Roundup
Written byPosted on December 29, 2006
Filed Under Roundup
- The 50 Greatest Cartoons, with video. (via Kevin Smokler)
- The Times: “Educated people are not supposed to believe in ghosts. This has done nothing to diminish their popularity, at least in fiction.” (via Kenyon Review)
- Children of Men: the book vs. the film.
- The next generation’s vocabulary is, like, diminishing. (via Maud)
- The San Francisco Chronicle offers a list of 2006 deaths, with many authors and journalists. Conspicuously absent are the great talents Octavia Butler and Gilbert Sorrentino, demonstrating that you can win a MacArthur Genius Grant or radically influence experimental fiction and still not earn so much as a sentence from the mainstream media.
- CNN: “A giant ice shelf the size of 11,000 football fields has snapped free from Canada’s Arctic, scientists said.” No global warming, eh? (via Michelle Richmond)
- Israeli literary critic Gershon Shaked has died.
- Reports of the American movie’s death have been greatly exaggerated.
- The excellent 10 Zen Monkeys serves up an overview on world sex laws.
- This week in ridiculous book trailers: Hannibal Rising. (via Ghost in the Machine)
- Kitchen Sink Magazine is folding. (via Warren Ellis)
- Historical Fiction for Hipsters. (via Largehearted Boy)
- Mr. Ewins is going crazy with the top ten lists.
- Reuters’ Mark Porter investigates the ongoing demise of the indie bookstore.
- Print aesthetic pleasantries from Fade Theory.
- Contributors to the New Yorker Winter Fiction issue share their fave books of 2006. Ian McEwan’s faves are particularly interesting.
- “Jack”: “the name of an instrument that supplies the place of a boy.” Well, that’s being a bit coy about a euphemism, Webster.
- Hitch on Gerald Ford.
- A tourist map of Gotham City.
- From earlier this year: Lethem on James Brown. (via Telescreen
- Technorati vs. Google Book Search.
- Well, I, for one, cannot be bribed or have my opinion purchased. Absolutely no price.
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Books To Jump Up and Down Over
Beyond Heaving Bosoms by Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan. The famed writers behind Smart Bitches, Trashy Books have written a very funny and thoughtful volume about romances, both Old Skool and New Skool. Here is a book that any smug and humorless literary manboy beating his flabby passive chest over Banville or Bolano should probably read pronto, if only for the distant possibility that he might get over himself. While the Choose Your Own Adventure segment at the end caused me to have a very disturbing dream involving Shelley Long (don't ask), Sarah and Candy did have me rethinking many of my own misperceptions when I wasn't busy laughing. They're not afraid to take on the New York Times Bok Review or even the groupthink within certain sectors of the romance community.
Alice Fantastic by Maggie Estep. This wild and highly enjoyable narrative involves two sisters (presumably, the third one was still being rented out by Chekhov), a hippie ex-junkie mother who lives with seventeen dogs, a murder, gambling, and libidinous Hollywood actresses who live in Woodstock. But this is the wonderful Maggie Estep we're talking here. And what seems at first like a quirky yarn becomes something unexpectedly moving about connectivity. What I love about Estep's work is the way that she'll juxtapose an extremely astute observation (now that you mention it, why do cab drivers always have somebody to talk with on the phone past midnight?) with an often outrageous story development.
Generosity by Richard Powers. It doesn't come out until September 29th, but Richard Powers's latest will have anyone committed to books reconsidering their literary fervor. I foresee some animosity from the vanilla critics hostile to idea-driven novels, but book bloggers, YouTube chroniclers, and MFAs would do well to plunge into this chance-taking narrative, which introduces vital questions about what the reader's relationship is with media, scientific dissection, and "creative nonfiction." Are we rats fleeing to happy cities? Or can we find the humanism within the purported plague?
Pieces for the Left Hand by J. Robert Lennon. Lennon is one of the most underrated fiction writers working today. Much as On the Night Plain proved that Lennon had a lot more in the toolbox than heartfelt (and often very funny) suburban satire, this slim but fascinating volume juxtaposes 100 small-town anecdotes -- arranged by category -- in a manner that reads, at times, like Nicholson Baker's passions for minutiae and, at other times, Stewart O'Nan's concern for psychological detail. The result is fiction that makes us wonder about whether one person's subjective view of particulars can entirely be trusted. This book never found a publisher in 2005. But thankfully, Graywolf has released it in the United States, along with Lennon's latest novel, The Castle.
Wonderful World by Javier Calvo. This wonderfully raucous volume has been completely ignored by the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times. But it's probably one of the most delightful reading experiences I've had this year. Calvo cavalierly mashes up multiple genres and manages to mix up familial subtext with larger-than-life, almost cartoonish characters. (Indeed, one might argue that one mobster's penis is a character of its own in this sprawling novel.). This is not an easy thing to pull off, but Calvo makes it work. And it's helped immeasurably by Mara Faye Lethem's idiom-specific translation. (See longer post.)
The Means of Reproduction, Michelle Goldberg This thoughtful book tackles the complicated (and little discussed) subject of reproductive rights from numerous angles, which includes a number of unpleasant but necessary ones. The upshot is that there isn't a quick fix solution for declining birth rates and fundamentalist abuses. Just about every political faction has contributed to the friction. But you'll want to read this book anyway to refamiliarize yourself with the topic, but also to understand just what's occurred during the past several decades to get us where we are today. (See also podcast interview with Goldberg.)
It makes me sick what’s happening to the ice shelves.
I’ve seen that cartoon list before – there’s some creepy racist toons on there. The best cartoon ever is on there, though – “Feed the Kitty”. It’s so cute, you have to watch it!
I don’t care if that booklist is for “young” hipsters, I want to read all those books now!
That Feed the Kitty is great. It’s been removed from YouTube, but I found it on Google Video: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6762987539031638117
Actually, Ed, if you listen closely to Dubya’s public comments, you’ll notice that he has quietly shifted from “global warming doesn’t exist” (though Jim Inhofe still insists that’s the case) to “okay, it exists, but there’s no proof that humans are causing it.”
Sometime in 2007, I suspect he will shift once again, this time to “okay, it exists and humans are causing it, but stopping big corporate polluters from doing it threatens the very foundation of the free enterprise system and will unnecessarily harm the profit and loss statements of some of my very best pals.” Though I’m sure his speechmakers will come up with a more graceful way of saying it.