—NYRB?
New York Review Books is the publishing house of the literary journal and magazine, The New York Review of Books, of which I proudly know nothing about. However, their publishing branch is excellent, in my uneducated opinion. Their main imprint is NYRB Classics, which publishes “an eclectic mix of fiction and nonfiction from different eras and times and of various sorts.”* Many of the books are either out of print or rarely translated into English, ripe for reprinting.
If you’ve been around a particular side of YouTube, you might have heard praise for John Williams’ Stoner or seen shelves stacked with rows of solid, colorful books. That corner is where, more than three years ago, I heard about the NYRB Book Club, a yearly subscription that offers one new book from the Classics catalog each month. It is not a crazy steal, the books just slightly discounted, but the variety appealed to me. I am not a worldly, literary kind. I read “classics” and enjoy them. That’s the extent of it. What better way to force myself to take a break from fantastical worlds and read new stuff than a random literary volume dropped off in the mailbox once a month?
Two renewals later, thirty-six books. In total, ten made four or five stars. Only one earned five—Lisa Tuttle’s My Death. It deserves a more careful review, and I plan to re-read it sometime-maybe-soon.
I was going to write a short review for each of them; I have since changed my mind. With my horrible memory, there was never a chance. Instead, here are my thoughts on two that stuck the most.
Friday, Michel Tournier
- Originally Published 1967
A retelling of the classic story of Robinson Crusoe. I’ve never read Defoe’s original work, so this is my first introduction to the famous story. At first compelled to civilize the island with technology, agriculture, social structure (even for one person), and religion, Crusoe abandons the effort in favor of some kind of natural paganism when he notices Friday’s carefree nature.
I found the philosophical digressions in Crusoe’s journal extremely interesting. My favorite was the discussion on how we have a prejudice against breadth in favor of depth. We interpret “superficial” to mean lacking depth rather than possessing great breadth. Why should we love deeply rather than widely?
I feel a little guilty for reading this before Defoe’s original. But oh well, at least when I do get around to it, I’ll have a little extra enthusiasm.
Since I have been here I have become something of a specialist in silence, or in silences, I should say…There are airy, scented silences like a June night in England, others with the glaucous thickness of the mire, and yet others that are hard and sonorous as ebony.
The Universal Baseball Association Inc., Robert Coover
- Originally Published 1968
I have never played or followed baseball. I couldn’t describe how the game is played. First opening this book and reading the title, I shelved it in my brain beside the rest of the NYRBs that just weren’t me. Fortunately for me, this book isn’t really about baseball. Not exactly.
Enter Henry, dead-end accountant on the brink of losing his job because he can’t stop playing his simulated baseball game. And if you’re like me, and your first thought is bets and trades and ridiculous punishments, you’d be far from the truth. When this book was written, the idea of fantasy sports didn’t exist as we know it. What Henry has created is an entire alternate world: The Universal Baseball Association. For 55 in-game seasons, Henry has simulated not just the game, but the league and the politics of baseball, with dice, scorecards, fictional records, characters, and more. Coover’s writing brings the players to life, and the way the real and unreal blend together shows just how obsessed Henry is.
One of my favorite passages is when Henry invites his only friend, Lou, to play a few rounds of the game. Greasy pizza fingers on the scorecards, split beer, and a heretical disrespect for the association make for an uncomfortable night for Henry. It perfectly captures the feeling of trying to share a niche personal obsession with a friend, when everything once magical seems lame in the moment.
The book opens at a rough time for the UBA. Henry blames himself for the stagnation of the league, hoping that one star pitcher, Damon Rutherford, might garner new seasons of vitality. However, when an incredible series of rolls leads to Damon’s death by a stray pitch, Henry loses it all. By the end of the book, he has started to manipulate the game out of desperation. Reading this today, you can’t help but think about all the different simulations we escape to.
Henry had invented for them a variation on Monopoly, using twelve, sixteen, or twenty-four boards at once and an unlimited number of players, which opened up the possibility of wars run by industrial giants with investments on several boards at once, the buying off of whole governments … strikes and rebellions by the slumdwellers between “Go” and “Jail,” revolutionary subversion and sabotage with sympathetic ties across the boards … but it never caught on.
Final Thoughts
I got my last book this May and didn’t renew. Having to read twelve specific books each year became too much of a commitment and a restriction on my reading choices. If I were to join the club again, I would spread it over two years instead of trying to keep the pace. Anyway, nobody made me renew every year and treat it like an assignment. It’s not much of a complaint that there are too many books!
Whether or not you can keep up, the quality and variety of the selection is wonderful. It gave me the chance to read books in unfamiliar genres and from unknown authors, and I’m happy to have discovered a handful of new favorites. Best of all, I have this amazing band of color on my shelf, a reminder to always be as broad as I can in my reading.