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Bookshelf Report: Reggie Garrett, his dogs and Salman Rushdie

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The Bookshelf Report is an ongoing series where a Bushwick reader or artist shares a little bit about the books that occupy their shelves.

Reggie Garrett often performs with the Bushwick Book Club and will take the stage at the upcoming 3-for-3; Music Inspired by Books; Books Inspired by Water event. He is currently working on a song inspired by Jim Lynch’s Before the Wind.

To get to know him a bit before the show, Reggie let us snoop around his bookshelves. Here we go.

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Bookshelf Report: More Music Books Than You Can Shake A Drum Stick At

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The Bookshelf Report is an ongoing series where we ask 5 questions and share 5 pictures of a bookshelf  belonging to a Bushwick reader. Today’s bookshelf comes from long time Seattle music journalist Travis Hay. He has written for many notable publications such as MSN Music, the Seattle-Post Intelligencer, and Seattle Weekly, and is the creator of GuerillaCandy.com, an amazing website dedicated to documenting the Seattle music community.

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What’s your favorite book on the shelf?

Asking me to name my favorite book is like asking me to name my favorite record. It’s a very tough thing to do. As you can tell, most of my books have something to do with music and I consider the music books in my collection to be good reference material. If I had to name a single one as my favorite it would have to be “Everybody Loves Our Town” by Mark Yarm. It’s a massive oral history of the Seattle music scene from the late 1980s to mid/late 1990s, aka the grunge era. I own quite a few local rock history books (“Love Rock Revolution,” “The Strangest Tribe,” “Sonic Boom” too name a few) but Yarm’s book is the definitive book on grunge and everything comes from first-hand primary sources. There’s stories about Eddie Vedder drinking bile as part of Jim Rose’s Circus Sideshow, The U Men lighting a pond on fire outside of the mural Amphitheater at Bumbershoot and tons of other really great stuff. It’s a must read for any fan of the Seattle scene from back in the day. Read more

Bookshelf Report: Library Guy with a Joint Collection

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The Bookshelf Report is an ongoing series where we ask 5 questions and share 5 pictures of a bookshelf  belonging to a Bushwick reader. Today’s bookshelf comes from Levi Fuller, a veritable veteran of the Bushwick Book Club Seattle. Over the years he’s performed songs inspired by The Shining, 1984, Dr. Seuss, Alice in Wonderland, Lust by Ellen Forney, and many others.

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What is your favorite book on these shelves?

I will give you two answers: My current favorite book on these shelves as a possession is a recent edition, my signed copy of Ellen Forney’s Lust. It will always remind me of how much fun it was to play the Bushwick show for that book, and how gracious and wonderful Ellen was. My favorite book just as a thing to read is probably David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, although that’s tough to answer, as I pretty much only hold on to books that I really love or have some other attachment to. Read more

Bookshelf Report: Who Needs Clothes?

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The Bookshelf Report is an ongoing series where we ask the same 5 questions of Bushwick readers who share 5 pictures of their bookshelf with us. Today’s “bookshelf” comes from Noah Skocilich, a Bushwick fan currently living in China. Noah showed us his traveling books on a recent visit to Seattle.

photo of suitcase full of books

1. What is your favorite book on this shelf? 

Easy. Infinite Jest. Best novel ever. Simply in a class of it’s own. I almost had to stop reading altogether for awhile after finishing, just to let the pure essence of that novel fully settle into my mind. I brought it with me from China thinking that I would give it as a gift to my mother. That didn’t work out, and I’m actually glad, because this is one book I really just do feel a sentimental attachment to; I mean, even to this physical copy, that I physically read over the course of a couple weeks in Jan and Feb 2013. Read more

Bookshelf Report: Dave Eggers and a Tiny Gun

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Today marks the start of an ongoing series that documents reader bookshelves. We will ask the same 5 questions of  each reader who shares their shelf with us. 5 photos, 5 questions. My own bookshelf will start the series.

What is your favorite book on this shelf?

You Shall Know Our Velocity by Dave Eggers. It’s a McSweeney’s first edition and it is beautiful. I bought it at The Strand and then had a chance to meet Eggers at a reading a short while later. He signed the inside by drawing me a picture of half of a three-eyed dog. [Ed.: Check our twitter for a photo.]

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How do you organize your books?

I usually just put my favorites in the most prominent places, then try to alphabetize a little bit, then (maybe this is a girl thing) make them look pretty. I really hate a book that has an ugly cover. My husband’s Solzhenitsyn collection haunted my dreams for years. The back covers all have these giant-size photographs of the author. Not that he’s not a particularly unattractive man, but…

I think this shelf is a pretty good example of the marriage of two types of readers. My part of it is a mix of styles–poetic (Ondaatje) and terse (ol’ Papa), dramatic and comedic (Eggers), hell-raising (Kerouac) and meandering (Krauss). All the Faulkner, Camus and Kapuscinski, plus the nonfiction belongs to my husband. He’s also a huge Nicholson Baker fan. The shelf also has glass doors so our dog can’t eat the books and collectibles.

Be honest. What percentage of the books on this shelf have you actually read?

Ha! I actually figured this out. Of the books that are mine, I’ve read 57%. Not great, but not bad either. Also, I’m excluding books that I’ve only read halfway through.

What book do you plan to read next?

The book sitting on top of the shelf, which is an edition of Alice in Wonderland illustrated by Yayoi Kusama. She recently had an exhibit at SAM that was so mesmerizing–a wall of hot pink (and like, electric hot pink) with neon orange polka dots that you couldn’t look away from–that I had to get the book. Also, I’ve never read the actual text of the story.

Wild Card Question: What’s the deal with the tiny gun?

I got it in Georgetown. It’s an old cap gun. I have a couple others, one that is even tinier and one that is regular size and looks frighteningly real. 

Think your bookcase has what it takes? We’d love to take a look! Send us your photos!