The Stack of Books Next to My Bed

stack-of-books2016-8

I read a lot, and keep a massive stack of unread books next to my bed that I’ve bought, found, or been given. I’ve got two main principles when it comes to reading:

  1. It should be fun.
  2. There’s a whole lot of different books out there to check out.

Up until 2017 I wrote about each book I read in 99 words or less and posted one review a week to keep myself on track. I post these reviews less frequently now, but here’s hoping you find something you like.

Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses, by David Lodge (1975)

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Two English professors, one American and one British, join their universities’ annual exchange program to escape disconcerting ruts in their respective countries.  Lodge’s west-coast America is torn amidst the uproar of 1960s counterculture, while his small-town industrial Britain is chilly, polite, and exaggeratedly tame.  By showing each world from the other country’s POV, Lodge creates a witty and poignant commentary on academic and social life on two continents.  The novel itself also takes different forms in each of its six sections (letters, a screenplay, etc.), a cool twist on the relationship between fiction and reality.

Rating

Where I Got It

Bought from a used bookstore in Columbus, Ohio this past summer.  I’d been meaning to read this book for literally ten years, after a former coworker recommended David Lodge to me in 2006.  WHY OH WHY DIDN’T I LISTEN TO HIM SOONER? I enjoyed this book too damned much to have gone without it for so long.

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2015 Review in The Guardian

Rules for “Humiliation,” a reading game Lodge invented for the novel

Rose of No Man’s Land by Michelle Tea (2005)

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Fourteen-year-old Trisha has a hypochondriac mother, a sister who wants to be on The Real World, and not much else.  Her new job at a teenybopper mall store leads her to Rose, a rebel who smokes and otherwise does what she wants, and together they set out on a late-night adventure through the sprawl of northeastern Massachusetts.  Tea’s writing hums with crazy energy, sharp observations, and madcap scenes that leave you racing.  This is a book about when everything was exciting and meant something, a book for those of us who play by our own rules.  Read it.

Rating:

Where I Got It:

Christmas gift from a friend who was like, “I’ve got a book for you.”

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Michelle Tea’s website

1Q84, by Haruki Murakami (2011)

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A man and a woman in different parts of Tokyo find themselves drawn into the bizarre world of 1Q84 (kyū is Japanese for nine) where everything looks the same but a sinister religious cult is wreaking havoc.  I enjoyed parts of this book immensely, but others dragged on through its 1,100 pages, and a lot of the slower portions could have been trimmed.  The novel explores the idea of parallel worlds in classic Murakami fashion, and though the ending makes the whole read worth it, I recommend starting with something lighter for your first Murakami experience.

Rating:

Where I Got It

Christmas, 2015.

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Haruki Murakami’s website

Murakami Interview about 1Q84, his early life, and running every day

Once Upon a River, by Bonnie Jo Campbell (2011)

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Sixteen-year-old sharpshooter Margo Crane leaves home after a family dispute and follows the river, initially seeking male companions of varying quality before deciding to live by her wits.  Though the story starts out with a literal bang, the rest feels disconnected as Margo undergoes a series of strung-together tribulations.  We see her growing up, but the change feels less satisfying since a lot of it was there all along.  The scenes vary in their effectiveness, with some feeling clunky as they follow that literary fiction voice often copied by graduate writing workshops.  In short: nothing too new here.

Rating

Where I Got It:

Bought online in August 2013 for a graduate writing workshop (the last of several books I bought for that workshop but didn’t actually read until later).

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Author website

Aphorisms on Love and Hate, by Friedrich Nietzsche (1878)

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This pocket-sized British edition of Nietzsche reflections is pretty awesome: it’s more manageable than the full-length essays by Nietzsche I’d read previously, but more substantial than the 140 character Nietzsche Twitter feed.  The editors picked 55 pages of reflections from Human, All Too Human that tackle such truths as how we despise the people we pretend to like, how we can’t ever really promise to always love someone, why rich people just don’t understand their own cruelties, and why those who seek to understand life will always undergo struggle.  Nietzsche’s ideas are relatable and real, so check ‘em out.

Rating:

Where I Got It

Picked up from the break room free table at the university press where I used to work, sometime in the spring of 2015.

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Nietzsche quotes on Twitter

Nietzsche on Love (essay)

The Wicked + The Divine Book 2: Fandemonium, by Kieron Gillen & Jamie McKelvie (2015)

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Is fleeting greatness worth the ultimate cost?  How many of us can reach that greatness?  Furthermore, what happens when we feel that greatness lies within our grasp but just can’t seem to reach it?  These questions feel more pronounced in the Wicked + The Divine’s second collection, where mere mortal protagonist Laura tries vainly to reproduce the teensy little miracle we saw in Book 1 and questions her relationship to the Pantheon of reincarnated gods that the world continues to fawn over.  Fantasy works best when it tackles real-world values in relatable ways, and this series does it beautifully.

Rating:

Where I Got It

Gift from old college friend, Christmas 2015 (along with Book 1).

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Book trailer on Youtube

Longer review, with pictures

 

Stack of Books Update

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In honor of a new year (and my finally remembering to start writing 2017 for the date) it’s time to post an update on my reading progress, since that’s part of the reason I started doing this in the first place.

Since I started keeping track last April, I’ve read 20 books, which is WAY more than I read over the same timeframe in 2015.  Two of those books had been sitting in the stack next to my bed for three years, and one (The Epic of Gilgamesh) had been there for four.  That feels pretty good. Continue reading »

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, by Laurence Sterne (1767)

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The whimsical freedom of the seventeenth century led to some of the most innovative fiction ever conceived, and Tristram Shandy is no exception.  Its narrator sets out to tell his life story but goes off on so many tangents that it takes him two hundred pages to get to his birth.  The book itself is chaotically filled with blank pages, scrawled lines, musical scores, skipped chapters, and entire sections written in Latin, plus a whole load of sex jokes for careful readers.  The innovations are fun, but the archaic prose makes for a challenging 650-page slog.

Rating:

3-kafkas

Where I Got It

An old Modern Library edition picked up from the English department free table, sometime in fall 2014.

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Full text at Project Gutenberg

Quick and Easy Guide to Reading Tristram Shandy (I really wish the person who made this site had kept it up, since it promised to be both funny and down-to-earth about a really difficult novel, and also because it compared Tristram Shandy to a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book)

The Wicked + The Divine Book 1: The Faust Act, by Kieron Gillen & Jamie McKelvie (2015)

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Amaterasu, Baal, and ten other gods from world mythology get reincarnated every ninety years; this time they’re taking the form of teenage pop stars and a little bit of hell breaks loose when Lucifer goes rogue.  The premise promises lots of action, and I loved artist Jamie McKelvie’s style, particularly the splash pages, where there’s always something to look at.  The collection also comes with variant covers and apocrypha that form the graphic novel equivalent of a DVD bonus menu.  Reading more chapters feels necessary to make a more concrete judgement, but I’m definitely liking the start.

Rating:

3-kafkas

Where I Got It

Gift from old college friend, Christmas 2015 (along with Book 2).

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Kieron Gillen’s Tumblr

Jamie McKelvie’s website

Friday Night Lights, by H.G. Bissinger (1990)

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I have zero interest in football, but I enjoyed Bissinger’s book because it’s mostly about the all-encompassing influence that football holds over midwestern culture.  Bissinger spent a year in the west Texas town of Odessa following its high school football team to the state championship, and shows how completely football trumps academics and leads the town to build a $5.6 million stadium for its high school.  He also discusses how racial tensions and Reagan-era politics affected the region—history seen from ground level.

There’s a lot of football play-by-plays too, but I kind of skimmed over those.

Rating:

4-kafkas

Where I Got It

Bought online a few weeks ago, part of the research process for my new novel.

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Bissinger reflects on Friday Night Lights 25 years later (Sports Illustrated)

Interview with Bissinger on the book’s 25th anniversary (NPR)

Conversations with Kingsley Amis, by Thomas DePietro (2009)

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DePietro’s collection covers forty years of interviews with British novelist and man of letters Kingsley Amis, who has a lot to say on the writing process, British politics, and the working-class hero in post-WWII fiction as he moves from card-carrying Communist party member to hardcore Thatcher supporter over the course of forty years.  The collection also serves as a useful, expedited autobiography of Amis’s life (with his philandering only alluded to), but can be repetitive since Amis retells the same anecdotes over and over—how many times can we hear him deny being one of the Angry Young Men?

Rating:

3-kafkas

Where I Got It

Bought online a few weeks ago as part of research for the new novel.

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1975 Interview with Amis for the Paris Review

Or, check out Amis’s first and most famous novel Lucky Jim instead

 

Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf (1925)

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I found Mrs. Dalloway more accessible than other Virginia Woolf novels I’ve read, possibly because it’s also shorter.  The stream-of-consciousness novel shows a day in the life of a fiftysomething socialite reflecting on the mundanity of her married life, the passionate love of her youth, and her deeply hidden feelings for a female friend.  My favorite scenes, though, were the surreal and hard-hitting takes on WWI shell shock in the hallucinatory ramblings of ex-soldier Septimus Warren Smith.

There’s a lot to like here, but it’s still high modernism and can get…dense.

Rating:

4-kafkas

Where I Got It

From a grad school friend who had two copies, Summer 2015.

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Virginia Woolf on Wikipedia
Virginia Woolf Was More Than Just a Women’s Writer (essay)