Freedom, truth, love, beauty.

Reading List Update

NYRB Classics is having a Summer Sale.

They have assembled more than a dozen collections of 2-4 books grouped by theme or author and marked them down 40%. Individual books in the collections can be picked up for 25% off. The entire back catalog is marked down 20-30%. Amazon’s regular price for these is usually about 20% off the MSRP.

Additionally, if you buy more than $75 worth, you get a free bag.

I picked up several new books, some on my list and some not—in all enough to get one of those stylish totes:

• The Old Man and Me by Elaine Dundy; the follow-up to her bestseller The Dud Avocado
• The One Straw Revolution by Masanobu Fukuoka, translated by Larry Korn, Chris Pearce, and Tsune Kurosawa; “One of the founding documents of the alternative food movement, and indispensable to anyone hoping to understand the future of food and agriculture.”— Michael Pollan
• John Williams collection:
  • Stoner; consistently the best-selling NYRB Classic on Amazon, I’ve heard and read it called “the perfect novel”, whatever that means
  • Butcher’s Crossing; “Paved the way for Cormac McCarthy. Perhaps the first and best revisionist western.”— Morris Dickstein
• Unusual Lives collection:
  • Black Sun by Geoffrey Wolff; Drugs, drink, sex, gambling, the deliberate derangement of the senses in the pursuit of transcendent revelation
  • An African in Greenland by Tete-Michel Kpomassie, translated by James Kirkup; Brilliantly observed and superbly entertaining record of his adventures among the Inuit
  • Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist by Alexander Berkman; No other book discusses so frankly the criminal ways of the closed prison society, its homosexuality or extortion.
  • Ringolevio by Emmett Grogan; “The best and only authentic book written on the sixties underground.”— Dennis Hopper

I haven’t decided yet how this will change my reading schedule, if at all. I do know it means I won’t be reading Ackerley’s books, The Other House, or The Siege of Krishnapur this year.

NYRB Classics has a nice little blog too.