The Magus by John Fowles

At the start of this year I started reading The Magus by John Fowles. For some reason, I never heard about him at college or anywhere else. I think that this book was recommended in a Jesse Ball interview I was reading. So I ordered it from the library. And now I'm going to read all of his novels, in the order they were written. I am really dumbfounded, every sentence is amazing. I'm reading most sentences twice or more because I don't want to waste them.

Also reading some of the case histories in The Terror That Comes in the Night, which is about sleep paralysis, or the "old hag," which is a surprisingly common experience which is possibly a little bit supernatural or perhaps just about sleeping in the wrong position. I actually had this happen to me a few times, about 5 years ago. It's like something out of a horror film.

And, in line with Matt, I'm reading through Eat, Drink, and Be Vegan, though I'm vegetarian and not vegan. The smoky avocado sauce and cumin lime tofu are looking good.

Anna-Lynne

January Staff Reading: Addendum

More IDT staffers chime in with their January reading lists...

Mara Naselli: My reading life is chaos. There are books everywhere around the apartment, stacked, splayed open, or just scattered about. I'm reading Feasts and Riot for a freelance project I'm working on, and have at some time or another opened Tattooed Girl by Joyce Carol Oates, the collected works of Isaac Babel, and some books on suburban architecture and planning.

Summer Block: I don't remember if I already recommended these two excellent nonfiction books, but if not, I just finished A.N. Wilson's The Victorians and After the Victorians: The World Our Parents Knew. Both absolutely great and very fun reads.

Jesslyn Roebuck: I'm reading The Moviegoer by Walker Percy, The Best American NonRequired Reading (ed. Dave Eggers, and intro by Sufjan Stevens, and I just finished The Kite Runner and The Sound and the Fury.

Staff Reading: January

A quick rundown of what some Identity Theory staffers are digging into this month...

Drew McNaughton: Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson, The Brightening Glance: Children and Imagination by Ellen Handler Spitz, The New Kings: Nonfiction edited by Ira Glass

Robert Birnbaum: The Song Before it is Sung by Justin Cartwright, Wrack and Ruin by Don Lee, The Guardians by Ana Castillo, The Night Train to Lisbon by Pascal Mercier, The Optimists by Andrew Miller, Terminal by Andrew Vachss, Yalo by Elias Khoury, and Swimming in a Sea of Death by David Rieff. Also the McSweeney's 25 and the newest Open City.

Summer Block Kumar: I just came back from Christmas in the U.S. and brought back a big haul of new books. Right now I'm reading Denise Baker's Inscribing the Hundred Years' War in French and English Cultures, and I just finished the Dale Peck collection Hatchet Jobs. And plenty of health food cookbooks as part of New Year's Resolutions 2008.

Alexandra Tursi: I got my art fix with Joe Andoe's sugar-high insane autobiography Jubilee City. I also recently enjoyed Laura Moriarty's The Center of Everything and now I'm reading her latest, The Rest of Her Life. Joyce Carol Oates' The Gravedigger's Daughter, which I picked up at the Burlington Book Festival, is another that I'm slowly trudging through. On my night-table? The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel.

Matt Borondy: Reading through the Vegetarian Times Complete Cookbook as part of my resolution to cook more and to make sure I'm being a healthy vegetarian. (The more I read about it, the less I can believe that I ever voluntarily ate meat.) I recently started Right Livelihoods: 3 Novellas by Rick Moody and Boy by Japanese film director Takeshi Kitano.

Ondaatje, Amis, and Autobiography: What Bauman's Reading this Month

There were three novels back there: Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje, House of Meetings by Martin Amis, and Our Lady of the Forest by David Guterson. I won't belabor except to say I truly enjoyed all three. Especially, of course, the new Ondaatje. He is, really, breathtaking.

Since then, it has been the month of autobiography. I started with My Life, by President Bill. I bought this house of a book the very week it came out; I wanted to put Bill on the bestseller list, to flip the bird at Dubya. But it's a very big book. So I kind of put off reading it. For a few years. Did it this month, though. A marathon to be sure, but worthwhile. I just like Bill. So there.

A few weeks ago we had the whole family in Manhattan for an evening of doings, and whilst waiting for the train home my wife picked up Three Dog Life by Abigail Thomas. We have three dogs (four, actually, on the property). Brenda loved it, so I dug in. And was very pleasantly surprised. Abigail Thomas has a new fan. My favorite part, I think, was about Outsider Art, and art by the mad. Both in the description of the art (similar stuff hanging on our own walls) and in the mad place we all create from.

And from there to a memoir by Bill Strickland, Ten Points. Strickland is the managing editor of Bicycle magazine. I'm not a big sports fan or a bicyclist myself. But Brenda (again) heard him on Marty Moss-Coane's radio program one day and thought of me. Which, if you've read the book, isn't exactly a compliment. Just an observation. So on the heels of Abigail Thomas I dug into Strickland, and I'm there now, and it is difficult. Not the book, Strickland is a fine writer…the subject matter. It's never easy looking in the looking glass, and that's what I feel like I'm doing every time I pick this thing up.

On deck I plan to start the new year slightly fantastically. First, I'm reading aloud to my younger daughter A Wrinkle in Time, which I last read when I was maybe ten years old. On my own, I have on the nightstand Golden Compass by Phillip Pullman (which my older daughter has been trying to get me to read for years), to be followed by A Canticle for Leibowitz, which I somehow missed out on back when I should have read it. My friend Kirk loaned it to me after a conversation about Lazarus we had over cigars on New Year's Eve night.

-Christian Bauman