Don't Stop the Carnival by Herman Wouk

I struggled to finish Herman Wouk's Don't Stop the Carnival, not because it was hard to read, but because it was too familiar. In fact, a couple years ago it went into the Did Not Finish pile, and only recently was re-exposed to the light of day.

Listen: I grew with a father who was an incorrigible Jimmy Buffett fan. So, yes, of course I knew Buffett's musical adaptation of Don't Stop the Carnival long before I knew that it was based on a book. And the adaptation is faithful; Wouk even worked with Buffett to produce the musical.

Listen: while it may have been a scathing, and daring, critique of American business culture, involvement in the Caribbean, and race relations in 1965- fifty years will take the edge off most anything.

Norman Paperman is a workaholic, a philanderer and emotionally vacuous. And when he can't have his life the way he's always imagined it, he packs up his toys and goes home. I suppose I should feel either pity or satisfaction that he gets his come-uppance, but I've seen it coming- and I think I would have seen it coming even if I hadn't known the Buffett version. I'm indifferent to his struggles.

Happy Friday

Recovering From a Great Read

The often insightful Book Riot shared an article yesterday suggesting that the best cure for a Great Read hangover is a switch to a different genre. They suggest that if your mind was blown by Black Swan Green (and if it hasn't been, it will be), you should switch to a history or a memoir- anything but fiction.

And never once has been that my experience.

The better the book, the more I want more books like it. This feeling gets me reading 3 or 4 books by the same author in a single year. In fact, when I look back at the last year, the only gaps in my reading happened when I was in the midst of a rut: by bad luck, I read One Bullet Away, World Made by Hand, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks in succession. And one book's flaws fed my reading of the next one until I didn't even want to write the reviews, let alone read another book.

30 Before 30 Update

The full list
2. 70 pages into The Sound and the Fury
16. Went to the gym today with my new workout buddy! Seriously, of all the things I learned in the Boy Scouts, the buddy system seems to be the most important.
17. Board game drafted and board started! I need to buy some beads (to use as tokens) to keep score with.
18. Contacted my local Habitat for Humanity, but haven't heard back yet. It's probably too cold to have a project going.
24. So far, I have listened to 1 hour (and only 1 hour) of commercial radio. In that hour I heard only 9 songs, and this song twice.
27. Notice the widget via LibraryThing.com for books I've reviewed in the right hand column? Why didn't anyone tell me they made a widget sooner?
30. We've got 2 things left to do on our to-do list for January: get a pair of pants hemmed, and sort out our wedding photos.

Maus by Art Spiegelman

Art Spiegelman's Maus was one of the most difficult graphic novels I've ever read.

Not difficult because of the subject material- though it's hard to think of a book about the Holocaust as light reading.

Maus is hard to read because it's literarily hard to read. The colorless frames have very little gray; what might seem to be gray at first glance is in fact minutely cross-hatched black and white. This leaves the eye (or, at least, my eye) very little time to rest.

As a story about storytelling, hardly a frame goes by without a word in it, and in most frames, the words overlow. The dialogue bubbles interfere with the images; there's just not enough room for the words and images to co-exist. If that's not trouble enough, Spiegelman's hand printed writing slants and tumbles just enough to make it impossible to scan. Every page is a labor (and maybe it's supposed to be that way).

While the anthropomorphized animals might give a reader the emotional distance to deal with the tragedy (and while Jews-as-mice, Nazis-as-cats motif might help a grade school student keep track of good guys and bad guys), the truth is that none of the main characters are drawn distinctly enough to help me keep track of who's talking to whom across the disjointed and often interrupted narrative. Spiegelman's play on traditional expectations of animals in comics was subversive at the time (compare these Holocaust surviving mice to Donald Duck, Mighty Mouse and Garfield), the artifice doesn't hold up. Comics have come a long way in being appreciated as an artform since Maus won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992.

Am I harder on Maus than on so many other graphic novels because of how highly recognized and praised it is? Yeah, probably.

I mean, Maus has everything I love in a novel.

Selling Books and the Awards Circuit

The New York Times does not allow its sportswriters to vote for player awards like induction into the Hall of Fame, MVP or Rookie of the Year. The Times' standing position is that their reports should be covering the news, not helping create it. I think this approach is terribly naive, in that it ignores the "create the news" aspect of choosing which topics are news-worthy and which are not.

Award ceremonies are, at their essence, a celebration of self by the participants. The Oscars, the Tonys, the Emmys, all are designed to draw the attention of the New York Times and the rest of the press, creating news meant to sway an increasingly distracted and fickle public audience.

So it's no surprise that the National Book Awards have re-imagined themselves in a way that will spread more attention to more authors. That means more shiny medallions on book covers drawing the attention of people like me who do still occasionally browse for books in brick and mortar stores.

I'm a little bothered when someone like Morgan Entrekin, vice president of the National Book Foundation boardand CEO of Grove/Atlantic, says

I think there are plenty of awards that recognize [a collection of stories by a university press]... If one of those books is truly the best book of the year, that's no problem. But it seemed like the judges had been recognizing lesser-known authors for the sake of choosing lesser-known authors.

How to Stay Present

The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even

A couple weekends ago, Carol and I made a trip to Philadelphia. We spent the day with some of my oldest friends, first wandering the Philly Museum of Art (especially through the Dancing Around the Bride exhibition) and then on to lunch.

It seems silly that I made a decision to turn off my phone. It seems silly: there was literally no where on Earth I'd rather have been at that moment. It seems silly: I'm as annoyed by people on their cell phones in public places as everyone else.

But, I'm susceptible to the incessant buzz.

Is it the same sort of faulty logic that makes us think the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence? The way that constant reminders of other people's apparent happiness can make us think that the whole world is having a better time than we are?