s Weekly article a few days ago informing there are 1,050,000 copies of Pride & Prejudice & Zombies in print. That’s phenomenal. It indicates just how much that “good reading” is taking off, and it’s not just happening for zombies.
Quirk Classics, the publisher of Pride & Prejudice & Zombies, is doing quite well with its other mash-up, Sense & Sensibilities & Sea Monsters. BTW, mash-ups here refer to the art of mixing pop culture into public domain classics. According to Fine Books & Collections, P&P&Z is comprised of 85 percent original text and 15 percent “bone-crunching zombie mayhem”.
A prequel to P&P&Z – Dawn of the Dreadfuls — is coming this March from Quirk Classics. And if you’d like to move on from zombies, there’s:
- Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter also due out in March from Grand Central publishing. Not a mash-up, it’s original writing about the U.S. President’s side job as a vampire slayer.
- Android Karenina is to be published in June by Quirk Classics, an enhanced edition of the classic love story set in a dystopian world of robots, cyborgs, and interstellar space travel.
Why why why am I writing about this??? I think I’m stunned and also wondering what some of my lit professors back in the 1970s would’ve thought if they’d seen the future of zombies and other creatures lurching into their favored classics. They’re lurching not just within the confined walls of horror fiction anymore, but in the mainstream of bookselling and reader popularity. Yes, the night of the living dead is here to stay. Those zombies are probably lurching their way toward Jane Eyre and Madame Bovary as I blog, but who knows. Emma Bovary just might find death by zombies more pleasant than that wretched poison.
Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” in 2010
December 29, 2009
Peaver and Volokhonsky translation published October 2007
It’s time to fess up to that which I’ve ignored or procrastinated this past year and make a literary New Year’s resolution.
The first day of a new year presents a blank page for a fresh start. As all writers know, though, you can begin the same story over and over again on a blank new page, but continuing it onto the second page and beyond is the hardest part. April 1st, the Fool’s Day, should be designated as the official checkpoint for the status of New Year’s resolutions. We’ll see on that day where I stand with my resolution to read Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace in 2010.
In the summer of 2008, I bought the highly praised Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky translation of this Russian classic intending to dig in for the long haul of reading. What sets the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation apart is their absolute fidelity to Tolstoy’s use of language, including syntax and his tendency to repeat words. Other translators have edited Tolstoy’s repetitiveness. Pevear and Volokhonsky preserve it.
Also, Tolstoy wrote some of the story in French. Pevear and Volokhonsky are the first and only translators to keep intact all the French passages, according to Orlando Figes in The New York Review of Books (11.22.07). Figes writes, “Overall, about 2 percent of the book is in French — itself almost enough to make up a short novel — about ten French words for every page. In the original (1868 – 1869) edition Tolstoy translated the foreign passages into Russian in footnotes, but in the revised 1873 edition he cut out all the French (‘I think it is better without it,’ he wrote to the critic Nikolai Strakhov), only to restore it in the later editions.”
All in all, reading Peaver and Volokhonosky means reading an edition that’s as close as one can get to Tolstoy’s original Russian creation, but I barely dented the 1,500 pages before putting their translation aside. The problem was the French. Even though I studied French for 10 years in high school and college, and off and on in my adult life with a tutor, the passages became interruptions to the story’s flow. I decided to read the Louise and Aylmer Maude translation, written in the 1920s and still considered to be one of the best. (No long French passages. More comfortable translation.) I looked for The Maude in used bookstores and finally found it in the spring of 2009. I promised myself I’d read it this past summer, but I didn’t keep that promise. Let’s see if I keep it in 2010.
The unforgettables: 2009
December 14, 2009
Last Friday, on WOSU 820 AM NPR News All Sides Weekend, we shared the unforgettable books we read in 2009. Because I mentioned most but not all of my unforgettables, I thought I’d offer the complete list here on TLC. But first, what makes these books unforgettable? Lyric prose. Unsettling themes. Hypnotic storytelling. Unique voices and characters. Pure escape. And combinations thereof. More simply put, when thinking back on the reading year, they are the ones that come to mind, like a memorable event.
Classics
Michael Herr’s Dispatches (Herr was a war correspondent during the Vietnam War; this is his incredible report on that experience published in 1977.)
John Fowles’ The Collector (TLC post)
Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (TLC post)
Philip Roth’s Good-bye Columbus (Roth’s first work of fiction published in 1959)
Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road (TLC post)
Literary fiction
Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin (winner of the 2009 National Book Award in fiction)
A. S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book (finalist for the 2009 Man Booker Prize; TLC post)
Yoko Ogawa’s The Housekeeper and the Professor (TLC post)
David Vann’s Legend of a Suicide (A novella and five stories set primarily in Alaska; the narrator struggles to understand his father’s suicide.)
Empty calories
Josh Bazell’s Beat the Reaper (Bazell’s debut consumed a Saturday afternoon, but I couldn’t for the life of me, a few days later, summarize the plot other than to say the Mafia is involved; a total entertainer.)
Isabel Gilles’ Happens Every Day (A typical divorce memoir told with a Siren-like voice. TLC post)
Important books (both are novels)
Nini Holmqvist’s The Unit (TLC post)
Xiaoda Xiao’s The Cave Man (TLC post)
Memoir
Michael Greenberg’s Beg, Borrow, Steal: A Writer’s Life (TLC post)
Poetry
W. S. Merwin’s The Shadow of Sirius (2009 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; TLC post)
Read me! A collection of American book ads
November 23, 2009
Dwight Garner, New York Times book critic, became obsessed with vintage book ads while browsing through back issues of his newspaper’s Book Review. This month HarperCollins/Ecco published a collection of his findings, Read Me: A Century of Classic American Book Advertisements, “plucked from yellowing newspapers, journals and magazines large and small.”
The image-filled book is a page-turner for the curious fascinated by publishers’ methods of marketing what were once first novels and now are classics, spinning controversy, putting author’s photos “to bold use” and generally doing whatever they could to grab attention through the years.
Garner divides the book by decades between 1900 and 2000 and provides concise introductions to each decade with insights about changing trends for the black-and-white ads. Some of my favorites are the earliest, when publishers wrote ad copy as if they were old-time street barkers.
1914 advertisement in "Read Me" by Dwight Garner, published by HarperCollins/Ecco
Read Me is a fun trip down Memory Lane with Garner’s choices leaning toward — but not exclusive to – literary fiction: On the Road, Invisible Man, The Bluest Eye, Fahrenheit 451 and The Fountainhead are examples. You can peek inside the book on the publisher’s website; however, I think Barnes & Noble offers a much better preview. The bookseller showcases more of the ads.
Garner notes in his introduction that this is not a comprehensive survey and some readers may be disappointed not to find their favorite authors, books or ad campaigns. No disappointment here. A word of advice, though: Keep a magnifying glass handy for the wee print.
In “A Meaningful Life” everything is all wrong
November 20, 2009
I’ve recommended Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem as one of the funniest detective stories I’ve ever read. When I learned Lethem wrote the introduction for this year’s reissue of L. J. Davis’s Brooklyn novel A Meaningful Life (originally published in 1971), I took note and bought it. Reading Davis’s story, I laughed like I laughed with Motherless Brooklyn.
The plot summary: The novel’s protagonist Lowell Lake wakes one morning not long after his 30th birthday to a panic attack. He realizes his New York life isn’t going to get any better, or worse. The managing editor of a second-rate plumbing trade weekly, he sits in a cubicle slightly larger than a toilet stall. His marriage is equally small in affection. Everything is all wrong about his life, including, Lowell realizes, how little of it he’s spent thinking. To break free, he buys a fixer-upper on a crime-ridden Brooklyn street. All of this is fodder upon which Davis hangs his smartly dark and breezy comedy. Here and there it’s un-PC in an Archie Bunker sort of way, probably more so now than it was 38 years ago.
Davis’s humor deeply darkens when Lowell gets over his head with the Brooklyn project and commits a murder. That crime feels forced and over-imagined, and the book ends lacking much of its original punch. Davis delivers one of the most depressing last lines ever to be written. But we must keep in mind that Lowell’s fate is to live a life in which success eludes him. In that light, the final verdict about this hapless New Yorker settles into its context of dark comedy, and A Meaningful Life remains a funny book. Right up there with Motherless Brooklyn.
“The Anatomy of Melancholy”
November 16, 2009
The New York Review of Books Classics is celebrating 10 years of publishing. During that decade, one of its best sellers has been The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton. Every time I read or hear about this 17th century tome, there’s exceptional praise. But I can’t imagine heading in for the read. Not only is this compendium of melancholia’s many dispositions composed of dense prose, it’s written in 17th Century style, using the likes of “doth” and “hath.”
Last year, I urged my friend BE, a voracious reader, to read it for my vicarious enjoyment. He has yet to reach the last page. I’m not sure he’s even passed page 200. What is it about The Anatomy of Melancholy that sets it apart? viaLibri prices earlier copies ranging from $40 to $272 (as of this date). Echo Library, a print-on-demand publisher, offers it in two volumes. (The NYRB Classics version comes in one volume.) Michael Dirda writes in Classics for Pleasure, “…surrender to its seemingly wayward rhythms and you will understand why Samuel Johnson used to say that it was ‘the only book that ever took him out of bed two hours sooner than he wished to rise.’” Dirda also writes, “The Anatomy of Melancholy is not, in fact, a volume to read through so much as to live with.” I might add for a long time, considering it’s 1,392 pages.
