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A volume of essays is comprised of top-selected pieces from the past decade and considers a broad range of topics organized under such main categories as "Reading," "Being," "Seeing," and "Feeling."
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LibraryThing member veevoxvoom
Summary: A collection of Zadie Smith’s essays submitted to various magazines and venues. The topics range from literary criticism to film reviews to stories about her family.
Review: Zadie Smith is so good. I remember reading [White Teeth], knowing that when the author wrote it, she wasn’t so
Her meditation on the middle path of E.M Forster caused me to have a huge crush on him (and dig out my old copy of [Maurice]). Her analysis of Barthes’ “Death of the Author” theory and Nabakov’s larger-than-life authorial persona helped me articulate some of my own ambiguous opinions on authorial presence. Her argument for Kafka as everyman was a refreshing breath of air. Her love song to Zora Neal Hurston made me sniffle. Her film reviews are witty and rigorous. I especially love this line:
“I base this upon the stupidity/pleasure axis I apply to popular artists: how much pleasure they give versus how stupid one has to become to receive said pleasure.” (Pg. 168)
Is that not perfect?
Zadie Smith is the kind of thinker I would like to be. Now, I will point out that [Changing My Mind] is not for everybody. The first section especially seems geared towards those with high literary tastes who have read Eliot and Kafka, and who sit around at dinner parties and talk about things like the death of the author or the future of the novel. Not everybody is into these hyper-literary pretentions. There were certain parts where even I felt a bit alienated, and I’m normally the perfect audience for these types of thoughts. But that alienation — and fatigue, because there is some of that too — was rare and in between.
Conclusion: A wonderful collection of essays. I know that I’ll be thinking about them for days to come.
Review: Zadie Smith is so good. I remember reading [White Teeth], knowing that when the author wrote it, she wasn’t so
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much older than I was. That blew me away. Now Smith is older and perhaps wiser, and [Changing My Mind] reflects a lot of that. It catalogues some of her changing opinions, both as a reader, a writer, and a person. However, no matter if she is twenty-one or thirty-five, Zadie Smith’s mind is elegant and agile. It performs like a well-tuned piano — the parts work together seamlessly and what comes out is intellectual music.Her meditation on the middle path of E.M Forster caused me to have a huge crush on him (and dig out my old copy of [Maurice]). Her analysis of Barthes’ “Death of the Author” theory and Nabakov’s larger-than-life authorial persona helped me articulate some of my own ambiguous opinions on authorial presence. Her argument for Kafka as everyman was a refreshing breath of air. Her love song to Zora Neal Hurston made me sniffle. Her film reviews are witty and rigorous. I especially love this line:
“I base this upon the stupidity/pleasure axis I apply to popular artists: how much pleasure they give versus how stupid one has to become to receive said pleasure.” (Pg. 168)
Is that not perfect?
Zadie Smith is the kind of thinker I would like to be. Now, I will point out that [Changing My Mind] is not for everybody. The first section especially seems geared towards those with high literary tastes who have read Eliot and Kafka, and who sit around at dinner parties and talk about things like the death of the author or the future of the novel. Not everybody is into these hyper-literary pretentions. There were certain parts where even I felt a bit alienated, and I’m normally the perfect audience for these types of thoughts. But that alienation — and fatigue, because there is some of that too — was rare and in between.
Conclusion: A wonderful collection of essays. I know that I’ll be thinking about them for days to come.
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LibraryThing member bridget3420
This book is a collection of essays that give you a chance to befriend the author. The book is divided into four sections that are: Reading, Being, Seeing and Feeling. Reading this book made me look at some things a little differently. I started understanding things that I never understood before.
If you like to dig deep down and think about the meaning behind life, this is the perfect book to sit down with.
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At the same time, I was forced to rethink some of my own thoughts because I saw them from a different perspective.If you like to dig deep down and think about the meaning behind life, this is the perfect book to sit down with.
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LibraryThing member RidgewayGirl
Zadie Smith is a British writer who achieved great fame with her first novel, White Teeth. The book was good, but the hype concentrated on the fact that it had been written by a young, beautiful black woman who had grown up on a council estate in Willesden. Her second novel did not do well, and
Changing My Mind was a very uneven read, and I think she might have been better served by waiting a few years, until there was a better selection of material to chose from. Many of the essays, the ones that discuss authors and books or the ones that talk about her family are amazing. Then there are a few moderately interesting pieces about Liberia and her own writing methods that are worth reading, but not exciting and then there are the bits from when she reviewed movies for a newspaper. Essays about movies, or Hollywood, can be riveting, but Smith has too sharp a mind and, while she seems to like film, isn't a real fan or expert. So this section consists of describing the plots of various movies and there's a sense that she's looking down on the whole endeavor.
The essays on literature, however, are fantastic. She has the ability to delve deeply into a topic without talking down to her audience or making it too difficult to understand. I did have to pay attention, especially to the essay on David Foster Wallace, but I was never lost. She discusses Their Eyes Were Watching God, Middlemarch, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Kafka, Nabokov, E.M. Forster and Barthes and each essay was a revelation (to me, at least).
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Smith gave a few bitter interviews and then disappeared. She spent that time back in her academic comfort zone (she has a degree from Cambridge) and writing things like movie reviews and magazine articles about her family. She has since brought out another book, On Beauty, which was successful on its own merits and now she has had this book of essays published.Changing My Mind was a very uneven read, and I think she might have been better served by waiting a few years, until there was a better selection of material to chose from. Many of the essays, the ones that discuss authors and books or the ones that talk about her family are amazing. Then there are a few moderately interesting pieces about Liberia and her own writing methods that are worth reading, but not exciting and then there are the bits from when she reviewed movies for a newspaper. Essays about movies, or Hollywood, can be riveting, but Smith has too sharp a mind and, while she seems to like film, isn't a real fan or expert. So this section consists of describing the plots of various movies and there's a sense that she's looking down on the whole endeavor.
The essays on literature, however, are fantastic. She has the ability to delve deeply into a topic without talking down to her audience or making it too difficult to understand. I did have to pay attention, especially to the essay on David Foster Wallace, but I was never lost. She discusses Their Eyes Were Watching God, Middlemarch, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Kafka, Nabokov, E.M. Forster and Barthes and each essay was a revelation (to me, at least).
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LibraryThing member ElizabethAndrew
Smart, smart, smart. I can't imagine reading literary criticism in bed written by anyone else. Her essay on Obama's capacity to speak multiple versions of English should be assigned college reading. And her memoirs are rich, lively, worth studying.
LibraryThing member edwinbcn
Changing my mind. Occasional essays demonstrates that essay writing is not for everyone. Firstly, Zadie Smith seems to struggle to find the right form, an for lack of a format falls back on her university years, or so it seems. Some of the essays, particularly those about literature read like
The essays in Changing my mind. Occasional essays are grouped in five section, viz. "Reading", "Being", "Seeing", "Feeling" and "Remembering". This division and the titles of the sections is reminiscent of the essay collections by Susan Sontag, compare for instance with Where the stress falls, which is divided into three sections "Reading", "Seeing" and "There and Here". Is this a tribute to Susan Sontag?
However, it is obvious that the essays of Zadie Smith cannot compare even a little with the essays of Susan Sontag. The essays by Zadie Smith uttely lack originality. They were not written out of curiosity of the author, or the author's initiative to explore and attempt to capture a vision. They were not even, as Somerset Maugham migh call it, literary diversions, written to please the author. Most of the essays in this collection were written at request, or as the author puts it in the "Foreword" (..) requests that came in now and then. Two thousand words about Christmas? About Katherine Hepburn? Kafka? Liberia? A hundred thousand words piled up that way.
Where is the passion? Where is the sense of novelty and pleasure of writing as an adventure? It is not there. Changing my mind. Occasional essays is the result of Zadie Smith plodding from deadline to deadline.
Zadie Smith is a very successful author at a still very young age. Apparently, a number of these essays must have been written very early on in her career, or as she writes in the "Foreword" when you are first published at a young age, your writing grows with you. (...) Changing my mind seemed an apt, confessional title to describe this process. (p. xiii). In essence, the collection of essays in Changing my mind. Occasional essays are early attempts by an author who has not yet found a form.
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university term papers. For instance, the essays on Kafka, Barthes and Nabokov, Middlemarch and "Two Directions for the Novel" are longish and larded with long quotations, which are set apart. The essay on Barthes and Nabokov is 15 pages long with no less than 18 longish footnotes, and the essay on Kafka packs 16 footnotes in just 12 pages. The numerous long quotations and footnotes make for very uncomfortable and scholarly reading.The essays in Changing my mind. Occasional essays are grouped in five section, viz. "Reading", "Being", "Seeing", "Feeling" and "Remembering". This division and the titles of the sections is reminiscent of the essay collections by Susan Sontag, compare for instance with Where the stress falls, which is divided into three sections "Reading", "Seeing" and "There and Here". Is this a tribute to Susan Sontag?
However, it is obvious that the essays of Zadie Smith cannot compare even a little with the essays of Susan Sontag. The essays by Zadie Smith uttely lack originality. They were not written out of curiosity of the author, or the author's initiative to explore and attempt to capture a vision. They were not even, as Somerset Maugham migh call it, literary diversions, written to please the author. Most of the essays in this collection were written at request, or as the author puts it in the "Foreword" (..) requests that came in now and then. Two thousand words about Christmas? About Katherine Hepburn? Kafka? Liberia? A hundred thousand words piled up that way.
Where is the passion? Where is the sense of novelty and pleasure of writing as an adventure? It is not there. Changing my mind. Occasional essays is the result of Zadie Smith plodding from deadline to deadline.
Zadie Smith is a very successful author at a still very young age. Apparently, a number of these essays must have been written very early on in her career, or as she writes in the "Foreword" when you are first published at a young age, your writing grows with you. (...) Changing my mind seemed an apt, confessional title to describe this process. (p. xiii). In essence, the collection of essays in Changing my mind. Occasional essays are early attempts by an author who has not yet found a form.
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LibraryThing member gayla.bassham
Interesting, but so much of it was so trivial. Honestly, Zadie Smith is an amazing writer, but I still don't care what she thought about Memoirs of a Geisha.
LibraryThing member snash
Changing My Mind is a mixed bag of essays, all written with intelligence and insight but many of narrow interest. I found the essays on "Their Eyes Were Watching God", "That Crafty Feeling", Speaking in Tongues" and the three memoir pieces under the heading of Feeling very good and thought
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provoking. The rest I found a struggle. Show Less
LibraryThing member bodachliath
A disparate and wide ranging series of essays, mixing criticism of books and films, family history and travelogue. Smith is never less than engaging and thought provoking, whatever she writes about. The sections about her father are particularly moving, as is the account of the devastation she
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found on a trip to Liberia, the film criticism is very funny in places and the literary criticism clever and perceptive, though the final section on David Foster Wallace is hard work. Show Less
LibraryThing member lisapeet
My idea of escapist reading these days is something that requires my attention and engages me all the way, so I'm on a nonfiction kick—which is probably working too well, because I'm having trouble tearing myself away long enough to do a whole bunch of work reading I need to take care of at home,
I got into this one in anticipation of reading her new novel once I'm in a fiction-y mood again. The essays here weren’t particularly pertinent to anything in my life—I don’t care about the posthumous disposition of Kafka’s work, and I never really got on the David Foster Wallace train—but I like seeing how she does her reviewing, what's in her toolbox. She does a lot of thinking on her pages, and it veered close to being a vanity production in a lot of places, but I still enjoy watching her do it.
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and now have it all piled up for this weekend. Oh well, at least it's a long weekend and I can do both.I got into this one in anticipation of reading her new novel once I'm in a fiction-y mood again. The essays here weren’t particularly pertinent to anything in my life—I don’t care about the posthumous disposition of Kafka’s work, and I never really got on the David Foster Wallace train—but I like seeing how she does her reviewing, what's in her toolbox. She does a lot of thinking on her pages, and it veered close to being a vanity production in a lot of places, but I still enjoy watching her do it.
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LibraryThing member alanteder
Not sure how to review a book of essays, but I'll just say that I thoroughly enjoyed this. Even the somewhat lighter pieces like the movie reviews and Hollywood tales were by turns funny and intriguing esp. the portraits of Katherine Hepburn and Greta Garbo.
The best parts were about writing and
The best parts were about writing and
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rules for novelists and also the essays about other writers and other books. The main ones being about Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, George Eliot's Middlemarch, Vladimir Nabokov's Pnin, Joseph O'Neill's Netherland, Tom McCarthy's Remainder (which might also contain #ASMRinFiction if the reference to the main character's tingling sensation means what I think it means) and David Foster Wallace's Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Most of those I have never read but Smith's essays make all them sound intriguing. And I'm even more interested in reading those books of Smith's that I've missed along the way. Show Less
LibraryThing member brenzi
I absolutely love Zadie Smith but this collection of essays was a mixed bag. The first essay, “Their Eyes Were Watching God: What Does Soulful mean,” was especially good mostly because I just read the Zora Neale Hurston book in July. I appreciated almost every word Smith had to say on the
The essay about Katharine Hepburn and Greta Garbo was absolutely fascinating. So much I never knew about these women was brought out beautifully by Smith. And her essay entitled “Smith Family Christmas” was wonderful and this passage really hit home:
”Santa help me but I believe this too. You know you believe it when you start your own little family with some person you met four years ago in a bar, and then he tries to open the presents on Christmas Eve because that’s what he did in his family and you have the strong urge to run screaming from the building holding your banner about the end and how it is nigh. It is a moving and comic thing---a Murdochian scuffle between the Real and the Dream---to watch a young couple as they teeter around the Idea of Christmas, trying to avoid internecine festive warfare.”
So like many essay collections this one had its ups and downs but on the whole was really quite good. Recommended.
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subject. Essays about Nabokov, Barthes, Kafka and especially David Foster Wallace….not so much. The Wallace essay was downright deadly boring and long. Just terrible.The essay about Katharine Hepburn and Greta Garbo was absolutely fascinating. So much I never knew about these women was brought out beautifully by Smith. And her essay entitled “Smith Family Christmas” was wonderful and this passage really hit home:
”Santa help me but I believe this too. You know you believe it when you start your own little family with some person you met four years ago in a bar, and then he tries to open the presents on Christmas Eve because that’s what he did in his family and you have the strong urge to run screaming from the building holding your banner about the end and how it is nigh. It is a moving and comic thing---a Murdochian scuffle between the Real and the Dream---to watch a young couple as they teeter around the Idea of Christmas, trying to avoid internecine festive warfare.”
So like many essay collections this one had its ups and downs but on the whole was really quite good. Recommended.
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LibraryThing member jonfaith
One of Ms. Smith's projects in this rather sprawling collection is an assembly of the disparate. That sounds Foucauldian and I think I am wide of the mark with my designation, but only just. Such strange pieces are collected between these soft covers and I remain on the margins of my wits to
The essay Speaking in Tongues should be a necessary primer for those about to read NW. I wish I had encountered the essay before the novel. The Liberian journalism and cinematic sketches were sound if egregious. The autobiographical pieces on approach too the novel and her memories of her father are sublime. Such is the dearest under the sun, especially to this cranky sod who can't seem to step aside from the latest United loss.
The collection concludes with a eulogy of sorts to David Foster Wallace. Again Zadie Smith has not pushed my hand into another reading of DFW, I doubt nay one could these days. I am glad to have had this time with Smith's nonfiction.
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discern the "what for." It speaks of my amateur treatment of essays that I regard the value of such in its ability to persuade me to the author's perspective. By my metric the early essays were failures. I didn't want to read Hurston or any more Forster; it was quite the contrary, if fact, I thought I don't need to bother. Not now anyway. Ruminations on Barthes and Nabokov were a different kettle but it should be stated throughout these myriad points of interest, I loved Smith's observations and language.The essay Speaking in Tongues should be a necessary primer for those about to read NW. I wish I had encountered the essay before the novel. The Liberian journalism and cinematic sketches were sound if egregious. The autobiographical pieces on approach too the novel and her memories of her father are sublime. Such is the dearest under the sun, especially to this cranky sod who can't seem to step aside from the latest United loss.
The collection concludes with a eulogy of sorts to David Foster Wallace. Again Zadie Smith has not pushed my hand into another reading of DFW, I doubt nay one could these days. I am glad to have had this time with Smith's nonfiction.
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Awards
Publishers Weekly's Best Books of the Year (Nonfiction — 2009)
The New York Times Notable Books of the Year (Nonfiction — 2010)
Los Angeles Times Best Books of the Year (Nonfiction — 2009)