Far from Perfect

Posted 7 April, 2008 in Bookish | 2 comments

From the Telegraph, a list of 110 books that would create the “perfect” library.

My personal library, which apparently is far from “perfect,” contains exactly twelve of the listed titles:

• Gulliver’s Travels
• Madame Bovary
• Canterbury Tales
• The Prelude
• Odes
• The Waste Land
• Paradise Lost
• Portrait of a Lady
• The Human Stain
• The Prince
• Confessions
• Life of Johnson

What surprises me is that at five titles out of twelve, the vast majority of this dirty dozen, by category, are books of poetry. (Which seems serendipitous during National Poetry Month.) I’ll admit to having cheated here a bit by including poems that I’ve got in larger anthologies (Complete Poems and Major Prose of John Milton, for example, or The Riverside Chaucer). But, I think that’s fair enough.

Of course, like all lists of its kind, this one is something of an exercise in stupidity. I’d love to know what the criteria for inclusion were. How, for example, does someone decide that the “perfect” library contains a Harry Potter volume (although they’re not specific as to which one) and A Year in Provence, but not Don Quixote or King Lear or Crime and Punishment? Whose infinite wisdom determined that Jonathan Livingston Seagull and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (both execrable books) were more worthy than Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations or Thus Spake Zarathustra?

Ultimately, this list represents the “perfect” library of whoever created it. Someone else’s “perfect” library would presumably be made up of V.C. Andrews novels and Chicken Soup for the Soul books. Surely y’all have some pet MIA’s of your own?

Yr. Humble Correspondent Emerges from His Self-imposed Exile to Point Out an Observation that — Unreconstructed Lech that He Is — He Wholeheartedly Endorses

Posted 19 February, 2008 in Bookish | No comments

“I wish there were more sex in books, actually: not more souls melding together in bliss or dancing together like dolphins in heaven or wherever they dance, but sex acts. I want to know exactly what people do, how long they take, whether they both like it, whether they giggle, whether they both get off and how they feel about it afterwards — and I want to know all the awkwardnesses and embarrassments that result. Sex is as complicated and fraught as any human interaction: it seems arbitrary to cut out such a crucial battleground from our stories.”

– Russell Smith, from the Introduction to Diana: A Diary in the Second Person

It’s a Good Thing He Wasn’t Around to See Dr. Phil

Posted 18 January, 2008 in Bookish | No comments

“Today’s public no longer forgives an author for failing, after the action he describes, to give his verdict; indeed, in the very course of the drama he is told to take sides, to declare himself for Alceste or Philinte, for Hamlet or Ophelia, for Faust or Marguerite, for Adam or Jehovah. I do not claim, of course, that neutrality (I was about to say: indecision) is a sure sign of a great mind; but I do believe that many great minds have been greatly disinclined to … conclude — and that to state a problem properly is not to suppose it solved in advance.”

– André Gide, in the preface to The Immoralist (trans. by Richard Howard)

My First Favourite Literary Quote of the Year

Posted 3 January, 2008 in Bookish | No comments

“February, of all months, is the month when you are most likely to go out on a dark night and worry sheep.”

– Lolly Willowes, Sylvia Townsend Warner

(via Moonlight Ambulette)

Unread Books

Posted 30 November, 2007 in Bookish | 7 comments

As the year-end “best of” lists begin to make their appearance, I find myself succumbing to a kind of surprised depression at the number of books I haven’t read in the past twelve months. I’m not talking about sleepers, or those quirky, left-of-centre books that are trumpeted by the self-appointed arbiters of taste in the blogosphere (see, for e.g., The Last Novel by David Markson). I’m talking about big, splashy, blockbuster books.

Exit Ghost? Haven’t read it (despite my repeated assertion that I believe Philip Roth to be the best living writer in English). The Yiddish Policeman’s Union? Haven’t read it. Tree of Smoke? Haven’t read it. On Chesil Beach? Haven’t read it. The Post-Birthday World? Haven’t read it.

This from a guy who reads for a living. Of course, that may indeed be part of the problem. It’s not that I haven’t been reading over the past year, it’s more that my time has been spent reading things that are lacklustre at best. Like this. And this. And this.

Far be it from me to complain about my lot in life: it’s a pretty cushy one and, even if it weren’t, it’s one that I have consciously chosen.

Still, how is it possible for a self-consciously obsessed (and obsessive) reader to miss so many of the “best” novels in a given year? Certainly time is one factor: while it may be possible for a film buff to catch all of the major releases in a calendar year, and for a music buff to hear all of the year’s big albums, it is a physical impossibility for one person to read even a significant percentage of all the novels published in any one year.

But a paucity of time combined with an apparently endless stream of new releases necessitates a series of choices as to what one reads and what one ignores. In 2007, these choices have often been predicated upon my perception of what I was supposed to read as opposed to what I actually wanted to read.

In the past year I have read more Canadian fiction than in any year in recent memory. Much of this was assigned to me by various review editors, but in some cases I foisted this burden upon myself. I have been an outspoken critic of the Giller shortlist for years, without having read very many of the books that ended up as finalists for the prize. This is because I know enough about Canadian fiction, and about my own tastes and predilections, to know that these books would likely not have appealed to me. But I felt that this was unfair, and so, perhaps out of a misplaced patriotism, this year I read all five Giller shortlisted books. And guess what? None of them appealed to me.

People who take a contrary position would suggest that this was a foregone conclusion: I had decided I wasn’t going to like these five books before I even cracked their covers. And you know what? These people might be right. I base my reading choices on many factors, among them past experience. And past experience has taught me that most Canadian fiction, especially of the historical variety, is plodding, earnest, and slow. There are exceptions, of course: The Girls Who Saw Everything by Sean Dixon, The Line Painter by Claire Cameron, Between Trains by Barry Callaghan, to name only three. But by and large, most Canadian fiction is, in my experience, quite extraordinarily dull.

More to the point, the time spent reading the latest “important” Canadian novel about women on a farm in the 1800s is time not spent reading other things. The time I spent reading the Giller nominees could have been spent with the new Roth, which past experience indicates I would have enjoyed much more thoroughly. Instead of Vassanji, I could have been reading Michael Chabon. Instead of Elizabeth Hay, Denis Johnson.

In his Globe and Mail column yesterday, Russell Smith points out that the books that get lauded in this country — the ones that become “Heather’s Picks” and wind up on prize shortlists — are generally not the books that get fiction lovers excited about reading fiction:

[I]f you hang around a group of Canadian fiction writers, you will hear them excitedly discussing all kinds of exciting books — all the Lorrie Moores and Michael Chabons of the United States, all the Gautam Malkanis and Irvine Welshes of Britain … all the books that don’t make it to your mom’s book club, the books you can be forgiven for not knowing about if you’re a devotee of Canada Reads. (It will also give you the impression that these Canadian fiction writers don’t have a whole lot of time for the work of their Canadian peers, and that impression may well be correct.)

Therefore, it getting toward the time of year when resolutions are made, here’s mine: In the next twelve months, I resolve that my discretionary reading will be dictated by nothing more or less than what interests me, whether that be a highly touted new work, a crime thriller, or a neglected classic. I resolve to read more of what I want to read and less of what I’m told I’m supposed to read.

It’s an open question as to whether this approach will mean that my personal reading list for 2008 corresponds more closely to the year-end “best of” lists, but I reckon that at the very least it will put me in a better mood for the year ahead.

On Stealing Books

Posted 28 November, 2007 in Bookish | 2 comments

I’ve been undergoing the week from hell thus far, having kicked it off with a touch of what might have been food poisoning, but was more likely a mild bout of stomach flu, then capping that yesterday by taking a chunk out of my right hand by breaking a glass bowl. All of which is to say that you shouldn’t expect much in the way of content from me today, or tomorrow.

In lieu of which, I’ll point you toward an interesting article on stealing books by the venerable Kerry Clare, writing in the Descant blog:

Yes, the biblioklepts: those suffering from bibliokleptomania. There was even an article about it in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, in which writer E.C. Abbott explains that book thieving goes way back to the Middle Ages when books were rare and especially valuable. Abbott also writes of famous book thieves including Dr. Elois Pichler in the nineteenth century who stole 4000 volumes over three years from the Russian Imperial Library in St. Petersburg. He’d sneak them under his bulky overcoat, specially adapted with a storage sack inside, and when he was caught he was sent to Siberia. Also of Gilbert J. Bland, “the Al Capone of cartography”.

For more from Ms. Clare, keep watching this space.

Pardon Me while I Indulge My Inner Twelve-Year-Old

Posted 22 November, 2007 in Bookish | 1 comment

From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the winner of the award for the World’s Worst Book Title is Cooking with Pooh, which is an actual book from Disney. It narrowly beat out Letting It Go: A History of American Incontinence. (via Big Bad Book Blog)

The Perpetual Motion Reading Machine

Posted 18 October, 2007 in Bookish | 2 comments

Several stacks of books surround the desk in my office and cover every available inch of surface space. There’s the Giller shortlist pile, which stares back at me balefully each morning, the heavy tomes practically vibrating with a sonorous hum. This pile is the result of a rash and unconsidered promise your humble correspondent made a week or so ago, which is seeming more and more ill-conceived as every day goes by.* There is the pile of books for review, which at the moment is mercifully manageable.

Then there is the to-read pile. Actually, there are two stacks of to-read books, broken down roughly by date of acquisition. The pile that contains Michael Chabon’s novel The Yiddish Policeman’s Union and Leonard Michaels’s Collected Stories has been shifted behind a pile of newer books, including Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children and the paperback edition of Thomas L. Friedman’s The World Is Flat. These will likely be supplanted in coming days by newer books that are acquired at bookstores, through friends, industry contacts, and so on.

The plain fact is, I will never conquer the to-read pile. It’s a simple matter of physics. Too many (far too many) interesting books are published in a given season, there are only twenty-four hours in each day, and there’s only one of me (until I perfect that cloning device I’ve been working on in the back shed). Plus, I have an unquenchable acquisitiveness when it comes to new books: like a siren’s call, I am almost physically unable to walk past a bookstore without going in, and once inside, I’m unable to leave empty-handed. This causes an exhaustive drain on my already depleted bank account, but it also results in a kind of literary perpetual motion machine. I come home from each visit to the bookstore with a new volume (or, more frequently, volumes), which are then lovingly added to the pile in my office.

Unfortunately, space considerations being what they are (another law of physics being that you can’t cram more into a given space than the available space is able to hold), the addition of the new books to the pile means that the older books get shuffled over to the back. Eventually, these older books, which once had pride of place at the top of the to-read pile, will need to move off the floor to make room in the office, at which point they will be consigned to shelves. Once they’re placed unread on the shelves, the chances of my ever getting to them are reduced to about nil.

As I’m writing this, the shelves in my office are bulging with a group of politics and international relations volumes I purchased earlier this year. Noam Chomsky’s Failed States, Kevin Phillips’s American Theocracy, George Packer’s The Assassin’s Gate, Linda McQuaig’s Holding the Bully’s Coat. All of these once sat, shiny and new and inviting, at the top of the to-read pile. Now they wait in vain for a spare weekend that will probably never come.

This is the curse that inveterate booklovers suffer. I once read somewhere (I can’t remember off the top of my head where) that a booklover can immediately identify a non-booklover because the first question the latter will ask when gazing at the booklover’s shelves is, “Have you read all of these?” The obvious answer, of course, being no.

And yet the to-read pile continues to grow and mutate like a living organism. Perhaps one day I’ll find the right balance between setting reasonable goals for what can be read as against impulsively purchasing everything that catches my eye at any given time and deluding myself that I can get to it all by giving up television or by sleeping a couple of hours less each night. (After all, I’ve heard that one can be driven insane by attempting something that one knows at the outset to be impossible.) More likely, though, the to-read pile will continue to grow and change, like a snake shedding its skin every three or four months. There’s a kind of comfort in knowing that if I’m ever stuck for something to read ( ! ), I can always turn to my shelves, where books I’ve forgotten even acquiring sit waiting to be rediscovered, as though they were new.

*As I told one interlocutor about this promise: no, I was completely sober when I issued it, which makes it that much worse.