"Don't tell everything you know"

Back-to-school bits at the Oxford American from writers who are also teachers. Scroll down especially for J.D. Daniels' "What We Know," which contains a sentence that has captivated me: "I don’t trust the way being a teacher pleases me."

Romper room

Katie Roiphe interviews Nicholson Baker for the FT (site registration required).

Update

Just printed out the new and improved BOMH (really it is called "The Magic Circle"). One more light copy-edit through, then typing in those corrections and a final careful proof: it will definitely be ready to go back out by the end of the day Monday.

Rock biorhythms

At the Phoenix, James Parker on the new Metallica bio:

The most vivid and engaging passages of Enter Night, actually, are in this key of reminiscence: Wall bumping into Ulrich at the Hammersmith Odeon, the little drummer for some reason on crutches ("His outraged eyes studied mine. A precocious child growing rapidly into a full-on fuck of a man"); Mustaine emerging crackling from some toilet or drug tabernacle to be interviewed ("He held out his paw and allowed me to grasp it"); Hammett chatting pleasantly about essential oils and then clamming up at the arrival of macho man Hetfield ("As we all walked into the bar together, I noticed Kirk affecting a sort of mini-Hetfield saunter. Safety in numbers, I found myself doing the same"). It makes one wish that Wall could have departed further from the conventions of rock biography — got more personal or more poetic/fragmentary, or written a book called My Life In Heavy Metal. Except that Steve Almond already wrote that book, and it had fuck-all to do with heavy metal.

Shifting, shifty

At the Guardian, Teju Cole's top ten novels of loneliness. I am excited about this list as it gives me several good new things to read (persuasive to me via the fact that the thoughts on Sebald, Naipaul and Davis are so much what I would choose to note myself, though I dissent from the verdict on Ishiguro's Remains of the Day - I spin out from The Unconsoled as a hub and view Remains and Never Let Me Go as useful clarification of the master project). Naipaul's Enigma of Arrival is surely one of the great underrated books of modern literature, well worth a look for those who have not read it.

(More common style - not criticizing! - on these Guardian lists is to use up several spots, uselessly, on things like Robinson Crusoe - this is more practical.)

Closing tabs

I'm dug in properly on BOMH revisions now: I started yesterday morning, it takes a day or two to get into the swing of it but I'm definitely getting there...

My task is very clear, I have three priorities:

(1) Give the 'thriller' plot a better shape and momentum and build it more clearly from the start, including having a clearer sense of one main character's backstory and concerns as they shift over the course of the story the novel tells (and as they appear to and arouse the suspicions of the two other main characters);

(2) Address a couple of places where things suddenly end in an abrupt or overly compressed fashion (my besetting vice!);

(3) Handle the nonfictional/theoretical material about games and game-playing in a way that better integrates it throughout).

The last is easiest, the second is challenging because it's such a weakness of mine but not inherently that difficult, the first involves the need for extended concentration and reimagining and is the hardest part of what needs to be done. Aside from these three specific points, I need to give it one really good further pass through and make sure that the feel is as seamless and suspenseful as I can manage: my mental model for the effect I wanted to create was Donna Tartt's The Secret History, which I haven't reread for at least ten years but which is unusually effective in capturing the reader's attention with a relatively arcane body of material/subject matter melded with a genre-style suspense plot.

Meanwhile, a few tabs to close:

Ted Gioia's list of the top 50 postmodern mysteries includes many particular favorites of mine.

Joanne van der Woude on anagrams and acrostics of grieving in seventeenth-century New England.

Amazing cakes at the Night Kitchen Bakery in Philadelphia (link courtesy of my father, who went to a birthday party featuring one of their cakes and knew I would be entranced!).

Tiddlywinks nomenclature!

DIY recovery

Kara Van Malssen on working to restore Helen Hill's films in the wake of Katrina and after.

Two lists

I might dispute a few of the choices on Lev Grossman's list of his top ten must-read fantasy novels (I like George R. R. Martin's books very much, but I think they are distinctly optional!), but his list of his top ten favorite cocktails in literature is indisputable!

So true!

Maud Newton on David Foster Wallace and the problem of voice.

SENT!

I've finalized the manuscript of the style book and emailed it to my agent. Very pleased with how it's come together. She sent out the earlier version of the book last year, and while everybody passed on it at that stage, there were a number of editors who said they'd be interested in seeing the next iteration, so I am hopeful that it will find a home before too long. Will post here once I have definite news, but that probably wouldn't be till October - and that's quick, could easily be longer even if things go well!

The home stretch

It's been a quiet week at Light Reading; August is always slow as far as digital treasures go (though I enjoyed Andrew O'Hagan's Pippa Middleton piece for New York Magazine) and really I've just been dug in on the style book, which is now in the home stretch. (Mixed metaphor alert? But I cannot do without those phrases.) If it's not done by the end of the day today, I should be finished with it by lunchtime tomorrow...

(After doing a very thorough edit with gap-filling-in new writing in the first half of the week, I typed most of it up late Tuesday night and finished yesterday during the day. Got to Cafe del Sol at 6:30 this morning and sat down and copy-edited the whole manuscript all the way through, finishing around 10 or so. Now I'm sitting at my desk at home about to type in those edits; the only thing remaining to be actually written is several paragraphs for the very end. I don't like writing endings, I prefer just to stop, but it will not do!)

(This is one of the three or four main things I need to fix on BOMH also. That's next up in the queue: say about ten days or two weeks of work on that, and I can get it back to my agent by the end of the month. Couple other bits and bobs of work: reader's report on a journal article, a couple conference paper abstracts. Then change gears and get back into teaching mode; I'm teaching two new classes in the fall, I did one syllabus in June but the other still needs to be sorted out and "thunk" through.)

Anyway, back to style, once I've typed these changes in, I'll print out this final version and read it through one more time, but there are only a few stretches where I've really done significant editing, for lots of the book it's minor changes that I can check just by reading it against the marked-up copy. I am old-school in my methods, I find it is the best way to catch errors...

Light reading catch-up

It was a strangely good week for new books (conventionally they still seem to be published on a Tuesday, which was the old-school tradition). If you pre-order for Kindle, they then appear as if by magic when the official publication date arrives, and I was delighted to devour Charlie Williams' latest installment of the Royston Blake saga, One Dead Hen (if you've been reading here for a while, you already know that I think Charlie is one of literature's great unsung geniuses of the comic first-person voice - this book is great, but start at the beginning of the epic with Deadfolk - it's like reading Proust, the volumes are self-standing but there's no reason not to start at the beginning!); Lev Grossman's The Magician King (excellent, and definitely up to the high standard set by the previous installment - I was initially mildly skeptical, I have perhaps read "The Voyage of the Dawn Treader" too many times myself, but was completely won over by about 10% in, and particularly enjoyed the narration of Julia's backstory); and David Liss's The Twelfth Enchantment, an Austen homage of sorts with something of the feel of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell - I especially liked how it came alive when the characters talked about the balance of European trade and mechanization, the Luddite plot is inspired!

All of these books were highly absorbing - as I say, it was a very good week for new releases - but perhaps the book that most deeply transported me was an advance copy I obtained via the interesting new service Netgalley, which provides digital galleys to potential reviewers in a variety of formats. It is Deon Meyer's Trackers, and it is absolutely superb. It features several characters from previous books, but I don't think you'd need to have read them in order to immerse yourself in this one; it has an unorthodox structure, to the extent that I slightly started to worry about three-quarters of the way through that a different book had somehow been spliced into my electronic copy, but it all comes together beautifully in the end. If you enjoy crime fiction and aren't yet reading Meyer's books, this is a situation to remedy as soon as possible: he's incredibly good, I just looked through the Amazon listings to see if there was one I'd particularly recommend but really you can't go wrong.

I also read and enjoyed another Netgalley book, Kyle Garlett's inspiring and moving Heart of Iron: My Journey from Transplant Patient to Ironman Triathlete, but that will be more appropriately reviewed at my other blog!

Finally, I am relieved to report that Stephen Knight's vampire book seems to me significantly better than his zombie one, though still rather too much weaponry and firepower for my tastes (it is the same sort of disproportion, compared to the usual thrillers I read, as one finds with paranormal romance when it comes to sex: it is perplexing to encounter these very full descriptions of acts and details that are conventionally minimized or excluded!).

Gravity's Rainbow is mesmerizing: I'm about halfway through, will go back to that now I think...

Never bored of cake

I would be delighted to eat this piece of cake.

More pictures of opening night at the pop-up high tea (said cake looks even better as a cutaway than as a slice)...

Also: ugly cake contest!

American taxidermy

Curating the meat dress. This is a must-read!

Gordon Brown is a fan

Interesting interview with Val McDermid in the Guardian Review.