Feeling Bookish
I'm reading lots... also actually have started writing again, so I haven't been blogging as much. I am still trying to figure out my chick-lit book. I think I have an idea, so cross your fingers.
In the meantime I've discovered some new writers and also enjoyed the latest from old friends. During my trip to LA I read Kate Christensen's In the Drink, one of the books (along with The Girl's Guide to Hunting and Fishing) that is credited with launching Chick-Lit as a supposed genre. Like Girl's Guide, it is much more "literate" than one associates with what the genre has become, but it also speaks to the conclusion that Jennifer Weiner draws-- that Chick-Lit is a false catch all for books by women. I also read Christensen's The Great Man while I was in LA. They represent book ends for the writer; both are really good in very different ways. I would have never expected the writer of In the Drink, which so totally captures the sense of waiting for life to happen that gets people through their twenties, would capture so so well the full blown adults from a bygone era in The Great Man. I just picked up Trouble, her latest offering, and like the other two that I've read thus far, it's engrossing from page one. On the other hand, I have put down The Epicure's Lament several times, without even making it through the first third.
While I was in LA-- at the Westside Pavillion Barnes & Noble, to be precise-- I also picked up two works of nonfiction. Where Did You Sleep Last Night? By Danzy Senna, who I knew when she was at Stanford and I was at Berkeley, and whose fiction debut, Caucasia, I read in practically one sitting. I haven't gotten to it, yet, but the new one looks promising. She and I both lived in Cambridge/Boston at the same time-- during the bussing era-- and I remember talking to her about similar experiences with the terror of seeing adults so angry and out of control. We also each have parents were very involved in the civil rights movement, much to the chagrin of their parents, so I figure I will find some interesting stuff in this book. Because of my personal history, I have been really excited to see that there are some interesting and funny looking memoirs out there from Gen-Xers whose parents were idealist Baby Boomers (see: When Skateboards Will Be Free and skip anything by Rebecca Walker, thanks).
The other is A Day in the Life: One Family, the Beautiful People & the End of the Sixties. For some reason I really like things set in the era in which I was born (people always say the Sixties ended with Watergate and Nixon's subsequent resignation in 1974). I like reading books about different music eras and artists, even when I'm not that intensely into the music. In this case, the central characters are linked quite closely to the Rolling Stones. I'm a Stones fan, but not a superfan (Keith Richards really pissed me off way back in the eighties by dismissing rap music as unoriginal and saying something like, it was stealing music that you didn't write. This from the man whose group made their career by stealing every single blues song and riff of Muddy Waters' that they could get their hands on... seriously?!). I like the intel and background information, but what is really of great interest is just the crazy stuff that happens; LSD-induced psychosis, Keith Richards, drug smuggling, Keith Richards, benign neglect and uh, yeah... Keith Richards.
I read A Day in the Life on the nonstop back to DC. Right before we landed, as I was reading about the main character's resescutation of his dubious rock promoting career via the 90's rave scene, the flight attendants told us about Michael Jackson's death. The book is engrossing in a prurient-interest sense (the son of the main characters plays the husband on Medium, which is actually a favorite show of mine. I didn't realize this until I was well into the book) but isn't particularly well written. If you like the era, it's a good read. If you don't, you can pass and you won't have missed anything. The writer also did a book on the Rolling Stones that is supposed to be good-- I may have to read it; supposedly he stumbled on this story through his Stones research.
So, what to read next? Re-reading The Baghavad Gita, of course, followed closely by Stephen Mitchell's translation of the Tao Te Ching. I have been trying to seek peace lately, and also switch up my daily meditation process. I first read the Gita in college, right after doing my anthropology area studies survey on South Asia with Gerald Berreman. I think I was reading it and The Hidden Injuries of Class at the same time... we'd read excerpts from the book and I wanted to get it cover to cover. I can remember sitting on the lawn at Cloyne reading while all of the attendant noises swirled around me: someone chopping up the pavement while attempting tricks on the skateboard ramps that Boogie built before he designed the half-pipe; someone slamming shut the cover for the composting heap; planning for planting a palm tree; arguments over just how many times anyone really needed to listen to Blood Sugar Sex Magik in one afternoon. Good stuff. So... um... relaxing.
Anyway, now I'm still reading Trouble, and looking for the copy of Jeffery Euginides' Middlesex that I bought ages ago. My aunt highly recommended it, and I loved The Virgin Suicides. I just somehow never got around to it.
What are you reading this summer?
In the meantime I've discovered some new writers and also enjoyed the latest from old friends. During my trip to LA I read Kate Christensen's In the Drink, one of the books (along with The Girl's Guide to Hunting and Fishing) that is credited with launching Chick-Lit as a supposed genre. Like Girl's Guide, it is much more "literate" than one associates with what the genre has become, but it also speaks to the conclusion that Jennifer Weiner draws-- that Chick-Lit is a false catch all for books by women. I also read Christensen's The Great Man while I was in LA. They represent book ends for the writer; both are really good in very different ways. I would have never expected the writer of In the Drink, which so totally captures the sense of waiting for life to happen that gets people through their twenties, would capture so so well the full blown adults from a bygone era in The Great Man. I just picked up Trouble, her latest offering, and like the other two that I've read thus far, it's engrossing from page one. On the other hand, I have put down The Epicure's Lament several times, without even making it through the first third.
While I was in LA-- at the Westside Pavillion Barnes & Noble, to be precise-- I also picked up two works of nonfiction. Where Did You Sleep Last Night? By Danzy Senna, who I knew when she was at Stanford and I was at Berkeley, and whose fiction debut, Caucasia, I read in practically one sitting. I haven't gotten to it, yet, but the new one looks promising. She and I both lived in Cambridge/Boston at the same time-- during the bussing era-- and I remember talking to her about similar experiences with the terror of seeing adults so angry and out of control. We also each have parents were very involved in the civil rights movement, much to the chagrin of their parents, so I figure I will find some interesting stuff in this book. Because of my personal history, I have been really excited to see that there are some interesting and funny looking memoirs out there from Gen-Xers whose parents were idealist Baby Boomers (see: When Skateboards Will Be Free and skip anything by Rebecca Walker, thanks).
The other is A Day in the Life: One Family, the Beautiful People & the End of the Sixties. For some reason I really like things set in the era in which I was born (people always say the Sixties ended with Watergate and Nixon's subsequent resignation in 1974). I like reading books about different music eras and artists, even when I'm not that intensely into the music. In this case, the central characters are linked quite closely to the Rolling Stones. I'm a Stones fan, but not a superfan (Keith Richards really pissed me off way back in the eighties by dismissing rap music as unoriginal and saying something like, it was stealing music that you didn't write. This from the man whose group made their career by stealing every single blues song and riff of Muddy Waters' that they could get their hands on... seriously?!). I like the intel and background information, but what is really of great interest is just the crazy stuff that happens; LSD-induced psychosis, Keith Richards, drug smuggling, Keith Richards, benign neglect and uh, yeah... Keith Richards.
I read A Day in the Life on the nonstop back to DC. Right before we landed, as I was reading about the main character's resescutation of his dubious rock promoting career via the 90's rave scene, the flight attendants told us about Michael Jackson's death. The book is engrossing in a prurient-interest sense (the son of the main characters plays the husband on Medium, which is actually a favorite show of mine. I didn't realize this until I was well into the book) but isn't particularly well written. If you like the era, it's a good read. If you don't, you can pass and you won't have missed anything. The writer also did a book on the Rolling Stones that is supposed to be good-- I may have to read it; supposedly he stumbled on this story through his Stones research.
So, what to read next? Re-reading The Baghavad Gita, of course, followed closely by Stephen Mitchell's translation of the Tao Te Ching. I have been trying to seek peace lately, and also switch up my daily meditation process. I first read the Gita in college, right after doing my anthropology area studies survey on South Asia with Gerald Berreman. I think I was reading it and The Hidden Injuries of Class at the same time... we'd read excerpts from the book and I wanted to get it cover to cover. I can remember sitting on the lawn at Cloyne reading while all of the attendant noises swirled around me: someone chopping up the pavement while attempting tricks on the skateboard ramps that Boogie built before he designed the half-pipe; someone slamming shut the cover for the composting heap; planning for planting a palm tree; arguments over just how many times anyone really needed to listen to Blood Sugar Sex Magik in one afternoon. Good stuff. So... um... relaxing.
Anyway, now I'm still reading Trouble, and looking for the copy of Jeffery Euginides' Middlesex that I bought ages ago. My aunt highly recommended it, and I loved The Virgin Suicides. I just somehow never got around to it.
What are you reading this summer?
posted by mocha mayhem @ 9:24 PM
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