Maud's guests

Well, two complementary opinions about snark and fiction and reviewing at Maud Newton's blog. Is it just a coincidence that the names of the two authors rhyme? I agree with elements of Emma Garman's post (definitely there's a place for snarky humor in book reviews, esp. if it's making a serious point, and the blandness of the usual NYTBR is not to be believed--British-style reviewing definitely preferable). But I'm on the whole more in sympathy with Sean Carman's: surely the Julavits essay was "widely misunderstood" (I wish The Believer would reintroduce a word-length limit! When you write a long essay like that, it only increases the chance you'll say something that provokes outrage and wild disagreement), and also the use of Monica Ali and Stephen Elliott as examples of novelists that wouldn't deserve the take-down method of reviewing.

Forgive redundancy on previous posts

Clearly I lack patience and should wait longer for posts to show up...

I'm off now to the bookstore to get a copy of this, the great canonical book I am most mortified by not having read and which I have suddenly realized can't wait a minute longer! However if this edition isn't available at my local indy bookstore(s), I will order it from Amazon anyway.

Jonathan Strange

Blogger is conspiring to prevent me from posting any thoughts on this wonderful book, which completely lived up to my expectations. Won't say any more as I still have to write the review. I'm just hoping this post doesn't vanish like the two previous...

Since my last post seems to have vanished...

Don't know what happened--it has gone to the same place as my mysterious missing Discworld post of late July--anyway I've finished Jonathan Strange and it completely lives up to the hype. Won't say more since I'm reviewing it. But I loved it.

SABBATICAL IS OVER! However I had a realization on Thursday afternoon (at my office--mold infestation now cleaned out, huge dehumidifer chugging away, surrounded by curly-because-of-damp stacks of xeroxes awaiting compilation into my fall-semester course packs) that I was going to be very unhappy so long as I still thought I should be writing all day every day, but that it's all actually pretty fun if you can just get your head around it. I was SO EXCITED when I started grad school, it was ridiculous; but in general, I was always so bored by the end of August that I couldn't wait for school to start. Going and buying new notebooks and pencils and things; a new back-to-school haircut (I've just made an appointment for Tuesday, I was agonizing about whether to grow my hair out to its natural color & mid-shoulder length that's my default do, but no--I am keeping up the color & just venturing out into a slightly different short haircut, more like a bob...); the new books for new classes; all that good stuff. So I am now in the mood to welcome the new graduate students & generally get back into the school thing.

JonathanStrange

Well, this certainly lived up to its advance billing. I loved it. Won't say more, since I still have to write a review.

I had an interesting moment on Thursday afternoon in my office when I looked around me--stacks of xeroxes for my fall semester course packs, e-mails from students wanting to meet about the M.A. program, the list of all the new incoming graduate students--and realized that my sabbatical is definitively over. That I'd better stop mourning it, too, because all this stuff is pretty fun if only I can get my head around the fact that I'm not writing full-time any more! It was the list of new students that was really the clincher--I remember how excited I was when I started grad school, but also how excited I was EVERY September for school to start after the long, hot, BORING months of July and August. Where you check out your twelve books from the library (having persuaded them to give you an adult rather than a children's card), stay up all night reading & then find yourself about twenty-four hours later having literally read all twelve and with nothing to read again. One of the many, many things I like about adult life is that with the combination of Columbia's library, the NYPL, the guy who sells used paperbacks on Broadway and 113th and Amazon (plus occasional bookstore incursions) I can actually usually have enough books to read... It was certainly pleasant to be able to justify reading Jonathan Strange as work because of the review part of it; one of the things I will have to give up when school starts is this compulsive large-volume reading I've been doing this year, both for work and for fun.

Typefaces

Strange to think of this

Stephen Elliott's Looking Forward to It

I'm arranging a reading/discussion from this for October: Looking Forward to It promises to be very interesting... More details to follow.

AL Kennedy's Paradise

Haven't yet read this--just a note to remind myselfto get it. Strangely, though I am very fond of Scottish fiction, I haven't read any of Kennedy's books. Is there a better place for me to start than this one?

Guardian piece on Eva Ibbotson's new book

A good piece on Eva Ibbotson, author of The Star of Kazan, to be published in October in the US. It is an absolutely wonderful book--Ibbotson should be much better-known than she is in the US.

The Guardian reports on the Booker longlist

There is something amazing about the fact that this list provokes the English betting chains to produce lists of the odds on each book winning. I do think it's a more open list than the last few years; I've only read a handful of the ones on the list, and not many more of the authors' other books either. Lots of first and second novels. The two frontrunners seem to be Mitchell's Cloud Atlas and Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty, certainly the two I've been meaning to read anyway; must get hold of copies ASAP.

Philip Pullman on the science of fiction

Good little piece, though I am so obsessed with this topic that I was disappointed to see him not talk about why science is such a fascinating and essential body of knowledge for novelists. Of all the science writers he mentions, I think the one I like the most is V. S. Ramachandran, whose Phantoms in the Brain is one of the most remarkable books I have ever read. But all that stuff is great.

M.I.T. Makes Yale Provost First Woman to Be Its Chief

This is very cool news. I know Susan Hockfield a bit from the time I spent at Yale, and I think very, very highly of her. Exciting!

Medical thrillers!

Detoured from work to read two books loaned to me by my friend and colleague Michael M., Tess Gerritsen's Body Double and The Sinner. Both quite good. I do find myself wanting more interesting prose than you see here. But the identical twin plot in Body Double is sort of fascinating. I also found myself comparing these books to two books by Karin Slaughter that I also recently read (lent me by the same friend): A Faint Cold Fear and Indelible. I liked them both (much better than Kisscut, which I read at the beginning of the summer & made me feel that Slaughter was really overrated). Slaughter is more interesting to me than Gerritsen: there's a writing thing going on here that just isn't with Gerritsen, who is a very good storyteller but doesn't have a particular talent for character or place. Slaughter's more interesting, despite the inevitable Patricia Cornwell/Kathy Reichs comparisons. (I still like Cornwell much, more more than Reichs; the first-person voice in Cornwell's books is raw and painful & on the whole much more interresting than the other.) In sum: will read more books by Gerritsen and Reichs, who are similarly interesting and competent writers about female pathologists; Cornwell's gone off the deep end, but of course I'll still read hers; but Slaughter, despite my reservations (and partly it's just that I like the character of Lena so much more than Sara!), I will look out for actively and read new books ASAP.

Vidal's Villa

Slightly sad to see this article about Gore Vidal selling his Italian villa. I LOVE Vidal. He is the only living avatar of a particular kind of fiction-writing that I especially admire (Robert Graves and Anthony Burgess as precursors): historical novels, interestingly informed by strong opinions about present-day life. My favorite: Julian. But lots of other good ones too.

Identity Theory interviews Barbara Wallraff

This is a wonderful comment by Barbara Wallraff, and describes exactly my feelings about copy-editing (hmm... let me clarify... not about when my prose gets copy-edited by someone else, but when I'm the copy-editor!): the whole interview can be found at identity theory. Here's what Wallraff says: "Really almost the most fun you can have as editor--it's a perverse kind of fun--is turning something upside down and backwards and just buffing and polishing and doing all kinds of stuff to it and then getting it into type--giving the typeset version to the author in a way that he or she doesn't get to see the changes, just the final version. And have them look at it and say, "Oh you did hardly anything." And you are thinking, "Yes. Because I made you say what you meant to say. Clearly, you weren't being detail-oriented about this. Let me do that for you. And now it says what you want.""

I am a truly obsessive copy-editor; more to follow on this.