i got to cosign on Cloud Atlas, the Known World, and War is a Force that Gives us Meaning. and Foucault's Pendulum and Midnight's Children...and almost anything from Baldwin. some of my favorite books ever.

new recs?

+Nonfiction+

"The Greater Common Good" - Arundhati Roy (1999): about the resistance to dam-building in the Narmada Valley. It sort of bridges the gap between her essay/speech collections available from South End (of which I would really recommend "War Talk" and parts of "An Ordinary Person's Guide to Imperialism"...they're much more brilliant in spots but necessarily scattered) and the narrative of "The God of Small Things". It's short (50-60 pages), and a terribly relevant commentary on democracy and public works. I really enjoy reading Roy's shorter stuff in between books to help me contextualize things. I'm reading Bolano's "The Savage Detectives" right now...and some of her thoughts on economics and social spheres in neoliberal cities are helping me get my grips on Mexico D.F. (Has anyone read Paz's books on India?)

"Augustine: A New Biography" - James O'Donnel (2005): I just love his approach to writing and thinking about history. He seems much less concerned with getting entangled in the scholarship surrounding Augustine and the period and more concerned with telling a story. He's able to avoid getting mired in notions of "the end of the roman empire" or "the early church" or "the dark ages" and help us put things in perspective.

"We Say No" - Eduardo Galeano (1992): News pieces and essays from 60s, 70s, 80s...about/from (mostly) all over S. America. it's friggin brilliant. Some of the articles are about encounters with iconic figures like Pele, Che, and Pu Yi. My favorites were "God and the Devil in the Favelas of Rio de Janeiro" and "Ten Frequent Lies or Mistakes."

"Pedagogy of the Oppressed" - Paolo Friere : buh. at the very least there's a lot to *discuss*


+Poetry+ (I'm going to assume people know to read Rillke and Saul Williams here)

"The Artist's Daughter" - Kimiko Hahn (2004) - Hahn toys with?experimentswith?embraces?employs? things like diary fragments and emails along with more conventional poetry . In her other works she uses more traditional Japanese forms (kinda) too. There's something there about *identity*, but the bottom line for me is it's damned good poems. This is sort of a hinge/cornerstone piece for me...with themes carrying over from "Mosquito and Ant" (which i think most critics like better) and on to "The Narrow Road to the Interior." bits of medical trivia, murder mystery, etymology, mother-daughter relationships, relationships with men..."Reckless Sonnets" are the highlights to me....I'd quote...hmmm...this is just hard to explain. The part of me that likes the movie "Secretary" might like this, but there's also much more substance than that too.

"The Woman Who Died in her Sleep" - Linda Gregerson (1996) - I'm just going to cut and paste "An Arbor"

1.

The world’s a world of trouble, your mother must
have told you
that. Poison leaks into the basements

and tedium into the schools. The oak
is going the way
of the elm in the upper Midwest — my cousin

earns a living by taking the dead ones
down.
And Jason’s alive yet, the fair-

haired child, his metal crib next
to my daughter’s.
Jason is nearly one year old but last

saw light five months ago and won’t
see light again.


2.

Leaf against leaf without malice
or forethought,
the manifold species of murmuring

harm. No harm intended, there never is.
The new
inadequate software gets the reference librarian

fired. The maintenance crew turns off power one
weekend
and Monday the lab is a morgue: fifty-four

rabbits and seventeen months of research.
Ignorance loves
as ignorance does and always

holds high office.


3.

Jason had the misfortune to suffer misfortune
the third
of July. July’s the month of hospital ro-

tations; on holiday weekends the venerable
stay home.
So when Jason lay blue and inert on the table

and couldn’t be made to breathe for three-and-a-
quarter hours,
the staff were too green to let him go.

The household gods have abandoned us to the gods
of juris-
prudence and suburban sprawl. The curve

of new tarmac, the municipal pool,
the sky at work
on the pock-marked river, fatuous sky,

the park where idling cars, mere yards
from the slide
and the swingset, deal beautiful oblivion in nickel

bags: the admitting room and its stately drive,
possessed
of the town’s best view.


4.

And what’s to become of the three-year-old brother?
When Jason was found
face down near the dogdish — it takes

just a cupful of water to drown —
his brother stood still
in the corner and said he was hungry

and said that it wasn’t his fault.
No fault.
The fault’s in nature, who will

without system or explanation
make permanent
havoc of little mistakes. A natural

mistake, the transient ill will we define
as the normal
and trust to be inconsequent,

by nature’s own abundance soon absorbed.


5.

Oak wilt, it’s called, the new disease.
Like any such
contagion — hypocrisy in the conference room,

flattery in the halls — it works its mischief mostly
unremarked.
The men on the links haven’t noticed

yet. Their form is good. They’re par.
The woman who’s
prospered from hating ideas loves causes

instead. A little shade, a little firewood.
I know
a stand of oak on which my father’s

earthly joy depends. We’re slow
to cut our losses.





I'm not even going to bother with fiction right now. that's too hard.