Well, Nook and Kindle: The E-Book Debate

My wife and I are dead set against purchasing an e-reader -- that is until we find ourselves well enough off that we're able to take two or three holidays each year of durations permitting the reading of more books than we might carry with us. Will this ever happen? I hope we'll one day be able to travel as extensively as we long to -- but not at all so we might have what is for us the lone logical excuse to plump for an e-reader. I want to see the world, but I don't want reading experiences that prove to be inextricable from the sweat-grubbiness implicit in holding a shell of plastic for hours (and hours, and hours) on end. Likewise, I hate the idea of abandoning reading as a shorthand means to telling the world (in parks, in cafes, on buses, in waiting rooms, in halls before class) something about me -- even if that "something" is little or nothing more than that someone in the world is reading Peter Carey, or Marilynne Robinson, or -- gasp! -- the Bible. On a local bus this afternoon, I saw a girl reading A Farewell to Arms. Do I know who she was? No. Will I ever know? In all likelihood, no. But was my day (and, hence, my existence) brightened a bit in the knowledge that someone was (verifiably) reading a Hemingway novel? Yes.

I'm a little chilled by the possibility of widespread subsumption of individualism (individualism as manifest in what we read and that what we read -- and that we read what we read -- insists on a diverse intellectual and emotional landscape) under the corporate hegemonic umbrella that is the e-reader phenomenon. Imagine a world in which we're encouraged to tear the covers from our books before leaving the house with them, and you've imagined a world according to Nook and Kindle. I don't want that. Do I want people to read more? God yes -- but I don't want the imaginations of people held captive less by texts themselves (and the wonders therein) than by technological novelties and trends.

That said, if the advent of e-readers can usher back into print and wide circulation the likes of novels including Josephine Johnson's forgotten Pulitzer Prize-winner Now in November (I'm doubtful, having requested that Amazon make this one available in Kindle format for months and months, to no avail) and assure that little-read and little-printed novelists like Frederick Buechner (seven of whose individual novels -- the four Bebb books in an omnibus edition -- are available for download to either Nook or Kindle) remain in print (even if "print"), then there is some light (however compromised) in this turning point (and it is a turning point) in the evolution of publishing.

Taking to Task: Rick Bass

As most avid readers are, I, too, am a gleaner of blurbs. And while quotations (from both reviewers and the writer's fellow travelers) appended to trade paperback editions are much too often either (merely) unimaginative pap or quid pro quo nepotism, a critic or reviewer will sometimes make a point or observation so unusual that I'm intrigued enough to purchase the book in question. Indeed, I bought Beryl Bainbridge's novel Master Georgie (about which I'd been curious for some time, given its 1998 Booker Prize-shortlisting) for no reason (in the end) other than that the critic for the Chicago Sun-Times had written about it: "What other author could stop your heart with a sentence about walking down a tree-lined Liverpool boulevard on a summer evening?" But had that same critic, a decade on, written about another novel: "What other author could quicken your pulse with a sentence about sunlight reflecting off the surface of a pond?" -- how might I feel about his or her assessments? about the books themselves?

Rick Bass wrote the following in his Dallas Morning News review of Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried when the latter was published almost 20 years ago: "I've got to make you read this book...A certain panic arises in me. In trying to review a book as precious as The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien, there is the nightmare fear of saying the wrong thing -- of not getting the book's wonder across to you fairly -- and of sounding merely zealous, fanatical, and hence to be dismissed. If I can't get you to go out and buy this book, then I've failed you."

In April 2007, Bass wrote the following in his Boston Globe review of Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life: "My great fear in reviewing this book is that I might make it sound like the treatise of a hokey earth mother and do-gooder, rather than a profound, graceful, and literary work of philosophy and economics, well tempered for our times, and yet timeless."

I don't care that the reviews are separated by 15 or 16 years -- can there be a better-grounded suspicion of disingenuousness in a reviewer than in the reviewer who twice articulates so singular a sentiment? Bass has done both O'Brien and Kingsolver a disservice in his ostensible aim to do each of them the finest service a critic might.

Lit Geekdom

Earlier in the semester, a friend and colleague of mine had asked whether I was planning to use or introduce criticism in the Introduction to Literature section I'm teaching. I answered her last week: "Two chapters from Marjorie Garber." To which she said: "You know she's always photographed with her dogs?" And me: "I know. It's a little weird." And she: "It is a little weird."

What I find hilarious, and charming, about this exchange is that it is or would be (I imagine) neither amusing nor comprehensible to anyone but scholars of literature. ("Marjorie who...?" one imagines most people asking.) In short, I love those moments in which I'm reminded that this world of mine -- so staid on the surface and despite the absences of the fruits of fandom marketing and conferences or festivals at which we galivant about in costumes and queue for autographs on boxes of action figures -- has as much geek in it as the orbits of Trekkies and Lucas devotees.

One just needs to know where to look, or what to listen for (laughter at the appearance of John Webster expressing admiration for Titus Andronicus in Shakespeare in Love is a telling start).

Obsession is legion -- and as revealing as a star chart, a fingerprint, a wink.

Recapping MFOB

It's been a week since the 2009 Montana Festival of the Book wrapped, and while I've been planning to post since its final gala night, teaching and working at the bookstore and wrestling with Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse for the Eclectic Shade Tree (our October selection) muscled the blog to the back burner. But things have calmed down a bit -- I've finished the Woolf novel (surrendering to, and falling in love with, it after 100 grueling, confounding pages), have neither papers nor exams awaiting grading and took advantage of a lull in business last night at B&N to head home earlier than scheduled -- and so I'm here to:

1) thank novelist and Booklist Online senior editor Keir Graff for giving me the (charming and charmed) glimpse into the world of reviewing books in a professional forum that I (being the book geek that I am) have long been curious about; and

2) let readers know that neither breakfast nor coffee with Marianne Wiggins came off after all (she is a kind woman and a wicked smart novelist, but also one among the flightiest and space cadetiest people I've ever met -- I picture her remembering, a nebulous nagging on the road somewhere in Utah, a conversation about John Dollar that she'd arranged to have with this literature instructor that she, somehow, never had...); and

3) encourage everyone (myself included) to read something -- anything -- by the wonderfully gracious and endlessly delightful Andrew Sean Greer; and

4) announce to the world that I'm glad to have never read a Rick Bass book, and will never read a Rick Bass book (whatever the acclaim he's earned as a writer, he was bristling and resentful in his panel remarks, as much an offense to his audience as to the moderator whom he insulted at the word "go" -- I've a scornful post planned on Bass's insincerities as a book reviewer that I've been meaning to get to for some time, and will strike now the iron is hot); and

5) express disappointment in Maile Meloy's fiction (a 2005 Orange Prize nominee? -- nothing like a work of fiction with which one is wholly unfamiliar but that manages to sound like a half-dozen other sad clown twentysomething and thirtysomething stories to aggravate one's impatience with the marketable cookie-cutter pitch of so much prose coming out of MFA programs nowadays); and

6) thank Dennis Lehane for an insider scoop on the unexpected postponement in the release of Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island as he signed our remaining stock; and

7) rejoice that in a world in which so few people read literature (or books at all, for that matter), festivals like this bring people together to mingle and chat and share their zeal for the written word.

So while I'll likely never have my John Dollar question answered -- was Wiggins influenced at all by Carey's Oscar and Lucinda? by Hudson's Green Mansions? by Matthiessen's Far Tortuga? -- I find this love of books in me reinvigorated and the world before me entertaining sharper lines, richer colors, more pungent scents. (One can just imagine how I'll feel after seeing -- at long last! -- Bright Star tonight...)

Bullet Points

However articulate or fuming or foundering the defenses of historical fiction I've written here at Reports from a Room with a View, recent Booker Prize-winner (for the marvelous Tudor epic Wolf Hall, which I'm now 400 pages into) Hilary Mantel has made the argument with more wit, more incision and better aim than I imagine I'll ever be able. Take that, Kim Stanley Robinson.

Perhaps readers of this blog saw a certain National Guard "ad" (read: grotesque inculcation of patriotism), trumpeting the virtues of drone attacks in the Middle East, at the cinema this last summer? I can find it nowhere online (hence the absence of a link), which might be a revealing government response to the negative press the drone program has been receiving. To wit (from the August issue of Sojourners):
"Between January 2006 and April 2009, 60 cross-border drone strikes from Afghanistan into Pakistan killed 14 suspected terrorists, along with 687 civilians."

As the consensus (arrived at with poise and exercised intellect) among most level-headed conservative and liberal commentators demonstrates (whereas far right propagandists writhe and root like pigs in this grist for their distortion mills), the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to President Obama was a precipitate error in Swedish judgment (evinced not least in Obama's refusal to halt -- and escalation of -- antecedent drone attacks, a decision -- among others -- that seems to have given otherwise reasonable novelist David Maine the mistaken impression that hostilities make permissible and effective inroads where discursive persuasion is concerned).

Marilynne Robinson's lectures (delivered at Yale University earlier in 2009 -- the latest in the Terry Lectures Series, established in 1905, on religion, science and ethics) are being published in late spring 2010.

I'll be having either coffee or breakfast with Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-nominee Marianne Wiggins (Evidence of Things Unseen) next week to discuss influences I believe I've seen (we'll see...) in her terrific (and I mean "terrific" in both senses of the word) novel John Dollar. Quite excited.

Still waiting (and with growing impatience) for some Missoula cinema or other to bring in Jane Campion's Bright Star.