What I’ve been reading from in October
Rosecrans Baldwin’s Everything Now: Lessons from the City-State of Los Angeles (2021)
I could have finished this one earlier, but I kind of don’t want it to end. The essays read like concentric circles, which is my favorite kind of essay to read. But I don’t think I can string this one out much past this upcoming weekend.
Michael Lynn Crews’ Books are Made out of Books: A Guide to Cormac McCarthy’s Literary Influences (2017)
I’m in the part about the source materials that went into his novel Suttree. And, like Baldwin’s L.A. book, this is one I’m in no rush to finish.
Vinson Cunningham’s Great Expectations (2024)
Probably should have been pictured above. Cunningham’s debut novel came out late winter to early spring of this year. It’s about a certain political unknown, a Senator from Illinois who was born in Hawaii. Okay, it’s not so much about the Senator from what I can tell but how an individual on the rise gets filled with the hopes, dreams, ideas, and money of those behind the man. Okay, it’s not so much about how politicians are backed and supported but how anyone on the rise requires a benefactor. The act of being liked in anyway demands one who is attractive and one who is attracted. There’s also something happening with water as a metaphor or symbol. It might be archetypal. It might just be away of introducing reflected and refracted individuals. I’m about 50 pages in, but I can see why the title is borrowed from Dickens’ novel and possibly why Winslow Homer’s painting The Gulf Stream was chosen for the cover. It has to do with how the signifier and the signified function together to complete a sign. Maybe. We’ll see. Buckets empty. Buckets full of water. Buckets empty again. Those are my guesses. It almost sounds like a 21st Century Springsteen song.
Steve Hyden’s There Was Nothing You Could Do: “Born in the U.S.A.” and the End of the Heartland (2024)
This book was awesome. Even if you know what you know about Springsteen, the Baby Boomer generation, the appeal of strong men in the ’80s and today, this book will walk over that old ground in new ways. I liked Hyden’s Pearl Jam book a lot because I like Pearl Jam a lot, but this one felt bigger than one band.
David Maraniss’ They Marched into Sunlight: War and Peace Vietnam and America, October 1967 (2003)
Chipping away at this thing as if it were granite.
Alan Moore’s Saga of the Swamp Thing, Book One (1982)
Consistently struck by the Swamp Thing’s resemblance to a roided-up Grinch. Then again, the comic is a product of the early ’80s, so it probably can’t help but understand how a certain nation became obsessed with lifting and pumping and injecting itself out of a malaise. Halloween’s also this week, so a book about creature, or THING, seemed only natural to read in the moonlight.
J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Return of the King (1955)
The Rohirrim is riding or camping. Why are these fast horses taking so long?
Antoine Wilson’s Mouth to Mouth (2022)
A perfectly executed encounter of a novel. Like Hitchcock. Like Poe. Like Washington Irving. It knows how to make the brevity last.
Margaret Verble’s When Two Feathers Fell From the Sky (2021)
Okay, I thought I was going to burrow down with this one. Instead, I got distracted by the Obama novel, the Springsteen book, the Thing from the Swamp, and the bright lights of Los Angeles’ small neighborhoods and hidden enclaves.
