Looking for a Book?

Posting has been light because I'm nearing the end of the quarter at school, and I am in the final stages of a very big project. And posting will probably continue to be light because I'll be heading off on vacation as soon as school is done. I'm thinking about taking my laptop with me, but even if I do, I'm not sure how close I'll be to the Internet. I'm excited about this vacation (we'll be joining my family at the beach in North Carolina) not just because it'll be a much needed break from school, but also because there's no place I'd rather read than on vacation. On a proper vacation there are seemingly endless hours to spend with your books. I also love the way certain reading experiences become associated with certain exotic locales - and by "exotic" I mean simply "not home." For example, last summer Mrs. Millions both read Walker Percy's classic The Moviegoer during our honey moon in St. Maarten. The unfamiliarity of that island paradise mingled with the humidity of New Orleans where Percy's Binx Bolling is trying to keep "despair" at bay. The book and the place where I read it combined to form a peculiar sort of dreamy memory that I love. Though I haven't even gotten the suitcase out of the closet, I already know which four books I'll be taking with me. I plan to finish The Count of Monte Cristo on the plane ride there. I've been enjoying the book immensely, by the way. After that I'm going to read Belly, a debut novel by Lisa Selin Davis that will be coming out later this summer. The publisher's publicity compares her writing to that of Jane Smiley and Richard Russo. I'm also bringing a couple of nonfiction books: David Lipsky's account of following a class of cadets through West Point, Absolutely American. Lipsky was originally assigned to write an article for Rolling Stone about the military academy but ended up sticking with the story for four years. I'm also bringing The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki, the resident business writer at the New Yorker. The book's premise, which is borrowed from the world of economics, is that the collective choices of large populations of people are often correct, and that it's even possible, by setting up what amounts to a futures market for ideas, to use this effect to predict the future. A good example of this is a futures market where one can bet on who will be elected president. Such markets have been very good predictors of actual events over the years. None of these books particularly strike me as "summer reading," but I'll just be happy that it's summer and that my only obligation is to read.

As we adjust to new economic realities, Michael Lewis is emerging as the financial meltdown's most important voice. His Portfolio piece "The End" told us how we got here but it also illuminated his own failure, in the 1980s, to get the point across with his book Liar's Poker. Meant to be a cautionary tale, it became instead an inspiration.But Lewis appears unwilling to let "The End" be his final, confessional comment on the matter. This weekend, as a new year and new administration are gearing up, Lewis has delivered another far more aggressive piece, this time in the New York Times (Part 1, Part 2). In it, he calls out, more strenuously than before, the fraud, incompetence, and willful ignorance behind the financial crisis and makes it clear that this fall's efforts to resolve it were flawed at best. He also makes several direct, clear-eyed proposals to set things back on the right course. One hopes Obama is watching. One also notices that Lewis, in these pieces, is no longer acting as a journalist or even a columnist. He has thrust himself into the center of this issue, as if looking to finish what he tried to accomplish more than 20 years ago.But Lewis has grown up too. Liar's Poker didn't wake up the world to Wall Street's ills because its tone was too glib and too incredulous. We were meant to marvel at the goings on at Solomon Brothers just as the young Lewis had. That tone is gone now, and Lewis has returned to the task with a fierce seriousness. Whether or not you agree with everything that Lewis is writing in these pieces, his tone, backed up by his more than 30 years of writing about Wall Street, will give even the most optimistic observers pause.Interestingly, Lewis' co-author for the two New York Times pieces is David Einhorn, a hedge fund manager who doesn't exactly have a pristine reputation. Einhorn heads up Greenlight Capital, which racked up average annualized returns of 25.5% from May 1996 through mid-2008, according to New York Times, though his funds, like many on Wall Street, have struggled since. He's also a serious poker player. In 2006, he placed 18th in the World Series of Poker's main event, winning more than $650 thousand that he donated to charity.Einhorn made headlines this year for his very vocal bearish stance on now defunct investment bank Lehman Brothers. Einhorn eventually went public with discrepancies that he and his analysts had found in Lehman's numbers. Believed to be short (i.e. placing bets that the stock would go down) Lehman and other financial names, Einhorn was excoriated in a war of words on Wall Street as regulators targeted short selling among financial stocks. Lewis and Einhorn make it clear where they stand on that issue, calling short sellers, "the only market players who have a financial incentive to expose fraud and abuse."After much confusion as the crisis played out in 2008, it may be that we are seeing whistle-blowers like Lewis and Einhorn emerge from the mess to take control of the discussion. In time we will see if they have the ear anyone in power.

I have always wrestled, pretty unsuccessfully I think, with reading and writing poetry, and am often reluctant to discuss it in too much detail, as a novice pilot might be reluctant to land his plane at night. Occasionally, though, poems have the ability to break through whatever barrier to poetry I have inside my head and deliver to me the poignant seed of beauty that supporters of the medium so often rave about. Sometime earlier this year the New Yorker started occasionally putting a poem on its back page instead of the usual "Sketchbook." One of those back page poems (in the March 3rd issue) was an intensely moving anti-war poem by one of my favorie poets (if it could be said that I have favorite poets) C. K. Williams. It is called "The Hearth." This one is definitely one of those "break through the barrier" poems for me, as is a very different sort of poem called "The Clerk's Tale" by Spencer Reece, which appeared on the back page of the New Fiction Issue (June 16 & 23). I love the way this poem makes lyrical the banalities of suburban, modern life. According to the Author Notes for that issue Reece will "publish his first collection of poems next year." I haven't been able to find any info about this upcoming book, but I will post if I do find anything out. In other poetry news, FSG recently put out the brick-sized Collected Poems of Robert Lowell. This book has already recieved a ton of press including a major review in the New Yorker and the front page of the New York Times Book Review. The book itself is beautiful and the poems within are melancholy and transcendant; whether you are a longtime fan of Lowell or unaware of his work completely, as you flip from poem to poem you will find it difficult to pull yourself away.So, What Else is NewSometimes, even though there are mountains of unread books all around me, I find myself wishing that one of my favorite writers had a new book out. So instead of continuing to slog dutifully through my teetering piles, I decided to see what will soon be out that I can breathlessly begin to read the very day that I lay my eyes upon it: -- David Foster Wallace fans will be happy to hear that an as yet untitled (and perhaps even unfinished) short story collection is slated to come out sometime in January or soon thereafter. -- Jonathan Lethem's remarkable story "View From a Headlock" in this week's New Yorker turns out to be an excerpt from his new novel The Fortress of Solitude. Look for this one in September. -- Vandela Vida, one half of the McSweeney's super couple, has a new book coming out at the end of August called And Now You Can Go. Here's an excerpt. -- Jhumpa Lahiri has a new book coming out in September called The Namesake. This one was excerpted in the new fiction issue of the New York as a story called "Gogol." -- Apparently David Sedaris' long-awaited new book will be titled Repeat After Me and will hit shelves a few months shy of a year from now. Anything else out there? let me know.