On Books

Writing about reading is not reading to write

"All Is Assuredly Well"  Professor Gore and Maestro Wilson
"All Is Assuredly Well" Professor Gore and Maestro Wilson

We never meant this column to be inclusive.

There are an awful lot of books out there I'm not going to review. Not necessarily because they're unworthy of consideration, but because I'm not going to read them. Because I don't want to. (And you can't make me.)

Even so, I feel for the writers and for the publicists who send out books and emails (and even occasionally old-fashioned press releases via snail mail) with the hope that someone like me will spend at least a few minutes considering writing about the book. The answer is almost always no, and there's nothing really fair about that.

I only write about what I read, and there's a lot of competition for attention. I'm not unaware of things like best-seller lists and reader interest, and though I make an effort to give small presses (and even self-published books) a chance, I'll admit I tend to trust some big publishing houses. If one of the authors I follow -- Margaret Atwood, Julian Barnes, Martin Amis, Haruki Murakami, Alice Munro, et al. -- issues a book, I'll probably be on that.

Once or twice a year I'm going to explore some pop phenomenon like Lee Child or John Grisham, who can be really good. I should probably write more about nonfiction in this space. Steven Brill's Tailspin (Knopf, $28.95) and John McCain and Mark Salter's The Restless Wave: Good Times, Just Causes, Great Fights, and Other Appreciations (Simon & Schuster, $30) are two worth considering.

I've written -- and reluctantly taken part in the business of promoting -- books, so while others might find something funny in the fact that a French publisher specializing in aviation books sent our newspaper at least 20 copies of Pilot Errors 5: The Rio-Paris Crash -- Full Cockpit Transcription by Jean-Pierre Otelli, "a demonstration pilot at airshows" who "has written many successful books on air safety," I'm sort of touched. I wonder if they sent a comparable number of review copies to every media outlet on whatever list they obtained.

And while Pilot Errors is one of those books I will never read, it's not a book I wouldn't skim. And skimming it is enough to let me know some people would probably find it compelling. I can't recommend it to a general audience, and it's probably not anything you'd want to carry on a commercial airliner, but as Leonard Cohen said, "That don't make it junk."

Somewhere out there, someone will have use of this book, even if they're only using it to research how things go wrong on flights. And the final moments before the crash, when a "synthetic voice" pronouncing the word "stall" 75 times is clinically horrific.

But on to books I have read, and can recommend, though not without caveats.

All Is Assuredly Well by M.C. "Professor" Gore and Phillip "Maestro" Wilson (Camille Lancaster Literary Children's Books, $14.99) is an odd but thoroughly charming and beautifully illustrated (by Angela M.F. Trotter) story of King Phillip the Good and his "elegant husband, The Most Excellent Don Carlos Emiliano Felipe de Compañero y Campañero," and their quest to "earn" a baby girl to love and raise as a princess. While I'm not sure the book will be a huge hit with children -- the vocabulary is a little advanced and the allegory about the struggles of adoption might be lost on them -- it's a sweet and intelligent project that could catch on with a certain audience. And that would be very nice.

Also, Little Rock writer Marvin (We Wanna Boogie: The Rockabilly Roots of Sonny Burgess and The Pacers) Schwartz's new book True Stories ($15) is a collection of essays that form an impressionistic memoir beginning with the author's recounting of his grandmother's passage to America in 1910 and his post-haircut visit to her in Florida in 1971; a sojourn in a Nebraska jail cell after a marijuana arrest during a cross-country hitchhiking trip in 1969; an adventure involving acid and a machete in 1975, an educational encounter with this newspaper's Paul Greenberg in 2004, and other episodes.

The centerpiece of the book, for my money at least, is Schwartz's "Confessions of Distance Swimmer," which perceptively analyzes the obsessive compulsion of high-level adult amateur athletes. (Schwartz is an eight-time national champion masters swimmer.) There's an earnest quality to Schwartz's prose that has survived professionalism, an equanamity pervading the straight-forward words that drive his freighted stories.

Had we a bit more space, we might mention a certain novel co-written by a local author, a former neighbor of mine as a matter of fact, with a little help from a friend who's published a few things. It's apparently about a president who's a cross between John McCain and Harrison Ford in Air Force One.

I'd really like to write about it, but we have to have some standards.

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Style on 06/17/2018

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