Michelle Orange - This is Running for Your Life (essays)
- Bought this on a whim at the bookstore (yay, Pulpfiction Commercial Drive). I love essays, I like the cover, and the first essay is called The Uses of Nostalgia and Some Thoughts on Ethan Hawke's Face. I know nothing about the author.
Adam Gopnik - The Table Comes First: Family, France, and the Meaning of Food (culture)
- Gopnik wrote one of my favourite books, Paris to the Moon, about raising a family in Paris. In this book he writes about food culture, another of my favourite reading topics.
UPDATE: to add
- I think Borges wrote something about this, and then I spotted it at one of the best book shops I know - the guy who sells on Commercial, around 7th. A few pages in and it's so clearly an influence of Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.
As an aside, Nina and I have been toying with the idea of forming a book club. Standard stuff, read a book, talk about it with friends over wine and beer, etc. Might try to do something with this, might not.
The books, though. What do I want to read...
- A new Rebus book (when there weren't meant to be any more...). I grew up reading comfortable westerns, and this is about as close as I get to that. Frustratingly repetitive at times, but it's a long series and I'll be quite happy to burn through this.
- The series/character that Rankin moved on to after the (not-quite) final Rebus book. It's of a style, but Rankin updated the stereotypes somewhat, and he really is very good at his craft.
Joe McGinniss - The Miracle of Castel di Sangro (soccer history/memoir)
- A story of small-town soccer in Italy as experienced by an American new to the sport. A bit of travel tourism, sports history, culture, etc.
Adam Gopnik - Winter (musings, or something)
- I like to read the Massey Lectures every year. I've fallen off the wagon a bit of late, but Gopnik wrote one of my favourite books, Paris to the Moon, so I'm back, baby.
Lisa Moore - Alligator (fiction)
- Small-town Newfoundland, and the author won an award recently. That's all I know.
Salman Rushdie - Fury (fiction)
- After reading his excellent memoir, Joseph Anton, I wanted to read more fiction by Rushdie, and I'll be damned if I'm going to try Midnight's Children for the third time...
Edmund White - The Flâneur (more musings)
- I love the word flâneur - it might be the most romantic word I know. White lived in Paris, and here he writes about his days there, wandering about the city, etc. I imagine the book is pretentious but fun.
Miguel de Cervantes - Don Quixote
- This is an ambitious move on my part. It's a bloody huge book. I'm looking for interested reading buddies to take this on with me. Borges has such high praise for this book, and since he's my latest authorial obsession...
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There, that's a decent list. I'd like to add a few more soccer books in there (most notably Dennis Bergkamp's well-received autobiography Stillness and Speed - here, watch one of the most beautiful goals ever scored). I'm certainly not as prolific a reader as I once was, or anywhere close to my friend Derrick's speed-datingreading regime...
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Oh go on, watch this other amazing goal by Bergkamp:
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