A Year in Reading: Recap

Thanks to everyone who contributed to the Year in Reading at The Millions. It was great fun. The Millions will be dark for a week or so while the holidays are celebrated. Hopefully, upon its return in early January, the blog will have a new and improved look. In the meantime, here is an index to all the great contributions we got this month:

Writers:

• George Saunders
• Charles Shields
• Charles D'Ambrosio
• Sandra Scoppettone

Bloggers:

• Conversational Reading
• Pinky's Paperhaus
• The Bibliosphere
• Languagehat
• Two Umbrellas
• Emerging Writers
• The Elegant Variation
• SlushPile.Net
• Ed Champion
• Corey Vilhauer
• Condalmo
• Tabula Rasa
• Bookdwarf

Millions Contributors:

• Andrew
• Patrick
• Garth
• Ben

Readers:

• Derek
• Edan

• Extras

- C. Max Magee @ 2:00 PM ~ comments: 2 ~ Links to this post

 

Article in Poets & Writers

I have an article in the newest issue of Poets & Writers. It's about the publishing industry's recent interest in doing business in China and in bringing Chinese writers to the rest of the world.

Not unlike European explorers five hundred years ago, the U.S. publishing industry is looking for a route to China. And, like those explorers, each company seems to be setting a different course. HarperCollins recently partnered with a Chinese publisher and plans to release new and classic Chinese books in English translation in the United States, the U.K., and China. Penguin has also secured a local publishing partner and is already offering Chinese readers ten of its Penguin Classics in Mandarin - and it has an open-ended plan to bring out more. At the same time, Penguin has stepped up its efforts to release more Chinese literature in translation in Western markets. Macmillan, meanwhile, has started a new publishing division, Picador Asia, based in Hong Kong.

- C. Max Magee @ 1:44 PM ~ comments: 4 ~ Links to this post

 

A Year in Reading: Ben Dooley

Come the new year, Ben will be joining us as a regular contributor. I'll leave formal introductions until then, but in the meantime, he decided to get a jump on things by sharing the best books he read in 2006:

Since reading The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll several years ago in a back alley, flea trap of a hotel in Nadi, Fiji, I've been lending myself to a series of flawed and inherently hopeless business schemes in the hope of not just getting rich quick, but adding to my life even one iota of the melancholic romance the book so neatly distilled. For better or worse, my ventures have amounted to nothing more than a series of lessons in humility, and, in the process, they consumed a large part of my free time. Which is a long way of saying that I didn't have much time to read this year.

Of the books I did read, I will unequivocally recommend three, none of which were written in 2006. (Life is short, books are many and often long, so I prefer to wait a few years until a book has received some kind of critical imprimatur before digging in.)

My first recommendation is Graham Joyce's The Tooth Fairy. It's a coming of age story that deals with a young boy's relationship with a malevolent, gender ambiguous tooth fairy (the age old story), and the resulting consequences for his family and friends. The tooth fairy's presence is (much to my pleasure) never really explained, but her (?) antics serve as a catalyst for a long and engaging series of seemingly unrelated incidents that come together in the last few chapters with an extremely satisfying snap. The writing and humor are sharp enough to make your eyes bleed, and the characters are so well developed that by the end you won't know if you're crying because of the resolution's poignancy or just because it's time to say goodbye.

Book number two, The Orchid Thief, gained some notoriety when Charlie Kauffman "cinematized" it several years ago, ending up with a film not so much based on the book as about the book. His film, Adaptation (IMDb), which dwelled on the Sisyphean process of wringing a screenplay from a story that is, for all intents and purposes, unfilmable (at least by Hollywood standards), piqued my interest in the book, and when I found it on my grandmother's coffee table, I immediately dove in. I am pleased to say that while the word "unfilmable" might be the stuff of screenwriter's nightmares, it's a compliment when used here. Susan Orlean's tale of a man and his orchids spins off into a fascinating and sometimes surreal account of passion - what it is, what it isn't, why some people have it, and why some people (namely Susan herself) don't. On the way she introduces us to alligator wrestlers, Victorian explorers, and real estate scam artists, drawing from these disparate characters' lives the threads of a tapestry that when woven together makes you realize why people still bother to write books in this age of moving pictures.

Last but not least, book number three is one that I've read at least once a year every year since I first read it several years ago. Frederick Exley's A Fan's Notes was a Christmas present that spent many lonely years on my bookshelf before I finally picked it up and realized what I'd been missing. If any book has so neatly captured the essence of the long malaise that we call life in these United States, I have yet to read it. Exley's book is in turns appalling and laugh out loud funny, but it is always brutally, unflinchingly honest. Billed as fiction, the story follows Exley, as himself, as he wanders across the country, working odd jobs, getting married, going insane, reading Lolita, drinking himself to death, and pursuing an unhealthy obsession with the New York Giants. If suffering has ever created art, then this it. For my money, it's as close as anyone has yet gotten to the "Great American Novel."

Thanks Ben!

- C. Max Magee @ 7:58 AM ~ comments: 2 ~ Links to this post

 

Underrated Writers

Jeff Bryant and Trevor Jackson are back again this year with their terrific Underrated Writers series. They've asked a number of bloggers to nominate writers they feel are not getting the recognition the deserve. From the introduction:

The results, as with last year, are delightful, in the most literal sense of the word. We have writers from almost every continent, poets from the past, essayists who are concerned for the future, and novelists desperate to understand the now.

I participated last year, but was unable to join in this year. However, two Millions contributors took part. Garth selected Vasily Aksyonov (I read Generations of Winter on Garth's recommendation almost two years ago and was blown away by it). Garth also selected Patrick Chamoiseau and Jay Cantor.

Andrew, meanwhile, nominated a pair of Candian writers, Trevor Cole and Kenneth J. Harvey, with his premise being that all too often writers from north of the border get short shrift down here.

- C. Max Magee @ 7:29 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

A Year in Reading: Extras

I got a lot of responses to my call for people to share the best books they read this year. Here are some of the shorter entries and lists that I received.

Stephen Schenkenberg (who pens an engaging blog) said:

Cormac McCarthy's novel The Road -- the best book I read all year -- gutted me. William H. Gass' essay collection A Temple of Texts -- the second best -- has been the balm.

Steve Clackson also wrote in:

My favorite book this year.

• Three Day Road by Joseph Boyden - comments

Some others I've enjoyed.

• Painkiller by Will Staeger - comments
• De Niro's Game by Rawi Hage - comments
• Books by Victor O'Reilly - comments

Heather Huggins named her top three:

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer and The Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark. Ishiguro's Remains of the Day is a close third.

And finally, Sandra Scoppettone's list:

• Utterly Monkey by Nick Laird
• Citizen Vince by Jess Walter
• The Night Watch by Sarah Waters
• The Girls by Lori Lansens
• Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen
• Winter's Bone by Daniel Woodrell
• Triangle by Katherine Weber
• A Spot of Bother by Mark Haddon
• Eat The Document by Dana Spiotta
• No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy

Thanks everyone!

- C. Max Magee @ 6:56 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

A Year in Reading: Edan Lepucki

My good friend Edan got married this year (to Millions contributor Patrick no less), got published in the LA Times West Magazine, and taught her own fiction workshop. She's also one of the gang I worked with at Book Soup in Los Angeles, where she regularly wowed customers with her literary knowledge. In spite of being enviably well-read, Edan has once again gone the cookbook route for our year end series, as is her wont:

Since ALL of my favorite books of 2006 - The Echo Maker by Richard Powers; Everything that Rises by Lawrence Weschler; and The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan - have already been sufficiently lauded by other Millions contributors, I figured I'd instead sing the praises of one cookbook:

Brunch: 100 Recipes from Five Points Restaurant by Marc Meyer and Peter Meehan I purchased this fabulous book for my husband, who seems to have conquered the kitchen on Sunday mornings because I can't, just can't, rise before ten. It's easy to get into a scrambled eggs-and-potatoes breakfast rut, but this book, with recipes for Bourbon Vanilla French Toast, Ricotta Fritters, Asparagus and Artichoke Baked Eggs and Applesauce Muffins (among 96 others), ensures amazing spreads each time. The book has lovely, drool-inducing photographs for motivation, and chef Marc Meyers (5 Points, I've learned, is a well-known NYC restaurant), urges us to make more bacon "than you think you want (or than you think you should eat)." Bless this man.

Thanks Edan!

- C. Max Magee @ 5:25 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

A Year in Reading: Bookdwarf

I've been reading Megan's blog Bookdwarf for a long time now. I met Megan amidst all the crazy book folk at BEA this year and was surprised to find her not as short as one might have expected. While the name of her blog may be misleading, however, her taste in books can be trusted. As such, here are Megan thoughts on the best books she read this year:

I love reading the lists you collect because they give me a chance to reflect on what I've read this year. I feel lucky - I read a lot of great books this year, some old and some new. One of my favorites was Oracle Bones by Peter Hessler, which I was glad was nominated for the National Book Award in Non-Fiction. Hessler, who has lived in China for over ten years and speaks Mandarin fluently, writes about the changes occurring in China today. Not quite a travelogue nor a memoir, it's a cultural portrait of a rapidly changing world. What makes it so great is Hessler's ability to disappear from the narrative and paint a vivid portrait of everyone he meets and everything he sees. He shows us a big picture view with enough complexity and contradiction that we see all nuances.

Another favorite this year was Eileen Chang's Love in a Fallen City, part of the NYRB Classics series. First published to great acclaim in Hong Kong in the 40s, Chang's short stories are being published in English for the first time. She writes about men, women, and the ways even the smallest actions or words can transform relationships. The cultural divide in Chinese society between ancient patriarchy and the tumultuous modernity forms the vivid background. The stories seem to be about how life never works out. They're bleak and yet you can't help but be enchanted by the characters.

Other books I enjoyed this year were Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Aidichie, whose talented writing enchants this novel about the war in Biafra, and Random Family by Adrian Leblanc, who spent 10 years researching this finely written portrait of an extended family.

PS I also second Mark's love for Gregoire Bouillier's Mystery Guest and Ed's love for Echo Maker, not to mention Cormac McCarthy's haunting The Road. I think I'll try to read more older stuff in 2007. It's part of my job to read the new stuff, but there's so much out there already that needs reading.

Thanks Megan!

- C. Max Magee @ 7:16 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

A Year in Reading: Tabula Rasa

Francois Monti runs a litblog in French - mainly about American literature - called Tabula Rasa. If I could read French, I would probably read the blog, but I can't, so I'm happily making due with Francois' contribution - in English - to our Year in Reading series:

I should first point to the fairly obvious: among the books I most liked in 2006, you will find Richard Powers' The Echo Maker, Cormac McCarthy's The Road and Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day. I won't elaborate further on these books; they are already all over the literary blogs.

There has been much less discussion of Roberto Bolano Los Detectives Salvajes (The Savage Dectives), which is pretty understandable: the book was published in Spanish in 1998 and is yet to be translated into English [Max: it's coming in April 2007]. However, this year saw the publication of the French translation, my mother tongue. Pure bliss! In turn coming-of-age story, roman noir, literary quest, this is a real tour de force, reminiscent of Julio Cortazar and Jack Kerouac while remaining deeply original. Bolano passed away in 2003. He was fifty years old, and I just can't help thinking about what else might have been coming from him. He was undoubtedly a unique South-American writer; dare I say the best of his generation?

If we're talking older books, I've read and liked many in 2006, but none as much as The Tunnel. The contrast between the odious main character and the beauty of the prose, the music of William H. Gass' writing, make for a deeply disturbing, fascinating, and ultimately rewarding experience.

Thanks Francois!

- C. Max Magee @ 6:05 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

A Year in Reading: Condalmo

Though relatively new, Matthew Tiffany's blog Condalmo quickly became a must read for me - and many others, I'm guessing. With Condalmo, Tiffany strikes the essential balance between quick news items and longer, thoughtful posts that has been mastered by many of my favorite bloggers. With his entry for the "Year in Reading" series Matt asks us to believe the hype about a book that was a favorite of many book bloggers this year:

I had a pretty great year for reading - I was exposed to a bunch of new (for me) writers (Laird Hunt, Brian Evenson, Stephen Dixon, Marguerite Duras, Walker Percy), and got new books from some better known writers as well (Paul Auster, Haruki Murakami). The two newest Auster books were kind of a letdown, partially as part of "I liked the old stuff better, the new stuff sucks" syndrome, but partially also due to Laird Hunt's The Exquisite.

In a year with lots of contenders, this one keeps on bubbling to the top - it's got the best elements of vintage Auster, combined with some weirdness that could be culled from Haruki Murakami or David Lynch, combined with a great narrative structure. It's no pastiche of any of those sources, but just struck the same tones of enjoyment for me as those artists do. Hunt's got his own style; I recently read his Indiana, Indiana which has an entirely different subject matter, but the same wonderful voice. I'll bet someone reading this is thinking "again?", as The Exquisite has been mentioned by a number of good Web sites already, but there's a reason for it. This one's got the goods.

Thaanks Matt!

- C. Max Magee @ 7:46 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

A Year in Reading: Derek Teslik

My longtime friend and former roommate Derek Teslik is the guy who got me into blogging. He was once an avid blogger himself but has long since left the fold, and believe me, the blogging world is less for it. Luckily he has consented to send me a once yearly post from his undisclosed location:

The Psychic Soviet by Ian Svenonius. The former frontman of Nation of Ulysses and The Make-Up, now singer for Weird War (aka The Scene Creamers), finally delivers a theoretical tome to back up the agitative manifestos he places in his liner notes. Svenonius, who I have called the "kool keith of indie rock," expounds on some of the great questions of rock and roll (e.g. Beatles or Stones?) while drenching the whole thing in pseudo-socialist theory and protecting the pocket-sized book from beer and sweat stains with a handsome pink plastic cover.

State of Denial by Bob Woodward. The most influential largely-unread-but-published book of the year. Woodward's modern history provided the nation with the Geraldo-in-the-Superdome moment of the Iraq war, allowing the nation to come out and say what they knew in their guts but tried to hide in their brain. Because the most damning revelations of the book (the Bush inner circle was dismissive of the al-Qaida threat in the months before 9-11, etc.) had long been lunatic fringe allegations, they were dismissed as "old news" and somehow didn't have the staying power and impact they should have. But the book's publication shifted the American psyche on the war. Proof? After it's publication, even Chris Matthews grew a pair, at least on the subject of the war. I only read the first fifth or so, but MAN, is Rumsfeld a dick!

Stephen Colbert's Alpha Squad 7: Lady Nocturne: A Tek Jansen Adventure by Stephen Colbert. This unpublished work has already spawned a cartoon series and a late night talk show. From the galleys I've had a chance to read, it's a real page turner! Colbert picks up the pace a bit after the darker Alpha Squad 6: Death Be-comes Her, Or Does It?, returning to what fans of the series love the most - sex and gut-gripping fantasaction. This will make many best-of-2007 lists as well.

If I Did It by O.J. Simpson. State of Denial for the Dr. Phil set. And Chris Rock called it years ago.

Thanks Derek!

- C. Max Magee @ 10:31 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

A Year in Reading: Corey Vilhauer

This year, Corey Vilhauer, a blogger from South Dakota, joined us on twelve occasions to present his book of the month. I viewed his regular installments as letters from the reading trenches, from a reader who's willing to try anything as he expands his horizons to new genres and eras of writing. You'll be seeing the 2007 CVBoMC starting in January. (to see last year's entries, you can start in December and work back)

I wasn't asked, but I'm barging in on the Millions Best Books of 2006 section of the party and yelling loudly about what I like. Because it's brash, and brazen, and lots of other words that start with "B."

Actually, as is the pattern with the Vilhauer library, I only read two or three books that were released in 2006. Two of them – David Mitchell's Black Swan Green (which made my top 10) and The Thinking Fan's Guide to the World Cup (honorable mention) – were actually quite worth it.

However, my two favorite books this year are as follows:

John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939) - Never before has the plight of the dispossessed seemed so important. With The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck's classic Dust Bowl epic, the Okies get the center stage they deserved, one that holds the injustices and bad luck that followed them around up to the light for the entire world to examine. And while one might think that these stories have lost their weight, that modern culture has cut Steinbeck's novel off at the knees, it's simply not the case. The Grapes of Wrath is just as important today as it was in the 40s. In fact, you can't deny the similarities between the Dust Bowl's mass exodus and New Orleans' migration of displaced people. Bad luck, injustice – it's all pretty much parallel.

McSweeney's Quarterly Concern #13, edited by Chris Ware (2004) - I somehow missed the comic phenomenon when I was younger. But, after receiving McSweeney's #13 in the mail ("the Comic Issue", with a wonderful cover penned by Special Editor Chris Ware) the fire was rekindled slightly. This book is beautifully bound, with hundreds of full color prints, articles from some of the most well known authors and graphic artists, and simply packed to the gills with today's important comic creators. If you want to get into modern comics and graphic novels, get this first. You won't be disappointed.

Of course, there were more books - I've got an entire top 10 (and more, including honorable mentions) at Black Marks on Wood Pulp. It's the year end edition of "What I've Been Reading." So if you don't mind mindless plugging, go ahead and visit.

Thanks Corey!

- C. Max Magee @ 10:06 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

A Year in Reading by Garth Risk Hallberg

Let's say you're slightly to the left of the Bell Curve: you read, on average, a book a week. And let's say you're also slightly leftward-listing in your survival prospects: that, due to the marvels of future medicine (and no thanks to the blunders of contemporary foreign policy) you'll live to the fine old age of 90. Let's furthermore presuppose that you're one of those people, the precocious ones who were reading Kesey and King and Kingsolver and Kipling at 15. How many great books will you get to read in a lifetime?

Assuming you've already answered the adjunct question (why?) for yourself, the prospect of having to choose only three thousand books from among the many Millions may sound daunting. My Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of World Literature contains some entries on authors alone, and is hardly comprehensive. Balzac alone could eat up almost one percent of your lifetime reading. On the other hand, as usual, limitation shades into wonder... because in an infinite reading universe, we would be deprived of one of the supreme literary pleasures: discovery. Half of my favorite works of fiction of the year were by authors (women, natch) I'd never read, had barely heard of: Kathryn Davis' The Thin Place, Lynne Tillman's American Genius: A Comedy, and Mary Gaitskill's Veronica.

And if I had gone my whole life without discovering Deborah Eisenberg, I would have missed something like a literary soulmate. The beguiling, bewildered quality of Eisenberg's Twilight of the Superheroes - the sentences whose endings seem to surprise even their writer - is so close to the texture of life as I experience it as to be almost hallucinatory. On the other hand, Eisenberg's world is much, much funnier and more profound than mine. She's single-handedly rejuvenated my relationship with the short story... and just in time for the remarkable new Edward P. Jones collection, All Aunt Hagar's Children. I've already expressed my suspicion that Jones has been a positive influence on Dave Eggers, as evidenced by What is the What. So I'll just round out my survey of new fiction by mentioning Marshall N. Klimasewiski's overlooked first novel, The Cottagers - a dazzlingly written thriller.

In between forays into the contemporary landscape, I've been trying to bone up on the classics. I'm ashamed to say I hadn't read Pride and Prejudice until this year; it's about the most romantic damn thing I've ever encountered, and I'm a sucker for romance. Pricklier and more ironic, which is to say more Teutonic, was Mann's The Magic Mountain - a great book for when you've got nothing to do for two months. Saul Bellow's Herzog completely blew my doors off, suggesting that stream-of-consciousness (and the perfect evocation of a summer day) did not end with Mrs. Dalloway. Herzog is such a wonderful book, so sad, so funny, so New York. So real. I can't say the same thing about Kafka's The Castle, but it is to my mind the most appealing of his novels. As in The Magic Mountain, futility comes to seem almost charming. E.L. Doctorow's Billy Bathgate was another wonderful discovery - a rip-roaring read that's written under some kind of divine inspiration: Let there be Comma Splices! Similarly, I was surprised by how well page-turning pacing and peel-slowly sentences worked in Franzen's first novel, The Twenty-Seventh City. Ultimately, it's sort of a ridiculous story, but it's hard to begrudge something this rich and addictive. Think of it as a dessert. I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the rip-roar of that most sweeping of summer beach books, Lonesome Dove. And if the last three titles make you feel self-indulgent, because you're having too much fun, cleanse the palate the way I did, with the grim and depressing and still somehow beautiful. Namely, Samuel Beckett's Texts for Nothing or W.G. Sebald's Rings of Saturn. (What is it with those Germans?)

Nonfiction-wise, I managed to slip away from journalism a bit, but did read James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men while I was in Honduras... sort of like reading Melville at sea. I made it most of the way through Martin Heidegger's Being and Time (God knows why, half of me adds. The other half insists, You know why.) Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of the Enlightenment lightened things up... Not! But I will never read Cosmo Girl the same way again. Come to think of it, pretty much all the nonfiction I loved this year was a downer, about the impure things we can't get away from: Susan Sontag's On Photography, Greil Marcus' Lipstick Traces, David Harvey's The Condition of Postmodernity, and especially the late George W.S. Trow's astonishing, devastating Within the Context of No Context. Lit-crit offered a little bit of a silver lining, as William H. Gass' A Temple of Text and James Wood's The Irresponsible Self. Wood's essays on Tolstoy and Bellow remind me that "the world is charged with the grandeur of God"... which is, I guess, why I'll keep reading in 2007.

- C. Max Magee @ 7:48 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Asking Ford

New Millions contributor Noah, who recently wrote a review of Richard Ford's The Lay of the Land and helped answer a question (see the comments) about where to start when reading Ford's books, managed to get a question in at yesterday's Washington Post online chat with Ford. The question elicited a fairly long response from Ford, one that name drops a pair of his more well-know contemporaries. I'm quite certain that Noah is from Brooklyn but for some reason, the Post indicated his question was coming from Queens:

Queens, NY: At a Barnes and Noble reading in NYC, you said, almost inaudibly because someone was mad to ask another question of you, that one of your personal favorite pieces of your own was "Communist", the last story in Rock Springs. Can you talk just a little about that story, what it means to you? Do you ever feel that Bascombe-mania overpowers your other work, like the dog that is most aggressive in pursuing the owner's attentions?

Richard Ford: I don't feel like these Bascombe books overpower my other work, because they are so different from other work that I have done, and I actually value them all pretty much equally. I probably couldn't write a book or a story without thinking at the time, This is the best thing I could possibly do.

"Communist" I feel a lot of affection for, for several different reasons. One is its origin: that my friend Tom McGuane once asked me while we were hunting if I had ever written a hunting story. I told him I had never written a hunting story because I didn't like to read them. And he said, If I would write a hunting story, he knew some guy that was doing an anthology that would probably publish it. And so I wrote a hunting story. And from that innocent little inception came a story that was much more than a hunting story. I sort of like the humbleness of the origin. And I liked the story because it let me describe something, which is something I never do, it let me describe something I specifically experienced rather than just made up, which is an enormous number of geese taking flight, which I found was a very stirring experience both to have and to write. Two other things: I was moved by the opportunity to write the final conversation at the end of the story between the narrator and his mother, which I thought was quite an intimate relationship but that maintains the proprieties of parent and child. Finally, when I wrote the story, which was in 1983 in Mississippi, far from Montana, where the story is set, I wrote the story to an end which didn't feel like the right end although it felt like an end. And I showed the story to my friend Joyce Carol Oates, and she gave me the best advice any other writer has ever given me. She said, Richard, you need to write more on this story. Write more words. And I had to figure out what more words to write.

- C. Max Magee @ 7:29 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

A Year in Reading: Ed Champion

Ed put in another year unchallenged as the litblog world's preeminent gadfly, offering blanket coverage of all things literary with impressive depth and ample humor. His Bat Segundo show was equally impressive, offering dozens of interviews with top authors this year. I still need to catch up, but Ed has found the time to contribute to our ongoing series:

I am withholding my top ten list until the turn of the year, not because I don't find you sexy or stunning, Mr. Magee, and certainly not because I don't possess a taxonomic mind set. Rather, I object to associating one's literary compulsions with the dreaded consumerist impulses of the Xmas season. So that list will have to wait until we've all been thoroughly gorged with goose and egg nog and a few carolers have contracted laryngitis due to their relentless and cloying largesse.

Thankfully, sir, you have been kind enough to confine your question to one peremptory and all-encompassing one, an absolute value that I am all too happy to answer. And I can say, without a doubt, that Richard Powers' The Echo Maker is the finest book I had the honor of reading this year. I did not ride the National Book Award bandwagon on this one. I knew this tome was the Great Book early on, well before the NBA longlist was launched. I was enchanted, lost, and entirely inveigled by Powers' deceptively simple premise: a man gets involved in an accident, suffers a rare condition called Capgras' syndrome, and cannot recognize the sister who has sacrificed her job and the many threads of her life to care for him. This sounds like a ridiculously melodramatic premise. But it is Powers' adept narrative skill that makes this scenario fundamentally real and a fundamentally poetic tapestry revealing post-9/11 transformations within America.

The book, as Margaret Atwood has suggested, demands to be read twice. This book is the full realization of Powers as social novelist, an experiment he attempted before with Gain, albeit with some didacticism attached. But almost a decade wiser, Powers has given us a daring Rorschach Test that any person who cares about literature is indebted to pick up and get lost in.

Thanks Ed!

- C. Max Magee @ 7:25 AM ~ comments: 2 ~ Links to this post

 

Thursday Links

• A really great, thoughtful post about independent book stores in New York from The Written Nerd. A must read if you are a bookseller or if you care about the state of independent bookstores. Read the whole thing and then see my comment on the post for my thoughts.
• As an antidote to all the "best of" lists, check out the post at Book World about the twelve books she wishes she hadn't read this year.
• Least likely to be the next Oprah Book Club Pick: Kitty Kelley is writing an unauthorized bio of Oprah Winfrey.
• An esoteric obsession: Confessions of a Bookplate Junkie

- C. Max Magee @ 7:15 AM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

A Year in Reading: SlushPile.Net

I was first introduced to Scott at BEA in DC this past spring, and though I'd come across his blog, SlushPile.Net, in passing before, I began reading it in earnest after we met. I'm glad I did. He delivers a steady flow of commentary that is instructive and often funny. I've been enjoying it quite a bit so I'm glad he found some time to talk about the best book he read this year.

I must say, it's a challenge. Sometimes I feel like I read so much that it all kind of runs together. And even though I KNOW there are great books, they kind of get dulled by all the others.

Anyhow, looking back on the year, the book that I really enjoyed, and stands out because it was such a pleasant surprise was...

Seaworthy by T.R. Pearson

This nonfiction book details the trans-Pacific journeys of William Willis. At an age when most people enjoy retirement, Willis built a raft by hand and sailed from South America to Australia. He set out on his first trip when he was sixty. He repeated the adventure when he was seventy. Willis was part hero, part idiot. The storyline itself is compelling enough, but Pearson's warm, sophisticated tone suits this tale impeccably.

Thanks Scott!

- C. Max Magee @ 9:39 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Ask a Book Question: The 46th in a Series (The Third Ford First)

Poornima wrote in with an interesting question about what to do when you really want to read a book, but there are books that come before it. Her question has to do with Richard Ford's new book The Lay of the Land, which was recently reviewed on this blog by Noah. Poornima asks,

I have been very tempted to read the new Richard Ford book after reading the review on The Millions. Does one need to have read the first two to read this one?

I suspect that you would enjoy The Lay of the Land without having read the other books. All three books - the first two are The Sportswriter and Independence Day - cover the life of a New Jersey everyman, Frank Bascombe, but I don't think there's anything in the book that is only fully explained in the previous books. On the other hand, you would likely not get the full sense of who Frank Bascombe is, since he is after all, one of the more storied characters in contemporary literature.

This raises another interesting question, as well. I have read the first two Bascombe books, but I read them both more than six years ago. As such, I don't remember much about Bascombe, though I have impressions of him left from when I did read about him. I have to wonder how much those faint impressions would affect my experience of reading the new book. My thinking, though, is go ahead and read The Lay of the Land and if you like it, go back and read the first two Bascombe books. Readers, what do you think?

- C. Max Magee @ 9:09 PM ~ comments: 3 ~ Links to this post

 

A Year in Reading: The Elegant Variation

Mark Sarvas, proprietor of The Elegant Variation, takes some time to share the books he read in 2006 that he found, shall we say, most to his liking.

First off, the more I think about it, the less I care for the whole "Best of" formulation. It offends me on a number of levels, not the least of which is by the assumption that one has read enough of what's on offer in a year to be able to decide what's "Best". (And this is no knock on this inestimable blog; rather, it's a systemic crankiness that's afflicting me this year.) So I'm going to come instead from the perspective of "My Favorites of the Year," which seems more inherently more defensible. (And, in an open note to newspaper editors everywhere, why not opt for the more modest construction "Editor's Choice" or "Editor's Favorite"? It seems preferable to the untenably pompous "Best of" declarations that have become
de rigeur.)

OK. End of my mini-rant. A list, in alphabetical order, of books that
struck me as being of particular note in 2006:

Amphigorey Again by Edward Gorey: What will probably be the last collection from a master.

Black Swan Green: David Mitchell proves he can do "human" as well as "clever" with a breakthrough novel.

Christine Falls: It will only be available in the US next year, but John Banville's first thriller as Benjamin Black is drawing deserved praise for
its UK release.

Dead Fish Museum by Charles D'Ambrosio: The best short story collection we've read in years. Breathtaking.

The End of Mr. Y by Scarlett Thomas: Flawed but exuberant, it's a Foucault's Pendulum for the iPod generation.

Everything that Rises: Lawrence Weschler's brilliant John Berger-esque collection of essays on unlikely visual convergences.

Fun Home by Alison Bechdel: The graphic novel that finally won me over to the form.

The Lost: Daniel Mendelsohn's brilliantly written memoir answers those who ask if there's anything left to write about the Holocaust.

The Mystery Guest by Gregoire Bouillier, translated by Lorin Stein: A delicious Gallic treat, depicting the party from hell and explaining what every man should know about turtleneck sweaters.

Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris: OK, this one is a cheat - it's not out until March of next year but this hilarious and gorgeously written novel might just change my mind about MFAs.

Ticknor by Sheila Heti: If there's a favorite of the year, this bitter comedy of envy and failure would be the one.

Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon: It's not from this year but I only just caught up with it and can see what the fuss was about.

Thanks Mark!

- C. Max Magee @ 6:54 AM ~ comments: 8 ~ Links to this post

 

A Year in Reading by Patrick Brown

It was a slow year for me as a reader. I'm not sure if it's because I moved cross-country again, or because I was getting married, or because there were so many pictures of celebrities exposing themselves on the Internet, but I just didn't get around to reading very many books. I had trouble starting new books, quit several books midstream, which is something I rarely do, and felt bored by the majority of what I read.

That isn't to say that there weren't a few standouts in the field. Robert Baer's terrific CIA memoir See No Evil, the first book I read this year, was excellent, in spite of having several key passages blacked out by CIA censors. My main man Somerset Maugham came through again with The Moon and Six Pence, his examination of the choices and sacrifices a man must make to become an artist. And Jesus' Son, by Denis Johnson, was good enough to make me wonder why I hadn't read it back when I was living in Iowa City (Also, the edition I bought, which is the only one I've seen, fits in my pocket, literally. Isn't that great? Shouldn't more books fit in our pockets?).

The best book I read in 2006 was Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma. Pollan examines three different modes of food production and distribution. His critique of industrial agriculture, and its reliance on corn (which he points out is present in nearly everything in the supermarket, including beef, gossip magazines, even the walls of the market itself), is damning if not all that original (many of the points are made in Fast Food Nation), but the rest of the book, which examines organic farming, self-sustaining grass farming, and modern hunter-gathers, is truly eye-opening. He takes Whole Foods to task for their somewhat misleading labeling, spends a week working on a grass farm in Virginia, and cooks a meal entirely from foods that he hunted, gathered, and grew himself. What's great about Pollan's writing is his ability to take pages of statistics and endless lists of ingredients and turn them into something that is not only fun to read, but fun to discuss. I can't remember reading a book that gave me more cocktail party ammunition that the The Omnivore's Dilemma. While this review on Slate points out some of the flaws in Pollan's approach, I still highly recommend the book to anyone who is interested in what they eat, and how they've come to eat it.

Some non-book related best and worsts of the year:

Best Movie: Brick (IMDb) It actually came out in 2005, but in 2005 I lived in Iowa, and movies don't get to Iowa very quickly, so I didn't see it until 2006. It won't win any awards, which is surely a mark of its greatness.

Worst Movie: Rumor Has It (IMDb) edging out Loverboy (IMDb). Both of these movies left me wondering not only how they got made, but how I was duped into seeing them.

Worst Trends: Baseball general managers giving ludicrous contracts to borderline ballplayers. Juan Pierre? Gary Matthews Jr.? I'd be worth more money to a baseball team than either of these two out machines.

- C. Max Magee @ 6:25 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

Wednesday Links

• Some very cool Hunter S. Thompson photography showing now at an LA gallery. The show coincides with a pricey new "collector's edition" book that "presents a rare look into the life of Thompson." (via)
• Another most literate cities list has arrived. In 2006, Seattle wins, with Minneapolis second. My hometown Washington, DC, is tied for third and LA, where I lived when I started this blog, is eighth. The last two cities I've lived in, Chicago (39th) and, now, Philadelphia (tied for 33rd), fail to crack the top ten. Not sure what conclusions I can draw about that, but USA Today draws its own conclusions in an article about the list.
• Somebody gets into Gwenda's garbage, her papers fly everywhere, and before you know it, she's cought in a "indie movie scene wrought with ironic symbolism." Brilliant.
• Lesser-Known Editing and Proofreading Marks. Also Brilliant. (via Languagehat)
• On a more serious note, Tim O'Reilly explains why the book search efforts of Google, et al, are broken. The problem is that we must search in Google's (or Yahoo's) walled garden. There is no way to search across all of the books that have been digitized, which is very much at odds with our experience on the Web, where we can search everything at once.

- C. Max Magee @ 6:02 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

A Year in Reading: Emerging Writers

The indefatigable Dan Wickett is the hardest working man in book blogging. He is a tireless advocate for "emerging" writers, small presses, and literary journals. How he found the time to compile this post for us, I'll never know, but I'm glad he did.

I divided my thoughts about authors that I read in 2006 into three categories. First up would be (what else from my end) Emerging Writers. Writers that fell into that category that I can't wait to read more of would have to include:

Dag Solstad - His Shyness & Dignity is not his first novel, but it is the first available in English, and it was the best book I read all year. Graywolf Press took the chance on bringing this Norwegian's work to those of us without the skills to read his books in their original language, and they should be thanked.

Benjamin Percy - His debut story collection, The Language of Elk, was published by Carnegie Mellon University Press in the middle of the year and shows readers a new vision of the current west, with most of the stories set in Oregon. Percy's language crackles with masculinity and humor and the bizarre. Watch for him - he put a story in both BASS and Pushcart this year, has one coming in January's Esquire and his second collection is coming from Graywolf Press in 2007.

Robert Fanning - Are you kidding me? Wickett lobbed a poet into this list? Absolutely. Fanning's The Seed Thieves is his first full length collection of poetry, thanks to Marick Press, and it is beyond just being solid. Fanning has a fantastic way about his phrasing and observations that work both on page, and if you are fortunate enough to have the opportunity to hear him read his work.

Second up would be those writers who I already thought pretty highly of, that confirmed for me, once again, just how talented they were:

William Gay with his novel Twilight from MacAdam/Cage. He follows up his previous two novels and short story collection with possibly his best yet. A frighteningly gothic near fairy tale about a young brother and sister combination and their efforts to expose a rather sordid mortician.

Daniel Woodrell and Winter's Bone, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie with Half of a Yellow Sun. Anybody reading this far into Max's post has probably visited my site. Enough said as I'm pretty sure searching my blog for 2006 will show these two names and titles coming up way more than anything else.

Tom Franklin with Smonk. The fever Franklin had that induced this story to come oozing out must have been 104 plus.

Steve Yarbrough and Ron Rash with The End of California and The World Made Straight, respectively. These two gentlemen deserve accolades for not writing with any flash, or verbal pyrotechnics, but instead delivering captivating novels, time and time again by simply telling a great story, and doing so with, while excellent writing, not the need to make you notice it.

Michael Ruhlman has once again delivered a fantastic book about cooking with his The Reach of a Chef. If you have ANY interest in the art of cooking, his books are all a must. And even if you don't, you have more than half a chance at becoming enthralled anyway.

Charles D'Ambrosio and Lee K. Abbott just may be the two best short story writers around and readers were fortunate enough to enjoy a new collection by D'Ambrosio (The Dead Fish Museum) and a Collected collection of Abbott (All Things, All at Once). There isn't a mis-step in either, and above and beyond that, there are probably close to a dozen stories between the two works that are prize winning, year end anthology worthy.

Lastly would be those writers that I found myself embarrassed to realize I'd never read their work prior to 2006, and in many cases had not even heard of them:

Colson Whitehead - I had the opportunity to see him read in Ann Arbor earlier in the year and bought a copy of The Intuitionist, which I promptly read and loved. His other three books are high up in my TBR pile.

Magnus Mills - I don't know why I bought his The Restraint of Beasts - I thought I remembered his name from Jeff Bryant's Underrated Writers Project from last year, but his name is not there. Whatever the case - I loved it and the follow up novel, All Quiet on the Orient Express as well. The rest of his novels and a short story collection reside in my TBR pile at this time.

Rupert Thomson - Thanks to Megan for nominating his latest, Divided Kingdom, as an LBC nominee. Another one who I immediately began looking for his backlog of many novels to pad my TBR pile.

Richard Powers - Oh well, at least I waited for a decent book to hop aboard - The Echo Maker - NBA winner. Thanks to Ed Champion for inviting me to the roundtable discussion of this wonderful title. There's approximately 2100 pages of unread Powers' novels on a shelf here now.

Peter Markus - Even more ridiculous when you find out he resides less than 30 minutes from my house. Went to see the aforementioned Robert Fanning read earlier this year and Markus read some unpublished work from what should be his fourth book of short fictions that deal with brothers, mud, fish, and the moon. He was kind enough to give me a copy of his first, Good, Brother, which was reprinted by Calimari Press earlier this year. I read it that night and had ordered both The Moon is a Lighthouse (from a store in Japan - the only one I could find online) and The Singing Fish (also published, last year, by Calimari Press). The man is a unique writer, an amazing writer, and one I highly recommend you try to find. Plenty of his work is available online.

Thanks Dan!

- C. Max Magee @ 6:50 AM ~ comments: 6 ~ Links to this post

 

A Year in Reading: Two Umbrellas

I discovered Season Evans' blog after she, a Philly native, gave me some advice about my new city. Now she's come through again with a post about the best books she read this year:

On the top of my list is Play It As it Lays by Joan Didion. The focus is so strong and so sure and so meticulous. Each time I read anything she writes, whether it's a novel or an essay, I learn just a little bit more about the potency of precise narrative. The Dead Fish Museum by Charles D'Ambrosio came in a close second for its succinct and arresting prose style. In third place is Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson because it is the book I wanted to write.

Others:

• The Rainbow Stories by William T. Vollmann
• Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
• Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges
• Platform by Michel Houellebecq

Thanks Season!

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

 

"I'll Have the Moveable Feast, To Go"

From the WSJ, a story of how the Cuban government has licensed franchises of La Bodeguita del Medio, a watering hole where Ernest Hemingway supposedly once hung out. "The concept clicked, and La Bodeguita outlets spread across Latin America and European cities including Paris and Berlin. Even in former communist capitals like Prague -- where some locals call the restaurants 'McCastro's' -- the Hemingway link attracts business." It sounds like a Cuban Hard Rock Cafe that's Hemingway-themed rather than aging rocker-themed. My favorite part of the story is the lead paragraph:

A life-size likeness of Ernest Hemingway greets diners entering La Bodeguita del Medio bistro near Stanford University here. Patrons at La Bodeguita del Medio in Prague order The Old Man and the Seafood plate. And in London's new version of the same restaurant, which opened last month, the owner says Hemingway novels will be available for perusal in the men's room.

Separately, and more seriously, an article about how The Nature Conservancy came to own Hemingway's last house, in Ketchum, Idaho.

- C. Max Magee @ 5:29 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

A Year in Reading: Languagehat

Languagehat is a deep repository of interesting linguistic tidbits. An essential blog for those with an interest in language, Languagehat is also engaging enough to make regulars out of a monolingual like me. "Hat" was nice enough to share some of his favorite books from this year:

Jeff Prucher's Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction isn't even out yet, but as a copyeditor I've had the opportunity to read the whole thing, and it's definitely one of my favorite books of the year. Yes, I got paid money to read it, but anyone who knows me at all knows that lexicography and science fiction are two of my favorite things, and to have them combined in a glorious package is a thrill that has nothing to do with a paycheck. If someone had told me forty years ago that the people who put out the OED would one day apply their scholarly talents to my favorite field, I would have been even more impatient for the future to arrive. It's got etymologies, citations going back to the Renaissance and right up to 2006, fan terms going back to the purple-stained days of hectographs... Anyone who loves both words and sf will love this book. FIAWOL (= Fandom Is a Way of Life)!

Grant Barrett's The Official Dictionary of Unofficial English is another amazing lexicographical performance that does something that would have been impossible until the advent of the Internet: applies the full panoply of scholarly resources to new or marginal words that do not appear in other dictionaries. Grant's website Double-Tongued Word Wrester has been tracking such words since 2004, and he's put the best of them into this book. One of my favorites is vuzvuz 'a derogatory name for an Ashkenazic Jew... This term is usually used within the religion, especially by Sephardic Jews.' A few entries in succession: AMW "a (pretty) woman whose career derives in some way from her appearance' (from Actress, Model, Whatever); area boy 'a hoodlum or street thug' (a Nigerian term); armchair pilot 'a person who talks about, studies, or directs airplane flying, but is not qualified to, or does not, handle the controls' (a military term), and Asbo 'a court order designed to curtail unwanted public behavior' (UK, from "anti-social behaviour order"). I can splash around in it for hours.

I've been doing a lot of reading about century-old Russian history, trying to understand the Revolution and how it happened, and Michael Melancon's The Socialist Revolutionaries and the Russian Anti-war Movement was a surprisingly gripping read that is far more comprehensive than the title might indicate and explained things that better-known volumes pass over with hand-waving and generalities, in particular how exactly it was that all those workers and soldiers poured out into the streets in the last days of February 1917 and toppled the tsar. The SRs have been pretty much forgotten in the obsession over the Bolsheviks who wound up taking the tsar's place, and if you've read enough to know who they are, you probably (like me) filed them away on a mental index card labeled "terrorism, peasants." Turns out that's a ridiculous oversimplification, and they were tremendously popular with the urban proletariat until the summer of 1917, when (like everyone else anywhere near the reins of power) they disappointed people who wanted peace and land sooner rather than later. Anyone interested in the period should read the book; Melancon's working on one about the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, 1917-1921, which I'm looking forward to. (Incidentally, his name has a c-cedilla in French, and he pronounces it the French way, me-la(n)-SO(N).)

Thanks Languagehat!

- C. Max Magee @ 10:01 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

A Year in Reading: The Bibliosphere

Brandon of The Bibliosphere weighed in with the best book he read during a year in which he got around to catching up on a bunch of classics, new and old:

I couldn't resist joining in on the fun of all the best-of lists making the rounds: the New York Times Book Review printed its own list, as did Publisher's Weekly. My reading is pretty varied, but I always seem to be a few years behind: the most recent books I read this year were published in 2004.

2006 was more of a year for me to play catch-up - Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and Albert Camus' The Stranger were among my favorite books this year. They exemplified everything I love about literature; they were thought-provoking, obsessive, and deeply unsettling. Franz Kafka's The Trial disturbed me on a level no horror novel can reach. Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves, while treading a fine line between pretentiousness and genius, obliterated the very idea of what a novel is supposed to be. And Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time gave me one of the freshest and most sympathetic heroes I've come across in a long time.

But Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day is, without a doubt, the best book I read this year. It's funny, infuriating, tragic, and beautifully-written. Neither too long nor too short, this book is, in a word, perfect.

Thanks Brandon!

- C. Max Magee @ 7:21 PM ~ comments: 2 ~ Links to this post

 

A Year in Reading: Pinky's Paperhaus

Carolyn aka Pinky has, of late, been toiling away at -- while also giving us the play by play on -- the MFA program she started this fall, but she found a moment amidst the semester-end crush to send us a note about the best book she read this year:

I'll leave it to others to sing the obvious praises of Richard Powers, Thomas Pynchon and Mark Danielewski. For me, the best surprise was the excellent, gripping The Open Curtain by Brian Evensen.

I was entirely blown away by The Open Curtain. I didn't know what to expect from a horror book set in the Mormon community in Utah; what I got was a brilliant narrative that's impossible to put down. As the narrator's reliability begins to become a question, the story deepens into issues of identity and desire. It's an incredible, marvelous writerly feat. Plus it's the first book since Nancy Drew to get me bouncing on my bed, literally shouting at the girl in peril.

Thanks Carolyn!

- C. Max Magee @ 8:27 PM ~ comments: 3 ~ Links to this post

 

A Year in Reading by Andrew Saikali

A cursory glance at my 2006 reading list and I'm one scream away from seeking therapy. I'm all over the map, really. I couldn't even begin to explain the path that led me from Jonathan Coe's epic comic/psycho-drama/mystery The Winshaw Legacy (aka What A Carve Up!) to Jonathan Lethem's hallucinatory sci-fi Amnesia Moon, to Kenneth J. Harvey's tough, stylistically ground-breaking Inside, told from the point of view of a just-released convict, freshly cleared on DNA evidence - not guilty (but far from innocent).

Along the way, Philip Roth's American Pastoral made me rethink modern history, Graham Greene's The Power and The Glory introduced me to a whiskey priest in Mexico's past, and William Boyd's An Ice Cream War took me back further still, to World War I as it affected the lives of colonists in what are now Tanzania and Kenya.

All great, but what lingers the most:

Re-reading J.P. Donleavy's A Fairy Tale of New York which Andrew Saikali (that would be me) previously described as the story of "an educated rascal with an appetite for life, intertwined with social satire."

And especially stumbling upon Gustave Flaubert's Flaubert In Egypt, his actual journey, at age 27, along the Nile, told through journal entries and letters home that are passionate and ribald, frustrated and clear-eyed. To quote, um, myself (in a previous post), "Flaubert In Egypt pulls together these various strands and stands at once as 19th century Egyptian travelogue, youthful memoir, geopolitical Middle Eastern history, and literary artifact - the nexus of Flaubert the youthful romantic and Flaubert the keen-eyed realist."

- C. Max Magee @ 8:10 AM ~ comments: 2 ~ Links to this post

 

A Real Time Saver

Too many books, no easy way to read them all? A remarkable device was once conceived to solve this vexing problem. (via)

- C. Max Magee @ 8:05 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Another Independent Commission-Penned Bestseller

The long-awaited Iraq Study Group Report has been making headlines for months as Americans, weary of the war and our continuing struggles in Iraq, look for some fresh angles on this seemingly intractable mess. It should come as no surprise then that the book version of the report, which hit stores today, is shaping up to be a bestseller, as the Amazon ranking makes clear (and as has been discussed in a couple of wire stories today).

In this respect, it follows in the footsteps another report by an independent bipartisan group that turned out to be a hit in stores, The 9/11 Commission Report, which was deemed sufficiently well-crafted to be named a National Book Award finalist. Not only that, a Graphic Adaptation of the book was created as well. The (salacious) granddaddy of this genre, of course, was the Starr Report, which sold approximately one million copies in book form but is now more or less out of print. (It will interesting to see if the two books mentioned above are still in print eight years from now. I suspect they will be.)

Americans are often derided here and abroad for not being readers and for being disengaged with current events, but I think the success of these books goes a long way toward suggesting otherwise.

Update: If you'd prefer to read the whole Iraq Study Group Report online (or print off a copy) you can get it at the United States Institute of Peace Web site, where, according to a Washington Post article (which has a lot of great tidbits about the report and how popular its been bookstores) "400,000 people downloaded the report within hours" of its release.

- C. Max Magee @ 8:15 PM ~ comments: 2 ~ Links to this post

 

A Brief History of Book Blogs

Genevieve Tucker, the blogger behind Reeling and Writhing (formerly known as You Cried for Night) has penned an article for The Australian about book blogs that covers briefly the medium's numerous squabbles and scuffles (have there really been that many? I blame Ed) in what amounts to a history of the nascent "litblogosphere." A handy sidebar of prominent litblogs is included, though, sadly, The Millions has been left off. (Perhaps that will serve as fodder yet another litblog battle? Nah, I'm used to it.)

- C. Max Magee @ 8:14 PM ~ comments: 2 ~ Links to this post

 

Programming Note

Thanks to an onslaught of comment spam, which until now I've been dealing with manually, I've decided to turn on Blogger's "word verification" to put a stop to it. It's annoying because it adds an extra step to commenting here, but it's the best solution right now. If a better way of dealing with the spam problem comes along, I'll switch it off. For now though, it's been added to the Commenting at The Millions primer (if anyone needs a refresher.)

- C. Max Magee @ 8:13 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

A Year in Reading: Charles D'Ambrosio

Auther Charles D'Ambrosio has written two collections of short stories, The Point and, this year, The Dead Fish Museum. He also has a collection of essays, Orphans. D'Ambrosio's stories regularly appear in the New Yorker and other notable magazines. The best book D'Ambrosio read this year was the autobiography of a jazz musician. "Maybe this copping out," D'Ambrosio says,

but the book I've loved the most this year is Art Pepper's autobiography, Straight Life, which was revised and reissued by Da Capo Press in 1994. I know next to nothing about jazz, haven't listened to a lick of Art Pepper, but a smart guy in a bar in Portland told me I had to pick up the book - we were drinking - and it is, as drunkenly promised, really good. It makes me wish I were an aficionado. Art Pepper lived through all kinds of hell, which may be standard stuff for jazz greats, I don't know, but what makes Straight Life an excellent read isn't the sexual compulsion, the heroin, the crime, the brutal life in San Quentin - all juicy reading, for sure - but the intimacy, the way you get inside the dreamy logic of being Art Pepper. With a reality like that, who needs dreams, I guess, but Pepper's story is, from beginning to end, so sad and soulful it's like he never happened on our frequency - and this book (along with the music, which I plan to hunt down) is the vibrant record of the peculiar sound he existed in.

Thanks Charles!

- C. Max Magee @ 7:46 AM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

A Year in Reading: Conversational Reading

Scott Esposito's excellent literature and culture blog Conversational Reading likely needs no introduction here (don't forget his Quarterly Conversation either). Lucky for us, Scott has kindly pitched in with his best reads of 2006 for our year end extravaganza at The Millions:

Looking over the books I read in 2006, it seems like a banner year. I see a lot of novels that amazed me, and many that have expanded my view of what literature is and what it can be in the future.

Still, one novel towers above all the rest: