What We've Been Reading

Dustin:
I'm just finishing up Lowboyby John Wray (who is reading at the August 1207). I happened to be discussing books of this type with Geoff Herbach recently and it occurred to me (I was just starting the book then) that Wray has an extraordinary ability to make incredibly flawed characters but show them authorial love. The book is partially from the POV of a mentally ill teenager, but Wray handles these characters so well that it everything feels very real and vital. It feels like a book about the times not a book about a mentally ill person because he does it right.

David:
My pick this time around is an older book. The Meadowby the poet James Galvin was recommended to me by another great poet, Rick Barot. We were discussing nonfiction and I threw into the discussion Blues for Cannibals: The Notes from Underground by Charles Bowden. Rick responded with The Meadow, a meditative masterpiece on the history of a piece of land on the Wyoming-Colorado border and the people who occupy it.

Ashleigh:
I'm just about to finish the first volume of Art Spiegelman's Maus. The drawings are just okay, but the story and characters are compelling. It's been on my to-read list since seventh grade; I wish I'd gotten around to it sooner.

Jess:
Airships by Barry Hannah.Short story collection about the South (mostly white men in the South) post Civil War and through the 1970's or so. Many of these are only three or four pages long. Denis Jonson was obviously influenced by the language when he wrote Jesus' Son. Language like I wove a piece of cloth from a piece of lightning, buried it, dug it up half-wizened but still flickering, starched it and made a lamp shade. Wouldn't it feel shitty if I turned on the lamp? And then kept telling you about how I lost my wife?

Reina:
I've been very, very slowly making my way through Belovedby Toni Morrison while also reading a book on mother-daughter relationships.

If We Are What We Read, Than Who Are Barack Obama and John McCain?

Heidi Benson of the San Francisco Chronicle asks this question in a recent article published in the Chronicle. Among the favorites listed by the candidates are For Whom the Bell Tolls, All Quiet on the Western Front, & History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire on McCain's list, and Moby-Dick, Self-Reliance (Ralph Waldo Emerson), & Song of Solomon on Barack Obama's list.

These lists are kind of interesting, in that way where you are sick of hearing how Obama was raised by his grandmother and McCain was a POW and you need to read something a little different. Benson asks a few Bay Area authors to chime in on what they think about the lists. Susan Griffin, while analyzing McCain's choices, says, "This strange conglomeration leads me to wonder if the confusion McCain has displayed throughout his campaign may reflect a profound inner ambivalence."

Daniel Handler (Lemony Snicket) may have my favorite response to the lists when he said:

All of us polish those lists for public view, and you can't get more public than running for president. But these lists do tell us something, even if it's not the truth.

Obama's list says that he'd like to convey a willingness to face heartbreak and irony, that he's open to the new and to the experimental, but that he's serious of purpose and true of heart.

McCain's list says that sure, he reads books, but he's not a pansy boy.

Read the article at the above link, and weigh in on what you think.

InDigest out.