Book List 2009, the Second Six Months
Part one is here. Asterisks are rereads! LET'S GO LET'S GO!!! BOOKS!
40 My Life in France; Julia Child with Alex Prud'homme - what a lovely, lovely book. Child and her adorable husband have adorable food- and non-food-related adventures around Europe. Made me want to cook, also to marry a diplomat.
41 * The Heart of a Goof; PG Wodehouse - one of the collections of golf stories; normally not the first Wodehouse I'd turn to, but this choice (and the following one) were based on the local library having had a display of his books beside the door.
42 * Full Moon; PG Wodehouse - impulse book!
43 Home from Nowhere: Remaking our Everyday World for the 21st Century; James Howard Kunstler - This was nothing like as eye-opening as the Kunstler I read earlier in the year. Most of what's in here is old news to anyone who's familiar at all with the issues around sprawl and urbanism, plus ol' Kunstler sometimes comes across as at best a curmudgeon and at worst a racist.
44 The Heart of the Matter; Graham Greene - more Catholicism in the jungle! This time with a repulsive protagonist! Maybe actually, everyone in the book was repulsive! Hurrah!
45 State by State: a Panoramic Portrait of America; ed. Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey - The first of two books I read in this half-year which took their inspiration from the WPA writers' projects of the New Deal. This was predictably patchy, with some state entries being much more appealing than others.
46 Beautiful Evidence; Edward Tufte - I found this pretty amazing (with the exception of his own art, which was unremarkable), but that might be because I haven't read any other Tufte. Apparently his earlier books are better!
47 Paul a Quebec; Michel Rabagliati - Seulement un livre en français, pour six mois! VRAIMENT, emily, vraiment?
48 The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the 19th Century's On-line Pioneers; Tom Standage - This was a recommendation I took from the kottke blog. I liked it, although the development of telegraphy was less interesting to me than the use of it as its height. Did you know, for instance, that telegraph operators could recognize one another's distinctive rhythm of tapping?
49 * Candide or Optimism; Voltaire - read this back in first year, this was the first time I'd revisited it. I'll easily admit that it was the Penguin Graphic Classics edition with the Chris Ware cover that attracted me to it this time.
50 * The Only Way to Cross: The Golden Age of the Great Atlantic Express Liners; John Maxtone-Graham - This was a nostalgic reread, from back when I was first becoming interested in the history of shipping. Looking at dead or dying industries is always a sad business, the author was writing at a time when the wound was much fresher than it is today.
51 The Wordy Shipmates; Sarah Vowell - this has to be the only Sarah Vowell I've ever had a hard time finishing. I can only assume it is the subject matter (pilgrims, FYI), as her writing style remains its usual, engaging self.
52 Scurvy: How a Surgeon, a Mariner, and a Gentleman solved the Greatest Medical Mystery of the Age of Sail; Stephen R Bown - As a person who has spent a great deal of time telling groups of kids gross stories about scurvy, a good lot of this was old news. In fact, I recall one bit of information which I knew to not be true - damned if I can recall it now, naturally.
53 Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations; Clay Shirky - my goodness, it must be difficult to write books about how current technologies change the way people interact. Almost without a doubt, things will have changed a least a little by the time the book is printed and read. If you haven't read it before, you should read Shirky's essay Gin, Television and Social Surplus, found on this book's website.
54 The Loved One; Evelyn Waugh - We watched the movie version of this book a few weeks before I read it. The film was such a relentless, ridiculous sixties romp, I was shocked at how faithful it was to the book.
55 About Town: The New Yorker and the World it Made; Ben Yagoda - I ended up with a huge to-read list after reading this. I'd love to find a really good vintage-New Yorker-prose anthology, if anyone knows of one?
56 How Proust Can Change Your Life; Alain de Botton - ugh ugh ugh. This whole book was so twee and annoying. I borrowed three of his books, read two and gave up on the third. Keeping this list has made me a person who finishes almost everything she begins, so I was not even going to touch that third one...
57 The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work; Alain de Botton - you know, I liked this one a whole lot more than the Proust book. It's basically a collection of anecdotes about work in a bunch of fields, tied together with some light personal-experience stuff. Inoffensive but not enlightening.
58 Up in the Air; Walter Kirn - man, has the world CHANGED in the last eight years, or what?
59 When you catch an Adjective, Kill it: The Parts of Speech, for Better and/or Worse; Ben Yagoda - Entertaining, useful, and strikes a healthy balance between prescriptivism and descriptivism, which is really the main thing I look for in my grammar manuals! Had a lovely bit about how the tendency to correct people's grammar reflexively, just because you know better, is a tendency that should stay in middle school, where it begins.
60 Food of a Younger Land: A Portrait of American Food Before the National highway system, Before Chain Restaurants and Before Frozen Food, When the Nation's Food was Seasonal; Mark Kurlansky - I was hoping, when I put this book on my library hold list, that this would run along the lines of Kurlansky's previous books about food. Instead of a coherent narrative, what you get here is a collection of fragments from 1940s American food writers, with a little of Kurlansky's commentary. What interested me most about it was the tendency towards idealizing the 'authentic' food of the past, which is certainly a thread in current food writing too.
61 Lost in the Meritocracy: The Undereducation of an Overachiever; Walter Kirn - a clever little stab of a book, in which Kirn manages to both talk himself and his intellect up while simultaneously tearing his younger, arrogant incarnation a new asshole.
62 How to Cook a Wolf; MFK Fisher - This is Fisher's book about wartime cooking, I happened to read an edition which featured her parenthetical remarks of 15 years later in the text itself, so it's a book and a commentary on that book (I'm sure she prefigures DFW in some way). The wolf, by the way, is a metaphor.
63 A Single Man; Christopher Isherwood - So it looks like this half-year, I spent a good deal of time reading books and watching films based on those books. It's led to a good deal of griping about the films not doing justice to books, which is an old argument, and a dull one.
64 Serve it Forth; MFK Fisher - Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher had a DAMNED interesting life, and writes in a lovely, lush and funny way about that life, and the food she's eaten during the course of it.
65 Dubliners; James Joyce - Never read it before! Can you believe it?
66 Greetings! from Gumdrop Mountain; Jordan Stewart - 22 stories, both from Jordan's website (http://www.brokenchairessays.com/) and new stuff. There are some damn good stories in here!
67 An Alphabet for Gourmets; MFK Fisher - I wasn't that keen to read this one (it's a book within an omnibus which I ended up borrowing from the library right before leaving Toronto) because it seemed gimmicky (yeah, there's an entry for every letter of the alphabet) but it's entirely possibly that MFKF can do no wrong.
40 My Life in France; Julia Child with Alex Prud'homme - what a lovely, lovely book. Child and her adorable husband have adorable food- and non-food-related adventures around Europe. Made me want to cook, also to marry a diplomat.
41 * The Heart of a Goof; PG Wodehouse - one of the collections of golf stories; normally not the first Wodehouse I'd turn to, but this choice (and the following one) were based on the local library having had a display of his books beside the door.
42 * Full Moon; PG Wodehouse - impulse book!
43 Home from Nowhere: Remaking our Everyday World for the 21st Century; James Howard Kunstler - This was nothing like as eye-opening as the Kunstler I read earlier in the year. Most of what's in here is old news to anyone who's familiar at all with the issues around sprawl and urbanism, plus ol' Kunstler sometimes comes across as at best a curmudgeon and at worst a racist.
44 The Heart of the Matter; Graham Greene - more Catholicism in the jungle! This time with a repulsive protagonist! Maybe actually, everyone in the book was repulsive! Hurrah!
45 State by State: a Panoramic Portrait of America; ed. Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey - The first of two books I read in this half-year which took their inspiration from the WPA writers' projects of the New Deal. This was predictably patchy, with some state entries being much more appealing than others.
46 Beautiful Evidence; Edward Tufte - I found this pretty amazing (with the exception of his own art, which was unremarkable), but that might be because I haven't read any other Tufte. Apparently his earlier books are better!
47 Paul a Quebec; Michel Rabagliati - Seulement un livre en français, pour six mois! VRAIMENT, emily, vraiment?
48 The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the 19th Century's On-line Pioneers; Tom Standage - This was a recommendation I took from the kottke blog. I liked it, although the development of telegraphy was less interesting to me than the use of it as its height. Did you know, for instance, that telegraph operators could recognize one another's distinctive rhythm of tapping?
49 * Candide or Optimism; Voltaire - read this back in first year, this was the first time I'd revisited it. I'll easily admit that it was the Penguin Graphic Classics edition with the Chris Ware cover that attracted me to it this time.
50 * The Only Way to Cross: The Golden Age of the Great Atlantic Express Liners; John Maxtone-Graham - This was a nostalgic reread, from back when I was first becoming interested in the history of shipping. Looking at dead or dying industries is always a sad business, the author was writing at a time when the wound was much fresher than it is today.
51 The Wordy Shipmates; Sarah Vowell - this has to be the only Sarah Vowell I've ever had a hard time finishing. I can only assume it is the subject matter (pilgrims, FYI), as her writing style remains its usual, engaging self.
52 Scurvy: How a Surgeon, a Mariner, and a Gentleman solved the Greatest Medical Mystery of the Age of Sail; Stephen R Bown - As a person who has spent a great deal of time telling groups of kids gross stories about scurvy, a good lot of this was old news. In fact, I recall one bit of information which I knew to not be true - damned if I can recall it now, naturally.
53 Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations; Clay Shirky - my goodness, it must be difficult to write books about how current technologies change the way people interact. Almost without a doubt, things will have changed a least a little by the time the book is printed and read. If you haven't read it before, you should read Shirky's essay Gin, Television and Social Surplus, found on this book's website.
54 The Loved One; Evelyn Waugh - We watched the movie version of this book a few weeks before I read it. The film was such a relentless, ridiculous sixties romp, I was shocked at how faithful it was to the book.
55 About Town: The New Yorker and the World it Made; Ben Yagoda - I ended up with a huge to-read list after reading this. I'd love to find a really good vintage-New Yorker-prose anthology, if anyone knows of one?
56 How Proust Can Change Your Life; Alain de Botton - ugh ugh ugh. This whole book was so twee and annoying. I borrowed three of his books, read two and gave up on the third. Keeping this list has made me a person who finishes almost everything she begins, so I was not even going to touch that third one...
57 The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work; Alain de Botton - you know, I liked this one a whole lot more than the Proust book. It's basically a collection of anecdotes about work in a bunch of fields, tied together with some light personal-experience stuff. Inoffensive but not enlightening.
58 Up in the Air; Walter Kirn - man, has the world CHANGED in the last eight years, or what?
59 When you catch an Adjective, Kill it: The Parts of Speech, for Better and/or Worse; Ben Yagoda - Entertaining, useful, and strikes a healthy balance between prescriptivism and descriptivism, which is really the main thing I look for in my grammar manuals! Had a lovely bit about how the tendency to correct people's grammar reflexively, just because you know better, is a tendency that should stay in middle school, where it begins.
60 Food of a Younger Land: A Portrait of American Food Before the National highway system, Before Chain Restaurants and Before Frozen Food, When the Nation's Food was Seasonal; Mark Kurlansky - I was hoping, when I put this book on my library hold list, that this would run along the lines of Kurlansky's previous books about food. Instead of a coherent narrative, what you get here is a collection of fragments from 1940s American food writers, with a little of Kurlansky's commentary. What interested me most about it was the tendency towards idealizing the 'authentic' food of the past, which is certainly a thread in current food writing too.
61 Lost in the Meritocracy: The Undereducation of an Overachiever; Walter Kirn - a clever little stab of a book, in which Kirn manages to both talk himself and his intellect up while simultaneously tearing his younger, arrogant incarnation a new asshole.
62 How to Cook a Wolf; MFK Fisher - This is Fisher's book about wartime cooking, I happened to read an edition which featured her parenthetical remarks of 15 years later in the text itself, so it's a book and a commentary on that book (I'm sure she prefigures DFW in some way). The wolf, by the way, is a metaphor.
63 A Single Man; Christopher Isherwood - So it looks like this half-year, I spent a good deal of time reading books and watching films based on those books. It's led to a good deal of griping about the films not doing justice to books, which is an old argument, and a dull one.
64 Serve it Forth; MFK Fisher - Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher had a DAMNED interesting life, and writes in a lovely, lush and funny way about that life, and the food she's eaten during the course of it.
65 Dubliners; James Joyce - Never read it before! Can you believe it?
66 Greetings! from Gumdrop Mountain; Jordan Stewart - 22 stories, both from Jordan's website (http://www.brokenchairessays.com/) and new stuff. There are some damn good stories in here!
67 An Alphabet for Gourmets; MFK Fisher - I wasn't that keen to read this one (it's a book within an omnibus which I ended up borrowing from the library right before leaving Toronto) because it seemed gimmicky (yeah, there's an entry for every letter of the alphabet) but it's entirely possibly that MFKF can do no wrong.