Currently Reading
A Challenge for the Actor, Uta Hagen (Because it's what's on my mind at the moment.)

On My Night Stand
The Lucifer Effect, Philip Zimbardo (This book is very hard to read in one sitting, so I've decided to break it up. But it's fascinating and spot on, I think.)

• Recently Read
• Open, Andre Agassi (This is an incredibly compelling story, told in novelistic detail in the first half. A classic hero's journey, but with more attention to the arbitrary nature of life's trials. Just the right thing for a summer read.)
• Shoplifting From American Apparel, Tao Lin (This book was not good—a nouveau existentialism that reveals yet another story about a bunch of bored twenty and thirty-somethings who can't think of anything more interesting to do with their lives than nothing.)
• A Simple Heart, Gustave Flaubert (I'm not entirely sure why I feel such an affinity for Flaubert, but I do. His writing and his perspective are incredibly enticing to me, even when they border on the maudlin.)
• The Naming of Names: The Search for Order in the World of Plants, Anna Pavord (A very well-researched and readable book on the history of the development of an idea—taxonomy. Pavord explores the genesis of taxonomy through the lineage of botany, all the while revealing the individuals and historical events that contributed to the development of the naming of names in the plant world.)
• Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, Alison Bechdel (I'm struck most by the gyroscopic structure of this book—the way it circles back over the same set of circumstances with a new perspective, but still never gains control over the elements included. A fascinating book.)
• An Education, Lynn Barber (Funny how different the book is from the salacious promises that the back cover touts. I'm glad it is what it is and not what the marketing team attached to it wants it to be.)
• Barf Manifesto, Dodie Bellamy (A difficult work that circles back into itself and the community it concerns quite a bit.)
• Fingersmith, Sarah Waters (I tore through this book. Waters is clearly a very talented storyteller. The predominant thought I have after reading this one is about the prisons we create within ourselves and that we allow or perpetuate around us. Guess I'll have to read Joe LeDoux's book soon...)
• Tipping the Velvet, Sarah Waters (I would think it would be hard not to get sucked in to this book. Enjoyed it too much to think about what clever tricks besides strong storytelling she's using to carry the reader along.)
• Committed, Elizabeth Gilbert (Not her best work. But she still gets my vote, as she had it from Pilgrims onward. I look forward to her leaving memoir behind.)
• Baby Remember My Name, edited by Michelle Tea (Who doesn't like a good anthology now and again?)
• Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier (Haven't read a good page-turner in awhile. Had to stay up late to finish this one.)
• Free Fire Zone, Theresa Rebeck (Picked this up after interviewing Rebeck. So far it's the best book about the business of writing that I've read, with an emphasis on business. Learned and laughed a lot.)
• Martha Quest, Doris Lessing (Will finally have to read The Golden Notebook after reading this.)
• Lucky in the Corner, Carol Anshaw (A book club I was thinking about joining was reading this. Turns out I can't go to the first meeting and didn't love this book, but will give it another try.)
• Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers, Lillian Faderman (A jarring reminder that despite my fondest beliefs, our civilization does not tend toward greater tolerance.)
• We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Shirley Jackson (I was surprised to find that though I didn't at first imagine myself having much interest in this story, at the end, when I began to think about reinterpreting it, something new entered the story that was exciting—the isolation of perception described here is a powerful and disturbing reality.)
• My Life in France, Julia Child & Alex Prud'Homme (I'm ashamed to say I had no idea how hard she worked. And I love the idea that a bildungsroman could start in the main character's early thirties.)
• A Wheel Within A Wheel, Frances E. Willard (Too excellent; so much fun.)
• At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays, Anne Fadiman (A perfect example of why the essay is one of the most insightful, interesting, flexible, and often unexpected forms.)
• A Short History of Women, Kate Walbert (Subtle, as promised. I can't help wishing it was a bit richer.)
• First Execution, Domenico Starnone (This book calls a lot of attention to its structure and it's easy to get lost, but the getting lost did pay off in the end, and my interest in tales of political disillusionment only seems to grow.)
• The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame (Just wonderful. And the edition that my mother got for my brother and I as children has the most wonderful illustrations for the story, perfectly pitched, by Michael Hague.)
• Bad Girls Go Everywhere: The Life of Helen Gurley Brown, Jennifer Scanlon (Scanlon is out to paint a specific portrait of HGB, but it's a very compelling and very timely one.)
• Crossing to Safety, Wallace Stegner (An incredibly well-told story, which weaves in many of the themes and ideas about the role of storytelling in our lives that I've been puzzling over lately. A wonderful read.)
• Disquiet, Julia Leigh (Recommended by a friend from work, an excellent, absorbing read, that reminded me of why I always loved to read Poe's breathless and strange stories.)
• Our Life in Gardens, Joe Eck & Wayne Winterrowd (Everything I hoped it would be. I padded through it from cover to cover.)
• The Day of the Locust, Nathanael West (What great storytelling! And all the dreams of Hollywood dashed. A great book.)
• Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, Walter Isaacson (You can really see why Isaacson is such a popular biographer now—it's a very readable and smooth progression that's presented here, and a reasonable attempt to paint Franklin as the human he was rather than the caricature we like to imagine him as. It's been a useful piece of research for my new show.)
• New Grub Street, George Gissing (And the closing chapter in this little triptych on the business of art, or specifically literature—a Victorian literary world trying to reconcile art and commerce as unsuccessfully as they ever have been. It seems like we might actually end up reverting to more of a Victorian model of investors and personal investments in the next century, but who's to say.)
• Grub, Elise Blackwell (A funny book to read after Hyde's. It's amazing how much things refuse to change in certain arenas, but how much we insist that ought to.)
• The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World, Lewis Hyde (A wide-ranging book with some interesting conclusions. Like many others I've spent a fair amount of time worrying over some of these questions, but I'm not sure yet that there's an answer. I suppose what Hyde's book leaves me with is a stronger sense that there likely isn't a need for an answer to these questions.)
• The Ruins of California, Martha Sherrill (I'd been looking for books about California and my friend Beth brought this one over for me, it was a great start. And how odd for me two novels in a row with juvenile narrators, I've been reading so many other things in between this past two novels I didn't even remember that Hedgehog was the last. Anyhow, a good story, and that satisfaction of a strange view of a country I only think I know.)
• The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Muriel Barbery, translated by Alison Anderson (The title of this book does it no justice at all. The piece ranges widely, is sharp and incisive, has deeply human characters. And perhaps the most wonderful thing is the shattering lack of sentimentality that the author has for her characters or the world around her. I admire this story a great deal, heart-breaking though it is.)
• Advice for a Young Investigator, Santiago Ramón y Cajal, translated by Neely Swanson and Larry W. Swanson (It's remarkable how aptly so much of Cajal's advice applies to the artist. And it's also amazing to see such concise and spot-on advice for scientists that is over 100 years old—the book was originally published in 1897. It's also clear that this translation makes all the difference.)
• The Encantadas, Herman Melville (It's imperfect, of course it's imperfect, the metaphors are occasionally very foggy and sometimes get mixed up, but the richness and density of the imagery in a single one of his sentences is breathtaking.)
• Bouvard and Pécuchet, Gustave Flaubert (What a perfect example of my own travails so much of the time...)
• Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition, Robert Pogue Harrison (This book is remarkable.)
• A Schoolteacher in Old Alaska: The Story of Hannah Breece, edited by Jane Jacobs (I picked this up at the Strand Annex closing sale, the Alaska connection and Jane Jacobs involvement made me buy it. It's a great story, a remarkable portrait of the people who fulfilled America's Dreams in the new territories.)
• Netherland, Joseph O'Neill (A really well-told story with some very well-observed moments, and happily, one of the first novels I've read in ages—I miss them tremendously.)
• Only as Good as Your Word, Susan Shapiro (I'm taking a class with Susan and ended up buying one of her books. Glad to see that not all advice books some in the form of lists and quips, it's more of a memoir, really.)
• The Treasure of the City of Ladies, Christine de Pizan (My mother bought this for me while we were visiting the Cloisters on her recent trip to the city. It's not an action-packed read, so don't expect it, but there are some great bits of history in there, and a disturbing number of timeleess bits.)
• The Artful Edit: On the Practice of Editing Yourself, Susan Bell (By far among the better of the writing books I've ever read.)
• The Playwright As Thinker, Eric Bentley (Read about it in an article in American Theater about criticism and given my recent spate of theatrical reviews, I thought it might be interesting. The point that seems to be coming up again and again in many sources is the notion of how persistent the lack of serious attention to the art theater has been, and how light the interest in it, on the part of public, has been since the outset. Interesting to so constantly be reminded of this of late.)
• Click here for more past reads
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• Recommended Books
• American Humor: A Study of National Character, Constance Rourke (why this book isn't required reading in both American History and Literature classes is a mystery to me, it is absolutely remarkable)
• 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
• Free Fire Zone, Theresa Rebeck
• 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 Elegance of Hedgehogs, Muriel Barbery
• 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)
• Dodie Bellamy
  (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.)
• Anne Fadiman
  (My friend, Beth, had this to say when we wrote each other about her work: "I like to read the work of essayists progressively, because I enjoy the way in which their work changes and gets ever more delicious.")
• 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)
• Pagan Kennedy
• 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)
• Robert Pogue Harrison
  (anything)
• Beth Royer
  (anything)
• Constance Rourke
  (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)
• Wallace Stegner
  (anything)
• Boris Vian
  (just about all of it)
• Sarah Waters
  (so far everything I've read has been totally engrossing)

• 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.)