"Fiction and the Figures of Life" by William H. Gass (1971)

I suppose if you have no interest in how literature is created, there's no reason for you to read this book, a collection of essays and book reviews straddling literature and philosophy. But there's something so thrilling about his writing style, to me, it's a bit of a shame if people don't experience it at least once. The best, most succinct way I can describe it is: it doesn't ever feel cheap, or chintzy or mass produced or even triple-gilded, overadorned, and when you run into writing that doesn't feel cheap your awareness of the sheer amount of cheap writing that surrounds our lives actually begins to feel overwhelming, in a somewhat suffocating way. And! If you happen to already have an interest in how literature is created, what you'll find are a number of stunning insights, too many to list, often philosophically spiked, that avoids aphorism, grandiloquence, inspirational cant, or even equivocation—you really get the impression of a person who's very thoroughly thought through something in an attempt to get as close as possible to the heart of the heart of his subject (he's basically what David Foster Wallace would be if David Foster Wallace were actually as intelligent as he taught himself to sound.) And if that seems somewhat trite—praising someone for actually thinking deeply about something before writing it down—again, you come out of the book feeling like that kind of approach, for whatever reason, isn't actually valued by anyone with a pen. After all, putting on a cheap show, as we've all seen by now, is a fairly easy thing for anyone and their mother to do. Five stars.

"Dancing in the Streets - A History of Collective Joy" by Barbara Ehrenreich (2006)

I suppose all books like this bend the truth, it's only a matter of degree ("The Dawn of Everything" apparently bends the truth quite a bit in service of its ultimate point.) So, was public celebration really discouraged by the rise of Protestant discipline-fed capitalism? Was ritualistic dancing really seen as a threat to public order? Do we really live according to the dictates of a culture that sees benefits in our separation, that celebrates individualism and identity both as a triumph of selfhood and as a method of organization (if you identify as "gay" then I know what to sell you,) that peddles products to alleviate the dismay that the culture itself causes? Is what we're experiencing now the result of centuries of human repression at the service of power, control, and money? Beats me—most of the relevant information I know comes only from personal experience and this very book. Once again, Ehrenreich starts by examining something simple, in this case "joy", and spins it out into all sorts of enormous threads—Why do we, as humans, relentlessly seek out so much pointless joy? And why do people seem to find this so threatening? I can't tell you if she's onto something for certain. But it's something to think about, for sure. Four stars.

"Creating Fiction - Instruction and Insights from Teachers of the Associated Writing Programs" Edited by Julie Checkoway (1999)

Imagine my delight upon seeing someone's recommended list of writing books and discovering that I had already owned five of seven—a validation of my instinctive ability to sniff out quality writing advice! That included this and the benefit of this book over others as far as writing instruction goes is you get a variety of teaching styles in one sitting—you don't just get one person's theory, you get about thirty of them! Some very insightful and high quality, some of them asinine: the advantage of confidently declaring yourself an "expert" in a field like creative writing, a field that very few people actually understand, a field highly susceptible to wistful, windswept sentimentality, is that the chances an impressionable young hopeful will listen to you with unquestioning, shining adoration are very, very, very high, which is an attitude that’s remarkably easy to exploit. Some of these writers seem guilty of that. But, because of the book’s scattershot nature, the chances you'll run into unusually considered and highly worthwhile wrinkles of narrative craft are also very high. So, on the whole, I think it's rather good. At the same time, I've read this book before, as an unquestioning, shining, young idolator. And I think I wrongly took away lessons from the more flashy, inspirational teachers than from the ones who preached classical, grinding restraint in a minor key. Now that I look back, I think it's their fault. Three stars.

"Contagious - Why Things Catch On" by Jonah Berger (2013)

It's written in that extremely annoying "This American Life"-inspired conversational style which was in vogue during the (awful, just purely awful) 2010s. Plus, it's directed towards people who work in marketing and advertising. Nevertheless, the ordinary person gets a breezy, Wharton-kissed explainer about six major ways people try to manipulate your behavior. For instance, "Stories thus give people an easy way to talk about products and ideas. ... They provide a sort of psychological cover that allows people to talk about a product or idea without seeming like an advertisement." Read it, and maybe you'll be able to see through a lot things that typically slip past your bullshit detector. Now, if you happen to be an evil person, (1) you've likely already read this book; and (2) I'd think a person who had committed themselves to evil would be able to handle much more sophisticated reading material. Three stars.

"Commodify Your Dissent - Salvos from The Baffler" Edited by Thomas Frank and Matt Weiland (1997)

Its attacks on 90s pop culture—from Details Magazine to Donna Tartt to Henry Rollins to Quentin Tarantino to Wired Magazine to alternative rock (geez, how the hell did they set up Q101 just six months after Nirvana "suddenly shocked the world"?)—are still pretty thrilling, at least perhaps to me, someone who lived through it all as an impressionable teen, some of it I ate up, some of it not. The attacks on everything else are kind of boring, as if the pop culture stuff were the things the writers were most familiar with. Some of it seems dated, some of it seems hyperbolic, but mostly a lot of it just seems like precursors to issues we still deal with (there is an advertising executive here who preaches "disruption".) Most strikingly, they call out how we spend money on things that feel liberating or purposeful or rebellious or even meaningful to our identities when, all along, we're doing exactly what a bunch of people in a board room had planned and budgeted for. It may sound a little simplistic, but are our movie theaters filled with comic book blockbusters because that's what we as an audience demanded? Or did a corporation steer us towards a product that was highly addictive and, thus, easier to predict and reproduce? Three stars.

"Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student, Fourth Edition" by Edward P.J. Corbett and Robert J. Connors (1999)

It's a 500-page book about classical rhetoric, so I'll try to keep this brief. Maybe it's too late for you to become a stronger writer, but in the event your child shows a knack for words it might be a good idea to get this book on their radar. For some reason, I went through most of my life never once hearing about it, until it was referenced in an academic paper I was reading about advertising. Which means either the state of the humanities had been in decline for much longer than we thought, or narrow-minded parents were desperately dissuading their children away from writing as a career. I've found, if you dissuade a talented, budding writer away from a writing career, you're pretty much sentencing your peculiar, creative child to a long, sad, unfulfilled life (an unusually large number of these children grow up to be financially secure, emotionally damaged Asians.) So if you want to spare those kids a future, decades-long SSRI/Xanax dependency, just know this might actually be the best book on the nuts-and-bolts craft of writing I've ever read. (Sidenote: I can now recognize, thanks to this book, the advertising agency Fallon McElligott, in their heyday, more than anyone else, made use of classical rhetoric precepts in their work.) Five stars.

"Chekhov Becomes Chekhov" by Bob Blaisdell (2022)

It focuses on two years of Anton Chekhov's life at the beginning of his literary stardom in Russia, 1886 and 1887. At the time, Chekhov was 26 years old, a bachelor, a practicing doctor, and in constant debt because he had assumed the role of breadwinner for his immediate family. He wrote for the newspapers, which means he wrote his stories quickly, prolifically, and on deadline, mostly for the money. The book premises that, together with his extensively collected letters, you can piece together how his fiction was inspired by his life. This turns out to be more tedious than it sounds—it would be one thing if his seven stories or so-a-month pace produced one masterpiece after another, but this is more like if Lorne Michaels sat you down and explained the origins and production of every SNL sketch aired from 1976 to 1978: after a certain point you just don't care. I will grant the tightened focus gives you a much more nuanced picture of the overworked, tuberculosis-hiding human being than you tend to get elsewhere. And there's some insight into how he could keep the quality of his writing high despite publishing at least 176 pieces in those two years.* And Blaisdell often folds in fun, quippy, "excitable lit teacher" interjections (which I personally found irritating) to break up his lengthy story summaries. But, in total, it just all feels like empty speculation: did he write a story about a murder-suicide just because he happened to be depressed that week?; did the dog Kashtanka leave the circus and return to her abusive owner because, like Chekhov, she disliked fame? Maybe. And, also, so what? Chekhov is an extraordinary writer because of how perceptively he captures the nuances of human behavior—in comparison, everything else seems cartoonish—and you see that demonstrated here in excerpt after excerpt. But for a book that explicitly aims to shine a light on that sensitivity, you end everything feeling somewhat unsatisfied—How did Chekhov become so perceptive, you ask? Well, apparently, it was because he was really, really good at noticing things. Two stars.

*"Chekhov determinedly resisted writing fine quotable sentences. Wit and wisdom were to be suppressed in the service of description, so that only the description left its impression."

"Black Dada Reader" Edited by Adam Pendleton (2017)

What I thought I could finish in two or three days ended up taking two-plus weeks. It's interesting; I often put the book down and found myself dizzy; I enjoyed the deep dives into art school academia; I did not quite enjoy the art. Gertrude Stein was a great poet. Gertrude Stein was a Nazi sympathizer. Am I convinced abstraction is an equalizer? I can be talked into it. Three stars.

"Anton Chekhov's Life and Thought - Selected Letters and Commentary" Edited and Annotated by Simon Karlinsky, Translated by Michael Henry Heim (1973)

The audience, I'd imagine, is limited. And you can pretty much tell what you're going to get from the title, so let me just add this: Every letter features extensive footnotes which offer a look at 19th century Russian history through its street life and pop culture, if that sort of thing interests you—it might be the collection's leading virtue. Also, Karlinsky takes on an oddly catty tone throughout, gleefully debunking the many misperceptions of the man, Soviet-bred or otherwise (maybe he adopted that tone because a lot of the selected letters are kinda flat.) As for the letters themselves (185 here, out over 4,000 to choose from) one thing I noticed, having read other collections, the letters here seem much more even-keeled and less emotionally all over the place—you get the impression that Chekhov was a person who tried to maintain his sincerity in all situations, but only once in a while does any of the messiness sincere people tend to get themselves caught up in, and that I've seen expressed elsewhere, peek through the editing process (he, memorably, in more than one letter, brags about banging a bronze-colored Hindu woman under a tree in Singapore; his final recorded words involved mocking the way German women dressed; and he sent the following letter in its entirety to some kid who asked him to take a look at their story: "Cold, dry, long, not youthful, though talented. -Chekhov.") It's kind of funny how the truth about sincere people somehow becomes badly mangled, actually—one collection I read painted him as an eternal fount of saintly wisdom, one as an emotionally messy, deeply flawed human being, and this as a practical, sober-minded, stately celebrity. I'm betting the messy, flawed one is the honest one (somehow the story of a trained doctor who flat-out ignores his own tuberculosis for nearly 10 years, and the story of someone who said he wanted to be married as long they remained independent and apart, frustrating his new wife who was shocked to find out that he actually meant it, tends to get buried.) Three stars.

"An American Summer - Love and Death in Chicago" by Alex Kotlowitz (2019)

Two things alarmed me recently. One was hearing a Radiolab producer say that they never once aired a story that didn't have some sort of positive ending. The other was when I noticed how obsessed YouTube reviewers are with "character development". Alarming because that means people's idea of what the "golden rule" story consists of is becoming narrowed and calcified, which means a lot of stories that do not fit that idea do not get told. So it's downright shocking to read a nonfiction book full of stories that don't end well, that have no justice, where characters don't grow, where those that try to grow can't, where moral behavior is not rewarded, where immoral behavior is not punished, and where people's stories end more confused than where they started. Of all the books you hear tossed around anti-racism book clubs, I'm floored that this one never seems to come up. Because I would think that understanding how inner city people actually live their daily lives is far more valuable than understanding theories of systemic racism. Will you feel uplifted when the book ends? No, most certainly not. Because many stories worth telling aren't clean like that, and assigning quality to the satisfaction of character development is what unthinking, ignorant people do. Five stars.

"Advertising Theory" Edited by Shelly Rodgers and Esther Thorson (2019)

At one point in this exhaustive, 500-page, 31-chapter exploration of the sundry strands of academic advertising theory, one of the researchers wonders why those who practice advertising don't ever bother to read those who humorlessly study advertising.* It's a good question, and the only satisfying answer I can come up with is, "Because it's not cool." Five stars.

*"The problems advertising works to solve—of communication for commercial and social purposes—are important to the national culture, but often advertising professionals themselves aren’t clear or convinced of this. How then can they advocate for the value or their own work? Thinking about advertising as a societal institution fills the gap between understanding what the central issues of our academic advertising research are on one hand, and the experiences of practitioners as they apply that knowledge to businesses and social-cultural processes on the other.

The utility of advertising's institutional contributions are much more than communications for commerce. Advertising’s work consists of the symbol-making activities central to cultural processes (Sherry, 2005). Symbols and symbolism in communications are forces in processes of power sharing, conflict resolution, and evolution of traditions in modern societies. These activities are supported not only by business enterprises but also by a wide range of social, cultural, and political organizations, to name only a few.

In addition, conceptualizing advertising as a societal institution encourages us to think about ourselves as a community united by a work specialty and to focus on how non-ad-professionals like clients, regulators, watchdog groups, and others influence the valuation of our work. This may lead us to think differently about why practitioners and scholars have so few regular interactions, why practitioners do not read academic journals, and how to create richer connections than just trying to place students in ad agencies after they graduate (Wright-Isak and Faber, 1996)."

"Actual Minds, Possible Worlds" by Jerome Bruner (1986)

I frequently re-read these things and go back in and edit the shit out of them so keep in mind this review may change. But I was directed here by Maria Popova. You know, the longtime, yellow-tinged "inspiration porn" queen of the creative Internet? She told me that this was a deeply insightful inquiry into the narrative arts by a reknowned psychologist. What I found was, someone who spent nine chapters out of 10 laddering, in excruciating detail, a proof leading up to a psychological point, only, after hours of torturous logic, to finally arrive at the psychological point: when people read things, they combine what they already understand with newly presented information and then use this entwined knowledge in order to form new thoughts. OH, GEEZ, THANKS A LOT, EINSTEIN. Maybe next you'd like to explain to me why exactly human beings enjoy eating tasty food, or why human beings try to avoid experiencing pain, citing a whole bunch of meticulously researched studies. A rare, genuine: No stars.

Sidenote: I'm beginning to think Maria Popova doesn't actually read the books that she promotes.

"A Swim in a Pond in the Rain" by George Saunders (2021)

You know how there's this huge gulf between the kinds of stories "literature people" like and the kinds of stories "non-literature people" like? How you can't understand why anyone could possibly think, say, Rachel Cusk's "Outline Trilogy" is required reading when Emily Giffin at least writes books that actually make me feel joy? Well, I'm no George Saunders fan but I'd say this does a pretty good job of at least trying to bridge that gap. Three stars.

"A Rhetoric of Irony" by Wayne C. Booth (1974)

(1) I read this very slowly. Turns out, there's only so much irony one person can handle in one sitting; (2) If you have no interest in literature then you’ll probably feel intense hatred if you attempted to read this; (3) But if you did, you'd find the writing style surprisingly enjoyable, even as he never bothers to dumb things down; (4) I suppose if you wanted a lengthy defense of why irony isn't necessarily the insouciant societal cancer it's often made out to be, this would be the place to turn; (5) You might even be surprised to stumble upon existential discussions of meaninglessness and knowledge and truth and human communion and, briefly, even God; (6) Have you ever thought of irony as frighteningly powerful? Well I didn't, until I read this; (7) One of his main attacks is on the notion that works of literature mean whatever one perceives them as meaning (which I understand to be part of postmodernism and multiculturalism,) which particularly triggered me because I feel my formal English instruction was dominated by that philosophy, and I do not now believe it served anyone's brains well; (8) Can I assure you that you'll feel enriched and rejuvenated upon completing the book? No. I find right now that I just wish all thinking would stop: my eyes hurt. Three stars.