life is unfair

Y'know, if I thought that the Times would publish personal essays about embarrassing public puking incidents, I would have submitted about ten pieces a long time ago.

Once again, Sloane Crosley beats me to the (spiked) punch. Letting the Chips Fall

shortcuts

As I get older, and my years of hardcore television-watching start to catch up to me, I admit that my attention span is shot. If entertainment isn't broken down into manageable chunks, I whine and drag my feet like a third-grader faced with long division homework. So I've determined that short stories/essays are pretty much the ideal literary format. When magazines like The New Yorker make an extra effort to drop short fiction in my lap, I'm always thankful.

Their holiday fiction issue is especially strong this year, with stories from Alice Munro and Colson Whitehead. But my favorite was Another Manhattan by Donald Antrim. It starts out as a modern update on the kind of bantery, upper-class neuroticism that Woody Allen has practically trademarked in film (a little bit of covert spouse-swapping, and everyone seems to be a doctor or therapist of some kind). But then it turns darker, more serious, into a reflection on intense unhappiness among people who appear to have everything under control. The pacing is good, the nuances are there, and...it's short.

Of course, this fondness for brevity might not mean that I'm losing my attention span. It might just mean I'm turning into a Japanese teenager. The New Yorker also has an intriguing article about the latest literary fad to hit Japan: the cell phone novel. My first reaction was to scoff at the idea of full books written in text-message-speak, but the further I read in the article, the less absurd it seemed. Maybe teenage girls shouldn't be dismissed so easily--after all, they turned a lousy vampire book into a major phenomenon in about ten seconds flat. And after watching my own company scramble to figure out what kids want, what iPhone/Kindle users want, I don't think it will be long before you see oddly formatted books popping up here in the U.S. as well. Maybe this means I should start working on my Twitter-formatted memoir.

poetry

So you're the President-elect. Your advisors say you need to pander to the people in the heartland who are half-convinced you're going to take your oath on the Koran, so you need a megachurch-foundin', Prop 8-supportin' pastor to show everyone how much you love Jesus. Check! Who's left to charm? Oh, yeah, those Hillary chicks. I know! Why don't you pick someone who writes about vaginas to deliver the poem? It worked for Clinton!

Monsieur Cuvier investigates
between my legs, poking, prodding,
sure of his hypothesis.
I half expect him to pull silk
scarves from inside me, paper poppies,
then a rabbit! He complains
at my scent and does not think
I comprehend, but I speak

There haven't been enough gynecological poems at presidential inaugurations. In all seriousness, though, while I'm ticked about the Rick Warren thing, I like what I've read of Elizabeth Alexander.

Giving birth is like jazz, something from silence,
then all of it. Long, elegant boats,
blood-boiling sunshine, human cargo,
a hand-made kite –

Post-partum.
No longer a celebrity, pregnant lady, expectant.
It has happened; you are here,
each dram you drain a step away
from flushed and floating, lush and curled.
Now you are the pink one, the movie star.
It has happened. You are here,

and you sing, mewl, holler, peep,
swallow the light and bubble it back,
shine, contain multitudes, gleam. You

are the new one, the movie star,
and birth is like jazz,
from silence and blood, silence

then everything,

jazz.

Plus, yay for a president who knows enough about modern poetry (hell, any poetry) to go with someone a little off the beaten path, but who also has a kickass resume. Also, I had no idea--or had forgotten the probable reference from The West Wing--that only Kennedy and Clinton had included poets in their ceremonies. Definitely a wasted opportunity for the others--who would Nixon have chosen?

the rest is noise

I think I have a crush on Alex Ross from the New Yorker. I always enjoyed his pieces in the magazine, but never really thought much about him beyond "pleasant subway reading." But then today, I was reading last week's piece on Leonard Bernstein, and just really loved his lush, descriptive language and style:

"To attend the Bernstein festival night after night was to watch this man’s sometimes desperate struggle to find the proper vessel for his talent. In a better world, these conflicts—between classical and popular traditions, between composing and conducting, between high-art institutions and radical politics, between gay and straight sexualities—would have mattered little. The spirit of the man, which had something primordial, almost animalistic, about it, overwhelmed all categories."

and

"The moment exemplifies Bernstein’s ability to render almost any abstract sequence of notes or chords as a physical act, a sweatily human gesture."

So bravo, Alex Ross. Way to pull ahead of Sasha Frere-Jones.

it's retrospective season!

Good news, everyone! The New York Times 10 Best Books of 2008 is out, and I've actually read one of them! That's about the same as I was doing at this time last year, so yay for maintenance. (The numbers look, umm, less good if you take into account that I've read only two of the top 100 notable books of the year, but hey, who's counting? Chances are I'll get to Toni Morrison and Fareed Zakaria soon. Ish.)

Notably missing from both lists is The Wordy Shipmates, Sarah Vowell's latest book, which was pretty much eviscerated last week by Virginia Heffernan. What a sad Thanksgiving in the Vowell house.... Plus, this illustrates reason #46 not to piss off a TV critic in general, and a Times critic especially.

"And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting"

This time of year, I always make it a special point to read "The Raven." Part of it is that Poe has always been shoved down our throats as a horror writer (though I've always found him more sad than creepy), but really because it's such a good autumnal poem. It's cold and bleak and lonely--yeah, November!

Also, possibly the best thing ever (at least today): Christopher Walken reads "The Raven."

New Yorker Festival 2008

Sheryl and I had the following text message conversation today:

K: I def just brushed up against Salman Rushdie.
S: Whoa. Where?
K: New Yorker Festival HQ.
S: It's like our version of a strip club.

And she's right. I'd pick a pretentious book event over Chippendales any night of the week. Maybe next year I'll stock up on $1 bills, in case there are really cute hipster writers around.

Anyway, that's why the annual New Yorker Festival is one of my favorite NYC events. You can be any schmuck getting your complimentary cappuccino in the advertisers' lounge, turn to your left, and see the world's most endangered author at your elbow.

And it feels like kind of an anniversary, as well. I didn't make it to last year's events, but two years ago, my visit that weekend was when I decided to go through with my move to New York. So I've got a soft spot for the festivities.

"The past eight years with this president have basically been one big YouTube clip."

Yesterday, I attended a panel on Political Humor. It featured a pretty great group of writer-comedians: Samantha Bee (Daily Show); Allison Silverman (Colbert Report); Jim Downey (SNL); Andy Borowitz (The Borowitz Report); and Todd Hanson (The Onion). (Hanson was replacing The Daily Show's John Oliver, whose wacky British antics were missed.) It was like the heads of the Five Families coming together--but as far as I know, no firearms had to be confiscated.

Of course, most of the discussion was about this election--Sarah Palin in particular. The moderator asked the panel if it would be better for comedy if McCain and Palin won, since Obama is difficult to mock. Nobody really committed to the idea, and Andy Borowitz piped up. "...I'd rather have a country that's run well," he said. See? The "satiro-industrial complex" does have a conscience. It may be a smug one, but it's a conscience!


"To edit humor, you have to be funny. And if you're funny, why are you editing?"

Today's Humor Writing "master class" wasn't actually a class (which means no homework, so yay!). It was more of a mini-panel with longtime New Yorker writers Mark Singer and Ian Frazier. They didn't delve too much into the hows or whys of writing funny stuff, but they did talk a lot about the role that the "casuals," or humor pieces, play in the magazine. They both read entertaining pieces of their own, and shared anecdotes about writing for the New Yorker. (FYI: I don't know what Tina Brown is doing these days, but she doesn't appear to be missed much by her former staffers.) Singer also went into a lengthy discussion of his feud with Donald Trump. I'm not even sure how a feud like that works--isn't it kind of like fighting with a wall (a 100-story, gold-painted one, no less)?

One interesting element that came out of both sessions was that there aren't enough women writing comedy. Everyone was quick to point out that this doesn't mean women are any less funny (ah, liberal elite PC-ness), but either the humor sensibility is different, or they're scared off by the perceived sausage fest. Frazier had an interesting point: that teenage girls don't spend their time sitting around trying to outdo one another with one-liners and jokes like teenage boys do, so maybe the socialization is to blame.

The epigraph above, about editing vs. writing, comes from Frazier. It's probably true. But still...ouch.

I'm sorry I wasn't able to attend more of the events, but the terrible ticket availability (I'm pretty sure U2 tickets are easier to get) and the high prices ($25-$35 per event) just make me thankful I was able to do two of them this year. I still didn't make it to the New Yorker dance party, though. Next year! (Maybe.)

Curtis Sittenfeld at Lincoln Triangle B&N

Curtis Sittenfeld is pretty smart. After two novels which critics and readers alike proclaimed to be autobiographical, she came up with a way to make sure no one thinks her third one is about her: she made it about Laura Bush. Throw in some steamy President-on-First-Lady action, and no one's going to be talking about Curtis the Protagonist.

On tour for American Wife, Sittenfeld gave a reading at the Lincoln Triangle Barnes & Noble the other night. Sheryl and I (also known as the "We Could Have Written That" book club) made the trip up to see her, fueled by our mutual, post-adolescent love of Prep. Sittenfeld was remarkably...normal. A little nasal due to a cold, she was quirky and sincere at the same time. Very funny in her one-liners about her life as a writer, and very candid in her admiration for Mrs. Bush. (Sittenfeld is not a Republican, and not so thrilled with the Bush presidency.)

The crowd questions were pretty evenly divided between "How could you make a sympathetic character out of someone married to a monster?" and "Why didn't you write about yourself this time?" Ahh, reading crowds. At least no one ventured the usual question about influences. Maybe the best part of the discussion was the question about whether Sittenfeld knew if Laura Bush would read the book. Of course, Sittenfeld denied knowing anything about it, but come on. You're Laura Bush. You like books, and someone has just come out with a barely fictional version of your life. AND there's controversial sexual content, which is graphic and just biographical enough to gross out reviewers. You're pre-ordering that sucker on Amazon.

Anyway, it was an intriguing perspective on the First Spouse. I like Sittenfeld even more than I did before, and am looking forward to reading the book.

The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon

What if Israel had collapsed shortly after inception in 1948, and European Jews had relocated to a reservation of sorts in Alaska? And what if, 60 years later, the U.S. was about to say, "Hey, sorry, we want our land back. You don't have to go home, but you've gotta get the hell out so we can let our own natives play house for a while"? You'd have the right mix of events for Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union, an alternate history novel about just those things.

Kind of a Jewish noir, the story pivots around Meyer Landsman, a rumpled, agnostic detective investigating the murder of a junkie in Landsman's skeezy residential hotel in the Sitka District of Alaska. The dead junkie, of course, turns out to be significantly more important than you might expect from his iffy surroundings. And Meyer makes a series of bad decisions that plunge him into a shadowy underworld of Hasidic godfathers, possible messiahs, and red heifers. (Good thing I had that crash course from AJ Jacobs earlier this year.) On top of that, he's got kind of a 21st century Bogart thing going on: problems with his ex-wife becoming his new boss; increasingly unpleasant side effects from his alcoholism; and a sort of loose cannon partner, who's having trouble reconciling his half-Inuit, half-Jewish heritage. I believe that's known as the trifecta in the detective fiction world.

Part of the reason the book is so good is that Chabon really commits to the alternative timeline of the Sitka District, while making everything plausible. Like a throwaway reference to "American first lady Marilyn Monroe Kennedy in her pink pillbox hat, with mesmeric spirals for eyes." Chabon doesn't have to go there, but he does, and it deepens the "here but not here" element.

The rest of the goodness comes from the complex relationships between the characters. Meyer and his ex-wife are wary of one another, but there's still a lingering core of affection (and sex) that bonds them, even though the loss of a baby was just too much for their marriage. The dead guy, a refugee from a pious crime family, worked miracles for various members of the community before losing himself to heroin. The layers are intricate and expressed at a good, tension-maintaining pace.

And as with The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, the language is just so spot-on--lyrical without being too brainy or overwhelming. Chabon incorporates the Yiddish phrases, syntax, and sensibility so well that you'd think there really was a hybridized Yiddish community in Alaska. Unfortunately, Chabon never mentions whether Governor Palin makes the historical cut in this version. Let's assume she doesn't.

Some of my favorite parts:

"Bina reaches into the breast pocket of her suit jacket and takes out a pair of half-glasses that Landsman has never seen before. She is getting old, and he is getting old, right on schedule, and yet as time ruins them, they are not, strangely enough, married to each other."

"When, after careful consideration, she can't fit Berko into her taxonomy of lowlifes, Mrs. Kalushiner spits into her cup. By one kind of reckoning, she owes Landsman seventeen favors; by another, she ought to give him a punch in the belly. She steps aside and lets them pass."

"Each was the other's first lover, first betrayer, first refuge, first roommate, first audience, first person to turn to when something--even the marriage itself--went wrong. For half their lives, they entangled their histories, bodies, phobias, theories, recipes, libraries, record collections. They mounted spectacular arguments, nose-to-nose, hands flying, spittle flying, throwing things, kicking things, breaking things, rolling around on the ground grabbing fistfuls of each other's hair. The next day he would bear the red moons of Bina's nails in his cheeks and on the meat of his chest, and she wore his purple fingerprints like an armlet. For something like seven years of their lives together, they f*cked almost every day. Angry, loving, sick, well, cold, hot, half asleep....Bina and Landsman were twisted together, a braided pair of chromosomes with a mystery flaw. And now? Now each of them pretends not to see the other and looks away."

Heartsick by Chelsea Cain

You know how in real life, serial killers always end up being unattractive loners, or balding middle managers? Thank goodness for the literary world. A suave Manhattanite who knows how to use rats and cheese in the most horrific way possible? A vinophile cannibal with a taste for FBI agents? Yes, please!

Gretchen Lowell, in Chelsea Cain's novel Heartsick, may top them all. Not only is she brutal enough to kill indiscriminately, destroy a person's torso, and carve a heart into his chest as a calling card, but she's hot. Like, not just hot for a felon. Textbook hot. So when Detective Archie Sheridan not only survives her torture, but becomes her final victim (she inexplicably turns herself in after bringing him to the brink of mental and physical death), it's not really surprising that he develops a totally fucked up emotional and sexual obsession with her.

But by the time the action of Heartsick begins, this stuff is all two years in the past. There's a new Buffalo Bill running around Portland, and Archie (the lead detective on the task force that sought "Beauty Killer" Gretchen for years before she kidnapped him and ended the game) is asked to come out of medical retirement to catch the new guy. Local high school girls are disappearing and then turning up naked and bleached in Oregon's waterways. The press still hates the cops for not sharing enough info when Gretchen was the It serial killer. So Archie gets back in it, bringing a shiny new Vicodin addiction and a spunky reporter, Susan Ward, to embed with the task force. Things spiral out of control quickly.

The premise isn't so unusual (I can practically see "female Hannibal Lecter" on some long-forgotten tipsheet), but Chelsea Cain brings a fresh, snarky voice to the genre. (I heartily recommend her parody novel Confessions of a Teen Sleuth for anyone who ever loved Nancy Drew or the Hardy Boys.) None of her characters are simple in personality or motivation, and she keeps everything moving well. Archie is certainly not the most sympathetic protagonist around--lingering sympathy for his trauma and resulting celebrity are pretty much canceled out by his continued, bizarre bond with Gretchen (whom he visits in prison every week), and his iffy treatment of his friends and loved ones. The reporter, Susan, the ostensible "good cop" of the book, is an unapologetic lover of married men and exploiter of dead teenage girls for stories. So yeah--they never cracked open anyone's chest or made them drink drain cleaner for kicks, but they're not saints.

I liked the book very much--and that's coming from a book snob who usually avoids mass market thrillers like it's her job. Chelsea Cain will probably never get great odds in the National Book Award predictions, but the book riveted my interest through most of a flight and much of my poolside time. Perfect vacation reading.

"Good writing is like a windowpane."

"Orwell would be rolling in his grave." "This policy is Orwellian." "I don't like this, so I'm going to call it Orwellian."

George Orwell's name is pretty broadly abused in the punditry world, thanks to 1984. So we can safely assume that Orwell, if he had a blog today, would be a political blogger, right?

Wrong! He's a navel-gazing minutiae blogger, just like the rest of us. The University of Westminster is converting Orwell's old diaries into blog form. Most of it is boring English countryside stuff so far. But overall, it's kinda charming. It's bound to get more interesting (unless those English scholars are just big teases). And I'm all for getting the non-political aspects of Orwell out there.

He was a brilliant observer, and the blog thing actually kinda fits. After all, he totes perfected the "look what I'm doing, give me a book deal" thing in Down and Out in Paris and London. (I kid, I kid, love the book.)

Hemingwayapalooza

One day you're in college, reading The Sun Also Rises and thinking, "Hey, Brett Ashley's got a pretty sweet deal." Then, suddenly you're 27, reading The Sun Also Rises again, and realizing that somehow, instead of breaking expat hearts from Paris to Barcelona, you've become Jake Barnes instead. *sigh*

Anyway, I picked up The Sun Also Rises again in anticipation of hanging out in Key West, Hemingway's old stomping grounds. The vacation didn't work out, but I'm happy to have had a reason to revisit the book--it's definitely one of those novels that clicks a little deeper with age.

Hemingway's bunch of obnoxious, wasteful drinking buddies doesn't seem quite so glamorous anymore. It's clearer now how impotent they all are (not just poor Jake with his unnamed WWI casualty), and how hollow the relationships are. The main "love" relationship, Jake and Brett's codependent talkfest, has even less reality in it than Gatsby's infatuation with Daisy Buchanan. What's clearer to me now too is that Hemingway never took the crew seriously, either. They're a collection of "almosts." Almost a novelist, almost a real journalist, almost a Lady, almost a civilized group traveling in sophisticated circles.

But they're not without charm--and that's probably the best thing Hemingway does. He takes a deeply unlikeable group of people, and makes their petty squabbles and one night stands seem like Important Plot Points. And his attention to the machoness of Spain and bullfighting has been caricatured and become oversimplified--but what people seem to lose is how well he does it. Like so many male writers, he (or Jake, anyway) can't talk about sex directly...but the same sensuous care comes out in the details.

[Random Sun Also Rises note: my copy is a battered one I bought used at the UConn CoOp way back when. The previous owner wrote all over it. She or he starts off the first few pages with a few valid points about Jake Barnes's sexual issues. Then the comments get rarer, and rarer. Eventually, there's a tiny, final note in the bottom corner of a page: "I *heart* Chris." Ah, UConn. Turning out the great literary minds. There are also a few comments in my own handwriting that I don't remember making, proving that I wasn't always the book jotting prude that I seem to be these days.]

To follow up the novel, I went with the man himself. Or the Lillian Ross version, anyway, which is just as good to me. In the early 1950s, Ross befriended Hemingway and his wife, and ended up with Portrait of Hemingway, which ran as a (controversial) article in the New Yorker. Apparently people didn't like Ross's impressionistic presentation of the writer, including his odd personal habits and weird syntax. 1950s America might not have liked it much, but I did. So much of the Hemingway discussion today is filtered through the way he died (see also Plath, Sylvia). I'd much rather see the vaguely inappropriate portrait of a flawed man than the death mask of a tragic man. Hemingway was clearly kind of annoying, but also a gregarious and generous friend.

The book (extremely short, since nothing is added from the magazine piece except a couple of brief intros/analyses from Ross) is also a reflection on Ross's unique journalistic ability. She seems to have the talent of being the kid sister and the authority figure at the same time--something that was evident even when I saw her a couple years ago (at a surprisingly spry eighty years old) interviewing Robin Williams. When she goes, she'll take the last link to the spunky, pre-Tina Brown New Yorker with her, and it'll be incredibly sad. But she's still with us, so I'll save the pouring of the 40 for my homie for when the time is right.

Hemingway, as we all know, is not with us, so the least I can do is dig up his stuff every few years and pay my respects by looking at it with whatever small amounts of wisdom I've picked up in the meantime.

Joyce Carol Oates at Lincoln Triangle B&N

Joyce Carol Oates is the Law & Order of the literary world.

"But," you protest (why must you always protest?), "she's one of our most accomplished writers. She writes ridiculously academic reviews in NYROB. She's the Vegas favorite to win the National Book Award every year. How could she possibly be like the sensationalistic Law & Order?" Because beneath the fancy prose, the deft storytelling, the academic laurels, she's a true crime junkie who watches Nancy Grace to get book ideas.

Tonight at the Lincoln Center Barnes & Noble, Oates talked about her new book, My Sister, My Love. The book is the story of Skyler Rampike, whose family becomes a tabloid target when his six-year-old sister is murdered under sketchy household circumstances. The sister happens to be a budding competitive ice skater manipulated and sexualized by her parents. Sound familiar? It should. Then there's Oates's past work, including a fake autobiography about Marilyn Monroe's rise, fall, and death. And even my favorite Oates work, the creepy "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" is based on a real murder. So yeah. Ripped from the headlines(tm)!

But let's forgive her, because she does it so darn well. Anyway, the talk was entertaining. Oates was chatty, and I like chatty writers. They don't make you feel guilty for forcing them to get up there and plug their own book. And the event space was amazing: big and closed off from the rest of the store. I'll definitely be attending more events there. It beats the three-stories-and-still-too-small space in the Union Square B&N. Good times!

Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain

A few weeks ago, I knew Anthony Bourdain mostly as the bad-boy TV foodie who eviscerated Top Chef contestants, and the guy responsible for the awesome mac and cheese at Les Halles. Now I know him as an entertaining writer and official cute boy magnet. To wit, a conversation I had on the subway while reading Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly:

Cute guy: I see you're reading Bourdain. And marking the pages. [He gestures to my heavily post-it-flagged copy of the book] Are you thinking of becoming a chef?
Me: Nope, I just like to keep track of what I'm reading.
CG: Too bad. Bourdain was part of what inspired me to become a chef...

Then we had a lovely conversation about how the book was advanced for its time (2000) by having very foodie themes before the trend really hit. Two minutes later, I got off at my usual morning stop. But yay for surprising book conversations--and attractive guys on the R train (trust me, it's rare).

Anyway, where was I? Oh, yeah, the book.

Kitchen Confidential isn't the best organized memoir you'll find, or the most dramatic. What it does have is an honest love for the hustle and burn of the restaurant kitchen, and a "fuck it all" openness. Bourdain doesn't take himself too seriously (or at least he didn't eight years ago), and is very willing to talk about his humiliations as a young line cook, his unheroic recovery from heroin addiction, and the various reasons why you should never order fish on a Monday.

It's also a strange, roundabout tour of restaurant culture in New York City. Bourdain worked in just about every kind of restaurant with just about every kind of kitchen person--a UN of sous chefs, petty criminals (who just happen to be transcendent bakers), nutcases, brilliant chefs, and union shills. You've gotta hand it to a book that makes you feel so repelled by the kitchens of even high-end restaurants, but simultaneously makes you crave good cuisine no matter who's doing what with unrefrigerated seafood.

Side note: The book also spawned a short-lived sitcom with the same name and theme, but with a much more, y'know, sitcom-y vibe. Also highly recommended, but for different reasons. Anyway, I suggest checking it out on Hulu if you're so inclined.

Some tidbits from the top chef himself:

"I'm asked a lot what the best thing about cooking for a living is. And it's this: to be part of a subculture. To be part of a historical continuum, a secret society with its own language and customs. To enjoy the instant gratification of making something good with one's hands--using all one's senses. It can be, at times, the purest and most unselfish way of giving pleasure (though oral sex has to be a close second)."

"My naked contempt for vegetarians, sauce-on-siders, the 'lactose intolerant' and the cooking of Ewok-like Emeril Lagasse is not going to get me my own show on the Food Network."
[Respectful editorial note: apparently the naked contempt DID get him a show on Food Network, but I digress.]

When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris

If you're a memoirist and you're not eighty years old, chances are at some point that you're gonna run out of humorous life anecdotes. You've mined your childhood and your family. You've exposed the quirks of your friends. You've framed every traumatic event for comedic value. So what do you do then?

If you're David Sedaris, you keep plugging along anyway. His latest book, When You Are Engulfed in Flames is light on Sedaris family doings. It relies instead on the kind of stories you turn to when you've known someone forever, and don't need to discuss the big stuff anymore. He talks about his partner, his job, and daily struggles to quit smoking and interact with normal people. At this point, he seems to be going on trips (there are two airplane stories) and learning new languages just to be able to write about it. Some of the essays have distinctly enhanced qualities, but at this point I don't care if stuff is fudged. I just want him to churn out his patented funny-poignant essay collections every few years.

Some of the pieces are familiar. My favorite, "Solution to Saturday's Puzzle," was in the New Yorker a couple of years ago. But somehow even the recycled essays feel fresher, brighter than in the magazine. It may be the fresh, bright paper. Or the fact that I'm predisposed to love anything I've seen in the New Yorker. Either way, definitely worth the $15 on Amazon. (Even David Sedaris can't get me to pay full cover price.)

Favored parts:

"And there's an elderly Frenchwoman, the one I didn't give my seat to on the bus. In my book, if you want to be treated like an old person, you have to look like one. That means no facelift, no blond hair, and definitely no fishnet stockings. I think it's a perfectly valid rule, but it wouldn't have killed me to take her crutches into consideration."

"In the grocery section of a Seibu department store, I saw a whole chicken priced at the equivalent of forty-four dollars. This seemed excessive until I went to another department store and saw fourteen strawberries for forty-two dollars. Forty-two dollars--you could almost buy a chicken for that."

"It's pathetic how much significance I attach to the Times puzzle, which is easy on Monday and gets progressively harder as the week advances. I'll spend fourteen hours finishing the Friday, and then I'll wave it in someone's face and demand that he acknowledge my superior intelligence. I think it means that I'm smarter than the next guy, but all it really means is that I don't have a life."

The Updike of holiday weekends

A few months ago, The Sportswriter protagonist Frank Bascombe kinda pissed me off, with his poor decisions and his even poorer relationships. This morning, I found his creator to be considerably more charming. Richard Ford was a featured segment on CBS Sunday Morning (the drowsy, pleasant alternative to the Chris Matthews-style browbeating on Sunday mornings).

And it's hard not to like a guy who waxes rhapsodic about real estate: "The language of real estate is all about the language of people's hopes for where they live, how much they feel their house is worth and therefore, how much they feel themselves to be worth."

Also, I'd like to point out that Ford and his wife argue over the word "azure." Good to know that petty squabbles over word choice still happen after the honeymoon is over.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon

When I was a really young kid, my dad worked shifts. And when he'd do overnight ones, he'd always come home at 7 in the morning, just as Sam and I were getting up and ready for school. Dad would always have something in hand when we swarmed him at the door--sometimes donuts (the sprinkled kind, of course), but more often comic books. I loved them. For me, Dad usually picked the girly ones. Casper, Archie and company, and the occasional Wonder Woman. Sam got all the traditional "boy" ones. But four-year-old Sam wasn't really the reading type, so I was the one who ended up devouring all the comics as soon as they came in--Betty, Veronica, and Spider Man alike.

That was more than twenty years ago, though, and I can't say I've thought much about superhero comic books since. That's probably why I didn't expect to feel super-connected to the subject matter of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. I picked up the book based on the idea that I should be reading Michael Chabon, combined with a shiny Pulitzer sticker on the cover. ('Cause I'm a cover sticker sucker, let's face it.) But I ended up loving it.

The novel moves around Sammy Klayman, a 19-year-old Brooklyn polio survivor with tons of comic book ideas but no way of cashing in on them; and his cousin Josef Kavalier, a Czechoslovakian immigrant sent to America by his parents just as the Nazi occupation hit Prague. Joe's talents include magic tricks and Houdini-esque escape tricks, but his only marketable skill when he shows up at Sammy's door is a significant drawing talent. Soon, the "boy geniuses" are pitching their respective drawing and writing skills to Sammy's boss, the owner of a company that sells novelties like whoopee cushions and tiny defective radios. 1939 New York is their oyster, as the Amazing Midget Radio Comics are quickly outshone by their star, the boys' creation: the Escapist.

The Escapist becomes a huge, Superman-like hit. The former whoopee cushion salesman makes millions off the copyright while the boys make a tiny fraction of that, but they're content enough as the brains and minor celebrities behind Empire Comics. Nothing is particularly solid, however, in an industry dependent on the whims of American kids. And the guys have their own self-destructive streaks. Sammy struggles with his homosexuality, not the easiest thing in the pre-war era. And Joe feels massive guilt about abandoning his Jewish family to the Nazis' mercy. He sublimates the guilt by saving money to bring them over, and by picking fights with every German he can find in the five boroughs. Any pleasure he finds wracks him, even his sweet relationship with a spunky young artist. So yeah. The party doesn't last long, but somehow it keeps Kavalier and Clay going, through the War and into the bleak 1950s.

Probably the best part of the book is the translation of comic book style into the novel format. The whole thing is highly episodic, from Joe's complicated escape-from-Czechoslovakia story (it involves the Golem of Prague, but not in a way you might expect); to Sammy's, umm, awakening in the ruins of the World Fair with a handsome actor who plays the Escapist on the radio; to Joe's wartime antics as a prototypical soldier-with-nothing-to-lose. The language is highly illustrative, without a single picture anywhere in the book. And the pacing is amazing: the timeline skips around enough so that everything moves along, but Chabon gives so much descriptive detail that you don't feel like you're missing anything. The result is page-turning tension, without being overwrought.

It's not just the structure. The story itself is heavy on comic book mythology: the wish-fulfillment of costumed superheroes who overcome physical weakness (which Sammy can't do) and save the world's persecuted from evil (which Joe can't do). It adds a neat heft to all the characters.

At the same time, it's a shout-out to all the guys who really did bring characters like the Escapist to life. All of Empire's comic book competitors are real (everyone wants the next Superman), and names like Stan Lee pop up every now and then. Orson Welles is there briefly. So it's a cool picture of underground artistry in 1930s/40s New York, too.

Anyway, this is another one I could talk about endlessly if given the chance (where's the book club when you need it?), but who's got the time? I might have a night full of heroic crime-fighting ahead of me.

Parts I liked:

"As he watched Joe stand, blazing, on the fire escape, Sammy felt an ache in his chest that turned out to be, as so often occurs when memory and desire conjoin with a transient effect of weather, the pang of creation....It was, in part, a longing--common enough among the inventors of heroes--to be someone else; to be more than the result of two hundred regimens and scenarios and self-improvement campaigns that always ran afoul of his perennial inability to locate an actual self to be improved. Joe Kavalier had an air of competence, of faith in his own abilities, that Sammy, by means of constant effort over the whole of his life, had finally learned to fake."

[on watching the sudden appearance of "the Escapist" on the outside of the Empire State Building]
"There was something stunned in the faces of the children, blinking and tentative. The slow, dull, dark submarine of the lives in which they were the human cargo had abruptly surfaced. Their blood was filled with a kind of crippling nitrogen of wonder."

On Beauty by Zadie Smith

On the back cover of On Beauty, there's a New York Times blurb: "wonderfully engaging, wonderfully observed...a novel that is as affecting as it is entertaining, as provocative as it is humane."

You know, I never thought I'd agree with Michiko Kakutani, but....

I really loved On Beauty. It might even be on the elusive list of favorites. At the very least, it's near the top of the book club picks. (No offense, James Joyce and William Faulkner.) Zadie Smith's third novel is so full of character detail, fantastic descriptive language, and genuine charm that it's easy to overlook any small flaws. You can barely even see the behind-the-scenes conceit, that it's a modern reworking of Howards End. In the hands of a lot of other authors, that skeleton would be painfully obvious, like dubbing southern accents over a Merchant Ivory film. Here, it's more of a pleasant realization that you're seeing something vaguely familiar, but still refreshing. Think West Side Story.

The book channels its Bloomsbury-era inspiration by exploring whether it's possible to break class barriers (even when your intentions are good), and looking at the small legacies we leave one another. It's set in academia (a Boston-area college that's like pretty much every college/liberal arts department we've all known and loved), and focuses on the Belsey family. The father, Howard, is an art history professor, a British expat, who gets off on university politics much more than on Rembrandt. His African-American wife, Kiki, is his feisty conscience. Their grown kids are born-again Christian Jerome, obnoxious college student Zora, and adolescent Levi, who wants to identify with ghetto kids despite his very middle-class family. They love each other, but they're not the happiest bunch. Howard recently cheated on Kiki with a family friend (and not a one-night stand floozy, as he told his wife). They're not really separated, but not really talking much, either. The kids are isolated, too: no one takes Jerome's Christianity, or any of his emotions, seriously; Zora is completely absorbed in her own little quest to dominate Wellington College politics; and Levi is getting deeper and deeper with a group of unhappy Haitian immigrants, while still pretending that he's going to school and holding down a weekend job. Plus, the family's nemeses, a rival British family headed by a Clarence Thomas-type who once insulted Howard in an academic throwdown, is moving in down the street.

The main plot of the story involves the Belseys moving outward and engaging both the upper class (the rival professor, Monty Kipps) and the lower (Carl, a talented kid from the Roxbury projects with a knack for poetry). The latter becomes part of a campus tug-of-war over affirmative action, and whether kids who aren't paying tuition through the nose can sit in on poetry seminars. The Conservative bootstrap effort is led by Kipps, while his wife and daughter fraternize heavily with the Belsey enemies. Meanwhile, Howard just wants tenure--but his wounded professional pride and his unfortunate libido keep him right in the miserable middle with everyone else. The crumbling marriage is the backdrop for all the chaotic dealings going on outside their house.

This indictment of academia is exactly what I expected/wanted from White Noise, and just didn't get. You don't need absurdism to highlight a system that's already absurd. You just have to describe it well, and Smith does that. She hits all the right character notes, too. Even less fleshed characters, like Jerome and Carlene Kipps (whose bond with Kiki pushes the plot along in very technical ways), don't feel too awkward. Other characters are spot-on--like Zora's pushy Lisa Simpson-ism as overcompensation for physical insecurities. And the poet/professor Claire, whose 60s-style politics and blithe narcissism reminded me of half the English professors I had in college.

But more than anything, I really loved Smith's prose. She has an amazing way of distilling the essence of things into a sentence or two that smacks you right in the face with its accuracy. By the end of the book, I wasn't even tired of the Belseys. I'd gladly read follow-up stories about them. Maybe not another whole novel, but some short stuff in the New Yorker or something. And I enjoyed this one much more than White Teeth. I look forward to what Smith comes up with next.

It was hard to pick favorite parts, but since it would be a shame to waste the Post-It flags littering my copy....

"Jerome said, 'It's like, a family doesn't work any more when everyone in it is more miserable than they would be if they were alone. You know?' Kiki's kids always seemed to say 'you know' at the end of their sentences these days, but they never waited to find out if she did know. By the time Kiki looked up, Jerome was already a hundred feet away, tunnelling into the accepting crowd."

"Mozart's Requiem begins with you walking towards a huge pit. The pit is on the other side of a precipice, which you cannot see over until you are right at its edge. Your death is awaiting you in that pit. You don't know what it looks like or sounds like or smells like. You don't know whether it will be good or bad. You just walk towards it. Your will is a clarinet and your footsteps are attended by all the violins."

"God knows, even the story he ended up giving--a one-night stand with a stranger--had caused terrible damage. It broke that splendid circle of Kiki's love, within which he had existed for so long, a love (and it was to Howard's credit that he knew this) that had enabled everything else."

David Sedaris at Union Square Barnes & Noble

"If you read a story in Esquire and don't like it, there might be something wrong with the story. If you read a story in the New Yorker and don't like it, there's something wrong with you."

Tonight I saw David Sedaris kick off his latest book tour at the Barnes & Noble at Union Square. This is a victory, make no mistake. I have been trying for years to see Sedaris read live. There's always been a fatal scheduling conflict, or sold-out tickets. And my favorite consolation prize, a signed copy of Me Talk Pretty One Day procured by one of my favorite people, sits on my shelf in a place of honor. But I was never able to get to any of the events in Connecticut or Boston.

So today I left work and headed straight to Union Square, well in advance of the 7:00 start time. And I'm so glad I did--not only did I get one of the last seats available and bond with my neighbors, but Sedaris showed up an hour and a half early (!) just to sign books. I decided not to wait in line, but it was still extremely impressive. Even the store employees seemed nonplussed. Usually authors push through the reading, wearily answer some questions, and sigh through the signing line. I've never seen a writer voluntarily show up ahead of time to accommodate more people.

The reading itself was fantastic--probably the best I've ever attended. Sedaris was more energetic, more attractive, and more charming than I expected--definitely more so than he comes across on camera, or even on radio. He read one of the essays from When You Are Engulfed in Flames, and then some hilarious bits from his personal diary. Did I mention the energy? He just kept going. If there weren't eight million more people waiting for signatures after the talk, I'm pretty sure he would have kept plowing through silly jokes and the snippets from his journal.

And the questions were--get this--tolerable. Not a single person asked what his inspiration/influences are. That, my friends, is unprecedented. Unprecedented! The epigraph above came in response to someone's question about how his writing style has changed now that he's been published so much and in so many different places. It was cute.

The whole event was great from start to finish. It also sets the bar high for the next reading to come along. It's probably just as well that I won't be able to go to see Salman Rushdie tomorrow. Fatwa drama is such a downer.

White Noise by Don DeLillo

Disclaimer: I am very much a product of go-go 80s Reaganaut commercialism. I owned the Rainbow Brite dolls created by Hallmark. I nagged my mom to get whichever sugary cereal had the best cartoon mascot. I drank the Kool-Aid--literally!

So maybe that's part of why White Noise, the latest Jacob-Katy book club selection, didn't reach me as deeply as it should have. As a criticism of America's hysterical consumer culture, the book feels like familiar territory. What must have seemed novel to DeLillo and his readers in the early 1980s (pre-internet, pre-cable, pre-Oprah) now feels kinda stale. We know we're surrounded by a hum of constant radiation--we just don't seem to care anymore. Being alarmed about it seems almost quaint and Cold War-ish, like Yakov Smirnoff.

DeLillo chooses to do a sendup of a "normal" family by making his protagonists as wacky as possible: Jack, the Hitler-scholar father; pill-popping fourth wife who reads erotic poetry aloud; ex-wives who all happen to be spies; and an assortment of kids who do super-precocious things like research prescription drugs and have glib opinions about consumerism. They're a boisterous, name-brand-buying crew that functions pretty normally until there's a chemical spill in town, and all the suburban "white noise" overwhelms them. In the resulting panic there's a lot of "I told you so" going on, from the teenage son and Jack's smug fellow professor, who studies Elvis Americana and looks down on suburbia.

By the time the cloud hits, any chance at literary subtlety goes out the window. If DeLillo let the reader infer anything, the book would be more enjoyable. But alas, he does not. Want to parody society's obsession with death? Have two characters argue over who's more afraid to die. Of course. I'm down with absudity, but it's done so self-consciously here. There's no challenge to figuring anything out, because there's always a character doing it for you.

DeLillo's writing is technically fine, and he has some really great descriptive stuff going on. Like Jacob, I just found it hard to connect with any of it. Maybe I should take some Prozac for my apathy, and wash it down with some refreshing Diet Coke.

Sloane Crosley Redux

So continuing our new hobby of Timely Literary Jaunts, SPG and I caught a reading by Sloane Crosley (whom you may remember from last week, or, umm, right below, if this is still on the main blog page). She and Keith Gessen were speaking at Court Books in Brooklyn, in support of their respective first books.

It didn't do much to dispel the theory that we could totally be writing and promoting books like these ourselves as twentysomething editors. But unfounded bitterness aside, it was fun. The whole thing had a fun publishing insider vibe: tiny venue, book publicist/editor authors, young crowd. In fact, the crowd was SO young that the first question came from an actual six-year-old: "How did you make your book?" Good question, kid. She saved us all from having to ask the same thing, even though she was clearly a plant by her Gessen-editor father. Very shrewd!

The next big author event should be a little less intimate and more chaotic: David Sedaris at Union Square. (Yay!)

I Was Told There'd Be Cake by Sloane Crosley

I put a lot of thought into various "what-if" scenarios--especially morbid, what-happens-if-I'm-hit-by-a-bus-today ones. (Not that this stops me from leaving my bed unmade some mornings, or stuffing yet another bag of junk in my closet.) I like to think it's part of my unique charm. So imagine the intrigue when I started reading Sloane Crosley's new collection of essays, I Was Told There'd Be Cake, and was greeted with the following sentences:

Back in the apartment I never should have left, the bed has gone unmade and the dishes unwashed. The day I get shot in a bodega (buying cigarettes, naturally) will in all likelihood be the day before laundry Sunday and the day after I decided to clean out my closet, got bored halfway through, and opted to watch sitcoms in my prom dress instead.

I was hit by three simultaneous thoughts:

1. I could have written this.
2. I did not write this. Curse you, procrastination!
3. Sloane Crosley and I should probably be neurotic BFFs.

Every so often, a book or magazine piece comes along and reminds me that I spent a lot of money on a quasi MFA, and haven't written anything since. But on the bright side, someone's keeping it real for all the urban twentysomething navel-gazers. Crosley's book is a hilarious collection of suburban childhood trauma (or what passes for trauma in happy Westchester kids) and highlights of Generation Y adulthood.

A giant blurb on the front cover has Jonathan Lethem proclaiming that Crosley is from the "realm of Sedaris and Vowell." And while that's technically true, it gives everyone involved some short shrift. Crosley is witty like Sedaris. Except female. And straight. And young. The overlap with Vowell is even more narrow: both are female and funny. Picking the two most popular humor essayists may be a good sales hook, but it's getting old. Why not just throw in Augusten Burroughs, too, for the memoir trifecta?

For the most part, Crosley lives up to the blurb. The essays are self-deprecating and merciless. She moves pretty smoothly between the childish (summer camp) and adult (wanting to have a one-night stand because it always seemed so glamorous), so that it's all one big post-adolescent blur.

So rather than grumble about someone else writing the book I was too lazy to write, I suppose I should show some love for the many parts I liked:

"Suburbia is too close to the country to have anything real to do and too close to the city to admit you have nothing real to do. Its purpose is to make it so you can identify with everything. We obviously grew up identifying with nothing. Then one day you look in the rearview mirror of your existence and realize that you can see clear down the hill-less and curveless and bridgeless road of your life, straight to the maternity ward where you were born. And then you go to college. Where your bland past meekly follows, sluggishly scraping its feet on the floor."

"I'm not exactly sure how the ponies happened. Though I have an inkling: 'Can I get you anything?' I'll say, getting up from a dinner table, 'Coffee, tea, a pony?' People rarely laugh at this, especially if they've heard it before. 'This party's supposed to be fun,' a friend will say. 'Really?' I'll respond, 'Will there be pony rides?' It's a nervous tic and a cheap joke, cheapened further by the frequency with which I use it. For that same reason, it's hard to weed out of my speech--most of the time I don't even realize I'm saying it. There are little elements in a person's life, minor fibers that become unintentionally tangled with our personality. Sometimes it's a patent phrase, sometimes it's a perfume, sometimes it's a wristwatch. For me, it is the constant referencing of ponies.

I don't even like ponies."

Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri

Jhumpa Lahiri writes about Indian-Americans. It's a fact. And a lot of critics (as well as one audience member at her Strand reading two weeks ago) take issue with it. Such a lovely writer...why restrict herself to a small subset of people and circumstances? But what they all seem to overlook is that she uses Bengalis in the way Faulkner uses residents of Yoknapatawpha County--the repetition of geography and particular ethnic themes building a very specific sense of space. That's a big part of why her latest collection of stories, Unaccustomed Earth, is her best work yet.

I loved Interpreter of Maladies and enjoyed The Namesake, and wasn't sure how Unaccustomed Earth would stack up. But as I read, I found myself feeling reluctant to put it down, even though I dreaded finishing the book. Rather than being a rehash of old stories (after all, why mess with a Pulitzer-winning formula?), every story built upon the base. Having already broached the themes of Indian emigration and arranged marriages in the earlier books, Lahiri's free now to reflect on the deeper mechanics of relationships.

In a way, Lahiri moves her previous characters into a post-immigration era. Her new set of characters is almost all second-generation Indian-Americans, with parents who've long since assimilated into Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, etc. One of the most common threads of the book is the transference of anxiety from the parents to the children, who worry not about fitting in with Americans, but with their parents. White spouses, American food, and zero interest in Calcutta-based customs--those are the rebellions. But the rejections of heritage, no matter how small, cause the various protagonists to second-guess their lives, their lovers, and their own legacies. Nearly all of the relationships in the book are marked by this anxiety, tinged with a deeper melancholy than Lahiri's other stuff.

Perhaps the biggest difference in this book --and the most evidence of a maturing perspective--is the examination of marriage. Maybe it's because Lahiri is now married herself and has kids, but she seems especially interested in the ongoing conversation and evolution between two people who've committed to one another. One story features a couple attending the wedding of the husband's old friend/infatuation. Lahiri doesn't take the expected route, the "he still has feelings for the ex" one. Instead, she looks at the protagonist's complex feelings about his wife in general. There's no artificial choice between the old love and the current one.

The book's centerpiece is a trio of stories about Hema and Kaushik, whose lives cross several times. The first story is Hema recalling how Kaushik and his family, friends of her parents, came to stay with them for a month when the kids were teenagers. Hema uses the second person, clearly talking to Kaushik, saying the kind of intimate things you can't tell someone when he's sitting on the couch a foot away from you. The next story is Kashiuk's, and although Hema isn't actually present at all, it's his turn to use the private "you." Their final story, third person, details the most significant intersection of their lives. He's an itinerant photojournalist, and she's a professor about to give in and marry an arranged husband. This was by far my favorite story in the book. "Going Ashore" is such a perfect meeting of plot development, realism, and lush language that it has an extra sparkle. The last few paragraphs actually made me tear up because they were so unexpected--definitely not a common occurrence for me ever, but especially not when reading.

I'm not sure any contemporary writer conveys the love/loss duality like Jhumpa Lahiri does. And if she wants to keep doing it with Bengali characters who live in Boston, fine by me. I'll line up every time and hand over my money.

So much of the writing is beautiful, but there were some standouts:

"These women, with their rich, loose tangles of hair, their sunglasses concealing no wrinkles, were younger than Hema, but she felt inexperienced in their company, innocent of the responsibilities of rearing children and running a household. She had grown used to this feeling over the years with Julian--her position as the other woman, which had felt so sophisticated when their affair began, was actually a holding pen that kept her from growing up. She had denied herself the pleasure of openly sharing a life with the person she loved."

"And wasn't it terrible, how much he looked forward to those moments, so much so that sometimes even a ride by himself on the subway was the best part of the day? Wasn't it terrible that after all the work one put into finding a person to spend one's life with...that solitude was what one relished most, the only thing that, even in fleeting, diminished doses, kept one sane?"

"Kaushik never fully trusted the places he'd lived, never turned to them for refuge. From childhood, he realized now, he was always happiest to be outside, away from the private detritus of life."

The Nine by Jeffrey Toobin

This morning, I watched Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia do the book publicity song-and-dance on Tim Russert's show. He took questions about his judicial philosophy, and tried hard to behave himself. It felt strange. As a kid, all I knew of the Court was what I saw in snippets on the nightly news: confirmation hearings, swearings-in, and stock footage of Anita Hill. Never any selling or cajoling, which is the point of any Sunday morning talk show appearance.

This "better know a justice" phenomenon seems to be a direct byproduct of both the Rehnquist era and the hard work of Supreme Court groupies--er, journalists--like Jeffrey Toobin. His book The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court has all the personality tidbits you could ever want, while laying out many of the significant decisions and issues of the past 25 years. And for someone who's paid attention mostly to anecdotal Court stuff over the years, it's a great narrative of the Rehnquist regime.

The book does have its flaws. Like the adherence to the same handful of issues we hear about over and over in the coverage of the Court. In fact, about fifty pages in, I was afraid the whole book would be about abortion cases (it wasn't, thankfully). Toobin does much better when he gets off the Roe v. Wade path, and talks about the justices' personalities.

Also, Toobin doesn't do much to disguise his own loyalties to the justices. He totally hearts Sandy Day O'Connor. Either she gave the most extensive interviews, or his mother was a WASP-y blonde dynamo. And his dislikes are equally obvious. Calling Justice Thomas "the nation's most famous beneficiary of affirmative action" who opposes the policy for everyone else probably won't get Toobin a seat at the next Thomas dinner party.

All the same, each justice gets his or her share of quirk. Ginsburg and Scalia spend New Year's together, despite bitter philosophical fights. Thomas kept photos on his desk of his clerk's lesbian partner. Breyer can't conduct conversations at a normal decibel. O'Connor made her clerks exercise with her. Rehnquist wrote a song about the Miranda case. Stevens defies all odds by sticking around and holding out for a Democratic president. Kennedy is a Republican who cares what the international community thinks. And Souter is a woodsman who pretends to be Justice Breyer at Massachusetts rest stops.** Souter actually gets some of the funniest moments in the book. Like when O'Connor, the "Yenta of Paradise Valley," tries to fix up the hermit bachelor on awkward dates.

I also enjoyed the insight into Clinton's justice-selection process (we came dangerously close to having to listen to Alfonse D'Amato trying to out-New York Scalia), and the shout-outs to some of my favorite recent cases. Kelo v. New London got a page or two, and even Bong Hits 4 Jesus scored a mention (I believe this is one of Scott's favorites as well, at least until the Court has to rule on the constitutionality of fogcutters).

There's also some heartache mixed in. Turns out I still can't read about Bush v. Gore without a physical tug of revulsion. Knowing that O'Connor came to despise Bush isn't much comfort after her very partisan swing vote put him into office. And I'm more terrified than ever that Stevens will drop dead before November, despite his best efforts to the contrary.

But fears and political ulcers aside, the book is fast-paced and witty. I'm pretty sure there aren't many jurisprudential books that would be compelling enough to make me drag them on the subway.

Some of the favorite parts:

"Meanwhile, Scalia wrote his own dissent, which surpassed even his own high standards for invective and hysteria."

"There, surrounded by many of the most powerful people in the country, Thomas paid tribute to himself for having the courage to agree with them."

"One of his fellow justices once prevailed Souter to take a woman out to dinner, and she reported back that she thought the evening had gone very well--until the end. Souter took her home, told her what a good time he had, then added: 'Let's do this again next year.'"

"At an appearance at a New York synagogue in 2005, Scalia was asked to compare his own judicial philosophy with that of Thomas. 'I am an originalist,' Scalia said, 'but I am not a nut.'"

"At his home in the Naval Observatory, Gore passed the news to his family and watched the coverage on television. At 3:11 p.m., he sent a BlackBerry message to his chief spokesmen, Mark Fabiani and Chris Lehane: 'Please make sure that no one trashes the Supreme Court.'"




**This episode is under dispute by my independent Supreme Court expert. "What's the subset of Massachusetts rest-stop patrons who a) recognize the face of a sitting Justice, b) do not recall the name of said Justice, and c) recall the name of a different, semi-obscure Justice?"

Jhumpa Lahiri at the Strand

Did I say that the Strand was dead to me? I...lied. Sort of. We're still on a break, but I can go when there's a cool event, right? Like a reading by Jhumpa Lahiri, who's been a favorite writer since aught-three.

Having discovered recently that we have the exact same taste in books, Sheryl and I took our book buddy-ness to Union Square after work for the reading. We were way early (it's always so hard to tell when the suffocating literary mob will show up for these things), and after snagging some good seats, we amused ourselves in the children's/YA book sections. Between the old-school books and the fun conversation, good times.

Lahiri's on tour for her new book, Unaccustomed Earth. The reading itself was very professional, if a bit joyless. She read a story that I haven't gotten to yet in the book, but remembered vaguely from The New Yorker a few years ago. Lahiri's public demeanor is interesting. She's not a smiler, and it was hard to tell if she's done this so much that it's boring, or if she's got that jaded Boston-New York thing going on. Anyway, she didn't play up to the crowd, but it worked well with her low-key writing style. And she did thank her editor, which was cute. More people need to thank their editors, and stop squeezing them for money or complaining about deadlines.

Also, she was a good sport about the usual bad Q&A (paraphrased for maximum brutality):

"Clearly, every single one of your Indian-American characters is completely autobiographical. How did you manage to write a character that has a penis? You don't have one."

"Doesn't immigration make you sad?"

"Here's a bad review of your new book that I just read...."

*sigh* People ask the lame questions because they can't ask the ones they really want to know, about the author's personal life. Like, "Do you live closer to Kate or to Sheryl in Brooklyn?"

Anyway, it was a fun night, and I'm looking forward to the next one: David Sedaris!

bookstore breakup

Because I'm still in the midst of a reading binge, I've got a different kind of review for now: bookstore. More specifically, the Strand--home to "18 miles of books," except of course the books you want. The Strand is officially on notice!

It takes a lot for me to denounce (and/or reject) an independent bookstore. But the Strand has failed me repeatedly in the following ways:

1. They never have the books I want. Atonement...Last Exit to Brooklyn...The Sportswriter...and several others. It's dicey to go into a used bookstore with specific titles in mind, but those were hardly rare ones. And in each case, they had every other Ian McEwan book, every other Richard Ford book, etc. They didn't even have Gossip Girl (sorry, Sheryl!), which is not only old at this point, but there are a million copies floating around that people don't want to keep on their bookshelves. Also, neither the main Union Square branch nor the Fulton Street branch had any of the books. This is less the fault of the store than the sellers, but still: disappointing. Their retail books are just as hard to find.

2. They hate short people. When they do have a book I want, it's invariably located on the shelf eight feet above my head. Sometimes, like today, that means going to find a tall, friendly clerk to fetch the book for me. And while I'm usually all for having attractive guys do my manual labor, it's an inconvenience.

3. Manhattan-style space management. For a store that tries so hard to be browser friendly (tables with eclectic picks, lots of cool old books in odd corners), there's no room. The aisles are about two feet wide, which means it's impossible to get around the senior citizen professor browsing the philosophy display, or the hipster girl holding What is the What.

Anyway, it makes me miss my beloved Harvard Book Store something fierce. And it also makes me envious of those who get to visit Powell's in the near future. So in conclusion, Libya is a land of contrasts...and the Strand is dead to me for a little while.

The Family That Couldn't Sleep by DT Max

Sleep and I don't have the best relationship. I know we should spend more time together--in fact, we should be hanging out right now. Sometimes it's just so hard to make the schedules work. However, despite our problems, I don't know what I'd do without sleep.

That's what makes the subject of the nonfiction book The Family That Couldn't Sleep: A Medical Mystery so horrifying. The titular family is an Italian clan, dating back a single ancestor in the 1700s, whose members have a tendency to develop Fatal Familial Insomnia in middle age. FFI victims have a sudden onset of symptoms: since their brains can't rest, the body deteriorates as well. Organs begin to shut down. The person sweats and hallucinates uncontrollably. Even the ultimate coma is a nightmare of thrashing and agony. Finally, maybe months later, the person dies of total exhaustion. Five years later, his sister develops the signs. Twenty years later, it's his niece and one of his sons. It's the family plague.

While tracing the history of the family from that eighteenth-century Venetian doctor through a Mussolini-era local politician to the present day, science journalist D.T. Max takes a harder look at the science behind the disease. It turns out that FFI isn't caused by run-of-the-mill genetic defects, or an unlucky susceptibility to viruses. It's caused by "prions," or infectious particles derived from protein and almost impossible to eradicate. Nobody's really sure what to do about prion diseases. Since the 1950s, doctors and scientists have known that prions exist, and that they cause devastating (and almost always fatal) diseases like FFI and the similar Crutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (one strain of which is mad cow). But there's virtually no treatment available, and definitely no cure. Accurate diagnoses are rare as well; the Italian family had to fight against doctors who assumed nervous exhaustion and/or alcoholism were to blame for the strange tremors and rapid degeneration. Modern British and American people who have CJD aren't having much more luck--especially older ones, whose symptoms are generally assumed to be Alzheimer's.

The sections talking about the mad cow epizootic/epidemic are the most terrifying parts of the book. The fact that the disease is on an invisible timer ("Happy 45th birthday! Remember those burgers you ate all those years ago?"), and doctors can't predict which people will develop symptoms, is bad enough. But then add that countries like England, Canada, and the U.S. know that this disease is generally transmitted by feeding infected cow proteins to other cows, which are then fed to humans--yet they still can't get up the regulatory wherewithal to pull all the infected cows out of the beef population and ensure that farmers are using the proper precautions. Basically, we're all screwed.

(In completely related news, I don't think my birthday dinner will include the usual steak this year.)

if the subject matter is depressing, at least the storytelling is very good. The most disheartening part of the book (after you're done calculating all the beef you've eaten in your lifetime, and figuring out how much quality sleep you really got last night) may be that there's no real resolution. If the book has a drawback, that's it. A "happy" ending isn't feasible, but there's no ending at all. Just the politics of science, with slow drabbles of genuine scientific advance.

Now: who's up for some veggie burgers, followed by a long, luxuriant nap?

Wakefield Redux

"That's the stupidest story I ever heard, and I've read the entire Sweet Valley High series." -- Moe Szyslak

Sweet Valley High is back! And it's got a Gossip Girl makeover. I'm not really pissed that they're making the Wakefield twins a size thinner, or that the girls will drive a Jeep instead of a Fiat. But I'm ticked that they're upgrading it at all. The series is a fantastic representative of the girl genre in the 80s. It's a time capsule--why not leave the original books as such? Don't fear the past, Random House. What's next: Laura Ingalls Wilder getting a hip job as a prairie au pair and texting her friends about it?

At the same time, I'm super jealous that I don't get to be the editor on the relaunch. That's the job I was born to do, dammit! I read dutifully until #100 or so, when it was time to stop and relinquish the brand to the next group of tweeners. As a kid, I studied all the new SVH covers in B. Dalton books, and had most of them read while my parents did other stuff around the mall. I walked out of the library with stacks of the older, 1983-tastic books. I had the board game (I was always Elizabeth). If pressed, I could probably still talk fluently about plotlines and characters.

I hope they don't change the deeply literary prose: Jessica stared at herself in the full-length mirror and saw a picture of utter heartbreak and despair. But what was actually reflected in the glass was about the most adorable, most dazzling sixteen-year-old girl imaginable.

The Year of Living Biblically by AJ Jacobs

Once you've mastered all the knowledge in the world (or at least all the knowledge in the encyclopedia), where do you go from there? Well, if you're AJ Jacobs, Esquire writer and all-around infopreneur, you go for the biggest book of all: the Bible. Jacobs decided to follow up his encyclopedic memoir The Know-It-All with an even more intense test of the academic spirit and his wife's patience: he would live for a year, following every possible rule in the Bible.

Now, that's a lot of rules. And many of them involve things like stoning your fellow citizens--which is, surprisingly enough, not so cool in modern-day New York. But Jacobs makes a pretty good go of it in his latest book, The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible. As an agnostic, his main connection to Judaism is through purely social stuff and slightly wacky relatives. Curious, he wonders what a person misses by avoiding religion, and whether he's depriving his toddler son of a moral and emotional imperative. Hence the quest. But a writerly review of the Bible would be too easy--so Jacobs has to plunge himself, fully committed, into following every rule, every commandment, every suggestion in every book of The Book. (Well, minus the stoning ones.)

A lot of his journey is personal. He talks about growing out his beard (which Leviticus says can't be groomed) for an entire year. He tries to pray, wondering if his newfound piety will make him feel genuinely spiritual. He struggles with the Biblicality of his wife's fertility treatments (is it unnatural, or is it being fruitful and multiplying?). He risks his wife's constant exasperation with the rule that prohibits him from touching a woman while she's "impure" every month, and from sitting on any surface that might have been touched by an impure woman (good luck with that one on public transportation). He faces family drama by connecting up with his zany former uncle Gil, a wannabe cult leader in Israel. He alienates friends with limited conversations (sarcasm is a no-no, brutal honesty is a must) and many, many dietary restrictions. And it's all done in a funny, frank manner that makes you groan and sympathize with everyone who had to put up with him for a year.

The parts that aren't so intimate, which make it a real book and not just a long humor essay in Esquire, are Jacobs's interactions with real spiritual advisors and actively religious people to provide background. So many tidbits were interesting....Like the Orthodox Jewish man who freelances as a clothing-fiber consultant to make sure that one's clothes don't mix wool and linen. Or the aforementioned Uncle Gil, whose Jerusalem dinner parties are a combination of a 1970s Woody Allen movie and Waco.

One of my favorite informational bits was about the Red Heifer, the animal that must be sacrificed, cremated, mixed with water, and sprinkled on one's head for true purification. But the red heifer must be completely unblemished (not a single non-red hair), and have never plowed a field. No problem--except no such cow exists. Apparently there's an international breeding initiative supported by super-fundamentalist Christians and super-Orthodox Jews, because without the cow and its total purification, no one can build the Third Temple. No temple, no Jewish Messiah and battler of the Antichrist. So basically, everyone wants the cow. It's a fascinating project, and one I'd never heard of before. But while it's easy to categorize it as those loopy zealots doing their thing, there are political implications as well. "It's not just that it's zany...it's that it's potentially dangerous. If the red heifer arrives, it'll be seen by some as divine permission to build a Third Temple. Where would it go? On the Temple Mount, which is currently under the administration of Muslims--home to their sacred Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa Mosque. Then it really might be the end of the world." Yikes. Shades of Jesus Camp, which is, to date, the scariest movie I've ever seen.

All around, it's a very entertaining and informative book. Jacobs is really engaging, and isn't shy about making himself look like an idiot to get to some deeper knowledge. I am, however, glad I'm not his (obviously very patient) wife. Remember, kids: never marry a creative nonfictionist. And the next time you see a Moses-y looking guy on public transportation or walking down the street, and you think, "Uh oh, religious nut," be kind. He could have a book deal.

Some of my favorite passages:

"Is half the world suffering from a massive delusion? Or is my blindness to spirituality a huge defect in my personality? What if I'm missing out on part of being human, like a guy who goes through life without ever hearing Beethoven or falling in love?"

"Speaking of dinosaurs, if they were really on the ark, as creationists claim, how did Noah squeeze them all in?

'He put them in when they were younger and smaller. The equivalent of teenagers.'"

"[Gil] talks about his days as a cult leader only occasionally. At one point he grouses about the burden of having forty servants. 'You know what I said every day? "God, get them out of here!" What a pain in the tuchus to have to tell forty people what to do.'

When he finds out that one of the girls speaks American Sign Language, he boasts of the sign language he invented as a cult leader--and how it swept New York in the 1970s.

'I found that a lot of my signs were the same as deaf sign language. Like the word understand.'

Gil puts two of his fingers on his palm.

'You just did the sign for toast,' says the girl. Gil shrugs.

'Well, it wasn't the most important thing that I invented in my life.'"