The Sheila Variations

Overwhelming book deliveries

The Amazon logo smiling at me repeatedly. Something about unwrapping books makes my heartbeat quicken. I just don't even know where to begin.

I finished Blue Blood - the book by Edward Conlon, NYC detective and Harvard graduate. Dude can write. Thought the book was about 3 chapters too long. At the end, we have his experience at the landfill on Staten Island, post 9/11 - which was one of the more horrifying and disgusting things I have ever read - but riveting - so glad I read it - it's just that there were maybe 3 extraneous chapters floating around BEFORE that. But still. LOVE his writing and I will definitely keep an eye out for more of his work.

I also finally finished Imperial Grunts by Robert Kaplan - a book I had started about a year ago, put down - and now finished, in a frenzy, staying up late to polish it off. He's great. I look forward to the other books in the series he's planning and working on now.

But now books are arriving - either as gifts (thank you!!) or from stuff I bought in a fit of celebration last week - having come out of a brief rough spot - thankfully brief .... but harsh nonetheless. I needed books to get me through. Or - not even the books themselves - just the prospects of the books. And Rocky, of course. Rocky helped get me through. But that's a given at this point. I had forgotten, though, that I had had a book-buying binge, even though it was only a couple weeks ago. A lot of times I don't remember much of what goes on during the "rough spots" and this was no exception. Even 2 days later, the awfulness started to fade and mist into memory.

But now they are arriving.

Fun!!!

First of all - Tennessee Williams' notebooks. Holy freakin' crap - it's gotta be 1000 pages long - brand-new published - and ... I flipped through it last night, astonished first of all at how gorgeous the book itself is - but also how beautifully it is put together. On the right hand side of the page - we have the entries in Williams' notebooks - and on the left hadn side - we have corresponding notes. So that means you don't have to flip back and forth endlessly for the footnotes. It's amazing - we see his postcards, his photos ... I haven't even started reading it yet, and just looking at it is giving me a heart attack.

I got 3 more Library of America books ... I already have many (American Poetry, Willa Cather, Eudora Welty, William Faulkner - those are all from my dad) - and I also have Jefferson: Writings. But over the last 3 days more have arrived: Hamilton: Writings (there will, naturally, be some redundancy with the rest of my Hamilton collection, but that's okay) - the speeches of Abraham Lincoln (2nd volume - from 1859 - 1865 - and also the Library of America collection of writings during the Constitutional Congress of 1787. Letters written home, minutes kept, speeches ...

I feel actually a little nauseous thinking about how much I already love these books.

I have also been slowly but surely collecting each book in the American Presidents Series, edited by the late Arthur Schlesinger - and they're quite wonderful - written by all different people - I've very much enjoyed the ones I've already read. They're cheap, and usually about 150 pages long, maybe less - a quick read - and it focuses purely on the presidency of the individual. You get maybe 2 chapters of lead-in - but the rest is all about what went on during the presidency. So far I've read the one on James Madison and Thomas Jefferson - and over the past week I received 3 more to add to my collection: George Washington and John Adams and John Quincy Adams. But I will someday have them all - see if I won't!!

I also received the book Final Cut which I have always wanted to read - it's one of my favorite kinds of books: how certain films become notorious disasters. It's interesting to read books like "The Making of Casablanca" - to hear how things become hits - but sometimes it's more interesting to learn from the debacles. Like Devil's Candy - about the making of Bonfire of the Vanities which is one of the best books about Hollywood I've ever read. Anyway, I've wanted to read Final Cut for a while - it tells the story of Heaven's Gate - a movie directed by Michael Cimino which - like the words "Ishtar" or "Waterworld" has come to be shorthand for: 'HUGE FUCKING MESS'. Heaven's Gate is often seen as the granddaddy of all messes - and this book is written by one of the producers on the film. I can't wait to read it. Which, judging from my To be Read pile, will be sometime around 2015.

Oh, and also I got the "baseball anthology" in the Library of America - and I am almost more excited about that one than all the others. Classic American baseball writing since the beginning of the sport? Please count me in. Now.

I received a MASSIVE biography of Alexis de Toqueville - from an absent friend across the Atlantic (I miss you!!) - like seriously - it is HUGE - and gorgeous, beautiful typeface, very readable - and it's a guy I know almost nothing about, although I have read his book about America. So I'm very excited to read that, too. In 2023, which is when I will get to it.

Let's see. What else.

Oh yeah - a book about Theo Van Gogh - and also the novel Perfume: Story of a Murderer - which I've been dying to read, but just keep forgetting about. So now it has arrived.

I know there's more.

Some people go shoe-shopping when they get the blues. (Although what I had could not be called the blues. It was more like a crisis.) Shoes don't do it for me, although I love them as well. Books bring on the adrenaline, the pheromones, the energy, the pulse quickening. They bring life. Life to the spirit, yet again.

Posted by sheila