Saturday, August 20, 2016
I’ve long chuckled at Roz Chast’s cartoons in The New Yorker. This graphic memoir, the first such book I’ve read, was so much more than a chuckle: funny, yes — but direct, deeply poignant, sharply observant. It’s hard to think about someone more perfectly born and raised to write (and draw) one specific book. Having finished the book, I’m looking forward to listening to this “Fresh Air” interview with the author.Sunday, July 10, 2016
"> <figure class=" sqs-block-image-figure intrinsic " style="max-width:540px;"> <div style="padding-bottom:56.296295166016%;" class=" image-block-wrapper has-aspect-ratio "> <img src="http://sschenkenberg.files.wordpress.com/2016/07/0ce4d-image-asset.jpeg" alt="" /><img class="thumb-image" alt="" /> </div> </figure> </div> I loved everything about this singular, poetic, deeply moving book. Huge congrats to Max Porter on a phenomenal debut. (Here’s the review that led me to it.)Saturday, May 7, 2016
Really enjoyed this book, which eschews icy, spacious luxury and celebrates lived-in warmth and often modest SQF. The choices on the first few pages (shown below) are representative of the book’s distinct point of view. (That kitchen towel is telling.) <div class=" image-block-outer-wrapper layout-caption-hidden design-layout-inline "> <figure class=" sqs-block-image-figure intrinsic " style="max-width:500px;"> <div style="padding-bottom:126.40000915527%;" class=" image-block-wrapper has-aspect-ratio "> <img src="http://sschenkenberg.files.wordpress.com/2016/05/eea1e-image-asset.jpeg" alt="" /><img class="thumb-image" alt="" /> </div> </figure> </div> <div class=" image-block-outer-wrapper layout-caption-hidden design-layout-inline "> <figure class=" sqs-block-image-figure intrinsic " style="max-width:500px;"> <div style="padding-bottom:133.Wednesday, May 4, 2016
From his extraordinary book, When Breath Becomes Air: When you come to one of the many moments in life where you must give an account of yourself, provide a ledger of what you have been, and done, and meant to the world, do not, I pray, discount that you filled a dying man’s days with a sated joy, a joy unknown to me in all my prior years, a joy that does not hunger for more and more but rests, satisfied.Sunday, February 14, 2016
Really enjoyed Carrie Brownstein’s impressive, observant, terrifically titled memoir.Saturday, February 6, 2016
Having just finished book three of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle (I enjoyed the first two more, though this volume’s still captivating), I was eager to listen to both part one and part two of the author’s interviews on Michael Silverblatt’s “Bookworm.” It’s great listening. These insights from Silverblatt — which followed his comment that Knausgaard clearly knows his “great literature” — rang especially true for me: What’s daring about My Struggle is that you’re willing to put the difficulty of the literature of the century — Joyce on — aside, to recapture the human.Friday, January 1, 2016
Continuing a 15-year tradition (though one that’s gotten briefer with age and fatherhood), here’s a roundup of some of my favorite things experienced during the past 12 months: Books My Brilliant Friend, Elena Ferrante Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, Elena Ferrante The Story of a New Name, Elena Ferrante The Story of the Lost Child, Elena Ferrante Lila, Marilyn Robinson My Struggle: Book 2, Karl Ove Knausgård Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi CoatesSaturday, November 28, 2015
Two of my favorites.Sunday, January 11, 2015
Back before Tamara and I had our son in the summer of 2013, I used to keep regular lists of my “Annual Favorites” of the year — the best books, movies, TV shows, podcasts, exhibitions and so on that I’d consumed that year. To say my rate of cultural digestion changed with fatherhood would be an understatement; that said, I still have an interest in logging the great stuff (if only for myself).Tuesday, April 9, 2013
I’ve written before of the penetrating, often funny essays of Aleksandar Hemon, the Bosnian writer who, fortunately for us, calls Chicago home. His new collection, The Book of My Lives, is terrific, whether the subject is gravely serious (war, illness) or much more fun (pick-up soccer with a crew of fellow refugees). Here’s one opening paragraph I quite liked from the essay “The Lives of Grandmasters,” which has just been published online as well:Monday, April 1, 2013
BOMB offers an extraordinary excerpt from Bough Down, a volume by artist Karen Green, who is also David Foster Wallace’s widow: September again and I take your parents to the lighthouse, I do. There is nothing but September fog to cover our shame, and your father laughs just like you, at the opacity. I want to eat the laugh, I want to rub it on my chest like camphor, I want to make a sound tattoo.Saturday, March 23, 2013
At McSweeney’s, Teddy Wayne’s “Feedback From James Joyce’s Submission of Ulysses to His Creative Writing Workshop.”Sunday, March 10, 2013
"> <figure class=" sqs-block-image-figure intrinsic " style="max-width:500px;"> <div style="padding-bottom:100%;" class=" image-block-wrapper has-aspect-ratio "> <img src="http://sschenkenberg.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/6eca7-image-asset.jpeg" alt="" /><img class="thumb-image" alt="" /> </div> </figure> </div> Gerhard Richter, quoted in Atlas: Do you know what was just great? — To notice that such a stupid, absurd little act like copying a postcard can result in a painting. And then the freedom to be able to paint what’s fun. Deer, aeroplanes, kings, secretaries.Wednesday, March 6, 2013
Andrew Piper, writing in Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times: Books will always be there. That is what they are by definition: there. Whether in the classroom, the library, the archive, the bookstore, the warehouse, or online, it is our choice, however, where books will be. It is time to stop worrying and start thinking. It is time to put an end to the digital utopias and print eulogies, bookish venerations and network gothic, and tired binaries like deep versus shallow, distributed versus linear, or slow versus fast.Sunday, February 10, 2013
I really like this bit from Katherine Boo, taken from her interview for the New York Times Book Review’s “By the Book” series: I was working my butt off trying to investigate the violent deaths of some homeless children, under circumstances that had been covered up by the police, when I reached the section of “2666” entitled “The Part About the Crimes.” It begins with a relentless, near-forensic account of corpses and injustices (closely based on the murders of poor women in Juarez) that opens out into this fevered exploration of both the psychological cost of paying attention to the tragedies of others and the social cost of looking away.Saturday, January 5, 2013
From William H. Gass’ forthcoming novel, Middle C: Joey … rails ran across France then, rails ran through the mountain passes and through tunnels into and out of the mountains, rails ran along the Mur, through forests of fir trees, because the war was over, the sirens had hoarse throats, all the bombs they’d dropped on one another had gone plode, and so we could have traveled home together, because there were no more warplanes, no more lights fingering the sky, no more Nazis; it was, we used to say when we slunk from our underground huddle, the large lot of us, and looked to see if our rubble was still standing, we used to say that the sirens said — the sirens said, All clear.Saturday, January 5, 2013
A passage of exceptional precision in The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 1: On Sunday Lytton came to tea. I was alone, for L. went to Margaret. I enjoyed it very much. He is one of the most supple of our friends; I don’t mean passionate or masterful or original, but the person whose mind seems softest to impressions, least starched by any formality or impediment. There is his great gift of expression of course, never (to me) at its best in writing; but making him in some respects the most sympathetic & understanding friend to talk to.Tuesday, January 1, 2013
This post is part of my Annual Favorites list I’ve been keeping for the past decade-plus. Favorite Books (Goodreads profile) The German Genius, by Peter Watson (choice passages) Journey to the Abyss: The Diaries of Count Harry Kessler, 1880-1918 (choicepassages) Life Sentences, by William H. Gass Nox, by Anne Carson A Hologram for the King, by Dave Eggers Rineke Dijkstra: A Retrospective Donald Judd Every Love Story is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace, by D.Sunday, December 9, 2012
I’m still at work editing The Ear’s Mouth Must Move: The Essential Interviews of William H. Gass. While I’d love for this to be published in a gloriously beautiful print version, I haven’t yet found an interested publisher. So it’s likely that, as with Abstractions Arrive, I will publish it myself as an iPad e-book using iBooks Author. Life is short, and I get restless waiting for traditional gatekeepers. We’ll see, though.Thursday, November 15, 2012
The subtitle of this Slate piece is way too glib, but the essay from Piper — a literature professor at McGill — is worth reading. Thoughtful and thought-provoking. It’s excerpted from Piper’s book, Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times.Sunday, October 21, 2012
Interesting piece by Sean Bishop in the VQR blog. (And yes, I agree with this sentiment, and not just for literary publishers, but other groups in the arts: “There is still a contingent of presses and publishers who bristle at the idea of ‘branding,’ 'marketing’ and the lot. Stop it…. They (you) need to get over that. I mean, seriously: you’re a publisher, not a religion.”)Sunday, October 7, 2012
Following up on my previous post about this extraordinary 900-page book — I finished it last night — here are a few more remarkable passages around which I drew my customary lines, stars, and exclamation marks: Paris, February 1905: With [Théodore] Duret to Mademoiselle Courbet, Courbet’s sister. Works of Courbet from all periods, especially interesting the Demoiselles de la Seine (around ‘66) and quite early pictures from Courbet’s childhood when he was fifteen to seventeen.Sunday, September 30, 2012
<figure class=" sqs-block-image-figure intrinsic " style="max-width:338px;"> <div style="padding-bottom:147.63313293457%;" class=" image-block-wrapper has-aspect-ratio "> <img src="http://sschenkenberg.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/198bd-kessler.jpg" alt="kessler.jpg" /><img class="thumb-image" alt="kessler.jpg" /> </div> </figure> </div> Last April, I read an extraordinary review-essay by New Yorker classical music critic Alex Ross about the following book: Journey to the Abyss: The Diaries of Count Harry Kessler, 1880-1918. Ross, one of my favorite cultural writers, told a vivid story of someone with seemingly unlimited reach in European cultural circles, someone who might have breakfast with Rilke, discuss art with Rodin over lunch, spend an early evening looking after a deteriorating Nietzsche, and look ahead to a weekend with Vuillard.Friday, September 28, 2012
Some beauties in this annual competition, which is put on by Design Observer, AIGA, and Designers & Books.Monday, July 30, 2012
“Clever matches between bathing suits and books." Great idea.Monday, July 30, 2012
Today is William Gass’ 88th birthday. For the Big Other website, John Madera asked some writers, readers, and publishers to name their own “literary pillars,” as a tribute to Gass and his “50 Literary Pillars” project from the early 1990s. After being invited to contribute, I went in a slightly different direction.Tuesday, May 29, 2012
As ever, Mod offers smart, forward-looking thoughts on books and publishing. His central question: [I]f so much of what book cover design has evolved into is largely a brick-and-mortar marketing tool, then what place does a ‘cover’ hold in digital books? Especially after you purchase it? But, more tellingly, even before you purchase it? If you’re interested in the questions, you’ll be interested in the entire essay. Recommended.Sunday, May 13, 2012
A member of the Wallace-L listserv posted this Pascal quote this morning, commenting (insightfully) on how it brings to mind many statements DFW made about reading and indeed love: When a natural discourse paints a passion or an effect, one feels within oneself the truth of what one reads, which was there before, although one did not know it. Hence one is inclined to love him who makes us feel it, for he has not shown us his own riches, but ours.Thursday, March 29, 2012
As thoughtful and personal as his previous pieces.Sunday, March 18, 2012
Great piece in The New York Times, with clear-eyed (and entertaining) commentary from a writer and book critic about how technology has improved his reading life. This bit comes from his section on the smartphone: Keep an audio book or two on your iPhone. Periodically I take the largest of my family’s dogs on long walks, and I stick my iPhone in my shirt pocket, its tiny speaker facing up. I’ve listened to Saul Bellow’s “Herzog” this way.