The Book Shopper

Other Writings

Once in a while I will write a longer essay that doesn't fit The Book Shopper format, which is surprising because our editorial policy can be a little loosey-goosey at times. These alternative lengthier works often end up at the Tropics of Meta  (ToM). Using their words,  ToM "offers a fresh perspective on history, current events, popular culture, and issues in the academic world. Founded in 2010, ToM has published (online) over 1000 essays by historians, social scientists, artists, activists, and creative writers both within and outside the academy, giving voice to communities across the United States and the world."

Last month they published my long essay "The Power of the Endless Love of Automobiles" where I weighed the potential of the pandemic changing  our car centric culture versus our inbred relationship (using myself as an example) with automobiles.   

In addition to "The Power of Endless Love," I made a couple suggestions in ToM's end of the year summary on what they consider noteworthy in books, film and television, "What Made 2020 Slightly Bearable For the Tropics of Meta Gang, the Scariest of All Gangs".  I did a shoutout to Viet Thanh Nguyen for his three-index-card-of-notes book, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (2016), which I have written about earlier in this blog, but there are other worthy book suggestions from the ToM gang.

(Coincidently, my first ToM posting in 2017 was a retrospective look at Neil Sheehan's 1988 Pulitzer Prize winning A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam. The book is a sad reminder of the carnage a government inflicts when it lies and misleads its people. Sheehan died yesterday in Washington D.C. at the age of 84.)

Television Series

On a lighter note, my selection for recommendations for  television series are more escapist in nature such as Netflix's The Norsemen series billed  "Game of Thrones meets Monty Python."

Also in 202o, I've become a big fan Richard Ayoade, the "reluctant" host of Travel Man: 48 Hours in, an amusing show for plagued-with-doubt adventurers such as myself who always worries on "whether they should have come" as Ayoade reminds us in each episode.

Both series rely on dry humor and verbal repartee, which somewhat justifies their cameo appearances in a book blog.

A Dickens of a Year

 

Before "the old year slips away, lamented by no one*,"  a celebration of the 150th anniversary of the death of  Charles Dickens is in order.  My memory of Dickens goes back to my school days in the 5th grade when I was assigned the Victorian novelist as part of the class project on the "Great Authors." 

To explain why I kept this report all these years would require much space and deep thought, which is beyond the scope of this blog, but it does serve as physical proof of my lifelong interest in books and authors.  The "cover art" -- with a grade of A-  (see left) -- is an early example of grade inflation. The list of authors that were considered "great" is kind of interesting from the perspective of which classic writers were in vogue in the mid-1960s (very few authors from the 20th century and very few women).

I wish I still had that excellent penmanship.

I did go on to read quite a few Dickens novels  until I said "enough already" 30 years ago while I  was halfway through Oliver Twist. Still, Dickens is in my entertainment mix.

My longtime partner Denise and I always watch A Christmas Carol every December. She prefers the black and white 1951 Alastair Sim version, which is quite good, but I favor the 1984 version starring George C. Scott as curmudgeonly Ebenezer  Scrooge.  However, this season there is a new up and comer, a "live streaming film version" of  Jefferson Mays 's one -man stage performance where  he plays all the characters. The richness of Dickens's language really comes through in this filmed theatre version.

We also recently watched the film The Personal History of David Copperfield, a quirky adaptation by Armando Iannucci (Veep, Death of Stalin) and staring Dev Patel as the hero of his own life. 

For a more in-depth overall assessment of Dickens, read Charles Gottlieb's recent review of A.N. Wilson's The Mystery of Charles Dickens (2020), but if you're looking for something tighter that captures the crux of the novelist, check out this report from a 5th grader who showed some early promise.

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* The expression "the old year slips away, lamented by no one," is from Rick Atkinson's Day of Battle about the United States fighting in Italy during World War II. It was Atkinson's description of 1943 which had been a bloody stalemate that accomplished little at great cost. 

The Best Books Read 2020 Award

Unlike many book lists that enumerate the best books published during the year, The Book Shopper blog can boast that even though none of the books on our list were published in 2020, at least all the selections have been read cover to cover, and gleaned from a list of 30 books, which is a personal high (but I realize I don't qualify as a "voracious" reader). 

The major qualification to make the list below is that besides enjoyment, each book influenced me by either a)  leading to other books which I eventually read, or b.) slightly changed my thoughts or actions in my little 2020 world. There is no significance in the order and the links go to other locations on the blog where I wrote about them in more detail.

Brian Dillon. On Essayism: On Form, Feeling and Nonfiction (2017)

Viet Thanh Nguyen. Nothing Ever Dies Vietnam and the Memory of War (2016)

Thomas Pynchon. Gravity’s Rainbow (1973)

Leah Penniman. Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm Practical Guild to Liberation on the Land (2018)

On Essayism 

Not only does Dillon deconstruct essays to assist in my own writing, but he mentions authors that I have read recently (like W.G. Sebald who made last year's 2019 list), but he pointed me in the direction of Elizabeth Hardwick's  Sleepless Nights (1978) a peculiar but interesting read.  Dillon's book required 3 index cards of notes to properly document. (The index card system is for people who prefer stars and such to rate stuff.)

Nothing Ever Dies

Nguyen received a shoutout on the 2018 list for his amazing novel, The Sympathizer (2016), which led me to read earlier this year his collection of short stories, The Refugees, (2017), which did not disappoint. Not only does Nguyen give us a lesson in history and how it favors the victors, but he makes a recommendation for other books, such as Monique Truong's The Book of Salt (2003) which I am reading now.  The Book of Salt is about a Vietnamese peasant who learns the basics of French cooking in Vietnam and ends up in 1929 Paris cooking for Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas.  Nothing Ever Dies merited three index cards too.

Gravity's Rainbow

When rereading a book requires two to three months to read, and a special notebook and the formulation of a Gravity's Rainbow Support Group (GRSG) , it must be on the list. The GRSG did not disband and we have since read Vladimir Nabokov's Pnin (1953) and are finishing up Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death (1976) just in time for Christmas. The latter rates right up there with Albert Camus The Plague (1948) for not-so-light pandemic reading. By reading The Plague it should have tipped me off that these outbreaks can last a long time.

Farming While Black

This book qualifies because I spent more time at the community garden in 2020 and I did a pop up book stall called Destination: Books at the Freedom Farmer Market early in 2020. The book introduced me the Chelsea Green Publishing and I did end up carrying several of their books before going into a lockdown mode.  The book is a rare mix of the history of black farming, community activism, and how to grow better veggies. 

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Photo Credit: In 1969, I won a trophy for reading the most books in my 8th grade class, which required keeping a list of everything I read during the school year (so list making goes back to my childhood.) But what this further illustrates is that if you only win a few awards in your lifetime, you hang on to them.

Book Selling Is Not Easy

Over at Destination: Books the companion-other-side-of-the-counter  blog to The Book Shopper, I recently posted an article about "les bouquinistes" the Paris book vendors who have been selling reading material in book stalls along the Seine River since the Middle Ages. The pandemic has crippled their business because of the lack of tourism and the restrictions placed on local citizens. There are links that can take you to the complete story including fine photos of French booksellers. 

This same article has a brief write-up of Shaun Blythell's popular, The Diary of a Bookseller (2018) which is a daily account of selling second-hand books in Wigtown, Scotland. Blythell's book, though entertaining, is not an idyllic portrayal of bookselling  because there are many of his descriptions of hauling and processing boxes of books (some covered in cat hair)  and the challenging Scottish weather. Dealing with cantankerous customers and staff is never easy either. 

For more about reading, bookstores and libraries check out the books available on a shopping list compiled by Emory's Carlos Museum Bookshop.   It even includes this blog's namesake, the book that started it all. Impressive.

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Fortunately, the cover photo is not a book selling stall or some bizarre Book Jenga game, but rather a sculpture in the Kreuzberg section of Berlin. My older daughter Cynthia Browne took the picture several years ago.

Into the Spinning Void

While reading Vladimir Nabokov’s 1953 humorous novel Pnin about the teaching life of a Russian émigré in a fictitious small New England college town, this line stood out among the many noteworthy passages:

 “With the help of the janitor, he (Pnin) screwed on the side of a desk (in his new office) a pencil sharpener – that highly satisfying, highly philosophical implement that goes ticonderoga-ticonderoga, feeding on the yellow finish and sweet wood, and ends up in a kind of a soundlessly spinning ethereal void as we all must.”

This reference to the Ticonderoga pencils and those old pencil sharpeners brought back memories of the classrooms of my high school (built in 1912) that mounted similar sharpeners in the back of each room near the “cloudy blackboards.” Also, my father had a similar one mounted in our garage where I could grind a pencil to the finest point of procrastination before tackling my Algebra homework.

Museum Trips

Nabokov’s evocative prose provided additional respite, as I visited the online Made-in-Chicago Museum of Manufacturing to look for pictures of pencil sharpeners. (Thanks to the curator Andrew Clayman for granting me the permission to use the photo of the Giant sharpener made by the Automatic Pencil Sharpener Company.)

The MICM took me back to a trip  I made last year to Berlin, where my older daughter Cynthia took my longtime partner Denise and me to the Museum of Things (Werkbundarchiv – Museum der Dinge), which is dedicated to 20th and 21st century product culture.  We spent considerable time there on chilly wet day, soaking in the archive of the German industrial design association Deutscher Werkbund, founded in 1907. Items ranged from tape recorders and furniture to toy soldiers.

 

Book Shopping Novelty

While at the Museum of Things I purchased  the miniature book The Shadow on the Wall (Schottenspiele) (2014), which has illustrations of how to make shadow animals, which is a new game I like to play with my three-year old grandson Myrick.

Moreover, it is skill I can practice in the spinning ethereal void of 2020.

Tyranny, Voting, and Making Love for the Last Time

This passage comes from Timothy Snyder's On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (2017):

The hero of a David Lodge novel says that you don't know, when you make love for the last time, that you are making love for the last time. Voting is like that. Some of the Germans who voted for the Nazi Party in 1932 no doubt understood that this might be the last meaningfully free election for some time, but most did not. Some of the Czech and Slovaks who voted for the Czechoslovak Communist Party in 1946 probably realized that they were voting for the end of democracy, but most assumed they would have another chance*. No doubt the Russians who voted in 1990 did not think that this would be the last free and fair election in the country's history, which (thus far) it has been. Any election can be the last, or at least the last in the lifetime of the person making the vote. 

Timothy Snyder is History Professor at Yale University who has written several books on the Eastern Europe, Germany and the Soviet Union. In this short, compact book On Tyranny, Snyder provides terse lessons on how to combat tyranny in our daily lives and what tactics fascist regimes employ to undermine  democracies.  For example, in Lesson 6, Be Wary of Paramilitaries, Snyder describes how the Nazi Party in Germany rose to power during the elections of 1932 and 1933 with help from the Schutzstaffel (SS), which began as a paramilitary organization.  These groups "first challenge the police and military, then penetrate the police and military and finally transform the police and military," writes Snyder.

Although he has been around a while, I only heard about Snyder recently through my longtime friend and blog subscriber Bruce who recommended that I watch a YouTube interview  with Snyder while Snyder was promoting his latest book Our Malady: Lessons in Liberty from a Hospital Diary (2020) . In the Politics and Prose interview, Snyder also talks about the upcoming election in a scary yet calming manner.

 

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*For more about the The Memorial to the Victims of Totalitarianism photograph visit last year's posting "European Book Experiences."

Star Essays

To motivate myself to write more essays, I recently finished Brian Dillon’s Essayism: On Form, Feeling and Nonfiction (2017). As a long-time subscriber to Cabinet magazine, I am familiar with Dillon’s byline as an editor of the quarterly, which sadly is ending its gorgeous print version and going strictly online. A few years ago, while browsing at Printed Matter, Inc. in New York City  (Aaah those were the days of book shopping – browsing sans mask with the smell of old books and cats in your nostrils instead of hand sanitizer) I stumbled across Dillon’s Objects in the Mirror: Essays (2011), Oddly enough, I think I recall that the book was shrink wrapped, but I took a chance anyway.

I ended up writing a short, favorable review of Objects and posting it on Amazon, which is a rarity for me, since I have only posted six reviews in my life which explains my reviewer ranking at #17,428,947. I am hesitant to provide free content to the richest man in the world, but if I really admire a book and it suffers from lack of stardom (less than 5 reviews) I will sometimes oblige. As you know, the big publishers control the marketplace. This year’s fad is All Things Trump and the staggering number of  books and the numbers of readers' reviews illustrates this: Michael Cohen’s book 2,307 reviews, John Bolton’s book 25,503 reviews, but both are paltry compared to the numbers of  Dr. Mary Trump,  (the "angry" niece) whose reviews total 44,914.

In comparison, two recent books about Melania Trump totaled to 2500 reviews, and she has a long, long way to go to beat Michelle Obama’s Becoming which has over 58,000 ratings. Oddly enough, 89 % percent of reviews of Becoming were 5 stars with only 3 % one star. No surprise, except in the first six reviews, Amazon listed the 5 one-star reviews with insightful critiques such as “snoozer” or “poorly written” ahead of penta-starred reviews praising the book.

 I am skeptical of the veracity of these numbers. I ask myself, "What's the point of adding another review to the a book that has already thousands of review?" I have no special insider information except to say we live in a world of bots. (Be mindful that every time you verify existence to CAPTCHA, you are telling a robot that you are not a robot.)  Here at The Book Shopper Blog, I rate the books on how many index cards I need to make notes. I figure if one goes to the trouble to write something on a note card -- you're engaged!

On Essayism

This tight collection of short essays is not a how-to book on writing essays, but rather it examines the qualities found within essays that characterize the form. Dillon sets up each piece with a short title (IN CAPS) to quickly clue the readers in. For example, the second essay entitled, “ON LISTS” Dillon points out that making lists is an acceptable literary technique used by the likes of William Gass and Joan Didion. Thus fortified, I will resort to the same strategy (except this is blog posting not an essay) to enumerate some of the topics explored in Essayism. They include:

ON COHERANCE. Dillion reveals one of his secrets to writing a good essay: “Find the proper guiding metaphor.” He provides an example from the philosopher Theodor Adorno:

Properly written texts are like spider’s webs: tight, concentric, transparent, well-spun and firm. They draw themselves all the creatures on the air. Metaphors flitting hastily through them become their nourishing prey. Subject matter comes winging towards them.

Fortunately, if you cannot unearth the spot-on metaphor, Dillon thinks you can still write a good essay.

ON ATTENTION. For the record, Dillon admires essays that “pays the minutest or most sustain attention to one thing, one time or place, one strain or strand of existence.”

ON FRAGMENTS. Dillon discusses the concept of fragments. He explains how fragments have played role in history of knowledge. Fragments can be relics from an ancient civilization or the surviving passages of the Greek and Roman authors.  It is acceptable, to Dillion because disparate fragments can be put together and if not well, it is also permissible “to say many contradictory things at once.”

ON CONSOLATION. Throughout the book Dillon confesses his own bouts with depression, bordering on suicide, but the tone is more melancholic than desperate. He follows his own principles: “I distrust writers who write straight away about their depression or other mental pain…But why this doubt or scruple? I tell myself it is because I want from writing, from literature a more conscious and conspicuously worked evidence of distance and thought, transformation of the raw material.”

But Dillon does not limit himself in this book as a primer on essays, but rather he weaves narratives about his own life and an examination of some the essayists (including a thorough Readings list) whom he admires. If you like essays, expect your list of reading material is going to grow exponentially.

I give it 3 index cards.

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Book Shopping Notes: The easiest way to get a copy of Essayism or other Dillon books is to contact Mark Burell (mburell AT emory.edu).  Mark is the manager of the Carlos Museum Bookshop on the campus of Emory University and is responsible for my copy of Essayism.  The photo of Printed Matter Inc. is circa 2014, before they moved to their current larger and cleaner location.

Quote of the Day

"...there was no end to stupidity, and nothing so dangerous."

        W.G. Sebald, The Emigrants (1992)

Remembering Recommendations

This year I started keeping a personal list called Suggested Readings linked off the main menu of the blog’s homepage (unbeknownst to you email subscribers) where I keep track of books that have been recommended to me and the source of that suggestion. It can come in handy for ready-reference, but there are other proven methods as well, such as this offering from the Angry Algonquin blog.

This is in contrast to thinking that this blog is just a personal recommendation engine to others. The Suggested Readings list illustrates that book recommendations are coming in much faster than I can read them and that regular blog readers -- well, they kind of know what interests me. 

Post Gravity’s Rainbow

It was relief to finish Gravity’s Rainbow (See the essay, “A Screaming Comes Across the Sky”) and begin knocking off some smaller fanfare like the short Graham Greene novel, The Ministry of Fear (1943). This suggestion came from a writer friend and subscriber Jim, who encouraged me read this book set in Britain during The Blitz. (Considering that Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) is set in World War II Europe made it seem more timely.) The Greene book had an Alfred Hitchcock feel of humor and intrigue – like another Greene novel, The Third Man, (1949). Set in postwar Vienna I read The Third Man earlier this year and topped it off by watching the film classic based on the novel staring Orson Welles and Joseph Cotton. Thanks, Jim, for encouraging me to look at an author I heard of, but never read.

Nothing Ever Dies

A big shoutout goes to my friend Maggie who suggested that I read Viet Thanh Nguyen’s book of essays, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (2016). I had already read Nguyen’s book of short stories, The Refugees (2017) and the Pulitzer Prize winning The Sympathizer (2015), which I wrote about here. Nothing Ever Dies dovetails well with these works of fiction and inspired multiple index cards of notetaking. The book is filled with insights into the relationship between war and memory and most specifically with the War in Southeast Asia.  (Nguyen argues that referring to it simply as  the Vietnam War makes it too American focused and diminishes the deaths of the 400,000 who died in Laos, the 700,000 who perished in Cambodia, which includes the genocide at the hands of the Khmer Rouge and the 3,000,000 civilians and soldiers who died in North and South Vietnam from 1965-1975.)

Nguyen, who was born in Vietnam in 1971, came to the United States as a refugee with his parents after the Fall of Saigon in 1975.  He gives us numerous examples of how the war is viewed and remembered from a Southeast Asia perspective. This outlook varies greatly from the United States in terms of books, art, museums, memorials, and motion pictures (e.g. Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now which Nguyen satirizes in The Sympathizers).

Mixed in with his first-person accounts of his trip back to Southeast Asia to research the book, there are black and white photos that he took while visiting museums, cemeteries, and memorials. It gives the book a kind of W.G. Sebald look and feel. One contrasting set of observations are from outside of Ho Ch Minh City ("or what many still prefer to call, for reactionary, sentimental or simply lyrical reasons Saigon,” writes Nguyen). The first description is of the Truong Son Martyrs Cemetery built by the victors and features a towering grieving mother for the martyrs who won the war. Nearby is an almost forgotten South Vietnamese cemetery covered by little more than graffiti-ed gravestones and desecrated tombs. Nguyen deliberates on who controls the narrative of the Southeast Asia war. There are the victors of course, but what about the defeated South Vietnamese who stayed in the country and the South Vietnamese refugees (and the Hmong in Laos) who fled the country? Or is it the defeated superpower who controls the memory of the war?  

This is well-written book presents many ideas and deserves a thoughtful reading, which are too numerous to present here. One takeaway is that there is an ethics of remembering. Nguyen writes:

“Regardless of whether those we remember are saintly or all too human, the ethical force of remembering one’s own reinforces the shared identities of family, nation, religion, or race. In the ethics of remembering one’s own, remembering those of one’s side, even when they do terrible things, is better than ignoring them altogether. Nothing is worse than being ignored, erased, or effaced, as the losers of any war or conflict can affirm. In memory wars, a victory is had in simply being remembered and being able to remember, even if one’s self and one’s own appears troubled, tortured or even demonic.”

Another takeaway is that this book begets other recommendations. Maggie asked if I am interested in Monique Truong's The Book of Salt (2003), which Nguyen hails as "the only major work that focuses on the life of a (Vietnamese) peasant."

Oh no, the list never ends.

 

Photo Credits: The photograph at the top of the posting is from the Hanoi Military History Museum, which includes this sculpture made up of airplane parts from a B-52 bomber. And if you're wondering about the photograph that graces the email, that picture was taken at Last  Book Store in downtown Los Angeles in 2017. My longtime partner Denise Casey was the photographer.

Essay on Gravity's Rainbow

Every summer for the past four years, I have written a long piece for the Tropics of Meta or ToM for short.  In their words, ToM "offers a fresh perspective on history, current events, popular culture, and issues in the academic world. Founded in 2010, ToM has published (online) over 1000 essays by historians, social scientists, artists, activists, and creative writers both within and outside the academy, giving voice to communities across the United States and the world."

Regular readers of this blog know that I like reading history and thinking about history, and in ToM's section called Dog Day Classics they've published my longer  book review essays about the Vietnam War, The Korean War and the grisly Algerian war for independence from France. This year I used my extra pandemic reading time to revisit Thomas Pynchon's 1973 novel, Gravity's Rainbow which I first read 40 years ago and believed influenced my worldview, (maybe to my detriment). I was also became more interested in the end of World War II after visiting Berlin last year and reading Antony Beevor's The Fall of Berlin 1945  (2002). Gravity's Rainbow is set primarily in Germany at the end of war in 1945 and one of the "main characters" is the V-2 rocket. 

Photo Credits:  I have always had a soft spot for the original Viking edition artwork by Marc Getter.  The book photo comes from Thomas Pynchon wiki page which can be helpful along with The Gravity's Rainbow Support Group Page, which is linked off this blog's main page.  The gritty photo of the V-2 rocket comes  the photo book The Military History of World War II (1986).  Note how this is rocket is being fired from New Mexico in 1946. That's right. Obtaining the technical and engineering rocket expertise for the V-2 was extremely important to the United States after World War II (a major plot point of the book.)