We both, Vasili Ivanovich and I, have always been impressed by the anonymity of all the parts of a landscape, so dangerous for the soul, the impossibility of ever finding out where that path you see leads — and look, what a tempting thicket! It happened that on a distant slope or in a gap in the trees there would appear and, as it were, stop for an instant, like air retained in the lungs, a spot so enchanting — a lawn, a terrace — such perfect expression of tender, well-meaning beauty — that it seemed that if one could stop the train and go thither, forever, to you, my love ... But a thousand beech trunks were already madly leaping by, whirling in a sizzling sun pool, and again the chance for happiness was gone.

This short story appears in The American Idea.

Cloud, Castle, Lake | Vladimir Nabokov | June 1941 | The Atlantic

Gold Star.

Last night Doris Lessing, aged 88, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. In her acceptance speech she recalls her childhood in Africa and laments that children in Zimbabwe are starving for knowledge, while those in more privileged countries shun reading for the 'inanities' of the internet.

All done. I could take the rest of the month off now, to read.

Doris Lessing's acceptance speech for her Nobel Prize for Literature

Imagine a library that collected all the world's information about all the world's books and made it available for everyone to view and update. We're building that library.

The Open Library (Open Library)

“You gave your life to become the person you are right now. Was it worth it?”

This is the tale of the failed love affair in the heart of many who have embraced America and felt horrified by its post-9/11 transformation.

Booklist gave it a starred review:

Presented in the form of a monologue, which is a difficult technique to manage in a novel because the author has to ensure plausibility while guarding against monotony, Hamid's second novel succeeds so well it begs the question--what other narrative format than a sustained monologue could have been as appropriate? Generally, this is a 9/11 novel or, rather, a post-9/11 one. But to see it on its own terms, which, because of its distinctive scenario, is impossible not to do, it eludes categorization. A young Pakistani man, educated at Princeton and employed in a highly prestigious financial-analysis firm in New York, was about to start a brilliant career and had fallen for a young woman whose commitment to him, it must be admitted, was partial and elusive when the terrorist attacks occurred. Answering to his own conscience, he could not remain in the U.S. By the pull of his true personal identity, he must return to Pakistan, despite his reluctance to leave the enigmatic but beguiling young woman behind. From the perspective of a few years later, the young man relates his American experiences to an American man he meets in a cafe, whose visit to Lahore may or may not have to do with the young man's recent anti-American activities. This novel's firm, steady, even beautiful voice proclaims the completeness of the soul when personal and global issues are conjoined.

It is recently reviewed in Tehelka, "India's leading weekly independent newspaper":

Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid’s provocative new novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, is as much about America as it is about Islam. It makes one rethink the meaning of fundamentalism, writes Salil Tripathi.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist, by Mohsin Hamid

Ideas are abstract. They become books only when they are clothed with people and narrative.
--V.S. Naipaul

Compare with the Louis Kahn quote from yesterday.

The long way round | V.S. Naipaul

The word “scrotum” does not often appear in polite conversation. Or children’s literature, for that matter. Yet there it is on the first page of “The Higher Power of Lucky,” by Susan Patron, this year’s winner of the Newbery Medal, the most prestigious award in children’s literature.

Sammy told of the day when he had drunk half a gallon of rum listening to Johnny Cash all morning in his parked '62 Cadillac, then fallen out of the car when he saw a rattlesnake on the passenger seat biting his dog, Roy, on the scrotum.

I am reminded of Manohla Dargis's review of 'The Polar Express':

Tots surely won't recognize that Santa's big entrance in front of the throngs of frenzied elves and awe-struck children directly evokes, however unconsciously, one of Hitler's Nuremberg rally entrances in Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will." But their parents may marvel that when Santa's big red sack of toys is hoisted from factory floor to sleigh it resembles nothing so much as an airborne scrotum.

In the preface to "Style: Toward Clarity and Grace" [2], Joseph Williams writes:

Whether we are readers or writers, teachers or editors, all of us in professional communities must understand three things about complex writing:

* it may precisely reflect complex ideas,
* it may gratuitously complicate complex ideas,
* it may gratuitously complicate simple ideas.

...

Here is an example of the third kind of complexity:

The absence from this dictionary of the a handful of old, well-known vulgate terms for sexual and excretory organs and functions is not due to a lack of citations for these words from current literature. On the contrary, the profusion of such citations in recent years would suggest that the terms in question are so well known as to require no explanation. The decision to eliminate them as part of the extensive culling process that is the inevitable task fo the lexicographer was made on the practical grounds that there is still objection in many quarters to the appearance of these terms in print and that to risk keeping this dictionary out of the hands of some students by introducing several terms that require little if any elucidation would be unwise.
-- From the foreword, Webster's New World Dictionary of the American Language

This means,

We excluded vulgar words for sex and excretion not because we could not find them. We excluded them because many people object to seeing them. Had we included them, some teachers and schoolboards would have refused to let this dictionary be used by their students, who in any event already know what these words mean.

You'll also find the above excerpt discussed in American Lexicography, 1945-1973, an article by Clarence Barnhart, published in American Speech in the summer of 1978. (Subscription required for access to full text.)

With One Word, Children’s Book Sets Off Uproar

This is a neat site.

What is LibraryThing?

Enter what you're reading or your whole library—it's an easy, library-quality catalog. LibraryThing also connects you with people who read the same things.

What's good?

* Searches Amazon, the Library of Congress and 60 other world libraries.
* Get recommendations. Connect to people with similar libraries.
* Tag your books as on Del.icio.us and Flickr.
* Put your books on your blog.
* Export your data. Import from almost anywhere too.

If you want to explore the site, try the zeitgeist and the BookSuggester. For example: enter From Dawn to Decadence and you'll get a recommendation for The Metaphysical Club.

LibraryThing | Catalog your books online

The Book Review has selected this list from books reviewed since the Holiday Books issue of Dec. 4, 2005. (The 10 Best Books of 2006 will be released on the Web on Nov. 29.)

Here is my selection:

Against the Day, by Thomas Pynchon

IN “Against the Day,” his sixth, his funniest and arguably his most accessible novel, Thomas Pynchon doles out plenty of vertigo, just as he has for more than 40 years.

Where to begin? Where to end? It’s both moot and preposterous to fix on a starting point when considering a 1,085-page novel whose setting is a “limitless terrain of queerness” and whose scores of characters include the doomed Archduke Franz Ferdinand, a dog who reads Henry James, the restless progeny of the Kieselguhr Kid and a time-traveling bisexual mathematician, not to mention giant carnivorous burrowing sand lice, straight out of “Dune,” that attack passengers of desert submarines — or, rather, subdesertine frigates.

Note that Michiko didn't care for it:

It is a humongous, bloated jigsaw puzzle of a story, pretentious without being provocative, elliptical without being illuminating, complicated without being rewardingly complex.

Suite Française, by Irène Némirovsky

THIS stunning book contains two narratives, one fictional and the other a fragmentary, factual account of how the fiction came into being. "Suite Française" itself consists of two novellas portraying life in France from June 4, 1940, as German forces prepare to invade Paris, through July 1, 1941, when some of Hitler's occupying troops leave France to join the assault on the Soviet Union.

Reading Like A Writer, by Francine Prose

Prose recommends savoring books rather than racing through them, a strategy that “may require some rewiring, unhooking the connection that makes you think you have to have an opinion about the book and reconnecting that wire to whatever terminal lets you see reading as something that might move or delight you.”

“The advantage of reading widely,” she notes, “as opposed to trying to formulate a series of general rules, is that we learn there are no general rules, only individual examples to help point you in a direction in which you might want to go.”

The Places in Between, by Rory Stewart

Rory Stewart's first bo... [ Read More (0.4k in body) ]

100 Notable Books of the Year - The New York Times Book Review

Freeman Dyson's latest review appears in the current issue of the New York Review of Books.

If we wish to understand the phenomenon of terrorism in the modern world, and if we wish to take effective measures to lessen its attraction to idealistic young people, the first and most necessary step is to understand our enemies. We must give respect to our enemies, as courageous and capable soldiers enlisted in an evil cause, before we can understand them.

Religion from the Outside | The New York Review of Books