London Reading List

I read a lot of books while I was in London for four months. Here they are.

1. The English Patient - Michael Ondaatje (I love his imagery.)
2. The Eyre Affair- Jasper Fforde (Very fun book, going to try others in the series when I can)
3. Slaughterhouse Five- Kurt Vonnegut (Oh Vonnegut.)
4. Breakfast of Champions- Kurt Vonnegut (So full of beautiful sentences and kind cruelties.)
5. The Cinnamon Peeler- Michael Ondaatje (The book that made me start writing poetry again)
6. Cloud Atlas- David Mitchell (Toes the line of too much wink-nudge and won me over anyway)
7. Tess of the D'Urbervilles- Thomas Hardy (So much more depressing than I remember.)
8. Demons in the Spring- Joe Meno (Still my favorite collection of short stories possibly ever)
9. The Little Prince- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (In french and english. Adorable.)
10. Maus- Art Spiegelman (Yeah, I'd never read it before. So glad I finally did.)
11. Candide- Voltaire (Funny. Anachronistically, uproariously, wisely, unpretentiously funny)
12. Habibi- Craig Thompson (Can that guy DRAW or what?! So many lush pages.)
13. Art and Life- John Ruskin (So began my induction to the cult of the pre-raphaelites)
14. Oblivion- David Foster Wallace (Insanely talented writer.)
15. How We Are Hungry- Dave Eggers (Also dang good, but a little too winky/desperate at times)
16. The Lamp of Memory- John Ruskin (More Ruskin genius)
17. Stepford Wives- Ira Levin (Short, but chilling and very slickly written)
18. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius- Dave Eggers (Entertaining and ANNOYING.)
19. Middlesex- Jeffrey Eugenedies (A gripping read but also kind of heavy-handed and clumsy.)
20. The Collected Poems of T.S. Eliot (Dude was a genius.)
21. The Road- Cormac McCarthy (Grim and oh so pretty.)
22. All the Pretty Horses- Cormac McCarthy (Not as grim, but beaauuutiful.)
23. Letters to a Young Poet- Ranier Maria Rilke (Basic life truths from a thoughtful poet.)

I've also started Gilead by Marilynne Robison and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John LeCarre. I'm going on a cruise with my family next week and have decided to try and read Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace while I'm on the boat. We'll see how that goes. 

What a dream.

Just some things Tom Waits said about his wife. 

"We've been married for eight years (in 1988) and we're partners. Kalhleen's a great collaborator She's quick - she can catch a bullet in her teeth. She has a pet snake, reads The Wall Street Journal, has a '64 Caddy, and loves periodicals. She's from Johnsburgh. Illinois; that's the last place you can get margarine before you cross the Wisconsin border. No one makes me laugh like Kathleen. She got me listening to Frankie Laine, Rachmaninoff, and John McCormick. We write together, and she wants to do a two-character drama about a singer and his giant bald-headed limo driver who has a US Road Atlas tattooed on his head, wherever he itches his head that's where they play next. She's great in emergencies and she's brutally honest. Her own writing - her stories - is strange, bizarre and wonderful. Tragic and very Irish. She's real black Irish. Kathleen has a great sense of story and of the architecture of a story. I have a tendency to go back over familiar ground, and she's much more of a pioneer."

"Who wrote the Mule Variations songs? TW: My wife Kathleen and I collaborated on just about all of them. Of the sixteen songs that are now on the record, we wrote ten or eleven together. We've been working together since Swordfish... I'm the prospector, she's the cook. She says, "you bring it home, I'll cook it up." I think we sharpen each other like knives. She has a fearless imagination. She writes lyrics that are like dreams. And she puts the heart into all things. She's my true love. There's no one I trust more with music, or life. And she's got great rhythm, and finds melodies that are so intriguing and strange. Most of the significant changes I went through musically and as a person began when we met. She's the person by which I measure all others. She's who you want with you in a foxhole. She doesn't like the limelight, but she is an incandescent presence on everything we work on together."

"I trust her opinion above all else. You've gotta have somebody to trust, that knows a lot. She's done a lot of things. I'm Ingrid Bergman and she's Bogart. She's got a pilot's license, and she was gonna be a nun before we got married. I put an end to that. She knows about everything from motorcycle repair to high finance, and she's an excellent pianist. One of the leading authorities on the African violet. She's a lot of strong material. She's like Superwoman, standing there with her cape flapping. It works. We've been at this for some time now. Sometimes you quarrel, and it's the result of irritation, and sometimes it comes out of the ground like a potato and we marvel at it. She doesn't like the spotlight. She's a very private person, as opposed to myself"

I want to be that kind of woman someday. 

If you haven't listened to his first album in 7 years, get on it. Bad As Me. It's great.

Bookshelf update

Books I have read/listened to since last I posted. One sentence reviews.

The Book Thief- Markus Zusak

Wonderfully descriptive, explores WWII from a unique perspective, and you learn mild German swear words along the way.

Cosmopolis- Don DeLillo

 Don DeLillo's a great, lyrical writer, but I found this book a little -too- disaffected.

Against The Day- Thomas Pynchon

This book was hugely overlong sprawling hilarious genre-mashing mess and I loved it.

House of Leaves - Mark Z. Danielewski

This book is terrifying and also deeply, deeply romantic- a must-read.

The Age of Innocence- Edith Wharton

This story really resonated with me despite its being written in the style of a much more boring Oscar Wilde. 

Catcher in the Rye- J.D. Salinger

So much more relatable than I remember it being when I was ten.

I'm currently working on Atonement by Ian McEwan and Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami.

Reroute

 

Cleaning out old images on my hard drive.

Trailerspotting

New or newish trailers presented without necessary endorsement.

Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Don't know that I'll see it (those books!), but it looks terribly stylish and that Karen O/Trent Reznor cover of Immigrant Song is pretty powerful.

X-Men First Class. I'm bored of superhero movies, but this one might be worth seeing for all that WWII imagery (Same with Captain America.)

Adventures of Tintin. I love Tintin but 3D mocap gives me the wig.

Tree of Life. Of course I want to see this movie. It looks beautifully shot and overly preachy. I'm a pretentious art kid. Match made in heaven.

Music for Clouds

A playlist of songs that make me feel like I do when it's raining. 

It's been raining a LOT lately.



Concerning the UFO Sighting Near Highland, IL - Sufjan Stevens
Someone You'd Admire - Fleet Foxes
Brackett WI - Bon Iver
Leave (Live) - The Swell Season
Chandeliers - Sleeping At Last
My Body Is A Cage - Arcade Fire
Anywhere I Lay My Head - Tom Waits
Lemonworld - The National
Train Song - Feist and Ben Gibbard
Vivid - Greg Brown
Romulus - Sufjan Stevens
Mouthwings - Mountain Man
Go Long- Joanna Newsom

Explanation.

In case you were wondering. 

Here is what I've been doing. 

Building dinosaurs

Framing art

Trips to Salt Lake

Teaching a drawing class

Having a boyfriend (!?)

House of Leaves

Against the Day

Friends' band practices

100 block art projects

Cooking with friends

Sons of Anarchy

Game of Thrones

Sewing jobs

Sunday afternoon teas

 Planning the Eurojaunt

Not spending much time online

If that explains it.