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
Last week I went to the library and took out the following books: Nora Ephron's
I Feel Bad About My Neck, Meghan Daum's
My Misspent Youth, and Joan Didion's
Where I Was From. You guessed it: I'm on a ladies nonfiction kick.
I arrived at the library knowing exactly what I wanted to take out. I had done the research from home, and so this was a speedy pick up, drop off for me. I was thrilled that they had these books because I'd been yearning for a few good essays.
Nora Ephron is a longtime favorite of mine. In fact, after reading her essays I was enticed to re-read her all time classic,
Heartburn.
Let me take a moment to celebrate Heartburn. I love that book. That witty, pithy, concise little masterpiece has gotten me through more than one harsh breakup. I highly recommend it to anyone who thinks their love life is in the dumps; nothing could be worse than being 7-months pregnant and discovering that your famous journalist husband is cheating on you (this is an admittedly thinly-veiled account of the dissolution of her marriage to famed Watergate reporter Carl Burnstein). Read it! Then watch the movie with Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson. Also fabulous.
Meghan Daum is a notch more serious, but I'm making my way through it. I also enjoy her writing, but basically her writing - her life - brings back too many painful memories: she writes about working in publishing. Anyone thinking of taking a job in publishing (magazines OR books) should first see her essay "Publishing and Other Near Death Experiences." Read it! But then you can't say no one told you.
Joan Didion's book might be the most serious of the bunch, but after reading A Year of Magical Thinking I'm not sure I'm ready for more Didion quite yet.
In the meantime I'm also re-reading Wife, by Meg Wolitzer, and a new collection of stories just given to me: Twin Study, by Stacey Richter (very good so far).
Look what happens when you go to the library! I couldn't believe I walked out of there that night with a pile of books I considered paying for before I realized I could get them for free just a few blocks away. If you are not going to your local library for reading material, you deserve... heartburn.
--Deirdre Faughey
Labels: essays, library books
posted by Deirdre Faughey at 3/06/2007 05:34:00 PM
Robert Birnbaum has been reading
Naked Sleeper by Sigrid Nunez,
House of Meetings by Martin Amis,
Zoli by Colum McCann, Joseph Epstein's essay on turning 70, Chris Hedges' Nov 2004 aricle on the Christian Right and the Rise of American Fascism (that no major US periodical would publish), Jon Lee Anderson on Hugo Chavez and also the Taliban, Jim Harrison's essay in the NYTBR ("Feed The Poets"), Joyce Oates on Anne Leibovitz in the NYRB, Sigrid Nunez on Susan Sontag in Salamagundi,
Matters of Honor by Louis Begley,
Better by Atul Gawande,
Surveillance by Jonathan Raban, and the story of the week (Feb 3) at
Mr Beller's Neighborhood.
Summer Block is working on a travel essay/book review on Vikram Chandra's work, so she's taking
Red Earth and Pouring Rain,
Love and Longing in Bombay, and
Sacred Games along to India with her. On her desk at home she has Augusten Burroughs'
Running with Scissors, David Sedaris' (edited)
Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules, Nabokov's
Lectures on Literature, Freud's
The Uncanny, and her still-unopened copy of Pynchon's
Against the Day.
Ali Salerno has a thing for
Harper's. She's also started reading:
The Moonstone, by Wilkie Collins.
The Collected Stories of Richard Bausch. VQR.
Death in the Haymarket, by James Green.
Ross Simonini is on
Never Let Me Go by Ishiguro,
Six Memos for the New Millenium by Calvino,
18 Stories by Heinrich Boll, and
Design with X by Dean Young.
Alexandra Tursi is all over
Life is Elsewhere by Milan Kundera
, The Black Book by Orhan Pamuk
, Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert, and
The Beautiful Fall by Alicia Drake
Andrew Whitacre is checking out
Good Soldier Svejk by Jaroslav Hasek and
The Plot Against America by Philip Roth. Then mags...
Tin House, Believer, Post Road.Labels: essays, Joyce Carol Oates, lit mags, magazines, staff reading
posted by Matt Borondy at 2/18/2007 04:55:00 PM 
