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Join The Daily Beast’s Book Beast editors for a live chat on Wednesday, 12/12, at 1 p.m. EST, when we’ll talk about our favorite books of the year and help you discover what book to buy for your family and friends.
Come on over!
It is valuable to read a book like Gold once in a while. As E.M. Forster said, a reader must sit down alone and struggle with the writer—and, worst luck, for it takes a long time to read a book. We often choose books we will love for sure, according to our tastes. (“I adore baseball, so I’m guaranteed to love The Art of Fielding.”) Or we rely on award-winners and books already sufficiently praised. (A Visit From the Goon Squad won the Pulitzer, so it must be good.”) There are too many books and too little time.
But we ought to be tested on our critical skills often, lest we fall into complacency. It can be easy to classify Gold in the many different ways it is classifiable, and to justify yourself writing it off. “It is an Olympics book, which is not a topic worthy of serious literature.” “It is sentimental, and that is not worthy of my attention.” “It is about cyclists, and I don’t care for sports.” “It is a tearjerker, and who wants to go through that?”
But reading a book like Gold allows us to struggle with the writer. Why is this particular sentimentality bad? Wuthering Heights is sentimental, and many great novels are. How far can you take pathos? Are all novels featuring a child with advanced leukemia necessarily shamelessly capitalizing on tragedy? What makes schmaltz? A well-equipped critical mind can think more about these questions as the eyes roll over the sentences. Gold is a book that’s hard to submit to, because you’re aware of its contrivances and ways it wants to manipulate you. It is the perfect book to fight against—and in the process, sharpen your critical skills. - Jimmy So
Jimmy posted this over on the nwk book club tumblr and we wanted to share with y’all on nwktumblr because, well, damn! This is a great little contemplative tumblr post.
I wrote one too!
Are you in our book club? First 88 pages are due next Friday, the 13th.
We’re happy to introduce the NWK Tumblr Book Club! (We asked, and you answered!)
After consulting with our brilliant books editor, we selected 5 titles from our “Best Summer Reads of 2012” list. Now it’s up to YOU to pick which of the 5 we read first. We’ll announce your pick later this week, and let’s plan to start reading next week (July 2nd)!
Here are summaries of the 5 books you can vote for:
Trollopian, Dickensian, Balzacian—all should spring to mind when you pick up John Lanchester’s hefty new novel about near present-day London. Set on a typical (and dear reader, atypical in having a writer as gifted as Lanchester tell its story) London street (Pepys Road), he weaves a rich story about the financial collapse and its impact on financier and graffiti artist alike. We’re all connected by capital.
Seating Arrangements by Maggie Shipstead
“Literary thinking relies upon literary memory, and the drama of recognition,” Harold Bloom once wrote. Shipstead’s first novel can be read as an unremarkable Harvard-tinted, golf-club obsessed WASP comedy about a—what else—wedding on a—where else—Cape Cod island. But read past that and it’s clear Shipstead is coming to terms with T.S. Eliot (quoted in the epigraph), Shakespeare, Arthurian legends (chapters include “The Castle of the Maidens” and “The Maimed King”), and other mythologies (“A Centaur” and “The Ouroboros”), and connecting it to the American Camelot. (Even the title “Seating Arrangements” brings to mind the round table.) This is ambitious, but if you grew up in New England, how many times have you sat on your beach chair with The Once and Future Kingand a biography of JFK, purling these mythologies in your sunned head?
There’s a red house over yonder, and just as Jimi Hendrix splintered and exploded the blues while remaining exciting and accessible, Haddon, the author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, has the same tendency on narrative. So it is that the story of Richard, a doctor who invites his sister’s family to stay at his vacation home, is told through the perspectives of eight different people, with almost each paragraph beginning with “Daisy wants happiness…” “Melissa tries to ring…” “Benjamin was crying…” At its best, it resembles a game of “Clue.”
The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker
The rotation of the world begins to slow, and the end of days (at least, of 24-hour days) is written not only as the struggle for survival but also a terrible bummer when 11-year-old Julia tries to maintain her crush on hottie Seth Moreno. This debut novel might sound like a cross between The Lovely Bones and Lar von Trier’s film Melancholia, but the conceit is memorable and there are hilarious moments. “We were not required to squeeze our days into twenty-four little hours. No new law was passed or put into place. This was America.”
Incendiary and the mega-million bestseller Little Beedepended on the driving force of plot, and Gold is the same. But the story of three friends eyeing their last chance at a gold medal in track cycling at the 2012 Olympics (and a daughter battling leukemia) is told like one long episode of Law and Order, with each scene prefaced by a date and setting, even including the hilariously imagined “Death Star, 1:55 p.m.” and “Dagobah System, 12:55 p.m.” alternating with the heartbreakingly real “Pediatric intensive care unit, North Manchester General Hospital, 12:35 p.m.” Cleave is at last completely aware of his reliance of contrived events and emotions, just like in a television drama, and there need not be any shame in it.
To vote, fill out this quick form OR reblog this post with your pick! We’ll annouce your choice later this week and start reading next week (July 2nd)! Also, be sure to follow this Tumblr to be a part of our cool-kids-who-read club! So many exclamation points!It’s happening! Get up in our book club, tumblr! You’ve got a few days to vote and tell us which book we’re reading for July. AND! Make sure to follow the NWK Book Club tumblr for updates, discussion points, questions, #readingfaces, etc.
Hurray! Read the book descriptions above and then go vote! According to our Google form, you all are an average of 8.63 out of 10 on the excitement scale.
Frontpage: Monday, June 18th
1. Obama and Putin to Meet: World leaders talked in Mexico Sunday as a meeting of the G20 nations that will focus on the world economy got underway. President Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin will meet Monday.
2. Markets Rally, Settle After Greece: Investors in Europe sighed and then got back to business after a crucial Greek vote Sunday. Markets showed an early advance Monday, but soon receded as Spanish bond yields topped 7 percent and anxiety over the future of the euro zone continued unabated.
3. Attack on Israel-Egypt Border: At least one Israeli civilian was killed in what officials say was a cross-border attack by gunmen who crossed from Egypt. Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak called it a “disturbing deterioration.”
4. Iran Nuke Talks Begin: There’s not much hope, officials say. World leaders will nonetheless begin two days of meetings with the government of Iran on Monday to try to break the tension surrounding the country’s nuclear program.
5. Egyptian Generals Flex After Vote: No one voted for them. But Egyptian military leaders gave themselves wide-ranging new powers Sunday after the Muslim Brotherhood claimed victory in the country’s presidential election.
Photo by Aaron Jackson / AP Photos:
Empty shelves at the closed Borders bookstore at Penn Plaza in New York in September 2011.
30 whole minutes of Elizabeth Govern (aka Lady Cora from ‘Downton Abbey’) reading from Laura Moriarty’s ‘The Chaperone.’ Your welcome.
Like the story? Here’s our review, with an Amazon link.
Like thousands of other young men and women, my son Edward graduated from college last week. My husband and I spent 21 years raising him and hoping to instill in him a love of learning, a compassionate heart, and a passion and enthusiasm for all he can do.
I was nonetheless in a panic. Have we taught him enough? Has he listened? Has he read enough? Been exposed to enough? Is he independent enough? This may sound like helicopter parenting, but as a full-time working mother my fear was of having given too little, not too much.
He’s not just for kids! Malcolm Jones explores Sendak’s ageless appeal.
[O]ur current political debates are largely impoverished. We hear a lot of shouting past one another, and relatively little engagement with the big questions—including questions of justice and the common good—that people care about. But I believe there is a great hunger for a better kind of politics, and a morally more robust kind of public discourse. The book tries to provoke or inspire such arguments. Whether we can elevate our politics remains to be seen.
![thedailywhat:
Kindle Passage of the Day: The most highlighted passage in all of Kindle Land? It’s Katniss talking about her mom in Catching Fire:
“Because sometimes things happen to people and they’re not equipped to deal with them.”
Not suprisingly, the Hunger Games trilogy accounts for eight of the top 10 most-highlighted Kindle passages. Which begs the question: Readers are taking theHunger Games so seriously that they’re highlighting passages using Kindle?
[amazon]
Cool page.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m3070qSRBR1qzpwi0o1_500.jpg)
Kindle Passage of the Day: The most highlighted passage in all of Kindle Land? It’s Katniss talking about her mom in Catching Fire:
“Because sometimes things happen to people and they’re not equipped to deal with them.”
Not suprisingly, the Hunger Games trilogy accounts for eight of the top 10 most-highlighted Kindle passages. Which begs the question: Readers are taking theHunger Games so seriously that they’re highlighting passages using Kindle?
[amazon]
Cool page.
The Next Time Someone Says the Internet Killed Reading Books, Show Them This Chart
“Remember the good old days when everyone read really good books, like, maybe in the post-war years when everyone appreciated a good use of the semi-colon? Everyone’s favorite book was by Faulkner or Woolf or Roth. We were a civilized civilization. This was before the Internet and cable television, and so people had these, like, wholly different desires and attention spans. They just craved, craved, craved the erudition and cultivation of our literary kings and queens.
Well, that time never existed. Check out these stats from Gallup surveys. In 1957, not even a quarter of Americans were reading a book or novel. By 2005, that number had shot up to 47 percent. I couldn’t find a more recent number, but I think it’s fair to say that reading probably hasn’t declined to the horrific levels of the 1950s.”Full Story: The Atlantic
What are you reading, Internet?
Early in her career, the idea began to get around that she was more than merely human—that she was perhaps a bodhisattva, a living Buddha, born to save her people from suffering. In 1990, after the regime chose to ignore the landslide election victory of her party, the National League for Democracy, it was reported that Buddha statues around the country had begun to weep from the left breast. This was seen by many as confirmation of Suu Kyi’s supernatural provenance, and an indication that sooner or later this tender woman—the left breast indicating the feminine principle, weeping out of pity—was bound to prevail.
Berenstain Bears co-creator Jan Berenstain dies
Jan Berenstain, who with her husband Stan created the Berenstain Bears books that have charmed preschoolers and their parents for 50 years, has died. She was 88.
Mike Berenstain says his mother suffered a severe stroke on Thursday and died Friday without regaining consciousness. She was a longtime resident of Solebury in southeastern Pennsylvania.
The Berestains’ gentle stories of Mama Bear, Papa Bear, Brother Bear and Sister Bear address childhood subjects like coping with new siblings, summer camp and peer pressure.
Stan and Jan Berenstain, both Philadelphia natives, were 18 when they met on their first day at art school in 1941. Stan Berenstain died in 2005.
The first Berenstain Bears book, “The Big Honey Hunt,” was published in 1962. More than 300 titles have been released in 23 languages.
I love these books. Sad.
Part of my childhood has died
The Berenstain Bairs Go To The Funeral.
We live in a society where there’s this idea that you’re either in a long-term relationship or taking steps to get there. But if you read diaries, what you find is, that’s not what a lot of people are doing.
![imwithkanye:
The power of Maurice! [tweet]
He’s not just for kids! Malcolm Jones explores Sendak’s ageless appeal.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m3reovm9zV1qanm80o1_500.png)
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