The blog of The Top Ten author J. Peder Zane.


Happy Birthday Critical Mass
Monday, April 30, 2007

The National Book Critics Circle continues its Campaign to Save Book Reviewing by featuring an interview with Top Ten contributor Roxana Robinson and a link to a terrific editorial on the subject by another Top Tenner Michael Connelly. Another list maker, G.D. Gearino, offers some smart insight into the matter at his website (which has a super cool homepage).

The NBCC's mighty blog, Critical Mass, that is the hub of this heroic effort is celebrating its first anniversary today. Like the parent organization, Critical Mass, is an all-volunteer labor of love. NBCC President John Freeman and fellow board members, especially Rebecca Skloot and Jane Ciabattari, devote countless hours to maintaining America's best litblog.

Their efforts reflect how the efforts of a few people can make a big difference. Imagine what a difference all of us can make. That is why it is essential that each of us do what we can to support book reviews.

To wit: John brings me the happy news that about 4,100 people (and counting!)have signed the NBCC petition against the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's decision to do away with its book review editor. Signers include many distinguished writers and Top Ten contributors (see asterisk). Won't you join them here.

* Andrew Hudgins
* Erin McGraw
* Melissa Bank
* Kathryn Harrison
* Louis D. Rubin Jr.
* Edwidge Danticat
* Bobbie Ann Mason
* David Mitchell
* David Lodge
* Richard Powers
* Lee K. Abbott
* Meg Wolitzer
* David Anthony Durham
* George Saunders
* Reynolds Price
* Michael Connelly
* George Pelecanos
* Ian Rankin
* Adam Haslett
* Allan Gurganus
* Clyde Edgerton
* Philip Caputo
* Roxana Robinson
* Fracine Prose
* Peter Cameron
* A.M. Homes
* Donald Harington
* Madison Smartt Bell
* Heidi Julavits
* James Lee Burke
* Karen Joy Fowler
Harlan Ellison
Norman Rush
Richard Ford
Anne Applebaum
Michael Lowenthal
Kim Addonzio
Chris Abani
Judith Freeman
Ngugi wa Thiongo
Clay Risen
Ben Fountain
Ken Foster
Erik Reese
Hester Kaplan
Audrey Niffenberger
Gish Jen
Adam Braver
Don Lee
George Garrett
Julia Glass
Anne Fadiman
Kevin Young
Gary Shteyngart
Karin Slaughter
Ali Smith
Fay Weldon
Ariel Dorfman
Tracy Kidder
Larry Dark
Craig Unger
Whitney Terrell
Maureen Corrigan
Chimamanda Adichie
Allan Kornblum
Emily Barton
Hisham Matar
Michael Upchurch
Sean Wilsey
Lorraine Adams
Kenneth W. Davis
Karen Spears Zacharias
Debra Spark
Silas House
Meghan O’Rourke
Judith Thurman
Lisa Alther
Peter Kurth
Joshua Ferris
John Wray
Carolyn See
Joseph Skibell
Robert Crais
Lynn Tillmann
Joan Acocella,
Tina McElroy Ansa
Benjamin Kunkel
Michael Parker
Tom Barbash
Kelly Link
Victoria Glendenning
Christine Schutt
Aaron Hamburger
Victor LaValle
Chris Offut
Hettie Jonies
Marina Warner
Alan Shapiro
Helen Schulman
Diana Abu-Jabar
Jill McCorkle
Jim Shepherd
Hannah Tinti
Chris Bohjalian
Darin Strauss
Mark Winegardner
Alaa Al Aswany
Adam Shatz
Martha Southgate
Alix Ohlin
Denis Lehane
Todd Gitlin
Julie Phillips
Troy Jollimore
Robert Draper
Craig Nova
Rick Perlstein
Roland Merullo
Shari Goldhagen
H.W.Brands
John Dufresne
Ron Rash
Melissa Fay Greene

Posted by J. Peder Zane at 1:23 PM 2 comments  

Newspaper book reviews
Friday, April 27, 2007

I grew increasingly alarmed during my three years service on the board of the National Book Critics Circle by the reduction of newspaper book sections across the country. So I proposed a campaign in which we would raise awareness about this issue and make the case for why our work matters.

Unfortunately, my notion became a necessity almost immediately after I left the board in March, as book reviews around the country suffered a series of cuts. NBCC board member Art Winslow chronicles this bloodbath in a recent column.

Under the leadership of John Freeman and Jane Ciabattari, the NBCC has launched an impressive campaign to document this troubling trend and to fight it at its website. Writers such as Nadine Gordimer, George Saunders and Rick Moody have joined book review editors - e.g. Marie Arana (Washington Post) Bob Hoover (Pittsburgh Post gazette) - and others (i.e. Catherine Brady, president of AWP, the Association of Writers and Writing Programs) to argue for the necessity of books coverage to a healthy culture.

This is a lot to read. I'll return with my thoughts on the subject next week.

Posted by J. Peder Zane at 8:01 AM 0 comments  

Top Ten on the Air
Wednesday, April 4, 2007

Tom Perrotta and Gail Godwin were gracious enough to join me this morning on Minnesota Public Radio. Host Kerri Miller did a great job — and hats off to producer Chris Dall who prepared the broadcast. Have a listen.

Here are their lists:

GAIL GODWIN
1. The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
2. Emma by Jane Austen
3. The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad
4. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
5. Middlemarch by George Eliot
6. The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
7. The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen
8. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
9. Seven Gothic Tales by Isak Dinesen
10. Atonement by Ian McEwan

Gail Godwin’s novels include "The Odd Woman," "A Mother and Two Daughters," "The Good Husband," and "Queen of the Underworld."

TOM PERROTTA
1. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
2. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
3. Père Goriot by Honoré de Balzac
4. Howards End by E. M. Forster
5. The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford
6. My Ántonia by Willa Cather
7. Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
8. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
9. Rabbit Angstrom by John Updike
10. Where I’m Calling From by Raymond Carver
Tom Perrotta is the author of five works of fiction, including the novels "Election," "Joe College," and "Little Children."

Posted by J. Peder Zane at 10:07 AM 2 comments  

The Truth about David Sedaris
Friday, March 30, 2007

Scandals involving memoirists such as James Frey and Tim "Nasdijj" Burrus have led many reporters and critics to wonder about the veracity of work published as "nonfiction."

Last effort - by Alex Heard of The New Republic - focuses on an unlikely subject, David Sedaris. In a long article, Alex Heard cites various instances in which the humorist embellished or fabricated episodes inn hiss bestselling works.

Without challenging Heard's findings I asked - what's the big whoop? - in a column last Sunday. The link to my piece provided by a popular website for journalists, Romenesko, sparked a very interesting discussion on the purity of nonfiction.

Various folks weighed in — the anecdote about Sedaris supplied by Jerome Weeks, former Book Editor at the Dallas Morning News, is particularly revealing.

The most interesting responses, however, have come from Mr. Heard, who responded to my column and then responded to a Newsday interview in which Sedaris sort of fires back at him.

Good stuff!

Posted by J. Peder Zane at 3:18 PM 3 comments  

Somerset Maugham's Top Ten

Nigelbeale.com observes that Top Top Ten List in my book — that is the ten biggest vote getters from all 125 lists on the list — is very similar to the list compiled by Somerset Maugham 50 years ago.

Here's Maugham's list:

1. Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
2. Pride and Pejudice by Jane Austen
3. The Red and the Black by Stendahl
4. Le Pere Goriot by Honore de Balzac
5. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
6. Madame Bovary by Gustav Flaubert
7. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
8. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
9. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
10. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

Here's ours:

THE TOP TOP TEN LIST
1. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
2. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
3. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
4. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
6. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
7. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
8. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
9. The stories of Anton Chekhov
10. Middlemarch by George Eliot

Posted by J. Peder Zane at 6:25 AM 6 comments  

Jonathan Lethem
Wednesday, March 28, 2007

I had the great pleasure of sharing a cup of coffee with Jonathan Lethem on Tuesday (fear not germaphobes, we each had our own mugs of shade grown, free trade, organic Joe). (Interesting story: One of the early owners of my paper, The News & Observer of Raleigh, was Josephus Daniels. While serving as Woodrow Wilson's Secretary of the Navy, he banned alcohol in the service. The next best form of stimulation became known as a Cup of Joe, or so the story goes.)

In any event, Jonathan was in town promoting his new novel, "You Don't Love Me Yet" (what a great title). And he was gracious enough to sign the bookstore's copies of "The Top Ten" on page 91, where his list appears.

Jonathan Lethem
1. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
2. The Trial by Franz Kafka
3. The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead
4. The Red and the Black by Stendhal
5. A Dance To The Music Of Time by Anthony Powell
6. Alice in Wonderland/Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll
7. The Black Prince by Iris Murdoch
8. New Grub Street by George Gissing
9. Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne
10. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Not only is Jonathan one of the smartest people I've met — his mind works in higher gear — but he's also one of the most generous. Before "The Top Ten," he contributed a lovely essay on "The Loneliest Books I Read," to my first book, "Remarkable Reads." Check it out here.

Posted by J. Peder Zane at 11:37 AM 2 comments  

Banville discovers Simenon
Monday, March 26, 2007

Benjamin Black. The name sounds familiar, famous even. Where have I heard it before, you puzzle, while scanning the cover of his debut crime novel, “Christine Falls”?

Don't wrack the old bean too hard. There is a famous name somewhere but it's not Black but Banville — John Banville, the Man Booker Prize-winning author who has adopted Black as his nom de plum.

I mention this because of two connections to "The Top Ten." First, the Irish writer contributed a list to the book:

John Banville
1. Ill Seen Ill Said by Samuel Beckett
2. Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
3. Ulysses by James Joyce
4. Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann
5. Moby-Dick by Hermann Melville
6. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
7. Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald
8. Dirty Snow by Georges Simenon
9. Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
10. Vanity Fair by William Thackeray

Second, in his Philadelphia Inquirer review of "Christine Falls" Frank Wilson notes: " Banville has been quoted as saying how impressed he was to discover recently Georges Simenon’s psychological thrillers, and this novel compares quite favorably to Simenon’s best."

Although the Belgian writer published more than 500 books during his singular career — the most famous being his detective novels featuring Inspector Maigret of Paris — he was news to me until the brilliant British mystery writer Iain Pears listed Simenon on his Top Ten list. It just so happened that the great New York Review Classic Series was in the midst republishing several of Simenon's novels. I read 'em and wrote about 'em. Wow. Thank you Iain.

To help spread the good news news about Simenon, Iain wrote a short piece for "The Top Ten." Enjoy!

Appreciation of Georges Simenon’s Maigret Detective Novels
by Iain Pears
The Maigret series of detective stories, written by the Belgian Georges Simenon, are part of that rare breed of books — the massmarket entertainment that also works as great literature. Simenon is the master of atmosphere; with the lightest of touches he is able to conjure up Paris in the 1940s and 1950s, a seedy, largely poor city of shabby concierges and downtrodden traveling salesmen, of cheap hotels and squalid nightclubs, of hissing steam radiators and grubby shirt collars.

Much of the narrative is liquor soaked — Maigret begins drinking after breakfast, interviews witnesses over brandy, and suspects over beer. Only rarely is a case concluded by unraveling clues; these are not whodunits. Rather, they are studies in character, of place, and of people. Simenon would have been a brilliant analyst. As often as not, the books end when Maigret (and through him, the reader) so understands the criminal that the suspect confesses all. Indeed, the
reader is usually left sympathizing with the criminal, whose crime is reacting to limited choices and desperate circumstances.

The books are so compressed they could almost be short stories, but Simenon populates them with an extraordinary range of characters — the overweight, perpetually sweating Maigret, his eternally patient wife (more acute, in many ways, than her husband), his juniors, and the gallery of pimps and prostitutes, petty criminals, shopkeepers, bartenders, small tradesmen, and canal barge pilots who make up his world. There is no reveling in the grime of the underworld; most of the characters dream of better things and live a life of disappointment. Out of their lives, Simenon created some of the most enduring and compelling works of the twentieth century.

Posted by J. Peder Zane at 10:30 AM 0 comments  

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