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Today's unexpected discovery in a 1529 volume of Augustine. For future reference, we have acid free paper to mark your place. Please don't use baked goods. pic.twitter.com/YGiLDTjmSk
— Cambridge UL Special Collections (@theULSpecColl) February 21, 2020
Well, people have started working from home and society hasn’t collapsed yet. So here are a few book related links to get you through your self-isolation. I myself don’t need to worry because I got so sick of the literary world I’ve been self-isolating for over nearly 10 years, and am skilled at getting along without seeing anyone.
LAT is postponing the festival of books (you know, if things will get as bad as they say, I think the idea of “postponing” is at best overly optimistic, and at worse, a little naive);
‘I think we are in a period of stagnation. New titles continue to be published into the established categories, and readers are even more prone than before to act like sheep – that is, when they read at all, they read what everybody else is reading,’ said Indyk.
Conformity in readings habits is a modern phenomenon, where one title of genre fiction dominates local and international markets. Meanwhile literary fiction, while lauded on longlists, shortlists and deemed culturally significant, does not sell. Although some titles do buck the trend and occasionally deliver excellent sales.
‘Endangered,’ that’s what Terri-ann White, Director of UWA Publishing, suggests is the state of literary fiction.
The plain fact is Mallick has a point – or, at least, she might have had she been writing twenty years ago. There was a time when it was possible to argue that Canadian writing was mired in a kind of hidebound, sclerotic attitude that promoted historical romances and fiction that was largely static and stylistically moribund. I wrote numerous pieces forwarding this argument myself in the early to mid aughts.
It is less easy to make this argument in 2020, unless you read very narrowly and confine your focus to the handful of novels that win awards or receive heavy buzz in the mainstream press and online. Though even here, you’d run into difficulty: Ian Williams’s Reproduction, the novel that won the 2019 Scotiabank Giller Prize was a stylistically innovative, vigorous, pop-culture infused, hugely funny multi-generational family novel that would seem to tick off many of the boxes Mallick is advocating for.
To argue that novels published in this country are “not ambitious or invented or original or venturesome” displays a large degree of myopia as to what is currently being published, especially by the small presses in this country. Though even the multinationals are getting into the game: Reproduction was published by Random House Canada, an imprint of Penguin Random House Canada. Imprints of PRHC also published two of the most stylistically challenging, genre-bending novels of the previous year, Sara Peters’s prose-poetry hybrid I Become a Delight to My Enemies and Anakana Schofield’s Bina, the latter of which would seem like a perfect companion read to Ducks, Newburyport. (Granted, the book is set in Ireland, where Schofield was born, so perhaps it doesn’t qualify as Canadian in Mallick’s jaundiced eyes.)
The Millions points to this interesting list of things stolen from lye-berries. I did this as a kid a few times. I’m not proud of it now. But I really really wanted my own copy of Stuart Little and my parents were more of the Chilton’s Guide to Auto-Repair kind of bookowners.
It’s no secret that library books disappear. Many are misshelved and eventually resurface. Others are lost by library users, and some are borrowed and kept long after their return date. In many cases, the borrower pays the corresponding fine—just ask Emily Canellos-Simms, who returned a book to the Kewanee Public Library in Illinois a full 47 years late, at a cost of $345.14.
Then there’s theft, a common problem for libraries both big and small. In some of the most costly cases, these thefts are carried out by dedicated “tome raiders” who target rare books, maps, and documents, normally to sell to collectors. But it’s not always books that go missing: In recent decades, everything from presidential rocking chairs to swords and skeletons have been stolen from libraries across the world.
Wait, critics still review books? Mind. Blown. But seriously… what is the point? The societal wave that leads news outlets to include tweets from internet randos as part of their “journalism” is the same one that means book buyers are more likely to listen to Karen Schmoe on Goodreads or Amazon over a professional reviewer in the paper. The books sections (those few that still exist) are just there to make the sports scores less limp when you fold the paper over to read on the subway.
The notion of “punching up” – you try to be nice to first-time novelists, whereas you can say what you like about Stephen King or Ian McEwan – is, as Chong sees it, a reaction to the “superstar market” of publishing, where to a very small handful of victors go most of the spoils. She makes a decent case that in some ways this would-be corrective actually helps perpetuate the superstar market – by implicitly endorsing the special status of the writers under review, and by drawing attention to them (and the critic) with showy, giant-killing takedowns.
But although Chong acknowledges, with some rather bleak tables of percentages, that critics attempt to argue for their reactions to books with reference to characterization, prose style, structure, themes and genre expectations, she investigates in frustratingly sparse detail how that “evaluating work” is actually done, which is the heart of the matter. Good critics do make a coherent case, on the book’s own terms, for why its craft is or is not satisfactory – and they do so with their readers rather than the author in mind. That’s the counsel of perfection, and you don’t really need a statistical survey to arrive at it.
But is the discipline, as is frequently said, “in crisis”?
Did you know Dr. Seuss had a stint as a political cartoonist? I think I remember covering this back in the day, but we’ve all aged and probably spent those brain cells in wine and other attempts at self-medication, so here it is again, it all its bizarrely contradictory (sometimes progressive, sometimes downright racist) glory.
Minear also pointed to Seuss’s sympathetic view of black Americans with one image dated 1942.
“He has one cartoon of a U.S. War Industry building, surrounded by a maze,” he said. “And if you enter the door, there’s no way you can get to the factory. And over the door it says ‘Negro Job Hunters Enter Here.'”
The old run-around, June 26, 1942, Dr. Seuss Political Cartoons. (Special Collection & Archives, UC San Diego Library) Unfortunately, Minear said, Seuss did have an “Achilles heel”: stereotypical and offensive portrayals of Japanese people.
Unlike his diverse and varied portrayals of black Americans and Jews, Seuss used a “cookie-cutter face with a moustache and glass-bottle eyeglasses” to depict Japanese citizens and Japanese Americans, Minear said.
Bookninja 