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.
Books in the Air
Lots to report
Lots to report… first in Max’s writing news, the new issue of period magazine has been posted. It features the little piece I posted here earlier about Dodger Stadium. I like it, but it sure seems awfully short up there on the page. At any rate, it’s a pretty neat little online mag, eclectic and just for fun. Now, on to more pressing matters. I had a full and eventful last 3 days. On Friday, I saw The Yeah Yeah Yeahs at the Henry Fonda Theater. It was the second time I’ve seen them, and I was more or less equally as disappointed as I was the first time I came to LA. I still enjoy the music, and I think the EP is great little chunk of rock and roll, but they don’t seem to have the heft to carry a show in venues as large as the theaters they’ve been playing in LA. In fact, in vast cavernous spaces like the Henry Fonda and the Palace (where they played their first LA gig) the rock energy sounds hollow. Plus, I’m not really into Karen O’s onstage antics…. I mean I love onstage antics as much as the next guy, but it seems like she’s just mugging for the camera.On Saturday, quite unexpectedly, I had a remarkable, unforgettable experience. While I was working the cash register Gabriel Garcia Marquez came into my bookstore. I was floored. He is absolutely one of my heroes, perhaps my favorite writer of all time (or as I have occasionally phrased it “the best writer of all time”). He wandered slowly around the store, taking his time, looking at various books. When he came up to the register, another, younger gentlemen joined him, and he translated for me as I talked to Marquez. It turns out that he speaks very little English. Mostly, I talked to him about Maqroll since Alvaro Mutis is one of his oldest friends, and since I love that book so much. Plus I felt a little strange about talking to him about his own books. He told me that there will be no more novellas about the Gaviero and his friends, but that Mutis continues to write poetry in which Maqroll plays a central role. He also signed some books for me, including the Spanish-language edition of his autobiography which he inscribed “Para Max, del amigo, Gabriel Garcia Marquez 2003”.How fucking cool is that! I also got some signed copies of his other books. They have quickly become some of my most prized possessions.Last night, Easter Sunday night, I went back to the Henry Fonda to see The Faint and Les Savy Fav. I had never really heard The Faint, but I’m really into Les Savy Fav, and I’ve been dying to see their legendary live show. They didn’t disappoint: lead singer Tim Harrington’s antics (remember: I love onstage antics as much as the next guy) had a charming easter motif to them, and he made good use of chocolate bunnies and jelly bean filled plastic eggs. For the last song, he brought a few dozen people on stage and everyone really rocked out. The Faint followed, and while I don’t really get their electro-goth sound, their video projection light show was impressive… plus the kids really seemed to dig it. Finally, if you haven’t checked it out already. Go to 3wk It’s the best internet radio in the world.
Appearing Elsewhere
Over at More Intelligent Life, you’ll find my reflections on the Joseph Mitchell centenary. Mitchell is, for my money, the greatest reporter-stylist of his era; the essay points to a few reasons why. In related news, The New York Times today reports on a blog version of the diaries of that other great reporter-stylist, George Orwell.
Book News via RSS
If you read a lot of blogs, you’ve either discovered RSS by now, or you are spending a lot of time visiting your favorite sites each day. If you don’t know what RSS is, this site explains it pretty well. Basically, you can subscribe to the blogs that you like, and when the owner of a blog puts up a new post, it shows up in your “feed reader.” No more checking and rechecking all your favorite blogs to see if anything new has been posted.The really cool thing is that lots of newspaper sites have begun to jump on the RSS bandwagon in recent months, and now you can subscribe to their news feeds, most of which are divided into categories – world news, sports, etc. Why do we care about this at The Millions? Well, a handful of newspapers now have special feeds for their book sections, making it much easier to stay on top of all the reviews and book industry gossip. All the links listed below are to book news feeds. If you are already set up with a feed reader, go ahead and subscribe. If you aren’t set up yet, I recommend using Bloglines or My Yahoo. Here are the feeds I’ve found so far:New York Times > Bookswashingtonpost.com – Book Worldwashingtonpost.com – Jonathan Yardley – The Post gave Yardley his own feed, which I think is pretty cool.Guardian Unlimited BooksChristian Science Monitor | BooksLondon Review of BooksPowell’s Books: Overview – You may have seen Powell’s Review-a-Day where each day they post a book review from places like Salon.com, New Republic, and the CS MonitorSeattle Post-Intelligencer: BooksTelegraph Arts | Booksbaltimoresun.com | books & magsNPR Topics: BooksArts and Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate – not strictly book news, but a consistent, daily collection of links to thought-provoking articles many of which happen to be book reviews (not included in the Book News via RSS feature to the right)added 2/16/06: USATODAY.com BooksThere are quite a few publications that don’t yet have book news feeds, but hopefully they will add them soon. If you spot any new book news feeds or know of any that I missed, leave a comment or send an email, and I’ll add them to this post, which as time goes on will become a compendium of all the book news feeds out there. Finally, if you don’t want to bother with setting up your own feed reader but still want to keep up on all the book news, you can go here.Update:I found some tools to aggregate the book news feeds, and now the latest book news shows up in the column to the right. Enjoy!
Punctuationally Speaking
There are two types of people in this world: (Segment One) people who adhere, as a point of pride, to every last comma and period of the laws of punctuation, and then there the people who just don’t have the time (Segment Two) and, frankly, are a little tired of hearing about these numerous and arcane rules that are supposedly all that separates us from the animals. Bearing in mind that Segment One would be offended that anyone might suggest that punctuation rules are not self-evident and that Segment Two will tell you to blow it out your ear, a book aimed at teaching the populace the in and outs of punctuation doesn’t seem likely to be a blockbuster. Yet just such a book was a huge seller in England last year. Are the Brits crazy or are we Americans missing out on the pleasurable nuances of punctuation? We’re about to find out. Next week, Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation by Lynne Truss comes out, and its current sales ranking of 6 at Amazon indicates that it will indeed be a success on this side of the Atlantic. And the New York Times seems to like it, which can’t hurt. The success of this book will cement the notion that Americans appreciate this British brand of book that delivers dull subject matter contained in a humorous package and prove that the big sales of last year’s most delightfully useless British book, Schott’s Original Miscellany, was not a fluke. (I hope that I punctuated everything correctly in that post.)
Magic for Grown-Ups
Time’s book critic Lev Grossman made a splash on this week’s NYT bestseller list, debuting at number nine in the hardcover fiction category with his second novel, The Magicians. The book has gotten a healthy publicity push, but strong sales numbers also suggest that readers are responding to its hook: “a kind of Harry Potter for grown-ups.” I haven’t read The Magicians yet, but its premise – the academic and extracurricular adventures of a contemporary East Coast Wizard – puts me in mind of an unjustly neglected fictional opus: John Crowley‘s Aegypt Cycle.
After Matt Ruff chose Aegypt for our 2007 Year in Reading, I picked up the first novel in Crowley’s tetralogy and was hooked. Wands and fairies – er, faeries – were never my thing, but I probably learned more about magic, myth, and historiography than I would have from any work of nonfiction this side of Joseph Campbell. Moreover, Crowley is a beguiling stylist, a constructor of Joycean intertextual games, and (ultimately) a passionate humanist. For several years, The Solitudes, Love & Sleep, and Daemonomania were out of print, but now Overlook Press has brought them back into print, and Small Beer Press has published the concluding volume, Endless Things.
The Times points to an interview where Grossman muses about “all the things that were missing from J. K. Rowling’s Y.A. series, from sex and booze to . . . fantasy novels”; those are the very sorts of inclusions that make Aegypt so rewarding. This is not to undermine the originality of Grossman’s approach; rather, it is to demonstrate one of Crowley’s big ideas: that we make new stories, and new magic, out of the old.
Bonus Link: Michael Dirda on Aegypt in The American Scholar.