What are you reading?
Me: Recently finished James Lee Burke’s The Tin Roof Blowdown, a post-Katrina story by the (excellent) serial mystery novelist that contains some of the best prose descriptions of New Orleans after the storm that I’ve read anywhere–and a plot that does not quite live up to those parts of the book. Not my favorite Burke, but good.
Also read Zeroville, Steve Erickson’s fabulist novel about the psychic pull of Hollywood images. It’s my favorite Erickson since Days Between Stations, and, oddly, his most accessible novel owing to all the movies reference points.
You?
What were the good things that happened here this year?
The Mole (with help from the monkey, left) is in the process of compiling a top local stories of 2007 list for next week, a task that is not exactly full of uplift considering all the lousy things that happened here this year, from the bridge collapse on down.
Our question: What were the positive (exciting, encouraging, hopeful) things that happened in the Twin Cities this year? It’s meant to be entirely open-ended: Maybe it’s something that happened in the news–good luck with that–or maybe it’s a new band, a new building, a local artist you discovered, a new dining spot/watering hole…
It’s anything that happened this year that makes you feel a little better about the place where you live.
Books: What were your favorites in 2007?
Dwight Garner, who writes the excellent PaperCuts blog about books for the New York Times, reminds us that it’s list-making season again. He’s got lists from the Times of London and The Guardian; Publishers Weekly’s best-of-2007 list is here. Amazon has a reader list here.
What were your favorite books this year?
Open thread: Thanksgivings for which we were not entirely thankful
And you know what I’m talking about: Things seldom go wrong as frequently as on those occasions when we think they’ve got to go well.
An offbeat story from a friend–yeah, that’s the ticket–to get us started: “When I was four, my father brought home a box of two or three turkey chicks the day before Thanksgiving. I loved watching them through the air holes that ringed the covered crate they were in–until one of them marched over and tried plucking my eye from its socket. ‘One of your damn turkeys pecked me in the eye!’ I informed my parents. Not a direct hit, but it resulted in a frantic trip to the optometrist’s office, which turned out to be the traumatic part. To assure there was no damage, the doctor showed me a series of pictures of animals and asked me to say what they were. I could see them fine, but I had no idea what half of them were. The doctor, seeing my troubles, began whispering in grave tones to my parents. Very scary. I had visions of entering kindergarten with a glass eye due to vocabulary problems.”
Nightstand check: What are you reading these days?
And what do you think of it?
Me: More of same. Having read Don DeLillo’s Falling Man a couple of weeks back, I dipped back over the weekend and read Cosmopolis, his 2003 novella about a fatally leveraged money manager’s day-long limousine ride across Manhattan. “[M]oney has taken a turn,” one character observes. “All wealth is wealth for its own sake. There’s no other kind of enormous wealth. Money has lost its narrative quality the way painting did once upon a time. Money is talking to itself.”
Also looking forward to reading Zeroville, the new Steve Erickson novel noted last week at Pop Media.
What are you reading? Or, if you’d rather: Who’s the last author you binge-read?
