Monday, December 19, 2016

Reaching for a book

Eliot Weinberger, quoted in a New Yorker piece about his writing: “‘When I hear the word “Trump,”’ he said, ‘I reach for a book.’”

What books are you reaching for? Me: Stefan Zweig’s Collected Stories (trans. Anthea Bell), Bryan A. Garner’s The Chicago Guide to Grammar, Usage, and Punctuation, Harry R. Warfel’s Who Killed Grammar? And Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, which leads back to current events.

comments: 4

Slywy said...

Barchester Towers. Looks like one of my used bookstore buys.

Slywy said...

The Quiverful name, while blblical in origin, is worthy of Dickens.

Pete said...

I'm reading Kurt Vonnegut: The Last Interview and Other Conversations. Oh, to have Vonnegut alive today. I would love to know his impressions of the Trump horror show.

Stefan said...

Alexander Weinstein's Children of the New World, David Lambuth's The Golden Book on Writing (thanks, Michael), and Rita Felski's Uses of Literature. Weinstein's short stories might be called fantasy or speculative fiction, but they read more like an extended effort to take the implications of our technology to logical extremes. And by logical, I mostly mean apocalyptic. Quite apt as we await our own dystopic future.