Reading Diary
a) Goodbye 20th Century: A Biography of Sonic Youth by David Browne
Sonic Youth are my favorite band of all time, and I spent a good chunk of my teenage years devouring their music and any writing about them I could get my hands on, liner notes, magazine articles, message board chatter, whatever. So I went into reading a book about the band kind of feeling like there was nothing new I could learn about the band but still eager to try and add something new to my obsession. And I have to say, David Browne did a pretty good job of tying everything I already knew together, adding some other trivia and nuance, and making their career into a really cohesive narrative, even without much of the drama or tragedy at his disposal in his previous book about Jeff & Tim Buckley. My favorite weird fact that I learned from this book was that Kim Gordon dated Danny Elfman in high school, which makes SY covering "The Simpsons" theme song all the more surreal.
b) By Any Other Name by Spider Robinson
My dad's always been a big sci-fi buff, so I grew up with access to his large personal library of the stuff and connected with some authors more than others but generally have a limited appetite for those kinds of novels, even if I appreciate a lot of the sci-fi genre in other mediums. Spider Robinson is one author he likes that I'd never really checked out, and recently I cracked open one of his short story collections and was really blown a way with it, just how much story he can compress into a couple dozen pages and how much humor and characterization comes out in most of these stories. It's kind of amazing to me that Robinson hasn't been adapted for the screen, several of these stories could make for a good movie or TV series, and the opening story Melancholy Elephants has some really interesting insights about copyright law and the nature of musical creativity that I've been thinking about a lot since I read it.
c) Valis by Philip K. Dick
My dad didn't have any Philip K. Dick in his collection when I was growing up, which used to disappoint me when I was getting heavy into Sonic Youth and hearing about all the references to his stuff on the lyrics on Sister, but then in the last couple years my dad discovered his stuff and started recommending it really enthusiastically. I don't know if this was the right book to try first, though, I'm kind of having a hard time with his prose and haven't gotten into a groove with it yet.
Sonic Youth are my favorite band of all time, and I spent a good chunk of my teenage years devouring their music and any writing about them I could get my hands on, liner notes, magazine articles, message board chatter, whatever. So I went into reading a book about the band kind of feeling like there was nothing new I could learn about the band but still eager to try and add something new to my obsession. And I have to say, David Browne did a pretty good job of tying everything I already knew together, adding some other trivia and nuance, and making their career into a really cohesive narrative, even without much of the drama or tragedy at his disposal in his previous book about Jeff & Tim Buckley. My favorite weird fact that I learned from this book was that Kim Gordon dated Danny Elfman in high school, which makes SY covering "The Simpsons" theme song all the more surreal.
b) By Any Other Name by Spider Robinson
My dad's always been a big sci-fi buff, so I grew up with access to his large personal library of the stuff and connected with some authors more than others but generally have a limited appetite for those kinds of novels, even if I appreciate a lot of the sci-fi genre in other mediums. Spider Robinson is one author he likes that I'd never really checked out, and recently I cracked open one of his short story collections and was really blown a way with it, just how much story he can compress into a couple dozen pages and how much humor and characterization comes out in most of these stories. It's kind of amazing to me that Robinson hasn't been adapted for the screen, several of these stories could make for a good movie or TV series, and the opening story Melancholy Elephants has some really interesting insights about copyright law and the nature of musical creativity that I've been thinking about a lot since I read it.
c) Valis by Philip K. Dick
My dad didn't have any Philip K. Dick in his collection when I was growing up, which used to disappoint me when I was getting heavy into Sonic Youth and hearing about all the references to his stuff on the lyrics on Sister, but then in the last couple years my dad discovered his stuff and started recommending it really enthusiastically. I don't know if this was the right book to try first, though, I'm kind of having a hard time with his prose and haven't gotten into a groove with it yet.
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