The new office/library shelving has a whole row (about two and a half shelf-feet) for my reading list. No more vertical stacks of books that fall over whenever I go to read the middle one. In left-to-right order here’s what’s on that shelf:
(First, what’s not on the shelf? I’m currently reading James T. Patterson’s Restless Giant, the latest volume in the Oxford History of the United States and a readable overview from the year I was born to just a few years ago — with footnotes through 2005! And I recently finished Steve Coll’s excellent history of U.S., Soviet, Saudi, and Pakistani involvement in Afghanistan over the same period, Ghost Wars, so it’s back over in the history section.)
- Thomas Friedman. The World Is Flat. How many months ago did I start to read this? How many times have I heard his interviews telling me everything I need to know about it in the intervening span?
- Ian McEwan. Saturday. So far very good.
- Charlotte Cotton’s The Photograph as Contemporary Art and Edward Lucie-Smith’s Movements in Art since 1945. The former I know a fair bit about; but this is the year that I learn the secret handshake for getting the most out of the latter’s status markers.
- V.S. Naipaul. A Bend in the River. Nimmi’s Jay doesn’t much care for Naipaul.
- W.P. Kinsella. The Iowa Baseball Confederacy. “Field of Dreams” meets Foucault’s Pendulum?
- Jhumpha Lahiri. The Namesake. I loved the short stories in her Interpreter of Maladies. Someone lent us this; but who?
- Dolores Hayden. Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820-2000. Understand the suburbs and you will understand America, I suspect.
- Susan Sontag. On Photography. The original essay on photography that would have made Sartre weep with existential pride, before she moderated her feelings later in life.
- Richard Smith. Your Cat’s just not that into You. Before getting this at the holiday party, I had always suspected. Kitty is hiding in the paper bag again, feeling snug, sleepy, and a little crazy.
- Michael Palin. Sahara. How many euphemisms and phrases did this Monty Python man add to Lisa and my travel repertoire on his circum-Pacific PBS/BBC trek? Well, at least one. What will we learn from his Saharan adventure?
- Great Women of India: Kasturba Gandhi. So I haven’t read the 55-page young adults’ book I brought back in the bundle of gifts for coworkers. . . .
- Rudyard Kipling. Kim. My Air Deccan cabin baggage claim ticket marks the spot where I last fell asleep reading: page 118-119.
- Umberto Eco. Kant and the Platypus. Nonfiction from the semiotician who wrote some masterful fiction. Girl Trouble Alec lent me this.
- Liz Wells, ed. The Photography Reader. Lots of big words in little print.
- Karen Armstrong. The Battle for God: A History of Fundamentalism and A History of God. Becoming briefly Catholic didn’t help me understand religion; perhaps these will?
- Bobby Thompson. The Giants Win the Pennant! The Giants Win the Pennant!. We have a baseball signed by Brooklyn players from this miraculous year. Ken Burns covered the subject in pictures, but real hagiography requires words.
- Leo Marx. The Machine in the Garden. While attending some lectures at MIT in 2003 (?) I sensed that Marx still is a force to be reckoned with — kind of like Remini or a latter-day Turner.
- Wild: Fashion Untamed. The catalogue for the special exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
- Shauna Singh Baldwin. What the Body Remembers. I know nothing about this book except that it has a map of pre-Partition India in the front matter.
- J.K. Rowling. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Call me an early adopter if you must. I’m on the vanguard of British fiction.
- Mark Schreiber. Tabloid Tokyo: 101 Tales of Sex, Crime and the Bizarre from Japan’s Wild Weeklies. Lisa said this book “spoke to her” whilst Christmas shopping.
What are you reading?
