Books About Books. Meta.

Since I've spent the better part of this week trying not to cry on the subway because of Beautiful Boy, I thought maybe I'd cheer you guys (and myself, since I am, I imagine, my blog's No. 1 reader) up by recommending an author astronomically less likely to put you in a funk and make you stare resentfully at everything from beer to cough syrup, muttering things like to yourself like "stupid drugs."

Now, if you haven't heard of Nick Hornby, back up. Because you have. He's the bloke (he's British, so I can say that) behind About a Boy, High Fidelity and Fever Pitch (the book, on which the Jimmy Fallon abomination is based, is far superior). His books are almost compulsively readable, sort of like what David Sedaris might write if he took a Valium and/or developed a generally more upbeat (though still sarcastic) outlook on life. Which, again, not a dig at Sedaris. My idea of upbeat is assuming the world won't end in my lifetime.

Lesser known, however, than books like High Fidelity and A Long Way Down, are Hornby's essays in The Believer, a mostly literature-focused magazine published by McSweeney's (the brainchild of Dave Eggars, who is unto himself another blog post for another day). Fortunately for us, these essays have been compiled in a series of short books: The Polysyllabic Spree, Housekeeping vs. The Dirt and Shakespeare Wrote for Money.  These, almost as if to counteract the accessibility and general ease of Hornby's novels, are books for book nerds. You see, in the beginning of each chapter, Hornby lists two columns: the books he has bought that month, and the books he has read. ...It should come as no surprise that Hornby's ratio of books books bought to books read is as skewed as mine. The rest is a hodgepodge of reviews, anecdotes and general musings, which sounds...vaguely familiar.

The upside of these books is threefold: 1) Although they aren't novels, and although creating fictional characters is a Hornby strength, they still indisputably have his wit and style. 2) If you're looking for book ideas, they are a great place to start; I would venture a guess that they've added 20+  titles to my own Amazon Wish List. And 3) If you, like me, need the consolation that there are other neurotic weird book-buying freaks out there, well, look no further.

Come On, Get Happy

Sometimes I just know a book is going to make me cry. I think for many people this is true with movies--who didn't spend 75% of Million Dollar Baby trying to stifle sobs in a crowded theater? But I have equally strong, if not sometimes stronger, reactions to writing. Maybe it's because I'm free to visualize, maybe it's because reading one book written by one person makes you feel so much closer to whatever emotion they were feeling, or trying to convey; there's no army of screenwriters and props people and best boy grips making it difficult to suspend disbelief. Either way, there have been a number of books in my lifetime that have reduced me to tears: Dean Koontz's Watchers, Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife, Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones. Actually, everything by Alice Sebold. I've thrown books across the room because of how much they've upset me. I've skulked around the apartment for hours. I've questioned the direction and value of my life. I've essentially felt all the emotions of a 13-year-old Panic! At the Disco fan, just from reading. Put that in your marketing, Scholastic.

So considering Catch-22 was a comedy, albeit a dark one, I thought maybe this week I'd pick something on the other end of the spectrum. A few years ago, my mom gave me Beautiful Boy, a memoir written by a father about his son's addiction to crystal meth. I put it on the shelf. You see, when one is in college, experimenting with all manner of friends, substances and ...study techniques, naturally, a book about a 20-something's descent into addiction just doesn't fit the bill. I didn't want to read a particularly grueling chapter about young Nic's first transition from marijuana to cocaine and then try to go out partying; I didn't want to take a shot of tequila and spend the subsequent four hours crying in the bathroom of a bar and questioning all of my life decisions. The book had to wait. Until this week.

Now, I'm only 25, so there's still a distinct possibility I could read this and find myself crying on the floor of a bathroom this weekend. Worse, this Sunday is Halloween, which means I'd be crying on the floor of a bar bathroom while dressed as Buzz Lightyear. Hilarious? Yes; but after losing my Blackberry two Halloweens ago and riding the subway back and forth for five hours at 4 a.m. dressed as Uncle Sam ...well I think I'd like to keep that on record as my epitome of All Hallows' Eve shame. Just to be safe though, no tequila.

Yossarian Lives

This week at work, I was looking over a reporter’s story, about the recent death of the inventor of the MetroCard, and stumbled across this: “15 cents of every fare dollar collected goes to collecting that fare.” Huh? I asked him to change the line, for the sake of all that isn’t meta about business reporting, but it stuck with me, as this is how pretty much all of Catch-22 is written.

Keeping that in mind, you can imagine the nerves I’ve had this week over finishing what is only the third book in my endeavor--so I’ll take my pats on the back now for having done it. The truth is, Catch-22 was the perfect type of book for this project—entertaining and compelling but without being a page-turner, the kind of title that in another time (i.e a month ago) would have languished on my shelf after the first 100 pages, just because.

There’s a lot to say about this book, which it seems most people I talked to have either never read or can’t remember because they haven’t picked it up since high school. I’m pleased to report that, for me at least, Catch-22 lived up to the hype that comes with picking a modern classic. I can see why the book has its reputation, which isn’t something I can say for every equally reputable thing I’ve ever read.

So, I would take this time to pause and outline the plot, except…there really isn’t one. Catch-22 primarily follows Yossarian, a World War II bombardier stationed off of Italy, as well as a dozen other reappearing characters. There’s the colonel who keeps increasing the number of missions his squadron needs to complete to be discharged, so as to impress the higher-ups and potentially earn a mention in The Saturday Evening Post. There’s the mess hall operator who starts what’s essentially an international cartel of fine foods and military equipment, whose business acumen goes so far afoul of his patriotic duty that he is at one point paid to bomb his own men. There’s the dead man in Yossarian's tent, killed during a mission before he even reported for duty (a sitcom-level fluke) and subsequently reported by officers to have never reported for duty at all, lest they take the blame for his demise. And so on -- the cast is utterly absurd, and the way the book is written highlights that absurdity perfectly. Sort of like an endless loop of that “Who’s on first, What’s on Second” baseball skit.

Video Saved The Book Review...Star

Ron Charles.

Brosefs! I have barely had time to read this week, let alone write about reading (TBD whether I'll finish Catch-22 in time, but I remain optimistic, even if it means spending Saturday in a windowless room with nothing but my book and a vat of coffee.) In any case, I had to take a quick second out of my very busy and incredibly enviable life to jot down some thoughts on the Washington Post's newfangled video book reviews.

If you're like me, you care about national newspapers cutting their book-review pages with the same intensity that other people care about like, I don't know, sports or something. At this point, the vast majority of major papers (excluding the Wall Street Journal, who recently launched a book review, which unfortunately deals in primarily mind-numbingly boring titles) have slimmed their coverage of the book sector, minus repeated front-page stories on the swiftly progressing transition to e-books (which is for another post entirely, one I'll have to write in a room in which I'm free to sob). Even Kirkus Reviews, arguably the industry standard after Publishers Weekly, bit the bullet last year. Sad times.

In any case, Washington Post fiction critic Ron Charles has started doing video reviews, mildly bizarre and generally amusing shorts summarizing a book and highlighting some of its strengths and faults, much as a regularly written review (which Charles still does and WaPo still publishes) would. And you know, they're pretty fucking good.

On To The Next

So I've never read Catch-22. I'm not sure how, except I know that my high school had the kind of worldly approach to literature that had me analyzing obscure African books without ever having picked up Animal Farm (no seriously, I've never read Animal Farm either. I know!)

So considering my success over the last two weeks, I've decided it's time to challenge myself. Which isn't to say that Catch-22 is particularly difficult as a book, or burdensome to get through. In truth, of the 50-odd pages I've read so far, it's fairly hilarious. But this will be my longest book to date, more than 450 pages, and I don't mean that senior-citizen-size font you sometimes see in modern paperbacks. This is legit. I've got my work cut out for me.

Truth is, there are plenty of literary classics, modern or otherwise, that I've never actually gotten around to reading, many of which I want to: The Scarlett Letter, Gravity's Rainbow, On The Road, pretty much everything Dickens has ever written outside of A Tale of Two Cities. So perhaps, whenever I'm feeling particularly ambitious, I'll take a week out--like this one--to tackle the kind of book you can typically find on the Summer Reading table at Barnes & Noble (speaking of which, am I the only for whom this table is a source of constant guilt?)

So if you've got suggestions, which is to say, if there's some book you've always "wanted" to read but fear is in truth much more boring than its reputation suggests (worry not, I feel this way about both The Great Gatsby and Catcher in the Rye), well, here's your chance to foist it on me, an unsuspecting third party, who will not only have to finish it, but in a week no less.

Bring it on. All two of you.

Oscar Wow (Come On, I Had To)

I waited way too long to read this book. I know it doesn’t really matter, since books are timeless, etc., but had I known how easily I would have flown through this, I probably would have picked it up back in 2007, in hardcover. So I guess I can just chalk it up to a 30% discount. Go me.

Some things you should know, without really giving anything away.

1. This book is far less literary than I anticipated. And I don’t mean that in the inevitably negative way it’s going to come out. But I think, having not read much about it when it was popular and being persistently unenthused by the back-cover plot summary (seriously, it’s still not compelling and now I’ve read the book) I based a lot of my assumptions about Wao on the fact that it won the Pulitzer, among approximately seven jillion other awards. Because of this, I assumed it would be a dense read, something I’d have to put my back into to get through. In that sense, I was woefully wrong. Wao is incredibly readable and engrossing, without at any point sacrificing sophistication of prose for ease of consumption, or vice versa. That’s a hard thing to pull off.

2. Book’s got mad Spanish. Most of it is written in an English-heavy version of Spanglish, with Spanish slang terms thrown in willy-nilly, and minimal effort is made to qualify or translate them. As a former Spanish major and current resident of Brooklyn, I found myself keeping pace with most of the terminology, though I definitely missed some stuff. I decided not to look anything up and instead absorb the words through context/phonetics. It would have felt wrong to stop reading every five minutes to bust out my now-ancient Spanish-English dictionary. (Also, I didn't want to look for it. ..Mostly that).

Like the Oscars, Without Billy Crystal

Ooh gurrrll, it's that time of year. The National Book Award finalists were announced yesterday, and you know what that means: Someone needs to hold on to my credit card for the next few weeks. Or at least get me some sort of collar that distributes electric shocks when I go near a Barnes & Noble.

Anywho, since I don't much care for poetry (whatever, we all have our faults), let's do what all educated intellectuals do: judge the remaining ten finalists (five fiction, five nonfiction) by totally legitimate metrics, like 100-word summaries, cover art choice and number of stars awarded by Amazon.com customers.  (Why, as such a supposedly avid reader, I consistently fail to have ever read anything nominated for an award is beyond me. Probably has something to do with reality television.) I should clarify: I have little doubt all of these books are quite excellent, but since everything I decide to read now has the official one-week timeframe attached to it, a girl's got to be selective. So...

Harbinger of Gloom

David Rakoff

So guys, do you ever experience, like, intellectual omens?

Wow, didn’t realize how elitist that was going to sound; let me rephrase. On Monday, someone brings up a movie you’ve never seen. On Wednesday, you see that same movie referenced in a newspaper article. And maybe, just for good measure, on Friday it appears written in clouds across the sky – just kidding. But in all seriousness, these are what I consider intellectual omens, glitches in the Matrix, doses of kismet that may perhaps lead one to discover new music, cinema, obscure political history or, in my case, more often than not, books.

This week’s omen is David Rakoff, whose latest book of essays, Half Empty, was reviewed in the Times over the weekend and from whom I read an essay in the Wall Street Journal on Monday. (What’s that you say? There is perhaps a completely non-kismet explanation for why a publishing author might write an essay for a nationally distributed newspaper in the same month his latest book is being released? To that I say, pish posh!)

Almost As Important as Oprah's Book Club

In addition to guilt-tripping me into completing books, I had hoped that some part of this endeavor would be discovering things about myself and my reading habits; maybe in some way stumbling across what exactly turned me from a “books first, everything else later” kind of girl into “Did you guys see the last episode of Bad Girls Club?” As luck would have it, I’ve made my first discovery already, and it has everything to do with choosing what to read next.

You see, as I stopped worrying so much about finishing one book before moving on to the next, the weight of my reading choices diminished significantly. If, say, 50 pages in I felt even the slightest bit displeased or bored with a book, I could easily add it to the pile on the nightstand (whose shelves are devoted entirely to half-finished novels) and pick up something else. Nothing was set in stone.

Today, staring at my shelves, whose 200+ unread books are themselves a veritable library of options, I found myself hamstrung by an inability to decide what comes next. And it’s because I no longer have the liberty of indecision -- whatever I choose I have to finish, and I have to devote a significant amount of time over the next seven days to the task. There will be no tossing aside, or leaving at home in favor of getting 20 pages further in some other half-read novel. I feel like I’m committing to a weeklong cruise with someone I’ve just met, whereas before it was more like, you know, meeting a guy in a bar. You’ve got my attention for now, but I can’t say I won’t be talking to someone else in a half hour.

I've Done It!

Against all odds, I have met my deadline in Week 1! I couldn't be prouder than if I had actually spread all 300-some pages throughout the week, instead of buckling down and finishing two-thirds of The Fall yesterday. But hey, a deadline met is a deadline met. At the very least, I was fortunate to start with a page-turner, so I didn't end up guzzling coffee all day Saturday while trying to pound through 200 pages of dense prose.  

Now, The Fall is the second in a series, so in a way it's an awful title to start this project, sort of like beginning a comedy set with an inside joke. But since I've been waiting for this book for about a year, I had little choice but to begin it immediately after it was released. Don't worry, I'll fill you in.

The Fall, like its predecessor, is about vampires. Now wait. Before you get all huffy—"But Kira, I'm so sick of vampires!"—I'll say that it really could be about any virus or plague or epidemic; just so happens vampires are an apt analogy (hence its immediate association for me with Max Brooks' World War Z, which is as much "about zombies" as World War II was). Without giving away too much of the first book, The Strain, which I highly recommend and you would need to read before this one, let's just say that an ancient virus comes to New York via plane, infects a bunch of people, and proceeds to take over the city. A ragtag cast of characters—the head of the Centers for Disease Control, a local exterminator, a pawn shop proprietor who knows a creepy amount about ancient curses and shit, etc.—come together through various means and begin hatching a plan to save the city, or at the very least themselves. Already you should be intrigued since, if you're anything like me, your first move once the Vampire Apocalypse starts will be to hole up in a tanning salon (it's the UV rays that get them, right?) or try hoofing it to the sunniest town in Florida. I am not a fighter.

Some Thoughts for Philip Roth

In an interview this week, author Philip Roth said what I've been stupidly telling myself to stop thinking ever since the first Sony Reader came out: e-books suck. Granted, Roth is about 178 years old, and so I don't know how much credibility to lend to his perception of reading—blah blah blah, everyone was terrified of the printing press too—but he pretty much sums up all of my fears about the rapidly occurring transition to e-books, in his nice grandfatherly way.

So Phil, here are some of my thoughts...on your thoughts.

1. I feels you, bro. No one's saying people won't read books anymore (besides me...I am also saying that); but the concentration and serenity that comes with curling up next to a block of paper—one with which you cannot check e-mail, order a pizza or play Tetris—is definitely going to be lost.

2. At least you know you hate change. I have an ongoing problem with pretending I'm savvy and pro-change when if it weren't for peer pressure I'd still be wearing stirrup-pants and using a Discman.

3. If you want people to reconsider your status as a bit of a fuddy-duddy (albeit an incredibly prolific one), mayyybe don't write about polio. I mean seriously, polio?!

4. That said, kudos for the idea of making a list of U.S. events you've lived through but never written about. (Sidebar: Wow, you lived through polio). My list of future book topics will now be expanded to include September 11, the recession and Justin Bieber.

5. Just FYI, The Human Stain is simultenaously one of my most and least favorite book titles of all time.

I Need A Gatorade

This is how I feel today.

So I am really hungover today, which is why I love that Real Time with Bill Maher airs on Friday nights. There's nothing like getting a few new brain cells on a Saturday, after a night of mixed drinks and unnecessarily loud dance music. Psychologically at least, it's a wash.

Last night's predictably awesome guests included Bob Woodward, David Cross, Arianna Huffington and Princeton professor and all-around badass Cornel West. Also Time magazine columnist Joe Klein [Sidebar: It's always struck me as weird that Time still has editorial credibility even though no one on the planet reads it anymore.] Long story short, they've all written books! Which begs the question: At what age should I start frequenting bars during my lunch hour, downing whiskey and bemoaning the fact that I haven't written a book yet? 26?

As I mentioned before, I'm in the middle of David Cross' I Drink for a Reason, which you should want to read based on its title alone, but also happens to be incredibly funny (if you like David Cross). So super, one less Wishlist addition there.

Unfortunately for my semi-sincere intention of lessening my book-buying, three other newbies made the list based on last night's episode. At least these books will prepare me for fancypants cocktail party conversations.

Put it on the list.

It's my favorite time of the week! Well, third favorite after Thursday night television and Sunday afternoon ...television. It's my favorite book-related time of the week! The New York Times book review.

Every week this little gem appears in my inbox at a most inopportune time—right when I'm smack in the middle of doing 500 other things. But I'm nothing if not extremely adept at procrastinating on my actual work in favor of reading about books, and always keen to add a few more to my ever-growing and more or less infinite list of things I'd like to read.

Added to the Wishlist today:

BY NIGHTFALL, Michael Cunningham
THE PLOT: Art dealer Peter Harris and his magazine editor wife Rebecca are settled into a comfortable life in Manhattan's art scene, until their staid existence is disrupted by the arrival of Ethan, Rebecca's much younger brother whose nickname—Mizzy, short for "The Mistake"—belies his whimsical attitude and overall fuckup station in life. Mizzy wants to pursue a career in the arts, and upends the whole household in the process.
LINE THAT HOOKED ME: "[Mizzy was] one of those smart drifty young people who . . . seems to imagine that youth and brains and willingness will simply summon an occupation, the precise and perfect nature of which will reveal itself in its own time.”
READ THE REVIEW