Ran into an old friend the other night at the Cat Power show. As I was heading out, he asked, “What are you reading?” I damn near fell over. It’s one of my favorite questions to ask, if not answer, and so I told him I’m deep into “The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science,” by Norman Doidge, M.D.: A truly inspiring read for anyone interested in growth, reinvention, creativity, love, motor skills, etc. It’s nothing short of a life-changer, and instills the same sort of hope in the micro that’s going on in the macro with the historic political season unfolding before us.
To continue the hope-mongering, I asked a few musicians, writers, and other book lovers what they’re digging in these grey days of winter. The verdicts:
Ben Kyle, singer/songwriter, Romantica
Dennis Pernu, editor, MBI Publishing
Berlin Noir by Philip Kerr. It’s his trilogy that follows the prewar and postwar exploits of Berlin-based P.I. Bernard Gunther. Kerr packs it all in: a two-fisted private dick, hairy armed Russians, beheading by train, black marketeers, effete Nazis, fey Viennese, blustery Americans, smokin’ hot molls. Kind of like Raymond Chandler meets Graham Greene. It’s also a window on a comparatively simpler world which I’m sure seemed hopelessly broken at the time. I bought the book in 1994 when I worked at Borders but for whatever reason never got around to reading it. Also, the April issue of Rod & Custom.
Nick Tosches, essayist, critic, author (Where Dead Voices Gather and many others)
I am re-reading Jack London's John Barleycorn: Alcoholic Memoirs. This book from more than ninety years ago is not only London at his best, but also still stands as the best book about booze ever written.
Diablo Cody, Oscar-nominated writer (Juno) and author (Candy Girl: A Year In The Life Of An Unlikely Stripper)
Currently, I'm reading The Perry Bible Fellowship: The Trial of Colenol Sweeto and Other Stories by Nicholas Gurewitch. It's a collection of Gurewitch's brilliantly mordant comics. I crave beautiful, shocking, hilarious things in the dimmer months.
Mayda Miller, singer/songwriter
Candy Girl: A Year In The Life Of An Unlikely Stripper by Diablo Cody. I like it. She is hilarious and honest.
Adam Levy - Photo by Steve CohenAdam Levy, musician, Honeydogs/Hookers & Blow
I am severely ADD. I read a couple books at a time. Right now I'm juggling three. What's unusual for me is that each one is very hopeful—I would recommend all of them.
Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near is blowing my mind. He's a somewhat crackpot futurist arguing that human evolution is going to start being effected by computer developments within the next century; it's unreal and a bit scary but mostly exciting.
In The End of Poverty Jeffrey Sachs, using some interesting case studies, paints an optimistic view of eliminating abject international poverty through raising development aid from each first world country by a mere .07%. That extra dough will be used in creating politically stable landscapes, eliminating corruption, improving international health, and reducing protectionist barriers. I am having trouble understanding a lot of it but The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene is trying to bring together the seemingly contradictory ideas around relativity and superstring theory. I missed all this stuff in college because it's just too freaking hard to wrap your head around it. Thankfully he uses great and amusing examples to illustrate complex ideas.
Craig Finn, musician, The Hold Steady
Pete Christensen/Karmaglide, musician/manager of Java Jack’s
Finished The Razor’s Edge and still ruminating on it, balancing it with Into the Wild and the various outcomes of the wandering, experiencing life mindset. You can take the path to your end in many ways. It's OK to check out from the mainstream but it's important to keep a few tethers to it.
Also reading Espresso Coffee—Professional Techniques and realizing you can take any subject to the outer limits of exploration in terms of science, technique, chemistry, etc. One can devote much time and effort to understanding the minutia of relationships, food, gardening—whatever. But at the end of the day, sometimes you just want a good, hot cup of coffee.
Sarah Askari, music editor, City Pages
The Miracle Letters of T. Rimberg by Geoff Herbach. The author, Herbach, lives here in town and he's one of the Electric Arc Radio Show performers. The book starts with the lead character in Minneapolis writing suicide letters to Madonna but there are jokes and puzzles and by the end he's in Poland writing suicide letters to Lech Walesa, although I'm not that far yet. It actually comes out big-time this spring, but his friends keep handing me advance copies and asking me to read it and tell them how it was.
Nick Hornby - Publicity PhotoNick Hornby, author of High Fidelity, About A Boy, and Slam.
I'm reading Graham McCann's Spike And Co., about a bunch of brilliant comedy writers of the '50s and '60s who worked together above a greengrocer's shop in Shepherd's Bush, London, where they produced a whole string of series, including Steptoe (Sanford to you) And Son and Til Death Us Do Part (All In The Family). It's re-awakening very dormant good feelings about Britain, and making me itch to stop sitting in a study on my own.
Chris Riemenschneider, pop music critic, Star Tribune
At the risk of being utterly predictable: I just finished Charles Cross' Cobain biography, Heavier Than Heaven, which I'd never actually read, mainly because I'd already read too much on Nirvana by the time it came out. One of the reasons I decided to read it was because I loved Cross' Hendrix bio from a few years ago (Room Full of Mirrors), and of course the similarities between the two subjects are obvious. I couldn't help but think of Kurt as being something of a whiner and drama queen when it came to his childhood, which, yeah, certainly wasn't ideal but was Ozzy & Harriet compared to the shit Jimi and his kid brother went through.
Either way, Cross is one of the best. He doesn't sensationalize, he seems to be as accurate as they come, and he writes from the perspective of a music nut, not an "E Hollywood Story" kind of celebrity biographer.
Less predictable: I just started The Rising Tide, by Jeff Shaara. I've read a couple other Shaara books... fictionalized historical novels on different wars... and Ken Burns' The War got me to pick this one up. I make a concerted effort to alternate between one music book and one non-music book, just because I don't want to be That Guy, the one who can only carry on conversations like debating Stones albums and whatnot.
Mark Trehus, owner, Treehouse Records
Eye Mind: The Saga of Roky Erickson and the 13th Floor Elevators, The Pioneers of Psychedelic Sound by Paul Drummond. First in-depth look at a genuine rock and roll legend.
J. Otis Powell, musician/writer
I’m reading The Fire This Time by Randall Kenan; it was published in 2007 to mark the 45th anniversary of James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time. I recently met the author who was interviewed as part of the Archie Givens Foundation for African American Literature’s Nommo Series at the University of Minnesota. I’ve fallen in love with Randall’s literary voice and I am engaged by how he followed one of the major works of nonfiction in the last century without getting lost in its shadow. I went out yesterday and bought several copies to give to friends so that they can dig what Randall’s putting down. Now your readers may decide to do the same.
Dave Paulson, manager, Cedar Cultural Center
The Road by Cormac McCarthy; The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz; The Dog Says How by Kevin Kling. Varying takes on dealing with adversity—makes winter in Minne seem manageable. That, and wearing two pairs of socks at once.
Don Shelby, news anchor and talk-radio host, WCCO
On my nightstand are three books. Based on my mood after the news, I pick the one that suits it. Three rereads: Joseph Mitchell’s McSorleys’ Wonderful Saloon; George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London and Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. There is a big fat book I thumb through nights called The Complete Art of Modern Cookery by Escoffier. I’m trying to figure out what French cooking should taste like and why everyone thinks organ meat is to die for. Just finished Charlie Wilson’s War By George Crile, the 60 Minutes producer who discovered the role Wilson played in Afghanistan. The movie was good, the book is the record.
Stacy Schwartz, photographer/writer
Beyond my Family Law and Real Estate Law books, I've been reading Art of Modern Rock: The Poster Explosion by Paul Grushkin & Dennis King. It's a ridiculously awesome book I just got, and it actually has descriptions of the artists and their style and so on. Really interesting history and beautiful, explosive artwork. Also has Minneapolis artists like Aesthetic Apparatus inside! It's like 500 pages or something.
I also love the magazine The Big Takeover (one of the BEST sections of CD reviews ever written down—it's HUGE). I try to read it all, but there's so much information in it I barely get all of this quarterly mag read before the next one comes. It's also an independent and needs my support, so I feel good about paying for my subscription.
Frank Lee Drennen, musician, Dead Rock West
The book I am reading is The Archer's Tale by Bernard Cornwell. It's a historical novel, book one of the Grail Quest series. My band Dead Rock West has just returned form a three week tour of England, Scotland and Wales, so images of olde are thick in my imagination and I've had the book sitting around for some time and needed something to read, so I thought I might give it a read.
The story takes place in mid-1300s Europe with the English armies invading France. Mr. Cornwell is a master storyteller who writes with grit and no fanfare, fleshing his characters out to seem like real people might have been back then. This book in particular ( I have read a number of his books) is very evenly paced with no dull moments nor crazy-stupid dramatic events. There is plenty of bloodshed and sex and paganism and scheming to keep me reading till my eyes are useless. I love it and can't seem to stop.
Kieran Folliard, owner Kieran’s Irish Pub, The Local, and The Liffey
I'm reading The Deportees and Other Stories by Roddy Doyle, his first book of short stories. A fantastic read and for musicians and lovers of the book and movie The Commitments, he revives the band in a modern Celtic Tiger Ireland. The dialog takes me out of our Minnesota winter weather and his Dublin wit makes me dream of building a wall (VERY HIGH) between the U.S. and Canada and not on the Mexican border.
Dayna Kurtz, singer/songwriter
I just read Obama's The Audacity of Hope on the plane because I wanted to know if I was getting excited about him for any real reason at all, or if I was just part of some mass hysteria.
Haruki Murakami's After Dark.
A collection of essays edited by Ira Glass called The New Kings of Nonfiction.
Michael Chabon's TheYiddish Policemen's Union.
Jim Harrison's autobiography Off To The Side.
Haven Kimmel's Iodine (not out for a month or so; she's a friend so I got a galley copy).
Steven Almond's My Life in Heavy Metal.
Poetry by Charles Simic, The Voice at 3 a.m.
Jim Meyer, twice-semi-retired music reviewer, Farmington, MN
The Human Body Book: An Illustrated Guide to Its Structure, Function and Disorders, DK Publishers; Mosby's Comprehensive Review of Practical Nursing, Mary O. Eyles; Understanding Medical Surgical Nursing, 2nd Edition, Linda S. Williams, Paula D. Hopper.
Last Friday I booked my Nursing Board Practical Nurse exam (NCLEX-PN) for March 28, so I am singularly immersed in a world of anatomy/physio guides, medical-surgical textbooks, pharmacology tables and child development milestones like never before—including during my actual school coursework last spring, which seemed to take much of the fun out. I needed the deadline for focus, but I'm also enjoying the freedom of independent study to guide me where I feel I need to go.
It's taken years to outgrow my other passions (pop music, pro sports, BDSM) enough to face my deficient scientific knowledge and surrender myself to the miracles of the human body. Though I regret the lost time, I think the adult re-learner may have a deeper appreciation for both the minute delicacy AND the towering strength of the body at work: the cellular transport, vital gas exchanges, the life-giving blood flow and life-saving clotting factors, and the breathtaking natural science of neurosensory capability....You've got to be kidding me. I've never tripped, but to stand outside your own body with a heightened sense of awe is one of the greatest highs I can imagine.
Do you enjoy listening to music? Thank your local tympanic membranes. But please rock responsibly when you expose yourself to ear-splitting volume or the toxic fluids of your local neighborhood music club like I did for 20 years. Curse the smoking ban if you wish, but somewhere in my thoracic cavity, 300 million alveoli are dancing with glee.
Russell Rathbun, pastor, House Of Mercy Church
I have been staying inside with a couple of the ladies—Helen Dewitt and Debbie Blue, both of them brilliant and crazy in the they-know-something-I-really-need-to-find-out-about way and both of them writing about books and language. Dewitt's novel The Last Samurai I had recommended to me for a long time but I thought it must be the novel that Tom Cruse movie was made from, and I had seen the movie. But this has absolutely nothing to do with that.
It is a super-compelling narrative, structured unconventionally. It is about language and the knowledge and love and meaning and art. Blue's new book From Stone to Living Word, is about The book, the Bible. It is all about how people treat it like a sacred set of rules carved in stone that needs to be bowed down to, but it is really an alive document about the possibility that God is in the world and how that looks sometimes insane, sometimes utterly frightening, sometimes overwhelmingly beautiful and improbable. Which is a pretty good place to have your head on a desolate, sub-zero night.
Dan Gaardner, musician, Trailer Trash and many others
I just finished The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene (okay) and Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee (good) and I'm in the middle of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce (good so far). I recently found a set of 19th century encyclopedias and I've been grazing those as well.
Tara Key - Photo by Dawn Sutter MadellTara Key, musician, Antietam
I just finished The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon. I have not been reading fiction for a long while, and I really enjoyed this because I have spent a couple of short stretches in Barcelona in the last few years and was craving a return. It does a pretty good job of painting a darker version of being on the streets there. Now on my desk: The Seventy Great Inventions of the Ancient World edited by Brian M. Fagan.
Jeaneen Gauthier, songwriter/artist
1. The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World by Lewis Hyde. I can't really describe this book, except that it's mind-blowing. It explores the cultural context of art and creativity, and I think it's helping understand what it is to be an artist in a way I never really thought about before—he takes the idea of being "gifted" literally. Here's a quote: "For the slow labor of realizing a potential gift the artist must retreat to those Bohemias, halfway between the slums and the library, where life is not counted by the clock and where the talented may be sure they will be ignored until that time, if it ever comes, when their gifts are viable enough to be set free and survive in the world."
2. In My Blood by John Sedgwick (who is Edie of Andy-Warhol-Factory-fame's brother). It's a history of their whole f-d up family starting with colonial times.
3. O Magazine! This is my favorite magazine these days and reading it feels a lot like going to a day spa or something. I just finished reading Oprah's interview with Sally Field, who is so much more deep and dark and intense than I ever realized. You know I'll be re-reading Sybil again really soon!
Shawn Gibbons, singer/guitarist
However, for the last few years I've had a little book that I use during Lent and Easter season. I wish they had a book for the whole year, but they don't. It's called The Little Black Book. Our parish handed them out a couple years ago for Lent, and I absolutely loved the book. They don't hand them out anymore, but I just order my own.
At the risk of sounding goofy, it's meant to make you sit down and spend five-to-six minutes with the Lord. It's not a real "Bible-thumpy" kind of thing. It does walk you through a very short verse, but then it relates the verse to life, and it gives you something to think about. It is one of my favorite parts of my day, reading that little book. It makes me peaceful. I think it makes me kinder.
Stook!, songwriter/musician/producer
Laura Stamm’s Power Skating: Skills For Explosive Skating Proven By The Pros. Make hay while the sun shines. When it won’t/don’t, play hockey in the park!
Dan Wilson - Photo by Stacy SchwartzDan Wilson, singer/songwriter/producer
I'm reading two books: This Wheel's on Fire, by Levon Helm, the drummer and singer of the group The Band. It's a great story, and I love their music, and I had heard that Helm's version of the saga is wild and fun, which it is.
The other book is Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, by Douglas R. Hofstadter. This book is a multi-threaded discussion of number theory, DNA, musical fugues, artificial intelligence, human thought, and the limitations of formal logical systems. It's really amazing, but you have to do a bunch of math to really follow the arguments, so it's not for everyone. I have been reading and hearing about this book for a long time and I finally bit the bullet and launched in, and it's totally worth it, Hofstadter is endlessly creative in his presentation and he makes mind-blowing connections between science, art and philosophy. I'm reading this book for fun, and it's delivering.
Michael Hanson, editor, Minnesota Historical Society Press
Outside of the usual stack of unpublished manuscripts, I'm reading Blues People by Amiri Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones) and am only a little ways into it. The book, published in 1963, is a cultural history of the blues written by a radical black poet who made a name for himself in the 1960s and 1970s. In the part that I've read, Baraka traces the history of the blues, claiming that music and language were the only aspects of African religion and culture that were able to survive slavery. At the time Baraka was writing, the black consciousness movement was just forming, and African Americans were starting to look back at what the fuck happened and try to sort things out. Part of that was understanding where their culture came from and how it was shaped and distorted by three hundred years of forced labor and servitude. What's amazing to me is that deep elements of a culture can be subconsciously preserved in music and language, despite the worst of conditions. Values and insights can be preserved in tone and cadence.
Previously, I read A Choice of Weapons, a memoir by African American photographer Gordon Parks. The book was first published by Harper & Row in 1966, and the Minnesota Historical Society Press published a reprint edition in 1986. (Parks died in March 2006, and Harper took back the publishing rights.) At any rate, Parks was a musician, a filmmaker, a writer, and most famously a photographer for Life magazine, and the book covers his late-teenage years and the beginning of his career. The book begins with his move to St. Paul, Minnesota, from Kansas, after his mother's death when he was sixteen. From about that point on, he had to make it on his own, working odd jobs, sleeping in pool halls, playing piano in a brothel (and sleeping with the pimp's girl), traveling with a big band that played a song he composed, serving as a railroad porter, and working with the Civilian Conservation Corps. He was also paid to play basketball at one point. He eventually found his thing in photography and won a position in the Farm Security Administration (FSA), a Roosevelt-era program designed to battle rural poverty that had a phenomenal photography program, with alumni such as Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and, well, Gordon Parks. After the dissolution of the FSA, Parks became a war correspondent during World War II. He was attached to an African American flight group but was denied permission to join them in Europe. Elements within the government were pretty unhappy that the army had African American pilots and didn't want their heroics and sacrifice documented, lest they inspire their fellow African Americans to demand their god-given rights.
Tony Nelson, photographer/musician
Erik Lundegaard, writer/editor/journalist
David Michaelis' Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography and I'm liking it even though I think Michaelis needed a better editor. The book is full of unnecessary details and Michaelis assumes too much with his adjectives and adverbs. On Charles Schulz’s childhood cousins: “And in his sulky anger at going unnoticed, except as a target for corncobs, he kept boiling behind a cool facade a vast resentment against these loutish country cousins to whom he was humiliatingly kin.” Remove “sulky,” “cool,” “loutish” and “humiliatingly.” Hell, get rid of the entire sentence, which is convoluted anyway.
Too much of the book is this way. Michaelis gives us a detail of Schulz's life and then takes us inside Schulz's head and beams the flashlight around. See? See? This is why he was the way he was. Meanwhile I'm thinking, "What are we doing in here? We don't know enough to be in here."
But it's a subject I'm interested in so I continue. Schulz colored my childhood and thus my world and it's nice to know where he came from — with or without the flashlight.
Mare Lennon, musician
I'm reading poems - quotes -
anything anyone can say
that'll make me stop or make me go.
I'm reading fluff to stuff myself silly.
I'm reading Ann Lamott for protein.
I'm reading Eat Pray Love for dessert.
I'm reading faces - as best I can.
I'm reading currents - like a sailor
I'm reading blogs, fog, and the lyrics my friends are coming up with -
and I come up for air.
Steve McPherson, Reveille Magazine
Currently, I'm working on two books: Barack Obama's Dreams from My Father and James Agee's Film Writing and Selected Journalism. The Obama book is great, although I've bogged down a bit in the part where he's talking about community organizing. I was more interested in the early stuff about his childhood. Of course, it's just amazing to think that this guy, who can form complete sentences and is very upfront about how difficult life can be, could be president. I just can't picture Bush coming up with something as subtle and nuanced as this, where he likens the situation in the south Chicago neighborhood (Altgeld Gardens) to his experience growing up in Indonesia:
"I tried to imagine the Indonesian workers who were now making their way to the sorts of factories that had once sat along the banks of the Calumet River [in Chicago], joining the ranks of wage labor to assemble the radios and sneakers that sold on Michigan Avenue. I imagined those same Indonesian workers ten, twenty years from now, when their factories would have closed down, a consequence of new technology or lower wages in some other part of the globe. And then the bitter discovery that their markets [the farmers' markets he grew up with] have vanished; that they no longer remember how to weave their own baskets or carve their own furniture or grow their own food; that even if they remember such craft, the forests that gave them wood are now owned by timber interests, the baskets they once wove have been replaced by more durable plastics. The very existence of the factories, the timber interests, the plastics manufacturer, will have rendered their culture obsolete; the values of hard work and individual initiative turn out to have depended on a system of belief that's been scrambled by migration and urbanization and imported TV reruns. Some of them would prosper in this new order. Some would move to America. And the others, the millions left behind in Djarkata, or Lagos, or the West Bank, they would settle into their own Altgeld Gardens, into a deeper despair."
Just a beautiful exposition on how culture is not independent of industry, but is dependent on it in so many ways.
I found out about Agee from a writer named Louis Menand, who's one of my favorite critical thinkers and writers right now. Menand writes frequently for the New Yorker, and I just finished his book American Studies, which I heartily recommend to anyone interested in history, ideas, or the history of ideas. A very easy writer to read.
Agee most famously wrote Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, but he also wrote a film column for The Nation in the '40s, and no less a writer than W.H. Auden wrote a letter to The Nation expounding on Agee's virtues and saying that although he never went to the movies, he looked forward to reading Agee's column every month. The writing is fantastic, and it's true that you don't necessarily even need to be overly familiar with the movies he's writing about to appreciate the exacting, joyous, and ruthless way he dives into dissecting them. It's also interesting to compare the ways in which filmmaking have changed in the decades since Agee wrote, and how so many of his demands—that actors develop a screen-acting tradition that separates itself from stage acting, that the physical comedy of the silent era has been lost and needs to be rediscovered—have come to be met by movies since that time. The writing itself is witty and honest; when he hates something, he really takes it to task, but not in a mean-spirited way, and when he loves something, he makes you want to go out and see it, which, I think, is the hallmark of a truly great critic.
Daniel Corrigan, photographer
Iwo Jima: Portrait of a Battle: United States Marines at War by Eric M. Hammel. My friend Dennis Pernu, who knows I'm into this sort of thing, turned me on to this book. It's a very detailed account of the battle with a ton of
great pictures. A very beautiful book. It's coffee-table sized, so it's a little tough to read in bed, but I'm enjoying the heck out of it.
Desdamona - Photo by Jessica PursleyDesdamona, musician
One Thousand White Women - The Journals of May Dodd by Jim Fergus. I found it accidentally and I have a tendency to like historical fiction. It takes place in the late 1800's and it's the journal entries of a woman who was put into an asylum by her family because she had children out of wedlock and then gets recruited into a program through the government where they are placing white women with a Cheyenne tribe to basically "help" them assimilate into white society. It's crazy and interesting.
Chris Osgood, musician
The Perfectionist by Rudolph Chelminski, a book about the rise and fall of Bernard Loiseau, the charismatic and energetic chef of the Cote D'or restaurant in Salieu, France.
You might remember his story—he was a whiz kid chef that chased after the ultimate prize—three Michelin stars—and got them, then killed himself when he heard he was going to lose one, which turned out to be a false rumor.
It is a cautionary tale in which the perfect is the enemy of the good and the story is loaded with delicious descriptions of great French and Burgundian food and wine! Perfect for us "fishin' musicians" to wile away the sub-zero nights!
Laura F. Bennett, artist/musician
A People’s History Of The American Revolution; that Howard Zinn stuff. So educational, it’s reversing the mush feeling in my head that winter brings. I am also reading my rocks and minerals book because I miss outside so bad and I love to collect rocks so I’m thinking of looking up a place to go collect rocks this spring other than Lake Of The Isles. My fave picture book right now is this giant book of Basquiat paintings. I wish I could’ve met him, I have a lot to say.
George McKelvey, musician, Hookers and Blow, Soul Asylum, Rhythm Jones, many others
I’ve been on an Elmore Leonard – Cormac McCarthy kick lately. Something about a sparsely-written crime novel set in a warm climate gives me proper escape from the tundra when I need it. Miles Davis in the background and a glass of red don’t hurt either. Another guilty afternoon pleasure is any Michael Connelly book with Harry Bosch in it.
Brianna Lane, singer/songwriter
I was talking with my house mates a few months back and said, "Oh no, I don't read anymore, I just knit." My girlfriend Heidi wrote the quote down and posted it in our kitchen. It's kind of true: I'm a knitting fool and would rather be knitting two and purling one than reading another novel these days. (I posted pics of my latest knits on MySpace).
Anyway, this week I have been digging into another Paulo Coelho book, The Witch of Portobello. Paulo Coelho and Jeanette Winterson are my two fall-back authors. I just love their styles. I'm happy to be reading again since a good book always inspires me to write. Knitting inspires me to...well...just knit more!
Tim Easton, singer/songwriter
Liz Tormes, singer/songwriter
I am in the middle of Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim by David Sedaris and also The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rilke. David Sedaris just has such a wicked sense of humor. And Rilke—where to start? I have been reading that book for years now (still have not completely finished it, but I will pick it up a few times a year and start from the beginning). He says so much with so few words and there's such a lovely strangeness to this novel...
Bill Tuomala, writer/editor, Exiled On Main Street
I'm reading The Coldest Winter by David Halberstam. It's a history of the Korean War. No specific reason for reading it, just that it's a war I didn't know much about and my uncle served in it (he had the white-knuckled job of driving an ammo truck.) Plus Halberstam is one of my favorite authors - you can always tell that he has put in a lot of work via interviews and research.
Last night I was blown away reading an account of a Japanese-American officer in the onslaught of tens of thousands of Chinese soldiers entering the war in late 1950. He had done time in an internment camp during World War II and then was captured by the Chinese in Korea. He was fortunate enough to escape that same night, but already in his youth he had been a prisoner of two of the most powerful countries in the world.
Sally Mars, artist/writer
I am reading Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson. At 614 pages, I literally breezed through the first half but now, around 300 pages in, the ugliest darkness of the Vietnam War has come on with full nightmare force. Seriously, a book of fiction has given me nightmares, so my pace has slowed some. Denis Johnson can be great or awful. I think we’re getting great in this case, my take so far that this is a timely critique of the role of covert intelligence and its transmigration from information to political tool. From the book here, an excerpt from an essay written by one of the characters:
“Tree of Smoke...a sincere goal for the function of intelligence—restoring intelligence gathering as the main function of intelligence operations, rather than to provide rationalizations for policy. Because if we don’t, the next step is for career-minded power-mad cynical jaded bureaucrats to use intelligence to influence policy. The final step is to create fictions and serve them to our policy-makers in order to control the direction of government.”
Nate Simar, musician, Murzik
Morning Poems by Robert Bly. A couple days ago I felt it calling to me. I dug through my books until I found it and settled under some blankets and read it cover to cover. It's wonderful.
John Swardson, singer/songwriter
I decided a little while ago that I didn't know enough about how and why this country was started. Things are shifting pretty dramatically in front of our eyes. I needed to go back to our roots. I'm reading The Story of America by Allen Wenistein and David Rubel; Images of America by R.L. Bruck-Berger, and The Almanac of American History by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
Alexa Jones, writer/photographer
Spit Baths by Greg Downs, a wonderful collection of short stories by a music friend of mine from the East Coast. American history has rarely been so interesting to me as Greg writes in a way that makes these tales of war or slavery or country living real and these people relatable. It reminds me a little of riding around in my dad's Chevy truck as a child with the giant sheep pen erected in the back and stopping by Casey's General Store for a Garfield sucker. Plus, reading it makes me feel connected to a really important community of people I rarely get to see. I'm just so proud to stand next to Greg at these shows and rock out together!
I just got my grubby little paws on Kitchen Confidential which will inevitably feed my current Anthony Bourdain obsession. (Sidenote: EVERYONE needs to see the New Orleans episode of No Reservations. I was both heartbroken and inspired by the tales of how tiny hole-in-the-wall restaurants and the employees endured after the flood. Even when everything around them had been destroyed, these people found their coworkers, their families, went back into their restaurants, rebuilt them, and cooked for their city. I've never wanted a billion-calorie REAL shrimp po'boy so much in my entire life.)
And, of course, my new issue of Backstreets should be arriving by Spring thaw, hopefully right around March 16th! BRUUUUUUUUUUUUUCE!
Ben Connelly, singer/songwriter
I'm studying Dogen's Genjo Koan, Dogen was one of the early guys who brought Zen from China to Japan and was a huge influence on a lot of American Zen thought and practice. I love it! Dogen's emphasis is on radical acceptance and total attention to each moment (as opposed to working towards an objectified goal of enlightenment). I value writers whose work has depth and also a beautiful line-by-line surface and he has these in spades. Zen has a beautiful literary tradition whose princicpal expressions are poetry and very short stories, and here Dogen bridges poetry and philosophy. Dogen's playfulness with language and amazing ability to confound any fixed conceptual viewpoint you or he has created gives me a feeling of deep, playful enjoyment.
I'm also reading Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer, the last of the books I got for Christmas. It's fun. Half of it is in one narrative voice that I like and is very funny, and the other half is a little more writerly and is so-so. This is a fun book but not one I feel very moved to talk about.
Mark Mallman, singer/songwriter/musician
I'm currently in the midst of two books: At the Mountains of Madness, by H.P. Lovecraft and The Other Hollywood: An Oral History of the Adult Porn Industry by Leggs McNeil (author of one of my favorite books, Please Kill Me). I also recently purchased The Lobotomist, a biography of Walter Freeman, rogue pioneer of the frontal lobotomy mishap—but it was too scary, so I'm giving it to my friend.
Brad Zellar, writer, critic, editor, The Rake magazine
Here are some of the books near the top of the stacks next to my bed, all of which I am digging (I've reached the point where I no longer stick with anything if I get an early sense that I'm wasting my time, and last year for the first time in my life I started and tossed aside more book than I finished):
The Fables of La Fontaine. The last couple years I've read more than a dozen collections of classic fables, folk tales, and parables. Also in the current reading pile: The Annotated Brothers Grimm and The Parables of Kafka.
The Tenants of Moonbloom, Edward Lewis Wallant. A terrific lost book from the sixties, recently reissued by New York Review of Book Classics. The sad and funny story of a rent collector for a New York slumlord and the people he comes in contact with every day.
By Night in Chile, Roberto Bollano. I loved Bolano's The Savage Detectives and Last Evenings on Earth, both of which I read last year. He was a Chilean writer who died too young, and is recently experiencing a posthumous resurgence. The stuff's all great, and the obvious comparisons would be Garcia Marquez and Borges, if they'd come of age in the counterculture.
Love and Hydrogen: New and Selected Stories, Jim Shepard. Another follow-up, this after I read and loved Shepard's most recently collection, Like You'd Understand Anyway. Smart, funny, frequently profound.
The Pushcart Book of Poetry. An anthology pulled together from the annual Pushcart Prize anthologies (which are always worth seeking out), dating back to 1976.
The Waste Books, George Christoph Lichtenberg. Another New York Review of Books Classics reissue (check out their catalog; it's full of wonders). The notebooks of an 18th century German polymath, jam packed with aphorisms you'll want to jot down in your own notebooks.
The Living Thoughts of Kierkegaard. Yet another reissue from the NYRB series, with an introduction by Auden.
Whiz Mob: A Correlation of the Technical Argot of Pickpockets With Their Behavioral Patterns, David W. Mauer. Mauer also wrote amazing books on confidence men (The Big Con) and moonshiners (Kentucky Moonshine).
Joel Bremer - Photo by Steve CohenJoel Bremer, musician living in Sweden
I'm just now finishing up reading After the Ecstasy, the Laundry: How the Heart Grows Wise on the Spiritual Pat” by Jack Kornfield.
About a year ago I had a spiritual awakening. After many years of struggle I found myself one day sitting on my bed and just laughing out loud at life. I found out that the only thing I need to know about myself is that "I am." That's the only thing that really matters. Everything you add to that—in my case it can be "I am a fiddler," "I am a Springsteen head" or "I love Mpls but I'm sooo far away from it," is part of what you're experiencing. All of a sudden (or so it seemed) I could see very clearly that I can't find myself in any of that. Emotions, experiences, beautiful or terrible is ultimately not who I am. Realising that, life became very easy.
However, my old habits and mind patterns didn't go away in an instant. Life goes on. Even though I hadn't actively sought a spiritual awakening before it came to me, after it did my mind had a clear picture of how it should be. Life of course never sticks to anything like that. This book is helping me shine a light on all this. In the introduction there is a quote from Suzuki Roshi that says, "Strictly speaking, there are no enlightened people, there is only enlightened activity." Jack Kornfield is really helping me to get more of that enlightened activity in the world.
The other book I'm reading is 4th of July, Asbury Park, A History of the Promised Land by Daniel Wolff. This one I just begun. I visited Asbury Park in New Jersey last October and was deeply fascinated by the place. Asbury Park was founded by James Bradley who was a self-made man with very strong Methodist beliefs. It was named after a Methodist bishop. Bradley founded the city to be a moral role model community, and at the same time its whole economy was depending on what happened on and around the boardwalk. As Wolff describes it, "For years, Asbury Park condemned `fun’ as just another drug to corrupt the masses, meanwhile pushing that drug with every Ferris wheel and band concert."
After race riots and years of corruption, today Asbury Park is more or less a ghost town, even though they're now trying to change that. To see big empty ruins of what used to be luxury hotels was a very strange and special experience, especially as a Swede. We don't have anything like it in Sweden. Asbury Park was the city that shaped so much of Bruce Springsteen's music. Listen to the beautiful song “My City of Ruins” that Springsteen wrote about the current state of Asbury Park. Then read this fascinating book. It sorts under history but reads like a great novel.
Marc Perlman, musician, the Jayhawks, Golden Smog, Janey and Marc
The Stories Of Paul Bowles. A gift from very literary-minded musician, Jim Boquist. A few clunkers but on the whole good. Short stories work well for my short attention span. Bowles' Sahara (or South American jungle) and our tundra may be climatic opposites but share the same desolation and sense of detachment. Makes me not want to visit morocco.
Sandy Koufax - A Lefty's Legacy by Jane Leavy. Another Boquist gift. Without gushing, Leavy pays homage to Koufax's talent, intellectual approach to pitching and character, much through the memories of players and fans. She gives due the importance of Koufax's religious and cultural background while dispelling some myths. Good run-through of the '65 series. Great line about Koufax by Twins' catcher Earl Battey: "I accused him of being black. He was too cool to be white."
Mr. Tambourine Man: The Story of the Byrds' Gene Clark by John Einerson. Not the best-written book of the bunch. Also not a great book if you're already suffering from SAD. Offers mostly tragic insight into the best writer in the Byrds; a profound lyricist, raging alcoholic and drug addict—and maybe the most sympathetic of the Byrds. Funny how the most poetic, deepest writers and musicians can also be the most unlikable and f-up people you'll meet.
The Replacements - All Over But The Shouting. Started reading it but got a really bad sinus headache.
Willy Wisely, singer/songwriter
Fell by Warren Ellis, Illustrated by Ben Templesmith. Issue 9; $1.99 each issue; www.imagecomics.com.
Righteous little reads (graphic literature) that don't need to be read serially. They're dark and contemptuous, sometimes banal in their antiestablishmentarianism (hmmm spell check still doesn't like that word), but always beautifully haunting, with deep insinuations into the character of our hero and villains. They came recommended by the staff at Flying Colors Comics in Concord, CA -- a great store, where I played a "grand re-opening gala." Record store retailers might be aching, but comic book stores are hoppin' with people... misfits all.
Jen Paulson, writer
I have a stack of rock and roll magazines I haven't had time to read in the past couple weeks that I finally devoured very recently. I picked up a copy of The Source at the airport before I left that was a different read for me entirely. For some odd reason I have been wrapped up in the articles of Vanessa Grigoriadis online ever since I heard she did the recent Rolling Stone article (depressing as all get-out) on Britney Spears. She did this piece on that Manhattan Gossip site Gawker for New York Magazine late last year and it really made me think.. I really have been meaning to get to the bookstore to read that Charles Schulz biography that came out last year.
John Munson - Photo from MySpaceJohn Munson, musician, The New Standards, Semisonic
Well, I started with a mission to read Anna Karenina this winter... and got about halfway through it before I ran aground. It was pretty great right up until it became a chore. With 400 + pages still staring back at me I had to say, "No!" What I loved about it was the intense plotting, the sense of inevitability.
I just re-read The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien. The Vietnam war inspired a lot of great writing, but to me nothing touches O'Brien. I read it because I had a book about the Iraq war recommended to me, The Last True Story I'll Ever Tell, and I read it and found it... not terribly inspiring. I'm sure that Iraq will produce writing on the level of O'Brien's and I'll be on the look out for it. As horrible as it all is over there the human drama of it is important to look at and reflect upon... and hopefully learn from.
New books I've finished this season: No Country for Old Men. Chilling and great. Seems like it got mixed reviews, but I loved it. Cormac McCarthy's bleak vision matches my own wintry feelings about our times. The Road (also by McCarthy), which I read last year, is really great too.
Barry Thomas Goldberg, singer/songwriter
I'm reading Ulysses. I'm trying to read the greatest works of literature before I get too old to see. I would never have understood this stuff when I was younger and now at least, I have some comprehension
Matt Vannelli, musician, Bella Koshka
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov. A satire about society in the Soviet Union under Stalin. Does it get much more wintery than that? Satan and crew arrive to manipulate the working class. Hmm...how does Bulgakov really feel? Despite the blatant oppression, there is a bit of optimism. The sacrifices Margarita makes for the Master makes my insides all warm. The Master's novel about the relationship between Jesus and Pontius Pilate reveals itself in many ways in the ongoing theme of good vs. evil throughout the entire book as well. This Master and Margarita is amazing. If the time machine ever gets invented, going to the Soviet Union in the 1930s might not be my first stop.
Cindra Halm, writer/teacher/poet
A Sideways Look at Time by Jay Griffiths. A sort of feminist critique of the different ways that humans have/do experience time, in different cultures, for different individuals, in different eras, etc. Exceedingly interesting, with topics on "festival" time, how men and women experience time in different ways, the distinctions of time by the Greeks, etc.
Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote. When I read Southern American writing, I think, Finally! Somebody who thinks like I do! I love the languorous sentences, the highly metaphorical and decorative phrasing, the outrageous names of characters. Poignant, sensual, and inflectional. One of the best portraits of desperation anywhere.
Duende by Tracy K. Smith. She was here in November to read at the Plymouth Congregational Church's reading series. Stylistically, it straddles several "types" of poetry, and in content, the duende, or Spanish term for a restless spirit, provides common ground. I'm reviewing it for RAIN TAXI's spring issue, so look there for more!
The Best American Poetry, 2004, edited by Lyn Hejinian. More full of experimental and innovative poetry than the usual, because of editor Hejinian's (the guest editors shift every year) LANGUAGE poetry background and focus. I'm using this as the text for my Loft class right now. Go out of your comfort zone!
Lives of Mapmakers: Stories, by Alicia Conroy. I've been dipping into this great first collection of striking and enigmatic stories by local gal and RAIN TAXI contributor since it came out about a year ago. Some short, some longer, some other-wordly, some down to earth, some intellectually gripping, some pure heart.
Jonathan Rundman, singer/songwriter
Chronicles by Bob Dylan. Finally got around to this one a couple years after it came out, and I just finished it on an airplane last week. I enjoyed the descriptions of Minneapolis and New York in the ‘60s, but my favorite chapter was called “Oh Mercy.” It’s the late ‘80s and Dylan is visiting with Bono, touring with Petty, and recording with Daniel Lanois in New Orleans. The ‘60s Dylan is otherworldly and legendary that it seemed kind of unreal, but this ‘80s Dylan was really accessible....struggling with his career, feeling washed-up, having trouble writing songs, trying to catch a wave in the studio, hanging out enjoying life with his wife. A very good read for anybody in (or interested in) showbiz or the creative arts.
Tasha Baron, musician, Black Blondie
I just read a bunch of Jonathan Kozol books. He hangs out at public schools and churches in the South Bronx with the kids and teachers and parents there and writes about them. I have this image of an eight year old falling down to his death in an elevator shaft that was supposed to be fixed indelibly imprinted on my retina alongside the statistics about the absurd cuts in public housing inspectors and school health care workers that Giuliani made. I learned about that in Amazing Grace. Then I read Ordinary Resurrections: Children in the Years of Hope and I thought Kozol got a little bit sappy in that book. There is this cute little feisty girl named Pineapple in that book whose story he follows. I love kids, so I am a sucker for that kind of thing. He talks about how there are inner-city schools where secretaries walk from room to room with trays of psychotropic medicine that they hand to children listed on a dosage schedule. I also read The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini about the friendship of two boys growing up in Afghanistan. It read kind of like a Stephen Spielberg movie. Riveting at first but then became so unbelievable that I was almost laughing. I've heard his second book is better and I think I am going to read that next. I am also going to read a book by Barack Obama next.
DJ Kulkielka, musician, Hojas Rojas
I just read The Road by Cormac McCarthy—fucking awesome—and am currently reading Hearts In Atlantis by Stephen King—which is OK.
Dragich, singer/songwriter
The last books I've read, in chronological order, are as follows: Cormac McCarthy's The Road, Life of Pi by Yann Martel, Harry Partch's Genesis of Music (absolute scathing brilliance), George Orwell's Animal Farm and I'm reading for the first time since high school John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men. Couple that with sporadic readings of Johnny Cash's autobiography Cash and a little Tom Robbins to balance it all out.
Cormac McCarthy is a new passion since I saw the Coen Brothers' adaptation of No Country For Old Men. This is some of the darkest, most brutally beautiful writing I've ever encountered, and I plan to delve into his repertoire in full.
Life Of Pi is something people have been telling me to read for a long time, and I've avoided it for that very reason. I saw it cheap down at Majors and Quinn and picked it up one day. Most of the book was nothing to scream about until the end, which made most of the ridiculousness pretty much worth it.
What can one say about Harry Partch? For musicians, his school of thought is absolutely required for a fuller understanding of all things theoretical.
I can no longer read Of Mice and Men without visualizing Senise and Malkovich driving the story. I think it's a good thing.
Tom Robbins IS Tom Robbins.
Needless to say, I'm deep in the throes of consciousness expansion and hope to find enlightenment and/or salvation by early spring. Just awaiting the days when I can sit outside with a notebook and a guitar, put on some Uncle Tupelo and watch the pretty girls up and down Lake Street. Till then...