Book-Of-The-Day Club

Sun Kil Moon--"Lost Verses" (mp3)

For the past three days, I have read a book each day. Nelson DeMille's The Lion on the first day, Kenneth Slawenski's J.D. Salinger the second day, and E.L. Doctorow's Sweet Land Stories the third day. I will probably read another book again today.

This is not intended to be any kind of commentary, any kind of braggadocio. My circumstances are unique--I am alone in the family's Florida condo for another two days before my children come. I have the luxury of picking up or putting a book down whenever I feel like it. I can take it with me wherever in place of conversation. I have an incredible library to draw inspiration from. And it is certainly not a reflection on either my reading prowess or my loneliness. While I'm pretty good in the first and not yet affected by the second, it does need to be said that I am not reading a book each day either to show off or to pass the hours.

I am simply reading these books because I can. They are there and I am there to read them and reading is a habit I carry with me.

What I want to tell you about is the effect that it is having on me. I am already a regular reader; I'm sure you are, too. I read at night before I go to sleep. I occasionally go to lunch by myself and take a book (or Kindle) with me. I sometimes read at work in the when there is nothing else to do. But, most dayssummer , I don't have the easiest time carving out much reading time.

Reading before going to sleep is very ineffective. Since I am reading before I fall asleep, it stands to reason that some portion of the last pages I read each night are lost to that netherworld that exists between wakefulness and sleep. I recently read most of a very large fantasy novel, A Game Of Thrones, during those minutes before sleep. I can't tell you how often I had to go back a few pages until I could find something that I remembered reading. It is not an efficient way to read.

But reading an entire book in a day, well, that has its own set of challenges. In the cases of my past three days, that has involved a) on day one, hanging with a smartass N.Y. cop as he chases down and settles a score with a Libyan terrorist, b) on day two, following the entire writing career of Salinger, from his noodlings at Valley Forge Military Academy to his last, failed publication at the New Yorker, and c) on day three, a somewhat random story-by-story journey through some seedier aspects of American life. In each case, the circumstances have gotten so deeply into my head that they have been hard to shake. Not surprisingly, I guess, they have colored each entire day, even dreams.

I remember the first book (of an adult nature and length) that I read straight through. It was Word Of Honor by the above-mentioned Mr. DeMille. I read it straight through because I literally could not put it down. I can still picture sitting in that chair in that living room with that book as the day slid past me.

Poe claimed that he wrote his stories to be read in one sitting, which would allow them to achieve their single "effect" on the reader. His stories' typical length would seem to bear out this theory, or at least make it possible. Wonder what he would have thought about the idea of reading an entire book of some 400 or 500 pages straight through. I think he would have discovered, as I did, that even a long book, despite its many plot twists or its coverage of the 91 years of a person's life, still creates an effect.

Try spending the day with J.D. Salinger sometime. I promise you, not unlike in the music documentaries Billy discussed the other day, that you will not come away thinking, what a weirdo or pedophile or anything else negative. Instead, you will get enough of the cumulative incidents and circumstances that made him who he is. You may be surprised, as I was, by the intensity of his military service during WWII (D-Day, St. Lo, Cherbourg, Hurtgen Forest, Battle of the Bulge, liberation of concentration camps) and the impact that it so clearly had on him, when that was never clear before, except in "For Esme, With Love and Squalor." You may discover that religion, especially Eastern religion was central to the last 60 years of his life. You may see how, either as a result of their best intentions or their own agendas, the editors he worked with from beginning to end all let him down. Or at least he thought so. You may understand that he did not take a quick path from hero to hermit, that he lived for years in small town New Hampshire as a member of the community, traveling often to New York, but that when a man like Salinger only wants his privacy respected, it becomes the one thing that people are unable to do. Lastly, you may conclude that you have no interest in the reams of writing that he continued to amass through his entire life, even though he last published in 1965. It seems likely, at least to me, that J.D. Salinger is not "the next J.D. Salinger."

So, yes, the effect is understanding more than judgment. But spending your own day with such a singular focus has its own broader results as well. As you chronicle Salinger's writing career, you can't help but reflect on your own (lack of one). As you realize the fame and financial support that Salinger gained from short fiction (for years, the New Yorker paid him $30,000/year for the right to the first look at anything he wrote, whether they published it or not), you may wonder what happened to the United States. How and why did our support of the arts and artist wither away? Or, perhaps most of all, how can we judge anyone when we have incomplete knowledge about how they got to where they are?

And the same is true if you're simply spending the day reading a fairly well-written post-9/11 thriller. Again, you can't help but revisit memories, ponder the current global situations, think about a book you're teaching in the fall, hear a Bruce Springsteen or Steve Earle song in your head, shake your head at Americans' inability to tell where people from other cultures are actually from, wonder if the weaknesses that this fictional terrorist exploits in the novel are, indeed, real weaknesses, lessons we have not learned.

It is so rare these days that we get to focus at length on anything, that it almost doesn't matter what it is. The depth of thought it creates has great value regardless. Reading a book in one day becomes a kind of meditation, the quiet time that some of my friends like to carve out in the morning, the chance to slow life down, however briefly, to the pace that we are comfortable with. That's not a gift I'm going to turn down.

Kindle II: Revenge of the Kindle

I Could Write a Book - Harry Connick, Jr. (mp3)
Calling America - Electric Light Orchestra (mp3)

NOTE: Bob wrote a piece on his new Kindle back in July. Read it here, ‘cuz most of what he observes, I ain’t gonna re-observe.

I got the super-simple stripped-down Kindle for Christmas. After a month of somewhat intensive research and contemplation -- iPad? Droid Pad? Kindle? -- I decided the wisest move was to go with the cheapest and simplest option, the option that is almost universally loved in spite of its vast limitations. I’ve yet to hear someone complain that their Kindle “is too complicated” or “doesn’t do everything I expected it to” and that they regret the purchase. (I’m sure they’re out there, but not in my circle.) And, ultimately, isn’t that the best we can hope for in our modern capitalistic world?

Two weeks into my ownership, I’m giddy at the call. Worth every penny.

Yes, the weight and size are great. The user-friendly nature of the device is great. The ability to control how the text is presented in about 10 different ways is incredibly useful. But here are the 2 ½ most compelling reasons I’m loving this Kindle:

1. FREE SAMPLES!

You can download an introductory chunk -- usually the first chapter -- of almost any book sold for the Kindle free of charge. While far too many books cost a little more than I’d prefer when all you’re getting is the digital residue -- not like I can trade it into a used bookseller when I’m done, and paying merely for the information feels steep at times -- free samples are guaranteed to save me between $50-100 every year.

You see, pre-Kindle, if a book intrigued me, I had two options: (a) buy it and put it on my “In the Queue” shelf at home, where a long stack of books I bought in the hopes of one day reading linger, sad and forlorn like ugly pound puppies, or (b) make a mental or physical note of said book and hope to God I don’t forget or lose the note until some magical future time when I have time to give a flip. Neither of these options were ideal, and Option A can be painfully cost-ineffective at times. Buying a book used is even more doomed, because my screwed-up logical self then decides that, since I didn’t have to pay as much for said book, I need not feel the same urgency to read said book.

Now, if I want to keep a book in mind for consideration, I just download the free sample. It sits there -- Free. Brief. Harmless -- until I read that chapter. When finished with that chapter, I can then decide whether I want to pay for the whole book. This feature, dear friends, was made for idiots like me.

2. NOTES & HIGHLIGHTS!

Anyone who writes a blog for three years without ever earning much or building an arena-sized following must be in love with their own clever thoughts. But I’ve always been handicapped about marking up books I buy, and I have no logical explanation for it. I don’t like having to keep a writing utensil handy, and something about soiling the pages bothers me, but I don’t see how these reasons are quite enough.

Regardless, I bet I haven’t scribbled notes or underlined passages in more than half a dozen books since I graduated college. Yet here I am on my second Kindle book, and I’ve written more than 50 comments to myself and highlighted more than 100 passages. This is almost certainly New Purchase Overkill; however, something in me has long been wanting to have this power -- to add my own side commentary or observations to works with which I’m enthralled -- and it’s already clear that jotting notes and highlighting passages allows the book to make a deeper mark in my memory.

OH YEAH, NOT TO MENTION...

One of my biggest and baddest reading habits is to predetermine where I will stop reading. I find my bookmark and then immediately flip ahead to see where the chapter ends or where an ideal stopping place seems to be. Not having this ability on Kindle actually results in me reading more. I also now have the Kindle app on my Droid and, if stuck in a dark place with nothing to do (or the toilet stall next to Bob in the mall), can get through a few more pages on my phone.

So, in conclusion, It fits nicely and lightly into my backpack. It helps me better remember what I read. It minimizes my unnecessary purchase of books I might never read, and the books I do buy are a little (sometimes a lot) cheaper. And I read more ‘cuz I can’t as easily predetermine a good stopping place or too easily read the last page in advance.

Amazon, feel free to send all my advertising royalties ℅ “Bottom of the Glass.”

Book Guilt

Let's Active--"The Book Of Last Pages" (mp3)

Perhaps, unintentionally and in honor of going back to school, Billy has kicked off a kind of "Reading Week" on BOTG. His piece yesterday got me thinking about reading, especially in light of this strange occurrence: I finished two books yesterday.

Now, I'll acknowledge that I'm a pretty fast reader who has been known to skim though setting details that bore him, but yesterday wasn't about speed. It was about two different journeys converging.

In the morning, I fnished Zeitoun, the straightforward account of a Muslim-American painter and builder who stayed in New Orleans during Katrina, helping people and animals until he disappears into government bureaucracy and indifference, while his family and friends track him down. My daughter, who doesn't read much, had been required to read this book last summer and declared it her favorite book, so much so that we took her and several friends down to New Orleans at the end of the summer to find Zeitoun's house, which we did (he wasn't home). Last week, when we returned, I found one of his painting signs lying in a gutter outside of Commander's Palace (it now hangs in my daughter's English teacher's classroom), and I thought, okay, I probably need to read this book. The book is impossible to put down. I read it in about three days.

In the evening, I finished The Passage, a highly-regarded literary "vampire" novel (government program gone bad) I had purchased last summer with a gift certificate and which I had been slogging through at a pace of about 10-15 pages a night for several months.

You know how you stick with some books just to earn a "badge of honor?" Well, The Passage was one of those for me. I don't necessarily blame the book, since my reading pattern of a few pages until I fell asleep doesn't lend itself to cohesion or coherence in the mind of the reader, but I also never fully connected with the characters, and so the last 300 pages became about finding out what happens to conclude the 750 page, 100-year epic. I'm not sorry I read the book, but it didn't "wow" me in the ways I expected, drawing as it does too much on The Stand, Avatar, The Road, 28 Days Later, The Handmaid's Tale and a host of other influences. But, darn it, I was going to finish it.

I think most of us deal with some level of "book guilt," that notion that you are somehow a failure if you don't finish a book that you've started. My wife suffers excessively; I suffer selectively. I mean, let's face it, regardless of how well-reviewed or how classic they might be, some books just plain suck and are not worth the time that they demand. But once we start, we tend to let them dictate the terms of our relationship, we being mere readers, while they are published books.

They are like a meal we've ordered in a restaurant. We tend to eat it, if for no other reason than we've paid for it. I think it's worth realizing, though, that this guilt, like any other guilt, is entirely of our own creation, and need not be served. Just because I paid well over $20 for The Passage in hardcover, that should not create any more obligation than Zeitoun, which cost me $5.46 on the Kindle. The latter was the more pleasurable reading experience.

I mean, you don't keep listening to a crappy CD just because you blew $20 on it, do you? You might give it a few more tries, but you will give up on it. Same thing if someone hands you a burned CD that they say is their favorite by a band you've never heard of, but you can't get into. You'll find one song that you can mention to your friend by name, and then move on.

Finishing The Passage created nothing in me more than a sense of freedom. I had, for whatever reason, committed to it, and now I've finished it. Free to move on to other projects.

And so, last night, I had a third reading experience, as I started Matterhorn, the epic novel of Vietnam that came out last year that took the author 30 years to write. A friend had just walked into my office and handed it to me without saying much. He wanted me to start it right away, but I had other obligations at the time. But last night, within 50 pages, I was completely entranced by Matterhorn, and so right now, I am in my favorite reading position--at the start of a good book, with a few other good-looking ones lined up.

I've got Keith Richard's Life waiting on deck (a Christmas present to myself), and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, a Kindle book I started and liked, but got distracted from. It's a book I want to read and look forward to returning to, probably even starting over. No guilt, though.

Dystopia Dyspepsia

Honey Bee - Grinderman (mp3)

I saw Blade Runner in the theater in 1982. I was 10 years old. I thought it would be some futuristic Raiders of the Lost Ark or some revisioning of Star Wars, because I was just a kid, and I understandably equated Harrison Ford with those two movie franchises.

This memory came to me because I took my two daughters to see Tron: Legacy during the holidays. The movie was difficult for me to follow -- because, well, the plot kinda sucked -- so I knew the girls were lost during most of it. Their looks of stern concentration as they tried to comprehend it reminded me of the replicants and the scene on the roof where Rutger Hauer’s character is slowly dying in the rain. The difference between the two moments is that Blade Runner got better as I got older. Tron: Legacy will continue to suck with each passing year. In that sense, I have done my dear children wrong.

The other thing that reminded me of Blade Runner was a “debate” on the NYTimes web site about the current state of young adult fiction, or YA for lingophiles. Called The Dark Side of Young Adult Fiction, the debate is about what to think of the increasingly dark, violent and “dystopian” movement in the genre.

Anyone my age who read comics in their younger days knows that dystopian and dark visions are nothing new. They weren’t even new in the ‘80s when Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns completely nuked the Archie universe of sugary gum drops with superheroes who raped and murdered and TV reporters who smiled while reading about unspeakably horrific world events.

Worse still, some 25 years after Blade Runner and The Dark Knight Returns, one would have to admit that too much of their futuristic vision is far too close to our current reality.

I spent my break quickly devouring a popular YA novel on my Christmas present, a gorgeous and cheap Kindle. The Hunger Games is certainly dark and dystopian. A more believable and better-written and Americanized version of the Japanese cult novel Battle Royale. Both are about teens chosen to duel to the death for the entertainment of a captive and somnambulently passive citizenry, and both owe origins to a history of gladiators and The Running Man by Stephen King nee Richard Bachman.

The Hunger Games is extremely popular amongst our middle school-aged boys. While I have an admitted weakness for YA fiction, this book seemed particularly well-written and danced the line between violent enough and not too violent, and it never felt particularly exploitative or bandwagon-happy the way many of the vampire genres do.

So the questions worth asking about this “trend” of violent dystopian YA novels, which is hardly a new trend, are as follows:

• Are these books merely another form of vampire novels, pure science fiction meant to entertain and bemuse?
• Are they that “dystopian,” or are these novels trying to prepare our younger generations for possible realities our parents and culture refuse to acknowledge?
• Does reading about young protagonists struggling to survive and fighting to the death for food or shelter help keep stresses about stupid bubble tests in perspective for its readers?

If indeed there’s nothing new under the sun, then these apocalyptic visions downgrading The Road into something more palatable for young teen brains are also finding slightly new ways to tell tales as old as ink and parchment. And just as A Clockwork Orange did almost half a century ago, these tales must feed some part of us that needs a warning, a fright, a shock to our malaised system.

God bless you, Nostradamus, original dyspeptic dystopian visionary. Your spirit lives on!

Reading (What?) Is Fundamental

More Than Words - Extreme (mp3)
My Paper Heart - The All-American Rejects (mp3)

Before June 1, I'd only read two books in the last six months. This, in my world, is a huge problem.

For whatever reason -- be it an expectation of my time or the values of my mother or the educational baggage I refuse to leave behind -- when I use the word "reading" as an activity, what I actually mean to say is "reading books." Therefore in recent years I've found myself saying aloud in conversation and to myself hundreds of times: "I'm not reading nearly enough lately."

But I have been reading.

I probably read more on a daily basis now than I ever have in my life, but not "reading books," the only real kind of reading. No, I've been doing cheap and dirty reading. Newspapers, magazines, articles, columns on the Internet. I read articles to keep up with my job, which means lots of stuff about marketing and education. I read stuff to stay (relatively) in tune with current affairs of politics and medicine and psychology. I read funny stuff from Joel Stein... well, I did before he apparently got canned from the Los Angeles Times in late April. I proofread hundreds of words daily my coworkers have written. I receive roughly 100 emails every day to my work address (fewer in the summer, admittedly), another dozen or so to my Gmail account, and another few from Facebook.

Thousands upon thousands of words. Every day.

Yet I still go to bed at night thinking to myself, "I'm not reading enough." Is this a problem exclusive to English majors, or do others out there suffer from this confused situation?

In the last six months, I actually managed to catch up from my backlog of New Yorkers. That single magazine is the albatross of any human being who likes to read good long-form journalism. While non-fiction books tend to wear me about about midway through, a good New Yorker article can feel like a whole damn book yet maintain my energy for the topic at hand. Why the hell, and how the hell those bastards put out a new issue of that magazine on a weekly basis befuddles the ever-lovin' shit out of me.

Reading the New Yorker is like falling into the lightning sand from "The Princess Bride." You fall in, and you gotta have some serious lung capacity and a thick-ass rope to get yourself out of it before you die. And then damn if, not minutes after you get out of there with your life in tact and your lungs in order, another issue doesn't land in your mailbox.

Add to this my Newsweek subscription. This add-on was bad enough a few months and years ago, but the recent redesign has rendered this weekly almost as thick and juicy as the New Yorker. Now I've got two thick-as-hell, packed-to-the-gills with words magazines to swim through every dadgum week. Pile onto these two burdens my magazine version of meth, Entertainment Weekly -- easily the best crapper reading material this side of Weekly World News -- and the thank-God-it's-monthly WIRED subscription.

If I were being fair to myself, getting through even 3/4 of my monthly Newsweek and New Yorker pages, all of my EW, and 1/2 of my WIRED has to border on a novel if not a little more.

So how in the hell do I find myself haunted at times by the feeling that I'm not reading?

Here's my guess, and it's just a guess: I think writers, and people who aspire to be writers, feel some strange obligation to support others in the field. Just as wannabe young angst-filled poets find themselves sitting in coffee shops or bookstores with other young angst-filled wannabe poets and acting like they're paying attention when the other poets read their crappy poems. Just as karaoke addicts suffer through the torture of those no-talent ass clowns because they're fellow karaoke addics.

Or maybe there's reading for information and reading for expansion -- of our imaginations, of our philosophies, of our being -- and maybe all those magazines and Internet articles are too much about the trees and not enough about the forest.

Thankfully, I'm wrapping up my second book of the last three weeks. I Love You Beth Cooper. It's hardly expanding any part of me other than my rabid teen-obsessed immaturity, but it sure has been fun.

Nights in Columbine

Townes Van Zandt--"Columbine" (mp3)
Sparrow and the Workshop--"The Gun" (mp3)


These days, I do most of my reading before I go to sleep. It's an interesting challenge. Do I choose a book that I want to read because it's an exciting, well-written thriller, say, a Nelson DeMille, do I choose a book that I bought because I thought I should read it, like Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food, do I skip over the list of books stacked by my bed and go for the one I just bought, Dave Cullen's Columbine?

You can tell from the title of this post which one I chose. The DeMille is waiting and I know it will be good when I get to it, I'm part way through the Pollan book (the same thing happened with his first book, The Omnivore's Dilemna), but from the second I cracked the spine, I was hooked on Columbine.

There is a price you pay when you decide to spend your last conscious moments each night with a dissection of the tragic high school shooting incident that put the concept on the map. To be sure, there has been a larger school tragedy since then at Virginia Tech, but Columbine remains the reference point, the event against which all others will be evaluated. Fortunately for Virginia Tech, the incident there has not defined the school, but when you hear the name Columbine, you only think of one thing.

The price is not bad dreams exactly, and it isn't sleeplessness. There's just a kind of uneasiness that comes with a nightly reading of this book, and even if you sleep fitfully, as I did sometimes, even if you fall asleep reading the book, as I did sometimes, you still walk through your waking hours interpreting much of what you see through the lense of Columbine. And you want to tell other people what you know.

I don't want to give away the book, and, believe me, there are things to give away, because EVERYTHING that you think you know about Columbine is wrong. Except that it happened in Colorado. That's true. Everything else, from how the killers Eric Harris and Dylan Kleibold fit into the social structure of the school to the story of Cassie Bernall, the Evangelical Christian girl who supposedly said "Yes" when one of the killers asked her if she believed in God and then shot her in the head, to the Jeffco County cover-up that was only fully resolved in 2007. None of it is what you thought.

I remember when our school, back in the 1990's, dealt with the suicide of a student who had another student buy him an assault rifle and then put on a Nazi uniform and shot himself in the head in the middle of a stormy night in the middle of campus while eating a Snickers bar. Had things gone differently, we could have been Columbine years before Columbine. After all, why does one need an assault rifle and a Nazi uniform just to take one's own life?

But what I remember most about that event is how the school very quickly made the boy's taking of his own life into a very understandable event--the boy had been rejected that day from a number of top-notch colleges. We had to make it understandable, I'm reasoning, because we had to compartmentalize and distance ourselves from the dead boy so that none of our students would want to follow in his footsteps. But suicide is arguably the most irrational of acts and any attempt to make it rational, explainable, and dismissable is perhaps necessary, but, by definition, false at its core.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not faulting the school. I think they had to do that. But on a national scale, our media did the same thing at Columbine to such an extent that it gave an entire society a false impression of what happened. I guess we average Americans couldn't possibly handle a couple of shooters who actually had a lot of friends, who weren't part of a Trench Coat Mafia, who didn't have a list of students they intended to kill, etc. It's kind of like if a bunch of Saudi Arabians flew planes into our buildings, someone would have to alter our perception of who was behind that act because, hey, the Saudi Arabians are our allies. Aren't they?

What Columbine does is to give us a snapshot, a moment in time for our entire society--children, adults, police, parents, lawyers, reporters, politicians, religious leaders, haters, blamers, good girls who buy guns, people who miss signals from seriously disturbed people they know, people who just want to live, teachers and principals who in different ways give their lives for students--and to force us to look at it, not to turn away, to stay with it far beyond our original impressions through a full 10 years of sorting out the truth of what happened and how a community and the people in it changed during that time.

Oh, and the book has no photographs. Somehow, that works. Do we really need photographs of the killers as young children or the victims or the crime scene?

We accept that we live in an Information Age. Part of the daily acceptance of that fact is the corollary that when something happens, something bad, we should have known. Shouldn't we have seen it coming? What kind of parents are we? What kind of community? I mean, all of the information was there. How could we have missed it?

Given that it took author Dave Cullen 10 years to correct all of his own misperceptions about this awful event, one might be tempted to suggest that, unfortunately or not, there isn't a simple, rational explanation for everything. Especially why people do what they do.

Columbine High School is named after a local flower. I found both of these tracks at Hypem.com. Steve Earle has recently released a CD of his versions of Townes Van Zandt songs, available at Itunes.