Have you ever read something you've read before and liked and appreciated and understood, but suddenly, you're seeing it in new colors and shades and depths and light explodes and it's a little bit like when the Angel first visits Prior in a big budget production of Angels in America? 
I'm currently in the last weekend of my yoga teacher training. About two months ago, when my reading list arrived in my email inbox, I could feel my heart pitter patter with excitement. School! Reading lists! Maybe I should get a new lunchbox! And the books have all been fascinating and honestly, are helping me make some positive changes in my life, but they're tricky. The predominant text, the bible of yoga, if you will, is The Yoga Sutras of Patanajali. This is a brilliant text, but it's written for monks living alone on mountaintops. There is a portion that discusses how to use mind control to shrink yourself and levitate. I know, right? Clearly, your teacher at Yogaworks is a total hack. But in all seriousness, I've had difficulties applying some of the things I've been learning to the reality of life in the big bad city and one of my teachers recommended I read Yoga and the Path of the Urban Mystic. When I stopped laughing at the title and actually started to read it, I could not have been more grateful for the recommendation. It could be a quick read, but it shouldn't be, because the things Darren Main talks about are worth letting sit and stew. You don't have to have read the Sutras to appreciate it either. If you've ever left a yoga class feeling completely peaceful and at rest with the world and want tools outside of your asana practice o continue that feeling, this book will be helpful. If you want tools for leading a mindful and conscious life amidst all the everyday bluster, this book will be helpful. If you want to read about a point of view different from your own, this book will be helpful.
In high school my friend Vanessa used to make fun of me for reading Airport Novels, books like Life of Pi or She's Come Undone or anything at all by David Sedaris. Basically any book lots of people were reading because lots of other people had already read it. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is decidedly Airport in nature, wildly popular because of the story behind the author's death and also because the cover is just abrasive enough to be impossible to ignore. The story itself is really dark. Yeah, you might think the Swedes are all lingonberry jam and efficient furniture design but apparently that's just cover for the multi-generational incest/torture scandals and immense corporate corruption. It's a compulsively readable thriller but the writing veers into carelessness pretty often, the author sketching out scenes and telling the reader what to feel instead of bothering with character development or realistic dialogue. Still, all is forgiven because hidden among the murder scenes and rape sequences that would do Sade proud is a passage in which the narrator listens to the Eurythmics completely unironically. One more point for the Swedes.
Hi, Sarah! This is pretty much verbatim what I told you at dinner tonight but on the off chance my mom is reading this like I asked her to, I will repeat myself.
I'm halfway through The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and a manuscript about time travel. In lieu of an actual post, here is a picture I took on my phone. You're welcome.
A friend and I recently had a conversation about the fact that not finishing a book is a learned skill. We slog through unenjoyable novels as though they were homework and we are expected to turn in a book report upon completion. This was absolutely something I had to learn, the idea that nobody would be mad if I put down a half-finished book never to return to it. And then I had to learn not to be mad at myself, ha. And is it just me or do books of short stories lend themselves particularly well to this lesson? After all, if one story doesn't grab you, skip ahead to the next. There were a few moments of Not The End of the World worth commending, but for the most part, Atkinson's desire to weave apocalyptic visions into the mundane just makes for a lot of vaguely interesting stories that end suddenly and oddly. So I put them down and am on to the next.
About one hundred pages in, I was ready to give up on The White Rose, never again to fall for the phrase "a novel of manners and love" unless when applied to a Jane Austen book I am re-reading. But then Sophie arrived and I must admit, I have a soft spot for socially inept, painfully bright Jewish girls whose true beauty shines through as soon as we take off our metaphorical glasses.....and by "we," I mean "they," of course. She threw a wrench into what was looking to be another story of a young man and an older woman feeling something like love but unable to overcome circumstances. Suddenly, the book became interesting and harder to put down because suddenly it wasn't a story I had heard before and yet it was a story I'd heard before. Korelitz doesn't quite get everything there is to get about That Great Concept That Is Real Love, but she writes so many of its little intricacies so beautifully, you find yourself being taken back to moments in your own life and seeing them in a new light. Not bad for what I had assumed was going to be a piece of fluff, fun and witty and not much else.
If you've ever tried to read Knut Hamsun's Hunger only to discover that it takes three months and an insane amount of willpower to get past the first 40 pages (and honestly, who hasn't? Right?), you might give Herve Guibert a try instead. Guibert is Hamsun-lite, equally dark and funny but a little less manic. Also, he writes novellas. As you may have noticed: we are all about novellas. In this one, the narrator, a not-so-fictional version of Guibert himself, is a sardonic young Parisian writer embroiled in a number of romantic intrigues with beautiful, aloof young men. His two great-aunts, Suzanne and Louise, get robbed of millions of francs by a team of shady contractors. Rather than stick around and deal with the bungling French policemen, he leaves the old ladies to fend for themselves and takes off with a lover for the coast. On the trip, he writes letters and drifts into memories of his scandalous sexual affairs. He may or may not get murdered at the end. I don't know. It is all very French. From what I've read about Guibert, he was an OG hipster, a bisexual journalist and photographer who worked at Le Monde and ran in circles with Barthes and Foucault. He writes pretty much the way you would expect, his voice a blend of morbidity, self-loathing, exceptional wit and extreme arrogance. (Sample line: "Once, at dinner my friend Philippe informed that, scientifically, suffering was such a mystery that one could almost say that it did not exist.") Also, dude was H-A-W-T, especially if you can look past the whole contracting AIDS and passing it along to his lover and his lover's wife, then committing suicide at the age of 36 bit.
No joke, every time I hear the word "apprentice," I think of Johnny Tremain, this book I had to read in junior high about a silversmith's apprentice who accidentally pours hot silver over his hand and horribly disfigures himself. I don't remember what happens next, I think he and his crippled paw helped lead America to victory in the Revolutionary War or something, but he is eternally what I think of when I think of "apprentice." And sorry, Bill Buford, although you totally look like someone's cool grandpa in the jacket photo, you didn't come close to challenging that position.
Machine by Danish writer Peter Adolphsen is about the untimely drowning of a fox-terrier sized horse from the Pleistocene period. It is also about a one-armed Russian immigrant named Jimmy Nash (nee Djamolidine Hasanov) and his brief, unconsummated affair with one Clarissa Sanders, a doomed Austinite of above-average intelligence. The two stories are inextricably intertwined in ways both chemical and metaphysical. To sum up: the horse's heart winds up as a drop of fuel that ignites in the tank of a car driven by Ms. Sanders with Jimmy Nash in the passenger seat. The author draws out the relationship between the two plotlines via biological examinations of everything from death to oil refineries to acid trips over the course of fewer than 100 pages. It is a tiny book that will take you about an hour and a half to read. Afterwards, your brain will feel cleaner and more orderly somehow, as though somebody up there took a trip to Ikea and reorganized your thought space.
“What movie about Vietnam was made by Oliver Stone? Platoon. What movie about Vietnam was directed by Stanley Kubrick? No. Wrong. Full Metal Jacket.” This from an undersized boy in an over-sized pink tee-shirt, fourteen years old and yelling across the racket of Swingers at 10:00 on a Thursday night to a rapt audience made up of his parents and two best friends that look like the kind you only ever get to have once, but remember for the rest of your life. He is confident and brash in a way only kids born and raised in Los Angeles by artistic parents ever are, and I can’t help quietly falling in love with him from two tables away. Maybe it’s envy or nostalgia or projection or some such thing- I don’t know how to describe it. Tim O'Brien probably would. The reason I started listening to the kid in the first place, besides the fact that he pretty much made it impossible not to, was because I am in the middle of reading The Things They Carried for the first time and suddenly it seems like everybody, everywhere is talking about war. I picked it up for a lot of reasons: I saw the Hurt Locker and realized how much time I’ve wasted actively not knowing anything about actual Americans in combat; somebody sent me a list; I found it on a shelf at my office which meant I got to read it for free; it is one of those books that everybody else has read that I somehow never got around to. Besides being incredibly relevant even 19 years after it was written, it’s a near-perfect meditation on truth and fiction and the strength of language, on what it means to write a story and why anybody would ever do so. Go reread it or read it for the first time right now, I'm serious. Go.
Hey, wanna feel smart and be the kind of person who can finish a book in two days? Then allow me to introduce you to... The Novella. Half the length of a novel but nobody has to know that when you brag about having finished one on a cross-country flight. Of course, I'm giving away my secret now. I could have let you think it was a 600-pager I pounded through in these past two days. But I could never lie to you. Also, this really isn't a book worth bragging about. The Magic Christian concerns itself with the misadventures of Guy Grand, a billionaire whose predominant concern is discovering how low people will stoop for money. Spoiler Alert: Really low. It was a funny enough distraction and certainly not untrue, but too mean spirited to be really engaging and it never dipped below the surface. Such is the problem of the novella. There is only so much you can do in 144 pages. Unless you're Steve Martin.
