Search Results for: Charles Portis

5 good books I read this spring

Monday, June 24, 2019

Why wait until the end of the year? I shared 5 good books I read this winter, so here are 5 good books I read this spring (and bonus reads):

The Library Book
Susan Orlean

I am a former librarian who read this on a flight from Cleveland to Los Angeles, so it was pretty much the perfect book at the perfect time. A real page-turner. Orlean knows what she’s doing. (Another good LA book, not a page-turner, but a page-lingerer: Christoph Niemann’s Hopes and Dreams.)

Less
Andrew Sean Greer

How great is it when an acclaimed book turns out to be worthy of the hype? I laughed all the way through this book and then I cried at the end. (Another great novel, one I re-read: Charles Portis’s True Grit.)

How To Do Nothing
Jenny Odell

When I came across the original talk I knew this was going to be a good book, but I liked it even more than I thought it would. (Another book about attention I knew was going to be good based on the original Medium post: Rob Walker’s The Art of Noticing. I’d also throw in Bruno Munari’s Drawing a Tree, which I loved even more upon re-reading.)

The Three Robbers
Tomi Ungerer

My 4-year-old got obsessed with this book, and I got obsessed with it and with Ungerer. (Other great graphic tales [but not for kids]: Tillie Walden’s On A Sunbeam and Jaime Hernandez’s excellent comic, The Love Bunglers and the followup, Is This How You See Me?)

Essays Over Eighty
Donald Hall

“Maybe we’ll soon have a new literary category, Old Adult, to match Young Adult,” wrote John Wilson, in his review of Hall’s posthumous collection of essays, A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety. I’d be so down for that.

Okay, back to reading. Get more reading recommendations in my weekly newsletter, or browse the past decade of my favorite books.

My Reading Year, 2011

Saturday, December 17, 2011

Ten great books I read this year:

Lonesome Dove
Larry McMurtry

“I’m sure partial to the evening,’ Augustus said. ‘The evening and the morning. If we just didn’t have to have the rest of the dern day I’d be a lot happier.”

Decoded
Jay-Z

“We were kids without fathers…so we found our fathers on wax and on the streets and in history, and in a way, that was a gift. We got to pick and choose the ancestors who would inspire the world we were going to make for ourselves…Our fathers were gone, usually because they just bounced, but we took their old records and used them to build something fresh.”

The Dog of the South
Charles Portis

“My wife Norma had run off with Guy Dupree and I was waiting around for the credit card billings to come in so I could see where they had gone.”

Moby-Dick
Herman Melville

“Small erections may be finished by their first architects; grand ones, true ones, ever leave the copestone to posterity. God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a draught–nay, but the draught of a draught. Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!”

The Art of Fielding
Chad Harbach

“All you had to do was look at each of your players and ask yourself: What story does this guy wish someone would tell him about himself? And then you told the guy that story. You told it with a hint of doom. You included his flaws. You emphasized the obstacles that could prevent him from succeeding. That was what made the story epic: the player, the hero, had to suffer mightily en route to his final triumph. Schwartz knew that people loved to suffer, as long as the suffering made sense. Everybody suffered. The key was to choose the form of your suffering. Most people couldn’t do this alone; they needed a coach. A good coach made you suffer in a way that suited you.”

Skippy Dies
Paul Murray

“‘But, Dennis, do you think Mr Slattery’d be teaching it to us if it was really about anal sex?’ ’ What does Mr Slattery know?’ Dennis scoffs. ‘You think he’s ever taken his wife up the road less travelled?’”

Believing Is Seeing
Errol Morris

“The essays in this book should be seen as a collection of mystery stories.”

After the Apocalypse
Maureen McHugh

“Cahill lived in the Flats with about twenty other guys in a place that used to be an Irish bar called Fado. At the back of the bar was the Cuyahoga River, good for protection since zombies didn’t cross the river. They didn’t crumble into dust, they were just stupid as bricks and they never built a boat or a bridge or built anything. Zombies were the ultimate trash.”

The Medium is the Massage
Marshall McLuhan

“Xerography—every man’s brain-picker—heralds the times of instant publishing. Anybody can now become both author and publisher. Take any books on any subject and custom-make your own book by simple xeroxing a chapter from this one, a chapter from that one—instant steal!”

Where Good Ideas Come From
Steven Johnson

“Go for a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down, but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies; frequent coffeehouses and other liquid networks; follow the links; let others build on your ideas; borrow, recycle, reinvent.”

Ten other good books I read:

Jonathan Lethem, The Disappointment Artist
Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash
Lynda Barry, Everything: Volume 1
Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine
Tina Fey, Bossypants
Chris Ware, Acme Novelty Library #20
Maira Kalman, The Principles of Uncertainty
David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man
Grafton & Rosenberg, Cartographies of Time
Maggie Nelson, Bluets

See my past reading years: 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006

The October Country (a mixtape)

Thursday, October 10, 2024

Here’s another mixtape I made from a sealed, pre-recorded cassette I got for 99 cents at the record store. I tape over the cassette’s protection tabs and then I tape over the music and then I tape over the artwork.

I’ve made so many mixtapes this year that I think I’m starting to crack what I really love in a good mix.

Vibe.

What I really love in a mix is a vibe rather than a theme.

This comes up a lot this time of year when people post their Halloween mixes. All the songs are about witches or demons or whatever, but they don’t really cohere musically.

(I make exceptions for Bob Dylan’s brilliant Theme Time Radio Hour, which ruled completely, and also had a Halloween episode. Also: a radio show is different than a mixtape — the DJ can add context, switch the mood, etc.)

Anyways, I named this mix after Ray Bradbury’s collection:

“October Country . . . that country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and mid-nights stay. That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal-bins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain. . . .”

I wanted it to sound like what October sounds like to me — in feeling, if not in lyrics. (To be honest, I barely listen to lyrics most of the time, which might be surprising to hear from a writer, but I’ve been a musician a lot longer than I’ve been a writer?)

SIDE A
– Chris Isaak, “Wicked Game”
– Tom Waits, “Down in the Hole”
– Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, “Little Demon”
– Ty Segall, “Girlfriend”
– Leonard Cohen, “Waiting for the Miracle”
– Scott Walker, “On Your Own Again”

SIDE B
– Depeche Mode, “Enjoy the Silence”
– Fever Ray, “Shiver”
– Thee Oh Sees, “Ghosts in the Trees”
– Ravyn Lenae, “Sticky”
– Keith & Tex, “Run to the Rocks”
– Bjork, “The Anchor Song”
– Charles Simic, “We Were So Poor”
– Portishead, “The Rip”

Originally, I had a wizards vs. witches thing going with the sides, and I was going to do Bjork, Fever Ray, and Ravyn Lenae and more on side B, but, again, I throw out concept and theme for vibe when I do these things.

The Charles Simic poem was kind of an accident — I was just looking through Spotify at my “Liked” tracks and tried to find a short snippet to fit the rest of the tape. (On the actual cassette, I play a tiny little portion of “The Rip” to end the side, but I think it goes nicely as a full song at the end.)

You can listen to the mix on Spotify.