Books I bought today

(Or: Oops, I was just taking a walk!)

1. A Happy Marriage, Rafael Yglesias
2. Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, Nick Flynn
3. Oscar and Lucinda, Peter Carey
4. Various Antidotes, Joanna Scott
5. American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis
6. Beyond Black, Hilary Mantel

Make Believe, Joanna Scott

Preemptive New Year's resolution: chronicle all the books I read (perfect for the obsessive in me!). So here are a few (meager, disjointed) thoughts on the piece of fiction I just finished.

Have you heard of Joanna Scott? I hadn't until I came across a trove of her books in my favorite used bookstore (Seaburn, on Broadway in Astoria); I picked up The Manikin and Make Believe because, well, she was blurbed by Michael Cunningham and Rick Moody and David Foster Wallace ("the absolute cream of our generation"), and someone at the NYTBR held, "We haven't heard a voice like hers since Ovid wrote his Metamorphoses." Endorsements like those are hard to deny.

I read The Manikin almost in one sitting; I could not put it down, and it was easily one of the best books I've read this year. (Forthcoming: a list of my favorites? Hrmmm ...) A splash of the gothic, a story about what it means to be a young woman growing up -- there were a lot of themes for me to grab onto. I'll probably need to reread it, because I consumed it so greedily and in such a fever I can hardly cite what it is that impressed me so much.

The cover copy on Make Believe made clear that the book covered very different ground, so it's not surprising that I was not as entranced. Still good, but I've read a lot more books about the intricacies of the American family than I have about creepy old houses stuffed with taxidermy projects. Make Believe is ... well, I suppose you could say it's a story of two families who suffered a common tragedy, and it explores the very different ways that the two groups of people made lives out of the wreckage. This makes it sound a bit like a Lifetime movie, or one of those terrible after-school specials so popular during my formulative years, but it is much, much more than that; it is flashbacks, and shifting narratives, and layers of chaos that are as hard to untangle as the threads that hold together the fabric of any family.

At the end of the book, Scott writes:

As for the cold, well after the first shock you just stop feeling it, you stop feeling any discomfort, instead you’re treated to the very simple certainty that you should be exactly what you are, even as you’re changing.

2010 has been a bit of a shock for me. I am still out in the cold. My fingers are numb, but I think I know better now who I am and where I want to go.

Setting it in motion

From Galley Cat:

Bookmans Entertainment Exchange, an Arizona chain of used book (and other entertaining items) stores, released the web video embedded above–a series of literary domino displays, celebrating the physical joy of books.

Here’s more about the video: “Harrison’s video plays on connectedness, cause and effect, and non-linear lines while evoking the feeling of getting lost in a book so deeply that the hustle and bustle of the rest of the world fades away"

Squee! practically goes without saying.

Coffee. Books. Yes, please.

The new D'Espresso outlet (317 Madison Avenue, at 42nd Street, (212) 867-7141), just one block from the New York Public Library, offers a twist on the crowded bookshelf, courtesy Anurag Nema and his team at nemaworkshop. Fastcodesign.com reports:

The "books" are actually tiles printed with sepia-toned photos of bookshelves at a local travel bookstore that ring the room, including the floor, walls and ceiling. In addition to painting unusual surfaces with intriguing patterns -- whoa, you're standing on books! -- it gives an Alice in Wonderland-esque sense that the room has been suddenly upended.

Booker barnburning: C

Have recently plumbed the Booker shortlist; read (and liked) Room, and just picked up C, by Tom McCarthy.

It's a cool sort of book; you're plugging along with the protagonist, Serge, as he grows up in the early 20th century, and then you find yourself in a seance, the ghost of his sister looming unacknowledged in the ether of the pages. Or you discover yourself in Egypt, thrust back into Serge's childhood fixation with decoding messages hidden in the pages of the newspaper when he discovers the way early Egyptians secreted stories in scarabs. At times difficult to connect with, the narrative nonetheless crackles with a kind of fateful electricity.

My favorite excerpt (fascinated as I am by the commonness of my life and its definitive experiences, which I've come to imagine are little more exciting than discovering the sky is blue):

[Y]ou have to look at all of this, at all these histories of looking. The mistake most of my contemporaries make is to assume that they’re the first—-or, even when it’s clear they’re not, that their moment of looking is somehow definitive, standing outside of the long history of which it merely forms another chapter …

Washington Post review.

Guardian review.

Post-reading project

If you can stand to sacrifice one of your tomes, do something cool like these sculptures by Dutch artist Boukje Voet.

From the bookshelf

Summer reading was, for the most part, indulgently pedestrian: I checked out those durned Girl books by Stieg Larsson; I read the Hunger Games trilogy (by Suzanne Collins); I sped through Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett; as an aside, check out the author phot on his Web site: classic!). I also worked in A Visit from the Goon Squad (Jennifer Egan) and The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake (Aimee Bender) and Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness (Robert Whitaker -- highly, highly recommended, if you're of the nonfiction bent).

It's feeling more fall-like (pumpkin spice lattes: they're back!), and I feel a transition to heavier books coming on. I've been doing a bit of exploring of the Booker short-list; I just finished Room (Emma Donoghue), and I'm a few chapters into C (Tom McCarthy). 2666 (Bolano) and Wolf Hall (Hilary Mantel) are waiting for me to crack them open. At the gym today, gasping and red-faced and sweaty, the woman on the machine next to me looked over quizzically.

"How do you read like that?!"

"So many books, so little time." (Also: a bit of mania!)