A Tale of Two AJs

I haven't read any AJ Liebling, although he's been among my top five "must get around to reading" authors since college.

Somehow his books never reach the top of the pile, pipped to a place on my bedside table by competing authors whose works capture my attention at the eleventh hour, and it's always the eleventh hour, apparently, when I'm considering reading AJ Liebling. 

Just about any other author can trump AJ Liebling. James Pope-Hennessy, Sainte-Beuve, Fernando Pessoa, Stella Gibbons, that guy who wrote the illustrated guide to starting your own hand-tool based woodshop. Even DH Lawrence. 

I have looked at a different AJ's books - AJ Ayer - but I found that experience soporific. I don't think my tyrannized brain slogged past the first few paragraphs without rebelling into dormancy and profound torpor.

AJ Ayer's friends called him 'Freddie,' which is like calling Beelzebub 'Bubby,' if you ask me. 

But I have a new AJ Liebling paperback in my hands now, a collection of essays with the winningly advantageous title Just Enough Liebling. Maybe, just maybe, just enough Liebling will be the right amount of AJ to finally shut out the other contenders.

Update: I'm reading Edward Hoagland instead

Comments

[John]

I was recently gifted with, and read in its entirety, a book by A.J. Liebling. I wish I could say its title is Adequate J. Liebling, but, stirring my well-below-Liebling weight and going to check a bookshelf, I must report it's just The Sweet Science. Boxing (that's what it's about) writes well. Maybe Liebling himself did too but I am left untempted to pursue. I was at the same time gifted with Cast of Characters and old-timey New Yorker personnel just weren't and aren't interesting.

Update: I'm reading Jorge Amado's The Discovery of America by the Turks instead. By "Turks" Amado meant Ottoman-Empire subjects who immigrated to Brazil a century and more ago. But it doesn't matter what Amado meant because the guy had a cast-iron novelistic formula and a diamond-hard resistance to insight.

[stephenesque]

Agreed. Old-timey New Yorker writers are never as interesting as they're made out to be. But that's true of the magazine today also.