My summer vacation will be spent at the beach, though only because my family happens to live there. I hail from Vero Beach, Florida, and I’ll be going home for a long overdue visit this weekend. It will be great to spend time with my mom, dad, two sisters, brother and sister-in-law, but I’m especially excited to see my niece, Madison. She is three and is changing and growing so quickly that she’s a completely different person every time I visit. Last time I was home, I told her I work in a bookstore and asked her if she knew what a bookstore was. She said yes, so I asked what was in a bookstore. She replied, “You know, books, dragons, silly things, stuff like that.” I told her she was right on the money. As a good aunt, I’m going to bring her some books to read while I’m home, especially Junie B. Jones books, because of our great Oz event a few days ago. I may not be able to fit any dragons in my carry-on, though.
My dad’s a huge mystery fan, and while I’ve covered my Father’s Day gift for him already by sending him a copy of the new Steig Larsson book the day it came out, as a double whammy his birthday is Monday, so I’ve got a signed first edition of (shush, don’t tell) Lee Child’s 61 Hours tucked away in my suitcase. I’m also going to introduce him to Olen Steinhauer, whose new book, The Nearest Exit, is the highly anticipated follow-up to The Tourist.
But the books that will take up the most room in my carry-on are the ones for me to escape into when I’m looking to avoid my dearly beloved. I love my family, but after an evening of visiting the day I fly in, I’m sure I’ll be ready to dive in to those books I’m in the middle of, but also some I’ve been putting off reading, felt too overwhelmed to read, or never got around to reading.
The book I’m in the middle of:
A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan. I haven’t read anything by Egan before, though I’ve always wanted to. This one has such a great cover and title that I couldn’t pass it up. I am about halfway through and really love it. It reminds me a bit of The Imperfectionists because each chapter focuses on a different character, yet each is also set in a different time. We meet Sasha at the height of her kleptomania in the first chapter, but in the next she’s years younger and a successful assistant to Bennie, chapter two’s focus, at a record company. I’m looking forward to discovering how Egan will tie together all of the stories and lives she’s interwoven.
The book I’ve been putting off:
Reality Hunger by David Shields. This book caught my eye when it first came out but I just haven’t picked it up yet. Shields’ book is made up of passages about the directions art and literature are going, but most of his argument is constructed of improperly cited quotes from everyone from Emerson to Vonnegut. While flipping through it I came across a reference to Dave Eggers’ novel-memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and since it’s one of those books I never got around to reading, I read it instead. I hope to be able to talk about Reality Hunger and my spin-off reads in an upcoming blog; this topic is really interesting to me.
The book I’ve been too busy to read:
The Passage (signed!) by Justin Cronin. This book is just so long that I haven’t cracked it open yet. From what I’ve heard from Maggie and Joe, though, I shouldn’t let the length intimidate me, so while I’m frying on the beach for hours I’m going to escape to Cronin’s world of mutants and government experiments gone awry.
The book I never got around to reading:
Less Than Zero (first edition!) by Bret Easton Ellis. Because his new book, Imperial Bedrooms, is the sequel, it’s about time I read this novel that helped define a generation.
I like reading philosophy. Though it can be intimidating, reading the works of the great philosophers is often rewarding. Since philosophy provides a basis for how we function in our cultures, I’ve decided lately to try and gain a better grasp of postmodern thought. It is a fairly daunting task. I have only read a few selected writings and feel I have only scratched the surface. The subject is disregarded among many as trite; although in my limited reading it seems that these thinkers have very important things to say. They seem to be reading humanity and the climate of thought in a very broad and deep level, but they go about it in a way that is outside the scope of the tradition. For my first trek, I grabbed Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things. A historical work from the mid sixties in France; it investigates and brings into question the very practices that, we think, are used to communicate and hold together our perception of living.
But before jumping with both feet into a very deep pool, I decided to build up. I picked up in the mid 19th century with one of the fathers of Existentialism, Soren Kierkegaard. He was a christian philosopher that is regarded as one of the centuries best thinkers. I am about a quarter of the way through his Works of Love, but I only had to go the first couple of pages before I knew I was in for a stretch. I’ve been told that this work is holds both his theological mind and his philosophical mind better than his others. He speaks boldly and extensively about what he sees in our interactions with God, people and the rest of the world through love. Love seems to be one of those words that has now almost lost all definition, so it is refreshing to have a respectable chunk of pages give it some parameters.
