Nonsuch Book

book lust: the penguin drop cap series

Near the holidays, when people close to me begin to ask what I might like in the way of gifts, and all but a few put on their most resolute and stubborn faces and say to me, looking me directly in the eyes, "anything but books," I begin to craft lists of all the books I want, books for which I have no need. This eye-catching Drop Cap series from Penguin designed by Jessica Hische and Paul Buckley is the perfect example of this sort of object of my book lust. The first six titles will be available on November 27. I have read each of these books. Multiple times. I own multiple copies of each of the six titles. I want all of them for Christmas.

Compulsive, I know, but a lot of the appeal of this series is about book as design object again, the focus on typography and the info from the press release that I read at Imprint that stated that each book will have “a foil-stamped paper-over-board case and a decorative color stain on all three edges.” You feel warm all over when you read that, don't you?

More examples of Hische's lovely work may be found at her blog, Daily Drop Cap.

r.eaders i.mbibing p.eril vii

Don't you just love this image? Carl holds us all captive each fall with fantastic images and the promise of nothing but fun. And perhaps a fright or two. Or just a little jumpy nerviness from real or perceived peril. All the details are here. I want to actually have the fun I intend to have so have decided to keep it simple. 

For "Peril the Short Story," I will draw my inspiration from the event art work, and read through as much Poe as possible. On a whim, I picked up this inexpensive Poe collection this summer. I justified the acquisition by telling my children, who are often the audience for my bookish rationalizations, that my other editions are falling apart. And don't smell as good as this one does.

And then for a novel, I have been planning on a re-read of The Mysteries of Udolpho for some time. Once assigned reading for a graduate seminar, it went from the butt of my jokes to being a favorite for both it's gothic splendor and the fact that it inspired my favorite Austen, Northanger Abbey.

I might take part in the group read of The Graveyard Book which I have read several time with kids. Just not sure yet. What will you read? Anyone up for Udolpho with me?

rules of civility by amor towles

The Great Gatsby is one of my favorite novels, and the constant mention of the Fitzgerald work in reviews of Rules of Civility by Amor Towles made me both curious and apprehensive about reading this one. But the cover is lovely (I have a thing for the Conde Nast archives) so I kept picking it up in book stores to look through, read a bit here and there, and then maybe on the third or so go round of this, saw the list in the back of the book - the young George Washington's Rules of Civility & Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation. And then it clicked. Gatsby's boyhood schedule written in his copy of Hopalong Cassidy.

When Gatsby's father, Mr. Gatz, arrives at the end of the novel so obviously proud of his son and his son's possessions, he pulls a tattered old copy of Hopalong Cassidy from his pocket to show Nick Carraway.

He opened it at the back cover and turned it around for me to see. On the last fly-leaf was printed the word SCHEDULE, and the date September 12, 1906. And underneath:

Rise from bed......................................6:00         AM

Dumbbell exercise and wall-scaling.............6:15-6:30  "

Study electricity, etc..............................7:15-8:15  "

Work................................................8:30-4:30  PM

Baseball and sports................................4:30-5:00  "

Practice elocution, poise and gow to attain it.5:00-6:00  "

Study needed inventions..........................7:00-9:00  "

GENERAL RESOLVES

No wasting time at Shafters or [a name, indecipherable]

No more smokeing or chewing

Bath every other day

Read one improving book or magazine per week

Save $5.00 [crossed out] $3.00 per week

Be better to parents

"I come across this book by accident," said the old man. "It just shows you, don't it?"

"It just shows you."

"Jimmy was bound to get ahead. He always had some resolves like this or something. Do you notice what he's got about improving his mind? He was always great for that. He told me I et like a hog once, and I beat him for it."

He was reluctant to close the book, reading each item aloud and then looking eagerly at me. I think he rather expected me to copy down the list for my own use.

No matter how many times I read Gatsby, I always find this parental pride and the naivete of attachment to the dream of social mobility incredibly moving. While Rules of Civility tells a similar story of a female narrator that rises from Russian immigrant penury to the offices of Conde Nast and the parties seen in its classic photographs and a bright and shiny young man who has written a social place for himself, its snappy composition runs afield of the same type of emotional impact. It borders on a novel of manners type exposition and has a zing not present in the poignancy of Gatsby. It was a fun and quick read but suffers in comparison with the Fitzgerald classic. A little unfair but impossible not to draw comparisons.

poster lust: obvious state

Jacket Copy pointed the way to me this morning to what they called "pithy posters for writers." From the Etsy shop of Obvious State, these clever and visually pleasing literary posters delight me. My favorite is Molly Bloom's soliliquy from the end of Ulysses. Print featured above. Evan Robertson's design appealed even more after reading this description of the product:

For anyone that believes that James Joyce wrote Ulysses as an intellectual exercise designed to torture English majors, I appeal to you to re-read the last lines of this incredible story, which in my illustration form the wings of a butterfly emerging from a cocoon. The additional details of the illustration (the body, hindwings and the cocoon below) are formed from the dominant word in the monologue, "yes."

Other favorites include:

spanish lit month

The ubiquitous published summer reading lists always draw me in for a few moments. Reading the book of the moment or the sweet and frothy seems just the thing as I prepare for heated slothdom, but it never satisfies for long. One book in, maybe two books in and I want something... more. Last summer I went a bit overboard in attempting to read through the entire Art of the Novella series in just a month so I am steering toward less ambitious but no less worthy options this summer. So for starters, I am joining Richard and Stu for Spanish Lit Month in July. And am most excited about the group read of Bartleby & Co. at the end of the month.

I had thought about calling it a day there for participation but then an inviting copy of Dublinesque showed up in my mailbox. Hmm. Same author, wanted to read. Two by same in a row sounds good. I'm waiting for the ever willing to bait me Richard to lure me into something else so I will leave my options open aside from these two. Participating? What will you be reading?

antigonick by sophokles translated by anne carson illustrated by bianca stone

The arrival of this book yesterday has brought something wonderful to my weekend. Many of you have been subjected to my near idolatrous love of Nox, and know that anything Anne Carson is involved with is an object of book lust for me. The production value of Nox brought joy to me that such exceptional content should find a home in something so beautiful and thoughtfully assembled. New Directions has always been a favorite publisher of mine for their author list (Tennessee Williams, William Carlos Williams, Roberto Bolano and Muriel Spark being especially admired in a list where nothing is not book lust worthy), but the investment they made in producing Nox endeared them to me forever. And they extended another outrageously generous gift to readers in this Carson translation.

From the New Directions blog:

Carson has hand-lettered the text on the pages (see below), and artist Bianca Stone (a former student of Carson's) has provided color illustrations, which are being printed on translucent vellum pages. The end result being that the two will work together, the ghostly presentiment of the text-to-come enhancing the illustrations.

The translation itself is simply beautiful. She's playful with the language and the plot (the chorus has a decidedly sarcastic tone; Kreon enters on a motorboat), and yet it's still the fundamentally human story about death and honor, ethics and the law. It is, essentially what it was when it was written about 2500 years ago: a timeless classic.

 

The impact of the text peeping through the illustrations on vellum is best captured by the description on the ND blog as "ghosting through."

And the arrangement of thoughts in isolation on certain pages is powerful.

So I am starting to read this as soon as I click "Publish Now" here. And I am cheating. I am reading all the chorus sections first. To pick up the tone, the voice of that tool in this translation. And then a read from cover to cover.

irving, bolano and krauss in the house

My case of The History of Love by Nicole Krauss was all ready for me at my public library today. For distribution on World Book Night. As I said before, I couldn't be happier about the book assigned to me. So singing in the car,  singing up the steps to the house and then there were two more bookish gifts for me - a finished copy of the new John Irving due out in May and the new Bolano translation. So sweet a day.

book lust: horseshoe crabs and velvet worms by richard fortey

When this popped up in the book section of the NYT this week, it was instant love for me. The cover design is elegant, successfully combining scientific image with softer script and flourish. I also have an odd fascination with horseshoe crabs having spent much time in close examination of them growing up when they washed up on the beaches near my childhood home. A scientific consideration of them made me both nostalgic and curious. But then this from the review left me with little choice but to seek this one out: 

"The good news about “Horseshoe Crabs and Velvet Worms” is that Mr. Fortey is as vivid and charming about live things as he’s long been about dead ones, perhaps even more so. Reading this book is like stepping into the field with a man who’s equal parts naturalist and poet, let’s say equal parts E. O. Wilson and Paul Muldoon. The Wilson in him wields the notebook; the Muldoon flutters. It’s a bewitching combination."

Flutters. Bewitching. Soon to be mine.

the nonfiction

With little time on my hands recently, I have found that the amount of nonfiction I read has been steadily increasing. No narrative arc to follow. I can read multiple books at a time easily. Chapters often stand alone successfully, allowing me to jump around in a text and select that which interests me most. Skimming often. But a few in the last month or two have held my attention entirely.

• Language: The Cultural Tool by Daniel Everett - Aggressively challenges certain linguistic assumptions and shows how waning linguistic diversity corresponds with waning cultural diversity.
• "Multiplication is for White People" by Lisa Delpit - There is no achievement gap at birth. Enough said.
• The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt -
"His starting point is moral intuition—the nearly instantaneous perceptions we all have about other people and the things they do. These intuitions feel like self-evident truths, making us righteously certain that those who see things differently are wrong. Haidt shows us how these intuitions differ across cultures, including the cultures of the political left and right. He blends his own research findings with those of anthropologists, historians, and other psychologists to draw a map of the moral domain, and he explains why conservatives can navigate that map more skillfully than can liberals. He then examines the origins of morality, overturning the view that evolution made us fundamentally selfish creatures. But rather than arguing that we are innately altruistic, he makes a more subtle claim—that we are fundamentally groupish. It is our groupishness, he explains, that leads to our greatest joys, our religious divisions, and our political affiliations. In a stunning final chapter on ideology and civility, Haidt shows what each side is right about, and why we need the insights of liberals, conservatives, and libertarians to flourish as a nation."
• How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer - From the Author of Proust Was a Neuroscientist. A brilliant, fast-paced read that I loved for the fact that it employed the latest findings in neuroscience to champion my own personal and constant self-justification of the conflation of reason and emotion.
• Imagine: How Creativity Works by Jonah Lehrer - Came at a time when a friend at work shared a belief that creativity is not an innate gift but something that can be developed. A belief I share and found echoed here. But especially loved the focus upon creativity and productivity - making a vision real. It takes hard work, a cultivation of one's creativity and not a muse tapping you on the shoulder beckoning you into an afternoon of daydreaming. Which I, of course, have no objection to. But wish to touch the best my head holds in many instances.

lightning rods by helen dewitt

"I would have to know you really well before I would suggest that you would like this novel." Kevin Guilefoile wrote that recently in match commentary for the just-ended Tournament of Books. My thought exactly. Your friends frequently ask what they should read next, your book club at work turns to you for suggestions, your neighbor asks what you are reading now. So you tell them you have picked up this book, a both hilarious and empty tale of the American talent for commodification. It is about a failing salesman who is unable to sell a single vaccum cleaner in a territory that has been thoroughly exhausted. Filled with pie and numbed by rejection, Joe escapes back to his trailer in the middle of the work day to indulge his fantasy life where he masturbates distractedly as he tries to perfect the details of his fantasy. The mouths of your friends hang open a little at this point but you press on. Let me read you this excerpt to best explain the nature of Joe's fantasy, you continue.

His first fantasy was about walls. The woman would have the upper part of her body on one side of the wall. The lower part of her body would be on the other side of the wall... Sometimes the woman would be naked from the waist down. Most of the time she would be wearing a short tight skirt that could be pushed up and underpants that could be pulled down. Sometimes he would have trouble deciding whether it was better with or without the pants. The high point was pushing the skirt slowly up to reveal a firm, tight, unsuspecting ass.

And still not a word has escaped from your audience's mouth. So eager for them to understand the point of the novel, to not mistake it for mere pornography, you explain that Joe turns this fantasy into a multi-million dollar business that sets up the services of women, lightning rods, in work places for the "release" of high-achieving and testosterone driven males. He sells the service to companies as a preventative measure to lessen sexual harassment in the work place. Or scandals among the famous like politicians. The book moves from the voyeuristic look into Joe's fantasies to a detail laden and hardly sexy view of a country where anything is possible.

So for what portion of your intended audience will this conversation (or monologue) be appropriate? You see my difficulty. And Guilfoile's. But this book is such a telling read about the demystification of sex in our society, our talents for self-justification and our willingness to allow boundaries to be rationalized away in the name of commerce. Where sex can be so completely impersonal that a lightning rod views the job as a wonderful way to pay for law school and have extra time to finally read Proust when only the bottom half of her body is enagaged through a wall.

Simon Critchley talks about his new book Faith of the Faithless, a philosophical examination of the interplay of love and faith, over at Full Stop this week, and one particular section grabbed my attention in reference to DeWitt's book.

It was the extremity of that that drew me, which is because I guess the question is really whether you can love and desire in the same place. There are different ways of talking about this, but one way of diagnosing culture would be to say that we love in one place and that we desire in another place. So, for example, I’m sure Eliot Spitzer loved his wife, but he desired the hooker that ruined his career. What I’m exploring is not some sort of pacific, peaceful idea of love — love and harmony and reconciliation — but a love that is fueled by desire, that is sustained by it. I’m working with some idea that these could exist in the same place, whatever that means.

An ideal. And certainly not one that exists here where a decided lack of philosophical exploration, where a half-rate intellect drives the story, the effort. Thought provoking. You'll laugh through your sadness. Possibly. I don't know. Remember, I hesitate to recommend despite my enjoyment of the book.