So it's a book about writing by a guy who doesn't even claim to be a writer: he was a long-tenured fiction editor at Esquire. So that means there are no writing exercises, and there are no lofty flights about the magic and power of the written word. It's basically just one long essay explaining what exactly differentiates great literature and moving works of art from, say, "Cat Person" by Kristen Roupenian. A discussion I’ve, stunningly, rarely run into throughout my 20+ years of studying writing—perhaps because Hills isn't really a writer he feels less protective of allowing people to plainly see how literature does what it does (I mean, if I fully understood how to create literature the last thing I'd ever do is blab about it all to you.) Does he do it though? Does he explain what literature is? I think so. And it was way simpler than what I was attempting to do. Four stars.
"What to Listen for in Music" by Aaron Copland (1939)
Is this truly a guide to classical music for the non-musical layperson? Well, no—there were far too many things in here that went way over my head. But as far as steering you towards noteworthy compositions through the guidance of an accomplished, passionate composer goes (so passionate, apparently, he frequently forgets most people don't understand what the fuck he's talking about; also, Copland is the one who wrote the "Beef, it's what's for dinner" theme) I don't think you can beat it. I think I really like Bach now. Four stars.
"W-3" by Bette Howland (1974)
I've never seen someone with such rich observations and such rich material (observing the characters around her in a Chicago psychiatric ward following a suicide attempt) keep repeatedly tripping over their own writing. It's almost heartbreaking because the book is crazy interesting, if only you can get past a writer who can pull a pretty good (if often ill-timed) turn of phrase but who also appears to constantly, seemingly inadvertently, confuse you. Two stars.
"There Are No Children Here - The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in the Other America" by Alex Kotlowitz (1991)
I become embarrassed when I think back to my attempts at emotion as a young writer—don't get me wrong, an unusual number of my attempts were actually good and they worked (I'm professionally paid to write stuff that makes people cry, you know.) But you do certain things in your youth, like temper the police killing of a well-respected non-gang member with scenes of children literally chasing a rainbow down Chicago streets, things you wouldn't do when you're older and you perhaps realize that one can easily smother their own emotional seedlings simply by working the soil a little too hard. A review said this was the better of his two books on Chicago inner city life, but I disagree. In fact, I think Hoop Dreams, the movie which covers similar territory, is better than this book, a book that's fascinating though naggingly facile (as opposed to engagingly real.) You know, like a middling This American Life story. I'd go read "An American Summer." Three stars.
"Theory of Literature" by Paul H. Fry (2012)
It's a Yale Open Courses class so there are YouTube videos, but I found Fry's speaking style so grating I decided to buy the book. There are 26 chapters, and most chapters have you read two or three outside essays, which are fairly easy to find on today's internet, and fairly difficult to read because (as I should have guessed from the book’s title) it turns out the class is less about literature and more about philosophy (I would describe reading philosophy as equivalent to drinking out of a container labeled "HEADACHE JUICE".) You'll span hermeneutics, modes of formalism, semiotics and structuralism, deconstruction, psychoanalytic approaches, Marxist and historicist approaches, theories of social identity, and neo-pragmatism (and that's just what's written on the back cover, and also, hardly scratching the surface) which turns out is a lot for the brain to soak in when not spread out over 13 weeks. But, considering the density and breadth of the material, Fry does a pretty good job of keeping the class focused on its core ideas, even as he's seemingly steering everyone off-course. Would I say I got what I was expecting? Well, no. Was I exposed to far more ideas than I was expecting, far more than I ever needed? God, yes. Did I retain most of them? No—seemed like any new information I learned would push whatever previous information I learned out of my brain. Lucky I was taking notes. Four stars.
"The Tyranny of Virtue - Identity, the Academy, and the Hunt for Political Heresies" by Robert Boyers (2019)
Elderly liberal academic and steward of long-running literary magazine attempts to deconstruct, one-by-one, censorship inflicted by liberals upon themselves—examining in turn notions of privilege, safety, diversity, appropriation, identity, ableism—in cold, dense, academic prose. I could express more of my own thoughts on what Boyers actually says about it all but I’m afraid I might get cancelled. Four stars.
"The Death and Life of Great American Cities" by Jane Jacobs (1961)
Having grown up in a city, I got the impression that most people didn't really like them—I never saw city life as I knew it depicted on TV, and in fact, throughout my adult life I rarely run into another person who was also raised inside the city proper. I loved them, though, to the point that in my 20 years in New York I've never lived in a high-rise, because I don't like separating myself from street life; it's why I've spent the last 10 of them living in a place like Crown Heights. So reading Jane Jacobs I couldn't be more thrilled to run into someone who was just as enthusiastic about cities as I am. And not just the fancy, fun parts: Jacobs is in love with the complexity, with the mess, the collisions and the contradictions. In essence, she's spending the entire book trying to shine lights on a mystery no one seems to understand, both then and now: how can a confused, massive throng of people actually succeed together? So I'm all about this book; I can see why it's considered revolutionary. I'm even thrilled that she spends a lot of time questioning what I consider an overwhelming human epidemic among people my age and younger, the lust for control where control is a fantasy. Sure, there are some spots where it seems like she's backing up an assumption with nothing more than a confident-sounding voice, but it's a five-star book. At a certain point though, lightheaded, you lift your bleary eyes from the dense, small type and say, to nobody in particular, "Geez, she just sort of kept going on and on for a bit now there, didn't she?" Four stars.
"The Craft of Fiction" by Percy Lubbock (1921)
I'm not sure if this is considered "New Criticism"; if anything, it feels like a precursor to that movement, which apparently took off in the 1940s. Both this book and that movement import to the ordinary reader that in order to fully appreciate literature a reader needs to go beyond the pleasures of story and implant within themselves some understanding of the workings of craft. I buy that in the sense that ... well, remember how in the 90s people thought Harry Potter would usher in this renaissance of reading? And all that ended up happening is now there are a whole bunch of grown adults pushing 40 reading books that were explicitly intended to be comprehended by children? Well, so, to backtrack, I buy that in the sense that understanding the mechanism of story might help people expand beyond the things they already like, in the same way that someone who understands the game of baseball can watch and appreciate games played by teams other than their favorite. So should this book, which is focused entirely on the role point of view plays in accomplished novels, be read by the casual reader? Well, no. But if you aspired to be a writer, there's great stuff in here! What's interesting is, as writing instruction became more formalized in the 20th century, it seems like the "rules" actually grew more and more rigid, even as the field became more and more democratized. I think that's what happens if you want to open up the field to more people: it's hard to organize (hard to sell) a big tent if you tell everybody: Hey, fundamentally, there are actually no rules whatsoever! The New Criticism crowd seemed to understand that, even while pointing out exactly how the gears turned. It's interesting to read thoughts about writing from this era, to me, because I keep running into fundamentally sound arguments that seem to have been entirely forgotten/ignored/rejected, for whatever reasons, none of which seem good. Four stars.
"The Chicago Neighborhood Guidebook" Edited by Martha Bayne (2019)
I get the sense most good writers in Chicago end up moving away. One star.
"The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick" by Elizabeth Hardwick, Selected by Darryl Pinckney (2017)
She's a very very good writer, but it's striking how her writing style didn't change all that much from the first essay published in 1953 to the final one published in 2003. For contrast, Flannery O'Connor's writing style matured exponentially in just the 18 years between "The Geranium" and "Judgement Day". Kind of gives me pause, considering. Anyway, you probably shouldn't read this book if you don't particularly like reading (Hardwick on Joan Didion: "The inclination to pedantry in instances of piddling, measly inconsequence are sometimes the only protection one has against the witchery of this uncompromising imagination, the settings so various and the sometimes sleepwalking players who blindly walk through windows and fall into traps of great consequence such as the Vietnam War or the world of the Contras.") But if you do, it's a BONANZA. Four stars.
"The Art of the Novel - Critical Prefaces" by Henry James (1934)
It's one thing to read Henry James' dizzying writing style in a piece of fiction—you work at it because you trust he's leading you somewhere. It's another thing when he's speaking as himself, reflecting on his own work, the sentence structures splintering into a winding, sprawling train consisting of his own lightly tethered thoughts. Don't get me wrong: he's brilliant. And unlike most accomplished writers, he's not coy. In fact, he's very generous about the process of creating and crafting fiction. But he's also an overthinker. And reading this book has been difficult for me because the result is akin to one person directly injecting their craziness into my brain. (Strangely, though, you leave the book with the impression "American literature's biggest snob" might actually have been, deep down, a really nice guy.) Two stars.
"The Art of Fiction" by John Gardner (1983)
If you retitled the book "Irritating Man Explains It All", you wouldn't be far off. Four stars.
"Soldier Field - A Stadium and Its City" by Liam T. A. Ford (2009)
I didn't expect a 300-page book about a stadium to read as a hopelessly depressing tome detailing one city's cyclic, unrectifiable morass of corruption and cynicism over the course of a century, but then again we're talking about Chicago here. Three stars.
“Schulz and Peanuts” by David Michaelis (2007)
Solidly constructed but, oddly, not enough. At the least, a telling portrait of the seemingly humble person who privately wants to destroy everyone. Two stars.
"Rabelais and His World" by Mikhail Bakhtin, Translated by Hélène Iswolsky (1965, 1968)
I ran into this book in The New Yorker. The author of the article brought up this Russian philosopher's examination of Rabelais's Renaissance-era comedy while discussing how Volodymyr Zelenskyy's former life as a comedian factors in the fight against Russia. What's interesting is, the book actually seems to frown on comedy as satirical resistance. In fact, you could easily characterize the book as a 500-page defense of poop jokes—he argues comedy that has an individual target is almost worthless, but comedy that joins the hoi polloi together in gleeful abandon pulls power down from cosmic, divine, virtuous enormity and gives it to the common, unsophisticated person, the kind of person who eats too much, drinks too freely, and defecates without compunction. It's basically saying the simple act of calling everyone you dislike "retarded jagoffs" removes fear. So, basically, that Ivy League-educated, well paid, richly connected writer for The New Yorker namedropping an obscure Russian philosophy book in order to produce timely content for their snooty magazine, whether or not the message of the book is actually a sensical fit for the situation (it far better explains the vulgarity embraced by the right against progressive shame) seems to me like a retarded jagoff. Three stars.
"Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" by Fredric Jameson (1991)
In a word, it's exhausting. Which isn't to say it's unpleasant—there's actually a nice little (albeit peculiar) flow to this Marxist literary critic's entangled and far-ranging writing style. I'll start with this though: you get a clearer idea of whether his ideas on the tenor of our current culture hold any water now that we're 33 years out and the "postmodern" trends he identifies and argues for only seem to have exponentially exploded. Whether you're patient enough or primed enough to explore them is a whole other issue (I don't think I would have understood practically anything here if I hadn't taken myself through a university survey of literary theory a couple years ago, and that still didn't prevent a great deal of re-reading.) So why do I feel it's worth talking about if the book is so clearly difficult and esoteric? Well, attempting to take an all-encompassing, birds-eye view of the cultural era we currently live in—characterized mainly by gargantuan pluralization, fragmentation, and commodification—is frankly insane.* That Jameson does a pretty good job of it in a little over 400 pages is impressive, at least considering how many times he got me to pause and consider my own era (Have you ever spent an idle weekend considering your own era? Especially one as fucked up as this one?) There aren't many books out there that attempt to sum up THE ENTIRE STORY. And if that wets your whistle I'd say this is a pretty good one. I would think speeding through it on your one off-day away from the kids is out of the question though: you'd give yourself a stroke. Four stars.
*Here is the book's closing paragraph: "The rhetorical strategy of the preceding pages has involved an experiment, namely, the attempt to see whether by systematizing something that is resolutely unsystematic, and historicizing something that is resolutely ahistorical, one couldn’t outflank it and force a historical way at least of thinking about that. 'We have to name the system': this high point of the sixties finds an unexpected revival in the postmodernism debate."
"Pleasure: A History" Edited by Lisa Shapiro (2018)
Was reading a philosophy book about pleasure in and of itself actually pleasant? No, in fact at times it was downright maddening. Nonetheless, did I want to read it? Yes. Would I say reading it was worthwhile? Actually, very much so. In a way, it was exactly what I was looking for. But would I recommend that people pick up and read a philosophy book for themselves? Not if you don't like being driven crazy. Adjoining to the above contradictions, does it make sense that I would highly rate a book that filled me with deeply unpleasant feelings, that I wouldn't recommend to others, and in fact would advise to actively avoid, that spends a tremendous amount of time logically explaining how in the end it's impossible to understand certain things? (Why do we seek pleasant things? <24 pages later> It is because they are pleasant.) No, probably not. Four stars.
"Our Aesthetic Categories - Zany, Cute, Interesting" by Sianne Ngai (2012)
A dense academic book (accordingly, a fairly slow read) nonetheless it might be interesting for the casual reader as it focuses on three things we're culturally, irresistibly drawn to: things that are cute, things that are interesting, and things that are zany. Why these three and not, say, the most familiar aesthetic category: beauty? Because Ngai believes a focus on these three will help us understand much more generally "what hits" in our current era, the postmodern era*—cute is a "claymation"/dollhouse Airbnb commercial, interesting is an ongoing Wendy's "staffers" campaign, and zany is Flo's ever-shifting role in Progressive ads—you see these three "hooks" pop up again and again and again, and in combination, in any commercial break or, for that matter, in any social media post (YouTube video essays commonly, strenuously aim for all three at once.) Now, I'm not going to claim I've read enough books on philosophical aesthetics to confidently say exactly where Ngai is or isn't off-base with her arguments (cuteness=commodity, interestingness=information, zaniness=performance), or whether her focus on these three aesthetic categories is even justified, though I certainly have some thoughts (tying zaniness to the ever-consuming demands of capitalism on femininity kind of makes sense, but still feels somewhat shoehorned in—I don't think that explains why I enjoy watching "I Think You Should Leave.") I sure don't want to drag this out too long, so what I'll say is: there must be a reason why people in, say, advertising or social media reliably turn to these three things in order to nab our attention/affection in a crazily overstuffed field, and there must be a reason why these three things are often relied upon by ourselves to procure our own likes. And in a very extensively, very diversely sourced book that gets you to pause on and consider these seemingly disposable aesthetics—things we encounter every day that actively and powerfully and somewhat silently influence our behavior, things we barely give a second thought to—any serious examination is welcome, even if inevitably at times it feels "off," even if it's naggingly dominated by Marxist ideas. There's more than enough "on" there to encourage eyeing the world through an askance view: Ever notice that tech companies overwhelmingly embrace a cute visual style? Ever notice that whenever you're drawn to something cute, they're usually "little" and "submissive" and "weaker," which implies a power differential between you and the cute object? Ever notice that that power differential, much like with a newborn baby, inspires a kind of protectiveness, which means that the cute object is now making demands off of you? So who exactly is the powerful one here?—Ngai makes you think about stuff like that. Four stars.
*"The zany, the cute, and the interesting are not really 'minor' in the sense of being unimportant or marginal. The specific social transformations and/or aesthetic problems to which they intimately speak—the convergence of art and information; the loss of tension between art and the commodity form; the rise of an increasingly intimate public sphere and of an increasingly exchange-based private one; the proliferation and intensification of activity in both public/private domains that cannot easily be dichotomized into play or work—are ones that significantly affect the making, dissemination, and reception of all culture. These three particular categories thus help us totalize the contemporary repertoire of 'aesthetic categories'; indeed, they help us understand the meaningfulness of this very concept for doing aesthetic theory in general."
"On Writing" by Eudora Welty (2002)
I feel like we all forgot about her—sure, Flannery O'Connor wrote better short stories, and sure, Flannery O'Connor was so enticingly mean, and sure, it's a little odd that a fellow Southern writer wouldn't mention Flannery O'Connor once in her book about writing (Faulkner gets gushed upon), but Eudora Welty was still good. At the very least, Eudora Welty was more generous in her thoughts about it, even in this short, 100-page book (Flannery O'Connor's mysteries and manners kind of feels like a scolding.) What's different about this one? First, it starts from a base of: Not everybody can write. So it immediately dispenses with "Writing 101" issues. Hence, it also dispenses with the Writing 101 idea that writing should be a mirror reflection of life, and insists that good writing is really more an imitation of life, similar to how Van Gogh's sunflowers don't quite look like real sunflowers, and that's what makes it beautiful. The rest of her thoughts lie on this elevated level: how does the writer work with the reader to, together, create something beautiful? The effect is to expand your understanding of how beauty is achieved beyond, say, describing landscapes using exquisite words. And you could see her focus on beauty across each page: this is probably the best written treatise on writing I've ever read, wordsmith-wise. As I went through this I couldn't help but think that the prevailing writing advice I've received: "Just keep reading and writing," is flat-out horrible advice—yes, I've learned how to pack an enormous amount of big thoughts into one small paragraph and still make it digestible, but is what you just read beautiful? I would say no. Four stars.
"Of Elephants and Toothaches - Ethics, Politics, and Religion in Krzysztof Kieślowski’s ‘Decalogue’" Edited by Eva Badowska and Francesca Parmeggiani (2016)
It's an academic book that's only worth reading if you enjoyed watching all 10 hours of "Dekalog". That said, because of the film's subject matter—10 films based on The Ten Commandments, centering on realistic stories about everyday people during communist Poland—the book is allowed to dive into psychology, theology, cinematic craft and analysis, philosophy, morality, the nature of love, drama, politics, human behavior, parenthood, the legal system, and even comedy, all in less than 230 pages or so. Of course, with so many different perspectives you won't necessarily agree with everything, but one of these 12 scholars is bound to talk about something intriguing that viewers hadn't before noticed. In fact, it's a little astounding that the film can bear this much scrutiny and still maintain its integrity. I think, in all the years I've spoken to people about this movie, I've convinced roughly 0.0 percent of them to sit down and watch it. Which, I suppose, is just as well. Three stars.