Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays / by Zadie Smith

Even for an accomplished writer and scholar, Zadie Smith, English author of the award-winning White Teeth and the later novel On Beauty, is quite a literary aficionado. She's also quite culturally aware, having reviewed movies for the Guardian newspaper earlier in her career and possessing an instinct for connecting art and society. With a reading backlog of literally thousands of classic fiction masterpieces, read and re-read dozens of times--take her essay on Eliot's Middlemarch for example--Smith is truly a reader's writer while at the same time a peer-approved scholar, elucidating what the concept of an author's work represents. Her latest non-fiction foray into essay display's her acute eye for effectual material from personal, professional and atypical perspectives. References to obscure intellectuals as well as contemporary comedians and satirists, presidents and peasants, round out the author's fascinatingly broad assortment of subjects. Keen to be objective, and yet contrary in her judgement, Smith also reveals bits and pieces of herself along the way, exposing a diverse influence of legendary authors and figures including her mother right along with the aforementioned Eliot, E.M. Forster, Zora Neale Hurston, Fouceault, Spinoza, Nabokov, Lehrmontov, Barthes, Kafka and David Foster Wallace. You don't have to be a writer, scholar, critic or even that much of a heavy reader to appreciate Smith's amusing, anecdotal and self-reflective prose. Her essays on her family, her intimate and curiously professional relationship with her mother and her appreciation for her father and his wartime experiences, are candid, touching and sure to interest anyone. (824.914 SMITH)

Twitterature: The World's Greatest Books in Twenty Tweets or Less / by Alexander Aciman

Is there anything that can't be done faster and with more abruptness? Apparently not. Even the greatest of the classic works of literature are never safe from the fast food mode of information dissemination we live with nowadays. Instant messaging, texting and Twitter have seemingly revolutionized communication to a point of no return. And so it's kind of an inevitability when you think about it that all "knowledge" will be streamlined before we know it. With this in mind, a couple of kids (both of them 19 at the time of writing) have taken it upon themselves to redo some of the world's best books (and plays and poems) ever. From the point of view of the major characters involved with a bit of of side-noting, each book is translated in Tweet-form, summarizing the gist of the story. For example, All Quiet on the Western Front / by Erich Maria Remarque, quite a "@Remarquable Tale" we're told, things start off with a nod to the now regrettable decision by the main character Paul to enlist in the German Army during World War I. "I've always heard 'Paul. Listen to adults, and teachers.' You too? We could be in Hamburg cracking open a Holsten instead."

On the cover of this book is a definition for the title--Twitterature: \'twi-te-re-,chur\n: an amalgamation of "twitter" and "literature"; humorous reworkings of literary classics for the twenty-first-century intellect, in digestive portions of 20 tweets or less. And that's just what it is. Some of the tweets are very funny; others are just plain silly and far more than just a few are really raunchy. Swiftness is key. Most tweeted book reports aren't but a page (a small page) or two at most. Along with the often quite sublime (and college-level crude) comments, things can get to the point in a hurry (i.e., from Fitzgerald's best known book: "Two bad drives met. :O," "Gatsby is so emo. Who cries about his girlfriend while eating breakfast... IN THE POOL?"). A brainchild of college students, Aciman and his roommate Emmett Rensin, at the University of Chicago, Twitterature is really irreverent. But it's also something which, as with everything else in the digital age, can't help but providing your literary knowledge with burst of quirky ingenuity. It might not be Cliffs Notes, but it's definitely a trip. Readers should be warned that this book is definitely *adult* in its humor. (818.607 ACIMAN)

Critic's Choice

Recently the National Book Critics Circle announced their 31 nominees for the 2010 year in review. The Circle awards the best English-language literature published within six major categories: autobiography, biography, criticism, fiction, nonfiction and poetry. This is the only awards presentation for which the selection committee is entirely composed of established literary critics. Since 1975 it's been associated with some of the top writing in America. Among this year's nominees are Jonathan Franzen's novel Freedom (FIC FRANZEN), The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham: A Biography by Selina Hastings (B MAUGHAM) and musician Patti Smith's personalized memoir Just Kids about her early period in New York City (782.42166092 SMITH). The winners for each category will be announced at a ceremony in New York City on March 10.