17 bought, 11 read: failing to meet my quota for the second month running, I lost a bet with myself. I’ll put the money to good use though: buying more books…
With The Once and Future King (the thickest of the set) finished, I have finally made my way through Penguin’s beautiful (and toe-threateningly heavy) perspex-encased SciFi collection of six classic novels.
This was one of the strangest, although least science fiction-y, of the set: four uneven books linked through time and characters, swaying back and forth between a youthful King Arthur, vindictive witches, and valiant young knights, but for me reaching its pinnacle with Book 3 which follows the hapless hero Lancelot in his attempts not to destroy the Kingdom.
In a completely different mold, ‘World Without Fish,’ from journalist extraordinaire Mark Kurlansky, is a wake-up call for our future. The cartoon/science info blend may be written for kids but this book is relevant for anyone who cares about the future of our oceans, (and our dinner-plates).
I was led astray by John Searbrook’s ‘The Song Machine‘, thinking it would be one of those fascinating, sweepingly historic non-fiction books on a single topic I have such a penchant for. Instead, it was one of those fascinating, narrowly-focused historic non-fiction books on a single topic which I love just as much.
Where I thought I’d be learning about the evolution of pop music over the decades and genres, instead I was treated to the story of how a bunch of Swedes have essentially dissected music into microseconds of aurally pleasing hooks and rhythms and ‘written’ (or constructed) just about every major pop song of the past twenty years, from Britney to Backstreet, Pink to Perry, Avril to Aguilera.
My favourite nugget of knowledge explained why so many lyrics lately don’t quite seem to make sense these days. It’s not wily ambiguous lyricism from the songwriters: its Swedes not quite having a grasp on the idiom. Ever wondered why ‘(Hit Me) …Baby One More Time‘ sounded so…well, abusive? Apparently the authors knew that you ‘hit someone up’ for their phone number, but not that you didn’t ask people to ‘hit you’ when you wanted them to call. And voilà: a pop hit was b(j)orn.
(Sorry: couldn’t resist!)
My guilty pleasure this month was a return to my youthful days of sports card collecting, when I liked nothing better than ripping open a pack of Upper Deck basketball cards and seeing which players I got. (Full disclosure: there’s still little I like better than ripping open a pack of sports cards and seeing who I got!)
‘The Card’, picked up in the $1 section of a Manhattan second-hand bookmonger’s, was a surprisingly interesting and readable history of cardboard collecting, from its innocent 19th century roots to its Wall Street-esque 1980’s gluttonous boom and bust, through the lens of the millionaire collectors (I’m looking at you, Wayne Gretzky…) and shady certifiers who took over (and, it seems, corrupted) what was once a simple, childhood hobby.
But the most interesting book I got through this month was a gift from family friends in South Carolina: ‘Stealing Fire’, a wide-ranging look at how people from a range of lifestyles (from athletes to CEO’s, Navy SEALs to Burning Man attendees) find different ways to expand their consciousness and achieve a state of ‘flow.’ From mind-expanding drugs to extreme sports, I wasn’t expecting to have my mind expanded quite as much as it was, and can recommend this to all those seeking a little something extra in life.
And what little extra did I get out of the book? Among other things, the fact that my name is not only Hebrew for ‘gift‘, (which I’d known all along of course), but also Greek for the same thing, (which I’d only had a vague inkling of), and that Pandora’s Box contained, linguistically, ‘pan’ (all) ‘doron’ (δωρον – gift), or all the gifts of the world.
Books Bought, June 2018
A History Of The Middle East (Peter Mansfield)
Kidnapped (Robert Louis Stevenson)
Rip Van Winkle and other stories (Washington Irving)
The Time Machine (H.G.Wells)
Flowers Of Anti-Martyrdom (Dorian Geisler)
The Glass House (Salman Rushdie)
The Card: collectors, con men, and the true story of history’s most desired baseball card (O’Keefe & Thompson)
White Sands (Geoff Dyer)
The Road Through The Wall (Shirley Jackson)
Conscious Capitalism (Mackey & Sisodia)
Revolutionary Suicide (Huey P. Long)
The Little Book Of Lykke: secrets of the world’s happiest people (Meik Wiking)
The Evolution Of Everything : how new ideas emerge (Matt Ridley)
Mind Over Money: the psychology of money and how to use it better (Claudia Hammond)
Dream Cities: seven urban ideas that shape the world (Wade Graham)
We Were Eight Years In Power: an american tragedy (Ta Nehisi-Coates)
The Complete Novels (Jane Austen)
Books Read, June 2018 (highly recommended books in bold)
Dinner At The Center Of The Earth (Nathan Englander)
Classic Penguin: cover to cover (ed.Paul Buckley)
The First Four Notes: beethoven’s fifth and the human imagination (Matthew Guerrieri)
Vladimir Nabakov (Jane Grayson)
World Without Fish (Mark Kurlansky, illustrated by Frank Stockton)
The Design Of Alain Grée
Stealing Fire: how silicon valley, the navy seals, and maverick scientists are revolutionizing the way we live and work (Kotler & Wheal)
The Song Machine: inside the hit factory (John Seabrook)
Flowers Of Anti-Martyrdom (Dorian Geisler)
The Card: collectors, con men, and the true story of history’s most desired baseball card (O’Keefe & Thompson)
The Once And Future King (T.H.White)
