The Book Beast
Former Vanity Fair and New Yorker editor Tina Brown’s new online venture, The Daily Beast, is an amazing sensory overload of hard news, pop culture fluff, and opinion pieces from across the political spectrum. The site takes its name from the fictional newspaper in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Scoop, and it shows off its literary bent in its impressive Book Beast section.
On first glance the crazy conglomeration of dozens of reviews, interviews, celebrity recommendations, and links seems exactly the kind of venture that is killing off print newspaper book sections. While we read by the glow of their funeral pyres, it is hard to deny the addictive qualities of the Book Beast’s approach.
Its reviews range from best-selling novels to serious political and historical tomes, and a handy “Literary Round-Up” sidebar collects hot news items from the publishing world. The “Book Buzz” section throws out recommendations from a passel of celebs as diverse as My Name Is Earl’s Jaime Pressly and iconic playwright Edward Albee.
The site’s ever-expanding video library features interviews with authors like Michael Connelly and Jodi Picoult, while its “Book Bag” features a four-pack of blurbed “must-read” tips from prominent writers. The Daily Beast has also lined up an impressive collection of writers to provide content throughout the site, including Christopher Buckley, Michael Kinsley, and Scott Turow.
The Daily Beast appears locked in a steel-cage deathmatch with the more established Huffington Post to combine news analysis and tabloid cheap thrills in a multi-layered web platform. When it comes to book coverage, its Book Beast is leaving them in the shade.
Great Bad Reviews
The array of scathing criticism earned by Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones reminded me just how fun it is to read a negative review. When a talented critic gets ahold of a work upon which heaps of eloquent scorn can be piled, the results can be as darkly satisfying as a hearty, villainous laugh.
One of my favorite literary assassins is the eternally unimpressed Joe Queenan, who has vivisected any number of pop culture figures, politicians, and entire nations in his books and essays. In a New York Times piece called “Why Not the Worst?” Queenan explains “one of life’s unalloyed pleasures”: finding ”an uncompromisingly stupid novel in a world filled with stupid novels that do make compromises.”
In the essay Queenan explains his resistance to “the tyranny of the good” and confesses, “One of the reasons I became a book reviewer is because it gives me the opportunity to read a steady stream of hopelessly awful books under the pretense of work.” While the essay revels in Queenan’s effortless eviscerations of bad writing, he also points out the sheer entertainment value and priceless critical thinking practice gained by wallowing in the gutters of horrible literature.
A slightly different twist on the joys of nasty criticism is offered by Bill Henderson’s Rotten Reviews collections. The thin but priceless volumes catalog hundreds of witty dismissals of both long-forgotten works and canonized classics. Assorted victims of these poisonous pens are labeled, among other things, ”an explosion in a cesspool,” “a copy editors despair,” and “a third-rate work of art but a first-rate outrage to our sensibilities.”
Equally evilly enjoyable is Fifty Works of English Literature We Could Do Without, a legendary 1968 collection of essays trashing everything from Beowulf to Hamlet to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. This compilation of hatchet jobs by a triumverate of British writers tears down a series of classics that for centuries have “choked (readers) . . . with the implied obligation to like dull books.” A particularly tasty example comes from their battering of The Bride of Lammermore:
“What can be made of a writer who at the most poignant and harrowing climax of his novel describes events only with the desperate phrase that they ’surpass description’? It is immediately obvious that we are dealing not with an artist but with Sir Walter Scott.”
All of this reveling in negative reviews also reminded me of a quote usually (but not definitively) attributed to Winston Churchill, in a note responding to a bit of acid criticism directed toward him:
“I am sitting in the smallest room in my house. Your criticism is in front of me. Soon it will be behind me.”
Just what I didn’t need
Like a junkie looking for his next fix after a dramatic, once-a-year weekend bender, I recently used the awesome NoveList database to, *gulp*, search for more book recommendations.
NoveList is a diabolically useful tool available through the Metropolitan Library System website to any of the half-million or so Oklahomans with a valid MLS library card. Once you’ve logged in at the “Catalog and Databases” tab with your card number, you can proceed to the “Databases” link to the tab labelled “Readers Advisory.” From there, a quick click on “NoveList Plus” opens up this fiendishly helpful guide to great reading.
I recently finished Dennis Lehane’s gripping psychological thriller Shutter Island, which I picked up after learning Martin Scorsese is currently filming an adaptation of it for release later this year. The book didn’t disappoint, with stomach-churning twists and turns that seemed movie-ready from the first page. The director of Cape Fear and The Departed, among his other masterpieces, should knock this gothic noir tale out of the park with a seriously great cast including Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, Ben Kingsley, and Patricia Clarkson.
I was so fired up by the novel that I turned to NoveList to see what else it would recommend along the same lines. The database allows searches by author, title, series, or plot description and can also be limited by age group. Among the wealth of book information it provides is a list of “similar authors” as well as “author read-alikes,” while an extensive list of subject headings is also provided to search for similar books. A collection of full reviews from Booklist, Library Journal, and Publisher’s Weekly is also available for most titles.
A helpful and extensive essay on “author read-alikes” for Dennis Lehane described the writer’s themes, settings, and characters before thoughtfully linking him to other authors like Pete Dexter, S.J. Rozan, and Archer Mayor, none of whom I had even heard of before, much less read. (Great, juuuust great.) The “advanced search” option allows users to refine their search by means of targeting genres, nationalities, and even number of pages, among many other categories.
NoveList is exactly what I didn’t need — another source of book recommendations to add to my already overstuffed pile. For readers who’ve exhausted the complete works of a beloved writer or genre fans who are looking for expert opinions for where to turn next, it’s a pretty great resource.
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.
Book Review Websites
Sometimes reading a great book review is almost as satisfying as wrestling your way to the end of a 900-page Russian novel.
To be honest, the only Russian novel I’ve ever finished is the conveniently slim One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, but I stand by my original statement.
I always appreciate when a book review sums up the relevant details of some massive tome, works in a bit of thoughtful analysis, and leaves me feeling like I’ve enriched myself so much in about five minutes that I won’t have to add yet another title to my massive list of books to read.
It doesn’t always end so cleanly, though. So many excellent book review resources on the web inevitably unearth fascinating new authors or revisit classics I predictably haven’t read.
Here are some that I try to keep up with, and I’m curious what other sites readers find especially useful:
The New York Times Book Review kind of seems like the granddaddy of them all, even though it’s been pared down like so much other newspaper content over the last few years. Still, the big-name reviewers who know they can make or break careers like small-time Oprahs seem to take their responsibilities here seriously.
The New York Review of Books is the place to go in between breezing through those Russian novels, as their exhaustingly lengthy reviews often require almost as much heavy lifting.
Arts & Letters Daily is way too packed with fascinating articles, and their often misleadingly named “New Books” section is great for dragging overlooked classics out of semi-obscurity.
Blogcritics.org’s book reviews are great for quirky genre stuff, and the wide range of reviewers offers truly (small “d”) democratic opinions.
Slate.com’s Books section often features interesting “Book Club” discussion groups where medium- to big-name writers shoot emails back and forth for a week or so. For readers, it’s like eavesdropping on the conversations of geniuses (or wacked out but entertaining nut jobs).
What other book review resources on the web should readers know about?
