Welcome to Bookchat! Where you can talk about anything; books, plays, essays, and audio books. You don’t have to be reading a book to come in, sit down, and chat with us.
I JUST WANT TO SIT ON THE BEACH AND STARE AT THE OCEAN
Sometimes, as I navigate these years of my late sixties, I get the heavy feeling that I’ve reached the limit of what I can absorb. I’ve read so many books in my life, starting in early childhood. My brain is stuffed with vivid characters, complicated plots, beautiful descriptions, and deep life lessons. Countless moments from these books swim day and night like dust motes before my mind’s eye, unbidden, unexpected, and oh so beloved.
I’ve delved into the research of so many authors on so many subjects. The nonfiction books I’ve read over the decades have built much more of my education than school ever did. And yet the march of published scholarship continues, each generation bringing new insight, archives and interpretation to every subject under the sun. How can I keep absorbing more?
My TBR pile? An impossible challenge, just a mockery at this point.
Really, how much more can I take? How much more can I stuff into this mind? All these sweet moments of fiction and fascinating facts of nonfiction that already fill my reveries...isn’t that enough?
So many books.
Sometimes I just want to stop. I just want to sit on the beach and stare at the ocean and let my mind drift over the endless memories of books already read.
And I can be happy with that. No more books. No more reading.
Not a single word.
I LIVE IN THE PAST
My brain, it stirs and it says to me: You know, that last sentence you wrote, ‘not a single word.’ That’s <SPOILER ALERT!> the closing line of Saul Bellow’s 1964 novel Herzog.
And I know my brain is right. I loved that novel when I read it back in the Seventies, and I remember that line, a deeply satisfying end to the story. That was my second Bellow, after Humboldt’s Gift, which I picked up in mass market paperback after he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1976. The paperback had a blurb from John Cheever: “I think it A Work of genius, I think it The Work of a Genius, I think it brilliant, splendid, etc. If there is literature (and this proves there is) this is where it’s at.” So I eagerly dove in.
I abandoned the book quickly. I was 21, just starting out my adult life in my very own apartment in Philadelphia, and the book was simply beyond me. Too dense, too cerebral. The book sat in my bookcase, mocking me. I tried again a year or two later, and again quickly hit a brick wall of incomprehension. I picked it up a third time after another year or so...and was blown away! It was brilliant, it spoke to me in ways no other book had done. It is still one of my favorite novels, and one of the few I have reread several times.
My life is nothing without the books that have filled my past. In my late teens, I read Joyce Maynard’s Looking Back: A Chronicle of Growing Up Old in the Sixties and was astounded by how perceptively this young woman, just two years older than myself, could describe the era in which I was growing up. What no one knew until 25 years later, when she published her memoir At Home in the World was that 53-year-old reclusive Catcher in the Rye author J. D. Salinger was also impressed and drew the eighteen year old Maynard into a year-long affair. Maynard still exists in my life with her continuing string of novels, most recently The Bird Hotel.
In my early thirties there was a period when I took a deep dive into feminist literature. In quick succession I read some of the modern classics like Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch, and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. I expanded my frame of reference by reading some then-current crop of radical writing like Andrea Dworkin’s Intercourse and Mary Daly’s Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism, writings by women of color like Audre Lord’s Sister Outsider and the anthology This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria E. Anzaldúa. I opened my frame of reference to the international with books like Robin Morgan’s Sisterhood is Global: The International Women's Movement Anthology. That reading, along with the political writing in magazines like Rolling Stone and the Village Voice, are what accelerated my embrace of liberal politics.
And travel! One of the defining motifs of my life, and one of the defining sources of my reading. My wanderlust was inspired early on by books like Ed Buryn’s Vagabonding in America and Paul Theroux’s The Great Railway Bazaar. I’ve marched with the Madres de Plaza de Mayo in Argentina and read Revolutionizing Motherhood: The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, by Marguerite Guzman Bouvard. I’ve been deep in the tin mines of Potosí, Bolivia and read We Eat the Mines and the Mines Eat Us: Dependency and Exploitation in Bolivian Tin Mines, by June Nash. Before a trip to Kenya, I read books like Kuki Gallman’s I Dreamed of Africa and brought home Kenyan fiction like Going Down River Road, by Meja Mwangi, and A Grain of Wheat, by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. A visit to Istanbul lives on in Tales from the Expat Harem: Foreign Women in Modern Turkey. So many books on India, Nepal and Tibet, on Israel and Morocco and Kashmir.
So many years gone by, so many experiences, so much learning, so much reading.
So many books.
I LIVE IN THE FUTURE
I run an online bookstore, The Literate Lizard, and each week as I plan my promotions I scan the synopses of literally hundreds of books due to come out in the future. I go through the hundreds of books listed in the “On Sale Next Week” list on the Ingram Book Distribution website. I look at the hundreds of books coming out next month in Ingram Advance. I read dozens of reviews of books coming out in the next 3-4 months in Publishers Weekly. I peruse publisher’s catalogs for next season on Edelweiss.
AND I GET SO EXCITED!!!
Colson Whitehead’s new novel Crook Manifesto, a follow-up to Harlem Shuffle, is coming out July 18th! Mobility, a novel by Lydia Kiesling coming out August 1st, sounds like a political hoot! Rachel Steir’s Betty Friedan: Magnificent Disrupter, coming out September 12th, sounds so interesting, drawing on previously unavailable archives! The Slip: The New York City Street That Changed American Art Forever, coming August 1st from Prudence Peiffer, about a tiny street in lower Manhattan that in the 1950s and 1960s was home to bunch of great modern artists: fascinating! Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy, coming September 12th from Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman, about “an international web of surveillance and control, which it weaves in the form of globe-spanning networks such as fiber optic cables and obscure payment systems!” I want to read that! A new Ann Patchett, Tom Lake, coming out August 1st—she’s one of my faves! And a new James McBride novel, The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, coming August 8th!
Every single week I’m absolutely beside myself with excitement over the incredible wealth of new books in the pipeline.
So many books!
BOOK ME, DANNO
So who am I kidding? I can never give up books. If I do end my days sitting on the beach, it will be with a book in my hand. In the background, the sound of the ocean will usher the new wave of literary images into my mind. And every once in a while, I’ll glance up at that great expanse of ocean and smile.
So what are you reading? What’s on your mind?
**************************
All book links in this diary are to my online bookstore The Literate Lizard. If you already have a favorite indie bookstore, please keep supporting them, but if you’re able to throw a little business my way, that would be appreciated. Use the coupon code DAILYKOS for 15% off your order, in gratitude for your support (an ever-changing smattering of new releases are already discounted 20% each week). We also partner Libro.fm for audiobooks. Libro.fm is similar to Amazon’s Audible, with a la carte audiobooks, or a $14.99 monthly membership which includes the audiobook of your choice and 20% off subsequent purchases during the month.
I also write the weekly Nonfiction Views diary on Tuesday evenings, sometimes with a review of a new book, sometimes just with publishing news and a look at the week’s most interesting new nonfiction. I also contribute a comment in one of the two weekly Black Kos diaries, featuring the week’s new books of specific interest to Black and Latino/a readers.
Thanks to an upgrade in the American Bookseller’s Association eCommerce platform, on which many indie bookstore websites are run, The Literate Lizard is undergoing a complete redesign, which will make it much more reflective of my interests and passions. I’ll be able to feature different modules and booklists on subjects that matter to me. I hope to take it live very soon. Here are two screencaps of what I’m working on:
READERS & BOOK LOVERS SERIES SCHEDULE
If you’re not already following Readers and Book Lovers, please go to our homepage (link), find the top button in the left margin, and click it to FOLLOW GROUP. Thank You and Welcome, to the most followed group on Daily Kos. Now you’ll get all our R&BLers diaries in your stream.