I’ve put my list of the books I’ve read in the last decade into a Google Spreadsheet, which is here for your browsing pleasure.
Look it over if you want to know what kinds of books you ought to read to find yourself stranded socially, politically and professionally in your late fifties but with a mind still curious for stories and knowledge. (I just looked this sentence over and I’d typed ‘twenties’. So Freudian.)
Just back from the nail shop, getting my tips re-done. I got tips (extensions) for the first time 3 weeks ago, with SNS powder, and was deeply satisfied with the result and its longevity. My hands are pudgy and chillblained and wrinkled but having fancy nails makes me happy. After all, I look at my nails a lot.
What else has been generating pleasure:
“Transcription” which is Kate Atkinson’s latest novel, about a woman who works for the MI5 during WWII. The Tara French Dublin Murder Squad series.
Riverdale on TV.
Nounos yogurt, a local brand I’m obsessed with since I first tried their coconut mango flavor a couple years back. That is can be hard to find adds to its glamour — the other day I scored an unexpected hat trick when, going to the rather obscure grocery store that is the only one that sells the frozen breakfast sandwiches I like, they also had Nounos AND the big bottles of Starbucks medium roast ice coffee, which isn’t at Gristedes or Whole Foods or,obviously, Trader Joe’s, so I have to go Fairway just for that. And none of those carry the breakfast sandwiches which I suspect are far too downscale for the nabe, and I know I oughtn’t to be eating them either, but fuck it, I like them. All my various preferences means that I visit about 5 different grocery stores over any 2 week period to stock up on this thing from that and then that other thing that only the other one carries. It gets a bit crazy. And somehow I never really have anything in the house I want to eat.
Recently, I quite Facebook and Instagram though I’m doubtful anyone will notice. I don’t miss, but I do miss a sort of platonic idea of it that it never really was anyhow.
I’m to going to write anything now about Individual One, or any current events, just what I do to keep the too-muchness of our times at some bay.
For the last few years — alas, I wish I’d done this always from a child — I’ve kept a list of every book I’ve read.
Yesterday my list for 2018 hit 50 books, and here they are. I like complete freedom in choosing books, so I don’t make any kind of reading plan, and often bypass my pile of recently purchased books to choose others. I use the New York Public Library and the Brooklyn Public Library (for audiobook downloads) a lot. I follow my interests (in the last few years, Russia, pre-and-post revolution), or powerful suggestions, such as the Backlisted Podcast, which brought me to #27, 28, 32, or books mentioned on other podcasts I listen to. I note when I’ve listened to a book instead of reading it on paper, but I consider listening equivalent to reading. In some cases, it’s superior to reading — for instance, hearing the audio of “Purple Hibiscus” gave me the Nigerian accents and pronunciations of names without which the experience would have been much flatter. I also like audiobooks for history, which I’ll happily listen to all the way through instead of getting bogged down in the paper book.
I’m committed to maintaining my ability to concentrate for long bouts of reading, in physical books. I did read a couple of these books on my iPad because e-books were the only format the public library had to lend, but while I don’t condemn it, I’ll still never prefer it.
The books that wowed me the most are in bold.
1 Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets Svetlana Alexievich Audiobook
2 Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine Anne Applebaum Audiobook
3 The Orchid House Phyllis Shand Allfrey
4 The House of the Dead: Siberian Exile Under the Tsars Daniel Beer Audiobook
5 Niels Lyhne Jens Peter Jacobsen
6 City of Sedition: The History of New York City During the Civil War John Strausbaugh Audiobook
7 The Adolescent (The Raw Youth) Fyodor Dostoevsky
8 Hotel Savoy Joseph Roth
9 Nothing is True And Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia Peter Pomerantsev Audbiobook
10 Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 & How It Changed The World Laura Spinney Audiobook
11 The Shooting Party Anton Chekhov
12 The Girl From the Metropol Hotel: Growing Up in Communist Russia Ludmilla Petrushevskaya
13 Notes From Underground Fyodor Dostoevsky
14 The Double Fyodor Dostoevsky Audiobook
15 Caught in the Revolution—Petrograd, Russia, 1917 Helen Rappaport
Audiobook
16 My Cousin Rachel Daphne Du Maurier Audiobook
17 Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: A Essay in Contrast George Steiner
18 Where the Jews Aren’t: The Sad and Absurd Story of Birdbizhan, Russia’s Jewish Autonomous Region Masha Gessen Audiobook
19 Lincoln in the Bardo George Saunders
20 The Unpossessed Tess Slesinger
21 Slow Days Fast Company Eve Babitz
22 The Fox in the Attic Richard Hughes
23 The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia Masha Gessen Audiobook
24 L.A. Woman Eve Babitz
25 Eve’s Hollywood Eve Babitz
26 Elmet Fiona Mozley
27 Corregidora Gayl Jones
28 The Lowlife Alexander Baron
29 The Romanovs 1613-1918 Simon Sebag Montefiore Audiobook
30 An Empire On the Edge: How Britain Came to Fight America Nick Bunker Audiobook
31 Kudos Rachel Cusk
32 The Fatal Englishman: Three Short Lives Sebastian Faulks
33 Remember Me Like This Bret Anthony Johnston
34 American Wife Curtis Sittenfeld Audiobook
35 The Turn of the Screw Henry James Reread/Audiobook
36 A Wrinkle in Time Madeline L’Engle Reread/Audiobook
37 Journey into the Mind’s Eye: Fragments of an Autobiography Lesley Blanch
38 Purple Hibiscus Chimananda Ngozi Adichie Audiobook
39 Trotsky in New York 1917: A Radical on the Eve of Revolution Kenneth Ackerman Audiobook
40 The Feud: Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson: The End of a Beautiful Friendship Alex Beam Audiobook
41 Red Plenty Francis Spufford Audiobook
42 The People’s Act of Love James Meek
43 In A Lonely Place Dorothy Hughes
44 The World Broke in Two: Woolf, Eliot, Forster Lawrence and the Year That Changed Literature Bill Goldstein Audiobook
45 Florida Lauren Groff
46 Asymmetry Lisa Halliday
47 Corpus Christi Bret Anthony Johnston
48 The Rainbow D H Lawrence Audiobook
49 Days of Awe: Short Stories A M Homes
50 The Best American Short Stories 2016 Junot Diaz, editor
The book by Lesley Blanch was so much fun for me, because it hit my reading pleasure center in multiple ways — a lot of romantic tosh about pre-revolution Russia, a transgressive love affair, enthusiasm about books, and evocative descriptions of foreign places — Blanch writes about the origins and experiences of her life-long obsession with Russia, a Russia of fairy tales, wolves chasing sleighs across stony wastes, onion domes, extravagant despots. It’s an absolutely charming book, and it came to me at random — NYRB republished it and sent it to me as part of a subscription; I think I enjoyed it more for not having anticipated it at all.
w/Campari & tonic
As recommended by my podcast-soulmate Backlisted, I’m reading Drinking Coffee Elsewhere by ZZ Packer, which is a story collection and, at long last, In a Lonely Place by Dorothy Hughes, the 1940s noir novel on which the film with Bogart and Grahame was based. The film is one of the handful that I can’t not watch whenever I see it’s coming on TCM. Reading the book afterwards is quite a lesson in how novels, when adapted for movies, can be changed, plot-wise, in big ways, often for the (cinematic at least) better. The simple switch — though so not simple! — from making the protagonist in the book, whom we know is a serial killer from the outset, into a man with anger issues who could be the killer, but we’re pretty sure isn’t, takes it to a higher orbit.
Gloria Grahame and Humphrey Bogart in In A Lonely Place
I’m also in the midst of Lauren Groff’s latest book, “Florida”, another story collection. Post writers conference, my interest in the short is resurging.
On audio I’ve got 1922: The Year That Changed Literature by Bill Goldstein, which is about how, in that year, four great writers made their great leaps forward: Woolf, Lawrence, Eliot, and Forster. It’s sending me to read some Lawrence, which I haven’t seen college.
You may well wonder how I get all this reading done — but in fact I usually feel I’m not getting enough reading done, as, come dusk, I turn to TV binge-watch mode.
“My” show of the moment, Claws, has been putting out a 2nd season even better than its stellar first. It hits my Buffy the Vampire Slayer and sleazy southern noir buttons, it’s hilarious and continually inventive, and also akin to Buffy, the characters are real people with backstories that are “surprising and inevitable,” as Flannery O’Connor says the ending of a short story must be.
In a similar vein, I saw the movie The Spy Who Dumped Me” this week, with expectations pretty low: killing an afternoon somewhere cool, seated comfortably, so as to avoid running into my cleaner. I’d read somewhere that the action sequences in it exceeded those of the latest Mission Impossible, and I like action — I also like movies that Tom Cruise is nowhere near. My expectations were large exceeded — this was a funny BFF comedy with Mila Kunis and Katherine McKinnon getting mixed up in a dangerous international caper. The plot was superfluous, the pleasure was in seeing a story about a pair of best friends who use their best-friendship to conquer all before them. Recommended, though maybe not for the $17.50 I had to pay when I wandered like a shorn lamb into the theater at 2 o’clock on a Thursday afternoon. (I go to very few movies — the last one I saw was The Death of Stalin last winter.)
I went to the VQR Writers Conference to mix with a bunch of my fellow writers, and for a fiction workshop run by the novelist Bret Anthony Johnston.
My workshop teacher, Bret Anthony Johnston, and me.
Bret was funny, super-smart, friendly, focused on accentuating the positive in everyone’s writing. He also taught me things (see two random notebook pages) about story structure that I’ve struggled with for years in trying to do it intuitively — not only do I feel energized by spending the week with him and other workshoppers whose work filled me with an urge to make more of my own, but I’ve come away empowered with some tools I didn’t have before.
Structure 101 was new to me.
Story structure diagrams are my new jam.
Got home on Saturday evening, and Chuffey just arrived, dropped off by his heroic dogsitter, Jason — also a fine poet.
Chuffey is glad to be home with Blue Elephant.
