Also, Also, Also

Joel sent me this article about the lost art of reading.

If you read this blog you could probably submit to this.

The Gangsters

If you've ever tried to read Knut Hamsun's Hunger only to discover that it takes three months and an insane amount of willpower to get past the first 40 pages (and honestly, who hasn't? Right?), you might give Herve Guibert a try instead. Guibert is Hamsun-lite, equally dark and funny but a little less manic. Also, he writes novellas. As you may have noticed: we are all about novellas. In this one, the narrator, a not-so-fictional version of Guibert himself, is a sardonic young Parisian writer embroiled in a number of romantic intrigues with beautiful, aloof young men. His two great-aunts, Suzanne and Louise, get robbed of millions of francs by a team of shady contractors. Rather than stick around and deal with the bungling French policemen, he leaves the old ladies to fend for themselves and takes off with a lover for the coast. On the trip, he writes letters and drifts into memories of his scandalous sexual affairs. He may or may not get murdered at the end. I don't know. It is all very French. From what I've read about Guibert, he was an OG hipster, a bisexual journalist and photographer who worked at Le Monde and ran in circles with Barthes and Foucault. He writes pretty much the way you would expect, his voice a blend of morbidity, self-loathing, exceptional wit and extreme arrogance. (Sample line: "Once, at dinner my friend Philippe informed that, scientifically, suffering was such a mystery that one could almost say that it did not exist.") Also, dude was H-A-W-T, especially if you can look past the whole contracting AIDS and passing it along to his lover and his lover's wife, then committing suicide at the age of 36 bit. 

Johnny Tremain Did It Better

No joke, every time I hear the word "apprentice," I think of Johnny Tremain, this book I had to read in junior high about a silversmith's apprentice who accidentally pours hot silver over his hand and horribly disfigures himself. I don't remember what happens next, I think he and his crippled paw helped lead America to victory in the Revolutionary War or something, but he is eternally what I think of when I think of "apprentice." And sorry, Bill Buford, although you totally look like someone's cool grandpa in the jacket photo, you didn't come close to challenging that position.

I have a lot of respect for Ol' Bill. It takes balls to decide you love something and want to pursue it despite all logical and sane knowledge to the contrary, even if you do know in the back of your head a lucrative book deal is imminent. Bill Buford "gave up" his writing career to work in the kitchen of Mario Battali's famous restaurant, Babbo. For anybody who has ever eaten in a bustling restaurant, this is fascinating, this look behind the scenes. But then he goes off to Italy to learn how to make pasta from grandmas and how to butcher pigs from The Maestro and he totally lost me. Maybe it's the whole me-not-eating-meat thing that made these portions of the book less than...let's say, appetizing? I don't think that's what it is though. Sometimes, these special, life-altering experiences just don't translate to the outside world. The last 1/3 of this book is the equivalent of me describing to Sarah what it was like when I went to the Tony Awards when I was 13 but without the fun and/or danger of possibly losing an eye to an emphatic arm gesture.

And The Scandinavians Win Again

Machine by Danish writer Peter Adolphsen is about the untimely drowning of a fox-terrier sized horse from the Pleistocene period. It is also about a one-armed Russian immigrant named Jimmy Nash (nee Djamolidine Hasanov) and his brief, unconsummated affair with one Clarissa Sanders, a doomed Austinite of above-average intelligence. The two stories are inextricably intertwined in ways both chemical and metaphysical. To sum up: the horse's heart winds up as a drop of fuel that ignites in the tank of a car driven by Ms. Sanders with Jimmy Nash in the passenger seat. The author draws out the relationship between the two plotlines via biological examinations of everything from death to oil refineries to acid trips over the course of fewer than 100 pages. It is a tiny book that will take you about an hour and a half to read. Afterwards, your brain will feel cleaner and more orderly somehow, as though somebody up there took a trip to Ikea and reorganized your thought space. 

How To Tell A True War Story

“What movie about Vietnam was made by Oliver Stone? Platoon. What movie about Vietnam was directed by Stanley Kubrick? No. Wrong. Full Metal Jacket.” This from an undersized boy in an over-sized pink tee-shirt, fourteen years old and yelling across the racket of Swingers at 10:00 on a Thursday night to a rapt audience made up of his parents and two best friends that look like the kind you only ever get to have once, but remember for the rest of your life. He is confident and brash in a way only kids born and raised in Los Angeles by artistic parents ever are, and I can’t help quietly falling in love with him from two tables away. Maybe it’s envy or nostalgia or projection or some such thing- I don’t know how to describe it. Tim O'Brien probably would. The reason I started listening to the kid in the first place, besides the fact that he pretty much made it impossible not to, was because I am in the middle of reading The Things They Carried for the first time and suddenly it seems like everybody, everywhere is talking about war. I picked it up for a lot of reasons: I saw the Hurt Locker and realized how much time I’ve wasted actively not knowing anything about actual Americans in combat;  somebody sent me a list; I found it on a shelf at my office which meant I got to read it for free; it is one of those books that everybody else has read that I somehow never got around to. Besides being incredibly relevant even 19 years after it was written, it’s a near-perfect meditation on truth and fiction and the strength of language, on what it means to write a story and why anybody would ever do so. Go reread it or read it for the first time right now, I'm serious. Go.

The Novella: Literature's Ego Booster

Hey, wanna feel smart and be the kind of person who can finish a book in two days? Then allow me to introduce you to... The Novella. Half the length of a novel but nobody has to know that when you brag about having finished one on a cross-country flight. Of course, I'm giving away my secret now. I could have let you think it was a 600-pager I pounded through in these past two days. But I could never lie to you. Also, this really isn't a book worth bragging about. The Magic Christian concerns itself with the misadventures of Guy Grand, a billionaire whose predominant concern is discovering how low people will stoop for money. Spoiler Alert: Really low. It was a funny enough distraction and certainly not untrue, but too mean spirited to be really engaging and it never dipped below the surface. Such is the problem of the novella. There is only so much you can do in 144 pages. Unless you're Steve Martin.

In Which Jen Feels Guilty For Having Been a Snotty Seventeen Year Old

Reefer Madness was published the summer I graduated from high school. I spent that summer working at Barnes and Noble, which was a lot like the Target lady sketch on SNL. I'd see cool books customers bought and have to run and get them for myself. I actually memorized my credit card number that summer so I wouldn't have to keep my wallet with me at the cash register. This was one of the few books I didn't read because I was dating a super pothead at the time and I felt to be at all pro-marijuana legalization was to be pro-my-boyfriend-not-buying-me-dinner-cause-he-spent-all-his-money-on-weed. But I saw Food Inc. the other day and remembered how brilliant Eric Schlosser is and decided to pick up this book. I'm so glad I did, although I now feel overwhelmed with a sense of indignation and a little guilt for being such a snot. The book is divided into three large essays, one on marijuana policy, one on illegal immigration (specifically focusing on the immigrants working in strawberry fields in California) and one on the pornography industry. All are fascinating and all will leave you equally confused with how good ideas and good intentions go so incredibly awry.

But that still doesn't mean I should have had to pay for my own burrito at Chipotle.