Cyberflanerie: Better Books, Books of Note, Decluttering Books, Rare Books

The NYT's Charles M. Blow says, Reading Books is Fundamental.

Making Better Books:

The Book Designer's archive of articles "practical advice to help build better books"

Chronicling America in the Library of Congress (newspaper archives)

Book Aesthete Tumblr

Books of Note:

Sam Quinones' Tell Your True Tale East Los Angeles

The Daily Beast's Ted Gioia says The Smartest Book About the Digital Age Was Published in 1929. (José Ortega y Gasset's The Revolt of the Masses.)

My book! Updated edition in Kindle, Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution: Francisco I. Madero and His Secret Book, Spiritist Manual.

>see also recent Madam Mayo posts on Gregory Gibson's Demon of the Waters and Bruce Berger's The End of the Sherry.

>see also lists of recommended reading on Mexico; creative process; craft of  creative writing; literary travel memoir.

Decluttering Books: 

Early Retirement Extreme on How to Get Rid of Books

>see also Madam Mayo's easy-peasy 10 Question Method

Rare Books:

Mexico Desconocido on Mexico City's antiquarian bookstores (en español)

>see also recent blog post,  Una ventana al mundo invisible (A Window to the Invisible World) or, Master Amajur and the Smoking Signatures

COMMENTS always welcome

The End of the Sherry by Bruce Berger

Blue collar and provincial Puerto Real in the police state that was Franco's Spain might seem an unlikely venue for an amusing, eccentric, and very sensitive artist's memoir. A graduate of Yale and a grad school drop out, pianist and writer Bruce Berger's whole life seems unlikely, lived wildly out of sequence, and in The End of the Sherry, the Spanish chapters thereof beset by, in his words, "a curious passivity." From the moment Berger washes up in a bar in Puerto Real, he and his beer-slurping dog drift and bob in the flow of happenstance. There are gigs with a rock band, a flash-in-the-pan career as a fishmonger, a pointless foray into Tangiers-- yet always with sails set toward his true loves, music and writing. I first came across Bruce Berger's work in his travel memoir of Baja California, Almost an Island, and was enchanted by the beauty of his language, his courage in always pushing past clichés, and, best of all, his scrumptiously puckish sense of humor. Yes, I laughed out loud a lot in reading The End of the Sherry, too, and shook my head in wonder at the strangeness of his adventures and enthusiasms, and prodigious talent for cross-cultural friendships. Masterfully poetic, this belated coming-of-age / travel memoir throws a weird and wonderful lava-lamp light on his other works, even while standing solidly on its own, an exemplar of those genres. In sum, a five star read.

> Recommended literary travel memoirs (updated)

COMMENTS

Bruce Berger's The End of the Sherry

I like to say that books are thought-capsules that can travel through time and space-- e.g., here I am rereading Cabeza de Vaca's 16th century Naúfragos, his memoir of (who'd a thunkit?) far West Texas, and other yonder beyonds. But the fact is, thanks to our books, we writers often make friendships in the here and now. Bruce Berger is one such. He's the author of Almost an Island, one of my very favorite travel memoirs, as well as a passel of other works about Baja California and the deserts of the southwest United States. When my book about Baja California, Miraculous Air, came out in 2002 and apropos of that he-- out of the blue-- sent me an autographed copy of his latest, Sierra, Sea and Desert: El Vizcaíno, well, though we hadn't yet met in person, we were good friends. 

So what shows up in my mailbox this Christmas but his autographed latest, The End of the Sherry-- and just as with Almost an Island, as I read, I am not only in awe of his poetic prose, but laughing out loud at one thing or another on almost every page. 

The End of the Sherry is his coming of age as an artist story-- set all the way back in the 1960s, when he played piano in Spain for three years. With his love for music, enthusiasm for travel, his poetry, appreciation for beauty, for the quirks and peculiarities of all kinds of people, and always served up with that scrumptiously puckish sense of humor... reading Berger is the best way to start out the new year.

COMMENTS

La Giganta y Guadalupe

An absolutely beautiful and crucial book about the volcanic spine of Mexico's nearly one thousand mile-long peninsula.

Published by Planeta Peninsula / Niaparaja AC
ISBN 978-607-95007-1-9

Fotografía de Miguel Angel de la Cueva y textos de Bruce Berger y Exequiel Ezcurra.

UPDATES:

>>Webpage for Fundación Wild

>>Center for a Better Life article.


Planeta Península A.C.


www.miguelangeldelacueva.com