Moominsummer Madness
by Tove Jansson

Moominpoppa at Sea
by Tove Jansson
-I had important, brilliant world-changing notes written on the bookmark.  I finished the book this morning.  Now I have somehow lost the bookmark.  Where did it go???

The Love of a Good Woman
by Alice Munro

-Another book sale pickup, begun randomly one night a few weeks ago. If I could go back and give myself advice about this book, I'd recommend just the first three stories, esp. the first–the title story, which was pretty awesome. All the stories are of course well-crafted and the characters varied and vivid, but after the first three, maybe not weird enough. For a dude, reading these stories about women and the various kinds of relationships with men and with each other–the loves of "good women"– was definitely wandering outside usual zones of research.

The Watcher and other stories
by Italo Calvino

The Phantom Tollbooth
by Norman Juster

Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time
by Stephen Jay Gould

Absence of Mind
by Marilynne Robinson
- I hope to write about this when I get some more time.

Berlioz and His Century: An Introduction To the Age of Romanticism
by Jacque Barzun

Little Lulu Vol. 23
-I dunno if I've been keeping track of these on this blog, but yeah I've read them all, up until vol. 23, as has Katie. @#%!. It occurs to me that I've read maybe more pages of Lulu than any other comics? Not a bad way to spend your @#%!ing leisure time.  Alvin tells a story in this one!  Tubby-sitting on Halloween, The Spider spins, and a unexpected homage to Abraham Lincoln.  Seems like Tripp starts using a different new brush in this one, but I'm not sure.

The Best American Short Stories 1998

ed. Garrison Keillor

- I felt like reading the kind of stories I figured would be in here. I was right! I like to buy these old Best Americans at the YMCA booksales. Mr. Keillor says in the introduction that he read and selected all the of the stories without knowing the authors' names. Seems like a good approach, but how did that super boring Updike story make it in? Some really good stories and some pretty good ones, along with a few snoozers, which is usually the case with these Best American gimmick-books.

A Jacques Barzun Reader

- Got this for a buck.  Loved reading it, a nice hardcover. The straightforward and sensible essay "Criticism: Art or Craft?" was timely and instructive for me during the last few weeks, when so many comics critics and cartoonists have been talking about these subjects. 

Here's something from p. 506, "Three Enemies of Intellect"--

"Avante garde psychology, avante-garde art, and the philanthropy that is coeval with them, alike cherish the warm confusions of animal existence." The first part of the sentence is maybe confusing without the context, but the last bit about "warm confusions" is nice. Even when he overstates and over-generalizes, in order to correct what he sees as the sloppy over-reaching of progressives and avante-gardes, I sympathize with him more than, say, the pontifications of a GK Chesterton or Marilynne Robinson, or a lot of conservative-minded writers, who seem to cherish warm confusions of a different kind. It's because I know that in Barzun there's always the strong influence of William James. Barzun's book on James needs to be read first, I think, (I've read it twice) and definitely before House of Intellect. Barzun follows James in his secularism and pluralism, and he stays very open-minded and relativistic, enthusiastic and sensible, no matter how cranky he might get in his old age.

"This rational linking of fact, motive, and explanation is what distinguishes sensible crime fiction from the thriller, which is the acme of helter-skelter [guess he never read superhero comic books]. Thrillers can be fun when the writer makes things happen so rapidly and surprisingly that the reader never even thinks of motive of probability. Otherwise, actions and agents appear childish and insane by turns, and the effect is tedium and disgust."

 (p.568 "A Catalogue of Crime").

Ethan Frome
by Edith Wharton

Weathercraft
by Jim Woodring
-3x

Logicomix
by various
-I really hated this, but forced myself to finish it.  (The week this came out, I had been thinking about Godel and Russell and Wittgenstein and about how much I'd like to draw comics about them, I shit you not.  When I saw the book on the shelf I couldn't believe it!)  Here's all you need to know:  this book refers to these philosophers and mathematicians as "true superheroes."  In the actual story, the writer of the story says that.  It's often super corny and artless in this way.  Also, the "lecture with slideshow" genre of nonfiction comics is on display, literally, as a framing device. (I'm guilty of this too, but I swear I try to avoid it, or at least do it right...)  It's a great story, 20th C. and wars and Russell and Ludwig and all that, in theory, but this was cheeseball.  It's a shame they ruined the material.  Here "comix" means cheese and melodrama and writing for "young adults," not just the formal sense of mixing words and pictures.  NYT Bestseller.

The Kat Who Walked In Beauty
by Geo. Herriman
-Read 2 pages a day, every so often, for 6+ months to get through this.  I was very inspired by it...the world of it, the forms.  The world has changed a lot since Mr. Herriman drew these strips.  Some real groaners in here, but some good jokes too.

Market Day
by James Sturm
-I loved this.  It's very dark.  Beautiful sequences.

books from class

Exemplary Tales of Love (Novelas ejemplares y amorosas) by María de Zayas y Sotomayor
Lazarillo de Tormes (anonymous)
Novelas ejemplares por Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

Half of Snow Leopard and Shadow Country by Peter Mathiessen

Kiss of the Spider Woman (Beso de la mujer araña) by Manuel Puig, thought I'd hate it and I loved it
The Bad Girl (Las Travesuras de la niña mala) by Mario Vargas Llosa, thought I'd love it and I hated it
100 Years of Solitude (Cien Años de Soledad) by Gabriel García Márquez (Gabo)
Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo, remembered from 10 years ago as a "dry classic" but was wrong, it's awesome
The Death of Artemio Cruz (La muerte de Artemio Cruz) by Carlos Fuentes, maybe a bit over-dramatic in parts

The Invention of Everything Else
by Samantha Hunt
- After the first 50 pages it seemed pretty good, but I decided to stop.  Complicated feelings about the project.  But it seems smart and readable.

The Culture of Fear: Why Americans are Afraid of the Wrong Things
by Barry Glassner
-A run-through of the big media panics of the past few decades, and what's the deal.  Turns out people don't check the facts, believe what they want to hear, love a scary story, and distract themselves from looking directly at the real problems because it's too uncomfortable.  Pro-gun conservatives come out looking particularly bad.  Actually, conservatives in general come out looking pretty bad in this book, though I wouldn't say the book as a political agenda.  I suppose it makes sense; the conservative attitude tends to be fearful.  (I speak from past experience.  And certainly not every fear is misplaced)  The second group that comes out looking foolish and dangerous are, of course, journalists.  Their environment selects for stories of outrage and danger...  The hero is the skeptic--patient, thorough, sensible.

Educating the Reflective Practitioner
by Donald A Schon.

"In a climate of mystery and mastery, undiscussability and indescribability reinforce each other.  We keep ourselves unaware of what we already know because we habitually stay away from situations where we are called on to describe it.  We describe it poorly because we get so little practice, which reinforces our disposition to keep it undiscussable."

The Exploit: A Theory of Networks
by Alexander R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker

The Design of Design
Essays from a Computer Scientist
Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.

Portraits from Memory and other essays
by Bertrand Russell

On Poetic Imagination and Reverie
by Gaston Bachelard

"To say that the poetic image is independent of causality is to make a rather serious statement. But the causes cited by psychologists and psychoanalysts can never really explain the wholly unexpected nature of the new image, any more than they can explain the attraction it holds for a mind that is foreign to the process of its creation.  The poet does not confer the past of his image upon me, and yet his image immediately takes root in me.  The communicability of an unusual image is a fact of great ontological significance.  We shall return to this question of communion through brief, isolate, rapid actions.  Images excite us--afterwards--but they are not the phenomena of an excitement.  In all psychological research, we can, of course, bear in mind psychoanalytical methods for determining the personality of a poet, and thus find a measure of the pressures--but above all of the oppressions--that a poet has been subjected to in the course of his life.  But the poetic act itself, the sudden image, the flare-up of being in the imagination, are inaccessible to such investigations.  In order to clarify the problem of the poetic image philosophically, we shall have to have recourse to a phenomenology of the imagination.  By this should be understood a study of the phenomenon of the poetic image when it emerges into the consciousness as a direct product of the heart, soul and being of man, apprehended in his actuality. "

Sounds like fun to me...I'm loving these Bachelard books.  Didn't laugh out loud in gladness as much as with Poetics of Space.  This book is a sampler.  Didn't know that when I ordered it.

Whole Earth Discipline
by Stewart Brand
-Pragmatic and optimistic and terrifying, and well-written, I thought.  Sometimes when I'm searching around for a big abstract category of people to blame, I'll think, "engineers are the ones to blame!"  Brand says he thinks like an engineer, like a problem solver, and that engineering will save us.  We'll see.  Seems like someone really has get to the people in charge, who make the rules, and change their minds. 

Generation Ecstasy
by Simon Reynolds
-I have to say, I really didn't read all that much of this.  But I really liked the parts I did read (esp. the Intro!).  I like Reynolds' writing very much (and it's not just me--he's quite widely respected) and like his critical approach more than I like the music.  More at his several blogs. When I read his series on "the nuum and its discontents" I wished there was a equivalent comics critic.

The Poetics of Space
by Gaston Bachelard

Starting Point 1979 - 1996
Hayao Miyazaki
-collection of interviews and lectures and articles, by the maker of my favorite movies (so far).

The Way Through Doors
by Jesse Ball
-Couldn't get into this. I love meta-, but here there's too much archness/cuteness for me. Maybe there's some smartness to be found in the rest of the book.  Not my style.

The Book of Disquiet
Fernando Pessoa
(Extraordinary Classics)
-finally finished this after years (?) of off and on reading.  It seems like the right way to read this book, with its short, dense meditations.  I'll keep dipping back into it, it's a mental space that's good to return to from time to time.  But I couldn't live there.  I loved the book and felt a fondness and kinship with the author, even though at times I disagreed with the philosophy and attitude toward life he set forth in some of the meditations.  He changes his mind often, however, and experiments with ideas, plays with them, and so it seems wrong to hold him firmly to anything he says.  Irony and dreaming and play, not dialectics.  The book is not about setting forth arguments, though he does try, arguing as an absolute aesthete, the real deal.  This book was never even published in his lifetime.  ...anyways...look it up...  It goes on the shelf with favorite, wise, dense books I'll return to over and over during the years I have left.

33 1/3 - Another Green World

- not much new to me, but easier to read than Aja or DNation

Time

by Eva Hoffman

-small books, big ideas series by Picador.  Intro was good, so I was excited to read this, but the bulk of it was just "notecard writing" (is there a term for this?)  If you're interested in the broad topic "time," like me, I'd say read the Intro and the final chapter.

Recent noteworthy articles and essays (off top of my head):

Adam Ciralsky in Vanity Fair on Blackwater

James Fallows in the Atlantic on “How America Can Rise Again"

Believer essay by Bachelder about kid and surprises. (Tried reading Bear vs Shark, couldn't get through it, despite the occasional good joke)

David Owen on smells in NYer (loved this, and the nickname one a while back.  I'll buy this book when it comes out)

Article on Tea Party in New Yorker got terrifying with the Creation Museum cameo!

33 1/3 Series:
Aja
Daydream Nation
-DNation not recommended, crazy writing.  Aja for chord nerds only, and session musician imdb-ing.

Gave up on Madame Bovary 1/3 through!  Complicated feelings about it, respeck, but couldn't take enough pleasure in it to keep going.  Might try again.

The Invention of Air
by Steven Johnson

-Good pop science/history, short, but a lot packed in here, good ideas.  I probably should read his other books. (also see his talk with Eno at ICA, can be found in iTunes podcasts)

Climate Change Links (Leaks)

When It Changed

Leak Pseudo Scandal

Oy

The Real Leak

Hansen

Krugman re: Hansen

On Some Faraway Beach: The Life and Times of Brian Eno
by David Sheppard
-disappointed in this, but dutifully finished. Would have liked more ideas to chew on. Instead mostly a rundown of "then he did this, then this, then this" with few interesting insights into the whys and wherefores.

Reading a lot, as always, but not finishing anything.

Entre Parentesis
La Pista de Hielo
Putas Asesinas
Una Novelita Lumpen por Roberto Bolaño
Eleven Kinds of Lonelines by Richard Yates
Anton Chekhov's Short Stories (Norton)

Eating the Sun: How Plants Power the Planet
by Oliver Morton
-Really enjoyed this.

Little Lulu Vol:19
by John Stanley et.al

Bourbon Island 1730
by Lewis Trondheim and Olivier Appollodorus

On Deep History and the Brain
by Daniel Lord Smail

The Desire of My Eyes: the Life and Work of John Ruskin
by Wolfgang Kemp

Herbie Vol. 2

Monologues for Calculating the Density of Black Holes
by Andrew Nelson

Angels and Ages
by Adam Gopnik

Herbie Vol. 1 and 2

--
skimmed/didn't finish

A Biographer's Notebook
by Hector Bolitho (good, funny)

The Scramble for Africa
by Thomas Pakenham (good, not funny)

Breaking the Headache Cycle
by Ian Livingstone and Donna Novak
(I don't get migraines, but I was curious the relaxation exercises)

There's a few more but I can't remember offhand.

The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll
by Alvaro Mutis
-I can only recommend the first 3 novellas, which I really enjoyed...but considering what came after, I now doubt my reaction to those stories. As the book goes on, the interesting structures and adventure gets dialed way down, and the cliches and fake world-weariness and self-regarding bullshit gets to be too much, and it turns into almost a self-parody. By the end I was rolling my eyes big time! and almost quit reading, but kept with it. Sorry Katie.

(These are the interesting and noteworthy articles and essays I read this month.)

March
(open)

The Last Book Party
Gideon Lewis-Kraus

Invisible Hands
Ken Silverstein

Curtain callsBy Edward Hoagland

Fatal Distraction
by Gene Weingarten
-Overwhelming. Be sure to read to the end.

The Unfinished
by D.T. Max

A Devil Obsessed Conglomeration of Christian Misfits
by William Giraldi

Six Walks in the Fictional Woods
by Umberto Eco

Last Evenings on Earth and By Night in Chile
by Roberto Bolaño

The Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
by James Joyce

The Odyssey
Robert Fagles translation

Difficult Loves and Marcovaldo
by Italo Calvino

The New Sun
by Taro Tashima

I'm going to start keeping track of noteworthy articles, essays, and longer blog posts I read on month-by-month basis. I'll add to this entry until Feb. is done.

February

Speaking in Tongues
Zadie Smith

Wow, Fiction Works!
Colson Whitehead

Sick in the Head
Why America won't get the health-care system it needs
Luke Mitchell

The war on telephone poles
By Eula Biss

A brief personal history of altweekly comics in America
Tom Tomorrow

The Dolphin Reader
ed. Douglas Hunt

-This is 1000+ pages, an anthology textbook of essays, 1986 edition. There are several editions of this anthology. From what I can tell by a quick look around the Internet, different editions have sometimes very different content. I think it's pretty great; at times it felt like reading a great issue of a giant magazine--a lot of it is magazine-style writing.

It goes high on 2 of my lists: "Books That Give You a Decent Liberal Education w/o Going to College" and "How To Write."

These were some of the highlights:

"Twins" and "Progress and Change"
by EB White
"Lord Bacon"
by Thomas Babington Macaulay
"On a Greek Holiday"
by Alice Bloom
"Why Paul Fussell Thinks He's Better Than You"
by James Fallows
(The section on "Art and Sport" contained the highest number of essays that I really enjoyed:)
"In the Country"
by Roger Angell (I was surprisingly moved by this, about loving baseball, of all things!)
"Georgia O' Keefe"
by Joan Didion
"Bullfighting"
by Ernest Hemingway
"Art for Art's Sake"
by EM Forster
"Benefit of Clergy"
by George Orwell
"Las Meninas"
by Kenneth Clark
(and...)
"Holy Dying"
by Jeremy Taylor
"Sightseer"
by Walker Percy
"Writing and Typing"
by John Kenneth Galbraith
"Examsmanship and the Liberal Arts"
by William G. Perry

(Left off this list are some classics which "go without saying," like "Civil Disobedience," "Letter from Birmingham Jail" or "Once More to the Lake" etc. Also Jessica Mitford's muckraking journalism makes a couple of inspiring appearances. She is new to me.)

As a service to future generations, I also kept track of what the LAME! essays, which I thought were either written in a weak or annoying style, or full of bad thinking, usually both:

"The Abolition of Man"
by CS Lewis (I have read this essay/book probably 4 or 5 times over the years, and I grow to despise it more and more. Someday I hope to write more about it...)
"Hugh Hefner" and "The Right Stuff"
by Tom Wolfe (These confirmed for me why my spider-sense has told me to avoid Tom Wolfe over the years. I don't like reading the way he writes.)
"The Middle Class"
by Paul Fussell
"In Defense of Snobs"
by William Manchester
"Going Home Again: The New American Scholarship Boy" and "Mr. Secrets"
by Richard Rodriguez (Not really that offensive...just mediocre navel-gazing.)
"The Poetry of Edwin Arlington Robinson"
by Robert Frost
"Suburbia: Of Thee I Sing"
by Phyllis McGinley
"Sunrise with Seamonsters"
by Paul Theroux (I have liked some of his writing in other places, but this was like being told a long anecdote by a person you wouldn't want to hang out with.)
"The Faith"
by David Bradley (skippable memoir)
"No Essays, Please!"
Joseph Wood Krutch (What a name! Not that bad, just particularly skippable.)
"Enlargement of Mind"
by John Henry Newman (This one has some meaty ideas to think about, but Newman is one of THE classic versions of my arch-enemies, the Disingenuous Intellectual Christian Krusader, whose schtick goes something like, "here's an argument showing how I'm right and you're wrong...but by the way, just so you know, also you're going to burn eternally in hell...so there's that to consider as well...")

----
Six Walks in the Fictional Woods
by Umberto Eco

Wolf Whistle and
Music of the Swamp

by Lewis Nordan

Savage Detectives (in English), Amulet, and Nazi Literature in the Americas
by Roberto Bolaño

The All Girl Football Team
by Lewis Nordan