The Glass Castle

Ah, another mom book. You would think I would change this blog's title to Distracted by MOM by now, wouldn't you? If only I wasn't a mid-40's man who is confounded by technology I would, but that's for another day.

So you've probably heard of this book by now. It spent 100 weeks on the NY Times best-seller list. It's being adapted into a major motion picture by Paramount (With Claire Danes as Jeanette Walls, fingers crossed!). You're probably all like "Luke, when are you going to review an obscure book that I haven't heard of instead of all this best-seller book club crap?". Well, now that I live very far away from mom and don't have to hear her ask how come I'm not reading all the books she gives me I might get around reading something a little darker, more obscure, and have some things to say about it.

NOT! I love these mom books! Their easy as hell to read, full of apple-ripe juiciness, and use really small words and familiar cliches to keep things movin'.

The Glass Castle is a crazy fucking memoir, and that's the best way to make 'em. Can you imagine reading a memoir about how I lived on an idyllic 3 acre plot and lived a relatively carefree childhood burning caterpillars and jumping off of trampolines into nettle patches (well, can you? and would you be willing to pay 29.95 to relive it?). I know I wouldn't. Snooze Alarm. Boooooooring! But The Glass Castle is different. Replace "idyllic" with "hellacious" and "3 acre plot" with "broken down jalopy" and add on some truly crazy-ass parents and now you're cookin' with memoir-gas.

Notice how I rarely talk about the plots of books? Why is that? It's called niche marketing, dummy. I figure since all the other book review blogs and odds and sods spend most of 90 percent of the time giving away major plot devices, I'd rather just give you the Distracted by Pages treatment. Which is to say, I'm Distracted by Pages (tm) of other books right now that I need to read, so here's the low-down: Fun, crazy memoir with some decent writing, but not a work of art as the cover quote would lead you to believe. Read it in a night or two, or just wait for the movie to come out.

Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven

Every once in a while my mom tries to push a book on me that has a chick on the cover, or like flowers or some Thomas Kincade-y, soft-focus beach front and it will have a name like "Heaven's Orchids" or something like that. Usually I'll lie and be like "Mom, I'm already reading a book" when I really mean "Mom, I need to finish watching every video that ever existed on Hulu" and she'll smile at me and pat me on the head because I am the good, intellectual son she's always wanted.

So I was surprised when I agreed to read this and actually did and really enjoyed it and passed it on to some other people. At first I thought it was gonna be some self-discovery travel bullcrud where I am condescendingly told how amazing it is to be around poor people (as long as you stay at a 4 star hotel) and how important it is for the soul to backpack through Europe (as long as you have a lot of money to stay in a 4 star hotel when you get sick of camping in wine fields). Turns out, it wasn't (really) and it was a great read.

Basically, this is a memoir about a girl traveling to the People's Republic of China a week after it was officially opened to outsiders in the early '80s. I don't want to give away too much, but it's a pretty insane adventure, and there's a weird sense of intrigue foreshadowed throughout the book that pays off pretty well in the end, which is something that puts it above other travel memoirs and makes it a real page-turner (okay, that's the last time I use that cliche, I swear).

Give this one a shot if you feel like taking a trip through China with a pretty solid narrator. It's thoroughly entertaining and definitely worth the few days you'll spend blazing through it.

Um

Boy o boy, have I been distracted by pages(tm)! So distracted. Every time someone calls me up for a late night outing, I say "sorry! I'm working very hard at finishing this book so I can update my blog which only four (very important and loyal) people seem to read!". If only I had health insurance that covered all of the blisters and paper cuts from the non-stop page-turning I would read EVEN MORE.

So here's the deal: I've read quite a few books, but I want some input from you four (very important and loyal) guys (girls, actually). Which one should I review next? They all were pretty interesting, but I thought I'd let my burgeoning internet fanbase decide.

-American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis

-The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Steven Chbosky

-This is Water by David Foster Wallace

-Free: The Future of a Radical Price by Chris Smith

-James Dean: The Mutant King (Biography) by David Dalton

eh?

Brief Interviews With Hideous Men

Hey guys! I've been reading, I swear. I know it doesn't seem like it because this internet blog is getting internet dust all over it's internet cover, but books are being read. Trust me, I've got a whole ante-chamber in my large Victorian mansion FILLED with large, musty tomes that I plow through nightly in my satin smoking jacket and large slippers. I'm totally NOT sitting on the internet 8 hours a day playing banner-ad games and obsessively refreshing facebook every 5 minutes. That would be a waste, and I am not a wasteful person.

My personal collection; JD Salinger lives on row 12.

Amidst the clutter of my thick, hard-bound and gilded medieval book library, sandwiched in between my unabridged War and Peace and Voltaire collection, I happened upon a book by a contemporary author (I was so shocked I almost torched it on my gothic candelabra, until I realized it was 7 years overdue at the public library). Quelle horror! I gave it a glance and realized it was written by a young man named David Foster Wallace, and since all respectable authors and serial killers go by three names, I thought I would give it a shot (and maybe it might even be an autobiography about a serial killer!)

Turns out it wasn't, but it was still great. David Foster Wallace is an author everyone should know about by now, but for some reason, even when I'm at my high-falutin' literary conventions, I tend to get blank stares and tired yawns when I mention his name. He wrote the critically acclaimed Infinite Jest, which Collin Meloy is urging everyone to read right now, and he has pretty much changed the game for writing and inspired a new generation of writers with his prose and hyperkinetic, pomo style.




Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, which is also a movie that John (Jim) Kracinzky (from The Office) directed, is definitely a little more challenging than some of his other work, but also still accessible in its short story format. The basic jist of the book is an interviewer is conducting interviews with men (who also happen to be pretty hideous) and there are other stories intertwined. Actually, I'm not even sure I can explain it. Basically, this book might blow your mind or it might make you throw it against the wall and vow never to read DFW again.

All of my snarky words and hi-larious asides can't really do any of his books justice, so I'll just say it how I've been saying it: There's a reason Jim from the Office took time out from fake-boning Pam to try and make this seemingly unfilmable movie; It's really fucking good. If you need a primer to DFW (scaredy-pants), go read A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again and read the cruise ship and state fair essays to see if you like his style. Otherwise, go back to ignoring one of the most exciting authors of the last half-century and reading vampire novels (though there's nothing wrong with that, as long as you do it in your OWN personal library/dungeon).

I'm Only Into Hard Sci-Fi: A Scanner Darkly and Pattern Recognition

A Scanner Darkly came out a few years back in film form. It had Robert Downy Jr. and Keanu Reeves and some other famous actors in it, but you can't really verify it since they are all covered up in animation via a technique known as 'rotoscoping'. After reading the Philip K. Dick book the film was based off of, I eagerly tried to watch it since it was on Netflix's "Instant Watch" database, but after about 30 minutes I decided I only really like Keanu Reeves in real-world flesh format and stopped it. That's the miracle of Insta-watch, baby. No guilt at abandoning a movie, since it's always there to come back to (as long as my roommate keeps letting me use the password on her account).

Now where were we? Oh, shit, the book. Books: so much better than movies. Almost always (unless its a book based off of a movie, of course, like those shitty Star Wars novels).




A Scanner Darkly: The Book was my first introduction to Philip K. Dick. Typically, when confronted with anything that has the remotest tinge of "sci-fi" to it I say "PASS!" and try to find the alcoholic memoir/dysfunctional family section of the book store; I like my books based in reality, for some reason, while I tend to like my movies based in escapism: don't ask.

I picked up A Scanner Darkly with some hesitation. Are there going to be a bunch of weird alien race names I'll never be able to remember and a holodeck? I asked myself. Fortunately, the book comes out of the gate with some straight 70's be-bop shit and makes it clear that while this is set in the "future" (1992, yet there's no mention of Saved By The Bell or Super Mario), the book is way more grounded in a slightly alternate, drugged out reality based on the post-Nixon era.

I'll just sum it up for ya: there's a reason a lot of respectable people (sans Reeves) put the time and effort into making this a movie and its because it's fucking awesome. I can't really describe it much more than the first half makes you feel like you're on drugs like a cybernetic version of "Electric Koolaid Acid Test" and the second half makes you feel like you're mind is exploding into the future. Verdict: read this shit now, before you forget how to read books. Or just see the movie if you're lazy; it's not half-bad (based on the first half I saw).



Okay. This is a two-parter. I also read William Gibson's Pattern Recognition, which, like Darkly, I thought was gonna be some bugged-out, future sci-fi mumbo-jumbo, but turned out to be based in a pretty normal, present-day reality. The trick that Gibson turns is he runs the prose like his usual cyberpunk haiku's, which makes you feel like you're in some flipped-out version of Akira but pretty much everything in the book-universe he's created has already happened and exists in the real world.




I'm not sure if that makes sense, but this will: I liked the book until about half-way through, when you start to realize this book is very well written, but still a pretty boring mess with half-assed characters and some twists that seem straight out of a bunch of bad young adult fiction. I finished it out, like a trooper, because my roommate recommended it, but after this and Spook Country, I've decided he really isn't my cup of tea. Go Dick or go home is what I say (and that's what she said, too).


Next Up: Brief Interviews With Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace and American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis.

Jonathan Franzen: Two Books

The Discomfort Zone is a memoir thinly veiled as a collection of essay's by the author of the Nation Book Award winning novel The Corrections. It's funny, occasionally heartbreaking, and gives you insight into the inspiration for the charmingly dysfunctional Lambert family, which is Franzen's own curious childhood.

While the book is scant in pages, it's infinitely readable, filled with tons of hilarious stories and thought-provoking digressions. This is definitely a writer at the top of his game, although you feel like he's sometimes omitting a lot, perhaps to fill another book with. Speaking of filling other books, when I was at the store, I decided to pick up another Franzen book since it was used and relatively cheap.




(Plus the cover possessed a weird metaphysical element to it while I was standing in the bookstore, even though I hardly think I resemble a bookish blond woman (I had to double-check to make sure it wasn't my roommate, Donald Dunbar, too).)

Anyway, don't pay money for this book. Instead, try and find the one essay worth reading in here online, which I believe is titled "Why Bother?" and was published in Harper's in 1996. It's a pretty insanely ambitious essay for an at-that-point unestablished writer, and it hits its mark pretty well, although he makes it clear that the book contains a highly edited and revised version.

Pretty much everything else in here seems kinda rambly, half-baked, or severely outmoded. A lot of the essays are from the late 90's and are about television and technology, and while they contain some interesting ideas and moments of elucidated prescience, they evoke the haughty breathlessness and invective of early Naomi Klein. He does a pretty good sociological dis-assemblage of the severely effed-up Chicago Postal Service, as well as a kinda interesting look at some of Gaddis' work, but you start to think that he published this as a way of cashing in, because the tone, authorship, and content of the rest is pretty dull. Skip this one and read The Corrections if you haven't, and then check out The Discomfort Zone.

Water For Elephants

Chosing what book to read can be daunting. Unlike a movie, or YouTube video, where you commit yourself to a certain amount of time, you never really know how long a book is going to take. I've read 500 page novels that go by in a few days, and itty-bitty novellas with dense, florid prose that seem to take months. On top of the time issue, there is the whole guilt-factor, and the many different levels of it, when you decide that enough is enough, and this book is just not doing it for you.

One more thought before getting into this book review: lately I've found myself reading very similar type books. Thinking books. Books with rich themes and poetry, oftentimes laden with nihilism and darkness. After reading Water For Elephants I can now say that I see the cooling refreshingness in reading something as escapist and ephemeral as Sara Gruen's debut novel.

This book follows a very classic format and feels almost like low-reaching cinema in some ways: A young man leaves town, undertakes a new life he would have never imagined by joining the circus, falls in love, encounters problems and obtains resolutions, fights a nemesis, and all while undergoing the adventure of a lifetime. I don't mean to sound cynical, and if I do, it's only because I'm used to books that have such untraditional formats and plotting devices.

Despite following this familiar narrative, Water For Elephants is pretty fun and occasionally transporting. You feel like you are at the Big Top, with a frequently rotating cast of surly roustabouts and clever carnies. The pacing of the book is very good, too, as its caterwauling speediness and efficiency often parallels the rollicking attitude of a depression era circus.

My Mom recommended this book to me. It's really a total mom book; It even has book club questions in the back (along with a powells.com interview with my old co-worker Dave Weich!). I still liked it though. Give it a shot if you've got a gray weekend going on and need a little swirling color in your head, or, if you just want to escape to the circus for a few days.

American Wife

I read American Wife for two reasons: Curtis Sittenfeld wrote a book I happened upon called Prep that I was surprised to find myself liking, and the Inauguration was about to happen. I also wanted something with some emotional and acute observational depth, both things Prep had an inordinate degree of, and I wanted something that read easily.

American Wife is about Laura Bush, but not really. It's more of an autobiography of someone I doubt Sittenfeld has ever met, accompanied with a vast artistic license. While most things in this semi-fictional retelling of the Bushes lives actually happened, Sittenfeld twists things subtly enough to make them feel fresh and real. American Wife has a lot of good things going on for it, but it seems massively uneven, and quite frequently lacks a center of gravity to keep it from becoming more than a spruced-up rehash of a story we're already mostly familiar with.

While her other book Prep has an incredibly likable, three-dimensional protagonist, Sittenfeld possesses a weakness for surrounding her central characters with very flimsy secondary characters. In American Wife, the stand-in for Laura Bush, Lindy Blackwell, doesn't have the element of realness and likability to hold the some five-hundred pages together, especially when her character is merely buffered with are lazy stereotypes of George Bush and his cronies. It's also very hard to like a character, no matter how well written, who is willfully and happily married for many years to a very unlikable buffoon.

Ultimately, I did enjoy this book, partly due to its gimmick occasionally working and giving true insight into the fallibility of a presidential couple. Also, Sittenfeld is quite often a very masterful writer, communicating ideas and emotions very accurately and very bluntly. She always seems to choose the right words and have very economical sentences and structure. It is unfortunate that, despite her talents, the overall narrative lacks the same depth and nuance of one of the worst presidencies ever to befall our nation.

I would recommend this book at the moment because it really does make you think about how love and politics can be such a separate thing, and with a new President and First Lady entering the office, it definitely sheds some light on the reality of the function of a presidential wife. Although I am still grasping for whether or not it answers some fundamental questions about how those love and politics co-exist, the book definitely poses some interesting questions and keeps you thinking about how people can end up in any situation so quickly and unexpectedly.

Welcome to my book blog

So I'm starting a book blog. This is part New Years resolution, part desire to write about books I've read, and part challenge to myself to push myself to read more books and less internet junk. In this blog I will:

-most likely write in complete sentences
-tone down the "snark-factor" a few notches
-write thoughtful but probably brief reviews of books I have read
-attempt to sound smarter than I have in the past few months

Here's the first two books I've read in 2009:

Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

This is the new book by the same guy who wrote Blink and The Tipping Point. It's basically a study of what social, ancestral, and cultural elements cultivate successful people. I've always loved Gladwell's very layperson-y way of talking about complex sociological issues in an endearingly narrative fashion. In other words, he lets real life stories pave the way for his theory, as well as dictate the overall rhythm of his book.

He gives good examples of how luck and circumstances have so much to do with why some people are so extraordinarily successful, while also outlining how those who have obvious innate talent can miss opportunity. It's pretty fascinating thinking that if Bill Gates hadn't had a large sequence of events occur in his life, he probably would have ended up a very different person.

I would definitely recommend this book if you want to let your brain do some big thinkin'. I'm totally into it because I was a Sociology major, but it's so engaging and well-told that anyone can get into it without to many thought hurdles.

Travels With Charley by John Steinbeck

I recently picked this up because I had read the State by State book, which takes the 50 states and has an author, usually from the region or at least associated with it, write about it. It was based on the WPA project started by the FDR administration, wherein many of the great writers of that era struck out into the country to document each of the states.

Travels With Charley is like a companion to these books, in the sense that Steinbeck does a tour around the US with his dog, Charley, and tries to find a unifying theory for what makes us American. While that sounds a bit cheesy, Steinbeck injects a pretty good narrative thread and pace throughout the book, detailing events and areas that stood out the most to him.

I really liked it because 1) it inspired a sense of freedom and wanderlust in me and 2) Steinbeck is a pretty keenly observant person and seems to note a lot of stuff that is still prevalent in American culture, without being too overtly judgmental or nostalgic about it.

Good read for when you get tired of being rooted in one place and want to have someone take you on a whirlwind tour.