Your Winter Reading List
Relax, sit back, let my questionable cultural choices take you over
To prevent your inner entitled narcissist from leaching into the holiday season, I instead invite you to channel this energy into Eloise. In case you do not know, Eloise is six. She lives at the Plaza (yes, that Plaza). Watch her torment her nanny, steal cantaloupe from balding men, and display a troubling ignorance of what “charge it, please” means for someone who uses the phrase so much—while sizing up every adult in her path. Bonus points if you read it while in Paris/being trailed by cartoon KGB men in fur hats. P.S. Eloise in Moscow is the book that gave me my enduring love of a good grey/yellow color scheme.
Make sure you get a copy with an appendix, because the appendix of this book is the best part. It’s difficult to say anything original about The Sound and the Fury that isn’t a personal opinion, so I’ll just comment that Faulkner’s infamous run-on sentences and muddled trainwreck descriptions have conveyed to me intimate subtleties of human emotion with an unparalleled urgency. I can’t imagine I will ever find a parallel.
When is the last time you read a poem you weren’t instructed to read for a class? Update: in 2 minutes, after you read this description! I saved this poem a long time ago because in high school I loved peanut butter so much I used to eat it by the jar. Then I was re-reading it one day and realized that I just really like it, and also Eileen seems like a fun lady. Here is one of many good parts:
I am an enemy / of change, as / you know. All / the things I / embrace as new / are in / fact old things, / re-released: swimming, / the sensation of / being dirty in / body and mind / summer as a / time to do / nothing and make / no money.
Instructions for this one: Go back in time to when you were eight years old. Read this book. Reread approximately every two years after that. Enjoy learning about the relativity of the passage of time. Reflect on the events you’ve used to mark phases of your life and realize that everything is too continuous to be divided by births, deaths, marriages, and jobs.
Kim Kardashian West on Kanye and Taylor Swift, What’s in O.J.’s Bag, and Understanding Caitlyn
Ah yes, the article that set the internet on fire with a prelude to Kim’s receipts of KanTay-gate, my appreciation for which must be credited to Maddie, who urged me to read it. If the intro isn’t enough of a moneyshot for you, read on for a thoughtful portrait of a woman painted too often as thoughtless. The success of Kim and her family, love or hate them, is a vital indicator of our changing definitions of art and culture. This profile is especially helpful for remembering to send Good Thoughts to America’s First Family of Media as they are very painfully experiencing the major dangers that come with fame.
Ignoring low-hanging election joke fruit, this was the best book I read this summer. An oral history of the punk movement, it’s a cleverly diced and spliced collection of interviews with anyone and everyone connected to the inception, ascent, and death of punk music.
Look inside for firsthand accounts of gonorrhea symptoms, acquaintances’ true feelings toward Patti Smith (Social climber or driven by the validation of her idols? Are these the same thing?? You be the judge!) and lessons in how to avoid arrest for heroin possession by claiming to be an antique needle collector. I suggest reading it in New York so you can discover that the café you’re in is JUST behind one of the 7,504 city gutters in which Iggy Pop’s bandmates realized that Iggy wasn’t dead but just like, really drunk and passed out in a gutter.
Tom Robbins, absurdist creator of Sissy Hankshaw and her giant thumbs, tackles most topics in this treatise on explosive environmentalism and (even more?) explosive love. If you’ve ever felt a kinship to eco-terrorism, princesses from the Pacific Northwest, redheads, and/or have a severe gambling debt, this book is undoubtably for you. In addition to unwittingly offering us a remarkable photo caption template (“Still Life with Cronut” has quite a ring, doesn’t it?), Robbins graces us with tidbits like
Who knows how to make love stay?
1. Tell love you are going to Junior’s Deli on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn to pick up a cheesecake, and if loves stays, it can have half. It will stay.
2. Tell love you want a memento of it and obtain a lock of its hair. Burn the hair in a dime-store incense burner with yin/yang symbols on three sides. Face southwest. Talk fast over the burning hair in a convincingly exotic language. Remove the ashes of the burnt hair and use them to paint a moustache on your face. Find love. Tell it you are someone new. It will stay.
3. Wake love up in the middle of the night. Tell it the world is on fire. Dash to the bedroom window and pee out of it. Casually return to bed and assure love that everything is going to be all right. Fall asleep. Love will be there in the morning.
The book also has an effing fantastic last line Adam won’t let me publish because he’s still mad at me for spilling it to him two months ago.
This is my most very favorite New Yorker piece, and as the title suggests it is about World Champion Snooker Player/Very Sad Man Ronnie O’Sullivan. Read for 1) A Lesson in what Snooker is. 2) Proof of the existence of a man who repeatedly used the statement “Ron’s the name, porn’s the game,” in casual conversation (Ronnie’s father). 3) Reassurance that even Very Impressive People also get sad. 4) Such rhetorical gems as “In the winter, he volunteered to work on a local farm. He dug ditches and fed the pigs. He was somewhat afraid of the goats.”
I read this at 15, before I was fully aware of the political insanity that is Ayn Rand. Trust—after reading this you cannot be anything but aware. While, to quote Rory Gilmore, “no one writes a forty page monologue like she does,” I am recommending this book not for the courtroom speech, but instead because nothing says “Happy Holidays 2016” like a story about a man with jarring hair who likes to construct tall buildings and shun the interests of others!
