I have a handful of friends that run. As I’m not a runner myself, I was interested in knowing what drives someone to do such a thing. So I decided to read Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. It also helps that I love this author’s contemporary fiction and that Chip Kidd designed the hardcover book.

I completed the memoir with a better understanding of the training that goes into running a marathon (or triathlon) and that the process can be quite painful on the body. But running gives Murakami time to think, time to himself, and a place where there is no need to compete with anyone but himself.

I was disappointed that the writing style was so simplistic when compared to his novels, but it is a memoir and was translated (like most of his work) from Japanese. Maybe Murakami wanted to keep it simple. Or maybe the translator chose this route. Either way, I’ve gained an admiration for the sport of running.

I just finished the memoir/graphic novel Stitches by David Small. It’s a short read, completed in one sitting, but still an effective way to tell the story of his health and serious family issues at ages 6, 11, 14, and 16.

1. Resolutions ::
2. Page ::
3. Narrow ::
4. Refuse ::
5. Fountain ::
6. Grunt ::
7. Construct ::
8. Nightmare ::
9. Inch ::
10. Instant ::

Read my responses in the comments section. Feel free to leave your responses, too!

Courtesy of Unconscious Mutterings.

Happy new year! Here’s a list of my favorite things from 2009 (several items were out prior to 2009, but 2009 is when I first experienced them):

• Favorite Book: The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón
• Favorite Book Cover Artist: Chip Kidd
• Favorite Book Podcast: Books on the Nightstand
• Favorite Film (Theater): A Single Man
• Favorite Film (DVD): Tie between Synecdoche, New York and Tell No One (Ne le dis à personne)
• Favorite TV Show: Lost
• Favorite Album: Wilco by Wilco
• Favorite Purchase: iPhone 3GS (I can finally check personal email at work via this device!)
• Favorite Meal: Capsouto Freres
• Favorite Restaurant: Lan Cafe (vegan Vietnamese food)
• Favorite Dessert: Chocolate cake at Gotham Bar & Grill
• Favorite Podcast: WNYC’s Radio Lab

Just as I did in 2007, I am looking through my database of movies I’ve seen since 1997. It gives me a good idea of how my film habits fluctuate throughout the years. Highs and lows are in red.

1997: 125 (55 in the theater)
1998: 101 (44 in the theater)
1999: 221 (84 in the theater)
2000: 169 (82 in the theater)
2001: 127 (39 in the theater)
2002: 232 (44 in the theater)
2003: 97 (30 in the theater)
2004: 122 (26 in the theater)
2005: 182 (25 in the theater)
2006: 160 (21 in the theater)
2007: 165 (8 in the theater)
2008: 172 (16 in the theater)
2009: 118 (14 in the theater)

WWW Wednesday is hosted by Should be Reading:

To play along, answer the following three questions:

What are you currently reading? Changing My Mind by Zadie Smith
What did you recently finish reading? The Man Who Loved Books Too Much by Allison Hoover Bartlett
What do you think you’ll read next? Stitches by David Small

Teaser Tuesday is hosted by Should be Reading:

• Grab your current read.
• Open to a random page.
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page.
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR lists if they like your teasers!

From Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays by Zadie Smith, page 59:

Recent years have seen some Kafka revisionism, although what’s up for grabs is not the quality of the work, but rather its precise nature. What kind of a writer is Kafka?

Earlier this month, Details magazine published their list of the “25 Greatest Gen X Books of All Time“. Of all time? That’s a bit pretentious, but here’s the list (ones I’ve read are in bold).

1. American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
2. Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus by Rick Perlstein
3. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz
4. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
5. Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation by Jeff Chang
6. The Dirt: Confessions of the World’s Most Notorious Rock Band by Mötley Crüe and Neil Strauss
7. Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter by Steven Johnson
8. The Father of All Things: A Marine, His Son, and the Legacy of Vietnam by Tom Bissell
9. The Forever War by Dexter Filkins
10. Ghost World by Daniel Clowes
11. Home Land by Sam Lipsyte
12. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon
13. Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
14. The Last Shot: City Streets, Basketball Dreams by Darcy Frey
15. The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell
16. Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem
17. Our Dumb Century by The Onion
18. Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
19. Running With Scissors by Augusten Burroughs
20. The Secret History by Donna Tartt
21. A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace
22. The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides
23. We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda by Philip Gourevitch
24. White Teeth by Zadie Smith
25. Zeitoun by Dave Eggers

Both White Teeth and Zeitoun are on my “to be read” list. There are some really great books on the list – The Secret History, Motherless Brooklyn, American Psycho, and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay are standouts for me. Then there are titles I’ve never heard of such as The Forever War. What’s your take on this list?

1. MacGyver ::
2. Garter ::
3. Wedge ::
4. Inches ::
5. Code ::
6. Water ::
7. Running ::
8. Curly ::
9. Turkey ::
10. Stupor ::

Read my responses in the comments section. Feel free to leave your responses, too!

Courtesy of Unconscious Mutterings.

I was walking around the East Village a few weeks ago with my friend Amy and we stumbled upon this church facade. Usually when I see a facade, there’s a building attached to the back. However, this one is a stand-alone model.

I just finished reading The Man Who Loved Books Too Much: The True Story of a Thief, a Detective, and a World of Literary Obsession by Allison Hoover Bartlett. The book thief, John Gilkey, is determined to own rare books at any cost – even when faced with imprisonment. What I really enjoyed about this biography was the other side of the story – those book dealers who lost books and large sums of money in Gilkey’s schemes. It’s difficult to determine if Gilkey has no sense of right and wrong or if he’s just a con man to the core of his being. Either way, it makes for a sad tale of obsession.

Bartlett includes a few side notes concerning people with literary obsessions. One of my favorites is about a botanist:

…Thomas Jefferson Fitzpatrick, a botany professor who bought so many books in the 930’s that his Nebraska house exceeded the building code maximum load. When he died in 1952, at age eighty-three, it was on an army cot he used as a bed in his kitchen, surrounded by ninety tons of books.

I flew through the first 200 pages, but soon grew tired of Gilkey’s every move. I wish the author had cut about 50-75 pages, as it would have made for a more moving, tighter story. Still, it was an interesting read and one of my few non-fiction reads of 2009.

I have quite a long list of reading material at the moment. Why are so many exceptional books published in Autumn?

Currently at home from the NYPL:

• Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart (for book group)
• Homer & Langley by E.L. Doctorow (hoping to finish by Monday)
• Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby
• Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger
• Manhood for Amateurs by Michael Chabon

On hold from the NYPL:

• Invisible by Paul Auster
• The Humbling by Philip Roth
• Last Night in Twisted River by John Irving
• Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem
• The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood
• A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore
• Zeitoun by Dave Eggers
• That Old Cape Magic by Richard Russo

Teaser Tuesday is hosted by Should be Reading:

• Grab your current read.
• Open to a random page.
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page.
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR lists if they like your teasers!

From Nocturnes by Kazuo Ishiguro, page 15:

After the quiet and the darkness we’d been traveling through, the restaurant was kind of unsettling. It felt like we were the stationary ones, watching from the quay, as this glittering party boat slid by.

Currently I have four books checked out from the library:

• Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall by Kazuo Ishiguro
• Homer & Langley by E.L. Doctorow (accidentally requested the large print edition, so I’m hoping to return this copy ASAP)
• Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture by Paul D. Miller (a.k.a DJ Spooky)
• Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart (for book group)

Last week I finished reading Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon. Michael Kindness of the Books on the Nightstand blog/podcast had recommended the novel a few weeks ago, but it took me awhile to receive a copy from the library. The chapters are broken into a few story lines that eventually merge together (I won’t give any more away), which isn’t a new concept, but one that is masterfully accomplished here.

I’ve had a great run of books lately, so I can’t say that Await Your Reply was my favorite, but it’s definitely in my top 5 Summer reads.

1. Omelette ::
2. Classic ::
3. Thrifty ::
4. Search ::
5. Fan ::
6. Fussy ::
7. I am not ::
8. Indulge ::
9. Poor ::
10. Manicure ::

Read my responses in the comments section. Feel free to leave your responses, too!

Courtesy of Unconscious Mutterings.

Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart
Date: Monday, October 19 @ 7:30 PM
Location: Solas Bar

Teaser Tuesday is hosted by Should be Reading:

• Grab your current read.
• Open to a random page.
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page.
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

From The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson, page 17:

The Wennerstrom affair had started out with such promise in the cockpit of a thirty-seven-foot Malar-30 on Midsummer Eve a year and a half earlier. It began by chance, all because a former journalist colleague, now a PR flunky at the county council, wanted to impress his new girlfriend.

Not much of a teaser, but I just started the book yesterday and didn’t want to page ahead!

“I still remember the day my Father took me to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books for the first time.” So begins Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s 487 page tome, The Shadow of the Wind. Set in Barcelona in the 1950’s, the novel follows Daniel, a young man in search of Julian Carax, the author of The Shadow of the Wind. Mystery, romance, and friendship slowly untangle Julian’s dark past while Daniel’s exploration leads him deeper into the gothic tale.

My only disappointment was that more time was not spent in the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, which seems like such a magical place.

A labyrinth of passageways and crammed bookshelves rose from base to pinnacle like a beehive woven with tunnels, steps, platforms, and bridges that presaged an immense library of seemingly impossible geometry…Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens.

1. Spinning ::
2. Impasse ::
3. Gravy ::
4. You are ::
5. September ::
6. Divulge ::
7. Training ::
8. Crap! ::
9. Results ::
10. Shutting down ::

Read my responses in the comments section. Feel free to leave your responses, too!

Courtesy of Unconscious Mutterings.