The Book Shopper

An Updike Baseball Keeper

After finishing reading a tattered copy of a Walker Percy book (see last posting), I shifted 180 degrees and switched to a recently purchased copy of John Updike's account of Hall of Fame slugger Ted Williams' final game at Fenway Park in Boston.

Published last year, Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu is a re-issue of an essay that John Updike wrote for the New Yorker in October, 1960 a few weeks after witnessing Williams' exit from baseball. Less than fifty pages long, Updike's writing is superb and worthy of all the praise from notable sportswriters such as Roger Angell and Peter Gammons that grace the back dust jacket.

What struck me about this slender $15 book, which you can read entirely over your Saturday morning coffee, is how physically wonderful it is to hold. Designed by Chip Kidd, the book jacket is shiny with the title hologram over the picture of Williams and the subtitle, “John Updike On Ted Williams.”

The inside art (known as the endpapers) has a reprint of Updike typewritten manuscript complete with edits and minor changes. If you remove the jacket, you'll see a second cover – a sepia tinged, black and white photo of Ted Williams' perfect swing, which Updike describes as “a grand motion, never a lunge or a hasty fending, with a graceful follow-through that left his body yearning toward first base.”

I almost decided not to include my pathetic photograph with this posting, because it doesn't do the look and feel of this book justice (and baseball is a tactile sport: the leather of the mitt, the red stitches of the baseball, the grip of the bat....) Stop by your local bookstore ( I picked up my copy at Blue Elephant) and check it out. Hold it in your hand. Can you resist taking it home?

 

Revisiting Walker Percy Thru Emory

Sometimes what we choose to read at a particular time comes from the unlikeliest sources. Case in point, I'm finishing up a read of Walker Percy's 1971 apocalyptic, satirical novel, Love in the Ruins: The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World. Though I am already familiar with Percy's work (The Moviegoer, Lancelot and Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self Help Book) what motivated me to dig up my disintegrating paperback copy (shown) is that the Emory Center for Lifelong Learning is offering a six week course on the book beginning on February 10th (See here for details). The course catalog arrived in the mail last month.

If I had the time and money I'd take the course, but I will have to be content in just reading the book and looking over some sources already at my disposal. Here's a few things I like about Percy and his work:

• Percy (1916-1990) did not publish his first book until he was 45 years old and it (The Moviegoer) won the National Book Award, which gives hope to any writer in their 40s who hasn't published yet.

• Percy was responsible for bringing John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces to print after Toole had died. Again, reinforcing the romantic notion that unpublished writers may eventually get their material published – – even if it is posthumously,.

• Percy's fiction is ( in his own words), “a philosophical conviction with novelistic art," which means the narrators speak intellectually over social issues. (In Ruins, a troubled physician Thomas More — named after the 16th century lawyer and philosopher opines about race relations (in language that readers must put in the proper context), the death of the Auto Age, American imperialism, and religion.

• Percy's narrator reminds me a lot of Richard Ford's narrator Frank Bascombe of Independence Day and The Lay of the Land, two of my favorite books.

• Percy is worthy of an entry in David Thomson's The New Biographical Dictionary of Film. Thomson writes, “The movies owe much to novelists. Dickens, Conan Doyle, Graham Greene, Raymond Chandler, Mario Puzo to name some notable examples, have provided inspiration, direction, material. Moviegoing owes a similar debt to just one novelist. Percy's first and best novel, The Moviegoer...”

Just a few tidbits to take to class with you if you sign up. Please take good notes and pass them on.

 

 

MARTA Book Club #11: The Warmth of Reading

It’s been a strange turn of events since the last compilation of the MARTA Book Club --- the loose confederation of people who read while riding Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority’s public transportation. Opportunities for book reading may been curtailed over the holidays, but last week--because of the Winter Storm of 2011--we saw quite an influx of new riders and new club members (remember the only requirement to be in the club is to read a book while riding public transportation).

Even though the trains ran throughout the week (albeit on the weekend "schedule," which means only three stops at unspecified times per hour for some routes) it wasn’t until Wednesday that I left home and returned to the rails myself.   At that point, I’d seen enough winter suffering on television, especially those pitiful sleep-deprived weather reporters assigned to the frozen guardrails at Spaghetti Junction, while the warm studio anchors quipped endlessly at the Jackass-worthy photos and video that viewers at home so generously provided.

Despite the perilous conditions, I was ready to return to the warmth of the MARTA book club (ice removal at the stations consisted mainly of yellow caution cones and conductors warning us not to fall on our collective asses), if for no other reason than to find out what books people got for Christmas.

What We Are Reading. Here’s a list of what we’ve been reading since the last posting:

The Pecan Orchard: Journey of a Sharecropper's Daughter by Peggy Vonsherie Allen
Beach Music by Pat Conroy (two spottings)
Art by Committee: A Guide to Advanced Improvisation by Charna Halpern and Adam McKay
Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond
Black Postcards: A Memoir by Dean Wareham
Double Pleasure, Double Pain by Nikki Rashan (a steamy cover for a cold commute…)
The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman
The Last Templar by Raymond Khoury
Arthur & George by Julian Barnes
Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver
Blink by Malcolm Gladwell
Homeboyz by Alan Lawrence Sitomer
Battlestar Galactica and Philosophy by Josef Steiff and Tristan D. Tamplin
Total Eclipse of the Heart: A Novel by Zane (just one name)
The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates by Wes Moore
The Mis-Education of the Negro by Carter Godwin Woodson
Plainsong by Kent Haruf 

The Apocalypse Watch by Robert Ludlum
The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand (submitted by Emily Britt)

Brian Dettmer’s Exhibit at Saltworks Gallery

Don’t despair if you didn’t see the Salvador Dali exhibit at the High Museum before it left town. (If it makes you feel any better, I rated the Dali exhibit up there with the Leonardo Da Vinci “doodles” from the previous year, but I am no critic— strictly a poseur, and not a very good one at that.)

But if you are interested in books as art objects or more specifically sculpture, there is still time for you to see Brian Dettmer’s New Worlds to Conquer exhibit at the Saltworks Gallery (located near the west side Six Feet Under).  The exhibit closes Saturday, January 15th. 

Dettmer, who lives here in Atlanta, takes hard-cover books—older books with elaborate illustrations (e.g. Military Preventative Medicine, Encyclopedias of World Travel)—and carves through them page by page, pulling out words and pictures from the book. This creates a stunning visual and reminds us how the richness of books can convey new meanings beyond just reading them. A better description and interpretation of Dettmer’s work and technique can be found at the Art Critic Atlanta website.

Shown here is Dettmer’s carving of the book, The War on All Fronts (photo courtesy of Brian Dettmer and the Saltworks Gallery), but photos really don’t do the work justice. As mentioned earlier, it’s the perfect exhibit for those who like books and for those who don’t like books—I guess it can be one of those 101 Uses for a Dead Cat type of experiences.