In the Washington Post, Donna Rifkind reviews Chang-rae Lee’s The Surrendered.

Q. What will surprise us?

A. That people in political life–however remote their fame may be in relationship to a 10-year-old kid–have no difficulty embracing the notion that they are on “Billy’s” radar. Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Gerald Ford, Bob Dole, Nancy Reagan, Ralph Reed and many others sign collectible trading cards and 8 x 10 photos for their young fan like they are superheroes.

Washington Post blogger Steven Levingston talks to Bill Geerhart about Little Billy’s Letters: An Incorrigible Inner Child’s Correspondence with the Famous, Infamous, and Just Plain Bewildered.

In the Washington Post, Dennis Drabelle reviews Jonathan R. Cole’s The Great American University: Its Rise to Preeminence, Its Indispensable National Role, Why It Must Be Protected.

Cole’s prescriptions for improving American higher education include a push for more emphasis on the humanities. “The discrepancy between the growth of federal investments in the sciences and the humanities is appalling,” he writes toward the end of the book. “The humanities are essential to our understanding of other languages and cultures, of the values we hold, and of the moral arguments we make. In a world that increasingly depends on such knowledge for both our economic welfare . . . and our national security, the absence of significant programs to improve our grasp of it represents nothing short of a national disaster.”

Ron Charles of the Washington Post reviews Adam Haslett’s Union Atlantic.

In the Washington Post, Patrick Anderson reviews Henry Porter’s The Bell Ringers.

This is a sophisticated, engrossing and important political thriller. Porter wants us to see that the same technological tools that can be used to fight terrorism or to make government more efficient can also, in the wrong hands, be used to destroy freedom. Perhaps Porter’s most important updating of Orwell is to show how corporate money might work with political corruption to create a dictatorship behind a democratic facade.

The appearance in English of this new version of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s best novel, mistranslated as “The First Circle” when it appeared in Britain and America more than 40 years ago, is an exciting literary event that is destined to be little noticed or appreciated in our Twitterized times.

Robert Kaiser of the Washington Post reviews the new version of Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn’s In the First Circle.

Michael Dirda of the Washington Post reviews Umberto Eco’s The Infinity of Lists.

In one of my favorite chapters, Eco describes rhetorical devices, or tropes, used in listmaking, such as asyndeton, the avoidance of conjunctions. For example, I left out “and” when speaking of “schedules, calendars, in-boxes, deadlines, memoranda.” Asyndeton conveys the impression that a series could go on forever. In my immediately following sentence, I employed polysyndeton, in which a conjunction — in this case “or” — appears between each activity mentioned. Such repetition creates a feeling of almost naive breathlessness or awe, as if the writer, overwhelmed by the number of choices, can only point to an item there and another here and still another over there and . . .

In the Washington Post, Jason Goodwin reviews John Burdett’s The Godfather of Kathmandu.

Michael Dirda of the Washington Post reviews Vivant Denon’s No Tomorrow.

Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post reviews Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s The Informers.

It is a novel about many things, all of them interesting and explored by Vásquez with acute moral sensitivity, but at its core is one of the greatest of all literary themes: betrayal.

Michael Dirda of the Washington Post reviews Keith Thomas’s The Ends of Life.

When young, we are all aesthetes, eager to enjoy a wondrous world full of beauty, promise and reward. The experience of life itself seems enough to keep us busy and happy. So we fall in love and go to work and find success or not, and the decades roll by.

In later years, however, we become unwilling philosophers. A parent unexpectedly dies. The now-grown children go off on their own. Work suddenly loses its savor. Before long, we are taking long walks and wondering about the old perplexities: What makes for a meaningful life? How should we pass our too few days upon this Earth? What really matters?

For the Washington Post, Marie Arana interviews Karl Taro Greenfeld.

In the Washington Post, Jonathan Yardley reviews Margaret MacMillan’s Dangerous Games.

When political leaders are ignorant of history, as the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld triumvirate most certainly was, yet seek to employ it toward their own ends, the inevitable result is a distortion of history that is unwitting at best, deliberate at worst. It is easy to find in the past justifications or excuses for doing what one wants. It is rather more difficult to examine the past thoroughly and objectively and to learn whatever lessons it may teach us, however inconvenient they may seem.

In the Washington Post, Jonathan Yardley reviews Ward Just’s Exiles in the Garden.

The Washington Post’s Marie Arana interviews Eduardo Galeano.

Ron Charles of the Washington Post reviews Ron Carlson’s The Signal.

Carlson never drops an extra word or a false phrase, even as “The Signal” accelerates like an avalanche, suspicion rolling into fear and then roaring down with a conclusion that shakes the ground. If men can’t be brought back to fiction by books as fine as this one, it’s their own damn fault.

Ron Charles of the Washington Post reviews Richard Flanagan’s Wanting.

Lady Jane, now widowed, has dedicated her life to defending her late husband’s reputation from reports that he and his crew failed to discover the Northwest Passage and resorted to cannibalism before expiring in a manner unbecoming to British gentlemen. Determined to raise her husband above such ignoble rumors, Lady Jane enlists the help of the age’s most popular writer, Charles Dickens, who not only defends Franklin’s incorruptible British spirit but goes on to write and star in a sensationally popular play about the expedition!

In the Washington Post, Marie Arana reviews Chesa Boudin’s Gringo: A Coming of Age in Latin America.

Eventually, Boudin admits, the American left is the real destination of his journey. “I came to see Latin America,” he writes, “as a prism through which I could better understand my own roots in the radical left in the United States, and the role my country plays in a global society.”

So, there we have it. Though we await desperately needed insights into the promise that has always been Latin America, we get the shaky road map of a callow young man.

In the Washington Post, Michael Dirda reviews Reynolds Price’s Ardent Spirits.

When Auden finally left Oxford, the neat and tidy Price was given a glimpse of the poet’s living quarters: “I looked round at two rooms in a state of disarray that I’d never before seen generated by any human being. And Wystan had only been in residence for two months. The desk, the floors, the tables, and every other surface were inches — if not feet — deep in abandoned books, magazines, clothing, galley proofs, dirty dishes, whatever. My face may have betrayed my literal shock; but Auden only gave a brisk wave above the chaos and said ‘If you’d like to come back later and see if there’s anything you want, by all means do.’”

At the Washington Post, Bob Thompson notes retrenchment in American publishing.

Chiang emerges as a flesh-and-blood man rather than the buffoonish cardboard-cutout figure he has generally been portrayed as. China’s nationalist leader is revealed as a tormented soul, as prone to bursting into tears as into angry tirades, who through force of will conquered his own demons to — as he saw it — lead his people out of colonial oppression and moral decay to forge a strong, unified nation.

The Washington Post has Laura Tyson Li’s review of Jay Taylor’s The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the Struggle for Modern China.

Having recently re-read Richard Wright’s “Black Boy,” I am struck by the parallels and affinities between it and “Closing Time.” As boys both Wright and Queenan were poor, often to the point of having little or nothing to eat; both had bad relationships with their father; both were driven to read at a very early age, read everything they could, and set their hearts on the writing life. It is possible to rise up from poverty, but it takes a rare soul to do so, and a force of will that those of us who are more fortunate are ill-equipped to understand.

Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post reviews Joe Queenan’s Closing Time.

As his power leaves him, Selig writes: “I make lists now of the things I once could do that I can no longer. Inventories of the shrinkage. Like a dying man confined to his bed, paralyzed but observant, watching his relatives pilfer his goods. This day the television set has gone, and this day the Thackeray first editions . . . and tomorrow it will be the pots and pans, the Venetian blinds, my neckties.” In the end, as Shakespeare said long ago, we are left “sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”

Michael Dirda of the Washington Post reviews Robert Silverberg’s Dying Inside, which was recently reissued by Orb.

Michael Dirda of the Washington Post reviews Cambridge University Press’s The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume 1, 1929-1940.

In the Washington Post, Jonathan Yardley reviews Richard Mason’s Natural Elements.

For the Washington Post, Maureen Freely writes about translating Orhan Pamuk’s works.

Michael Dirda of the Washington Post reviews Theodor Storm’s The Rider on the White Horse.

Throughout his fiction Storm repeatedly evokes the beauty of nature, “the sharp odor of the golden tansy blossoms,” the “grieving voices” of sea birds, the “secret music of the summer night.” But he also celebrates the simple pleasures of long ago: “We had jokes and riddles and rhymes at the table; and when they served dessert, we sang all the lovely songs that are now forgotten.” Somehow, he makes this nostalgia avoid the taint of mawkishness. Sometimes, this is through a sudden harsh truth: “For the first time she was facing life directly, in all its barren poverty: it was a path that seemed endless, dry; until, suddenly, it did end: you died.”

Reading is required for any John Updike pilgrimage. That’s not “reading,” as in books, but Reading, as in Pennsylvania. It seems you can’t go a block in this city of about 83,000 without running into one of the author’s old stomping grounds or a scene from one of his books, where often the city is named Alton or Brewer.

For the Washington Post, Ben Chapman takes the tour.

In the Washington Post, Michael Dirda reviews Daniyal Mueenuddin’s In Other Rooms, Other Wonders.

The Complete Review covers the end of the Washington Post’s Book World section.

What compels a man, 63, to run a side business in publishing books mainly of poems, as well as reprints of classics, in the year 2009? Not money.

Ian Shapira of the Washington Post profiles Roger Lathbury, principal of Orchises Press.

I write all my first drafts by hand — not, however, with a quill pen — because there seems to be some kind of symmetry between the muscular movement of my hand and the flow of ideas in my head. That symmetry gets destroyed by a keyboard, which becomes an alien intruder in the dialogue within myself. Lots of friends assure me that I could quickly make the transition to the laptop and enhance my productivity. I’m sure they’re right, but my dirty little secret is that I want to prolong rather than shorten the writing process, since it is my only source of creative fulfillment.

In the Washington Post, Joseph J. Ellis defends putting pen to paper.

For the first time since the NEA began surveying American reading habits in 1982 — and less than five years after it issued its famously gloomy “Reading at Risk” report — the percentage of American adults who report reading “novels, short stories, poems or plays” has risen instead of declining: from 46.7 percent in 2002 to 50.2 percent in 2008.

Bob Thompson at the Washington Post covers the report.

[The novel] moves along fast and offers some vivid writing. But it’s more annoying than pleasing. The problems include too many wisecracks, too much profanity, too many “colorful” characters and a general feeling that the author is trying too hard.

In the Washington Post, Patrick Anderson reviews Ira Berkowitz’s Old Flame.

In the Washington Post, Patrick Anderson reviews Simon Lewis’s Bad Traffic.

It has been Jian’s habit, since his days as a Red Guard, to recite the sayings of Chairman Mao as he goes into battle. Thus: “He watched the peasant scuttle forlornly away. He rubbed earth on his face and over the hammer, so that they didn’t shine, and put the hooded top over his football shirt and pulled the hood up. He mumbled ’surmount every difficulty to win victory,’ and set off down the track.”

With book sales in a general free fall, bookstores — large and small — closing around the country, and library and school budgets slashed, the publishing industry is now feeling the same pain as the rest of the economy. Small presses and university presses are not exempt from the squeeze; in the end, it comes down to income and profit, and as consumers find themselves short of cash, publishers are discovering the hard way that the fat years are over. It can’t be business as usual. The business as it has been run since Kerouac poured his novel onto a massive roll of paper stopped making financial sense long ago. Change is here to stay, even if we don’t yet know what those changes will be.

For the Washington Post, André Bernard describes the mood in the book publishing industry.

Michael Dirda at the Washington Post offers advice on book giving.

9. Support the midlist. Many good novelists, most poets and nearly all scholars sell only a few thousand copies of their books, if they’re lucky. Blockbuster titles and brand-name authors will always be with us, but the books that matter in the long run, the books that will truly speak to our very innermost being, can easily be overlooked. Browse through the fiction shelves. Pause at the poetry section. Buy a few of these books, and you’ll be a patron of the arts.

Michael Dirda of the Washington Post reviews The World Is What It Is, Patrick French’s biography of V. S. Naipaul.

. . .according to French and such one-time friends as Paul Theroux, the young Vidia really could be humorous and charming, and he seems to have been the indulged pet of the English literary and social establishment. On his travels, surprisingly, Naipaul also shows a rare ability to win the confidence and help of other people — not that he is a person one could ever actually trust.

Ron Charles of the Washington Post reviews José Saramago’s Death with Interruptions.

The story opens at the start of a new year in a small, unnamed modern country. As is typical of the allegorical universalism in much of Saramago’s work, we never get a precise location or time period. The frenetic, amiable narrator refers to characters only by each one’s generic function: e.g. prime minister, mother, editor. All of them are confronting the most unusual nonevent in human history: “No one died. . . . New year’s eve had failed to leave behind it the usual calamitous trail of fatalities, as if old atropos with her great bared teeth had decided to put aside her shears for a day.”

In the Washington Post, Sir Ian Kershaw contrasts the writing of history with the writing of fiction.

One of the most frustrating feelings I experience when I sit in front of a computer screen before I start writing is knowing that I have to put words onto the empty space and that I am the only person who can do this.

Ron Charles of the Washington Post reviews Ron Rash’s Serena.

Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post reviews John le Carré’s A Most Wanted Man.

The anti-American note struck there is not new to le Carré — it has coursed through his work much as it did in the fiction of Graham Greene — but it is expressed in A Most Wanted Man with special virulence. No doubt this reflects the author’s opposition to innumerable aspects of recent American foreign policy, but he seems neither to know nor to care that many Americans share that opposition.

In the Washington Post, Ron Charles reviews Per Petterson’s To Siberia.

The Washington Post lists the authors who will appear at the National Book Festival on Saturday, 27 September.

Michael Dirda of the Washington Post reviews Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog.

. . .halfway through [the novel], the lives of Paloma and Madame Michel are unexpectedly transformed. A Japanese gentleman named Kakuro Ozu buys a vacant apartment. Though clearly rich, he is also immensely courteous and shrewd, and immediately perceives that neither the little girl nor the concierge is just what she seems. Before long, Monsieur Ozu is gently contriving some little tests to discover more about their secret lives. And this leads to developments that range from the comic to the touching to the heartbreaking.

Michael Dirda of the Washington Post reviews Julian Barnes’s Nothing to Be Frightened Of.

The Washington Post has Carolyn See’s review of Xiaolu Guo’s Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth.

In the Washington Post, Patrick Anderson reviews Jonathan Segura’s Occupational Hazards.

Kay Ryan is now the poet laureate of the United States.

He’s produced 11 volumes of novels and short stories, but he lives in western Australia, one of the remotest parts of the world. People don’t know about him. They don’t know what they’re missing.

Writing for the Washington Post, Carolyn See reviews Tim Winton’s Breath.

The reader knows at the outset that Poland and France soon will fall and that millions will die, including many of those whom we meet in these pages, and Furst means us to feel frustration and anger as the prevailing idée fixe opens the way to Hitler’s acts of aggression.

Jonathan Yardley at the Washington Post reviews Alan Furst’s The Spies of Warsaw.

Ron Charles at the Washington Post reviews Jeffrey Lewis’s Adam the King.

F. Scott Fitzgerald (a Princeton man) set the bar high for anyone who wants to luxuriate in the tragedy of excess wealth and shattered dreams. In his best novels and short stories, the language is so lovely that you don’t mind or even notice how really silly the plots are, how insufferable the characters. Lewis can’t match that poetic style, but his novels have an elegance of their own, sparked with wit and marinated in nostalgia.

Ron Charles at the Washington Post reviews György Dragomán’s The White King.

Michael Dirda of the Washington Post reviews Patrick McGrath’s Trauma.

Beautifully crafted and paced, Trauma can be viewed as either a superb psychological thriller or as a masterly evocation of modern alienation and despair — assuming, of course, there is any difference.

Book collectors might be presumed to be among the happiest of mortals. There, in the evening, they sit contentedly in soft easy chairs, beneath pools of warm lamplight, surrounded by their libraries — row after serried row of beautiful or rare volumes, all the great works of scholarship and the human imagination.

At the Washington Post, Michael Dirda reviews Alberto Manguel’s The Library at Night.

Jason Wilson at the Washington Post reveals the discovery of a musty literary liqueur.

My brother Tyler and I sometimes play a game we call Liquor Store Archaeology. . . .

Tyler became the clear victor not too long ago when he turned up something called, somewhat disturbingly, Peanut Lolita, a thick, peanut-flavored liqueur that once was produced by Continental Distilling in Linfield, Pa.

Jonathan Yardley at the Washington Post reviews Gordon S. Wood’s The Purpose of the Past: Reflections on the Uses of History.

Jonathan Yardley at the Washington Post reviews Antonio Skarmeta’s The Dancer and the Thief. On The Diane Rehm Show guest host Susan Page interviews the Chilean author.

At the Washington Post, Janice P. Nimura reviews Yoko Ogawa’s The Diving Pool.

These three quiet novellas, composing the first of Yoko Ogawa’s books to be translated into English, share an eerie quality of nightmare, the precarious sense that beauty and distress are equally possible at any moment.

Ron Charles of the Washington Post reviews Peter Carey’s His Illegal Self.

At the center of the story is a precocious 7-year-old boy named Che. The child of ’60s radicals and the subject of one of the decade’s most sensational news photos, he was placed in the custody of his Park Avenue grandmother at the age of 2 and raised in strict isolation in upstate New York. “She planned to bring him up Victorian,” Carey writes. No television: no chance of seeing images of his infamous parents being escorted away by police. But the boy picks up stray details from a teenage neighbor who regales him with stories about the SDS, the Weathermen and his namesake, Che Guevara. He shows the boy a picture of his father from Life magazine. “You got a right to know,” he tells him. “Your father is a great American. . . . They will come for you, man. They’ll break you out of here.”

Russell Banks’s latest novel, The Reserve, gets a lukewarm review from Ron Charles at the Washington Post and a negative one from Michiko Kakutani at the New York Times.

The Washington Post’s Book World has bungled its annual list of one hundred remarkable books. How many entries could one need for ABC? Would Paul Auster not be rather shocked to discover that he had written Stalin’s Ghost?

At the Washington Post, Shashi Tharoor reviews Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.

Neoliberal capitalism, [Klein] argues, thrives on catastrophe: Not only are fortunes made from the misfortunes of the masses, but the global dominance of free-market capitalism is built on the infliction of disasters on the world’s less fortunate.

Ron Charles at the Washington Post reviews Ha Jin’s A Free Life.

Michael Dirda at the Washington Post reviews a new translation of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace.

Ron Charles at the Washington Post reviews Stephane Audeguy’s The Theory of Clouds.

We need more fiction featuring librarians.

The Washington Post is running a preview of events at this year’s National Book Festival.

The Washington Post has a piece on the persistence of incorrect information.

The Washington Post has a review by Jim Krusoe of Percival Everett’s The Water Cure.

The narrator of The Water Cure is a man whose 11-year-old daughter has been raped and killed. He now is in the process of torturing her murderer, but this, as they say, is only the tip of the iceberg.

Book World at the Washington Post states that “Michael Dirda is on vacation this month.” It shows.

Robert Kaiser of the Washington Post reviews Larry Berman’s Perfect Spy: The Incredible Double Life of Pham Xuan An, Time Magazine Reporter and Vietnamese Communist Agent.

At the Washington Post, Art Taylor reviews recent mystery novels.

Rick Moody’s latest book, a collection of three novellas titled Right Livelihoods, gets a positive review at the Washington Post and a negative one at the New York Times.

The Washington Post has a review of Mark Slouka’s The Visible World.

It is a rare thing for a novel to split open the illusion of narrative–like one of those 17th- century anatomical drawings where the corpse helpfully holds back the flaps of his own stomach–to reveal the underlying mechanics of creation, memory and desire.

The Washington Post has a review by Michael Collins of Andrew Wilson’s The Lying Tongue.

Christopher Byrd at the Washington Post reviews Dinaw Mengestu’s The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears.

Michael Dirda at the Washington Post reviews The Other Side of You by Salley Vickers.

The Washington Post has a review of Jeffrey Rosen’s The Supreme Court: The Personalities and Rivalries That Defined America.

The Washington Post has an article about a reading program in which students earn points that are meant to act as an incentive.

Under the formula, the complicated and violent “Macbeth” earns a reader four points, and the Nancy Drew mystery “The Picture of Guilt” is worth five points. Michael Crichton’s “Jurassic Park” is worth 20 points; Tom Clancy’s voluminous “Executive Orders,” 78 points.

“Macbeth,” the story of a man’s lust for power, is given a book level of 10.9, meaning that it is understandable by 10th or 11th grade. Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “Beloved,” which depicts a mother choosing to kill her daughter rather than see her enslaved, is given a book level of 6.0, appropriate for sixth grade. It is worth 15 points.

Stef Penney has won the Costa Book of the Year Award for The Tenderness of Wolves.

The Washington Post has a review of Elisabeth Ladenson’s Dirt for Art’s Sake: Books on Trial from Madame Bovary to Lolita.

Colbert I. King’s hard-hitting editorial at The Washington Post is well worth reading.

The documented portrayal of my bloodline isn’t easily forgotten. Those relatives of mine were considered legal property, which explains why they were listed by name, with individually assigned monetary value, among the inventory of farm implements, barnyard animals and other Colbert-owned assets.

“Get over it.” Not likely.

Michael Dirda at the Washington Post reviews John Haffenden’s William Empson Volume II: Against the Christians.

This is the second, and final, volume of John Haffenden’s monumental biography of the 20th century’s most dazzling and original literary critic.

. . .

William Empson: Against the Christians is even better than Haffenden’s first volume, rich in anecdote and scandal, with superb summaries of the difficult later criticism, and honestly affectionate.

Jonathan Yardley at The Washington Post reviews Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games.

The enthusiasm with which the venerable firm of HarperCollins is promoting this massive deadweight of a novel, and the money that it’s putting where its mouth is, leaves one to ponder once again the eternally mysterious ways of the book-publishing industry.

Libraries in my area and across the country are scrambling to get rid of books. An article in the Washington Post reads:

. . .thousands of novels and nonfiction works have been eliminated from the Fairfax County collection after a new computer software program showed that no one had checked them out in at least 24 months.

. . .

Like Borders and Barnes & Noble, Fairfax is responding aggressively to market preferences, calculating the system’s return on its investment by each foot of space on the library shelves–and figuring out which products will generate the biggest buzz. So books that people actually want are easy to find, but many books that no one is reading are gone–even if they are classics.

The mind reels. Someone somewhere must have said: “The public library is a superb institution, a place of knowledge, discovery, preservation, a place of life, a place of liberty. It is nearly perfect. The only way in which we could possibly improve it is to make it more like Wal-Mart.” Someone else, nay, a whole board of someones, must have agreed.

I have always deeply respected the American Library Association for its commitment to excellence and its strong ethical and legal stance. Surely, then, this cannot become a truly national problem. Surely, then, some sense will trickle down from on high. The Post article continues:

“I think the days of libraries saying, ‘We must have that, because it’s good for people,’ are beyond us,” said Leslie Burger, president of the American Library Association and director of Princeton Public Library. “There is a sense in many public libraries that popular materials are what most of our communities desire. Everybody’s got a favorite book they’re trying to promote.”

Again, the mind reels. Read the article and the delicious backlash it prompted. Be aware of attempts to do this to your library.

The Washington Post has an article on how the hideous shorthand that makes instant messaging so unbearable is seeping into students’ papers.

The Washington Post has a review of William Julius Wilson and Richard P. Taub’s There Goes the Neighborhood: Racial, Ethnic, and Class Tensions in Four Chicago Neighborhoods and Their Meaning for America. The reviewer concludes of the authors’ work that:

Their careful and convincing summary of research carried out in Chicago during the mid-1990s paints a picture of social intolerance and bad faith that makes wasting away on a desert island sound like a pretty reasonable alternative to scraping out a living in today’s contentious American cities and suburbs.

The Washington Post is running a review of The Classical World: An Epic History from Homer to Hadrian.

The Washington Post is running a review of I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg.

The Washington Post is running a review of Against the Day, reclusive author Thomas Pynchon’s new novel.

The Washington Post is running a review of Richard Ford’s The Lay of the Land that, while mostly positive, touches on a few of the strangely anachronistic quirks of a Ford novel.

It’s probably time we all just accepted that Ford isn’t going to do anything about certain tics, such as his jarring references to “Negroes” and “Chinamen” (as if he were writing in 1961), or the manner in which his interlocutors constantly address each other by name when conversing. (Does anybody really do that outside of novels and infomercials?)

Stephen King is getting some surprising praise, such as that below from a review in today’s Washington Post, for his new novel Lisey’s Story.

. . .King has crashed the exclusive party of literary fiction, and he’ll be no easier to ignore than Carrie at the prom. His new novel is an audacious meditation on the creative process and a remarkable intersection of the different strains of his talent: the sensitivity of his autobiographical essays, the insight of his critical commentary, the suspense of his short stories and the psychological terror of his novels.

At last month’s National Book Festival, Bob Woodward found himself in a fix.

“Even though [State of Denial] was being sold in stores, even though the whole embargo was broken, he was legally bound not to speak about his own book,” says Book World’s editor, Marie Arana, who had the unenviable task of breaking the news to the crowd. “It was the apex of the ridiculous extreme that an embargo can go to.”

Recommended with reservations.

The Washington Post has a review by Martin Kettle of Michael Isikoff and David Corn’s Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War.

The print edition of The Washington Post is carrying a scan (p. A14) of a short hand-written letter that disgraced Representative Mark Foley (R-FL) sent to a former page. What struck me, rather than the creepy tone of the note, was the preponderance of errors. Have we really set the bar this low?

Today’s Washington Post carries a review by Ron Charles of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Apparently the novel “follows two of the last people on Earth, an unnamed man and his young son, as they walk through an incinerated wasteland foraging for food and hiding from gangs of starving cannibals.” If you have a friend or relative who knits sweaters and socks with kittens on them and foists these items off as gifts, then you clearly need to hop on Amazon right now and return the favor by sending her a copy of The Road.

The Washington Post has a review of Ian Buruma’s Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance.

An article by Jonathan Yardley at The Washington Post on Robert Hughes’s memoir Things I Didn’t Know bears this refreshing conclusion:

Hughes is, by his own rather defiant declaration, “completely an elitist, in the cultural but emphatically not the social sense.” He is, “after all, a cultural critic, and my main job is to distinguish the good from the second-rate, pretentious, sentimental, and boring stuff that saturates culture today.” He quite properly refuses to apologize for this: “I am no democrat in the field of the arts, the only area–other than sports–in which human inequality can be displayed and celebrated without doing social harm.”

The Washington Post is running a review by Alan Wolfe of Ray Suarez’s The Holy Vote: The Politics of Faith in America. After some initial misgivings, Wolfe finds that the book handles its subject well.

Suarez, who identifies himself as a deeply religious person without giving specifics about his own faith, is offended by the Christian right’s efforts to identify their country with their faith, and he has no problem saying so. The result is a powerful reaffirmation of America’s greatest contribution to human liberty: the separation of church and state.

Jerome Karabel, a professor of sociology at Berkeley, reviews The Price of Admission: How America’s Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges–and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates at The Washington Post.

The Washington Post has a positive review of T. Christian Miller’s Blood Money: Wasted Billions, Lost Lives, and Corporate Greed in Iraq.

The Washington Post’s Marie Arana has compiled a list of the upcoming season’s highly anticipated titles.

Today’s “Book World” in the Post was a little sparse, a condition to which I have sadly resigned myself. The most interesting bit was a short (part of a ho-hum roundup of recent mysteries) review of Poppy Z. Brite’s Soul Kitchen. Some time ago, in graduate school, a friend handed me a Poppy Z. Brite paperback. I read it in little fits in my kitchen (with the blinds drawn–it had one of those horror/fantasy covers that would make someone carrying a trashy romance around look sophisticated) as a respite from weighty literary theory texts and found it not to my taste. Even though the book wasn’t my thing, I got the strong sense that Poppy was interesting and, er, bright, an impression long since reinforced by posts at her blog. I have not read her series of New Orleans semi-mysteries, but I think that I will place the first in the queue.

A new book by two Beltway veterans laments a sidetracked Congress. The Washington Post’s review succinctly summarizes the authors’ approach:

The authors are members of what, sadly, may be a disappearing breed in Washington: independent-minded, knowledgeable experts whose concern for process is stronger than their desires for particular outcomes. They are means guys in an age dominated by ends. And they most emphatically do not believe that any particular end justifies craven or extra-legal means.

The Washington Post article on “chick lit” moves from a dead-on opening (below) to a bizarrely half-hearted defense of the genre.

You can spot a chick-lit book a mile away. Pastel cover? Check. Obligatory graphic of baby carriage, Christian Louboutin stiletto, engagement ring or all of the above? Check.

The lukewarm defense is repeated throughout the four capsule reviews contained in the article, but its juxtaposition–the first book is described as having a “featherweight plot,” the second is “pretty cheesy,” the third is “a little dull,” and the fourth is possessed of “fluffy moments”–seems to make it clear that an author who knew better was asked to write a positive article on the genre.

A Washington Post article carries the following cogent but low-key defense of speculative fiction:

All fiction begins with the question “what if?”–as in “What if a bunch of pilgrims set out on the road to Canterbury and told stories along the way?” or “What if a governess discovered that her handsome, brooding boss has stashed his crazy wife in the attic?” or (unfortunately) “What if Adam Sandler got his hands on a remote control that could fast-forward time itself?” Speculation is at the heart of the enterprise, and sci-fi and fantasy are merely its logical outcomes.

Why is summer seen as the time to charge fearlessly onto the public stage with a stack of “guilty pleasure” books under one’s arm?

Yet another article, this one at The Washington Post, serves up the genre fiction:

Unlike many other genre series, mysteries are often better the second, third or 15th time out. The best authors deepen their detectives, turn caricature sketches into character studies and hone familiar rhythms until a P.I. or an amateur sleuth feels like an old friend. Their cities evolve from generic backgrounds into bas-relief; supporting characters evolve from human props to essential sidekicks with their own inner lives.

When fame finally came to him–fame, that is, in the tiny, hermetic world of American literary fiction and its great sideshow, the lecture-and-workshop circuit–Maryann didn’t much like what it turned him into: “the Important American Writer.”

Read the rest of the article at The Washington Post.

The Washington Post has a transcript of its recent live online discussion with Ron Suskind, the author of The One Percent Doctrine.

Reviewing White Ghost Girls, Judy Fong Bates writes:

“What can you give me?” is the opening line of Alice Greenway’s debut novel, White Ghost Girls . For Kate, the adolescent narrator of the story, this is a question with no satisfactory answer, one that resonates with urgency and vulnerability as she recounts the painful summer of 1967 when her world spun out of control.

Kate and her older sister, Frankie, are Americans, living with their parents in Hong Kong, a safe place for the family yet close enough for regular visits from their father, who works as a war photographer in Vietnam. Their beautiful but distant mother has chosen to follow her husband to Hong Kong, fearing that if she remained in the United States, he might find a mistress or become addicted to war itself.

Read the rest of the review at The Washington Post.

On Gatsby’s Girl Ron Charles writes:

Exhuming a character buried in a famous novel sounds like a late-night violation of sacred ground, but if someone talented does the digging, who can resist the temptation to see what’s there?

Read the rest of the article at The Washington Post.

I enjoyed Al Gore’s earlier book on environmental issues and railed against the mudslinging that unfairly tarnished it slightly (type ‘”al gore” unabomber’ into Google to see what I mean). I plan to pick up his latest, which by all accounts is a clear presentation of the scientific evidence for global warming, when I return to the States.

Resources:

• Buy An Inconvenient Truth (Paperback) at Amazon.com
• Read about Al Gore at The Washington Post

In “The Da Vinci Clones,” Brigitte Weeks writes:

What should we call a large group of conspiracy theorists? A British reviewer wryly suggests “a connivance.” There are certainly enough writers in pursuit of Mary Magdalene’s supposed French descendants to make up a large connivance. Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code has sold more than 40 million hardcover copies in 44 languages, and conspiracy mavens will be hard-put to imagine it is coincidence that two related novels are appearing in the same season that finally sees the paperback publication of The Da Vinci Code and the premiere of a movie version.

Read the rest of the article at The Washington Post.