What I Like is Better Than What You Like, or It’s Not Genre if Literary Writers Do It

Literature is like pornography: no one can tell you what it is, but they know it when they see it. Such is the underlying assumption behind this cry for help from Arthur Krystal in the New Yorker, which allows him, among many other logically-suspect things, to claim unto literature’s greedy penumbra several works which are clearly speculative (that is, genre) fiction. It allows him to say that works like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road are simply a literary sensibility working with genre, and not in it, as if some aesthetic prophylaxis were involved, allowing said literary giant to wade into the post-apocalyptic pool and take a swim without getting any of it in his hair.

What is the nature of the distinction? I’ll let Krystal answer for himself. Continue reading “What I Like is Better Than What You Like, or It’s Not Genre if Literary Writers Do It” →

On the Importance of Books for the Traveler

There are those of us who are never, or rarely, without a book, no matter where we are or what we´re doing. Sometimes we´ll carry it around even though we know we aren´t going to have a chance to read it, our own little personal totem, if you will, that marks and protects us and reveals us to kindred spirits. And while we increasingly fill those interstitial moments these days with social media as delivered to us via our pocket-sized electronic umbilica, we can´t always get a signal, and even if we can, there´s something to be said for the pleasures of immersive single-tasking, and books come in really handy at times like that.

But there´s something about traveling that turns almost everyone into a reader. Continue reading “On the Importance of Books for the Traveler” →

One Reason Real Books Aren’t Going Away

bkshelf:cropped — A way to get to know me.

“Hi, Come on in. Let me take your coat. Can I get you something?”

You step inside, a first-time visitor. You accept some hospitality, something to sip on, something to eat. Your host disappears into the kitchen, from which clinking or boiling sounds and questions emanate. You look around, taking the place in.

You see the bookshelf. The rest of the room dims, turns into background. Before you know what happened you’re standing in front of it, eyes and perhaps a finger gently tracing the cracked and wrinkled spines, the authors’ names and titles printed on them. Some you know, some you don’t. Maybe some are in your to-read pile (you never can keep up with it). Those are most exciting of all, because maybe your new friend has read them and can tell you about them. You pick a volume at random, one you don’t know, and open to a random page. The smell of the paper wafts gently into your nostrils, the traces left by the eyes and fingers of those who’ve read these words before are almost tactile. The words slide through your pupils and fall like rain into your self; they sink into the loam of your life-world, send shoots and rhizomes out into the soil around them, grow into the latticework of intertwined roots that have been weaving themselves together since your parents first sat you down on their knee and taught you the magic trick that turns little lines and curves on paper into imagination.

Despite the solitude in which it’s performed, reading is one of the most intimate activities there is. Continue reading “One Reason Real Books Aren’t Going Away” →