Category: Reading and Books

I’m recommending 3-5 books a week at my new mailing list which you can sign up for here. No spam, just books.

Along the Border Lies by Paul Flores ($12.95 in paperback, Creative Arts Books, 208 pages)

Paul is a poet here in the Bay Area whose first novel goes off like a cannon. It’s a series of interlocking stories, all with people in their twenties and thirties and their relationship to the California/Mexican border between San Diego and Tijuana. Some on the California side burn with fury about “those fuckin’ illegals” even though their parents were once immigrants as well. Others were once prosperous business people in Tijuana before it became a sleezy playground for white, American college students. More still traverse the border with ease, carrying cargo both legal and illegal, with sometimes nothing more than a desire not to be defined by that invisible line across the canyon.

Along the Border Lies is the story the movie Traffic should have told. Tough, unblinking, yet surprising tender, its a great read about a part of this country in daily struggle over the definition of “American”

Authentically Black: Essays for a Black Silent Majority by John McWhorter ($25.00 in Hardcover, Gotham Books, 264 pages).

Professor McWhorter, a linguist at UC Berkeley caused a bit of a row in 2001 when his previous book Losing The Race: Self-Sabatoge in Black America posited that the educational and societal troubles of African-Americans were basic human issues not insititutionalized racism. I read the first 100 pages of Losing the Race while killing time in Cody’s Books in Berkeley and was bowled over by how eloquently McWhorter (who is black, if it matters to you) argues what seems like a terribly Un-PC opinion but McWhorter is one smart fella. And I will read just about anything from smart fellas who can write, particularly if they are approaching the fundamental tenents of our society (race, class, gender) in a way I haven’t seen before. And I’ve seen most of them.

His publisher was goodly enough to send me his new collection of essays Authentically Black, which epxands his arguments into the realms of popular culture, the business word, and politics. I just started reading it on the bus yesterday. I can’t wait for my bus ride to the office tomorrow.

The Great Movies by Roger Ebert
(29.95$ in Hardcover, Broadway Books, 432 pages.)

In 1996, Roger Ebert pursuaded the brass at the Chicago Sun-Times to let him re-view 100 of his favorite movies and write a bi-monthy essay on each. His feeling was that with the slow death of independent video stores, repatory movie houses and classic movies on late night TV, that film history was in danger of beginning, in most film fan’s minds, with Star Wars.

His book isn’t an AFI-style list of The 100 Best Movies of All Time. Most of those lists are old news anyway, but rather a primer on the high watermarks of the history of the movies. His essays are personal rather than didactic, allowing me to read the book for pleasure first but then eager to jet to the video store soon afterward.

I’m recommending 3-5 books a week at my new mailing list which you can sign up for here. No spam, just books.

“Songbook” by Nick Hornby
($26, McSweeney’s Books, 147 pages in Hardcover)

I’m pretty sure I’ve recommended this book before and it’s still a bit too expensive for my blood but I can’t help myself. Nick Hornby has done a fantastic little book about his favorite songs, a 3 or 4 page essay on each. Comes with a CD with some of those songs but you’re better off reading this one next to your computer so can download the hundreds of tunes Hornby mentions so lovingly.

Old readers of my swill will now that I have my issues with Hornby’s fictional style. But as a music critic, he’s just plain sublime. He writes as a 45 year-old divorce’ with a kid, which I think describes most rock critics even though they still think they’re 19 and working at the college radio station. Plus Hornby addresses music snobbery head on and calls himself an unabashed pop fan without apology. A listener after my own heart.

“Rory & Ita” by Roddy Doyle ($23.95, Viking, 352 pages in Hardcover)

Roddy Doyle is perhaps my favorite fiction author, one of the few out there where I’ve read every one of his books. If you’re not familiar with Mr. Doyle, you probably are with the movies based on his books, “The Commitments”, “The Snapper” and “The Van.” This is first non-fiction book, a memoir of his parents, how they met at a New Years dance in 1947 and raised a bunch of kids in the surburbs of the Irish capitol.

I don’t have any idea if Roy & Ita Doyle are interesting people or not but I have a feeling that A) they are and B) if not, their son Roddy will make them that way. He hasn’t let me down yet and I don’t expect him to this time.

“Motherless Brooklyn” by Jonathan Lethem
($13.00, 311 pages, Vintage Paperback)

My friend Nina has been on me to read this one for several months now. When I saw her in Austin last week and she gently reminded me that I had promised, I moved it right to the front of the Nightable line. She’s about the 5 person to insist I read this book. Finally I’m listening.

I guess I’ve been hesitant because Lethem has big Pomo cred which almost always means an author’s work is unreadable or as pleasent to dive into as swimming pool without water. And for pete’s sakes, it’s a crime novel about a detective with Tourettes Syndrome. Yet my buddy Dave, who doesn’t have much patience for thicket and bramble narratives either, said “you’ll finish it in a day.” I’m gonna give it a try.

After a lively exchange from my last post, reader Matt Kirkpatrick sent me this story on how attendence in creative writing classes, of both the savory and not so variety, is on the rise. Interesting stuff.

Novelist Ann Patchett was on City Arts and Lectures (no archiving on their site for some inexplicable reason) last night and was fantastic. It’s such a relief to hear a writer talk about “the craft”, how she’s never wanted to be anything but a writer, and yet wear it so lightly. I’m beginning to think there is nothing worse than a self-important writer with no sense of humor.

My favorite part? Someone asked her the old standard “I want to be a writer. Do you have any advice?” Most writers will equivocate when asked this for fear of alienating their readers and sounding like a snot. Patchett did not and answered perfectly with this story. I paraphrase…

“Everytime I go to a cocktail party, at least one person says something like this…’I’m a neurosurgeon but I’m thinking about writing a novel. So I’m going to take Tuesdays off and write a novel. To which I answer ‘What a coincidence. I’m going to take Tuesdays off to practise neurosurgery!”

Writing is work and study. Years of it. It doesn’t mean everybody doesn’t have the right to try. It just means that “writing” and “operating a word processor” are two very different things.

I’m sold. Now I have no excuse for not reading Bel Canto which Suzan’s sister Anne Marie recommended to me last fall has been sitting on my shelf for like 6 months now.

Nick Hornby’s new book Songbook (published by McSweeney’s) , a collection of essays on his favorite songs with an accompaning CD is fantastic. I’m not the worlds biggest fan of Hornby’s fiction, even though I’ve read them all. Although I’ve always had fun with his novels, I think he’s week at character voice. Or put another way, I feel like I’ve got a story in front of me and Nick Hornby jabbering in my ear about it.

His non-fiction though, oh yeah. His pop music column in the New Yorker are sublime, even when they focus too often on bands like Sublime. So Songbook was a slam dunk for me, albeit a rather pricey one. It’s a little book (like 150 pages) but nearly 25 bucks. Yeoow. However the production quality (complete with lovely illustrations by Marcel Dzama) is superb.

Right now I’m on a three song a day diet and very satisfied.

Some prize finds at this weekend’s Alternative Press Expo…

—Alison Elizabeth Taylor, a bright, sexy comic book artist from Los Angeles whose book Synthetic Universe reminds me of a blunter Ghost World. She’s also a painter and illustrator. I picked up a mini comic of hers called “The Perfect Job.”

—Comic Dork Comics: They’re a boyfriend/girlfriend operation (I think) out of Grass Valley, CA a little town northeast of Sacremento. I don’t know exactly what to make of their first comic “The Cosmics”which is on its way, but they ain’t exactly in a comic book mecca so I appreciate their spunk.

—C. Scott Morse. A catalytically talented artist who has done stuff for Dark Horse, Marvel, Top Shelf, the biggies of comics as well as self-publishing. I picked up a sketch book of his bound in foam rubber. Far out.

—Black Velvet Studios. I’m totally unclear on what these guys do but the artwork is way way phat.

–“Raptoonist”. A term used to describe a cartoonist with a hip-hop sensibility. Aaron McGruder, creator of “The Boondocks” and Keith Knight of “The K Chronicles” pioneered the field but its growth has only just begun.

I feel like I’ve posted about Book Thing of Baltimore before but it bears repeating. Some guy named Russell has turned his whole basement into a book giveaway depot. You just show up on the weekends and take books away. That’s it. No catch. No joke. When I was in town last, I told myself I was going to take one book because that was all that would fit in my suitcase.

Laugh. I walked away with 9 books that my friend Nina was kind enough to ship back to me. What a great idea this is.

My friend Po Bronson has a new book out called What Should I Do With My Life? Ya’ll probably know Po as the guy who wrote a handful of books about Silicon Valley at the height of the dot com boom and drove gaggles of women crazy. He then, like lots of people in the maelstrom of it all, spent some time soul searching and recorded those searches and others in book form.

Hundreds of people showed up for his first San Francisco reading at Clean Well Lighted Place for Books leading me then believe the book would begin a nationwide trend of life assessment in some circles. Apparently it already has.

My copy is on the coffee table. I’m almost there.

The good folks at Sasquatch Books in Seattle were kind enough to send me One Hundred Demons by Lynda Barry which I am mad excited about reading. My friend Laura has been pulling at my earlobe for a couple of years now to read Lynda Barry, a cartoonist for Salon and whose formidable writing talents give punch to both words in both “Graphic” and “Novel.” One Hundred Demons is getting great reviews every which way including a mention in Nick Hornby’s recent New York Times piece (reg. required) on 6 graphic novels worth watching.

I’m all over it.

Alex Good, the mind behind the wise Canadian book site Good Reports cracks me up every year with his annual awards, The Puffies, given to the emptiest windiest book jack blurbs. To wit…

“Behind each word, each sentence, you can feel the blood coursing, the flesh breathing and the sinews tensing.”

“A writer who sets his foot firmly on your throat from the start; he won’t let up and you won’t want him to.”

Ugh.