May 13, 2011 ARCHIVES | Entertainment | COLUMNS ISBN NA
Reviewed by Yvonne Zipp
For those who prefer Gutenberg's delivery system to Amazon's, the prospect of replacing all those gorgeous, groaning library shelves with a sterile plastic rectangle is like something out of Orwell. Here are four new books extolling the pleasures of the printed word and how to do justice to it.
1. It's hard to imagine a more compelling argument for pages, spine and glue than Francine Prose's desire to give her childhood copy of "Andersen's Fairy Tales" to her granddaughter. "Perhaps it represents the failure of a weak imagination, but I cannot quite imagine feeling the same way about passing my first e-book down to a new generation," the National Book Award finalist writes in "Bound to Last: 30 Writers on Their Most Cherished Book," edited by Sean Manning (Da Capo; paperback, $15, 95). For Ray Bradbury, it was a copy of Edgar Allan Poe's "Tales of Mystery and Imagination" given to him at age 9; for Anthony Swofford, it was the copy of Albert Camus' "The Stranger" he carried with him (instead of a Bible) as a soldier in Iraq. Joyce Maynard, on the other hand, would give anything to have her father's Bible. "Bound to Last" is a lovely ode to the dog-eared, water-stained, mouse-nibbled pleasures of a real book.
2. If writers writing about their favorite book is enchanting, writers writing about a single word is a little ... quixotic. This was the task set before 77 of them at a literary conference that inspired "The Novelist's Lexicon: Writers on the Words That Define Their Work," edited by Villa Gillet (Columbia Univ., $16.95). Award-winners like A.S. Byatt ("web"), Jonathan Lethem ("furniture") and Colum McCann ("anonymity") all take a run at the gantlet, but more memorable is Etgar Keret's entry on "balagan," a Hebrew word that imbues "total chaos" with a positive vitality: "In a place where people push and shove in line, where children insist on drawing on walls and not on paper, where a briefcase holds stained income tax reports lying between a pastrami sandwich and a piece of graph paper with the beginnings of a poem on it -- that's where you'll find human liberty."
3. A word might be too small to hang a book on, but what about a sentence? New York Times columnist and professor Stanley Fish collects great sentences the way others collect wine, he explains in "How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One" (Harper, $19.99). "Just get the first sentence right, everything else will follow," Fish was advised when writing his first book. In chapters such as "Why You Won't Find the Answer in Strunk & White" and "It's Not the Thought That Counts," he first explains the logic inherent in a sentence and then walks readers through the forms. Most of us may not go as far as Gertrude Stein, who said, "I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences." (Couldn't you just hug her?) But for those who "belong to the tribe of sentence watchers," the fun comes from the examples cited throughout. John Updike, Jane Austen, Elmore Leonard, Herman Melville and Ernest Hemingway are among the greats quoted, but my favorite line comes from Eli Wallach in "The Magnificent Seven": "If God didn't want them sheared, he would not have made them sheep."
4. Los Angeles Times book critic David L. Ulin sat down to help his son with his homework on "The Great Gatsby" and found that he couldn't concentrate long enough to get through the 180-page novel. (This is a pretty gutsy thing for a reviewer to admit.) Ulin joins media critics such as "The Shallows" author Nicholas Carr in decrying our distracted age in "The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time" (Sasquatch, $12.95), which blends memoir and commentary in a way that could use a little more memoir. Still, if even professional bookworms are having trouble reading novels, it might be time for an Internet detox. "To read, we need a certain kind of silence, an ability to filter out the noise," Ulin writes. He's no Luddite; he describes himself as "enchanted" with a friend's iPad. But he's leery of a culture in which we can read 100,000 words a day (the equivalent of a 300-page book), and yet the results are so fragmented that nothing sticks.
Yvonne Zipp frequently reviews books for The Washington Post and the Christian Science Monitor.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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