« Father/Son Relationships | Main | EVENT - VERMIN ON THE MOUNT »

November 30, 2006

On Lit Blogging And The Maudster

I was looking around for things to "lit-blog" about. I found myself over at Maud Newton's and that's pretty much where I stayed for the last 45 minutes. She's feeling down about New York, which can happen. But the interesting thing about Maud is just how well, and fairly, she writes about books. It's really  amazing. I've enjoyed many other lit-blogs but frankly, and I'll offend some people here, Maud Newton is just better than everybody else. Her writing is succinct and precise and her reading of the books she's commenting on is measured and insightful.

There is a lot of value in the other blogs, and there are also blogs that have no value whatsoever. But Maud really shouldn't have to do anything other than write her blog. When you do something that well it shouldn't just be a hobby. I'm sure she's already been approached by newspapers and has turned them down for her own reasons. The point I'm making is that Maud has elevated lit-blogging to an art and I (and many others) appreciate it. The only comparison that makes sense to me is Josh Marshall over at Talking Points Memo, the only political blog I'm going to miss in my month offline.

Maud, you're the Josh Marshall of book writing, which is as much a compliment as I know how to give.

Posted at 02:52 PM |

| | Pin It! | |

Comments

The comments to this entry are closed.

TEV DEFINED


  • The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

SECOND LOOK

  • The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

    Bs

    Penelope Fitzgerald's second novel is the tale of Florence Green, a widow who seeks, in the late 1950s, to bring a bookstore to an isolated British town, encountering all manner of obstacles, including incompetent builders, vindictive gentry, small minded bankers, an irritable poltergeist, but, above all, a town that might not, in fact, want a bookshop. Fitzgerald's prose is spare but evocative – there's no wasted effort and her work reminds one of Hemingway's dictum that every word should fight for its right to be on the page. Florence is an engaging creation, stubbornly committed to her plan even as uncertainty regarding the wisdom of the enterprise gnaws at her. But The Bookshop concerns itself, finally, with the astonishing vindictiveness of which provincials are capable, and, as so much English fiction must, it grapples with the inevitabilities of class. It's a dense marvel at 123 pages, a book you won't want to – or be able to – rush through.
  • The Rider by Tim Krabbe

    Rider_4

    Tim Krabbé's superb 1978 memoir-cum-novel is the single best book we've read about cycling, a book that will come closer to bringing you inside a grueling road race than anything else out there. A kilometer-by-kilometer look at just what is required to endure some of the most grueling terrain in the world, Krabbé explains the tactics, the choices and – above all – the grinding, endless, excruciating pain that every cyclist faces and makes it heart-pounding rather than expository or tedious. No writer has better captured both the agony and the determination to ride through the agony. He's an elegant stylist (ably served by Sam Garrett's fine translation) and The Rider manages to be that rarest hybrid – an authentic, accurate book about cycling that's a pleasure to read. "Non-racers," he writes. "The emptiness of those lives shocks me."

Categories

Subscribe to this blog's feed