Remember when this used to be a book blog? Me either! (It was!)
From top to bottom, here are the books (two textbooks not yet arrived) I’m reading this semester as well as the classes they belong to. I’ve read the ones marked with asterisks:
The Awakening by Kate Chopin (Toni Morrison)*
Night by Elie Wiesel (The Holocaust)*
A Mercy by Toni Morrison (Toni Morr…let’s just presume that the rest of the Toni Morrison books are for the Toni Morrison class, ok?)
Sula, Song of Solomon, Jazz, Playing in the Dark, The Bluest Eye, Tar Baby by Toni Morrison
Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter (Pomo Brit Writers)
The Real Thing by Tom Stoppard (Pomo Brit Writers)
Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes (Pomo)
The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles (Pomo)
East West by Salman Rushdie (Pomo)
Top Girls by Caryl Churchill (Pomo)
Under the Net by Iris Murdoch (Pomo)*
Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett (Pomo)*
Three Novels (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable) by Samuel Beckett (Pomo)
Maus by Art Spiegelman (The Holocaust)
Cuba by someone or other (History of Cuba)
Selected Writings by Jose Marti (History of Cuba)*
From the House to the Streets: The Cuban’s Women Movement for Legal Reform 1898-1940 by Kathryn Lee Stoner (History of Cuba)
Not pictured: The Elements of Style and another grammar reader for The Roots of Modern English and a few other books for The Holocaust. Happy reading!
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Confession: this is the only one of the series I haven’t read, I just kept putting it off. For the next few days I ask, DON’T SPOIL ME.
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Currently reading (like everyone else on the internet): Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace by David Lipsky
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"11:30 pm on a Friday night is a certain kind of witching hour on the platform of the Brooklyn-bound Q train at Union Square. One couple is pressed up against the wall at the end of the platform making out like teenagers, probably because they are teenagers. Over by the benches there are four other couples — the whole platform, actually, is couples (except for the person observing the couples). A man puts a proprietary hand on his girl’s face and says something that makes her wrinkle her nose, faux-mad. Another couple holds hands as they stare down the tunnel in the direction of the approaching train. No first dates here — the first dates are headed over the river in cabs. Everyone is smiling, a little drunk from the wine at dinner or still laughing about the funny thing at the end of the movie. Everyone seems happy to be going home to a sure thing instead of heading back out into the night in search of something. Three hours from now the platform will be crowded again with those seekers, heading home alone."
Emily Gould from her blog.
I picked up Emily’s new book And The Heart Says Whatever yesterday and very much look forward to reading it (review?). I’ve followed her lovely food/cat tumblr for a bit and am now reading through Emily Magazine. This passage is lovely and sort of jumped out at me from the rest of the page. Also, the title of her book is a Stevie Nicks reference which, as soon as I figured it out, made me happy like a small child.
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When I was a kid, I had this US Presidents fact book that I read in the bathtub. I had sensitive skin and was allergic to bubble bath as a kid so my parents tried to make up for this bubbly wonder of childhood by giving me unlimited bath toys but all I wanted in the tub was a book, specifically this one. It got soggy and I read it over and over but it just became the bathtub book, you know? The pulpy pages swelled with moisture like my fingers as I turned the pages. I learned that George Washington did not have wooden teeth but dentures made of cow teeth among other animals. I learned that most presidents had been Episcopalian. I learned that Woodrow Wilson and I shared a birthday, December 28th. James Madison was the shortest President at 5’4” and Martin Van Buren and his wife spoke Dutch at home. Zachary Taylor died of eating a big glass of milk and a bowl of cherries on a hot summer day. Abraham Lincoln was the only president to receive a patent, for this device that lifted boats over shoals. Ulysses S. Grant was actually born Hiram which I always pointed out to my dad over dinner post-bath since that was his name. Theodore Roosevelt lost the eyesight in one eye from boxing in the White House. Gerald Ford is the only President whose two assassination attempts against him were made by women. Calvin Coolidge is the only President to have been sworn into office by his father. James Buchanan was the only bachelor president. These facts were more interesting to me then and they still are now, more interesting in some regards than the policies of these Presidents. Of course I have researched and studied the actual administrations of many of these men and drank in the information but there’s something about the human element of a story. I feel this way even when discussing athletes with my boyfriend, I have this curiosity to know which person enjoys sailing and which guy has a specific quirk. I want to know what makes people tick, the things they do behind closed doors, the things they are reading in their bathtubs. It’s what we do when we’re alone that says the most about who we are.
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I reread Self-Help by Lorrie Moore last weekend in bed while G. tapped away at my laptop. I sat up against pillows, laid on my stomach, reclined on my side, crossed my legs as I held the book with its cracked spine close to my face, smelling the pages and pulp, maneuvering my way around the bed as I grew uncomfortable while reading. I don’t mean uncomfortable negatively so much as I mean that Lorrie Moore always seems to write things in such a way that they seem to hit too close to home. Moore crafts sentences in the most physical way imaginable, creating images that you have thought before but never found a way to describe. The concrete nature of her writing, of the images, makes her writing seemingly breathe with all of your senses coming alive from sights and smells both lovely and repulsive. “But I love you, he will say in his soft, bewildered way, stirring the spaghetti sauce but not you, staring into the pan as if waiting for something, a magic fish, to rise from it and say: That is always enough, why is that not always enough?” Lines like that leave you with little to say in comparison to what Moore has just told you.
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book #1 of 2010: brief interviews with hideous men by david foster wallace
suggested by monsterbeard
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haiku for january 3rd, 2010
a book helps my mind
wander, roam where my feet have
yet to take a step
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To my three fellow bookstore customers who just asked me for help in finding something:
Just because I’m wearing glasses, a pencil skirt, and a cardigan does not mean I work at a bookstore (but I will help you find those books because I do actually know where they are).
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currently reading: 2666 by Roberto Bolaño
A group of us, which includes myself, walkwhilereading, printed&bound among others, has taken on the daunting task of reading all 912 pages of 2666. We will be posting about our progress here at the 2666 book club as well as reviews and thoughts on the novel as we read. If you’d like to be a part of this endeavor, please follow and read along with us.
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54 Best Books of the Decade; mostly in no particular order.
compiled & reviewed by Anaïs Escobar—this will be permanently in the links at the top of my main page below the writing archive if you need to find it in the future. reblog as needed.
1. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz, 2007
2. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon, 2001
3. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides, 2003
4. The Road by Cormac McCarthy, 2007
5. Fun Home by Alison Bechdel, 2006
6. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer, 2005
7. The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño, 2007
9. A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore, 2009
10. Sailing Alone Around The Room by Billy Collins, 2001
11. Running With Scissors by Augusten Burroughs, 2003
12. Invisible by Paul Auster, 2009
13. Livability by Jon Raymond, 2008
14. Lockpick Pornography by Joey Comeau, 2005
15. The Harry Potter Series by J.K. Rowling
17. Littlefoot by Charles Wright, 2007
18. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume II by Alan Moore & Kevin O’Neill, 2003
19. No One Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July, 2007
20. Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, 2004
21. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon, 2003
22. 30 Days in Sydney by Peter Carey, 2001
23. The Plot Against America by Philip Roth, 2004
24. The History of Love by Nicole Krauss, 2005
25. Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer, 2002
26. The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt, 2000
27. Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life by Steve Martin, 2007
28. The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel by Amy Hempel, 2006
29. The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion, 2005
30. The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa, 2009 (US)
31. Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris, 2000
32. Super Spy by Matt Kindt, 2007
33. The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman, 2008
34. The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson, 2003
35. The Complete Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, 2007
36. The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood, 2000
37. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke, 2004
38. The Puppet & The Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity by Slavoj Žižek, 2003
39. Life of Pi by Yann Martel, 2001
40. Rose of No Man’s Land by Michelle Tea, 2006
41. Blonde: A Novel by Joyce Carol Oates, 2000
42. Marie Antoinette: The Journey by Antonia Fraser, 2001
43. All Families Are Psychotic by Douglas Coupland, 2001
44. Inés of My Soul by Isabel Allende, 2007
45. Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood, 2003
46. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, 2003
47. The Dante Club by Matthew Pearl, 2003
48. Zeitoun by Dave Eggers, 2009
49. The Bonesetter’s Daughter by Amy Tan, 2001
50. Mystic River by Dennis Lehane, 2001
51. Cecil & Jordan in New York by Gabrielle Bell, 2008
52. Yoga For People Who Can’t Be Bothered To Do It by Geoff Dyer, 2003
53. Bee Season by Myla Goldberg, 2000
54. The World Without Us by Alan Weisman, 2007
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Best Books of the Decade: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz
1. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz, 2007
“But if these years have taught me anything it is this: you can never run away. Not ever. The only way out is in.”
There was a time when everyone was reading this book. My grandmother, the woman who coaxed out of me not only my love of reading but my love of writing, read it before me. I lived in Gainesville at the time and she called me and told me she was mailing me something. She told me about this book written by a Hispanic author and how it was this layered story about this “geek boy” as she called him, and that it felt like reading something entirely new. The wrapped package arrived with a card two or three days later and I sat down to read it in my apartment.
She was right. It read like something I had never seen in print before. This was a novel about Oscar, an overweight Dominican nerd who writes page after page of fantasy fiction, and his family, all of the different generations of it, and the curse that was on this family. It had Spanglish and the kind of English you don’t see in novels. It had page after page of nerdspeak and thoughts about how it felt to be an outcast (“You really want to know what being an X-Man feels like? Just be a smart bookish boy of color in a contemporary U.S. ghetto. Mamma mia! Like having bat wings or a pair of tentacle growing out of your chest.”) amongst others. It spoke in metaphor, made reference to Homer, and was occasionally formal. It’s spectacular. Junot Díaz is a man in love with not just the English language but language in general, honoring all forms of communication and creating a concise novel that remains sprawling in your mind for weeks after you read it.
It wasn’t just Hispanic people or literary nerds reading this book either. I began seeing groups of little old ladies carrying this book around, soccer moms, teenagers stretching their literary legs, every kind of person imaginable. Oscar Wao is a game changer, the kind of novel that no one can put down because it is a living, breathing document. It exists outside of Junot Díaz now because he has done the exact thing every writer hopes to do: write something that can stand on its own. There are good books that people read and discuss, and then there are excellent books that we lose ourselves in and truly experience in an almost physical way. This is one of those books, and this is why reading will never die because we seek to experience and recreate the best feelings that life gives us in the pages of a book. No matter who the character is, if it’s written well, written as a living, breathing human, we will always find parts of ourselves there.
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