Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: What to Read Next

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Tuesday, February 5, 2008

What to Read Next

Critical Mass, the National Book Critics Circle's blog, has a regular feature it calls Good Reads. It surveys the membership as well as some eminent authors to come up with a list of top choices in fiction, nonfiction and poetry among the current books. Their current picks are these:

Fiction

1. Denis Johnson, Tree of Smoke (Farrar Straus & Giroux)
2. Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Riverhead)
3. J.M. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year (Viking)
4. Geraldine Brooks, People of the Book (Viking)
5. Steve Erickson, Zeroville (Europa)

Nonfiction

1. The Rest Is Noise, by Alex Ross (FSG)
2. Brother, I’m Dying, by Edwidge Danticat (Knopf)
3. In Defense of Food, by Michael Pollan (Penguin Press)
4. Musicophilia, by Oliver Sacks (Knopf)*
5. The Shock Doctrine, by Naomi Klein (Metropolitan)*

Poetry

1. Elegy, by Mary Jo Bang (Graywolf)
2. Time and Materials, by Robert Hass (Ecco)*
3. Gulf Music, by Robert Pinsky (FSG)*
4. The Collected Poems, 1956–1998, by Zbigniew Herbert (Ecco)
5. Sharp Teeth, by Toby Barlow (Harper)

*There was a tie for fourth in nonfiction, and for second in poetry

I can endorse the list, even though I've read only one of the titles (Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food). My own choices, which didn't make the final cut, were:

Fiction
The Commoner, by John Burnham Schwartz (Talese/Doubleday) -- My review of this fine novel should be up next weekend.

Nonfiction
Coal River, by Michael Shnayerson (Farrar, Straus) -- See here for my review.

Sadly, like most people, I know nothing about contemporary poetry.

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