bookshelves of doom

I was lucky to get a 3/10.

Yowch.

This quiz on exotic words is HARD.

"What exactly, Thomson asked, are your politics? "Fishing," Ransome replied."

Sir Arthur Ransome:

Author of Swallows and Amazons.  (Knew that.)
Won a libel trial against Lord Alfred "that jerk" Douglas.  (Didn't know.)
Proposed to "virtually every eligible woman of his acquaintance".  (Didn't know.)
Ran away from his wife and daughter... (Didn't know.)
...and ended up shacking up with Trotsky's personal secretary.  (Didn't know.)
British spy.  (Knew that.)
Possible double agent for the Russians.  (Didn't know.)

Note to self:  Ask the director to order this book.

PS to self:  Will you be able to convince her to import it?

PPS to self:  BE VERY CONVINCING.

What is it about celebrities, food and plagiarism?

Following in the illustrious footsteps of Jessica Seinfeld, Elizabeth Hasselbeck has been accused of swiping passages from someone else's book and using them in her guidebook to gluten-free living.

I have got to re-subscribe to Smithsonian...

...because the stuff they run is just so darn cool.

The Gonzo Tapes: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson Disc Three: More Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

The disc begins with Thompson and Acosta following up on the leads they got at the taco stand...

"In other words, you think The American Dream would have to be licensed or approved by the government in some way?"

Thompson muses about his love of electric windows in the car and talks about the narcotics officers' convention.

"I should have stolen one of the drug exhibits, I could've got totally crazy with that."

More on his clothing choices and a great bit about Acosta arguing that his hunting knife isn't a concealed weapon because he was wearing it under a yellow net shirt.

I'm finding that the parts I enjoy the most by far are the parts where Thompson is alone, just talking to his tape recorder.

"Jesus, the music out here, everything out here is geared to about the thirteen-year-old mentality.  Maybe twelve, eleven, possibly fifteen at the most.  Be charitable and say fifteen.  The music, the houses, the roads, the jobs, the politics, everything is that way."

_________________________________________

Previously:

Disc One:  Hell's Angels
Disc Two:  Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

The Gonzo Tapes: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. ThompsonDisc Two: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

"This is... the way it should be.  You should never go anywhere without a giant white Cadillac convertible."

Listening to this disc while kneading bread was one of the oddest experiences I've had in quite some time.  Possibly because I was doing something so purely wholesome while listening to Thompson and Acosta wander around looking for the American Dream in what must have been a seriously drug-induced haze?  It's hard for me to wrap my mind around the fact that these tapes are the real deal -- maybe because the events and Thompson himself are so legendary that it's difficult to imagine all of this actually taking place for real? 

Anyway, I'm continuing to really enjoy them.

____________________________________________________

Previously:

Disc One:  Hell's Angels

The Gonzo Tapes: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. ThompsonDisc One: Hell's Angels

"What follows here is a conversation between me and Allen Ginsberg and two police officers."  Heh. 

I received a review copy of The Gonzo Tapes quite some time ago, but that 6-day power outage put a crimp in my original listening plans.  Anyway, I'm getting to them now.  Actually, Josh and I have both been listening, but separately -- which has made for some interesting conversations, since we're coming at them from such different places.  He's read a ton of Thompson, while I've read only tiny bits and pieces -- not even Fear and Loathing in its entirety.  So for Josh, this set is acting as an enhancement to the text, while for me it's acting as an introduction.

After listening to the first disc, he said that while he was finding it fascinating, he thought it would mostly only be serious Thompson junkies who'd be into it... but I didn't agree at all. 

I put the first disc on while I was sorting puzzle pieces and I ended up giving up on sorting the pieces.  I ended up just sitting and listening.  Granted though, I have a tendency to get really interested in, well, anything interesting, and I definitely have that the-more-I-know-about-something-the-more-I want-to-know-about-it personality trait.  So there is that. 

This first disc is almost all material from 1965, when Thompson was collecting information for his book on the Hell's Angels.  I found the interviews really interesting (though I continue to not understand the attraction that Joan Baez's music holds for so many people), but what I especially liked were the parts where Thompson would describe events and conversations on the sly or after the fact -- he seemed so careful about words, there were these long pauses while (it seemed, anyway) he searched for the right one, and sometimes he'd use one but then correct himself a couple of times before continuing on.  I liked, too, how much he thought about the Hell's Angels in the context of their relationship with society -- really, he sounded like an anthropologist more than what I think of as a journalist.  But then, his version of journalism was different.

The book that came with the set is getting rapidly well-worn because I keep going back to it to leaf through and look at the pictures and attempt to decipher Thompson's handwriting on the reproductions of his tape cases.

More later.

My hero.

Supermarket cashier writes bestseller.

Also, how awesome is the word beepeuse?

New Rochelle School High School is teaching Girl, Interrupted... minus pages 64-70.

From New Rochelle's Talk of the Sound:

"The material was of a sexual nature that we deemed inappropriate for teachers to present to their students," said English Department Chariperson Leslie Altschul, "since the book has other redeeming features, we took the liberty of bowdlerizing."

Happy guy.

Josh has been running around like a freak, all happy because we just received a review copy of The Gonzo Tapes in the mail*.

As he's the fan in the house**, he'll be doing a guest post about it in the near future.

There's an audio sampler available online.

________________________________________________________

*When he found out it was coming, he started listening to this old adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas during our drive in to work -- it makes for extremely odd morning listening, but it works, somehow.

**Thompson is one of those people who's been on my list for a bazillion years but who I still haven't gotten to... but to my untrained eye, this set looks pretty cool.

I can't believe this still hasn't been resolved.

Seriously.  This started a year ago.

From the Lewiston Sun-Journal:

A local woman said Wednesday she's prepared to go to jail rather than return a library book about sexuality that she calls "dangerous" to children.

JoAn Karkos, 64, was confined to a courtroom at 8th District Court for about an hour after she was ordered by a judge to hand over the borrowed book: "It's Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex and Sexual Health."

Judge Valerie Stanfill revised her order shortly after noon, giving Karkos until the end of the week to produce the property of Lewiston Public Library. Karkos also was ordered to pay a $100 fine within a month.

I'm dying to know how this will play out.

[Later:  Okay.  No jail for Karkos.  But you have GOT to watch this video and see who she compares herself to -- seriously.  Seriously.  Make a guess first, then watch it.  I'm still in shock.]

[Even later:  I suppose it would help if I actually included the video link, huh?  My shock was so great that I forgot!]

A sign of really good historical fiction.

Yep, still thinking about The Green Glass Sea.  Last night I helped a patron find some books on the military aircraft of WWII, and I noticed a book on the shelf below.  In the past, I never, ever (EVER) would have considered taking home a 928-page book on the making of the atomic bomb, but now, after reading the Klages book, everything has changed.

I do think I'll start much smaller, though -- with this one, maybe.

Texas Textbook Shocker!

GASP!

Yeah, okay, it's not very exciting.  I just thought it was funny because it made the news.

And suddenly, the Jessica Seinfeld book is interesting.

MotherReader, take note!

From the NYTimes:

But a number of readers posting on Amazon.com and Oprah.com and other Web sites have pointed out some similarities between Ms. Seinfeld’s book, which was published this month by Collins, an imprint of HarperCollins, and another cookbook published by Running Press, an imprint of the Perseus Books Group, in April.

Okay, okay, okay.  Story* aside, what on EARTH is Jessica Seinfeld wearing in that publicity photo?

*Which is hilarious and somewhat frightening:  Two books with recipes for spinach brownies??

I really want to read it, but...

...I'm worried that it'll break my heart.

From the NYT review:

Schulz was raised in what sounds like a grim, even more isolated version of Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon — a close-knit place ruled by church and family, where book learning was regarded with suspicion and where, far from being above average, children were discouraged from thinking too highly of themselves. Early in grammar school, Schulz was bumped ahead a grade, which guaranteed that for the rest of his school career he would always be the smallest, skinniest, most awkward kid in the class. Though a decent pickup hockey player, and a good enough golfer to play No. 2 on the school team, by the time he got to high school Schulz was so crippled with shyness he had become virtually invisible. “I wasn’t actually hated,” he said later. “Nobody cared that much.”

When will it end?

Celebrity books are bad enough. 

But now we're to be subjected to books by people who are only famous for being married to celebrities?

And how vomitrocious is this?:

“I have a standing date with my husband in the kitchen every Sunday night after the kids have gone to bed. We do a good catch-up while I purée the night away … and when I’m done I feel so virtuous.”

Blecch.

Winnie Cooper loves math.

From Newsweek:

She's penned a book aimed at helping young girls survive—and even thrive—in math class. "When girls see the antics of Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan, they think that being fun and glamorous also means being dumb and irresponsible," says McKellar. "But I want to show them that being smart is cool. Being good at math is cool. And not only that, it can help them get what they want out of life."

Any jab at PH or LiLo is fine by me.  Good show, Danica.

While the book sounds a bit girly for my tastes, it sounds a whole lot more fun than the usual celebrity literary offering.  It's called Math Doesn't Suck.

I would like to publicly thank...

...Chrissy and Jeremy for my new favorite book:  Naughty Needles:  Sexy, Saucy Knits for the Bedroom and Beyond.

When I opened the package, I howled for a good five minutes.  I'm not even exaggerating a tiny bit.

I think I'd like a poster-sized copy of the Ice Vixen vs. Cave Girl Furry Bikini picture.  (The one where they're fighting, not the one on the bearskin rug.)

They have a website.

Donna Martin Graduates!

Yep.  Tori Spelling is writing a memoir*.

From another story:

She and her husband, Dean McDermott, who are expecting their first child together this spring, are shooting a reality series for the Oxygen network in which the newlyweds search for a bed-and-breakfast to refurbish and run. The plan is to write the memoir in the B&B between takes and when "the baby is napping," though she is looking to partner with a ghost writer who shares her sardonic tone.

*Is it just me, or did USA Today commit quotation mark abuse in their headline?  Or are they saying that it's not quite a memoir because it's not going to be a tell-all?  I'm so confused.

I'm so immature.

I want, I want, I WANT.

Some Fun Nonfiction.

Unless I have the day off, I don't like to read novels in the morning -- if I do, I run the risk of getting so engrossed that:

A) I have a hard time leaving the house and/or
B) I'm crabby all day because I'd rather be reading my book.

There are some books, thankfully, that work for me in the early morning.  These are the ones that have been getting me through lately:

Pick Me Up, created by David Roberts and Jeremy Leslie --

I've always been a big fan of factoids.  I would have been totally, totally obsessed with this book in elementary school.  That's what it is -- page after page after page of factoids on a broad range of subjects, from technology to history to the human body to the arts.  On each page, there are references to other pages, so I've found myself flipping from page 81 (Try Being a Girl for a Day) to page 154 (Who Wants a Fight?) to page 72 (Brazil) to page 280 (What's All the Fuss About Drugs?) to page 100 (How the Ancient Egyptians Tried to Live Forever).  Super fun.

Jurassic Poop:  What Dinosaurs (and Others) Left Behind, by Jacob Berkowitz --

If I was still in the bookselling game, I'd probably hate this book.  For real.  It happens.  When I was still at The Monkey, a day wouldn't go by without some gaggle of gigglers guffawing over The Gas We Pass or Everyone Poops.  It got old fast and it made me very cranky. 

Happily, I don't have to deal with that anymore and now I'm free to be one of the gigglers.  There's an illustration (by Steve Mack) of a T-Rex pooping that makes me laugh every single time I look at it.  I'm not exaggerating.  Very, very silly section headings like Unpooped Poop (the study of mummified remains), Turd to Treasure (the story of agate) and Survival of the Feces (how things fossilize).  Fun and informative, but very short. 

The American Story: 100 True Tales from American History, by Jennifer Armstrong --

This is the one of the three that I've had difficulty putting down.  I'm going to put some time aside this weekend to just sit down and read it cover to cover. 

For example: Newsies fans listen up:  Spot Conlon was a real person!  Crutchy, too.  And Racetrack Higgins.  So cool.

Armstrong's 100 stories are each only two-five pages long, range in time period from 1565 to 2000, cover very well-known events (the moon landing) and lesser-known events (the first potato chip).  The Scopes Monkey Trial, the Battle of the Sexes, the Molasses Flood and the Donner Party are all in here.  Houdini and Cher Ami and Al Capone and Lizzy Borden.  Roger Roth's illustrations are fabulously detailed.  Loving it in a big, big way.

Shocker.

The National Enquirer piece on O.J. Simpson's tell-all If I Did It?  Untrue.

Have I mentioned lately that I own the OED?

Problem is, all these silly new words aren't in it.

(via Literary Gas)

While we're on the topic of book trailers...

This is the geekiest thing I've ever seen.  Ever.

(via Bookslut)

Hippo Eats Dwarf: A Field Guide to Hoaxes and Other B.S. -- Alex Boese

My regular patrons were very impressed and surprised when they heard that I was reading non-fiction for once.  Then I told them what it was about.  Their surprise evaporated, and I once again regained my usual position as Laughingstock Librarian of Kennebunk.

But come ON.  How could I have possibly resisted?  The title alone would have done it, but the cover art sealed the deal.  Hippo Eats Dwarf is hugely entertaining, but also serves as a reminder that not everything you see, hear, or read is true.  Anything can be faked.

While this is technically a grown-up book, there are probably some middle school boys out there who will read it compulsively.  (If some savvy librarian gives it to them, that is…)  It can be read in bits and pieces, it’s a great one for people with short attention spans. (Or for bathroom reading, for those of you who do that.)

It’s split up into 16 chapters, with titles ranging from Birth to Food to eBay to Advertising to Politics to Death.  Boese covers the Bonsai Kitten Hoax, tells anecdotes about cashiers that have accepted two-hundred dollar bills, explains what emails NOT to forward (any that contain the directive to “Forward this to everyone you know”), and tells the infamous story about Disney murdering lemmings:

The most infamous phony nature footage appeared in the 1958 Disney documentary White Wilderness As part of its presentation of Artic wildlife, the film showed lemmings jumping into a river to commit suicide, as legend has it they do.  Except that lemmings don’t really commit suicide: they sensibly avoid large bodies of water.  So to get the shot the filmmakers had to round up some lemmings and herd them off a cliff.  PETA would have been horrified.  As a result of this faked scene, lemming suicide became an accepted fact in popular culture for decades afterward.

Although I adored the Food chapter, Boese did make me decide to avoid chicken nuggets for the rest of my life (or at least for a while):

Regulators in the United Kingdom recently became concerned when they detected beef and pork proteins in samples of imported nuggets.  Unscrupulous manufacturers were buying cheap chicken meat and bulking it up by injecting it with water and group-up parts—including skin and bones—of old cows and pigs.  In some cases consumers were lucky if their chicken nuggets were 10 percent chicken meat.

He made me reminisce about my college years by reminding me of the Breatharians  “…who claim to subsist on light and air.”  (The kid that passage brought to mind wasn’t considering becoming a Breatharian, thank goodness, but he was considering becoming a “Fruitarian”.  According to him, they subsisted on fruit that had already fallen from trees, because picking it would harm the trees.  Yes, I also hope that he was joking.  But I don't think so.  I knew some strange people in college.)

Man Eats Dwarf allows for a decent amount of audience participation – there are a plethora of website addresses included – try PetsOrFood.com, bigredhair.com/boilerplate (which famously duped Chris Elliott not so long ago), and EatBabies.com.

Alex Boese is also the author of The Museum of Hoaxes (which I am totally going to read) and the creator of the website of the same name.

Still on the obit train.

See?  Sometimes there's even profanity!

From the Telegraph:

Paul Gleason, who died on Saturday aged 67, was an actor best known for his roles as a corrupt FBI agent in the comedy Trading Places, as a bumptious high school principal in the "brat pack" movie The Breakfast Club and as a pompous police chief in the action picture Die Hard.

...

One fan site admiringly described him as "the assholes' asshole", who had "set the bar high and looks to be Tinseltown's asshole to beat for some years to come".

(For the few that haven't heard me rave about The Dead Beat, it rules.  Read it and you will end up like me, viewed as a sick-o by your co-workers for reading the obits page and cackling wildly.)

The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries -- Marilyn Johnson

I apologize for not posting yesterday.  It was my fault.  The Internet was working, I had time, I had access.  But.  I also had a new obsession.  I spent every free moment reading obituaries.

I also blathered about The Dead Beat to anyone who came within fifteen feet of me.  (Poor them.)  I wish I had a couple of cases full -- I'd just hand it out on the street.

You may have realized -- I loved this book a whole lot.

Marilyn Johnson covers the difference between American and British-style obits, news (famous people) vs. egalitarian (just plain folks), she interviews current (and former) editors of most of the major newspapers in New York and London.  She tells story after story about the big, big personalities behind the obits.  There are more obituary excerpts than you can shake a stick at -- some made me laugh out loud, some made me tear up.

While I was blathering yesterday, one of my co-workers asked the obvious question -- "Yes, Leila (you freak), but WHY would you WANT to read obituaries?"  My answer?  Because if they're done well, they're just like very short stories.  And there are new ones EVERY DAY!

If you have any interest whatsoever in obituaries, obituary writers or obituary writing, you will like this book.  Likewise, if you're interested in different methods of storytelling, journalism, history or trivia, you'll like this book. 

Re: trivia:  I suspect that reading obits regularly will up my Jeopardy! scores.  For instance:

Carly Simon probably wrote "You're So Vain" not about James Taylor or Warren Beatty or Mick Jagger, but about the dissipated eccentric William Donaldson, who left her "when she was still quite naive."  Donaldson wrote wonderful satirical books, but he also ran through several fortunes, pimped, and enjoyed crack cocaine and the date-rape drug Rohypnol (he liked to use it on himself).  "It's such a nuisance," the Daily Telegraph quoted him in his obit.  "The trouble is, it wipes your memory.  You have to video yourself to appreciate just what a good time you had."

At the end of the book, Johnson includes an extensive bibliography as well as listing many of the websites she monitored during her research.  (Which is what got me into trouble yesterday.)  So far, I've especially enjoyed the non-flowery (somewhat snarky) pieces in the Telegraph.  From yesterday's obituary of Prof. J. K. Galbraith:

A master of acid invective, he was particularly cruel to industrialists (who conducted much of their business "under conditions of advanced intoxication"), bankers ("a profession where style, self-assurance and tailoring are much more important than intelligence"), and the United States Congress, which "uniquely among modern organs of public and private administration… rewards senility".

But he feigned elegant surprise that opponents should find his grand New England scepticism offensive: he once remarked to President Kennedy that he did not see why the New York Times had to call him arrogant. "I don't see why not," the President replied. "Everyone else does."

alt.obituaries is also worth a look.  Like any other newsgroup, there are people that regularly bait and verbally (textually) abuse each other, but for the most part, it's all obit-related.  Not only do people post obits and reactions, they also post articles about celebrities with failing health, etc.  It's fascinating if you love pop culture.

I highly, highly recommend this book.  Subject matter aside, it's non-fiction for people that aren't fans of non-fiction -- chatty and funny and fast-paced.  The cover art is wonderful and the book itself is tall and narrow -- fittingly, it immediately make me think of a newspaper column.

Read it and report back.

Rush Hour, Volume Three: Face -- Ed. Michael Cart

You'll find more of an explanation of Rush Hour here.

I was going to wait until I'd tracked down Volume Two... But I caved. 

Volume Three is much stronger than the first one -- obviously, I have no idea what V2 is like, but they've really hit their stride in this one:

David Yoo's "Turning Japanese":  His temp boss assumes that because he's Asian, he must be Japanese, he doesn't correct her, it turns into a whole big thing where she expects him to teach her Japanese:

Sharon was in her late forties.  She was extremely thin, with buggy eyes that made her resemble a grasshopper.  She was friendly in a way that was undeniably authentic but still sounded artificial.  It was probably her southern accent.  The fact that she assumed I was Japanese didn't help my impression of her.  I didn't bother clarifying that I was a Korean (albeit one born and raised in the States who can't speak Korean) the first time because at that moment it felt like less of a hassle to just let it slide.  She'd made only a few passing references to my "Japanese" heritage since then, and I figured her thinking this wasn't hurting anybody.  It had now been five months, and far too much time had passed for me to correct her because it would make me the asshole for leading her on the whole time. 

Lara M. Zeises' "Me and the Bean":  I've been meaning to read her for some time now.  This story pushed me right over the edge.  I must track her books down.

K. L. Going's "Samuel":  This one was rough.  But very, very good.  Made me realize that I need to bone up on my Bible knowledge, though.

Adrian Chamber's "The Scientific Approach":  Super short -- 4 pages -- loved it.  I will now finally read Postcards From No Man's Land.

There was also an excerpt from Grand & Humble, an essay about transsexuals called "The Wrong Body", an excerpt from a German novel that I MUST read, photos and drawings and a bunch of other pieces.  I'm so into this series.  Eclectic is an understatement.

They really should set up some kind of subscription package.  If that doesn't work due to changing release dates or whatever, maybe a standing order set-up: Sign-up and when a new one comes out, your credit card gets charged and the new volume is automatically shipped.  Or something. 

Volume Four, Reckless, is due out in June.  I'm especially looking forward to Bennett Madison's short story:  "Little Sisters Steal the Best Shit".

Body Brokers: Inside America's Underground Trade in Human Remains -- Annie Cheney

Oog.

So, Stiff turned me off re: donating my body to science.  Body Brokers turned me off re: donating my body to science and... pretty much everything else.  Maybe someone can just dig a hole out at The Land and chuck me in?  Or a Viking funeral?  Or maybe that awesome freeze-drying/sonic waves thing that they're working on in Sweden?

It's a great read for those who liked Stiff, for those who like non-courtroom-drama-true-crime (no O.J. and no Scott Peterson, thankyouverymuch), and for those who have a bit of a morbid side.  (Happy me, I fall into all three categories.)

Body Brokers tells the story of Michael Brown, a crematorium owner who started selling bodies to research facilities instead of cremating them:

Like many criminals, Brown blames his victims.  Corpses are vulnerable, he tried to tell me.  They're just asking for it.

Um, yeah, he's in jail now.

That's just the first part.  There's a section on the history of body-snatching, a section on the frighteningly frequent medical school scandals, a bit about the problems inherent in shipping body parts around the country, and loads more.  Considering that the book weighs in at just under two hundred pages, there's a lot. 

It's very readable non-fiction.  It's very journalistic, not as chatty as Mary Roach or Sarah Vowell, but occasionally, you'll be treated to sentences like:

It's not every man who would give a corpse an enema.

I'll just leave you with that.

Talk to the Hand -- Lynne Truss

This book, in a nutshell:

Manners are good.  Be considerate.  Remember that the people you interact with (or just share space with) are human beings.  Treat them as such.

The only problem?  Do you really think that unabashedly rude people are going to read a book about why they're so horrible?  Probably not.  This book is a rant.  If you agree with her, it's fun.  For those of us on Lynne Truss' side of the fence, there are a lot of 'Sing it, Sister' moments.  It's like reading Al Franken or Rush Limbaugh.  Entertaining if you agree, annoying-to-maddening if you don't, but ultimately not very productive.

I only disagreed with her on one thing:  Cashiers.  After working no more than seventeen seconds in a busy store in Harvard Square, ANYONE would be horrified at how the general public treats the lowly cashier.  It's no wonder than they aren't always bright, chippy, friendly and cheery.  They are exposed to a constant barrage of rude people that treat them as automatons.  So give them a break.  As my fabulous (and eloquent) co-worker said, "They eat shit all day long".

Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife -- Mary Roach

Mary Roach writes about our search for the afterlife.  She talks about spiritualism, a scientist who massacred mice in an attempt to weigh their souls (a different scientist originally tried something similar (weigh-ins at the moment of death, not massacres) on people dying of consumption but, go figure, the public objected).  She goes to India to find out about reincarnation, to England to go to a weekend seminar about being a medium, gets zapped with electromagnetic rays to induce a haunting via vibrating eyeball.  There was a even a chapter about ectoplasm.

It was awesome.

Do I really need to say anything else? 

The City of Falling Angels -- John Berendt

In the prologue of his new book, John Berendt gives the reader a warning.  (Well, actually, it's Count Marcello that gives it, but it was Berendt that used the conversation within the first three pages of his book.  You know what I mean):

"What is true?  What is not true?  The answer is not so simple, because the truth can change.  I can change.  You can change.  That is the Venice effect."

We descended from the bridge into Campo Manin.  Other than having come from the deep shade of Calle della Mandola into the bright sunlight of the open square, I felt unchanged.  My role, whatever it was, remained the same as it had before the bridge.  I did not, of course, admit this to Count Marcello.  But I looked at him to see if he would acknowledge having undergone any change himself.

He breathed deeply as we walked into Campo Manin.  Then, with an air of finality, he said, "Venetians never tell the truth.  We mean precisely the opposite of what we say."

Throughout the book, Berendt returns to that idea--but, depending on who he's speaking to, the idea of 'truth' changes, over and over again.

Alright, here's the short version.  If you liked Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, you'll probably like this one too.

Longer version.  It has basically the same structure--John Berendt goes on vacation, ends up staying, he writes about the city, the people, the history and current events.  The major difference (and who knows--maybe I'm completely crazy about this) is that while Garden felt up-close-and-personal, Falling Angels felt much more distanced.  A lot more of the stories seemed to be second and third-hand, rather than from the original source.  Most of the information about the burning of the Fenice (except for the personal accounts of the spectators, of course) seemed to be culled from newspapers.

That isn't to say that there weren't some completely fascinating people in the book--I was especially taken with the Seguso family:

After all those years of turning the steel pipe hour after hour, Signor Seguso's left hand had molded itself around the pipe until it became permanently cupped, as if the pipe were always in it.  His cupped hand was the proud mark of his craft, and this was why the artist who painted his portrait some years ago had taken particular care to show the curve in his left hand.

And with the Rat Man:

"I'm a chef," he said, speaking to me and the woman sitting between us.  "My cuisine is known around the world!"

"Really!?" the woman said.  "Are you famous for a culinary specialty?"

"Yes," he said.  "Rat poison."

Oddly, both of my examples are actually from Venice.  But as a whole, the book seemed to be focused more on the American and British expatriates that have settled in Venice than on the true Venicians.  (And, woo boy, it totally matters.  There's a family that's been there for five generations, and they still don't count as 'true' Venetians.)

My reading list is much longer now--because of this book, I now have to read The Aspern Papers, some Ezra Pound, and Venetian Stories.   (According to The City of Falling Angels, the author of Venetian Stories was accused of trying to steal (in a sketchy legal way) the papers (and house!) of (the late) Ezra Pound's ailing wife.  Pissing off the majority of Venice with that move, she went one step further and wrote a "fictional" book about Venice--except, of course, the people that she "created" were just thinly veiled descriptions of real people.  Supposedly.  Yowza.)

Vonnegut just keeps on trucking.

Am I completely insane?  Didn't Vonnegut say that Timequake was going to be his last book? 

Maybe he said last novel, rather than last book.  But I could have sworn that he said book--you know, so that he could concentrate on his art?  Does anyone else remember that?

Anyway, he has a new book out.  I guess that I can forgive him for going back on his word (if he actually did), because he appreciates librarians so much:

From USAToday (via Bookslut):

Librarians, too — "not famous for their physical strength" — who resist having books removed from shelves and refuse to give names of people who have checked out certain books in the era of the Patriot Act.

"The America I loved," he writes, "still exists in the front desks of public libraries."

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil -- John Berendt

So, I thought that I hadn't read this, but as I was reading, so much of it was so completely familiar that I started to wonder.  I know that I saw the movie ages and ages ago, but I was recognizing complete chunks of dialogue.  Surely I couldn't be remembering that much from the movie?  (Sometimes I find it a little scary to think about how much information gets packed into a brain in one lifetime.  And about how hard it can be to access that information sometimes).   

Regardless of whether this was a first-time read or a re-read, I completely enjoyed it.  Berendt's depiction of the people of Savannah was affectionate, but at the same time, their real personalities--complete with faults--seemed to come through intact.  It didn't seem hazy.  I loved Miss Harty, the woman that brought him on a tour of the town squares and the cemetery:

"Savannah's always been wet," she said, "even when the rest of Georgia was dry.  During Prohibition, filling stations on Abercorn Street sold whiskey out of gas pumps!  Oh, you could always get a drink in Savannah.  That's never been any secret.  I remember when I was a child, Billy Sunday brought his holy-revival crusade to town.  He set himself up in Forsyth Park, and everybody went to hear him.  There was great excitement!  Mr. Sunday got up and declared at the top of his voice that Savannah was the wickedest city in the world!  Well, of course, we all thought that was perfectly marvelous!"

As a huge fan of Joan Aiken, I was especially interested in any mention of her father:

"Aiken loved to come here and watch the ships go by," she said.  "One afternoon, he saw one with the name Cosmos Mariner painted on the bow.  That delighted him.  The word 'cosmos' appears quite often in his poetry, you know.  That evening he went home and looked for mention of the Cosmos Mariner in the shipping news.  There it was, in tiny type on the list of ships in port.  The name was followed by the comment 'Destination Unknown.'  That pleased him even more."

"Where is Aiken buried?" I asked.  There were no other gravestones in the enclosure.

"Oh, he's here," she said.  "In fact, we are very much his personal guests at the moment.  It was Aiken's wish that people should come to this beautiful place after he died and drink martinis and watch the ships just as he did.  He left a gracious invitation to that effect.  He had his gravestone built in the shape of a bench."

An involuntary reflex propelled me to my feet.  Miss Harty laughed, and then she too stood up.  Aiken's name was inscribed on the bench, along with the words COSMOS MARINER, DESTINATION UNKNOWN.

Luther Driggins, the man who glued string to flies and carried them around town with him and was rumored to have a jar of poison so toxic that if poured into the Savannah water system, it would kill every single person in the city; Chablis, the drag queen with a mouth that might even impress Brian Michael Bendis (the man who, as far as I know, invented the word 'fucktard'); Big Emma, a woman that was famed for refusing to let her chauffeur drive her Mercedes limo--he had to sit in the back while she drove.  These are a few of the people that populate this book.  And I haven't even mentioned the story that pulls everything together--the murder of Danny Hansford, the 'walking streak of sex' by Jim Williams, a prominent antiques dealer.

I am totally looking forward to reading Berendt's new book--I'm next on the list for the library copy.

Ithaki or Paliki? Author dreams of finding the gold of Odysseus.

From the Guardian:

An improbable coalition of an economist turned management consultant, and two British professors of classics and geology, yesterday announced they had cracked the true location of Homer's Ithaca, one of the riddles of the ancient world. They claim that it was not the Greek island of Ithaki, as the islanders have proudly boasted for centuries, but a peninsula of Kefalonia.

...

"You could say Homer didn't care, he was writing a poem, not a Michelin guide - but what if Homer was right all along, what if the geography of the land has changed?" Mr Bittlestone said. He believes Paliki matches Homer's description of the island in detail and dreams that the gold of Odysseus may one day be found there.

According to the article, the trio has a book coming out next week.

In Cold Blood -- Truman Capote

Until one morning in mid-November of 1959, few Americans--in fact, few Kansans--had ever heard of Holcomb.  Like the waters of the river, like the motorists on the highway, and like the yellow trains streaking down the Santa Fe tracks, drama, in the shape of exceptional happenings, had never stopped there.  The inhabitants of the village, numbering two hundred and seventy, were satisfied that this should be so, quite content to exist inside ordinary life--to work, to hunt, to watch television, to attend school socials, choir practice, meetings of the 4-H club.  But then, in the earliest hours of that morning in November, a Sunday morning, certain foreign sounds impinged on the normal nightly Holcomb noises--on the keening hysteria of coyotes, the dry scrape of scuttling tumbleweed, the racing, receding wail of locomotive whistles.  At the time not a soul in sleeping Holcomb heard them--four shotgun blasts that, all told, ended six human lives.  But afterward the townspeople, theretofore sufficiently unfearful of each other to seldom trouble to lock their doors, found fantasy re-creating them over and again--those somber explosions that stimulated fires of mistrust in the glare of which many old neighbors viewed each other strangely, and as strangers.

So I read it.  And I'm all confused.

First, I kick myself for being such a huge wimp and avoiding it for so long.  It was fantastic.  I was late for work yesterday because I started discussing it with a co-worker and completely lost track of time.

I had been scared of reading it because somehow, I was under the impressing that Perry Smith and Dick Hickock entered the Clutter home specifically to massacre the family.  You know, for kicks.  But they actually entered the house for a reason--they were under the impression that there was a money-filled safe there.  Of course, there wasn't.  And they killed the entire family.  For what amounted to about forty dollars.  But the idea of a couple of guys going in to a secluded farmhouse just to kill people vs. the idea of two guys going into a secluded farmhouse to rob people... it's slightly different.  Less scary (to me).  Less Manson-esque, maybe. 

Although, Dick Hickock was quoted a few times as planning to "cover the walls with hair".  So he, at least, seemed pretty sure of the outcome.  Which is odd because he wasn't the one that pulled the trigger.  Well, maybe.  That was kind of in question--he said that Perry Smith killed all four Clutters, then Smith said that Hickock actually killed two of them, but later Smith changed his story and said that he killed them all.  But Smith said that he changed his story to lessen the pain for Hickock's mother.  So nobody will ever know the truth, really.

I seem to be rambling horribly here.  What I really want to know is this:  Did Truman Capote have a closer relationship with Perry Smith than Dick Hickock?  Because Perry Smith, the man that actually admitted to killing the entire Clutter family, comes off as much more sympathetic.  Dick Hickock just scared me.  I kind of felt bad for Smith.  Which was strange.  It felt strange to feel sympathy for someone that said this:

Just before I taped him, Mr. Clutter asked me--and these were his last words--wanted to know how his wife was, if she was all right, and I said she was fine, she was ready to go to sleep, and I told him it wasn't long till morning, and how in the morning somebody would find them, and then all of it, me and Dick and all, would seem like something they dreamed.  I wasn't kidding him.  I didn't want to harm the man.  I thought he was a very nice gentleman.  Soft-spoken.  I thought so right up to the moment I cut his throat.

So I wondered if the book was colored by Capote's emotions at all.  He did mention, though, that even Dewey, the man in charge of the investigation felt that "Perry possessed a quality, the aura of an exiled animal, a creature walking wounded".  Whereas he's quoted as saying that Hickock was "a small-time chiseler who got out of his depth, empty and worthless."

Perry Smith killed the Clutters.  Dick Hickock ran over dogs for fun.  Dick Hickock wanted to rape Nancy Clutter and Perry Smith wouldn't let him.  Dick Hickock lettered nine times in high school while Perry Smith was almost getting killed by nuns in an orphanage. 

So yes.  I feel all confused and torn.  (Not about what happened to the Clutters, just Hickock vs. Smith).

A Million Little Pieces -- James Frey

Phew.

I walk toward a door where a Nurse stands waiting for me.  As I walk past her she is careful not to touch me and I am brought back from the happy afterglow of pachyderm memories and I am reminded of what I am.  I am an Alcoholic and I am a drug Addict and I am a Criminal.  I am missing my four front teeth.  I have a hole in my cheek that has been closed with forty-one stitches.  I have a broken nose and I have black swollen eyes.  I have an Escort because I am a Patient at a Drug and Alcohol Treatment Center.  I am wearing a borrowed jacket because I don't have one of my own.  I am carrying two old yellow tennis balls because I'm not allowed to have any painkillers or anesthesia.  I am an Alcoholic.  I am a drug Addict.  I am a Criminal.  That's what I am and I don't blame the Nurse for not wanting to touch me.  If I weren't me, I wouldn't want to touch me.

That passage comes just before James has his four front teeth replaced.  (He lost them when he fell face-first down a fire escape.  His friends found him hours later, crack pipe still in hand).  Two of the teeth only needed to be capped.  The other two required root canals first.  As he said, without anesthesia.  It's one of the most physically painful things I can imagine.  And his description of it is incredible. 

Not surprisingly, the pain doesn't stop there.  It was a hard book to read--but riveting at the same time.  I do think, though, that if I hadn't read the sequel (which I LOVED) first, I would have had a harder time finishing it.  Knowing how things ultimately turned out made reading about his time in rehab (somewhat) easier.  But only somewhat.  It's a powerful book.

Sing a Song of Tuna Fish: Hard-to-Swallow Stories from Fifth Grade -- Esme Raji Codell

I loved Esme Raji Codell's other two books.  Adored them.  I was really, really looking forward to this one--not only did I love the others, but Booklist had given it a starred review.  I was the one who actually requested that the library purchase it.

It's a collection of essays (more a collection of her memories, really) about growing up broke (never poor) in Chicago.  The description on the book flap mentions a story about Esme and her mom egging a fancy car and another one about staging a fist fight with her best friend to avoid her dreaded piano lessons.  Sounds great, right?

I loved the illustrations.

The text was kind of a disappointment.

Like quite a few memoirs geared toward the younger set, I don't think that this one will be particularly attractive towards the intended audience.  Not only because of the references that they won't catch (she explained some of them, but I thought she came off as pretty condescending), but because of the voice she used.  I just don't think that the reminiscent voice works well in juvenile literature.  I'm sure that there are exceptions, but for the most part, I don't like it.  It's fine in adult books.  Maybe it goes back to the condescending thing?  I'm not sure.  Either way, it doesn't work for me. 

There were essays that I really enjoyed--the ones on religion and education, specifically--but overall?  Pretty weak.  I'll still watch for her next book, though.  Her first two were so wonderful that I won't give up on her easily.

This Boy's Life -- Tobias Wolff

People are so lame.  I know that the school that yanked this book pulled it because of a curriculum overview, but they wouldn't have done the overview if some freakazoid hadn't complained about the book in the first place.  Not that I take issue with the idea of curriculum overview--I just can't help feeling that this book and the Walter Dean Myers book were the school's attempt to throw the censors a bone. 

My assumption is that the "objectionable content" would be the f-bomb (and variations of it).  It pops up about seven times over a page and a half, which is, I'm guessing, all the that the complainers actually read of the book.  For the record--the swearing really isn't gratuitous.  In that specific case, it's necessary to the telling of a specific story, and that specific story is necessary as a turning point in the whole journey.

Oh, wait.  They might have also taken issue with a one-time split-second kiss between two boys.

But other than that, I don't get it.  I don't get how someone could read this entire book and take issue with it.  It's a fantastic book.  Which, having read Old School, I expected.  But I had no idea that it would be anything like this.  It was funny, it was heartbreaking, it was impossible (you should read this book IF ONLY to see how Tobias Wolff got into prep school), it was heartening.  Even his foreword was wonderful: 

I have been corrected on some points, mostly of chronology.  Also my mother thinks that a dog I describe as ugly was actually quite handsome.  I've allowed some of these points to stand, because this is a story of memory, and memory has its own story to tell.  But I have done my best to make it tell a truthful story.

My first stepfather used to say that what I didn't know would fill a book.  Well, here it is.

So don't listen to the Jackass Patrol in Kansas.  Read this book.

My Friend Leonard -- James Frey

Call me crazy, but I don't think that the cover art really fits with the text.  Try the first paragraph:

On my first day in jail, a three hundred pound man named Porterhouse hit me in the back of the head with a metal tray.  I was standing in line for lunch and I didn't see it coming.  I went down.  When I got up, I turned around and I started throwing punches.  I landed two or three before I got hit again, this time in the face.  I went down again.  I wiped blood away from my nose and my mouth and I got up I started throwing punches again.  Porterhouse put me in a headlock and started choking me.  He leaned toward my ear and said I'm gonna let you go.  If you keep fighting me I will fucking hurt you bad.  Stay down and I will leave you alone.  He let go of me, and I stayed down.

This book is the follow-up to Frey's first book, A Million Little Pieces, which chronicled his time in rehab.  My Friend Leonard picks up with James leaving rehab to serve a short stint in jail and then, after jail, trying to put the pieces of his life together and stay sober.  The title character is a mobster that James met in rehab, a man that decides that James is his adopted son, a man that continues to support James (emotionally and sometimes financially) after they both re-enter the real world.

I loved this book.  I loved the story--sometimes it would seem so unreal that I had to remind myself that it was a memoir, that it was true.  I loved Leonard and Snapper.  I loved James.  I loved his writing style.  He ran words together to describe mixed feelings in a way that I found extremely effective--in another, different book it wouldn't have worked, it would have felt lazy, but in this book it seemed right and perfect. 

It made me cry--at some points my eyes would just well up and at others I would sob.  I cried all over the damn book.  Highly recommended.

Assassination Vacation -- Sarah Vowell

In a word?  Fabulous.

I loved it--Sarah Vowell travelled around the country, visiting all of the places that are connected with three presidential assassinations: those of Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley. 

For some writers, that might just mean going to Ford's Theatre and calling it a day.  But Sarah Vowell didn't write this just because she was at a loss for something to write about.  She wrote about it because she is obsessed:

The Museum of Funeral Customs is on the edge of Oak Ridge Cemetery, a five-minute walk from the tomb.  Supposedly the fellow who swoops over to greet me is the museum director, but he speaks in the hushed low voice of a funeral director.  He warns me about "the sensitive nature of our exhibits."

Please.  I actually giggle when he tries to steel me for seeing the re-created 1920s embalming room, as if I'm not wearing Bela Lugosi hair clips; as if I didn't just buy a book for my nephew called Frankenstein and Dracula Are Friends; as if I was never nicknamed Wednesday (as in Addams); as if in eighth-grade English class, assigned to act out a scene from a biography, when all the other girls had chosen Queen Elizabeth or Anne Frank, I hadn't picked Al Capone and staged the St. Valentine's Day Massacre with toy machine guns and wadded-up red construction paper thrown everywhere to signify blood; as if I'm not the kind of person who would visit the freaking Museum of Funeral Customs in the first place.

If that doesn't convince you, one of her friends told her: "Assassinations are your Kevin Bacon."  (There are a lot of pop-cultural references in the book).  Apparently, she can bring any topic of conversation back around to assassination. 

This isn't just a walking tour around the D.C. area, either--she went all the way to Alaska to see a couple of totem poles that were related to Lincoln (the story attached to them was unbelievable--why didn't we learn stuff like this in high school?).  While visiting places connected with the Garfield assassination, she visited the former home of the Oneida religious cult.  (Yes, it's the same Oneida). 

It would be nice if history books in school were like this--she's so exuberant that I think it would be impossible NOT to get interested.  Her passion is contagious.  She also has great empathy for almost everyone that she writes about--especially, oddly, James A. Garfield, whom she calls "Mr. Loner McBookworm".  I went into this book knowing next to nothing about the man--well, I knew he was a president--now I'd like to find a good book about him.  (It might have something to do with her description of him sneaking away from Congress to read Jane Austen).

Let it be known, though, that if you're looking for a history book without bias, this ain't it.  She lets her opinions be known, both about the past government and the present.  If you're a big fan of GDubs, and defensive of it, this might not be the book for you.  Not personally being a big fan of him, I loved it and highly, highly recommend it.

I can't help it.

I continue to be totally fascinated by stuff about Jack the Ripper. 

Maybe my fellow staff-members are right and I really am a sick-o.

The Glass Castle -- Jeannette Walls

The memoir seems to be the publishing industry's favorite genre lately.  Apparently, everyone and his brother has been busy at the typewriter.  While many of them don't look like they're worth reading, a few stand out--The Glass Castle being one of them--as stories of extraordinary lives.

It has an super wonderful hook of a first sentence:

I was sitting in a taxi, wondering if I had overdressed for the evening, when I looked out the window and saw Mom rooting through a Dumpster.

Three pages later, she goes back to the beginning.  Well, to the beginning of her memory.  At age three, she burns herself so badly while making herself boiled hot dogs that she is taken to the hospital for skin grafts:

The nurses and doctors kept asking me questions:  How did you get burned?  Have your parents ever hurt you?  Why do you have all those bruises and cuts?  My parents never hurt me, I said.  I got the cuts and bruises playing outside and the burns from cooking hot dogs.  They asked me what I was doing cooking hot dogs by myself at the age of three.  It was easy, I said.  You just put the hot dogs in the water and boil them.  It wasn't like there was some complicated recipe that you had to be old enough to follow.  The pan was too heavy for me to lift when it was full of water, so I'd put a chair by the stove and pour the water into the pan.  I did that over and over again until the pan held enough water.  Then I'd turn on the stove, and when the water was boiling, I'd drop in the hot dogs.  "Mom says I'm mature for my age," I told them, "and she lets me cook for myself a lot."

After her dad sneaks Jeannette out of the hospital to avoid the bill, the family skips town.  Skipping town is a pretty regular occurrence in the early years:

Dad was so sure a posse of federal investigators was on our trail that he smoked his unfiltered cigarettes from the wrong end.  That way, he explained, he burned up the brand name, and if the people who were tracking us looked in the ashtray, they'd find unidentifiable butts instead of Pall Malls that could be traced to him.  Mom, however, told us that the FBI wasn't really after Dad; he just liked to say that were because it was more fun having the FBI on your tail than bill collectors.

Her father was brilliant, charismatic and charming.  After Jeannette and her brother blow up an abandoned shed doing a chemistry experiment, he doesn't get angry:

He said it was an incredible coincidence that he happened to be walking by.  Then he pointed to the top of the fire, where the snapping yellow flames dissolved into an invisible shimmery heat that made the desert beyond seem to waver, like a mirage.  Dad told us that zone was known in physics as the boundary between turbulence and order.  "It's a place where no rules apply, or at least they haven't figured 'em out yet," he said.  "You-all got a little too close to it today."

The problem is that he spent all of his time dreaming up his big plans, drawing up designs for his various inventions or playing poker.  And, as Jeannette's mother put it, he had "a little bit of a drinking situation".

I haven't even gone into what her mom was like.  Or what happened when they left the desert to move to Welch, West Virginia, her father's hometown.  Or how the kids finally got out.  Or what happens when their parents follow them to New York.  Or how things got to the point described in the first sentence.

[Later]  Sarah was just in here, looking for books, and I was rambling on and on, talking about the book.  I realized, that basically, what I got out of it was this:  If these kids made it, anyone can.  (It does help to be really smart, though).

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers -- Mary Roach

Mary Roach is usually a journalist, and it comes through in her writing.  Not in a bad way at all--in fact, it's exactly the kind of non-fiction that I like to read.  Each chapter stands on its own, so the result is a book of related essay/interviews.

It's totally worth it--and since each chapter examines a different facet of the life of the dead, you can pick and choose. If you want, you can avoid the really icky stuff.  (Or, if you're like me, you can go straight for it).

In the introduction, she addresses a major issue: death vs. dying:

There are those who will disagree with me, who feel that to do anything other than bury or cremate the dead is disrespectful.  That includes, I suspect, writing about them.  Many people will find this book disrespectful.  There is nothing amusing about being dead, they will say.  Ah, but there is.  Being dead is absurd.  It's the silliest situation you'll find yourself in.  Your limbs are floppy and uncooperative.  Your mouth hangs open.  Being dead is unsightly and stinky and embarrassing, and there's not a damn thing to be done about it.

This book is not about death as in dying.  Death, as in dying, is sad and profound.  There is nothing funny about losing someone you love, or about being the person about to be lost.  This book is about the already dead, the anonymous, behind-the-scenes dead. 

I think that there's a chapter in here for everybody (not counting the people who'd be horrified by the book in the first place).  There's a chapter about the history of body snatching (which let to full-on murders--it's easier to bonk someone over the head than it is to dig them up later), one in which she visits the guys that are the brains behind forensic science (they put cadavers in the backyard and just let 'em go), and one about reconstructing plane crashes (apparently, a lot of your clothes come off when you fall from great heights). 

There was a guy in the 30s who wanted to prove that the Shroud of Turin was the real thing.  What did he use?  Cadavers.  Later, there was a guy that wanted to prove that the first Shroud guy was full of it.  What did he use?  Cadavers.  (That chapter, for whatever reason, was the one that freaked me out the most).

There's a guy that's wants to perform the first human head transplant.  Actually, the book came out in 2003.  For all I know, he could have done it by now.  I hope not.

There's one about definition of death, which was really interesting, especially in relation to the Schiavo case.

In Sweden, there's a lady that has come up with a method of more ecologically-sound burial.  It involves both freeze-drying and composting.  And it's pretty cool.

20 pages in and loving it.

Keep in mind that those twenty pages include the table of contents and the title page.  All I've really read is the Introduction and the first two pages of the first chapter of Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers.  This is the first paragraph:

The human head is of the same approximate size and weight as a roaster chicken.  I have never before had occasion to make the comparison, for never before today have I seen a head in a roasting pan.  But here are forty of them, one per pan, resting face-up on what looks to be a small pet-food bowl.  The heads are for plastic surgeons, two per head, to practice on.  I'm observing a facial anatomy and face-lift refresher course, sponsored by a southern university medical center and led by a half-dozen of America's most sought-after face-lifters.

I shouldn't have started reading it this morning, because I was SO PISSED when I had to stop.  Working is for the birds.

I think that I'm going to use this book for the next session of my high school reading group.  We're going to be reading nonfiction, after all.

Dry -- Augusten Burroughs

In Dry, we get Augusten Burroughs' take on rehab and alcoholism in general.

Not surprisingly, the rehab part of the book is pretty surreal:

Two of the patients reach behind their chairs and retrieve two large, well-worn stuffed animals; one is a monkey, one is a blue kitten.  They hug the dirty plush toys to their laps and wear great big smiles.

At once, the entire room breaks into an alarming musical chant.  It's Monkey Wonkey time . . . Monkey Wonkey was a lonely monkey.  Then Blue Blue kitten became his friend . . . now Monkey Wonkey and Blue Blue Kitten want to make friends with . . . YOU!!"

When he gets back to work after his month away, things are pretty weird:

I've never seen her look so bizarre.  The vein on the side of her forehead seems to actually be pulsating.  It's awkward to be around her, because I feel like she's walking on eggshells.  Like in one of those cheesy interracial movies from the seventies where nobody ever mentions that the white girl's boyfriend is black, but everyone is highly aware of it.  Then somebody says watermelon in a sentence and everyone sort of gasps.  That's how I feel.

An extremely handsome crack addict in group therapy is hitting on him, his best friend is dying, and someone is trying to sabotage his sobriety by hiding bottles of gin in his office.  Things are rough.

It was totally different than Running with Scissors.  It wasn't laugh-out-loud funny like RwS--it was more of a wry smile book.  But a really good one, both just as a book in general, and as a book about addiction.

Now I really want to get a hold of Sellevision, which is his novel about the Home Shopping Network.

Blowing My Cover: My Life as a CIA Spy and Other Misadventures -- Lindsay Moran

You know how Full Metal Jacket is kind of two movies stuck together--the boot camp part and the Vietnam part, with the boot camp half being (by far) the superior?  That's what this book was like.  I loved the first half--the part about getting into, and then training for, the CIA:

After the physical exam, we took a series of multiple-choice tests.  One particularly asinine test contained in excess of two thousand questions.  There were bizarre true/false statements like "I would rather be a florist than a firefighter," and confusingly worded ones such as "I rarely like to torture small animals." 

I found the second part of the book--the part where she was actually a spy--less interesting.  But because of the strength of the first half, ultimately, I thought that the book was worth it. 

The major things I took away from it? 

One:

Contrary to popular jargon, a CIA agent is not the actual employee of the CIA but rather the hapless schlub who has been recruited by a CIA case officer to spy on behalf of the United States, usually in exchange for money.  The whole process of spotting, assessing, developing, and enlisting foreign agents is called, "The Recruitment Cycle."

Two:

They spend a CRAPLOAD of money.  Especially during the wining-and-dining portion of training (obviously, it doesn't add up to gazillions of dollars, but it still seems excessive).

Three:

I can't really think of another one, other than that there were WAY too many typos in this book.

Oh, and in case anyone was worried:

The material in this book has been reviewed and approved by the CIA.  That review neither constitutes CIA authentication of information nor implies CIA endorsement of the author's views.

Talking to the Dead: Kate and Maggie Fox and the Rise of Spiritualism -- Barbara Weisberg

I've been reading a lot of non-fiction lately.  Well, a lot of non-fiction for me, anyway.  This one caught my eye because of Mallory's Oracle--there was quite a bit about spiritualism in that one, specifically the different tricks that fake mediums use to create the sound (and sometimes visual) effects for their (sometimes) unsuspecting clients.

In late March 1848 two young sisters excitedly waylaid a neighbor, eager to tell her about the strange sounds they had been hearing at home nearly every night around bedtime.  The noises, the girls confided to Mary Readfield, seemed to have no explanation.  Their father had failed to discover the source of the raps and knocks.  Their mother was exhausted from worry and lack of sleep.

This paragraph kicks off a biography of Kate and Maggie Fox, the sisters that (according to the author) were the beginning of the huge surge of interest in Spiritualism in the late 1800s.  From this small beginning in their own house, surrounded only by their own family, (according to the question-and-answer sessions with the invisible rapper, the spirit was a murdered peddler that was buried in the basement) the girls were catapulted to stardom--early on in their careers, their older sister, Leah, also discovered that she was a medium--and over the next 40-or-so years, they attracted thousands and thousands of followers all over the world.  Kate even traveled to Russia to hold a seance for the royal family in St. Petersburg.  As their careers moved on, the effects generated during the seances grew in intensity and impressiveness--from the simple rappings to moving furniture to actual spirit appearances.

Of course, there were many detractors--over and over again, the girls were subjected to humiliating public "tests" to prove themselves--men would hold their ankles and feet, to make sure they weren't secretly rapping their toes against the floor or moving the table with their knees.  Harry Houdini was a huge anti-spiritualism advocate.  He saw the mediums as worse than frauds--according to him, they were just bad magicians.

Later in life, the younger Fox sisters came forward and publicly said that they had never been in contact with the spirit world--that Spiritualism itself was a fraud.  They even explained how they had created many of the special effects.  Years later, they reversed the denial, saying that they had made the statement under pressure from anti-Spiritualist groups.

In 1904 schoolchildren playing around the Hydesville "spook" house ventured down into the dark cellar.  A crumbling wall gave way:  Eureka! a skeleton lay behind it.  According to an article in the Boston Journal, a doctor was consulted who estimated that the bones were about fifty years old.

The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll: The Search for Dare Wright -- Jean Nathan

Anyone who really knows me knows that once I've loudly proclaimed my opinion, I have a hard time admitting that I've changed my mind--or worse, that I was wrong.  (Steve, the giant squid/blue whale incident might come to mind).

Well, here goes.

I no longer think that The Lonely Doll is a creepy book.  Sad, yes, and dark.  But after reading Dare Wright's biography, I'll probably add her books to my personal collection.

It's a must read for anyone who's interested in children's books. Even if you aren't particularly interested in kid's books, it's a completely fascinating biography.  But get ready to be depressed.

Kick Me: Adventures in Adolescence -- Paul Feig

Fans of Freaks and Geeks will find a lot of the stories in this book familiar. Remember the stuff that Sam and Neil and Bill went through? The creator of the short-lived best-show-ever lived most of it--and in most cases, even more painfully:

More laughs exploded, and I knew that I had just witnessed the birth of something horrible. It was bound to happen and, in all honesty, I don't know why it didn't happened sooner. The word "fag" had started to float around on the outer fringes of my peer group right around the fifth grade. But I guess that in grade school, a fig-filled cookie was funnier that a cruel term for something we didn't understand. However, as I was about to find out, junior high was where the term flourished, and I had just been dubbed the Keeper of the Flame. As Mr. Parks tried in vain to quiet the class and regain order, I sat in the stunned realization that I had just seen the next several years of my life laid out for me.

Fig Newton was dead. Long live Paul Fag.

Oddly enough, at points, it really reminded me of the Wonder Years--but never syrupy and often excruciatingly painful (and funny--don't forget that it's hysterically funny!). I've always considered my middle school experience to be pretty miserable, but I'm not sure if I can really claim that anymore--compared to Paul Feig, my 5th-8th grade years were all sunshine and daises. Read it, cringe and laugh. Then watch Freaks and Geeks again.