Four Books I'm Currently Ignoring

I'm usually reading more books than I can remember at any given time. Right now, with work and the Boy, finding time to read anything is nigh impossible.

So, as summer came to a close, I had acquired four books and was poring over them in the limited time I had. I quickly took a picture of them all at once---I knew the magnitude of the wave of attention-suck that was about to crest and that I wouldn't be getting back to them anytime soon.

I wanted to talk about each one briefly, about what it's about and where I got it, as the location of each's coming into my possession is different and highlights the ways a librophile like myself comes to books.

The picture:

The first, Astro City, is a collection of Kurt Busiek's first comic miniseries of the same name, all six issues and some extras. Here's a link of me praising this book. My brother, having thought I had given it to him and then being corrected, gave it to me. Some books find their way to proper owners through hand to hand. I haven't finished it, but it is excellent.

The second, Half Life, author Shelley Jackson's first novel, is about Nora and Blanche, conjoined twins in a world where the number of "twofers" is a much higher percentage, only here Blanche has been asleep for fifteen years and Nora, running from a dark past of her own, is thinking of having Blanche hacked off. The narrative is told in two timelines; one in the current time where Blanche has been asleep and Nora is thinking of the surgery, and one in the earlier timeline where we see the conjoined twins' parents meet, the birth, and the life of conjoined twins that must lead to the event that causes Blanche go to sleep. I imagine as one timeline ends and Blanche goes to sleep the other comes to a crescendo and Blanche wakes up.

I imagine that, because I haven't finished it. Each section is very short and they alternate like a ping-pong game. It reminds me of something I might write. Another of Shelley Jackson's projects is called "Skin": it's a novel written on hundreds of people's bodies. I took this book from my family's Cabin in the far north of California. Some books need to be liberated by the intellectually needy. 

The third book has printing on the cover that is very difficult to read. It's Islands in the Stream by Hemingway. This is the first book I bought by Hemingway. It was a manuscript found by his wife, and she and his editor prepared it for publication, publishing it posthumously.

I had been having conversations with another writer about Murakami, HST, and while I pushed Pynchon he pushed Hemingway. After seeing Woody Allen's "Midnight in Paris", I was inspired to get more Hemingway (I have some that wasn't purchased). I bought this at an indie bookstore in Alameda. You should always support independent bookstores.

Ernest Hemingway had multiple sets of kids with multiple wives; he lived for a time in the Gulf Stream, which is the eponymous Stream from the novel's title. I'm about halfway through the Astro City and about two-thirds through Half Life, but with this book, Hemingway's posthumous finale, I'm only about fifteen pages in. This is where "write what you know" rears it's obnoxious head. Tom Hudson, the main character and always, in those first fifteen pages, referred to as "Tom Hudson" (would Ernie had left that during his re-writes?) is excited because his eldest son, Little Tom, and two of his younger sons from his second marriage will all be spending two months with him at his island home. It looks like it may be based more on real life Mike Strater and Gerald and Sara Murphy, two sets of Bimini Island white folks who fit that criteria a little better maybe than Hemingway himself.

Anyway, the book is pretty good, but didn't make me stop everything to devour it.

The last book in that picture is Peter Godfrey Smith's Other Minds. It is a philosophy book about consciousness masked as a biological sciences book about the way all of us "thinking species" developed. "Thinking Species" is a title that collects many highly developed mammals (primates, elephants, whales and dolphins) and birds (crows, ravens, and jays, among other passerines) and groups them with the cephalopods (octopuses and squid). The evolutionary branching between mammals is geologically recent, and between mammals and the birds is slightly older, but the branch that separates/connects the chordate thinking species (mammals and birds) with the cephalopods is so far back that it boggles the imagination.

And that's the central focus of this book: how did the ability to abstractly think develop in something so alien as an octopus?

Primatologist Frans de Waal suppled a quote for the dust jacket, so you know it has to be good. I'm through the first chapter and I know I will be finishing it before these other ones. This kind of topic seems to come to me out of a dream. I'd been planning on buying it since I heard about it last December, but found it at the gift shop of the Aquarium of the Pacific, our Long Beach walkabout getaway. You should always support public institutions that you love, respect, and frequent often.

Here's a picture from a recent trip to the aquarium, when the Big Guy was out and about and showing off:

It sucks to be emotionally and/or intellectually involved in books and then have to stop working on them. But it is what it is...

Also, it looks like I developed some guidelines for librophiles:

1. Some books find their way to proper owners through hand to hand.
2. Some books need to be liberated by the intellectually needy.
3. You should always support independent bookstores.
4. You should always support public institutions that you love, respect, and frequent often.