The Mookse and the Gripes discussion
General Non-Book Discussions
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Café Quito: 'pub' thread for general discussions
Paul wrote: "The best response I saw to that article was on Twitter. The Lithub headline was about how "Faber rejects Paddington Bear""And tragically, and unlike the other authors featured, poor Paddington was so traumitised he was never to publish his novel"."
That's very witty. I should follow that person! I have far too little wit in my Twitter feed.
Ella wrote: "Paul wrote: "The best response I saw to that article was on Twitter. The Lithub headline was about how "Faber rejects Paddington Bear""And tragically, and unlike the other authors featured, poor ..."
So you don’t follow @realDonaldTrump who today tweeted, “...Knowing all of this, is anybody dumb enough to believe that I would say something inappropriate with a foreign leader...”
I had a very bookish few days this week. My husband Dave and I went to NYC to meet Niall Griffiths who I became pen pals with via Twitter and then email. Niall and his partner Deb were in California for a wedding, then flew to NYC for a day so we could all spend time together. Two of my friends who live in NJ and Dave and I met Niall and Deb early afternoon and went to a couple of bars in the Village, including the historic White Horse Tavern where many famous writers met to drink and talk. We walked from bar to bar to restaurant to bar until after midnight and had an incredible day of talking, drinking, laughing and not laughing about books and politics. That was a lot of fun, but the other highlight of the trip was finding an amazing little independent bookstore in the Village. My husband’s uncle, Bill Amidon, lived in the Village in the 60s and wrote pulpy novels including one about life there when it was the center of the Beat Poets, we knew he lived on Charles St so walked his old neighborhood and that’s where we found this excellent shop. As soon as we walked in I saw Ducks, Newburyport, looking around I saw We That Are Young and a Fitzcarraldo book. The owner was reading Ducks and had finished Anniversaries so I had an excellent discussion with him and another bookseller there about indie presses and their recent favorites. It was as if someone had curated a bookstore with me in mind so for the first time I bought books on the recommendation of the store owner and bookseller, Certain American States: Stories and A Change of Time from archipelago press. I would dearly love to have a bookstore like this near me instead of just Barnes and Noble.
Overnight (and still going), I got over 20 likes plus a few comments on my 2019 reading challenge from people I don’t know. Any ideas how this could happen all of a sudden?
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I see that kind of thing occasionally - sometimes it just means someone with a lot of followers found and liked something, and the others just followed suit. I have never really understood why people take the reading challenge seriously...
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That was the first time this year I have looked through the reading challenge! I won't be signing on for it until late November. I still like the display box to look back on the books read, but not using it through the year avoids the problem I got into last year of fixing on the idea of always reading books in multiples of 5 per month (generally 10) to make full lines on the display, and trying to catch up on that when I didn't.
Ah yes, some of the likers have 700, 800, even 1000 friends, not to even count the followers. I’m having trouble keeping track of my friends’ reviews and I barely have 80 friends here – can’t even imagine what a feed would look like with 1000 people.
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The “top friend” system helps a little, but I have so many top friends!
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That is my problem too. I use the "reviews only" and "top friends only" settings on the home page, and some of my top friends never appear, whereas other reviews keep coming back again and again, even when nobody has commented on them...
I hadn’t seen this before and thought it could interest people here in light of both of the Booker prizes: Valeria Luiselli interviewing Laszlo Krasznahorkai and Salman Rushdie a few years ago:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJfqv...
"The project began to feel like a flamboyant completist stunt, like one of those Buzzfeed articles where someone ranks every episode of the original Care Bears cartoons. " "Flamboyant completist stunt" Well phrased. From Patricia Lockwood's essay on John Irving in The London Review of Books.
I love her writing in the LRB every time she's there. Thanks, Ctb!I love the beginning too - way to start an article:
I was hired as an assassin. You don’t bring in a 37-year-old woman to review John Updike in the year of our Lord 2019 unless you’re hoping to see blood on the ceiling. ‘Absolutely not,’ I said when first approached [...] all I would be left with after months of standing tiptoe on the balance beam of objectivity and fair assessment would be a letter to the editor from some guy named Norbert accusing me of cutting off a great man’s dong in print. But then the editors cornered me drunk at a party, and here we are.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v41/n19/patrici...
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Ctb wrote: ""The project began to feel like a flamboyant completist stunt, like one of those Buzzfeed articles where someone ranks every episode of the original Care Bears cartoons. " "Flamboyant completist st..."Oops. Woke from a dream last night (that essay dredged up some dream affecting bad-mojo) abashed to realize I typed Irving rather than Updike. Thank you both for not correcting me.
In which Haruki Murakami may or may not reveal the seed of his cat obsession, and also writes beautifully about his father. | The New Yorker https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...And I've been thinking about this article (I've had it open in my browser for days now & keep going back to it) from Zadie Smith, subtitled "In Defense of Fiction" but she goes into who can write about whom etc as well. I wonder if this will get her into trouble again. (Thinking about the hoopla that she caused with "Who owns black pain") I'm reading Rachel Cusk at the moment, and it feels almost like she's writing directly to Cusk at times - probably b/c I read an article by Cusk where she said she doesn't believe in characters anymore... I'd love smart people's thoughts!
Oops - ETA the link to Smith's article: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019...
Ella wrote: "And I've been thinking about this article (I've had it open in my browser for days now & keep going back to it) from Zadie Smith, subtitled "In Defense of Fiction""Thanks for that link, Ella. If ZSmith gets "into trouble", I'll defend her ideas.
Ella wrote: "And I've been thinking about this article (I've had it open in my browser for days now & keep going back to it) from Zadie Smith, subtitled "In Defense of Fiction" but she goes into who can write about whom etc as well. I wonder if this will get her into trouble again"Thanks for sharing this. I think she did well to present her views by grounding the discourse in a broader question of the dialectics of fiction and fictional representation, for without it, it might have sounded like a rebuttal of one of those polemical essays replete with identity politics that regularly pop up here and there.
I do not believe, have never believed, that legitimate concerns about minority representation, stereotyping, and the historical baggage of institutional literary racism are best addressed by shutting down writers from the dominant culture, in this case white Western men, who 'dare' to write about cultures and peoples other than their own. I'm a big fan of dead white men as well as their big critic. This isn't an either/or phenomenon as some make it out to be.
Same is true for other personal identifiers which are used to shut down 'the outsiders,' i.e; religion, gender, sexual orientation, language, you-name-it.
A lot of noise around this debate relates to the unmistakable trend of auto fiction in contemporary literature. Fiction created through one's own deeply personal firsthand experience is considered morally superior, or has more 'authenticity' than something that appears to be entirely imagined. Personal experience will always be an important factor for writers but this is not - and has never been - the primary or most important determinant as to how well the subject is represented in fiction.
In any case, fiction is an art form and depends on the supremacy of words and sentences and how they are employed to create effect. A good novel isn't that 'correctly' tells a 'true' story of a certain time and place (although this can be a by-product of a good novel, not the main ingredient) but one that convinces the reader of the imagined world of the story. The stress is on mimetic persuasion that reveals truths about the human condition, not on the possibilities of personal experience.
Those who want to make fiction simply a vehicle for their personal experiences should stick to writing and reading memoirs.
That's a very thoughtful reply. Thank you. You've put a lot of things into words that had been swirling in my brain without pause.I've been thinking about what "truth" means for me when I read fiction. It's not truth as in "these facts are real" - it is more the book convincing me that the world created is real, perhaps even unveiling some universal truth (like people are both good and bad.) Often these universal truths are very basic, but if a story is well done, I don't care.
When I fell in love with reading, I was very young and a bit lonely (though rarely truly alone) and I would literally live in the books I read. So as a black girl in downtown Baltimore, I became Holden Caulfield for a while - shoved off to private "fancy school" as I called it when I talked about it, and he helped me feel less alone. I felt like someone "got me" finally. I read it really young and it opened up a world of possibilities for me. I know it's cliche, but true.
I like Zadie Smith, and I can identify with her situation - being a person who has to cross cultural barriers when I visit my mother after leaving my father or vice versa. And I'm worried about the current climate where everyone wants to draw a line around the kinds of fiction this kind of person or that can write. Especially because that feels a bit like I'd have to draw a line right down the center of me. (I figure it's only a matter of time before we're also not allowed to read across difference, which is sort of the point for me.)
Maybe I'm reading something into this piece, but along w/ ID politics, it does feel like a commentary on the current trend in autofiction. I don't mind autofiction, and I find it interesting, but to think that it's somehow automatically better or "more true" than other types seems very reductive. Anyway, thanks for the thoughts!
So, this happened yesterday at Georgia Southern University. Something tells me these students have never read Fahrenheit 451 or The Book Thief. A Latina novelist spoke about white privilege. Students burned her book in response.
The book Make Your Home Among Strangers by Jennine Capo Crucet is assigned reading for Freshmen.
Debra wrote: "So, this happened yesterday at Georgia Southern University. Something tells me these students have never read Fahrenheit 451 or The Book Thief. A Latina novelist spoke about white privilege. Stud..."
Even worse, she had another talk scheduled for Thursday, and the University cancelled that one “because the administration said they could not guarantee my safety or the safety of its students on campus because of open-carry laws.”
So guns + white supremacy and zero repercussions for the students who did this b/c of their 1st am rights. I'm all for the Bill of Rights, but on a campus, we were punished for doing things that the university said were not OK. I have a strong feeling that threatening a person who dared to question our privilege would have fallen into that category. The idea that college students can't bear to hear that they may be catching breaks they're unaware of is just insane to me. And the pictures were upsetting, to say the least.
Ella wrote: "That's a very thoughtful reply. Thank you. You've put a lot of things into words that had been swirling in my brain without pause.I've been thinking about what "truth" means for me when I read fi..."
Powerful reflections. Thanks for sharing, Ella.
In my case it was Marquez who taught me the difference between a true story and a story that establishes greater truths about the human condition, and the primacy of language in the unveiling of those truths. He also taught me that you can relate with characters and their struggles without having anything in common with them.
Outrageously fantastical stories can sometimes be more 'true' than the most accurately told 'true story' ever. This isn't to say accuracy isn't important; it surely helps to be accurate in terms of social, cultural, and historical elements when the purpose is to create a story set in a particular time and place. This is part of a writer's job and one would assume that they have done their homework before setting out to commit it to paper.
All fiction is autobiographical is a popular idea among some literary circles. In a way it's true insofar as it means admitting the importance of background and personal experience on a person's writings, but it's misinterpretation or rather misapplication into 'write only about people like you,' is a very recent phenomenon and one that I don't subscribe to.
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/pu...Apologies if this has been posted before.
Apropos of the discussion we're having on the Booker thread, here is an article that goes into some detail about navigating the minefield of ethnic diversity in literature. Worth a read in full.
A few nuggets below:
Isn’t faux praise and elevation of mediocrity just as patronizing as the dismissal of “ethnic writing”?
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Dialogue Books, tells me that it’s partly the result of an evolving culture of shame and embarrassment: “Agents are asking people who have a little bit of a social media presence to come up quite quickly with ideas that they can sell to publishers who are desperate because no list wants to be all white, as it has been”. With the dread of being associated with the hashtag #publishingsowhite, the simplest and cheapest way of adding black names to their lists is to put out anthologies packed with malleable first-time authors and one or two seasoned writers seeded through the collections."
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One of the things was a condescending false praise. For instance, George Lamming’s first book was eaten up; he was the greatest writer on earth. And that also happened to John Hearne, who was so praised. Once I was asked to review a book of his and I didn’t review it very favourably. The programme brought in an Englishman, John Wain, to contradict me, saying it was Oh wonderful. And afterwards, off air, Wain confessed, “Well of course I wouldn’t have said that about an English writer”.
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“The writers should be allowed to be mediocre sometimes because white writers are having mediocre work published all the time. Black writers are providing a tableau of information from personal experiences, and that has to be valuable.”
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I clicked the link to see if it was the same article I read earlier today, but it wasn't. I've read at least three pretty nuanced articles on this topic recently. While many of the articles I've read before now seem politically motivated toward one "side" or the other, I'm starting to see some good interrogation of all parts of this issue, and I think that can only be a good thing for the future. I've read a couple books by people w/ huge social media presence that were, well... dismal, to put it bluntly, and that is not good for anyone. Especially the writer, actually. I panned a book earlier this year or last on GR that had gotten all 5-star reviews and I was truly fearful to do so until I went to my in-person book club, made up of all black women over 35 (none of whom are writers or work in anything close to publishing.) We were, to a woman, pissed off that we'd spent money on the book (and we had to b/c the list at all libraries was so long.) Later reviews on GRs from other black readers were not equally so fawning, but I think about that book all the time when I see some new hot take on race being "anticipated."
This:
In many regards, James Baldwin’s extraordinary collection of essays The Fire Next Time (1963) is still the gold standard in informed polemical writing that calls out racism. To suggest, as I’ve heard when touring some publishing houses, that the work of these young black British writers is comparable to his in excellence is not only disingenuous; it is also at odds with the duty of care publishers owe to debut authors still developing their craft.is what I'm trying to say.
However, I also don't think publishers do a lot of nurturing for anyone these days, unless it's a small press designed to do exactly that.
I am halfway through Celestial Bodies and, for its themes and subject matter, this is precisely the kind of novel the gatekeepers of diversity like to promote first and foremost. I'm not passing a judgement on the novel (which I'll review when done) but it's a good example of the kind of novel that is preferred. Not surprised some would see it as part of the same phenomenon because this is the "politically correct" Booker which excels in "rewarding mediocrity," whether at home or from abroad.
Sometimes mainstream publishers and their agents demand a running commentary on sociopolitical matters disguised as a novel. Young writers who wish to see their names in print often commit to writing what they see as having more chances of success in the Western market. I see this in a considerable number of South Asians writers, especially those who write in English. It is how the authentic experience is destroyed and you get a filtered and distilled novel written with mass Western tastes in mind - a tainted cultural experience if not a false one, I'd say.
A Pakistani writing in English sent a manuscript to an agent in the USA and was asked why was there no mention of certain important political events that had taken place a couple of years ago. The writer told the agent that 1) it's a novel not a current affairs book and 2) he wasn't writing about what happened two years ago. Didn't work.
Jibran wrote: "A Pakistani writing in English sent a manuscript to an agent in the USA and was asked why was there no mention of certain important political events that had taken place a couple of years ago. The writer told the agent that 1) it's a novel not a current affairs book and 2) he wasn't writing about what happened two years ago. Didn't work."Leonard Chang has repeatedly bemoaned the fact that publishers refuse his books/stories usually accompanied by questions about why his characters don't look in the mirror to view their Asian features or eat typically Asian foods, etc. He wrote a great piece on it a few years back. I'll have to look for it.
However, I think this social media star/viral blogger -> author of (usually nonfiction) diatribe is a slightly different animal. And while the article says the US does a good job of vetting these books, that's not always the case. There are plenty of shiny writers/debut books etc that I feel could have used a strong editor or just more time.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/arti...A very middlebrow list of best 100 novels that 'shaped' or 'inspired' our world. The modest BBC is avoiding to call them them 'great' or 'best' as other lists do.
But I'm not even sure about the bit about shaping the world. Many of these were commercially successful but eventually forgettable books.
Also never seen lit fic books groups into 'themes' before.
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The premise could have been presented better as a sort of pomo comment on the subjectivity of all book lists. They are more explicit about starting from subjectivity than the usual trad lists of classics. But not explicit enough!
I think it's interesting. Those I have read I rate highly so it could point me to other books I might like. They are quite openly saying this panel chose the books that shaped their lives, and asking for others to share theirs. I guess it's the headline that is a little misleading.
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Episode 1
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000...
Episode 2
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000...
The earlier publicity several months ago has already prompted me to finally read A God of Small Things and to select specifically Oroonoko and Robinson Crusoe when I had been planning to read something by Behn and Defoe anyway. I'd hoped to have finished Pamela by the time the 'women' episode was shown, but it's on earlier and ordered differently from what it looked like it would from the old press releases, so I won't be.
I had been going to read Noughts & Crosses at the time of the BBC Big Read in 2003, but didn't manage to as it was always out of the library, and I didn't think it was right for a childless adult to reserve it and deprive kids of it. May as well read it this time anyway.
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I will watch the BBC series. Thank you.
I suggest that anyone suffering from insomnia or otherwise unoccupied with something useful, play a game of trying to match the selection with the selector. For example, I think it would be likely that Alexander McCall Smith chose For Whom the Bell Tolls, based on age and sex. Most of you should be much better at this than I.
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I suspect The Far Pavilions is McCall Smith. (Though possibly Abell.) And definitely Mr Standfast as obscure John Buchan would be a very older-Scottish-people choice, likewise Ivanhoe. Relatives know him, which probably gives some advantage here, in assuming a similar frame of reference.
If the list and the way it’s grouped gets some sci fi and fantasy fans to buy the Gilead trilogy then I think the list is more than worthwhile.
I had fun looking through this list. Some of my all-time favorite YA books are there as are many books that I saw capture the teens in my high school and make them into voracious readers. There are also some books on the list that spoke to me at different ages and stages of my life and in different genres. I've read a lot of the books and have loved them for a variety of different reasons.I was thinking about this as I continue to work through the Booker longlist and realized that I might have enjoyed The Testaments more if it hadn't been on the Booker list in the first place and I had read it as a "thriller". The Wall was like this, too. I can't wait to read Girl, Woman Other as I am enjoying the other books that didn't even make the shortlist.
Great comments both on this list and on the two Booker books you mention.
Gumble's Yard wrote: "Great comments both on this list and on the two Booker books you mention."Thanks! I guess whoever put the categories together was thinking of Atwood's Gilead;)
I guess Robinson's Gilead trilogy does fit the Life and Death part of the theme, though. I haven't read all three books yet, so it does encourage me.
At least the Brits didn’t include Fifty Shades of Grey on the list.
WndyJW wrote: "At least the Brits didn’t include Fifty Shades of Grey on the list."ROFL - as a member of the Great American Reads group, I had to state boldly that despite it being on the list, I was never ever going to read this book (and a few others that made that list. Also, I really want to know the statistics on how Pilgrim's Progress made it onto that list. I know a lot of people have read it, but is it really their favorite book?)
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It doesn't surprise me too much that Pilgrim's Progress made such a list in the USA as I would guess that there is quite some crossover between the people who would vote in a public poll of this sort and those who, in the US, tend to be strongly Christian and who would consider it their civic duty to nominate a Christian classic. (Maybe also some organisation on forums?)
There is a lot of crossover between it and the Big Read - I'm kind of surprised how much. Goes to show how how international bestsellers are, and how much the UK had adopted some American classics, like the Grapes of Wrath, which I hadn't realised before it.
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I'd been wondering recently what the results would be like if the Big Read poll were re-run now,. It would be an insight into what people who don't post lots on GR actually like. (I figured it would also be impossible to re-do properly as the internet voting would mean lots of international participants and multiple votes from individuals). But I assumed that if it were done, these were exactly the types of books that would no longer be on it as people would have read and enjoyed different bestsellers since, or had aged out of voting in it. But a lot of these old bestsellers were still people's favourites in the USA last year!
Maybe it's because people are reading fewer books because of internet use, and they were still reading more in the 90s and early 00s when a lot of these were published?
Weirdly, I have read almost the same number from both the Great American Read (45) and the new BBC list (44, if I'm allowed to count 4/7 Harry Potters and 55-60% of the Sandman series. If I'm not allowed to count 36/41 Discworlds that would be ridiculous though).
Yes, not only did we get orangeman as president, but then we further embarrassed ourselves by creating that list. Argh. Anyway - question - do we have an end of year roundup place - like for how our yearly reading breaks down? (Sorry, I'm a statistics nerd, and I like to make charts/graphs - I start getting itchy around now and it lasts until I can create my pie-chart of reading on January 1.) Please don't create one for me, but I do want to know if a thread like this exists.
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Talking of pie-charts, I miss the ones that used to be in bookshelf stats. The demise of some bit of Google software meant GR stopped doing those early this year. There was more info about exactly what it was in the Feedback group before it was deleted.
You can also post whatever stats take your fancy in the 2019 on Goodreads thing, but that isn't group specific.
Ella wrote: "Yes, not only did we get orangeman as president, but then we further embarrassed ourselves by creating that list. Argh."The UK has its own embarrassing politicians. The most, or only, positive aspect of Boris Johnson's tenure as PM is that he isn't Foreign Secretary any more.
I found a spreadsheet earlier in the year which I use. I will try to find the blog entry. She creates a new one each year and creates a video on how to use it.
The Mookse and the Gripes
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to which one reply was "And tragically, and unlike the other authors featured, poor Paddington was so traumitised he was never to publish his novel".