anna karenina

 I love it so much. I first tried to tackle it when I was 18. I got a few pages in and decided to stick to Stephen King. But after seeing Joe Wright's "Anna Karenina," I was inspired to try it again (it is with a sheepish hand that I type that bit of info. I don't love admitting that movie adaptations inspire me to read the books, but there you have it).
And I'm just loving it. The writing just sticks with me and some of his sentences are just so beautifully crafted, I go back and reread again and again. And thank god for those it's-slow-at-work-because-of-the-holidays shifts at the restaurant. I could read my book with my feet up and a Bailey's on the rocks.

currently reading

Reading Chekhov, by Janet Malcolm

She is one of my favorite writers. "The Journalist and the Murderer" is just the best. I love her writing-- it's dense and concise and funny and she creates some of the most well-tuned passages:

If privacy is life's most precious possession, it is fiction's least considered one. A fictional character is a being who has no privacy, who stands before the reader with his 'real, most interesting life' nakedly exposed. We never see people in life as clearly as we see the people in novels, stories, and plays; there is a veil between ourselves and even our closest intimates, blurring us to each other. By intimacy we mean something much more modest than the glaring exposure to which the souls of fictional characters are regularly held up.
-Reading Chekhov

This is definitely eat your spinach reading. Whereas The Journalist and the Murderer and Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession feel quick and sexy and full of "eureka!" moments, this one is much more deliberate and the pace is tempered, and it reads a lot more like, well, Chekhov. I had a cursory sense of his life details (I knew he was a doctor, knew he was into nature, knew he was Russian-- hey, that counts), but I wasn't aware of his health struggles, and I knew nothing of his short stories, nothing of his love life, nothing of his ambivalence towards solitude. And if these specifics are implicit in his writing, I was still a bit of a dummy and not picking up on them.

This book is giving me facts, yes, and it's also giving me an interesting framework through which to synthesize those facts (some Russian history, details about Chekhov's family), but it's also giving me permission to read Chekhov in a different way. To search through his plays and stories looking for those moments that reveal all I could want to know about the burden of living and the exquisite beauty of being alive. 

so much to look forward to!

There are three books coming out that I cannot wait to read. I already have a huge stack of things I need to read, but I'll move these to the top of the pile. Doesn't it always work that way? When you have eight billion things to read, there's always one more to add to the heap. When you're at a loss for what to read next, when you're wandering around the bookstore for hours at a time, there are no good books to be found.

"May We Be Forgiven," A.M. Homes 

 I believe this began as a short story. I read it in an anthology a few years back, and I think I've reread it at least a dozen times since. The story is a painful, lovely, eerie tale of marriage and trust and family and holidays and infidelity. And it's violent and sexy and really perfect. I can't frigging wait to read the entire novel. My friend William finished it already and gave it a thumbs up.

"This is How You Lose Her," Junot Diaz

Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes. Please, yes. I've read two recent stories of his in the New Yorker (although I'm unsure if "Monstro"- my favorite: the apocalypse is nigh and the protagonist can't stop thinking about his sweetheart- is included in this collection), and I'm very stoked.

"NW," Zadie Smith

I waited on Zadie Smith once and she was so unbelievably pleasant and polite and I wasn't surprised at all. You can feel that warm, light touch in her writing. She has a generous eye and she's so smart and so talented and I love her. She and David Foster Wallace (and I think maybe Stephen King) are the writers I would like to invite over for dinner. With beer. And dessert. And whiskey. There would definitely be some "I-know-it's-late-but-one-more-bourbon" drinking as the night winds down and the used dinner plates remain on the table.