It seems that Jonathan Franzen’s latest novel is all the rage...even though it hasn’t even been published yet. The New York Times has already published a lengthy review (by Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus no less), while other publications across the world weigh in as well. Tanenhaus calls it a “masterpiece of American fiction.” He writes, “Once again Franzen has fashioned a capacious but intricately ordered narrative that in its majestic sweep seems to gather up every fresh datum of our shared millennial life.” Even President Obama has been rumored to have received an early copy and is enjoying it on his vacation. By the way, the novel is called Freedom, and it doesn’t arrive in stores until Tuesday.

Yet, in the article I linked to above, Julie Bosman writes that some of the early praise has started a bit of controversy. Does the book deserve it, so soon? And does the New York Times (and other publications) favor the white male author over all others? She writes, “Within this Franzenfrenzy there is the whiff of Franzenfury, or Franzenfreude, as the novelist Jennifer Weiner has called it. She and Ms. Picoult have recently unleashed a steady stream of Twitter jabs about Mr. Franzen and The New York Times, charging that female novelists are unjustly overlooked by critics.

“Do I think I should be getting all of the attention that Jonathan ‘Genius’ Franzen gets? Nope. Would I like to be taken at least as seriously as a Jonathan Tropper or a Nick Hornby? Absolutely,” said Ms. Weiner in an interview that the Huffington Post conducted with her and Ms. Picoult. For Ms. Picoult’s part, “I want to make it clear that I have absolutely nothing against Jonathan Franzen,” she said in the interview. “I hope I read (‘Freedom’) and love it. None of this was motivated as a critique against him or his work, just that he is someone The Times has chosen to review twice in seven days.””

For a complete list of all that’s been said about the book, check out the post from Amazon’s book blog. A few highlights from that post include:

* Sam Anderson in New York: “Few modern novelists rival Franzen in that primal skill of creating life, of tricking us into believing that a text-generated set of neural patterns, a purely abstract mind-event, is in fact a tangible human being that we can love, pity, hate, admire, and possibly even run into someday at the grocery store.”

* Jonathan Jones in the Guardian: “This new book demands comparison rather with Saul Bellow’s Herzog or something loftier – it is self-evidently a modern classic.... Freedom is the novel of the year, and the century.”

* David Ulin in the Los Angeles Times: “For Franzen, this is the trick: not to outgrow who we are but instead to accept it, and in so doing, to accept the world of which we are a part. That’s the freedom to which the title is referring, the freedom at the center of this consuming and extraordinarily moving book.”

Franzen is scheduled to make an appearance here in St. Paul on September 21, as part of the Talking Volumes series. It is especially interesting in that the book is also set in St. Paul. It should be quite an event.

One last word from Tanenhaus about the book: “Like all great novels, “Freedom” does not just tell an engrossing story. It illuminates, through the steady radiance of its author’s profound moral intelligence, the world we thought we knew.” I can’t wait to read it. I’ve already got my copy pre-ordered.

Preliminary research is showing that people who buy e-readers are actually reading more than they ever have before. This recent article from the Wall Street Journal highlights some of the most recent data. From the story: “A study of 1,200 e-reader owners by Marketing and Research Resources Inc. found that 40% said they now read more than they did with print books. Of those surveyed, 58% said they read about the same as before while 2% said they read less than before. And 55% of the respondents in the May study, paid for by e-reader maker Sony Corp., thought they’d use the device to read even more books in the future. The study looked at owners of three devices: Amazon.com Inc.’s Kindle, Apple Inc.’s iPad and the Sony Reader.” By the end of September, 11 million Americans will own at least one type of e-reader, according to the predictions made by Forrester Research.

From Newsweek...

One of the more fascinating books I’ve read over the past few years regarding the subject of new media is The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information by Richard Lanham. An emeritis professor of English literature, Lanham looks at today’s evolving media environment not through the lens of technological development but rather at the ever-valued, and ever-depleting, of commodities: our attention. Here is a description of the book, which came out in 2006, from Barnes and Noble.

"If economics is about the allocation of resources, then what is the most precious resource in our new information economy? Certainly not information, for we are drowning in it. No, what we are short of is the attention to make sense of that information. With all the verve and erudition that have established his earlier books as classics, Richard A. Lanham here traces our epochal move from an economy of things and objects to an economy of attention. According to Lanham, the central commodity in our new age of information is not stuff but style, for style is what competes for our attention amidst the din and deluge of new media. In such a world, intellectual property will become more central to the economy than real property, while the arts and letters will grow to be more crucial than engineering, the physical sciences, and indeed economics as conventionally practiced. The new attention economy, therefore, will anoint a new set of moguls in the business world—not the CEOs or fund managers of yesteryear, but new masters of attention with a grounding in the humanities and liberal arts.”

I recently came across this interview with Prof. Lanham from the California Literary Review. Prof. Lanham, from the interview: “The common assumption runs deep. What is really important, really real, is the physical stuff of the world. Commodities. Substance. We dug and grew it in the Agricultural Age, and we built it in the Industrial Age. The allocation of such stuff, after all, is what classical Adam-Smith economics came on the scene to explain. The rest is just “Fluff,” style not substance, “rhetoric” instead of “reality.” But now we are in a third age, the Age of Information. Now we’re stuck, it seems, with the “everything else.” With the “fluff.” And the fluff sometimes seems to be more important than the stuff.

“The driver of the change, the earthquake that has caused the tsunami, is how we have come to think of physical nature itself, as information, information “as an active agent, something that does not just sit there passively, but informs the material world, much as the messages of the genes instruct the machinery of the cell to build an organism.” (Jeremy Campbell, Grammatical Man: Information, Entropy, Language, and Life, Simon & Schuster, NY, 1982.)

I happened to come across this article recently while browing the Web. I like the line of thinking it presents into the debate about the loss of the printed word--the idea that our personal libraries are a means of mapping our mental journies. The article doesn’t examine the idea of books themselves but rather the concept of the bookshelf.

Author Nathan Schneider writes, “Modern life, if we can still call it that, occurs as a sequence of gleeful apocalypses. One world constantly gives way to another. If it doesn’t, “consumers”—as people now call themselves—get anxious. We’re familiar with the drill: new audio/video formats arrive every decade; a new “generation” of cell phone every couple years; and, on a rolling basis, there’s the expectation that several totally unexpected paradigm shifts are in the works—the internet, global climate change, a new fundamental particle, and that sort of thing.”

If you enjoy the books of Alberto Manguel as much as I do, you will be familiar with this way of thinking about books and what they mean for our culture. For readers, the books on the shelf mean more than the information they contain; they are maps of our inner creation. Schneider writes, “In the age of inexpensive, printed books, our memory theaters have become both richer and more banal; we have entrusted them to our bookshelves rather than to tricks of mental contortion or cosmic schemata. As I look over my own shelf, I see my life pass before my eyes. The memories grafted onto each volume become stirred and awakened by a glance at the spine, which presents itself to be touched, opened, and explored. Without the bookshelf’s landscape to turn to, that manifest remainder from a lifetime of reading, how would one think? What would one write?”

I think I am rushing out to buy a new book this morning. It’s A Reader on Reading from writer Alberto Manguel, who just might be the most well-read person on the planet. Read more about him here. I’ve previously written (enviously) on this blog about his wonderful personal library in France. If you are unfamiliar with him, Manguel is a distinguished scholar and man of letters who has become known for writing about reading. I would highly recommend his previous book, A Library at Night, where he talks about the history of libraries as well as his love for his own private space.

Famed critic Michael Dirda writes about Manguel in this issue of Barnes and Noble Review. I like what he says in this paragraph about how Manguel describes writing: “Manguel the reader never quite expected to become Manguel the writer. Reading, he says in “Room for the Shadow,” “is a contented, sensuous occupation whose intensity and rhythm are agreed upon between the reader and the chosen book.” By contrast, writing is “a strict, plodding, physically demanding task in which the pleasures of inspiration are all well and good, but are only what hunger and taste are to a cook: a starting point and a measuring rod, not the main occupation. Long hours, stiff joints, sore feet, cramped hands, the heat or cold of the workplace, the anguish of missing ingredients and the humiliation owing to the lack of knowhow, onions that make you cry, and sharp knives that slice your fingers are what is in store for anyone who wants to prepare a good meal or write a good book.”

From More Intelligent Life, this interesting story takes a quick look at something I’ve always wondered about: What are some of the most popular books at those book stalls outside well-known New York bookstores?

Simon Akam writes: “Arriving in New York from Britain to study for a master’s, I spent a lot of time hanging around these stalls and soon saw the same titles cropping up time and time again—in particular literary American fiction by writers like Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Steinbeck. And so last autumn I set out to discover the most common title on secondhand bookstalls in New York, as a way to gauge literary tastes and trends. I chose four areas where booksellers congregate: the stretch of Broadway at 112th and 113th streets on the Upper West Side near Columbia University, Bedford Avenue in the Williamsburg neighbourhood of Brooklyn, West 4th Street outside New York University, and Sixth Avenue around 8th Street. In each location I catalogued two stalls, listing their collections by author and title. After several weeks I had a tally of more than 3,000 books.”

Here is what he found:

It practically goes without saying, but throughout history our nation’s presidents have been avid readers. This Washington Post article highlights some of the books that have helped shape presidential viewpoints over the years.

From the article, written by Tevi Troy: “In a historical sense, Obama follows a long line of ardent presidential readers, paging all the way back to the founders. John Adams’s library had more than 3,000 volumes—including Cicero, Plutarch and Thucydides—heavily inscribed with the president’s marginalia. Thomas Jefferson’s massive book collection launched him into debt and later became the backbone for the Library of Congress. “I cannot live without books,” he confessed to Adams. And it’s likely that no president will ever match the Rough Rider himself, who charged through multiple books in a single day and wrote more than a dozen well-regarded works, on topics ranging from the War of 1812 to the American West.”

In the past, I’ve blogged about some of the most interesting book stores around the world. Along that same line, this link shows some of the most interesting libraries across the globe. What great environments. This photo is from the Libray Parabola, which is the reading room of the British Library.

From the most recent New York Review of Books comes this wonderful essay on the Future of Publishing:

“Though Gutenberg’s invention made possible our modern world with all its wonders and woes, no one, much less Gutenberg himself, could have foreseen that his press would have this effect. And no one today can foresee except in broad and sketchy outline the far greater impact that digitization will have on our own future. With the earth trembling beneath them, it is no wonder that publishers with one foot in the crumbling past and the other seeking solid ground in an uncertain future hesitate to seize the opportunity that digitization offers them to restore, expand, and promote their backlists to a decentralized, worldwide marketplace…

“The resistance today by publishers to the onrushing digital future does not arise from fear of disruptive literacy, but from the understandable fear of their own obsolescence and the complexity of the digital transformation that awaits them, one in which much of their traditional infrastructure and perhaps they too will be redundant ...

“Digitization makes possible a world in which anyone can claim to be a publisher and anyone can call him- or herself an author. In this world the traditional filters will have melted into air and only the ultimate filter—the human inability to read what is unreadable—will remain to winnow what is worth keeping in a virtual marketplace where Keats’s nightingale shares electronic space with Aunt Mary’s haikus. That the contents of the world’s libraries will eventually be accessed practically anywhere at the click of a mouse is not an unmixed blessing. Another click might obliterate these same contents and bring civilization to an end: an overwhelming argument, if one is needed, for physical books in the digital age.”

It’s the end of the year and I think it’s time to throw my choice into the “best-of” mix. My choice this year is The Evolution of God by Robert Wright. I wouldn’t necessarily call it the best book of the year, or my favorite. But I am calling it my book of the year for its bold attempt to tackle a big idea. I have greatly admired all of Wright’s work; he writes those big-idea books that incorporate data and theories from across many fields of study.

Althought I don’t think any book or author can have the final say on religion, science and society, this book creates a unique framework for future study of how religion and culture evolved over the centuries. Wright builds on themes that he explores in some of his earlier books, primarily that of Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny--the idea that people enter relationships that are of mutual benefit. Does he come to a final conclussion as to whether he believes in God, or that God is a creation and function of societies? Maybe both. Here is how author ?? describes the book in this recent and thorough review of the book in the New York Review of Books:

“Wright thus offers what he emphasizes is a materialist account of religion. As he further emphasizes, the ways in which religion responds to the world make sense. Like organisms, religions respond adaptively to the world. More formally, Wright argues that religious responses to reality are generally explained by game theory and evolutionary psychology, the subjects of his previous books. Subtle aspects of the human mind, he claims, were shaped by Darwinian natural selection to allow us to recognize and take advantage of certain social situations. The most important of these—and the centerpiece of Wright’s theory—are what game theorists call non-zero-sum interactions. Unlike zero-sum games, wherein one player’s gain is another player’s loss, in some games both players can win; hence “non-zero-sum.” The classic example is economic trade. In a free market, trade occurs when both parties benefit from exchange (otherwise they wouldn’t engage in it) ...

“One consequence of the growing number of non-zero-sum interactions was that, through time, the “moral circle” expanded. While primitive man tended to view only his clan or tribe as fully human and so worthy of moral consideration, the ties forged among peoples via their cooperative interactions encouraged them to expand the moral circle from tribe, to ethnic group, to nation, and ultimately to all human beings.”