Myla Goldberg's Blog: Bookish

Russell Hoban rediscovered

Okay, "rediscovered" is a misnomer because I've been a rabid fan since I first read Riddley Walker over twenty years ago, and my esteem only expanded when I discovered the guy's genius for kids' books. I'm not talking about Bread and Jam for Frances et al, though those are perfectly nice -- I'm talking How Tom Beat Captain Najork and His Hired Sportsmen, which is among my top five of best illustrated books of all time and The Mouse and HIs Child, one of the most melancholy and Beckettian children's chapter books ever written.
But I actually meant to talk about The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz, which was published 5 years after Mouse and 7 years before Walker and is technically Hoban's first book for adults, if you don't count Tom and Mouse, which are as much for adults as they are for kids (especially Tom, which every human should read at some point). The neat thing about Lion is that it plays with language in ways distinct from Walker, but which very much anticipates it. It's also fanciful and strange and beautiful in the way that all the best Hoban is. The lion of the title is a real lion, of sorts, in an unnamed land at an unnamed time when lions are extinct, which doesn't stop a father and son from being stalked/haunted/possessed by one. Reading it made me wonder if Jonathan Lethem had this book under his belt when he was writing about a tiger stalking NYC.

Two places to read Lauren Weinstein, and why you should

I just finished Mother's Walk, by Lauren Weinstein, in issue 17 of Frontier, a quarterly comics monograph, and it's one of the smartest, funniest, most honest explorations of giving birth to a baby human that I've ever read.

http://www.youthindecline.com/product...

Lauren's also part of the excellent comics section that is appearing regularly on Popula (https://popula.com/category/comics/), which is filled with the work of other smart weirdos as well.

One thing Ted Chiang does that Arrival can't

It's not the movie's fault. It does a decent job of evoking Ted Chiang's time-fluid aliens and the human linguist whose perception of time is completely rearranged by them; but in "Story of Your Life," form follows function in a way that only prose can pull off. The idea of time being fluid is integrated into the narrative timeline and even the grammar of Chiang's story, so that in any given sentence you get verbs in various tenses...and it totally works! While I greatly admired the mind behind Chiang's story collection, "Story of Your Life" is more than a cool idea: it's a story I'm just plain jealous of.

A New Book Is On Its Way

Have I seemed a little quiet for the past five years? That's because I was hard at work on my new novel, Feast Your Eyes, which I'm happy to announce will be published by Scribner in April 2019! There's lots more to come, so stay tuned.

Hey wait, Caro's bio of Robert Moses is incomplete!

So here I am, wading through all the awful stuff Robert Moses did to New York City after his brief, ill-fated life as an idealist ended, and the thing I keep waiting for, the one thing I knew about before I started reading--which is to say the battle between Moses and Jane Jacobs over the fate of the West Village--isn't in there! That's right, over 1,000 pages detailing Moses long, power-corrupted life, and there's not one word about how he lost the battle to run a highway right through Washington Square Park. I knew there was no way Caro wouldn't have known about that, seeing as he's one of the most meticulous researchers to grace the page, so what gives? A quick Internet search revealed that The Powerbroker was edited for length (though, really, if you're already clocking in at 1,160 pages, what's another 100 more? Okay, in this case it'd be more like 300 more), and that as many as three omitted chapters, including one on his losing battle with Jane Jacobs, reside in Caro's archives.

And so, a plea: Anyone out there with Caro's ear? Tell him I'm the one who showed up to his reading at the Newark Library with two friends, the ones who gave him the WWLBJD (yes, that's short for What Would LBJ Do) bumper sticker. Ask him if he might be so kind as to use the magic of digital technology to make his omitted chapters available to folks like us who want to read what he wrote about this stuff while we eagerly await the next volume of his LBJ bio. Tell him there's another bumper sticker in it for him.

We Are All Barbarians (with thanks to Barbarian Days by William Finnegan)

I unexpectedly finished the book I'd brought with me to Seattle when my American Airlines flight lasted 11 hours instead of 6, but my friend Megan saved the day when she handed me this.

I'd read an excerpt from William Finnegan's memoir in the New Yorker and had liked it, but not being a surfer I hadn't felt compelled to rush out and track down the thing. Man, am I glad it ended up crossing my path.

Finnegan's love for surfing transcends its subject. Sure, this is a book about surfing but more broadly this is a book about committing yourself to the thing you love. Reading Finnegan's gorgeous accounts of a life spent finding waves and watching waves and learning waves and riding waves made me think about writing, the same way I suspect it will make a painter think about painting, and a runner think about running. It's ultimately a love poem to pursuing one's art, whatever that art may be.

Robert Caro: R. Moses vs LBJ

For the first forty-five years of my life, I only ever read fiction, unless non-fiction was part of a school assignment or, later, part of writing research I was doing. But then, in my forty-fifth year of life, for reasons I don't remember, my friend Tim and I decided it was time we tried Robert Caro.

We were initially dubious that we would have the stamina or stomach to read all the volumes of the LBJ biography, so we asked around and were told that Volume 3 was The One, so we figured we'd read that and then call it a day. Except that Volume 3 was so compelling and addictive that we then wanted to read Volume 1, because who doesn't love an origin story, and then we just kept going, because at this point we were regaling our friends with crazy LBJ factoids on a regular basis and were hungry for more more more.

But all good things must come to an end, and unless and until Caro is able to write the 5th and final (?) volume before he croaks, there is no more LBJ to be had. And so, it was on to Robert Moses, whom Caro chronicled first, and who got him hooked on writing about power to begin with.

But here's the thing: Caro's writing is just as compelling in The Powerbroker, but his subject isn't. While LBJ was a fascinating and complex and divided man, Robert Moses was just a flat-out asshole. Once RM loses his youthful idealism and starts pursuing power for power's sake, the litany of urban atrocities he commits in power's name becomes, well, kinda monotonous. So at this point, I'm skimming through the rest of his bad old days until I reach the point where he starts getting his comeuppance, which I intend to read slowly and with a big snarky smile on my face.

Book Notes for a Middle-Aged Brain

Back in the day when I habitually bought books, it was way-easy for me to remember what I'd read because I'd look on my shelf, and there it was! Now that I've run out of bookshelf space, I've become a power library user. Putting a hold and then waltzing into the library to see the book waiting for me with my name on it feels a little bit like my birthday every time...but once I return it to the library it's gone. And so, I have vowed, with the arrival of 2018 (okay, so I'm a few months late) to keep a running list of what I'm reading and what I'm thinking about it, starting...now!

Brain food

I just got back from a week of teaching at the Queens University low-res MFA program in Charlotte, NC, and as a person who spends most of her time in a little room with her word processor, it was way fun to be able to talk books at breakfast, lunch and dinner!

LFAQ from Book Stalker

Want to know about Myla's most awkward reader request? Or the reading that will be forever emblazoned in her memory? Check out this Q&A with Bookstalker.