The Whining Stranger on Politics and Current Events: On 9/11

Given my profession, it's no surprise that I believe art and literature have a messianic propensity for salvation--or at least for offering the understanding of experience, the shaping of chaos into form, that seems to offer salvation as we stumble through our lives. Today I try to remember my early reactions to that tragic morning, five years ago. The disbelief that clouded my early day as I watched mass murder on television. The uncertainty that seemed to hover in the air in the weeks that followed.

This, of course, was all before insidious politicians tried to shape circumstance for me. It preceded the appropriation of grief to encourage a blind faith in unjustified violence. Before garish magnetic ribbons on the backs of gas-guzzling vehicles criss-crossing the empire's highways.

Five years later, one of the best responses to 9/11 is still one of the earliest: Toni Morrison's poem, "The Dead of September 11," which I first read in Vanity Fair around November of that weighty autumn. Read it and think about Morrison's compassionate response, and how it makes so much more sense--it shapes the chaos so much more efficiently--than so much of the nonsense that's followed in the half-decade since.

The Whining Stranger on Books and Reading: One Book, etc.

[Note: To date I've resisted memes in filling my blog content, if only because I'm fixated enough on my own various small obsessions never to lack content. This one, which I came across on Light Reading (by way of Kate's Book Blog) was too good to pass up though.]

1. One Book That Changed Your Life

Without a doubt, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. It's a novel that contains the whole history of American culture (and even crosses the pond in meaningful ways) yet offers such a completely personal version of experience. It's comprehensive without sacrificing accessibility. It's erudite but steeped in the vernacular. Novels should contain multitudes, it convinced me, but they need also embody the writer's best sense of hope. This one does all that.

2. One Book That You've Read More Than Once

While I've read Ellison's novel many times (maybe five, six), I'll say J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey here. I'm smitten with the Glass family. I admit I'm enamored with the thought of New York apartments and genius families. ("Oh, to have more academic relatives to talk with!" says the guy who has to explain what he does exactly every time he returns home for a family visit.) As an adolescent reader I was taken with Salinger's prose style. Now older, I find myself drawn to the book's major problem: where does the cynical, ironic deep thinker turn to settle his/her monkey mind and find true spiritual calm?

3. One Book That You'd Want a Desert Island

This may appear to compromise my reading tastes, but I'm an unbashed lover of baseball, and so I'll say Bill James's Historical Baseball Abstract for its heft, and for its digestability. Anecdotes, sidebars galore!

4. One Book That Made You Laugh

I'll say the first half of Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections or the first half of Robert Sedlack's The African Safari Papers. Apparently family dysfunction really hits my funny bone. Go figger.

5. One Book That Made You Cry

The second half of Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections. Apparently family dysfunction really hits my--

6. One Book That You Wish Had Been Written

...or at least finished according to its author's plan? Definitely Ralph Ellison's second novel, posthumously published in much-edited form as Juneteenth. I actually cried when I first read this one too--for its flashes of greatness, and for its tragically unfinished quality.

7. One Book That You Wish Had Never Been Written

Now that's just mean. If I answer this, instant karma's gonna get me.

8. One Book You're Currently Reading

Still trudging through Don Quixote. Oh, to be a faster reader!

9. One Book You've Been Meaning to Read

Where to start? David Bodanis's E=mc2: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation. Or Zadie Smith's On Beauty. Or George Plimpton's Shadow Box: An Amateur in the Ring.

There. Now wasn't that fun?

The Whining Stranger on Books and Reading: Wanted: Slim, Elegant Volumes

Every year since 2000, I have assiduously recorded every book that I've read in its entirety. I type the list into a file of my computer, and sometimes go back and look at past years to see where my reading has taken me. It's another way of documenting my existence. There are rules, of course. I can only record a book on the list when I've read the entire text. (Sometimes, with Penguins or Oxford Classics, I skip the Introduction and let myself off the hook.) If I start a book in one year but finish it in another, I record it in the year in which I completed it. Each year I strive to read fifty full books. Each year I fall short: sometimes by just a few, sometimes by a dozen.

This year, I'm on an embarrassingly slow pace. I got busy with university administrative stuff in the winter. I traveled a lot in April and spent more time listening to my Discman than reading on planes. Don Quixote is, of course, killing me. And the next read on my agenda, Ralph Ellison's Complete Essays, at 800+ pages, threatens to slow me down all the more.

So, I'm in need of slim, elegant volumes. What are the greatest novels, for instance, under 200 pages. Or better, under 150. My partner and I just did The Great Gatsby again. That's surely on the list. As would be, hm, Nella Larsen's Passing? Don DeLillo's The Body Artist? The new Philip Roth, which is short and well-reviewed, should go on my to-read list. I have a copy that a friend passed on.

But others?