I spotted this essay by James Wood in the Guardian about endings that disappoint. I agree that there is hardly anything more disheartening than a novel that just peters out at the end. To me reading a book is like making an investment. You put in the time, and at the end you hope to walk away with some pleasure. A bad ending screws up the whole arrangement. I tried to think of some really good endings and off the top of my head I came up with a couple. In terms of paying off on an investment, one of my favorites is John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany. The “a ha!” moment is almost too perfect but Irving has set it up so well that you can’t help but believe it. Another great ending that comes to mind is John Steinbeck’s East of Eden. After such a long journey, one almost expects the book to run out of steam, but Steinbeck magnificently collects everything together at the end and sends you out of the book with real emotional force. When I read the last words of that book and put it down, I said to myself, “Wow, that was worth it.”
Happy Endings
Care for a Drink?
Yet another use for books (other than reading them): pile them up and use them as a bar.
McEwan’s Long Lost Brother
It’s the stuff of fiction. Ian McEwan’s mother had an affair with an army officer and became pregnant while her husband was away fighting in World War II. She ended up giving away the baby via a newspaper ad saying “Wanted, home for baby boy aged one month: complete surrender.” After her husband was killed in the war, however, she married the baby’s father and went on to have Ian, who didn’t know about his long lost brother until recently. According to an article in The Independent, McEwan’s brother David Sharp is turning the story into a book.
HarperCollins Teams with Women’s Blog Network
HarperCollins, which has been more and more active in many facets of the online world, is rolling out a “virtual book tour” with the BlogHer Advertising Network and Community. With hundreds of blogs in the network, BlogHer represents an ample crop of writers and readers for HarperCollins, which is spurred on by BlogHer’s data that among women who read blogs in the network “32 percent spent at least $100 purchasing books online in the past six months.” The idea is that HarperCollins will make review copies of several books available for bloggers in the network to read and review “and participate in book title discussions on their own blogs and on BlogHer.org.”It all seems like a perfectly reasonable plan to build an Oprah-like grass roots phenomenon, but I have two reservations. First, Oprah doesn’t have a special arrangement with any specific publisher, and while there is likely some corporate horse-trading behind the scenes when she makes her picks, at least we know she isn’t limited to only talking about selections from a small subset of all the books out there. Secondly, BlogHer operates an ad network. From the press release, it doesn’t appear as though HarperCollins will be buying ads through the network, but if that does happen, then this initiative will have crossed a line. Obviously, I have no problem with advertising on blogs and/or getting review copies from publishers, but advertising shouldn’t be explicitly tied to an initiative like this.Update: Some of the concerns I raised have been addressed in a followup post.
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.