BOOKPATHS

New Hampshire, U.S.

Boyd Tonkin talks with John Irving, whose latest novel, Twisted River, is “set amid the many perils of the New Hampshire logging camps in 1954.”

Via a cousin in the logging business, Irving tracked down veterans of an almost Homeric way of life, of feats and feuds in a 'world of accidents' where death stood no more then a torpedoing tree-trunk, a cracking ice-sheet or a bar-room brawl away. 'These men – they didn't just survive a very rough way of life. The drinking, the diet was so self-destructive. Most of them smoked and drank themselves to death if they didn't die in the rivers.' It took effort to find an old-time log-driver alive, alert and literate enough in English to read Irving's manuscript – many in New Hampshire were French-speaking Quebecois. Meanwhile, he unearthed the buried remnants of transient townships on sites where steam-powered logging engines still sit and rot deep in abandoned woods: 'It is like finding the skeleton of a dinosaur.' – from “Cooking Up a Storm: John Irving’s Latest Saga Reveals the Secrets of Authors and Chefs Alike,” by Boyd Tonkin, The Independent

The Arctic

Sara Wheeler discusses The Magnetic North, “a tale of the people and landscapes contained within the Arctic Circle.”

[Sara Wheeler] ‘In contrast, I was very unnattracted to the Arctic because it was everything the Antarctic wasn't. It was owned, it was polluted, there was lots of oil and all sorts of miserable people, it was just not something that interested me. Years went by and I went to other places; I went to Africa and did this and that, and then I became middle aged – I'm almost 50 – and I started thinking about the Arctic. Of course, it is all those things, and that more suits the elegiac melancholy of middle age, where everything is fragmented. I'm not interested in idealism any more, I'm interested in reality.’ – from “Life in a Cold Climate: How Sara Wheeler is Shaking Up Arctic Exploration,” by Emily Dugan, The Independent

World

On last week’s Bill Moyers Journal, Mark Danner talked about his newest book, Stripping Bare the Body: Politics, Violence, War; “Obama’s challenges in resetting the mindset of American from war to peace; and redefining the US as a nation.”

MARK DANNER: I wish I could -- you know, there's this sense, and I say this in the book, that the wonderful voluptuous thing about reporting, the great voluptuous pleasure of it, is that you will look at a place from afar and it will seem-- will think you understand it. You will look at Iraq and you'll say, ‘My God, look at what's going on. I understand it. Well, I can say to you this and this and this?’

And as you get closer, as you set foot on the ground, as you talk to people, tens of people, you know, scores of people, as you travel around, as you see what's going on the ground, bit by bit, your certainty is stripped away, and you know less and less. Until you reach a moment, a couple weeks in, usually in my case, where you've been bombarded with sense impressions.

You've been bombarded with opinions. You've been bombarded with descriptions. And you suddenly think, I know nothing. I know nothing about this place. And that is a wonderful place to reach because you've achieved a kind of tabula rasa. You know, now I can try to understand it on my own terms. It's a wonderful thing about reporting, but unfortunately, it's not necessarily very good at understanding the ultimate ontological questions that you push-- that you just put to me. – from Bill Moyers Journal Website

San Francisco, California, U.S.

Bruce Weber reports on San Francisco’s Litquake.

It was, over all, a pep rally, an emblem really of the school spirit that San Francisco literary life has established in the last decade or so. And though the city has a venerable history in letters, the community of writers has never been as, well, communitylike as it is today. Like the thriving theater culture in Chicago, which coalesced around a few key companies and created an important center for the art form without becoming a rival to New York City as a center for theater commerce, so San Francisco’s writers have come to recognize and trumpet the idea that this city prizes their craft, its solitary difficulty and what can emerge from it, even though there isn’t much of a publishing industry here. – from “In Praise of Amy Tan and San Francisco’s Literary Life,” by Bruce Weber, The New York Times

United States

Lisa See considers three novels by Japanese-American women – Summer of the Big Bachi, by Naomi Hirahara; My Year of Meats, by Ruth Ozeki; and The Age of Dreaming, by Nina Revoyr.

I'm drawn to novels by Japanese-American women. They write about the same things that I do: love, race, identity and history — and its effect on the present. Yet their stories couldn't be more different from mine. – from NPR Website

United States

Julian Barnes explains why he thinks John Updike’s Rabbit quartet “is the greatest postwar American fiction.”

Any future historian wanting to understand the texture, smell, feel and meaning of bluey-white-collar life in ordinary America between the 1950s and the 1990s will need little more than the Rabbit quartet. But that implies only sociological rather than artistic virtue. So let's just repeat: still the greatest postwar American novel. – from “Running Away,” by Julian Barnes, The Guardian

Patrick Kavanagh Rural and Literary Resource Centre, Inniskeen, County Monaghan, Ireland

The Patrick Kavanagh Rural and Literary Resource Centre honors the life and work of Ireland's celebrated poet.  It’s open from early June to late September and for special events, or by arrangement, during the rest of the year.  See the Centre’s website for visitor information.

The Centre houses exhibitions on local history and on Kavanagh, a sixty-seat Audio- Visual Theatre, and a Research Library. Also on view are twelve specially commissioned   paintings illustrating Kavanagh's epic poem ‘The Great Hunger’, a miniature model depicting Kavanagh's classic, ‘A Christmas Childhood"’ Kavanagh's Death Mask and other memorabilia associated with the poet.

The special feature of the Patrick Kavanagh Centre is the unique performance tour of Kavanagh Country, which takes in many local sites immortalised by Inniskeen's most famous son, with anecdotes, historical facts, wild rumours and even the odd poem along the way. – from The Patrick Kavanagh Centre Website

(Photograph from Discover Ireland website.)

The Quantock Hills, the Brendon Hills and Exmoor, England

Follow in the footsteps of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834).

Walk 36 miles through the stunning Somerset countryside of the Quantock Hills, the Brendon Hills and Exmoor, a landscape that inspired Coleridge to produce some of his best known work. – from The Coleridge Way Website

Newark, New Jersey, U.S.

Philip Roth joined participants on the October 17th “Philip Roth’s Newark” bus tour.

Philip Roth came home again Saturday, which is not so unusual because he’s been a frequent visitor in recent years. 'As you get older, you get closer to home.' Roth said this as he entered the Newark Museum yesterday as the surprise guest on a bus tour of Newark. Now 76, the man once called one of America’s greatest authors is now called America’s greatest living author as contemporaries like Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer and John Updike have passed on in recent years. – from “A Tour of Philip Roth’s Newark Includes Surprise Visit By the Author,” by Mark DiIonno, The Star-Ledger

Tarrytown and North Tarrytown, New York, U.S.

As Halloween “looms,” Tarrytown and North Tarrytown are the perfect, “eerie,” destinations.

Tarrytown, which sits high on a hill and has majestic views of the Hudson River, claims as a native son none other than Washington Irving, the author of 'The Legend of Sleepy Hollow' and other spooky tales. Its sister village, North Tarrytown, voted to rename itself Sleepy Hollow in 1996. So a visit to both villages is worthwhile, especially as Halloween looms and Irving’s tales come to life — at least in the imagination. -- from "On the Trail, an Eerie Tale," by Kate Stone Lombardi, The New York Times