two umbrellas

I spend a lot of time reading. I love to read. In fact, when I was thinking about a career for myself, I would think, “What job could I have that would allow me to read all of the time?” Often, some sort of night-watchman would always seem dangerously appealing for a little, bookish lady. So, I thought again, and decided a high-school English teacher could work. And did – for a few years, at least. Then, I went into publishing, where, sadly, I had little time for actual reading – though, in its defense, I was working with words. When I became a full-time mama, I had some free time to read and thought, “There must be something I could do with that.” So I decided that I would review books. Fortunately, someone was willing to let me.

It was a nice (albeit non-paying) gig. I could review any new or recent fiction or non-fiction that I wanted. What a great idea! I could read whatever I wanted, write about it, someone would publish it, and possibly someone would read it. Amazing. I started scouring my wonderful S Philly branch of the FLP. I tried keeping up with blogs and new titles. I even received a free review copy. I had made it! I was a reviewer. But something just didn’t feel right about it. (Not receiving the free book – that was great and I loved the book and tried to write as glowing of a review as possible for it because everyone should read What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going by Damion Searls.)

First, I started reading books differently. I started reading them analytically. I began to seek out specifics in the books: reasons for people to like or dislike it, good quotes, etc. rather than letting myself experience the book as a whole. My reading experience was getting so lost in my concerns for the article that I was starting to resent reading. Even though I could have read just about anything I wanted to, I felt paradoxically constrained by the obligation to review. Since my reading time has been limited with the Parasol running around, that time has become more and more valuable. Somehow, now, I felt pressure to read certain books and felt I couldn’t read what I wanted. Though I could. I know – a bit neurotic.

Second, I found writing reviews to be hard. That sounds like an excuse – and maybe it is – but it was challenging. I would think about the reviews I liked to read and found that that was part of the problem. When I do read book reviews, I often read the ones for books that I probably won’t read. Often, if I read reviews for books that I actually want to read then I learn too much about the book (usually there’s too much plot synopsis), so much so that it takes something away from my reading experience. That experience, for me, is something personal, a discovery, of sorts, of how I react to the words on the page. If I know too much beforehand that sense of discovery is tainted. For example, I just picked up Colum McCann’s new novel, Let The Great World Spin, from the library. NYTBR had a review, which I started to read. The first paragraph was okay: a little plot summary that I already knew. And then out of nowhere the author writes (and I’m paraphrasing) that this was one of the best books he’d read. Great! Thanks a lot! I stopped reading. I don’t remember who the reviewer was so I don’t remember if I trusted him or not. But I knew that the review would be biased and tell me way too much, considering there was a whole page left. I already had high expectations for the book since I like Colum McCann; but, I didn’t want a one page version of the novel or a one page sales pitch. Let me decide.

So if I didn’t want too much plot or too much opinion from a book review, what, then, was I supposed to give my audience? I don’t know. I still don’t know. How is it different writing this blog than writing for a publication? The main reason is voice. On twoumbrellas, I don’t have to develop a voice – I already have one. I write this blog for me. It started because I have a terrible memory. I write about books so I can remember them: remember how I felt, remember what they were about, and use it as a guide – for myself – of the narrative of my reading (and sometimes writing) life. I post about other things, too, but mostly what I read and what I think about it. Why then couldn’t I transfer it to this other publication? Most likely a personal hang-up of my own but I think that has to do with the editorial slant of the magazine. I just didn’t fit in. I thought I could fake it but I couldn’t keep that up. It just wasn’t me. It didn’t feel right.

So I stopped writing reviews (officially). I still write them here because this is my little space to do it and I still have a terrible memory, in fact, it’s getting worse.

But as I write this, I am trying to figure out why I read book reviews? What do I want to get out of them: recommendations? book choice affirmation? Probably a little of both. Often, I read reviews after I’ve read a book to get a different perspective. I think I read them just because I like to hear/read/discuss about books. Not sure. But, I will continue to read them but more often than not I won’t finish them.

I recently finished Damion Searls’ What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going**, which I loved. Amazon’s book blog, Omnivoracious, has an interview in two parts. I highly recommend it.

**Update: Here’s my review over at WFTC.

I’ve got another review up at WFTC. It’s Mary Gaitskill’s Don’t Cry. Here’s a bit:

I’ve only ever read two of Mary Gaitskill’s story collections: Bad Behavior, her first (published in 1988), and Don’t Cry, her latest. Both are highly charged works of fiction — strong, full of sexuality, intensity, and intelligence. After reading both of these collections, I have come to the conclusion that if I ever had the chance to meet Mary Gaitskill I would be quite intimidated. Her writing is tough and confident, somehow masculine and feminine at the same time, which doesn’t make it feminist — it makes it authentic.

My review of Miles from Nowhere by Nami Mun at When Falls the Coliseum is up. Here’s a bit:

There are so many things that could be potentially cliche about Nami Mun’s Miles from Nowhere: the title, the cover, the characters, the plot — just about everything. The main character, Joon, runs away from home when she is twelve. Her father has left the family, which drives her mother to insanity. After leaving her mother, Joon goes down the inevitable path of drugs and prostitution as she copes on the streets of New York City. But there is something keeping this novel from falling into the trap: Nami Mun’s writing.

My ‘New Lit’ column will appear the first Wednesday of each month. Check it out…

I, too, have been pretty jazzed about Jim Webb. In fact, I would love to see an Obama/Webb ticket in November. But, I was surprised to read Elizabeth Drew’s review in the NYRB of Webb’s new collection of essays, A Time to Fight, which even from the first paragraph (below) seemed to fawn over Webb:

Jim Webb, the junior senator from Virginia, who defeated the incumbent Republican George Allen in 2006, is or has been: a best-selling author; a screenwriter (Rules of Engagement, and another in the works); an Emmy-winning documentary producer; the author of a large number of articles and book reviews; an Annapolis graduate; a boxer (he lost a legendary and controversial championship match at Annapolis against Oliver North); an autodidact who grew up a military man’s son and indifferent student but on his own became a passionate reader of history; a first lieutenant and Marine rifle platoon commander with Delta Company in Vietnam, where he won the Navy Cross for heroism (the second-highest award in the Navy and the Marines), the Silver Star, two Bronze Stars, and two Purple Hearts; a graduate of Georgetown Law School who then worked on the staff of the House Veterans Affairs Committee; a teacher of English literature at the Naval Academy; and an assistant secretary of defense and then secretary of the Navy during the Reagan administration. Webb resigned from that position after losing a long battle to block a reduction in the size of the Navy at a time when the Pentagon was under orders to cut its budget. In The Reagan Diaries, the former president wrote, “I don’t think Navy was sorry to see him go.

Granted, the Senator has a lot of accomplishments and seems like a sharp leader; but, I’ve never read a review quite like this.

Sarah Kerr reviews Joan Didion’s collection We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Non-Fiction. Here are a few excerpts:

“Style is character”: at several points in her career, Didion has offered this sentence as one of her core beliefs. But what does it mean? Not that you are what you look like, or that what you look like is what counts. Style is the writer’s site of decision-making-literally, the site of actions whose integrity can be measured. It is the place where the self meets the world. And so Didion felt a need to do what for her was, by her own admission, extremely difficult: go out and meet the world.

…

Because Didion’s later reporting on politics, often for this magazine, took a turn generally more critical of a reawakened American conservatism – and critical, also, of paralyzed Democratic accommodation – it’s sometimes been said that at some point in the decades after these first two books she was radicalized, or at least nudged toward something more like traditional liberalism. To argue this is to ignore how much the writing life has always been her central concern, and how much politics has always been a secondary, if all too gift-giving, subject. All along her aimed-for target has been behavior that is in error, above all behavior that resists – and therefore demands from the observing writer – irony.

But it’s true that something does seem to shift in her work. Early on, it seems to me, she is still in training as the capturer of moods and moments. Her ambition is to render thoroughly and truthfully her point of view, even if that point of view occasionally contains what she admits to be aspects of emotional projection. “However dutifully we record what we see around us,” she had warned in “On Keeping a Notebook,” “the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable ‘I.’” Another line from that gorgeous but youthful essay, in response to the challenging of her memory by relatives: “Very likely they are right, for not only have I always had trouble distinguishing between what happened and what merely might have happened, but I remain unconvinced that the distinction, for my purposes, matters.”

I am glad that I am not the only one who noticed that six of the sixty-one non fiction books were written by NYT staffers – not to mention there were only thirty-nine fiction titles, but that is another issue that leads to my weekly disappointment in the NYTBR. The NYT has an article from the public editor discussing the literary nepotism, both of which I find disappointing.

READERS, it seems to me, are generally well served by the Book Review screening process. In some situations, I think the editors probably could have done more to find a reviewer less vulnerable to the perception of a conflict.

The conflict then becomes self-promotion, much to the detriment of literary writing (both fiction and non fiction), even if some of the Times authors have well written books. The author, Bryon Calame, spends most of article defending the “reviewing” process thus skirting the issue of the “selection” process.