"Prescribed Reading"...

While God and “militant atheists” are duking it out on the bookshelves (see Anthony Gottlieb’s "Atheists with Attitude" in the New Yorker), Jerome Groopman, author of How Doctors Think, argues in the NY Times article "Prescribed Reading" that for medical students looking to learn about the more existential aspects of their profession - the miracle of birth or the specter of death - the Bible would be a good place to start. He writes:

Each spring, I address these nonscientific dimensions of medicine with 12 freshmen at Harvard College in a seminar called “Insights From Narratives of Illness.” We read about a dozen works, from short stories by Turgenev to Samuel Shem’s Rabelaisian hospital novel “The House of God.” The students are generally surprised to learn how the experience of illness touches every corner of human emotion and behavior. But they are even more surprised to discover that even as they read the assigned books, they are often reading, in the background, one of the world’s oldest books. That book is the Bible. Whether read as revealed truth or as a literary work, the Bible is a sourcebook of human psychology and an enduring inspiration for authors trying to capture the drama and dilemmas of medicine.

I think Groopman’s argument for the Bible as an essential sourcebook to which medical students should turn is interesting but, it seems to me, he makes a better case for all literature as required reading for pre-med students rather than simply the Bible. Groopman writes,

The seminar begins with the Tolstoy novella “The Death of Ivan Ilyich.”...We move on to Turgenev, Chekhov and Kafka before reaching Richard Selzer’s “Letters to a Young Doctor,” a set of autobiographical essays first published in 1982...Later in the semester we shift to New Age writing, examining the message of books like the surgeon Bernie Siegel’s “Love, Medicine and Miracles” and, new this spring, Rhonda Byrne’s “The Secret,” the runaway best seller that asserts you can solve all your problems, including “eradicating disease,” by correctly aligning your thoughts and aspirations...This semester, the class will end with a short novel that can be seen as a modern-day “Ivan Ilyich,” Philip Roth’s “Everyman.”

Such a wide-range of authors and style, seems to prove more than anything that literature, of which the Bible is merely a part, is the means through which, as Groopman says, pre-med students can engage “life’s existential mysteries: the miraculous moment of birth, the jarring exit at death, the struggle to find meaning in suffering.”

From Blog to Book...

Zoe Margolis over at the Guardian Unlimited wonders if publishers aren't looking to blogs for their next best-sellers enough:

Yesterday's announcement of this year's winners of the award for blogs turned into books, the Lulu Blooker prize, would have us believe that many publishers are perusing blogs with the aim of adapting them into books. The website eagerly claims, "Traditional publishing houses, ever in search of the next big name author, have begun to mine blogs and websites for new talent...

According to the Blooker site, books based on blogs are "the world's fastest- growing new kind of book ... a new hybrid literary form". Yet last year, the first year of the award, there were 89 blogs-to-books entered for the Blooker prize. This year it's still only around 100. That doesn't seem to support the idea that every publisher and their dog is jumping on the bandwagon - I think it'll be a while before publishers treat bloggers with the same regard as authors. But perhaps not for that much longer: with a plethora of blogs showcasing good writing to a book-buying public, what publisher doesn't want to utilise a ready-made audience for their book?

Ms. Margolis, having had her own blog published into a book, certainly seems to support authors making the leap from blog to book. And she certainly makes a good point when she argues against the "inverted snobbery" of publishers who believe that anything written on a blog must inherently be of bad quality. However, the case that Margolis makes for blogs...

Unlike a book, a blog allows instant feedback. Readers can send in comments immediately upon reading a blog post. This can then initiate a dialogue between writer and reader that is both interactive and productive. Blogging is not writing in a private vacuum, rather it's about putting your thoughts into a public space and finding out what people think of them instantly. This can assist the writer in terms of developing their ideas: it forces you to write succinctly and with focus. While I'm not suggesting it is solely readers' input that makes blogs worthy of being published, I do think the interactivity and open access of blogging is what can make it so enjoyable for both writer and reader.

...could be construed as argument as for why blogs shouldn't be translated into books at all. I'm unsure how I feel about publishers surfing the blogosphere searching for the next Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist. On the one hand, certainly some bloggers are writing the kind of posts which would translate well into a memoir of sorts or a collection of essays. But, on the other hand, I think of blogs as an ongoing conversation and, for this reader at least, turning a blog into a books seems a lot like publishing one side of a telephone conversation.

Reading For the Ole' Red, White, and Blue

The Miami Herald asks presidential candidates what last work of fiction they read:

DEMOCRATS

Delaware Sen. Joe Biden: "Runaway Jury" by John Grisham.

New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton: "Team of Rivals" by Doris Kearns Goodwin

Connecticut Sen. Chris Dodd: "The Broker" by John Grisham.

Former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards: "Exile" by Richard North Patterson.

Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich: "Einstein's Dreams" by Alan Lightman.

Illinois Sen. Barack Obama: "Gilead" by Marilynne Robinson.

New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson: "The administration's energy plan."

REPUBLICANS

Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback: "The Dream Giver" by Bruce Wilkinson with David and Heather Kopp.

Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani: "The Beach House" by James Patterson and Peter De Jonge.

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee: "My oldest son's screenplay."

California Rep. Duncan Hunter: "The Democrats' proposal to balance the budget."

Arizona Sen. John McCain: "A Farewell to Arms" by Ernest Hemingway.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney: "Term Limits" by Vince Flynn.

Colorado Rep. Tom Tancredo: "An Inconvenient Truth" by Al Gore.

I'm not going to take the obvious potshots at those Grisham and Patterson readers - hey, to each his own right? Right. I will say that I'm most impressed with Obama's read. Perhaps, the Miami Herald will next ask the candidates what they thought of their reads. Now that would be interesting reading.

Saturday Morning Cartoons...On Sunday

If you haven't already, please, oh please check out the Weekend Extras over at Book Ninja. Cha-booooon!

So Bad It's Good

Joe Queenan at the NY Times defends the pleasure in reading incredibly bad books:

Bad books have an important place in our lives, because they keep the brain active. We spend so much time wondering what incredibly dumb thing the author will say a few pages down the road. One caveat: As with bad movies, a book that is merely bad but not exquisitely bad is a waste of time, while a genuinely terrible book is a sheer delight. This is what made the late, great Mickey Spillane so memorable: he never tried to write poor man’s Raymond Chandler books like Robert Parker; he wrote pure trash. I feel the same way about those “Loins of Telemachus” or “Cuirass of the Myrmidons” books that retell famous stories from the point of view of a marginal character. The dumber, the merrier.

Speaking of wonderfully bad movies, anyone remember "Snakes on a Plane?"...

Blogging at 'The Onion'

The Onion pokes fun at us bloggers in the way only The Onion could...

My blog is more of a hobby than anything else, something to do for fun when I get home from my bookstore job. I've never dreamed of making a living from it. Though hypothetically speaking, if The New Yorker—a publication that I'm sure pays top dollar—wanted to publish my August 9, 2005 post "Creative Thinking Spots" in its "Shouts And Murmurs" section, I'd consider it. Didn't cross my mind when I wrote that post, and that's certainly not why I wrote it, nor why I have a Google news alert set up for New Yorker editor David Remnick, but I can understand how someone on their staff might think the piece is a good fit for that section.

James Robertson at 'Bookslut'

Bookslut has posted an interview of James Robertson, author of The Testament of Gideon Mack, a novel I'm thoroughly enjoying at the moment. There are some interesting things happening in this book, which this interview helps bring into perspective...

Roses? What Roses?

Four months ago, on January 12, 2007 Joshua Bell, a world-renowned virtuoso agreed to pretend to be a street musician and play for one hour outside a Washington, D.C. metro station. It was a sociological test of sorts to see how many people busily on their way to work would recognize the beauty and art coming from a violinist whose concerts can cost over $100 to attend. This article in last week's Washington Post is an illuminating contemplation of art and beauty’s place in our lives. This isn’t exactly an article on books or on reading but it is on our ability to appreciate art - even of the written word - in the fast-paced, stressed-out, modern lives we lead today. I found this passage to be of particular interest:

A couple of minutes into it, something revealing happens. A woman and her preschooler emerge from the escalator. The woman is walking briskly and, therefore, so is the child. She's got his hand.

"I had a time crunch," recalls Sheron Parker, an IT director for a federal agency. "I had an 8:30 training class, and first I had to rush Evvie off to his teacher, then rush back to work, then to the training facility in the basement."

Evvie is her son, Evan. Evan is 3.

You can see Evan clearly on the video. He's the cute black kid in the parka who keeps twisting around to look at Joshua Bell, as he is being propelled toward the door.

"There was a musician," Parker says, "and my son was intrigued. He wanted to pull over and listen, but I was rushed for time."

So Parker does what she has to do. She deftly moves her body between Evan's and Bell's, cutting off her son's line of sight. As they exit the arcade, Evan can still be seen craning to look. When Parker is told what she walked out on, she laughs.

"Evan is very smart!"

The poet Billy Collins once laughingly observed that all babies are born with a knowledge of poetry, because the lub-dub of the mother's heart is in iambic meter. Then, Collins said, life slowly starts to choke the poetry out of us. It may be true with music, too.

There was no ethnic or demographic pattern to distinguish the people who stayed to watch Bell, or the ones who gave money, from that vast majority who hurried on past, unheeding. Whites, blacks and Asians, young and old, men and women, were represented in all three groups. But the behavior of one demographic remained absolutely consistent. Every single time a child walked past, he or she tried to stop and watch. And every single time, a parent scooted the kid away.

PostNote: Many thanks to the folks over at bookninja for bringing this to my attention. I live in Washington, D.C. and I had no idea. How's that for oblivious? And God knows with all of the ugliness in the world today - what with last week's Imus tornado and yesterday's killing on Virginia Tech's campus - I need all the beauty I can get.

Shakespeare...Again?

I know I promised last month to move away from my obsession with Shakespeare and I figured that my completion of Will in the World would go a long way toward accomplishing that feat. But Philip Lopate’s LA Times review of The Shakespeare Riots by Nigel Cliff makes keeping that promise very hard indeed. The premise of Cliff’s The Shakespeare Riots:

One evening in May 1849, hundreds of stone-throwing rioters clashed with New York City police and state militiamen outside the Astor Place Opera House, leaving more than 20 people dead and scores wounded...Clashing fans of two Shakespearean actors, the American Edwin Forrest and the Englishman William Charles Macready, became so overwrought that they put their bodies on the line for their thespian idols.

If the riot itself isn’t intriguing enough, Cliff explores the underlaying tensions which sparked the riots. Lopate writes:

...we are given separate chapters on the hazards facing English troupes that toured America in the early 19th century, the reputation of actors as unsavory and licentious (sometimes quite justified), the literary accounts of English travelers who profited by insulting America as an uncouth wasteland, and the mounting ill will between England and her former colony. There were tensions over the Northwest Territories' boundary ("Fifty-four Forty or Fight!"), repudiation (the refusal of Pennsylvania and other states to pay their debts to English banks), the Mexican-American War and America's clinging to slavery long after England abolished it. These excursions into social and political history, crammed with entertaining nuggets, are still only the backdrop for the heart of the matter: a thwarted friendship between Forrest and Macready involving America's favorite playwright, William Shakespeare.

The Shakespeare Riots is set to be released tomorrow. I know where my next $20 on books is going.

Who Says Librarians Lead Boring Lives?

The online diary of Saad Eskander, Director of the Iraq National Library and Archive (INLA), is a moving daily account of Saad's life as a librarian struggling to replenish the library's looted collection in the middle of an unstable war zone. I was particularly struck by this succinct but very telling entry:

Saturday, 10 March: Three bombs exploded in my neighborhood. Two bombs went off at 7.30. They violently shook my flat, as I was watching some TV programme. At 13.20, another bomb exploded in my neighborhood. It shook my flat. I spent the whole day writing and reading in my room.

On March 5, Saad offers this heartbreaking entry on the bombing that took place last month in Bagdhad's outdoor book market:

As we were talking, a huge explosion shook the INLA's building around 11.35. We, the three of us, ran to the nearest window, and we saw a big and thick grey smoke rising from the direction of al-Mutanabi Street, which is less than 500 meter away from the INLA. I learnt later that the explosion was a result of a car bomb attack. Tens of thousands of papers were flying high, as if the sky was raining books, tears and blood. The view was surreal. Some of the papers were burning in the sky. Many burning pieces of papers fell on the INLA's building. Al-Mutanabi Street is named after one of the greatest Arab poets, who lived in Iraq in the middle ages. The Street is one of well-known areas of Baghdad and where many publishing houses, printing companies and bookstores have their main offices and storages. Its old cafes are the most favorite place for the impoverished intellectuals, who get their inspirations and ideas form this very old quarter of Baghdad. The Street is also famous for its Friday's book market, where secondhand, new and rear books are sold and purchased.... It was extremely sad to learn that a number of the publishers and book sellers, whom we knew very well, were among the dead...This day will be always remembered, as the day when books were assassinated by the forces of darkness, hatred and fanaticism.

More Scary News On Newspaper Book Reviews...

The folks at the blog Critical Mass report:

As reported on CNN and other places, the Tribune Company will be sold to Chicago real estate tycoon Sam Zell in a deal for $13 billion. This will make the company which owns the LA Times, the Chicago Tribune, Newsday, the Hartford Courant and other newspapers (not to mention the Cubs and other radio and television stations) a private company, and less beholden to stock price above all else. In other words, the deal could be good news for book sections, especially if they can be seen as integral to building a bridge between newspapers' past and their future.

Which is good news, especially considering the news posted at the Literary Saloon last week:

As has long been feared and now widely reported on, The Los Angeles Times is doing away with its stand-alone Sunday book review section, 'merging' it with the opinion section, beginning on 14 April...(Yes, the press release says 14 April, which is a Saturday, and early reports suggested it would be a Saturday-section, but they do also write that it would be: "a combined Sunday section". We'll see.)

The future of newspaper book review sections seems precarious indeed. Is it possible that ten years from now the only major newspaper that may still be running a book review section is the NY Times? As much as I value the reviews in the NY Times, I sincerely hope not.