Long for This World is the story of the Han family, beginning with the elders: Han Jae-kyu and his older brother Han Hyun-kyu, who immigrated to the United States as a teenager. Both are now physicians, middle-aged with grown children and a web of in-laws, both married to women so deeply invested in their own versions of reality they barely see the husbands and children behind the constructs. When Han Hyun-kyu abruptly bolts from his life in New York and turns up on his brother’s doorstep in Korea, his daughter Ah-Jin—Jane—follows to check up on him. She’s a war photographer, already a veteran in her 30s, and has made decisiveness a way of life: “You have exactly one second to think, not a moment more (or less)… you always and immediately run toward the danger, but never at full speed.” So Jane, brave but lost, leaves her brother Henry—a year out of rehab, lost but brave—and runs toward Korea. There she finds not only her father and uncle but her aunt; her pregnant, disconnected cousin; and her aunt’s brother, a restless and successful artist building a studio on their property. Family: danger of a different sort.

The idea of the family as a tapestry is an old one, but that’s precisely what works to give this novel its texture. Each member of the clan, as we meet them at different times in their lives, fills in a detail here, provides a clue there. The whole, though, remains beyond any easy definition. Long for This World is all about the threads, the small moments and interactions that attract and repel, and Chung has done a fine job of rendering the complexities.

Woven deeply into the theme of family here are the ways we leave each other and are left behind in turn. Husbands leave wives, children leave their parents, siblings leave each other’s sides. Long before she leaves Henry to chase their father to Korea, as a child Jane abandoned him in the woods—less out of maliciousness than an odd curiosity: “I can see him now, absorbed in his play, sweaty and flushed, foggy-headed from the heat. I can feel the distance between us, then and now, how he ceased to be Henry to me, my brother. How I saw him as a thing—an experiment, an idea. I snapped his image with my eyes…. And I left him.” No one’s motives are simple in all this coming and going.

The novel is heavy with loss as well, from adult deaths to the quiet, wrenching slipping away of the unborn, and no one gets away intact. The formidable Dr. Lee, Jane and Henry’s mother—this is how they refer to her, which tells us plenty—is relied on to counsel couples who have lost a pregnancy. Yet she rides roughshod over her own children, barely seeing them, speaking “in loops: from herself, about herself, to herself.” And Han Jae-kyu’s wife, Han Jung-joo, is so preoccupied with the careful order of her life that she doesn’t notice her husband and daughter drifting in their own directions.

In fact variations on seeing, and being seen, figure deeply in the narrative. After all, what is more intrinsic to the idea of family? On the one hand kinship involves intrusive scrutiny, and on the other a blinding familiarity. “One minute you are the image in the telescope, you are so close that you are inside…. The next minute you are the viewer, you are standing at a remote, zooming in, drawing the image as close as possible, and yet knowing that what you see, what you long to see in detail and immediacy, is ever and always far, far away.” It’s no accident that Jane, a photographer whose earliest memories are of framing the world through a viewfinder, allies herself with her aunt’s brother Chae Min-suk, an artist whose formulaic success has distanced him from his own work.

There is a lot going on here, but it works. Chung balances multiple time frames and points of view well, the voices identifiable without resorting to a shorthand of quirks. She even manages to discern between the English and Korean speakers with a slight, elegant change of tone—the difference between linguistically formal and informal languages is clear but not didactic. In fact, her touch is light throughout, and her ear is good. Most important, she doesn’t succumb to the urge to pathologize her characters. They’re allowed to be more than their stories, and by the novel’s end we truly care for them, both the casualties and the survivors—those who weren’t long for this world and those who are. This is a skillful and heartfelt debut, and Sonya Chung is definitely one of the latter.

I mentioned the single thing that his wants made me want, and then I told him how it was probably best that neither of us was going to get what we wanted that day. Then I told him to step off, that I had work to do. To my surprise, he just walked away. Equally surprising was that I felt angrier than scared. I had finally found this excellent warehouse, close to my apartment, roomy and cheap and with plenty of electrical outlets. And inspirational quit-drinking literature. In Spanish. It was perfect, and I was not in the mood to have some jackass ruin the setup.

I never saw that guy again. And the crack house burned down, was rebuilt, repopulated, flooded, abandoned, rebuilt and repopulated during the time I was there. Business for the neighborhood drug dealers was steady through all those travails, a good thing. The one who watched the corner often helped me retrieve my keys when I locked them in my truck. Most of us were flying below radar in one way or another—the neighborhood was not zoned for the sort of workshop I had there—and that single similarity bound us together more than our differences separated us.

That first week, I put mirrored paper on the glass of my shop doors. From the street, all you could see was yourself. From inside the shop, the mirror was like an 80” 3-D TV tuned to the Palmyra Street Channel. The morning programs on that channel were dominated by children meandering toward the elementary school on the corner. Sometimes there were fights. Sometimes kids practiced their dance moves. My doorstep was the exact spot at which they tended to finish the chips they bought at the corner store, so glossy chip bags gathered there like perpetual fall leaves.

My own program was called “Lady Carpenter,” a show that drew the biggest audience when I was unloading power tools and lumber from my truck, but which, otherwise, went mostly unwatched.

Mid-morning, it was “The Myrtis Show.” Myrtis collected cans in a city that had no recycling program, and in a neighborhood that enjoyed its adult beverages in aluminum. She had an incredible flair for dressing, pairing seemingly disparate items to create an overall effect of genius whimsy. We all put our cans in bags and hung the bags from our gates or low branches, the Mid-City International Sign for “hands off.” Myrtis would chew you out but good if she caught you reaching for her stuff. Everything else was up for grabs. The neighborhood was a perfectly balanced ecosystem.

A program I called “The Super” came on several times a day. The Super oversaw the lack of maintenance on the crack house across the street. The building contained 12 rented rooms with an old shed behind it. The Super installed a garage door on the street side, and when the garage door went up, the program came on. The action was slow—mostly The Super sat in his pilfered Naugahyde recliner, smoking a cigar, drinking a tall boy. He had a very impressive belly, proof of his diligence. I often wondered what he thought about out there in the heat or the cold. Sometimes people disappeared into the recesses of the shed. Then they reappeared. I never knew what happened in between, which made “The Super” kind of a mystery show.

“What Was That?” came on at two when the kindergarteners, beneficiaries of early release, went flying down the sidewalk. There was no crossing guard—several phone calls revealed that there was supposed to be a crossing guard—and the flashing school-zone sign never worked. So at about two, the sound of tires lurching to a halt started up as the little ones practiced navigating the giant boulevard.

Laws were broken every day on Palmyra Street, but it was not a lawless environment because the infractions were mostly without malice. It was not an easy place, but it was a good place, a place with its own rhythm and flow and tremendous loyalty. Which is how I knew that guy from the first day—the one who wanted to do things to me— wasn’t from the neighborhood. Palmyra Street wouldn’t put up with that kind of mess for minute.

We’re looking at an exceptionally rainy, cold weekend here, and I don’t foresee any real reason to leave the house. So I was pleased to find out, via the Book Bench, that all of Luigi Serafini’s big, weird, trippy Codex Seraphinianus has been digitized and posted online. Serafini’s  alternate world, complete with its own bizarre ecology and invented calligraphy, seems like a good place to get lost when the weather outside is frightful. Or even when it’s not.

I’m sure holding the actual book in my hands would be a whole lot more rewarding. But given the fact that used copies are going for upward of $400, and that I’ve long wanted to get my hands on one of these, I’m not complaining.

The National Book Critics Circle isn’t my favorite literary prize (yes, I am the sort of person who has a favorite literary prize–the Booker, even though it outrages and infuriates me almost every year), but I have long considered it the most reliable. And last night the National Book Critics Circle outdid itself. I’ve read three of the winners–Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, Blake Bailey’s Cheever: A Life, and Richard Holmes’s The Age of Wonder–and they were three of the best books I read last year. (Wolf Hall took the Booker last year as well, which makes 2009 the first year in some time that the Booker judges haven’t broken my heart.) I’ve also heard wonderful things about Diana Athill’s Somewhere Towards the End. I’m not familiar with Rae Armantrout’s Versed or Eula Biss’s Notes from No Man’s Land, but given the quality of the other winners I’m now very interested in reading them (I’m particularly intrigued by an essay in Biss’s book that discusses the intersection of telephone poles and lynching).

Just as good, the NBCC gave Joan Acocella a prize for reviewing and my girl Joyce Carol Oates received a lifetime achievement award.

We all know that literary awards are nonsense–they’re political, they compare apples to oranges, they trivialize the work and pit authors against each other. I still love them. They’re so much fun (at least, they are fun for the sort of person who has a favorite literary prize), it’s so nice to see books make news, and it’s so satisfying when the award giver-outers (all too rarely) get it right. Last night the NBCC got it right. I have nothing to complain about. What is the world coming to?

And it’s true, and it’s a good thing: The new endless playing field of online reviews has stretched out the conversation about any given book to however long someone wants to talk about it. For anyone who uses the library, who loves used books or just wants to wait for the paperback to come out, the review factory is limited, to say the least. One of my favorite things about the shift to online formats has been the freedom of breaking away from that.

A bit of an obvious point, maybe, but it does address my endless question of what exactly makes literary websites valuable and viable… aside from the fact that self-expression is the new entertainment, that is. Most of the blogs and electronic journals I keep coming back to give both old and new books equal respect; selections come from the bookshelf as well as the bookstore, which is, mostly, how real people read.

The Second Pass, a perfect example of what I’m talking about, celebrates its first birthday today. And in the spirit of what makes reading online reviews worth your while, proprietor John Williams has invited a dozen guests to offer up Tales of the Unread, a selection of their favorite out-of-print books. The mix is tempting and eclectic—not just proof that there’s an infinite world of undiscovered treasure out there, but that The Second Pass has plenty of interesting friends with good taste. Happy anniversary, and here’s to many more years to come. There are a lot of books left to talk about.

After an initial feeling of productivity, van der Zee is soon plunged into a fictionless misery. She concludes that books are among her “longest, truest friends,” and that she is never giving them up again. A pointless exercise, perhaps: one that only serves to confirm what she already thinks. But the article’s interest for me is how she describes books before the experiment.

Van der Zee initially decides to go cold turkey on books because she wonders if they are holding her back. She is in the “grip of fiction,” and wonders how many of us “end up feeling as if books are eating you up instead of the other way round.”

As someone who spends more of my life reading than doing any other activity, except sleeping—though given my insomnia and rapid consumption of paperbacks, perhaps not—this interests me. From childhood, we are told that reading is good. Reading anything, no matter what, is more educational and character-improving than almost any other activity. So I wonder: When does this inherently good act become less useful than the things we do not do while we’re reading?

Many years ago, I came across a piece of advice: If you read for one hour, write for two hours and think for three hours. I immediately resolved to do just that, which lasted for about a day. Thinking is hard work, and it was just so much easier to jump back into the fantasy world. Reading a book requires some mental energy, but it’s also letting someone do your thinking for you. The brain needs time to process, and we’re not properly absorbing what we read if we just pile more words on top before they’ve sunk in. Chain-reading paperbacks is no more inherently intellectual than watching all the Back to the Future films in one go.

In another recent Guardian article, Evan Maloney tells us something else we already know: Reading is an essential part of the writing process. Of course you need to read in order to write, just like you need to breathe in order to live. But breathing is not living, and reading is not writing. Talking to other writers, sending out stories, sleeping, going for long walks, and drinking coffee are also essential parts of the process for many writers, but they are not writing. It’s easy to spend the days with your mind full of ideas but forget to actually transfer them to the page. Similarly, it is dangerous for writers to read more than they write because reading is less of a fight. Slipping into someone else’s made-up world is easy bliss when you’ve struggled for hours to create your own world. I’m not advocating the Garth Marenghi approach (he claims to have written more books than he has read), but neither should we just escape into reading when we would gain more from making our own words.

This is not only for writers. All of us read, and all of us get a lot out of books. Perhaps, though, our enjoyment and intellectual gain could improve if we took time to let the words sink in, give our brains a chance to process.

I still firmly believe that reading is good, but I (and perhaps you) need to learn how to read with eyes fully open. Next time you’ve spent an hour reading, try taking ten minutes to sit and think about what you have just absorbed. Piling words on top of words is like finishing the whole cake even though you only wanted one slice. Perhaps a happy medium is in order: Try savoring words instead of gorging on stories.

(Kirsty Logan is the reviews editor at PANK and can be found at kirstylogan.com.)

Libraries have been acquiring writers’ archives for hundreds of years, but they’re only beginning to scratch the surface of making the collections accessible and interactive for the general population. These are obviously good resources for researchers, but there’s so much that could sweeten the experience of serious readers, non-scholarly admirers, fans. It makes me happy to see more rare book and manuscript departments making the internet really work for their collections. The Harry Ransom Center, at the University of Texas at Austin, is a great example. Although their permanent digital collections available right now cover a fascinatingly sketchy stretch of culture (Edgar Allan Poe, The Gutenberg Bible, Medieval and Early Modern Manuscripts, Mike Wallace), the site is nicely curated and has something for everyone.

They recently acquired the David Foster Wallace archives—not just papers and manuscripts but around 200 books from his personal library. And out of everything available to explore online, the books are what I find most arresting. To say that Wallace was an annotator is selling him short. He wrote notes and ideas, listed words to look up (and circled words he liked in his dictionary), stuck in Post-its and stickers, and—possibly the last writing-in-books taboo I can think of breaking—doodled on author photos. Not just any author photo, but Cormac McCarthy. In Suttree. Somehow that seems entirely fitting. Among his word list of from the inside cover of Cynthia Ozick’s The Puttermesser Papers: “brobdingnagian—huge, immense—porn stars w/brobdingnagian penises.” This is the tip of the iceberg of Wallace’s brobdingnagian intellect.

I suppose the line between intimate and voyeuristic is a fine one, but I think this is terrific. I’ll never be a Wallace scholar, but I’m a fledgling fan who’s definitely moved by the Ransom Center’s teasers to go deeper into his work. A good archival collection goes both ways: It serves enthusiasts but it can also make them. I want to find out, now, if he ever wrote about those porn stars.

(Image is the inside cover of David Foster Wallace’s annotated copy of Suttree by Cormac McCarthy, courtesy of the Harry Ransom Center.)

This month leads off with Kathleen Rooney’s look at five poetry collections by women—Matthea Harvey, Katy Lederer, Brenda Shaughnessy, Robyn Schiff, and KarenVolkman—what they offer up and what they withhold.

Ingrid Norton continues her A Year with Short Novels series with Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey, and sells me right from the start: “Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey is a peculiar masterpiece. Its chapters and themes interlock with such grace and necessity that the book seems more like a marvelous and free-standing mechanism — a jeweled music box or perfectly sprung wrist-watch — than like a novel.”

Plus:

Steve Donoghue’s take on Tom DeHaven’s chatty Our Hero: Superman on Earth.
Laura Kolbe on Mikhail Chekhov’s Anton Chekhov: A Brother’s Memoir, originally compiled in 1920.
Irma Heldman on Paul Adam’s Paganini’s Ghost.
John G. Rodwan, Jr. watching the watchers, examining Don DeLillo’s Point Omega and the reviews that have sprung up in its wake.
Finch Bronstein-Rasmussen on Katharine Beutner’s Alcestis.
Laura Tanenbaum on Louis Menand’s The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University.
Philip Gambone’s essay from The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered on Donald Windham’s 1965 novel Two People.
Ascanio Tedeschi on J.G. Nichols’ translation of the 19th-century poet Ugo Foscolo’s Sepulchres.
Tuc MacFarland’s elegiac take on Scott D. Kraus’ The Urban Whale and R.J. Scholes and K.G. Mennell’s Elephant Management: A Scientific Assessment for South Africa.
Kristin Brower Walker on a couple of YA novels, Francisco X. Stork’s The Last Summer of the Death Warriors and Benjamin Alire Saenz’s Last Night I Sang to the Monster.
Janet Potter on Justin Taylor’s short store collection Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever.
Bartolomeo Piccolomini on Alastair McEwen’s translation of Roberto Calasso’s Tiepolo Pink.

The poem this month is Amy King’s “Café Town” and Jessica Breiman looks at the oeuvre of poet Shafer Hall.

And Phillip A. Lobo discusses the ethics of Mass Effect 2.

The photograph that opens the issue and this page is Jeffrey Eaton’s “snoverkill.” We can only hope this is the fine art equivalent of a votive offering to the gods of No More Snow, Please, and that there really is something to this “in like a lion” stuff. In the meantime, enjoy the issue.

That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.

– Thomas Jefferson, “Thomas Jefferson to Isaac McPherson, 13 August 1813″

This excerpt from a TJ letter is included as part of the expansive Founders’ Constitution project in illumination of the US Constitution’s Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 (the one between post offices and non-supreme tribunals) which, of course, reads:

[The Congress shall have Power] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;

And so, at the very kernel of understanding the germination and flowering of ideas in community, we find a Founder’s stance rooted in the notion of abundance: like fire.

(Image of our sun made today by the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory’s (SOHO) Extreme ultraviolet Imaging Telescope, a project of international collaboration between the European Space Agency and NASA.)

Over on the PANK Blog, reviews editor Kirsty Logan discusses some dos and don’ts for Meanwhile Reads. I think readers who are fairly catholic in their tastes are especially predisposed to sort their literary experiences: You have your vacation reading, your bathroom reading, your insomnia reading, your commute reading. And this category of Meanwhile Reads—what I’ve always thought of as interstitial reading—what you pick up, or bring along, for those brief stolen moments of downtime. Admitting to them is one of those secret handshakes serious readers use to suss each other out. Beyond the old cliché of reading the back of the cereal box during breakfast and or having a stack of periodicals by the toilet, we all have a personal taxonomy of material for brushing teeth, waiting for your bagel in the deli, being kept on hold by the cable company. Or as Logan puts it, “I like to read. I need to read. But I’ve got shit to do.” She has a few prime choices:

Action: Reading aloud to your significant other because s/he can’t sleep and you just want to get some reading done, damn it, but you can’t just stick your head in a book because s/he keeps turning over in bed and stealing the covers.

Do Read: At Large And At Small: Familiar Essays by Anne Fadiman. Essays on ice-cream, Arctic explorers, coffee, and moving house: something for everyone. There’s even an essay on sleeping.

Don’t Read: Erotica. Either you’ll both wake yourselves up again, or you’ll have distracting dreams.

And she invites PANK readers to chip in with their own Meanwhile Reads. On this end, my toothbrushing pick lately is Mark Kurlansky’s The Food of a Younger Land, with its short, tasty food essays; my middle-of-the-night bedside book is Simon Schama’s Citizens, so if I can’t sleep at least I can learn something that I probably slept through in high school; and when I’m waiting for my dog to attend to her needs in the park I usually check Twitter. I’ve been known to bring a magazine with me on trips to the mailroom at work, to take advantage of those stolen minute-and-a-half increments waiting for the elevator.

And you, Like Fire readers? How do you fill up the tiny reading spaces in your day?

(Photo of women and girls stealing some reading time in July 1910, by Lewis Wickes Hine, is from the New York Public Library Digital Archives.)