Read This: Recent Character Approved Selections

I realized it had been a while since I mentioned any of the books I’ve been reading for my regular column with the USA Network’s Character Approved blog—like the centennial editions of Edgar Rice Burroughs that the Library of America put out. It’s been something close to 30 years since the last time I’d looked at A Princess of Mars and Tarzan of the Apes, but those stories sucked me right back in, and the new introductions are pretty interesting—Junot Diaz on the Martian stories especially, but you’ll still want to give Thomas Mallon on Tarzan a look.

I also really liked Mary Robinette Kowal’s Glamour in Glass, which I totally expected—after all, I’d enjoyed Shades of Milk and Honey when it came out in 2010, and this was a straight-up sequel. Kowal found a great solution to the problem of what to say about your romance characters once you’ve hit the Happily Ever After; as I noted, Glamour in Glass is “a charming fantasy, a delightful comedy of manners, and a gripping suspense story, expertly blended into one novel.”

Ellen Ullman’s By Blood is on my shortlist for the best fiction of 2012, an exquisitely claustrophobic story about a man who listens in on the therapy sessions being conducted in an adjacent office, then conceives of a mad plan to help the patient discover her birth parents, which just opens up the trauma further. Considering how much of the story comes secondhand, and how little we actually see most of the major characters, it’s a testament to Ullman’s skills that the suspense levels keep getting higher and higher.

On the nonfiction side of things, I was excited about Jonah Lehrer’s Imagine, so much so that I also lined up a Shelf Awareness interview with Lehrer. I’m a big fan of books about creativity, and Lehrer’s blend of anecdotal evidence and explanations drawn from neuroscience research was lively and inspiring—not so much in spurring specific projects, but in terms of maintaining a working environment that will promote creative tendencies.

Then there’s Kevin Young’s The Grey Album, one of the best works of cultural criticism I’ve come across in a long, long time. “[Bringing] dynamic expression to academic rigor,” I wrote, “he picks out the connecting threads of an American tradition that’s always existed, if only we’d known where to look for it.” I’d rank his exploration of “the blackness of blackness,” which covers American culture from the slave poets of the colonial era right up to the Wu-Tang Clan, with books like Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces in terms of its brilliance, and I hope this isn’t the last time Young takes on the essay.

This isn’t all I’ve been reading for the column—if you get a chance, take a look at the archives, where you’ll find plenty of other books I think stand a good chance of capturing your attention and holding on to it. I also hope the column will give you an idea of the diversity of voices contributing to America’s literary culture—a goal I’ve been working on with a little extra diligence over the last few months.

18 May 2012 | read this |