February 2012
January 2012
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Reviewing books is often a good way to feel like a puppy-kicking sonuvabitch. And sometimes, when you find yourself the lone grump before a buzz juggernaut, you can feel like a crazy, puppy-kicking sonuvabitch. That’s about where I sit after finishing Eowyn Ivey’s debut novel, The Snow Child (Reagan Arthur Books), a novel already popular in Europe, a novel the Christian Science Monitor and Oprah tell me to watch for in 2012, and a novel of which one enthusiastic blurber was moved to say: “If Willa Cather and Gabriel García Márquez had collaborated on a book, The Snow Child would be it.”
Cue my furrowed brow.
” — Our own Lydia Kiesling really knows how to start off a book review.
“Dora the Explorer is accessible. The Unconsoled is not”
— Ben Marcus gets interviewed by our own Adam Boretz
“Finding the entrance points to New York’s musical undergrounds has never been quite as simple as decoding MTA maps, though that’s usually the first step. Two excellent new books chart a decade-and-a-half worth of street-level detail, illuminating not only entrance points, but how they were willed into existence”
— Find Myself A City To Live In: Ed Sanders’ Fug You & Will Hermes’ Love Goes To Buildings On Fire by Jesse Jarnow
“I confess that I had the book on my shelf for a few months before delving in, because, having skimmed the first sentences and the shapes of each story, I couldn’t imagine “getting into” them. But by the third story (once I did set myself to reading), I couldn’t wait to see how [Daniel] Orozco would do it – how he’d come up from behind me with a beat-up old club chair, slip it underneath my knees, effectively saying, “Stay a while. Have a seat. You’ll need it.”
— Post-40 Bloomers: Daniel Orozco by Sonya Chung
“There is beauty as well as hatred in [Henry Miller’s ‘Tropic of Cancer’], and it deserves its place on the shelf. Yet the central question it poses was stupidly buried under censorship in the 1930s, and gleefully swept aside in the permissiveness of the 1960s. Kate Millet asked the question in the 1970s, but the effort to ignore it is prodigious. A new round of mythmaking is ignoring it once more. The question is not art versus pornography or sexuality versus censorship or any question about achievement. The question is: Why do men revel in the degradation of women?”
— Jeanette Winterson brings the heat in The New York Times’ Sunday book review.
“I think, though, that the bigger reason why there’s no social stigma attached to downloading is because, on some level, most people break laws when we find them inconvenient and when we don’t see harm in doing so. Drivers exceed the speed limit all the time–some do it recklessly, but others do it moderately. I’ve been known to go 75 in a 70 under the notion that a state trooper isn’t likely to pull me over when there are people going 80 or faster. I rationalize it by saying to myself that the damage I’m doing is minimal at worst. There’s no question I’m breaking the law, and if a trooper gives me a ticket, then I can’t really complain about it (though I no doubt will).”
—Brian Spears, “Missing the Point on Content Piracy” on The Rumpus.
“You should never read just for ‘enjoyment.’ Read to make yourself smarter! Less judgmental. More apt to understand your friends’ insane behavior, or better yet, your own. Pick ‘hard books.’ Ones you have to concentrate on while reading. And for god’s sake, don’t let me ever hear you say, ‘I can’t read fiction. I only have time for the truth.’ Fiction is the truth, fool! Ever hear of ‘literature’? That means fiction, too, stupid.”
—John Waters
