NPR’s “You Must Read This”
National Public Radio has a really cool book series called “You Must Read This” that I wish I’d heard about a long time ago.
A series of interesting authors describe their “buttonhole books”: the new titles, beloved classics, or obscure favorites that they enthusiastically recommend to anyone who will listen.
In the most recent installment, author Melissa Bank discusses Elizabeth Strout’s novel Olive Kitteridge in an essay titled “Who Says You Have to Like a Character?”
Whenever people say they didn’t like the main character of a book, they mean they didn’t like the book. The main character has to be a friend? I don’t get that.
Bank describes the title character as someone who is “as bad as you’d be if you let yourself.” Later in her essay she confesses that she is “willing to do almost anything to get you to read” Olive Kitteridge’s tale of this seemingly ordinary, ruthlessly cruel, strangely compelling small-town Maine woman.
Interestingly, Banks’ own hugely enjoyable novels The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing and The Wonder Spot are structured similarly to the Elizabeth Strout novel she raves about. The novels are in the form of sort of interwoven short stories that revolve around a unifying character, and they’re full of witty observations and possibly mildly insane characters.
The ”You Must Read This” web archive is full of great essays like Banks’, in both text and audio format. It’s really great to hear authors like Salman Rushdie, Brad Meltzer, and Ann Patchett describe works that have influenced them or otherwise blown them away as readers in this entertaining series.
Holiday Book Exchange
This Christmas I heard about a local family’s very interesting gift-giving idea. Rather than fighting holiday shopping crowds to hunt down the perfect sweater-vest for Uncle Wayne and the snazziest Snuggie for Aunt Vernita, each family member wrapped up his or her favorite book from the previous year and contributed it to a “Dirty Santa”-style gift exchange.
I thought this book-recycling project sounded like a really cool way to connect with family members who would likely end up with a book they would never have ordinarily picked up. In the best of all possible worlds, maybe families who don’t have much to say to each other (or have a few too many un-civil things to say all the way through Christmas dinner) could at least talk about good books and their reasoning for picking out their particular titles.
The anti-consumerist aspect of it appealed to me as well, as I genrally try to avoid coming within a three-mile radius of a shopping center from late-November to January. On the other hand, this book-exchange idea would present me with a couple of serious problems.
First, I’ve gotten to the point where I almost never actually buy a book. Even if the library system doesn’t have a title in its collection, the surprisingly speedy “Inter-Library Loan” option allows patrons to request just about any title for library staff to track down from other libraries all across the country.
I’ve also found that I’m especially compelled and driven to read library books because of the finite nature of the loan. If I buy a book, it can sit on the shelf for years, decades even, and I won’t necessarily feel like I have to read it. With library books, on the other hand, I can renew it for up to six weeks but I know I’m eventually going to have to give it back. This really works as a serious motivator to either put down a book I’m not enjoying or power all the way to the end of a great read.
Finally, I’m a lot like a struggling Little Leaguer at the end of a season-long slump when it comes to reading. I mean, I just love to have that trophy at the end to keep on the shelf.
There’s a painfully true Seinfeld episode where Jerry and George argue the merits of keeping books they’ve already read, and I definitely fall into the mildly shameful category of people who have to keep them like the antlers of some big game hanging on the wall.
If, for example, I ever finished James Joyce’s Ulysses (hell, if I ever got through the first chapter), there’s no way I could give that book away to Cousin Cletus at the Dirty Santa exchange. I’d prop that baby up on the coffee table as a permanant conversation piece to brag about endlessly to anyone unfortunate enough to ask me what it was doing there.
Holidays on Ice
There aren’t many ironclad holiday reading traditions in my house. For a few years I tried to give an annual reading to O. Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi,” but I’m not generally a fan of anything to which the adjectives “heartwarming” and “feel-good” can be attached. James Joyce’s “The Dead” is mind-bendingly brilliant and heart-crushing and almost too intense to read more than one December per decade.
There is one magical holiday story collection to which I have found myself returning year after year. These tales of disgruntled department store drones, nightmarish annual family holiday letters, and the timeless classic “Dinah the Christmas Whore” make David Sedaris’s Holidays on Ice the definitive yuletide reading material for mildly misanthropic Scrooge McGrinches like myself.
It’s difficult to choose a favorite story from Sedaris’s viciously brilliant collection. My copy seems to automatically fall open to “Front Row Center with Thaddeus Bristol,” wherein a rigorous theater critic takes aim at some of the more disappointing local elementary school Christmas pageants.
“If you happened to stand over four feet tall, the agony awaiting you at Sacred Heart Elementary began the moment you took your seat. These were mean little chairs corralled into a ‘theater’ haunted by the lingering stench of industrial strength lasagna. My question is not why they chose to stage the production in a poorly disguised cafeteria, but why they chose to stage it at all.”
“Season’s Greetings to Our Friends and Family!!!” perfectly captures the deeply uncomfortable tone of a holiday update letter from relatives not distant enough, complete with multiple hammered exclamation points and an almost violent level of sentimentality.
As with all of Sedaris’s writing, equal pleasure can be gained from listening to the audiobook of Holidays on Ice, read by the author with guest appearances from his brilliant sister Amy and pal Ann Magnuson. This excerpt from “The SantaLand Diaries” gives a taste of Sedaris’s unmistakeably dry wit as he describes his initiation to working as a Christmas elf at Macy’s in New York City.
My holiday season is now incomplete without a ritual reading of these sanity-restoring Christmas horror stories. As the tasteful, elegant dust-jacket attests, “This drinking man’s companion can be enjoyed by the warmth of a raging fire, the glow of a brilliantly decorated tree, or even in the backseat of a van or police car.”
How to Talk about Books You Haven’t Read
It’s a title that certainly leaps right off the shelf: How to Talk about Books You Haven’t Read.
I actually did read French professor and psychoanalyst Pierre Bayard’s book all the way through before finding out I never needed to and learning how to discuss it anyway.
Approximately 97% of all reviews of the book include sentiments along the lines of, “I wish I’d read this book A) in college, B) in high school, C) before becoming a book critic,” but Bayard’s intention turns out to be a little more subtle than handing out speed-scanning tips for lazy students or delinquent book club members.
The book raises some fascinating questions about the psychology, purpose, and pleasures of reading at the same time it attempts to overturn any obligation to actually read before discussing a book. Bayard convincingly argues that books we haven’t read still influence us through knowledge we’ve managed to gather about them, and he encourages readers to let go of any guilt they may have acquired from failing to read the entire canon of classic literature upon entering adulthood.
Bayard notes, “We must not forget that even a prodigious reader never has access to more than an infinitesimal fraction of the books that exist.” While he cites fascinating examples of the value of “non-reading” from novels like The Name of the Rose and The Man without Qualities, Bayard even includes a complicated and hilarious footnote technique to alert the reader that he has often only “skimmed” or “heard about” a particular work before forming an opinion about it.
Along the way, interesting questions are asked about the nature of reading. If we forget about a book we’ve read, can we really say we’ve “read” it? Considering the tiny amount we remember about any given book, how much memory constitutes true “reading” anyway? Using the plot of The Name of the Rose as an example, Bayard points out that deceptive reconstructions or misremembered fragments can become more real in our minds than the true texts.
(And I totally bought it because, even though I’ve never read The Name of the Rose I’ve heard a lot about it and have seen the movie and really would like to read it . . . someday.)
The book is framed by a pair of quotes from the great non-reader Oscar Wilde. First, Wilde insisted, “I never read a book I must review; it prejudices you so.” Later, Bayard quotes Wilde’s observation, “To know the vintage and quality of a wine one need not drink the whole cask.”
Bayard’s philosophy encourages readers to engage their own creativity while practicing what he calls “active non-reading.” I imagine many teachers and professors might not fully appreciate these techniques that could be mis-applied as “active slacking off” or “creative laziness,” but the book makes a really compelling case for re-thinking the way we approach and talk about reading.
Oklahoma Author Jana Hausburg
Oklahoma has a pretty remarkable history of producing Heisman Trophy winners, astronauts, and country music superstars. There are also plenty of fascinating stories of “ordinary” Oklahomans who have done extraordinary things, several of which are collected in local author Jana Hausburg’s new book, It Wasn’t Much: True Tales of Ten Oklahoma Heroes.
Ms. Hausburg is a Cataloger for the Metropolitan Library System, and her first book tells some amazing stories about heroic Oklahomans. One chapter highlights Father Stanley Rother, a Catholic missionary from Okarche who was martyred in a bloody Central American civil war in the 1980s and who may one day soon become Oklahoma’s first canonized saint. Another fascinating story involves World War II nurse Rosemary Hogan, who survived a brutal Japanese P.O.W. camp in the Philippines and was awarded a Bronze Star and Purple Heart among other medals.
The book’s title comes from the story of Rufino Rodrigues, a young miner who saved over 150 lives in a devastating 1912 fire in a Lehigh, Oklahoma, coal mine. Rodrigues commented that his amazing heroism “wasn’t much,” even decades later when survivors and their families would praise his efforts to pull fellow miners from the underground inferno.
Ms. Hausburg’s book is targeted to younger readers, from 4th to 9th grade, but her engaging style makes it a great read for anyone interested in Oklahoma history. Each chapter is augmented with website addresses, suggestions for further reading, and information about how to visit the historic places mentioned in the book.
The Forty-Sixth Star Press website includes portraits of the book’s subjects, excerpts from the text, and tons of extra web-links to more information about each of the Oklahoma heroes.
I interviewed Ms. Hausburg about her terrific book for newsok.tv, and the video of this interview can be seen here: http://www.newsok.tv/?titleID=4688337001
Best Books of 2008
It would take me until 2018 to get into all the books on the various “Best of 2008″ lists, but I just can’t help looking over all those lists anyway and inevitably adding more and more books to my own list of books to read. As we’ve seen, lists create plenty of unsolveable problems.
The New York Times Book Review has helpfully pared down its list of “The 10 Best Books of 2008,” narrowing it even further with five fiction and five non-fiction titles. That’s the way to do it — drop a clean, concise Top 10 list like Moses on Mt. Sinai and always leave the crowd asking for more.
If you’re really still asking for more, the New York Times is also glad to provide an exhaustive “100 Notable Books of 2008″ list with capsule reviews and links to longer write-ups for fiction and non-fiction titles.
Publisher’s Weekly weighs in with its even lengthier “Best Books of the Year” list, but they’ve at least helpfully narrowed it down to 13 different genres including Mystery, Religion, Poetry and three separate children’s genres.
Amazon.com goes all-out with its “Best Books of 2008″ section, which includes “Top 100″ lists from both editors and customers as well as 10 different genre lists. Their “Top 10 Best Book Covers” list is an especially fun one to judge for yourself.
NPR’s “Best Books of 2008″ webpage is packed with interesting content, including exerpts from books in over a dozen genres, audio stories and interviews with authors, and cool gift book recommendations.
Salon.com features a “Book Awards 2008″ section with a thoughful intoduction and 10 capsule reviews of their “most pleasurable” fiction and non-fiction titles.
Time magazine’s online “Top 10 Everything of 2008″ section features lists for fiction, non-fiction, and children’s books. It’s also a rabbit-hole of dozens of authoritative 2008 lists from which list-making, list-reading list-lovers may not emerge for several list-frenzied hours.
After glancing at all these “Best Books” lists and seeing the late Roberto Bolano’s novel 2666 high on almost every one of them, I’m still not sure I’m ready to tackle this 912 page monster that Time’s reviewer describes as “baffling, maddening, difficult, violent, obscene, over-indulgent, under-edited, and way too long” in a review that also calls it “the best novel of the year.”
. . . Before You Die!
Books of lists are definitely one of my top ten favorite things to read.
Maybe I’m seeing them everywhere lately thanks to the holiday season, when a thoughtfully-chosen book of lists makes a solid gift for an impossibly picky movie-lover, music-aficionado, or world-traveler. There appear to be at least two warring publishing outfits working on the “1,000/1,001 . . . Before You Die” premise of list-making, and while their products seem to spawn more argument and debate than consensus, well, perhaps that’s the whole point of obsessive list-making in the first place.
The first one I ran into several months ago was the bracingly-titled 1,000 Places to See Before You Die, by Patricia Schultz. With a true Okie sense of mild inferiority, I hesitatingly paged toward the “O” section of the chapter of places to see in the United States to check out how the Sooner State was represented. I found a single entry there for our entire state–Cattlemen’s Steakhouse–which proudly sits alongside the Grand Canyon, Mount Kilimanjaro, and Count Dracula’s Castle in Romania on Ms. Schultz’s comprehensive global checklist.
Not long afterwards I ran into Schultz’s more narrowly focused 1,000 Places to See in the USA and Canada Before You Die, a far more realistic prospect given my own meager travel budget and rudimentary command of only a single language. Oklahoma is slightly better represented in this volume, with seven entries for the pathologically ambitious traveler to check off his or her life list.
Schultz’s books are very handy either for a starting point for serious travel research or for idle browsing and daydreaming. She provides contact information and web addresses as well as helpful tips on the best times of year to visit, and her lists encompass some off-the-beaten-path entries as well as the obvious highlights. I especially appreciated her write-ups on Oklahoma City’s own Red Earth Festival and the awesome Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge.
The same publisher has also released music critic Tom Moon’s daunting 1,000 Recordings to Hear Before You Die, which hops from genre to genre in a straight alphabetical listing that is even more opinionated and arguable than Schultz’s travel volumes. Moon’s approach is thoughtful and impassioned, as he takes the “before you die” aspect of the list especially seriously. He notes in the introduction that he saw the title “as a mandate: Everything here had to have some incandescent life-changing energy inside it.” Thus readers will find The Flaming Lips’ Soft Bulletin rubbing elbows with Ella Fitzgerald and Flatt & Scruggs, while each entry also features key tracks and suggestions for further listening deeper in the artist’s catalog.
The list-making ante is upped by one in editor Steven Jay Schneider’s “1001″ series, which includes 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (thanks a lot, pal) as well as volumes on classical recordings, popular music, and movies. Schneider’s entries are impressively international in scope, featuring many less-familiar recommendations among foreign films and music and lengthier essays on each entry than the 1,000…Before You Die versions.
The Schneider series goes on to demand you view thousands of paintings, taste thousands of foods, and ogle thousands of buildings before exhaustedly collapsing into the sweet caress of death by sensory exhaustion. For readers who enjoy a good list-driven argument or the fantasy of sampling 1001 wines, it’s easy to enjoy (and overlook the explicit threat in the titles of) these would-be authoritative compilations.
Muddy Waters
The newly released film Cadillac Records documents Chicago’s Chess Records from the 1940s to the 1960s, when hugely influential artists like Chuck Berry, Etta James, and Willie Dixon wrote and recorded many of the groundbreaking songs that would first bring African American music to a national audience.
Perhaps the most important of all Chess’s artists was blues legend Muddy Waters, played in the film by the excellent Jeffrey Wright. Robert Gordon’s 2002 biography of Waters, Can’t Be Satisfied, is now out in paperback, and it is a brilliant study of the man and his incalculable influence on 20th century culture.
Gordon’s story is centered around the events of August 31, 1941, when Library of Congress folklorist Alan Lomax successfully tracked down the 28-year-old Mississippi Delta sharecropper McKinley Morganfield, already legendary in the music-rich region as “Muddy Waters.” Up to this point Waters’ considerable artistic ambitions left him deeply unsettled amid the crushing drudgery of the Delta cotton fields, and Gordon tells the fascinating tale of how the folklorist first recorded Waters’ powerful voice and guitar.
Gordon’s extensive interviews with Waters’ friends and family reveal a troubled, searching soul whose demons were translated into incandescent songs of hurt and longing. The author interestingly contrasts the communal spirit of gospel music and its focus on the afterlife with the immediate, individual release offered by the blues. Little more than two decades after Waters’ first recordings, his music would be a seminal influence on rock musicians like Eric Clapton and the Rolling Stones and would vault Waters into the pantheon of legendary 20th century artists.
Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards provides an entertaining foreword to Can’t Be Satisfied, describing the unmistakeable influence on the band named after one of Waters’s own best-known songs. “There’s a demon in me,” Richards writes, “I think there’s a demon in everyone, a dark piece in us all. And the blues is a recognition of that and the ability to express it and make fun out of it, have joy out of that dark stuff. When you listen to Muddy Waters, you can hear all of the angst and all of the power and all of the hardship that made that man.”
Can’t Be Satisfied is a brilliantly researched, lovingly written testament to Muddy Waters and his continuing influence on popular culture. In this terrific interview with NPR’s Terri Gross, Gordon talks about his work and also plays some of Waters’ earth-shaking, soul-moving music.
Book Awards: Nonfiction
The finalists in the Nonfiction category of this year’s National Book Awards represent an array of powerful and often controversial stories.
The winner, Annette Gordon-Reed’s The Hemingses of Monticello has been praised as “epic” and “mesmerizing,” as it traces the intertwined family roots of Thomas Jefferson and his house slave and mistress, Sally Hemings. Gordon-Reed describes the world of American slavery with a broad focus beyond the story of Jefferson and Hemings’s 38-year relationship. The book takes into account the backdrop of the American Revolution, the troubled lives of Hemings’s siblings, and the extensive and fascinating history of “race-mixing” among the slaveholders of the American south.
Another Nonfiction nominee, Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side, tells the disturbing and dramatic tale of the U.S. government’s decision-making from the earliest days of the War on Terror following September 11, 2001. Mayer is unhesitating in her condemnation of un-Constitutional actions taken by White House officials, and she argues that the treatment of U.S.-held prisoners has actually hampered the global pursuit of al-Qaeda. Mayer’s meticulously researched book attempts to illustrate the balance between acquiring intelligence through the use of torture and the greater price paid by resorting to such tactics.
Kitty has mentioned that local author Tim Tharp was nominated for a 2008 National Book Award for his brand new Young Adult novel The Spectacular Now. I have read and greatly enjoyed his previous novel, Knights of the Hill Country, which is a riveting story of an Oklahoma high school football hero with a complicated personal life, and I’m really looking forward to reading his highly praised new release.
Book Awards: Fiction
The end-of-the-year book awards season isn’t nearly as sexy as its equivalents in the movie, television, and music industries. Perhaps a catchier name, a la the “Oscars” (the “Twaineys”?) with a flashier trophy suitable for jubilantly thrusting into the air amid Vegas-style production numbers would grab the public’s attention more than the mostly sober National Book Awards proceedings I watched on C-Span’s “Book TV” last weekend.
The full list of National Book Award nominees and winners can be viewed here, along with links to interviews with and information about all the finalists.
In the fiction category, won by Peter Matthiessen’s Shadow Country, other nominees were Aleksandar Hemon’s The Lazarus Project, Rachel Kushner’s Telex from Cuba, and Salvatore Scibona’s The End.
Another notable finalist was Marilynne Robinson’s Home. After a twenty-four year span between her first and second novels, Robinson’s acclaimed third novel appeared a mere four years later. Admirers of 2004’s remarkable Gilead will be equally interested in Robinson’s new novel, which tells a parallel story set in the same small Iowa town in the 1950s.
Robinson revisits Gilead’s themes of crippling Calvinist guilt and the tensions between judgement and forgiveness, this time through the eyes of the returning, sort-of-prodigal son of a close friend of Gilead’s protagonist, John Ames. The new novel further powerfully explores the meaning of returning home to face the secrets and injuries of the past. One reviewer at powells.com notes that as she read Home, the following line from Robert Frost echoed in her head: “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”
