New book previews: Michael Cunningham, Dai Sijie, Terry Gamble, Kaui Hart Hemmings

Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer-winning novel The Hours was one of the biggest hits of the last ten years, so it's fair to say that his follow-up Specimen Days is being anticipated by many readers. Like The Hours, Specimen Days is composed of three interrelated stories. The title of the novel is borrowed from Walt Whitman's autobiography, and much as Virginia Woolf was the inspiration for The Hours, Whitman provides raw material for Specimen Days. The book gets a gushing review in the New York Observer: Specimen Days is "an extraordinary book, as ambitious as it is generous; and the depth of its kindness, or grace, is to convey that it is we ourselves, the multitude, who are extraordinary, or might be."

Another anticipated follow up is Dai Sijie's Mr. Muo's Traveling Couch, which comes on the heels of Sijie's popular novel Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress. Traveling Couch (no relation to the Traveling Pants as far as I know) is about a French-trained psychoanalyst who returns to his native China where his sweetheart is a political prisoner. You can read an excerpt of the book here.

Terry Gamble has new book out, Good Family, her second novel after her 2003 debut, Water Dancers. Good Family starts like this: "In the years before our grandmother died, when my sister and I wore matching dresses, and the grown-ups, unburdened by conscience, drank gin and smoked; those years before planes made a mockery of distance, and physics a mockery of time; in the years before I knew what it was like to be regarded with hard, needy want, when my family still had its goodness, and I my innocence; in those years before Negroes were blacks, and soldiers went AWOL, and women were given their constrained, abridged liberties, we traveled to Michigan by train."

Kaui Hart Hemmings is the author of a debut collection of stories, House of Thieves, that sounds very interesting. Hemmings is Hawaiian, and PW says "a dusty, dreamy Hawaii rife with sexual frustration, loneliness and adolescent heartbreak is the setting for the nine stories of Hemmings's bold debut collection." Her story "The Minor Wars" appeared in the 2004 Best Nonrequired Reading, and here you can read an excerpt of the title story which appeared in Zoetrope: All Story.

- C. Max Magee @ 1:23 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Bookfinding

Today I happened to walk by one of those thrift stores connected to a hospital, and, thinking they might have a couple of shelves of books, I decided to stop in. I'm glad I did. The books were way in the back in this weird garage-like annex, and the room smelled pretty bad. This made browsing unpleasant, but I had a theory that the odor might have kept prospective shoppers out - more books for me. The store was also right on with their pricing: 50 cents for paperbacks and a dollar for hardcovers, which, in my opinion, should be the standard pricing scheme if the customer has to sift through messy, disorganized shelves. The selection turned out to be pretty great, and I had to restrict myself to only the best books I could find - books that I was surprised enough to see on the shelves that I felt passing them up would be criminal, so I ended up leaving a lot of pretty good stuff behind. If I had bought everything I wanted, I would have had a hard time getting home on the el, and furthermore, empty bookshelf space is somewhat scarce in my apartment these days. So it was only the cream of the crop for me.

I grabbed three hardcovers: The Biggest Game in Town by A. Alvarez. I was working at the bookstore when the poker craze started getting pretty big, and this classic from 1983 was one of the books we recommended to people wanting to read up on the game. I also found a copy of Philip Roth's American Pastoral, which I've been told is one of his best. And I was delighted to spot baseball guru Bill James' out of print treatise on the Hall of Fame, Politics of Glory. I also snagged a pocket paperback edition of John Barth's Giles Goat-Boy. All in all, a pretty good haul.

- C. Max Magee @ 4:25 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

New and upcoming books

John Burdett's sequel to Bangkok 8, his mystery set in Thailand, has come out. It's called Bangkok Tattoo. Here's my review of Bangkok 8 (scroll down). Here's EW's review of Bangkok Tattoo. And here's an excerpt.

I noticed that Penguin has put out a smart-looking new edition of John Keegan's essential history book, The Second World War. The new edition includes a new foreword by Keegan.

It looks like T.C. Boyle will have a new collection of short stories out this fall called Tooth and Claw.

- C. Max Magee @ 4:00 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Some things

Kate Atkinson's editor at Little Brown, Reagan Arthur, has posted at the LBC blog and there's some good Q & A going on in the comments.

I just surreptitiously spy on people reading, but Ed - prompted by an idea from Sara - marches right up to them and quizzes them on their literary knowledge.

Been enjoying a couple of new (new to me, anyway) book blogs recently: Using Books Weblog and BookLust.

- C. Max Magee @ 11:08 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

What people are reading

I spent a lot of time on the el yesterday riding all over Chicago, and there were lots of folks reading books. When you actually look at what people read, you realize that the reading habits of average folks range far beyond the coverage of newspaper book sections. In terms of what actually gets read, genre fiction certainly seems more popular than literary fiction. Here are the books people were reading on the red, purple, and brown lines yesterday.

The Tristan Betrayal (a posthumous effort by Robert Ludlum that inspires PW to say "Perhaps it's time to let the master rest in peace.")
Five Quarters of the Orange (Joanne Harris' follow-up to Johnny Depp-vehicle Chocolat)
Dutch II (part 2 of a trilogy by Teri Woods - and put out by Teri Woods Publishing - that scores an Amazon ranking of 1,229)
Devil in the White City (I think every resident of Chicago has read Erik Larson's account of murder at the World's Fair.)
Great Expectations (I love it when I see people reading classic novels on the el - it can restore ones faith in society, I think)
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (Jonathan Safran Foer is reaching the masses!)
Hotel Pastis (Peter Mayle's "novel of Provence")
Sense and Sensibility (Jane Austen never goes out of style)
Deception Point (The obligatory Dan Brown thriller - law requires that at least one Dan Brown novel be present in every train car and a dozen on every airplane.)
Elantris (PW says: "[Brandon] Sanderson's outstanding fantasy debut, refreshingly complete unto itself and free of the usual genre cliches.")
Lana: The Lady, the Legend, the Truth (Lana Turner never goes out of style either)
We Thought You Would Be Prettier (Laurie Notaro's "true tales of the dorkiest girl alive" - ranked 1,446 on Amazon)

- C. Max Magee @ 12:01 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

The Island of Lost Maps by Miles Harvey

First the good: there's lots of neat info in this book about antique map collecting and about the history of maps in general. Anyone with a passing interest in maps will find that the The Island of Lost Maps contains a number of absorbing digressions about adventurous mapmakers from centuries ago. Miles Harvey's book also, however, bills itself as an account of the crimes and ultimate downfall of map thief Gilbert Bland. As Harvey writes early on in the book, Bland never agreed to talk to him, and the crimes themselves, while interesting, are not compelling enough to carry the 400-some pages that it takes Harvey to tell the story. The book is a 15 page magazine article enveloped in hundreds of pages of discursions and asides about various cartographic topics as well as a great deal of melodramatic meta-narration about Harvey's efforts to tell Bland's story:

I was trying to map the life of a man - an anonymous and elusive man, a man I did not know, and a man who demonstrated no desire to meet me. And even all that might not have been so bad if I had somehow been able to find a way inside his head, to put myself in his shoes. But Bland and I were very different people. Other than a few shared superficialities - both of us white males, both right-handers, both map lovers - our common frames of reference were few.

It's as though Harvey, realizing that he is devoting a tremendous amount of writerly energy to what is, in the end, a rather straightforward crime committed by an uninteresting man, feels the need to overexplain himself. Over and over he tells the reader how fascinating this crime is and obsessed he has become with telling Bland's story, and after a while it seems that Harvey has forgotten about his readers and is simply trying to convince himself. The best creative nonfiction seems effortless (John McPhee's books, for example), but Maps reads like it was a tremendous effort to write.

- C. Max Magee @ 10:52 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Music Meme

1. The person who passed the baton to you.
Scott.

2. Total volume of music files on your computer.
At the moment I've got a bit more than a gig, much of it the songs that have managed to follow me through the three computers I've been through since the Napster heyday.

3. The title and artist of the last CD you bought.
Sadly, I rarely buy music anymore. I used to spend a decent chunk of my disposable income on music, but in recent years I haven't had much disposable income, and I definitely haven't kept up with new music with the fervor that I once did. Accordingly, I last purchased a CD in October of 2004, Flight from Echo Falls by The Vells

4. Song playing at the moment of writing.
I listen to more and more NPR-type stuff instead of music these days (All Things Considered at the moment). When I do feel like listening to music at my computer, I'll often listen 3wk.com, an Internet radio station that plays lots of great, obscure stuff.

5. Five songs you have been listening to of late (or all-time favorites, or particularly personally meaningful songs)
See above.

6. The three people to whom you will 'pass the musical baton.'
Derek
Cem
Justin

- C. Max Magee @ 5:26 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

A Lawrence Weschler Reading List

Back in March after hearing about Robert Boynton's book of interviews with journalists called The New New Journalism, I put together a post that listed some of the books by this select group of writers. At the time, my friend Garth was taking a class at NYU taught by Lawrence Weschler (himself a "New New Journalist"), and felt that we had only scratched the surface. Weschler had introduced Garth and his fellow students to a wealth of "creative nonfiction." Garth wrote to share his experience with the class and the marvelous list of books that was at its heart. This is long, but it's worth it.

As alluded to earlier, here's a slightly more in-depth summary of the Weschler Literary Nonfiction Class. This was a ridiculous class, in the best sense of the word. The reading list was incredible, handouts of poems were constantly circulating, and every five minutes we were treated to a "you've got to read this" digression. Highly recommended; for a quick summation of the ideas treated in the class, check out the Weschler interview in Robert Boynton's new The New New Journalism.

I kept careful notes on what was being mentioned and read, and in the end, I probably had twice this many names on my list. In order not to divulge Weschler's trade secrets, I cut a lot of stuff out, but I wanted to share with you some of my amazing discoveries from this class. The top 10 list is my actual top 10 list, though, in general, I tried to omit what we actually read, because with some of these guys - [Joseph] Mitchell, [Ryszard] Kapuscinski, [John] McPhee - it's all amazing. What's in parentheses may be stuff on the syllabus, or may be something that was mentioned in class that sounded fantastic, or excerpted on a handout - stuff definitely to check out. We also read maybe 25 others, but many of them ([Susan] Orlean, etc.), you'll be familiar with. I included the four Of Note because they were relatively new to me, except for [Christopher] Hitchens, whom I loathe, but who apparently used to write pretty compelling essays. The second part of this list compiles allusions that came up in class and handouts that we received. Again, this is less than half of what we got in class, but I've included only stuff I couldn't bear not to share, or stuff I had never heard of before. Divided up by genre. Hopefully, to the degree that syllabi and course materials are the instructor's intellectual property, I've managed to obscure what the actual syllabus looked like, while still managing to convey a fraction of the stimulating panoply of material we were exposed to. I never knew I liked journalism so much.

I. Top 10 Writers We Read, In My Humble Opinion:

Joseph Mitchell (Everything This Man Ever Wrote. My Ears Are Bent (recently republished), Up in the Old Hotel)
Ian Frazier (see esp. "Canal Street" (New Yorker, April 30, 1990), and the book Family)
Ryszard Kapuscinski
Susan Sheehan (Is There No Place On Earth for Me?)
George Orwell ("Reflections on Ghandi")
David Foster Wallace
John McPhee (Oranges, Annals of the Former World)
William Finnegan (see esp. "Playing Doc's Games," (New Yorker, Aug. 24 and 31, 1992)
Jamaica Kincaid (A Small Place)
Lawrence Weschler (I especially like Calamities of Exile, Boggs, Vermeer in Bosnia)

Other Writers of Note Whom We Read:
Christopher Hitchens (before he became a right-winger, e.g. Prepared for the Worst)
Alastair Reid (Oases)
Jane Kramer (someone in class mentioned The Last Cowboy)
Diane Ackerman

Go Look This Up:
Columbia Journalism Review symposium, July 1989
Transom.org (resources for radio journalists)
Omnivore prototype issue at mjt.org

II. Mentioned in Passing, Piqued My Interest

A. Nonfiction (Roughly in order of Interest)
A.J. Liebling
Walter Murch (In The Blink of An Eye, The Conversations (w/ Michael Ondaatje))
John Berger (Ways of Seeing)
Jonathan Schell (Observing the Nixon Years)
Rebecca Solnit (River of Shadows)
Susan Sontag (on Abu Ghraib in NY Times Magazine)
Wendy Lesser (Nothing Remains The Same)
Curzio Malaparte (Kaputt)
Vijay Seshadri (essays in The Long Meadow)
Norman Mailer (Executioner's Song)
Neil Sheehan (A Bright Shining Lie)
Dave Hickey (Air Guitar)
Jonathan Raban (Passage to Juneau)
Mark Salzman (True Notebooks)
Adam Menendes (80s reportage on Central America)
Adam Michnik (Letters from Prison and Other Essays)

B. Philosophy
Nicholas of Cusa (Of Learned Ignorance)
H. Vaihinger (The Philosophy of As If)

C. Poetry
[The Poles:]
Wislawa Szymborska
Czeslaw Milosz
Stanislaw Baranczake
Zbigniaw Herbert (Mr. Cogito)
Tadeusz Rosewicz
[The Rest:]
Nazim Hikmet
Christopher Logue (translations of Homer)

III. Drama/Film:
Harold Pinter (A Kind of Alaska)
Wallace Shawn (The Fever)
Roberto Rossellini (The Rise of Louis XIV)

IV. Fiction:
Grace Paley
Norman MacLean (A River Runs Through It)
Jose Saramago (Blindness)
Barry Unsworth (Sacred Hunger)
Thornton Wilder (The Bridge of San Luis Rey)
Joseph Heller (Something Happened)
Nicholas Mosely (Hopeful Monsters)
Stanislaw Lem (A Perfect Vacuum)
Bruce Duffy (The World As I Found It)

Wow, a tremendous list. There's a lot to mine here.

- C. Max Magee @ 4:17 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

In the Trees

Remember a little more than a month ago when I implied that spring had arrived in Chicago despite the insistence of the natives that I was being laughably optimistic? Well, the natives were right, and I was wrong. Since then we've had our fair share of plunging overnight temperatures and frigid rainy mornings. But now I'm hoping I can safely say that spring is really here, and our first brutal Chicago winter is behind us. Since leaving Los Angeles, where weather is stubbornly perfect 95 percent of the time, I have enjoyed the seasons despite the difficulty getting acclimated to bad weather. In LA it's green all the time, but here watching the leaves appear on the trees has been an enjoyable novelty. And yesterday, which may have been the best day of the year thus far, I decided to dust off my tree books, unused since I left the east coast for California five years ago. I was curious to see what kinds of trees line our street, and what's living in our back yard. (I was partly inspired to do this by the Talk of the Town piece in this week's New Yorker about the guy who's running New York City's "tree census.") So, using my National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Trees and Trees of North America, I discovered that we've got a Northern Catalpa and an American Elm in the front and some kind of Maple in the back yard. If the thunderstorms stop today, I might go back out and see what else is growing around here.

- C. Max Magee @ 9:21 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Adam Langer's next book

They're starting to get excited about Adam Langer's next book here in Chicago. I'm not sure how much of this is new information, but it looks like the new book, Washington Story, is a sequel to his debut, Crossing California. From the Sun-Times:

In it, Jill Wasserstrom and Muley Wills, the young heroes of the first novel, are now high school students. Over the five years from 1982 to 1987, the world around them expands from the boundaries of Rogers Park and changes immensely including the Chicago mayoralty (Harold Washington is a character in the story).

It's due out August 18th.

- C. Max Magee @ 9:28 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

New Book Previews: Philip Caputo, Charles Chadwick, Jonathan Coe

Philip Caputo's new book Acts of Faith is being favorably compared to The Quiet American. Caputo, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, has traveled extensively in Africa, and this new novel is set in Sudan. According to PW, Caputo "presents a sharply observed, sweeping portrait, capturing the incestuous world of the aid groups, Sudan's multiethnic mix and the decayed milieu of Kenyan society." Though the novel has a timely, flashy, "ripped from the headlines" sound to it, Kakutani called it "devastating" before comparing it to the work of Robert Stone, V.S. Naipaul and Joan Didion. Scott noted Kakutani's "heady praise" a couple of weeks ago. And here's an excerpt from the book (which weighs in at 688 pages, by the way. Whoa!)

Charles Chadwick wrote recently about being a first time novelist at the age of 72 (scroll down): "A first novel of 300,000 words by a 72-year-old sounds like someone trying to be funny. Acceptance by Faber and then by Harper Collins in the US - the recognition that all along one had been some good at it - took a lot of getting used to. Still does." The book, It's All Right Now, which also weighs in at 688 pages, oddly enough (not exactly light Summer reading, these books), was panned by Nick Greenslade in The Guardian. Greenslade suggests that its publishers were more enamored by the idea of a 72-year-old debut novelist than by the book itself. I'm curious to see what US reviewers say because the book doesn't sound all that bad to me.

As I recall, Jonathan Coe's 2002 novel, The Rotters' Club, was well-received by my coworkers and customers at the bookstore. A sequel, The Closed Circle, comes out soon. Here's a positive review from The Independent and an excerpt. These are good times for Coe. His recently released biography of British writer B.S. Johnson, Like a Fiery Elephant has been shortlisted for the $56,000 Samuel Johnson Prize.

- C. Max Magee @ 12:23 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

It's Here

Hurry over to the LBC blog to see the first Read This! pick.

- C. Max Magee @ 10:14 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

The Bestseller List: Bastion of the Middle Aged

Lulu, a self-publishing outfit, went back through 50 years of New York Times fiction bestseller lists and determined that the average age of the bestselling author is 50 and a half (via BBC). It makes sense in that the upper reaches of that list are often dominated by franchise-type writers - Stephen King and Danielle Steel are cited - whose careers plateau at a point where every book they write goes to number one, no matter the quality. A younger writer with few books under his or her belt has no reputation to ride on, but the middle-aged writer can ride on reputation to year after year of number ones. But NYT bestsellers are kind of a bore, I'd be more curious about the average ages of the winners of different prizes. Regardless, it almost goes without saying that the most exciting voices in fiction are younger than 50, except for the ones who aren't.

- C. Max Magee @ 7:26 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Trying to buy books

I've had gift cards for some chain stores lying around for months now - gifts from Christmas and my birthday - and yesterday I decided to use them. It was strange though, despite having quite a bit of free money at my disposal, I found it very difficult to buy myself books. Over the last several years I've grown so accustomed to buying books very cheaply that I couldn't rationalize paying full price, even with the gift card. I felt pretty bad about it, too. I know that authors get their paychecks when we buy their books new, but they don't see any of my money if I buy a book at a used bookstore or a yardsale. I also feel bad because most independent bookstores can't afford to mark their books down, and even the chain stores only put a handful of titles on sale, but I know that Amazon will have the book I want at 30 percent off, or more. After thinking about it for a while, I decided to get mad at the publishers. Why does a book have to be a luxury good? I won't pretend to know the economics of bookselling, though I know that it requires many people - all of whom need to be compensated - to put out a book, but does it really make sense to charge 25 bucks or more for a new book? There are probably a lot of people who occupy a grey area as book customers. They enjoy reading but not enough to spend 25 bucks on it or even the 15 they now want for a paperback. Instead they buy a magazine or see a movie or go out to lunch, all equally entertaining in their minds. I don't know where the money gets squeezed out of the book creation and selling process, but if books get cheaper people will read more and I won't stand with my nose pressed up to the window of the bookstore staring at new releases that are beyond my means.

Nonetheless with all this cash in hand, I had to buy something, so instead of spending it all on handful of paperbacks or a smaller handful of hardcovers, I decided to buy a truly expensive book, this time for Mrs. Millions who deserves such things. I bought Modern House Three, a Phaidon architecture book of considerable heft filled with glossy pictures of space age homes (she's an architect). I got a couple of books for myself, too, a couple of novels I've been curious about for a long time: Donald Antrim's The Verificationist and English Passengers by Matthew Kneale. I actually still have some more left on these cards, so maybe I'll take another stab at the whole chain bookstore thing soon.

- C. Max Magee @ 11:14 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

More Reading Diaries by Emre Peker

In an effort to keep up with my Turkish reading, I reverted to one of my favorite authors Atilla Ilhan for the fifth book in a series of 6 titled Dersaadet'de Sabah Ezanlari (Morning Calls to Prayer in Istanbul). This novel too, unfortunately, is not translated into English. Frankly, I could have used a good translation myself as the language of the novel was embroidered in early 1900s "high" Istanbul Turkish, hence employing a lot of Persian and Arabic words, and therefore extremely difficult to follow. Nevertheless, Atilla Ilhan is a master whose historic novels reflect the power struggles among the politically significant personalities of Istanbul - as well as their indecisive nature and pitiful lack of influence - during the occupation of the city in the aftermath of World War I. I strongly recommend Dersaadet'de Sabah Ezanlari to any Turkish readers that follow the Millions. Surely, you must read the prequels first, which are Kurtlar Sofrasi volumes I and II, Sirtlan Payi and Bicagin Ucu.

Next I turned to The Moviegoer by Walker Percy upon my good brother John D. Davis' recommendation. Indeed, the novel was everything that he described to me: struggles of an elite Southern gentleman about to turn thirty and seeking a meaning, goal, and career in life. The subject is deeply intriguing since I, save for the Southern part and minus a couple of years in age, battle with similar issues. What is most intriguing is Binx Bolling's ambivalence to his family's legacy. This particular quality enables Binx (Jack) to analyze everyone surrounding his life with utmost precision. There is his ever criticizing Aunt Emily, his successful, catholic and acquiescent Uncle Jules, his manic-depressive cousin Kate, his hot secretaries, a bunch of relatives that Binx cares little for, and his fraternity brothers from Tulane who are all full of advice and ideas as to the proper way of going about life, getting settled, and marrying the right woman. Binx, for his part, could care less for advice. The internal struggles of this Korean War veteran push him to resist his customary temptation to tease life and instead to take matters into his own hands. The events that subsequently shape Binx's life unfold on the eve of Mardi Gras in New Orleans in the mid-1950s, much to the self-reflective amusement of the reader. The Moviegoer is a very witty and entertaining read, with a great language and good hold on Southern culture. I look forward to reading other works of Walker Percy and have rather high hopes.

You can see Max's thoughts on The Moviegoer here.

- C. Max Magee @ 9:56 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

The Remix

File under odd marketing ploy: Penguin UK is offering up 30 audio samples from their catalog of books for intrepid djs to incorporate into their mashups. (I think of got the lingo straight here, no?) Spoken word snippets are available from classic titles like The Great Gatsby, Moby Dick, and Nick Hornby's How to be Good. So, as all media continue to converge toward a single point do not be surprised to find some "Call me Ishmael" in your hip hop.

- C. Max Magee @ 9:37 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Fraud by David Rakoff

When I encounter readers who've read all of David Sedaris' books and are pining for more, I often point them to Fraud by David Rakoff. I based this recommendation on his frequent and frequently amusing appearances on This American Life, and a general idea that he and Sedaris share a certain world view for whatever reason. Well, now I've read the book, and I think it's fair to say that Rakoff is a reasonable substitute for Sedaris, should no Sedaris be available. But they are not the same writer. Rakoff frequently pens a sort of meta-article in which he talks about the particulars and relative merits of his assignment as he embarks on that assignment. I have no idea if the essays that appear in Fraud were published in the same form in magazines or if for every article he crafted a meta-article with which to entertain himself (and us). Either way, the reader feels invited in for a behind the scenes look at what it is like to be a disaffected, overly-qualified, under-ambitious journalist as he takes on his fluffy assignments. In this way he differs from Sedaris, who writes almost exclusively about himself, with no artifice in between him and the reader. The fluffier the assignment, the more devil-may-care Rakoff becomes. He takes jabs at Steven Segal's new age retreat, a New Englander who walks up the same "mountain" every day, and, most often, himself. At times the persona wears thin, too much cynicism and self-awareness, as when he writes about portraying Sigmund Freud in the window of Barney's department store. But he redeems the collection with the final two essays in which he lets the reader see his more human side. In "Tokyo Story," he returns to the city fifteen years after being forced to leave and start over his life after being diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease. Returning, he finds no haunting demons, but instead paints a funny and endearing portrait of a unique city.

I have been so relieved to find that the city in and of itself is not enough to unlock the sadness of my younger self. To the contrary, I have been unable to wipe the smile from my face since I arrived, giddy with a sense of survival. It's not even clear to me that that old misery is still housed in my body anymore. I have been avoiding a monster behind a door for thirteen years, only to find that it had melted away long ago, nothing more than a spun-sugar bogeyman. It's definitely not the first time in my adulthood I have realized this, but it never fails to cheer me to have it proven yet again that almost any age is better than twenty-two.

The final essay, "I Used to Bank Here, but That Was Long, Long Ago" is about Rakoff's bout with Hodgkin's. Here he is at is best, and his typically casual vulgarity is more important to the plot, which revolves around a long lost sperm sample from his cancer days. Ultimately, he revisits his illness, long tucked away after he beat it, and we realize that the cynical Rakoff isn't so cynical when he's willing to be brave.

- C. Max Magee @ 6:59 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Litblogs come in many flavors

I've been a little out of loop lately, but today I picked up a copy the Chicago Reader, having noticed that it was their "Spring Books Special." Among the many reviews and briefs is an entertaining article called "So This is the Blog Revolution" by Laura Demanski AKA OGIC. It's a short history of the litblog phenomenon and an attempt to gauge its importance (unfortunately the article is not available online). As both a reviewer and blogger, Demanski understands that part of the draw of such blogs is to watch as non-professionals turn book criticism into a conversation and review the reviewers. The tendency of litblogs to critique mainstream book coverage directly (eg. the Brownie watch, The LATBR Thumbnail, etc.) has no doubt raised their visibility. What better way to get noticed by journalists and reviewers than to repeat their names incessantly? Everyone gets a thrill out of Googling themselves. In terms of elbowing its way into mainstream book coverage, it may be that the LBC will represent the pinnacle of the litblog movement.

I love my fellow litblogs dearly, and I have enjoyed watching the community grow. But I also think that one can keep a blog about books that does not exist to be the David to the New York Times' Goliath, and, no, I'm not going to deliver The Believer's anti-snark manifesto here. There is a certain joy that is derived from reading a good book and discussing that book with a fellow reader. Having a blog has allowed me to direct this inward act outward. My blog is essentially a reading journal, and my reading journal exists to interact with other readers (and with their reading journals, if they have them). Although many of my fellow members in the LBC have garnered a certain amount of fame by holding mainstream book coverage to a high standard, I am relieved that the LBC seems to arise from a different sort of urge. I look at the LBC as twenty readers getting together to recommend to you a book that they hope you'll enjoy.

(Mark your calendars, LBC selection #1 is just 6 days away).

- C. Max Magee @ 4:22 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Over at the LBC

I put up a post.

- C. Max Magee @ 10:59 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

A Reading Tour Continues by Emre Peker

The next novel I picked up was Jeffrey Eugenides' The Virgin Suicides. I was, as some of you might recall, very impressed by Middlesex and wondered about The Virgin Suicides. Most of my friends who have only seen the movie despised it, and those who read it suggested that the book was a success and that I should never bother with the movie, which is precisely what I did. The Virgin Suicides has a very complex storyline, narrated in contrasting simplicity by a man years after a quiet suburb of Detroit was shaken up by the suicides of the Lisbon girls. Eugenides is very successful in capturing the mental state of teenagers, as well as their struggles in growing up and establishing an identity. The lack of a male influence among the Lisbons - a family of seven with five daughters - the dominant, repressive and over-protective nature of Mrs. Lisbon, and the disengaged, mostly submissive stance of Mr. Lisbon form the nexus of complexities that eventually infect the Lisbon family and drive the daughters to suicide. The sexual escapades of Lux - the youngest of four sisters following thirteen year old Cecilia's suicide - and the enigmatic Trip Fontaine's obsession with her expand the plot and provide a window into the social environment of 1970s suburbia. The Virgin Suicides presents a good glimpse of Eugenides' immaculate prose by the delightful narrative of a grown up from the stand point of a '70s teenager obsessed with inward girls and the mysteries that surrounded them. I would strongly suggest The Virgin Suicides as an intro to Euginedes.

Mark Helprin's Winter's Tale is my fourth book of 2005. The time-bridging adventures of Peter Lake, a fantastic protagonist raised by the Baymen out on the Jersey shore and thrown into the life of New York at age twelve in the late 1800s, Pearly Soames, a gold-obsessed thief and the nightmare of all gangs in New York (think Bill the Butcher from Gangs of New York), Beverly Penn, daughter of media magnate Isaac Penn who suffers from consumption, and the bridge builder Jackson Meade, who aims to build the rainbow bridge that will bring the Golden Age all reflect on the essence of the human spirit, which is warmest in the bitter colds of Winter. The narrative moves from the late 1800s to the early 1900s in a chronological fashion until a crucial showdown between Peter and Pearly, whom the former had wronged by ambushing the gang - the notorious Short Tails - during an attack on the Baymen. Next, you find yourself in the 1990s (and keep in mind that this novel was written in 1983), in a futuristic world not so different than the one we live in today, but one that has lost all sense of romanticism and sincerity. Still, there are those affiliated with the Lake of the Coheeries (a mystical upstate town, unbeknownst to common eyes - a pseudo Neverland more along the lines of The Shire) who have assimilated into modern culture yet maintain a hidden greatness inherent in their heritage of understanding and love. As characters cross paths in search of the Golden Age, and few know what to look for, back comes Peter Lake, Pearly, and Jackson Meade. When these characters of a century ago find themselves in New York, in the 1990s, they are befuddled to say the least. But shortly, everyone comes to realize that the unsettled accounts of the past were but the beginning of a reckoning scheduled for a hundred years later. As events unfold, New York suffers from a terrible fire and one gets the feeling that things are headed for the worst. Helprin's fantastic story is touching and surreal, the beauties he draws upon are essential elements that most of us are prone to forget or overlook. Winter's Tale is also a great ode to New York, one of the central and most beautiful characters - yes a character indeed - in the novel. The early image and infinite ideal of New York is best described in another character, Hardesty Marratta's proclamation: "For what can be imagined more beautiful than the sight of a perfectly just city rejoicing in justice alone." If you are not a staunch realist and love a long build up, you will be delighted at the interplay of history, characters, New York, and romantic idealism that leads to a fantastic resolution.

- C. Max Magee @ 5:48 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

What people are reading

Spotted on the Red and Purple lines of the El today and organized by Amazon ranking:

Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt (4)
Blink by Malcolm Gladwell (7)
Wicked by Gregory Maguire (140)
The Source by James Michener (9,873)
Between Past and Future by Hannah Arendt (15,939)
Dreaming in Cuban by Cristina Garcia (21,324)
Fabulous Small Jews by Joseph Epstein (37,316)
Jungle of Cities and Other Plays by Bertolt Brecht (505,028)

You've got the bestsellers Blink, Freakonomics and, to a lesser extent, Wicked on one end, and you've got Brecht on the other... probably a grad student, but I like to see those literary, engaging books (the Arendt, Garcia, Epstein) that occupy the broad middle reaches along the span between big media-backed bestsellers and academic obscurity (with no disrespect meant toward Brecht, he just happened to be there). As for the Michener, well, you never know what you're going to see people reading on the El.

- C. Max Magee @ 4:47 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Travel Writing by Train by Andrew Saikali

It's the little things in train travel that stay with you. It's not the sweeping vistas or the pastoral villages. After a while, the specific memories of panorama seem to bleed into each other. It's not the quaint architecture or the run-down graffiti-filled approaches to the stations. It's not the things that every travel book raves about that linger. It's the little things which seem to come out of nowhere.

It's being Vienna-bound at the Budapest train station five years ago and, somewhat confused by the vague pointing that passes for traveler's assistance, winding up unchallenged onboard a train at a platform which quite plainly said Vienna. It's suddenly cluing into the passengers' conversations and realizing that the train has in fact just arrived FROM Vienna. It's scrambling out of the train mere seconds before it pulls away, before it heads off to its actual destination, which, it now becomes quite clear, is in fact Moscow, and, well, not part of my plan.

It's things like that.

For every train story that I have, Paul Theroux must have a hundred. But what makes his tales so compelling is context. With a novelist's eye for setting and ear for dialogue, Theroux presents The Great Railway Bazaar and The Old Patagonian Express as travel literature in the purest sense. They are not about the destination. They are about the journey. The 'getting there.'

The Great Railway Bazaar chronicles Theroux's mid '70s journey from London, through Europe, and across the vast expanse of Asia, onboard trains with such imagination-firing names as the Orient Express, the Mandalay Express, and the Trans-Siberian. Theroux travels through the former Yugoslavia, through pre-Taliban Afghanistan, and through Soviet-era Russia, throwing the last 30 years of history on its head.

The Old Patagonian Express tracks Theroux, a few years later, leaving his Boston home and taking train after train through the U.S., Mexico, Central America, and down through South America to Patagonia, in southern Argentina.

If his novelist's eye gives the book its richness, his sarcasm gives it its edge. Paul Theroux doesn't suffer fools gladly. When he encounters them, as when he encountered an astonishingly incurious 20-year-old pontificating vegan. He lets loose -- pointedly playful to her, a bit more viciously sarcastic to us. It's not always fair, and the frustrations that come with an extended voyage permeate his observations, but it's honest in a brutal sort of way, and often terribly amusing.

I've not yet read any of Theroux's fiction, despite the presence on my bookshelf of The Mosquito Coast which has been sitting there, unread, for probably ten years. But I rate these two non-fiction accounts as the best travel literature I've read so far.

I've also sampled some of Bill Bryson's work. Bryson is a different sort of travel writer. Where Theroux has his novelist's eye and ears, Bryson has the sensibilities of a humorist. His books seem somewhat lighter; they skim the surface more and come off as humorous memoir. His recent works seem more massive, somewhat less flippant. But in Bryson's case, I would recommend his earlier books which drip with irreverence -- sometimes self-deprecating, sometimes glib. But always quite funny.

Neither Here Nor There recounts Bryson's travels through Europe in the early 90s, a journey which in fact re-traces one he made some twenty years earlier. Wound-up by an encounter with a neighborhood of Belgian dogs, Bryson lets fly with a paragraph about why cows would in fact make the best pets, with a punch line worthy of classic Woody Allen. This book may not reach for the same lofty goals as his later works, but it hits its mark. It's tight, funny and breezy.

I guess where Theroux and, to a lesser extent, Bryson, brought travel literature into the modern age is in the acceptance that travel is a succession of small adventures, each one potentially rich in little details, in comically surreal moments. And in embracing these moments as the details which propel the story.

My own Central European train journey five years ago hit its surreal zenith on an overnight train from Prague to Budapest. Essentially alone, save for a comatose heap near the window, I happened to be eavesdropping on an altercation in the next compartment. We were in Bratislava, and Slovakian officials were now on the train rousing passengers from their slumber. I could hear an American voice politely assuring the officer that his ticket was for the full journey, and was paid in full. But the booming official, drunk with power, somehow managed to coerce more American dollars out of the passenger.

I was next. The intimidating official had a broken arm, slung in a cast. Now, as it happens, I have one arm. (Or more accurately, I don't have a second arm). Normally in public I wear a creepily lifelike prosthetic arm, rendering me effectively two-armed to any limb-savvy onlookers who happen to be counting. Alone, at night, I had removed it, and it was to this empty space, this void, that the Slovakian official, ready to bleed me of more money, suddenly pointed, then pointed to his own injured arm, then beamed, then pointed back and forth again, gave me the OK sign, and then left me alone to continue my journey.

- C. Max Magee @ 9:29 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Looking for a Ship by John McPhee

John McPhee books are like crack for the curious. He mines his topics, usually some slice of America or Americana, for all the minutia that the curious crave, diversions and details and especially lists. In Looking for a Ship he turns his pen to the United States Merchant Marine, already a dying institution when McPhee wrote the book in 1990. He manages to secure a spot as a PAC - Person in Addition to Crew on the Stella Lykes for a voyage from port to port down the Pacific coast of South America. The topics he dissects are many: the histories of his fellow seamen, the tribulations of the Merchant Marine, the astonishingly various contents of the hold, and the port towns they visit seen through the eyes of a sailor, to name a few. Interspersed in the story are tales of pirate attacks and boat wrecks, not to mention a discription of the ship's engine room that will make you sweat just reading it. In this book, as in all his others, McPhee is pitch-perfect, taking the reader down any interesting digression encountered in the narrative, extracting wry humor from his observations, and digging deep into the personal history of any fascinating person he encounters. His books are biographies of a place and time.

- C. Max Magee @ 10:15 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

My Scrabble Curse

Last night, caught in some sort of TV doldrums, Mrs. Millions and I ended up watching "The National Scrabble Championships" on ESPN2. Two pasty guys hunched over a table doesn't typically qualify as a sport, but we figured we'd allow ESPN2 this digression from its usual content. Or maybe since the poker shows have been such a hit, they're trying to introduce more "seated around a table" activities to their lineup. Regardless, since we're known to whip out the Scrabble board, we watched. It was mildly entertaining. One of the commentators was Stefan Fatsis, sportswriter for the Wall Street Journal and author of Word Freak, a look into the odd world of competitive Scrabble. A couple of years ago I gave the book to Mrs. Millions, and let her know that I'd like to read it when she was done. She ripped through it, and started talking about "bingos" and "combos" and other strange things. She read the book so intently that the it literally fell apart - torn binding, pages scattered everywhere - totally unreadable. So, I've never read the book. And she's beaten me at Scrabble ever since.

- C. Max Magee @ 2:45 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Some Pynchon Coolness

"So I illustrated Gravity's Rainbow - nobody asked me to, but I did it anyway." -- Zak Smith

Check it out.

- C. Max Magee @ 8:51 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Narrative Magazine: Lots of fiction online

I came across Narrative Magazine this weekend, which, if you register, offers a free online subscription. The magazine comes out twice a year and includes several short stories and novel excerpts as well as interviews, non-fiction, and classics. Under classics, the magazine has published work by Jean Stafford, Peter Taylor, and Ivan Turgenev. Recently they have also published a sizable chunk of the Rick Bass book I mentioned yesterday, The Diezmo. Once you've registered, go to the Archive page to see all the stuff they've got online.

- C. Max Magee @ 11:42 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Brand New Books: Jane Alison, Steve Amick, Rick Bass, Ann Beattie

Fans of historical fiction set in far flung lands will likely enjoy Jane Alison's new book Natives and Exotics. It's a multigenerational tale set in South America and Australia that spans the twentieth century. The publisher notes liken the book to W.G. Sebald's The Emigrants, which is a lot to live up to. PW describes the book thusly: "More impressionistic than narrative, Alison's third novel is a lush evocation of the way people love and alter (and are altered by) the environments they inhabit."

Closer to home is Steve Amick's debut The Lake, the River & the Other Lake. The center of the book is the small town of Weneshkeen, Michigan. And as is so often the case, this small town buzzes with odd characters and neighborly conflicts which are exacerbated by the summer presence of inconsiderate tourists. PW says this: "Bitterly comic and surprisingly meaty, this roiling tale of passion, anger, regret and lust is dark fun for the Garrison Keillor demographic." So I guess it's like a much less saccharine Lake Wobegon. There's an excerpt available here. And if that's not enough for you, try this short story from the Southern Review.

Rick Bass' new novel, The Diezmo, is garnering comparisons to a pair literary adventure classics, The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane and Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, both favorable and unfavorable. Still, I love this sort of book so my interest has been piqued. Bass' setting for the novel is the rough borderlands between Mexico and the Republic of Texas in 1842. Here's a mixed review of the book from the Denver Post, and here's an excerpt so you can make up your own minds.

Ann Beattie doesn't need much of an introduction. She's one of America's better-known short story writers, and her latest collection, Follies received the hard to come by Michiko Kakutani seal of approval with the declaration, "Ms. Beattie has hit her stride again." Here's an excerpt.

- C. Max Magee @ 9:20 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post