The Selfish Book Club

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Introduction

Resolved: no more brown amazon boxes until I read through (and weed) my own library.

I’ve gotten a little more apprehensive each time an amazon package arrives with a new book. It’s far too frequent, unfortunately, for me to keep up with the influx. Beginning July 19, 2017, I resolve to not order another book until I read through and digest all the books I already own. That is, approximately, 685 books, those on my library shelves that for some reason have been deemed worthy to sit in my permanent collection, and 20-40 other stragglers–new, as yet unopened books and a few oldies that have migrated to a potential give away pile. Continue reading “Introduction”

The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin

I’ve read this book a bunch of times and my paperback is full of underlining, margin notes and little stars, but when I try to recall the main points of Gretchn Rubin’s the Happiness Project, I come up somewhat empty. It’s a book written in the “one year spent doing x” format, which I happen to like. Rubin and I have similar personalities–we are sticklers for rules, self-monitoring maniacs, lovers of gold stars and atta-girls. A lot of the stuff about her that bugs me is the same stuff that bugs me about myself.

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

Middlesex is a tough act to follow, and Jeffrey Eugenides third novel, The Marriage Plot, seems thin and humorless in comparison. It has been in a resell bag in my car and was not going to earn a blog post, but I brought it back into the house and placed it back on the shelf next to Middlesex based more on Middlesex’s merit than it’s own.

The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert

When an author becomes really famous they earn the right for first editions of their subsequent books to be more opulent than their earlier efforts. and Elizabeth Gilbert’s The Signature of All Things (TSOAT) is gorgeous. Since the book is set in the 18th and 19th centuries, the look of it is antique, with unevenly cut, thick ivory pages and a dust jacket printed to look like aged parchment. There are dreamy colored illustrations of orchids on the end papers and the hardbound cover is a soothing green-tinged ivory with an olive colored spine, the author’s initials stamped in gold on the front. The feathery edges of the pages are soft and the book is very sensual, befitting some of the subject matter. My copy is even signed!

The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen

The winter solstice is still ahead of me but it has been freezing and I am dreading the next four months of short, cold days and long, cold nights. I have a buffalo hide on my bed that makes me feel like a pioneer and I snuggle under it to read the winter away. I love the book The Snow Leopard, but I wish I’d chosen a book about the Tropics. Author Peter Matthiessen’s melancholy account of his trek through the Himalaya with his leaky tent and snow-sodden sneakers only makes me feel colder, and also unadventurous and guilty.

In Our Time, The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Byline by Ernest Hemingway

I’m writing the week after the 2022 mid-term elections when the expected Republican “red tsunami” never materialized and hope for civility and moderation returned to many places in the USA. The insensible, egomaniacal rantings of Le Grand Orange and his minions aren’t as omnipresent and I’m reading and listening to some politicians who actually can string a few sentences together intelligently and who don’t resort to schoolyard name-calling. Reading a lot of Hemingway during this time has helped tune my ear back to the recognition of strong, clear, sensible American English.

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

I’ve been through peaks and valleys with my admiration for Hemingway. Fact is, when I read about him I like him less but when I read his actual writing, I admire him enormously again. He left all these astonishing books–so what if he, like his compatriot Picasso, wasn’t faithful. To take a Tom Robbins quote about the rich and apply it to geniuses: “A lot of geniuses are assholes, but a lot of idiots are assholes too and at least a genius can contribute something great to the world.”

The Paris Wife by Paula McLain

From Gravity’s Rainbow to elevated chick lit! It’s astounding how enjoyable the ride of a good, straightforward novel can be after a Pynchian or Joycean brain wreck. It’s like going from a groaning board of beautifully prepared pigs feet and sweet breads served with absinthe and laudanum in a darkened hall to a simple morning repast of a scone and coffee in the sunlit corner of a cozy kitchen. The Paris Wife by Paula McLain is smart historical fiction about one of the historical figures I’m most fascinated by, Ernest “Papa” Hemingway.

Man and His Symbols by Carl Jung

Go into any person’s house who has a liberal education and you will probably find a copy of Jung’s Man and His Symbols. I found my nice, hardbound edition in a used bookstore in San Francisco; I think it was in the Mission district, or the Castro, on the way home from an Ntozake Shange reading (I also found a book of hers there). I have flipped through MAHS many times but never read it. As I am working on a book that has to do with Jungian psychology, I am finally cracking it for real–for the words, not just the pictures.

Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon

In 1991 I was hanging out occasionally with a wine magazine editor who lived in New York and would visit San Francisco once a month to make forays into wine country for tastings and interviews with winemakers. He had graduated from Princeton and was a real east coast snob, but when I was young many of my self-improvement activities were attempts to win the approval of various snobs and iconoclasts, or at least get them to have sex with me. The editor had written his thesis on Pynchon, so in order to prove to him that I was not the California air head I thought he thought I was, I devoured Pynchon’s V, then slogged through Gravity’s Rainbow.

The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan

Gardening has become my new favorite hobby. I’ve had a lot of resistance to gardening, but on an acre and a half in the country, especially with the added threat of wildfires nearly year round, I’ve had to pay more attention to my landsaping than ever and have finally, after a ton of work, relaxed into it and started to enjoy it. As Pollan discusses in Second Nature, his first of many excellent books relating to plants, a dislike of gardening is usually rooted in childhood experiences.