If you were to read The Informationist without any external reference or context, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was just another half-cooked thriller. Vanessa Michael Munroe is a perfect, unstoppable freelance “agent,” for lack of a better word (Stevens’s, obviously, is “informationist,” but I can’t say I prefer it). She takes an assignment, gallops all over the world, gets betrayed and takes revenge.
Right, so… wake me when the movie comes out, depending on who plays Munroe.
I’m super-excited for baseball to start. Thursday can’t come fast enough. Here’s an history of baseball that looks to take an interesting twist:
Thorn, baseball’s most eminent historian, investigates the hanky-panky (in every sense) that lay behind baseball’s creation myth, and while doing so teases out the complicated tangle that was the game’s actual evolution.
I’m already re-watching Ken Burns’s “Baseball” this week. So this looks like a good addition to my reading list to keep up the festivities. Also, check out this post on baseball reading I did a few years back. Get a copy at Powell’s.
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Future Babble, by Dan Gardner. Reviewed by Kathryn Schulz (New York Times).
People want to know the future. Analysts and meteorologists and all kinds of other professions make calculated predictions that the majority of us consider to be at least somewhat reliable. Yet many of us see soothsayers and fortune tellers as hocus pocus. According to Gardner, mathematical models aren’t able to help predict the future with any more accuracy any more than an oracle can read bones. It’s an interesting topic, and the review is good. (I like Schulz’s observation: “To his credit, Gardner is a fox. His book, though, is somewhat hedgehoggy.”) Get a copy from Powell’s.
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The Red Garden, by Alice Hoffman. Reviewed by Valerie Miner (Los Angeles Times).
Hoffman is an excellent writer, so I have little doubt this book is good. As Miner describes it, it’s a really cool concept:
The Red Garden is a fantastical history of Blackwell, Mass., from 1750 to the present, replete with intermarried families, melancholic bears and altruistic mermaids. If you have trouble with bears and mermaids, this just isn’t your kind of book, for Alice Hoffman is a star in the burgeoning field of fairy-tale literary fiction.
The book is a collection of linked stories; sounds a lot like Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, or Alice Munro’s The Beggar Maid. Not bad company; this looks like a book to read. Get a copy from Powell’s.
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Briefly: PostSecret has an exhibit on faith. The NY Times writes up some baseball books.
[Deserted Isle Books is our new series in which our contributors discuss the one book they would choose if they were, well, stranded alone on a deserted isle forever. Read other installments of the series here, get your own copies at Powell's, and explore other series like this on our Special Features page.]
Making my own holy book.
If I found myself stranded on a desert island the one book I would want to be stuck with would be sprawling and epic. It wouldn’t tell one story, but many. That way I would always have on hand something to fit my mood. I’d want a living world and a variety of intangibles and ideas, not an unbreakable plot with a beginning, middle, and end to retrace ad infinitum. That book would be my one source of entertainment, of companionship, of inspiration and of escape. I’m not religious, but I almost picked The Bible.
That’s exactly the kind of book I’d need to survive. I read The Bible a lot when I was a kid. I loved the stories and the characters and the lessons. Even at a very young age though, I never thought of them as more than stories. I remember being weirded out by the few people at my Episcopal church that seemed to take the thing literally, it seemed to me they were missing the point. I first read Metamorphoses in college, and it grabbed me in a very similar manner. I’ve since read it in 3 different translations.*… Continue reading »
[This column highlights the best pieces of journalism in magazines each month, all available free online unless noted. Follow it here.]
Since when is there crying in politics?
The other day, my girlfriend got a haircut. This happens about once a year, and since we were having such a pleasant Saturday afternoon together, when her appointment time rolled around, I decided to go with her to the salon. It was the first time I had ever been in one (weird, I know, but my mom had a beautician’s license and cut my hair at home. I cut my own hair now. I’ve been to a barbershop only a few times). I was pleasantly surprised with the free coffee, and also with the magazine selection. I picked up the copy of Rolling Stone with Jimmy Fallon on the cover and thought to myself, “hmm, I wonder why I didn’t get this yet.” I looked at the date.
It was at that moment I realized my subscription to Rolling Stone had ended three months ago, and I was sad (how someone can go three months without realizing a magazine subscription has ended is a story for another column). I’ve grown fond of Rolling Stone in recent years. They’ve gone beyond their well-rounded music/pop culture coverage to put together some serious pieces of journalism. Ten-years-ago-me would probably punch me in the neck for writing this, but I’m going to write it anyway: In a world where journalism is becoming more and more biased, it’s refreshing to know that places like the Rolling Stone take reporting seriously. Maybe that is just a said sign of our times. While they have gone the way of the NY Times and started charging online readers, a few of their articles are available online. Here is a taste of some of what I missed, along with a few extras:
Crybaby
Ok, maybe I shouldn’t champion Rolling Stone’s journalistic integrity and then highlight an article that begins “John Boehner is the ultimate Beltway hack, a man whose unmatched and self-serving skill at political survival has made him, after two decades in Washington, the hairy blue mold on the American congressional sandwich.” But if you’ve read this column before, you know that I am a fan of Matt Taibbi’s political and economic coverage (and, as I pointed out, because RS is now charging for archive access, I didn’t have much to choose from). Yes, it’s highly biased, and yes, Taibbi sometimes comes across as a pompous dick, but if you tend to agree with his viewpoint, he’s an entertaining writer. Plus, c’mon, is there really anybody out there who doesn’t think Boehner looks ridiculous when he breaks into tears? … Continue reading »
I have no doubt that Karen Russell writes excellent short stories. There are some compelling, affecting scenes in Swamplandia!, but each is isolated from the others, suspended in its own private amber. But a novel—as opposed to a story, which can survive on a single exquisite moment—must have ladders and pyramids of such things, needing each other and adding to the total sum.
Most of Swamplandia!’s the narrative pales in comparative excitement to the conspicuous swashbuckling of the book’s name and setting. For a novel with an exclamation point in its title, there’s disappointingly little energy or novelty in the storytelling, except for Ava’s overcooked voice (more on that shortly). The premise, too, promises great things: the three children of the gator-wrestling Bigtree family go on dangerous adventures after the death of their mother (insert exclamation point). But Russell seems determined to waste that set-up entirely. Almost nothing, quite literally, happens at Swamplandia!, the Bigtrees’ gator park, and the possibilities of the children’s unique upbringing go unexplored. … Continue reading »
This book is touching, hilarious, depressing, fun, and profanely honest. Skippy Dies bores right to the core of its many characters, all of whom live, work, or learn at Seabrook College, a Catholic boarding school for boys outside of Dublin. Murray moves between perspectives fluidly and often brilliantly, at times I felt I was reading a more-accessible Joyce. At many points a picaresque or coming-of-age joint with a multiple-character lens, the novel (which is a big one at almost 700 pages) tackles some hefty stuff. Namely it’s about the transition from childhood to adulthood in a world with an infrastructure that seems increasingly incompatible with each new generation.
Murray accomplishes this from a variety of angles at once, and by incorporating many themes. In that regard, this book reminded me a bit of Freedom. If I had read Skippy Dies last winter when we were picking Best Books 2010, it would have taken my top spot. Though the style and setting are very, very different, it pushes–at its heart–some of these same core buttons as Franzen’s opus, and does a better job. … Continue reading »
Lendle, as the name implies, was a site that helped Kindle users utilize the lending feature included in some Kindle ebooks. They don’t pirate books or sell lending credits or increase the amount you can lend, they’re only a sophisticated bulletin board to match up borrowers and lenders.
When I first read that they’d been shut down, I was furious—but really, it makes a lot of sense. Amazon has never thought much of lending ebooks—it’s never allowed library ebooks on the Kindle, and when Barnes & Noble first announced the Nook’s LendMe feature, Bezos denounced it for being “extremely limited.” When Amazon caved and copied that exact lending feature, their execution of it was both obnoxious to use and riddled with bugs.
So, obviously Bezos wants credit for reader-friendly features like ebook lending, but doesn’t want customers to actually use those features, no matter how “limited” he claims they are. File this one under: another reason not to buy a Kindle.
The good news: you can still find people to borrow and share ebooks with, at such sites as BooksForNooks.com, K BooksForMyEreader.com (formerly BooksForMyKindle, but they probably got cease-and-desisted), and eBookFling.com. At eBookFling, you can actually buy a lending credit (reportedly for $1.99), so you don’t have to own a single Kindle book to borrow them. Personally, I would’ve shut that site down and left Lendle up, but far be it from me to tell Bezos how to polish his head.
[In this feature, we highlight a handful of the best book reviews appearing over the weekend in major newspapers. Follow it here.]
Galore, by Michael Crummey, reviewed by Steven Galloway (The Globe and Mail)
Galore doesn’t arrive in U.S. bookstores for another week yet, but I’m so excited about it that I dug up this gem from the Canadian review of geography and package transport, The Globe and Mail. And by “gem,” I mean turd: it’s a kludgy, simple review, but it gets the job done. Gangsters, whales, flawless prose and a folkloric, boisterous, mythmaking epic novel? I’m sold. [Get Galore at Powell's.]
Spiral, by Paul McEuen, reviewed by Janet Maslin (New York Times)
Spiral, Cornell physics professor Paul McEuen’s debut novel, is a techno-thriller starring a Cornell physics professor. It doesn’t sound like it blazes much of a new trail, but Maslin calls it “a galloping read,” mentions “scalpel-footed robots,” and says, “Neat tricks abound,” which is more than you can say for most thrillers. [Get Spiral at Powell's.]
Art and Madness, by Anne Roiphe, reviewed by Andrea Hoag (Minneapolis Star Tribune)
Roiphe’s memoir documents her years in the 50s and 60s being a “helpmate” (not sure if that’s Hoag’s bizarre word choice or Roiphe’s) for her husband, playwright Jack Richardson. It’s an interesting review, if perhaps not quite enough to sell me on the book. [Get Art and Madness at Powell's.]
Another collection of “new and selected stories” and another great review from David L. Ulin: business as usual at the Times. This doesn’t sound like the next Ragtime, but if you’re a fan of Doctorow—or short stories in general—you could do worse. [Get All the Time in the World at Powell's.]
In brief: Somehow, I’ve missed discussing The Informationists in this space. I’m reading it now, and my own review will be up next week—in the meantime, here’s a profile of the author, Taylor Stevens; she’s had a gruesomely fascinating life. … Here’s a piece by Frederick Forsyth in the WSJ about the details of writing thrillers. Not sure I entirely agree, but it’s cool nonetheless. … Physics of the Future is an educational, if charmless, look at the robots to come, says the NY Times. …. The Paris Wife is a likewise poorly written but not meritless book, says the other Times. … Started Early, Took My Dog is another intriguing mystery on my radar.
[Deserted Isle Books is our new series in which our contributors discuss the one book they would choose if they were, well, stranded alone on a deserted isle forever. Read other installments of the series here, get your own copies at Powell's, and explore other series like this on our Special Features page.]
If I landed on a deserted island with just one book to read, I hope that book would be David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. This novel has everything a castaway needs: it is huge (over 1,000 page), complex (it defies casual description), and would hold up through many re-readings (holding all the strange threads of this behemoth in your mind at one time is impossible). Most importantly, Infinite Jest is unrelentingly humane. Cut off from society, it would be a well-needed reminder of what was being missed. And there might even be time to read all those footnotes.
