People have a tendency to lend me books. To be fair, I look through my friends' bookshelves a lot, and I sometimes ask if I can borrow something, but quite often somebody just pushes a book on me without provocation. And I don't know how to just say no books. My track record for actually reading those books, however, is pretty dismal: in fact, Jamie and I have an entire (smallish) bookcase dedicated to the combined borrowed library we've accumulated over the years, and most of the books are awfully good. So the second part of my summer reading list is dedicated to the books I've borrowed and never read or returned. Hopefully, a few of these will make it back to their owners in the next few months (to be immediately replaced, of course, by several more books for the borrowed shelves).
1.The Areas of My Expertise, John Hodgman (Borrowed during an especially good New Year's gathering that involved chai-flavored waffles)
My friend Charlie is an inveterate book lender. There was a time when he simply wouldn't stop making me borrow his books: he'd regularly press them into my hands, throw them at my head, or stack them up outside my front door so that I'd have to dodge a lethal avalanche of paperbacks when I opened the door to go to work in the morning. I have trouble picking just one of his books to add to my list, but I've actually read a good hundred pages of this one before, a couple of summers ago, and it is hilarious. It resembles an almanac in form and style, but all the information Hodgman provides is false and even occasionally scurrilous, much of it having to do with things like failed palindromes (Slow speed: deep owls), the worst-ever men's haircuts, and tables illustrating the intersection of omens and portents. (Apparently Ragnarok will result if an owl screeches with the voice of a man on a broken gravestone. Or if a gravestone breaks within three months of the owl thing. Hmm.) You can never have too much made-up information.
2.The Book of the Dun Cow, Walter Wangerin, Jr. (Borrowed sometime in the middle of a crazy late summer in which too many people, including me, were moving)
Before Jamie and I moved in together, she lent me several books she particularly thought I should read, including this strange-looking fantasy that I hadn't heard of before, about farm animals and the good and evil they do. It's remained in my borrowed stack for about two years since then. I'm curious whether these beasts are as distinctive or as political as those in Animal Farm or Watership Down.
3.The Guns of the South, Harry Turtledove (Borrowed about the same time as Dun Cow)
My friend Zack said I should read this alternate history of the end of the Civil War (the guns of the title are AK-47s, given to the Confederate Army in 1864 by a time-traveling interloper with mysterious motives). This will probably be the first and last Turtledove book I read: I've heard from several people, including Zack, that most of his work is very dull and largely ghostwritten. Still, as I've said before, I'll try most things once, especially for the sake of such a fascinating concept.
4.The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Mark Haddon (Borrowed last summer or something)
You've heard of this one, I imagine. I know I've heard plentiful and favorable things about it: from my parents, from The A.V. Club, from my girlfriend, and finally from my friend Nick, who has generously supplied me with his copy. Flipping through it, I've noticed that the chapters are numbered not 1, 2, 3..., but 2, 3, 5, 7, 11... Prime numbers, in other words. I'm excited about this one.
5.The Silent Miaow, Paul Gallico (Borrowed last fall)
Jamie and I need cats. We have severe cravings for a pair of little purring mammals to be prowling around the apartment, jumping up where they don't belong, and rubbing up against our legs to demand feeding and petting. And we're probably going to get to fulfill our cat wishes later this summer by adopting a couple of cats from the Pixie Project, a local no-kill shelter. There's a lot of research and preparation to do before we have a cat-friendly place here; one thing I plan to do is read this book, which my friend Tessa (the same one who gave me Giving Good Weight, from my previous post) lent us last year. It's a sort of owner's manual for cats who have come into the possession of new humans, meant to instruct young felines in the best methods of taming people and teaching them their responsibilities as cat stewards. It's illustrated with beautiful black-and-white photos of cats demonstrating cat/human etiquette. After flipping through it, I cannot deny that I am quite charmed and enlightened. This one should be highly useful in welcoming new cats to our place.
So those are the personal books I've borrowed that I plan to read before long. Next up, another kind of borrowed property: library books.
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