Condalmo

Book club offer: nine books for a penny. Join in the next sixty minutes, get free naked people pictures

Polaroids, no less! 

If you're wondering whether that link is safe for work, here's a hint:  naked people Polaroids

Reading: "Personal Days" at Google.

(via Scott)

Popular music about cold-blooded murder.

I would submit the soundtrack to Tombstone, which I listen to and enjoy, but I suspect that "popular" does not apply, except among early/mid-90's college graduates.  What a horrible sentence.  Anyway, look:

I Shot a Man in Reno: A History of Death by Murder, Suicide, Fire, Flood, Drugs, Disease, and General Misadventure, As Related in Popular Song.  I especially appreciate the "general misadventure" category.

Reading and writing with a paucity of time.

Not a lot of lit in the blog here lately, I know.  My time's been shifting around as I work to get my private practice moving.  I've also been looking into counseling work with organizations already established.  Not a lot of time for reading and also blogging about it - hence my recent short posts.  I've been reading, though.  I'm not going to write about them at length now, but I liked Voyage Along the Horizon by Javier Marias, found it really fun in that nothing-gets-resolved-not-really sort of way, and expect I'll track down a copy of Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me sooner rather than later.  I also wanted to mention Ed Parks' Personal Days again, as I finished it and laughed out loud.  Fans of The Office, take note. 

Okay, that's it for now, I got a copy of Rob Walker's Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are in the mail yesterday.  Time for that and an iced coffee. 

Enjoy your weekend.

Man books.

Via the extraordinarily thorough site The Art of Manliness, here's the 100 Must-Read Books: The Essential Man's Library.  Have you read all the books on this list?  Yeah, I could tell.

Ed Park split into five.

Ed Park, a man of many parts, divides again this week at Five Chapters with "The Oblivion Arms."  He also blogs this week at Powell's, while also editing The Believer, crafting The New York Ghost, and sharing his Personal Days with you.

A strange and not entirely welcome balance.

Do you ever get to a place where you don't want any more books?  I've got so many unread books, yet there's always something I'm interested in checking out, some new author (for me) whose back catalog is beckoning.  It's always 75% "want more books," 25% "that's enough for now." 

I won a Powell's gift card the other day, and was looking at my wish list last night, trying to decide what to get before my postage pass expires.  And there's good stuff on the list, but I've got good stuff lined up already.  I didn't buy anything, and thinking about it, I realized that even with money for new books, there isn't anything I want to spend it on right now. 

Should I call the doctor?

UPDATE: Never mind.  Phew for a minute there

In the dictionary.

Okay people, let's talk about good dictionaries.  Comment or e-mail me.  I want to know what dictionary you recommend, and why.  I haven't bought a new dictionary in well over ten years, so I need to shop around.  Thanks.

UPDATE ONE:  No sooner do I post this, Grant Barrett comprehensively responds!  The man moves quickly.  However, no actual recommendations, just guidelines, so let me know your favorites.

John Updike's wife abuses him.

Strep throat and general disgruntlement has me in the mood to break some wildly distorted headline news here at Condalmo.  Let's lighten the mood!  Freeman and Updike in a wide-ranging and poorly-checked interview:

Q: I recall reading about you offloading some of your reviewing library of the past forty years recently – do you ever miss those books or have they made room for more?

A: You would know better than I that there is no ending of books. That was just my wife’s attempt to keep an orderly house. I’ve actually had to go back to stashing a few books in the barn, because the shelves here are full. I love books, but I don’t love them enough to constantly order and reshuffle them. My own books have grown frighteningly – I just remember when it was a tidy little shelf the Carpenter’s Hen, The Poorhouse Fair, Rabbit, Run, Pigeon Feather and the Centaur, that’s what five titles? And those early books are the ones that seem to get assigned in classes, and I could have stopped then with no detriment, but now the shelf is long and it’s a storage problem. I do miss sometimes those books that were given away – you never know when you are going to need a book, even when you are a fiction writer…in a way it’s cruel to make authors cull.

Emphasis added in attempt to justify screaming hyperbole post subject.  But, you know - books.  Come on!  Do you think Victoria Beckham makes David Beckham weed out his rare soccer ball collection?  I doubt it!  For the love of God, he's a man of letters!  (Updike, not Beckham.)  I have no idea what I'm talking about.

Then again: wouldn't it be great to mooch something from Updike?  Almost as soul-satisfying as The Dalek.

St. Borges.

As you might suspect, I've had little time for reading since I finished the excellent The Company of Ghosts.  (I have Salvayre's The Power of Flies ARC to read, but haven't felt up for it, yet.)  I've ducked in and out of Grace Paley, Barthelme, and Tobias Wolff story collections and may not get into another novel before McCarthy's Men in Space arrives.  (Any day now.)

After overcoming some technical difficulties, I've got my mp3 player to accept audiobooks and the like.  Just as of yesterday, in fact, so when I went to work last night, I had a hearty helping of Wolff's Old School and three of the New Yorker fiction podcasts - Paley again, Barthelme again, and "The Gospel According to Mark" by Borges and read by Paul Theroux.  Now that's a damned good story.  The end made me laugh - so perfect, so unexpected.  I listened to it again to pick out all the clues that had been there all along.  ("She had a little lamb" - genius!) 

I had thought about writing something somewhat-lengthy about it, but on three hours of sleep, it would come out... poorly. 

At any rate, if you haven't subscribed to the New Yorker podcast, it's in your best interest.  I think it's monthly, and in addition to the three storytellers I mentioned above, there's one with Junot Diaz reading one of his own stories.  I know you love Junot Diaz.  (I have yet to read Drown.  Might as well come clean here.) 

As the New Yorker has decided to be irritating about not giving you a link to a page with all the podcasts and details (unless you want to go directly to iTunes, which you may in fact want), and my efforts to copy the links to the individual pieces have failed, I offer you this link; you'll need to scroll 3/4 of the way down the page to find the "Fiction Podcast" section.  Word on the street is, they'll be updating the site to be Netscape Navigator friendly soon.

Robert Walser alternate cover.

BookMooch flagged me to let me know a copy of Robert Walser's Selected Stories was available.  I pounced; I was told that the cover is not the NYRB cover.  Did I still want the book?  A quick Google search on my end was not helpful, but the moochee found it.

Sold!  (well, mooched.)

Cursing, cussing, swearing.

From The Company of Ghosts, the narrator's childhood servant, Filo, on swearing:

Filo taught my mother... to utter oaths as long as your arm and even longer... oaths that Filo defined as follows:  small rockets launched high into the sky without any intention of causing injury or offense but merely with the aim of breaking with the idiocy of ordinary conversation and of opening small cracks in the walls in which laziness normally encloses us.

Unease, anxiety, unrest.

We've started the discomfort.  Stop by, add it to your feed reader, tell your friends, agitate in the comments.  Brief unwieldy mission statement:

The purpose of this site is to draw out everything that comes from reading Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet.  As the reading progresses, it will inform the content of this manifesto, which will - possibly - grow and change to reflect the effect of the book on its readers.  While this may read as unnecessarily pretentious, in practice, as with the case of many blogs, the entries will reflect whatever reactions and thoughts the participants care to share, provided it centers on texts from The Book of Disquiet and does not digress too far from the source.  Think of it as a blog from inside the text.

Inquiries and participation.

Darby begins a close look at Dhalgren and makes the following statement, which I feel reflects my own place as well:

But then, I don't come to literature as someone with answers but as someone who is trying to learn how to ask questions. I'm not even worried about learning to ask the right questions, or the best questions. It's just questions I'm after. Good questions, perhaps. Interesting questions, maybe. Questions, and the question of where they come from, and how they are found. Which is to say: I'm not here as an authority, but as a participant. I like it better that way.

Remainder film.

The subject says it all.  Well, not all. 

MT: I understand the film rights for Remainder have been sold? What does this actually mean!? When might we see a film?

TM: A partnership of FilmFour and Cowboy Films have bought the rights and are producing the movie. They’re the partnership behind the recent adaptation of The Last King of Scotland, which was a huge success and won an oscar for Forrest Whittaker. The first draft of the script has been written, by John Hodge, who wrote the script for Trainspotting. I’m not technically involved, but the producer gave me a peek and it looked really good. Next they decide who the director will be. So maybe 2008/9 for the release date. It always takes longer and costs more than you think, apparently...

There are approximately 126 ways this could be bungled.  Lead actor?  I see Trainspotting mentioned, I think Ewan MacGregor, I shrug. 

The interview (part two; part one ran yesterday) also features McCarthy talking about similarities and differences between the first and second books.  My copy of MiS is en route from very, very far away.  This ends your weekly McCarthy update.

ABCDEFG.

This looks like my kind of book:

ABC might have been subtitled "Difficult Letters," dealing as it does with Gerard Chauvin's sudden obsession with the origins of the alphabet. The novel opens with a terrifying, heartrending scene in which Gerard and his wife, Peggy, witness the death of their 6-year-old son, Harry, when the child plunges through the floor of an abandoned house during a sunlit summer outing. Moments before Harry's fall, Gerard notices a scrap of paper in the fireplace of the ruined building.

"On the top of the heap, not crumpled, was a sheet of writing, and Gerard leaned closer to try to decipher the meaning. He couldn't, and he reached down to pick it up. Frowning, he saw what he assumed must be letters, but he had no idea in what script, because it was not any he was familiar with. The letters were drawn very carefully, maybe by a child."

In the months that follow, Gerard grows increasingly estranged from Peggy. He is compelled to ask again and again the unanswerable question that surrounds his son's death: Why?

But that question gradually becomes subsumed into one he asks his wife as he broods about the scrap of paper with its indecipherable writing: "Have you ever wondered why the alphabet is set up the way it is? . . . Why does it start with A B C and not F D Q? Who arranged it the way it is, and when?" Gerard's obsession leads him back to the abandoned house where his son died. There he discovers that Harry's death was the result of a malicious act, no less terrible for being random. In the wake of this knowledge, Gerard's grief-driven detachment begins to resemble a sort of madness. He remains aware of his past and his identity, but neither bears any meaning for him now: He sheds them as though they were ruined clothing. His actions become dictated by impulse, by a sense of predestination that propels the novel more, and far more affectingly, than any conventional plot does.

Films for the blind.

As Maud noted, Jose Saramago's Blindness is set to be made into a movie, with Fernando Meirelles ("The Constant Gardener" and "City of God") directing and Mark Ruffalo as the doctor, Julianne Moore as the wife.  If there are two actors I'd rather see in a (hopefully) artful adaptation, I can't think of who they'd be.  Both Ruffalo and Moore have the chops.  As for the book, amazing, though I had to leave it unfinished - this was in grad school that I was reading it, and I never did get back to it, not yet.  My wife loved it, speaks very highly of Saramago in general - I think she's read two or three of his other novels - and picked up Seeing soon after it was released in paperback, but found it a bit heavy for an exhausted pregnant person to be slogging through at bedtime, and so we remain The Family That Puts Aside Saramago. 

Reader invests object with talismanic power.

A phenomenon people who read are familiar with: book in hand, hours pass unnoticed. A book has so engaged the mind that the hard desk chair, the unheated library, the downstairs neighbor’s murderous lovers’ spat go unnoticed. To emerge from such a state is like waking from an afternoon nap: sleep snatched during normal business hours, dreams lucid.

This phenomena is concentration. Not the space-out, but rather an opposite state: an active mind working in and out of text, drawing from memory and new information.

That this depth of concentration can only occur when storytelling is transparent, i.e., when there is no authorial presence to interfere with the reader’s attention upon the story, is false. An easy read encourages a sloppy read. Strong, plot-driven narratives often keep readers rapt, but something that demands close attention—which plot-driven narratives rarely do—is better equipped to engage the active reader. Just because a reader looks up from the page doesn’t mean the reader isn’t still inside the text. Books that hold the active reader’s attention allow for contemplation, invite the reader to pause and reread a line that was especially dense or especially beautiful, and stimulate new thinking. I’ve heard such interludes described negatively as “being thrown out of the story.” Rather, such interludes are a part of the story.

A book is an exciting object. Exciting because of the promise of what’s inside. By inside, I mean the text of a book—be it a story, a collection of poems, paintings, diagrams, mathematical equations, etc. This is why a poorly made book can be as exciting as a book that is beautiful. Recall the brittle paperback that became prized, made more precious for every page the cheap glue gave up, for every yellow flake of paper that fluttered away. That smell? That’s the acid destroying the cheap paper. Maybe you re-bound that book with a rubber band. Reader invests object with talismanic power.  (via)

"The Raw Shark Texts": soundtrack.

Largehearted Boy's "Book Notes" has (as usual) got the goods.  Excerpt from the intro:

People ask me lots about books and films - if I have seen such-and-such or read such-and-such and to what degree whatever-it-is has influenced The Raw Shark Texts. People rarely ask me about music though, which is strange because there’s a lot of music in the book and a lot of music went into writing it. There are even a few musical puzzles - spotting a song title and a few seconds searching for song lyrics will give a reader a nice little Raw Shark Easter egg of one sort or another (but I don’t want to give those away here!). I thought about putting together a playlist made wholly of mash-ups or cover versions, which might have been clever and fun and could even have worked as a commentary on my ideas and aims in a roundabout sort of way. Maybe a bit too clever though, and not very honest. Instead, I’ve decided on a playlist that tries to capture the tone and mood of The Raw Shark Texts. It’s a list of songs that helped me find and hold onto the mood of the story and songs which I’ve heard since which feel very close to what I was trying to get down on paper.

I keep going back and forth on whether or not to add this to my TBR pile.  This piece gives it a nudge in the positive direction...

T.K.O.

Does anyone remember that old arcade boxing game, the one where you were essentially standing behind the boxer that is "you", and he's transparent with green gloves, and you're facing your opponent with red gloves?  The announcer would shout "Body blow!" every single time you took a shot at the guy's gut, and it was a high speed game, which resulted in often hearing "Body blow!Body blow!Body blow!Body blow!Body blow!Body blow!" shouted in your face throughout the game.

Probably how Malcolm Jones must feel, if he has a scrap of professional dignity.  If.  Does he? Excerpt:

It's unclear from Jones's brief essay whether he had taken on Vikram Chandra's new novel Sacred Games (the 900-page novel in question) as a review assignment and decided to forgo it, or whether it was simply one of those books he tried to wedge into his otherwise busy evenings "after work." If the former, it's hard to see why he couldn't have forced himself through the book (although he claims to have found Sacred Games a good book, just not a great one) during the time he was actually at work. Is this not what full-time book reviewers for national magazines do during the day--read the books they then review? Or are they otherwise too busy taking lunches and doing meetings? Perhaps I'm not sufficiently informed about what the job description for a journalist-reviewer like Malcolm Jones really looks like.

Signs point to no.  Daniel Green advances to the next fight.

Paperback reader.

A recent post here once again highlighted my preference for the paperback over the hardcover, and lamented that publishers always release the unwieldy, overpriced hardcover first, and then make us wait for the paperback.  If only a publisher would step up to the plate and launch a simultaneous release system, thought I.

Wickett provides the remedy:

This spring MacAdam/Cage is rolling out Readers' Choice, a program that allows booksellers to decide whether they'd like to purchase select frontlist titles in hardcover or paperback formats. ... The company has been considering the Readers' Choice program for some time and decided to launch it with the spring list, a time of year when it tends to publish lesser-known authors who are "brilliant but haven't found a niche yet," said MacAdam/Cage publisher David Poindexter. For such authors, booksellers routinely indicated a willingness to take a stronger stance on paperback originals than hardcovers.  ... "A publisher's job is to find a readership for your authors," [MacAdam/Cage publisher David] Poindexter said. "When you talk to booksellers and they say, 'I can sell more copies if it's a trade paperback original,' it becomes the responsibility of publishers to do that."

Can I get an Amen?  Click over to see those titles they're running first.  Shout it from the rooftops.  Run down the street naked with "MacAdam/Cage" written on your chest in permanent marker. 

Condalmo by Dawn.

Rarely does a post inspire excerpt-quoting as this one has; here's most of it:

...So is anybody else digging the Hard Case Crime series? This is a new-ish crime fiction imprint that puts out a book every month; you can arrange to have a standing order charged to your credit card, and you'll just get the new book in the mail. The books look and feel fantastic--mass market paperbacks, just the right size, the title and author printed in bold sans serif type in yellow and black on a white spine, and an outrageously lurid fifties-retro painting on the cover...

If you'd like to read a book written by a woman, by the way, forget it. So far there are precisely zero. If, however, you like the idea of getting shot in the head by one, especially a totally hot one in her underwear, then you're in business.

On a related note, there's a part of me that wishes everything were a mass market paperback. I'd happily pay a little extra for nice, acid-free paper, but I don't enjoy paying for hard covers and rough-cut pages--and I especially don't enjoy thinking of all the people who don't bother buying my own stuff when it comes out because it costs twenty-five dollars. I wish every decent book cost ten bucks. I wish every decent book could fit in your jeans pocket.

Groovy!  The staff here at Condalmo love the pulp covers, detest the mandatory hardcover-paperback order of the universe. 

An excerpt, from Hard Case Crime's Blackmailer:

I was stalling, trying to get my mind back on the track again.

She smiled. It was just a smile. It didn’t tell me anything.

"What’s there to know? I have the only copy of a book Charles Anstruther wrote before he died. You publish books. I want to sell it. Now, are you going to offer me a drink?"

I looked at her.

She was very cool and very attractive. Suddenly I began to feel angry. "No," I said, "I don’t think I am."

She raised her eyebrows inquiringly.

"Not right this minute, I’m not." I walked over to where she was sitting. "Not till I find out what this is all about. Fifteen minutes after you walked out of the office this morning, I had a note from a man named Max Shriber offering me a book he said Charles Anstruther wrote before he died. As far as anyone knows, Anstruther didn’t leave an unpublished book. What’s going on here? What kind of racket is this?"

"Take it easy, baby," Jean Dahl said.

She stood up and very casually walked over to the bar. Very deliberately she poured about two inches of whisky into a glass. She reached into the ice bucket and filled the glass with ice. She stood by the bar for a moment casually swirling the ice and whisky around in her glass.

"You’re a lousy host, baby," she said. "I don’t think I like you."

She raised the glass. "Cheers," she said and took a long sip.

I walked over and stood very close to her.

"I don’t think I like you either," I said. "But I’m going to find out."

I wasn’t quite sure what I was going to do. But I was going to do something.

For more hard-boiled fun...

Late Tuesday night. I was in my office on Grant Street, slurping cold whiskey smashes and wagging my cranium to a very tasty Coltrane solo. My nostrils had finally stopped bleeding. The mousetraps were empty. Things were looking up for me, and I was back on the yum-yum juice again. I set fire to a Winston and swung my bare feet up on the desk. “Here’s to moderation,” I said.

I woke up on the floor. I was under my desk. Somebody had pulled a fast one. It was Wednesday afternoon.

... click here.

"Oh Pure and Radiant Heart" shortlisted for award.

I didn't care for it, but many people did, including the folks at the Arthur C. Clarke Award judging panel.  I'm not sure exactly how it qualifies as SF - though I did skip a few pages midway through; perhaps at some point therein, Don Knotts joined Oppenheimer in battling Daleks, or something. 

NBCC Finalists, 2007.

Nonfiction:
Patrick Cockburn, The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq (Verso)
Anne Fessler, The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe V. Wade (Penguin Press)
Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (Penguin Press)
Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution (Ecco)
Sandy Tolan, The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew and the Heart of the Middle East (Bloomsbury)

Fiction:
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun (Knopf)
Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss (Grove/Atlantic)
Dave Eggers, What is the What (McSweeney’s)
Richard Ford, The Lay of the Land (Knopf)
Cormac McCarthy, The Road (Knopf)

UPDATE:  Here's the same list with links to excerpts, pictures.

Stagger Lee.

Fascinating look at the different versions of the song at LB's Book Notes for Stagger Lee by Shepherd Hendrix and Derek McCulloch - in researching the book, they sought out as many versions of the song as they could find, made an actual soundtrack.  Excerpt:

Stagger Lee – Lloyd Price: Lloyd Price has done more than anyone to keep the legend of Stagger Lee alive in popular culture. In 1959, he pulled together elements from different versions, upped the tempo, and most crucially added the “Go Stagger Lee!” chorus that transformed what was often a mournful cautionary tale into a gleeful celebration of machismo and mayhem. In a shrewd marketing move for the time, Price also added a chorus of white backup singers to – what? Well, to remove a little soul from it, I suppose, and make the song more palatable as a crossover hit…exactly the opposite of what legions of blue-eyed soulsters would later do by backing themselves with gospel singers. (Amusingly, the backup vocals on Stagger Lee were by a group named The Ray Charles Singers – no relation.) Whatever Price’s reasons, one can’t argue with his success – the song sold more than a million copies and went to #1 on both the rock ‘n’ roll and R&B charts. For generations, Price’s was the best-known version of the song and arguably remains so today. “The night was clear/The moon was yellow/And the leaves came tumbling down…”

Show her your type face.

Andrew points to a nice site for those of us who feel a good typeface can make a good reading experience into a great one.  I ordered a Robbe-Grillet book a while back and the typeface was so horrible that it immediately sank like a stone to the bottom of the TBR pile.  Minion, o n the other hand, looks like number one with a bullet. 

From "Of Song and Water" by Joseph Coulson.

Running straight out and going slow, he watches for a sign, an indication that he's passed this way before.  He feels his body rising and falling, the skiff beating against the current and in some way holding its own.
He knows he should be grateful for the lake's hard beauty - his father embraced it always - but on this day it seems cruel, almost lonely.  He tries to stay calm.  He wants to hold everything in check, but he feels a pressure in his chest, his heart pounding, and beads of sweat roll down his back.
Without warning, a thin wall within him suddenly gives way.  He wants to break something with his hands, to bulldoze long stretches of the past and start building again from the ground up.
He dreams of pouring the lake away.  He wants to dam out all water and walk the singlehander's course from Port Huron to Mackinac Island, cataloging the shipwrecks, mapping the caves and trenches, listening as whispers rise up from the seaweed and debris.  He wants to search the naked lake bed, cursing the light, cursing the darkness, following the scavengers that circle overhead, their shrill voices calling, until he finds the lost pile of teeth and bones, the bleached remains of his father's body.

Adaptation.

Patrick Brown covers some upcoming book to film adaptations.

Best of the books for the wee ones, 2006.

A list of lists. 

My 3.75 year old got a lot of enjoyment this year out of the following:

• Don't Let The Pigeon Drive the Bus
• The Colors of Us
• Swimmy
• The Puddle
• 10 Minutes till Bedtime
• The Complete Adventures of Curious George
• The Mitten
• The Hat
• Llama Llama Red Pajama
• Mrs. McMurphy's Pumpkin
• A Kiss for Little Bear
• Mama, Do You Love Me?
• My Love for You
• My Friend and I

When she was in the womb, I read Guess How Much I Love You to her many, many nights, particularly early on in the pregnancy.  Much enjoyment was had on the part of my wife when we learned through the magic of ultrasound that I had been reading directly into the little one's bum.

Plans for 2007.

Happy New Year! 

Another post, this one at the Paperhaus, about The End of Mr. Y - a lot of people talking about this one, and what they're saying makes it sound worth a look.  Maud referred to it as one of those books that "that made you skip work, or stay up half the night, or forget yourself at stoplights", which has been seconded by enough people whose opinions I respect to get this one onto the list. 

This is the sort of book I want more of in 2007 - the books that will make me pull over to the side of the road on the way home to read one more paragraph, that will fully occupy my brain.  The exciting ones.  The ones that kick reality in the teeth.  Here's what I have waiting in the wings - not the entire TBR pile, but the ones that are muscling their way to the front:

20 Lines a Day - Harry Mathews.  Spoken of highly by Bud, among others, this looks to be a promising read, "genius or not".

The Impossibly - Laird Hunt.  Well, yeah.  I also have a copy of his Paris Stories that I'm looking forward to. 

The Brotherhood of Mutilation - Brian Evenson.  Brian was kind enough to provide me with this at his recent reading here in Maine.  I still haven't gotten to it, but my increasing interest in noir prompted him to share this with me.   

The Children's Hospital - Chris Adrian. I'm 2/3 of the way through, but forced myself to put it on hold at a key point to turn my attention to a book for review, Of Song and Water by Joseph Coulson.  Hospital has been rewarding, though, so I intend to go directly back to it after finishing Coulson.  I suspect I'll be reading his Gob's Grief this year, as well.

What is the What - Eggers.  I had initally decided I'd skip this; I liked his first two books, did not at all like How We Are Hungry, and the subject matter of What just didn't sound like something up my alley.  That must be why I received a review copy in the mail, just as I'd read that one more stellar review that tipped me into deciding to read it when it comes out in paperback.  Oh kind and gentle fortune, thank you!

The Book of Disquiet - Pessoa.  I keep waiting for a month of sunny days to start reading it again. 

These, in addition to some fine Christmas additions, the back catalog of Stephen Dixon, The Savage Detectives, After Dark, Then We Came to the End, the new Roth - not a lot of surprising picks, probably, considering where my interests are, but a good stack of front runners, all strong contenders.  I'm tempted to start a Max-style queue; we'll see.

Best of all, though: the books I have no idea are out there.  Lord knows I've got enough books to read already, but it's those authors just off to the side of my peripheral vision, the ones hovering there, that I'll find out about this year, that will be the most satisfying - the unexpected find, the new (for me) author that I want to tell everyone about - that's what I'm most excited about.  It's always the ones you don't see coming.

Five Vida.

Five Chapters has "an exclusive first serial" of Vendela Vida's new novel - "Let The Northern Lights Erase Your Name" - up at the site.  I started her other book, "And Now You Can Go", a couple of times in the bookstore and thought it was interesting, but not quite enough to make me pull the trigger.  This will be a good chance to try her writing out again.

Gather ye blogs together.

Some assorted stuff for those of you out there with not a lot planned tonight -

Darby comes up with a list I wish I had thought of first.  I sure didn't get to Swann's Way, did I now?  I could have had a lot of fun with this, as he clearly did; instead, I remain grumpified for the rest of the year.  This, too, shall pass.

Excerpt:

18.  The Red Tent by Anita Diamant

I own this? What the hell? I don't remember buying this.

And:

20.  Libra by Don DeLillo

21.  Mao II by Don DeLillo

22.  Underworld by Don DeLillo

Motherfucking Don DeLillo. Right? Am I right? You know what I mean.

See: I have this theory that outside of White Noise, nobody actually reads Don DeLillo's books. People just talk about them at dinner parties so they can attract mates, but if you gave them a pop quiz on the contents of the books, they'd all fail miserably.

Well, except for Jennifer Egan, who I believe when she says she read and liked Underworld, but that's because her brain is naturally sexier than those of most of the rest of the human race. For her, Underworld did move to my end table, so that if on the off-hand chance she drops by my apartment for a visit, I can pick the book up real quick and act like I was about to start reading it. Then she'll marry me.

Okay, so, fine. I put Don DeLillo on this list solely to get to the Jennifer Egan joke. My editors informed me that I haven't met my "Darby has a huge literary crush on Jennifer Egan's brain" jokes yet this year. And by jokes I mean, well, I sort of want to ask her to prom. The Literary Prom. The one where instead of a band, it's just Don DeLillo reading excerpts of White Noise, while Jennifer Egan and I dance under the moonlight, and William T. Vollmann spikes the punch. With crack.

What? Yeah, like your fantasies are less weird.

Meanwhile, Stefanie makes a game plan for 2007.  Given my tendency to stomp around like a little pisshead when I don't have a good book going, a game plan might be a good idea; but, with baby #2 on the way, and plans brewing for me to sit down and take the test to get my license to be a therapist, I don't want to make a plan only to have it fall apart.  So, willy nilly into the new year. 

People are already talking about next year's releases - the new Roth, new Chabon, and Murakami all getting frequent mentions. 

Jenny Davidson plans to start keeping a journal.  Again, a good idea for me; I was religious about it for years, from senior year in high school to a few years after undergraduate college.  Not a lot written down from Freshman year at UMF, but after that I got back to it and wrote down everything.  But that sort of environment has breathing room for pursuits like that.  I know, I know, I could make time for it now if I really wanted to, I know.  We'll see. 

Callie's going to write.  Write, write, write.  I wish her good luck.  One of the hardest to keep.

Metafiction in America is dead.

Posted by Lance Olsen at Now What: 

In the conclusion to her chapter on postmodern fictions for the seventh volume of The Cambridge History of American Literature [1999], Wendy Steiner argues that the 1990s have signalled the end of the experimentalist period of esoteric metafiction in American prose writing. Whereas outside the U.S. such writings continue not only to be produced but also to be appreciated, Steiner claims that in America critical taste "has moved on" (Steiner 529). As a possible reason for this turn away from self-reflexive fiction, she notes the fact that several of the most renowned American experimenters, notably Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, Robert Coover, John Hawkes, and William Gass, have passed their creative peak. A more compelling factor, however, would have been the so-called "culture wars" in the American academy which seem to have undermined the cultural validity and vitality of postmodern "high" fiction. According to Steiner, the controversies in the universities have resulted in the gradual erosion of the boundaries between "art" and "reality" (530). Further, the development of new media as well as dramatic changes in the marketing of books have made such distinctions between "high" and "low," or "popular" and "serious," even more precarious. More and more, apparently, novelists are moving away from elitist game playing and instead are drawing inspiration from mass culture and the lives of "ordinary people" (brackets in Steiner's text, 535).

So says Wendy Steiner.  I call B.S.  Read more here and join the discussion...

All was quiet.

I've been uninspired lately with Condalmo, with the few posts trickling out mainly being links to other pieces.  There's just too much stupidity in the air, seems like something new every day, and the holidays can be a little bit overwhelming.  (It helps knowing I'm not alone.)

I'm halfway through Chris Adrian's fine The Children's Hospital, and will probably save any lengthy comment for when I finish it; meantime, Shelley Jackson wrote one of the better reviews to date (though I disagree, continuing my curmudgeonly coda of 2006, with her connection of the book with an America "too preoccupied with curing its various ailments" to consider the rest of the world; seems to me the opposite is the case) - the review does contain a few plot point spoilers, but only if you know absolutely nothing about the book, and it's enjoyable anyway.  (The book.)  Here's an excerpt of The Children's Hospital, as well as an interview with Chris Adrian. 

Anyway, I'll post a less-than-robust roundup tomorrow.  Please check out some of the fine sites in the poorly-maintained/updated "Sites" section.

Free books for Christmas.

A holiday reminder that it's easy to put free books in the hands of kids.  I'd share my heartwarming grandmother-in-the-bookstore story, but we'd both be better off if you'd just click here.  (Daily.) (After Christmas, too.)

Underrated Writers 2006.

Now online at Syntax of Things is the 2006 Underrated Writers list.  I was pleased to contribute to this year's list - I studied last year's list like a treasure map.  Highly recommended.

His Moviegoer epiphany.

Scott checks in today with a good post about Walker Percy's The Moviegoer.  Excerpt:

In a way, Binx and his aunt are the same. They both want to believe themselves above other people. Binx has some vague idea that he's part of a lost tribe cast out from society (at one point he compares his plight to that of the Jews), and his aunt sees herself as part of a more genteel, mannered class, something that the "common people" can't touch. Binx's commoners aren't the working class, but rather those 50,000 motorists driving along the Gulf Coast. I think Binx and his aunt have a lot more in common than either seem to realize.

Yet there's also a fundamental divide. Binx's aunt can't understand why he never absorbed her way of life, and Binx can't understand what his aunt is trying to tell him. When his aunt finishes her rant, Binx doesn't stop to think about any of it. He just assures his aunt that he's "pondered over it all my life" but "can't express" his own thoughts about what his aunt has tried to teach him.

I have had a post about the book, and how I see it connected with another book I read long ago, percolating for quite a while now.  I'm not really sure if I'm full of beans or not, so it's been on the back burner, but Scott got a few synapses firing for me here, so I may come back to it. 

Erasing The Children's Hospital.

I don't know what this means, exactly, but I'm enjoying the heck out of both of these, so this little coincidence makes my season bright.  (Please also note track seven, "And It Rained All Night.")

Marquez bulldozed my house.

My wife has expressed bemusement many times over my reluctance to read Gabriel Garcia Marquez.  Any number of reasons - too big a project, I have this or that book to review, it's in the TBR pile (it being One Hundred Years of Solitude) and I'm just not there yet, saving him for when I'm really lacking something dynamite to read - none of them especially convincing.  I finished The People of Paper and didn't immediately grab anything else - I was waiting for my copy of The Children's Hospital to arrive in the mail (which it did, finally, to my very great excitement) and didn't want to start anything lengthy in the meantime; then I agreed to review another book that should be arriving any day now, which left me with a small opening.  "Now's your chance to read Memories of My Melancholy Whores," she said. 

So, I did.  I was initially underwhelmed - this was the grand master?  I had a mix of expectations - yes, it was virtually a novella compared to some of his other works, and so probably smaller in ambition of reach, a Body Artist, so to speak.  And yet, Gabo.  The story unfolded in a decent enough fashion, and I dutifully read on.

Around thirty pages in, the book really took off for me.  I wish I had written about it immediately afterward, or even as I was reading; as is too often the case, I was full of thoughts I wanted to get into a post here, but time has scattered them.  I did dog-ear this passage:

The only things that remained the same were my columns in the newspaper.  Younger generations launched an attack against them as if they were assaulting a mummy from the past that had to be destroyed, but I maintained the same tone and made no concessions to the winds of renovation.  I remained deaf to everything.  I had turned forty, but the young staff writers named it the Column of Mudarra the Bastard.  The editor at the time called me into his office to ask me to conform to the latest currents.  In a solemn way, as if he had just thought of it, he said: The world is moving ahead.  Yes, I said, it's moving ahead, but it's revolving around the sun.  He kept my Sunday column because he could not have found another cable editor.  Today I know I was right, and I know why.  The adolescents of my generation, greedy for life, forgot in body and soul about their hopes for the future until reality taught them that tomorrow was not what they had dreamed, and they discovered nostalgia.  My Sunday columns were there, like an archeological relic among the ruins of the past, and they realized they were not only for the old but also for the young who were not afraid of aging.  Then the column returned to the editorial section and, on special occasions, to the front page.

They, living as large as possible in youth, didn't think about the future until they were already discovering that it wasn't to be taken for granted - that hopes, once laid out, aren't safe to be put aside as "finished", because as the world changes around you, your ideas of what a "good future" will be need to change, as well.  But because we're all carpe diem in our youth, when we reach tomorrow and find it doesn't match our long-ago blueprints, drawn and set aside, that we instead prefer to think of the times that those blueprints were in front of us.  That we still had the pen to make changes.  The nostalgia.

Or something like that.  Literary analysis, not my strong suit.  But I like a good passage as much as the next guy.  The book became magical around this point, but not magical in an old-man-with-wings sort of way - just in the quiet way Marquez gave something to his old man, something to long for without actually knowing what it is he needs, or why, or if possibly he might even already have it and just not understand. 

Tormented by love, I had the storm damage fixed and also took care of many other repairs I had put off for years because of insolvency or indolence.  I reorganized the library according to the order in which I had read the books.  And I discarded the player piano as a historical relic, along with more than a hundred rolls of classical music, and bought a used record player that was better than mine, with high-fidelity speakers that enlarged the area of the house.  I was on the verge of ruin but well-compensated by the miracle of still being alive at my age.

Nostalgia, indeed.  Out with the old and in with the new as he simultaneously embraces his old age and seeks the meaning in it.  His new love drives him to make change after change.  That last sentence sums it all up, for me - the torment he feels ruining him and also thrusting him into a feeling of life, of aliveness. 

I was disappointed in the way the book ended; too pat.  But I felt after reading the book that I had sorely underestimated the power of Marquez in his old age.  Like his narrator, he's taken an old story and presented it in a way that combines the nostalgia with that greed for life.   He no longer needs three hundred pages to turn our heads. 

Leader of the pack.

My contribution to Max's series on the best books of 2006 appears today at The Millions. 

Reading despite your instincts (and slumbers).

At the always interesting Book World, some thoughts on her "Dirty Dozen" of the year.

I've been dithering all day over whether to name and shame the twelve books I mentioned yesterday as ones I wish I'd given up on.  On balance I've decided to do it, but with the clear disclaimer that in some cases it was a mismatch between the reader and the book.  However, in a few cases it was definitely the book. 

Dirty:  Black Swan Green.  Dirty: The Sea.  Dirty:  On Writing.  And so on.

Against Chabon.

I loved the Wonder Boys movie.  Still do.  Michael Douglas hasn't done better, ever; remember when Tobey Maguire was somebody other than Peter Parker?  Remember when Katie Holmes still had that something?  Robert Downey, Jr.'s "I'm lookin' at you, fella!"?

I didn't like the book, and so have not been moved to read any other Chabon works.  (There's only so many hours in a day.)  I felt that a good part of my dislike of the book came from seeing the movie first, and then because of the differences between the two the book fell short.  I picked it up again recently and decided no, not just that - I really just didn't like the book.

Like the Travelling Wilburies (Wilburys?), I'm Not Alone Anymore:

"As a lifelone habitue of marijuana I was used to having even the most dreadful phenomena prove, on further inspection, to be only figments of my paranoid fancy, and all day I had been trying to convince myself that this morning at about six o'clock, while I lay snoring with my legs scissor-forked across the freshly uninhabited regions of the bed, my marriage had not come asunder."

Give me a break. The book (or at least its first hundred odd pages) is stuffed with this kind of thing. It probably doesn't seem so bad from that example, but the cumulative effect is awesome in its powers of repulsion. Unputdownable? I can hardly pick the thing up. It's not that I'm agin the use of arcane vocabulary and long sentences (I believe the standard critical term is "sinuous"), but like anything the proof is in the how rather than the what and, frankly, Chabon sucks at the how.

The other thing about Wonder Boys is that Chabon, much praised for his storytelling prowess - Google again - isn't so hot in that department, either. It's a bit like with Chabon's idol, Stephen King. All you hear about is how he's this great storyteller, and after all that's what the people want, proper stories, but when you sit down and read one of his books you're confronted with a mess of clunky characterisation, telegraphed plot twists, and forced exposition. Chabon is particularly bad with the latter; it seeps into almost every paragraph, and the dialogue is riddled with snort-inducing detail: "...I know I must be pregnant, Grady, because although I gave up all hope of ever having a child a year ago, when I turned forty-five, I really only reconciled myself to the notion a couple of weeks ago." Fuck off.

I'm looking forward to the follow up post, in which we hear what Tim really thinks. 

"The People of Paper"

Reading The People of Paper.  I think that Plascencia is, far and away, one of the most

The books for the kids.

Article on the crap of My Little Pony and what sounds so much better - Jenny Linsky and the Cat Club. 

Last month I was in New York for a week and among the many small humiliations I endured—my husband and I were auditioning our family for preschool—was this one: I had to ask a clerk in a very famous children’s bookstore if they carried any of the My Little Pony books. I did this because my daughter, who is three, likes them, and as the week was hard on her, too, I thought she needed a treat. My daughter knows I’m not particularly good at locating things in stores and so she expects me to ask for help. In fact, she orders me to if the item we are looking for happens to be for her. I found a friendly-looking clerk, the most Meg-Ryany of the ones on the floor that day (we were in the bookstore used as a model for Ryan’s shop in You’ve Got Mail). But still, her answer, “We do not,” implied everything she meant it to. Then the clerk with the cute short haircut looked at my daughter as if she had a fresh young mind I was trying to fill with garbage, and so I did what any parent would have done. I said it was my daughter’s idea.

Later I told the story to a friend and he took the admirable position that the clerk had been an elitist snob. A book is a book, he declared indignantly, and how I wish I could have agreed! The problem is, the My Little Pony books really aren’t books. They’re marketing confections, perfectly designed and executed to appeal to the three-year-old girl who likes—and these things appear to be largely universal—pink, horses, and cats, in that order. Put bright pink and baby horses together and you have something irresistible, the book equivalent of Banilla yogurt. As if to prove the point, they’re frequently displayed in “spinners,” metal racks more suitable for the sale of spices or stickers than literature.

Nice article for those of us with little Future Readers of America at home.  Mine is three and a half, and as previously noted, there's another on the way.  She's excited to read to the little sister, and we've been fortunate, for the most part, in the books we've received as gifts over time.  Some have made it in that straddle the line between crass commercialism and good story, and it's interesting, the way that they do it - wrapping the product up in a story about sharing, or becoming friends, or not hitting, that makes it difficult to criticize. 

And really, anyone over the age of thirty would be hard pressed to criticize The Muppets - or even their mutant, treacly offspring, Muppet Babies.  OK, maybe not so hard pressed, as somewhere around that era was when The Muppets went from TV variety show and movies to animated, half-hour commercials for the Muppet Baby line of toys - and then Disney bought The Muppets, and anyone with one quarter of a brain can see that Disney is interested in taking your money, and they'll be damned if they won't find the mathematically-tested, homogenized, appeal-to-all-ages way of doing it.  It's depressing to see childhood favorites become a cog in a machine.

Which brings me back to the books - sort of.  The Muppet Babies books we have at home straddle that line, coming before the complete commodification took place.  You get some age-appropriate stuff here, no sneaky adult-style jokes worming their way in with a nudge nudge wink wink.  "Kids who share have twice the fun!" - and while I'm not entirely convinced, my three-year-old offers me some of her cereal most mornings.  I suppose I would suggest that any book that provides enjoyment without the "benefit" (I use that word loosely) of its television counterpart, without the "benefit" of all the merchandise tied in to the characters - that book can be judged on its own, because that is the way the child is receiving it. 

I see that there's a number of Jenny Linsky books, which makes me nervous.  Granted, it's six more years until my oldest falls in that recommended age category, and by then Jenny will be buried until layer upon layer of The Newest Cool Thing, slowly fossilizing from the weight and pressure.  But anything that comes in a line of books is nervous-making, given my own experience with "lines" of books and the products associated with them.  Anything popular enough to be a "line" will likely have people seeing dollar signs - Harry Potter halloween costume, anyone?  I'm well aware that more children can identify the golden arches than anything of actual importance - that the corporations marketing these things have placed my daughter into a target group, whether I like it or not.  As a father, the idea of my daughter being any sort of a target is distressing.

Review: "The Exquisite" by Laird Hunt.

My review of Laird Hunt's The Exquisite is online at PopMatters.   

There's also a review of it in the Dec/Jan Bookforum, though that isn't reflected on their site.

What I read in 2006 - the incomplete list.

Here's my shot at fulfilling the "reading log" nature of this site.  Between a variety of childcare/workplace induced illnesses, a three-year-old hitting full speed, a new baby on the way, and other assorted personal tales that have no place here, it's a wonder I managed to read as much as I did, much less kept any reasonable track of it.  You'll note that the further back I go, the thinner my comments get.  Next year I'll keep the list up as I go, so you can receive the full pointlessness of the order in which I read these books, plus some nice pictures, links - you know, interactive. 

Here's most of what I read this year, in something close to reverse order. 

The Moviegoer - Walker Percy

Just finished this recently.  Trying to gather my thoughts about it for a lengthier post - I started off not impressed, but by the end I think I'd dog-earred more pages than not.  Took me back - but more about that later. 

Indiana, Indiana – Laird Hunt

A few weeks ago, I had a brief moment of terror when I was completely unable to choose what book