2010

Image of Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution

Girls to the Front

Sara Marcus

I became aware of riot grrrl late, mostly from a distance through zines and records. I can still conjure some sadness that Huggy Bear actually played a show in northern Connecticut, but on a Tuesday night when there was no way I could go. What I experienced influenced me greatly, but I never felt like I was a part of the movement in the political sense. There was a lot that I didn't know about the origins and history. I'm glad this book exists now, though it doesn't feel like the "definitive" record it claims to be.

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04 December 2010

Published 2010
Image of Sunset Park: A Novel

Sunset Park

Paul Auster

I was excited about this book since it is largely set in my neighborhood, plus I always enjoy reading Paul Auster. While the book is definitely entertaining, the writing feels a little rough around the edges, at times even clunky. His description of Sunset Park as a neighborhood during this time period — the 2008 economic collapse — is largely inaccurate, though the other NYC neighborhood descriptions are perfectly evocative.

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26 November 2010

Published 2010
Image of Between the Acts (Annotated)

Between the Acts

Virginia Woolf

Jacob's Room is maybe my favorite Woolf novel, with its dark look at WWI and the futility of life; this novel shows England just before its entry into WWII, in a village hours outside of London, where a fragmented family is hosting a pageant on the grounds of their modest .

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16 November 2010

Published 1941
Image of I Wonder

I Wonder

Marian Bantjes

Apparently Marian Bantjes' approach to her first book was to make it "feel like a brick of gold." With a cover of gold and silver foils on a satin cloth with gold-gilded page edges and lots of gold ink on the interior, it's definitely a success, gold brick-wise. Her work is known for being both illustrative and typographic at once, involving intricate patterns and highly ornamental vector art. The graphics represent all of these aspects and fully entangled with the text throughout.

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13 November 2010

Published 2010
Image of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: The American Classic, in Words and Photographs, of Three Tenant Families in the Deep South

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

James Agee & Walker Evans

Words could, I believe, be made to do or to tell anything within human conceit. That is more than can be said of the instruments of any other art. But it must be added of words that they are the most inevitably inaccurate of all mediums of record and communication, and that they come at many of the things which they alone can do by such a Rube Goldberg articulation of frauds, compromises, artful dodges and tenth removes as would fatten any other art into apoplexy if the art were not first shamed out of existence…

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07 November 2010

Published 1939
Image of Atget, Paris (Taschen 25th Anniversary Edition)

Paris

Eugène Atget

A couple favorites …

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26 October 2010

Published 2008
Image of As Ever: Selected Poems (Poets, Penguin)

As Ever

Joanne Kyger

This collection has been hanging out on my bedside table for months, read in little pieces until finally this week I decided it would not be renewed again. I picked it up in the midst of the Desecheo Notebook (circa 1971), a semi-diary. In some ways her poetry can at times chronicle specific time periods and feel very similar to her published journals, Strange Big Moon, which I failed to get through earlier this year. But this collection spans so many decades that it doesn't get so bogged down in the every day.

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17 October 2010

Published 2002
Image of Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel

Anthropology of an American Girl

Hilary Thayer Hamann

Very Short List made this sound so good (a well-crafted classic!), and the NYPL hold list was hundreds of people deep, so when a copy finally came through nearly four months later, I was expecting a pretty awesome coming-of-age story based in the late 70s and early 80s in New York (the city and east Long Island). The story isn't so much non-linear as episodic with not all the episodes following the chronology, the jumps aren't distracting but lack purpose.

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26 September 2010

Published 2010
Image of True North

True North

Rebecca Solnit

True North was a 2008 exhibition at Deutsche Guggenheim; this catalog is technically not by Rebecca Solnit, but I borrowed it to read her opening essay, "The Needle Points, the Ice Melts: Thoughts Facing North." Solnit manages a fairly broad survey of the north, framed through Mary Shelley's

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25 September 2010

Published 2008
Image of The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life

The Creative Habit

Twyla Tharp

For some reason I expected a little more memoir and a lot less self-help from this one. But when the first chapter ends with a reference to The Karate Kid's "wax on, wax off" scene, self-help it is. The practical approaches to maintaining and honing creativity (with exercises) weren't really what I wanted to read, so I skimmed through those and stuck with the stories — from Tharp's experiences, those of people she knows, and more from various historical figures. Nothing is particularly earth-shattering but some bits are interesting.

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21 September 2010

Published 2005