Friday, August 05, 2005

dcat's Bedside Table Reading

My favorite feature from one of my favorite magazines comes monthly from one of my favorite writers. (I’m also an Aries and I love the Red Sox, and ice cream. My turnoffs are Yankees fans, spineless editors of history websites, and people who use air quotation marks with their fingers or misuse the word “irony” or any of its derivations, unless they are being ironic in either case.) Nick Hornby has a monthly column in The Believer that is one of those brilliant ideas so obvious you are jealous you did not come up with it first. His column is called “Stuff I’ve Been Reading,” and it is an essay based on two lists that he provides at the beginning of the column: “Books I’ve Bought” and “Books I’ve Read.” The two oftentimes overlap. (Here is a teaser from this month’s column.) “Stuff I’ve Been Reading” carries Hornby’s trademark style – witty and sometimes snort out loud funny, accessible, learned, slightly “laddish” as they might say here in Britain, insightful, unpretentious, and irreverent without being mean. In other words, it’s just about perfect.


One of my goals with dcat is to have a series of fairly regular features. Or what some might call “gimmicks.” And I want one of these gimmicks, I mean features, to be about books. The ideal goal would be to write every Friday. I do not want to rip off Hornby entirely for two good reasons – it wouldn’t be very original, and I’d be afraid of being sued (although let me remind the good folks at McSweeney’s of Steve Dallas’ first rule of being a lawyer from the late, great Bloom County: Never, ever sue poor people.).


So let me introduce you to “DCAT’s Bedside Table Reading.” My bedside table is a bit like my desk – covered with teeming piles on the verge of toppling. They seem inscrutable to outside observers, but a good anthropologist could do a fascinating (albeit inevitably poorly written and jargon laden) study of my life and interests based on these piles. There are usually several categories – magazines, journals and articles I should read, books I am supposed to be reviewing, books I am reading for other work related purposes, and pleasure books. There are rarely neat lines among those last two categories. I love what I do, and so inevitably books that I am reading that fit my areas of scholarly or teaching interest (Modern -- post 1865 give or take -- US and African history broadly but with an additional emphasis on race, politics, and civil rights movements in the South and southern Africa; global terrorism; and sports) are books I would read anyway. But the latter category also includes a whole range of fiction, memoirs, essays, music and sports books that are not at all related to anything I might write.


My bedside table in Oxford is not a table at all, but rather is the floor by my bed. Right now you can find a stack of newspapers (another regular pile, or blight, if you are my girlfriend at the time, wherever I am). I have not really settled on a favorite British paper, so each day I buy whatever seems best, usually choosing among the Guardian, Independent or Times of London. Once the pile reaches a certain height I must admit that I am unlikely to read most of what by that point only serves to provide a pretty accurate timeline of my sloth. So I toss most of the stack, save a few chosen sections that, while not quite worth my reading in the past month, I really surely will get to in the near future.


I also always have magazines. I subscribe to a disturbing number of them, covering the range from politics to sports to music to popular culture to magazines such as the one that currently lies half-read, Men’s Health. It, alongside Men’s Fitness and Men’s Journal are supposed to keep me fit, eating right, and insecure about what I look like, how much I work out, and just about every other salient factor of my very identity. I have not lifted a weight since arriving here, and so this issue is giving me all sorts of ides for the routine I am going to develop as soon as I get back. Anyone want to place bets?


I also am finally getting through the OAH Magazine of History special issue on Martin Luther King Jr. There is much of use in it, including several essays on historiography and special topics by Clayborne Carson, probably the single most important King scholar today. Carson is the issue editor, and for the first time the magazine allowed one person to dominate the writing of most of the pieces. There is little truly new in here, but it provides a nice consolidation of ideas, and for those of you who teach civil rights or want some handy King references in a digestible format, I’d suggest looking here.


I have deadlines for four reviews on me, so I will be discrete about them. They are, on the African side, Howard French’s A Continent For the Taking, James Barber’s Mandela’s World and an edited collection by Richard Calland and Sean Jacobs, Thabo Mbeki’s World (these last two are for a longer review) and Steve Estes’ I Am a Man on the Civil Rights Movement front. Basically, of the four, one is a fantastically readable book that fits into a tradition of reportage-cum-history, two are solid academic treatments that deserve a wide audience, and one is a train wreck. I probably owe my editors the courtesy of letting their readers know first which is which. But if you email I’ll tell you.


Finally we have the books that are work related and/or just fun reading. There are four I am in the midst of right now (I am, if you have not discerned it, a multi-tasker. I can never read just one book at a time.). These books are Kevin Toolis’ brilliant look into the “soul of the IRA,” Rebel Hearts; Michael Dorman’s long out of print We Shall Overcome about his year as a reporter on the front lines of the Civil Rights struggle; Paul Theroux’s account of his Cape to Cairo trip (one I want to be intrepid enough to tackle someday) Dark Star Safari; and Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim a classic satire of British academic life in the 1950s.


All four are wonderful reads. I am using both Toolis’ and Dorman’s books as background reading for books I am beginning to write. Theroux’s was a must read both because of my Africa work but also because I love good travel writing, Theroux is always fabulous on that front – maybe the best alive today – and as I said, I have my own ambitious Africa travel plans. And I am finally getting to Lucky Jim after being told by my undergraduate advisor over dinner at the Southern last fall that it is the best satire of academic life ever written.


And that’s what’s at my bedside. I’ll probably give the books more focus next time, but I hope you like this new feature and I will gladly take any comments about the books or this idea of mine. And go read the Hornby stuff – it’s brilliant. It is a highlight of my month whenever I get my issue.

No comments: