Real Book

Martin Eden

By Jack London

One of my all-time favorite books is “Martin Eden” by Jack London, which is a very different work from some of his other books like White Fang. Martin Eden is a blue-collar tough guy, a sailor, a street-fighter and a sometime gang member. When he meets and falls in love with an upper-middle-class girl named Ruth, he falls for her completely, but he doesn't realize it's not really her he loves. He loves her apparent refinement and veneer of education, because Martin is actually extremely intelligent and inside himself he recognizes that he wants to have what he thinks she has.

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E-Books Will Kill The Library Book Sale

And that's a good thing!

Literary news blog The Millions has a great essay by Rebecca Rego Barry titled "A Rare Book Collector's Guide to the College Library Book Sale." Rather than a literal guide to book sales, Rego Barry's essay is a paean to books themselves, to the history they contain, the fads they speak of, and the promise they hold for the future. It is wonderfully evocative of the experience of browsing a college library's book sale, and it made me nostalgic for a book sale I attended decades ago on a perfect autumn day.

After reading this eminently satisfying essay I sat back in my desk chair - for I read her essay on the computer, not to point out the obvious - and thought, "That's one more thing that e-books will kill."

American Insurgents, American Patriots

The Revolution Of The Common People

I picked up “American Insurgents, American Patriots” for two main reasons. One is that two of my direct ancestors fought in the American Revolution as citizen soldiers in the New York Militia, and I wanted to better understand their motivations and their experiences. The second reason is that I'm an Occupier, and reading about an earlier generation of American revolutionaries and patriots is inspiring to me.

McDonald's UK: Happy Meal Books Instead Of Toys

I remember how excited I was, as a kid in the late 1970s, to get a Moby Books Illustrated Classic with my fast food meal.

The Huffington Post is reporting that McDonalds stores in the UK will soon be offering books instead of toys as prizes in their Happy Meals. This is - if you ask me - pretty much the best thing ever.

First of all, kids do not need any more toys. I know that sounds curmudgeonly of me, but it's true. Especially the cheap plastic toys that come with Happy Meals. These are just merchandising tie-ins to the latest fad movie, and all they do is encourage kids to consume more advertising. (Sure, the book is a promotional tie-in with the movie War Horse. But the promo item is a real book, "Mudpuddle Farm" by the author of the book "War Horse.")

The Land of Non-Readers

So much less taxing, so much simpler to just watch television or play video games or mess about endlessly on the internet.

Essayist Jonathan Gourlay recently wrote a sort of confession about the months he spent as a non-reader. It is surprisingly easy to slip away from reading. After a lifetime as a bookworm, I quit reading for almost a decade. Only recently, in the last three or four years, have I started to make reading a priority again.

As Gourlay notes, my experience is that "not reading" was a surprisingly seductive pleasure. It is the height of laziness to not read a book. So much less taxing, so much simpler to just watch television or play video games or mess about endlessly on the internet. (It MUST be easy to not read - otherwise, why would so many Americans be doing it? [i.e. not reading.])

I did some of my worst writing during those ten years. That's no coincidence.

Lord of The Rings

A Literary Masterpiece

J.R.R. Tolkien's “Lord of the Rings” is one of the most significant literary works of the Twentieth Century, with tremendous influence at all levels of popular culture. The fact that the literary establishment still doesn't recognize this is an indictment of the validity of that establishment as a whole.

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The BEST Best Books of 2011

A meta-survey of 2011 "Best Books" lists

I am continually boggled by all the good books in the world. How can you ever possibly hope to read anything more than the tiniest sliver of the best literature every year? This overwhelming bounty is brought home by skimming a bunch of "best books of 2011" lists. It's astounding how little these lists overlap.

Therefore - I figured - the books that appear on multiple lists must be REALLY good. And after conducting a semi-exhaustive and not-at-all-scientific survey, here they are:

Chad Harbach, The Art of Fielding: A Novel

This book is listed in the top 3 of just about every list that I found, including the New York Times and Amazon. Wow, I bet it's good!

Kingkiller Chronicles

Patrick Rothfuss

Most modern fantasy isn't really fantasy at all in the classic sense. There's no beauty of language, no sense of wonder. If you haven't read the classics of the genre- Tolkien, Dunsany, Lewis, LeGuin and so forth- you can't really expect to write serious fantasy, yet much of what's written these days is more like Dungeon and Dragons. And that's no surprise- when writers with a background in role-playing rather than classic fantasy literature started to write their own novels, the inevitable result was that their novels would end up more like their favorite game than the stories on which the game was based.

Patrick Rothfuss is a shining exception. His series “The Kingkiller Chronicles” now consists of two books: The Name of the Wind, and The Wise Man's Fear. “The Kingkiller Chronicles” tell the story of Kuothe, a washed-up former hero tending an out of the way country inn as the world falls apart. Kuothe is tracked down by a man called The Chronicler, who manages to talk him into telling his story- his real story, that is, free of legends and distortions.

Northwest Passage

Kenneth Roberts

When I was in high school, I read “Northwest Passage” by Kenneth Roberts, and immediately became fascinated with Roger's Rangers and with the colonial-era Rangers in general. Rangers were specialized troops picked from the woodsmen and hunters of the colonial frontier. They fought far behind enemy lines as a matter of course, worked closely with Indian allies and made war on the Indians allied with the French. Rangers were renowned for fighting “Indian style”- in other words, via the raid and the ambush and all the other features we would now think of as guerilla warfare.

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Moby-Dick

"From Hell's heart I stab at thee!"

Originality is impossible and every story has already been told a thousand times. Trying to be original is a recipe for failure, because all you'll end up doing is coming up with some arbitrary and meaningless twist on the old cliches. But every once in a very long while, somebody actually writes something completely different, something that breaks all the rules and gets away with it.

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