Baby Got Books

Each year I try to read the latest cycling book before the Tour de France. This year’s offering was Inside the Postal Bus by Michael Barry.

I picked up a signed copy of the book at the Tour de Georgia this spring. And don’t get me started about how stupid it is that they call it the Tour de Georgia. Puh-leeze. Michael Barry is a member of the Discovery Channel Cycling Team (formerly the US Postal squad).

Michael Barry is not a great writer. He says as much in the introduction. It doesn’t really matter though. If you are a cycling fan, then reading about the workaday world of professional cycling from an actual professional can not be beat. VeloNews has recognized this, and they publish diary entries of various cyclists on their web site throughout the cycling season to provide first hand insights into the sport. Think of it as “reality reading”. It’s very cool if you are into that sort of thing.

It was an enjoyable read, and I learned lots of interesting tidbits that I’ll carefully break out, one at a time, for the fans at home while watching the three weeks of The Tour. Here’s an example. Manuel Beltran, a Spaniard and one of the Discovery Channel riders, is known as “Triki”. Such is my command of the Spanish language that I always thought that he got the nickname because he was “crafty” or something. It turns out Manuel has a sweet tooth, and Cookie Monster is called “El Triki” in Spain. There ya go.

This is a rabid fan boy book. Read it if you fall into that category or if you long to become a skilled cycling tufosi. Otherwise take a pass. Tonight I was practicing for the Tour. I was able to switch between the Braves game and pre-Tour TV coverage all night long. I love July. I’m afraid the reading is going to take a hit. See you guys in August.

Disappointing………….I was so eager to read History of Love by Nicole Krauss mainly because she is married to one of my favorite authors, Jonathan Safren Foer (see earlier posts).

I came away last night feeling like I had been duped. The reason for my unpleasant feeling about this book is that the style, format, characters, flow are EXACTLY like Foer’s.

What a surprise that there are 3 different main characters in this story: Leon Gursky, a Polish Jew nearing death who has spent his life revisiting the past which centered around his love for his childhood sweetheart, Alma; Alma, a pre-teen who was named after a character in a book titled The History of Love (written by Gursky) who lost her father (that’s a new theme) and is struggling with her own identity and Zvi Litvinoff, Gursky’s childhood friend, who somewhat assumes Gursky’s identity. Each chapter is told from the standpoint of one of the characters and assumes the voice of the character. I absolutely loved Leon Gursky, he is this fabulous old man who does something “public” every day - i.e. buys a soda, drops money on the ground, models nude for an art class - just to make sure that he doesn’t die on a day that noone knew he was alive. I also loved a more minor character “Bird” who is Alma’s younger brother and believes he is one of the 36 people that God designated to save the world.

My big issue was that there were so many similarities to Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close that I felt like I was just re-reading a different version of this book. The style that seemed so innovative when Foer wrote it now just seemed regurgitated under his wife’s writing. I also wish that she had created characters that were not old, Jewish people who managed to survive WWII/holocaust and were now looking back on their lives. Krauss and Foer are both Jewish and obviously pulling on stories/experiences that are familiar but Krauss threw one South American character in there - why couldn’t she have continued on that theme and ventured into a different culture than Eastern European Jewish.

I am probably unfairly bashing this book more than it deserves and I think it is a classic case of not meeting my expectations rather than not being a well written novel.

Amazon has got you covered. The new Penguin Classics Library (Complete) will be delivered to your door (all 1082 titles in paperback) for the low price of $8000. That’s US Dollars. It’s the perfecft gift for the reader who doesn’t have everything. Shipping is free, natch.

Nextbook has a top 10 list of the most memorable television bar mitzvahs. One of my all-time favorite Simpson episodes featured Lisa and the Rabbi Krustofski (Krusty’s dad) getting into a Talmudic debate. Krusty and his father had become estranged at early age. The Rabbi K wanted Krusty to follow in his footsteps, but Krusty wanted to become a clown. Lisa saved the day and reconciled the duo by drawing her trump card and quoting the well-known Jewish scholar, Sammy Davis, Jr. Which made the Rabbi K exclaim “Accch, The Candy Man!”. Anyway, I didn’t know that the rift had prevented Krusty from being bar mitzvah-ed. Apparently so, as the Krusty the Clown Bar Mitzvah comes in at #10.

I’ve just finished “Spoiling Childhood: How Well Meaning Parents Give Their Children Too Much, But Not What They Need” by Diane Ehrensaft.

This book caught my eye at the library one day; I am not a big reader of child psyhcology or self help books by any stretch but this one looked intriguiging. Basically the author is a child/family therapist and the book is written based on her observations as such in the last 10 to 15 years. While I think that every generation believes that the current one is totally screwed up and doomed this author made some valid points that as a parent I could identify with.

The question that the book attempts to demystify is how in recent history, middle class children have become “over-valued”. By that she asserts that as soon as a woman pees on a stick and gets the news that a baby is on the way; a whole circus erupts which generally involves consuming a whole lot of stuff ( think Babies R Us) before the baby is even close to arriving. And once the child is born the buying and clamoring for the perfect everything doesn’t stop. This phenomenon is attributed to the fact that we have way more buying power than our parents did; and that while our generation is what she coins as “inevitable” ie. your parents got married relatvively young and subsequently or inevitably they had a bunch of kids, we wait to develop our careers and with all the hype about infertility and the like we are led to believe that every pregnancy is fully intentionalized miracle of sorts. I personally coin this as the “LBJ” syndrome ( little baby Jesus). This snowballs into every kid is so awesome and deserving of as much crap as we can buy them because we wanted each one SO BADDDLY. So from these beginnings we move into the phase the author describes as “kinderadults”…we treat our progenty like little adults by indulging all their desires and overstimulating them but at the same time over coddle and over nuture them from experiences that we think might put them in harms way. Here is an example…nowadays, parents have to carefully plan and itinerize their kids summer; shuttling them from one paid activity to the next safely ensconced in the oversized SUV. Gone are the days of wandering around your neighborhood, finding other kids to play with and attending the school of hard knocks. However, we have no problem burdening our children with all the graphic details of the Tsunami disaster ( my kids school had a fund raiser !) or other disturbing imagery and ideas as long as its on T.V. You could argue a current news story may have something to do with protecting kids too much from real life and then suffering devastating consequences…could the teen girl from Alabama ( straight A student and “good girl”, everyone who goes missing or is killed in an accident is, by the way if you pay attention to the news) been too sheltered to know that heading the beach with a bunch of drunk local boys in a foreign county that you didn’t know from a whole in the wall be an incredibly stupid idea ???? A stretch you say ? Maybe not. If your whole experience was vacation bible school and cheerleading camp in a priveledged suburban envionment, maybe you wouldn’t think it was a bad idea.

The other interesting observation is how we describe our kids with so much hyperbole..”My kid is the greatest, cutest” whatever, fill in the blanks. The contention is that kids are smart enough at some point to spot the B.S. I mean, go stand in any playground and listen to all the parents tell their kid “Good Job” for some insanely obviously do-able kid thing like sliding down a slide or something. So this action actually backfires into low self esteem because if every kid gets a trophy and is told how great they are, then nobody is. It rings false.

O.K. so what’s the alternative ? The author suggest that we carefully examine why we treat our kids the way we do. Do we think we could have been better people, greater successes if only our parents had given us every opportunuity or more attention? Are we just trying to shut them up because we don’t have the stamina to not take the path of least resistance ? Do we actually intend to create a generation of people who equate happiness with a trip to the mall to buy more stuff ? Thought provoking at the least. It made me think about some of the things I probably can improve upon as a parent and made me feel better about not trying to keep up with the ultra child-centered set, which based on personal experience particularily when my kids got into school is pervasive and nauseating. Thanks for hanging with the rant.

On the Strong Read recommendation of Dr J, I hopped on The Russian Debutante’s Handbook with a quickness. I had a feeling that I would enjoy Gary Shteyngart’s sensibility from reading an interview with Jeffrey Eugenides at Bookslut. I was not mistaken. The book is an absurdist adventure of Russian immigrant Vladimir’s poorly thought-out stab at assimilation. I particularly enjoyed Shteyngart’s use of language and his satirical eye. For example, when describing a crowd of fiercely communist revolutionary babushkas in Prava, he describes their little dogs as agit-pups. That killed me for some reason. Shteyngart also mentioned, in passing, an old man ordering the vegetarian liver at a restaurant. This is a particular pet peeve of mine; vegetarian sausage, tofu-rkey, etc. It was a quick throw away line, but it had me chuckling. Having now read the book, I am somewhat surprised at how much praise was heaped on this book. It’s an engaging, humorous tale, sure. I’m not sure that it reaches “BIG IMPORTANT BOOK” status. But whatever. You could bring much worse books to the beach this summer. Gary Shteyngart is an original voice, and I recommend picking this up. And it’s priced to move used at Amazon.

Last week, Slate had an article about how children should be taught to read literature. My daughter and I tried out the “treat each book as a mystery” approach on Goodnight Gorilla with mixed results. We decided that the gorilla represented man’s complex relationship with nature, but we’re still not sure what to make of the mouse with the banana on a string.

In yesterday’s NYT Book Review, Neal Pollack (who is on book 28 for the year) had an essay about his McSweeney Years and losing his persona.

The Egyptologist is the second novel by Arthur Phillips.

The first thing I’ll say about it is that it has critical praise coming out the wazoo. The second thing I’ll say about it is that I had some assumptions and preconceptions about the book (aside from the heaps of critical praise) that made me expect something completely different.

I think the critical praise is warranted, for two reasons. First, this guy can truly write. He has a gift with words that makes reading this book easy and enjoyable. Even when he uses metaphor or figurative language to make a point, it’s understandable and meaningful (unlike, e.g., Michael Chabon’s use of metaphor, which is often incomprehensible). And even his straight literal writing is often moving. Example: after slipping some money into a poor boy’s bag while strolling through 1922 Cairo, one of the characters writes:

There is a mist of good luck, I suppose, hanging about the worthy or at least the entertaining poor — as if their one compensation for their lot is to decide upon your future, or as if they are an easy way to impress whichever gods one thinks will be judging one later or clearing one’s path sooner. Or, perhaps there is no surer way to prove to yourself that the poor are not you than by giving them your money.

I don’t know what it was about that particular passage, but it just resonated with me. Second, I think he’s constructed a whopper of a tale here, but more on that below.

As for my preconceptions and assumptions about the book, let me just say that for some reason I completely expected the next Da Vinci Code, set in the desert. I expected chases, thrills, suspense, treason, a Vatican-controlled conspiracy, secret clubs, aliens, etc. Okay, maybe not aliens, but I had visions of a hero being chased through the tunnels of the pyramids, clutching the final piece of a puzzle that some evil organization wished to keep secret. But this book contains none of that. In fact, in large part because of its structure, there is very little in the way of suspense, spine-tingling confrontation, chips, dips, chains, whips and the like. This is because the story is not written as a true narrative, but rather is pieced together solely and exclusively out of journal entries and correspondence by the main characters.

This structure initially led me to the point of confusion, as I tried to understand who was who, what their story was, and how all of the characters mentioned related to one another. And I’ll admit it was a bit of a struggle early on, but in the end I believe it was worth the effort. And I’ll also say that the book seemed a bit longer than it needed to be. I don’t know why I say that, because if you ask me to go back and excise portions of it, I don’t know that I could pick any particular pieces that could be done away with. But the fact of the matter is that the book is 383 pages long (which I think would require two trips to el bano for DJ Cayenne given his ferocious speedreading abilities), but the denouement (sp?), to the extent there is one, takes place almost exclusively in the final 20 or 25 pages.

And when I say “to the extent there is one”, what I mean is that this book, in retrospect (meaning when I woke up at 2:00 am last night and started thinking about it a couple hours after finishing it), reminds me quite a bit of Life of Pi, in that the reader is essentially presented with conflicting accounts of what truly happened, and reasonable minds can differ as to what the true result was. If anyone else reads this, I would love to discuss it to find out if what I think happened is what you think happened. What I think happened truly is a whopper of a tale.

I just finished The Glass Castle by Jeannette Wells (aka Running with Scissors - the girl version).

Here’s another memoir of a girl growing up in a totally whacked family - but hey she turns out great, ends up going to Barnard and is now a totally together writer/novelist and happily married to her fabulous husband.

The story itself kept me interested just because every memory of her childhood was more hideous then the next - being horribly burned while cooking her own hotdogs at the age of 3 and then having her parents pull her out of the hospital because they didn’t believe in medical treatment, rooting through the garbage cans at school because they never had any food in their house, having her father bring her to a bar to “hustle” her - every story was heartwrenching.

What I really didn’t like about this book was that it was told from a very factual, almost clinical standpoint. The writing was very simplistic without any of the beautiful prose, a la Angela’s Ashes, and you just didn’t feel any emotions from the author. I didn’t feel her pain at all so why was I reading the story of a horrible childhood without any of the gut-wrenching emotion to go along with it.

In sum - this is the typical “Oprah/bookclub” read (in fact it was my bookclub selection this month) that just didn’t do it for me.

Have you seen the new feature on Amazon “Inside This Book” that has quietly shown up on Amazon pages for books that allow you to “look inside this book”. It’s an interesting way to kill some time. Here, check out How I Paid For College. Scroll about halfway down the page under the Product Details section. There it is. You learn that “evil stepmonster” is a statistically improbable phrase. Who knew? The “concordance” feature shows the hundred most used words. Not very interesting in this case. The text stats show various metrics, like the Flesch-Kincaid index that tells us that this book is suitable for a US sixth grader. Really? Words/Dollar = 7,122. Nice.

To continue on the “group read” theme - I just finished Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and thought the book was amazing. Prior to reading it, I had also read the vast amounts of criticism being thrown against Jonathan Safer Foer (1/2 of the current literary “IT” couple - his wife, Nicole Krauss has a bestselling novel out now as well) and think it is totally unjustified. I applaud Foer for tackling the untouchable subject of 9/11 and he did it in a way that was bearable to read. That is not to say that there were parts that I didn’t find emotionally gut-wrenching and if you lost someone in 9/11 there is no way you could read the book, but that being said Foer uncannily captured the feelings of all those children who lost parents (or at least what I imagine they felt). I also thought the “gimmicks” which DJ Cayenne referred to made the book that much more interesting and that they weren’t pretentious or because he couldn’t write.
My big problem with the book was the entire secondary theme with Oskar’s grandfather. He was a complicated character with a whole host of issues but this storyline just made me lose focus from main story about Oskar and his search for the key. The book would have been as good without the convuluted grandfather story.

This book and Foer’s first novel, Everything is Illuminated, are two of the most interesting books I’ve read in the 21st century. If I was inviting my 5 favorite authors over for cocktails - Foer would definitely make the cut.

After reading Incredibly Loud and Extremely Close, I was ready for a lighter read. So I got my homo-erotic slapstick on with How I Paid For College (and again here)- a Shaft recommendation. I’m backing his call. The author is known as the “gay Dave Barry” - and that’ s an accurate description of what you’re in for. Quote of the book - “If I can’t be well hung, I can at least be well-read”. Hear, hear.

Check out this house constructed to look like its made of books. Cool. (link via Librarian.net)

Bookslut has an article that compares TV show’s Stacked’s bookstore with the real thing. It’s also a generally favorable review. And check out the title of the article. Nice.

At the recommendation of Mrs. Cayenne (aka shortbus), I read Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (ELIC) by Jonathan Safran Foer (JSF).

Now, I’m a big Foer fan. I loved JSF’s previous book, Everything Is Illuminated; it’s one of my all-time favorites. I was leery of reading ELIC though. Its subject matter is based upon the aftermath of September 11th, which I just knew was going to be a barrel of laughs. I had also heard brief summaries of the novel’s plot, which sounded a little trite and a lot dumb (boy whose father died in the WTC finds key in his dad’s belongings and goes through the Five Boroughs in search of its lock). The book was collecting vitriol months before it came out, and people couldn’t wait to hate it. Seriously.

Why so many haters? I think that JSF suffers from some of the same grief that Dave Eggers gets. There seems to be this backlash against young writers (anybody under 30) who become insanely successful on the strength of one book (or less - some get ginormous advances on unwritten books), especially if that book breaks some of the “rules” and is in any way imperfect. In JSF’s case, his first book took some missteps, sure, but he so clearly has talent to spare that I, for one, didn’t mind at all. If anything, its flaws proved that it was written by a genuine human being. Still, some seem to demand that if you are going to get all this fame and attention “you had better damn well write how I expect you to write and you sure as hell better act in a way conforming with the entirely arbitrary expectations that I have set for you that are subject to change without prior notice dammit”. Anyway… The NYT also had a lukewarm review for the book - it went something like this (I’m paraphrasing)… “Meh.”

So, like I said, I had some misgivings about reading ELIC. I liked JSF’s first book so much that I really, really didn’t want him to fall flat on his face in this one. And if he did, I didn’t want to know about it. I bought the book any way. I watched it sit on my shelf for a few months, daring me to read it. Then Mrs. Cayenne read it. She loved it and then I was able to I decide that it was OK to read it after all.

So let’s talk about the book. I’ll try to describe the book in a way that addresses some of the criticism that has been dumped upon it, because the criticism almost kept me from reading this book - and it it all seems undeserved having read the book. As always, your mileage may vary. First off, the plot summary that gets circulated a lot goes something like this “annoying and unrealistically smart kid whose dad died in 9/11 finds key, combs New York to find matching lock, has adventures due largely to bad parenting, book ends with a flip movie - that’s right - muthafuckin’ flip movie”.

So let’s break it down. Many who are critical of the book point to Oskar Schell, the 9 year-old protagonist. The haters insist that there has never been a 9 year old as precocious as Oskar EVER - in the history of the planet. To me, Oskar was a believable goofball fourth grader. He often acts illogically but always in a way that makes sense to him. He knows a lot of stuff, is pretty worldly, but he often doesn’t know things that we might think that he should - like who Winston Churchill is, for instance. He makes lists of things to go home and Google, like a curious fourth grader might. I suspect that enough of the contributors to this site were sufficiently nerdy in fourth grade to relate to how big a dork the kid is.

Yes, Oskar finds a key in his dad’s belongings, and he does try to find out what it belongs to. No argument there. I would argue that the story provides some context for his search that don’t make it as ridiculous as it might sound otherwise. The search seems to be in keeping with Oskar’s character as well as with the relationship that he had with his dad. There also seems to be some disbelief that Oskar is allowed to wander the city on his own. I think there is also context there to put that his wandering into some perspective other than - “his mom is a workaholic who doesn’t really care” - I don’t think that’s what was going on at all.

ELIC also takes some crap because it does things like include pictures of things, it has pages that are supposed to represent things talked about in the book, it has a few pages with mistakes circled in red, and, yes, it has a flip movie at the end. No matter what I say, those types of things will always seem precious or pretentious to some people. There seems to be this feeling that a writer includes pictures and other “gimmicks” because (a) they can’t write adequately to convey what they are trying to say in words, or (b) they are bullshit artists. I say, if it adds to the story, go, man, go. I thought it was creative story telling. I remember reading a Kurt Vonnegut book long ago, I forget which one it was, but he was describing someone’s - uh - anus. So he said their - er- butthole looked “just like this” - and he had a hand drawing of an asterisk that took up half the page - *. Vonnegut is a national treasure. The point? It’s been done before by respected writers that don’t get dumped on. So there you go - get off JSF’s back.

This book covers a bit of historical ground, perhaps meant to provide some perspective on wholesale tragedy. Oskar’s grandparents are survivors of the WWII fire-bombing of Dresden (a nod to Vonnegut if ever there was one). For me, some of the grandparents’ stories, told through letters never delivered, were where this novel took some missteps. Oskar also gives a report on the bombing of Hiroshima to his fourth grade class that is a little unsettling.

Oskar meets lots of people in his travels through NYC. Thankfully these encounters are pretty realistic, I thought. There were no encounters with a one-eyed former pirate with a wooden leg, or a world record holder for most hot dogs eaten, or a man with the loneliest monkey in the world, or any of that kind of crap. They seemed like real people, real New Yorkers anyway. Oskar also writes lots of letters to famous people asking to become their protege - like Jane Goodall and Stephen Hawking. I always looked forward to getting back to Oskar’s story from the parts that contained the grandparents’ letters.

Some additional criticism that I’ve read couldn’t believe the hubris, the enormous stones, that JSF must have to think that he is the guy who should tackle the difficult subject matter of 9/11. How dare he! This line of reasoning asserts that the books that have best dealt with national tribulations (WWI, WWII, etc.) were all written well after the fact, once there was some perspective about what it all meant. It’s too soon for anyone to write about this event - the argument goes - much less that flipbook fucker. What do you say to that? No one should try to write about September 11th now? When would be a good time to start? 8 years? 10 years? Never? Whenever Philip Roth is ready?

I think it took a certain amount of courage to go anywhere near the subject. Is ELIC the perfect book that will sum up our national angst circa 2005 for posterity? Who knows. It is not a perfect book. It takes chances, and it feels a little raw around the edges. I think that ELIC’s a better book for it. I’ve rambled on at some length, defending (I hope) both the author and the book, because I think that both deserve your attention. ELIC is ambitious, it is clever, it is flawed. You might not like this book. You may even actively dislike it. To my way of thinking, that doesn’t necessarily mean you shouldn’t read it.

Note: Mrs. Cayenne was just looking over my shoulder and commented that I didn’t really talk about the powerful emotions of this book. True. I was trying to keep it to 10,000 words or less. Maybe she’ll comment on that. And the criticism of this book really bothers me to no end.

This book for baby daddies, currently on the Amazon Top 10, may keep me up nights.

Have you ever come across a piece of writing that is so beautiful - that so completely sums up your own beliefs and feelings that you feel a kind of deep spiritual connection with the writer, like they could be your long lost twin sibling? This piece of writing at McSweeney’s got to the core of my essential worldview in a way that so few writers have. Hats off.

I’m just starting to emerge from the post-natal sleep deprivation fog, and the first book I chose to read in between naps was Gary Shteyngart’s The Russian Debutante’s Handbook. (My secret shame: I read this on the good DJ’s recommendation, enjoyed it, and decided to check out Shteyngart’s 2002 debut novel.)

Shteyngart has been compared to Nabokov. Fair enough, I thought. Russian immigrant. Strong command of the English language. Dry sense of humor. That much was evident after just the first couple of pages. I figured that comparison was just a lazy critic’s crutch, though; no one writes arid farce like Nabokov. But Shteyngart delivers. This dude is the real deal.

His protagonist, Vladimir Girshkin, is a Russian Jewish immigrant struggling to assimilate–sometimes succeeding, but mostly failing hilariously. He does manage to adopt the American twenty-something’s “glam-nerd” look, which is incomplete without “janitor pants.”

Girshkin is forced after a series of misadventures to Prava, a thinly disguised Prague, “the Paris of the ’90s” for recent American college grads. Never having been an expat, I can’t attest as to how accurate his depiction of this scene is. But I have my suspicions. I know some of these people. Girshkin goes to work for the Russian mob. Picaresque hijinks ensue.

I could recount the plot here, but I couldn’t do it justice, so I won’t. But it’s damned funny.

I come away from this book with a keen appreciation for Shteyngart’s use of the language. His send-ups of the special jargon of American popular culture that has somehow internationalized itself are especially hilarious. When a minor celebrity dj rolls into Prava he screams, “MC Paavo in de haus! In de pan-European ‘hood! Got de Helsinki beat, y’all can’t fuck wif!” His prickings of academe’s unique pretentions are also spot-on: A girlfriend’s father is “evolving” the field of Humor Studies as a history professor at City College; a “trio of emaciated grad students” stands around a pool table at a bar “with their cue sticks at the ready, as if waiting for funding to appear.” Apropos of nothing, but it got a guffaw out of me.

I’m going to be very curious to see what Shteyngart can pull off with his next novel. Like I said: The real deal.