reading

New reading, writing tools

November 14, 2013 | 24 Comments

On Friday, November 1, I get up and open my computer. Sure to Google’s months of warnings, iGoogle is gone. I’m flying blind.

For years, dozens of RSS feeds filled my iGoogle page—it’s the way I kept up with blogs and got news feeds. In an instant I could scan headlines, note a blogger’s new post, feel connected with the hive. Google wants its iGoogle fans to use another of its services. There’s no way.

For starters, I’m miffed. iGoogle was so perfect a reader and home page for me. Not that I ever paid for it, so how much can I fairly protest? And yet, by the end, I would have paid. (For the record.) But paying for what I’d grown to love wasn’t an option—you live by the Internet’s freebies and you die by them.

There’s all kinds of new readers. Most make the same mistake, emphasizing graphics. The beauty of iGoogle was its clarity and simplicity. Supposedly you can make Netvibes or Feedly or whatever look like iGoogle. But I fail.

Instead, I select igHome, which most resembles iGoogle. Superficially. Since it’s kind of clunky and uncool, however—like its very name—I feel even more Internet inept. And certain I’ve made a mistake. Surely igHome is doomed.

Trying to adjust to my new window on the web, it feels like my glasses prescription is from a decade ago. Everything’s a bit out of focus and less graspable. But such a problem everyone should have in this world! Complaining about igHome makes me feel worse about myself than does having picked it.

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‘Works Cited,’ a stealth memoir

August 27, 2013 | 12 Comments

My summer’s most happy reading surprise was Works Cited, a well-written memoir with a structure both clever and pleasing. Brandon Schrand hit upon the idea to tell his coming-of-age story by listing alphabetically the authors he was reading as he came to manhood, from high school through graduate school. You know, like an MLA Works Cited list. What might have been a story too mundane or too urgent with authorial desire to move us emotionally becomes, instead, a truly affecting stealth memoir by a guy who knows he escaped his fate by the skin of his teeth.

All you really need to know about Schrand, who grew up in the working-class sticks in Idaho, is that his stoner-electrician father’s nickname for him was “Bird-Turd.” He was a goofy kid, a heavy metal punk, and an awful student. But he had one great asset that saved him: he was a reader. Although he blew off assigned books, even in college, from which he dropped out and had to fight his way back, he kept finding great books and reading them. His priorities were often wrong, but they were pure.

Here he is, having blown his last $10 on a collection of Hemingway’s short stories:

“Who was that young man in that coffee shop that afternoon, and what was he feeling? A strange creature, lean and quiet, he is apologetic in his countenance. It’s a tricky business cracking open our younger selves for a peek inside, especially in vulnerable moments . . . There I sat, broke, with a copy of Hemingway’s stories. The college flunky. The dropout. It’s a wonder I bought the book at all. It’s a wonder I took the time to read it. It’s a wonder how I fell into those pages. But I did. First in that coffee shop, and then in the days and weeks and months and years that came afterward.”

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In praise of reading

August 19, 2013 | 9 Comments

Novelist Anakana Schofield’s essay in The Guardian starts with a lament about reporters’ fixation on writers as personalities and about the odd hustling landscape in which writers now dwell—

“These days, an author, especially an unknown author, must—in order to entice any readers to her work who aren’t blood relatives—write endless unpaid blogs, articles and responses for newspapers and magazines and random people creating things in basements. What results is the subsidising of publishers by outsourcing the marketing of the book to the writer, and now and again the subsidising of often giant media corporations, who in times gone by would have had to pay her.”

—and builds to a powerful statement about the primacy of reading:

“There seems to have been a shift from a reading culture to a writing culture, a diminishment of critical space for the contemplation of literature. Writing needs to be discussed and interrogated through reading. If you wish to write well, you need to read well, or at least widely. You certainly need to contemplate reading a book in translation, unlikely to be widely reviewed in newspapers, many of which are too busy wasting space on “how to write” tips and asking about an author’s personal fripperies. It’s a great deal more fulfilling to read and think about a fine book than to attempt to write one.”

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Solnit redux & a sociopath’s story

August 14, 2013 | 10 Comments

My wife and I listened to 2.4 audio books last week as we drove to California on vacation. We put 4,000 miles on our rental car, one way. We saw lovely things, like the Painted Desert, the Petrified Forest, and the red cliffs of Sedona, Arizona, where we rested up for a day. Then the endless Mojave Desert of Arizona-California caused me to whimper. While it did break my spirit, I dispute my wife’s assertion—however funny her impersonation of me—that I became catatonic as I drove. But look, I’m a once and future southern boy, a child of green and humid places. When the bare earth between plants stretches to more than a few feet, I get queasy.

Anyway, given the vast ranges we traversed in Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, you’d think we would have made more of a dent in the pile of audio books I checked out from the library. We started with a short work, David Sedaris’s Holidays on Ice, most of which we’d heard on NPR over years—though I had to wonder if we’d really ever heard all of his famous story about working as a Macy’s elf: like the rest of the collection, it’s hilarious but far sadder and darker than I remembered, maybe an effect of listening to one Sedaris story after another.

The bulk of the trip we spent with the dozen or so CDs of Bill Bryson’s At Home: A Short History of Private Life, which is history for us ordinary folk who haven’t always paid close attention to history—because history sometimes requires that you know more history than you do. Bryson read it himself, and we loved his arch delivery, even if I never could reconcile his ritzy British accent with his photos that show him as the ruddy, beefy man from Iowa that he is. We finished up, driving through California’s fecund central valley, a true agrarian Eden, with Jennifer Egan’s remarkable novel A Visit from the Goon Squad. What a talent she is. One day I’ll finish this book, but I did hear enough to learn that the goons are a wonderful metaphor for aging.

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Ray Bradbury: “Style is truth”

August 3, 2013 | 6 Comments

I’m on the road as I post this, headed for Berkeley, California, where our son is entering graduate school; one of my sisters just moved across the way, to San Francisco. My wife and I are driving cross country from Ohio. An adventure! We’ve stopped for the night in Miami, Oklahoma, which is hot and crowded with casinos. I feel at home, though, because the folks are friendly and because my Mom was from Oklahoma. This afternoon in central Missouri I knew we were getting into the West because when we stopped in the backwater of Buffalo for a soda, I noticed in the McDonald’s a row of stools had real leather kids’ saddles for seats.

We reserved a modest vehicle for this trip, but the guy at the rental company said we’d probably be uncomfortable crossing the desert and might have difficulty getting over the mountains. In fact, he implied, we might die. So we rented, for only $20 more a day, a huge (to us) Lincoln Navigator. It is black, and terrifying. We feel like real Americans at last. But will we be safe in San Francisco ensconced in such an SUV? We look like Secret Service, or drug dealers. Or both.

I’m working on a book review on the road, and meantime here is a summer roundup of stuff I’ve found interesting.

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How should you read a book?

July 11, 2013 | 15 Comments

As the opening sentences of her famous essay on reading show, Virginia Woolf is highfalutin only to those who haven’t read her. As always, her chatty offhand charm and modesty impress and please. The humbling phase comes when you re-read, and see how simple she’s made complex matters, yet how rounded, deep, and full her expression.

I turned again to “How Should One Read a Book?” because after a while a reviewer tends to ask himself what he thinks he’s doing. What’s fair? Relevant? This weighed on me in wondering how to assess, for my recent review, Ted Kerasote’s Pukka’s Promise: The Quest for Longer-Lived Dogs. I found this fine book marred by one major flaw in Kerasote’s judgment. I was uncertain how serious my disagreement is for the book, and puzzled by the issues it raised for reviewing in general.

I love Woolf’s unabashed passion and how it endorses one’s own deeply personal emotional response to literature—which, after all, is made from emotion. Engendering an emotional response is its very purpose.

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Swamped by ‘Infinite Jest’

January 11, 2013 | 13 Comments

On failing to finish David Foster Wallace’s masterpiece novel.   Carry nothing even remotely vegetabalish if in the path of a feral herd. —Infinite Jest To paraphrase Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven, “It’s a terrible thing to quit a book. To take from it less than it has to give.” I don’t believe that about books—we should quit any one that’s not working for us and start another—but David Foster Wallace’s 1,079-page novel Infinite Jest is a special case. And I’ve …

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