Dirda on Books

Michael Dirda (The Washington Post)

Prize-winning critic Michael Dirda takes 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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Bethesda, Md.: Michael -- Not a question, but a reminiscence and a thought prompted by the good news that Dennis Drabelle will be leading a discussion of the excellent "Augustus" by John Williams. I was just out of college and, looking for a way to catch up on more recent American fiction, read my way through National Book Award winners, including "Augustus," "The Hair of Harold Roux" by Thomas Williams, "Dog Soldiers" by Robert Stone, and "The Moviegoer" by Walker Percy. All were wonderful books. While I would no doubt have bumped into Stone and Percy later in life, I don't think I'd have read the Williams boys but for their awards. Maybe "literary awards mean much less than most people think," as Mr. Yardley said in his Grisham review, but they do have genuine value for us general readers of literary fiction: They point us to the good books that aren't canonized and usually survive only in small press reprints (or, with luck, in libraries). There may be a simple test for overall judging of the literary award: After reading one year's winner, will the reader genuinely want to read another? At keast in those days, the quality of one National Book Award winner was the best recommendation for reading another.

Michael Dirda: Welcome to Dirda on Books! It's snowing here in Washington--I hope there's a blizzard and they cancel the inauguration--and it looks quite pretty out the window. Of course, I"ll have to go out into it sooner or later, either to walk Seamus the wonder-dog or pick up noisy offpsring at various venues around town. Still, this morning I should have been writing, but instead lay in bed with a big cup of peppermint tea and read Anne Carson's Eros the Bittersweet--a book-length essay about the Greek conception of love. A very good book, by the way. As you all must know, I'll be teaching this spring at lovely McDaniel College and one of my courses is on love in the western world, Plato to Patsy Cline.
But enough of this. Let's look at this week's questions and comments.

What a good posting. I've never read Augustus, but I own it and I know my friend and colleague Denny Drabelle is a big admirer of the book. (Is this the same author who wrote the wonderful novel about a teacher, Stoner?) I once thought that I might write a piece about fictional accounts of classical figures--Robert Graves's I, Claudius, Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian, Mary Butt's book about Cleopatra, Thornton Wilder's Ides of March (about Julius Caesar), etc etc.
My colleague Henry Allen is a great admirer of the Thomas Williams book too--I remember that it shared the National Book Award with Gravity's Rainbow, so I've long figure it must be good. But when, oh when, will I read it? After a certain age, one begins to realize that there are some books, no matter how good, that one is likely never to get to.

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Story Hill, Milwaukee, Wis.: Books on deck for early 2005: Bob Dylan's "Chronicles," one or two Wodehouse (will pack these for upcoming cruise) and either "A Christmas Garland" or "Zuleika Dobson" by Max Beerbohm, depending on which you think would be the better introductory read. Then "Master and Margerita" by Bulgakhov.

2005 also starts with renewed possibilities for retunring to Proust (started last year) or Ulysses (started 15 years ago, returned to two years ago, but still on bedstand)? Thanks.

Michael Dirda: I wouldn't start with either of those Beerbohm's. Garland is wonderful--but they are parodies, and half the authors guyed won't be familiar to most modern readers (e.g. Maurice Hewlett). Zuleika is half terrific, half tedious--in my view. You should look for one of thos compilations of the best of Beerbohm. What you must read are the stories "Enoch Soames" and "A.V. Laider," as well a goodly number of the essays. But look for a book of his caricatures too--Yale has a couple, edited by N. John Hall.

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Fairfield Farm: Hello: in the "nothing new under the sun" department... if I have it right, does fantasy go back farther than Dunsany (fairie tales, perhaps?), and, is there a precedent to the Tom Holt/Pratchett/Fforde branch of humorous fantasy? Thanks.

Michael Dirda: In a lot of ways, the wonder tale is the primal story. Myths can be looked at, in part, in this way. Certainly books like the Odyssey and the Argonautica are filled with fantasy. Then think of The Arabian Nights.
Science fiction is easier--Brian Aldiss argues that it really begins with Frankenstein. There has to be some sort of technology. But fantasy is pretty continuous, with lots of ghost stories and visionary tales (think George MacDonald) throughout the 19th century.

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Boston, Mass.: Michael,

My Must Reads for 2005 include three books that I have tried to read before and could not finish:

"Vanity Fair." This is a book that I know I should like, but I couldn't finish it the two times I've tried reading it. Starts off great (I really like the part of Becky Sharp heaving Johnson's Dictionary out the window of the stagecoach), but then goes downhill for me. I'm going to try reading it one last time this year before admitting defeat.

"Lolita." Another book that would seem ideal for me because of the language and word play, but I haven't made it through more than a 100 pages or so. I have the edition annotated by Alfred Appel and the problem may be that I get bogged down in his notes. So this time I'm going to ignore the notes and just concentrate on Nabokov's story. I also thought that listening to Jeremy Irons reading "Lolita" would be a help, but there is no CD version of his reading. Pity.

"Education of Henry Adams." Some years ago I overheard a customer in a bookstore say that this book is the wisest he had ever read. So I bought a copy to find out what he meant and I couldn't get through it. In this case I would have welcomed explanatory footnotes. I'm going to go back to the book this year, but first I plan to do some background reading about Henry Adams.

2005 is the centennial of Albert Einstein's annus mirabilis, when he published his papers on the light- quantum hypothesis and the special relativity theory. The best detailed and technical biography of Einstein that I have read is "Subtle is the Lord" by Abraham Pais. I intend to re-read the beginning of this book through the year 1905. I also want re-read "Einstein's Cosmos" by Michio Kaku -- a fine biography that is short (250 pages), well-written, and easy to understand for a non-technical reader.

My last Must Read is the "New Annotated Sherlock Holmes," which I bought last month as a Christmas present for myself. I'm going to have fun with this one.

Michael Dirda: THis is a good list, and I'm glad to have the pointers toward Einstein. Still, if VAnity Fair and Lolita don't work for you, pitch them and try some other books. I think Thackeray wonderfully witty and cynical, so I like the novel a lot; and Lolita I enjoy for the language, the word-games, and no doubt, to a certain degree, for the titillation of the subject matter. But there are so many good books out there. So if you're reading for pleasure, poke around a bit more. Maybe this is the year you should discover Raymond Chandler or Georges Simenon.

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College Park, Md.: Hi Michael, I have two questions:

I received a nice collection of John Keat's complete work of poetry and am not sure where to start. Is there a certain part of his career or particular poems that are know to be his greatest?

Seperate from that, with reading as much as you do, do you find it difficult to stay in the moment and not get ahead of yourself? Being interested in so many different things, I often find my mind wandering when I'm reading toward all the other books I want to read. This has nothing necessarily to do with the quality of what I'm reading at the moment, just that there's so much out there that I want to read. Do you ever experience this? If so, how do you combat it?

Thanks, and enjoy the snow!

Michael Dirda: In general, I read one book and work on one project at a time. I prefer immersion to dispersion, though lately I've had to break that habit because I'm juggling too many different activities (reviewing, teaching, writing). If you find that you're not finishing books or if you're losing their thread, then you might want to stop flitting about so much and just force yourself to concentrate. But if you're not suffering these problems, just keep to your old habits.
As for Keats: You might want to swing by the bookstore or library and look at a selected Keats or even in the Norton anthology--these will point you to the major works in your collected. Certainly you should read the great odes (Grecian Urn being the most famous), The Eve of St. Agnes, and the sonnet on Chapman's Homer. After that you can start to explore the rest of his work. I find much of Keats a bit sickly-sweet for my taste, and tend to prefer more astringent poets (Pope, Byron, Tennyson, Eliot).

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Washington, D.C.: Just wanted to tell you that I'm really enjoying your contributions to the Oxford American Writer's Thesaurus, which I received as a Christmas present. I particularly enjoyed your entries on the words "boring" and "depression" (for different reasons, clearly).

Did you enjoy working on this project? How do you feel it turned out? It's proving already to be a great resource for my own writing and the way I contemplate words.

Michael Dirda: Oh, I am pleased. I found it a great honor to be one of ten writers to contribute essays on favorite words to an Oxford thesaurus, especially when the other notables included Simon Winchester, Zadie Smith, David Foster Wallace, Francine Prose et al. Let me tell you a story. On the back jacket I give a blurb which ends with a phrase "and nine distinguished writers." Originally, as I've said, there were 10 of us, and so I was being a little coy and leaving myself out (mere journalist and all). But then one of the contributors dropped out and so I now sound rather vainglorious. Sigh. This was compounded by the over-the-top subtitle that I couldn't convince NOrton to change for Bound to Please: An EXtraordinary One-Volume Literary Education. I would never say anything like that, even were it true (which it is, in a way).

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Lenexa Kan.: Mr. Dirda: Some (additional) reflective favorites from 2004:
Colm Toibin's "The Blackwater Lightship", 1999
Christina Stead's "The Man Who Loved Children", 1940
Charles Dickens's "The Pickwick Papers", 1837
Elizabeth Hand's "Mortal Love", 2004
Paul Theroux's "The Stranger at the Palazzo D'Oro", 2004
Tom Wolfe's "I Am Charlotte Simmons", 2004

Some prospective favorites planned for 2005:
Murasaki Shikibu's "The Tale of Genji", 1015
Joyce Cary's "The Horse's Mouth", 1944
Henry James's "The Ambassadors", 1903
Marilynne Robinson's "Gilead", 2004
Donna Tart's "The Little Friend", 2002
Michael Dirda's "Bound to Please", 2004

Michael Dirda: What good lists! Of course, you saved the best for last.

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Washington, D.C.: I am planning on reading Stendhal's "The Red and the Black" and Ovid's "Metamorphoses" for the first time. What are your preferred translations of these works? Also, any opinions on translators of Dostoevsky?

Michael Dirda: Stendhal is hard to translate effectively into English, and I'm not sure which version of Rouge et Noir I would point you to. Were it Chartreuse de Parme I'd suggest Richard Howard's. As for Ovid, the best introduction is certainly Ted Hughes's Tales from Ovid--see essay on same in BTP--and the best modern verse translation is the recent one by Charles Martin.
Dostoevsky's best translators are now Larissa Volokhonsky and Richard Pevear. But his power comes over no matter who does the English.

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Lexington, Ky.: Michael, books to look forward to this year or on my reading list, always conscious that few books live up to their promise. But for now it's anticipation we're discussing.

"Saturday" by Ian McEwan (because Atonement is a masterpiece and this is the first book after that one)

"Flashman on the March" by George McDonald Fraser (because he never disappoints)

"Kafka on the Shore" by Haruki Murakami (admittedly, he's an acquired taste but no one writes like he does)

"The House of Storms" by Ian Macleod (sequel to "The Light Ages," set in an alternative Victorian age)

"The Last Crossing" (best Western since "Lonesome Dove")

Cormac McCarthy has a new book, "No Country for Old Men"

And, whether any of those disappoint or not, some re-reading: "Bleak House;" "Pickwick Papers;" "Mason & Dixon" (so I can see this county in its infancy and promise, and, retreat from the current "reading" of America by our government); a first tackling of "The Tale of the Genji." Okay, classics offer a refuge that's better than just moving to another country so maybe this will be a good year to read more from the past, an excellent year to plug holes in my education (with the help of "Bound to Please," an excellent guide to the past)!

Michael Dirda: A very good list. I didn't know there was a new McCarthy on the horizon. Last I heard he was working on a book partly set on an oil rig in the Gulf--I wonder if this is it?
I still have Light Ages on my shelf. Maybe I need to review Storms, so that would force me to go back to the earlier book.

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Maitland, Fla.: Is there a particular version of the Bible that you recommend to readers?

Michael Dirda: Maitland, Florida! A person very dear to me lives in Maitland. Do you ever go over to Leiby's Used Books in Casselberry Commons? Would that I were in Maitland on this snowy day, sipping a Dos Equis and looking out over a certain creek, hoping to glimpse a blue heron. . . .
Oh wait, you actually had a question. Excuse me while I wrench myself away from this revery.
The most poetically beautiful version of the Bible is the King James, aka Authorized Version. Some purists even prefer Tyndale's earlier version, the basis of perhaps three quarters of the language in the KJ. If you want a Bible that preserves much of this beauty of language, but corrects errors and replaces all those thous with yous--try the Revised Standard Version. Not the new RSV, the first one, with the Old Testament edited by Herbert Gordon May and the New by Bruce Metzger.

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Columbia, Md.: I've come to the conclusion that I'm not a fan of books that are endorsed as "small gems" (examples: "Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress;" "The Reader"). Short on ideas, bland of style, I say. I read "Vanity Fair" last year and loved it. This year will be tackling more hefty tomes: "Jonathan Strange," "Cloud Atlas," "Infinite Jest."

Michael Dirda: A chacun son gout. I quite enjoyed Seamstress, thought Jonathan Strange ambitious but only fitfully engrossing. It sounds to me as if you're a young reader, where ambition and reach matter more than a smaller,perhaps easier perfection. I sympathize with this view myself, but do like classically well-made books. What is more perfect than Candide?

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Ballston, Va.: Must Reads for 2005:

"Gravity's Rainbow." I even bought a reader's guide to help me. I've read "V." and "The Crying of Lot 49" and "Vineland," but I gave up on "Mason/Dixon" midway through.

"Infinite Jest."

Something by William Gaddis.

Actually, if I can get through any one of these this year, I'll be pleased. There always seems to be something more immediately accessible to read.

Michael Dirda: The Gaddis should be The Recognitions--though A Frolic of His Own is very funny.

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Minnetonka, Minn.: Michael,
Do you have a book that you could name that comes from "The Cemetery of Lost Books" as in The Shadow of the Wind. Something that you feel you could spend time researching and studying and even book scouting trying to keep its memory alive.

Michael Dirda: Hmmmm. The book I most often urge on people is Cyril Connolly's The Unquiet Grave. Its a mix of diary, commonplace book, literary essay, erotic memoir and hokey philosophical maunderings (with diagrams!), but its pervaded by wistfulness and its author possessed the most elegant lapidary prose of the century.

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Anonymous: Is the "blue heron" a reference to James Salter?

Michael Dirda: No. It's a real blue heron. Came to have symbolic meaning for me.

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Ashcroft, B.C.: Your story about your blurb on the Thesaurus reminded me of when Margaret Drabble edited the updated Oxford Guide to English Literature and, out of modesty, omitted an entry on herself, thinking that someone else would pick up on the omission and insist that of course she should be included; at least that way it wouldn't look too egotistical on her part. Unfortunately, no one did...

Reading plans for 2005 (much of it inspired by "Bound to Please") include:

Henry Green (several titles);
Herodotus;
The Arabian Nights;
Italo Svevo (ZENO'S CONSCIENCE and EMILIO'S CARNIVAL);
Joseph Roth, THE RADETZKY MARCH;
Claire Tomalin's biography of Pepys;
Anthony Burgess (A DEAD MAN IN DEPTFORD and NOTHING LIKE THE SUN);
and more Proust. Always more Proust.

Michael Dirda: Well, as I"ve recommended all those books, how can I say anything but: "What fine and discriminating taste you display here!"
I like that Drabble story. I remember once losing some sort of class election in 5th grade because I voted for my opponent, thinking that was the honorable thing to do. Of course, he voted for himself and won by a single vote--mine.

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Towson, Md.: Just put Patsy Cline and Edith Piaff on the turntable to get in the mood for your chat.

I read in Powerline about your panel discussion this week on Wolfe's "...Charlotte Simmons." Wish I'd been there. How did you think it went? And do you enjoy such discussions?

Thank you, by the way, for your review of "Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell." I bought it that week, fell asleep three times in the first 50 pages, but kept at it, and three months later felt bereft when I turned over the last page.

Michael Dirda: I'm trying to imagine a duet of Patsy and the Little Sparrow.
I presume powerline is some sort of blog or website. But yes I was on the panel--the token Democrat among Republicans, the defender of '60s freedoms against 21st century values. I thought all the presenters were first-rate. BookTV filmed the event and I'm told it'll be on this weekend or next. Had I known I was going to be on camera I would have worn my contacts.

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Munich, Germany: O'Hanlon's "Trawler" has been out for a while. I bought that book in 2003. I was just wondering how books are chosen to appear in Book World. Is a personal choice of the reviewer, or does the managing editor dole out titles to be considered?

Also, yourself being a crime aficionado, what do you think of Iain Banks? Is his fiction too British or Scottish to have an interest in the States? The "Wasp Factory" achieved some success in the States, did it not, but his prodigious work afterwards has never received much attention.

Michael Dirda: Book World originates all the reviews that appear in its pages. I remember a discussion of Trawler and one of my colleagues was supposed to assign it. O'Hanlon is a terrific, and very funny, travel writer.
Most Iain Banks doesn't seem to get picked up by American trade publishers. He is so prolific, alternating between those books with and without the middle initial M. I have a couple of his books, from his science fiction days, but haven't kept up with his work. I was always jealous that he should be a) a good writer, b) a productive one, and c) very good looking, at least from his jacket photo.

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Billings, Mont.: Not a question, just a comment. Currently I'm in D.C. after driving from Montana for four days, and it's snowing and 20 degrees. Back home I see that it is in the 50s. Something's not right. We're here to drive surrey and two black horses in the Inauguration parade if anyone happens to be watching. Back on a book topic, before becoming the official navigator on the trip, I was enjoying Linda Fairstein's newest, "Entombed," which is (almost too) full of info about Edgar A. Poe.

-- PK the Bookeemonster

Michael Dirda: Can one ever have too much information about Edgar A. Poe? I recently shelled out 50 bucks for The Poe Log, which purports to list every piece of factual data that we know about America's most mysterious and haunting author.

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Midland, Mich.: Michael: A few months ago, you wrote one of the coolest sentences I've ever read in a book review. I liked it so much I wrote it down in my personal notebook: "Many books are to be read, some are to be studied, and a few are meant to be lived in for weeks." Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, you said, fell in the last category. I'm about 200 pages into it and enjoying it very much; however, I can see why some people would find her mannerisms a too cute. What other books fall into that last category, in your mind?

Michael Dirda: Gosh. I'm glad you liked the sentence, though in retrospect I feel I liked JS a lot less than that that sentence suggests. It is, of course, a variant on Francis Bacon: Some books are to be tasted etc.
Books to live in need to be, by definition, long or difficult books, and there are any number of these, from the famous: Boswell's Life of Johnson, Proust, to the less well known: The Tale of Genji; S.Schoenbaum's Shakespeare's Lives; such great reference books as E.F. Bleiler's Guide to Supernatural Fiction, Martin Seymour-Smith's New Guide to Modern World Literature, the massive encyclopedias of fantasy and science fiction co-edited by John Clute.

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Ashcroft, B.C.: Apropos Poe: America's most mysterious and haunting author would be 196 today, were he still alive. Raise a glass!

Michael Dirda: What do you mean "were he still alive"? Some of us know things we're not at liberty to divulge. There are some matters that must remain veiled, if only so the people can rest easy in their beds at night.

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Nani, Tex.: Re-reads for 2005 (for sheer reading pleasure and, to see if they evoke the same emotions as when I was a young girl)

Crime and Punishment
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Winter of Our Discontent
Ivanhoe

Michael Dirda: Ivanhoe may be a disappointment. Try Waverley instead.

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Lenexa, Kan.: Actually Drable has a 38-line entry in my edition of the 2000 "Oxford Companion." Under the influence of Charles Murray's methodology I shouldn't admit it but I also counted her sister's. A.S. Byatt had 35.

Michael Dirda: This is doubtless the later edition. Antonia is probably lucky to be there at all, as far as her sister is concerned.

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Small Gems and more: FYI, I didn't mean a short book can't be great. But the "small gem" appellation seems to attach itself to books that are not only of small size but small reach (another adjective to watch out for: "lyrical"). Anyway, that's my "gout."

I also wanted to recommend the Allan Mandelbaum translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses to the chatter interested. It is a really beautiful translation.

Michael Dirda: Many thanks. Mandelbaum also translated Dante and Homer as I recall. A man of many turns.

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Annapolis, Md.: Michael, I am intrigued by the subject of your course at McDaniel: Love in Literature from Sappho through Lolita. Can you share with us the works you will be teaching as a potential reading list for those of us who visit these discussions?
-- A WMC student many years ago

Michael Dirda: Plato's Symposium, poems by Catullus, Horace, Ovid, troubadour lyrics, Dante's Vita Nuova, Shakespeare's sonnets, Racine's Phaedra, Madame de Lafayette's The Princess of Cleves, Congreve's Way of the World, Stendhal's On Love, Constant's Adolphe, Fontane's Effi Briest, Tolstoy's The Kreutzer Sonata, Chekhov's "The Lady with the Dog," Wilde's De Profundis, Ford's The Good Soldier, Nabokov's Lolita. I'll also devote a class or two to opera--chiefly Nozze di Figaro and Tristan--and painting, probably focusing on Bronzino's Allegory of Passion aka Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time. Supplementary readings will include Goethe's Elective Affinities and Colette's The Pure and the Impure. I'll end with modern American standards and country and western heartbreakers. Anyway that's the idea. I also have a half dozen secondary readings: Anne Carson's Eros the Bittersweet, de Rougemont's Love in the Western World, Lewis's The Allegory of Love, Praz's The Romantic Agony.

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Fairfax, Va.: For Iain Banks, I strongly recommend "Crow Road" if you can find it. I read it when I lived in England. As for the middle "M," that tends to mean the book is science fiction.

Michael Dirda: Many thanks. I knew about the M.

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Maitland, Fla.: Mr. Dirda,

I've resolved this year to read the Bible from Genesis to Revelation. For me it would be a "literary" experience, and I wonder, other than the King James version, what text or translation do you consider better than the rest? I've still got my Revised Standard Version the Ladies of the Church gave me on my Confirmation in 1960. I'm sure it's adequate, but having just finished the Constance Garnett translation of War and Peace, if I'm going to make a similar investment of time I thought I'd at least ask first if there is a favored version.

Michael Dirda: I already answered this a few minutes back.

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Oxford, UK: Mr. Dirda,
I am an incorrigible judge of books by the cover -- and my friends have often scolded me for allowing myself to be biased by a thing as superficial as dustjackets. What do you think? After all, there is something to be said for a beautifully done cover, or one that perfectly captures the mood of the book. Of course, the substance within those covers is of greater importance, but it is infinitely more pleasurable to pick up a beautiful book than an ugly one.
And on the same subject, what are your favorite book covers (taking aesthetics and suitability into account)? And perhaps we could make this next week's topic. I think my list must include Atwood's "The Blind Assassin," the trade paperbacks of His Dark Materials (the embossed title is fabulous), the Overlook editions of Wodehouse (somehow the atmosphere is just right), the American Harry Potters (though the British grownups' version is pretty cool as well), and the Barnes and Noble editions of Sherlock Holmes, showing scenes of fog-covered London at dusk. Oh, and also Edward Gorey's illustrations for Aiken's books.

Michael Dirda: I certainly value well-made,hansome books, and a striking dustjacket can make a book into an object of beauty and pleasure. Still, I tend to prefer older books without their jackets--I like the dark, muted tonality of bookcloth, as opposed to the jarring kaleidoscopic busyness of spines with jackets.
As for Wodehouse: the Overlook editions are very good, but the old ones with Paul Galdone covers are echt Wodehouse to me.
Still, I think a discussion of book jackets would be fun--let's do it next time.

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Chicago, Ill.: Michael,

I seem to recall that, in one of the online discussions, you mentioned a short story by Lord Dunsany (I think it was a ghost story) that you thought was exceptional. What was the name of the short story and what collection is it published in?

Thanks.

Michael Dirda: Hmmm. Dunsany wrote many exceptional stories, but I most likely mentioned either a Jorkens tall tale--the best are in The Travel Tales of Joseph Jorkens and Jorkens REmembers Africa (both combined as volume 1 in the recent Nightshade edition)--or possibly a favorite one-off like the classic chess story, "The Three Sailors' Gambit" or the very celebrated, and macabre mystery, "Two Bottles of Relish."

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Herndon, Va.: The topic of the week, if I remember correctly, is what books we most look forward to reading this year. That is a question that is difficult to for me to answer. I am currently reading The Knox Brothers, by Penelope Fitzgerald, General Washington's Christmas Farewell, by Stanley Weintraub, and Fifth Business, by Robertson Davies -- Bedroom book, briefcase book (I get a surprising amount of reading done waiting around for some event or person), and living room book, respectively.

Waiting in the wings, so to speak, are:

Coyote Blue, by Christopher Moore
The Collected Jorkens, vol. 1, by Lord Dunsany
The Coffee Trader, by David Liss
Gallow's Thief, by Bernard Cornwell
The Waste Books, by Georg Lichtenberg
My Dog Tulip, by J.R. Ackerley
Skin Tight, by Carl Hiaasen
Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories, by Italo Calvino
Casanova in Bolzano, by Sandor Marai

These will carry me through the next month or two, depending on how busy I get.

The difficulty is that reading any of these could get indefinitely postponed by a trip to the bookstore or library, a hearty recommendation from a friend or acquaintance, or a review that makes a book sound particularly enticing. My bookshelves are filled with books that were bought with "good intentions," and are yet unread. Walter Van Tilburg Clark's Track of the Cat has been disapprovingly glaring at me from the bookcase for a number of years now.

One book I want to add, though I'm not sure I'm looking forward to reading it, is Joyce's Ulysses. It's been sitting on a shelf for several years, and I think this year is the year to try it.

Michael Dirda: A very nice list. Do you know Walter van Tilburg Clark's short stories? They're very fine--The Track of the Cat, and Other stories. I've never forgotten one, "The Portable Phonograph" about a future world that has been bombed back into the Dark Ages--but one man still owns a portable phonograph and a stack of classical records. The last sentence is a chiller--and a provocative one, ideal for book discussion groups.

And that, dear friends in reading (I'm sounding more priestly with every year), is it for this week. Go forth. . . Oh, to hell with it. Keep reading! See you next Wednesday at 2 when we talk book jackets and book design and books as esthetic objects.

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