Citizen Reader

David Denby, you're the most boring man alive.

And if you want to call that snark, that's okay with me.

David Denby is one of those nonfiction authors I keep trying, even though I've never, ever read anything of his that made me say, "Yeah, that's right!" He's a film critic for The New Yorker magazine, which goes a long way toward explaining why I never really find anything I like reading in The New Yorker.

His latest book is titled Snark: It's Mean, It's Personal, and It's Ruining Our Conversation. Denby spends 128 pages describing what he thinks is and isn't snark, which he defines as "a strain of nasty, knowing abuse spreading like pinkeye through the national conversation--a tone of snarking insult provoked and encouraged by the new hybrid world of print, television, radio, and the Internet." Of course that's not all there is to it; he goes on for some time describing what snark ISN'T (it's not Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert; it's not Internet "trolls," it's not irreverence or spoof.)

I'd like to offer a better overview of Denby's premise, but I think the major weakness of his work is that he never really gets around to explaining it himself. Instead he gets all sanctimonious, at the end of his first chapter:

"We are in a shaky moment, a moment of transition, and I think it's reasonable to ask: What are we doing to ourselves? What kind of journalistic culture do we want?...Journalism is a vast sea of good and bad, but surely some demands can be made, and the distinction between toughness and cynicism, incisiveness and fatuous sarcasm, satire and free-floating cruelty--these are differences worth fighting for in any medium."

Whatever, Mr. Denby. Methinks someone sniffed a market for erudite earnestness (also known as the same people who purchased Harry Frankfurt's dreadfully dull but creatively titled books On Bullshit and On Truth) and decided to exploit it for all it was worth. I expected no less of the man who wrote Great Books, one of the few boring books about books I've ever read, a compilation of his not-so-fascinating remarks on the great books of Western civilization, and American Sucker, about his adventures losing money in the stock market he wasn't smart enough to exploit before the dot-com bubble burst.* I don't care if you need the money, Mr. Denby, but for once would you consider selling out by writing an interesting book?

Yes, this is all very snarky. And I'm doing it on the Internet, on one of those disgusting snarky little blogs. So be it. Not all of us can luck onto film reviewing gigs because we were disciples of Pauline Kael.

*I probably shouldn't be so mean about this. He got into the stock market because he was going through a messy divorce and wanted to make enough money to be able to buy his wife's half of their New York apartment so he could stay in it.

Shameless self promotion: continued.

So are any of you librarian types out there going to the big ALA conference in Chicago this upcoming weekend?

If so, I certainly hope you have a great time. And, somewhere in between the sessions and the networking and the sneaking out of the conference to go eat in good Chicago restaurants, might I make a small suggestion? Please do pop by the ABC-CLIO booth in the Exhibits (they're in booth #3918, I'm informed) and see all the new readers' advisory books that Libraries Unlimited has published in the last year.

In addition to new guides for historical and women's fiction, I'm very excited to announce that my new book, The Inside Scoop: A Guide to Nonfiction Investigative Writing and Exposes,* will be there! This is really exciting to me (not only because it means I'm done writing that book, whew), but because it means that the Libraries Unlimited Real Stories series is now a reality. Just like LU's Genreflecting series, these books will examine different genres and types of nonfiction, and I say, it's about time too. Also at this conference will be Rick Roche's brand spanking new book Real Lives Revealed: A Guide to Reading Interests in Biography,** which I am dying to get a look at. So please do stop by the booth and check out these new guides--I'd love to hear what you think of them!

Also, don't be shy about asking anyone in the booth to show you their spectacular reading database, the Readers' Advisor Online. I've spent some time in the LU booth in the past and everyone who works there is always so, so nice, and they'd love to show you what they've got, and answer any questions.

And, of course, have a good conference. Safe travels!

*My first Libraries Unlimited book, The Real Story: A Guide to Nonfiction Reading Interests; will be at the conference at well; Jessica Zellers's Real Stories book Women's Nonfiction: A Guide to Reading Interests, will be published later this year.

**I intend to talk more about Rick's book after I've seen it--it's just been published.

I'm officially giving up on Michael Chabon.

I am officially giving up on Michael Chabon. If I never, ever have to read anything the guy writes ever again, I will be one happy camper.

I didn't want it to be this way. I loved the movie Wonder Boys (although I don't think I ever did get around to reading the book) and people I know and respect keep liking his books, so I keep trying to like him. I've tried several times to make it past the first thirty pages of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, and I made it all the way through his action adventure historical fiction title Gentlemen of the Road (which he originally wanted to title "Jews with Swords"). I've tried. But they don't do anything for me. And I'm so confused by the very concept of The Yiddish Policemen's Union, which seems to be about Judaism but has cover art that signals a Native American theme and which is evidently set in Alaska, that I didn't even bother starting it.

So I was very excited to see that he had a new nonfiction collection out, titled Maps and Legends. At last, I thought. Maybe I'll have a fighting chance of understanding his nonfiction writing. It's a book about writing and reading, so naturally I thought I would find a lot to love in it.*

But, sadly, the Curse of Chabon continues, and I have decided I have to stop trying to read him or I'm going to end up hating him as if I knew him personally. Normally I don't have a problem describing what I don't like about authors, but with Chabon I'm at a loss. Take the opening sentence of his opening essay, titled "Trickster in a Suit of Lights: Thoughts on the Modern Short Story":

"Entertainment has a bad name. Serious people learn to mistrust and even to revile it. The word wears spandex, pasties, a leisure suit studded with blinking lights."

Now that's okay. That's good, evocative writing, and I'm with him. But the high doesn't last for long. Before I know it, he's on to a paragraph like this one:

"...I read for entertainment, and I write to entertain. Period. Oh, I could decoct a brew of other, more impressive motivations and explanations. I could uncork some stuff about reader response theory, or the Lacanian parole. I could go on about the storytelling impulse and the need to make sense of experience through story. A spritz of Jung might scent the air. I could adduce Kafka's formula: "A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul.' I could go down to the cafe at the local mega-bookstore and take some wise words of Abelard or Koestler about the power of literature off a mug. But in the end--here's my point--it would still all boil down to entertainment, and its suave henchman, pleasure. Because when the axe bites the ice, you feel an answering throb of delight all the way from your hands to your shoulders, and the blade tolls like a bell for miles."

What I was going to say was that I get bored of that paragraph in the middle, just like I get bored in the middle of all his paragraphs. But then as I typed it I started to get it, just a little bit. But not enough to like it. So I think this is a case where I am too lazy for the author, and me not liking him is not his fault. I'm sure Chabon'll be able to sleep easier at night, knowing that.

*I don't know what is up with Mr. CR and his willingness to look at nonfiction lately. When I told him this book wasn't for me, he said, "Yeah, I looked at it too, but...seemed like a good concept, but most of it was just really boring."

Not your typical cozy British village.

Good lord, if you've got any kind of trend toward depression, don't pick up Nicola Monaghan's The Killing Jar.

Monaghan's slim novel is set on a council estate* in the British city of Nottingham, where life's anything but cozy cups of tea and Miss Marples and Christmas crackers and any other jolly British stereotype you can come up with. This novel is filled with poor people, mothers addicted to heroin ("brown") who can't be bothered to care for their children, and children themselves who start selling drugs and living together as young teens to form their own family units in lieu of any kind of other normal childhood and young adulthood.

And yet? I really, really liked it. I liked Monaghan's main character, Kerrie-Ann Hill (most frequently called "Kez"), even though or perhaps she grew up in a shitty world and did what she could to survive, including falling in love with Mark Scotland, her childhood friend and, in the beginning, a fairly sweet guy who looked after her younger brother when she got sent to the British equivalent of juvie and her mother spent most of her time high.

But I'm not going to kid you. It is a relentlessly dreary novel. If you don't think you can stomach reading about junkies and beatings and people who never stop letting other people down, I can't recommend it. But it does offer moments like this:

"They reckon you feel love in your heart but that's bollocks. True love, the type what strikes you down and makes you change forever, you feel that kind of love in every fucking organ inside you. Liver, kidneys, heart, and spleen. Every tiny cell what makes up your brain and your spine, your bones and blood and muscles. It keens through you." (p. 270.)

Oh, that gave me shivers. That gave me Emily Bronte-esque shivers, the way I shivered when I first read Wuthering Heights and found Cathy's monolgue about Heathcliff: "My love for Heatcliff is like the eternal rocks below, a source of little visible pleasure, but necessary."

*Evidently council estates in Great Britain are the equivalent of our "projects" here, found in urban areas. If you'd like to see what they look like, check out an episode of Shameless, which is set on a council estate (in Manchester, I think) and leaves VERY little to the imagination.

Last of its kind.

For years Nick Hornby wrote a column in The Believer magazine about his monthly reading habits; in each column he would list the books he bought that month, the books he read (and those two lists seldom corresponded), and then shared his thoughts about what he was reading. Because he is British, he also somehow managed to work tidbits about the soccer matches he was watching into every column.* Previously, two books collecting his monthly pieces had been published, titled The Polysyllabic Spree and Housekeeping vs. the Dirt. Both were highly enjoyable reads.

So it's no surprise that Hornby's gone back to the well one last time, and published his last collection of Believer columns under the title Shakespeare Wrote for Money. (Subtitled: Two Years of Reading Begat by More Reading, Presented in Easily Digestible, Utterly Hysterical Monthly Installments.) And it truly is the last of its kind, as Hornby has stopped writing his column for the magazine (as of September 2008).

I don't know why he's stopping, but one guess is because, like anything else, it feels like the column has run its course. Although this was a very enjoyable read, I just don't think I enjoyed it the same way I enjoyed the first two books. Although this volume does have a hilarious introduction by Sarah Vowell, proving to me that I do like Sarah Vowell, just in small doses, and flashes of hilarity are still there, it just doesn't have that kick. Also, Hornby continues the Believer's policy of not sharing the titles of books he really disliked, which bugged me in the first and second volumes and continues to bug me, because I think it's dishonest.

But I'd still recommend it. For one thing, in this volume, Hornby discovers the entire genre of YA fiction, and is shocked by how much he loves it, and it's always fun to watch a passionate reader discover a new love (he read such books as M.T. Anderson's Feed and David Almond's Skellig, although I'm disappointed he never made it to John Green's Looking for Alaska). For another, parts of it are still just very, very good:

"I recently discovered that when my friend Mary has finished a book, she won't start another for a couple of days--she wants to give her most recent reading experience a little more time to breathe, before it's suffocated by the next. This makes sense, and it's an entirely laudable policy, I think. Those of us who read neurotically, however--to ward off boredom, and the fear of our own ignorance, and our impending deaths--can't afford the time." (p. 97.)

I hope you get some time this weekend for yourself, to read neurotically. Have a happy Fourth, everyone.

*The lust for soccer is one of the few attributes of the British soul that I don't understand. I have this theory that soccer is how Britons relase their aggression, just like I believe hockey is an outlet for Canadians, and Americans have, you know, handguns and shopping in Wal-Mart on the day after Thanksgiving.

Helene Hanff Portrait Update.

Many thanks to "Catherine from Oz," who commented yesterday and shared a URL where many more portraits by the artist Elena Gaussen can be found--including two portraits of Helene Hanff* that I'd never seen. Thanks, Catherine! I'm glad someone out there knows how to use this fancy thing called "the Internet."

In other news, today is the first day I'll be posting over at BookNinja, although actually we got started yesterday, because evidently we're all go-getters. Except, oh yeah, I'm not a go-getter. I have a feeling I'm out of my depth around the other bloggers, who seem very up on book news (and also know their way around the Internet, as several of them have referenced their RSS feeds, which I am personally too lazy to set up). So wish me luck.

*My favorite is the portrait of her in her home office, surrounded by books.

Anything but gone tomorrow.

Although Mr. CR would beg to differ, I'm really not a hard girl to please when it comes to movies.* I have two criteria that are crucial to my enjoyment of a film: that movies be the right length (meaning, unless they have a spectacularly complex story or otherwise merit it, they not be longer than 90 minutes--VERY FEW movies need to be longer than 90 minutes), and that I think about the movie the next day. If I give the movie a bit of thought the next day, that counts as a movie I've enjoyed.

To some extent, these criteria work with books too. Very few books need to be longer than 250 pages long, and if I think about them as I go about my life, well then, I've enjoyed that book. One novel I've read this summer that I've particularly enjoyed (and I know I enjoyed it because I've thought about it a lot since reading it) was P. F. Kluge's Gone Tomorrow. I actually finished this one a month ago but have been sitting on it until I had time to write a "really good post" about it.

Yeah, well, I guess I'm figuring out that's not going to happen. (Either on the time or quality scale.) The story's set on a small liberal arts college campus in Ohio, where the author George Canaris has taught most of his life, where he's pushed into early retirement, and where he dies. When the book opens, a new faculty member that he chose as his literary executor is going through his house, looking for the novel George had supposedly been working on for thirty years. (Canaris had published a few early books to wide critical acclaim, been offered the faculty post at the college, and then never wrote anything again.)

The novel's told primarily in flashbacks, illuminating George's life at the college and his work on "the Beast," as he came to refer to the book that all his fans were waiting so patiently for. In a way, this novel's a dream for anyone who has ever wished they could get to know an author (any author they love) over the course of their life, because that's exactly what happens here. You get to know George. And, at least in my case, you really like him.

So. What happens? Did George actually write one last novel? Will it be found? Will it be as well-received as his early works? You'll just have to read this one to find out. In the meantime, I'll just leave you with my favorite bit from the book, and one which sums up my life's philosophy as well as any other:

"I had not prepared what I was going to say. I was winging it. And that felt right. What occurred to me was a paradox: that even as good writing and its inevitable counterpart, good reading became more marginal, those of us who read and wrote believed in it more passionately. When fiction was central--when even a U.S. president might read a novel--you could take and leave books, as you liked. When it became endangered, when the very act of writing was like sticking a message in a bottle and tossing it into the ocean, then reading, too, was a matter of life and death. We were a club, all of us, a freemasonry, and an underground."

I love everything about that paragraph. And I loved this book. Along with Tom Drury, P.F. Kluge counts as one of those authors I can't believe I'd never read before.

*Although my unreasonable dislike of Tom Hanks means we can't see any movie with him in it. Other than that I'm flexible.

Dylan has the proper attitude.

I'm in the middle of a few books, so no coherent thoughts this morning. The only thing one can do when unfocused, is, of course, spend some quality time at YouTube.

So, even if you don't know him, you should consider watching Irish comedian Dylan Moran's talk show interview. I particularly like what he has to say about technology:

"It's just that you're filling your life with all these gadgets and shite because you're bored." (Around the 1:30 mark.)

Dylan Moran on Chat Show

And yes, I am aware of the irony of embedding* a YouTube clip to laugh at modern technology. It's still funny.

*Or I should say, trying to embed. I'm not sure why it's not working this morning, and I'm too tired to figure it out. So all I can offer is the link.

Golden week.

Although last week was a rather long week for completely non-reading reasons, it was one of those charmed weeks where I rather enjoyed every book I picked up--even books I normally wouldn't have thought I would like.

A case in point is Nathan McCall's Them, which I read about somewhere, and although I didn't think I would read the whole thing, it sucked me in. The story is basic, and one that is happening in all sorts of cities in America: Forty-year-old Barlowe Reed, a single black man, is living in a primarily black section of Atlanta known as the Old Fourth Ward. He works hard as a printer, hates paying taxes, and mostly enjoys a good cold beer at the end of the day in the house he rents. When his new neighbors turn out to be a white couple, though, the reader can see what's happening: gentrification.

It's not a subtle book by any means, and reviewers and readers (at Amazon) have hammered it for McCall's reliance on stereotyping, particularly where the white characters are concerned. But I thought it was interesting all the way through, and for once I didn't really mind the stereotyping, which made the book's title all the more appropriate--after all, we're all a "them" to somebody else, regardless of who we are. (I find it interesting, moreover, that "stereotyping" is lambasted in this book, but nobody dares bring up the word where the collected works of Jodi Picoult are concerned, which are rife with stereotyping.)

And I liked the main character, Barlowe Reed. I would like any character who gets in a fight at the post office because he hates flags and he doesn't want stamps with flags on them, let's face it ("They tried to make me buy flags, Nell. What you expect from me?"--p. 10.) This was a different read for me; and I think it might pair well with a nonfiction book like Judith Matloff's Home Girl, in which the author herself was the agent of gentrification in a Harlem neighborhood. I'm also going to look into McCall's memoir Makes Me Wanna Holler.

WOW WOW HOLY SHIT WOW: The Sequel.

Well, let's just say I owe all of you big time!

That's right, I get to be one of several guest bloggers at the BookNinja site, which is not only a fabulous books and reading blog, but is also masterminded from Canada. That's right! My dream of being Canadian moves one step closer to fruition!

Thank all of you so much for your votes! As I told George, the editor at BookNinja, this is way better than my eighth-grade student council run, which ended in tears (but also, thankfully, a much clearer understanding of my social standing, or lack thereof, which actually made it a lot easier to get through high school). I don't know all of the details yet but we'll get to run amuck at the BookNinja site from July 2 through July 16.

I would say I will endeavor not to let the quality of Citizen Reader suffer, but let's face it, me and "quality work" have never been in the same room together anyway. (Ah--and there's the payoff in doing mediocre work and keeping everyone's expectations low!) I'll still be here, though.

Now, for the rest of the weekend, as another fine Canadian citizen would say, "Keep your stick on the ice. We're all in this together." And thanks again.