Well, um, no, I don't think so

I just received an ad from audible.com.  One of the recommended books is The forgotten room:

"It's 1945: When the critically wounded Captain Cooper Ravenal is brought to a private hospital on Manhattan's Upper East Side, young Dr. Kate Schuyler is drawn into ..."

Thanks anyway, audible.

Reading

In preparation for our travels:

• Crescent and Star: Turkey Between Two Worlds (Stephen Kinzer)
• The Story of Ireland: A History of the Irish People (Neil Hegarty)

Only three other nonfiction:

• To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 (Adam Hochschild)
• King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (Adam Hochschild)
• What It Takes: The Way to the White House (Richard Ben Cramer)

The rest were novels:

• Stoner (John Williams)
• TransAtlantic: A Novel (Colum Mccann)
• The Woman Upstairs (Claire Messud)
• Ragtime: A Novel (E.L. Doctorow)
• A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters (Julian Barnes)
• The Shack (William P. Young)
• Juniper Berry (M.P. Kozlowsky)
• The Graveyard Book (Neil Gaiman)
• The Calder Game (Blue Balliett)
• The Watsons Go to Birmingham--1963 (Christopher Paul Curtis)

I have my wonderful granddaughter to thank for suggesting the last four entries in that list.

I'd recommend all these books except Transatlantic and The Graveyard Book.  I'm undecided about The Shack; I'm glad I read it, but I doubt that most people would care for it.  The best of the lot were To End All Wars and Stoner.

Update: The Shakespeare Stealer (Gary Blackwood), another of the wonderful granddaughter's suggestions, bridged the old and new year; I began it a couple days a few days after Christmas and finished it a week later.  It's good.

Books, good and bad

A couple months ago I dropped a heavy-handed hint about books I'd like to receive for Father's Day.  My wonderful family obliged.  Larkin's book of poetry is excellent; Will's book, unfortunately, is not.

Two novels I read at the beach:

• E.L. Doctorow, The Book of Daniel.  Amazon quotes Newsweek to the effect: "A ferocious feat of the imagination . . . Every scene is perfectly realized and feeds into the whole–the themes and symbols echoing and reverberating."  To which I can only say "Amen."
• Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon.  I'd tried to read it several times before but never got into it.  It's not in the same class as The Book of Daniel, but it's still very good.   Amazon again: "a powerful, sensual, and poetic exploration of four generations of a family mistakenly named Dead."

Solomon is, after the first ten or twenty pages, an easy read; Daniel is more challenging.  Much more challenging.  And much more rewarding.

Literature exam, 2012

Who is the best English-speaking novelist of recent decades, Julian Barnes or E.L. Doctorow?  Defend your answer, with specific reference to Flaubert's parrot, The sense of an ending, Arthur and George, Homer and Langley, The March, and The book of Daniel (the only novels I've read by these authors).  Extra credit for including an analysis of the nonfiction Nothing to be frightened of.

Garry Wills, Philip Larkin

The other day I spent $5 on a one-week subscription to the NYRB so I could get access to a few recent articles.  One was a review of, among other things, two of Garry Wills's books, Font of Life, and Augustine's Confessions:

For [Augustine], baptism no longer stood out in high relief. The baptized Christian could not expect to be buoyed up by the sense of having been transformed by a single, dramatic rite. Human nature did not change so fast. Each believer remained like a leaky ship on the high seas, kept afloat by the constant creak of the bilge pump. The salt water of small, insidious sins dripped through its timbers. If not pumped out by constant acts of penance, prayer, and almsgiving, these small trickles of sin could sink the ship. In this, Augustine preached a doctrine for the long haul, suited to a gray world where almost everyone was a Christian and very few of them were good Christians.

Another was a review of The complete poems of Philip Larkin.  Here's Larkin on modernism:

I dislike such things not because they are new, but because they are irresponsible exploitations of technique in contradiction of human life as we know it. This is my essential criticism of modernism, whether perpetrated by Parker, Pound, or Picasso [or, Einekleineblog might add, Miró or Klee or Warhol]: it helps us neither to enjoy nor endure. It will divert us as long as we are prepared to be mystified or outraged, but maintains its hold only by being more mystifying and more outrageous: it has no lasting power. 

And on aging:

“Ash hair, toad hands, prune face dried into lines—”

And on death:

Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

On James Joyce:

“a textbook case of declension from talent to absurdity.”

Anyone looking to buy me a Father's Day present could do a lot worse than Wills's Augustine's Confessions and Larkin's The complete poems.

The judges of the secret court

I just finished, and very much enjoyed, David Stacton's The judges of the secret court, "a long-lost triumph of American fiction as well as one of the finest books ever written about the Civil War," according to a review in the NYRB.

A brief essay about Stacton -- whom I'd never heard of before Michael Dirda mentioned The judges a couple months ago -- is here.

A review I couldn't finish

In the publicity material for William Landay’s Defending Jacob, its publisher and several advance readers liken the novel to Scott Turow’s Presumed Innocent, arguably the finest of American legal thrillers. The hype is justified. I don’t think Landay’s novel has quite the elegance or gravitas of Turow’s, but . . .

Washington Post, February 5

(My underlining)