Cover via Amazon

In The University Bookman Gerald J. Russello reviews two books I want to read: Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s by Bruce J. Schulman and Julian E. Zelizer, eds. and A Conservative History of the American Left by Daniel J. Flynn.

Russello argues that neither book quite captures the complexities involved.  Flynn first:

Flynn has done a significant amount of research, and the text is readable and lively, even if one would wish for more explicit connecting threads. The same ideas—common ownership of property, say, or free love, and odd juxtapositions of science and social criticism—occur throughout Western history. To merely lump them all on “the Left” is as helpful as a different farrago of ideas—monarchy, say, joined with capitalism, hierarchical social classes, and table manners—is when defining the Right. The problem is not that such dichotomies do not have explanatory power; it is that they do not explain enough. Even according to Flynn’s taxonomy, the connections among these various radicals are unclear. The Puritans may have opposed free enterprise, but no one could say they opposed religion or the family. Similarly, one can find in Washington or New York many Republican stalwarts defending free trade, but whose devotion to traditional values of the kind Flynn wants associated with the Right leave something to be desired.

But Rightward Bound even more so:

By and large, however, the contributors are not really up to the task of explaining the Right. They stick too closely to the academic formula, where conservatism is somehow not an authentic cultural position for people who wish to preserve their traditions, but an ideological construct forced upon a supine electorate that is otherwise liberal except when manipulated by well-financed corporate cadres. The collection ignores the bigger stories of those years: why conservatism could not stop the leftist onslaught of the 1970s and later. Despite ferocious conservative opposition in the years following the Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade in 1973, which legalized abortion, the decision still remains the law of the land. Where once mildly controversial television programs and movies would have spurred protest, young men and women from the South and Midwest (traditionally the most conservative parts of the nation) now compete on crass reality programs. What was it about the conservative strategies of the 1970s that, from the point of view of the cultural concerns that motivated conservatives to enter politics in the first place, have been largely failures?

Given Russello’s review, I think I will look to read A Conservative History of the American Left but avoid Rightward Bound for now.

Time was you couldn’t click on this blog without running into a list.  But it has been a long time since we discussed one around here.  But I just stumbled upon, via Nigel Beale, Esquire’s The 75 Books Every Man Should Read and thought I would post on it for old time’s sake  As usual, I have some work to do.  I have only read ten.  How do you stack up?

List below with what I have read in bold.

Read the rest of this entry »

I am a compulsive reader.  Not only do I like to read, but there is some sense in which the act of finishing - not just reading but completing - a book gives me satisfaction.  The problem comes from reading too fast or in reading small sections over a larger period of time.  My compulsion drives me to read whenever I can and to read as much as I can.  Sometimes this leads to less than ideal comprehension or insight into the material read.

And when it comes time to write a review I often feel like I would be better off reading the book again to get a deeper appreciation for the work and to catch things I missed the first time through.  This doesn’t happen all the time, but regularly with non-fiction and more complex fiction.

But to take time to read a book again means a missed oppertunity to read a book I haven’t read yet.  And there are so many books out there that I want to read but haven’t, that the pressure is usually too much.  So I rarely read a book a second time despite the obvious benefit it would bring to me as a reviewer.

Does this make any sense?  Anyone else have this problem?

*It really has nothing to do with the post, but I love that Alice in Wonderland image.

I am so jealous:

via: YA Book Nerd

From The Dart League King by Keith Lee Morris:

Tristan had begun to grow bored, and he hated boredom more than anything else, probably because it was the state at which he arrived more often than not when he was with other people, because when it came right down to it he didn’t find people all that interesting, as they all seemed more or less to have the same kind of thoughts, perform the same sort of actions, very little variation occurring between the experience he had with one person or group of people and the next, this was disturbing to him, because he was a conscientious person in the large ways and the deep ways if not in the small and everyday, and so wanted to think of himself as someone who tried to be helpful, someone who cared, even while he realized that he wasn’t very helpful and usually didn’t care, at least not until long after the fact, so that he passed up new opportunities for helping or caring due to his preoccupation with the missed opportunities of yesterday or the month before or last year.

Richard Lewis, author of The Demon Queen,  on being a writer:

I don’t know if the current economic migraine dooms this novel or not, but I find myself curiously indifferent, even if I was thinking somewhat commercial as I wrote it. I’m a writer. That’s what I do, what my lovely wife encourages me to do (and as my young daughter once said to a friend about me, “Oh, don’t mind my dad. He’s not really grumpy, he’s just writing.”) I’m most happy when I’m unhappily writing. Writing is an exercise in a state of sustained dissonance. Yeah, sometimes I get in that much ballyhooed “zone” where scenes and words come as a babbling brook of blessing from the big beyond, but I don’t get too excited about it, because I know there is always the revision. For example, hunting down silly alliterations.

Alan Jacobs concludes his review of Neal Stephenson’s latest novel Anathem with this:

But this is the problem with all of Stephenson’s books of the past decade, starting with Cryptonomicon (1999): He has more energy than his readers are likely to have.

But what a wonderful problem! Stephenson is immensely and delightedly curious about an astonishingly wide range of ideas and disciplines — from cryptography to mechanical computers and clocks to steam engines to calculus and geometry to martial arts to quantum-theoretical accounts of infinite possible worlds — and not many readers are likely to be able to catch up with it all. But even for those who fall behind there is, or should be, admiration for Stephenson’s sheer love of ideas, and his belief that fiction can be a powerful means for communicating those ideas and infecting others with a love of them — a love of them and a conviction that they matter, that, as another long-winded novelist once said, ideas have consequences.

Stephenson doesn’t get noticed by many of our best critics — it’s simply impossible to imagine a James Wood essay about Stephenson (though ‘tis a consummation devoutly to be wished). There will always be someone to step up and decry Stephenson’s interests as “adolescent,” simply because many adolescents (especially socially awkward male ones) are fascinated by the things that fascinate Stephenson. But then, the most “literary” of novels tend to be occupied with teasing out every implication, however subtle and even vaporous, of human relationships, and that’s an adolescent concern too, isn’t it? — just one that occupies a different subset of teenagers.

“Adolescent” is a sneer, not a critique. The important questions are these: Does Stephenson make his ideas live? Does he make us want to care about then as he does? Do those ideas matter — should they matter — to thoughtful people? Yes; yes; yes. Anathem is going to sell a hell of a lot of copies, but it’s also an important and exciting book, and deserves more serious reflection from serious people than it is ever likely to get.

Besides the mention of James Wood, Jacobs’ comments on ideas and literature seem relevant to the post below.

Image via Wikipedia

Image via Wikipedia

If for some odd reason you read this blog but have yet to read Dan Green’s post on Dostoevsky and the resulting commentary - including James Wood and others - please do so as soon as you are able.  Intelligent, snarky, confusing, and thought provoking - it’s all there.

I want to make a note of something Wood said in the comments for future reference:

But then Green is hostile to ideas in fiction; he is a formalist fatalist (see his earlier post) for whom fiction, over the centuries, simply discloses not the world, nor ideas, but ideas about how fiction gets written…It is an astonishingly narrow view of the novel, and it needs to be said again and again that fiction does EVERYTHING: it is about itself, and it is also about the world; it is about sentences, and also about lives; it is form, and it is also politics, metaphysics, ideas. We don’t have to choose.

I want to come back to this when I have time because I think it does get to something that is very different about the way Dan and I approach literature.

Lev Grossman takes a look at How Fiction Works by James Wood and argues that the book is enjoyable but perhaps not in the way it was intended:

Books about how to read fiction are a thriving business. This summer also brings us Thomas C. Foster on How to Read Novels Like a Professor (Harper; 304 pages) and John Mullan on How Novels Work (Oxford; 346 pages), though Wood, as a book critic for the New Yorker, is the heavyweight of the field. These books fall into the curious netherworld of extra-academic literary theory. They are the last, depleted descendants of what used to be called aesthetics, the branch of philosophy that theorized the human response to works of art. For most intents and purposes, aesthetics collapsed in 1970 under the weight of Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory. What’s left is books like How Fiction Works–which is, oddly, a delight, but not for the reason it’s supposed to be.

The pleasure of the book lies in watching Wood read. For Wood, the history of the novel is itself like a novel, in which genius-heroes perform astounding feats of literary innovation. Proust finds a new way to render character in Swann’s Way (”Progress!” Wood shouts); Flaubert (”the bearish Norman, wrapped in his dressing gown”) writes prose with a precision that until then had been reserved for poetry, and in the process inadvertently invents realism as we know it; Tolstoy narrates the fading consciousness inside a freshly severed head. Wood’s enthusiasm is glorious. Reading alongside him is like going birding with somebody who has better binoculars than yours and is willing to share.

He then argues that theory, as it pertains to the novel, is a hopeless cause:

The point of How Fiction Works is supposed to be Wood’s theory of the novel. And yes, we dutifully make the rounds of narration, dialogue and so on, topics that inspire in even the most passionate reader a special, pure kind of boredom. But as Wood himself observes, “The novel is the great virtuoso of exceptionalism: it always wriggles out of the rules thrown around it.” The novel is corrosive to systematic thought–whatever is good about it is precisely that increment that resists theorization. The great pleasure of Wood’s book lies in the examples, not the points they prove, and the lessons lie in watching him read, not think. The novel exists only in practice, not in theory, in the moment when the brain hits the page–the moment when a dying servant’s bare heels meet beneath the sheets on his deathbed.

Read the whole, rather short, review and tell me what you think.  Do we need to know how fiction works?  Is theory ultimately of no use because fiction/novel “is corrosive to systematic thought”?  Or is Grossman missing something? 

When I first started Collected Miscellany I had such high hopes.  I envisioned it as a sort of online magazine with News, Views, Reviews, and Interviews covering the wide world of books and culture.  At times I feel like I came close to that ideal, but for the most part it has turned out to be just another book blog.

Now, it is barely that.

For a variety of reasons I am just not able to blog consistently, and intelligently, about books like I had hoped.  Lately, I am lucky to get two or three posts up a week and almost everything has come down to “I read this book here was my reaction.”  I will admit that on occasion I think my reviews are useful and/or interesting, and I think my short Q&As are worth reading, but I have a hard time finding the time and focus to write about the books I read.  I still read quite a bit, it is the writing I have trouble with these days.

So what to do?  Heck if I know.  I thought about adding some co-bloggers but that has never really worked out for me long term.  If people have the talent, time, and willingness to blog they can start their own and get all the credit without having to share someone else’s site.  It isn’t like the couple hundred visits a day constitute a big audience to attract writers.

I have thought about seeking to join another site or blog so that when I do post on books I have a larger audience and I don’t feel the pressure to carry a blog all on my own.  But that involves work as well.  What blog to join and who would have me?  Would I still post those entries here or just at the new place?  This seems like more work.

I am indecisive.  So let me throw it out there to the last few remaining readers I have.  Any of you who read this site intentionally, and don’t just surf in here from Google or other search engines, what do you think I should do?  Is it worth having a site that posts a couple of book reviews a week of varying quality and depth; that offers author Q&As when and if it strikes my fancy?  When does a blog cease to work?  Does it matter who reads and why?  Why have people stopped leaving comments around here?

Knowing myself, it is likely that this blog will simply struggle on until either things change and I can post more regularly or quit worrying about it.  But any and all feedback is appreciated.

UPDATE: Thanks for the emails.  I thought I had opened up comments but it appears you had to be registered to comment.  That has been fixed so feel free to leave a comment.  You don’t have to have a MT passoword or anything now.