Literature

Amazon readers review the best. I laughed so hard at this that I  was crying and clutching my middle:

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway (1926)
“Here’s the first half of the book: ‘We had dinner and a few drinks. We went to a cafe and talked and had some drinks. We ate dinner and had a few drinks. Dinner. Drinks. More dinner. More drinks. We took a cab here (or there) in Paris and had some drinks, and maybe we danced and flirted and talked sh*t about somebody. More dinner. More drinks. I love you, I hate you, maybe you should come up to my room, no you can’t’… I flipped through the second half of the book a day or two later and saw the words ‘dinner’ and ‘drinks’ on nearly every page and figured it wasn’t worth the risk.”

I think that is perhaps the best book review I have ever read, on a par with A.O. Scott, a nerdy NYT movie reviewer who consistently manages to pierce my armor with something pithy and worthwhile.
I also think the Morning News is worth a daily read.

Kids And Books

 This really got to me. Tears welled up. Really.

As much as we love libraries, there is something in possessing a book that's significantly different from borrowing it, especially for a child. You can write your name in it and keep it always. It transforms you into the kind of person who owns books, a member of the club, as well as part of a family that has them around the house. You're no longer just a visitor to the realm of the written word: You've got a passport.

More on the study here.http://www.salon.com/books/laura_miller/2010/06/02/summer_book_giveaway/index.html

10 Books

All the best bloggers are doing it but I didn't think much about it because my books wouldn't be life-changing, mind-changing intellectual challenges like Sophocles or whatever. In fact, while my books changed me and the way I viewed the world, I really can't remember specifically why or how in any detail. Just that they impressed me at a time and it made a difference and I've never forgotten.

1. Gone With The Wind — Scarlett became my female role model, replacing Nancy Drew.
2. Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. First, big, serious book I read independently, loaned to me in high school by a college boyfriend. I ate it up.
3. Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer.
4. Shirley Jackson horror stories.
5. Catch-22.
6. The Alexandria Quartet.
7. A series of famous people bios for children that had orange covers. Babe Ruth taught me how to hit a baseball, important at the time, and the Zen of it has applied to most of my life. Keep your eye on the ball. Always.
8. All the Black Stallion books. And the Lad, A Dog books.
9. Little Women, Little Men, whatever else she wrote.
10. Richard Hofstader, probably The Age of Reform, but I'm not sure.
11. Confessions of An Ex Prom Queen, Fear of Flying.

Okay, that's 11. Take off the Quartet then.

The Book List

Facebook had some fun with various lists a while back, but they were all fiction. Wonder why? Well, because non-fiction is for people who have a lot of time on their hands or are in school or are really, really — really —  smart.
I happen to have a lot of time on my hands, at least I will when I stop sleeping so much, so I'm bookmarking these lists to dip into later. Well, I'm not bookmarking Tyler Cowan because I hate him for a very good reason I can't remember, but Ezra Klein has a link.
Oh, read the comments, too, if you're really interested. But you don't have to make a list and start reading, just knowing what people are thinking about and why is kind of satisfying in and of itself.
Oh, okay, I'm linking to Cowan because of the commenter alone, but his commenters are all enlightening and very different from Yglesias'.

My 9th grade literature textbook, which introduced me to Borges, Ionesco, Beckett, Ibsen.

The Next New Thing: Bood Dept.

Huffpo's got this up for Jeremy Rifkin's newest book. I likee. No, I no readee yet.

Er, Book Dept., Book Dept. I need staff.

Quote O' Teh Day

"There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action and because there is only one of you in all of time this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist in any other medium and it will be lost. It is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how valuable, nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours, clearly and directly, to keep the channel open."

A Martha Graham quote kept and referred to often by Ursula Nordstrom, longtime children's book editor at Harper Collins. A book is just being published of her wonderful letters. She was definitely a contrarienne.
You can read some of the letters from the book and more about her here.

The Book I'd Write

if I knew anything at all.
Given the circumstances, I'll just read it.

Would You Like To Live Another 100 Years?

Someone at Time Magazine did a profile of Cormac McCarthy without ever being able to interview him. It was a striking piece of work. Probably came out after All The Pretty Horses.

This time, he's talking.

If you think about some of the things that are being talked about by thoughtful, intelligent scientists, you realize that in 100 years the human race won't even be recognizable. We may indeed be part machine and we may have computers implanted. It's more than theoretically possible to implant a chip in the brain that would contain all the information in all the libraries in the world. As people who have talked about this say, it's just a matter of figuring out the wiring.

These Are My People

But, somewhat regrettably, not me.

A third group, though, is making the ‘access to literature’ argument without much real commitment to its truth or falsehood, because they aren’t actually worried about access to literature, they are worried about bookstores in and of themselves. This is a form of Burkean conservatism, in which the value built up over centuries in the existence of bookstores should be preserved, even though their previous function as the principal link between writers and readers is being displaced.
This sort of commitment to bookstores is a normative argument, an argument about how things ought to be. It is also an argument that might succeed, as long as it re-imagines what bookstores are for and how they are supported, rather than merely hoping that if enough nice people seem really concerned, the flow of time will reverse.

Bet they don't know they are Burkeans. Okay, maybe they do, but they, like me, would never think to use the term.
Damn you, Clay Shirky, and the Kindle you rode in on.
What is the longtail again?

Stumbled Upon

Somebody over at another Web site said the review of J.G. Ballard's short stories was probably the most linked in the universe. I doubt it. But I think I've found another author to read. Books, must get.

His is the voice reminding you not to take the postmodern hangover too personally: it was always going to happen this way.

Anyone Want to Do a Little Weeding Out?

So do the keepers of popular website Awful Library Books.

World eBook Library

I sort of knew this existed but had never sought it out. Tonight it popped onto my screen via a free site I have listed on my Google home page.
For $8.95 you can join and get your choice of 500,000 titles. But you will need either an iPod or an ebook reader. Seems fair enough. I harbor this hidden desire to read things I will never look for in the library.
Churchill, perhaps, or Thomas Aquinas.

The Publishing Industry

on its way out?
Can't happen soon enough for Andrew Sullivan. Bittah. Bittah.

My own view is that the publishing industry deserves to die in its current state. It never made economic sense to me; there are no real editors of books any more; the distribution network is archaic; the technology of publishing pathetic; and the rewards to authors largely impenetrable. I still have no idea what my occasional royalty statements mean: they are designed to be incomprehensible, to keep the authors in the dark, to maintain an Oz-like mystery where none is required.

The future is obviously print-on-demand, and writers in the future will make their names first on the web. With e-distribution and e-books, writers will soon be able to put this incompetent and often philistine racket behind us. It couldn't happen too soon.

Northwest Women Writers

Lisa Albers has an ongoing series of interviews with women writers of literary, romance and mystery fiction featured in the magazine Seattle Woman.

On Death

Oh, julimac, did you have to bring that up?
Well, there it is. It sits on your shoulder, reads your thoughts. And ur blogz, heh.
This quote from a Philip Larkin poem today in a highly recommended interview by Harper's blogger and all-round wonderman Scott Horton.

And specious stuff that says no rational being Can fear a thing it cannot feel, not seeing that this is what we fear—no sight, no sound, No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with, Nothing to love or link with, The anesthetic from which none come round.

The interview is with Susan Sontag's son David Reiff about his mother and his book about her death.