The Daily Sabbatical
Music, Books, and Assorted Maunderings

Salvatore Scibona is an extraordinary writer.  His first book, The End, was nominated this year for The National Book award, and I'd say there is a very good chance he would have won it had the staggeringly good trilogy by Matthiesson not been allowed in the race.  What's even more impressive, I suspect this author will only get better.  Scibona is a crafter of sentences in the DeLillo tradition--and in fact his dialogue, at times, feels like that of the Don.  His… Read More

At this point I've read almost everything Vladimir Nabokov ever published.  There is simply no other writer like him.  When I finish reading his prose, I immediately feel like holing up in a garrett somewhere and crafting sentences that dance and narrative strategems that make a first reading useless.  If I actually get so far as to put pen to paper, I feel so dwarfed by the master that I quickly consign my pen to the dustbin. Mary is Nabokov's first novel, written when he was in Berlin in 1925, shortly after… Read More

I'm always tempted to break up my anally alphabetical ordering of books to create a special shelf of books that, to me, constitute lessons in writing.  These are not necessarily the best books--although they often are--but they are the books I feel I could read and reread in hopes of penetrating the secrets of their consruction.  They are the books that would signpost the way to the literary style I'd most like to emulate.    Body Snatcher by Juan Carlos Onetti would find a place on that shelf. Onetti remains a bit… Read More

I have two episodes before I am done with The Wire, and I am sick.  I already want more.  It might be the best TV show ever made, and though I'm sure I'll rewatch it from start to finish, it just won't be the same.  Still, I can take some heart: the writers for The Wire are out there writing novels, and if Lush Life by Richard Price is any indication, they are almost as good.
As Dennis Lehane says on the dust jacket, Price is one of the best writers of dialogue this country has.  (Actually, Lehane says the best we have ever had.)  His writing… Read More

Suite Francaise is worth reading if for no other reason than for the unique perspective it has on the second world war and the French occupation in particular.  The harrowing story of its author gilds the work with both authenticity and poignance.  Irene Nemirovsky was a Jewish, Russian born novelist who achieved great success with novels such as David Golder, which became a play and a movie.  She lived in Paris during the French Occupation, and decided to write a five volume work about what she was seeing.  Before she finished, however,… Read More

You heard it here first: More Than It Hurts You will be nominated for the National Book Award this year.  It reminds me of no book more than The Corrections, which despite the Franzen backlash is a masterpiece.   Strauss might not have attained the perfect touch Franzen achieved in that novel, but More Than It Hurts You shares its general profile and spirit, while also being an unpredictable page turner. The story centers around a possible case of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy.  If you… Read More

It's both exciting and depressing to read an excellent debut novel by some twenty-one year old punk.  It is outright distressing, though, that someone so young should demonstrate such an insider's acquaintance with the seamy world the book depicts. On the cover of my edition, Irvine Welsh compares the book to Less than Zero, and that's apt--perhaps if you splice it with Welsh's own Trainspotting and the controversial movie Kids.  The novel is written from the perspective of a handful of kids in… Read More

I bought this book on the strength of the dustjacket blurbs.  Thom Jones, Dan Chaon, Julie Orringer, Kevin Brockmeier, Adam Johnson and Peter Orner all write as if this is the debut novel we've all been waiting for.  It also promised to be a genre bender of the sort that has increasingly gained in popularity (in no small part, I think, due to the encouragement of writers like Michael Chabon and Jonathan Lethem.)  A young cop with rich brat high-school friends patrols the cemetery garrison of San Francisco and finds… Read More

If you read many book reviews or book blogs, you’ve no doubt been exposed to the hype surrounding Joseph O’Neil’s Booker-listed novel. If it’s not the most positively reviewed book of the year, it has to be close. Sadly, I cannot disagree with the consensus. Netherland may not win the Booker—indeed, my vote still goes to Sebastian Barry—but it will put O’Neil firmly among the list of top young writers.

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At some point I learned to repeat to my teachers that Greek tragedy is cathartic. It probably would have been better to have us read something that actually was cathartic, but I seriously doubt Sophocles would have fit the bill for a bunch of fourteen year olds. Sophocles doesn't do it for me today either, and it's the rare piece of literature that does. But every once in a while I become so enthralled with a book that it threatens to become transformative; I emerge from the reading as if baptised. This was my e experience with… Read More