I think we should have a book-talk, because I've read some interesting things since the beginning of August that I'd like to bring up here.
1) Underground by Don Delillo. Yes, Amy, his first name is in fact Don, not Dom; that was a Freudian typo by me stemming from my desire that there be more people in the world who share the same name with Dom Deluise. I borrowed this book from Kristen's brother, because if I'd decided to buy it then another portion of the rainforest would've had to be pillaged and burned, the book is that massive, and God knows there might be that one little goddamn flower that could hold the cure for cancer that might happen to be living on the fodder for Mr. Delillo's book. But anyway.
The book opens with this really rockin' prologue that happens to be sixty pages long, and it's all about the 1951 playoff game where the NY Giants' Bobby Thompson hit the Shot Heard Round the World to beat the Brooklyn Dodgers, as the "super-omniscient" narration follows several characters present at the game, including the trio Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason, and J. Edgar Hoover, and Cotter, a Harlem kid who has snuck into the game and retrieves the coveted home run ball. The home run ball become the loose thread by which the rest of the book is held together. I can't say that the body of the novel was always that engaging, but the momentum of that rockin' prologue just sent me spiraling all the way to the end. Seriously, just buy the book (or borrow it, because when you're sixty and cancer-ridden you're going to want that flower) to read the prologue, because it's a piece of literature that should be read and analyzed in America's classrooms every year.
Delillo weaves some themes about trash, and how the stuff we throw away defines us, and some adjacent ideas that don't really click when you think about it. He's really great, though, at writing scenes that capture perfectly the collective mood of a moment. The novel spans the entirety of the Cold War, so there's a series of 5 or 6 interspersed chapters in the middle that take place during the Cuban Missile Crisis, but the real subject is this famous political comedian, Lenny Bruce, who is touring during the 13 days where Kennedy's trying to get the country out of peril. Every chapter recreates a night on Lenny's tour, his routine and everything. I've never seen or heard any of Lenny Bruce's stuff, so I just superimposed Lewis Black over the character, and it worked perfectly, because the chapters are all about the precarious balance between humor and the threat of certain death. There's a chapter where Delillo describes how Lenny's hot and the whole audience has just forgotten their worries over the Crisis, but then the house lights flicker and the power goes out, and of course everyone thinks its nuclear war, and you feel the electric tension and how everyone's thinking "my god, how could i be about to die when only a few minutes ago i was laughing my ass off?" It was one of the few times where I've actually put a book down and said "Wow" out loud.
So... how many of you just read all that? I didn't think so.
2. Songbook - Nick Hornby. Yeah, I bet you didn't know he had a new book out. You can find it in the "Music & Entertainment Literature" section of your local chain bookseller, because otherwise, you're not going to see it advertised anywhere else. So the book is non-fiction, and it's essentially Nick Hornby taking 31 of his favorite songs and talking about why he likes them, and what they've meant to him, and what their significance is in the world of pop music. Excited? You can just get that on this blog, why spend $26? Well, because Mr. Hornby included a little CD with 11 of the songs he talks about in is book. The essays themselves are somewhat forgettable, except for one I'll talk about, but the CD is really kick-ass. I've been listening to it 3 times a day this entire month. Here's the track list, because it's not listed anywhere else and the cover of the book won't tell you until you've bought it, so see if anything strikes your interest:
1. Paul Westerberg - Born For Me
2. Teenage Fanclub - Your Love is the Place Where I Come From
3. The Bible - Glorybound
4. Aimee Mann - I've Had It
5. Rufus Wainwright - One Man Guy
6. Rod Stewart - Mama You've Been On My Mind
7. Badly Drawn Boy - A Minor Incident
8. Teenage Fanclub - Ain't That Enough
9. Ben Folds Five - Smoke
10. Mark Mulcahy - Hey Self Defeater
11. Ani DiFranco - You Had Time
I've fallen in love with the Paul Westerberg and Aimee Mann songs. Mark Mulcahy used to be the lead singer of Polaris, who did the theme song for a little show called The Adventures of Pete & Pete. I never thought I liked Ani DiFranco, but this song is emotionally devastating to me, and I don't even know what it's about.
But the Badly Drawn Boy song is incidentally from the About a Boy movie. In that chapter of the book, Hornby talks very emotionally about how his son is autistic to the point where he can't talk and pretty much lives in a world of his own. But when he wrote About a Boy, he hadn't set out to write about his relationship with his son; it was only when the movie was made, and Badly Drawn Boy wrote this song for the movie, that Hornby discovered that the song related to him and his son in almost eerie verisimilitude and made him wonder if the book had been about his son after all. So I won't be a douche and post the lyrics here, but you should really go and download Badly Drawn Boy's "A Minor Incident," because in light of this background information about Hornby, I think it's incredibly poignant.
3. Ghost Light - Frank Rich. For the record, I finished this before Daniel, despite his mention of it last week on his blog. So I get to be Laura's favorite. And, for the record, this is not a book about a rag-tag but lovable theater cast who uses their non-rehearsing time to solve mysteries in a haunted theater. I made it about halfway through the book before I had to come to terms that there would be no such mystery-solving hijinks. But I loved it just the same! The writing is a little spotty, maybe because there are only so many adjectives in existence to describe a good musical, but the story of Frank Rich's life is entirely absorbing and infinitely relatable. This despite the fact that I've never really understood what all the hub-bub was about Broadway, I think I came away with a new appreciation of musical theater. Rich does a good job with describing that feeling of excited obsession that kids acquire when they're young, and if I was the author, the book probably would have been about, sadly, newspaper comic strips.
So, thank you, Laura, for the kind gift.
4. The Human Stain - Philip Roth. Yes, I purchased this book just in the nick of time before it started to don the "Now a Major Motion Picture!" stickers on its cover. But I'm tired of writing about books, and I'll just say that it felt like Philip Roth was given a homework assignment to write a book on racism and the intellectual community, and he met all the requirements that were indicated on the rubric sheet that was given him, including some extra credit points, but ultimately, I don't think he was ever excited about writing it. But this man, from what I hear, has given the world more Nicole Kidman nudity this fall movie season because of his book, and for that he deserves our praise.
Now I'm reading David Sedaris's Naked, which is funny but ultimately less satisfying than the above books. Tomorrow or Friday should bring a real blog. Oh, and here are the results of last Sunday's Apple-Picking.
1) Underground by Don Delillo. Yes, Amy, his first name is in fact Don, not Dom; that was a Freudian typo by me stemming from my desire that there be more people in the world who share the same name with Dom Deluise. I borrowed this book from Kristen's brother, because if I'd decided to buy it then another portion of the rainforest would've had to be pillaged and burned, the book is that massive, and God knows there might be that one little goddamn flower that could hold the cure for cancer that might happen to be living on the fodder for Mr. Delillo's book. But anyway.
The book opens with this really rockin' prologue that happens to be sixty pages long, and it's all about the 1951 playoff game where the NY Giants' Bobby Thompson hit the Shot Heard Round the World to beat the Brooklyn Dodgers, as the "super-omniscient" narration follows several characters present at the game, including the trio Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason, and J. Edgar Hoover, and Cotter, a Harlem kid who has snuck into the game and retrieves the coveted home run ball. The home run ball become the loose thread by which the rest of the book is held together. I can't say that the body of the novel was always that engaging, but the momentum of that rockin' prologue just sent me spiraling all the way to the end. Seriously, just buy the book (or borrow it, because when you're sixty and cancer-ridden you're going to want that flower) to read the prologue, because it's a piece of literature that should be read and analyzed in America's classrooms every year.
Delillo weaves some themes about trash, and how the stuff we throw away defines us, and some adjacent ideas that don't really click when you think about it. He's really great, though, at writing scenes that capture perfectly the collective mood of a moment. The novel spans the entirety of the Cold War, so there's a series of 5 or 6 interspersed chapters in the middle that take place during the Cuban Missile Crisis, but the real subject is this famous political comedian, Lenny Bruce, who is touring during the 13 days where Kennedy's trying to get the country out of peril. Every chapter recreates a night on Lenny's tour, his routine and everything. I've never seen or heard any of Lenny Bruce's stuff, so I just superimposed Lewis Black over the character, and it worked perfectly, because the chapters are all about the precarious balance between humor and the threat of certain death. There's a chapter where Delillo describes how Lenny's hot and the whole audience has just forgotten their worries over the Crisis, but then the house lights flicker and the power goes out, and of course everyone thinks its nuclear war, and you feel the electric tension and how everyone's thinking "my god, how could i be about to die when only a few minutes ago i was laughing my ass off?" It was one of the few times where I've actually put a book down and said "Wow" out loud.
So... how many of you just read all that? I didn't think so.
2. Songbook - Nick Hornby. Yeah, I bet you didn't know he had a new book out. You can find it in the "Music & Entertainment Literature" section of your local chain bookseller, because otherwise, you're not going to see it advertised anywhere else. So the book is non-fiction, and it's essentially Nick Hornby taking 31 of his favorite songs and talking about why he likes them, and what they've meant to him, and what their significance is in the world of pop music. Excited? You can just get that on this blog, why spend $26? Well, because Mr. Hornby included a little CD with 11 of the songs he talks about in is book. The essays themselves are somewhat forgettable, except for one I'll talk about, but the CD is really kick-ass. I've been listening to it 3 times a day this entire month. Here's the track list, because it's not listed anywhere else and the cover of the book won't tell you until you've bought it, so see if anything strikes your interest:
1. Paul Westerberg - Born For Me
2. Teenage Fanclub - Your Love is the Place Where I Come From
3. The Bible - Glorybound
4. Aimee Mann - I've Had It
5. Rufus Wainwright - One Man Guy
6. Rod Stewart - Mama You've Been On My Mind
7. Badly Drawn Boy - A Minor Incident
8. Teenage Fanclub - Ain't That Enough
9. Ben Folds Five - Smoke
10. Mark Mulcahy - Hey Self Defeater
11. Ani DiFranco - You Had Time
I've fallen in love with the Paul Westerberg and Aimee Mann songs. Mark Mulcahy used to be the lead singer of Polaris, who did the theme song for a little show called The Adventures of Pete & Pete. I never thought I liked Ani DiFranco, but this song is emotionally devastating to me, and I don't even know what it's about.
But the Badly Drawn Boy song is incidentally from the About a Boy movie. In that chapter of the book, Hornby talks very emotionally about how his son is autistic to the point where he can't talk and pretty much lives in a world of his own. But when he wrote About a Boy, he hadn't set out to write about his relationship with his son; it was only when the movie was made, and Badly Drawn Boy wrote this song for the movie, that Hornby discovered that the song related to him and his son in almost eerie verisimilitude and made him wonder if the book had been about his son after all. So I won't be a douche and post the lyrics here, but you should really go and download Badly Drawn Boy's "A Minor Incident," because in light of this background information about Hornby, I think it's incredibly poignant.
3. Ghost Light - Frank Rich. For the record, I finished this before Daniel, despite his mention of it last week on his blog. So I get to be Laura's favorite. And, for the record, this is not a book about a rag-tag but lovable theater cast who uses their non-rehearsing time to solve mysteries in a haunted theater. I made it about halfway through the book before I had to come to terms that there would be no such mystery-solving hijinks. But I loved it just the same! The writing is a little spotty, maybe because there are only so many adjectives in existence to describe a good musical, but the story of Frank Rich's life is entirely absorbing and infinitely relatable. This despite the fact that I've never really understood what all the hub-bub was about Broadway, I think I came away with a new appreciation of musical theater. Rich does a good job with describing that feeling of excited obsession that kids acquire when they're young, and if I was the author, the book probably would have been about, sadly, newspaper comic strips.
So, thank you, Laura, for the kind gift.
4. The Human Stain - Philip Roth. Yes, I purchased this book just in the nick of time before it started to don the "Now a Major Motion Picture!" stickers on its cover. But I'm tired of writing about books, and I'll just say that it felt like Philip Roth was given a homework assignment to write a book on racism and the intellectual community, and he met all the requirements that were indicated on the rubric sheet that was given him, including some extra credit points, but ultimately, I don't think he was ever excited about writing it. But this man, from what I hear, has given the world more Nicole Kidman nudity this fall movie season because of his book, and for that he deserves our praise.
Now I'm reading David Sedaris's Naked, which is funny but ultimately less satisfying than the above books. Tomorrow or Friday should bring a real blog. Oh, and here are the results of last Sunday's Apple-Picking.
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