Books: January 2007 Archives

How I escaped the jaws of adolescence without reading Lolita, I'll never be quite sure. It is, after all, one of those books that defiant teenage ne'er-do-wells insist on reading, evocatively, in public. I suppose it's at this point that I should mention I never was much of a hell raiser, despite a penchant for obviously inappropriate boyfriends.

So it was with great pleasure this week that I realized, Nabokov is hilarious. I mean, miss-your-subway-stop, chuckle-oddly-to-yourself-on-the-train hilarious. A gentle professor named Timofey Pnin impelled this realization as I devoured the short novel that bears his name. Easily readable, but jammed full of twists and turns of linguistic information, Pnin makes you want to read aloud, just so the crunch of the syllables last a bit longer. Definitely worth checking out whether you're a fan of Nabokov already or, like me, have been missing out all these years. And with this one, you won't have to worry about sly glances from teenage schoolgirls.

Below, the top five on the F train:

Lifeguard
by James Patterson and Andrew Gross

Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India, and Indonesia
by Elizabeth Gilbert

The Places In Between
by Rory Stewart

Shalimar the Clown: A Novel
by Salmon Rushdie

The First Lady
by Carl Weber

Any time a spelling bee is accompanied by copious amounts of alcohol, well, it's got to be more fun. Join Pete's Candy Store tonight and kick off their every-other-Monday orthographic love-fest. Sign-up's at 7 p.m., and the letters start flying around 7:30, so nab a spot early.

Tonight's event is a $20 suggested donation to support leukemia research. Your donation is 100 percent tax-deductible and goes straight to the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. In return, you get a raffle ticket and a chance at prizes such as Broadway tickets, a gym membership, gift certificates, etc. Oh, and the best prize of all? -- a bar tab at Pete's.

Thanks to nonsensenyc for the details! The full Subway Reads after the jump:

The Dead

by James Joyce

Atlas Shrugged

by Ayn Rand

Whatever

by Michel Houellebecq

The Wonder Spot

by Melissa Bank

High Fidelity

by Nick Hornby

It's got to be a really good book to drown out hour upon hour of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young covers. Did I mention they were bluegrass covers? Nothing against the genre (I once lived with a woman who played the mountain dulcimer, after all), but when one is in a small, confined space ... say, a car, for 11 hours, well, the banjo loses some of its twangy appeal.

I was very lucky, then, to have on my lap a copy of The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe Vs. Wade. It's a book about secrets and whispers and gossip, about stiff necks and profound denial. It's about feminism and mothers and their daughters and their grandchildren. It's about manipulation, intimidation, and the notion of "choosing" when you have no choices. It's about guilt and silence.

It's also about the deepest love and longing imaginable. About how young girls were forced to give away their babies and how 50 years later they still remember every contour of their baby's face. They still think of who those babies may have become.

And it's also about America, where our sexual culture has come from and I couldn't help but wonder how much further we are along teaching girls about their bodies and how to keep themselves safe.