Obsolescence

Yesterday I took my Kindle to Best Buy to get the right memory card for it (why didn't I do this before? I have no idea) and when I took it out, the employee helping me said "Whoa, what is that?" I handed it to him and he said, "I've never seen one of those." The scene repeated itself at the cash register, although the cashier was less interested in what it was than trying to hurry me along.

The 1st generation Kindle was released less than 5 years ago, or a little more than one-sixth of my life ago. On the bright side, I've never gone into a store and heard someone say to me, "Whoa, what is that?!"

August Unbookening

"Buy books used, perform periodic culls, and resell them."
--Sarah Manguso, "How to Have a Career: Advice to Young Writers"

Checked out: 7
Reviewed: 10
Bought: 5
22 in

Returned: 7
Lent/ returned: 2
Donated: 19
Left behind while traveling: 1
29 out

And that's how you hit zero for the year -- diligently, and with a secret list of "Books To Buy Right Now" that you are not actually buying right now.

Now hear this: Martin Amis on "The Bat Segundo Show"

This is a great interview if you want to feel your eyebrows shooting up approximately once every 10 minutes. I am weirdly fascinated with Amis and will probably chase that down, but I don't trust him at all when he says (in this interview) he loves all his characters. Nope!

Everybody knows it sucks to grow up

I liked this book in equal proportion to how much I disliked its protagonist.

The fictional magical college, Brakebills, at which most of THE MAGICIANS is set is outwardly closest to Hogwarts of the HARRY POTTER series, but not as close as I would have believed given the glibities of describing this book as "Harry Potter for grownups." That's some of the story, bu not the whole story. Hogwarts just picks up where all those English-boarding-school novels left off, giving a new plausibility to students' choosing to go to boarding school (particularly for an American audience in which these institutions are rare, and considered either for the super-rich, the red-shirted or the troubled [or all of those]). It's not just because your aristocratic parents don't want you underfoot any more.

Quentin Coldwater, THE MAGICIANS' hero of sorts, is a smart an isolated high school student in Brooklyn who finds a passage to Brakebills and decides, more or less immediately, to leave his friends and family behind and enroll. This is in keeping with the senior-year-of-high-school mindset, and think of all the teen movies that start with the protagonist switching schools or making themselves over in some way with the goal of being unrecognizable. (Later, Quentin will reflect back on his upbringing with a venom that frankly shocked me and didn't seem supported by what we have known about them, so we know that he can never go back.)

When my book club discussed THE MAGICIANS earlier this month, we split pretty fiercely on it, including on whether Quentin is at all altered during his five years studying at Brakebills and what happens to him after. I thought he was altered, but I couldn't identify at the time what the dimensions of them were, only that Quentin becomes more and more unlikeable even as the plot presses us to root for him. I think I recognize it now: Quentin arrives at Brakebills a 17-year-old kid and proceeds to go through the whole roil of adolescence while he's there, stirring up a range of emotions he doesn't know how to deal with. In his previous life, he was content to go along; now the full forces of anger, superiority, jealousy etc. are hitting him and it makes him act (as teenagers often do) like an asshole. Whatever he had suffered before, it was just a trial run.

Quentin's just a late bloomer, and in some ways I sympathize, but he is fairly unpleasant to be around for most of this book. Sometimes it was hard to believe that his friends were still his friends. Practically the only person he can tolerate (who thus comes off fairly blandly) is his fellow advanced classmates, and in return he wounds her pretty deeply for her loyalty. Everyone else gets scorn to varying degrees. I know the disillusionment of discovering that his magic school isn't as fun or life-changing is supposed to help us empathize with Quentin, and it did sometimes. It's enough for me to see if Quentin gets his footing in the second part of Grossman's series, THE MAGICIAN KING. After all, Harry Potter went through this, and he came out all right. But that's not a very flattering comparison after all.

"(In those high-school days, we thought that poetry was pretty much anything about 'feelings.')"
--Daniel Mendelsohn's critic's manifesto for the New Yorker is excellent all around, but I love this parenthetical the most. 

I enjoyed this post and this diagram by Lydia Netzer about "the difficult second novel." I have long suspected that such a phenomenon was real (akin to bands' struggle to record their follow-up albums to big hits) but rare is the author who will be open and honest about it.

I'd give Netzer's first novel SHINE SHINE SHINE, which came out this summer, an F for "fantastic prose" and a D for "Definitely cried on the subway while reading."

Maybe it's Form Reversion Week: Michael Chabon tells Mother Jones his new novel TELEGRAPH AVENUE began life as a TV pilot for TNT:

"It never got past the script stage. I put it aside. But I think partly because I was living in the world of that story every day and because I really love the characters, I decided to go back to it. I mistakenly thought all I needed to do was novelize it. Well it turned out that was just idiotic. And I spent two years wrestling with that laziness. Because—it seems so obvious in hindsight—a TV pilot doesn't do anything that a novel does. A TV pilot is all about setting the table. It's opening doors and leaving them open, and they're the doors that you're gonna go through to tell stories in the course of the series. Oh, it was a horrible structure. You try to make a novel out of it! I spent two years trying to before finally deciding just to abandon the novel completely. My wife talked me out of it. She loved Archy; she loved Gwen especially. And she just said, 'You can't do that! I need you to write this book.' Anyway, I kept the same characters and settings but I just reconceived the whole thing." 

I believe my response to this is best delivered in a YouTube video.

(P.S. I linked to this interview on Twitter, noting that the interviewer asked Chabon how he and author wife Ayelet Waldman manage their work and kids, which I thought was a positive step because it's a question most often asked of female authors. I thought I might get backlash for pointing this out -- is it reverse sexism to say that male authors should be asked that question? I don't know, okay? -- but I only had 1 unfollower and no angry responses. It's like the medium is growing up or something!)

How tos meet to dos

My post about summer reading made it to The How To (and was promptly shared by a user named jaygatsboobs... can't make it up). That's where I found this great post on how to start a group writing retreat, something I would really like to do, though maybe not for two weeks. Anyone in?

Some "Don'ts" for authors on social media

1. Don't complain about how your book only went to #2 on the New York Times best-seller list, and the crushing disappointment of not being #1. (Comparing yourself to the Buffalo Bills is, I guess, still kosher.)
2. Don't send your husband or assistant to comment on negative reviews about your work...
3. ...especially if they are going to call out negative reviewers by saying things like "Psycho alert" and "You are just plain wrong."
4. Don't argue that every negative review of your book is a personal attack.
5. Don't link to negative reviews on your fan page and ask your fans (or have your assistant ask them) to defend you.
6. Don't say "Well, she asked for it by posting a negative review in the first place" when a reviewer is harassed over said negative review.

Amazingly, Emily Giffin broke all those rules. Nice work! She even suggested the author of the original negative review remove her post after someone called her house to threaten her to delete it. Because clearly, that's not an outsize reaction or anything.

(I have never read any of Giffin's books, so I can't comment on her oeuvre. And frankly, in this case? Doesn't matter. She could be Leo Freakin Tolstoy and this would still be absurd.)

Summer Reading: Reading (and still reading) like a writer

There have been (and I have written about) a ton of blog-to-book adaptations, but Francine Prose's READING LIKE A WRITER is a book that should beget a blog.

This is an outsize request for an author who doesn't even have a website (as it seems), but hear me out: READING LIKE A WRITER is a useful but not that revolutionary guide to close reading for fun and profit technique, clearly compiled from Prose's years teaching writing here, there and everywhere. (If anyone out there is a professor, the scene of Prose cramming Chekhov in a Greyhound bus terminal might be inspirational... hopefully not too dispiriting. I loved it.) I don't mean to downgrade her advice, which overall is excellent. I didn't find it too earth-shattering, but only because I majored in it.

The real treat for me in this book was hearing about the authors Prose loves and looks up to, the ones she uses as models for her students and holds up as exemplary. It would be hard to come away from this book not wanting to read the aforementioned collections of Chekhov short stories, along with A SHIP MADE OF PAPER, Henry Green's LOVING, even treat A MOVEABLE FEAST to a second look. Her habit of using block quotes to illustrate especially good use of detail or dialogue or character serve as textbook examples without the textbook feeling. It wouldn't be too hard to extrapolate writing exercises from them should someone be so inclined; in almost all cases you see what she's getting at.

(This just in: Having written it several times, I am just now realizing how well suited Prose's last name is to her profession. She didn't marry into it either. Ah, should we all be so lucky.)

These passages are why I think Prose should have her own blog -- to call out exemplary parts of prose that she comes across in her reading, that can offer Teachable Moments. A SHIP MADE OF PAPER is one of the most recent books quoted (2003) and surely Prose has come across exemplars since READING LIKE A WRITER came out that could be similarly didactic. For concerns of time, the blog could only publish twice a week: The excerpt (maybe on a Tuesday), and then the professorial gloss (on a Thursday), and in between readers could speculate on what the device of the week is, and whether it's working, and how it fits into the overall work if they're familiar. Dear Professor Prose, if you need help with online strategy, just let me know! I would love to see what she's reading now, not just what she has read.

That's why I liked this book and will take several of its recommendations, but I probably won't go back to it. I'll stick to my personal pantheon of WRITING DOWN THE BONES, ON WRITING and LETTERS TO A FICTION WRITER.

Reading on the Road: If I could escape, I would but first of all let me say

As you read this I'm packing myself on a bus to Washington D.C. for a few days. There will be many more weekend trips after this, but there won't be any more this summer.

I'm taking two much anticipated fall reads, Emma Straub's LAURA LAMONT'S LIFE IN PICTURES and Martin Amis' LIONEL ASBO STATE OF ENGLAND. (That latter title... such cojones.) And I'm bringing a paperback of Charity Shumway's TEN GIRLS TO WATCH that the good people at Atria sent me. I had seen the author's name around and was trying to figure out why it looked familiar -- turns out we were classmates in a summer course a few years ago. So, that's cool!

Basis for my sitcom, "Word Up"

Someday Haruki Murakami's going to write a book about what it's like to be perpetually in the running for the Nobel Prize for Literature and never get it. Also, cats and a mysterious woman. Naturally Philip Roth and Cormac McCarthy would be his next-door neighbors and Gabriel Garcia Marquez would be a local gangster who swaggers past without ever actually doing anything. Personally, I'm rooting for Italian author Dacia Maraini, because it's good to take a side.

You know, as long as nobody got hurt.

It makes me happy to think of the polite, soft-spoken David Mitchell being mobbed by fans of CLOUD ATLAS in China. Some people should be rock stars.

This is the 100th book I read this year.

I predict it will surprise a lot of people and as with all surprises, some of them aren't going to like it.

Hey, maybe disgraced Missouri representative Todd Akin just got his false and reprehensible ideas from the DUNE books! (Not having read these books I have no idea whether this is true or not. Perhaps you can speak to it. But I think this blogger makes the point that it really doesn't matter where he got his ideas, he's still wrong.)