Welcome to the Book Reviews.
Newspaper book reviews around the country, along with newspapers, continue their decline. Many newspaper writers and editors have been fired.
Via Forbes:
"Buyouts are being offered to 55 percent of The Sacramento Bee's full-time employees and a smaller number of part-timers, including most editorial employees, according to Sacramento Bee publisher Cheryl Dell...(The Bee is) owned by McClatchy Co., which has seen advertising revenue at its California and Florida newspapers drop 22 percent this year, Dell said....
"Sacramento-based McClatchy owns 30 daily newspapers nationwide. It imposed a companywide wage freeze two weeks ago.
"The Sacramento Bee's move to cut staff Monday comes after that paper eliminated 86 jobs in June. The Fresno Bee cut 44 workers in June. The McClatchy-owned Modesto Bee offered all its full-time employees buyouts last week."
Cancel the Bee blogspot writes, "Here is the tally of McClatchy newspapers offering buyouts in August...
Bradenton Herald
Fresno Bee
Wichita Eagle
Sacramento Bee
Kansas City Star
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
Modesto Bee
Lexington Herald-Leader"
Further, another company, "Cox Enterprises, Inc. announced today that it intends to sell the Austin American-Statesman, its affiliated operations including Austin360.com, and all of Cox's stand-alone community newspapers in North Carolina, Colorado and Texas....
"Cox Enterprises will retain ownership of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Palm Beach Post, Dayton Daily News and their affiliated publications."
So far, not including all of the above August buy-outs and firings, there have been about 8400 newspaper jobs cut in 2008 in the U.S. Look at this graphic.
Book reviews are a valued part of newspapers that increase newspaper sales, yet they have been among the first newspaper sections to be cut.
In PBS's discussion of newspaper book review decline and their possible replacement with on-line versions, Steve Wasserman, the former L.A. Times Book Review Section editor for nine years, said, "...the internal marketing surveys of the Los Angeles Times have shown, despite the steady loss of overall circulation, some 300,000 people every Sunday did try to seek out the lowly Book Review, sandwiched as it was between the real estate section and the calendar section, and proclaimed it their most favored section next to the main news section....
"But the important point here is that the Los Angeles Times, as well as other newspapers around the country -- the Hartford Courant, which only recently let its book editor go -- has constricted its space not only in the print medium, but they've not added people to expand what they do online either....
The Los Angeles Times fired 40 percent of its Book Review staff, and it has not added people to increase coverage online...."
Sounds like a job for us, don't you think? Let's increase on-line coverage of books.
You can help, right here, right now.
Save the book review.
If you had time, what book would you read? See interesting answers from last night and post your own here.
Any book reviews welcomed.
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Classics
"The Jungle" by Upton Sinclair
This is the book that helped start the pure food laws of the U.S.. The young immigrant Jurgis Rudkus is trying to make it so he can start a family. This is now an old-fashioned book and the style of writing is very much like telling a story about the characters; we are not there in terms of seeing things through their eyes moment by moment and we do not flash through the action. But the story catches you. The utter wrongness of the poverty that many suffer is hard to bear--a few of the medical problems reminded me of some stories of today, although generally medical knowledge and access was worse then. The courage that many show to save their own families is uplifting. The tricks that the manufacturers use to produce food will fill you with indignation.
Life Of Pi
by Yann Martel (Harcourt)
This book has been very popular and is widely regarded as a serious commentary on life and religion, which has uplifting whimsical touches combined with facing the hard realities of survivalism. However, although some of the praise is true, I disliked this book. The premise felt contrived: fleeing the sinking cargo ship they were on, a sixteen-year-old has to share a lifeboat with zoo animals, one of whom, a 450-pound tiger, wants to eat him. Then, in the isolation of the sea, the voice of Pi is both wise and crazy. We concentrate on the minutiae of what happens to Pi on an isolated life raft, trying to save his own life as horrible things happen to animals around him, highlighted by constant terror and a few religious epiphanies. It's the kind of book that when someone asks you what happened or why, you have to say, "I have no idea."
i loved it--you have to just keep in mind
that he's telling this story after the fact, and that it's both fantasy and fable--and also psychological coping mechanism after horrendous and real trauma and tragedy.
give it another chance in a year or so, and keep in mind that he's trying to explain what happened in a way that makes sense--more sense than whatever actually truly happened. And in a way that will allow him to not kill himself or be insane.
like-- this is the only way he can tell the story--if he had to keep it real, it would kill him because it was so horrible.
Avedon highlights WaPo piece which posits MCM should find way
to get all those little (annoying) news providers off the Web. Like, increase energy costs to the point only the big guys can play, and, without those pesky mosquitos, they'll make money again.
Quite interesting, on many levels.
Avedon says: ...Washington Post Article last Sunday...advocated pricing small media off of the internet so that more people would read the important information that can be found in The Washington Post...
Wow.
Last Call Beach Book Recommendations Unless
you live--like BIO?--where you're still picking tomatoes at Thanksgiving.
What are you reading on the beach?
What are others reading on the beach?
I'm seeing many Europeans visiting, many more than usual and they are reading mostly books in English. Yeah, Paul, we gotta work on our languages.
I'm seeing a bunch of teens with classics, which they seem to be into--a later summer phenomena so I'm thinking a lot of it is required reading for hs or college, which a few confirmed. Several I asked said they were catching up on classics they had never read.
Generally, book reads I'm seeing are sci fi-fantasy (are they in the same group still?), mysteries, romances, some action. A few horror. A few tourist "what to see" guides. A couple of marine i.d. and bird books. A fair number of long kids's books, even read by people not toting kids at the moment, especially J.K. Rowling books.
Forget free speech, who believes in capitalism?
If the major, business-people-run newspapers are going to "out-compete" the internet that is "stealing" their business by making sure no one except them can afford to use it, doesn't that mean that they not only want to repress free speech on the electronic space that is owned by all of us (and rented by some) but that they don't believe in capitalism? Aren't they supposed to up their game, in the face of winning competition, by improving their product?
Avedon (link at Jawbone's comment):"Our taxes paid for the development of the internet, and our participation helped it evolve into something that people want to use. We already pay commercially for the equipment to use it, the software, and the bandwidth. Now they want to tax us into silence so that they can monopolize speech here, too. No surprises. And no shame."
Okay, amberglow,
I'll put Life of Pi back on the shelf and look at it in a year or two as you suggest. Sometimes books can sneak up on you and feel different after time or after where you are in your life has changed.
Did you like "Blindness" better?
they're not comparable really--
Blindness is a harrowing journey that happens for real to one woman who tries to deal with it but is separate from it by virtue of being not-blind--she's a witness more than a participant really, and we see it all thru her eyes as it happens. It's more about responsibility and society and how fragile and needy and interdependent we--and society--all are and that kind of stuff. Blindness is a devastating journey that happens as we read--we are that one woman who can see, and we see what she sees as she sees it all. We're implicated with her too--her decisions and reactions and actions are ours too--it's incredibly powerful.
Pi is a survivor --and a kid--and it's looking backward after the facts--and about how our own memories and conscious and subconscious and brains translate things and change reality so that we can function and endure, etc. We look backwards with Pi at what may or may not have happened--all filtered thru coping mechanisms and translations into easier-to-deal-with things.... We don't experience it so much as we sit beside his bed and just listen to a storyteller. It's more like hearing of a journey or classical adventure like Homer or one of those guys--or Gulliver, or Around the world in 80 days or something like that. It's removed and told to us instead of us journeying with the main character.
I loved them both, but i think Blindness is more powerful and more relevant society-wise--it's more grounded in our own lives. Pi is more like "a story", and less "real".
Handmaid's Tale--
that's kinda more comparable to Pi--but still more bigger picture and society-focused.
Handmaid's Tale is a "found diary" of events that happened in the past--we hear this one woman's experience of things that already happened--how they happened, and how it changed her whole life and the lives of everyone she came in contact with. We don't experience things as they happen to her, but only 2nd-hand.
& maybe The Stand by King is
more comparable to Blindness--we take the journeys with the participants and it's happening as we read---as things happen to the characters, we are there and seeing it thru their eyes or as if we're next to them--not looking back after the fact.
Best Veggie Cookbooks
Moosewood (any but especially the first one)
Vegetarian Epicure
Cabbagetown Cafe
other nominees?
Has anyone read The Winter Harvest by Barbara Damrosch and
Eliot Coleman?
"We call it the "winter harvest." Our success thus far is very encouraging. We currently sell freshly harvested salads and main course vegetables from the 1st of October until the 31st of May."
Books about universities
I want to recommend two:
Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis.
The Masters, by CP Snow.
[ ] Very tepidly voting for Obama [ ] ?????. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.
"First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win." -- Mahatma Gandhi
More Books About Universities
David Lodge wrote some very funny ones:
Small World
Trading Places
Nice Work
Sayers about a university
Gaudy Night
(excellent)
Looking for "Been Down So Long"...
"...It Looks Like Up to Me" as a university novel, which it is, in large part and found this description of a course called "The Great American Cornell Novel:"
"Novels Set At (A University Very Much Like) Cornell" written by Cornell writers who were students or faculty...here are some of the authors and books:
A. Manette Ansay, Paul Cody, Susan Choi, Junot Dîaz, Richard Fariña, Lamar Herrin, Alison Lurie, Dan McCall, Maureen McCoy, Lorrie Moore, Robert Morgan, J. Robert Lennon, Toni Morrison, Vladimir Nabokov, Stewart O’Nan, Julie Orringer, Thomas Pynchon, Ernesto Quiñones, Stephanie Vaughn, Helena Maria Viramontes, and Kurt Vonnegut...and the professor herself is a writer as well, Molly Hite.
Alison Lurie, "The War Between the Tates." Warner PB.
Richard Fariña. "Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me." Penguin PB
Vladimir Nabokov, "Pale Fire." Vintage PB, 1989
Thomas Pynchon. "The Crying of Lot 49." HarperPerennial PB
Kurt Vonnegut. "Slaughterhouse-5." Dial PB
Toni Morrison. "Beloved." Vintage PB
Helena Maria Viramontes. "Under the Feet of Jesus." Plume PB
Robert Morgan. "The Mountains Won’t Remember Us." Scribner PB
Ernesto Quiñonez. "Bodega Dreams." Vintage PB
Citizen Vince
Citizen Vince by Jess Walter covers eight days in the life of a small-time criminal who's living a quiet life far from the action of the New York mobsters he used to associate with. Now in a witness protection program, Vince makes donuts for a living in Spokane, WA but can't seem to break some old habits. He plays poker with some unsavory characters late night before heading to work, has a soft spot for the local hookers, and makes extra dough via a credit card theft ring he set up.
The eight days in Vince's life coincide with the eight days leading up to the 1980 presidential election. Vince - with his record wiped clean thanks to his new identity - is about to vote for the very first time when a familiar face from his old life shows up in town.
Citizen Vince won the Edgar Award for best novel. If you're looking for a noirish, comic page-turner, this is a good one.
Here's Richard Russo's blurb:
"It's been a long time since I read a book as compulsively, indeed greedily, as I read Citizen Vince. Here are characters who seem to live of their own volition, who talk out of a terrible inner need to make themselves known and understood, who reveal not just themselves but the yearning heart of our great flawed democracy."
that sounds wonderful--
i'll look for it--thanks!
“We are absurdly
"We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing. We take it for granted so simply that in a sense, by the very act of brutish routine acceptance, we undo the work of the ages, the history of the gradual elaboration of poetical description and destruction, from the treeman to Browning, from the caveman to Keats. . . . . I wish you to grasp not only at what you read but at the miracle of its being readable (so I used to tell my students)."
— Charles Kinbote, editor, Nabokov character
fab quote--
i really wonder -- my mother's generation grew up on books and the radio, and we had books and (very very limited) tv, and now there's mostly 500-channel tv and the internet -- except for things like Harry Potter, it seems that books count far far less nowadays.