Millions Quiz: Out of Print Gems

Millions Quiz
November 11, 2009 | 8 books mentioned 27 4 min read

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So that you may get to know us better, it’s The Millions Quiz, yet another occasionally appearing series. Here, as conceived of by our contributor Emily, we answer questions about our reading habits and interests, the small details of life that like-minded folks may find illuminating, and we ask you to join us by providing your own answers in the comments or on your own blogs.

Today’s Question: In honor of the 10th anniversary of NYRB Classics: What out-of-print book would you like to see become an NYRB Classic?

covercoverEmily: With presses like Dover, Everyman, the Library of America, Broadview, NYRB, and the Persephone Press (not to mention Oxford and Penguin classics series) doing excellent rediscovery and reprinting work of all kinds, I don’t often find myself longing for a new edition. The one great—nay, I would go so far as to say glaring—exception is the work of Ogden Nash, perhaps best know for epigrams like “Candy/Is dandy/But liquor/Is quicker” and “The Cow”: “The cow is of the bovine ilk;/One end is moo, the other, milk.” Yes, there is a “best of” anthology arranged by Nash’s daughters and printed by Ivan R. Dee, and, yes, he’s in Library of America’s American Wits: An Anthology of Light Verse, but what I long for is a chronological, scholarly “complete works” volume: I want America’s great comic poet to be taken seriously.

Those who’ve only encountered “Custard the Dragon” or Nash’s epigrams (my favorite, which he composed with Dorothy Parker: “Hoggamus higgamus,/ Man is polygamous,/ Higgamus hoggamus,/ Women monogamus”), might question whether Nash is a serious artist deserving of such attention, but if you’ve read poems like “Don’t Look Now, But Your Noblesse Oblige Is Showing,” “Curl Up And Diet,” “Don’t Wait, Hit Me Now!”, or “Bankers Are Just Like Anybody Else, Except Richer”, you know that Nash is a keen social observer with a satirical edge (an edge sharpened by the Great Depression), and an approachable, conversational stylist reminiscent of Frank O’Hara (think “Ave Maria”). Nash’s conversational style sometimes obscures his sparkling wordplay (Cole Porter-ish), his deft, innovative use of meter, and his subtle allusiveness, but look again at poems like “Pastoral” or “Portrait of the Artist as a Prematurely Old Man” or “Columbus.”

covercoverGarth: This year, a panel at the PEN World Voices festival prompted me to explore the work of an author who was barely on my radar: Andrey Platonov. I devoured The Foundation Pit in one gulp, on a plane, intoxicated by the discovery of a sensibility as potent, distinctive, and hard to describe as Kafka’s. I’ve since moved on to the stories in Soul, in an impressive translation by Robert & Elizabeth Chandler and Olga Meerson. A certain novelist friend of mine, who’s also a reputable critic, assured me that Platonov’s other major novel Chevengur, is even better than The Foundation Pit, and that a Chandler translation already exists…in the U.K. Apparently, the unreconstructed character of Platonov’s socialism makes Chevengur a tough sell for U.S. audiences. His response to Stalinism was not to abandon utopia, but to turn it into an organizing principle for his art. Still, this is one of the major stylists of his age. We deserve to have his work in print domestically, no matter how undomesticated it may be.

coverMax: I was introduced to Vasily Aksyonov via his epic Generations of Winter. Here is the twentieth-century Russian analog of the multi-generational epic, tracking the Gradov family through the tragic and tumultuous decades spanning 1925 to 1945. It is a historical period deserving of the weightiness of the once exiled Aksyonov’s novel, and yet the book is not widely known or read. But at least it is still in print. The rest of Aksyonov’s books are unavailable in the U.S.

While Generations of Winter was published after the fall of the Soviet Union (it became a mini-series on Russian television), his dissident novels, originally banned from the Soviet Union, may be more important. The New York Times this year called The Burn and The Island of Crimea “increasingly phantasmagoric and outspoken in their dissidence.” The Burn, the Times said “is a surreal, jazz-inspired riff on the plight of intellectuals under Communism, and Island of Crimea imagines what life would have been like on the Black Sea peninsula if the White Army had staved off the Bolsheviks there during the Russian Civil War and their descendants had flourished.” See also: Vasily Aksyonov, Giant of Russian Literature, Dies at 76; Sonya’s recent championing of another hard-to-find contemporary Russian author.

Let us know what out-of-print books you’d like to see returned to print.

This is the byline used for site announcements and for articles by more than one Millions contributor.

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Millions Quiz

Where We Write

Millions Quiz
February 23, 2012 | 8 books mentioned 33 10 min read
The ultimate in writing spaces seems to be the writing shed, a spare, distraction-free room set in some verdant landscape, where, in fertile solitude, the writer may create worlds out of nothing. Roald Dahl had one, so did Mark Twain and Virginia Woolf. Perhaps one day, we'll each be writing in our own. Until then, as our Millions staffers share in their illustrated entries below, we're making do (often happily!) with offices, studio apartments, coffee shops, and guest bedrooms. Share a photo of your own writing space using the hashtag #writespace on Twitter and we'll repost some favorites on our Tumblr.   Michael Bourne: That’s right, I write in bed. I used to have a desk, one of those hideous pasteboard rolling-keyboard-drawer deals, but this being Brooklyn, when we adopted our son five years ago, my “home office” became his bedroom and I was relegated to the guest bed. But now I wouldn’t trade it for the world. The big stack of paper in the foreground is my recently finished novel, which I’m now reading one last time before sending out. The yellow legal pads are where I take notes for my reported pieces (yup, I do most of my phone interviews in bed, too). There’s also some old New Yorkers and a Toy Story comic book that I read to Luke before he goes to bed. (Also, I now see peeking out from the Thomas the Tank Engine blanket, a big black motorized toy car, whose provenance I cannot fully account for.) What the photo doesn’t show is the built-in bookshelves that cover the far wall and the prints of Impressionist paintings on the other walls. It also doesn’t show the cats – one ginger tom and a silver-and-black girl cat – who snuggle around me as I write. I thought about cleaning it up, but that would not only present me as a neat freak, which I am not, but more importantly it would convey the wrong impression. This isn’t a work space so much as a work nest. Like a lot of writers, I write a ton of bad stuff. Really bad stuff. Embarrassing bad. But here, behind closed doors, in my messy bed in my son’s bedroom, with the big wall of my favorite books smiling down at me and the cats curled up in purring puddles at my side, I can be my fraudulent self and no one will ever have to know.   Sonya Chung: I live in a studio apartment with one other human and two dogs. It's pretty crowded. I work at a long table that is divided from the sleeping/TV area by bookshelves. I straightened up a little for this photo, but generally, I work, and think, in piles. Writing pile; teaching pile; life administration pile. On the far right end of the table is the miscellaneous crap/mail pile (and, of course, dog biscuits). I included my knitting-in-progress in the photo (a scarf) because it's a strategy I'm trying out, i.e. I'm teaching myself to knit and hoping (as many people have told me) that it helps to de-stress and focus scattered thoughts. The kneeling chair recently replaced an exerball-as-deskchair (which gradually deflated) -- back pain, anyone? The lamp is a Kmart special that was originally all-white, but we spray painted the shade hot pink, couldn't tell ya why...   Garth Hallberg: This probably isn't the messiest workspace you'll see, though the handprints I've left in the laptop grime are pretty gross. Still, when I behold The Desk objectively like this, any pleasure I might take in the externalization of my own mind loses out to my chagrin at all the work remaining to be done. Atop the compact O.E.D. are six books I'm currently supposed to be writing about - one of them a three-novel omnibus, another a year past deadline. To the left of that, bits of my wife's dissertation have drifted down on top of the desk references (Shakespeare, Hobsbawm, Trucker's Atlas, Complete New Yorker). Multiple drafts from my own work in progress lie atop books unread (Juan Jose Saer) and un-reread (Joseph Mitchell), because there's no open space on the desktop. To the front right looms…well, the less said about that, the better. The picture of my son is for inspiration. The knife is to be used against hostile invaders. The envelope of inspirational quotations has yet to be unpacked, a year-plus after we moved. The coffee right now is what is keeping me going. If you look closely in the glass of Amos' Ab/Ex masterpiece, on the wall, you can see me shadowed against the awful pink bathroom tile, camera to eye, heavily caffeinated, but, for a moment at least, no longer quite so hard at work.   Kevin Hartnett: Whenever I start focusing on the less desirable features of where I work I remind myself of this: It’s an upgrade. I started as a freelancer three years ago. At the time, my wife I were living in Philadelphia in a one-bedroom apartment. We got on all right in our small space. Then we had a kid. And another kid. By the end of our time in Philadelphia I had to move two piles diapers and a changing pad just to find a place to put my laptop down. Now we live in Ann Arbor. I work on the second floor of our house, at an antique secretary, in a room with sliding glass doors that lead out to a deck in our backyard. It’s not strictly speaking “my office,” but from 9am-2pm everyday, when my wife is at work and our kids are with their nanny, I have the space all to myself. My idée fixe of office spaces is a clapboard shed that overlooks Buzzard’s Bay on the front lawn of a friend’s house on Cape Cod. My present situation is a far cry from that. The sliding glass doors face west, which means I work in dimness. And the view out my window is just a boring suburbanish backyard. Occasionally a scrum of kids will burst into view, toting sleds or soccer balls. More often it’s just me and the squirrels who are so obviously fat and healthy it’s off-putting. But overall I try not to fetishize where I work. All I really need is quiet and enough light to see by. When I find myself longing for a New England sea breeze I try to remind myself of this: The most consequential feature of any potential office is that I’ll be the one sitting in it.   Lydia Kiesling: Before a friend moved and bequeathed us the coffee table, the workspace was just the couch, where I sat with computer perched on lap and fretted about irradiating my womb and/or femurs. Now that we have the coffee table, my womb and femurs are presumably okay, but my back suffers. For now, this is where I do everything that I routinely do--homework, writing, cat-hugging, facebook-creeping, school reading (I prefer to read novels before bed, in bed). Most important: My betrothed, knowing this to be the lint-filled navel of my universe, pried the leftovers from my hands and proposed marriage in this very spot.   Edan Lepucki: Last summer I wrote about my workspace for the deliciously voyeuristic Tumblr site, Write Place, Write Time. The photos show my desk at home, which is my preferred place to write. Since having a baby, though, my apartment and the desk within it are far less calm and tidy, and I've had to go elsewhere to work. Most days I write fiction at my neighbors' kitchen table while the baby plays and eats furniture next door. (Don't worry, someone is watching him.) Since it feels weird to post a photo of my neighbors' place, I present you instead with a picture of their dog, Saul. He is my muse. He understands only Spanish. His mohawk is growing out. Que lindo, no? I write most of my essays for The Millions at Paper or Plastik Cafe, the coffee shop down the block from me. The place boasts excellent coffee, friendly baristas, beautiful high ceilings, and internet access, which I need for all these damn links. Here is a shot of my most recent camp-out. Mine is the only Toshiba on the block, but it's proud not to be a fancy-pants Mac. Who cares if the bottom is duct-taped together?   Emily St. John Mandel: I'll be the first to admit that my workspace is looking a little strange these days. It used to be much less eccentric, but then I decided that I wanted a standing desk, and, since all the standing desks I saw online were either hideously generic or too expensive, I made some improvisations involving a couple boxes, an unused Ikea shelf, and a two-volume dictionary. It isn't beautiful, but I like it, and I find that I much prefer to work standing up. Other details: that's Ralph in the desk chair, the papers taped to the wall are notes for current and future projects, and the window looks out on rooftops.   Nick Moran: My desk is full of nomads, and much of its population changes regularly. To wit: the five different histories of Russia. Though I minored in the stuff as an undergraduate, and I've always been drawn to the place, those are only visiting until I finish something I'm writing. (I don't always use Red Star Over Russia as a mouse pad, either.) The rest: the asthma inhaler, the little wooden box from an Amman bazaar (labeled, adorably "Cofee"), and the Real Housewives-noise-canceling headphones are permanent residents. So, too, is the stack of aborted articles beneath the VQR. And the computer, of course. There's also a Qur’an left over from a recent trip I took to visit my mother in Jordan. An exercise in immersion, that was, and a longtime desk resident it’s become. Finally, there’s the art on the wall above, a relic from my AP art class in high school. My theme was "breakfast." That one you see is a diptych of a pig turning into a slice of bacon.   Bill Morris: I like a short commute. So I made an office out of the second bedroom in my apartment on New York's Lower East Side. Normally the place is not such a pigsty – honest! – but at the moment I'm working on a long magazine article about the future of my hometown, Detroit, and my notes, tape transcripts and drafts have taken on a life of their own. In case you're curious, that Royal manual typewriter is not a prop. I still write on the gorgeous beast, then use the Mac for editing and sending my stuff. Looking at this picture reminds me of the beautiful simplicity of the writing life: all you need is a table, a chair, a writing tool, a stack of blank paper (optional), and an idea. How much less could anyone ask for?   Mark O'Connell: My desk is normally a lot more cluttered than this, but I didn’t want to let the side down, so I did a little spring cleaning before taking the photo. I work in Trinity College Dublin, where I’m doing a postdoctoral research fellowship; I’m in an open plan office in a snazzy new building dedicated to interdisciplinary research in the humanities. On the right, my desk overlooks an atrium where book launches and wine receptions for academic conferences are often held. As a result, I’ve become a connoisseur of awkward standing. I also get to see a lot of surreptitious lunging (for plates of sandwiches) and timid but determined sidling (toward established clusters of interlocutors). That can be fun to watch, and is often a reason in itself to work late. On to the desk proper: the obvious centerpiece here is the nifty set-up with the elevated laptop, wireless keyboard and trackpad: this discourages slouching and does wonders for the lower lumbar region. Those books lined up at the back are mostly by or about Walter Benjamin, who might have something to do with something I might end up writing (that’s about an average number of mights for me). A lot of them I haven’t so much as opened, but I feel significantly smarter just having them there in front of me. In that sense they’re like a sort of bibliographic mascot or talisman. On the right of the laptop is a hybrid pencil sharpener/rubber I picked up earlier in the week. I probably paid more for it than I should have (€3), but you’ve got to spend money to make money in this business. I don’t mean for this to turn into a bragging session, but I do also own an electric pencil sharpener. It’s a very high-end machine. I keep it at home, though, because in an academic work environment, a thing like that can be viewed as a vulgar display of status.   Janet Potter: Four minutes after this photo was taken, I started packing everything pictured into boxes. I'm moving this month, so my work area will soon be reconstructed in another Chicago apartment with a bigger kitchen and walk-in closets. I can say with some confidence, however, that it will look a great deal like this, because the iterations of my work area in each of my post-college apartments have been built around the following, horcrux-esque elements: #1 - The Big Blue Desk. How great is that desk? It's royal blue! It's a solid wood secretary desk (with the flip-up thing for a typewriter) that I bought on craigslist for $30 in 2005. #2 - The Posters. The signed cover prints of On Beauty and Ghostwritten were going away presents when I left my old job at Brookline Booksmith, and the signed print of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet was a gift from a friend at Random House. #3 - The Chair. That stool with the ugly green cushion was the bench to my grandmother's vanity. #4 - The Formative Books. The bookshelf that sits to my back holds only the best of my childhood, teenage, and college reading. The Hedgehog and the Fox, Cloud Atlas, The Harry Potter series, Proust, Natasha's Dance, Banvard's Folly. Only the best. #5 - The Presidential Biographies. Each time I finish another biography in my project, I add it to the ranks lined up on top of the bookcase, supported by Abraham Lincoln bookends that used to be in Conan O'Brien's New York office (long story). Show us photos of your writing spaces using the hashtag #writespace on Twitter!
Millions Quiz
| 8 books mentioned 33 10 min read
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27 comments:

  1. I would love for them to publish some Marcel Ayme–his work is all but unavailable in English, and I’ve wanted to read some since falling in love with the musical version of his short story Le Passe-Muraille.

  10. Susan – It’s great to see a comment from someone herself responsible for getting some great stuff into print. (Run out and read Robert Walser, everybody.) I second your appeal for the Uwe Johnson. I read about it at The Complete Review, and am kind of dying to read it. Also, what about Heimito von Doderer’s The Demons? A Nazi, I know, but NYRB’s already done Ernst Junger, so why not? (Or is it already in print…with some of these things, it’s so hard to tell.)

  11. P.S.: Speaking of twentieth-century multiple generation Russian epics…Vasily Grossman’s Everything Flows is due out from NYRB Classics in December…and is considerably shorter than the great Life & Fate, for those on the go.

  15. The Colour of Blood by Brian Moore. So many of Moore’s titles deserve to be brought back into print, but this one is my favorite. It works as a thriller; it works as an exploration of faith under duress; it works as a character study. Really, any way one looks at it, it works.

    Neither the Sea Nor the Sand by Gordon Honeycombe. A haunting gothic romance. And zombies are all the rage these days. Cash in, NYRB Classics. Cash in!

    Either The Burning Court or The Hollow Man by John Dickson Carr. I believe there are a handful of Carr titles still in print, but I’m pretty sure neither of these are.

  16. The Devil to Pay in the Backlands, the great Brazilian novel by João Guimarães Rosa, is long out of print. This book is a watershed of language and longing. It deserves to be rescued from the cult to brave the flow of the mainstream.

    A new translation, by Gregory Rabassa, was supposed to be in the works(?). But a republication of the old translation will be welcome rain.

  20. Dear Shryh,

    I’m also an admirer of Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle. When you mentioned her other work, I hoped perhaps the Persephone Press, a London boutique publisher that puts out gorgeous editions of lesser known books by and about women (with a particular focus on C20th British women’s experiences) might have reprinted some of S’s other titles titles. I checked and sadly, no luck there, but Persephone does have quite a bit in the DS ilk–if not the thing itself,

    Emily

  21. The Very Model of a Man by Howard Jacobson. He’s widely acknowledged as a great novelist (in the UK, if not the US), and this is his most ambitious – and I think best – novel. But it went very quickly out of print. Where is the justice?

  22. I seconded “The Devil to Pay in the Backlands.” This book GENUINELY deserves a place in being published, specifically by NYBR, a place I know will do it justice. NYBR is renowned for publishing foreign, “lost” classics, and this is the one that everyone has missed. If they do this one, they will be doing all of the American speaking world a favor.

  25. Vasily Grossman’s Everything Flows is due out from NYRB Classics in December…and is considerably shorter than the great Life & Fate, for those on the go.

    I just read it; you can read my brief review at the Library Thing page for the book. Even briefer summary: it’s powerful and well worth reading, but not really a novel.

    My own nominations: Jim Quinn’s American Tongue and Cheek (a superb work of populist linguistics), the BBC Pronouncing Dictionary of British Names, and The Penguin Book of [language name] Verse (I have Greek, Russian, German, Latin, Italian, and French; they’re well-chosen bilingual editions that no adventuresome poetry-lover should be without).

  27. Pretty sure ‘I Capture the Castle’ is still available as a Vintage classic (in the UK), so surely you can get it in the US?

    My vote for the novel that most deserves to come back into print is ‘Children of the Arbat’ by Anatoly Rybakov. It is outrageous that it is not currently available, though I believe Random House still holds UK rights.

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Millions Quiz

The Millions Quiz: The Glaring Gap

Millions Quiz
January 29, 2009 | 8 books mentioned 38 6 min read
So that you may get to know us better, it's The Millions Quiz, yet another occasionally appearing series. Here, as conceived of by our contributor Emily, we answer questions about our reading habits and interests, the small details of life that like-minded folks may find illuminating, and we ask you to join us by providing your own answers in the comments or on your own blogs.Today's Question: What is the biggest, most glaring gap in your lifetime of reading?Edan: There are so many gaping holes in my reading! I haven't read Proust (saving him for my white-haired years) and, beyond Chekhov, not many Russians (I'll be reading Anna Karenina next month and I'm looking forward to it). I haven't read Tristram Shandy, Ulysses, Gravity's Rainbow, or Infinite Jest - I tend to avoid big books. I'm too embarrassed to name one very famous Shakespeare play I know next to nothing about. I never read mysteries or horror, mostly because I'm a scared wimp, but I'm thinking of reading a Patricia Highsmith novel this year. Recently, I've started to read more books in translation, and since graduating from college I've made a point of reading all the classics I missed, like To the Lighthouse and Tess of the D'Urbervilles, both of which I loved. I'm also making myself read more nonfiction, since I never would otherwise. I haven't even read Truman Capote's In Cold Blood! Writing this reminds me of all the writers I haven't read: Homer, Norman Mailer, John Irving, Gertrude Stein, John McPhee, J.K. Rowling. That's right, I haven't read Harry Potter!Why am I wasting my time writing this? I must go read. Now.Andrew: As I do a quick mental survey of my life of reading, I notice a number of gaping holes. Some beckon; others continue to keep me at bay.Chronologically, then: The Classics. Aside from some excerpts of the ancient Greeks in high school English, I've never delved into classical literature. I have seen a number of theatrical adaptations of classical Greek plays, but that's about it. Aside from excerpts, I've never even read Homer.I'll jump ahead to the 1800s only because I'm not exactly sure what I'm missing from the intervening centuries. Lets assume EVERYTHING. (except Don Quixote - I've actually read that). So, on to the 1800s: I've never read Moby Dick or Middlemarch. I've done quite well re: Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, Charles Dickens, and the Russians. I've also done quite well in early-mid 20th century fiction - that was always (and remains) my favorite literary era.More recently, I've done quite well with modern British fiction, and I've also been quite good at Latin American fiction from the past 50 years (Mutis, Marquez, Borges, Bolano). But still some gaps remain in 20th century fiction: Thomas Pynchon and Margaret Atwood (I should be stripped of my Canadian citizenship for that).Before the Millions, contemporary American fiction had been a giant hole. But over the past 6 years I've delved deeply into Lethem, Chabon, Franzen, and once I can successfully wrap my puny brain around David Foster Wallace's encyclopedic prose, I'll actually finish Infinite Jest. It's mesmerizing, but exhausting.Emily: When it comes to playing readerly "I Never," there are rather a lot of burly man-authors, chiefly twentieth-century man-authors, whose work I've never read. Hemingway (other than the 4 page story "Hills Like White Elephants"), Kerouac (a bit of his poetry; enough of On the Road), Roth, Updike, Kesey, Heller, Burroughs, Cormac McCarthy, Vonnegut, Pynchon, Moody, and Foster Wallace all fall into the category of authors I haven't read. Many of them fall also into the category of authors I have no interest in reading. Perhaps it is that I intuit (or imagine - not having read them, it is hard to say) a masculinist, vaguely misogynist aura that has put me off; Or, as in the cases of Pynchon and Foster Wallace, a virtuousic formal complexity or grandiose heft, that I also associate with the masculine artistic mind. There is, I am aware, no way to justify my philistine (and perhaps sexist) distrust of these authors - my sense that I would find their depictions of violence and apocalypse, aimless wandering, women conquered, uninteresting; that I think I would find their self-conscious cleverness, their feats of stylistic and structural brilliance somewhat tedious; that in reading B.R. Meyer's "A Reader's Manifesto" at The Atlantic some years ago, I decided that Meyers' extended pull quotes designed to illustrate McCarthy's "muscular" style were as much (more) than I'd ever need of McCarthy's much lauded prose:While inside the vaulting of the ribs between his knees the darkly meated heart pumped of who's will and the blood pulsed and the bowels shifted in their massive blue convolutions of who's will and the stout thighbones and knee and cannon and the tendons like flaxen hawsers that drew and flexed and drew and flexed at their articulations of who's will all sheathed and muffled in the flesh and the hooves that stove wells in the morning groundmist and the head turning side to side and the great slavering keyboard of his teeth and the hot globes of his eyes where the world burned. (All the Pretty Horses, 1992)No thank you. Well-founded, my prejudices certainly are not, but I do not apologize for them or intend to renounce them. Cormac McCarthy may keep his pretty horses - give me clarity, proportion, precision; give me Austen and Burney, Defoe, Iris Murdoch, P.G. Woodhouse, Willa Cather, Evelyn Waugh, Mary McCarthy, Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis. If one must be a philistine, it is best to be an unrepentant one.Garth: What is the biggest hole in my lifetime of reading? The question should probably be phrased in the plural: holes. I've never read Kundera; never read Saramago; never read Robinson Crusoe, or Wuthering Heights, or Clarissa; William James, Slavoj Zizek, Henderson the Rain King... Then again, these are kind of scattershot: smallish holes, with some space in between them.Where I feel a huge constellation of holes, threatening to make one giant hole large enough to swallow me, is in Classics. Especially the Greeks. I would like to take a year and just read Plato and Aristotle and the Greek dramas. Or go back to school... So much is built on a basic corpus of Hellenistic knowledge that I somehow never acquired in school. We did The Iliad, The Odyssey, Oedipus... and that's pretty much it.Kevin: The holes are too numerous to count and the biggest are likely ones I'm not even aware of. I have tried over the last couple years to close some of the most gaping omissions in my reading - secondary Shakespeare plays and the big books of Russian literature being two areas of particularly concerted effort. What remains? Well, a lot. Two that seem particularly important are the British romantic poets and the modernist. The former feels like washing the dishes, to be done of necessity but without any great joy. I think I'll save Lord Byron and his court for later life, when the years will hopefully have afforded me the wisdom to enjoy their work more. I feel a greater urgency with the modernists, in part because I've had enough false starts that I worry I lack the concentration to extract the good stuff from their difficult prose. For about three years I've been thirty pages into Mrs. Dalloway and likewise with Ulysses. When it's the time of day when I typically turn to fiction, I find I lack the appetite to pick them up to begin the fight anew. So, the hole remains, and seems even to grow deeper by the day.Max: This turns out to be a rather liberating exercise. The largest missing piece in my reading experience has been Faulkner, I think. I've never read any of his books, though I made a poor and ultimately unsuccessful attempt at The Sound and the Fury in college. I've long felt that I should have gotten started on the Russians sooner. So far, I've only got Crime and Punishment under my belt. I think I'd like to try Anna Karenina next. I've also never read Lolita. Updike's passing this week reminded me that I've never read any of his books. The same is true of DeLillo's books and Foster Wallace's. By Philip Roth, I've read only Portnoy's Complaint, which I know leaves out many, many good books. I really need to read Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides, Tree of Smoke and Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson, The Road by Cormac McCarthy, and The Echo Maker by Richard Powers. There are likely many more that I can't even recall that I haven't read, but I'll leave it with Virginia Woolf, whose To the Lighthouse I started not long ago but ended up setting aside when it failed to grab me (or rather, I failed to be grabbed by it).So, tell us, in the comments or on your own blog: What is the biggest, most glaring gap in your lifetime of reading?
Millions Quiz
| 8 books mentioned 38 6 min read
Millions Quiz

The Millions Quiz: Fresh, Old, and Moldy

Millions Quiz
June 17, 2008 | 8 books mentioned 7 5 min read
So that you may get to know us better, it's The Millions Quiz, yet another occasionally appearing series. Here, as conceived of by our contributor Emily, we answer questions about our reading habits and interests, the small details of life the like-minded folks may find illuminating, and we ask you to join us by providing your own answers in the comments or on your own blogs.Today's Question: New, Used, or Antequarian?Edan: My preference is for new books - to me, reading someone's yellowed copy of Pride and Prejudice feels too much like wearing that same someone's stinky sneakers. Well, maybe it's not that bad, but I can never drum up the same kind of lust for the used as I can for the new. This might have its origins in childhood trips to Children's Book World in West L.A. where I went to attack L.M. Montgomery's entire oeuvre, or to get the latest installment of the Babysitter's Club series. My appreciation for the new became part of my job at Book Soup; there I spent a lot of time stacking smooth hardcovers and shiny paperbacks, and oohing and aahing over what the receiver unpacked next. Even now I can't help but fix displays at my local bookstore - it's just too pleasurable to handle all those new novels.For me, buying a new book is an event, and after a day or two of reading, I write my name, and the month and year, on the book's inside cover. I rarely get rid of the new books I buy; the connection is too deep. I love starting with a stiff and shy paperback, and ending with something dog eared, scribbled on, and creased - in that process, the book becomes read, and becomes mine.Andrew: I know I've been in a good used-book shop if, upon leaving, I begin to muse what it would be like to quit my job, buy the shop in question, and become Andrew Saikali, bookseller, Esq. Then reality usually sets in, and I forget this fanciful notion.Second-hand book shops are like an extended version of my den - they are what it would resemble if I had the resources. So, for me, because of the experience of buying used, coupled with the cost-savings, second-hand books trump even the shiniest new books. That said, on occasion I'll comb the city looking for a just-released title, price be damned. (Bob Dylan's Chronicles was a case in point.)While I admire antiquarian books - taunting me as they do from their snobby little perch behind the glass, behind lock and key - I've always resisted the temptation to splurge. However, if anyone wishes to initiate me into the rarified world behind that glass, my birthday is in April. You've missed this year's, but you can begin to think about next year's. I also like imported wine and fine chocolate.Kevin: I don't know if the problem is with me or with used book stores, but either way, the relationship always ends in disappointment. I want to like used book stores, to see them as little pockets of virtue in the miles and miles of new, shiny waste sold by other stores on the block. I want to admire the shy, balding hippy who runs the place, and his quiet young apprentice, who volunteers five hours a week for unlimited free trade-ins. In my first year in every city I've ever lived in, I've made the rounds of the local used bookstores. Usually my initial trip is also my last. My latest such dalliance was with two places down in Old City Philadelphia. Not wanting to leaving empty handed, I walked out with a frayed history of colonialism in Latin America and a collection of Vonnegut short stories. Both are sitting just where I left them when I came home, in a stack at the foot of my bed. One problem with big chain bookstores, I suppose, is the way they press books upon you, with table displays and prominent shelf placements. It's hard to discern value that way, too, as hard as it is to determine the same among the undifferentiated clutter of most used book stores. That's why, all in all, I prefer hand-me-downs from friends, and the library.Emre: I find it hard not to get new, crisp books. There is a certain delight in slowly molding a novel's spine until the covers bend for a comfortable one-hand-hold read. And, they smell good. That said, I prefer used books when reading not-so-recently published works. I appreciate three qualities in used books: artwork and fonts from a different era, notes by various previous owners (I enjoy the conversation regardless of whether we agree or not) and the randomness that often characterizes how I get them. So far they have - through friends, hole-in-the-wall bookstores or sidewalk vendors - introduced me to Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five and The Sirens of Titan, and Dumas's The Count of Monte Cristo, among others. As for collecting and caring for vintage books, I got nothing. Some sort of book karma seems to be recycling everything that passes through my hands.Emily: Although I love a good rare books room (nothing like the feel of vellum and a little paleographic challenge), I don't own anything much that's worth more than the paper it's printed on. I do own a first edition of Mary McCarthy's first novel The Company She Keeps, but that wasn't more than fifty dollars. No, the most expensive book in my collection, coming in at a whopping $92 plus shipping, is (try to contain your jealousy) the out-of-print Life, Letters, and Philosophical Regime of the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, edited by Benjamin Rand (1900). It's a discharged copy from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville and falling apart in spite of the fact that quite a few of the pages were uncut when it arrived. This purchase was practical: The Stanford library didn't have a copy and since I didn't make it to see the manuscript version of Shaftesbury's regimen at the National Archives in London, this was the most expedient solution. In general, I'm pretty cheap when it comes to books. My most recent acquisition, for example, was a copy of La Princesse de Cleve (1678) by Madame de Lafayette, considered by some literary historians to be the first European novel. And that was free! (The only treasure in box of books left outside a used bookstore after hours.) Probably my best "find" after a copy of Colley Cibber's classic (and then, perhaps still, out of print) early eighteenth century play The Careless Husband that I found on the sidewalk in Park Slope.Max: All three types of books speak to me. I blossomed as a reader thanks to used bookstores in Washington, DC and Charlottesville, where the books were cheap and I could easily compile the oeuvre of whoever I was obsessed with at the moment, Vonnegut or John Irving or Hemingway. But I've soured a bit on used books because too often used bookstores are hobbies of hoarders and impossible to navigate, or they are too polished and expensive. I will always love, however, the pocket paperbacks of the 50s to the 70s. I love the cover designs across those eras and I love being able to have a book with me, quite literally in my pocket, without having to schlep it awkwardly under my arm.But new books are in most cases better. I find them incredibly tempting with their shiny covers and crisp pages, though, as noted, I do get a bit weary of lugging hardcovers. As for the antiquarian books, I sometimes fancy the idea that it might be fun to be a book collector, but I know I do not have the temperament for it. I cannot see books as objects in that way, and, with the few books of value I have accumulated over the years, I fret about what I am supposed to do with them... sell them? Lock them in a safe? They sit in a box so that they won't get wrecked. And that's no place for books to be.So, tell us, in the comments or on your own blog: Used, new, or antiquarian?
Millions Quiz
| 8 books mentioned 7 5 min read
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Millions Quiz

The Millions Quiz: Subscriptions We Can’t Go Without

Millions Quiz
May 11, 2009 | 8 books mentioned 4 9 min read
So that you may get to know us better, it's The Millions Quiz, yet another occasionally appearing series. Here, as conceived of by our contributor Emily, we answer questions about our reading habits and interests, the small details of life that like-minded folks may find illuminating, and we ask you to join us by providing your own answers in the comments or on your own blogs.Today's Question: This one is inspired by a recent item at The Morning News. With print subscriptions becoming increasingly rare for many people, what magazines or newspapers do you still subscribe to in print and why?Garth: I've already given this question a fair amount of thought, insofar as my life is an attempt to ride herd over the thousands of pages of print that make their way into my apartment. Over the years, I've subscribed to The Believer, The Atlantic, A Public Space, and, during the Lewis Lapham era, Harper's. (I've got my eye on Lapham's Quarterly, the strikingly dense and beautiful journal the former Harper's editor now helms.)Through trial and error, I've found I can handle about three subscriptions at any given time before the coffee-table magazine offerings start to take a serious toll on my ability to get anything done. The New York Review of Books feels like a keeper, and I need to renew with n+1. But the one I can't live without is (of course) The New Yorker. John Updike celebrated the magazine as "a heedless river of print" flowing from Manhattan to Shillington, Pennsylvania. For me it's more like a family. There are favorite aunts, cousins I wish I saw more often, uncles I dread having to talk to. Some encounters are transcendent and some forgettable. Still, I'd never choose not to have a family, and, barring financial disaster, I'd never choose not to receive the print edition of The New Yorker.Ben: Comic books remain the only "magazines" that absolutely must be consumed in their original form. They gain nothing from being digitized. Not only do you lose all of the tactile enjoyment of handling them, the pleasure of going to the store and gabbing with the other comic book nerds, and the vain hope that they might one day pay for your retirement, but they're actually much more difficult to read online. I tried following Spiderman on the Marvel site for a while, but the computer's aspect ratio means that either you have to do a lot of scrolling (incredibly irritating) or the artist's vision becomes compromised. Although it's certainly possible to make comics work online, in doing so, you create a different art form, something that's no longer a comic book, but some strange cross between animation and a comic strip. Thanks, but no thanks.Andrew: As a Globe and Mail copy editor, I have easy online access to the paper whenever I want, at my desk, while working, and no one will bat an eye. On Saturdays, however, I like to have my own copy of the weekend Globe. I'll physically buy it from the newsstand and keep it with me as I stroll around town. Over brunch I'll do the cryptic crossword and read the front page. Pausing for a coffee, I'll read the op-ed pages, work my way through the rest of the front section, and start on assorted weekend features. The Saturday Globe is my constant companion. I like spreading it out in front of me in coffee shops. And when I'm done with a section, I'll leave it behind for someone else to enjoy.The only actual subscription I have is to The Paris Review. It's a thrill, once a season, to open my mail box and find The Paris Review crammed in there, slightly bent, but all mine. Like the Globe on a Saturday, The Paris Review keeps me company. If I'm in transit, or if I'm waiting for someone or something, I'll pull it out of my satchel for a quick dose. I usually begin with the Interview, then check out any photographs, then any archival bits, poems, then finally settle into the meat of The Paris Review - the short fiction.Edan: I subscribe to two magazines, The New Yorker and Bon Appétit. These days it's rare that I get through an entire New Yorker, but I can't imagine not having that wonderful pile of issues to sift through when I finish a book and I'm not yet ready to start another. I absolutely love cooking magazines, and someday I'll get subscriptions to all of them - especially Cook's Illustrated! Until then, Bon Appétit keeps me inspired, and it's a nice companion to my library of cookbooks and sites like thekitchn.com. It's also great breakfast reading: you know, hopes for the day, hopes for the stomach.I also subscribe to one or two literary magazines a year, although I don't always renew when I need to. I'm partial to One Story, and Meridian, where my first short story was published.And, I've been known to buy issues of US Weekly from the newsstand down the block (a blessing and curse, that newsstand!) A tabloid is the most delicious bathtub reading after a long day of writing and teaching.Lydia: In seventh grade, I got (or took, as the old folks say) Seventeen Magazine, through a program where you sell wrapping paper to your parents and get magazine subscriptions, or something like that. I thought it was all very racy and exciting until the day I realized that the Trauma-Rama submissions are not real. I have not subscribed to any publication since then, but at Christmas I received a New Yorker subscription, which was one of the best gifts ever. I used to read it online, but it is not the same as lying down on the couch with an adult beverage and one's feet elevated, sometimes eating chips. Also being of a somewhat limp constitution paper-wise, The New Yorker is easily furled and put into a purse for reading about town. If Anthony Lane had a magazine all his own I would probably subscribe to that too.Emily: I know that signs of the print media apocalypse are everywhere, but I still think that the death knell won't come for a while yet. This is largely because don't I think I am alone in finding reading from my computer at my desk unpleasant. I also find reading from my computer not at my desk unpleasant. I like paper - it's light, you can spill coffee on it or drop in the pool, it doesn't hurt your eyes or take time to load, there are no pop-up ads, you can fold it up and shove it into a bag, and you don't have to worry about anyone stealing it. I subscribe to the London Review of Books, n+1, The Economist, and Vogue, and I've just subscribed to the New York Review of Books.The Vogue subscription was free, and Vogue - my friend, my enemy - usually makes me angry and a little sad when I read it (Such silly women! Taking themselves so seriously! Such impossible standards of female beauty!), even as I enjoy Steingarten's food writing and the photography. Inane as fashion is and much as I wish I was immune to its charms (and the charms of the impossible beauty of fashion models), I am, alas, susceptible. This is my guilty and doubtless self-destructive pleasure.The Economist has the best international coverage of any news magazine I've encountered. It's very frank about its politics, and it dissects political and social problems in a tidy (sometimes too tidy) way. It also has a sense of humor. A recent cover bore the title "A Glimmer of Hope?" over this drawing.N+1 is beautifully written, and the quality of thought and feeling that shapes this beautiful writing is not something I've seen elsewhere. The care with which its writers examine themselves and culture sometimes borders on the spiritual. I want n+1 to continue to exist.As for the LRB and NYRB, these are the best publications out there devoted exclusively to reviews.Anne: I love getting mail. Mail that must be delivered physically is better than email, because it takes more effort on the sender's part, for one, and there's room for personal embellishments and hidden surprises, not to mention that virtual pleasures often pale in comparison to the real thing. There's pleasant repetition in receiving the mail, too. It's delivered around same hour most days, and yet you never know what will arrive (especially in New York, where you can never be sure that even what's expected will come). Like Ann Marlowe who in her memoir How to Stop Time: Heroin from A to Z tells how heroin addicts measure their days by both copping and doing their H, I divvy time by the arrival of my magazine subscriptions. The weeklies' (The New Yorker and New York) arrival on Tuesdays marks the official start to the week; and while Harper's announces the coming of the next month before I'm even thinking about it, The Believer usually punctuates the middle of the four-week run.If magazines are an addiction, it's one I relish with unadulterated pleasure, and one my doctor isn't likely to tell me I need to cut back on anytime soon. I try to keep the roll call in check, but I find subscriptions are like intimate relationships - and difficult to end. The last magazine I straight-up dumped was the Atlantic Monthly. When it stopped publishing fiction regularly, our relationship was over. Even though I've tried to quit others - on behalf of the bank account and attempts to clear clutter, or during moments of clarity when I realize that to read all of my magazines from cover to cover would leave time for nothing else (including sleep) - it's a hopeless cause. As soon I let my subscription lapse, they send beckoning discount offers. Just like a haughty ex, The New York Review of Books once included a sticker to decline that said, "No, I don't like to think." Next thing I know, I find myself picking up copies that I've missed at the newsstand, or gawking at the online table of contents wishing I hadn't let my subscription lapse.While I could (and do) read much of what's available online, for free, I usually print out copies of longer stories. I'm far more inclined to surrender to the curatorial authority of the editors when a magazine is in my hands. And not infrequently, I find myself drawn to read articles I may not have jumped to from the TOC. On the internet, my reading is often guided by my own preferences. Still, Cabinet remains the one immutable magazine in my repertoire, that should always be consumed en vivo. In fact, most of the content isn't available online, so you really don't have a choice. But even if it were, Cabinet is meant to be collected. As if offering reading pleasures as varied as Shelley Jackson's riff on the color mauve or an essay on Artaud's gastronomical obsessions weren't enough, each issue features eclectic artwork and artists' projects, with bonus pull-out goodies like postcards, bookmarks (one of the more recent listing Jonathan Ames's top ten most shameful moments), and, once, a mobile.The magazine arrives in a cardboard envelope, to protect the handsome volume from the hazards of transit. In addition to being the only magazine I've ever purchased with a picture of Larry Hagman on its cover, Cabinet is also the only magazine I've received by hand delivery, directly from the hands of one of the magazine's staff, or so I'd like to think. My roommate was the one who answered the door, so I'll never know who it was except that he wasn't the postman. Talk about personal service: a paper magazine may be more difficult to distribute than its online counterpart, but it's also far more enjoyable to receive.Max: The one magazine I'll always have as long as they put it on paper is The New Yorker. I've spent so much time with the magazine over the last decade or so that I've become the sort of obsessive that I normally shy away from. But I can't help it. I notice every minor formatting change, every new byline, and every editorial shift. As much as I love the internet (and have a career that's powered by it), I could never have this sort of relationship with a publication that I only read online. I'm also a big fan of The Economist - self-assured in its seriousness, never stooping to celebrity journalism to move copies - but, dauntingly thorough as it is each week, I never made much of dent in it. Instead, I've recently shifted my subscription to the audio edition, and I their British-accented readers provided an edifying diversion when I go on long drives or run at the gym.I've also become a big fan of The Week, the perfect magazine for the internet age. It digests the coverage from hundreds of global newspapers and magazines into an incredibly entertaining and readable package. My favorite section is "Best Columns," which selects a handful of the best columns and op-eds from newspapers around the world and boils them down to a paragraph or so. It's a full week of news, expertly curated and smartly presented. Finally, we are weekend subscribers of The New York Times. It's nice to have an issue or two lying around. But increasingly it seems, we are just in it for the Sunday puzzle.Recently, we've also begun polling members of The Millions Facebook Group to get their answers to our Millions Quiz question. Here a few of the responses:Trevor Berrett: I still subscribe to, and can't see myself giving up, The New Yorker and The Economist. Both are too well written to treat as simple news or as a quick break to read something online. Though both are available online, it's not the same as being able to go through the print to underline passages for their excellent writing.Tray Davis: New York Review of Books, New Yorker, London Review of Books, Harvard Business Review, The Nation and The Economist. I subscribe because I learn something of interest every time I have time to read any portion of any of them. Cannot imagine reading them online, but don't have a good reason why not.So, tell us, in the comments or on your own blog: What subscriptions can't you go without?
Millions Quiz
| 8 books mentioned 4 9 min read
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