“An essay about the DESIGNING DUO [the Eameses] that changed how we look at the world.” My kind of self-help.

I picture a Malcolm as a pale and chinless Englishman. Thanks to an article in this month’s W, I get the bonus discovery that not only does he write wonderful essays, but he’s a sexy Canadian with dreads. Gladwell is a natural teacher, with a scientist’s mind.
One chapter treats a scientific study I’ve been fascinated by since hearing about it on This American Life’s “Marriage” show several months ago: by analyzing a fifteen-minute tape of a couple arguing, John Gottman can predict, with 90% accuracy, whether they will divorce in the next ten years. Who wouldn’t want such a marital CAT-scan? Or—who would?

I compose unsent letters to Jonathan Raban. His is the gift I’d most like to have, and the subject matter I like best. Though I’ve read almost every book he’s written, he’s never seen royalties from me, since I bought them all second-hand. This pains me. On the pretext of sending him a royalty check, someday I’ll invite him to lunch. It’s the gift (and, I’m sure, the curse) of certain writers to make their readers believe they’re already friends.

A parting gift from Ranger Tim. On the strength of The Corrections alone, and a few New Yorker essays, Franzen is one of my favorite writers, and in this collection he dissects my obsessions with a delicacy, generosity, and precision that I hope for from any neurosurgeon I might ever come to employ. When I read essays like this I wish I didn’t have to work for a living: there is so much to learn out there, and so little time.

Picked this up for a buck at the Housing Works Bookstore, and it’s frickin’ fantastic. Cooke is one of my heros. Like him, I’m an immigrant, and so I missed many of the basics of American history that he teaches here with such joy and verve. May he rest in the peace of a life well-lived.

Apparently I read this before, because I signed and dated it this exact week in 1993, and scribbled notes and highlighted passages. But I remember almost nothing other than disliking it. We read in such a perverted way in college,
skimming through to find chunks that would support whatever inane essay we’d
been assigned to argue that week.
It reads differently now, after eighteen months living out of a backpack, and six months in a log cabin in the woods. Monsieur Thoreau, c’est moi-earnest absurdity and all. His self-righteousness makes me laugh with recognitions-a great reminder to zip it on my endless prescriptions for a better world. But I feel such affection for this guy, working out his own system in the woods. A crank, but dear to my heart.

Oh lord, this is SO cheesy. Twelve Stepping for creative blocks.

(My best friend just delivered her first child using techniques learned sheepishly at her “Birthing from Within” class. As we said to each other, where else would you birth from? This book is like that.)

I’ve been following it for five weeks now, dutifully doing the morning pages and the weekly exercises. Once I got past the bad prose, it’s actually useful—though the exercises can too easily take the place of the work they’re supposed to encourage.

Icelandic novel about sheep. If you deserve this book, that won’t put you off.

A Christmas gift from Joy. Morrie deserved a better Boswell than the self-regarding “young man” in the title.

Exquisite, and irritating. Sometimes at the same time.