Weekend Read: How Proust Can Change Your Life

This weekend, I’m re-reading a little book that I’ve found very enjoyable: How Proust Can Change Your Life, by Alain de Botton. De Botton is a Swiss writer who lives in the UK and writes in English; I consider him to be a “popular philosopher.” He has written books about philosophy, travel, business and work, our perceptions of status, and much more. In this 1997 books, de Botton examines the life and work of Marcel Proust, and shows us how reading this work can help us understand, as Proust said, that, “The real voyage of discovery consists, not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”

Proust is perhaps one of the most daunting of authors. He didn’t write separate novels, but one long work, A la Recherche du temps perdu, or, In Search of Lost Time. This work covers thousands of pages, and follows its protagonist (the “narrator”) from his childhood through his adult years as he discovers aristocratic society in France. With long sentences, florid descriptions, and acerbic characterization, Proust presents a portrait of a society that, behind the glossy surface, is wicked and deceitful. Yet in spite of the length of the work, In Search of Lost Time is funny, strange, and a delight to read. Proust’s style is verbose, but his writing is musical.

I first read Proust in 1982, when a revised edition of an earlier English translation was released. In three large, hardcover volumes, this book was quite heavy, and I read it on the subway and bus as I went to and from work in New York City. When I moved to France in 1984, the first book(s) I bought was a three-volume Pléiade edition of the work (now superseded by a later four-volume edition; the extra girth is made up of notes, sketches and variants). I’ve since read Proust twice in French, and once in audio. Every few years, I get an itching to read him again, and this often starts by reading a book like de Botton’s or a biography of the author’s life.

But even if you haven’t read Proust, or don’t plan too, this little book about Proust can delight you and give you some interesting lessons about life and literature. Proust can change your life, if you take the time. Read this book to find out how.

Two notes:

1. Interestingly, this book tends to get filed in the “self held” or “self development” category, in addition to being put on the “literature” shelves. I guess it is, in some ways, a guide to living, but, then again, isn’t all great literature?

2. I’m a fan of audiobooks, and I was tempted to buy this in audio to listen to when walking. But seeing it at $20 (on the iTunes Store) quickly dissuaded me. Paying twice as much for an audiobook is ludicrous, especially as I know how much audiobooks cost to produce. It’s a shame, because a book like this at $10 would probably sell a lot better.

Books I Want: Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson

I’ve got lots of books; probably too many. But there are some books that I’d like to own, bu I simply cannot afford. My tastes are varied: from Stephen King to Henry David Thoreau, by way of Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Robert B. Parker, Peter Robinson, Robertson Davies, William Shakespeare, and much more.

But one of my favorite authors is Ralph Waldo Emerson. He was one of America’s finest thinkers, and reading his essays, lectures and journals is one of my favorite pleasures. I have a couple of editions of the journals: the recent two-volume Library of America selection; a 1909 ten-volume edition, which is a different selection from what, at the time, was a relatively un-scholarly edition, and a few paperback books that offer selections from the journals, both from early editions and from the 16-volume Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson published by Harvard University Press.

This scholarly edition, published between 1960 and 1982, is the ultimate edition of Emerson journals. It is a true scholarly edition, with all changes, corrections, deletions and other details noted carefully. (You can see an example on Google Books.) They contain much more than just the journals themselves, but also contain the “Miscellaneous Notebooks,” which include drafts of Emerson’s lectures and essays.

In any case, I’m not planning to buy them soon, but found a complete set online from a German bookseller at a price well below list. Tempting, but it’s still way above my budget for now. But this is a series I’d like to get, and I may try looking for used copies of the individual volumes online.

Update: I have since purchased this set, at great expense, and I have been delighting in reading Emerson’s “raw” thoughts now for several months. You can see some of my favorite excerpts on my Emerson website Reading Ralph Waldo Emerson.

For those who want a taste of Emerson’s journals or other works, particularly in much more affordable editions, see my Emerson bibliography.

Book Review: The Quotable Thoreau

The Quotable Thoreau
Collected and edited by Jeffrey S. Cramer
552 pages. Princeton University Press, 2011. $20

Buy from Amazon.com | Amazon UK | Amazon FR

Jeffrey Cramer, notable Thoreau scholar and head of the Thoreau Institute, has been publishing some wonderful books for fans of Henry’s writing in recent years. In 2004 he published Walden – A Fully Annotated Edition, in 2007, I to Myself: An Annotated Selection from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau, and in 2009, The Maine Woods: A Fully Annotated Edition. All of these books take Thoreau’s texts and add annotations and explanations to help the reader better understand the little details.

Cramer’s latest Thoreau collection is The Quotable Thoreau, described as containing “more than 2,000 memorable passages from this iconoclastic American author, social reformer, environmentalist, and self-reliant thinker.” This small hardcover book – roughly the size of a DVD case, or more correctly, a season of Lost – contains a wealth of selections from Thoreau’s varied works. Divided into sections on different topics, such as Beauty, Conservation, Day and Night, Simplicity, Society, and Solitude, each excerpt is from a few words to a few sentences, and contains an attribution specifying which text it is taken from.

Fans of Thoreau will find this an excellent book to keep by their bedsides, to flip through and read nuggets of Thoreauvian wisdom as they please. Those who have never read Thoreau will find a book containing the heart of Henry’s works, in small, easily digestible pieces. (Hopefully, after sampling the appetizers in this book, they’ll go on to the main course of Henry’s full works.)

While any such florilegium of an author’s work is, by necessity, a series of bits and pieces taken out of context, one thing this book does is offer a broader spectrum of Thoreau’s works, and shows how much his writing was all part and parcel of the same set of ideas.

If you’re curious about Thoreau’s writing, this is the ideal book to get to whet your appetite for his larger works, such as Walden. If you’re already a Thoreauvian, you’ll certainly enjoy flipping through this book and finding so many of those sentences and paragraphs that you’ve enjoyed as you’ve read through Henry’s books.

My Latest Book: Take Control of Scrivener 2

Have you ever used Scrivener, the word processor for creative writers? If you have, you’ll want to check out my latest book, Take Control of Scrivener 2.

In this ebook, you’ll take a creative voyage with Scrivener 2, a unique and popular content-generation tool. Scrivener supports wordsmiths of all types, and it’s designed especially for long-form writing projects—scripts, novels, academic works, and more.

Using Melville’s Moby-Dick as his exemplar, author Kirk McElhearn walks you through using Scrivener to create and manage a writing project. You’ll learn how to use Scrivener’s Binder, Outliner, and Corkboard to develop characters and settings, collect and organize research materials, and arrange your scenes. Kirk even explains how to keep yourself on track by composing in Scrivener’s Full Screen mode and by setting daily progress targets, all on the way to helping you produce a polished, submission-ready manuscript.

Learn more about the book on the Take Control Books website. Download the book in any of a number of ebook formats – PDF, ePub, Mobi, etc. – and order printed copies if you want. The ebook is available for only $10. You can also buy this in Kindle format from Amazon.com.

Hear me discuss Scrivener on the MacVoices podcast.
Read a review on the MacTips website.

This Week’s (or Month’s) Read: Herman Melville, by Hershel Parker

I have a certain fondness for 19th century American authors: Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Poe, and Herman Melville. A couple of years ago, I did a marathon reading of Melville’s fiction, along with a brief biography of him. At the time, I said, “The two-volume biography by Hershel Parker seemed a bit much at this stage.” But literary biographies are one of my favorite sub-genres, so I’m finally getting around to reading Parker’s massive work on Melville’s life.

Volume 1 is a bit over 900 pages (880 pages of text, the rest of indexes and bibliography), and I’ve started reading it now. (I’m surprised to find that there are no detailed notes, as I would expect in such a work; a glance at volume 2 on Google Books shows that there are only a few dozen pages of notes.) The second volume is more than 1,000 pages. So this is a big work, but Parker is recognized as the leading Melville scholar in the world, and I’m looking forward to the time it takes to read these books.

I’m sure that not many of the readers of my blog are interested in such works, but if you are, feel free to add a comment. What literary biographies have you read that you’ve liked?

Take Control Books 50% Off Sale

To celebrate its 7th year, Take Control books is running a 50% off sale on all its books, including my recent Take Control of iTunes 10: The FAQ.

Take this opportunity to stock up on the many great books that Take Control has published. Get some for yourself, or for friends or relatives for Christmas. Make sure to use this link to take advantage of this great offer.

Robert B. Parker’s Spenser Novels

Since he died in January of this year, I’ve been reading all of Robert B. Parker’s Spenser novels. I had read about half of them oven the past few years, but I started from the beginning, and have been buying all the ones I hadn’t gotten to. If you’re not familiar with this mystery series, it features Spenser (no first name), a tough private eye in Boston, along with his co-characters, ranging from his heartthrob, Susan Silverman, a shrink, to Hawk, the tall, tough, black enforcer who helps him out.

Parker was a wizard of wit, providing some of the finest dialog in contemporary mystery fiction, and some of the oddest situations. His books aren’t wacky like Carl Hiaasen’s, but they feature a combination of typical and atypical cases where Spenser investigates, sometimes even when he has been fired by his clients. He’s a chivalric type, a lug of a guy, but with honor. And many of the other characters in the stories have that same kind of old-fashioned honor that make these books different from the typical serial-killer mysteries and police procedurals.

Parker was a master wordsmith, and his books have exactly as many words as they need, but no more. They’re not very long – I can read one in a longish evening – but they are a great pleasure to read.

So if you want to discover one of the classic tough-guy mystery series, which is witty and creative, check out some of the Spenser novels.

Book Review: Excelsior, You Fathead! The Art and Enigma of Jean Shepherd

Excelsior, You Fathead! The Art and Enigma of Jean Shepherd
Eugene B. Bergmann
495 pages. Applause, 2004, $28.

Buy from Amazon.com | Amazon UK | Amazon FR

When I was around 10 or 12 years old – back in the late 60s and early 70s – I discovered Jean Shepherd’s nightly radio show on WOR AM in New York. Every evening at 10:15, Shep would come on the air, following his theme music (Strauss’ Bahn Frei), and talk for 45 minutes. He would just talk – there was no script, though people who knew him have suggested that he spent hours preparing for his shows – seemingly improvising, riffing on current events, his pet peeves, and telling stories. When listening to Shep, it always sounded like he was talking to me; like there was no one else listening to the radio. It was the stories that got me hooked, especially those about him growing up in Hammond, Indiana, a small town near Chicago. Shep talked about his time in the Army, and about the events of his childhood, which occurred between the age of about 7 and 17, events that happened to him and a few of his friends, such as Flick and Schwartz.

Shep and his friends were average kids, with the usual preoccupations of kids that age – my age – and the stories were bittersweet memories of their growing up in the Depression. Some of them were funny, others poignant, but Shep brought to these oft simple stories the true art of the storyteller. He always managed to make them last up until the final theme music, weaving threads and events until his time was up. I would be held in a spell for those 45 minutes, just before I went to sleep, as I entered his world.

I was a real Jean Shepherd fan back then. Not only did I buy his books (two books of stories, In God We Trust – All Others Pay Cash, and Wanda Hickey’s Night of Golden Memories and Other Great Disasters), his records (LPs of him reading from the books, or more scripted versions of the stories), and I even took up the instruments that he played on the show: the kazoo and the Jew’s harp.

Shep contributed greatly to my worldview, teaching me the power of stories and how the true storyteller could take control of the listeners’ minds, but also through the seemingly simple profundity of some of his observations.

Over the years, I had forgotten about Jean Shepherd – his stories were still someplace in that mushroom soup of memories that dated back to those pre-teen years, but they didn’t surface often. But recently, thanks to the Internet and a group of fanatics, I’ve been able to rediscover the joys of listening to this great artist.

And now (to finally get to the meat of this review), a new book examines Jean Shepherd, his art, his legacy, and his philosophy: Excelsior, You Fathead! The Art and Enigma of Jean Shepherd, by Eugene Bergmann. This book, written by a true Shep fan and fanatic, is a compendium of thoughts about Jean Shepherd, his work, his life, and, as the title suggests, his enigma.

Because Shep was an enigma. Having created his own radio genre, he eventually got tired of all the advertising that the radio stations tried to squeeze into his show and left, gave up, walked away from more than two decades of radio. He was a trendsetter – and, in a way, a minor cultural icon in the early days – but he hated trends, and hated following them even more. He was a unique friendly voice, but could be, at times, arrogant and opinionated.

Bergmann’s book is not a biography; instead, it is a collection of chapters that examine different periods of Shep’s life and work. There is no attempt to rationalize the complex relationships he had with his family, nor his personal life, beyond some basic anecdotes. However, this book, with its many excerpts from Shep’s radio shows, gives the best overview of what Shep was like, and what his shows were about. While the book is a bit disjointed, so was its subject.

If you’re familiar with Jean Shepherd, you’ll know why you should buy this book; if not, you may want to buy it to discover one of America’s most unique comic voices (though comic is by far too simplistic a word to describe Shep). And if you want to hear him at work, some 1,500 shows are available for download at the Jean Shepherd Archive, or, to hear a few random shows, check out the Jean Shepherd Podcast, or check out the Brass Figlagee podcast on iTunes.