Kate Atkinson has begun tentatively posting at the LBC blog. She’ll be discussing her book Case Histories and answering questions from readers. Feel free to join in.
Kate Atkinson at the LBC blog
Birnbaum and Jonathan Safran Foer
At The Morning News, Robert Birnbaum interviews Jonathan Safran Foer. In his email announcing the interview, Birnbaum tries to elevate the current level of discourse surrounding Foer, who seems to have a target painted on his back these days: First, a word about what you will not read here – no reference to Steve Almond’s kvetchy and disingenuous hand wringing about Jon Foer’s new novel (at MobyLives.com)or the exponentially vile and bombastic heaving by Harry Siegal about the same at the loathsome and vile NYC weekly that produces journalistic marvels such as “50 Loathsome New Yorkers” and includes novelists on that hit list.The interview is long, and once again portrays Foer as thoughtful and unwilling to respond to criticism or praise, preferring to concentrate on just the reader and the writer:Foer: Really good books are books that have two authors, the reader and the writer. Or maybe the idea of an author is actually just a combination of two people, the reader and the writer? So when writing you use the word “tree.” Four letters. Very, very short word. Fits a couple millimeters on a page. But in the reader’s mind it becomes a kind of idealized version of a tree, and that tree is different for each person who reads the book and because of that a book is customized for each person in a way a song never could be and as a painting never could be.
Tivo for readers
As a proud TiVo owner, I get their email newsletter letting me know about new features and promotions. Rarely do my TV habits and reading habits occupy the same mental turf, but the latest newsletter included a TiVo tip for TV watchers with a bookish bent.TiVo Tip: Bookworms love TiVo, too! Here’s how one TiVo subscriber is using the smart TiVo service to think outside the (TiVo) box, too (oh, c’mon; that’s clever). “Many bad movies are based on good books,” Larry H. so aptly points out (Prince of Tides, anyone?). “So before I go to the library or bookstore, I do a keyword WishList search for ‘BASED ON.’ Usually about a dozen or so programs pop up. I’ll read the descriptions and see if anything looks interesting.”There you have it, use your TiVo to find good books to read.
●
●
News Roundup
Most folks have probably heard that Jack Kerouac wrote On the Road on a 120 foot long continuous roll of paper, but now you can seen it. “Beginning this week at the Orange County History Center in Orlando, Fla., and ending with a three-month stay at the New York Public Library in 2007, Kerouac’s “On the Road” scroll will make a 13-stop, four-year national tour of museums and libraries.“One great byproduct of the new translation of Don Quixote is that it has given way to many reconsiderations of the classic. Now the Atlantic Monthly weighs in.Also from the Atlantic, a great piece explaining how they choose which books to review and why their reviews may sometimes come across as atypical. It’s a great read for anyone who is tired of the prevalence of cookie-cutter picks and pans.
●
●
Mother Russia
Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been reading two illuminating books about the Soviet Union. Gulag: A History by Anne Applebaum is the first compresive account of the Soviet system of forced labor and random terror. Now that the shroud of secrecy and propaganda is lifted, the reality of twentieth century Soviet Union, and especially the period of Stalin’s rule, is of a catastrophically malfunctioning totalitarian state. At times the horror of the Gulag is almost unfathomable. Applebaum’s research here is clearly very thorough. She makes ample use of survivor memoirs, recently opened Soviet archives, and interviews. Gulag is an unwavering look at a piece of human history that is difficult to behold. Any inclination to sympathise with the Soviets is dispelled by this remarkable book. If Gulag is a book about the rot at the center of the Soviet system, then Lenin’s Tomb by David Remnick chronicles the point at which the rot became more powerful than the Communist Party’s iron fist. Remnick is a storyteller telling the story of a riveting period in history. As he writes, “To live anywhere between Bonn and Moscow in 1989 was to be witness to a year-long polical fantasy. You had the feeling you could run into history on the way to the bank or the seashore.” Lucky for us, Remnick spent 1989 (as well as the years before and after) in Moscow. Reading these two books simultaneously has provoked in me a minor obsession with 20th century Russian history, which is fantastic because in the last year alone several compelling books about the subject have come out. I’ll let you know if and when I read them.Some Good BookfindingToday, on my day off, I went by a nearby Goodwill store and found a mini treasure trove of good reading. The best find was 7 old issues of Granta, each one chock full of fantastic writers, including some of my favorites like Ryszard Kapuscinski, T. C. Boyle, and Haruki Murakami. Flipping through the tables of contents, I can see I’m in for some great reading. I let you know what I find. I also bought an old issue of Story magazine from 1997 featuring stories by Heidi Julavits and Bobbi Ann Mason among several others. I don’t know who is giving away old literary magazines but I was more than happy to find them. I also found two history books that look pretty great: Balkan Ghosts by Robert Kaplan which is about Eastern Europe and The Price of Admiralty by John Keegan, a history of naval warfare. And just in case all these books are too serious I found a copy of The Essential Calvin And Hobbes for only two bucks… yes!Don’t ForgetGo to Realistic Records to get a copy of the Recoys album. And go see them play Friday June 20th 9pm… Kingsland Tavern at the corner of Kingsland and Nassau in Greenpoint (that’s Brookyn by the way). I’ll be there!
●
●
The Market Meltdown Explained
Every time the stock market crashes, someone gets famous for having predicted it. Though some will argue that there’s always somebody arguing that armageddon is right around the corner (and that even a stopped clock is right twice a day), one of the voices who predicted our current economic crisis – banker and economic historian Charles R. Morris – is getting quite a bit of praise on Wall Street and his recently released book, The Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash, is selling like hotcakes.Thanks to our 24-hour news cycle, newsworthy events (9/11, Katrina, elections, the Red Sox winning the World Series, etc.) often spawn books that are rushed into print so that they can be in front of readers before the next headline has taken the spotlight. Morris’ book is unique in that it’s not a rush job, he began formulating the ideas behind it back in 2005, basing his pessimistic view on the activities of hedge funds and other Wall Street firms. As a recent NPR interview put it, “He ran a company that created the software investment banks and hedge funds use to build these new, exotic credit instruments. And he saw how they used his software, and thought, ‘This is crazy,’ he says. ‘I was sure that people weren’t keeping track of the trends so they had proper margins and collateral and so forth.'”For those interested in the topic, the NPR interview linked above is good, as is The Economist’s review, which explains just how far back the roots of the crisis go, in Morris’ estimation, “Mr Morris deftly joins the dots between the Keynesian liberalism of the 1960s, the crippling stagflation of the 1970s and the free-market experimentation of the 1980s and 1990s, before entering the world of ultra-cheap money and financial innovation gone mad.”At Foreign Policy Morris has offered up an 8-step explanation for what exactly went wrong and gives some insight into what happens next. Despite some technical terminology, this article should prove quite illuminating for those bewildered by our current economic crisis.
●
●