Sometime in the spring, I was looking for used copies of Didion’s books and instead impulsively bought the Everyman’s Library volume of her collected nonfiction, We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live. It’s taken only brief journeys off the shelf since it’s so darn unwieldy, and I tend to grab something else for on-the-go reading, get caught up in that, put this one back on the shelf, etc.

I had only a passing awareness of Didion before The Year of Magical Thinking. As this is a collection of works written for different publications, it’s less of the “Book” Magical Thinking is. Yet the pieces sit together really well, or they are all interesting in their own right that any inconsistencies in atmosphere hardly matter. While everything in this book was written in the 1960s, it still feels so fresh to me—almost like if I went to Haight-Ashbury today I’d still find it inhabited by hippies getting busted for possession of LSD. I can’t quite figure out what makes Didion’s writing to engaging exactly, though I especially loved the last section of writings about places. She is incredibly evocative about specific locales. It’s perhaps the one part of the book where the datedness feels more what it is, but since her perspective there tends to be more nostalgic, it hardly matters.

In the realm of contemporary YA fantasy, the HP series isn’t quite as well-written or nuanced as Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy (which will hopefully get a bit more attention from the masses this winter with a big film version of The Golden Compass). But Rowling definitely has her suspense tricks down, which I would venture is what makes these books so popular. Especially in this last installment, each chapter builds in a progression of increasingly tantalizing cliffhangers, and the knowledge that the very end is coming makes it all the worse. The occasional outbursts of heavy-handed schmaltz and recurrences of certain emo themes do get on my nerves at times, but overall I appreciate Rowling’s goofy humor and how she’s slowly brought such big darkness over this otherwise carefree world.

Nothing in this ending will come as much of a surprise to fans from what has been hinted, aside from the unfortunate deaths of certain beloved characters, which is inevitable considering how many fight scenes comprise the book. But there are enough final triumphs that balance out the losses. While the major resolutions weren’t far from what I expected, there were enough twists and turns to reveal how much of the story was crafted all along, from the very beginning. In the end, it feels like not just a coming-of-age story but a coming-to-consciousness.

eta: now that the series is over what else would you expect but all seven books packaged together in a stylish “trunk-like box” (with “privacy lock”)? It will be available come September for a paltry $195.

I took advantage of last month’s store-wide McSweeney’s sale to buy a few things. Though I’m not necessarily a fan of everything McSweeney’s, this book has a nice cover (which, you know, is always a swaying influence) and said it was about a teenage girl in 1970s New York. Most reviews reference this, how the book takes place in the 70s, yet the only time that is obvious is reading the jacket description. There’s a nostalgic, not-present feel to the book, so the story works regardless of the intended time period. But I found it strange that so many reviewers reference that, like everyone’s cheating off the blurb. Perhaps the clues are there, for people who really know NY. Yet many reviews also reference the narrator being a “13-year-old,” which definitely isn’t spelled out so specifically.

The story itself is lyrical and lilting. Seasons seem to shift back and forth and while the subtle plots progress steadily, though apparently it all arcs over just one year. Just before reading this, my friend pointed me towards Haruki Murakami’s essay “Jazz Messenger” in the NYTimes (not yet under the paywall), about the parallels he has found between music and writing, so I kept noting how this book is composed musically. It definitely has its rhythm down, the story will pull you along without you noticing—short chapters drawing you straight into the next. Melodically and harmonically, it can be flat for several pages before revealing some short, lovely passage that comes together nicely.

Overall there’s something enigmatic about it: the characters often feel either conflated or idealized, but never in a way like I could put my finger on exactly why. I found this podcast with Yannick Murphy that discusses the autobiographic inspiration of the book, which may account for some of that haziness.

I got this book out from the library the same day as The Book of the Bookshelf, and Petroski makes several references to this book, so that was a kind of odd coincidence. I can’t remember now what made me seek out these two books specifically. Then I was also thinking about “books about books” and whether I should integrate it as a category. This one ends with a short chapter of recommending reading that begins, “Most good secondhand bookstores have a shelf labeled ‘Books About Books.’” Not particularly earth-shattering, but it’s always interesting when synchronicity abounds, especially around a common locus.

Fadiman’s collection of personal essays about reading were originally published in the Library of Congress magazine Civilization—which apparently doesn’t exist anymore as this is the most recent news about it on the LOC. They vary in topic from book-owning-specific musings—she and her husband marrying their libraries after five years of their own marriage, the “odd shelf” in most people’s collections, buying used vs. new—to language-specific musings. Among the latter I realized that all language nerds aren’t equal. A lot of these pieces reflect a dedication to the classics, whereas most of the language nerd folk I know are not so canonically bent. In the essay “My Ancestral Castles,” she discusses growing up around books, and both her parents are writers, with her father’s collection focused on English poetry and fiction of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and “the only junk, relatively speaking, was science fiction.” It struck me to read later:

There must be writers whose parents owned no books, and who were taken under the wing of a neighbor or teacher or librarian, but I have never met one.

… and realize that growing up the only bookshelves in our house were in the kids’ rooms, that my parents surely had some books, since they did read—but they did not keep a collection of books we could peruse. And what I do remember my parents reading, Fadiman would surely consider “junk,” relative to anything referenced in this book. I certainly did not inherit any particular reading legacy from them. That quote in its context seems to imply a qualifier on the word “writers,” as it seems obvious that of course there are writers out there whose parents didn’t own books or weren’t big readers of, let’s say, “legitimate” literature.

Aside from a few such moments, this is a nice collection of essays focused around reading.

If I’d paid better attention, I would have waited to read Abandon the Old in Tokyo in order to be properly anal and read the books in sequence. The introduction by Adrian Tomine is both a personal and technical opener to the series and how it came to be, including a note on the difficulty of translating the comics from Japanese—not necessarily the written words themselves but rather the format. The panels had to be re-arranged to flow from left to right as Western books read, with some frames mirrored in order to preserve the continuity inside dialogues.

There was some suggestion in the second book that this first collection of stories (representing a collection of Tatsumi’s work from 1969) was lighter in content, and a few are more lighthearted than the rest, like the title story about a “push man” who helps shove passengers into subway trains and ends up getting a taste of what he inflicts daily on others. Yet the majority still feel incredibly tragic and brutal, stories of everyday people that end in some shocking manner. Two of the common adjectives used about these works are “unsentimental” and “gritty.” It’s almost overwhelming reading two of these collections so close to one another.

Tatsumi has a bit of a fixation with fully-formed, aborted fetuses drifting through sewer drains (and several of his stories feature the drain cleaners who find them), but aside from that quibble, these two collections are certainly among if not the best comics I’ve read in the last few years. It seems I read so many comics that are more autobiographical than fictional, and since I am also a fan of the short story in general, the combination of short stories and the comic form is pretty ideal.

Possibly you’ve read something by Henry Petroski before, as he is quite prolific: writing about the pencil, useful things in general, as well as more abstract concepts like Success through Failure.

In this book he begins staring at his bookshelves and wondering how much he really sees them or just the books on them, or some combination of the two entities in which they are fully dependent on each other being there to be seen at all. It segues into a history of bookshelves through the book itself, but not just the progression from scroll to codex, but also how books were used and stored and organized. From the earliest scribed volumes to later printed volumes, Petroski pairs his scholarly research with personal anecdotes where he can. There are many quotes from Melvil Dewey with his admirable dedication to spelling reform fully intact.

Petroski certainly doesn’t let go of an idea once it gets a hold of him, and it’s impressive how much information he’s found and collected in a digestible format. There are a few times he gets a little extra-obsessive about some aspect of his story, like when he documents the progression of how books came to sit on their bottoms with the spines out, all through Medieval woodcuts. Or giving in-depth descriptions of libraries from the past, countered with his experiences with the various libraries he’s used as a scholar. But as this book could appeal to readers and librarians and engineers and assorted historians, chances are he’s found some little-known fact or philosophy related to books and the shelves that keep them handy that you haven’t yet heard or considered.

Includes an appendix that attempts to collect every possible means of organizing books on shelves. I’ve already tried the color method.

This collection of Tomine’s “uncollected work” from 1990–2004 is divided into three sections: miscellaneous comics—either unpublished, drafts, or work that appeared in places other than Optic Nerve; (mostly commissioned) illustrations; and selections from his sketchbook. While these represent distinctly separate aspects of his work, they blend together nicely and given a well-rounded look at his career.

It probably goes without saying that people not already familiar with and interested in Optic Nerve might not have enough context or patience to appreciate this book. Many of the comics he calls the equivalent of “outtakes” and aren’t as polished as his other work, and the illustration section is pretty much a portfolio that varies from indie rock cover art to copious little New Yorker illustrations (many for movie reviews). The sketchbook section may be most interesting to even the casual reader, as there’s something compelling about getting a window into any artist’s process. I felt like that part could have easily comprised more than the fifty or so pages it fills in the book.

I haven’t been keeping up with Adrian Tomine, or the last few issues of Optic Nerve for that matter. So that might be why I also missed hearing about this series of translations of Tatsumi’s work, which Tomine is editing/designing/lettering. This book represents work originally published in 1970 and the epitome of his “gekiga” style, somewhat the opposite of manga. Each story, while tinged with humor in parts, is generally bleak and includes some key unsettling or profoundly melancholy moment.

The way Tatsumi’s male protaganists are all drawn similarly reminds me somewhat of Murakmai’s “Boku“—though the natures of protaganists themselves feel much different.