How To Read in an Election Year

I am reading Didion again. You can tell when I am reading Didion because contractions disappear. I begin to sound matter-of-fact, clinical.

I wanted to savor the last novel, The Last Thing He Wanted, to the very latest possible moment. I sometimes wonder if she will ever write another novel. But it was too difficult to resist, especially given the climate. Last night, after watching the results roll in from New Hampshire, I read Didion's introduction to Political Fictions, and smuggled The Last Thing He Wanted, itself set during the 1984 elections, into my bag on the way to work. Election years are like that. Suddenly our lives are filled with red-white-and-blue promises, analysis, jargon. And so, of course, my books must be too.

(Here is where I suppose I could truly elaborate on the title of this post: write about what to fill your civic-minded bookshelves with, political biographies, autobiographies, books on farming, foreign policy and tax law, Robert Penn Warren and The Worst Hard Time, or advice on how to discern the chaff from the wheat in newspapers and online. But I feel myself getting a headache at the smallest suggestion of it. The title is my attempt at cleverness, nothing more — a way to tie one paragraph to an-unrelated-other*... Apologies if I tricked you into reading. I can be deceiving like that.)

So. Elsewhere.

At The Magazineer, Heather Champ shares her guidelines for how to read the New Yorker (though she should try the fiction sometime, really). How-Tos (*now you see my intention) on the brain in The Guardian blogs as well, where there's an appreciation of life lessons learned from a 1957 How-To book on knitting.

Languor Management offers Mandelshtam's thoughts on writing children's literature in Lenin's time without anthropomorphizing animals: In the next story she submitted, the sheep and the rams were embarrassed to say "baa" and "maa." As the tale was told, the sheep silently grew wool for a useful purpose.

Voices are raised for a better translation of Simone de Beauvoir.

Stephany at Crooked House links to the Sorted Books Project. Earlier, Ed Park and readers shared their own. You might not me believe me when I tell you I wasn't considering this when I posted this week's Sunday Zen, which, read vertically...

Innocents abroad, lend me your character! Slouching towards Bethlehem - the last thing he wanted. If nobody speaks of remarkable things: the razor's edge.

...kind of charms me. Or scares me.

Does that make me a flip-flopper?

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