What I’m reading from in February
Leigh Chadwick’s Your Favorite Poet (2022)
I’m probably about seven or ten poems into this one. I expect I’ll have more to say on it later this month.
Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep (1939)
I’ve seen the movie. I’ve taught the movie. I’ve seen a few movies based off Chandler’s novels. But I have never read a Chandler novel. This is the first. I have about a hundred pages to go.
Michael Lynn Crews’ Books are Made out of Books: A Guide to Cormac McCarthy’s Literary Influences (2017)
I ordered this one when I was just a few years out of graduate school and still awoke each morning with the lingering thought to push my Master’s thesis into something more. In the least, I thought I could shape myself into one of those Cormac McCarthy experts on Twitter, but alas, the world and my brain had other plans. I have to take the title at its word — I’m only seven pages into this book that has moved into the space by my work computer.
Matthew E. Henry’s the Colored Page (2022)
Have you read any of Matthew E. Henry’s poetry? You should. I think this one took like a week’s worth of reading while my kids brushed their teeth before bed.
Thomas Pynchon’s novel Inherent Vice (2009)
This one was sitting next to my work computer in January, but I’ve since moved it to a different location. I’m still only about fifty pages into the California haze.
Amy Roa’s Radioactive Wolves (2023)
I liked it and wrote a little more about it here.
Theresa Runstedtler’s Black Ball: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Spencer Haywood, and the Generation that Saved the Soul of the NBA (2023)
I finished this one a few days into the month. Runstedtler reframes the 1970s era of professional basketball well. The complaints then are the complaints now. Some people just can’t help treating live sports like museum display vases. Someone with a lot of time and old newspapers should write a book that dissects how the negativity of the Boston sports media permeated the national landscape for decades.
Sam Wasson’s The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood (2020)
The book is about the making of Chinatown, sure, but really the reason to read is a look at the intersection between individual creativity and collaborative processes. The give. The go. The dream. The compromised reality that, in some ways, might out do the dream. I have about 160 pages to go.
Colson Whitehead’s Harlem Shuffle (2021)
I haven’t been reading this one long, but I’m at the part where we’re breaking down how the robbery took place and there’s a great sentence about the first deviation from the plan. I can’t wait for more deviations.
