Tag Archives: Essays
01142013: A book pile to cleanse the palate
I picked up The Drawing of the Three, the second book in Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series, because I wanted something hefty that would take me away from the bad juju flying around today. And so when Ronald wakes up at the beach (where The Gunslinger, first book, ended) and starts being eaten by the scariest, most ridiculous demon lobster in literary history—the man gets two fingers and a toe eaten, for fuck’s sake—I was thankful for someone to sympathize with, someone who made me think, “Well, he’s more fucked than you are, girl.” See, after being all, “I see serious problems ahead,” at page twenty, Ronald goes, “I jerk off left-handed, at least that’s something.” Yeah, let the Gunslinger remind you look for the bright side, Sasha. [Continue reading.]
Just more, Nick, okay?
Proof of what makes Hornby such an effective writer on reading: He can share his experiences with books I will never ever care for, and yet I keep devouring his work. For example, here in the latest collection of his Believer columns: He prattles on about austerity in Britain for two pieces, and I read hungrily. He digresses (like always) toward football, and yet I read on. I mean, setting aside my purely selfish motivations—I want to talk about myself, and I want to talk about books, which is also largely about myself—isn’t that supposed the point of all our bibliophilic navel-gazing? Beyond setting one’s encounter with a book on a page of our own (so to speak), isn’t this reaching out to other readers—shouldn’t you be constantly making the case for reading and for good books, and for that wearied yet reinvigorated state of your soul in the aftermath of some spankin’ awesome literature? [Continue reading.]
01092013: Bye, Franzen; and Proust, still
Franzen, I’ve found, shies away from an indulgent narrative about families—about his family, here in particular. Snidely, I think: His essays need to have reach—they shouldn’t only be about the Franzens. And so: Family dynamics should naturally draw on Snoopy and its creator. An awkward adolescence—too enlightening, really: who knew Franzen was such a big dorkus?—dignified by an examination of the youth group he belonged to. Selling the house his mother had spent nearly a lifetime to build—a house full, no doubt, of his mother’s disappoints—should lead to a dissection of real estate in America. And, goddammit, troubles with his wife should veer into bird-watching in them good ol’ United States. [Continue reading.]
The Hustvedt essay
Desire has long been Hustvedt’s forte, from her novels and threaded through her nonfiction. And the essays in this collection are so unmistakeably-to-me Hustvedtian: They’re essays in the blessedly conventional sense—the simplest route from writer to reader. Here are a host of subjects in a deeply personal voice, exceedingly intelligent, more than a little sensuous, and familiar all throughout. Desire weaves in and out of the essays—“Living,” for her musings on family life; “Thinking,” for her reflections on the making of and the appreciation of literature, the academe, as well as her disarmingly easy relationship with neuroscience; “Looking,” for her meditations on art. Again: All of them fascinatingly eloquent, and all of them unafraid to draw from Hustvedt’s own life. No shame to tell the reader that this was how she felt as she thought. This unabashedness, coupled with her goddamned intellect, never fails to send happy shivers down my spine. [Continue reading.]
“Why read otherwise?”
“The opportunity to single out a book that ‘changed my life,’” says Billy Collins, “makes me realize that no book leaves us unchanged, for better or worse. Why read otherwise?” Subtitled “71 Remarkable Writers Celebrate the Books that Matter Most to Them,” The Book that Changed my Life, brain-child of bookstore owner Roxanne J. Coady […]
Why, Indeed?
Doing more reading of the Classics as I have been lately, it seemed only right that I pick up Why Read the Classics? by Italo Calvino [translated by Martin McLaughlin]—and not so much because I needed to convince myself that there really was something good with all my befuddlement and the near-constant-feeling-of-being-out-of-place of late. Key […]
