teamsweeting

I’ve read more than half my height in books. This is an accomplishment deserving of another Narragansett, I guess.

Russel Bank shows his mastery in Rule of the Bone by somehow making the bleak Northway Corridor, with its bikers and crack addicts and dampness, look romantic.  Of Human Bondage is probably one of the most mundane novels about obsession I have ever read, I finished it still hoping it would turn into House Of Holes.  Reading New York Stories from The New Yorker cover to cover iis kind of like giving yourself a really interesting homework assignment but the real gem here was Remnick’s introduction. Makeshift Metropolis was given to me by my Anthropology thesis advisor and sat in boxes and untouched on shelves as I moved from Saratoga back downstate. It wasn’t until I cracked it on the subway that I saw the thoughtful inscription he had written me. What a saint. Crown is publishing Ethan Coen’s new book of poetry so I grabbed a galley. His poems are what you would expect, more Burn After Reading than Fargo, though. James Wolcott’s Lucking Out somehow avoids the cliched potholes of the burgeoning I-survived-the-70s-in-the-East-Village genre memoir, probably because he is so fucking earnest. Got me into Pauline Kael too.  

Follow along at home. 

Another measly contribution to the pile. No excuses this time. 

I don’t know much about how to read poetry but John Ashbery’s Planisphere makes it easy. The poems are playful and encyclopedic, full of facts and slang and notes about French things. Nikky Finney’s Head Off and Split is an astonishing autopsy of American history and deserving of all the good things the whole world is saying about it. Lis Harris’ Holy Days is the closest thing to an ethnography I’ve read since I graduated with a degree in Anthropology nine months ago and I would recommend it to everyone. 

This isn’t going as fast as I thought it would. I only read 4.5 inches on this go around, probably because I moved into an unheated apartment in Bushwick and forgot how to read. I moved into an unheated apartment Bushwick and taught myself to hang curtains and take the J train and sue my landlord but I guess I forgot how to read. 

Those four beautiful paperbacks at the bottom are the Summer 2012 galleys from Hogarth—Jay Kang’s The Dead Do Not Improve, Anouk Markovits’s I Am Forbidden, Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya’s The Watch and Stephanie Reents’ The Kissing List—each amazing in its own way and books I am lucky to get to work with. 

Joan Didion’s Blue Nights doesn’t amount to much more than Sad but those Carson McCullers short stories, particularly The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, are so smart you’ll take the train back uptown to retrieve them when you leave them at work. 

The pile. 

Look at all these books! We have so much to discuss!

The Marriage Plot was a little boring towards the middle and really pessimistic about the prospects of love among the manic depressive. The Art of Fielding wasn’t really about baseball at all and the reviewers really shouldn’t have dragged it through all those baseball metaphors. Home run! Leaving The Atocha Station is narrated by the world’s most frustratingly familiar person. Denis Johnson’s novella Train Dreams originally appeared in a bright-orange issue of The Paris Review in 2000 but you should buy this new hardcover edition so publishers catch on and start putting out more novellas.  Empire State is another one of those smart graphic novels that everyone loves so much but never really talks about. n+1 issue twelve isn’t really a book but it has two pretty great essays on gChat and The Gathering Of Juggalos (their Occupy Wall Street Gazette isn’t bad either). Tell Me You Love Me Julie Moon is sad and subtle and the best read in this pile. Greg Hrbek taught one of my writing seminars and sometimes we email back and forth but I would recommend you go out a get a copy of Destroy All Monsters even if I didn’t know him. 

Follow along at home. 

In Nazi Germany they stacked books in huge piles and burned them. In my room I stack books in huge piles and read them.

World War Z is Max Brooks’ finest zombie work. The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake is heartrending and beautiful, unnecessarily at times. Raymond Carver writes short stories with more on three pages than most novelists can layer into entire books. White Tiger won the Man Booker Prize in 2008, I guess. Black Whole is dark and weird and confusing and kind of cheating because it is a graphic novel.

Follow along at home, let’s talk about books.

Onward and upward! One thousand two hundred and seventy nine pages on to the pile.

Susan Sontag talking about photography and Maggie Nelson talking about Susan Sontag talking about photography. Denis Johnson on drugs, long Elizabeth Bishop poems and boring Sloane Crosley essays that seem to have gotten more praise than they deserve. The Colson Whitehead wont be in stores until October but I can assure you it is great.

Follow along at home.

Once, I was the type of person that never finished what they started. Now I am a new man. I am reborn. I am still going to read my heights in books. I am going to finish this stupid idea and prove everyone wrong.

I am almost there. I am so close I can taste it. What do those words mean? Click here to see what I’ve been reading.

Dave Eggers’ Zeitoun is a wonderful story but almost painfully plainly written. I don’t need to tell you that Anne Beattie is wonderful and beautiful and sad and littered with references to Saratoga. Steve Stern’s Frozen Rabbi is a short story dragged into 383 pages that only survives thanks to its Jewish humor, which, no matter how hard I tried, barely resonated. Thomas Mann’s short stories and novellas were dreadful and boring but that is to expected from the Germans and, anyway, I had to read it because Boyers loved it.

In an attempt to combine my passion for reading and my passion for being tall I have decided to read my height in books. I am going to keep reading until the pile of books next to me is six feet and six inches tall. Follow along at home!

This picture is a little misleading because it only features four inches of books. You see, I have actually read AT LEAST five inches of books but I accidentally returned Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From The Goon Squad to the library before I had a chance to photograph it, Photoshop it down to scale, place it in this photo and upload it to my blog. SILLY ME! Don’t worry though guys, tomorrow I’ll solve that problem. Promise. 

I’m not really setting a deadline or a time limit or anything because setting yourself up to fail is sooooo two-thousand-and-late and racing against the clock is for game show contestants and Olympians. I just want to read a lot of books. Maybe when I finally finish reading all these books I will throw a big party or something. Maybe when I finally finish reading all these books I will never read another book again.

If you are looking for something to read or if you are incredibly bored at work you can see what I’ve been reading here.