Spotted on the subway

Being read by a woman about my age in a white puffy coat, tall-ish with dark circles under her eyes.

Profiling is not right, but I would not mess with someone carrying this book.

"The technology I like is the American paperback edition of FREEDOM. I can spill water on it, and it would still work! So it's pretty good technology. And what’s more, it will work great 10 years from now. So no wonder the capitalists hate it. It’s a bad business model... Maybe nobody will care about printed books 50 years from now, but I do. When I read a book, I’m handling a specific object in a specific time and place. The fact that when I take the book off the shelf it still says the same thing - that’s reassuring. Someone worked really hard to make the language just right, just the way they wanted it. They were so sure of it that they printed it in ink, on paper. A screen always feels like we could delete that, change that, move it around. So for a literature-crazed person like me, it’s just not permanent enough."

-Grumpus in chief Jonathan Franzen -- though he has a point about the technology -- speaking at a book festival in Colombia over the weekend.

My five years with Marilyn

The role of Arthur Miller in the Oscar-buzzed biopic "My Week With Marilyn" is one of the most thankless parts in a movie full of them. Miller's job in the script is to show up, look awkward, and then be a real jerk so that Marilyn can seek solace in the movie's real hero, scrappy 3rd assistant director Colin Clark. Dougray Scott's performance as Miller is just stage furniture but that's not his fault.

I wasn't much moved by "My Week With Marilyn" overall because as we all know I hate Hollywood, and America, and sexiness. (Mostly I entertained myself on Kenneth Branagh, who seems to be having a really good time having a really bad time as Sir Laurence Olivier.) But Miller's life is rich enough to furnish its own biopic in which he is allowed to play more than just a nerd whose desire to have his own life is inconvenient to the plot.

Tournament of Books '12: Will you be ready when the rooster crows?

The Morning News' annual book competition, the Tournament of Books, announced its contenders about a week and a half ago. Check them out:

Nathacha Appanah, THE LAST BROTHER
Julian Barnes, THE SENSE OF AN ENDING
Teju Cole, OPEN CITY
Helen Dewitt, LIGHTNING RODS
Patrick DeWitt, THE SISTERS BROTHERS
Jeffrey Eugenides, THE MARRIAGE PLOT
Chad Harbach, THE ART OF FIELDING
Alan Hollinghurst, THE STRANGER'S CHILD
Jesmyn Ward, SALVAGE THE BONES
Haruki Murakami, 1Q84
Téa Obreht, THE TIGER'S WIFE
Michael Ondaatje, THE CAT'S TABLE
Ann Patchett, STATE OF WONDER
Donald Ray Pollock, DEVIL ALL THE TIME
Karen Russell, SWAMPLANDIA!
Kate Zambreno, GREEN GIRL

The T.o.B. is more fun and transparent than most literary awards for the following reasons:

• Inclusion of a "March Madness" style bracket pitting books against each other. 
• Unabashed celebrity judge included among the authors making the decisions. This year's, Wil Wheaton, is also an author in his own right to be fair. (There's also a reader judge, should you non-famous people feel under-represented.)
• Every judge writes an essay defending her or his choice, so if you disagree, you have plenty to chew on in your disagreement. (Or you can print the essay out, ball it up and throw it into the wastebasket shouting No it's not!!! Your choice.)
• "Zombie Picks" (voted on by readers) resurrect two picks discarded by the judges in earlier rounds and give them a chance to compete for the big prize.

I have made the questionable decision to try and read as many of the contenders as possible before the tournament begins on March 7. Not only will I be catching up on some of the (possible) best books of '11 I missed, I will have slightly more authority in arguing that the judges' picks are wrong, so wrong. (Uh, if they are, that is.) Taking out the ones I had the foresight to read beforehand, here's my personal reading list:

1. Nathacha Appanah, THE LAST BROTHER
2. Julian Barnes, THE SENSE OF AN ENDING
3. Teju Cole, OPEN CITY
4. Helen Dewitt, LIGHTNING RODS
5. Patrick DeWitt, THE SISTERS BROTHERS
6. Haruki Murakami, 1Q84
7. Michael Ondaatje, THE CAT'S TABLE
8. Ann Patchett, STATE OF WONDER
9. Donald Ray Pollock, DEVIL ALL THE TIME
10. Kate Zambreno, GREEN GIRL

Granted, I could probably spend all that time on 1Q84 and not read any of the rest, so let's just call this... a noble attempt. I'm kicking it off with Nathacha Appanah's THE LAST BROTHER for the highly scientific reason that it was the first to make it off the library request page and into my hands. Which one of these did you like the most?

Reading on the Road: Martin Amis edition

"Junk novels were sold in airports. People in airports bought and read junk novels. Junk novels were about people in airports, inasmuch as junk novels needed airports to shift their characters round the planet, and airports served, in junk novels, as the backdrop to their partings, chance encounters, reunions and trysts. Some junk novels were _all_ about airports. Some junk novels were even _called_ things like AIRPORT. Why then, you might ask, was there no airport called Junk Novel? Movies based on junk novels were, of course, heavily reliant on the setting of the airport. So why wasn't one always seeing, at airports, junk novels being made into movies? Perhaps there really was a whole other airport, called, perhaps, Junk Novel Airport, or with a fancier name like Manderley International Junk Novel Airport, where they did them all... Readers of junk novels and people in airports wanted the same thing: escape, and quick transfer from one junk novel to another junk novel and from one airport to another airport."
--from THE INFORMATION

Brooklyn Authorati Gather On Area Woman's Stoop For Some Reason

But be careful, some of them bite!

For a good time, Photoshop yourself into this Conde Nast Traveler portrait of a number of (though by no means all of) the borough's finest and pretend they all showed up to talk shop with you.

Check out the original via Jami Attenberg. (Also, that's not my stoop, although if you have an inkling of where it is...)

NYC: Free publishing panel Feb. 15

Q: Do you like social media?
A: Too bad, you're already in it! But while you're there you might as well check out this panel about publishing in the 21st century next month during Social Media Week. Emma Straub will be there, undoubtedly revealing how she can be working at BookCourt and on Twitter and writing books all at the same time. (I suspect a secret twin.)

Obvious headline is obvious

Really Popular Book Still Really Popular; Movie Adaptation Will Also Be Popular Probably

Impulse mass-market purchase of the month

Sorry I'm not sorry. I heard it was terrific.

Two new ways to unbooken

Finding that your New Year's resolution to read the books you have and not buy any more is weakening? Maybe one of these approaches would work for you:

• In the spirit of Judith Levine's NOT BUYING IT, Meg Hourihan (who cofounded Pyra Labs, the company that once launched a little web program called Blogger) is tracking her spending openly and making an effort not to make unnecessary stuff purchases in 2012, over on her blog Makeit.do. Per her rules, she can borrow a book from a friend or the library, but not buy it.
• For something more literary and less generally minimalist, pay attention to Canadian critic Michael Hingston, tackling his unread books a few tomes at a time in Shelf Defense. (I am a sucker for a good pun.) For each book he addresses it contents and whether he wants to keep or sell it. It's systematic and elegant, particular the hallmark photo he uses to show the progress he's making.

INTERVIEWER

Did you read as a child?

DeLILLO

No, not at all. Comic books. This is probably why I don’t have a storytelling drive, a drive to follow a certain kind of narrative rhythm.

--I've been reading about Don DeLillo after finishing THE NAMES last week and, I don't really know what to say about this exchange from a Paris Review interview. I want to say "Well, of course you're kidding," but it seems sort of disrespectful. (He does talk about what he read later, though. This interview is also where his quote that I love "The novel’s not dead, it’s not even seriously injured" comes from.)

Even though music was my bag

This may be too dark for some of you to listen to during the workday, but someone recommended this interview with Meghan Daum to me and I'm finding it really fascinating. Pairs great with her recent Believer essay (although it's not available online now due to the McSweeney's SOPA blackout) "Haterade."

Filmbook: "Hugo" (2011)

I reviewed THE INVENTION OF HUGO CABRET for a now-defunct (but trust me it was awesome) geek-culture magazine, more or less on reputation alone. I wasn't sure if Brian Selznick's young-adult Caldecott winner would even appeal to an adult audience, but so rarely does the Caldecott (as an award for artistry in children's books) go to a YA book I thought it was worth looking into. I was taken in by how Selznick's illustrations of Hugo, an orphan in the 1930s who works the clocks in a Paris train station, used cinematic angles and tropes to illuminate the story, and as I got deeper into the plot I understood why: Not only has Hugo been instilled with a love of the movies, he develops a relationship with an old man who works at the station with his own history in film. Maybe I was one of the only people who wasn't surprised that director Martin Scorsese would take on an adaptation like this.

"Hugo" lags a little in its first half, but by the end of the movie, to employ the cliché, I had completely fallen under its spell. The double mysteries of what Hugo has been up to in his room above the train station, and what happened to the embittered old man who takes him on as some kind of apprentice, were completely enthralling, highlighted by a few amazing setpieces. Asa Butterfield as Hugo provided just the right amount of pathos without mugging, and leave it to Scorsese to wring out of Ben Kingsley (as the embittered old man) his best performance since 2000's "Sexy Beast," in a role that could not be more different in terms of overall volume. 

When the movie comes to show us some of the old movies Hugo loved, a hush fell over the theatre; imagine how magical these things could be, when they didn't have the tricks to make them look seamless like they do now. The simple delights of camera foolery like making an actor "disappear" by stopping the film, are still delightful now. And speaking of foolery, I'm not sure what the 3-D adds to the element of the film, although in a few instances this really stands out. This is Scorsese's shiniest movie (at least among the ones I've seen) and to be honest I had expected him to insert a little more grit into the story of Hugo. (Though, Scorsese fans, try to spot the Steadicam-Copacabana equivalent sequence early in this film.) I think it's an output of the combination of 3-D CGI that characters often seem to have a glowy aura around them; sometimes I found it fitting, sometimes distracting. As was pointed out by another critic, Scorsese is dabbling in new technology to honor a film innovator who did the same; I'm just not convinced he needed those tricks to bring his marvelous illusion across.

Watching "Hugo" made me think a lot about the other major award contender this season honoring the history of cinema, "The Artist," about the silent-film era and the move to "talkies." For me there's no question that "Hugo" is a better movie, because it doesn't just recreate the art it's trying to honor, it transcends it using the budget and powers that we have. It doesn't just say, "Remember that bygone era? That was awesome." Additionally, I liked "The Artist" but I never bought its characters as truly in danger; they were just figures of whimsy enacting an homage, whereas for all the comedic moments Hugo's nemesis the stationmaster (played by Sasha Baron Cohen, with many echoes of the Childcatcher in "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang") gives to the movie, he is a real threat. (Also, really happy for you, gonna let you finish, but "Singin' In The Rain" is the best movie about the end of silent film of all time. Of all time!) If critics aren't taking "Hugo" seriously because it's ostensibly a children's movie, and it didn't screen at Cannes, that's a real shame. 

Filmbook verdict: See the movie even if you haven't read the book, but if you have the chance to read the book, also do that.

Forthcoming in this space: Reviews of "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close," "We Need To Talk About Kevin" and the 2011 "Jane Eyre."

Linked without comment: Ten Aspects of THE GREAT GATSBY We Can't Wait For Baz Luhrmann To Film In 3-D

My small SWAMPLANDIA! problem, or the literary lost soul

I really liked Karen Russell's SWAMPLANDIA! (correct punctuation and all) but I wish I had loved it. I'm looking forward to Russell's next book as well as catching up with her first, a short-story collection entitled ST. LUCY'S HOME FOR GIRLS RAISED BY WOLVES. I was caught off guard by how much magical realism there was in SWAMPLANDIA!, the story of the decline of a family amusement park in Florida after the death of its star attraction, alligator wrestler Hilola Bigtree. (In fact, we begin with a recollection of her performances struck with the unforgettable opening line, "Our mother performed in starlight.") 

Russell is a fair author to take on this mantle, particularly if she will address some of the faults of other magical realist writers (ahem long lines of beautiful available ladies in ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE). And in some ways, the narrator she chooses to bear the burden of most of the book, the sheltered yet adventure-seeking Ava Bigtree, is the perfect choice -- still young enough to harbor some illusions, but old enough to be forced to witness some of them being dismantled. Her unique worldview is captivating -- except in the odd moments where it feels like Russell is trying to make it unique, through using metaphors and similes that flower out of control.

Don't get me wrong, I love a good poetic line, and Russell can sling them. (Insert digression here about whether Russell might have been better served as a career poet and my conclusion that, while maybe she leant that way, poets should be able to write novels, because why not. It livens the shelf.) Here's an example of a poetic digression in SWAMPLANDIA! that I loved, about Ava's brother:

"Kiwi and his father could sometimes meet at the intersection of their two angers, like neighbors drawing up to the barbed stars of a fence." 

It's a neat simile, it's concrete, and it illustrates a detail about their relationship that you didn't already know. Here's a more elaborate one that I think still works:

"Something about the way [the seaplane] landed, floats first, gave Kiwi the impression of teeth entering the water, the jet floats biting in to the red-dyed water like two bright fangs."

But every so often Russell leans on her metaphors and her ornate command of language and, to my mind, ends up making no sense at all. I feel like my hated eighth grade English teacher pointing this out, but I don't know what to make of a passage like this:

"Moths jumbled tunelessly above our heads, kaleidoscoping in this way that looked like visible music to me -- something that would be immediately audible to an alligator or a raccoon but that we human Bigtrees couldn't hear."

The conflict between tunelessly and music/audible, the needs to clarify "kaleidoscoping" (a verb I don't have a problem with, only I think it's fairly clear as-is) and specify that the humans wouldn't hear it, even though if we follow the path they could see it... see the moths? Do moths even make noise apart from when they brush up against things? It's also puzzling why Ava would pick out this detail of a night sequence (as it happens to come from) and invest it with such particular importance, although there is ample evidence in the rest of the book that she is prone to paying attention to the wrong things.

Reading passages like those I started to understand, when people fault critical darlings like SWAMPLANDIA! for being "too literary" and somehow unapproachable, that this is what they mean. If I had had to close-read that passage I might still be reading the book right now (exaggeration). I would never say everyone has to write like Hemingway or McCarthy, and some of Russell's turns I dearly loved -- like the way her shame for her father, trying to keep Swamplandia from going under, became "like a sword I'd made, glinting and strong." But I have to go with the comment made by Slate's John Dickerson who, exasperated on the Slate Audio Book Club's discussion of the book, finally exclaimed "Everything can't be like everything else!" That is a useful lesson for all of us out there.