Read This: Jack Fish

So I’ve been dipping back into J Milligan’s Jack Fish, in anticipation of his appearance tonight at Coliseum Books, and it’s reminding me all over again why I like it so much. Sure, a lot of it has to do with its New York-specific, and for that matter outer-borough-specific, humor, but saying it’s “just a New York book” would be like saying The Brother From Another Planet is “just a New York movie.” And, yeah, I chose that example quite deliberately. Here’s the thing: I love science fiction that stays true to its central conceits, but doesn’t feel the constant need to take itself so damn seriously. So I dig the Pohl & Kornbluth collaborations, I dig Robert Sheckley and Frederic Brown, and now I’m digging J Milligan.

16 March 2006 | read this |

Read This: Peter Ackroyd’s Shakespeare

Because of my busy schedule these days, I end up reading a lot of books piecemeal—a few chapters one day, a few more a couple weeks later—and that’s how I’m getting through the latest biography by one of my favorite writers, Peter Ackroyd’s Shakespeare. I was lucky enough to get to hear Ackroyd speak a few months back, at a Sunday brunch lecture sponsored by the 92nd St. Y, where he discussed the challenges in writing yet another biography about someone who, it seems, has a book published about him every single day…but also about the challenges of biography itself. “In fiction,” Ackroyd observed, “you must always tell the truth, but in biography you’re allowed to make things up.” This was well before the whole James Frey thing, mind you; what Ackroyd was talking about was the way in which the genre relies equally upon imaginative reconstruction and scholarship to give a sense of a life. “What is the point of the historian or the biographer,” he wondered, “if we can’t use imagination as a source for inspiration?”

During the question period, I asked him if he felt any difference between writing the big biographies like Shakespeare and the recent series of “brief lives” he’s developed about subjects like Chaucer and J.M.W. Turner. “It doesn’t make any difference as far as I can tell,” he smiled. “The vision has to be approximately the same.” And it is, I have to confess, a vision I’m usually willing to follow in just about any direction.

4 March 2006 | read this |