This Week’s Recommended Books (6.26.2003)

This week’s theme: Work schwag.

Every now and then, one of the many in the pile of books I’d like to read and some work related project or event intersect. It happened a few weeks ago when I got a call from Drawn & Quarterly, an excellent graphic novel publisher based in Montreal, and asked me to do an onstage conversation at the Booksmith bookstore in Haight Ashbury with Adrian Tomine, the creator of the fantastic comic, Optic Nerve. Adrian was promoting the paperback release of Summer Blonde, his latest collection of stories based on the comic, and being a huge fan, I agreed.

Sumer Blonde contains issues 4-8 of Optic Nerve and is the perfect graphic novel if right now you’re saying to yourself “I have no interest in comics or graphic novels.” Called “the Raymond Carver of comics” Tomine creates worlds of thwarted romances, lonliness and youth seen as a curse as well as a blessing. It’s a quick but enormously satisfying read and a solid introduction to this growing, fascinating segment of contemporary literature.

Summer Blonde by Adrian Tomine
(Drawn & Quarterly, $16.95 in paperback, 132 pp.)

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Okay, who remembers the last issue where I couldn’t stop hooting about Random Family by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc? Well I finished last night and my enthusiasm was justified. This is a stunningly beautiful, sad book about 2 sets of teenagers becoming adults amidst the poverty, violence and addiction of the South Bronx. LeBlanc, who spent ten years with her subjects, writes in a straighforward, journalistic style that treats Coco, Jessica, Cesar and the other members of this family not as sympathy cases, not as poster children for larger social issues, but simply as human beings. And strangly then, it becomes both the story of these people’s lives and a devastating look at the last twenty years of war on the poor of urban America.

I don’t typically cheerlead for any one book because I come in contact with too many of them and I’m a bit of a skeptic. This is different. This is one book you cannot afford to miss. Please do yourself and your reading life a favor by getting a copy of Random Family.

Random Family by Adrian Nicole LeBlance
(Scribner, 25$ in hardcover, 408 pages)

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Before books became my career, I used to take a break after finishing a book by reading essays, short stories, poems, magazine articles, something shorter and lighter before plunging into the next book. I got this idea from the prologue of John Barth’s Further Fridays, a collection of essays and lectures that I received as a gift while a student at Johns Hopkins where Barth tought until he retired. Barth spent weekday mornings working on his novels then held seminars in the afternoons. After his Thursday class, he and his wife split for their country home on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Friday morning, he would recharge his batteries by writing a light essay, preparing a lecture or a quick missive on some topic that had been bothering him. He took the weekend off.

I love this idea of shifting gears, gently but with purpose, in your work, instead of slamming on the breaks on Friday night and then passing out from the whiplash. I used to do this regularly in my reading but have felt in such a hurry this year to finish books that haven’t paused for so much as a breath before finishing one and starting another.

I’m going to change that. For the next week, I’m going to clean out my reading pipes by dabbling in reading essays, short fiction and magazines I’ve let pile up. Next week’s Smoke Signal will be dedicated to the places I go. But I’ll probably start at the source. Therefore…

Further Fridays: Essays, Lectures and other Nonfiction 1984-1994
By John Barth (Little, Brown, 392 pages).

• Category: Reading and Books