Steve Kettmann's Blog: Writers Helping Writers

Originally published https://medium.com/biblio/why-the-mar...

Mark Zuckerberg, guilty of the crimes of being too powerful and too rich for someone with so little seeming experience of the world, can’t seem to catch a break so far with his recently launched book club, A Year of Books, which anyone with a Facebook account can follow.

The Washington Post checked in with a choking-on-its-own-snark update, headlined “Mark Zuckerberg’s book club is off to a pretty lame start,” which cast aspersions on the Zuckerberg effort to get people to read, claiming “the Internet” reacted “hysterically” to its launch. Damn, I hate when Internets do that. Reporter Caitlin Dewey then went on to point out — uh, is anyone still new to Facebook? — that the social media giant’s platform actually sucks when it comes to hosting a coherent discussion string.

Well, in fairness, this graf was pretty good: “Among the 137 ‘questions’ that followed: several requests for a pirated PDF of the book, a conspiracy theory involving Saudi social media and the price of oil and a photo of a Maltese wearing a frilly dress, along with many more on-topic, but still fairly stupid, questions.”

Even the New Yorker, weighing in via a Talk piece, seemed more interested in meandering remembrances of (cue up some sappy music) the glory days of Oprah and her original Book Club, the publishing world equivalent of the first days of girls screaming their lungs out for John and Paul and Ringo and George, with not much time to ponder what this choice by Zuckerberg means. So here are some points to ponder.
Mark Zuckerberg is actually reading books

OK, OK, now I’m the one going snark, but it’s a serious point: I’m the author of nine books, including four Times best-sellers as a co-writer/ghost, and I’ve been repeatedly bowled over the last decade by the doom and gloom in New York publishing. There was a craze to fret that e-books were going to ruin traditional New York publishing! Then there was a boom in talking up e-books as the financial salvation for New York publishing! Then came the fussing over modest growth in e-book sales! Like moon-faced high school sophomores staring goggle-eyed at the captain of the cheerleading team and not even noticing the book-loving knockout next door with the killer sense of humor and great smile, far too many key players in New York book publishing talk themselves into a desperation that justifies spending huge sums to snag this or that trend-of-the-moment title that won’t earn out but might make people feel good in-house for a while. It’s all stupid and self-defeating when the real task at hand is simple: Get back to your core mission of celebrating book reading, in all forms, and getting people to read. We need influential people to talk up book reading. We want them all to start book clubs and bring people along for the ride. We want this not because of the dream of Oprah-esque instant best-sellers to make lots of money, but because every time someone dives into a book, we always have a good shot at creating another passionate book-reader. Better to go reader by reader than forever stare up into the glare of stratospheric super-best-sellers.
Other book clubs will pop up via social media

I’ve been scratching my head in recent weeks whenever I check in at Facebook, which (admittedly) is not that often any more: Every day, I have new followers for a modest little effort I started at Facebook years ago called the Baseball Book Club. I’m a baseball author myself, and love baseball books. Activity at the site had pretty well flat-lined, then I started noticing new likes. On January 16 there were 14 new likes, then seven more the next day and nine more the day after that. This for a site that just cracked 600 likes total. I’ve asked these new arrivals to my book club what brought them, and the answer was “Facebook.” My theory: the surge in interest in Zuckerberg’s club is having a spillover effect. Prediction: Soon many more will launch their own book clubs via social media, San Francisco crime fiction to Maine minor-league baseball to cross-dressing surfers. In fact, have you considered starting your own book club? Why wait?
Time for some new technological bells and whistles from Facebook propeller heads

I’m willing to bet that even as I’m typing out these words, one or more tech wizards at Facebook are noticing that the big boss needs some help with the functionality of his book-club page. There has to be a way to tweak the software so that my tiny Baseball Book Club and Zuckerberg’s massive-and-growing A Year of Books (272,923 likes as of today) offer a more hospitable environment for consideration of the book at hand, instead of so much that is random and jumps all over the place. And if Facebook introduces such changes, it will be an improvement in the site that emerges not from some devious back-room scheming about long-term money-making or data-mining, but out of a comparatively unambiguous impulse to serve the community.
Zuckerberg’s tastes are going to evolve

Oprah famously started out recommending books that tended to meet certain criteria, and with time, her tastes broadened. She recommended books no one expected her to recommend. I can see why Zuckerberg has started with meaty ideas books like the current choice, Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. He might consider Ahmed Rashid’s brilliant Descent Into Chaos as well. But he has a year of book-reading ahead of him and sooner or later, he’s bound to want to mix it up. Maybe a little California history? Or some Latin American fiction?

I for one think Zuckerberg deserves a little credit for going to the trouble to get people reading, and whatever comes of this experiment, I count it as all to the good. I know I’ll be watching his choices with interest — and I’m even going to step in and offer some thoughts at the Facebook page for the club. Not that anyone will notice …

On the death of a friend, we should consider that the fates through confidence have devolved on us the task of a double living, that we have henceforth to fulfill the promise of our friend’s life also, in our own, to the world.
Henry David Thoreau

The temptation is strong to turn those we love and lose into monuments. In the weeks after their death we seek solace from the pain of loss, and turn toward that pain, again and again, like a ship pointing its prow toward an onrushing nor’easter. The risk is that in seeking to brace ourselves against the ravages of feeling that pain, we turn to the pain too often, we seek it out, we come to need it as a companion through our days, and tell ourselves that in letting the pain become us we are honoring the one we have lost. We are not. We are living our own inner drama.

My father, my mother and my three brothers and I all spoke at my sister’s memorial service earlier this month on the University of Colorado Boulder campus. I was last up, and paused a moment before deciding what to say. My sister, raised in snowless San Jose, California, always loved snow; it made her feel alive. Outside, a heavy snow was following as we remembered her and it felt like a beautiful cosmic gesture.

The snow made me think of James Joyce, and I considered trying to recite the last paragraph of his greatest short story, which burned in my mind as I stood there, but not word for word. Here are those words now: “It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, on the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”

Instead, in my remarks, I talked of my sister as a mother, and also reflected on how it’s not enough to remember those who have been great friends to us, great mentors, but also to let their presence be a living, ongoing component of our lives. We want to stand with Thoreau in focusing not on our pain or loss or the reduced capacity that both bring, and instead on the responsibility we have – to the departed loved one, to ourselves, to life itself – to be strong and brave and lean into the daily choices that go into being there for other people. To engage in this kind of double living, as Thoreau put it, is not merely to add to the richness of life, but to multiply it.

The American Transcendentalists were important to my sister Jan and me when we were both in or near our twenties. We spoke of Thoreau and Walden Pond, and in founding the Wellstone Center in the Redwoods with Sarah Ringler in 2012, I was in essence taking a half-step to Walden (you’re welcome to come and visit us). For Christmas in 1981, when I was nineteen, she gave me a small hardcover of Emerson’s “Self-Reliance,” which she inscribed, “Thank you very much for your support as I struggle for ‘self-reliance’ and you have all of my support as you do the same.”

Jan did have her struggles, as we all do. I was thankful to a man named Willie who spoke up at the memorial service to talk of having had a conflict with Jan, and how she reacted afterward (scolding him, in effect, for believing for a second that a disagreement could in any way diminish her respect and love for him).

If we are to live up to Thoreau’s challenge and live out a commitment to the best in those we love and lose, we must also continue to see them for the three-dimensional, flawed figures they were. What I know for sure about my sister is that she was often caught in the trap of having not enough time, and that she faced hard choices, and surely suffered from them: She could not be there for everyone, could not reach out to maintain every close contact she cherished, and yet still she gave of herself so much she often ended up exhausted and sick with a cold.

I think the way to honor her best is to live the healthy life she valued – spiritually healthy, emotionally healthy, balanced and present – to the greatest extent possible. I will ask for her help in this: Thanks to the vision and generosity of my parents, Nancy and Gerard Kettmann (that’s him in the picture), and the fine work of my brother, we were able to enlist the services of wood artist Del Cover to construct a bench that we have placed on the back slopes of the Wellstone Center, alone looking out on a stand of redwoods. It’s a calm, beautiful spot where I once sat for a long, passionate, loving conversation with my sister: Visiting that spot now, I feel her presence like a hand on my shoulder and I feel her love of nature encouraging in me a sense of calm, of peace, and of joy.

Jan’s life was amazing in many ways, and her accomplishments were impressive; her legacy as an education researcher will live on. But for me the path to the kind of ongoing relationship, the double living of Thoreau, is to focus on what she and I loved together and to let that be enough. She was not more than human. She was very human. She was my sister. I’m thankful her spirit remains so palpable a presence to so many of us, especially near the redwoods – it will be strong in the Redwood Grove her daughter Heidi is seeking to have dedicated to her at Big Baisin, and, for me, especially on the bench bearing her likeness in a small redwood forest near Santa Cruz, California.

This blog also appeared here: http://www.wellstoneredwoods.org/stev...

An Excerpt From NIGHT RUNNING, http://www.amazon.com/Night-Running-E...

BY STEVE KETTMANN

I kept glancing up at the tall Gothic lamps spaced out every so often on the trail gently curving through the gloom of the Plänterwald. I knew from past runs that these lamps would soon disappear from the side of the trail as I made more progress. The run up to this point had been almost disappointing in its lack of drama. I was amazed at the feeling I had of my feet and legs knowing the way all on their own without much input from me. This was my regular run, but I was also a beginner and had probably only done the route fifteen or twenty times. That was enough for my body to go on auto-pilot. I'd come through the little park fronting the Spree River and headed up over a railroad bridge toward Treptower Park with a postcard view of Berlin's comic TV Tower, the iconic Fernsehturm, looming a few miles downriver, its dimpled dome making me smile with "Jetsons" associations. As an American living in Berlin I never got tired of the "Let's do the Time Warp" feeling of looking at the TV Tower and feeling pulled back into the past. It was as if it was October 1969 again and, Communist Party leader Walter Ulbricht was celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the German Democratic Republic by all in one day marking the opening of the Fernsehturm and then throwing a switch to bring color television for the first time to GDR residents. Modernity had arrived! Somehow that eager embrace of the future, that hungry pursuit of progress in technology, felt so sad and funny, from the perspective of so many years later, so forlorn and misguided. Putting such thoughts aside, I was glad to veer sharply left at the far end of the bridge and run along the bank of the river.

I had been carried along by the giddy sense of release that came with doing something I didn't think I would do, running at night, even though the largest obstacle through the first miles was that of feeling like a loser. Whenever it's summer in Berlin there are always legions of people out enjoying themselves, beers in hand. I kept passing little groups of these types who would look at me sideways and smirk or say something rude to the gray-haired loser jogger dude out for a run at such an hour. I'd run about four miles, the last of it along a pebbly stretch of tree-bounded trail that was completely dark, when for the first time I had a sense of foreboding. I could hear snickering and something like caterwauling up ahead.

I kept my eyes moving, not really scanning, since when you're looking around in the dark you really don't see much of anything, but keeping them moving anyway, just in case. As I kept running I caught glimpses of the glow of a fire, eight meters back from the trail, and of forms huddled around, clinking beer bottles and making the loud, growling sounds that for some reason young German men with beer in their bodies like to make. It is an unnerving sound, embarrassing in the way it calls to mind the desperate need for release that explains bursting forth with a sound so feral. It is also of course a sound that advertises menace or threat. This was mostly an abstraction, since street violence of any kind was basically unheard-of in Berlin. For someone who had lived a year in the Bed-Stuy neighborhood of Brooklyn, a block away from where Biggie Smalls used to sling crack (and this before gentrification started to transform the neighborhood), there was something deeply comic and ludicrous in the idea of German boys from middle-class families trying to look tough.

I smiled to myself at the Bed-Stuy comparison as I kept running. But I'll admit, my pulse quickened. I had so loved the feeling of being alone in the quiet night of Berlin, it felt like a small violation, these loud revelers. Then I was past them and it all seemed so stupid. They didn't care about me. I didn't care about them. Losing yourself in a run meant never having to care about any of that. On a purely practical level, I was warmed up and in gear and if anyone felt like menacing me I could sprint past them and off into the night in seconds. This was an aspect of night running, the feeling of venturing into some new realm, where what would normally alarm you might soothe you instead and where what would soothe you most of the time might seem suddenly alarming. But I was still going. The night was still enveloping me in its pregnant calm. In almost no time, as I ran deeper into the dark along that riverside trail, the memory of the fire and the rowdy little group flickered into a point of recollection and then vanished.

Jon Stewart can’t do it all alone. The Daily Show has evolved toward more open-minded consideration of the issues of the day and less outright comedy because Stewart still thinks honest people of good faith can cut through the nonsense and figure out problems in a way any reasonable person can admit makes sense. Colin Woodard’s American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America pulls off the unlikely feat of both offering the tools for just such a broader, deeper understanding—and demonstrates why, in a larger sense, that effort is doomed.
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Many readers will be skeptical at first, and I was, too. No doubt Thomas Frank (What’s the Matter With Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America) and others have done valuable work in looking deeper than the familiar red state/blue state divide to try to explain why people in different regions think and vote the way they do. But come on! Eleven nations? And right there in the map on the cover of Woodard’s book, we can see that the bottom half of Florida has simply been ignored, included in no “nation,” left uncolored as if by a kindergartner who got called to recess before he or she could finish drawing.

In fact Woodard pulls it off. He compellingly lays out his vision of why it makes sense to throw state boundaries out the window for the most part and think instead of 11 nations, each defined by its history, by a common culture and set of assumptions about government and life. I always hated the term “Left Coast,” the way any self-respecting San Franciscan hates the term “Frisco,” since it seemed to carry the hint that even someone like me, fourth-generation Californian on both sides, was somehow not part of America. Yes, Woodard explains, that is exactly right: “Left Coast” culture, running in a coastal strip from around just north of San Luis Obispo, California, up to British Columbia, does in key respects stand apart from “the Far West,” “El Norte,” “First Nation,” “New France,” “the Midlands,” “Greater Appalachia,” “the Deep South,” “Tidewater,” “the New Netherlands,” and “Yankeedom.”

"The United States is a federation comprised of the whole or part of 11 regional nations, some of which truly do not see eye to eye with one another."

“America’s most essential and abiding divisions are not between red states and blue states, conservatives and liberals, capital and labor, blacks and whites, the faithful and the secular,” Woodard writes in his introduction. “Rather, our divisions stem from this fact: the United States is a federation comprised of the whole or part of 11 regional nations, some of which truly do not see eye to eye with one another … Few have shown any indication that they are melting into some sort of unified American culture. On the contrary, since 1960 the fault lines between these nations have been growing wider, fueling culture wars, constitutional struggles, and ever more frequent pleas for unity.”

The key to the book’s effectiveness is Woodard’s skill—and irreverence—in delving into history with no qualms about being both brisk and contrarian. New Yorkers, for example, are not always going to feel great stirrings of pride in reading about the history of New Amsterdam, especially the period shortly before the Civil War when residents of Manhattan were far from the forefront of anti-slavery. Yankees come off the worst, though, as important as they have been to U.S. history, and Woodard seems particularly aghast at their eagerness to claim the U.S. narrative as their own. He takes glee in pointing out that rebellion in the North American colonies against the rule of a distant king started not in the 1770s, but in the 1680s, and not “as a united force of Americans eager to create a new nation, but in a series of separate rebellions, each seeking to preserve a distinct regional culture, political system, and religious tradition threatened by the distant seat of empire.”

Rather than playing around with his concepts, Woodard focuses most of the book on giving the history of each of his 11 nations; we’re more than 250 pages in by the time he finishes off the “Founding the Far West” chapter. What could have been an entire book-length riff of its own, “The Struggle for Power,” gets squeezed into two short chapters near the end, in which Woodard explains how the balance of power in the U.S. has shifted based on how swing nations align themselves—either with the northern alliance of Yankeedom, the New Netherlands and the Left Coast or with the Dixie alliance, the Deep South and Greater Appalachia joined by the “junior partner” Tidewater. The better we understand the orientation of each of the nations, the better we can grasp the way individual politicians have set about cobbling together support.

“George W. Bush may have been the son of a Yankee president and raised in far western Texas, but he was a creature of east Texas, where he lived, built his political career, found God, and cultivated his business interests and political alliances,” he writes. “His domestic policy priorities as president were those of the Deep Southern oligarchy; cut taxes for the wealthy, privatize Social Security, deregulate energy markets… Meanwhile, Bush garnered support among ordinary Dixie residents by advertising his fundamentalist Christian beliefs, banning stem-cell research and late-term abortions, and attempting to transfer government welfare programs to religious institutions.”

I’d have preferred to see more application of the ideas to contemporary politics, but maybe that will have to wait for the next book. In the meantime, American Nations may not leave much room for optimism about our dysfunctional political dynamic improving any time soon, but in offering us a way to better understand the forces at play in the rumpus room of current American politics, Colin Woodard has scored a true triumph. I am going to order copies for my father and sister immediately—and I hope Woodard gets a wide hearing for this fascinating study.


This review originally appeared at:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles...

Even people who do not have half-written novels stashed away in old desks or old computer files can be forgiven for reacting to much-hyped new novels with a groan and then reading with a flicker of hope that the book will turn out to be a dud. I had some of that in recent months reading Jennifer Egan and Tom Rachman, but loved both their books, so figured maybe with Chad Harbach's "The Art of Fielding" I was due to really dislike an over-hyped book.

Instead I loved it -- and I think Harbach has succeeded in writing a book that has major importance -- and will be influential -- both in the context of American novels and baseball writing. That's no mean feat.

First, to the baseball part -- there are two major risks to writing a baseball novel, one, that you can easily lose the baseball-loving reader with one false note, and two, you can lose everyone else if the balance between "baseball" and "novel" tips too far toward baseball, as if the work in question were only a fictional exploration of a sport without the Frankenstein's monster spark of life that turns a novel into a living entity unto itself.

Harbach avoids both these pitfalls and does so with a disarming lack of self-aggrandizement. The story he tells of a talented pipsqueak shortstop befriended by a big, beefy catcher on a mission, who ushers him into the world of fictional Westish College and becomes much more than a mentor, moves far beyond baseball or sports, including also surprising narratives on the college president and his daughter. I for one found all Harbach's main characters likable and intriguing; I wanted to know them.

At the same time even as a former professional baseball writer, one of those guys who gets paid to sit in the press box and write about hundreds of games per year, I found Harbach's baseball imagination thrilling and authentic and unforced. There is a way in which one can write from inside the game, or inside a deep connection to it, and Harbach does that, describing sequences on the diamond with a taut, unapologetic fondness.

Beyond that, though, baseball lives inside of him -- and it shows. It can get dreary to start talking about life lessons culled from baseball, but the fact is, as a game of disappointment, a game of failure, baseball does have the power to teach. One of its most important lessons can be summed up in the difference between a pitcher who can throw a great fastball or curve and a pitcher who knows how to pitch: Put simply, often during the heat of a game, a bad pitch is better than a good pitch if it works in a larger sequence. Put another way, looking impressive with a given pitch is never the point; knowing how to pitch often means going through a whole game without ever wowing anyone with a single delivery, but understanding in an uncanny way how they all fit together.

Even in his baseball terminology, Harbach -- like his shortstop Henry -- puts together a dazzling streak of successfully making a play (forming a phrase) without the slightest hitch. He does make one odd bobble, which doesn't quite count, because it comes in the form of dialogue between his baseball players, but here it is:

"'How's he looking, Meat?'

"'He's poppin' it, Mike. Really poppin' it.'

"'Deuce?'

"'Poppin' it."

A deuce is a curve, and no ball player I've ever talked to -- that would be hundreds -- would refer to a pitcher popping a curve. A fastball is poppin', yes, absolutely, and you always hear coaches talking about a hitter with pop, which means a smallish guy who can hit for power. Does this all sound like quibbling? It might be -- the point is, it's the only place in the entire 512-page novel where even the tiniest quibble could be raised on Harbach's baseball bona fides, and that's an astonishing feat given how much fun he has with his baseball scenes.

"The next Amherst hitter walked to load the bases," he writes late in the novel. "Up came a lefty, thin as a toothbrush, who held the bat straight over his head as if trying to catch lightning. With the count 2 and 0, he hung back on a big slow curveball and punched it the other way, just past a diving Boddington."

My sense is that Harbach's novel comes along at a time when baseball writing as a whole needed a reminder about the primacy of narrative and character -- the elements of good fiction. There was a war going on for a while in baseball writing, where fans of Bill James were arguing that people like scouts and traditional baseball writers really knew nothing about the game -- and only the smart new breed with their statistical analysis knew what was what. Whoever might have been right or wrong in that debate, arguments about who is right and who is wrong are boring -- much more interesting are stories that make you care about what happens next on a baseball diamond, even when there are twists and turns you could not possibly have anticipated or predicted.

I had the feeling throughout the novel, and maybe this was just me, that Harbach was not really writing about baseball at all, but rather, the magic of creativity, of being a writer. All of his characters love books, even Henry, the shortstop, whose early life has been defined by his reverent rereading of a fictional nonfiction baseball book called, yes, "The Art of Fielding." Book love saturates the story, especially in the musings of the college president, Guert Affenlight.

"Nineteen seventy-three," he reflects at one point. "In the public imagination it was as fraught a year as you could name: Watergate, Roe v. Wade, withdrawal from Vietnam, Gravity's Rainbow. Was it also the year that Prufrockian paralysis went mainstream -- the year it entered baseball? It made sense that a psychic condition sensed by the artists of one generation -- the Modernists of the First World War -- would take a while to reveal itself throughout the population."

Later on the same page, he continues his thoughts: "Literature could turn you into an asshole; he'd learned that teaching grad-school seminars. It could teach you to treat real people the way you did characters, as instruments of your own intellectual pleasure, cadavers on which to practice your critical faculties."

I agree that literature can turn you into a jerk and I think in its way the quote comments on novelists who know too much about writing-school-polished techniques and not enough about life or how people really are. There is a quality in Harbach, open, searching, not convinced he has all the answers, that makes me think "The Art of Fielding" is much more than a promising debut, but that rarity even among highly touted novels by young American writers, a book that could serve as the foundation for a long and thrilling career as a novelist.




This review originally appeared at Huffington Post Books:

my link text

Here's a must-read title for anyone who loves books -- and thinks that the time has come to get vocal about that love, to share it with others, to take it new places, instead of accepting the tired drone of doom-and-gloom prognostication from certain elements in New York publishing circles:

Tolstoy and the Purple Chair: My Year of Magical Reading, by Nina Sankovitch, a first-time author.
Sankovitch found herself in a deep funk after her sister died young from cancer. Who can blame her?

The twist is what she chose to do with her grief: She funneled it into a daffy, crazy notion, namely, that every day for a year she would read a book and post an online review of that book all in real time. Plenty of people have had such notions. Sankovitch really did it -- with an assist from her obviously patient husband Jack.

The book that emerges from this year of heavy reading is as memorable for its depiction of the progression of Sankovitch's grief as for her thoughts on individual books she has read. "My year of reading one book a day was my year in a sanatorium," she writes. "It was my year away from the unhealthy air of anger and grief with which I'd filled my life. It was an escape into the healing breezes of hills of books."

For me at least the passages that tend to lift off the page most consistently are those in which she writes about her sisters and her parents -- especially her accounts of her father's wartime experiences. She uses these evocations to pull into focus her larger theme of book love as something boundary-busting and transformative, a larger force than love of any one book or any one author.

"As Nick Hornby counseled me, way back in February, in his book Housekeeping vs. the Dirt , 'One of the problems, it seems to me, is that we have got it into our heads that books should be hard work, and that unless they're hard work, they're not doing us any good,'" she writes, then adds: "But all the books I read, the hard ones to work through and the easy ones to devour, were doing me good, lots of good. And bringing me pleasure, lots of pleasure."

I applaud Sankovitch for going for it on book-reading in a way so few people do. I happen to think that books matter more than ever in the Age of Twitter with attention spans forever being sliced and diced every which way; books are our one chance to fill out our thinking -- and our feeling -- in a relaxed and thorough way that might actually stay with us for years or decades, not milliseconds.

I think instead of sitting around and debating whether books are dying, or being marginalized, people who love book-reading ought to look at changing their lives and encouraging book-reading and book-buying in ways large and small. Start a book group! Give nothing but books as gifts! Become a regular here at Huffington Post Books, or sign up at Goodreads.com. Watch less dumb TV, spend less time at Facebook, sleep less -- time can always be found.

Authors like Sankovitch and my friend Sara Nelson, whose So Many Books, So Little Time: A Year of Passionate Reading I also thoroughly enjoyed and recommend, are starting and deepening a conversation about books -- and that's a conversation we as a culture need to have deepened.

Book by book my tastes line up more with Sara Nelson, I think. Sankovitch read a book by Carl Hiaasen, one of my favorite writers, and dismissed him breezily with some talk about Florida weather -- when to me he's our answer to Mark Twain, a first-rate satirist with important points to make. But I didn't mind at all feeling like I was having some disagreements with Sankovitch; that's all part of starting a conversation.

Most of all I am thankful to get glimpses into the worlds of many writers I have not yet read. Edith Wharton, for example.

" The Touchstone is about morality and identity, as are all of Wharton's books," Sankovitch writes.

"She is the master of pulling back the curtains of propriety and custom to reveal the duality of life, the struggle between publicly identifying -- 'finding' -- oneself and deliberately hiding what is private or shameful in an effort to bolster respectability, wealth, and most important, security. Wharton enveloped her insights on human nature within page-turning plots of love, intrigue, and betrayal."

Sounds pretty interesting. I might have to go read me some Wharton -- and many of the others covered here.

So if you love books, give this one a shot -- or give it as a gift. You can also follow Sankovitch's blog, if you want to sample her writing on books.

What is the absolute worst way to try swimming two-plus miles from one end of Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro down to the other, actually making landfall at Leme Beach (here)? That would be thrashing your lower body around in the water with big, frantic kicks, like someone hoping to scare off a great white.

Yet that is exactly what an alarming number of the swimmers at the annual Travessia dos Fortes Swim in Rio, the largest mass ocean swim of its kind in South America, did on Sunday, instead of just taking easy, smooth strokes and gliding through the water, which is what I was at least trying to do.

(Here is what the start looked like as part of USA Today's photo gallery of the "Day in Sports" for Sunday, April 3.)

OK, it was alarming to me - doing my first swim of this kind, not counting the Run-Swim-Run in Santa Cruz, California, many years ago.

To me, the only point in doing things like crazy open water swims or half-marathons and marathons is to have it all be free and easy, almost relaxing. That does not mean one has to be slow, exactly. Last month at the New York Half Marathon I started the event on a crisp, beautiful Manhattan morning shoulder to shoulder with the Wolverine of "X Men" fame, that is, Hugh Jackman (who was self-mocking and charming and friendly in a low key way with everyone in the vicinity and was running for charity, too). I, a dude who got into the running thing a couple years back at age 46, have to admit I took some pleasure in smoking the Wolverine in the New York Half, finishing in a not-that-slow 1:47:55, well ahead of the Wolverine, who finished in 2:05.52.

Back in New York last month, where the undulating ups and downs of a lap and a half around Central Park were something new for someone used to training in flat Berlin, and again on Sunday in the churning water out in front of Rio's famous Copacabana Beach, I reminded myself of what a lazy person I am and how that has worked for me: Too lazy, that is, to slack off, but also too lazy to run or swim in that rough, jerky way of people trying to prove something.

Even before I read Chris McDougall's I-can't-recommend-this-book-enthusiastically-enough Born to Run last December, I had for the previous year been approaching outdoor exertion with the idea that I never wanted to push myself. I saw it more as being pulled along by the fun of the thing.

To fans of Born to Run, this will make sense - and if it all sounds like claptrap, like some kind of way-too-California-everything-is-beautiful nonsense, then I would say: Read the book! Now! Or very soon!

McDougall was tired of having sore feet all the time. He started off on a quest to learn how the Tarahumara of Mexico's Copper Canyon area could run so far, so fast, and have so damn much fun doing it. I had the weird feeling reading the book that it was a book springing out of just what I had been exploring on my own the previous year.

Not too much is more boring than hearing of others' fitness pursuits - especially when those others are in their forties and beyond - but the fitness part of this is only a part: The real point is about doing what you love in a way that makes all that boring hamster-on-a-treadmill, pushing-yourself stuff just fade away, evaporate, vanish, really.

I was never a runner, beyond a little burn-off-the-hangover type stuff in college and one go-out-too-hard-and-try-to-hang-on 10k in my mid-twenties. Then on a dare of sorts with my good buddy Pete Danko, I ended up training for the Berlin Marathon in a few months and actually finishing the thing.

I can't give Born to Run credit for that. I had not read the book yet. But the same message in the book was what had enabled me to dispense with all the voices inside saying "You can't do this" and "Hah! Hah! What an idiot you are even to try this!" and most of all "OW! That hurts!" Learning to ignore these internal voices is something that can make anyone and everyone enjoy their lives more.

I wish McDougall would consent to bringing little groups together for weeklong pursuits of the Tarahumara Way, which is to look for a tranquility and calm and ease and fun in running - or whatever - not in some showy, look-at-me way, but with the grin and cackling laugh of a five-year-old running after a cat to go pull on its tail.

Back to Rio and the big swim this weekend: I had only flown down from New York less than forty-eight hours earlier and my friend Andi took a look out his balcony at the rain and clouds over Copacabana Beach and said, "You can always do it next year!" I was not officially registered for the event, since they had closed out registration at two thousand entries - after two hours, that is! So it would have been easy to bag it.

Instead, I went with the Tarahumara Way, which to me means doing it not because I felt like I should or I would regret not doing it, but because I wanted to give my body that experience that day, the sensation of being part of a swarm of bodies in the ocean, all making their way together across one of the more spectacularly beautiful oceanfront settings you'll ever see. I did it for fun and it WAS fun.

I have bought Born to Run to give to several family members already and will keep giving it to people: It is a book about living, a book about breaking out of pointless old patterns, but above all a book about joy and freshness. Chris, if you want to come swim the Travessia dos Fortes next year with me, you know where to find me.


This blog also appeared at Huffington Post:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steve-k...

As I noted over at Huffington Post, I don't think I was alone this week in having a strange reaction to the news that the remains of Sean Flynn, a Vietnam War photographer who was also the son of the famous Errol Flynn, might finally have been found in Cambodia. Here's the link my link text to that post. The news brought to mind the portrait of the younger Flynn in Michael Herr's amazingly moving Dispatches and, I hope, will prod anyone who has long wanted to read the book - as I had, for a good 25 years - to pick it up and dive into its uniqueness and pain and insight and beauty.

The miserable winter here in Berlin, with snow on the ground pretty much every day from Sylvester straight through to mid-March, seems finally to be thinking of giving way to some springlike days and before long it will be another glorious spring in Berlin. I'm wondering if still more young Americans and other seekers will flood to Berlin this spring and summer, or if the wave that has built for many years, as Berlin's "It" city of the moment status has been built through affectionate coverage in places like the New York Times Travel section, might finally be cresting. We'll see. I'd just say this: If you're a writer, or want to be, and are looking for a place with strong echoes of history (and I don't only mean the jack boots - not by a long stretch) and a lively cultural scene, where food and rent are cheap, or cheaper than you're going to find in any other city with that great-world-city vibe going, then Berlin is definitely a great choice. People come and go and seem to benefit from the experience. I'm wondering when we're going to start seeing some great novels in English emerging from Berlin. I'm going to dig into Vladimir Nabokov's Berlin novels pretty soon and will write about that here. Maybe he will offer clues on where to look.