Mistakes We Knew We Were Making

On the bookshelf opposite the bed where I normally sleep, there is a lovely limited edition copy of Alain de Botton's The Art of Travel. It was recommended to me by someone whose opinion I value highly, and the first 30 pages promise a wealth of surprising insight rendered in the kind of prose that makes me want to not only be a better writer, but a better person. In my inbox is a series of emails from Kevin consisting entirely of quotes from David Lipsky's new book "Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself," a memoir about following David Foster Wallace across the country on a signing tour. Here is a sample quote, in which DFW discusses his fame from Infinite Jest:

"There's an important distinction between--I've actually gotten a lot saner about this. Some of this stuff is nice. But I also realize this is a big, difficult book. Whether the book is really any good, nobody's gonna know for a couple of years. So a lot of this stuff, it's nice, I would like to get laid out of it a couple of times, which has not in fact happened. I didn't get laid on this tour. The thing about fame is interesting, although I would have liked to get laid on the tour and I did not."

I'm on a non-fiction bent lately and I've been itching to read both of those. And so of course I read something else. I don't know why. Perhaps it had to do with my insurmountable attraction to books with covers like shiny pieces of candy. I'd read the article "How To Get Divorced by 30" is based on once upon a long time ago, and it made me chuckle a little bit in the same way New Yorker cartoons sometimes do. A mental "heh heh." Like that. Apparently some enterprising editor read it too and pounced, and, unfortunately, together with the author produced this book. On the one hand, yes, I am a bitter literary agency assistant/aspiring writer with no book deal to speak of. On the other hand: there is something to be said for being semi-literate before deciding to write and publish a memoir with your actual name on it.

going together like peanut butter and something that isn't jelly

When I read two books in a row, both good books, but I am too lazy to blog about the first one until I'm blogging about the next one, I am in the tricky position of try to tie them together. Even though I don't have to. You're not my teacher. I have no thesis. My thesis is, Jen is a friggin' rockstar. Bam. But because I'm a nerdy student, I want to connect these two books anyway. So first, we have Orange is the New Black and if that had been the cover of the book at Barnes and Noble, probably wouldn't have bought it cause I do judge books by their covers. And second, Israel is Real. Both non-fiction (check), both about groups of people (check), both brought on unexpected reactions (check).

Orange is the New Black has been written about in a few newspapers and magazines lately and because I developed from my father a taste for voyeur literature (that is, if a book starts with Confessions Of... or The True Story of..., we don't care if it's Kate Gosselin's face on the cover, chances are, we will read it), the idea of reading a book about this young woman who idiotically ran drugs for her girlfriend in her 20s and then realized, hmm, bad idea, turned her life around and ended up in jail for it ten years later was immensely appealing. But while I was expecting my typical voyeur read, "oooh this is what prison is life, badass," I found myself being blown away by what's really a story about learning to ask other people for help, a lesson I can maybe sort of sometimes hear.

AND THAT WAS THE LESSON IN MY COUSIN'S TORAH PORTION LAST WEEKEND AT HIS BAR MITZVAH WHICH BRINGS US TO BOOK TWO! OH SNAP. Excellent transition, self. This is a blog about books and not politics, so I won't go into detail about my thoughts on Israel, as an American Jew, as a Jew, as an American, as someone who assumes relatives died in the Holocaust because apparently some of them were Czech, as someone who definitely went on an indoctrinating trip to Israel in the 6th grade with my temple but spent most of it trying to keep my cds from melting and flirting with a boy from home (I think that was the first and last Jew I've ever hit on for those of you keeping score at home). It's a complex issue. But suffice it to say, I've never seen it as black and white and have always been frustarated by the fact that sometimes I feel my temple and fellow Jews are asking me to. Nothing is as simple as, "I was born Jewish and therefore anything Israel does is a-ok in my eyes." Or at least it's not to me. And that's why I found this book fascinating. Cohen discusses the history of Israel and how, at one point when the Temple stood, Judaism was a temple-centric religion. Everything took place there, everything was for there. When it was destroyed, some scholars made it a book-centric religion, allowing us to wander the globe but retain our Judaism. And then somewhere along the line, Zionism decided to bring it back and make it temple-centric again. It's a really fascinating study of Judaism and Zionism and Israel and why American Jews feel so conflicted about Israel. I'm glad I read it. But I'm also still ok that my Birthright ability expires in 2 months and I haven't done shit about it.


(yes, what I write on the blog is slightly more insane when I write from Cincinnati. there's something in the air here. or it's all the sugar from Graeters.)

Los Angeles Still Reads Books

LA Times Festival of Books is this weekend! Yay!

If you live in Los Angeles and you're going, you should come say hi to me. I'll be that girl in the audience asking too many questions after the panel discussions and annoying the moderators.

Well alright

I'm thinking this blog should be called "Jen still reads books" or "We still read books, only Jen reads real ones and Sarah reads shitty manuscripts for work that will never be published so she won't subject you to reviews about them because probably they would just be endless tirades, and nobody likes to read those. She gets it. You have your own problems to deal with." But that would overstretch blogspot's word limit, and we can't have that, now can we? All I can say is: omg, grad school starting in 5 months. Really hope I still have a working, literate brain at that point. Anyway, one of the bright spots of working at a commercial book-to-film agency, along with access to the fed-ex account, is that every once in a while I discover that we represent an author I actually like. For example, this guy Patrick DeWitt. He wrote a book called Ablutions about the slow disintegration of an alcoholic bartender working on the Sunset Strip. It is brutal and ugly and beautiful and very real. I saw the author speak at the LA Times Festival of Books last year and you can see the truth of every word of the book in the lines in his face. Guy writes like Bukowski if Bukowski were less of a narcissist, more of a poet. Made me feel ok about living in Los Angeles, like beautiful art can come from here. I hope that's true, though I doubt it a lot of the time.

better with age?

For those of you keeping score at home who are wondering where Sarah is, I'd like to remind you that she has a boyfriend and a real(er) job, whereas I spend 1/4 of my day on the subway. So. This week, I read Another Country! James Baldwin is a famous African-American writer who I had never heard of until he was mentioned in Stew's musical, "Passing Strange," because sometimes the public school system fails. And then my literary beloved, Jonathan Lethem, listed Another Country as influential in his writing of The Fortress of Solitude, so I figured it was worth a read. I was right. It's a massive meditation on all the...unwanteds, so to speak, of New York. Not exactly the homeless people sleeping on the subway, but the people who didn't quite fit into society in the 1960s....and let's be honest, today too, to a certain degree. I'll be honest though, the whole time I was reading it, I couldn't wait to read it in another ten years. It's like when I played Anne Frank when I was 17. Being 14 made sense three years later, but I would have sucked if I had been cast when I was 14. The people in this book are in their mid to late 20s and I think I'm too closely aligned to them to fully appreciate how brilliant Baldwin's writing is. I'm too busy feeling kinship and empathy. So I happily placed it on my bookshelf and look forward to picking it up in a few years, after it has had a chance to breath.


Also, totally unrelated to books unless you count Us Weekly and Star, but here are my two favorite things this week:
The Original and the Equally-Funny-But-For-Different-Reasons Parody. I have watched both too many times for them to be as hilarious as they still are.

on a roll!

This is awesome. I don't usually post about the mediocre books, the ones I end up skimming as I people watch on the subway. Sometimes I finish them, sometimes I don't, but I don't usually bother posting about them because...why? Hey guess what, Sarah, I read another sort of ok book. Next time you're at Barnes and Noble, pick it up, read the back, get bored halfway through the synopsis, put it down and go browse US Weekly instead (am I the only one who has started reading this rag again because of Sandra Bullock? oh god I am.). But FOUR AWESOME BOOKS IN A ROW. AWESOME. And with the knowledge that grad school is a-comin' (!!!), my To Read Pile now has a due date, so I can focus on reading books about accounting for the theater and labor relations (seriously, I will soon know these things!). Therefore, I am happy that as I'm plugging along, the books are this good. Clearly, I have good taste.

Oh right, Never Let Me Go. This book reminds me of Caryl Churchill's A Number, another work that ponders that moral implications of cloning by introducing clones to us as soulful human beings. Except I really liked this book and I just appreciated A Number because Churchill...doesn't really do it for me (please don't make me return my Pretentious Theater Snot membership card). The constantly growing realization of everything this book is about makes it impossible to put down, even after you put it down. When I started reading it on the subway the other day, the man sitting next to me freaked out. "Oh my God, I just finished that book! And...wow. What do you think? Cause like, it's so...Orwellian, right? Or maybe not. But....wow." To which I responded, "I am one chapter in but um, it's cool. I think." But now I understand his stammering.

Side note, this is being made into a movie with Carey Mulligan, Keira Knightley and Andrew Garfield (Shannon's boyfriend, Sarah) and I actually have hope it will be awesome because this casting seems so ridiculously on the money.