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  books 06.02.05: Anthony of The Meatriarchy has tagged me as part of a kind of literary chain letter that’s been filtering through conservative blogs over the last few days. Another victim, Monte Solberg, still hasn’t bothered letting us know what a Canadian Member of Parliament reads, even with a fully active blog to broadcast the news. All of the three blogs I’ve maintained over the last few years have been moribund for too long, but none as long as this particular site – the first thing I ever did online, back when online diaries were the blogs of their day. Whatever that means. I’ve wanted to revive at least part of this site for months now, but time has been scarce. But I’m feeling ambitious this week, so here I go, making a commitment I probably can’t keep. I doubt if I’ll be able to update this thing more than once a week, probably not even that often. So if you like what you read here, I can’t promise you anything more. The best I can offer you is to go here, or here. I actually make money writing that stuff, so the motivation to produce is obvious enough. Anyway - books. I own a few. Read all about it. Number of books I own: Oh … my. Okay – we moved six months ago, and then had a baby, so I haven’t quite had the time to build all the bookshelves necessary to get our library out of boxes yet. And so they sit – around eighty boxes or so, filling up one whole hallway, still filled with the books that our friends Kathy and her boyfriend Arnie helped us pack months ago. (Thanks again, guys.) I’ve unpacked a dozen or so boxes in my study, and filled the Ikea shelves in the dining room with the “pretty books” - our Folio editions, most of the art, photography and architecture books, basically. That would make about a hundred boxes of books. Assuming somewhere between two and three dozen books in each box, depending on size, that would make it about 3,000 books, best guess, probably more. Not including about a hundred and fifty board books and storybooks up in the girls’ room, or course. Since we’ve moved – and probably since almost all of my scant free time is taken up with building bookshelves – I’ve tried to imagine owning fewer books. I’ve been giving away books to friends and co-workers over the past few months, and being a lot more ruthless about selling anything I don’t absolutely want to keep. I’m hoping that, by the time the shelves are done, enough time will have passed that – at least for me – I’ll feel a lot less sentimental about the books I’ve been carrying around for years. My wife, I think, will be much more ruthless. I have a dream of a few dozen boxes of books to sell or give away, and something we haven’t had in years – empty shelves, in single, not double rows, so we can see all of our books without having to pull out a front layer. No one without a massive home should own this many books, unless they’re planning to donate it to someone, one day. Last Book I Bought: Anthony Blunt: His Lives, Miranda Carter: Behold the story of a traitor. I find the Cambridge Spies fascinating – how does privilege produce a spy? What kind of logical torture do you have to inflict on yourself to betray a system that’s placed you very nearly at the top? How can an intelligent person end up working for an tyranny, one that exaggerates the inequities they claim damn the west with an even more extreme repression? Blunt, even more than Burgess or McLean, embodies this contradiction to me – the fact that the system he worked to undermine protected him for so long makes his story even more compelling. Last Book I Read: Churchill’s Hour, Michael Dobbs: The third book in a fictionalized trilogy set during the first few years of WW2 in Britain, with Churchill as the protagonist. Thanks to Nick at the Flea for the recommendation – I enjoyed them tremendously, the first (Winston’s War) most of all. Dobbs was in Thatcher’s cabinet, so he has a pretty decent feel for Westminster. If you need to be reminded of just how close we came to losing that war, this is as good a place to start as any, provided your next stop is John Lukacs’ Five Days In London: May 1940. Five Books That Mean a Lot to Me: The Moviegoer, Walker Percy: I’ve been re-reading this every four or five years since I bought it, just after I left college. It’s a book about an aimless man, which is why it sometimes seems like an aimless book – Binx Bolling (who’d write a name like this today?) is pushing back the onset of adulthood as far as he can, leaning back into the cushion that his very comfortably middle-class New Orleans family can provide. Looking back, what attracted me to the book was a combination of identification and wishful thinking; I was committed to delaying responsibility as far as possible into a future that, frankly, didn’t promise much. I didn’t have the cushion of family and money, though, no matter how much I tried to imitate Binx’s style – I still find something terribly appealing about the whole American post-war period today. I can’t help but wonder if my identification with characters like Binx wasn’t a self-fulfilling prophecy – that if I’d just chosen my fictional heroes a bit differently, I might not have drifted so painfully through the whole of my twenties and half of my thirties, only really getting on with my life when it was probably nearly halfway over. It was the title that grabbed me, I think – evoking a life spent watching, at a distance, doing your level best to take in life in small, carefully examined increments, maintaining the illusion of control. If I’m honest with myself, though, it’s hard not to admit that it was probably as much as I was capable of at the time. It’s amazing to me, and a bit shaming, to realize how long I spent with my emotional training wheels. The Leopard, Giuseppe di Lampedusa: Saw the movie first, then read the book. When I was young, I was impressed by its epic qualities – now I’m almost overwhelmed by the sense of decay and sadness. Lampedusa, a Sicilian aristocrat, wrote about the end of the world of his father and grandfather with a sense of inevitability that only comes from living squarely in the aftermath. The Leopard feels more like history than most history books. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh: Another book I revisit every few years. It’s amazing how well Waugh depicts the strange status of English Catholics – they weren’t the ones who made a break with their country’s heritage, yet they’ve become something very like foreigners in their own country. While we watch the slow self-implosion of the Church Of England, this book gives a glimpse at one small facet of that collapse, captured in time decades ago. Intellectuals, Paul Johnson: There was a time when I needed to hear that the people I admired – or rather, the people I’d been told to admire – had feet of clay. When you grow up looking at culture and intellectual life like something behind a thick pane of glass – a party in a well-lit room from which you’ve been somehow been excluded – it’s hard to develop the habit of skepticism. Johnson’s polemical book has been called a lot of things; Christopher Hitchens called it “foul-minded” and “disgraceful” back when he was still a fully-paid up member of the left. I doubt if he’s changed his mind, though, in spite of whatever sea change has overtaken him (and all of us) over the last few years. It might not be Johnson’s best work – or even a particularly responsible piece of history – but it served the purpose of shaking me away from the political and cultural moorings to which I’d been tethered for too many years. England’s Dreaming, John Savage: I suppose Legs McNeil’s Please Kill Me would do as well, but it’s Savage’s book that I come back to again and again, the only book about punk that’s actually as smart as we all fancied we were, back when rebellion still felt like something an adult could do. Punk was my cultural moment, and while I was too young to participate in the first wave of punk as much more than a spotty spectator, saving up to buy records with money I earned caddying at the local golf course, it is still and will always be the high ground from which I’ll survey culture and history. I’m happy to be an old punk; I couldn’t help but smile the other day when my 2-year-old daughter started bopping along to a Lurkers track while sitting on my lap in front of the computer. Still, I wonder what her rebellion will be like, and whether I’ll be shocked, or merely judge it poorly compared to my own – I still don’t know which would be more tiresome. And in keeping with the game, I nominate: John Scalzi
...and one more besides:
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