TOP 100 BOOK SITES
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| Hardcover Nonfiction Top 5 at a Glance1. THE BOOK OF BASKETBALL, by Bill Simmons2. SUPERFREAKONOMICS, by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner3. HAVE A LITTLE FAITH, by Mitch Albom4. WHAT THE DOG SAW, by Malcolm Gladwell5. ARGUING WITH IDIOTS, written and edited by Glenn Beck, Kevin Balfe and others feeds.nytimes.com |
The Physiology of Taste – Or Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy by Jean Anthelme Brillat–Savarin | Book review This 1825 account of one man's passionate relationship with food remains an appetising read, says Mary FitzgeraldSince its completion in 1825, this handbook has appeared in so many different guises – from 1889's Gastronomy as a Fine Art to The Philosopher in the Kitchen in 1970 – that much of its wisdom has become idiomatic. Brillat-Savarin was, for example, the first to coin the phrase: "You are what you eat" – item four in a long list of "Aphorisms of the Professor" intended as "a lasting foundation for the science of gastronomy". In fact, Brillat was no professor, but a judge who often worked on his magnum opus while presiding in court. His life (1755-1826) spanned perhaps the most turbulent period of France's history. As Bill Buford writes in the introduction, he was "witness to what France no longer is and what it was about to become – especially in the way it thought about food". It would be hard to place this book, which meanders from ruminations on the "inconveniences of obesity" to the philosophical history of cooking, in any one genre; it is perhaps best characterised as an intimate account of a man's passionate relationship with food. "The discovery of a new dish does more for human happiness than the discovery of a star," Brillat insists and furthermore: "The destiny of nations depends on how they nourish themselves." His pronouncements are both serious and self-parodying, often lascivious ("A dinner which ends without cheese is like a beautiful woman with only one eye") and, in this volume, amplified by the playful, wise commentary of MFK Fisher, who translated the text in 1949. "I could be accused, I know, of letting my pen run away with me," Brillat acknowledges. But the result is certainly appetising. ClassicsMary Fitzgeraldguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Love's bite is deeper, Tiger | Agnès Poirier Without risk there can be no passion. Philosophers know that, beyond golf, romance is under threatA curious saga unfolded across the media last week. Hour by hour we were fed reports on the Tiger Woods car crash, his refusal to meet police, and speculation about extramarital affairs. The best-paid sports star in the world barricaded himself at home and apologised for his "transgressions" and "failings". But this did not stop the alleged "love cheat" being lectured about Truth with a capital T. Indeed, so many words ring false in this modern chronicle of love: hero, zero, recompense – as well as truth.If this saga proves one thing, it is not Woods's "malice", but that love is threatened by the world's two leading ideologies: libertarianism and liberalism. These two 21st-century diseases concur to make us believe that love is a risk not worth taking: as if we could have, on one hand, a safe conjugality; and on the other, sexual arrangements that will spare us the dangers of passion. Both are illusions.In a remarkable book that has just come out called Eloge de l'Amour (Eulogy of Love), the French philosopher Alain Badiou ponders on the nature of love, and how Judaism, Christianity, philosophy, politics and art have in turn treated and considered this universal event: the bursting on to the stage of our lives of this most unruly agent.Badiou was struck by an advertising campaign last year for Meetic, a European dating website. Its slogans: "Get Love without the hazards!"; "You can love without falling in love"; and "You can love without suffering!" In other words, Meetic offers the public 100% Guaranteed Risk Free Love. This prompted Badiou to comment: "Love without the fall, love without the risks, is just another piece of propaganda, just like the presumed security of arranged marriages or, for that matter, the American invention of a zero-casualty war. Love is what gives our life intensity and meaning, thus full of risks, in my opinion worth taking." For the philosopher, the other threat to love today is the liberal dogma: one that denies love its importance by making it another extension of hedonism and consumerism.As Rimbaud said, "Love must be reinvented" – against the dictatorship of security and comfort. Placing himself between the extremes represented by Schopenhauer's pessimism and Kierkegaard's absolute, Badiou starts from Plato – for whom love is an elan towards idealism – and distances himself from French moralists, who traditionally view love as the ornament to desire and sexual jealousy. For him, love is not truth, but a construction of the truth with someone who is not identical but different. It is also a pig-headed attempt to make an event last in time. "Obstinacy is a strong element of love."Artists have always preferred the figure of love as an all-consuming encounter, revolutionary perhaps, but doomed from the start, as in AndrĂ© Breton's Nadja. In the arts, obstinate love hasn't much inspired artists. Except one perhaps: in Samuel Beckett, Badiou sees the real champion of love. For Badiou, Beckett's Happy Days is far more romantic than Tristan and Isolde. "Think of this old couple who have pigheadly loved each other: magnificent!" Badiou refutes the romantic notion of fusion and the dissolution of oneself in the other's gaze. He insists that love is built on the alterity between lovers, and says – in opposition to religious thinkers – that children are steps along the way, not love's final destination.For all these reasons, Badiou links love to revolution and resistance: a revolution because it implies contradictions and violence; and a resistance to today's tyranny of puritanical lecturing, hypocritical public confession, naming and shaming, and the ultimate fantasy – the infallible hero.Tiger WoodsFranceGolfPhilosophyPhilosophyRelationshipsUnited StatesAgnès Poirierguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
2009: the year of the short story Alice Munro won the Man Booker International, Raymond Carver's widow published a revised edition of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, and fine collections appeared from old hands and debutantes. This year proved that reports of the short story's death have been greatly exaggerated2009 has proved that rumours of the death of the short story – so often forecast that almost every review of almost every collection seems duty-bound to repeat and thus propagate it – are greatly exaggerated. The consensus running through the end-of-year reviews is that it's been a vintage year for short fiction, and I agree. I come here to praise the short story, not to bury it. Starting at the top, one of the world's greatest living short story specialists, and one of its greatest writers full-stop, took the 2009 Man Booker International prize. Canadian Alice Munro published her 14th collection, Too Much Happiness, earlier this year. A powerful grouping of stories more violent than her normal work, it shows her enormous talent remains undiminished as she nears her ninth decade. Mavis Gallant is already well into hers, and while no new work is forthcoming an edition of her previously uncollected stories, The Cost of Living, has just been published. As for the brand new, this year saw collections from big names such as Kazuo Ishiguro, Ha Jin, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, James Lasdun, and this parish's own AL Kennedy.Good work from the living, then, but notable new collections issued even from beyond the grave. Raymond Carver's Beginners reinstates the writer's original drafts of the stories that made up his definitive 1981 collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love; stories that his editor Gordon Lish famously and controversially reduced in length, in some cases cutting up to 78% of Carver's prose. I had misgivings before reading it, but Beginners is a fascinating document. The decision to publish these versions is controversial, but the logic behind his widow Tess Gallagher's desire to show the "connective tissue" between his pre- and post-Lish work seems sound. Additionally the endnotes, wherein the editors detail what revisions were made where and when, are like morsels of crack for Carver geeks.This has also been an excellent year for debuts. I read David Vann's Legend of a Suicide and Wells Tower's Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned back to back, and while their shared interests – hunting, ichthyology, destructive rages, divorce, abuse and guns – might lie heavily on their readers' psyches, the quality of the writing precludes any chance of leaving them depressed. Both superb, Vann's book in particular suggests the arrival of a significant talent; one who can marry tremendous plot twists to an appealingly downbeat style that fans of Carver and Cormac McCarthy alike will thrill to. In case you're wondering what Legend of a Suicide, supposedly a novel, is doing in a blog about short stories, it was originally published as a story collection in America. Vann told the Guardian he prefers the way the book is being sold in the UK, but really it sits somewhere between the two forms: the stories are discrete, but at the same time are all reactions to or descriptions of a single central event. Another book that hovers in this enjoyable and I think fertile space between the story collection and the novel is this year's Pulitzer winner, Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge, a story cycle set in Crosby, Maine, and presided over by the retired schoolteacher of the title. It's sold upwards of 400,000 copies so far: impressive for a literary novel, extraordinary for short fiction. Of course, all this jubilation would be Panglossian without some acknowledgement of the short story market's real and present downsides. In the US it's commonplace for short story writers to get a deal for their first collection only on the proviso that a novel follows, a business practice that casts short story-writing as apprentice work. In the UK it's worse still, with story collections treated like dirty secrets to be snuck out in disguise (pace Penguin's strategy with Vann), with only a determined study of the back cover revealing the truth. And I don't know if it's a case of reading practices following publishing's lead or vice versa, but I'm constantly surprised and disheartened by the number of readers who tell me they don't read short stories, as if they were a homogenous type that could be not to your taste like, say, policiers.I do see more reason to celebrate than to mourn, however. Radio 4 broadcasts nearly 150 stories a year; the Atlantic's recent decision to sell short stories via its Kindle store inspires hope for a vibrant market for individually sold shorter works, while flash fiction and sites dedicated to the short story continue to proliferate online. This year saw the US publication of the Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, a particular favourite of mine, whose sharp, hilarious, often minuscule fictions have long had a small but dedicated following. She's the next subject in the short story series I've been writing for the last couple of years, and in the words of the New Yorker her body of work "will in time be seen as one of the great, strange American literary contributions, distinct and crookedly personal." Hamish Hamilton have just picked up the UK rights, so British readers as yet unfamiliar with her will soon have an even better chance to find out how good she is. It looks like 2010's already shaping up to be another good year.Chris Powerguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Ruth McBride Jordan, Subject of Son’s Book ‘Color of Water,’ Dies at 88 The recollections of Mrs. McBride Jordan by her son, James McBride, became the basis of a best selling novel. feeds.nytimes.com |