Booklist 2011

Books devoured for 2011 so far...

1. Please Kill Me, tenth anniversary edition, Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain
2. Black Hole, Charles Burns

I loved Please Kill Me. Between that and Punk: The Definitive Record of a Revolution (oh my god, what a prententious title!) by Stephen Colgreave and Chris Sullivan, you have a, dare i say, complete idea of what was going on both sides of the Atlantic during that period. Punk, being another oral history of the period, even borrows passages from Please Kill Me. Add the Punk Magazine collection to the list and, if you couldn't actually be there for the party, it's the next best thing to seeing Cheetah Chrome with tennis sweatbands on his arms at Max's, or actually playing Max's, or playing CBGB's wearing black lipstick and a Vox Bill Wyman bass, or meeting the various junkies, transvestites, hanger-ons and Madonna and her band...ermmm...or maybe not. Then again, i got to the party a little late. Geez, maybe i should start writing this stuff down.

I also loved Black Hole, but it's Charles Burns and i've always been a sucker for Burns. Hey, does a comic boo...err, graphic novel count as a book?

Working on Damp Squids: The English Language Baid Bare by Jeremy Butterfield. This book was on my Christmas list because i was under the impression from the description it was more about the etymology of English language words and phrases but it's actually more about the English language as a living entity, its corpus: where it's been and where it's going. It surprised me that for an offering from Oxford University Press there are typographic errors and an error i wonder if it is typographical: Edgar J. Hoover! The other thing that put me off, being an non-British speaker of English, is that it is more from a British English point of view. Somewhat disappointed, all in all. Finishing it up just to get it out of the way.

I had started Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged during my flight to Detroit, but that got put off (almost happily) when i received the other books. Oh my God, i'm in only 50ish pages and i find Rand extremely melodramatic and two-dimensional. "Who is John Galt?" I almost wanna say "Who cares who is John Galt?!" I've read Archie comics with more depth. Maybe i'm jumping to conclusions...? I'm also trying to factor in when it was written...but...