Bookselling, Fiction

Television Killed the Literary Snob

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A popular British TV couple started a book club four years ago, and now “the R&J Book Club accounts for 26% of the sales of the top 100 books in the UK, and Amanda Ross, the club’s creator and book selector, is the most powerful player in British publishing.” Anyone heard of this R&J pick for the summer? It looks interesting.

The Pirate’s Daughter by Margaret Cezair-Thompson (Headline Review). A multi-generational story based on the extraordinary true story of Errol Flynn‘s arrival in 1940s Jamaica. The Pirate’s Daughter follows Ida, a girl who falls for Flynn’s charms. Through the eyes of Ida and her daughter, May, it also tells the story of their home, Jamaica, before and after independence.

(By way of Books, Inq.)

Reading

More on Reading the Bible

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My cousin, blogging at The Cruciform Life, writes about reading the Bible two different ways:

In his lecture (which is well worth listening to), Keller describes two ways of reading the Bible. When we read the Bible diachronically, we read the text “along the chronos…along the timeline of the Bible from Genesis to Revelation, in which case the Gospel (read diachronically) is: Creation, Fall, Redemption, Restoration.” We might also read the Bible synchroncially that is “across the grain…you can look at it topically: what does the Bible say about God?…about sin?”…etc. If you read the Bible in this way, says Keller, “the Gospel is: God, Sin, Christ, Faith, not works.” Keller argues that “you’ve got to read the Bible both ways.”

I recently found a second confirmation of this “both/and” view in Paul David Tripp’s new book A Quest for More: Living for something bigger than you. . . .

How do you read the Bible? I keep wanting to read it through from cover to cover, and I keep failing to discipline myself to do it. Most recently, I’ve picked a book to read through, sometimes repeating parts of it. But I recognize that I need the discipline of regular Bible reading, regardless my approach.

Fiction, Non-fiction

History Being What One Makes It

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Patrick Buchanan has written a historical argument on WWII. Adam Kirsh reviews it for the NY Sun, comparing it to Nicholson Baker’s “Human Smoke.”

When they look back to the 1930s, Mr. Baker’s role models are the Quakers and pacifists who believed it was better to lie down for Hitler than take up arms to fight him; Mr. Buchanan’s are the isolationists who believed that Nazi Germany was a necessary bulwark against the real menace, godless communism. But the net result of their lucubrations is the same. Both men have written books arguing that World War II, far from being “the good war” of myth, was an unnecessary folly that Britain and America should never have engaged in. And both have zeroed in on Winston Churchill as the war’s true villain — an immoral, hypocritical, bloodthirsty braggart whose fame is a hoax on posterity.

But where Mr. Baker’s book can be, and in most quarters has been, dismissed as the ignorant blundering of a novelist who wandered far out of his depth, Mr. Buchanan’s book is more dangerous.

By way of Frank Wilson, who comments on factory life.

What is this about Churchill being a villain? Here’s a bit of his argument for the war: Continue reading History Being What One Makes It →

Fiction

What Is the Map For?

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Seriously, why do fantasy novels have maps in the front? Johan Jönsson writes about it.

The very idea that maps and fantasy belong together is of course a cliché in itself. Maps of St. Petersburg and Russia would not make much of a difference to a reader of Crime and Punishment even if the person in question had never even heard of Eastern Europe before, and the idea of a map of Britain in a novel by Jane Austen is laughable. A bleak way to look on the phenomenon is that the map is there as a crutch to help our understanding of our beloved heroes’ travels on their world-saving quest, or so that we can understand the strategic movements of armies of good or of evil. This would support the idea of the conservative fantasy reader who wants what he or she knows and who is only comfortable with innovation of the genre as long as it is kept within well-defined boundaries.

Addendum: Strange Maps. (I may have seen this before. In fact, Lars may have blogged on it, but I forget now.)

Reading

Rich Language

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By way of Frank Wilson, here are a couple posts from Patrick Kurp of Anecdotal Evidence. First, he reads mostly poetry and non-fiction lately, in part because he can’t hack bad modern fiction. Second, he describes a “theology of language.”

Uncategorized

Caveat elector

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One of these days I’ll get around to writing about books in this space again. My problem right now is that I’m reading a very long book which I find amazingly boring. So you have my review of that book to look forward to eventually (perhaps sometime in August). Until then, I blog on whatever catches my fancy. Or my plain.

I say “plain” because I was looking at a wall calendar I got from Half Price Books last winter. It’s a freebie, and worth that price. Instead of pretty pictures, it features monthly calendars on both the top and bottom panels (to save paper), along with tips on how to live in a more environmentally friendly manner. Continue reading Caveat elector →

Publishing

John S. Zinsser Jr., Populist

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“He believed ardently in [Reader’s] Digest’s populist mission of making well-written books with strong stories and interesting characters available to people who might not otherwise be readers,” Stephen Zinsser said of his father, John S. Zinsser Jr., who was editor of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. Zinsser died on May 27.