Monday, May 08, 2006
The funny thing
about some of John Crace's "digested reads" for the Guardian is that they are in a style virtually indistinguishable from the original, because the original is already almost self-parody: delightfully, this week he digests Wicked! by Jilly Cooper. Oh, I want this book so badly! Last week I almost threw fiscal responsibility to the winds and ordered it from Amazon UK, but it wasn't shipping until May 3 and I actually got worried about whether it would arrive before I left (and also, seriously, I just do not need another book that will then have to be shipped back to NY). Now I wish I had just pre-ordered it and taken my chances!
The hardboiled wonderland
of Charlie Huston has had me in thrall this weekend: I've just read the first two volumes of the Henry Thompson trilogy, Caught Stealing and Six Bad Things, and they are wonderfully good. Very, very high body-count wholly justified (in my opinion) by the way the violence seems real--just because we like someone doesn't mean he/she isn't going to get unpleasantly killed in the next scene or two.
This is noir taken just about as far as it can go while still remaining stylish rather than absolutely existentially bleak; the thing that makes it work is the beauty of the writing, Huston is an absolutely angelic sentence-writer & the voice of the main character (who narrates the books) is unbelievably well realized, with a light touch that makes the painfulness of the whole business much more striking. Huston's got a great way with dialogue, too.
Here and there, I found myself questioning the plausibility of the books' set-ups (I have never met a cat, for instance, who was nearly so ready to get into a bag as the one that accompanies Hank for all of the first novel & the first part of the second one--really that cat would have been lost to him early on, though of course it is very enjoyable that he's around for all those scenes), but the whole thing gets more and more effective as we go along; the second half of the second one is spectacularly good, I have just read it on the edge of my seat (cliche, cliche--but really I did mean to try and go to bed early for once but I couldn't stop until I got to the end) and am already scheming as to who will send me an advance copy of the final volume of the trilogy, A Dangerous Man, which will be published in September.
(Despite their excellence, these books haven't displaced from my heart my most-favorite introduction to Huston's writing, the vampire-zombie-alternate-Manhattan noir Already Dead--here's me in the grip of it this past fall, I remember hearing about it some months before it was published & just being consumed with longing for it, I could not rest until it was in my hands because of my conviction that it must be the perfect book. And it was.)
This is noir taken just about as far as it can go while still remaining stylish rather than absolutely existentially bleak; the thing that makes it work is the beauty of the writing, Huston is an absolutely angelic sentence-writer & the voice of the main character (who narrates the books) is unbelievably well realized, with a light touch that makes the painfulness of the whole business much more striking. Huston's got a great way with dialogue, too.
Here and there, I found myself questioning the plausibility of the books' set-ups (I have never met a cat, for instance, who was nearly so ready to get into a bag as the one that accompanies Hank for all of the first novel & the first part of the second one--really that cat would have been lost to him early on, though of course it is very enjoyable that he's around for all those scenes), but the whole thing gets more and more effective as we go along; the second half of the second one is spectacularly good, I have just read it on the edge of my seat (cliche, cliche--but really I did mean to try and go to bed early for once but I couldn't stop until I got to the end) and am already scheming as to who will send me an advance copy of the final volume of the trilogy, A Dangerous Man, which will be published in September.
(Despite their excellence, these books haven't displaced from my heart my most-favorite introduction to Huston's writing, the vampire-zombie-alternate-Manhattan noir Already Dead--here's me in the grip of it this past fall, I remember hearing about it some months before it was published & just being consumed with longing for it, I could not rest until it was in my hands because of my conviction that it must be the perfect book. And it was.)
Sunday, May 07, 2006
The Freakanomics guys
are always coming up with the kind of glib yet ingenious formulations that make me first read the piece with enjoyment & then dig in my heels & feel like a scrupulous and nit-picking academic, but they've got a thought-provoking article in this week's NYT magazine on the idea that "the trait we commonly call talent is highly overrated":
Or, put another way, expert performers - whether in memory or surgery, ballet or computer programming - are nearly always made, not born. And yes, practice does make perfect. These may be the sort of cliches that parents are fond of whispering to their children. But these particular cliches just happen to be true.
[Anders] Ericsson's research [on talents and learning] suggests a third cliche as well: when it comes to choosing a life path, you should do what you love - because if you don't love it, you are unlikely to work hard enough to get very good. Most people naturally don't like to do things they aren't 'good' at. So they often give up, telling themselves they simply don't possess the talent for math or skiing or the violin. But what they really lack is the desire to be good and to undertake the deliberate practice that would make them better.
This seems to me pretty much right (in the full article they do make allowances for what I always in my head though I am a non-believer call "god-given talent," cf. Michael Jordan).
I was particularly thinking about it this afternoon (this is a ludicrous but apt example) because I had a surprisingly stimulating afternoon at the gym on the elliptical trainer; the first and more familiar part of the stimulus was the Prince Hits/B-sides stuff I've been listening to a lot recently, but the second (I am the product of long-term television self-deprivation, thus my jaw-dropped enthrallment) was the truly amazing PBA Skills Challenge.
It was extraordinary!
Seriously, it's a little bit goofy of course, watching these guys (for example) use a pin instead of a bowling ball to do their strike, or having to bowl up over a ramp, or having to bounce the ball off two chairs halfway down the lane. But the thing that's amazing about it (aside from the fact that it's so much more playful than real professional bowling) is that you just can see when one of these guys gets it totally right on some completely absurd and farfetched bowling stunt that (a) he has an amazing talent and (b) he has spent a GAZILLION hours under the artificial light of the bowling lanes doing the same thing again and again. You have to love it to be that obsessive, and it's the obsessiveness that makes it all work. I always take pleasure in seeing something done well; you know how it is a great pleasure when you get your hair cut by someone who really cares about and understands how to cut hair well? (It can be somewhere very modest, this is not a thing about fanciness.) This is the pleasure in seeing a really beautifully decorated cake, or even on a more minor note watching someone tie up a parcel with string in a particularly accomplished & elegant way. Most delightful.
(In a more literary afterthought, I will add that as I watched the stunt bowling I couldn't stop thinking about Charlie Williams' protagonist Royston Blake, narrator of the Mangel trilogy--here are my thoughts on the first volume, here's a good one on the sequel Fags and Lager--just now available in the US--and here is my "all good things come to an end" post on volume three, King of the Road. This bowling thing is very Blake, I couldn't get the idea out of my head of him having a very serious opinion about how the regular professional bowlers were low-class, this "skills" bowling thing would be the sort of thing that Blakey would turn his hand to & make his name on television, but only in a high-class way and donating all the proceeds to a charity of some doormanish sort.)
Or, put another way, expert performers - whether in memory or surgery, ballet or computer programming - are nearly always made, not born. And yes, practice does make perfect. These may be the sort of cliches that parents are fond of whispering to their children. But these particular cliches just happen to be true.
[Anders] Ericsson's research [on talents and learning] suggests a third cliche as well: when it comes to choosing a life path, you should do what you love - because if you don't love it, you are unlikely to work hard enough to get very good. Most people naturally don't like to do things they aren't 'good' at. So they often give up, telling themselves they simply don't possess the talent for math or skiing or the violin. But what they really lack is the desire to be good and to undertake the deliberate practice that would make them better.
This seems to me pretty much right (in the full article they do make allowances for what I always in my head though I am a non-believer call "god-given talent," cf. Michael Jordan).
I was particularly thinking about it this afternoon (this is a ludicrous but apt example) because I had a surprisingly stimulating afternoon at the gym on the elliptical trainer; the first and more familiar part of the stimulus was the Prince Hits/B-sides stuff I've been listening to a lot recently, but the second (I am the product of long-term television self-deprivation, thus my jaw-dropped enthrallment) was the truly amazing PBA Skills Challenge.
It was extraordinary!
Seriously, it's a little bit goofy of course, watching these guys (for example) use a pin instead of a bowling ball to do their strike, or having to bowl up over a ramp, or having to bounce the ball off two chairs halfway down the lane. But the thing that's amazing about it (aside from the fact that it's so much more playful than real professional bowling) is that you just can see when one of these guys gets it totally right on some completely absurd and farfetched bowling stunt that (a) he has an amazing talent and (b) he has spent a GAZILLION hours under the artificial light of the bowling lanes doing the same thing again and again. You have to love it to be that obsessive, and it's the obsessiveness that makes it all work. I always take pleasure in seeing something done well; you know how it is a great pleasure when you get your hair cut by someone who really cares about and understands how to cut hair well? (It can be somewhere very modest, this is not a thing about fanciness.) This is the pleasure in seeing a really beautifully decorated cake, or even on a more minor note watching someone tie up a parcel with string in a particularly accomplished & elegant way. Most delightful.
(In a more literary afterthought, I will add that as I watched the stunt bowling I couldn't stop thinking about Charlie Williams' protagonist Royston Blake, narrator of the Mangel trilogy--here are my thoughts on the first volume, here's a good one on the sequel Fags and Lager--just now available in the US--and here is my "all good things come to an end" post on volume three, King of the Road. This bowling thing is very Blake, I couldn't get the idea out of my head of him having a very serious opinion about how the regular professional bowlers were low-class, this "skills" bowling thing would be the sort of thing that Blakey would turn his hand to & make his name on television, but only in a high-class way and donating all the proceeds to a charity of some doormanish sort.)
Saturday, May 06, 2006
Julian Barnes on Flaubert
at the New York Review of Books (it's a superb piece, Barnes at his very best--only a bit scathing to Flaubert's latest biographer--a little too long to read comfortably online, but print it out & read it if you're at all interested).
The two major writers I have scarcely revisited since reading them when I was a Young Person & who I am burning to read seriously & all the way through again properly & to really engage with are Beckett and Flaubert. I'm not sure if I'm going to have the mental space for it this summer, I'm definitely going to reread some of those great nineteenth-century Russian novels in the good new translations but that's more compatible with what I really need to concentrate on, which is meeting a Sept. 15 deadline for my academic book manuscript. I think Beckett and Flaubert might have to wait till after that. But I'm really, really yearning for them....
The two major writers I have scarcely revisited since reading them when I was a Young Person & who I am burning to read seriously & all the way through again properly & to really engage with are Beckett and Flaubert. I'm not sure if I'm going to have the mental space for it this summer, I'm definitely going to reread some of those great nineteenth-century Russian novels in the good new translations but that's more compatible with what I really need to concentrate on, which is meeting a Sept. 15 deadline for my academic book manuscript. I think Beckett and Flaubert might have to wait till after that. But I'm really, really yearning for them....
Three good things for free
at the London Review of Books: Ian Hacking on two new books about autism (this one's going to get a lot of distressed letters in response to his opening paragraph); a rather lovely piece by Thomas Nagel on Bernard Williams; and a rich long essay by Colm Toibin on Borges. It's a very thorough report on the recent biography and on Borges's life itself, and includes appealing quotations from others who've written about the Argentine writer:
The real world came to Borges in the guise of the young men who visited his apartment to read to him. Buenos Aires is now full of them. The best account of that experience is by Alberto Manguel in A History of Reading (1996) and With Borges (2004):
In that sitting-room, under a Piranesi engraving of circular Roman ruins, I read Kipling, Stevenson, Henry James, several entries of the Brockhaus German encyclopedia, verses of Marino, of Enrique Banchs, of Heine (but these last ones he knew by heart, so I would barely have begun my reading when his hesitant voice picked up and recited from memory; the hesitation was only in the cadence, not in the words themselves, which he remembered unerringly) . . . I was the driver, but the landscape, the unfurling space, belonged to the one being driven . . . Borges chose the book, Borges stopped me or asked me to continue, Borges interrupted to comment, Borges allowed the words to come to him. I was invisible.
Paul Theroux in The Old Patagonian Express (1979) remembered reading Kipling ballads to the blind old man, being stopped after every few stanzas as Borges exclaimed how beautiful they were, his favourite being ‘The Ballad of East and West’. Evita, he told Theroux, was ‘a common prostitute’, as the writer, taking a more benign view than Naipaul, went back to see him again and again.
He stayed up late, eager to talk, eager to be read to; and he was good company. By degrees, he turned me into Boswell . . . There was something of the charlatan in him – he had a way of speechifying, and I knew he was repeating something he had said a hundred times before. He had the beginnings of a stutter, but he calmed that with his hands. He was occasionally magisterial, but he could be the opposite, a kind of student, his face elfin with attentiveness, his fingers locked together. His face became aristocratic in repose, and when he bared his yellow teeth in the exaggerated grin he used to show pleasure – he laughed hard at his own jokes – his face came alight and he looked like a French actor who has realised that he has successfully stolen the show.
The real world came to Borges in the guise of the young men who visited his apartment to read to him. Buenos Aires is now full of them. The best account of that experience is by Alberto Manguel in A History of Reading (1996) and With Borges (2004):
In that sitting-room, under a Piranesi engraving of circular Roman ruins, I read Kipling, Stevenson, Henry James, several entries of the Brockhaus German encyclopedia, verses of Marino, of Enrique Banchs, of Heine (but these last ones he knew by heart, so I would barely have begun my reading when his hesitant voice picked up and recited from memory; the hesitation was only in the cadence, not in the words themselves, which he remembered unerringly) . . . I was the driver, but the landscape, the unfurling space, belonged to the one being driven . . . Borges chose the book, Borges stopped me or asked me to continue, Borges interrupted to comment, Borges allowed the words to come to him. I was invisible.
Paul Theroux in The Old Patagonian Express (1979) remembered reading Kipling ballads to the blind old man, being stopped after every few stanzas as Borges exclaimed how beautiful they were, his favourite being ‘The Ballad of East and West’. Evita, he told Theroux, was ‘a common prostitute’, as the writer, taking a more benign view than Naipaul, went back to see him again and again.
He stayed up late, eager to talk, eager to be read to; and he was good company. By degrees, he turned me into Boswell . . . There was something of the charlatan in him – he had a way of speechifying, and I knew he was repeating something he had said a hundred times before. He had the beginnings of a stutter, but he calmed that with his hands. He was occasionally magisterial, but he could be the opposite, a kind of student, his face elfin with attentiveness, his fingers locked together. His face became aristocratic in repose, and when he bared his yellow teeth in the exaggerated grin he used to show pleasure – he laughed hard at his own jokes – his face came alight and he looked like a French actor who has realised that he has successfully stolen the show.
Friday, May 05, 2006
Lionel Shriver
did not like David Mitchell's Black Swan Green (at the FT). And elsewhere in the FT books section, David White makes me want to read Wole Soyinka's memoir You Must Set Forth at Dawn, a sequel to his Ake: The Years of Childhood. In my experience of multi-volume memoirs divided in this way, the childhood parts are often better written but the adult ones have much more interesting material to work with. (And here's the link for Norman Rush's review in the NYTBR.)
John Lanchester on Muriel Spark
at the Guardian. It's the introduction to a new edition of The Driver's Seat: Amazon UK only, I think--great title for a novel--but here's another US edition (minus Lanchester) and here it is in an omnibus edition which looks like extremely good value for money assuming it is halfway normal. (Lanchester's The Debt to Pleasure, by the way, is a delightfully nasty little book.)
Thursday, May 04, 2006
The Labrador pact and the Springer uprising
A tedious but scrupulous accounting of recent book consumption....
I finished The Idea of North on Monday evening so that I could return it to the library, and the rest was just as excellent as the first half, Peter Davidson is a wonderfully good descriptive writer and I thought it was one of the most interesting and thought-provoking non-fiction books I've read for quite a while. Probably more interesting to people with some slight foot in the academic world, but it's very beautifully written & accessible so if you've got a passion for the north, you do really need to get it and read it.
Then I finished another half-read volume (this one from the bookstore a few weeks ago), a collection of stories by Diana Wynne Jones called Unexpected Magic. The short stories in the first half are very good (personally I feel that every word that drips from the pen--or more likely emanates from the word processor--of DWJ is wonderful & sacred & preferable to almost anyone else's stuff) but the novella at the end was disappointing, rather conventional and heavily Narniaesque with an overlay of those Elizabeth Goudge kinds of book, however I felt more kindly towards it when I saw an author's note at the back (it would have been better as a headnote--and though I don't in general see the need for headnotes in story collections that were conceived more or less as a whole, with only a few pieces published elsewhere, I like it when the kind that collect miscellaneous stories over a stretch of the author's career have headnotes explaining anything that might be interesting or important or funny about the story's composition etc.) that said although it was only first published in 1995, "Everard's Ride" was written in 1966. A very respectable journeyman piece, just not up to the usual standard.
It was a bit of a mystery what prompted the subsequent light reading binge: I guess I was feeling like I'd made serious headway with the non-work-related library books, but that it was really too much serious fiction and not enough light, and then I gave my big talk on Tuesday afternoon at the Academy & went afterwards to the library to return these recalled books and (yes, it's ridiculous) check out a few novels, four that I'd requested from the off-site storage facility (all brand new, never read by anyone else before, which is especially pleasing) and that were waiting for me at the circulation desk and then four or so more plucked (targeted plucking, though) from the shelves.
(And I seriously had to restrain myself from grabbing tons of others as I was in the contemporary British fiction section--my hand grasped desparately for Sebastian Faulks's new novel and John Fowles's Journals until I firmly commanded it to cease and desist--oh, and I was rather enchanted by the shelfside juxtaposition of Helen Fielding and Eva Figes, the latter makes various appearances in Jonathan Coe's B. S. Johnson book and it reminded me I wanted to read more of her books. But this was not the kind of light reading I coveted.)
The first one I read was on the whole rather delightful, Matt Haig's The Last Family in England. It is beautifully narrated by a black Lab (the Labrador Pact=Duty Over All) and though I didn't love it as much as Charlie Williams did (there was a muddled-sort-of-alluding-to-1 Henry IV thing going on that didn't do anything for me, and at times the dog's voice wasn't quite convincing), it's a very enjoyable read and I recommend it to anyone who's interested in checking out some high-class dog noir--the coinage is Charlie's, not mine. Matt Haig has an extremely appealing imagination, I will look forward to his next book. (BTW in the meantime I want to reread 101 Dalmatians, though, that is a book I must have read twenty times when I was a kid; and Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle is one of my favorite novels of all time.)
Colleen Mondor heard me bemoaning the lack of light reading & made a few helpful suggestions, so part of my haul was four books by Katie Fforde, though I have to say my response is mixed. I quite see why Fforde at her best would be very appealing & especially soothing if you were in the thick of too much non-light reading; but this kind of book is not so much my thing. That said, I've just read three of them and half of the fourth (I laid it down in disgust when I realized that not only was the point-of-view-character thing being seriously mishandled, it was also shaping up to include much, much more interior decorating than I possibly wanted to hear about. What is this fantasy of English village life? I do not understand it. I do not want to live in an English village and beautifully renovate by hand a small Georgian house and vacuum dog hair off the couches).
So anyway first I read Practically Perfect & found it pretty weak (worst line of dialogue I've read in the past year: "'Quite frankly Max,' she hissed, 'I don't really care. We're over! I loved you so much for so long but I realise now I was in love with a person I didn't really know'"). Along the lines of the "What awful food they serve here, and such small portions!" joke, however, I then read Flora's Lot (this one was much better, the main character far more appealing & the milieu a bit more interesting) and then Paradise Fields (hmm, not so good again, annoying main character) and then got halfway through Restoring Grace before suddenly realizing with absolute disgust that I couldn't face reading another page of this stuff. Sorry, Colleen! Only after I'd checked these out did I get Colleen's e-mail with some more specific suggestions about Fforde's best three or four--however these were the only ones they had at the library, what can you do.... I think Victoria Clayton does a rather better version of this kind of thing, I highly recommend hers; but will give Fforde another chance especially if I can come across one of the recommended ones.
Thoughts:
(1) I love the novels of Jane Austen, in fact if I could only have one novelist it would almost certainly be Austen (unless I caved at the last minute and chose Dickens instead), but the author of Pride and Prejudice has a lot to answer for in terms of the wretched plots of this kind of book. Seriously, couldn't they for once not have it be that the hero and heroine hate each other on first sight but experience a strong mutual attraction etc. etc.?
(2) Novelists should also be banned from showing the surly but handsome male protagonist being kind to animals as a way of showing he'll be a sweet boyfriend despite anger management problem and bad manners.
(3) I'm curious about the pros and cons of writing books in which each new hero/heroine is extremely similar to the last versus series in which the main character (i.e. usually a detective) stays consistent. The latter can get very tedious (Adam Dalgliesh! Spenser!), but the former suffer from the fact that some of the characters inevitably come out more appealing than others. It's very noticeable in Georgette Heyer, for instance, but also in Dick Francis. On the whole, I'd have to say that if you can do it well, carrying the same main character over from book to book is the best bet. (Two words: Jack Reacher. I love those Lee Child books, they are pretty much the perfect light reading.) But you obviously can't do that for these man-and-woman-happily-ever-after kinds of book, unless they got surreal & bizarre and had the woman psychotically killing the man off so that she could find a new one in the next book. Structurally problematic, in any case.
Now I am only going to do things that are either useful (clean the bathroom) or intellectually stimulating (read Swift) for a little while. Or perhaps, actually, I will scour the apartment to find whatever the next-lightest reading may be--something like a compass needle in my head infallibly directs me to such things....
I finished The Idea of North on Monday evening so that I could return it to the library, and the rest was just as excellent as the first half, Peter Davidson is a wonderfully good descriptive writer and I thought it was one of the most interesting and thought-provoking non-fiction books I've read for quite a while. Probably more interesting to people with some slight foot in the academic world, but it's very beautifully written & accessible so if you've got a passion for the north, you do really need to get it and read it.
Then I finished another half-read volume (this one from the bookstore a few weeks ago), a collection of stories by Diana Wynne Jones called Unexpected Magic. The short stories in the first half are very good (personally I feel that every word that drips from the pen--or more likely emanates from the word processor--of DWJ is wonderful & sacred & preferable to almost anyone else's stuff) but the novella at the end was disappointing, rather conventional and heavily Narniaesque with an overlay of those Elizabeth Goudge kinds of book, however I felt more kindly towards it when I saw an author's note at the back (it would have been better as a headnote--and though I don't in general see the need for headnotes in story collections that were conceived more or less as a whole, with only a few pieces published elsewhere, I like it when the kind that collect miscellaneous stories over a stretch of the author's career have headnotes explaining anything that might be interesting or important or funny about the story's composition etc.) that said although it was only first published in 1995, "Everard's Ride" was written in 1966. A very respectable journeyman piece, just not up to the usual standard.
It was a bit of a mystery what prompted the subsequent light reading binge: I guess I was feeling like I'd made serious headway with the non-work-related library books, but that it was really too much serious fiction and not enough light, and then I gave my big talk on Tuesday afternoon at the Academy & went afterwards to the library to return these recalled books and (yes, it's ridiculous) check out a few novels, four that I'd requested from the off-site storage facility (all brand new, never read by anyone else before, which is especially pleasing) and that were waiting for me at the circulation desk and then four or so more plucked (targeted plucking, though) from the shelves.
(And I seriously had to restrain myself from grabbing tons of others as I was in the contemporary British fiction section--my hand grasped desparately for Sebastian Faulks's new novel and John Fowles's Journals until I firmly commanded it to cease and desist--oh, and I was rather enchanted by the shelfside juxtaposition of Helen Fielding and Eva Figes, the latter makes various appearances in Jonathan Coe's B. S. Johnson book and it reminded me I wanted to read more of her books. But this was not the kind of light reading I coveted.)
The first one I read was on the whole rather delightful, Matt Haig's The Last Family in England. It is beautifully narrated by a black Lab (the Labrador Pact=Duty Over All) and though I didn't love it as much as Charlie Williams did (there was a muddled-sort-of-alluding-to-1 Henry IV thing going on that didn't do anything for me, and at times the dog's voice wasn't quite convincing), it's a very enjoyable read and I recommend it to anyone who's interested in checking out some high-class dog noir--the coinage is Charlie's, not mine. Matt Haig has an extremely appealing imagination, I will look forward to his next book. (BTW in the meantime I want to reread 101 Dalmatians, though, that is a book I must have read twenty times when I was a kid; and Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle is one of my favorite novels of all time.)
Colleen Mondor heard me bemoaning the lack of light reading & made a few helpful suggestions, so part of my haul was four books by Katie Fforde, though I have to say my response is mixed. I quite see why Fforde at her best would be very appealing & especially soothing if you were in the thick of too much non-light reading; but this kind of book is not so much my thing. That said, I've just read three of them and half of the fourth (I laid it down in disgust when I realized that not only was the point-of-view-character thing being seriously mishandled, it was also shaping up to include much, much more interior decorating than I possibly wanted to hear about. What is this fantasy of English village life? I do not understand it. I do not want to live in an English village and beautifully renovate by hand a small Georgian house and vacuum dog hair off the couches).
So anyway first I read Practically Perfect & found it pretty weak (worst line of dialogue I've read in the past year: "'Quite frankly Max,' she hissed, 'I don't really care. We're over! I loved you so much for so long but I realise now I was in love with a person I didn't really know'"). Along the lines of the "What awful food they serve here, and such small portions!" joke, however, I then read Flora's Lot (this one was much better, the main character far more appealing & the milieu a bit more interesting) and then Paradise Fields (hmm, not so good again, annoying main character) and then got halfway through Restoring Grace before suddenly realizing with absolute disgust that I couldn't face reading another page of this stuff. Sorry, Colleen! Only after I'd checked these out did I get Colleen's e-mail with some more specific suggestions about Fforde's best three or four--however these were the only ones they had at the library, what can you do.... I think Victoria Clayton does a rather better version of this kind of thing, I highly recommend hers; but will give Fforde another chance especially if I can come across one of the recommended ones.
Thoughts:
(1) I love the novels of Jane Austen, in fact if I could only have one novelist it would almost certainly be Austen (unless I caved at the last minute and chose Dickens instead), but the author of Pride and Prejudice has a lot to answer for in terms of the wretched plots of this kind of book. Seriously, couldn't they for once not have it be that the hero and heroine hate each other on first sight but experience a strong mutual attraction etc. etc.?
(2) Novelists should also be banned from showing the surly but handsome male protagonist being kind to animals as a way of showing he'll be a sweet boyfriend despite anger management problem and bad manners.
(3) I'm curious about the pros and cons of writing books in which each new hero/heroine is extremely similar to the last versus series in which the main character (i.e. usually a detective) stays consistent. The latter can get very tedious (Adam Dalgliesh! Spenser!), but the former suffer from the fact that some of the characters inevitably come out more appealing than others. It's very noticeable in Georgette Heyer, for instance, but also in Dick Francis. On the whole, I'd have to say that if you can do it well, carrying the same main character over from book to book is the best bet. (Two words: Jack Reacher. I love those Lee Child books, they are pretty much the perfect light reading.) But you obviously can't do that for these man-and-woman-happily-ever-after kinds of book, unless they got surreal & bizarre and had the woman psychotically killing the man off so that she could find a new one in the next book. Structurally problematic, in any case.
Now I am only going to do things that are either useful (clean the bathroom) or intellectually stimulating (read Swift) for a little while. Or perhaps, actually, I will scour the apartment to find whatever the next-lightest reading may be--something like a compass needle in my head infallibly directs me to such things....
Wednesday, May 03, 2006
If you buy only one book this year
it should be Toni Schlesinger's Five Flights Up and Other New York Apartment Stories.
I know I am prone to hyperbole, but trust me on this.
It's a collection of her Shelter columns for the Village Voice, and whether you're interested in (a) becoming a (better) novelist (b) learning how to capture voices on the page as a playwright (c) getting the urban anthropology-cum-archeology of New York (d) indulging your nosiness about how much rent people pay for their apartments (e) learning how formally extreme works of art can also be highly accessible (f) contemplating the human condition (g) laughing a lot (etc., etc.; I'm writing a longer piece about this for another publication, so will not say more now but will link if/when the time comes) then you must have this book.
Also it has an exceptionally attractive cover; I am fond of black cats, so it particularly appeals to me, but I defy anyone not to be charmed. (Here's a nice large-scale reproduction at the Observer's real-estate blog.)
So here's my "review" of the book at the Voice. We did it in the form of one of Toni's columns (i.e. demented interview), which might be puzzling if you've never read them, so check out a few first if you like: here is one of my favorites, with the snakes we talk about in the interview; and here are parts one and two of another one I especially like, about the housing activists Pauline and Barnard Goodman.
The cumulative effect of reading all these pieces bound together in book form is quite staggering and uniquely delightful.
I know I am prone to hyperbole, but trust me on this.
It's a collection of her Shelter columns for the Village Voice, and whether you're interested in (a) becoming a (better) novelist (b) learning how to capture voices on the page as a playwright (c) getting the urban anthropology-cum-archeology of New York (d) indulging your nosiness about how much rent people pay for their apartments (e) learning how formally extreme works of art can also be highly accessible (f) contemplating the human condition (g) laughing a lot (etc., etc.; I'm writing a longer piece about this for another publication, so will not say more now but will link if/when the time comes) then you must have this book.
Also it has an exceptionally attractive cover; I am fond of black cats, so it particularly appeals to me, but I defy anyone not to be charmed. (Here's a nice large-scale reproduction at the Observer's real-estate blog.)
So here's my "review" of the book at the Voice. We did it in the form of one of Toni's columns (i.e. demented interview), which might be puzzling if you've never read them, so check out a few first if you like: here is one of my favorites, with the snakes we talk about in the interview; and here are parts one and two of another one I especially like, about the housing activists Pauline and Barnard Goodman.
The cumulative effect of reading all these pieces bound together in book form is quite staggering and uniquely delightful.
Hox!
Edward Ziff and Israel Rosenfield on some new books about evolution at the New York Review of Books, making me wish I were doing developmental biology (and I'm halfway through a great book by Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb called Evolution in Four Dimensions that I'm really loving, it's super-thought-provoking and interesting though specialized enough that it may not appeal to the very general reader). I feel I have recommended these before, but if you're wanting something highly readable--i.e. relatively free from technical stuff except where it can be made extremely interesting and engaging--a wonderful recent book was Armand-Marie Leroi's Mutants: On Genetic Variety and the Human Body; and surely there is no single more appealing & important book on the idea of heredity than Francois Jacob's The Logic of Life.
I love the way
the TLS has reorganized its website; they put up an appealing selection of the new issue's stuff every Thursday, available without a subscription, only they seem to be outrageously on top of things & it's often all there by Wednesday, I can never resist looking even though I feel I'm cheating & that I should save it for the next day.
Lots of good stuff this week, in any case: Benjamin Markovits calls Philip Roth's new book "more novella than novel"; a great piece by Peter Parker on the evolution of biography (oh, this is the stuff I love; it's a review of a bunch of the volumes edited by Richard Holmes for this new short biography series, Defoe on Jonathan Wild and Johnson's Life of Savage and Godwin's Wollstonecraft etc., these little books are very attractive and I highly recommend them especially if you're not already familiar with these eighteenth-century English biographies; and he also praises a volume that I definitely need to get, Javier Marias's Written Lives); and best of all, Joyce Carol Oates on Norah Vincent's year as a man (I am curious to read Self-Made Man, I tend not to read that kind of new non-fiction mostly just because I don't want it quite enough to buy it & yet those new books are difficult to get from libraries, they are always checked out immediately by people more anxious to read them than I; but this one really does sound interesting, worth a look).
Lots of good stuff this week, in any case: Benjamin Markovits calls Philip Roth's new book "more novella than novel"; a great piece by Peter Parker on the evolution of biography (oh, this is the stuff I love; it's a review of a bunch of the volumes edited by Richard Holmes for this new short biography series, Defoe on Jonathan Wild and Johnson's Life of Savage and Godwin's Wollstonecraft etc., these little books are very attractive and I highly recommend them especially if you're not already familiar with these eighteenth-century English biographies; and he also praises a volume that I definitely need to get, Javier Marias's Written Lives); and best of all, Joyce Carol Oates on Norah Vincent's year as a man (I am curious to read Self-Made Man, I tend not to read that kind of new non-fiction mostly just because I don't want it quite enough to buy it & yet those new books are difficult to get from libraries, they are always checked out immediately by people more anxious to read them than I; but this one really does sound interesting, worth a look).
Tuesday, May 02, 2006
On paper engineers
and pop-up books. Very cool. I am out of the loop on all this stuff, I haven't seen any of the books they're talking about. Will remedy this.... (Thinking of that Allen Kurzweil story-novel about a man married to a paper engineer--what was it called? The Grand Complication?)
Monday, May 01, 2006
A nasty shock
reading Deborah Solomon's interview with Carlos Fuentes in the Times Magazine: Natasha Fuentes is dead, she died last summer. I can't say I knew her well enough to think of her as a friend exactly, she was beautiful & elusive in a way that made her hard to pin down, but she was the kind of person it was easy to love (and also the kind of person to whom love hardly mattered, she was so bent on extinguishing herself). I remember her well, though, from hanging out in Cambridge and New York in the winter of 1991-92 and during the year or so following. It is a melodramatic expression, I don't know what else to say, but I hope she rests in peace.
Ultima thule
Reading priorities rearranged this weekend--fortunately--by a series of recall notices from the library. In graduate school in particular I remember just cursing whoever was recalling books--though I am not in general prone to paranoia, it is impossible when you are writing a dissertation not to take the 6 random recall notices which in all likelihood have been submitted by six completely different people (you know, a political science professor who wants the standard edition of Hume, a undergraduate philosophy major who doesn't have the money to buy the assigned book by Sissela Bok, a sociology graduate student refreshing her memory of Erving Goffman's early work, another English graduate student who wants Leslie Stephen's history of English thought in the eighteenth century because she's writing about Stephen's daughter Virginia Woolf, etc. etc.) and do an insane connect-the-dots in which some evil person is thwarting you by taking all of the books you need for your chapter and using them to write their own book which will inconveniently appear before yours. (I am somewhat exaggerating, but not about the connect-the-dots part, and in fact looking at it from the opposite point of view I often will recall five or six related books at a time & I feel sure that they mostly have been checked out by the same person who is no doubt cursing my name as s/he hauls them back to the library.)
But given the book problem round here, having a few choices made for me was helpful. (Thus Danzy Senna yesterday also.) And today I read the collection edited by Wendy Lesser called The Genius of Language : Fifteen Writers Reflect on Their Mother Tongue. It's a very good volume, on the whole, with an impressive lineup of writers & all the pieces interesting in terms of content and well-written too (especially interesting pieces, for instance, by Bharati Mukherjee, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Nicholas Papandreou and M. J. Fitzgerald; but I found Ariel Dorfman's footnote-thing in his contribution quite maddening).
In another sense, though, a disappointment: the essay that drew me to the volume (here is when I read it for the first time & fell in love) was Luc Sante's "French Without Tears," and it is still the absolute standout essay in the volume. Brilliant, funny, sweet, and beautifully well-written, one of those times where you really feel that a good essay is better than anything but the very best novels. And I of course had hoped that several of the other pieces in the volume would be just this good; but I feel it stands alone, nothing else quite matches it. The piece was originally published in the Threepenny Review, and is available on line; do go and take a look, it's pretty spectacular in a modest and appealing way.
And then I picked up Peter Davidson's The Idea of North and though I'm only halfway through I can't keep quiet about it, it is a most excellent book! (My Scottish grandfather was convinced that all Davidsons are related, he would have loved this book & I can super-easily imagine him going through some enjoyable-to-him-but-terribly-dull-and-yet-endearing calculations as to the nature of the genealogical relationship in this case.)
All I can say is that Peter Davidson has a lovely mind & I would like to sit down & have a long conversation with him about the frozen north. It is really quite a remarkable book. Not without flaws: at times I felt (though he is a very good sentence- and paragraph-writer) that the style rambles too much & that the material would be better served by way of a highly eclectic exhibit or even a really good website. But it is a ravishing and enchanting read, and Davidson has an extraordinary feel for all the different sorts of material he describes--poetry and the visual arts in particular, perhaps, but his passion for topography animates his writing about geology and all sorts of other things as well, so that some of the most poetic passages come where he talks about the "fundamental marvel of the earth itself having an idea of north, a northern memory." Also he is remarkably good on Auden, and perceptive about my beloved absolute-favorite Andersen story "The Snow Queen."
Oh, and there is an amazing section about the ice hotel, my longtime obsession--if I ever get a lump sum that I really can blow on something useless & decadent I am so going to the Ice Hotel in Swedish Lapland (but I learned from Davidson that there's one in Quebec as well, possibly that would be more affordable to get to). And he's got all kinds of other fascinating stuff in this bit about the ice sculpture sites in Finland; and on glass that looks like ice; and . . . but both premise and execution are altogether transporting.
(Here Mark Thwaite interviews Davidson at Ready Steady Book. I must stop reading now & try to get some sleep, in spite of the pull of the north. Also make a note to get Francis Spufford's polar exploration book, which I have meant to read for a long time now.)
But given the book problem round here, having a few choices made for me was helpful. (Thus Danzy Senna yesterday also.) And today I read the collection edited by Wendy Lesser called The Genius of Language : Fifteen Writers Reflect on Their Mother Tongue. It's a very good volume, on the whole, with an impressive lineup of writers & all the pieces interesting in terms of content and well-written too (especially interesting pieces, for instance, by Bharati Mukherjee, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Nicholas Papandreou and M. J. Fitzgerald; but I found Ariel Dorfman's footnote-thing in his contribution quite maddening).
In another sense, though, a disappointment: the essay that drew me to the volume (here is when I read it for the first time & fell in love) was Luc Sante's "French Without Tears," and it is still the absolute standout essay in the volume. Brilliant, funny, sweet, and beautifully well-written, one of those times where you really feel that a good essay is better than anything but the very best novels. And I of course had hoped that several of the other pieces in the volume would be just this good; but I feel it stands alone, nothing else quite matches it. The piece was originally published in the Threepenny Review, and is available on line; do go and take a look, it's pretty spectacular in a modest and appealing way.
And then I picked up Peter Davidson's The Idea of North and though I'm only halfway through I can't keep quiet about it, it is a most excellent book! (My Scottish grandfather was convinced that all Davidsons are related, he would have loved this book & I can super-easily imagine him going through some enjoyable-to-him-but-terribly-dull-and-yet-endearing calculations as to the nature of the genealogical relationship in this case.)
All I can say is that Peter Davidson has a lovely mind & I would like to sit down & have a long conversation with him about the frozen north. It is really quite a remarkable book. Not without flaws: at times I felt (though he is a very good sentence- and paragraph-writer) that the style rambles too much & that the material would be better served by way of a highly eclectic exhibit or even a really good website. But it is a ravishing and enchanting read, and Davidson has an extraordinary feel for all the different sorts of material he describes--poetry and the visual arts in particular, perhaps, but his passion for topography animates his writing about geology and all sorts of other things as well, so that some of the most poetic passages come where he talks about the "fundamental marvel of the earth itself having an idea of north, a northern memory." Also he is remarkably good on Auden, and perceptive about my beloved absolute-favorite Andersen story "The Snow Queen."
Oh, and there is an amazing section about the ice hotel, my longtime obsession--if I ever get a lump sum that I really can blow on something useless & decadent I am so going to the Ice Hotel in Swedish Lapland (but I learned from Davidson that there's one in Quebec as well, possibly that would be more affordable to get to). And he's got all kinds of other fascinating stuff in this bit about the ice sculpture sites in Finland; and on glass that looks like ice; and . . . but both premise and execution are altogether transporting.
(Here Mark Thwaite interviews Davidson at Ready Steady Book. I must stop reading now & try to get some sleep, in spite of the pull of the north. Also make a note to get Francis Spufford's polar exploration book, which I have meant to read for a long time now.)
Students of Columbia's Writing Division
respond to Mark Slouka's Spectator piece from last week.
(Strange as it may sound, I know very little indeed about the Writing Division, which exists quite separately from the Department of English and Comparative Literature, though the School of the Arts does fall for various historical reasons I can't attempt to reproduce under the umbrella of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. I have no brief for either side in this case, and the only point I want to make here--which is surely entirely uncontroversial--is that it would indeed augment Columbia's MFA program in all sorts of ways if the university were able to offer much better financial aid.)
(Strange as it may sound, I know very little indeed about the Writing Division, which exists quite separately from the Department of English and Comparative Literature, though the School of the Arts does fall for various historical reasons I can't attempt to reproduce under the umbrella of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. I have no brief for either side in this case, and the only point I want to make here--which is surely entirely uncontroversial--is that it would indeed augment Columbia's MFA program in all sorts of ways if the university were able to offer much better financial aid.)
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