Mary Ann Gwinn's Lit Life article in the Seattle Times looks at a local connection to the Google Books Project:

Peter Leonard is a doctoral student in Scandinavian studies at the University of Washington. He's bookish but is equally at home in the computer world (he has been the Webmaster at the UW's Simpson Center for the Humanities). He and a partner, UCLA professor Tim Tangherlini, have just received $45,000 from Google to create tools for large-scale literary analysis through Google Books, part of nearly $1 million Google has committed to support digital humanities research over the next two years.

At Boston.com, Joseph Peschel reviews Finny, by Justin Kramon:

In the unfolding of Finny’s life, Kramon shares with Dickens a primarily optimistic outlook: His major characters, especially Finny and Earl, mostly get what they deserve. “Finny’’ is lighter social commentary than “Copperfield,’’ but more relevant to the way we live today, the way we face death, disloyalty, and hardship. He’s not quite in Dickens’s league — who is? — but Kramon is a talented young author and “Finny’’ a worthy read, and a dickens of a first novel.

In the Washington Post, Ron Charles on Ayelet Waldman's Red Hook Road:

Waldman's sharp eye for social detail makes her particularly good with the loneliness and awkwardness of modern grief. The abandonment of all those fussy Victorian customs along with the loss of any common religious vocabulary leave her characters wandering in a boundless but unacknowledged cloud of sadness, resenting neighbors' nervous platitudes ("The Lord don't give us more than we can bear") and empty, earnest questions ("How are you doing?").

Donna Rifkind looks at The Late Mrs. Dorothy Parker, by Leslie Frewin, in The New Criterion:

In the end, Frewin’s biography, like Dorothy Parker herself, must be regarded as a victim of its own high-spirited irresponsibility and disappointed good intentions. Readers hoping for a substantial, finely tuned study of a complex writer, of which a book such as Elizabeth Frank’s recent Louise Bogan is representative, will have longer to wait. Frewin states at the end of his book that “Mrs. Parker . . . had spent her life searching for Dorothy Parker. She never found her.” Neither, unfortunately, has Leslie Frewin.

David Means's short-story collection The Spot is reviewed in the Los Angeles Times by David Ulin:

What can we know, Means is asking, except that, whether because of childhood illness or an act so thoughtless as to be unintended, loss is our inevitable due? Seen in those terms, there is no larger meaning, no orderly progression, no pattern by which the past leads into the present, which is why his writing holds time in such loose regard.

In the Book Bag column of the Howard County Times, Rebecca Oppenheimer on thrillers:

In his latest novel about a man just out of prison, following "Small Crimes" and "Pariah," Dave Zeltserman displays a genius for capturing the brute facts of survival "on the outside." Leonard is disarmingly sympathetic, which makes the novel's surprise conclusion even more disturbing.

Bethanne Patrick is a freelance critic and blogger.

Critical Mass has been querying writers all summer to see what they're reading. Here's what 2008 Criticism finalist Richard Brody had to say:

An unusual run of work has cut into my pleasure reading, which, lately, I find myself doing mainly on the subway or in the “third place” of a café. This makes portability a priority, which is why my summer-reading plans involve a big, fat, heavy book that I’ve been impatient to read since it landed in my eager hands: The Genius, the hitherto-unpublished original 1911 version of Theodore Dreiser’s The “Genius”. I’ve always been troubled by the quotation marks with which Dreiser ultimately burdened his quasi-autobiographical protagonist, as if he considered his subject to be society’s view of the artist rather than the inspired artist himself. (Of course, the censorship that the book faced proved him, at least to some extent, to have been right.) At home, I’ve started to read the original, more inward portrait of the artist; it’s more sprawling and contradictory than the later version, as if the material of his life were poured onto the page with less shaping and more immediacy. Dreiser was, indeed, a genius both of immediate experience and of collective power, and I’m curious to see how the battle between them tilted in these earlier rounds. But the lovely and treasured volume (of which the University of Illinois Press should be proud) is big and heavy, far too bulky to schlep around the city except as a particularly self-punishing form of exercise. That’s why, if our family vacation comes off as planned, I intend to spend a good part of it on a chaise longue, in a rocker, or at a kitchen table, exulting vicariously in the strivings of a crude, blundering, yet determined and visionary young man—in a similarly harsh yet energetic era—in pursuit of art, money, and love.

Richard Brody was a finalist for the 2008 NBCC Award for Criticism for Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard. He worked in various capacities in the film business (including documentary researcher, writer, and producer) and in advertising before writing and directing Liability Crisis, an independent feature film released in 1995. He began writing book reviews for The Forward in 1996 and started writing about cinema for The New Yorker in 1999. For the last five years he has been the magazine’s movie-listings editor; he also writes film reviews, a column about DVDs, and a blog about movies, The Front Row. (Photo: Alex Remnick.)

Join us for an NBCC Reads Conversation on Books about Conjugal Love at Book Passage in Corte Madera, August 4, 7 pm, with NBCC President, Jane Ciabattari, Balakian winner Molly Giles, NBCC members Meredith Maran and Greg Sarris. Included in the discussion will be Annie Dillard's THE MAYTREES, Jane Smiley's A PRIVATE LIFE, and Evan Connell's MR. BRIDGE and MRS. BRIDGE.

Book Passage
51 Tamal Vista Boulevard
Corte Madera, CA 94925-1145
(415) 927-0960
 

How do you decide what to read next? Where are the reviewers you trust and pay attention to? The landscape changes daily. Do you read about books: online?
In print? In daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly publications? On the radio? On podcasts? Video? Word of mouth (if so, whose word?)

NBCC member Sharon Oard Warner, founder and director of the Taos Writers Conference in New Mexico, introduces Jane Ciabattari, president of the National Book Critics Circle, who discusses the constantly morphing state of book reviewing today.

Credit: Ann Huston
http://www.decoloresgallery.com/

Adam Kirsch in Tablet on The Rebbe: The Life and Afterlife of Menachem Mendel Schneerson and Open Secret: Postmessianic Messianism and the Mystical Revision of Menahem Mendel Schneerson:

Faith, it has been said, is the evidence of things not seen. By that definition, to believe in Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the seventh Lubavitcher Rebbe, requires no faith at all: It is far easier to see him today, anywhere in the world, than it was when he was actually alive…On YouTube, Chabad.org, and many other sites, you can hear the Rebbe talk about Torah and world events, watch him distribute dollar bills to guests (a practice that became his trademark), and witness some of his frequent visits to the grave of his predecessor, Yosef Yitzhak, the sixth Rebbe—the tomb, or tsiyen, where Schneerson himself now rests, in Queens, not far from JFK airport.

On NPR, Marueen Corrigan reviews Pearl Buck in China:

As Spurling deftly illustrates, that alienation gave Buck her stance as a writer, gracing her with the outsider vision needed to interpret one world to another. Buck's unconventional childhood also seems to have made her resistant to group think: In midlife, as a famous novelist, she made enemies criticizing the racism of the mission movement; she also shocked contemporaries by writing in her memoir, The Child Who Never Grew, about her brain-damaged daughter Carol, at a time when such children were quietly institutionalized and publicly forgotten.

In The Oregonian, David Beispiel talks Wordsworth:

Wordsworth's best writing values the second two lines' spontaneity and feel for common life. He emphasizes a correspondence between nature and the inner life -- with the self and the imagination supreme. This, alone, is his greatest argument against Pope's poetry of Augustan authority. For Wordsworth, poetry is not an argument -- as it was for Pope and George Herbert and Anne Bradstreet. Instead, poetry is a mood, an emotion and a way of feeling that distills experience. Wordsworth's definition of poetry, in fact, has come to dominate the thinking and the making of poetry in English for two centuries.

Colette Bancroft covers John Brandon's Citrus Country for the St. Petersburg Times:

Citrus County explores the consequences of that act on its characters' lives in ways that both surprise and ring true. Brandon draws his characters so deftly that we can be horrified and intrigued by them at once, and his plot just as deftly avoids cliches.

In Slate, Wendy Smith writes on Allegra Goodman's The Cookbook Collector:

Allegra Goodman has rediscovered her sense of humor. Not that her new novellacks seriousness: With a plot propelled by the dotcom bubble and a principal character in the wrong place on 9/11, it tackles big, contemporary topics. But “The Cookbook Collector” takes a welcome step back from the dark brilliance of its predecessor,“Intuition.”A grim tale of possible fraud at a cancer research lab, that novel displayed all of Goodman's searching moral intelligence and virtually none of the wit or amused savoring of human folly found in such previous works as “Paradise Park” and “The Family Markowitz”. In her new novel, she works on a larger social canvas than ever before, armed with an awareness that to comprehend all the scheming and the sorrow, wit is indispensable.

Anis Shivani interviews Breathless in Bombay author Murzban Shroff:

In Shroff's stories, Mumbai is a city of corruption and caste division, just as much as it is a city of emerging meritocracy and class breakdown. Shroff's writing has little in common with the standard American short story's constriction, narcissism, and exhibitionism; the influence of Chekhov and other Russians clearly comes through in an expansive, restful melancholy, a metaphysic that is simultaneously hot and cool.

Michael O'Donnell covers two new books about l'affaire Dreyfus for The Washington Monthly:

If European fascism were a ladder, the Dreyfus affair would have its own rung. Situated between the Russian pogroms of the 1880s and the first echoes of the goose step, it ushered in the bloody new century with the cry of “Death to the Jews” and the smashing of store windows. Writing in 1951, Hannah Arendt marveled that “[n]either the first nor the second World War has been able to bury the [Dreyfus] affair in oblivion,” and observed, “Down to our times, the term anti-Dreyfusard can still serve as a recognized name for all that is anti-republican, antidemocratic, and anti-Semitic.”

In The San Francisco Chronicle, Rayyan al-Shawaf reviews Megan Stack's Every Man in This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War:

So moving are these stories, so passionately related by a traumatized journalist - Stack recently requested another posting, and is now the Los Angeles Times' Moscow bureau chief - that one might momentarily forget the distressing lack of originality in the author's conclusions.

Steven G. Kellman in the B&N Review about A Thousand Peaceful Cities, by Jerzy Pilch:

Pilch’s antic sensibility confirms that he is the compatriot of Witold Gombrowicz, the Polish maestro of absurdist pranks. But readers with a taste for the fermented Irish blarney of Flann O’Brien, Samuel Beckett, and John Kennedy Toole might also savor Pilch.

At Shelf Awareness, Harvey Freedenberg reviews Anthony Doerr's Memory Wall: Stories:

In its breadth and depth, Anthony Doerr's second collection--two novellas and four short stories--extends the impressive range displayed in his 2003 debut, The Shell Collector. Traversing settings from South Africa to Wyoming to Lithuania to suburban Cleveland, and time from the Holocaust to a near-term dystopian future, Doerr probes the subject of memory in evocative prose that enhances the richness of these consistently moving tales.

Bethanne Patrick is a freelance critic and blogger.

NBCC member Barbara Fister responds to the third question in our "Next Decade in Book Culture" series:

My answer to this question is a bit odd. My genre is crime fiction, and I read (and review) a lot of it. But within a genre that, to outsiders, seems formulaic—people get murdered, killers get caught—there is a huge variety, and for any one reader, it’s a challenge to discover the gems.

Once upon a time I would scribble lists of books to try based on reviews by Marilyn Stasio, who reviews a handful of mysteries for the New York Times Book Review every other week, but I quickly learned she’s either more catholic in her tastes or less picky; while her brief reviews were helpful, the books she approved of hit the spot less than half the time.

There are lots of mysteries published every year, and when Publishers Weekly and Library Journal cross my desk in the library where I work, I see whole constellations of stars, but those stars don’t align with my tastes. That perfect mix of vivid setting, excellent prose, and realistic characters who (as Chandler said) commit murder for a reason, is a tall order. And though the “big books” of the season get reviewed--over and over again--in newspapers and magazines, it’s harder to find serious reviews of crime fiction that are more than plot synopses in most mainstream media.

I found my fix in a reading group. Not your typical reading group, but one that has over a thousand members worldwide and lives on the Internet. It’s devoted to discovering and discussion mysteries, and it’s appropriately named “4MA” --for mystery addicts. One of its best qualities is that it’s a promotion-free zone. Authors may join, but they aren’t allowed to talk about their writing, and those who join to cross-promote friends’ books get the cold shoulder. Members vote on two books to read together every month, with a volunteer discussion leader, and at the end of the month people sum up what they’ve been reading and what they thought of it. These lists are a goldmine.

People tend to find their “reading twins” --readers who share similar tastes--and build their list of books to read based on their reviews. Social networking sites like LibraryThing and GoodReads fill a similar niche, but they are not as effective as 4MA at emptying one’s bank account and stuffing one’s shelves. At 4MA readers know the genre and read far beyond the bestseller list. They can explain what made a book work for them, and how it compares to other mysteries. I’ve also found myself moved by the place of reading in people’s lives. One member from Argentina told of her widowed grandmother emigrating years ago from Spain with two small children and a trunk full of books; another wrote that both her mother and grandmother read in secret because it was considered self-indulgent when there was work to be done.

I follow a number of blogs that review mysteries, and websites such as EuroCrime, Stop, You’re Killing Me, and Reviewing the Evidence are essential sources for mystery addicts. (Full disclosure: I contribute to Reviewing the Evidence.) But the word-of-mouth magic that publishers would kill for is alive and well at 4MA, where sharing reading experiences is an everyday practice.

A book critic has so little time to devote to so many books that he can start to feel perpetually, hopelessly behind, like a college student staring despondently at a huge pile of required reading days before finals and knowing deep down inside that this semester is simply not going to end well. One always, always has to keep moving, with the result that the reason one got into the business in the first place—a love of books—can become a casualty, because the simple fact is that not many books—even good books—are masterpieces. And with so much to read, anything that isn’t a masterpiece can start to look dreary and obligatory.

But when they are!

Friends tell me that Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, Freedom, is the most stolen galley of the year, that it disappears off of cubicles in newspapers and publishing houses throughout the land, that they are kept under lock and key at FSG—and boy can I see why. I read The Corrections years ago, when it came out, and I recalled the sensation of delight that that book gave me when reading this one. It’s so good that other novelists will find it in equal measure inspiring and intimidating. It’s so funny, so brilliant, and so good that the critic has to abandon his usual posture: there’s not even that much you can say about it—all you can do is gape in open-mouthed admiration. 

So this summer, I’m going to go back and read Franzen’s first two novels, Strong Motion and The Twenty-Seventh City. I know I’ll be just as sorry to put them down as I was when I turned the last page of The Corrections and Freedom—the kind of books that remind you what it was about books that made you decide against law school and embark on this uncertain profession of reading and writing.

Benjamin Moser was a finalist for the 2009 NBCC Award for Biography for Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector. He is the New Books columnist for Harper’s Magazine and a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books. His work has appeared in many publications in the United States and abroad, including Condé Nast Traveler, Newsweek, and The American Scholar. He worked at Foreign Affairs magazine and Alfred A. Knopf in New York before becoming an editor at the Harvill Press in London. He was born in Houston and currently lives in the Netherlands. (Photograph: Tessa Posthuma de Boer)