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A Tale of Two Big Reads
The NEA just released its list of grantees for thousands of dollars in funding for its Big Reads. Popular choices are: Fahrenheit 451, The Great Gatsby, and Bless Me, Ultima.
In my humble opinion, the titles we’ve been Big Reading on this site (see the column to the left) are a lot more interesting.
As Alex Estes says on Twitter:
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- Reading Resolutions 2012 I wasn’t going to do a reading resolutions for 2012 because these things always tend to be a crapshoot for me. I’ll line up a...
- NBCC Good Reads The Good Reads list that I mentioned yesterday is up now. I like the idea, and I hope the list gets better and better with...
- A Tale of Two Reviews William Grimes and P.J. O’Rourke agree that Leslie Savan’s Slam Dunks and No Brainers is a self-righteous rant that isn’t worth your time. So why...
- Literary Nonfiction A couple weeks ago, I did a Friday Column about 3 writers of literary nonfiction whose work I enjoy. It was my little way of...
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Recommended Books DeLillo's major work before White Noise is probably his most underrated novel. Its all right here--the politics of paranoia, terrorism, the unnamable--set in an evocative, timeless Greece.
The most bizarre Abe novel I've yet read, which is indeed saying something. About a subclass of Japanese men who go around wearing boxes from the waist up (and then use them as domiciles in the evening), the book is also an experiment in perspective shifts, a highly unstable, metafictional first-person narrative, and an exploration of voyeurism, consumerism, and aberrant sexuality.
Charting the path to three gunshots--the one that killed filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, the one that disabled his Islamic extremist assassin, Mohammed Bouyeri, and the one that led to Vincent Van Gogh’s one hundred years earlier--Olsen tells three separate stories that resonate with one another on numerous levels: the logic of extremism, the role of the dissident in Dutch society, the limits of tolerance, the purpose of the artist, the feeling of the most important five minutes of your life. Read my interview with the author.
Creatively structured, well-executed epic novel of rural South Africa from 1950 - 2000. Takes on a lot and lives up to it magnificently. Highly recommended.
A book that's an interview about the book you're supposedly holding in your hands. Creative, potent, and full of life. Just what metafiction should be. Read my post on it.
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The Rachel Shihor Interview
Graphs, Maps, Trees
The Names by Don DeLillo (1982)
The Box Man by Kobo Abe (1973, English 1974)
Head in Flames by Lance Olsen (2009)
Agaat by Marlene van Niekerk (2006, English 2010)
The Weather Fifteen Years Ago by Wolf Haas (2006, English 2009)
That’s a pretty snobby sentiment. The books you’ve selected might be more interesting, but do honestly think that they would be better picks for a program aimed at involving people who maybe don’t read very often?
Are you trying to say something in this post other than “My books are better”?
I don’t understand your dismissal, as there’s still a lot of great literature on the list. Better just to be grateful the NEA is funding anything at all, especially literary projects.
Most of these books are superior to A Naked Singularity.
One point, which may or may not be trivially obvious, is that the word “big” seems to be being used in two different ways in these two fora: the NEA Big Read is big in the sense of “widely-participated” in (the books, at least these three books, being in fact quite small); the CR Big Reads have, so far, been big in the sense of “tackling, as a (small) group, a large, challenging work of fiction.”
Like I said, probably obvious; and yet it’s the homonymy that seems to have provoked this rather unfortunate comparison.