Nightglow Window

Reading List

My dad gave me a gift certificate to Amazon.com for Christmas, so my bedside table is now full of new books.

After the ASR trade show, we have dinner with Heather and Mike and their kids, then I collapse in bed with my books. Both Sydney and Hannah have friends over, so the house is full of the loud, excited talk and laughter of girls.

It's a needed juxtaposition for Cormac McCarthy's book The Road, a bleak and harrowing story. The post-apocalyptic world of The Road is a gaping wound that pelts down upon the two main characters, an unnamed man and his young son. The sky is a gray shroud that drizzles ash. All wildlife is gone, the forests are burned, and bands of cannibals roam the landscape. In this rusted tin can of a world used up, the only thing that keeps the main character moving forward, heading toward the mythic "Coast" where things just might be better, is the love he has for his son.

It's so brutal that I purposely left this book behind when I went to Hawaii, but the theme of the enduring power of love, faith, and hope over all else began to reveal itself as I read tonight and I'm eager to see how McCarthy expands on this. His style is sear and spare and a few tricks are used to heighten the effect. (He rarely uses apostrophes or quotation marks; there are no chapters.) It's a haunting read that will no doubt stick with me for a long time.

A completely different book in style and substance, but also in it's own way disturbing is Bob Woodward's State Of Denial, which chronicles the somewhat pell-mell run-up to the Iraq war and how things fell apart after that. Like with The Road, I'm still in the early stages of this book, but (hardly a surprise) I'm extremely impressed by Woodward's reportage, the breadth of who he interviews and the candor they provide to this politically charged topic.

The last book I'm pecking away at now is Reading Like A Writer by Francine Prose. Prose, a professor of creative writing, instructs on how to ready with deliberation and forethought, savoring every sentence morsel instead of rushing through the meal. The examples she uses are great and should provide a short list of great books to read.

The other books waiting in the wings are:
A Farewell To Arms By Ernest Hemingway
Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris
The Book Of Laughter And Forgetting by Milan Kundera
A Portrait Of The Artist As A young Man by James Joyce
The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2005 edited by David Eggers