My Kind of Town

Puffy winter coats with fur-lined hoods. Bright yellow sweatshirt/peacoat hybrid. Chucks. Brunches at Owen & Engine and escapes to DeKalb. Fall walks downtown. Reading benches: River East, Lincoln Park, and Oz Park. 22, 36, 151, 8, Brown, Pink. Movies at the AMC, at the Music Box, at the Landmark. Rats. Ann Sather's cinnamon rolls. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter at Steppenwolf and a monologue for the ages. That feeling of knowing people are watching out for you. Walking slowly; learning swag. Getting called Princeton again. 11/11/11 at the cupcake place. Injustice; losing a friend. Robyn, Kanye, "Good Feeling," "Whip My Hair," "Feel It In My Bones," "Dust Bowl III," "Help I'm Alive," "Break On Through (To The Other Side)." Fear. Christmas lights softening a room. Snow on the trees outside. ZooLights and Christkindlmarket and chocolate-covered peppermint Joe-Joes. The lowest point; breaking down in hysterics on Lake Shore Drive and pulling off to take surface roads, still crying. The restorative joys of Cloud Atlas, and the staggering power of the Letter Game, immediately following it. Walks by the North Pond; heron spotting; loon searching. Friday pizza nights, Person of Interest, Arrested Development, and Elementary. Rediscovering springtime. Getting beaten down by winter, a once-favorite season. Sunburn at the Pride Parade and dancing at Ravinia. Car trouble. Internet trouble. Decision-making and follow-through. Friends who refuse to see you as anything less than who you are. Finding points of connection to a girl who is even shyer than you were. Baking powder as an air freshener. The universal in the specific and the momentous in the ordinary. Scandal and literal water coolers. Floriole and La Fournette and portable traditions. "Imma need for you to get it together." The architecture boat tour. The beer baron's house. Gino's East. Hanging way too many floors above nothing at the "Willis" Tower Skydeck. The Ferris Wheel. Getting creeped out by the H. H. Holmes Wikipedia entry on Halloween. Walking around on Halloween smelling the air and admiring costumes and eating M&Ms from a jacket pocket. Accidentally getting stuck in Cubs foot traffic. Dining a block from the Obamas. The Tribune Tower and stones from all over the world; a coolness test for guests. Growing up. Empathy. Self-analysis. Specialty drinks. Tacos. Deming, Geneva, Cermak, Washtenaw, 19th, Ogden, Roosevelt, Pine Grove, Lake Shore, Arlington, Orchard, Webster, Burling, Stockton, Larabee, Fullerton, Halsted, Clark, Lincoln, Sheffield, North, Damen, Michigan, Illinois, McClurg. Life-changing at the Duke of Perth and the Violet Hour. Mon Ami Gabi. The Purple Pig. The Burwood Tap. The Hopleaf. Tall, tall tales and professional lies. Other people's beloved plus ones. Dancing all night at business students' weddings. Green river. People watching in The Palmer House. Arguing with a taxi driver who won't go to 78th and Cottage Grove; "There's a Starbucks there. Relax." "I love running errands with a white person." "You're tougher than you look. We thought you'd be long gone by now."

“Only love could pick a nested pair of steel Bramah locks.”

Better late than never!

Beginning in April 2007, I started keeping a list of all the books I'd read the previous year. 2013-2014 was a good year for reading, continuing and refining my new trend of quality over quantity. (We'll see how this trend stands up against grad school for the next three years.)

Books
1) A Dance for Emilia, Peter S. Beagle
2) The History of Love, Nicole Kraus
3) Christopher and His Kind, Christopher Isherwood
4) Friendship of Convenience, Rufus Gunn
5) Aspects of the Novel, E.M. Forster
6) Kathleen and Frank, Christopher Isherwood
7) Dido and Pa, Joan Aiken*
8) Memoirs of Hadrian, Marguerite Yourcenar
9) A Boy's Own Story, Edmund White
10) Good Kings Bad Kings, Susan Nussbaum
11) City Boy, Edmund White
12) In the Woods, Tana French
13) All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy
14) The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon
15) The Reason I Jump, Naoki Higashida
16) The Swimming-Pool Library, Alan Hollinghurst
17) The Arrival, Shaun Tan
18) Breakfast at Tiffany's, Truman Capote
19) Hymn and Cocktail Sticks, Alan Bennett
20) Pawn in Frankincense, Dorothy Dunnett*
21) The Days of Anna Madrigal, Armistead Maupin
22) The Light Between Oceans, M.L. Steadman
23) The Ringed Castle, Dorothy Dunnett*
24) The Devil in the White City, Erik Larson
25) The Raven Boys, Maggie Stiefvater
26) The Dream Thieves, Maggie Stiefvater

*re-reads
 

Top Five of the Year, in descending order

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon
The Days of Anna Madrigal, Armistead Maupin
The Dream Thieves, Maggie Stiefvater
Christopher and His Kind, Christopher Isherwood
Kathleen and Frank, Christopher Isherwood 


The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay was this year's best because, finishing it, I could imagine myself great. I could see greatness in others. I could imagine ordinary people leaping tall buildings with a single bound. I've enjoyed a lot of books, but the ones that stay with me are the ones where I discover little pieces of myself. 

I wrote a little about Christopher Isherwood in my personal statement. Here is an excerpt. It was a really good year.
 

Early this year, partially in an effort to understand where I might be heading with my own writing, I immersed myself in the writings of Christopher Isherwood. Having already read Berlin Stories and A Single Man in college, I went on to read Lions and Shadows, Down There on a Visit, Christopher and His Kind, and Kathleen and Frank.

Lions and Shadows is the book I wish I could hand anyone attempting to write about people in their twenties. It's great to read about Isherwood, pre-Berlin, trying to find himself as a writer in places of little or no inspiration; struggling to reconcile his calling as an artist with the pressure to come up with a solid career; consoling himself with this friends while simultaneously comparing himself to them and always coming up short; feeling most confident at the beginnings of things, before they've had a chance to become complicated. This is the way to talk about your twenties: at a distance, with fondness, and with hope.

Isherwood is famous for his depiction of a European turning point, and is also well known for the candor with which he revisits his stories. Down There on a Visit revisits ground covered in Berlin Stories. Christopher and His Kind revisits both those works while peeling back the light veneer of fiction covering both of them. In Kathleen and Frank, Isherwood does something completely different. He steps, for the most part, out of the spotlight. He dispenses with fictionalization altogether. He attempts to tell the story of his parents in their own words, through letters and diary entries.

These are not the parents he described in his own writing. These people are multifaceted, deep thinking, and kind, and may have understood him a great deal more than he realized. In Kathleen and Frank, Isherwood comes closest to walking in another’s shoes. The place he describes in Kathleen and Frank is not somewhere you could visit; it is his childhood, through the eyes of others.

Past years
2012-2013
2011-2012
2010-2011
2009-2010
2008-2009
2007-2008