Until the MacArthur Foundation or the Pulitzer committee gives me a call, my primary occupation is as a copywriter in the Prepress Design Services department at the Richmond Times-Dispatch. There, my tasks include proofreading advertisements, writing promotional features, and copy editing specialty sections.

Occasionally, I will do noncompetitive freelance work — writing brochures or proposals, editing Web copy, essentially anything where the hand of a wordsmith would prove useful. For an interesting essay on what “noncompetitive” means, check out what Malcolm Gladwell has to say. In my case, it would be inappropriate for me to accept work from a current or potential advertiser of The Times-Dispatch.

For more information about my editing services, feel free to contact me at jonsealy [at] yahoo [dot] com.

What it is:

This might be the best nonfiction book I read all year. Muller gives us five chapters—Terrorism, Energy, Nukes, Space, and Global Warming—and offers us the physics underlying each of these issues and how the physics relates to policy. With a breezy style and few graphs and equations, this book should interest anyone with even a modicum of interest in science or politics.

Why it’s interesting:

Muller tosses off gems of information. For instance, he explains just how difficult it is to build a nuclear bomb. In passing, he says we really don’t need to worry so much about a terrorist building a nuclear weapon as someone buying a weapon from a disgruntled nuclear technician, which means we need agents to flood the market to keep buyers and sellers away from each other. A bigger threat, Muller suggests, is a terrorist loading up a crop duster with gasoline and flying it into the Rose Bowl. He then moves on to discuss other things, and the book is chock full of these little nuggets. (Why hydrogen energy is a pipedream and why solar energy might be a viable alternative to oil, or why human space exploration is a foolish waste of resources, etc., etc.) This book is essentially Freakonomics for physics. I’m sure plenty of scientists could take issue with some of his presentation (having no graphs or equations, it’s a bit general and not particularly rigorous), and I’m sure the strongly political (both right and left) will have a boatload of uninteresting complaints about Muller’s book, but for the politically indifferent and scientifically curious, this is a fantastic read.

Further Reading:

I don’t know about too many potboiler science writers. I’ve heard Neal DeGrasse Tyson is good. Brian Greene and Michael Pollen are popular now. Who else?

What it is:

This novel is about a guy who, in the mid-90s, cracks up and starts digging a bomb shelter in his backyard. Over the course of his digging, his marriage is strained, his daughter thinks he’s a lunatic (as does the reader), and he recounts his life (and America) from the 1950s to the present.

Why it’s interesting:

This isn’t O’Brien’s best. Like Tomcat in Love, it’s told in the first person, and has an unreliable narrator, which I’m beginning to think is an absolute trainwreck of technique. What unreliable narrators actually work in fiction? Other than Huck Finn, I can’t think of one that sustains a good novel. Or, conversely, what narrator is wholeheartedly reliable? Maybe they’re all unreliable to some extent, so consciously making them unreliable is overkill. At any rate, the narrator here isn’t particularly interesting.

I was just grumbling yesterday morning about authors doing the same thing over and over. John Irving sparked the rant, because, with a few exceptions (notably The Fourth Hand), you can expect a John Irving novel to be 200,000 words, told in an omniscient voice, and about a dysfunctional family (and maybe there will be bears, incest and prostitution to spice things up). It gets tedious. The World According to Garp is an absolute masterpiece, but I’m not sure I could even stomach the first chapter of his new one. I know that’s unfair to John Irving, who sometimes nails it, but I bring this up in order to give Tim O’Brien credit for trying out something completely different. Even though The Nuclear Age fails as a novel, I appreciate the effort. Without his formal experimentation (and perhaps a couple of dud novels in the mix), there would be nothing to separate Going After Cacciato from The Things They Carried, and there would be no In the Lake of the Woods, which I think is one of the best novels of the 1990s.

Further Reading:

You really can’t beat Roth’s American Pastoral for covering the second half of the 20th century, and you really can’t beat DeLillo for his paranoia and his obsession with the Cold War. If you’re looking to read more Tim O’Brien, I’d pass on his first-person efforts and go to In the Lake of the Woods.

What the hell, it’s the end of the decade. Time for a recap. The decade opened with Amazon reaching for the book business with online sales, and the decade closed with Amazon altering the book business once again with the Kindle. Other than that, here are 5 trends I’ve noticed about fiction this decade:

1. Chick lit. I don’t mean just your ordinary book about women or domesticity, but a particular breed of urban-chic-single chick lit (the novel’s response to Sex in the City – Shopaholic, The Devil Wears Prada, etc). I think the HBO series is what pushed this genre into existence, and I think the recession might have killed it.

2. Boy Wonders. Maybe Nick Hornby launched himself in the ’90s, but his ilk have taken over for the ’00s: Jonathan Franzen, Dave Eggers, Michael Chabon, Jonathan Saffron Foer, Jonathan Letham and Joshua Ferris. (Apparently it helps if your name is Jonathan.) I guess this literature is the urban-chic-male response to #1. This genre is still thriving, though I’m not sure it’ll carry us into the ’10s.

3. Multi-Cultural Lit. Ethnic was cool this decade, be it the heartrending The Kite Runner or the comic The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. We live in a global community now. (And America might be on the decline, so it seems fitting for us to go out the way we came in, by examining the immigrant experience.) This genre probably won’t do anything but get more popular for a while yet.

4. Memoirs. I know I titled this section “fiction,” and memoirs are supposed to be nonfiction, but the aughts really exploded that facade. Unless you consciously question the nature of truth and memory, I suspect your memoir is a load of horseshit. It might not be, but James Frey apologizing to Oprah and Nasdijj (white guy who quit writing gay porn and decided to write his “memoir” about growing up on the reservation) have undercut every memoirist’s efforts at revealing the truth. (Though, to be fair, humans have such a short memory that we’ll still fall for the “based on a true story” line anyway.) I’m sorry to sound bitter about memoirs, but too often in the ’00s they’ve seemed like an excuse for sloppy writing. Allegedly, Frey couldn’t sell his book as a novel, so they slapped “nonfiction” on the spine and it hit the bestseller lists. I blame readers as much as Frey himself. I hope this genre is dead, though I suspect it’s got plenty of life yet.

5. Children’s lit. Ok, so Harry Potter came out in the ’90s, but the ’00s really seem to be the decade of adults devouring children’s literature – Harry Potter, Twilight, Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia. Not that there’s anything wrong with any of those stories, exactly, though some are exponentially better written than others, but this childhood escapism seems dangerous to me. I’m all for book sales, I guess, but what does it say about our society when grown men will dress up like child wizards and stand in line at midnight to find out Hedwig dies and Harry lives? Could these same grown men find Yemen on a map before last Friday or define “Kurd”? Now that Harry’s saga has come to the end, I’m not sure this genre has that much life left – I’d be surprised if there was as much brouhaha over the final movies as there was for the final books, which is a true testament to the raw power of narrative (versus mere special effects). I also suspect most people won’t have much tolerance for cheap knockoffs of what has already been done, so if children’s literature is going to continue to dominate, it has to find new ground, beyond witches and such.

There were plenty of other trends in fiction this decade (a resurgence of the short story? The blurring of the line between genre and literary? Flash fiction?), but the above five are the most interesting to me, because they seem to affect both the MFA crowd and the mainstream (whereas the mainstream might not care so much about genre vs. literary, or what the difference is between flash fiction and prose poetry).

Looks like a great movie:

What it is:

I recently looked back to see what was the best book I read in 2009, and I realized that although I read this novel over the summer, I never did a write-up of it. Too bad, because it’s a strong contender for best novel I read this year (definitely in the top 10). It’s kind of like The Office meets Don DeLillo meets Nick Hornby. Told in the first-person plural, it follows a group of folks in a Chicago ad agency at the end of the ’90s boom, when the layoffs began.

Why it’s interesting:

The novel is a good study on making form and content work together. Because it’s told in the plural POV (We did this, we did that, this is what we thought), there isn’t a central protagonist, though you still feel more intimately connected to the environment that if Ferris told the story in third person. The story is funny and satirical and has a lot of heart, which might be the hardest combination to pull off.

Further Reading:

If Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections was a fitting novel at the beginning of the decade, Joshua Ferris’ Then We Came to the End is perfect for the end. Both authors take a DeLillo worldview and inject it with a down-to-earth heart that makes their work accessible to a much wider audience. I can’t think of too many novels that balance intelligence, humor and heart as well as Ferris does. The World According to Garp, maybe, or High Fidelity.

What it is:

This novel, published in the 80s and set in the early 70s, is about a man who comes back from Vietnam and settles on family land outside Nashville to raise sheep and play the banjo. He joins a band and plays the Nashville scene. His friendship with an old army buddy, a black man, creates first a stir with some local rednecks and then serious problems with the KKK. (The novel is much better than this description makes it sound.)

Why it’s interesting:

The novel is a slow build. The first hundred pages are wonderful and precise descriptions of the pastoral setting, but not much happens until the protagonist (Laidlaw) finds a deerstand on his property. There are these moments of high tension, like lightning in the night, that kept me up reading late into the night. Then, after finishing a particularly tense section, I had to go walk around and drink a beer to calm my nerves before I could sleep. Beyond the plot, the novel is a good study in character development, because we don’t get much back story here. We know Laidlaw was a “Lurp” in Vietnam, but if it weren’t for having read Tim O’Brien, I wouldn’t know that Lurp meant “Long-Range Reconnaissance Patrol,” real bad special forces dudes. Nowhere in Soldier’s Joy are we told that, but it fits Laidlaw’s character.

Further Reading:

Unlike a lot of Vietnam literature, this novel really is just about a soldier’s return, the aftermath. It’s Tim O’Brien in “Speaking of Courage” rather than the rest of The Things They Carried. One novel I felt had some kinship with Bell’s novel, and which I’m happy to recommend, is Mark Powell’s Blood Kin, which has a spiritually wounded character returning from war. There’s also an element of Rambo (Part 1) in Bell’s novel, which is fun to read. (Has anyone ever actually read First Blood?) Finally, there’s an element of being somewhere you don’t belong (or you can’t go home again, or something), as in C.E. Miller’s All the Living and Fred Chappell’s Look Back All the Green Valley.