I recently finished reading Harry Frankfurt’s “On Truth” — a followup to a book with an opposite title that couldn’t be published in the newspaper (the euphemism I used then was “hot air.” But that review is available here.
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Category / Reviews
Judging a book by its cover
My colleague Casey Seiler handed me this book the other day and said, “Here’s a title that is purely meant to get D’Souza on talk shows.”
Sure, it’s just not right to judge a book by its cover. But with something like 172,000 books published last year in the U.S. (I think I saw this figure in Publishers Weekly), readers have to filter through the onslaught somehow.
Here’s what a reviewer says about the above book in the NYTimes:
He is a childish thinker and writer tackling subjects about which he knows little to make arguments that reek of political extremism. His book is a national disgrace, a sorry example of a publishing culture more concerned with the sensational than the sensible.
The reviewer is Alan Wolfe, who teaches political science at Boston College and is the author of “Does American Democracy Still Work?”
A little Menken in the morning…
On of the book blogs I check out often is Of Books and Bicycles. In a recent post, Of Books responds to a post on a different blog — BlogLily — about book reviewing and feeling sheepish about criticizing someone who has put so much work into a book AND has gotten it published. A worthy read, of course, would be the list of rules for reviewers that John Updike wrote and is now posted at the blog of the National Book Critics Circle (I am member of the organization, by the way). But it is also good to review the words of HL Menken:
A book review, first and foremost, must be entertaining. By this I mean that it must be dexterously written, and show an interesting personality. The justice of the criticism embodied in it is a secondary matter. It is often, and perhaps usually, quite impossible to determine definitely whether a given book is ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ The notion to the contrary is a delusion of the defectively intelligent. It is almost always accompanied by moral passion. But a critic may at least justify himself by giving his readers civilized entertainment …. If he is a well-informed man and able to write decently, anything he writes about anything will divert his readers.
Why I quit reading “Against the Day”
By now all the initial hoopla surrounding Thomas Pynchon’s “Against the Day” has died down, with the reviews coming in mostly mixed. So I feel I can finally confess that even though I was among those to receive an advanced readers copy, complete with my name and the name of the Times Union imprinted in thick magic marker, I gave up around Page 199.
Giving up is not something that gives me pride, but when I realized that I didn’t know who I was reading about or, really, what was going on, and was searching my house for a really big piece of paper to map out the family trees of the book’s characters, I realized that the book had escaped me.
I’ve enjoyed reading Pynchon before, including Gravity’s Rainbow, The Crying of Lot 49 and, especially, Mason and Dixon, but I don’t consider myself a huge fan of his work. I even gave up on Vineland.
Basically, the book wasn’t leading me anywhere — just showing me some rather clever and mildly humorous scenes, and connecting them with long expositions that spanned who knows how much time (I’m sure someone out there is busily trying to figure that out).
Audio books review “World War Z”
“World War Z,” by Max Brooks. Read by a full cast. Abridged, 6 hours. Random House Audio. $29.95.
What were your favorite books of 2006?
In a twist on the question above, I thought I’d write about the books that I’ve talked about the most with people who have asked me for reading recommendations. In a way, these two books are the ones that have stayed in my mind longest after reading and have seemed appropriate to the people I was speaking with. Both books are challenging and have distinct , fully realized aesthetics, and they share a kind of spirit that questions commonly accepted realities.
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Audio books review “Between Georgia”
“Between, Georgia,” by Joshilyn Jackson. Read by the author. Unabridged, 9 hours. Hachette Audio. $31.98.
Richard Ford’s “Lay of the Land”
If you read my review of Ford’s book in Sunday’s Times Union, you know that I started the book with high hopes, and ended in disappointment. That, of course, is just me. Or is it?
Having finished reading the book and writing the review, I allowed myself to read other reviews, and found the disconnect between the NYTimes Michiko Kakutani and A.O. Scott to be quiet interesting.
Kakutani’s review includes these lines:
the lethargic third installment of Frank’s story (it follows “The Sportswriter,” published in 1986, and the 1995 sequel “Independence Day”)
…
the book tends to substitute a lot of talk about New Jersey property values and realtor strategies for genuine insights about how people live today.
