aaron hamburger

Thursday, April 15, 2010

This blog has moved

This blog is now located at http://aaronhamburger.blogspot.com/.
You will be automatically redirected in 30 seconds, or you may click here.

For feed subscribers, please update your feed subscriptions to
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posted by aaron hamburger at 5:07 PM | 0 comments

Monday, April 05, 2010

Don't Judge a Book by its Hype

Every once in a while, a book comes along with such hype attached, you want to avoid reading it, just out of spite. I must confess that for me, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower was just such a book. I'd heard so much about this story collection for so long, the thought of actually picking it up made me feel as if I were being manipulated.

My loss.

I'm not sure what the proverbial tipping point was, but a few weeks ago, I was browsing in a bookstore and picked up a copy of the paperback. Last week, I began to read.

What I love most about this book is the prose. It's hard to believe this is Tower's first book. Line after line, the guy comes up with arresting stuff like "a steeply sloping apron of mud that sang with mosquitoes and smelled terribly of fart gas." His language is lovingly precise. Corduroy pants are "wide-waled," fake antique furniture is ornamented with "buboes" (I had to look that one up!), a hunky model is described as wearing a "cowrie shell necklace" and having "salt stiff hair." Tower's also great at finding metaphors that are both evocative and appropriate to his characters' world, like a character from the rural South who is described as having the figure of a "pickle jar."

Speaking of characters, what a range of beautifully etched lives are on display in this collection. The complexity of Tower's characters sneaks up on you as read. They're not necessarily people I'd want to have lunch with, but they keep surprising you with their vulnerability. As Tower makes painfully clear, they are people worth caring about, each with his or her own hurts and needs.

Finally, I love the way each of these stories end, usually on a wistful and inconclusive note. You know that the story has gone somewhere, but where is not immediately certain, a lot like life. In workshop (Tower went to my MFA program), I'm sure Tower must have heard that his endings weren't satisfying. I probably would have said the same thing myself. And yet, there's something Chekhovian about the way his stories move forward in time. It isn't necessarily that his characters or their lives have changes so much as they have shifted, in ways that will only become clear later in the characters' lives, or for readers, upon rereading.

My only quibbles about this book were the last two stories, which felt more like exercises that hadn't been fully fleshed out in comparison with the masterful stories that preceded them. But who cares? This is easily one of the best story collections I've read in a long time.

posted by aaron hamburger at 10:07 AM | 1 comments

Sunday, February 14, 2010

When a Story's Not a Story

What elements do you need to make a story? Most fiction consists of plot, character, and setting, in some combination. The proportions of each always change, but generally all three are present. But what about fiction that doesn't fit the mold, fiction that "colors outside the lines" so to speak?

In general, I'm not a fan of this type of fiction, but to my mind, for these kinds of books to work, they need to compensate for the lack of what's not there with a stronger emphasis on what they do have to offer. No plot or character? Then you'd better have one hell of a setting. No character or setting? Then that had better be some plot you've got to tell.

But what about if you have none of the Big Three? Then I guess all we're left with is language. In which case, your language had better be fucking incredible.

Though I typically prefer fiction that does what fiction's traditionally expected to do, some of my favorite books are ones that don't follow any rules, that make up their own logic as they go along. So here is a list of some of my favorite rulebreakers, in no particular order except alphabetical.

How German Is It?, Walter Abish
Mansfield Park, Jane Austen
The Mezzanine, Nicholson Baker
40 Stories, Donald Barthelme
Snow White, Donald Barthelme
An Invisible Sign of My Own, Aimee Bender
Sacco and Vanzetti Must Die!, Mark Binelli
The Decameron, Boccaccio
Stories, Jorge Luis Borges
A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs
The Bloody Chamber, Angela Carter
Mrs. Bridge, Evan S. Connell
Try, Dennis Cooper
Samuel Johnson is Indignant, Lydia Davis
Bleak House, Charles Dickens
The Lover, Marguerite Duras
Veronica, Mary Gaitskill
Loving, Henry Green
Catch-22, Joseph Heller
The Question of Bruno, Alexander Hemon
A Pale View of Hills, Kazuo Ishiguro
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera
Homeland, Sam Lipsyte
Moby Dick, Herman Melville
Self-Help, Lorrie Moore
Notable American Women, Ben Marcus
The Captain's Fire, J. S. Marcus
Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell
Purple America, Rick Moody
Open Secrets, Alice Munro
Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov
Martin and John, Dale Peck
The Streets of Crocodiles, Bruno Schulz
The Emigrants, W. G. Sebald
The First Hurt, Rachel Sherman
Collected Stories, Jean Stafford
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, David Foster Wallace
The Intuitionist, Colson Whitehead
The Waves, Virginia Woolf
Memoirs of Hadrian, Marguerite Yourcenar

posted by aaron hamburger at 11:42 AM | 0 comments

Saturday, January 23, 2010

Why Write? Why Read?

A week ago, I was honored to give the commencement keynote address at the Stonecoast MFA Program. I'd like to share one section of the speech I gave, which I think speaks to the current unease about the state of where we are now as writers and book lovers:

Recently, in the Guardian newspaper of London, novelist Philip Roth predicted that in 25 years, the number of people reading fiction would be similar to the number of people who today read Latin poetry. If you talk to authors, editors, and journalists who cover writing, they'll all say the same thing: The publishing industry is at one of the lowest points that it's ever been.
Then again, the good news, I guess, is that for as long as I can remember, people have been saying the publishing industry is at one of the lowest points that it has ever been. I keep asking myself, when was this supposed golden time in publishing when everything was just hunky dory?

Still, I do think it's fair to say the notion that a work of writing is something you can exchange for money is becoming fairly outmoded. Increasingly, text, or what is currently referred to as "content," is something that readers expect to be delivered for free to their laptops, their PDAs, and now their Kindles. Remember when we used to buy newspapers and magazines? Remember when we used to buy books in bookstores? Remember when books were made out of paper instead of digital blips?

When it come to the economics of publishing, we don't know if we're at the bottom of a valley that in the coming years will slope back upward, or if we've reached a new plateau that will stretch on to the foreseeable future. Maybe writers will once again be able to earn money for their work in the way that they used to. Or maybe they won't.

However, there is one thing I do know for sure: The world needs writers.

I'll say it again. The world needs us. In fact, at the very time that our work seems at its most under-read, undervalued, underappreciated in every way, the world needs us worse than ever, even if the world doesn't quite know it yet.
Facebook is fun. Tweets are witty. Blogs are, well, blogs are blogs. But none of these can inspire us in the same fundamental and important way that a great work of literary fiction and pop fiction, non-fiction, or poetry can. I'm thinking here of E. M. Forster's simple yet desperate plea from his brilliant novel Howards End: "Only connect..." Forster wasn't talking about searching for a WiFi connection to log onto his Gmail account. He was asking us to see and hear each other in the fullness and richness of the individual human experience. And in an age when we're constantly glued to screens, both for work and for pleasure, we as human beings are in desperate need of genuine connection with each other and ourselves.

Now, I don't mean to sound like some Luddite here. I love my laptop too. I watch TV pretty much every day. I check my email almost every five minutes.

Also, I want to make clear that the acts of reading and writing are not the only antidotes to our contemporary illness of being entertained to death. There is a whole host of things we all could do each day to fulfill E. M. Forster's maxim of "Only Connect": We could cook a good meal for a friend, we could listen to someone we love, we could close our eyes and take several deep breaths of air, or simply smile at someone we don't know. All of us, writers or not, can do things like these every day to connect more deeply with the very real world in which we live, at a time when it's so much easier and more tempting to simply connect to the Internet.

The trouble is, that all too often we forget to connect. So we need certain people in our society to remind us to do just that. And that's where writers, you guys, come in. By laboring each day to use black ink-marks to recreate our world, or to imagine worlds that don't exist but just maybe might, you stir us to stop watching passively as our lives go by, to stop whatever we're so busily doing for one moment, and... think. Just think.

So that's why I think it's not only advisable but in fact essential that as writers you keep doing what you're doing, published or unpublished. And if not for us, then do it for yourselves. Even if your work touches just one soul, it's worth it. And maybe that one soul just happens to be your own.

posted by aaron hamburger at 4:29 PM | 0 comments

Sunday, December 20, 2009

Book Recommendations from 2009 for 2010

I've never liked year-end top ten lists, though I'm a sucker for looking at them, because it seems strange to me that good films, books, albums should occur in multiples of ten. What's so special about the number ten that causes newspapers to make a festish of it every year?

With books, this practice seems more than a little suspect given that no one can possibly have read all the books that have come out in a certain year and from those select the ten "best." Therefore, I'd just like to note a few books I read in 2009 (where they were published in that year or not) which gave me pleasure:

1. The Big Sleep and Lady in the Lake by Raymond Chandler: This guy knows his way around a metaphor like few writers I've seen. I love the plots, I love the worlds he creates, but above all I love hard-bitten, wisecracking Philip Marlowe.

2. Lake Overturn by Vestal McIntyre: A fun, old-fashioned, Dickensian style novel bursting with characters and incidents.

3. Reading Jesus by Mary Gordon: A chance to explore the New Testament with a stirring and sensitive reader.

4. Status Anxiety by Alain de Botton: The first half of this book is a devastating take down of our obsession with status. The second half, in which de Botton advises us on how to deal with the problem of status, is not as strong as the first.

5. Don't Cry by Mary Gaitskill: Why this book wasn't more celebrated is beyond me, especially since it so radically outshines other clunkier efforts (like the new Lorrie Moore novel) to capture the tragedies of the Bush era. Stylistically and emotionally, a triumph.

6. The Scenic Route by Binnie Kirshenbaum: A former teacher of mine and a wonderful, wry stylist, Kirshenbaum creates a vivid profile of a passive life.

7. A Friend of the Family by Lauren Grodstein: Lauren is also a friend of mine, but trust me, this book well rewards your reading. It's a gripping emotional thriller about a man determined to protect his son to a fault. Read this book.

8. Unaccustomed Earth and The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri: Lahiri's first book, Interpreter of Maladies left me baffled about all the praise it received. Her second two have made me a believer. I can't think of another contemporary author who musters so much sympathy for her characters. I loved these two books.

9. The Believers by Zoe Heller: I read this in one day. Heller makes you care about her characters, even if you don't particularly like them.

10. Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama: Whatever you think of the politician, you have to be impressed by the writer. A surprisingly naked and moving self-portrait.

11. Perfume by Patrick Susskind: A terrific ode to the senses, with many beautiful passages.

12. The Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain: The kind of book you dip in and out of rather than read cover to cover. The anti-European bias is unintentionally hilarious and a fascinating portrait of American reverse snobbery when it's offensive.

13. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh: I've read it before, but I reread it this year. What a strange book! The first half is one of the most beautiful portraits of young love I've ever read. The second half is a lame apology for it.

That's it for now. I'd love to hear from other people about books they enjoyed...

posted by aaron hamburger at 12:48 PM | 0 comments

Friday, December 11, 2009

This is Just to Say...

I'm busy as hell right now with the end of the semester, but I thought I'd leave a quick note to say I've been immersing myself in the novels of Raymond Chandler and they are indeed, delicious...

posted by aaron hamburger at 10:49 PM | 1 comments

Monday, November 02, 2009

I Like You, You Like Me, We're a Happy Family

If there's one word I'm sick of hearing in a literary context, it's "likable." Then again, maybe I'm sick of hearing it in any context.

Remember when it was fashionable for political pundits to say that the reason Bush Jr. was elected was because he was more "likable" than his opponents, Al Gore and John Kerry? Or in the last campaign, when Hillary Clinton was accused of the grave charge of not being "likable." It seems a little odd to me that one of the standards for being elected leader of the free world should be "likability," but if that is a measure voters are using, then it's a tendency to be decried, rather than analyzed.

Or, on a much more mundane level, imagine if a friend came up to you and said, "I just wanted to tell you, you're really likable." Would you take that as a compliment? Would you even know how to interpret such a remark? One possible response: "Gee, thanks for telling me that it's possible, even probable, that people like me."

And yet, in literary criticism, it's become accepted, even fashionable, for readers, critics, and editors to routinely charge writers with the crime of creating characters who are "unlikable." Forgive me for thinking that my job as a writer was to create characters with distinct and recognizable traits, characters with lifelike complexity, characters who do and say memorable things. No, it turns out that what writers are really supposed to do is create characters with whom a reader might like to split a salad with at lunch. Or, rather, we're supposed to create characters whom editors in New York imagine that readers in such exotic locales as St. Louis, Chicago, or Seattle might like to split a salad with at lunch.

In the past few months, I've read three novels by Raymond Chandler and The Education of Hyman Kaplan by Leo Rosten, and reread A Passage to India by E. M. Forster. These books all had two qualities in common. First, they were brilliant works of literature that were fun and absorbing to read. Second, they featured oodles of characters who could not be called "likable." Coincidence? I think not.

If I want an agreeable lunch partner, I'll call up one of my friends. If I want to read a great novel, the last thing I'll do at the bookstore is scan the jacket copy as if it were a personal ad in the hopes that the characters might be plausible BFF candidates. In fact, what I'm often looking for is quite the opposite.

In life, I would not want to hang out with Philip Marlowe, Hyman Kaplan, or Miss Quested and Dr. Aziz. They'd probably be too much to take after a short while. But in literature, I get the chance to spend time in their company for as long or as little as I wish and whenever I wish, without the burdens of courtesy, comparing schedules, remembering birthdays, etc. Furthermore, the authors who've created these characters have done me the favor of excluding the un-interesting parts of their lives and saving all the interesting stuff for the page. And I'd rather have unlikable and interesting than likable and boring.

I guess what it comes down to is that I read to expand my knowledge of the universe, not to confirm what I already know. As I open each new book I read, my hope is that I will get to observe people and places and storylines that I may not come across in my daily routine. If all I wanted were the latter, I could always go on Facebook.

posted by aaron hamburger at 1:22 PM | 1 comments


	Thursday, April 15, 2010 This blog has moved This blog is now located at http://aaronhamburger.blogspot.com/. You will be automatically redirected in 30 seconds, or you may click here. For feed subscribers, please update your feed subscriptions to http://aaronhamburger.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default. posted by aaron hamburger at 5:07 PM \| 0 comments Monday, April 05, 2010 Don't Judge a Book by its Hype Every once in a while, a book comes along with such hype attached, you want to avoid reading it, just out of spite. I must confess that for me, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower was just such a book. I'd heard so much about this story collection for so long, the thought of actually picking it up made me feel as if I were being manipulated. My loss. I'm not sure what the proverbial tipping point was, but a few weeks ago, I was browsing in a bookstore and picked up a copy of the paperback. Last week, I began to read. What I love most about this book is the prose. It's hard to believe this is Tower's first book. Line after line, the guy comes up with arresting stuff like "a steeply sloping apron of mud that sang with mosquitoes and smelled terribly of fart gas." His language is lovingly precise. Corduroy pants are "wide-waled," fake antique furniture is ornamented with "buboes" (I had to look that one up!), a hunky model is described as wearing a "cowrie shell necklace" and having "salt stiff hair." Tower's also great at finding metaphors that are both evocative and appropriate to his characters' world, like a character from the rural South who is described as having the figure of a "pickle jar." Speaking of characters, what a range of beautifully etched lives are on display in this collection. The complexity of Tower's characters sneaks up on you as read. They're not necessarily people I'd want to have lunch with, but they keep surprising you with their vulnerability. As Tower makes painfully clear, they are people worth caring about, each with his or her own hurts and needs. Finally, I love the way each of these stories end, usually on a wistful and inconclusive note. You know that the story has gone somewhere, but where is not immediately certain, a lot like life. In workshop (Tower went to my MFA program), I'm sure Tower must have heard that his endings weren't satisfying. I probably would have said the same thing myself. And yet, there's something Chekhovian about the way his stories move forward in time. It isn't necessarily that his characters or their lives have changes so much as they have shifted, in ways that will only become clear later in the characters' lives, or for readers, upon rereading. My only quibbles about this book were the last two stories, which felt more like exercises that hadn't been fully fleshed out in comparison with the masterful stories that preceded them. But who cares? This is easily one of the best story collections I've read in a long time. posted by aaron hamburger at 10:07 AM \| 1 comments Sunday, February 14, 2010 When a Story's Not a Story What elements do you need to make a story? Most fiction consists of plot, character, and setting, in some combination. The proportions of each always change, but generally all three are present. But what about fiction that doesn't fit the mold, fiction that "colors outside the lines" so to speak? In general, I'm not a fan of this type of fiction, but to my mind, for these kinds of books to work, they need to compensate for the lack of what's not there with a stronger emphasis on what they do have to offer. No plot or character? Then you'd better have one hell of a setting. No character or setting? Then that had better be some plot you've got to tell. But what about if you have none of the Big Three? Then I guess all we're left with is language. In which case, your language had better be fucking incredible. Though I typically prefer fiction that does what fiction's traditionally expected to do, some of my favorite books are ones that don't follow any rules, that make up their own logic as they go along. So here is a list of some of my favorite rulebreakers, in no particular order except alphabetical. How German Is It?, Walter Abish Mansfield Park, Jane Austen The Mezzanine, Nicholson Baker 40 Stories, Donald Barthelme Snow White, Donald Barthelme An Invisible Sign of My Own, Aimee Bender Sacco and Vanzetti Must Die!, Mark Binelli The Decameron, Boccaccio Stories, Jorge Luis Borges A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs The Bloody Chamber, Angela Carter Mrs. Bridge, Evan S. Connell Try, Dennis Cooper Samuel Johnson is Indignant, Lydia Davis Bleak House, Charles Dickens The Lover, Marguerite Duras Veronica, Mary Gaitskill Loving, Henry Green Catch-22, Joseph Heller The Question of Bruno, Alexander Hemon A Pale View of Hills, Kazuo Ishiguro The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera Homeland, Sam Lipsyte Moby Dick, Herman Melville Self-Help, Lorrie Moore Notable American Women, Ben Marcus The Captain's Fire, J. S. Marcus Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Gabriel Garcia Marquez Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell Purple America, Rick Moody Open Secrets, Alice Munro Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov Martin and John, Dale Peck The Streets of Crocodiles, Bruno Schulz The Emigrants, W. G. Sebald The First Hurt, Rachel Sherman Collected Stories, Jean Stafford The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, David Foster Wallace The Intuitionist, Colson Whitehead The Waves, Virginia Woolf Memoirs of Hadrian, Marguerite Yourcenar posted by aaron hamburger at 11:42 AM \| 0 comments Saturday, January 23, 2010 Why Write? Why Read? A week ago, I was honored to give the commencement keynote address at the Stonecoast MFA Program. I'd like to share one section of the speech I gave, which I think speaks to the current unease about the state of where we are now as writers and book lovers: Recently, in the Guardian newspaper of London, novelist Philip Roth predicted that in 25 years, the number of people reading fiction would be similar to the number of people who today read Latin poetry. If you talk to authors, editors, and journalists who cover writing, they'll all say the same thing: The publishing industry is at one of the lowest points that it's ever been. Then again, the good news, I guess, is that for as long as I can remember, people have been saying the publishing industry is at one of the lowest points that it has ever been. I keep asking myself, when was this supposed golden time in publishing when everything was just hunky dory? Still, I do think it's fair to say the notion that a work of writing is something you can exchange for money is becoming fairly outmoded. Increasingly, text, or what is currently referred to as "content," is something that readers expect to be delivered for free to their laptops, their PDAs, and now their Kindles. Remember when we used to buy newspapers and magazines? Remember when we used to buy books in bookstores? Remember when books were made out of paper instead of digital blips? When it come to the economics of publishing, we don't know if we're at the bottom of a valley that in the coming years will slope back upward, or if we've reached a new plateau that will stretch on to the foreseeable future. Maybe writers will once again be able to earn money for their work in the way that they used to. Or maybe they won't. However, there is one thing I do know for sure: The world needs writers. I'll say it again. The world needs us. In fact, at the very time that our work seems at its most under-read, undervalued, underappreciated in every way, the world needs us worse than ever, even if the world doesn't quite know it yet. Facebook is fun. Tweets are witty. Blogs are, well, blogs are blogs. But none of these can inspire us in the same fundamental and important way that a great work of literary fiction and pop fiction, non-fiction, or poetry can. I'm thinking here of E. M. Forster's simple yet desperate plea from his brilliant novel Howards End: "Only connect..." Forster wasn't talking about searching for a WiFi connection to log onto his Gmail account. He was asking us to see and hear each other in the fullness and richness of the individual human experience. And in an age when we're constantly glued to screens, both for work and for pleasure, we as human beings are in desperate need of genuine connection with each other and ourselves. Now, I don't mean to sound like some Luddite here. I love my laptop too. I watch TV pretty much every day. I check my email almost every five minutes. Also, I want to make clear that the acts of reading and writing are not the only antidotes to our contemporary illness of being entertained to death. There is a whole host of things we all could do each day to fulfill E. M. Forster's maxim of "Only Connect": We could cook a good meal for a friend, we could listen to someone we love, we could close our eyes and take several deep breaths of air, or simply smile at someone we don't know. All of us, writers or not, can do things like these every day to connect more deeply with the very real world in which we live, at a time when it's so much easier and more tempting to simply connect to the Internet. The trouble is, that all too often we forget to connect. So we need certain people in our society to remind us to do just that. And that's where writers, you guys, come in. By laboring each day to use black ink-marks to recreate our world, or to imagine worlds that don't exist but just maybe might, you stir us to stop watching passively as our lives go by, to stop whatever we're so busily doing for one moment, and... think. Just think. So that's why I think it's not only advisable but in fact essential that as writers you keep doing what you're doing, published or unpublished. And if not for us, then do it for yourselves. Even if your work touches just one soul, it's worth it. And maybe that one soul just happens to be your own. posted by aaron hamburger at 4:29 PM \| 0 comments Sunday, December 20, 2009 Book Recommendations from 2009 for 2010 I've never liked year-end top ten lists, though I'm a sucker for looking at them, because it seems strange to me that good films, books, albums should occur in multiples of ten. What's so special about the number ten that causes newspapers to make a festish of it every year? With books, this practice seems more than a little suspect given that no one can possibly have read all the books that have come out in a certain year and from those select the ten "best." Therefore, I'd just like to note a few books I read in 2009 (where they were published in that year or not) which gave me pleasure: 1. The Big Sleep and Lady in the Lake by Raymond Chandler: This guy knows his way around a metaphor like few writers I've seen. I love the plots, I love the worlds he creates, but above all I love hard-bitten, wisecracking Philip Marlowe. 2. Lake Overturn by Vestal McIntyre: A fun, old-fashioned, Dickensian style novel bursting with characters and incidents. 3. Reading Jesus by Mary Gordon: A chance to explore the New Testament with a stirring and sensitive reader. 4. Status Anxiety by Alain de Botton: The first half of this book is a devastating take down of our obsession with status. The second half, in which de Botton advises us on how to deal with the problem of status, is not as strong as the first. 5. Don't Cry by Mary Gaitskill: Why this book wasn't more celebrated is beyond me, especially since it so radically outshines other clunkier efforts (like the new Lorrie Moore novel) to capture the tragedies of the Bush era. Stylistically and emotionally, a triumph. 6. The Scenic Route by Binnie Kirshenbaum: A former teacher of mine and a wonderful, wry stylist, Kirshenbaum creates a vivid profile of a passive life. 7. A Friend of the Family by Lauren Grodstein: Lauren is also a friend of mine, but trust me, this book well rewards your reading. It's a gripping emotional thriller about a man determined to protect his son to a fault. Read this book. 8. Unaccustomed Earth and The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri: Lahiri's first book, Interpreter of Maladies left me baffled about all the praise it received. Her second two have made me a believer. I can't think of another contemporary author who musters so much sympathy for her characters. I loved these two books. 9. The Believers by Zoe Heller: I read this in one day. Heller makes you care about her characters, even if you don't particularly like them. 10. Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama: Whatever you think of the politician, you have to be impressed by the writer. A surprisingly naked and moving self-portrait. 11. Perfume by Patrick Susskind: A terrific ode to the senses, with many beautiful passages. 12. The Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain: The kind of book you dip in and out of rather than read cover to cover. The anti-European bias is unintentionally hilarious and a fascinating portrait of American reverse snobbery when it's offensive. 13. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh: I've read it before, but I reread it this year. What a strange book! The first half is one of the most beautiful portraits of young love I've ever read. The second half is a lame apology for it. That's it for now. I'd love to hear from other people about books they enjoyed... posted by aaron hamburger at 12:48 PM \| 0 comments Friday, December 11, 2009 This is Just to Say... I'm busy as hell right now with the end of the semester, but I thought I'd leave a quick note to say I've been immersing myself in the novels of Raymond Chandler and they are indeed, delicious... posted by aaron hamburger at 10:49 PM \| 1 comments Monday, November 02, 2009 I Like You, You Like Me, We're a Happy Family If there's one word I'm sick of hearing in a literary context, it's "likable." Then again, maybe I'm sick of hearing it in any context. Remember when it was fashionable for political pundits to say that the reason Bush Jr. was elected was because he was more "likable" than his opponents, Al Gore and John Kerry? Or in the last campaign, when Hillary Clinton was accused of the grave charge of not being "likable." It seems a little odd to me that one of the standards for being elected leader of the free world should be "likability," but if that is a measure voters are using, then it's a tendency to be decried, rather than analyzed. Or, on a much more mundane level, imagine if a friend came up to you and said, "I just wanted to tell you, you're really likable." Would you take that as a compliment? Would you even know how to interpret such a remark? One possible response: "Gee, thanks for telling me that it's possible, even probable, that people like me." And yet, in literary criticism, it's become accepted, even fashionable, for readers, critics, and editors to routinely charge writers with the crime of creating characters who are "unlikable." Forgive me for thinking that my job as a writer was to create characters with distinct and recognizable traits, characters with lifelike complexity, characters who do and say memorable things. No, it turns out that what writers are really supposed to do is create characters with whom a reader might like to split a salad with at lunch. Or, rather, we're supposed to create characters whom editors in New York imagine that readers in such exotic locales as St. Louis, Chicago, or Seattle might like to split a salad with at lunch. In the past few months, I've read three novels by Raymond Chandler and The Education of Hyman Kaplan by Leo Rosten, and reread A Passage to India by E. M. Forster. These books all had two qualities in common. First, they were brilliant works of literature that were fun and absorbing to read. Second, they featured oodles of characters who could not be called "likable." Coincidence? I think not. If I want an agreeable lunch partner, I'll call up one of my friends. If I want to read a great novel, the last thing I'll do at the bookstore is scan the jacket copy as if it were a personal ad in the hopes that the characters might be plausible BFF candidates. In fact, what I'm often looking for is quite the opposite. In life, I would not want to hang out with Philip Marlowe, Hyman Kaplan, or Miss Quested and Dr. Aziz. They'd probably be too much to take after a short while. But in literature, I get the chance to spend time in their company for as long or as little as I wish and whenever I wish, without the burdens of courtesy, comparing schedules, remembering birthdays, etc. Furthermore, the authors who've created these characters have done me the favor of excluding the un-interesting parts of their lives and saving all the interesting stuff for the page. And I'd rather have unlikable and interesting than likable and boring. I guess what it comes down to is that I read to expand my knowledge of the universe, not to confirm what I already know. As I open each new book I read, my hope is that I will get to observe people and places and storylines that I may not come across in my daily routine. If all I wanted were the latter, I could always go on Facebook. posted by aaron hamburger at 1:22 PM \| 1 comments		Literary Blogs Beatrice Book Angst 101 Bookdwarf Booklust Book Ninja Book Slut Conversational Reading Emerging Writers Network Gawker James Tata Jessie Sholl Literary Salon Moby Lives Queer Type Rake's Progress The Reading Experience Tingle Alley Other Sites Eco Home Gear Recent Posts This blog has moved Don't Judge a Book by its Hype When a Story's Not a Story Why Write? Why Read? Book Recommendations from 2009 for 2010 This is Just to Say... 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