Baby Got Books

Happy New Year, everyone. It is never too early to start mapping out your reading for a new year. Luckily, The Guardian has compiled a list of titles to look out for. Here are some highlights:

• Haruki Murakami, whose Kafka on the Shore I found to be weirdly cool, is back with a new novel – After Dark.
• A new book by Ian McEwan – On Chesil Beach.
• A new one from a guy named Norman Mailer – The Castle in the Forest.
• Micahel Chabon’s upcoming counterfactual history, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, imagines that Alaska rather than Israel has become the Jewish state in the 1940s. This is, of course, a total ripoff of the Mel Brooks gag, “Jews on Ice.”
• Khaled Hosseini follows up The Kite Runner with A Thousand Splendid Suns. Look for it on airplanes everywhere in May.
• Marina Lewycka will follow up A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian with Two Caravans, which will also portray Ukranians finding their way in Britain.
• Philip Roth will publish his last Nathan Zuckerman novel, Exit Ghost, which will be set during the Kerry/Bush elections. Good times for us all.

There are many more interesting titles in the article. Check it out. I have got to make a dent in the “to read” pile before I even consider reading any of these.

Also: While this post was still in draft, The Guardian felt the need to run a second article with titles to look out for in 2007.

I raved so much about Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex that I was given The Virgin Suicides for my birthday. I finished this book months ago, and I’m not quite sure why it took so long to get around to posting about it. I also haven’t seen the movie yet (directed by Sofia Coppola). But I digress.

The Virgin Suicides is a great book. Like Middlesex, the city of Detroit is featured prominently in the novel. This time, the action takes place in a suburb during an eventful summer in the 1970’s, the year of the suicides. A group of men who lived in the neighborhood look back to the year when the five beautiful sisters who lived on their block decided to kill themselves – one at a time. As bleak as that sounds, the novel is funny in parts. However, it mostly sets a fantastically gloomy mood that it sustains almost throughout. You know what’s going to happen, it says so right on the cover. The genius of the book is that it holds your interest going in (and keeps it) even though five girls are going to die in relatively unspectacular ways before you are done . You try it.

The book is about lost innocence, for the girls, obviously, but also for the boys, Detroit, and our Nation as a whole. While the girls are busy killing themselves, people of different colors are moving into the neighborhood, the Detroit automakers are faltering for the first time, environmental damages occur due to development, the kindly local mob boss is nabbed – things are changing. The “faith” of the parents doesn’t save any of the girls, nor does it keep the family together. The repressiveness of their faith in a changing world appears to have hastened the girls’ exits. There’s a lot going on, thematically.

It’s a great book. If you and enjoyed Middlesex, do yourself a favor and read this one, too. Of the two, I think that Middlesex is the better of the two, but that’s a pretty high bar.

Here are the top 10 books for 2006 that I actually read. According to me. Links go to my posts on each. In order:

• Suite Francaise by Irène Némirovsky
• Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl
• The Twilight of the Superheroes by Deborah Eisenberg
• Only Revolutions by Mark Z. Danielewski (oops, post coming soon)
• King Dork by Frank Portman
• Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart
• The Echoing Green by Joshua Prager
• The Great Deluge/Why New Orleans Matters
• The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
• The Dream Life of Sukhanov by Olga Grushi

Production was way down this year, so a top 10 list represents a full 25% of what I read this year. Yikes. There’s always next year.

And if you want to check out my favorite tunes of the year, you can mosey on over here.

[youtube]U-OTQmVOqJU[/youtube]

The Washington Post has a great story that details how this fantastic collaboration almost didn’t happen.  Bing Crosby died one month after this was filmed.

This is a fitting book to be my last post of 2006 considering that NYC is overflowing with “abundance” these past few weeks.  Goldman Sachs alone just paid $16 billion in bonuses – an average of $622,000 per employee and apparently the secretaries were pissed off that they only walked away with an average of $120,000.  So as I open the NY Times every day and read about these Wall Street bonuses, the book “Abundance” which is a historical novel about the life of Marie Antoinette, suddenly didn’t seem so outrageous.

I am a fan of historical novels and with all the buzz this year about Marie Antoinette, this sounded like a good read.  Plus, the author is Sena Jeter Naslund who also wrote, Ahab’s Wife, which was a favorite pick of mine a few years ago.

Overall, the book was about a B.  The book was told in the first person and I thought Naslund did a good job of portraying Antoinette’s voice throughout the book.  The story began when she was 14 and and the prose definitely conveyed a young teenager’s voice.  As the book progresses through her 20’s and into her 30’s, the reader follows her maturation from a teenage girl to a young woman who is then executed at age 37 during the Reign of Terror.

One of 10 children of the Empress Marie Therese of Austria, Marie Antoinette was married off to Louis XVI and became the Dauphine of France, in order to align the French and Austrian empires.  Antoinette is portrayed as an innocent girl whose sole purpose in life is to please her mother and her husband and have fun.  Prior to reading this book, I always envisioned Antoinette to be a scheming, selfish person but both she and Louis XVI are shown to be naive, somewhat unintelligent people who had no idea with how to deal with the changes that were happening around them.   She is also portrayed as compassionate and while she believes that it is her divine right to rule over France, there are also many scenes throughout the book where she wishes to have the “simple, peasant life”.  Seemingly naive to the impact that her whims have on the royal coffers, she spends money whenever and wherever she likes.  Ironically, she views herself as sympatico with the peasants but then spends millions to build herself a charming cottage so that she can live like “them.” 

Much of the first half of the book discusses the inability of the King to consummate their marriage much to Antoinette and everyone else in the court’s chagrin.  It is quite humorous to read about all the ritual surrounding their sexual relations or lack thereof.  Between the sex, the court intrigue, her relationship with another man, Count Axel von Fersen of Sweden and all the descriptions of her clothing and hair, it was an easy, fun book to read.

” he builds a steep cliff straight up from the forehead.  High up in this hairy tree trunk, he will embed embellishments.  His case overflows with fruits of all sorts, animals, especially monkeys, jeweled flowers, carriages, a herd of cows, a sailing ship larger than two hands with all its miniature masts, line and canvas sails.  I have asked for something musical to plant in my coif today……..”

If you have any interest in her or the French revolution – it’s worth a read.  If not – pass.

Happy Holidays to all my fellow BGB bloggers! 

I picked up Deborah Eisenberg’s collection of short stories, Twilight of the Superheroes, a few months back. I was actively trying to work more female writers into my life, and I read an article – somewhere – touting Deborah Eisenberg and Alice Munro as the modern masters of the short story. I’ve bought both, but I’ll confess to reading the Eisenberg collection first after falling in love with the cover. I’m that shallow.

It also didn’t hurt, as Michael Schaub at Bookslut pointed out, that the book “has been getting better reviews than, let’s say, a hypothetical collaboration between Philip Roth and God.” Schaub’s blurb also mentions that Eisenberg’s companion of more than 30 years is the actor who played Vizzini in The Princess Bride. “Inconceivable!” You’ve got to read it then, right?

The title story is fantastic. I’ve read it twice and will probably read it again periodically. It tells the story of a group of people, and the impact that the 9/11 terrorist attack has on them. What would seeing something like that do to you if you were just out of college and vaguely adrift anyway? What if you were someone who worked in the arts, but had grown disillusioned with art’s direction in the modern world? And what if you had come to this country to escape from a world where men with guns could kick in your door looking for you? There are no physical superheroes in the story – it is not a fantasy or sci-fi tale. The superhero motif is used as a metaphor for some other, greater, time in our own lives and/or in our collective history:

Well, superpowers are probably a feature of youth, like Wendy’s ability to fly around with that creepy Peter Pan. Or maybe they belonged to a loftier period of history.

The fading superheroes are the dreams of younger versions of ourselves (we’re no spring chickens) and the greater days of our society and our country. I listened in to KCRW’s Bookworm interview with Eisenberg yesterday, and he gets much, much deeper into the symbolism and meaning of these stories. Check it out if you’re interested in what it’s all about (they also have an excerpt if you want to take the stories for a test drive).

The collection is unified by a mood throughout the book. Angst and ennui are on every page. If you like your short stories upbeat or neatly resolved with a traditional narrative arc, these stories are not for you. These short stories are also relatively long but not quite novella length. I highly recommend this collection if you are up for being challenged and a little depressed. You may want to hold off until after the holidays. If you are prone to winter-time depression generally, you may want to hold off and use the book to take some of the luster off of spring.

Check this out:

Boing Boing posts that John Hodgman’s (he’s a PC!) The Areas of My Expertise is available for free (no pay) for download on iTunes. You have two BGB reviews to weigh (1 and 2). Govern yourself accordingly. But really, the price is right.

Mark your calendars, and line up your baby sitters. Manuel’s Tavern (N. Highland, ATL) will be hosting the 37th Annual Atlanta Open Orthographic Meet on February 17 at 7 PM. It is a word nerd extravaganza with beer and burgers. There is no down side. In the past, Dr J has represented the crew more than ably advancing to the third round on at least two occasions. As Dr J has relocated outside of our fair city, its time for someone else to elevate their game this year. The event is free (no pay).

Since we are all marking time until we can flee our offices for a few days, run over to the web HQ for KCRW’s Bookworm show. Past shows are made available for your listening pleasure for free (no pay). I’ve listened to a handful of shows, and host Michael Silverblatt is some kind of super genius. His insights into books often amaze the authors themselves (check out his interview with Zadie Smith for an example of what I mean). His interview with Marisha Pessl is funny, because he disagrees with her, at length, regarding the origin of her book’s “final exam.” Be sure to check out the archive. There’s a good chance that he’s interviewed your favorite author.

The new book Hemingway and Bailey’s Bartending Guide to Great American Writers details the drinking habits of famous authors – with recipes.  NPR has an interview with the book’s authors, Edward Hemingway and Mark Bailey, along with excerpts.  The book quotes Raymond Chandler as saying, “I think a man ought to get drunk at least twice a year just on principle.” If you haven’t met your quota for the year, the holidays have arrived just in time.

The makers of the movie The Pursuit of Happyness are not, apparently, complete morons.  The misspelling in the title, which was bugging me to no end, is intentional.  In the movie and book, there is reportedly a scene at a day care center where a sign is shown that misspells happiness.  Says Will Smith:

The education of your children is everything, and for your children to be educated in a place where the people can’t spell happiness – that represents the ultimate parental failure.

I’m still recovering from latke overload last night. My family gets to celebrate both Hanukkah and Christmas (Cajun style!) in an annual multi-cultural extravaganza that ensures that the holiday season is a weeks-long affair. I’m slow moving today, and I still smell like fried potatoes. My attention span is dwindling as the office begins to clear out, and I’m looking forward to my pilgrimage back to Louisiana. I’m babbling. Check out these holiday/year end links:

The Guardian has published their list of the Best Fiction of 2006 in their usual laid back style.

Read the heart-warming Christmas story about the old lady who received the gift of whale vomit from her elderly sister.

BookLust has a nice round-up of Christmas reads.

And the current #1 holiday song on my daughter’s play list:

<[youtube]OYQFeZFLyM4[/youtube]

Tonight is the first night of Hanukkah, so I want to extend a warm holiday greeting to all of our Jewish pals on behalf of all of us here at BGB.

Author Neal Pollock has a nice article about the changing nature of Chanukah over at Jewcy. Whenever I think of the Festival of Lights though, I naturally turn to South Park:

[youtube]qXToXBOYPYI[/youtube]

The NYT recommends books that the recipients will not only like, but open again and again.

NPR’s All Songs Considered has released its annual holiday music special as an MP3 podcast. It gets better after the oddly lisping Al Gore’s global warming song at the beginning.

Playing the role of Grinch this holiday season is BGB’s favorite merkin, Michael Crichton. Crichton allegedly decided to get back at a critic by including him in his new book as a self-absorbed pedophile – with a small penis. The character reportedly has no impact on the plot whatsoever. (Thanks for the link, Dr J). The NYT’s article on the controversy explains the “small penis” rule of libel:

Mr. Crowley contends that Mr. Crichton has tried to escape public censure for his literary attack by hiding behind what has become known as “the small penis rule. The rule, Mr. Crowley writes, is described in a 1998 article in The New York Times in which the libel lawyer Leon Friedman said it is a trick used by authors who have defamed someone to discourage lawsuits. “No male is going to come forward and say, ‘That character with a very small penis — that’s me!’ ” Mr. Friedman explained.

All those references to “Mr. Crowley” have me thinking of Ozzy. A good sign that it’s time to go.

I’m trying to think of a book I have read that has as bleak a moral and physical landscape as the one Cormac McCarthy creates in The Road. The only one that comes close is Blood Meridian. That’s also a Cormac McCarthy creation. No Country for Old Men might be in the ballpark. Also Cormac’s. So, even though I did my best to avoid reading reviews before I had tackled this for myself, I knew what I was getting into. (And, if you’re not as crazy as I am about McCarthy’s body of work, I don’t think I could recommend this book to you.)

Set in the eighth year of the G. W. Bush presidency an unspecified post-apocalyptic future time, probably in nuclear winter, The Road balances the sublimely tender relationship between a father (The Man) and his son (The Boy) against the ashen, inhumane world through which they travel. This world is nearly devoid of animal and human inhabitants, and those that have survived cause one to question the iron law of natural selection; they’re not exactly the best and the brightest. Existence in this novel is just short of pointless. In fact, it’s not clear why either of these characters exists in the world at all, except to be there for the other. That’s not the cheeriest message you could find in this holiday season, but you could surely do worse.

I think it’s probably fair to call McCarthy’s novels misanthropic, though that’s not quite the word I’m looking for. But strangely, I guess, the other hallmark of his writing, at least for me, is the genuine warmth and humanness between characters that McCarthy portrays via their speech. The cowboys’ repartee in all three of the Border Trilogy novels, but especially in The Crossing is, I think, some of the best and most memorable in American fiction; I would put it in Twain’s class.  (I don’t have All the Pretty Horses in front of me, so I can’t quote it directly, but as I recall, one of the young cowpokes, Rawlins, I think, says by way of explanation, “You know what a blivet is, don’t you? A blivet is ten pounds of shit in an eight-pound sack.”  That should really enter the lexicon.  Exhibit A, George W. Bush is a blivet.) My fondness for the back and forth between the title character and Harrogate in Suttree is boundless. In The Road these kinds of conversations are completely stripped down and raw, but packed with emotional intensity.

What will stick with me from this book may not be the characters or the plot, but the circumstances under which I discovered them. When I read fiction these days I usually do it with a sporting event on in the background. The crazy juxtapositions of images from this novel and whatever was on the tv screen at the moment I happened to look up from the page were truly disorienting. The image of more-than-half-dead people attempting to escape a makeshift jail where they’re being held by cannibals, for instance, jangled up against the backdrop of a Broncos-Seahawks football game. (In the end, it was comforting to be able to move from the surrealism of the one to the banality of the other.) At one point I decided that maybe I didn’t really want to read a description of people roasting a prematurely born infant over a campfire at that particular moment, put the book down, and found my 3-year-old son beaming as he showed off a picture he had drawn of an auto carrier. (Quite good, if I do say.) The feeling I had at that moment was pretty close to the overriding emotion that comes forth again and again from The Man in this novel: I will do anything for you.

As I said, sublime.

Researchers from the august Central Connecticut State University have released this year’s listing of America’s Most Literate Cities. Atlanta came in third (tied with D.C.). Atlanta moved up from number four on last year’s charts thanks to the tireless efforts of those here at BGB World Headquarters. Hats off, everyone. Actually, I find this very difficult to believe. I believe the operational definition of “literate” has to be suspect in this study.

Besides being the number three (woo!) most literate city in the U.S., Atlanta is also the crunk capital of the world. Don’t believe me? Google “crunk capital.” I’ve lived here for 10 years now, and I have no idea what “crunk” means. I’m also pretty sure that the Montreal reporter who maintains the Regret The Error blog has no idea what it means either. Yesterday the site ran a post under the headline: Crunks ‘06: The Year in Media Errors and Corrections. We kicked around RTE’s usage of “crunk” last year, and I am less satisfied than ever that this guy has any clue what the word means. Review the available definitions on Urban Dictionary and pick the one that seems to make the most sense in the context of that headline. Give up? That’s why we’re number three, baby! Do read the list of gaffs though, it’s highly entertaining. For instance, did you know that worker bees were commanded by Queen Elizabeth?

The Echoing Green by Joshua Prager is a thinking man’s book about baseball – and I’m not just saying that because I read it. The book takes its name from a 1789 poem by William Blake. Each chapter begins with a relevant quote by the likes of Eugene O’Neill, W.H. Auden, Langston Hughes, James Joyce, Shakespeare, Charles Bukowski, etc. And that’s just the first hundred pages.

Prager’s book goes deep inside the fabled “shot heard ’round the world” in the 1951 NL playoff between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants. The book expands on a story that Prager broke in the Wall Street Journal in 2001. Through old-fashioned shoe leather journalism, Prager found the evidence to show that persistent rumors that the Giants had stolen signs over much of the ‘51 campaign were true. He found the family of the electrician that installed a buzzer at the Polo Grounds for relaying the signals. He was shown the telescope that was used to spy on the catcher’s signals from the club house in center field. He had even found the old men who were finally willing to clear their consciences. He had the smoking gun. Which isn’t to say that a “crime” had been committed. There was no rule against stealing signs.

Prager explores the history of stealing signals in sporting contests in general, and the nuanced ethics of baseball specifically, a game of rich unwritten traditions regarding how the game should be played. And though the book provides an in depth look into a single season and its implications, it also highlights a game on the verge of tremendous change.

Willie Mays was a young new player for the New York Giants; Jackie Robinson had broken the color barrier by playing for the Brooklyn Dodgers. Many of the players on both teams took off-season jobs or played in barnstorming exhibition games in order to support their families on their (generally) modest professional baseball salaries. Even though this one game would leave an indelible imprint on a generation of New Yorkers, both teams would relocate to California within a decade. The game completely overshadowed the World Series that followed, which has largely been forgotten. (The Giants would go on to lose to a Yankees Team that fielded Yogi Berra, Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, and Phil Rizzuto).

The players at the center of the controversy, Ralph Branca and Bobby Thomson, would become linked for the rest of their lives as hero and goat, pitcher and slugger. They’ve appeared together regularly in those roles for more than half a century. Prager shows us how that relationship changed over time and how the revelations of sign stealing has changed the relationship to more equal footing. He also explores how his revelation has changed the popular perception of the iconic game (not much).

Prager walks the reader through the entire ‘51 season of both teams and the careers of Branca and Thompson in rich detail. I loved learning an endless amount of great trivia. for example, Thomson was forced to make way in the outfield in his career, first for Willie Mays on the Giants and later for rookie Hank Aaron of the Milwaukee Braves. Thomson would also be the first man to strike out against a new Dodger pitcher named Sandy Koufax. He also determined that Jackie Gleason did drunkenly throw up on Frank Sinatra’s shoes during the game (causing Frank to miss the shot). Contrary to Don Delillo’s masterful account (and others), J. Edgar Hoover was not at the game. That’s just good stuff.

The scholarship of the book is incredible, and it is very easy to believe the reports that it took Prager five years to research and write it. The acknowledgments at the end of the book are almost a Cooperstown roll call, and I am green with envy that he got to interview so many legends of the game. (As a remedial typist, I also appreciated that Prager thanked his thumbs and index fingers for their hard work). The Notes and Bibliography are exhaustive, and this should be the definitive work on the subject. Yet, Prager asks in his Author’s Note for people who know more of the story to come forward, correct him where he was in error, and share their stories of the mythical game

It’s an endlessly fascinating book, and one that I highly recommend if the subject matter appeals to you at all. I’ve bought two additional copies for gifts – if you’d prefer a root canal to painstaking detail on a long baseball season, my advice is to run the other way. In the interest of full disclosure, I’ll mention that Prager is a friend of a friend – which is how I first heard of the book. I’ve never met Prager, so I don’t think that influenced my appreciation of the book at all. I’ve discussed the origins of my fascination with this subject at length here.

Last week, Prager had another great story in the Wall Street Journal. He located a photojournalist who won the Pulitzer in 1979 as “anonymous.” The picture was of a firing squad executing blindfolded Kurds in a field during the Islamic Revolution in Iran. The picture was published anonymously to protect the photographers life, and the origins of the photograph became shrouded in mystery. Read that story on Prager’s web site, or listen to Prager tell the story on NPR’s Weekend Edition.

Since Prager seems to have a gift at getting to the bottom of historic mysteries, I propose that he take on some or all of the following subjects for his next scoop: the Lindberg Baby, the whereabouts of Jimmy Hoffa, Cheney’s undisclosed location, Osama’s undisclosed location, and/or why Paris Hilton is famous.

This week, The Guardian’s digested read takes on Hannibal Rising:

“The poor boy has been left mute,” wept Hannibal’s uncle Robert, a noted painter. “Indeed,” replied his wife, the impossibly beautiful and exotic Lady Murasaki. “He has suffered unimaginable horrors that readers can all too easily guess. We must take him back to our French chateau.”….

See how the reader struggles to feign surprise.

A bloodbath ensued.

Hannibal smiled. He had got away with his greatest crime to date. A bestselling thriller with no thrills at all.

*Digested* read! Get it?

In other news, who do you get to show up at your Holocaust revisionist convention in Iran. Hey, look everybody, it’s David Duke.

On the heels of the NYT’s top 10 books of the year, here are few other lists:

NPR’s Maureen Corrigan has announced her top fiction picks of the year. Among them is Intuition by Allegra Goodman, which was added to my to “definitely” check out in March. It’s still there. Damn.

NPR listeners also picked the top 10 albums of 2006 on All Songs Considered. It’s a list I can get behind. I would have put Cat Power a few spots higher, but that’s quibbling. There are free samples if you check it out.

Slate’s editors each picked out their favorites of the year.

Meghan O’Rourke doubts the NYT’s claim that Special Topics in Calamity Physics is one of the best books of the year. She’s certainly entitled to her opinion, however… She says, “Four months since the book’s appearance, the statute of limitations on revelations is up. (Spoilers follow.)” O’Rourke has unilaterally decided that you get four months to read a book before reviewers can start telling you all of the book’s secrets. I am so screwed. Do not read her piece if you have any intention, at all, of reading the book. Half the fun of the book is that the revelations send you reeling. I’ve read the book, and I had to quit reading her article. It just bummed me out. Merry Christmas, Scrooge.

You probably don’t need this service, but it is fun to play with. The social networking book site, Library Thing (which SallyRogers first pointed out last year), has an Unsuggester. If you type in a book that you like, it will provide a sample of the books that you are least likely to enjoy. It’s not exactly perfect (the book must be “owned” by at least 75 other people using the service in order to provide anti-recommendations). For example, if you loved Anna Karenina by Tolstoy, you’ll hate Night Pleasures by Sherilyn Kenyon. Duh. Unlike Amazon’s recommendations, which are based on what you’ve looked at, what you’ve bought, what you hide on the back shelf, and what you’ve bought again, the Unsuggester is based upon what people are willing to admit that they own and like. My own Library Thing library is based upon the books that I dumped in a year ago when Sally’s post was still fresh (and I haven’t updated since). I’ll admit that there may have been some guilty pleasures that did not make the cut. One day, I’ll update that list. In the meantime, post your interesting Unseggester pairings in the comments. If you’ve got a Library Thing library, share your link with us, too.

Speaking of pop culture essayist, Chuck Klosterman – he has a great essay on ESPN about Muhammad Ali, rap, and the modern sports/hip-hop connection. ESPN will run a documentary, Ali Rap, on Saturday that is based on the premise that Ali is the real creator of rap. Klosterman calls the idea “an interesting (albeit specious) hypothesis.” The show will be hosted by Chuck D of Public Enemy. A companion book, also called Ali Rap, has been published by ESPN as well. Based on the pictures of the book available on Amazon, I’d check it out on your coffee table. Klosterman’s article has some cool video accompaniment.

In other pop-culture news, Neal Pollack’s Alternadad has received a rave review from Booklist (according to Pollack, anyway). They call it “the most offbeat book about parenting ever written.” I’m looking forward to checking it out.

I was planning to run over to the Carter Center tomorrow during lunch to see if I could catch a reading/signing with the former President. The AJC reported today that long-time advisor to Jimmy Carter (and Emory University professor), Kenneth Stein, resigned his position as a Carter Center Fellow, over the contents of Jimmy’s latest book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. Representatives of the Jewish community resent the apartheid label and say the book is an unfair portrayal of Israel. Stein is quoted as saying that the book:

is replete with factual errors, copied materials not cited, superficialities, glaring omissions and simply invented segments.

As it turns out, the event is sold out. If you’re interested in reading the story, here’s a link – be forewarned that the AJC requires registration to view the full story, which of course is a giant pain in the ass. Govern yourself accordingly. Alan Dershowitz has an accounting of the factual errors in the book on the Huffington Post (Thanks, Nitro).

Lastly, build your Word Power with BGB! Vocabulary Case Study: This morning My boss came by and asked me if I knew what a word meant. I thought that I might know the definition in a vague way, but surely it couldn’t be what I was thinking of because (a) he’s my boss and (b) the word appeared in a work-related e-mail that he had received. The word: merkin. After looking it up, I didn’t ask the context, and he sort of wandered off.

I’ve had a number of false starts lately, with books that I thought I would like but just kind of didn’t. In between false starts, I filled my time with Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa-Puffs, by Chuck Klosterman, which is basically a compilation of essays and short pieces by him on various pop culture topics. Just as I finished it, I found myself in upstate New York for the Thanksgiving holiday and picked up John Hodgman’s The Areas of My Expertise [that's the short title], which also appeared to me to be a compendium of pop culture tidbits and information.

Let’s just say I’m batting .500. Chuck Klosterman’s book is pretty hysterical, and hits me right in the wheelhouse on a number of topics. As an example, he’s got an essay entitled Sulking with Lisa Loeb on the Ice Planet Hoth, in which he talks about how it’s cool to like Star Wars, and how that makes it totally uncool to like Star Wars, and then he proceeds to explain how Luke Skywalker was the first Gen Xer. Quote (I believe small enough to avert a copyright infringement claim):

For one thing, he was incessantly whiny. For another, he was exhaustively educated — via Yoda — about things that had little practical value (i.e., how to stand on one’s head while lifting a rock telekinetically). Essentially, Luke went to the University of Dagobah with a major in Buddhist philosophy and a minor in physical education.

He goes on to talk about parental problems, Luke vs. Han Solo as role models, and plenty of other elements from the original trilogy that resonate with anyone born and raised as part of Generation X. I won’t crib any more from the book; just go out and buy it if you are reading this (because if you are into this kind of stuff, chances are you’ll love this book).

As for John Hodgman’s book, it was a piece of crap. I finished it in less than twenty minutes, by skipping from page to page looking for something — anything — funny. I failed to find it. This was a great concept that was completely and utterly underdelivered on. Hint: if you think a list of 700 made-up hobo names, or a list of nine presidents who had hooks for hands would be funny, then this book is right up your alley. But we’re not friends anymore.

An author that I’m not crazy about these days? Michael Crichton. I’ve read several of his books, and I found those to be entertaining if formulaic. After the nine Jurassic Park movies, it seemed that his “novel as warning against the dangers of the future of science and technology” schtick was paying off handsomely.

It wasn’t until his book State of Fear that I had finally had enough. As a rule, I don’t generally trash books that I haven’t actually read. It just seems fundamentally unfair. However…. The book, if you’re not familiar with it, has the general premise that rogue environmental scientists are creating natural disasters as eco-terrorists in order to make us all afraid, therefore furthering their own political agenda.

Crichton always likes to show off his science chops. Even so, the Amazon text stats show us that the book was written at a U.S. fifth grade reading level (according to the Flesch-Kincaid scale). Crichton was also presented with a journalism award for the fictional novel by a petroleum industry group, if that gives you any idea where he was coming from. Again, I haven’t read the book, so I’ll cop to any accusations that my view is conjecture and based on media hoopla. So be it. (WikiPedia has a weirdly “both sides of the coin” write-up about the book).

Anyway, that’s all lead in to say that I got a chuckle out of The Guardian’s “digested read” of Crichton’s new book Next, which warns us all about the dangers of gene therapy (can’t go to that genetics well too often). Here are some excerpts:

“UCLA never told me my cancer was in remission because they wanted to exploit my cells,” he said. “Can you say that more scientifically so that everyone will realise this is serious fiction?” the judge asked….

Frank Burnet had done well to keep a low profile in such a ludicrous plot…

Author’s note: I am very clever and want you to know that I’ve read a lot of books about gene therapy and it’s a dangerous science.

On that last note, Crichton conveniently showed up this week in an article in The New York Times about the emerging trend of authors who include a bibliography in fictional works. Says Crichton:

“My feeling is that if I’ve spent a lot of time in a particular field, after a couple of years I know quite a bit about it,” Mr. Crichton said in a telephone interview. “I try and include the ones that either matter to me, or from a legal standpoint, the ones from which I drew most heavily.” Readers are often impressed with his bibliography, Mr. Crichton added. “People will often say to me, ‘Oh my goodness, look how many books you’ve read,’ ” he said.

Oh my goodness, that just bugs the crap out of me.

Last night, Richard Ford read from his novel The Lay of the Land at the Center for Southern Literature in Atlanta.  The portion of the book that he read is also available at The New Yorker, so you can read it yourself if you are so inclined.  If you read it to yourself, do so standing with an impressive literary carriage.  You must also be able to pull off being deathly serious and disarmingly humorous simultaneously.  Good luck.
Mr. Ford spoke briefly before the reading and took many questions afterwards.  A few things that that I thought were interesting:

• I didn’t know that he is a long-time resident of New Orleans.  No one tells me anything.  I haven’t seen him in any of the post-Katrina collections of writing about the city that I’ve read, but a quick Google search turned up this essay in The Guardian.
• His wife was the City Planner for New Orleans before being summarily dumped by the current mayor, Nagin.
• The Fords are not very optimistic about the prospects for New Orleans.  They are moving back permanently next week.
• Ford grew up in Jackson, MS a few streets away from Eudora Welty.  He credits having his mother point out Ms. Welty at the neighborhood convenience store when he was 8 as the moment when he internalized that being a writer might be a respectable way to make a living.
• Ford is distrustful of writers who speak of having a “burning yearning” to write their message, lest they go mad.  He says that he has no burning yearning to write what he “has to say” – in fact he spends a lot of time making up things to write about.
• He became a writer out of a love of reading rather than a burning need to “tell his story.”  He always hoped that his writing would be something that would excite young readers (and the not so young), passing pass along his love of reading, which drew a round of spontaneous applause from the crowd
• He dropped out of law school to become a writer. We learned in the Q&A after the reading that his wife supported him for 18 years before he made a dime from his writing.

He read to a full house, many of whom brought entire gym bags full of books to be signed.  It was a great Monday night out, and I’m glad that Mrs. Cayenne and I rallied to make it.  Having pre-paid the baby-sitter helped.  The book appears to be fantastic by all accounts.  The reading helped bump this one up several places in the “to read” pile.