WIBR Tournament - Round 3

April 28, 2008

The Final Four is right around the corner. Let’s cut this group in half, shall we?

The What I’ve Been Reading Tournament of Books
Bracket One:

Housekeeping - Marilynn Robinson
vs.
Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth - Chris Ware

It’s funny how we come across the books we love – and how random those choices can be.

Housekeeping was a book on the periphery of eventuality for a long time. Two years ago we celebrated Marilynn Robinson’s Gilead (which lost to Rabbit Angstrom in the first round) as the One Book South Dakota. I read it, wrote about it and fell in love with it.

It could have ended there, but a coworker told me that I absolutely had to read Housekeeping – how it’s better than Gilead (it’s not, but close) and blah blah. At the SD Festival of Books, I purchased a copy, had it signed by Robinson and placed it on my shelf.

It could have ended there, as well. But while I sat in the hospital waiting for Sierra to be born, I read Nick Hornby’s Housekeeping vs. The Dirt, a collection of his Believer articles. He read Housekeeping, loved it, and spurred me to reach for it on the shelf.

I read it and loved it too.

Jimmy Corrigan was fueled by some McSweeney’s love as well – he designed the cover of McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Issue 13, a book I received because McSweeney’s was six months late in fulfilling my subscription to Believer.

I loved his style and looked him up. I purchased a copy of Voltaire’s Candide simply because he designed the cover. And naturally, I had to have Jimmy Corrigan, widely accepted as his best work and one of the most respected graphic novels of the 2000s.

It didn’t sit on my shelf. Graphic novels are easy to read, so I started it just hours after taking it out of the box it was shipped in.

What I’m saying is that there’s a lot of love put into a book selection before it’s read. There’s the act of locating the books and the fight to make time to read it. Opinions are gauged, budgets planned, reviews read. After a while, you either impulsively pull the trigger by ordering it online or grabbing it at a store or you wait until you find it at a used bookstore, knowing you’d like to have it on hand but may never read it.

A lot of love went into both of these selections. A chain reaction of factors led to each book’s purchase and completion.

After all of that, it’s hard to shut one of these out. But I have to.

And it makes it so much harder to know that a Final Four showdown of Pulitzer Prize winners is being shot down as well.

The Winner: Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid on Earth – Chris Ware

Bracket Two:

The Whistling Season - Ivan Doig
vs.
East of Eden - John Steinbeck

The Whistling Season was selected as 2007’s One Book South Dakota (in fact, it was Gilead’s successor). East of Eden was selected as one of Oprah’s books – in fact, it was a return to the classics, if I remember correctly.

As much as I love One Book South Dakota, it doesn’t really carry the influence (though, admittedly, it also doesn’t carry the stigma) that Oprah’s book club does. Which leads part of me to want to go for the upset here, choosing The Whistling Season over the book everyone knew was going to make it to the Final Four.

But I can’t. Ivan’s a nice guy, and I refuse to let him hang in the wind. The true fact is that this bracket was as chalk as can be. There was no way East of Eden wasn’t going to make it out, which is pretty evident in the fact that I haven’t bothered to write anything about why I’ve chosen it.

Here’s why I choose East of Eden. Because it’s a wonderfully layered novel by one of the English language’s great masters, a book that doesn’t seem as long as it is, a book that looks deep into the psyche of an entire family of fuckups, a family that is doomed to repeat its own mistakes on and on ad infinitum.

It’s Steinbeck’s love letter to the place where he grew up. And it’s as candid as he ever really got (notwithstanding those times when he was accompanied by a dog. See: Travels with Charley.)

The Winner: East of Eden – John Steinbeck

Bracket Three:

Rabbit Angstrom - John Updike
vs.
The Road - Cormac McCarthy

Hey – speaking of Pulitzer Prize winners, here’s two! In fact, four of the final eight have all won Pulitzer Prizes (these two, Steinbeck and Marilynn Robinson). What heady company!

Okay. I’ve been dreading this. Either one could win. And I’m convinced that the winner of this bracket will win the entire tournament. The entire tournament! This is like Spurs/Suns 2007, a battle of heavyweights that will ultimately determine the entire tournament, leaving the other three Final Four combatants shaking in their boots.

But at this point – right now, as I type this – I still haven’t chosen a winner. I’ve even placed links to both book images in the code, not knowing which I’ll eventually choose.

There are two things I could do. I could go on and on about the merits of both of these books, dragging on forever (too late!), ultimately coming to a hackneyed decision based on some triviality like a hangover I had while reading page 346 or a comment that my father made regarding someone with a similar name as the author.

Instead, I will tell you why this decision is so hard.

After reading The Road, I dubbed it “The Best Book I’ve Read in the Past Five Years.”

Oops.

Now, my dilemma: I can either back up that statement wholeheartedly or turn my back on it and choose the other book that qualifies under The Best Book, etc.

I do have an out, though. The Best Book statement was made in March 2007. I read Rabbit Angstrom in April 2007. Continuity, my friends.

The Road really is the greatest book I’ve read from the past five years. It’s haunting and simple, saying so much with so little. That’s what I loved about it – the fears weren’t spelled out for us – they were implied, allowing our minds to create whatever fears we had and transpose them into the story. It was well worth the praise it received. It’s a required read, one of my top ten of all time.

However, Rabbit Angstrom, for all of his faults, sticks with me. The effort of reading all four of the Rabbit books at once, bound together not as four separate sections but as one collected life, made Rabbit part of my circle of friends. I know more about that one character – have watched his rise and fall, his fears and bold accusations, every wrong word and misguided step – than I know about a lot of people in real life.

They’re time capsules, beautifully written and still striking today. The Road is a wonderful book. But Rabbit Angstrom is wonderfuller.

(P.S. – this is a case where both books are equal. So equal, in fact, that if you would ask me which book was better tomorrow, there’s a good chance that The Road would win. Call it a mental coin flip.)

The Winner: Rabbit Angstrom – John Updike

Bracket Four:

Then We Came to the End - Joshua Ferris
vs.
Black Swan Green - David Mitchell

My past vs. my future. Sad kid trying to fit in vs. copywriter.

As this tournament has gone on, Then We Came to the End has gained momentum I never thought it would have. It’s still pretty fresh in my mind, which helps – like a basketball team that had a rough start of the year forging ahead with a winning streak into the playoffs.

This time, Black Swan Green isn’t saved by a less spectacular book of short stories or a coin flip. When it comes to Then We Came to the End, David Mitchell’s just not in the same league (WIBR-wise).

The Winner: Then We Came to the End – Joshua Ferris

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

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WIBR Tournament – Round 2, Bracket 3 & 4

April 25, 2008

After today, the road to the Final Four is just one win away. We’ve got some heavy hitting match-ups, ladies and gents.

Click here for the entire bracket.

The What I’ve Been Reading Tournament of Books
Bracket Three:

Travels with Charley - John Steinbeck
vs.
Rabbit Angstrom - John Updike

It’s a pity that Travels with Charley was in this bracket. Though let’s be honest – it made it a round further than I had expected. The simple fact is, at the time of writing, I am still trying to figure out if Rabbit Angstrom or The Road will make the Final Four.

Which, I guess, writes Travels with Charley out before it even had a chance.

That’s too bad. Travels with Charley might be the perfect sunny day camping book. While reading Rabbit Angstrom would require an entire month of sunny camping trips.

The Winner: Rabbit Angstrom – John Updike

You Shall Know Our Velocity! - Dave Eggers
vs.
The Road - Cormac McCarthy

Dave Eggers, your cuteness fails you.

McSweeney’s is great, and this book was good, but none of it seems to have any social impact. You never quite grasp the idea that a book can be powerful without throwing yourself into it.

The main character of your life doesn’t need to be the main character of your books.

With A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, it was okay. It was a great plot device, and it was a touching book. It’s your best, and the only one I’d read again.

With What is the What, you never failed to mention your involvement in the book, and while you never physically showed up in the story, you were always there, floating above the story, reminding us of your worth.

But the worst was with You Shall Know Our Velocity. A great story, marred by your infernal meddling. You just had to butt in, throw a wrench in anything we had believed at the time, breaking down the fourth wall and wandering into our engaging fiction novel.

Cormac McCarthy would never do that. He’d just kill the entire nation for our pleasure.

The Winner: The Road – Cormac McCarthy

Bracket Four:

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close - Jonathan Safran Foer
vs.
Then We Came to the End - Joshua Ferris

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (ELIC) was read with rapt attention. Then We Came to the End (TWCE) was read quickly, devoured in just three days.

ELIC is multi-layered, featuring touching relationships and a three-tiered historical set of characters. TWCE is about advertising.

ELIC is filled with beautiful imagery, a tragic story and clever typography. TWCE is written in the simple and expressive style of a copywriter.

ELIC and TWCE could be on separate ends of the spectrum, yet both had a feeling of lightheartedness, though ELIC’s lightheartedness hid a sleeping remorse. TWCE’s lightheartedness didn’t hide anything but a good time.

That’s all fine and good.

What really matters is that Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is a great book with great characters. But Then We Came to the End is a book I can relate to. And laugh with. Over and over again.

I guess that wins, right?

The Winner: Then We Came to the End – Joshua Ferris

Black Swan Green - David Mitchell
vs.
Like Life - Lorrie Moore

I feel like I’ve already reviewed this match-up. Except in slightly different circumstances, I guess.

Lorrie Moore, in the grand scheme of writers, is not Jorge Luis Borge. Of course, neither is David Mitchell – it wasn’t the quality of the stories that knocked Mirror of Ink out, but the impact and length.

Still, David Mitchell’s short story collection resonated with me because it was joined together to form a perfect novel-like progression of total dork to nearly accepted cool kid. It felt good to me, like all of us total dorks had been somehow vindicated through Mitchell’s stories.

And, if I remember correctly, I chose Like Life to win because…

I just liked Lorrie Moore better.

No real reason. It’s hard to explain. Maybe I’m just a sucker for stories set in New York City. Maybe I like a slice of city life more than I like a slice of trailer park trash.

Or maybe I just liked it better. Let’s go with that.

Nothing against Lorrie Moore, who’s one of my favorites in the short story genre (if you’re curious, you’ve got to read “People Like That are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk” from Birds of America) but Black Swan Green has stuck with me a lot better.

The Winner: Black Swan Green – David Mitchell

Tags: Random, What I've Been Reading, Books, Literature |

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WIBR Tournament – Round 2, Bracket 1 & 2

April 23, 2008

Sixteen books have been knocked out already, with fifteen more yet to be served their “go home” papers. Some heavy hitters have already been sent away: The Grapes of Wrath, Gilead and White Teeth all had aspirations of going far into the tourney.

Now, we’re paring down to the final eight. Who else will be going home early?

Click here for the entire bracket.

The What I’ve Been Reading Tournament of Books
Bracket One:

Moneyball - Michael Lewis
vs.
Housekeeping - Marilynn Robinson

Hey, I love sports as much as the next guy, and Michael Lewis is one of the best at writing about sports in a way that appeals to the semi-casual fan – those people who are passionate about one sport and casual about the rest of them, who can spout off the important statistics yet aren’t bogged down by a weighted knowledge of irrelevant information.

Die-hards might find him too pandering and general. Non-fans find him boring and tedious (though he has a way of reaching out to those non-fans with a personal side to every story). But everyone in between – which is to say most of us – probably have a hard time finding much fault.

That’s really all I can say, though. When you boil everything down, Moneyball is a sports book – suffering two horrible strikes against it; it’s a non-fiction book (which I tend to draw away from) and it’s a sports book (which throws it into the novelty pile) – while Housekeeping is a beautiful masterpiece that I read, in part, while rocking my beautiful two-week old daughter to sleep. The choice is pretty easy.

The Winner: Housekeeping – Marilynn Robinson

Fortress of Solitude - Jonathan Lethem
vs.
Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid on Earth - Chris Ware

I look at these two books and I can’t help but be drawn to Jimmy Corrigan.

Why is that?

I won’t lie. When I started matching the brackets up, I didn’t expect Ware’s graphic novel to make it past the first round, let alone take on two great novels like White Teeth and Fortress of Solitude.

But the more I think about it, the more endearing Jimmy Corrigan becomes. I keep reminding myself of how wonderful it is. One of the saddest things I’ve ever read, but wonderful all the same.

Maybe Fortress of Solitude – a 2008 completion – hasn’t quite sunk in as a modern classic. Or maybe Jimmy Corrigan really is as good as I keep thinking.

Either way, Ware’s moving on.

The Winner: Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth – Chris Ware

Bracket TWO:

The Whistling Season - Ivan Doig
vs.
The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint Exupéry

I’ve met Ivan Doig. He’s a very nice man – an older, patient man who admittedly came up with the name of his novel The Whistling Season before he had come up with any part of the story. He was humble and well spoken. He wasn’t at all what I expected, which was a welcome surprise.

I’ve never met Antoine de Saint Exupéry. But Kerrie’s grandfather has, during World War II. Both were pilots, and while I am unsure of the exact meeting place or circumstances, I know that the two did indeed meet. It’s the reason we found a special edition copy of The Little Prince for Kerrie’s grandfather during our honeymoon in New Orleans, and it’s one of the reasons I wanted to read The Little Prince to embryonic Sierra.

Yes, I mentioned before that The Little Prince holds a trump card over many of the books in this competition – the “I read this to my baby when she was yet to be born.” But there’s something that has been mentioned twice already that pokes a hole in The Little Prince’s armor – there are books I read during those first few weeks that hold the same emotional tug.

I once wrote a post about how location and context can be just as important as content. It’s true. I remember where I was when I read Housekeeping, or Then We Came to the End – I was spending my first few weeks with Sierra, rocking her to sleep, reading with the aid of a night light (back in the days when rocking Sierra to sleep could be paired with another productive exercise). The Whistling Season was one of those books.

(A quick aside. Just to get the record straight, the books I read during those few weeks were very good – don’t think they’re getting a pass just because Sierra was present; remember, the surprisingly below-average The Sportswriter was read during that time as well.)

What it comes down to is that no matter what nostalgic slant I put on The Little Prince – no matter how many times Sierra will hear it, no matter how emotionally attached I am to its story, no matter what paternal urges tug me in its direction, no matter what physical connection I’ve had with the author – I can’t deny that, after all, it’s a children’s story. And while it may have made more of an emotional connection, The Whistling Season can make many of the same claims.

Taking the books at face value, for their content instead of their context, I find myself choosing The Whistling Season every time.

The Winner: The Whistling Season – Ivan Doig

East of Eden - John Steinbeck
vs.
Feet on the Street: Ramblings Around New Orleans - Roy Blount, Jr.

This one really isn’t even fair. Sorry, Roy. You snuck through one round. You had to have expected to lose here.

The Winner: East of Eden – John Steinbeck

Tags: Random, What I've Been Reading, Books, Literature |

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WIBR Tournament - Round 1, Bracket 4

April 22, 2008

Just one more sectional!

Click here for the entire bracket.

The What I’ve Been Reading Tournament of Books
Bracket Four:

The Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco
vs.
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close - Jonathan Safran Foer

I took Umberto on as my first WIBR challenge. And a challenge it was – the Italian Stallion of Complicated Imagery nearly knocked me on my ass, what with his long, drawn out descriptions of mundane monastery life and theological discussions that sailed blissfully over my head. I wouldn’t say the book was difficult, but it was one of the harder books I’ve read in my 29 years.

Which I suppose means it was difficult.

Still, it was a gripping mystery, fueled by a monastery’s desire to protect one of the most precious collections of classic texts ever assembled. So it played to my literary side while still swashbuckling its way through my bookshelf.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close had a little bit of mystery itself, though it was served in much easier to digest tidbits. It has some precious moments, and it’s known more for being a post-9/11 book on post-9/11, but it’s still pretty clever and, for the most part, very very good.

Most of all, it wasn’t difficult. I didn’t feel a need to finish it because I had already started it. I just WANTED to finish it.

So, there you go. Winner, winner, chicken dinner.

The Winner: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close – Jonathan Safran Foer

Then We Came to the End - Joshua Ferris
vs.
Atonement - Ian McEwan

Never before has a book made me more green-eyed and red-faced jealous than Ferris’s Then We Came to the End. I mean, come on – the guy writes a book about life in a big city advertising agency, complete with mundane trivialities, account pitches and interoffice relationships – and makes it side-splittingly funny. He takes what’s usually seen as boring, soul-drenching environment and makes it memorable in a way no one else has before.

In other words, he wrote the book I wished I had written. From the view I wish I had. In the position I currently hold. He’s a copywriter who wrote a funny book that everyone loved. I’m blood-curdlingly jealous.

(I just made that word up. Blood-curdlingly.)

Atonement was one of the few period pieces I’ve actually liked, though it’s not as much a period piece as, say, the Austen canon. Yet, there are entire sections of the book that I barely remember. Whether this is because I read it too fast or because they were wholly unremarkable is hard to figure out.

The book gets extra marks for sending a mass of refugee soldiers down a long and burnt road toward the sea, foreshadowing Cormac McCarthy’s The Road in a grand and dramatic style, and for making me care about fountains and greenery and those other things best left in a Virginia Woolf novel.

Atonement is a better novel from a technical standpoint – beautifully written by one of today’s masters. So what if he lifted a line or two, right?

But Then We Came to the End is one of those rare books I want to go out and buy after reading it for free from the library. I think that counts for a lot more.

The Winner: Then We Came to the End – Joshua Ferris

Mirror of Ink - Jorge Luis Borge
vs.
Black Swan Green - David Mitchell

Jorge Luis Borge (whose name sounds like a nursery rhyme) is the master of magical realism, an expert at creating ideas that leave your mind reeling, thinking about what is real and what is our imagination. The stories in this book – the only entry from the Pocket Penguins 70th Anniversary Box Set – are the best of what I’ve come across, spanning the entire genre with tales of crucial lotteries and kingdoms of the blind and the like.

Unfortunately, it’s very short – 56 pages. It feels like a Borge primer, an opening stanza that was never quite finished. For this reason, I’ve never really held it in high esteem. Mirror of Ink is like an hors d’oeuvre; I need an entire collection of his stories, a full-out anthology, something with weight that I can read and enjoy until I am full.

Black Swan Green carried with it a sense of weight, though that weight was mainly made up of horrible memories and trying times throughout middle school, classically thought of as one of the most harrowing times in a young, unpopular boy’s life. That’s me, friends, and I took Mitchell’s account of fighting your way into the cool crowd as a guide to what should have been.

Borge is fantastic. So is Black Swan Green. When it comes down to it, Borge may be the more important author, with the better stories and better skill. But Black Swan Green was inspirational, if only in a bittersweet way, and it has the added benefit of being a little meatier.

The Winner: Black Swan Green – David Mitchell

Deliver Me from Nowhere - Tennessee Jones
vs.
Like Life - Lorrie Moore

The last two books were, in some odd way, collections of short stories. Mirror of Ink was more of an excerpt – a small collection that spanned an entire career – while Black Swan Green was a series of short stories arranged in a chronological order, much like Miranda July’s The Wonder Spot.

Considering both Deliver Me from Nowhere and Like Life are both short story collections, we’ve managed to group nearly all of the great short fiction I’ve read over the past three years into one side of a bracket. No matter what, a short story collection will fight to represent Bracket 4 in the Final Four.

Should I actually talk about the books now?

There’s really no need. Like Life was a top 10 selection for the end of 2006. And Deliver Me From Nowhere wasn’t. The feeling still stands today.

Because while I love the idea of crafting a set of short stories based on the feeling and emotion of an album (in this case, Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska) I just liked Lorrie Moore better.

No real reason. It’s hard to explain. Maybe I’m just a sucker for stories set in New York City. Maybe I like a slice of city life more than I like a slice of trailer park trash.

Or maybe I just liked it better. Let’s go with that.

The Winner: Like Life – Lorrie Moore

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

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S.O.S. RIF

April 21, 2008

Reading is fundamental.

Still, it should come as no surprise that to our current administration doesn’t hold reading in as high esteem. True or not, the perception is there. You’ve heard all of the jokes; the “reading is hard” image, etc.

But if anything points to these perceptions becoming reality, it’s this. President Bush is proposing to eliminate all funding for Reading Is Fundamental’s book distribution program.

In other words, no more free books to those who need them most.

Since 1966, RIF has provided more than 300 million books to underprivileged children. From RIF’s CEO/President Carol Rasco:

“With 13 million children living in poverty in this country, the need for RIF has never been greater,” said Rasco, “With a recent report showing a declining interest in reading among adults and teens, supporting children’s literacy is critical to reversing this trend.”

We’re dropping in the education standings. We’re perceived as a dumber nation, growing more and more complacent in matters of education. Now, we’re proposing to drop another program that can only help – a program that, over the past six administrations, has gone uninterrupted.

I understand that cuts need to be made somewhere. I get the fact that our budget is a mess and something has to be done. But why make the cut here, especially when trillions are being wasted on a war that a shrinking minority even approves of. (That’s your obligatory useless war message for the day.)

It may sound like nothing, but it’s quite the contrary. Some families don’t have the means to buy seemingly extravagant items like books. And the children suffer, unexposed to reading, already years behind when they make it to the school system, given less of a chance to succeed in the future. It leads to special classes, an increase in poverty and a greater strain on our nation’s economy.

I’m not saying that four free books a year are going to change the world. But, hell – it sure can’t hurt.

Check out RIF’s Web site at www.RIF.org and let your voice be heard. E-mail your Senators and Representatives. Let Bush hear how important this is.

And then hope he actually cares.

(via Condalmo)

Tags: Books, Politics, Education |