books, etc.

11-28-99

Did pretty much nothing today except feed dogs and lie about the house. Lay around Barnes and Noble for an hour or so while John picked up some reading material for tomorrow's bus trip to Alabama.

I could use some reading material. Lately I've gone into B+N and poked around the new releases, never lighting on anything long enough to get it. There are a couple of things I'm into picking up, but naturally the Macon version of B+N doesn't carry a great fiction selection. They have all the basics, the biggest-selling one or two books by every author. I've already read those. I'm looking for some David Sedaris that's not Naked. (I know, that's essays, don't pester.) For Heaven's sake, where are my periodicals? I haven't read Press or Story since I left Michigan. There are a zillion "Southern Cooking" magazines, but not a damn literary publication except for "Write Your Own Children's Book And Make $$$ !!!"

If that can be called literary.

So, anyone with suggestions of books I might be into, send those ideas this way. John's going to be gone a lot in December, owing to the Christmas tours his band makes to "cheer up" the servicemen who can't be home. I'm not sure a concert band arrangement of Faith Hill's "This Kiss" would cheer me up, but who am I to rain on someone else's parade, huh?

Hints:

I'm totally into Douglas Coupland, Milan Kundera and Richard Russo. I dig David Foster Wallace's essays, but his novels give my brain too much room to wander. I read Oprah-style books like candy, but I'm embarrassed to buy anything with her face on the cover. She's wrecked a lot of books for me. I've also begun to wonder why all these great books by women are about the woman as a victim—there's always a rape or extreme abuse in her childhood, or an abusive husband, or a schizophrenic mother, or all of the above.

I used to be a Joyce Carol Oates fanatic. I was for years, and yet I still couldn't read all of her work. Now I've cooled off on her a bit; she and Foster Wallace could both use a good editor. Classic case of the author's head getting too big for their own good.

I read a decent amount of short fiction. Works for my attention span.

In the classics: I've fallen in love with--at any given time--Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Hemingway, Vonnegut, Beat poetry, transcendentalism, existentialism, and a number of other -isms. That's what happens when Mom is a Lit teacher.

On the side, I enjoy reading books about pedagogy and creative teaching methods. Don't ask.

What I just can't get into: forensic novels, sports novels, mysteries, weterns, sci-fi, romance, and all that other "popular" stuff. It really needs to be well-written, and usually it has to be scientifically possible. I can't stand Stephen King, so don't even go there. In fact, when he made his version of the movie, The Shining, and it was "the way King wanted it," I liked the other one better. The man has no ear for dialogue. Great plots, yes. Dialogue, no. And he's just way too obsessed with that whole getting-hit-by-a-van thing. Buying the van to smash it up? You're a fucking genius, Steve.