Citizen Reader

Roll me up and smoke me when I die.

Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die: Musings from the Road
by Willie Nelson

You know, Willie Nelson is just a fun person with whom to spend some time.

And that's exactly what you feel like you're doing when you read Nelson's autobiographical collection Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die: Musings from the Road. The book is truly that--musings--but meatier than you might realize at first. It includes excerpts from Nelson's writings while on the road, interspersed with commentary from family and band members, and friends. Subjects range from Farm Aid to guns to writing music to jokes (of which there are very many good ones here, although some are a bit raunchier than others). I'd quote one here but I think it's more fun to read them in Willie's book.

One of my favorite things to learn about Willie came from his son Micah (whose illustrations are also featured throughout the book): "there has never been any pressure from him to be anything but a decent person" (p. 75.) That seemed about right, and I hope it is something CRjr might be able to say about me some day.

If you enjoy Nelson's music, I think you'll enjoy this book too. (I think you might even enjoy it if you're not a fan of his music--he's just that likable.) Although I guess I would not suggest it to people who are not fans of casual marijuana use. It's also a particularly nice laid-back little read if you are GOING CRAZY FROM CABIN FEVER, which I would guess just about everyone in Wisconsin (and perhaps in other parts? are you having an early or late spring where you are?) is by now.

Have I maxed out on memoirs?

Drinking with Men: A Memoir
by Rosie Schaap

Over the course of the past month I've slowly been munching my way through Rosie Schaap's well-received memoir Drinking with Men: A Memoir.

I never really got to the point where I had to keep reading it, but for a while it seems I haven't been finding much at the library and I couldn't find much other nonfiction around the house I was interested in, so when I needed to read, I'd just go back to it and read another chapter. I don't know why, really. It's not a bad book, and it's certainly not bad as far as memoirs (which can, I find, vary widely in quality) go. Feeling pretty ambivalent about it both during and after reading it has left me with just the one question:

Am I done reading memoirs?

Could be. For a long time I read a lot of them. For a long time a lot of them have been published. But for whatever reasons, it's also been a long time since I found one that really lit me up.

This is all not really fair to Schaap's book. There's nothing earth-shattering here, but the author seems to know her way around a sentence and is also likable enough, although I almost didn't make it past her early chapters, wherein she described dropping out of high school and following the Grateful Dead around.* In later chapters she settles into a nice pattern of describing bars she has loved and the drinking companions (almost exclusively male) whom she has loved within them. Perhaps one reason it left me cold-ish was because her descriptions of the bars themselves are much more vivid and loving than her descriptions, really, of her drinking companions (which even include a man whose friendship affected her life very deeply). I really do think "Bars I've Loved" would have been a more accurate, if not a catchier, title.

There's some insight into her friendships with men, and with bar culture, but it wasn't quite what I was looking for. I have my own history of getting along well with guys**, which is a painful history, because once you become an old married lady with a kid, guy friends are impossible to come by. I miss them and rather thought this memoir would have more to say on the actual dynamics of such friendships, but it didn't. Perhaps when I find a memoir that does that I'll have found one that once again makes me want to read more memoirs.

*Here she is describing her experiences following the Dead around: "We were mostly decent if slightly wayward kids who, for a variety of reasons, needed to leave the people who had raised us and who, many of us felt, had failed to understand us, and make a family of our own...We drank and danced, bartered bootlegs, got high and hung out, lived in vans and slept in cars under piles of stripy Mexican blankets in need of a good washing; we gave one another scabies and sometimes worse, and sometimes money, and often pot, and really whatever we had, sold trinkets and tofu stew, and for the most part, though not always, looked after one another." (p. 29.) It's vivid writing, but just the thought of getting scabies and sleeping in cars with strangers, oh my lord, it is NOT for me.

**A guy friend in high school once told me that gossiping and eating candy with me made him feel like he was back in fifth grade again, in the best possible way (we had a total joke class called "Media Film" together, we just shared candy and talked through the entire semester while ostensibly watching and critiquing movies). I still think it's one of the nicest things anyone's ever said to me.

Being a woman is complicated.

I laid on the couch last week for quite some time and wondered if I should write about Caitlin Moran's How to Be a Woman here.

No fooling. Now, granted, we are in a run of somewhat craptacular February weather here in Wisconsin, and cabin fever and the blahs have set in in a big way, but normally I do have slightly more exciting things to do than lay around on the couch and think about blogging. But there you have it. You'll see why I was giving this one some thought in just a bit.

Moran's a popular columnist and critic in Great Britain, and I know I saw this book on a number of "buzz books"-type lists last year, so I picked it up. It is exactly what the title proclaims it to be--a very handy guide to womanhood punctuated by stories from Moran's own sometimes funny, mostly cringe-worthy journey to adult womanhood. Most of the early chapters ("I Start Bleeding!" "I Become Furry!" "I Don't Know What to Call My Breasts!") in particular focus on her childhood, being raised in a large, poor family. And I don't mean American 1980s poor, where you grew up without cable. I mean poor, where she had to wear her mother's hand-me-down underwear as a teenager.*

How to Be a Woman
by Caitlin Moran

I started the book not too interested, but somewhere in the middle I started getting a real charge out of it. Perhaps it's because she seems so sensible--she'd like to see some porn where the women are actually enjoying themselves, for a change; it's ridiculous to shave off all of your pubic hair because that's the going style and because men (evidently fed by quantities of hair-free porn? I confess my knowledge of porn is not extensive) demand it; spending tens of thousands of dollars on your wedding and expecting it to be the best day of your life are both ridiculous. These are all thoughts I can get behind, and for the most part, she's funny while making these points, such as this one, about pubic hair waxing:

"I can't believe we've got to a point where it's basically costing us money to have a vagina. They're making us pay for maintenance and upkeep of our lulus, like they're a communal garden. It's a stealth tax. Muff excised. This is money we should be spending on THE ELECTRICITY BILL and CHEESE and BERETS." (p. 46.)

The line directly before that one is "Can you imagine if we asked men to put up with this shit? They'd laugh you out the window before you got halfway through the first sentence." I think she's really on to something there.

She even changed my thoughts a bit on strip clubs. Now, for most of my adult life, I have not been all that bothered by strip clubs. I have largely been of the "maybe it's actually an okay-paying job for some women" persuasion. My only really strong feeling about them has been that men should only be allowed in with five-dollar bills (or better yet, tens or twenties) and no change should be given for anything. But with paragraphs like this Moran might start winning me over to her point of view on them:

"Strip clubs let everyone down. Men and women approach their very worst here. There's no self-expression or joy in these joints--no springboard to self-discovery, or adventure, like any decent night out involving men, women, alcohol, and taking your clothes off. Why do so many people have a gut reaction against strip clubs? Because, inside them, no one's having fun.

Instead, people are expressing needs (to earn money, to see a woman's skin) in pretty much the most depressing way possible...

And the men--oh, are you any gentler or happier? You cannot put your hand on your heart and say--as the music starts up, and she moves toward you--that you have kind feelings toward these women. No man who ever cared for or anted to impress a woman made her stand in front of him and take her knickers off to earn cab fare home...Between 60 and 80 percent of strippers come from a background of sexual abuse. This place is a mess, a horrible mess. Every dance, every private booth, is a small unhappiness, an ugly impoliteness: the bastard child of misogyny and commerce." (pp. 163-164.)

By this point in the book I'm thinking, huh, this woman is actually making a lot of sense. On a lot of topics.

So why did I end up laying on the couch wondering if I had the energy to talk about this book? Well, I skipped ahead to the chapter titled "Abortion." And here's the crux of the matter--and a SPOILER. Read on only if you want to find out what happens in that chapter.

Well, Moran has an abortion, to end an unplanned third pregnancy conceived in her marriage. She's pretty matter of fact about it all, explaining that she just could not take on a third child, and then describing the procedure. She concludes the chapter by saying that, for her, it was an action with only good consequences.

And that's where I hit the ground in this book with a big thud. I can't help it. I am and always will be anti-abortion.** I'm not going to get into the whys and wherefores of this, and I'm not going to say I don't empathize with Moran's feelings. Trust me, I only have the one CRjr and I can UNDERSTAND how one or more kids saps your energy. But still. It's just a deal-breaker for me and it always will be.

So where are we left?

With an overly long blog post, I realize. But I thought, what the hell, what good is a book blog if we can't talk about every aspect of how we react to books? I'm not sorry I read this one. Did the last chapter I read ruin some of my enjoyment of the early chapters, during which I was feeling almost frighteningly simpatico with the author? Well, sure. But I'm going to take this as an important reminder about nonfiction specifically (because the author is often telling you exactly how THEY feel, without filtering it through fiction) and books in general: they are a conversation. They don't always end how you think they will. And a lot of times you will feel the shock of recognition, of love, even, with their authors, but then eventually you'll realize, sadly, that this relationship is not for you. Doesn't make either of you bad people. Doesn't mean I won't meet other people who I think will really enjoy this book, and I will tell them about it in positive terms. But it also doesn't mean I'll feel compelled to read her next book, either.

Sorry to unload all of that on you. Next time I face this dilemma of whether or not to bore you with an overlong post on a book I'm conflicted about, I'll decide against, I promise.

*I realize there are still more heinous scales of poverty, but come on. To most of us, having to wear our mother's worn-out hand-me-down underwear would be more than poor enough for us, thank you.

**You can see why I've always been conflicted about voting. Once a co-worker asked me why I don't vote, and I said, "I'm anti-war and anti-abortion. For whom should I vote?" And she said, "Huh. That IS a tough one."

A little bit of perspective goes a long way.

Always Put in a Recipe and Other Tips for Living from Iowa's Best-Known Homemaker
by Evelyn Birkby

Where I live got more than 18 inches of snow today.

That's right. Just today. Because one of my phobias is driving in snow (and worrying about those I love driving in snow), you can imagine this was a bit upsetting. But a book I'm reading gave me a little perspective.

The book in question is Evelyn Birkby's Always Put in a Recipe and Other Tips for Living from Iowa's Best-Known Homemaker, published by the University of Iowa Press. It's a compilation of newspaper columns written over the past sixty years by Birkby, who is lauded on the cover as "Iowa's best-known homemaker." The columns range in topic from Birkby's marriage to her husband Robert, their years in farming, the raising of their children, their vacations, involvement in boy scouts, and many other subjects. The part that gave me perspective was the chapter in which she discussed living through winters in less-than-cozy homes:

"The small white house was uninsulated, and when the temperature got down to freezing in the winter, frost formed on the inside of the windows...when chill winds blew tenaciously through the walls of the house and up from under the floor boards.

I remember using the playpen to provide a warm place for the children. I put a blanket on the bottom of the pen, which was about four inches above the floor. Then I hung another blanket on three sides. I placed the pen with the fourth side open toward the oil burning stove in the living room -- the only heat source in our house. The children would get inside the playpen to read, color, play with their toys, and stay warm." (p. 66.)

Holy crap. Our sixty-year-old house isn't the warmest thing in the world, but we don't have breezes coming up between the floor boards, for the love of pete.

It's really a pretty interesting book. Birkby is nothing if not upbeat* and the stories range from tragic to mundane to heartwarming. If you know any readers who like "cozier" nonfiction, particularly with a rural bent, they might really enjoy this.**

*For some reason this book tickled me this week--I must have been in the right mood. In real life optimistic and wholesome people who "never say die" tend to make me a bit uneasy.

**Although it's not a perfect book. It would be better if the columns included the date they were first published; sometimes the date can be figured out from the context, but it would be easier if it was just there. I also think it might benefit from an index.

Fiction Interlude: Tepper Isn't Going Out

Well, I said I was probably going to re-read Tepper Isn't Going Out, when Calvin Trillin won the 2012 Thurber Prize for Humor, and I did. This marks the third or fourth time I've read this novel, and it never fails to make me smile.*

Murray Tepper is a simple man**, who asks simply to be left alone as he sits in his parked car and reads the paper. After all, he's in a legal spot and he's put money in the meter. So how does he become a magnet for the city's citizens, who start to show up wanting to discuss their problems and life in general with him? How does he become the target of the city's megalomaniac mayor? It'll only take you 213 pages to find out, and I think you'll enjoy the ride. Do give it a try; here's a quote from the first page to give you the flavor of the thing:

"Murray Tepper looked up from his newspaper to see what was happening. Tepper was sitting behind the wheel of a dark blue Chevrolet Malibu that was parked on the uptown side of Forty-third street, between Fifth and Sixth. Across the street, an argument was going on between an intense young man in a suit and the peddler who set up a stand on Forty-third Street every day to sell apples and bananas and peaches to office workers. Tepper had seen them go at it before. The young man was complaining about the price that the peddler charged for a single banana. The peddler was defending himself in an accent that Tepper couldn't place even by continent." (p. 3.)

This year I'm thankful for great paragraphs like that. And a great many other things besides, including my many friends to converse with here. Happy Thanksgiving, all.

*And also to make me hungry for New York deli food, not to mention hungry to visit New York City again in general. Although I am aware (and sad that) they are having a rough autumn in New York.

**Or is he? Read the book to find out.

How am I supposed to kick my Daily Show habit this way?

The lovely author Jon Ronson of such (funky and completely enjoyably weird, or weirdly enjoyable, whatever) titles The Men Who Stare at Goats and The Psychopath Test: A Journey through the Madness Industry was on The Daily Show last week.* He's adorable, and love that accent:

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

I have decided I have to stop watching The Daily Show online, I just don't have the time to spend. But it's going to hurt, especially when Stewart hosts authors like Ronson. And also this Lewis Black segment, which is emphatically not suitable for work, but is HILARIOUS.

*I should add Ronson has a new book out, titled Lost at Sea: The Jon Ronson Mysteries. Can't wait to read it!

Update: Here's another interview with the lovely and talented Jon Ronson, at The Millions.

Is your cat plotting to kill you?

How to Tell If Your Cat Is Plotting to Kill You
by Matthew Inman

I am a fan of Matthew Inman and his site The Oatmeal, and I heartily enjoyed his first book, 5 Very Good Reasons to Punch a Dolphin in the Mouth (and Other Useful Guides)

So when I saw that he had a new book out, How to Tell if Your Cat Is Plotting to Kill You, I had to get it from the library. It was funny--and I do like kitties, and I rather suspect mine IS plotting to kill me (sometimes, anyway, when I don't feed her fast enough)--but it wasn't as good as the first book. I like kitties, but this was almost too much kitties; I rather preferred the first book where a variety of subjects were on display in the cartoons.

I know it's just a book of cartoons, but this one felt very slight. There were lots of full-page panels that could have been smaller and fit on fewer pages, and I'll admit his The Bobcats series is not my favorite (and it comprises a fairly good-sized chunk of the book). But still? Good for a laugh, and a nice quick read.*

*And Mr. CR did enjoy the illustration of two kitties riding bunnies in a jousting contest. He likes the highbrow stuff like that.**

**I just looked at the book again, to find said illustration of cats riding bunnies, and I must say: Inman draws the cutest kitties imaginable.

Re-reading a classic: The Three-Martini Playdate.

I did a lot of re-reading this summer, both fiction and nonfiction. Sometimes I was just lazy and wanted to enjoy something I knew I'd already enjoyed, and sometimes I wanted to see if something I remembered liking held up in the re-reading. One nonfiction title that held up (it got better, actually), was Christie Mellor's fun little guide The Three-Martini Playdate: A Practical Guide to Happy Parenting.

The Three-Martini Playdate: A Practical Guide to Happy Parenting
by Christie Mellor

I originally read this slim little book before I had a kid,* and it struck me as funny and quite pragmatic then. Now that CRjr is around, this book strikes me as pure genius. Here's some of the chapter headings: "Saying No to Your Child: It's a Kick!", "Bedtime: Is Five-thirty Too Early?", and "Self-Esteem and Other Over-Rated Concepts." Those are good, but the text is even better:

"There is no shame in explaining to your children that they should go and find Something to Do, that the grown-ups are having grown-up talk, that they, the little children, need to go somewhere and be little children. Whether you would like to share a portion of your time with one grown-up or a party of them, or simply enjoy a moment alone, it is time to exert a little autonomy and encourage some in your child. This book explains how. It's time to warm up the ice cubes, curl up on the sofa, and send darling Spencer into the other room to play by himself. Mummy and Daddy need a little break." (p. 13.)

At last! A parenting book I can get behind. And lest anyone think Mellor is simply calling for ignoring one's children, this paragraph appears a scant few pages later:

"I am not espousing a return to the era when children were seen and not heard--a lofty goal, but one which is now simply impractical. In fact, one should have conversations with the children from time to time, so that they will learn how to speak with confidence and enthusiasm, should a grown-up wish to have a thoughtful exchange." (p. 32.)

Mellor can also be quite practical. In a later chapter she discusses what you absolutely need when you go to make visits with your baby, and the list is simple: 3 to 5 diapers, a small blanket or two or an extra sweater or hat, a small tote of cars, a coloring book, or reading materials (depending on the age of the child), and "a nice bottle of wine for your hosts, which should be opened upon arrival." (p. 48.)

Loved this book then. Love this book now. Find copies of it anywhere you can to buy and take to the next baby shower to which you're invited.

*Don't ask me why. I like to read stuff that is age- and situation-inappropriate, for whatever reason. I read a lot of dating manuals after I got married, and I read a ton of parenting books before I had a kid.

Gotta love a guy who sucks at girls.

I haven't found a whole lot of good humor or "light" books this past summer or fall. As previously noted, I blame the election. (For everything, not just a boring nonfiction publishing cycle.) But one book I did read and enjoy last month was Justin Halpern's short and funny memoir I Suck At Girls.

I Suck at Girls
by Justin Halpern

You may know Halpern better as the author of the Twitter feed (and book, and short-lived TV show, starring William Shatner) Sh*t My Dad Says. I still don't understand Twitter (and never will, it's starting to look like), and I didn't think that book was all that funny. So I wasn't expecting much from this one.*

It's a short memoir in vignettes, of Halpern's completely addled attempts at connecting with girls. He opens the book with describing his first crush, in the second grade, on a little girl named Kerry. How did he express his devotion? He drew a picture of her, and then drew a yellow dog in the air above her, taking a poop on her head, and for his big finish, drew in a thought bubble that showed her with the thought bubble "I like it."**

And things only went downhill from there for Halpern in the girl department. You'll just have to read the book to find out how (although there's some upbeat stories as well).

If you have read and enjoyed Halpern's first book, rest assured there's lots more sh*t his dad says in this one, too. In fact, my favorite parts of the book pretty much all involved his father. Consider this little exchange, when Halpern is describing how, when he was little, he woke up early in the morning after a scary dream, went to the kitchen for a drink, and was frightened by his father, who was also up:

"I shrieked like a frightened monkey and jumped back, crashing into the bookcase behind me. As my eyes adjusted I realized that the shadow was my dad, sitting in total darkness in the La-Z-Boy chair that faced the windows to our backyard.

'Jesus H. Christ. Calm down, son. What the hell is wrong with you?'

'I had a freaky dream,' I said, trying to catch my breath. 'What are you doing?'

'I'm sitting in the dark drinking a hot toddy. What the hell does it look like?'

'Why are you doing that right now? It's the middle of the night.'

'Well, contrary to popular fucking belief, I enjoy a little time to myself, so I wake up early so I can have it. Clearly I'm going to have to start waking up earlier." (p. 33.)

I enjoyed that a lot. And oh yeah, be warned: there's swearing in the book (quite a lot of it, whenever Halpern's dad is around), in case you don't care for that kind of thing.

*Low expectations: always the secret to happiness!

**This vignette was one of the more amusing, with Halpern's parents getting called into school to discuss this incident and his father, a very practical doctor, being more worried about the "basic physics" tenets Halpern was ignoring by drawing the dog floating in midair over Kerry.

Let's catch up, y'all.

So what did I read this past summer?

Well, I think we should start from the beginning (as Maria von Trapp would sing: "a very good place to start"). In early June I had a little health issue* that preoccupied me for a while, and that sort of thing always makes it hard to read. (At least it does for me.) Shortly before that I was reading a fantastically hilarious little book titled Life among the Savages by Shirley Jackson. You may know Ms. Jackson better as the author of the infamous short story "The Lottery," which was required reading for most high schoolers for many, many years. She is primarily known as a horror author, as she also wrote the book The Haunting of Hill House, which was a popular book that got made into a movie (several times).

Life Among the Savages is not a horror book, unless you consider the idea of raising four young children horrifying (and many people do, and no one can blame them). It is in fact a nonfiction memoir, published back in the days before they called them memoirs, about Jackson's life raising her kids, which she did in between writing, taking ridiculously good care of her husband (more on this later), and trying to function as a regular member of their community. It's somewhat similar in tone and writing style (and era) to Jean Kerr's also very popular parenting memoir, Please Don't Eat the Daisies, as well as Erma Bombeck's books. (I'm guessing that all of these books, when they were published, were maybe considered Humor? I don't think publishing categories were as prevalent or important back then.)

The important thing is: it's hilarious. At least it was to me. Jackson's voice is wonderfully pragmatic, and she seems to have a knack for really describing her children's experiences and lives without making them sound too twee. At the point when I read this book, I wasn't keeping notes or marking pages, so I don't have any exact quotes for you. But I can tell you one of the huge reasons I loved this book: it was such a product of its time (the 1950s). When describing how it came time to have her third child (I think; it could have been her fourth), Jackson was living in a house in a small town in Vermont with no car. (Can you imagine that today?) So on the morning she gave birth, she heated up some coffee from the night before, then called a cab to take her to the hospital, and in the back of the cab she had a cigarette. Oh my God. I just sat in pure wonderment at the difference between childbearing then and childbearing now. (Oh, and after all that, and having the baby, she got to stay in the hospital for more than a week, resting, while others looked after the other kids. Not because she had a c-section or anything, just because that's how they did it.) When I finished that chapter I thought, hey, even I might have been able to have four babies in THAT kind of childbearing environment.**

So I'd really, really suggest you look into this book. It's fascinating on its own and as a little window into the fifties (it was first published in 1952, and considered a fictional grouping of stories based on her real life). More on all of this tomorrow.

*I'm fine now, no worries.

**Of course: no I couldn't have. Even with a mug of coffee and a cigarette to bolster me I could never handle four kids. Four kids and a really needy husband.

Paul Theroux: Part 2

Just a bit more about Paul Theroux's Kingdom By the Sea, which I really enjoyed.

As I was saying yesterday, I think I have finally aged into an appreciation for Theroux's writing and mix of observational travel writing with his own quietly (very) opinionated take on the people and places around him. In this book, an account of his travels around Great Britain's copious island coastline, he shares many small stories that very admirably get at the tone of people's encounters with one another. (He also didn't make me laugh out loud as much as Bill Bryson does, but I enjoyed something about his surprisingly gentle humor all the same) I really enjoyed this exchange, about a gentleman who was really just trying to give his newspaper to his bus driver:

"The bus driver said, 'That's a Tory paper.'

'I'm through with it,' Mr. Lurley said.

Dan, the bus driver, said, 'I don't want it.'

'Why not?' Mr. Lurley said.

'Tory paper!'

'They're all the same,' Mr. Lurley said, and left it on the little shelf under the windshield with Dan's lunch bag (two cheese and chutney sandwiches, a small over-ripe tomato, and a Club Biscuit).

Dan picked up the newspaper and threw it out the bus door.

'They're not the bloody same,' he said. 'That's a Tory paper.'" (p. 94).

I really enjoyed that. This book was written in 1983, and a large part of its narrative is Theroux's observations of Brits' observations about the early days of the 1982 Falklands War. I don't know much about that period in history, but I found it interesting all the same.

And, in case you're wondering, Theroux does a good job with the standard travel writing attribute of describing one's surroundings with flair. I am not often enamored with landscape descriptions (I tend to skip right over them, as a matter of fact), but this type of writing seemed worth reading:

"Ever since Tenby I had noticed an alteration in the light, a softness and a clarity that came from a higher sky. It must have been the Atlantic--certainly I had the impression of an ocean of light, and it was not the harsh daytime sun of the tropics or the usual grayness of the industrialized temperate zone; daylight in England often lay dustily overhead like a shroud. The cool light in West Wales came steadily from every direction except from the sun." (p. 162.)

It was a good read. I'm going to try one of his non-British titles again and see what I think of it.

Have I finally aged into Paul Theroux?

I gave a short talk on nonfiction the other day, to a lovely class of library school students (at the request of their indefatigable teacher--you know who you are--thank you!) and we chatted a bit about nonfiction readers and their characteristics. As I babbled on and on, I think I said something about readers "aging into" nonfiction; this is certainly the way it happened for me. I didn't become a nonfiction junkie until my late 20s, although I always read a bit of it. In fact, I find this one of the most interesting facets of nonfiction--how young readers love perusing it (dinosaur books, anyone?), often seem to leave it behind in favor of fiction, but then sometimes return to it as older readers.

Anyway. I've read some Paul Theroux in my time, but never understood why he was such a classic travel author or how he'd gotten so popular. Well, I recently picked up his Kingdom By the Sea, and either it's because the book is about Great Britain and I'm just a sucker for all things Brit, or I've finally aged into an appreciation for Paul Theroux's writing. Or perhaps a little of both.

Theroux took as his task traveling around the entire coast of Great Britain by rail, bus, and walking, starting in London and working clockwise (including Ulster, Northern Ireland, as well). A common theme throughout is the lamenting of the dismantling of Britain's rail system, particularly as he sometimes found it difficult to "get from here to there" without a vehicle, and most particularly towards the end of the narrative when transit workers went on strike. Although the book was published in 1983, I still feel that Theroux had a good grasp on where the world was going. Consider this exchange, with a person he met on his travels:

"'Our society is changing from one based on the concept of the individual and freedom,' Mr. Bratby said, 'to one where the individual is nonexistent--lost in a collectivist state.'

I said I didn't think it would be a collectivist state so much as a wilderness in which most people lived hand to mouth, and the rich would live like princes--better than the rich had ever lived, except that their lives would constantly be in danger from the hungry predatory poor. All the technology would serve the rich, but they would need it for their own protection and to ensure their continued prosperity."

There were quite a few bits I wanted to quote from this book. More tomorrow.

 

Still not quite the service memoir I'm looking for.

I always had this dream of writing a memoir about working service jobs for the bulk of my career, and how my twenty-five years in the profession (I started young, selling veggies at my parents' farm market stand) had one overwhelming result: I now hate people.*

But it turns out it's work to write a memoir, so it remains a dream. In the meantime, I keep searching for the type of service memoir I always wanted to write. During my search, I've read a lot of books that didn't particularly turn me on: Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed, Caitlin Kelly's Malled, etc. About the best one I've found so far has been Debra Ginsberg's superlative Waiting: The True Confessions of a Waitress. I would highly recommend that one.

The latest entry in this field is Anna Sam's Checkout Girl: A Life Behind the Register, which has been translated from the French. Evidently, if the cover can be believed, it's an international bestseller. And although it was a fun, quick read, it wasn't quite what I wanted either. Sam makes the point, well, that one can indeed be well-educated and still end up working as a checkout girl; she's got advanced degrees and she works in a supermarket. Anyone who's worked behind a service counter will find a lot to chuckle at here: making sure your register "cashes out" correctly; people talking on their cell phones while you wait on them; devious customers finding new ways to cut in line; spotting shoplifters; etc.

But one of my favorite anecdotes was this one, about being used as a cautionary tale:

"When you hear a mother tell her child as she points her finger at you, 'You see, darling, if you don't work hard at school, you'll become a cashier like the lady,' there's nothing to stop you from explaining that it's not a profession for stupid people, that you'd rather do this than be unemployed, and that you actually have a good degree...

Well, I have news for all those ignorant, self-righteous parents out there: it's been a long time since a degree guaranteed a dream job. Today's graduates sometimes have no choice but to do less skilled work. Dear parents, thank you for reducing our profession to a warning! Wake up: this is a new century." (p. 104.)

I found that funny and scary. So yes, this one was kind of fun. But I think it suffers a little bit in translation, and it wasn't quite what I had in mind. But still a book that might make you chuckle if you've ever stood behind a cash register.

*This is actually the chicken-or-egg question of my life: Have I always hated people, or did waiting on them so early make me hate them? It's a thinker.

I'm starting to think it might just be me.

This week I had two books home that were both by women, and were supposed to be somewhat humorous.

The first, Valerie Frankel's It's Hard Not to Hate You, is a collection of essays about Frankel's belief that the hatred she's been suppressing for years might have expressed itself in cancerous cells that were found in her colon (and the discovery of a health problem that meant she was at risk for many gynecological cancers as well). She bases this on a line she enjoyed in Woody Allen's movie Manhattan: "I can't express anger. That's my problem. I internalize everything. I just grow a tumor instead."

Because Frankel decided early on not to show people when she was angry or bothered (stemming from young adult memories of putting on weight and taking grief for it at school), she starts to think it'd be healthier to let her anger out, which is what her essays here are about. Here she is, talking to her doctor:

"'As I was saying, when I'm expecting a check from a magazine and it's alte, I want to punch in the mailbox. When I email my editor about it and she doesn't reply, I want to throw my computer out the window.'

'I see.'

'I even hate my cats. They clawed my lilac to death. I raised it from a tiny shoot. I really loved that bush,' I said wistfully.

He nodded, made a note in his chart, and said, 'I'd also strongly urge you to find a way to reduce stress.'

Doctor's orders: The hate in me just had to come out." (p. 18.)

The first few chapters were all right; but it wasn't quite what I wanted.*

The other book was Laurie Notaro's It Looked Different on the Model: Epic Tales of Impending Shame and Infamy, which is another collection of essays. Notaro's known as a humorous author, but I've never been able to see it, and this book was no different. They're both bestselling authors, but along with Tina Fey, Laurie Notaro and Jen Lancaster make up my trinity of Totally Unfunny Women. But it must just be me; other people keep buying their books.

*Mr. CR wasn't as opposed to this book as I was. He looked it over and thought it was better than some other essay books by women that I've had home. But Mr. CR does not, to my mind, properly appreciate Hollis Gillespie, so I don't know how seriously I can take his opinion on this one.

Calvin Trillin.

I was so, so excited to get Calvin Trillin's new book, Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin: Forty Years of Funny Stuff, at the library.

But somehow when I got it home it just wasn't what I was expecting. It's a collection of Trillin's humorous pieces from the many places where he's been published: The New Yorker, The Nation, in books, etc. It's organized thematically; about five to seven pieces in chapters with such headings as "Biographically Speaking," "High Society and Just Plain Rich People," "Life Among the Literati," "Twenty Years of Pols--One Poem Each," etc. Because they're written by Calvin Trillin, all the pieces are funny. That wasn't the problem. I liked this bit, in which he suggests one of his wife Alice's economic suggestions:

"The true Alice Tax would probably inspire what the medical profession sometimes calls 'harumph palpitations' in those senators who used the word 'confiscatory' to describe a surcharge that would have brought the highest possible tax on incomes over a million dollars a year to 41 percent. To state the provisions of the Alice Tax simply, which is the only way Alice allows them to be stated, it calls for this: After a certain level of income, the government would simply take everything. When Alice says confiscatory, she means confiscatory...

Alice believes that at a certain point an annual income is simply more than anybody could possibly need for even a lavish style of living. She is willing to discuss what that point is. In her more flexible moments, she is even willing to listen to arguments about which side of the line a style of living that included, say, a large oceangoing boat should fall on. But she insists that there is such a thing as enough--a point of view that separates her from the United States Senate." (From 1990; pp. 109-110.)

The individual pieces were good, but for some reason I found the thematic ordering somewhat hard to follow. It threw me to learn that many of the pieces were published in the eighties or early nineties, and were sometimes about topics I just wasn't very familiar with. I think I would have preferred it in chronological order, so I could get a feeling for the context; or if the pieces' dates had been listed at their start so I knew "when" I was.

Basement Reading: Robert Sullivan

If you'll recall, I had very unstructured plans for my summer reading. I wanted to read a few books from off the bookshelves in my own basement (consisting of a mix of already-read favorites and TBR classics and reference works), and I wanted to partake in a few challenges.

So here it is, the day after Labor Day, and I didn't do one post all summer about my "Basement Reading." Typical.* Although I did fulfill my duty of participating in a challenge in July, when I took part in Thomas's very enjoyable International Anita Brookner Day challenge, and I had a really good time with that. I want to read more Brookner someday.

So it turned out I only re-read one book from my basement this summer, and it barely counts because it's barely 150 pages long--Robert Sullivan's tiny little book titled How Not to Get Rich: Or Why Being Bad Off Isn't So Bad. Back in the day when I was first falling in love with nonfiction (my eyes met the pages of Matthew Hart's nonfiction science title Diamond: A Journey to the Heart of an Obsession across a crowded library...the book wooed me shamelessly, with smooth prose and new facts and the irresistible sensation that I was learning something at the same time I was wasting time reading...ooh! The rush of a new relationship), one of the first books that blew my reading mind was Robert Sullivan's Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants. It sounds ucky but it's not, it's fascinating. I wrote a review of it for Bookslut, which they were kind enough to publish, and then I rushed off to read some other Robert Sullivan titles, and developed a huge crush on him. I developed such a crush that I actually wanted to help support him monetarily, even in a tiny way, so I bought a copy of one of his books new (which I almost never do, as I am cheap). That book was titled, ironically enough, How Not to Get Rich.

Now, trust me, I do not need a book on that subject. I have been getting not rich for more than a third of a century now and I am GOOD at it. I am the idiot who tips my change AND a dollar bill when I buy a plain coffee at the coffee shop. But in the throes of my Sullivan Crush I didn't need a reason to buy his (then) newest book. When I got it, I read it and enjoyed it, and it ended up on my basement bookshelves, which sounds sad, but is actually where I keep most of my most treasured books (we have, luckily, a quite clean and dry basement). But I don't know if I enjoyed it as much on that initial read as I enjoyed it this time. Probably because in the interim I have had a few more years in which not to get rich.

The whole volume, if you can't tell from the title, is a cheeky little spoof of advice books, many of which cover financial topics. In addition to being funny, and charming, it rings with truth (as all the best truly humorous writing does). Consider the text in the chapter headed "How to Spend the Bulk of Your Leisure Time If You Are Not Going to Get Rich, Probably Ever":

"You read. You read for pleasure. Not constantly; you want to see your friends and get outside once in a while and so on, but you want to do a lot of reading. Perhaps it sounds too simple, but reading is an important strategy in the pursuit of a lifestyle that is, monetarily speaking, not that well-off."

Ha. Sound familiar, anyone? But what I really like about this title is how it admits, basically, that the average person (and the below-average, and the above-average) is not going to get rich in their lifetime, regardless of what sort of American dream, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps bullshit we've all been taught since elementary school. It admits that, but yet it's not depressing. You actually finish this book feeling pretty good about not being rich. You feel dumb because you're not as funny and as good a writer as Robert Sullivan is, but you feel better about not being rich. That's worthwhile.

*Reminds me of one of my favorite jokes: How do you make God laugh? Make a plan.

Some old favorite authors with new books.

Last week seemed to be the week for reading new books by nonfiction authors I've previously enjoyed. First up: Catherine Friend.

I first came across Friend when I read her memoir Hit by a Farm: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Barn, about she and her girlfriend's experiences starting a working farm. Friend's partner, Melissa, was really the one with the interest in farming, so Catherine often just seemed along for the ride. (To which I can relate: I grew up on a farm but would have to be coerced--strongly coerced, say, by a world financial meltdown or apocalypse of some kind--to return to the farm.) That was a fun memoir. I also enjoyed her follow-up, The Compassionate Carnivore, which was a great book about eating meat while still like animals, and which made a strong argument for simply making better choices about the meat you eat (and paying attention to how and where it is raised). In that respect it was about a million times better than Jonathan Safran Foer's pointless Eating Animals.

So when I saw her new title, Sheepish: Two Women, Fifty Sheep, and Enough Wool to Save the Planet, I was excited to read it. This one, like her previous books, offers short chapters and a wealth of funny stories, but I struggled to find the cohesive story arc in this one. This is rare, as I am not normally a nonfiction reader who needs a lot of story.* It's divided into five different parts, with Friend chatting variously about the latest farm adventures (including a fascinating chapter about sheep getting pregnant at the wrong time of year); menopausal difficulties; some struggles in her relationship with Melissa; and an appreciation for the farm, the sheep, and particularly their wool. She shares some interesting tidbits about wool, its history, and its properties, but I must confess she lost me on her knitting chapters. Knitting for me is a lot like gardening: It seems like a good hobby and I feel like I should be interested in it, but at the end of the day, knitting comes in at about #434 on the list of things I want to learn how to do in my life, somewhere below curling my eyebrows but above sewing in general.

It was a fun**, quick read, but if you're looking for something more cohesive I'd start with any of Friend's earlier books.

*This is why it annoys me when nonfiction read for recreation is referred to as "narrative nonfiction"--just because something isn't a how-to, doesn't necessarily make it "narrative." But people need labels. I understand.

**It starts with a zap, literally, as Friend describes a young couple's tour of her farm and their reaction to the electric fence: "...the man looks down at the smooth wire running from post to post. 'Is this electric?' I nod. There's a yellow sign hanging from the top wire about thirty feet away. The sign says, 'Warning: Electric Fence...' He can't take his eyes off the fence. 'Would it hurt?' The guy's wife rolls her eyes. 'Honey, don't touch the fence.'" Of course he touches the fence. As a wife who probably (too frequently) rolls her eyes, I got a charge out of that one. Pun intended.

Poor dolphin.

5 Very Good Reasons to Punch a Dolphin in the Mouth (and Other Useful Guides) the funniest book ever?

Well, I don't know about funniest book EVER. But I did laugh all the way through it, and Mr. CR had to show me the cartoon he thought was the funniest. Mr. CR has a poker face that would get him through any televised poker tournament--without sunglasses--so when he thinks something is funny enough to tell me about it, and then laugh himself, trust me, it's funny.

The book is a collection of cartoons drawn by a guy who calls himself The Oatmeal (really: Matthew Inman). Luckily, a lot of his cartoons are online, but there's just something fun about reading them in a book (you don't have to wait for them to load, for one thing). This also makes it handy for me to show you one of his cartoons (one of my favorites; I looked for Mr. CR's but couldn't find it online):

What it's like to own an Apple product.

Tee hee. This new one also made me giggle like a five-year-old.

So yeah, read this one. It's good for a solid half-hour of mindless giggles, and sometimes you need that at the end of the day. I could see this being a good graduation present too, although let's face it, the best present for graduation (any occasion, really) is still cold hard cash.

Would a Kindle work in the bathroom?

I know very little about how Kindles or any e-book readers work. But I do tend to think that even if I got one, I wouldn't want it in the bathroom with me. For one thing, it seems like the sort of thing I would drop in the toilet, although I have never, ever done that with a book (or even dropped one while reading in the tub). But I'm pretty sure if something electronic and expensive was involved, I'd find a way to drop it in whatever water was nearby.

I also don't know if you have to fire them up when you're using them, or if they go right to your saved page. This is one of my favorite features of a print book: whenever I go to the bathroom, I can almost always get a few pages read of whatever book I've got going in there. Take this morning. I'm re-reading Hollis Gillespie's memoir Bleachy Haired Honky Bitch, which made me laugh the first time, and which I'm enjoying again (particularly as I believe Gillespie is one of our country's most talented and most underrated essayists). Here's the paragraph I got to read this morning:

"Like he should worry. Lary is almost immune to police. I couldn't even get the police to handcuff him when he was shooting at people running through the parking lot that abuts his backyard. Granted, they were burglars Lary had caught in the act of robbing his house, but I don't see how the police could have known that at first. I figured I'd at least get to see a SWAT showdown before matters got sorted. But no, Lary says they told him not to miss next time, and to just drag the bodies from the parking lot onto his property, thereby reinforcing a self-defense scenario." (p. 58.)

I try not to be a violent person, but that's kind of funny. I do love cops. But back to the point: I was able to get a laugh in about 30 seconds with my good-old hardcover book. Would it be that easy with an e-book reader?

Being Ariel Leve.

About a third of the way through Ariel Leve's essay collection It Could Be Worse, You Could Be Me, I still couldn't decide if I was liking it or not. At first I thought it was a little, well, a little too over-the-top "woe is me." (I just couldn't get myself to feel too bad for a woman who splits her time between New York City and London, and who is making a living as a writer.)

But somewhere in the middle of her essays she started to charm me. Leve is a journalist and writes for The Sunday Times Magazine, The Guardian, and other publications, so I'm not sure if these are pieces from a column or what; here, they're organized into thematic sections like "Getting through the Day," "Personality Defects," "Health Concerns," and "Not a Fan." They're deceptively easy--she'll take you along on a perfectly valid rant for a couple of pages, and then she'll throw in a last zinger of a paragraph that just wins you over. By the time I was done with the book I was sorry it was over.

I didn't have bookmarks handy where I was reading this one (an aside, for no reason: would it ever be acceptable to have a bookshelf in the bathroom? Or does that strike people as unhygienic?), so I'm just flipping through now and will share a couple of her asides--a lot of which made me feel very close to her. Consider:

On the week between Christmas and New Year's: "No-one expects any work to get done, the streets are empty, the pressure is off. Changing out of my pyjamas feels like an accomplishment." (p. 101.)

On going out: "Getting older has rewards. Behaviour that was once unacceptable is becoming what's expected. For instance, when I was twenty-five and wanted to stay home on a Saturday night, everyone thought I was a loser. My friends would nag me to join them: 'C'mon, you're young. Live it up!' I tried to explain I was barely interested in living. What makes them think I'd be interested in living it up?" (p. 107.)

Here's the truest thing I've read in a long time: "People say you live and learn, but sometimes that's not the case. Sometimes you just live. And keep going. Or what you do learn you forget." (p. 159.)

And here was something on low-maintenance and high-maintenance women that someone should have shared with Mr. CR before we got hitched: "A low-maintenance groomer with a high-maintenance personality is not considered a catch." (p. 252.)

I could go on, but you get my point. Actually, the back-cover* copy of this one gives a good clue to its contents. Does this make you laugh (after inwardly cringing, because it's what you do to?): "If someone tells her everything will be okay, she asks: How do you know?'" It made me laugh. That's what I ALWAYS think first when someone tells me everything will be okay.

*Speaking of the cover, you can't tell in the horrible graphic I've used, but in the stock photo on the cover of this one the person covering their head with a pillow is wearing a ring on their left ring finger, which bothered me, as Leve is clearly not married. Yes, I am demanding about my book covers. Find a different stock photo!