This is my first time participating in a Spotlight Series blog tour, and I hope not my last!  What is the Spotlight Series?  It takes the form of blog tours, focusing on small press publishers, their authors, and their books.  The current tour, running from July 18-31, is all about Graywolf Press.  Graywolf Press publishes a wide range of books, from translations to literary criticism to poetry.

Although I already have at least one book (“The Looking House” , poetry by Fred Marchant) published by Graywolf Press, I chose to read and discuss “Burning Down the House” by Charles Baxter. 

 I’m a fan of the books and short stories of Charles Baxter (that I have read so far), but especially “The Feast of Love”.  When I first read “The Feast of Love” which takes place in Ann Arbor, I was also living in Ann Arbor at the time, and so was Charles Baxter.  Then, he was a professor at University of Michigan along with being a writer.  Now he is teaching at the University of Minnesota.  “Burning Down the House” seems to be a product of his professorial requirements.  Neither a novel or short story collection, and subtitled “Essays on Fiction”, it is described on the back cover as “a groundbreaking collection of essays on the craft of writing and the writer’s life“, and “has been enjoyed by readers and taught in classrooms for more than a decade“.  Taught in classrooms?  That explains the frequent textbook-like tone of this book. 

Not having a college literature background (I majored in science instead, unfortunately), I sometimes felt lost during reading these essays — mostly when Mr. Baxter was referring to works of literature (and this was often, I’m afraid) that I have never read.  I still found some thought-provoking  moments.  Some other parts, though, I want to go back to again to absorb a bit deeper in my mind (especially since I had to speed-read the last couple essays; not realizing my post was to go up today rather than a couple days from now).

“Burning Down the House” isn’t really about the “nuts and bolts” of writing, but aims to analyze the various flaws found in contemporary fiction.  The essays include titles such as:

• Dysfunctional Narratives, or: “Mistakes Were Made”
• Against Epiphanies
• Counterpointed Characterizations
• Maps and Legends of Hell: Notes on Melodrama

There were a few quotable gems from this book.  I’m not sure that I can get away with quoting very many of them, so I’ll just include a couple.

From the essay, “Rhyming Action” — which I liked, because Baxter displays more humor in this essay than the rest:

“Contemplating the lives of poets, however, is a sobering activity.  It often seems as if the poets have extracted pity and terror from their work so that they could have a closer firsthand experience of these emotions in their own lives.  A poet’s life is rarely one that you would wish upon your children.  It’s not so much that poets are unable to meet various payrolls; it’s more often the case that they’ve never heard of a payroll.”

But, then, Baxter says in the same essay:

“Prose writers, however, are no better.  Their souls are usually heavy and managerial.  Prose writer of fiction are by nature a sullen bunch.  The strain of inventing one plausible event after another in a coherent narrative chain tends to show in their faces”.

From “Regarding Happiness”, which examines why so much of fiction has unhappiness running through:

“Anyone who has taught literature probably has had….the students in class complain that the texts they have been assigned to study are “depressing.”  The stories are “morbid.”  Their endings are “sad.”  Sometimes the students become more aggressive in the pursuit of good cheer. “Why”, they ask, “can’t we read some novels and stories about happiness?”

Baxter says that “We all understand intuitively that reading about the happiness of others is often boring.”   He also quotes Oscar Levant, who once said, “Happiness isn’t something you experience; it’s something you remember”.

So, it gets me thinking about what great books have been solely about happiness and/or have happy endings.  I can’t think of any off-hand.  I’m sure there are lots of  happy novels, but to me, they are mostly forgettable.  Do you agree?

“Burning Down the House” is a good and thought-provoking collection of essays.  But at the same time, to be fully appreciated,  it requires from the reader more of a literature background than I have.  Still, I think I got enough from this book to think a bit more critically about why certain books might not work for me, and why some books more satisfying than others. 

My version of  ”Burning Down the House” is an Expanded Edition (2008; 233 pages), with a new prologue and two extra essays than the original edition published in 1997.  You may want to keep this in mind if you want to acquire a copy of your own.  To read an excerpt from this book, here is Charles Baxter’s preface at the Graywolf Press site.

Interested in visiting other Spotlight Series tour stops about Graywolf Press books?  Good!  Here is the link that will take you to all the tour stops.

Disclosure: “Burning Down the House” by Charles Baxter was purchased by me.

Well, it seems like I’m moving from one Nick to another Nick.  A couple days ago, I blogged about attending junior high school with Nicholas Sparks.  Today, I’ll discuss Nick Hornby.  I absolutely love reading Nick Hornby’s essays about the books he has read.   I read his first collection of essays, “The Polysyllabic Spree” a while back (that blog post is here).  Recently, I read “Housekeeping vs. the Dirt”.  Hornby’s essay collections are published by McSweeney’s, and currently McSweeney’s is having a “garage sale” of books on their site.  I just ordered the third collection, “Shakespeare Wrote for Money” on sale from them, and can hardly stand to wait to read it.  I still haven’t read any of Hornby’s novels, but that is going to change soon! I have his “About a Boy” in my TBR pile.

“Housekeeping vs. the Dirt” is a collection of Hornby’s essays that were originally published from February 2005 to June/July 2006 in The Believer  magazine. I’ll have to pick up a copy one of these days soon to see what an entire issue is like.  It’s not exactly a magazine that you see at the grocery store, unfortunately.

A portion of Hornby’s most recent column in the magazine (June 2010 issue) is on the site.   If you haven’t read Hornby’s essays yet, this is a good way to get a flavor of what they’re like.

Anyway, back to “Housekeeping vs. the Dirt”.  Even though these essays were written four years ago, they aren’t out of date at this point in time.  Many of the books Nick Hornby discussed then are still on today’s radar.  For example, he discusses both “Persepolis” and “Persepolis 2″; and shares an excerpt of “Persepolis” by Marjane Satrapi.  He makes the interesting point that:

“Satrapi draws in stark black-and-white blocks which bring to mind some of Eric Gill’s woodcuts, and these blocks quickly begin to make perfect sense; in fact, it would be pretty hard not to draw postrevolutionary Iran without them — what with the beards and the robes and the veils, there was and still is a lot of black around”.

While Hornby is very funny at times, his essays are not full of clowing around.  He can be profound, too.  There were many, many excerpts I wanted to quote from this collection, but here are a couple of my favorites:

In the preface:

“To put it crudely, I get bored, and when I get bored I tend to get tetchy.  It has proven surprisingly easy to eliminate boredom from my reading life.

And boredom, let’s face it, is a problem that many of us have come to associate with books.  It’s one of the reasons why we choose to do almost anything else rather than read; very few of us pick up a book after the children are in bed and the dinner has been made and the dirty dishes cleared away. We’d rather turn on the television…..This is partly because reading appears to be more effortful than watching TV.”

Later in the preface, Hornby says:

“If reading books is to survive as a leisure activity activity — and there are statistics which show that this is by no means assured — then we have to promote the joys of reading rather than the (dubious) benefits.  I would never attempt to dissuade anyone from reading a book.  But please, if you’re reading a book that’s killing you, put it down and read something else, just as you would reach for the remote if you weren’t enjoying a TV program.”

Amen, Nick!  We really should not feel guilty about not being able to finish a book.  Not only that, Hornby points out that we should read what we like to read, not what we think we should be reading.  Also, that we should not patronize others that are reading books that we ourselves would not read.  Amen, again.

One more excerpt I’d like to share — this is Hornby’s opinion on American bookstores (remember, he is British), and he is addressing it to us Americans:

“Did you know that you have the best bookshops in the world?  I hope so.  Over here in England, the home of literature ha-ha, we have only chain bookstores, staffed by people who for the most part come across as though they’d rather be selling anything else anywhere else; meanwhile you have access to booksellers who would regard their failure to sell you novels about Mennonites as a cause of deep personal shame.  Please spend every last penny you have on books from independent bookstores, because otherwise you’ll end up as sour and as semi-literate as the English”.

He said it, not me.  I agree with his opinion on supporting independent bookstores.  But I don’t know if, as a percentage, the English actually are less literate than we Americans are. I’d love to visit there again (visited London for a week in 2000).

Nick Hornby’s essays are a reminder of why we enjoy reading, include keen observations on life, and causes me to add books to my TBR list.  I definitely want to read “Assassination Vacation” by Sarah Vowell now.  It’s a book about the assassinations of Presidents Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley.  Hornby points out that he  himself is briefly in this book — Vowell and Hornby spent four hours “sitting on a bench in a cold Gramercy Park staring at a statue of John Wilkes Booth’s brother. (this was her idea of a good time, not mine.)” and that she made those four hours pass by quickly by relating interesting tidbits that she eventually put in her book.  Has anyone read this one?

Have you read anything by Nick Hornby?  Any thoughts on the quotes I’ve included? 

Disclosure:  I purchased my copy of “Housekeeping vs. the Dirt”.

Illustration of Nick Hornby, in the 9/11/09 issue of the Financial Times

For quite a while, we have been an subscriber to the pink newspaper, The Financial Times; and I always look forward to their weekend edition where they interview illustrious people such as authors; and also FT’s  book reviews.

This weekend’s edition featured Nick Hornby, and I recommend that you read the interview in full here.  This was very timely, because I had just enjoyed and finished his collection of essays, The Polysyllabic Spree.  I’m not sure when I first heard of Nick Hornby, but it might have been a post by Stainless Steel Droppings.

Hornby is British, and the Financial Times is a British newspaper, so it’s not surprising that he’d be featured there.  The interviewer talks about how unassuming Hornby is but also how likeable he is.  He is also very funny; his sense of humor really appeals to me.  I look forward to reading his other collections of essays, mostly about the books he has been reading: “Housekeeping vs. the Dirt”, and “Shakespeare Wrote for Money”.     I am not sure if his novels reflect his humor also; I will just have to find out!  I did borrow one of his novels from the library, but was unable to get to it before it came due.

It is worth noting that one of Hornby’s  sons (he has three boys) has autism.  He recounts (in the Financial Times interview) a gaffe made by somebody interviewing him.  The interviewer said something along the line that Hornby’s teenage son must be really into skateboarding, etc.; and Hornby replies, “No, he has severe autism”.  Hornby says in the FT article “you could hear the sound of somebody being fired because he didn’t do his homework”.

So, in “The Polysyllabic Spree”, Hornby discusses three books related to autism; the first two which I’ve also read: the novel “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime” by Mark Haddon; the memoir and stories on autism,  ”Not Even Wrong” by Paul Collins; and the memoir “George and Sam” by Charlotte Moore. 

Still, Hornby maintains his sense of humor throughout; if you are dealing with autism it does help to have a sense of humor.  He was sent these books because it was beleived he could relate to them.  But as he says:

“Like a lot of writers, I can’t really stand my own writing, in the same way that I don’t really like my own cooking.  And, just as when I go out to eat, I tend not to order my signature dish– an overcooked and overspiced meat-stewy thing containing something inappropriate, like tinned peaches, and a side order of undercooked and flavorless vegetables– I really don’t want to read anything I could have come up with at my own computer”.

This book also includes some excerpts of the books Hornby read during the time period of “The Polysyllabic Spree”, including the book of poems “What Narcissim Means to Me” by Tony Hoagland.  I have not read Hoagland before, but I’m intrigued now to read more.  In addition to Hoagland’s poem “Impossible Dream” being quoted in this book, Hornby also says:

“Tony Hoagland is the sort of poet you dream of finding but almost never do.  His work is relaxed, deceptively easy on the eye and ear, and it has jokes and unexpected little bursts of melancholic resonance.  Plus, I pretty much understand all of it, and yet it’s clever….”

I feel bad that I found “The Polysyllabic Spree” as a used book because all proceeds of the initial sales of this book will be split between 826NYC, a writing center in Brooklyn for students between 8 and 18, and Treehouse, a London-based charity for children with autism.

I don’t know what proceeds ( if any),  Hornby’s other books goes to, but I am definitely going to be keeing my eyes out for his other books!