What We're Reading

When Sonny Bravo Met Holden Caulfield

2008-04-30T22:16:00.000-07:00

Spurred by what one critic said of Dagoberto Gilb's The Flowers (that its narrator Sonny Bravo could be Holden Caulfield), I read The Flowers then reread Salinger's Catcher in the Rye. The narrators do share the word "phony," it's true. Rather than interchange them, I'd like to see them meet.

Finished a novel that debuted in 2005, The Professor's Daughter by Emily Raboteau. Lyrical and exacting, the author hits a lot of nerves, one that especially twangs: growing up gray in a black and white United States.

In the middle of Voltaire's Candide. What took me so long? It's hilarious. No wonder it's been around since 1759.

On my to-do list: Sharp Teeth by Toby Barlow. And another by authors that hail from or otherwise beholden to the Motor City: Detroit Noir, an anthology of edited by E.J. Olsen and John C. Hocking.

Following that will be Joshua Ferris' Then We Came to the End, one of those books that hasn't stopped talking since it was released.

Next time, a slew of women and one man.

-Stacy Muszynski, copy editor

Rereading Steinbeck

2008-04-30T22:13:00.000-07:00

I'm rereading everything Steinbeck for my 11th grade English class (The Pearl, Of Mice and Men, and The Grapes of Wrath).

For fun I've got Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs and Veronica by Mary Gaitskill (I adore her).

-Sarah Presite, assistant fiction editor

The Omnivore's Dilemma

2008-04-30T22:10:00.000-07:00

I just finished reading, Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma, and Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex. On deck is Carl Bernstein's A Woman in Charge: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton.

-Jesslyn Roebuck, contributing editor

How to Rig an Election

2008-04-21T15:14:00.000-07:00

For this fiction editor, no fiction lately! I recently finished How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative, am in the middle of Sacco and Vanzetti: The Men, the Murders, and the Judgment of Mankind, and have Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions waiting on my nightstand after reading a great review of it in the MIT Technology Review.

I do have one novel in the queue: Dennis Lehane's Mystic River. My fiancee and I were visiting the mystery book store--well, a house more than a store--up the street from us, and I pulled Mystic River off the shelf to find it was a whopping $35. Turns out the shop's owner, Kate, had Lehane autograph it.

-Andrew Whitacre, fiction editor

Why the Devil Chose New England for His Work

2008-04-14T14:21:00.000-07:00

I just finished reading Jason Brown's collection of short stories, Why the Devil Chose New England for His Work, David Bornstein's How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas, and Daniel Stashower's The Beautiful Cigar Girl: Mary Rogers, Edgar Allan Poe, and the Invention of Murder.

-Sherry Saturno, interviews editor

The Reluctant Fundamentalist

2008-04-09T13:06:00.000-07:00

James Warner: I just read The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid, and Christine Falls by John Banville (writing under a mysterious pseudonym). I'm now engrossed in Mark Helprin's Refiner's Fire--not very close to me politically, that guy, but I can forgive anything of someone who writes that kind of prose.

-James Warner, assistant fiction editor

The Magus (still)

2008-04-08T05:49:00.000-07:00

I'm just finishing The Magus, still, I've been on that one for a while. But as soon as I started reading it, it immediately fell into my Top 5 list. And I always take my time with those. Remembrance of Things Past, Of Human Bondage, Lolita.
I'm going to be traveling most of this month, so I need to pick some smaller books. I'm going to bring The Pigeon by Patrick Suskind, and Notes From Underground because I've never read it.

-Anna-Lynne Williams, music editor

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

2008-04-07T13:43:00.000-07:00

I just finished rereading Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which is pretty great but I don't think matches up to some of his subsequent books. Before that was South of the Border, West of the Sun (also by Murakami), and before that was a cool little comic book called Tales of Woodsman Pete, by Lilli Carre. This morning on the train I started rereading Calvino's Invisible Cities, which is just too good to be true. I'm hoping after that to start the Yiddish Policeman book, but who knows.

-Sumanth Prabhaker, assistant fiction editor

What Birnbaum's Reading

2008-03-31T06:11:00.000-07:00

Human Smoke by Nick Baker, The Resurrectionist by Jack O'Connell, Alan Furst's The Spy of Warsaw, Havana Deco, Jim Kunstler's The World Made by Hand, Love Letters from a Fat Man by Naomi Benaron, The Lazarus Project by Alexander Hemon, and I am trying to make space to get back to reading Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, Bolano's The Savage Detectives, and Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke.

-Robert Birnbaum, editor-at-large

The World Without Us

2008-03-26T14:26:00.000-07:00

I just finished Veronica by Mary Gaitskill. I also went to my community library for the first time since I was fourteen the other night, and I picked up The World Without Us by Alan Weisman (which I started reading last night and am already glued to), The Control of Nature by John McPhee and The Bad Girl by Mario Vargas Llosa. Also, I have the new translation of War and Peace next to my night stand, which I imagine will take me through to June!

-Alexandra Tursi, visuals editor

Shortcomings

2008-03-21T15:05:00.000-07:00

This month I'm reading Shortcomings by Adrien Tomine, Sex Sleep Eat Drink Dream: A Day in the Life of Your Body by Jennifer Ackerman, and Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger's by John Elder Robison.

-Stephanie Johnson, copyeditor

A Civil Action

2008-03-19T12:25:00.000-07:00

I just finished A Civil Action by Jonathon Harr, a masterly piece of research, reporting, and narrative. I recently picked up Among the Thugs by Bill Buford at a tiny used bookstore. Last I night finished Marilynne Robinson's "The Waste Land," a sharp, short piece published in an early issue of Granta and reprinted in The Granta Book of Reportage, and "The War at Home," Janet Wondra's lovely contribution to Short Takes: Brief Encounters with Contemporary Nonfiction, edited by Judith Kitchen.

-Mara Naselli, nonfiction editor

Lee Miller: A Life

2008-03-18T15:46:00.000-07:00

My big project lately has been another fascinating lady bio, Carolyn Burke's Lee Miller: A Life.

Earlier this month I was introduced to Kate Christensen by randomly coming across her novel, The Epicure's Lament, in the library. Its protagonist, a wry hedonist suddenly forced into family-life, has stayed with me in a very pleasant way, which I bet would really piss him off.

Also this month I have been making slow progress on Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom, which, in my opinion, is the only kind of Faulkner progress allowed, given that lines like the following tend to appear casually on every page:

"War would settle the matter, leave free one of the two irreconciliables, since it would not be the first time that youth has taken catastrophe as a direct act of Providence for the sole purpose of solving a personal problem which youth itself could not solve."

-Alexandra Bullen, interviews editor

My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead

2008-03-17T11:53:00.000-07:00

Greetings from Chicago everyone, it's your friendly roving nonfiction acquisitions editor, Alex A.G. Shapiro. I'm reading My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead: Great Love Stories, from Chekhov to Munro by Jeffrey Eugenides (Editor), and a business book called Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath, Dan Heath. On deck is Charles Bock's much ballyhooed debut, Beautiful Children.

-Alex Shapiro, contributing editor

On the Art of Life and Vice Versa

2008-03-13T09:52:00.000-07:00

Today I started reading Michael Kimmelman's The Accidental Masterpiece: On the Art of Life and Vice Versa and I've liked it so much that I've more or less finished it in an afternoon. I just finished the short story collection Stories from the Afterlife, by Quinn Dalton, and up next is Gail Jones' Dreams of Speaking to prepare for interviewing the author. I just finished Doris Lessing's The Good Terrorist and Umberto Eco's On Literature. Last but not least, I've been slowly but happily reading Inscribing the Hundred Years War in French and English Cultures--getting back to my Medieval Studies-major roots.

-Summer Block Kumar, contributing editor

The Audacity of Hoping to Read Five Books This Month

2008-03-11T15:32:00.001-07:00

My reading list this month includes the two Obama books, Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope, both of which I purchased during a random trip to Dartmouth and am very excited to take in.

I'm also looking forward to our man Christian Bauman's third novel, In Hoboken, a new release from Melville House Publishing.

Harry, Revised, the first book from lit blogger Mark Sarvas, is also on the list.

Finally, I can't wait to read Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex, the latest from Identity Theory interviewee Mary Roach.

-Matt Borondy, founding editor

Pulp Masters, Cultural Amnesia, Bob Dylan

2008-02-11T19:05:00.000-08:00

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 20^th-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

IDT Staff Reading Lists: February '08

2008-02-06T06:59:00.000-08:00

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.

The Magus by John Fowles

2008-01-17T23:29:00.000-08:00

At the start of this year I started reading The Magus by John Fowles. For some reason, I never heard about him at college or anywhere else. I think that this book was recommended in a Jesse Ball interview I was reading. So I ordered it from the library. And now I'm going to read all of his novels, in the order they were written. I am really dumbfounded, every sentence is amazing. I'm reading most sentences twice or more because I don't want to waste them.

Also reading some of the case histories in The Terror That Comes in the Night, which is about sleep paralysis, or the "old hag," which is a surprisingly common experience which is possibly a little bit supernatural or perhaps just about sleeping in the wrong position. I actually had this happen to me a few times, about 5 years ago. It's like something out of a horror film.

And, in line with Matt, I'm reading through Eat, Drink, and Be Vegan, though I'm vegetarian and not vegan. The smoky avocado sauce and cumin lime tofu are looking good.

Anna-Lynne

January Staff Reading: Addendum

2008-01-11T18:48:00.000-08:00

More IDT staffers chime in with their January reading lists...

Mara Naselli: My reading life is chaos. There are books everywhere around the apartment, stacked, splayed open, or just scattered about. I'm reading Feasts and Riot for a freelance project I'm working on, and have at some time or another opened Tattooed Girl by Joyce Carol Oates, the collected works of Isaac Babel, and some books on suburban architecture and planning.

Summer Block: I don't remember if I already recommended these two excellent nonfiction books, but if not, I just finished A.N. Wilson's The Victorians and After the Victorians: The World Our Parents Knew. Both absolutely great and very fun reads.

Jesslyn Roebuck: I'm reading The Moviegoer by Walker Percy, The Best American NonRequired Reading (ed. Dave Eggers, and intro by Sufjan Stevens, and I just finished The Kite Runner and The Sound and the Fury.

Staff Reading: January

2008-01-09T18:56:00.000-08:00

A quick rundown of what some Identity Theory staffers are digging into this month...

Drew McNaughton: Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson, The Brightening Glance: Children and Imagination by Ellen Handler Spitz, The New Kings: Nonfiction edited by Ira Glass

Robert Birnbaum: The Song Before it is Sung by Justin Cartwright, Wrack and Ruin by Don Lee, The Guardians by Ana Castillo, The Night Train to Lisbon by Pascal Mercier, The Optimists by Andrew Miller, Terminal by Andrew Vachss, Yalo by Elias Khoury, and Swimming in a Sea of Death by David Rieff. Also the McSweeney's 25 and the newest Open City.

Summer Block Kumar: I just came back from Christmas in the U.S. and brought back a big haul of new books. Right now I'm reading Denise Baker's Inscribing the Hundred Years' War in French and English Cultures, and I just finished the Dale Peck collection Hatchet Jobs. And plenty of health food cookbooks as part of New Year's Resolutions 2008.

Alexandra Tursi: I got my art fix with Joe Andoe's sugar-high insane autobiography Jubilee City. I also recently enjoyed Laura Moriarty's The Center of Everything and now I'm reading her latest, The Rest of Her Life. Joyce Carol Oates' The Gravedigger's Daughter, which I picked up at the Burlington Book Festival, is another that I'm slowly trudging through. On my night-table? The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel.

Matt Borondy: Reading through the Vegetarian Times Complete Cookbook as part of my resolution to cook more and to make sure I'm being a healthy vegetarian. (The more I read about it, the less I can believe that I ever voluntarily ate meat.) I recently started Right Livelihoods: 3 Novellas by Rick Moody and Boy by Japanese film director Takeshi Kitano.

Ondaatje, Amis, and Autobiography: What Bauman's Reading this Month

2008-01-07T07:24:00.000-08:00

There were three novels back there: Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje, House of Meetings by Martin Amis, and Our Lady of the Forest by David Guterson. I won't belabor except to say I truly enjoyed all three. Especially, of course, the new Ondaatje. He is, really, breathtaking.

Since then, it has been the month of autobiography. I started with My Life, by President Bill. I bought this house of a book the very week it came out; I wanted to put Bill on the bestseller list, to flip the bird at Dubya. But it's a very big book. So I kind of put off reading it. For a few years. Did it this month, though. A marathon to be sure, but worthwhile. I just like Bill. So there.

A few weeks ago we had the whole family in Manhattan for an evening of doings, and whilst waiting for the train home my wife picked up Three Dog Life by Abigail Thomas. We have three dogs (four, actually, on the property). Brenda loved it, so I dug in. And was very pleasantly surprised. Abigail Thomas has a new fan. My favorite part, I think, was about Outsider Art, and art by the mad. Both in the description of the art (similar stuff hanging on our own walls) and in the mad place we all create from.

And from there to a memoir by Bill Strickland, Ten Points. Strickland is the managing editor of Bicycle magazine. I'm not a big sports fan or a bicyclist myself. But Brenda (again) heard him on Marty Moss-Coane's radio program one day and thought of me. Which, if you've read the book, isn't exactly a compliment. Just an observation. So on the heels of Abigail Thomas I dug into Strickland, and I'm there now, and it is difficult. Not the book, Strickland is a fine writer…the subject matter. It's never easy looking in the looking glass, and that's what I feel like I'm doing every time I pick this thing up.

On deck I plan to start the new year slightly fantastically. First, I'm reading aloud to my younger daughter A Wrinkle in Time, which I last read when I was maybe ten years old. On my own, I have on the nightstand Golden Compass by Phillip Pullman (which my older daughter has been trying to get me to read for years), to be followed by A Canticle for Leibowitz, which I somehow missed out on back when I should have read it. My friend Kirk loaned it to me after a conversation about Lazarus we had over cigars on New Year's Eve night.

-Christian Bauman

Christian Bauman on Amazon Rankings

2007-09-27T23:57:00.000-07:00

So here's something: of course I look at Amazon. I've been published long enough now to have the Amazon ranking not matter so much to me, but there is something else I find addictive about Amazon: what books are offered at a discount if you buy it with one of mine. There is an algorithm to this, I'm sure. Or something. Clearly the decisions aren't being made by actual people (I'm guessing) because Christ you'd need an army. But I'm not sure what it's based on. Always fascinating to me, though. Sometimes it's easy: sometimes Amazon offers one of my books with another of my books. Boring (but encouraged, from a college-fund-for-my-daughters standpoint). Other times the selection is just way too predictable (offering The Ice Beneath You with something by Tim O'Brien, for instance. Not that I don't love O'Brien, I do, but you know what I'm saying). Other times I'm stymied to find the connection, and it's at those times that I get most excited. About a month ago, Amazon was offering Voodoo Lounge with the novel Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai. I'd heard good things about this first novel, so I jumped and picked up a copy. What a great read! I lived in India for a year at a very impressionable age (I was 13), at about the time the novel was set. A wonderful and subtle voice, Desai has.

My brother-in-law gave me a copy of DeKooning: An American Master, by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan, which won the Pulitzer for biography not too long ago. Big book, and an endlessly fascinating read. I have zero ability in the visual arts, so am always very curious as to the inner workings of those who do. I found a lot to like and identify with in DeKooning, as well.

Two by Roth, recently: The Plot Against America and Everyman. Plot started very strong, but disappointed me somewhat in the end. Everyman I thought better than the bad reviews it got.

A People's History, The Dark Materials, Becoming Jane Austen

2007-09-06T04:43:00.000-07:00

Very recently I began a journey that many others were already on. Person after person kept mentioning the same book to me that they were very hungrily reading. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, you ask? No, indeed not. (Besides, I read that the night it came out like the crazy, sleep-deprived maniac I was.) No, instead it is Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. I decided to fully understand the history madness, I needed to read it immediately, albeit it in very slow, sporadically read pieces. To be blatantly honest, I'm only on chapter three and so easily distracted by all the books I have to read, the books I want read, and the books that aren't even published yet that I'm reading, to read it all in one gulp like I usually prefer...but I will prevail!

In the meantime, I've read The Dark Materials trilogy, which I recommend completely to anyone looking to escape into another world. I'm actually very much surprised it did so well due to the questioning nature of it towards the Church and Heaven that rose throughout. But perhaps there was hoopla and I just missed it during the original publication. But it was phenomenal and addictive. Not addictive in that manic Harry Potter sort of way, but you definitely wanted to find out what happens and really feel for the characters...even the somewhat evil ones.

Meanwhile I'm very excited at the moment about Tin House's Issue 32, "Hot and Bothered" has a veritable feast of fiction, non-fiction, and randomness going on right now. I especially suggest checking out the New Voice Fiction from Daniel Menasche, "We Just Came up from San Francisco" and Irina Reyn's piece on Anastasya Verbitskaya...but these are only to start...really you should read the whole issue.

Also, I recently read Becoming Jane Austen after falling completely in love with the film. Until reading it I didn't know much of her life though I knew she was unmarried and had read all of her completed novels and some of her unfinished. It's kind of sad that really most of her work was published during such a short interlude in her life, shortly before her death. It makes you wonder in her case as well as many other writers of the time, what else they might have been creating in their minds that never made it to paper.

And in other news, I tried and failed miserably at reading F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and the Damned. Really, I will just always love The Great Gatsby best.

--Vicki Lame

Natasha's Dance

2007-09-04T06:00:00.000-07:00

I just started Orlando Figes' excellent Natasha's Dance: The Cultural History of Russia. In addition to serious commentary and new perspectives on Russian social history, the reader is treated to facts like the following:

"Serfs were essential to the Sheremetev palaces and their arts . . . Many of these serfs were sent abroad or assigned to the court to learn their craft. But where skill was lacking, much could be achieved through sheer numbers. At Kuskovo there was a horn band in which, to save time on the training of players, each musician was taught to play just one note. The number of players depended on the number of different notes in a tune; their sole skill lay in playing their note at the appropriate moment." [pg.27]

-Summer Block