I’m terrible about reading real books now, but I was pretty good back in the day, and I read “The Corrections”. I thought it was Don DeLillo for totebaggers, but I liked it a lot. I didn’t love it that much, though (I didn’t think it was humorous or poetic at all), so I’m curious….how did Jonathan Franzen become the official author of the New York Times?
I’m a tl;dr type of reader these days, and I know that’s bad, and it’s bad that I’m asking this question too, but here goes: why do totebaggers like such long books? Do they really read them all the way through?
ranchandsyrup
They’re elaborate but heavy props. They don’t even read them. smh.
beltane
Totebaggers like whatever they are told to like by the taste makers at the NYT Book Review just as their political opinions are informed by the the columns of Mr.s Brooks and Friedman.
catclub
Who would you pick as the NYT writer? he has been around fora long time now – 25 plus years – has not blown up or gone crazy.
Seems like a safe, respectable, long lived choice. Also a white guy from the US midwest – which would have nothing to do with it.
DougJ
@catclub:
I guess I’d prefer the official NYT reader to be a cynical New Yorker, or maybe better yet cynical former New Yorker who left because of the housing prices and hot yoga and so on.
benw
I feel like everything’s getting longer. The swollen page counts of “serious” literature are peanuts compared to what’s happened in fantasy and sci-fi these days.
I had to look up totebagger. At first I thought I am one, but then I read a little more and maybe I’m not.
Terry Guerin
It’s a short-fingered, Trumpian question, Doug, one you might hear in the green room before the next Republican debate.
DougJ
@Terry Guerin:
Are the moderators going to ask the candidates if they’ve read “Purity” yet?
beltane
@DougJ: I’m one of those cynical former New Yorkers who left because of the high housing prices. As I’ve grown older, I’ve become way to cynical to be an official NYT reader.
Culture of Truth
I tend to avoid long books for simple reason that they’re too heavy to carry around. I did read DeLillo though. I thought it was okay.
Lots of kids read the Harry Potter books, and those are pretty long.
I recently saw the miniseries “The Pillars of the Earth” and liked it, which made think I might have liked the books.
schrodinger's cat
I saw Franzen yesterday on the Snooze hour. He seemed pretty smug and full of it and the interviewer Jeffrey Brown was like a giggly fangirl. Franzen calls global warming/climate change a vague issue not apparently as important as saving the birds (he is a birder).
I haven’t read anything by him after watching the interview, I don’t know if I want to. I mean it is possible that he is a good author even if he is not such a great specimen of humanity. I usually don’t read much fiction and when I do, its usually dead British authors.
DougJ
@beltane:
I still love to visit, and it might be my favorite place in the world, but it’s a once great city now.
DougJ
@Culture of Truth:
DeLillo is hit or miss in general, but White Noise is pure genius.
BGinCHI
Franzen is a good writer but his subjects are white people with white people problems. If that also defines the “comedy of manners”-type novel then you have him squarely in a tradition that stretches back a good distance.
Personally I can’t stand the characters or their “problems.” It’s like reading the terribly overrated John Updike, but with less acid and worse prose.
There are SO many better writers, but people in book clubs hew to the safe middle where no one gets offended and no one has to get upset.
Roger Moore
@benw:
People learned from JRR Tolkien that gigantic series sell, and they’ve never looked back. I think there’s an assumption that once you get readers hooked, you can drag a series out indefinitely and they’ll never stop buying. That certainly seems to be the MO behind things like The Wheel of Time and Song of Ice and Fire.
BGinCHI
@schrodinger’s cat: I like writers who are assholes, but not writers who are boring assholes.
Culture of Truth
I’m not sure books are getting longer. There was Clan of the Cave Bear, and before that James Michener, and before that there was “War and Peace” and the Iliad.
DougJ
@BGinCHI:
That’s my problem with Franzen, I can’t get into his characters. I have the same problem with Updike. I realize that’s subjective. I have trouble relating to WASPy characters in general.
schrodinger's cat
@BGinCHI: Is he a one trick pony like Jhumpa Lahiri? I liked her first book of short stories but none after that. Basically she is writing about the same topics and the same people again and again. Bengali academics in the eastern United States and their entitled and spoilt children.
Boring.
schrodinger's cat
@DougJ: I read NYT religiously, although I am not New Yorker and I am plenty cynical and not just of the NYT.
BGinCHI
@DougJ: It’s all Cheever’s fault. Wait. Edith Wharton and Henry James!
James is a great example of a really great writer who just leaves me totally uninterested. I just honestly don’t give a shit about the characters and their world.
Again, there are SO many alternatives, both for books published a long time ago and right now.
If you haven’t read Hilary Mantel’s first two books in the Cromwell series, please do so. They are fucking lights out good.
Also, for those here looking for a terrific read, please pick up the novel “HHhH,” by Laurent Binet. Just trust me on this one.
Amir Khalid
I guess the real fans of literature do read books all the way through, but the poseurs don’t bother.
I seem to remember an episode of The Rockford Files or some PI show like that, where the murder victim was a Kerouac-like writer whose one published work was a “classic” everyone admired but no one had read.
Terry Guerin
They’re CNN hacks and would frame any question about Fransen, an actual great American novelist, the way you did. With a sneer at elitist readers and a wink to the low-info crowd.
BGinCHI
@schrodinger’s cat: Exactly right. Same with Claire Messud. I just don’t care who is doing what to whom in that form or fashion.
It’s like they are either unable or too chickenshit to write a murder mystery where a bunch of those people get murdered. Now that I would read.
DougJ
@Terry Guerin:
I wasn’t seeing the elitist angle here. I was just curious why the NYT talks about Franzen so much and about all other writers so little.
dedc79
Delillo’s Underworld is a monster of a book, but I don’t think I’d change/cut a thing.
And for those of you who are fans of baseball and history and haven’t read it yet, well, you’re missing out.
BGinCHI
@Amir Khalid: James Joyce was in the Rockford Files??!!
Man, I can’t believe I missed that episode.
DougJ
@BGinCHI:
I like Cheever. If WASPs are sufficiently alcoholic and depressive, they become interesting. And I admire how concise and precise he is.
geg6
Franzen is a raging asshole, not to mention a very mediocre writer, IMHO. The Corrections may have been a fun book in the hands of a writer with a sense of humor, any knowledge or understanding of women and who wasn’t quite so self-important. From the reviews I’ve read (and you’d certainly call them positive reviews), it doesn’t sound like he’s gotten any better at it.
I don’t read much fiction, but I think I’d rather read Jennifer Weiner than another self-important book about horrible people.
Peale
Now that we have sparknotes and wikipedia, I find very few reasons to read a book. The bullet point versions are fine.
Amir Khalid
@BGinCHI:
All I really remember is that the writer was played by Anthony Zerbe.
dedc79
As for why fiction has gotten so long, I wonder if it’s that editors have become very timid when dealing with popular “talent.” It’s a profession that is completely under siege.
beltane
@BGinCHI: I’ve read a couple of Mantel’s earlier works and they were also wonderful, though creepy. She does have a deep understanding of working class life, which distinguishes her somewhat from all the writers who focus on various flavors of upper-middle class angst.
Betty Cracker
I thought “The Corrections” was okay but overrated. I LOVED “Freedom” — thought it was the best book I’d read in a decade, though only one of the several people who read it at my urging agreed. Just started reading “Purity” yesterday evening, so it’s too early to form a definite opinion, but so far, it hasn’t grabbed me like “Freedom” did.
It’s true that Franzen tends to focus on middle-class white people and their middle-class white people problems. Like serial killers, authors tend to hunt within their own demographic. I don’t think he has an obligation to have a more racially inclusive set of protagonists, but as a reader, I do feel an obligation to seek out more diverse perspectives.
BGinCHI
@DougJ: I would agree, actually. I meant that people like Updike, who purported to follow him, did so in a much more sanitized way. Writers like Cheever and Yates, and with a slightly different set of interests, William Maxwell, had so much more blood in their writing veins.
Carver, of course, took this whole thing and injected the working class nastiness it needed.
geg6
Assumes facts not in evidence. I’ve read his shit. It sucked.
DougJ
@geg6:
I don’t think he’s mediocre, but I agree he’s not great with women characters.
I’m sort of fascinated by the NYT thing where it’s “how does Jonathan Franzen capture the world we live in now?”. They used to do that with Tom Wolfe too.
MattF
I think the NYT reviewers are ex-English majors whose goal is to bridge that irritating gap between ‘literary’ and ‘popular’.
To be a little clearer about terms here, ‘literary’ books are difficult and make you think, while ‘popular’ books are entertaining. Franzen is the NYT pet because he is not particularly entertaining and therefore not ‘popular’, and he is difficult in the sense that it takes a long time to get to the last page– if you actually read all the words between the first page and the last.
BGinCHI
@Betty Cracker: There is just such a sameness to all of them. But perhaps that says more about contemporary America than it does about Franzen’s abilities to conjure characters.
I read the first 40 pages of Freedom and it just did not entice me to care about the plot or characters. It was like a soap opera with a script by a good writer.
I think the deal for me is that I not only want more conflict, but I also want a different kind of conflict.
Hillary Rettig
http://www.salon.com/2015/08/21/jennifer_weiner_slams_jonathan_franzen_for_believing_iraqi_war_orphans_exist_solely_for_the_moral_edification_of_white_men/
relatedly, this was published in the pre-JF era, but I think some people on this thread would dig it:
http://www.amazon.com/Readers-Manifesto-Pretentiousness-American-Literary/dp/0971865906/
Terry Guerin
” I was just curious why the NYT talks about Franzen so much and about all other writers so little.” By any fair measure, they don’t.
ReplyReply
benw
@Roger Moore: It’s ironic that the Lord of the Rings and Foundation trilogies, the two benchmarks for “epic” fantasy and sci-fi series, respectively, are made up of relatively short, quick-reading books.
Also, anecdotally, I think that assumption is wrong. Almost all of my friends are fantasy/sci-fi fans at some level, and we’ve all quit both Jordan and Martin, some of us pretty early on in the series. Maybe the later books are still big sellers.
BGinCHI
@DougJ: It’s the “we” that bears all the weight in that sentence.
dedc79
@BGinCHI: Re Carver, Cathedral was the first story we discussed in my college creative writing seminar and i’ll never forget that opening:
DougJ
@MattF:
It makes me sad that that’s what it’s come to, though I realize lazy non-readers like me have helped cause it.
I used to love to read old NYT book reviews. I read some amazing ones, a put-down of “Catcher In The Rye” written completely in the style of Holden Caulfield, a review of “Across the River and into the Trees” calling Hemingway the greatest writer in English since Shakespeare.
There was a time when our culture cared about books, and had strong opinions (positive and negative) about them even within the pages of very conservative (culturally, not politically) media outlets. Now it’s mostly eat-your-vegetables.
neonnautilus
Couldn’t get through the corrections. Found it very boring and haven’t tried anything of his since then. I probably should purchase a couple of the tomes, though, and used them in my weights and balance class.
jl
DougJ is getting a little carried away with the totebaggger stereotype.
Look into Brooks long enough and eventually, Brooks looks into you, DougJ.
DougJ
@BGinCHI:
Yup. What you mean we, Kakutani?
Roger Moore
@MattF:
I think of the difference between literary and popular a bit differently. Literary works are ones where you’re supposed to admire the prose, while popular works are ones where lots of people enjoy the story. It is actually possible to have both, but there are certainly lots of wordsmiths with a poor sense of story and great storytellers with mundane prose.
BGinCHI
@DougJ: This also captures for me the larger paradox of newspapers circa 2015:
I lament their demise, but every time I read one (one of the big ones, esp.) I can’t wait for them to go the fuck out of business.
Indy
The Life and Adventures of Mr. Anderson.
Just heard about it, it’s a forgotten novel from 1750’s America, written by an Englishman who lived in Maryland for a while. Basically about a man (Anderson) who had the whole Robert Louis Stevenson “Kiddnapped” thing happen to him- taken to Maryland and sold as a white slave / involuntary indenture, he moves on, becomes a frontiersman and indian trader and a generally successful and wealthy friend of all humanity. Or something like that.
Forgotten, due to having a frank depiction of slavery and decent portrayals of various non-white people being looked down on in the mid-18th century.
Princess
Purity got panned on NPR a day or so ago so #notalltotebaggers. Myself, I haven’t gone near him since I put The Corrections down after reading about 100 pages. And I love long books. The longer, the better.
BGinCHI
@Princess: I was floored when I saw that Alan Cheuse was killed in a car accident!
I have mixed feelings about his tastes sometimes, but he seemed like a hell of a sweet guy.
Elizabelle
NYTimes from 2007: Remembrance of Things Unread:
I’d always thought Kinsley’s messages were on interior pages of Salman Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses”, but same diff. Cuz later in the article:
DougJ
@Princess:
Maybe I should check it out.
dedc79
@Elizabelle: About ten years ago, I was reading The Satanic Verses at a coffee shop in Washington DC owned by two Pakistani immigrants, when one of the owners approached me and asked if he could look at the book. I handed it to him, he thumbed through the book for a few minutes and gave it back to me, commenting, “This book was banned where I grew up, and I just wanted to see what all the fuss was about.”
Elizabelle
@BGinCHI: I know.
But then they go and perform a public service every now and then.
The NYTimes’ recent expose on the 85 hour per week corporate culture at Amazon HQ (Amholes, etc).
The WaPost with excellent economics of the middle class reporting by Jim Tankersley. A great series (by someone else) on older DC residents losing their homes.
Which makes paying for a digital sub worthwhile, even while wincing at the NYTimes’ latest “Oh noes! Hillary emails” and having treated Rick Perry as a more formidable candidate than Bernie Sanders. Who is that for?
Paul in KY
@Culture of Truth: Charles Dickens wrote a couple of tomes.
Elizabelle
@dedc79: Cool story.
So: are you now the ONLY person I know to have actually read that book? Did you finish it? Was it good?
@Indy: Wow. I’d like to see that novel on Mr. Anderson. Possibly available in a PDF version. I will look for it. Thank you.
Betty Cracker
@DougJ: I think he’s pretty damn good with women characters, at least some of the time (example: Patty in “Freedom”). Franzen seems like such a twit personally (from what I’ve read) that I was surprised at how believable some of his female characters were to me, since it’s been my experience that self-important twits typically lack the empathy required to gain insights into a perspective outside their own direct experience.
Paul in KY
@jl: So true, so true…
DougJ
@Elizabelle:
I like the NYT a lot, on balance. I wish they’d let up on the Clintons and have fewer articles about the rich and not-quite-rich-enough. But there’s a lot of great journalism they produce and it would be a disaster if they went out of business.
Paul in KY
@Elizabelle: Woooo, a whole $5. I’ll start looking thru big books at my library.
dedc79
@Elizabelle: I did finish it, but honestly, I feel like I knew far too little about the Koran and Islam to understand why it was so controversial.
If you’re thinking of reading Rushdie, go with Midnight’s Children (about the India-Pakistan split) over Satanic Verses.
Roger Moore
@benw:
I didn’t say that people learned the right lesson from LOTR. For one thing, as Tolkien himself said, it’s really not a series but one novel published in three volumes, and it was written that way. I also gave up on both WOT and SOIAF because they were dragging on too long. It is actually possible to write enormous series successfully- I greatly enjoyed the Malazan Book of the Fallen, for instance- but it’s tough. It seems to me that it only works if the author follows one of two plans:
1) Write an actual series, where the books are capable of standing as independent works that just happen to share a setting and possibly some characters.
2) Have a detailed plan at the beginning and enough discipline both to stick to that plan and to get the books out quickly enough that the fans don’t give up from the wait.
I think the Diskworld series is a great exemplar of the first, and the Harry Potter series is a good example of the second. I wonder how much of the wordiness of the later Potter books is the literary equivalent of Pascal writing a long letter because he didn’t have the time to write a shorter one. I suppose it’s also possible to do a series of series, like the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, where each series is small enough not to drag out forever but the author can afford to spend time plotting between the series because fans don’t expect a new one to come out right away.
Haydnseek
@dedc79: Underworld is about baseball about as much as Moby Dick is about whales.
catclub
@Betty Cracker: I would recommend ( and am thinking about re-reading) Gospel by Wilton Barnhart. It is a travelogue and mcguffin search, also fun. I enjoyed it. The anti-credit to American Express ( they cancelled his card while he was in southern Egypt) is notable.
High school mate wrote it.
Brachiator
@BGinCHI:
I feel the same way about “The Great Gatsby.” I can acknowledge the mastery of James and Scott Fitzgerald, and still note that the works don’t quite do it for me.
I will make a note of the Laurent Binet work, for when I have a chunk of free time for a good book.
@dedc79:
This seems to be the case with Stephen King sometimes.
I remember reading James Clavell’s “Shogun” in almost one sitting. A big book, but not overlong. I absolutely understand the book’s appeal and the later success of the subsequent TV miniseries. I went back and read his “King Rat,” which is very short and compact. But then there was the later work, “Noble House,” which had to be around 1,000 pages. Clavell must have slapped editors around and convinced his publisher that the book should be sold by the pound. I don’t think I ever finished it.
MattF
@Roger Moore: I’ve been reading Stross’s ‘Laundry’ novels; they’re a series, so things happening in earlier novels affect the later novels, but the novels are relatively independent of each other. I actually started reading in the middle of the series and then went back to the beginning. It worked because Stross is fun to read and the characters are interesting.
Betty Cracker
@geg6: This comment reminds me of my part in the surprisingly acrimonious discussion around the “Mad Max” reboot. Opinions differed there too!
Eric
@beltane: nitpicky, but it’s messrs.
gogol's wife
@BGinCHI:
My pre-bedtime hours this summer were spent reading Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies for the second time. I’m ready to read them a third time, and a fourth, and . . . . She’s the only contemporary writer who makes me read every sentence at least twice and enjoy the experience.
gogol's wife
@BGinCHI:
LOL
Haydnseek
@Peale: This is snark, right?
catclub
@Princess: I loved the struggle and reward of Proust, and Joyce. I have read them more than once. Divine Comedy is another GUB that I have really enjoyed. John Ciardi translation.
Roger Moore
@MattF:
There’s obviously a long history of series where the individual books are intended to stand alone rather than forming a giant overarching story. The example that springs immediately to mind are the Sherlock Holmes books, and I think it’s pretty common in mystery/detective fiction in general.
bluefoot
@dedc79: I have to second the recommendation for Midnight’s Children. It was excellent.
I started The Satanic Verses, but couldn’t finish it. Not because it wasn’t good, but because parts of it were hitting too close to home and it was messing with my head, so I had to put it aside.
Cheap Jim, formerly Cheap Jim
@schrodinger’s cat: You mean like Amy Tan’s novel about Chinese immigrant mothers’ and their American daughters’ inability to communicate? Yeah, I’ve read that one under more than one title.
schrodinger's cat
@Elizabelle: I have not read any of Rushdie’s books but I his essays and articles about India are spot on. He gets India, like almost no author writing in English does.
sophronia
@Betty Cracker: I think your observation really explains Franzen’s appeal. He’s a self-absorbed twit, but he’s still got enough native intelligence to realize that he’s a self-absorbed twit and to see himself semi-objectively. He describes people like that very accurately. So if you are like that, you think he’s God; if you know people like that, you think he’s great; and if you hate people like that, you want to throw his books across the room.
I haven’t read Freedom although a good friend who is a voracious reader thought it was fantastic. I did read The Corrections and found it hit or miss, with some truly moving prose buried in a lot of trendy yammering.
Haydnseek
@Betty Cracker: I agree. I thought freedom was very good. I big, naturalistic mainstream novel in the grand tradition. While on the subject, Betty, I know you’re a music fan. Please, if you have time, try to read Evening’s Empire by Bill Flanagan. I would be very surprised if you didn’t love it.
Geeno
@BGinCHI: What did Gerry Cheevers ever do?
Elizabelle
@dedc79:
@schrodinger’s cat:
Thank you both. Putting “Midnight’s Children” on next year’s reading list, and will keep an eye out for Mr. Rushdie’s good essays on India.
(Miss Cat: that would be an excellent blogpost, would it not? And I still have to read your India Company blogpost and I will, this very week. Had a passel of sisters in town over the weekend. With accompanying drama from one of them …)
kped
I just got done with “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold”, and i was more than happy with it’s story, which came in at a brisk 223 pages. I don’t run away from long books, but reading something like that, makes me wonder why seemingly every modern writer feels the need to put out 900 page “epics”.
Tom Q
Wow, a lot Opinions here.
I’m with Betty, that I sort of liked The Corrections, but I loved Freedom.
Don’t understand the Updike hostility — though, to be fair, I mainly know him for the Rabbit books, all of which I think are wonderul.
To paraphrase what Roger Ebert said once about movies, no good one is too long and no bad one is too short. I find William Styron’s books ludicrously over-written, but it probably means I don’t really like his stories that much. On the other hand, I just finished over 700 pages of Yanagihara’s A Liitle Life, and I’m only sorry there wasn’t more of it to read.
dedc79
@kped: The ending to that book is a punch to the gut that I will never forget.
Kerry Reid
A friend had the best description of Franzen that I think applies to a lot of authors: “magnificently competent.” I read “The Corrections” and enjoyed it in the way that I might enjoy snacking through a bag of mediocre bridge mix. And it bugged me that he stole the talking-poo thing from “South Park.”
I am thinking of re-reading “Lanark” by Alasdair Gray, since I just read that there is a stage version going up in Glasgow.
Tom Levenson
For the record (on a dead or dying thread) my next book, to be released on November 3, is ~46,000 words long — about 180 pages, not counting notes and bibliography and such. A perfect stocking stuffer if I do say so as shouldn’t. (The Hunt For Vulcan, Random House, Nov. 3, 2015)
Eugene Hill
i do not know anything of the author/book you are posting about. however i like books that require mental effort. not in the sense of hard to read because the author cannot write, but in the sense of a rich environment, complicated narrative etc. i do not however like a book just because it is long and complicated. i also do not adhere to specific genres, even fiction vs. non fiction.
Denali
Took Pat Conroy’s Beach Music and Bruce Chatwin’s On the Black Hill on vacation. Black Hill won by a long shot.
benw
@Roger Moore: I enjoyed Tad William’s Otherland series. 4 doorstops, but it actually ended!
Aardvark Cheeselog
@Culture of Truth:
I’m pretty sure books are getting longer. As somebody above noted, “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold” came in at 250-odd pages, which was pretty typical for novels of the day. I just went to Amazon’s list of new and upcoming titles: after eliminating a videogame guide and a comic book, none of the top 15 are less than 400pp.
I blame word processors. Back in the days of pen and paper you had to be seriously masochistic to write a magnum opus, and even with typewriters the difficulty of making a “clean copy” for submission was a real obstacle for long works. Now the only limitation seems to the number of pages that the bookbinding machines can handle.
kped
@dedc79: How’s the movie? I’ll be honest, not a huge fan of movies made pre-1970 (acting was too stage for my liking, just a taste thing). But I loved the story, the triple cross, just fantastically plotted.
Keith G
Interesting. Does Part-time love bring you down as well?
I do read, although my Totebagger membership has probably lapsed. I will let you know how Purity is. It’s up next on my list, but it will be a while before I start as I am about 1/5th of the way through The History of the Medieval World: From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade. After several lengthy histories, it’s time I get back to fiction.
I like Franzen. I don’t get the hate out there. The fiction authors I have gotten to know (through their work) are by and large an odd lot at best and many are at least borderline insufferable. Franzen seems downright jovial by comparison.
dedc79
@kped: The movie is good but suffers from some of those pre-1970ish tendencies that you identify.
I am almost always anti-remake, but I find myself wishing that someone would give this one a shot.
BGinCHI
@Geeno: What DIDN’T Gerry Cheevers do??
Still, he was no Murray Bannerman.
BGinCHI
@Tom Levenson: You magnificent loafer.
shell
Due to mobility issues, its been several years since I’ve been down to my local library. But I just got my li card renewed and am enjoying downloading books and free audio-books. But theres one thing I forgot about public libraries; the books you always really want are always out! ;-)
Got a couple of hold for the past few weeks but am still waiting.
Chris
@Roger Moore:
Interesting; in my case, I loved the Hobbit and have reread it quite a few times, but can’t seem to make it through the Lord of the Rings series.
kped
@dedc79:
Honestly, I’m not anti remake. The original gets exposure, and sometimes, the remake is better. No one takes the original away. I’m more annoyed by the modern “reboot” where they take something (usually a comic book movie), and restart it 3 years later. But a remake, especially of a 1960’s movie, or a foreign movie that no matter how much we wish, no one will ever see? I say go for it.
Debbie
@Betty Cracker:
Good thing you didn’t hear his interview on “Fresh Air” this week. His self-reverence is maddening.
redshirt
@Tom Levenson:
It’s true, you know. Books still exist. For now.
redshirt
@Chris:
My enjoyment of LOTR was more about his descriptions of lands and trees and meals and food and naps and so on. The little stuff. JRRT created a whole new mythological world and we’re living in it today, and will be forever more I think.
Full metal Wingnut
@MattF: I think Chabon straddles that “literary”/”popular” line well.
Michael57
@schrodinger’s cat: Franzen actually had an interesting and persuasive case to make that overarching fears about global warming put ordinary conservation efforts at risk. It was in the New Yorker. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/04/06/carbon-capture