Citizen Reader

Why are books on reading always so boring?

One book I did NOT put a lot of bookmarks in recently was David Ulin's The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time.

Come on. Check that title. Can you blame me for thinking this was going to be a really interesting book?

Well, it's not. Or at least it wasn't to me. It turns out that Ulin's one of those book critics and writers who's always writing way above my head.* Maybe if I'd been an actual English major I'd be able to keep up with his references, but I wasn't. And I'm never going to have the time to correct that shortcoming (that is, to go back and read all the stuff I should read: more Romantic poets, Shakespeare, mid-twentieth-century classics, more world literature, etc.), and having that pointed out to me just makes me cranky.

Ulin's starting point is a discussion with his son Noah, who is having to read and "annotate" F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby for school. Noah tells his father, the book critic:

"'This is why reading is over. None of my friends like it. Nobody wants to do it anymore.'" (p. 8.)

Much as that statement disturbs Ulin, he has a feeling his son isn't wrong. From there he goes on to explore his own experience of reading, citing such sources as Frank Conroy's memoir Stop-Time, and explaining the creation of his own private library with such authors as Vonnegut, Mario Puzo, Philip Roth, E.L. Doctorow, and Joseph Heller. He describes his travels to Paris as a twenty-two-year-old and his discovery of the author Alexander Trocchi.**

As he describes his own lifetime relationship with reading, he does write some nice sentences of his own ("This is what literature, at its best and most unrelenting, offers: a slicing through of all the noise and the ephemera, a cutting to the chase.") but I never really felt this short book*** gelled as a complete or passionate treatise. Ulin himself never cuts to the chase--how and why are we reading differently now, David, and what does this mean for what we will read in the future? He just kind of babbles around, citing an author here and a cultural commentator there, mixing political stories with personal recollections. In the end I can't say there is one bit of this book that stands out to me, or that I could talk about with others.Which, to me, is where the real problem is with reading today. We don't read enough things that are worth talking about with each other, and if we did, we wouldn't have the time to. We're too busy programming our cell phones and Tivos. Or whatever the electronics are these days that people seem to love buying and programming.****

And, frankly? His son sounds like kind of a jerk to me, although I guess I should cut him some slack as a high-school boy.

*Here's a representative paragraph: "All of this suggests a complicated conundrum, between what we once were and what we are in the process of becoming. Such a conundrum is both personal and collective, having to do, on the one hand, with the way that in the floating world of cyberspace nothing is ever truly past or lost and, on the other, with the unintended consequences of this instant access, how it alters identity and memory. These issues, of course, have informed the human experience ever since there was a human experience." (p. 82.) I mean, I understand what he's saying but Christ, what a boring way to get there.

**I've never even heard of this author.

***It actually started life as an article, and I think it should have stayed that way.

****Not me. If I'm in a Best Buy for more then ten minutes I start to hyperventilate and have a panic attack. No fooling. It drives Mr. CR nuts--he once wanted to buy a new TV and get my input but I could never stay in the store long enough to give him an opinion. We still have his college TV.

Just Kids, part 2.

Yesterday I was so busy talking about my crush on Patti Smith, developed after reading her memoir Just Kids, that I didn't even get to talk about the love story/friendship at the heart of the book; that is, her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe.

The story(ies) of how they met indicate, from the start, the sort of fated friendship they were bound to share (as well as illustrating what a small town late-1960s New York City seemed to be). When Smith first moved to New York City, with no money,* she went in search of some friends of hers who attended the Pratt Institute for art, but when she arrived at their address, she found they had moved. Instead she met someone else who would become hugely influential to her: Mapplethorpe.

"I walked into the room. On a simple iron bed, a boy was sleeping. He was pale and slim with masses of dark curls, lying bare-chested with strands of beads around his neck. I stood there. He opened his eyes and smiled." (p. 25.)

A bit later, after Smith found a job in Brentano's (where they also must have sold crafts and jewelry), that same boy came in and used a credit slip (he had a job at a different Brentano's) to buy Smith's favorite necklace on display. And not long after that, when Smith was on a date with a bookstore customer whose motives she didn't trust, she happened to see Mapplethorpe nearby and used him to make good her escape:

"It was as if a small portal of future opened, and out stepped the boy from Brooklyn who had chosen the Persian necklace, like an answer to a teenage prayer. I immediately recognized his slightly bowlegged gait and his tousled curls. He was dressed in dungarees and a sheepskin vest. Around his neck hung strands of beaded necklaces, a hippie shepherd boy. I ran up to him and grabbed his arm.

'Hello, do you remember me?'

'Of course,' he smiled.

'I need help,' I blurted. 'Will you pretend you're my boyfriend?'

'Sure,' he said, as if he wasn't surprised by my sudden appearance..." (p. 38.)

I'm sorry, but that, my friends, is a relationship that was meant to be. Three chance encounters across Brooklyn and Manhattan? Of course, their entire love affair doesn't stay that idyllic. But you've got to read this book: what these two did for art, the people they met (particularly while living at the Chelsea Hotel), the way they loved each other--take your pick. It felt like about four great books in one.

*Have I said how much I love Patti Smith? Check out this sense of adventure: "At twenty years old, I boarded the bus. I wore my dungarees, black turtleneck, and the old gray raincoat I had bought in Camden. My small suitcase, yellow-and-red plaid, held some drawing pencils, a notebook, Illuminations, a few pieces of clothing, and pictures of my siblings. I was superstitious. Today was a Monday; I was born on a Monday. It was a good day to arrive in New York City. No one expected me. Everything awaited me." (p. 25.)

Tina Fey is not funny.

I know, everyone else thinks she is, including my sister. And it hurts me to disagree with my sister, if not with everyone else. But I've been saying it for years and I'm sticking with it: Tina Fey is not funny.

Checking out her new memoir Bossypants from the library was my last-ditch effort to find her funny, so I could agree with my sister and all would once again be right in my familial circle. But I can't do it. I read the first few chapters, some bits in the middle, and then some of the excruciating conclusion when she gave the play-by-play (seemingly minute by unending minute) of her stint impersonating Sarah Palin on Saturday Night Live. Now, I'm not saying she's not talented. Or a bad person. Or that she wasn't just spectacularly in the right time and place to be an unnerving lookalike for a famous politician whose accent is really easy to impersonate. All I'm saying is: she's just not that funny.

Okay, well, there's one funny bit in the very beginning, when she describes how her mother told her about menstruation by giving her a box of Modess pads and leaving the room; evidently Modess used to put pamphlets in their "feminine products" in which a fake correspondence between friends was supposed to help illuminate the mysteries of the process. Here's Fey's re-creation of that pamphlet, in a sidebar:

"Dear Pam, I'm supposed to go to a pool party this week, but my 'Aunt Blood' is still in town. Can I go?

Dear Tabitha, Of course you can still go! Modess makes great feminine protection products that are so thick and puffy, you'll be super comfortable sitting on that bench near the pool telling everyone you're sick." (p. 14.)

Okay, I got a mild giggle out of that, but that's about it. (And by the way, I personally think "Aunt Flo" would have been funnier than "Aunt Blood," but maybe AF was too obvious? Copyrighted?)

So, even though I should find Tina Fey funny, and there's lots of bits in this book about being an older lady with a baby, which I should enjoy, as a similarly older lady with a baby, there's just not that much for me here. I can't even get myself to track down any bits with Alec Baldwin, although I LOVE Alec Baldwin. It's just going back to the library.

Update (before I posted, even!): Unruly Reader just posted a review of this (audio)book on her blog, and it hurts me to disagree with Unruly. So I went back and read one of the last chapters, on breastfeeding, which, by rights, I should find HI-larious, as my experience with breastfeeding made (makes) me think my breasts should be revoked by some sort of "Real Women" judging panel. I can't resist the pun: I got a few titters out of the chapter, but that's about it. Yes, I'm just not that funny. But neither is Tina Fey.

Wow, I forgot dating was THIS bad.

I'm a total sucker for investigative/"year in the life" books. Even when I don't particularly enjoy them, I almost always feel compelled to finish them. This was the case, this past weekend, with Rachel Machacek's The Science of Single: One Woman's Grand Experiment in Modern Dating, Creating Chemistry, and Finding Love.

Machacek, who lives in Washington DC and works for a trade magazine, decided that she would undertake a year's worth of power dating--leaving no stone unturned* in her search for "the one." During her quest she enrolled in online dating services, attended singles events and mixers, paid dating services**, committed to dating in other cities, read a pile of dating advice books, and hired dating coaches.

I'll let you read it and find out if she finds her "One," but let me just say this: if the guys she dates are representative, wow, it's a scary dating world out there. Although I wasn't crazy about the author as a character (she did seem a little picky, I'll admit it, and her insistence on immediate and overpowering chemistry was a bit off-putting after a while), she did make me laugh a few times. Consider:

 "He's a good kisser, but the chemistry has waned at exactly the same rate that my buzz has worn off. It's gone by the time he goes for the boob grab, awkwardly reaching under my seat belt that's still fastened. There's a time and place for boob grabbing, and when you are thirty-five years old, you should know when and where that is." (p. 38.)

Ha. (Funny sad.) Although I can't find the page right now, later on she decides that guys should really be taught the aforementioned proper place and time in health class, as they are all helpless at mastering a properly timed boob grab. I totally agree.

I'm sitting here trying to think of some pithy way to sum this one up, but nothing's really coming to me. It's that kind of read--okay but not really anything to write home (or on one's blog) about.

*It seems like this literally sometimes, as many of the guys she dates seem to have slithered out from under a primordial rock somewhere.

**She paid one company, It's Just Lunch, $1300 for fourteen date match-ups. Holy cow. I need to get into the dating advice business.

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.

Weekend fluffy reading.

I have been reading a lot of stuff lately that I feel like I have to read--books about babies' first years and developmental milestones (which CRjr is mainly hitting, but about which I am nervous all the same); books I'm indexing; books I'm not really into but that are coming due at the library; books to review for outside sources that I don't feel like reading; finance books because I am just desperate to understand something, anything, about investing; etc.

So this past weekend I saw the title After Diana: William, Harry, Charles, and the Royal House of Windsor by Christopher Andersen on my TBR bookshelf and thought, well, hell, I'm just going to read that this weekend and enjoy myself. So I did. And I didn't do any other reading I thought I should do--I read this book, and the paper, and I did the New York magazine crossword, and in general slacked off disgracefully. It was awesome.

I enjoyed this book because it didn't look or feel particularly fluffy, but man, was it a fast read. It was also fun to read it after watching the big Royal Wedding a few weeks back; I'd never read that much about the Windsor family, so it was fun to learn more about Wills and Harry. (Particularly hilarious was the part about Wills attending college at St. Andrews, in Scotland, and heading over to campus on a street called Butts Wynd--I have a picture of that street sign from when we visited St. Andrews ourselves! Also funny--when it was announced he was going to school there, admissions for that year shot up 44%, accounted for by almost all women.) Although I did learn MORE than enough about some of the goings-on among Diana and the rest of the royals, Charles and Camilla, the Queen and Charles, etc. There were some wild stories here.

But all in all I don't think I'll search out any more bios by Christopher Andersen. This one was okay, as I was interested in the subject matter, but the chapters seemed somewhat disjointed and there wasn't much of an overall story arc. But that's okay. I wanted fluffy reading and I got fluffy reading, so I can't complain.

His way.

Thanks to some research I've been doing for a workshop I'm doing in a couple of weeks* on biographies and memoirs, I've been on a real Frank Sinatra bender. Do you know how many biographies there are about Frank Sinatra? A lot. A lot a lot. This works out nicely for me, as I am a fan.**

I've got a pile of Sinatra books here, and every day I wander through some of them, looking at the pictures and reading snippets of text here and there. It's also gotten me in the mood to listen to some Sinatra, which I did today, and which was fun, as CRjr seems also to be a fan. He particularly seemed to enjoy "Luck Be a Lady," although that might have been because his crazy mother was sashaying around the kitchen singing along to it.

One book I made it all the way through was Pete Hamill's Why Sinatra Matters, which I'd file under "hagiography"--Hamill doesn't sugar-coat some of Sinatra's less savory connections or personality attributes, but he definitely comes down on the side of fandom. It's brief--180 pages--and if you like Sinatra's music you'll probably enjoy it. There's a bit about his parents and hometown, birth (he was a 13-pound baby!), childhood, marriages, and mob connections, but the best part is the chapter on the second part of his career, when he made a ton of his hits at Capitol Records:

"There were a number of components to the Sinatra-Riddle collaboration. Friedwald emphasizes one of them: 'Lightness shines as the primary ingredient of the Riddle style. Whether he has ten brass swinging heavily or an acre of strings, Riddle always manages to make everything sound light; that way, the weightiest ballad doesn't become oversentimental and insincere, and the fastest swinger doesn't come off as forced.'" (p. 171.)

I enjoyed that; I enjoyed the look behind the scenes at Sinatra's music (and Nelson Riddle's arrangements of it). Much more fun reading than any of the stuff about the mob. And let's hear it for Hamill; in the back of the book he lists a little bibliography of other books about Sinatra. Nice.

*Calling all library staff in the Chicago area: there's still time to join us!

**Come on. I've Got the World on a String? One of the greatest songs ever.

Know anyone in the thea-tah?

If you do, have I got a book for them.

I checked out Judi Dench's autobiography/memoir And Furthermore because I love Judi Dench. Although I have learned that there is a lot about Judi Dench I don't know--primarily, that she is a thea-tah actress of long standing, and only did television and film roles quite late in her career. I love her as an American does--for her performance on the BBC series As Time Goes By (not to mention as M in the latest James Bond movies)--not for her theater roles.

I enjoyed this book, although if you're looking for gossipy insights you're not going to find them here. She covers her As Time Goes By experiences in about four pages, and the death of her husband Michael in six. Quite simply, this seems to be a woman who just wants to get on with things and does so. And yet, she's got a lot of sparkle. I enjoyed this anecdote about when a director asked her to play Cleopatra in a play (when she was getting on in years):

"I was always anxious about playing her, because whenever I said I was going to play Cleopatra people used to openly laugh in my face. 'Cleopatra?' You? So I was really paranoid about it, and at the first rehearsal I said to Peter, 'Well, I hope you know what you are doing, setting out to direct Cleopatra with a menopausal dwarf.'" (p. 105.)

This is a woman with a sense of humor.

But most of all this is a book for people who are either serious actors or are enthralled with serious actors. Over the course of her career on (primarily) London's stage, she's played a wide variety of roles and worked with many well-known people, and those are the stories she tells. And she loves her life, you can tell, it's so refreshing:

"Well, I am doing the things I want to do now, so I don't want to retire. Actors are really remarkable people to be with. I like the company of other people, but I love the company of actors, and to be in a company...The whole idea of a group of people coming together and working to one end somehow is very appealing to me. It is the thing I have always wanted to do, and I am lucky enough to be doing it." (p. 240.)

As Lionel's father would have told Judi Dench's character in As Time Goes By: "Rock on."

What to get the reader who has everything.

I'm so sorry I missed these two books in the weeks before all the big winter holidays; they would have made great gifts. Need birthday gifts (or late Valentine's gifts?) for any readers you know? I'd like to suggest a couple of titles.

Read This Next: 500 of the Best Books You'll Ever Read, by Sandra Newman and Howard Mittelmark,* is one of those fantastic readers' guides that is almost as fun to read as many of the books its authors suggest. In various sections on love, memoir, family, history, politics, humor, work and money, war, religion, and death (you can see they've covered all the bases), the authors list books you should read, histories of and book-group-ready questions about those books, and lists of other related titles you might like. They also do all this, bless them, in a witty way. This is how their section on "Love" opens:

"O love! How manifold are your stings! How versatile your applications! Love is sweet and bitter, pungent and cloying, brittle and squishy, in and out. In Saudi Arabia, they stone you to death for it. Meanwhile, in France, it is compulsory for third graders...

These twelve books will clarify (or inspire) the misadventures in your own life. At the very least, they will show you that--however bizarre, wonderful, sordid, or humiliating your experience--you are not alone." (p. 3.)*

Another great "books about books" title out there is Books: The Essential Insider's Guide (City Secrets), edited by Mark Strand. It's actually part of the "City Secrets" series of guide books, but instead of learning a city's secrets, you learn the secrets of literature. In this book authors such as Oscar Hijuelos, Calvin Trillin, Adriana Trigiani, and many others offer short essays on forgotten or little-known books they think you should read. And the titles! Wonderful. I've never heard of any of them. (Examples: The Armada, by Garrett Mattingly; Black Milk: Poems, by Tory Dent; Elizabeth Smart's By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept.) Truly a book for the person who thinks they've read everything. And it's very aesthetically pleasing, too; with thick, glossy paper, and not one but TWO little ribbon bookmarks already attached to the spine. Lovely.

*Titles they suggest on "Love" include Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert; Enduring Love, by Ian McEwan; and Marriage: A History (nonfiction!) by Stephanie Coontz.

*Thanks to Stacy Horn, at whose great blog I first read about this book.

Magazine Review Week: Publishers Weekly

Back in my flush days as a public library assistant, I actually subscribed to Publishers Weekly magazine, which is a weekly publication and can get quite pricey.* But it didn't matter--I loved my PW, and read it from cover to cover each week without fail.

Now that I no longer subscribe, I haven't looked at a PW in a long time. So imagine my shock when I picked up an issue from the library and it felt like a shadow of its former self. It used to be quite the dense magazine, packed with articles and reviews and sales charts, and each issue actually had some heft. No longer...although I see the per-issue price is still a hefty $8.

It may be a shadow of its former self, but I still enjoy it as a magazine. It glories in its nerdy love of books, bookselling, and book reviewing; in the issue I read there was an article about the National Book Awards, how the Bible is a perpetual bestseller, a list of hot new books internationally, and the story of a small indie bookstore in Wisconsin. And, of course, there were the same old publisher ads (which I love to peruse) and the reviews, which I always found refreshingly honest, even though PW is a magazine that is definitely interested in selling books. There is no lame policy here (like there is at Booklist) of only printing positive reviews, and some of the negative book reviews in PW have been the ones I've enjoyed the most.

I won't be subscribing anymore. But I'll have to remember to pick PW up at the library once in a while again.

*This should tell you how much one can make as an editorial freelancer--when one can look back at one's library paycheck as the "flush days."

Magazine Review Week: GQ and Esquire

Let's count the ways I love GQ and Esquire magazines:

1. They're total porn for women. I think it's pretty accepted that women don't have the same need to observe the naked male body that men have to observe the naked female body, but who doesn't like a little eye candy in the form of a well-dressed man? These magazines offer page after page of menswear ads and articles featuring, yes, men in dapper suits and ensembles that nobody I know could ever afford or pull off, beautiful cashmere sweaters and tweeds and carefully tailored wool suits (complete with pocket squares), etc. Nice. It's the next best porn-for-women to, well, Porn for Women.

2. No articles on losing weight, craft-making, kids, or how to better your life by having a cleaner house. Also: no "inspirational" articles, and nary an Oprah opinion in sight. All of these things seem to be staples of "women's magazines."

3. God help me, I love cologne ads. I don't really like cologne on men, but I do like my magazines to smell musky and spicy. It's festive.

4. Actually interesting articles. They run the gamut from politics to culture to books coverage, it's great.

So yes, people always look at me a bit strangely when I check out my piles of these "lads' magazines" at the library. I just tell them they're for my husband (although he usually steers pretty clear of them, preferring his copies of Wired and Kiplinger's).

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.

Authors you love even through their books that you don't.

For whatever reason, Steve Almond is one of those writers who I really enjoy, even when I'm not particularly loving their specific books.

Take his latest, Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life. I was pretty pumped to get this one, as I enjoy Almond and I really enjoy music (although I have not been what you would call a slobbering fanatic about any one group, singer, or style for some time). I've been reading it off and on, but never more than two short chapters at a time or so; nothing in it has really set me on fire.

But, even so? I just enjoy Steve Almond's writing. I enjoyed interludes like this:

"Back in fourth grade, Alissa Fox brought to class a miraculous device her father supposedly helped invent. It had a numerical keyboard and performed all four basic math functions, with the results visible (sort of) on a tiny gray screen. Of especial interest was the fact that you could turn the machine over and type a secret series of numbers, o as to produce words such as 'hello' and 'boobs' and 'bigboobs.' This machine--called a cal-cu-lator--so totally blew our minds that it was assumed that Alissa Fox's dad was int he CIA and could shoot lasers from his teeth.

Back when I was teaching undergrads how to write short stories that would horrify their parents, I often told this story, in an effort to compel my classes to think about how quickly technology has transformed our species, has shifted our attention from individual imaginative tasks to collective screen addiction and thereby replaced the peculiar sensitivities of our internal lives with a series of frantic buy messages. One of my students would eventually respond to this by smiling timidly and saying, Man, you're really old."

Which is a great lead-in, really, to discussing how formats of music have changed (and a discussion of the relative merits and drawbacks of each), which is what he does in this chapter.

This book may not be the one for you. But do give Steve Almond a try. I'd particularly suggest his titles Candyfreak: A Journey Through the Chocolate Underbelly of America (about his investigations into how different candies are made) or Not That You Asked: Rants, Exploits, and Obsessions (an essay collection).

A thoroughly unique mind.

It's ALMOST the time of year for me to re-read Ray Bradbury's classic novel Something Wicked This Way Comes. Each year I look forward to October primarily for that reason.*

So when I saw a new book at my library called Listen to the Echoes: The Ray Bradbury Interviews, by Sam Weller, I got super excited. And I was not disappointed. This was one of those books I was going to wait on, because I have lots of other library books that should get read and returned first...but I couldn't wait, and then I blew threw it in a couple of days.

Organized in sections titled things like Childhood, Faith, Art and Literature, Writing and Creativity, the book is a straightforward question-and-answer session. To his credit, Weller is an appropriately understated interviewer, which leaves plenty of room for Bradbury to work his magic. Now, I did not agree with everything Bradbury said, and I actually learned some things I didn't like about him (**SPOILERS** he likes Ronald Reagan; he cheated on his wife). But I still have to appreciate the fact that the man does have an entirely unique mind. And any librarian is going to love a man that says things like this:

"The library was very important. After high school, I went two or three nights a week for nearly ten years. The library is all the education you need. When I married Maggie in September 1947, I figured I was done. I graduated from the library when I was twenty-seven." (p. 203.)

Weller is also the author of a biography of Bradbury, The Bradbury Chronicles, which I also want to read sometime soon. Do give this one a try, even if you're not a particular fan of Bradbury--he's never dull.

*I'm thinking this year I'll re-read Fahrenheit 451, too, it's been ages since I read it the first time.

Will someone please explain to me why Jen Lancaster is considered "hilarious"?

Really. I want to understand, and I don't.

My apologies, first off, if you DO find Jen Lancaster amusing. Somebody (or a lot of somebodies) must, because she's a bestselling memoir author who pumps out a memoir a year. But I just don't get it. A million years ago I read her first memoir, Bitter Is the New Black: Confessions of a Condescending, Egomaniacal, Self-Centered Smartass, Or, Why You Should Never Carry a Prada Bag to the Unemployment Office, about how she lost her spectacularly well-paying job and she and her boyfriend faced being broke, which, for a woman who liked to shop at Prada, was a painful experience. I still remember what I thought: the author was obnoxious and I didn't care at all that she was struggling financially (really, if you make tons of money for a few years, you can't put some of it into savings?*), and it just wasn't that funny. I further thought the book wouldn't go anywhere, and I agreed with lines like this, from an original review of it:

"She's almost gleeful about lacking 'the internal firewall that keeps us from saying almost everything we think,' but she doesn't come off as straightforward, just malicious. (Of course, it's possible she's making up much of her dialogue, which is a little too clever to be believable.)"

Well, four memoirs later, here we are, with Lancaster's latest title, My Fair Lazy: One Reality Television Addict's Attempt to Discover If Not Beinga Dumb Ass Is the New Black or a Culture-up Manifesto.** I know. Why do I keep looking at her memoirs if I can't stand them? It is literally because I want to figure them out. On the one hand, her books read like completely un-edited blog posts, and she seems to think throwing in the word "ass" (and referring to herself as a "dumb ass") constitutes the height of comedy. On the other hand, there must be something about these books that I'm missing.

While reading My Fair Lazy (the motif in this memoir is Lancaster's desire to immerse herself in culture and avoid embarrassing situations like the one where she met her idol, Candace Bushnell, who told her she's really into Baudelaire, and Lancaster had no idea who that was) I tried to keep an eye out for quotable bits that annoyed me, but here's the thing: the whole book annoyed me. Maybe a story from the end of the book will be instructive. For context, Lancaster has been invited to a party where Alec Baldwin is; in the course of the evening, her husband even takes a picture of him because he can't believe he's not wearing a belt. So, as Baldwin is leaving, she decides she wants a picture with him, and this is what she tells her friend later about the encounter:

"'Fletch and I kind of chased after him to see if we could get a shot taken together. But Alec was in a rush and had to go but he wanted to make sure he wasn't snubbing someone important by running off to his dinner. He looks at me--not rude or anything, just direct--and goes, 'I'm sorry, who are you?'

I run my hands through my newly extension-free hair and continue. 'And somehow every single thing I've worked on for all these months totally flew out the window, and I looked him dead in the eye and said, 'New York Times bestselling author, motherfucker.'" (p. 366.)

Now, I sincerely hope she's exaggerating for the sake of story. Otherwise, that's obnoxious (and not in a good way) and I'm on Alec Baldwin's side. You know, maybe when your husband was taking a picture of a beltless Alec Baldwin, earlier in the evening, THAT would have been the time to ask him for a photo, not when he had to get somewhere else.

So please: someone, anyone. Tell me why this woman is, in fact, a New York Times bestselling author.

*I call this "Jerry Maguire Syndrome." My brother couldn't stand the movie Jerry Maguire, primarily because he refused to believe that a super-rich sports agent wouldn't have had some money saved up.

**I also hate her stupid long subtitles.

John Hughes in book form.

I know I'm not the only John Hughes (The Breakfast Club, Sixteen Candles, etc.) fan out there because I waited for Susannah Gora's new book You Couldn't Ignore Me If You Tried: The Brat Pack, John Hughes, and Their Impact on a Generation on hold from the library for a LONG time.

The book is quite simple; Gora describes each of the "Brat Pack" films of John Hughes in separate chapters (she doesn't bother with his later blockbusters like Home Alone), and also throws in bonus chapters about the magazine article that first named the Pack, what that label did to the actors' careers, and on related films that John Hughes didn't direct, like St. Elmo's Fire and Say Anything.

I didn't actually mean to blow through this one as fast as I did, but I've always been a big John Hughes fan and I must confess it was a lot of fun reliving his movies through this text. I also enjoyed getting the inside scoop on the relationships between the young actors on whom Hughes relied, and other film trivia tidbits. It was also interesting learning a bit more about the youth and personality of Hughes himself--turns out he was a bit mercurial, which, for whatever reason, I wouldn't have pictured. In the end, though, I'm still willing to cut the man who gave us Ferris Bueller's Day Off a bit of slack. Sure, he may have been difficult. But he could sure show joy on film.

If you've ever watched and enjoyed a Hughes film I'd recommend this one. If nothing else it's easy to read the chapters just about your favorite movies and leave the rest (I'll admit I skimmed some of the chapters that focused on the Brat Pack actors).

She can really write, I'll give her that.

I did not like Meghan Daum's Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived In That House as much as I liked her essay collection My Misspent Youth (remember? "Carpet is Mungers.").

This is not to say that I didn't like it. I did read the whole thing, and enjoyed parts of it immensely. I think Daum really knows her way around nonfiction prose. The whole book is nothing but a dissertation on Daum's fascination with her own living arrangements: her childhood home, her desire to live in New York City (a certain kind of apartment/place in NYC, mind you), her move to Nebraska, her living situations there, and her eventual search (at the height of the real estate boom) for the perfect house in Los Angeles.

Her descriptive powers are at their height when she describes the house she ended up buying in L.A. (for $450,000), especially when she discusses its "fixer-upper" qualities:

"And then there was the garage. I realize that this is the kind of statement that makes people think women are not equipped to own property other than full-service condos, but I'll just come out and say it: I didn't really look at the garage right away because I was afraid to. But let's understand something: many a grown man was also afraid of this structure (a weirdly endearing macho man who I know owns a gun refused to even approach it; another man told me he wouldn't go near it without a life insurance policy). What wusses, I thought, though undoubtedly they just thought I was a moron and a sucker...The property had been sold in as-is condition, not least of all because the garage, which was presumably built in 1928 or shortly thereafter, had been completely caved in for decades. Somewhere along the line, the slabs of broken concrete from the roof had even bisected a Volkswagen bus parked inside." (pp. 175-176.)

Interestingly, the parts of the book set in L.A. were my favorites (which surprised me, as I am not an L.A. fan). But mainly what wowed me about this book was hearing how Daum got by on a writer's salary and without health insurance until at least her mid-thirties (at least that's the way it sounded). I salute her. But I also don't think that's what I was supposed to take away from her book.

That pesky little issue of subject matter.

I love, love, LOVE Tom Bissell. If there was a nonfiction author who was going to come close to challenging my allegiance to William Langewiesche, Bissell would be that author. Remember our Book Menage about his travel/history/memoir The Father of All Things? The guy is a super-talent.

So when I saw he had a new book coming out, of course I had to put myself on hold for it, even though I knew that its subject matter was video games. This was optimistic on my part, because if there's one subject that bores me, it's video games. Not only have I never understood the appeal (although I do remember playing some sort of "shoot aliens" game on my brother's first Apple computer when I was little), but I am one of those tiresome people who won't even give them a try. Sometimes Mr. CR goes to a friend's and plays Wii, but the very thought of playing Wii games or any other video game is so boring I can't stand it. Again: it's not that I need to be intellectually stimulated every minute. I am perfectly capable of re-watching movies more than twenty times (so sad, but I know it's been at least that many viewings for Broadcast News and the BBC version of North and South). I think I tried to play something once and was literally so bored while people tried to explain to me what buttons did what that I gave up before the game even started.

BUT...I wanted to give Bissell's Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter a try anyhow. And, although I made it fifty pages in, I wasn't able to stick with it. Once again, his writing is stellar.* The man can make even his first time playing the game Evil Dead compelling. And I do get the feeling he's got a lot of interesting things to say about why people play video games so obsessively, and what these games mean to our culture, and how their narrative structures and the experience of playing them leads to their players' other experiences of entertainment, art, and culture. Or, in his own words, "I wrote this book as a writer who plays lots of games, and in these pages you will find one man's opinions and thoughts on what playing games feels like, why he plays them, and the questions they make him think about." (p. xiv.)

But in the end...I couldn't do it.** And, for the record, I still can't get myself to believe that video games matter. But, if you have an interest in gaming, or in youth culture, I would still recommend this one. I'd actually love to see who is buying and reading it, because for the life of me I can't see it appealing to the vast majority of those who play these games. But I wish him luck with it anyway. In the meantime I'll probably just go re-read bits of The Father of All Things.

*I love this quote: "I have somehow spent more than two hundred hours playing Oblivion. I know this because the game keeps a running tally of the total time one has spent with it. I can think of only one personal activity I would be less eager to see audited in this way, and it, too, is a single-player experience." (p. 5.)

**Although I did cheat and read the last chapter, which is a dual tour-de-force about what makes the Grand Theft Auto games so compelling, and how the author played them while frequently doing cocaine. For some reason this surprised me, and I actually have to give Bissell kudos--he puts it all out there. I realize I don't know him at all, but he makes you feel like you do, and that's part of his charm. Even when I can't finish his books I find him, and his writing, fascinating.

Not quite sure I liked it until I finished it.

I've never been a big Truman Capote fan, Audrey Hepburn is a movie actress I can largely take or leave, and I was completely bored throughout all of the movie Breakfast at Tiffany's when I watched it a million years ago. So why exactly did I get Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany's, and the Dawn of the Modern Womanout of the library? I have no idea.

What's even weirder is that I read the whole book, and enjoyed it. It delivers exactly what its subtitle promises: an in-depth look at the making of the classic movie, from Capote's writing of the story on which it's based, through its screenplay development, casting, and filming. It didn't hurt that it was only about 200 pages long.

I would think any film buff would enjoy this book; likewise, anyone who's ever had any interest in Truman Capote or Audrey Hepburn might find a lot to like here. It's a nice look at film and social history, and it's very readable, broken up into workable chunks throughout each chapter. (I particularly enjoyed the bits about how Capote wanted Marilyn Monroe to be cast in the lead, and how the screenwriter had to fight the studio/film censors on every teensy little risque item. It must have been a different world.