And Now! The Overlooked Part 2

It's November (as if you weren't aware) and there've been way more books read than covered here by Corduroy Folk this year. Here's the start of the final-scramble, an attempt at giving some blinking, glancing attention to all the great books that've hit this year to which we haven't given enough time.

The Architecture of Patterns by Paul Andersen and David Salomon

 

You've read that Foer's got a new book? One in which he's taken x-acto (or whatever) to page (let's presume a machine's actually done the die-cutting, despite the fact that the book's $50)? I'd like to see that book, and not just because Foer's stuff is usually worth reading (he's batting above average: one book was great, one not great, one okay, and his stories are almost always eye-poppingly good reading), but becaue the book must, fundamentally, rejigger a reader's notion of what a page looks like and/or can be.

So too Architecture of Patterns, which is one of the most satisfying visual books I've held in a long, long time. Here's the mathy breakdown of what the book's pushing toward: one must first understand pattern as being an organizing, synthesizing structural thing—a pattern helps us understand chaotic day-to-day stuff. Here's the problem, say Andersen and Salomon: pattern becomes, too often and too easily, inflexible, boring, expected. Here's what cool, say same: pattern needn't mean blocky repetition; pattern can mean flexibility; patterns can actually be systems through which disparate stuff's integrated.

Here's the thing: this book's smart, and asks for smart readers. Here's what's awesome: not since McPhee's geology writing have I read a book in which my vocabulary's been so exploded (rep sentence: "A pattern's sensibility can be both responsive and influential; an active agent organizing material and functional forces as it elicits emotional and sensory responses." Rep section title: Elastic Precision). Here's why you pick up this book and read it cover to cover: it'll make you look at everything differently, literally. That quoted sentence? Break it down to simplest bits: a pattern can be in dialogue with those who experience the pattern. I dare anyone to read this book and not immediately look at her/his world suddenly full of questions.

 

Skin, Inc. by Thomas Sayers Ellis

 

This book is more and bigger than I can fairly go into here. Everyone should be reading this poetry. I haven't read this interesting and exciting of poetry since…well, maybe since I got knocked into Terrance Hayes's Wind in a Box, though it could be before that, even. Ellis is fucking fearless, and has heart, and isn't scared to laugh while he's fearlessly chasing that which makes him pulse. If you're following poetry and not following Ellis you're not doing it right. Read this book. Buy this for every single teenager you know. Buy it for every single person you know who quit reading poetry after college. Buy it for everyone.

 

The Weather of the Future by Heidi Cullen

This is the second book I've read recently which features a speculative aspect—the first was Perfection Point, which posited absolute limits for human accomplishment in sport. Cullen's Weather of the Future establishes, in its first 50+ pages, a sort of here-we-are regarding weather, extreme weather patterns and fluctuations, and, most awesomely, on differentiating climate from weather (climate: long-term patterns; weather: yesterday, today, tomorrow, the wknd).

But after those first 50+ (it's actually almost 60) pages? The reader's whisked abroad and ahead: New York City into 2050, ditto Austalia, Africa, Canada, Greenland, California. This is a luxuriously interesting trick Cullen's trying (and being allowed) to pull: each chapter focusses on a specific place, tracking its climate from recorded history to the present, and then, quickly, Cullen pushes the climate forward, educatedly speculating how the next 40 years will play out.

There's a massive danger in such a trick, of course: speculation, no matter how well-intentioned or scientifically-informed, can make those with doubts more certain of their doubts if the speculation doesn't come to pass—which is a long-winded way of saying that you can go ahead and expect Cullen's book to be a bright target for skeptics and simple-minded critics. What it is for the rest of us, for those of us with an open enough mind to listen to one of the world's leading climatologists, is a scary and strange book: what happens if we keep doing what we're doing? What will happen as the world keeps fundamentally changing—not just in terms of degrees, but in terms of topography, storm severity, patterns of seasons, etc? Cullen paints an alarming picture, and you're left wondering, at book's end, if we're gonna stupidly, dimly waltz into the most easily-avoidable catastrophe ever. It's a hell of a thing, this book. Read it now—especially if, like me, you're in any part of the country in which the weather's not doing what it should be doing for mid-/late-November (hello, barefoot in IA).