For Our Reference

The other day I found a fascinating blog devoted to words, linguistics, languages and other related topics called Languagehat. I have been meaning to mention it for a while, and today I have good reason to. I don't often talk about reference books on The Millions even though I use them every day. Lucky for us, Languaghat keeps track of these sorts of things. Today, he posts links to interesting reviews of new editions of two popular reference books, The Chicago Manual of Style, 15th Edition and Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 11th Edition.

- C. Max Magee @ 1:30 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

What People Are Reading... Part 2

People are reading non-fiction, too. The big debut this week is Joan Didion's new book Where I Was from. It's part family history, part historical exploration of "where she was from," the perplexing state of California, a fertile subject for analysis if ever there was one. People are already waving this book above their heads and extolling its virtues much in the same way as they did with her earlier book, Political Fictions. Another politically minded author garnering a wide readership is New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, whose op-ed pieces from the last three years have been collected in a single volume entitled, The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century. As the title indicates, his columns chronicle the collapse of the prosperity of the previous decade, and the former economist from Princeton feels that the current administration deserves much of the blame. If that's too heavy, there are some less serious books that are or will soon be best sellers. Among them is a peculiar book that comes to us by way of England. Schott's Original Miscellany by Ben Schott is an astoundingly clever and thorough little collection of trivia that manages to strike the perfect balance between being informative and being fun. For example, go to the official miscellanies website and get the official scoop on how palmistry works, and then feel free to troll around for other odd info at your leisure. Meanwhile, the more musically minded may have caught Martin Scorsese's seven-part documentary about the blues which is currently airing on PBS. Elvis biographer Peter Guralnick helped compile the companion volume to the documentary entitled, Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues: A Musical Journey, an attractive book that features new essays by David Halberstam, Hilton Als, Suzan-Lori Parks, Elmore Leonard, and others. And finally, all this talk of books about music reminds me of Chuck Klosterman. I may have mentioned a few weeks ago that I was reading Klosterman's first book, Fargo Rock City, a terribly clever book that seeks to make a case for heavy metal in the annals of music history. The book started strong, and I found myself laughing out loud once every couple of pages; however, by the end, Klosterman's personality, which is as much on display as the subjects about which he writes and which is an odd mix of self-effacement and shameless arrogance, began to grate on me. To make things worse, right after I finished the book, I read a couple of horrendous reviews of his new book which brought into even clearer focus what had bugged me so much about Klosterman. Nonetheless, the ranks of readers devoted to Klosterman's absurd and witty social commentary seems to be growing, because his new book, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto seems to be selling at an ever quickening clip. Stayed tuned for the next installment... Paperbacks!

- C. Max Magee @ 2:12 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

What People Are Reading... Part 1

So, maybe you're curious about what books people are reading right now. I'll start with new fiction. There's a lot of interesting new books out there right now. The book that everyone is talking about remains The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem. Lethem has recently been interviewed in periodicals ranging from Entertainment Weekly to the Paris Review, and the book is the current pick for countless book clubs. Despite the hype, this book is a worthy read, and you'll have something to talk about at cocktail parties. In the category of science fiction for those who don't typically read science fiction comes Quicksilver, the first book in a new series by Neal Stephenson. The book has been out for a week and is already flying off the shelves, most likely to the very same folks who are always telling me how much they love Stephenson's previous novels, especially Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon. Meanwhile, Zoe Heller is nearing breakthrough status with her second novel What Was She Thinking?: Notes on a Scandal, which is about a teacher who carries on an affair with her fifteen year old student. It sounds trashy, but from what I hear it turns out to be a nuanced and moving character study. It's been short-listed for the Booker Prize and is beginning to sell accordingly. Also short-listed and selling incredibly well in England is Brick Lane by Monica Ali. Following in the footsteps of fellow young Londoner Zadie Smith, Ali's debut novel is another unsparing look at multi-cultural London. Finally, another debut, this one is a cleverly wrought time traveling romance by Audrey Niffenegger titled, appropriately, The Time Traveler's Wife. So there you go. A few things to read this fall. Stayed tuned for the next installment: new non-fiction.

- C. Max Magee @ 4:28 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Sad News

I can't believe it... Just caught the headline. George Plimpton died today. He was one of my favorite writers. I met him twice: once in college when he signed a copy of his The Best of Plimpton collection and again a few months ago when he came by the book store to promote the new Paris Review collection. Both times he regailed everyone present with a vast array of stories that placed him as an observer or a bystander to some remarkable moments (for example he was in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel when Robert F. Kennedy was killed.) But he didn't mind being the center of attention either, like when he stepped in the ring with Archie Moore or ran out on the field as quarterback of the Detroit Lions. He put himself in many situations like this because he knew that most folks had, at one time or another, wondered what it might be like to be a modern day gladiator. It wasn't a stunt really; it felt more like a favor to his friends. And though he wrote a lot about sports, that was only one dimension of his life. He also founded the The Paris Review, perhaps the most significant literary magazine of the last fifty years. It is notable for having published early works by many great writers, and it is also well-known for the "Art of Fiction" (or Poetry, or Drama) interviews included in each issue. There is a wealth of knowledge in each interview; the worlds greatest writers talking about how they write. Most of all he simply seemed like someone who truly loved life. You could see it in his face when he spoke and you could see it in his writing. Whether he was ringside for the Thrilla in Manilla or running with bulls in Pamplona it was really about the joy of it all. Here's the obit.

- C. Max Magee @ 1:02 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

The Literary Art & The Art of Literature

Holy Crap! Have you been into a bookstore lately; have you noticed how good books look these days? When I go to used book stores, I find that all the books released during a particular decade tend to look like one another with not much variation. But now you walk into a book store and each new book looks like a work of art. Some remarkably attractive books have come out over the last few years, and book design has come into its own as an art form that it is peculiar adventurous considering the publishing industry's ever tightening ties to multi-national conglomerates. A lot of this is marketing. Many of the companies that own the publishing houses also have major entertainment divisions, and they tend to use the same marketing style to push both their movies and their books. Hence, book covers have gone the way of movie posters and trailers; they seek to grab the attention of the reader with an alluring display of eye candy. Every day, I see people buy books simply because of how cool the cover looks. You would be surprised at how often it happens. Which brings me to another reason why book covers have become more adventurous: people are ready for it... they need it even. People are constantly bombarded by interesting and strange visual imagery on television, in movie theaters, on billboards. If every book looked the same, people wouldn't buy as many books, no matter how amazing the contents. It's kind of sad, but not entirely. Though a result of the pervasive marketing that seems to have taken over our culture, the good looks of these book covers are still a good thing. Where else do graphic designers get such freedom in such a corporate setting? Where else is art combined in such an interesting way with the written word? If you want it to be, you can now treat every visit to a book store like a trip to an art gallery. Walk slowly down the aisles and admire the artwork, take the books in your hands and inspect the detail as closely as you want, then buy whatever it was you came in for. You've just turned an everyday act of commerce into an experience in art appreciation.

Which brings me to Chip Kidd. If there is any one person who is at the forefront of forward looking book design, it is Kidd. As a book designer for Knopf, he has designed literaly hundreds of covers, and, as a result, has been heralded as the best in the business. To celebrate his work Yale University and Veronique Vienne have come together to produce a very attractive volume collecting and celebrating some of Kidd's many covers. It is entitled, appropriately, Chip Kidd. Here are a few of Chip Kidd's book covers:

- C. Max Magee @ 3:06 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

More Magical Libraries

My friend Brian read yesterdays musings on libraries and wrote in with a couple of addenda...

two things:

1) you need to include tam tam books in your links... not only b/c it's tosh [a co-worker and the founder of Tam Tam Books], but b/c it's a very idiosyncratic, interesting, eccentric, and different site (much
like the man himself...)

2) loved the piece about "library angels and book fairies", and very happy to see mention of borges (one of my all-time favorties), but you must make specific mention of his story "The Library of Babel" which is, without a doubt, the greatest story about a library ever written -- the library... as a/the universe. a magical story that when i first read on the NYC subway, on my way downtown from hunter college, caused me to miss many a stop... i found myself in brooklyn, and so caught up in a borgesian daze and full of inspiration was i, that i chose not to go back the other way, but exited the subway in a strange part of town and explored, got myself dinner at a greek restaurant, chatted up a one-eyed drunk, then hopped back on the train and went home late that night, all hopped up on borges... (oh, how i miss the whirlwind that is nyc life!) - anyway, if you haven't read this story, it's short and ESSENTIAL. enjoy! [see page 112 of Borges' Collected Fictions]

Heard on the Radio

Today while I was running errands, I was pleasantly surprised by some decent mid-day public radio that mentioned a couple of books that sound pretty interesting. First, I caught the end of a show that airs twice a month on KCRW called DnA. It's devoted to design and architecture issues. Today's guest was design writer Michael Webb who talked about his new book Brave New Houses: Adventures in Southern California Living. According to Webb, over the course of the last century, cutting edge architects have used the single-family home as a kind of laboratory in which they could try out some of their more avant-garde ideas on a smaller, less risky scale. Since, in comparison to most cities, Los Angeles is a very new place, it is home to many of these houses. RM Schindler, Richard Neutra, and Frank Gehry all built single family homes in L. A., and Webb's book is a photographic record of this adventurous ground-breaking architecture.

After spending a considerable amount of time in the post office, I got back in my car in the middle of an interview with compilers of another interesting-sounding book (I think the show was The World, by the way). Embedded: The Media At War in Iraq is an oral history of the journalistic experience of the war in Iraq. During and after the war, the two writers, Bill Katovsky and Timothy Carlson wandered from Kuwait City to Baghdad to Amman, and interviewed every journalist they crossed paths with. As they tell it, the resulting book inculudes many tales of both danger and poignency, which, taken as a whole, represent a singular record of the journalistic experience on the front lines.

- C. Max Magee @ 7:52 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Note From a Reader

I recieved this note from a reader the other day and I enjoyed it so much I thought I would provide it for public consumption. Enjoy:

I came upon your blog this morning and I liked it. The meta of the blog is a noble idea and I wish you the best. Thought you might appreciate a little ditty I penned
-

Summapoeta


Summa was a bookie, not the Vegas thing where 5 will get you 10, but a fairy that
hung out around ink and parchment and leather bindings. Summa hung out around books.
Sometimes bookies are call library angels, but Summa bristled at this nomenclature.
She was always quick to point out that angels were entities that had been very bad,
that were now trying to be good. Not so with fairies. Fairies had always favored
phun and play and giggle, wiggle, laughing. Why be bad when having phun was so much
better?

Summa's full moniker was Summapoeta. She favored the short sweetest of poems to the
drudgery of wading through the ramblings of fools and their novels. Yes, beauty to
Summa was to say much with little. -


And unto my beckoning
it did come
a perfect point
of celestial splendor
and with this light
I now see
the beauty amongst the shadows.


- to Summa this was a zillion times more beautiful than any novel.

I have always liked the concept of library angels or book fairies, an invisible hand
that seems to lead you to what you need.

You can catch some of my other stuff on http://robertdsnaps.blogspot.com. Hint -
Some of the big ones hang out in the archives.

Doing time on the ball,

"d"

I love libraries and I love the idea of "library angels and book fairies." Libraries can be incredible, mystical places. Anyone who has been to the New York Central Library or the Los Angeles Central Library knows it... and anyone who has read the work of poet, writer, philosopher and blind librarian Jorge Luis Borges, knows the power of the library as well... see his Collected Fictions for various magical library tales. My favorite fictional library? It would have to be the library in Richard Brautigan's novel, The Abortion. In this library, anyone can walk in and place their own handmade book on shelves that gather no dust, and the book will remain there for posterity, for anyone who wishes to see it.

Bookfinding... Classic Literatures and my Broken Down Car

I feel no particular affinity for my car. It is very average and there is nothing romantic about it. And yet, living in Los Angeles, I depend upon the car perhaps more than any of my possessions. Somehow though, this unassuming car of mine must be really tuned into my psyche, because it seems to collapse sympathetically when ever my life hits a rocky patch. During my various periods of full and gainful employment, my car has behaved admirably, quietly doing it's job, asking and recieving no special notice from it's owner... very unassuming. However, whenever I am scrimping and struggling, my car seems to feel my pain and its insides deteriorate and fail, seemingly reacting to the stresses felt by its owner. And so, naturally, with a rent check looming that may be beyond my means, I brought my car to a trusted mechanic for routine and necessary maintainance, and sure enough my trusted mechanic, after spending some time under the hood and under the car, quickly identified several areas where my car was teetering on the brink of total collapse. Having seen the decay with my own two eyes, and resigned to the fact that my car's chronic desire to push me ever deeper into credit card debt, I set out on walk, not often done in Los Angeles, to kill time while my car was unde the knife.

Along my way, I passed several bookstores peddling both new and used books, many of which I would like to have owned, none of which I could afford. So, I was much pleased to come upon a Goodwill store in the course of my travels, one with many shelves of dusty paperbacks going for 49 cents a piece. Many of the usual thrift store suspects were present, mounds and mounds of bestseller fodder from two decades ago, but I was able to lay my hands on three classic novels that I am very pleased to add to my growing library. First I found an old Signet Classic paperback copy of Bleak House by Charles Dickens. Dickens has long been one of my favorites, and I am especially fond of Great Expectations and Hard Times. Many consider Bleak House to be his greatest work. I also found a copy of one the most important American novels ever written: Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. Finally, I came across a novel that I had not heard of before working at the bookstore. Somehow I went through life without any knowledge of Carson McCullers, who as a 23 year old wrote a Southern gothic masterpiece called The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. But now I own the book, and I can't wait to read it.

- C. Max Magee @ 4:04 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Author Sighting

Today at the bookstore I had the pleasure of meeting a young author named Felicia Luna Lemus. Her debut novel, published by FSG, is titled Trace Elements of Random Tea Parties. This book is about both "princess dykes" and the chicana life, a blend that could only occur in Los Angeles. She seemed almost giddy at seeing her book on the shelves, and understandably so. She is diligently at work on another novel which she foresees finishing in about five years, which is about how long the first one took. In the meantime, she is actively seeking a position teaching creative writing, which should be well within reach considering this first novel and her MFA from Cal Arts. If you want to hear more check out this review at the San Francisco Chronicle and here is a double interview with her and one of the original outlaws of queer fiction, John Rechy (City of Night is the book that made him famous), which appeared in The Advocate magazine.

- C. Max Magee @ 10:46 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Something to Read

There is a fantastic story in this week's New Yorker by Thomas McGuane. But hurry, because it will only be on the website for a couple more days. If you enjoy it and want to read more, try reading McGuane's novel from 2002 The Cadence of Grass.

- C. Max Magee @ 11:43 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

A Free Book for a Volunteer

Today, while I was driving, I caught a review of Triangle: The Fire That Changed America by David Von Drehle on Fresh Air. It was a very favorable review (in fact the book has been getting great reviews in most places). I would love to read the book and comment on it here, but I can't forsee myself getting to it any time soon. And therefore, I won't get to talk about it here. The stack of books is just too high. Yet I happen to have an advance copy of Triangle, and I hate to see it gather dust. So here is my idea: whoever among you would like to read this book and put together a little review or comment or whatever on it for this site, email me and I will send you the book. Then I was thinking, I am lucky enough to have access to advance copies of books from time to time, and wouldn't it be great if I could pass them along to people so they can write a little something which I can then post on The Millions. It sounds like good fun to me. So... if you would like to review Triangle for The Millions email me and I will send you the book. (By the way Triangle is about the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, an unconscionable tragedy that proved to be a watershed event in improving working conditions [and especially working conditions for women] in America.) As I get other new books, I will offer them up for review as well. Also, if you happen to have access to review copies of books, and would like to help stock my guest review program, well, that would be really sweet.

- C. Max Magee @ 2:21 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Violence and Tenderness

Pete Dexter's new book Train comes out October 7th. Here is my review:

In the grand tradition of Los Angeles noir, Pete Dexter's new novel Train, is framed in black and white by the minds eye. Yet Dexter has applied his considerable skill to softening the edges; it is delicately written noir.

Train is the nickname of Lionel Walk, a black caddy at a posh Brentwood country club, whose world seems populated only by malevolent forces: the crass racism of the country club members, the criminal element among his fellow caddies, and the undisguised malice of his mother's lover. In the same city, and yet, of course, in another world entirely, a woman named Norah is brutally attacked and her husband is murdered while they are on their yacht, anchored off the coast. Norah manages to escape into the arms of Miller Packard, whom Train will later dub "Mile Away Man," which sets the book careening towards its inevitable conclusion. Packard is brilliantly written as both heroic rescuer and herald of malevolent chaos.

The mystery inherent in this book is not of the whodunit variety - we know from the start who commits the murder on the yacht - rather it is to see which of the forces that seem to inhabit Packard will win out in the end. In fact, one of the strengths of the book is Dexter's ability to embody his characters with such ethereal qualities. Packard seems as though he has been touched by some unmentioned force that torments him. Train, meanwhile, has been similarly touched, and though this force is of pure benevolence, one cannot be sure if it will be strong enough to lift him from his circumstances. Train turns out to be, of all things, a golf prodigy, which would be a lucrative gift for almost anyone except someone in Train's circumstances. Instead, his unaccountable proficiency serves only to further enmesh his life with that of Packard and Norah and a blind former boxer named Plural.

Train is bleak but captivating. The book unfolds in front of you, and you find yourself not wanting to look away.

- C. Max Magee @ 3:47 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Motherless in Brooklyn

Jonathan Lethem's new book The Fortress of Solitude comes out today. Here is my review:

Now it is Jonathan Lethem's turn to write a "big book." The breakout success of his last novel, Motherless Brooklyn, set the stage for an eagerly anticipated follow-up. As if borrowing from the title of his previous book, Lethem's two protagonists grow up motherless in Brooklyn. One is Dylan Ebdus, whose father is a morose and cloistered artist and whose mother is a frenetic but flaky hippy, who, before she is distracted away from their rugged corner of Brooklyn, is determined to blend her white family seamlessly into the black neighborhood. For Rachel Ebdus, gentrification is a dirty word. Next door lives young Mingus Rude, son of soul superstar Barrett Rude, Jr, a brooding musical genius who permits himself to slide into a sort of secluded decay. The two boys are ostensibly best friends, but as is perhaps more true to life, their adolescent lives intertwine, split apart, and become intimately joined as they make their way warily through a minefield of street-borne dangers. The dangers are different for each boy, more often than not according to skin color, but to say that this is a novel about race would be to simplify in a way that Lethem does not.

In the second part of the novel, Dylan is all grown up, and still sorting things out. He doesn't know what it means to have had such a peculiar upbringing, but he knows that if he weren't white, he would probably be in prison like Mingus. His black girlfriend accuses him of collecting poor black people as she looks at his obsessive music collection and mementos from his youth.

There is to this book, as there has been to Lethem's others, a supernatural element, a fantastical token that lifts the story from the realm of reality. With the chaos that surrounds them, it comes as no surprise that young Dylan might see a homeless man named Aaron X. Doily fall from the sky, or that, having found Doily's secret, Dylan and Mingus might become a couple of low rent super heroes. This fantasy realm never becomes the point of the story; if anything, it underscores the insurmountable mania of the world around them. Lethem's insistent devotion to music is perhaps a more dominant trope, and the timeframe of the novel allows him to delve into soul and rap and punk in an enjoyably voyeuristic sort of way.

It is exciting to watch an author like Lethem put together a largely successful, career-changing type novel. This is a deserving book that a lot of people will read. Look for Lethem to join Jonathan Franzen and Michael Chabon at the top of the youngish American writers heap.

- C. Max Magee @ 2:21 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Bookspotting

When: Early afternoon Monday 9/15/03
Where: A park bench in Larchmont (A tony neighborhood in L.A.)
Who: Twenty-something man
What: Bobos In Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There by David Brooks.
Description: "Once it was easy to distinguish the staid Bourgeois from the radical Bohemians. This field study of America's latest elite--a hybrid Brooks calls the Bobos--covers everything from cultural artifacts to Bobo attitudes towards sex, morality, work, and leisure."

Anyone else like to go bookspotting?

- C. Max Magee @ 1:31 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Random Roundup of Recent Books

Sorry about the infrequency of updates. I saw the Walkmen play two nights this weekend. The new songs are great. The new album will be called Bows and Arrows and it'll be out some time next February.

If you've read much of this blog, you've probably noticed that I am a fan of food writing (Jeffrey Steingarten, Calvin Trillin, and Jonathan Gold are my favorites), and all too often I find myself allured by a brand new restaurant that I can't possibly afford. Food writing, more than any other type of journalism, tends to dwell upon the personality of the writer, and so as I devote untold hours to living vicariously, I get to know my food writers pretty well. For quite awhile now I have enjoyed weekly imaginary meals with LA Weekly food writer Michelle Huneven. She's eloquent and friendly and thorough; not as adventurous as her predecessor Jonathan Gold, but sometimes a peaceful and upscale imaginary lunch is exactly what I'm in the mood for. So, naturally, the other day when I saw that she had a new novel out, I was intrigued. It's called Jamesland, and it was put out by Knopf (a good sign). Then I noticed that the LA Weekly published an excerpt, which I promptly read. It was surprisingly good, compelling enough to make me want to read the book. You can find the excerpt here.

You may have heard of "the original club kid," James St. James. He arrived in New York City towards the end of the Warhol heyday, and with his cadre of maniacs, built a new "scene" from the ground up. It was Studio 54 for the next generation: drugs, sex and a taste for the macabre and bizarre. Fast forward a few years: a murder has shattered the fantasy they created for themselves, and James is spiraling into drug addiction. At this point he decided to write a book: it is half memoir, half true crime account of the "clubland murder." It came out a few years ago under the title, Disco Bloodbath. Then this year it was made into a (profoundly forgettable) movie called Party Monster. Though the movie is bad, the book is not, and now it has finally been released as a paperback (and retitled Party Monster: A Fabulous But True Tale of Murder in Clubland). It's hard to find a book more fun than this one.

A new issue of my favorite magazine came out. The latest installment of Colors is devoted to slums. In classic Colors fashion, their eye is unblinking, yet they do not dwell upon misery or pass judgment, instead they focus on how these hand made cities are an example of human ingenuity and a will to survive and live a life of dignity. Where there is beauty and humor to be found in these places, Colors finds it. These people are everyone, the magazine seems to say.

- C. Max Magee @ 12:53 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Dispatches from the Front

Not too long ago, on a book finding expedition, I found a whole cache of old Granta magazines. Granta is very cool journal devoted to both short fiction and on the ground reporting of international conflicts and events. It attracts fantastic writers who tend to be relatively unknown to Americans, and so it tends to deliver angles on stories that you don't see in the American press. Case in point: the other day I was, briefly, between books, and I picked up one of the old Grantas that I have lying around (this one was Autumn 1989). One of the stories I read was a first hand account of the Tiananmen Square massacre by a BBC journalist named John Simpson. I have always found first-hand accounts of these sorts of events to be the most fascinating type of news reporting. (The best I read this year were John Lee Anderson's "Letters From Baghdad" in the New Yorker.) Simpson's story on Tiananmen Square was both enthralling and terrifying, he captures a brutality that most of the Western world did not see. Immediately after I finished the article I wondered: is this piece in a book somewhere and has this guy written anything else like this? This answer to both questions is yes. Simpson's World: Tales from a Veteran War Correspondent came out in August and it's filled with close encounters with dictators and on the scene dispatches from all the major world conflicts from the last couple of decades.

- C. Max Magee @ 5:18 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Ask A Book Question: The Seventh in a Series (Calling All Readers of Hesse)

C. Ryan Edwards wrote in hoping to jumpstart a discussion on one of his favorite authors, Hermann Hesse:

I was hoping to start some discussion of one of my favorite books by mentioning hesses's the glass bead game or magister ludi whichever one wishes to call it. Have you read it? It did gain hesse the 1946 nobel prize.

The only Hesse I have ever read is, predictably, Siddhartha, which I considered to be very good, if only because it kept me interested in subject matter that I don't typically care for. I have heard more than once that as far as Hesse goes Siddhartha should be considered a lesser work, since his other writing typically surpasses it. I invite anyone out there with thoughts on The Glass Bead Game/Magister Ludi to speak up via the "comments" link. I meanwhile will add it to my list of things to read.

- C. Max Magee @ 1:52 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Ask A Book Question: The Sixth in a Series (Santa and the Romans)

Richard Smith writes in trying to track down what sounds like a very cool story. Hopefully someone can help him out

I read a story in a compilation book in the 70's about Santa Claus, but you didn't know it was about Santa Claus. I want to know how to get a copy again. It was about a centurion called Claudius who was at the crucifixion. Does anyone know what it is called and who wrote it?

Well, I googled this one for about an hour and couldn't come up with anything. There seem to be several Christian storytellers who have written first person accounts of the crucifixion, many of which are very interesting, but none that I could find include Santa Claus. Of course, there are also many dozens of great stories and legends about Santa Claus, but, again, none that I could find had a basis in Ancient Rome. If I had better access to a good library I bet I could figure this out, but, alas, I do not. Sorry I couldn't be more helpful, but maybe someone else out there has heard of this or knows their way around those great library databases. If you knows this story, please let us know by pressing the comment link below. Good luck on your search, Richard!

- C. Max Magee @ 7:06 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

The Millions Guest Contributor: Author, Kaye Gibbons

I had the pleasure of making Kaye Gibbons' acquaintance via email, and I have very quickly become a big fan. Aspiring writers and precocious readers could learn a lot from her. One of the more noteworthy events of Gibbons' distinguished career was the selection of two of her books, Ellen Foster and A Virtuous Woman by Oprah Winfrey for her eponymous book club. I asked Gibbons how she looks back on this experience as a writer, and she was kind enough to send us the following reply:

You'd asked how I felt about having two novels of mine on the Oprah Book Club. There's so much to say about it that I'll talk about it chronologically. Before the Oprah call, I was doing fine, amazing fine. But it didn't start out that way. My advance for Ellen Foster was 1500. But I've always had a strong work ethic, and as I worked, as rights were sold and awards won, the money began to catch up to the blood and time I was putting into it. Unfortunately, being a rather eccentric, free-thinking woman in the South led others and eventually me to conclude that there had to be something pathological about me, and it wasn't until two years ago that a twenty-year old diagnosis of bi-polar disorder was eradicated. Doctors made me feel forced to take drugs that took the edge off my creativity, but I've taken nothing in two years and haven't ever felt and written better.

My theory is that I want to write the best literature possible and have it read by as many people as possible. Living in NC, now half-time in NY, there's a long tradition of writers helping one another, reading manuscripts, finding agents. Lee Smith introduced me to my agent, and then in 1997 I was able to pass that along when I read the first pages of Cold Mountain. Chuck [Charles Frazier] and I had had children at the same Montessori school for years and had been close friends. Things like that happen here all the time.

But there's still a great deal of intellectual isolation here--and that's probably why I write and read as much as I do. The other day in the grocery store, an acquaintance asked me what'd I'd been writing since I finished Divining Women. When I told her I'd been reviewing books for Atlanta and Chicago, she asked, "They let you review your own books?" This is a strange occupation to have in Raleigh, not so much in Chapel Hill, where Alan Gurganus, Reynolds Price, and others live. But sometimes 20 miles feels very far away.

So, with regard to Oprah, one thing her call did was to give what I do for a living a certain amount of validation. I'd been knighted by the French, won awards galore, sold about a million books, had a movie made, done 12 thirty-city book tours, but dealing with the perception that I was a local writer was often frustrating. I'd have an audience of 2000 in Michigan and then 30 in Raleigh, for example.

What it took to manage it was self-esteem, and that generally comes from having a firm grasp of reality and what's important, my children. A digression, because I anticipate someone mouthing about the Oprah money: I have a hard time tolerating the starving artist in the garret whining about how a writer writes a brilliant book that the publisher won't promote and that no one is reading. It's easier to be a victim than take action, write a better book, listen to an editor's input, find a new publisher. I truly believe, because I've seen it, that if a brilliant manuscript exists, that if that writer has had enough gall, brains, energy, etc. to write it that he or she can get it to the right people. When a person sends me something that deserves publishing, I see it through the process. But ninety-nine percent of what I'm sent just isn't good. A writer has to be a superb editor, and wishing a book good doesn't make it so. When someone sends me something drowning in cliches, I tell them that language is to use, not to take easy advantage of. When Oprah called and said she wanted to put the two novels on her show, I was nervous about it diminishing my literary reputation, which sounds pompous to say. When she held A Virtuous Woman up and said, "America, you've wanted a love story, well, here it is," I thought, Well, here we go.

But, you see, her selling, what now, about three million books that month, didn't change the basic nature of the novels or me. When Jonathan Franzen started running his mouth about the maudlin trash or whatever he said about her choices, I smiled and remembered that the first novel, Ellen Foster, is taught all over the world beside The Catcher in the Rye and To Kill a Mockingbird. When it was finished, in 1986, it was sent to and read by Eudora Welty, Walker Percy, Gordon Lish, John Barth, and other people who, over the years, became dear to me. The whole Franzen thing got sort of tedious, and I didn't have the time to get dragged into it.

What someone like a Franzen doesn't see was how poor I was growing up, a surreal state of poverty, and then that small advance, and how I worked my way up to financial security. I'm finally making now what many, many first, very young writers are getting, and I think it damages the soul. I finally have a house that doesn't have something hanging off in disrepair. There's the whole attitude now in music and writing of, I'm 21, Where's my Big Deal? So, even though the Oprah thing seemed to come out of the blue, it had been earned. I think I'd have felt a little ridiculous if it hadn't been. I used a lot of the money establishing a library at a local children's home, which my daughters and I still maintain. We sat down and wrote checks, making decisions together about where the money went. Anything I put away personally was completely eradicated, gone, during a horrible divorce two years later. So, I found myself back at the beginning financially, having been reamed. But I've got this work ethic, and I've got the post-Oprah, broadened visibility. It'll be okay. My daughter wasn't able to go to college in NY, stayed here because of the financial drain of the divorce, but it remains, we will all be okay.

I admire Oprah, enormously. As for the book club, she's getting it done, getting people in bookstores. If there's the criticism that the books she selects have taken on a certain sameness, well, so what? She's not picked Danielle Steele, for crying out loud. I know for a fact, given the hundreds of letters, that people are reading, because of her, who haven't read before.Let me tell you that when I got a letter from a mother who said her daughter's impression of her totally changed when she saw her mother sitting down, reading a book at night in bed, how very proud this woman was, it is hard to say anything critical about the Oprah Book Club.

The problem is that it is hard, to impossible, for people who live around books, who read them, own them, who have, like me, about 4000 books in the bedroom, to even process the notion that houses exist where there are no books except the ones the kids bring home from school. That's a deplorable, elitist attitude. When I was house-shopping, I looked at about fifty upper middle-class houses, and only in a couple did I see more than a handful of books. I started asking the real estate agent if the sellers had hidden the books, thinking they were clutter.

I have two younger teenagers, and I can tell you that seeing them reading anything is a blessing. I don't go over and demand that they upgrade. And for those 350 kids who use the library Oprah made possible day in and day out because the public library in their town will not trust them to check out and bring back books, they'd wonder what all the snobbish hoopla was about. They're able to do their homework better, their grades have improved, and that money was funneled directly from Oprah.

I felt nothing but honored by the whole process, and only wish that I'd been in better emotional and physical shape at the time. I was 75 pounds heavier, weight that drugs I didn't need had put on me, and I felt run down and a little thick in the head. But that was then. This is now. I'm the person I used to be before my marriage went to hell, and I'm nothing but glad that the Oprah thing is a part of my experience. If nothing else, local ladies who stop me in the grocery store don't talk to me like I'm having to sell books out of the back of my car.

I think anybody who wants to be successful at this whole ordeal of publishing has to take a certain amount of responsibility that I see so many people abdicating in favor of bitter comparisons. Language is a gift, and to be able to use language to make a living is one of the most joyful enterprises I can imagine. I try to take that joy and make what I'm writing a better book every time I edit it. I work 18-hour days. It is a long, lonely, spiritually hazardous occupation. But the joy I feel in putting even two words together in something of an original way has nothing to do with money or movies, nothing external. I think that people buy and read my books, regardless of Oprah, because I've always studied everything I've read, even packaging on the mascara I just bought, and tried to figure out why a particular word was chosen. You can get in a habit of alert, concentrated reading that comes back when the writing begins. I've learned to be honest with myself and cut what sucks.

Kaye Gibbons lives in Raleigh, North Carolina. Her books include Charms for Easy Life, On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon, A Cure for Dreams, and Sights Unseen, as well as the titles mentioned above. Her latest novel, Divining Women will come out April 14th. And make sure to check out her cool new website, kayegibbons.com.

Many Thanks

Thanks to Will Femia for allowing my self-promotion to extend to MSNBC's Weblog Central. For those that are blog-fans, it is always a must-read.

- C. Max Magee @ 2:50 AM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

A Noted Debut

My good and old friend Garth, while describing what struck at his most recent visit to a book store, alerted me to an intriguing first novel by a 26 year old writer. According to the Washington Post, "Matthew McIntosh, young and despondent though he may be, is the real thing." His book is called Well, and every review I've found so far is very positive and at times a touch awed. This is definitly in the "yes pile." You can find an excerpt on the official page.

- C. Max Magee @ 1:56 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Ask a Book Question: The Fifth in a Series (The Russians Are Coming)

All of a sudden I've worked my way pretty quickly through the pile of books I have lying around, so I was digging through my shelves looking for what to read next. I dug up an old copy of Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov that I'd come across on a book finding expedition a while back. The Russians occupy a gaping hole among books that I have read. I have never read any of the 19th century classics, and I figure I ought to start sooner rather than later. However, staring at this brick-like copy of Karamazov, I became intimidated as I wondered if this was the best place to begin my education in Russian literature. Yet, I did not panic; instead I emailed my friend Brian, who I happen to know is a great connoisseur of Russian Lit. Here is what I wrote:

I've never read any of the classic Russian writers, and I want to start, but I'm not sure which one to start with. Any ideas? I've got The Brothers Karamazov... so I'm thinking of starting with that.

...and here is his response...

the russians are my favorites -- all of 'em, dostoevsky, tolstoy, chekhov, gogol, turgenev, pushkin, etc...

my favorite russian writer is Dostoevsky (chekhov is second) and my favorite novel is definitely The Brothers Karamazov. it might be my favorite novel of all time, but i think you should start with Crime and Punishment a much more conventional and accessible book. not that i think you couldn't handle The Brothers, but just think you might wanna ease your way in... check out Gogol's short stories "The Overcoat" and "The Nose" [in The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol] and Chekhov's story "Ward No. 6" [in Stories] is a masterpiece, as are many (most) of his stories.

Thanks, Brian... If anyone else has insights on the Russians, let us know by using the comment button below.

Two Hot New Books

A couple of very different brand new books have been getting lots of attention from customers lately: The Zanzibar Chest by Aidan Hartley is part mystery, part memoir that is a story of life in post-colonial Africa, which must necessarily touch upon the history of colonialism as well as all too recent war and genocide. Here is an excerpt. Completely unrelated but also very interesting is Where'd You Get Those? New York City's Sneaker Culture: 1960-1987 a pictorial history of playground basketball and the footwear that accompanied it by Bobbito Garcia, writer for Vibe, world-class DJ, "basketball performer," and world-renowned break-dancer. For pics of the hot kicks... go here.

- C. Max Magee @ 1:05 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post