filed under Books
Lit Up
3:19PM ON
01/17/2008
BY
Daily Dose
Here at the Dose we don’t just waste our days away trolling the Internet for inane blather. I do, but the others don’t. They read! Books! Welcome new contributor Shannon Cole who’ll be checking is with us from time to time to tell us what we should be reading. Now I gotta go find me some lolcats…
Nicole Krauss’ novel The History of Love (2005) is the history of one love that weaves through languages and across continents in the form of a book (also titled The History of Love), and the lives it alters along the way. But don’t get confused. It’s not a romance novel — as evidenced by the repeated mentions of farting and the running list of tips on How to Survive in the Wild — and it never gets, you know, mushy. Instead, The History of Love manages to feel intimate in a small, cozy way, even while drawing large, scrawling connections between people and our search to regain the things we’ve lost.
You should read this book because:
- Krauss creates two distinctly divergent narrative voices in her characters Leo Gursky and Alma Singer, but they are equally insightful and vivid and alive (despite Leo’s protestations that he’s dying).
- You need to read about the Age of Glass, during which “everyone believed a part of himself to be extremely fragile.” It’s one hellofa metaphor.
- The use of white space on the page is killer. You’ll know what I mean when you get there.
- So far the book’s been translated into twenty-five different languages, and if it’s important enough to translate that many times, it’s important enough for you to drag your butt to your local library or bookstore and grab a copy.
I swear to you, John McPhee can make anything interesting. Anything. The man once wrote a book about oranges (yes, the citrus fruit) that I guarantee beats the pants off any of the presidential candidates’ biographies (ok, fine — I guess that’s not hard — but still). McPhee’s latest book is Uncommon Carriers (2006), and although it sort of sounds like it might be about the spread of rare infectious diseases, it’s actually about modes of transport. By extension, it becomes a portrait of American commerce and culture. Think of it as a behind-the-scenes glimpse at how everything from orange juice and lobsters to carbon fuel and Fort Knox’s gold travel from point A to point B via semi-truck, cargo ship, river boat, UPS, or train and the everyday people who make it all possible.
You should read it ’cause:
- You’ll never think of truckers or truck stops the same way again, and it might make you just a smidge less likely to cut off that semi on I-95 next time.
- McPhee is a master of description. He captures motion and images as deftly as he does behaviors and accents.
- I know you’ve wondered just how UPS does it all, and here’s your chance to find out! (Apparently, on an individual basis, it’s not really that hard: “Label-side up. That’s pretty much the extent of training for these folks.”)
- Even though we all pretty much agree fossils fuels are killing the planet, the engineering feats of these massive transport vessels that consume huge quantities of gasoline are freaking awesome.
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