book meme

The book I am reading: Too Big to Fail by Andrew Ross Sorkin (Penguin). Subtitle: Inside the Battle to Save Wall Street. Gripping and trashy, seems headed for Hollywood. There's a sly wit, too. It fleshes out the personalities in that excellent documentary, Inside Job. Sample extract:

Ben Shalom Bernanke was born in 1953 and grew up in Dillon, South Carolina, a small town permeated by the stench of tobacco warehouses. As an eleven-year-old, he traveled to Washington to compete in the national spelling championship in 1965, falling in the second round when he misspelled "Edelweiss."

Wait, no, here's a better example:

John Mack and Colm Kelleher, Morgan Stanley's chief financial officer, were sitting in the backseat of Mack's Audi, having hurried to the car just ten minutes earlier after Mack's secretary had instructed them to get down to the Fed as soon as possible. "This must be Lehman," Kelleher had said as they rushed out.
Not only was the rain pelting the roof furiously, but they were sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the West Side Highway, still miles away from their destination.
"We're not fucking moving," said Mack, repeatedly checking his watch.
"We're never going to get there," Kelleher agreed.
Mack's driver, John, a former police officer, noticed the bicycle lane running alongside the highway -- a project of the Bloomberg administration to encourage walking and cycling.
"Boss, that bike lane on the right, where does it go?"John asked, craning his neck back at them.
Mack's face lit up. "It goes all the way down to the Battery."
"Fuck it!" the driver said, as he found a break in the street divider and inched the car onto the bike lane, speeding down it.

Delightful people.
The book I am writing: Some short stories. Don't know if this counts as a book.
The book I love most: At the moment, Edmund de Waal's The Hare with Amber Eyes.
The last book I received as a gift: A History of the World in 100 Objects by Neil MacGregor, based on the outstanding radio series.
The last book I gave as a gift: Hisham Matar's Anatomy of a Disappearance, purchased at the launch last week. It opens:

There are times when my father's absence is as heavy as a child sitting on my chest. Other times I can barely recall the exact features of his face and must bring out the photographs I keep in an old envelope in the drawer of my bedside table. There has not been a day since his sudden and mysterious vanishing that I have not been searching for him, looking in the most unlikely places. Everything and everyone, existence itself, has become an evocation, a possibility for resem­blance. Perhaps this is what is meant by that brief and now almost archaic word: elegy.

I do not see him in the mirror but feel him adjusting, as if he were twisting within a shirt that nearly fits. My father has always been intimately mysterious even when he was present. I can almost imagine how it might have been coming to him as an equal, as a friend, but not quite.

Like de Waal, Matar is also a poet.
The nearest book on my desk: I don't have a desk as such at the moment, but the nearest book to where I'm typing this is the catalogue of the John Stezaker exhibition at Whitechapel Art Gallery. I've been meaning to post about the Stezaker exhibition but am still mulling over what it means. The critics in the Guardian, The Independent, The Times, and The Evening Standard have a lot to say that is thoughtful and well worth reading. I liked the exhibition a lot more than I thought I was going to, hence the purchase of the catalogue. Reading about it beforehand, I'd assumed it was facile and gimmicky, but it touches and disturbs on a deep level, and I'm not sure how. Is it simply the assault on integrity? My infant son was upset by a broken biscuit and the eclipse of the moon. He crawled away in horror when he saw me with wet hair. Another small child I know was terrified by the Mother and Toddlers Santa Claus, who was really her own father. It is disturbing when something is different from what we expect. Stezaker's interventions are witty and profound, sometimes utterly mysterious, but they are technically adept. He has a fantastic visual memory, that enables him to match up totally disparate images (eg, the distance between two lovers and a wild ravine) so the disjunction is thematic rather than simply linear.