Carnegie Medals: In which I (almost) make a literary prize reading deadline

[gallery type="slideshow" ids="1576,1575,1574,1573,1571,1572"] Every year when the shortlists for various literary prizes -- Booker, Pulitzer, National Book Award -- are announced, I think hey wouldn't it be cool to read all the finalists and compare my judgment with the judges? But I never do. This year, however, I had no excuse when the finalists were announced for the Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction. This is the second year for this prize, given by the American Library Association -- and I would be attending the annual conference in Chicago. I bought tickets to the ceremony and started reading -- there were only six books total, three fiction and three nonfiction.

Neither of my top choices -- The Round House by Louise Erdrich and The Mansion of Happiness by Jill Lepore (with a serious caveat I'll get to below) -- were the ones chosen by the judges. The winners were Canada by Richard Ford and Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher by Timothy Egan. All six were excellent reads; I highly recommend them and I'm glad I did this. I'll probably do it again next year. And then maybe take on another project: reading the winners of the various big contests and comparing them to each other.

A couple things I learned along the way:

* I've been neglecting my literary fiction -- for the last couple years I've been on an extended genre jag. Which is cool ... but means I'm missing out on some great books. It was good to have a reason to read some of the best current fiction. Canada was probably my least favorite of the three but it was an absorbing, if grim, read. It did feature a few fantastic lines like this one about spending the day at the movies in Mississippi:

"We'd emerge at four out of the cool, back into the hot, salty, breathless Gulf Coast afternoon, sun-blind and queasy and speechless from wasting the day with nothing to show for it."

And that is EXACTLY what it's like after you go to the early show at the Regal.

* After reading This is How You Lose Her, I didn't at all buy the argument that it was misogynistic or otherwise hostile towards women -- if anything, Junot Diaz goes out of his way to show what an idiot Yunior is for repeatedly screwing up relationships with smart, cool women. Hence, the title.

* I liked Spillover and I feel kind of guilty for it not being my favorite in the nonfiction category -- in fact, it was probably my least favorite of the three -- but I'd just like to take the opportunity here to say that David Quammen is an amazing science writer for nonscientists and if you haven't read The Song of the Dodo, his masterpiece about island biogeography, go do it RIGHT NOW. It's one of the books I'd grab if my house were on fire. Seriously.

* There wasn't a theme at all to the choices, but the fiction titles were all coming of age stories, which is interesting since Erdrich and Ford are in the double digits, bookwise. And even more interesting, all three were celebrations of geekdom -- Canada's young hero is seriously into beekeeping, Yunior is a comics geek and Joe and his buddies in The Round House are obsessed with Star Trek: The Next Generation. I liked that about all of them.

* The Mansion of Happiness was the easiest going down of the nonfiction titles and I was glad to see it here since it didn't seem to make a lot of other year's best lists, and I admire and respect Jill Lepore as one of those top-notch academics who writes for humans (she's a Harvard professor AND a New Yorker staff writer). But the book felt more like a compilation of great New Yorker pieces than a cohesive book. I'd already read most of them in the magazine and I still enjoyed reading them again -- it was full of fun facts about board games and attitudes toward breast-feeding (like the book called Spiritual Milk for Boston Babes, Drawn out of the Breasts of Both Testaments, published in 1646), the history of library children's rooms and the publication of Stuart Little, sex education and eugenics (including the fact that the guy behind the Ladies' Home Journal column "Can This Marriage Be Saved" was a hardcore eugenicist. Lovely).

* This little project helped clarify for me the role of ebooks and ereaders in my life. Obviously they're great for immediate gratification and convenience and I have no intention of giving them up. But I think I'll try to limit my use of them on my genre reading, which is really focused on plot and character, and not for nonfiction and literary fiction, where I need to focused in a different way. I bought Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher as an ebook shortly after it came out -- but when it came to reading it, I had a difficult time. Which also could have been due to other events in my life at the time. I didn't finish it before the awards ceremony, which made me feel bad -- I was so close to actually meeting my deadline. But I bought a couple print copies at ALA -- they were reduced price! And we didn't have it in the library collection! -- and found my reading was much easier when I switched formats. This is not a judgment on the quality or value of different types of books -- just an observation of my own reading experience. And means, as I had suspected and hoped, that there will be a continuing role for print for many of us even as ereaders and ebooks find their place in what one marketing dude at ALA called "the reading ecosystem."

Key West Literary Seminar: Session 1 download

Session 1 of this year's Key West Literary Seminar wrapped up yesterday. If you missed it, I suspect recordings will be showing up soonish on the Seminar's audio archive site. And we're getting particularly good coverage this year on Littoral, the Seminar blog and from WLRN, the public radio station in Miami. If you're Twitter-inclined, check out the hashtag #kwls -- you'll even see eminences like Judy Blume and James Gleick chiming in along with us lesser mortals in the audience. This year is not as Twitterific as last but we don't have William Gibson and Margaret Atwood with us (though Gibson is scheduled to return next year -- don't wait too long to sign up for 2014's Seminar, The Dark Side, because it's selling fast). As has quickly become tradition, Jason Rowan is back making custom-crafted cocktails, tailored to the year's theme. Keep an eye on his blog, Embury Cocktails, for recipes and more information in the near future.

Phyllis Rose opened with a wonderful keynote address Thursday night, examining John Hersey (for whom the Thursday event is named) as a lens through which to view the whole writer vs. person question. Is the man Key Westers saw riding his bike around the island the same person who wrote "Hiroshima" and "A Bell for Adano"? The answer is, of course, no and yes. Rose was also refreshingly dismissive about the overwhelming adoption of deconstruction and other French-influenced critical approaches toward literature, which tortured those of us who were English majors in the latter part of the 20th century and dared to think that writers' lives and times might influence their work. For literary scholars who didn't feel like sacrificing themselves on the altars of Derrida and Foucault, literary biography became "a welcome oasis during the desert years of deconstruction," Rose said. "Writers about writers were rescued by readers who wanted to know about writers' lives."

A sporadic sample from the rest of the weekend:

From Judith Thurman, biographer of Isak Dinesen and Colette and staff writer for The New Yorker:

• "Fiction is high-minded betrayal and biography is dirty-minded fidelity."
• One of Thurman's early jobs was translating pornographic movies. "It's freelance work that I heartily recommend because it's easy -- you just have to understand the words 'Yes.... yes!' and 'More!'"
• Translation is "yoga for the mind and for the ear."
• "One definition of the truth is that which is untranslatable."

From Brenda Wineapple, biographer of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Gertrude and Leo Stein, author of a book about Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson:

• On her subjects: "I prefer them deader and deader."
• Emily Dickinson is "the elusive subject par excellence."
• Oscar Wilde quote: "Biography adds new terror to death."

Most amazing fact learned at this year's Seminar (so far):

• Bram Stoker based the character of Dracula on Walt Whitman (amazing fact supplier: Mark Doty). Edmund White followed this with a comment on why vampire is so often code for gay in literature: "You meet someone, you kiss them and you turn them into you."

More from Edmund White, biographer of Genet and Proust, literary critic and author of a biographical novel on Stephen Crane:

• "Politics and literature are opposites. Politics are all lying and literature is all truth-telling."
• "Having come out when I was 12, I've always wondered what it would be like to be closeted."
• On fiction vs. nonfiction: "The contract with the reader is entirely different." That's why he calls the books about his life autobiographical novels, not memoirs. "Once they're called novels, you're free to do whatever you want."

From Jay Parini, biographer of William Faulkner, Robert Frost and John Steinbeck and author of biographical novels on Melville and Tolstoy:

• Leon Edel's five-volume biography of Henry James is "better than Xanax" as a treatment for insomnia. "He's the Xanax of all writers."
• On the difference between writing biographies of Jesus (his most recent subject) and Gore Vidal (his next subject): "At least Jesus didn't think he was Gore Vidal."
• "Biography is a form of fiction. .... I love to read biographies, even bad ones."
• In writing biography, "you're not presenting a life. You've giving an illusion of a life."
• To Edmund White: "I read your biography of Genet. I thought it was a great novel."

Literary subjects that KWLS panelists attempted as grade-schoolers:

• Phyllis Rose: Eleanor Roosevelt, after her mother rejected her earlier choice of the Duchess of Windsor as a suitable subject for an assignment to write about "an admirable woman."
• Edmund White: Peter the Great. "I was absolutely power-mad as a child."
• Brenda Wineapple, at 10 years old, wrote the first chapter of a novel and gave it to her father, whose response was "But there's no plot here." Wineapple: "My career as a novelist was over."

Books I have purchased (so far):

• The Master by Colm Toibin
• Promised Land: Thirteen Books That Changed America by Jay Parini
• Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer by Richard Holmes, who isn't at the Seminar but the book was mentioned several times

If all of this makes you eager to sign up for Session 2, it's not too late. It all starts again Thursday night with a keynote I'm really looking forward to: Colm Toibin talking about Elizabeth Bishop. That's Toibin in the photo, by the way, speaking at the podium that Cayman Smith-Martin and his crew built from books they got from us here at the library -- they were otherwise destined for the recycling plant so it's great to see them serving literature one last time.

The inevitable end-of-year best list

My list of best books I read this year is composed of books that were published this year, at least in fiction. That's not usually the case, but I think it's part of the deal with working at a library (and getting ever-increasing access to advanced review copies, both in print and digitally).

Fiction:

This year for me, fictionally, was all about the sequels. Like everyone else I adored Bring Up the Bodies, Hilary Mantel's Booker Prize-winning follow-up to her Booker Prize-winning Wolf Hall. If you can't get enough of the Tudor era, having a fine novelist at the top of her form inhabit that era -- from a previously underrepresented viewpoint, that of Henry VIII's minister Thomas Cromwell -- is literary nirvana.

Also in Tudor-land but with a contemporary, and paranormal, perspective was Shadow of Night by Deborah Harkness, sequel to her blockbuster A Discovery of Witches. In this book, the protagonists travel back to the time of Elizabeth I in search of answers about their history, their destiny and the powers of academic scholar and reluctant witch Diana Bishop. The best shorthand description I can come up with for these books is Harry Potter for Grownups.

I also loved Crucible of Gold, the seventh entry in Naomi Novik's Temeraire series Napoleonic Wars -- with dragons! No honestly, it's awesome -- of course thanks to George R.R. Martin and HBO dragons have a little more cultural cache than when I first started raving about this series. To be perfectly honest, the last couple entries weren't as engaging as the first three, but I was invested enough in the series to keep going and I'm so glad I did.  The newest book is definitely back on track. Here's hoping she keeps going with this story as long as Patrick O'Brian did with his Aubrey-Maturin series.

Nonfiction:

I'm going to go with the collected works of Rick Geary, who does historical true crime in graphic format under the rubric A Treasury of Victorian Murder and A Treasure of 20th Century Murder. I read a bunch of them this year and I can't pick a favorite. They're all fantastic.

I also loved Out of Sheer Rage by Geoff Dyer, his memoir/meditation on not really getting down to writing a critical study of D.H. Lawrence, though the book does include many interesting considerations of Lawrence as Dyer checks out various Lawrence hangouts. Dyer will be here for the Key West Literary Seminar next month (both sessions!) and I am simultaneously dying to hear him in person and terrified to hear what he'll have to say about Key West. He is hysterically, viciously funny on the less appealing characteristics of various tourist towns he visits in Out of Sheer Rage so I'm guessing we'll be in for it from him, sooner or later.

Honorable mentions:

People Who Eat Darkness by Richard Lloyd Parry -- Contemporary true crime done extremely well, with nuance and compassion. Blessedly free of sensationalism and righteousness.

Live By Night by Dennis Lehane -- Another sequel of sorts, a follow up to The Given Day and even better, in my opinion. Set in Boston and Tampa during Prohibition. Fans of Boardwalk Empire should check it out.

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn -- The bestseller that keeps on going -- and for good reason. I gulped this one down in just a couple sittings.

The Twelve by Justin Cronin -- Yes, yet another sequel, this one to the post-viral-vampire-apocalyptic The Passage. He jumps around in time and wields a huge cast of characters and you manage to stay with him. As with Mantel and Harkness, I'm now trying not to count the days until the final installment in the trilogy.

I can't get enough of end-of-the year best lists. If you're like me you can't do better than this source, a blog by Large-hearted Boy. In the individual list category, I loved this one. And I appreciate the large-mindedness of NPR in their different categories. They even acknowledge that smart people read romance!

Time to get reading some Writers on Writers

I love this time of year for a few reasons. Holiday decorations in Key West are fun and appear to be getting more fun every year. I love the best of the year book lists that come out around now, to compare my own reading and to get ideas for books I might have missed. And I love the annual library display of books by writers appearing at the upcoming Key West Literary Seminar.  The theme this time is Writers on Writers and the works encompass straight-up biography, meditative memoir and novels with real writers as fictional characters. Lots more detail, including the writers appearing and the schedules for both sessions, is available on the Seminar website. You can still register! The books by this year's authors include some serious -- as in long and demanding attention -- books. But don't let that discourage you. While you may not be up for wading through a magisterial Literary Biography, especially during the distractions of the holiday season, there are plenty of other books that you may find surprisingly entertaining, as well as edifying.

We've just put up a display of books by Seminar writers at the Key West Library so if you're in town stop by and check it out (the display is in the Reference Department, turned over the summer into a more open reading room if you haven't been in recently).

As usual, I haven't read every single writer who will be appearing at the Seminar. But I have read enough to make some recommendations, especially for those who might feel apprehensive about this year's theme. My top choice is one of my all-time favorite nonfiction books: Parallel Lives by Phyllis Rose. I love this book so much I've bought it, given it to a friend, then bought myself another copy because I had to know it was available. We have it in the library, both in hard copy and as an ebook. Rose, a part-time Key West resident, writes about the marriages of five Victorian writers (or four marriages and one long-term cohabitation, that of George Eliot and George Henry Lewes). It's got the satisfactions of high-toned literary gossip -- most of these matches were, in some way, disastrous -- but also offers the chance to reflect on what it means for personal, domestic life when one partner is an artist, as well as the dynamics between men and women, both between individuals and within a context very different from our own.

The most difficult title to categorize but one of the best books I read this year is Geoff Dyer's memoir/meditation on D.H. Lawrence, Out of Sheer Rage. It's funny. It's thought-provoking. It's comforting, if you're prone to procrastination. I wrote a whole blog post about it a few months ago. It's very difficult to describe but it's intelligent and entertaining. And you should be able to read it a whole lot faster than I did, assuming you're not moving house after 14 years of accumulating stuff.

Some other nonfiction titles I can wholeheartedly recommend: Jane's Fame by Claire Harman -- if you're a fan of Jane Austen on print and screen, this is an interesting examination of why her five novels have retained such a high profile in our cultural lives. New Ways to Kill Your Mother by Colm Toibin, an essay collection about writers and their families. Especially insightful about Irish writers, not surprisingly, though the last couple sections on James Baldwin are masterful. Judith Thurman's biographies of Colette and Isak Dinesen are interesting and extremely readable (there's a reason she's a staff writer for The New  Yorker). Her essays on artists and writers are collected in Cleopatra's Nose. As someone who grew up in and around Amherst, I'm always interested to hear more about Emily Dickinson so I can't wait to see Lyndall Gordon, author of Lives Like Loaded Guns (yes, that's a Dickinson biography), as well as biographies of Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot and Charlotte Bronte.

I'm looking forward to the discussions about writing about writers in fiction and there's a great selection there, too: Flannery O'Connor (A Good Hard Look by Ann Napolitano), Sylvia Plath (Wintering by Kate Moses), Stephen Crane (Hotel de Dream by Edmund White), Edith Wharton (The Age of Desire by Jennie Fields). Jay Parini, who will be at the Seminar has written novels about Leo Tolstoy (The Last Station) and Herman Melville (The Passages of H.M.).

Finally finishing a book about not really writing a book about D.H. Lawrence

Last night I finished reading Out of Sheer Rage by Geoff Dyer. According to my record on LibraryThing, where I obsessive-compulsively record such things, I started reading it on March 6. So it took me more than four months to read a 256-page book. First up: It was great. More on that later.

I have good excuses. I had a couple other things going on. Moving, mainly, which involved organizing, and packing, and holding a yard sale and unpacking. Most of our books remain in boxes since we still haven't built the Wall of Bookshelves. All that chaos meant I wasn't in the right frame of mind to appreciate Dyer's dry, funny, smart observations on literature and himself. It was easier to dive in to various kinds of genre novels and a true crime book. And I went out of town for a week and that meant I had to read a Patrick O'Brian book because I only read those when I travel and I rarely travel these days. Besides, procrastinating on reading a book that is, in large part, about why and how we avoid doing the things we supposedly want to do, seemed appropriate.

But I kept the book near the surface level of the moving chaos and eventually finished it and am extremely glad I did. Dyer is hysterically funny, writing about his journey to write (or not write) a critical study of D.H. Lawrence, which winds up being this book instead, a memoir of sorts and meditation on the creative process and, not least, on Lawrence and his choices in life.

I especially loved Dyer's rant about academic literary criticism, which is over the top but perfectly expresses the fury many of us feel toward the current "official" approach to literature by its self-appointed judges who appear to be interested only in finding reasons to tear it apart and blame it for humanity's evil excesses, and then express their findings in repellent prose. Who needs it? Dyer speaks for those of us who love reading, and wind up majoring in English or studying literature in some fashion but are horrified by the way academia handles the field.

There's one other good reason to read this book if you're in Key West or interested in coming to Key West this January: Dyer will be here for the Key West Literary Seminar's upcoming session, Writers on Writers. We're holding two sessions -- the first is sold out but there's still room in the second, Jan. 17-20. And Dyer will be here for both, along with an impressive roster of fellow writers. Can't wait to find out if he's as funny and interesting in person as he is on the page (though after reading his comments on Rome, Santa Fe and Taos, I fear a little for Key West in future essays).