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A Valediction

December 16, 2009 in book thoughts

Not only is it the end of 2009, but it’s the end of a decade. All the bloggers around me are coming up with best of the year lists, and the truly ambitious are writing best of the aughts lists.

I really don’t have the stamina for all that.

First off, GoodReads* is telling me that I only rated 9 books with 5 stars in the past year, and I’d say that only a third of those were published in 2009. So I guess I’m gonna talk about those three books.

Secondly, how are people my age writing best of the decade lists?! 10 years ago, I was 15 and reading God-knows-what. Probably textbooks, because I did that kind of thing for fun back then. And Dean Koontz, because I am from the suburbs. So that means I’ve only had about 5-6 years with an awakened literary sensibility, and that simply isn’t enough time to read a decade’s worth of books and make a knowledgeable pronouncement on the Best Books of the Decade.

So you are getting, oh, My Three Favorite Books Published in 2009. Based on a sample pool of Seven Books Read That Were Published in 2009. Enjoy!

The Hakawati
by Rabih Alameddine

How have none of you read this book? I know you haven’t read this book, because there are only 151 ratings on GoodReads. Is it because it’s set in Lebanon? Is it because the jacket, while stunning, looks kinda girly? Is it because you saw it marketed as “a retelling of the Arabian Nights for the modern age” and dismissed it like so much Amy Tan? WHY?

THIS BOOK JUST READS SO WELL.

It’s like…a Lebanese Brothers Grimm, replete with inspired retellings of the Arabian folk tale canon. But it’s also a moving story about leaving home for America. And shedding one’s ethnic skin. And then trying to put it back on. And dying fathers. If you’re home for the holidays without a book (yeah, right—I don’t know anyone who isn’t going home with 10+ books), I urge you to bring home The Hakawati. Reading it is like crawling into a cave made out of paisley velvet. That is the best simile I can come up with.

Never Learn Anything From History
by Kate Beaton

I don’t know how you feel about web comics, but I’m sure you weren’t thinking, “Historical figures in historically accurate situations, but speaking hilariously.”** That’s what Kate Beaton does.

Also, to her credit, this collection of her best comics made me want to read up on my history. This is a big deal. I’ve studiously avoided history class since my sophomore year of high school. How did I get this far in life with absolutely no concept of American or world history? By studiously avoiding any conversation about facts. I mean, take this blog, for example. There is not one fact in the whole of it.

Asterios Polyp
by David Mazzuchelli

I think I’ve written about this graphic novel before. I cannot emphasize to you enough that this graphic novel is the apex of what a graphic novel can achieve. I should have received this book as a prize for completing my senior course in “The Graphic Novel.” The professor should have given it to me and said, “Pam, now you are ready.”

Anyway, that’s it for me. Care to share your top three? Lengthy justifications not required.

*I’m noticing that as I enter my late 20s—horrors!—I’m increasingly relying on external sites to do the mental record-keeping for me. Just like my poor compy, I’m running out of memory.

**Except for Beaton’s wordless depiction of Napoleon eating a cookie. Perhaps not historically accurate. But would that it were so!

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Marie Ponsot

December 1, 2009 in book thoughts

I think I love this lady.

“Bliss and Grief”

No one

is here

right now.

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What I learned from Thomas Aquinas

November 1, 2009 in book thoughts

Things are signified by words…but through the use of metaphors, things can also signify spiritual truths!

I also like how this one site sums up Articles 9 and 10 of the “Sacred Doctrine” essay by writing:

1) God made the world;
2) The world is God’s book; and
3) The book is made of symbols.

That’s so Dan Brown-y.

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Weekend Reading

October 30, 2009 in book thoughts

If I can make it through this, word on the street is that I will have gained some knowledge about literary theory. We shall see!

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The Paleface versus the Redskin

August 23, 2008 in book thoughts

Barry Gewen from Paper Cuts harkens back to Philip Rahv’s essay “Paleface versus Redskin,” which proposes an interesting dichotomy in American literature:

American literature, Rahv said, divided between two polar types, redskin and paleface, creating “a dissociation between energy and sensibility.” The redskins were spontaneous, emotional, rebellious, the palefaces refined and intellectual. Each type had its virtues, and its faults. “At his highest level,” Rahv said, “the paleface moves in an exquisite moral atmosphere; at his lowest he is genteel, snobbish and pedantic.” . . . . Rahv went on: “In giving expression to the vitality and to the aspirations of the people, the redskin is at his best; but at his worst he is a vulgar anti-intellectual, combining aggression with conformity and reverting to the crudest forms of frontier psychology.”

An interesting way to look back at American letters, if you can look past the hideous analogy. For Rahv, the classic example of paleface v. redskin was Henry James v. Walt Whitman, respectively. These days, at least with respect to last Sunday’s cover review of James Wood’s How Fiction Works in the New York Times Book Review, it’s James Wood v. Walter Kirn.

I was talking over this division of literary personalities with a friend, and we were discussing which writer we preferred. At first, I thought I tended towards paleface writing, since I have a thing for placid, formal “literary fiction.” He has a preference for the confrontational, masculine sort of writing. But it turns out that this dichotomy has its limitations. Even Henry James is a poor example of a paleface—Isabel Archer’s kind of a spitfire! Nevertheless, the paleface/redskin dichotomy remains a useful organizing concept, if you’re going for a quick-and-dirty summation of American writers. I guess everything American inevitably comes back to cowboys and Indians.

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Reading Essays

August 23, 2008 in book thoughts

In a blog post on Arthur Kryst, the essayist, Wyatt Mason observes that we enjoy reading essays because we perceive them to be founts of certainty, whether or not the essay is actually true. And “when certain, we’re freed from having to think at all.”

A chilling reminder to read non-fiction as closely as we read fiction, with an eye for bias, perspective, and intention.

From the excellent Harper’s blog, Sentences.

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Woman’s World

February 10, 2008 in book thoughts

I wonder how Graham Rawle wrote Woman’s World, a novel out this month from Soft Skull Press. Composed solely of reproduced textual fragments from women’s magazines, did Woman’s World exist first as a collection of clippings before Rawle shaped them into a narrative? Or did Rawle conceive of his story first, and then scour magazines for the words?

[Image of scanned text from Soft Skull's blog]

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The 50 States Project…in Books

February 5, 2008 in book thoughts

This is one feature to keep an eye on: The Columbia Spectator is unveiling one book a week that epitomizes a state (although at the rate these kids are going, it’s more like one book a month). First off, Alabama gets To Kill A Mockingbird for its segregation-era moral tale about the good Atticus Finch defending the guilty-until-proven-innocent Tom Robinson. Then Michigan gets The Virgin Suicides, which strikes me as a little weird, but I’m not from Michigan. What bland narrative of upper-middle-class family drama will be chosen to represent life in Connecticut? What controversy will The Columbia Spectator rake up by crowning, once and for all, the ultimate New York novel? (And wouldn’t it be funny if they chose a novel that had nothing to do with NYC?) Nominations for the book representing your home state are appreciated!

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Do We Need a Literary Canon?

December 10, 2007 in book thoughts, the literary conversation

I.

This weekend, despite hosting some house guests, I managed to find a good amount of time to catch up on some reading. In the recently read pile is a decent article from Prospect Magazine called “Do We Need a Literary Canon?” The article is not as polemical as it sounds. Instead Richard Jenkyns responds to an essay Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks wrote about multiculturalism’s detrimental effects on America’s literary canon. Sacks believes that culture relies on canons to establish communal vocabularies, but that multiculturalism interrupts and/or corrupts this shared history. He defends the unadulterated canon by arguing:

“It is important for us to understand where we have come from, to know the texts which have formed the beliefs and behaviour of the world in which we live. If we know nothing about the past, or even if we know only about the recent past, we are fated to misunderstand the present.”

I say that it is more important to understand where we are now—and that understanding comes from assessing what makes up our culture today. Of course knowing something about the past is important, but living in the past is harmful, especially if the past is so different from our present.

Now I haven’t read Rabbi Sacks’s original statement, but I figure he didn’t become Chief Rabbi by running on a platform of forced assimilation. I’m going to assume that Rabbi Sacks means that we ought to reach out to minority cultures by teaching them our canon, as a way of establishing a common language. But I wonder whether we ought to go one step further and adopt the canons of these other cultures, as a way of creating a new, inclusive culture. However, one could argue that the virtue of multiculturality is its heterogeneity. If that’s the case, maybe we ought to maintain several distinct mini-canons. But how do we avoid positioning one canon from becoming the master canon while the others are relegated to the position of attendant minority canons? The debate boils down to one that’s irked me for some time now: is it more important to highlight those qualities (or works of literature) that various sub-cultures have in common? Or when we teach literature, should we incorporate emblematic works of literature from various sub-cultures as a way of highlighting the differences that make each cultural tradition unique?

Personally, I’m in favor of creating a new inclusive canon, because cultures in a multicultural setting ought to be able to talk to each other, and to do so, we ought to have a communal vocabulary. Therefore, we ought to revise the current canon so that it speaks to all constituent cultures.

Jenkyns offers his take:

“We should indeed assert the importance of historical memory, of ancestry and rootedness. This is something which immigrants do not share, but the answer is not to pretend that it does not matter, but to offer new citizens a kind of historical memory by proxy.”

Rabbi Sacks may have hinted at something like forced assimilation, but Jenkyns doesn’t mince his words. They’re both missing the most obvious compromise: Why not modify our historical lessons to include theirs?

II.

But for the moment, let’s return to Jenkyns’s original question: Do we even need a canon in the first place? This is where I agree with Rabbi Sacks: I think it helps. A canon establishes common ground, and while it’s important to preserve those eccentricities that distinguish cultures from each other, it’s even more important (especially now, when cultures uncomfortably abut one another) to emphasize the literature and vocabulary we have in common. Public school cirricula are moving in a good direction when they seek to incorporate Latino, Asian-American, African-American, Native American, and Jewish (the list goes on) texts into the syllabus by accentuating what these narratives have in common. But college cirricula only serve to underscore the boundaries between cultures when they offer their increasingly tangential canons, including some of my favorite courses from college: Gender and Sexuality in Asian-American Literature, Mixed Race Literature from the Post-Civil War Era. I militantly immersed myself in the clamorous voices of the subaltern, letting them speak so much that I no longer knew what they were speaking against. As someone who’s largely dodged the canon, I regret that I have so few books in common with my peers.

Jenkyns nicely sums up the conundrum when he advises:

“There is a good deal we can do about the way in which we teach literature, though here there is a nice balance to be found between drawing the young in through the works that may most naturally appeal to them and stretching them with works that may seem less attractive. We should also teach the development of a personal taste: the risk in stressing the canon too much is that it can seem to require that we dwell always on the upper slopes of Parnassus, and that we should always like what we have been told to like; yet without personal predilection, there is no true cultivation.”

III.

Let’s agree, for the sake of continuing this discussion, that we accept the need for a canon. Which books of the past 25 years deserve to be inducted into the Canonical Hall of Fame? Jenkyns frets that no such book exists, and that our era exhibits a dismaying lack of canonical heroes. I think that remains to be seen: the canonical texts of our time likely won’t be recognized until well after we’re gone. A canon is never contemporary, never up-to-date. Nevertheless, speculation is fun. I know lists abound on this subject, but I’m curious: any out-of-left-field nominations for the future canon?

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This Week in Books

November 4, 2007 in book reviews, book thoughts

Another long delay, more apologies. Let’s move on.

Books I’ve Recently Read

This is the last book I finished, and the only one I’m interested in writing about. I found it a difficult read, but an intensely provocative one. After one read-through, I’m not entirely sure I understood everything that Llosa wove into his story. I tripped up over the untranslated Peruvian words, and I got lost in the unannounced transitions between narratives. This is not a book that you can read with only half a mind.

Let me begin the simplest way I know how: with a stab at a plot description. Corporal Lituma and his deputy Tomás have been sent to a village in the Peruvian mountains called Naccos to investigate a number of disappearances. Human disappearances. As Lituma and Tomás hole up in their bunks, wary of the cold and a roving band of revolutionaries/slaughterers, Tomás tells a story of a woman he loved and lost. Meanwhile, Llosa introduces us to the witch Dona Adriana and her husband, the village bartender, whose enigmatic tales circle and bring us closer to the reason behind the disappearances.

Meanwhile, this is a story of a country and a culture at war with itself. As new politics and new beliefs from the cities (in the form of Lituma and Tomás) attempt to establish control over the more remote villages, we witness the old traditions struggling to survive. Death in the Andes chronicles the failure of applying old solutions to new problems—a failure we witness worldwide as globalization places old cultures in unfamiliar new territory. This clash of civilizations reaches deep into the heart of Peru: As one of the terrorists explains to a soon-to-be martyr, “This is war, nobody can say it’s not their business. It’s everybody’s business, even mutes and deaf people and half wits.”

And this is also a story of an inherited culture of violence. The history of Peru is written in blood. As new waves of knowledge and politics and custom sweep in from the coast inland, history repeats itself. One of Naccos’ engineers muses, “I wonder…if what’s going on in Peru isn’t a resurrection of all that buried violence. As if it had been hidden somewhere, and suddenly, for some reason, it all surfaced again.”

In the end, the story is pretty chilling. Even though Tomás’ love story has a touch of Marquez, I was correct in my original assessment: this is magical realism of a different sort. Here magic and realism do not embrace each other in a beautiful, transcendent sort of way. Here magic and realism are at war. Magic warps reality, and reality debases magic. And this is the so-called “panoramic view of contemporary Peru” that the book’s back cover promises.

Books I’m Currently Reading

I’m reading this for a post I’m eventually going to make on Conversational Reading (a fantastic book blog, one of my favorite). It’s such a treat to go back to Pullman’s trilogy—the first time through, I realized that I had stumbled onto something far more profound than I had bargained for. Sure, you’ve got your witches and talking bears, but you’ve also got your particle physics and sharp criticisms of organized religion. In light of The Golden Compass coming out in theaters this December, I’m eager to see how Hollywood adapts this sprawling, magnificent tale.

Another collection of essays from Updike! This guy’s so prolific that his latest tomes encite more groans than anticipation, which is too bad, considering that Updike is probably one of our country’s most incisive critics and public intellectuals. I look forward to dipping into these essays in order to find out more about him.

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