Dave Itzkoff on the "No. 1 Omission from Top Ten Book List". Yep, it's where in the world are the women (and oh the irony that the NYT would be asking). I do have to confess that while I'm finding Shop Class as Soul Craft interesting reading, I'm perplexed as to how it's a top ten of the year. (He's no Tracy Kidder, that's for sure.) (Sometimes I feel like I'm reading a graduate thesis.) Hat tip to @Gwenda
Moving right along, Tanita on an overlooked Philip Pullman: "Nothing is reliable anymore when half-remembered wisps of things she thought were dreams are perhaps a real part of Ginny's history. Bewilderment, isolation, and suspicion push Ginny out of her safety zone and into the world to find out -- something. Not knowing who to trust, she must repair the broken bridges of her life in order to go on."
Little Willow on books being dated by pop culture references; she nails one big problem with this: "When a book references a Top 20 hit or right-now story/gossip/whatnot every few pages, that bothers me, because what's popular and "hot" when the book is in its first draft will change by the time it is published. That just-missed dating can be worse, in a way, than a few years/a decade removed. A perfect example would be a YA title which shall remain nameless that referenced a celebrity marriage which, by the time the book was published, had dissolved. Even if you, like me, do not care a whit about celebrity gossip, you must admit that it is, to some extent, unescapable when it's plastered all over the covers of magazines that line the aisles in the grocery store."
The November issue of Bookslut is up which includes my latest column: Wars of the World. I have several nonfiction titles on conflicts around the world, also two MG books on kids with parents fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan and a wonderful picture book that is perfect Veteran's Day reading. Sometimes a column really clicks and this was one of those times. Jason Armogost's essay "Things to Pack for Baghdad" from the anthology When War Becomes Personal continues to stay with me. Here's a bit from my review:
But what stood out for me overall was the essay by B-2 bomber pilot Jason Armagost who wrote “Things to Pack for Baghdad” about serving as the lead aircraft in the first airstrikes on the city in the Second Gulf War. Framed around the 20,000 mile long flight to his target, Armagost writes about the books he brought to engage his mind as he takes turns flying, walking, eating and sleeping before the crucial 208 seconds over the city. The author is a thoughtful man and he has given his reading -- all much loved titles -- much consideration. “In the middle of the Atlantic,” he writes, “I won’t be interested in the cheap plot-twists of the latest bestseller. I’m in need of art -- recklessness, patience, wisdom, passion and largess. I rifle through the titles, grab five and return to the seat. We are over Ohio -- me, my books and the colonel.”
The books Armagost reads vary from Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried to Rick Bass’s Winter: Notes From Montana. He reflects upon Admiral Jim Stockdale’s memoir and the seven and a half years he was held as a prisoner-of-war in Vietnam. He quotes Clausewitz’s On War and Ezra Pound, Socrates, Thucydides, Xenophon. Over the desert it is Antoine de Saint-Exupery he reaches for, and then later Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. The combination of flight and war, literature and history that Armagost blends together is stunning; each paragraph is a different trip to some other time or place. The essay is incredibly personal but through the words of others he makes it that much more reachable for readers -- he brings what he saw and what he did on the flight down to earth so that we may understand it a little bit and also understand him.
Somebody needs to give this guy a book deal; we're talking a 21st century James Salter when it comes to war writing for sure.
Also see Elizabeth Bachner's "Blowing Down Bleecker Street" in the new issue, which has made me rethink my relationship with Kerouac:
He went to Big Sur and wrote another real novel on a single scroll of paper. It took him ten days. I just watched a new documentary on this -- One Fast Move or I'm Gone: Kerouac's Big Sur -- and it made me cry. He went out to the ocean and reckoned with writing again, he reckoned with himself again, and seven years later he died of cirrhosis. When I sit in the White Horse Tavern, even when I’m sponge-eyed, when my soft little body is loaded to the gunwales, I’ve never seen Dylan Thomas’s ghost in there. But every time I walk down Bleecker, stone cold sober on a grey day just as it’s starting to get cold, there’s Jack Kerouac blowing all around me.
Mark Sarvas has a significant object (joining many others in this delightful series).
Sara Zarr is reclaiming physical objects, an activity I wholeheartedly endorse....Sara Ryan went to France and didn't exactly pack right (this is funny)...Fans of Whip It get ready for Down and Derby coming next spring from Soft Skull (I'm all over this one)...And finally, via The Morning News:
“The most damaging deficit with which poor and minority children must cope is their deficit of hope.”
—Dreams of Better Schools - The New York Review of Books
Yeah, it made me angry, sad and ready to take on the world too. Tomorrow's my birthday - here's hoping the next 12 months are as productive as the last.
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November 5
2009
09:32 PM
The pop culture references issue is such a catch-22. Coming off as dated is terrible, unless you're writing a sort of period piece — even if the period is, say, 2007 — but so often the alternative is to invent fictional pop culture, and I've seen very few books in which the fictional alternative feels even remotely believable. It's possible, of course, but what I find hard to pin down is what makes fictional pop culture sing with that strange, nebulous pop culture truth. I can think of more books that fake it to terrible effect than books that make it work for them (fantasy and SF notwithstanding, as they generally create a whole different sort of pop culture). Right now I'm reading Arthur Phillips' The Song is You, and it's like the book is on a pendulum; half the time, when he's writing about music, even rock music — so often poorly fictionalized — he's so goddamn right on it's beautiful. And then I'll get to a paragraph full of made-up band names and it just makes me cringe. Sure, there are lots of bands with idiotic names, but when this novel, which has been carrying me along in gorgeous writing that gets inside the way an obsessive listener can over-relate to a singer, trips over itself in an attempt to avoid dating its story — well, that doesn't work either, does it?
I don't have any answers. I just think about this, well, kind of a lot.
(I'm also confused as to why it took the NYT a week to notice the PW list, but I could probably answer that one for myself, if a bit bitterly.)