I have this little stack of books, see, that refuse to stay shelved for too long. Sometimes I try to tidy the apartment, to find the flat surfaces underneath the piles of books (I’m only half to blame for this–we both have an addiction), but within a few days this certain little stack always finds itself migrating back to the dining room table where I do most of my writing.

The stack changes depending on the project I’m working on, but lately for me it’s been all-novel, all-the-time. Here’s a little survey of the stack’s current makeup:

The Etched City by K. J. Bishop

I thought a friend recommended this book to me ages ago, and so I picked it up at the bookstore. It turns out that he’d recommended a different book entirely, but I am so incredibly happy I made that misunderstanding. The Etched City is a gorgeous book, full of beautifully descriptive passages that make my mouth water every time I read them. Whenever I get stuck for description in an urban scene, I think, “how would Bishop have written that?” and I flip to one of the many bookmarked passages for inspiration.

More Terrible Than Death by Robin Kirk

Robin Kirk’s book has taken decades of violent history in Colombia and turned it into a powerful, gripping narrative of corruption, massacres, drug lords and hope. Her book is one of the most lyrical books on South America that I’ve read, and she does an amazing job at focusing the reader on the big picture, then driving it home with visceral interviews and portrayals of the people she met. I’ve devoured this book cover to cover many times since I first read it in college. You should, too.

Coming Home to Eat by Gary Paul Nabhan

Nabhan is one of the best writers about local food, traditional agriculture and sustainability in the American Southwest. He’s based out of Tucson, AZ, and as the environment of my novel is based on the Sonora desert, whenever I find myself staring out at the drizzly Seattle cityscape with my photos and research notes in front of me, trying to recapture the magic of the desert, I search through one of his books.

(Total NPR nerd alert, but check out this interview he did a few months ago on KUOW about native Northwest foods.)

Honorable mentions

Those three books are dogeared and marked up, but I have plenty of other books I turn to in my time of need. If I’m looking for inspiration for making my dialog better, lately I’ve been turning to Tana French and to Stacia Kane’s Downside books. For historical inspiration, I bring out Bitter Fruit by Stephen Schlesinger, Guerrilla Warfare by Che Guevara, Violent Politics by William R. Polk (definitely check that one out), and of course, anything by Eduardo Galeano.

What are you reading?

Hi Bugan ya Hi Kinggawan by Rochita Loenen-Ruiz. Lovely.

The fantastic folks over at The Book Smugglers just posted the results of their cover survey. The results are interesting–to sum up, people do judge books by their covers, although they understand how little an author has to do with the cover art.

My thoughts? I’m much more likely to buy something I’ve never heard of if it has an interesting cover, but I’ll buy a book I’ve been wanting to read anyway despite the cover art.

If I’ve never heard of it and the cover art is nothing but boring cliches? A great blurb on the back won’t save it, because I won’t bother to pick it up.

When I was a freshman in high school, we had to write a certain number of book reports on “classics” a quarter in order to get an A. My teacher came up with an idea that was supposed to make reading fun and inspire creativity: we would make book covers for the books we reviewed.

I had a ton of fun making these imaginary book covers (the one for Dune used up all my tan-colored crayons, if I remember correctly), but the project had one flaw which I quickly realized. Book covers by nature provide only a cliffhanger synopsis of book’s first half, therefore, I had no incentive to actually finish a novel that was boring.

Now that I’m an adult who has spent a good part of her life finishing books she wasn’t interested in because of her educational path, I know that I have better things to be doing with my time.

I’ve argued with many people about whether or not I should finish books that I find boring. To me, the question comes down to whether or not the book is good for me. Is celery good for me? Yes, so I will eat it although I find it boring. Is Haruki Murakami good for me? He certainly is popular among professors that I respect, but his random diatribes against feminism annoy me in a manner that far outweighs the annoyance caused by a few sticks of celery.

I once dated a guy who always finished books. When we argued about whether or not it was necessary (we graduated with the same English Lit degree), his main point was that sometimes a mediocre book could be saved by a great ending, and that if you didn’t read to the end, you’d miss the life-changing finale.

My response: I just get pissed off if an author somehow manages to summon up enough talent to pull off a good ending. Why couldn’t s/he have gotten hir act together for the preceding 200 pages?

I’ve often caught my mother in the act of finishing books that she’s not enjoying. Sometimes those books were loaned by someone who’s feelings she doesn’t want to hurt (and I’ll admit I rarely get up the courage to tell people that their taste in books is sucky in comparison to my much more refined tastes), but sometimes she’s just sighed and told me, well, I’ve gotten this far….

A bad book takes so much more time to read than a bad movie. Don’t waste your life, people!

What got me started on this rant? I actually intended to write a book report on Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine (which I liked immensely except for that one night of nightmares), but my opening paragraphs about my high school book report days sent me off on a tangent. Blogging about books + Deschutes Inversion IPA = Tangential posts.

I probably still need more time to process the Bradbury anyway. I’ll post about it tomorrow.