12 posts tagged “reading”
Favorite books:
Some of these were published in 2006, but when reading I'm always behind by at least a year, I figure--so I think it's safe to say that these were my favorite books that I read in 2007 (hey, they all start with "M"!):
- Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policeman's Union
- Mark Helprin, Freddy and Fredericka
- Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics
- Michael Ruhlman, Reach of a Chef
The following twelve songs are my personal favorites for 2007: they're the songs I most enjoyed and that, out of sheer narcissism, I suppose I'd classify as "best", whatever that means. More than anything else, they're the songs I'd like to listen to most, right now.
Some notes:
- R. Kelly makes an appearance on three out of twelve tracks: it was the year of R. Kelly, after all!
- There's no Ghostface or Wu-Tang, because I just bought Big Doe Rehab and 8 Diagrams last week and haven't had nearly enough time to digest them. This makes me sort of sad, but I guess gives me license to include them next year.
In alphabetical (essentially unordered) order:
- Celebration, "Evergreen" (listen)
- Ciara, "Promise (Remix) feat. R. Kelly" (listen)
- The Fiery Furnaces, "Restorative Beer" (listen)
- M.I.A., "Paper Planes" (listen)
- Of Montreal, "Bunny Ain't No Kind of Rider" (listen)
- R. Kelly, "I'm a Flirt feat. T.I. & T. Pain" (listen)
- Richard Hawley, "Lady Solitude" (listen)
- Rihanna, "Umbrella feat. Jay-Z" (listen)
- Robin Thicke, "Got 2 Be Down feat. Faith Evans" (listen)
- Siobhan Donaghy, "Goldfish" (listen)
- Spoon, "Black Like Me" (listen)
- Swizz Beatz, "It's Me Bitches (Remix) feat. Lil Wayne, R. Kelly, and Jadakiss" (listen)
I love this quote (among others) from a 1996 interview with David Foster Wallace:
And I know that when I started this book I wanted--I had very vague and not very ambitious...ambitions, and one was I wanted to do something really sad. I'd done comedy before, I wanted to do just something really sad and I wanted to do something about what was sad about America.
Which "this book", i.e. Infinite Jest, definitely is, i.e. sad, and which reminds me--again--that I really want to re-read it. One of these days, I guess.
(via Jason and Daring Fireball)
This weekend, I finished Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policeman's Union, which--despite an ultimately far-fetched explanation for the central plot point--I absolutely loved. The marvel of the book is that the world Chabon creates feels so real that it's easy to forget that all of it--Sitka as the temporary Alaskan homeland of the Jews, the various sects, &c.--is imaginary.
As the review from the New York Times puts it: "More important, Mr. Chabon has so thoroughly conjured the fictional world of Sitka — its history, culture, geography, its incestuous and byzantine political and sectarian divisions — that the reader comes to take its existence for granted."
One of my favorite passages:
Landsman taps the wheel, considering his promises and their worth. He was never unfaithful to Bina. But there is no doubt that what broke the marriage was Landsman's lack of faith. A faith not in God, nor in Bina and her character, but in the fundamental precept that everything befalling them from the moment they met, good and bad, was meant to be. The foolish coyote faith that could keep you flying as long as you kept kidding yourself that you could fly.
A couple of weekends ago, I finished Michael Ruhlman's Reach of a Chef, which makes me three for three on the "* of a Chef" series. There's so much great stuff in Reach of a Chef that it's difficult to choose a favorite part, but this passage from the amazing chapter on Grant Achatz is probably my favorite:
... it explained more than anything why Grant, for all his Midwestern humility and PBS elocution, commanded a deep respect from the kitchen staff: Not only did he run this restaurant, not only did he do the hiring and firing, not only was he a nationally respected chef and culinary innovator, Grant Achatz could, at any instance, take over your station and work it better and faster than you could do it yourself on your best day.
Speaking of Ruhlman--who has a great blog on TypePad, btw--he has a great post up about Ratatouille, which we saw recently and absolutely loved.
Books I've read recently include:
Tender at the Bone, very solid & a fast read; The Sushi Economy, some fantastic stuff about tuna, and some great chef profile stories of Nobu Matsuhisa and of Tyson Cole, of Austin, TX; The Namesake, which is wonderful but really sad; and YES, I read the DaVinci Code, and I enjoyed it, even though I hated the ending, but not nearly as much as I hated the entire movie.
This commercial (from Ford Europe) almost made me cry this morning! Baby animals in the womb? So cute! (via Very Short List)
Two other books I've read recently (in addition to...): Plenty, which I bought on a warm spring day at the farmer's market when I was particularly inspired by the idea of eating locally; and Busting Vegas, which is another Ben Mezrich book about smart young people in over their heads (c.f. Bringing Down the House, Ugly Americans). Both were okay, but overall felt a little bit empty for me--honestly, though, I think this is my newfound bias towards fiction talking.
R. Kelly. Double Up. On Vox. Best ad evar!
Yesterday, I found a wonderful Of Montreal show captured online. Today, I listened to it, and loved "Du Og Meg," which despite my love for this year's Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer? I hadn't heard (it's from Icons, Abstract Thee, a special-edition EP that was previously to this month sold only on tour, I guess?). It's a lovely, heart-on-the-sleeve pop song that reminds me of early Orange Juice, with all of the charm/giddiness/lovesickness that implies. Listen!
I finished Marisha Pessl's Special Topics in Calamity Physics last night, which book sounds like some sort of weird collection of boring science essays, but isn't, at all. And I've also found that if you describe it as a "murder mystery," people just look at you kind of funny.
But so this book is to a murder mystery as green tea mochi is to ice cream: it's all sophisticated & scholarly & erudite, but in the end, it's just really good fucking ice cream.
One of my favorite passages:
I looked down at him. He looked like Hamlet. And I'm not talking about the Hamlets enamored with the language, the ones always thinking ahead to the upcoming sword fight or where to stress the line (Get thee to a nunnery, Get thee to a nunnery), not the Hamlet worried about how well his tunic fits or whether he can be heard in the back. I'm talking about the Hamlets who actually start to wonder if they should be, or not be, the ones who are bruised by Life's Elbows, Kidney Punches, Head Butts and Bites on the Ear, the ones who, after the final curtain, can barely speak, eat or take off their stage makeup with cold cream and cotton balls. They go home and do a lot of staring at walls.
From Marisha Pessl's Special Topics in Calamity Physics, p. 399
Anyway, I loved it.
As much as I loved Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, until recently I hadn't since sought out any of his other books. In particular, Wonder Boys, of which I never saw the movie, either, but whose trailer I was always sort of annoyed by. [1]
But so I read Wonder Boys last weekend, and I really loved it, and wondered again if I might actually enjoy the movie. And so afterwards, I was looking at the movie info, and based on the character list it seems as if a large chunk of the book was omitted from the movie--namely, the scenes where Grady and James visit Emily's family and celebrate Passover.
That would, indeed, be too bad, as those were my favorite passages in the book, including the following:
He inhaled, and exhaled, and then, as he started in on that old rigged four-part quiz we'd all heard Philly reel off, in weary Hebrew, so many times before--asking Irv why, on this night that commemorated a strange assortment of emergencies and miracles, he ate crackers, horseradish, and parsley and sat slumped against a crocheted orange throw pillow--the Warshaws left off their arguments, and their wry asides, and their shifting around in their chairs. Instead they just sat, motionless, listening, while James picked his way carefully through the passage, in his clear, high corrupted-altar-boy voice, as though his Haggadah were an instruction manual and there was some complicated machine there in the living room that we were all trying to assemble.
[1] I'm not a big fan of Michael Douglas, particularly when he's making faces like this. Thankfully, my paperback doesn't have his simpering face on the cover.
Over a recent trip & the requisite flights, I read Calvin Trillin's The Tummy Trilogy and J. Maarten Troost's Getting Stoned with Savages. The latter was an incredibly light read about the author's experiences living on a couple of South Pacific islands, and was exactly what I wanted for plane reading. It's fairly light stuff, which is fine.
But so The Tummy Trilogy is really quite interesting, as it's a collection of three of Trillin's short collections of stories (dating from 1974, 1978, and 1983). Trillin's a fantastic & hilarious writer, and most importantly, as a promoter of interesting & local food he's incredibly convincing--he's now made me intensely crave fried clams, smoked whitefish, and Cincinnati chili, for instance.
But what shocks me most about reading his stuff is how now, how current, a lot of it seems. Take the following passage, which sounds like it could be from any 2007 article or book about the qualities of local food (but which is actually from 1978):
A lot of vegetables at the Barnstaple market taste more like vegetables than shelf displays simply because they are the product of a kitchen garden rather than an assembly line. ... It is not unusual to come across a farmer's wife standing behind a table that holds, say, three dozen eggs, one chicken, three bunches of carrots, some beetroot, five turnips, six baby cabbages, a bunch of rhubarb, one marrow, a jar of apple chutney, and a jar of quince jelly. ... A preference for free-range eggs is based partly on the theory that a chicken that spends its life roaming around a barnyard instead of being crammed into the wire cages used for what are called battery or factory or deep-litter hens is a healthier fowl that is likely to produce a better egg.
I don't know whether to be happy or sad to fully realize how long people have been thinking & writing about these things. I think I'll settle on hungry, and leave it at that.
The following is just one of many lovely passages from Freddy and Fredericka, which was recommended to me six to eight months ago, and which I've now gotten around to reading--I finished it the week before last on a flight, and loved it.
"What will he be like?" Bannerman echoed. "He won't be like us. He'll arrive clean-shaven, having moved heaven and earth to make a fire in the snow, to heat the water. He will have washed his clothes. He will look, despite seven days in the wilderness, like an officer on parade. He will have strained as we have never strained, carrying the burden of the whole country and its history. And he will have carried, its weight far heavier than any gear a soldier has ever carried, his reputation as a madman and an idiot. For a person of honour, that is a difficult thing indeed."
From Mark Helprin's Freddy and Fredericka, p. 544
The book is really gorgeous & sad & hilariously funny, a sort of love note for everyone and everything involved--America, Britain, the monarchy, &c.
And combined with watching The Queen a couple of months ago, I'm now an absolute royalist! I find myself reading articles about the Prince of Wales [1] with a newfound respect & really, truly caring about the royal family as people, which is a pretty nice thing for art to've done for me. Very highly recommended.
[1] Like this one from Vanity Fair about the prince's environmental work.
