Books

One phenomenon which has swept pop culture media as of late is a replacement for the classic “Let’s count down the 10/20/50/100 best examples of something or other of all time!” article as a way of ranking the greatest somethings or other. Instead, websites from Grantland to Vulture have swiped the NCAA Bracket model, picking the 64 greatest songs of the Millennium or television dramas and having readers vote to knock them out one by one until only a single example remains. If the seeding process is even less scientific than the NCAA model (How did they decide to pit The Wire against My So-Called Life in round one?) it’s still no more random than sticking “Tower of Song” one spot ahead of “Waiting for the Miracle” when Flavorwire picked the 79 best Leonard Cohen songs of all time. And allowing the audience to have their say makes it a bit more fun, giving one a reason to care about something arbitrary. The reason for bringing up the subject is that Entertainment Weekly recently did a bracket which I found out about a little too late…okay, just after the Final Four had been cut to the ultimate Two…but I was attracted to right away because it touched a subject dear to my heart, and I think the hearts of my colleagues and our own readers as well.

The 64 Greatest Young Adult Novels of All Time

Naturally, this could not escape some commentary on the level of Alex and I’s dissection of the Sight and Sound poll last year, for even more than cinema, there were books on this list which will forever be associated with key moments of my childhood, my personal growth as a writer, and inspiring thoughts on love, life, the universe, and everything. Douglas Adams does not appear on this list, by the way, though you could argue if any of his work could be defined as young adult, and even then he is NOT the most glaring omission. That being said, quibbling over the reduction of the shelves upon shelves of literature I used to keep in order at Barnes & Noble to a scant 64 titles is not the game I wish to play, especially because the field got one very important thing correct right away, and which made this bracket a worthwhile endeavor.

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Travis isn’t the only one with associates.

I’m the one member of the staff here without a degree from Bowling Green. I fell in with these other motley characters when Alex and I met at grad school at the University of Chicago. And I still remember the first day our precept groups convened–there was a tall, thin, earnest man in my group who discoursed at length but so wisely, never with a trace of boredom, about all of our discussion topics that in a single moment I realized I had to step up my intellectual game more than ever, if he represented the standard for our program.

Later, he told me he just talked a lot when he got nervous.

That was after Adam Osborn and I had become friends. He actually lived in the Addison vicinity after we all finished school, only moving for the greener, brighter pastures of Auburn for doctoral work, but we have never lost touch and I’ve followed his work with much pleasure.

Recently, I read a book partly on his recommendation which captivated me in ways I didn’t expect. For certain reasons you’re about to hear, it is a book designed to be a very personal experience…and for that reason I wanted to discuss it with one who had also gotten enraptured by its magic. So on what happened to be my parents’ 34th anniversary, we hopped on GChat and had a three-hour conversation on Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus.

What follows is a transcription, slightly edited…particularly our tangential expression of frustrations over George R. R. Martin.

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My excellent colleagues have all published equally excellent articles since our endorsement by the AV Club, and I have regrettably been the last to the party. I’m upset about this; the Recorder is one of the finest things I do in my life and the company I keep with it is wonderfully rewarding. That being said, I have an excuse: I spent the past month and a half hard at work on my second graphic novel.

(For those interested, and I don’t think the guys would mind me making a little plug, I’ll be signing copies of my first graphic novel, An Elegy for Amelia Johnson, at the Archaia Comics booth at C2E2 in two weeks. Come by and say hello!)

In the process of writing this work, I’ve been doing a fair amount of reading which led me to a particular observation.

My new comic is modeled on the (auto)biography, the life story, and as an aide and inspiration to the writing process I dove headlong into a variety of renowned books from the genre, some of which I’d read before, most of which I hadn’t. Those who remember my piece on Lytton Strachey know that part of the article involved chronicling Strachey’s variations on the traditional model of the biography: treating it as a closely-structured satire, heavily-detailed series of specific impressions, and stagelike grand romance. But further reading has shown me that there are variations within variations, and the traditional model itself, the straightforward life-to-death narrative, is not that straightforward.

Indeed, given its popularity on the bookstore shelves in subsets ranging from scholarly historical documents to more salacious memoirs, the biography at first glance seems an easier task than the novel: you have a ready-made structure and you get to work with known facts instead of making things up. But writing a biography is a messy task, especially when you don’t know the subject, especially when the subject is long dead, and even those who did know the subject may be hindered by agendas, excessive reverence or disdain, or just a plain inability to write. (James Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson becomes more and more, in my eyes, the most miraculous book ever written every time I think about it: a writer very close to the subject who could write within the conventions of his time while still slipping harder truths between the lines, and writing with a magnificent, inviting, yet still complex style.)

Equally amazing that a man who had at least fifteen cases of gonorrhea in his life found the energy to write a masterpiece

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