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
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
most years there is one book that slows down my reading progress. usually because it is a great book, and i read it too carefully with a pen in my hand for writing in the spines. usually it is more than 60 years old and it is a little too big to hold comfortably, a little too stuffy to understand sentences on first pass. sometimes there are too many passages about flowers and i find i am picking up magazines instead.
when i am not reading this sort of book, i will reward myself with the entire catalog of jonathan ames or haruki murakami. i did both of those last year, and it's like eating good cookies.
2 years ago the slow monster was
lolita, which is thoroughly thrilling, i think it was the writing in the spines that made it last so long, and a bit of hesitance on my part to allow the book to be over, i wish i was still reading that book in fact. in
venus magazine this month there is a nice question and answer with mary gaitskill about
lolita that is worth reading.
i was probably reading that magazine because i am also dealing with reading
jean santeuil by proust and i needed a respite. though i have a feeling
jean might turn out to be the book that a year from now i will be saying is my favorite book of all time (only to take the torch from proust's
remembrance of things past). but i have been in the 100s pages for at least a month. there are passages that have me breathless and pained ("whenever she spoke to him - as she spoke to all the others - he hopped from side to side of the path in an ecstasy of joy, feeling that he was loved. but he noticed, with sadness, that her kindness to him had nothing in common with his devotion to her, and that she never felt any reluctance about saying: if it rains tomorrow, i shan't be here, see you again the day after.") there are also very long passages about a cherry blossom and about a salamander and about a lamp.
for a year i read all of the books of w somerset maugham because it seemed the closest thing to proust without the difficulty of language or the meandering lengths.
of human bondage is quite similar to
remembrance of things past in the particular sufferings it explores, and while it is about 700 pages it is still only a small fraction as long as the proust. but then because it does not cause the reader suffering in it length and weight, it does not have the same effect.
for a book like
lemon,
survivor, or
iceland, which i excitedly tore through, i can recall a few sittings, but mostly i just remember the plot. but in remembering
remembrance of things past, there are at least 100 sittings in my memory - on a ferryboat to victoria island, in a coffee shop in newport beach (where i finished it), sitting on the top of a hill in la jolla with a panoramic view of the ocean, before going on stage to sing in an LA club called the lava lounge or lava something and lighting the pages with a dim candle. being in the process of reading that book was part of my life for years. then i gave myself a break for a few years. and now it is
jean santeuil, his only other book (and considered an early version of the same story), which will take up most of my 2007. i am only in the 100s pages, but it already has a worn cover. i have already taken it all around seattle with me. it even came with me to a joanna newsom show this week, where i read by a dim candle again while i was waiting for the show to start.
this is the first time i have written on here in the book blog, so i will name a few of my favorite recent reads, though i mentioned most of my all-times above. you should read: krusoe's
iceland, goethe's
sorrows of young werther, unger's
the maimed, yates'
revolutionary road.
i will write more about my progress with jean, if there is any.
-anna-lynne williams
Labels: Lolita, magazines, Proust
posted by anna-lynne at 12/07/2006 10:03:00 PM 
