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Dirda on Books
Hosted by Michael Dirda
Washington Post Book World Senior Editor
Friday, April 11, 2002; 2 p.m. EDT
Washington Post Book World Senior Editor Michael Dirda took your questions and comments concerning literature, books and the joys of reading.
Each week Dirda's name appears -- in unmistakably big letters -- on page 15 of The Post's Book World section. If he's not reviewing a hefty literary biography or an ambitious new novel, he's likely to be turning out one of his idiosyncratic essays or describing his travels to, say, a P.G. Wodehouse Convention. Although he earned a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Cornell, Dirda has somehow managed to retain a myopic 12-year-old's passion for reading. He particularly enjoys comic novels, intellectual history, locked-room mysteries, innovative fiction of all sorts -- just the sort of range you'd expect from a Pulitzer Prize winner in criticism (1993).
These days, Dirda says he still spends inordinate amounts of time mourning his lost youth, listening to music (Glenn Gould, Ella Fitzgerald, Diana Krall, The Tallis Scholars), and daydreaming ("my only real hobby"). He claims that the happiest hours of his week are spent sitting in front of a computer, working. In the fall of 2000 Indiana University Press published "Readings: Essays and Literary Entertainments," a selection from Dirda's Book World columns. He hopes to bring out a companion volume soon.
Dirda joined The Post in 1978, having grown up in the working-class steel town of Lorain, Ohio and graduated with highest honors in English from Oberlin College. His favorite writers are Stendhal, Chekhov, Jane Austen, Evelyn Waugh, T.S. Eliot, Nabokov, John Dickson Carr, Joseph Mitchell and Jack Vance. He thinks the greatest novel of all time is either Murasaki Shikubu's "The Tale of Genji" or Proust's "A la recherche du temps perdu." In a just world he would own Watteau's painting "The Embarkation for Cythera." He'd also like to spend six months in Florida writing a book that would become a runaway best seller, a critical success, and the hottest cinematic property of the year. A guy can daydream, right?
The transcript follows.
Editor's Note: Washingtonpost.com moderators retain editorial control
over Live Online discussions and choose the most relevant questions for guests and hosts; guests and hosts can decline to answer questions.
Austin, Tex.:
Last week you only had time to answer part of my question. The second part: What memoirs and diaries do consider essential to a personal library? Thanks for your time each week.
Michael Dirda: Welcome to Dirda on books! We had some peculiar computer difficulties, but they seemed to be resolved now. Not to worry, we'll go for an hour of uninterrupted biblio-bliss, as I attempt to field questions about books and reading.
This is one of those big questions, but here are are a few autobiographical classics:
Augustine, Confessions
Cellini, Memoirs
Rousseau, Confessions
Adams, The Education of Henry Adams
Pepys, Diary
Sei Shonagon, The Pillow Book of SS
Jules Renard, Journal
Kafka, Diaries
Stendhal, Life of Henry Brulard
Virginia Woolf, Diaries
Bonn, Germany:
Google-searching for something else, I came across the following statement from Neil Gaiman about "a fascinating article by Michael Dirda on fantasy which says everything I've been saying for a long time now and says it quicker and better. Go and read it. Print it out and make people read it."
Gaiman's entry is dated July 2001, and the site he links to doesn't have your article any longer. Do you know what he is referring to?
Michael Dirda: Gee, I think it was one of my Readings essays, in which I talk about favorite works of fantasy, with a kind of prefatory essay. Don't know quite when it appeared, but sometime within the last year and a half. Wish I could give you more definite information. I'll have to include the piece in the next volume of my essays.
Woodbridge, Va.:
Read your review a few weeks ago of the Times Literary Supplement. Picked up a copy and enjoyed it. A few questions: I noticed that the subscription price for the USA is $145 per year. Do you subscribe? Is it worth this (to me) astronomical amount?
How does TLS compare with New York Review of Books (which I have subscribed to, from time to time, until my bedroom gets totally filled up with bulky old issues)? NYROB seems to use the same reviewers repeatedly, so on some subjects you might get the same point of view repeated. NYROB seems to cover fairly heavily certain ponderous, Ought-To-Read subjects, like nuclear arms, German history, the ongoing disputes in the Middle East, which is one reason unread issues take over my bedroom. Is TLS like this also?
Do you ever order books that you find reviewed in the TLS and that aren't available here in the U.S.? Is this expensive?
Michael Dirda: Lots of questions. 1) Why not see if your local library carries the TLS? Or maybe you can go halvsies with a literary minded friend on the subscription? 2) The TLS covers a far greater number and variety of books than the New York Review--its pages do tend to favor certain subjects and reviewers, and to offer its writers lots of space. The TLS usualy has one or two longish pieces, but most are of normal or slightly longer review length.
I haven't ordered books from England in a while, but I undertstand that many people use online booksellers to acquire books. For instance, thousands of kids ordered the last Harry Potter from England.
Woodbridge, Va.:
Thursday afternoon, just booted up my computer to go to your program, and you've rescheduled! So, I'll just post early: What do you think of Salman Rushdie? I know you like Nabokov, but in what ways do you think Nabokov's work is better than Rushdie's (assuming that this is what you think). I have read "The Moor's Last Sigh," "Satanic Verses," and "Imaginary Homelands." What should I read next? Does the fact that I like Rushdie mean that I would like Nabokov? How come our best novelists started off speaking something other than English?
Michael Dirda: I don't think of Rushdie as being like Nabokov, though they both have a flair for language, outrageous situation, and controversy. You should read Rushdie's Booker winner: Midnight's Children. Sometimes coming to a language from another one does give a writer a freshness and oddity that can work in his favor: Conrad, Beckett (into French), etc. But these are rare writers.
Palookaville:
Michael -- Among my wife's biggest reading enjoyments are the works of Jane Austen, Anna Karenina, Possession, A Suitable Boy, Diary of a Geisha, and Alice Munro's stories. I just bought her The Tale of Genji for her birthday. Good bet? And how do you pronounce "Genji" anyway?
Michael Dirda: Gen with a hard g, as in get. ji as in gee. I love the book, but it's leisurely, uneventful, delicately beautiful. Somewhat like Proust. In other words, it's not a book that everyone responds to easily. You should read my essay Heian Holiday. It's probably archived here, or you can find it in my book, Readings.
McLean, Va.:
I'm not ordinarily much of a mystery reader but I just finished "The Long Goodbye" by Raymond Chandler, an author I've seen mentioned in this chat. It really drew me in -- a little hard to explain why -- I think it's because he's just barely on the right side of over the top. What other authors (I know the obvious answer is Dashiell Hammet) offer a similar read? Thanks!
Michael Dirda: I like your noticing that he's just near the top-and sometimes does go over. Chandler is rococo; Hammett is classical. If you want someone in between, try Ross Macdonald. If you like lean and mean, go for Chester Himes, David Goodis, Jim Thompson. If you like wit, look for Donald Westlake or Lawrence Block.
New York, N.Y.:
What's your impression of Charles Frazier's novel. "Cold Mountain?" (Soon to be made into a major motion picture.)
Michael Dirda: Never read it. Wanted DeLillo or Pynchon to win the prizes it won.
College Park, Md.:
After re-reading Tolkien's stuff, I am getting in the mood for non-fiction again. I am an avid fan of big, modernist socialist literature, but I never read any of Trotsky's essays on the arts. I have been told that his writing is quite exquisite, but I never really got around to it. Do you know of where I should start?
Hope you can help...
Michael Dirda: I read LIterature and Revolution years ago, and was impressed by the sensitivity of his literary judgment. I supose I'd say try that. Wouldn't it be better to read some Soviet literature, though? Say, Bulgakov's Master and Margarita, Zamyatin's We, poetry of Tstevaea, Akhmatova and Mandelstam (who also wrote terrific prose: see the memoir The Noise of Time).
SciFiGirl:
Michael -- Just wanted to say thanks to you and the Book World staff for the outstanding Science Fiction/Fantasy issue last week. I got lots of new ideas, and Elizabeth Hand's article on women authors was especially illuminating. Though I will say that I am still failing to see the genius of Gene Wolfe, after struggling through the Shadow of the Torturer, but maybe I should give him another go with one of the other books. On the other hand, Chia Mievielle's book, Perdido Street Station, also left me cold, so it's possible that they just don't appeal to me.
Michael Dirda: Wolfe is an austere writer in some ways, and his esthetics don't appeal to people who want a lot of plot or story--though he does give you that, in his way. He's a writer in which a whole lot of activity is taking place beneath the surface--in the etymologies of words, the things not said, seemingly minor allusions that prove major, that sort of thing. You need to have something of a puzzler's mentality, or like art that demands a fair amount of input.
Boston, Mass.:
Have you checked out the Everyman Wodehouse yet? I actually like the Everyman volumes quite a bit. They are small but the print is very readable. Overlook Press is issuing them here in the States but their run will be much smaller than Everyman's (60 volumes v. 80 volumes, or something like that...). Time to update the Wodehouse?
Michael Dirda: I have most of the books already, but one paperback line recently reprinted some of the novels with ragged right margins--I hate this. Can't read a book with such an unkempt appearance. I haven't actually seen any of the Everyman books--though you'd think they'd send them, as there are few greater Wodehouse admirers around.
Morgantown, W.V.:
Mr. Dirda,
I'm sneaking in a bit of C.S. Lewis' Four Loves (the chapters on Eros and Friendship). What would you recommend as similar books?
Second, I have a quote that rings through my head -- it's not what books you pass through but what books pass through you (I think this is right); is this an Emerson quip or someone else?
P.S. I enjoyed the recent Atlantic Monthly article by Christopher Hitchens, about Amis' Lucky Jim -- pointed and hilarious!
Michael Dirda: The quote is, I'm pretty sure, from Thoreau, though it's a little more pointed, something like "It doesn't matter how many books you get through as how many get through you."
Try Lewis's enemey: Denis de Rougemont's Love in the Western World.
I've read Lucky Jim, and lots of Amis; so I wouldn't normally read anything about either. Most of my periodical reading tends to focus on writers and books I haven't read, and want to.
Gaiman/Dirda reference:
Neil Gaiman: "Michael Dirda in the Washington Post felt moved enough by the responses in-house to his lengthy and positive review of 'American Gods' to write this amazing little article on fantasy. And on why missing it is short-sighted, foolish and betrays a lack of understanding of the basics of English literature."
"Many readers," Dirda wrote in the Post on July 1, "simply can't stomach fantasy. They immediately picture elves with broadswords or mighty-thewed barbarians with battle axes, seeking the bejeweled Coronet of Obeisance ... (But) the best fantasies pull aside the velvet curtain of mere appearance. ... In most instances, fantasy ultimately returns us to our own now re-enchanted world, reminding us that it is neither prosaic nor meaningless, and that how we live and what we do truly matters."
From an October interview with CNN.
Michael Dirda: Thanks. I do go on for quite a while before I get to that concluding sentence. Anway I must have written that piece shortly after reviewing AMerican Gods--I suspect it was sometime last summer.
Cleveland Park, D.C.:
I've recently embarked on a satisfying tour of Great American Novels, and I'm wondering if you have any to recommend -- I've been focusing on stylish, canonical works from the likes of William Kennedy, James Baldwin, Updike, Salinger, Faulkner -- and I'm now asea with Moby Dick. Where next?
Michael Dirda: Hmmm. The Scarlet Letter, Huckleberry Finn, Sister Carrie, The House of Mirth, The Portrait of a Lady, Tender is the Night, Invisible Man, Lolita, Gravity's Rainbow, The Recognitions, A Lost Lady, Accordion Crimes, The Grapes of Wrath, Herzog, Catch-22 . . . .
E-Guy:
May I please tout one of my favorite books, long out of print, which has just been republished? It’s “On the Yard,” the 1967 prison novel by Malcolm Braly, who spent almost 20 years in various penals (including San Quentin) for burglary and embarked on a writing career while still in the joint, scribbling about what he knew best. All y’all who were discussing hard-boiled detective fiction a few weeks ago would enjoy this tough but humorous book. If you need more proof, Kurt Vonnegut blurbs it “the great American prison novel,” and Jonathan Lethem provides the new edition’s introduction. Michael, did you ever read it? Any other prison novels you like?
Michael Dirda: Never read it. I've read novels where the hero spends time in prison--Charterhouse of Parma, say--but I don't know if I've read a prison novel. Did read that Stephen King novella, Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, which was quite good. Guess I should chek out ON the Yard. I think I had it vaguely mixed up in my mind with George Jackson's Soledad Brother.
New to Washington, D.C.:
Hi. I'm new to D.C., coming from Oregon. Could you name any books that sum up the soul of my new home? (I can think of many books that in some way touch on the essence of Oregon, but I'm not sure what their D.C. counterparts are.) Thanks.
Michael Dirda: The search for the great DC novel is never ending. You might read George Pelecanos's crime novels, or Chris Buckley's lobbyist novel Thank You for Smoking, or books by Susan Shreve, Edward Jones, Marita Golden, et al. Some people say the best Washington novel is still Henry Adams' Democracy.
Pentagon, Arlington, Va.:
Any comments on Oprah eliminating her book club? In case anyone missed it, she finds it increasingly difficult to find books she feels "compelled to share." Therefore, she will no long have a monthly book club.
Michael Dirda: Well, this only goes to show you how shallow Oprah's taste really is. The world is filled with wonderful books, old and new. ENough said.
Venus:
Michael -
I must object strenuously to your characterization of Dashiel Hammett as Classical and Raymond Chandler as -- gasp! -- Roccoco. That is an unacceptable insult to everyone concerned (except the Roccoco school). Chandler is an Impressionist. Hammett is a Realist.
Thank you.
Michael Dirda: Oh, come now. Hammett's prose is lean, precise, balanced, declarative, unemotional; Chandler's is lyrical, simile-rich, witty, sentimental and slightly excessive. THey both thought they were realists, but are they? Hammett's books are as over the top as anything--I mean, The Dain Curse, really, or all those murders in Red Harvest.
Venus:
My two bits on Salman Rushdie: I have found his work to be shallow at best. He attempts to ape the style of Gunter Grass but, in Rushdie's case, the outcome is a victory of style over substance.
My advice to the person in Woodbridge is to read Gunter Grass. (And Nabokov, too, but not because you like Rushdie.)
Michael Dirda: Ok.
Kilkenny, Ireland:
Congratulations on the F/SF issue of Book World -- it was really very well done. It was especially nice to see M.John Harrison getting some attention. He tends to be overlooked a bit in the U.S. Have you read any of his recent novels/short stories?
Michael Dirda: THanks. No, I read the early Viriconium stories, but haven't kept up enough with his recent stuff.
Herndon, Va.:
Mr. Dirda: Time for my semi-annual question -- any word about a new book (Flashman or other) from the august pen of Mr. George MacDonald Fraser?
Michael Dirda: Nope. George must be getting up there. The last Flashman was really a collection three novellas. Still, I hope there's more to come. Akkadine Books of A Common Reader have reissued some of Faser's early books, Quartered Safe out Here, THe Steel Bonnets, and a few others.
Baltimore, Md.:
I've noticed that several novels from the 19th century show great disdain for the institution of marriage. Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, Jude the Obscure all portray marriage in a very depressing light. I assume these writers are rebelling against Victorian morals, but is there something else that causes them to have such disrespect for marriage?
Michael Dirda: Well, happy marriages make for dull novels. In fact, it can be argued that adultery is the central theme of western fiction.
Bethesda, Md.:
Michael
Last week you asked me to remind you to raise for discussion the possible role of formal education in discouraging reading for pleasure in our children. I think schools are certainly capable of bleeding the life out of literature, but parents share at least some of the responsiblity. If kids see adults incessantly watching TV or engaged in other passive entertainment (I would definitely not include reading in this), they'll just imitate that behavior. I also think that parents should try to follow what their kids read -- maybe read along with them in their assignments and rediscover some works, and make literature part of family life/discussion. Lots of opportunities to make things better here; also lots of opportunities to point fingers.
Michael Dirda: Perhaps we can have a general discussion of schools and books, with the way the former sometimes inadvertently discourage the reading of the latter. So let's think about books and education for next week. OK?
For the Chandler Neophyte:
The best of the over-the-top guys, by my estimation, is James M. Cain. "They threw me off the hay truck about noon." "I had to have her. I had her."
Michael Dirda: Ah yes, the immortal first sentence of The Postman Always Rings Twice. Have you read Paul Cain's Fast One? Even leaner. When the hero bleeds to death the other Cain writes something like "And after a while the life went away from him." Talk about affectless.
Woodbridge, Va.:
I have read about a little town in Wales that has devoted itself to becoming a sales center for used books, and about Larry McMurtry's attempt to do the same with his home town in Texas.
Have you or any of your posters been to either of these towns? Are they worth the trip?
Michael Dirda: Hay on Wye and ARcher City. haven't been to either, alas. Perhaps one of these days.
Oops. I need to call this session to a close, as I need to go write headlines. Sorry about the delay at the begining. See you all next Thursday. Till then, keep reading!
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