jpkenyon

[jpkenyon]

I go back so far I'm in front of me

Though I am a big music fan, and several shelves in my house are dedicated to books about music and/or by musicians, I don't own nor have I read many books of lyrics. They seem superfluous. Few song lyrics are strong enough to stand alone when divorced from their music, and I'm not sure why you would ask them to do so.

Despite this, I do own a few. One, of course, is a collection of Bob Dylan lyrics, the one that stops in 1985. I bought it as much for the extraneous things it includes, such as old liner notes and sketches, than for the lyrics themselves. Still, in this case, seeing the lyrics alone does help to emphasize things I missed when listening alone. I usually listen for the music, only paying attention to the lyrics after I have lived with a song long enough for them to really grab my attention. That goes for Dylan as well. Were I not captivated by his melodies and arrangements, his lyrics alone would not be enough to make me a fan. This extra reading -- as is the case with the 20 or so Dylan books that fill a shelf -- add context that makes me appreciate him all the more.

The second and third lyric books I own are by indie artists, for lack of a better term. Steve Wynn, singer and songwriter for the Dream Syndicate (who had a wonderful two-decade solo career before reforming that band); and Mark Lanegan, singer for the Screaming Trees (who continues to have one of the most interesting careers in rock music). Wynn's was an automatic purchase. I'm a big fan, and pretty much support whatever he does. I found Lanegan's a few years after it was released while searching for his memoir, Sing Backwards and Weep. I knew I wanted to read that, and when I saw he had a lyric book as well, I Am the Wolf, I figured it was more than I needed.

Then I read the first lyric in the book, from the lead track on his debut solo album, The Winding Sheet. That song, "Mockingbird," was always a favorite, a brooding, acoustic tune that showed there was more to this long-haired, gravel-voiced rocker than had previously been revealed:

Your voice is a mockingbird Calling me when the day is gone You please yourself with every word Telling me where I'm going wrong Telling me where I've gone wrong

I realized these songs were deeper, more nuanced than I had previously thought, and knew that reading the lyrics while listening to the albums would unlock a new level to this music, making something I already enjoyed that much more resonant. Commentary about each album -- something that Wynn's book features as well -- was enough to seal the deal. Lanegan's book was an enlightening complement to his memoir, and now I eagerly hope for a similar book from Wynn to serve as a companion to his Complete Lyrics 1982-2017.

But I'm here because of Paul McCartney's The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present, a massive, two-volume book that is as close to a memoir as we're likely to see from the cute Beatle. This was a library acquisition, as I can't imagine reading it more than once and I couldn't justify the $100 price tag. I started with volume 2 thanks to fumbling the hold list at the library, but because everything is in alphabetical order, I'm not really missing anything save for Paul Muldoon's introduction.

When I brought it home, I figured it would be interesting to look at the photos, read a few of his commentaries about favorite songs, and then be done. But I've found myself reading it cover to cover. McCartney selected 150 songs, so it doesn't include everything. It does feature most of his Beatle favorites, of course, but also a smattering of tracks from Wings and his later solo records that might have (definitely, in my case) escaped notice. I found myself calling up a song on YouTube and listening while I read the lyric and his write up. After doing this for a the first few, I settled into that pattern for the long haul. Some of it is rather banal, but much of it is insightful. Despite having penned several tracks that any of us could quote from memory, McCartney is not a terribly talented lyricist overall; his real talents lie in melody and arrangement. He wrote "Silly Love Songs" because he loves and excels at writing rather cloying, somewhat embarrassing tunes about affection. That this sentiment was expressed in perhaps the most cloying, somewhat embarrassing tune of McCartney's career is really on the nose.

But for every few songs I sped through because my suspicions and biases were confirmed, there was one that had me tapping the "repeat" button. Sometimes it was the story behind the song, sometimes it was hearing something I hadn't previously thanks to McCartney's insights, and sometimes it was simply because I hadn't heard a song that I would have liked no matter when I first heard it.

Some of this is about hearing the right song at the right time. When I first heard "The World Tonight" from 1997's Flaming Pie, I'm sure I pushed scan on the radio to find another station. Today, 25 years after it was released, I hear a tightly arranged rock song with a solid guitar hook and a catchy melody that doesn't sound dated in the least. Context is everything. At the time, McCartney was 55 and more than three decades into his career. I'm sure I wasn't alone in asking, "Does the world really need more Paul McCartney?" Now, hearing it for the first time in more than two decades with my 52-year-old ears, it takes all my power to not wave my fist at the heavens and yell "Why don't they play music like this on the radio anymore?"

I still have little use for Wings, and McCartney's late-career clunkers outnumber his gems by a considerable margin, even in this hand-selected sample. But those gems are there to be found, and as much as the "writing about music is like dancing about architecture" line is bandied about, it's a foolish notion belied by books like this. As with anything, the perspective of an educated ear -- or that of the creator and/or performer -- can add significantly to the experience of listening. Words about music in the absence of that music are near meaningless at best, maddening at worst (how many songs have I read about and absolutely pined to hear because of the way they were described? (and how many lived up to the hype?)). But together, as I sit at my computer with YouTube cued up and McCartney's The Lyrics in my lap to read along, it is a rewarding experience.

Books cited:

Sing Backwards and Weep; I Am the Wolf, Mark Lanegan; Complete Lyrics : 1982-2017, Steve Wynn; The Lyrics: 1956 to Present, Paul McCartney

[jpkenyon]

Connections that cut through the languor

I haven’t been here in a long time, and I was beginning to think it was because I was being lazy. Surely there were connections to be found in what I was taking in, but I just wasn’t attentive enough to notice.

Then one hit today, and I realized that while my lack of attention might have played a part, when a connection is strong enough, it jumps through the languor to grab you.

The first part came from Nightmare Alley, William Lindsay Gresham’s 1946 noir novel. I saw this included on a list of some sort a few years back, was spurred to check out an ebook from the library, and then let it expire before reading a word. I kept it there on the app as a reminder to re-download it at some point.

In October, I had my friend, Gregory Galloway, to town to participate in the Iowa City Book Festival in support of his wonderful new novel, Just Thieves. In conversation at the event, Greg mentioned a handful of influential noir novels, including Nightmare Alley. I smiled, nodded, and made a mental note to make good on my intention to finally read it.

I was pretty sure there was a movie made from the book, and while looking up details of the 1947 release, I learned Guillermo del Toro will release a remake in December. All the more reason to read it now. So far, so good. It isn’t what I expected, but that’s usually for the best, is it not?

Today, while taking a moment to read a few pages (screens?), I came across this:

The earth doesn’t age as fast as the things man makes.

This is a thought from Stanton Carlisle, a mentalist returning to a place from his past that has changed cosmetically, if not fundamentally. I was taken enough with the line to highlight it, which is something I rarely do.

As the final days of November roll off the calendar, my reading takes on a determined quality as I whittle the stack of books to ensure I finish everything by Dec. 31. That means a spare hour finds me reading something until my mind drifts, and then switching to something else. In this case, it was Louise Glück’s new Winter Recipes from the Collective, a brief collection of poems (and her first since winning the Nobel Prize in 2020). After Glück ‘s win, I wanted to read some of her work. I grabbed her then-most recent collection, Faithful and Virtuous Night from 2014, and was captivated. That led me to ask for her Poems: 1962–2012 for Christmas. It collects the 11 books that preceded it. I read one before the end of 2020, and have read another five this year.

[As an aside related to my rather specific rules related to cataloging what I read, I consider a “collected” book to be just that: a collection of complete books. As long as they include everything from the original books, I consider myself to be reading the book, not a section of a “collected.” So The Wild Iris lands on my list, but Poems: 1962-2012 never will, even once I finish it. Probably self evident, but why not make it clear?]

As I was finishing Winter Recipes from the Collective, the penultimate poem, “Song,” caught my attention. In the poem, an artist named Leo Cruz (not the Dominican boxer who comes up first on Google, one assumes) makes “the most beautiful while bowls.” Glück seems quite taken with Cruz, and she is an attentive student as he shares his views. Then this:

Leo thinks the things man makes

are more beautiful

than what exists in nature

Ah, but does he agree with Stanton Carlisle that those beautiful man-made things age faster than nature?

Yes, it has been a while since the books I read have conversed quite this directly, but when it happens it can derail a day as I sit in contemplation of what I have read, of the dialogue I’m luck enough to witness.

An addendum: The following morning I listened to an old mix CD on my way to work, one that gathered songs of a countryish bent, both new and old. Just as I was pulling into my parking spot, the Louvin Brothers' "Great Atomic Power" began. Those brotherly harmonies are irresistible, so I sat and listened, my ear catching on that first verse:

Do you fear this man's invention that they call atomic power? Are we all in great confusion, do we know the time or hour When a terrible explosion may ring down upon our land Leaving horrible destruction blotting out the works of man

Fifteen years after Gresham's character notes the different aging processes of nature and man-made works, and nearly 60 years before the observation in Glück's poem about their relative beauty, Charlie and Ira remind us we're a push of the button away from losing it all.

(A note: It has been so long since I have visited here that I not only forgot my previous, pandemic-related excuse for being away (at least I didn't lean on that one again), but also that it was another Glück poem that sparked my last visit. That is some powerful verse).

Books cited:

Just Thieves, Gregory Galloway; Nightmare Alley, William Lindsay Gresham; Winter Recipes from the Collective, Faithful and Virtuous Night, and Poems: 1962-2012, Louise Glück

[jpkenyon]

The flower, the whale, and the Wellerman

I’m moved to revisit this space after nearly two years away because I continue to find delightful little surprises in my reading. Many times over the past several months I have thought to myself that I ought to document these, that others might find them to be of interest. Then, the existential angst of everyday life oozes over everything and stops initiative in its tracks. I can’t even fully blame the pandemic, for this was there long before the first virus spore floated into an unsuspecting host.

The things that catch my eye are those connections -- a common reference, a similar idea, a parallel mention -- in and amongst the things I’m reading. You could chalk a lot of that up to demographics -- if it’s in the wheelhouse of a white, middle-aged, hetero Midwestern guy with a love of crime fiction and books about music, I’m familiar with it -- but not all. These connections are a bit more esoteric...or at least strange.

Today is a fine example; the one that led me back. Or the ones, for it was the second that finally had me emailing Tumblr to ask for a password reset so I could get back in here.

Last year I read a handful of long books -- some classics, some not -- purely because the pandemic allowed me the time to do so. I participated in the Public Space War and Peace project led by Yiyun Li, and my own organization’s run through The Decameron and Paradise Lost. Emboldened, I tried a similar “read 10 pages a day” method on a couple of longer history books that have been on the shelves for a few years. Jill Lepore’s These Truths and John Culver and John Hyde’s American Dreamer: A Life of Henry A. Wallace moved from the TBR pile.

I decided I was ready for something that has been on my “why didn’t I read this in high school?” list for decades: Moby-Dick. I’m now about 150 pages in, and while it has been slow going, I know I’ll finish and be rewarded for the effort. And, I find connections. 

The first is rather simple. Today, Melville mentions japonicas, noting their beauty is enhanced by their whiteness (as opposed to a certain leviathan of the sea). It was the second time in a week I’ve seen mention of a flower of which I wasn’t previously aware. I know roses and a few others, but I’m mostly familiar with flowers I don’t want, including hostas that refuse to die and the clover that etches its way across my yard in a pattern that might as well spell out “you’re bad at yard work” when viewed from above. 

The other recent reference was Louis Glück’s poem “Japonica,” found in her 1975 collection, The House on Marshland. After Glück won the Nobel, I rectified the fact that I hadn’t read her by picking up her most recent collection, the wonderful Faithful and Virtuous Night. Figuring, rightly, as it turns out, that I would like her other work, I asked for and received her Poems 1962-2012 for Christmas, and have been enjoying it as I work my way through. 

Now, anyone who knows about japonicas may wonder what Melville had in mind, as the flower, as Google helpfully showed me just now, seems to be a deep, bright pink. The reference earned a footnote in my Norton Critical Edition, which suggests Melville was likely thinking instead of the Japanese camellia plant (all of this makes today the source for about 10 percent of everything I know about flowers).

The second connection was stranger, and not to anything specifically in Moby-Dick, but rather to the book itself. Clicking around the web earlier this week, as one does, I came across a series of videos of people singing sea chanteys, with one person starting and others adding harmonies and instrumental accompaniment. Nothing planned, but the results were surprisingly compelling. This morning, quick to jump on the trend, Amanda Petrusich (whose Do Not Sell at Any Price has been on my TBR list for a while) wrote a quick but informative story about sea chanteys and this TikTok trend (that made its way to Twitter before I found it -- see above about my blindered existence).Early in the piece, Petrusich writes, “The recently popularized ‘Soon May the Wellerman Come’ -- which the band the Longest Johns covered in 2018 -- leaves out such naughty narratives in favor of a ‘Moby-Dick’-like whaling adventure,” comparing it to the bawdier songs that qualify as true chanteys.

This won’t necessarily enhance my reading of Melville’s book, but it does place the 170-year-old tome in present-day context, which shows why it persists beyond its quality as literature. 

This ended up longer than I expected, given the minor connections to be found, but it is this conversation we have with the world, mediated by books and other forms of literature, that leads us down so many fruitful paths toward seemingly endless reward. I have often been sucked down a rabbit hole from this link to that link on the web. It is infinitely more satisfying when the connections sneak up on you as the pages of books from distant shelves start to talk to one another in your presence.  

-----

Petrusich on sea chanteys: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/13/style/sea-shanty-tiktok-wellerman.html

Books cited: 

Moby-Dick, Herman Melville; Faithful and Virtuous Night and The House on Marshland, Louise Glück; War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy; The Decameron, Giovanni Boccaccio; These Truths, Jill Lepore; American Dreamer: A Life of Henry A. Wallace, John Culver and John Hyde; Do Not Sell at Any Price, Amanda Petrusich

[jpkenyon]

Everywhere you look, a reason to read a book

Sickness, snow days, work projects... life gets in the way sometimes, does it not? What it has gotten in the way of has been writing about reading. The reading itself has remained a priority. 

The motivation for picking up a book always varies. In some cases, a new book by a favorite author means casting all else aside and diving in. Such was the case when the library notified me that Lawrence Block’s new novella, A Time to Scatter Stones, was ready for me to pick up. I took it home on Friday and finished it on Saturday. A slight 150ish pages with generous point size and margins, it was a quick read, and with it, I have read my Block for the year (though I’ll likely read another... or two or three). 

I’m still processing it, as it was the latest (and perhaps last) appearance by Block’s PI character Matt Scudder. It was the Scudder series that hooked me on Block 25 years ago, and so I am quite fond of the guy. He has aged through the years, and much of this book centers on how he has lost a step over time. Is that Block’s way of admitting the same? I’ll always enjoy spending time with Scudder, but I saw where this one was going from early on.

Perhaps it suffered because there was one small bit of equipment overlap with Jonathan Ames’s You Were Never Really Here, and the suspense and visceral rush of that book was tough competition. I checked out Ames’s book after seeing the film adaptation. The movie is so singular, an atmospheric character study with bursts of violence, that I wanted to see the source material. Ames’s book is markedly different from a plot perspective, but the mood is accurately conveyed from page to screen. It was another novella, and thus a quick read.

I picked up a Mary Oliver book not only because of her recent death, but because my social media feeds were filled with affectionate postings sharing favorite poems or passages from her work. I knew the name, but was not familiar with Oliver’s verse, and figured I should rectify that. I read her Pulitzer Prize winning collection, American Primitive, expecting to be dazzled. Instead I found pleasant poems that showed a deep appreciation for nature. The closest I came to the sort of revelation that others shared at the time of her passing came at the close of the poem “In Blackwater Woods,” where she writes

To live in this world

You must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it

against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.

Much of my reading over the past month has been in stolen moments on my phone with the Kindle versions of the first two books in what has become Don Winslow’s “Cartel” trilogy. As a crime fiction lover, I had always heard about but never read Winslow. I rectified that with two of his biggest books, Savages and Kings of Cool, connected tales of people getting wrapped up in the drug trade with ultra-violent and occasionally hilarious results. The style -- short sentences making up short paragraphs with ample spacing that made the short chapters zip by -- made these quick, engaging reads. 

When his book, Cartel, came out a few years back, itself a sequel to 2005′s The Power of the Dog, and both taking a look at the Mexican drug cartels, I had good intentions to read both. But at 500-plus pages, I never found myself with the time. Now, the third of the trilogy, The Border, is coming next week, and I decided it was time to wade in. Once I found myself engaged with The Power of the Dog, I found myself looking for any excuse to pull out my phone and read a bit. The result is that I blasted through 1,200 pages or so in about five weeks, all while reading other books. I now find myself waiting eagerly for the third, planning to read it as an ebook as well because, why mess with a good thing?

Books cited: 

A Time to Scatter Stones, Lawrence Block; You Were Never Really Here, Jonathan Ames; American Pastoral, Mary Oliver; The Power of the Dog, Cartel, and The Border, Don Winslow

[jpkenyon]

In sickness and in health

Diagnosed with the flu five days ago, the only solace I could find was in the growing stack of books next to the bed. My usual mix of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry had grown as I added a second book of poetry and a short story collection. Quarantined to the house for a work week, I figured that stack of books at least would be conquered.

Naive at best, revisionist at worst, I should have known better. The doctor told me I would be wiped out, and I should have believed her. Then again, every time I’m home with any ailment, these same thoughts rise to the fore and are grounded by reality. Reading requires thought and concentration, and the flu robs you of the capability of both.

I did read; ibuprofen can do wonders, and for a sweet spot of about two hours during each six-hour dose, I felt somewhat human. I had the best luck with Tim Johnston’s The Current, a literary thriller by a local author. A perk of my job is the occasional ARC (advance readers copy) of a book, and I was hoping to finish Johnson’s novel before attending his tour-opening reading at Prairie Lights next week. It had been slow going because the densely woven, time-hopping opening section of the book was requiring more uninterrupted time than I had been able to give it last week, and so it was not until I found myself bed-bound that I really got into it. That meant, as it often does, that my idealistic idea of rotation among various books (see my comment above about uninterrupted time and then consider my habit of reading too many books at the same time : I’m my own worst enemy) fell by the wayside as the accelerating plot of Johnston’s book drew me in.

I did read a bit of those other books, of course. Johnston taking over worked in my favor, for a change, with A Spy in the House of Loud by Chris Stamey. Not just a musician memoir, Stamey’s book is as much the history of a place and a movement, detailing his travels through North Carolina and New York -- thus far in the story -- and the music scenes at the edge of the mainstream and beyond. Stamey seems to have been everywhere, worked with everyone, and done far more than I had imagined. At the same time, the book also is deep in music theory. Though I consider myself to be fairly knowledgeable about music, I know little about why I like things, why one song works and another doesn’t. Stamey does, and explains it, though my understanding of his explanations is surface at best.

His format -- a little history, a little theory -- makes this a book I want to slowly savor, not rush through like most such books as I search for stories I don’t yet know (or details about those I do that better contextualize that received history). So a few pages here and there while taking breaks from Johnston’s novel worked perfectly.

The book that suffered -- temporarily -- was Deborah Eisenberg’s Your Duck is My Duck. To my knowledge, I hadn’t read Eisenberg before this. I certainly had read and heard about her, as she is among the best-reviewed short story writers in the country. When her Collected Stories came out in 2010, I held it in my hands a few times, but its size (about 1,000 pages) was daunting. The time was right with this new collection, gathering just six stories at a manageable 230 pages. 

But these are long stories, and my flu-addled attention span was not ready for them. I had read a couple before getting sick, but took the entirety of my ailment to get through the third. Once I finished Johnston’s novel, I re-focused on Eisenberg, finishing the third story and making it halfway through the next (itself about 20 pages short of being novella worthy in length, though in story and tone, it already is there). It’s a formidable collection, and her Collected Stories is likely to end up on my holiday wishlist at year’s end.

The poetry has taken a backseat to all of this, my synapses not firing strongly enough to effectively parse verse. So, Max Ritvo’s The Final Voicemails and Mary Ruefle’s My Private Property (more prose poems and short essays than traditional verse, but with a similar need for a mind that doesn't feel like a bag of cotton candy) will rejoin the rotation in a couple of days.

So yes, I probably read more over the past five days than I would have otherwise, but it was not the blissful immersion I foolishly hoped it would be. 

Books cited: 

The Current, Tim Johnston; A Spy in the House of Loud, Chris Stamey; Your Duck is My Duck and Collected Stories, Deborah Eisenberg; The Final Voicemails, Max Ritvo; My Private Property, Mary Ruefle

[jpkenyon]

Soundtrack of our lives

The book about the Replacements that I started on the 1st -- Lemon Jail by roadie Bill Sullivan -- was finished by the 2nd. It was a slight book peppered with photos of the band, and it added a few stories and augmented a few others I have read in the other three books* about the band I own.

If there is a second-favorite pastime beyond reading (or a dead-heat tie, more like) it is music -- listening to it, occasionally playing it, and often reading about and researching it. A prominent section of my personal library is taken up with books by and about musicians. There is a decent jazz segment, several record review guides, about half a shelf devoted to Bob Dylan, and much more. I usually read at least one book about Dylan each year (though I didn’t get to one in 2018), and while I can go months without reading a book about music, I usually get to a handful of others by the time my list closes on Dec. 31.

Reading about music always leads to listening to music. If I tackle an entry in Bloomsbury’s wonderful 33 1/3 series of books about specific albums, the work in question always spends some time in rotation while I’m reading it and beyond. Or rather, during the period in which I’m reading it. I occasionally can listen to jazz or ambient music while reading, but otherwise it is a pursuit requiring quiet... or the cacophony of a coffee shop which takes the place of white noise.

In the past few years, I have realized I like to listen to most if not all of an artist’s discography when reading about them. For example, I picked up Warren Zanes’ excellent Tom Petty biography, Petty, shortly after Petty passed, and found myself working my way through his albums as I went, Zanes’ chronology dictating my listening. 

As an aside, that wasn’t the case with Sullivan’s book about the Replacements. That band’s music is like a fiber woven into my consciousness, and I didn’t feel the need to revisit the songs as I read. I could call them to mind with such clarity that his tales of stale beer and cigarette butts could have been printed on scratch-and-sniff pages.

Late last year, for the first time, I consciously picked up a book not because I’m a huge fan of the artist in question and want to fill in the gaps in my knowledge and understanding of the music, but because I knew very little about the group and thought that if I knew more, I would discover a new favorite band. That group, the Go-Betweens, is one I admired but didn’t fully appreciate. This Australian alternative pop band, for lack of a better category, was a critical darling that never sold well and barely broke through in the U.S. The last album of their first phase, 16 Lovers Lane, was a modest hit on college radio, and I remember seeing the cheesy looking cover on posters dotting the walls of BJ Records here in Iowa City while I trolled through seeking music that was louder and faster as a wide-eyed freshman.

A promotional copy of co-leader Grant McLennan’s solo debut, Watershed, made its way to me a couple years later while I was working at the college newspaper, and I liked it well enough to buy his third (and second in the U.S.), Horsebreaker Star when it came out in 1995. I decided his lanky, dour looking partner in the band, Robert Forster, would have nothing for me, and save for acquiring a Go-Betweens best of that was rarely played beyond McLennan’s gorgeous “Streets of Your Town,” my connection with the band lay dormant for some time.

They returned in 2000, and subsequently put out three albums that I heard but didn’t spend much time with, again admiring more than loving.

Then McLennan died at 48 of a heart attack, bringing the band to a tragic end. As a fan of his work, I noted his passing, but didn’t think much beyond the fact that there would be no more music from him.

Sometime in the past year, I saw that Forster had written a memoir of his time in the band. Normally this wouldn’t have been cause for anything beyond an eyebrow raise of mild interest and then moving on to something else. But the title of the book intrigued me: Grant & I. How many memoirs have a title where someone else gets top billing? This usually happens only when it is an assistant or hanger-on or someone tangential to the person in question. But Forster and McLennan were equals; indeed, most, I would assume, though the stern looking Forster was probably the dominant one in the partnership. That, coupled with what has seemed to be a rediscovery of the band by another generation and the tributes that come with such a shift in public consciousness, made me interested enough to get the book.

Perhaps it was my then-pending trip to Australia, but something made me pick it up late last fall and start to read. I know one motivation was to force myself to listen to the band’s music. There was something there that I wasn’t ready to embrace 20 years ago, but perhaps now it would click.

As I read through Forster’s book, which pulls off the neat trick of being able to project both self-effacing doubt and a never-swaggering confidence, I played the band’s music. From its earliest singles through its first body of work and its improbable second act, I listened to everything. The early music is quaint and endearing, the first couple of albums the sound of a band finding its sound (and not, as Forster self-awarely states, creating a classic debut like the band’s heroes in Television). By its third album, the band's mix of increasingly lush arrangements and stark song structures started to hook me, and I quickly fell in love with nearly everything I was hearing. And the songs, dropped with little impact onto the U.S. market by tiny labels back in the 1980s, now had resonance and context thanks to my contemporaneous reading. The catalog took on a richness and depth that it lacked when I first listened to the band back in college.

Given the title and clear theme of the book, Forster doesn’t spend much time on the solo work that came at the same time as those McClennan albums I picked up back in the 90s, but I found myself listening to those, and the McLennans anyway, filling out my timeline and providing a full soundtrack for the book. 

Reading the book accomplished what I set out to do and more. Hoping to simply make my way through the band’s catalog to discover why others loved this music so, I went further, becoming one of those people. And unlike the Replacements, which I still love but don't listen to as much anymore because of saturation, I will listen to the Go-Betweens quite a bit over the coming years.

The next book I have started I do so with similar intentions. Chris Stamey’s A Spy in the House of Loud, is the New York by way of North Carolina musician’s memoir about that time. I long have admired Stamey and his 80s band the dBs, but at times I have found his music too cold, too angular. I love power pop, and Stamey and the dBs always are lumped in with that genre. But his music stands apart from that more straight-forward blend of sugary vocals and crunching guitars, and my hope is that his book will do for his music what Forster’s did for that of the Go-Betweens, to provide a helpful context that will help me to better appreciate what I know is waiting there for me to (re)discover.

I started out listening to Stamey’s early band, the Sneakers, this morning, and have a big stack of band and solo LPs to make it through as I go.

*How improbable it would have seemed back in the band's heyday for there to be four books about the Replacements. I remember as a teenaged fan of the Police and Sting walking the aisles of B. Dalton at South Ridge Mall hoping to see a biography of Sting so I could learn more about this intriguing fellow. Alas, not even a cheap paperback regurgitating well-known facts to be found. I wouldn't have dreamed of a Replacements book, but nostalgia and a fan base with disposable income can work miracles. Nostalgia -- both mine and that of others in my age range/buying demographic -- means that today I also have two books about the Police on my shelves, and have read the (mostly excellent) memoirs by his bandmates, Stewart Copeland and Andy Summers. Sting's memoir, Broken Music, something I pined for as a teen, has yet to entice me because he chose to stop the story just as the Police started to find success; 450 pages about adolescent Sting holds little appeal.

Books cited:

Lemon Jail, Bill Sullivan; Petty, Warren Zanes; Grant & I, Robert Forster; A Spy in the House of Loud, Chris Stamey; Broken Music, Sting

[jpkenyon]

Promoted to visible shelves

So, I finished the Simenon on New Year’s Eve, having less reading time over the weekend than expected. That put me at 65 for the year and added to the list of authors I’ve read more than once. I could see myself going on a little Maigret jag later this year, as these short books are so entertaining and the character so mysteriously compelling.

But I started the year as I do most, grabbing a work of fiction, something non-fiction, and a poetry collection, an assemblage I’ll stick with (and likely add to in foolishly optimistic ways) throughout the next 12 months.

The non-fiction and the poetry were new acquisitions -- Lemon Jail, a tour diary by Bill Sullivan, the long-time roadie for the alt-rock band the Replacements; and Stet, the latest collection from from Iowa City poet Dora Malech. 

The fiction book, The All-Girl Football Team, a collection of short stories by southern writer Lewis Nordan, was drawn from a small pile I assembled last week as I sought out something short to read in those last few days of the year. I scoured my shelves seeking slim volumes, and the Nordan was among them. I added a handful of these to my “to be read” shelf, filling the space vacated by the five books I wrapped up at the end of the year.

It felt good to rescue these books from less visible shelves in the house. I’ve had the Nordan for 20 years or more, back when I would buy any Vintage Contemporaries title from a used bookstore, those distinctive white covers with the 80s fonts and odd paintings (there is a great write-up about the aesthetics of those covers here) a promise of great writing within. And then I moved it from house to house and shelf to shelf. 

That is probably the oldest of these books, in terms of my acquisition. Peter Rabe’s Kill the Boss Good-bye (bought for its imprint as well, this one a Vintage Black Lizard), was another used bookstore find. I have read other Rabe’s, led to him by trusted voices in crime fiction who declared him one of the masters of the genre, but haven’t gotten to this one yet. Dirty Eddie by Ludwig Bemelmans came at the recommendation of Roger Ebert, who declared it, along with Nathanael West’s Day of the Locust, as among the greatest novels about the seedy side of classic Hollywood. The book is long out of print, and I finally tracked down and bought a copy online a decade ago or so.

The last of these books is The Inspector Barlach Mysteries, which includes translations of two mysteries from the German writer Friedrich Dürrenmatt. I found this 2006 book at Prairie Lights a few years back, on a shelf that gathered books for a class at the University of Iowa. That shelf contained many other books I had read and liked, so I figured the professor had good taste and picked this up. It was a couple of months after the start of the term, so I decided any student who didn’t have the book already wasn’t going to come for it, and so I bought it and promptly filed it on my “to be read” shelf. With regret, I moved it to another shelf about a year later after it was crowded out by other titles. I moved it back last week with the hope that I will actually get to it sometime soon. If not, it may at least earn some notoriety as the first book to be moved from that shelf twice.

Books cited:

Lemon Jail, Bill Sullivan; The All-Girl Football Team, Lewis Nordan; Stet, Dora Malech; Kiss the Boss Good-Bye, Peter Rabe; Dirty Eddie, Ludwig Bemelmans; Day of the Locust, Nathanael West; The Inspector Barlach Mysteries, Friedrich Dürrenmatt

[jpkenyon]

Keeping up with the Connellys

I feared that my last post made it sound as if I’ve only read a handful of authors. One could leap to such conclusions when noting I have read 79 Lawrence Blocks and 47 Donald E. Westlakes. But by my count (which changes a bit now and again as I recall something and correct some years-old list), I have read about 813 different authors over the past 27 years, or an average of about 30 new authors each year. Not bad.

By the same token, I’m loyal, and when I like an author, I tend to read multiple titles. I have done so with 202 authors and counting. I turn now to those who round out my top 5.

John Sandford is an improbable entry at No. 3. I didn’t start reading him until 2002. I had dismissed Sandford because of his success. Anyone who regularly topped the New York Times bestseller list couldn’t be any good, could he? I picked up his then new book, Chosen Prey, the latest in his Lucas Davenport “Prey” series, because I was scheduled to interview him for the local paper. Sandford, born John Camp, is a native of Cedar Rapids, just north of here, and a graduate of the University of Iowa here in Iowa City. He was to do a reading at Prairie Lights Books here in support of the new book, and I was assigned to write a preview of the event. I liked Chosen Prey, and decided to read the first in the series, Rules of Prey. I liked that as well, enjoyed my talk with him, liked the reading event, and ended up reading six of his books that year, including one stand-alone.

In each of the past 17 years, I have read at least one of his books, and in 13 of those years, I have read more than one. Sandford has helped to push his totals into the top three by starting a second series, this one following another Minnesota-based police detective, Virgil Flowers. That’s two books a year from Sandford just to keep up with his new output. So far, it has been a pleasure to keep pace. There still are a handful of mid-period “Prey” books and a couple stand-alones of his I haven’t read, so if he ever slows down, I’m covered for a while.

The same goes for No. 4, Ken Bruen (33). I can remember exactly when I started reading Bruen. It was fall of 2004, and my wife and I had just had our first son. He was born  very prematurely, and the last two-plus months of the year were a whirlwind of worry, long visits to the hospital, sleeplessness, and stress. I needed something energetic and visceral to deliver me from all of that on occasion, and Bruen’s The White Trilogy was perfect. Gathering three of his novels about Irish detective sergeant Brandt, they were violent, witty, brief, and poetic, and I devoured them quickly.

I somehow read four more of his books and 10 from others in those two months, which surprises me as I look back. Long hours spent at our son’s bedside must in the hospital account for much of it.

Bruen had been writing for years before he cracked the U.S. market, so there were many import books to find and read and several more that found U.S. publishers in the wake of his success with The White Trilogy. That meant no shortage of his books to read. But as I caught up and his pace slowed, there were some years where I didn’t read anything by Bruen. Most years, however, I found something, such as In the Galway Silence, his latest featuring Jack Taylor, and the last book I read this year (for now). I do still have one omnibus, A Fifth of Bruen, that collects several of his earliest short novels, that remains unread. One day...

Rounding out the top 5 is Michael Connelly (32). No such backlog for him. I started reading Connelly in 1996 after reading a rave review of Concrete Blonde, the third in his series following police detective Harry Bosch. I loved it, and went back to read the first two immediately after and then the fourth, followed by his then-new book, The Poet, a stand-alone.

From that point, having caught up, I was limited to reading what he published in a given year, and have read a Connelly book in 21 of the past 23 years. The gaps came because a book came out toward the end of a year and I didn’t get to it until the next.

Connelly is an anomaly on my list as a writer I started reading early in his career and stayed with, and who has written enough to climb to the upper reaches. The others all had a significant back catalog that gave me room to run when it came to indulging a new passion.

Any more, I’m hesitant to read a mystery or crime fiction author with a long backlist for fear of getting sucked into yet another series. With two Sandfords, a couple Connellys, and regular books from Bruen and Block, a big chunk of each year’s reading time is spoken for before I discover any new authors. There are plenty of other writers I read religiously, meaning my opportunities for discovery are limited. Adding to that is daunting, and it’s why authors I like, such as James Lee Burke and Ian Rankin, have fallen off my radar. I like them, but as I was reading their fourth and fifth books they were putting out their 15th or 20th, and the prospect of keeping up was a hurdle I wasn’t up to scaling.

Books cited:

Chosen Prey and Rules of Prey, John Sandford; The White Trilogy, In the Galway Silence, A Fifth of Bruen, Ken Bruen; Concrete Blonde, The Poet, MIchael Connelly

[jpkenyon]

Block after Block after Block

Here’s how geeky I am: One of my favorite tasks is the year-end transfer of that year’s “what I read” list to my master list. This is no cut-and-paste job. In addition to a straight reporting of what was read, I also keep track of who wrote what I read. Or rather, I tabulate the results to keep track of how much I’m reading by a certain author.

For example, I have read more books by Lawrence Block than any other author, nearly as many as the next two authors on my list combined. This year I logged my 79th book by Block. The next two on the list are Donald E. Westlake (and all of his various pseudonyms) at 47 and John Sandford at 38. Rounding out my top five are Ken Bruen (33) and Michael Connelly (32). Yes, all white males, and all in the mystery/crime field.

These series authors make it easy, of course, turning out one or two books per year to juice their totals. It’s not until Denis Johnson, way down at 9 books read that I reach my first non-mystery/crime author on the list. The literary types, for the most part, simply don’t crank ‘em out like their colleagues in genre.

Perusing the list, I was struck by how I started to read, and continued to read, those top five. I first read Block in 1994. I was working as a cub reporter at the Ottumwa Courier, and my 23-year-old self found little to do in that small meat-packing town in southern Iowa. On the weekends where I didn’t escape back to Iowa City, I would visit the public library and then hole up with my finds. 1993 was the year of pulp fiction, with James Ellroy (7 read) and Jim Thompson (6 read) as my lodestones (with some Graham Greene and Kingsley Amis thrown in for good measure).

In 1994, after reading a favorable review in my cultural bible at the time, Entertainment Weekly, I checked out Block’s A Ticket to the Boneyard (which wasn’t the book that would have been reviewed). I was hooked, falling for his ex-cop detective Matthew Scudder. That’s how I started the year, and amid another Ellroy and books by Cormac McCarthy, Richard Price, and James M. Cain, among others (sense a pattern here?), I read two more Blocks: A Dance at the Slaughterhouse and The Devil Knows You’re Dead.

By that point, if memory serves, I had exhausted their Block selection. Lucky for me, I moved back to Iowa City that autumn. Of the last 14 books I read that year, 10 were Blocks, catching up on the dozen Scudder books by that point and venturing beyond. That’s a total of 13 in that first year. In the years since, not one has gone by without me reading at least one Block book, and in all but six of those years, I have read at least two. Makes sense: 79 books in 25 years.

Block was a pulp writer in the 1950s and 1960s before starting to take off commercially in the 1970s. As such, has dozens of books, both under his name and others, in his back catalog. For the longest time, he didn’t claim that older, pseudonymous pulp work. Along came ebooks and reprint publishers, and suddenly the floodgates opened. Willing to take a paycheck in exchange for making fans like me who had decided to attempt to read his entire output, Block started to issue those old titles to our mutual benefit. What had seemed at one time to be a manageable if daunting task suddenly became near insurmountable. And what fun I’m having in the attempt.

Westlake is a fellow pulp writer (and close friend and occasional collaborator of Block’s), which means he has his own back catalog that numbers in the dozens. I came to him later, reading my first of his books in 1998 when he resurrected his Richard Stark pen name for a continuation of the Parker series. These books arrived about one a year, and I kept up. My first Westlake under his own name also came in 1998, followed immediately by a second. I must have decided I liked the Starks and didn’t want to wait until the next arrived. I read another in 1999, and then didn’t read another under his own name until 2007. In 2006 I began to seek out the older Starks, aided immensely when a wonderful reissue series was initiated by the University of Chicago Press.

Since 2007, I have read something by Westlake, either under his own name or a pen name, each year. Though he passed in 2008, given his output, I look forward to many more such years.

This is getting a bit long, so I’ll touch on Sandford, Bruen, and Connelly tomorrow.

Books cited:

A Ticket to the Boneyard, A Dance at the Slaughterhouse and The Devil Knows You’re Dead, Lawrence Block

[jpkenyon]

Tying up loose ends, and adding a few in the process

After several weeks of unleisurely reading activities such as counting pages and keeping track of goals and targets, I find myself with nothing to read.

I had a plan in place that would allow me to get through all of the books I was in the middle of so I could finish by the end of the year. After making dutiful progress, I finally found some time over the holidays and blazed through everything, page counts be damned.

The biggest accomplishment was Greil Marcus’s Real Life Rock, a collection of the titular column he has written for 25-plus years about music, film, books, visual arts and anything else that piqued his interest. It was 522 pages, which by my math meant I needed to read about 10 pages each week to breeze through it by the end of the year. I did very well until a summer vacation, and then never caught up until reading about 100 pages in December.

I also knocked out Ander Monson’s Letter to a Future Lover, which purported to be commentary and/or writing inspired by ephemera and marginalia found in library books. This is so up my alley, or would have been had Monson actually done that. I suppose he did in his own mind, but his mind works much differently from mine (and we’re probably both thankful for that), and it was a slog. So was the latter half of Tin Cans, Squeems & Thudpies, a Rick Johnson Reader. It collects highlights from Johnson’s writing for legendary rock magazine, Creem, which was enlightening and insightful to this fan of the music and the cutting-edge writing from that era. His prognostications about Major League Baseball from the early 1980s? Not so much.

But that’s why those books, as well as Arthur Taylor’s Notes and Tones, Tim Parks’s Where I’m Reading From, and Scott Miller’s Music: What Happened? seemed so perfect for year-long reading. There was no through-line to any of them, so my plan to read a few pages each week would be endlessly rewarding, with no need to remember what came before. Great plan, lousy execution, for all five books singled out for this treatment ended up on my shelf untouched for weeks at a time.

With those nearing completion, as well as Jane Harper’s excellent The Dry that I picked up in Melbourne, I decided to check out Forces of Nature, the second in Harper’s series, and finished that, as well as yet another book that I’ll write about tomorrow, as well.

This always happens; I create unnecessary worry and that propels me through far more pages than I would have thought possible. So, with four days left in the year, I have nothing on my nightstand. Or should I say had. Yes, the temptation was too great, and while the idea of lounging around with a stack of piled up magazines has appeal, I figured I could do a bit of that and still squeeze in one more book.

Looking for something short, I headed to the mystery stacks and landed on Georges Simenon. As a mystery buff, Simenon has long been a glaring gap in my reading. I finally took a dip a few years back, but grabbed a title not featuring his famed police detective Jules Maigret. I rectified that today with The Bar on the Seine, one of his earlier novels. I’m already hooked, wondering if I’ll need yet another book before midnight strikes on the 31st.

Books cited:

Real Life Rock, Greil Marcus; Letter to a Future Lover, Ander Monson; Tin Cans, Squeems & Thudpies, a Rick Johnson Reader, Rick Johnson; Notes and Tones, Arthur Taylor; Where I’m Reading From, Tim Parks; Music: What Happened? Scott Miller; The Dry and Force of Nature, Jane Harper; The Bar on the Seine, Georges Simenon

[jpkenyon]

So much for discovery

Travel, it seems, takes it out of me. I like to think that after my many transcontinental journeys I am able to pick up where I left off. This time, it took far longer to re-acclimate and catch up.

That doesn’t mean I haven’t been reading. if anything, that has been the one constant. I have knocked off two of those five books I had been chipping away at all year, finishing Notes and Tones by Arthur Taylor, and Music: What Happened? by Scott Miller. That leaves me within striking distance of finishing the other three in the 10 days before the end of the year.

The vagaries of that Melbourne trip -- which involved about 10 more hours spend in airports than I expected -- gave me plenty of extra time for reading. I started and finished musician Jeff Tweedy’s memoir, Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back) before I even made it to the airport for the return trip, which made me glad I had picked up The Dry by Jane Harper on my first day in Melbourne.

Because my job involves international travel and literature, I have become fairly obsessed with picking up things to read when I visit a city, and visits to bookstores are seen as professional development (a bonus given that I would do this in my free time anyway). I had been in Melbourne for about two hours when I found myself browsing in a Readings store, a wonderful chain of indie bookstores that dot the city. I asked my host and colleague for a crime fiction recommendation, figuring that would be good plane fodder for the way home. He suggested The Dry. The cover was packed with award listings from Australian organizations, so I figured it was a safe bet.

I started reading it on the plane home, and was captivated. It’s a debut by a journalist (always a good sign; several of my favorite crime fiction authors -- and certainly the most prolific -- got their start in newspapers) and it was exceedingly well done. The characters, the descriptions, the plot all are wonderfully well done. I have been reading it, and the many other books on my list, over the couple of weeks that I have been home, and finally finished it this week. I looked it up, knowing she had written at least two more books, and wondering how difficult it would be to obtain them. So much for discovering something unique on my trip. The Iowa City Public Library has five copies of The Dry on the shelves, two on its bookmobile, and the ebook and eaudio as well. It also has Harper’s two subsequent books in multiple formats. It seems my only discovery is that I somehow missed the boat on Harper, the silver lining being that I now have two more of her books to dive into.

As for discovery, my suitcase was full, both with books and journals purchased and gifted, including several entries in Black Inc.’s “Writers on Writers” series, the latest issue of the edgy and inventive lit journal, The Lifted Brow, and a doorstop in the form of musician Paul Kelly’s memoir, How to Make Gravy. None of those things are sitting on the shelves of the library or the local bookstores, so unique experiences await. 

Books cited: 

Notes and Tones, Arthur Taylor; Music: What Happened? Scott Miller; Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back), Jeff Tweedy; The Dry, Jane Harper; How to Make Gravy, Paul Kelly

[jpkenyon]

Being there

Perhaps it is the fact that my reading isn't as broad as I like to think it is, but now that I am paying more attention to what I am reading, I am finding linkages that allow one thing to enhance the other.

In grabbing the Jeff Tweedy memoir to read on the plane, I gave thought to my views on his band, Wilco. I like but don't love Wilco. I admire Tweedy's songwriting chops, and the band he has assembled to perform those songs is staggeringly talented and brings so much to his deceptively simple structures. But there always has been something holding me back. I own everything he has ever done, but don't find myself listening to it near as much as that rate of consumption would seem to indicate.

Knowing I was going to be writing about that book here, I was trying to think of ways to articulate what it is about his music that keeps me at arm's length. I've thought about that a lot over the years; probably more than is reasonable or healthy. But it wasn't until reading another of the books I brought with me, that it fell into place.

Scott Miller's book, Music: What Happened? has been both a fun affirmation and an interesting detour depending on the year. As I mentioned, the book essentially collects liner notes he wrote for compilation CDs that gather what he found to be the best songs of each year. It was a given that Wilco and Tweedy would be covered at some point, and in 2002 Miller writes about the Wilco song "Heavy Metal Drummer." He writes, "Summerteeth had a little bit of an Oliver Stone problem: it was the dark, edgy record that was a bit too aware that it was dark and edgy."

That sums it up well. I've always found a coldness in Wilco's music that was off putting. I like (and sometimes love) intentionally cold music. But there was always something about Wilco that grated. Not on every song, and sometimes not even on every album. Miller seems to have hit upon it. It was that knowing sense of darkness, that "Hey, look at how dark and serious we are!" that never allowed me to embrace the music. I could admire it, and I could occasionally find it quite stirring and uplifting, but for the body of work as a whole, I could never quite get there.

That said, Tweedy is an exceptionally likable person, and the candor with which he speaks about things that are potentially unflattering, and the light he shines on things that even we non-rabid fans find of titillating interest, makes this a winning read. As with most good books about music, this makes me want to listen to Wilco again, to re-contextualize and perhaps really appreciate what Tweedy and his band have accomplished over the years.

Alas, when filling my iPhone with music for this trip, I wasn't prescient enough to anticipate that desire. So that deep dive that will surely come will need to wait until I get home.

I'll likely finish both the Miller and Tweedy books before I depart Melbourne, and I'm curious to see if there are other ways in which they talk with one another.

Books cited: Music: What Happened? Scott Miller; Let's Go (So We Can Get Back), Jeff Tweedy

[jpkenyon]

My unstated goal for this was to eschew pictures. I wanted the words to speak for themselves, and to not let a bunch of book cover images take the place of prose. However, sometimes that whole "a picture is worth a thousand words" thing makes some sense.

This photo was taken overlooking a vista on Fiji. As you will recall, I had prepared copious amounts of reading for a long haul flight to Melbourne. About 11 hours into that 16-hour journey, the pilot came on to tell us there was engine trouble and we were diverting. Long story short, I spent an unplanned day on Fiji.

I found a spot in the sun and planned to spend some time reading. Every time I would get a sentence or two into the book, however, I would look up and see this. Suffice to say, not a lot of reading was done that day.

I made up for the next day with a six-hour stay at the Nadi airport waiting for our plane to be cleared to continue our journey. Much of the reading material I expected to last for both parts of my travel has been read. No worries; I have picked up much new material in my less than 24 hours in Melbourne.

[jpkenyon]

Preparing for (aerial) captivity

I’m heading abroad for 10 days, and this necessitated two things from a reading standpoint: 1) I needed to finish library books, and 2) I needed to load up on reading material for my flights.

The first was relatively easy. Thanks to a weekend followed by three days of work followed by two days off, I was able to power through Michael Connelly’s Dark Sacred Night, Nico Walker’s Cherry, and Sebastian Junger’s Tribe. The first was top priority because it was my Dad’s checkout that he let me read first because he had too many books stacked up himself (more on the juggling act that is the library hold system another time). I finished just in time to give it to him at Thanksgiving. The Walker I had been reading for a while, setting it aside when other things came up, and the Junger was my book club’s latest pick.

So, I hit the plane with only long-term reading projects awaiting me when I return. I am taking one of those with me: Music: What Happened? by Scott Miller, late of the wonderfully quirky pop band Game Theory. Miller assembled a series of mix CDs that covered what he deemed the best songs of each year from 1957 to 2009. He then essentially compiled the liner notes from each CD into this book. This is so up my alley, as I confirm his good taste when we agree, decry his taste when we disagree, and make notes to check out things about which I was unfamiliar. I must admit, I admired Miller’s well-crafted music more than wanted to listen to it at times, but his ear and ability to describe what he hears makes for an enlightening, endearing read.

I’m about halfway through, and figure I can read the rest on the plane. I’m headed to Australia, so a 16-hour flight awaits. I don’t want to take more than this, however, because I don’t want to cart around a lot of books that I’ll only need to bring back (I have a stack of supermarket paperback crime novels to read and leave behind for just this purpose). I assume, given that I am making a City of Literature-related trip to Melbourne to help this sister City of Literature celebrate its 10th anniversary, that I will return with many new books. Might as well plan (and pack) accordingly.

That means a lot of electronic reading, for the most part. I’m still working my way through Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter, and would love to finish it on this trip. In addition, I have many magazines saved in PDF format on my iPad (and remembered to mark them for offline reading so they’ll actually be available... a lesson learned from an early trans-continental journey). I also have a print issue of Book Forum that just arrived in the mail. I rarely get through one of these dense things before the sell-by date feels like it has passed, but with this much time as a captive audience, perhaps now is BF’s moment.

I also have many podcasts that have piled up, a lot of new music and, of course, the seat-back screen full of movies you wouldn’t watch anywhere else to occupy me. Even with those distractions, with a full 20 hours in the air each way, I should be able to get through a substantial chuck of my planned reading.

If I somehow exhaust all of that, I also have an ebook of Jeff Tweedy’s new memoir, Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back) loaded up. I eventually will read this, though I might be a fool to start it now as I stare down the end of the year with about eight books still on my reading pile.

Books cited:

Dark Sacred Night, Michael Connelly; Cherry, Nico Walker; Tribe, Sebastian Junger; Music: What Happened? Scott Miller; Vibrant Matter, Jane Bennett; Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back), Jeff Tweedy

[jpkenyon]

You again?

When you read a lot, you start to see linkages you would otherwise never have known. It’s that way with anything, really. When you are looking for a new car, whatever model you are considering suddenly seems to be everywhere on the road.

Today it was Mark Halliday. As you will recall, I first read about the poet in Greil Marcus’s Real Life Rock, and that spurred me to buy his collection, Jab. Today, while Reading Tim Parks’s Where I’m Reading From, a collection of pieces he wrote for the New York Review of Books about reading and writing, I came across another mention of the poet.

In a piece about the professionalization of writing, Parks cites a lecture given by Halliday at the annual conference of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics, in which he said, “I think all of us who keep striving and striving to publish another and another book of poems are still in love with the ideas of GREATNESS and IMPORTANCE.” (emphasis Parks). Halliday concluded (and Parks concurred) that this is incompatible with the “era of the career writer.”

To be honest, when I first read about Halliday, I had no idea where he was in his career, how old he was, or the topics about which he typically writes. I was intrigued by Marcus’s description of one particular poem that dealt with music. That and the fact that the cover image is of people playing basketball was enough to pique my interest.

Seeing another reference to Halliday sent me in search of more information, and I find he has a longer career than I expected, though I’m not sure why. He is described in similar terms across the handful of pieces I read. Parks refers to him as “the excellent poet Mark Halliday,” while the New Yorker, in a review of Jab, called him “prolix and quotidian, a Whitman in a supermarket.” A review of his latest collection, Losers Dream On, notes the humor in his work, and his penchant for writing in a “speaking voice.”

Now that I have Halliday on my mind, I fully expect to see him everywhere. I also expect this to happen frequently with other authors, particularly because of the type of book I’m reading now. the Marcus and the Parks, both collections of varied writings, are full of mentions of other authors, and the likelihood that I’ll find more overlap there, followed by still more in the other things I’m reading and encountering in my day to day, ensure more connections and more additions to my reading wish list.

Books cited:

Real Life Rock, Greil Marcus; Jab and Losers Dream On, Mark Halliday; Where I’m Reading From, Tim Parks

[jpkenyon]

Flipping pages, filling gaps

As I have mentioned, I am reading more books at once than I would normally in part because I identified five titles on my to-be-read shelf that all were designed to be read in short chunks. I had the rather idealistic idea that I would read a few pages now and again and would eventually complete all of them by year’s end. 

This has not happened. Instead, I am now facing a stack of books each night, reading a few pages in each so I can finish them all in the next few weeks. At one point earlier this fall I counted pages, counted days, and determined that reading a total of 14 pages from these books each day would get me to the end. I missed a few days here and there, read more than 14 pages several times, and now I’m down to a required 13-page pace.

Not the most pleasurable way to read, but all of the books are of interest and I actually am benefiting from this exercise, because I am keeping a good flow going that is making each of the books more meaningful.

One of the books is Ander Monson’s Letter to a Future Lover. Monson was in town back in 2015 and read from the book. I was intrigued by the premise -- Monson wrote about the “marginalia, slips of paper, fingerprints, highlighting [and] inscriptions” he found in library books. He originally printed these short pieces on cards that were placed back in the book in question, later to be collected in a box and still later collected in book form.

It is thought-provoking, funny, occasionally puzzling work, and given the subject matter, it’s right in my wheelhouse. Because his source material is so varied, it is easy to dip in and read an entry or two without the need to have read what came before in order to make sense of it all. That said, there is a rhythm and flow to it, despite the only organizational structure being that the pieces are organized alphabetically by title.

Tonight I read a piece called “The Fold,” which takes as its inspiration a quote from the book of the same name by the philosopher Gilles Deleuze. It wasn’t the context of Monson’s book that made this meaningful, but rather that provided by other things I’m reading, specifically the book by Jane Bennett that I downloaded as part of the Read Me Weird Things book club, Vibrant Matter. 

Bennett writes frequently about Deleuze in her book, often in tandem with Felix Guattari. Though I find it fascinating, my knowledge of anything beyond the most basic philosophy is fleeting at best. Already I was driven to look up Theodor Adorno, who also is mentioned frequently in Bennett’s book, and that led me to a book in the Iowa City Public Library titled Hitler’s Philosophers by  Yvonne Sherratt. That book dealt more with the lives of the philosophers than their work, so I’m still in search of something to give me a better understanding of Adorno.

I assumed I would find that something on my shelves. Perhaps not. One of the perks of writing about the arts in my journalism days was a steady supply of review copies of books and CDs, and the heaving shelves in my house are testament to that. For the past 25 years, I have been carting around History of Philosophy from the Harper Collins College Outline series. I assumed that at some point I would find it of use. I pulled it from the shelf tonight, sufficiently intrigued by seeing Deleuze mentioned in yet another book, and assumed I would find him listed here. No such luck. (No Adorno, either). Nor is he listed in The Book of the Mind by Stephen Wilson, a book I have moved from house to house for the past 15 years waiting for just such a moment.

I struck a thin vein with the third and final book I pulled from the shelves, A Scream Goes through the House by Arnold Weinstein. Though it seemed the longest shot -- it is subtitled “What Literature Teaches Us About Life” -- it contains a fleeting mention of Deleuze and Guattari, but only in reference to their own writing about the work of Kafka.

I’m clearly out of my element here, but I won’t stop looking. Such scavenger hunts are a real kick, and every mention I find somewhere beyond my original source gives me that much more context to better understand what I am reading, and helps me to justify my shelves full of otherwise-untouched books.

Books cited:

Letter to a Future Lover, Ander Monson; The Fold, Gilles Deleuze; Vibrant Matter, Jane Bennett; Hitler’s Philosophers, Yvonne Sherratt; History of Philosophy, various contributors; The Book of the Mind, Stephen Wilson; A Scream Goes Through the House, Arnold Weinstein

[jpkenyon]

When books prey on weak minds

I just did a foolish thing.

In the grand scheme of things, it’s fairly trivial. It won’t have long-term negative repercussions, nor am I likely to even regret it.

I checked out a book. One of the benefits of having an office located in a public library is that I have tens of thousands of books at my fingertips. One of the perils of that location is the same.

So, while walking through the main floor of the library, I glanced -- with no intent of stopping -- at the new fiction shelf. There in the Express section was the new John Sandford mystery, Holy Ghost. I stopped, looked at it for a moment, thought about walking away, and then picked it up and checked it out.

As I have mentioned here several times already, I’m in the middle of many books. I whittled the list when I finished the Shaun Bythell book, but then immediately added to it by picking up Tribe by Sebastian Junger, which is the latest pick from my book club. It’s short -- 136 pages without the index -- so I knew that would be a quick read that wouldn’t detract much from the other things I’m reading.

But now, those other books will suffer, for once I start a Sandford, it becomes a bit all consuming. 

I started reading Sandford in 2002 when he visited Iowa City to read from his work. I was assigned to interview him for the newspaper. I’m a mystery buff, but had never read him. So, to prepare, I read what was then the latest in his “Prey” series, Chosen Prey, then went back and read the first, Rules of Prey. I was hooked. He is an Iowa native, even graduated from the University of Iowa with a journalism degree, as did I, so I should have been pre-disposed to follow him. I suppose his wild success made me steer clear. If that many people read him, my counter-intuitive thought process deduced, could he possibly be good? He is; the masses got it right for a change.

I read four more of his books that year and have read at least one in every year since, occasionally dipping into his back catalog to catch up to where I started. In 2008, Sandford added a second long-term series, following Minnesota state policeman Virgil Flowers. He didn’t stop writing his Lucas Davenport “Prey” books, meaning he was publishing a new book about every six months. Another favorite, Michael Connelly, has done likewise, meaning I have four books a year to read just to keep up with the two of them. It’s a pleasure to do so, but it does mean less time to explore the work of other writers.

This latest from Sandford is a Flowers novel. In some ways I like them better than the Davenports. They are a bit lighter in tone, the protagonist a bit more likable at this point. I usually breeze through one in two or three days, which means I might not crack open many of those other books on my stack until the weekend.

Ultimately, it was my impatience and lack of will power that did me in. I’m no. 17 on the hold list for the book, meaning I probably would get it toward the end of the year. The prospect of waiting that long, when there was a copy right in front of me, was too much to bear. Sorry other books. I’ll get to you in good time.

Books cited:

Holy Ghost, Chosen Prey, Rules of Prey, John Sandford; Tribe, Sebastian Junger.