Ukrainian born Vitali Vitaliev's interesting memoir, Life as a Literary Device: A Writer's Manual of Survival, which is really good so far... Though each edition of the book seems to have a different subtitle...
Fridays at Enricos. By Don Carpenter (completed by Jonathan Lethem). A lightly fictionalized novel about the overlapping lives of writers who eventually all come together in San Francisco. Mostly, it's novelists who got there a bit too late to be classified with the San Francisco Rennaissance or the Beat Generation or even the Brautigan-era hippies. Carpenter is one of those writers admired by writers (which means 1) he's extremely gifted but also 2) his work doesn't sell enough or attract enough critical attention to arouse envy: too bad, based on this book, he can write accessible prose that tells good stories about interesting characters)
The Town - William Faulkner "Only a fool would try to fool smart people, and anybody that needs to fool fools is already one." The Hamlet is much better than this second volume of the Snopes trilogy, but this one is still well worth reading.
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon I'm about halfway through. It seems worthy of the praise it received about a decade ago (2003 Whitbread Book of the Year, Longlist for Man Booker Prize).
I've been bouncing between essays in One Man's Meat, a book I was barely familiar with until last summer, when I forced my son to choose it as one of his summer reading books for an AP class he's taking his senior year of high school. Published in the early 40's, but with essays that go back to before WWII, some of the content feels dated, don't quite click. But other essays shine. This morning I read the essay "Progress and Change." Wonderful, a joy to read. Such a gifted writer, not overly complex, but masterful. Funny as hell, but the deft use of sarcasm, satire and simply hilarious turns of phrase never mask the undercurrent of a serious message, of deep perception. As I said, not all of the essays here strike me as this one did, but those that do hit chords that reside chronologically and stylistically between Thoreau and more contemporary writer and essayists (for me, it would be someone like Wendell Berry, but with more humor). Anyway, a lovely book. I'm glad I forced my son into reading it.
Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer by Peter Turchi. This book is a meditation on story tellying that, beyond that, is really hard to describe in a way that makes it sound as interesting as it is (edit: so I won't try). But it says something about American publishing that this was published by Trinity University Press and not, say, Penguin or Simon and Schuster, and what it says is not good.
This has been on my shelf for a while and I finally have had at it. Interesting bit is Buddy's digs at Willie Dixon. Basically he claims Dixon took credit for a lot of tunes he didn't write-which when juxtaposed with Dixon's lawsuit against Led Zeppelin for "Whole Lotta Love,"...Willie doesn't look like quite the victim. Quick fun read.
Terrible Swift Sword and Never Call Retreat - Bruce Catton Read volume one of this civil war history trilogy a couple few weeks ago, so I had to read these to see how it turned out.
The next political science book I'm reading says what the Supreme Court has thought about public opinion.
Reading about this specific type of qualitative research to prepare for what is likely my next study/dissertation topic.
Down and In: Life in the Underground, a memoir by the novelist Ron Sukenick. I read this in paperback a decade ago, and I found a first edition in a good used bookstore this summer for around $4... of course, the thing about Sukenick: it's the SECOND editions of his books that are rare, though this is one of the best memoirs about life in the now bygone Post WWII New York scene that I've read, maybe the best, though there are enough of them that I can't really even decide whether it's even my favorite, let alone the top dog.
Mark Twain -- A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court ...from this Library of America collection. I'm about 60% finished and it's shaping up to be one of my favorite books.
What a great trio. Joan of Arc is one of my favorite works of all time, and pretty darn accurate, esp given the resources he had when he wrote the novel.
Sorry to quote myself, but it turns out I have much the same fascination with Joan of Arc as did Twain. http://www.theawl.com/2012/04/the-riddle-of-mark-twains-passion-for-joan-of-arc I can't find an attribution readily, but apparently Twain seriously considered penning this novel under Samuel Clemens. Just because he knew this work was personal.
It has been a pretty rough run for me - almost no time to read for nearly two months. Tomorrow on the way home from work though, I am headed to the library to get a week's worth of books and remedy that. In the meantime most of my reading for pleasure has been limited to reading my collection of Science Fiction & Fantasy magazines. Not a big collection; I subscribed from a year but didn't read very often. Until I needed to read for only minutes at a time, and then it was ideal. I hadn't renewed after the year (it costs around $40 for six issues) was up, but after this run I sent them a check to re-up.
Alex Irvine used to post on Bigsoccer. Bummer to see he's now hanging with riff raff like Porges and Sterling....
The Mansion - William Faulkner “Old Moster jest punishes; he dont play jokes.” Final volume of the Snopes trilogy. Some of the Mink Snopes parts are right up there with Faulkner’s best. But Linda Snopes, meh.
First up in my week of wonderful reading: How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez tracks a family - mostly the four sisters - who are forced to leave the Dominican Republic when their father gets caught up in a coup plot. The book is set in both the US and the DR; I like it quite a bit.
Virginia Nicholson, Among the Bohemians: Experiments in Living 1900-1939, a pretty interesting account of English artists and writers reacting against Victorian values and trying to create art while, occasionally, eating. More interesting and diverse scenes than I would've expected. Picked it up because 1) it keeps up a theme in my reading that has been developing and 2) I was surprised to find it in my local branch of the public library.
The Poisoner's Handbook -- Deborah Blum A study of one of the first professional coroner's offices in the world, and perhaps the beginning of detective forensics. Great topic, rather pedestrian writing. One thing that I find very annoying is that she doesn't mark her footnotes in the body of the text. I read footnotes generally -- I was quoted in one once -- but here, all I can do is just keep flipping back to the footnotes and try to find the text she's referring to.