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The Weekly Wrap: August 9-15

Reading Projects

Have you ever thought of reading through an encyclopedia, from A to Z? In 2004, A. J. Jacobs published The Know-It-All, chronicling his big project of reading through the 32 volumes of the print edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. I am reading the book, and while I haven’t gotten to the end of the book, it is apparent that he discovered that lots of factual knowledge is not the equivalent of wisdom. I liked browsing our family’s encyclopedia as a child, but reading through one? No way!

A reading project usually involves either a number of books or one very large and challenging book. For many, the ultimate challenge seems to be the reading of James Joyce’s Ulysses or Tolstoy’s War and Peace or Hugo’s Les Miserables. Frankly, I have no interest in Joyce, but Les Miserables is on my TBR. I’ve known some to take on a topic, like the biographies of the presidents or the English monarchs. Others like to read all the works of an author. One of my reading goals for this year is to read the major novels of Jane Austen.

It seems to me that one of the reasons to pursue a reading project is that you’ve found an author or topic you love and simply want to read as much on it as you can. However, there is a certain allure for some to read through a set, whether an encyclopedia, a multi-volume theology like that of Karl Barth, or The Great Books.

I have two reading projects that I hope to get to. One is to read the set of Balzac novels my grandfather collected and handed down to my mom, who loved reading them when she was young. The other is to read the three-volume Systematic Theology of Charles Hodge. I bought it from a retiring pastor forty odd years ago. So, maybe in my retirement I’ll get around to reading it.

In the end, what it comes down to is that there are so many good books to read. But we only have one life to read them. So the project is choosing those books that will mean the most to us, to read and re-read.

Five Articles Worth Reading

Do you like thrillers and mysteries? I certainly do. The New York Times just published “Readers Pick Their 100 Best Thrillers of the Century.” You’ve probably read some and might find some others that pique your interest.

Richard Russo grew up in a hardscrabble town and his books revolve around characters from these places. In “Hard-Luck Men in Hardscrabble Towns,” Mark Oppenheimer looks at the corpus of his novels as well as reviewing the latest.

Many of us from the Vietnam era read Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut. Now Susan Farrell has written Vonnegut’s War: The Making of Slaughterhouse-Five looking back at Vonnegut’s World War II experiences as a P.O.W. and how they influenced the book. Here is the Publishers Weekly starred review.

Melanie Challenger has written what looks to be a fascinating book on human agency, Alive: The Hidden Intelligence of the Living World. She previews the book in “Where Does the Will To Live Come From… in Humans and Nonhumans Alike?“

“Wielding the Blue Pencil” reveals that British publishers only added editors to their staff after World War II. The article explores the reasons why publishers added editors and the relationships formed between authors and editors.

Quote of the Week

John Galsworthy explains why politicians in power don’t always advocate the same things they did when in opposition:

“There is one rule for politicians all over the world: Don’t say in Power what you say in opposition; if you do, you only have to carry out what the other fellows have found impossible.”

Miscellaneous Musings

“Jason Arday, Cambridge Scholar Who Resigned Under Scrutiny, Is Found Dead.” This story turned up in my email late yesterday. Police do not believe his death was suspicious. He was the youngest professor appointed at Cambridge but recently faced charges of plagiarism and of embellishing his resume. He resigned from Cambridge last week. Out of respect, I will not speculate, particularly because cause of death hasn’t been established and the investigations of the charges against him were ongoing at the time of his death. Very tragic.

This case also brings to mind authors rightly and wrongly accused of using AI generated text and not disclosing it. Recently, a novelist lost a $2 million dollar deal over such accusations. My son passed along this very helpful article: “You Will Be Accused of Using AI. Here Is How to Prove You Wrote It.”

Earlier this year, Daniel Kraus’ Angel Down won this year’s Pulitzer Prize. Three hundred pages. One sentence. Andrew Krivak’s Mule Boy is not that extreme but I’ve counted a single sentence covering a least four pages. Can’t say that I’m a fan of this kind of writing. Probably too much training about run-on sentences! But probably no one challenged him for using AI to write it!

Next Week’s Reviews

Monday: David Nasaw, The Wounded Generation

Tuesday: Christine Jeske, Racial Justice for the Long Haul

Wednesday: T.A. Gibson, A Wayfarer’s Poems: The Invitation

Thursday: Andrea Ferrari, The Fall and Redemption of Conscience

Friday: Andrew Krivak, Mule Boy

So, that’s The Weekly Wrap for August 9-15.

Find past editions of The Weekly Wrap under The Weekly Wrap heading on this page.

I’ve been struck of late with the lack of good editing in some of the newer books I’ve read. Marjorie Braman’s post on What Ever Happened to Book Editors opened my eyes to what I think is a disturbing trend–that editors in publishing houses are having to increasingly “double-down” as acquisition agents and publicists, and editing is something done on the side.

Braman highlights the work of Maxwell Perkins, who was the editor for Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. I discovered that he was also responsible for the publication of Alan Paton’s Cry the Beloved Country, one of my all time favorite works. What struck me as I read about Perkins (at least in Wikipedia), was that a critical part of his work with Scribners was acquisition. But it also seems that he played a huge editorial role with his authors, particular Thomas Wolfe, cutting 90,000 words out of Look Homeward, Angel.

It seems that part of Perkins genius was identifying skilled writing and nursing it along. This recognizes a critical truth–editors cannot make a mediocre work great. They can take good to great writers and make them better and part of the skill of a good editor must be the ability to recognize great writing “in the raw.”

One wonders where this will happen in the changing publishing world, particularly with the rise of self- and independent publishing. Publishers in the past served as a clearing house whose survival depended on editors who could identify writers. Braman argues that this might better happen these days with freelance editors working with the publishers. I wonder.

Jim Hoover

I learned recently of the retirement of Jim Hoover as an editor at InterVarsity Press, the publishing house associated with the organization I work for. Once again, I learned that Jim was responsible for the acquisition of works by authors like Eugene Peterson (A Long Obedience in the Same Direction) and editing works by Richard Lovelace, James Sire, Ben Witherington III, and more. His last project was editing the Encyclopedia of Ancient Christianity. His work was recently featured in a blog by fellow editor, Andy LePeau. While the books he edited served a far more limited audience than those edited by Perkins, they are marked as works of clarity and excellent, readable scholarship. Those whose books he worked on would describe him as both “careful” and “gracious”.

If the place of editors like Hoover and Perkins is marginalized in the publishing industry, I wonder whether the quality of books we will see in this century will measure up to the last (By the way, I don’t see this happening at InterVarsity Press!). And this is at a time when reading habits are changing and the public is turning to other forms of media.

What concerns me is the issue of quality. In an upcoming post, I will explore the issue of “platform” and how this is a substitute for quality (and no doubt, one of the things that de-values good editing).

I’d love to hear what my friends who write or publish think of all this. My vantage point is simply that of the humble, but necessary, reader.