| Welcome! It was the week when we learned more about Paramount Plus, which will replace CBS All Access, which replaced the vacuum tube or something. This included news that they're reviving, of all things, Frasier. (As my friend Glen Weldon would say: Finger on the pulse!) It was also the week when people actually managed to get mad about Mr. Potato Head. Let's get to it. |
Opening Argument: The Delights Of A Beautiful Sentence |
It can be really hard to choose a book to read. Note that I didn't say it's hard to find books to read, only to choose them. There are always a zillion books that you could potentially pick up, many of which have good reviews, many of which are by respected authors, many of which are being compared to other books that you've enjoyed. (Those "this book is like X crossed with Y!" or "great for readers of Z!" blurbs can be either very helpful or very, very misleading in my experience.)
One of the reasons things like the Book Concierge at NPR are so beloved is that sorting through all the books you might like is really difficult. There's not necessarily a book equivalent of a movie trailer that's as efficient at communicating the style and the whole and the direction of a thing. You can read excerpts, sometimes, and you can look at blurbs on covers, but it can be very hard for a single review to capture what a book really is, other than by writing the kind of long and incisive review that only a tiny fraction of books ever get. (Last week, I mentioned Parul Sehgal's review of Lauren Oyler's Fake Accounts, for instance.)
But it also occurred to me this week that it's hard for blurbs to capture whether books are ... fun and pleasurable to read, word by word. I thought about this while I was reading Chang-rae Lee's My Year Abroad, a tale of a college-aged kid who accompanies a somewhat mysterious businessman on an overseas journey. The story starts out with a narrator describing a life that's now relatively ordinary, although it's heavy with hints that he is about to unspool a wild adventure that got him to this place. Here, the narrator is describing an encounter with a guy who shows up in his neighborhood in an SUV asking questions. (The questions are ... part of the story, and not important at the moment.) He says: This guy was maybe late thirties at most but had a receding hairline and was rocking an overmanicured five-o'clock shadow plus oversized mirror-shade aviators and stippled black leather driving gloves and I almost asked him how long he'd been driving Formula 1, but instead recast myself as goat-faced and sleepy-eyed, as dim as the fescue I imagined myself chewing, and just stared at the dude like he was an endless plains vista, a portrait of beige. |
Now, that is a long sentence. This kind of long, multi-part, it-just-keeps-going sentence is typical of the book, and it's at least part of why people refer to Lee's prose as, say, "acrobatic on the level of the sentence." But it's hard, I think, to efficiently capture and describe that reading experience as opposed to a book's significance or thematic weight. By the end, my sense was that the story in My Year Abroad got a little too exaggerated in ways that didn't quite work, and maybe the book didn't need to be quite 500 pages long. But I never stopped enjoying those detail-rich sentences that tumble head-over-heels toward where you get to take a breath. Even in the parts where the story wasn't holding on to me, the style was.
And by the same token, I suspect there are people who read a sentence like that and realize this kind of book is not for them. Perhaps it's the kind of book that drives them mad, because their brains receive a sentence like that as over-written, in the same way mine receives it as extravagantly written. They, too, wouldn't necessarily get a full picture from perusing blurbs and descriptions, let alone clusters of stars in reviews.
When you try to capture a book in a couple of sentences, which is often the kind of description potential readers will see of the vast majority of books that don't get those in-depth reviews, it's hard not to try to make sure you capture the big picture, as far as what kind of book it is, what it's about, what it's saying. This can make choosing books feel like choosing classes, almost -- there's a sense of "what are you going to get from this book, in the end?" With My Year Abroad, that would tempt me to talk about how it is a story of identity and family, that it creates vivid portraits of several memorable characters, and so forth.
But regardless of the limitations of that kind of description, you know quite a lot about whether you should choose that book from reading that one sentence. |
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| Sometimes a really good profile of an actor just hits the spot. I greatly enjoyed Kate Aurthur's profile of Kaley Cuoco in Variety. (And of course, as I've said a few times already, if you haven't watched The Flight Attendant on HBO MAX, maybe give it a shot!)
Also a very good piece: Mara Wilson's reflections, partly in light of the current discourse about Britney Spears, on growing up as a little girl in the public eye.
With the Golden Globes coming up this weekend, I strongly recommend the reporting in the L.A. Times about the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. I beg of you: Think of the Globes as an oddity and an event and perhaps even a noteworthy scandale, but don't mistake them for an awards show that says much of anything about anything. |
Courtesy of Walt Disney/Storyline/Citadel/Kobal/Shutterstock |
On Monday, Glen and Bilal Qureshi talked about the HBO MAX series It's A Sin.
On Tuesday, Eric Deggans and I talked about some great nonfiction books of 2020.
On Wednesday, Aisha talked to NPR's own Danielle Kurtzleben about the film I Care A Lot, which they had many opinions about.
On Thursday, Aisha and Stephen and I were delighted to be joined by Britney Luse to chat about the Disney TV version of Cinderella starring Brandy and Whitney Houston, which is now available on Disney+.
And on Friday, Glen and I talked to Tobin Low and E. Alex Jung about the marvelous family drama Minari, which we all would recommend.
I wrote about the Netflix series Ginny & Georgia, which we'll be covering on the show, so if you buckle in for a wild ten episodes this weekend, you'll be all ready.
We'll be wrapping up the Golden Globes on Sunday night with our most skeptical goggles on, so if you choose to watch something else that evening, we'll make sure you don't miss anything important.
By the way: We're still taking your questions about King of the Hill for an upcoming episode we'll be doing, so please do send us a voice memo with your question to pchh@npr.org. |
| Every week on the show, we talk about some other things out in the world that have been giving us joy lately. Here they are: |
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