Ha! “Psychosomatic” was coined by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. That seems…apropos.
(Found out in The Age of Wonder, Richard Holmes)
Progress: 14 down, 1 abandoned, 6 to go (list)
Which: The Creative Habit, Twyla Tharp
I figured out a long time ago that I like to do the groundwork. Or anyway, I recognize the need and importance of it, so doing it doesn’t annoy me. Not a huge surprise, then, that Habit makes buckets of sense to me. I think my favorite bit is what she calls scratching: gathering up all the things you can to get you on your way for a new project. I’m pretty sure this just earned itself a spot among my reference books.
Progress: 13 down, 1 abandoned, 7 to go (list)
Which: Let the Great World Spin, Colum McCann
Cloud Atlas is my yardstick for disparate-but-connected stories: Spin is not Cloud Atlas. But it is pretty good, the great world mostly contained in the boroughs with the timeline only pretending to be linear.
Part of me didn’t want to like it, its award-winning and top-pick status splashed all over the cover. By the end, though, I did like it—somehow the characters more than McCann’s storytelling, which seems maybe backwards, but there it is.
Progress: 12 down, 2 abandoned, 7 to go (list) ¹
Which: Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, Jane Austen and Ben H. Winters
Um: zzzzzz.
I held on as long as I could (80 pages), but…no. Most of the sea monster business doesn’t feel too shoe-horned in, which is pretty good, but the overall effect is squishy, slimy, and plodding. Pass.
¹ Agh! Stupid book! You weren’t even on the list! Honestly.
Progress: 12 down, 1 abandoned, 8 to go (list)
Which: The Age of Wonder, Richard Holmes
I like this sort of storytelling: regularly deep-diving into this or that topic with historical-context mile-markers. It was interesting to realize Darwin’s Origin alone didn’t knock out the six-days story, but that John Banks & co. had been delivering a series of nice stunners for decades beforehand.
Humphry Davy’s uh experimenting with nitrous oxide had me rolling. Scientifically dissecting getting high. It’s not like he (and his subjects) knew that’s what would follow, but still.
Sometimes I can go into and walk out of Elliott Bay Book Co without having bought a pile of books. Today was not one of those times.
- This week’s New Yorker (20 short stories)
- The Imperfectionists, Tom Rachman
- The Manual of Detection, Jedediah Berry
- Proust was a Neuroscientist, Jonah Lerher
- The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
Why am I buying books, when I still have 9 to go? Heh. My Gatsby from college disappeared between then and now, so: another copy. (Mine was the small one, the all-blue cover. sigh.) I love The Imperfectionists cover; I’m glad I’ve heard good things about it so I had an excuse to get it. (:
I like the footnote indicators (clubs?)
Progress: 11 down, 1 abandoned, 9 to go (list)
Which: Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer, Fred Kaplan
I really need to check these historical books’ bibliography and notes sections; I thought I had another 70 pages to go—oh. Hmph.
“Writing—the art of communicating thoughts to the mind, through the eye, is the greatest invention of the world.” (Feb, 1859) Lincoln was a writer almost before anything else and that along with his need to be precise guarantees my affection.
Not that Kaplan made it easy to read. It’s possibly just me, but much of this read like a textbook, making it hard to really dig into. That the pace is noticeably faster during his presidency can’t be helped, but still: the rest didn’t have to drag so much, did it?
The explicit and implicit messages, though, occupied the slippery slope between realpolitik and genocide. [Lincoln] had recently shown that as the vehicle of his people he was pledged to affirm the national will by military force.
p. 344, Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer, Fred Kaplan
- I like the look of the word “realpolitik”
- The wildly different perception and proposed treatment of slaves vs. Indians (put down mostly to Lincoln’s personal/familial history and participation in wars with the Indians) is the most frustrating thing about this book (and era).
Blah blah modern-sensibility-cakes, but come on! It’s gross.
Sunday, reading.
Wednesday night, post-farmer’s market dinner (& ice cream!). (wallpaper, if you like it)
Progress: 9 down, 1 abandoned, 11 to go (list)
Which: The Partly Cloudy Patriot, Sarah Vowell
Sarah Vowell cracks me up and makes me want to read more (e.g. returning to Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer). I listened to the Assassination Vacation audiobook before I read anything else by her, so reading Patriot, she narrated instead of my inner reading voice.
(Work was pretty slow; this was a nice way to spend the afternoon.)
Last week’s Instapaper reading…
- David Foster Wallace on Life and Work (via ticjones)
- Embrace content strategy: throw out your design process (via ticjones)
- Life and Letters: Far from Narnia (via cleversimon)
- Why a Soda Tax Makes Sense for Washington (via kottke)
- Daring Fireball: iPad and Android Web Traffic Share; John Paczkowski’s Interview With Adobe Co-Founder Chuck Geschke
I had grand plans to read the rest of my Instapaper queue over the weekend, but sleep and The Wire took precedence. (:
Progress: 8 down, 1 abandoned, 12 to go (list)
Which: The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
The best part about this book? That cover. Good grief; I don’t remember how many times I asked Dorian Gray and Lord Henry to shut the hell up. Poetic comeuppance, sure, but I’m not at all sorry I quit reading it. Blah.
