WWZ, returns

so , i just finished max brooks’ World War Z for the second time around, and i gotta say, my initial assessment remains exactly the same – 5 stars – because it’s still a great book, and certainly the best zombie novel i’ve ever read. it’s the perfect blend of true horror and socio-political exploration/what-if exercise.

i’ve noticed that some folks on goodreads and in amazon reviews have expressed frustration with the fact that WWZ has no single protagonist. i find this a bit odd. because what has always been clear to me is that the real protagonist in WWZ is humanity itself. while an individual’s story can certainly reveal and explore facets of the human experience, it seems to me that a wider cast of characters, such as that provided in WWZ, is necessary to really delve into to the wide range of emotions and reactions that people and whole governments are capable of having in the face of an imminent and horrific global disaster.

brooks clearly aspired to tell a story that has a global scale. i much prefer his studs terkel approach to doing so, as opposed to, say, through the perspective of a single American (white) man who flies around the world as humanity’s last great hope.* some of the voices in the novel could have perhaps been written more distinctively. but most of the voices were distinctive enough that it’s a negligible complaint, if one at all. 4.5 bookish cheers!

*i haven’t seen the film (i plan to eventually), but this is how it certainly looks to me from the trailers. thought 1: good lord, am i over the whole summer blockbuster hero complex. thought 2: grateful for the fact that at least i know enough to expect pitt’s “zombie movie” but not WWZ.

one step closer to neil gaiman, everywhere: neverwhere

have you heard? because i hadn’t heard. in fact, ever since i (kind of) left twitter, i haven’t heard much of anything. okay, that’s an exaggeration, but not by much. anyway, the news. the NEWS is that, over the course of the last week, BBC Radio 4 has produced and released a radio play of Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman.*

“Neverwhere” cast

so i‘ve never read Neverwhere. but i‘ve read Neil Gaiman in my time, and i love me some Neil Gaiman. in fact, i‘ve been unofficially** re-reading Fragile Things for the past few weeks. and i‘m in the middle of a personal reading challenge to work my way through two, long-running comic book/graphic novel series – one of which is the Sandman series (the other is Fables). also this. i can’t wait for this.

lucky for me (actually, lucky for us all), i have this Neverwhere radio drama to tide me over. (side note: why is the BBC so awesome? now, i‘ve heard that the BBC isn’t all that awesome, but from where i‘m standing, the BBC looks like a beautiful, public-funded spot of very green grass). besides the obvious (um, Neil Gaiman. hello?), there are already 10 very good reasons why you should listen to the Neverwhere radio play. and here are a few more:

1. although you could probably find the audio in other places, the series will be on the BBC Radio 4 website for only three (three?!) more days.

2. Benedict Cumberbatch. with all the stuff that cumberbatch has been in lately, i‘d be tempted to say that he’s overexposed. except that he’s benedict cumberbatch. who can never be overexposed. never.

3. the rest of the cast. which includes sophie okonedo, james mcavoy, and christopher lee.

behold!, the first installment:

 

Postscript: one of my favorite new (to-me) websites, openculture, has compiled a fantastic list of free Neil Gaiman stories. check it out and yea shall not be disappointed.

* if you’ve heard already, you could just pretend you haven’t. i don’t have much. announcing old news on the news-saturated internet is the highlight of my week. (no, not really. but, kind of, yeah)

** “unofficially” just means that i get to read one short story every four days without feeling bad about myself.

Related articles

• Listen to Benedict Cumberbatch sing in Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere (io9.com)
• Q&A: Neil Gaiman on the Star-Studded BBC Audioplay of Neverwhere (wired.com)
• Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere: Why the best thing that’s on this weekend is on the radio (telegraph.co.uk)

mary maclane: the ‘wild woman of butte’

this week, melville house is publishing “I Await the Devil’s Coming” by Mary MacLane. MacLane’s memoir was first published back in 1902, and became a sensational hit. MacLane, herself, was nineteen years old, born and raised in butte, montana and, if this excerpt (via book bench) is any evidence, damned witty too:

The more I see of conventionality, it seems, the more I am odd.

Though I am young and feminine—very feminine—yet I am not that quaint conceit, a girl: the sort of person that Laura E. Richards writes about, and Nora Perry, and Louisa M. Alcott,—girls with bright eyes, and with charming faces (they always have charming faces), standing with reluctant feet where the brook and river meet,—and all that sort of thing.

I missed all that.

. . . . 

And then, usually, if one is not a girl one is a heroine—of the kind you read about. But I am not a heroine, either. A heroine is beautiful—eyes like the sea shoot opaque glances from under drooping lids—walks with undulating movements, her bright smile haunts one still, falls methodically in love with a man—always with a man, eats things (they are always called “viands”) with a delicate appetite, and on special occasions her voice is full of tears. I do none of these things. I am not beautiful. I do not walk with undulating movements—indeed, I have never seen any one walk so, except, perhaps, a cow that has been overfed. My bright smile haunts no one. I shoot no opaque glances from my eyes, which are not like the sea by any means. I have never eaten any viands, and my appetite for what I do eat is most excellent. And my voice has never yet, to my knowledge, been full of tears.

No, I am not a heroine.

There never seem to be any plain heroines, except Jane Eyre, and she was very unsatisfactory. She should have entered into marriage with her beloved Rochester in the first place. I should have, let there be a dozen mad wives upstairs. But I suppose the author thought she must give her heroine some desirable thing—high moral principles, since she was not beautiful. Some people say that beauty is a curse. It may be true, but I’m sure I should not have at all minded being cursed a little. And I know several persons who might well say the same. But, anyway, I wish some one would write a book about a plain, bad heroine so that I might feel in real sympathy with her.

_________

sadly, this is the first i‘d ever heard of MacLane. talk about a serious gap in my education, people! wikipedia tells me that MacLane not only helped usher in the confessional style of autobiographical writing (a favorite genere of mine – David Sedaris, i‘m looking at you), but was also an openly bi-sexual feminist. say what?! well, whatever. say no more. it’s already on my amazon wishlist.

 

Related articles

• Why I Am a Thief (newyorker.com)

beware the ides of march, it’s (still) chilly outside

ah, march 15th. the ides of march. and one of my favorite days of the year. for, it is on this day oh so many centuries ago, that julius ceasar, the formidable general and roman politician, was famously (back)stabbed by that traitor brutus and his co-conspiring members of the roman senate. i can never let this day pass without indulging in a little Shakespeare. Julius Ceasar, is my usual poison of choice —

Caesar:
Who is it in the press that calls on me?
I hear a tongue shriller than all the music
Cry “Caesar!” Speak, Caesar is turn’d to hear.

Soothsayer:
Beware the ides of March.

Caesar:
What man is that?

Brutus:
A soothsayer bids you beware the ides of March.

Caesar:
Set him before me; let me see his face.

Cassius:
Fellow, come from the throng; look upon Caesar.

Caesar: 
What say’st thou to me now? speak once again.

Soothsayer:
Beware the ides of March.

Ceasar:
He is a dreamer; let us leave him: pass.

and then of course, there’s mark antony’s famous speech. Antony:

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones;
So let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus
Hath told you Caesar was ambitious:
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Caesar answer’d it.
Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest–
For Brutus is an honourable man;
So are they all, all honourable men–
Come I to speak in Caesar’s funeral.
He was my friend, faithful and just to me:
But Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man.
He hath brought many captives home to Rome
Whose ransoms did the general coffers fill:
Did this in Caesar seem ambitious?
When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept:
Ambition should be made of sterner stuff:
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man.
You all did see that on the Lupercal
I thrice presented him a kingly crown,
Which he did thrice refuse: was this ambition?
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And, sure, he is an honourable man.
I speak not to disprove what Brutus spoke,
But here I am to speak what I do know.
You all did love him once, not without cause:
What cause withholds you then, to mourn for him?
O judgment! thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason. Bear with me;
My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar,
And I must pause till it come back to me. . .

this and the rest of the speech is so masterfully done – the repetition, the sly implications – that it’s hard to know who to praise: antony and his beautiful roman rhetoric or shakespeare, the poetic playwright. it’s a treat either way. and if you don’t agree, maybe marlon brando can convince you otherwise:

stories for any time of the day: loory reads

this is love at first listen. i haven’t read Ben Loory’s collection of really short stories, Stories for the Nighttme and Some for the Day , but i’m already head over heels. i first heard about these modern fables on This American Life when Loory read one of the stories from his collection. The story is “Cold Stone Creamery” and begins at 39:00 of the posted audio. it is absolutely well worth a listen (actually, the entire episode is worth a listen if you’re so inclined.).

here’s loory reading another of his stories, “The Tree” for the Writers’ Block.

https://soundcloud.com/kqed-writers-block/ben-loory-more-from-stories

there’s something about these deceptively simple stories that i find absolutely delightful. they feel incredibly familiar yet refreshingly new. i’m so broke it’s silly (don’t ask), but when i get some dough i know where some of money’s going.

postscript: in case you’d like to do the reading yourself, a copy of Loory’s story “The TV” can found here in the New Yorker.

time flies: with dahl and a few grim(m) fairy tales

good grief. it’s march, and my last post was back in january. i’d say something about time flying and having fun and all that. but i wasn’t having fun. in fact, these past few months, i’ve been having the opposite of fun: work. and lots of it. a never ending stream of it. so much of it that it’s been pouring out of my ears.

and in the meantime, i’ve had no time to read. i mean, i’ve been “reading” the same two books for oh, about a month and a half now. and they’re good books too, so i know it’s not them; it’s most definitely me.

Philip Pullman‘s Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm is deliciously well . . . grim. who knew there were so many fairy tales in the grimm canon that are so frankly marvelous? needless to say, i much prefer these wicked, raw fairy tales to their disney-fied, toddler-friendly versions. some of these stories are so shocking (women eaten by cannibals, men’s eyes pecked out by crows, etc.) that i can never tell where they’re going. in fact, the only thing i can predict with a degree of certainty is that the good guy/gal will usually prevail in the end. but perhaps not before something truly (and deliciously) appalling happens.

the good news is that i’m almost finished. the bad news is that i’m almost finished. these stories have been uniformly good if not great, even the more familiar ones. however, a few standout favorites have been “The Juniper Tree,” “Six Who Made Their Way in the World,” “The Two Travelling Companions,” and “Hans-My-Hedgehog.” i’m not finshed yet (still 50 pages to go), but i’ve read enough to know that i highly recommend it. i’m talking 4.5 bookish cheers here.

the other book i’ve been snailing my way through is The Best of Roald Dahl by (you guessed it) Roald Dahl. i never really got into Dahl’s children’s stories. i think i read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory way back when, but that’s about it. this, however, is a collection of Dahl’s adult short stories. i don’t know about you, but i didn’t know Dahl even wrote adult fiction. and boy does he write adult fiction. ladies and gents, this is good stuff. i mean seriously good stuff. these stories are smoothly told, tightly plotted, and wonderfully macabre. for a taste, try reading this copy of “A Dip in the Pool.” it’s a critical favorite.

i’m only halfway through this (259 of 520 pages), which is alright because i’m in no hurry to see the back of this book. i love this feeling i get when i’ve discovered a new author. dare i say it? yeah, i’m going to say it: it’s almost magical. it’s like falling in love with reading for the first time. it’s too soon to assign bookish cheers, so i won’t. but, all the same, you should check out these stories, even if you think you don’t like short stories. hell, you should check them out especially if you don’t like short stories. if dahl can’t make a believer out of you, probably nobody can.

bonus track: a clip of the phenomenal Derek Jacobi reading an extract from Dahl’s short story, “Georgie Porgy.” unfortunately, i can’t find a full clip, but this should be enough to whet the appetite.*

* i’m generally unmoved by audio books. i tend to find the voice acting too distracting and much prefer the sound of my inner voice. but Jacobi is an unquestionably skilled narrator. if anyone could make a believer out of me, it’d have to be this guy.

gary shteyngart: giving it up for two covers, a spine, and at least 40 pages

i remember hearing about the literary kerfuffle surrounding Gary Shteyngart and book blubs a while back. the way i recall it, it happened a few years ago, but the Google tells me that it happened as recently as last year. it started (or maybe, restarted?) back in august when A.J. Jacobs, author of the frequently funny nonfiction”humble quest” books like The Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible*, wrote an article for the new york times book review. the article was about copious book blurbing, and you can’t write an article about copious book blurbing without mentioning Shteyngart, the godfather/whore (choose your own adjective) of book blurbing.

so, if you don’t already know, the deal is that Shteyngart loves to blurb books. well okay, he doesn’t love it, but he also doesn’t like saying no when he’s asked to write one. so the long and short of it is that he’s blurbed a lot of books. like a lot. like over a hundred. and they’re blurbs, so they’re positive. and nobody trusts you if you’re positive about a lot of books. Shteyngart’s blurbs are doubly problematic because they’re not just positive, but exuberantly positive. See blurb of Aravind Adiga’s White Tiger (“An exhilarating, side-splitting account of India today, as well as an eloquent howl at her many injustices. Adiga enters the literary scene resplendent in battle dress and ready to conquer. Let us bow to him.”)

some people have wondered whether Shteyngart even reads the books he blurbs. others have wondered if his blurbs are glowing just because they’re his friends’ books (he must have a lot of friends). me, well i‘ve always wondered what the big deal was. are people buying books based on blurbs alone? i‘ve been known to read blurbs just like the next gal, but if i‘m looking at a book, it’s because i‘m already interested it. i might be persuaded to go ahead and buy it if more than one author whose writing i enjoy or reviewer whose taste i respect has something nice to say. but i‘m not going to buy it just because Gary Shteyngart (or A.J. Jacobs) alone said it was good. it’s one of the few cases in my life where quantity matters more to me than content. so again i ask, what’s the big deal? especially when, let’s face it, the blurber is so damn good at it? See blurb of Patrick DeWitt’s The Sisters Brothers (“DeWitt’s dirty realism makes me want to roll in the mud with him.”). if tweeting book reviews paid (good) money, Shteyngart would make a killing.

so, obviously i don’t get the whole fascination with Shteyngart and his book blurbs. but i still thought this Ed Champion-produced mini-documentary about the whole thing was pretty great. it’s tongue-in-cheek funny with a hint of serious exploration. kind of like a Shteyngart blurb.

in case you were wondering, here’s a link to the Gary Shteyngart blurbs tumbler.

* Jacobs also wrote The Know-It All: One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World (which i read back in ’05 and thoroughly enjoyed, from what i remember) and, most recently, Drop Dead Healthy: One Man’s Humble Quest for Bodily Perfection. Jacobs should call his books “the perfect man” trilogy. i suspect that Jacobs’ light-hearted writing masks a much more profound cultural statement about our fascination with mental, spiritual, and physical perfection. there’s always something both silly and sad and maybe a little hopeful (can he do it? can he really do it?) about Jacobs’ endeavors. after all, they’re really just a magnification of what many of us try to do every day, especially this time of year: try to live a little better, and move a little further down the path to perfection.

Jacobs takes the idea of self-improvement to the extreme. in so doing, he forces us to ask, is it worth it? really worth it? buddists would probably say no. i don’t know what i think. i‘m curious about what Jacobs thinks. i think i might finally be ready to finish The Year of Living Biblically, which I abandoned with intent to return years ago.

Related articles

• Leninglad! Celebrating 10 Years of Gary Shteyngart, Contemporary Literature’s Hairiest, Funniest Author (observer.com)

george saunders: author of my heart

a wonderful, luminous, fantastic profile of George Saunders — author of the most electric short stories i‘ve ever read — is featured in this week’s new york times magazine (today’s front page!). fans of saunders or of awesomely-written profiles should check it out.

Excerpt:

It is true that if there exists a “writer’s writer,” Saunders is the guy. “There is really no one like him,” Lorrie Moore wrote. “He is an original — but everyone knows that.” Tobias Wolff, who taught Saunders when he was in the graduate writing program at Syracuse in the mid-’80s, said, “He’s been one of the luminous spots of our literature for the past 20 years,” and then added what may be the most elegant compliment I’ve ever heard paid to another person: “He’s such a generous spirit, you’d be embarrassed to behave in a small way around him.” And Mary Karr, who has been a colleague of Saunders’s at Syracuse since he joined the faculty in the mid-’90s (and who also, incidentally, is a practicing Catholic with a wonderful singing voice and a spectacularly inventive foul mouth), told me, “I think he’s the best short-story writer in English alive.”

Aside from all the formal invention and satirical energy of Saunders’s fiction, the main thing about it, which tends not to get its due, is how much it makes you feel. I’ve loved Saunders’s work for years and spent a lot of hours with him over the past few months trying to understand how he’s able to do what he does, but it has been a real struggle to find an accurate way to express my emotional response to his stories. One thing is that you read them and you feel known, if that makes any sense. Or, possibly even woollier, you feel as if he understands humanity in a way that no one else quite does, and you’re comforted by it. Even if that comfort often comes in very strange packages, like say, a story in which a once-chaste aunt comes back from the dead to encourage her nephew, who works at a male-stripper restaurant (sort of like Hooters, except with guys, and sleazier), to start unzipping and showing his wares to the patrons, so he can make extra tips and help his family avert a tragic future that she has foretold.

Junot Díaz described the Saunders’s effect to me this way: “There’s no one who has a better eye for the absurd and dehumanizing parameters of our current culture of capital. But then the other side is how the cool rigor of his fiction is counterbalanced by this enormous compassion. Just how capacious his moral vision is sometimes gets lost, because few people cut as hard or deep as Saunders does.” 

the title of the profile is “George Saunders Has Written the Best Book You’ll Read This Year.” to which my response is: “well, obviously.” i have both of saunders’ short story collections and a copy of a The Braindead Megaphone sitting on my bookshelf. i can’t wait to get a copy of The Tenth of December.

epilogue:

for those who can’t wait until tuesday for a dose of Saunders, here’s a link to the the eponymous short story “The Tenth of December,” curtesy of the new yorker circa 2011.

and, just because it’s such a great story with such a great reading by Joshua Ferris: an audio reading of “Adam.”

steve almond speaks: the thrust of good sex writing

so, the literary review recently announced this year’s winner of the “bad sex in fiction” award (via bookriot). apparently, thanks to the fact that E.L. James  doesn’t qualify (no erotica or bdsm novels allowed), this year’s the award went to Nancy Houston for her novel Infrared. Infrared included such gems as, the “undulating space where the undulating skies make your non-body undulate.” Yeah . . .

Houston had some stiff (ha!) competition this year. personally i think Tom Wolf’s Back to Blood should’ve won for, “Now his big generative jockey was inside her pelvic saddle, riding, riding, riding, and she was eagerly swallowing it swallowing it swallowing it with the saddle’s own lips and maw.” seriously, guy. pelvic saddle ? (incidentally, James Wood has an excellent review of Back to Blood in the new yorker).

it does make me wonder, where’s the good sex in fiction award? for that matter where’s the good sex in fiction? i mean, i read my fair share of romance (no, not 50 Shades) and i refuse to read a romance author who can’t write a good sex scene. after all, it’s romance. sure, not all romance is about sex or even has sex it it. but when i read a romance i expect there to be sex and i expect it to be well-written. i’m rarely disappointed. it’s only when i read literature that i get nervous for the writer if i see a sex scene around the corner. usually it’s not that bad but that’s because most writers cop out as soon as naked body parts begin to touch.

which reminds me of an essay i read a few years ago by Steve Almond called “Hard Up for a Hard On” (found in The Writer’s Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House). it’s a fantastic essay on all that’s wrong with fictional sex scene writing and how it can be improved. Almond wisely notes that

The central reason that people muff – I said muff – their attempts to write sex is because they are putting pressure on themselves for the scene to be sexy. And any time you feel pressure you start making all the mistakes associated with pressure: the unnecessary similes and metaphors, the needless obfuscation, the genital euphemisms, the fancy words that wind up feeling imposed by the author instead of experienced by the characters.

he goes on to write that the best sex writing isn’t about how good the sex is but the way it reveals something about the characters, which is “what really matters.” Almond provides several compelling examples of good sex writing (see, for example, Spending by Mary Gordon). none of the excerpts are particularly concerned with being sexy. and in so doing, they end up being – you guessed it – sexy.

i won’t provide Almond’s excerpts here because they’re fairly long and i’m frankly too lazy to type them. but i leave you with this final quote from Almond’s essay, which is my favorite:

Real sex is compelling to read about because the participants are so utterly vulnerable. We are all, when the time comes to get naked, terribly excited and frightened and hopeful and doubtful, usually all at the same time. You [author] mustn’t abandon your characters in their time of need. You mustn’t make them naked playthings with rubbery parts. You must love them, wholly and without shame, as they go about their human business. Because we’ve already got a name for sex without emotional content: pornography.

bonus reel: “bad sex in fiction awards 2012: hunting for dirty books” (“you dirty cake”)

law school: i (kind of) love you, but you’re bringing me down

so. i‘m in law school. i have mentioned this, no? well, littlebookishthings is about books not law, so i guess what i do during the day doesn’t really matter. except when it prevents me from doing what i‘d like to do with my evenings, which is read and write about what i‘m reading. unfortunately, it’s that time of the year again when i’m called to tell my professors, in three and a half hours, everything i’ve (supposedly) learned. it’s… not. fun.

so, for the next week or so, littlebookishthings is going to be m.i.a. i leave you with this little gem (kermit the frog and lcd soundsystem!). if i had time, i‘d rewrite the lyrics to fit my situation. but honestly it’s pretty much perfect as it is, so why bother?

interesting note: if you are, know or love a lcd soundsystem fan, you might be interested to know about LCD, the book of photography by Ruvan Wijesooriy featuring the band coming out next week on the 11th. previews of the book can be found here.

and here’s a picture of james murphy’s bookshelf.

favorite quote: “I always sign books when I read them, and I make people, when they borrow them, sign the backs and that way I know who borrowed my books and who’s read them, and when.”