Just words on a page

Just words on a page

According to Goodreads, I read 46 books in 2024.

There is an asterisk to that number (46) but we’ll get to that.

I haven’t posted a “year in reading” since my recap of 2021. Reviewing a year of reading feels different than reviewing music or movies. Those mediums, for whatever reason, demand lists. People, it seems, love lists and, more importantly, love to bicker. It’s all fine. It’s part of being human. If we didn’t have tastes, we would just be surviving, not living. It’s fine to just survive too, by the way. Writing and reading help us both survive and live.

Anyway.

It's fun to see what books found us throughout the year.

& then there it is

& then there it is

Meet [  ]. An unnamed victim of the unnamed narrator in Violent Faculties by Charlene Elsby.

Don’t be [  ].

[  ] cut the budget for the philosophy department at the university where he works. 

What does a philosopher do without her philosophy department?

She must experiment privately, on her own budget. 

Dancing in the Dark

Dancing in the Dark

“The book of events is always open in the middle.”

A Chicago Sun-Times article from January 10th, 2024 is headlined: “Art Institute to defend its ownership of watercolor that New York authorities contend Nazis stole during Holocaust”

The piece in question is “Russian War Prisoner” by Egon Schiele (not currently on display). Prosecutors in New York allege that pierce is the rightful property of the family of ritz Grünbaum, a cabaret star who was killed in the Holocaust. The museum insists his sister-in-law was the rightful owner, who sold the painting. The artwork is valued at $1.25 million.

During a chapter of Teju Cole’s Tremor, the narrator Tunde shares the history of a painting, Landscape with Burning City. It is currently housed at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. It was owned by Franz Koenings in Germany in the 1930s. He took out a loan and used the painting as collateral. The painting as later sold to Adolf Hitler’s second in command, Hermann Goering. And then…?????...and then it ended up at the MFA.

Chess and Nothingness

Chess and Nothingness

“The more one limits oneself, the closer one is to the infinite.”

1. e4 e5 

One of my last visits to Space Oddities before it closed, I found The Lüneburg Variation by Paolo Maurensig. I was not familiar with the author but a blurb compared him to Italo Calvino. The description on the back cover made it seem like it would be a murder mystery. Given a recent infatuation with chess (since waned) I decided to give it a try. Never hurts to have something lighter around to read - as light as a Calvino-inspired murder-mystery could be at least. 

2. Nf3 Nc6

Stefan Zweig is a writer that I do not recall how I first heard about. Perhaps browsing in a different bookstore, perhaps he swam in the same waters as other writers and authors I was familiar with and appreciate. The novella Chess Story probably isn’t the best introduction to his work but it’s the one that kept calling out to me. Adding to cart every time the NYRB had an online sale, but never quite checking out. Until all the pieces were ready.

Eduardo Galeano's Chicago

Eduardo Galeano's Chicago

Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano passed away in 2015 and has been on my to-read list since. His books have remained elusive, seemingly banished from all Chicago bookstores. Eventually, I took advantage of the deus ex machina of Bookshop and ordered two books of his last fall, primarily because I wanted to read Soccer in Sun and Shadow ahead of the World Cup (required reading for any soccer fans or frauds like myself). Last week, I started reading the other book I’d ordered, the Book of Embraces. Here he wrote (as translated by Cedric Belfarge):

Chicago is full of factories. There are even factories right in the center of the city, around the world’s tallest building. Chicago is full of factories. Chicago is full of workers.

Arriving in the Haymarket district, I ask my friends to show me the place where the workers whom the whole world salutes every May 1st were hanged in 1886.

‘It must be around here,’ they tell me. But nobody knows where.

No statue has been erected in memory of the martyrs of Chicago in the city of Chicago. Not a statue, not a monolith, not a bronze plaque. Nothing.

The Urgency of Kenneth Patchen

The Urgency of Kenneth Patchen

The Journal of Albion Moonlight found its way to me as I was shelving books in the used bookstore where I used to work. A beat-up copy of a New Directions paperback with scribblings inside, I began salivating the instant I saw it. With comparisons to Camus on the back cover and praise from Henry Miller (“Nothing like it has been written…in all English literature it stands alone”), it was too on the nose, up my alley, a pair of gloves made just for me. I purchased it without giving any customers a chance. 

I expected a couple punches to the gut. 

Milk. And Mice. And Mothers.

Milk. And Mice. And Mothers.

“What does Aleppo mean?” asks a President. “It means to give milk to travelers as they pass through the region,” says a President.

Milk. And mice. And mothers. That’s what these stories are about (and not about). 

Also, Mums, it is impossible to tell if you really love a mouse or if you only love the word ‘mouse’ for some exhausting reason.

The stories of Sabrina Orah Mark’s Wild Milk feel like a code, or a jigsaw puzzle without a map. There isn’t a legend or key or guide. It’s something obscure that’s meant to be put together, bit by bit, piece by piece. Unfocusing your eyes a little bit to see the magic three dimensional reveal.