God, No! Signs You May Already Be An Atheist and Other Magical Tales - Penn Jillette

Part manifesto, part autobiography and part joke, the uneven quality in this book can be attributed to it not knowing exactly what it wants to be. Zooming out of the gate, Jillette lays out what it means to be an atheist (All you have to be able to say is "I don't know") and recalls a story about eating bacon with Hasidic Jews. His attempt to match the Ten Commandments with his own has some wings (even if Hitchens did it better) but it sags in the middle, bogged down in personal anecdotes about having sex while scuba diving and stripping naked on the vomit comet. It picks up again at the end, with Jillette offering atheism as the only hope against terrorism, that faith is the enemy that rational people must overcome:

"Being religious means being okay with believing in things without evidence... Once you've condoned faith in general, you've condoned any crazy shit done because of faith."



 

A Million Little Pieces - James Frey

Yes, I'm a little late to this. I would have never read it all if I hadn't seen it in a used bookstore for $2.00 (my cut-off purchase point for any book). Of course I had read all the articles about the controversy, had seen the clip from Oprah. What never came up in all those discussions is that this isn't a very well written book. It's not poorly written, but there is a lot of repetition, a lot of being inside the author's head as he repeats the same thoughts again and again.  Intended to give a glimpse into the mind of an addict, it gets tiresome 100 pages in. All the characters talk the same, sound the same. Addicts offer words of wisdom in long, rambling bursts. The author finds redemption in a good girl living a bad life, guidance from a Mafioso with a good heart.

If this were a real memoir, you could defend all of this under the banner of  'it really happened'. Fiction doesn't get the same pass as memoir and non-fiction does - you can be sloppy and sentimental in a memoir, you can have clunky sentences and poorly constructed paragraphs and characters that act as pure plot devices, because it all happened. In fiction, you can't. Well, you can, but don't expect to be taken seriously.

There are some interesting parts about addiction and recovery, but if you want that you can watch Intervention or read the parts about AA meetings in Infinite Jest. The dental surgery scene is toe curling, and the main character does seem utterly irredeemable and unlikable, so the fact that people cheer on his recovery is a testament to the author's talent. But,you know at the end of the book he is going to make it, on his terms, his way. I almost expected a scene at the end where he walks across a football field and fist pumps the air.

I've never taken to memoirs. I prefer fiction, even thinly veiled fiction, but if I'm going to read about someone's life, I prefer autobiography and biography before memoir.  I didn't really see what the big fuss was about - of course he fudged some of this. It's a book.  Even realism isn't real - it's a version of real, an edited, crafted version that has a identifiable elements (plot, characters, motivations, etc) the real life often does not. All memoirs have some level of artifice involved - if a memoir recounts a conversation that the author had when he/she was eight years old - it's made up.   It doesn't bother me that he made up some central elements to this book, and it doesn't bother me that he tried to sell it as fiction first but then re-branded it as memoir when he saw where the  money was.  What bothers me is that is that he tried to hide some poor writing under the memoir tag.

That Is All - John Hodgman

How does the world end? Widespread economic collapse leading to a breakdown to society, forcing us to form post-industrial tribes that compete for dominance in  the Thunderdome? Environmental upheaval that melts the polar ice caps, causing the oceans to rise and forcing the remnants of humanity to live on floating cities? How about the Jock/Nerd convergence, combined with the awakening of the Unspeakable Ones and the awakening of the Century Toad that lives in the centre of the earth?

The third, and final, book in the series of world knowledge, That Is All details the end of the world, scheduled for Dec 21, 2012 (the Mayans were right, after all), which Hodgman, now a Deranged Millionaire from his work as a minor television personality, witnessed as visions one night under the influence of his albuterol asthma inhaler.  There's also some helpful tips on wine, cruise ships and how to become a Deranged Millionaire.

The most amusing part is the page-a-day calendar that runs across the top of the book, outlining how the world will end. (It includes Oprah's Space Ark, Stephen King's additional 700 pages of the Stand, The Dogstorm and the Singularity) It's a specific type of humour, one aimed at the kids who read McSweeney's for the pictures, who fast-forward the podcast of The Best Show to get the Philly Boy Roy call and laugh at the bits on The Daily Show that no one else does.

Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone: The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson - Hunter S. Thompson

I finished this book the same day a woman pepper sprayed people at a Wal-Mart to get at an X-box during a Black Friday sale. Thompson would have been at home in this madness. He also would have recognized the incident a few weeks at Berkeley when a campus cop causally pepper sprayed a line of student protesters.

This collection stretches from the beginning days at Rolling Stone all the way to a few months before his death - a piece about the Bush re-election victory in 2004, and Thompson's opinion that he would rather have voted for Nixon, his arch-nemesis, than Bush (perhaps the harshest indictment of the presidency of George W Bush ever given)
The cliche would be to say that we need a voice like Thompson now, but it could never happen. You can draw connections between Thompson's style and bloggers (personal, argumentative, opinionated, vitriolic) but Thompson put himself in the story by going to the centre of action (instead of sitting back and commenting on what's happening) and he wrote long, rambling pieces that required heavy editing and don't fit nicely onto the screen of an i-pad.

In-between the pieces are letters between Thompson and Jann Wenner, some of which hint at what might have been. One of the great lost books is Thompson's lost Vietnam novel. Some of the dispatches are collected here, with Thompson bunkered down in a hotel as the Viet Cong approach, collecting ammunition and trying to teach two other journalists how to to use a walkie talkie system for when the walls are breached. Vietnam was pure gonzo, and it takes a madman like Thompson to make sense of the madness.

The Marriage Plot - Jeffrey Eugenides

A few pages in and a main character throws a Rolando Barthes book, A Lover's Discourse. So it's going to be one of those kind of books, is it?  Three characters, in university in the early 80's, fall in love, talk about religion, literary criticism, yeast cultures and truth.  Mitchell (Young Tom Waits as he is referenced) is searching for meaning in religion. Leonard, manic depressive, is searching for truth in science. Madeline is the girl they both fall in love with, who doesn't quite get the new literary criticism and prefers Victorian novels.

She picks Leonard. Mitchell goes off to see the world, and after a negative experience at Mother Theresa's hospital in Calcutta, he comes back to the U.S. to find that Madeline has married Leonard.  Leonard, however, is a manic depressive who can't get his meds right, and as the story unfolds, Madeline was more in love with the idea of being in love with Leonard than actually being in love with him. She could blame Barthes, or she could blame all the Austen she read.

There is some wit in this realistic prose, but the novel feels like an experiment - can an old fashioned love story be written for these modern (or near-modern) times? Nobody seemed to ask why this should be a topic to explore, but the author puts together a readable novel, even if it's hard to find an emotional connection to these characters.  There's something for everyone - you can read it as a straight ahead romance novel, or you can hold it under the light of your weary, post-post-post-modern microscope and dissect it.

One aspect was particularly distracting - the author seems to be paying homage to David Foster Wallace in the character of Leonard. He's smart, large, wears a bandanna and chews tobacco, majoring in philosophy. DFW was a depressive and not a manic depressive, and Leonard isn't a writer, but the similarities are too close to be coincidentally. Eugenides has denied this, which makes it even more distracting - surely an editor or a first reader must have pointed this out, even if it wasn't intentional.

Boomerang: Travels In The New Third World - Michael Lewis

If the end does come, it won't be zombies - it will be bankers. They brought us to the edge of ruin in 2008 and no doubt will lead us there again. Lewis starts in Iceland, where the fishermen came off the boats and into banking, and in 30 years bankrupted the country. In Greece he spends time in a monastery run by an order of monks that turned a land deal into a series of business deals that brought down the economy. It didn't help that no one in Greece pays taxes, and public sector employees make boat loads of money.  In Germany he tries to find out why the Germans kept pumping money into failing EU economies but instead comes away with insight about the German relationship to excrement. Last stop is California, where a state out of money still manages to be one the largest economies in the world.  Lewis is an excellent writer with a talent for getting out of the way and letting his characters tell the story.

Zone One - Colson Whitehead

When the end comes, it won't be the smartest or the bravest or the best among us who will survive. It will be the ones that make the hard choices, the ones that have that built-in survival skill  - those one will survive. In Zone One, Mark Spitz (everyone has a new name at the end of the world) is an average guy from Long Island who managed to live this long into the zombie apocalypse. He's joined the re-formed military and is a sweeper, assigned to clean out the office towers and Chinese restaurants of Zone One.  Everything is run from Buffalo and the outlook is grim for humanity, even with sponsorship opportunities for warlords who have managed to secure beer distribution routes and athletic shoe warehouses. Everyone is damaged from the trauma, and for Mark Spitz it manifests itself in a almost reckless disregard for his own life.

Too literary to use the word zombie, the author calls them skels (short for skeletons). The plague has divided them into two groups - ones that try to eat your brains and ones trapped in a pre-life daze that causes them to sit at desks or or stand at a hot dog cart. The prose sings, even if at times it's laid on a bit too thick. A believable look at the zombie apocalypse, the novel reminds you what it means to be human.

Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs - Chuck Klosterman

This is what Klosterman does best - non-fiction ruminations on pop culture. His desire to write fiction is understandable, but he has yet to achieve the level of skill and engagement he does with this collection. The best piece is on a Guns'N'Roses tribute band that has more energy and passion for the music than the original band ever did, but all of the pieces are good. He nails how reality TV has changed the way we behave in real life, and makes a convincing argument that Trisha Yearwood is more important than Lucinda Williams.  He's searching to understand how pop culture (and really, at this point, is there any other kind?) affects us.

The Visible Man - Chuck Klosterman

The problem with an invisible man story is that it's been done.  There was the original story, a slew of movies, a few Twilight Zone episodes and all of those daydreams everyone has had.  So, what to do if you want to tell an invisible man story?  (Let's ignore the answer "don't tell one" for one) You look for a new way to tell it. The first thing you do is get rid of the invisible part - there's no such thing as invisible, and science will back you up. So, make him visible, in the sense that if you knew what you were looking for you could see him. Add a suit and and a cream and an obsessive type with social skills so poor that he can only understand other humans by observing them for lengths at a time.

But a straight ahead narrative won't do, and neither will a journal type story. Instead, change the focus to a series of conversations between a therapist and the invisible man. But you can't do like that - you need to have it a collection of notes and emails that could be used to create a book, add a letter from the therapist to the editor, and there, now you have something.

What you have is a story that's made more entertaining by the diversions and asides and the observations about culture and people, but lacks a narrative force in the main story.  The structure gets in the way of the first section (an email exchange - literary history question - what was the first novel to use letters as a narrative device? And what was the first novel to use emails? Those authors have some answering to do) but gets out of the way for the remainder, and the book is better off for it.

Killing Yourself to Live - Chuck Klosterman

The problem with Chuck Klosterman, or at least Chuck Klosterman's writing, is that he knows that he's a writer, and he knows that you know that he's a writer. You have certain expectations, even if you don't know who Chuck Klosterman is, because as someone who would read a book about rock star deaths, you have a set of certain expectations about what a book like that would be about and what kind of person would write that kind of book. And Chuck Klosterman knows this, and he knows that you this. And he knows that you know that he knows this.

We could call it the Eggers effect, or perhaps the DFW effect. It's a bit maddening, really, this level of self-consciousness. We could blame reality TV as well, and maybe The Gary Shandling Show, for breaking the 4th wall and never putting it back together again.

This book is about a music writer doing a 20-day tour to all of rock's famous death spots - the Chelsea Hotel, a field in Iowa, Mississippi, and Seattle.  If you care about rock deaths (and why wouldn't you if you are reading this book) then you know about these places. You will probably also chuckle at the author calling the rental car Tauntan and get all of his other references. 

Instead of giving us the expected writer-on-the-scene reporting, the book takes a left turn and the author ruminates about three major relationships in his life.  Most of the novel is spent on these three women , rehashing the past, worrying about the future.  It's all fine and good, but it stalls the forward motion of the book.

But, the author knows this. He mentions that the main thesis of the book is underdeveloped and the cutesy sub-title shows his hand - we're not getting the full story, either about his relationships with these three women or about the rock star deaths. Not sure where to go, he ends with a phone conversation between him and a female friend who implores him not to write a book about women he used to be in love with it.  She cites the faults in such a novel (all of which are in the book that you just read). And that's the ending you're given, which is probably the ending you were expecting, if you are the type of person who would read a book like this.

Half Empty - David Rakoff

We've adopted this idea that we have to think positive to be successful, that thinking happy thoughts can lead to actual happiness. It runs contrary to what most of us actually think, and that's part of the challenge - change your thoughts, change your life.

David Rakoff takes the opposite view. He interviewed Julie Norem, a psychology professor that wrote a book about 'defensive pessimism' which is the idea that a certain type of negative thinking, of preparing for the negative by assessing the possible outcomes, is actually a more positive approach.  The essays in this collection follow this idea of defensive pessimism, finishing with the darkest one about the author learning that the cancer he had in his youth had returned.  Very dark and very funny.

Bang Crunch - Neil Smith

The style ranges from one end to the other in this short story collection. There is that too-literary style, the one that I associate with writing workshops and  university creative writing classes, the ones that are too clever for their own good. "These canine teeth of mine... stick out like box seats at the opera" is a line from a story in this collection. Not a bad line, but compounded with a character named
Eeepie Carpetrod and it becomes a bit much.  

Two of these stories don't suffer from this over style - Jaybird and Scrapbook - and they are the best in this collection. They demonstrate the author can indeed write without relying on the the rhetorical flourishes that look good in a writing workshop and but nowhere else.

Arguably - Christopher Hitchens

The trick with Hitchens is that he wants you to disagree with him, to take on his arguments and offer some ones of your own.  You can feel it in the writing, this need to engage. This collection of essays, the first since he was diagnosed with cancer, focus on the post 9/11 decade, a time when he carved out a complex position that neither conforms to left or right.  He's famously anti-religion, with a scorn that encompasses both Islam and Christianity, and thinks that the US was justified in the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan. But he also criticizes the Bush administration over their response to Katrina.

In the end it's the writing that matters, and most if it here quite good. You shouldn't agree with everything he says (he probably would respect you more if you didn't) but it's a fun ride.

How To Be Good - Nick Hornby

After sleeping with an acquaintance, Katie begins to question her goodness. She's a doctor who doesn't really like her patients, a mother who doesn't really like her children and a wife who hates her husband, and aspiring novelist who writes a weekly Angry Man column in the local paper.  She wants to think of herself as a good person, but when her husband finds a faith healer who encourages him to take in homeless, she begins to doubt.

The first part of this novel is some of the best stuff Hornby has written, but it loses steam about halfway through. As with his other characters, it's hard to really like Katie - she's too flawed, too human to either dislike  or embrace completely. It this ambivalence that is a weakness in the book, leading to an unsatisfactory ending.

Pulse - Julian Barnes

A collection of short stories about how we get together or how we fail to, how we try to stay together but can't,  how we are connected but fail to connect.  The thread that holds most of these stories together is a series of dialogue-only scenes about three couples that meet at dinner parties and talk about love, marriage, sex and politics. Some of these scenes made me feel as if I showed up late and hadn't enough to drink to fully enjoy myself.  The second half of the book are stories set in the distant and near past.

The best story is also the title of the book, a first-person story about a man who cannot keep his relationship together, a sharp contrast to the way his parents endure through hardships.

Ten Thousand Saints - Eleanor Henderson

Starts strong, get a little too soap opera-ish in the middle, finishes as you think it will. The best parts are about the Straight Edge scene in NYC in the late '80's and those bits are what kept me moving through a somewhat conventional plot of teenage pregnancy, unrequited love in all it's different forms, the passing of the generational zeitgeist, and a Indian deus ex machina (Krishina?) of sorts that helps wrap everything up.

The writing is solid, but at times threatens to collapse under it's own weight - everything is described in detail, every sentence has had the hell written out of it. In some parts it works, but in others you wish the things would move forward.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - Hunter S. Thompson

Re-read this one as a break between some other books, after I watched the first half of the movie on TV late one night. Still a personal favourite, even with its flaws and shortcomings. If you want to understand what happened to the '60's - how peace and love became the '70's - then use this book as guide.

"There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda .... You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning ....

And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simplyprevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave ....

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark —that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back."

Embassytown - China Mieville

It takes a while to get going, but once it does it becomes a smart story about the meaning of language. In the distant future, on a remote planet, humans live side-by-side with The Hosts, a very alien race that has two mouths and no difference between language and thought.  Interaction is mediated by Ambassadors, highly trained, genetically created twins. A new kind of Ambassador is sent by the government, which turns The Hosts into drug addicts with his voice.

The ending comes rather quick, glossing over some action sequences to wrap it up in a reasonable amount of time. More of a philosophical dissertation than a novel, but worth the read for the imaginative level of detail.

Flight Paths of The Emperor - Steven Heighton

The best story in this collection is the first one, about a Canadian, who speaks some Japanese, working at a coffee shop in Osaka to make ends meet. The coffee shop, built after the war, is slated to be demolished to make way for some new developments, and there is some trepidation that a certain lifestyle was about to come to a end.  Shot through with bits of humour (even if some of it seems a bit forced - the idiom mangling English student, for example) you can tell it's a serious work of fiction because the coffee shop isn't saved.

This "serious work" tag infects most of these stories - objects take on significance, narrative shifts through time, connections are drawn between relationships and larger events. At times the stories collapse under this seriousness, but at other times it works - a story in which a man (Caucasian) takes his daughter (born to a Japanese mother) back to Japan ends in uncomfortable territory.

Of course there's the war and the bomb and a sense of old Japan dying to make room for a new Japan (though it should be pointed out that the old Japan, such as it was, created the conditions for the war) and proverbs that start stories and a very unbelievable episode involving Yakuza kidnapping an English teacher.

These stories are trapped in a certain time period - both a certain time in Japan and a certain time in Canadian fiction - and the energy created in the first story failing to sustain itself throughout the collection.

The Big Short - Michael Lewis

On the surface, it`s hard to find the good guys, the heroes, in this story. Three years we are living in the aftermath   - S&P, who just downgraded the U.S.`s credit rating and sparked a massive dip in the stock market, plays a role in this book as one of the agencies that continued to give triple A ratings to mortgage backed securities, even though they were junk.  It reminded me of the moral universe in a James Ellroy novel - everyone is selfish and corrupt, so the hero is the person who is the least corrupt, or at least corrupt for a reason.

The story follows a few individuals saw the impending economic doom of the sub-prime mortgage, and shorted the market (and made a fortune in doing so)  They are colorful characters - a medical doctor with Aspger`s, a socially stunted trader, three California dudes who have little idea what they are actually doing - and the author spends considerable time with them, providing some solid reporting and character background.  The usual suspects are here - Goldman Sachs, Bear Sterns, AIG - and what struck me is how they managed to not only screw people and businesses over and make millions, but it was all technically legal - it was so far out in front that no one had any idea if it should be against the law or not.

2030 - Albert Brooks

A challenge in reading a book by an author who is famous for other things is that you are predisposed to view the book through a lens clouded by the author's fame. In non-fiction and autobiography, this isn't much of an issue - the reason why are you reading the book is usually based on who the person is. With non-fiction, this gets a bit trickier.

Since he is famous of acting and directing, I was expecting more of a Vonnegut, black humour style tale of the future. There are elements of that in this, but it's mostly a straight up story about what happens to the US in 2030, after a massive earthquake destroys Los Angeles. It takes time to get where it's going - the characters are set up with lots of background, the plot is put in motion - but it comes together at the end. An ending that seems entirely probably under the circumstances, and one that seems devoid any political influence.  One thing that did stand out - the lack of the role technology plays in this future, particularly the Internet. There is an Internet, but no one in 2030 seems to have an iphone or spend their time online - it's a future Internet that could have been written in the late '90's. (Which stands in contrast to Super Sad Love Story)

Lost in Shangri-La - Mitchell Zukoff

Perhaps the most remarkable part of this adventure story set in the later days of the Second World War is the consequences for the natives of the secluded area called Shangri-La that three American soldiers crash into - living a lifestyle unchanged for thousands of years, the natives are yanked into the 20th century. In the epilogue the author finds a few still clinging to their traditional ways (penis gourds, bones through noses) to sell their souls by posing for photographs with tourists.

In May 1945 twenty American military personnel (including women) go on a pleasure flight over a secluded section of Papa New Guinea but bad weather forces the plane to crash. Only thee survive and they are helped by the natives, who believe the Americans with their white skin are spirits. A group of Filipino-American soldiers parachute in to set up a camp and help the survivors, and eventually a daring rescue plan is crafted involving gliders, a near-forgotten aircraft nicknamed "coffin boxes".  A good summer time adventure read.

Pastoralia - George Saunders

My second George Saunders book this year, I bought this one based on how much I liked CivilWarLand in Bad Decline. Pastoralia is similar - a collection of short stories, all about sad sacks trying to survive in a world that has it in for them, a world where things go from terrible to even worse that you could have imagined.  In the first story, a man with a very sick boy has a job as a caveman in a history theme park, but his desire to do a good job is thwarted by his partner's tendency to speak English and act uncave-like when visitors come by.  The best one in the collection is Sea Oak, about a male stripper trying to support his extended family by working in a nautical-themed club. His grandmother dies during a break-in at their squalid apartment complex, but the cheap coffin they buried her in can't hold her and she comes back to tell them to start improving their lot and not wasting their life.  Her advice crumbles along with her corpse, leaving the narrator in the same place as when he started, except this time haunted by the bleak future before him.



 

Among The Truthers - Jonathan Kay

The most disappointing part of this book is the part that's not there - the refuting of the claims of 9/11 Truthers. Kay writes around it, mentioning it only once when he offers up an excuse for not including it  - "Debunking books don't sell". This hole transforms the book into a history of conspiracy theories, starting with The Truther Movement, rather than a book singularly about the Truther Movement, making the title a marketing ploy. Given the title a reader expects that the author spends time among 9/11 Truthers and reports back, but we are only offered truncated versions. (Better versions appeared in the National Post when Kay was writing this novel). This 'among the natives' approach was done much better by Matt Taibbi in The Great Derangement, who spends time with the religious right in the US and the 9/11 Truthers and draws connections between the two groups.

You can't go far complaining about a book for what it isn't. This book is a history of conspiracy theories, including the JFK assassination and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the two Rosetta stones of conspiracism.  The parallel between religion and conspiracism is drawn, as is the power of the Internet and video streaming. Overall very nice, but ultimately unsatisfying.

This Cake Is For The Party - Sarah Selecky

10 stories, remarkable for being even in their distribution of style, wit and a high degree of writing. All are about loss, and what comes before and what comes after.  The most skillful is the last in the collection, One Thousand Wax Buddhas, which plays with narrative structure and first-person perspective to tell the story of a candle-maker and his mentally ill wife. Hints of Munroe, suggestions of Carver, but Selecky makes these stories her own.

True Grit - Charles Portis

It's always difficult reading a book after seeing a movie - the comparisons, either way, never hold up. In this case, however, the book and movie (both versions) can be treated as separate artifacts. In the novel, it's Mattie who narrates from the vantage point of years later. She seeks the man who killed her father and hires Rooster Cogburn - oh, I'm sure you've seen the movie. What separates the book from the movie is the murky morality - Mattie states she wants to capture the man who killed her father, but hires the Marshall known for killing to do it, I man who plans on shooting bandits in the back. The man who kills her father expresses remorse over the action. Of course the movie makes the morality clearer, but the style alone makes this a worthwhile read.

Author on Author Verbal Violence

Is there anyone better to insult an author than another author?

9. Truman Capote on Jack Kerouac

“That’s not writing, that’s typing.”

8. Elizabeth Bishop on J.D. Salinger

“I HATED [Catcher in the Rye]. It took me days to go through it, gingerly, a page at a time, and blushing with embarrassment for him every ridiculous sentence of the way. How can they let him do it?”

From Flavorwire

No Such Thing As A Contemporary Novel?

Russell Smith on Graham's Swift essay that claims that there is no such thing as a contemporary novel:

"His argument is simple and undeniable: As soon as something’s written and published it is about the past. Novels take years to write, so “… the ‘now’ with which they begin will be defunct by the time they’re finished.” And the hippest of new novels will look very dated in a couple of years. He points out that many of our favourite novels from the 19th century are actually not about their own time but are set many years previous to their writing: War and Peace, for example, was written in the 1860s but set during the Napoleonic wars, about 50 years earlier. The lag seems immaterial to us now."


Globe and Mail

The 100 Greatest Non-Fiction Books

The Guardian lists the 100 Greatest Non-Fiction books of all time.

Rubber Balls and Liquor - Gilbert Gotfried

There are some laughs in this memoir, but the whole endeavor feels obligatory. All the signposts of the typical comedic memoir are here - precocious childhood, awkward teenage years, followed by grinding it out on the stand-up circuit. More stories about that scene would have added more meat to this limp broth. In his comedy he is fearless, but here he is like a meaner version of Paul Reiser.

The Age of Wonder - Richard Holmes

Puts to the rest the notion that the Romantic era was filled with poets and not scientists with a passion and enthusiasm one doesn't usually read in books about science. Focusing on Joseph Banks, Humphrey Davy and William Hershel, the book at times reads like a thriller. A thriller that informs - the balloon flight mania of the time is particularly engaging, as Banks' journey to Fiji.

Theroux: Travel Writing Isn't Dead

A master at the form on why, despite popular belief, good travel books are just waiting to be written:

The world is not as small as Google Earth depicts it. I think of the Lower River district in Malawi, the hinterland of Angola, the unwritten-about north of Burma and its border with Nagaland. Nearer home, the urban areas of Europe and the United States.


Theroux: The Places In Between

Interview with George Saunders: Steer Towards The Rapids

Best advice on writing fiction I've read in a while:  “Any monkey in a story had better be a dead monkey"


From the good people at BOMblog

George Saunders Interview Part One


George Saunders Interview Part Two

Great Book, Terrible Person

After V.S. Naipaul said some stupid things about women writers the issue of having a great book written by a terrible person has come up again.  Dickens treated his wife terribly, but he wrote Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities. Hemingway was a drunk who harboured petty grudges and was married four times, but he wrote The Sun Also Rises. TS Eliot was an anti-Semite but he gave us The Wasteland. The list goes on.

The real question is whether it matters to the work. Of course what the indiscretion is and how long it was are two factors - it's hard to imagine any Nazi writers gaining any kind of credibility, but Gertrude Stein is still read, even though she made comments in support of Hitler.  It's also interesting that this doesn't come up as much in the movie/TV/music/sports world - we almost expect an actor/athlete/rock star to behave in a certain way.


When Bad People Write Good Books  - Salon

A Collection of Good Books by Morally Questionable People - Flavorwire

Famous Literary Spats

From the good people at Flavorwire:

In 2002, Whitehead gave us a hilarious and scathing review of A Multitude of Sins in The New York Times. He writes, “The characters’ sense of befuddlement comes to infect, but never to enlighten, the reader.” He later notes, “At the top of the story, the protagonist offers an Awkward Pang of Simmering Dissatisfaction, which sounds suspiciously like the A.P.S.D. offered by the character in the previous story.” For this, Richard Ford spit on him at a Poets & Writers party. Afterward, Whitehead said, “This wasn’t the first time some old coot had drooled on me, and it probably won’t be the last. But I would like to warn the many other people who panned the book that they might want to get a rain poncho, in case of inclement Ford.”


Famous Literary Spats

Esquire's Big Book of Fiction - Adrienne Miller

Reads like a who-who of American fiction of the 20th century, with all the names you'd expect - Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Mailer, Carver, Ford, McCarthy, O'Conner, Wallace, Cheever, Barth, DeLillo.  Some are good, others are great, and a few were added just to be inclusive. A book you can pick up at different times, turn to a story and read - one of my favourite kind of books.

Gary Shteyngart Super Sad True Love Story Trailers

Somehow, I missed these two trailers from Gary Shtenygart for his book Super Sad True Love Story.

Super Sad True Love Story - James Franco

Gary Shteyngart and Paul Giamitti Buddy Comedy

The Pale King - David Foster Wallace

Somewhere in here is a great novel, amid these half-formed, half-written sections. It's about the IRS and boredom and how ordinary people doing ordinary things (processing tax forms) can achieve a level of heroism, a level of cool that mostly goes unrecognized. 

The Pale King can't really be called a novel, more of a journal, and will be remembered more for what it could have been rather than what it is. It's a greatest hit album - if you like David Foster Wallace than you'll like this, but if you don't, this won't change your mind.

King Leary - Paul Quarrington

Manages to turn hockey, a topic so mundane and familiar to Canadians that we can smell it in our sweat, into a metaphor for magic. As a character King Leary skates alongside other great Canadian literary figures (Duddy Kravtiz, Anne of Green Gables)  and as a novel King Leary should body check a few stodgy works that are taught in classrooms. There are some tried and true concepts here - the small town boy who only knows hockey, the rich business man who ruthlessly operates the team with only profit in mind, the bitter and alcoholic sports writer, the destined to die in a hotel room player  - that Quarrington weaves into something new and wonderful. A classic.

Remainder - Tom McCarthy

Moves through the world in supreme control, a remarkable feat for a first novel, with hardly a misused word. It builds to the only ending that makes sense, a satisfying conclusion to a treatise on memory, identity and the need to control the world around us that reads like a novel.

Tokyo, My Everest - Gabrielle Bauer

The issue about reading a story about something similar to what you went through is the tendency to draw comparisons to your own experiences. Often, because the subject matter is so familiar, the story comes up lacking, and not in any particular deficiency in the story, but because your experience is different and more real.  This was somewhat the case with Tokyo, My Everest, the story of a 30-something Canadian woman who moves to Tokyo to teach English and figure out what to do with her life. 

Her experiences are typical to the newbie in Japan - getting to know the subway system, overcoming the language barrier, dealing with non-Japanese who treat the country as a party palace.  The author is one of those people who come to Japan to find the 'real' Japan - kimonos and temples and tea ceremonies - the kind of person I tried to avoid in my own time in Japan. Living in a big city, riding the subway and eating convenience store food heated in a microwave has the same claim to legitimacy as does hiking Mt. Fuji or watching Noh. I always bristled at this idea of a 'real' version of a country (Do Japanese come to Canada in search of the real Canada, with images of snowy tundras and beavers in their minds?)

Curious about Japanese men, the author finally finds one that meets her specifications. The only problem is that he's cloaked himself in secrecy as well as a rigid schedule that he never wants to veer from, which causes friction in their relationship that eventually leads to its demise. Heart-broken, the author leaves Tokyo, having been there for less than year.

Downtown Owl - Chuck Klosterman

Wanting to like this book, because I like his writing on music and pop culture (Sex, Death and Cocoa Puffs, IV) I tried to overlook the flaws in this book, but by the time the ending comes (slapped on) my patience had waned. Klosterman can write a good piece on a Guns'N'Roses cover band or Latinos who love Morrissey, but his journalistic/ironic detachment isn't suited to creating characters the reader needs to care about, or at least be mildly interested in, especially given the ending.  There are moments when the  divergences into pop culture and commentary achieve a level of near brilliance, but this novel would have worked better as a faux-memoir or having  Klosterman  embedded in a small North Dakota town an report from the ground.

Broadsides - Mordecai Richler

A collection of reviews, journal entries and what can only be called filler, released after what I consider to be his best book, Solomon Gursky Was Here. Even if it feels like a publishing obligation, it still works - the Richler style applied to sex manuals, vapid actresses and writing.  The last piece, a collection of journal entries, is the best piece, and for fans, you can see Richler's mind already focusing on his next (and final book) Barney's Version. At his most shallow he's still better than many others, as this collection proves, and he's been missed.

King, Queen, Knave - Nabokov

An early one from an old master, a too familiar plot (ambitious wife with a young lover plots to kill wealthy husband) is rendered with an expert's touch. Nabokov re-worked the translation of this novel in the 1960's, injecting the atmosphere with the spectre of Nazism and a curious sub-plot involving automatons. Moves between stream-of-consciousness, imagination, perception and drama and an ending that takes some time to get there but surprises in the end.

Famous Authors And Their Typewriters

 When I was teaching in Japan, I taught kids class that used a textbook from the early 90's that had picture cards showing a secretary (a woman) using a typewriter. When I asked the 8 and 9 year olds what this was (pointing to the typewriter) they gave me blank stares until one boy said "Computer?"
I explained what a typewriter was - you fed paper into the top and it printed the letters directly onto the paper and if you made a mistake you had to white it out - and they all looked at me as I were mad.

Flavorwire

The Pale King Early Review

Earlier this year I toyed with the idea of re-reading Infinite Jest. Instead, I've already pre-ordered a copy of DFW's new novel,The Pale King.  Lev Grossman at Time has an early review:

"Pietsch spent two years assembling and editing the contents of that duffel bag. The results will be published, appropriately enough, on April 15. If The Pale King isn't a finished work, it is, at the very least, a remarkable document, by no means a stunt or an attempt to cash in on Wallace's posthumous fame. Despite its shattered state and its unpromising subject matter, or possibly because of them, The Pale King represents Wallace's finest work as a novelist."

Time Magazine

The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things - Barry Glassner

A valiant attempt to use logic, reason and statistical reality to dispel our fears about airplane crashes, road rage and young black men. Pre-9/11, it has a wholesome feeling (should we be more afraid of terrorist attacks? Residents in NYC, London and Madrid might have a strong opinion) of fears that we used to worry about - Internet porn, for example.  The main message remains the same - our real problems are so large and complicated and difficult to fix it's far easier to get worked up by less substantial problems.

F.I.A.S.C.O. - Frank Partnoy

A pale cousin of Liar's Poker, the best part of F.I.A.S.C.O. was the unheeded  warning that the economic collapse in 2008, caused by Wall Street shenanigans, could have been avoided if the people who had the power to stop it had bothered to listen. Which no one, did, because they could hear over the whaps of their money being counted.  F.I.A.S.C.O. focuses on hedge-funds at Morgan Stanley, an area of finance so shady that it didn't even fall apart in 2008. Clunky in parts, it reads like a very long magazine article that 's a bit heavy on the technical jargon. In the end you will either shake your head and sigh or clutch your fist, and move your money out of stocks and into a rusty coffee can in the backyard.

CivilWarLand in Bad Decline - George Saunders

The only problem I had with this book is that it took me so long to discover George Saunders. He had been on my literary radar for a while, a distant blip, and I'm glad to have zeroed in on him. The 400-pound CEO is the best, about an morbidly obese loser who gains control of a raccoon-killing company after giving his boss a lethal bear hug and the novella, Bounty, reads like a movie that should have been made 10 years ago.  The world Saunders creates is 20 minutes into the future of our own, where things have fallen apart a little more than they have now. The endings, especially of the title piece, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline - takes us to unexpected places that are entertaining.

Hemmingway's Yelp

From the good people at McSweeney's:

Sun City Asian Bistro and Café
Category: Asian
TWO STARS

I called Sam and asked him if he wanted to come to dinner but he said he had softball practice and I said that was a damned shame and hung up. When I got to Sun City Bea and Rob were at were at the bar, behind tattooed women and men with guitars. They were sitting in the shade and their beers were half empty. We drank beer and ate pho but Rob was restless and did not talk very much. He said he wanted to go see a band that was playing in a dive bar across town. Bea called him a smug hipster and Rob called her a bitch and I sat and drank my beer and wished I had not come. They left early and I paid for Bea's spring rolls and went home alone.

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Roscoe - William Kennedy

Kennedy owns Albany like no other writer owns any other city, having constructed a city that surpasses the reality. Roscoe Conway is a lawyer for the Democratic Party Machine that runs Albany, an insider that stands just outside the circles of true wealth and power. Elisha Fitzgibbons, the money behind the party, former lieutenant governor of the state and married to the woman Roscoe really loves, kills himself, setting in motion a mystery that only his right-hand man, Roscoe, can solve.
With other Kennedy novels, the dead are too near us, giving Roscoe hints and faint suggestions. Moving quickly from past to present, Roscoe finds his present and his future tied too deeply to this past, and in the end, sacrifices himself for love, for the party, and for the city.

Fear and Loathing at 40

One of the best books about the 60's, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, turns 40 today.  If anyone wants to understand how the 60's turned into the 70's (and then into the 80's), they should read Fear and Loathing, which explains it better than any history or sociology book.

"There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning….Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting – on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave.

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark – that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back."

More at The Millions

A Writer's Life and Where I'm Calling From: Selected Stories - Raymond Carver

The value of matching the events in a writer's life to his/her work has always been suspect, but interesting, to me. My first year English prof warned us against doing so (and this was well before the reality TV got placed a headlock on pop culture and the public confession became our new art form) - he recognized it was fun but it didn't add much to the discussion, or the understanding, of the work.  He was right - knowing that Carver was a drunk for most of his life doesn't add a dimension to any of his stories - but it is satisfying to connect some dots between fact and fiction.

Two main points stand out in Raymond Carver A Writer's Life Carol Sklenicka: the relationship that Carver had with his editor, Gordon Lish, and Carver's dedication to becoming a writer.  The first has been talked about at some length, but it appears that what a lot of people like about Carver may have been from Lish - the sparse detail, the minimal style that Carver made famous.  Most of the controversy has to do with what we think a writer is versus what we think an editor does, but also that Carver was so eager to achieve literary success (and not to mention some measure of financial success as well) that he may have sold out to Lish in order to be publish. Once he establishes himself, he does push back on Lish - reading through Where I'm Calling From:Selected Stories, you can chart the relationship.


Carver's dedication to be a writer forms early, and his entire life is dedicated to the cause, to the extent that he sacrifices personal relationships. Sklenicka portrays a man that grows resentful at his wife and children for distracting him from writing, who takes the raw material of his life and transforms it into stories. Boxes, which appears in Where I'm Calling From is a good example - the narrator's mother keeps moving apartments, never satisfied and resembles Carver's own mother so much that she "threw the book across the room."


Intentional or not,  Carver becomes a character in one of his own stories. The risk in reading a writer's biography, even one as neutrally written as A Writer's Life, is that it can reveal the writer's true nature, forming a stain on the writer's work.  If the writer is a terrible human being, does it mean the work is viewed differently?

Zombie Spaceship Wasteland - Patton Oswalt

Reads less like a memoir and more like a some memoir pieces glued together with pieces Oswalt couldn't find a home for. This doesn't distract from the read, which is quick and funny and filled with some astute observations (even if they do tend to border on the sentimental) about life in the suburbs.  A good piece about being a stand-up in Surrey, BC in 1993 ends the book, and the title piece about geek culture leaves a warm smile.

The Unamed - Joshua Ferris

At the start, Tim is a lawyer in New York with the usual trappings - a pretty but bored wife, an alienated daughter, a too big house - and the unusual problem of losing control over his body and compelled to walk until he collapses.  No cause or name can be found for this condition, and similar to mental illness or addiction, the unamed warps his life. Plot lines are raised and dropped and the story, somewhat disappointingly, goes in a straight line from start to finish. Any expectations of salvation or redemption are dashed halfway through, and unlike Then We Came To The End, the ending fails to offer any satisfaction or any relief.

The First Real David Foster Wallace Documentary

If you consider yourself a serious reader of literary fiction, then you have to have an opinion on David Foster Wallace. You need not have read Infinite Jest, though I suggest you do. Or at least try. I'm toying with the idea of re-reading it this year - stretch it out over the year, read it in sections, come back to it.

At any rate, there's a documentary out on DFW:

From Flavorwire:

If you’re a reader, a writer or even just a member of the television saturation generation, it’s worth a listen, and if you’re a fan of Wallace, the program may tug at your heartstrings, suggesting what might have been, but celebrating the man as he was. As Don DeLillo tells Ward, “I can’t think of anyone quite like him, at all… Wallace stands alone.” Click through to hear the documentary in its entirety.


Endnotes: David Foster Wallace from georgelazenby on Vimeo.