Bookloft Staff Picks

Why do I set up this (false) dichotomy of fiction-slash-nonfiction? Isn’t it just a spurious argument to say that they are different species?  Or that one should dominate the other?  Eat the other’s lunch? [Or breakfast? John McPhee: "Nonfiction---what the hell, that just says, this is nongrapefruit we're having this morning. It doesn't mean anything. You had nongrapefruit for breakfast; think how much you know about that breakfast."  The Paris Review, Spring 2010]  Can’t we all just get along?  Aren’t fiction & nonfiction all just writing?  And why start this screed with a bunch of questions?  Does this have something to do with the question mark at the end of “Clash of the Titans”?   Isn’t there some echo in there of Chariots of the Gods?, the UFO book that years ago called into question its own thesis of the “reality” that They Have Landed?  Isn’t that Part Duh kinda reduh-duh?  Duh?  Aren’t I just stating the obvious?  Are ve getting tired of zeez qvestions?

I know I am, so I’ll just start up with some answers. It goes without saying that fiction is as viable & valid as nonfiction as a written means of conveying reality, oops—”reality,” especially the human one(s). The (spurious) question/argument springs from my sometimes-real dissatisfaction with what “the novel” gives me, the sense that it isn’t true-to-life, is just a construct (accent on the con) that draws our attention away from what’s really important or interesting, that it’s an escape & mere entertainment. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, as the open-minded Seinfeldians say, it’s just that it should also be something more than that. Added to this blague (my idiosyncratic, multilingual use of this word, I’ll explain later) is the time-sense, ever-present in this aging brain, that whatever fiction I read better be worth the time it takes me to read it. Maybe that’s the crux—don’t we all feel that crux?

And I know this my feeling of anxious dissatisfaction stems from a specific time & a particular person’s question put to me. For a while I was in the rotation of booksellers who appear on Public Radio station WAMC’s Roundtable program to introduce & discuss new, worthy books. On what was very likely my last appearance there, I had my usual raft of super-juicy & wonderful new books to talk to Susan Arbetter & Joe Donahue about & I was going along swimmingly in my usually dorky radio-voice (talk about anxious dissatisfaction), guiltily praising the latest gut-busting, swinging-for-the-fences magnum opus from my professed favorite writer Thomas Pynchon, his Against the Day (Penguin Press) being my 1036-page Exhibit A.  And then Susan reasked me a question on the air about AtD (& perhaps big novels in general) that has haunted me—no, not that much, but I’ve replayed this question in my mind often, & because I have a recording of my segment I can literally replay the question over & over— & it was: “I asked you if you were a better person”—chuckles from Joe—”after having read this book.”  And I, duh, said something like, I don’t know how it’s improved me, but if you can be improved by laughing & by learning something about a time in history that you didn’t know anything about, then, uh yeah (etc) & then we wrapped it up by saying it’s a book that you can get lost in on those long winter nights & we made it sound only marginally better than freezing to death. [I'm not sure it's a valid question---I don't see or hear a question mark--- or even why Susan asked it, but how about this?:]  It’s like asking how useful poetry is & the answer Billy Collins gave once, something like it’s surely useful if you’ve got a poem written as directions to assemble a child’s swingset.  Forget mere functionality; fiction’s form & function is to give pleasure & we shouldn’t ask any more of it than that, though it will give historical knowledge, insight into humanity’s vast range of characters & other peripheral advantages (betterments), maybe an improved vocabulary.  I can’t claim to be a better person after having read a novel—that’s ridiculous, Susan was just sandbagging me—but I can say if I liked it or if it gave me aesthetic pleasure or even if it made time pass pleasantly. An insight to Susan’s question: her last name is Arbetter, so maybe that’s why her question “Are (you) better” formed itself that way, when she was really asking something more like “Is this book worth your time to read?” And then one might say, given the near-infinite scheme of things to do, short of saving the world, yes, not really, & like a Beckett character you’ll still go on with your words, reading & writing (in my case) inextricably intertwined.  But keeping your expectations very low. [In the immortal words of Bob Dylan's great Basement Tapes & its song "Nothing Was Delivered": "Nothing is better, / nothing is best. / Take care of yourself, / get plenty rest."] So there; take a break.  Nothing is better [Interestingly, Sony Music has now pulled this YouTube clip, so truly now 'Nothing is delivered' here...]

[But before I polish up (off?) fiction's brief, I should say that I often feel better informed while reading nonfiction, especially the periodical kind, & that the best of it conveys a personality & a humanity, a breathing presence, in addition to just the facts, that one may get in a well-written novel.]

The best novel I’ve read recently (& so the best example) is The Ask (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) by Sam Lipsyte. While it may not be the casual reader’s cup of poison, it does have novelistic elements that I like: a first-person narrator, wicked wit & a satisfying ending. Milo Burke is an unemployed underdog at his nadir who gets a chance at regaining his job as a Mediocre University fund-raising officer if he can successfully ask an old college buddy for a big-money donation. The simple plot is centered nicely on this deed & its enablers/frustraters (co-workers, family, bankrollers) & Lipsyte carries it off with his “chewy, corrosive” (EW) language. It is truth-telling & wincingly funny.

And that satisfying ending I (didn’t) mention—no spoiler-alert needed here—is the sense of escape that rounds out a novel nicely, as in Huck Finn “lighting out for the territory” or, if I remember correctly, the main character’s ascent, at the end of Tom Robbins’ Another Roadside Attraction, beyond the stratusphere in a weather balloon. A satisfying ending is a Big Deal to me (to us all?) in the novel-reading world; it really is the crux upon which is hung the determination of a novel’s worth, I think, & it can take almost any form, from an old-fashioned author’s envoy (“Goe then, booke”) to a suspenseful, modern fragmentation or breaking-off of the story, as in Gravity’s Rainbow or the ultimate ending of  The Sopranos  in unbelievable “Don’t stop”—  (Some people hated that, I know, but I just had to laugh in delight at David Chase’s audacity.)

Of course, probably my favorite masterpiece ending of all is the last scene of Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (very dramatic & historic), or maybe the last words of Molly Bloom’s interior monologue in Ulysses or even Joyce’s ultra-tease at the end of Finnegans Wake where he obliges us to link the last words to the book’s beginning words & to start reading it all over again.  This is All Too Much, of course, but a sense of surfeit is far preferable to the more common sense I get these days from novels whose authors have rushed the ending (at the request of their bottom-line editors/publishers?) & have somehow short-changed the logic of the story they’re telling to get the job done.  I must admit that a book I enjoyed last year, The Gate at the Stairs (Knopf) by Lorrie Moore, a favorite writer of mine, let me down in its rather rushed, unrealistic & too neat ending. It just seemed that the story required more–& I guess I really required more Moore too. Far more satisfying was my later rereading of her Collected Stories, published by Faber & Faber in England, & her novel in alternating stories Anagrams.

As a matter of fact, a popular strategy currently of some writers in their novels is to arrange them as a series of discreet stories, the most successful of those being Elizabeth Strout’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning Olive Kitteridge (Random House), & there are lots more of them on offer these days. Lorrie Moore recently recommended to The New Yorker’s readers group a story collection that reads like a novel, David Vann’s Legend of a Suicide (Harper Perennial), & a much-raved-about first novel, Tom Rachman’s The Imperfectionists (Dial Press), tells its characters’ intersecting stories in each their own chapter. How it all adds up to an enjoyable reading experience is the novel’s trick, I guess, & perhaps the looser structure & breathing space of stories gives me the sense of freedom & escape that I seem to ask of all my fiction-reading. Another great writer & example of this is Aleksandar Hemon’s Love and Obstacles (Riverhead), stories united by their common narrator into a novel’s substantial effect. Ellyne at The Bookloft really admires Hemon’s writing, as you can tell from her Staff Picks. I can’t wait to get into & out of Love and Obstacles—it looks like really ravishing reading. (By the way, Ellyne won the not-racy race to read & Staff Pick Elif Batuman’s The Possessed, mentioned in my previous post, but that’s because she’s the champion staff reader & rivals only Linda in the q & q (quantity & quality) of her Staff Picks.)

In a feeble attempt to wrap up this fabulous fiction blog-post, let me request your indulgence as I portray another recent favorite novel (not) or two & launch into a descending scale of new books I aspire to read & offer a plan as to how I might deal with them here. [But first, the blague that I mentioned awhile ago: in French it literally means a joke, & punningly borrowed into English it means the neverending blog-post characterized by anxious or unsatisfied feelings, a disquiet, that would be funny if it just got to the point (but then it wouldn't be funny), & in practice it looks like the sort of thing you see here, a neurotic dance around books in a bout of bibliomania. These foolish things remind me of ...] It was an enticing premise for a book & how could I pass it up? The Interrogative Mood: a Novel? (Ecco) by Padgett Powell is a slim novel (not) made up entirely of questions, that in its nonsequitor surrealist way tells a story & isn’t it all about you?  Doesn’t it invite both introspection & laughter & isn’t that a heady mix for any book to concoct? Why don’t you check out my imprecis—see Mark’s Staff Picks—&/or even the Sunday Book Review of the book, or by-golly just come into The Bookloft & browse the thing with your own hand-eye coordination & tell me what you think? It might even make you a better person & who could ask for anything more?

The late Gilbert Sorrentino also wrote a novel in questions, Gold Fools (Green Integer), that is an actual story of 3 teenage boy prospectors (adventure & desert gold) as well as a relentless inquiry into reality & its fictions, but I think I’ll tackle his final ‘novel’ first, The Abyss of Human Illusion (Coffee House Press), “fifty narrative set pieces full of savage humor and cathartic passion,” yet another novel-in-stories playfully ignoring novelistic conventions & showing that the novel can be almost anything.

Another just-right-sized novel of great renown, Paul Harding’s Tinkers (Bellevue Literary Press), was the surprising winner of the Big Chicken (what I like to call the Pullet Surprise) for Fiction this Spring & it just begs for attention at the top of my library stack.  Rick at The Bookloft has taken it up & confirms that the story & writing are marvelous & that he will likely Staff Pick it. [By the way, I've really got to recommend the blog/podcast Books on the Nightstand by 2 colleagues from Random House, Ann Kingman & Michael Kindness, who consistently bring interesting books & topics into discussion & feature astute bookpeople & their recommendations. A few weeks ago, after Tinkers won the big prize, they featured Melissa Klug talking about it & her job in the paper industry (podcast #73).  It's well worth checking out regularly by signing up for their email notifications when they've put forth a new podcast. Highly recommended!]

Other worthy, to my mind, short (attention span) novels are Don DeLillo’s Point Omega (Scribner) & John Banville’s latest mystery as Benjamin Black, Elegy for April (Henry Holt). I’ve also been captivated by Empty the Sun (Barnacle Books) by Joseph Mattson, a modern California noir thriller that comes with an “open-road, open-whiskey” CD soundtrack by the band Six Organs of Admittance. (I’m more of an ‘open-book, open-CD-case’ kinda guy…) I must say that the thoroughly left-field book I’m reading currently, Orion You Came and You Took All My Marbles (Milkweed Editions) by Kira Henehan, is a stunning, playful (my highest term of approbation)  not-really detective story & puzzling evidence that aliens do live among us. Henehan writes like Donald Barthelme crossed with Beckett, seasoned with Flann O’Brien. I’ve also been bothered by my promise to my Penguin salesrep to read The Breaking of Eggs by Jim Powell, a Kafkaesque fable of the fall of Eastern European communism & the publishing industry, ready to be read & blurbed before it’s published in August. & then my desire to reread the Dalkey Archive republishing of an old grad-school favorite, John Hawkes’ The Passion Artist, knows (no) bounds as I work up some Staff Pick verbiage. The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) also beckon, as does C (Knopf), a novel by Tom McCarthy (author of the knuckleball The Remainder) coming out in September. & I really want to get into Death of a Pirate: British Radio and the Making of the Information Age (Norton) by Adrian Johns, also due in the Fall; after the travesty that was the movie “Pirate Radio” last year, I’d like to see sixties pirate rock-n-roll radio treated with some seriousness & imagination, & I’m hoping this book might be it. (Though I’ve always thought it was the perfect subject for a Pynchon novel, I don’t think he’s all that interested in it.)

So you see: fiction seems to be predominant on my plate now, seasoned with select nonfiction, all keeping a precarious balance in my attention.  But here’s what I’d like to do: instead of these interminable omnibus gatherum blog-posts, I’d like to vary the postings with shorter looks at a book, maybe slightly longer than 140 characters or a Staff Pick card, & I want to call these posts Let It Blurt, after the Lester Bangs record, with the idea that these are momentary, unrevised ideas that might not yet pollute so much the blogosphere.  Let It Blurt #1 can be about one of the books mentioned above; I’d take your suggestions & try to have a more positively regular posting presence here.  If there’s anyone out there (there, here, ere, er, e), let me hear from you & maybe we can improve this thing.

As a reward for getting to the end of this, I’m leaving you with video of another Staff Pick, Jakob Dylan performing 4 songs from his new album Women & Country, Live on the Interface on Spinner.com & a fine performance it is.  I can’t curb my enthusiasm (paw-chay Larry David).

The Enthusiast @ The Bookloft

I’ve been pondering the difference in my experience of reading fiction & nonfiction… & it’s gotten to be (the pondering) a bit more than ponderous sometimes.  Over the past few months (& years), my most enjoyable reading, & the predominant part of it, has been in nonfiction, & the fiction I’ve read (with exceptions noted below) has been mostly disappointing, for larger & smaller reasons & suppositions.  When David Shields’ book Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (Knopf) came out last month & I picked it up due to the accompanying book buzz (buzz-buzz), a lot of what he was proposing struck a chord with what I’d been feeling lately while reading.   [The nut, essentially: "What I want to do is take the banality of nonfiction (the literalness of "facts," "truth," "reality"), turn that banality inside out, and thereby make nonfiction a staging area for the investigation of any claim of facts and truth, an extremely rich theater for investigating the most serious epistemological questions. The lyric essay is the literary form that gives the writer the best opportunity for rigorous investigation, because its theater is the world (the mind contemplating the world) and offers no consoling dream-world, no exit door."]  Some of us at The Bookloft have been casting this reading disappointment, or dilemma, or disagreement (or some other duh-word), as the contrast between fiction (the novel mostly) & nonfiction (biography, memoir, essays, history, dare-I-say poetry) & in my mind’s eye I’ve dramatized it as a sort of epic contest, like a Clash of the Titans, but of course it’s not like that at all.  (Though I’ve no doubt that Monty Python could totally embody & absurdize this duality wonderfully.)  No, like most conflicts, this is most interesting as an internal one… Let me see if I can characterize it sufficiently for you.

[I'm seeing now that this'll be a multi-part blog-post, so in an effort to reduce the bloggage to just two carry-ons (so to speak), I'm going to halve the discussion & book-blurbing into its nonfiction & fiction components & post the nonf-one first.]

When I was a child, I read as a child (when I wasn’t glommed onto the teevee), that is to say I wanted to read of thrilling adventures that at the same time had a familiar reality to me.  (The Hardy Boys, anyone?)  There were the occasional Rutabaga Stories (Carl Sandburg), but mostly it was (& I was) Lost on a Mountain in Maine (Donn Fendler), reading to do a dutiful book report for school.  As I got older & dumber, I sought out books (mostly fiction, as I was told ‘that’s where it’s at’) that provided a ripping yarn & also a cursory education about a profession or group of people. (Arthur Hailey, James Michener, anyone?)  Then I got totally warped at college: James Joyce laid a whammy on me, not to mention the trance-inducing firm of Hawthorne, Emerson, Melville & Thoreau, followed by Beckett, Pynchon & the other unusual suspects. Talk about getting turned around!?…  What I think has proven the decisive factor in my fiction/nonfiction whirl has been the habit I picked up early in college of getting & reading the Sunday New York Times—there‘s the bias for my reality-based reading—followed by a stream of periodicals at the headwaters of which is The New Yorker, then music magazines, then Bookforum & the NYRoB, then McSweeney’s & latterday The Believer,  then what-have-I…  Less & less time to read a novel, it seems.

All of this as preface (I warned you it was ponderous) to a 20-volume discussion of the merits of fiction versus nonfiction, ending with a final bloviation (aka philosophical meditation) on the worth of it all.  You should recognize & know that I’m of at least two minds about this supposed fiction/nonfiction opposition & that for the purposes of this argument/book-recommending-blog I’m going to cast it as a “What do I feel is worth my time to read?” discussion.  [Because I still love a well-written made-up story or novel---a great one gives me the fresh-air-flowers-blooming-in-the-spring-life-affirming endorphin rush---& I constantly turn encountered facts into potential fiction---putting words to them does it---I'm "really" essentially a fictioneer in nonfictional clothing. Or is that a nonfictionista in fictional clothing?]

In my previous posting I praised Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Crown) as perhaps the best book I’ve read in quite some time, mostly because she wrote an involving personal/social history with a novelist’s flair.  One felt the writer’s passion for her material & I (two) responded in a dialogue with the world she was presenting; the give-&-take was lively & expansive.  This is what I’m looking for when I open a book, & I’m sure most active readers would agree that making a world come alive in a well-written narrative is what they expect the best writers to do. It can be in a ‘nonfiction novel’ like Capote’s In Cold Blood or in a fictional ‘memoir’ like Nabokov’s Lolita.  There are greater & lesser gradations of commitment to style & substance, but words with life in them is what we want & need to respond to.  Skloot really brings her story home.

So what’s the problem?  Shields is put off by most fiction’s artifice in plot-construction & the falsifying if not outright deadening effect it has in portraying the wider world, especially in the pretense of a third-person narrator.  ’She-said-He-said-They-did’ is such pre-19th century dramaturgidity & Shields wants a more recombinant (mash-up) approach to writing that is “equal to the complexity of experience, memory, and thought” & that exists on the borders of fiction & reality, sometimes straddling them.  He says the lyric essay is (one of the places) where it’s at & I agree with him there.  One of my most fondly remembered books by a favorite short-story & novel writer is Julio Cortazar’s collection of vignettes with illustrations, Around the Day in Eighty Worlds (sadly now out-of-print): essays, stories, poems, surrealism. It’s a remarkable instance of a fictionista really coming to life in a multi-genre (mash-up?) journal-like-book, imagining fleeting worlds into existence with his blue guitar.

I’m going to demanifestofy this blog post now & (as my wife would insist) cut to the chase:  the books that most concern (consume?) me now & why.  Along with Shields’ Reality Hunger, there’s a raft of zeitgeisty books about new-media art & culture & its effect on people, some of which I’ve picked up.  Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget (Knopf) is a cyberspace visionary’s argument for a humanistic technology in the face of the individual’s grappling with society’s ‘hive mind’ groupthink.   Michiko (Kakutani) had some very favorable things to say about Lanier’s manifesto, as opposed to her take on Shields’ “deeply nihilistic” one ; access it by clicking on the second highlighted buzz-link in my first paragraph.  Also I rescued from The Bookloft’s return pile a fascinating, somewhat-similar brief for a humanistic-realistic arts project, David Edwards’ interdisciplinary Artscience: Creativity in the Post-Google Generation (Harvard), which has some nicely autobiographical scenes among the tech cultural history & seems movingly inspirational to boot.  [I've saved it for you; you can buy it or any of the worthies mentioned here now in person or online at The Bookloft.]

Reboot: now for a look at some truly jazzing-to-me new nonfiction titles just teetering on the edge of my reading table.  I’m virtually chomping at them, sniffing them before eating them whole.  Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace (Broadway Books) by David Lipsky takes us along on the book tour that Wallace made for his much-vaunted novel Infinite Jest. It takes the form of a transcription from Lipsky’s tape recorder & explodes the genre of author interview into a wonderfully faithful & compassionate (dispassionate?) portrait of the late, lamented light of American fiction.  (Although I must say that I more readily responded to DFW’s nonfiction collections,  A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again & Consider the Lobster, he is truly a monster writer of whatever stripe, & I’ve been told that his Big Book is well worth the time it takes to read.)  Top o’ the heap.  Another roundtable of writers talking about their work, The Secret Miracle: The Novelist’s Handbook (Holt), edited by Daniel Alarcon, under the auspices of the McSweeneyites’ 826 National writing centers, collects the email responses of a number of fine contemporary writers—Jonathan Lethem, Edwidge Danticat, Aleksandar Hemon, Stephen King, Haruki Murakami, Shelley Jackson among them—to the most common questions of craft posed to writers.  Some surprising & lively exchanges make for a kind of mega-Paris Review interview: an inspiring look behind-the-scenes at the typical fictioneer’s struggle.  And I would be remiss if I didn’t mention a neat little gift book (graduation, anyone?) that came my way, First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process (University of Iowa Press) by Robert D. Richardson, also the author of the sturdy intellectual biography Emerson: The Mind on Fire.

Breakfast with Socrates: An Extraordinary (Philosophical) Journey Through Your Ordinary Day (Free Press) by Robert Rowland Smith looks very tasty, with bite-sized (I might say) episodes of working with Nietzsche, working out with Foucault, reading with Barthes & winding up in bed with Simone de Beauvoir.  It’s friendly (very witty) & fits in the hands nicely too, as portable as a Kindle.  Anne Carson’s NOX (New Directions) is an epitaph for her late brother, in the very interesting form of an accordion of illustrated pages—photos, letters, word origins, regrets—folded into a box.  It is at once poetry, biography & art book: beautiful & strange.  John McPhee’s Silk Parachute (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) is a more wonderful than usual collection of this paragon New Yorker writer’s essays, as it has briefer autobiographical sketches folded into its mix of pieces on geology, lacrosse, fact-checking at The New Yorker, & it just brims with life.  It sometimes reminds me of another favorite New Yorker writer’s memoir, Roger Angell’s Let Me Finish. [By the way, the current issue (#192) of the Paris Review has a really candid & enjoyable interview with McPhee on the art of nonfiction, as well as an interview with s-fictioneer & teen-fave Ray Bradbury & six poems by the incomparable Charles Simic.  All of which can be sampled by clicking on www.theparisreview.org ...]

Wendell Berry is another multifaceted writer I admire for his essays (though his fiction & poetry are equally distinguished), & he has a new collection, Imagination in Place (Counterpoint), with essay/remembrances of Wallace Stegner & Gary Snyder, among others, & ending with a group of essays “Against the Nihil of the Age.”  Very grounded & straight-seeing stuff.  A book that perhaps gets at the nub of the problem this posting started considering, the fiction/nonfiction divide (though I see now it’s better viewed as a continuum than a duality) & Shields’ & Wallace’s etc. etc. disillusion or just plain boredom with fiction’s claim on “reality” (Nabokov says it should always rightly be in quotation marks), such a book is Richard Todd’s The Thing Itself: On the Search for Authenticity (Riverhead), which essays & cuts through the big topics of history & identity & contemporary culture, politics & spin, drugs & mind, ethics & nihilism, considering the choices that make us most authentically human.  Then there is the real wild card in this bunch, The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) by Elif Batuman.  The Roz Chast cover portraits of the eccentric, possessed scholars & grad students sets us up for “one of the funniest books ever written about Russian literature or grad school,” neither of which seem to me to be even slightly humorous, & yet they are!  Several of us at The Bookloft are contending with who will be the first to read & Staff Pick this worthy, brainy, funny essay-memoir, & I have the feeling that it won’t be me (witness the pile o’ books strewn about me here) & so what?  [Parenthetically, yesterday several of us Booklofters were attempting to answer the question, which of us was that day the most neurotic, & we really couldn't decide, we were all three such strong contenders, but I have to say I won.  It was a very Roz-Chasty moment.]

I see the home stretch coming & I haven’t even mentioned the new music books that’ve caught my eye.  What first drew my eye was the cover of The Blue Moment: Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue and the Remaking of Modern Music (Norton) by Richard Williams, depicting the upturned bell of a trumpet with a blue atomic explosion coming out of it—very cool.  The book itself plays very well with the cultural history of 50′s jazz, Miles in particular, & the modal break that helped usher in everything from free jazz to New Age music.  Eno & ECM are there too, along with Bill Evans & Sun Ra (talk about a pianistic time/space continuum), so this should prove to be entertaining & expansive cultural history.  I hope to improvise upon it as a jazz-book phenomenon on some future blog-date.   Dutch writer/philosopher Sytze Steenstra has newly published his “scrupulously researched & uncannily on-the-money” Song and Circumstance: The Work of David Byrne (Continuum).  Byrne’s assessment above lends this career overview a lot of credibility & the author really delivers some keen insights into this fascinating artist’s work. [By the way, Byrne's blog/website at davidbyrne.com is always of interest & details his travels & fascinations & projects in real detail.  A lot of his newish book Bicycle Diaries (Viking) is drawn from his online journal; it's about much more than getting around by bike in cities & has a breathless, wide-eyed tone that makes me hear his voice as I read it, & it has a deadpan-hilarious author photo to boot!  He's always struck me as being admirably, artistically adventurous & authentically off-the-wall...]   I’m eagerly anticipating (with reservations) the new David Byrne / Fatboy Slim musical theatre project (without the theatre) on Imelda Marcos, titled Here Lies Love (Nonesuch).  With a 120-page book & 2 CD’s & a DVD, it promises to be an extravaganza like Byrne used to do with Robert Wilson, but with a disco beat.  Put on your dancing shoes—sorry.  [Reality Note: April 17th is Record Store Day & I hope to put on my walking shoes & support my local, independent record store (quaint retro misnomer) by picking up the Byrne/Slim piece, as well as other notable Nonesuch releases & serendipitous discoveries, at Tune Street in Great Barrington (www.tunestreetgb.com), a fine establishment & a real audio-visual experience.]

Greil Marcus is an always-interesting music critic & cultural writer; he has a spanking-new book, When That Rough God Goes Riding: Listening to Van Morrison (Public Affairs).  This brief book is at once a Van-the-man career-overview & a close-listening to his signature songs. Marcus’s approach is especially illuminating of this somewhat-hermetic-or-inscrutable musician’s world & work; he tells me things I didn’t know about a mid-period Morrison (1979) favorite, Into the Music, “And the Healing Has Begun,” & the liberating interplay he had with his virtuoso string-player Toni Marcus.  Dense & delightful, Greil Marcus always is.  Then I finally pulled out of my stack of publisher catalogs the Continuum Spring 2010 book-list, to see that Peter Mills’ Hymns to the Silence: Inside the Words and Music of Van Morrison is newly-published as a paperback original (god bless the pbo’s) & looks in-depth & fascinating.  Continuum’s music books are continuually (consistently?) top-drawer & its 33 1/3 series of ‘short books about critically acclaimed & much-loved albums of the past 40 years’—77 strong—is a music-mad reader’s dream.  I still flash occasionally on an old Staff Pick of mine, John Niven’s novelisation of The Band’s Music from Big Pink (33 1/3), as a faithful real-life novel & the way things could have happened.  Witness that among & between last year’s Brian Eno’s Another Green World by Geeta Dayal & this year’s forthcoming Van Dyke Parks’ Song Cycle by Richard Henderson, there’s still a lot of written rumination/cultural history/imagination to plump into discreet little record books.  (Have you ever thought “I could write a book” about a favorite record, like…oh, I don’t know…The Mothers of Invention’s Uncle Meat?  Me neither.)

I must stop now & regroup (as in learning how to break up these blox of text into more shall-we-say lyrical, paragraphical essays), so that I may drop the other shoe of this one-two nonfiction-vs-fiction shuffle, which I guess I’ll call Fiction vs. Nonfiction: Clash of the Titans? Part Duh.  There I will put my spin on the so-called ‘failure of fiction,’ the triumph of marketing, & my past, current & expected future experiences of the novel & my ‘expense of spirit’ & time ‘in a waste of shame,’ to quote the Bard.  It goes without saying, it’s not as great as it seems, says your somewhat worn-out Enthusiast @ The Bookloft.

[Now I put on my real shoes & hustle on down to my local independent store to show support by buying the music & books that so consume me. You may pick up any worthies mentioned here now at The Bookloft during store hours or virtually whenever online at The Bookloft.]  E@TB

It’s really wonderful when the Enthusiast can share his excitement & admiration for a book or a subject with a colleague.  It’s especially nice when, in my role as senior bookbuyer, my intuition that a forthcoming book would meet up with an enthusiastic reader on staff prompts me to get an advance copy for that coworker, who really loves the book & tells me excitedly about it, to the point that I have to read it too & end up really liking it as well.  That’s a big payoff & it really happened big-time with Linda, our science & biography reader (& so much else) at The Bookloft & The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. (Read Linda’s Staff Picks at  Linda’s Picks.)

Rebecca Skloot’s remarkable real-life story, published last month by Crown after her decade-plus spent researching & writing the book, is an amazing, emotional & eye-opening tale of the life (& immortality) of an African-American woman whose cells were taken during her cancer treatment in the early 1950′s.  What was done with her cells & how they attained immortality (& notoriety) & what was not done for her family makes for an extraordinary reading experience.  Skloot’s close involvement with the Lacks family to tell Henrietta’s & their stories has resulted in a sensitive drama told with novelistic sweep.  At the heart of the book is Henrietta’s daughter Deborah, whose turmoil & passionate curiosity about the mother she lost as an infant makes the story so poignant & drives it suspensefully forward, inspiring ‘her reporter’ Rebecca to craft this fascinating narrative.

As Linda says in her Staff Pick card, this book is written “with compassion & a thorough sense of the scientific implications” of the experimentation done in the past on patients without their informed consent, & Skloot “has brought justice to this issue” by telling the Lacks family story with such clarity & emotional sympathy.  When I read of Henrietta’s treatment & death in the ‘colored’ ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital & her family’s subsequent bereft & drifting decades, I couldn’t help thinking that her unwitting sacrifice & the development of her cells into the predominant disease research medium & a very big business, compared with her family’s poor health care & near destitution, starkly dramatized the inequalities of race & our country’s troubled health care system.  Not that her family ever had any legal claim to benefits from the HeLa cells business, but I couldn’t help thinking of moral & social-justice implications of the family situation.  Skloot fills in the backgrounds of the controversy & the (mostly lacking) legal protections of individuals in the realms of disease treatments & research; she shows that there are no easy answers.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is the standout nonfiction title of the new year.  (Buy It Now at #mce_temp_url#.)  It’s compelling reading beyond any entertainment-expectation & it’s a book with a lot of heart that makes you think seriously of the wider world.  Also, considering the realm of books & my recent novel-reading experiences (not good), it has made me weigh the relative merits of reading fiction versus nonfiction.  As I ponder this, while reading David Shields’ Reality Hunger: A Manifesto & talking with folks at the store about what their most satisfying reading experiences have been (& what the most frustrating), I’ve set myself up for a next-blog discussion of today’s fiction vs. nonfiction books: what they promise & what they deliver, authenticity & contrivance, truth & claptrap, & the entertainment value in each.

In the meantime, you may contribute your thoughts on The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks & the fiction/nonfiction divide, perhaps about a fine novel you’ve recently read; the Enthusiast @ the Bookloft is always interested to hear your responses, come what may.

I’m psyched about local artist & friend-of-the-store Walton Ford’s new edition of his PANCHA TANTRA, which has just arrived at The Bookloft.  The publisher Taschen has done a beautiful job of replicating its awesomely huge limited-edition monograph of 2 years ago in a smaller but still breathtaking hardcover.  It’s as we say a coffee-table book (11 x 14.8 in.) of 320 pages & it’s spectacular.  Walton’s bestial tableaux practically leap off the pages & the level of detail we see in the reproductions is awe-inspiring.  I remember seeing his show a few years back at the Brooklyn Museum & being absolutely blown away by the scale & color & the sheer achievement of his watercolors. The big PANCHA TANTRA edition sits like a Buddha in my home library & I think this sibling (lighter & more affordable at $70) wears its lineage equally worthily.

Walton’s agreed to come by The Bookloft to sign some copies in 2 weeks, on Friday, Sept. 25th at 7 p.m.  If you’re in Great Barrington then, you should stop by to meet the artist & see the repros of his work in the book.  (Signed copies will be in limited supply, so if you really want one & you’re unable to get here then, I’d suggest you call us at The Bookloft–413-528-1521–to order one sent to you.)  Walton’s an affable & animated guy, so it’ll be fun to have him here doing his artist-signing-his-book thing.

[I should mention another recent Taschen book of great size & importance that also landed at The Bookloft last month, namely the Artist Edition of Norman Mailer's MOONFIRE. It's limited to 1,969 copies & sells for $1000 (the dozen copies that have an actual moonrock in them are priced astronomically higher, & of course we don't have those)--the  lunar-landing-module-sized copies we have contain a plexiglass-framed, ready-to-hang, archival-quality photographic print signed by Buzz Aldrin.  The photos are from NASA's archives & are just stunning, & Mailer's text comes from his Apollo 11 reportage Of a Fire on the Moon. This commemorates one of the more important & memorable events of 40 years ago...]

Last post I said there’s an incredible number of noteworthy books by good-to-great writers coming out in the 2nd half of 2009 & to keep a lookout here for this parade under the banner of Here Comes Everybody. Now it’s started & the grand marshall is Thomas Pynchon‘s INHERENT VICE, his stoned-soul beach-read of a detective novel, published today by Penguin Press. Before I launch into blurby verbiage, you should pause to sample the promo video from the publisher (voiced by the author?) via YouTube:

(A fellow Booklofter–thank you, Rick– told me of WIRED magazine’s interactive Google-mapped web article “The Unofficial Thomas Pynchon Guide to Los Angeles” where I clicked on ‘Pynchon’s home?’ & found the Penguin Press promo ad posted today, featuring a narrator sounding awfully like the Simpson’s Pynchon of several years ago.) Intriguing… & a really cool teaser/intro to the book, even if it’s not the author acting as his main character.

INHERENT VICE finds Thomas Pynchon back in California circa 1970. It’s not a baggy monster like his masterworks, but it has the same DNA (Do Nothing Average) as those awesome adventures & forms a loose trilogy as a hybrid of the psychedelic THE CRYING OF LOT 49 & the more sinister VINELAND. ‘Doc’ Sportello is our laid-back hippie P.I. narrator, on a breezy tour of beach shacks, surf-rockers’ mansions, Mansonized paranoia (you knew it would be here, didn’t you?) & the outer-limits hallucinations of America as it skews weirder from wonderful. The plot has shaggy-dog hairs all over it, but it ostensibly deals with the search for a missing billionaire, his shady real estate developments, dopers & detectives & assistant DA’s, with the odd resurrected surf sax player thrown in. It reads like Cheech & Chong & Chandler, & sounds like a classic Firesign Theatre record, i.e. stoned wordplay, ‘What’s Up, Doc?’ cartoony characters abound, with the heady, high-low, trademark Pynchon mix spiked with even more sex, drugs & surfin’ tunes. Enough… just dig this: Pynchon’s written a great summer beach read—Far out!

The critics are weighing in on this ‘lighter fare’ genre entertainment & I must say that I found another favorite writer Louis Menand‘s review in the August 3rd NEW YORKER to be especially illuminating about the Raymond Chandler private eye’s personal code of honor & other genre conventions & how Pynchon plays with them. Other reviewers invoke the Coen brothers’ THE BIG LEBOWSKI & that seems an entirely right-on comparison to me too. I’d be interested to hear how you view this Pynchonian ‘departure’ & how you think it compares to his other California novels.

The Enthusiast @ The Bookloft

Looking for a great read?

The Bookloft, located in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, has been a vibrant independent bookstore in the heart of New England for 35 years. Welcome to our new Staff Picks site, an integral part of our new web initiative to reach people searching for information and opinions about some of the great books being published these days. We have a staff of avid readers and our Staff Picks section has been a popular one in the store.

We, here at The Bookloft, read what we sell and love sharing our comments about particular books with our customers. A great many of you are already familiar with our Staff Picks and some of you have even found that one individual bookseller’s choice of reading has a particular appeal for you. If you are visiting the Berkshires, we hope you’ll visit the store. We’ll be happy to talk about our favorite reads (and yours!). If you can’t make it to the store, check out our ever-expanding selection of staff book reviews online.

What does our staff like?

Owner Eric: The big guy (he’s really tall), loves good fiction, often with a bent towards the gritty side of life. His favorite authors include Richard Russo, Annie Proulx, and Peter Matthiessen. His shelves at home are filled with books about the natural world (he makes maple syrup and keeps bees on his small farm). Wendell Berry is a favorite.

Co-owner Ev: Married to the big guy above, Ev is a writer herself. She reads a lot of contemporary fiction and is especially drawn to imaginatively written novels and stories that explore the far horizons of our thoughts and the complicated depths of our hearts.

Manager Mark: The literary giant in the store – as well as our musical guru. He’s as comfortable with Dylan Thomas as he is with Bob Dylan. He devours Thomas Pynchon (the subject of his Master’s thesis) and Don DeLillo. But give him Ry Cooder’s new musical/book combo or Al Kooper’s latest bio and he’s ready to rock and roll!

Assistant Manager Kat: Our children’s book buyer. She prefers reading children’s books over “grown-up” books because she feels the emotions portrayed in children’s books are more raw, more important, and closer to real life. Her adult reading preference tends towards the sciences.

Ellen: Doesn’t like to be pigeon-holed. She reads from all genres. Her only requirement – it must be well-written or she’s not going to put her stamp of approval on it!

Ellyne: Also a writer, Ellyne’s appreciates superbly crafted fiction – the stuff that creates Man Booker Prize winners. She also has a penchant for stories and history about NYC – a place she dearly loves.

Lauren: What attracts her in books are the words – words used well with a clarity and depth that push her further into life than she’s ever been before.

Linda: Our resident naturalist is most at home in her pick-up truck, arm-deep in her garden’s soil, or walking her hound in the woods. Her preferences are books on nature, animals and plants, along with a big dollop of history. She also loves a good mystery!

Rick: Our marketing guy is an enigma (especially to himself). He reads whatever strikes his fancy at the moment – that’s why he has so many books piled up on his nightstand! His only criteria for a staff pick – it’s got to make you stop and think!

With the click of your mouse, you’ll soon be able to order any of our recommended titles!