Yesterday, the T broke or something and I ended up walking from the Andrew Street Station, in South Boston, to Harvard, in Cambridge. Actually, I walked from the Broadway Street Station to Andrew, realized I was going the wrong way, turned around, and saw all of Boston in front of me. I am an idiot. However, it did give me plenty of time, while I was walking around, to read What Maisie Knew by Henry James. This was a splendid way to spend a sunny day, I thought. I have been fighting a long battle against What Maisie Knew, which was assigned to us in my Henry James class in late 2006, and which I didn't finish then and -- as of this writing -- still have not finished. I have ten pages left to go. I don't know why it is such a struggle to finish this book, which I enjoy mightily. The only other books that I have had such titanic battles with are Life of Johnson and Proust, both of which are Loose Baggy Monsters in a way that Maisie is certainly not.
One of my friends expressed incredulity that I can read and walk at the same time. "And with glasses!" she said. I don't know when or why I developed this talent, but I wonder if this peripatetic reading is a good or a bad method, and whether it is good or bad for Maisie in particular. I certainly feel as if the books I have read partially while ambulatory have been understood as well as any others. I still underline in them, for example, though I usually stop walking in order to do that. I have sometimes tried reading while driving, though I do not recommend it, not even for Maisie. At any rate, it is good to remember, on the eve of Bloomsday, the day celebrating the most peripatetic of novels, that you don't have to be stationary to read.
[Editor's note: this was written during a fourth quarter timeout in the Celtics-Lakers Game Five, which was indeed the day after the T stopped and the day before Bloomsday. It is now neither of those things, but the trusty MacBook ran out of batteries and didn't get replugged until now. So, uh, Happy Belated Bloomsday!]
Sunday, June 15, 2008
Thursday, June 12, 2008
Deep Discounts
Here, in honor of my final day of work having commenced, presented in roughly chronological order: the list of books I bought while working at Borders, using my employee discount:
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz*; Shakespeare: the Invention of the Human by Harold Bloom*; Volpone, the Alchemist, Bartholomew Fair by Ben Jonson; The Master of Petersburg by J.M. Coetzee; The Noonday Demon by Andrew Solomon; The Compleat Angler by Izaak Walton; The Marx-Engels Reader; The Road by Cormac McCarthy*; How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read by Pierre Bayard; Grendel by John Gardner*; The Art of Fiction by John Gardner*; Author, Author by David Lodge; His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman*; The Time-Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger*; Leave it to Psmith by P.G. Wodehouse*; Like You'd Understand Anyway by Jim Shepard; The Performing Self by Richard Poirier; Bend Sinister by Vladimir Nabokov; The Code of the Woosters by P.G. Wodehouse*; Fargo Rock City by Chuck Klosterman; Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris*; Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman; Imperial Life in the Emerald City by Rajiv Chandrakesaran; Through the Children's Gate by Adam Gopnik; Molloy, Malone Dies, the Unnameable by Samuel Beckett; Love and Death in the American Novel by Leslie Fiedler; The Anxiety of Influence by Harold Bloom; Must Me Mean What We Say? by Stanley Cavell; The Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussell; The Book of Imaginary Beings by Jorge Luis Borges; Everyday Drinking by Kingsley Amis; and Nine Innings by Daniel Okrent.
Asterisks denote books that I have actually finished. As you can see, my readerly eyes were obviously way bigger than my readerly tummy. Especially w/r/t the ol' Literary Criticism section though, in fairness, some of those were meant to augment my no-underlining summer reading. Gotta make up that underlining somewhere. Also, I am glad that my last three purchases as an employee were about baseball, alcohol, and things people made up, which I consider my three ruling passions.
Here, also, are the books that I read while on breaks/during down time, while at good old store 0196:
A Disorder Peculiar to the Country by Ken Kalfus*; I Was Told There'd Be Cake by Sloane Crosley*$; God is Dead by Ron Currie Jr*; After Theory by Terry Eagleton*; All the Sad Young Literary Men by Keith Gessen*; and Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama*.
Asterisks again denote books I have finished, for continuity's sake, and dollar signs denote authors whom I have Facebook friended.
And so of course I made these lists while I was bored at work, and waved them at my coworkers as a sort of conspicuous, tasteful consumption. But of course the more I thought about it, the more the list seemed to mean to me: there it was, laid out, what I wanted to do for nine months. Around January, I wanted to be a guy who knew about Walt Whitman and the Green Zone. I still know nothing about them, but I know more about me and what I'm doing, because of those books I picked up. Do any other commodities work like that? Can you still call something that works like this a commodity? I think that's one reason I am happy to be leaving my current position --I will get away from the commodification of books -- because, man, I love books. Them, and baseball, drinks, and imaginary beings.
Postscript -- glad to be leaving my current position as I am, I would be remiss, at any such juncture, not to quote the Doctor: "of a place which has been frequently visited, tho' without pleasure, the last look is taken with heaviness of heart". That sounds about right. Fleeting heaviness, though, I hope.
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz*; Shakespeare: the Invention of the Human by Harold Bloom*; Volpone, the Alchemist, Bartholomew Fair by Ben Jonson; The Master of Petersburg by J.M. Coetzee; The Noonday Demon by Andrew Solomon; The Compleat Angler by Izaak Walton; The Marx-Engels Reader; The Road by Cormac McCarthy*; How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read by Pierre Bayard; Grendel by John Gardner*; The Art of Fiction by John Gardner*; Author, Author by David Lodge; His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman*; The Time-Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger*; Leave it to Psmith by P.G. Wodehouse*; Like You'd Understand Anyway by Jim Shepard; The Performing Self by Richard Poirier; Bend Sinister by Vladimir Nabokov; The Code of the Woosters by P.G. Wodehouse*; Fargo Rock City by Chuck Klosterman; Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris*; Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman; Imperial Life in the Emerald City by Rajiv Chandrakesaran; Through the Children's Gate by Adam Gopnik; Molloy, Malone Dies, the Unnameable by Samuel Beckett; Love and Death in the American Novel by Leslie Fiedler; The Anxiety of Influence by Harold Bloom; Must Me Mean What We Say? by Stanley Cavell; The Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussell; The Book of Imaginary Beings by Jorge Luis Borges; Everyday Drinking by Kingsley Amis; and Nine Innings by Daniel Okrent.
Asterisks denote books that I have actually finished. As you can see, my readerly eyes were obviously way bigger than my readerly tummy. Especially w/r/t the ol' Literary Criticism section though, in fairness, some of those were meant to augment my no-underlining summer reading. Gotta make up that underlining somewhere. Also, I am glad that my last three purchases as an employee were about baseball, alcohol, and things people made up, which I consider my three ruling passions.
Here, also, are the books that I read while on breaks/during down time, while at good old store 0196:
A Disorder Peculiar to the Country by Ken Kalfus*; I Was Told There'd Be Cake by Sloane Crosley*$; God is Dead by Ron Currie Jr*; After Theory by Terry Eagleton*; All the Sad Young Literary Men by Keith Gessen*; and Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama*.
Asterisks again denote books I have finished, for continuity's sake, and dollar signs denote authors whom I have Facebook friended.
And so of course I made these lists while I was bored at work, and waved them at my coworkers as a sort of conspicuous, tasteful consumption. But of course the more I thought about it, the more the list seemed to mean to me: there it was, laid out, what I wanted to do for nine months. Around January, I wanted to be a guy who knew about Walt Whitman and the Green Zone. I still know nothing about them, but I know more about me and what I'm doing, because of those books I picked up. Do any other commodities work like that? Can you still call something that works like this a commodity? I think that's one reason I am happy to be leaving my current position --I will get away from the commodification of books -- because, man, I love books. Them, and baseball, drinks, and imaginary beings.
Postscript -- glad to be leaving my current position as I am, I would be remiss, at any such juncture, not to quote the Doctor: "of a place which has been frequently visited, tho' without pleasure, the last look is taken with heaviness of heart". That sounds about right. Fleeting heaviness, though, I hope.
Friday, June 6, 2008
Summer Reading
It’s summer! It is not actually summer, of course, but really. Summer enough for summer reading! The last time I made a summer reading list, I gave it the depressing .doc “Summer (Life?) Books” because I was all mopey that I would have a job and no summer vacations and summer books wouldn’t mean anything. Sad, sad. Also sad was that there were thirty-one books on that list and I read four of them. I mean, I read a bunch of non-list books, sure, but one likes to see one’s plans fulfilled.
I have little doubt that this list will itself gang agley. However, the alternative – no lists to disappoint – seems dour. And what I am doing in this “Summer Reading” program, unlike last year’s big books on Life and Theory (one was The Rhetoric of Fiction by Wayne Booth – yikes, spikes!) or 2006’s Year of the Great White Male Narcissists, in which I attempted the tetralogies on Zuckerman (success) and Rabbit Angstrom (25% success), is going to be Books I Wouldn’t Underline. This is for two reasons: one, I am poor, and will be getting most of these from the library; two, they are the sort of bellelettristic non-fiction that I imagine one can do without underlining. It is dominated, I hardly need to say, by people who have been on staff at the New Yorker:
1) Confederates in the Attic by Tony Horwitz (if this one is good, I will go for his A Voyage Long and Strange)
2) The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright
3) The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh by Linda Colley (on the Times Best of 2007 list)
4) The Nine by Jeffrey Toobin (also NYT Best of 2007)
5) The World Without Us by Alan Weisman
6) The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop? by Francisco Goldman
7) The Post-America World by Fareed Zakaria
I think that should be a good list. And it will lead to a new column: adventures in the non-underlined, or something, and according to my records the last time I read a book remotely like any of the foregoing, it was (maybe) The Rest is Noise and (considered more rigorously) …Jesus, the Red Queen, which I read on the bike at the gym in Williamstown while I lived in Mission. So you know, a while.
And it should be fun. Summer reading tends to be fun, even, according to one of my creative consultants for this blog, for people who normally are unimpressed with reading. I’m not sure why. Why do you guys like summer reading, assuming its appeal is as universal as my consultant indicates? And what are you planning to read? Tell us, or beg for advice, below!
I have little doubt that this list will itself gang agley. However, the alternative – no lists to disappoint – seems dour. And what I am doing in this “Summer Reading” program, unlike last year’s big books on Life and Theory (one was The Rhetoric of Fiction by Wayne Booth – yikes, spikes!) or 2006’s Year of the Great White Male Narcissists, in which I attempted the tetralogies on Zuckerman (success) and Rabbit Angstrom (25% success), is going to be Books I Wouldn’t Underline. This is for two reasons: one, I am poor, and will be getting most of these from the library; two, they are the sort of bellelettristic non-fiction that I imagine one can do without underlining. It is dominated, I hardly need to say, by people who have been on staff at the New Yorker:
1) Confederates in the Attic by Tony Horwitz (if this one is good, I will go for his A Voyage Long and Strange)
2) The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright
3) The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh by Linda Colley (on the Times Best of 2007 list)
4) The Nine by Jeffrey Toobin (also NYT Best of 2007)
5) The World Without Us by Alan Weisman
6) The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop? by Francisco Goldman
7) The Post-America World by Fareed Zakaria
I think that should be a good list. And it will lead to a new column: adventures in the non-underlined, or something, and according to my records the last time I read a book remotely like any of the foregoing, it was (maybe) The Rest is Noise and (considered more rigorously) …Jesus, the Red Queen, which I read on the bike at the gym in Williamstown while I lived in Mission. So you know, a while.
And it should be fun. Summer reading tends to be fun, even, according to one of my creative consultants for this blog, for people who normally are unimpressed with reading. I’m not sure why. Why do you guys like summer reading, assuming its appeal is as universal as my consultant indicates? And what are you planning to read? Tell us, or beg for advice, below!
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