Warren Zevon, writer of songs about werewolves and serial killers, once said that we love to buy books because we believe we are buying the time to read them. If I could buy time, I might, but buying books is more fun, particularly from bookstores you know and love, others you hope one day to visit, and others, strange and glittering, that exist only online.
Scattered across the galaxy of open tabs on my computer, bookstore shopping carts are full of titles that have caught my eye, some new, like a yet-to-be published book on how it might be wise to live more like lichens, those delightfully weird little opportunistic microworlds conjured by fungi and algae, and some old, like Stella Baker's 1933 Pull Devil, Pull Baker, a genre-busting biography of one Count Nicolas De Toulouse Lautrec De Savine, K. M. (Knight of Malta). Boiler House Press describes it as "the oddest book you may ever read." That is enough part me from my hard-earned cash, but then I found stumbled upon this Neglected Books blog post ca. 2007, which is full of many tantalizing excerpts, not least:
There is, perhaps, no thing called Truth in any book — or at any rate that can be arrived at by appraisal from a standpoint outside the book itself. Words in books are like citizens in cities; as long as they live in accord with their neighbours, they are beyond outside challenge…
Odd and delightful: Is this my favorite genre? Maybe! I am also a sucker for books about the perils of editing. After reading Jared Michael Pollen's marvelous review. I am longingly eyeballing Helen DeWitt's The English Understand Wool. It's one of the Storybook ND titles, and the whole series activates my hoarding impulses, as does this complete set of Lando's Decadence University Press zines, mysterious science fiction comics with titles like Stones in Focus, "looking into the emotions and consciousness of rock formations."
The 50th-anniversary re-issue of a novel by Herman Melville's great-grandson beckons, as does Lucy Ives' new novel, Life is Everywhere, even if it is, sigh, about a grad student. Shola van Reinhold's Lote has some grad school flavor, too, but Juno Jill Richards is persuasive:
“Have you read Lote yet??!!” we asked each other, with increasing urgency, on text threads and social media. “Did you hear about Lote?” we queried, unprompted, at pandemic-friendly outdoor social functions. In a manner sometimes annoying to our nearest and dearest, we found ourselves made over into Lote hype people, insisting that everyone drop what they are doing and order a copy right now.Emily Hall's The Longcut is about "an artist who doesn't know what her art is"—(is it me? Lol. I digress.)—and Not Without My Ghosts is about art haunted by spirituality. I am wild to get a copy of Batia Suter's Parallel Encyclopedia—she is a genius of creating meaning through arrangements of found images—and also covet Stephen Ellcock's The Cosmic Dance.
And then there is a love story set between the wars, the "poignant yet unsparing" saga of an Osaka family in decline, "an authoritative and visual history and dictionary of the foods of the world," a compilation of pathetic literature and a collection of poems of death, a book about the invention of nature photography, a "a horror fiction, a work of speculative theology, an atlas of demonology, a political samizdat and a philosophic grimoire" in one "theoretical-fiction novel," not to mention a cookbook with a section on "the usefulness and frugality of breadcrumbs" and another with Angela Carter's recipe for potato soup (I so wish someone would re-issue this). And who could resist a "fascinating exploration of the eldritch matter of foreknowledge," a book about "the broken lineage of troubadour culture" and Simone Weil, and an investigation of "the links between thought and poetry and natural science." And then there are all the Percival Everett novels I have yet to read; gotta remedy that. Oh, and Gwendoline Riley—Jessica Stanley said My Phantoms was her favorite novel this year. I may need to buy some time after all.
Merry everything, friends.
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Incongruously fancy duds for loafing around and leafing through pages: Momoni Ossicocco sweater-tunic situation / Etro turtleneck / YMC Sylvan plaid pants / Victorian day-to-night bird locket (one side swallows, the other an owl) and silver book-chain necklace / Erica Weiner moonstone crystal ball earrings / Suzanne Rae Blixen lady loafer / Jennifer Behr velvet Katya headband / Kuranberi all-over color / first edition of Pull Devil, Pull Baker / March black-and-white spatterware candlestick / marzipan fruits.
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