I know last blog I promised you a review of 2016, but as the legendary Douglas Adams famously said: “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by…”
So that’ll be next month.
I read a large baker’s dozen of books this past month (14), but everywhere I turned I seemed to stumble across a treasure trove of Penguin Classic Deluxes, which I am slowly accumulating and which account for the elevated quantity of books in the Jane Austen and Louisa May Alcott wheelhouse, as well as the tally of 43 books acquired, (including two of the Brooklyn bard’s classic ‘Leaves Of Grass.’ Anybody looking for a spare copy? I just can’t help myself from buying beautiful books…)
I discovered a new favourite author this January in Simon Rich, ripping through two collections of short stories by this New Yorker and Saturday Night Live writer, every one of which was rye, twisted and hilarious.
Don’t let the fact that he looks 12 years old put you off: go out and read something by him, now.
(Here you go: I’ll even get you started with one).
I gave my nod to NY history by finishing the mammoth biography of the richest man in modern times, John D.Rockefeller (Sr.), and refreshed my scientific curiosity with the short and sweetly written ‘The Ten Most Beautiful Scientific Experiments,’ a blend of history and explanation of the magical universe I greatly enjoyed.
That set me up to read the equally delightful ‘The Pattern On The Stone,’ a simplified explanation of the theory behind computers. Terrified I would be inundated with complicated jargon and incomprehensible technical maps, this exploration of the core concepts of logic and information storage may not help me to create an iPad from scratch after the inevitable apocalypse, but was a fascinating and highly accessible read nonetheless.
Miranda July continues to be one of my favourite people, and I finally got hold of a copy of her unclassifiable ‘It Chooses You,’ a masterclass in procrastination in which she visits, interviews and photos strangers advertising things for sale in a local newspaper which she has absolutely no intention of buying. Truly bizarre, and a little hypnotic.
A lot like this video of hers…
And, after reading two award winning novels last month, I eventually read 2016’s Booker Prize Winner, ‘The Sellout,’ in which Paul Beatty sets off from the starter’s pistol at pace and never lets up. A coiled, compact tale of race relations and twisted stereotypes packed with endless, streaming wordplay, I can’t believe it took me this long to read it.
You shouldn’t wait, either.
Books Bought, January 2017
Leaves Of Grass (Walt Whitman) x2
Privacy (Garret Keizer)
An Anthropologist On Mars (Oliver Sacks)
I Like You: hospitality under the influence (Amy Sedaris)
The Great War: july 1, 1916: the first day of the battle of the somme (Joe Sacco)
McSweeney’s No.23
On Argentina (Jorge Luis Borges)
Lonely Planet: colombia
Lonely Planet: iceland
Songs Of The Garden (Utamaro)
Twelve Years A Slave (Solomon Northup)
One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest (Ken Kesey)
It Chooses You (Miranda July)
Bat-Manga! the secret history of batman in japan (Chip Kidd & Geoff Spear)
Ronin (Frank Miller)
The $100 Startup: reinvent the way you make a living, do what you love, and make a new future (Chris Guillebeau)
Top 10 New Orleans (Dorling Kingsley)
Pride And Prejudice (Jane Austen)
The Polysyllabic Spree (Nick Hornby)
Shakespeare Wrote For Money (Nick Hornby)
Housework Vs.The Dirt Nick Hornby)
More Baths, Less Talking (Nick Hornby)
Today Will Be Different (Maria Semple)
The Mark And The Void (Paul Murray)
Islam (Karen Armstrong)
The Broom Of The System (David Foster Wallace)
The Strange Library (Haruki Murakami)
Fooling Houdini: magaicians, mentalists, math geeks, and the hidden powers of the mind (Alex Stone)
Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)
Emma (Jane Austen)
The Narrow Road To The Deep North and other travel sketches (Bashô)
The Gospel Of Wealth: essays and other writings (Andrew Carnegie)
The Empathy Exams (Leslie Jamison)
The Divine Within: selected writings on englightenment (Aldous Huxley)
ABC (Marion Bataille)
The Pale King (David Foster Wallace)
The Ministry Of Special Cases (Nathan Englander)
Being A Dog: following the dog into a world of smell (Alexandra Horowitz)
Writing In The Dark: essays on literature (David Grossman)
The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments (George Johnson)
Collected Essays (Arthur Miller)
Presence: collected stories (Arthur Miller)
Books Read, January 2017 (Books in bold are highly recommended)
The Jaguar Smile: a nicaraguan journey (Salman Rushdie)
Spoiled Brats (Simon Rich)
A Book Of Penguin (various)
The Sellout (Paul Beatty)
The Pattern On The Stone: the simple ideas that make computers work (W.Daniel Hillis)
The Last Girlfriend On Earth: and other love stories (Simon Rich)
Hallucinations (Oliver Sacks)
Titan: the life of john d.rockefeller, sr. (Ron Chernow)
The Geography Of Genius: a search for the world’s most creative places (Eric Weiner)
Privacy (Garret Keizer)
It Chooses You (Miranda July)
The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments (George Johnson)
Scepticism Inc. (Bo Fowler)
The Broom Of The System (David Foster Wallace)
Doron's Book Blog 