I Know Because I Read

Reading through my Goodreads, one book at a time.

[mashable]

I come to the understanding that maybe what was on the inside was more important, and that your outer covering didn’t count so much as folks thought it did, colored or white, man or woman.

James McBride, The Good Lord Bird (p 318). (via mashable)

[lastnightsreading]

James McBride at the National Book Awards, 11/20/13

[commongoodbooks-blog]

Trip to Echo Spring: Interview with Olivia Laing

Olivia Laing discusses “The Trip to Echo Spring,” Thursday, January 23rd at Common Good Books.

CGB: While The Trip to Echo Spring takes us across the map from New York to Seattle, the six subjects of your book live, more or less, in the same time period of the twentieth century, when alcohol, it seems, meant differently than it does now. Were you to write an account of addiction and creativity in 2014, where might you think to start?

OL: I think the story of writers and alcohol really does belong to the 20th century. It seems to me that our age is much more puritanical and clean-living, and much less tolerant of drunkenness and debauchery, though still inclined to glamourise it in a nostalgic way. The addictiveness I see everywhere now is to technology - I watch people all the time using iPads and smartphones, and there’s a kind of gratified abandon to it that’s disturbing to anyone who’s spent times with addicts. I’m not counting myself out of that - I’ve stopped using a smartphone, but I’m barely ever off Twitter. It’s a hit, it eats time, and while it promotes a certain kind of creativity of expression and connection, it shatters concentration, which of course is vital to any larger creative project.

Read More

[picadorbookroom]

The perfect way to end the old year and ring in what we hope will be a fantastic new year: Olivia Laing’s “charming and gusto-driven” The Trip to Echo Spring on the front cover of this week’s New York Times Book Review!  

[ericnyquist]

Inside cover illustration for Jeff Vandermeer’s Annihilation.  

[wordbookstores]

WHEN PLANTS ATTACK!!!

(Can you tell we are excited about Annihilation?)

[quoted-books]

That’s how the madness of the world tries to colonize you: from the outside in, forcing you to live in its reality.

Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation  (via quoted-books)

[trotleveller-deactivated2015032]

Take, for instance, Rand Paul’s recent comment that to believe in the right to health care is to believe in the right to slavery. It seems fairly clear to me that the Right’s inability to escape the rhetoric of slavery, its insistence on framing all political debate within the absolutist antinomy of freedom and slavery, and to assail not even social rights but even the idea of public policy as a form of enslavement, has something to do with the history of slavery in America.

A decent interview with the author of Empire of Necessity, a historical account of the slave rebellion (and the larger social context) that inspired Melville’s Benito Cereno.

[nypl]

"The Empire of Necessity is scholarship at its best. Greg Grandin’s deft penetration into the marrow of the slave industry is compelling, brilliant and necessary.” - Toni Morrison

Former Cullman Center fellow Greg Grandin is earning high praise for his new book The Empire of Necessity, a deeply-researched account of the slave revolt that inspired Melville’s Benito Cereno. Grandin’s returning to the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building on January 21 with his Cullman Center classmate Philip Gourevitch to discuss The Empire of Necessity for the next installment of the Conversations from the Cullman Center series. Reserve your free ticket - and check out more praise for Grandin’s book - here. 

[aftotrof]

[polyscinerd]

The Wall was perfect theatre as well as a perfect symbol of the monstrosity of ideology gone mad.

John lé Carré - The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (via polyscinerd)

[greatliteraryquotations]

"This is a war," Leamas replied. "It’s graphic and unpleasant because it’s fought on a tiny scale, at close range; fought with a wastage of innocent life sometimes, I admit. But it’s nothing, nothing at all beside other wars – the last or the next."

- John le Carre, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (via greatliteraryquotations)

[gershwins]

The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, John Le Carré

[gnossienne]

[iknowbecauseiread]

[theparisreview]

While you wait, read an excerpt from National Book finalist Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers

[intotheroots]

“People who are harder to love pose a challenge, and the challenge makes them easier to love. You’re driven to love them. People who want their love easy don’t really want love.”

Rachel Kushner, “The Flamethrowers.” (via intotheroots)