Books I've Read in Trees

Books I’ve read in trees. The place I like to read best.

David Foster Wallace is the sometimes precious, always precise, spot-on Joyce of our age.

I think David Foster Wallace's essays in CONSIDER THE LOBSTER (whose best essay, “Authority and American Usage,” arises from this Harper's article:

http://instruct.westvalley.edu/lafave/DFW_present_tense.html

and "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" are really important, especially "E Unam Pluribus" [stet]

For the mathematico-philosophical: DFW's "Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity"

I’ve shied away (so far) from teaching Wallace’s INFINITE JEST (1996), whose weight is fun at 1,079 pages. I relish DFW's stuff, footnotes and all.

And I just finished Mark Crispin Miller's BOXED IN on film and TV culture--and since it was published around '93 we / you might recall some of the subject matter.

Turned my TV off since then but Miller finds that’s a bad idea.


Devil in the White City, which blends some fine historical fiction about the Chicago World's Fair with alternate chapters showing America's own Dr. Holmes (stet) and his Ripperish
> methods, on a larger American scale.

This spring at MICA I’m teaching American Ugly: Lit 431 (Brown, 222) Thursdays, 9-11:45

Don Delillo, White Noise

Toni Morrison, Sula

Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides
Short story: Eugenides:
http://www.newyorker.com/printables/fiction/051010fi_fiction

Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters



David Foster Wallace,
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
Broom of the System


Lorrie Moore, Self-Help and other Stories
Annie Proulx, POSTCARDS 1841155012

Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics the website amazes; the similes mostly off, like “elephants on ice.”

David Eggers, What is the WHAT?


http://nedsparrowbooks.com/
All the Bookish BEST,

Professor Ned Sparrow

ned@nedsparrowbooks.com