What We’re Reading This Week

“Main Street is almost all right,” declares Robert Venturi in “Learning from Las Vegas.” Someone referenced this quote to me last summer and I haven’t been able to forget it. I love it. To celebrate the beauty in the mundane. Obsessing over this statement led me to Venturi’s book, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, a book we don’t typically carry, so I had to special order it to the store. While I await its arrival, I picked up The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs. A book that has inspired many to claim, “What Complexity and Contradiction did for architects, Death and Life did for urban planners.” Both books were released around the same time, although the latter had received significantly more attention. It’s accessible, eloquent, and intelligent. A beautiful exploration of what makes a city a city. I’ve only just started it, but already I am fully committed. I can’t wait to dive deeper into this expansive, thoughtful, and remarkable book.

Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawai:

Despite the obvious reference to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in the title, Frankenstein in Baghdad is a completely original book. The novel follows Hadi, a hermit in Baghdad who trails the various explosions in the city to collect the strewn body parts. Over time, he pieces together a corpse in order to send a message to the government about burying the dead. However, his creation soon goes missing, and chaos ensues. This book sounds bizarre, and it is — in all the right ways. The murderous creature fits in perfectly with the American occupation of Baghdad in 2005, and speaks to the pain that sets in after the worst is seemingly over.