The call of the I don’t know what I want to do

The Writer’s Almanac has a great essay on Jack London, born in San Francisco on this date in 1876. You really should go read it all, but here is the final paragraph:

When he returned to California, he finally had some stories to write. His first big success was his novel The Call of the Wild (1903), about a dog named Buck who goes from living as a domestic pet to living on its own in the wilderness of Alaska. His most famous short story is “To Build a Fire” (1908), about a man struggling and failing to light a single fire in the snowy wilderness. It is one of the most widely anthologized and translated stories ever written by an American author.

The Gift of the Magi

By O. Henry (William Sydney Porter), 1906.

One dollar and eighty-seven cents. That was all. And
sixty cents of it was in pennies. Pennies saved one and two
at a time by bulldozing the grocer and the vegetable man and
the butcher until one’s cheeks burned with the silent
imputation of parsimony that such close dealing implied.
Three times Della counted it. One dollar and eighty-seven
cents. And the next day would be Christmas.

Read the rest of this entry.

A Christmas Carol

… was first published on this date in 1843.

Scrooge. a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shrivelled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin. He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dog-days; and didn’t thaw it one degree at Christmas.

The Six-Word Memoir Contest

Write your memoir in six words. Write the best six-word memoir and win an iPod Nano.

Presented by SMITH Magazine and Twitter.

Link via Freakonomics co-author Stephen J. Dubner. His contribution: “On the seventh word, he rested.”

The Gift of the Magi

NewMexiKen usually posts The Gift of the Magi just before Christmas and I will again this year, too. But, just follow the link if you find your spirit lagging.

The 10 Best Books of 2006

The editors of The New York Times Book Review chose books by Gary Shteyngart, Amy Hempel, Claire Messud, Richard Ford, Marisha Pessl, Danielle Trussoni, Lawrence Wright, Nathaniel Philbrick, Michael Pollan and Rory Stewart.

Best Books: Another Take

The Christian Science Monitor list the Best Fiction 2006 and Best Nonfiction 2006.

If Barack Obama is as good a politician as he is a writer, he will soon be President

Anyway, all of this is just a long prelude to the fact that I picked up his book The Audacity of Hope and was blown away at how well written it is. His stories sometimes make me laugh out loud and at other times well up with tears. I find myself underlining the book repeatedly so I can find the best parts quickly again in the future. I am also almost certain he wrote the whole thing himself, based on people I know who know him. I have no interest in politics, yet I am devouring this book. If you aren’t giving Freakonomics as a Christmas gift this year—probably you gave it to everyone on your list last Christmas —this would make a great gift.

I suppose I shouldn’t be that surprised at what a good writer he is because I read his first book Dreams from My Father two years ago and loved that one as well. But unlike that first book, written 15-20 years ago before he had political ambitions, I thought this new one would just be garbage. Rarely does a book so exceed my expectations. Also, I should stress that I don’t agree with all his political views, but that in no way detracts from the enjoyment of reading the book.

If he has the same effect on others as he does on me, you are looking at a future president.

Steven D. Levitt

As far as NewMexiKen is concerned, Gates, Obama, whoever, I’m voting for Jeb Bush.

100 Notable Books of the Year

The New York Times Book Review has published its annual list.

Best line of the day, so far

He’s good-looking, though, like he just stepped out of some “Don’t Litter the Earth” public-service advertisement. He’s got those great big cheekbones that are like planets, you know, with little moons orbiting them. He gets me jealous, jealous, and jealous. If you put Junior and me next to each other, he’s the Before Columbus Arrived Indian and I’m the After Columbus Arrived Indian.

Sherman Alexie, “What You Pawn I Will Redeem,” The New Yorker, 2003, an absolutely first-rate short story.

National Book Award Winners

Young People’s Literature: M.T. Anderson, The Pox Party (The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Vol. 1) (Candlewick Press)

Poetry: Nathaniel Mackey, Splay Anthem (New Directions)

Nonfiction: Timothy Egan, The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl (Houghton Mifflin)

Fiction: Richard Powers, The Echo Maker: A Novel (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Pippi’s mom

It’s the birthday of the Swedish author Astrid Lindgren … born Astrid Ericsson on a farm near Vimmerby, Sweden (1907). She’s the creator of Pippi Longstocking, a nine-year-old girl with no parents who lives in a red house at the edge of a Swedish village with her horse and her pet monkey, Mr. Nilsson. She has red pigtails, and she wears one black stocking and one brown, with black shoes twice as long as her feet. She eats whole chocolate cakes and sleeps with her feet on the pillow, and she’s the strongest girl in the world.

The Writer’s Almanac from American Public Media

November 8th is the birthday

… of Patti Page. A good gift for Patti as she turns 79 might be A Doggy in The Window. Depends on how much, I suppose.

… of Morley Safer. He’s 75.

… of Bonnie Raitt. She turns 57 in the Nick of Time.

It’s also the birthday of Margaret Mitchell, born on this date in 1900. As you all must know (but just in case), Mitchell’s original name for Scarlett O’Hara was Pansy O’Hara. Just wouldn’t have been the same.

The Blind Side

NewMexiKen spent much of the day reading Michael Lewis’s The Blind Side. While I often recommend books, I hate to rave about them because I realize we have different interests, tastes and sensibilities. But if you have any interest whatsoever in NFL or college football or American socio-economic conditions, I urge you to get this wonderful work of nonfiction literature. Perhaps it even surpasses a need for those interests.

The Blind Side is the story of Michael Oher, a black virtually abandoned child from the worst slums of Memphis who gets admitted to a Christian prep school, adopted by a wealthy white family, and ends up at Ole Miss (where he’s currently in his second season.) Along the way, Lewis tells how the left offensive tackle became the second most valued position in pro football — because the left tackle protects the blind side of a right-handed quarterback.

We went to dinner again, but this time my wife, Tabitha, came along. When we got around to the subject of Michael Oher it took Sean [Oher's guardian] about ten minutes to get her laughing, twenty to get her crying, and thirty to ruin the meal. But it was worth it, because in the car on the way home she said, “I don’t understand why you are writing about anything else.”

Three amusing, yet insightful passages:

“Where are his parents?” asked [prep school football coach Hugh] Freeze. He felt a twinge of interest. If a man who weighed 400 pounds was referring to someone else as “Big Mike” he’d like to see the size of that someone else.

She didn’t know a lot of gay people. White Evangelical Christian Memphis—which is to say most of East Memphis—wasn’t really designed to make black people feel comfortable in it, but if you had a choice of being black in East Memphis, or being gay in East Memphis, you’d think at least twice about it.

Of course, football players weren’t the only Ole Miss students majoring in Criminal Justice. But when the Criminal Justice program took the field trip to Parchman Farm—aka the Mississippi State Penitentiary—the football players were the only students with friends on the inside.

A fascinating, informative and moving story.

Blood and Thunder

Pulitizer Prize-winning novelist M. Scott Momaday has written a review of Hampton Sides’s Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West. Momaday’s summary paragraph:

“Blood and Thunder” is a full-blown history, and Sides does every part of it justice. Five years ago he set out to write a book on the removal of the Navajos from Canyon de Chelly and their Long Walk to the Bosque Redondo, hundreds of miles from their homeland, where they were held as prisoners of war. But in the course of his research a much larger story unfolded, the story of the opening of the West, from the heyday of the mountain men in the early 1800’s to the clash of three cultures, as the newcomers from the East encountered the ancient Puebloans and the established Hispanic communities in what is now New Mexico, to the Civil War in the West and its aftermath — and all of it is full of blood and thunder, the realities and the caricatures of conquest. By telling this story, Sides fills a conspicuous void in the history of the American West.

NewMexiKen began reading the book the other day and, so far, it’s been very good — excellent reading. For whatever reasons, Sides jumps around in the chronology but, while unusual for a narrative history, it seems to work. It has the effect of seeming to move the story along more rapidly.

I’d noted three passages I found particularly amusing, informative, or resonant:

[S]tories like the one about the mountain valley in Wyoming that was so big it took an echo eight hours to return, so that a man bedding down for the night could confidently shout “Git up!” and know that he would rise in the morning to his own wake-up call.

As a baby in his cradleboard, Narbona [a Navajo leader] probably was not called anything at all, for Navajos, who tended to view early infanthood as an extension of gestation, did not usually give names to their children until specific personal characteristics began to show themselves—Hairy Face, Slim Girl, No Neck, Little Man Won’t Do As He’s Told. Although Navajo parents followed few hard rules about how to name their children, it was generally agreed that the watershed moment when a baby could definitively be said to have passed from infanthood into something more fully human was the child’s “first spontaneous laugh.” First laughter was an occasion for much celebration, and it was the time when many Navajos held naming ceremonies for their young; it is likely that this is when Narbona received his original “war name,” whatever it might have been.

Perhaps to dignify the nakedness of Polk’s land lust, the American citizenry had got itself whipped into an idealistic frenzy, believing with an almost religious assurance that its republican form of government and its constitutional freedoms should extend to the benighted reaches of the continent held by Mexico, which, with its feudal customs and Popish superstitions, stood squarely in the way of progress. To conquer Mexico, in other words, would be to do it a favor.

We Interrupt This Afternoon Off

The book (see below) is very good and, indeed, very readable. I just came up to make sure the world hadn’t ended while I was reading.

So here’s two political ads. Which do you like better?

It’s Trying to Be a Rainy Day

It’s a cool, almost dreary day here by the Sandia Mountains; a good day to curl up with a book. And so I shall, with Hampton Sides’s Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West, a new history of the conquest of the American southwest and California.

Reviews for Blood and Thunder have been positive, most finding the storytelling compelling. In the Times, William Grimes wrote it’s a “rousing, full-throated rendition of an old story, the making of the American West.”

I’ll let you know. [See here.]

Walking the Line

Douglas Brinkley has a good review of Michael Streissguth’s richly detailed Johnny Cash: The Biography.

Good antidote to the movie.

Three for Saturday

Last week’s New Yorker was particularly good and these stood out.

Surgeon Atul Gawande surveys recent developments in childbirth — as he describes it “How childbirth went industrial.”

Historian Jill Lepore reviews Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West, a new history of the conquest of the American southwest and California.

Mark Singer has a profile of murderer and escapee Richard McNair. The article is not available, but here’s a video of the suspect confronted by a police officer the day of his last escape. Priceless.

Winner of the Booker Prize

Although it focuses on the fate of a few powerless individuals, Kiran Desai’s extraordinary new novel manages to explore, with intimacy and insight, just about every contemporary international issue: globalization, multiculturalism, economic inequality, fundamentalism and terrorist violence. Despite being set in the mid-1980’s, it seems the best kind of post-9/11 novel.

The above paragraph begins the review published last February in The New York Times Book Review for The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai.

The novel by the 35-year-old Desai was named the Booker Prize winner this evening. She is the award’s youngest winner ever.

Blitz? I Don’t Think So! You Blitz.

Discussing The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game by Michael Lewis, Jason Kottke suggests a fascinating idea:

Many of the left tackles that Lewis talks about in the book can run faster than most quarterbacks, they can throw the ball just as far or farther (as a high school sophomore, Michael Oher could stand at the fifty-yard line and toss footballs through the goalposts), possess great athletic touch and finesse, have the intellect to run an offense, move better than most QBs, know the offense and defense as well as the QB, are taller than the average QB (and therefore has better field vision over the line), and presumably, at 320-360 pounds, are harder to tackle and intimidate than a normal QB. Sounds like a good idea to me.

America Unabridged

At Jill and Byron’s, NewMexiKen was poking around the magazines and found the December 2004 issue of American Heritage with its outstanding bibliography of American history. This list is worth saving.

So here it is, certainly the most challenging editorial task we’ve ever attempted—and one of the most rewarding. We have drawn on the knowledge and enthusiasm of leading historians, writers, and critics to offer a compendium of the very best books about the American experience. Divided into both chronological and subject categories ranging from the rise of the Republic to sports, from the years of World War II to the African-American journey, each section presents the writer’s choice of the 10 best books in a particular field, along with lucid, lively explanations of what makes them great. The result, we believe, is both a valuable reference work and an anthology of highly personal views of the making of our country and our culture that is immensely readable in its own right.

— American Heritage: America Unabridged.

No, I Don’t Think So

NewMexiKen almost bought Bob Woodward’s State of Denial yesterday — Costco had it for $17.

But then I thought, you couldn’t trust Woodward’s reporting in any other book he’s done in recent years, why think you should trust him on this one just because you like its storyline better?

Thirteen Moons

Louis Menand has written a review of Charles Frazier’s new novel, Thirteen Moons. Frazier you will remember is the author of Cold Mountain and Menand’s review discusses that novel as well.

If you’ve ever tried to read Cold Mountain, as NewMexiKen has, and failed, as NewMexiKen has, you will find this review quite interesting.

Two

A couple of items worth your time.

First, a brief blog piece from Malcolm Gladwell, “Degree of Difficulty.” Gladwell, bothered that a recent article he did for The New Yorker wasn’t appreciated as much as he would have liked, notes that “We can see all the things that someone, in a different profession than us, does. What we cannot know is the relative difficulty of those tasks.”

Next, the wonderful Peter Matthiessen writes “Inside the Endangered Arctic Refuge” for The New York Review of Books. His opening paragraph:

Wild northern Alaska is one of the last places on earth where a human being can kneel down and drink from a wild stream without being measurably more poisoned or polluted than before; its heart and essence is the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) in the remote northeast corner of the state, the earth’s last sanctuary of the great Ice Age fauna that includes all three North American bears, gray wolves and wolverines, musk ox, moose, and, in the summer, the Porcupine River herd of caribou, 120,000 strong. Everywhere fly sandhill cranes and seabirds, myriad waterfowl and shorebirds, eagles, hawks, owls, shrikes and larks and longspurs, as well as a sprinkling of far-flung birds that migrate to the Arctic slope to breed and nest from every continent on earth. Yet we Americans, its caretakers, are still debating whether or not to destroy this precious place by turning it over to the oil industry for development.

The Blind Side

Malcolm Gladwell writes:

“I just had the pleasure of reading an advance copy of the new book by Michael Lewis, the author of, among other things, MoneyBall and Liars Poker. Its called the The Blind Side. It is simply sensational. It will be in bookstores October 2nd.”

There’s more on this book and other sportswriting. Don’t miss it.

Update: And here’s an article based on the book — The Ballad of Big Mike.

Coincidence, I Think Not

Today is an important day in the history of three related genres of literature: science fiction, horror, and fantasy. It’s the birthday of the science-fiction novelist H.G. Wells [1866], the horror novelist Stephen King [1947], and it was on this day in 1937 that J.R.R. Tolkien published his first novel, The Hobbit.

From The Writer’s Almanac, which has a little about each of the three.

Novel Idea

Author Carlos Fuentes on the saving grace of literature. He begins:

Not long ago, the Norwegian Academy addressed one hundred writers from all over the world with a single question: Name the novel that you consider the best ever written.

Of the one hundred consulted, fifty answered: “Don Quixote de la Mancha” by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. Quite a landslide, considering the runners up: Dostoevsky, Faulkner and Garcia Marquez, in that order.

Re-posted from last year.

Six Things to Think About

1. According to a report in Automotive News, Ford and General Motors discussed a merger in July.

2. The price of gasoline has gone down 50 cents in a month. How much lower can it go before the election? (Thanks to mjh’s blog for focusing my thought on this one.)

3. Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez’s favorite books include “Les Misérables” by Victor Hugo and “Don Quixote” by Cervantes. Also “Dude, Where’s My Country?” by Michael Moore.

4. Charles P. Pierce thinks the president is on the edge:

This all came back to me because, quite frankly, I think the president of the United States is getting ready to slug somebody. And, based on several recent on-camera performances, all of them readily available to anyone who wants to watch, you wouldn’t have to say anything about his momma, his wife, his kids, his dogs, or the fundamental legitimacy of his pedigree to get him to throw down on your ass like the genuine Earnie (The Acorn) Shavers. It appears that all that would be necessary is for you push a question about his policies beyond the limits of whatever talking-points he has on the subject.

… There are presidents who can rise above it, and presidents who can’t, but none of them ever looked like they were ready to toss hands because people questioned their right to torture. It’s become truly startling how close we seem to be coming to the “Because I said so, that’s why” moment.

5. John Yoo understands American history a little differently than I learned it.

But the founders intended that wrongheaded or obsolete legislation and judicial decisions would be checked by presidential action, just as executive overreaching is to be checked by the courts and Congress.

6. Path to 9/11 writer Cyrus Nowrasteh is even more delusional.

I felt duty-bound from the outset to focus on a single goal–to represent our recent pre-9/11 history as the evidence revealed it to be. The American people deserve to know that history: They have paid for it in blood.

… Fact-checkers and lawyers scrutinized every detail, every line, every scene. There were hundreds of pages of annotations. We were informed by multiple advisers and interviews with people involved in the events–and books, including in a most important way the 9/11 Commission Report.

Agatha Christie

… was born on this date in 1890. The Writer’s Almanac has this (and more):

During World War I, she was working as a Red Cross nurse, and she started reading detective novels because, she said, “I found they were excellent to take one’s mind off one’s worries.” She grew frustrated with how easy it was to guess the murderer in most mysteries, and she decided to try to write her own. That book was The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920) about a series of murders at a Red Cross hospital.

Christie’s first few books were moderately successful, and then her novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd came out in 1926. That same year, Christie fled her own home after a fight with her husband, and she went missing for 10 days. There was a nationwide search, and the press covered the disappearance as though it were a mystery novel come to life, inventing scenarios and speculating on the possible murder suspects, until finally Christie turned up in a hotel, suffering from amnesia. During the period of her disappearance, the reprints of her earlier books sold out of stock and two newspapers began serializing her stories. She became a household name and a best-selling author for the rest of her life.

Even Security Can’t Stop Harry Potter

“The heightened security restrictions on the airlines in August made the journey back from New York interesting, as I refused to be parted from the manuscript of book seven (a large part of it is handwritten, and there was no copy of anything I had done while in the US). They let me take it on, thankfully, bound up in elastic bands. I don’t know what I would have done if they hadn’t; sailed home, probably.”

J.K.Rowling

More Mencken

The Writer’s Almanac has a little bit about H.L. Mencken today, his birthday (1880). NewMexiKen particularly liked this, Mencken’s translation of the Declaration of Independence into American English from Mencken’s The American Language (1919):

“When things get so balled up that the people of a country got to cut loose from some other country, and go it on their own hook, without asking no permission from nobody, excepting maybe God Almighty, then they out to let everybody know why they done it, so that everybody can see they are not trying to put nothing over on nobody.”

H(enry) L(ouis) Mencken

… essayist and editor, was born on this date in 1880. Some Mencken quotes:

• The cynics are right nine times out of ten.
• Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.
• A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.
• It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.
• The first kiss is stolen by the man; the last is begged by the woman.
• The only really happy folk are married women and single men.
• It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.
• Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
• A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.
• Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.
• No one in this world, so far as I know — and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me — has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.
• Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
• I believe in only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone.
• In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for. As for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.

Storytime

Two Pulitzer Prize-winning novelists, Edward P. Jones, The Known World (2004), and Richard Ford, Independence Day (1996), have published wonderful stories in recent weeks in The New Yorker — Jones, Bad Neighbors and Ford, How Was It to Be Dead?.

Enjoy, while they remain online. And read the novels, too.

Bookies

BookMooch, a community for exchanging used books (book swap and book exchange and book trade).

DebbiesIdea.com. Debbie’s idea was to fill a simple need: to help a reader decide which book to read first of an unfamiliar author.

Links via Freakonomics Blog.

The President’s reading habits

After six years of complaining about what an ignoramus Bush is, the left bloggers are now criticizing the President for reading too much — or lying about it.

Regular readers of NewMexiKen know that I am no fan of this president. I truly believe he is the worst president this country has ever had. I would impeach him if I were in the House and find him guilty if I were in the Senate.

But reading 60 books (the number usually associated with this flurry) in 34 weeks (so far this year) does not strike me as unbelievable. That’s just less than two a week.

If Bush reveals anything about himself, it’s that he’s competitive and compulsive. Look at the work-outs, the bike riding, the brush clearing. Why not reading?

I’ve never thought Bush stupid, just mind-bogglingly lacking in curiosity. If this compulsion to read shows some new interest in the world around him, hurrah. We’ve still got him for 874 days.

Stuff

Ken Jennings has the answers to yesterday’s Capitol Statuary Hall trivia and some more Capitol trivia.

Michael Bérubé responds to a pretty good meme about books: One book that changed your life, One book you have read more than once, etc.

Speaking of books, Bob Cesca thinks “No Way In Hell President Bush Has Read 60 Books” —

Yet, he’s somehow found time to read not one, not five, not 20, but 60 books this year alone (via Crooks & Liars). According to US News & World Report, he’s in a competition with Karl Rove to see who can read more books over the course of the year. Rove is trailing by 10 books, until November when Diebold will put him up by three.

Maybe it is 60. Laura’s a librarian and maybe she introduced George to the “for Dummies” series. You know, Foreign Policy for Dummies, Economic Policy for Dummies, Military Strategy for Dummies, Healthcare Issues for Dummies, Disaster Assistance and Recovery for Dummies.

Oh, and The Constitution for Dummies.

Education is for liberals

From Bookslut:

A (very, very) small group of Clemson University students are upset that they’re being treated like adults.

Several Clemson University students have joined a member of the Commission on Higher Education to say they did not like the book the school chose for a required freshman summer reading assignment.

The seven students, mostly freshman, joined commission member Ken Wingate and about 40 parents, grandparents and alumni Monday to talk about their concerns with “Truth & Beauty,” by Ann Patchett.

The book, which was a best-seller, tells the story of Patchett and a friend, Lucy Grealy, who struggled with the effects of cancer throughout her life and later dealt with drug addiction. Wingate said it glamorizes “deviant and debasing” behavior and is unhappy with its sexual content.

How did Clemson end up with the kids who weren’t smart enough to get into Bob Jones or Oral Roberts? Isn’t there some kind of correspondence school for the sheltered and whiny?

Best line of the day, so far

“[Bush] only read The Stranger because he’s just now getting around to his 9th grade syllabus. He read The Stranger, Catcher in the Rye, half of Treasure Island and Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.”

Jason Jones, The Daily Show

Four American Immortals

… died young on this date.

Robert Johnson in 1938 at age 27.

Babe Ruth in 1948 at age 53.

Margaret Mitchell in 1949 at age 48.

Elvis Presley in 1977 at age 42.