SFist Reads
As the holiday season approaches, our attention turns from the San Francisco public library and our pile of online reserves, and toward books we buy for other folks at one of our fine local independent bookstores. What are you hoping to get this year, and what are you giving? Let us know in the comments!
SFist Jake, for once, is reading something for work that he thinks might be interesting to people who don't share his (rather narrow, it turns out) professional interests: White Christmas : the story of an American song, by Jody Rosen. Did you know "White Christmas" is the most-recorded song, ever? Did you know that, until 1997, it was the best-selling single, ever? Do you know what passed it? Rosen is pretty good with musicological analysis, but he's better at doing, and pointing to the stakes of, cultural criticism that brings together all kinds of interesting questions immigration, the Depression, popular music and mass culture. Oh, and "Candle in the Wind '97," Elton John's tribute to Princess Diana, is now the best-selling single ever.
SFist Rita just finished Mary Gaitskill's Veronica, about a woman's afternoon musings about her time as a model in Paris and a friend who died in New York. (SF also makes a cameo.) It's sort of a thematic sequel to Two Girls Fat and Thin, Gaitskill's first book. Veronica is gorgeously written, but she's not entirely sure she got the point (the ephemeral nature of beauty, the permanence of pain?). Also -- and this could go either way for readers -- Veronica has a lot less degrading sex than Gaitskill's other writings usually features.
SFist Derrick isn't so much reading as solving. The latest issue of GAMES magazine arrived yesterday, and he cheerfully flipped to the cryptic crosswords and the logic puzzles. But first, he read the article about Oskar van Deventer, who's a friend of his and one of the best puzzle designers alive today. With his iBook in the shop, he's making good progress through The Best American Essays of 2005, but his enjoyment of the essays is tempered by his jealousy of the writing aptitude on display. He's decided he wants to be Oliver Sacks when he grows up.
SFist Jon is reading Orhan Pamuk's Snow which is nominally about an exiled Turkish poet returning to Turkey as a journalist but really about God, religion, politics, art, love, sex, death and all that good stuff. You know, you're typical piece of European literature. It's even got a tough of absurdism thrown in for good measure. Actually, as it's about modern day Turkey, what it's about is about as "now" as could be as its main theme seems to be the clash between Western secularism vs. Eastern religious fanaticism. And yes, terrorism plays a part in all of it. Jon loved the themes, loved the debates, and love the writing but can't help but feel kind of bored by it all. Whenever he goes to pick it up to read, he always finds himself attracted more to the latest issues of ESPN the Magazine or EW and reads that instead. And he's not sure why, other than the plot isn't that exciting and that reading long debates about religion and God don't make the most scintillating of readings. In other words, it's one of those books you admire much more than you love and he's not loving it. Admires it, though, yes.