The New York Times Book Review, again

Most of my library career was spent on the East Coast, usually surrounded by readers of the New York Times, in particular, its Book Review. I was frequently influenced to purchase a book for my school library (Pre-school through Grade 5) which ended up a shelf sitter (i.e. never loved by the kids as much as it was loved by the reviewer). This was more often the case with picture books than with books for older kids.

But as a grown-up reader, I read their reviews just for sheer pleasure of the prose. Yes, I frequently find a book there I've never heard of and do read and adore (Case in point, Kate Atkinson's mysteries).

But what better description of Ian McEwan's new book SOLAR than today's review by Walter Kirn who calls it "a book so good-- so ingeniously designed, irreproachably high-minded and skillfully brought off-- that it's actually quite bad... It's impressive to behold but something of a virtuous pain to read." Later in the review he calls the book "a buttery, rich sauce ladled onto overcooked, dry meat."

Ouch.

But I do not need to read a virtuous pain of a book.

I've read another mediocre review of this book so even though I adored Ian McEwan's Atonement and kind of liked a couple of others, I'll wait for somebody to dispute Mr. Kirn's opinion before adding it to my To Read list. Because that review is just so dang fun to read, I have to trust it.


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New York Times Book Review

Often a book review appeals to me more than the book. With good writing and an interesting topic, I learn all I need to know just from the review. That's the case with Ben Yagoda review of The Tyranny of E-Mail. I may or may not look at the book, but I learned a lot from the review.

1. The "average corporate worker" gets about 200 e-mail messages a day.
2. 62% of Americans read and answer work e-mail on vacations. (Bet it's more than that!)
3. E-mail is highly prone to being misinterpreted. (Oh, really?)
4. Don't "debate complex or sensitive matters by e-mail." (Again, this shouldn't be news to anybody.)
5. E-mail is an instantaneous, demanding, borderline addictive medium.

That's what the author of the book has to say.

Yagoda has some thoughts on the topic also.
E-mail has "flaws and limitations, but they have also served as cleansing agents for prose..they may disinhibit inappropriate declarations, they also inhibit dull, abstract wordiness."

Took me a minute to work that out, but I think I agree.

The review concludes that "every day I get a half-dozen or more fine e-mail messages: short, (often) witty, (usually) pointed, (sometimes) thoughtful, and always written in that correspondent's particular register."

I suspect I get a few that are just as witty, pointed, thoughtful, and certainly written in a way that there's no mistaking the writer.

Maybe not all bad, this addiction of ours?

More on Words

Yes, I know, I already wrote about how I love words. But now I'm in good company. What a great review of Roy Blount Jr's new book ALPHABET JUICE in today's New York Times Book Review. Can't wait to read this one. As Jack Shafer cleverly writes in his review, "Blount hangs out in dictionaries the way other writers hang out in bars."

As a huge fan of Blount's, I suspect it will be fun to "pub crawl" through the OED and Webster's Third with him.