Cleaning House

It’s New Year’s Resolution time, and the New York Times’ Room for Debate blog asks authors for tips on paring down book collections that threaten to take over our homes.  It’s a good problem to have in my way of thinking.  The response that is closest to my heart, and frankly not very helpful, comes from Joshua Ferris (And Then We Came to the End):

Books are notes from the field, bound and domesticated, life brought into narrow focus. Get rid of a book? No way. Every one is a brick keeping the building standing. Books are my life. I leave and come back, and the books I find there tell me I’m home.

That said, this year’s attack on the stacks at my house has been two-pronged: three new bookcases and aggressive purging.  I brought four boxes of books of limited value from the attic to a local book donation center.   We backed that up by donating another large bag of books to a local new/used bookstore.  Hopefully they have found a good home.  The third prong, which is upcoming, will be to foist books on anyone who visits.  We’re starting to see some promising results.

Rabbit Redux

Having just finished Rabbit Redux, I’m now three-quarters of the way through John Updike’s Rabbit series, although I haven’t read the four books in the order in which they were written and take place, having started with the third book, Rabbit is Rich, and then high-tailing it back to the beginning with rabbit, run.  I can truly say that I’m starting to realize why such heaps of praise have been thrown on Updike (may he rest in peace, having passed away this past year).

Rabbit’s story is epic in so many ways, yet is so not epic in so many others.  It’s epic in that it can sustain my interest through three (soon to be four) books, and it’s epic in that so many of the events that take place in Rabbit’s life are so far removed from anything that has ever happened to me.  At the same time, though, these are not events that I wish I could emulate, or that would typically be written about on the front page of the paper, although they are really strong events in an individual’s life.

Something that fascinates me about this character and this series and the way Updike has crafted Rabbit’s tale is that the four books were written approximately a decade apart from one another and cover periods in Rabbit’s life that are approximately a decade apart from one another.  When I finished rabbit, run, I assumed that Updike was going to put pen to paper immediately for a sequel; it wasn’t until I looked at the dates of publication that I realized he took a decade off while Rabbit spent the same amount of time growing into the next phase of his life — the part that would unfold in Rabbit Redux.

The thing that struck me immediately about Rabbit Redux was how things turned around completely on our main character (Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom) from the first book.  In rabbit, run, he had decided that life had more to offer than what he had at that point, and he took it upon himself to grab life by the horns and try to shape a more satisfying existence for himself.  While it would be a stretch to call his efforts a success, at least he was in control.  As Rabbit Redux begins, Rabbit and his wife Janice are together, but Rabbit soon figures out that Janice is cheating on Rabbit with a co-worker at Janice’s father’s car lot, Charlie Stavros, and Rabbit’s control of his life is taken away from him.  Again, it’s not that one could say Rabbit was completely happy with his life at the time of Janice’s infidelity, but at least he felt that he was in charge.  All of sudden, life starts controlling him rather than the other way around.

It was also fascinating to me the way Rabbit handled Janice’s affair — by telling her that she should go spend time with Charlie and figure out what she wanted.  While that may sound like control, I certainly didn’t view it as such.  At best it was acquiescence, a move that left Rabbit alone at his house with his son Nelson.  But not for long.  By accepting an invitation from an African-American co-worker to meet out at Jimbo’s Friendly Lounge, Rabbit becomes mixed up with a rich runaway from Connecticut named Jill and a Vietnam vet who appears to be her pusher, Skeeter.  These two characters truly take over his life.

Without getting into where Jill and Skeeter’s involvement takes Rabbit, I’ll simply point out that these three novels in the series are incredible portraits of our culture at the times in which they were set (and indeed were written).  While the first book oozed with early-1960′s Americana, this book reflects so much of the elements that made the end of the 1960′s and beginning of the 1970′s so unique — the moon landing, free love, drugs, Vietnam, and just a groovy, open mentality.

I’ve started Rabbit at Rest, the final book in the series, and I’m absolutely impatient to finish it.

Every Day I Write the Book

We love the intersection of books and music.  Usually that means we’re enthusing about a book with musical references.  In this case, it’s a song about writing a metaphorical book.  Elvis Costello and Ron Sexsmith do an acoustic version of Elvis’s classic Every Day I Write the Book as Neko Case et al. look on.

Friday Links

It’s cold and rainy in Atlanta today.  Perfect weather for clicking some links.  Here you go:

Earlier this week I missed Neil Gaiman doing his thing at Agnes Scott College.  By all accounts it was a smashing success with around a 1000 fans in attendance.  Gaiman signed books well past 1 AM for an event that started at 6PM.   That’s amazing.  The best part of this recap of the event is a quote from a sponsor of the event, Little Shop of Stories co-owner Dave Shallenberger:

Amazon does not put Christmas trees on the roof, Barnes and Noble does not ask you to bring your dogs to story time and Borders does not bring Neil Gaiman to Atlanta.

Amen.

Speaking of bookstores, Laredo, Texas will soon become the largest US city without a bookstore.   None.

In the UK, The Telegraph finds that  ”Sarah Plain’s gun-toting, meat-eating memoir is petty and shallow.”  You don’t say.

The Guardian (also UK) gives Going Rogue the digested read treatment.

The Guardian also compiles a suspect list of the best new words and phrases of the decade.

Omnivoracious talks to Aleksandr Hemon (an author on my 10 favorites of 09 list) about his new anthology of translated European fiction.

Catching up with Valentino Achak Deng

In today’s column Nicholas Kristof brings us up to speed on Valentino Achak Deng’s efforts to build a modern high school in his hometown, Marial Bai.  Valentino and Dave Eggers have plowed every penny of their profits from the sale of What is the What into the Valentino Achak Deng Foundation. If you haven’t bought the book yet, this would be a good time to get started.

Hermione Makes a Difference

Chronic City

Machiko Kakutani, writing for the New York Times, wrote a crushing review of Jonathan Lethem’s latest novel, Chronic City.  Kakutani bemoans, ”…in this tedious, overstuffed novel…Mr. Lethem’s Chronic City seems like an insipid, cartoon version of Manhattan…(and) In the end the reader simply doesn’t care…”  That review ran the morning after I bought the book in Manhattan.  Thanks for pooping in my cornflakes, Michiko!  It was going to take more than that to run me off though. Motherless Brooklyn and Fortress of Solitude are two of my favorite books.  It felt a sort of vindication when the New York Times Book Review named Chronic City one of the Top 10Books of 2009.  In my opinion, however, neither view is right.

Like Fortress, Chronic City is largely the story of the friendship between two men, Chase Insteadman and Perkus Tooth. Chase is a former child actor, currently out of work, who remains in the public eye as the fiance of a doomed female astronaut trapped in space.  Perkus Tooth is a former rock critic who spends his days smoking lots of pot (the titular chronic) and theorizing about – stuff.   The two men and most of the characters who drift in and out of their orbit are artists, writers, actors, independently wealthy, or are otherwise disconnected from the quotidian world.

Chronic City takes place in Manhattan, a much different place than the rough and tumble Brooklyn of Motherless andFortress.  Manhattan as represented here is a complex, unknowable place where strange phenomena occur that are taken in stride by a populace too busy to notice.  The novel takes place post-9/11, and the aftermath of that event is only referred to obliquely.  The entire south end of Manhattan is described as being “in a fog.”  Although this is meant literally, it also neatly describes the prevailing mood of the Financial District and its residents/workers/survivors.

The feelings of detachment, alienation, and loneliness in the center of a city of millions of people is a central theme to the book.  The complexity of life in a place teeming with people and the hidden world that ensures its successful orderly operation necessarily boggles the mind.  Perkus quotes Alan Watts:

“You mustn’t concern yourself with information from outside your immediate village. People…make demimondes for the purposes of of sensory sanity.  Nobody–that’s no body–really believes in the news from beyond the boundaries of their neighborhood or pocket universe.  Manhattan is one of those, you know, a pocket universe.”

Perkus and Chase are definitely members of a constructed demimonde with little news of the world outside of their prescribed borders.  Commentary on the media’s role in the perception of a collective reality is also a theme in this book.  A “war free” edition of the New York Times is available for those who don’t want to be bummed out or who prefer to limit their news to that of their own immediate village.

My view is that Kakutani was too quick to dismiss the aimlessness of the Chase-Perkus gang and their struggle to process the world around them.  Maybe as a resident of (or a least a worker in) Manhattan, she has lost sight of how unreal Manhattan is to those of us from some place else or how seemingly all-consuming the city appears to be to those who do live there.  Then again, I think that she is absolutely right that the novel drags in places and seems a little rudderless. Chronic City did eventually arrive at a satisfying conclusion for this reader, but it took its sweet time in getting there.  This is not Lethem’s best novel, nor do I think that it qualifies as a top 10 of the year.  That said, Lethem fans should find plenty to enjoy in this latest effort.

rabbit, run

A while back I decided to introduce myself to John Updike’s character Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom by reading the third book in that series, Rabbit is Rich, since it had won the Pulitzer Prize.  As I noted in my review of that book, I had wished I’d started at the beginning instead, and so I’ve gone back and done that, with rabbit, run, Updike’s first book in the series.

And it seems perfectly clear in retrospect that Updike knew he was going to write more about Rabbit after rabbit, run.  Not to spoil the “ending” of this book, but there is just way too much left on the table as this one concludes to think that Updike wouldn’t put pen to paper again for Rabbit’s followers’ sake.

Rabbit Angstrom is a former high school basketball star living in Mt. Judge, Pennsylvania.  He’s working as a salesman for the MagiPeel Peeler Company and is married to pregnant, alcoholic Janice, whom Rabbit doesn’t really seem particularly close to, and they already have a young son, Nelson.  As rabbit, run begins, Harry’s lack of direction and certainty in his life is abundantly clear, and as the title somewhat metaphorically suggests, he decides to take drastic action to try to put himself in a better place.  It reminds me of the old phrase “what’s the worst that can happen?” as Rabbit sort of decides that there’s no law that says he can’t just extricate himself from his current situation.  I won’t share details about how exactly he goes about it, but as a married man and father, I was both totally captivated and absolutely horrified by the decisions he made and the feelings he seemed to exhibit (or not).

I’ve read a book or two about grown men trying to make sense of their lives, and I can’t think of any that I’ve found as engaging as the Rabbit series (at least what I’ve read of it so far).  Don’t get me wrong — I don’t like Rabbit Angstrom — I think he’s a pretty awful person.  But his story is a total trainwreck and I can’t look away.

Dr J’s Favorite Non-Fiction of ’09

OK, so my annual list of The Best Non-fiction Books I Read This Year is a little skimpy this time around, but what it lacks in sheer numbers it more than makes up for in total awesomeness. I was awful busy in 2009 putting my own book to bed (see if you can guess which one is mine), so I read less for pleasure than I normally do.

Having said that (apologies to Larry David), here’s the list:

The Jazz Loft Project: Photographs and Tapes of W. Eugene Smith from 821 Sixth Avenue, 1957-1965. Author Sam Stephenson is an old friend, so I’ve watched this one develop for years and I knew I would love it. I’m hardly an impartial observer.  But as Sam himself would say, “Holy f**king dogshit is this awesome.” Dwight Garner, the New York Times’ reviewer, considers it the most significant coffee table book of the year.  While I wouldn’t necessarily classify it that way, I can’t disagree. “The book is an elegiac stew of sight and sound,” Garner writes, “and a singularly weird, vital and thrumming American document.” Couldn’t have said it better myself. You can learn more about the project through a multi-part WNYC radio documentary series here. Honestly: I cannot possibly recommend this book highly enough.

Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original, by Robin D.G. Kelley.  I’m a big fan of RDGK’s work as a historian and Monk is one of my favorite musicians. I’m the target demographic. I don’t think I was quite prepared, though, for how great this biography would be.  It’s clearly a labor of love for Kelley; he’s the only person in the world who could have written this book. This is an idiosyncratic and meticulously detailed chronicle of one of the most unique artist-geniuses the US has ever produced. (Monk arranged and rehearsed the Town Hall concert that put him on the map in Eugene Smith’s loft; see above.) The way Kelley deals with Monk’s mental illness is thoughtful, generous, and heartbreaking.

Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt, by Hasan Kwame Jeffries.  All this one does is pull back the curtain on a too-long ignored corner of the civil rights struggle, introduce the world to some unforgettable freedom fighters, and rewrite the early history of Black Power.  Not bad for a first book.

Hopefully 2009 was the year when I read the last of the accounts of the Bush administration’s goings-on that made me as ashamed of my country as I’ve ever been in my life while I was reading them.  This year’s entries:

The Forever War by Dexter Filkins.  Filkins is dogged journalist, an incredible writer, and a good soul; he has since moved on to the Afghanistan beat and earlier this year stepped out of his journalist shoes to raise money for Afghan schoolgirls. (I can’t find the Times Magazine article about this behind the firewall, but it’s back there somewhere.) But this book about bumbling through the war in Iraq didn’t quite move me the way Imperial Life in the Emerald City did.
Angler : The Cheney Vice Presidency. Ugh. Why do I even bother? This book is an impressive display of investigatory journalism by Barton Gellman. It’s just that Gellman has a total creep for a subject.  How in the world are we going to explain this asshole to our grandkids?

Zeitoun has been covered elsewhere on this site.  I concur with all of the plaudits. Rather than seconding them, however, I want to use this space to give Dave Eggers another shout-out for What is the What? I assigned it to my graduate Oral History Theory and Methods class this semester and it led to one of the best classroom discussions I’ve ever been a part of.  Dave Eggers, you rock.

There are three books about the Amazon I meant to read this year but didn’t.  I’m pretty sure they would have made my list if I had:

Fordlandia and The Lost City of Z are the obvious choices.  What nearly slipped past my notice was Conquest of the Useless, which may be the granddaddy of them all. I haven’t exactly followed director Werner Herzog’s career, and I’ve never seen his movie “Fitzcarraldo.” That one was set in the Amazon, and according to all accounts Herzog made some… let’s just say questionable decisions while filming it, and this is his behind-the-scenes recount of that episode.

I’m curious about this book because Herzog’s film “Grizzly Man” is one of my favorite documentaries, easily the most unintentionally hilarious movie I’ve ever seen.  I can’t begin to explain it in a paragraph, but it revisits the life of Timothy Treadwell, whom we can charitably call a unique fellow who went off to Alaska to live with wild-ass grizzly bears. Treadwell believed that he had come to understand and commune with the grizzlies totally.  The grizzly bears, being grizzly bears and all, finally got sick of his shit and – no one could have possibly predicted this – ate him (and Treadwell recorded it). Herzog tells the story straight, which is funny in its own right, but he also drives the story along with his own narration: dime-store philosophy that he voices in Schwarzeneggerian English. Imagine the Terminator saying, “I believe Timothy tried to escape the bonds of humanity to become a bay-ah.”  I can’t possibly do it justice.

Surely Conquest of the Useless offers more of the same, in equal doses of self-importance and utter lack of self-awareness. (You know how they say Tragedy + Time = Funny?  No.  The formula should be Funny Accent + Self-Importance – Self-Awareness = Really Funny.) I think this one could be the laugh riot of the year.

Special bonus: Herzog has a new film that features Nicolas Cage trying on a New Orleans accent that will surely drive Tim crazy.  The man is a comedy genius!

Nicole’s Picks for ’09

It’s hard to believe that 2009 has come and is almost gone.  I guess it is true that the older you get, the faster time goes by.  When I first sat down to compile my “best of” list, my initial thought was that this was not such a great year for great reads.  After reviewing my entire 2009 catalogue (love Shelfari….), I realized that I did read some really great books; it was just interspersed with a lot of mediocre books.  And even worse than last year, I posted very infrequently - sorry Tim!  If I can’t seem to get my act together to write a review, you can at least take a look at my Top 10 of 2009 (in no particular order other than I am listing non-fiction first)………

• Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin
• Last Days of the Incas by Kim MacQuarrie
• River of Doubt, Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey by Candice Millard
• My Father’s Paradise by Ariel Sabar
• Push by Sapphire
• All Other Nights by Dara Horn
• Zeitoun by Dave Eggers
• Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones
• Sarah’s Key by Tatiana de Rosnay
• The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamnada Ngozi Adichi

As Hanukah approaches this week and I have no answer for my husband who  keeps saying “Do you want a Kindle or not?”  I would like to know who amongst the BGB readers have made the switch.

Russ weighs in…

Russ’s Top 3 Novels of 2009, In An Order That Is Completely Arbitrary But Also Alphabetical:

A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick (my review)

Goolrick did it and did it well with this novel: a period piece, a love story and a mystery with fantastic writing and a plot that twists and rolls and plays with strings tied to both the heart and the brain.

Last Night In Montreal by Emily Mandel (my review)

It took me nearly the whole damn year to finally read this book, but oh god I’m glad I did. This is a wrecker, a heart-stopper, a book that aches long after you turn the last page. It’s as much about how to leave as it is how to love, and Mandel’s second novel, 2010′s The Singer’s Gun picks up the loving and leaving.

Swimming Inside The Sun by David Zweig

What a first novel this is-it’s Dave Eggers and Chuck Klosterman writing about each other, really. Zweig conjures a musician struggling with his art and with himself, and in the process has crafted a psychological treatise on depersonalization (we’re all over-exposed to media and are losing ourselves), as well as a tale of an everyman in New York falling in love on every corner.

Favorites of 09

It is lists week here at BGB.  Our contributors will be posting lists of varying length and descriptions about our favorite books that we’ve read in 2009.   I’m kicking things off with a traditional top 10 list.   While most of my favorites were new in 2009, some were just new to me.  In no particular order, my favorite reads of ’09:

• All Other Nights by Dara Horn
• Nine Lives by Dan Baum
• Zeitoun by Dave Eggers
• The Long shot by Katie Kitamura
• The Great Perhaps by Joe Meno
• Lowboy by John Wray
• Green Metropolis by David Owen
• The City and The City by China Mieville
• Radiant Days by Michael Fitzgerald
• Love and Obstacles by Aleksandr Hemon

The City and the City

China Miéville is another is those authors that I’d been meaning to get around to reading.  I had vaguely remembered coming across glowing reviews of his past books somewhere or other.  When I came across his latest book,  The City and The City, hidden in The Strand’s downstairs half-off shelves, it seemed like it was high time to pull the trigger.

One of the best things about The City and The City is the strange, but completely believable world the author has created.  The novel takes place in a Baltic city-state that has been divided for centuries.   Unlike most divided cities, there are no walls or other physical impediments splitting  the city.   The divisions are entirely cultural and are deeply ingrained.   The two cities – Beszel and Ul Qoma – exist “grosstopically” are deeply enmeshed, with areas that may be common to both cities described as “crosshatched”.  Citizens of the two cities must master the art of practiced heedlessness towards the foreign city and its inhabitants clearly in their midst.  Visitors to the strange city-state would have a harder time:

…they would have had to undergo mandatory training and passed the not-unstringent entrance exam, both its theoretical and practical-role-play elements, to qualify for their visas.  They would know, at least in outline, key signifiers of architecture, clothing, alphabet and manner, outlaw colors and gestures, obligatory details…

Noticeably sensing the citizens of the other city in any way is a strictly enforced taboo.  To violate the taboo is known as a “breach.”  The mysterious enforcers of the taboo are known simply as Breach.  Miéville notes the seriousness with which abuses of the stricture are handled:

Trust to Breach, we grow up hearing, unsee and don’t mention the Ul Qoman pickpockets or muggers at work even if you notice, which you shouldn’t, from where you stand in Beszel, because breach is a worse transgression than theirs.

Did you catch the “unsee” there?  Miéville infuses his dystopian vision with plenty of Orwellian word play.  ”Unsee”, “unsmell”, and “unhear” define the methods by which citizens of both cities choose to be oblivious to people and places within the immediate vicinity.   Topolgangers, grisstopically, disensus, and liminality are some of my favorite neologisms.

Don’t worry, there is a plot, too.   A seemingly straightforward murder becomes anything but as a detective in Beszel follows leads to the other city, Ul Qoma, and the seedy underbellies of both.  Eventually detectives from both sides join forces to solve a crime that seems purposefully executed to exploit the grey areas between the two worlds.  The novel features also features one of the most bizarre chase scenes (on foot) that I’ve ever read.

The City and The City is an engaging novel that wonderfully blends the crime novel genre with thoughtful social commentary.  Miéville explores the ways in which we separate ourselves from others and can consciously or unconsciously “unsee”  the people around us.  This is one of my favorite novels of the year – hands down.

Thoughts on Bookselling

Clay Shirky (Here Comes Everybody) posts an interesting take on the future of bookselling:

Got that? Lower prices will lead to higher prices, and cheap books threaten to reduce the range of ideas in circulation. And don’t just take the ABA’s word for it. They also quote John Grisham’s agent and the owner of a book store, who both agree that cheap books are a horrible no-good very bad thing. So bad, in fact, that the Department of Justice must get involved, to shield the public from the scourge of affordable reading.

Cory Doctorow (Makers) responds with some “half-formed thoughts”:

I think that Clay’s probably right that the most traditionally profitable sector of bookselling — mass-produced bestsellers — is going to keep on migrating onto the web (that’s where I get most of my mass-produced bestsellers, certainly). But I also think that there’s something to be said for physical street-level stores de-emphasizing those products in favor of the simultaneous pursuit of the top- and bottom-end of the markets.