"Audrey Hepburn's Neck"

To do my part to sell readers on Alan Brown's first novel, Audrey Hepburn's Neck (1996), I've got a fresh post up at Spot-on.

It's not only a wonderful read but it will make you (a little) smarter about life in Japan.

This is more than I'm willing to say about Sophia Coppola's film, Lost in Translation (2003). But it's a fine film for other reasons, all spelled out in the Spot-on post.

If my enthusiasm for Brown's book doesn't persuade you to put it on your reading list, click here for a second opinion.

--Marshal Zeringue

In praise of David Mitchell

Wayne Terwilliger, an admitted "occasionally obsessive follower of the Booker Prize," graciously agreed to share his view on "bad Booker beats," i.e., novels that should have won the (Man) Booker Prize but were beat out by less deserving books.

Here's his take:

I agree with Perry Middlemiss' opinion on the 1986 prize: I've read all of the shortlisted titles from that year except The Handmaid's Tale and any of them would have been a better choice than The Old Devils (which was by no means a bad book, just a minor one).

My concurrence with Martyn Goff's assessment of the 1980 prize is even more avid. Earthly Powers is, I think, one of the outstanding British novels of the 20th century, grand in scope & incisive in characterization. Moreover, A Month in Country is also, I think, a great novel, far smaller in scope but in its way nearly perfect. Both of these books would have proven a more worthy winner than Golding's Rites of Passage (again, not a bad book but not really up to the competition).

To choose a year myself in which I think the wrong book won the Booker Prize, I only need look back two years to 2004 when the judges selected Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty over David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas. I found The Line of Beauty, though well written line by line, ultimately a tedious story of small-minded people acting nastily. (Yes, one could say the same about Madame Bovary but The Line of Beauty is not of that caliber.)

Cloud Atlas, on the other hand, is simply brilliant: a technical high-wire act of styles and genres that embraces the widest scope of human history (& history still to come).

David Mitchell just wows me. He's not yet 40, has written 4 novels, been short-listed for the Booker twice and, as of last week, long-listed for a third time. I've read all four of his novels and think they are all outstanding. The scope of his imagination astounds me: no re-hashed semi-autobiographical domestic drama here. Perhaps this year, the Booker judges will make a selection with which I can't disagree.

Many thanks to Wayne for such a stimulating response to the question.

I've obviously got to catch up on my David Mitchell reading.

Wayne Terwilliger has one of those of those jobs that every book-lover (at least thinks he or she) would love to have: he's the Assistant Director of the University of Virginia Bookstore.

Click here to see the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2006 longlist.

--Marshal Zeringue

Another French writer on the presidential bookshelf

Mark Sanderson writes in the (London) Telegraph:

Eagle-eyed viewers of The West Wing, the long-running television political drama, may have been somewhat surprised to glimpse the works of Michel Foucault being taken off the shelves of the Oval Office as removal men cleared the way for President Bartlet's successor.

Then again, maybe the most powerful man in the world ought to be familiar with the philosophy of a man who gained his wisdom in the sex dungeons of San Francisco.

Perhaps, in George W. Bush's library, his prized copy of Eric Carle's The Very Hungry Caterpillar is rubbing shoulders with Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology. As if …

--Marshal Zeringue

Nora Roberts' 166th book

Ginia Bellafante profiles romance writer Nora Roberts in today's New York Times. This paragraph caught my eye:

With the publication next week of her 166th book, Morrigan’s Cross, Ms. Roberts remains one of the top-selling novelists of the last decade and the most prolific romance writer of all time. At 55 she has written more books than Sidney Sheldon, Harold Robbins, Judith Krantz and [Danielle] Steele combined.

What does Roberts read when she's not writing? Click here to find out.

--Marshal Zeringue

An interview with Imre Kertész

In an interview which originally appeared in the Hugarian weekly Elet es Irodalow, Eszter Radai talks with the Hungarian author Imre Kertész about his new novel Dossier K., the breed of Euro-anti-Semitism after Auschwitz, and how to survive a dictatorship.

Click here to read the interview at signandsight.

Kertész won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2002. Click here to read his biography, and here to see a video of his Nobel lecture.

Click here to read an excerpt from Fatelessness, which the New York Review of Books called, "“Remarkable . . .an original and chilling quality, surpassed only by Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz.”

--Marshal Zeringue

Vargas Llosa: Madame Bovary reads pulp fiction

Hurree at Kitabkhana snagged this catch from the Daily Star (Lebanon):

Mario Vargas Llosa on readers and reading:

"Madame Bovary doesn't read masterworks. She reads ... pulp fiction. That's what she reads: pulp fiction, love stories, very banal, very superficial. But these stories disturb her profoundly, because they give her the idea of a very different kind of life. A life of pleasure. A life of romantic deeds. A life in which women become heroines, martyrs. Romantic martyrs of love. And so what does she do with all this? She does exactly the same thing that Don Quixote does when he reads chivalry novels. He thinks life is like life in chivalry novels! ... In the case of Madame Bovary it's tragic. We admire Don Quixote because he doesn't accept the world as it is. Well, I think that is the function of literature: to make us desire a different kind of world and to create in us a kind of dissatisfaction with the world as it is. I think this is a very important function, because this gives you a kind of motivation to act for changing things, for transforming not only the society but moral values, cultural values."

Mario Vargas Llosa's fixation with Flaubert and Madame Bovary goes much deeper than this observation, according to Michael Kerrigan's review of Vargas Llosa's new novel Travesuras de la niña mala (The Bad Girl’s Escapades).

In The Perpetual Orgy (1975), Vargas Llosa describes his own long love affair with Flaubert’s Emma Bovary. On first meeting her, he confesses, “I knew that from that moment on, till my dying day, she would be for me, as for Léon Dupuis in the first days of their affair, ‘the beloved of every novel, the heroine of every play, the vague she of every volume of verse’”. What makes her so compelling is her rebellion against the humdrum condition to which her destiny has condemned her, her determination to snatch at a more highly coloured, glamorous life. The bad girl [in the new novel] resembles Mme Bovary in this: in her case too we find a reminder that, as Flaubert’s lawyer Antoine-Marie-Jules Senard put it at the author’s prosecution over Madame Bovary, with masterful reductiveness, “dangers lie ahead for a girl who receives an education superior to that of her class”.

Kerrigan again:

The other great virtue of Flaubert in Vargas Llosa’s eyes is that this most rigorous of artists, this most meticulous of stylists, was so open in his engagement with vulgarity. Madame Bovary’s yearnings may seem absurd to us, yet her resolve to realize them remains inspiring, her failure tragic. “It pleases me”, writes Vargas Llosa, “that Madame Bovary can also be read as a collection of clichés–that it is peopled with stock characters.”... Vargas Llosa’s taste for such vulgarities has always been evident, as has been the transparent sincerity of his sensibility: this is no slumming aesthete or patronizing wit. He is being neither perverse nor condescending when he writes, in The Perpetual Orgy, “the melodramatic element moves me because melodrama is closer to the real than drama”. Overblown language and exaggerated gestures express a Bovaryesque rebellion against quotidian realities, though Vargas Llosa would resist any temptation to intellectualize them. Despising the sensibilities of kitsch and camp for the knowing detachment they presuppose, he insists on a straightforwardly emotional response to the most imbecilic extravagances of popular stories and song.

--Marshal Zeringue

Three new books from Latin American masters

Anderson Tepper praises three recent books of Latin American fiction in the Village Voice: The Tango Singer by Tomás Eloy Martínez, Last Evenings on Earth by Roberto Bolaño, and Voices of Time: A Life in Stories by Eduardo Galeano. Click here for his review.

It's tempting to generalize after reading three recent books from the southern tip of Latin America. What do they tell us about the continent and its literature today? Yet what is most interesting is what the books tell us about themselves: that the era of military dictatorships in Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay, in the '70s and '80s, imbues them with an unforgettable sense of melancholy and loss, nostalgia and rage; that the spirit of Borges, more than García Márquez, hovers over these haunted tales of bloody pasts.

About The Tango Singer, from the publisher:

Restless in Manhattan, student Bruno Cadogan heads to the city of his dreams, Buenos Aires, where the inflation crisis of 2001 is beginning to spiral out of control. He is on the trail of Julio Martel, a legendary but elusive singer, who he hopes will inspire and enlighten his writings on the tango. But the moment he meets El Tucumano at the airport, not only does his new friend find him a cheap room in an expensive city, but a place in the very building where Borges set his celebrated story 'The Adelp'. With El Tucumano's unpredictable help, Bruno is increasingly drawn to the mystery of Martel and his strange and evocative performances in a series of apparently arbitrary sites around the city. And as he untangles the story of the singer's life, Bruno begins to believe that Martel's increasingly rare performances map a dark labyrinth of the city's past.

Click here for a strong review of The Tango Singer in the Independent and here for the equally positive review in the Guardian.

Of Bolaño's collection, Tepper writes:

Last Evenings on Earth contains some of the most achingly dark stories you'll read for a long time—farewell letters from a drowning generation and a dying man. Here, we travel out from Chile to Mexico City and Barcelona and beyond, following the autobiographical trajectory of Bolaño himself. And what a bedraggled lot of characters we cross: second-rate writers, fringe poets and revolutionaries, aging adventurers, insomniacs, recluses, and vagabonds.

But their grainy, wayward existences don't mean they're out of focus: Bolaño has a laser eye and a frank, confessional first-person voice as relentless as it is irresistible.

And, for all his praise, Tepper is hardly Bolaño's greatest fan: for that role I'm tempted to nominate Francine Prose. Click here to read her effusive review in the New York Times.

"If Bolaño's writing...is an incantation—against horror, against defeat, against oblivion—Eduardo Galeano's is a bittersweet affirmation," writes Tepper.

The Uruguayan author's vignettes stitch together tales of wonder and terror, love and war, and just about everything in between. Are these koans, fables, experiences, or testimonials? And why is a passage about Diego Maradona shimmying up next to ones about Rigoberta Menchú, Sebastião Salgado, José Saramago's grandfather, and an anonymous tango singer? Because Galeano, author of the groundbreaking "Memory of Fire" trilogy, is a collector of stories, a clairvoyant reared in the cafés of Montevideo who, like Bolaño, carries with him a multitude.

In May, Tepper interviewed Galeano in New York for Vanity Fair "to discuss his own version of literary tapestries, the marvels—and pitfalls—of technology, and, as the World Cup commences, the unsurpassed joy of watching Ronaldinho." Click here to read the interview.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five unforgettable memoirs

Roger Kahn, author of The Boys of Summer and the memoir Into My Own, recently described five outstanding memoirs for Opinion Journal.

Here are two of the titles:

The Nightmare Years: 1930-1940 by William L. Shirer (Little, Brown, 1984)

The personal account by the famous foreign correspondent of what it was like to cover Germany during the Hitler years and to live inside the Third Reich. We join him as he drinks beer and eats sausage with such as Hermann Göring and Heinrich Himmler. In the Bavarian Alps he sees a Nazi road sign: "Drive Carefully! Sharp Curve. Jews 75 Kilometers an Hour!" Shirer read Hitler's intentions sooner than most. He relates titanic events in a warm human voice that makes unforgettable reading.

Wait Till Next Year by Carl T. Rowan with Jackie Robinson (Random House, 1960)

This is a wholly honest account of the life of baseball's great pioneer, and the best of all the Robinson books. Jack speaks, sounding much as he did in life, and Rowan provides connective material. Robinson remembers his early days in Pasadena, Calif., after his mother had fled racist Georgia, and one very hot afternoon when a sheriff ordered him out of the reservoir where Robinson and some friends were wading. "Looka here," said the sheriff behind a gun. "Niggers in my drinking water." Robinson lettered in four sports at UCLA and was commissioned a captain in the U.S. cavalry. The Army actually court-martialed him for refusing to sit in the back of a military bus. After a harsh trial, he was acquitted. Triumph came when Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947, the first African-American allowed to play major league baseball since 1884. He recounts his Dodger years with great vigor. Unfortunately, Doris Kearns Goodwin later wrote a memoir about her supposed days as a Brooklyn Dodgers fan, lifting Robinson's title verbatim. That is not illegal but neither is it very nice. Stick with the original, by an original.

Click here to see Kahn's other three selections.

--Marshal Zeringue

What seven classic novels say about the stages of life

Friend of the Blog Cary Federman pointed me to Adam Begley's interesting review of Edward Mendelson's The Things That Matter: What Seven Classic Novels Have to Say About the Stages of Life.

The book is a study of seven novels—Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, Middlemarch, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and Between the Acts—which, his subtitle promises, have something to say about “the stages of life”: birth, childhood, growth, marriage, love, parenthood and (a touch of euphemism here) “The Future.” The Things That Matter makes very few startling claims (provocation isn’t friendly), but taken as a whole, it is startling—especially in the way it relates novels to the “inner life” of the reader.

In the old days, lit crit would teach us how a novel works (or fails to work, due to the tragic disconnect between signifier and signified), or how the world works (or fails to work, due to the perfidy of capitalism). Mr. Mendelson is more like a highly literate self-help guru: He wants to teach us about ourselves as “autonomous persons”; he wants to reach “readers … who are still deciding how to live their lives.”

There's more of interest in the review: click here to check it out.

--Marshal Zeringue

What does a book say about its reader?

"With people evaluating your intelligence, background, politics and even how likeable you are by your selected reading, choosing the right book could be the key to projecting aspects of your personality," according to the spokesperson for Borders bookstore who spoke to the Guardian about a survey the book merchants conducted.

The survey revealed that the "majority of the British public--57%--believe they can determine someone's personality by their choice of reading matter, while 42% think that a person's intelligence can be gauged in the same way."

But interpreting the data can be tricky:

Borders' "rough guide", which summarises what characteristics can be gleaned from a person's choice of book, marks [George W.] Bush as a reader of "literary fiction" [because his staff recently let it be known that he had read Camus' The Stranger while on vacation]. This means he is likely to be "a well-educated person who reads The Independent or Guardian and tunes in to Channel 4 or BBC 2 to satisfy more leftfield interests".

Make of that what you will.

Click here for the Guardian article.

The writer Nick Hornby argues you shouldn't infer anything in particular from what one reads and you shouldn't care what they infer about you from your reading choices.

[P]lease, please stop patronising those who are reading a book--The Da Vinci Code, maybe--because they are enjoying it.

For a start, none of us knows what kind of an effort this represents for the individual reader. It could be his or her first full-length adult novel; it might be the book that finally reveals the purpose and joy of reading to someone who has hitherto been mystified by the attraction that books exert on others. And anyway, reading for enjoyment is what we should all be doing.

I don't mean we should all be reading chick-lit or thrillers (although if that's what you want to read, it's fine by me, because here's something else no one will ever tell you: if you don't read the classics, or the novel that won this year's Booker Prize, then nothing bad will happen to you; more importantly, nothing good will happen to you if you do); I simply mean that turning pages should not be like walking through thick mud.

The whole purpose of books is that we read them, and if you find you can't, it might not be your inadequacy that's to blame. 'Good' books can be pretty awful sometimes.

--Marshal Zeringue

Shortlist for the 2006 Ned Kelly Awards

Yesterday, Jeff Pierce of the "The Rap Sheet" posted an item about the shortlist for the 2006 Ned Kelly Awards, to be presented by the Crime Writers’ Association of Australia.

Click here to read the list of contenders for best novel, best first novel, and best true crime.

The winner will be announced at the end of August.

Click here to see the 2005 winners.

--Marshal Zeringue

Attractive author, seductive book

Last month I asked, What's crazier than judging a book by its cover?

The answer: Judging it by its author's photo.

Crazy though it may be, that hasn't stopped a number of individuals from doing just that. Today's New York Times reports the story (that has already buzzed around the books blogs) of the author whose good looks led some in the publishing industry to doubt her talent.

(Oddly--perversely?--the Times runs the least attractive of the several photos I've seen of the writer.)

Actually, that "controversy" is merely the seductive lead-in for an article about Marisha Pessl's background, industry, and talent.

Click here to read a previous item about her debut novel and a few books she loves.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Doing Nothing"

Tom Lutz, author of Doing Nothing, submitted to a brief Q & A with Powell's .com.

Among other subjects--including why he might have liked to have been Hitler, Mao, or Stalin--Lutz discussed a project that might become his next book:

Driven, which is in part the flip side of Doing Nothing, is a study of the way automobile culture manages to transform our basic relation to the world, infiltrating our notions of psychology and social life and even such notions as spiritual transport and, as the title suggests, getting ahead. It will include sections on Southeast Asia, the countries along the old Silk Road, and Africa--places where automotive culture is just taking off--as well as examinations of older automotive cultures in the West.

Asked about the last great book he read, he named more than twelve titles.

Click here to read about those books and the rest of the Q & A.

Lutz's Doing Nothing: A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers, and Bums in America was published in May. Celia Wren, a theater critic for the Washington Post, wrote a fine review of the book for the Boston Globe that included some industrious footwork (no slacker, she) to check on Lutz's argument that Benjamin Franklin, America's patron saint of industriousness, was actually something of a slacker himself. Click here for her review.

Click here to read an excerpt from Doing Nothing.

--Marshal Zeringue

Coming attractions

This week on the blog:

• an exclusive essay from a political philosopher who argues that Fight Club may be "philosophy masquerading as a thrill ride"
• another entry in the "bad Booker beats" series
• the best poem of the last millenium
• a book recommendation for fans of HBO's The Wire
• the best novel of 1986

--Marshal Zeringue

Marisha Pessl tags six books

Marisha Pessl's debut novel, Special Topics in Calamity Physics, has been getting rave reviews.

Laura Miller called it "a real novel, one of substance and breadth, with an arresting story and that rarest of delights, a great ending." Liesl Schillinger said "this skylarking book will leave readers salivating for more."

The bottom line from Janet Maslin's New York Times review: "Q: Is Special Topics in Calamity Physics required reading for devotees of inventive new fiction? A: Yes."

Pessl can write a rave, too. The verve with which she described some books for The Week not only whet my anticipation for her novel but made me want to read these books she loves.

Two of the titles:

The Dead Fish Museum by Charles D’Ambrosio

In these tales, which range from a screenwriter in a psychiatric ward to weary grifters wandering the American West, D’Ambrosio displays a talent and versatility of language that is jaw-dropping. I’m crossing my fingers he’s working on an 800-page novel so I can spend weeks with his work, rather than a cherished afternoon.

The Known World by Edward P. Jones

Biblical in scale but nimble in execution. Not since Toni Morrison’s Beloved have stories about the effects of slavery been so heartbreaking, or powerfully rendered. Jones’ prose is deceitfully plain, pitch-perfect, fascinating. I’m awaiting his upcoming book of stories, All Aunt Hagar’s Children.

Click here to read about the other four books on Pessl's list.

The Known World won the Pulitzer Prize and earned excellent reviews. Click here to read an interview with Edward P. Jones, and here to read an excerpt from the novel.

D'Ambrosio's short story collection enjoyed wide praise; click here to read an excerpt from one of the stories, "The High Divide."

--Marshal Zeringue

Books on the Bible

Robert Alter, who has written a number of important books on the subject, recommended five top books on the Bible for Opinion Journal.

Mimesis is the only one with which I am familiar. Or, I should say, some years ago it was a book that that I loved to dip into, struggle with and be fascinated by, and then set down not sure that really understood what I had read. Alter's take:

Mimesis by Erich Auerbach (Princeton, 1953)

The formidable challenge that Erich Auerbach set himself with Mimesis is made clear by its subtitle: "The Representation of Reality in Western Literature." But the German scholar succeeded brilliantly, producing a masterwork of 20th-century criticism that also happens to have pioneered a modern literary understanding of the Bible. Though only the first chapter is strictly focused on the Bible--a comparison of a passage from The Odyssey with one from Genesis--a biblical grounding is essential to Auerbach's discussions of Dante and other important writers of the medieval and early modern periods. His enduring contribution: making us see that the Bible is not somehow apart from literature, sequestered in a special preserve of theology and spirituality, but is rather a manifestation of a high literary art.

Mary Douglas's is another book from Alter's list that looks interesting. I'm tempted to skim it to see what she says about eating crustaceans.

Leviticus as Literature by Mary Douglas (Oxford, 2000)

British anthropologist Mary Douglas takes us on an intellectual adventure with Leviticus as Literature. No small feat, given that Leviticus is notoriously the driest of biblical books--it consists mainly of elaborate instructions for the sacrificial cult. But Douglas proposes that these cultic procedures reflect a sophisticated system of thought: In describing the ritual preparation of the sacrificial animal and the sanctuary's spatial divisions, the Leviticus writers may have also been explaining the structure of the cosmos as they understood it, a place where the vertical division of Mount Sinai (God and Moses at the top, the elders of Israel halfway up, the Israelites below) is mirrored horizontally in the sanctuary (the Holy of Holies within, the inner court for the Levites, the outer court for the Israelites). Douglas makes a persuasive case that more is going on in this book of the Bible than is generally supposed--and she shows that modern condescension toward biblical writing is misguided--but I am still tempted to say that Douglas is more interesting to read than Leviticus.

Click here to read about Alter's other recommendations.

Robert Alter's most recent books are The Five Books of Moses: A Translation With Commentary and Imagined Cities.

--Marshal Zeringue

New fiction this fall

Recently Fritz Lanham at the Houston Chronicle offered up some selected new fiction coming soon to a bookstore near you.

Here are a few titles from the list that I'll be reading:

Memorial by Bruce Wagner (Simon & Schuster). Dark comedy combines with a family's redemptive journey, all rendered in Wagner's typical high-voltage prose.

Black Girl/White Girl by Joyce Carol Oates (Ecco). Fifteen years after the death of an assertive black student at a mostly white liberal-arts college, her former roommate plumbs the mysteries of her death.

The Mission Song by John le Carré (Little, Brown). Naive young interpreter, son of an Irish father and Congolese mother, gets drawn into a seamy British intelligence plot in this latest post-Cold War thriller from the master of the genre.

Bleeding Hearts by Ian Rankin (Little Brown). Professional assassin decides his mysterious employer has set him up for a fall.

Click here to see the rest of Lanham's list of forthcoming fiction.

Click here to read the publisher's description of Wagner's Memorial.

Interested in a list of Ian Rankin's "desert island discs"? Click here to check it out.

Click here to read the publisher's description of Joyce Carol Oates' Black Girl/White Girl.

Click here to read the publisher's description of The Mission Song by John le Carré.

Earlier on the blog I linked to the Denver Post's coverage of books coming this fall; click here to read it.

--Marshal Zeringue

If you could recommend one book...

This week David Ignatius of the Washington Post proposed a question to some of his international associates: "What one book would you suggest to summer readers and why?"

Michael Young, the opinion editor and a columnist for Lebanon’s The Daily Star and a contributing editor at Reason magazine, responded from Beirut. In part:

...if I had to recommend the mother of all summer books, blending humor and drama, fantastic prose and all the other qualities publishers will splash across a cover, I would recommend Evelyn Waugh's The Sword of Honor Trilogy (Men at Arms, Officers and Gentlemen, and Unconditional Surrender). Probably the best opening pages I've ever read followed by a dark middle, and a compassionate equilibrium returning at the end.

Bashir Goth, a veteran journalist, the first Somali blogger and editor of a leading news website, replied (with a "Somalia/United Arab Emirates" dateline):

In a region living with the stigma of terrorism, I recently read one refreshing book that portrays the Arabs as just ordinary people who are keen to achieve prosperity through hard work and business acumen. With its English version expected soon, My Vision, by General Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, UAE Vice President and Ruler of Dubai, sums up the story that turned Dubai into a world metropolitan where all cultures and races rub shoulders with only one common goal in mind--to make profit. (Click here to read the rest of his reply.)

Mahmoud Sabit is a historian and an authority on Egypt’s 19th century political reforms. He responded from Cairo:

If I had to choose one book with which to spend my vacation, I would want something escapist, but not fictional--a sort of analogy for today. The book would be A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century by Barbara Tuchman.

It certainly feels escapist as far as it goes. It recounts events from seven hundred years ago. Yet it's definitely not fictional. I usually find non-fictional events far more fascinating than pure fiction, possibly because reality is far more strange and more fantastic than a fictional narrative. It's also informative as it profiles a human condition, and human reactions to extraordinary events, filled as it is with examples of human fortitude, and human endurance against unimaginable odds. It's entertaining. What after all are we entertained by? Intrigue, action, love, outright evil and outright good, bliss and pain in equal measure, yes it is entertaining. There are of course modern analogies: greed, piety, cruelty, compassion, deep love, and bitter hatred, in short all those personality traits that we recognize as so very human. (Click here to read the rest of his reply.)

Mubashar Jawed Akbar is a leading Indian journalist and author. He's the founder and editor-in-chief of The Asian Age, a daily multi-edition Indian newspaper with a global perspective. From New Delhi, India, he wrote:

Alternatively the question could be framed thus: The British authorities permit you to carry one book in your assigned plastic bag on an air journey. Which one book would you carry on-board? In either scenario, dream-holiday or nightmare, the book I would recommend is any Jeeves-Bertie Wooster novel by P.G. Wodehouse (Right Ho, Jeeves is at the top of my list). (Click here to read the rest of his reply.)

Leon Krauze, a Mexican blogger and a founder of letraslibres.com, replied from Mexico City:

It certainly isn't light summer reading, but I highly recommend Ron Suskind's new book, The One Percent Doctrine. Suskind's honest--sometimes even brutal--account of American foreign policy after 9/11 is indispensable for an understanding of how the world has worked for the last few years. I tend to agree with Ian McEwan, who, after what happened in New York and Washington, decided that pure fiction was no longer entirely appropriate. This world of ours begs to be understood rather that dramatized. (Krauze allowed himself to recommend a book of poetry as well.)

Miklós Vámos, a Hungarian novelist, screenwriter and talk show host, recommended a book that regular blog readers may have heard enough about already. Click here to read about his recommendation. He also puts in a plug for his own latest book (but does so with charm).

Daoud Kuttab, a Palestinian journalist and the director of the Institute of Modern Media at Al Quds University in Ramallah, does not recommend a book. Click here to read why not.

--Marshal Zeringue

John Irving on Günter Grass

John Irving, having initially refused to take a public position on the Günter Grass debate, has now written a letter to the Frankfurter Rundschau.

My friend and one-time mentor Kurt Vonnegut would have called the nationalistic babble in the German press a 'shit storm'. What I read from all the lead editorials, the lofty comments of my colleagues, the critics and journalists from all political camps is the following: all this is a predictable, hypocritical stripping down of Grass' life and work, carried out from the oh so cowardly standpoint of hindsight.

Signandsight has a bit more of the letter here.

If you read German, click here for the whole letter.

Perhaps this is the same letter Irving sent to the Associated Press, which does not appear to be available (yet) online. The Australian summarizes parts of the letter, however, and has additional background on the controversy here, as does the New York Times here.

--Marshal Zeringue

A top 10 list of wildlife books

Malcolm Tait, editor of Going, Going, Gone?, an illustrated compilation of 100 animals and plants in danger of extinction, and the author of Animal Tragic, a collection of common misunderstandings about the natural world, came up with a list of wildlife books for the Guardian.

His frame of reference:

There's a tendency among some to think of wildlife writing as being a waffly little affair that rambles on about otters or daffodils or babbling brooks, while the rest of us get on with something a good bit meatier like a juicy novel or a well-researched biography. How wrong that thinking is. It is our relationship with the natural world that over the millennia has formed us, informed us, and shaped the way we live and, when we are disconnected from it, we are left with a hollow void into which pour stress, depression and a vague sense of meaninglessness. Good wildlife books don't just tell us about wildlife, they tell us about the people who wrote them, and most importantly, they tell us about ourselves.

Here are two of his picks:

How to be a Bad Birdwatcher by Simon Barnes

You know the feeling: you're reading a book, and as you turn every page you're nodding in agreement, as if the writer has popped into your head and committed your own thoughts to paper. This is one of books. It's about being a normal birdwatcher, reasonably knowledgeable, constantly passionate, but often a bit confused as to what you've seen or heard, and with the vague feeling that everyone else you're with knows so much more. It's the book for those of us who find birdwatching pleasurable, not competitive, and it's terribly funny to boot. I always smile, now, when I see a sparrowhawk. I urge you to read this book to find out why.

The Future of Life by E.O. Wilson

Talking of Wilson, here's a fascinating book that he brought out in 2002 which is a great example of conservation-based writing. The ecological debate will always rage on--should mankind continue to experiment with new sciences and discoveries, or are we destroying our world and ourselves in the process--and Wilson gets to the heart of the arguments superbly, driven by a constant love of the animals with which we share the planet. Agree with him or not, he's a stimulating writer and this is a stimulating book.

Click here to read about his other eight choices--and his explanation for why Darwin's Origin of the Species got bumped from the list.

It appears that Going, Going, Gone? is not scheduled for U.S. release anytime soon, but here's what his publisher says about Animal Tragic:

Crocodiles lure unsuspecting, sympathetic victims towards them by crying. Hedgehogs steal apples by collecting them on their spikes. The chronicle of natural history is absolutely littered with mistaken notions like these, some embarrassing, some bizarre, and some downright hilarious. How did these fantasies ever come about? Take a look at a bevy of bestial booboos, wildlife no-nos, and artistic animal atrocities and discover the reality behind each myth. Among the astounding beliefs: that swallows hibernate under riverside mud (which explained their winter absence); that lemmings hurl themselves over cliffs (blame that one on Walt Disney); and that some creatures could kill with just a glance. Plus, there's a look at misconceptions from everyday speech—including "blind as a bat." (They're not!)

--Marshal Zeringue