Review This Online

We bring in the New Year with a Omnivoracious bookshelf from Ben Lukoff, our former colleague over on our music blog, Amazon Earworm (who I believed signed off from Earworm this fall with a post on his "concert experience of a lifetime": a Petula Clark show! Ben loves him some '60s Brit pop--and who can argue with "Downtown"?):

This is one of the seven bookshelves in my apartment: fairly typical in its mix of subjects (almost entirely non-fiction, heavy on the linguistics and philology with a bit of economics, history, and politics--plus some classic comics), but not so in that it is one of only two of those bookshelves shallow enough to only accommodate one row of titles. The book I acquired longest ago is probably Pig-Tail Days in Old Seattle, bought for me by my father at the Seattle Museum of History & Industry gift shop sometime in the early 1980s. Second oldest is The Young Detective's Handbook, which my sister got me for my seventh birthday--I fancied myself a bit of an amateur Sherlock Holmes at the time. Next is The Glory of Their Times, a history of the early days of baseball my dad bought me when I was 10. The latest acquisition is, I think, The Elements of Murder--I've always been fascinated by toxic chemicals. I blame library sales, remainder bins, working at Amazon for over five years, and what used to be an excellent local secondhand-books scene for the fact that I may soon be forced to move to make room for not only the books on the back rows, but the ones filling the boxes in my living room, as well.

See Ben's full bookshelf and links, and contribute your own shelf photo to banner@omnivoracious.com. --Tom

New York Times:

• Sunday Book Review cover: Kathryn Harrison on Diary of a Bad Year by J.M. Coetzee: "What changes for Coetzee’s readers between 'Disgrace' and 'Diary of a Bad Year' is our opinion of the author. In this most recent 'novel,' we are deliberately manipulated by a form that is coy as well as playful, and it’s hard not to conclude Coetzee is more invested in his relationship with his readers than in his characters’ credibility and interactions with one another.... After all, how riveting can fictional entanglements be when compared with the more immediate and real relationship between a writer and his audience."
• Lee Siegel on Modernism by Peter Gay: "If anyone is aware of the complexity of modernist attitudes, it is Peter Gay. He is the country’s pre-eminent cultural historian and the author of masterpieces of social and intellectual reimagining including 'The Enlightenment,' 'Weimar Culture,' 'Freud' and the towering multi-volume study 'The Bourgeois Experience.' Such achievements make it all the more dismaying to find that in this rich, learned, briskly written, maddening yet necessary study, Gay’s formidable syntheses often run aground on lapses of knowledge and judgment."
• Tom Shone on The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved by Judith Freeman: "The author of four novels, Freeman is, you realize, a little more in love with mysteriousness than with mere mysteries, or their resolutions, and while the same could be said for Chandler, who never could keep track of who did what to whom in 'The Big Sleep,' this makes for a woozy kind of book, in which the blurry latitude afforded by long-distance 'obsession' consistently cuts against the more painstaking task of bringing the marriage into any kind of focus."
• Mark Costello on An Ordinary Spy by Joseph Weisberg: "Ruttenberg, the narrator, is a bit like the text, a sutured and negotiated personality. He can view his spying in heroic terms, hoping 'to protect and promote freedom.' But he is, at heart, a company man.... He is a team player for the evil C.I.A., that boogeyman of history. Yet the boogeyman seems to have the office culture of a savings bank in Cleveland. Among its other satisfactions, this book is surely the best portrait of the working C.I.A. we have had in many years."

Washington Post:

• Book World is on a New Year's holiday.

Los Angeles Times:

• Emily Barton on People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks: "Geraldine Brooks has ... half-found and half-invented a swashbuckling book and, despite occasional quirks, woven a tale that's haunting and satisfying. Her Sarajevo Haggadah embodies both the story of the survival of the Jews against terrible odds and the story of all thinking people's relationship to the past."
• Sarah Weinman on Salt River by James Sallis: "When Sallis' characters do make choices ... he doesn't always give the reader a sense of closure. Rather, he invites chaos back in, as when a major character is never seen again, his or her fate left outside the scope of the book.... Conventional crime fiction craves resolution, but by looking inside order's hairline fractures for any fleeting sense of chaos, the author creates a texture that is both comforting and quietly disturbing."

Globe & Mail:

• Greg Gatenby on The Whale Warriors by Peter Heller: "Throughout his book, and especially in the last chapter, Heller questions the morality of the tactics used by Watson, and even, albeit politely, questions his sanity. In other words, while no fan of whaling, Heller remains objective about his subject, and it is that relative aloofness that gives this account its authority. I have hundreds of whale books in my library, but this title easily earns a place among the top 10."

Times Literary Supplement:

• Joyce Carol Oates on Bernard Malamud by Philip Davis: "It is rare that a biographer succeeds in evoking, with a novelist’s skill, such compassion for his (flawed, human) subject; yet more rare, that a biographer succeeds in so drawing the reader into the shimmering world he has constructed out of a small infinity of letters, drafts, notes, manuscripts, printed texts, interview transcripts etc, that the barrier between reader and subject becomes near-transparent."

The New Yorker:

• Joan Acocella on Kahlil Gibran: The Collected Works: "Gibran was familiar with Buddhist and Muslim holy books, and above all with the Bible.... In 'The Prophet' he Osterized all these into a warm, smooth, interconfessional soup that was perfect for twentieth-century readers, many of whom longed for the comforts of religion but did not wish to pledge allegiance to any church, let alone to any deity who might have left a record of how he wanted them to behave. It is no surprise that when those two trends—anti-authoritarianism and a nostalgia for sanctity—came together and produced the sixties, 'The Prophet' ’s sales climaxed."

--Tom