archive.Joe Lamantia.com

The other day, over a hot corned beef sandwich from the 2nd Avenue Deli, someone asked what I’m reading now. As usual, I ended up mumbling a few half complete book titles (not sure why, but I always have difficulty remembering on the spot – probably because I’ve got four or five things going at once…).

To help fill out the list, and because I’m still doing most of my writing via other outlets, here’s a snapshot of the books scattered around my house. It’s divided into helpful categories, including ‘Books I’d Like To Start Reading Soon, But Shouldn’t, Because I’m Still Reading Other Stuff’, and ‘Books I’ve Been Meaning to Read Sometime Soon, But Probably Won’t Won’t Get To In The Near Future.’

Books I’m Reading Now

• This Is Your Brain On Music: The Science of a Human Obsession. Daniel Levitin
• Critical Mass: How One Things Leads To Another. Philip Ball
• Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing. Adam Greenfield
• Pulse. The Coming Age of Systems and Machines Inspired by Living Things. Robert Fresnay
• The River Cottage Meat Book. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall
• In Praise Of Barbarians: Essays Against Empire. Mike Davis

Books I’d Like To Start Reading Soon, But Shouldn’t, Because I’m Still Reading Other Stuff

• Maximum City. Suketu Mehta
• Atlas of Novel Tectonics. Reiser + Umemoto
• Failure: Experiments in Aesthetic and Social Practices. Various
• Istanbul: Memories of A City. Orhan Pamuk
• Uncany Networks. Geert Lovink
• The Shock Doctrine. Naomi Klein

Books Recently Finished

• Sailing to Byzantium. Robert Silverberg
• A Cook’s Tour: Global Adventures in Extreme Cuisine. Anthony Bourdain
• The Laws of Simplicity. John Maeda
• Buda’s Wagon. Mike Davis
• The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. Michael Pollan
• The Sushi Economy: Globalization and the Making of a Modern Delicacy. Sasha Issenberg
• The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases. Mark Roberts, Jeff Vandermeer

Books I’ve Been Meaning to Read Sometime Soon, But Probably Won’t Get To In The Near Future

• A Thousand Plateaus. Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari
• Hackers and Painters. Paul Graham
• Leonardo’s Laptop. Ben Schneiderman
• Emergence. Stephen Johnson
• In The Bubble. John Thackarra
• The Direction of Cities. John Guinther
• Home: A Short History of an Idea. Witold Rybczynsk

Bonus: Things I’m probably Never Going to Start / Finish Reading

• Women Fire and Dangerous Things. George Lakoff
• Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Apparently, if you wait long enough, all circles close themselves. Case in point: I’ve always thought Golding’s Lord of the Flies nicely captures several of the less appetizing aspects of the typical american junior high school experience.
And I’ve always thought that much of the reality television programming that was all the rage for a while and now seems to be passing like a Japanese fad, is simply a chance for people on all sides of the screen to revisit their own junior high school experiences once again — albeit with a full complement of adult secondary sexual characteristics. When I do channel surf past the latest incarnation of the primal vote-the-jerk-off-the-island epic, Golding’s book always comes to mind.
Then a friend recommended Koushun Takami’s Battle Royale as recreational reading. Battle Royale is, as Tom Waits says, ‘big in Japan’ – it being a Japanese treatment of some of the same themes that drive Lord of the Flies.
The editorial review from Amazon reads:
“As part of a ruthless program by the totalitarian government, ninth-grade students are taken to a small isolated island with a map, food, and various weapons. Forced to wear special collars that explode when they break a rule, they must fight each other for three days until only one “winner” remains. The elimination contest becomes the ultimate in must-see reality television.”
And so the circle closes…

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Slow to begin, and very, very French, my imme­di­ate reac­tion to this open­ing novel in Sartre’s Roads to Free­dom tril­ogy is pos­i­tive. It is an oddly obvi­ously organic lan­guage, full of ref­er­ences to the flu­ids, flesh, smells, and tex­tures of human­ity; per­haps a con­se­quence of the trans­la­tion? The con­clu­sion took me by sur­prise, again per­haps an after effect of los­ing sub­tleties in the trans­la­tion — or the fact that most of my read­ing was done late at night while about to fall asleep.