A Book, A Real Book!

In the past 48 hours I managed to make my way through a real book, The Image of the City. It is a seminal work in the field of urban planning and was written in 1960 by Kevin Lynch. The whole premise is to understand how people "read" the city, visually. He and his team studied Boston, Jersey City, and Los Angeles with the help of residents who participated in interviews and drew mental maps (a map drawn of your city from memory). From all this information, he breaks cities down into constituent elements that designers can focus on to create more "imageable" (or "visually legible") cities. It's a classic and even though it was written almost 50 years ago, it would serve the design community, especially the developers, well to read it in earnest.

So, since someone at the library has Pelham on hold, I'm going to return it tomorrow, unfinished, and call Lynch's book number 36. Issue 7 of n+1 comes out next week so that will likely be 37. And if I can get to the final book in McCarthy's trilogy, Cities of the Plain, that will be 38. Maybe I'll get to 40 by years end...especially if I can find another copy of Pelham.

I've already committed myself to a fresh start on new years day. On the recommendation of Jabiz, I've decided that I'll start 2009 with a new author: Gore Vidal. His Narrative of Empires is a collection of seven historical novels which span from the dawn of our nation to 1950, and then with a final chapter at the start of the 21st century. Think I can make to fifty books in '09? I doubt it too.