What Some of us are Reading

Matt Borondy: I'm checking out the new Leonard Cohen (Book of Longing), Maddox's
Alphabet of Manliness, Joan Didion's Year of Magical Thinking and Hillary Carlip's Queen of the Oddballs

Christian Bauman: Ditto on Didion (finished), starting Nick Hornby On the Way Down

Jessica Rowland: I'm reading Siddhartha by Herman Hesse to give me some meditative inspiration while I wait out the last few agonizing moments of my grad school waitlist purgatory.

Ross Simonini: The Dead Father by Barthelme, The Second World War by John Keegan, For the Birds by John Cage, Youth by Coetzee, Airships by Barry Hannah, A couple biographies of Yves Klein, Joshua Beckman's poetry

Jesslyn Roebuck: A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole, 100 Years of Solitude - Marquez, Babylon and Other Stories - Alix Ohlin, How We are Hungry - Dave Eggers, Immortality - Milan Kundera, Poesie - Rimbaud

A Spy's Fate, or "What Birnbaum's Reading"

A Spy's Fate by (supposedly the godfather of Cuban noir) Arnaldo Correa

A Practice of Deceit by Elizabeth Benedict

Sam Harris's Atheist Manifesto at TruthDig.com

The Lost by Daniel Mendelsohn

Going Sane: Maps of Happiness by Adam Phllips

Don't I Know You? by Karen Shepard

The Economics of Attention by Richard Lanham

Joe Bageant's weblog on Terry Gross, which begins:

Having come to understand that mainstream media are in the business of selling fried chicken and cars, giving Wall Street head, and stealing bandwidth from the public's airwaves, none of us expect them to question anything afoot in the empire. We quite understand they cannot be wasting profitable air time on a nation whose collective memory is 30 seconds long. So we watch them pull their punches and wait for the commercials, which are their whole point anyway. If, god forbid, you are the pointy headed type interested in details, turn on NPR. And if you consider yourself hipper than the couch taters out here in Budland, go onto the net and visit Salon. Or if you are so worldly and hip you are a downright commie, then subscribe to Mother Jones. That's the way it used to be...

-Robert Birnbaum

Infatuated with not-quite-current books

Infatuated as ever with not-quite-current books, I just finished Janet Malcolm's wonderful study of writer and subject, The Journalist and the Murderer. It opens with a killer first line, but I'll quote the entire opening graf because it is just that good:

Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse. Like the credulous widow who wakes up one day to find the charming young man and all her savings gone, so the consenting subject of a piece of nonfiction writing learns--when the article or book appears-- his hard lesson. Journalists justify their treachery in various ways according to their temperments. The more pompous talk about freedom of speech and "the public's right to know"; the least talented talk about Art; the seemliest murmer about earning a living.

I'd like to think there is another way, but she has a point, and illustrates it so beautifully with the story of a young, hungover freelancer's impetuous indulgence in William Styron's especially expensive-and-hard-to-get-saved-for-a-special-occasion crab meat. I also just started John McPhee's Coming into the Country, and in an uncharacteristic turn toward the contemporary, courtesy of Mr. Borondy, Horse: How the Horse Has Shaped Civilization by J. Edward Chamberlin.

-Mara Naselli

Jesus' Son

I was psyched to find that my local used bookstore finally put a copy of Jesus' Son (by Denis Johnson) on the racks. I'd read it before (as well as seen the movie starring Billy Crudup) but didn't own it until it was recently made available to me for a few schekels.

Here's a quote:

"Down the hall came the wife. She was glorious, burning. She didn't know yet that her husband was dead. We knew. That's what gave her such power over us. The doctor took her into a room with a desk at the end of the hall, and from under the closed door a slab of brilliance radiated as if, by some stupendous process, diamonds were being incinerated in there. What a pair of lungs! She shrieked as I imagined an eagle would shriek. It felt wonderful to be alive to hear it! I've gone looking for that feeling everywhere."

Denis Johnson is to literature what Lou Reed is to music.

-Matt Borondy