No themes or requests for specific types of books this week—enjoy the break while you can, the spring holidays are a-comin’ and I’ll be back in that groove, requesting rabbity reads, or perhaps some bitter herbs cookbooks, or narratives about religious persecution and ultimate triumph.
I will also try to spare you the blow-by-blow accounts of apartment hunting and landlord insanity that is my life these days. It’ll be hard, but I can do it!
So let’s talk about what we’re reading. Last week the WWR correspondents delighted and distracted me with house reads (Mahnaz and I discussed the Dakota in fiction; Etta visited a World War I-era boardinghouse) and not-so-house reads (Kate fan-geeked about her “Band of Brothers” love; Ashleigh traveled to the land of graphic novels, where a crop of heroines kick ass in princess mode). And LJ Managing Editor Bette-Lee Fox and I had a bookish meetup with Australian author Fiona McCallum in another New York landmark, the Woolworth Building.
Me, I’m still in escape mode, riffling through the fabulously illustrated, well-written pages of Matt Zoller Seitz’s paean to indie director Wes Anderson and his 2014 film, The Grand Budapest Hotel (Abrams). Remember the Academy Awards, where Anderson’s film of the same name swept the design categories? Seitz’s book (illustrated by Max Dalton and designed by Martin Venezky) shows you why those Oscars were so deserved and it contains so many special tasty treats: interviews with Anderson, his designers, colleagues, and actors; exquisitely reproduced excerpts of Stefan Zweig’s novels accompanied by a sampling of Zweig book covers; on-set photos; storyboards. Every time I open this book a new jewel is revealed. It’s the perfect entree to another world, which is exactly what I need right now. Wes Andersonville, here I come!
This isn’t the first time I’ve drooled over Zweig books (the Austrian-born author whose works informed Anderson’s story). Right before Anderson’s film came out, there was a flurry of Zweig reissues—my colleague Wilda Williams wrote about them here in the April 8, 2014 WWR column. I happened upon more Pushkin Pr. reissues of his short stories in the LJ book room, on the Classic Returns shelves. I can’t decide which to start with: The Invisible Collection: Tales of Obsession and Desire, or Fantastic Night: Tales of Longing and Liberation.
Which should it be, readers, obsession or liberation? Which would you choose?
