James Woods

Making and Mastering Wood Planes: Revised Edition, 2nd Printing
$24.95
The latest edition of this highly regarded instructional manual. See the great reader reviews posted for the previous editions. With this book and a weekend of your time you can make a plane and learn to use it effectively. You'll also discover a wealth of general woodworking tips and acquire a solid grounding in many fundamentals of fine woodworking. Now in its third printing, "Making and Mastering Wood Planes" by master craftsman David Finck is the definitive book in the field and a classic introduction to the art of fine woodworking. Reviews: . . . the best book available on making and using Krenov-style wooden planes. Finck's advice on construction and planing techniques is a woodworking education in itself. He also provides excellent insights and instructions on tools, power-tool techniques, jigs and the theories underlying the process of planemaking. A clearly written and far-ranging treatise." -- Ellis Walentine Webmaster & Host, WoodCentral "Essential reading for anyone with an interest in handplanes. I wore out my first copy." -- Christopher Schwarz, Editor, "Popular Woodworking" and "Woodworking Magazine."

The Book Against God: A Novel
$15.00
Raised in an evangelical Anglican family, James Wood - a successful literary critic who teaches at Harvard and is a New Yorker staff writer - discusses the failure of Christian apologetics to justify belief in a God who allows so much suffering and evil to exist in The New Yorker: "Holiday in Hellmouth," a review of Bart Ehrman's God's Problem: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2008/06/09/080609crbo_books_wood.
The feckless protagonist of Wood's 2003 novel, The Book against God, is hard to identify with the high-achieving Wood, but they share a compulsion to argue against theodicy - the branch of theology devoted to justifying God's ways to man - from the Old Testament to Kierkegaard.
Tom Bunting is a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy with a dissertation he cannot finish. It bores him, as does the prospect of a career of teaching and research that finishing the degree might lead to. He spends his time on another project instead - an endless series of screeds against the God he was raised to believe in, quarreling with writers who try to justify Him. The inadequacy of Christian apologists to make a watertight argument in God's defense is proof, in Tom's eyes, that Christianity is absurd and that God does not exist. If Christianity is to be accepted at all, it must be done on faith alone, and faith is what Tom sorely lacks.
The comedy is mostly in the early chapters, as Tom lays out his predicament - unable to finish his degree, separated from his wife, lying habitually to get out of scrapes, but whose lies are catching up with him. As we meet his wife, Jane, his few friends, and finally his parents - all of whom are concerned for him and wanting him to grow up and face responsibilities - the comedy drops away, and the tone becomes more serious. His father, particularly, is an impressive man who about the time Tom was born gave up a career as a theology professor to become a parish priest. Like Chaucer's Parson, Peter Bunting lives the gospel in his daily life, ministers to his flock, and is kindly and cheerful into the bargain. The only real issue Tom can find to differ with this loving father is their inability to agree theologically.
Why do some children raised in a faith take it on so easily, while others rebel? There's no question here of abuse, physical or emotional. Tom believes he had a happy childhood, if a bit of a lonely one. His parents' marriage is exceptionally loving, and he too was loved as a child. Yet he exhibits the traits of many children of successful parents (Bunting pere is successful in his own terms - a beloved pastor who genuinely embodies the virtues of the faith he ardently espouses). Tom fails to measure up to his father, or to meet his parents' gentle expectations that he will share their faith. Instead he quarrels incessantly with that faith - not face-to-face, since he can't bear to hurt his father - but behind his back, in his unpublishable book against his father's God.
This is an incomplete summary of a book that is full of incidents and nicely drawn characters. Wood has a knack for metaphor and simile that Aristotle says is the one part of a poet's craft that cannot be learned. Anyone who has had a half-finished thesis hanging over his head will recognize the sort of limbo it puts one in. The novel is hardly an advertisement for abandoning religious belief. Rather it is a wistful statement of someone who sees the horror of existence in this world, but is unable to console himself with visions of the next.
This all makes the book sound somber, but it is not. It is lightened with amusing portraits of Tom's friends and relations, and in later chapters set in the parsonage in the North of England, in Peter Bunting's parish outside the city of Durham, a gallery of local country "types" is diverting. Inevitably hints of allegory creep in - doubting Thomas, a man called Peter, the rhythms of the Christian calendar - but if some sort of Pilgrim's Progress is suspected, there is no resolution. Without redemption, this world is absurd and awful. But redemption is a fairy tale that cannot stand up to scrutiny.

True Believer
$14.94
If you like suspense, drama, etc. plus James Woods and Brian Denehy, you really need to add these two DVDs to your collection. The stories are great...some of the best work both actors have ever done!

How Fiction Works
$14.00
This book isn't a comprehensive, systematic treatise on fiction, despite the promise of the title and the almost obsessive organization of the contents into numerous chapters and sections, many of them only a few pages long. Actually, I wonder how seriously Wood takes all this, delivering impossibly ambitious chapter headings like "A Brief History of Consciousness" when the chapter's less than ten pages long. Anyway, the book's really more of a collection of essays containing some interesting observations about fiction, worth a read, but not a re-read. High points include the discussions on descriptive technique, narrative voice, and how the Russians were fundamental to the development of novelistic character as we know it. My main disappointment is that Wood has been making the rounds talking about how contemporary fiction is stuck in the mud of "realism", and I was hoping for an enlightening discussion of this; I was expecting more examples of the work of contemporary "post-realist" authors just in case I found Wood's "post-realist" world of literature interesting enough to pursue further. I'm happy to go along with the idea that a novel doesn't need a plot (though I would never describe plot as "juvenile", as Wood does). But when I reached the chapter on this topic, I found Wood lapsing into uninformative and quizzical generalizations. What's "real"?, he asks; you can have all manner of narrative, even the fantastic and dreamlike, which nevertheless can seem "real"; actually, the problem with contemporary fiction isn't "realism", because "realism" (i.e. convincing narrative) exists in all literature; the problem with contemporary fiction is that it is too "conventional", meaning it repeats a pattern born in the 19th century; and what's important in fiction is that it not be conventional and that its "realism" manifest itself as "lifeness" (whatever that means). At which point the book abruptly ends. I found this discussion to beg more questions than it addressed.

And I may need to sign up for remedial reading comprehension classes, but did Wood never get around to fulfilling his promise of defining the sin of "hyper-realism", of which he accuses Zadie Smith and others?

In his discussion of language, he lauds examples which make the reader see things "in a new way", unfortunately without discussing what is the point of the "new way", i.e. what is its objective and what does it add to the reader's insight. The discussion didn't provide much more than would an average run-of-the-mill introductory text for Poetry 101. I did enjoy the description of Flaubert's obsessiveness with language, though.

What the reader gets in this book is Wood extolling the virtues of certain passages in certain books (certain "bright moments" in literature he's experienced), loosely organized as a discussion on "How Fiction Works". It's all interesting enough, Woods has some fine insights along the way, and it's a fairly quick and entertaining read, though its ultimate objective seems unclear.