{"id":9756,"date":"2018-02-13T18:59:42","date_gmt":"2018-02-13T23:59:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lettersandsodas.com\/books\/?p=9756"},"modified":"2018-02-13T18:59:42","modified_gmt":"2018-02-13T23:59:42","slug":"going-into-town-a-love-letter-to-new-york-by-roz-chastbloomsbury-usa-2017","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/going-into-town-a-love-letter-to-new-york-by-roz-chastbloomsbury-usa-2017\/","title":{"rendered":"Going into Town: A Love Letter to New York by Roz ChastBloomsbury USA, 2017"},"content":{"rendered":"

Despite loving Roz Chast’s work whenever I see it in the New Yorker<\/em> (speaking of which: her recent cover<\/a> is amazing), I hadn’t known she had written a book about NYC until Jenny from Reading the End<\/a> mentioned it in a comment here last year. I immediately put a hold on it at the library, and after a lengthy wait, it finally arrived, right as I found my normal reading routines upended by an injury that means I can’t currently hold anything heavier than a coffee cup in my right hand, which makes reading on the subway pretty much impossible.<\/p>\n

Ah well: this ended up being a perfect book to read on my couch in two sittings, though I am not entirely its ideal audience. I came to NYC for college and stayed after graduation: I’ve now been here for nearly 18 years if you count my time in college; I’ve lived in Brooklyn for nearly 14 years. So I don’t really need an explanation of uptown\/downtown, how streets and avenues work, and where the different Manhattan subway lines go. That said, Chast’s style, both narration-wise and illustration-wise, totally works for me, so even her descriptions of basic Manhattan geography had their charm. (This book got its start as a guide for Chast’s daughter, who grew up in the suburbs and came to NYC for college, so it’s a little bit of a beginner’s guide to the city, but it’s also more than that.) <\/p>\n

Where this book shines, for me, is in the more personal bits: the parts about Chast’s favorite things in NYC, the parts that capture her style and sensibility and sense of humor and way of looking at the world. There’s a bit about the time when Chast found an unusual item on the sidewalk that I’d read previously (I think it was published in the New Yorker<\/em>) that still made me laugh out loud this time around. There are bits about the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the American Museum of Natural History. There’s a drawing of a street tree in winter with plastic bags caught in its branches, whose accompanying text is just: “If Manhattan had an official tree, it would be this one” (125). There are multiple bits about the pleasures of walking in the city, which I relate to a whole lot. “I am interested in the person-made,” Chast writes, and continues: “I like to watch and eavesdrop on people. And I really<\/em> like DENSITY OF VISUAL INFORMATION” (40). (Which is followed by the totally excellent image you can see as the lead illustration in this NPR piece<\/a>.) “If you are feeling antsy or out of sorts,” Chast advises, “pick a street and walk across it from coast to coast. Any street will do. The more nondescript your street is, the greater chance you have of making your own discoveries” (47-49). And Chast’s drawings and photographs show some of these sorts of discoveries: I love a drawing of a sign for a deli advertising “ham & cheese warps,” and photos showing different varieties of standpipe connections. I also like the way Chast quotes from E.B. White’s Here Is New York<\/i>, another lovely book about the city that I should reread one of these days.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Despite loving Roz Chast’s work whenever I see it in the New Yorker (speaking of which: her recent cover is amazing), I hadn’t known she had written a book about NYC until Jenny from Reading the End mentioned it in a comment here last year. I immediately put a hold on it at the library, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9756","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nonfiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9756","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9756"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9756\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9756"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9756"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9756"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}