Embedded Files
photo by Christian Erroi
You know how you can intuit so much about a stranger from what is in their shopping cart?
I have always had a mania for looking at bookcases, shelves, and audiobook libraries.
In the book Pastures of Heaven, Steinbeck writes, "It's almost impossible to read a fine thing without wanting to do a fine thing." If it is true, I have chosen a singular calling.
Here is what I have read* in recent days, in descending order from most recent [beloved ones **] [you will notice what a receptive audience I am]:
Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles Robert Maturin [e-book]**
Melmoth by Sarah Perry [audio]**
The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry [audio]**
Fashion Climbing: A Memoir by Bill Cunningham**
The Complete Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle [audio]**
The Moor's Last Sigh by Salman Rushdie [audio]**
Kristen Lavransdatter [audio]**
When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing [audio]
The Prisoner of Heaven by Carlos Ruiz Zafon [audio]**
The Angel's Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafon [audio]**
The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon [audio]**
The Duke's Children by Anthony Trollope [audio]**
The Eustace Diamonds by Anthony Trollope [audio]**
Phinneas Redux by Anthony Trollope [audio]**
The Prime Minister by Anthony Trollope [audio]**
Phinneas Finn by Anthony Trollope [audio]**
Can You Forgive Her? by Anthony Trollope [audio]**
Night Thoughts by Wallace Shawn [audio]**
Italian Journey by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe [audio]**
The Most Dangerous Man in America by Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis [audio]**
The Dawn Watch by Joseph Conrad [audio]**
Beneath a Scarley Sky by Mark Sullivan [audio]**
Bunk by Kevin Young [audio]**
The Aesthetic Brain by Anjan Chatterjee [audio]**
Leonardo Da Vinci by Walter Isaacson [audio]**
The Atlas of New Librarianship by R. David Lankes
History of New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations by Harry Miller Lydenberg**
Species of Spaces and Other Pieces by Georges Perec**
The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Furture by Kevin Kelly [audio]**
Focus: The Secret, Sexy, Sometimes Sordid World of Fashion Photographers by Michael Gross [audio]
Species of Spaces and Other Pieces by Georges Perec [print book]**
The Golden House by Salman Rushdie [audio]**
The End: A Novel by Salvatore Scibona [audio]**
Orley Farm by Anthony Trollope [audio]**
1984: New Classic Edition by George Orwell [audio]**
He Knew He Was Right by Anthony Trollope [audio]**
The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope [audio]**
Guide to the Research Collections of the New York Public Library by Sam P. Williams [print book]**
Daniel Deronda by George Eliot [audio]**
The Trouble with Reality: A Rumination on Moral Panic in our Time by Brooke Gladstone [e-book]**
Marjorie Morningstar by Herman Wouk [audio]**
Metadata [The MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series] by Jeffrey Pomerantz [e-book]
The Discipline of Organizing by Robert J. Glushko [e-book]**
The Mother of All Questions by Rebecca Solnit [print book]**
Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood [audio]
Reading Pictures: What We Think About When We Look at Art by Alberto Manguel [print book]**
Age of Anger: A History of the Present by Pankal Mishra [audio]**
The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge by Abraham Flexner and Robertt Dijkgraaf [print book]**
Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood by William J. Mann[audio]
The Future of Nostalgia by Svetlana Boym [e-book]**
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood [audio]**
Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. by Ron Chernow [audio]**
The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson [audio]
The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester [audio]**
A Pre-History of the Cloud by Tung Hui-Hu [e-book]**
Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie [audio]**
Swing Time Zadie Smith [audio]**
Curiosity by Alberto Manguel [audio]**
The Six: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters by Laura Thompson [audio]**
It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis [audio]**
The Romanovs 1613-1918 by SImon Sebag Montefiore [audio]**
Incarnations: India in Fifty Lives by Sunil Khinani [audio]**
Diane Arbus: Portrait of a Photographer by Arthur Lubow [audio]*
The Conversational Firm: Rethinking Bureaucracy in the Age of Social Media [e-book]
Data Love: The Seduction and Betrayal of Digital Technologies [e-book]**
Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu [audio]**
The Tales of Max Carrados [audio]
The Meaning of the Library: A Cultural History [e-book]**
Destruction was by Beatrice [e-book]**
No-ISBN: On Self-Publishing [print book]
Dada Globe Reconstructed [print book]
Ta Ta Dada: The Real Life and Celestial Adventures of Tristan Tzara [print book]**
All the Light We Cannot See: A Novel by Anthony Doerr [audio]**
Gushing Fountain: A Novel by Walter Walser [audio]**
The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert Caro [audio]**
Exploratory Programming in the Arts and Humanities by Nick Montfort [e-book]**
Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason Since 1945 by Orit Halpern [e-book]**
Information and Intrigue: From Index Cards, to Dewey Decimals to Alger Hiss [print book]**
This Orient Isle: Elizabethan England and the Islamic World by Jerry Brotton [print book]**
The Silk Roads: A New History of the World by Peter Frankopan [audio]**
West of Eden: An American Place by Jean Stein [audio]**
Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights by Salman Rushdie [audio]**
Between the Black Box and the White Cube by Andrew V. Uroskie [e-book]**
The Ground Beneath her Feet by Salman Rushdie [audio]**
The Little Paris Bookshop by Nina George [audio]
The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England by Dan Jones [audio]
The Wars of the Roses: The Fall of the Plantagenets and the Rise of the Tudors by Dan Jones [audio]
SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome by Mary Beard [audio]
Bad New Days: Art, Criticism, Emergency by Hal Foster [e-book]**
Avant-Garde Museology by Arseny Zhilyaev [e-book]**
Other Paris by Luc Sante [audio]**
The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro [audio and e-book]**
Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 3 [audio]**
Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald [audio]
City on Fire by Garth RIsk Hallberg [audio]**
A Handful of Dust: From the Cosmic to the Domestic by David Campany [print book]**
In Montmartre: Picasso, Matisse and the Birth of Modernist Art by Sue Roe [audio]
The Beautiful Fall: Fashion, Genius, and Glorious Excess in 1970s Paris by Alicia Drake [audio]
A Book of Migrations by Rebecca Solnit [audio]**
Just Kids by Patti Smith [audio]**
Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs by Sally Mann [audio]**
Flood of Fire by Amitav Ghosh [audio]**
Archival Anxiety and the Vocational Calling by Richard J. Cox [print book]**
Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production by Johanna Drucker [print book]**
Theater of Exhibitions by Jens Hoffmann [print book]
Culture Class by Martha Rosler [print book]**
The Complete Short Stories of Clarice Lispector [e-book]
Destruction was my Beatrice: Dada and the Unmaking of the Twentieth Century by Jed Rasula [e-book]
The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy [audio]**
Equal of the Sun by Amira Amirrezvani [audio]**
Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay by Elena Ferrante [audio]**
The Story of a New Name by Elena Ferrante [audio]**
My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante [audio]**
The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa [audio]
Lives of the Artists, Volume 1 by Giorgio Vasari [audio]
Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami [audio]**
The American by Martin Booth [audio]
The Turn of the Screw by Henry James [audio]
The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas [audio]
Marcel Duchamp: The Afternoon Interviews by Calvin Tompkins [e-book]**
Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh by John Lahr [audio]**
The Hare with the Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal [audio]**
The Miniaturist by Jessie Burton [audio]
Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon [audio]
An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro [audio]
In Search of a Lost Avant-Garde by Matti Bunzl [print book]
Radical Museology by Claire Bishop [print book]**
An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro [audio]
Digital Memory and the Archive by Wolfgang Ernst [print book]
The Calcutta Chromosome by Amitav Ghosh [audio]**
The Archive as Project [print book]
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon [audio]**
Digital Curation: A How-to-do-it-Manual by Ross Harvey [print book]
The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt [audio]
Meta Skills: Five Talents for the Robotic Age by Marty Neumeier [e-book]
The Rabindranath Tagore Collection: 50 Classic Works [e-book]**
Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty by Vikram Chandra [e-book]
Post-Digital Print: The Mutation of Publishing since 1984 by Alessandro Ludovico [print book]
Metadata for Digital Collections: A How-to-do-it-Manual by Steven J. Miller [print book]
The Island of the Day Before by Umberto Eco [audio]
Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth Century Muslim Between Worlds by Natalie Zemon Davis [audio]
Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino [audio]
Romola by George Eliot [audio]
1Q84 by Haruki Murakami [audio]**
Re-Collection: Art, New Media and Social Memory by Jon Ippolito and Richard Rinehart [print book]
The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse [audio]**
Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey [audio]**
Colorless Tsuki Tazaki and his Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami [audio]**
The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age by Astra Taylor [e-book]
The Histories of Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais [print book]
The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk [audio]**
Siddhartha by Herman Hesse [audio]
After Art by David Joselit [print book]
Catalogue 2.0: The Future of the Library Catalogue edited by Sally Chambers [print book]
The Wretched of the Screen by Hito Steyerl [print book]
Off the Wall: A Portrait of Robert Rauschenberg by Calvin Tompkins [print book]**
Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens [e-book]
The Shadow Lines by Amitav Ghosh [audio]**
The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh [audio]**
Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age by Alex Wright [e-book]**
Controlling the Past: Documenting Society and Institutions edited by Terry Cook [print book]
The Spy by James Fennimore Cooper [audio]
Words Not Spent Today Buy Smaller Images Tomorrow by David Levi Strauss [print book]**
24/7 by Jonathan Crary [e-book]**
Barnaby Rudge by Charles Dickens [audio]
Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder by David Weinberger [e-book]
The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy by Franco "Bifo" Berardi [print book]
The Pastures of Heaven by John Steinbeck [audio]**
The American by Henry James [audio]
How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis by N. Katherine Hayles [e-book]
The Other House by Henry James [audio]
The Spoils of Poynton by Henry James [audio]
Booktrek: Selected Essays on Artists' Books (1972-2010) by Clive Philpot [print book]**
The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad [audio]
Survival is Not Enough: Why Smart Companies Abandon Worry and Embrace Change by Seth Godin [e-book]
Novels in Three Lines by Felix Feneon [e-book]
Saul Steinberg A Biography by Deirdre Bair [e-book]**
Time by Eva Hoffman [e-book]**
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Schaffer and Annie Barrows [audio]
The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky [audio]
The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Photographic Era by William J. Mitchell [print book]
The Circle of Reason by Amitav Ghosh [audio]**
Looking for Marshall McLuhan in Afghanistan by Rita Leistner [print book]**
The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt [audio]**
The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing [e-book]
The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie [audio]
The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie [audio]**
Gora by Rabindranath Tagore [audio]**
Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship [print book]
The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse by Louise Erdrich [audio]**
River of Smoke by Amitav Ghosh [audio]**
Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh [audio]**
The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind and Brain by Eric R. Kandel [print book]
Art History as Cultural History: Warburg's Projects by Richard Woodfield [print book]
My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk [audio]**
Formless: A User's Guide by Yve-Alain Bois and Rosiland E. Krauss [print book]
Other reading not represented by the above list includes regular reading from print subscriptions to Cabinet magazine, N+1, Bookforum, and print, digital and archives of The Nation, The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books.
* Some people dispute that audio books constitute "reading." Let them debate. Meanwhile, I will hear great, memorable books read into my ears while I cook, clean, go for long walks and embroider.
I am not including the amount of screen reading I do - the online papers, magazines, Twitter links, articles, and reading I do as a part of my work, because everyone does that. It is the extra reading that is in the inventory here, although the lines between my librarian, artist and civilian selves are undeniably blurry.
These photographs by Christian Erroi were taken to accompany an interview for the blog DART.
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