New Century Reading

Chunkster Challenge

Looks like the Chunkster Challenge has been revived for 2010! I'm all for that--there's something about diving into a long, lovely book that is really blissful.

It starts Feb. 1 for a year. I'm going with the middle of the road level: Do These Books Make My Butt Look Big? Four chunksters of at least 450 pages (525 if they're large-print books) of adult book-length works. No collections of short stories, etc., but fiction and nonfiction are allowed.

Fortunately, I don't have to fully commit to specific books, which is great, since no doubt I'll start some and not finish them. Off the top of my head, I'm leaning towards:

The Children's Book, by A.S. Byatt.

Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel (this year's Booker Prize winner).

Company of Liars, by Karen Maitland (squeaking in at 457 pages).

The Brontes, by Juliet Barker. I've had this on the shelf forever--it's time to take it down and read it, especially since I've been re-reading some of the Bronte novels this year.

Glad this challenge is back!

The 2010 Tournament of Books

One of the great joys of the past couple of springs has been following the Morning News' Tournament of Books. Set up like March madness basketball tournaments, the ToB selects 16 books, brackets them, gets some guest judges, and away they go, with the winner of each round advancing to the next round, with completely subjective reasoning and spirited discussions along the way. This year, for the first time, they've released their "long list", showing the crop that will yield the March madness 16. Of this list, I've followed the old meme and bolded those I've read, italicizing those I want to read/own/have on my library queue.

The Year of the Flood, Margaret Atwood
The Anthologist, Nicholson Baker
Rage, Sergio Bizzio
The Women, T.C. Boyle
Await Your Reply, Dan Chaon
Trouble, Kate Christensen
Little Bee, Chris Cleave
Fever Chart, Bill Cotter
Four Freedoms, John Crowley
Everything Matters!, Ron Currie Jr.
Spooner, Pete Dexter
Homer & Langley, E.L. Doctorow
Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth, Apostolos Doxiadis
The Believers, Zoe Heller
Last Night in Twisted River, John Irving
The Book of Night Women, Marlon James
Under the Dome, Stephen King
The Lacuna, Barbara Kingsolver
Big Machine, Victor Lavalle
Chronic City, Jonathan Lethem
The Golden Mean, Annabel Lyon
Let the Great World Spin, Colum McCann
Ransom, David Malouf
Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel
The City & The City, China Mieville
Manituana, Wu Ming
A Gate at the Stairs, Lorrie Moore
Miles from Nowhere, Nami Mun
Once a Runner, John Parker
Lark and Termite, Jayne Anne Phillips
Generosity, Richard Powers
Inherent Vice, Thomas Pynchon
Wetlands, Charlotte Roche
My Abandonment, Peter Rock
That Old Cape Magic, Richard Russo
Burnt Shadows, Kamila Shamsie
The Help, Kathryn Stockett
Far North, Marcel Theroux
The Alternative Hero, Tim Thornton
Brooklyn, Colm Toibin
Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, Wells Tower
This Is Where I Leave You, Jonathan Tropper
My Bird, Fariba Vafi
The Book of Fathers, Miklos Vamos
The Informers, Juan Gabriel Vasquez
A Short History of Women, Kate Walbert
Half Broke Horses, Jeannette Walls
The Little Stranger, Sarah Waters
Sag Harbor, Colson Whitehead
Lowboy, John Wray

If I had to bet, based only on the ones I've actually read, I'd have a tough time choosing between Toibin's Brooklyn and Walbert's A Short History of Women. But look how many I have waiting for me, and how many I know little about or just am not interested in reading. Surprising to see the Booker's Wolf Hall didn't make the long cut.

Gonna be a great March, I think.

A new look at Anne Frank

When I was 14, I was into the whole idea of diaries and journals. Of course I kept one myself, and whenever I could find books about people who kept diaries, all the better. So imagine my glee at discovering Anne Frank: Diary of a Young Girl. I'd never heard of her, and I knew little about the Holocaust (my dad was a WWII veteran, but in the Pacific battles, so that's mainly what I'd heard about). Frank's diary had a huge impact on me; for months it was all I read. I'd read from beginning to end, then turn back to the beginning and start over. So many things played into my obsession: a young girl, my age, living under those horrendous circumstances; the brutal ending; the diary-keeping itself; and the fact that, in spite of the living conditions, she still felt like I felt as a teenage girl, decades later. One of the worst moments of my high school life was not getting a role when the drama club performed the play. So unfair. I would have been the perfect Anne, I just knew it.

Frank's book has long been treated as a historical document, which of course it is. But Francine Prose makes a case for viewing it as a literary document as well, in her new book Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife. 

She argues--very convincingly--that readers are experiencing the rise of what could have been a major literary talent, and at a very young age. What's more--and I didn't know this, and found it so interesting--after hearing a radio speech that talked about publishing documents after the war, Anne became determined that her diary, up until then a private record, could be such a document. She didn't intend to publish it as the Diary of a Young Girl, but as Het Achterhuis (literally, the "house behind"). To that end, she began revising the earlier parts of the diary. The originally published form used her revisions rather than the original diary entries, but as Prose compares and contrasts, it's clear just what an astonishing leap Frank made in terms of her writing abilities in those two short years, and with what clear, professional eyes she viewed the reviewing process.

Prose goes on to examine how the book found its way into print, including the wonderful story of legendary editor Judith Jones finding it in a rejection pile, flipping through it, then reading it, unable to put it down. Prose also looks at issues that arose during and after publication, not the least of which was the obsessive Meyer Levin's determination to bring it to stage, as long as it was his telling, and the road from book to stage to screen. She discusses in detail the effect that both the play and movie had by using the now-iconic line, "I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart!" as a dramatic finale. In essence, she argues, it softens the blow that Frank's death should have had.

But the diaries did their share of good as well, not only in highlighting that part of the war, but in teaching lessons about anti-Semitism and racism in general. Prose illustrates how groups in countries as disparate as Russia and Guatemala are using the text to teach tolerance and understanding, a legacy Frank surely would have appreciated.

This is an excellent book, filled both with passion and with meticulous documentation. Prose has done a great service to Frank's work, and best of all, it's causing me to revisit this long-ago favorite of mine.

It's Tuesday, where are you?

I'm in Lexington, KY, in the early 1800s, living a life marked by tragedy that will turn me into an enormously unpopular, reviled historical figure.

Mary Todd Lincoln by Jean H. Baker, a deep look at the tumultuous life of Lincoln's wife.