It must be from all those old film noirs I'm obsessed with--Double Indemnity, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Out of the Past, and the like. Or maybe it stems from my love of Faulkner's Sanctuary, which I read as an undergrad and never let go of. Hence, now I'm in the middle of Pulp Masters, a collection of hard-boiled crime novellas edited by genre writer Ed Gorman and Martin H. Greenberg. First in the set is The Embezzler by James M. Cain (author of the novels Double Indemnity and Mildred Pierce), and now I'm in Donald Westlake's Ordo, about a navy chap who learns from a magazine article that his ex-wife is the newest sex goddess of the big screen. Naturally, the guy has to go looking for her. Good stuff, and I feel that the novellas get better as I go through the collection.
I'm also reading around in Clive James' Cultural Amnesia, a collection of biographical essays on 20th-century cultural and political figures--some of them important but lesser known. Inside we get essays on everyone from Hegel, Borges, and Charles de Gaulle, to Louis Armstrong, Terry Gilliam, and Dick Cavett.
I'm also finally getting to Bob Dylan's Chronicles, Vol. 1, which has some fine spirit behind it. With that I've taken up The Complete Bob Dylan Songbook for an artistic point-of-view behind Zimmy's personal history, and to improve my guitar chops by learning personal favs "Jokerman," "Not Dark Yet," and others (as best as my talents will allow).
-Matt Sorrento
Labels: biography, crime novellas, music
posted by Matt Borondy at 2/11/2008 07:05:00 PM
Matt Borondy: Felicia Sullivan's
The Sky isn't Visible from Here;
The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel; and three random picks from the Burlington library (I just got a library card for the first time in five years):
How to be Alone by Jonathan Franzen,
Back on the Fire by Gary Snyder, and
The Best American Essays 2007 ed. by D.F. Wallace. I'm also hoping to read Chris Abani's
Song for Night and Hari Kunzru's
My Revolutions, which were recommendations hurled at me via
Facebook.
Robert Birnbaum:
The Silver Swan by Benjamin Black (John Banville),
Kyra by Carol Killigan,
Dominion by Calvin Baker,
Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson,
The Flowers by Dagoberto Gilb,
The Soul Thief by Charles Baxter,
The People's History of American Empire: A Graphic Adaptation by Howard Zinn w/ Mike Konoipacki & Paul Buhle,
A Treatise of Civil Power by Geoffrey Hill,
The Expeditions by Karl Iagnemma,
The Art of Funerary Violin by Rohan Kriwaczck,
The Thing About Life is That One Day You'll Be Dead by David Shields, the
London Review of Books piece on
Praised Be Our Lords: The Autobiography by Régis Debray, Vol III, A FINANCIAL TIMES piece on James Wood (
a critic of sublime ferocity) by Trevor Butterworth, Michael Lewis's piece on football locker rooms in the NYT magazine.
Stephanie Johnson: I'm currently reading/planning to read Tessa Hadley's
Sunstroke and Other Stories, Kenzaburo Oe's
A Personal Matter, Jonathan Selwood's
The Pinball Theory of Apocalypse, and
The Braindead Megaphone by George Saunders.
Alexandra Tursi: I have a few stories left in
The Collected Works of Amy Hempel, which is marvelous. Next up is
Signed, Mata Hari by Vermont-based writer Yannick Murphy, then
A Plea for Eros by Siri Hustvedt. I noticed Paul Auster's
Travels in the Scriptorium on a recent trip to Borders and hope to pick that up and read it before the end of the month.
Mara Naselli: I'm reading and rereading
Brown Bear Brown Bear, Hop on Pop, The Very Hungry Caterpillar (a favorite),
That's Not My Dinosaur (another favorite),
Green Eggs and Ham, Goodnight Moon, and Let's Go Visiting. And that's about all I can handle.
Elham Shabahat: Joan Didion's
White Album and Albert Camus'
Exile and the Kingdom. I've also been rereading Kerouac's
On the Road. (The New York Public Library's excellent exhibit on Kerouac and my road trip vacation plans have something to do with that choice, I think.) Also, I recently attended a four day activist intensive on black resistance movements, and now I'm armed with a copy of
The Black Panthers Speak (edited by Philip S. Foner) that I hope to finish soon.
Alexandra Bullen: This month (last month, and probably next month, too) the book I keep coming back to is Nancy Milford's
Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay...not just because it's a dense 600 + pages, but also there's something comfortable about living inside of it for a while. I've finally put down
Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky, and can say that I enjoyed the many appendices much more than the book (or partial book) itself. Other than that, it's been a lot of airplane-friendly magazines. I don't know if I've been living under a rock (or on one...) but I've just discovered
National Geographic's Adventure Magazine...in last month's issue was a fascinating and very funny piece about those feisty Bonobos, and a tribe in the Congo that might be their last hope.
Labels: Amy Hempel, children's literature, essays, fiction, Joan Didion, magazines, nonfiction, staff reading
posted by Matt Borondy at 2/06/2008 06:59:00 AM 
