New Reads

I've been trying toget back into a few books recently. I remember in the first few months of the other blog, caliboyinbrooklyn, I was constantly reading and typing about what it was that I read. Mostly I was devouring Thomas Pynchon's complete library, but sometimes, like that link above, there were other books.

Now I'm back at it, though I'm working on three different things.

The oldest work I'm reading is Candide, by Voltaire, and if I had a long enough patch of free time I could probably finish it in a sitting. As it is, I read a short chapter and then get to my own projects. (They ate one of the Old Lady's ass cheeks? Crazy Frenchmen...)

As well as that classic I'm starting Murakami's 1Q84, a Decemberween gift I'm finally getting after. In the first handful of pages you can get a sense of the pacing that Haruki'll be using, as well as a sense of the weirdness and fantastical that is a characteristic of his work.

About the name: I'm pronouncing it--in my head and to Corrie when I talk about it--as "Q-teen-84". It takes place in the year 1984, and the 'Q' is supposed to signify the questions and quandaries the year was inspiring, so I just replaced the letter/syllable 'Q' for the syllable/word 'nine'. So, like 1984, "1Q84" becomes "Q-teen-eighty-four".

The third book I'm reading is Ken Dryden's The Game, supposedly one of the best sports books ever written, if not the best, and easily the best hockey book ever written. Ken Dryden was a Hall of Fame goalie for the Montreal Canadiens, the Yankees of the NHL (as in able to build dominant dynasties in different eras) for a special time in their history, when one of their teams, the 1976-77 team, has been labeled "Best Team Ever".

I'm not the first to recommend books written by athletes, or about athletes, but this is no ordinary book, and Dryden, a former Canadian Parliamentarian and holder of a BS in History from Cornell, is no ordinary jock. Here's a sentence from the first page of the introduction, about the scraps of paper that he'd written things on after games, after interviews, on the buses and airplanes...the shoe-boxes full of scraps:

"Like most midnight thoughts, what I found in the morning looked disturbingly thin and incomplete, often contradictory, not at all the story that had seemed to me so different and untold."

Even working with Tom Verducci, Joe Torre never came up ideas even like that. (The Yankee Years, 2009)

Better luck finding that kind of thing in George Plimpton's One for the Record, his account of Hank Aaron's Babe Ruth-eclipsing homer. It's a good, quick, lyrical read, one that will boost whatever thoughts you had about one of the game's all time greats: the Hammer. It even inspired me to get this hat:



(Also I like blue.)