What We're Reading

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

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

Labels: fiction, John Fowles, vegetarian

posted by anna-lynne at 1/17/2008 11:29:00 PM

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.

Labels: Amy Hempel, art, fiction, Joyce Carol Oates, staff reading, vegetarian

posted by Matt Borondy at 1/09/2008 06:56:00 PM

This morning I finished Felicia's Journey, a novel by William Trevor. I normally go to Travor for short stories, and this is not only not a short story, but a bit of a psychological thriller to boot. Great, great book. And once again a writer from across the pond disproves the silly American notion that great novels have to be big novels.

Also this month has been much incestuous reading...whenever I return from New York I come bearing presents from my agent and publisher. Two highlights so far from my last journey:

Stephen Dixon's Old Friends. I haven't read Dixon before, so this was quite an introduction. Again, like Trevor, a brief novel, but the parallel ends there. I severely disliked both of the characters, but what was cool is that this did not make me dislike the book. A neat trick.

And in nonfiction, Greg Palast's "Armed Madhouse" was eyeopening, explaining a few key things that have eluded me to date (for instance, it's not about controling the oil, it's about controling the price of the oil. It seems obvious upon hearing it, but it's not as intuitive as you would think). All non-Republicans should read this book prior to the 2008 elections if you'd like to avoid having the election stolen for a third time.

-Christian Bauman

Labels: Christian Bauman, fiction, politics

posted by Matt Borondy at 6/25/2007 11:02:00 AM

Matt Borondy: A couple of books I tore through recently that were really enjoyable, well written and informative (but not incredibly "literary") were Chasing Cool, a new book about marketing by Noah Kerner and Gene Pressman, and Don't Make Me Think, a classic on user interfaces (and writing for the web) by Steve Krug. I'm also happy to report that I finally finished The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. Right now I'm working through Frances Moore Lappe's Diet for a Small Planet and surfing about 50 websites a day.

Robert Birnbaum: The Pesthouse by Jim Crace; The Unknown Terrorist by Richard Flanagan; Fellow Travelers by Thom Mallon; The Dirty Life and Times of Warren Zevon by Crystal Zevon; the reviews of god is not Great by Christopher Hitchens (I'm not sure as much as I like reading Hitchens, that the subject really interests me); the various articles by Michael Connelly (LA Times), Pat Holt (Holt Uncensored #398) and Mikimoto Rich (NYT) on the (imperiled) state of newspaper book reviewing; "The Return of the Idiot" by Alvaro Vargas Llosa in Foreign Policy; the (almost incomprehensible) instruction manual of my digital camcorder; the umpire guidelines and rules for the Newton MA Central Little League

Drew McNaughton: Collapse by Jared Diamond; The God of Animals by Aryn Kyle

Alexandra Tursi: I've been lost in Paul Auster lately - read The New York Trilogy and Oracle Night. Now I'm reading City of Illusions. Others on my nightstand are The Bastard of Istanbul by Elif Shafak and Mergers & Acquisitions by Dana Vachon, which I'm told is a Bright Lights, Big City for our generation. I'm also hoping to start Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart because I loved The Russian Debutante's Handbook.

Jane Friedman: I just finished Baby Love by Rebecca Walker; currently reading The Post-Birthday World by Lionel Shriver and Thank You for Arguing by Jay Heinrichs. More interesting is what I'm editing -- a humor book forthcoming from TOW Books this September: Really, You've Done Enough: A Parents' Guide to Stop Parenting Their Adult Child Who Still Needs Their Money But Not Their Advice (by Sarah Walker).

Ross Simonini: The Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson; Galatea 2.2 by Richard Powers; The Palm Wine Drinkard by Amos Tutuola

Summer Block: I am (shamefully) reading Scott Turow's mystery novel The Burden of Proof -- I ran out of books while backpacking around Japan and found a free copy at the Kyoto Visitor's Center.

Labels: fiction, humor, marketing, mystery, parenting, staff reading, web design

posted by Matt Borondy at 5/04/2007 12:28:00 PM

Mara Naselli: The New New Journalism, a book of interviews edited by Robert Boynton, an essential reader for people interested in studying the craft of reporting nonfiction, and (rereading) John Hersey's Hiroshima, a classic in of the narrative nonfiction form. Also, just arrived on my doorstep, a purchase inspired by a superb and hauntingly vivid article I found in VQR by John Ghazvinian-- Untapped: The Scramble for Africa's Oil.

Summer Block: I'm studying short stories and how they work, since I've been embarking on writing some myself. I'm reading or re-reading stories by Tolstoy, Checkhov, Somerset Maughm, Thomas Mann, Kafka, Borges, Hemingway, you name it. One interesting anthology I picked up is Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules, compiled by David Sedaris.

Robert Birnbaum: Big Girls by Susanna Moore, Heyday by Kurt Anderson, The Custodian of Paradise by Wayne Johnston, The Lisbon Crossing by Tom Gabbay, The Age of Betrayal by Jack Beatty, Black and White by Dani Shapiro, The Ministry of Special Cases by Nathan Englander, Endless Things by John Crowley, The Second Coming by Walker Percy, The Paris Review Vonnegut interview, Paul Wolfowitz profile in The New Yorker, Charles Murray on Jewish Genius in Commentary, Brendan Bernhard's appreciation of George ws Trow in The New York Sun, Tom Englehardt at TomDispatch.com on Seymour Hersch

Matt Borondy: I'm migrating the bulk of my reading habits to the online world while trying to avoid obnoxious, agenda-pushing opinions about the Va Tech shootings. Yesterday I picked up my copy of On the Road and re-read the first chapter and realized I pretty much have that book memorized despite having only read it once, about ten years ago. Mainly I'm trying to figure out how to make this blog better. What do you think?

Labels: fiction, interviews, journalism, short stories

posted by Matt Borondy at 4/19/2007 04:39:00 AM

An interesting combination of long novels, this month.

The first was Stephen King's new one, "Lisey's Story." I got this as a Christmas present. I read my first King novel ("The Shining") when I was a wee lad of 11 or 12. Way too young to be reading King. It warped me. Before age 14 I had polished off "The Stand," "Salem's Lot," "Night Shift"...well, in fact, everything he'd written to date. Did I mention by age 14? Seriously warped me. (Context: I was born in 1970.)

More recently, the work has been hit or miss. Maybe Steve was getting stale. Or, maybe, I had enough horror in my own life that Steve didn't have a lot to show me anymore. But there have been a few of the more recent books that shook me like old King. "Bag of Bones" from a few years back was one such book. And "Lisey's Story" is another. It was a pleasure to again read a Stephen King novel and enjoy every moment of it. It was nice in another way, too; the book clearly meant many things to him on many levels, and was a love letter to many things for many reasons, but the obvious ones aside, there was another: it read to me like a love letter to those of us who had read him as a kid then gone on to become writers. It was a bit startling, frankly; kind of like having ol' Steve over my shoulder saying, "See? I told you. I warned you. But cool beans anyway, right? Not like you had a choice, right? Rock on, baby."

Since it's that kind of month (long novels, warped stories, returns to childhood), I just started Elizabeth Kostova's "The Historian." Looking forward to this one like nobody's business. I'll report back later.

-Christian Bauman

Labels: Christian Bauman, fiction, horror, Stephen King

posted by Matt Borondy at 2/23/2007 10:26:00 AM

If you're Irish, like me, the stories of your family loom large in your mind and weigh heavily on your shoulders. Everyone from grandparents to second cousins and even great aunts and uncles work together to form a personal mythology - a collection of saints and sinners, on two sides of the Atlantic, among whom you need to find your place. Perhaps those of us in this generation, first or second in this country, are swampled in the mire of this past more than those who came before us, as we have the mystery of the square mini-photos of housewives in horn-rimmed classes to look upon, the silent squeals of the children in the Super 8 films to wonder about. We are given tidbits in the chatter of our grandmothers, glimpses from the images found in shoeboxes, and we are left to fill in the blanks. What are we to do with this information?

If you are a writer, you might easily become preoccupied with it. There is so much there, and so much missing, that it all happily becomes fodder for blank pages. Alice McDermott, author of After This, said in an interview that we tell stories in order to make something more of life. These stories, she says, give us the faith that life is valuable, even when it might seem pathetic. The first-person narrator in her 1998 book, Charming Billy, is there, she says, to string together the various stories in her family and "make something of it." Of the Billy in the book's title, she says, "They love him so dearly and are so fond of him and have - they've watched him destroy himself - and it's not enough for them to say, well, Billy's had an unfortunate life. They need to make something more of his life. And they do that by telling stories about him."

That is exactly what she seems to be doing in her most recent book, After This. I'm reading it at a steady pace, and thoroughly enjoying the characters and the language (which seems to fit easily into my own head, as though I was reading my own words), but I'm also starting to wonder what is going on. My husband asked me a simple question - What is it about? - and I found myself rattling off a few boring details. A man and a woman meet, get married, have kids, move to Long Island - and, oh yeah, they're Irish (more like a sidenote here). What is happening in this novel? I wondered. Why am I not totally bored? There's no charm and no Billy - these characters are rather dull people, forgotten even by the people in their own town, and yet I keep reading. Perhaps it is because McDermott is slowly revealing the mundane facts of a few typical lives, the ones of those who appear in the worn photos we stumble across at the bottom of our closets, and I am like the narrator in Charming Billy, left to make something of it.

--Deirdre Faughey

Labels: fiction

posted by Deirdre Faughey at 2/14/2007 01:55:00 PM

I just finished We Need to Talk about Kevin, by Lionel Shriver, and I re-read Lake Wobegon Days on the flight from Shanghai to Hong Kong. Now I'm on to Anne Tyler's Digging to America and Tony Judt's Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945.

-Summer Block

Heidi Julavits' new one, The Uses of Enchantment

Faulkner's Light in August, which I've had and not read for so long that the bottom edges of the pages have soaked up the wood stain from my bookshelf.

And then an excellent poetry anthology by some New England folks I know: The Powow River Poets Anthology.

-Andrew Whitacre

Carry Me Across the Water - Ethan Canin
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close - John Safran Foer
Micro Fiction - Edited by Jerome Stern
Ravens in Winter - Bernd Heinrich

-Drew McNaughton

everything by Amos Tutuola
everything by Daniel Pinchbeck
Remainder by Tom McCarthy

-Ross Simonini

Labels: fiction, poetry, staff reading

posted by Matt Borondy at 12/19/2006 04:28:00 AM

Wilder Times: The Life of Billy Wilder by Kevin Lally

Devil in a Blue Dress by Walter Mosley

Crackpot: the Obsessions of John Waters (if you like his films, you'll want to devour this book whole -- good news is you can in a handful of hours -- get the updated 2003 edition, with director's commentary)

- Matt Sorrento

Labels: fiction, films, staff reading

posted by Matt Borondy at 12/13/2006 03:01:00 AM

Finn by Jon Clinch (a novel about Huck Finn's father)

The Crimson Portrait by Jody Shields

"Tango" by Thom McGuane (in the New Yorker)

Conversations with Thomas McGuane edited by Beef Torrey (excuse the chest pounding by my IDT chat with McGuane is in this tome--and in departure from my habits I actually reread it)

The Killing Moon - Chuck Hogan

"Iraq, The War of Imagination" - Mark Danner (The New York Review of Books)

Anthology of Graphic Fiction - Ivan Brunetti

Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties - Robert Stone (There is no better American writer than Robert Stone)

Surveillance - Jonathan Rabin

The Castle in the Forest - Norman Mailer

Against the Day - Thomas Pynchon (200 pages in and I am , much to my surprise, bored)

-Robert Birnbaum

Labels: fiction, interviews, staff reading

posted by Matt Borondy at 12/12/2006 01:10:00 AM