Buyer Beware: Vol. 11

We're on vacation until August 6th. Until then, buyer beware: this isn’t  the book you’re looking for…

Buyer Beware: Vol. 10

We're on vacation until August 6th. Until then, buyer beware: this isn’t  the book you’re looking for…

Buyer Beware: Vol. 9

We're on vacation until August 6th. Until then, buyer beware: this isn’t  the book you’re looking for…

Buyer Beware: Vol. 8

We're on vacation until August 6th. Until then, buyer beware: this isn’t  the book you’re looking for…

Buyer Beware: Vol. 7

We're on vacation until August 6th. Until then, buyer beware: this isn’t  the book you’re looking for…

Buyer Beware: Vol. 6

We're on vacation until August 6th. Until then, buyer beware: this isn’t  the book you’re looking for…

Buyer Beware: Vol. 5

We're on vacation until August 6th. Until then, buyer beware:  this isn’t  the book you’re looking for…

Buyer Beware: Vol. 4

We're on vacation until August 6th. Until then, buyer beware: this isn’t  the book you’re looking for…

Review: The Monkey Wrench Gang, by Edward Abbey

So, I’ve mentioned the Monkey Wrench Gang  a couple times already, but now that I’m through with it I might as well put a few thoughts together by way of review. What an entertaining book! It’s its own strange mix of humor and melancholy, hope and defeat, beauty and crassness.

Dubbed by Larry McMurtry as the Thoreau of the American West, Abbey can paint effortless word pictures like this one…

“He remembered the real Colorado, before damnation, when the river flowed unchained and unchanneled in the joyous floods of May and June, swollen with snow melt. Boulders crunching and clacking and grumbling, tumbling along on the river’s bedrock bed, the noise like that of grinding molars in a giant jaw.”

… and a minute later, refer to a truck’s “seared differential scrota” without batting an eyelash. The biggest coups he manages to pull off, though, are the well-drawn, memorable characters: the loveable Jack-Mormon river guide, the crude PTSD-stricken Viet Nam vet, the refined and aging surgeon, the beautiful yet aimless female Brooklyn transplant, and of course, the stunning, forbidding, alluring canyon country of southern Utah and northern Arizona, which is perhaps the most important character of all. Even the villains jump off the page and make a deep impression.

There’s plenty of pastoral contemplation coupled with truckloads of surprise and suspense, and the whole time the reader is drawn right into the characters’ eco-activist conspiracy. There are cliffhangers (like, literally) and a surprise ending that made me want to go right out and buy the sequel. (There really is one!) Anyway, I highly recommend it.

Books on Screen

We hope you're making time for a few literary adaptations in between summer blockbusters, moviegoers. Here are a couple I've recently watched.

On the Road (2012)

I loved this book, and I was really looking forward to the film. After I missed it in theaters, though, it was kind of hard to get a hold of until it popped up on my On Demand offerings—I hoped this scarcity meant that it was just too awesome for the unwashed masses to appreciate, but that I would still love it. Alas, no, it was just okay. And it was a bit depressing. And it was kind of boring. I mean, look, there are moments in the book like this one:

“At dawn I got my New York bus and said good-by to Dean and Marylou. They wanted some of my sandwiches. I told them no. It was a sullen moment. We were all thinking we’d never see one another again and we didn’t care.”

…that clearly show there were some lulls and some downers in Sal’s adventures. But to see those moments pervade the entire film was a bit of a letdown. Here’s the other thing: what excitement there was, was mainly focused on drugs, sex and fast driving, all of which were played up disproportionately compared to the book. But where was the unbridled exuberance? And the sense of wonder? Where was the fun? They tried to sell us on Sal’s and Dean’s friendship with lots of intense, heartfelt man hugs—a constant coming and going where locked eyes and sincere, sullen glances were supposed to communicate everything. They didn’t. I thinkall but the most hardcore Kerouac fans, and even a good number of those, can skip this one.

The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952)

Ten years before he became Atticus Finch, Gregory Peck played the role of Harry Street in the adaptation of Hemingway’s classic short story. But while it starts off true enough to the original—the necrotic leg injury, the vultures, the desperate wait for a plane—it takes some liberties that rubbed me the wrong way. For one, the flashback action was just a cheap rehash of Hemingway’s own life story: Spanish Civil War, expat Paris, big game hunting, bullfights in Pamplona. I guess if you’re trying to get Hemingway nuts into the theater, that’s one way to do it. But it cheapens the work of fiction that’s supposed to be played out on screen. 

And while the trail of tortured romances opened up roles for Ava Gardner and Susan Hayward, that’s not what the story’s really about. Snows  is about examining one’s life, finding it wanting, resolving to change and redeem oneself… only to have the chance whisked away at the last second. Bittersweet brilliance. Which brings me to the most egregious crime of all: the ending. Instead of flying off into the metaphorical snows of Kilimanjaro, a peaceful resignation to death and dying, Harry Street (and his romance!) are saved. The plane arrives, the vultures disappear, and all’s well that ends well. I haven’t had a film betrayal like that since The Grapes of Wrath , the movie.

Makin' it Twain!

Here’s a fun fact for you: At a time when the average household income was less than $500 per year, that venerated man of the people, Mark Twain, had household expenses in excess of $30,000 per year. Sixty times the median. In today’s dollars,  that would be more than $3,000,000 per year. And he still  had to hit the lecture circuit to make ends meet.

Literary Devices with Edward Abbey

A couple choice excerpts from Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang:

“They roared down the high-centered road, bristly blackbrush and spiny prickly pear clawing at the truck along the greasy perineum of its General Motors crotch.”

“The enemy, only a few miles behind, out of sight but closing the gap, spurred on with extra vigor by the indignity of singed bottoms, scorched automotive coccyges, seared differential scrota, would soon come round the last bend in the trail and see them—Hayduke and Smith, Inc.—crawling slow and beetle-like up this improbable exit way.”

Gotta admit, the man has a way with words. Of course, the technical  term for this literary device is "anthropomorphization." And for those interested in further study, its commercial application, can be explored here.

J.K. Rowling & Little Brown: 1, Honest Business Practices: 0

In case you haven’t heard, J.K. Rowling has been unmasked as the true identity behind “Robert Galbraith,” a Little Brown author who recently released a detective novel to mostly positive reviews. The news is being hailed far and wide as the greatest literary coup since Stephen King took up the pen name “Richard Bachman” back in the 80s. But there’s an important question no one is asking: Is this kind of thing actually ethical?

Because to me it stinks to high heaven.

Not the use of a pen name, mind you. Let me state at the outset that I am all for  the use of pen names. If an author has a reason to stay incognito, power to them. We’ve covered that topic here. But when the publisher  goes so far as to fabricate an author bio in order to lend credibility to an unknown author, I have to admit that as a reader, I’m a little miffed. Here is what Little Brown says about Mr. Galbraith while pitching his book on their site:

“A remarkable debut…” (LIE)

“Robert Galbraith is married with two sons. (LIE) After several years with the Royal Military Police (LIE), he was attached to the SIB (Special Investigation Branch) (LIE), the plain-clothes branch of the RMP. He left the military in 2003 (LIE) and has been working since then in the civilian security industry. (LIE) The idea for protagonist Cormoran Strike grew directly out of his own experiences and those of his military friends who have returned to the civilian world. (LIE) Robert Galbraith is a pseudonym. (TRUE! But all the lies above kind of lead us to believe the pseudonym is simply a necessity in Galbraith’s line of work, so… LIE!)

Did the fabrications accomplish what Little Brown wanted it to? Sure. Getting reviewed as a “major new talent,” or having your work praised as an “auspicious-” or “stellar-” or “remarkably mature debut” is a heckuvalot better than getting reviews that say, “J.K. Rowling seems to have righted the ship after her last non-Harry Potter project, which actually had a lot of her fans quite worried.” But it’s patently dishonest. Fiction is what’s inside the book. We expect the packaging and the credentials on the outside to represent the publisher’s best, but honest, effort to get us to buy what’s inside. Lying to me about the author’s background so that I’m more likely to pick up the book, is two or three kinds of shady.

After all, where do we draw the line? Can a publisher pull non-existent blurbs out of thin air to sway potential readers? Can they throw “New York Times Bestseller” on the cover if it will help them sell copies? How about an Oprah’s Book Club seal? Or “Winner of the Man-Booker Prize?” Made-up snippets from national media outlets? Or outlets that sound like national media authorities?

I’m happy the Rowling’s written a great book, but as long she  uses snake oil salesmen to hawk it, I’m not buying.

Another Month in the Can!

Yesterday marked the end of our 19^th month on the web. That’s well over 500 posts in just over a year and a half. Thank you to all our regular, intermittent, and accidental readers. We hope you keep coming back for more. Above are the authors we’ve mentioned in the past 30 days, and below are the five most popular posts from that period:

• Practice Shelf Actualization this Summer— sincerely, Science
• The Tour (de France, in literature)
• What They Were Reading: Wallace Stegner
• Review:The Sea Is My Brother, by Jack Kerouac
• Don’t let me make you sad

And, as always, some of the many-splendored search terms that led people here:

• Delicate nostrils  >>  Madame Bovary had them
• Doesn’t W.B. Yeats look like Steve Martin?  >>   Yes. Yes he does.
• B-25 Mitchell crew armor  >>  In the nose with Captain Yodarian
• First line establishes character  >>  Well, yes. It certainly can.
• Voice of Rudyard Kipling  >>  Retiring bank clerk? sniveling apothecary?
• Art Garfunkel in sunglasses  >>  With sunglasses you might not see thedifference
• Lord Jim Analysis  >>  leads you here, or here, or maybe here
• Chris McCandless route Krakauer  >>  our first maps post
• Great white whale  >>  Mine was the great white whale himself
• Jane Eyre vs. Wuthering Heights  >>  The epic beatdown

"A Ruse of One's Own" or Virginia Woolf: Practical Joker

You learn something new every day. Today, for example, I learned that 28 year old Virginia Woolf helped perpetrate a hoax on the British Navy that got attention around the world. Not merely as a planner or supporter, mind you, but as a cross-dressing imposter prince in black-face. That’s right. Take a closer look at that sleight fellow on the far left below. That is not  an Abyssinian prince. But the officers of the HMS Dreadnought thought it was. And hilarity ensued.

You can read more about the Dreadnought Hoax here and here. But my favorite detail is this: the Navy couldn’t scrounge up an Abyssinian flag anywhere, so the Honor Guard used the flag and national anthem of Zanzibar. Naturally.

—Via Retronaut

Buyer Beware: Vol. 3

This isn’t  the book you’re looking for…

Try this one instead:

Review: Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

In his book Palm Sunday, Kurt Vonnegut once gave out letter grades to his own works. He handed out some Bs, Cs and Ds, but he also gave Mother Night , God Bless You Mr. Rosewater  and Jailbird  a grade of “A.” Of those, I’ve only read Mother Night , and absolutely loved it. So far so good.

To two other books, he awarded “A+”s:  Slaughterhouse-Five , which is kind of a universally accepted no-brainer, and Cat’s Cradle , which I hadn’t read until this week. So the question I naturally kept asking myself was this:  is Cat’s Cradle  really as good as Slaughterhouse–Five? And is it really better than Mother Night ?

And even though it was nominated for a Hugo Award, the answer I kept coming back to is… not a chance. That doesn’t mean it’s bad, mind you, but I don’t think it really measures up.  Now, it’s certainly as funny as either one of them, but I just got the impression it wasn’t really about  anything.

He starts out strong, unraveling a mystery for the reader that is equal parts family history and geopolitical intrigue, and piecing together the fictional religion of Bokononism, which is wildly entertaining and has, I suppose, some decent satirical purposes. But from there we’re just kind of sucked through a vortex where everything happens so suddenly, and ends so quickly, that it  almost left me with the impression  Vonnegut was too bored to follow through and make it a book about something important. Either that, or he wasn’t sure how to end it, so he just cut it short in a “betcha-didn’t-see-that-coming” sort of a way.

Anyway, it’d be fine as a beach read. It packs a few punches, and it will definitely make you laugh. But if you’re looking for A-level Vonnegut, you might want to look elsewhere. Just my $0.02.

Meeting your literary hero...

I’ve always wondered, would it go something like this?

"Don't let me make you sad"

"Really our Fourth of July is our day of mourning, our day of sorrow. Fifty thousand people who have lost friends, or who have had friends crippled, receive that Fourth of July, when it comes, as a day of mourning for the losses they have sustained in their families.

“I have suffered in that way myself. I have had relatives killed in that way. One was in Chicago years ago—an uncle of mine, just as good an uncle as I have ever had, and I had lots of them—yes, uncles to burn, uncles to spare. This poor uncle, full of patriotism, opened his mouth to hurrah, and a rocket went down his throat. Before that man could ask for a drink of water to quench that thing, it blew up and scattered him all, over the forty-five States, and—really, now, this is true—I know about it myself—twenty-four hours after that it was raining buttons, recognizable as his, on the Atlantic seaboard. A person cannot have a disaster like that and be entirely cheerful the rest of his life. I had another uncle, on an entirely different Fourth of July, who was blown up that way, and really it trimmed him as it would a tree. He had hardly a limb left on him anywhere. All we have left now is an expurgated edition of that uncle. But never mind about these things; they are merely passing matters. Don't let me make you sad.”

—from “Independence Day”, a speech made by Mark Twain July 4^th, 1907

I - wish - he - were - just - joking ...

Happy Fourth!

“I began to occupy my house on the 4^th of July, as soon as it was boarded and roofed…”

—from Walden , by Henry David Thoreau

“Noiseless as a flower opening, a rocket burst above the hills. She sat up, watching the white stars curve and fall. Then BOOM! All the night air between her and the town, two and a half miles of it, trembled with the delayed report.

“…Another rocket seared across the sky at an angle and bloomed with hanging green balls. Another went up through the green shower and burst into an umbrella of red. Then three together, all white. Then one that winked hotly but did not flower. BOOM! Went the cushioning air. BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

“…Above the town, streaks of smoke were lighted by the rocket bursts. Under the sodden booming she heard a continuous musketry of firecrackers, big and little. She could imagine the boys and drunken men who would be darting around through the crowds on the Capitol grounds throwing cannon crackers under the feet of tied horses and dressed-up girls, and into the buggies of the dignified.

“…And yet from a distance how beautiful! There was a colored mist all above the unseen city, as if the smoke of the explosions were now lighted by fires from below.”

—from Angle of Repose , by Wallace Stegner

Author Look-Alikes: Vol. 17

Theodore Dreiser and Carl Reiner. If you don’t see it, I don’t know what to tell you:

Zora Neale Hurston and Queen Latifah: the cheekbones, the nose, the smile, the eyes… it’s all there:

Vladimir Nabokov and Alfred Hitchcock are not a bad match:

Neither are Alexander Solzhenytsin and Edward Norton Jr.:

And when I look at this picture of Charles Dickens all I hear is Vincent Schiavelli screaming for me to get off his train:

"A platinum blond Jesus with spaniel eyes"

"During my trip to Ilium and to points beyond—a two-week expedition bridging Christmas—I let a poor poet named Sherman Krebbs have my New York City apartment free. My second wife had left me on the grounds that I was too pessimistic for an optimist to live with.

"Krebbs was a bearded man, a platinum blond Jesus with spaniel eyes. He was no close friend of mine. I had met him at a cocktail party where he presented himself as National Chairman of Poets and Painters for Immediate Nuclear War. He begged for shelter, not necessarily bomb proof, and it happened that I had some.

"When I returned to my apartment, still twanging with the puzzling spiritual implications of the unclaimed stone angel in Ilium, I found my apartment wrecked by a nihilistic debauch. Krebbs was gone; but, before leaving, he had run up three-hundred-dollars’ worth of long-distance calls, set my couch on fire in five places, killed my cat and my avocado tree, and torn the door off my medicine cabinet.

"He wrote this poem, in what proved to be excrement, on the yellow linoleum floor of my kitchen:

"I have a kitchen.

But it is not a complete kitchen.

I will not be truly gay

Until I have a

Dispose-all."

—from Cat’s Cradle , by Kurt Vonnegut

What's a Marmon?

Glad you asked:

Everything about that behemoth was an anachronism—hand choke, starter button on the floor, a switch instead of a key, a hinged hood that lifted up on both sides, a chrome radiator cap in the form of a naked lady who leaned into the wind. Sid unscrewed the lady, stuck his finger down the pipe, and screwed her back on. He lifted one side of the hood and found the dipstick and pulled it out and carried it to the light and squinted at it and brought it back. With one foot he flattened the folding luggage rack on the running board, opened the door, and climbed in. Squinting down into the shadow, he pulled out the choke. I heard his foot pump the throttle three times.

“Hail Mary full of grease,” he said, and stepped on the starter.

A subterranean grinding, heavy and hoarse. I could imagine pistons the size of gallon jugs trying to move in the cylinders. Sid took his foot off the starter, adjusted the choke, and stepped down again. The grinding resumed, went on patiently for a good minute, grew slower, weakened. Another tired half turn—uh-RUG!—and on the last juice from the battery she coughed, raced, faded, caught again, and was running.

“Ha!” Sid said. He sat nursing her, easing the choke in until she talked to us comfortable. Looking in under the propped hood I could see that the engine was not twelve in line, as I had always half believed, but a V-16. It would have pulled a fire truck. At every stroke a stream of gasoline as thick as my finger must be pulsing through the carburetor. She panted at us in the whiskey-and-emphysema whisper of an Edith Wharton dowager. “Dollar-dollar-dollar-dollar-dollar,” the Marmon said.

—from Crossing to Safety , by Wallace Stegner

Dr. Breed told me that Dr. Hoenikker, as a very young man, had simply abandoned his car in Ilium traffic one morning.

“The police, trying to find out what was holding up traffic,” he said, “found Felix’s car in the middle of everything, its motor running, a cigar burning in the ash tray, fresh flowers in the vases . . .”

“Vases?”

“It was a Marmon, about the size of a switch engine. It had little cut-glass vases on the doorposts, and Felix’s wife used to put fresh flowers in the vases every morning. And there that car was in the middle of traffic.”

“Like the Marie Celeste ,” I suggested.

—from Cat’s Cradle , by Kurt Vonnegut

The Tour!

I gave pretty short shrift to Roland Barthes’ Mythologies  when I “reviewed” it last year. But since the Tour de France is kicking off tomorrow, I thought I’d share an excerpt from the book on just that subject—to give you a taste for his analysis (with a few paragraph breaks inserted for readability):

“The Tour’s geography, too, is entirely subject to the epic necessity of ordeal. Elements and terrain are personified, for it is against them that man measures himself, and as in every epic it is important that the struggle should match equal measures: man is therefore naturalized; Nature, humanized. 

"The gradients are wicked, reduced to difficult or deadly percentages, and the relays-each of which has the unity of a chapter in a novel (we are given, in effect, an epic duration, an additive sequence of absolute crises and not the dialectical progression of a single conflict, as in tragic duration)- the relays are above all physical characters, successive enemies, individualized by that combination of morphology and morality which defines an epic Nature. The relay is hairy, sticky, burnt out, bristling, etc., all adjectives which belong to an existential order of qualification and seek to indicate that the racer is at grips not with some natural difficulty but with a veritable theme of existence, a substantial theme in which he engages, by a single impulse, his perception and his judgement.”

“The dynamics of the Tour itself are obviously presented as a battle, but its confrontation being of a special kind, this battle is dramatic only by its décor or its marches, not strictly speaking by its shocks.

"Doubtless, the Tour is comparable to a modern army, defined by the importance of its materiel and the number of its servants; it knows murderous episodes, national funks, and the hero confronts his ordeal in a Cesarian state, close the divine calm familiar to Hugo’s Napolean (“Gem plunged clear-eyed into the dangerous descent above Monte Carlo”). 

"Still, the very action of the conflict remains difficult to grasp and does not permit itself to be established in duration. As a matter of fact, the dynamics of the Tour knows only four movements: to lead, to follow, to escape, to collapse. 

"To lead is the hardest action, but also the most useless; to lead is always to sacrifice oneself; it is pure heroism, destined to parade character much more than to assure results; in the Tour, panache does not pay directly, it is usually reduced by collective tactics. To follow, on the contrary, is always a little cowardly, a little treacherous, pertaining to an ambition unconcerned with honor: to follow to excess, with provocation, openly becomes a part of Evil (shame to the “wheel-suckers”). 

"To escape is a poetic episode meant to illustrate a voluntary solitude, though on unlikely to be effective, for the racer is almost always caught up with, but glorious in porportion to the kind of useless honor which sustains it (solitary escapade of the Spaniard Alomar: withdrawal, hautiness, the hero’s Catilianism a la Motherlant). Collapse prefigures abandon, it is always horrible and saddens the public like a disaster. On Mount Ventoux, certain collapses have assumed a “Hiroshimatic” character. These four movements are obviously dramatized, cast into the emphatic vocabulary of the crisis; often it is one of them, in the form of an image, which gives its name to the relay, as to the chapter of the novel (Title: Kubler’s Tumultuous Grind). Language’s role is enormous here, it is language which gives the event- ineffable because ceaselessly dissolved into duration-the epic promotion which allows it to be solidified.”

—from Mythologies , by Roland Barthes

"People will come, Ray."

I am not a big baseball guy. And I don’t usually go in for magical realism. But… BUT—rarely a summer goes by that I don’t sit down and watch “Field of Dreams.”  It’s one of the few movies that can still make me cry like a little girl.

Now, you may know that the film is based on a book called Shoeless Joe , by W.P. Kinsella. And if you know that, then you probably know (or can guess) that the character of Terrance Mann was originally written as real-life recluse J.D. Salinger. But what you may not  know, is that we have none other than Salinger himself to thank for James Earl Jones’s memorable portrayal of Terrance Mann.  The producers were so worried about a lawsuit from Salinger, that they renamed the character and changed up his race. I, for one, don’t think you can argue with the results:

Buyer Beware: Vol. 2

This isn’t  the book you’re looking for…

Try this one instead:

Review: The Sea is My Brother, by Jack Kerouac

A week or two ago I picked up The Sea is My Brother,  the so-called “lost” novel by Jack Kerouac, and a thinly veiled account of his days in the merchant marine.

I’ve been told by people who have dipped further into the Kerouac mystique than I have, that while  “good” Kerouac is great,  “bad” Kerouac is pretty terrible. For evidence, I was invited to read Visions of Cody  or Big Sur  —each of which reportedly indulges in drug-induced poetry binges for hundreds of pages. I have not read them, and probably never will. But having loved On the Road  so much, I was intrigued to find out just how an early  Kerouac might read.

Turns out it’s pretty uneven. There are small flashes of the style that would evolve in later years, but he spends way too much time cataloguing how many beers each of the characters consume at a sitting, or letting one of them wax philosophical about life and literature in a way that is pretty obviously a soapbox for the author rather than believable dialogue. Oh, and every tenth sentence ends with an all-too-enthusiastic “, by George!” Not only that, but the story is pretty unbelievable (a college professor is granted a sabbatical to ship out to sea in the middle of the war with about 15 minutes’ notice) and there are lots of little mistakes (a character smokes his last cigarette and then produces another a minute later.)

Even the larger narrative feels unbalanced. With a title like The Sea is My Brother , you’d expect the characters to put out to sea, right? Well, it finally happens seven eighths of the way through the book. The rest of it is just a poor man’s On the Road , a hitchhiking debauch from Manhatten to Boston, where the characters are flat broke, but always magically coming  up with food, liquor, cigarettes and costly government documents out of thin air. And while the principals do manage to move from point A to point B, it’s really more of a loose sketch than a fully developed novel. In all honesty, I kinda wish I had this one back. I’ll bet Kerouac does, too.

What They Were Reading: Wallace Stegner

From a 1974 interview between James Day and “Wally” Stegner. The whole thing is fascinating, but the really good stuff starts at about the 22 minute mark:

STEGNER: I think probably there’s no point in teaching people who don’t have a noticeable gift. Often there’s no point in teaching people who do  have a noticeable gift, if they don’t have those qualities of character, or neurosis or whatever it is that keep them at it. If they can be stopped, they’ll stop.

DAY: What is the gift?

STEGNER: The gift is partly of the senses, I think. It’s basically a gift of the senses, a gift of observing and also, I suppose this is William James’ doctrine, the gift of quick association so that one thing suggests another and things go together to become something new and ahead. I’m not a psychologist and you’d better not follow my formula, but I think it has to do with senses in the first instance. And then it has to do with the gift of words. A lot of writers have been writers of some consequence, however, without the gift of words-Dreiser being one. He just comes over you like a tank leaving his tread tracks in your lawn, and he clanks and grinds and so on, but he does tear up your lawn alright. And he never wrote a good sentence in his life. Not a one, I think.

DAY: So how do you measure good fiction then?

STEGNER: I think the measure should be nothing that one person defines. I can tell you the kind of fiction that I like. That’s about the best I can do, and the kind of fiction that I like is a kind of fiction which is not only perceptive, and which has people in it who are plausible people, and which has some relation to real life.

DAY: It’s important to you that it do relate to real people.

STEGNER: Oh yes, I’m a realist. I never get over that. I told you I was a nineteenth century character. I don’t know what it’s about unless it’s about real life. I don’t see any point in turning real life upside down, unless what you’re doing gives you a better look at real life, like looking at a view through your spraddled legs. That’s alright. I don’t mind that. But the ultimate thing is that illusion of reality, and some kind of commentary on reality. So I would guess that anybody who has something to say about reality, who can say it in memorable ways is going to appeal to me. And sometimes they get away with it even if they can’t say it in memorable ways. If they have, as Dreiser had, every gift of the novelist, except the verbal gift. He’s a great feeler. He knows how people feel in certain situations, and he is structurally, a man who can build bridges that reach from here to there. They go from bank to bank. But I guess if I were picking the kinds of people that I like best, what is good fiction, I would pick people like Checkov, Conrad, Turgenev. I seem to be very Slavic about it. Those are the people I’d take to my desert island if I had to take some three.

Feature Film Friday: Salinger

This isn’t technically a feature film, but it’s the trailer for one. And it looks amazing. Can’t wait:

Title Chase: The Sea is My Brother, by Jack Kerouac

I've been working my way through Kerouac's first and, until it was released posthumously two years ago, rightly unpublished, novel The Sea is My Brother . The book draws on Kerouac's own brief experience in the Merchant Marine. Or, at least, that's what I thought it would be about. Here's where the title comes from:

“Perhaps the old adage, “We’re all in the same boat” went without saying in the Merchant Marine and seamen resigned themselves to one another quite philosophically. And of course, like the slogan he had heard of—a famous placard above the door of the Boston Seamen’s Club—which said, very simply, that all those who passed under the arch of the door entered into the Brotherhood of the Sea—these men considered the sea a great leveler, a united force, a master comrade brooding over their common loyalties.”

I'll have more to say about the book later on, but I thought the title was a good one. That is, until you consider the make-up of the book:

Perhaps Kerouac's "brief experience" in the Merchant Marine was briefer than we thought. Afterall, we know his active duty in the US Navy lasted all of 8 days before he was diagnosed with dementia praecox and honorably discharged.

Author Look-Alikes: Vol. 16

Shave off Sherwood Anderson’s eyebrows and you’ve got Chris Cooper:

Turn Gustave Flaubert’s hair white and you’ve got Wilford “Diabeetus” Brimley:

Pump E.E. Cummings full of red blood cells and performance-enhancing drugs and you’ve got Lance Armstrong:

Give Saki a smirk and a wristwatch and you've got Bob Hope :

Give Somerset Maugham a consiglieri and a 'family' of hired goons and you've got Don Corleone:

Practice Shelf Actualization This Summer-- sincerely, Science

Summer's here, and people's summer reading recommendations are out in full force. So I thought why not add one of my own. Here it is: 

Read something good. Read something challenging. Read a classic or two.

In the world of lay book bloggers I’ve noticed some pretty vociferous opposition to the notion that people should read “good” books instead of dividing all their time between wildly popular vampire novels and the latest blockbuster S&M fantasy. Those who advocate reading the so-called classics or high-minded literary fiction often get labled as snobs for doing so. The basic argument against these people seems to be that it doesn’t matter what  folks read, as long as they are reading (which, they always fail to realize, is merely snobbery of a different sort.)

I guess I can get on board with that argument… to a point. Reading is  an essential life skill that improves the lives of those who possess it. And reading just about anything will foster that skill. But does it really not matter what  we read?

That’s like saying that eating is essential your health and wellbeing, but that it doesn’t really matter what  you eat so long as you are eating. Nevermind that a constant diet of Big Macs and Twinkie chasers (may they rest in peace!) will eventually land you in home hospice care with an oxygen tube up your nose and a nurse to administer sponge baths to the folds and crevices you can no longer reach by yourself.

I don’t begrudge anyone the hot new Dystopian Young Adult title or the occassional Epistolary Urban Fantasy Steampunk Romance, just like I don’t deprive myself of inordinate amounts of chocolate chip cookie dough or obstain from Black Raspberry Dark Chocolate Chunk ice cream. But sheesh, if that’s all your reading? (Or eating?) It’s time to recalibrate.

Now, would I rather have my kids read a crappy book, than spend the afternoon shooting heroine? Sure. No question. But would I rather have my kids read a crappy book, than spend the afternoon shooting hoops? Probably not.

And yes, this all depends on what your definition of ‘classic’ is, or what ‘good’ or ‘crappy’ mean to you in terms of books. But let’s be honest, it’s not tough to recognize challenging fiction, or a brainless beachread, when you see it. So, read something that will challenge you. Read something that has stood the test of time. Read a classic. And this isn’t me being a book snob, this is backed up by science. Check this out:

“Researchers at the University of Liverpool found that serious literature catches the reader's attention and triggers moments of self-reflection.”

"...Serious literature acts like a rocket-booster to the brain. The research shows the power of literature to shift mental pathways, to create new thoughts, shapes and connections in the young and the staid alike," Philip Davis, an English professor who worked on the study with the university's magnetic resonance centre, said.”

“...The academics were able to study the brain activity as readers responded to each word, and noticed how it 'lit up' as they encountered unusual words, surprising phrases or difficult sentence structure.”

“...The research also found poetry, in particular, increased activity in the right hemisphere of the brain, an area concerned with 'autobiographical memory', which helped the reader to reflect on and reappraise their own experiences in light of what they had read.”

“The academics said this meant the classics were more useful than self-help books.”

Who can argue with that?  Improve yourself. Improve your shelf.