I loved A Field Guide to Getting Lost, so it was only a matter of time before something else by Rebecca Solnit wound up on my hold list. This one is a pretty impressive history of walking, which has a rather left-leaning gait at times.
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I noticed this on Leslie's good reads page and put it on my to-read list more to remember it as a potential resource. But I wound up with some time to kill in NYC and the Mid-Manhattan library has it for reference use only, so I went to visit. The book went with the 2002 exhibit that came out of a gift of 1,100 illustrated books from the Judith Rothschild Foundation.
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Elissa was returning this at the library and told me I should read it, so I checked it out. This collection could be subtitled something like "variations on grief," as all of them involve a core theme of loss, whether imminent or realized. Most of the deaths involve sickness, especially cancer, mostly parents. Somehow they all capture something a little different.
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I'd only ever read Calvino's amazing Invisible Cities, but I wandered into the fiction c aisle the day I got my New York Public Library card and grabbed this collection. I guess I've always been worried of treading beyond Invisible Cities since it struck me so deeply. It's kind of a collection of stories, as a young Marco Polo entertains Kublai Khan with descriptions of various cities in his empire, but it also kind of defies categorization.
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I kept hearing people talk about this book saying that Krauss wrote the same book as Jonathan Safran Foer (her husband), but she wrote it better. It's somewhat true, being a multilinear story steeped in the Holocaust and its lost histories and secrets, driven by clever, young people who go through great lengths to reveal them. But in Krauss's book, there is also the quirky, old man Leopold Gursky who escaped Nazi-occupied Poland for a lonely life in New York City, where he fears he is disappearing.
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I often forget to post books like this that I read in passing, but I already know I'll want to recall this one later, so luckily I remembered enough to find it easily. Though it probably wouldn't be too hard to find, as there aren't many other picture books about soldiers in Vietnam (if any). Unfolding measuredly like a poem, the story follows a soldier on patrol in the forest who comes across a soldier from the other side. Both hesitate.
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Elissa sent me this book a while back and I finally cleaned all my piles and found it again. It's a good Sunday afternoon read about a young boy Tolly who is at boarding school while his father and stepmother are in Burma. He usually spends his holidays at the school, but this year is sent to his great-grandmother, who lives in a castle-like house called Green Knowe.
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Early on something about this book reminded me of Among other things, I've taken up smoking, I think because both are set around the ocean in the northeastern part of the US. But any notion of similarities beyond setting dissipated quickly.
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I feel as if I've been reading this book forever but it's actually just been a month or so. The scope of Weisman's imagining of the entire world suddenly depopulated of humans is so broad that inevitably some parts feel leggy. But the scenario may give the best look at our overall impact on the planet.
—Read more…A friend told me about Cloverfield Press a while back — short fiction paired with art and letterpress-printed covers. Since I missed this Murakami story in The New Yorker (it's only online in a terrible, abbreviated version) and never finished Blind Willow Sleeping Woman, I hadn't read this one before. It's a lovely piece on loss, and this little volume is a great way to read it.
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I have to preface this by saying that I haven't actually read this whole book yet, but rather listened to some excerpts. I will appreciate the irony (noted by Gomez) that I will be reading a book about how reading paper books is dead when the time comes, but I wanted to put down some thoughts before I lost them.
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This is probably my favorite short story collection that I've read all year. I find the collections I enjoy the most are those where all of the stories are rooted in certain commonalities while each one retains a distinctive feel and focus, as if the collection constitutes an exercise in working out all the possibilities of those few specific themes.
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This is kind of the academic version of Sex and the City, and I kept finding myself using the words "it's kind of a 'chick lit' novel" in describing it. But it's more than just a quirky novel about dating.
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I came across a mention of this book after I finished Cruddy, more specifically a mention of the story about Barry's relationship with Ira Glass entitled "Head Lice and My Worst Boyfriend." The hilarity potential was irresistible.
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There's something strangely straightforward and matter-of-fact about this story of a girl who grows up on an island in Maine and then takes an internship in New York where she experiences her "sexual awakening" (as a back-cover quote describes it). In many books there are moments that feel vaguely out of context for either the character or the progression of the storyline, but this book seems to be a string of such events.
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In my attempts to make full use of the library, I often forget to hunt out the nice art books I'd buy if I had that much money to throw around and the strength to haul the hefty tomes around every time I move house. Cartier-Bresson is perhaps the photographer I am most likely to browse.
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I didn't expect this book to be quite as violent as it is. Yet somehow the teenage heroine's strange sense of humor and the dark, smudgy illustrations make it seem like no big deal. This is one of those stories that progresses in the present while skipping back to the past, maintaining two plot lines that come together near the end seamlessly.
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I first came across Kilgallen's work in the 2002 Whitney Biennial, though I didn't note her name at the time. It was a somewhat unexciting show, and the Village Voice referred to her piece as "a rare high point." It wasn't until a year or so later than her name came up again and I put them together.
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Eleanor mentioned this and it sounded interesting. Much like she said, the characters were really great but the ending was lackluster. The story takes place in the town Kalimpong during the Indian-Nepali insurgency in the late 1980s with a lot of post-colonial, first-world/third-world themes. Overall the meshing of history and fiction is rather seamless.
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Today part of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville, Hatch Show Print is also the oldest operating letterpress shop in the US. This books takes a look at the history of the shop with lots of samples of posters from the early circus days through the rise of country music to their contemporary work. It's a very handsome book.
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