Bookstorm

I still prefer to round up, not down ...

• "Marry, sir!--You be Lebowski, I be Lebowski, 'tis a wondrous strange comedy of errors." The Big Lebowski, as written by William Shakespeare.
• The 2010 Tournament of Books is about to become a big literary party: Andrew W.K. is one of the panel judges.
• Find a ruler: which of these authors has the biggest dick?
• Jane Austen, appreciated.

I'm going to try reading James Joyce's Finnegans Wake again--I failed miserably the first time, giving up after one hundred fifty pages--and while I'm still deciding just how I'm going to approach it (with or without Joseph Campbell's A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake?), John Bishop's introduction mentions Virgilian "fortune-telling," "a reading practice whereby one would flip open a copy of Virgil at random and elicit a prediction from the verse on which one's finger landed." So I did a bit of Virgilian fortune-telling using Virgil's Aeneid. I'm not very heartened:

Cutting through waves blown dark by a chill wind
Aeneas held his ships firmly on course
For a midsea crossing. But he kept his eyes
Upon the city far astern, now bright
With poor Elissa's pyre. What caused that blaze
Remained unknown to watchers out at sea,
But they knew of a great love profaned
In anguish, and a desperate woman's nerve,
Led every Trojan heart into foreboding.

I'm going to go on a cruise this year. The cruise ship will be raided by pirates who, instead of burying us at sea, will set the cruise ship on fire--with everyone still on board.

Thanks, Virgil.

I love reading about literary feuds, but this one--between novelists Camille Laurens and Marie Darrieussecq--is pretty bizarre. It even spawned a new form of plagiarism.

It all began with the publication of a novel by Darrieussecq in 2007, when she shared a publisher with Laurens. Tom Est Mort (Tom Is Dead) tells the story of a woman whose baby dies shortly after being born.

Laurens, who had lost a baby two hours after his birth and who had written movingly about it in a book called Philippe in 1995, accused Darrieussecq of "psychological plagiarism", a new term in French letters.

"Reading Tom Is Dead," she wrote in a literary review, "I had the feeling that it had been written in my bedroom, that she [Darrieussecq] had sat on my chair, lain in my bed."

Darrieussecq, 40, whose first novel, Pig Tales, about a bulimic beautician who turns into a sow, was a bestseller, called Laurens's claim "vile" and denied literary theft.

Currently reading and recently read:

• Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee. I think a more fitting title would've been Hubris. In any case, this was the first book I read this year, and it's as good as people say. If you haven't read it--okay, who hasn't?--then get to it.
• The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa. The Book of Disquiet is damnably good. It's quieting, the perfect book to read after a shitty day at the office.
• Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Now that I'm reading Crime and Punishment--the translation is by Jessie Coulson--I'm wondering why it took me so long to get around to it. Raskolnikov's psychology is nauseating and headache-inducing (I felt the same way while reading Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina), but it adds to the overall experience. Raskolnikov is a sick, bitter character, and Dostoevsky's underlying themes of crime and poverty are still relevant today. Bonus: I want to read this now.

With short stories like "Tao Lin Raped Me," "I Fucked Jane Austen," and "Mary Gaitskill Makes Shitty Cupcakes," Oprah Read This should be required reading. Go!

I meant to link to this a few weeks ago, but things--such as the holidays--got in the way. In any case, here's Lydia Davis's "The Cows," belated and animated. Have a good new year, kids.

From Text 12 of Fernando Pessoa's (very quotable) The Book of Disquiet:

I envy--but I'm not sure that I envy--those for whom a biography could be written, or who could write their own. In these random impressions, and with no desire to be other than random, I indifferently narrate my factless autobiography, my lifeless history. These are my Confessions, and if in them I say nothing, it's because I have nothing to say.

In somewhat-random order, here are the ten best books I read this year:

1. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace.
2. Varieties of Disturbance by Lydia Davis.
3. Rasskazy by Mikhail Iossel and Jeff Parker (editors).
4. Demon Theory by Stephen Graham Jones.
5. We Did Porn by Zak Smith.
6. Welcome to the Monkey House by Kurt Vonnegut.
7. The Mystery Guest by Grégoire Bouillier.
8. The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño.
9. The Exquisite by Laird Hunt.
10. Beowulf by Anonymous.

And, again in somewhat-random order, here are the ten worst books I read this year:

1. The Pact by Jodi Picoult.
2. The End of Alice by A. M. Homes.
3. The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril by Paul Malmont.
4. Travels in the Scriptorium by Paul Auster.
5. All the Sad Young Literary Men by Keith Gessen.
6. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith.
7. Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner.
8. American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis.
9. Shining at the Bottom of the Sea by Stephen Marche.
10. Who the Hell is Pansy O'Hara? by Jenny Bond and Chris Sheedy.

And there you have it, kids: the best and worst of over sixty books read this year. Happy trails.

Merry Christmas, from my blog to yours. Make your eggnog a little stronger, and don't neglect your holiday reading.

I've never given any thought to what might be the best poem ever written in the English language, but Sven Birkets, in an essay reprinted in The Story About the Story, edited by J. C. Hallman, considers a worthy contender: "To Autumn" by John Keats. As Birkets writes, "I have seen it cited many times as the most perfect poem in the language. A more suitable test case for beauty, it seems, would be hard to find."