Filmbook-to-be: Highbrow word salad

Your chosen terms are New York Review of Books, Berlin and Martin Scorsese...

Thanks to Calliope Author Readings, it is now possible to hear '60s-era recordings of John Updike, Nelson Algren and James Baldwin among others reading some of their famous works. (The recordings were released on 33 1/3 RPM records and only freed for this CD issue.) But who will be the first to turn them into a peppy dance remix for the gym?

The Best Picture Nominees, If They Were Historical Romance Novels

AMERICAN BUSTLE
THE MOST DASHING CAPTAIN PHILLIPS
DALLAS SWEETHEART BUYERS CLUB
THE GRAVITY OF MY EMOTIONS
HER, THAT LADY WHOM I LOVE
NEBRASKA NOCTURNE
PHILOMENA, FAIR MAIDEN DISHONOR'D
12 YEARS A SLAVE TO YOUR MEMORY
THE WOLF OF WALL STREET TAMED

Tournament of Books X: Herman Koch's THE DINNER

What makes the term "page-turner" a pejorative is books like this one. Composed of flash paper, THE DINNER startles and then disappears, a sub-Pinter drama of familial nastiness more invested in shoving surprises into its back half than having those surprises make sense when piled on each other.

Moving back and forth in time, THE DINNER's central meal is held at a slightly-too-fancy restaurant where brothers Paul and Serge are having dinner with their wives. Serge is in politics and picked the restaurant because he knows the maître d'; Paul, a former school teacher, resents the venue and the tiny portions. Both of them dance exaggerated politeness around each other in order not to confront the central issue, a concern involving a crime and their sons. The central issue arrives like clockwork just before dessert.

The first review that popped up under a recent search for this novel called it a European GONE GIRL, and THE DINNER retains that slippery nastiness that causes every character, including the supposedly trustworthy narrator to leave a slime trail throughout the book. If only as much time had been invested into the origins of that nastiness! For example, a major feeder of tension into this dinner, the narrator's relationship with his brother, is never properly established; the reader gets only glimpses and thrown-out asides, intimations of a grand history without which they both look even more petty and graceless than they do already. But even that gets more airtime than the cartoonish wives, who play pivotal roles in what happened but talk such nonsense they might as well be Charlie Brown's parents.

That's what makes THE DINNER a meager meal, although the cultural issues barely perceptible in its flavors give it more potential (which it didn't live up to). There are suggestions of a discussion of race and class in the Netherlands that are more interesting than what has been reproduced on the page, suggesting that something could have been lost in translation. That would stoke the flames of what is otherwise a pretty cold dish.

(P.S. this is the U.K. cover of the novel. The U.S. one is not bad but this is great.)

New York Public Library Pulls a Quikster

I woke up this morning to the unpleasant discovery that most of my library holds had been deleted from my account and I wasn't able to make new ones. Not ideal, given that I just threw everything on the Tournament of Books  An NYPL chat bot directed me to the library's new site, Ebooks.nypl.org, which is an ugly cluster with a weak search function and (apparently) a somewhat depleted resource of books available to reserve.

Yet the really nice thing about the old functionality was the ability to search for physical library books and e-books simultaneously, just like with Netflix, and to have those queues in the same place. That appears to be over. The design is just a fig leaf on my frustration.

Should high school students read more nonfiction and less fiction?

Natasha Vargas-Cooper refers to this piece for Bookforum as "provocative" but I think it makes a lot of sense! Maybe high schoolers don't relate to the books they read in English class, and if they do happen to relate then the emotional relativity is squashed out of them by the search for Symbolism and Foreshadowing that is being Imparted to them. (Lit majors are allowed to say that. Check the fine print on your membership card.) Nonfiction is just as carefully crafted and can use the same rhetorical arsenal, but can also be similarly transporting. Reading nonfiction is also important to teach the tool of skeptical reading, essential for this Internet age. Vargas-Cooper includes a reading list of her favorite works of nonfiction, which is very useful too.

Blog favorites Hilton Als, Donna Tartt, Sheri Fink and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie are among the 30 finalists for the National Book Critics Circle's 2013 awards, to be presented March 13. The NBCC is somewhat unique in that they have specific categories for criticism, biography and autobiography along with fiction, nonfiction and poetry. Congratulations to the finalists! 

The Morning News Tournament of Books X: Let's Go Rooster, Let's Go

Good to know I didn't spend my entire winter vacation checking for this to go live, for nothing! The shortlist has been revealed and here we go:

• Daniel Alarcón, AT NIGHT WE WALK IN CIRCLES
• Eleanor Catton, THE LUMINARIES
• Mia Couto, THE TUNER OF SILENCES
• Elizabeth Gilbert, THE SIGNATURE OF ALL THINGS
• Mohsin Hamid, HOW TO GET FILTHY RICH IN RISING ASIA
• Herman Koch, THE DINNER
• Jhumpa Lahiri, THE LOWLAND
• Kiese Laymon, LONG DIVISION
• James McBride, THE GOOD LORD BIRD
• Scott McClanahan, HILL WILLIAM
• Philipp Meyer, THE SON
• Ruth Ozeki, A TALE FOR THE TIME BEING
• Rainbow Rowell, ELEANOR & PARK
• Donna Tartt, THE GOLDFINCH
• Hanya Yanagihara, THE PEOPLE IN THE TREES
• either Kate Atkinson's LIFE AFTER LIFE or Fiona Maazel's WOKE UP LONELY

Notable judges include authors Jami Attenberg, Roxane Gay and last year's finalist John Green, Tumblr litmaven Rachel Fershleiser, Mountain Goats impresario John Darnielle, Wormbook #1 Platonic Crush John Freeman and columnist and publisher Lizzie Skurnick.

I am going to try to read as many of these as I can again this year, for I am foolish. The tournament starts in mid-March, TBD. How do you feel? Any early favorites?

What we talk about when we talk about talking about Jennifer Weiner

"Weiner’s readers—who, on the Internet, review her work with all the attentiveness it has not received from the Times—seek out her latest books for the same satisfactions they have found in her earlier books, with their casual prose, happy resolutions, and lovable heroines. It is unlikely that literary critics will ever applaud Weiner’s work for these qualities, because literary criticism, at its best, seeks to elucidate the complex, not to catalogue the familiar."

from Rebecca Mead's profile of Jennifer Weiner in the New Yorker this week. Mead portrays Weiner fairly, I think, as an author with a broad base of commercial success who has also been vocal about the disparity between literary fiction coverage and treatment and commercial fiction coverage and treatment, and the gender lines on which they often fall (men writing about women is literary, women writing about anything is commercial/ not worthy of critical examination).

I am a critic who also enjoys Weiner's books, which I believe makes me a special unicorn* uniquely able to dispense the following points:

1. While Mead clearly read the Weiner canon for this article, some of her characterizations feel like oversimplifications. Weiner's work has in fact gotten darker despite what one might see as "happy endings." The ending of THE NEXT BEST THING was more troubling than satisfying, and it was my favorite Weiner book in years. The box is convenient but the profile doesn't fit in it.

2. Hand in hand with that, I think this article would have benefited from more data points from readers or people who know readers of these books (such as booksellers who successfully handsell copies, or book club programmers) -- to make these generalizations a little more palatable.

3. Clearly some of Weiner's speaking out on this issue is self-serving, but when the notion of self-promotion itself is considered dirty in the first place, it's a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't situation. No one was dinging Franzen for being too much in the spotlight when he was on the cover of TIME (and I saved that cover, so I'm not here to attack him either).

4. In a way, the whole idea that Weiner has struggled with using her platforms to talk about highbrow and lowbrow culture is something that a lot of people in public struggle with, but seems to be more of a problem for women striving to be taken seriously. (In a world where Idris Elba can safely discuss the high calling of playing Nelson Mandela on one day and his bowties on the next... By the way, don't Google that if you're at work.) I do not care one whit for "The Bachelor," but I don't see it as an automatic invalidator. (For one thing, a safe margin of people who watch hatewatch it. For another, I watch some ridiculous things too.) How many male newsmakers' feeds out there are fully devoted to professional sports on Saturdays and Sundays? And that, as a form of entertainment, is superior because?

*I'm joking, but "barely intersects" was probably oversalting it.

December and 2013 Unbookening

Bought 3 books
Received 1 to review
Checked 10 out from the library
Received 8 for Christmas
Borrowed 2
24 in

Returned 12 to the library 
Returned 3 to others
Donated 5 
Exchanged for Amazon credit 1 (wasn't worth it! How could a Kindle book magically degrade in price?)
20 out

As I already know from the hilarious state of my bookshelf/ nightstand, I still finished out the year with too many books (17 more than when I started, according to my very meticulous note-keeping). I have no regrets, but hoping this year I will make some more room. This means trying to get through all my outstanding 2013 galleys before BEA, and continuing to rely on the library ahead of bookstores. But I'll always save room for gifts and books I'm borrowing from friends.

January's goal is to give away 8 more books than I get.

That kid is a real bully!

HARD LUCK, the 8th book in the DIARY OF A WIMPY KID series, was the best-selling print book of 2013 with over 1.8 million copies sold, says Publishers Weekly.

Best Books of 2013, Part 3

Books read in 2013: 135

Best month: June

Worst month:  Tie, March and September

Best Fiction

Caleb Crain, NECESSARY ERRORS

Lionel Shriver, SO MUCH FOR THAT

Ben Schrank, LOVE IS A CANOE

Meg Wolitzer, THE INTERESTINGS

Chimamda Ngozi Adichie, AMERICANAH

Ian McEwan, SWEET TOOTH

Stewart O’Nan, WISH YOU WERE HERE

Best Fiction That’s Practically Nonfiction: Adelle Waldman, THE LOVE AFFAIRS OF NATHANIEL P

Best Nonfiction

Oliver Burkeman, THE ANTIDOTE

Greil Marcus, DEAD ELVIS

Sheri Fink, FIVE DAYS AT MEMORIAL

Joe Queenan, ONE FOR THE BOOKS

Samantha Irby, MEATY

Rob Delaney, MOTHER. WIFE. SISTER. HUMAN. WARRIOR. FALCON. YARDSTICK. TURBAN. CABBAGE

Amanda Lindhout, A HOUSE IN THE SKY  

Gideon Lewis-Kraus, A SENSE OF DIRECTION

Kate Christensen, BLUE PLATE SPECIAL: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MY APPETITES

Best Nonfiction Recently Back in Print: Nora Ephron, CRAZY SALAD/ SCRIBBLE SCRIBBLE. I don't even like "When Harry Met Sally" (gasp!) but Ephron wrote so much more than that, and her columns from the 60s and 70s reveal a sharp wit straining against the confines of what was expected from female writers. 

Best Books With An Asterisk

Can't resist a brag on behalf of the three people I know who published books this year! My former Ballast editor and fellow book critic Michael Hingston came out with his first novel THE DILETTANTES, an alternately biting and sweet look at the editorship of a failing college newspaper. Speaking of student journalism, my former college co-editor Jason Q. Ng studied Chinese censorship on the level we use the Internet every day -- the search engine -- for BLOCKED ON WEIBO, and Dissolve editor Nathan Rabin compared two passionate groups of music lovers -- Phish fans and the Juggalos -- in his memoir YOU DON’T KNOW ME BUT YOU DON’T LIKE ME.

The Internet giveth, and the Internet taketh away: Neil Gaiman is going on a Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook break for the first six months of 2014 so he can get some work done. No seriously! He told the Guardian he would be taking the sabbatical so he could "concentrate on my day job: making things up."  At least he'll still be blogging.

Best Books of 2013, Part 2

Saddest Ending: Herman Wouk, MARJORIE MORNINGSTAR. The dangers of Shirley-ing are not to be understated.

Most Depressing Nonfiction

Personal: THE JOURNALS OF JOHN CHEEVER. You know how some people joke about a certain pop star who writes songs about all of her exes, and how maybe she's the problem? John was the problem. He was also so talented, and it's such a shame.

Political: Helaine Olen, POUND FOOLISH. One in a series of books this year to convince readers that they will never be able to retire, because either they or the system are flawed. (Or both, I suppose.)

 

Scariest Book: Chad Kultgen, THE AVERAGE AMERICAN MALE

Best Books With The Worst Endings

Kate Atkinson, LIFE AFTER LIFE

Marisha Pessl, NIGHT FILM

 

Least Necessary Comeback

Helen Fielding, BRIDGET JONES: MAD ABOUT THE BOY. I really liked and will gladly defend BRIDGET JONES' DIARY as an artful piece of work, imitated to inferiority. I didn't mind BRIDGET JONES: THE EDGE OF REASON. But even Fielding's surprises on re-encountering the character who made her famous couldn't save this book from being a slog. Bridget's lucky cluelessness just doesn't wear well any more.

Worst Nonfiction: Drew Manning, FIT 2 FAT 2 FIT. A moratorium please on all of the "I did X with my health, which means it's easy and anyone can do it" books.

Best Books of 2013, Part 1

Best Book I Should Have Read A Long Time Ago: Margaret Atwood, THE EDIBLE WOMAN

Best Page-Turners, The  Stieg Larsson "Failed To Finish GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNET'S NEST" Memorial Category

Laura Lippman, AND WHEN SHE WAS GOOD

Simon Van Booy, THE ILLUSION OF SEPARATENESS

Jordan Belfort, THE WOLF OF WALL STREET

Modern Library of Awesome

Graham Greene, THE END OF THE AFFAIR  

Dashiell Hammett, THE MALTESE FALCON  

Carson McCullers, THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER

Evelyn Waugh, A HANDFUL OF DUST

John Steinbeck, THE GRAPES OF WRATH

Samuel Butler, THE WAY OF ALL FLESH

Henry James, THE WINGS OF THE DOVE

Best Villain, Maniacal Laugh, Maniacal Laugh!!! The food in Frank Bruni's BORN ROUND. (Sincerely, this is an excellent memoir from two underexplored sides of eating disorders: binge eating/ overeating, and EDs among men. And part of what makes it great is how frank Frank is [sorry] about his struggles and how present the threat.)

Most Surprising

For achievements in relying on narrative ignorance to spring a late plot twist, Beatriz Williams, A HUNDRED SUMMERS

For redemption from previous disappointments, Dave Eggers, THE CIRCLE

Hidden Gems of 2013

Fiction: Andre Aciman, HARVARD SQUARE - a NETHERLAND-style tale of friendship and culture clash, disguised as a Bildungsroman

Nonfiction: Daniel James Brown, THE BOYS IN THE BOAT - a touching and shocking personal history of the Great Depression, disguised as a sports book

Best Book Endings

Barbara Kingsolver, FLIGHT BEHAVIOR

Ayelet Waldman, RED HOOK ROAD