I love to read. Well, I should clarify that. I love books. I collect first editions and rare hard cover editions of any book I can get my hands on. I love the way books smell, like vanilla and cigars. I love the way their spines crack with wear and age and finally gives, like a perfectly worn leather jacket. I love the way they look in my house, stacked in haphazard piles on any available surface area. The saying goes, "don't judge a book by it's cover," but I definitely buy books based on their covers. I buy books for aesthetic value, and then grow to love them through their content. 

I keep my rare first editions on the top shelf of a built-in nook in the kitchen. I've got a first edition of J.D. Salinger's Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters; a first edition of Truman Capote's Thanksgiving Visitor (the best present I've ever received by the best boyfriend I ever had); a very rare edition of Voltaire's Candide illustrated by Paul Klee that my father gave me for Christmas one year; and a first edition of Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, which I found at Logos Books and Records in Santa Cruz for nine fucking dollars. 

Okay, so I also like to read my pretty books every once in a while. I have a really bad habit of picking out a random book from my library and reading it halfway through and then putting it down, either bored by the narrative, or distracted by another story that just begs me to read it right then and there. I'm working on this habit. It's a work in progress. But about a month ago, I somehow managed to get myself engaged in four different books, reading them all intermittently at the same time. 

Here's my list.

1. Armed Love, by Elia Katz. Armed Love is a nonfiction narrative account of Elia's experience living on communes across the country. He starts out in New York City in 1971, broke and hungry for adventures, and ends his journey in California. Katz's writing is sophisticated yet dry, very to the point, and he rambles in a way that makes the reader believe the book was meant for them and their eyes alone. The book is a glimpse into the life of a young male traveling across America in search of meaning, but the storytelling is smooth, like a diary, told through anecdotes of commune life and the instability of the decade. Katz makes little references to the politics of the time, except in his description of authority. In one scene, he recounts time spent in a New York City jail. Wearing purple flared bell bottoms, a pink blouse, and his hair curly and long, looking like a hipster, he accompanies a friend to the courthouse, forgetting the buck knife concealed in his pocket. Once the knife is discovered by guards, Katz is detained and booked on charges of concealing a deadly weapon. The book is fascinating, and reads like a stream of thought. 

2. This is How You Lose Her, by Junot Diaz. This is How You Lose Her is a collection of short stories about (mainly) Junior, Diaz's alter ego if you will, and the women he cheats on. It's almost a man's guide to losing women, or a women's guide to avoiding men like Junior. The stories are all beautifully told, heartbreaking, both funny and sad. Diaz writes in a very masculine way, using curse words in almost every sentence, and talks about pussy like homeboy from the corner near McArthur Park. Some of the stories are written in second person, where Junior almost speaks to himself. "It was 1985. You were sixteen years old and you were messed up and alone like a motherfucker." (Check out an excerpt on The New Yorker). But the best part about this book is how easy it is to read. Diaz is a celebrated writer; he won the Pulitzer in 2007 for The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. He teaches creative writing at MIT. But Junot Diaz isn't Faulkner. He isn't Hemingway. He's not even Jonathan Franzen. His writing is loose, experimental, and sometimes uneven. Half of the words in any given story are in Spanish. But the reason he's famous, the reason he's won a fucking Pulitzer, the reason he teaches at a University like MIT, is because he owns his style. I admire that, above anything else. 

3. The White Album, by Joan Didion. The White Album is a collection of essays about Didion's life in the '60s, mainly taking place in Los Angeles. These essays were originally published in magazines and collected as a whole in 1979. Didion writes about Los Angeles and her involvement in the "scene," describing a night when she was in The Door's recording studio when Jim Morrison stumbled in and proceeded to sing incoherently to himself while the rest of the band ignored him and ate sandwiches. She describes John and Michelle Phillips in a stretch limo on their way to the hospital to give birth. And then there's Linda Kasabian, the key witness in the Manson murder trials. Didion describes interviewing her, buying her a nice dress to wear to court the day she gave her testimony, and then later in life meeting her in Cony Island with her daughter. Didion describes Los Angeles in its bleakest form, yet makes you yearn for the absolute desolation of the city of lost angels. Although the essays move through Los Angeles to San Francisco and the Black Panthers to bishop James Pike and then to Georgia O'Keeffe, her writing, just like Diaz's, is entirely her own. Her voice booms from the pages, as if she were telling you her stories face to face. 

4. Beloved, by Toni Morrison. Morrison is one of the most prolific writers of our generation. She won the Pulitzer for Beloved in 1988, and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Fiction in 1993. I've read almost every book she's ever written: Sula, Tar Baby, The Bluest Eye, Songs of Solomon. Not to generalize her work into the African American literature genre, but she mainly writes about the struggles of blacks in America. Her writing style is beyond impressive; she can change tense, voice, perspective, and structure in one novel so seamlessly you don't even realize it at first. In Beloved, she starts out in third person, moves into third person omniscient, then into first person, then into poetry, then free form, then back into third person. She changes tense from past to present within one sentence. She breaks all the rules of traditional fiction writing. All of them. Beloved is about three generations of women (grandmother, mother, daughter) living in a haunted house in Cincinnati, Ohio, in the 1860s. Without ruining any plot lines, the story centers around Sethe (mother) and Denver (daughter) and an unexpected mysterious guest, Beloved, who turns their lives upside down. The story is also about love, and how it can consume you, and alter your conscious, change your decisions, and affect every aspect of life. "Love is or it ain't. Thin love ain't love at all." 

I hope to finish all of these books by the end of the week. 

The end.