British artist illustrates the war

British paper The Times hired artist Matthew Cook to do illustrations of the action in Iraq. The resulting drawings and paintings provide a different look at what's going on over there. An online gallery shows him at work along with a bunch of the illustrations, and an article tells his story. He's also got a gallery show coming up in London apparently.

- C. Max Magee @ 4:15 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Pronunciation challenges

I happened upon The American Heritage Book of English Usage Pronunciation Challenges page the other day. On the Pronunciation Challenges page, one can find a list of 191 commonly mispronounced words (or word types.) The page starts with a sentence that - though it doesn't make any sense - is made up of words that can be pronounced in "at least two distinctly different ways":

The affluent and choleric comptroller heinously inveigled herbs from the impious valet who often harasses the dour governor with aplomb.

- C. Max Magee @ 11:17 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

In Our Time from the BBC

I usually listen to the BBC World Service when I listen to radio online, but Millions contributor Andrew recently told me about an excellent programme (as they say) on BBC4. "In Our Time" is hosted by Melvyn Bragg who, each week, is joined by three guests as he explores "the history of ideas." To give an idea of the varied topics the program touches upon, the most recent show was about Samuel Johnson, 18th century author of Lives of the Poets among many other books (here's his greatest hits), and "England 's most famous and well connected man of letters," while next week's show is on asteroids. All the old shows are archived and organized by subject.

- C. Max Magee @ 9:13 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Notable News Items

I've got another post up about Nadeem Aslam's Maps for Lost Lovers at the LBC Blog. I've been going back and forth with Sam (of Golden Rule Jones), so check out his posts, too.

Calvin Trillin talks turducken and other things Cajun in the most recent issue of National Geographic. The piece is typical Trillin, funny and featuring mouth-watering descriptions of various regional delicacies. (Much like the articles collected in a favorite book of mine, Trillin's Feeding a Yen)

Jim Crace discusses his Guardian column, The Digested Read, "The idea of rewriting a book in the style of the author in just 500 or so words is a gift to any satirist, and it remains the only outlet in the print media where publishers' hype always gets treated with the irreverence it deserves." A collection of the columns is out in England

The CS Monitor takes a look at the self-publishing craze: "IUniverse, which prints several thousand books annually, reports submissions are up 17 percent in the first six months of this year."

A couple of new McSweeney's offerings that you may or may not have seen already. Noisy Outlaws, Unfriendly Blobs, and Some Other Things... is anthology for young adults, edited by Lemony Snicket and with stories by Nick Hornby, John Scieszka and Neil Gaiman, among others. Meanwhile Issue #17 of their Quarterly Concern is also out. According to Amazon: "Issue 17 is not an ordinary issue of McSweeney's. It is, however, an ordinary bundle of mail, stacked and rubber-banded, containing the usual items: a recent issue of Yeti Researcher, a sausage-basket catalog, a flyer for slashed prices on multi-user garments, a couple letters... the usual. Also: the debut of a DVD quarterly, featuring never-before-seen work by Spike Jonze and David O. Russell. Also: stories."

- C. Max Magee @ 1:19 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

New book previews: Garcia Marquez, Iweala

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a Nobel Laureate with a decent claim to the mantle of "greatest living writer," has a new book out this week called Memories of My Melancholy Whores. It's been out in the Spanish-speaking world for a year, so most folks have heard what this slim volume is about: according to the Times Online: "a respected journalist, breaking the rules of a lifetime to fall madly, anarchically, transgressively in love with a 14-year-old girl on the eve of his 90th birthday." The review goes on to say, "There is not in this slender book one stale sentence, redundant word or unfinished thought." But Tania Mejer in the Boston Herald writes, "To call Gabriel Garcia Marquez's latest effort disturbing is an understatement," and later, "every time I reflect on the story, I can't help but think how unsettling it is." In fact, the reviews across the board seem torn over this book - is it yet another transcendent example of Marquez's writing or is it creepy? Luckily the Complete Review is keeping score and gives this one a B+. See Also: The Marquez scoop and an early look. Update: Here's the glowing review in the Chicago Tribune that Pete mentioned in the comments. Amazing the disparate reactions to this book.

23-year-old Uzodinma Iweala started his debut novel, Beasts of No Nation in high school after reading an article about child soldiers in Sierra Leone. The novel is told in the pidgin voice of a child soldier in an unnamed West African country. Iweala, who is American-born but has Nigerian roots, is already receiving plaudits from some big names. In an interview with MoorishGirl, Salman Rushdie named it "book he most enjoyed reading recently," and Ali Smith in a review at the Guardian described the book as "a novel so scorched by loss and anger that it's hard to hold and so gripping in its sheer hopeless lifeforce that it's hard to put down."

- C. Max Magee @ 8:03 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

At the LBC blog

I've got a post up about LBC nominee Maps for Lost Lovers by Nadeem Aslam up over at the LBC blog.

- C. Max Magee @ 9:25 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

The Prizewinners

The list at the end of this post is arbitrary. Necessarily so, because awards, by their nature, are arbitrary. Nonetheless, after a couple of weeks full of awards news, including the inaugural appearance of the Quills, I was curious to see if all these awards are really pointing us towards good books.

If we are dissatisfied with the Booker Prize or the National Book Award or the Pulitzer, the Quills, which casts the net very wide and relies on voting from the reading public, have been presented as a populist alternative. The results are less than satisfying. It is not news to anyone that the reading public likes Harry Potter and books by Sue Monk Kidd and Janet Evanovich. I hold nothing against those bestsellers, but naming them the best books of the year does little to satisfy one's yearning to be introduced to the best, to have an encounter with a classic in our own time. We like those bestsellers because they entertain us, but while monetary success is the reward for those entertaining authors, awards have typically honored books with qualities that are more difficult to quantify. These award-winners are supposed to edify and challenge while still managing to entertain. But, as we saw with last year's National Book Awards, readers are unsatisfied when recognition is reserved only for the obscure. We want to know our best authors even while they remain mysterious to us. So, pondering this, I wondered which books have been most recognized by book awards in recent years, and could those books also be fairly called the best books.

It turned out to be a challenge. I wanted to include both American books and British books, as well as the English-language books from other countries that are eligible to win some of these awards. I started with the National Book Award and the Pulitzer from the American side and the Booker and Whitbread from the British side. Because I wanted the British books to "compete" with the American books, I also looked at a couple of awards that recognize books from both sides of the ocean, the National Book Critics Circle Awards and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. The IMPAC is probably the weakest of all these, but since it is both more international and more populist than the other awards, I thought it added something. The glaring omission is the PEN/Faulkner, but it would have skewed everything too much in favor of the American books, so I left it out.

I looked at these six awards from 1995 to the present awarding three points for winning an award and two points for an appearance on a shortlist or as a finalist. Here's the key that goes with the list: B=Booker Prize, C=National Book Critics Circle Award, I=International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, N=National Book Award, P=Pulitzer Prize, W=Whitbread Book Award, bold=winner

• 11, 2003, The Known World by Edward P. Jones - C, I, N, P
• 9, 2001, The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen - C, I, N, P
• 8, 1997, Underworld by Don DeLillio - C, I, N, P
• 7, 2004, Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst - B, C, W
• 7, 2002, Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides - I, N, P
• 7, 2001, Atonement by Ian McEwan - B, N, W
• 7, 1998, The Hours by Michael Cunningham - C, I, P
• 7, 1997, Last Orders by Graham Swift - B, I, W
• 7, 1997, Quarantine by Jim Crace - B, I, W
• 6, 2004, Gilead by Marilynn Robinson - N, P
• 5, 2003, The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard - I, N
• 5, 2001, True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey - B, I
• 5, 2000, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon - C, P
• 5, 2000, The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood - B, I
• 5, 1999, Waiting by Ha Jin - N, P
• 5, 1999, Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee - B, C
• 5, 1999, Being Dead by Jim Crace - C, W
• 5, 1998, Charming Billy by Alice McDermott - I, N
• 5, 1997, American Pastoral by Philip Roth - C, P
• 5, 1996, Every Man for Himself by Beryl Bainbridge - B, W
• 5, 1996, Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer by Steven Millhauser - N, P
• 5, 1995, The Moor's Last Sigh by Salman Rushdie - B, W
• 5, 1995, The Ghost Road by Pat Barker - B, W
• 5, 1995, Independence Day by Richard Ford - C, P
• 5, 1995, Sabbath's Theater by Philip Roth - N, P
• 4, 2004, Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell - B, C
• 4, 2003, Brick Lane by Monica Ali - B, C
• 4, 2003, Bitter Fruit by Achmat Dangor - B, I
• 4, 2003, The Good Doctor by Damon Galgut - B, I
• 4, 2003, Evidence of Things Unseen by Marianne Wiggins - N, P
• 4, 2002, Family Matters by Rohinton Mistry - B, I
• 4, 2002, The Story of Lucy Gault by William Trevor - B, W
• 4, 2001, A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry - B, I
• 4, 2001, Bel Canto by Ann Patchett - I, N
• 4, 2001, John Henry Days by Colson Whitehead - N, P
• 4, 2001, Oxygen by Andrew Miller - B, W
• 4, 2000, The Keepers of Truth by Michael Collins - B, I
• 4, 2000, When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro - B, W
• 4, 2000, Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates - N, P
• 4, 1999, Our Fathers by Andrew O'Hagan - B, I
• 4, 1999, Headlong by Michael Frayn - B, W
• 4, 1999, The Blackwater Lightship by Colm Toibin - B, I
• 4, 1997, Autobiography of My Mother by Jamaica Kincaid - C, I
• 4, 1997, Grace Notes by Bernard MacLaverty - B, W
• 4, 1997, Enduring Love by Ian McEwan - I, W
• 4, 1997, The Puttermesser Papers by Cynthia Ozick - I, N
• 4, 1996, Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood - B, I
• 4, 1995, In Every Face I Meet by Justin Cartwright - B, W

I find the list to be fairly satisfying, especially at the top, though it does skew in favor of men. There are also a preponderance of "big name" literary authors on this list, but it begs the question: Does the fame come first or do the awards? I'd love to hear other opinions on this list, so please, share your comments.

See Also: Award Annals compiles similar lists (though much more comprehensive than this one.)

- C. Max Magee @ 10:00 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

The publishers' big blunder

On Wednesday, five publishers, McGraw-Hill Cos. Inc., Pearson Plc's Pearson Education and Penguin Group (USA) units, Viacom Inc.'s Simon & Schuster and John Wiley & Sons Inc., filed suit for copyright infringement against Google's Google Print service. What is Google Print? Google has scanned the full text of thousands of books and made them searchable, and as the database of included titles becomes larger and larger, one can imagine that future Web users will find answers to their questions not just on the world's Web pages but in the world's books. If a given book is under copyright, Google Print will only show a small excerpt - perhaps a few pages or a few paragraphs. Books not under copyright can be perused in full. Google is working with some publishers as they do this, but they are also working to scan the contents of some of the country's major libraries. It is the interaction with the libraries, which circumvents the publishers, that has the publishers so angry. At the heart of this controversy, though, the publishers are suing Google Print for the same reasons that other big media companies have fought to retain control over their content: ignorance and fear. From a recent Reuters article via the Washington Post:

"If Google can make...copies, then anyone can," Patricia Schroeder, president of the Association of American Publishers, said in a phone interview. "Anybody could go into a library and start making digital copies of anything," she said.

It sounds pretty scary, but is this a realistic concern? Google or not, the technology currently exists for anyone to start digitizing the books in the library or in their own homes, but I don't see this happening, and it's not because people are afraid of lawsuits from publishers, it's because people aren't that interested in digitized copies of books. Google, on the other hand, is attempting to do something constructive by scanning all of these books. They have the ability to make the world's text (read: knowledge) searchable.

What's even more outrageous about publishers' opposition to Google Print is that they actually stand to benefit financially from it. This isn't anything like "stealing" music, this is Google marketing and selling their books for them. Google even explains how this works on their information page for publishers. In fact, it's so simple it only takes one sentence for Google to sell it:

Sign up for the Google Print publisher program to attract new readers and boost book sales, earn new revenue from Google contextual ads, and interact more closely with your customers through direct 'Buy this Book' links back to your website.

Publishers are turning down the opportunity to earn - for the first time ever - advertising dollars based on the content of their books. Publishers are also keeping readers from sampling books before they buy them and publishers are turning down Google's offer to send these potential customers right to their online doorsteps (or the doorsteps of other booksellers.) All because they are irrationally afraid that readers are going to go broke buying paper and ink trying to set up their own bootleg bookshops.

Just as musicians have come out against the music industry in the debate on file sharing, at least one author is speaking out against the publishing industry's fight against Google Print. After Meghann Marco, author of the humorous Field Guide to the Apocalypse: Movie Survival Skills for the End of the World, was told by her publisher, Simon & Schuster, that they wouldn't allow her book to be a part of Google Print, she wrote a letter to Jason Kottke. From there, Marco's plight has been publicized on dozens of blogs including big guys like Boing Boing and GalleyCat, and now - if you read some of the comments on the Kottke post, you'll see - readers everywhere are scratching their heads wondering why in the world publishers are going down this path.

- C. Max Magee @ 2:34 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Book jacket silliness

Artist Dawne Michelle Watters has created a set of book jackets bearing fake titles. So now you can fool public transit eavesdroppers (like myself) into thinking you're reading classics like How to Overcome Nymphomania, Laser Eye Surgery at Home and Fast Track to Prison - Exploring the Many Benefits of Life Behind Bars.

via

- C. Max Magee @ 10:43 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Author interviews

Three terrific author interviews for your reading (or listening pleasure):

• Robert Birnbaum sits down with Jonathan Lethem.
• Ed's latest guest on the Bat Segundo show: T.C. Boyle
• Powell's snags Zadie Smith for their latest author interview.

- C. Max Magee @ 4:20 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Indie Publisher Blogs

Richard Nash, the guy behind Brooklyn's Soft Skull Press has started a blog. Aside from writing about Soft Skull's books, Richard also plans to discuss matters of importance to small publishers. Look for his dispatches from the Frankfurt Book Fair coming soon.

Another small publisher, Unbridled Books, presents its homepage in a blog-like format. Small publishers have to work hard to be heard among the media conglomerates that control most of the publishing industry. Using blogs give these little guys the opportunity to do something that their much bigger competitors have trouble doing, make individual connections with their readers.

- C. Max Magee @ 9:29 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Alexandra Fuller wins the Lettre Ulysses Award

The winners of the Lettre Ulysses Award - a prize for book-length reportage that I discussed a few weeks ago - have been announced. Alexandra Fuller's account of her travels with a white, African mercenary, Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier took the 50,000 Euro first prize while A Season in Mecca: Narrative of a Pilgrimage by Moroccan Abdellah Hammoudi and Baghdad Burning: Girl Blog from Iraq by Riverbend won the 30,000 Euro second prize and 20,000 Euro third prize, respectively.

- C. Max Magee @ 4:01 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Small Island by Andrea Levy

Andrea Levy's Small Island is a post-colonial novel told from four points of view. Queenie and Bernard, separated by war, are a British couple with a tepid relationship and Hortense and Gilbert are Jamaican, married out of convenience and lured to England by opportunity. The book explores British racism in the 1950s. It's less overtly ugly than its American cousin, but it nonetheless dictates the borders of the lives of Gilbert, Hortense and their fellow immigrants. Britain, long the colonizer, renowned for her Empire, in Small Island has reached a point where it would like to forget about the past and start from scratch. This time all these people of different colors can stay in their own lands. But, of course, this is not an option. Instructed by centuries of colonialism to believe they are British subjects and stirred up by the global tumult of World War II, immigrants from all over the world resettle in their "Mother Country." Nearly all of the white folks in the book are like Bernard, dismissive and even affronted by the arrival of darker people on their shores. They stare, heckle, slam doors and on occasion take a swing at these people. It matters not that thousands of Jamaicans fought along side the British during the war. It is telling that most of the British folks Gilbert interacts with think that Jamaica is in Africa. Queenie, however, is the anomaly and perhaps even a cliche since so often these novels of race relations have at their center an enlightened white person. But luckily Levy gives her sufficient depth to carry a large chunk of the novel. What sets this book apart, and what probably helped Levy win awards for it - the Orange prize in 2004 and then this year's Orange "Best of the Best" - was her ability to imbue each of the four narrators with his or her own voice. Gilbert and Hortense speak with the native rhythm of their home island, Bernard's voice is pinched and fidgety, and Queenie is the voice of hope and happiness. Though the chapter headings indicate who will narrate each chapter, the voices are so distinctive that this touch is unnecessary.

- C. Max Magee @ 3:26 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

The Nobel goes to Harold Pinter

It's been a busy week on the awards circuit. What seemed like a relatively calm Booker season grew divisive after the winner was announced: "The worst, certainly the most perverse, and perhaps the most indefensible choice in the 36-year history of the contest," said former Booker judge Boyd Tonkin of this year's choice, John Banville's The Sea, and then the Irish press called the British press "bitchy" (reg. req.) in response. The National Book Awards, meanwhile, will likely involve less controversy than last year thanks to a more diverse mix of finalists. And the less said about the Quills, the better.

But it has been the Nobel Prize for Literature, usually a civilized affair, that has been grabbing headlines this year. First, it came to light that the award was being delayed a week as the judges fought over the politics of a potential Laureate, the Turkish author Orhan Pamuk. Then, a day before the announcement, former judge Knut Ahnlund denounced last year's Nobel winner Elfriede Jelinek, whose writing he called "whingeing, unenjoyable, violent pornography." But now we have a new Laureate, and he seems less likely to incite controversy, the British playwright, Harold Pinter, whose name, as the LA Times puts it, "has become a synonym for a unique space in the universe of drama." Pinter is the first British Laureate since V.S. Naipaul in 2001, and he is, as far as I can tell, the first playwright to win the Nobel since Eugene O'Neill in 1936. For those wanting to get their hands on Pinter's body of work, try his Complete Works: One and Two

Update: So, from Richard and Jenny in the comments, it seems as though Dario Fo and Wole Soyinka are more recently lauded playwrights than O'Neill, and possibly there are others depending on how you classify them.

- C. Max Magee @ 2:33 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Awards Mania: National Book Award Finalists

The Booker was awarded Monday, the Nobel Prize will be awarded tomorrow, and today this year's National Book Award finalists were announced (by John Grisham, no less). Last year the National Book Foundation was vehemently criticized by some and defended by others for nominating five relatively unknown women from New York in the fiction category, but there will likely be less controversy this year as big name (and past winner for World's Fair in 1986) E.L. Doctorow leads the list. As the Amazon rankings at the time of the announcement indicate, the Mary Gaitskill doesn't exactly qualify as obscure either. Though not a commercial superstar, another notable nominee is William T. Vollmann. The complete list of nominees in all categories follows:

Fiction

• E.L. Doctorow, The March (Random House) (rank: 17)
• Mary Gaitskill, Veronica (Pantheon) (rank: 786)
• Christopher Sorrentino, Trance (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) (rank: 45,062)
• Rene Steinke, Holy Skirts (William Morrow) (rank: 423,858)
• William T. Vollmann, Europe Central (Viking) (rank: 51,709)

Nonfiction

• Alan Burdick, Out of Eden: An Odyssey of Ecological Invasion (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Leo Damrosch, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius (Houghton Mifflin)
• Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking (Alfred A. Knopf)
• Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn, 102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers (Times Books)
• Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves (Houghton Mifflin)

Poetry

• John Ashbery, Where Shall I Wander (Ecco)
• Frank Bidart, Star Dust: Poems (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Brendan Galvin, Habitat: New and Selected Poems, 1965-2005 (Louisiana State University Press)
• W.S. Merwin, Migration: New and Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press)
• Vern Rutsala, The Moment's Equation (Ashland Poetry Press)

Young People's Literature

• Jeanne Birdsall, The Penderwicks (Alfred A. Knopf)
• Adele Griffin, Where I Want to Be (Putnam)
• Chris Lynch, Inexcusable (Atheneum)
• Walter Dean Myers, Autobiography of My Dead Brother (HarperTempest)
• Deborah Wiles, Each Little Bird That Sings (Harcourt)

- C. Max Magee @ 2:24 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Books: an inventory of life by Andrew Saikali

My life boxed and crated. Transient. Completely uprooting my existence and collapsing it into the family Honda. University in one town. Internships in another. Back and forth, ping-ponging along Ontario's highways every four months for about five years. Years ago, this was my life.

I learned to adjust to my new surroundings very quickly. Whatever record albums I happened to own at the time would be the first things unpacked, sorted and shelved along with whatever stereo I could afford. Next would be books and the milk crates that passed for furniture.

Once these were set up I would generally think of my apartment as being complete. Four walls became a home. Anything else is basically an afterthought, an extravagance that I might or might not indulge in, like, I suppose, a chair.

Every four months the following could be witnessed on Highway 401: a suitcase full of clothes with me in the backseat, a trunk full of crated books and records, my father at the wheel of the Honda still shaking his head from the contents of the trunk, completely mystified as to how the quantity of books and records had somehow increased exponentially since four months previous, and my mother riding shotgun, snacks at the ready. And, oh yeah, a giant bed tethered precariously to the roof of the car, overhanging front and back, providing shade under the Southern Ontario sun.

More than anything else could, my books and records anchored me to my new surroundings - re-connecting me with me. They defined my home. They still do. The milk crates disappeared when I discovered Ikea and I've made the necessary overtures to furniture dealers. But the core of my world is as it always has been.

There's a passage in A History of Reading that leads me to believe that Alberto Manguel would understand, that we're cut from the same cloth. The son of a diplomat, Manguel moved around a great deal as a boy. "Books gave me a permanent home," he writes, "and one I could inhabit exactly as I felt like, at any time, no matter how strange the room."

It is sentiments like that, moments of memoir, that give what could have been a dry cultural history run-through its spirit. In the end, A History of Reading is anything but dry, as Manguel, a wonderful storyteller, chronicles "reading" from ancient civilizations on up to the modern age.

As a young man in Argentina, Manguel was honored to be a reader to the great Jorge Luis Borges, by then blind. Manguel looks back on these reading sessions as "happy captivity", reading aloud whatever Borges asked him to from his own library. In this way did Borges re-connect and rediscover a part of himself. Reading a book (or having it read to you) has a cumulative effect. Manguel writes that "every book has been engendered by long successions of other books." Borges was intimately familiar with each of the books that Manguel would read to him. Yet with each new reading, Borges' brain would have a new take on it. His mind would not only connect it with other books he's read, but with previous readings of the same book. Each would leave its imprint.

And different people, imprinted by different attitudes can perceive the same text in different, often contradictory ways. And no single reading can be isolated as the one correct reading. Manguel writes of Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis which has, by different readers, been called: humor, parable, a Bolshevik tract, a Bourgeois tract, an allegory. Some readings might be better informed, more lucid, more challenging. But "no reading can ever be final," Manguel writes. "This is not a failure of the process, but proof of our freedom as readers."

Manguel, in addition to assessing theories of reading, also teaches us a bit of history. He charts the development of paper and its antecedents - tablets, codex, scrolls. He writes about how the type of surface determined both the type of storage and one's own reading space. (In my case, reclining on a futon in my den, away from the distractions of the TVs and stereos that are the centerpieces of both bedroom and living room. If no remote control is within arm's reach, my reading stands a chance.)

One of my favorite chapters in the book deals with public readings in mid-1800s Cuba. A largely illiterate workforce was nevertheless one thirsty for stories. So, while people worked, while their bodies performed routine functions, their minds would be engaged by stories - they would be read to. Eventually, fearing intellectual subversion, a prohibition went into effect resulting, as prohibitions will, in "underground" clandestine work-time readings. These kinds of readings continued among the Cuban immigrant population of the US into the early 20th century.

Manguel also tells us about how the increase in world travel cried out for a new kind of portable book. And a 'good book', beyond just the already-available populist or pulp fiction. The result - the founding of the iconic Penguin.

The history of libraries, the history of cataloguing, censorship through the ages, and a great little aside about a noted life-long book-thief - they're all given due consideration in Manguel's book. He even explores the history of reading-glasses (perched on the nose of the "bespectacled book fool")

Well, this bespectacled book-fool is a hoarder. That trunk full of books and records would now barely cover the A's. Manguel, my kindred spirit, he knows what it's like. He reckons that his books were brought into his home for a reason. Sure, he could attribute it to thoroughness, or scarcity, or scholarship. But Manguel knows the truth. He knows its just "voluptuous greed". "I enjoy the sight of my crowded bookshelves," he writes. "I delight in knowing that I'm surrounded by a sort of inventory of my life."

- C. Max Magee @ 7:38 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

George Packer's good book on Iraq

New Yorker writer, George Packer has written some impressive articles on the Iraq war over the past few years (rivaling those of another favorite, Jon Lee Anderson.) Of late, I've been hearing good things about Packer's new book on the subject, The Assassins' Gate. From a Washington Post review:

How did this happen? How could the strongest power in modern history, going to war against a much lesser opponent at a time and place of its own choosing, find itself stuck a few years later, hemorrhaging blood and treasure amid increasing chaos? Americans will be debating the answer for decades, and as they do, they are unlikely to find a better guide than George Packer's masterful new The Assassins' Gate.

The Post will also be hosting a live discussion with Packer today at 3pm Eastern.

- C. Max Magee @ 9:21 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

John Banville's The Sea wins Booker Prize

Mark will be happy. He recently posted the first three parts of his long interview with John Banville. Maybe now that Banville has won the Booker Prize for his novel, The Sea, Mark will get around to posting the interview's final installment. From the Times story linked above:

The chairman of the judges, Professor John Sutherland, described The Sea as "a masterly study of grief, memory and love recollected". He hailed the quality of Banville's writing: "You feel you're in the presence of a virtuoso. In his hands, language is an instrument."

The Booker is typically a modest mover of books in the States, so it will be interesting to see if Knopf pushes up publication from the current release date of March 21, 2006. Right now only the British edition is available.

An excerpt from The Sea

For one last bit of Booker fun before we put it all away until next year, visit this blogger who is almost done reading every book on the longlist (and gave the Banville just one out of five stars.)

Update: Looks like Knopf is moving publication up to early November. The American version.

- C. Max Magee @ 5:23 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

My brief encounter with J.T. Leroy

I saw this post at Galleycat about the mysterious transvestite cult author J.T. Leroy (Sarah, The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things). As the Galleycat post suggests, there has been much speculation over the years about whether or not Leroy is a real person or perhaps simply the pseudonym and persona of another author, and the evidence remains inconclusive. Having never read any of Leroy's books, I don't have much to say about Leroy as writer, but, as a bookstore clerk in Los Angeles, I did see him (or someone pretending to be him) in the flesh, so I may have something to add on the subject of whether or not he exists.

I'm probably a little off on some of the specifics, but here's what I remember. On a weekday sometime during 2002 or 2003 (see, I told you I'm a little foggy here), the manager told us that she'd gotten a call from Leroy's representative and that he would be stopping by to sign some books. We bookstore clerks, aware of Leroy's reclusiveness, mysteriousness, and even the possibility that he didn't exist, awaited his arrival with much curiosity. Many speculated that it was a hoax and he wouldn't show. But then he did. He wore very baggy clothes including a much too large gray hooded sweatshirt. The hood was pulled low over his face, which was further obscured by a disheveled blonde wig. In photos, you almost never see Leroy's face, and even though we were in close proximity to him as he signed books, none of us got a very good look at him. Nor did he talk much, mumbling one word answers or giggling nervously in response to our questions. The strange thing was, even though my coworkers and I had all seen him in the flesh, after he was gone none of us were any more or less sure that he was actually real.

- C. Max Magee @ 2:21 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

A recommended play

Mrs. Millions and I don't get to the theatre that often, but we went to see a play on Friday that I recommend to anyone in Chicago right now. The play is called "Recent Tragic Events" and it looks at the mundane - in this case a blind date - through the lens of tragedy and shock - this blind date is taking place on September 12, 2001. I recommend the play for three reasons. First, and this is the least of the reasons, I went to high school with the director, Mikhael Tara Garver. She helped start Uma Productions in 2001, and she does a really great job putting on this play. Second, the play was penned by Craig Wright who has written for the HBO show, "Six Feet Under," and he brings that same sensibility to this play. Mixing death and banality, he is unafraid of both the seriousness and the humor that arise in such situations. Finally, and this is where the literary relevance comes in, I recommend this play because that most prolific of authors, Joyce Carol Oates figures prominently in the production. The play's main character, Waverly, happens to be Oates' grand-niece, and at one point all of the Oates books on Waverly's shelves and stacked on the floor in a pile that reaches several feet high before tipping over. For some reason I always get a kick out of pokes at Oates' prodigious literary output. But then, Oates herself appears, played by - get this - a sock puppet, and, while I know it sounds ridiculous, it's somehow perfect hearing this bespectacled sock name drop Salman Rushdie and John Updike. The play runs through next weekend at Chopin Theater. If you're in Chicago, check it out.

- C. Max Magee @ 1:59 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

New books: Clark, Cusk, Dermansky

As the Amazon review says, "it takes a world of confidence to name your debut novel The Great Stink," but that's just what Clare Clark did. Clark's novel is set in the sewers of Victorian England as it follows the lives of William May, who has been hired to overhaul the decrepit system, and Long Arm Tom, who makes his living scavenging in the filth. According to a recent New York Times review, Clark is quite explicit in her descriptions of the vile sewer, but "Clark's triumph is that she makes us see and smell everything we politely pretend not to, and she even manages to give the miasma its own kind of beauty." The book has been shortlisted for the British Crime Writers' Association John Creasey Memorial Dagger Award for first time authors. You can read an excerpt here.

Rachel Cusk's Booker longlister In the Fold comes out in a few days. Despite the Booker nod, reviews have been mixed. Says Louise France the Guardian: "Cusk has a knack for scene-setting and handles certain setpieces with an unflinching eye for anything pretentious or fake; but throughout the novel, tediously little happens," a sentiment echoed in the Independent: "at the novel's heart there's not very much going on." An excerpt is available for those who'd like to see for themselves.

The Village Voice compares the twin protagonists of Marcy Dermansky's Twins to those of the Sweet Valley High books, but Dermansky's twins "have acquired a fearsome host of modern ills: pill habits, self-injury, bulimia, a penchant for juggling." Twins is getting good reviews on lots of blogs, as well, including at Collected Miscellany where Kevin describes it as "oddly compelling." And Dermansky herself recently recommended a book at Moorish Girl. If you want to know more, Dermansky's got her own Web site, and an excerpt of the book is available as well.

- C. Max Magee @ 10:13 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

The Lettre Ulysses Award

There are plenty of awards for fiction and quite a few for different types of non-fiction, but, according to the people behind the Lettre Ulysses Award, "no world prize for reportage literature existed before 2003." That's when a couple of German foundations got together "to provide symbolic, moral and financial support for reporters whose courage, curiosity, and integrity drives them to create in-depth, well-researched texts, bringing unknown, forgotten, and hidden realities to light. The prize is also intended to publicly honor and highlight the extraordinary achievements of literary reportage." Each year they award a first, second and third prize worth 50,000, 30,000 and 20,000 Euros, respectively. One of the most interesting aspects of this award is its international reach. In the award's first two years, a Somali, a Russian, two Chinese and two Americans have been prizewinners. Indeed this international bent is a part of the award's mission: "By facilitating the translation and publication of texts from often inaccessible places or languages, this project aims to focus attention on diverse topics and issues."

This year's award will be announced on October 15th, and the Shortlist looks very interesting:

• Baghdad Burning: Girl Blog from Iraq by Riverbend (Iraq)
• Von den Kriegen: Briefe an Freunde (Of the wars: Letters to friends) by Carolin Emcke (Germany)
• Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier by Alexandra Fuller (Zimbabwe)
• A Season in Mecca: Narrative of a Pilgrimage by Abdellah Hammoudi (Morocco)
• The Outlaw Sea: A World of Freedom, Chaos, and Crime by William Langewiesche (USA) (my review)
• Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found by Suketu Mehta (India)
• Muerte en el Pentagonito: Los cementerios secretos del Ejarcito Peruano (Death in the Pentagonito: The Secret Cemeteries of the Peruvian Army) by Ricardo Uceda (Peru)

- C. Max Magee @ 4:38 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Things to do with your books when you're done reading them

(I spotted this in my neighborhood recently.) Can't find a brick? Use some old books to prop up your air conditioner!

- C. Max Magee @ 4:38 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

New John McPhee book

I'd noticed that over the last few months, John McPhee's articles in the New Yorker have been somewhat thematically linked, and it occurred to me that his next book would probably be about that theme, transportation. Based on the contributor's notes from last weeks issue, it appears as though this is indeed the case: "This piece" - about coal trains - "is part of a series about freight transportation that will be published as a book, Uncommon Carriers, in May." None of those articles are available online, but off-hand I recall ones about river barges, UPS's gargantuan shipping operation and riding along in a tanker truck. In an interview at the New Yorker site, McPhee talks a little bit more about the book, which he says grew out of his work on Looking for a Ship - which Emre and I both read recently. He also discusses the enormity of his twenty year undertaking, the Pulitzer Prize-winning book about American geology, Annals of the Former World.

- C. Max Magee @ 12:31 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Leaving books on the subway

As some of you know, I read the New Yorker, more or less methodically, every week, and as a result the magazine very much becomes a fixture in my schedule. The problem is, I'd gotten used to my copy showing up in the mail every Wednesday, but recently and unaccountably, my issue has been showing up on Fridays, throwing my reading schedule out of whack and making me feel like I'm a little behind the curve.

So, having finally gotten a chance to delve into the most recent issue, I was quite amused by Alec Wilkinson's Talk of the Town piece about lost books that are retrieved from the New York subway with help from the "Operations Specialist, Asset Recovery Rejected Material, Material Division." The idea of lost books on public transit sort of added a new element to my recent hobby of spotting what books people are reading on Chicago's El. I also recently discovered that this is a hobby that I share with some other people including the folks at the CTA Tattler (who were kind enough to link to me last week. The Tattler is a blog about what is "seen and heard on the Chicago Transit Authority" and is a must read for any Chicagoan.)

Though outnumbered by iPods and tabloid newspapers, according to my unscientific research, books are the third most popular public transit accessory.

- C. Max Magee @ 7:50 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Guest appearances at the LBC blog

With recent postings devoted to the second Litblog Co-op pick, Steve Stern's Angel of Forgetfulness, the LBC Blog is living up to its promise. This weekend, Stern's editor Paul Slovak posted his comments about the book and also delved into details about some of the other writers he works with including T.C. Boyle and William T. Vollmann. Also making a guest appearance was Stern himself, who responded to the dialogue about his book that Derik and Dan had going last week.

- C. Max Magee @ 7:24 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post