What I'm reading right now is Jon Savage's Teenage, and up in the queue is The End of Mr. Y and The History of Beauty.

Dombey & Son was amazing. One of the best novels I've read in a long time--possibly one of the best novels I've ever read. And with some of the most indelible characters I've run across, everything from the ephemerally major, such as Paul Dombey Jr., the major major, such as Edith, and the seemingly minor, such as Mr. Toots:

Mr Toots never went upstairs; and always performed the same
ceremonies, richly dressed for the purpose, at the hall door.

'Oh! Good morning!' would be Mr Toots's first remark to the
servant. 'For Mr Dombey,' would be Mr Toots's next remark, as he
handed in a card. 'For Miss Dombey,' would be his next, as he handed
in another.

Mr Toots would then turn round as if to go away; but the man knew
him by this time, and knew he wouldn't.

'Oh, I beg your pardon,' Mr Toots would say, as if a thought had
suddenly descended on him. 'Is the young woman at home?'

The man would rather think she was;, but wouldn't quite know. Then
he would ring a bell that rang upstairs, and would look up the
staircase, and would say, yes, she was at home, and was coming down.
Then Miss Nipper would appear, and the man would retire.

'Oh! How de do?' Mr Toots would say, with a chuckle and a blush.

Susan would thank him, and say she was very well.

'How's Diogenes going on?' would be Mr Toots's second
interrogation.

Very well indeed. Miss Florence was fonder and fonder of him every
day. Mr Toots was sure to hail this with a burst of chuckles, like the
opening of a bottle of some effervescent beverage.

'Miss Florence is quite well, Sir,' Susan would add.

Oh, it's of no consequence, thank'ee,' was the invariable reply of
Mr Toots; and when he had said so, he always went away very fast.

Now it is certain that Mr Toots had a filmy something in his mind,
which led him to conclude that if he could aspire successfully in the
fulness of time, to the hand of Florence, he would be fortunate and
blest. It is certain that Mr Toots, by some remote and roundabout
road, had got to that point, and that there he made a stand. His heart
was wounded; he was touched; he was in love. He had made a desperate
attempt, one night, and had sat up all night for the purpose, to write
an acrostic on Florence, which affected him to tears in the
conception. But he never proceeded in the execution further than the
words 'For when I gaze,' - the flow of imagination in which he had
previously written down the initial letters of the other seven lines,
deserting him at that point.

What I'm reading right now is Dombey and Son--about 200 pages into it and I'm just in a daze of joy (Dickens writes thick: everything's happening all at once and all his characters jump and cough and wheeze--their skin is alive but so is everything else about them, they're as animated as one can hope for--as do the locales. Everything bristles with life.)

One Nation Under Goods does contain some good insights, but the book lacks substance: there's just too many blanket assertions as well as too much reliance on other, sharper sources (such as Paco Underhill's The Science of Shopping). What's worse, perhaps, are the frequent, unsuccessful, and often pun- or wordplay-dependent patches of prose that pass for concluding thoughts near the end of nearly every chapter.

I just finished Susan Hubbard's The Society of S, which proved terrific, engrossing, dry, and funny. There were two monkeys, a few vampires, some terrific sendups of various kinds of questionable taste, some lovely (and sharp-eyed) descriptions of Florida, one hurricane, some synesthesia, a compact and way cool sense of what's good and beautiful in the world--a tidy and serene worldview--plus a terrific Nabokovilian moment:

He warned me that it would be a long story, one that took time to tell. He asked me to be patient, not to interrupt with questions. "I want you to understand how things ensued, how one thing caused another," he said. "As Nabokov wrote in his memoir, 'Let me look at my demon objectively.'" [Then, later in the same page:]"An odd coincidence," he said. "Yes, we'd met when we were children. My aunt lived in Georgia. I met your mother one summer afternoon on Tybee Island, and we played in the sand together. I was six. She was ten. I was a child, and she was a child."
I recognized the line from "Annabel Lee."

Look for Jennifer Price's "Looking for Nature at the Mall" & Jon Goss's "Once-upon-a-Time in the Commodity World: An Unofficial Guide to Mall of America," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 89 (March 1999): 47.

I forgot to add this lovely bit from Against the Day to the previous post:

At a cafe off Katunska Ulica near themarketplace, Cyprian, sitting across a table from the cooing couple (whose chief distinction from pigeons, he reflected, must be that pigeons were more direct about shitting on one), at great personal effor keeping his expression free of annoyance, was visited by a Cosmic Revelation, dropping from the sky like pigeon shit, namely that Love, whic hpeople like Bevis and Jacintha no doubt imagined as a single Force at large in the world, was in fact more like the 333,000 or however many different forms of Brahma worshipped by the Hindu--the summation, at any given moment, of all the varied subgods of love that mortal millions of lovers, in limitless dance, happened to be devoting thesmelves to. Yes and ever so much luck to them all.

What I'm reading right now is Dan Simmons' The Terror, the 2006 Best American Stories anthology, and Lynda Barry's 100 Demons.

Walker Percy Remembered stressed, more than anything I've read in recent memory, the tremendous isolation and small-c catholicism of some of my favorite writers: Percy emerges as a polite, interested, ethical, and highly reticent human being. There are also heartbreaking moments marking Percy's death, of which this small section jumped out:

...[Percy] asked, "Lee, did you get my response to your letter?" I hadn't, and he said, "Oh, I think I sent it to the wrong address. Would you try to track it down because I'd hate to write it all over again." Well, I didn't realize how sick he was, and he died a month later. He had sent it to the wrong address and I could not track it down, so I never got the letter.

A lovely portrait. You should check it out. As you should Made in Japan: terrific illustrations, the best of which are ephemera that showcase Japanese graphic designers embracing Western traditions, fashions, all sorts of things. Lots of fun.

And Absurdistan? An absolute hoot. Proof?

I absolutely refuse to sleep with one of my co-nationals. God only knows where they've been.

And buckets of Nabokovilia (to be posted, soonish, to Nabokovilia):

A typical male Russian sadness descended upon us. "Speaking on the subject of women," I said, "I fear my Bronx girl, Rouenna, may be the quarry of the emigre writer Jerry Shteynfarb."

"I remember that weasel," Alyosha-Bog said. "I saw him in New York once after he wrote that Russian Arriviste's Hand Job. He thinks he's the Jewish Nabokov."

And then:

"Die, Pasternak, die!" he was shouting.

"Hey, Bob," Jerry Stheynfarb said, "what do I do with the toaster oven?"

"Toss it!" Alyosha-Bog shouted. "The fuck I gonna use it for? I'm never eating again. Hey, look at this, guys. Fucking Ada. Take that, Nabokov! You sixteen-karat bore!"

So yes. And other books read? Stephen King's Lisey's Story (a mild disappointment: King's normally perfect pace is off, and the book's language and tone vacillates wildly between baby-talk and pedestrian--though there is a wealth of King's usual sharp observations of the world), Clifford D. Simak's City (a gem: strange, lovely, growing progressively more poetic near the end; also? it is about the gradual erasure of mankind and the equally gradual ascendancy of dogs and their robot companions--and although it's clear that the book grew out of a series of short stories, it holds together beautifully, Kem Nunn's Tapping the Source (terrific noir--as good as noir gets, with a strong sense of place (a rundown surf town)--even if an important plot element felt a little too eighties), Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day (large and unwieldy and way good and way funny).

What I'm reading right now is Gary Shteyngart's Absurdistan. I'm also reading Reed Darmon's Made in Japan and David Horace Harwell's Walker Percy Remembered: A Portrait in the Words of Those Who Knew Him.

Found was a treat. As was Ernesto Lechner's Rock en Espanol: The Latin Alternative Rock Explosion, though the latter takes on a weird melancholic tone, what with all these fiercely inventive bands having a brief moment of recognition in the late nineties/early oughts, and then having that moment pass. So that Cafe Tacvba, for example, is now clearly foundering. And the people doing really wonderful, weird stuff (electronica and tango, or electronica and cumbia) are doing it to an audience that should be way bigger. The book does great journalism. Great profiles. Worth reading, particularly because this genre has been pumping out some of the most interesting music of the past decade.

What I'm reading right now is Found: The Best Lost, Tossed, and Forgotten Items from Around the World.

Cambpell's Overnight is good, not great, though it seems dead-on in its portrayal of a how a chain store operates--the general goodwill of its employees, the exhaustion, the dread of having someone mess up your section. It is actually sort of similar to Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, even if the latter does not have eerie creatures rising from an ever-present fog and burying you in mud.

Most irritating is Overnight's paperback cover: whoever designed it does not know the difference between a bookstore or a library.

What I'm reading right now is Ramsey Campbell's The Overnight. I'm also reading Dave McKean's Cages.

Straight Cut was good--a solid, well-crafted novel that moves assuredly through crime territory, with plenty of local color (some of it takes place in Italy) and plenty of attention to detail (the narrator works as a film editor) and even some Kieerkegard. There's also this passage, which is fantastic:

It seems my luck to see things structurally, and I picture our first greedy love as a sort of core, an inner ring, a spot where something fell and started ripples.

Look up: stanchion, block and tackle.

What I'm reading right now is Madison Smartt Bell's Straight Cut (Hard Case Crime).

Kathryn Davis's The Thin Place is good, but not great. You get to go inside the head of just about everyone in town, and each brief chapter is a joy--particularly the chapters where you're in cats and labradors and beavers--but the author has an annoying tendency to overuse fragments. Small bursts. Often followed by more. And the quiet lyricism is a little too quiet and a little too lyrical.

All the same, the author is capable of dazzling writing, with passages as good as the one below popping up about every other page:

According to Helen Zebrigge [sp?], the intensive-care unit of the Upper Valley Hospital was situated on the fourth floor because it was closest to heaven. You didn't want the souls of the newly dead drifting through the nursery or, worse, the psychiatric ward. The emergency room was different--it had to be on the ground floor for two reasons. One: the elevator was fatally slow. Two: it was closest to hell.

I also read Joann Sfar's The Rabbi's Cat. It's beautiful, funny, and full of some of the most touching observations on family, travel, and belief I've read all year.

Look up: esker, crucifer, breakfront, vetch, candent, presbyotic, marl, postulant, inhere.

What I'm reading right now is Kathryn Davis's The Thin Place: A Novel.

Body Piercing Saved My Life is well worth reading if you, like me, are puzzled by why Christian rock exists, why people actually listen to it, and if you were under the impression that all of it was uniformly awful. It apparently is not. And the book is fair; it doesn't shy pointing out the absurdities and inconsistencies of a music genre that is, in some regard, no genre at all, but rather a whole bunch of rampantly appropriated mainstream flavors of music (punk, rock, etc.) to serve a niche market. The book does manage to build a case for the music, and--most surprising--provides a portrait of musicians whose opinions are less dogmatic and narrow, and far more aware and interesting, than one would think.

All that said, the best parts are the ones that skewer (this is often reserved for "worship" music, which isn't actually christian rock proper; it's music meant to be played in church services):

...folks in the audience started lifting their hands in the air.

This gesture is probably the characteristic of evangelical services that looks the most unusual for outsiders. Some call it a "hug from God," and as the music that morning lifted in intensity, more and more hands popped up till the ballroom looked like a psychedelic classroom in which a lot of students had questions. (152)

Christian culture's strong preference that young people marry rather than date has not just resulted in a divorce rate nhighter than the national average, it's produced a bumper crop of chunky singers. It's a sad fact that once men are freed from the fear that each woman they meet may be their last chance at happiness, they tend to scarf that third hot dog without reflection. (165)

What I'm reading right now is Andrew Beaujon's Body Piercing Saved My Life: Inside the Phenomenon of Christian Rock .

Made to Break was full of detailed, interesting historical nuggets on obsolescence, but irritatingly short on insight. The book is good but undercooked; if anything, it seems to suggest that obsolescence serves a couple of really important functions, and that it's not the overconsumption nightmare that conventional wisdom makes it out to be. If that's the case, however, then Slade should develop the idea. And if that's not the case (as Slade seems to hint now and then, particularly toward the end), then he should explain why. As it stands, the book feels like a compilation of data with no clear point and little development. Even if it is meant to be read as simply a kind of history, the book feels lacking.

Less undercooked, but also unsatisfactory, was The Book of Lost Books: An Incomplete History of All the Great Books You'll Never Read. While there is terrific material in nearly every page--an odd anecdote, way witty turns of phrase--the problem is with the form, and so maybe the book is not to blame so much as my own irritability with compendiums, where you get a page or two of an author's life, learn a thing or two, and then you're off to the next. (I had the same problem with Farquhar's A Treasury of Deception: Liars, Misleaders, Hoodwinkers, and the Extraordinary True Stories of History's Greatest Hoaxes, Fakes and Frauds, which I abandoned near the end. Nothing wrong, exactly--after a while, however, you've had enough story-lets. If that's all you're getting, and you're getting too much of it, you eventually get a little sea-sick.)

High Concept: Don Simpson and the Hollywood Cultures of Excess, on the other hand, is thoroughly meaty and satisfactory. Part E! True Hollywood Story, part meditation on aesthetic and moral failures and successes, this is as good a Hollywood story as one can get. The book is fair to Simpson, compassionate without shying away from the awfulness of the man. This is a book worth devouring.

What I'm reading right now is Made to Break : Technology and Obsolescence in America. Moby Dick was fantastic, though it did take me three months to finish it.

Also read Stephen King's Cell, Peter Straub's Lost Boy Lost Girl, Edward St. Aubyn's terrific, acerbic Mother's Milk , The Complete Peanuts 1959-1960, and Wimbledon Green, and Dave Barry's Money Secrets. All of these were pretty terrific, and well worth your time, though the Straub novel loses steam near the middle (it's still a good novel, full of uneasy family relationships, but some of it seems pulled out of a second-rate horror movie).

What I'm reading right now is Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, Second Edition (Norton Critical Editions) (various e-text versions here), partly out of respect for the advice of many wonderful UNLV folk, and partly because of this episode of Studio 360. (Don't have time for the full hour episode? Please please listen to this Laurie Anderson bit on the Enterprise v. the Pequod. Please.)

Listener Supported may be dry, but as an introduction to public radio, it is fantastic. It's an institutional history told by an insider who does a pretty clear and remarkable job at explaining the manueverings that NPR, PRI, WGBH and others engaged in. Also good are the first couple of chapters that define public radio's audience--it's an actual demographic, no surprise there, and it's one with a long history. The one giant minus is the unforgivable number of typos, most notably a missing "l" in public near the end.

The one giant plus not mentioned before? The rampant dissing of Bob Edwards:

Karni accepted the limitations Edwards brought to the program--his lack of curiosity, which limited his ability to conduct an interview, and his total lack of enthusiasm for any task assigned to him. (99)

Let me quote Home Movies's Jason: Wee-ow.

Also read Chip Kidd's Chip Kidd: Book One : Work: 1986-2006 (Chip Kidd)--gorgeous covers, gorgeous meditations on graphic design (though his The Cheese Monkeys : A Novel in Two Semesters

What I'm reading right now is Jack W. Mitchell's Listener Supported : The Culture and History of Public Radio. Mary Roach's Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers was a delight: funny and sweet and willing to talk about death in ways that were both respectful and frank. (One of the last chapters deals with plasticized bodies, and by odd dint of coincidence, or perhaps by unavoidable converge of sensibilities, I stumbled upon this link.

What I'm reading right now is Mary Roach's Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers. Lint was good (though the joke erodes as one reads it through), as was Boring Postcards USA (lives up to its name), Mary Roach's Spook (a good, clear-eyed look at misguided, sometimes scientific (sometimes way pseudoscientific) efforts to pin down the afterlife (do not miss her footnote on the intrinsic curiousity of cows), all pretty much failures), Trollope's glorious The Way We Live Now, Kirn's somewhat Trollopian Mission to America (the blurb makes it sound like its central concern is religion, but it's really more about all forms of consumption, overconsumption, and the lure and absurdity of money).

Not so good were James Herbert's Others (beautiful moments throughout, and brave choices throughout (the narrator is seriously deformed, and his love interest suffers from spina bifida), but kind of treacly and new agey), and Gaiman's Endless Nights, which was pretentious, precious, and obvious.

What I'm reading right now is Steve Aylett's Lint, a way funny fictitious biography of a science-fiction writer who is a little like Philip K. Dick, a lot like many of the old Golden Age eminences (Lint submits stories as Asimov, figuring it's going to up his chances of publication; it does), and whose assassination conspiracy treatise figures that the Magic Bullet of JFK infamy has been ricocheting since it killed Lincoln, taking care also of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Bobby Keneddy, et al. A map of the bullet's trajectory is provided.

The Effect of Living Backwards is fantastic, as were Paul Ford 's Gary Benchley, Rock Star, Paco Underhill's Why We Buy (though Gladwell's article on Paco is better, and brief), and George Saunders's The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil.

I go on movie kicks, and some good companions for these jaunts were Dk Holm's Kill Bill: an Unofficial Casebook, Alternative Europe: Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945 (this one offers revelatory analysis of Italian nunsploitation movies, and features probably one of my favorite article titles in recent history--IQ Hunter's "Deep Inside Queen Kong: Anatomy of an Extremely Bad Film"), and the lovely Sleazoid Express.

What I'm reading right now is Heidi Julavits's The Effect of Living Backwards. I am also reading Richard Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy (various free e-text versions here) ten pages at a time. Both are really, really good so far--Burton for its humor & humanity & sheer abundance, and Julavits for some of the same, though her humor is cooler. Julavits sometimes sounds like Richard Powers, and sometimes she's just Julavits--buckets of fun and eery and reminiscent of this documentary, which from what I've heard is heavily indebtted to Mao II, which I have not read.

Ybarra's memoir is witty, suave, funny, and and just plain good--his father was Venezuelan, his mother Bostonian, and the family shuttled between these worlds round the end of the 19th century, so the book is well worth one's time, especially if you're interested in people who are equally at home in one culture and another, which ususally means that you miss one when you're in the other or viceversa, and even more so if you are lucky enough, or unlucky enough, to be one of these people. Or if you're not. Young Man of Caracas will appeal to you even if you are a staunch monoculturalist. Witness Ybarra's Anglo grandfather's amazement at Venezuelan communication:

He was much struck by the exhuberant rhetoric dished out by Venezuelans to one another & to foreigners, especially in official correspondence.

"Their main idea," he confided to Aunt Jane, "is to tell polite alsehoods in words of six syllables."

And here's Ybarra's father's ambivalence:

Always he looked upon the circumambient Latinity of my early years with the cold eyes of a codfish.

Ybarra mentions the Tovar family, which I had always assumed to be German, since during my stay in Caracas we'd often visit La Colonia Tovar, a kind of little Germany renowned for bread & jam &
schnitzel & sausages. But so anyway.

More quotes:

If she rallied him too much he would retaliate by casually putting on a slipper of hers--for he had the small feet characteristic of Spaniards & their descendents.

*

In accordance with Venezuelan custom, some red wine was fed to that turkey on the night before his doomsday--a treatment supposed by Venezuelans to make the meat tender. By the fascinated eyes of my sister, my brothers, and myself, the big bird reeled around our yard, dead drunk, amid an extraordinary succession of hiccuping noises.

[This treament was also prevalent in Colombia: one of my mother's old cookbooks, a legacy from my grandmother, suggests as the first step in turkey preparation that one get the durkey good and drunk.]

She was very low and begged me to promise her to have her veins cut when she died, and make sure she was not buried alive. I did.

*

There were plows and coffee machinery. There were bottles of whisky and other American-made liquors, in a big class case (kept securely locked). And typewriters. And office furniture. And stationery. And jewelry. And assorted machinery posd artistically along the colonnades of the big interior patio, which the deceased Englishman had provided for his handsome residence. The most impressive and exhibit of all was an enormous and lugubrious coffin, which had been entrusted to us by the National Casket Company. It dominated everything around it so heavily that it gave the main exhibition room of the Warehouse the general air of a lying-in-state. (...)

...I did fairly well at this as long as I could limit my explanations to pointing at a bottle of whisky and announcing "That is a bottle of whisky"--or directing the eyes of visitors to our gigantic mortuary exhibit and saying brightly "That's a coffin." But when details were demanded by possible purchasers about plows and machines destined to displace manual labor on Venezuelan coffee plantations, I was a flop of the first water.

*

"Tell him," the American Minister would instruct me, in a deep voice, nodding toward Castro, "that the government at Washington is so sore about those unpaid American claims that, if he doesn't pay them p.d.q., there will be fireworks!"

"What does el senor ministro say?" Castro would inquire eagerly.

"He says," I would reply, "that the government at Washington fully appreciates the difficulties of Your Excellency's position. But, at the same time, it feels itself compelled, though most reluctantly, to consider the position of American claimants. Therefore, the government at Washington would esteem it a great favor if Your Excellency would take up again the possibility of paying at least part of these claims--merely, of course, as a token of good will."

Castro would bow politely in the direction of Mr. Loomis. Then he would give an answer something like this:

"Tell His Excellency the American Minister that I deplore from my heart the losses unfortunately incurred by certain citizens of the great and noble republic of the North, owing to the cruel exigencies of that glorious and spontaneous national upheaval that made me President of Venezuela. And tell His Exllency that, in view of the great friendliness toward the United States that throbs in my bosom, I shall give orders at once that the claim against the republic of Venezuela made by the American citizen, John Doe, is to be reconsidered immediately."

"What does he say?" Mr. Loomis would ask impatiently.

"O.K.," I would reply. And Mr. Loomis would bow to General Castro, and General Castro would bow to Mr. Loomis, and I'd feel that, as a
decorator-deflowerer, I wasn't half-bad.

Notes for moi: look up mulcted, lap-a-pie, noni soit qui mal y pense, cytherean, billets, William Eleroy Cortes's book on Venezuela, mossback, Ybarra's light verse book & his Young Man of the World plus his stuff from Collier's and the New York Times Sunday magazine, David Harum (novel), hawser, Henry Seidel Canby ("distinguished author & critic").

Also read Freakonomics, as has half the world. If you haven't, do. It's good & breezy & full of surprising information, as well as a good frame from which to look at the world. Also, quotes:

He did not consider [conventional wisdom] a compliment. "We associate truth with convenience," he wrote, "with what most closely accords with self-interest and personal well-being or promises best to avoid awkward effort or unwelcome dislocation of life. We also find highly acceptable what contributes to self-esteem." Economic and social behavior, Galbraith continued, "are complex, and to comprehend their character is mentally tiring. Therefore we adhere, as though to a raft, to those ideas which reflect our understanding."

*

An expert doesn't so much argue the various sides of an issue as plant his flag firmly on one side. That's because an expert whose argument reeks of restraint or nuance often doesn't get much attention. An expert must be bold if he hopes to alchemize his homespun theory into conventional wisdom. His best chance of doing so is to engage the public's emotions, for emotion is the enemy of rational argument, and as emotions go, one of them--fear--is more potent than the rest.

There were other books read, all worth one's while: David Rees's My New Filing Technique is Unstoppable, David Chelsea's David Chelsea in Love, Tony Millonaire's When We Were Very Maakies, and Alex Robinson's Tricked. These are all comics, and they are all fantastic. Also reading buckets of required stuff, which I don't list, because of no good reason, but here's a snippet from Robinson's Western Translation Theory on the life of Etienne Dolet:

...he moved to Lyon, where he ran afoul of the law by killing a painter. He was thrown in prison but pardoned by the king, who delcared the act justifiable homicide.

Here are some Can You Forgive Her? quotes (look up dudgeon, cicature, brougham, trailing weepers (w/r/t widows), doits, hustings, quidnuncs, Bradshaw & Murray's Guidebooks, Daughters of Danaus, buckram), the first because it's a political-campaign-promises discussion with What's the Matter with Kansas? echoes:

Of course it won't be done. If it were done, that would be an end of it, and your bread taken out of your mouth. But you can always promise it at the hustings, and can always demand it in the house.

*

How was he to dance...? Even to Burgo Fitzgerald the task of running away with another man's wife had in it something which prevented dancing.

*

I know a young woman who broke the os femoris by just kicking her cat.

*

I always think that worldiness and sentimentality are like brandy-and-water. I don't like either of them separately. But taken together they make a very nice drink.

What I'm reading right now is T.R. Ybarra's Young Man of Caracas--funny and urbane so far. The author is half-Bostonian and half-Venezuelan and all wit. Quotes will follow. (As they will from Can You Forgive Her?, which was good and ventured into darker territory than usual for Trollope, and even had a villain proper (Trollope's novels have deeply flawed but not really fully malign antagonists), and he had a scar.)

What I'm reading right now is Anthony Trollope's Can You Forgive Her? (Free e-text here.)

The Gift is gorgeous, my favorite of VN's Russian novels for many reasons, but if anything for its rapt descriptions of being poor and in love and happy in a foreign land. Also read Lilek's The Gallery of Regrettable Food--the recipes are real, the mold-fixation was apparently real, and so yes: very funny.

What I'm reading, right now, is Vladimir Nabokov's The Gift--enchanting, delightful, and thoroughly sustained and controlled and fantastic so far. Which no surprise.

What I've read, during the long months of no updates: Chabon's The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Och's 1,000 Record Covers, Lady into Fox, Devil in the Details, At the Villa of Reduced Circumstances (sporadically wonderful, but marred by a lazy plot and nearly saved by having its later half set in Colombia), The Nanny Diaries, Stranger than Fiction, The Good Body, A Massive Swelling, Perdido Street Station, Assassination Vacation, and Florence of Arabia.

The ones in bold you shouldn't miss. The others are eminently missable.

Reading (all at once, for reasons unknown:

Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything
Michael J. Rosen's Mirth of a Nation
Ricky Jay's Journal of Anomalies
Bentley Little's The Association
Charles M. Schulz's The complete Peanuts : 1953 to 1954

Read:

Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas? and the Thomas-Frank-edited Commodify Your Dissent.

Berkeley Breathed's Opus : 25 years of his Sunday best

Spiegelman's In the Shadow of No Towers

Garrison Keillor's Homegrown democrat : a few plain thoughts from the heart of America

Charles M. Schulz's The complete Peanuts : 1950 to 1952

What I'm reading right now is Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, in addition to working my way through my textbooks, all of which are good, though Readings for Writers is exceptional for its straightforwardness.

What I'm reading right now is the 11^th edition of Readings for Writers & the 4^th edition of Signs of Life in the USA. I am also in the middle of reading Lisa Ede's Work in Progress, Janet Burroway's Imaginative Writing, Stephen Minot's Three Genres, Ben Marcus's Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, and an omnibus Best American Essays of the Century. All are being read in preparation for the courses I'm teaching at UCF & Valencia: four composition sections & two of creative writing.

Was reading, but had to abandon because of time constraints, David Foster Wallace's Oblivion (enjoyed "The Suffering Channel") & a book on the Middle East mess, The Missing Piece.

Since the last post, I read Kircher: A Renaissance Man and the Quest for Lost Knowledge, Lit Riffs (must read more Heidi Julavits & Michel Tournier).

What I'm reading right now is Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections.

What I'm reading right now is W.N.P. Barbellion's Journal of a Disappointed Man. Good stuff so far and w/ one of the best opening lines ever:

Am writing an essay on the life-history of insects and have abandoned the idea of writing on "How Cats Spend their Time."

One feels in the middle of a moving, tragic true-life story or a wonderful hoax. But all cursory evidence points to the former.

Read buckets but have not had a chance to record. In brief (and reverse order), have read Thomas Frank's The Conquest of Cool, Arthur Golden's Memoirs of a Geisha, Alan Bennet's The Clothes they Stood Up In, and John Seabrook's Nobrow, and have finished Alexander Theroux's Darconville's Cat.

What I'm reading right now is Franz Kafka's Amerika.

Chateaubriand was a hoot. Corny, laden with cheese, with the noblest savages south of James Fenimore Cooper. For all that, the two novels are well worth reading--strange, true works of art, and buckets of fun--there are some genuinely wonderful, over-the-top moments (sad young man contemplating the infinite by the lip of an active volcano), as well as a weird obsession with incest--in René, the lovers were raised by the same father-figure, and refer to each other as brother and sister, and in Atala, they really are brother and sister, so no wonder Nabokov makes a note of it in Ada. More shocking than anything, perhaps, is Chateaubriand's pessimism:

Believe, my son, sorrows are not eternal. Sooner or later they must come to an end, because the heart of man is finite--this is one of our great miseries. We cannot even be unhappy for long.

I also read Marcelo Birmajer's spare, mostly satisfying No Tan Distinto, whose exploration of Jewish life and the afterlife as a kind of muted resort full of the ordinary is okay. The book takes on greater weight nearer the end, with the Isaac Bashevis Singer motto gaining resonance, but the book could have done more, it seems.

What I'm reading right now is Chateaubriand's Atala / Rene.

Paul Rand's thoughts on design were spare, but effective and true, though I'm 50/50 on Rand's designs themselves: some are breathtaking in their simplicity, impact, and beauty. Others are just sort of ugly. Also read Susan Orlean's The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup, which is wonderful.

What I'm reading right now is Paul Rand: A Designer's Art.

Amphigorey was a welcome dose of genial morbidity.

What I'm reading right now is Edward Gorey's Amphigorey.

The Secret Parts of Fortune is mammoth, and a treasure, and not to be missed--fascinating journalistic pieces on obssessives, obssessions, strange goings-on, and the stranger-still activities of those investigating the strange goings-on. Plus a passionate plea for the superiority of cats. Plus the unprintable satanic photograph of Long Island. Skull and Bones. Hitler. Watergate. All funny & well researched & true & worth your while.

As is John Stilgoe's Outside Lies Magic, which turns what we think of ordinary landscapes as places full of hidden information. I don't want to give too much away--it's a very brief book & lucid and will change how you look at the world, from interstate "clusters" (fast-food joint/gas/lodging) to, well, pretty much everything. (Like many, I was startled into look up Stilgoe by this 60 Minutes story, and mostly by the Harvard professor's example of the FedEx logo, with its arrow embedded in the negative space between the E and the x. It had never dawned on me that anything so familiar could hide information. But of course it wasn't quite hiding. I just was not looking. And I wasn't looking b/c no one had told me to look. Which is the problem, says Stilgoe. We don't take the time to really look, to think, to explore.)

What I'm reading right now, courtesy once again of the DoC (this time a while-back recommendation only recently returned to) is Ron Rosenbaum's The Secret Parts of Fortune : Three Decades of Intense Investigations and Edgy Enthusiasms. I had actually come across Mr. Rosenbaum's work before, by accident, because, while living in Bogotá, I read his "Long Island Babylon" story and enjoyed it thoroughly, and even looked it up again in Orlando, mostly for the Unprintable Satanic Photo bit, and all this w/o really being aware of the author. This is great journalism and I am enjoying it buckets.

Susan's book is criminally light but fun and well worth anyone's time. It is pretty much the perfect thing for summer. And way funny. And sweet. And good. So go read it.

What I'm reading right now, courtesy once again of the DoC (this time a while-back recommendation only recently returned to) is Ron Rosenbaum's The Secret Parts of Fortune : Three Decades of Intense Investigations and Edgy Enthusiasms. I had actually come across Mr. Rosenbaum's work before, by accident, because, while living in Bogotá, I read his "Long Island Babylon" story and enjoyed it thoroughly, and even looked it up again in Orlando, mostly for the Unprintable Satanic Photo bit, and all this w/o really being aware of the author. This is great journalism and I am enjoying it buckets.

Susan's book is criminally light but fun and well worth anyone's time. It is pretty much the perfect thing for summer. And way funny. And sweet. And good. So go read it.

What I'm reading right now is my thesis director's novel: Lisa Maria's Guide For the Perplexed. Started this morning & have been engulfed & charmed. The wit is dry. There is wonderful subtext concerning the dynamics & importance of taste--a kind of Nabokovian exploration of poshlost in what is, nonetheless, very much light (in the best of ways) reading. Lisa Maria herself is a wonderful character. I'm looking forward to seeing what happens to her. The novel is a hoot.

Less of a hoot was Everything & More, which was closely read 1/3 of the way, then skimmed, then dropped: the book is actually rather good & worth the effort, I suppose, but I was not quite getting it & was spending buckets of time trying to grasp concepts, then moving on, then having to backtrack to get what I thought I had gotten, but had not.

Nonetheless: David Foster Wallace is a true talent and I love his prose, even the abstract math prose that I was not quite getting.

What I'm reading right now is David Foster Wallace's Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity, this following the engrossing and persuasive paracinema musings of Joan Hawkins in Cutting Edge, as well as a quick and enjoyable devouring of the very brutal (+ funny) Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World, and plus a healthy selection of cheerful nihilism in The World of Charles Addams.

Everything read has been fab, with the minor quibble in Cutting Edge that it seemed as though a few threads were left hanging, but the main points--that the aesthetics and modes of reading art-house fare and slasher stuff are pretty similar, that they both are heavy on the affect (as well as being "body genres," by which she means that the movies manage to physically affect us), that they share many of the same roots, and that there is interest & value & innovation in both the high & the low, and that such classifications are, in many ways, means to domesticate "good taste"--is well taken, and Hawkins' enthusiasm is infectious. Will be checking out many of the movies as soon as possible (and ditto for all the cool stuff mentioned in Incredibly Strange Films). Eyes Without a Face is first.

What I'm reading right now is Joan Hawkins' Cutting Edge: Art-Horror and the Horrific Avant-Garde, shortly following the very messy and joyous devouring of Incredibly Strange Films, which for the latter I've got the DoC to thank.

There is now a list of weird weird movies to watch--some had been watched already, and much enjoyed, and so there are more.

Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde is simply very good and very much a gem. Darconville's Cat waits on the shelf.

What I'm reading right now is Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde--which yes, you've read, my sister has read, and pretty much everyone but me has read it.

I have not. But I am fixing that. And enjoying it much. If you would like to peruse the Jekyll, here it is, for free.

The Real McCoy is a joy, half Malamud's The Natural and half its own marvelous reassesment of fame-seekers and their intimate relationship to America. Read it. You will like it.

Read Paul Collins' Banvard's Folly as well. I had a wonderful time doing so, and seldom will you find a book this bubbly and exciting about failures of all kinds. You finish this book wanting to pick up as many forgotten, dusty books from the most remote corners of the library.

What I'm reading right now is Darin Strauss's The Real McCoy. Terrific so far, and full of narrative verve. The author is a masterful, assured storyteller.

My reading of Darconville's Cat has been interrupted, alas, because it had to be returned to Interlibrary Loan. Will return to it as soon as I can secure a copy. I'm enjoying it throroughly--Theroux's phrasing is exquisite and worked over to a point where one is either exasperated or delighted (most readers, I hope, will fall under the latter camp), as is his diction. I'm in the middle of a chapter entitled "The Deipnosophists."

So yes: many words and names have been noted, to be looked up when time allows:

pushwailing, sippets, crake, conventicle, Domenichino, Spellvexit, Lords of Pleroma, pannikins, jabot, noil, burgraves, orbilius plagosus, wopsical, baldric, chantepleure, anablept, skipjacks, groutnolls, agraphia, autoscopic, alcibiadean, boffa, thimbleriggers, opsimath, kaleidogyns, batrachian, acumination, gynotikolobomassophile, Simonetta Vespucci, menhir, nainsook, intervenient, cedilla, diaresis, pyrite, Van Der Weyden's lady, pyroballogy, grice, apodictic, dorp, leaves of Vallombrosa, drazels, desuete, pilcrows, terricrepant, bombinate, ikonodule, pteriopes, procinian, Parmigianino (paintings), massebah, suffites, volutes, thalweg, slonks, ignavia, hypocaust, fatamorgana, fucus

There are also two near-Nabokovilian bits: a long bit interjected by a parenthesis: "(knockwurst, picnic)"; and a character called Mona Lisa Drake who reminded me, briefly, of Mona Dahl.

What I'm reading right now, with much delight and just as much annotation of unfamiliar words, is Alexander Theroux's Darconville's Cat.

Wyatt Wyatt's Catching Fire was funny and full of odd grotesque characters, but it didn't seem to go anywhere, nor did its portrait of Orlando and Winter Park add up to much. Slight. Worth your while but not likely to impress itself upon your memory.

What I'm reading right now is Wyatt Wyatt's Catching Fire.

What I'm reading right now is Tobias Wolff's The Night in Question.

What I'm reading right now is Alice Munro's Selected Stories.

What I'm reading right now is Frederick Barthelme's Bob the Gambler.

What I'm reading right now is Chinua Achebe's A Man of the People

What I'm reading right now is LP Hartley's Facial Justice

What I'm reading right now is Flannery O'Connor's Complete Stories.

What I'm reading right now is Rappaccini's Daughter. I am in the midst of wrapping readings for my thesis defense, so there's an awful lot of storming through material, but it's fun.

Money? A treat. Read it. Read The Information, too, and all of Martin Amis's nonfiction.

Mr. Sammler's Planet, incidentally, is where you'll find the "mad agility of compound deceit," a wonderful phrase quoted in Martin Amis's Money.



Money was laid aside while I read Arthur Machen's Dog and Duck--a collection of newspaper pieces published in 1924, long out of print, and quite wonderful. An excerpt:

Humour, we may almost say, is a strange and exquisite byproduct of a world which is seen to be all wrong; a recognition that its incoherences and even its tragedies have something wildly funny about them

What I'm reading right now is Martin Amis's Money. Funny, caustic, and disturbing, with a few near-Nabokovilian references (from a reference to a dedication that makes sense within the novel, but also outside of it ("to Vera"), as well as repeated but sideways references to Pale Fire--maybe--such as "Timon of Athens" appearing on a bookshelf (p 67), a couple of overly effusive paeans to his car (a Fiasco) that sound suspiciously like Kinbote's, as well as a tiny valentine to the narrator's "small but powerful refrigerator," plus a bodkin mention (pages 72, 74, respectively)... So maybe, who knows.)

Regardless: fantastic novel so far. The best Amis I've read since The Information, many years back.

The Golden Compass? Even better on a second read. I can't wait to read the second volume.

What I'm re-reading right now is Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass. I wanted to read the second one but had forgotten the first book already.

What I'm also reading, in preparation for teaching ENC1102, is Memering & Palmer's Discovering Arguments. It looks like a fairly solid textbook so far.

I'm also in the middle of a book of Bradbury short stories, "A Medicine for Melancholy," and finished, and very much enjoyed, Paula Vogel's terrific, rather disturbing (but funny) play, "How I learned to Drive," as well as Jane Martin's fantastic "Jack and Jill".

Tom Carson's Gilligan's Wake is worth it for the mix of high and low references, and for the buckets of wit, but it does seem to collapse under its own information overload -- that much, however, seems intentional, and goes w/ the wit of the book. And there's this Nabokovilian bit:

Then the song faded away, and a surprisingly strong-voiced announcer started spieling: "This is Double-You-Ache-Ay-Eee, your pop-classics station, where the Top Twenty's older than a lot of people who have died. Now -- say folks. When you're a nude descending a staircase under the brown fog of a winter noon, does the greed of this metropolis fill you with intolerance? Go to our sponsor: Refuge Paints. Art Refuge knows the secret of durable pigments, gang, and he's out to save you a stately, plump buck. Get on down there!..."

. So yes: Joyce and Nabokov name-dropped in one sentence.