2006 List

Here's the list of books I read this year -- annual essay to follow.

January
1. The Elementary Particles, by Michel Houellebecq, 264
2. Deep Blues, by Robert Palmer, 277
3. The Seas, by Samantha Hunt, 192
February
4. The Assassins' Gate, by George Packer, 451
5. Chip Kidd: Book One, by Chip Kidd
6. Pattern Recognition, by Wm. Gibson, 356
7. Everything That Rises, by Lawrence Weschler, 232
8. Other Electricities, by Ander Monson, 164
March
9. The Trouble with Tom, by Paul Collins, 275
10. Perfume, by Patrick Suskind, 255
11. The Anarchist in the Library, by Siva Vaidhyanathan, 256
12. The Man of Feeling, by Javier Marias, 187
April
13. Black Swan Green, by David Mitchell, 295
May
14. This Side of Paradise, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, 322
15. Time Was Soft There, by Jeremy Mercer, 267
16. The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, by Michael Chabon, 297
17. The Whitsun Weddings, by Philip Larkin, 46
18. V. and other poems, by Tony Harrison, 86
19. King of the Jews, by Nick Tosches, 316
June
20. Hide & Seek, by Ian Rankin, 261
21. Your Face Tomorrow Vol. 1: Fever and Spear, by Javier Marias, 387
22. Voyage Along the Horizon, by Javier Marias, 171
July
23. About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made, by Ben Yagoda, 479
24. Cold Skin, by Albert Sanchez Pinol, 182
25. Banvard's Folly, by Paul Collins, 287
August
26. Killings, by Calvin Trillin, 231
27. The Gift, by Vladimir Nabokov, 366
28. The Thin Place, by Kathryn Davis, 275
September
29. Killing Yourself to Live, by Chuck Klosterman, 257
30. Staying Up Much Too Late, by Gordon Theisen, 256
31. The Adversary, by Emmanuel Carrere, 216
32. Dermaphoria, by Craig Clevenger, 215
October
33. The Caretaker & The Dumb Waiter: Two Plays, by Harold Pinter, 121
34. Shoedog, by George Pelecanos, 286
35. Diary of a Madman and Other Stories, by Nikolai Gogol, 236
36. The Journalist and the Murderer, by Janet Malcolm, 162
37. The Woods; Lakeboat; and Edmond (three plays), by David Mamet, 298
November
38. English, August: An Indian Story, by Upamanyu Chatterjee, 326
39. Radio Free Albemuth, by Phillip K. Dick, 224
December
40. The Innocents Abroad, by Mark Twain, 52?
41. Little Girl Lost, by Richard Aleas, 220
42. In Defense of English Cooking, by George Orwell, 56

Michel Gondry v. Rubik's Cube

In case you haven't seen this yet.

The Divine Gas

This is the huge mural in the lobby of Boston's new Insititute of Contemporary Art. From the museum's description of the exhibit: "The setting seems idyllic and serene-butterflies flutter, a deer nestles near her foot, a couple frolics hand-in-hand. Meanwhile, a billowing cloudscape, lorded over by a genie creature, emerges from her bottom."

Cahiers

I'm making a book.

Will Self takes a walk...

...and the New York Times covers every step. If you're a journalist assigned to cover a story about a dude going on a long walk, you better hope said dude is of Will Self caliber. It's not that a walk isn't ripe for a ruminating narrative, but I think you need the walker to do some really heavy lifting for this thing to work. Not just anyone is going to give you this:

He seemed relieved when he encountered, next to the bridge over the Long Island Rail Road, a busy, noisy junkyard where metal was being squashed. “The city is flowing out to embrace us,” he said. Through the housing project at the end of Glenmore, a little zigzag and on to Eastern Parkway, where Mr. Self, looking back for a second, said: “There is a deep sadness to American poverty, greater than the sadness of any other kind. It’s because America has such an ideology of success.” But then he brightened and said: “Perhaps we’ll feel better when we get to the Brooklyn Bridge. We’ll hear the skirl of the Gershwin clarinets, and we’ll believe in the dream of possibility once again.”

And it all starts to make a bit more sense when you dip into Will Self's Psychogeography columns at The Independent. The very first column -- published two years ago -- begins in such a way that I tried to convince myself I fully understood the concept of psychogeography:

I've taken to long-distance walking as a means of dissolving the mechanised matrix which compresses the space-time continuum, and decouples human from physical geography. So this isn't walking for leisure - that would be merely frivolous - or even for exercise, which would be tedious.

A few sentences later, I somehow understood more and less. Here:

As Emile Durkheim observed, a society's space-time perceptions are a function of its social rhythm and its territory.

The concept doesn't crystallize in the second column, Lost In France, but it does end with a tit joke:

"See that," says the lad, indicating the fragment of a map Michelin have put on the cover of their France 2003 Tourist and Motoring Atlas. "D'you think they've put Brest on the front so that they'll sell more copies?"

Will Self's office