Bookshelves--What Are You Reading?

[Monte Smith]

I recently finished the very excellent, very literary JARHEAD by Anthony Swofford. I can easily recommend that to supporters of the war and naysayers alike. Swofford is only concerned to tell his own experience from Gulf I, and it is de profundis. Excellent book.

Now I am charging thru some shitty Hitchens (LETTERS TO A YOUNG CONTRARIAN) from the ill-advised Basic Books "Letters To" series based on the concept from Rilke's LETTERS TO A YOUNG POET...a seriously over-rated book to begin with. Dinesh D'Souza's LETTERS TO A YOUNG CONSERVATIVE wasn't bad, but basically this series is a bunch of extended magazine articles and who could ever read Alan Dershowitz's LETTERS TO A YOUNG LAWYER? I'd rather plead guilty.

What are you reading? And by all means, share with us a shot of your shelves in addition to your current reading. The technology of digital photography is magic.

[Brian Olewnick]

Aside from Walter Horn's "The Perennial Solution Center" which has its own thread, I've been doing some light reading including Walter Mosley's "Bad Boy Brawley Brown" and Paul Theroux' "Hotel Honolulu".

[gnhrtg]

This week, I'll be finished with the following:

Thomas Schelling - Micromotives and Macrobehavior
Jon Elster - Ulysses Unbound

I'm also trying to find time to get started on Martin Amis' "Money." Maybe some encouragement from you can help!

[mjb]

I have lost track of the number of times I have read "Money" and not because I have a poor memory. It is simply a book that reveals itself upon subsequent visits

Its combination of humour and insight into the human condition is, I find, invigorating. John Self is a character, in every sense of the word, who is drawn so well that I virtually worry for him as his story evolves.

It also causes me laugh out loud ... and as a stereotypical uptight repressed Englishman of my generation, each outburst catches me by surprise.

[Gary Sisco]

Closing in on the final chapters of Dos Passos' "USA."

Recently started "The Faith: A History Of Christianity" (can't remember the author at the moment).

About a third of the way through Mance Lipscomb's oral autobiography.

and the study of the slave trade continues.

[Tom Storer]

I too am doing what Brian calls "light reading" - a detective novel by Dennis Lehane. Good stuff if you like well-written, violent detective novels.

"Light reading" accounts for about 90% of my reading.

My wife was at the London Book Fair last week and brought me back a couple of doorstopper paperbacks to raise my sights a little. Nothing new, but literary: Thomas Pynchon's "Mason & Dixon" and Peter Nadas's "A Book of Memories."

Which should I read first?

Monte, is that Greil Marcus's "The Old, Weird America" I see on your shelf? Do you have the CD "Country Blues" by old, weird banjo player and singer Dock Boggs, with lengthy and fascinating liner notes by Marcus? If not, I recommend it. It's on a label called Revenant.

We also have a 2-CD compilation Marcus made to accompany "Invisible Republic." Email me if you're interested!

[Salvador Dali Lama]

Right now I'm reading Watership Down. Just recently finished "Fathers and Sons" by Turgnev though, it was great. I'm looking forward to getting more into the Russian novelists...

after this it will probably be Midnights Children by the man, Salman Rushdie.

The Death of Artemio Cruz by Carlos Fuentes
The Underdogs by Mariano Azuela
Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo

I'm teaching these 3 most important Mexican novels in Cuernavaca this summer--anyone familiar
with Cuernavaca? would love to hear from you if so, I've not been there myself.

Currently:

Tinderbox by Stephen Zunes. History of U.S. involvement in the Middle East and Islamic world, advancing the thesis that our government is a destabilizing presence in the region.


Hey, Sisco, since you're doing a comprehensive study, you done C.L.R. James's The Black Jacobins yet? The essential study of the San Domingo slave revolt under Touissant L'Ouverture and the formation of Haiti.

Also, there's Robin Blackburn's The Making of New World Slavery, which I've bought but haven't read.

P.S. As with all things Monte-related, there's some political bias in his assessment of Hitchens' Letters To a Young Contrarian (which I loved).

You should all know that the crap about the Basic Books series being ill-conceived (which I agree with, BTW), is just a smokescreen for the fact that Monte's favorite Lefty still has nice things to say about Lenin, Luxemburg, Gramsci, and co. and says so in his book. This must piss of our boy somethin' fierce.

[Monte Smith]

Tom:

Your wife was at London this year? Cool. I didn't go, but I did a heck of a lot of support and sales coordinating for my company's booth at the Book Fair. Hopefully it will pay off in foreign sales.

Yeah, that's THE OLD, WEIRD AMERICA you see. Absolutely untouched, just like the quasi-similar WHERE THE DEAD VOICES GATHER by Tosches which is lying somewhere in the home office. I think I said on the book thread on the old site that I don't have "to read" piles anymore, I have whole rooms. To the disdain of my sensible wife.

Alex: Hardly. I like Hitchen's writing quite well and throughly enjoyed his more recent WHY ORWELL MATTERS in which Hitch has quite a few good things to say about the old Left. However, his LETTERS TO A YOUNG CONTRARIAN is scatter-shot and rambling. I don't find it offensive to my political sensibilities.


Here's my orange books. I arranged them this way because back in college a hallmate made the interesting critique that I owned too many orange books. By which he meant Penguin paperbacks. The notion stuck.

[Monte Smith]

P.S. Funny Alex should mention C.L.R. James: I picked up his BEYOND A BOUNDARY at the library because Hitchens recommended it as *the best* book on cricket in WHY ORWELL MATTERS.

[walto]

Speaking of Orwell, I was kind of annoyed by condescending retrospectives of both Orwell (by, I think, Menand) and Huxley (by Clive James) in recent NYers. I posted my comments on the latter at the NYer forum a week or so ago.

[Salvador Dali Lama]

Picked up some solid looking stuff today... a book about improv called "Free Play: improv in life and art", Kafka's Metamorphisis, and Out of India. G'wan be a lot of late nights this week.

[Dennis Gonzalez]

I'm reading "Communion Blood", a vampire (St. Germain, to be exact) novel.Communion Blood Yaaaah!

Achilles, all I hear about Cuernavaca is that it is beautiful. Quizá Sergio ya ha visitado...

[Dennis Gonzalez]

Oh, beloved convex bookshelf!

[Monte Smith]

Awesome, Dennis.

They say that a bookshelf is the costume of the mind. I know that everytime I see in a magazine a picture of someone in front of their bookshelves, or a picture of someone's library, my head invariably tilts to the side as I check out the spines. "Have that, have that, read that, hated that, that sucks, garbage, never heard of that, have that."

Oops...had an image here but I tried to upgrade to an IMG doohickey and I messed up.

[Sergio Zamora]

Originally posted by achilles
The Death of Artemio Cruz by Carlos Fuentes
The Underdogs by Mariano Azuela
Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo

Achilles, 'Pedro Paramo' is my favorite novel ever. 'Los de Abajo' and 'Artemio Cruz' are very good, too, but 'Pedro Paramo' is a whole other thing.

Q: are you teaching it in Spanish, and do you speak Mexican? To me the power of the book comes in the deft and economical use of a language which is very specific to Mexicans. Anyone can enjoy the book, of course, but I don't think one gets as much out of it without understanding Mexican language and the sometimes complex emotional relationship a word or a phrase may have in a particular context. Same goes for Rulfo's other masterpies 'El Llano en Llamas'. When I read it, I can 'hear' what the characters are saying and how they say it.

[Sergio Zamora]

Originally posted by Dennis Gonzalez
Achilles, all I hear about Cuernavaca is that it is beautiful.
Quizá Sergio ya ha visitado...

Passed by on a bus, but never actually been there. From what I know, it is beautiful.

Oh, and me - I'm finally reading the Carr Miles bio, and interspersing it with articles from the Improvised Music from Japan journal.

[cookie]

I admit I'm reading a trashy romance novel my husband gave me for Valentine's day two years ago. Just didn't get to it until now.

I'm interested in the Stephen Zunes book Alex mentioned: TINDERBOX. Zunes used to teach in town I believe. It would be an interesting topic on which to hear what he has to say.

I keep a book of Harlan Ellison stories (ANGRY CANDY right now) by my bed. Hasn't given me nightmares yet.

Sergio,
yes Pedro Paramo is one of the great books--a truly orginal
work of art that deserves more acclaim (though Susan Sontag wrote the foreward to the new English edition). My Spanish is
pretty sketchy--I have to resort to the dictionary a lot, so no
doubt I'm missing some things. I'm teaching all three of those books in translation. Any of your insights on Pedro Paramo you can pass along would be greatly welcomed.

Dennis, yes I keep hearing the same about Cuernavaca--have you been there?

[S.Eden]

“Free Play” by Stephen Nachmanovitch is a very worthwhile book, IMO. I disagree with him on some basic premises regarding spirituality, but his analysis of the many facets of improvisation comes off as very refreshing.


Currently on my "doing" list:

“The Underground History of American Education” by John Taylor Gatto

“To Criticize The Critic and Other Writings” by T.S. Eliot

"The Getaway and Other Stories" by Dorothy Thomas

[patricia]

I'm not going to post my book collection storage facilities. They sure aren't as organized as the above ones are. I have them everywhere. They're on shelves, on the floor in neat stacks, in the living room and the bedroom, on top of and underneath carved chests, which have CD's and video-tapes in them as well as in rows on my desk and on top of my sideboard.
Almost forgot, under my TV/audio/video table. It's fairly organized, but my shelves are full of video tapes. The books multiply in the dark, like rabbits, it seems. And, this is after I've culled my collection through three rather rapid moves.
Bibliophelia is as deeply affecting and hard to kick as a heroin habit. And, like heroin, you have to want to kick it and I don't have any immediate plans to stop reading.

Around Christmas, I was reading a series of books by Francis Parkinson Keyes, which I hadn't seen for years. I had forgotten I had them. "Crescent Carnival" has more information about New Orleans than most about the background preparations for Mardi Gras.

If it's a book, fiction, non-fiction, I'll read it. More than once, I've perused the Gideon in the night table, in the hotel, when I've forgotten to bring a book.

[cookie]

As a book, the Bible's ok. I think it becomes not okay when folks start using it to explain their poor or insane behaviour. As a book though, it can be pretty cool. I like the Psalms alot. Some of the imagery is so beautiful. Ancient song lyrics....

I keep a modern translation of the Bible on the nightstand too. I also keep a journal and a few sundry recovery books.

I too will read anything. Fact, fiction, short-story, poem, cereal box, old newspaper....anything. "I'm reading last year's papers, although I don't know why..." Steely Dan.

[Salvador Dali Lama]

me too patritia, I have more books piled up in rooms all over the house than I do on shelves. same with cds. its a real mess. but at least I keep my vinyl in crates.... usually...

[patricia]

Originally posted by cookie
As a book, the Bible's ok. I think it becomes not okay when folks start using it to explain their poor or insane behaviour. As a book though, it can be pretty cool. I like the Psalms alot. Some of the imagery is so beautiful. Ancient song lyrics....

I keep a modern translation of the Bible on the nightstand too. I also keep a journal and a few sundry recovery books.

I too will read anything. Fact, fiction, short-story, poem, cereal box, old newspaper....anything. "I'm reading last year's papers, although I don't know why..." Steely Dan.

I've always treated the Bible much like any other book, not as a guide to life, but an interesting compilation of writings by observers of events in long-past history. It's so vague and subject to interpretation, by those who would use it that way, that it amazes me how effective that it is taken in totally un-faith related situations.
As you say, you can't explain, or worse, excuse people's behaviour by referencing the Bible, or any other book.

"The question turns mainly on whether the strange Greek in which the four Gospels are written is simply the work of Jews thinking in Aramaic though writing in Greek, or whether it represents rather an effort to translate literally into Greek original Aramaic Gospels now lost." Ernest Sutherland Bates

I smiled when you mentioned cereal boxes. My own low was reading my toothpaste tube and the box it came in.

Monte:

http://www.marxists.org/archive/james-clr/index.htm

Collection of writings by C.L.R. James. Politics aside I think you might enjoy him for the literary quality alone. World Revolution is a very well-written, Anti-Stalinist critique of Comintern politics.

Cookie:

http://www.commoncouragepress.com/in...ook&bookid=226

Zunes's book is very useful, but for some reason I can't do more than a single chapter a sitting, since I'm one of those compulsive foot-note checkers, and he's got a lot of them. That aside, it's very approachable.

[Gary Sisco]

Damn. Well, I learned a new thing about the new board I'll have to remember. My dial-up connection timed out while I was writing a response to Achilles and Alex, and after I was reconnected, my post was long gone. No amount of "back" or "forward" button pushing will find it again. Lesson learned. (It was too long to rewrite, so it's gone, now.)

[Tom Storer]

Gary, that happened to me, not with a time-out but when I hit "Back" to check something in another post. I went forward again and my post had disappeared. The old JC didn't do that, but now that I think of it, other vB boards do, so I should have known.

When I'm settling in for a major session at the board, I open a text editor at the same time. If I start getting into a real long post, I do it in the text editor and paste it in when I'm ready. Or if I have to get up for some reason, I copy and paste my current post into the text editor to make sure I don't lose it if the board crashes or something.

oh, come on, Gary, give it another go--what say you?!