Books Reviewed in The Economist of 13 August 2011

Here are the books (The Economist doesn’t publish the names of the reviewers):

• Julie Salamon’s “engaging new biography” about American playwright Wendy Wasserstein, Wendy and the Lost Boys:  The Uncommon Life of Wendy Wasserstein
• Belinda McKeon’s Solace, about a young couple who meet and fall in love “at a Dublin house party . . .  in the shadow of an old family feud” (The reviewer describes their meeting as “a Romeo and Juliet attraction.”)
• Sebastian Barry’s newest novel, On Canaan’s Side, which is on the longlist for this year’s Man Booker Prize for Fiction:  “For Sebastian Barry, an Irish novelist and playwright, history is not passive but an active force that pursues his characters and clouts them over the head.”
• Matthew Parker’s The Sugar Barons:  Family, Corruption, Empire and War in the West Indies, “a tumultuous roller coaster of a book.”
• Jamil Ahmad’s first novel, The Wandering Falcon, “about the Pushtun and Baluchi tribes that make up Pakistan’s wild west.”

Stay tuned, dear blog readers.  Stay tuned.

The Best Review Self Has Read (So Far) Abt Molly Peacock’s THE PAPER GARDEN

The Paper Garden: Mrs. Delany (Begins Her Life’s Work) at 72, by Molly Peacock, was reviewed in The Economist of 11 June 2011:

Mary Delany  —  aristocrat, gardener, prodigious letter-writer, woman of fashion and friend to George Frederic Handel, Jonathan Swift and King George III, died childless more than 220 years ago.  Yet she left a multitude of vivid, vital offspring:  985 botanically accurate and startlingly beautiful portraits of flowers in bloom, collectively known as the “Flora Delanica.”

Delany started this project as a widow in her eighth decade.  Despite grief, ageing hands and eventually failing eyesight, she invented a new method for creating her flower “mosaicks” :  collaging layers of cut, painted paper onto a dense black background, matching her materials to the papery fineness of a flower’s petal.  In Molly Peacock’s illustrated biography, the results leap out of the darkness of the past, pulsating with life.

Ms. Peacock is a noted American poet, and it shows in her approach:  she repeatedly uses the mosaicks as a simile for the rich and varied life of her subject, which she describes as “so shapely that it feels like a complete work of art, cut and pasted.”  Certainly parts of the narrative read like an 18th century novel:  at 17, Delany was married by her wicked uncle to a 60-year-old drunken squire, who tore her away from her family to live in a rotting Cornish castle.  After he died

Reading for the Day: The Economist on Saving the Web

Emma Watson was on the Today Show! Oh my goodness, with her new pixie haircut and her skin-tight-yet-demure-grey-knit dress with little Peter Pan collar she looked adorable, simply adorable! (Her hair was shorter than Carey Mulligan’s, last year’s Existential Pixie)

And Prince William is marrying his long-term girlfriend! (Doesn’t it seem to dear blog readers that the Prince seems to be prematurely balding? To think that all these years, his fair coloring had self lulled into thinking that his genes came mostly from the Spencers!)

It is such a beautiful day! Self planted the narcissus “Sugar Cup” she bought on Sunday from the Menlo Park Farmers Market (The bulbs are enormous! Simply enormous! She paid $10 for 10)

Reading for the day is an article from the Oct. 23 -29 Economist, about an organization called the IIPC, short for the International Internet Preservation Consortium.

Here’s an excerpt:

. . . although search engines such as Google index the web, they do not archive it. Many websites just disappear when their owner runs out of money or interest. Adam Farquhar, in charge of digital projects for the British Library, points out that the world has in some ways a better record of the beginning of the 20th century than of the beginning of the 21st.

In 1996 Brewster Kahle, a computer scientist and internet entrepreneur, founded the Internet Archive, a non-profit organisation dedicated to preserving websites. He also began gently harassing national libraries to worry about preserving the web. They started to pay attention when several elections produced interesting material that never touched paper.

In 2003 eleven national libraries and the Internet Archive launched a project to preserve “born-digital” information: the kind that has never existed as anything but digitally. Called the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC), it now includes 39 large institutional libraries. But the task is impossible. One reason is the sheer amount of data on the web.

Naturally, self has to leave off at the cliffhanger. Did dear blog readers know that self has a distressing tendency to end posts abruptly (much in the same way that she ends her short stories?)

Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.

Perusing THE ECONOMIST’S Best Books of the Year 2009

Books self is interested in reading after perusing The Economist’s Books of the Year 2009:

Politics and Current Affairs

• It’s Our Turn to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistleblower, by Michela Wrong, a “down-to-earth yet sophisticated exposé of how an entire country can be munched in the clammy claws of corruption and tribalism”

Biography and memoirs

• The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham, by Selina Hastings, about “one of the finest short-story stylists Britain has ever produced”
• Constable in Love:  Love, Landscape, Money and the Making of a Great Painter, by Martin Gayford, about how “John Constable, disapproved of by his wife’s relatives, his own family and his painting peers, was buoyed by the support of his wife, Maria Bicknell, and triumphed in the end”
• William Golding:  The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies, by John Carey, “the first authorised biography”

History

• Poorly Made in China:  An Insider’s Account of the Tactics Behind China’s Production Game, by Paul Midler, a “useful analysis by a consultant who advises Western companies on what to do about China’s manufacturing problems”

Science and technology

• Catching Fire:  How Cooking Made Us Human, by Richard Wrangham, a “persuasive analysis of the evolutionary role of cookery”

Culture and society

• A Jury of Her Peers:  American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx, by Elaine Showalter, a blend of “academic respect and robust judgment with humour and a common touch”
• The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Vol. 1, 1929 – 1940, “letters from Samuel Beckett’s most prolific decade”
• Outside of a Dog:  A Bibliomemoir, by Rick Gekoski, “a roly-poly book dealer with a passion for Groucho Marx’s motto:  Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend.  Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.“

Fiction

• Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel, “a deserved winner of the Man Booker prize”
• Too Much Happiness, by Alice Munro, “the Canadian winner of the 2009 Man Booker International prize”
• Love and Summer, by William Trevor, “an elegant collection”
• The Glass Room, by Simon Mawer, “a novelist who has an inquisitive, and quite un-English, interest in history and science”
• Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, by Geoff Dyer, “this is by far his best”
• Your Face Tomorrow:  Poison, Shadow and Farewell, by Javier Marias, transl. by Margaret Jull Costa, a spy thriller that is also “a novel of ideas”
• In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, by Daniyal Mueenuddin, “a remarkable debut”
• The Winter Vault, by Anne Michaels, a novel “of violence, death and bereavement, and about survivors who are also mourners”

Quote of the Day: The Gatling Gun

“It occurred to me that if I could invent a machine — a gun — which could, by rapidity of fire, enable one man to do as much battle duty as a hundred, that it would, to a great extent, supersede the necessity of large armies.”

— Richard Gatling, inventor of “the first reliable machinegun,” 1877 (as quoted in The Economist, June 14)