Archives for November 17, 2004

I just got back from my joint appearance with Bob Gottlieb and Robert Greskovic at the Barnes & Noble on Union Square. It went well. The house was nearly full, the crowd asked terrific questions, and we sold and signed a pile of books afterward. One woman bought a copy of All in the Dances for her young daughter, who had School of American Ballet stamped all over her. Sure enough, it turned out that she’ll be dancing in New York City Ballet’s Nutcracker this season, so I inscribed it to “Lisa, who carries the torch.”

Her mother smiled when I handed back the book. “She won’t understand it just yet,” she said, “but someday she will.” That’s a nice thought, isn’t it?

I was pleased to spot several friends in the audience, among them a critic, a biographer, three musicians, and fellow bloggers Sarah
and Beatrice. Their presence buoyed me up, seeing as how my steam was already running low by the time I crawled up to the dais. Needless to say, Wednesday promises to be at least as hectic–lunch with a MoMA curator, followed by Phil Woods and Bill Charlap at Birdland, to which Sarah is accompanying me–so I’d better head for bed right now.

Don’t expect any earth-shakingly brilliant postings tomorrow. I’m nowhere near my picture-perfect best (it actually took me two hours longer than usual to write my Friday drama column this morning), so I doubt I’ll be generating any more prose until Thursday, when I have to write a speech. For the moment, I’ll be more than happy just to get another good night’s sleep.

Oh, one more thing: now that you’ve all bought my book, don’t forget to buy Bob Gottlieb’s George Balanchine: The Ballet Maker, just out from HarperCollins. It’s good, too!

“One of the constant minor joys of reading Trollope is coming across descriptions of little gestures which reveal character in much the same way as a good actor does, either deliberately or half-consciously. There is an example early on in The Way We Live Now in his description of Father John Barham, a young, overenthusiastic, gentlemanly Catholic priest.

My new iTunes program contains a screen called “Top 25 Most Played” that tells me which songs I’ve listened to most frequently since I installed it. Here are the tracks at the top of the current chart:

– Erin McKeown, “A Better Wife”

– Frank Sinatra, “Witchcraft”

– George Strait, “I’ve Come to Expect It from You”

– Toto, “99”

– Marvin Gaye, “Got to Give It Up”

– Ahmad Jamal, “New Rhumba”

– Couperin, “The Mysterious Barricades” (played on guitar by G

In case you haven’t figured it out yet, I’m letting the blogmail pile up, in the hopes of finding buried treasure when I answer it all over the weekend (but mainly because I just don’t have enough steam in the boiler to open it right now).

As always, thanks for your patience. I really don’t like being sick, even when I’m getting better….

In the comments over at Mad Max Perkins’s excellent newish publishing-insider blog, commenter Marjorie offers this startling perspective:

By my reckoning, I read about two books a month. (It used to be more, but children have an odd way of needing a lot of attention.)

My financial adviser informs me that I must die when I am 87 because I will run out of money at that point. So, assuming she is right, at two books a month I will read only 520 books more in my lifetime. Do I want to waste one of those precious allotments on an award-winning book that I find neither enjoyable nor enlightening? I do not.

Screw the awards and their fallible human judges. I start with reviews and word-of-mouth. Then I go to the book jacket and read a page or two at the bookstore or on Amazon. Then I buy it and give it 50 pages. If I’m not laughing, crying, or learning something by page 50, out it goes, guilt-free. Life is too short to read a book that doesn’t give me something in return for my time, energy, and money.

520: astonishingly finite and sobering, that figure. I’m reminded of last year, when the Booker Prize went to a book I’d never heard of by a writer also unknown to me. On impulse, I ducked into a bookstore on my way home the day of the announcement and bought a cloth copy of D.B.C. Pierre’s Vernon God Little. I would never get beyond chapter 2. So at least I still had my time, save a few minutes. But had I held off and read a few of the reviews that soon followed, I would also still have that particular $20. Whoops.

My own expected number of books-yet-to-be-read is higher than 520. But that doesn’t make it any less stark, wherever it may fall. This is why I want to know if Critic X didn’t think a book was the best of the year as reputed, and why I don’t want critics to pull their punches. It doesn’t mean I implicitly trust any one critic’s judgment (well, maybe Wood’s, tried and true), but, like Marjorie, I do want as much varied input as possible, and I want critics to write with readers, not authors, in mind. The 2003 Booker showed me that awards committees can be every bit as fallible as critics; I hasten to add that the converse is also true. All we can ask of each is frank and searching judgment, and to please keep in mind the (shudder) 520.