The Olive Reader

The New York Times has announced its ten best books of 2005. Working in publishing, I don’t have much time to… what’s the word I’m looking for… oh, read many published books. The only one of this batch I’m familiar with is Saturday by McEwan. His previous novel, Atonement, was one of the two or three best I’d ever read, so I was eager to see how he followed it up. It was good. No Atonement, but good. The man can write a sentence.

As for the rest here, I’ll definitely get to Zadie Smith’s latest, and I’ve been meaning to pick up a copy of Prep. My silliest ambition is to read Tony Judt’s book, which was sent to me by a friend at his publisher. It’s approximately 33,480 pages, and I should be able to finish by June 2058 if I play my cards right, and if I live that long. (I hope to be a robust 84 when I’m done.)

(By the way, I meant my silliest reading ambition. My silliest life ambition is to play shortstop for the Yankees — the likelihood of which seems inversely proportionate to the difficulty I have climbing the escalator stairs in the subway every morning.)

At first I was thinking, “How funny could this be, really?”

Then I read this:

“We started with the idea of Moe as Charles Bukowski,” explains Matt Warburton, who wrote the episode. “We brought Lisa in as the person who discovers in scuzzy, barfly Moe something that we’ve never seen before: a poet.”

And I thought they might be on to something.

It’s that time of year. This week we will learn the winner of the Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction award, now in its 13th year in the UK. The prize focuses on literary fiction – this year’s finalists include John Updike, Salman Rushdie, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez – and its stated goal is to “draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it.”

This must be the easiest award to…award…on the planet, since it’s difficult to think of a well-written sex scene, no? Perhaps they should also try to find a good one worth rewarding, otherwise the general rule shouldn’t be “Write good sex scenes,” but rather “Don’t write sex scenes.”

If you’re interested in reading this year’s nominated excerpts (the “long list,” which somehow sounds different when it’s said about the Booker Prize or the National Book Award), go here. If you’re interested in reading about the award more generally, go to this article, which suggests there should be another award given every year: Least Inspired Headline About the Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction Award. (I’m not saying I did any better.)

If you want my opinion – and yes, I read the nominees; it was for research! – I have to give my vote to Giles Coren for the passage from Winkler. (“Like Zorro.” One could write for decades and not match the profundity of it.) Please, though, don’t let the kids read it. Or even most adults. Not because it’s filthy, though it is, but because it will ingrain bad writing habits.

One last weird note: One of the chosen novels is titled The Olive Readers. This blog wants to make clear that it has no vested interest in seeing that book win, though if it does, and we accidentally get increased traffic because of it, well: Welcome, perverts. You should be ashamed you ever learned to Google.

[EV: One of my books is on this list. All publicity is good publicity, right?]

That’s fine, but who will review the reviewers?

We love, love, love Nabokov.

So, while we’ve been unaware of The Original Laura until now, we deperately hope that there’s a chance we’ll get to buy a copy, no matter what state it’s in. There’s the possibility, however, that it could be destroyed.

“When Nabokov died in 1977, he left behind an unfinished novel entitled The Original of Laura. His express wish was that it be destroyed upon his death. Before him, Virgil and Kafka had left similar instructions [to destroy their work]; neither was obeyed. Nor was Nabokov. His wife, Véra, found herself unable to carry out her late husband’s wishes, and when she passed away in 1991 she bequeathed the decision to their son. The manuscript’s location is kept secret.”

If you’re a fan too, we recommend his Lectures on Literature.

Good grammar costs nothing.

Buy this.

Then once it comes, set it up, sit near it, and read this.

Then watch this and put it on continual play.

It never gets old.

Books are often categorized by the media as “entertainment”. And thus, on the night of the National Book Awards, the lead entertainment story for November 16, 2005 is that Matthew McConaughey has been named the “sexiest man alive” by People magazine.

Last night, publishing gathered for the big black-tie event of the year, the National Book Awards. Much like prom without dates or dancing, we all get gussied up, drink a little too much, and mingle.

Before the “Best Picture” is announced, there’s always the honorary medals. This year, Lawrence Ferlinghetti – one the last beats standing and the heart behind City Lights and Norman Mailer were honored.

I need to tell you that both men had similar stories to tell. And they both spoke of the importance of good books. Books that will last and impact and change and inspire. Books – real books with pages – are needed in the world and we’re dangerously close to giving up the ghost. “Mailer has long lamented the decline of the novel and continued to do so Wednesday night, likening himself to a carriage maker helpless before the arrival of the automobile.”(link) But most of the news stories do not mention Ferlinghetti’s speech at all. Ferlinghetti! And most of the wire stories (short wire stories) mention Mailer’s speech only in context of the Toni Morrison introduction.

“Mailer was introduced by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, who praised him extensively but couldn’t help pointing out his “almost comic obtuseness about women.” The 82-year-old Mailer, recovering from heart surgery and limping to the stage on bad knees, responded: “I’m obtuse about women, but also wary of them.”

Back to my point. Mailer and Ferlinghetti spoke of this happening – entertainment overshadowing the importance of literature standing the test of time. And those statements should be quoted in the wire stories because people should think about that – even just a little – the next time they walk into a bookstore. But critiques are often not news. Instead, the articles and news stories that will be fed out tonight barely mention Ferlinghetti’s speech (if at all) and Mailer’s headline is women.

What do you want from me? I’m a sucker. I get a little sentimental when I hear true luminaries like Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Norman Mailer talk about publishing – and the importance of it. Isn’t that the real reason I go to work everyday? I believe it. And if that makes people roll their eyes at me, so be it.

Then dinner (Lamb? Really. I can’t eat that. I’m no vegetarian, but there’s just something about a baby sheep, that I just can’t eat. On my way home, I went to Pizza King for a slice). Then more talking and socializing. And then on with the program.

There are only four awards. Young People’s Literature, which went to Jeanne Birdsall for her debut novel The Penderwicks. W.S. Merwin wins for Poetry (OK, we wanted John Ashbery to win for Where Shall I Wander, but if it’s not us, I like it when a small press wins. Also, Merwin, at 78, has never won the National Book Award, so that’s also nice), and then the two biggies – Non-Fiction and Fiction.

I think that 99% of people in the audience that night just wanted Joan Didion to get up on stage. So we could see her (Is she really that small? Yes. Does she smile? No.). So when the title was announced, she gracefully took the stage, took her heavy award, and said “There’s hardly anything I can say about this, except thank you.” We all stand. Because we should.

For Fiction, we were pulling for Rene Steinke’s Holy Skirts. But Vollmann! William T. Vollmann wins the fiction award – for Europe Central. Good for Vollmann. He says “I thought I would lose, so I didn’t prepare a speech.” After the ceremony, he also referenced Mailer’s speech, saying “The book is probably going to become an irrelevant object,” he said. “I’m just going to stick it out as long as I can.”

It’s comforting that Didion’s book is on the top of the bestseller list. And will sell many, many more copies because of tonight. And Vollmann. And Merwin. And Birdsall. And all the nominated books.

Congrats, Bill.

Because books are not all we dream of…

My new favorite website:
Penguin cam.

Forbes magazine has a series online now called Tastemakers, where they identify “100 men and women who shape the way we eat, listen, drink, dress and more.“

Those who shape the way we read, according to Forbes, are listed here.

Lists are fun, no?

Jacob Weisberg has a satisfying series about book collecting on Slate this week (the first installment is here). It includes the paragraph below, which appears near the top when he’s itemizing the pleasures of bibliophilism. This excerpt name-checks a HarperCollins author (though this book of his is by another publisher), but that’s not why I spotlight it. I spotlight it because I’m a fairly enthusiastic book- and music-collector, and this gets at what, for me, besides the actual reading and listening, is the primary thrill:

“The second pleasure is simply that of making a collection—assembling objects that are related in some way and then filling in holes and extending from the edges. Book collecting is a largely solitary, mostly male, and completely absorbing activity. Nicholas Basbanes’ wonderful study A Gentle Madness explores what has driven the great book collectors. As his title indicates, it’s not necessarily outstanding mental health. But while “completism” is clearly a form of nuttiness, it is for the most part a benign one, causing no harm to others and usually little to oneself.”

A British study finds that 44 percent of Londoners have bought a book for the purpose of impressing other people. That number seems a bit low to me, especially if you take into account all the underlying psychological reasons for reading (i.e., not only the sight of a book on your coffee table, but your ability to convincingly talk about said book at a Lower East Side bar – or Tottenham Road bar, to stick with the study’s origin).

In last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, the Freakonomics boys argued that citizens in democratic countries excercise their right to vote mostly to maintain their social standing with other people. Reading might not follow exactly the same formula — in fact, since books primarily offer an interior experience, you could argue that reading them offers little social incentive (after all, you can talk about them without actually reading them) — but it’s an interesting parallel as far as it goes. I can’t wait until it’s proven that everything we do — commuting, eating, sleeping — is done to impress other people. Then it will finally become clear that the world is just a giant cafeteria from a WB show, and that this intelligent designer we’ve been hearing so much about is none other than Aaron Spelling.