What I was reading from in September
Rosecrans Baldwin’s Everything Now: Lessons from the City-State of Los Angeles (2021)
I’m not too far along, but the current feel of the book is somewhere between the film Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003) and Joan Didion. Maybe those references are somewhat cherrypicked — they’re easy to associate with a book about L.A. Perhaps I should say that what made me promote this one from the stack were the tears I shed watching Tom Cruise leaving Paris on the back of the motorcycle. This book is that too.
Michael Lynn Crews’ Books are Made out of Books: A Guide to Cormac McCarthy’s Literary Influences (2017)
Thought I was going to read this one more heavily in September, but my work schedule for the month cut into the time in the day where I’d been picking up momentum the month prior.
James by Percival Everett (2024)
I almost forgot to include this one because I read it in a matter of days at the start of September. That feels like forever ago now. I annotated the hell out of it, so without saying everything I probably ought to say about this book, I’ll just say, read it.
Brandon Hobson’s Where the Dead Sit Talking (2016)
IT LIVES! This one has been in the stack forever. Glad it finally came up for air. The first person narrator has my divided attention, yes, divided.
Will Leitch’s How Lucky (2021)
I took a return trip to Athens, Georgia, last year for my birthday. Leitch’s novel was in the bottom of my bag, but I never finished the book I was already reading on the trip so Leitch’s novel stayed at the bottom of the bag. This read is a quick one. The Stephen King blurb on the front says you’ll like it. I think Stephen King is right. Think two parts Rear Window and one part My Left Foot. (The read the Acknowledgements and realize how close to home this novel was for Leitch.)
David Maraniss’ They Marched into Sunlight: War and Peace Vietnam and America, October 1967 (2003)
The cliche is those who don’t know history are bound to repeat it. The other cliche is history doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes. I’m not sure to what extent either cliche is true. However, similar circumstances do occur and one of the fascinating aspects involved when reading about a time period so close in proximity to the present is the random cameos. About the same time an old Dick Cheney started popping up in campaign stump speeches this year, a younger version of him popped up in Maraniss’ book, as Cheney was once an aid to Wisconsin Governor Warren Knowles. At that time in his life, Cheney’s wife, Lynne, attended the University of Wisconsin. She was after her doctorate in British Literature in the same years when student protests were broiling in Madison, the campus that Maraniss holds in parallel to the jungle treks in Vietnam.
J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Two Towers (1954)
We are on the Stairs of Cirith Ungol. We are thinking about all the things a third grader thinks about.
Margaret Verble’s When Two Feathers Fell From the Sky (2021)
First fifty pages have slowly pulled me in. Getting to the point where I think I just need to hold my breath and go under all the way.
Sam Wasson’s The Path to Paradise: A Francis Ford Coppola Story (2023)
Strange reading this with all the film heads on the internet offering up opinions on Megalopolis, which opened for general audiences over the weekend. I’m about 200 pages in and every other page or so offers context and explanation for Coppola’s choices in Megalopolis and the reactions to those choices. Admittedly, I have not seen Megalopolis, but a lot has been shared and I do wonder if a movie based off Wasson’s book might be more interesting and genuinely thought-provoking. Something along the lines of The Fablemans. Then again, we already have Tropic Thunder.
