Our Week of Long Reads

Here at Harriet HQ, we deal mainly in nugget-sized news tidbits. But we love a good long read. In the past, this sort of astoundingly pleasant Chicago weather might have curbed our literary consumption. But with all these sweet gadgets we’ve accumulated lately, our park and patio reading has made our reading diet more rich and diverse than ever. Behold our humble recommendations from this week.

The love letters of Richard Nixon. Total outlaw lit.

Caveman poetry. Concrete verse from the Stone Age. Not unlike the work of Tao Lin, in a weird way.

Lorine Niedecker’s Cooking Book. She dissed foodies before it was cool.

The Collected Works of Richard Brautigan. Because it’s time to psych ourselves up for the other Tricky Dick’s forthcoming 900-page autobiography. We are so acing the next Brautigan trivia night at Kasey’s.

Poems from each of the 204 Olympic nations. National anthems for the tone deaf.

That new Frank O’Hara reprint. In honor of Mad Men’s return, Christina Hendricks’s leaked cell phone pictures, and O'Hara's evergreen dadly wisdom.

The Urban Dictionary. There are some highbrow references in there, people! Fortunately, a “Chaucer” is not what we were afraid it was.

#Twitterature. Those 140-character blasts are not just for hack comedians anymore.

Lots of good, old-fashioned chapbooks. Because, with the nice weather, there’s obviously a festival coming up. And because unlike our nice handheld devices, chapbooks do not appear to be magnetically attracted to toilet bowls.