Selling used books online

When: Afternoon 11/16/03Where: The Pig, a Bar B Q joint on La Brea Ave. In Los AngelesWho: The woman behind the counterWhat: The Corrections by Jonathan FranzenDescription: “A comic, tragic masterpiece of an American family breaking down in an age of easy fixes, Franzen’s third novel brings an old-time America into wild collision with the era of home surveillance and New Economy speculation. Winner of the National Book Award.”A Lingering QuestionAs much as I loved Crime and Punishment, it is refreshing to step away from Raskolnikov’s paranoid world; however, I still have one unresolved question about the book… Towards the beginning, Raskolnikov has an encounter with a very drunk girl wandering in the street. At first he is protecting her from a predatory man lurking in the shadows, then a police officer shows up and Raskolnikov begins to antagonize him. It’s a very odd scene that I assumed would have some significance later in the book, but as far as I could tell, the three characters never appear again and the incident is forgotten. Has anyone read the book recently? Does anyone remember this scene? Can anyone shed some light on why it is in the book and what it means… if I manage to figure it out on my own. I’ll let you know.

I caught a few minutes of Fresh Air on NPR while I was out running a quick errand today. Terri Gross was interviewing David Denby, the New Yorker film critic who has a new book out. The book is called American Sucker and it is a memoir of the boom years. In 2000 Denby and his wife split, and he decided that he wanted to keep the Upper West Side apartment that had been their home for many years. In order to do this, Denby hatched a plan to buy out his wife’s share of the apartment. Lacking the funds to make the apartment his and cast adrift by the collapse of his marriage, Denby threw himself wholeheartedly into the mania of the stock market boom with the hopes that he, like so many others seemed to be doing, could hit it big. It would be the solution to all of his problems. A sort of addiction to his quest set in and American Sucker was the result. Today, Terri Gross, in her way, was trying to get him to relate his experience to some classic gambling films, Denby being a film critic and all. Denby, however, begged off and mentioned two interesting books that he feels are most analogous to the way he felt during his ordeal. Dostoevsky’s The Gambler and a somewhat forgotten Victorian classic by Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now, to Denby’s mind, best portray a sense of monetary desperation in the midst of a boom. I’m hoping that over the next few years there will be more books that look at the boom of the late nineties through a literary lens. It was a strange and fascinating time. Denby’s colleague at the New Yorker, James Surowiecki has penned a less personal book about business and money called The Wisdom of Crowds which is slated to come out at the end of May. A quick look reveals that Surowiecki has put together a readable tome meant to illustrate a principle that many economists hold dear: the idea that decisions can be made, problems can be solved, and the future can be predicted by the market. Imagine the Nasdaq but replace companies with possible outcomes. At the end of the day the outcome that is trading at the highest level is probably the correct answer to whatever problem was trying to be solved. Using markets you can, as Surowiecki terms it, unlock the “wisdom of crowds.” Last summer there was much public outcry when it was announced that one of our government agencies was considering setting a market that was meant to predict future terrorist attacks. The idea of people profiting off of this sort of speculation was abhorrent to many people and the plans were shelved, but, in The Wisdom of Crowds, Surowiecki will likely argue that the plan would have worked.