Are you in the mood to read a page-turner? If you’re not afraid to read something in the mystery section at your local bookstore, try Paranoia by Joseph Finder. I keep hearing people talking about it, and it’s getting good reviews. Check out this one at Slate.com (the reviewer gets to it after he reviews John Le Carre’s latest, Absolute Friends).
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Books Far and Wide
Ms. Millions and I embarked upon a whirlwind trip to the East Coast this weekend for equal parts partying and wedding planning, and although Jet Blue’s inflight television distracted me from my reading, I managed to get some done, as did several other folks that I spotted in airports and on the planes. Lots of folks had their noses in the usual, low impact airport reading, but I also noticed quite a few people diverting themselves with some pretty literary fare. Off the top of my head I can remember spotting Family History by Dani Shapiro and Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds by America’s super intellectual, Harold Bloom, but there were others as well. It was good to see people getting some reading in on their way to their far flung destinations, which reminded me about an award I heard about last week that celebrates books that take place in far flung destinations. The Kiriyama Prize recognizes books “that will contribute to greater understanding of and among the peoples and nations of the Pacific Rim and South Asia” in two categories, fiction and non-fiction. Here’s their map of the Pacific Rim. The fiction finalists are Brick Lane by Monica Ali, My Life as a Fake by Peter Carey, The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard, The Girl Who Played Go by Shan Sa, and The Guru of Love by Samrat Upadhyay: five highly regarded books from last year. It’s interesting to see an award that groups books by subject matter and setting rather than the location, nationality, or gender of the author. Here are the non-fiction finalists.
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Holden and Middlemarch in Windhoek
Complete with phonies, small things that men love about women, and the mid-1800s equivalent of bathroom graffiti, Middlemarch is a book that I think Holden Caulfield would have grudgingly found acceptable.
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The NaNoWriMo Backlash
November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), a group project which encourages participants “to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30” – (they couldn’t have picked a month with 31 days?). The quality of work produced by such speedwriting is questionable at best, I’d guess, but people seem to have fun doing it, just like some people seem to have fun climbing Mount Everest or participating in eating contests. The NaNoWriMo community also employs a lot of slap on the back, “you can do it!” type of encouragement, and the Web site lets you track your progress along with the other writers participating. I can think of many, many better ways to spend one’s time (and there are probably many, many better ways to write a novel), but NaNoWriMo is harmless, if a bit irritating if you stray too close to the frenzied participants.Perhaps there have always been NaNoWriMo haters (it started in 1999), but I don’t recall having seen NaNoWriMo haters before this year (although that may have more to do with my studied averting of the eyes from the NaNoWriMo frenzy). However, this year I happened upon Eric Rosenfield’s anti-NaNoWriMo post, which lays out a few reasons to hate the endeavor, calling it “nothing if not oblivious to the absurdity of its own project.” The Rake has also jumped in to explain why NaNoWriMo is like eating so many shrimp.In the end, though, hating NaNoWriMo is both too easy and pretty fruitless, like hating hippie music or “blue collar comedy.” It will always have its devotees, but the appeal of it probably doesn’t make sense to most people.Update: More NaNoWriMo
Ombudsman
Arts and Letters Daily recently linked an article from the National Journal that takes stock of an interesting development at the New York Times. In the wake of the Jayson Blair scandal and a good amount of internal and external strife about wavering journalistic standards, the Times has appointed an ombudsman, a position more commonly found at campus newspapers than at the world’s most important dailies. This ombudsman happens to be an author and journalist, Daniel Okrent, whom I admire for his baseball book Nine Innings and who was recently named a Pulitzer finalist for his book, Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center. His columns bring an impressive amount of transparency to a very powerful newsroom, and I suggest everyone read them before Okrent’s fellow employees stage a coup and kick him out. The most recent column can be found here.
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