Discoveries

Why Read?

Mark Edmundson

Bloomsbury USA: 224 pp., $21.95

“Who am I? What might I become? What is this world in which I find myself? How might it be changed for the better?” Mark Edmundson, professor and journalist, believes that we read not just to entertain ourselves but to answer these and other questions.

In academia, where New Criticism and Critical Thinking and Close Reading compete for thesis topics, this is an iconoclastic point of view. Obvious, even showy: We read to help us decide how to live. Edmundson wrote this provocative book because he was discouraged by the vague, positive evaluations he was getting from his students. They were using words like “enjoyable” and “entertaining.” “ ‘True liberal education requires that the student’s whole life be radically changed by it,’ ” Edmundson quotes Allan Bloom. He didn’t think that was happening in his classes. He wanted soul-making, not entertainment.

Novels, he quotes Milan Kundera, are populated by “experimental selves.” In the end, literature shows us that there is no one “map of human nature.” “Why Read?” is a question worth asking. Never forget: “Because I just like to” is a perfectly defensible answer.

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The Wedding of the Two-Headed Woman

A Novel

Alice Mattison

William Morrow: 288 pp., $23.95

Alice MATTISON is often called a “writer’s writer.” It’s a vague phrase meaning a writer other writers read, but it puts her in such excellent company as Charles Baxter and James Salter, to name just two. Mattison’s writing gives the humdrum an edge we didn’t know it possessed: Choices like what to keep and what to throw away or whether to stop and have coffee take on a bearable weight in her writing.

“The Wedding of the Two-Headed Woman” features Daisy Andalusia, a character (written in the first person unreliable, a voice Mattison favors) who has recently started a business helping clients remove the clutter from their lives. She lives in New Haven, Conn., a town she loves, even with the shadow of Yale looming over every corner of its landscape. Daisy develops a fascination for prostitution and murder, especially the two combined. She writes this book as we read it, which creates the odd effect of watching someone knit you a sweater. Serious things happen, but it is impossible to take them too seriously. Daisy doesn’t.

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Rio de Janeiro

Carnival Under Fire

Ruy Castro

Translated from the Portuguese by John Gledson

Bloomsbury USA: 224 pp., $16.95

“Rio” is the fifth book in a marvelous series called “The Writer and the City,” which includes Edmund White’s Paris, Peter Carey’s Sydney, David Leavitt’s Florence and John Banville’s Prague. Now that fall is here and life is settling into an over-scheduled predictability, I say: “Let the armchair traveling begin!” And what better place than Rio, which has always occupied that little table in the mind’s cabaret reserved for really bad behavior.

Ruy Castro is proud of his city’s reputation; he’s proud of the cariocas, or locals, with their Afro-centric culture, their European manners and style and their jeito, or “indefinable spirit ... an almost masochistic refusal to take oneself very seriously, a combination of boredom and mockery in the face of any kind of power, and, not least, a joie de vivre which defies any kind of rational argument.”

Wait a minute ... that sounds like Los Angeles. In fact, Castro’s Rio is also a beach city -- “Here, the beach isn’t just a towel for spreading out in the sun. It’s a whole culture. You go to the beach to read the paper, meet friends, play football, get to know people, get the latest gossip and even, sometimes, to talk business.” Castro writes about Rio’s history through its most famous and outrageous personalities. Colonization, the slave trade, even the government relocating to Brasilia -- nothing could crush its spirit.