What I’ve Been Reading - Amsterdam

April 30, 2009


What I’ve read:
Amsterdam - Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan - AmsterdamI’m risking a lot with this post – they might kick me out of the “pretending to be a literary snob” club. I just read Ian McEwan’s Amsterdam – winner of the Booker Prize, England’s top literary award. And I have just one question.

Was it a down year for novels? Because I can’t, for the life of me, figure out how this is award-worthy.

It’s funny. I typically, without fail, love award winning books. If you look at my ten favorite books of the past ten years, five Pulitzers are accounted for (Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies, and John Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom [which accounts for two: Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest]).

And that’s not even putting another favorite – The Grapes of Wrath – in the top ten.

But Amsterdam fell flat for me. Really flat. Though, because I’m a novice book reviewer and self-taught critic, I have trouble expressing what exactly it was that I found so…well…

Meh.

Amsterdam is a nice novel. It’s well written. It’s at times haughty, at times funny. It’s everything you’d want in a quick summer read, I guess – intrigue, death, sex, newspapers and grand orchestras. Maybe not so much of those last two, but a lot of the first three.

The story is simple – one woman dies, three ex-lovers meet, two of the ex-lovers plot revenge against the third. The two are a newspaper editor and a composer, the third is an aspiring Prime Minister.

The newspaper person gets some naughty pictures of the aspiring Prime Minister. The composer isn’t sure it’s such a good idea. Hilarity ensues.

Except that’s not what happens. No hilarity ensues – in fact, all we get is a desperate attempt by the newspaper person to slander the aspiring Prime Minister, while (despite a distracting and seemingly unrelated interruption) the composer continues to compose.

It’s a morality tale, or so I’m told. I just read it because it seemed quick, and because I absolutely adored McEwan’s Atonement – another great novel I’ve read in the past ten years. And, upon finishing it, when I had finally figured out how silly and contrived the ending of the book was, I put the book down and just sat there.

Not in wonder, as I have with great books, but in confusion.

I thought this guy was otherworldly. This book seems so pedestrian.

Which, I guess, leads to another question.

Am I missing something?

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What I’ve Been Reading - Unaccustomed Earth

April 16, 2009


What I’ve read:
Unaccustomed Earth - Jhumpa Lahiri

I’ve never been to India. I’ve never been to the east coast, or attended an Ivy League school. I’ve never traveled up and down the coast searching my soul. I’ve never had parents who were born in another country, who couldn’t understand why I was unwilling to honor their traditions, no matter how outdated and out of style.

Yet, I feel like, given the chance, I could perform in these situations without fail, my mind fully understanding the consequences of each action. I could be a second-generation Indian living in Boston. I could travel to Calcutta and know what it feels like to be both privileged and brilliant.

Thanks, Jhumpa.

Unaccustomed EarthJhumpa Lahiri – who won the Pulitzer for her first book of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies – has a style that’s genuine, not tricky or cute. There’s no mind-bending literary allusions, no sideways words or slight of hand. It’s all honest; great writing from a mind that seems to understand every aspect of social and psychological growth, from child to adult.

Unaccustomed Earth is like Interpreter of Maladies in that it’s a book of short stories. It’s unlike Interpreter in that there’s a common theme throughout each story: the chasm that separates parents born in India from their largely Americanized children. It’s this theme that makes everything so relatable. After all, the reader gets several chances to capture the feeling of confusion in living someplace new, or the pained development of a college student as he struggles to ditch his old culture in preference to the new.

The scenes seem the same – private school education, solemn fathers, traditional mothers, young adults struggling to understand their place between two cultures. But it’s the emotion that makes each story so phenomenal. These are studies into the minds of multi-continental misfits; unable to effectively fit into a mold, they move from adoration to frustration in just pages. They are human, as relatable as any characters I’ve ever read.

What I remember most about Lahiri’s stories is their finality. Often, short stories are left open-ended, leaving the reader to deduct each character’s final outcome through a series of hints. It’s what makes short stories so creative – they can begin and end at any point.

Lahiri, on the other hand, leaves only a slight opening, summing up each story with some of the most powerful final words I’ve ever read. They’re still open ended, but they close in a way that brings conclusion, the stories ending not like a bottle with the bottom cut out, but like a cloth bag with a string tied around it.

I thought I would be frustrated, reading about the same type of character over and over again across eight stories. Instead, it helped me focus. And by the end, I had nothing but praise.

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What I’ve Been Reading: McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern #30

March 27, 2009


What I’ve read:
McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern #30 - Dave Eggers (editor)

And here we are, just one day later, with another What I’ve Been Reading book report.

The reason behind the suddenness of this one has a lot to do with why I had given up on the WIBR format as it was. I had finished both Liar’s Poker and Outliers a few weeks ago. But rounding up the energy to write the entire seventeen page diatribe was difficult, especially when I’m – you know – busy.

So I made the decision to do these one book at a time. With that in my head, I put off writing about the two books even longer – long enough for me to finish yet another book in the meantime.

Thankfully, this book was just another McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, a short story vice I have subscribed to for a few years (and talked about on this site for as long).

With short story collections like these, it’s difficult to summarize, mainly because it’s a grab bag of authors and styles and stories. This one, with it’s Obama-centric cover of relief, is no different. It does, however, feature a Story by a Famous Person. Two or three issues ago, it was Stephen King (Ah! A Truly Famous Person in the hallowed pages of McSweeneys! What a Treat!). This time, it’s Michael Cera.

Yeah. Juno Michael Cera. Big Fancy Movie Star Michael Cera. The one guy who was poised to derail the entire idea of an Arrested Development feature film. That Michael Cera.

I thought to myself, “What does THIS guy think he’s doing? Where does he get off, trying to be an alternacool indie actor AND a thoughtful super independent writer?”

“You can’t be both Casey Affleck and David Foster Wallace, my friend. You can’t have your cake and shit where you eat, too.”

I may have gotten the idioms messed up. I dunno. All I do know is that I wanted to hate the Michael Cera story, “Pinecone.” I really did.

But I didn’t. It was good. Not fantastic – it wouldn’t go into my fictional list of great short stories, a list I have been planning to create for several years – but good.

Funny enough, a story earlier in the collection came to mind. By Kevin Moffett (a McSweeney’s regular), “Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events” is about a son who struggles to write a great story, only to find that his father, who is not classically trained, who is just dabbling in the art of storytelling, has taken up writing as a hobby and blown his son out of the water. It’s a fantastic story, and it hit me hard – the writers block, the thoughts of insufficiency, all of it.

The son wants to hate his father’s stories – he doesn’t want to admit that his father has talent. But he does. And that’s how I felt with Michael Cera. I wanted to hate the story, but I couldn’t.

Ugh. Can you believe that? Where’s the passion?

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What I’ve Been Reading: Outliers/Liar’s Poker

March 26, 2009


What I’ve Read:
Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
Liar’s Poker by Michael Lewis

There are two ways to move ahead in life: work with privilege, or work with luck.

In the case of Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, it’s privilege. In the case of Michael Lewis’s Liar’s Poker, it’s luck.

Well, maybe that’s being too general. No, it is being too general.

But first, let me tell you what I’m doing here.

For over three years, I’ve written a monthly column about what I’ve been reading, cleverly titled “What I’ve Been Reading.” They were long, winding rambles that touched on everything from the reasons I chose the book to the tangents I found myself trailing off to while reading it. It touched upon everything I read and purchased over the past month.

It was a tome, and no one read it.

After a while – especially recently – I became less concerned with the Web version of “What I’ve Been Reading.” (It started as a pitched book column for Prime Magazine, which was eventually picked up and run for a year.) It kept getting longer and longer, and after writing it I’d be so exhausted I wouldn’t bother editing it, and – like I said – no one read it anyway.

So last year, I went a month without it. On accident: the book I had read literally took me two months, and what was I going to write about after the first month – how I had made it halfway through a book? No. Instead, I just skipped the column.

No one noticed. Which set the plan to do away with the column in motion.

The reason I started it – and the reason I keep writing about books – is because, while I loved books, I had lost the discipline it took to be an avid reader. I simply purchased without making time to read, and the idea of writing about what I wrote about gave me an incentive to get back on track.

I did. And, despite a child and new hobbies, I still am.

Which brings us to now. “What I’ve Been Reading” isn’t going away. It’s just not going to be a month-by-month laundry list of books I’ve read. Instead, it’s going to be on a book-by-book basis. Sometimes they’ll be mashed together, if they’re similar. Sometimes they’ll be on their own. They’ll be short. Shorter, at least, but at times short.

Getting to this point in my writing career has been more Outliers than Liar’s Poker. In Gladwell’s book, the most successful people aren’t lucky – they’re privileged. At least, they’re privileged in that they found themselves with opportunities that gave them a slight advantage over others.

Bill Gates received lucky chances in learning computers that others did not – and he took advantage of them. Hockey players born in an early part of the year take advantage of being the oldest in an age (and, therefore, bigger and stronger) and, in the major leagues, this is shown by a higher number of early-year birthdates.

But it’s not just the advantages. It’s the time spent as well. You don’t just get something because you lucked into some opportunities. You also need to work hard at it. Asians can read numbers faster (due to the words they use in their language), but it’s a culture of hard work that makes them better at math. Hockey players who are born earlier in the year are more often moved up into advanced classes, but they still have to practice harder when they get to that level.

I started writing my column because I liked books. I had an interest. A new magazine started and I offered to write for it. I was proactive. I wrote when I could. The article became well liked. I gained confidence. I practiced, became better, and when a job opportunity arose I went after it, despite having no formal experience. I got the job because of a lack of competition, but I did so also because I had practiced and worked and proven myself at the right times. It’s all very Gladwellian.

Liar’s Poker shows the opposite side. Set in the mid 80s, when mortgage bonds and junk bonds came into being, Michael Lewis recounts his time at Solomon Brothers, a trading firm on Wall Street. Here, luck seemed to outplay hard work, though, just as in Outliers, both were needed.

I’ve loved Michael Lewis’s sports books (Moneyball and The Blind Side), and enjoyed Liar’s Poker as well. For two reasons, really. First, it gave me an understanding as to the complete awfulness of the financial markets – both in their unpredictability and in the boy’s club mentality that pervades the system. Second, it was funny. Michael Lewis doesn’t take himself too seriously. He knows he was great at what he did. But he also realizes the utter stupidity of what he did. He can laugh at himself because he was too good to be in there in the first place.

Liar’s Poker had emotion, while Outliers had head-scratching aha moments. Liar’s Poker had luck, while Outliers had privilege. Liar’s Poker was at times tedious, or at least it seemed that way to someone just learning complicated markets, without being boring. Outliers was always fast but at times coincidental.

Either way, both showed the value of chance and the value of persistence. Which made them equally interesting – and perfectly paired.

Oops. So much for a short review, huh?

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What I’ve Been Reading - January 2008

February 10, 2009


Books Acquired:
Unaccustomed Earth – Jhumpa Lahiri
Home – Marilynne Robinson
ABC3D – Marion Bataille
Watchmen – Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons
Liar’s Poker – Michael Lewis

Books Read:
Watchmen – Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons
Alphabet Juice – Roy Blount Jr.

Etymology
From the Greek for “the true sense of the word.” That goes back to what roots showed through a lot more than they do today. But just as you appreciate a vegetable more if you know how it grows, you have a better hold on a word if you use it in acknowledgment of its roots, its background, some of the soil still attached.

I flagged this definition from Roy Blount Jr.’s Alphabet Juice because it summed up my thoughts about words themselves this month, both how they work in a literal sense and how they relate to the actions of our nation, to life, to all aspects of art – not simply literature, but graphic mediums as well.

Of course, I’m late in writing about these words. Again. To be honest, I haven’t finished Alphabet Juice – a book I began before 2008 was distant memory. There are excuses, which I’ll get into. Because that’s what I do. I get into my excuses.

My first excuse was a magazine. I received a subscription to The Atlantic for Christmas from my mother. A subscription that I asked for out of the blue, actually. It just kind of popped into my head, like Ralphie’s football in A Christmas Story. Yet, in my case, the instant thought was valuable.

I had always wanted a magazine like this – not simply Sports Illustrated or Time, but something with a little traction. Something I could look forward to reading every month, cover to cover, in an effort to become more knowledgeable about life.

I thought I had that magazine with The Believer. (I didn’t. In that case, I wanted a fiction magazine, but realized I couldn’t handle the weekly onslaught of New Yorkers.) Now, I see that I finally do with The Atlantic. It gives me a wider view of the world – one that isn’t digested into bite sized chunks.

I don’t trust magazines. I’ve written about that before. But here I am, reading The Atlantic, literally from cover to cover. “Is this it?” I thought. “Is this the death knell to my reading habits?” Given the opportunity to read a heavy, solid book or the flimsy magazine on my bedstand, I chose the magazine every night until it I had completed it.

I’m an adult. I enjoyed it. Every word. I learned. Like taking short catnaps all day long, my eyes were opened without the grogginess of eight hours of straight sleep.

What I found was, in this time of political rebirth, I’m more receptive to news – to the news cycle, to my place in its coverage and, even more, its effects. I’ve taken the words that crop up from each article - each in depth hearing and each critical analysis – and discovered that their strength comes from deep in the roots of democracy, that these words are important not just because they are information, sweet information, but also because they are the very foundation of what makes this country great. Communication. A free transfer of ideas about any aspect of life.

A lot to learn from some liberal pinko news rag.

So there’s one distraction. A week of magazine reading. The other, I’m afraid, was a comic book.

Watchmen, which many may recognize as a big-budget blockbuster on its way to theaters sometimes in the near future, is more than a comic book, to be honest, much in the way Chris Ware’s sprawling masterpieces are more than just circles and squares.

Drawn in what I consider to be typical superhero style (but, let’s be honest, what do I know – I snobbishly read these for the art), Watchmen didn’t impress me with its visual aspects. This is, no doubt, because I am unaware of the skill needed to render a comic book – especially one of this size.

Instead, it was the writing that moved me. It was superhero done with a realistic slant – realizing full well that superheroes don’t really exist, and that if they did it would occur with real life consequences. Think Fortress of Solitude without the magic ring – instead, these superheroes go all out with gadgets, a keen mind or genetic manipulation. They exist as society allows them to.

Society isn’t really crazy about them, though. “Who Watches the Watchmen?” they ask. Superheroes have been banned for years, and only a rash of violence on those who used to be masked brings them back together. For one goal.

Save themselves.

It’s a feat of writing to take a jaded anti-superhero mind like my own and convince it that superheroes can be a fascinating subject. I love that Watchmen reads like a philosophical and psychological assessment of what superheroes would be if, in fact, real. And, I love the suspense, the twists, the characters. I love the allusion of more famous superheroes. (Night Owl is most certainly Batman, by my estimation.)

Most of all, though: I may have simply enjoyed reading a comic book.

Of course, there was the book I actually read (am still reading): Alphabet Juice, Roy Blount Jr.’s amusing romp through the English language. It’s a look at why words matter; at why I love them so much, despite my utter hackery at times. It covers syntax in a way that seems so blatantly obvious, causing me to rethink everything I knew about how I write. It covers rare words that I’ve never heard, and will promptly forget, but feel all the more blessed to have knowledge of no matter how fleeting.

Above all, it covers the peculiarities of our language, and how those peculiarities are part of what makes it so wonderful. Words are sonicky; they are verbal interpretations of what we’re experiencing. And some songs just seem to have a sonic connection. Other times, the roots are weird, the roads they’ve traveled long and winding, until the word isn’t even aware of it’s original home, like a seventh generation immigrant who can no longer remember where his ancestors came from.

It’s a love letter to English, really. Blount Jr. takes his dry delivery and crafts it lovingly into a tribute, checking each pretension and putting forth an amazing display of honor at being associated with the language.

And all parts of language, too; what I love about this book is that the wit stretches across the landscape of language. ROFL, teh and other newfangled slang mixes with discussions about syntax and grammar and proper writing. It’s the entire span of English, good or not. Origins to usage to trends. Txt to Texan to Tennyson.

Which gives me hope for the future. I can butcher the language all I want, and I can put off the What I’ve Been Reading recaps to my heart’s desire, but English will always be there. Language and words – the roots of our verbal communication – will forge along, subtly changing, but always moving forward.

It gives visual masterpieces a unique voice. It gives us the basis of communication that helps build a free society. And, at times, it just stands on its own – a testament to its own strength and a tribute to every word that’s come before, either lost or passed from use.

Each word, I’ve learned, is sacred. And I should never consider letting one go unwritten.

Tags: Books, Journalism, Literature, What I've Been Reading, Words, Writers, Writing |

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John Updike (1932-2009)

January 28, 2009


It’s yesterday’s news, but a sad farewell to John Updike, of whose Rabbit Angstrom books I found to be brilliant. So brilliant that they came in Runner-Up in the Great WIBR Championship Tournament.

I didn’t know him. I didn’t read a lot of his writing outside of the Rabbit books. I wasn’t an expert - can’t anoint him the greatest of all time or any other hullabaloo. I won’t blather on with some ham-handed tribute because, let’s face it, I’m unqualified to do that and hundreds of others will tackle the task with much more insight.

But I do think he was great. And anytime a great writer passes away - whether you care for his or her writing or not - the literary world and those who follow it understand that an amazing amount of creativity and spirit has passed away as well.

See also: What I’ve Been Reading - April 2007 and an offshoot of that article, my Corey Vilhauer Book of the Month for May 2007.

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What I’ve Been Reading - December 2008

January 8, 2009


Books Acquired:
McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern #29 – Dave Eggers (editor)
Alphabet Juice – Roy Blount, Jr.
Obama – David Mendell

Books Read:
McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern #29 – Dave Eggers (editor)
Paul’s Boutique – Dan LeRoy
Doolittle – Ben Sisario
Murmur – J. Niimi (not finished)

Well, Christmas has come and passed, and our New Year’s trip rode by quietly, at least in terms of Black Marks on Wood Pulp coverage, so I suppose it’s about time I tackled those books I read last month.

Our book collection grew thanks to a healthy helping of Christmas cheer. Kerrie’s parents added a biography of Obama by the Chicago Tribune’s David Mendell, who covered Obama from the beginning of his first Senate campaign. The book runs from that point until his announcement that he was running for President, and comes highly recommended.

On the other side of the family, my mother brought me Roy Blount, Jr.’s Alphabet Juice, which I have begun reading and absolutely love. More next month.

Of course, as I do quarterly, I received (and read) the newest edition of McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern – Issue 29 this time around. I’m sure I’ve exhausted my word count on this series, so I won’t go into it aside to say that it was as good as always, though there were no stories that made me sit up and say “OMG THAT WAS AMAZING” like Stephen King’s story from Issue 26 or Dan Chaon’s “The Bees” from The Better of McSweeney’s.

There were disturbing stories (Laura Hendrix’s “A Record of Our Debts” hit me hard enough to wish I hadn’t read it) and cute stories (Blaze Ginsberg’s “My Crush on Hillary Duff”) but nothing that stuck with me.

(Yeah, I just said it. “Cute.” As in, “oh, that’s cute, why don’t you stop back when you’ve started writing like a big kid.”

Ugh. I hate it when people call my stuff “cute.”)

This stuff was all secondary, though. The bulk of my month, in terms of both reading and writing, was devoted to my very first book proposal, a 3,000 plea to allow me the freedom of writing about something I probably was ill-equipped to write about yet feel completely convinced that I can do regardless. (Though I’ll never get approval with sentences like that.)

The subject is Continuum’s 33 1/3 series, a fun collection of books written by very fancy musicians or music expert, all focused on one classic album. The catalyst was an open call for proposals. The brewing idea was my plan to write a collection of short stories based on the 16 songs on Ween’s Chocolate and Cheese. The revelation: why not combine the two?

I’ve kept this quiet from you, dear blog reader. I didn’t mention this beforehand for a few reasons; mainly that I’ve tried as hard as I can to stop writing about writing. Or blogging about blogging. Or going too meta on your ass in every sense of the word. It’s hard, though – I love writing about myself. I really enjoy it. I like talking about myself too, in case you’re ever in a room with me and don’t have anything to say.

So I sort of hid the proposal, though I tweeted about a billion or so times – enough that what was supposed to be a subtle plea for assistance turned into a handful of great examples. (Thanks, Deane!) I kept the proposal in my head. I held back on writing it. I wanted it to be good, done a bit at a time, developed and rewritten until it was perfect; not a frantic race to the finish like most of my projects end up becoming.

To prepare, I purchased four 33 1/3 books, thinking that buy the time I was finished with the fourth I’d be fully prepared to begin. The books are short – they took only a day or two to read – and would give me a little insight on what the crew at Continuum was looking for.

I breezed through Dan LeRoy’s Paul’s Boutique, enjoying the chance to get a behind-the-scenes look into a classic album. A classic album that almost wasn’t, I learned; it was a hit with those who wrote about music, but commercially panned because it wasn’t License to Ill. In other words, it was critically revered, but no “Paul Revere.”

(Ahem.)

Ben Sisario’s Doolittle struck a similar chord. Instead of a straight forward history, Sisario went driving with Pixies front man Frank “Black Francis” Black, a rambling remembrance of one of indie rock’s most famous groups and albums. I didn’t see behind the curtain as much as into the living room of a “dysfunctionally brilliant” family.

After finishing one of the books, I’d find myself obsessed for days with the namesake album. I listened to Paul’s Boutique more this month than I had my entire life, and Doolittle finally broke out of the “one song wonder” pile and into a full rotation.

I got ready for more of the same with R.E.M.’s Murmur.

Alas, something had to give. My attention wasn’t what it should have been, maybe. Or perhaps I had soaked in all of the research I could handle and needed a break. Whatever it was, I never finished Murmur. I will (after all, I only have 25 pages left). But I didn’t.

J. Niimi’s Murmur wasn’t horrible, it just wasn’t written for me. It was written for a music geek who thought too long and too deep about his album of choice. Paul’s Boutique and Doolittle didn’t try to make the albums more than they were in real life – they just honored them, told the story and let the reader understand the thought process behind it. Murmur, on the other hand, from the first pages, took its album topic to another level, placing it high above everything else, as the savior of alternative rock. It outlined every detail of the recording to a level that only the most seasoned audio geeks would understand, and waxed poetic about the often incomprehensible lyrics.

Murmur’s not a bad album. But I don’t think I like it that much. Which made this book hard to swallow and, unfortunately, boring.

Though when I think about it, I may have learned more from Murmur than I did the others. I understand the power of knowing my audience. It might so happen that the Murmur audience is into that stuff, that I got caught with the wrong author and the wrong album. Murmur isn’t the same as Automatic for the People – the two albums come from nearly completely different bands. I shouldn’t have expected something that connected with me, because Murmur as an album doesn’t connect with me.

If I’m lucky enough to have my proposal approved – lucky enough, that is, to write a 30,000 word book on Ween’s Chocolate and Cheese for a modest advance and little to no royalties, a project done for the sake of doing it, for the idea of having a book published with my own ISBN number – I’ll hopefully capture the right mood. My audience is Ween fans and those with a passing interest in goofy, yet brilliant albums. I can’t take the subject too seriously because, let’s face it, that’s not who I’m writing for.

In school, we all learn how not to write. In doing so, we’re really learning how to write for a select audience – teaching professionals, those who are defined by rules and structure. It’s not until later that we realize that we can write for other people. That every audience deserves a different voice.

For some of us, it takes a lot longer.

Tags: Books, Literature, Music, What I've Been Reading, Writers, Writing |

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