Dirda on Books – Transcript Michael Dirda Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, July 21, 1999

Michael Dirda The Washington Post

Michael Dirda's name appears weekly in The Post's Book World section. If he's not reviewing a fat literary biography or an ambitious new novel, he's likely to be writing a lighthearted essay about the joys and burdens of living in a house filled with way too many books. Although he holds a PhD in comparative literature from Cornell, Dirda is still smart enough to be an unabashed fan of "The Simpsons," noting that "the show's genius derives from its details." He also loves P.G. Wodehouse, intellectual history, children's books and locked-room mysteries – just the sort of range you'd expect from a Pulitzer Prize winner for distinguished criticism.

These days, Dirda says he spends inordinate amounts of time mourning his lost youth and daydreaming ("my only real pastime"). Otherwise he just reads books and writes about them, with occasional visits to secondhand bookstores in search of treasures. He claims that the happiest hours of his week are spent sitting in front of a computer working on his reviews and Readings columns. "Do not imagine that I regard my taste for literary artifacts as anything but shameless and vulgar," Dirda says, "I have sunk so low as to covet Edward Gorey coffee mugs. I yearn for a bust of Dante to place on a bookcase."

Washington, DC: Sometimes a book is a book.

I recently read Charles Portis's novel "The Dog of the South" - long hyped by The New York Observer's Ron Rosenbaum as a "scandalously out-of-print book." I enjoyed it, thought it funny in parts, found it dragged a bit in the middle -perhaps this was intentional-, but concluded it was certainly not the masterpiece of American modernism described by Mr. Rosenbaum. I'm wondering your thoughts about the intent of authors vs. those who review and seem to read much more into it than is there. I simply did not see the same things Rosenbaum did.

Michael Dirda: Interesting that you should bring up Portis, because I put Dog of the South aside for reading this summer or fall. There is, of course, a tendency by reviewers to go overboard--if they like book, they want to be enthusiastic so that others will read the it so they sometimes indulge in hyperbole. If they're disappointed, they tend to mete out vengeance for having had to slog through so many dull pages. Of course, Dog of the South may simply not have been your kind of novel--people have different tastes, expecations, etc.

Washington, DC: Mr. Dirda,

I'm a college student and aspiring writer. My mother always tells me, "If you want to be a good writer, you have to be a good reader." While I completely agree with this, I have a hard time concentrating while reading and retaining the requisite information that I had just read only minutes before. ADD aside, what's my problem? Should I make notes, etc. like I do for my Lit thesis papers? Thank you.

Michael Dirda: Just read a lot and more will stick with you than you realize. Quantity is at least as important as quality when you're young; discrimination can come later after you've discovered your tastes. In my own case, I can't read anything without a pencil in myh hand--I like to mark favorite passages, make occasional marginal notes. Such writing slows down the reading, but I think it makes one pay closer attention to the prose and the ideas.

Washington, D.C.: I just finished "The Reader" by Schlink. Being German, I should have read it in German, which I will do when I get my hands on a German version. Would you have any ideas on how I could get a german version? My other question is do you know of other known works of his that I might like as much as I liked "The Reader?"
That's it. Thanks for making yourself available to us avid readers.
Keep it up!

Michael Dirda: Some of the bigger bookstores have foreign language sections. Have you checked the Yellow Pages? And, of course, the on-line bookstores can probably find a GErman version for you. I don't know Schlink's work at all, so can't really guide you in this instance. My favorite novel about reading, though, is Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler.

Mt. Rainier MD: I'd saved some recommendations of yours for a while - Chinua Achebe, Ben Okri, Amos Tortuola. Yesterday I went -finally!- to the library with my Ugandan houseguest. When she saw me pick up Achebe, she was so excited - she said this is the man who taught her how to express herself in English. She wanted me to get all six volumes right off, and I confess I am twice as eager to get to them now. She has started with Ben Okri, by the bye. Tortuola seems not to have broken into the American market much? Nothing of his in PG county libraries.

Michael Dirda: You can find The Palm-Wine Drinkard in bookstores--at the least, in second-hand shops. And since it's short, it's relatively inexpensive paperback. Kids study Achebe in school now--my 6th grader read THings Fall Apart for English this past year.

Indio, CA: Please explain your esteem for Cormac McCarthy? I recently succumbed to peer pressure and picked up a copy of ALL THE PRETTY HORSES and found it to be a Faulknerized version of Louis L'Amour. Many years ago I read BLOOD MERIDIAN, the paradigm of the tedious gore genre, stilted and stylized to conceal its depthlessness from readers, and apparently wise critics such as yourself.

How long can this faker get away with it?

Michael Dirda: Setting aside matters of taste, McCarthy has long been a controversial writer. Pretty Horses, though, is a fairly exciting "western," a novel about coming of age in the Huck Finn mode, and a series of beautifully written descriptions. Blood Meridian strikes me as a genuine epic, a kind of land equivalent to Moby-Dick--another book that many people don't like for its bloatedness. By inclination, I am a classicist, liking wit, compactiness, balance, elegance, etc. But even more so, I hope I recognize brilliantly original writing--and that's where McCarthy shines. Blood Meridian is a haunting book, filled with descriptions that take one's breath away. It's not just a WIld Bunch gore fest, with mythological overtones--though it is that, too, of course.

Vienna, VA: I am starting to read "chapter books" to my bright 4-year-old. My original plan was to read one or two chapters a night, but he can't tolerate the suspense and he has such a long attention span for reading that we read CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY in one weekend..... What are your suggestions for reading aloud to a 4-year-old?

Michael Dirda: Read the other Roald Dahl books, especially those geared to younger kids like The Enormous Crocodile. Also try some of the books by Daniel Pinkwater for younger kids--e.g. I was a SEcond Grade Werewolf. But I wouldn't push too hard at your child and I'd still spend a lot of time with picture books, especially those good stories and longish texts. Your librarian can guide you, but you should definitely try the books of William Joyce, Chris Van Allsburg, etc. They'll be plenty of time for longer books. Oh yes, you should find a good collection of fairy tales, classical myths and retold Bible narratives--great stories and central to our culture.

Washington, DC: One of my favorite things to read are plays. I like to read them more than I like to see them, actually. I was just hoping to pick your incredibly well-read brain for some suggestions maybe about some more obscure plays-authors I may not know about. Especially ones from non-English speaking countries. Thanks very much. I enjoy your essays and these chats a great deal.

Michael Dirda: Plays? Let's do English first. I'm extremely fond of several Elizabethan tragedies: John Webster's The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi ("Mine is another voyage"), Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, Hamlet, etc. Look for T.S. Eliot's wonderfully stiomulating essays collected as Essays on Elizabethan Drama (also inclouded in Selected Essays). In other languages, I love Ionesco's The Bald Soprano and Rhinoceros; Genet's The Maids and The Balcony; Dario Fo's Accidental Death of an Anarchist; Beckett's Godot and Endgame; Gogol's The Inspector General; and, of course, the classic drama of ancient Greece, especially Aeschylus.

Farifax, Virginia: How closely are you involved in your children's reading for pleasure and school? Do you know if they consider it an honor or a burden to have a dad who is knowledgable about so many books?

Michael Dirda: My kids are 15, 12 and 8, and I was heavily involved in reading to and with them for the most of their lives. I think it extremely important. But I'm sure it's been something of a mixed blessing for them to grow up surrounded by books. My childhood was quite different, and, as a result, books were very special to me from an early age. To my kids, they are simply the background of their lives, and reading and writing what their dad does. Frankly, they'd be happier if I reviewed movies or video games. But they are all good readers, and one, at least, is also a superb writer. None of this is any different from what I expected.

District of Columbia: Coming up this weekend on PBS is a dramatization of "Far from the Madding Crowd." What is your assessment of it?

I looked in Cliff Fadiman's "Lifetime Reading Plan" and found that he prefers "Mayor of Casterbridge." Do you?

Michael Dirda: I do prefer Mayor Casterbridge--there was an excellent British tv version starring Alan BAtes, first televised 20 years ago. How can you not love a book that opens with a drunken husband selling his wife to a passerby at a fair?

Washington DC: Hello, Michael,
I see that you will be teaching in the fall semester. Which aspects of the teaching are you most looking forward to?

Ruth Widmann
Professor at U Colorado and resident of Washington DC

Michael Dirda: Hi, Ruth!
Teaching for me is the road not taken, and so I'm looking forward to discovering whether I made a mistake some 20 or so years ago by sticking with journalism. Alternately, I might discover that I was luckier than I knew to escape from academe. I'll keep you posted. Also, it'll be fun to be in a clasroom--I'm a pretty good showman.

Washington, D.C.: Last week, you said-wrote that "All the King's Men is certainly one of the dozen great American novels of the century."

What do you consider to be the other 11? <my cyber-pencil at the ready now>

Michael Dirda: Hmmm. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man; Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby; Vladmir Nabokov, Lolita; Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian; William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury or Absalom, Absalom! Willa Cather's A Lost Lady; Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon; perhaps Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination; and I don't know what others right now. But there's a start. Of course, some of the best writers worked in shorter forms: Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio; the stories of Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor, etc.

Somewhere, USA: You're teaching? Where? All of us want to take the course!

Michael Dirda: It's easy to get to--Orlando, Florida, at the University of Central Florida. A long and amusing story about how this came about, but not for now.

Arlington, VA: I was glad to see you point out in your recent review of Pérez-Reverte's "Fencing Master" how chronology is often ignored in the publication, and later marketing, of translated texts. I got a promotional e-mail from Amazon.com about a month ago stating that this was the latest Pérez-Reverte novel. Finding it ironic that they were promoting a book to me of which they themselves seemed somewhat ignorant, I decided to write back to inform them that it was just a new translation and that the novel had already been published some years ago and that it was even made into a Spanish film. They wrote back to thank me for my astuteness, but it made me wonder whether the people in their employ ever bother to read the inside cover of a book or do any kind of work besides download some ready-made press releases from the publishers. I think Amazon is okay if you already know what you're looking for and you're pressed for time, but it seems that such a site can never compete with a knowledgeable bookseller or informed reader. Any views?

Michael Dirda: Good posting. I resist the lure of on-line bookselling and buying. Personally, I like to browse thorugh bookshops, never knowing quite what I'll find. In the same way, I like libraries with open stacks. No card catalogue or online search can ever replace serendipity. Not that they don't have their place.

Rockville, MD: Do you have a favorite PG Wodehouse book? I love the Jeeves and Bertie stories but would like to branch out. Pub. libraries don't have much Wodehouse; can you recommend a likely used bookstore? Thanks

Michael Dirda: I usually recommend starting with Leave it to Psmith--which is about the last Psmith novel and the first Blandings Castle. Most critics would agree that the Master's finest novels are The Code of the Woosters, Brinkley Manor (aka RIght, HO, Jeeves); The Mating Season; Uncle Fred in the Springtime. Try the anthology THe Most of P.G. Wodehouse, which turns up in used fairy regularly.

Atlanta, GA: Hello. The Common Reader catalog has a category described as "thumping good reads -- books you can READ read, books you can get lost in, books with real storytelling." I thought this was a neat categorization, and wondered if you have any favorite thumping good reads.

Michael Dirda: Thumping good reads--I suppose this means exciting tales of derring do? Ok, I love George Macdonald Fraser's hilarious and thrilling The Pyrates--a sendup of every pirate book and movie ever; Bester's The Stars My Destination is The Count of Monte Cristo set in space, with touches from John Webster; the mysteries of John Dickson Carr, Edmund Crispin and Michael Innnes; G.K. Chesterton's philosophical thirller, The Man Who Was Thursday; Jack Vance's Demon Princes series, as well as The Dying Earth and The EYes of the Overworld; TErry Pratchett's Discworld comedies and the early novels of Tom Holt; STella Gibbon's Cold Comfort Farm, Eric Ambler's Jounrey into Fear; and oh I don't know how many ohters, including most of AGatha Christie.

Fairfax, Va: My wife and I are new parents and we very much want our son to not only read avidly, but to also have deep affection for books. But we want to be careful not to succumb to the parental temptation to force the process. Other than reading to children regularly, and reading in front of them, what other suggestions would you offer? -Particularly in a tv-saturated culture.-

Michael Dirda: Make sure your child has books of his own. Take him to the bookstore and let him choose a book or two on his own. Go to the library regularly as a family. Surround him with magazines and other reading material too. Talk about books. Tell him stories from the Greek myths, etc. None of this may work, however. But you'll learn as much as he. Good luck.

Dallas, TX: Funny someone should mention "All the King's Men". I just spent the weekend reading it and loved it. are any of his others good, or was this a one-hit wonder?

Michael Dirda: That's his best book, though Night RIder is also very strong. Look for Warren's poetry too--it's first rate, especially his later work. And his essays are also extremely intelligent--there's a long brilliant reading of the Rime of the ANcient Mariner, "a poem of pure imagination" as he calls it.

Washington, DC: My uncle teaches junior high and high school English at a midwestern prep school. Whenever he tells me the titles of the books he is assigning, it raises the question: It is a teacher's job to inculcate a love of reading with "sexy" books or to make sure his charges actually get the classics in in good time? The two don't always go together: I remember hating Silas Marner, for example, but since I doubt if I would have ever read it under any circumstance besides assigned reading, I now think it's a good thing I got it under my belt when I did since it gave me a feel for the period that I later found helpful as a history major. I was also assigned "Gone With the Wind" in high school, which was a page turner at least, but which also made me shun historical fiction and even studying southern history for the longest time because I equated both fields with overdramatized wishful thinking. What do you think?

Michael Dirda: Good question. Basically, I think schools should make classics into assigned texts, but encourage kids to choose fun or sexy titles for their private reading and book reports. On the other hand, I think shrewder minds might choose a better classic novel than Silas Marner. There are, of course, books that teach well and those that don't--and one can hope that by teaching a sexy book the class will be inspired to become better readers in general.

Philadelphia, PA: Michael,

CNN.com recently reported that Nina King will be stepping down as Editor of Book World, though I haven't seen anything in the Washington Post about this. Can you comment on what this will mean for Book World? She's been at the helm for several years and seen it through a lot of changes.

Michael Dirda: Yes, she'll be taking on some slightly different duties involving books. As for the larger question, Book World will continue, we'll eventually have a new editor, and, one hopes, we will both attract new readers and keep the old.

Arnold, MD: HAPPY BIRTHDAY PAPA! Well, ol' Hemi would have been 100 today - his former boat captain is now 102 and still fishing -talk about an Old Man and the Sea-. So what's your vote for Papa's best effort? I've found "bell tolls," "old man," and his short stories sustain multiple readings and interpretations. Not too keen on "moveable feast" and the Paris stuff - But I fully intend to mark the day with a scotch and soda and a couple of shark steaks.

Michael Dirda: My favorite novel is The Sun Also Rises; I love a dozen of the stories, especially Big-Two-Hearted River; and they are lots of sections in the nonfiction I like too, including big chunks of Green Hills of Africa, Death in the Afternoon and A Moveable FEast.

Washington, DC: Michael, for some reason I tend to gravitate towards books by male authors -- Phillip Roth, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nicholson Baker are some of my favorites. I'm trying to make a concious effort to read a few more female authors. Recently, I've found a liking for Joan Didion. Are there a few other authors and-or specific books by modern women authors you'd recommend? Thank you.

Michael Dirda: Favorite contemporary women writers: Annie Proulx (Accordion Crimes, recent book of stories); Jeanette Winterson (esp Oranges are not the Only Fruit), Angela Carter (stories and Nights at the Circus), some Carol Shields; A.S. Byatt (Possession; later fairy tale collections); Ursula Le Guin's early and middle science fiction (Left Hand of Darkness.

Washington DC: Hi Michael, thanks so much for the suggestions. I'm familiar with a few of them, and the others sound great. I just want to suggest one play to you and the other readers, by Susan Glaspell, most famous for "Trifles." It's called "The Verge," and it's brilliant, original, philosophically deep, politically radical, very 'modernist' in style I guess. That's all!

Michael Dirda: THanks.

Washington, D.C.: As a lover of biographies, I was wondering if you recommend any current or past works greatly?

Michael Dirda: Richard Ellmann's James Joyce and Oscar Wilde; Rupert Hart-Davis's Hugh Walpole; Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson; Samuel Schoenbaum's Shakespeare's Lives; John Aubrey's Brief Lives; Richard Holmes two volume life of Coleridge; lots of others.

Alexandria, Va: Michael, As a regular and devoted reader of your Sunday column in the Post, I don't think I have seen you write about your preferences for mystries. What do you think of Ruth Rendell, P. D. James and Elizabeth George, to name just three? Thank you.

Michael Dirda: I've written fairly often about my favorite mystery authors--John Dickson Carr, Cornell Woolrich, Edmund Crispin, AGatha Christie, Michael Innes, etc. AMong living contemporaries I've reviewed Lawrence Block, Donald Westlake (and Richard Stark), Michael Dibdin, Iain Pears, and Ruth Rendell (also Barbara Vine). Have never read P.D. James or Elizabeth George. What should I try?

Washington, DC: I'm going to spend some time in Belgium later this summer. Could you recommend any novels by Belgian authors or non-fiction books about Belgium other than travel guides? Thanks.

Michael Dirda: Georges Simenon was Belgian, and there are scores of good books by him.

Omaha, NE: Does literary criticism rise to the level of art form? Or is it always secondary to the work-works under examination?

Michael Dirda: In general, crigicism is always going to be secondary--We need Emily DIckinson; we don't need Harold Bloom on DIckinson. Besides, who would be a critic or reviewer when he could be a poet or novelist? There are only a handful of critics who seem the equals to creative minds--Aristotle, Johnson, Hazlitt, Arnold, Sainte-Beuve, Eliot, possibly Empson.

Alexandria, VA: You wrote a nice article in May about your eighth grade teacher. Did you ever hear from him?

Michael Dirda: Yes, we spent the afternoon together, along with my 7th grade social studies and home room teacher. I'll write about that day sometime.

Johnstown, Pa.: Another chatter mentioned Fadiman's "Lifetime Reading Plan," which I have leafed through. Do you recommend this plan? Is it possible for ordinary folks to get through the plan in a lifetime -or midlife, which is me-?

Michael Dirda: You don't have to read everything in Fadiman, or on any other list. But it's useful, at times, to have an intelligent guide, and Fadiman's has stood the test of time. It meant a lot to me when I was 12 or so and just starting to read serious books.
WEll, that's the time for this week. Sorry if I didn't get to your question. In the meantime, till next WEdnesday at 2--keep reading!