Books

I buy books by the armload, both new and used. Always have. We give them away by the bag-load, too, for causes we support that have yard sales and so forth.

I've bought some gems during 2012 and enjoyed them as always. I've also bought some that deeply disappointed me.

Gordon Bowker's James Joyce, A New Biography is no threat to Richard Ellman's famous earlier bio of Joyce. There is an odd sense of prudery about Bowker--as if a Puritan had chosen to write about such a frequently bawdy writer almost as a scold. Bowker's books isn't bad by any means, but rather than shell out the bucks for it, I'd get it from the library.

I've always loved Wallace Stevens's poetry. It is hard-edged and oblique, but it has a strange quality that keeps bringing us back. I think I may have tried to read Joan Richardson's two-volume biography of Stevens a long time back, but I decided to try again and bought both volumes through different used booksellers on Amazon.

Alas, even at a few bucks a volume, it's nearly unreadable. There is an awkwardness and thickness to her prose that makes one feel as if the books would be about 80 pages each if the vamping and speculation were cut out. Made me sad to find out I still can't read either volume.

By far my biggest disappointment of the year was a book with the modest title of Van Gogh: The Life, by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith. This book is massively researched and beautifully written, much like their biography of Jackson Pollock, one of the best biographies I've ever read. (As of this writing, I've read it three times.) And yet it is about someone I don't know. It is my opinion they hate Van Gogh. And I mean loathe. Whenever there were two ways one could interpret his actions, they chose the worse of the two. I've read Van Gogh's complete letters more than once, and the person who wrote those letters isn't in this biography. I'm not sure why, either.

But I finished the book and closed it, deeply disturbed and saddened that one of my heroes had been ripped off the frame of his life with such determination. I don't doubt their facts are solid. What I do not understand is why they came to dislike him so much. At any rate, while I still love their book on Pollock and will read it again, I will never again tough their Van Gogh.

But that's the book world. One never knows, but the joy of the search goes on.