In Which We Give Joan Didion Something To Remember Us By

You can find more of our Summer Reading series here and here.

Summer Reading

by ELEANOR MORROW

Alex and Andrew have been occupying the male side of the SFF spectrum, but what about the work of Ursula K. LeGuin? Know perhaps better for her classic bildungsroman The Wizard of Earthsea (Harry Potter when there was no such thing), this magnificent novel combines the worlds of fantasy and science fiction, and won a Hugo and Nebula in the year the Apollo 11 mission reached the moon. It is an endlessly deep tale, which would make a magnificent film. I won't spoil the particulars, but LeGuin is a hard genius.

I was never much for physics; my instructor was a Russian immigrant and frankly I barely understood a word she said from the moment I met her to when I dropped out of her class with my C- average. Nevermind that, because Ilya Prigogine's masterpiece brings to bear all the things we can't understand. Some days I can't believe it myself that I'm walking on a planet, in a solar system, in the universe, in space.

Is Play It As It Lays a great novel? Probably depends on where you're standing. To a repressed New Englander, it was basically Fear of Flying in a literary package. The narrative concerns itself with an unhappy actress recovering from a nervous breakdown. No one writes seriously about these sorts of people, or even unseriously, but that's what makes Joan fun. She's essentially unserious even when she's at her most didactic. I still think this book is a lot of fun, although I sure wouldn't recommend the movie.

A beautiful, spare, short book about growing up. Read it on the way to somewhere. You will be more surprised by your arrival than you can imagine. Jaggy followed up this masterpiece with a father-daughter melodrama, S.S. Proleterka, but it's really Sweet Days of Discipline that is her masterpiece.

My favorite poet: instead of being blunt, she is delicate, praying over what normally doesn't get prayed over. A biting sense of humor, and a New York setting. Her Collected is probably more readily available, but The Kingfisher preserves her eye for the natural in any environment. The woman even wrote good poetry about trash.

Perhaps the most forgotten genius of 20th century literature, McCarthy reaped accolades with her debut, The Company You Keep, a hilarious expose of the intellectual circles of the 1930s. Not exactly timeless, as her memoirs prove. She got around quite a bit, and had a lot of fun. Who knew that the 1930s were wild for some? I didn't. The polar opposite of her Minnesota mirror-universe writer Midge Decter's disturbingly weird autobiography, An Old Wife's Tale.

Some folks write that masterful first novel and quit trying. Amis never did, and probably bettered his heartsick debut. It was turned into a strange but funny film starring Ione Skye. Not much has been written perceptively about the experience and consequences of sex, let alone for teenagers, but this and Philip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus are short little masterpieces that their authors should probably have returned to more often than they did.

Eleanor Morrow is the senior contributor to This Recording. She lives in Manhattan, and tumbls here.

"Kids Aflame" - ARMS (mp3)

"Tiger Tamer" - ARMS (mp3)

"The Frozen Lake" - ARMS (mp3)

ARMS myspace

In Which We Have The Page Turners for the Plebes

You can find Andrew Zornoza's summer reading list here.

Summer Reading

by ALEX CARNEVALE

Summer is a time for reading. We used to have a game at our library (with useful prizes) for books completed. I am sure I bested everyone, but reading, like the acquisition of all knowledge is its own reward. To find that first explicit sex scene, to tell of Dumbledore's death, to make the round hole in your heart full with Robert Heinlein.

These days my friends tell me of what they are reading. I am always cringing! If you like to read, read it all. If you do it grudgingly, consign yourself to only the best. Stick with the classics — the real classics, not what gives Harold Bloom bloomies. Find something readable and rewarding and forget the rest. A real page turner.

Heinlein's most ragtag fun adventure. Great for engineering majors; lovers of robots and cats. It begins in the dark recesses of a bar, it ends someplace a lot more fun. The greatest revenge fantasy ever written, you will literally be cheering so loudly that they'll hear you in cold sleep. Why would you want to read anything better than this?

If you can't get the good Heinlein, settle for an inspired imitator. Awesome scale, moving feeling for the victims of interplanetary war. Here's Scalzi: build a real universe, with some of the vagaries of our own. Put everything on the line. Pack with bludgeoning sense of humor and moral responsibility. Enjoy on the beach or with cocktails.

Since girls don't usually like spaceships (I sympathize, they're so damned big), there's something for everyone. If you can't read this book in an afternoon, consider retiring to Florida.

John Irving's had his moments. Hell, he's had more than a few moments. Despite being a major dickhead, he can really write and his family histories are extremely engrossing. For tears and such there's Garp but Hotel New Hampshire is best for really weeping and has a million endings, each better than the last. It made it to the movies, but it could never really be a movie — it was too wild and wonderful.

There are lots of great multiple narrators novels (Joe Haldeman's Seasons, Faulkner's As I Lay Dying) but this is my favorite, American Psycho before there was an American Psycho. (Have you read American Psycho? It's brilliant.) Yet Bret Easton Ellis weeps his Lunar Park dream about being a fad and Amis just releases quality novel after quality novel. He's a very funny man.

His father had the more perverse sense of humor.

Morgan decided to write a fantasy novel. He'd never written one before. So he wrote a combination steampunk/Guy Gavriel Kay/Future Earth missile of a fantasy novel. It's a bit thick in places, but the mythology is just breathtaking and there's a sequel coming.

The greatest Canadian novelist ever, Kay's imaginativeness knows no bounds. If this guy was in a supermarket, he'd probably be high on acid and praying to the Budweiser display. This is the first book of a fantasy trilogy that makes The Lord of the Rings look like Spongebob Squarepants. That's not really a putdown but do I have your attention. Six Canadian college students get transported to Fionovar, first of all worlds. I love multi-world fantasy with sex and boners and Princes and insane mage battles. I could bathe in The Fionovar Tapestry, I really would.

If you're going to rip somebody off, go straight to the top. Ishiguro took Kafka's measure and turned out a long book that could be 50 pages for what it feels like. Deeply moving, strange and wonderful, it holds your attention like an exciting dream, and although I can't remember any sex in it, that's OK this time.

A collection of all his short stories with generous introductions for each, GRRM got a profile for his Game of Thrones series but he's also an extremely versatile genre-hopper with a devious mind for the unexpected.

His stand-alone novel with Lisa Tuttle is the perfect beach read. A spaceship lands in a ocean-dominated world. To get from island to island, they refashion the materials from the craft into wings handed down through families that allow passage around their strange but vibrant little world. One girl changes all that.

I couldn't put it better myself.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He tumbls here.

"Dismantle" - Collarbones (mp3)

"Weatherman" - Collarbones (mp3)

"Voltaire" - Collarbones (mp3)

Also, do not read Donna Tartt's The Little Friend. I warned you.

In Which We Put You On The Right Literary Track

Summer Reading

by ANDREW ZORNOZA

I'm a habitual self-interlocutor.

Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto has been photographing seemingly random swaths of oceanscape since 1972.

In the summer we think more about the sea. What else is there to say? Sugimoto divides the landscape right at the vertical midpoint of his photographs, he provides no focal point—these are compositionally crude, a child's drawing without a boat. The photographs are titled simply: Ligurian Sea. Boden Sea, Ionian Sea, North Atlantic Ocean, etc. . . .

Naming things has something to do with human awareness, with the separation of the entire world from you. So with the Seascapes I was thinking about the most ancient of human impressions. The time when man first named the world around him, the Sea…[the Seascapes] all look alike, but they are located at different places in different countries, and the oceans have different names.

But the seas do not all look alike. There is no need for a focal point because none exists. Any part of the sea is as good another to lose yourself in. All that remains the same is Sugimoto's perspective, the viewing angle, the perceived height of the vantage point.

Sugimoto uses an 19^th century large-format cabinet camera. The 8 x 10 negatives are easily scarred by static electricity; the ASA speed of the film is tortuously slow.

...but personally I was also concerned with the quality of the photography, traditional professional photography. I didn't want to be criticized for taking low-quality photographs, so I tried to reach the best, highest quality of photography and then to combine this with a conceptual art practice. But thinking back, that was the wrong decision [laughs]. Developing a low-quality aesthetic is a sign of serious fine art - I still see this.

The shutter opens, the sea enters: despite their detail, each image has compressed time, each incorporates a spool of motion into its present tense. Buy it here.

If you are not indoors for the summer, here are some more seas in motion—appropriately pondered from a beach towel:

Self-Portrait with Beach, Frederic Tuten

The beach, the sea, the blue umbrellas. A sail. Then another, like a long arm climbing the horizon. She stretched out on a blanket beside me in the dreadful hot sand.

Tuten, a generous boulevardier and elder statesman of the avant-garde has quietly been assembling a series of self-portraits. Tuten's stories are tender, with an oddly refreshing touch of narcissism thrown in. And always beautifully written. The author's Self-Portrait with Icebergs also makes excellent summer reading, despite the title.

Goodbye My Brother, John Cheever

A must read for anyone trapped on a family vacation — especially those take the extra minute to make sure they have Vampire Weekend on their iPod before they leave for the Cape. First time readers generally sympathize with the narrator and loathe the dour brother, Lawrence. Those who re-read start to see holes in the narrator's story and begin to loathe the unnamed narrator. Those who reread over and over say fuck it and hate Lawrence anyway. Similar to Sam Shepard's True West, and arguably like any brother narrative, this one flirts with schizophrenia. Neither character is real, only Cheever says Thallasa, thallasa and gets away with it. When the women walk naked and unshy out of the sea — all this is playing out inside one bifurcated mind.

The Man Who Lost the Sea, Theodore Sturgeon

The sick man is buried in the cold sand with only his head and his left arm showing. He is dressed in a pressure suit and looks like a man from Mars. Built into his left sleeve is a combination time-piece and pressure gauge, the gauge with a luminous blue indicator which makes no sense, the clock hands luminous red. He can hear the pounding of surf and the soft swift pulse of his pumps. One time long ago when he was swimming he went too deep and stayed down too long and came up too fast, and when he came to it was like this: they said, 'Don't move, boy. You've got the bends. Don't even try to move.' He had tried anyway.

Thomas Sturgeon is undoubtedly an acquired taste, but so is life. Too pulpy for the literati, too silly for those who thought they knew better (with titles like The [Widget] The [Wadget] and Boff; and "If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?" who can blame them), Sturgeon is perfect for the beach. If you like the above which you can read here , find “Slow Sculpture.” The latter story contains one of the most imaginative most heartbreaking leaps in all literature with the words: "Come up to the house and I'll fix it."

The Terminal Beach, JG Ballard

Above him, along the crests of the dunes, the tall palms leaned into the dim air like the symbols of a cryptic alphabet. The landscape of the island was covered by strange ciphers.

It is sad that so many young experimentalists of today have fallen under the spell of Barthelme. Ten years ago, it seemed there were many other paths to follow. Calvino, Acker, Ballard.... Now that he is dead, people will miss him.

Some Clouds, Paco Ignacio Taibo II

He was sitting in the last chair under the last lonely palm tree, drinking beer out of a bottle and cleaning the sand off a pile of small shells..."

So opens this Taibo novel, with one-eyed Hector Belascoaran Shayne downing Coronas and waiting for his sister to arrive and shake him out of his torpor.

Belascoaran is one of the great characters in all modern fiction. Too bad, the author, Paco Ignacio Taibo II, is woefully unappreciated here in the United States. Taibo's Belascoaran novels have the proper blend of sex, drama and hijinks to make the hours disappear and spin the mind into a blissfully woozy state of vicarious carpet riding. The gimpy, one-eyed Belascoaran is an aficianodo of carbonated beverages, has an urban geographer's love for "The Monster" (Mexico City) and — pre-craigslist — practically lives in his "office": a rented desk in a room shared with a plumber, an upholster and a sewage engineer. Highly recommended.

Also:

To The Lighthouse, Virgina Woolf

The Tempest, William Shakespeare

The Invention of Morel, Adolfo Bioy Casares

Andrew Zornoza is the senior contributor to This Recording. You can find his website here. You can purchase his new book, Where I Stay, here.

"Stopover Bombay" - Alice Coltrane (mp3)

"Shiva-Loka" - Alice Coltrane (mp3)

"Journey in Satchidanada" - Alice Coltrane (mp3) highly recommended