Tag Archives: Long

The Best of McSweeney’s, Edited by Dave Eggers & Jordan Bass (2013)

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This 600-page tome from the McSweeney’s journal packs a hard punch—not just because of how much they’ve crammed inside, but because the writing is straight-up good.  There’s a comics section, a play starring three cavemen, an account of a NASCAR weekend by a man who knows nothing about racing, a list of facts about Spokane, Washington, two stories based on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s notebooks, and a scattering of 20-minute fiction.  Extra points go to the fine design: the dustjacket folds out into a poster and the bonus materials include a box of postcards and colorful booklets.

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Updike, by Adam Begley (2014)

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Begley’s biography of writer John Updike exhaustively covers its hero’s rural Pennsylvania childhood, his stint as a twentysomething New Yorker writer, his years in suburban Massachusetts, his elderly descent into isolation, and his many, many novels.  Though Updike’s serial adultery plays a key role, Begley keeps the details vague for privacy reasons—unfortunate, since it often feels like there’s more we’re not getting as Begley instead summarizes the autobiographical facets of Updike’s vast oeuvre.  The result reads more like literary criticism than biography, but still decently flushes out one of America’s most prolific 20th century writers.

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Where I Got It

Ordered online in Fall 2016.

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Longer review

If you haven’t already, you should probably read Rabbit, Run instead, because it’s excellent.

1Q84, by Haruki Murakami (2011)

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A man and a woman in different parts of Tokyo find themselves drawn into the bizarre world of 1Q84 (kyū is Japanese for nine) where everything looks the same but a sinister religious cult is wreaking havoc.  I enjoyed parts of this book immensely, but others dragged on through its 1,100 pages, and a lot of the slower portions could have been trimmed.  The novel explores the idea of parallel worlds in classic Murakami fashion, and though the ending makes the whole read worth it, I recommend starting with something lighter for your first Murakami experience.

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Where I Got It

Christmas, 2015.

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Haruki Murakami’s website

Murakami Interview about 1Q84, his early life, and running every day

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, by Laurence Sterne (1767)

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The whimsical freedom of the seventeenth century led to some of the most innovative fiction ever conceived, and Tristram Shandy is no exception.  Its narrator sets out to tell his life story but goes off on so many tangents that it takes him two hundred pages to get to his birth.  The book itself is chaotically filled with blank pages, scrawled lines, musical scores, skipped chapters, and entire sections written in Latin, plus a whole load of sex jokes for careful readers.  The innovations are fun, but the archaic prose makes for a challenging 650-page slog.

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3-kafkas

Where I Got It

An old Modern Library edition picked up from the English department free table, sometime in fall 2014.

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Full text at Project Gutenberg

Quick and Easy Guide to Reading Tristram Shandy (I really wish the person who made this site had kept it up, since it promised to be both funny and down-to-earth about a really difficult novel, and also because it compared Tristram Shandy to a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book)

The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, ed. by Karen V. Kukil (2000)

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I like books where writers talk insightfully about writing, and I also like books about young people finding their way—Sylvia Plath’s journals have both.  She worries about the same things writers today do: getting published, getting rejected, making money as a writer, never recapturing her earlier success, and whether teaching is killing her creative drive, though she also worries a lot about dating and relationships (including whether 1950s gender roles will smother her creativity).  The only problem is that finding these insights requires sifting through 500+ pages of journals and a lengthy Appendix.  I recommend judicial skimming.

Rating:

3-kafkas

Where I Got It

Found in my office in grad school, left by previous inhabitant.

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Sylvia Plath on Wikipedia

List of Quotes (for the skimmers)

Interview with Karen V. Kukil

American Cornball: A Laffopedic Guide to the Formerly Funny, by Christopher Miller (2014)

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An encyclopedia of humor clichés of the Looney Tunes/newspaper comic variety, American Cornball covers the ubiquitous falling anvils, stinky limburger, and bindlestick-carrying hoboes of the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, along with why and how these now-outdated gags entered the mainstream.  Miller realizes (rightly!) that books about funny things should also themselves be funny, and writes with graceful wit and humor.  The book is also exhaustive, with enough pictures, literary references, and observations about the human condition to keep the fun moving through the 500 pages from A to Z (or, from “Absentminded Professors” to “Zealots”).

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5-kafkas

Where I Got It

Ordered online, Summer 2015.

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Amazon page

NPR Interview with the author