Stuff I'm Reading

"Awww yeah, all right, so tight, forever" - Bing Ji Ling, Forever [music-for-robots] 52 Books in 52 Weeks is something that should have probably made it to the 101 in 1001 but didn't. Ever since I was a wee one, I have loved to read but for much of this year I hadn't been motivated to pick up a book. I don't know why but I suspect there's an addiction to electronic forms of entertainment at play. Over the past few weeks though, I've made a commitment to reading. 3 Sundays in a row, I have found myself with the tv off, the iTunes shuffling, and my nose in a book. Those first two Sundays ended with reviews written here. This past Sunday found me with Walter Mosley's Little Scarlet and some heady thoughts about my book selection process. Nick Hornby writes an occasional column for Believer Magazine called Stuff I've Been Reading. In it, he talks about the books he's been reading but also the selection process and the journey for new knowledge that each book brings him. I had first read the column in the Summer of 2003 and thought about it a couple times that fall while reading Steve Martin's The Pleasure of My Company and Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. Both novels referenced number squares and mathematical "magic" and I thought that I should know more about the subject but didn't follow through with the thought choosing instead to get lost in XBox and television on DVD. But now I'm back to the concept. Where You're At had me hungry for more hip hop knowledge so I sought Unbelievable. At the same time, I had blown through Birth of a Nation which tickled my interest in good fiction immersed in dark skinned worlds so I sought out Walter Mosley's latest. Little Scarlet is as hard-boiled as any of the previous Easy Rawlins books but is set against a landscape that, for the first time, is changing for Easy and the people that populate his Los Angeles. Starting mere hours after the Watts Riots, Easy spends the entire story exploring the emotions that the riots have stirred in him while dealing with a brand new Los Angeles and the murder of a black woman quite possibly by a white man. From here, I'm first going to take another crack at Fearless Jones, a Walter Mosley novel that I couldn't connect with the first time I tried to read it but the mention and appearance of it's main characters in Little Scarlet has me wanting the complete story. Then, it's onto Rivers of Blood, Years of Darkness (which I suspect I will be visiting a public library for as it doesn't seem to be readily available in stores) and finally a different fictional take on the Riots and their aftermath with Southland. I'm sure these other books will take me in new directions as well. I want my reading to weave together into a cohesive narrative and I don't know why I've only rarely done this in the earlier parts of my nerdy bookworm life. Little Scarlet, especially for Angelenos, is highly recommended.