Another month in the Can

Right about the time I was lamenting the latest “100 Best” list yesterday, this little website quietly stacked its 16^th month in the Shelf Actualization archives. With the average lifespan of a blog sitting right around two years, we promise to give it our best over the next 8 months or so before we shut it down.

Just kidding. (I hope.) Anyhoo, above are the authors we've covered lately. Now on to the 5 most popular posts from this past month:

• Number 2
• Conan the Literarian
• Paris, by Time Machine
• Review: Nemesis, by Philip Roth
• Jonathan Franzen on the Overrated and the Underappreciated

And the many-splendored search terms that led some of you here:

• Image of big merchant ship  >>  We’ve covered the merchant marine here
• Sperm whale habitat map  >>  So big it should’ve made Ahab’s quest harder
• Nanhsuchou  >>  The Good Earth, found!
• Boat that inspired old man and the sea  >>  Well, at least the harbor
• Huxley Smolarski  >>  A question of plagiarism, or just bad luck?
• Taller than Robert Wadlow  >>  Our ode to the short story
• Call me Ishmael Fourth Wall  >>  One way to open your own book
• The Punishment of X4  >>  Appropriate now that Mad Men is back
• Broken meats  >>  Shakespeare, the great hurler of insults
• Animal House where are they now  >>  An early post on Turgenev and Belushi

Thanks for stopping by. Keep coming back!

Another 100, Another Controversy

The Guardian has come out with another Top 100 list. But they aren’t just limiting themselves to the last hundred years or the last century. No, their claiming to have the list of the 100 Greatest Novels of all time. Yikes.

There are some predictable old-school entries, like Don Quixote and Pilgrim’s Progress, but I’ve actually only read twenty-one of their hundred (giving myself credit for In Search of Lost Time , even though I’ve only read the first installment of that seven-volume monster.) There are also, as you can imagine, some head-scratchers. That’s right, Roald Dahl’s The BFG  is one of the Guardian’s Top 100 novels of all time. As is Wuthering Heights —excuse me…   sorry…  had to go puke.

E.B White makes the list, but John Steinbeck and Cormac McCarthy don’t. Hemingway’s only entry is a short story collection, Men Without Women . I dunno, we’ve looked at these lists before, and there are always flaws. The whole point seems to be not so much the cataloguing of worthy titles, but the generation of reader responses.  

Meh, I don’t have the time for that crap. I’d rather go read something.

Not quite fictional geography

It’s rare that I’m pulled into a book simply because of it’s cover (don’t judge a book and all that crap…). But I’ve been intrigued by Jess Walter’s Beautiful Ruins  ever since I first laid eyes on it. That’s a gorgeous book. One of these days I’m going to have to pick it up and give it a whirl.

According to the first few pages on the Amazon preview, the action opens in the “brutto  fishing village of Porto Vergogna,” a fictional sixth, cliff-side town along the famous Cinque Terre section of the Italian Riviera. The book’s own, hand-drawn map puts the imaginary village just south of Riomaggiore, where you'll find nothing but boring, scruffy-looking hillsides sloping into the water. 

But before you give up on visiting this little piece of book-cover-paradise, I thought I’d point out that that mesmerizing cover image is actually a shot of Manarola- the 4^th of 5 real-life villages running north to south along the coast.

Thomas Jefferson's "canine appetite" for reading

Sharing a phone-pic from the DeMarest family museum visit this past weekend. What you see here is Thomas Jefferson’s first stab at pioneering the “tabbed browsing” experience we’re all familiar with on modern internet browsers. This rotating book stand contraption, of his own invention, allowed him to quickly switch between 5 different open books and to satisfy his self-described "canine appetite" for reading.

As someone who generally reads a two or three, if not more, books at any one time, I am in awe of the man’s ingenuity.

Oh, and that little ceramic piece to the left? That’s Jefferson’s inkwell, in the shape of Voltaire’s head, naturally. Pretty cool, huh?

Review: Babylon Revisited and Other Stories, by F. Scott Fitzgerald

One of my goals for this year was to knock off one of the handful of books that I’ve started but never finished.

Now, I love me some F. Scott Fitzgerald. I zipped through The Great Gatsby , This Side of Paradise , and Tender is the Night – all three. But the only short story collection of his that I’ve tried, Babylon Revisited and Other Stories , had me snoozing before I finished the first story. Maybe because the tales are so long (they have 6 or 7 chapters apiece.) But when I happened upon the audiobook at my local library, I thought it must be a sign to give it another go. Here's my second appraisal.

The sentence-level writing is, of course, first-rate. But I think I identified the problem I’d been saddled with earlier: the collection is simply pretty boring. I found that I couldn’t really identify with the bulk of his characters- most of whom seem to be uppercrust, Mid-western, young men on the margins of high-society, who are in love with unattainable, snobbish girls. That kind of story is perfectly fine, and he’s done it well elsewhere, but I get bored with the repetitive nature of it.

Fitzgerald is said to have been conflicted over a lot of his stories. He felt like he was whoring himself out for a magazine paycheck rather than concentrating on producing his best work all the time. But I’m not going to dwell on the bad (The Diamond as Big as the Ritz is a highly-sensationalized, pulp-fiction tale that was hard for me to swallow) or the boring (see previous paragraph,) I’d rather talk about a couple I really liked.

“The Ice Palace” is all about cultural differences and assimilation between North and South in America. A southern girl dissatisfied with her sleepy, southern town, decides to marry a northerner. Her first foray into northern society as his fiancée raises some red flags for her and the tension builds slowly, but when she gets left behind and trapped in the labyrinth of a Winter Carnival ice palace, everything becomes clear, and she retreats to the South. Unlike some stories in the collection, things actually happen in this story— it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. And it packs enough emotional action to keep you thinking long after you’ve read it.

There were a couple others I enjoyed, but the title story is the coup de grace. “Babylon Revisited” is a brilliant, heart-wrenching tale that lays bare the wasteful decadence of the Jazz Age. In the aftermath of the market crash and too much out-of-control drinking and debauchery in Paris, Fitzgerald shows you the slow transformation and rehabilitation of the main character, who is ready at long last to take back custody of his daughter and to start a new life in Prague. That is, until some of his old friends come crashing in at the last minute to prove that there are some demons you can never quite get away from. It’s sad and brutal and wonderful. And the internet tells me it became the movie “The Last Time I Saw Paris.”

Most of this collection was just okay. I probably wouldn’t have crossed the finish line if some audiobook voice talent hadn’t read it to me. But those two stories really redeemed the collection for me. You may as well check’em out.

Feature Film Friday

Got a spare hour and 11 minutes this weekend? Then you might want to give this animated adaptation of Orwell’s  Animal Farm  a whirl. Enjoy:

What makes a reader?

And two posts turn into three.

Jonathan Franzen once penned a famous essay in Harper’s titled “Perchance to Dream: In the Age of Images, a Reason to Write Novels.” There is a helluva lot to chew on in that article, but among them, there is also this smidgeon of empirical research on readers that I really found interesting.

“Shirley Brice Heath is a former MacArthur Fellow, a linguistic anthropologist, and a professor of English and linguistics at Stanford; she’s a stylish, twiggy, white-haired lady with no discernible tolerance for small talk. Throughout the Eighties, Heath haunted what she calls “enforced transition zones”—places where people are held captive without recourse to television or other comforting pursuits. She road public transportation in twenty-seven different cities. She lurked in airports (at least before the arrival of CNN). She took her notebook into bookstores and seaside resorts. Whenever she saw people reading or buying “substantive works of fiction” (meaning, roughly, trade-paperback fiction), she asked for a few minutes of their time.

“…her research effectively demolishes the myth of the general audience. For a person to sustain an interest in literature, she told me, two things have to be in place. First, the habit of reading works of substance must have been “heavily modeled” when he or she was very young.

“…According to Heath, young readers also need to find a person with whom they can share their interest.

“…I told her I didn’t remember either of my parents ever reading a book when I was a child, except aloud to me.

“Without missing a beat Heath replied: “Yes, but there’s a second kind of reader. There’s the social isolate—the child who from an early age felt very different from everyone around him. This is very, very difficult to uncover in an interview. People don’t like to admit that they were social isolates as children. What happens is you take that sense of being different into an imaginary world. But that world, then, is a world you can’t share with the people around you—because it’s imaginary. And so the important dialogue in your life is with the authors of the books you read.

“…According to Heath, readers of the social-isolate variety are much more likely to become writers than those of the modeled-habit variety.”

What They Were Reading: Jonathan Franzen

A continuation of yesterday’s theme, from The Paris Review’s Art of Fiction #207:

INTERVIEWER

What books were you reading in those years?

FRANZEN

Everything. I read fiction four or five hours a night every night for five years. Worked through Dickens, the Russians, the French, the moderns, the postmoderns. It was like a return to the long reading summers of my youth, but now I was reading literature, getting a sense of all the ways a story could be made.

But the primal books for me remained the ones I’d encountered in the fall of 1980: Malte, Berlin Alexanderplatz, The Magic Mountain, and, above all, The Trial. In each of these books the fundamental story is the same. There are these superficial arrangements; there is the life we think we have, this very much socially constructed life that is comfortable or uncomfortable but nonetheless what we think of as “our life.” And there’s something else ­underneath it, which was represented by all of those German-language writers as Death. There’s this awful truth, this maskless self, underlying ­everything. And what was striking about all four of those great books was that each of them found the drama in blowing the cover off a life. You start with an individual who is in some way defended, and you strip away or just explode the surface and force that character into confrontation with what’s underneath. 

Jonathan Franzen on the Overrated and the Underappreciated

    

Poet's Corner: "Fast Break" by Edward Hirsch

The Sweet Sixteen have come and gone, and the Elite Eight have been narrowed to a Final Four. We may have to wait a few more days to determine a champion, but that doesn’t mean we can’t celebrate the roundball through a little poetry today, right? I had a hard time deciding whether to post the one below, which most of us can relate to as fans, or this one, which many of us relate to as sadly broken-down, hobbyist ballers. They're both great.

Fast Break

BY EDWARD HIRSCH

In Memory of Dennis Turner, 1946-1984

A hook shot kisses the rim and

hangs there, helplessly, but doesn’t drop,

and for once our gangly starting center  

boxes out his man and times his jump

perfectly, gathering the orange leather  

from the air like a cherished possession

and spinning around to throw a strike  

to the outlet who is already shoveling

an underhand pass toward the other guard  

scissoring past a flat-footed defender

who looks stunned and nailed to the floor  

in the wrong direction, trying to catch sight

of a high, gliding dribble and a man  

letting the play develop in front of him

in slow motion, almost exactly

like a coach’s drawing on the blackboard,

both forwards racing down the court

the way that forwards should, fanning out

and filling the lanes in tandem, moving  

together as brothers passing the ball

between them without a dribble, without  

a single bounce hitting the hardwood

until the guard finally lunges out  

and commits to the wrong man

while the power-forward explodes past them  

in a fury, taking the ball into the air

by himself now and laying it gently  

against the glass for a lay-up,

but losing his balance in the process,  

inexplicably falling, hitting the floor

with a wild, headlong motion

for the game he loved like a country

and swiveling back to see an orange blur  

floating perfectly through the net.