Books: September 2007 Archive Page

My five-year-old sat and listened for over an hour while I read the first chapter of Gregor the Overlander and the first chapter of The Hobbit.  Earlier that day she had found an old beat-up costume jewelry ring that another kid on the playground said he found in a stream.  When the park time was over, When I asked which she liked better, she handed me Gregor and asked for another chapter. (My nine-year-old son asked for more of The Hobbit, which I read to him when he was five or six... I was impressed that he remembered Smaug's vulnerability.)

When Peter was two or three, I read to him an hour or more each night. Carolyn has always wanted to play with Peter rather than sit still and listen, but now that she is old enough to focus on a story that also interests Peter, I hope we'll be able to have more reading time.

Jennifer Reeger of the Tribune-Review (Pittsgurgh) reports on my colleague's local (Westmoreland County) history book.

"Thank God we do have this beautiful building," said Mike Cary, professor of history and political science at Seton Hill University and an editor of a book on the courthouse's history. "People remember Greensburg -- they remember that dome when they see it from a distance, and it's somehow inspirational for people." The courthouse, completed in 1907 and dedicated in 1908, will be celebrated in upcoming events and a book, "This American Courthouse: One Hundred Years of Service to the People of Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania," scheduled to be released Sept. 14.

Morris Dickstein:

Book review editors often have difficulty convincing their bosses that the news about books is in the books themselves, not in mega-buck contracts, bestseller chitchat, and profiles of famous authors. Truly conscientious reviewers are not exactly a beloved breed: authors sensitive to criticism detest them, publishers would love to coopt them, and academics rarely respect those who write for a wider public, not for other scholars. Yet book reviewing is where talented young critics often get their start. It encourages them to be generalists, keeping in touch with contemporary writing. It forces them to write quickly and clearly and to put flesh on their arguments, eschewing the abstract jargon of many professionals. And it contributes to a cultural conversation otherwise dominated by hot TV shows, blockbuster movies, and media-manufactured celebrities.

[...]

Though it is built on reading and writing, the Internet is seen as the enemy of literature, digging the grave of the printed book. But just as the computer lent new fluency to the act of writing, the Internet has revolutionized literary research, allowing instant access to vast bodies of information that would have required arduous labor only yesterday. It has amplified the reach of print publications by becoming a prime carrier of the printed word, creating a simultaneous worldwide audience for publications great and small, local and national. But the economic crisis afflicting newspapers and magazines, which has battered literary journalism, shows how the Internet is eating away at it own foundations, the printed sources of so much of its real content. The blog will not make up the difference, at least in its unedited form as a spontaneous effusion, a personal diary in shorthand. As Adam Kirsch has written: "Bitesized commentary, which is all the blog form allows, is next to useless when it comes to talking about books. Literary criticism is only worth having if it at least strives to be literary in its own right, with a scope, complexity, and authority that no blogger I know even wants to achieve." (Critical Mass)