Dirda on Books

Michael Dirda (The Washington Post)

Prize-winning critic Michael Dirda took your questions and comments concerning literature, books and the joys of reading.

Each week Dirda's name appears -- in unmistakably big letters -- on page 15 of The Post's Book World section. If he's not reviewing a hefty literary biography or an ambitious new novel, he's likely to be turning out one of his idiosyncratic essays or rediscovering some minor Victorian classic. Although he earned a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Cornell, Dirda has somehow managed to retain a myopic 12-year-old's passion for reading. He particularly enjoys comic novels, intellectual history, locked-room mysteries, innovative fiction of all sorts.

These days, Dirda says he still spends inordinate amounts of time mourning his lost youth, listening to music (Glenn Gould, Ella Fitzgerald, Diana Krall, The Tallis Scholars), and daydreaming ("my only real hobby"). He claims that the happiest hours of his week are spent sitting in front of a computer, working. His most recent books include "Readings: Essays and Literary Entertainments" (Indiana hardcover, 2000; Norton paperback, 2003) and his self-portrait of the reader as a young man, "An Open Book: Coming of Age in the Heartland" (Norton, 2003). In the fall of 2004 Norton will bring out a new collection of his essays and reviews. He is currently working on several other book projects, all shrouded in the most complete secrecy.

Dirda joined The Post in 1978, having grown up in the working-class steel town of Lorain, Ohio, and graduated with highest honors in English from Oberlin College. His favorite writers are Stendhal, Chekhov, Jane Austen, Montaigne, Evelyn Waugh, T.S. Eliot, Nabokov, John Dickson Carr, Joseph Mitchell, P.G. Wodehouse and Jack Vance. He thinks the greatest novel of all time is either Murasaki Shikubu's "The Tale of Genji" or Proust's "A la recherche du temps perdu." In a just world he would own Watteau's painting "The Embarkation for Cythera." He is a member of the Baker Street Irregulars, The Ghost Story Society and The Wodehouse Society. He enjoys teaching and was once a visiting professor in the Honors College at the University of Central Florida, which he misses to this day.

Editor's Note: Washingtonpost.com moderators retain editorial control over Live Online discussions and choose the most relevant questions for guests and hosts; guests and hosts can decline to answer questions.

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Carbondale, Ill.: At one time you mentioned your favorite French bookstore in Canada. I think you gave the email address. I have ordered books from Amazon.fr, but I find the postage awfully high.

Love your online chats. Am 85 years old and struggling to keep up with all the reading you and your readers do. Just reading the comments is a vicarious way of enjoying books I will probably never get read.

Michael Dirda: Welcome to Dirda on Books! Last week, I erroneously ended by saying I wouldn't be here today. In fact, it's tomorrow when I'm flying to California for the Los Angeles Book Festival, so I do hope at least a few of you will have ignored me and checked in as usual.
As usual, spring in Washington lasts about five minutes. Today, it feels like summer--hot, already building up humidity (must start the dehumidifier in the basement when I get back on Sunday), and bright. In other words, the kind of weather where you want to sit by a pool, sip something from a tumbler filled with ice, read a light novel, and generally pretend that, at last, you have reached the land of the Lotos Eaters.
Hmmm. Odd sentiments for one about to go to Los Angeles. But I've never really been there, and don't quite know what to expect.
As usual, I seem to be maundering on in these introductory remarks, and so it's probably time to look at a real question.

Carbondale, I wish I had a favorite French bookstore in Canada,but I don't. It's quite possible that a poster mentioned one, but I can't remember if this is so. I'm impressed that you continue to read as steadily as you suggest. I hope I can do as well when and if I reach 85.
But maybe someone out there can suggest a good French bookshop in Canada?

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Providencia, Chile:

Well, thanks for your conversation on Hungarian literature. I think that Sandor Marai is one of their best writers.

Regards,

Marcos Solís
Director Ediciones Lagar

Michael Dirda: Many thanks for writing. I did enjoy Embers a great deal, as did many other people.

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Dallas, Tex.: Many thanks for your review of Michael Schmidt's The First Poets. I saw immediately that this is a book I'd enjoy and so rushed and bought a copy. There are previous purchases I've promised myself to read first, but I have opened The First Poets a few times to poke around inside. Reading from the chapter on Sappho reminded me of the good time I had reading Erica Jong's Sappho's Leap - have you read this book? I've never read Ms. Jong's work before, but she seems to have had a wonderful time inhabiting the mysterious world of Sappho's age. Reynolds Price is another author who I think imagines great encounters in vague history. For example his religious inquiry in Three Gospels and his poetry in Vital Provisions, which imagines Mary and Joseph's private thoughts about the Annunciation.

Finally, for the poster last week who requested help deciding a translation for Augustine's Confessions, I thought Garry Wills did a great job - his work appears in about five slim volumes. His notes reflect his deep concentration on the text, but sometimes assumes a donnish "Augustine has been misread until placed beneath my eye" quality. I think a lot of translators show that attitude, though.

Thanks so much for these chats!

Michael Dirda: I knew that Wills had produced, I think, three slender books about Augustine, but I took these to be biographical/critical studies of the various period of the great thinker's life. I didn't know that they were in fact translations of chunks of the Confessions.

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Rockville, Md.: Hi Mr. Dirda, I was looking for leather bound copies of Sherlock Holmes' mystery novels as a birthday gift for my husband. Would you have any suggestions as to the best places to find them?
Thanks so much.

Michael Dirda: I wouldn't bother with leather-bound volumes of Sherlock Holmes--just buy a handsome hardcovers with good type and lots of illustrations.
I have several suggestions: 1) Heritage Press reprinted the Limited Editions Club editions of the stories and novels in three volumes. These turn up at used bookstores with some frequency and shouldn't be hard to find. The print is large, they are abundantly illustrated by the classic artists (e.g. Frederic Dorr Steele), and are very inviting. This is the set I gave my youngest to read when he was about 11 or 12.
2) If you want a handsome scholarly edition of the stories, with lots of historical notes, look for the seven volume Oxford Sherlock Holmes, under the editorship of Owen Dudley Edwards. The problem here is that there are little dots throughout the text, indicating notes at the back of each handsome trade-paperback sized volumes. This could be distracting for a young reader and the notes themselves may be a bit too scholarly. Still, this is a great edition and research tool.
3) The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, by Leslie Klinger. This came out from Norton last fall, and is a handsome oversized two volume box set of the stories (the novels will be out next fall). Klinger provides hundreds of illustrations and lots of interpretive notes, based on the scholarship of the Baker Street Irregulars. By this, I mean that the notes are fanciful--they assume Holmes lived, that Watson botched some of the chronology and that clever speculation will fill in the gaps. What kind of snake was used in The Speckled Band? Where did Holmes go to university? What did he do during the Great Hiatus when he was thought dead after the Reichenbach Falls. This is a wonderful book to dream over.
I should point out that Les Klinger is a friend of mine and that I helped arrange for him to work on this book for Norton and that he and I are having dinner tomorrow in Los Angeles.

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Los Angeles, Calif.: Mr. Dirda, I am looking forward to attending your panel at this weekend's festival (actually, I'm SUPER excited)! I'm actually on my way to a Ticketmaster center to pick up tickets for many of this weekend's panels.

I've had a touch of the blues lately, but I think your signature in my copy of Bound to Please will work wonders to cheer me up!

Michael Dirda: Well, I know about the blues, and I just wish that you could sign something for me that would cheer me up. At any event, I look forward to meeting in LA.

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Minnetonka, Minn.: Michael,
I'm reading "The Book Nobody Read" by Owen Gingrich. It is an interesting account of Copernicus' De Revolutiorbis. It tells the story of the first two editions of the book, who read them and where they now reside. It is histiry of astonomy, early printing and even church censorship. Are you aware of any other books about books that cover the ideas as well as the physical objects?

Michael Dirda: I reviewed this book, and found it deeply irritating. Gingrich doesn't, as my father used to say, hide his light under a bushel. I gathered after my review appeared that he was widely disliked by fellow scholars for just this egocentricity. Pity, because the book took up a fascinating subject.
You know, I'd take a look in the university library for some of the collections of essays by Anthony Grafton. He is our leading interpreter of Latin learning during the Renaissance and early modern eras. He has fascinating essays about all sorts of odd books, characters and movements. Plus he writes well and for a popular audience. He's one of my favorite scholars. Grafton has done longer books on The Footnote, the astrologer Girolamo Cardano (whose autobiography is one of my favorite books), and Alberti.
Another good scholar to check out is Frances Yates. Her two classics are The Art of Memory, a study of Renaissance memory systems, and Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition. But she wrote lots of other books on similarly interesting topic in Renaissance intellectual history.
Marjorie Nicolson is another good scholar along these lines--books on voyages to the moon, the sublime, and the relationship of Renaissance science and literature.

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Elgin, S.C.: Since you're a confessed Nabokovian I'll pitch this somewhat technical query out of the blue: Did you read Nabokov biographer Brian Boyd's critical study of "Pale Fire" a few years back? As you know, the novel is half poem by the late John Shade, half critical annotation by the mad "scholar" Charles Kinbote, and readers have been fighting ever since over whether one imagined the other, or one became the other, etc., etc. Boyd's theory: Kinbote's annotations were guided from beyond the grave by John Shade. What did you think? I thought it was interesting and almost persuasive.

Michael Dirda: Boyd adumbrates this view in earlier essays and in his two volume life of Nabokov. It sounds absurd--until you remember that Nabokov apparently believed in such a spiritual realm and that "ghosts" or spiritual beings could have influence on our lives. My feeling is that a lot of Pale Fire is essentially undecidable--it's so nuanced that you can't really be sure of what's really what. Personally, I like to think that Kinbote really was exiled royalty being pursued by a dogged assassin.

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Washington, D.C.: I just picked up "I Got Somebody in Staunton" by William Henry Lewis. It's a delightful book of short stories, particularly if you are from the South.

Michael Dirda: Thanks for the lead.

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Green Bay, Wisc.: This discussion is my favorite thing of all on the Internet. Read and enjoyed "Open Book" and "Readings." Any favorite L.A. or California books?

Michael Dirda: What, you didn't like Bound to Please?
Favorite LA or California books--the ones everyone likes, I guess: Chandler novels, Day of the Locust, etc etc. There's one that's less well known, but that was recently republished by New York Review Books in paperback: A Way of Life Like Any Other, by Darcy O'Brien. Very funny and moving evocation of growing up the child of movie-star parents. A novel, but I gather close to the truth. Seamus Heaney writes the introduction.

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Calgary, Alberta: Hello, Mr. Dirda, many thanks for your labours here; you've suggested half my TBR list.
A question and a comment:
Do you favour any particular translation of "Candide"? Our library has several, including Raffel, Butt, and Adams.
And for last weeks posters who were looking for half remembered books, the Booksleuth feature on the Abebooks site has scores or even hundreds of denizens who can name a story from a snippet of plot and half a character.

Michael Dirda: Denizens--you mean there are teeny tiny people, indentured to this Booksleuth service? In truth, this does sound interesting--I'll have to check it out, as I finally break down and gradually use the net more and more. Or then again maybe I won't. Might be better just to sit by some pool of blue water and read the books I have.
As for Candide--if you have any French at all, you should try it that way. Voltaire writes clearly, simply and beautifully--I wish I could write like Voltaire. Bantam or Dell or both used to have dual language editions of CAndide. As for the English: I've not read them, but I do tend to opt for Norton Critical Editions (Adams) when I have a choice.

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Washington, D.C.: I have a question about available editions of Walt Whitman's works: the available editions (e.g. Penguin) either offer the 1855 (1st) edition of Leaves of Grass or the final "deathbed" version, which contains Whitman's later (and mostly inferior) revisions to his earlier work in addition to his later (and, again, mostly inferior) later poetry. Is there some "middle ground" edition that you know of that concentrates on his best work between the 1850's and the end of the 1860's? Sadly, like Auden, W. seems to have disowned aspects of his earlier poetry. Thanks.

Michael Dirda: This has always been a vexatious problem for Whitman readers, and several editions--e.g. Library of America--solve it by printing both the first and the last. THis seems a reasonable approach. Compare, for instance, the Norton Critical Edition of Wordsworth's Prelude, which gives you the early two-book Prelude, as well as the 1805 version and the later one (I've forgotten the date). There are good things in all three, though the 1805--I do hope that date is right--tends to be the most satisfying.
I believe that the Norton Whitman adopts a similar policy too.

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Brooklyn NY:
Have you seen this book Snakes and Earrings by Hitomi Kanehara? It says on the jacket that it won the Akutagawa Prize, "Japan's highest literary honor". Do you know if this is true, the description of the Akutagawa prize, I mean? I read the book over my lunch break. It really stinks.

Michael Dirda: Hmmm. I don't know the names of Japanese literary prizes, though Akutagawa is a famous name (he wrote Rashomon and a number of supernatural stories). It's possible they gave this year's prize to a clinker, or maybe you simply didn't respond to the book's esthetic.

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Los Angeles, Calif.: I like a varied mix of books. As someone said at last week chat, I read for pleasure: mine.

I've really enjoyed many of the authors and books that have been discussed in this chat. I've read Judith Tarr and Harry Turtledove's Household Gods, and Tarr's Kingdom of the Grail. What other books in this genre would you recommend?

Michael Dirda: I presume that "by this genre" you mean historical fantasy? There are lots of interesting writers working this field: You might try, Avram Davidson's The Phoenix and the Mirror (about Vergil Magus), Gene Wolfe's Soldier of the Mist and its sequel (about a Greek fighting man with a strange memory problem), Gregory Feeley's recent Arabian Wine (about the supposed discovery of coffee), and a zillion others. You might try some of the Arthurian tales or Mary Renault.
A good practice: Look who blurbs Tarr and Turtledove--usually those people work in the same or a related genre.

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Tysons Corner, Va: While awaiting my reserved audiobook of Marilyn Robinson's "Gilead," I checked out George Pelecanos' "Soul Circus" on CD. The Robinson title subsequently became available for pickup next Monday. I have only 3 weeks to finish off "Gilead," so should I press ahead with the 4-disc Pelecanos book before devoting my time to Robinson's book, or simply return it for a time when I don't have anything else in the library queue? In other words, is Pelecanos a good writer? As good as Janet Maslin thinks he is?

Michael Dirda: Well, I think you should just mosey over to Silver Spring here and talk to George, who lives about five minutes from my house.
Of course, Pelecanos is a good writer--but he's very gritty, down-and-dirty, street-smart, etc. etec. Some people find his books too violent, too threatening. But he's certainly one of the hottest writers of serious crime fiction. Or just serious fiction.
AS for Gilead--I reviewed it, loved it, thought it amazing in its control of tone. I'm glad it's won prizes. But Housekeeping is even stranger and in some ways more beautiful.
In truth, I would think you have time to listen to both Pelecanos and Robinson--the latter isn't terribly long.

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La Belle Province: Here in the "capitale nationale" there is a particularly fine French-language bookstore -- Librairie Pantoute -- which also has a good website, just Google it. It's especially strong on Quebec authors, but has everything else French as well. Amazon.ca is also a good source for French books, and is not as expensive as Amazon.fr.

By the way, just finished David Bellos' magisterial life of Georges Perec -- a favorite of mine -- which I discovered through Bound to Please. As good as Brian Boyd's Nabokov volumes, don't you think?

And I second the idea, Candide is quite approachable in French.

Michael Dirda: Many thanks. My son has just returned from Montreal, where he's been been accepted at McGill and is trying to decide whether to go or not. He does like French and this is part of the university's appeal.
Yes, the Bellos is very fine--I also reviewed both volumes of the Boyd, but had to restrict myself to one piece on VN, so chose--with some unsureness--the Lectures on Literature. I was young when I wrote that piece, and I feared it might seem a little overdone.

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HYerndon, Va: Mr. Dirda: The time has come!! For us "Flashman" fans, anyway. "Flashman on the March" is now on sale in the UK. I purchased a copy via Amazon UK. It covers Flashies advertures with the English "incursion/rescue mission" to Ethopia in the 1860s, with General Napier fighting the mad Emporer Theodore. Maybe not the absolute best of George MacDonald Fraser's fiction, but certainly close to the top. As always, I recommend any of the "Flashman" books, with a special recommendation for Fraser's memoirs of his service in Burma in WWI - "Quartered Safe Out Here." (Yes, Mr. D, and we won't forget "The Pyrates"!!)

Michael Dirda: Okay. This is good news. If I'm lucky, maybe I'll get a chance to finally write about the Flashman books when the new one comes out in this country. I'm glad to hear you judge it near the top because I've felt the last couple have been rather wan.

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Michael Dirda: Well, fans, I seem to have--for the first time in living memory--actually answered all this week's questions. If I don't see any more in my queue when I send this, I'll be signing off until next week. Do come back then at 2 for more book talk. Again, I apologize for having gotten confused on when I"d be away.
People often write in to say how much they enjoy the program, but I don't say often enough how much I enjoy answering your questions and conversing with other readers for a little while each week. Some of you I know as friends; others only from your postings; but I am grateful that we can spend an hour together each Wednesday.
Okay. As I said, if there are no further questions waiting, I'll see you all next Wednesday at 2.

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Boston, Mass: Hi Michael,
Have you heard anything about Jeanette Winterson's new book? I remember loving "Oranges" when I was in high school, but I haven't seen anything about the new books in the WP or the NYT. Any rumors?

Michael Dirda: Ah, there was another question: I haven't heard anything about Winterson's new book either. She's been quiet for quite a long time. I wrote about Art Objects seven or eight years ago, and then there were one or two novels, but nothing in a while. She is an amazing writer, and I admire her aesthetics, though I gather some people feel she is a bit too full of herself. I love Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, but The Passion is also terrific. Sexing the Cherry is a bit more problematic, I think.

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