The Best Kind of Guide Book

Were it not for my beloved Sarah, I would never have picked up Birds of America. For one thing, it sounds like a guide book to my least favorite species (they are going to poke out my eyes with their evil beaks and they carry diseases in their dirty dirty feathers and nasty feet!) and for another, short stories are tricky business for me. I'm particular about the short story books I pick up because I have to get engaged several times, not just once. That takes mad skill, especially with my currently wandering mind. But of course, Sarah was right, the book was brilliant. I wish I could see the world the way Lorrie Moore does. Also, I wish I could see the world the way Sarah does. I miss you, lady.

Ignorance is Bliss?

Reading is a dangerous passion. It encourages sitting on a couch, wrapped in a blanket with a mug of something warm on a nearby table. No matter how horrible what goes on in the book you're reading, it's just a book. You can put it down to answer a phone call or meet a friend for dinner or even just clip your toenails. It makes being complacement easy. So the Voice of Witness series is both incredibly valuable and incredibly difficult to take. These books confront you with things going on right now that you can do something about. Closing Out of Exile, putting it on a shelf and forgetting about it until the next time someone asks me to recommend them a nonfiction book is impossible. This book is a compilation of various Sudanese refugees' stories. Many of them live in Cairo, some are in other African countries, a few are in the United States. Nobody's story has a happy ending, there are just happier and less sad endings. And they aren't even really endings, because who knows what happens next? One chapter ended with a post-script, describing the narrator's death. If you're willing to open yourself up to this, read this or any book from Voice of Witness, but know what you're in for.

The Kind of People Who Wear Lobster Print Trousers

Judging by the title, I expected this to be a novel about the chafing caused by Brooks Brothers' trousers and how awkward it is to be named Chas Pennyworth VI. I kinda wish it had been. Cause I dunno, man. If you're gonna tempt me with a book about the elite of Boston and open with a prologue describing how far back our leading character's family goes in American history, can the story not be about a girl who just graduated from college and doesn't know what she's doing and her stoner friend who doesn't know what he's doing and her rich dad who knocked up the Spanish nanny and her sad lonely mom and her awkward precocious brother? I imagine Chas Pennyworth VI's life was way more exciting.

Septimus, what is carnal embrace?

Engrossed in all the drama and minutia of moving, I have started two books, one I will certainly never finish as it is now propping up my bed on the slanted yet charming pre-war floor of my new apartment. The other I am enjoying partially because it is good on its own merits and partially because it doesn't require much of my brain, which is great since I don't have a lot to give right now. I can't focus on anything, my mind wanders back to thoughts like, "I live in New York now" and "It's cold" and "Whyyyy didn't I notice how much this floor slants when they were showing me the apartment?"

Times like now, it's nice to return to an old friend and I have spent my Columbus Day, when not being awkwardly flirted with by the sketchy dude installing my air conditioner, re-reading Tom Stoppard's Arcadia. Lovely. I am somehow ready to re-engage with the world and ask questions of it, though none will ever be as eloquently phrased as Stoppard's. Reading Stoppard is almost depressing; he makes the most complicated issues of life seem so simple and he phrases it so beautifully that you have the urge to write his quotes on every blank piece of paper you have and to always be reminded that no, this is what love is, this is what beauty is, this is what life is.

We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of ARchimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?

Twilight of the Superficial

Twilight of the Superheroes took me a month to finish because I kept falling asleep. At first I thought the problem was me. After all, reviewers in publications with familiar names described it in terms usually reserved for the likes of Alice Munro and Philip Roth. "Magic," muses Newsweek. "Dazzling," laughs Time Out New York. "The most important work of fiction published this year," cries the Cleveland Plain Dealer. But no. It isn't me. This book may be all of those things but above all it is also aggressively boring. Perhaps I shouldn't criticize. I mean, where's my MacArthur Genius Grant? But, ok, listen. Someone needs to tell every contemporary literary fiction writer who grew up or now lives in Manhattan that it's ok not to write about wealthy New York families with problems. It just is. Adding in a cursory reference to 9/11 or the Iraq War or the economy doesn't fix things. It only highlights your odd absorption with this tiny, increasingly irrelevant population. The writing is lyrical and beautiful, and Eisenberg teaches at one of the top MFA programs in the country. So why does each story in this collection feel ripped from the headlines of the NYT Thursday Styles section?

postscript: Oh, excuse me, "Home & Garden"

post post-script: At first I accidentally typed Home $ Garden. That made me laugh, probably too much.

post post post-script: I just got mad rageful over a book of short stories nobody I know will ever read. Think it's maybe time to go outside.

Betrayal

Halfway through this book about a weeklong global quest to get rid of a huge sum of money quickly and honor the memory of a recently deceased friend, the companion of our narrator interrupts the story to inform us it is all a lie. He is writing from New Zealand to tell us the only true thing about the 300 pages read thus far is that the narrator did die in Colombia after the completion of this book and they did go to Senegal and Morocco and Estonia. And then I'm supposed to read the next hundred pages and suddenly, I don't care because it's not true. Even though it was never true. It's a work of fiction. But I feel betrayed by this fictional dude I've just spent all these hours with. What the crap, man? Why'd you lie to me, your new best friend? What'd I ever do to you but be interested in you and your crazy shenanigans?

And that's when I realized I need more real friends.