After this no more middlebrowbookblogging I promise.

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

After this no more middlebrowbookblogging I promise.

So I just ordered Krakatoa: The Day The World Exploded and The John McPhee Reader from Paperback Swap. (I know you were all on the edges of your seats.) (I still have two credits left! Send along suggestions!)

“What happened to libraries?” GM asked me earlier. Well, for one thing, homeless people hang out there. But also you can’t keep the books! And I have a perilous track record with things I have to return. Netflix has a warrant out for my arrest, probably, and I was 5 minutes and a full cross-campus sprint to the library away from not receiving my college diploma. (Which would have sent my poor parents into a breakdown; it was bad enough that at my post-graduation luncheon my father learned that “my” - ie his - car had been totaled. Thank you, passive voice!)

Anyway, I like to keep books so I can lend them out to friends and scare away potential suitors. Which is why I got the John McPhee collection; I think I’ve probably already read most of the essays within (Encounters With the Archdruid is one of my very faves) but I just want to have it on my shelf.

Oddly, twenty minutes after placing the order I was trolling mah Google Reader and came upon this, about McPhee’s Coming Into the Country:

Survey the nonfiction cannon, if you will. Its avant garde is dazzling: I defy anyone to argue that better words than Tom Wolfe’s could be found to capture the Merry Pranksters, or that any writer could top David Foster Wallace on the topic of a luxury cruise. Atop the heap, however, are a very few writers like John McPhee whose style is so understated, malleable and subservient to his larger purposes that he does not write badly on any subject.

(snip)

You should read this book. It must be the kind of thing that sits on the unvarnished shelves of Gay Talese, William Langewiesche and Lawrence Weschler. “A grizzly, no slower than a racing horse, is about half again as fast as the fastest human being.” There, I’ve given you a taste.

Hey now! a) Kinda Baader-Meinhof-y, no? and b) “An author who writes on the sex trade” and I will now have something in common, according to the imaginings of Conor Friedersdorf.