Books Acquired Recently

Bacigalupi, Paolo. The Windup Girl. 2009. San Francisco: Night Shade, 2012.

This book and Walker’s were recently recommended to me by a new friend that I met at Rocky Mountain MLA last week. They both sound fascinating. The reviews of The Windup Girl just inside of the front cover compare it to William Gibson’s writing, which I love, so I look forward to getting to read it as a diversion from my scholarly reading (which is not to make a value judgment of it as somehow being unworthy of study, but simply to say that at this point I have no plans to teach it or write about it), perhaps over Thanksgiving Break. Bought on amazon.com.

Castillo, Ana. Watercolor Women Opaque Men. Willimantic: Curbstone, 2005.

I went to a reading by Castillo last night that was one of the best I’ve ever been to. She only read six poems, but they were some of her most political, and as such were quite powerful, especially because her delivery of them was perfect. I felt the need to buy a book to commemorate the occasion, and this was the only one of her books that was for sale which I didn’t already have (because it’s a novel in verse, blech. But maybe it will surprise me.).  She gave me a lovely personal inscription.

Fry, Paul H. Theory of Literature. New Haven: Yale UP, 2012.

I received this as a free exam copy from the publisher. I’m teaching a literary theory course for the first time next semester, and while I won’t be assigning this book (perhaps I will in the future, but it arrived after I had to turn in my textbook list), I find that it’s always helpful to get several different perspectives on the subject that one is teaching, so it will come in handy.

Rushdie, Salman. Joseph Anton: A Memoir. New York: Random, 2012.

Rushdie is one of my favorite writers (and I think he is one of the best writers alive, certainly more deserving of the Nobel Prize in Literature than this year’s winner), so I didn’t need an excuse to buy this book, but I have one anyway: we’re reading The Satanic Verses in the aforementioned theory course, thus his new memoir about the novel’s political aftermath will provide some helpful background knowledge. Bought on amazon.com.

Walker, Frank X. Affrilachia. Lexington: Old Cove, 2000.

I love poetry, and African American literature is one of my academic interests, so when I heard about Walker I wanted to read him right away. I got this book used via amazon.com, and when it arrived I happily discovered that Walker had inscribed it to one of his students, a “Michele.” I would never get rid of a book that was inscribed to me even if I knew I was never going to read it again, which makes me wonder what this particular copy’s story is. Did the student die and her family took all of her books to a used bookstore without looking through them first? Did she sell the book because she was desperate for cash? (probably not, because I got it for less than five dollars, though I’ve had students sell their books back to the bookstore for less because they were just that desperate) Did she–it’s horrible to think about–forget that it was inscribed? Did she have a falling out with Walker? Did she join a religious order that forced her to get rid of all of her possessions? One could write a fascinating short story about this volume’s history. Anyway, I am happy to add it to my library.

As regular readers of the blog will note, I have acquired thirteen books in the last nine days. This is a lot, even for me. But it’s been the perfect storm of events: a conference, visits to two new-to-me excellent bookstores, a powerful reading and signing, and the need to begin preparing for next semester. Also, I’ve just finished teaching Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, so I’m feeling especially sensitive about the necessity to surround myself with books since both novels remind us how much of a privilege it is to be able to interact with literature. In my further defense, I have already read three of the thirteen, so they aren’t just sitting there looking pretty on the shelf.

The End of Newsweek

I read today that Newsweek will cease publication of its print version at the end of 2012: http://money.cnn.com/2012/10/18/news/companies/newsweek-print-edition/index.html?hpt=hp_t3.

This is sad news. The magazine is another casualty of the shift toward electronic texts, which, as I have written about here before (and yes, I am aware of the irony of writing against digital culture in a blog), is not nearly as positive of a trend as it is made out to be. From a practical standpoint, I question whether this decision will help Newsweek. I don’t think many of their print readers will shift over to the electronic edition, nor do I think that people who primarily read news online will be interested in getting it from Newsweek. In other words, the magazine’s declining sales aren’t just a result of a decline in print readers, they are also a result of a shift in people’s view of the news. My late teens/early twenties students make it clear that “getting the news” is not important to them, whereas for someone even of my generation (I was born in 1980), reading the news has always been an essential aspect of being an educated person. The shift from print to electronic texts is problematic in part because we lose the ritual aspects of reading that makes reading something fun to do, and without this ritual people read less and society gets dumber.

Newsweek‘s demise saddens me in part for personal reasons because my mother has subscribed to it for all of my life, and it was the first magazine that I read on a regular basis, simply because it was around. Being exposed to it at such an early age is what helped me to realize that educated people care about the world around them, and helped me begin exploring other ways of learning about the world as well. My mother is an example of the audience that Newsweek will lose as a result of it shift to being a web-only publication. She uses the internet some, but is not enamored with it enough to use it for tasks other than keeping up with what her children are doing. She’ll just continue to get news from her local newspaper and do without the extra information that she gets from the magazine.

Paul Lukas’s Permanent Record Blog

I just got around to checking out Permanent Record, which is a blog written by Paul Lukas of UniWatch fame. Here is the address: http://www.permanentrecordproject.blogspot.com/.

As someone who is also fascinated by print culture ephemera, I think Permanent Record is fantastic! The blog’s description mentions writing about topics including “things left inside of old books,” which is a subject near to my heart. I sometimes intentionally leave a variety of paper objects in my books, including receipts (especially if I bought the book at a memorable bookstore), plane ticket stubs, business cards, cut-out New Yorker cartoons, and so on. That way, whenever I die (which is when I will get rid of my books, no sooner), some of my books will have interesting things in them for their new owners to discover.

The USA Continues on the Road to the World Cup

The USA advanced to the final round of qualifying for the 2014 (Men’s) World Cup last night with their 3-1 victory over Guatemala. The Yanks won their group, which was expected, though they put in several terrible performances along the way. The USA is still a favorite to grab one of the three automatic qualifying spots from the six-team final qualifying round, but it must be said that they go into the Hexagonal with poorer form than any of the other five teams aside from possibly Jamaica or Panama. The USA was able to skate through their first qualifying group with a makeshift roster (due in part to injuries and in part to head coach Jurgen Klinsmann’s experimentation with different lineups) because of a lack of quality competition, but the level of play in the Hexagonal will be much more intense. The Yanks need to get their act together sooner rather than later.

Books Acquired Recently: Rocky Mountain MLA Edition II

Today I walked around downtown Boulder, Colorado with a colleague and several new friends as Rocky Mountain MLA wound down. We visited two excellent bookstores, Red Letter Secondhand Books (where they gave me my books in a recycled Borders bag! Independent bookstores forever!) and Left Hand Book Collective, a fantastic all-volunteer leftist bookstore (though I’d like to think that their name is inspired in part by Simon and Garfunkel’s “A Simple Desultory Philippic”: “I been Ayn Randed, nearly branded Communist, ’cause I’m left-handed. That’s the hand I use… well, never mind.”). I bought the Atwood and Whitman at the former and the Marable and Hugo (half-price!) at the latter.

Atwood, Margaret. Dancing Girls and Other Stories. 1977. New York: Anchor, 1998.

I have an essay coming out on one of the stories from this collection, “Rape Fantasies,” but did not actually own the collection itself. I’ve been looking for a copy of it for a while, and this one is in good condition and was only $6.00.

Hugo, Richard. Selected Poems. New York: Norton, 1979.

I’ve enjoyed the Hugo that I’ve read in anthologies, and have almost bought his Collected Poems several times. I haven’t bought or read any poetry in quite a while, so I decided to finally break down and buy one of Hugo’s books since both the vendor and the price were right.

Marable, Manning. Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention. New York: Penguin, 2011.

Marable’s book has gotten excellent reviews (in fact, it won the Pulitzer) and I’ve been meaning to pick it up for a while.

Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass and Democratic Vistas. London: Everyman’s, 1912.

Whitman is one of my literary obsessions, and as such I own numerous printings of Leaves of Grass. This Everyman’s Library edition is aesthetically pleasing and includes an introduction by one of Whitman’s friends, Horace Traubel. It’s interesting to note that Whitman died in relative obscurity in 1892, but twenty years later he was already canonical enough for the Library to reprint his work.

Books Acquired Recently: Rocky Mountain MLA Edition

I’m currently at the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association conference, which has been fun so far although the conference hotel does not have free internet access. This afternoon I took a stroll through the book fair and picked up a few things (plus ordered several more that I will write about when I receive them):

Eliot, T.S. The Waste Land and Other Poems. Ed. Joseph Black, et al. Peterborough: Broadview, 2011.

I love Eliot–he’s another one of those Modernists that I enjoy, but feel guilty about enjoying–and teach him from time to time. This volume, which I got free as an exam copy and might actually assign sometime, includes Eliot’s first three books of poems. I’ve assigned Broadview’s texts before, and have always been happy with them because they are handsome (much nicer looking than Norton critical editions), inexpensive, and well-supplemented by scholarly paratext.

Max, D.T. Every Love Story Is A Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace. New York: Viking, 2012.

I love Wallace’s writing (everyone who cares about literature should read Infinite Jest) and have wanted to read this biography since I read a review of it in the New Yorker and a short excerpt in Newsweek (of all places!). The Penguin publishing group always has fantastic deals at these kinds of conferences, as was the case here: I paid $10.00 for a $27.95 book!

Moon, Michael. Darger’s Resources. Durham: Duke UP, 2012.

I picked this up for free as a review copy from the Rocky Mountain Review. A free book in exchange for writing a review that will be published sounds like a swindle to me! The book is about Henry Darger, a janitor who wrote and illustrated an epic (over 15,000 pages) story about a children’s war in his spare time that was not discovered until after his death. The story of him as an outsider artist is quite fascinating and very controversial (some call his illustrations child pornography because the children are often naked, but others argue that the children’s nudity is innocent because there is evidence that Darger was mentally disabled [e.g., the naked girls in his book have penises, apparently because Darger had so little sexual knowledge that he did not realize how females differ from males]), so I am excited to read Moon’s book.

Patell, Cyrus R.K., and Bryan Waterman, eds. The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of New York. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010.

I find the Cambridge Companions series very useful, thus as a New York City native I was intrigued by this volume. It was on sale for $11.00, down from $24.99. Aside from looking generally interesting, it has chapters on several of my particular interests, including Walt Whitman and the city’s role in LGBT literature.

 

 

Junot Diaz’s This Is How You Lose Her

I just finished reading Junot Diaz’s new book, This Is How You Lose Her. I read it in one sitting because I couldn’t put it down. The stories basically all have the same plot–an incredibly sexy woman leaves an idiotic man (usually Yunior) who cheats on her–but Diaz’s language, especially his gift for dialogue and atmosphere, make them all riveting. It is not quite as good a book as his first one, Drown, but it is still a masterpiece. I don’t have much to say about it because there’s really nothing negative about it to nitpick, and its beauty is best experienced on one’s own rather than having a reviewer try to describe it secondhand.

Books Acquired Recently

Child, Lydia Maria. Letters From New-York. 1843. Ed. Bruce Mills. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1998.

I picked this up from the “free book box” at school. I’ve never heard of Child, but I love books about New York City and I am also interested in the Abolitionist movement as an extension of my scholarship on African American literature (according to the blurb she was a prominent advocate for the cause), so the book sounds fascinating.

Diaz, Junot. This is How You Lose Her. New York: Riverhead, 2012.

I love Diaz’s previous short story collection, Drown, and have read a few of the stories in this new collection in the New Yorker and loved them, as well. So it was simply a question of when, not if, I would buy this book.

Bought on amazon.com (I tried to buy it at a local bookstore, but they were sold out).

Next week I’ll be at the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association conference, where I will try not to go crazy buying books from the book fair. But I’m sure I’ll have at least a few acquisitions to report!

 

Katie Baker on Mike Francesa

Katie Baker has a hilarious column on grantland.com about Mike Francesa’s show this past Monday: http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/8452270/the-jets-giants-mike-francesa-bad-weekend-nyc-sports.

Some of my happiest childhood memories are of listening to WFAN, New York City’s all-sports radio station (the jingle comes into my head immediately: “Sports radio sixty-six, the FAN! W-F-A-N, New York!”), in the afternoon after coming home from junior high school or at night when the Mets, Rangers, or Knicks were playing. We didn’t have cable, so the radio was the only option for experiencing these games during the week. I learned the words to “O Canada” just from listening to Rangers games, and can still remember the words to it better than those of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” When I listened to WFAN in the afternoons, Francesa’s old show, Mike and the Mad Dog, was on, so I can hear Francesa’s voice as I read Baker’s column. Good stuff.

Somewhere Else by Jan Guenther Braun

I just finished reading Jan Guenther Braun’s 2008 novel Somewhere Else. Although the prose is a bit uneven in the first half of the book, reading it was one of the most powerful experiences I have ever had with literature. I felt physically uneasy while reading most of the book, which speaks to just how much it affected me (a good thing). I am still at a point where I am recovering from the reading experience, and thus don’t have much to say about the novel here other than that I strongly recommend it. It’s about a Mennonite teenager from Saskatchewan who leaves home because her family rejects her for being a lesbian and tries to find herself sexually and spiritually. I first got into Mennonite literature because it gave me narratives that helped me to understand myself and helped me realize that I needed to leave the Church rather than forcing myself to conform to its various oppressions, and after a long period of not reading Mennonite literature it is again reflecting myself back at me via the narratives of other queer Mennos.