No beach reads here
June 11, 2010
This is the season of beach reads, and the lists are pouring into my mail box and in-box and popping up on literary websites. They are the escape books we mentally dig into while our feet dig into the vacation sand, and suntan lotion smears the pages. I’m not heading to the beach this summer, rather I’ll be reading on my patio with a cold glass of beer and corgis at my feet. I’ll be reading War and Peace. (I kid not. Has anyone ever carried War and Peace with a beach ball?) I’ll be reading other books, too, and below is the beginning list, added to the Reading Table: seven interesting books for the patio. The summer has begun.
Self Portraits: Fictions by Frederic Tuten
Inter-related stories in which the author appears. From the publisher’s website: “Fantasy and reality collide as the book’s principal characters — two lovers — meet, part and reunite, time and again, at different stages in life and in landscapes both familiar and exotic.” Tuten’s book will be published in September 2010.
With Love and Rage: A Friendship with Iris Murdoch by David Morgan
Morgan met the famous British author Iris Murdoch while he was a student studying at the Royal College of Art in London in the 1960s. This memoir — a compilation of essays and notes — is considered by some to be one of the more insightful accounts into Murdoch’s life and art to appear since her death in 1999. According to the book’s introduction, it “vacillates between disrespect and homage, between hilarity and tears and between love and rage on both sides.” Published by Kingston University Press of Kingston University in Surrey, England.
Walks with Men by Ann Beattie
A paperback novella at 102 pages, the story of a smart girl fresh out of Harvard hooking up with an intoxicating writer 20 years her senior in New York City. Here she gets her real education. Considered a shadow of Beattie’s own story in the 1980s.
Why Translation Matters by Edith Grossman
A small book from Yale University Press I’ve been meaning to read because it’s important we bring books of literature from around the world into English, so we read globally. Also, as I struggled to find a translation of War and Peace that worked for me, I became aware of the significant role of the translator.
Driftless by David Rhodes
Praised by the Chicago Tribune as “The best work of fiction to come out of the Midwest in many years.” In 1976, David Rhodes’ life changed tragically in a motorcycle accident that left him paralyzed from the chest down. He stopped publishing for three decades. Driftless is his return, about contemporary life in rural America. Poets & Writers magazine created a slide show of all his novels.
Spies of the Balkans by Alan Furst
A new novel by this master of World War II espionage. I’m a Furst fan and anticipate this to be another smart page-turner. According to the publisher’s website: “Greece, 1940. Not sunny vacation Greece: northern Greece, Macedonian Greece, Balkan Greece—the city of Salonika. In that ancient port, with its wharves and warehouses, dark lanes and Turkish mansions, brothels and tavernas, a tense political drama is being played out.”
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
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. I found the translation cumbersome, for reasons I wrote about several months back on TLC. At hand, now, is the Louise and Aylmer Maude translation, written in the 1920s, still considered to be one of the best.
The book that got me off the bad news train
November 10, 2009
It seems like every magazine and newspaper I pick up these days has an article delivering what I find to be depressing news on the fate of books. Here’s the recent lot:
- “The Future of Reading”
Library Journal November 1, 2009 - “The Future of the Book”
The Wilson Quarterly Autumn 2009
(The article is not yet available online.) - “Books in Hard Times”
Fine Books & Collections
(The article is not yet available online.) - “Where Have All the Students Gone? The Demise of the English Department”
The American Scholar Autumn 2009 - “Lament on the Culture of the Printed Word”
The New York Times, November 3, 2009
For a book lover, it’s a bit like watching crime & murder TV news day after day. Eventually you punch the remote to a sitcom or the nature channel for relief.
In this scenario, I reached for The Time of Their Lives by Al Silverman on My Reading Table. It revisits the golden age of book publishing from1946 to the early 1980s, “when books were most beloved by a reading public” and before “the great old-line book people began to be replaced by bottom-line businessmen.”
Stories about authors are the book’s behind-the-scenes, entertaining gems, such as the one about “Jerry” Salinger approaching Harcourt with The Catcher in the Rye. Harcourt had a textbook division, and the “crazy” prep school protagonist, Holden Caulfield, was inappropriate for their publishing house. And so it was rejected.
And then there’s the story about James Herriot’s books first published in England: If Only They Could Talk and It Shouldn’t Happen to a Vet. St. Martin’s Press combined the American version into one memoir about the Yorkshire veterinarian. It became the best-selling All Creatures Great and Small. That title is thanks to a British man in St. Martin’s marketing department. Americans in editorial wanted to call the book Cow in the Waiting Room.
TLC appears on Critical Mass
October 8, 2009
The National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) is in the midst of celebrating its 35th anniversary on the NBCC blog Critical Mass. Past and present NBCC board directors, members and award-winners are posting commentary, including authors and poets Katha Pollitt, David Lehman, E. L. Doctorow, John Ashbery and more. This week my post, “The Discerning Voice,” appeared with this esteemed group.
The National Book Critics Circle has been a gathering place for book critics since 1974. Here is a membership for what many believe is a dying breed, with the advent of casual commentary at bookseller websites and the pervasive layoff of newspaper book critics. Yet the NBCC and its members are more important now to book lovers, shoppers and readers than ever before, which is a topic in my post on Critical Mass.
Two essays by Philip Connors
October 4, 2009
Two soul-stirring essays by a little-known writer, Philip Connors, captured my attention. They appeared in The Nation (March 2009) and n+1 (Fall 2009). They are about, respectively, Norman Maclean’s life and work and the suicide of Connors’ brother. Norman Maclean is the author of the classic novella about fly fishing in Montana — “A River Runs Through It” — made into a movie directed by Robert Redford. Connors’ brother, Dan, at the age of 22, shot himself with a semiautomatic rifle.
Connors writes in a seductive tone, offering vulnerable information about himself while presenting engaging biographical information about his subjects. That’s especially true in the n+1 essay about his brother, “So Little to Remember,” written in choppy diary entries.
Connors’ struggle to understand why his brother killed himself came to mind when I recently read articles in The New York Times and Boston Globe about suicides. One particularly troubling article featured employees at France Telecom: 23 suicides in 18 months. Connors writes about his brother, “He made a statement of thundering finality and left no means of answering it.”
These well-written essays evoke the complexity of the individual, a love of life and a deep need to understand it.
Because of the Nation essay “A Tough Flower Girl: On Norman Maclean,” I want to re-read Norman Maclean’s “A River Runs Through It.” I want to read his Young Men and Fire, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1992. Connors writes:
“It’s not as if Maclean didn’t know his stories were strange. He often said he wrote them in part so the world would know of what artistry men and women were capable in the woods of his youth, before helicopters and chain saws rendered obsolete the ancient skills of packing with mules and felling trees with crosscut saws. Artistry, specifically artistry with one’s hands, was for him among life’s most refined achievements. As he says in the opening pages of ‘A River Runs Through It,’ ‘all good things–trout as well as eternal salvation–come by grace and grace comes by art and art does not come easy.’”
Connors’ essays are worthy of the reading pile, should you be short on time. They gave me the feeling I’d read something that had legs beyond the last word. (And there’s a great photo of Maclean teaching at the University of Chicago, 1970.)
n+1′s contributor bio for Connors says he’s at work on a book about his time as a fire lookout, to be published by Ecco. I’ll be on the literary lookout for it.
An intense graphic memoir: “Stitches”
August 23, 2009
David Small is an award-winning illustrator of children’s picture books. He used his artistic talent to make life meaningful, let alone livable.
His graphic memoir — cartoon scenes with narrative — of his 1950s childhood is to be released September 8. This weekend, I read an advance copy in two short sittings.
The unsettling images and the story they tell kept me looking at the next page, and the next, and the next. I now, still, keep looking. In gray and white, they unveil the cruelty of David’s repressed parents who raised their two sons in a Detroit home of hidden emotions, silence and deeply rooted rage. There is no color in this book, Stitches: A Memoir, of any kind.
David suffered with breathing difficulties, and his father, a radiologist, treated his condition with excessive doses of radiation. It was the accepted therapy in the ’50s.
When David developed a lump in his neck, at age 14, he went through two operations that removed a vocal cord and his thyroid. No one told him he had cancer. His father’s treatment was the likely cause of it. David couldn’t talk.
This memoir is yet another dysfunctional family horror show. But Stitches stands apart by its distinguished style.
Instead of digesting difficult narrative passages of emotional abuse and neglect, we see it in facial expressions: the young David’s innocence, isolation and fear; his mother’s stinginess and bitter anger; his father’s cold, professional distance.
We see it in the unfolding of disturbing comic-strip sequences.
David runs away when he’s 16 and lives in a one-room inner city apartment. We’re not told how he pays for anything to survive, let alone how he gets into college and then Yale’s art school (which I learned from the press release). But these gaps in information at the end of the book don’t make this story any less powerful.
Thank God for the white rabbit that enters David’s life when he is 15. The image represents a life-saving psychiatrist who says to David, “You’ve been living in a world full of nonsense, David. No one had been telling you the truth about anything. But I’m going to tell you the truth.”
