Ben Greenman's Dilemma

Ben Greenman's dilemma is one with which I am intimately familiar:

One afternoon at the bookstore I picked up Nikos Kazantzakis' The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel, a thirty-thousand-line poem that imagines Odysseus's adventures
after he leaves the Homeric universe. It was the largest book on the table by far. It felt like a brick that, if thrown, could shatter the windows and let the light come in. I held it up. "You sure?" my mother said. "You'll never read it."
The book came home. It went on the shelf. It stayed there. At first it was a challenge. Two months later, it was black comedy. Two months after that, it was an embarrassment. I blamed the victim: it was too thick, too dense, too much. I went off to college. Graduated. Got a job. Got a girlfriend. One summer on the telephone my father told me that my parents had decided to sell the house. "We need you to come down and help pack," my mother said. Read all about it...

Top 10 psychological thrillers

Alex Barclay's top 10 psychological thrillers

Sylvia Plath Reads 'Daddy'

Sylvia Plath Reads 'Daddy'

On Chesil Beach

Ian McEwan: On Chesil Beach

Summer 1962. Newlyweds Edward and Florence have arrived at a hotel on the Dorset coast to begin their honeymoon. In this extract from Ian McEwan's new novel they confront their private fears about the night to come.

Top 10 books for figuring out the French

Expat Lit: Top 10 books for figuring out the French,
Take the Boy Scout approach to culture shock: be prepared. Here are our recommendations for 10 good books that will help you answer the eternal question: why are they like that?

The Infamous Proust Questionnaire

"In the back pages of Vanity Fair each month, readers find The Proust Questionnaire, a series of questions posed to famous subjects about their lives, thoughts, values and experience. A regular reference to Proust in such a major publication struck me as remarkable, and it was only until I'd read Andre Maurois's Proust: Portrait of a Genius that I understood what this was all about.
The young Marcel was asked to fill out questionnaires at two social events: one when he was 13, another when he was 20. Proust did not invent this party game; he is simply the most extraordinary person to respond to them. At the birthday party of Antoinette Felix-Faure, the 13-year-old Marcel was asked to answer the following questions in the birthday book, and here's what he said"

Via Grow a Brain

Kurt Vonnegut - 8 Rules For Writing Fiction

"1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things -- reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a sadist. Now matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them -- in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages."

OCLC Top 1000

Fun Facts About the OCLC Top 1000 -
What’s the most popularly held book in libraries around the world? Which author or character—or monster or animal—is found most often on library shelves worldwide? The research division of OCLC (the Online Computer Library Center, which libraries in more than 110 countries use to locate and lend library materials) compiled a list of the top 1,000 titles owned by member libraries—the intellectual works judged to be the most worthy based on the “purchase vote” of libraries around the globe.
Via

Specimen Days

Specimen Days is composed of three novellas that have a lot in common: poet Walt Whitman, a deformed boy, a white bowl, dead kids, brave mothers and the grinding horror of life in cities (in this case New York) whether it be past, present or future. Michael Cunningham's previous novel, The Hours similarly bound the stories of three dis-synchronous characters. If you liked that book (and I did -very much) chances are you'll like this one.

Cunningham explores three genres to great effect: the industrial age historical novel , the contemporary detective thriller and futuristic sci-fi. He raises fundamental questions: What is beauty? What does it mean to be human? What risks will we take to prevail? It's a crazy soup of haunted machines, a female Walt Whitman, cyborgs and little green men and women but it works. I don't know if it is great literature but it's a damn good read.

Eats, Shoots and Leaves Game

The Chartist Poets

Lost voices of Victorian working class uncovered in political protest poems

How comes it that ye toil and sweat
And bear the oppressor's rod
For cruel man who dare to change
The equal laws of God?
How come that man with tyrant heart
Is caused to rule another,
To rob, oppress and, leech-like, suck
The life's blood of a brother?

These men and women toiled in factories and wrote poetry in an attempt to bring about social justice.

Emma Darwin's Diaries

Emma Darwin's Diaries (1824-1896) have recently been published.

Barbara Yates' Book Blog

Barbara Yates is an environmental artist who recycles dead trees into art for parks and retreat centers.

Via Neatorama

Oryx and Crake

I let Oryx and Crake languish on the shelf for a very long time before I read it (even though Margaret Atwood wrote it). Why? Because I dislike the SF genre, especially fin du monde stories. I'm glad I finally broke down and cracked its hefty spine. Snowman is the main character, a survivor of some cataclysmic disaster. Also surviving, and doing much better at it than Snowman, are the Crakers, a strange humanoid species. What happened to the rest of Earth's population? The story unravels gradually, working back to Snowman's youth in a world that has been deeply and negatively impacted by man's greed and environmental disinterest. Society is divided into "compounders" and "pleebs". Snowman (Jimmy then) was a compounder, protected from the pleebs by high walls and security guards called CorpSeCorps. Disease and mayhem run rampant in the pleeblands. Within the compounds scientists work on dubious genetic manipulation projects. All told, things were pretty bad even before disaster struck.

We are curious about Oryx and Crake before they enter the story. Who are they? Where are they? What have they to do with the catastrophe (whatever it is) that has occurred?

The ending leaves us hanging but, whatever happens, we know Snowman is up the proverbial creek without a paddle.

Move over, Al Gore, this Atwood story is every bit as scary as An Inconvenient Truth. It is a terrifically engaging cautionary tale. Atwood makes us believe the unbelievable. I couldn't put it down.

The Napkin Fiction Project

Esquire put 250 napkins in the mail to writers from all over the country -- some with a half dozen books to their name, others just finishing their first. In return, they got nearly a hundred stories.

Via Cynical-C

Books in which things end badly

Richard Gwyn: books in which things end badly
"Our predilection for the sad ending can be traced to the stories of Greek mythology and (as I point out in my first choice, below) to the Bible, in which I read Christ's torture and execution as an allegory of human suffering in general.

The piece was originally going to be called 10 books with a bad ending until it occurred to me that a 'bad' ending could either be one of catastrophe and malevolence, or else one that is ill-conceived or poorly-written. For the purposes of this list, of course, I meant the former, and consequently changed the title to avoid an (admittedly rather satisfying) ambiguity.' "

List

The Love Letters of Abelard and Heloise

"This is the first web posting of the letters of Abelard and Heloise. This includes a long poem by Alexander Pope about the lovers, notable for the phrase 'eternal sunshine of the spotless mind, which was recently used for a movie title. "

Via Plep

The Top 10 Sentences From 3rd Rate SF Stories

For all I know these could be real. I've never been a fan of the genre (although in high school I sometimes pretended to be to impress adolescent male SF geeks).

10. As he was led to die in an arcane alien ritual, Tank McPhoton tried one last time to apologize. How was he to know that what he took to be an extended hand of friendship which he gripped firmly and shook vigorously was actually the Supreme Ruler’s private parts?
9. Frank watched the mushroom cloud spread across the horizon with annoyance, knowing that this meant more weeks of disruption to regular cross-Manhattan train service while the debris was cleared.
8. As the F-AB-603 Klydor-class Imperial Interceptor star ship dropped out of hyperspace and entered orbit around planet 827Evad, the glow of the blue star Ensyiarrar cast a shadow of Commodore Acthulio’s hand hovering over the self-destruct button.
7. I lived on the land, she lived in the water. It gave shore leave a whole new meaning. Or the same old meaning, except with bigger crabs.
6. As one, the Spacemarines stood up, raised their spacerifles in salute, then marched out the spacedoors to the spacedock, where their spaceship was waiting to boldly take them where they’d all been before: Space!
5. You could tell it was a real UFO because there weren’t any wires holding it up and it smelled like outer space.
4. The red dwarf just kept looking smaller, and redder, somehow; until Klep-Graknezz could hardly tell if it was Doc, Grumpy, or Sneezy he’d been arguing with about the ray gun’s misfire. 3. Frodo felt his BVDs moisten with fear.
2. She was a tentacled Squid and I was a horny Toad, but our species didn’t matter. We married and soon there were little horny suckers running all over the place.

And the Number 1 Sentence From a Third-Rate SF Story …

1. Snarp wasn’t sure just *what* he was looking at; it seemed humanoid, though the features and limbs were laid out in strangely peculiar ways. No matter, he was pretty sure he could still have sex with it.

Via Cynical-C

12 Rare Books of the Avant Garde

Via gmtPlus9