Nicholson Baker, a print guy if there ever was one (Double Fold, 2001), falls in love with something that only lives on servers (”The Charms of Wikipedia,” TNYRB).

Not only does Wikipedia need its vandals - up to a point - the vandals need an orderly Wikipedia, too. Without order, their culture-jamming lacks a context. If Wikipedia were rendered entirely chaotic and obscene, there would be no joy in, for example, replacing some of the article on Archimedes with this:

Archimedes is dead.

He died.

Other people will also die.

All hail chickens.

The Power Rangers say “Hi”

The End.

The electronic world, it turns out, abets his love of all things archival.

I signed up for the Article Rescue Squadron, having seen it mentioned in Broughton’s manual: the ARS is a small group that opposes “extremist deletion.” And I found out about a project called WPPDP (for “WikiProject Proposed Deletion Patrolling”) in which people look over the PROD lists for articles that shouldn’t be made to vanish. Since about 1,500 articles are deleted a day, this kind of work can easily become life-consuming, but some editors (for instance a patient librarian whose username is DGG) seem to be able to do it steadily week in and week out and stay sane. I, on the other hand, was swept right out to the Isles of Shoals. I stopped hearing what my family was saying to me - for about two weeks I all but disappeared into my screen, trying to salvage brief, sometimes overly promotional but nevertheless worthy biographies by recasting them in neutral language, and by hastily scouring newspaper databases and Google Books for references that would bulk up their notability quotient. I had become an “inclusionist.”

I’m reading Thomas Kohnstamm’s Do Travel Writers Go to Hell? A Swashbuckling Tale of High Adventures, Questionable Ethics & Professional Hedonism (Three Rivers). Kohnstamm, bitten early by the travel bug, has an early-life crisis (at the time the book takes place, he’s still in his twenties), walks away from his job, and flies to Brazil to write for the Lonely Planet guidebook.

The book’s emphasis on Kohnstamm’s wild ‘n’ crazy adventures made me think of Glasgow Phillips’ Royal Nonesuch: or, What Will I Do When I Grow Up? And also Dan Dunn’s Nobody Likes a Quitter (and Other Reasons to Avoid Rehab): The Loaded Life of an Outlaw Booze Writer…and also Tom Sykes’ What Did I Do Last Night?

Besides their seeming prediliction for titles in the form of questions, what do these books have in common? Well, they’re all writing in the shadow of Hunter S. Thompson, of course. The jacket copy on Kohnstamm’s book invokes the name of the gonzo great, and Dunn, apparently, was even a protege of Thompson. But making such comparisons is dangerous. In part because, if you measure your worth by feats of consumption, there’s actual danger in trying to be the “best.” But more because Thompson’s gift wasn’t his herculean intake of mind-altering substances, it was his mind itself. And, before he himself became a parody of himself [Ed: that reads like Nigel Tufnel channeling Austin Powers, dunnit?], the gonzo style allowed him a way to capture the weirdness at the heart of some of his stories–and it was new, a refreshing antidote to the style of journalism practiced by his contemporaries.

Also, he was insanely funny.

Writers who go gonzo without Thompson’s humor and savagely penetrating intellect run the risk of coming off like boring drunks. Or at least like self-absorbed, self-indulgent navel-gazers who think it’s funny to do journalism–or any job–poorly.

Having gotten all that off my chest, I think Kohnstamm’s book is actually the best of the lot. Roughly speaking, there are three elements in it: his early-life crisis and the pull of wanderlust; his drinking, drugging, and fornicating; and his expose of the business of writing travel guides. He plays the HST card on his first hand, during a booze-and-coke-fueled pub crawl with a character referred only to as “the Doctor,” but his sharp, funny writing and self-deprecation save the day. To wit:

There is nothing tough about writing–the act of writing is about as burly as operating a cash register…. 

But it’s his thoughts on travel writing that keep me turning pages: the Lonely Planet’s journey from backpacker tip sheet to middle-class faux-hobo itinerary; the loneliness that can ensue when it’s your job to write seriously about what everyone else does for fun; the impossible assignment of writing about travel that you can’t yourself afford. (In one brilliant scene, he gets thrown out of a hotel that he’s researching because he looks like he can’t afford to stay there.)

I’ve never done any travel writing, but I have had a few experiences that resonate. I’ve written reviews of restaurants where the assigning publication wouldn’t cover the cost of a decent meal. And I contributed to a Chicago guidebook once–a great learning experience, but the pay probably didn’t cover the cost of my shoe leather.

So if booze is fuel for the journey, then so be it. But writers need to be careful not to get stuck at the bottom of the glass.

Or should that be “how-to-read books”? In the Independent, D. J. Taylor’s review of James Wood’s How Fiction Works mentions the “very considerable critical sub-genre: the literary user’s manual.” Which includes:

How to Read a Novel, by John Sutherland (2006)

How Novels Work, by John Mullan (2006)

Fifty-Two Ways to Read a Poem, by Ruth Padel (2002)

Aspects of the Novel, by E. M. Forster (1927)

Not to mention:

Reading Like a Writer, by Francine Prose (2006)

Reading Comics, by Douglas Wolk (2007)

On the how-to-review-a-book front, would-be reviewers should take note of Taylor’s first paragraph, which certainly made me want to read the rest of his review:

Whatever one may think about James Wood’s constant ejaculations, his ceremonious name-dropping (”W G Sebald once said to me…”) and his lecture-hall mannerisms - more of these in a moment - he really is an A-grade exponent of what university syllabi used to call “practical criticism”. Some of the best bits of this brief but luminous primer - and they are very good indeed - come when Wood strips the engine of some fabled fictional juggernaut down to its component parts with the aim of establishing just how a piece of prose works to bring off its effects, the way in which, as he puts it, a novel “teaches us how to read its narrator”.

In the Times Literary Supplement (”Erotic qualifications“), Robert Irwin offers a somewhat cheeky (ahem) review of Gaetan Brulotte and John Phillips’ Encyclopedia of Erotic Literature (Routledge):

I also finished my reading of these two volumes with the feeling that sex was a lot less fun than I had hitherto supposed.

That’s funny, I had much the same feeling after finishing Chuck Palahniuk’s new novel. (Rimshot!) Although there is a clear difference between the two works:

In general, the entries tilt towards the intellectual, the magical realist, the transgressive and the gay. In the article on the novelist Jack Fritscher, Fritscher is quoted: "The gay erotic writer is to gay non-erotic writers what Ginger Rogers was to Fred Astaire: gay erotic literature does everything gay literature does, but it does it backwards and in high heels adding to its Olympic degree of difficulty and pleasure". This is a striking but puzzling metaphor. What sort of shoes is the non-gay erotic writer wearing and for what sort of dance?

But the real reason I’m writing about Irwin’s review of the EEL (as we in the “biz” refer to it) is a throwaway line in the first paragraph:

(It is common practice in reference books to insert a bogus entry or two in order to establish copyright in any future plagiarism case in court.)

Really? Is this true? Such a practice would seem more likely to cause the publishers of a reference book to end up in court themselves than to help them drag others there.

Can any reference librarians out there weigh in on this?

On Galleycat, Ron Hogan is continuing his campaign to get the New York Times Book Review to replace Dave Itzkoff. Itzkoff recently made the following jaw-dropping statement (”Across the Universe: Elsewhere’s Children“):

I sometimes wonder how any self-respecting author of speculative fiction can find fulfillment in writing novels for young readers. I suppose J. K. Rowling could give me 1.12 billion reasons in favor of it: get your formula just right and you can enjoy worldwide sales, film and television options, vibrating-toy-broom licensing fees, Chinese-language bootlegs of your work, a kind of limited immortality (L. Frank Baum who?) and - finally - genuine grown-up readers. But where’s the artistic satisfaction? Where’s the dignity?

He also wrote (one presumes “playfully,” but still):

Like his fellow Britons Lewis Carroll and Roald Dahl, Miéville has no illusions about what utter bastards children can be….

I’m not in favor of treating childhood sentimentally–or treating kid lit like instruction manuals, for that matter–but I’m inclined to agree with Hogan that perhaps the NYTBR isn’t making the best use of Itzkoff’s talents.

When we read in public, we give passersby a glimpse into our souls. (Knowing that, of course, many among us choose their public reading accordingly–don’t tell me you’re enduring the wrist strain of reading Russian classics on the 144 bus because you never read anything lighter.) But for those of us who don’t always choose our own reading, the glimpse may not be an accurate one.

I’ve written about this before, of course. And, this morning, crawling down Lake Shore Drive in a packed bus in a blizzard, I was opening my book so narrowly that it was a little like trying to read the contents of an envelope, trying to ignore the frown of a gray-haired commuter to my left. ”Gimme a break, lady,” I wanted to say, ”I’m working!”

What was I reading? Snuff, by Chuck Palahniuk. It’s about an aging porn legend who, as the flap copy puts it, ”intends to cap her legendary career by breaking the world’s record for serial fornication on camera with six hundred men.” (Note how they cleverly avoided the more common word for the act.)

To quote the back-flap further (and doesn’t “back-flap” sound like a good reason to try diet and exercise?):

This wild, lethally funny, and thoroughly researched novel brings the huge yet underacknowledged presence of pornography in contemporary life into the realm of literary fiction at last. Who else but Chuck Palahniuk would dare do such a thing?

Well, Robert Coover would, for one. But I agree completely that it’s a worthy project. I’ve heard all sorts of stunning figures (financial figures; the other kind you have to see) about the size of the porn industry, about how it’s been the driving force in many technological advances, etc. etc. Vast numbers of people are buying and “consuming” porn, but its effect on society has yet to be reflected in the arts in a proportional way. I applaud Palahniuk for his bravery; clearly he has a keen sense of intellectuals’ responsibility to explore our society as a whole, no matter how uncomfortable that journey might make us.

Either that or he wanted to have fun making up fake movie titles like “On Golden Blonde” and “A Separate Piece.”

A. L. Kennedy (Paradise, 2005; Indelible Acts, 2003) has won the Costa Book of the Year award (you remember the Costa, it used to be the Whitbread) for her fifth novel, Day (Jonathan Cape, 2007).

Taking a quick look at the author’s site, I found myself charmed by her reviews of her reviews. Not for Day, alas, but for Paradise and others:

If you are a reviewer and your work appears here, take it as a compliment. Or take it as a minute exposure to the delightful "being reviewed" experience. The reviews are categorised as follows:
Good - reviews which give the impression the book is good.
Bad - reviews which give the impression that the book is bad.
Silly - reviews which are not really terribly well written, or informative. Reviews are shown to help readers decide if they should read a book and as a small comment on the state of literary reviewing.

In Slate, Garth Risk Hallberg asks, “Who Is Grady Harp?”

I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I had imagined Amazon’s customer reviews as a refuge from the machinations of the publishing industry: “an intelligent and articulate conversation … conducted by a group of disinterested, disembodied spirits,” as James Marcus, a former editor at the company, wrote in his memoir, Amazonia: Five Years at the Epicenter of the Dot.Com Juggernaut. Indeed, with customers unseating salaried employees like Marcus as the company’s leading content producers, Amazon had been hailed as a harbinger of “Web 2.0″ - an ideal realm where user-generated consensus trumps the bankrupt pieties of experts. As I explored the murky understory of Amazon’s reviewer rankings, however, I came to see the real Web 2.0 as a tangle of hidden agendas - one in which the disinterested amateur may be an endangered species.

And, somewhere, Grady Harp asks, “Who is Garth Risk Hallberg? What’s that you say? I reviewed his book?”

For more on the subject, click here.

I’m on deadline today for my review of the new C. J. Box novel, Blood Trail (Putnam). A couple of years ago, I complained that Mr. Box had deprived me of a good night’s sleep. At the time, I’d just returned from spending three months at home with my first son, and the readjustment to business hours was proving rocky.

Well, Box did it again on Wednesday night. And, with a second son who’s–how do I say this politely?–slumber-challenged, I could still use the shut-eye. But I defy anyone to get within 50 pages of the end of a Box novel and just stop, no matter how scratchy their eyes are.

Despite the number of terrific books that I’ve been fortunate enough to review for Booklist, it’s pretty rare when I find that I can’t stop reading one of them. Books have become my job, and no matter how much I enjoy my work, I know that there will be more good stuff coming my way soon. So when I simply cannot close the book, that tells me one thing for certain: it’s going to get a starred review.

I will say that Blood Trail isn’t quite as good as the last Pickett, Free Fire, or my favorite, Out of Range, but given that Box is now on the two-books-a-year plan (”amateur,” scoff Ken Bruen and Walter Mosley), it’s remarkable how close he is to those benchmarks. Box’s other book out this year was the terrific Blue Heaven (St. Martin’s/Minotaur), which I approached with some trepidation only because it seemed to signal an effort to make the Wyoming author more mainstream (they photographed him without his cowboy hat, for example). But that was a needless worry. Box has proved that he can branch out with stand-alone thrillers while keeping his large core audience (Pickettheads? Romanowskians? Boxovites?) happy.

Come to think of it, my only quibble with Blood Trail is probably that it’s a bit shorter than usual–in which case, I shouldn’t be complaining. Because then I’d really be short of sleep.

Check out the critical conversation in the new Time Out Chicago (”Critical Condition,” by Kris Vire), featuring Booklist’s very own “books critic,” Donna Seaman (the accidental title makes it seem as if we also have food, TV, and automotive critics). An excerpt:

Kris Vire: Is passion more important than education?

Donna Seaman: Initially, but passion must lead to discipline and immersion. Expertise is gained from sustained attention.

Don Hall: I think passion and education go hand in hand. If you’re passionate about theater, you’ll likely educate yourself about it.

Anne Holub: You have to have a passion for it; otherwise, you’re simply not going to bother.

Chuck Sudo: Expertise is gained from sating your curiosity, then realizing there’s still more to learn.

Donna Seaman: Yes. One must also have the urge to share one’s enthusiasms. To advocate. To be clear about what it is that matters in a work of art.

Sam Jones: Formal education is probably not more important than passion, but knowledge of the medium you’re criticizing is.

Anne Holub: Right, and since most subjects are constantly changing and growing, it’s likely going to be a lifelong pursuit.

Jim DeRogatis: In as (allegedly) democratic an art form as rock & roll, it is true that literally everyone is a critic. The difference between a good critic and a bad critic is the ability to put into words the reasoning behind those opinions. And there education can be helpful, but it can be as informal as simply being a voracious reader.

Chuck Sudo: Or, if you’re talking about food and drink, as simple as going to that one hole-in-the-wall restaurant you’ve long avoided because of preconceived notions.

Mike Sula: Or just being aware of your preconceived notions.

Don Hall: In order to appropriately criticize, a dollop of self-awareness is necessary - knowing your own prejudices, etc.

Sam Jones: Critics are like statistics - what they say is almost meaningless without the underlying story.

Donna Seaman: Ongoing self-education is essential.

Jim DeRogatis: And education is another word for journalism: If you have a perceptive young reader, you can send him or her out to critique something without having a deep knowledge in the subject, so long as he or she does the journalistic homework beforehand. You need not have gone to Juilliard to critique the Rolling Stones, or to have heard all of their 40 or so albums. But you’d better get the facts right when you come back and write up your emotional reaction to the show.

Donna Seaman: Everyone who reads a book, listens to a piece of music, and so on, experiences a slightly different work of art. A critic has to be able to imagine many responses, and see the experience in a greater context.

Jim DeRogatis: Why is that important? Do you really want to know how an 11-year-old experienced Hannah Montana?

Donna Seaman: Writing is always about exposing the workings of a mind, even a tween with bad taste.

Anne Holub: I want to know how the 11-year-old’s parents experienced paying for those tickets!

Sam Jones: We come to trust critics by reading them - that’s how we have traditionally gotten the story.

Believe me, Donna does not look like her icon. She actually looks like this.

Hey, TOC gave yours truly a mention, too! (Chest thump.) Respect.