Books: April

The idea here is to write a little bit about what I've read each month. I spend more time commuting than anything besides sleep and most of my train ride is spent with fiction. I love the Polysyllabic Spree, Nick Hornby's column in The Believer, and I'm aping his style here.

Books bought:
Sonnets by William Shakespeare
Wherever I Wind Up by R.A. Dickey

Books read:
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Cherry by Mary Karr
The Polysyllabic Spree by Nick Hornby
Fue ayer y no me acuerdo by Jaime Bayly

Starting with the purchases. Picked up the Sonnets at E. Village books on St. Marks. Lord knows if I'll ever read them, but for $2, it feels good to keep the Bard around. I like to have books of poetry around for reference, and often they end up at the bottom of my locker, which makes me feel better about my life at law school. I'm reading the Dickey book now and excited to write about it- candid for a baseball book.

Beloved unlocked a half-century of American history for me and it did some beautiful things with language. That said, it was brutal, and took me half of March and the first week of April to finish. It's the best kind of writing- touching on stories that we don't have the language to tell, reaching into that space where there are no words. You should read it, but probably not during law school, and not unless the rest of your life is going pretty well.

Mary Karr is the kind of writer I would like to be. This is because she writes only about herself, and I only really know how to write about myself, but she does it in a way that's completely engaging. Cherry is the story of her childhood in Texas. It ends with her narrative from an lsd trip, and reading the climax on the F-train, I felt like I was hallucinating. Mary Karr is good at writing.

The Polysyllabic Spree is the inspiration for this blog, and it's published as a monthly magazine column and collected in a book, which is what I read. Nick Hornby's thoughts on what he reads are much more interesting than mine, so if you like this at all, you should probably buy his book or subscribe to The Believer. He has some ideas about where books fit into our lives, and how they connect us, and I agree with these ideas. I came away wanting to read David Copperfield, Chekov, and a bunch of some obscure British novelists whose books I'll never find.

Jaime Bayly is my favorite Peruvian writer. He's simple and funny and writes mostly about sex and drugs. Very little not to like. Bayly is a public figure- he's on TV each night and ran for president in Peru. Which is why it's so amazing that he writes about his drug use as a young person, and his proclivities toward the same sex. He plays a game with what he reveals- almost like a gossip column about his life, which I something I do here but more obscurely. This is part of the appeal. The other part is that he's so close and honest and self-depricating that no matter what he's writing about, it feels good to read.

I read more than usual in April. With the semester wrapping up and my stress level high, I submerge myself in fiction. Excited to tell you about the Dickey book next month and apply it to all the ways I can throw knuckleballs in my life.