Currently Reading
One Day A Year, Christa Wolf

On My Night Stand
The latest issue of Cabinet &
The Best American Essays of the Century, edited by Joyce Carol Oates & Robert Atwan

• Recently Read
• ARTSCIENCE, David Edwards (This book has an incredibly self-congratulatory tone throughout, which made it repetitive and dull to read, but there are loads of useful examples beneath the rhetoric.)
• Holes, Louis Sachar (Recommended to me, this is the first contemporary children's book that I've read that doesn't pander to its audience. It was an enjoyable read and had just the right mix of magic and reality.)
• The Diamond Makers, Robert Hazen (Needed to read this to do some research for a project that I'm working on. Should have read it a couple of years ago when I was working with a handful of the 'diamond breakers'.)
• Writings, Agnes Martin (I don't know that I've ever read an artist's writing that was as deeply ascetic. It's moving in that, if nothing else, this joy and seriousness that resulted in such rigorous and good work. I am a great admirer of much of her work.)
• Crome Yellow, Aldous Huxley (The last of the Huxley books. Now I've read them all. The main burst of reading was as an undergrad, so it's been a few years now. Never was a better comparison made than between this book and Beerbohm's Zuleika Dobson. Good ol' Brits.)
• Six Characters in Search of an Author, Luigi Pirandello (I realized in reading this, that I had never read it before. That was odd.)
• The Great Risk Shift: The New Economic Insecurity and the Decline of the American Dream, Jacob Hacker
  (Although this is a policy book and is meant to influence using some scare tactics, I'm afraid the scare tactics had a more lasting effect than the solutions offered, as he is nowhere near as detailed or clear about his proposed solutions as he is about the mire we find ourselves in. Nevertheless, you can't really fault him for telling the truth, it's just that the truth is pretty damn scary.)
• Right You Are (If You Think You Are), Luigi Pirandello
  (I was always an admirer of Pirandello, but it was worth remembering why. This is a very strong piece of writing, even a bit ferocious.)
• The Great Man, Kate Christensen
  (It's a strong device that she's using here—narration by the three women in his life. And of course the book is about them, the man is not really a sympathetic character. There is something good here, but I think it would have been better if the playing field had been a bit more even between his ladies and him. But good for the writer for getting the PEN/Faulkner, I liked the sense of this book being a project as well as a story.)
• Creative Time: The Book, edited by Anne Pasternak
  (There's a lot in here, and it's clear (and they admit it) that they're seeking an organizational document, but there's still some great writing and ideas in it.)
• Beyond the Myths: Mother and Daughter Relationships in Psychology, History, Literature and Everyday Life, Shelley Phillips
  (I have so much to say about the things in this book, so much. And there's so much in it. I think the mother-daughter conflict is central to feminism in a way that has never been acknowledged and freedom from it is the first step to real liberation.)
• American Avant-Garde Theatre: A History, Arnold Aronson
  (Needed a bit of background for a piece that I was working on—not a bad survey, though I'm sure there is much to disagree with.)
• The Extra Man, Jonathan Ames
  (A friend indicated that the characters in this book somehow mirrored certain aspects of the life he aspires to here in New York. The old man is a great character, but the writing is a bit shoddy, I think.)
• A Trip To Niagara, William Dunlap
  (A truly remarkable piece of spectacle-based early American theater from 1830, replete with dioramas, the real Leather-Stocking and all the glories of the Hudson Valley.)
• A Woman In Charge: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton, Carl Bernstein
  (What's remarkable here is what the sheer force of will can accomplish, even when it isn't in the best interest of the person who is willing it.)
• Break of Day, Colette
  (This book, maybe more than any other I've read recently, represents a kind of essential example of writing as a testing out of a hypothesis—one that Colette herself did not end up choosing to pursue outside these pages.)
• Two Serious Ladies, Jane Bowles
  (Too much like someone I used to know, was more creepy than funny.)
• Farewell, My Lovely, Raymond Chandler
  (What a spectacle of metaphor and simile. The story hardly matters with Chandler's use of language.)
• Dubliners, James Joyce
  (There's no denying that I'm jealous of his command of a place, but the inability of emotions and wills to align seems to be the thing he has even better command of here.)
• On Love, Alain de Botton
  (Bought this years ago in Providence. Never got around to reading it. M. de Botton is what he is, but the lesson still manages to peak through his hubris—there's no thinking through that mess.)
• Living by Fiction, Annie Dillard
  (The more I read of her the more impressed I am. This one is particularly pointed. And I always love a good polemic.)
• Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Portraits of Married Life in London Literary Circles 1910-1939, Katie Roiphe
  (Gossip is gossip, literary or not. I'm just as guilty as the next one.)
• Reading Like A Writer, Francine Prose
  (See note about educative mood below.)
• Poetics, Aristotle, translated by S.H. Butcher
  (In an educative mood lately, and wanted to reread this—the last reading was in college. It seems to me that he missed the most important question—not how to write effective tragedies, i.e. like those of his predecessors and contemporaries, but why tragedy has persisted as a form for as long as it has. But that wasn't his aim, or I suppose he would say he did answer that question, but I'm not giving it to him, gall-darn-it.)
• Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard
  (Oh, Virginia, what a state you are. And my first prolonged experience with Ms. Dillard—the rewards were many.)
• Letters to a Young Artist, various contributors, compiled by Art on Paper magazine
  (Half graduation speech, half interesting stuff--a clever little book.)
• Click here for a list of past reads
• 
  

• Recommended Books
• Angle of Repose, Wallace Stegner
• A Short History of Scientific Ideas, Charles Singer
  (because it's very well written, among other reasons)
• Arrow in the Blue, Arthur Koestler
  (It's rare to read such a well-observed memoir, I think.)
• Art & Science, Siân Ede
• Daughter of Earth, Agnes Smedley
• Faust, Goëthe
  (particularly the Norton edition)
• Flaubert's Parrot, Julian Barnes
• Frankenstein, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly
• Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things, Gilberto Sorrentino
• Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov
• Par Lui-Même, Marcel Broodthaers
• Pilgrims, Elizabeth Gilbert
• Portrait of Lady, Henry James
  (I know, but it's a great book)
• The Divine Mistress, Samuel Edwards
• The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, James McNeil Whistler
• The Ladies' Paradise (Au Bonheur des Dames), Emile Zola
• The Price of Salt, Patricia Highsmith
• The Unconsoled, Kazuo Ishiguro
• Writings, Agnes Martin
• Zuleika Dobson, Max Beerbohm
  (you have to love it )

• Recommended Authors
• Hannah Arendt
  (particularly 'On Violence' and 'The Human Condition')
• Donald Barthelme
  (anything)
• Italo Calvino
  (I've only read one so far, but I think if you forget everything everyone says about him, you can really enjoy a lot of what he's doing)
• Raymond Chandler
  (I don't know his body of work well enough at this point, but I gather there are gems in all of them.)
• Lydia Davis
  (anything)
• Annie Dillard
  (anything)
• Michel Foucault
  (because you should, and if you do you will be rewarded)
• Elizabeth Gilbert
  (anything)
• Aldous Huxley
  (it's not always great writing and his characters can be uneven, but there's something there)
• Bruno Latour
  (not for the faint of attention span)
• Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• Mary McCarthy
  (the essays)
• Iris Murdoch
  (I'm the first to admit it's on the fluffy side and that they aren't all good, but many of them are good reading if you want a long break from having to think so hard all the time)
• George Orwell
  (his essays are incredible, particularly the Everyman Library Collection--well worth the money, but if you've never read them, read 1984 before you read Animal Farm--you'll have lots to talk about, I would argue that Animal Farm is the far better book)
• Beth Royer
  (anything)
• Charles Simic
  (anything)
• Agnes Smedley
  (I've only read one, and I imagine there are many reasons not to read her, but do it anyway.)
• Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
  (anything)
• Boris Vian
  (just about all of it)

• You Might Want to Avoid These Ones
• Belle du Jour: The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl
  (Trash has it's place in the literary world, I certainly don't want to deny anybody that. But this one...well, I made it about 60 pages in before I just got bored with all of it, particularly in light of the fact that it seems pretty likely that all of it is a lie. But I can't complain, I won my copy in a contest run by the Society of Young Publishers, so as a thank you, I'll be leaving it on the Tube tomorrow for the next lucky winner.)
• Philosophical Theories of Probabilities, Donald Gillies
  (Realizing fully that most people would never even have the inclination to consider such a book, I urge those who do to think twice...)
• Virgins of Venice: Broken Vows and Cloistered Lives in the Renaissance Convent (Aside from the overly lurid title, the authoress managed an obscene amount of research but neglects to give us very much of it or to give it life in this petite and rather didactic book.)