the best american infographics 2013

I love the collision of visuals and information so it's no wonder that one of my favorite books at the moment is this:

The Best American Infographics 2013

Some interesting selections from the book were featured over on Wired, including "Which Birth Dates Are the Most Common," "Four Kinds of Dog," "Map of a New America," and "The Last 45 Seconds." 

One infographic that I keep going back to is Randall Munroe's "Deepest of the Deep" which shows depths of oceans and lakes of the world side by side. As someone with a fear of deep water, I'm both fascinated by it and repelled.

Such a great book!

hipster branding

Hipster Branding via SwissMiss. Genius.

wildwood

 

I'm half way through Wildwood by Colin Meloy (of The Decemberists) and Carson Ellis (illustrator) and LOVING it. I wish I had a few hours to become completely transported to this world they've created...

 

visualizing bach

My friend Sam sent me this mesmerizing video.

baroque.me visualizes the first Prelude from Bach's Cello Suites. Using the math behind string length and pitch, it came from a simple idea: what if all the notes were drawn as strings? Instead of a stream of classical notation on a page, this interactive project highlights the music's underlying structure and subtle shifts.

This Prelude to the first Bach Cello Suite used to be one of my favorites warm-up pieces to start off a practice session. Enjoy.

Baroque.me: J.S. Bach - Cello Suite No. 1 - Prelude from Alexander Chen on Vimeo.

a few recent book buys

This won the 2011 Man Booker Prize for Fiction. I loved Arthur & George, and liked Flaubert's Parrot, and Love, Etc., so I have high expectations for The Sense of An Ending.

Kjell Eriksson's The Princess of Burundi and The Cruel Stars of Night were both strong page-turners. The third in the series featuring police detective Ann Lindell, The Demon of Dakar, was kind of a drag (as in it dragged and I didn't finish it). I'm hoping this is more in keeping with the first two books in the series.

I know, the cover is a little too cheesy mystery. But... the premise sounds entertaining and it was a pick on the 2011 Booker longlist. And, I admit, I love a good Victorian-era mystery, à la Crimson Petal and the White, Misfortune, and Fingersmith.

“Extravagantly entertaining . . . One of the great pleasures of this novel is how confidently [Paul Murray] addresses such disparate topics as quantum physics, video games, early-20th-century mysticism, celebrity infatuation, drug dealing, Irish folklore and pornography . . . Six hundred sixty-one pages may seem like a lot to devote to a bunch of flatulence-obsessed kids, but that daunting length is part and parcel of the cause to which Skippy Dies, in the end, is most devoted. Teenagers, though they may not always act like it, are human beings, and their sadness and loneliness (and their triumphs, no matter how temporary) are as momentous as any adult’s And novels about them—if they’re as smart and funny and touching as Skippy Dies—can be just as long as they like.” —Dan Kois, The New York Times Book Review

“The success of The Line of Beauty meant that Alan Hollinghurst’s next book was surely going to be eagerly anticipated. But the seven-year wait for The Stranger’s Child and the steady unfurling of its ambition over the novel’s 435 pages has had another effect too. It has dawned on people that Hollinghurst, the gay novelist, might also be the best straight novelist that Britain has to offer—that is, the writer whose talents sit most comfortably within the contours of the form. . . . The Stranger’s Child stands comparison to Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections for the way that the sweep of the narrative, its simultaneous flicker of comedy and drama, is matched and sustained by the precision and the leisurely economy of its individual sentences . . . The Stranger’s Child spans almost a century. And here, too [as in his previous books] sex opens up the novel, though the thing unlocked is not the small, cloistered world of Edwardian privilege but of all English literary history. The book’s sections are linked by two houses that, in their different ways, stand witness to social decline: Corley Court, a Victorian pile, home of the aristocratic young poet Cecil Valance; and the more modest Two Acres family home of George Sawle, his friend, and lover, from Cambridge. With [this] novel Hollinghurst imaginatively insists that our literary tradition would be unrecognizably depleted without the submerged current of homosexuality. And that The Stranger’s Child itself is the culmination of not only Hollinghurst’s ambition but that secret literary tradition to which it is addressed. It is a claim that is hard to dispute.”
—Geoff Dyer, New York Magazine

How about you? Any books you are dying to read?

feminist ryan gosling

Feminist Ryan Gosling.

the last werewolf

So I finished another book. I know, amazing! One of the perks of having my parents visit us is that I usually get a little time to myself. When my mom took Stella to the park on Thursday I started Glen Duncan's The Last Werewolf. 

Before I launch into how much I LOVED this book (LOVED IT!) I'll preface by stating that this book isn't for everyone. First, it's about a 200-year-old werewolf. So, you know, if you're not into werewolves or vampires (I myself am not big fan of the occult) you might not be inclined to fully appreciate this book. Second, it's gory and at times raunchy, as you might expect from a book about a flesh and guts (human) eating, horny werewolf.

The premise is Jake Marlowe (possibly a nod to the other Marlowe, creator of Doctor Faustus?) finds out he's the last werewolf on earth, the last of his brutal kind. He is lonely without a She, and now alone in a world with filled folks seeking to destroy him. With no real reason or desire left to live he contemplates suicide.

This is a gothically dark but deeply funny, strangely sexy (werewolf coitus), beautifully written book. I flagged half a dozen pages with paragraphs of luminous prose. Like this:

One develops an instinct for letting silence do the heavy lifting. In the three, four, five seconds that passed without either of us speaking, the many ways the conversation could go came and went like time-lapse film of flowers blooming and dying. When it was over all the relevant information was in. Parodoxically, it renewed our licence to pretend.

And this:

Iowa. Nebraska. Wyoming. Utah. Those unritzy states of seared openness, giant arenas for the colossal geometry of light and weather. Here the main performance is still planetary, a lumbering introspective working-out of masses and pressures yielding huge accidents of beauty: thunderheads like floating anvils; a sudden blizzard. Geological time, it dawns on you, is still going on.

on the topic of buying books

The subject of book buying came up over dinner a few weeks ago with friends Andie and Darcy. Andie and I studied at college together and we met Darcy at a publishing company we worked for a few years back. We are all avid readers so it's not a strange topic to come up over dinner. I think that they were a little incredulous, though, to learn how many books we buy on average per week. Before going on, I'll ask you this. How many books do you buy a week or in a month?

Having worked in a bookstore for years I know how important it is to buy books. How important it is for the bookstore's livelihood, and how important it is for my psyche. I love the knowledge that I have new worlds to explore on our shelves. I love being surrounded by them, and being able to share our library with friends.



Buying books for us means supporting our local bookstore. It means browsing the tables for new releases for 30 minutes, catching up with the booksellers, sharing our finds and then deciding what we want to bring into our library and what we want to buy as gifts. We dread the day there will be no brick and mortar bookstores to linger in on a lazy Saturday afternoon.

So we buy books. On an average, we buy around 3-5 books a week. Before Stella I used to be able to read through that many in a week. But, things change when you have a baby.

Yesterday Andie brought my attention to this wonderful quote which I have to share:

"He should live with more books than he reads, with a penumbra of unread pages, of which he knows the general character and content, fluttering round him. This is the purpose of libraries.... It is also the purpose of good bookshops, both new and secondhand, of which there are still some, and would that there were more. A bookshop is not like a railway booking-office which one approaches knowing what one wants. One should enter it vaguely, almost in a dream, and allow what is there freely to attract and influence the eye.

"To walk the rounds of the bookshops, dipping in as curiosity dictates, should be an afternoon's entertainment. Feel no shyness or compunction in taking it. Bookshops exist to provide it; and the booksellers welcome it, knowing how it will end."

--Economist John Maynard Keynes, as quoted in a Canberra Times piece headlined "Bookshops about more than just purchasing.

With that, I'll share our book purchases so far this week:

1. Mr Rosenblum Dreams in English by Natasha Solomons, called "[A] rare treat; a debut novel that is pretty much flawless" by Alyson Rudd of the Times (London).
2. Rules of Civility by Amor Towles. This got two thumbs up from John Evans, co-owner of Diesel, and scored a starred review in Publishers Weekly: "A smashing debut novel...remarkable for its strong narrative, original characters and a voice influenced by Fitzgerald and Capote, but clearly true to itself."
3. The Last Werewolf by Glen Duncan. Besides the fact that this was recommended by my bookseller friend, Grant, this buy was clearly influenced by the fact that I am totally and completely addicted to True Blood (hello, Eric Northman!).
4. D&AD, The Copy Book. A gift.

What books are on your nightstand?

thou

Some faves:
Thou yeasty plume-plucked death-token

Thou pribbling hell-hated maggot-pie

Thou dankish bat-fowling moldwarp

[via ian claridge]