White Noise: Part Four

I have two bookshelves. Both are so overstuffed, I've taken to storing books in the kitchen and in the hallway. This shot includes reference books (A Biographical Dictionary of Film, Film Noir Reader, Placing Movies), books I haven't started (I Put a Spell on You, King Suckerman, Union Dues), and book I haven't finished (The Collected Stories of John Cheever, Sirk on Sirk).


This shot includes books I've read (Cruel Shoes, Gone with the Wind, How the Irish Became White, In the Cut, Monty, Neon Angel: The Cherie Currie Story, Mystery Train, Please Kill Me, The Ice Storm, and White Noise). Plus, an assortment of nail polish and fragrances. I don't keep every book I read, so these are all titles that made some sort of an impression. Those that don't, go away (I sell or pass them on). The spine is hard to read, but the oldest is by A. A. Milne: The House at Pooh Corner.

Click here for Part Three: The
Complete Book Club List

Images courtesy Kodak one-time use camera.

White Noise: The Complete Book Club List, Part Three

Here are the titles book club has tackled since 2007. For a history of the club, please click here. For part one of the list (2000-04), click here; for part two (2005-06), click here.*

* The third link is currently inoperable; I'm hoping to find a way to retrieve it.

2007 2007 2007 2007 2007 2007 2007 2007 2007

02/07: Peter Carey - True History of the Kelly Gang
[Winner of the Man Booker Prize]
05/07: Martin Amis - Money: A Suicide Note
07/07: Mike Davis - Dead Cities [I swear I'll finish this...someday]
09/07: Cormac McCarthy - The Road
[Nice lead-in to No Country for Old Men]
11/07: John Nathan - Mish-
ima and/or Legs McNeil & Jennifer Osborne - The Other Hollywood: The Uncensored Oral History of the Porn Film Industry [I read both]

2008 2008 2008 2008

02/08: Jonathan Lethem - The Fortress of Solitude
05/08: Russell Hoban - Riddley Walker
07/08: Max Brooks - World War Z:
An Oral History of the Zombie War*
09/08: Rose McCauley - The Towers of Trebizond
11/08: Jonathan Franzen - The Corrections

* Soon to be a major motion picture.

2009 2009 2009 2009 2009 2009 2009 2009

1/09: Herman Melville - Billy Budd and Other Stories
5/09: Jack Black - You Can't Win [I loved this]
7/09: Jane Austen & Seth Grahame-Smith - Pride and Prejudice
and Zombies and George MacDonald Fraser - Flashman: A Novel
11/09: Willa Cather - The Song of the
Lark and Amitav Ghosh - Sea of Poppies
12/09: Jean-Dominique Bauby - The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

2010 2010 2010 2010 2010 2010 2010 2010

3/10: Zachary Lazar - Sway
4/10: Lord Auch (Georges Bataille) - Story of the Eye
and the Invisible Committee - The Coming Insurrection
7/10: Joshua Gamson - The Fabulous Sylvester: the
Legend, the Music, the Seventies in San Francisco
9/10: Haruki Murakami - Norwegian Wood
12/10: Charles Burns - Black Hole

2011 2011 2011 2011 2011 2011 2011 2011

5/11: Jennifer Egan - A Visit from the Good Squad
7/11: Kate Buford - Burt Lancaster: An American Life
10/11: John Fowles - The French Lieutenant's Woman
12/11: Samuel R. Delany - Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand

More to come...and suggestions are always welcome.

Endnote: Images from The Voice (Jonathan Lethem)
and the BBC (Martin Amis and Christopher Hitchens).

Seven Years of Magic-
al Thinking: The Com-
plete Book Club List

Here are the book club titles
from 2000-2004 (plus editorial
comments). An asterisk means
I didn't have time to read the tit-
le in question. For a history of
the group, please click here.

***** ***** ***** ***** *****

11/00: Cormac McCarthy - Blood Meridian* [I'd like to read this]
12/00: Mikal Gilmore - A Shot in the Heart* [And this, too]

2001 2001 2001 2001 2001 2001 2001 2001 2001

02/01: Larry McMurtry - The Last Picture Show
[So good I read it twice; great movie, too]
10/01: John Updike - Rabbit, Run and John Cheever - "The
Swimmer" (short story) [Depressing, but I liked them
both...haven't seen the film of the former; own the latter]

2002 2002 2002 2002 2002 2002 2002 2002 2002

01/02: Katherine Porter - Ship of Fools [Took me awhile
to get into this...but I did. Haven't seen the movie yet]
02/02: Pete Dexter - Paris Trout
[I liked this; haven't seen the movie]
04/02: Bill Buford - Among the Thugs [I loved this]



05/02: Susanna Moore - In the Cut [Some
hated this; not me...I liked the movie, too]
06/02: Michael Chabon - The Amazing Adven-
tures of Kavalier and Clay [I really enjoyed this]
07/02: Raymond Chandler - The Long Goodbye
[Loved it; Altman's quirky adaptation, too]

2003 2003 2003 2003 2003 2003 2003 2003 2003

04/03: Joan Didion - Play It As It Lays
[Cold as ice, but I liked it...haven't seen the movie]
05/03: Gabriel Garcia Marquez - Love in the Time of Cholera*
07/03: Phillip K. Dick - Confessions of a Crap Artist
[Not science fiction, but I liked it. Haven't seen the
movie; Jacques Audiard adapted the screenplay]
11/03: Jung Chang - The Wild Swans*
12/03: Sylvia Plath - The Bell Jar
[I liked this; haven't seen the movie]

2004 2004 2004 2004 2004 2004 2004 2004 2004

02/04: Mian Mian - Candy [Girl gone wild in mo-
dern China. Like a film by Jia Zhangke come to print]
03/04: Walker Percy - The Movielover [I liked this]
07/04: David W. Maurer - The Big Con [A must for Mamet fans]
10/04: Ben Hecht - A Child of the Century [Didn't finish this]



Endnote: Joan Didion photo from Random House.

A History of Book Club

In the fall of 2000, the love-
ly and talented Wendy Har-
ris formed Book Club (to
be pronounced in the same
hushed tones as Fight Club,
i.e. "The first rule of Fight
Club..."). The initial selec-
tion was Cormac McCar-
thy's Blood Meridian.

At that point in my life, I was working full-time at Amazon and doing contract work for Microsoft, and was unable to join, as much as I wanted to. But then, due to budgetary constraints, my MS gig came to an end, and I had a little free time on my hands...

So things went fairly swimmingly for the next year or two, but
Wendy wasn't happy, so she pulled the plug on the old club and
reformed it as an all-woman group (even her future husband,
Kristian, got the boot) and instituted a few new rules. Nothing
unreasonable, but more structure would be part of the game.

I wasn't too excited about the all-female thing, but decided to
give it a try. Had a fine time at the first meeting, and a terrible
time at the next (too much "girls talk," as Nick Lowe might say).

For the next couple of years, I read most of the books, but never
attended another meeting. I really missed the old group, so in late
2004 I ran the idea by Clarke Fletcher, and we decided to start
it up again. Since then, we've been meeting regularly and things
have been going well. We've read some fine literature, enjoyed
some lively conversation, and consumed some tasty food and
drink ("The third rule of Book Club: No booze, no meeting!").

After consulting my sales records, I've put together a list of the
books the various groups have read between 2001 and now. All
dates are approximate, and I'm sure I've left out a few titles (like
Reading Lolita in Tehran, which held little interest for me—
I would've preferred to read Nabokov's original novel). Because
the list is getting so long, I've created a separate entry for it.

As for the new/old group, we now meet every six weeks (as op-
posed to four), but this can change if someone's going out of town
or if the sixth week falls on a holiday. If you'd care to suggest a-
ny titles, please feel free to leave a comment or drop me a line.

Atonement cover image from Books Tell You Why.