Here are two retrospectives on Tony Hillerman:
Robert Jordan, Hemingway’s Bipartisan Hero : NPR:
Barack Obama and John McCain don’t agree on much, but they apparently agree on this:
They’re fierce political opponents, but it turns out that the presidential candidates do agree on a literary matter: Each man picks Ernest Hemingway’s 1940 novel For Whom the Bell Tolls as a favorite.
I’m working on a research proposal for school right now. As exhilarating as it is to be getting near working on my dissertation, this phase is very time-consuming. Consequently, I’m resorting to a summary list of the tabs I’ve left open in my browser for far too long in hopes of being able to write a separate post about each one.
Can e-books win global appeal?
This very short piece in the Christian Science Monitor links to two articles in foreign newspapers that discuss e-book readers like the Amazon Kindle and Sony’s digital Reader.
Reading Shouldn’t Be a Numbers Game
In this opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times librarian Regina Powers laments a trend she’s noticed:
Although I am elated that many families are visiting my public library more frequently because schools send them, I am disturbed at how infrequently parents and teachers are allowing young readers to choose what to read.
During the summer, children were excited about reading because, freed from school requirements, they decided what to read. Being able to choose their favorite author, genre or topic seemed to empower them to read more. Now with school back in session, finding a book again involves navigating through a labyrinth of point values and reading levels.
A Trilling Look at Literary Criticism
This piece in Columbia University’s campus paper Columbia Spectator discusses the work of Lionel Trilling, an iconic figure in the history of literary criticism:
Trilling, CC ’25 and GSAS ’38, was one of the most celebrated public intellectuals of his day. The first Jewish professor in the English department, he rose to fame as one of the “New York Intellectuals” (a group whose members included Saul Bellow and Irving Howe) and a writer for Partisan Review. He also published acclaimed studies of Matthew Arnold and E.M. Forster, before trying his hand at novel-writing with The Middle of the Journey. His later works—collections of essays like The Liberal Imagination, The Opposing Self, Beyond Culture, and Sincerity and Authenticity—are classics of literary criticism. He died in 1975, at age 70, and remains an iconic figure, if not a fashionable one.
Using Video Games as Bait to Hook Readers
Increasingly, authors, teachers, librarians and publishers are embracing this fast-paced, image-laden world in the hope that the games will draw children to reading.
Spurred by arguments that video games also may teach a kind of digital literacy that is becoming as important as proficiency in print, libraries are hosting gaming tournaments, while schools are exploring how to incorporate video games in the classroom.
When Books Could Change Your Life
“Why What We Pore Over At 12 May Be The Most Important Reading We Ever Do”
In this wonderful piece Tim Kreider explains why the books we devour as children and adolescents are some of the most important reading of our lives:
It’s not that children’s books are pure entertainment, innocent of any didactic goal–what grownups enviously call “Reading for Fun.” On the contrary, the reading we do as children may be more serious than any reading we’ll ever do again. Books for children and young people are unashamedly prescriptive: They’re written, at least in part, to teach us what the world is like, how people are, and how we should behave. . .
The Scout Report, a fine weekly newsletter from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Wisconsin, offers this roundup of stories about the recent death of author David Foster Wallace:
Friends and colleagues remember author David Foster Wallace
David Foster Wallace, Influential Writer, Dies at 46 [Free registration may be required]
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/15/books/15wallace.htmlWallace Invented ‘New Style, New Comedy’
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=94629055Author created ‘Jest’ in Syracuse
http://www.syracuse.com/news/index.ssf?/base/news-15/122155534751021.xml&coll=1In Memoriam: David Foster Wallace [pdf]
http://www.pomona.edu/ADWR/president/dfw1.shtmlConsidering David Foster Wallace [iTunes]
http://www.kcrw.com/etc/programs/pc/pc080916considering_david_foDavid Foster Wallace: Harper’s Magazine [pdf]
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2008/09/hbc-90003557David Foster Wallace: Commencement Speech at Kenyon College
http://www.marginalia.org/dfw_kenyon_commencement.htmlFriends, acquaintances, fellow writers, and others all offered memories of author David Foster Wallace this week in articles, online treatises, weblog posts, and editorials. Wallace, who was perhaps best known for this sprawling masterwork “Infinite Jest”, was thoroughly catholic in his interests, and his work was peppered with references to everything from Continental philosophy to the behavior of cruise line passengers. Writing in this Tuesday’s New York Times, fellow writer Verlyn Klinkenborg commented, “His writing could subsume the DNA of any language, any form it encountered, while remaining completely his own.” During his 46 years, Wallace was awarded the Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, a MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant”, and also taught at Illinois State University and Pomona College. While many websites offer a way to comment on Wallace’s work and life, the “In Memoriam” site created by Pomona College provides a fine glimpse into the effect he had on those he taught and influenced. One comment offered by Sean Pollack is particularly poignant: “We mourn for a humane and generous teacher and lover of the language.” [KMG]
The first link will take interested parties to the New York Times’ obituary for David Foster Wallace which appeared in print this Monday. The second link will lead visitors to a remembrance of Wallace from fellow writer David Lipsky. Moving on, the third link leads to a Syracuse Post-Standard piece from this Tuesday about Wallace’s time in Syracuse in the early 1990s. The fourth link leads to the previously mentioned Pomona College “In Memoriam” site created for Wallace. The fifth link leads to a special edition of “Politics of Culture” hosted by bookworm Michael Silverblatt. Joined by book critic Anthony Miller they discuss Wallace’s impact on fiction, his generation, and American culture. In addition, a collection of interviews with Wallace culled from the archives of KCRW’s “Bookworm” program is also available. In terms of celebrating Wallace’s life and writing, the sixth link is a very welcome find indeed. It contains links to many of his non-fiction pieces, including his very observant and wonderful take on a cruise-line adventure, “Shipping Out: On the (nearly lethal) comforts of a luxury cruise”. The last and final link leads to a transcript of the honest and insightful commencement address that Wallace gave at Kenyon College in 2005. [KMG]
>From The Scout Report, Copyright Internet Scout Project 1994-2008. http://scout.wisc.edu/
Nova Scotia News - TheChronicleHerald.ca:
In Nova Scotia’s The Chronicle Herald, Judith Meyrick reviews Magic Island: The Fictions of L. M. Montgomery by Elizabeth Waterston. Montgomery was the author of Anne of Green Gables and several subsequent best-selling novels.
Montgomery kept journals and scrapbooks passionately and meticulously, preserving for us a picture of her daily life and the times she lived in. She was hugely talented and wrote obsessively, through good times and bad, occasionally using her writing as “therapy,” however unwittingly. She suffered through depression, the loss of her second son and the sometimes extreme mental distress of her husband. Through it all, she kept writing.
According to Waterson, Montgomery used writing as therapy. She suffered periods of depression throughout her life but used her own misery to develop powerful characters: “She found it possible to neutralize her miserable thoughts about herself by giving some of her worst traits to characters in her books and making light of them.”
Moving Beyond ‘Catcher’ On School Reading Lists : NPR:
“The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger’s beloved novel, once banned and full of frank four-letter words, will continue to be assigned to high school reading lists this year.
But Anne Trubek, a professor of English at Oberlin College, argues that it’s time to update Salinger’s coming-of-age tale.
This article provides a link to the sound version of Trubek’s discussion with NPR’s Scott Simon and lists a few of Trubek’s suggestions for books to replace “Catcher” on a list of required reading for today’s teenagers.
As a baby boomer, I’m one of the millions who read about Holden Caulfield while growing up. I reread the book when my daughter was in high school and found it just as compelling the second time. Moreover, my daughter (who, admittedly, is now 30 herself) seemed to have no problem comprehending Holden’s teenaged angst.
What’s your take on this? Is Holden Caulfield outdated for today’s young people? Do you have your own memories of reading “Catcher in the Rye”?
“How Fiction Works” | csmonitor.com:
Matt Shaer reviews the recently published book How Fiction Works by James Wood: “Wood, a staff writer at The New Yorker and former chief literary critic at the Guardian and The New Republic, is often called America’s preeminent literary critic.”
And, Shaer reports, that for the most part, Wood succeeds.
Drawing on his own vast fund of reading, Wood seeks out those moments when novelists come closest to achieving “lifeness” – or at least “the nearest thing to life” – in their art. One of the great pleasures in reading “How Fiction Works” comes from savoring the carefully selected passages that Wood chooses to illustrate his points.
How Fiction Works is, Shaer says, mainly an academic text that requires a familiarity with the major Western texts, including works by writers such as Henry James, Stendhal, Flaubert, Dafoe, Dostoevsky, and Nabokov. Wood uses passages from these writers to illustrate his points about “the basic building blocks of the novel: narration, detail, character, metaphor, and style.” But the emphasis is on characterization:
What really fascinates Wood – and what makes the book hum – is the messy business of characterization: the “thousands of different kinds of people, some round, some flat, some deep, some caricatures, some realistically evoked, some brushed in with the lightest of strokes.”
I’m still waiting for my pre-ordered copy of Wood’s book to arrive from Amazon. This review has piqued my impatience.
Clive Thompson on Why Sci-Fi Is the Last Bastion of Philosophical Writing
If you want to read books that tackle profound philosophical questions, then the best — and perhaps only — place to turn these days is sci-fi. Science fiction is the last great literature of ideas.
In this short article in Wired magazine Clive Thompson expounds on thoughts sparked by the novella After the Siege by Cory Doctorow. According to Thompson, literary fiction has dropped the ball in terms of dealing with great ideas because “there are, at the risk of sounding superweird, only so many ways to describe reality.” Eventually, he says, he found himself reading essentially the same book over and over again.
This conclusion comes from a certain assumption about the nature of fiction. Thompson says that writing literary fiction is like running a simulation such as The Sims a number of times: “eventually you’re going to explore almost every outcome.” This is, of course, a notion that most serious readers and writers cannot take seriously. From writers’ perspective, a novel presents the author’s particular view of reality. From readers’ perspective, even those who do not consciously think of reading as a transactional process know that something special happens when a particular reader encounters a particular text.
Thompson says that thought experiments–works in which authors ask “What if. . . ” questions–have been the foundation of Western thought since ancient times. His contention is that science fiction is now the main branch of literature dealing meaningfully with such questions.
So, then, why does sci-fi, the inheritor of this intellectual tradition, get short shrift among serious adult readers? Probably because the genre tolerates execrable prose stylists. Plus, many of sci-fi’s most famous authors — like Robert Heinlein and Philip K. Dick — have positively deranged notions about the inner lives of women.
But, Thompson says, many mainstream authors are producing “genre-bending” novels that incorporate traditional science fiction elements. Among these authors are Cormac McCarthy, Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, and Margaret Atwood, whom Thompson calls “a sci-fi novelist trapped inside a literary author.”
Read Thompson’s article, and be sure to read the comments posted underneath it. So far, the comments cover a wide range of responses, both for and against, Thompson’s claim.