I Read Too Many Books at Once

I’m a little apprehensive about these “what I’ve been reading” posts. I love books and I read a lot, but the truth is, in some ways, I’m not the best reader. I read too many books at once and invariably abandon some, only to return to them years later. So any single snapshot of the books I am currently reading is accurate only in the strictest sense. I’m easily tempted. In the long list of the books I am working through, I am probably only actively reading say three on any given day.

I was reading David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years,* which is a fascinating study of how debt and fairly elaborate credit systems have almost always been the norm.

Money was actually a later invention. Barter, at least as it’s treated in economics textbooks, is all but a fiction, historically. In fact Graeber basically paints economics itself as a completely bogus field. Having pursued a degree in it before turning to literature, I was oddly cheered. I wasted four years, but so did Alan Greenspan. I’m looking forward to the sections of the book arguing that widespread debt amnesty must come every once in a while or there is open revolt and the destruction of all records of debt. So put that in your pipe and smoke it, Citi Bank.

Then Jake leant me a copy of The Tender Bar* by J. R. Moehringer, a memoir about a boy whose male role models come from the main bar in Manhasset, Long Island where he grew up. The book will be a part of The Civil Life Library when I return it. Jake thought I would enjoy it, and indeed I do. My wife is reading it now too. It’s funny and very readable. It’s also nicely structured, something I always look for in a book (pattern, symmetry, etc.). But most of all, I appreciate the way that Moehringer captures so eloquently in spots how the bar is, for many of us, no less than a scared space. The right kind of bar provides solace at every stage in life and suits every occasion, comic, tragic, or banal. There is something of the sacrament in the first drink one consumes upon entering the bar. Oh, and every drink thereafter. Amen.

I have also been reading Horst Dornbusch on Bavarian Helles,* a light, delicate, wonderfully refreshing beer I hoped to brew. Instead I brewed what promises to be a misshapen monster of a lager. My light delicate beer looks as if it will be close to 9% alcohol. Drink up! Clearly, I should leave brewing beer to people who know what the hell they’re doing.

I have also been reading Evelyn Waugh’s When the Going Was Good.* I kind of love Waugh, even when he’s being an ass. The book collects what he deemed his best travel writing. Whether in Abyssinia (Ethiopia) during a revolt or a coronation or deep in the Brazilian Amazon, rest assured, the gin flows freely. One of the essays contains what I think is among the most gorgeous descriptions of a drink ever composed:

I told him that I had had a late night, drinking after the ball with some charming Norwegians, and felt a little shaken. He then made me this drink, which I commend to anyone in need of a wholesome and easily accessible pick-me-up. He took a large tablet of beet sugar (an equivalent quantity of ordinary lump sugar does equally well) and soaked it in Angostura bitters and then rolled it in Cayenne pepper. This he put into a large glass which he filled up with champagne. The excellences of this drink defy description. The sugar and Angostura enrich the wine and take away that slight acidity which renders even the best champagne slightly repugnant in the early morning. Each bubble as it rises to the surface carries with it a red grain of pepper, so that as one drinks one’s appetite is at once stimulated and gratified, heat and cold, fire and liquid, contending on one’s palate and alternating in the mastery of one’s sensations. I sipped this almost unendurably desirable drink … (p. 59).

What more can one say?

Well, I’ve also been working through The Exegesis* of Philip K. Dick, About Writing* by Samuel R. Delany, a great collection of essays by Geoff Dyer called Otherwise Known as the Human Condition,* E.F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful,* Gershom Scholem’s memoir of his friendship with Walter Benjamin,* an old Penguin Classics copy of Balzac’s Old Goriot,* and The Waste Books* by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (brilliant little gems, these). I should probably do entries on all of these books at some point.

Oh, my parents gave me a copy of Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84* for Christmas. It has a beautiful cover designed by Chip Kidd.

Stay tuned.