Further Reading Lists

The lending library as vision of the world economy to come. Not only as institution, but as idea: sharing books. 

The way it's done online and on social media is one level. The polished personal canon, and my own many attempts. Reading Rainbows bridging worlds. 

Then the lists of actual libraries, and initiatives like Spokane is Reading. 

Prize-winners: Nobels, Bookers, Whitbreads, Newberrys... 

Backlisted podcast, ie. The Anatomy of Melancholy.

Ezra Klein's guests' recommendations, still more numerous and disparate. 

The NYRB and the Library of America. The curated lists and new arrivals at the local library: for instance, To Save and To Destroy by Viet Thanh Ngyuen, which opens onto other lists: the post-colonial worlds of Said, Lahiri, Anzaldua... and the hoity-toity of book-length lecture series at Harvard and elsewhere -- The Bollingen Library! How could I forget? Or A Natural History of Empty Lots, by Christopher Brown, with its citations of Marion Shoard who coined the term "edgelands" and poets Paul Farley and Michael Symonds Roberts' Edgelands: Journeys into England's True Wilderness; Richard Mabey's The Unoffical Countryside, and WG Sebald's On the Natural History of Destruction. The "Earth is an alien planet" of JG Ballard, Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle and "psychogeography" of the Situationists where "sous les paves, la plage" conjures the digressions of Victor Hugo in Les Miserables... 

Then the time to read them. This summer, for want of a better, I started the One Story That Leads to Jesus and a hodgepodge of Nobel laureates, beginning with Ishiguro and Undset.

But then to actually understand or better yet do the things the books talk about: to learn Japanese by playing MOTHER 2, to steal shiny bits of art and story in the course of an ongoing study of video games and Philip Pullman, not entirely giving up on the writing of stories, either, and to keep slowly imagining that new school into being. 

Summer projects, why not? when it's still only just past solstice. 

Collaborating with Moses on Legendaria!

The Rose Field Announcement: Philip Pullman and the News

Philip Pullman does it again. Long-awaited word on the concluding volume of The Book of Dust appeared at the end of April in the BBC and Guardian, among other outlets. In his words, the forthcoming book is "partly a thriller and partly a bildungsroman: a story of psychological, moral and emotional growth. But it’s also a vision. Lyra’s world is changing, just as ours is. The power over people’s lives once held by old institutions and governments is seeping away and reappearing in another form: that of money, capital, development, commerce, exchange." 

Once more, his choice of commentary suggests he is returning full circle to his first published books, The Haunted Storm and Galatea. The former is implicit in the flood that structures La Belle Sauvage; the latter directly deals with "money, capital" and the rest as its key plot mechanic and thematic concern, and it is dedicated, like The Secret Commonwealth, to Nick Messenger. 

This is a post where I'll collect more of the myriad public statements of Pullman's which must be classed as "news," years out of date as they are.