Baby Got Books

A headline for a story about the National Spelling Bee, above the masthead in my morning paper, says, “Kan U Spell? Word Nerds’ Time to Shine.” Congratulations kids! The regional newspaper thinks you are a big loser, because you can spell words correctly. I am sure that you won’t get your ass kicked today. There is no link to the headline – the AJC’s on-line version had the good taste not to belittle grade school children’s academic achievements.

Other things that are pissing me off today include:

• Christian Yoga – you know, because the regular yoga is little more than witchcraft.
• The Left Behind video game.
• The 50 best conservative rock songs – which could be the stupidest thing you see all day. How stupid is it? It includes a Clash song. The author should be relieved of his keyboard.
• Lastly, there is a demonstration of striking carpenters going on 27 floors below me. The working man has no greater friend than yours truly, but, dudes, shut up already.

It was proposed that we come up with our own list of the Top 25 American Works of Fiction of the Past 25 Years, which will, of course, be much better than The Times’. To get the ball rolling, here’s your home work assignment. Look at your bookshelf and write down the best American Fiction that you’ve read since 1980. E-mail your list to me, and we’ll go from there. If you don’t have my e-mail address, use the “Contact Us” page to send it in. I’ll compile any responses after the holiday. In an unrelated note, I recommend the new CD by Gnarls Barkley to be your official CD to run into the ground over the summer. Enjoy your weekend. I’m off to Canada.

I wanted to take a look at the NYT’s list of the Top 25 works of American fiction for the last 25 years from another perspective. I decided to take a look at the awards that were actually handed out each year in the time span, specifically the Pulitzer for Fiction and the National Book Award for Fiction. Each are limited to American fiction (The National Book Critics Circle Award includes other English-speakers, mostly British). If you look at the two awards’ lists of winners from 1980 to the present, you can see a much more diverse body of work than the NYT’s. Interestingly, few of the books on The Times’ list won either award. Participation by women goes way up on my new improved list (e.g., The Color Purple, The Shipping News, A Thousand Acres). A comic book ( ! ), Maus, won the Pulitzer for Fiction. The Pulitzer also includes people with names like Hijuelos and Lahiri. White Noise makes the cut on the National Book Award list, but Underworld does not make either list. Middlesex and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay get a shout out. Even overlooked old white guys like William Gaddis and Norman Mailer make the new improved cut. Bottom line, a more satisfying list could have been developed with about ten minutes of WikiPedia-ing. Also, some people question the NYT’s moral authority to print such a list, given their scant coverage of contemporary fiction generally.

Cover of the Sunday NYT Book Review yesterday.  The essay by A.O. Scott is pretty interesting.  Scott’s most fitting commentary  “I was surprised at how few of the highly praised, boldly ambitious books by younger writers – by which I mean writers under 50 – were mentioned. One vote each for “The Corrections” and “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,” none for “Infinite Jest” or “The Fortress of Solitude,” a single vote for Richard Powers, none for William T. Vollmann, and so on.” 

I preferred any of those books to the Top 5 from the survey.

I just (finally) finished Carter Beats the Devil, by Glen David Gold. I borrowed this from a friend who had great things to say about it, and those great things were somewhat corroborated by a fellow BGBer. The chain of great things stops here.

Look at the cover of this book — Satan, cards, a tuxedo, a funny hat — what self-respecting potential reader could turn it down? Well, suffice it to say that the cover tells very little about the story behind it. In the story, there’s a magician, some other magicians, a President, a lion, an elephant, some secret service guys, pirates, torture devices, tough chicks (one of whom is blind), motorcycles, fights, daring escapes, a lusty librarian, and more, but not in any particular order. The story features some parallel story lines that are supposed to catch up to one another at the end, and I guess they do, but not in a satisfying way (at least for me).

I think it’s safe to say that the main storyline is based on the career of Charles Carter, p/k/a “Carter the Great” (apparently he was a real magician) and allegations that he murdered President Harding (apparently he was a real President). But so much stuff is thrown in here about secret service guys, competing magicians, and representatives from the military and from RCA, that it’s hard to tell who’s a good guy and who’s a bad guy. Normally that would be okay, if it led to suspense and the twists and turns befitting a well-developed thriller. But here, I couldn’t buy in to what appeared to be the eventual motives driving the actions of all of the characters. I just didn’t get it.

I’m pretty sure I know what happened when all was said and done, but for some reason by the time it was all said and done I just didn’t care anymore — I just wanted to finish for the sake of finishing. If anyone else can shed some insight into what made this book good for them, maybe I’ll reflect differently on it. But in the meantime, this one goes in the “mistake” pile.

The DaVinci Code movie opens today and it appears to be taking a beating by the critics: Exhibit A, Exhibit B. Some of the grief heaped on the movie seems to be carried over from how much the reviewer hated the book. For example, A.O. Scott reviews the movie by heckling a piece of Dan Brown’s writing. My review of the book was that it was the worst book that I couldn’t put down. A (minor, but increasingly annoying) problem that I had with the book is the idea that Robert Langdon is a “professor of religious symbology” at Harvard, a phrase that you will see repeated in every description of the book and movie. Is there such a thing? The Harvard listing of academic programs isn’t aware of it. Wouldn’t Dr. Langdon be a professor of religion who, maybe, specializes in religious symbolism? How about semiotics? Harvard doesn’t have a semiotics program either. Brown does, but Brown is decidedly less sexy than Harvard. Anyway, I am saving my movie dollars for the other controversial religious movie of the summer, 10 Things I Hate About Commandments.

Michiko Kakutani positively reviews two new books about Hurricane Katrina in the NYT. The first is The Great Deluge by Tulane historian Douglas Brinkley. Brinkley is a New Orleans native, and his book provides tremendous detail, as well as a personal look at the Hurricane and its aftermath.  Douglas Brinkley was on Fresh Air this week. The second book is The Storm by Ivor van Heerden. van Heerden is the co-founder of the LSU Hurricane Center, and his book provides a less personal, more scientific look at what went horribly wrong.

New Orleans’ newspaper, The Times-Picayune, has created a fascinating animated map of the sequence of events that led to the flooding of the city.
Find out how the candidates for mayor of New Orleans would react if they came across Nicole Ritchie and Paris Hilton stranded on a roof top and could only rescue one in this penetrating interview.

Lastly, Rob Walker, author of the excellent Letters from New Orleans, has used a quote from our review as a blurb for the book on his web site. Really.

Once you’re tired out from your new dance moves, take a break and go see Akeelah and the Bee. I saw it with my 7 1/2 year old son, Noah, this weekend and it was a fabulous movie. It was so much more than a movie about the Scripps Spelling Bee (even though I now know how to spell “xanthosis”). The plot of the movie centers around Akeelah, a girl from south/central LA who rises above her ghetto world and goes onto the National Spelling Bee. Along the way, she gets help from Laurence Fishbourne, a UCLA professor, who is her coach, and Javier, her new found Mexican friend from chi-chi Woodland Hills. When I asked Noah what he liked best about the movie – he said that it taught him if you try your best you can accomplish anything. Now how’s that for a good parent/child moment? And I must say that it was a delight to go to a family movie that was not animated.

And even more on the highbrow list is this article from the New York Times Sunday magazine. The prediction is that within a few years, there will be a virtual library on the World Wide Web that will include every book every published and all available at anyone’s fingertips. The most interesting part was the discussion of how all the books will be linked together rather than individual entities on book shelves. A la Wikipedia, this virtual library could be open source so that anyone can “tag” sections of books that will then link them to other books and so on and so forth. How cool is that?

Attention lame white people – you know who you are. Tired of being a year behind on the latest dance moves? Worry no more. The Instructional Video “How to Snap” by Cherish will have you bustin’ all the new routines with a quickness. Learn the Snap Dance, the West Side Walk, Lean with It/Rock with It, Pool Palace, etc. D-Roc of the Ying Yang Twins assures us, “It’s still Crunk, it’s just Crunk with a slower pace.” Also, be advised that “The ATL” may be on the way out to be supplanted by “The A”. Yes, this has nothing to do with books. It’s spring time. Sometimes you’ve got to put that book down and shake it. You are looking a little pasty.

Any books about Indian culture are right up my alley so I was really looking forward to reading Brick Lane by Monica Ali. This book was shortlisted for the 2003 Booker prize and was critically acclaimed when it first came out.

The book opens in Bangladesh and chronicles the life of Nazneen, a seemingly typical village girl who ends up in London after her parents arrange her marriage to a Bengali immigrant, Chanu, who is twice her age. The first half of the book portrays their traditional relationship – Nazneen is the dutiful housewife who recognizes that she is married to an intellectual “wanna-be” who will never really make anything of himself – but she never questions that this is the way her life was meant to be. She cooks for him, listens to his prattling on, and even cuts the corns on his toes every night. Nazneen is an extreme fatalist. The book actually opens with the story of Nazneen’s birth at which the midwife and her relatives thought she would die because she didn’t nurse for a few days. Rather than take her to the doctor, her mother’s response was that it is God’s will. This sets the tone for the the first three decades of Nazneen’s life. Nazneen never leaves Brick Lane, which is a Bangladeshi enclave in London, and spends her days with her fellow Bangladeshi neighbors trying to raise her 2 daughters who struggle with wanting to be typical British teenagers but being raised by ultra-traditional parents. Nazneen’s first child is a son who dies when he is about 2 years old. I was frustrated by the fact that this episode in their life was described at length but the reader never found out what was wrong with the child and what he died of. I guess this was just another example of God’s will.

Suddenly (or at least it seemed sudden to me), Nazneen takes a younger lover, Karim, a Muslim idealogue, and suddenly has a complete change of personality. The second half of the book explores Nazneen’s personal growth as she realizes that she feels truly alive when she is with Karim and that she can make decisions independent of her husband. I felt that the author did not delve deep enough into why Nazneen started having this affair. Clearly this was the catalyst which changed the rest of her life . Nazneen comes into her own throughout the remainder of the book and culminates with Chanu returning to Bangladesh without his wife and kids.

Throughout the book are many great characters who almost border on being caricatures (the moneylender, Mrs. Islam; Dr. Azad, Chanu’s best friend who is a true intellectual; Hasina, the rebellious sister who ends up an indentured servant; and even Razia who is so Anglofied that she always wears a Union Jack sweatshirt). All of these characters contribute to the great storytelling in this book.

What I enjoyed most was Ali’s rich, descriptive writing style. Certainly I had no prior knowledge of life in Bangladesh but the by end of the book I could imagine sitting in the dirt road of her village with the smell of cattle and chickens next to me or living in an immigrant enclave and never going further than 2 blocks from my home. Ali’s description of Nazneen’s cooking made me crave Indian food on many a night while I was reading the book. I always find that the best books are those rich in characters and describe lifestyles of which I have no knowledge. Brick Lane certainly fit that bill.

Recent events make it all too easy to hate the University of New Jersey at Durham, all of its students and sundry alumni. The rich northern kids, the entitled attitudes, the obnoxiousness that serious dook watchers have all known and loathed for years came bursting out for all the world to see this spring. Now hating dook is like shooting fish in a barrel.

I remember a happier time, a more innocent time. A time when thinking Americans could hate dook for less tawdry reasons. Will Blythe does, too. Will Blythe is the former fiction editor of Esquire Magazine, a native of Chapel Hill and Carolina alum, and a dook-hater of the old school. He remembers where he was when Jeff Capel hit a half-court heave to send a 1995 UNC-dook game to overtime. (I remember where I was, too: in a sports bar in Austin, drinking beers on the Austin Duke Alumni Club’s bar tab, and making fun of the members of the Austin Duke Alumni Club; Carolina won the game, by the way.) He can tell you what the weather was like at his house when Walter Davis drained one from about 30 feet away to complete an 8-point comeback against dook with 17 seconds to play in a 1974 contest. He has dreamed up 101 ways to murder Dick Vitale. The man knows his Carolina-dook rivalry. (I can tell, because not only does he hate the same dook players that all diehard Carolina fans hate, he hates the same Carolina fans that real Carolina fans hate.)

What separates Blythe from your run-of-the-mill basketball fan is the rather sophisticated philosophy he has developed to rationalize his obsession: Blythe posits that human beings can find true happiness only by hating someone or something totally. Embrace that base instinct and give in to it. Blythe, like all thinking Americans, hates dook basketball and its execrable, rat-faced leader.

Blythe is an exceptionally funny writer. I am fully prepared to admit the possibility that only maniacs and people with lots of time on their hands would read To Hate Like This is to be Happy Forever, but I do believe it will find a wider audience with fans of sport generally and readers who enjoy unadulterated acerbity. (I wrote in a previous post that Warren St John was the writer best able to describe the experience of being a fan. Well, Blythe is better.) If you read this far, you might like it, too.

I read a piece on the Carolina-dook rivalry that Blythe published in Sports Illustrated about 4 years ago, absolutely loved it, and waited for this book to come out. And waited. And waited. And then read it the week my pre-ordered copy from Amazon finally arrived. It was well worth the wait, even if the Sports Illustrated piece, published here as a prologue, was the best part of the book.

What can I say? I am a dork; this book validated everything I hold dear. I know that at least one BGBer has close ties to a dook alum. I urge her to forsake the darkness and come to the light.

Mac Thomason of the Braves Journal (an outsanding place to keep yourself current on the Braves) has an excellent review of Built to Win, a new book by the Braves’ GM, John Schuerholz. It appears that Schuerholz is yet another very smart baseball man who doesn’t get, or doesn’t want to get, the actual Moneyball concept. The idea is not, as Schuerholz seems to believe, all about getting statisticians in a room full of laptops and making team decisions based on ANOVAs and linear regression analyses. (Are baseball scouts that insecure?). It is all about recognizing and taking advantage of the inefficiencies in the system. Mac’s examples of JD Drew and Julio Franco are great examples of how the Braves have done this in the past. However, the comments on Mac’s original post reveal something even more troubling for the not insane Braves faithful – apparently Johnny is a big friend of Rush Limbaugh, for the love of Mark Lemke! As long as we’re talking baseball, a great blog about baseball, economics, and statistics with actual charts and graphs that gets Moneyball can be found over at Sabernomics.  Check out this amazing post regarding steroids and their effects on home runs.

A friend who was new to the blog checked it out recently and later asked me if we actually read any of the books that we talk about. That was my clue that I needed to get back to posting on some of the books that I’ve read recently, instead of cracking wise. Next in my queue, is the Booker Prize short-listed Arthur and George by the three time Booker-nominated author, Julian Barnes.

(warning: spoilers ahead) Arthur and George is an historical fiction account of certain events in England at the end of the Nineteenth Century and beginning of the Twentieth. The titular “Arthur” is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who we know is destined to become the legendary creator of Sherlock Holmes. George is George Edalji, the son of a Church of England vicar, a first generation Englishman, and a promising young attorney.

The book follows the two men from childhood with each chapter sub-heading typically named after one of the other so that the reader is aware of whose story is being told as the novel jumps between them and other key figures. The two men’s lives are notably different, and they do not intersect until George has been accused, convicted, and imprisoned for committing the “Great Wryley Outrages“.

For various reasons, it appeared obvious to outside observers that George had been wrongly convicted. Once out of prison, George fights to clear his name and to be restored to the legal bar so he can continue to work as an attorney. In a rather unlikely turn of events, but all true, Arthur becomes involved in the campaign to clear George of all wrong doing.

The case highlighted several interesting issues with the British court system at the time. The judge hearing George’s case had no legal training and was a representative of the local gentry. Even scarier, once a case had been decided at the time, there was no recourse for appeal other than to write a letter to the Home Office (whatever that is) explaining your plight. There was no legal reason for the Home Office to read, much less act, on your letter.

Arthur was able to bring publicity to the case and helped to expose some of the more suspect evidence used to convict George. Eventually, in classic Orwellian language, George is declared innocent of the charges, but he is not compensated in any way since the government did nothing wrong in convicting him. As a result of George’s case, the needed judicial reforms were eventually implemented.

I thought the book was mostly very well written and fascinating. The problem for me began when I realized that George’s case had been resolved and there was still a hundred pages to go. The book continues on until George attends a memorial event for Arthur’s death. The men had seen fit to run into one another exactly once in the interim. The book’s WikiPedia entry says that the book touches on some of Barnes’s most cherished themes: how people change over time, death, spirituality, etc. Great. I could have done without a large chunk of descriptions of Arthur’s interest in and defense of spiritualism and seances. It seemed, to me, to take away from the more interesting interaction between the two men and their differing backgrounds. It also suggests that regardless of what happened, one of them was really much more interesting than the other. Why not call the book Arthur and George, but Mostly Arthur.

An aside: The book’s official web site could be one of the more annoying book sites I have ever visited. You have to play “concentration” with words like “British!” (their exclamation point, not mine) and “clever” to reveal one by one the ten reasons why they think that you should buy the book. But at least it has lots of flash animation and is difficult to navigate.

This is the best post pretty much ever. I’m posting what follows below for my friend, Frank. Way back in October or early November 2004, Frank had a freak health emergency. He was rushed to the hospital and patched up. However, he had infections, fevers, major organ failures, and other life-threatening complications.

According to his doctors at the time, Frank was supposed to die around the First of 2005, but he didn’t get the memo. Somehow, he fought back. It’s been a long slow road with some rather unbelievable obstacles along the way. He was bedridden for so long that he has been working on relearning to walk and get around with atrophied muscles, but he’s been reading like a fiend. He sent me an e-mail earlier tonight with his thoughts on Jonathan Lethem’s Fortress of Solitude. Nothing makes me happier than being able to post here on his behalf. If he hadn’t been in a drug induced coma at the time, Frank would have been the first person that I strong-armed into our nerdy merry group. It’s a rainbows and unicorns kind of day here at BGB.

With the introductions properly made, here’s Frank:

I just finished “Fortress of Solitude” last night.

Jonathan Lethem is an extremely gifted writer with a great grasp of the
cultural milieu in which he evidently grew up.

I wasn’t sure where he was going to go with Dylan and Mingus after about
350 pages, but then Barrett Senior got shot and the section entitled
“Liner Notes” started, and it just knocked me on my ass. Wow!

I’m not sure why anyone that isn’t a white guy, between 20 and 40 would
get this book. It is replete with references from everything from early
soul to Fantastic Four, from Monty Python to the Gormenghast trilogy.

Barrett Rude Junior may be the best drawn character in a book since Tom
Buchanan.

The only thing that confused me was Aaron X. Doily’s ring, and whether
its power was imaginary, its effects simply perceived by the children or
real. It is only in the third act are we shown that the powers of the ring are
indeed true and that they only respond to Dylan’s command. The fact that
this isn’t clear earlier in the book, is the book’s main failing, or
perhaps its genius.

Even if you don’t get all the references (Lord knows I didn’t,
especially all the music,) the book is definitely worth the 500-page
ride, no matter what your background. The story is strong, the
characters are ultra-real and many of the scenes are quite tender.

Take off your Clark Kent glasses, use your x-ray vision and “boost”
yourself a copy of “Fortress of Solitude” today.
– frank

Way back in the early days of the BGB Empire, we had a lengthy back and forth on this book, with everyone having a slightly different take on it. Refresh your memory here and here.
OK, I have to post this now so I can comment on Frank’s post. Bye.

The NYT notes that the blogosphere is a abuzz debating Stephen Colbert’s roasting of the prez at the White House Correspondent’s Association dinner. Not us. We barely have time to link to the transcript. It took the Paper of Record four days to get the story out. We should get some slack.

The Kaavya Viswanathan plagiarism scandal continues on without any additional piling on by us. Just because she had a book deal and got into Harvard does not necessarily make us bitter. The list of books the young author may have borrowed from seems to grow daily, but we have no time to be smug. However, I, for one, plan to make the time to participate in the TMN “Sloppy Seconds With Opal Mehta” Contest.

And I really have no time to comment on Brad and Angelina starring in the Atlas Shrugged movie. I will pause briefly, however, to reaffirm my position that Ayn Rand can suck eggs. >> I’ll also find a few moments to update this post to point out that #54 on Esquire’s 59 Things That a Man Should Never Do Past 30 is read The Fountainhead. It is also on the list of things that he should not do past the age of one. Take that, Ayn.

BGB’s Dr J forwarded the NYT’s review of Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart. It may need to bump up a few places on my “to read” list. Here’s critic Walter Kirn gushing over the book:

Why praise it first? Just quote from it — at random. Just unbutton its shirt and let it bare its chest. Like a victorious wrestler, this novel is so immodestly vigorous, so burstingly sure of its barbaric excellence, that simply by breathing, sweating and standing upright it exalts itself … Compared with most young novelists his age, who tend toward cutesy involution, Shteyngart is a giant mounted on horseback. He ranges more widely, sees more sweepingly and gets where he’s going with far more aplomb.

I’m not sure where Mr. Kirn stands on this book. There is also a link to an interview and reading by the author (click on the picture where Shteyngart looks like Vlad the Impaler)- if you want to go all multi-media and whatnot.