Author Archive
While some people like lists, and some don’t, I couldn’t resist Jane’s invitation to list my own favorites from the year. Just because I haven’t been posting, this doesn’t mean I haven’t been reading, so here are the top ten, in alphabetical order:
- Barthelme, Donald. Forty Stories. Shorter than Sixty Stories (reviewed here) and more fun.
- Bouldrey, Brian. Honorable Bandit: A Walk Across Corsica. A rollicking adventure in Corsica combined with a poignant memoir about the AIDS epidemic. Available from The University of Wisconsin Press.
- Bulgakov, Mikhail. The Master and Margarita. The devil, a giant talking cat, witches, and lots of other interesting characters in this book.
- Campbell, Bonnie Jo. American Salvage. Intensely realized stories of people living in rural poverty in Michigan. “The Inventor, 1972″ is particularly great.
- Chabon, Michael. Wonder Boys. Reviewed here.
- Flaubert, Gustave. Madame Bovary. Very funny, somewhat sad, and a little bit hot. Flaubert’s characters are obsessed with sex and money, and here we are, 150 years later, obsessed with the same things.
- Garcia Marquez, Gabriel. One-hundred Years of Solitude. Reading this book made me feel more alive.
- Kumin, Maxine. Still to Mow: Poems. A vital, relevant collection.
- Manguel, Alberto. The Library at Night. Reviewed here.
- Percy, Walker. The Moviegoer. A philosophical novel that never gets bogged down in ponderous ruminations.
December 10th, 2009
Jon - Central Library
I laughed out loud eighty-four times over the course of Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys. Some were mere chuckles, but others were loud guffaws of the wake-up-the-person-sleeping-next-to-you type. That’s a lot of of laughs, especially for a guy like me, and by “guy like me” I mean the kind of guy who keeps track of how often he laughs. Eighty-four laughs over three-hundred and sixty pages is a pretty good percentage, so if you actually end up enjoying the book more than I did, I don’t know how you’ll ever finish it. Then again, even if you find this book half as amusing as I did, or a quarter, you will probably still enjoy it.
Wonder Boys follows Grady Tripp through the weekend of Wordfest, a writer’s conference held at the college where he teaches writing. Grady’s wife has just left him, his mistress, the chancellor of the college, is pregnant with his child, and his editor, Terry Crabtree, wants to see the book he’s been working on. The book he’s been working on for seven years. It’s over two-thousand six-hundred pages long and has five alternate endings. Like Grady’s life, it’s a mess.
In spite of this, or because of it, Grady makes for a wonderful picaresque hero and Wonder Boys is a wonderful novel. While the laughs are there, so are well-drawn characters and real pathos. As Grady, Crabree, and Grady’s student, James Leer, stumble through one adventure after another, it begins to appear that the book’s real subject is male friendship. Don Quijote was published in the early seventeenth century, and Wonder Boys in 1995, which makes me wonder why people seem to think Judd Apatow discovered it. Not that there’s anything wrong with Apatow’s films, but if you’re all caught up on the bromance canon, Wonder Boys was also made into a film with Michael Douglas, Robert Downey, Jr, Katie Holmes, Tobey Maguire, and Frances McDormand.
September 14th, 2009
Jon - Central Library
This year biographies of three important short story writers came out. Hiding Man: A Biography of Donald Barthelme appeared in February and Cheever: A Life appeared in March. A Flannery O’Connor biography just appeared as well; unlike Barthelme and John Cheever, however, I had read quite a few of O’Connor’s stories along the way and didn’t feel like she was someone I had to catch up on. But Barthelme and Cheever were two writers I had missed. My own little reviews that follow may seem limited; if you want a broader take, check out the biographies mentioned above; in addition, AO Scott in the New York Times recently made a good case for these three writers, among others, and the short story in general, and To The Best of Our Knowledge recently featured Cheever and Barthelme.
First up was Barthelme’s Sixty Stories. I can imagine him being one of those writers people either love or hate. I think it fits to call his stories postmodern. “The Emerald” is about a talking emerald born of a witch who knows a spell for French fries. In the metafictional “The Balloon” a giant balloon generates a variety of responses from the populace. “Views of My Father Weeping” is a sort of theme-and-variations combined with a mystery. Plots, maybe, aren’t really Barthelme’s thing. Ideas and language are. The book abounds with great lines and sharp observations that, despite their unusual or odd context, somehow get at the fundamentals of the human experience. One of my favorites is the faux-travelogue “Paraguay” which is not about any Paraguay that actually exists. In Barthelme’s Paraguay, “temperature controls activity to a remarkable degree,” and differently for men and women, silence is sold in paper sacks, and everyone has the same fingerprints. A field of red snow “invites contemplation and walking about in,” which I think is something most good stories-and most of Barthelme’s stories-do.
Though roughly contemporary with Barthelme, Cheever’s stories are very different, focusing almost entirely on suburban New Yorkers. Before reading Cheever I had been reading Charles Bukowski and Aimee Bender, so his style seemed a bit stiff. I ambitiously lugged home the thousand-plus pages of the Library of America edition, but then felt daunted. I decided to read just the eight stories mentioned on the dust jacket first. Of those, “Goodbye, My Brother” and “The Swimmer” were both excellent, but, while I think of Barthelme as a kindred spirt, Cheever remained too upper-class, or too East Coast, perhaps, for me to get into any deeper. The Stories of John Cheever (not even seven-hundred pages!) has most, but not all, of the stories in the LOA edition, including the two mentioned here.
May 18th, 2009
Jon - Central Library
The books in our libraries say a lot about who we are. This goes for both our own personal libraries as well as our public libraries, and it applies whether we consciously try to build our identity with what we possess or whether what we’ve acquired at first seems haphazard.
“The Library as Identity” is just one of the essays in Alberto Manguel’s loving look at the libraries of the world, both ancient and modern, physical and virtual, real and imagined. Other topics in The Library at Night include “The Library as Order,” “The Library as Workshop,” and “The Library as Survival,” among many others. In each of the unnumbered, erudite sections Manguel moves elegantly around what must be his own library, stopping briefly with Walter Benjamin before moving on to Borges, gliding past Plutarch and Plato, and then spending time with Rabelais.
The tone of the essays are learned but friendly, covering more breadth than depth. If there is one overriding idea in the collection, it might be that our attempts at order-alphabetical or otherwise-are ultimately futile. Can the world be truly represented by the way we’ve ordered our books on our shelves? This can also be expressed in the contrast between the way our libraries seem during the day and how they really are-at night. During the day, our books sit on their shelves in their assigned places, but at night, we begin to wonder why two books are next to each other, and to doubt whether Dewey really knew anything, or not. Chaos enters our libraries under cover of darkness.
For Manguel, this is a welcome occasion, a fortunate fall. His book is an example of the good that can come from letting yourself wander among the stacks, letting your instincts guide you. In the end, The Library at Night is as much about the pleasures of reading as it is about the books themselves and the libraries where they are kept.
April 13th, 2009
Jon - Central Library
The time when everyone publishes an end-of-the-year list. If the New York Times can do it, why not me? I’ve really only been keeping track of my reading since July 1, so here are many of the books I’ve read since then.
Brown, Wayne. Landscape with Heron. Insightful vignettes, newspaper columns, essays, and stories about life in Trinidad and Jamaica.
Bukoski, Anthony. North of the Port: Stories. UW-Superior’s Bukoski elegantly tells stories of displacement. Reader at the Wisconsin Book Festival.
Burton, Richard F, Sir, translator. The Arabian Nights. Simply the best. Bawdy, violent, fantastic, and clever; Disney’s Aladdin it ain’t.
Calvino, Italo. The Baron in the Trees. An Enlightenment-era baron seeks his utopia among the trees. Playful and smart, but not without its emotional moments.
Chekhov, Anton. Stories. Chekhov’s stories are as sharp and true-to-life as ever.
Eprile, Tony. Temporary Sojourner, and other South African Stories. A pointed look at apartheid-era South Africa combined with stories about coming of age in that country and in the United States. Publishers Weekly: “Vibrant.”
Fitzgerald, F Scott. The Great Gatsby. See my review here.
Foos, Laurie. Before Elvis There Was Nothing. Before the end of the novel, a woman has a horn growing out of her forehead. Booklist: “Leave it to Foos to write such a stunningly ironic, page-turning commentary on public image, beauty, and celebrity.”
Hemingway, Ernest. The Nick Adams Stories. Some of the best short stories written in the English language.
Hemon, Aleksandar. The Lazarus Project. See my review here. Reader at the Wisconsin Book Festival.
Lowenthal, Michael. Charity Girl. Tells the story of women rounded up during World War I because of their sexual behavior. Publishers Weekly: “Lowenthal ably captures the transformation of a naïve adolescent into a woman in his provocative story.”
Lychack, William. The Wasp Eater. A ten-year-old boy finds himself caught in the middle when his father is kicked out of the house for adultery. Booklist: “Beautifully understated, delicately crafted.”
Maraniss, David. Rome 1960: The Olympics that Changed the World. See my review here. Reader at the Wisconsin Book Festival.
McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. Small words and small actions are given the thought and attention they deserve as a father and son traverse a post apocalyptic wasteland.
McEwan, Ian. Atonement. You saw the movie, now read the book.
McEwan, Ian. First Love, Last Rites. A collection of some of McEwan’s rich and strange early stories.
Mignola, Mike. Hellboy. Awesomely drawn monster tales make the best bedtime reading.
Millhauser, Steven. Dangerous Laughter: Thirteen Stories. Srange tales and eerie fables for fans of Borges and the New Yorker. Check out his recent essay “The Ambition of the Short Story.”
Mori, Kaoru. Emma. Mori’s “maid mania,” as she calls it, resulted in this delightful manga series about finding love in Victorian England.
Mori, Kyoko. Stone Field, True Arrow. When a woman’s father dies, she is forced to reconsider her safe but sterile life. Publishers Weekly: “Graceful in its simplicity of language.”
Murakami, Haruki. What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. See my review here.
Nabokov, Vladimir. Lolita. Nabokov’s “love letter to the English language” and one of the most notorious books ever published.
Proulx, Annie. Brokeback Mountain. See Atonement, above. From the collection Close Range: Wyoming Stories.
Strout, Elizabeth. Olive Kitteridge. Interrelated short stories bring the titular character to life. Reader at the Wisconsin Book Festival.
Unger, Nancy. Fighting Bob La Follette: The Righteous Reformer. Well-researched one-volume look at La Follette and the Progressive Era. New to Wisconsin? Lived here all your life, but want to learn more about your home state? Check it out!
Verdelle, AJ. The Good Negress. A young woman tries to find her place in her family and in the world. Publishers Weekly: “Consistently absorbing and beautifully detailed.”
December 21st, 2008
Jon - Central Library
I was happy to see that Aleksandar Hemon’s The Lazarus Project was nominated for the National Book Award. It’s easily the best book I’ve read this year. To begin with, the book is structurally interesting: it’s a sort of reverse immigration story in which the narrator wins a grant in order to investigate the 1908 murder of Lazarus Averbuch at the home of the Chicago Chief of Police, George Shippy. Shippy alleged Averbuch was an anarchist, and his version of events was widely distributed, but the facts of the case remain in dispute. It’s entirely possible Averbuch was only trying to obtain a letter from the chief, such as he would have needed in Russia, indicating that he was of good character. Regardless, it’s a 100-year old case, and Averbuch and Shippy are dead. The narrator of the novel, Brik, sets out to understand Averbuch not just through what happened to him (through the few known facts) but also through finding out who Averbuch was before he was a photograph in the Chicago Historical Archives. This means a trip to Eastern Europe with Rora, a photographer; together they visit run-down hotels, museums, and cemeteries, while the narrator digresses on his problems with his wife, with “Mr. Christ,” and with America. And while Brik may be angry, the book is not. Not only does Hemon use Brik to explore Averbuch’s “before,” but he also tells the story of Olga, Averbuch’s sister, and in this way explores Averbuch’s “after.” The alternating narratives combine in powerful and melancholy ways, finally ending in Brik’s—and Hemon’s—birthplace, Sarajevo.
The book is well-planned and well-executed, but Hemon’s style is what makes it more than academic. Gun smoke moves like a school of fish. Soldiers contemplate their “possible limb-by-limb entry into eternity.” Every other page has a memorable turn of phrase, and jokes and tales abound. We were lucky to have Hemon here at the Wisconsin Book Festival. As he read, photographs from his book played on a screen in the background, and he ended his presentation with a short film. For me, seeing Hemon was the highlight of the festival.
October 24th, 2008
Jon - Central Library
Novelist Haruki Murakami has finished twenty-five marathons, winning none, which I think makes him an authority on running for the rest of us. What I Talk About When I Talk About Running is a memoir built on a running log made while training for the New York City Marathon in 2005. It details Murakami’s changing relationship with running as he grows older. Even as his times begin to slide, the inevitable result of aging, he keeps at it, adding triathlons to his schedule to keep things interesting.
It’s a wonderful little book, a great response to the fearful prospect of physical and literary decline. There’s lots of talk about running, but it isn’t the only theme. Murakami talks about owning a jazz club and about his early novels, and about different types of writers-those who blaze brightly and die young, and those who have to reckon with longer careers. The Great Gatsby makes an appearance, and so does Raymond Carver, of course; Murakami is retranslating his stories into Japanese.
My favorite chapter is about when Murakami ran a sixty-two-mile ultramarathon. The process he undergoes as he’s running reminded me the most of his novels, and left him with “runner’s blues” at the end of the race; to me, it sounded a lot like one of those changes that occur in any long-term relationship. You either get through it, or you don’t. Murakami gets through it.
Though Murakami states in the book he doesn’t recommend running to others (he runs simply because it suits him, he says) I am happy to recommend this book to runners and to fans of his other books. You might also check out A Wild Haruki Chase: Reading Murakami Around the World. I think I might reread After Dark.
September 25th, 2008
Jon - Central Library
Are you getting excited for the Wisconsin Book Festival? A lot of great authors are already lined up, including Madison’s own David Maraniss, whose latest book is Rome 1960: The Olympics that Changed the World. Maraniss is a gifted storyteller both in print and in person, so put his October 18th appearance on your calendar now.
Though not a short book by any measure, it’s still amazing to think of how much of a particular moment in time Maraniss captures in his book: changes in television (the Games weren’t live in the US! Film was sent in tubes by plane), changes in research (anchorman Jim McKay didn’t learn about smaller countries from Google, he used the Encyclopedia Britannica), tensions between China and Taiwan, tensions between the two Germanys (they competed as a unified team and behaved like divorced parents at a child’s birthday party), Cold War intrigue (can runner Dave Sime convince a Russian to defect?), sponsorship and the decline of amateurism (a German winner wore Adidas during a race but put on Pumas to collect his medal), all while telling the stories of American athletes like Rafer Johnson, Cassius Clay, and Wilma Rudolph.
Maraniss is especially interested in the ways life was opening up for African Americans and for women, and decathlete Rafer Johnson and sprinter Wilma Rudolph emerge as two of the heroes of his book. My favorite story was of Ethopian marathon runner Abebe Bikila. He won the race barefoot in the capital city of a country that had very recently occupied his own. Amazing.
September 15th, 2008
Jon - Central Library
I groaned when I learned I would have to reread The Great Gatsby for a school assignment. Reread the one about the guy with the fancy library? Come on. I don’t know how it happened, but a literature professor friend of mine and I were so bored with Gatsby that we started telling everyone we knew that they should forget Gatsby and read The Day of the Locust instead. So after years (seriously, years; this little joke took on a life of its own) of rolling my eyes at Gatsby, the last thing I wanted to do was reread the one with the floating eyes in it.
Now that I’ve done the assigned reading, I have to admit that telling people not to read Gatsby was a colossal mistake. It’s so well put-together that you can’t tell it’s been put together. The commentary is there, the symbolism is there, but Nick Carraway’s ambivalence ensures that it’s all entirely believable and real. Each scene is crafted with that rare level of precision that makes great novels seem completely natural.
So, English teachers everywhere are right. We should all read Gatsby and, if we’ve already read it, we should reread it, for the story and for the commentary and for a writing lesson. And then we’re allowed to read The Day of the Locust again, if we really want to.
July 24th, 2008
Jon - Central Library
Sometimes, reading those dutiful introductions at the beginnings of old books can pay off. Quite a while ago, I read The Turn of the Screw, by Henry James, and didn’t get much out of it. Well, that’s not entirely true. What I really mean is that I didn’t get it. At all. So, when I was ready to give it another shot, I read through R. W. B. Lewis’s introduction to the Bantam Classics edition and learned that either
- The governess really is seeing ghosts that are trying to harm the children, or
- The governess invents the ghosts as a way of dealing with her repressed erotic desire, or
- The ghosts are real, but the governess might handle them better if she weren’t so busy repressing her erotic feelings.
This knowledge made the tale less baffling and more fun, but not much scarier. Which is fine, since, for me, scares aren’t really the point. Though reading old guys like James is almost like reading a foreign language, it’s usually worth it.
June 18th, 2008
Jon - Central Library
After reading Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee, by Charles J. Shields, I thought it would make sense to revisit the novel itself, almost fifty years after it was first published and over ten years since I read it. It’s hard to read it with a clear eye. It’s still such a well-known part of American popular culture that The Onion recently published a disappointingly lazy column by Atticus Finch alongside a picture of Gregory Peck.
In Shields’ book, he discusses the initial reception of To Kill a Mockingbird. Many reviews were very positive, of course, but others criticized the book as little more than a collection of unconnected anecdotes. This idea stuck with me as I was reading the book, and I have to agree: the novel wanders, and not in a good way.
In spite of this, To Kill a Mockingbird is still a great book. This love letter to small, Depression-era Alabama town and one of its patriarchs gives one a feel for what life was like so many years ago, and still manages to pack an emotional and moral punch without giving into sentimentality or overzealous didactics. It comes close on both counts but never goes over the edge.
As for Shields’ biography, it has good insights into Lee’s struggles to write To Kill a Mockingbird and her struggles dealing with the fame it brought. Shields also provides good details on Lee’s friendship with Truman Capote. Unfortunately, Lee rarely grants interviews, and Shields’ biography suffers from a secondhand quality. Parts of it seem overwritten in an attempt to compensate for not getting to the heart of the woman herself.
May 31st, 2008
Jon - Central Library
Marshall Frady’s biography, Martin Luther King, Jr., manages to do two things well. First, it illustrates the depth and breadth of Dr. King’s nonviolent movement. There wasn’t just a bus boycott in Memphis and a speech at the Lincoln Memorial, there were other triumphs, of course, along with setbacks and organizational divisions. And there were other, more violent elements to contend with, like the Black Panthers or the people surrounding Malcolm X.
Second, Frady’s biography conveys the way nonviolence is an active method of resisting inequality. Nonviolence does not mean passively letting others do whatever they want. Instead, it means deliberately putting thousands of people in harm’s way, knowing full well that life and limb are on the line. Frady uses the phrase “love despite everything” when discussing Dr. King’s movement, but there were complex organizational efforts underlying this simple idea. It’s hard to believe the terrible things human beings can do to each other, but Dr. King, like Viktor Frankl, believed our ability to overcome violent injustice would carry the day.
Though I’m sure Frady’s two-hundred-page biography is no substitute for Taylor Branch’s three-volume account of Dr. King’s life and times, it’s still a satisfying introduction to one of the most influential Americans who ever lived. One complaint: all nonfiction books, no matter how small, should have an index.
To read reminiscences of Dr. King by local residents, see this article in The Isthmus. You can see other titles in the Penguin Lives Series by clicking here.
April 30th, 2008
Jon - Central Library
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