BookLust

Random Readings 28

Is everyone to go off and lock the door and sit secluded like the lonely writers do, in a soundproof cell, summoning people out of words and then proposing that these word people are closer to the real thing than the real people that we mangle with our ignorance every day? The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that – well, lucky you.

– from American Pastoral by Philip Roth

Random Readings 26

Superstition is the rotten fruit of human stupidity! Stupidity is the seedbed of disinformation! And the sole product of disinformation is disaster! Superstition is the greatest pestilence mankind has ever known and it has killed more people than all plagues put together!

– from Have Mercy on Us All by Fred Vargas

Random Readings 25

Three years ago, McEwan culled the fiction library of his London town house, in Fitzroy Square. He and his younger son, Greg, handed out thirty novels in a nearby park. In an essay for the Guardian, McEwan reported that “every young woman we approached . . . was eager and grateful to take a book,” whereas the men “could not be persuaded. ‘Nah, nah. Not for me. Thanks, mate, but no.’ ” The researcher’s conclusion: “When women stop reading, the novel will be dead.”

– From February 23, 2009 issue of The New Yorker, The Background Hum, a profile on author Ian McEwan, written by Daniel Zalewski

Random Readings 24

There is always the easy way out, although I am loath to use it. I have no children. I do not watch television and I do not believe in God – all paths taken by mortals to make their lives easier. Children help us to defer the painful task of confronting ourselves, and grandchildren take over from them. Television distracts us from the onerous necessity of finding projects to construct in the vacuity of our frivolous lives: by beguiling our eyes, television releases our mind from the great work of making meaning. Finally, God appeases our animal fears and the unbearable prospect that someday all our pleasures will cease. Thus, as I have neither future nor progeny nor pixels to deaden the cosmic awareness of absurdity, and in the certainty of the end and the anticipation of the void, I believe I can affirm that I have not chosen the easy path.

– from The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery

Random Readings 23

Heller observes "a relatively new and very unhealthy phenomenon" arising, perhaps, from "Oprahfication of fiction writing or book clubs: This demand for characters you can root for, inspirational fiction, where you feel like you'd like to climb into the book and be there. There's something slightly infantile about all of that. It clearly doesn't win me any friends to say this, but I feel [like saying] a lot of the time, when I'm answering questions in bookstores, ‘Oh, grow up!'

– from Saturday, March 07, 2009 edition of The National Post

UPDATE: Steven W. Beattie, review editor at Quill & Quire and blogger extraordinaire of That Shakespeherian Rag fame has delved much deeper into the issue of "this demand for uplift and sympathetic characters in fiction". He often expresses so well what I think, but can never quite put into words with such eloquence. That is why he is the embattled literary critic, and I, um, draw goofy cartoons.

Random Readings 22

I have a much younger friend, Sally, who when her children were just beginning to read became annoyed because so many of the books written for them were about animals: it was a mouse, not a child, which disobeyed its mother and got into trouble, a rabbit who raided the kitchen garden, an elephant who became a  king. Why, she asked, was she expected to feed her children on this pap of fantasy instead of on stories about her real life? The answer, it seems to me, is that children respond to animal protagonists because when very small what they need is not to discover and recognize 'real life', but to discover and recognize their own feelings. Take a pair of well-known animal characters, Piglet and Tigger, in The House at Pooh Corner. Piglet is an anxious, timid little person, capable of being brave if he absolutely has to be, but only at great cost to himself, and Tigger is so exuberantly bouncy that he can be a nuisance. Both of them express things which a child discovers and recognizes with pleasure because they exist within himself. If those characteristics were expressed on the page by a child, they would belong to that child and would call for the use of the kind of critical faculty one employs vis-a-vis another person. Expressed by a 'made up' animal (I have yet to meet a child so simple-minded that it doesn't know perfectly well that animals don't talk in human language), they slip past the critical faculty into the undergrowth of feelings which need so urgently to be sorted out and understood.

- from Somewhere Towards The End, by Diana Athill

Random Readings 21

   

    "These are for people who like to  make their own words," the man in charge informed him. "you can pick any assortment you like or buy a special box complete with all letters, punctuation marks, and a book of instructions. Here, taste an A; they're very good."
    Milo nibbled carefully at the letter and discovered that it was quite sweet and delicious – just the way you'd expect an A to taste.
    "I knew you'd like it," laughed the letter man, popping two G's and an R into his mouth and letting the juice drip down his chin. "A's are one of our most popular letters. All of them aren't that good," he confided in a low voice. "Take the Z, for instance – very dry and sawdusty. And the X? Why, it tastes like a trunkful of stale air. That's why people hardly ever use them. But most of the others are quite tasty. Try some more."
    He gave Milo an I, which was icy and refreshing, and Tock a crisp, crunchy C.
    "Most people are just too lazy to make their own words," he continued, "but it's much more fun."

– From The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster. Illustrated by the wonderful Jules Feiffer.

Random Readings 20

    

     You can understand and relate to most people better if you look at them – no matter how old or impressive they may be – as if they are children. For most of us never really grow up or mature all that much – we simply grow taller. Oh, to be sure, we laugh less and play less and wear uncomfortable disguises like adults, but beneath the costume is the child we always are, whose needs are simple, whose daily life is still best described by fairy tales.

– Leo Rosten, author of The Joys of Yiddish, as well as many other humorous books. I found this specific quote in Robert Fulgham's Words I Wish I Wrote, which was hanging around the house over the holidays.

Random Readings 19

     I was so busy rushing headlong into the future, loving libraries and books and authors with all my heart and soul, was so consumed with becoming myself that I simply didn't notice that I was short, homely, and untalented. Perhaps, in some corner of my mind, I did know. But I persisted – the need to write, to create, coursed like blood through my body, and still does.

     I always dreamed of someday going into a library and looking up and seeing a book of  mine leaning against the shoulder of L. Frank Baum or Edgar Rice Burroughs, and down below my other heroes, Edgar Allan Poe, H.G. Wells, and Jules Verne. My wild love for them and their worlds, and for others like Somerset Maugham and John Steinbeck kept me so invigorated with passion that I could not see that I was the Hunchback of Notre Dame in their grand company.

– From the introduction of Bradbury Stories: 100 of Bradbury's Most Celebrated Tales

Random Readings 18

Every year there is a new batch of talking animals that want to sell you the library. Vinnie the velociraptor can't wait to dig his claws into a good book. Danny the dinosaur. Whatever. The theory – and I believe it – is that it's not necessary to change the formula too much, because within a year or two there's a whole new audience walking in the front door. By the time you're fourteen or fifteen, Minnie the mastodon is not going to get you into the library. At this point, you're either a reader, or you're not. If you are a reader, you'll walk in, see the posters for the summer reading club for Bobo the black bear, cringe nostalgically, and not break stride.

- from Free for All: Oddballs, Geeks, and Gangstas in the Public Library
by Don Borchert
(An absolutely hilarious book about all the craziness one encounters working in a public library).