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- Life: A User's Manual, Georges Perec
- And then there are the books that make you feel too stupid even to
contemplate writing anything. This would be one of them. Wow. I
don't even know how to describe it. Its structure is a description of
stuff in a building (much like a condominium), but actually amounts to a
collection of short stories, only more. I don't know what else to say.
Just wow.
- Thinks..., David Lodge
- Great (because gosh I always like discussions about consciousness and
stuff), but not as great as the other works of Lodge I've read. The
affair just doesn't seem believable somehow, and the satire just isn't as
biting. Which is too bad. It's weird that critics seem to like this work
of his more than his others, because I so prefer the others.
- The Cheese Monkeys: A Novel in Two Semesters
- It was pretty light, but gosh I liked it. I liked the narrator,
I liked Winter Sorbeck, I even kinda liked Maybelle. But Himillsy Dodd
was too much. And she kept reminding me of Marla from Fight Club,
which was also a little distracting. But the art projects were a fun
read, as was the subtle (almost) coming out story embedded in there.
- Erasure, Percival Everett
- Oh dear me. This was great. That is to say, I like the way that
everett explores the narrator's frustrations with the accusations of not
being black enough, frustrations with being a minority in a certain type
of fiction often regarded as "white." So. And, of course, I like the
theme of a prank gone wild. I've always liked that.
- The Father Costume, Ben Marcus (with images by Matthew Ritchie)
- Ooh this was really creepy. And pretty. It felt like a slow
lament, that wraps you more and more as time passes.
- A note: earlier I had an exchange with him about the book! I'd
written (about Notable American Women and The Father
Costume), "Ben Marcus's faculty web page at Columbia says this will be
published in the spring of 2001 by Artspace Books. But I haven't seen it
anywhere! Where is it, Ben?" and Ben wrote back,
- "The novel, Notable American Women, is coming out in March from
Vintage. The Artspace book is called The Father Costume and has images by
Matthew Ritchie. It is scheduled for April or May, 2002."
- Zazie in the Metro, Raymond Queneau
- Dare I say it? Foul-mouthed Zazie is endearing. I was expecting not
to be endeared, but oh, I was. Nasty nasty child.
- Fever in Urbicand, Francois Schuiten and Benoît Peeters
- More from Schuiten and Peeters (this one more like Invisible
Cities and less like Brazil. Again, the horrors of overzealous
urban planners. I'm liking this "Cities of the Fantastic" theme.
- Brusel, Francois Schuiten and Benoît Peeters
- Kind of like a graphic novel version of Invisible Cities mixed
with Brazil. Lighter than I'd hoped, but still great. Oh, the terror of
overzealous urban planners.
- Yeats Is Dead!, Joseph O'Connor (ed.)
- Hilarious, though fluffy. A mystery written by a bunch of Irish
authors, chapter by chapter. It'd be neat to have seen the process.
Anyway, it reminds me of the Eyre Affair a little, in the manner that it's
set in a world where certain literature is highly prized. There are some
darned good twists in here.
- The Poor Mouth, Flann O'Brien
- Spoof of a lot of other Irish novels. Everyone eats potatoes, and
complains about their hard Gaelic life.
- Manhattan Transfer, John Dos Passos
- Um, wow, was this book really written in 1925? The style is just so .
. . modern, the way you hear little snippets of conversations and see tiny
pieces of interactions. It's very Gaddis. It's very New York. And some
of the character portrayals, wow.
- Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron, Daniel Clowes
- How creepy and surreal and sad can you get, all at once? This seems
like the extreme.
- A Void, Georges Perec
- I don't know why I had such a hard time reading it last time! Because
it was really pretty easy this time. Maybe it was just that I was home
for the holidays last time. I dunno. But yeah. Good, despite the mild
contrivance of the curse. But you just have to be impressed by having no
e's.
- 53 Days, Georges Perec
- It is strange that this is unfinished, because the actual unfinished
nature of the real book fits into the set-up of the story inside the book
almost too perfectly. It is good. I wish Perec had been able to finish
it before he died. What a great mystery it would've made. But now it's
all unsolved.
- Around the Day in Eighty Worlds, Julio Cortazar.
- God! Cortazar is sweet! I can't say that more! Favorite essays:
"Only a Real Idiot," "Louis, Super-Cronopio," "Journey to a Land of
Cronopios," "No, No, and No," and "Glass with Rose."
- The Cambridge Quintet, John Casti
- Hmm. Not sure what to make of this. I really wouldn't call it a
novel, see, because the characters (of real people) just didn't feel
fleshed out, and, well, all the book was was just a conversation between
them. But though it lacked character, it wasn't a bad conversation in
terms of ideas, it was a nice edifying one similar to the conversations
between Achilles and the turtle in Godel, Escher, Bach, only here
it was between C.P. Snow, geneticist J.B.S. Haldane, physicist Erwin
Schrodinger, mathematician Alan Turing, and philosopher Ludwig
Wittgenstein. Or it would've been edifying had I not read lots of stuff
about this already. Still, it was fun.
- Nice Work, David Lodge
- Funny satire of English academia, though a wee bit too harsh on the
lit-crit feminists, methinks. Still, the book's full of amusing
characterizations of all the types of people in those fields.
- Chimera, John Barth
- This totally rocked! Funny, self-referential, and lit-theoried all
at the same time, but in a spoofy kind of way! And I bet this is why
David Foster Wallace got all into Medusa in Infinite Jest. Okay,
the ending kinda petered off, but most of it was a total pleasure to
read.
- The Wasp Factory, Iain Banks
- Iain Banks is one sick fuck. What a great book. Except for the last
half chapter, which was a wee too explicative. Otherwise, fab. Enjoy the
grotesqueries, ignore the unrealities.
- Fingersmith, Sarah Waters
- Boy, did she throw on the twists in this one! Okay, so some of the
twists got unbelievable, it was so over-the-top. But if you ignore that
and just play along, it's so fun! What a great adventure! Madness,
intrigue, betrayal!
- Affinity, Sarah Waters
- Wow, much more depressing than Waters's other book, endingwise. But
still nice. I liked the twist, I love the description. I can't help but
think, though, that Waters is showing off her academic background in
history, some of the details seem so in depth. But hey, it works.
- Stranger Things Happen, Kelly Link
- I can't tell if I adore her or if I'm annoyed by her. Or both. She's
weird, and creepy, which I like. But she's so het, and in a boy-loving
way. Which I am, sometimes, but not as often. I'm more often het in a
girl-loving way. Except not. Except torn. But I really like her
creepiness. The blending of horror and fairy tales and
Nancy Drew and Lorrie-Moore-like angst. It's not bad. It's pretty good.
- A later note: Now that I'm not writing the blurb while drunk,
I should add that what I meant by "I'm more often het in a girl-loving
way" is that the times I really truly feel het is when I feel like a boy
who likes girls (rather than when I feel like a girl who likes boys,
as I never quite feel like I approach boys in a het-girl way).
Because when I like girls, I usually feel more like a boy who likes
girls than a girl who likes girls.
- Notable American Women, Ben Marcus
- I liked it, but not as much as The Age of Wire and String.
Maybe because this was so much creepier, and I just didn't expect that.
There's this whole theme of maybe child abuse in there that just squicks
me. But it's fascinating, nevertheless. I wish I could disassociate
myself like that.
- Tipping the Velvet, Sarah Waters
- Great! I haven't read great lesbian fiction in awhile, and this was
definitely great lesbian fiction. Victorian adventure-ey stuff, in a
light, rompy tone. The final romance at the end wasn't totally believable,
-- seemed like Waters kinda ran out of steam there. I completely
couldn't figure out why the narrator had a thing for the last woman she
did. But the rest of it was marvelous.
- Glad Andrea lent it to me, and will probably look out for Waters's
Affinity and Fingersmith.
- Intimacy and Midnight All Day, Hanif Kureishi
- Because I enjoy a good, cold emptiness, I read Kureishi's Intimacy
while listening to Death Cab for Cutie's new EP, Stability. Both the
novella and the EP are stark stark stark (especially the cover of
Bjork's "All Is Full of Love"), and made me feel as if my layers
are being slowly frozen and crushed into some kind of organic powdered
snow.
- You wouldn't believe how pure Intimacy feels, how weird and
transparent and filled with conflicts that are too icy to be angstful. It
makes me feel so empty I can't even cry.
- The weird thing is that the book is little, plotwise, like the movie.
I mean, you can see bits and pieces of where the movie came from in the
Midnight All Day part, the short story collection part (like
"Strangers When We Meet" and "A Meeting, At Last"). But the book is about
the night before a protagonist leaves his girlfriend and their two
children, and his thoughts. The words have the same jumpy resonance of
Wittgenstein's Mistress, and the same echoing truths of, well,
Kureishi's other stuff. While the movie centered around a protagonist's
weekly trysts with a woman he didn't know at all.
- Wait, correction. That's not the weird thing. The weird thing is how
the book's tone is exactly like the movie's even though the book's plot
is little like the movie's. They have the same all-too-true emptiness. The
protagonist's recognition of responsibility, at least in part. But the
coexistence of hope for the future, despite it all. And the transience,
always the consistency of transience.
- The relationship between the book and the movie was similar, too, for
Ghost World. The remarkable similarity in tone and atmosphere,
given the plot differences. As if under an impressionist's scheme, the
book and the movie would be the same work. Anyway, I think it's pretty
neat how this was done.
- But back to Intimacy and Midnight All Day. The other stories
in the book (that is, other than Intimacy, and with the exception
of "The Penis," which was just too gimmicky) have the same stark mixture
of failing and hope. Like "Four Blue Chairs," "Girl," and "Midnight All
Day."
- As usual, I've found that someone else has pointed out what I could
not point out about the clear sadness I found so wonderful about this
book, and has done it much better than if I had even tried to do so. From
Ben Marcus, in a book review (of another book) in the News and Observer:
"Yates makes you think for a while that no other outcome is even likely,
but the upside is that we do things, we live, we have relationships, for
their intrinsic pleasure, and not as a guarantee. His bleakness is in fact
an argument for joy right now."
- Yes. That's it.
- Read the last paragraph of Intimacy. It does exactly
that.
- Small World, David Lodge
- Hilarious. It's a comedy (about academia), so I don't mind how all
the plotlines tie up. And tie up they do, in an amusing fashion. I read
it twice just to catch everything I missed the first time.
- A funny coincidence with Small World: so I'm reading
it pretty soon after The Paradoxes of Mr. Pond, right? And one of
the last short stories in Paradoxes has this deal about a pantomime
of Puss in Boots, go figure. The funny thing (at least to me) is that
Small World opens up by mentioning this very same Puss in Boots
pantomime! Is this a Brit thing? Are there tons of Puss in Boots
pantomimes over there such that you can't help but mention them? But I've
never run across them in writing before!
- Ghost World, Daniel Clowes
- This was so much better than the movie! Wow! Starting off
with Enid saying, in reference to Sassy, "I hate this fucking
magazine! These stupid girls think they're so hip, but they're just a
bunch of trendy stuck-up prep-school bitches who think they're
'cutting edge' because they know who Sonic Youth is!" and Becky
responding, "You're a stuck-up prep-school bitch!" It captured my
frustrations, and the problems with my frustrations, oh so well.
The book was also pretty different from the movie. Like Steve Buscemi's
character is nothing in the book. Same with the whole art-school
storyline. But both the movie and the book kept very much the same tone
(with the book being more subdued, but similarly
melancholically ambivalent), which was interesting.
Everyone else's escape dream involves cars, but Enid's dream -- getting on
a bus and just going -- is still my dream.
- The Paradoxes of Mr. Pond, G.F. Chesterton
- More detective stories by Chesterton. Again, of the Sherlock
Holmes/Agatha Christie problem-solvingy sort.
- Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk
- This was just like the movie. Really. (I'd borrowed it from
Ed, who said, "This was just like the movie. Really.")
- The Club of Queer Trades, G.K. Chesterton
- A few light-hearted stories by Chesterton -- almost detective stories,
but not quite. Flavored kinda like the Sherlock Holmes stories, though,
but weirder.
- The Eyre Affair, Jasper Fforde
- Okay, this was just candy. I mean, it has everything I love -- time
travel, literary detectives, alternate universes, death -- and tons of it.
It's fun, it's fluff, it's fun fluff. But if it weren't for all those
things (time travel, literary detectives, alternate universes, death), I'm
not sure I'd read it. Everything wraps up a little too nicely for
my tastes. I prefer my ends loose.
- The Voice Imitator, Thomas Bernhard
- What an odd book. I picked this up from Politics and Prose, because
it was on their recommended list. Found out just now that Ben Marcus
reviewed it, and had this to say: "Those still reading can be
assured that simperingly positive attitudes, blind faith, feel-good
philosophy and deluded optimism -- all of which have become like a
new form of oppressive American weather -- will never show up in the
brutal darkness of Bernhard's work."
- It's really not that brutal. I mean, it occasionally is, but the
violence in each of the stories is as cold and clean as you'd expect in a
story that's less than a page (as they all are). They have to be. Maybe
callous is a better word for them. Reminded me of the violence, when it
appears, in Ben Katchor's works. Maddening and short.
- The Impossibly, Laird Hunt
- A quick way to get yourself off my to-read
list is to email me, and tell me to read your book. That's what
happened here. It won't guarantee a good review, though. But
(thankfully) The Impossibly was a great great read.
- The greatness of this book lies in the narrator's voice, which is both
detective-noiry in its vagueness and darkly humorous, in its
self-contradictingness. Only teensy bits are revealed at the time, and
the narration continually folds back on itself in surprising ways.
- Plus there are some great quotes, like this: "I was told once in a big
bed in the countryside by the woman I loved that what made it always so
difficult, all of it, was being an interior in a world of exteriors. The
skin embraces while the bones, stripped of their flesh and fat, long to
click and knock against each other. It is only when the skin is gone and
the flesh, a function of decay, releases its water that they finally heap
the bones together, she supposed, but this is too late."
- A personally endearing thing about the author is that he used to be a
U.N. press officer, which gives me hope, too, that someday I'll get the
chance to write fiction, despite my anchor in legal writing.
- Another personally endearing thing (this time about the book, not the
author, though it's kind of about the author, too), is that there's a
little quote of Ben Marcus in the book, at the beginning of chapter C.
- The Melancholy of Resistance, Laszlo Krasznahorkai
- That took a long time to read, but it was pretty worth it, in the way
that Gaddis is pretty worth it. In fact, the book is very much like
Gaddis's books, only inverted. That is, rather than showing the external
dialogue of people, this book almost entirely focused on the internal
dialogues of people. Very meanderey and wanderey, therefore, with
constant interjections. But not Joyce-ey, because the emphasis was almost
entirely internal, rather than providing various references to outside
works of literature. Or so I thought. It was interesting seeing how
the train of events wove together. And the quotes around "verbatim"
thoughts seemed a fairly novel (no pun intended) technique, at least the
way it seemed employed by Krasznahorkai.
- Birds of America, Lorrie Moore
- Okay, let's get this straight. I enjoyed this lots. It was eminently
readable. But I'm not sure I could stand too much of it (certainly I
couldn't read too much at once). There's something too . . . arranged in
Lorrie Moore's writings. Too composed. Smooth. Elegant. Witty. Which
makes it, I dunno, not quite what I look for in books, even though I
enjoyed reading this book. On a weird note, this is exactly how I imagine
Rusty would write, if he were older (and more "mature") and female.
There's something similar there, in the observant style, in the
witticisms.
- Holidays on Ice, David Sedaris
- A few mean and funny short tales by David Sedaris. Present from
Louise.
maybe
- Ella Minnow Pea, Mark Dunn
- Clever, but unbelieveable (even within the context of suspending
disbelief.) Plus the girl was a little annoying.
- Exercises in Style, Raymond Queneau
- Better as a sort of cookbook for narrative styles. As fiction,
though, kinda tedious.
- The Barnum Museum, Steven Millhauser
- Okay, the one really derivative story ("The Barnum Museum," of Borges)
I liked a lot. The others were enjoyable, but didn't wow me, they kind of
felt like they dragged a little--not too much to be annoying, but enough
not to make me fall in love with them. Oh well.
- Pricksongs and Descants, Robert Coover
- Pretty decent collection of short stories, but not as metafictional as
I'd expected. And some were just plain creepy, like "The Marker" in
"Seven Exemplary Fictions."
- Milosz's ABC's, Czeslaw Milosz
- Wow, that took me awhile to go through, even though it wasn't so long
a book. Basically an ABC compedium of interesting things in Milosz's
life, as perceived by Milosz. Which meant it would help if I knew
something about him other than the fact that he was the winner of the 1980
Nobel Prize in Literature. But I really don't. So.
- The History of the Seige of Lisbon, Jose Saramago
- I read this because I wanted to familiarize myself with more Nobel
prizers in Literature. It took me awhile to get into it, but I finally
did. Still--it wasn't amazing. Felt like a lighter Cortazar (in
Hopscotch, perhaps, or 62: A Model Kit.) I did like the
interplay between the proof-reader (more like fact-checker) and the editor
and the author, though. I totally dig that kind of stuff. But the love
story? It was too tentative, too nervous. Eh.
- Moon Deluxe, Frederick Barthelme
- Okay, though, coming off Kureishi's Intimacy, not nearly
as incredible. I mean, they're the same stories of frustration and
longing, only dulled. Maybe that means they're more subtle, maybe it just
makes them less distinguishable from each other. Still, the book was
not bad, overall. I can see why Rusty likes him.
- The Atlas of Experience, Louise Van Swaaij, Jean Klare, David
Winner
- Weird book -- basically this fictitious atlas of things conceptual.
It's a little gimmicky, but fun in the way that the map in The Phantom
Tollbooth was fun.
- Omon Ra, Victor Pelevin
- Maybe I'd need to read this again to get the full effect of it, but I
found it mostly confusing and weird. Kind of Tim Burton-ey, but
not in a good way.
- New Japanese Voices: The Best Contemporary Fiction From Japan,
Helen Mitsios (ed.)
- Okay, so the big reason I wanted to read this is because it has the
only other (other than "Christopher Columbus Discovers America")
translation of a Gen'ichiro Takahashi short story that I've found -- "The
Imitation of Leibniz", which I think would've been pretty durned good,
except that I know nothing about baseball. The other short stories were,
well, okay. "On a Moonless Night," by Sei Takekawa, had a good element of
horror to it. And "Living in a Maze," by Kyoji Kobayashi, was fun in
describing this guy's waking dream. But "X-Rated Blanket," by Eimi
Yamada, was a somewhat boring erotic story. And the translation of
Murakami's "100 Percent Perfect Woman" by Kevin Flanagan and Tamotsu Omi,
lacked the zing of Alfred Birnbaum's translation. So.
no
- The Human Stain, Philip Roth
- Ugh, I really thought this book was badly put together. First, the
writing was inconsistent -- I mean, a lot of it was just annoying, though
it was interspersed with pretty good parts. And so many of the characters
(the Vietnam vet, the postmodern French-born professor) were all too
stereotypical. And even the narrative frame was inconsistent. I mean, it
seemed to be told from the first-person, with that first-person being a
friend of the protagonist, but all too often, the narrator seemed to know
far more (or at least seemed to be able to relay far more) than what he
should've been able to know.
poetry
- The Best of The Prose Poem: An International Journal, Peter Johnson
(ed.)
- David Foster Wallace was right--it's a mixed bag. But there were some
lovely ones in here (if I were a good reviewer, I would've flagged them,
but no, I'm not, and plus I'm just logging these for myself mostly, so
there.) The ones I enjoyed were not, however, the ones DFW seemed to
admire. Well.
- Here, by the way, is what DFW wrote (in Rain Taxi) about the nine
entries "that are so great you end up not even caring what genre they're
supposed to be part of."
- "Paradoxical consequence of the [mediocre/bad poems in the book] for
the 31 p.p.s [prose poems] in the book that really are rich and alive and
fine: It makes them even better. And not just better in comparison to the
dross that surrounds them. It's more like the 173 mediocre/bad p.p.s here
help the reader appreciate the terrible, almost impossible disadvantages
of the P.P. form, which then makes the pieces from Davis, Ignatow, et al.
seem less like just successes than like miracles. The experience of
reading a piece like Davis's 'The Frogs' or Stevens's 'The Sign' or
Ignatow's 'My Own House,' of watching the p.p. somehow achieve poetry's
weird blend of logic and magic with hardly any of poetry's regular assets
or tools, helps us to understand the allure of transgressive forms for
writers, and maybe to remember that most formal conventions themselves
start out as 'experiments.'"
- Okay, so he really said it about thirty-one
"good/alive/powerful/interesting enough to persist in reader's mind more
than 60 seconds after completion," of which nine of them are the
aforementioned Nine. Oh, and that quote should've been block-quoted, I
know. But while I'm being lackadaisical about following Good Editing
Conventions, here's another quote:
- "Big paradox/oxymoron behind this raison [transgression!] and the
current trendiness of transgeneric forms: In fact, these putatively
'transgressive' forms depend heavily on received ideas of genre, category,
and formal conventions, since without such an established context there's
nothing much to transgress against. Transgeneric forms are therefore most
viable -- most interesting, least fatuous -- during eras when literary
genres themselves are relatively stable and their conventions
well-established and codified and no one seems much disposed to fuck with
them. And ours is not such an era."
- But let me propose this one theory. That if prose poetry is to have
any increased appeal, it will not be because of its transgressive
qualities, but its ability to fit more easily into the medium of internet
publication. The common features in the "good" p.p.s described by DFW --
tightness, brevity, subtle iambicness, intimacy rather than formality --
these are features that really really shine in web publishing. Longer
pieces do not shine. Nor, I think, do many rational arguments, at least
the kind that need full, fleshed out discussion. The space thing, like I
said.
- So good p.p.s (the ones with the aforementioned quality) really has, I
think, the opportunity to thrive on the internet. Man, that was a big
tangent.
essays
- Consciousness and the Novel, Connected Essays, David Lodge
- This book both inspired to write more, and scared me from writing
more. The first essay, "Consciousness and the Novel," is just incredible,
describing how literature's approach to, well, telling both
reflects and sheds light on consciousness itself. (I didn't know Lodge
had it in him. I mean, I guess at the back of my mind I kinda knew, but
because my main introduction to his works was through his satire, I never
saw what his analytical side had to offer.)
- I varied in how much I liked the other essays. "Literary Criticism
and Literary Creation" I thought captured pretty well how these to spheres
interact. "Dickens Our Contemporary" and "Forster's Flawed Masterpiece"
gave me new appreciation for the respective authors being discusses.
But ewwww, David Lodge appreciates Philip Roth? Eww eww ewww!
Reading Lodge's essays gave me no understanding as to what Roth's works
has to offer. The same things that Lodge finds fascinating, I find
despicable, and even more damning, flat. But wade through that essan and
get to Lodge's "A Conversation About Thinks" (where he discusses his
recent novels), and all is good again. Ah.
periodicals
- McSweeney's 7
- None of the pieces really wowed me except "The Former World Record
Holder Settles Down," by Courtney Eldridge, which was pretty amazing. But
other than that, eh. The design was lovely, though.
- McSweeney's 6
- Some of this was enjoyable, other parts of it didn't work so much.
First of all, when the songs were too short, there was all this
pressure (intended or not) to read quickly. Secondly, some of the
songs were way too literal. But I did like the blue stones. And the song
about bangs was nice. And the art of Walter Koenigstein (and the
accompanying music by They Might Be Giants) was actually pretty
incredible.
- McSweeney's 5
- Overall, enjoyable, but still, a bit of a mixed bag. Enjoyable
(Marcus's "Literary Enhancement Through Food Intake," Lennon's "The
Accursed Items," and Klemm's "Mr. Squishy") to funny (Werthmann's "Hot
Sex Story Lost in the Thicket of Humanity") to just kind of eh
(Feeney's "The Days Here," Davis's "Marie Curie, Honorable Woman," and
LaFarge's "The Observers.") My take on these stories is probably more due
to my personal tastes, though, than any skill or nonskill on the part of
the authors, who seem genuinely decent. So.
nonfiction
- The Social Construction of What?, Ian Hacking
- Almost makes the social constructionist side of the science wars
sympathetic (to me). But it seems to verstate the "scientists'"
viewppoint in regards to the development of science as more dogmatically
predetermiistic than it really is. Lots of us accept the idea that
science could have and still can develop in many directions, and that
certain ideas could conceivably have been skipped entirely in development.
Or that there are multiple ways of formulating the same idea (wave v.
matrix mechanics, for example).
- Overall, though, it's a good book, and captures the "debates" pretty
well (and in some ways, reframes them well). That said, argh, the copy
editor sucks. Too many typos mar this well-argued book.
- The New Geography, Joel Kotkin
- Maybe I've been reading too many legal texts lately, but the problem
I've had with reading city-studies type books is that they don't make
their argument very clear. What's the thesis of this book? It's unclear.
Somehow changes is technology is changing how we view cities. Nice, but
not well structured. Blah blah blah, we gain stuff, blah blah blah, we
lose stuff. Um.
- The Economy of Cities, Jane Jacobs
- I need to read more, I need to figure out more. Jane Jacobs goes into
her theories about the evolution of cities. It's almost like a prequel to
Rise of the Creative Class, a book that's out nowadays that I
haven't read but I can't imagine doesn't build off Jacobs's writings. Her
ideas center around her thesis that what makes cities economically vibrant
is how they enhance innovation--a simple thesis, but she develops it well.
- Free Agents: A History of Washington, D.C. Graffiti, Roger Gastman
(comp.)
- Pretty incredible. Not just for the art, which is in itself
pretty incredible (it's *hard* to paint with spray cans, at least for me),
but for the language of it all. Tags. Getting up. Writers. Black books.
Bombing. Toys. Piecing. Wildstyle. Wow, just wow. I am just so ignorant.
The feeling of discovery I had reading this book was amazing. (One minor
annoying point about the book, though--there's some awful typos in there.
annoying.)
- The Power of Maps, Denis Wood
- Odd postmodern critique of maps, and about how they obscure judgments
under the guise of objectivity. Sure. Anyway, I read it for
fiction-writing inspiration, and I think I got that out of the book, so
yay.
- Bird Watching in the Americas, Donald Heintzelman
- Not amusing as the other bird book I'd bought. I mean, sure, it lists
what major types of birds are found in each location, but it doesn't have
enough about bird watcher culture, which is what I'm really
fascinated by.
- Nicaraguan Sketches, Julio Cortazar
- Cortazar, in the early 80s, traveling and living in Nicaragua and
documenting the lives of the people.
- Birding for Beginners, Sheila Buff
- Yeah, I've decided to learn about birding. Both as a hobby (not that
I've started, but I've been putting out feelers), and as professional
development. Because in my line of work, it seems somewhat useful to know
what a woodcock is. This book isn't a bad introduction. Buff says things
like, "You should wear such-and-such -- it'll make you look dorky, but who
cares! You're a birder." That kind of acknowledgement is just great.
And the lists, the way birders like to keep lists, that just makes me all
warm and fuzzy with empathy.
- Dirty Little Secrets of the Twentieth Century, James Dunnigan
- No idea how I got this book (a gift? an accidental self-purchase? a
loan?), but there it was, in my unread pile at home. So I read it. And
it was awful. I won't go into how it's a pile of right-wing claptrap, or
how I know that tons of the "facts" in there have been rebutted,
many times, in mainstream analyses. I'll just say this: there are no
sources in the books. Nada, zip, nothing. There.
- The Alphabet Versus the Goddess, Leonard Shlain
- I got this book specifically to get annoyed, and boy was I not
disappointed! First of all, the logic used in the book was just terrible.
Like numerologists, Shlain picks on tenuous and contrived connections, and
converts them into "proofs" of his theory -- that writing itself leads to
dominance by the patriarchal mindset. Every chapter is a parade of
horribles ending with "and all because of the madness of the printing
press."
- Conspiring with Forms, Terry Caesar
- Just weird. I mean, I got interested in it because it started off as
a lit crit analysis of, er, recommendation letters. Then the rest of it
gets all lit critty about English department politics and stuff, which is
fine, but which I'd rather see in fiction.
- A Beautiful Mind, Sylvia Nasar
- I'm guessing this was much more in-depth than the movie was. Certainly
Andrea (who read and watched both, and from whom I borrowed the book) says
so. I'm told the movie left tons of stuff out, too. Ugh. The book,
however, is a great narrative of Nash's life, tons of stuff I'd never
known, being familiar with him only through the Nash equilibrium and all.
It was also nice (as Andrea said to me) to see our MIT prof, Arthur
Mattuck, in the book.
- Who Rules in Science?, James Robert Brown
- Wow. This was a great overview of the "science wars" (the debates
between and among scientists and humanities people regarding the nature of
science, the existence or nonexistence of objectivity, and the methods of
science. Brown does a pretty good job of remaining respectful throughout,
and of describing all the "camps" (with numerous caveats, of course) in
the debate.
- Salt: A World History, Mark Kurlansky
- I got this book because I like salt. And it's great. . . for someone
who likes salt. Otherwise, it doesn't have much of a point, as the
Washington Post book review pointed out. (Someone at the book signing
pointed out that Kurlansky's other food tome, Cod, is much better.
"My heart belongs to Cod," as she put it.) But Salt's still
a great history on salt! It's also inspired me to maybe get a tattoo of
the word "salt," in old Chinese calligraphy form, just over my left
shoulder. A celebration of my love for salt, some sort of cultural
representation, and a warding off of bad luck, all at once.
- Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress, Lawrence
E. Harrison and Samuel P. Huntington (eds.)
- Eh, this was okay. I mean, you have to hand it to them to take on
such a controversial topic, and to try to include various opposing
views (like Richard Schweder's), but all the same, it was fairly uneven.
Some essays were pretty insightful ("Disaggregating Culture," by Nathan
Glazer, I'd pick as one), while others were terribly simplistic.
Plus a lot of the analyses seemed to have a bunch of (unstated)
assumptions. And I think I disagree with tons of it. Though it's good
for me to read stuff I disagree with.
- Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and
Software, Steven Johnson
- Awesome! Fun stuff about self-organizing forms in biology, software,
urban spaces, and the internet. Gets a little too giddy about the
potentials they have, but hey, it's still a great read.
that i won't be finishing, for various reasons
- Digital Leatherette, Steve Beard
- Too cyberpunk! And too disconnected, in the same way that Coover's
A Night at the Movies was. Trying to be clever, but not.