What are writers reading?

What new books does John Updike discuss with his circle? How about Jim Crace or Cynthia Ozick — what do they rave about with friends over coffee or another beverage of choice? The National Book Critics Circle has tapped about 500 of its members (including these fine names) for a new feature, Best Recommended, a list of new fiction and nonfiction picks appearing every month.

"Before the Internet, book recommendations traveled at the rate of sound," NBCC president John Freeman writes in a brief explanatory note. Blogging, he contends, gives people a chance to hear what others are talking about, if only at the level of an individual blogger’s tastes. Notice Freeman’s italics here: "But with all this connectivity, it felt like a moment had yet to be seized about finding out what a lot of people said was good." Hence, the group’s decision to enlist the opinions of its mighty membership.

What’s on its inaugural list? Some expected titles--Denis Johnson’s "Tree of Smoke," Michael Chabon’s "The Yiddish Policeman’s Union" and Tim Weiner’s "Legacy of Ashes"--as well as some unexpected recommendations, such as Per Petterson’s novel "Out Stealing Horses" and Rae Armantrout’s poetry collection, "Next Life."

It’s an interesting approach. And does this mean that old-fashioned bestsellers’ lists are going the way of the dinosaurs? Too soon to tell, of course, but measuring success by a poll rather than bookstore sales may just give attention to deserving titles that otherwise don’t stand a chance of making a noticeable blip on a bookstore’s sales report.

Nick Owchar

The worst book title and more: Some random links

You’ve got to be kidding! A catchy title is as crucial as a well-designed cover to grab a book browser’s attention of book browser in those first few seconds of scanning a store’s shelves.

And just as there are some awful cover designs, there are some pretty bad titles out there.

The winner of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution book blog’s "World’s Worst Book Title" contest is a 1995 book published by Mouse Works called--that's right--"Cooking with Pooh."

Is it possible--did someone miss that yucky double entendre? Or did they think it was really cute? Among the runner-up titles (actually published) is "The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification" (2006) (Abrams Image).

You can read a longer list, plus public reaction, at the newspaper’s website. The contest asked for submissions of real and fake titles, which is too bad. It’s much more surprising to learn about real books (such as "Cooking with Pooh") that had a manufacturing/marketing push behind them; some of the invented ones--for instance, "Letting Go: A History of American Incontinence--are just silly.

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A Native American Thanksgiving: The new winter issue of Parabola magazine explores the theme of Old Worlds/New Worlds with a rich variety that is characteristic of this fine publication. Among the pieces are a recent interview with Sufi leader Pir Zia Inayat-Khan, new poems by Mary Oliver and a 2002 excerpt of Pope John Paul II extolling the evangelical value of the Internet. A particularly poignant article comes from Jacqueline Keeler, a commentator with Pacific News Service and a member of the Dineh (Navajo) nation. She explains why she embraces Thanksgiving and the encounter between the starving Pilgrims and Squanto, a Wampanoag man, who found and helped them. It is less about the meal, she says, and more about making a moral effort to confront the bitter mistreatment of her ancestors in the years after that first meeting so that "the evil and the good will that met that Thanksgiving day in the land of the Wampanoag will have come full circle. And the healing can begin."

Nick Owchar

Reviews that make you go "wow"

Morine Krissdóttir must have had an extremely good day after reading Margaret Drabble’s review in the Nov. 16 issue of the Times Literary Supplement of "Descents of Memory," Krissdóttir’s biography of John Cowper Powys, and the unabridged version of Powys’ Arthurian epic, "Porius," which she co-edited (both for The Overlook Press). Drabble’s essay/review is superb: Her fascination with a self-destructive author (not a chemically induced sort of behavior, but a carelessness with his manuscripts that made it devilishly hard to sometimes round them up) is contagious.

Drabble closes her insight-rich look at this eccentric, enigmatic 20th century novelist with a monumental claim for the books under review: "One can only hope that [‘Porius’] will now find the readers that it deserves, for it is, as critics have argued, fit to be compared both for ambition and achievement with ‘Ulysses,’ while the biography, ‘Descents of Memory,’ deserves to stand with Richard Ellmann’s ‘James Joyce’ as a major work about a major artist."

Nick Owchar

Reviews that make you go "ouch" and more: some random links

Reviews that make you go "ouch": At Bookslut, Peter Hoeg’s "The Quiet Girl" comes under fire for trying to do too much, as reviewer Rosette Royale explains: "It’s that lack of comprehending half of what’s written that just about drains all the thrill out of The Quiet Girl.... That poor Kaspar, that troubled KlaraMaria: if their stories, their joined plights, could have been pulled out of the riot of so much highbrow intellectualism, then this novel would sing. Instead, you want nothing more than to clear your head when it’s all over."

Royale also lists some items essential to reading this novel, including: a street map of Copenhagen, a Ouija board and a bottle of ibuprofen (extra strength).

Big deal: In a moment of unparalleled eloquence, CNN reacted to Oprah’s new book choice last week with the following: Gee, it’s a big one. Ken Follett’s "Pillars of the Earth," like its new sequel "World Without End," may seem in better company alongside telephone directories than novels. But even though the book’s length--978 pages--may scare off some readers, all they have to do is begin reading and they’ll soon realize, as has been said in an earlier posting on this blog, that the novel is a soap opera set in the Middle Ages. There's plenty of anachronistic action, language and sex--in other words, it's a quick read, even at that size. Oprah’s book club members have faced more challenging works than this: Remember "A Summer of Faulkner"?

Poetry in the sky: It’s nice to see that in some places around the world writing on public walls isn’t only advertising and graffiti. Sheffield Hallam University decided that the best solution to decorating a plain building on campus was to ask Andrew Motion, British poet laureate, to compose something. The result--a new poem called "What If?"--was inscribed on its nine-story facade and unveiled earlier this month as part of the "Text and the City" initiative, a program organized by the Off the Shelf literary festival. In part, the poem declares to passersby:

Pause now, and let the sight of this sheer cliff
Become a priming-place which lifts you off ...

For an image of Motion’s poem on the building, click here.

Nick Owchar

Mailer and the posterity question

Norman Mailer always wrote with one eye on the present and the other on his legacy. He was, he often said, a writer in competition not just with his contemporaries but also with Hemingway and Tolstoy; he wanted to be one of the greats. And yet, in the wake of his death, a quick visit to Amazon.com reveals that many of his books are out of print. Even "Advertisements for Myself,"  his groundbreaking 1959 collection of essays and reporting, is available only in a university press edition, with a shipping time of four to six weeks.

All this brings to mind the elusive issue of posterity, which is a force no one can control. It’s common to suggest that writers and other artists want their work to outlive them, that in the act of creation they aspire to a kind of immortality. But I don’t buy that for a second, since we live in a world--a world? a universe--that is degrading relentlessly toward entropy.

"Writers have this great obsession, to create an immortal work," Shelley Jackson noted in an interview a few years ago. "But how immortal is it, really? I worked in used bookstores for 10 years, and I saw how much gets lost and disappears."

Even Mailer, for all his rhetoric, was at his most effective (and, I’d suggest, most fulfilled) when he focused on what he referred to as "the time of his time"--the social, political and personal eruptions of mid-to-late 20th century America, from the Vietnam War to the space race to the women’s movement and beyond. That’s an example to remember, a useful lesson in what a writer does. What matters is to engage as fully as you can with the world you live in, and let posterity take care of itself.

David L. Ulin

Some buzz about Stinging Fly magazine

The winter issue of the Dublin-based literary magazine the Stinging Fly is out. Started in 1997 as a venue for publishing new writers from Ireland and around the world, the Stinging Fly has an expressed interest in promoting the short story. The magazine has spawned a press that has published a book a year since 2005. (This year’s release, the short-story collection "There Are Little Kingdoms," by Kevin Barry, has won a leading Irish literary prize.) The new issue of the magazine boasts seven pieces of fiction set in such far-flung locales as Los Angeles and Donegal (who says relative location isn’t everything?), works by 16 poets as well as a quartet of book reviews. Samples can be found at the magazine's website.

Included in the issue is a piece by London literary agent Lucy Luck in which she details the joy she found in reading as a child, a joy that quickly dissipated when she entered secondary school and was subjected to the "reading of ‘proper books.’ This was very different from the stories I’d been loving--these were books read for instruction, so that essays could be written. It was all a bit like hard work."

Luckily, "Jane Eyre" got under her skin, and her enthusiasm was rekindled. "Now the written word defines much of my day," she continues, confessing: "Though there is nothing to compare to the thrill of being the first to appreciate a new literary talent, it can be exhausting to only read unpublished books when there are still so many published ones I’ve not managed to start." So don’t feel too guilty about that pile on your nightstand.

Orli Low

And the winner is ...

There weren’t a lot of surprises last night in New York at the National Book Awards. Denis Johnson--long considered the presumptive favorite--received the fiction prize for his Vietnam War epic, "Tree of Smoke,"  while New York Times reporter Tim Weiner took nonfiction honors for his magisterial "Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA," and Robert Hass won in poetry for "Time and Materials."

If there was anything unexpected to the evening, it may have been Sherman Alexie’s getting the nod in the young people’s category for his first Y.A. novel, "The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian." According to reports, Alexie himself seemed somewhat astonished, cracking that "I obviously should have been writing Y.A. all along."

Alexie’s win is yet another sign that young adult literature is a genre in full throttle at the moment, with children’s writers and adult writers alike taking advantage of its seemingly boundless potential to accommodate all sorts of stories and ideas. If it’d had this kind of vibrancy when I was a kid, I might have stuck with it a little longer; as it is, I find myself interested in a way I haven’t been before.

David L. Ulin

Ray Bradbury scores another honor...

He has an asteroid named for him, a star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame, an Emmy and lifetime achievement awards in science fiction and fantasy. A crater on the moon has been named after his novel "Dandelion Wine." Now, Ray Bradbury, once christened "the Poet of the Pulps" by Time magazine, is a commandeur of France's Order of Arts and Letters.

The 87-year-old literary lion jumped the lesser categories of chevalier and officier in this most prestigious of French prizes "in recognition for his significant contribution to furthering the arts in France and throughout the world," the French government announced Monday.

Bradbury — who has written more than 60 books and 600 short stories, including "Fahrenheit 451," "The Martian Chronicles," "Something Wicked This Way Comes" and, most recently, two novellas under the title "Now and Forever" — already got the official U.S. literary honor in 2004, a medal from the National Endowment for the Arts. Earlier this year, the Pulitzer Prize board issued a special citation for the writer's "distinguished, prolific, and deeply influential career as an unmatched author of science fiction and fantasy."

A longtime Southern California resident who eschews automobiles and is an outspoken advocation of building a monorail system in Los Angeles, Bradbury won't have to travel far from his Cheviot Hills home for his investiture. Pierre Vimont, France's ambassador to the United States, will present the medal Dec. 17 at the Résidence de France in Beverly Hills.

Bradbury, who says he has written every day since the age of 13, joins the ranks of fellow non-French commandeurs Bob Dylan, Clint Eastwood, Nadine Gordimer and Patti Smith.

— Kristina Lindgren

Some random links: Ken Follett and a promising writer

Dollars without end: Publishers Weekly reported late last week on a big book deal for Ken Follett--as big as one of the cathedrals in his medieval bestsellers. So far, the novelist has arranged foreign deals totaling more than $50 million for "The Century," a trilogy of novels set around both world wars and the Cold War.

It seems like Follett’s value as a "utility bill" author--one of those reliable bestsellers, like Danielle Steel or Robert Parker, who pays the rent, heating and electricity at publishing houses--has lessened in recent years. Thrillers like "The Third Twin" and "Whiteout" are murky, overwrought affairs that just haven’t seemed that thrilling. Earlier this year, though, "World Without End," his mammoth sequel to "The Pillars of the Earth," landed on bestsellers lists. No doubt the success of this and "Pillars," which are both very readable novels that amount to medieval soap operas, helped remind investors that Follett is a name you can still bank on.
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Promising?: In this book award season, Belgian writer Amélie Nothom’s selection for the Prix de Flore, an award recognizing young authors of promise, has been received with some controversy. That’s understandable: The fact that she has published 16 books in 16 years doesn’t quite seem to qualify her as "promising," though this didn’t trouble the judges, according to the Guardian.

Nick Owchar

Some random links: a creepy good writer, Gabo and the songbird

Creepy good: Novelist Kate Mosse’s ("Labyrinth") recent appreciation in the Guardian of horror writer Algernon Blackwood reminds us that we’d all be better off with a little more phantasmagoria in our lives.

Few, I think, read Blackwood today, though his influence (born in 1869 in southeast London) is undeniable on the works of H.P. Lovecraft and later members of the "weird" school such as August Derleth and T.E.D. Klein. Mosse’s piece describes the austerity and theosophical influences of Blackwood’s upbringing and how these must have contributed something to his vision of terrors invading our world from cosmic, other-dimensional places. She also styles him as a nature artist, though not exactly in the Wordsworth school of the great outdoors:

"For me, it is Blackwood’s idea of nature as sentient that dazzles--even more than his weird tales of psychic detectives and retributive ghosts and ancient demons summoned by old words and spells. His was not a sentimental affectation: he felt that to be within nature was the only way in which to be free and alive."

Too bad her piece doesn’t quite hit on the weirdness, even though she acknowledges the breakthrough success of his John Silence stories. Silence is a psychic detective, a clairvoyant problem-solver whose adventures can be had on the cheap in a Dover edition edited by the indefatigable S.T. Joshi (who also edited a Penguin volume of Blackwood’s stories called "Ancient Sorceries" as well as the recent "American Supernatural Tales"--what, does Joshi never sleep?).

Mosse’s piece, like many appreciative essays, serves as a reminder that even though the shelves in your neighborhood bookstore may seem full, they don’t contain nearly everything that’s worth reading. In this vein, there’s also something slightly disturbing (in a decidedly un-Blackwoodesque way) about Mosse’s essay: She ranks Blackwood as worthy to share the company of Lovecraft, Sheridan Le Fanu, M.R. James and Edith Nesbit--wonderful writers who, with the exception of Lovecraft perhaps, may need an appreciative essay one day.

Gabo and Shakira: If you didn’t know, Gabriel García Márquez is good friends with pop star Shakira, a relationship dating back to a profile of the singer that the novelist wrote in 2002. So don’t be surprised, as Hello! magazine reminds, to hear her music in the forthcoming film adaptation of his "Love in the Time of Cholera," which opens in theaters November Nov. 16.

Nick Owchar

Still running ...

In 1978, John L. Parker Jr. found a solid niche audience for his debut novel. Who were they? Runners. His novel, "Once a Runner," which follows the life of college running star Quenton Cassidy, is considered a classic. Many of today’s marathon stars cite the book as essential to their own development. Success, however, didn’t come easy to the novelist, as Benjamin Cheever relates in a profile of Parker in the current issue of Runner’s World magazine. Parker self-published the book (he even had to set the type himself) and relentlessly peddled it everywhere, including shoe stores and races.

The occasion for Cheever’s piece is the arrival later this month of the long-awaited sequel, "Again to Carthage." Cheever explores the intimidation factor involved in writing the followup to what is now a cult classic and candidly asks Parker, why did it take so long?

Though Parker admits that his first novel’s success certainly hung over him like a "sword of Damocles the whole time," he also says the long delay was simply the result of his temperament and age. For many years, he just wasn’t at the right stage in his life to tell readers where Quenton Cassidy went next: "[T]he extra time and gnashing of teeth seems appropriate to me now. The first book is all about youth and hormones, winning and losing.... This book is a lot more poignant."

Cheever seeds his piece with interesting comments about the writing life, including glimpses of his father, a master of the short story, and insights into what writing and running have in common. Both are endurance tests, Cheever writes as he considers Parker’s career, and "like the best runners, the best novelists are a little bit insane. However self-effacing, a champion has got to believe in himself."

Nick Owchar

Dumbledore and more

It’s everywhere, in all the major publications, including Time and Newsweek, but for a smart roundup of reaction to the news that "Harry Potter's" Albus Dumbledore could be gay, see Jim Emerson’s Scanners blog.

Although Emerson does cite what some people are saying about J.K. Rowling’s revelation about the head master of Hogwarts, he also discusses at length the creative process of writers. It’s refreshing to read about the literary considerations--not the controversy--of Rowling’s fictional decisions.

"Note that Rowling did not say Dumbledore was gay," he writes. "She was explaining how she had always thought of the character she created."

Emerson goes on to argue that, in serial fiction especially, much of what happens to characters is kept "off-page or off-screen, where we are encouraged to imagine them leading lives beyond what we actually witness as readers or viewers." The best fictions, in other words, are those with layers.

A long time ago, I attended a speech in which Doris Lessing said the same thing in describing her practices as a fiction writer. Often, she said, you must imagine details about your fictional world that will never be included in the story--and yet, their presence will be indirectly felt, thus giving a richer, fuller dimension to the universe you’ve created.

That’s the literary aspect of Rowling’s disclosure, a consideration quickly eclipsed by all the social, religious and political furor of the last week. Dumbledore’s sexuality was more important to her creative process than to our reading of her books--a point, it seems, that is far too subtle for some of her critics.

Reaction this week also included references to other beloved fictional characters who are or have been under similar microscopes for being gay. Here are a few that may amuse, and quite possibly exasperate:

"Star Trek’s" Capt. Kirk and Mr. Spock: There’s been speculation about the "true nature" of their relationship for some time, as Jim Emerson also relates on his blog.

Batman and Robin: Complaints and allegations have long swirled around the Dynamic Duo.

Bilbo Baggins: In a recent Guardian piece about Rowling’s announcement, Philip Hensher writes of the "Lord of the Rings" character: "[W]ith his domestic fussiness ... [he] seems a strong candidate."

Gandalf: No way, but Stephen Colbert on his TV show last week suggested that the color scheme of the wizard’s robes is cause for suspicion. "Gandalf the Gray: perfectly straight," he says. "Gandalf the White, on the other hand? We’re not sure. It’s the robe. Who wears that much white after Labor Day?"

Nick Owchar

But will she speak?

On Monday, Harper Lee, the author of the 1960 novel "To Kill a Mockingbird," will receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom at a White House ceremony. The medal, America’s highest civilian honor, will be presented to her by President Bush.

Also being honored at the ceremony will be 1992 Nobel economics prize winner Gary Becker; Francis Collins, head of the Human Genome Project; civil rights leader Benjamin Hooks; and former congressman Henry Hyde (R-Ill.) and others. A fuller list is available from the White House.

I wonder--does the medal require any sort of acceptance speech? If it does, will we hear more than just a phrase or two from the reclusive writer? Or will Lee continue to deprive the public of any personal insights into a book that continues to stir and inspire people 47 years later?

Nick Owchar