When I started this here blog, I was working in sales, slinging advertisements for the local small town newspaper. This mostly meant calling existing accounts and making sure they still wanted to spend money on the paper. My best client was the liquor store, and I was not very good at getting new accounts. The actual placement and ordering of the ads was the majority of the actual “work,” and because I can do computers, was pretty simple. Naturally, I was reading a lot at work. Thus the original “Wednesday Weekly Recommended Reading.”
A lot has changed since then. For example, tomorrow will be our two year anniversary in Boston.
All of which is to say that I’ve clearly fallen off the horse. And though I don’t know that I’m going to get back on said horse (go watch this music video, by the way, it is great on so many levels), I figured I would at least do a brief summary of some recommended reading, insofar as this is what I’ve been reading the last few weeks (novel-wise), and what I think I’ll probably read today (Internet-wise).
So. Books, recently read and recommended:
Play it As it Lays by Joan Didion
This is tough, amazing, marvelously written, and very, very good.
Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathanial West
One of those books I kind of hated until the end, at which point I kinda really liked it. Intend to read The Day of the Locust soonish and then re-read this one.
By Night in Chile by Roberto Bolaño
So, so good. Also sent me to the dictionary/Wikipedia more than any book I’ve read in a while (e.g., learning about Chilean history), and the prose is lovely, the music and rhythm of it, and it was a very good read.
(Currently reading:
- The Waves by Woolf, which is great but slow-going
- Ready Player One by Cline, which is silly and (dare I say) masturbatory but also very fun
- …and then I’m technically still in the middle of Bellow’s The Dangling Man, but I will probably have to re-start that one by the time I get around to it.)
Internet stuff that I intend to read at some point today: