I’ve been feeling disappointed in books lately. Whereas I’ve encountered many well-written books, they’ve lacked something—a politic, perhaps, or maybe something as simple as a point. I’ve found myself reading half a book, losing interest, the well-crafted sentence not enough to compel me to completion. But then, yesterday, as I was rushing out the door to go to a dentist appointment, I remembered this book that Johannes Goransson had sent me, a new Action Book, and I thought maybe this would be different. And it was.

Don Mee Choi’s The Morning News is Exciting is perhaps one of the most exciting books I’ve read recently. A collection of poetry or prose or prose poetry or poetic prose, whatever, genre is so passé these days, Choi’s book challenges not only genre but also the politics of colonialism, post-colonialism, empire, and identity. As cutting as it is tender, as angry as it is intelligent, this is not a book for the faint-hearted reader.

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In this week’s NYRB, Tim Parks reviewed Best European Fiction 2010, an anthology published by Dalkey, edited and with an introduction by Aleksandar Hemon and a forward by Zadie Smith. Parks discusses the demographic of contributors, mentioning that Europe isn’t fully represented in this anthology of “best European” writing. Heavy-hitting writer countries like Germany, Sweden, Greece, and the Czech Republic are absent. So I wonder: Would an anthology of “Best American” writing need contributors from every state? I’d examine my copy of Best American, but I don’t own it. Someone else, please, do.

Parks goes on to say:

“Represented” is hardly the right word. Many of the stories do not take place in the writers’ native countries: the pieces from Castilian Spain and Serbia take place in France, the French story in Japan, the stories from Poland and Macedonia in Austria, the story from Croatia in Hungary, the story from England in France; most curiously, the story translated from Gaelic tells of an old blind clairvoyant in rural Bolivia. / I have no problem with this. All the contributions are interesting and some impressive. That is enough for me. But it does make one wonder whether we are learning much about other cultures from this venture, whether it is true, as Hemon claims, that “ceaseless” and “immediate” translation of literature from abroad is a “profound, non-negotiable need.”

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Most contributors, it would seem via FB—because that’s how I get a lot of my non-news news—of the Best of the Web 2010 anthology have gotten their contributor copies. I have not yet, so I can’t make any testaments to how great or not great it is. I’m pretty sure, given that Kathy Fish and Matt Bell are the editors, that it’s a stunning collection of writing originally published on the web.

This past week, Time Out Chicago reviewed BoTW 2010. Though quite brief, Jonathan Messinger gave it a positive review, noting how difficult anthologies are and the unimaginable task of combing through the seemingly self-exponentiating number of things published on the web. He ended with this:

Of course, we all know the Internet is home to just about anything our brains can Google. But what Best of the Web does—aside from doing the work of finding great writing so we don’t have to—is make a case for it as an ideal literary medium.

And this is where I question things. I have a story in BoTW. I publish on the web. I like publishing on the web, I really do. But I also like paper. Yummm, wasteful unsustainable paper: I can’t get enough of it. I love to print out manuscripts. I love to mark up manuscripts. I even love how heavy it is in my bag, how much space it takes up, and on and on. I love books published on paper, bound in paper, I probably don’t need to go on. Needless to say, I’m not as “with the times” as Nick.

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