Read Recently #7: Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell

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 The scrap and cynicism of Take the Cannoli and Partly Cloudy Patriot has been replaced by a vague sense of humoristic entitlement, of too many jokes forced into too many awkward places because the writer thinks every utterance she makes is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.

• Category: Reading and Books