Category: literature

I think Wal-Mart’s “Hot Release Tuesday” may be the grossest name ever for a promotion, but today actually sees a couple of releases that I’m enthused about:

War and Peace – A new Tolstoy translation by Pevear & Volokhonsky! This pair jump-started the wave of new translations of the Russians with their 1990 edition of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, the hardcover of which was the most expensive novel I ever bought (as far as I can recall)! Here’s a short essay from Richard Pevear on how he and his partner Larissa work.

Oblivion with Bells – A new record from Underworld! My wife better stock up on Lamictal or some other anti-epileptic drug, since those beats tend to mess with her head pretty badly.

Schulz and Peanuts – David Michaelis’ biography of Charles Schulz will likely be the first bio I read since David Guralnick’s treatment of Sam Cooke, proving that I have some pretty odd tastes, I guess.

I thought I’d try to make this a regular feature, but I discovered that

1. I couldn’t come up with a single DVD release that would make this list, as I have no interest in Transformers, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip or A Mighty Heart, which convinced me that
2. there aren’t enough new books, records, movies coming out each Tuesday that interest me.

One of my friends wrote me about yesterday’s Middlemarch post, essentially smacking me down for sounding like I “don’t want to be bothered getting into another time and place, which is something that most people think that novels do.”

Guilty! As I hit the “publish” button, I felt that this post came off as a whine, rather than the argument I wanted to make about living at hyperspeed and how difficult it is to slow down. If anything, I wasn’t trying to get into the merits or specifics of Middlemarch: only 125 pages in, I wasn’t in a position to judge it.

Living at hyperspeed, I was stuck for time. Given more of it, I would’ve contrasted the experience of reading a book like this with the experience I had reading Spook Country, an entertaining thriller that felt like it was made of now. Its McGuffin is pretty easy to suss out, unfortunately, but I enjoyed the book probably because of its utter now-ness.

What I was trying to say about Middlemarch, on the other hand, wasn’t that the particular time and place are like a foreign country (nor one that I’m disinclined to visit), but rather that the very experience of reading that novel is like a foreign country (or maybe one I was raised in as a child but forgot about).

Given my tendency not to extrapolate from my own experiences and tastes, I should’ve concluded that this is merely a symptom of my middle-aged shallowness, especially as the past 3-4 months’ workload has left me frazzled and constantly dealing with crises.

Humorously enough, the chapter I read last night begins with this passage about . . . how times are faster “now” and there’s less leisure:

A great historian, as he insisted on calling himself, who had the happiness to be dead a hundred and twenty years ago, and so to take his place among the colossi whose huge legs our living pettiness is observed to walk under, glories in his copious remarks and digressions as the least imitable part of his work, and especially in those initial chapters to the successive books of his history, where he seems to bring his arm-chair to the proscenium and chat with us in all the lusty ease of his fine English. But Fielding lived when the days were longer (for time, like money, is measured by our needs), when summer afternoons were spacious, and the clock ticked slowly in winter evenings. We belated historians must not linger after his example; and if we did so, it is probably that our chat would be thin and eager, as if delivered from a camp-stool in a parrot house. I at least have so much to do in unravelling certain human lots, and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed over that tempting range of relevancies called the universe.