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| Drop Jaw Photography, Bay Area, CA, 20...10? |
Today, I'm not in the mood to pontificate about modeling, traveling, or whatsit.
So in lieu of that, here is a catalog of the books I've been reading since I started modeling, starting with the more recent. I'm likely forgetting some. Some were great, some were awful. Some are rereads. Some are comics. Bite me.
Since I've paused on the traveling thing:
Griffin and Sabine, Nick Bantock [it's a short epistolary picture book, but really charming and with lovely art--I recommend]
Poor Folk, Fyodor Dostoevsky [still working on this one--I started it ages ago and then misplaced my copy, which has just resurfaced in my car--liking it so far]
What is this Thing Called Love, Kim Addonizio [amazing, amazing, amazing contemporary poet--the only one]
On this last trip up the west coast:
Venus in Furs, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch [absolutely beautiful, though not the strongest story]
Battle Royale, Koushun Takami and Masayuki Taguchi [revolting and depressing]
The Story of the Eye, Georges Bataille [this left me incredulous...some of the imagery was impressive, but for the most part I was at a loss to find anything notable about this]
The Story of O, Pauline Reage [same as above, though this one was doubly unredeeming--it lacked both deeper significance AND smut. Okay, I'm being too harsh. I found both of these interesting, but was thankful that they were short.]
In North Dakota/Minnesota:
Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy [struck a chord with me and had a genuine influence on my own introspection, but, seriously, it was too long]
Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov [beautifully-written, but the last quarter/third of the book took a strange turn that I didn't like]
Mr. Thompkins in Paperback, George Gamow [fantastical, child-like stories explaining quantum physics concepts--I really liked it]
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll [Yay]
The Pearl, John Steinbeck [One of my favorites--I first heard this one in fourth grade on cassette tape, and have found it incredibly beautiful ever since]
Lullaby, Chuck Palahniuk [Another Palahniuk, enough said: there's not much variation in style so you pretty much like them all or hate them all]
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams [Yay]
Howl's Moving Castle, Diana Wynne Jones [Yay]
A book of Oscar Wilde's plays. [None of them hold a candle to Dorian Gray.]
Some random one-shot comic books whose titles escape me [what do you mean, comics don't count?]
Road-tripping through the Midwest, Deep South, and Southwest:
Prozac Nation, Elizabeth Wurtzel [Meh...this was all right]
Running with Scissors, Augusten Burroughs [Fun and quick]
Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens [I was completely engrossed by this one, though the very end was a bit deflated]
The Stand, Stephen King [Again, I liked this one until it made a major shift towards the end]
Tons and tons of Vonnegut! He's my favorite.
In the backcountry, during my hiatus from everything:
Desert Solitaire, Edward Abbey [I love Abbey's way of writing; it has a squillion characteristics of what I want to emulate in my own writing]
Ishmael, Daniel Quinn [vaguely patronizing, but kind of cute]
The Prophet, Kahlil Gibran [surprisingly poignant; I thought this one would annoy me, but I liked it]
The Alchemist, Paolo Coelho [seeming to go hand-in-hand with The Prophet, I read this while quarantined in my tent one day with a sprained ankle--for secret reasons, I'm particularly fond of this one]
Tao Te Ching, Lao-tzu [given to me by my mother before I went into the woods...was beautifully relevant to me when I read it]
Working in an office at NASA, at which point I started modeling:
Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand [this propelled an ugly, obsessive late-teens-Ayn-Rand phase that lost me a bunch of friends, but I recovered a year or so later]
Catch-22, Joseph Heller [fantastic]
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