Post Category → BOOK REVIEWS

Review Of Steven Pinker’s “The Sense Of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide To Writing In The 21st Century”

Now, to be sure, I have never had much use for style guides. Yes, there was all the studying for the writing portion of the SAT, years ago, which required lots of rule-learning and — even worse — the application of said rules to poorly-written ‘answers’ that were anything but right. Yes, I’d been assigned the oft-banal Strunk & White’s Elements Of Style in college courses, and have, out of curiosity, perused a number of similar guides not only across form and genre (prose, poetry, non-fiction, sci-fi, grammar) but multiple languages, as well, just to see how the rest of the world, well, merely hypothesizes the sorts of things that are in fact REAL to me. For instance, I still recall reading Orson Scott Card’s How To Write Science Fiction And Fantasy, and finding — even as a 10 year old with a desire to impart stories — the thing too restrictive for anyone but the worst writers, to whom issues of mechanics and advice re: ‘world-building’ might narrowly apply.

Thus, I was both intrigued and a little alarmed when I read the title of Steven Pinker’s new book. Now, don’t get me wrong. While admittedly a very good writer with MANY interesting ideas across the board, Steven Pinker is a thinking academic (as opposed an academic thinker!), first, and has not, in his occasional comments on the topic, shown any deeper understanding of the arts. Yes, he’s constructed some great arguments, and pointedly done away with scientific fraud … Continue reading →

Book Review: “Sonnets: 150 Contemporary Sonnets” by William Baer

As a kid, I was, I admit, a little gullible. No, one could not play tricks on me, or generate obvious lies in the hope that I’d believe them, for such things — please excuse the pun — were mere child’s play, and always level with the world. Not so with poetry, I thought. Here were smart people, most of whom were a lot more experienced than I was, and were, therefore, in the position to guide me. I was willing. I was receptive. And I wanted to learn, for — despite the burgeoning ego of adolescence — I was quite serious, too, and needed help to connect memories, this or that minor experience, some fleeting, ill-remembered word into a system that mattered. I wanted, in short, to be a writer, here were people that were doing it, and every force, from awards, to reputation, personality, popularity, and, at times, the opaqueness of how such things were judged, in the first place, seemed to imply that they were doing it quite well.

That was on the one hand. On the other, I was also discerning enough to realize that the advent of free verse helped engender poetry that slipped, well, into total formlessness. This was not ‘freedom’ (as the phrase might imply), since to be free also implies to be in (and under) the control of something, to allow good expression to flow. The crowd did not heed this, and my automatic reaction was, well, reaction: that if … Continue reading →

Review Of Haruki Murakami’s “Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki And His Years Of Pilgrimage”

Although I’d read a number of Japanese novels as a kid, I only became interested in Japanese literature in earnest via Jessica Schneider, who’s reviewed a number of Japanese classics for PopMatters, and elsewhere. Compared to the West — at least in the past century or so — Japanese art has always struck me as a little more mature. No, this does not necessarily mean that it’s always better, but merely that, if you look at the subject matter, it aims a lot higher, and either succeeds, or fails, but fails nobly. This is true of books, film, and even Japanese anime, wherein shows like Neon Genesis Evangelion and Cowboy Bebop, while delivered by solid/good directors who simply never grew up, have enough moments of poesy to keep things interesting and fresh, despite such films’ more obvious lacks.

That said, Haruki Murakami is one of those writers I’d suspect to be better in his short stories than long novels, and his latest book (quite the best-seller, today) is no exception. This is because, on the plus side, he attempts philosophy, and sometimes even poesy; he tries to get to the bottom of this or that idea, and, more importantly, see how characters might live this idea out, in real-time, which is really the difference between philosophy and art. Some of his situations are innately interesting (fantastical plot-points in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle; the melding of waking and dream in Kafka On The Shore), and he … Continue reading →