Citizen Reader

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!

Escapist nonfiction.

God help me, I enjoyed Lisa Scottoline's essay collection My Nest Isn't Empty, It Just Has More Closet Space.

I never pick on or look down upon anyone who reads fiction genres*, because I know there's plenty of escapist nonfiction fare I enjoy. This book definitely comes under the "escapist nonfiction" heading, as the essays are all about three to five pages long, primarily cover the trials of author Scottoline's daily life and family members (one family member, her daughter Francesca, even has a few essays from her point of view included), and are compulsively readable. I left this book in the bathroom and was able to polish it off in a few days; if you sat down to read it it might take you an hour. Deep stuff it is not.

But I find something about Scottoline very amusing. It's not like we're in the same stage of life**--she's in her mid-fifties and her daughter has finally left the nest and I'm just at the beginning of that whole child-raising scene. But I still like her. Consider:

"I have lots of grudges, maybe three hundred of them, and they're always with me, like a Snuggie of bad feelings."*** (p. 18.)

I also like how she talks (gossips?) about her family members:

"Most people have a list of Things To Do, but Mother Mary has a list of Things Not To Do. Or more accurately, Things Never To Do. At the top of the list is Don't Go To The Movies. Other entries include Don't Eat Outside With The Bugs and Don't Walk All Over This Cockamamie Mall." (p. 58.)

I loved that, as I too refuse to walk around cockamamie malls and eat outside with bugs. (My own such list is extensive and includes things like Do Not Go Camping and Do Not Touch a Sewing Machine.) But I digress. It's a fun book if you need something fluffy and you're not feeling like a novel. It's as good as her first collection, Why My Third Husband Will Be a Dog, and that takes some doing--humor follow-ups aren't often the strongest of books.

*Except Mr. CR, whose genre bookcases I mock ceaselessly, just because I'm a real gem of a wife.

**We also don't have much in common as she is a fabulously successful bestselling author.

***I'll admit it, I just find Snuggies funny. I find just SAYING "Snuggies" funny.

Introducing Mr. CR to Etsy.

It's embarrassing to admit, as I used to be a reference librarian, but Mr. CR always knows more interesting websites, trivia, and general all-around information than I do. So when I brought home the humor book Regretsy: Where DIY Meets WTF, I was charmed when Mr. CR told me it was pretty amusing, and set about telling me there must be some crafting website out there known as Etsy. And for once I got to say, "Yes, I know, that's why I got the book." Although I knew about Etsy, I can't say I've ever spent much time there (usually I'm trying to get crafty stuff out of my house, rather than bringing more in).

The book's pretty simple in execution (and is based on the website of the same name); each page shows the craft on offer, with its original advertising copy and a brief paragraph having a little fun with it by Winchell. It's divided into sections like "pet humiliation," "art," and "toys and dolls." Also, let me just say: there's an entire section of this book dedicated to "Vulvacraft." That's right. Uteri and vaginas in art, oh my.

It's good stuff. And if you've been wondering where to find that perfect pair of uteri earrings, look no further--the contact info for the sellers highlighted is also included.

At long last.

A new essay collection from David Rakoff!

I love, love, LOVE David Rakoff. I love him like I love William Langewiesche; without reservation but with more than a smidgen of awe. Whenever people extoll the virtues of David Sedaris, I always take care to suggest Rakoff to them as well--I like Sedaris, but for my money, Rakoff is the superior stylist.

You only have to look at the cover of Rakoff's new book, Half Empty, to know that it will be a pessimist's dream: there's a warning printed right on it that says "No inspirational life lessons will be found in these pages." The essays contained within vary by subject--from Rakoff's stature as a small child to his attendance at a porn convention to a bout with cancer (his third)--but they are all beautifully written.

The writing is one thing, but I also love Rakoff's tone. His book jacket declares that he's the guy who looks at things "through a dark lens," but I think you'll find that even at his bleakest he has a surprising gentleness. Consider this thought, as he muses on the things that people say to him when they find out he's being treated for a tumor:

"But here's the point I want to make about the stuff people say. Unless someone looks you in the eye and hisses, 'You fucking asshole, I can't wait until you die of this,' people are really trying their best. Just like being happy and sad, you will find yourself on both sides of the equation many times over your lifetime, either saying or hearing the wrong thing. Let's all give each other a pass, shall we?" (p. 217.)

Exactly.

The last paragraph of that essay's even better, but I won't spoil it. If you've never read him, it's time.

Not so great.

You'd think a book with a title like The Great Typo Hunt: Two Friends Changing the World, One Correction at a Time would be a lot of fun to read, wouldn't you?

It's not.*

*Read Lynne Truss's Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation instead.

Cute, but not a whole lot of substance.

I knew when I saw the title Careers for Your Cat (by Ann Dziemianowicz and illustrations by Ann Boyajian) I would have to check it out. Mr. CR and I have spoken frequently about our own little furry freeloader, and how it's just about time she went out and made the living for us, as she has been sponging free food and lodging off me for fourteen years now. Which made this, in the introduction, all the funnier:

"I've seen it for far too many years. It's always the same scenario. You're toiling away at your job, putting in the overtime to bring home the bacon--and the Fancy Feast--and what is Fluffy, your freeloading, fat cat, doing?...

I'll tell what she isn't doing, she isn't raising one paw to help you." (p. 1.)

This is actually kind of a cute little gift book, consisting of the introduction, some questions under the heading "The Meowers-Briggs Career Test," and then a list of Career Options. The Career Options pages consist only of the job title and a few of the job attributes (Librarian: Polite and reserved, but not unfriendly; likes to curl up with a good book), plus great illustrations of kitty cats. Really, the pictures make the book. If you're the sort of person who's amused by drawings of fat cats wearing ties and other career-appropriate clothing (and I am) then you might still be charmed by this book; otherwise, there's not a lot of content here.

How does that keep happening?

Waking up a few times every night and not being able to get back to sleep is not doing much for my daytime productivity, but it is doing wonders for my reading track record. Several times this week I have caught myself not particularly enjoying books, but finishing them nonetheless. There must be something about the wee small hours that make them very efficient reading times.

The book I started and finished in the dark this week was Sloane Crosley's essay collection How Did You Get This Number. I read Crosley's first essay collection, I Was Told There'd Be Cake, and although it got raves from every single critic there is, it didn't do a whole lot for me. So I'm not sure why I got this next volume, but there you have it. And again, there's either something about Crosley's subjects or writing that just doesn't light me on fire.

But yet...I read the whole thing. And in the last essay I got a little bit of Crosley's appeal: she's got the "essay twist" skill (this is what I call it when an essay takes a turn from its subject matter to its deeper meaning, usually aided and abetted by some sentences that take my breath away). In "Off the Back of a Truck," she combines the topics of a love affair gone wrong with her acquaintance with a furniture store employee who helped her get some questionable deals on merchandise. Sounds simple, but it's one of those essays where you know a lot more is going on than you're appreciating. I hope I'm not giving too much away, but in the end she gives up her furniture deals and her sadness over the failed relationship:

"Time passed, and I found myself wandering into Out of Your League [the store in question]--where I was apparently wearing an outfit that indicated I should be followed around like a fourteen-year-old shoplifter...I went over to the carpet wheel and spun, but I couldn't find one to fall in love with. I think I had just outgrown my fascination with the store in general. A thin, older saleslady in pearls lowered her glasses and asked me if she could help me with anything. But I could tell she didn't mean it.

'I think I'm set.' I waved, repeatedly pressing the button for the ground floor while she pretended not to judge me.*

What can you do? Time grabs you by the scruff of your neck and drags you forward. You get over it, of course. Everyone was right about that. One mathematically insignificant day, you stop hoping for happiness and become actually happy. Okay, on occasion, you do worry about yourself. You worry about what this experience has tapped into..." (pp. 270-271.)

There's more, in a totally fabulous conclusion, but I don't want to ruin it in case you read it. I just love the "time grabs you by the scruff" bit, because that's exactly what it does. Damn talented essayists, even when they're not my favorite essayists.

*I must always look pretty low-rent because this is how I usually get treated in stores too. Oh well. I can live with it.

Both ends of the spectrum: Death.

I enjoyed the hell out of Tom Jokinen's Curtains: Adventures of an Undertaker-in-Training.

This is weird, I know, but I ALWAYS seem to enjoy books about death and funerals. I really liked Lisa Takeuchi Cullens's Remember Me: A Lively Tour of the New American Way of Death, and I loved Jessica Mitford's classic The American Way of Death. I know three books does not a whole lot of experience make, but I have this feeling I've read other books on the subject and am just not remembering them right now.

Jokinen is a Canadian author who takes some time off from his job in order to become an undertaker's apprentice; basically, helping out at a local funeral home business with such tasks as transporting bodies, assisting at embalmings, and just being a general all-around helper. I know, it sounds morbid, doesn't it? But it's really not. His personal reaction to the jobs he's given is interesting, his insight into his employer's funeral home business is fascinating, and his wider look at current trends in funeral services (including "green" burials and cremation, of course), especially as they become ever more separated from tradition and religion, is also really well done.*

I liked it for its non-sentimentality. Consider this job tip: "Summer at the Factory [Jokinen's name for the funeral home] means the smell of freshly turned earth from Brookside cemetery, and Zep bug spray, which Shannon uses to fog the dressing room to keep flies off the customers. 'The last thing you want is to open the casket and have a fly come out of someone's nose,' she says. Shannon's full of helpful hints. When threading a needle in the prep room, she says, resist the urge to put it in your mouth. Moisten the end with water from the sink. 'Never lick anything in a funeral home.'" (p. 75.)

Now that's good advice. It's a great book--give it a try if you can handle the subject matter.

*Plus, he's Canadian, which means I love him by default. At one point he references the band Blue Rodeo, which is a great Canadian band, and one of my favorites, which made me feel very Canadian myself. Please, Canada, just adopt me already?

What was the point of this farming experiment, exactly?

I did not enjoy Manny Howard's My Empire of Dirt: How One Man Turned His Big-City Backyard Into a Farm.

I did end up reading most of it, although I could tell from the start it wasn't really going to be my type of "back to the land" narrative. Although, to be honest, I can't think of one of these types of books that I've really, really loved, other than perhaps Doug Fine's Farewell, My Subaru, which was at least kind of charming, or Michael Ableman's On Good Land, which was more of a "staying on the land" story. I did not like Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, either. I think I tend to find these books either obnoxious or smug, neither of which are tones I enjoy in most of my nonfiction (unless, of course, the obnoxious is coming from Anthony Bourdain, who has a new book coming out!).

This book grew out of a New York Magazine article that Howard wrote in 2007, in which the magazine challenged him to live the locavore lifestyle by growing enough vegetables and livestock in his 800-square-foot Brooklyn backyard to keep him in food for a month. Perhaps the book just needed tighter editing; Howard seems to bounce, without any sort of plan, from one scheme to the next: growing plants from seed in his basement, growing vegetables through hydroponics, breeding rabbits for food, and eventually getting a few chickens and ducks as well. I was also annoyed that, throughout, he seemed to have endless money and resources for these projects; I couldn't tell if that was because his wife had a great job in the city, or if the magazine was footing all of his expenses. Consider his exploits in the hydroponics store, when he realizes the salespeople probably think he is a narc looking for information about home marijuana growers:

"Have the boys here made me for a narc? Me? Maybe...I may not be a narc or a drug-enforcement agent, but ever since I walked into the store I have been doing what my profession trained me to do, ask as many dumb questions as you can think of...But I neglected to identify myself as a reporter--because I am not, I am a farmer--so I have inadvertently communicated only a deep desire to burn vast amounts of money on a project I know nothing about. I have spent the last half hour asking after only the most obvious covert growing rigs--ones designed to fit inside closets. I can be one of only two things, the dumbest cannabis grow king ever to step through this front door, or a cop." (p. 85.)

I have two problems with that paragraph. First: dude, you are no farmer, even if you do keep trying to quote Wendell Berry. (Anytime you grow something for just the one season, I can call you at most a gardener.) And secondly, I have no patience for people who get to burn vast amounts of money on any project, because I have never had vast amounts of money, and frankly, hearing about other people burn through such amounts makes me both jealous and annoyed. It's the way the entire book progresses; he goes from one project to the next, and eventually does get some garden produce, but at the end of the season a tornado (first tornado in Brooklyn in a hundred years, which was unfortunate) wrecks most of his backyard and most of his animals die off. By the next season he's back to putting sod over his backyard, and that's the end of that. Leaving me with only the one feeling: What was the point of all that?

Meh. If you're looking for a better book on living off the land, do try Doug Fine's Farewell, My Subaru. Likewise, if you're interested in a more humorous memoir of a man bumbling through the first years of his marriage and home improvement, try Lawrence LaRose's vastly superior Gutted: Down to the Studs In My House, My Marriage, My Entire Life.

Kicking off the summer of Bryson.

When someone asked me about my summer reading plans this summer, I must admit I was stymied. Without kids and with a freelance job that tends to be somewhat constant year-round, and not liking to travel during the summer when everyone else is traveling, I never ever think of summer as its own reading season. I also am not a fan of either a. beaches, or b. beach reads (which seem mainly to be "women's fiction" novels or thrillers, neither of which are my cuppa), so "summer reading" wasn't something I had thought about at all.

But then I did think about it, and thought there might be a couple of goals I could have for the summer. After reading and enjoying Bill Bryson's Notes from a Small Island, I thought maybe I'd work my way through the rest of his books (or at least the travel ones--he's also written books about the English language, but I don't know if I need to be that dedicated about it). I'm also thinking this should be the summer when I finally, finally read Lonesome Dove, by Larry McMurtry (which is periodically recommended to me by one of my very favorite librarians), or perhaps even Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind. I have always wanted to know if Rhett was as dishy, and Scarlett as annoying, as they are in the movie.

But I decided to ease myself into things with Bryson's American travelogue, The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America. Now, I just didn't love this one the way I loved Notes from a Small Island or In a Sunburned Country, but I did finish it, and I've got quite a few bookmarks stuck in it, so I at least enjoyed many parts of it. In this travelogue, first published in 1989, Bryson visited his homeland of the United States (he was then living in Great Britain with his wife and family), and drove around most of it, writing about his experiences as he went, and engaging in nostalgia for the road trips of his youth, organized and run with a frugal hand by his father.

I don't know if Bryson has mellowed with age, but I found him a little more abrasive in this narrative, and the tone, to me, seemed a bit uneven: you could never tell whether he was going to love a place or activity, and even when he was enjoying himself it seemed like a grudging "well, that wasn't a bad time, considering how lousy this whole trip has been" way. Because he was in America, of course, a lot of his time was also spent driving and exploring American historical spots (colonial Williamsburg, the Gettysburg battleground, etc.) and since I am completely bored and annoyed by driving (preferring to travel near big urban centers where we can almost exclusively ride trains or other public transportation) and was never all that interested in American history, I fear much of the charm of this volume was lost on me.

But that doesn't mean there weren't moments. I LOVED his description of Franklin Roosevelt's Georgian retreat, Warm Springs:

"I drove out to the Little White House, about two miles outside town. The parking lot was almost empty, except for an old bus from which a load of senior citizens were disembarking. The bus was from the Calvary Baptist Church in some place like Firecracker, Georgia, or Bareassed, Alabama. The old people were noisy and excited, like schoolchildren, and pushed in front of me at the ticket booth, little realizing that I wouldn't hesitate to give an old person a shove, especially a Baptist. Why is it, I wondered, that old people are always so self-centered and excitable? But I just smiled benignly and stood back, comforted by the thought that soon they would be dead." (p. 75.)

Okay, in all fairness, that's a description of old people, not Warm Springs. But HERE is a further description of Warm Springs that I also enjoyed:

"In every room there was a short taped commentary, which explained how Roosevelt worked and underwent therapy at the cottage. What it didn't tell you was that what he really came here for was a bit of rustic bonking with his secretary, Lucy Mercer. Her bedroom was on one side of the living room and his was on the other. The taped recording made nothing of this, but it did point out that Eleanor's bedroom, tucked away at the back and decidedly inferior to the secretary's, was mostly used as a guest room because Eleanor seldom made the trip south." (p. 77.)

Now THAT is American history. If my school textbooks had been a bit more honest about things like that, I might have actually been interested in American history. I look forward to continuing the Summer of Bryson!

The best part of jobs: reading memoirs about them.

I have always loved a good "work memoir." As much as I don't enjoy working jobs, I do enjoy learning about them, particularly ones I know I am never going to do. This was the case with Claire Lewis's new memoir Exposed: Confessions of a Wedding Photographer.

I know I'm never going to be a wedding photographer not only because I'm not a very good photographer, but also because I hate all things associated with weddings. I disliked every moment of planning mine (well, picking out the food was okay), even though we kept it as simple as possible, and to this day I rather wish we'd eloped. Live and learn. Lewis's memoir was pretty much what I expected it to be: the unreasonable demands of mothers-in-law; working with bridezillas; wedding day disasters (evidently it never, ever works for your wedding attendees to release butterflies that they sell in individual boxes, just for that purpose--where are the PETA people when that crap is going on?); and rare anecdotes of joyful couples who are just happy to be getting married and take everything in stride.

I also enjoyed the interactions between Lewis and her assistant, Sarah. During one of their meetings, Claire was complaining about one particularly picky bride who was emailing constantly with messages like "We are having a MAJOR PROBLEM.* We want to use an ivory tablecloth on our cake table...People are telling me the ivory doesn't photograph well?!! We're pretty upset about it because it took us a super long time to make our linen decisions and it wasn't easy..." To which her assistant advised her on the following course of action: "Just tell her that ivory won't work and will look terrible. Then she'll have to start the whole linen planning over again. She'll be in heaven. It'll give her and her fiance something to worry about. Happiest time of their lives. They'll never have so much in common again." (pp. 131-146.) Ha!

In between her work experiences, Lewis also relates the story of her own romance, marriage, and childbirth, although those chapters felt a little rushed and slight to me. No matter: this was still a light, fun read. And now I can officially add "wedding photographer" to the long list of jobs I never want to hold.

*I also got a chuckle out of this book because it never ceases to amazes me what people categorize as "problems."

Something a bit lighter today, methinks.

David Rose has a new sequel out to his great, great book They Call Me Naughty Lola. This one is titled Sexually, I'm More of a Switzerland, and it's more of the same greatness: personal ads from the London Review of Books, most of which give new meaning to the word "quirky." Traditionally I'm not a huge fan of the humor books you just have to dip into a little bit at a time, but I'll make an exception for these books. Here's some of my favorite ads:

"They gave me this personal advert for free because I moaned, whinged and complained like a mo'fo' over my last advert not getting any replies. Who's the winner now LRB? Me. It's me. I'm the winner and don't you ever forget it. Man, 29. Deprived of affection and most forms of human contact since birth, now just wants a ton of free stuff and to be loved."

"I am not as high maintenance as my highly polished and impeccably arranged collection of porcelain cats suggests, but if you touch them I will kill you. F, 36. Likes porcelain cats. Seeks man not unused to the sound of sobbing coming from a bedroom from which he is strictly prohibited."

"Rich old buggers about to peg it, write to attractive, nubile young filly."

"Don't refer to your biceps as 'guns' and you may stand a chance of me not wanting to kill you at the next LRB singles night. You know who you are. F, 37. Always remembers a face and any subsequent associatoins of despair."

Tee hee. That's good stuff. I want to live in London. Failing that, I want to subscribe to the London Review of Books. We'll have to wait and see which dream I make good on in my lifetime.

*If you enjoy these books you might also enjoy Michael Beaumier's fantastic memoir I Know You're Out There: Private Longings, Public Humiliations, and Other Tales from the Personals.

The evidence mounts.

This week we have still more evidence that I am not smart enough for the magazine The Believer, or for the people who write it. Recently in my library catalog I came across this title: You're a Horrible Person, But I Like You, which of course I had to request immediately. The problem was the subtitle: "The Believer Book of Advice."

The entire book is a collection of humorists' pieces giving advice, but every chapter is written in the format of advice letters written to the contributors, which they then answer. Let me give you an example, from the chapter written by Paul Feig*:

"Dear Paul: For years I have tried to make my Hungarian grandmother's cucumber salad. She improvises her recipe, so she wrote down the steps for me to follow. But try as I might, mine never tastes as good as hers. What am I doing wrong? --Linda Nagy, Fort Wayne, IN.

Dear Lisa: You're trying to crash your grandmother's party, that's what you're doing. Did you ever stop and think that maybe your grandmother isn't giving you the exact recipe because she wants your salad to be worse than hers? What's next? You going to try on her clothes? Steal her boyfriend? Pretend you're from Hungary, too? My advice is to let your grandmother be the master of her cucumber recipe. Tell her she's the only one who can make it, then take a bowl of it to a lab and have it analyzed. Then you can make the exact recipe in the privacy of your home and she'll still believe she's the queen of cucumbers. --Paul." (p. 67.)

Now, taken alone, I guess that's kind of funny. But a whole book of chapters like that? It's too much. Even with contributors like Feig, Aasif Mandvi, Amy Sedaris, Sarah Silverman, and Sarah Vowell, I just couldn't sustain the interest. Plus, I'm just too literal to enjoy things like this. Did they write the letters themselves? Or did they actually come from somewhere?

*I love, love, LOVE Paul Feig, author of the memoirs Kick Me and Superstud.