I was busy with other stuff but came across this and decided you deserve to know about it and read it.
And, speaking of wonderful, entertaining writing — as I was immediately above — here is another — Joe Posnanski on 32 Great Sports Illustrated Covers.
Ode To Quiz and Nolan and Ichiro are both by Posnanski as well, and both exceptionally fine baseball essays.
A look at John Updike’s wonderful 1960 essay about Ted Williams final game, “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu.”
It’s not too much to say that “Hub Fans” changed sportswriting. Affectionately mocking the tradition of sports clichés (as in the title, which didn’t actually appear in any of Boston’s seven dailies at the time, but easily could have), the essay demonstrated that you could write about baseball, of all things, in a way that was personal, intelligent, even lyrical. Updike compares Williams to Achilles, to a Calder mobile, to Donatello’s David, standing on third base as if the bag were the head of Goliath.
Both the article and Updike’s wonderful piece are well-worth your time.
Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu, John Updike (1960)
Update: I read Updike again (I have read it more than once before.). It really is magnificent.
Well, about 1/10th of the way in I decided that if I was going to invest the time to read War and Peace I really ought to do it with the richest translation available. I did some reading on Russian translations and decided the free electronic version I had wasn’t it.
So I downloaded the free sample of the preferred translation — Pevear and Volokhonsky (2007).
Pevear and Volokhonsky have, rightly I think, left the French in Tolstoy’s Russian novel intact. I can read some French, but very little, so thankfully they have translated the French and provided those translations in footnotes. Alas, the electronic version has the French translation footnotes as links. The dead-tree version has those translation footnotes a glance away at the bottom of the page. Much, much better. Chalk one up for paper and ink.
[Tolstoy himself translated the French to Russian as notes. I believe Pevear and Volokhonsky have relied on his translations.]
And a handcart to carry it around on.
I’ve enjoyed what I’ve read so far.
I’m reading War and Peace.
On my iPhone.
The Penguin Classics Library Complete Collection: More than 1000 of the Greatest Classics
Just $13,413.30 + shipping.
At Live From Silver City Avelino takes a look at Steve Coll’s Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001. One-third of the way through, and Avelino is already recommending the book.
“I’m incredibly impressed with Ghost Wars. It’s an elaborate, if chilling, history of the events leading up to some of the most important events in our lifetimes.”
He also recommends Jon Krakauer’s Where Men Win Glory, the story of Pat Tillman and the coverup.
“Like other Krakauer books, the text is engaging and (at least to me) moving.”
Follow the link above and read more of what Avelino has to say about these two books. He got me interested.
A good New Mexico poem today at The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor.
“I read omnivorously, I always have, my entire life. I would rather be dead than not read. So, there’s always time for that. I read while I eat, and our whole family did. We all had very bad manners at the table. All of our books are stained with spaghetti sauce, and that sort of thing.”
E. Annie Proulx, who turns 75 today, from a worth-reading profile at The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor.
Nora found that reading about Raymond Chandler earlier — today is his birthday — made her reminisce. Fortunately she shared her book-loving memories with us.
The basement of my childhood home was lined with plank boards and cinderblocks (painted white so they didn’t look quite as cinderblock-y) to house all of the books that Dad and Priscilla owned. Periodically, I would poke through their collection looking for something new to read. One day, and I can’t remember how old I was at the time, I stumbled across my father’s mystery books. I’m pretty certain that my first read was a Nero Wolfe novel, and I quickly made my way through Rex Stout, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Ross Macdonald, and John D. MacDonald. In middle school, I decided to expand the collection and went on a hunt for more Nero Wolfe. In high school, I focused on Travis McGee. In college, eBay was my friend and I found lots more to read.
I have a few memories that make me smile when I think of my mystery collection:
And of course, my favorite part of this story is that my parents always told me that I was named after Nora Charles from The Thin Man. Boy, I would have been Nick. Dog, I would have been Asta. 😉
Even if you are not among the twenty-seven million readers worldwide who bought the books in Stieg Larsson’s posthumously published Millennium trilogy, you’ve probably heard enough talk about “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” to know that readers are in the mood for mysteries this summer. As a former Agatha Christie addict who once subjected her mother to the nonstop playing of the “Murder in Mesopotamia” audio book during a road trip to Vermont, I’ve found that the Larsson craze has reawakened my love for mysteries. In search of some solid mystery recommendations for my summer reading list, I recently sought out Kizmin Reeves, one of the three owners of Partners & Crime, the venerable mystery-and-crime bookstore in Greenwich Village.
Store policy forbids employees from recommending books they haven’t read. This is no challenge for Reeves, who estimates that she reads ten mystery novels a week. Dressed all in black and fitted with a pin that read “I am not a serial killer” (it’s the title of a book), Reeves walked me around her store and pointed out some great summer reads.
The Book Bench : The New Yorker has the recommendations.
“To Kill a Mockingbird” might just be more popular than the Bible, Mary McDonagh Murphy suggests in the introductory chapter to her new book “Scout, Atticus & Boo: A Celebration of Fifty Years of To Kill a Mockingbird.” Murphy writes:
Fifty years after its publication, it sells nearly a million copies every year—hundreds of thousands more than “The Catcher in the Rye,” “The Great Gatsby” or “Of Mice and Men,” American classics that are staples of high school classrooms. No other twentieth-century American novel is more widely read. Even British librarians, who were polled in 2006 and asked, “Which book should every adult read before they die?” voted “To Kill a Mockingbird” number one. The Bible was number two.
If you love the book, you’ll want to read this whole essay. If you don’t love the book, WTF.
“Reading ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ is something millions of us have in common,” Murphy writes, “and yet there is nothing common about the experience.”
Above, Roger Ebert’s example of great writing in 140 characters.
Ebert has other fine examples.
He also had this. Get it? Rockin’ Robin. Tweet! Tweet! Tweet! For my part, I just marvel at Michael.
“I started the Sarah Vowell book on the plane yesterday and I am almost done with it. I LOVE it. I want to go find her and be best friends with her.”
Jill reporting from Grand Cayman regarding Sarah Vowell’s Assassination Vacation
I’ve read all three Stieg Larsson books since I began the first last Saturday afternoon. (The third I read on my iPhone using the Kindle app.)
Two kept me up to after one. The third kept me up to 2:30 this morning. I finished it early this afternoon.
If you like crime, detective, police procedural, espionage books you should like these.
Read them in order. It’s essential.
This Sunday’s New York Times Book Review discusses the Girl Trilogy.
Do NOT read the review unless you have read the second book! There is a warning in the review, but there is an unbelievable spoiler.
Amazing and thoughtless and unnecessary.
The three books should be read in order.
Her name is Lisbeth Salander.
I bought The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Monday I ordered the second book, The Girl Who Played with Fire
I’ll be ordering the third book, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest
If you like crime thrillers with fascinating characters, complex plots and a feminist bent, you’ll want to spend nights with Lisbeth Salander too, tattoos and all.
One of my very favorite western novels is The Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark. Everyone should read it.
And one of my very favorite western movies is The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) with Henry Fonda, Dana Andrews, Anthony Quinn, Harry Morgan and many others. I watch it every so often, including again this evening. The film has been selected for the National Film Registry as a “cultural, artistic and/or historical treasure.” But beyond that, it is a pleasure to watch.
Tonight I streamed the film from Netflix via my Wii. (The Wii Netflix disk arrived just today.) Of course, it’s a 67-year-old black and white film, but the streaming by Wii worked well.
All Wiis have built-in wireless capability.
My god, I do love this woman.
J.K. Rowling writes about the British election. An excerpt:
Nobody who has ever experienced the reality of poverty could say “it’s not the money, it’s the message”. When your flat has been broken into, and you cannot afford a locksmith, it is the money. When you are two pence short of a tin of baked beans, and your child is hungry, it is the money. When you find yourself contemplating shoplifting to get nappies, it is the money. If Mr Cameron’s only practical advice to women living in poverty, the sole carers of their children, is “get married, and we’ll give you £150”, he reveals himself to be completely ignorant of their true situation.
How many prospective husbands did I ever meet, when I was the single mother of a baby, unable to work, stuck inside my flat, night after night, with barely enough money for life’s necessities? Should I have proposed to the youth who broke in through my kitchen window at 3am? Half a billion pounds, to send a message — would it not be more cost-effective, more personal, to send all the lower-income married people flowers?
Go read it all. It’s time well spent.
Thanks to Avelino for the link.
Christine Granados thinks despite what he has said, plenty of writers before Cormac McCarthy had written about this region, and many did so a lot better. An excerpt:
Had George Sessions Perry or Leslie Marmon Silko been quoted as saying, “I moved to the north-east because I knew no one had ever written about it,” the literary establishment would have laughed and rained intellectual expletives upon them. However, when Rhode Island-born and Tennessee-reared McCarthy stated last year in the Wall Street Journal that he moved to the south-west because “he knew no one had ever written about it”, not one voice was raised. McCarthy’s misinformation was treated as fact and as if writers such as Perry, Katherine Anne Porter, O Henry, J Frank Dobie, John Graves, Larry McMurtry, and Elmer Kelton did not exist.
His misstatement in the Journal took me back to a college course I took where All The Pretty Horses was touted as one of the best works of south-western US literature. But I didn’t understand what was so special about the stereotypical John Grady Cole, a silent 16-year-old ranch-hand orphan from Texas who spoke Spanish and fell in love with the Mexican Americans and Mexicans he encountered on both sides of the border – yet treated them as colourful props and scenery by relegating them to the role of minor characters in the novel. I won’t discuss the stereotypes and archetypes he used for “them darkies” in his book.
Richard Bausch makes the case against writing manuals. An excerpt:
The trouble of course is that a good book is not something you can put together like a model airplane. It does not lend itself to that kind of instruction. Every day books are published that contain no real artfulness in the lines, books made up of clichés and limp prose, stupid stories offering nothing but high concept and plot—or supra-literary books that shut out even a serious reader in the name of assertions about the right of an author to be dull for a good cause. (No matter how serious a book is, if it is not entertaining, it is a failure.) I’m not talking about the books we write or publish in the attempt to answer the need for entertainment at whatever level one chooses. And I have no quarrel with the genres, because to help people escape from life is harmless, and honorable enough, and in its way just as valuable as helping them escape into it.
“Given that men have sailed the seas for thousands of years, it’s perhaps surprising how few great works of literature have been inspired by the seafaring life. Sailing may have promised adventure, but in reality it was a dangerous profession that attracted only the toughest, few of whom were equipped with a talent for writing. Their yarns remained fixed in the oral tradition, and in general, writers directed their attention elsewhere. But the exceptions are majestic.”
“Mr. Martel’s new book, “Beatrice and Virgil,” unfortunately, is every bit as misconceived and offensive as his earlier book was fetching.”
Mr. Martel’s earlier book was Life of Pi.
“War Dances” by novelist Sherman Alexie has won the 2010 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the organizers announced Tuesday.
The prestigious annual award, presented by the Washington-based PEN/Faulkner Foundation, was given to Alexie because of his book’s breadth of topics and innovative style, judges said. “War Dances” consists of short stories interspersed with poems.
“That book was the one we all liked immediately,” said Kyoko Mori, one of the three judges. “There was something special about the range of characters. It was like watching a dance. I liked how some of the characters were unlikable but compelling.”
The other finalists were Barbara Kingsolver, Lorraine M. Lopez, Lorrie Moore and Colson Whitehead.
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