February 2010

A lot of short stories.

The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis
Wind, Sand and Stars, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
The Interrogative Mood, Padgett Powell
The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel
A Universal History of Iniquity, Jorge Luis Borges
Manhood for Amateurs, Michael Chabon

January 2010

Books:

Vacation, Deb Olin Unferth

Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays, Zadie Smith

Movies:

The Rules of the Game

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

End of the year.

November:

Books:

Vertigo, W.G. Sebald
Oblivion, David Foster Wallace
The Lemon Tree, Sandy Tolan
The Canine Good Citizen: Every Dog Can Be One, Jack and Wendy Volhard

Movies:

Enchanted April
Nine Lives
Brick

December:

Books:

If on a winter's night a traveler, Italo Calvino
Whatever It Takes, Paul Tough (about the Harlem Children's Zone)

Movies:

The Princess Bride
Fantastic Mr. Fox
Mon Oncle
The Usual Suspects

The tally for 2009, in terms of books read this year? 65. A strong start to the year, but it ended with a whimper. At least I can say with conviction that I had a good reason to be distracted from reading, and that reason begins with an L.

September:

Books:

The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs
Darkness Visible, William Styron
The Stranger, Albert Camus

Cesar's Way, Cesar Millan
Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit, PG Wodehouse

Movies:

The Rage in Placid Lake
Melvin Goes to Dinner
The September Issue
Stolen

October:

Movies:

This American Life, Seasons 1 & 2
Where the Wild Things Are
Let the Right One In

August 09

The books:

Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk, Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain (don't do drugs)
The White Tiger, Aravind Adiga (the month's book club selection)

Men in the Off Hours, Anne Carson

Finished Sept 2nd:

War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy



It's better than you think.


And the movies:

(500) Days of Summer
Gigantic
Seraphine

In the Loop
Metropolitan
The Anniversary Party

re: books

I read whatever crosses my path. Since ceasing to just buy books outright and get them either through the library or through my volunteer work, I take a lot more risks with choosing books. It's surprisingly rewarding.

I do like to keep an eye out for other works by authors I already enjoy (cf: the Murakami , Carson, and Oliver in July).

I especially take note of articles that clue me into something worth tracking down - for this month, that includes:

this Believer article on the Codex

and this NYRB article by Zadie Smith that references The Remainder (and Netherland, which I read back in March)

also there was a lovely NYT article on Mary Oliver and Provincetown, not far from where I grew up (and you can hear her reading her poems).

July 2009

Books:

And Now You Can Go, Vendela Vida
Thirst, Mary Oliver
The Elephant Vanishes, Haruki Murakami
The Atlas of Experience, Louise van Swaaij
Collected Poems, Elizabeth Bishop
Codex Seraphinianus, Luigi Serafini
The Executor, Michael Kruger
Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name, Vendela Vida
If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, translated by Anne Carson
Minotaur, Benjamin Tammuz
Remainder, Tom McCarthy
The Silver Linings Playbook, Matthew Quick

Movies:

Lolita
Bringing Up Baby
The Money Pit
I've Loved You So Long
The Royal Tenenbaums (my favorite movie)
Rushmore


Surreptitious pictures of some of my favorite Codex illustrations:

june 2009

Books:

Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
Unaccustomed Earth, Jhumpa Lahiri
The Enchanted April, Elizabeth von Arnim
Averno, Louise Glück
The Secret of Scent, Luca Turin
The Beauty of the Husband, Anne Carson
The Look of Architecture, Witold Rybczynski
Very Good, Jeeves!, P.G. Wodehouse


Movies:

Smart People
Arrested Development (re-watch)
Away We Go
Sweet and Lodown

May 2009 - the books.

The Portable Dorothy Parker

Louise Bouregois: The Secret of the Cells, Rainer Crone and Petrus Graf Schaesberg

The School Among the Ruins, Adrienne Rich

The Leaf and the Cloud, Mary Oliver

Also, the Domino book on decorating, but I don't really think that counts. (The magazine issues were far better, anyway - more sourcing)

This month's book club selection was Alan's War. Above, the artist's amazing technique.

So I was reading Pitchfork just now and they have an interview with a DJ called A-Trak. I've heard of him because he's a big fan of Baltimore club.

Going from that, I was totally blown away when he name-dropped Proust in the interview:

Last Great Book I Read

Marcel Proust: "Un Amour de Swann" [Pt. 3 of Du côté de chez Swann, or Swann's Way]

My brother is obsessed with Proust, and he gave me-- I guess the work of Proust, you can buy it split up into smaller books, if you don't want to carry around a huge brick [laughs]. So this particular section that I read, "Un Amour de Swann", I was just reading and thinking, wow, this guy has figured out all of humanity, he's figured out what really goes on inside my head, and he's saying stuff that I'm probably even too scared to admit to myself, but he's saying it and I read it and I'm like, holy shit we all really think like this. And then he pushes it even further, and brings out all these strange comparisons that you wouldn't really think of, that are so well-argued, but at the same time, kind of clumsy, because his sentences are really long and really... I guess just the opposite of what, traditionally, writers try to achieve-- a sentence that lasts a whole page, and it should be clumsy and long, but it's just so good and so dead on, you're like, "Jesus, how does he do this stuff?"

april 2009

Books:

The Substance of Style, Virginia Postrel
Alan's War: The Memories of G.I. Alan Cope, by Emmanuel Guibert (graphic novel about WWII, book club selection for May)
Seven Days in the Art World, Sarah Thornton
The Connoisseur, Evan S. Connell
Alex & Me, Irene Peppenburg
Asleep, Banana Yoshimoto
So Long, See You Tomorrow, William Maxwell


Movies:

Caro Diario
Out of Africa
Ginger and Cinnamon
My Architect
A Woman is a Woman
The Triplets of Belleville
L'Avventura

March 2009

A little late.

Books:

Winter's Tales, Isak Dinensen
Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder, Lawrence Weschler
The Invention of Morel and Other Stories, Adolfo Bioy Casares
The Black Book, Orhan Pamuk
Netherland, Joseph O'Neill
Predictably Irrational, Dan Ariely
Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind, Gary Marcus
Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules, David Sedaris

Movies:

Coraline
Bottle Shock
La Dolce Vita
Roman Holiday
Crimes and Misdemeanors
Contempt
Rothko's Rooms
Happenstance
Happy Go Lucky
Big Night
Secretary
John Adams

February 2009 - the books. (and movies)

Books:

Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences, Lawrence Weschler
The Zanzibar Chest, Aidan Hartley
No One Belongs Here More Than You, Miranda July
Hard Boiled and Hard Luck, Banana Yoshimoto
An Iliad, Alessandro Barrico
The Book of Imaginary Beings, Jorge Luis Borges


Movies:

Annie Hall
Dr. Strangelove
Me and You and Everyone We Know
Persepolis
Blow Up
Man on Wire
Pollock
Broken English
I Like Killing Flies
LoudQUIETLoud
Winter Passing
Mostly Martha
Grey Gardens

January 2009 - the books.

Decreation, Anne Carson
Proust's Way, Roger Shattuck
Proust and Signs, Gilles Deleuze
Learning to Love You More, Miranda July
The Art Instinct, Denis Dutton

December 2008 - the books

Heat, Bill Buford
Shopgirl, Steve Martin
Mythologies, Roland Barthes
The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Muriel Barbery
Swann's Way, Marcel Proust

Proust is amazing. I developed something that I called "The Proust Zone". It's not unlike super careful reading for a class. The sentences were just so dense, so jam-packed with meanings, several of them, which then combined to form a new, subtle direction. I'm going to have to read the remaining volumes of the Search.

This year I read 76 books.

Of course, there's still some started that I have yet to finish:
A People's History of the United States
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Book of Disquiet

..but I think I'll get to them. A new year can include some old books. In fact, I think it should!

The pivotal scene of Swann's Way - once you are enthralled by this, perhaps there's no going back-


Many years had elapsed during which nothing of Combray, save what was comprised in the theatre and the drama of my going to bed there, had any existence for me, when one day in winter, on my return home, my mother, seeing that I was cold, offered me some tea, a thing I did not ordinarily take. I declined at first, and then, for no particular reason, changed my mind. She sent for one of those squat, plump little cakes called "petites madeleines," which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted valve of a scallop shell. And soon, mechanically, dispirited after a dreary day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory - this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me it was me. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I sensed that it was connected with the taste of the tea and the cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours, could, no, indeed, be of the same nature. Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it?

I drink a second mouthful, in which I find nothing more than in the first, then a third, which gives me rather less than the second. It is time to stop; the potion is losing its magic. It is plain that the truth I am seeking lies not in the cup but in myself. The drink has called it into being, but does not know it, and can only repeat indefinitely, with a progressive diminution of strength, the same message which I cannot interpret, though I hope at least to be able to call it forth again and to find it there presently, intact and at my disposal, for my final enlightenment. I put down the cup and examine my own mind. It alone can discover the truth. But how: What an abyss of uncertainty, whenever the mind feels overtaken by itself; when it, the seeker, is at the same time the dark region through which it must go seeking and where all its equipment will avail it nothing. Seek? More than that: create. It is face to face with something which does not yet exist, to which it alone can give reality and substance, which it alone can bring into the light of day.

And I begin to ask myself what it could have been, this unremembered state which brought with it no logical proof, but the indisputable evidence, of its felicity, its reality, and in whose presence other states of consciousness melted and vanished. I decide to attempt to make it reappear. I retrace my thoughts to the moment at which I drank the first spoonful of tea. I rediscover the same state, illuminated by no fresh light. I ask my mind to make one further effort, to bring back once more the fleeting sensation. And so that nothing may interrupt it in its course I shut out every obstacle, every extraneous idea, I stop my ears and inhibit all attention against the sound from the next room. And then, feeling that my mind is tiring itself without having any success to report, I compel it for a change to enjoy the distraction which I have just denied it, to think of other things, to rest refresh itself before making a final effort. And then for the second time I clear an empty space in front of it; I place in position before my mind's eye the still recent taste of that first mouthful, and I feel something start within me, something that leaves its resting-place and attempts to rise, something that has been embedded like an anchor at a great depth; I do not know yet what it is, but I can feel it mounting slowly; I can measure the resistance, I can hear the echo of great spaces traversed.

November 2008 - the books.

November seems to be a great month for reading for me, especially when last year's November count is taken into consideration too. Blame it on the change in weather? It only really got wintery-cold this month...

Right Ho, Jeeves, P.G. Wodehouse

Cleopatra's Nose: 39 Varieties of Desire, Judith Thurman

The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck

Kitchen, Banana Yoshimoto

The Book of Other People, Zadie Smith, ed.

Staying Alive, Neil Astley, ed. (poetry anthology)

The Accidental Masterpiece: On the Art of Life and Vice Versa, Michael Kimmelman

Proust Was a Neuroscientist, Jonah Lehrer

My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead: Great Love Stories from Chekhov to Munro, Jeffrey Eugenides, ed.

Wodehouse was a wonderful discovery this month courtesy of a bookish friend. Lighthearted and humorous - I'm looking forward to reading more about my new favorite butler.

Have you seen Zadie Smith's worthwhile piece for the New York Review of Books?


Versus


Interesting reading.

October 2008 - the books.

The Omnivore's Dilemma, Michel Pollan

The Tapestries, Kien Nguyen

How Proust Can Change Your Life: Not a Novel, Alan de Botton

Perfumes: The Guide, Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez

Austerlitz, W.G. Sebald

The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz

Consider the Lobster and other essays, David Foster Wallace