Staff Picks
3/24/08
Actual Air
by David Berman
In 1999 David Berman (lead singer of Silver Jews) published a book of poetry. Right off the bat there’s a double whammy of skepticism: 1) singer/musician-turned-poet (Jewel, anyone?) and 2) poetry. That’s right, I suck at reading poetry, I have a difficult time with it, being a voracious reader of novels, a reluctant reader of short stories, and a reader of poetry whose experience began and ended with Shel Silverstein. If nobody goes for a ride in a flying shoe I’m out of my element. But the poems collected in Berman’s Actual Air are so surpassingly delightful - that is to say bright, earnest, wacky, moving, off-kilter, each poem pierced through with a vision that takes in the absurdity of the important and the importance of the absurd, each poem an antidote to the mundaneness of everyday objects or events. Together they constitute a deeply gratifying reading experience.
-Davi
3/22/08
The Savage Detectives
by Roberto Bolaño
Not since The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle have I been blown away by such an enormous, bizarre, unpredictable, endlessly entertaining work of literature, nor been so completely absorbed into a fictional world. We start in Mexico City with a group of teenage poets who call themselves the Visceral Realists. Youth for them is sex and violence and poetry - especially poetry. To read this book is to believe that literature is a powerful, if not the most powerful, force in the world. From Mexico City the narrative begins to explode like fireworks all over the rest of the globe - Austria, Spain, France, England, Israel, Africa - as a consuming quest for a lost poet hurls the two enigmatic youths at the center of this story through 20 years of adventure, hardship and depravity.
The Savage Detectives is an important book, a testament to the power of literature and a rebuke to the notion that originality and ambition have left the field of the novel. Please don’t miss it - it’s a big deal!
–Davi
The Book of Disquiet
by Fernando Pessoa
Darker and deeper and more sad and beautiful and lucid than anything I’ve ever read. This book is an absurdly rich vein of wisdom and poignancy. And it is never cheesy, always somewhat surreal and dreamlike, as if Pessoa had been granted access to a realm just outside regular existence and wrote back to us from this vantage point. Written from the perspective of an alter-ego, a severely introverted accounting clerk who lives by himself in a small apartment in Lisbon, The Book of Disquiet is collected from a trunk full of unpublished manuscripts found in Pessoa’s home after his death. I can’t help thinking that literature would be a much smaller thing if it hadn’t been discovered, the same with my notion of what’s possible with the written word.
–Davi
1/16/08:
We promise to try to stay more on top of this section of the site in the future, but for now, feel free to check out my page on GoodReads to see what I’m reading.
-Christine
11/29/07:
The National Book Critics Circle just launched their Most Recommended List, a great resource which we will try to post here regularly. It’s a monthly list of book recommendations compiled from votes cast by NBCC members as well as famous writers and critics, and here’s the first one:
Fiction
1) Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
2) Denis Johnson, Tree of Smoke
3) Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union
4) Philip Roth, Exit Ghost
5) Per Petterson, Out Stealing Horses
Nonfiction
1) Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I’m Dying
2) Alan Weisman, The World Without Us
3) Noami Klein, The Shock Doctrine
4) David Michaelis, Schulz and the Peanuts
5) Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes
Poetry
1) Robert Hass, Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005*
2) Zbigniew Herbert, Collected Poems: 1956-1998*
3) Robert Pinsky, Gulf Music*
4) Rae Armantrout, Next Life
5) Mary Jo Bang, Elegy
*These three titles tied for first place in the poetry category.
10/11/07:
Christine:
-is currently reading Special Topics in Calamity Physics (fiction, $15.00)
-read Absurdistan (fiction, $13.95) and liked it, but didn’t love it
-read The Worst Years of Your Life: Stories for the Geeked-Out, Angst-Ridden, Lust-Addled, and Deeply Misunderstood Adolescent in All of Us (story collection, $15.00). This one was not as light and humorous as I expected from the cover, but still worth reading. Some of the stories in the collection are powerful and dark.
-read The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (young adult, $16.99). I enjoyed this one, and think it’s definitely appropriate for the young adult (14 and up) crowd. Boys should love it.
