Reading list: July - September 2020

 
Vincent Eras, Locks and Keys throughout the Ages. Watchung, NJ: Artisan Ideas, 2019.

I was hoping for something to help learn to use a lock-pick set, but got a reminder that there are many ways to achieve the same goal. Security may be best served by using a variety of techniques to foil those prepared to breech a specific defense.

This volume is a reprinting of the 1957 edition, originally published by LIPS Safe and Lock Manufacturing, the author’s employer. It provides an amply-illustrated history of locks in general, then proceeds to chapters on various modern lock types. It is full of good and useful information. Unfortunately, it is also very dry, using passive voice and stiff, midcentury business-formal constructions. Recommended, nonetheless, for both locksmiths and thieves.


Colson Whitehead, Underground Railroad. NY: Doubleday, 2016.

Two-time Pulitzer Prizewinning Whitehead makes the same move here the Velvet Underground’s cover designer made for “Loaded” and takes the phrase literally. Cora, like her mother, runs away from her plantation in Georgia. The story follows her escape, as does a slave catcher, to South Carolina and beyond.


Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash. NY: Bantam, 1992.

With its focus on viruses, this cyberpunk classic is once again a timely -- and quick -- read.


Lief Enger, Virgil Wander. NY: Grove Atlantic, 2018.

So many times, it made me stop and reread just for joy. One key element doesn’t work, but it’s easy to overlook, especially given its resolution.


Ta-Neshi Coates, Brian Stelfreeze, et al, Black Panther vol. 1 - 3, #1 - 12. NY: Marvel, 2016.

This series finds Wakanda falling into civil war, as the nation’s foremost philosopher’s revolutionary cry “No one man” takes hold; Shuri is trapped, undead, in the plane of memory, and T’Challa is conflicted about how to respond.


Roxane Gay, Untamed State. NY: Black Cat, 2014.

“...though I couldn’t know then the price I would pay for that love” is a warning label at the end of chapter five, one I heed. Though Gay’s tale of an American, kidnapped outside her father’s home in Haiti, is compelling, told in an immediate, powerful first person voice -- one that makes clear she survives, as it looks back -- I do not want to know the price, so I returned this (very good) book to my library unread.


Rainer Maria Rilke (trans. MD Herther Norton), Sonnets for Orpheus. NY: Norton, 1942.

The other day I said, offhand, that Rilke’s Sonnets for Orpheus is one of my favorite books. There is no need to justify this statement, but having made it about a book I hadn’t read in thirty years, I needed to verify. And yes, it still holds. These poems create an exquisite image of our place in eternity. Petrarchan in the German, Norton’s translation is necessarily less concerned with rhyme than sense, and somewhat ethereal.


Shruti Swamy, A House Is a Body. Chapel Hill: Algonquin, 2020.

This collection, it is almost indescribable. The stories are so finely drawn, so full of physical being, that the ephemeral nature of the moments within passes unnoticed, as moments do. Simple declaratives -- this is -- take the place of emotional exploration; things unsaid loom large; like life itself, there is no resolution. I would read it again, but I can’t keep this book -- it simply must be shared. It is too good to hoard for myself.


Gary Cieradkowski, League of Outsider Baseball. NY: Touchstone, 2015.

This is a beautiful book. The most obvious attraction is the illustrations of ballplayers, each an original by the man responsible for graphic design at Baltimore’s Camden Yards and author of the Infinite Baseball Card Set blog. Inspired by conversations with his father, it is an exploration of the colorful, the outlandish, and the forgotten among those players who make the national pastime such an interesting way to spend time.


James Gapinski, Fruit Rot. Indianapolis: Etchings Press, 2020.

This little contemporary morality tale is about gifts and their value. A tree sprouts in a poor couple’s yard; the bite of its fruit heals the person who eats it, entirely, of any and all ills. The fruit turns black upon exposure to air, and a second bite from this blackened fruit kills the immediate family of the person eating it. The couple is soon wealthy.