More reading.

Books I've read in the last couple of weeks:

The Blind Side made me sort of confused in an inspired way; Norwegian Wood made me sort of depressed; Feeding a Yen & The Soul of a Chef both made me hungry & want to cook and then eat some fucking food right now; and The Ghost Map made me think, which isn't an adjective like the others, but oh well.

The Ghost Map--which is just generally brilliant stuff about maps, and cities, and diseases, and technology, and science, &c.--contained a passage I really liked, from p.96 in the hardcover:

There is a lovely symmetry that comes from telling the story this way, because a city and a bacterium are each situated at the very extreme boundaries of the shapes that life takes on earth. ... In a city like Victorian London, unchallenged by military threats and bursting with new forms of capital and energy, microbes were the primary force reigning in the city's otherwise runaway growth, precisely because London had offered Vibrio cholerae ... precisely what it had offered stockbrockers and coffeehouse proprietors and sewer-hunters: a whole new way of making a living.

I approve of all of these books.

Comments

[Michael Sippey]

holy cow.  do you ever sleep?  or am i just so far gone from Life Before Children that i can't imagine being able to consume books at that rate?

[kathryn]

[this is good] Norweigan Wood also made me feel sort of depressed; I like his other stuff much better.

Feeding a Yen has been on my to-read list for ages. Trillin does a private walking + tasting tour of lower NYC each year for the New Yorker Festival and it always sells out in two minutes flat. He sounds like a fantastic tour guide.

[miyagawa]

Interesting. Norwegian Wood is my favorite one from Murakami. It's true that it's a very sad story but I felt it very beautiful at the same time. Maybe something is lost in translation.

[btrott]

I thought it was quite lovely as well; I just tend to read a lot more non-fiction than fiction, and the non-fiction generally isn't too depressing overall, as it tends to be about people loving to eat food. :)


So I think it was a bit of a shock for me to read something that was just so sad.

[Kitsune]

[this is good] I agree that Norweigan Wood really wasn't the most uplifting of books.  Next time go for Kafka on The Shore or Windup Bird Chronicles.   Though I have to say that my non-fiction reading is usually more depressing than my fiction reading - stuff like surviving the Khmer Rouge.