Category: Reading and Books

Backstory: I always buy a hardcover book on my birthday, something I’ve been keeping an eye on but can’t justify buying in hardcover. I dug Sittenfeld’s essay on lit groupies in the New York Times (even wrote a reply) but didn’t know much about Prep and felt, somewhere, I’d only be buying it to read about grouping sessions in the P.E. supply closet. But your birthday is when you let such defenses down.

Notes: 4 years in the life of Lee Fiora, a lower middle class kid from Indiana at an exclusive prepatory school in Massachusetts. I think she’s been called “Holden Caufield in a kilt” although she lacks HC’s brazen and misdirected confidence. By a whole lot.

Verdict: I love books, movies, TV, anything about the high school experience. My father and I watched Dawson’s Creek together for most of the length of its run. Proudly. But you’re bout 150 pages in before you realize that Sittenfeld is telling the story backwards, that Lee is older and has, we hope, learned a few things. Sittenfeld inhabits both halves of her protagonist with complete confidence. This isn’t another annoying tale of pubecent self-absorption or a smug cultural shooting gallery with WASP privledge as the ducks. She plays fair with her text, a coming of age tale in the archetypal sense. Lee goes to class, has crushes, makes friends and loses them, fights and makes up with her roommate. It’s all been done before but Sittenfeld seems to know that. She focuses on character instead of milestones, making Lee a real person, someone we might pity but are more than interested enough to spent 409 pages with. There are times when her whining never stops and her self-analysis sounds rote rather than inspired but they are rare enough not to distract from Prep’s achievement: A novel about high school that doesn’t make you wince or look away in predictibility.

Recommended. If you’re into this sort of thing.

My friend Elizabeth Spiers spells out in 800 words what I’ve been yammering about for 3 years. And better. She’s going to put me out of a job.

I’ve been tagged.

1. How many books do I own?

Hard to say. They’re scattered all over the house, my office, next to the bed, tilting dangerously off the top of the living room cabinetry. But if I had to guess? About 1100, or one for each square foot.

2. Last Book I Bought:

Everybody into the Pool by Beth Lisick at ACWLP in San Francisco. I buy a hardcover every year on my birthday.

3. Last Book I Read:

The Day of the Locust by Nathaniel West. Finished it ten minutes ago.

4. Five Books That Mean A Lot To Me:

1. And the Band Played On by Randy Shilts
2. Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury
3. Random Family by Adrien Nicole LeBlanc
4. The Impossible H.L. Mencken: A Selection of his Best Newspaper Stories
5. Trumpet of the Swan by E.B. White

5. Tag Five More:

Mark Sarvas
Dave Thomas
Erica Olsen
Sarah McCauley
Wendy McClure

Powells.com is having a contest where you can win 15 books recommended by the contributors of Bookmark Now as the books that changed their lives. I think the contest was supposed to stop yesterday but it’s still up on their website so hurry! hurry!. Enter here.

Backstory: I’ve been trying to get to this book for 2 years. Finally I just bumped to the front of the line.

Notes: Inspired by a an actual incident, a group of terrorists seize a birthday party of a wealthy Japanese industrialist being held in a nameless South American country. On hand are that country’s Vice President, several diplomats and the world’s most famous opera singer. Over months of standoff, terrorists and hostages realize a bond neither of them thought they had, a bond betted by a love of beautiful music.

Verdict: Patchett’s command of language, mood and setting are masterful. At first I objected that her tone–polite, even a bit aloof–seemed a rather cruel way of discussing hostages and home invasions. But even though she takes her time, it makes sense if you can hang in there with her.

Two minor objections: The characters are mostly servicable types rather than real people, which didn’t bother me all that muh and the ending is an irrational rush to tie everything up. Still recommended.

Title: I’m Not the New Me: A Memoir

Author: Wendy McClure

Relationship: Touring buddies. Wendy and I are both on book tour this summer and have friends in common. So we started bonding by email and have had lunch in our respective cities. We’ve also geeked it up by wandering into bookstores and asking for each other’s books.

Synopsis: Comic memoir about attempts to lose weight

Acquired: Wendy’s publisher Riverhead sent me about 95,000 copies. Was it something I said?

Excitement: Author’s got talent coming out of her ears. I’ve been reading her blog for about a year now and would probably be entertained by her transcription of the phonebook.

Early Verdict: I’ve had my own issues with wieght loss and didn’t think it was a good attic to go digging around in while on a book tour. But we’re in the later weeks of Summer of Bookmark Now and I’ve been hanging with Wendy here in Chicago. I’ve been thinking that one is lucky to have funny, talented friends and their projects are cause for celebration. So I’m bumping this to the front of the line, for the downetimey fall.

Backstory: I’ll read anything Sarah Vowell does. And buy it in hardcover. So when I saw this one at The Booksmith, I grabbed it immediately and moved it to the front of the queue. I started reading it maybe a week later and soon it was following me on the bus, to the gym and the bathtub. At 250 pages and change, it didn’t last long.

Notes: Sarah Vowell got fascinated with presidential assassinations and takes a road trip to visit historical sites even tangentially connected with the killings and deluted little men who pulled the triggers. Her friends, sister and nephew come along. Wisecracking and trivia abound, which is more than ok by me.

Verdict: Vowell, a self-proclaimed Americana nerd, will always be a favorite of mine. I just find her prose and normally her attitude, smart, funny and compulsively readable. Which is why I’ll probably still buy her books even when they let me down. Vowell focuses resolutely on the deaths of Presidents Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley which just be all that interests her but not even mentioning Kennedy, Lee Harvey Oswald or why they aren’t included seemed bratty to me. Yes, we all been conspricacy-theoried to death. So say so and move on. Not mentioning it at all is like devoting a book to American car companies and leaving out Ford.

Also we’re definitely reading a successful author at work here. The scrap and cynicism of Take the Cannoli and Partly Cloudy Patriot has been replaced by a vague sense of humoristic entitlement, of too many jokes forced into too many awkward places because the writer thinks every utterance she makes is hilarious. or at least believes we should think so. Most of them are but the presumption, as a reader, left me edgy and a little uncomfortable. Which is why I can’t recommend AV as heartily as I can Sarah Vowell’s earlier books, much as I would like to.

G Dog and the Homeboys: Father Greg Boyle and the Gangs of East Los Angeles by Celeste Fremon

Backstory: I heard Father Greg Boyle interviewed on "Fresh Air" and ordered the book immediately. I’ve been interested in gangs since I saw Colors as a diluted white, suburban teenager in 1988. 

Notes: I cannot say enough about what a fabulous book this is. And not just because the subject  (Jesuit preist devotes his life to ministering to latino gangs in East  L.A.) yanks at your heart. It’s fabulous because, in quiet defiance to the commandments of New Journalism, Fremon speaks openly about her own investment in her story. A lesser writer would come off as self-indulgent. Fremon comes off as both politically strident and heartbreakingly honest. She argues that gang policy based on crackdown and lock-up not only doesn’t work but erodes community trust in law enforcement. Investment in at-risk-youth, while expensive, time consuming and politically inefficient, works. Greg Boyle now runs Homeboy Industries, a jobs and business program staffed entirely by ex-gang members, the largest of its kind in the world.

Verdict: Lovely, lovely, lovely. Read it immediately. Then re-read Random Family by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, my favorite book of 2003.