Reading Diary
a) Alphabetter Juice: or, The Joy of Text by Roy Blount, Jr.
My wife got me this as a Father's Day gift, because she'd heard about it on NPR and the author is a regular on "Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!" and she'd gleaned that it would appeal to my word nerd tendencies, and she was right. I haven't read the original Alphabet Juice but I assume it's in the same format as this just with different material. Blount has a really infectiously playful approach to breaking down all these interesting matters of meaning and pronunciation and etymology, boiling down a lot of knowledge and research into something too personal and offbeat to be dry. Sometimes his sense of humor is a little over the top for my taste and the thing gets too clever for its own good, but for the most part this is a really fun read.
b) The Pale King by David Foster Wallace
It surprised me how much I was able to just enjoy this as a David Foster Wallace book and lose myself in it, without thinking too much about it being the incomplete novel he was working on when he committed suicide. And then it hit me, as I was finishing it recently, that I've pretty much read everything he's published, and after this there's nothing, which made me sad about his death all over again. But really: this book resonated with me. I read a lot of it while on temp jobs doing filing work, which really helped me connect with the book's overarching themes about boredom and tedium and the virtues of deep concentration. The "author's foreword" sections and the whole meta memoir conceit struck me as vaguely distasteful, almost a throwback to the kind of postmodern '90s schtick I'd like to think Wallace was way past, but it didn't really detract from the whole, which held together surprisingly well despite its incomplete nature and the many loosely connected strands of narrative (I especially loved when a 50 page chapter of first person monologue is followed by the revelation that it was being narrated by a long-winded character whose nickname is 'Irrelevant'). There are some things in here that are really going to stick with me, I think, in the same way so much of Infinite Jest has and will always rattle around my brain.
c) Decoded by Jay-Z
As jaded as I can be about Jay's post-'retirement' music, I still have a lot of respect for the guy on an intellectual level, and this book is really just an amazing look into his lyrics, the kind of dense and frank self-analysis people always wish a Bob Dylan or someone would write but never will. The book's editor or co-writer or whoever obviously dresses up Jay's conversational tone into something slightly stiff and formal at times, and is clearly geared to a broad audience that doesn't necessarily appreciate his catalog or rap music in general (which probably can be said for too much of his recent music, sadly), but overall you really get a sense of a guy and a great window into his writing process. I always knew when Jay had mentioned working on a book that it wouldn't be a tell-all memoir, that's just not his style, but I was shocked he actually did write an autobiographical book, and I'm really grateful it took this particular shape.
d) Me, the Mob, and the Music: One Helluva Ride with Tommy James & The Shondells by Tommy James and Martin Fitzpatrick
My friend Andy lent me this book telling me what a great quick read it is, and I really dug it. It was kind of alarming to read this book and realize how huge Tommy James was in his day, which underlines how much some '60s artists have been somewhat forgotten by history, considering that I generally only heard his music growing up in the form of '80s covers of "Mony Mony," "I Think We're Alone Now," "Crimson & Clover" and so on. I thought at first that the mob aspect of the story was a little sensationalized and played up for the title, but it really did end up providing some pretty wild stories.
e) Last Night a DJ Saved My Life: The History of the Disc Jockey by Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton
One of the daunting things about writing this book about Baltimore club music that I'm going to finish and publish one of these days is that I come to it from more of a hip hop background and don't have a really well rounded understanding of dance music history. So I grabbed this book off my friend Mat's bookshelf and it seemed like a good place to start for some kind of overview. It took me a while to get into it and sometimes the tone the writers take is kind of light and fluffy with some heavy-handed editorializing that doesn't quite coalesce into a real sense of personality on the page, but overall they did a great job of structuring a whole lot of divergent eras and scenes into a narrative that really kind of flowed and built upon itself, really learned a lot and got a little more curious about certain genres I've been a little closed minded towards.
My wife got me this as a Father's Day gift, because she'd heard about it on NPR and the author is a regular on "Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!" and she'd gleaned that it would appeal to my word nerd tendencies, and she was right. I haven't read the original Alphabet Juice but I assume it's in the same format as this just with different material. Blount has a really infectiously playful approach to breaking down all these interesting matters of meaning and pronunciation and etymology, boiling down a lot of knowledge and research into something too personal and offbeat to be dry. Sometimes his sense of humor is a little over the top for my taste and the thing gets too clever for its own good, but for the most part this is a really fun read.
b) The Pale King by David Foster Wallace
It surprised me how much I was able to just enjoy this as a David Foster Wallace book and lose myself in it, without thinking too much about it being the incomplete novel he was working on when he committed suicide. And then it hit me, as I was finishing it recently, that I've pretty much read everything he's published, and after this there's nothing, which made me sad about his death all over again. But really: this book resonated with me. I read a lot of it while on temp jobs doing filing work, which really helped me connect with the book's overarching themes about boredom and tedium and the virtues of deep concentration. The "author's foreword" sections and the whole meta memoir conceit struck me as vaguely distasteful, almost a throwback to the kind of postmodern '90s schtick I'd like to think Wallace was way past, but it didn't really detract from the whole, which held together surprisingly well despite its incomplete nature and the many loosely connected strands of narrative (I especially loved when a 50 page chapter of first person monologue is followed by the revelation that it was being narrated by a long-winded character whose nickname is 'Irrelevant'). There are some things in here that are really going to stick with me, I think, in the same way so much of Infinite Jest has and will always rattle around my brain.
c) Decoded by Jay-Z
As jaded as I can be about Jay's post-'retirement' music, I still have a lot of respect for the guy on an intellectual level, and this book is really just an amazing look into his lyrics, the kind of dense and frank self-analysis people always wish a Bob Dylan or someone would write but never will. The book's editor or co-writer or whoever obviously dresses up Jay's conversational tone into something slightly stiff and formal at times, and is clearly geared to a broad audience that doesn't necessarily appreciate his catalog or rap music in general (which probably can be said for too much of his recent music, sadly), but overall you really get a sense of a guy and a great window into his writing process. I always knew when Jay had mentioned working on a book that it wouldn't be a tell-all memoir, that's just not his style, but I was shocked he actually did write an autobiographical book, and I'm really grateful it took this particular shape.
d) Me, the Mob, and the Music: One Helluva Ride with Tommy James & The Shondells by Tommy James and Martin Fitzpatrick
My friend Andy lent me this book telling me what a great quick read it is, and I really dug it. It was kind of alarming to read this book and realize how huge Tommy James was in his day, which underlines how much some '60s artists have been somewhat forgotten by history, considering that I generally only heard his music growing up in the form of '80s covers of "Mony Mony," "I Think We're Alone Now," "Crimson & Clover" and so on. I thought at first that the mob aspect of the story was a little sensationalized and played up for the title, but it really did end up providing some pretty wild stories.
e) Last Night a DJ Saved My Life: The History of the Disc Jockey by Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton
One of the daunting things about writing this book about Baltimore club music that I'm going to finish and publish one of these days is that I come to it from more of a hip hop background and don't have a really well rounded understanding of dance music history. So I grabbed this book off my friend Mat's bookshelf and it seemed like a good place to start for some kind of overview. It took me a while to get into it and sometimes the tone the writers take is kind of light and fluffy with some heavy-handed editorializing that doesn't quite coalesce into a real sense of personality on the page, but overall they did a great job of structuring a whole lot of divergent eras and scenes into a narrative that really kind of flowed and built upon itself, really learned a lot and got a little more curious about certain genres I've been a little closed minded towards.
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on Friday, August 12, 2011 at 10:20 PM.
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