This week is turning out to be a mini-family reunion for me. My parents and two of my brothers are in town as are some aunts and uncles and cousins. Yesterday evening at a family barbecue near Venice Beach I fell into a conversation with my aunt and uncle about the reading habits of my young cousin, Tim, who is 10. He’s a very precocious reader and has finished off nearly all of the highly recommended children’s series that are out there right now: Harry Potter, Lemony Snicket, and Brian Jacques’ Redwall Series (I recommended Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials Trilogy since he hasn’t gotten to that yet.) The thing is, there’s a limited amount of high quality young adult fiction out there, so what do you do if your kid has read it all? Since I started working at the bookstore I have occasionally been posed this question by parents. It’s actually a crucial moment in the life of a young a reader, the point where they could very easily lose some interest reading because they have read all the kids’ books and aren’t allowed to read adult books. What folks sometimes forget is that there are quite a few books that, though they are shelved in the adult fiction section, are perfect books to help segue strong, young readers into the wider world that lies beyond the young adult section. Some people call these books classics, but they are perfect for challenging kids and keeping them interested in reading: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Time Machine, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and Journey to the Center of the Earth, to name just a few. I would also recommend that these children read the books in their original forms, not the abridged versions. I remember reading abridged versions of various classics when I was younger, and I think lots of other folks do as well, but looking back it just doesn’t seem necessary. In fact, as an eleven or twelve year old, I learned a lot of complex things about the world around me from the books I read, and these important details, the harsh language in Huck Finn, for example, seem to be just the things that are excised in order to create the kid friendly versions. We challenge kids in many aspects of their lives, why not challenge them to explore the big questions that arise from reading the classics. I hope that the children’s book industry continues to move in this direction, and a lot of the intelligent and challenging kids’ books that are out there indicate that it will. On the other hand, my friend Edan pointed out to me the other day the upcoming release of a “Student Edition” of Yann Martel’s international bestseller Life of Pi, from which, one can assume, the editors have removed anything that might distress, and therefore challenge, a young reader. Here’s hoping that this doesn’t kick off a new trend.
Giving Kids the Classics
More Celebrity Fiction on the Way
The current issue of McSweeney’s includes a short story by Michael Cera, whose contributor’s bio informs us that he was “born in Brampton, Ontario and now lives in Los Angeles,” and, inevitably, that “This is his first published story.” Yes, this becomingly modest debut author is that Michael Cera, co-star of Arrested Development and Superbad and avatar of skinny-geek chic (for which at least one Millions contributor owes him a debt of gratitude). For those keeping score at home, this makes Cera at least the fourth movie star in the last two years to turn his talents to the only marginally less glamorous and remunerative field of short fiction. (Others include Miranda July, James Franco, and Sharon Stone.)The forthcoming 106th issue of Granta suggests that even the World’s Most Serious Literary Magazine is not immune to the trend. Through our vast network of informants, we’ve obtained page proofs, and the “Contributors’ Notes” include one or two names you may recognize, behind their veneer of careful self-effacement:M. Louise Ciccone is a media professional who divides time between the New York Kabbalah Center and the Miami Kabbalah Center. This is her first published story.Washington-based R.I. Emmanuel spends weekends in Chicago with his wife and beloved children. He promised to shove Granta‘s head so far up Granta‘s f*&^ing a^% we’d be able to see our &^%[email protected] if we didn’t get his first published story published.Julius Erving, a retired physician, lives in the metro Philadelphia area. This is his first published story.Phillipa Longstocking is one of world literature’s most beloved characters. For more information, you may contact the Wylie Agency.P.R. Nelson is a Minneapolis-based composer and erotic acoustician. His work has appeared widely, under a variety of names. His 4thcoming memoir, All of My Purple Life will B published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux this fall.Joaquin Phoenix, an obscure itinerant musician, scribbled this, his first published story, on the back of a New Jersey Turnpike exit ticket.Julia Roberts is Julia Roberts.Borat Sagdiyev is making the literature sexy sexy for much enjoyment of Kazakh people. His story “My Goat, She is Not Breathing” (translated here by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky) appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, and was selected for Best Central Asian Short Stories 2007.Schmary Schmate and Schmashley Schmolsen, whose first published story this is, are sometime undergraduates in NYU’s make-your-own major program. They are majoring in Undeclared, and also this is their first published story, because what, do you think they have time to be writing stories all the time, or something?The late Dave Thomas (1932-2002) was the founder of Wendy’s and creator of the internationally acclaimed Chicken Cordon Bleu. This is his final published story. The Chicken Cordon Bleu is back for a limited time.All your base are belong to Carnie Wilson.
Exclusive: The First Lines of Zadie Smith’s NW
There’s a lot for readers to look forward to in the second-half of the year, and high up on the list is Zadie Smith’s first novel in seven years, NW. Lydia covered the book in our big preview published last week, “NW follows a group of people from Caldwell–a fictional council estate in northwest London whose buildings are named for English philosophers–and documents the lives they build in adulthood. Smith (who since 2005 has become a mother, NYU professor, and Harper’s columnist) has variously called this a novel of class and a “very, very small book” (highly unlikely). Smith’s own deep roots to London, and this particular corner of London, were most recently aired in her stirring defense of London’s local libraries for the New York Review of Books blog.” Smith sets the scene evocatively in the book’s opening paragraph. The fat sun stalls by the phone masts. Anti-climb paint turns sulphurous on school gates and lampposts. In Willesden people go barefoot, the streets turn European, there is a mania for eating outside. She keeps to the shade. Redheaded. On the radio: I am the sole author of the dictionary that defines me. A good line—write it out on the back of a magazine. In a hammock, in the garden of a basement flat. Fenced in, on all sides.
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.
A football book
I’ve written often of books about baseball (especially ones by Roger Angell). Baseball values words over images – I prefer listening to games on the radio to watching them on television, for example – and so lends itself well to the page. Football is a different story, entirely. If one doesn’t see these men bash each other on cold, gray Sunday afternoons, then what’s the point really? Reading about a spectacle kind of defeats the purpose. And this probably explains why there isn’t much “football literature” to speak of. The only football book I’ve ever read is George Plimpton’s Paper Lion, which, though terrific, is really more about Plimpton than football. Most of the other football books I’ve seen have been the ghostwritten memoirs of retired Hall of Famers. But the Washington Post’s Jonathan Yardley, in his series which “reconsiders notable and/or neglected books from the past” recently wrote about a football book that deserves to sit amongst all those baseball books on the shelves of sports literature. Instant Replay was a collaboration between Jerry Kramer, a guard for the Green Bay Packers in the 1960s, and Dick Schaap, a sportswriter. By unlikely but entirely happy coincidence, Kramer had been persuaded to keep a diary of his 1967 season by Dick Schaap, an uncommonly capable and convivial sports journalist. Schaap knew that Kramer was intelligent, literate, observant and thoughtful, and suspected — rightly — that he could provide a unique view of pro football from its innermost trenches: the offensive line.The book sounds like a treat for any football fan, especially at this time of year.
Two Quick Links
Check out an excerpt of the Art of Fiction with Haruki Murakami from The Paris Review. If you are a Murakami fan like me, you should buy the issue and read the complete interview. If you do, you will find a discussion of Murakami’s upcoming novel Kafka on the Shore, which is due out in January. And from the British Library: “On this site you will find the British Library’s 93 copies of the 21 plays by Shakespeare printed in quarto before the theatres were closed in 1642.” (LINK)
New Books and Book News
Some quick observations: Bob Woodward’s new book Plan of Attack is selling as fast as I have seen any book fly off the shelf in my two years at the book store: faster than Hillary and approaching Harry Potter levels. One time Millions contributor Kaye Gibbons has a new novel out called Divining Women. Early reviews are mostly good. On the other hand, the review that New York Times’ “Madame” Michiko Kakutani gave Alice Walker’s new book, Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart, is just about the most brutal I have ever seen in that paper. View the carnage hereIn Millions news, I’m heading to New York tonight. I’m in a wedding this weekend and there are other East Coast errands to run, so I probably won’t be blogging much, if at all. I will, however, be checking the comments here as well as my email. I don’t know how special this makes me, but I have been asked to be a trial user for Google’s mega-hyped webmail service, GMail, so if you are curious about how well it works, feel free to drop me a line.