For the first time, the New Yorker website contains comments by all of their contributors about the best books they read last year. It’s a great idea. I’ll be studying it for a long time. I was most immediately persuaded to read The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate by Jacqueline Kelly (recommended by Margaret Talbot) and The Gardner Heist by Ulrich Boser (recommended by Jeffrey Toobin). I’m interested in anything Lauren Collins has to say because she is a very talented writer. Her list was unusually long. Tad Friend misspelled the title of his own book.
Some of the writers didn’t write very well. Paul Muldoon, the poetry editor, used the royal we:
We’re very pleased to report that the title-poem first appeared here in The New Yorker.
It should be called “the pompous we“. He also wrote:
Among the poetry books that particularly recommended themselves this past year
Richard Brody wrote this:
The laser-like clarity and probity with which Lanzmann brings
I think he means “the laser-pointer-like clarity . . . “.
I highly recommend The Gardner Heist. Not sure what the New Yorker says, but half the fun is that it’s an open ended case. By the time you’re done reading, you’re convinced you can come up with a plausible theory for the whodunit. The answer seems so tantalizingly close.
The Guardian book section in the UK has done this kind of thing every year for years (I’ve seen it for at least 5). They ask famous writers (and other famous Brits) what they’ve read that they liked best in the past year. I suspect that the New Yorker borrowed this idea from them. It’s a good one, I agree with you.
Here’s the URL from the Guardian for this year: https://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/nov/22/books-of-the-year-2009
There’s mostly poets on the interview list this year, but I seem to remember more of an assortment of professions in past years.
Re the “royal we”–this is typical New Yorker style (which I have read for years)–a bit “twee” as the Brits like to say–i.e., the New Yorker’s “voice” has always been a bit self-amused going back to the days of Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker when they were staff writers.l
Seth, I’m not sure why you think “laser-like clarity” is wrong–it’s kind of a cliche in literary/film critical writing. But now I gotta go look at the list on their website–thanks for the heads up. Interesting about Tad Friend’s typo–might not be his fault–they have underlings at magazines, y’know, who do the actually drudgery. What is interesting is that the New Yorker (of old, when edited by William Shawn–for 30 or 40 years or so) was notorious for its fact checking and attention to meticulous detail. This is of course before the internet and blogs when the magazine was actually typeset. There’s a good book about the history of the New Yorker by the way, by Brendan Gill (can’t remember the title–My Days at the New Yorker or something like that).
To think I came to your blog to see if there was anything new about fermented food! This is the first time I’ve ever posted, but thanks for the Shangri-La Diet while I’m at it. I have very high LDL numbers. Has your high dose of flax oil ever disturbed your LDLs? Cause flax oil sure does help me sleep the few times I’ve tried–almost too deeply in fact…
“Laser-like clarity” is not only a cliche, it’s nonsense. Lasers are not especially clear.
I don’t know what the flax oil I drink has done to my LDLs, sorry.
Brendan Gill, Here at the New Yorker. That is the book on the history of the magazine that is recommended by Pat. And “laser-like” refers to the fineness of a laser; nothing else can be as pointed (so far as we know currently). Well, that is how I read the cliche.
I would like to read your recommendations for a reading list of authors who best represent what I call the New Yorker style.