What's the Story, Book Review?

So you can tell that I wasn't dicking around about that recommitment to this blog, I am posting again, in what I hope will be a new running feature in which I tell you what I think about the New York Times Book Review. For friendless book nerd, the New York Times Sunday Book Review is the most important thing that happens every week. It's got a lot going for it. It comes on Sunday, and what else are you going to do on Sunday? It combines book reviews, lists of best sellers to be indignant about, and, the piece de resistance, the Fun Essay About a Topic. This is the NYTBR equivalent of the New Yorker's Critic at Large pieces, which are basically little chunks of thinking out loud about books that are occasioned by Events. Lots of times, the Event is a biography or a movie or something. This week's fun Essay About a Topic is about a new translation of something, namely Kafka's first novel, Amerika. Adam Kirsch considers the weirdness of this, Kafka's first and unfinished novel, as the first spin of a spiral that "surveys the same spiritual territory but from a [progressively] more commanding height." As Adam Kirsch, who wrote this essay, notes, Amerika is the least commanding height; the Trial and the Castle would later encompass more of our guilt, and understand our complicity in a way that the more defensive Amerika fails to.

This Fun Essay About a Topic was a good one. As for the rest of the NYTBR, well, I will admit that this first week was not the best, and that I did not (ahem) technically read all of it. Or really any of it, apart from that thing about Amerika and the review of Downtown Owl by Chuck Klosterman, which failed to be totally excoriating and thus determined that I will end up reading Downtown Owl. Which leads me to want to say another thing about why the NYTBR on Sundays is so great: the reviews. What's so great about the reviews, you ask me, those are in every day excluding Saturdays! Well, I say, these aren't just any reviews. They are like the Judicial Branch reviews. Every day, Janet Maslin, Michiko, and those other guys show up lay down the book review laws. Then, once a week, in rolls the big shots, reviewing books that may or may not have been reviewed by the everyday guys, doing whatever they please. Interpreting the laws. So anyway, hopefully soon I will have more things to say about the reviews. But for now: don't necessarily avoid Downtown Owl.