For Your Eye Alone: The Letters of Robertson Davies

Robertson Davies, who died in 1995, was a major voice in Canadian literature. Davies’ novels explore the human condition, and all of his writing is deeply rooted in his interest in Jungian psychology. In his essays and reviews, Davies wrote with lively wit and sharp eyes and ears about music, theater, literature, and art.

Davies’ interest in what it is to be human and in the arts is equally evident in his letters. This collection, selected and edited by his biographer, Judith Skelton Grant, reflects many of the same qualities that readers enjoy in Davies’ fiction and nonfiction—crisp prose; strong, carefully (sometimes sharply) expressed opinions; and a love for music, literature, and theater.

Davies is never shy about his opinions, and in his letters he expresses himself in what is at times a less than politically correct fashion, especially when critiquing modern culture. But he is also generous with his praise, as can be seen in his correspondence with the artist who designed the covers for the American editions of Davies’ novels from 1981 on. Letters to Davies’ family blend easily here with notes to publishers and fellow writers. All of the letters evidence Davies’ humor as well as his love of language.

Unlike E. B. White’s letters (reviewed yesterday), these letters were all written during Davies’ adult life (1976-1995). Nonetheless, the reader gets occasional glimpses into his youth in rural Canada in the early 20th century and into his early years as a writer, newspaperman, and actor. Anyone who enjoys Davies’ elegant prose and wit will enjoy this collection.

Check the WRL catalog for For Your Eye Alone

The Letters of E. B. White

Finding more about an author that you really enjoy can be a mixed blessing.  On the one hand, you might get new insights into that author’s work. But what do you do when you discover that someone whose writing moves you deeply is actually not a particularly nice person or has beliefs that are diametrically opposed to your own? In one instance, reading some of a favorite fiction writer’s political writings left me unable to continue to read his novels. The question of whether an author’s (or a musician’s or an artist’s for that matter) personal life should influence our reading of, listening to, or viewing of their work is an interesting one. Time and distance seem to play a role here. Does it matter if Shakespeare was perhaps a distant father and husband or if Benvenuto Cellini was a braggart and a thug? Maybe to some, but probably not to many. Their art has outlasted their personal lives. If you are willing to take the risk of having your favorite writer’s reputation diminished, reading someone’s collected letters is one of the best ways to get a view into that person’s life. This week, BFGB will look at several collections of letters from noted writers.

E. B. White is perhaps best known for his children’s books; Charlotte’s Web, The Trumpet of the Swan, and Stuart Little have delighted generations of readers. He was also a masterful essayist as well as a writer of light verse. During his years with The New Yorker, White had a hand in a wide variety of types of writing.

White was also a prolific letter writer, and this collection includes letters written between 1908 and 1976. Over the course of his 70-year epistolary history, White wrote to family, friends, agents and editors, fans, and other writers. The letters in this collection not only give a history of White himself but also present a view of the literary and cultural history of the U.S. in the 20th century. Of particular interest are the letters to those writers, editors, and staff at the newly launched New Yorker. White’s letters open up a new vista on the development of a magazine and on the passion and wit of the people that Harold Ross brought together in the 1920s. White’s letters of support to other writers are also fascinating. He excelled at giving a boost, or sometimes a kick, when it was needed.

Like his essays and his fiction, White’s letters reflect his concern with writing clear, spare prose. “Omit needless words” was his battle cry (learned from his Cornell professor William Strunk, Jr., whose Elements of Style White later reissued). Anyone who enjoys E. B. White’s writing for adults or children will find something to enjoy in this fascinating collection of letters.

Check the WRL catalog for Letters of E. B. White

The List: International Police

Stieg Larsson’s Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and the TV series based on Henning Mankel’s Kurt Wallander brought many English-speaking readers to the vast world of mysteries set in other countries.  Pun definitely intended.  One subset of the international mystery universe deals with the police of various countries, which can often serve to give insight into different cultures and mores.  These stories can also provide history lessons and a snapshot of current conditions that won’t always make the tourist bureau pamphlets. So here’s a look at policework in places where procedures may be different, but the aim is still towards justice.

• Karin Fossum – Norway’s Inspector Konrad Sejer (Don’t Look Back)
• Leighton Gage – Brazilian Chief Inspector Mario Silva (Blood of the Wicked)
• Peter Temple – Melbourne Homicide detective Joe Cashin (The Broken Shore)
• Arnaldur Indridason – Reykjavik Police Inspector Erlendur Sveinsson (Jar City) (Cela gave her thoughts on Jar City here.)
  
• Michael Genelin – Slovak Criminal Police Commander Jana Matinova (Siren of the Waters)
• Brian McGilloway – Garda Inspector Benedict Devlin (Borderlands)
• Petros Markaris – Athens Homicide Inspector Costas Haritos (Deadline in Athens)
• L.A.  Garcia-Roza – Rio’s Inspector Espinoza (The Silence of the Rain)
• Alicia Giminez Bartlett – Barcelona detective Petra Delicado (Dog Day)
• Arimasa Osawa – Tokyo detective Samejima (Shinjuku Shark)
• Jean-Claude Izzo – Marseilles beat cop Fabio Montale (Total Chaos) (Click here for Barry’s review)

Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood, by Mark Harris

I have a fascination with pop culture, but not because I think it’s fun to wallow in tabloid trash or guilty pleasures. The products of culture—books, music, television, Internet content, and particularly, in this case, movies—speak volumes about the values of that culture. I find the stories of what it takes to get these products to market and the reactions they receive from different quarters fascinating and revealing.

Mark Harris’s Pictures at a Revolution is the perfect fix for fans of pop culture and modern history. He follows the five nominees for Best Picture in 1967—Bonnie and Clyde, Doctor Dolittle, The Graduate, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, and In the Heat of the Night—for the five year period that it took to develop, produce, and market them. The story he tells involves a raft of interesting actors, directors, writers, and other personalities:  Mike Nichols, Warren Beatty, Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy, Dustin Hoffman, Sidney Poitier, Faye Dunaway, Stanley Kramer, Rex Harrison, Rod Steiger, Norman Jewison, Jane Fonda, Richard Zanuck, and Arthur Penn to name just a few.

This isn’t just a tell-all about a few films. Harris shows how the films represented different aspects of the old Hollywood studio system as well as a new generation of stars and more independent filmmakers. More than changes in Hollywood, the films touch on youth culture, defiance of authority, the battle against racism, less repressed sexuality, and freedom of speech—all concerns that were becoming paramount in society at large as the changes of the 1960s reached full bloom.

Pictures at a Revolution tells a hundred fascinating stories. It will send history buffs looking for more books about the era and film buffs in search of dozens of films. Along the way, it will make every thoughtful reader think twice about our contemporary pop culture and what it, correspondingly, says about our world today.

Check the WRL catalog for Pictures at a Revolution

The Center of Everything, by Laura Moriarty

Here’s a book with a perfectly apt title. Let’s count the ways that Evelyn Bucknow, the child narrator of Laura Moriarty’s marvelous first novel, is in The Center of Everything. First, she’s growing up in Kansas. Second, she’s in the middle, not in the good way that a child should be, but in the terrifying way of someone besieged by the dramas of those around them. Third, she’s politically in the center between her liberal mother and fundamentalist grandparents. Fourth, as the smart girl pursued by both the evangelists and the science teachers, she’s caught in the middle of a controversy about teaching evolution in her high school. Finally, as Evelyn ages, she’s caught in between her friends Deena and Travis in a love triangle.

The book is set in the 1980s and captures the time well, with young Evelyn a fan of the grinning Ronald Reagan, but increasingly disenchanted with the results of his agenda. Evelyn has first-hand knowledge of some of her hero’s scapegoats—welfare mothers, teen pregnancy, and science in the schools—and her experiences consistently contradict his easy platitudes.

With its sad pregnancies, poverty, disabled children, and family strife, this isn’t light reading, but Evelyn’s gumption and levelheadedness keep the reader afloat. You might cry, but you’ll also celebrate her survival, her minor victories. There’s a hearty dose of incidental humor as well. Evelyn seems sometimes to be more mature than her tender years, but there’s also a naivete there that rings true for a girl who grows up smart, poor, and forced to care not just for herself but for the dysfunctional friends and adults she encounters.

Fans of Midwestern authors like Jane Smiley and Kent Haruf or of stories of troubled childhoods such as those depicted in works by Tobias Wolff, Kaye Gibbons, or Jeanette Walls will love this book. It will give hope to anyone who hopes to rise above circumstances that don’t seem to allow a personal life.

Check the WRL catalog for The Center of Everything

Listen to The Center of Everything on audiobook

Or get it in the large print format

Inventory, by the Onion A.V. Club

At our library, I’m infamous as the most list crazy of a list-obsessed crew. I read them, I make them, I use them all the time in working with our patrons. Yet while I check out dozens of them, I’m rarely satisfied by the books of lists that I encounter. Leave it to the wild minds at The Onion (or more specifically in this case, their A.V. Club) to buck the trend.

Inventory: 16 Films Featuring Manic Pixie Dream Girls, 10 Great Songs Nearly Ruined by Saxophone, and 100 More Obsessively Specific Pop-Culture Lists is exactly what the subtitle advertises. If you’re not a fan of pop culture, most of the references in here will escape you (and even a pop culture maven like me found plenty to gloss over). For every entry I skipped over, however, there was another that made me nod knowingly, smirk, giggle, or occasionally, to my wife’s dismay, snort.

Care to study “10 Highly Pretentious Musical Instruments?” (My favorite here is “Children’s Choir.”) How about “6 Keanu Reeves Movies Somehow Not Ruined by Keanu Reeves?” Some of the lists are just silly, like  ”Oh, the Places You Shouldn’t Go: 15 Dr. Seuss Characters that Sound Like Sex Toys,” “35 Things We’ll Forever Associate with The Simpsons,” or “15 Ridiculous Lies Perpetuated by John Hughes Movies.” Others are educational and sometimes enlightened. For instance, “25 Sure Signs that a Sitcom is Terrible” will let you know to turn the channel if “every episode ends with hugging or learning,” “it stars an actor who previously appeared in a much more popular sitcom,” “there’s a cool uncle who may or may not wear leather vests,” or “at least once per episode, the studio audience is prompted to lasciviously “Wooooo!”"

Even when a list doesn’t interest you, you’ll still want to read the lines that run along the top and bottom margin of every page. The top is for items that belong in pop culture heaven, the bottom for pop culture hell. So at the top we get the divine but short-lived Freaks and Geeks, while at the bottom we get the never-ending hell of Saved by the Bell; at the top we get “the idea of the reunion tour,” at the bottom “the actual reunion tour”; at the top we get “pets,” at the bottom, “books about pets.”

You’ll disagree with some of the opinions, but that’s half the fun. If you like following, or just laughing at, contemporary pop culture, you’ll want to take Inventory.

Check the WRL catalog for Inventory

Thirteenth Night, by Alan Gordon

It’s a conspiracy of fools, and I’m not leading into a joke about politicians, lawyers, or the military. Alan Gordon’s Fools Guild mystery series takes the delightful premise that the fools and jesters of the medieval era are a sort of self-governing agency of super-spies, using their raucous antics as cover activities for political manipulations. They’re a laughing-on-the-outside, brilliant-on-the-inside kind of clowns, keeping the peace in Europe with pratfalls, juggling, and atrocious puns.

The series opens with Thirteenth Night, in which our hero Feste (that’s the name he uses in this book anyway) has aged a dozen years since the time he spent as the fool in Orsino (during the events described in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night). When the guild discovers that the Duke of Orsino has died from a suspicious fall, Feste disguises himself as a merchant and journeys to his old stomping grounds to investigate. Olivia, Viola, Sebastian, and Malvolio are among familiar characters gracefully mixed into Gordon’s story.

The puzzle here is perhaps a little predictable, but I thoroughly enjoyed this mystery anyway. Feste is a great lead character, mixing jokes and wordplay, thrills and hi-jinks with the pathos and gravity that one hopefully finds when murder is in question. Period detail concerning subjects such as holiday festivals, the skills of the fool, alchemy, and theatrics is thrown into the mix too.

Later books in the series, which has grown to eight books with the recent publication of The Parisian Prodigal, maintain quality well and take readers to some of Europe’s most exciting locations. These are among the best in the busy field of light medieval historical mysteries.

Check the WRL catalog for Thirteen Night

The Architecture of Happiness, by Alain de Botton

If asked to name one of the arts, most people would not think of architecture, despite the fact that it may have the greatest effect on our lives. After all, we live, shelter, work, and play every day in architecture, and whether or not we’re always aware of it aesthetically, it impacts the quality of all of these activities. It’s from a position like this that Alain de Botton builds the arguments in The Architecture of Happiness.

The Swiss-born de Botton, who now makes England home, is one of the premier philosophers of our time. His work lives somewhere between the smarmy ghetto of self-help land and the lofty clouds of most contemporary philosophical scholarship. While de Botton’s name may not mean much to academics, his philosophical positions, explicated in terms that the lay reader can understand and appreciate, are laden with practical applications. He won’t just leave you thinking, he’ll help you understand your everyday experience and make modifications to make it better.

Rather than making a solipsistic case for one particular kind of architecture or bamboozling us with jargon-filled aesthetic hand-waving, de Botton simply asks what makes a work of architecture beautiful. Ultimately, he makes the case that architectural beauty is contextual, depending on whether the work communicates its intent and its surroundings through its structures. He bolsters his position with dozens of well chosen black and white photographs. The book is broken into short but systematic essays, moving gracefully from point to point, and rarely losing momentum as de Botton builds his deceptively simple but elegant argument.

De Botton is not just writing about architecture, he’s doing something about it, leading an effort called Living Architecture, which is commissioning architects to build houses in Britain that vacationers can rent. Check out some of these fascinating buildings here.

Check the WRL catalog for The Architecture of Happiness

Farewell, Robert B. Parker

The last 10 days have seen the loss of three great figures in American letters – J.D. Salinger, Howard Zinn, and Robert B. Parker.  (Correction: news of Louis Auchincloss’ death came through as I was writing this.)  Each added, in his own way, to a portrait of the American sensibility.

Robert B. Parker is perhaps best known for his Spenser series.  Across nearly forty titles, Parker developed the character of the wisecracking private eye with his love of good food and good drink and of everything Boston.  His ongoing relationship with  Harvard psychologist Susan Silverman provided an element of stability in a world marked by shades of gray and frequent violence, but it was always plain that he wouldn’t be domesticated.

Spenser lives by a personal code that allows him to cross legal boundaries in search of justice – but not too deeply into the alien territory of the criminal mind.  He has a link to that world through the character Hawk, who serves as a kind of  guide and protector to Spenser.  His contacts in law enforcement also come in handy, and are often used to introduce the reader to a legal view of his cases.  But Spenser isn’t strictly a private eye.  He also reads and quotes poetry, and uses the lyrics to songs to give his thoughts focus.

Spenser wasn’t Parker’s sole creation – small town police chief Jesse Stone, Western lawmen Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch, and female PI Sunny Randall offered Parker opportunities to explore other settings and other issues that challenged his main characters.  Stone, Randall, and Spenser all make guest appearances in each others’ books (though, like Hitchcock in his films, you may only find them in the background).  All share that same sense of honor, the same reluctance to initiate violence, and the capacity to unleash mayhem on those who cross the line.

Robert B. Parker may not be part of the literary canon, like J.D. Salinger; he may not have been a gloves-off provocateur like Howard Zinn.  But his stories did capture the American ideal of the loner seeking justice, and he wrote with flair and skill.  Those qualities alone should keep his books alive for many years.

The List: Best of 2009, Aggregated

Here at Blogging for a Good Book, we don’t skimp. When it came to recapping last year’s best, we could have given you a list based on the small sampling of last year’s output that we actually read, but that didn’t just feel right. Instead, we broke out our handy spreadsheet and started counting votes from as many authoritative Best of 2009 lists as we could find. The result is available for download and sorting in Excel format. Here it is: a many-voiced look at the best of 2009.

The spreadsheet has tabs for general fiction; mystery and thriller fiction; speculative fiction; historical fiction; romance fiction; young adult fiction; poetry; graphic works; nonfiction; biographies and memoirs; and how-to, art, and cookbooks. We construe genres broadly, so if you don’t find a favorite in general fiction, then try one of the genre categories. Each list is sorted by number of votes, then alphabetically by title. While we count votes from several international sources, only works first published in the U.S. in 2009 were tabulated. In nonfiction, Dewey call numbers at WRL are listed for the books that our library currently owns. The last tab on the spreadsheet lists and links to sources used to compile the votes.

The aggregation is not yet finished as we add more sources and wait for a few more of the awards to be announced. Our thanks to Largehearted Boy, whose long list of online Best of 2009 lists made one step of building our big spreadsheet easier. Basically, we’re up to the letter N in his lists, so there are many more votes to come before we’re finished. To date though, the list aggregates 74 different best of 2009 lists, where 1262 different titles have received votes as the Best of 2009!

We’re far enough into the count to identify some early favorites:

Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall is the top vote getter, with mentions on 29 different lists so far. In fiction, Alice Munro’s Too Much Happiness: Stories received 20 votes to date. This was followed by Suzanne Collins YA SF/adventure sequel Catching Fire (18), A. S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book (17), Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs (17), and Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood (16). One vote further back are The Help by Kathryn Stockett and Love and Summer, by William Trevor.

In nonfiction, the top vote getter so far is Stitches: A Memoir, the graphic memoir by David Small, with 22 votes. This is followed by Dave Eggers’ tale of Hurricane Katrina victim Zeitoun (14 votes to date),  David Finkel’s The Good Soldiers (13), Dave Cullen’s Columbine (12), David Grann’s The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon (12), Blake Bailey’s biography Cheever: A Life (12). One vote behind are Mary Karr’s Lit: A Memoir, Tracy Kidder’s Strength in What Remains, and Richard Holmes’ Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science.

But these books are just the tip of the iceberg in this magnificent aggregated list.  Best-of lists will always favor certain kinds of works and books that have been publicized well, so sort down a little farther to find more gems. Please, check back: We’ll continue to update the spreadsheet once a week until we’ve counted as many votes from major best-of lists and awards as we can find!

To suggest a best-of list for consideration in the aggregation or to notify us of a mistake, post a comment below or send email to nholland@wrl.org. Enjoy!