The Boy Who Would Be Shakespeare - Doug Stewart

During his career as a London playwright, in fact, Shakespeare appeared not to care greatly whether his plays were printed and sold for popular consumption. The publication of plays was almost an afterthought. At a time when most people in England were barely literate, live performances were what mattered.
Nearly half of Shakespeare's plays never appeared in print until the First Folio was published in 1623, seven years after his death. The theater friends who compiled the texts sometimes had to scrounge for old prompt books--copies of play scripts made by a theater's scribe--and then piece scenes together. In many cases, passages could be reconstructed only by tracking down actors who had played a part years before and asking them to recite their lines from memory. Printers both before and after the playwright's death used their own judgement in intrepreting the handwritten pages they had to work from, giving rise to multiple versions of the plays.

This is a very enjoyable read and for lovers of Shakespeare, a must read. It tells the true story of a boy who creates a huge scandal in the 1790s with his forged documents. The book has several layers to it, including the relationship of the boy and his father and the public attitude of Shakespeare. This is not a typical forgery where money is the object. And while many forgeries are designed to appeal to art or antique experts, these forgeries were designed to fool the public. It it amazing how successful this became and the outcome. Along with the great story, the author does a very nice job of including details about Shakespeare and his times.

Human Smoke - Nicholson Baker

Stefan Zweig, a young writer from Vienna, sat in an audience at a movie theater in Tours, France, watching a newsreel. It was spring 1914.

An image of Wilhelm II, the Emperor of Germany, came on screen for a moment. At once the theater was in an uproar. "Everybody yelled and whistled, men, women, and children, as if they had been personally insulted," Zweig wrote. "The good-natured people of Tours, who knew no more about the world and politics than what they had read in their newspapers, had gone mad for an instant."

Zweig was frightened. "It had only been a second, but one that showed me how easily people anywhere could be aroused in a time of a crisis, despite all attempts at understanding."

This is one of the most moving books I have ever read. Subtitled, "The beginnings of World War, the End of Civilization", reading this will change how you feel about war and your fellow humans. Nicolson gathered small excerpts from news stories and public documents and piece them togther is a most compelling arrangement. The short exerpts tell a history of the build-up to WW II in a most fascinating way. The book reads like a novel even though it is entirely composed from other documents.

I don't have a strong interest in the history of wars, but this book shows the human story that took civilization from WW I to a more devastating war. Interspersed in the news excerpts are pacifists who tried to stop the massive annihilation. I cannot stop thinking about this book that has caused me to deeply examine the attitudes in myself and others that lead to wars. I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

Posthumous Papers of a Living Author - Robert Musil

Why posthumous papers? Why of a living author?

There are poetic estates that also happen to be great gifts; but as a rule, literary legacies bear a suspicious resemblance to everything-must-go clearance sales and cheap bargains. The popularity that such works nonetheless enjoys may indeed derive from the fact that the reading public has a forgivable weakness for poet who for the last time lays claim to their attention. However the case may be, and whatever questions may arise as to whether such a legacy may be truly worthwhile or merely of some worth, might lead one to suppose--I at any rate have decided to forestall publication of my own last literacy effects before the time comes when I will no longer have a say in the matter.

This collection of writings by Musil from the 1920s and 1930s provides a broad range of his style. Best known for his book, "A Man Without Qualities", he presents his own collection of favorite writings. Musil is more popular in his native Germany, but is popular with writers. This book is worth reading for Musil's insights written in a style that is both intellectual and humorous.

Liquidation - Imre Kertesz

What would a publisher's reader be with belief, an intellectual challenge, in a censored, evil, and illiterate world? No one an nothing. A paper-marking slave, a proofreader groping in the dark. But I believe in writing--nothing else; just writing. Man may live like a worm, but he writes like a god. There was a time when that secret was known, but now it has been forgotten; the world is composed of disintegrating fragments, an incoherent dark chaos, sustained by writing alone. If you have a concept of the world, if you have not yet forgotten all that has happened, that you have a world at all, it is writing that has created that for you, and ceaselessly goes on creating it; Logos, the invisible spider's thread that holds our lives together.

Liquidation is a rich, dense novel from the Nobel winning author, Imre Kertesz. A short novel, it is dense with ideas and reflections on the human condition. A survivor of Auschwitz, this book includes a plot that involves other affected that death camp. Kertesz's writing style, sparse and somewhat detached, allows him to cover vast subjects and plots with ease in this short novel. I thoroughly enjoyed the book and highly recommend it.

Kiss & Tell - Alain De Botton

Mr. Rogers had escaped his wife's complexity with interest in the peripherals of existence. He could entertain a conversation of many hours' duration on the second downward clue fo the The Times crossword, the migration of African birds, the effect of carbon dioxide on the synapses of the brain, not to mention the pros and cons of buying a water purifier or the gradual supersession of the sewn bookbinding by its glued counterpart - but remained at a loss to understand the role allotted to him in the family drama.

Everything one said threw him into deep thought, whereby he would roll back his eyes, lift up his head and enter into a phrase of saying 'Yes' in rapid succession though the comment which had elicited this might have been no greater than, 'It's getting harder to find red apples these days.'

This book is original, funny, and well-written--but it doesn't add up to a good read. Dissecting the biography genre, de Botton selects an ordinary person's life to display in this book. With of interest about the person, the gist of the book becomes a dissertation on structure and style of most biographies. There are some great moments and interesting thoughts in the book, but it too often digresses into details that are modestly interesting and briefly amusing. Apparently, a lot of readers seem to like this book, but for me a short story would have been adequate.

Names - Marilyn Hacker

Letter to Mimi Khalvati

Dear, how I hate the overblown diction of

lines for occasions: festschrifts, like elegies

making a banal birthday seem to

signpost a passage to unmapped wasteland,

...

This book is very intelligent and meticulously composed, but its poetry doesn't move me. I appreciate the writer's fine skill, but the writing feels too structured and intellectual in spite of the book's themes of women in the Middle East and America's role in disrupting societies. The author chooses to write in obscure poetry forms: ghazals, gloses, sonnets; which I don't find particularly appealing nor contributory to expressing Hacker's thoughts. One of the reviews on the back cover states "Marilyn Hacker's language saves us through its brilliant riches, its coruscating threnodies of structure." Yes, there are brilliant rich lines, but I get lost in artificial structure and it feels like Hacker is trying too hard. It feels like a book more for college literary professors to dissect rather than one for the average poetry lover.