The Conversation: National Book Critics Circle Good Reads List
tags:
Awards, Book Reviews
Perhaps the best thing to be said for a list of books is the conversation surrounding it. If there’s no conversation the list has no real context and therefore, in my view, little value. The National Book Critics Circle recently posted their ”Good Reads” list,…
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Mr. Darcy’s Daughters
tags:
book reviews, Jane Austen
Wow this week’s reviews are rough. Kind of like the day I had. Ok! this book is supposed to be a sequel to Pride & Prejudice. Lizzie and Darcy have 7 children; the book only features the 5 daughters- Letitia, Camilla, Georgina, Isabelle, and Alethea. …
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(How to) Review Realist Fiction for Dummys
tags:
Book Reviews, Josipovici, Modernism, Realist Fiction
I was making dinner tonight, listening to NPR, when Maureen Corrigan came on with her list of best reads for the year. These on-air reviews usually wash over me, my mind too busy on other matters, but tonight--after so many blog posts on reviews, reviewers,…
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Book-blog’s best reads of 2007
tags:
book reviews, books, Dick York, Joseph Finder, Patricia Highsmith, Peter Sagal, Scott Smith
We’re nearing the end of 2007, which means that it’s time for me to look back over the my year of reading and revisit the books I designated as 5-star reads. I was a less prolific reader this year than in years past. The slow-down…
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What is a Review?
tags:
Book Reviews, Junot Diaz
What is a Review? What do I want in a review? I ask this, because I’m so seldom satisfied with the reviews I read. Even those I most admire. Think of John Updike. How effortlessly he weaves his erudition into the exposition, how easily he…
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2 commentsSher;man Alexie: Flightt
tags:
Book Reviews, Flights, Sherman Alexie
Sherman Alexie: Flight I’ve just finished Sherman Alexie’s FLIGHT. A reading in one sitting. I’m not going to review this book. It’s too personal, too close to the author. What would make it possible to write a review--what I think of as a review, at…
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The Compartmentalization of Desire
tags:
Book Pricing, Book Reviews, Marketing
Saturday, September 8, 2007 The Compartmentalization of Desire I’ve found the comments by Simon Lipskar in the discussion on Book Pricing for Literary Fiction (http://www.litkicks.com/) both enlightening, and more than a little troubling. No question that he understands the reality of marketing books, and for…
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Intelligence and Navel- Gazing
tags:
book reviews, Gayle Brandeis
I really want to feel, when I’m reading a book, that I’m in the company of an intelligent person. I do get a kick out of books with literary allusions in them. But it’s so very, very dull to read books about self-conscious English majors…
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Christian Jungersen: The Exception
tags:
book reviews
Repressed desire, Jean Francois Lyotard once said, results in a blindness, an “acting-out” that does not know, and in Christian Jungersen‘s latest novel, The Exception (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2007), we see this played out with a devasting and chilling effect. It would not do the…
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Collinsworth, Eden: It Might Have Been What He Said
tags:
book reviews, books, Eden Collinsworth
Arcade © 2006, 279 pages [amazon]
Eden Collinsworth’s It Might Have Been What He Said begins with an arresting first paragraph:
“Isabel could remember the precise moment she tried killing her husband. Strangely enough, she couldn’t recall why.”
The lines suggest what sort of a story might follow: layers of mystery and deceit to be unwrapped, and pieces of Isabel’s mental puzzle connecting to form a clearer image of the events that precipated the story’s violent climax. But that’s not what happens. The book tells the story of Isabel’s marriage to James, an account that encompasses forays into their respective childhoods. Isabel’s was something out of a gothic novel (so even the author tells us), with a distant father who communicated almost exclusively through New York Times clippings, an undemonstrative, mentally ill mother, and a by-the-book nanny. James is the scion of an aristocratic but money-poor Virginia family. James’ principal problem is that he’s fiscally irresponsible. Isabel’s principal problem is James. Their marriage should never have happened, should not have lasted for as long as it did, and when it fails no one should be surprised. As for the book’s first lines, their promise is never paid off: Isabel, as it happens, eventually regains her memory of the event without any trouble at all, and the attempted murder, when it’s finally detailed to us, proves to be anticlimactic. Since it amounts to nothing in the end, it becomes apparent that Isabel’s memory lapse is merely a device used to delay the narration of the dramatic scene.
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Book-blog.com on Twitter!
tags:
book reviews, books, Twitter
Book-blog.com now has its own Twitter account! Add the book-blog as your Twitter friend to receive notifications of new reviews and the occasional announcement. If you haven’t signed up for Twitter yet, do go check it out--it’s a very cool global communication tool with a…
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New DeLillo: Falling Man and the Problem of Time
tags:
9/11, book reviews, DeLillo
When Bud and I had lunch, we talked about blogging and the future of book blogging and the reasons why it can be hard to get a conversation going on a book blog.
The problem, it seems to me, is the problem of time.
While we all follow the news on the same day, we aren’t--thank God--reading the same books at the same time. That’s why, for lively discussion and a change of pace, I love the success of some of the great reading group blogs like 400 Windmills (Quixote), A Curious Singularity (short fiction), and the LitBlog Co-op (contemporary literature).
More fiercely than that, though, I love the ability to choose to read whatever in the world I want to read next, regardless of what is being talked about.
And the forthcoming DeLillo is a great example of that.
My upstairs neighbor is in the book business. She came by the new DeLillo and passed it on to me. I read it and gave it to a student who’s a huge fan. (JRG: If you read this, maybe you could put the first paragraph into the comments to satisfy the commenters?) So now, a couple months before it’ll start showing up everywhere else, I’ve read it.
And, oddly enough, it’s the only DeLillo I’ve read. So, what can I tell you about it?
It’s a 9/11 novel. It’s wonderful. My guess--confirmed by my student--is that it’s excellent but not the very, very best of his work.
It opens on the morning of September 11, 2001, after the collapse of the first tower, with a dust-covered and bleeding man walking uptown, briefcase in hand. In shock, he steers himself to his ex-wife’s apartment.
From there, we follow him, his wife and son, his wife’s mother & her boyfriend, and the owner of the briefcase, in those dark, confusing weeks after September 11. There are also several interpolated chapters--stunning and moving and deeply upsetting--following the life (and death) of one of the suicide bombers. DeLillo captures the uncertain mood of those days perfectly but this is not a novel about that strange grief-stricken elation, that “we are all Americans now” mood that the war so effectively killed. Instead, it’s a novel about mounting anger, anxiety, and nervousness. Maybe it’s a novel about the mood that led to the war. The children--the son and his friends--are incredibly wonderful, creepily watching the skies with binoculars.
Best, for me, was the brittle anger of the ex-wife, lying next to her husband in bed, wondering if they would ever make love again, washing his clothes separately, and, most chillingly, letting herself think racist thoughts--doesn’t that music sound Arabic? Is that blouse Morroccan? Why is she wearing that blouse in these difficult times? Why is she listening to that music in these sensitive times?
Oh, those poisonous thoughts. Oh, the marvel of watching DeLillo reveal the poisonous thoughts of an ordinary unhappy woman to us.
There is neither hand-wringing nor kumbaya here. Just carefully observed, horrible, limited, and ordinary upper-middle class white Americans burrowing back into the Upper East Side.
So, months from now, when the book comes out, when people start talking about it, perhaps you’ll remember reading this little meditation-cum-review and think to pick up the book. But, by then, where will the comments thread on this post be? You’ll post your reaction on your own blog and our imperfect, ill-timed conversation will carry on imperfectly, at its own lugubrious and erratic pace.
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Downing, Michael: Spring Forward
tags:
book reviews, Daylight Saving Time, DST
Shoemaker & Hoard © 2005, 202 pages [amazon]
Michael Downing’s Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time is one of two books about Daylight Saving Time that were published in 2005, the other being Seize the Daylight by Michael Prerau (see my review). Downing and Prerau cover much of the same ground in their respective volumes, both authors detailing the complex history of DST since its adoption in England and the U.S. during World War I. But there are, of course, differences between the two books. Downing’s is a shade more conversational in tone than Prerau’s, and Downing seems to be less sold on the benefits of DST than Prerau, his relative negativity toward the time shift perhaps signaled in the “Madness” of his subtitle. Another difference between the two books is that Prerau’s approach to telling the story of DST is primarily chronological, while Downing adopts more of a thematic approach to the subject. He offers chapters on DST and sports, for example, on New York City’s role in the DST debate, and on the oddities of time management--sidereal days vs. solar days, solar months vs. lunar months, and so on.
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Prerau, David: Seize the Daylight
tags:
book reviews, books, David Prerau, Daylight Saving Time, DST, Seize the Daylight
I grew up hearing as an explanation for Daylight Saving Time that it was “good for the farmers.” It turns out that this is a widespread misconception, and it also turns out not to be true: farmers have in fact historically opposed the adoption or expansion of DST because of the inconveniences it imposes on them. Another childhood illusion put to bed, if decades late.
Since 1986 the U.S. has observed DST from the first Sunday of April to the last Sunday of October. Beginning in 2007, DST is to be expanded by three weeks (in accordance with the Energy Policy Act of 2005). It will now begin on the second Sunday of March and extend until the first Sunday of November. Given this change I figured it was high time for me to find out what Daylight Saving Time is all about.
I review below David Prerau’s Seize the Daylight: The Curious and Contentious Story of Daylight Saving Time. It’s the first of two DST-related books that have been weighing down my TBR shelves. Both books were published in 2005--the idea of exploring DST apparently being very much in the air in the first years of the new millennium. My review of Michael Downing’s Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time will appear tomorrow.
Thunder’s Mouth Press © 2005, 256 pages [amazon]
Benjamin Franklin proposed in 1784, when he was serving as the American minister to France, that Parisians conserve energy--in the form of candle wax and tallow--by changing their habits, rising with the sun rather than sleeping in with their shutters closed against the daylight. The idea never caught on, and it is at any rate impractical as it would depend on the alteration of individual habits on a large scale for it to have any chance of working for a community. Over a hundred years later, in 1905, a certain William Willett devised an alternative plan for increasing the number of usable daylight hours during England’s summer months. His plan, what we now call Daylight Saving Time, called for setting the nation’s clocks forward in the spring (he initially imagined the time being changed in 20-minute increments on each of four successive Sundays) and back in the fall, thus not relying on people to alter their sleep patterns on an individual basis. His idea didn’t catch on either, at least not immediately. In his book Seize the Daylight: The Curious and Contentious Story of Daylight Saving Time author David Prerau, who has coauthored government reports on the effects of DST, traces the complex history of DST from Willett’s tireless campaigning on behalf of its adoption to the modern era. Prerau also provides a chapter on the two artificial adjustments to natural sun time that men adopted prior to the introduction of DST. (Mean solar time was adopted starting in the late 18th century. It differs from apparent solar time in that the length of a day is a constant throughout the year rather than depending on the amount of daylight in any given day, which varies throughout the year. The second artificial adjustment was standard time, adopted in the late 19th century, which is when a single mean time is recognized over a large area.)
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Long winded Vollman trashes author in book review!
tags:
Book Reviews
This is nice when an internationally acclaimed and an award winning author, decides to take it upon himself to thoroughly trash a fellow writers work. Vollman (who always seems to me to be to more impressed with his own writing than anyone else is), now tears apart the second book from the author of Jarhead. While Anthony Swofford’s second attempt might leave something to be desired why would a talented author albeit not everyone’s cup o’ tea (me especially) take this on and write about it with the petty vindictiveness of a school yard bully? Did the PR blurb about “Swofford and the line “confirmation of Swofford as a major literary talent.” really upset Vollman so much as a threat to his self professed kingdom that he had to write this insipid nonsense. Maybe the NYT needs to address the criteria they have for picking authors to write book reviews. This is a disgrace for the paper and should have been above Vollman, however, now he has expressed part of his true character! What an asshole!
Steve Clackson
NY Times
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Smith, Mary-Ann Tirone: Girls of Tender Age
tags:
book reviews, Girls of Tender Age, Mary-Ann Tirone Smith, memoir, true crime
Free Press © 2006, 289 pages [amazon]
Mary-Ann Tirone Smith’s Girls of Tender Age is a memoir wrapped around a true crime story. She writes about growing up among the “working stiffs” of 1950’s Hartford, Connecticut under less than ideal conditions. Smith’s mother was distant and negligent:
“Until I am in first grade, I have no idea that when you are hurt, some people have the urge to hug and comfort you. In the first grade, my fingers get caught in the girls’ lavatory door and my teacher, Miss Wells, takes me in her arms and hugs me to her big bosom. I don’t understand why this is, a body surrounding mine, pressing sympathy from one heart into another. But my mother is the prototype of a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown.”
Her father was a sort of saint who devoted his life to caring for the author’s autistic older brother at a time when no one understood that condition. Smith’s autobiographical chapters--compelling enough without the introduction of further drama--are interspersed with brief sections, sometimes chillingly succinct, on the career of serial rapist and murderer Bob Malm:
“It was during this time [while in service during World War II] that Bob pursued his interest in forced sexual contact with preadolescent girls; he could only have sex successfully with preadolescent girls and only after terrorizing and hurting them, leaving some of them unconscioius, or possibly, dead. A man could get away with this in Okinawa.”
Eventually, the two threads of Smith’s story meet, tragically, when the author is nine years old.
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