Nicholson Baker, U and I: A True Story (New York: Random House, 1991).
Julian Barnes, Through the Window: Seventeen Essays and a Short Story (New York: Vintage International, 2012) ("I have lived in books, for books, by and with books; in recent years, I have been fortunate enough to be able to live from books. And it was through books that I first realized there were other worlds beyond my own; first imagined what it might be like to be another person; first encountered that deeply intimate bond made when a writer's voice gets inside a reader's head. I was perhaps lucky that for the first ten years of my life there was no competition from television; and when one finally arrived into the household, it was under the strict control of my parents. They were both schoolteachers, so respect for the book and what it contained were implicit. We didn't go to church, but we did go to the library." Id. at ix. "And I remain deeply attached to the physical book and the physical bookshop." Id. at xvii. "There will always be non-readers, bad readers, lazy readers--there always were. Reading is a majority skill but a minority art. Yet nothing can replace the exact, complicated, subtle communication between absent author and entranced, present reader. Nor do I think the e-reader will ever completely supplant the physical book--even if it does numerically. Every book feels and looks different in your hands; every Kindle download feels and looks exactly the same (though perhaps the e-reader will one day contain a 'smell' function, which you will click to make your electronic Dickens novel suddenly reek of damp paper, fox-marks, and nicotine). ... I have no Luddite prejudice against the new technology; it's just that books look as if they contain knowledge, while e-readers look as if they contain information...." Id. at xviii.).
Sven Birkerts, The Other Walk: Essays (Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2011).
Nancy Marie Brown, The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2007).
Nancy Marie Brown, Song of the Vikings: Snorri and the Making of Norse Myths (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise, with a New Foreword by Alex Woloch (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 1982, 2008) ("Every admirer is a potential enemy. No one can make us hate ourselves like an admirer--'de lire las secrete horreur du devouement dans des yeux'--nor is the admiration ever pure. It may be us they wish to meet but it's themselves they want to talk about." Id. at 12.).
J. M. Coetzee, Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews, edited by David Attwell (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 1992).
Rita Dove, ed., The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry (New York: Penguin Books, 2011) (I am very please that this anthology includes Robert Pinsky, Samurai Song.).
Andre Dubus III, Townie: A Memoir (New York: Norton, 2011).
David Gilmour, The Pursuit of Italy: A History of a Land, Its Regions, and Their Peoples (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2011) (For the German poet [Goethe], Palermo was also a paradise, and Sicily as a whole was 'the clue to everything'. 'To have seen Italy without having seen Sicily,' he bizarrely warned, was 'not to have seen Italy at all.' Yet to see Sicily in the eighteenth century was to see a place with no trace of that epoch except in the profusion of its buildings, for the island was immune to the spirit of the Enlightenment. As the Sicilian historian Rosario Romeo observed, the only European development that the island welcomes was the Counter-Reformation; the Protestant Reformation, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment had virtually no impact. Unlike Naples, Sicily contained only a handful of reformers, and even they were too timid and tepid to advocate the abolition of feudalism.... Aristocrats in other parts of Italy were showing increasing interest in visiting their estates and making them more productive, but in Sicily landowners did not follow the trend. Instead of riding from time to time over their latifondi, seeing what was happening on their farms, they stayed in Palermo, trundling up and down the marine front each afternoon in their carriages, attended by their liveried footmen. When the great Neapolitan viceroy, the Marquess of Caracciolo, arrived in Palermo in 1781, the nobles united to impede his reforms, especially those that might have led to a reduction of their feudal powers." Id. at 123-124. "Italy's unease at the start of the millennium was exacerbated by intellectuals who demonstrated their anxieties by writing books with titles as stark as The Death of the Fatherland, If We Cease to Be a Nation and Is Italy a Civilized Country?, sometimes containing an equally pessimistic subtitle such as Why Italy Cannot Succeed n Becoming a Modern Country. Many were fixated by the 'problem' of the national character, and one newspaper editor ascribed the country's shortcomings to the nature of its people, who were wily, deceitful and amoral, who possessed no 'spirit of service' and who were too attached to their mothers. The sense of national identity such as it had been, seemed to have disappeared, and increasing numbers of Italians were now questioning the legitimacy of the state. The Northern League, which became the third party in Italy in 2008, had long denounced the Risorgimento and claimed that unification had been a mistake. Now the Resistance, the second sacred experience of modern Italian history, was being discredited by politicians of the Right. A mayor of Rome publicly denied that fascism was evil, a minister of defence praised the brutal soldiery of Salo, and a speaker of the Senate pronounce the Resistance to be a myth that ought to be abandoned. Berlusconi made his own opinions clear in 2002 by refusing to lay a wreath to the partisans and going on holiday to his villa in Sardinia instead." "By the start of the millennium it was hard to discern a sense of pride in being Italian, unless the country's football team was playing well, except for that pride understandably engendered by the high quality of exports exhibiting 'Italian style' and 'made in Italy'. Although Italy was still a unitary state, it was evidently not a united one." Id. at 392-393.).
Robert E. Goodin, On Settling (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2012) (This extended 'essay' is very much worth reading, remembering, and applying. From the bookjacket: "In a culture that worships ceaseless striving, 'settling' seems like giving up. But is it? On Settling defends the positive value of settling, explaining why this disdained practice is not only more realistic but more useful than an excessive ideal of striving. In fact, the book makes the case that we'd all be lost without settling--and that even to strive, one must first settle." "We may admire strivers and love the ideal of striving, but who of us could get through a day without settling? Real people, confronted with a complex problem, simply make do, settling for some resolution that, while almost certainly not the best that one could find by devoting limitless time and attention to the problem, is nonetheless good enough. [The perfect is the enemy of the good?] Robert Goodin explores the dynamics of this process. These involve taking as fixed, for now, things that we reserve the right to reopen later (nothing is fixed for good, although events might always overtake us). We settle in some things in order to concentrate better on others. At the same time we realize we may need to come back later and reconsider those decisions. From settling on and settling for, to settling down and settling in, On Settling explains why settling is useful for planning, creating trust, and strengthening the social fabric--and why settling is different from compromise and resignation." "So, the next time you're faced with a thorny problem, just settle. It's no failure." I would like to have seen some discussion of the relationship between settling and reaching a consensus.).
Jill Lepore, The Story of America: Essays on Origins (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2012) ("To say that the United States is a story is not to say that it is fiction; it is, instead, to suggest that it follows certain narrative conventions. All nations are places, but they are also acts of imagination. Who has a part in a nation's story, like who can be a citizen and who has a right to vote, isn't foreordained, or even stable. The story's plot, like the nation's borders and the nature of its electorate, is always shifting. Laws are passed and wars are fought to keep some people in and others out. Who tells the story, like who writes the laws and who wage the wars, is always part of that struggle." Id. at 3. "The story of America isn't carved in stone, or even inked on parchment; it is, instead, told, and fought over, again and again. It could have gone a thousand other ways." Id. at 4. "In The Anti-Intellectual Presidency: The Decline of Presidential Rhetoric from George Washington to George W. Bush,, political scientist Elvin T. Lim argued that the problem isn't that presidents appeal to the people; it's that they pander to us. Speech is fine; blather is not. By an "anti-intellectual president' . . . Lim meant, with a handful of exceptions, everyone from McKinley forward, presidents who, in place of evidence and argument, offered platitudes, partisan jibes, emotional appeals, and lady-in-Pasadena human-interest stories. Sloganeering in speechwriting became common place that, in 2009, the National Constitution Center hosted a contest for the best six-word inaugural. ('New deal. New day. New world.') Public-spirited yes; nuanced, not so much." Id. at 313.).
Zakes Mda, Sometimes There Is a Void: Memoirs of an Outsider (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2011).
Richard Russo, Elsewhere: A Memoir (New York: Knopf, 2012) ("Our second day on the road, around dawn, we were awaken by a call form the motel's front desk. During the night somebody had broken into my car, smashing in the windshield with a tire iron. . . . The front seat and floor were vacuumed, but tiny glass shards had worked their way into the fabric of the seat cushions, and by the time I drove back to the motel where my family anxiously awaited, my undershorts were pink. My mother would now have to ride in the other vehicle. 'Which car do you want to drive?' I asked Barbara. That is, would you rather have my mother in your car for the next seven hours or bleed from the ass in mine? After twenty-five years, she was used to such choices. Still, she seemed to debate this one for a long time." Id. at 98. Also, see Meg Wolitzer, "His Mother, Himself," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 12/9/1212.).
Salman Rushdie, Joseph Anton: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 2012) ("In spite of India's much-trumpeted secularism, Indian governments from the mid-seventies onward...had often given in to pressure from religious interest groups, especially to those claiming control of large blocs of votes. By 1988, Rajiv Gandhi's weak government, with elections due in November, cravenly surrendered to threats from two opposition Muslim MPs who were in no position to 'deliever' the Muslim electorate's votes to the Congress Party. The book [i.e., The Satanic Verses] was not examined by any properly authorized body, nor was there any semblance of judicial process. The ban came, improbably enough, from the Finance Ministry, under Section 11 of the Customs Act, which prevented the book from being imported. Weirdly, the Finance Ministry stated that the ban 'did not detract from the literary and artistic merit' of his work. Thanks a lot, the thought." "Strangely--innocently, naively, even ignorantly--he hadn't expected it. ... [I]n 1988 it was possible to believe in India as a free country in which artistic expression was respected and defended. He had believed it...." "To be free one had to make the presumption of freedom. And a further presumption: that one's work would be treated as having been created with integrity. He has always written presuming that he had the right to write as he chose, and presuming that it would at the very least be treated as serious work; and knowing, too, that countries whose writers could not make such presumptions inevitably slid toward, or had already arrived at, authoritarianism and tyranny. Banned writers in unfree parts of the world were not merely proscribed; they were also vilified. In India, however, the presumption of intellectual freedom and respect had been ever present except during the dictatorial years of ;emergency rule' imposed by Indira Gandhi between 1974 and 2977 after her conviction for electoral malpractice. He had been proud of that openness and had boasted of it to people in the West. India was surrounded by unfree societies--Pakistan, China, Burma--but remained an open democracy; flawed, certainly, perhaps even deeply flawed, but free." Id. at 116-117. "When a thing happened that had not happened before, a confusion often descended upon people, a fog that fuddled the clearest minds; and often the consequence of such confusion was rejection, and even anger. A fish crawled out of a swamp onto dry land and the other fish were bewildered, perhaps even annoyed that a forbidden frontier had been crossed. A meteorite struck the earth and the dust blocked out the sun but the dinosaurs went on fighting and eating, not understanding that they have been rendered extinct. The birth of language angered the dumb. The shah of Persia, facing the Ottoman guns, refused to accept the end of the age of the sword and sent his cavalry to gallop suicidally against the blazing cannons of the Turk. A scientist observed tortoises and mockingbirds and wrote about random mutations and natural selection and the adherent of the Book of Genesis cursed his name. A revolution in painting was derided and dismissed as mere impressionism. A folksinger plugged his guitar into an amp and a voice in the crowed shouted 'Judas!'" "This was the question his novel had asked: How does newness enter the world?" Id. at 343. Also, see Donna Rifkind, "A Fictional Character," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 10/14/2012.).
Will Schwalbe, The End of Your Life Book Club (New York: Knopf, 2012) ("You can no longer assume, the way you could when I was growing up, that anyone is reading anything" Id. at 4. "I'd become weary of my work, for all the same boring reasons privileged people get sick of their white-collar jobs: too many meetings, too much email, and too much paperwork." Id. at 24. Commenting on Karen Connelly, The Lizard Cage: "In an era of computers, there's something deeply poignant about a political prisoner with his scraps of paper, about a prison convulsed in the hunt for a pen, and about Connelly's recognition of the importance of the written and printed word. It's easy to forget in our wired world that there are not just places like prisons where electronic text is forbidden, but whole countries, like Burma, where an unregistered modem will land you in jail or worse. Freedom can still depend on ink, just as it always has." Id. at 132. "Evil almost always starts with small cruelties." Id. at 151. "She felt whatever emotions she felt, but feeling was never a useful substitute for doing, and she never let the former get in the way of the latter. If anything, she used her emotions to motivate her and help her concentrate. The emphasis for her was always on doing what needed to be done." Id. at 194.).
Colm Toibin, New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers and Their Families (New York: Scribner, 2012) (From "Jane Austen, Henry James and the Death of the Mother": "If it had suited novelists to fill their books with living mothers . . . then they would have done so. In Novel Relations Ruth Perry takes the view that all the motherless heroines in the eighteenth-century novel--and all the play with substitutions--'may derive from a new necessity in an age of intensifying indiiduaism' This necessity involved separating from the mother, or destroying her, and replacing her with a mother-figure of choice. 'This mother,' Perry writes, 'who is also a stranger may thus enable the heroine's independent moral existence'." "Thus mothers get in the way of fiction; they take up the space that is better filled by indecision, by hope, by the low growth of a personality, and by something more interesting and important a the novel itself develops. This was the idea of solitude, the idea that a key scene in a novel occurs when the heroine is alone, with no one to protect here, no one to confide in, no one to advise her, and no possibility of this . [Note: The eighteenth century, the age without the Iphone, the Ipad, laptop Mac, Internet, Google search, email, text messaging, tweeting, or Facebook; in short, a world in which one could actually be alone, in solitude, for more than 30 seconds. Sigh.] Thus her thoughts move inward, offering a drama not between generations, or between opinions, but within a wounded, deceived or conflicted self. The novel traces the mind at work, the mind in silence. The presence of a mother would be a breach of the essential privacy of the emerging self, of the sense of singleness and integrity, of an uncertain moral consciousness, of a pure and floating individuality on which the novel comes to depends. The conspiracy in the novel is thus not between a mother and her daughter, but rather between the protagonist and the reader." Id. at 3. From the bookjacket: "Acutely perceptive and imbued with rare tenderness and wit, New ways to Kill Your Mother is a fascinating look at writers' most influential bonds and a secret key to understanding and enjoying their works.").
John Fabian Witt, The Accidental Republic: Crippled Workingmen, Destitute Widow, and the Remaking of American Law (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2004) (From the bookjacket: "In the five decades after the Civil War, the United States witnessed the development of a profusion of institutions designed to cope with the nation's exceptionally acute industrial accident crisis. Jurists elaborated the common law of torts. Workingmen's organizations founded a widespread system of cooperative insurance. Leading employers instituted welfare-capitalist accident relief funds. And social reformers advocated compulsory insurance such as workmen's compensation." "John Fabian Witt argues that experiments in accident law at the turn of the twentieth century arose out of competing views of the loose network of ideas and institutions that historians call the ideology of free labor. These experiments a century ago shaped contemporary American accident law; they laid the foundations of the American administrative state; an they occasioned a still hotly contested legal transformation from the principles of free labor to the categories of insurance and risk. In this eclectic moment at the beginning of the modern state, Witt describes American accident law as a contingent set of institutions that might plausibly have developed along a number of historical path. In turn, he suggests, the making of American accident law is the story of the equally contingent remaking of our accidental republic.").
John Fabian Witt, Lincoln's Code: The Law of War in American History (New York: The Free Press, 2012) ("This is a story about war in America. To be more specific, it is the story of an idea about war, an idea that Americans have sometimes nurtured and often scorned. The idea is that the conduct of war can be constrained by law." Id. at 1. "In August and September 1862, Dakota warriors associated with the Sioux Nation had launched a bloody series of assaults to reclaim land they had ceded to the United States. Disputes had arisen over payment for the land. The Dakota attacked white settler homesteads across the southern part of the state, killing 358 settlers in all, including women and children." "The American response was swift and ferocious. Major General John Pope...ordered Colonel Henry Hastings Sibley to treat the Dakota 'as maniacs or wild beast,' and declared his intent 'utterly to exterminate' them. Pope's attitude was shared widely. 'Nits,' one soldier told Colonel Sibley, 'make lice.'" "Yet in September and October, when he took into custody some 2,000 Dakota Indians, Colonel Sibley did not execute them summarily. Instead,he convened a five-officer military commission and tried the Dakota for murder and related crimes. Minnesota settlers complained bitterly about the delayed retaliation against the Dakota.... But the settlers did not have to wait long. The military trials began two days after Sibley had begun to take the Dakota into custody. On the first day, the commission tried sixteen men, sentencing ten to death by hanging and acquitting six others. When the trials conclude on November 3, the commission had heard charges against 392 Dakota for murder, rape, and robbery. The commission convicted 323 warriors, 303 of whom were sentenced to death." "Historians of the Dakota conflict have focused on the procedural shortcomings of the military commissions, which were considerable. Most rials were extremely short: some lasted no more than five minutes. Key evidence was often provided by cooperating witnesses who otherwise faced execution themselves. No defense counsel appeared." "But the more interesting question is not whether the military commission trials were paragons of civil libertarian virtue (they were not), or even whether they lived up to the already dubious standards of trials in nineteenth-century courts (they did not). The real question is why U.S. officials held trials at all. Summary executions, after all, had been standard practice for American solders capturing Indians since the seventeenth century...." "At a moment when the South had captured thousands of Union soldiers, when Lincoln's critics pilloried him for initiating barbaric war of servile insurrection, the North could not afford to draw the charge of cruelly executing prisoners of war. And so, after agonizing over the cases for a month, Lincoln resolved them by applying a principle drawn from the laws of war. Distinguishing between those Indian warriors who had participated in massacres and those who had fought against soldiers and militia, he approved the death sentences of thirty-nine Dakota warriors and left the sentences of the other unresolved." "Rarely if ever had U.S. military force against Indians been so closely regulated by law. But then, the United States had rarely been prepared to execute so many Indian warrior at once, by law or otherwise. The military commissions had served to restrain the use of sheer force. But commissions had also been a legitimating device, a way of moving forward with mass executions on an unprecedented scales." Id. at 330-334.).
John Fabian Witt, Patriots and Cosmopolitans: Hidden Histories of American Law (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2007) ("From the bookjacket: "Ranging widely from the founding era to Reconstruction, from the making of the modern state to its post-New Deal limits, John Fabian Witt illuminates the legal and constitutional foundations of American nationhood though the little-known stories of five patriots and critics. He shows how law and constitutionalism have powerfully shaped and been shaped by the experience of nationhood at key moments in American history...." "Each of these individuals [i.e., James Wilson, Elias Hill, Crystal Eastman, Roscoe Pound, and Melvin Belli] came up against the power of American national institutions to shape and constrain the directions of legal change. Yet their engagements with American nationhood remade the institutions and ideals of the United States even as the national tradition shaped and constrained the course of their lives.").
I know. I am a one-person book club.
