I've wanted to read something by Borges for a while but I always felt intimidated by his reputation of "superhuman erudition." Most of this book is pretty cerebral with stories that are really academic-sounding fake histories; yet as the book progresses, the stories edge into the accessible range.
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"Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice" is probably the best story in this book.
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In the strongest sense, letterforms do not age but become fixed to a period of time primarily in their application. Longevity is often precluded by blatant design approaches that are banal, modish, and consequently ephemeral. Many products and graphics are designed to seize the moment and cash in on a popular idea.
When I first browsed through this book, I didn't realize all of Young's logos are handlettered. After reading the introduction, I delved back into this catalog of work much differently.
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It was a little funny to read this slim little book directly after Play it as it Lays, as they are both wrapped so much in hot weather and it's been colder and colder lately.
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There's something soap-operatic about this terse novel detailing a vaguely successful Hollywood actress's nervous breakdown. Avoiding histrionics, the story details all the gossipy founders of Maria Wyeth with glances to her similarly challenged friends. Despite the concise nature of Didion's prose, she manages paint nuanced settings. From the freeways Maria drives all day for a while just to fill her time to later when she joins the film crew in the desert.
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A few years ago I abandoned my vegetarianism and started adding fish to my diet. Mostly I felt like I needed variety in my protein sources, but also there are a lot of nutritional benefits to eating fish. I've looked at the Monterey Bay Aquarium's Sustainable Seafood Guide many times, but have always found it difficult to consistently remember what to avoid.
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An attractive tight-back bound book with edge-stained pages, Make it Bigger is at its heart a survey of Scher's work from the 70s through the 90s. Yet it feels more like a memoir or a study of process than just a portfolio of her work. I loved her discussion of discovering how to "sell down" designs at CBS Records (get the highest decision maker on your side and everyone else will fall in line). The various hierarchies of her different positions and the diagram of a meeting are some of my favorite parts of the book.
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Reading this book on the subway was probably not the best approach, but I managed to struggle through it. Auster's earlier poems have some overwrought tendencies, but in a way all of his poems fit together as a larger work, making this collected volume very useful. He's attached to images of stones and whiteness and snow among other things, and many common images are threaded across his work. He has a tendency towards oxymoronic lines and a knack for good poetic punchlines, endings that could almost sit on their own:
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I've somehow managed to never read an entire collection of Raymond Carver's short stories, despite being somewhat of an enthusiast of the form and having read a few of his stories in passing. This one caught my eye at the library, as I'd guess Murakami played off this title with his recent memoir.
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Maybe I'm just a hater this week but I couldn't find much to latch onto in Didion's exploration of her history with California, including her pioneering ancestors' treks to get there. Though it's kind of a personal history placed within a larger context, even the parts about her family read strangely impersonal. It seems like each chapter starts out interesting and then gets laden down with too many facts without any real narrative structure. One begins looking at the painter Thomas Kincade — and I love her description of his paintings:
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