This Week’s Recommended Books…

Los Angeles: People. Places, and the Castle on the Hill
by A.M. Homes
(21.95$ in hardcover, National Geographic Directions, 176 pp.)

A longish essay that won’t teach you much about L.A. except that A) the Chateau Marmont is a really cool hotel and that B) A.M. Homes is a grumpy, funny, world weary as day-old-coffee writer who I want to read more of. Her collection “The Safety of Objects” is the basis of a film being released by IFC this month so I might start there. Oh and the Chateau is known the world over as a favorite hotel for writers, actors and creative types of all kinds. It’s also where John Belushi croaked.

National Geographic Directions has been doing these little books (send famous writer somewhere and have them write about it) for a few years now. I love series lihe this and would recommend getting them all but NGD is doing such a piss-pour job of promoting them, I can’t. They’re scarely mentioned on National Geographic’s web site and I can’t seem to find them indexed at Amazon either. These sorts of practices are tantamount to open hostility towards readers and I just do go for that.

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
by Mary Roach ($23.95 in Hardcover, W.W. Norton, 224 pp.)

I don’t have much interest in death, not even my own, but these facts are just plain neat….

Did you know that the human head is about the size of a roast chicken? And that Diego Rivera once fed his students human meat? And that anatomy classes will have memorial services for some of the dead bodies?

It’s all in this pretty damn funny book by Mary Roach, who used to be a columnist for Salon.com and does a humor gig for Reader’s Digest. The first line goes something like this.

“The way I see it, being dead is not terribly far off from being on a cruise ship. Most of the time is spent lying on your back.”

I’m so there…

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
($27.00 in Hardcover, FSG, 544 pp.)

Boy gets reborn as girl. 80 years of wild family history in Southeast Michigan. Eugenides went to the same high school as my dad. And just won the Pulitzer Prize for this one. ‘Nuff said.

• Category: Reading and Books