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At the end of last month, I shared four books that stood out to me from my reading experiences in January. To mark the end of February, I thought I’d do that again.

If you’ve read any of these and have thoughts, please let me know in the comments. Or, let me know what you read and enjoyed in February. As always, I’m keen to receive recommendations!!

Crossover: Balmond, Cecil: 9783791345222: Amazon.com: Books

Cecil Balmond’s Crossover (Prestel Press, 2013)

Every year I try to find some new aspect of life that I don’t know much about and I spend time learning about it. This year I decided I want to try and learn more about architecture. After some looking around, I kept coming back to this book and the first book from Balmond called Informal. The thing that sold me on this one in particular is that it includes a collaborative project he did with Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, who wrote an essay called “Junkspace” back in 2002 which I think is just next level rad.

This giant, absolutely amazing, book by one of the most innovative and influential engineers in the world documents some of his wildest projects in art, architecture, and bridge design, as well as his theoretical work. One of the coolest things about it is the way it focuses on one project at a time and walks the reader through the project from initial idea to finished project.

The jacket copy describes the book as a collection of “more than a dozen international projects and five theoretical chapters that embody the notion of Crossover which Balmond describes as the movement between Metaphor and Substance through Pattern.” You can watch Balmond discuss it here.

Christopher Pike’s The Midnight Club (Archway, 1994)

I remember the goth girls and stoners reading Christopher Pike books in middle school circa 1990-93. Since books in general didn’t appeal to me in middle school, I missed that phase. Then this past fall I learned that Mike Flanagan and his team will soon adapt The Midnight Club into a series for Netflix, so I decided to track down a copy and check it out.

What’s weird is that this book isn’t horror by any stretch of the imagination. It’s a straight up teen romance. A group of dying kids in a hospice meet up at midnight and tell stories. The stories they tell aren’t even ghost stories or horror stories, they’re mostly romance stories. It’s truly baffling to me how this book got marketed. It claims on the jacket copy that “they make a pact with each other that says that the first one of them who dies is to make every effort to contact the others — from beyond the grave. Then one of them dies. And the story begins.” But that’s just not the case. The first kid dies around page 150 of a 200 page book. If that jacket copy were true, the story would begin in the last fifty pages. Not to mention, after that first character dies, she doesn’t try to contact the others. In fact, nothing supernatural happens. That character dies and then the others die and that’s it. There’s no ghosts. There’s no hauntings. There’s no horror. There’s nothing scary at all except the fact that the children are dying of cancer and AIDS.

But that doesn’t mean the book wasn’t awesome. I enjoyed the hell out of it. But then I enjoy the hell out of romances — I grew up watching and enjoying Days of Our Lives and romantic comedies with my mom, so I wasn’t upset by the false advertising. I thought it was well written and well paced and full of interesting characters and important topics and pretty progressive attitudes toward sexuality and disability.

I am seriously interested, though, to see how on earth Mike Flanagan and company are going to make it scary. Can’t wait to see!

Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light, 100 Art Writings 1988-2018: Schjeldahl, Peter, Earnest, Jarrett: 9781419734380: Amazon.com: Books

Peter Schjeldahl’s HOT, COLD, HEAVY, LIGHT, 100 ART WRITINGS 1988-2018 (Abrams Press, 2020)

I don’t think I’d ever purposefully read anything by Peter Schjeldahl before. I vaguely knew he wrote for The New Yorker, but I can’t remember the last time I opened a copy of that magazine…maybe 2005?

I happened on this by accident. I think the LA Public library app suggested it? Or maybe I got an email from someone? I can’t remember. However I stumbled on it, I’m glad I did. I ate this book up. Then a couple weeks ago when we were at Bart’s Books in Ojai, I found a used copy of his collection The Hydrogen Jukebox: Selected Writings of Peter Schjeldahl, 1978-1990 and snapped it up, so I have that one to look forward to next.

This one opens with a fascinating essay on Andy Warhol. Then moves to a couple essays about Willem de Kooning. (About de Kooning he writes, “His art is not abstract, just relentlessly abstracting.”) Then he moves to Velazquez and Rembrandt and Courbet. He covers Kerry James Marshall and Christopher Wool and Jenny Holzer and Duchamp and Donatello (the artist, not the Ninja Turtle). So, yeah, the scope is wild.

For those of us who seek to spend time with writers who think and feel passionately about visual art, this book delivers an abundance of riches.

Amazon.com: Black Leopard, Red Wolf (The Dark Star Trilogy): 9780735220171: James, Marlon: Books

Marlon James’s Black Leopard, Red Wolf (Penguin, 2019)

I read this, the first book in a projected trilogy, when it first came out back in February of 2019 and I got obsessed with it. The strangeness of everything, the language, the storytelling, the unfamiliar disjointed kaleidoscope of fable and epic tragedy completely captivated me. I’ve seen it described as an “African Game of Thrones” but that reductive attempt at marketing misses the genius of this book by a mile. Compare it to Amos Tutuola's The Palm-Wine Drinkard or Ben Okri’s The Famished Road or Sofia Samatar's A Stranger in Olondria or Nnedi Okorafor’s Akata Witch or…better yet…don’t compare it to anything, because like those books I just listed this one is irreducible. It’s bonkers and bold and bloody and brutal and sad and trippy and thrilling and perplexing and the only reason to compare it to anything, let alone Game of Thrones, is to try and convince the mainstream to buy it. Or, if I’m being more generous, the only reason to compare it to something else is to attempt to classify an otherwise unclassifiable book.

Anyway, in anticipation of the release a couple weeks ago of Moon Witch, Spider King (the follow-up, book two of The Dark Star Trilogy), I decided to get the audiobook of BLRW to refresh James’s world in my mind. Read by Dion Graham, who has done a bunch of great audiobooks, including Esi Edugyan’s Washington Black, Maurice Carlos Ruffin’s We Cast A Shadow, and Colson Whitehead's Harlem Shuffle, I found myself totally captivated once again. Typically I tend to prefer audiobooks read by the author, since the author knows the rhythm of the sentences better than anyone, but in this case I found Graham’s reading mesmerizing. He embodies the text and gives it a voice that conjures James’s world so vividly. Now I can’t wait to dig into Moon Witch, Spider King.

If you missed the most recent exclusive collection (Month 2: Volume 2), which dropped last Thursday, you missed a doozy! It contains twenty-one contemporary visual artists from all over the world with an emphasis on Ukrainian artists, fifteen pieces of contemporary literature: poetry/fiction/theory/interviews, six albums, fifteen videos: artworks, fashion shows, music videos, interviews, documentaries, and more stuff that resists categorization!

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Beaucoup

Coming Soon + Four Books From February