February 2012
6 posts
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On "Girl Reading"
My review of Katie Ward’s excellent debut also ran in Shelf Awareness this week:
Katie Ward’s debut novel, Girl Reading,is better described as a collection of seven self-contained but intertwined stories drawn from nearly as many centuries and settings. Each story centers on the creation of a portrait of a girl, reading; each reveals a complex...
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On "Beautiful Thing"
My latest in Shelf Awareness. Truly loved this one—a gorgeous and brave book.
Beautiful Thing is a portrait that begins in profile: “Leela’s face was a perfect heart,” Sonia Faleiro writes. “And knowing well the elegance of her little nose, Leela would flaunt it like an engagement ring. On certain evenings at the dance bar, when...
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On "Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of...
From Shelf Awareness:
Hanne Blank follows up Virgin: The Untouched History with Straight, a compact and engaging look at not just the history, but the construction of heterosexuality. Yes, that’s right: the construction: Blank argues that heterosexuality is a concept “coined for a world in which the ideal of economically and socially viable adulthood meant marriage, children, and...
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Earrings, beards, toes
…She was sitting on the stoop with a notebook, wearing flip-flops, which made it easy to admire the shape of her toes. Most people’s toes look like extra things to me, like earrings or beards. Nancy’s look necessary. They work for her.
From “Hot Pink” by Adam Levin.
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The Believer Interview with Joan Didion →
JD: It was as a child. I was four or five, and my mother gave me a big black tablet, because I kept complaining that I was bored. She said, “Then write something. Then you can read it.” In fact, I had just learned to read, so this was a thrilling kind of moment. The idea that I could write something—and then read it!
January 2012
3 posts
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Grief
Scratching out my review of Katie Ward’s Girl Reading for Shelf Awareness. It’s a good book. I’ve been reading this over and over:
I fear that before long I shall lose the ability to recall your voice and your smell and your advice. You have left a Frances-shaped hole. Everything familiar is falling through it.
It may be the context of the story, but my heart snags on that...
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From 'The Maytrees,' Annie Dillard
Throughout her life she was ironic and strict with her thoughts. She went dancing most Friday nights in town. People said that Maytree, or felicity, or solitude had driven her crazy. People said she had been an ugly girl, or a child movie star; that she inherited fabulous sums of money and lived in a shack without pipes or wires; that she read too much; that she was wanting in ambition and could...
December 2011
1 post
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Good title, good cover, decent book. →
June 2011
7 posts
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Fightin' Words
The 30 Harshest Author-on-Author Insults in History (Flavorwire)
3. Virginia Woolf on James Joyce
“[Ulysses is] the work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.”
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Lit Lawyers: The Fake Memoir Business (New Yorker) →
“Judges and juries ruling on the various qualities of books may strike us as odd, and perhaps even dangerous—especially weighing the various merits of fact and fiction—but literature and the law are natural companions, in that they both center on the meaning of words and interpretation of text.”
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Read my review in Shelf Awareness!
Today, Shelf Awareness, a daily newsletter for book industry professionals, launched a new twice-weekly version for regular folks. I write reviews for this new reader publication, and for their inaugural issue they’ve included my review of Irshad Manji’s Allah, Liberty and Love. (It’s at the bottom of the page. Credited to some chick named Hannah “Caulkins.”)
This is...
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Judging Clarence Thomas
In “Skip the Legalese and Keep It Short, Justices Say” (NPR), Nina Totenberg reports on a bunch of 2007 interviews in which Supreme Court Justices discuss their writing processes, and their relationship to words. Most of them credit great fiction authors with having some influence over their ideas about what constitutes good writing.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg: “[Nabokov] was a...
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The Periodic Table of Storytelling →
Science.
May 2011
48 posts
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“Put bluntly, if you call yourself a reading man, but don’t read books by women,...”
– Ta-Nehisi Coates (via morninggloria)
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LISTEN TO SUSAN STAMBERG
and support your local independent bookstore.
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“Who can find anything bad to say about the last day of a novel? It’s a feeling of happiness that knocks me clean out of adjectives. I think sometimes that the best reason for writing novels is to experience those four and a half hours after you write the final word. The last time it happened to me, I uncorked a good Sancerre I’d been keeping and drank it standing up with the...
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On 'Another Bullshit Night in Suck City'
What a title, right?
It’s a good book, too, especially as it goes along and Flynn gets increasingly experimental. This is technically a memoir, but Flynn is a poet, and he’s best when he’s, you know, “pushing the boundaries of genre.” (I use quotes because I could never say that while taking myself seriously. There goes my academic career.)
Flynn simultaneously...
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“Nowadays I know the true reason I read is to feel less alone, to make a connection with a consciousness other than my own. To this end I find myself placing a cautious faith in the difficult partnership between reader and writer, that discrete struggle to reveal an individual’s experience of the world through the unstable medium of language. Not a refusal of meaning, then, but a...
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ACTUALLY
that little NYT Gary Shteyngart piece is really good.
He just like walks around and eats.
Then I like to get up to Central Park — I’ll take the subway, or a taxi or something. I like Cedar Hill. Maybe because it’s so close to my psychiatrist’s office. My brain is open all day during the week, and there I close my brain and close my eyes, and there’s so much different food inside me, all these...
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The LA Times Summer Reading List →
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“A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.”
– Orson Welles (via chrisvillacillo)
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To the Editors: Reviewing Nothing Plain & simple. I am reviewing nothing. ¿Me oyes? Absolutely nada, nada – nada. Obama is reviewing Libya. Libya is reviewing the CIA on their property. The CIA is reviewing the new Arab Spring but it’s almost Summer. WikiLeaks is reviewing ____ ___ ____ can’t reveal it but it’s happening. Pudgy nukes are being reviewed by pudgy dignitaries. The Governator is...
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Trade secret
So I just started writing reviews for Shelf Awareness, a daily newsletter for book industry pros that’s launching a new publication aimed at regular folks (“consumers”) next month. Mostly I do this because my various internships have convinced me that I’m entitled to free books. Free books and no paycheck, actually, but Shelf Awareness gives me both! Crazy, right?
Anyway,...
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FRIDAY ROUNDUP
And I Should Know by Roseanne Barr (New York Magazine) THIS IS THE BEST THING YOU WILL READ ALL WEEK. Roseanne’s account of her experience with the “staggering sexism and class bigotry” that rules the TV industry is brutal. This woman is a badass. Okay, so maybe threatening homicide (specifically, “I will win this battle if I have to kill every last white bitch in heels...
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On 'This Must Be The Place'
Judge this book by its cover: Sort of pleasant at first… inoffensive… completely forgettable.
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“I want to go soon and live by the pond, where I shall hear only the wind...”
– Thoreau, Journal (via fuckyeahthoreau)
Nope…
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From "Another Bullshit Night in Suck City," Nick...
In the back of the library he sees a discarded blanket—closer he sees it is a man curled up on a grate. Hot, wet air steams up from the grate, warming the man like a dumpling. He’s seen this before, bums sprawled out and drinking, but he never actually stood above the blowers, let the hot air seep into his clothes. The air is sucked out of the library, he can hear the whir of the...
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Karen - The National
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“Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m...”
– Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)
I read this book a couple of years ago. I almost cried when I read this line. It’s the only one I remember.
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'Bridesmaids': Am I Doing Being A Woman Wrong?... →
Haven’t seen Bridesmaids yet, so I can’t comment, but this response by Michelle Dean is killer.
“Yes yes yes, I heard you, Judd Apatow, Paul Feig, every dissenting male commenter on an article about women and comedy, ever: nothing should be sacred in comedy. The problem is exactly that, though. Your view of what is and isn’t sacred is remarkably rigid. (Also, boring.)...
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“Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks...”
– Ernest Hemingway (via bookmania)
What a dick.
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Friday Roundup
Unspoken Truths by Christopher Hitchens (Vanity Fair) I cried.
Does Sad Sell? by Raina Wallens (The Rumpus) It does.
What Your American Girl Doll Says About the Rest of Your Life by Chiara Atik (The Hairpin) Felicity. It’s all true.
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“An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.”
– F. Scott Fitzgerald! (via rulesformyunbornson)
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TWENTY ODD QUESTIONS WITH DANIELLE STEEL (WALL STREET JOURNAL)
“I go to bed late and wake up early, but for the few hours I’m actually in my bed I like sleeping on beautiful Pratesi sheets. I love wonderful bedding, wonderful towels and wonderful soaps. I work with a charity that provides supplies for the homeless and I always try to include a bar of really nice soap.”
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Comments Written By Actual Students Extracted From... →
“You talk about pregnant raindrops and chaos and auditory canals and ‘the passing of time’ as ‘an orifice,’ when you could really just be talking about humidity and ears.”
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Sloane Crosley will be at Elliott Bay tonight
I’m so there.
