Seasonal Reading: War and Peace

Maybe War and Peace makes more sense to read in the winter, by the fireplace. But I've got the book--which is burning a hole in my bookshelf (figuratively)--not to mention the fact that I don't have a fireplace anyway. Weekly updates, details to come.

Fiction or Memoir? (I'm Biased)

I have a new book review up on Levi Asher's awesome blog Literary Kicks. In the review, I check out Mara Altman's new memoir Thanks for Coming: One Young Woman's Quest for an Orgasm. After 26 years Altman had never experienced an orgasm. So she quests to find one. Naturally, she wrote a book about it along the way. Who wouldn't? Here's a clip from my piece:

During her search, Altman gets her toes sucked at a foot fetish party, visits an S&M basement, an orgasm ranch, air-humps God in Israel, forgets completely about human-to-human sex, and makes routine visits to the vegan-muffin-man at the Union Square Greenmarket for yogi-like advice. Her book is overflowing with conflicting advice from such a plethora of sources, including Zola, a "pussy professional," and Eric, Altman's hotter-than-Hercules "sacred whore" who is obligingly the un-monogamous boyfriend of the "Mother of Masturbation" (and impetus of the sexiest and most amusing passages in the book). The state of free-world female sexuality might be a stirring talking point, but why then trivialize it with such an overabundance of facts? (Not to mention an even more overabundant collection of cutesy nicknames for female genitalia). Since Altman under this format could not possibly hope to probe at a greater truth, what exactly is she doing? Is Thanks for Coming supposed to be funny? Cute? Helpful?

Here's the review...

And here's a side note. (Because isn't that what this forum is for anyway?)

In an essay titled "Notes on the History of Fiction," E.L. Doctorow laments the decline in the influence of fiction as a system of knowledge over the last 2,000 years, beginning with the Homeric epic. "Who would give up the Iliad for the historical record?", he wonders, implying that specifics on the Trojan war is inconsequential. "Today it is only children who believe that stories, by the fact of their being told, are true. Children and fundamentalists. And that is the measure of the 2,000-year decline in the story’s authority."

With this in mind, for a contemporary work probing real questions - if not thematically, at least as far as its stunning popularity and societal influence - bravely open (and I mean, brace yourself) to the first chapter of Wetlands, a novel recently translated from the German exploring, among many things, female repression and sexual isolation. Fiction writer and German television personality Charlotte Roche has, objective worth of the novel aside, caused a controversial stir in her home country. According to the New York Times, the work has topped the international bestseller list, calling comparisons to Salinger, Ballard, and Greer, with book signings attracting hundreds of fans.

Summer Reading on Magic Mountain

If Aleksandar Hemon's "Summer Reading" piece in the New Yorker is even a little true, he might be my new literary hero. In "Magic Mountain," Hemon, who wrote prize-winning The Lazarus Project and newly-released collection of stories Love and Obstacles, briefly chronicles solitary summers in a mountainside cabin in Sarajevo, spent doing nothing but reading. The cabin was used in the winter for skiing holidays, but in the summer, the mountain was deserted.

"In our cabin I could read for eight to ten hours a day, fully in charge of my own time, which I regimented like a monk. I interrupted my monastic mission only to attend to the needs of my foolish body, which, in addition to food and coffee, demanded some occasional exertion. Hence, I went for long hikes up the mountain, to the harsh, barren landscape above the tree line. I avoided other people and delayed for as long as possible my trips on foot to the supermarket, a couple of miles away."

It's almost too unbelievably romantic, isn't it?

It helps, also, that Hemon looks kind of like a hit man with designer eyeglasses. In this Upstairs at the Square interview, he impressively addresses overly addressed questions about History vs. history, anger, nostalgia as a way to reimagine the past, and the role of literature.

Literature allows the individual experience in history to be conveyed and understood, or at least thought about. Because history is the big story bout big things, organized by usually big men. And those stores are boring in many ways and also falsified in many ways, as we so well know having lived through the eight years of the Bush regime. And they are fantasies of conquests and world transformation. But my life, I cannot take it out of history, and none of us can do that. And literature provides space in which we can talk about that experience.

The interview is fantastic, I'm convinced he's brilliant. Additionally, he claims he must have coffee and music, always and very loud, when he writes. I like writers who don't crave silence.

Never Published Photos of 24-Year-Old Marilyn Monroe

While I'm not a serious Marilyn fan, I love the idea of "lost images." Here are some early ones recently found in the LIFE archive, and they're pretty lovely.

Nancy Drew is a Gumshoe, Goddess of the Hunt

Sandra Day O'Connor, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, and Sonia Sotomayor used to read Nancy Drew novels. And so did I! As a child, my father and I scoured used bookstores searching out older editions of the mysteries. The Haunted Bookshop, of Iowa City, actually started calling us when new old ones were brought in. My collection is still set up at home at the top of my bookshelf. Eventually, as my literary interests widened I became aware of the mediocrity, as I saw it, of the series. After all, Carolyn Keene, the supposed author, is fictional in herself, and like the Hardy Boy series, Nancy Drew mysteries were written by a long string of ghostwriters. The plots are formulaic and Nancy as a character is flat, and white, and contradictory in her femininity. She has one girly friend and one, er, tomboy friend who help her out. (She's the hottest one, though). She drives a fucking convertible. She's very nice. Yes, Nancy Drew is a "Nice Girl." Although I couldn't have parted with my collection, the belief that my childhood fascination was, as it turns out, sexist and racist. I was ashamed, even, of this "heroine."

But wait, there's a reason I was attracted to the gumshoe (and what a gumshoe) in my girlhood. As it turns out, the opposite of what I believed about the character may be true. Nancy Drew is mythic! She is an everywoman, and her blankness a clean slate with which girls can better relate.

“The real allure of Nancy Drew is that, almost uniquely among classic or modern heroines, she can follow — is allowed to follow — a train of thought,” wrote Sandra Tsing Loh, reviewing Melanie Rehak’s “Girl Sleuth,” a biography of Nancy Drew’s creators, in The Atlantic. “The plot opens ever outward for her, her speeding blue convertible a metaphor for the sure-shot arrow of her intellect, the splendidly whizzing shaft of the maiden huntress Diana.”

“For clever girls of all ages,” Ms. Loh wrote, “it’s a rare treat to read stories in which our heroine’s emotions come alive not with the love of a good man but with the pursuit of a bad one.” (via NYT)

Sexist, yes. Racist, maybe. But that blue convertible? Divine.

Lit Link-Ups: Murakami's 2666, Obama backlash, and something called a Book Expo

(print is dead, the web is ahead)



Murakami's got a new book. It's big. Really big.

People like mindless romance, especially when they're worrying about mortgages and such. "Love may not conquer all in real life, but its power in relatively inexpensive books is quite a comfort in this economy." Hear, hear (I guess).

There is so much hype for "Obama bumps" (books, not babies), that some are complaining of his predictability and--if I understand correctly--actually yearning for W. But, I remind you, there was never a "W. bump." Get off the stage.

There was a Book Expo.

Geoff Dyer won a prize.

Nancy Drew! (More on this later).

Zadie Smith Learns As She Goes (And So Do the Rest of Us)

Because of an apparently shoddy grade-school background, Zadie Smith claims she constantly feels like she's learning "on the hoof." This solidifies my theory that everyone, even and perhaps especially intellectuals, sense that they do not know enough, and that others inherently know more than they do. I do. Or rather, I don't (know enough).

In fact, I learned the meaning of the very expression in question "on the hoof." Genius!