Here’s the first round of books I bought from our local bookstore, The Book Seller, using some generous gift certificates I’d accrued — a retirement gift from my colleagues, as well as a birthday gift from The Younger and a Christmas gift from his mom. These were, for the most part, impulse buys, based on what the store had in stock.
Note: This is where you’d usually find my affiliate disclaimer, but it felt weird to link to Amazon in a post about books I bought from my local bookstore. The links in this post go to The Book Seller, which doesn’t sponsor me in any way.
Art Spiegelman’s Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale – My Father Bleeds History has been on my to-read list for so long that I’m surprised I didn’t already have it. It’s a graphic novel that weaves together the story of Spiegelman’s parents’ experience as Jews in Hitler’s Europe and the challenging relationship between the survivor father and his son. It won a Pulitzer in 1992 and, at least for a time, was showing up on lists of books being challenged in schools.
I had heard an interview with Quentin Tarantino, in which he’d talked about a book he wanted to write; apparently he got around to it a couple years ago. Cinema Speculation is, as the book blurb says, a mix of film criticism and theory, reporting, and memoir. I’ll probably watch each movie as I read its chapter.
The other books are all by authors by whom I have read other works.
Amor Towles wrote the wonderful, wonderful A Gentleman in Moscow. I’ve heard that Rules of Civility is very different, but also very good. I thought it was worth a try.
Neal Stephenson wrote one of my favorite cyberpunk books ever, Snow Crash. His Cryptonomicon is also great, a story about World War II, cryptography, and the development of early computers. I’ve read a few others of his as well — Reamde, The Diamond Age, Seveneves — and started a couple others that I didn’t have the patience to finish. But I thought I’d give his latest a try, even though the book jacket says that Polostan is “the first book in a monumental new work,” and that “monumental” makes me nervous.
I’ve only read a handful of short stories from J.G. Ballard, so I wanted to give a novel a try. He’s hailed by writers I respect — most notably, William Gibson — as a not only a great science fiction writer, but one whose predictions are uncannily on target. The Drowned World, from 1962, explored the consequences of melted ice caps and global warming.
The Overstory, by Richard Powers, is the book that I’m most unsure about. I enjoyed two of his other books — Galatea 2.2, and Plowing the Dark, both of which tackled cutting edge technologies in an interesting, literary way. But each book is radically different, so I’m not sure what to expect.
It will be awhile before I get to any of these, however, seeing as I just started Joyce’s Ulysses (of course I did!), and reading that is already proving to be time-consuming — partly because the book was not meant to be sped through, but partly because my post-TikTok attention span needs some bulking up.
I will close with this: in my professor’s profile at the college (which has already been removed! fast!), I pointed out that being an English teacher means that I love to read but never have time. I’m pleased that the second half of that is no longer true.
Top photo by me.