Before some of the “What We’re Reading” team members head down to Orlando for the American Library Association (ALA) annual conference, we take a moment to discuss books about grammar and life, Hollywood and life, music and life, and oppression and life. Here’s to life, even the tough parts, and here’s to reading!
Mahnaz Dar, Assistant Managing Editor, LJS
As a self-professed grammar girl and punctuation nerd, I had to pick up Mary Norris’s Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen (Norton). Norris worked for more than three decades in the copy department of The New Yorker. She weaves in stories from her life with musings on grammar and style. My favorites so far? Her discussions of the dangling modifier (that dreaded foe to editors everywhere!), an in-depth look at hyphens that left me dizzy, and an examination of words and gender, topped off by the author’s experiences watching her transgender sister transition. I’ve also picked up some good tips: checking one’s work three times, a page at a time, for instance.
My favorite excerpt, though, is about some of New Yorker editor William Shawn’s peculiar preferences:
The generation of writers who were handled by Shawn in the mid-seventies to write for Talk of the Town were often puzzled by some of his prohibitions. In addition to the usual bodily fluids—piss, shit, blood, and spit—he was squeamish about fish hooks, wigs, twins, and midgets. Mark Singer once had a reference to Ex-Lax removed from a story about the dirty-tricks campaign for state senator of Roy Goodman, whose family money came from Ex-Lax. And in a story tabulating the cost of taking the subway to a movie and buying refreshments, the editors cut Junior Mints. When Singer asked why, the style editor, Hobie Weekes, told him, “A New Yorker writer should not be eating Junior Mints.” According to Ian Frazier, the sentence incorporating as many Shawn taboos as possible was “The short, balding man wearing a wig took his menstruating wife to a boxing match.”
Liz French, Senior Editor, LJ Reviews
Meet my new best-bud author (who doesn’t know I exist, of course). It’s Eve Babitz, chronicler of the 1960s and 1970s Hollywood scene. Eve grew up in L.A. and is a proud defender of her homeland, which is often labeled a “cultural wasteland,” mostly by East Coasters. She counters those characterizations with stories of her bohemian upbringing (dad was a musician and member of a studio orchestra; mom was an artist; the Hollywood intelligentsia regularly convened at chez Babitz) and displays of an agile, discerning brain. But she’s fun and frothy, too, and man, did she hang with the hippest! Her many-notched bedpost boasts musicians and artists, and she’s the young woman who posed nude with Marcel Duchamp in that famous chess-playing photo. I haven’t gotten to that part of her life yet in Eve’s Hollywood (NYRB), a collection of autobiographical essays first published in 1972. I’m still lurking in the halls of Hollywood High circa 1959 and smoking in the girls’ room with Eve and her impossibly gorgeous classmates, musing on truth and beauty.
Laura Girmscheid, Research Manager, LJS
I was hooked on Lauren Belfer’s And After the Fire (Harper) by the premise: a Jewish woman is bequeathed an original, unknown J.S. Bach cantata when her uncle passes away, but the choral music proves to be shockingly anti-Semitic. Does the world have a right to hear this art, or should it remain hidden? The story deftly weaves her present-day quest to learn more about the authenticity and provenance of the music manuscript while slowly revealing the progression of the piece’s custodians. I love novels that incorporate biographical facts into the narrative, and this one comes with an excellent soundtrack to boot! There’s music by J.S. Bach, Felix Mendelssohn, and his sister Fanny.
Kiera Parrott, Reviews Editor, LJS
This week, I’m reading Patrick Phillips’s Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America (Norton). It’s a powerful work of narrative nonfiction that examines the history of Forsyth County, GA, beginning with the 1912 murder of a young white girl and the subsequent hanging of two black teenage boys. The racial violence quickly spread as the white townspeople rioted and burned down homes, churches, and farms of the black citizens. They drove their black neighbors out of the town, declaring it “for whites only” and took over their land and businesses. The author, a white man who grew up in the Forsyth community, recounts how the events leading up to and following the destruction was quickly swept under the rug and all but forgotten by the town’s remaining residents and descendants. He discusses campaigns by townspeople to “Keep Forsyth White” as late as the 1990s. It’s a haunting account that will sadden and enrage. One of the best nonfiction books I’ve read all year.