my mind on books

How Fiction Works by James Wood (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) is an Amazon pick for “Best of the Month” for July 2008 and due to be released on the 22nd (though already available in the UK).

Product description from the publisher:

What makes a story a story? What is style? What’s the connection between realism and real life? These are some of the questions James Wood answers in How Fiction Works, the first book-length essay by the preeminent critic of his generation. Ranging widely—from Homer to David Foster Wallace, from What Maisie Knew to Make Way for Ducklings—Wood takes the reader through the basic elements of the art, step by step. The result is nothing less than a philosophy of the novel—plainspoken, funny, blunt—in the traditions of E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel and Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. It sums up two decades of insight with wit and concision. It will change the way you read.

Here is Wood’s review of Atmospheric Disturbances at the New Yorker (Atmospheric Disturbances is the “neurofictional” book I’m reading right now).

For those (like me) who might need a little more help, or just enjoy reading about reading, another recent title is How to Read Novels Like a Professor: A Jaunty Exploration of the World’s Favorite Literary Form by Thomas C. Foster (Harper, 2008).

Nabokov scholar Brian Boyd (University of Auckland) in “The Art of Literature and the Science of Literature” suggests that “Art is a form of cognitive play with pattern….” (The article mentions an upcoming book called On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition and Fiction but it doesn’t appear to be in the “pre-order” stage yet.)

This article “Consciousness as Content” by Gary Johnson uses the term ‘neuronarrative’ for neurologically or cogsci-oriented fiction, which here I’d earlier termed “neurofiction.” The novels discussed in the above article are Thinks . . . by David Lodge and Richard Powers’s Galatea 2.2: A Novel.

io9 has a good list of science fiction novels “that will rearrange how you think”; read down into the comments for more suggestions.

Maybe it’s a little off-topic but I couldn’t pass by without mentioning Sharp Teeth by Toby Barlow, a verse novel about werewolves(!), the subject of the review of the day at Powell’s.

Website for the book.

Meanwhile at Metapsychology Online Reviews, From Knowledge to Wisdom gets an enthusiastic endorsement.