Kind of like a Hot-or-Not for books (and cds and movies), judgeabookbyitscover.co.uk lets you rate by books by appearance, something I suspect many readers do (subconsciously or not) when they go shopping for books. (via)
Judge a book by its cover
Brand New Books: Jane Alison, Steve Amick, Rick Bass, Ann Beattie
Fans of historical fiction set in far flung lands will likely enjoy Jane Alison’s new book Natives and Exotics. It’s a multigenerational tale set in South America and Australia that spans the twentieth century. The publisher notes liken the book to W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants, which is a lot to live up to. PW describes the book thusly: “More impressionistic than narrative, Alison’s third novel is a lush evocation of the way people love and alter (and are altered by) the environments they inhabit.”Closer to home is Steve Amick’s debut The Lake, the River & the Other Lake. The center of the book is the small town of Weneshkeen, Michigan. And as is so often the case, this small town buzzes with odd characters and neighborly conflicts which are exacerbated by the summer presence of inconsiderate tourists. PW says this: “Bitterly comic and surprisingly meaty, this roiling tale of passion, anger, regret and lust is dark fun for the Garrison Keillor demographic.” So I guess it’s like a much less saccharine Lake Wobegon. There’s an excerpt available here. And if that’s not enough for you, try this short story from the Southern Review.Rick Bass’ new novel, The Diezmo, is garnering comparisons to a pair literary adventure classics, The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, both favorable and unfavorable. Still, I love this sort of book so my interest has been piqued. Bass’ setting for the novel is the rough borderlands between Mexico and the Republic of Texas in 1842. Here’s a mixed review of the book from the Denver Post, and here’s an excerpt so you can make up your own minds.Ann Beattie doesn’t need much of an introduction. She’s one of America’s better-known short story writers, and her latest collection, Follies received the hard to come by Michiko Kakutani seal of approval with the declaration, “Ms. Beattie has hit her stride again.” Here’s an excerpt.
Appearing Elsewhere
Pete Dexter has been in the news around here lately, and keeping that ball rolling, I’ve contributed a piece to The Rumpus series “The Last Book I Loved” about Dexter’s collection of columns, Paper Trails. Technically, it’s not the last book I’ve loved (more recently there’s been Waiting for the Barbarians, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, Shadow Country, A Mercy, and a few others), so let’s just call it “One of the Last Books I Loved.”
Happy Bloomsday
Dubliners and James Joyce fans are celebrating Bloomsday in the town that Leopold Bloom wandered through on that epic day exactly 100 years ago. Revelers, among other things, ate “Gorgonzola sandwiches and sipped Burgundy wine in the sunshine in honour of the lunch enjoyed by the novel’s hero Leopold Bloom, midway through his momentous day.” The novel of course is Ulysses. and you can read more about this remarkable literary festival here.Ray Charles died last weekend. He made such soulful and happy music. Driving from New York to DC, we encountered several radio stations playing his music, some of them continuously, side after side of classic records. Now the tributes are over, and the radio stations are back to their regular rotations, so I was annoyed when I realized that I left my fantastic 5 cd set in storage in LA.Spencer Reece and his book The Clerk’s Tale got a sizeable write up on the front page of the Washington Post Sunday Style section. Not bad for poetry.BookspottingHow powerful is Oprah? I spotted Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina mixed in with a couple of romance novels in the rest stops along the New Jersey Turnpike. Also spotted: On the Washington DC subway: The Lake of Dead Languages by Carol Goodman, Confederates in the Attic by Tony Horwitz, and The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom; and in the back seat of my little brother’s car: Our Posthuman Future by Francis FukuyamaFinally, check out the trilogy of Alice Munroe stories in the New Yorker fiction issue. It’s worth a look if only to read the stories that the New Yorker deemed worthy of such prominent placement. You’ll have to pick up the magazine to read all three. Only the first story is online.
Welcome to the Working Week 3: Garth
[Editor’s note: This week we’ve invited Megan Hustad, author of How to Be Useful: A Beginner’s Guide to Not Hating Work, to dissect our contributors’ first-job follies.]Garth writes:My first job out of college was writing for what was essentially a dot-com. In ways I wasn’t really aware of at the time, I thought I was pretty hot stuff. This delusion was encouraged by a mildly “fun” corporate culture and the fact that I could churn out a good chunk of the publication in about five hours of concentrated work, to general hosannas from my editors. I was working a lot faster than my predecessors. This left me with about three hours to kill every day; I didn’t want to take on added duties for the same paycheck.This is a fairly common predicament in American office life, I’m pretty sure; we become victims of our own efficiency. The problem was, I wasn’t into Solitaire or Minesweeper, blogs didn’t really exist yet, and part of my job involved reading four newspapers first thing in the morning, so that wasn’t an option for camouflaging my long periods of inactivity. I tried to read novels at my desk, but had a hard time concentrating with the computer screen right in front of me.Here’s what I came up with (ah, the callow brilliance of the 23-year-old!): I would work like a mule from 8:30ish to 1:30ish, print up my work, and carry it off to the office cafeteria to edit. Around 2:15, after a quick sandwich (eating on the clock), I’d go to a nearby park and sit in the grass and read a book until 3:30 or so. At which point I’d come back to the office to publish.I think I thought of work as a fee-for-service model. I completed my duties, I got paid. And okay, maybe I was stretching lunch just a little bit. Of course, I was away from my desk for two solid hours, and to anyone who saw me lolling in the park, I’d look like a student or trustafarian. Then again, I did get some great reading done that year. I got paid to read War & Peace!Megan Hustad responds:You’re weird. Minesweeper is a great game. Anyhow, the fee-for-service model works fine if superiors are oblivious and you aren’t hoping for a future in the industry. Trouble is, it’s hard to tell whether anyone is noticing. If your superiors are passive-aggressive or otherwise chickenhearted, they’ll mumble about you behind your back for months but never say anything to you directly. If they did notice, your callow brilliance probably worked their nerves. This is just one reason why business success books written throughout the twentieth century advocated acting smart, sure, but never too smart. “Excess intelligence,” wrote Peter Engel in The Overachievers (1976), “is a very sly asset.” Indeed.More importantly, people who take on added duties for the same paycheck tend to go on to have the most interesting careers. I was surprised — but perhaps shouldn’t have been — to discover that Helen Gurley Brown (1962’s Sex and the Single Girl and 1964’s Sex and the Office) went on and on and on and on about this. She believed exploitation had its uses. Uselessness rating: 3For more information, please see these related posts:Welcome to the Working Week: Megan Hustad Analyzes Our On-the-Job FoiblesWelcome to the Working Week 1: MaxWelcome to the Working Week 2: EmreWelcome to the Working Week 4: Andrew
Requiem for a Video Store
Amazon adds Statistically Improbable Phrases
In their quest to add more and more arcane content to every page, Amazon recently added Statistically Improbable Phrases to their pages for books that have the “Search inside…” feature. Apparently, Amazon is using an algorithm to determine which phrases in particular books are less likely to appear in other books with some interesting, though not terribly useful, results. Or so it would seem to me. (Although there is the prospect of a third party using this data to come up with some interesting applications). Anyway, to see it in action, let’s look at the page for Oblivion by David Foster Wallace, and you’ll see this near the top of the page: ” SIPs: consultant caste, executive intern, snoring issue, head intern, dominant village,” those, apparently, being some of the Statistically Improbable Phrases contained within the book. Then, if you want you can click on one of the SIPs to see other books that contain it. Here’s the short list of books that contain the phrase “snoring issue.”