Why I Read by Julie Orringer

An occasional feature in our email newsletter is the "Why I Read" column. We've collected some wonderful short essays on the topic from fine writers over the years. Here's one from Julie Orringer, author most recently of The Invisible Bridge, our June 2010 Book of the Month. (blurb and funny video here). The Invisible Bridge is now in paperback, or the eBook is $9.99 here.

Here's Ms. Orringer's essay:

At first it was because I couldn’t help it. When I was four, those mysterious and ubiquitous symbols I saw everywhere began to resolve into units of meaning. I saw that the written word could stop cars, could get you out of a burning building; I was impressed, and kept reading. I wanted to possess the whole strange English language. I found it hilarious that the words “Crumb” and “Thumb” ended with B’s, and felt I’d uncovered an esoteric secret when I learned that SCHOOL contained an H. Of course, the whole point was to be able to attain that pinnacle of erudition: the ability to read a Chapter Book. Christopher Robin was the subject of my first crush. Soon I became a word-traveler; I inhabited the Hundred Acre Wood, the Secret Garden, the Little House on the Prairie, the Chocolate Factory, Middle Earth, Oz, and a thousand other places.

When I started writing, reading became an endlessly complicated and fascinating answer to the question, how? At times—as when I read Shakespeare,Tolstoy, George Eliot, or, more recently, Shirley Hazzard, Stephen Dunn, Charles D’Ambrosio—it leads only to a deeper and more awestruck restatement of the question. I read for the sheer pleasure of seeing them do it: again and again, with infinite variety, they say those things that are most difficult to articulate. They tell us what it’s like to be human, and what it means; they turn on the lights to reveal love and loss and pain, and I find it impossible to look away.

PS. Other installments of the series await you by Beth Lisick, Susan Choi, Peter Rock, Dave Eggers, Daniel Handler, TC Boyle, Joyce Maynard, Peter Carlson, Peter Coyote, and Jennifer Traig.

Magic, Opiates...

Over the last year or so I've tried to describe CF's series POWR MASTRS to some number of people with only the tiniest bit of success at doing it the justice I feel it deserves. At best I cite some kind of example of what I can closest equate the title(s) to, usually something along the lines of Dune or The Lord of the Rings. These are inaccurate comparisons however. POWR MASTRS is an epic world all it's own, bearing only minuscule similarity to Herbert and Tolkien's classic epics (most likely coincidental, merely the mention of magic and opiates), and it was last night after reading the introduction to Ivan Brunetti's Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice that I realized I'd been going about my mode of recommendation somewhat a bit wrong.

In Brunetti's book (a syllabus and lesson plan) he stresses to his students "When form and content diverge, only a specter remains, and nothing solid can be built. It is like those ill-fated relationships where we convince ourselves that we are in love, when actually we are just consumed with lust, desperation, jealousy, and need. It is also the reason dictatorships and military occupations never last: anything that does not organically evolve from the needs of a society, but is instead imposed by an external force, eventually topples like the flimsy house of cards it essentially is."

Instead of likening CF's series to other titles simply because they are considered as visionary classics, that I believe POWR MASTRS is driven with a charge similar to that of a novelist who is attempting to build their own personal landscape, my pitch (reverie) should be concentrating on his seamless marriage of form and content. The illustrations meander from black and white to brilliantly colored, from absurdly intricate to a near lazy simplicity page to page. Paired with a haunting and heady writing style a reality that is entirely of its own is created.



Sadly this book is published by a small, artsy press and definitely not as widely distributed as I wish it could be, let alone believe it should be. I am doing my part to push it though. Please read POWR MASTRS. A quick skim of it can be misleading. It's not about wizards and elves or drugs or space stuff... although maybe it is too. Whatever. It is pretty much the best thing.

Some days are just better than others

Take Thursday the 24th from 6pm - 8pm, for example. That's the night that I will be hosting one of my favorite authors, at my favorite watering hole, to celebrate San Francisco's favorite book of 2011! If you don't know already, I'm talking about Rebecca Solnit at Tosca for Infinite City!!! Sounds like exactly the kind thing needed to get me over this cold / flu thing and back into the land of the living. . .

This free event (at Tosca) will feature a multimedia lecture by Rebecca Solnit, and will also include participation from many of the artists that contributed maps and artwork to Infinite City... (click here for full details)

Then, just a couple of weeks down the line, our fine friends at Litquake are putting on a show that screams to be witnessed, Regreturature: An evening of readings that probably shouldn't see the light of day." From the Litquake newsletter: "Everybody has to start somewhere, and here’s what happens when good writers start bad. On April 7th, join some of the Bay Area’s most successful authors as they sheepishly read works they may now regret, from fiction to nonfiction, blogs, journalism, opinion pieces, even diary entries." Tickets for this are available here.

And you know that you'll see me there. . .

The Library

The Library from Sergey Stefanovich on Vimeo.

“When I bought this flat, I promised myself: no books in the bedroom. I’m a terrible insomniac, and I thought having books in the bedroom, and all the psychological power they embody, would not be good for a quiet night’s sleep. However, the books demanded to be incorporated into my domestic world. And invaded my bedroom and there they are.” -- Duncan Fallowell

Nine Stories

I scanned these pocketbooks from my personal collection a long time because I enjoyed the cover designs as much as much as the content. In particular the rounded corners on the Singer title, the Rousseau inspired(?) cover of Animal Liberation, and the maniacal death mask adorning the copy of Frankenstein. I hope to never have to sell them for the pocket change that they're worth but if I do then here they are. They make me want to read.

The reason the birds attack is that global warming has caused them to be mutant, toxic and flammable.

On Saturday April 2 at 2pm, Green Apple will host James Nguyen, the "visionary creator" (his words, not ours) of what might be one of the great B-movies of all time: Birdemic: Shock and Terror. Produced for less than $10,000 and filmed in the Bay Area (and even partially on our own Clement Street), Birdemic is "a meditation on Hitchcock's classic and the environmental chaos caused by the industrial Age."

The film was recently written up in USA Today, which said "While Birdemic will probably never be honored at the Oscars — unless they add a Best Use of Exploding CGI Vultures category — Nguyen's enthusiasm for his so-bad-it's-good film and his do-it-yourself attitude were infectious to everybody around the low-budget production."

Nguyen has written a short memoir on his making of the movie, which he will be discussing on April 2. This might be one to mark on your calendar.

Browsing v. "Browsing"

If you're reading this blog, chances are you don't need to be convinced of the value of a bookstore in your community and are least a little skeptical about the relationship of e-commerce to bookselling, reading, and publishing.

With that in mind, I'll point you to The New Republic, which has just published a thoughtful piece by Nicole Krauss, author of Great House and The History of Love, called "The End of Bookstores." Krauss' perspicacious analysis includes a comparison of browsing online and browsing in a bookstore:

Both the Internet and Google Books strive to assemble the known world. The bookstore, on the other hand, strives to be a microcosm of it, and not just any microcosm but one designed—according to the principles and tastes of a “gatekeeper”—to help us absorb and consider the world itself. That difference is everything. To browse online is to enter into a search that allows one to sail, according to an idiosyncratic route formed out of split-second impulses, across the surface of the world, sometimes stopping to randomly sample the surface, sometimes not. It is only an accelerated form of tourism. To browse in a bookstore, however, is to explore a highly selective and thoughtful collection of the world—thoughtful because hundreds of years of thinkers, writers, critics, teachers, and readers have established the worth of the choices. Their collective wisdom seems superior, for these purposes, to the Web’s “neutrality,” its know-nothing know-everythingness.

Read the whole essay here.