A Slight Delay

Another post that Phil suggested, whether he realized it or not. After this, I’ll stop writing about books for a bit. Okay. A day, at least. Here’s my top fifty-two books. I picked 52 of them since you could read one a week and have a year’s worth of good books. The reviews, if you want to call them that, are by no means comprehensive; they’re meant more to give you a small taste (like those tiny little spoons you get at ice cream shops) of what the book’s about. Hopefully you’ll get a good enough idea to want to score a pint copy. Here (in no particular order) goes nothing…

1. Dave Barry’s Complete Guide to Guys, by Dave Barry. One of those books that you should probably be careful of reading in public; you’ll laugh out loud, getting all sorts of funny, or dirty, looks from those around you.
2. High Fidelity, by Nick Hornby. The author’s first book, and still my favorite of the buch. The film, which featured John Cusack and Jack Black, is one of the few that wasn’t a disappointment after reading the novel.
3. Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About by Mil Millington: mines some of the same territory that Hornby did in High Fidelity, but will also be familiar to anyone who’s seen “The Office,” or that’s worked in a terribly dysfunctional work environment.
4. Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole: The author committed suicide some time before the book was published; in the years since, there’s been speculation that it was finished by his mother. Whatever the case may be, by the time the book’s over, you’ll wish that one or the other of them had written another. Ignatius Reilly is literally an unforgettable character.
5. A Crack at the Edge of the World, by Simon Winchester. Winchester first gained acclaim for The Professor and the Madman, a page-turner about the writing of the Oxford English Dictionary (I shit you not). In this work, he turns his attention to the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire. As with his other works, he examines the history of the event, along with a fascinating explanation of the geology that caused the disaster.
6. The Benchley Roundup by Robert Benchley. Benchley is, sadly, a largely forgotten figure. From the 1920’s ‘til his death in 1945, though, he was a star, writing witty short pieces for his newspaper column, contributing to the New Yorker in its early days, reviewing theater, appearing in vaudeville, and acting in countless short subjects and feature films. This anthologizes the best of his writing over the course of his career. (more…)

A few posts back, I’d written about a list of 100+ books that–according to its compiler–people buy to impress other people, but usually don’t read. I didn’t really buy any of these to impress anybody, so I can’t speak to how well they’d work on that account. The only rules here are that the books have to be good, and that I have to have read them. Thanks to Phil for the idea…

1. The Dialogic Imagination, by Mikhail Bakhtin: Bakhtin doesn’t have the same name recognition as Barthes, Derrida, or Foucault. All of which made these writings great source material when you had a paper due in English Lit. Doesn’t hurt either when you have someone who chronically name-drops literary critics, philosophers, and others of that ilk. Remember, all you need is to have at least one person up your sleeve of whom you can say: “What do you mean you’ve never heard of…?” (more…)

 Thanks to Bohemian Rhapsody for a post that will probably end up killing an afternoon. After the “Read The Rest of This Entry” link, you’ll find a list of 106 books that someone, somewhere, decided that people keep on their bookshelves to make them look smart. While I know some people use books as furniture (cf. Nicholson Baker’s “Books as Furniture” in The Size of Thoughts), I guess I’ve never felt the need to impress someone with my reading list. If I did, I probably wouldn’t keep Dinosaur Bob or Bloom County Babylon in good company with Shakespeare.

Books I’ve read and purchased, I’ve bolded; I’m sure that there are books here that were on everybody’s required academic reading at one time or another, but if I liked it well enough to buy it and read it again, it goes into that category. Books I read at school and never really read again, for one reason or another, I’ve italicized. The rest I’ve just left as is. Here goes nothing… (more…)

An  essay worth reading in this week’s New York Times Book Review by Rachel Donadio. In brief, she writes about how people’s literary tastes can be a deal-breaker when it comes to romance. She writes:

We’ve all been there. Or some of us have. Anyone who cares about books has at some point confronted the Pushkin problem: when a missed — or misguided — literary reference makes it chillingly clear that a romance is going nowhere fast. 

It reminded me of something I’d read a long time ago in Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity: A Novel (okay, not that long ago… I read the book about once a year. It’s just one of those things). Rob Fleming, the book’s main character, says at one point: “[T]he truth was that these things matter, and it’s no good pretending that any relationship has a future if your record collections disagree violently, or if your favorite films wouldn’t even speak to each other if they met at a party.” (more…)