Thanks to the shoddy service of my DSL provider, I haven’t been able to post new reports for you. This is sad because I have many great books to tell you all about. But now it is too late since I am off to Europe this afternoon and I have far too much to do before I leave. If the facilities are adequate and I have the time, I will try to update from Europe. If not, please check back in two weeks when I will pick up right where I left off. Bye bye everyone!
To My Devoted Fans
Oscar Wao Author Helps Inaugurate New Online Series
Pulitzer winner Junot Díaz talks with his fellow “Year in Reading” contributor Meghan O’Rourke in the debut episode of the online video series Open Book, co-sponsored by Slate and my alma mater. I’m thrilled that the producers elected to keep the same zany voice-over guy who reads Slate’s audio podcasts. Future interviews, we’re told, will include John Ashbery, Charles Simic, and Jonathan Safran Foer.
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Spoken Word Oddities Tucked Away in the New Amazon mp3 Store
Amazon made a splash last week in unveiling its mp3 store. With this effort, Amazon is going head to head with Apple and its popular iTunes music store. iTunes has more songs on offer and is familiar to millions of iPod owners, but Amazon aims to bring people aboard by offering DRM-free songs with a more flexible pricing scheme. Amazon’s DRM-free mp3s can be transferred to as many devices you want, while iTunes songs are more limited.This is no doubt of interest to many music fans, but I was curious to see if Amazon would extend its expertise in more literary realms to this new audio offering. So far the selection of “spoken word” content is fairly limited – it can be found under the “Miscellaneous” heading. Amid quite a bit of comedy, however, there are some gems here and there for those that enjoy the occasional audio book, though you won’t be finding any bestsellers here. Among the intriguing items I spotted, are some historical, literary and cultural artifacts:The Ultimate Orson Welles (including the famous War of the Worlds radio hoaxSpeaking Personally… by Aldous HuxleyChe Guevara SpeaksFour Inaugural Addresses by Franklin D. Roosevelt; See also: The Best Of The Speeches (1960 – 1963) by John F. Kennedy; Campaign ’56: Sounds of an Election YearThe Lenny Bruce Originals, Volume 2Allen Ginsberg (including a track called “First Party At Ken Keasey’s“; See also: HowlAnthology of American Literature by Neal Pollack & Pine Valley CosmonautsBritish War Broadcasting 1938-45 (Pt 1); See also: Dunkirk & The Battle Of France & Flanders 1939-40Buckminster Fuller Speaks His Mind (a six-disk set); See also: Fuller’s The Clock is Stopping: The Human ScenarioCasablanca – The 1943 Radio Production starring Humphrey BogartThe Daemon Lover and the Lottery by Shirley JacksonDionysus by Jim MorrisonThe Exciting History of the Alaska Gold RushFuturism And Dada Reviewed 1912-1959Good Morning, Vietnam (not the movie)The Great Carl Sandburg: Songs of AmericaThe Historic Second Declaration of Havana: Feb. 4, 1962 by Fidel CastroLots more in there too.
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Birthday Loot
I got a package today from my inlaws who decided to get me five books for my birthday (which was Jan. 5). They came right off my wishlist, so, of course, they’re exactly what I wanted. Two of the five are coffee-table books. I’ll be spending a lot of time with the utterly gorgeous book The World on Sunday. Nicholson Baker and Margaret Brentano have put together really nice reproductions of Joseph Pulitzer’s colorful newspaper. Baker’s foreword and Brentano’s captions really elevate the book. I wrote more about it last month. The other big book I received is a monograph, put out by Aperture, of photography by Robert Capa. Capa is famous for his war photography from the 1930s, 40s and 50s. His photographs, all in black and white, are unflinching and powerful. He’s essential to the grand tradition of war reportage. (This one actually wasn’t on my wishlist but they knew I’d like it.) In keeping with the Capa theme, I also received his illustrated memoir of World War II, Slightly Out of Focus. I also got The Old Patagonian Express by Paul Theroux which Andrew wrote about a few months back, and Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World by Nicholas Oster, which I think I first heard about at Language Hat.
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The Librarians Speak
A treat for all New Yorker obsessives, Emdashes’ “Ask the Librarians” series has a new installment up. If you’ve always been dying to know the history of the “Tables for Two” column or the origin of the “cover strap,” this one’s for you.
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On the Ground in Philadelphia
We got back late last night from Los Angeles (where we had attended the wedding of two great friends), and are now wading through stacks of boxes in our still freshly moved into apartment in Philadelphia. Unfortunately, it turns out that when you go on vacation two days after moving, you don’t return to find all of your things miraculously unpacked and where you want them to be.However, after a few days of catch up (and thanks to the resourcefulness of Mrs. Millions) we should eventually approach normalcy. As for the digital realm, I still have many emails to respond to and my Bloglines “unread items” number in the thousands, but regular posting will ramp up again here over the next couple of days.In the meantime, I noticed that Philadelphia announced its 2007 One Book, One City selection this week Carlos Eire’s Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy, a National Book Award winning memoir. It tells the tale of Eire’s boyhood uprooting from Cuba and the subsequent “rootlessness” of his life in the United States. The selection puts the focus on our country’s immigration issues, though the question of Cuba has been less “hot button” of late. I, for one, prefer to “One Book” programs select fiction as I think there is something more special about a whole city reading a novel together. And anyway (though I read as much non-fiction as fiction), fiction is more in need of support from our public institutions. However, some consolation can be found in the fact that Waiting for Snow in Havana is literary and not just topical.
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Recent Reviews of Interest
Here are some book reviews and book related stories that have caught my eye in recent days. In the New York Times Charles McGrath reviews a forward-thinking anthology, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories. The review is tepid, but McGrath takes the opportunity to give us an interesting little summary of the state of the American short story. Also from the Times, Michiko Kakutani delivers a review of Arthur Phillips latest, The Egyptologist. She makes the book sound pretty exciting, but in the end quibbles that it is not sufficiently weighty. Despite her reservations, The Egyptologist seems worth a look. I would imagine that it’s great airplane reading.
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Books in the Air
How do I occupy myself during the hours upon hours that I must spend in my car each week? My boredom with the music offered on commercial radio stations and (sadly) LA’s current array of noncommercial radio stations has led me more and more to listen to the various talk radio outlets, both public and commercial. The fact that my car doesn’t have a cd player exacerbates this situation, and the selection of tapes scattered around my car, under seats and wedged in pockets, is a sad bunch, indeed. And too often, in fact there are several blocks of time during the day when this occurs, there is nothing the least bit compelling on the talk outlets. In this situation I am resigned to listening to either music I don’t like or talk I’m not interested in, which is why listening to the audio version of James McManus‘s Positively Fifth Street last year was such a revelation. Having a good book to switch over to when radio went bad was a lifesaver. And you must understand, driving in Los Angeles is a life and death situation, and often your sanity is the first thing to go. Many people I know here have complicated arrangements which keep them entertained. Some have industrial-sized binders of cds that they rotate in and out of their cars, always fearing that a criminal might wipe out their entire music collection by breaking just a single pane of glass. Others resign themselves to staying on top of every trend in car and/or portable audio and month after month discmen give way to mp3 players followed by cd/mp3 players followed by iPods and the inevitable satellite radio, the current savior of all who must spend hours in transit. I fit in to neither category, and books on tape and cd are both costly and bulky, so I am always searching for my own solution to the mobile entertainment dilemma… Here, maybe, is a solution: an interesting article a while back in the New York Times about the digital revolution in audiobooks caught my eye. It’s already in the pay-to-read archives at nytimes.com , but I found a mirror of it here. Of course, in order to take advantage of this I would have to purchase some sort of digital audio device (an iPod would be pretty sweet), but the fact that I could use it to listen to books as well as music makes the idea much more appealing. Digital audiobooks are much more convenient and much cheaper than their cd and tape counterparts, and with the proliferation of portable digital audio devices, I suspect that this will be big trend in books this year.
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