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.

well, don't I feel unorginal

This week I read two books that I am convinced were written by people who have met me and possibly also stalked me. Even though one is copyrighted 1958 and takes place in France where I have spent approximately 15 days in my entire life total. These are stories of optimistic young women who say the wrong thing and often do the wrong thing as well and yet, it all works out in the end. Mostly. Thanks for the recommendation on Him Her Him Again The End of Him, Sarah. In the three days I spent reading it, I recommended it to three people. Cause, like you said, every girl has to go through her Eugene. If you don't know what I mean, read the book and you will.

Seriously, my shoulder hurts.

Museum of Innocence is going to stay with me for a long time and not just because I have a sore shoulder from carrying all 529 pages of it around New York. This is the story of a decade-long love or infatuation, depending on your own personal beliefs, in Istanbul that is finally commemorated with a Museum of Innocence, a collection of little trinkets our hero picks up over these years spent with the object of his affection. Here's the thing.... I don't know if this was a book about love or lust or infatuation or obsession or what. It's sort of like the end of "Before Sunrise" or "Before Sunset"-do you think they'll end up together or not? And just like I think something new at the end of each of those movies every time I see them, my reading of this book is probably going to vary day to day depending on my mood and my life and my everything. I think that only makes it better. Sarah, please read this so we can talk about it because I really want to talk about it but I don't want to say anything about it because I don't want to ruin it and like..it's so good.

Not A Particularly Apt Title

So here's something that blows about being a morning person in a family of regular-time persons: waking up at 630am and having nothing to do because it's Ohio and even if there was something to do, nothing's in walking distance. It's raining and I just saw someone using an umbrella to walk across their yard and get their newspaper, which, incidentally, I could read, but it's the Cincinnati Enquirer and I'm already caught up on where all the fish frys are this weekend. But hey, good news is, gives me plenty of time to eat peanut butter from the jar (note to self: add peanut butter to parental grocery shopping list. also girl scout cookies.) and write about David Foster Wallace.

OH MY GOD SOMEBODY WOKE UP. GIVE ME YOUR CAR KEYS.

But back to the business at hand. The highlight of this book of "essays and arguments" is a tie between the essay discussing the Illinois State Fair and the dissection of cruise ships and the people that love them. I am partial to the state fair episode if only because my mother likes to tell the story of how, in a moment of working mother guilt, she took me, age 4, and my sister, age 1.5, to the Ohio State Fair. We arrived and she hustled us into the 4-H tent, where I promptly turned, looked at her and said, "Why are we here, Mom? We're not farmers." So clearly, I have a soft spot for the odd man out at the state fair. But then again you can make another equally hilarious essay out of the footnotes in his cruise ship episode, so.... We'll say it's a draw. And a must-read.

Thanks for the recommendation, Andy! This thank you is primarily a trap to see if you're actually still reading this blog or if you just skimmed it that one time to mollify me on gchat.


ADDENDUM, ADDED AT 918AM: When I got into my Dad's car to drive to the gym, he was listening to the TITANIC soundtrack.

Awesome.

If you're feeling sad and lonely...

Reconnecting with Franz Kafka for the first time since English AP probably would have been a better idea not during a week when I already felt detached and alienated. Also, reading Kafka on the subway is weird. But at least now I can say "Kafka-esque" and feel like only half a poser.