Like a Hole in the Head

That's how much I need another book.

Yet every few weeks I find myself in a bookstore. Again.

What happens next is not pretty.

I buy more books, of course, thus wantonly ignoring the stacks of books I've already bought that sit waiting at home for me to read them.

Sitting. Waiting. In all the usual places.

By my bed. On the coffee table. By the back door. By the front door.

Do I need to have my head examined?

Ah well.

What did I go and buy this time?

I am so glad you asked.

Because next to the pleasure of reading books and buying books, there is the pleasure of talking about books.

Well. For starters, I went to Politics and Prose, which in case anyone is curious is right here.

I limited my perusal to their justly famous and very generous sale/remaindered aisle. It's right next to their coffee shop, so it's convenient to segue to my other addiction.

I always begin by saying to myself, "no more books now, we're just looking." I say this as many times as it takes for the words to start to mean very little and then next to nothing and then--poof!--nothing at all.

That's a nice moment.

Then comes the time to stack books up my arm until there are little red marks all in a row.

(you know, this is getting pretty graphic. What is my problem this week?)

Of the loot I brought home last week, I've already read (and been somewhat disappointed in) the wonderfully titled Mortal City, a slim book of essays edited by Peter Lang and published by Princeton Architectural Press. The back cover was what gripped me: "A heightened perception of urban violence increasingly dominates public discourse...The very definitions of the city and of violence are constantly being redefined: the site of the city shifts across real and imagined space..."

I think in fairness that my disappointment stems from my having read lots and LOTS of essays of this nature. So I'm jaded.

Peter Lang's other work intrigues me, though; particularly Superstudio: Life Without Objects.

I also picked up a copy of James Howard Kunstler's The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition. Kunstler, a self-trained and self-appointed architectural critic (the best kind, I'm convinced) and gentle-hearted curmudgeon of the landscape, is a past master at sentences like these, with that wonderful new-minted coining of the adverb "immersively:"

One of the most popular beliefs of the computer era has been that virtual places are every bit as okay as real places. This idea gained popularity in direct proportion to the spread of immersively ugly, monotonous, dysfunctional suburban environments through the 1980s and 90s. The more our nation came to be composed of crappy housing subdivisions, highway strips, Big Box fiefdoms, and parking wastelands, the more appealing the idea of virtual reality became ("Virtual Is No Refuge from the Real").

Probably the book I am most looking forward to is Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the Visible City by Mike Davis. Anyone who follows the rapidly shifting demographics of the U.S. or was amused at the controversy over acclaimed author Sandra Cisneros's periwinkle purple house in San Antonio's King William District should get a kick out of this book.

Also on my list of recent acquisitions: The Courtesans by Joanna Richardson; The Gate by Francois Bizot; Kinship: A Family's Journey in Africa and America by Phillippe Wamba; and, in honor of my brother, The Birth of the Chess Queen: A History by Marilyn Yalom, and Monsters, Tricksters, and Sacred Cows: Animal Tales and American Identities, edited by A. James Arnold.

Happy reading.