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This page is an ever-changing, virtually random, annotated
list of books and media that I currently enjoy and which I highly recommend to others.*
July 2009
It occurred to me the other day that our
vocabulary is all wrong in this debate over
e-books – in the same way it’s
misleading to talk as if America actually had “healthcare,
when we really only have very expensive sickcare.
We don’t read e-books
or hardcovers. We read what people write.
Books – whether print or digital,
whether downloaded or mailed, whether new or old – are just one way that writing reaches the people who want to read
it. Books are just one way that people get paid for their writing.
Books are not what I read; they are where I read things that interest me.
I find writing in books interesting, because I like writing that reflect the author’s authentic research, originality,
and talent. I like the sentences and paragraphs they choose to combine to make
a book; I like the way their long story begins and ends.
I think if books are to survive we have
to stop thinking about books as a “consumer product.” Format usually follow price, but the quality of what’s
inside a book does not.
We need to start thinking about books as
a place where writers write and readers find them. If printed books morph into
e-books, that’s really not a lot of change.
If we don’t want to lose writing
that’s long, and thoughtful, writing that requires time to create – if we want writing we such as we find in War and Peace, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood
Prince, Dreams From My Father, or A
Room of One’s Own -- we have to find a way to subsidize the places readers can read what such writers write.
I submit that we could learn
how to live without books. It’s reading and writing we can’t live
without.
And the possibility of that impending
loss is what we should talk about.
For more, read Amanda Mecke's Google blog, \http://readtosurvive.blogspot.com/
Previous
Posts:
December 2008
I highly recommend the 12/7/08 column by Michael Dirda
in the Washington Post with advice about giving books as presents.
If you are fan of historical novels and Scandinavian
myths (as in Tolkien), look for the Plume publication next year of Ice Land by Betsy Tobin (published in the UK by
Short Books). You will also enjoy Jane Smiley's older novel, Greenlanders.
The Booker Prize winner The White Tiger by
Aravind Adiga (Free Press paperback) provides disturbing and vivid background to the terrorist attack in Mumbai, particularly
on police corruption, the elite's dependance on the servant class (who were the heroes of the massacre), and the devastating
poverty which haunts the world's largest democracy.
September 2008
I haven't yet read Marilyn Robinson's new novel Home
(FSG, hard cover), but her previous book Gilead (which involved the same characters) was one of the
most moving books I've read in ages.
For those adults who have never stopped reading YA fantasy,
a friend recently introduced me to a 1948 classic, I Capture The Castle by Dodie Smith (St. Martin's paperback).
January 2008
I met Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina when I was consulting
for Rutgers University Press on the publication of her biography of Frances Hodgson Burnett, the early
twentieth-century author of The Secret Garden.
Gerzina's new book, MR. AND MRS. PRINCE,
just out from HarperCollins's Amistad imprint, is a fascinating story of how she and her husband uncovered the lost history
of two freed slaves, also a husband and wife, who were among the first Black land owners in colonial New England, Abijah
Prince and Lucy Terry Prince. Everything in this book which they found will change your picture of early American
race relations.
This a remarkable story of how a couple earned their
freedom and fought all the way to the Vermont Supreme Court to protect their property rights and their children's inheritance,
long before the Underground Railroad was built by anti-slavery Northerners, both Black and white.
On a lighter note, George R.R. Martin is a wonderful
fantasy writer. Bantam has just released a two-volume collection of his short stories which are set outside the universe
of his bestselling Song of Fire and Ice series, Dreamsongs. St. Martins has also released a new book,
Inside Straight, in the collaborative series Martin edits, The Wild Cards. If you like fantasy
and science fiction with a sense of humor and real people, these are must reads.
December 2007
I have been a devote of Doris Lessing since I first read The Golden Notebook in
1971. She is never afraid of challenging her readers or admiting she has been wrong. Her Nobel Lecture is a vivid example of how she lives as she writes, showing -- not telling -- all the many reasons
empathy makes us human. She believes in the power of individual stories to change the world.
The full text is posted on the Nobel web site:
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Archives of posts about books I like
From 2007:
After the Sopranos ended, we discovered the marvelous Canadian TV series,
"Slings & Arrows;" three seasons of six episodes each were filmed through 2006 and are now on DVD. It was brought
to the US by Sundance. It is an exceptional portrait of acting, theater, Shakespeare, and mood disorders of all kinds,
set among the cast of the "New Burbridge Festival" in Ontario. First season they do "Hamlet," the second, the Scottish
Play, and the final, "King Lear". Don't forget the extras, especially on the last disk. (And if you don't
know "Shakespeare Wallah" from Ivory and Merchant, rent that too!)
I've been a fan of David Lodge's fiction since, fresh out
of grad school, I read Small Worlds, his send-up of an academic competion for the lucrative (and tax-free) UNESCO
Chair of Literature. No one who has ever looked for a teaching job should miss his marvelous account of an MLA meeting.
Lodge's book Author, Author (2004) gives us an
affectionate portrait of Henry James. Looking back from his deathbed in 1915, the story focuses on James' failures on
the London stage, which took place while his close friend, the Punch illustrator George Du Maurier
(and father of Daphne), wrote Trilby -- the bestselling novel of the century.
From 2006....
I recommend the German film on Hitler's last days in his bunker, Downfall, and
if you find our parents' war endlessly fascinating, as I do, you will also enjoy Scott Turow's ORDINARY HEROES (set during
the Battle of the Bulge) and Faye Kellerman's STRAIGHT INTO DARKNESS (set in Munich before Hitler took over Germany).
The novels are much, much more than mysteries.
THE REINDEER
PEOPLE by Piers Vitebsky is the amazing story of a British anthropologist's 25+ years
visiting and documenting the life of some of the last indigenous Siberian people to herd domestic reindeer. We
meet many keenly individual men women and children, from the university-trained to shamans. I was reminded of the Mongul
family in the documenary movie "The Weeping Camel," and of Amundson's antarctic expeditions, which used native skills while
Scott died using modern mechanical aids. We learn what it was like to live under Soviet rule (when
labor camps drove the meat markets); we watch Perestroika as it affects both animals and people, and we witness the region's
disastrous ecological and economic decline under Putin's Russia.
MAPS FOR LOST LOVERS
by Nadeem Aslam (March, Knopf hardcover). An extraordinary novel about long-time British residents, a family caught
between devout, traditional, misogynist Pakistani culture (which the mother enforces) and the marxist, integrationist -- yet
still observant -- attitude of the liberal father. I read this book a little before the London bombings,
and it gave me instant awareness of what kind of rage and hopelessness simmers beneath the surface, just waiting to be high
jacked by extremists. The father is an extremely sympathetic figure who has deliberately remained in the run-down, immigrant
neighborhood to help improve conditions for the working class. Yet several of his ethical decisions have disastrous
consequences for himself and his children, as does the mother's insistence on wanting her sons and daughter to be so faithful
they will return to Pakistan to marry.
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*AMecke Co. does not have
any consulting interest
in these titles, and
the authors are not clients.
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