Bookstorm

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore looks, well, fantastic: "Inspired, in equal measures, by Hurricane Katrina, Buster Keaton, The Wizard of Oz, and a love for books, 'Morris Lessmore' is a story of people who devote their lives to books and books who return the favor." Enjoy.

Here's a round-up of slightly interesting things ...

• Mohsin Hamid discusses writing The Reluctant Fundamentalist, a book I enjoyed when I read it a few years back.
• Guernica has an unpublished interview with John Updike. (I haven't read anything by Updike--his writing generation doesn't interest me--but I have Terrorist somewhere in my apartment.)
• "It's time, I told myself on the subway uptown afterward, to consider the e-book."
• Laura Miller surveys the best new graphic novels.
• The holidays are here, so I'm thinking about what I want from Santa Claus.

Sex is always a tricky subject, especially in literature.

[Mitzi] Szereto thinks the best kind of sex writing needs to explore the "psychology of desire". In an age in which sex has been divested of most of its mystery (hard-core pornography is a website away and Mills & Boon has invested in a "raunchy" series), it may be that the "psychology of desire" is the only unknown territory to explore.

Howard Jacobson, who last month won the Man Booker prize for The Finkler Question, believes it is the discussion of sex that is the intriguing part, not its depiction. "The only point in writing a 'he puts that in there and she puts this in here' scene is to arouse, and I'm not interested in doing that. Some critics who should have known better complained that my last novel, The Act of Love, didn't arouse them. It wasn't meant to. It was a book 'about' compulsive jealousy. It wasn't intended to make them jealous or otherwise titillate them.

"To a novelist--to me, anyway--the 'about' is more interesting than the thing. Explicitness almost invariably takes you to bathos. The great sex scenes in literature for me don't show sex at all--Dorothea in Middlemarch, for example, registering the sexual horror of her marriage through her revulsion from Roman art ... It isn't morality that determines this preference in me, but aesthetics."

Jacobson makes a good point: great sex scenes are never graphic. Take a look at John Milton's Paradise Lost--book four features the most erotic love scene in all of literature.

I'm reading William Gibson's Neuromancer, which is probably one of the most enjoyable science fiction novels I've read in a while. Gibson's world is rich, realistic, and stuffed with little details--such as slang, technology, and historical events--that make the book weirdly prescient. Comparisons to The Matrix--which is basically a cyberpunk film--are inevitable (if you remember what Neo and company did in The Matrix, you have a fair idea of what Case does in this book), but Neuromancer is a lot more fun. It certainly isn't like any other science fiction novel you've ever read, and when you consider that it was first published almost thirty years ago, you begin to understand why it was so visionary. And Neuomancer still holds up.

I read Ernest Hemingway's The Garden of Eden a few months ago, which is probably the best book Hemingway ever wrote. Now it's been adapted into a movie starring Matthew Modine and Mina Suvari. It'll be released on December tenth.

Here's a Sunday-night round-up for you ...

• Nadine Gordimer: "If you are writing with a direct cause in mind, you are writing propaganda."
• Jonathan Rée reviews two books on Friedrich Nietzsche--Julian Young's Nietzsche's Philosophy of Religion and Friedrich Nietzsche: a Philosophical Biography--and finds the erstwhile Antichrist "a likable sort of guy."
• Julian Barnes considers the history of translating Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary.
• Allen Barra pits Cormac McCarthy against Larry McMurtry.

I almost missed this, but here's a bizarre (complete with random capital letters) and amusing interview with a bearded Mark Z. Danielewski. Among the topics discussed: Jonathan Franzen ("A precise, evocative writer who has a passion for birds"), setting the foundation for a serious relationship ("... turn off my computer and commit myself to living a year as a slut"), and his next project ("Later this month publishers will receive the first five volumes of a 27 volume project entitled 'The Familiar'"). Have fun, kids.

I've been reading David Bajo's Panopticon, which is one of the strangest books I've read this year. It's also very erotic, but thankfully, the sex never gets graphic. (We've all had sex before, I'm sure, so we don't need a play-by-play recap of all the action, do we?) Panopticon's eroticism hinges on the sexual tension between journalists Aaron Klinsman and Rita Valdez. They have lots of great sex, yes, but it's overshadowed by their newspaper's impending shut-down. There's also a sense of voyeurism here: the book also explores our increasingly "watchful" society, where people are under constant video surveillance, and the ways in which our loss of privacy can be exploited by others. (Bajo's prose, which is cold and detached, contributes to the feeling that we're outsiders watching the characters from afar.) Sure, the themes retrace George Orwell's 1984, but Panopticon is more modern. And much sexier.