Library Books!

Top to bottom:
Wittgenstein Jr by Lars Iyer
The Penderwicks by Jeanne Birdsall
The Penderwicks on Gardam Street by Jeanne Birdsall
The Penderwicks at Point Mouette by Jeanne Birdsall
Satin Island by Tom McCarthy
The Penderwicks in Spring by Jeanne Birdsall
The First Bad Man by Miranda July
We Are Pirates by Daniel Handler
Nightwalking by Matthew Beaumont
(Oh, and that’s Wolf in White Van by John Darnielle to the right, which I read recently.)

I have been on a bit of a library spree lately, as evidenced by my stack of checked-out books, shown above. I started Wittgenstein Jr today and am liking it so far – it’s the third book by Iyer that I’ve read, and it’s deadpan funny in the same way the others were. I read The Penderwicks and The Penderwicks on Gardam Street in 2008 and really liked them (they’re kids’ books that remind me of Elizabeth Enright’s Melendy Quartet —sweet well-written realistic fiction about a family) but I haven’t yet read the next two books in the series, so I decided to get them all and have a Jeanne Birdsall reading spree. The New Yorker said Satin Island is an “experimental novel” that “takes the form of a brilliant series of numbered digressions on parachute accidents, Lévi-Strauss, hub airports, and many other things,” which sounds pretty great. I haven’t read anything by Miranda July or Daniel Handler and saw these two books on the New Books shelf today. And Nightwalking is nonfiction, subtitled “A Nocturnal History of London”: I like both walking and London, so am looking forward to it.