Books – Page 11

Shelf life

Monday, April 23, 2018

“Books are frozen voices, in the same way that musical scores are frozen music. The score is a way of transmitting the music to someone who can play it, releasing it into the air where it can once more be heard. And the black alphabet marks on the page represent words that were once spoken, if only in the writer’s head. They lie there inert until a reader comes along and transforms the letters into living sounds. The reader is the musician of the book: each reader may read the same text, just as each violinist plays the same piece, but each interpretation is different.”
—Margaret Atwood

Coming up with a title

Friday, April 13, 2018

“When I’m finished and the work is off the loom, it sits there and ruminates. Then it starts having a name in spite of myself.”
—Sheila Hicks

“Part of the impetus to name things is that if you don’t they get called Untitled, and that just gets to be a drag to have a thing referred to as ‘untitled.’”
—John McCracken

I’m one of those writers who likes to come up with the title for the piece first and then write the thing. That’s how my last two books worked, but now I’m working on this new book, and nobody can agree on any of the titles I’ve come up with so far.

In My Life in France, Julia Child writes about what a pain in the ass it was to come up with the title for Mastering The Art of French Cooking. She and her husband Paul debated “the merits of poetic titles versus descriptive titles.” They made lists and lists of titles, trying to come up with the right “combination of words and associations” that would work.

Editor Judith Jones (who got the original manuscript with the title “French Recipes for American Cooks”) finally came up with the title after “playing with a set of words like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, trying to get them to fit together.” (Dramatized in the movie, Julie & Julia.) This seems to me like a totally sensible approach, so I’m stealing it: I’m writing words I like on index cards, and shuffling them around.

Still, even if you come up with a great title, there will be Unbelievers. Alfred Knopf, when he heard Jones’ title, supposedly shook his head and said, “I’ll eat my hat if anyone buys a book with that title!”

Above: pages from Every Day a Word Surprises Me and quotes from Art is the Highest Form of Hope.

Two quick things about books

Saturday, December 30, 2017

1) If you give the same book to 100 people, they’ll read 100 different books.

2) We’re constantly changing, rewiring, shedding our old cells, so if you re-read a book, it will be a different book from the one you read before.

Making lists (checking them twice)

Sunday, December 17, 2017

I’m working on my 2017 year-end list. (Above list is from September, so no spoilers.) 3 years ago I got up on a high horse about how ridiculous it is for readers who aren’t professional critics (or affiliate bloggers) to make their year-end lists before the actual end of the year. (Do none of these people read books in December?) It’s a dumb thing to make a big deal about. People love year-end lists before the year’s end (including me, honestly) because they can see what they missed, argue, add to their Christmas lists, buy and write-off their taxes while they still can. It’s mostly harmless, so who cares?

I’ve been keeping a list of my favorite books for over a decade now, and the question on my mind is whether I should bother making a year-end list at all. I mean, I love sharing books I think deserve an audience — it’s the best part of putting out my weekly newsletter — but I’ve begun to weary of ranking books. (My favorite year-end list features no ranking at all: Steven Soderbergh’s media diary.) Reading is such a unique, personal experience, created by the author’s text, the quality of the printing (or e-device), the setting, and the mind (and mood) of the reader. Ranking books in any way, even by gathering up a top ten list, seems, at best, arbitrary, at worst, harmful to the spirit of what makes reading so awesome.

Still, I love a good list, and I love looking back on the year and making a list. I’ve always thought the best lists are more like a diary or a snapshot of a moment in somebody’s life, like John Porcellino’s Top 40 he’ll put in the back of King-Cat:

Reading JP’s lists give you another glimpse into who he is, beyond his comics. (For the past 3 years, I’ve ripped him off with my year-end top 100 lists.)

So I’ll keep on, but I’m going to try, as best as I can, to acknowledge that each of these lists is just a moment in time, just a snapshot of how I feel when I make them. I love the idea of the year-end list as an “interchangeable set of favorites” in the words of Stephanie Zacharek, who wrote of her year-end list: “If I’d eaten something different for breakfast on the day of making up the list, my number 2 might have been number 1, or vice-versa.”

One other thing: I’d like to go back occasionally, revisit my lists, see how they hold up. I’ll usually make a top 10 list of books, and then add on another list of 10 more good books. Often it’s this second list of books that contains the most interesting stuff. To quote Zacharek again:

[T]he end of a critic’s, or a moviegoer’s, list is where the oddball magic really happens. The movies here are the stragglers, the drifters, the hobos that not all of society loves. These are movies that may have been kicked off the list, put back on and kicked off again – they don’t ask for easy membership in any club. These are movies that may have reached us in ways we can’t quite parse, even after we’ve spent hours or days thinking and/or writing about them. If all top-10 lists are subjective (and all are, no matter how pompous some critics may be in presenting their choices), the tail end of the average list is truly the untamed wilderness, the place for inexplicable passions, for wooliness, for massive quantities of “What the f—itude?”

So, let’s have a little fun at the end of this post, and revisit a few years:

2016. It’s hard to believe John Cage’s Silence, Calvin Tomkins’ Duchamp: A Biography, and Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own didn’t make the top 10. Jeez.

2015. Great year. No complaints!

2014. I messed this one up. I mean, seriously? Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son didn’t make the top 10? I’m an idiot.

2013. Another good year. I’d bump up Michael Azerrad’s Our Band Could Be Your Life and Ellen Ullman’s Close To The Machine.

2012. Solid.

2011. Maggie Nelson’s Bluets is way better than some of the books on the top 10.

2006-2010. Too painful to think about!

Stay tuned for 2017.

Shelf life

Thursday, December 14, 2017

Here’s a photo of Steal Like An Artist on sale at a Target in Columbus, Ohio. (Photo by my cousin.) Sure, it’s on sale at all kinds of places, including some of the best bookstores and museum gift shops in the world, but there’s a kind of weird fun knowing that my aunt saw my book while doing her grocery shopping and texted it to my mom. (And a kick for my mom, I imagine: There’s not a whole lot of social currency in small-town Ohio when you tell your friends your son is a writer.) Even my wife said she got a little thrill seeing it in our local store.

In this Sunday’s New York Times, Jason Segel gives it a shout-out in his By The Book interview:

The book is 8 months older than my oldest son, and he reads chapter books, writes songs in Garageband, and tells poop jokes. He has a whole life of his own now! So does the book. I was 28-years-old when I wrote it. I’ll be 35 next year. Sometimes it doesn’t even feel like it was me who wrote the thing. How strange to see it still making its way out into the world, to have people reading it for the first time. I am lucky. And grateful.