Stay Tuned for the Next....658 Weeks
READING is a joy, but it's also -- for so many of us -- a map of our future years. How often in conversation a book will come up, snag our curiosity only to trickle back down into that untapped aqueduct upon which so many current books draw. Visits to a bookstore do not always resurrect this moment -- for there, amidst the Potter and the Powell, the venti decaf vanilla lattes, an insentient sea of titles swims towards you.One of the great functions of book criticism, then, is to give you safe passage through these waters to one book worth reading. The same goes for the National Book Critics Circle Award -- for thirty-two years the NBCC has tried to pick out and honor the best works of literature. We do not bestow money with this prize, but rather hope a group of working critics drawing upon an association of 700 voices can lend a certain sustaining value to what we chose -- particularly by putting copies of the book into hands of readers.
Over time, given how busy and prize cluttered our media has become, this task becomes slightly more difficult -- a difficulty which is matched by the trouble one has in picking out a book. What to read? Here is our not-so-modest, pie in the sky solution. For the next ten years, the NBCC will be dedicating one week of this blog to one of our former finalists or winners. Each week you will find original essays, interviews, remembrances of the author, Q&As with critics and links to reviews which appeared upon publication for all 658 of our former finalists and winners, from Elizabeth Hardwick's novel "Sleepless Nights" to Robert Duncan's volume, "Ground Work," and everything in between.
Our first essay -- Adam Kirsch writing on Robert Lowell's 1977 poetry winner, "Day by Day" -- will appear tomorrow, kicking off a Lowell week, followed by pieces by numerous Balakian criticism winners, award-winning novelists, poets, authors of narrative nonfiction, biographers, and several NBCC winning authors. Many of these pieces will be written by current NBCC members as well. Time being infinite, we invite you to read along and chime in. But for those of you who do sleep, eat and work on occasion, we hope this just makes for good reading. In an ideal world, we'd have time read all of these books. But as Virginia Woolf wrote to a friend in 1932, "The divine delight of a really good review is that one has read the book."
--John Freeman
Labels: In Retrospect Series
posted by John Freeman 9:28:00 AM
3 Comments:
Does anyone--Microsoft, Google--ever have a 10-year plan? Even the Soviet Union was modest enough to countenance only Five Year Plans, one at a time (if I'm wrong about this, please don't correct me). We don't even know who will hold the Olympics in 2016. This new NBCC project seems a bad idea to me for many reasons:
1. Something scheduled so far, so deeply & so predictably in advance is going to seem like droning, endless droning--not what you'd expect or wish for an organization's website, which you'll visit & revisit in the hopes of being, often enough, pleasantly surprised. The pursuit will become more important than the purpose, like trying to climb all the 4,000 ft peaks of Colorado, or eat hamburgers in McDonald's in every state before you die. It will become the butt of jokes well before Year 3: not Letterman jokes, maybe, but the lit-equivalent.
2. It's backward-looking and defensive, rather than confident & exuberant despite how it's presented above. It seems yet another angle in this Save-Book-Reviewing campaign, only not so boldly stated or apparent as direct advocacy. "Look, we're important... we were important anyway," it says.
3. This is arguable like everything else, but a book reviewers' circle could be more usefully concerned with new books than those it has sanctified long in the past (or even the recent past).
4. Er, I'm sure I'll think of more later. But others will get there first, and express them better no doubt.
Eric -- Hey, thanks for feedback. Couple things -- the blog will continue with regular programming as well so we'll have our focus on the future, and we'll all continue to read new books -- since we still have to judge the awards for 2007 of course. As for whether critics should focus on new books, that's debatable, you're right. When readers go into a store, many of them don't care what's new or old -- they just care what's good. The same goes for publications, to a certain degree. As Ann Fadiman pointed out in the introduction to her anthology, "Rereadings," the part of the American Scholar which printed a critic's reaction to a book they revisited became their most popular feature. Should the New Yorker scrap its essay by Adam Gopnik on Philip K. Dick because Dick is dead? I think we need to keep all this in mind and I hope when you see the essays which come in you'll think this isn't droning or defensive but lively and a way to remember, as a circle and as an award, where we're calling from.
Powell's Books has a "Review a Day" feature that reviews both new books and classics. A recent Rudyard Kipling was a true surprise. The Atlantic has archived its past reviews, and there are some refreshing essays there. Ditto the New Yorker, in its multiple set. There's room for retrospection as well as new material, I think. Critical Mass has many new territories to explore...
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