What am I reading?

More like, what am I not? Too many books going at once.

• First and foremost, Kevin Brockmeier’s elegant, brilliant, gentle A Brief History of the Dead. Sometimes there’s a book that imagines a world so obvious that you can’t believe no one ever thought it up before. Mysterious, beautiful, ultimately a little sad. A wonderful vision of the world beyond and how it might really be connected to this one. Technically, I’ve finished this, but I’ll be picking it right back up again as soon as I’ve finished these others.
• Wedding of the Waters by Peter Bernstein, subtitled “The Erie Canal and the Making of a Great Nation.” A fresh and well-researched look at the incredible (and nearly forgotten) importance of the Erie Canal, without which New York City wouldn’t be New York City, and the United States wouldn’t be nearly the same. In fact, Bernstein argues we might not even be united states if not for this incredibly important medium of communication and commerce. A very good read, and it makes me think more than ever that what the world needs is a good biography of Elkanah Watson. Perhaps I’m just the man to provide that.
• Windblown World : The Journals of Jack Kerouac 1947-1954 — “Sometimes my effort at writing becomes so fluid and smooth that too much is torn out of me at once, and it hurts. This is too much mastery! Accompanied with that feeling is the fear of not being perfect, when before, good is good enough, fair is fair enough. Also there’s the reluctance to soil white clean paper with imperfections. This is the curse of vanity, I know.” Yeah!
• Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea. This is one of those “history of a single subject” books that are all the rage these days, and by and large they’re best for all the side topics they can take you into while examining the subject. In this case, the fascinating part of zero is its long rejection by the west for some highly religious reasons, and what it meant for those who first embraced it. As we’re now trying to roll back the age of reason (this is, after all, the delightenment), it’s important to recognize the darkness that we toil in when we try to make the natural world fit into our imaginary dogmas.
• Speaking With the Angel, a collection of stories put together by Nick Hornby. This was a fundraiser for the education of autistic children, but it’s no throw-away collection. It includes stories by Helen Fielding, Roddy Doyle, Melissa Bank, and a wonderful piece by Dave Eggers, and while I borrowed mine from the library, I fully intend to purchase a copy first chance I get. And the foreword by Nick Hornby about the challenges of schooling his autistic son is humble but heartbreaking.
• Self-Made Man is a generally interesting story of a woman who went to great lengths to pass as a man for a year and a half, going so far as to join a bowling league, go out on dates, etc. Some of it is insightful, some of it deals in broad generalizations, but it’s never uninteresting. (He says, not having finished it, because I’m reading too many books at once and wifey absconded with that one.)