Category: Books & Writers
Speaking of Books
Family Life by Akhil Sharma won the Folio Prize for fiction last night. According to a New York Times report, Family Life, a “semiautobiographical second novel, tracks the Mishra family, who migrate to Queens from Delhi in the 1970s, but whose life slowly unravels when one son suffers a freakish accident.”
George Saunders’s short-story collection Tenth of December won last year.
Tsundoku
I am guilty of this pleasure. Even with ebooks.
Tsundoku. n. Leaving a book unread after buying it, typically piled up together with other unread books.
Illustration and background from Brain Pickings: Umberto Eco’s Antilibrary: Why Unread Books Are More Valuable to Our Lives than Read Ones.
Best Books
In 2003, The Guardian published a list of 100 greatest novels of all time.
Beginning in October 2013, “[w]ithout any reference to the 2003 list…a serial account of the classic English and American novel, from A to Z, and from the late 17th century to the present day.” The 100 best novels.
Seventy-eight essays have been published so far — the most recent, published today, is for book 78, To Kill a Mockingbird.
And, “[a]fter keen debate at the Guardian’s books desk, this is our list of the very best factual writing, organised by category, and then by date.” The 100 greatest non-fiction books. From 2011.
List of the Day
In 1999, San Francisco Chronicle readers ranked the 100 best non-fiction and fiction books of the 20th century written in, about, or by an author from the Western United States.
NewMexiKen has posted the top 10 from the lists several times — because the lists are interesting — but primarily to honor Wallace Stegner, who was born 106 years ago today.
Stegner is first in fiction, second in non-fiction; now that’s a writer.
Timothy Egan wrote an appreciation of Stegner in 2009, Stegner’s Complaint.
TOP 10 FICTION
1. “Angle of Repose,” by Wallace Stegner
2. “The Grapes of Wrath,” by John Steinbeck
3. “Sometimes a Great Notion,” by Ken Kesey
4. “The Call of the Wild,” by Jack London
5. “The Big Sleep,” by Raymond Chandler
6. “Animal Dreams,” by Barbara Kingsolver
7. “Death Comes for the Archbishop,” by Willa Cather
8. “The Day of the Locust,” by Nathanael West
9. “Blood Meridian,” by Cormac McCarthy
10. “The Maltese Falcon,” by Dashiell Hammett
TOP 10 NON-FICTION
1. “Land of Little Rain,” Mary Austin
2. “Beyond the Hundredth Meridian,” Wallace Stegner
3. “Desert Solitaire,” Edward Abbey
4. “This House of Sky,” Ivan Doig
5. “Son of the Morning Star,” Evan S. Connell
6. Western trilogy, Bernard DeVoto
7. “Assembling California,” John McPhee
8. “My First Summer in the Sierra,” John Muir
9. “The White Album,” Joan Didion
10. “City of Quartz,” Mike Davis
The Gift of the Magi
This is a Christmas season tradition here at NewMexiKen. Go ahead, read it again. It makes everything about the season seem simpler yet more precious.
Merry Christmas!
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-sevencents. And the next day would be Christmas.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
If it were your Harry, mother, or your Willie, that were going to be torn from you by a brutal trader, tomorrow morning,–if you had seen the man, and heard that the papers were signed and delivered, and you had only from twelve o’clock till morning to make good your escape,–how fast could you walk? How many miles could you make in those few brief hours, with the darling at your bosom,–the little sleepy head on your shoulder,–the small, soft arms trustingly holding on to your neck?
So wrote Harriet Beech Stowe in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, describing the scene as Eliza runs with her son, Harry. Reading this classic has somehow escaped me all these years, but I am enjoying it now, and can see — in the early going — why Lincoln reportedly said on meeting Mrs. Stowe, “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war.”
The book came out in 1852; proportionate to the population, it is one of the most popular novels ever.
And it’s fun and interesting to read.
Reposted from May 1, 2011.
Six short, amazing Gabriel Garcia Marquez stories you can read this weekend
Ernie Pyle
The great war correspondent Ernie Pyle was killed by gunfire on the island of Ie Shima 65 years ago today. This is often regarded his best column.
The Death of Captain Waskow
AT THE FRONT LINES IN ITALY, January 10, 1944 – In this war I have known a lot of officers who were loved and respected by the soldiers under them. But never have I crossed the trail of any man as beloved as Capt. Henry T. Waskow of Belton, Texas.
Capt. Waskow was a company commander in the 36th Division. He had led his company since long before it left the States. He was very young, only in his middle twenties, but he carried in him a sincerity and gentleness that made people want to be guided by him.
“After my own father, he came next,” a sergeant told me.
“He always looked after us,” a soldier said. “He’d go to bat for us every time.”
“I’ve never knowed him to do anything unfair,” another one said.
I was at the foot of the mule trail the night they brought Capt. Waskow’s body down. The moon was nearly full at the time, and you could see far up the trail, and even part way across the valley below. Soldiers made shadows in the moonlight as they walked.
Dead men had been coming down the mountain all evening, lashed onto the backs of mules. They came lying belly-down across the wooden pack-saddles, their heads hanging down on the left side of the mule, their stiffened legs sticking out awkwardly from the other side, bobbing up and down as the mule walked.
The Italian mule-skinners were afraid to walk beside dead men, so Americans had to lead the mules down that night. Even the Americans were reluctant to unlash and lift off the bodies at the bottom, so an officer had to do it himself, and ask others to help.
The first one came early in the morning. They slid him down from the mule and stood him on his feet for a moment, while they got a new grip. In the half light he might have been merely a sick man standing there, leaning on the others. Then they laid him on the ground in the shadow of the low stone wall alongside the road.
I don’t know who that first one was. You feel small in the presence of dead men, and ashamed at being alive, and you don’t ask silly questions.
We left him there beside the road, that first one, and we all went back into the cowshed and sat on water cans or lay on the straw, waiting for the next batch of mules.
Somebody said the dead soldier had been dead for four days, and then nobody said anything more about it. We talked soldier talk for an hour or more. The dead man lay all alone outside in the shadow of the low stone wall.
Then a soldier came into the cowshed and said there were some more bodies outside. We went out into the road. Four mules stood there, in the moonlight, in the road where the trail came down off the mountain. The soldiers who led them stood there waiting. “This one is Captain Waskow,” one of them said quietly.
Two men unlashed his body from the mule and lifted it off and laid it in the shadow beside the low stone wall. Other men took the other bodies off. Finally there were five lying end to end in a long row, alongside the road. You don’t cover up dead men in the combat zone. They just lie there in the shadows until somebody else comes after them.
The unburdened mules moved off to their olive orchard. The men in the road seemed reluctant to leave. They stood around, and gradually one by one I could sense them moving close to Capt. Waskow’s body. Not so much to look, I think, as to say something in finality to him, and to themselves. I stood close by and I could hear.
One soldier came and looked down, and he said out loud, “God damn it.” That’s all he said, and then he walked away. Another one came. He said, “God damn it to hell anyway.” He looked down for a few last moments, and then he turned and left.
Another man came; I think he was an officer. It was hard to tell officers from men in the half light, for all were bearded and grimy dirty. The man looked down into the dead captain’s face, and then he spoke directly to him, as though he were alive. He said: “I’m sorry, old man.”
Then a soldier came and stood beside the officer, and bent over, and he too spoke to his dead captain, not in a whisper but awfully tenderly, and he said:
“I sure am sorry, sir.”
Then the first man squatted down, and he reached down and took the dead hand, and he sat there for a full five minutes, holding the dead hand in his own and looking intently into the dead face, and he never uttered a sound all the time he sat there.
And finally he put the hand down, and then reached up and gently straightened the points of the captain’s shirt collar, and then he sort of rearranged the tattered edges of his uniform around the wound. And then he got up and walked away down the road in the moonlight, all alone.
After that the rest of us went back into the cowshed, leaving the five dead men lying in a line, end to end, in the shadow of the low stone wall. We lay down on the straw in the cowshed, and pretty soon we were all asleep.
Best Line of the Day
Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.
The Dickens of Detroit
“The sound and style of a city through the eyes of Elmore Leonard, its foremost author.”
Grantland is telling “various stories of this wholly original place” — Detroit, my place of birth — this week (April 11-18).
The Pulitzer Prizes
Winners for Books, Drama and Music, 2013:
FICTION – “The Goldfinch” by Donna Tartt (Little, Brown)
DRAMA – “The Flick” by Annie Baker
HISTORY – “The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832” by Alan Taylor (W.W. Norton)
BIOGRAPHY – “Margaret Fuller: A New American Life” by Megan Marshall (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
POETRY – “3 Sections” by Vijay Seshadri (Graywolf Press)
GENERAL NONFICTION – “Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation” by Dan Fagin (Bantam Books)
MUSIC – “Become Ocean” by John Luther Adams (Taiga Press/Theodore Front Musical Literature)
Click link above for Journalism award winners.
Reading
Working on my 19th book in the past two months, all but one read on my iPhone.
Not saying this is an entirely good thing, using the phone for novels and nonfiction. But it is my thing.
#19 is Five Days at Memorial by Sheri Fink.
The Gospel of Awesome
This post is from four years ago today. I thought it was awesome.
At The Book Bench at The New Yorker Deirdre Foley-Mendelssohn lists some of her favorite awesome moments from The Book of Awesome:
-When cashiers open up new checkout lanes at the grocery store.
-Hitting a bunch of green lights in a row.
-Bakery air.
-Waking up before your alarm clock and realizing you’ve got lots of sleep time left.
-The smell of crayons.
-Finally remembering a word that’s been on the tip of your tongue for so long.
-Putting potato chips on a sandwich.
-When you nudge the person snoring next to you and it makes them stop.
-The shampoo head massage you sometimes get at the hairdresser.
-Moving up a shoe size when you’re a kid.
-The smell of books.
What would you add?
John Updike
… would have been 82 today (he died in 2009).
“A novelist, short-story writer, poet and critic, Updike is, to borrow a phrase he has used about others,’one of the chief glories of postwar American literature.'” The New York Times
In 2004 Updike wrote an essay about Thoreau’s Walden.
In a time of informational overload, of clamorously inane and ubiquitous electronic entertainment, and of a fraught, globally challenged, ever more demanding workplace, the urge to build a cabin in the woods and thus reform, simplify, and cleanse one’s life – “to front”, in Thoreau’s ringing verb, “only the essential facts of life” – remains strong. The holiday industry, so-called, thrives on it, and camper sales, and the weekend recourse to second homes in the northern forests or the western mountains, where the pollutions of industry and commerce are relatively light. “Simplify, simplify,” Walden advises, and we try, even though a 21st-century attainment of a rustic, elemental simplicity entails considerable complications of budget and transport.
In 1967 Updike was interviewed by The Paris Review.
Updike is a fluent talker, but obviously not a man who expects talk to bridge the distance between others and his inner life. Therefore, the final stage of this interview was his revision of the spoken comments to bring them into line with the style of his written answers. The result is a fabricated interview—in its modest way, a work of art, and thus appropriate to a man who believes that only art can track the nuances of experience.
Best Line of the Day by Someone Born on This Date
“Mankind has always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much — the wheel, New York, wars, and so on — while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man — for precisely the same reasons.”
Douglas Adams, The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Adams was born on March 11, 1952. He died from a heart attack in 2001.
Johnny Cash
A few weeks ago I read Robert Hilburn’s biography of Johnny Cash, an interesting if somewhat longish and discouraging look at the Man in Black.
Today at Open Culture there was a link to the first episode of Cash’s music-variety show. The program from June 7, 1969, included guests Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and Doug Kershaw. And the Carters, of course. Not a bad way to visit 45-year-old music history.
It Really Ought to Be a National Holiday
It’s the anniversary of the birth of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807) and John Steinbeck (1902) and the 80th birthday of N. Scott Momaday.
Listen, my children, and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-Five:
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.
“Paul Revere’s Ride”
********
And he rushed into the wigwam,
Saw the old Nokomis slowly
Rocking to and fro and moaning,
Saw his lovely Minnehaha
Lying dead and cold before him,
And his bursting heart within him
Uttered such a cry of anguish,
That the forest moaned and shuddered,
That the very stars in heaven
Shook and trembled with his anguish
Then he sat down, still and speechless,
On the bed of Minnehaha,
At the feet of Laughing Water,
At those willing feet, that never
More would lightly run to meet him,
Never more would lightly follow.
“The Song of Hiawatha”
“I’ll be ever’where—wherever you look. Wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever they’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there. If Casy knowed, why, I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad an’—I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry an’ they know supper’s ready. An’ when our folks eat the stuff they raise an’ live in the houses they build—why, I’ll be there. See?”
Tom Joad, The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck.
Pulitzer Prize-winner Momaday was presented with the National Medal of Arts in 2007.
The Navajo Ben Benally remembers a snow-filled day (from House Made of Dawn
And afterward, when you brought the sheep back, your grandfather had filled the barrel with snow and there was plenty of water again. But he took you to the trading post anyway, because you were little and had looked forward to it. There were people inside, a lot of them, because there was a big snow on the ground and they needed things and they wanted to stand around and smoke and talk about the weather. You were little and there was a lot to see, and all of it was new and beautiful: bright new buckets and tubs, saddles and ropes, hats and shirts and boots, a big glass case all filled with candy. Frazer was the trader’s name. He gave you a piece of hard red candy and laughed because you couldn’t make up your mind to take it at first, and you wanted it so much you didn’t know what to do. And he gave your grandfather some tobacco and brown paper. And when he had smoked, your grandfather talked to the trader for a long time and you didn’t know what they were saying and you just looked around at all the new and beautiful things. And after a while the trader put some things out on the counter, sacks of flour and sugar, a slab of salt pork, some canned goods, and a little bag full of the hard red candy. And your grandfather took off one of his rings and gave it to the trader. It was a small green stone, set carelessly in thin silver. It was new and it wasn’t worth very much, not all the trader gave for it anyway. And the trader opened one of the cans, a big can of whole tomatoes, and your grandfather sprinkled sugar on the tomatoes and the two of you ate them right there and drank bottles of sweet red soda pop. And it was getting late and you rode home in the sunset and the whole land was cold and white. And that night your grandfather hammered the strips of silver and told you stories in the firelight. And you were little and right there in the center of everything, the sacred mountains, the snow-covered mountains and the hills, the gullies and the flats, the sundown and the night, everything—where you were little, where you were and had to be.
Momaday was instrumental in the production of the PBS series The West, whose website includes biographical background.
Wallace Stegner
In 1999, San Francisco Chronicle readers ranked the 100 best non-fiction and fiction books of the 20th century written in, about, or by an author from the Western United States.
NewMexiKen has posted the top 10 from the lists several times — because the lists are interesting — but primarily to honor Wallace Stegner, who was born 105 years ago today.
Stegner is first in fiction, second in non-fiction; now that’s a writer.
TOP 10 FICTION
1. “Angle of Repose,” by Wallace Stegner
2. “The Grapes of Wrath,” by John Steinbeck
3. “Sometimes a Great Notion,” by Ken Kesey
4. “The Call of the Wild,” by Jack London
5. “The Big Sleep,” by Raymond Chandler
6. “Animal Dreams,” by Barbara Kingsolver
7. “Death Comes for the Archbishop,” by Willa Cather
8. “The Day of the Locust,” by Nathanael West
9. “Blood Meridian,” by Cormac McCarthy
10. “The Maltese Falcon,” by Dashiell Hammett
TOP 10 NON-FICTION
1. “Land of Little Rain,” Mary Austin
2. “Beyond the Hundredth Meridian,” Wallace Stegner
3. “Desert Solitaire,” Edward Abbey
4. “This House of Sky,” Ivan Doig
5. “Son of the Morning Star,” Evan S. Connell
6. Western trilogy, Bernard DeVoto
7. “Assembling California,” John McPhee
8. “My First Summer in the Sierra,” John Muir
9. “The White Album,” Joan Didion
10. “City of Quartz,” Mike Davis
The Raven
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore–
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
“‘Tis some visiter,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door–
Only this and nothing more.”
Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December,
And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.
Eagerly I wished the morrow;–vainly I had sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow–sorrow for the lost Lenore–
For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore–
Nameless here for evermore.
The first two of 18 stanzas of “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe. The poem was first published in 1845.
Annabel Lee
For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never rise but I see the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling, my darling, my life and my bride
In her sepulchre there by the sea,
In her tomb by the side of the sea.
That is the last stanza of “Annabel Lee,” a poem by Edgar Allan Poe, born in Boston 205 years ago today (1809), raised in Richmond, Virginia, by foster parents, the Allans.
‘That’s My Grandmother’s Regalia’
Most days when I blog I go back through the 10 years I’ve been doing this and see what I’ve posted.
Eight years ago today I posted a link to a short story published in 2003 in The New Yorker by Sherman Alexie, “What You Pawn I Will Redeem.”
I said then that it was “an absolutely first-rate short story.”
I’ve read it again. I was wrong. It’s much better than that.
Command and Control
Heard author Eric Schlosser at the entirely fitting National Museum of Nuclear Science & History last evening. Schlosser’s Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety
It was an informative, sobering talk with balanced doses of anecdotal history, criticism, praise and rant. Human beings create these devices and weapons systems. They are not perfect, the improbable happens, the result could be beyond our imaging.
Looking forward to reading my inscribed copy of the book.
Schlosser is the author of Fast Food Nation and Reefer Madness.
Banned Books Week
Banned Books Week September 22-28, 2013
Top Ten Challenged Books 2012
- Captain Underpants (series) by Dav Pilkey
Reasons: Offensive language, unsuited for age group - The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie
Reasons: Offensive language, racism, sexually explicit, unsuited for age group - Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher
Reasons: Drugs/alcohol/smoking, sexually explicit, suicide, unsuited for age group - Fifty Shades of Grey by E. L. James
Reasons: Offensive language, sexually explicit - And Tango Makes Three by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson
Reasons: Homosexuality, unsuited for age group - The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
Reasons: Homosexuality, offensive language, religious viewpoint, sexually explicit - Looking for Alaska by John Green
Reasons: Offensive language, sexually explicit, unsuited for age group - Scary Stories (series) by Alvin Schwartz
Reasons: Unsuited for age group, violence - The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls
Reasons: Offensive language, sexually explicit - Beloved by Toni Morrison
Reasons: Sexually explicit, religious viewpoint, violence
The Gift of the Magi
This is a Christmas season tradition here at NewMexiKen. Go ahead, read it again. It makes everything about the season seem simpler yet more precious.
Merry Christmas!
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.