take three

Now, Vintage asks: what will be the classics of the future? (via Maud)

So, I don't get it. Did Bob Woodward have this book waiting in a desk drawer until Deep Throat's identity was revealed? Woodward is a good journalist, but he may be a better businessman. USA Today scored a copy a week early and reveals some Watergate-era tidbits here.

I got a free trial download from Audible.com, the digital audiobook store. I selected Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer. The downloading process was very quick and easy. I'll let you know how the listening experience is once I find time to check it out.

- C. Max Magee @ 8:57 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Book List: 10 overseas writers we should be reading

The recently awarded international Man Booker prize (given to Ismail Kadare of Albania) inspired critic John Carey to announce in the Guardian: "If you speak Spanish or French or Italian or German or any of a dozen other languages, and walk into your local bookstore, you will ... find what is being imagined in China, what stories are being told in Korea, how the novel is being reinvented in Spain and the Scandinavian countries. But if you live in England you will find no such abundance." The same is true of the US, so I was happy to see that the Guardian had some experts put together a list of "10 overseas writers we should be reading." As a supplement to the Guardian's list, here are some of the books by these authors that appear to be available here in the States

• Harry Mulisch - Netherlands - The Discovery of Heaven, The Assault, Sigfried, The Procedure


• Stefan Heym - Germany - The Wandering Jew, The King David Report


• Cees Nooteboom - Netherlands - The Following Story, Roads to Santiago: A Modern-Day Pilgrimage Through Spain, Rituals, All Souls Day, In the Dutch Mountains


• Marcel Benabou - Morocco - Jacob, Menahem, and Mimoun: A Family Epic, Dump This Book While You Still Can!, Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books


• Halldor Laxness - Iceland - Under the Glacier, Independent People, Iceland's Bell, Paradise Reclaimed, World Light, The Fish Can Sing


• Juan Goytisolo - Spain - State of Siege, The Marx Family Saga, Marks of Identity, Juan the Landless, Landscapes of War: From Sarajevo to Chechnya, The Garden of Secrets


• Jaan Kross - Estonia - Professor Martens' Departure, Czar's Madman


• Marie Darrieussecq - France - Pig Tales: A Novel of Lust and Transformation, My Phantom Husband, Undercurrents, Breathing Underwater


• Shen Congwen - China - Imperfect Paradise


• Dubravka Ugresic - Croatia - The Culture of Lies: Antipolitical Essays, Lend Me Your Character, Thank You for Not Reading: Essays on Literary Trivia, The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, In the Jaws of Life

Looks like an interesting, eclectic list. I'm intrigued by Ugresic in particular. For more Man Booker International Prize coverage check out the Literary Saloon.

- C. Max Magee @ 9:02 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

The Reading Queue Revisited

I created my reading queue about a year and half ago because I decided I needed a system to help me work through my big to be read pile. The main problem, as I wrote at the time, was that there were a number of books in my TBR pile that I was interested in reading but never seemed to get around to. A newer, more exciting book would come along and it would vault to the top of the pile and other books would languish, unread.

Part of the problem is how I read. I read fairly quickly, but I don't spend a lot of my day reading books. I spend a lot of time on this here computer, for one thing. Plus, every day I read the newspaper and every week I read the New Yorker from cover to cover. I'll probably read about 30 books this year, not a lot when you consider my TBR pile is more than 40 books tall. Though I'd love to be able to read two or three books a week, I don't really mind my slower pace. Still, I didn't like the idea of books staring at me year after year unread, so I created the reading queue.

As you can see if you check out the queue near the bottom of the right hand column, I alphabetize my TBR pile by author and then assign each book a number. When the time comes to pick my next book to read, I use a random number generator to decide for me. I know, it's impossibly nerdy, but I've decided I like handling my reading decisions this way.

For one thing, it is in keeping with certain compulsive tendencies I have about organizing things (although, sadly, those tendencies don't cause me to clean off my desk with any regularity, for example), and each new book I pick to read is a little surprise rather than an agonizing decision (well, maybe it's not that bad). The only time I read a book out of order is if a publisher or author has sent me an advance copy and I want to make sure I read and review it when it comes out. Those I bump right to the top of the list. But if I go buy a book or get one as a gift, it goes into the queue. Maybe I'll read it next week, maybe I'll read it in five years; the reading queue will decide.

I'm probably the only odd bird out there who feels a need to organize their reading this way, but if anyone else has a reading queue of their own, I'd love to hear about it.

- C. Max Magee @ 9:57 PM ~ comments: 5 ~ Links to this post

 

Jonathan Safran Foer: The Collected Blurbs

• For Sayonara, Gangsters by Genichiro Takahashi: "Sayonara, Gangsters is one of those rare books that actually defies description... It's funny, sure. And beautiful. And slightly insane. And haunting. And heart-breaking. But all those words miss the point. The point is you have to read it. So read it."
• For The Gangster We Are All Looking For by Le Thi Diem Thuy: "A beautiful, deeply moving story of a family. The more I read, the more I felt the family was mine."
• For It's All Right Now by Charles Chadwick: "This novel is huge -- in size, ambition, intelligence, and heart."
• For The Only Good Thing Anyone Has Ever Done by Sandra Newman: "Sandra Newman has an original way of thinking. The Only Good Thing Anyone Has Ever Done is often hysterically funny, profoundly strange, and unbearably beautiful. Often all at once."
• For My Life with Corpses by Wylene Dunbar: "My Life with Corpses is overwhelming: in its beauty, emotional force, and uniqueness. While I finished the book a few weeks ago already, I have the strange feeling that I'm still reading it -- it's that resonant."
• For Please Don't Kill the Freshman by Zoe Trope: "I am in awe of Zoe Trope. This book is more than the kind of good story we've become satisfied with. It's more than interesting. It's art."
• For The Know-It-All by A.J. Jacobs: "The Know-It-All is funny, original, and strangely heroic. I found myself rooting on Jacobs's quixotic, totally endearing quest."
• For The Noodle Maker by Ma Jian: "The Noodle Maker is hugely entertaining and deeply serious. It's something to celebrate."

- C. Max Magee @ 9:33 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Belly by Lisa Selin Davis

Belly is a book about a man named Belly. Belly aka William O'Leary is a grandfather now, just out of jail after four years in for illegal bookkeeping, but he used to be a real big shot in Saratoga Springs. He was also a drunk, cruelly dismissive of his family and torn up by the death of his third daughter. When he arrives back home he finds that his old stomping grounds have changed and that his three surviving daughters are wary of his presence. The book encompasses Belly's first week of freedom and is more a character study of this difficult man than a plot-driven novel. Because Belly is so stubborn and belligerent, it is difficult to commiserate with his bitterness about the incursion of WalMart and fancy chain coffee shops. In fact, I found Belly, the man, to be so repugnant that I thought that Lisa Selin Davis was trying to point out that he was wrong, that those chain stores aren't so bad, but based on this interview, I can see that that is not the case. Belly is an admirable debut, with a handful of well-crafted characters, especially Belly and his oldest daughter Nora, but I would have more enjoyed reading about these characters in a more dynamic plot.

- C. Max Magee @ 3:00 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Short stories from leading authors

Not sure how long this has been on line, but if you haven't seen it, take a look. The Guardian has a sizeable batch of fiction on line from Richard Ford, Donna Tartt, Haruki Murakami and many others. (via Conversational Reading)

- C. Max Magee @ 2:41 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Distinguished in a David Niven mustache by Andrew Saikali

I suppose it's what you do with luck that ultimately determines whether it was good or bad. The luck itself is kind of ephemeral, landing in your lap, ready to be spun and twisted into something more substantial. Ready to be given a direction.

I was on an airplane recently - destination Norway via Frankfurt. I'd settled into my window seat, two books at the ready, pillow just so, contacts off, glasses on, and with less than five minutes before take-off there was no one, absolutely no one, sitting beside me. I couldn't believe my luck. And then...

And then, with sitcom timing, a harried and rather shell-shocked individual traveling back to the EU silently slumped into the empty seat, looked up, stared at me, and then opened a magazine. In due course our flight attendant, distinguished in a David Niven mustache, began the food service. And so it was with bemusement that I watched my seat-mate take uncertain steps to lower his dinner tray - a process he began by banging the seat in front of him with jarring forward jolts. I came to the rescue.

I guess this primed me for the farce that followed. I was not entirely surprised when I saw my hapless friend struggling with his seat belt, completely mystified as to how to dislodge himself from this alien contraption. I happily walked him through the rocket science required to unclasp and separate the two parts. So it was a bit odd, then, when less than an hour later my companion tapped me on the shoulder and pointed to, well, to his seat belt area. He'd apparently neglected to take notes the first time and had once again become trapped.

All of which might have bounced off me except that every twenty minutes or so I noticed his peering head swivel towards my window and then extend, ostrich-like, in front of me, past my nose and right to the window pane without a single word or acknowledgement of my presence. And when he returned to his magazine he would invariably extend his elbows left and right, jabbing me sharply in the ribs each time. Now I'm not the biggest guy in the world, but I do occupy a certain amount of space. I have mass. I don't defy the principles of science. Were one to encounter me on a dark path, one wouldn't simply pass through me. There would be a discernible thud.

I left the plane bemoaning my fortune, but also contemplating how this fellow handles life in the real world, how he responds, and how much control he has over life's little day-to-day torments. What if he were Norman Bray?

Trevor Cole's wonderful novel Norman Bray In The Performance Of His Life just happened to be one of the two books I brought with me to Europe, and was the one I was reading as I was being poked and prodded by my oblivious airplane friend. Norman is a middle-aged stage actor in Toronto, years past his prime and relegated to the occasional voice-over gig. On the surface he seems pompous and childlike, walking through life in a pleasantly deluded state - a kindred spirit to Ignatius J. Reilly. And while this novel doesn't quite scale the same dizzying heights as A Confederacy Of Dunces, I found myself responding to the characters in a similar way - wanting to reach through the pages of the book and smack some sense into these guys, if only so they can begin to cope with their lot in life instead of just assuming with incomprehensible certainty that things would work out in the end. Of course then we wouldn't have these two gloriously funny novels.

Norman Bray's problems, which he attributes to bad luck, are largely of his own doing, and the glimmer of hope at the end, which he would probably credit to his own tenacity, is in fact more a conflux of circumstances which, for once, he doesn't sabotage. Sheer luck (which he would normally have obliviously squandered) is allowed to develop into good fortune.

My airplane friend would at least have stood a fighting chance as Norman Bray, since Norman relies on circumstance to extricate him from the chaotic mess of his own creation. He'd have a harder time as Lorimer Black, the hero of Armadillo the second book that I brought with me, and my first foray into the extraordinary world of William Boyd. Thanks to my fellow writer Emre, I now have a new author to obsess over and to devour everything from.

Like Norman Bray, Lorimer Black is bedevilled by circumstance, but in this case, through little fault of his own. Rather than being oblivious, Lorimer is remarkably self-aware. All the more troubling, then, to find him swept up by circumstance, his London routine twisted and tossed, and then thrown into a downward Kafka-esque spiral.

But at least Lorimer - an insurance-adjuster with a mysterious past, juggling work, women and family - is aware, conscious of his juggling act, conscious of his identity, and conscious of the luck that eventually comes his way. He's better suited to the task of accepting circumstance and turning it to his advantage.

I didn't see my airplane friend actually leave the plane. With any luck he managed it without incident. I can only hope that fortune shines on this guy and the people he'll inevitably be around as he goes through life. They'll all need it.

- C. Max Magee @ 9:34 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Consider the classic

I had such a good time reading the Count of Monte Cristo that it made me wonder why I don't read more so-called "classics." So many times I have wandered into a book store or browsed through Amazon fruitlessly, when I might have gone for the known quantity that is the classic. First, let me define what I'm talking about here. People shy away from classics for two reasons: because they are old. You worry that the book will seem moldy and out of touch. And a classic is the sort of book that is assigned in middle school and high school, and therefore it doesn't seem like the sort of book you'd want to read for fun (it might bring back bad memories, after all). But again and again I find that this is the wrong way to look at it. I am almost never disappointed when I read a classic novel. So, for all you casual readers out there, consider the classic.

But classics aren't just great for us grown ups, they're perfect for precocious young readers. When I worked at the book store, I would often encounter parents trying to find books for kids who had read all the kids books. These young readers had read all the Harry Potter, all the Lemony Snicket, and the parents were looking for more of the same. I realized that classic novels are the perfect way to graduate these young readers to the next level of reading. Sure they may get assigned some of these books in school, but I know that when I was young, I found reading books for fun to be far more gratifying than reading for school. Here's a quick list of classics that I like to recommend to precocious young readers (I'm only recommending books that I have read, so if you've got any ideas please share - there are so many more!):

• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
• The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
• Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
• Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
• Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
• Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
• Or you could just get ALL of them

Update: From the comments:

• Awakening by Kate Chopin (suggested by edan)
• Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (suggested by edan)
• Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte (suggested by erin)
• The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky (suggested by The Happy Booker)

Related: Ask a Book Question: The 27th in a Series (Classifying Classics)
Related: Giving Kids the Classics

- C. Max Magee @ 9:11 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

As I recall there was a brief burst of interest in Alexandre Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo when the movie came out in 2002. It makes sense because the movie does a good job of capturing this story of intrigue and revenge, and, in fact, the novel lends itself well to the screen because it is so packed full of brilliant schemes and vivid characters. At the start of the book Edmond Dantes, a young French sailor, gets unwittingly wrapped up in the political machinations of his day, and ends up getting hauled off to the Chateau d'If, an island prison as sinister as it sounds. At this point, though we feel sorry for Dantes, we are treated to 50 or so pages of his struggle against hopelessness and his friendship with a priest named Faria. Dumas' account of Dantes time in prison is thrilling both for its emotional weight and for the ingenious plans that Dantes and Faria concoct. By the next stage of the book, when the mysterious Count of Monte Cristo begins stirring up trouble among the Parisian elite, you wonder what else could be in store, since so many adventures have already occurred. But it turns out there's a whole lot more. Dozens of characters are introduced, and though at times it becomes a bit overwhelming trying to remember who is romantically involved with whom and who is trying to kill whom, the whole massive web manages to untangle itself wonderfully in the end. The book is a real joy to read and Monte Cristo is a brilliant character. You will find him to be both enthralling and terrifying.

- C. Max Magee @ 10:53 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Debut Fiction Reax

I know this is old news, but I thought I'd give my brief thoughts on the stories from the New Yorker debut fiction issue. I wasn't bowled over any of the stories, but I was most impressed by Umwem Alpem's "Ex-Mas Feast," not so much for writerly virtuosity as for the glimpse of the exotic the story provides. Perhaps because so many short stories seem to be set in the suburbs, I am always drawn to stories set in faraway places. I was somewhat less impressed by Karen Russell's "Haunting Olivia," which I thought would have been a more successful story if it had been half as long. I did, however, enjoy how Russell injected a bit of the surreal into her story. I was also dutifully shocked upon discovering that she is only 23 years old, even though I should know that the New Yorker loves to find these fiction savants. Least interesting of all to me was Justin Tussing's "The Laser Age," which, at first glance, I thought was going to be a story of the twisted not to distant future, but instead was just another mismatched boy-meets-girl tale.

- C. Max Magee @ 9:45 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Sifting through emails

We're back, and I'm sifting through my emails where a couple of friends have left some interesting tidbits and recommendations:

• Garth writes: "Europeana, by Patrik Ourednik, is one of the weirdest, funniest, most disturbing, and most wonderful books I've read in the last year. It's also, as a vacation bonus (depending on how one looks at it) a shorty: a two-hour read. I heartily recommend it to your readership. Description is difficult, but an interview with Ourednik is up on the Dalkey Archive website. These guys do amazing work finding and translating literature from around the world."
• And Millions contributor Andrew Saikali pointed out that Edward P. Jones was just awarded the $150,000 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for his novel The Known World. Add that to his $500,000 MacArthur Grant from 2004 and Jones is doing pretty well for himself. I just hope he takes some time off from all of this award collecting to write another novel!

- C. Max Magee @ 10:36 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Kapuscinski on the radio

For some reason, the CBC never made their interview with Ryszard Kapuscinski available online after it originally aired. Luckily, Millions contributor Andrew Saikali listened to the show live and sent me a quick recap:

- It was a half-hour interview which actually was recorded by the CBC at his home in Warsaw.
- he's a very thoughtful, eloquent man
- Much of it was devoted to growing up during the war, in Pinsk in the Poland/Belarus border area - I gather it sort of pingponged back and forth between the two jurisdictions throughout history
- childhood poor - the war hit on what would have been his first day of school. - grew up with War being the norm. Peace, when it came, felt transitional, tentative
- Pinsk was multi-ethnic then - Poles, Belarussians, Jews, Ukrainians maybe, and probably others that I forget. - Pre-war it was functional, the various ethnicities mixed and worked together in order to get by.
- his parents were both teachers
- hunger during the war caused him and others to ask the Russian soldiers for food, but all they could get were cigarettes.
- often went barefoot (as children, during the war) - because shoes were in short supply - still sees people in their fancy shoes and flashes back to when he thought of them as "luxuries"
- as a young reporter he was sent to both China and India (on two separate occasions) - and in each case the following happened: he was so overwhelmed by the culture, and got so immersed, that he felt as if he could spend the rest of his life reporting from there and writing about there - and so he asked to be transferred from there quickly - because as absorbed and fascinated as he was by it, he knew that first and foremost he was a man of the world and wanted so see and experience everything, everywhere - which, I think, shows remarkable self-awareness, especially in a young reporter, to know that one's worldly-tendencies were in danger of being trumped by a specific-regional fascination - to know enough about your own strengths and weaknesses to leave, and follow your "true path" before getting (permanently) drawn in to something specific (no matter how great it may be)

- C. Max Magee @ 1:45 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Mrs. Millions buys a book

Mrs. Millions thanks all of you for your suggestions. We stopped by the Borders today, and she selected Michael Frayn's Headlong. She wanted to purchase The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova, as well, but the staff at Borders was unsuccessful in its half-hearted attempt to locate the book for us nor did it appear to be on the new releases/bestsellers table, all of which seemed odd to me because isn't this supposed to be one of the big books of the summer? Well, hardcovers are no good at the beach anyway, so maybe we'll pick it up when we get back. That's all for now; time to go catch a plane.

- C. Max Magee @ 3:50 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

It's who you know

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has spotted a debut novel called The Testing of Luther Albright by Mackenzie Bezos. Recognize that last name? Mackenzie is none other than the wife of Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos. The book doesn't come out until August, but an Amazon.com in house reviewer is already describing it as "a debut novel that heralds the beginning of what bodes to be a substantial writing career." PW reviews the book favorably as well. It'll be interesting to see how much review coverage this book gets when it comes out.

- C. Max Magee @ 2:12 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

What's next for Mrs. Millions?

Mrs. Millions has decided that if I'm going to do all this blogging she should get something out of it, too. She reads a lot, and it seems that I'm always digging through our bookshelves looking for another book for her to read. Well, I'm running out of ideas, so she's decided to bypass me and go straight to you guys. She has thoughtfully provided her recent reading preferences to help you select something to her liking. You'll notice here, as well, the attention Mrs. Millions pays to the look and feel of the books she reads, so you may want to factor that in.

Like Max, I look forward to vacation because it demands that vast amounts of time be spent reading. Unlike Max, I do not have a reading queue but instead rely upon recommendations (always Max's) for what to read next, or I search for an appealing title and cover from the Millions library, letting chance encounters determine my next choice. But now, Max is kindly letting me use the blog to place a request for suggestions... I call it "What's next for Mrs. Millions?"

My most recent read is Small Island by Andrea Levy, which I am presently halfway through and am enjoying because it is fiction that weaves itself through history without being too tightly bound to it. Levy's book also has an incredibly intentional feel to it and it is filled with vivid detail. The book is printed on paper that is like newsprint with rough edges - the tactility of a book impresses me as much as the content. Prior to this was Case Histories by Kate Atkinson. This was not among my favorites, primarily because the story was too neat with not enough depth, and it's a hardcover with bookjacket (which I immediately removed, as I often do). But it had a tough act to follow: The World According to Garp by John Irving is messy and endearing, pressing all the wrong and right buttons. Ours is an older copy, used before we acquired it which seemed in step with the novel - I even kept this one's jacket on. And before that was John Steinbeck's East of Eden, my favorite among this group.

With that brief history in mind, please send Max your suggestions so
that I will be kept from interrupting his reading time. ; ]

So got any ideas? Help me out here folks. Leave your suggestions in the comments below.

- C. Max Magee @ 10:47 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Debut Fiction at the New Yorker

This is why I love the New Yorker. Right when I'm about to go on vacation, they put out the debut fiction issue, perfect for the beach. In fact, I still vividly recall reading an excerpt from Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything is Illuminated in a debut fiction issue while at the beach a few summers ago. This year's stories look interesting. There's "An Ex-Mas Feast" (read it here) by Uwem Alpan, "a Jesuit Priest from Nigeria." There's "The Laser Age" by Justin Tussing, an Iowa Writer's Workshop grad, whose first novel, The Best People in the World, comes out nest year. And there's "Haunting Olivia" by Karen Russell (read it here.)

I don't know why, but I always feel faint stirrings of jealousy when the debut fiction issue comes out. I'm not exactly an aspiring novelist, but I think it riles people up to see unknowns on such a big stage, the biggest in short fiction. I just have to remind myself that there are much more deserving things to decry in the literary world than the debut fiction issue. That way I can enjoy the stories with my emotions unclouded.

Update: I read the stories and here's what I thought.

- C. Max Magee @ 5:11 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Vacation, n., time spent reading while away from home

Posting has been light because I'm nearing the end of the quarter at school, and I am in the final stages of a very big project. And posting will probably continue to be light because I'll be heading off on vacation as soon as school is done. I'm thinking about taking my laptop with me, but even if I do, I'm not sure how close I'll be to the Internet. I'm excited about this vacation (we'll be joining my family at the beach in North Carolina) not just because it'll be a much needed break from school, but also because there's no place I'd rather read than on vacation. On a proper vacation there are seemingly endless hours to spend with your books. I also love the way certain reading experiences become associated with certain exotic locales - and by "exotic" I mean simply "not home." For example, last summer Mrs. Millions both read Walker Percy's classic The Moviegoer during our honey moon in St. Maarten. The unfamiliarity of that island paradise mingled with the humidity of New Orleans where Percy's Binx Bolling is trying to keep "despair" at bay. The book and the place where I read it combined to form a peculiar sort of dreamy memory that I love. Though I haven't even gotten the suitcase out of the closet, I already know which four books I'll be taking with me. I plan to finish The Count of Monte Cristo on the plane ride there. I've been enjoying the book immensely, by the way. After that I'm going to read Belly, a debut novel by Lisa Selin Davis that will be coming out later this summer. The publisher's publicity compares her writing to that of Jane Smiley and Richard Russo. I'm also bringing a couple of nonfiction books: David Lipsky's account of following a class of cadets through West Point, Absolutely American. Lipsky was originally assigned to write an article for Rolling Stone about the military academy but ended up sticking with the story for four years. I'm also bringing The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki, the resident business writer at the New Yorker. The book's premise, which is borrowed from the world of economics, is that the collective choices of large populations of people are often correct, and that it's even possible, by setting up what amounts to a futures market for ideas, to use this effect to predict the future. A good example of this is a futures market where one can bet on who will be elected president. Such markets have been very good predictors of actual events over the years. None of these books particularly strike me as "summer reading," but I'll just be happy that it's summer and that my only obligation is to read.

- C. Max Magee @ 6:44 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Kapuscinski on Canadian radio

Millions contributor and ardent Canadian, Andrew Saikali, dropped me a line to let me know that Ryszard Kapuscinski, the Polish journalist and one of my favorite writers will be on the CBC Radio program Writers and Company this Sunday, June 5th. If you're interested, you can listen live by clicking through from here. (Check that page to see when it will air in your time zone.) It appears as though the show will also be available here for download for a week after it airs on Sunday.

- C. Max Magee @ 3:04 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Fine Lines

I got a neat book in the mail the other day out of the blue. It's a smartly packaged collection of drawings by an artist named Don Nace. The book is called Drawn Out. Nace's strokes are like dark scratches on the page, and at first glance the drawings seemed full of tiresome, and possibly adolescent, angst. But after only a few pages I found myself quite mesmerized - drawn in, as it were - by the deceptive simplicity, the deep emotion and dark humor of the drawings. Thanks to a pointer from Ron, I see that Nace has a website where he posts a new drawing nearly every day. It's worth checking out.

- C. Max Magee @ 2:46 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

A Magazine Monster

You may have heard about this. In October an 8 DVD set containing digital images of every page of the 4,109 issues of the New Yorker from February 1925 to February 2005 will hit stores (retailing for $100 - but cheaper at Amazon and other discounters). As a huge fan of the New Yorker, my eyeballs nearly popped out of my head when I first saw the NY Times story about this, but I'm trying to restrain myself. As some of you know, I'm extremely compulsive about the New Yorker, in fact it may be the only compulsion I have. I read he magazine cover to cover every week, and if my issue is late in arriving I've been known to panic. My fear is that once I got my hands on this set, I would be compelled to consume every word of it at the expense of school and work and everything else, possibly even eating and sleeping. I'm may have to put myself into forced hibernation starting in October in order to keep those DVDs from falling in to my hands. Also, normally I would find the subtitle of this collection - "Eighty Years of the Nation's Greatest Magazine" - to be somewhat presumptuous, but I happen to agree with it.

- C. Max Magee @ 2:16 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Oprah's at it again

I'm guessing that Oprah's latest choice for her book club was timed to coincide with BEA (the big book expo) going on in New York right now. Despite recent pleas for a return to contemporary fiction, Oprah has decided to stick with the classics. The latest pick is notable in that it's not just one book, it's three. Vintage Books has combined three novels by William Faulkner - As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury and Light in August - into one Oprah-branded set called The Summer of Faulkner which retails for close to 30 bucks. To my mind, the selection is also notable in that these novels are probably the most challenging books that Oprah has ever recommended. I've said before that I don't think that Oprah's focus on classic books is a bad thing, but I have to wonder if this latest pick won't provoke a backlash. Among the literary types there is already much consternation over Oprah co-opting classic novels for use on her TV show, and this latest pick, which repackages three of the greatest American novels into a "summer of" set, might be enough to stir critics into a frenzy. From the standpoint of the regular Oprah Book Club readers, Oprah may lose some fans who find Faulkner tough going and resent the 30 dollar price tag that got slapped on this pick. On the other hand, if this really does turn out to be the "Summer of Faulkner" and hundreds of thousands of Americans read his novels, I'll be hard-pressed to say that this was a bad choice.

See also: All of Oprah's classic picks.

- C. Max Magee @ 1:50 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Heard any good books lately?

A few days ago Scott put up a post about audiobooks in which he put forward the idea that listening to a book isn't quite the same as reading it. There were quite a few people who disagreed with him, though not persuasively enough to change his mind. I happen to be a fan of audiobooks which I see as an alternative to bad radio rather than a substitute for reading. Anyway, in light of the recent discussions at Conversational Reading, I was intrigued by this article in the CS Monitor about the "Audies," the Oscars for the world of audiobooks. The three finalists for Audiobook of the Year are an eclectic bunch: The Bad Beginning: A Multi-Voice Recording read by Tim Curry et al, My Life read by Bill Clinton, and Ulysses read by Jim Norton and Marcella Riordan (that's 22 CDs or 27 hours worth of Ulysses by the way.)

- C. Max Magee @ 10:51 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post