Students Get New Assignment: Pick Book You Like.

WHAT? NO.

I hear this all the time at the library. Every time a kid checks out a Walter the Farting Dog book, or a Captain Underpants book (note: I do love Captain Underpants), or Gossip Girl or whatever. Junk food. The kid's mom rolls her eyes and says, "As long as s/he's reading! I don't care what it is as long as s/he's reading." Really? Because it's just a form of consuming media. It's like saying "As long as s/he's watching television, I don't care what it is." "As long as s/he's playing video games, I don't care what it is." There really honestly is nothing inherently noble about reading. It's putting words in front of your eyes, and then passing your eyes over these words, and putting those words into your brain. That's it! That's all. It's not a wondrous thing, it's not the hardest thing ever, it's just eyes and words and brains. And when you're telling your own kids that it doesn't matter what they read as long as they read, you're telling them, "Hey guys, don't challenge yourselves if you don't feel like it. Doing the bare, stupid minimum is fine with me. It's your free time, after all! No sense using it to make yourself better."

And a teacher telling them that! During the time that is supposed to be for LEARNING! Okay, to be fair, the teacher said no Gossip Girl, no video game books, no "junk" as she defines it. Except that you end up with kids reading those execrable YA James Patterson books (there is no market immune from James Patterson; I expect James Patterson easy readers at any moment now oh wait THEY ALL ARE) and probably a lot of like Sarah Dessen and those mass-market paperbacks with cartoons of smiley girls and hunky dudes on the cover. You also get one girl who reads Toni Morrison but also thinks that you spell the word "never" with the number 3. So anyway, the teacher! Who is supposed to be educating them! Is telling them, "You are all special unique snowflakes who don't need to be pushed in any way! Your own special unique worldview is all you need to think about. Some teachers try to tell you about this stuffy old thing called the 'literary canon' and this silly concept of 'a class discussion of a challenging book you are enjoying but might not otherwise have read', what a bunch of squares! Ha ha ha this is what your parents' tax dollars are paying for! Me not doing my job! This is great!" I just--this drives me absolutely insane. What is the point here? Wow, you got a kid to read Captain Underpants! GOOOOOD FOR YOUUUUU. That's not what school is for! It's for LEARNING. You would never get away with this shit in math (oh they just learn the algebra they want to learn!) or science (the chemistry they want to learn!), so why is this okay for books?

Plus this article keeps using To Kill a Mockingbird as an example of a book people are forced to read and hate, which, no. People love that book. Try using Frankenstein next time. That book blows.

So some blog I've never heard of, but which looks both classy and annoyingly contrarian, posted a list of books you totally don't have to read, even though people will tell you you do. I do not have a problem with this concept. I have long ago come to terms with the knowledge that I, personally, am never going to read Finnegans Wake. I'm never going to read In Search of Lost Time. It is entirely possible that The List will go unfinished forever because I might never read An American Tragedy. So I get it. I get acknowledging that books are long and plentiful, and life is short and singular.

BUT THIS IS A TERRIBLE LIST. A Tale of Two Cities is a "failure" and I should just read Bleak House and "the first half of David Copperfield" instead? Are you saving me time out of my life here, or are you trying to kill my soul? And White Noise? The Corrections? On the Road? These books are enjoyable. They are not going to tax you too much. They are not going to waste your time. I really do not see the harm in taking a week to read any of them, and the criticism of the first two is so fucking ridiculous I can't even start, except to say that maybe the writers here have never seen what a college student eats. It is not pretty. Oh my god PLUS On the Road gets the irritating "oh well maybe if I were FIFTEEN and trying to be COOL OR SOMETHING" treatment, which: yes. Everyone who likes Kerouac is fifteen. Gosh sirs and madams, you are so right. Spot on. You really nailed those lousy beatniks.

Also, I've never had anyone try to push D.H. Lawrence on me, and I'm not sure I've ever even heard of the book they tell me to avoid, so at least we have that one in common. Thanks, The Second Pass! I will make sure to keep avoiding a minor work by a major writer. I will also agree with them on the John Dos Passos, just because that is one of the things I'm pretty sure I'm never going to read. I don't know, I hear it's okay, but man there are so many things I want to read, you know? Which yes I know is the point, but THIS LIST IS SO AWFUL IT HAS ADDLED MY BRAIN. But if there is a classic novel that sucks, you should tell me so that I may take that under advisement.

The new Dave Eggers book addled my brain a little, too, but in a great way. It is so good, you guys. It is very real and immediate and actually really upsetting, but I don't want to tell you why because I want you to be as horrified as I was (because this fucking country, my god). You are welcome. Also, it is a McSweeney's book, so you should really buy it, just so you can have this beautiful book on your shelf. It's on sale, and goodness their books are gorgeous. It has shiny bits! SHINY BITS. Very important.

So some people in some town in Wisconsin decided that Francesca Lia Block's Baby Be-Bop is unacceptable reading material for young adults, because it deals with a gay guy. A really adorable, sweet gay guy. UNACCEPTABLE! UNCHRISTIAN! WE DEMAND TO BURN THIS BOOK. No, seriously: they literally demanded to take the library's copy of Baby Be-Bop and burn it. Why this one book out of the whole Dangerous Angels series, when Dirk is in all of them, I don't know, but here we are. (Which one is the one where Dirk and Duck and Weetzie all sleep together and also of course there's Secret Agent Lover Man, and all three of them are Cherokee's dad? Is it just Weetzie Bat? Because I feel like that is more objectionable, to people who would object to that. I'm just saying.)

Anyway, this is just the weirdest lawsuit ever. Let us burn the book! Give us $120,000 for emotional distress caused when we looked at the book in a display! We will tell people the library is not a safe place! The library director has “publicly stated that it is not up to the library to tell the community what is appropriate," so obviously THAT IS OUR JOB, A COUPLE OF RANDOM OLD PEOPLE. I feel like you guys misinterpreted some things, is all I'm saying.

In conclusion: Francesca Lia Block? You are picking on Francesca Lia Block? Yeah, god forbid teenagers be taught that the world is beautiful and lovely and interesting. Fuck you, old people.

Can't be any worse than the original!

In other contrarian news, I finally got around to part one of Octavian Nothing and was kind of underwhelmed.

HELLO, I'M KAREN, AND I DISAGREE WITH YOU.

Laura Kasischke! Where have you BEEN all my life? You write like Francesca Lia Block, sort of, if you read the whole book knowing something horrible was going to happen to Weetzie Bat. But, okay, this snippet of dialogue from Feathered, between teenage best friends, regarding an offer of a ride from a stranger, is kind of perfect:

"Let's forget it," Michelle said. "If you think it's a bad idea, let's take the bus."

"Do you think it's a bad idea?"

"I think," Michelle said, "he seemed pretty safe."

"They always seem safe," I said. "That's what they all said about Ted Bundy. That he was the most normal-seeming guy in the world."

"That's true," Michelle said. "But that's what they say about most men who are normal, too."

"That's true," I said.

Love it. This is the woman who wrote Boy Heaven, which I couldn't stop thinking about for weeks. No, seriously. Seriously!

Also, the new Barbara Vine is pretty good, the new Keith Donohue is good but not nearly as good as The Stolen Child, The Man Who Loved Children, from the List, is basically just HEY LOOK AT THESE PEOPLE THEY ARE AWFUL, and maybe this summer I will get started on the summer reading list Kyle gave me last year. Whoops.

Okay, so, I don't get it.

Is she saying that women love housework and this is a pleasure denied to men? Is she saying Delillo and Roth are unhappy and could use some simple pleasure? (Because: duh, this is not a point no one has ever made before, Joyce.) Is she really making vacuuming into a gendered thing? Everyone vacuums. It's vacuuming. It's something people do. I am pretty sure that if she hadn't inserted the word "male" in there, I would not be bothered at all, but she did, so here we are. PLUS I am pretty sure that with the word "female" in place of the word "male", it makes me spitting mad, so...ugh. ("Maybe if Doris Lessing vacuumed, she'd be happier." See? What?) Maybe I should wait and read the whole interview, because this is just making me angry and puzzled.

Oh uh also I read The Sun Also Rises and thought it was all right, even though Kyle kept telling me I wouldn't like it. It's just people hanging out and drinking, so. Now I am reading a book about conspiracy theories and trying to decide if I really want to read Crash after I went through all the trouble of having Kyle request it through the U of I library, because NOBODY in the northern Illinois system has it.

EDIT: oh man I meant to post this yesterday! WHOOPS.

HELLO. So, what with there being a tiny person in my house all the time, my house is loud, and therefore I can't read. So I've been reading less, which means only finishing two books most weeks rather than three. Sometimes only finishing one book in a week! I'm such a failure, dudes. But here are some things. Oh, lord, I haven't posted since my best of 2008 list? Oh looooord. Bear with me.

At the end of 2008, I read Richard Fariña's Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me and mostly really, really liked it. Except for something that Gnossos did at the end of the book that is just completely fucking unforgivable. (Have you read this? Do you know what I am talking about? Fuck you, Gnossos, that was not okay.) I therefore ended up with mixed feelings about the whole thing, so I got a book of a bunch of short stories and essays and stuff that was published after he died. A Long Time Coming and a Long Time Gone has a pretty big advantage over Been Down So Long in that it has this on the back cover, and that is pretty much the cutest picture I've ever seen in my life. I am bummed I can't find a bigger version to show you. But anyway: it had a story about Richard and Joan Baez and Thomas Pynchon going to a county fair and picking a fight with some John Birch Society dudes (this was a fabulous story), and it had some more Kristins, and it had cute notes written by his wife. I was a fan.

I was actually not such a fan of All the Sad Young Literary Men. I know, I know. But I got awfully tired of waiting for these annoying snobs to grow up, and they never did. Also one of those dudes drove drunk an awful lot, and I cannot even get behind that in fiction.

Also not a fan of Herzog, which is on The List. Like, hey, Saul Bellow, have you ever met a woman? Do you know how they talk? Do you know how they act? Because I am not sure that you hav, or that you do, and Herzog is a dick, and I am just unimpressed by the whole thing. Oh, and while I'm committing heresy, I'm going to say that I read Facing Unpleasant Facts, the book of Orwell's narrative essays compiled by George Packer, and I wasn't impressed by that either. I think part of the problem is that I wasn't ever sure if he was kidding, because sometimes it was so ridiculous he must have been kidding. Like when he was talking about how even the best socialist sometimes had to buy a paper other than the Daily Worker, because the Daily Worker was not always big enough to start a fire, and clearly you need a fire in your house, even though they are smelly and labor-intensive, because they force you to be sociable. He...he was kidding, right?

Okay, some things I liked: What Was Lost by Catherine O'Flynn, about Kate, a girl detective who is bright and independent and awkward, and who disappears when she's forced to take the entrance exam to a boarding school she doesn't want to go to. The only suspect is her best friend, a twenty-two-year-old guy who is pretty awkward himself. Then he disappears, too, and we pick up the story twenty years later with his sister Lisa and her shitty life, and the lives of other people in the town's big shopping mall. It's really really affecting and heartbreaking in the details, and reminded me a bit of David Mitchell in that.

Also: a book of Shirley Jackson short stories, Just an Ordinary Day, because obviously Shirley Jackson frigging rules. I Was Told There'd Be Cake, which I fiiiiinally got around to and which is totally delightful. The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway, which you really need to go to the bookstore and pick up and experience, because it is FUZZY. Oh my gosh. It is also a giant epic dystopian tome which suddenly gets fucking WEIRD about two-thirds in. It's a little bit Stephenson and a little bit Pynchon and I liked it quite a bit.

THIS IS LONGER THAN I'D INTENDED AND I AM TIRED I AM SORRY

I have been sitting here looking at my prospective best of 2008 choices. I have also been thinking that sometimes it is kind of frustrating being internet pals with iamfitz because whatever I try to say in here a) he totally already said it, or b) I already talked everything to death with him and then I don't want to write about it in here, because I am TIRED OF IT. But here goes anyway? If it sucks, it is his fault.

Black Swan Green! I learned a lot about the Falklands? And about what it is like to be a somewhat awkward little boy and a somewhat awkward teenage boy. Because SERIOUSLY I don't know how many times I've said this, but I'm saying it again: David Mitchell can fucking WRITE.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle, in the beautiful Penguin Deluxe edition. I demand Penguin Deluxe editions of all my favorite books, please, by the way. Shirley Jackson, you probably realize, can also fucking write, but it goes way past that into what family means, and what being yourself means, and how awesome it would be if you had a sister who baked cookies every day! All the time! Hooray for Constance Blackwood! Anyway, Merricat is awesome, and unreliable narrators are great.

God Is Dead is one of those things I read and then would! not! shut up about! It is about how God dies and is eaten by some wild dogs, and it is about what humans need to survive. If we need God to look up to, or if we can get along by ourselves, with just ourselves to look up to. It's so so sad, except for when it's hilarious, and it's hilarious except for when it's terrifying. This might have been my number one favorite.

I think The Cheese Monkeys and The Learners have to be taken together, and they have to be taken DELIGHTFULLY and EDUCATIONALLY and HIMILLSILLY (that is a terrible joke, but I am sticking with it!). I want so badly for Chip Kidd to be my best friend or my uncle or something. Also, I have been reading a lot of the books he did covers for and gushed about, and I think I am getting a good handle on the kind of books he likes. Chip Kidd likes books in which articulate, interesting people do horrible, horrible things. This is awesome, and I will continue using Chip Kidd's taste as a guide to inform my own.

I read eleven books off The List this year, which is a pitifully tiny number. Not even one a month! The only one I looooved was The Berlin Stories, because it involved clever people with interesting lives sitting around having delightful conversations. And then the Nazis came and ruined everything for everyone. Also, Sally Bowles comes across so much sadder and younger in the book than she does in the movie (or, I assume, the play). This is probably because we never get to see her sing "Mein Herr".

I don't know if I liked Anathem enough to put it on my year-end list. I am leaning toward yes, because I have been writing this for literally twelve hours, on and off (mostly off) and I am willing to go with whatever comes into my tired head at this point. Also because I think that "plane" is a really good word. If you make an argument that you think is really well thought-out and brilliant and then someone quickly demolishes it, that person has planed you. This is fabulous. Also: subjecting something to the steelyard. Also: IT KIND OF HAS AN ENDING, but the dude STILL NEEDS A BETTER EDITOR. Also, I guess it is a lot like A Canticle for Leibowitz , which I've owned for like two years and should really read.

Seven Types of Ambiguity (the novel, not the literary criticism) was my favorite tome of the year, though. It was extremely thrilling and complicated and lonnnngggg but I think I read the 800 or so pages in three days. Thrilling!!

Oh my gosh I almost forgot The Intuitionist!! IT SO GREAT, YOU GUYS. Conspiracies! Racism! Sexism! Completely unrealistic things that are treated totally realistically! I might just be a sucker for an elevator repair novel*, but I am pretty sure this is awesome.

Oblivion, because duh.

This is too long. I also loved Personal Days and Superpowers and One Foot in Eden and War by Candlelight (!!!! hey Daniel Alarcón: please write more) and Vineland and Sewer, Gas & Electric and Peace Like a River (because my heart is in Minnesota) and The Enormous Room and The Shadow Year and M. Rickert's book and John Kessel's stories and The Amnesiac mostly, and srsly my eyes are going to fall out of my head now.

*This is a joke. I am not. As far as I know.

From the (very) short story collection How the Water Feels to the Fishes, which is itself part of One Hundred and Forty Five Stories in a Small Box:

How the Air Feels to the Birds

They act as if they had never heard the question before. The what? they say. The air? What about it? We smile and rephrase the question: What does the air feel like to you, you being a bird, able to fly and all? Finally they seem to understand, and they meditate on this awhile. And then they begin: The air to us is a brother, a sister. We are intrigued, and lean in closer. The air, they continue, now quieter. We lean in yet farther. They peck us in the eye and laugh wickedly. Birds are bastards, every one of them.

QUICK THINGS:

1. I abandoned Under the Volcano fourteen pages in. My stack of books right now is too enormous to slog through something I am not going to like. I'll get back to it.

2. So do we now have to pretend that Michael Crichton was a genius and his books were literary masterpieces? Because: no. I will not be doing that.

3. I really liked Sam Taylor's The Amnesiac. It is very very clever and I can see a lot of people hating it, but then again I liked The End of Mr. Y, too, so clearly I like very clever novels that start out as mysteries and end up in faux existentialism.

4. I cannot get over how awesome this icon is. MO WILLEMS, LET'S BE FRIENDS.

So Kelly Link has a new book out, right? Pretty Monsters? Which is cause for joyous leaps and celebrations! It is a young-adult book, I guess for some reason! That is fine! EXCEPT that they...aren't new stories? I mean, I get that when you are a writer like Kelly Link, you write stories for random anthologies and zines and then collect them in a book so that people can read your work without having to buy all the random anthologies and zines. EXCEPT, I mean, do we really need to read "Monster" again? "Monster" is fucking EVERYWHERE, and so is "The Faery Handbag" and so is "The Specialist's Hat". The worst is that "Magic for Beginners" is in the new book. Seriously? THAT WAS THE TITLE STORY OF YOUR PREVIOUS BOOK. IT IS NOT EXACTLY HARD TO FIND. (Although--it is slightly different? I am looking at the old one and my favorite silly line is not in it.) I am annoyed! As you can tell. Booooooo.

Maybe I am too cranky because I was just all over the internet trying to find out why exactly Maurice Sendak hates Salman Rushdie, and ended up reading many delightful tales of how cranky Maurice Sendak is, the best examples of which are in this article from way back when We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy came out. You know, the one about being homeless and starving? Anyway, Maurice Sendak rules a ridiculous amount: "He has attacked the 'Home Alone' movies for their brutality and described 'The Little Mermaid' as a vapid film about 'getting married, having cupcakes for bras and going to live in White Plains, New York, forever and ever.'" HA HA HA HA SERIOUSLY THAT IS AMAZING. Also some little kid at the library today was reading his pop-up book and thought it was pretty much the greatest thing ever. Which it is.

I...also read the new Neal Stephenson? It is enormous and entertaining and I devoted so much time to reading it that I keep forgetting that some of the words in it aren't really words. Like, Kyle was telling me about somebody saying something stupid in one of his classes and how Kyle took this person down, and I almost said, "You totally planed her!" but caught myself in time, but now I am telling this story to THE INTERNET so oh well. Anyway it's really good! It actually kind of has an ending! Which is a TREMENDOUS ACCOMPLISHMENT for Mr. Stephenson. It is, though, very long and difficult to get into, especially if you do not read a ton of speculative fiction and therefore just hear a buzzing in your head whenever a word that is not really a word appears. Now, in celebration of the week-long, once-in-a-decade rite of BZZZZ, the BZZZZ and BZZZZ prepare to venture beyond the BZZZZ's gates—at the same time opening them wide to welcome the curious "BZZZZ" in. (That is from the jacket, and also is wrong--BZZZZ lasts for ten days and occurs every year, but the BZZZZs like Erasmas are only allowed out once every ten years. Come on, book jacket guy.)

GOD I AM SO TERRIBLE AT TALKING ABOUT BOOKS SOMETIMES. I'M SORRY. I'm reading Under the Volcano off the List next, so wish me luck there, because I kind of hate books about alcoholics.

FIRST OF ALL: I finally got around to reading Possession and I was kind of underwhelmed. For one thing, the poetry was awful. For two things, there was too much of it. For three, if you are going to write a book with a lot of letters written between people, and you are going to have like seventy pages solid of correspondence, maybe you shouldn't put that ALL IN ITALICS because it is REALLY HARD TO READ SEVENTY PAGES OF ITALICS. For four, does A.S. Byatt really hate feminists? It...kind of came off like she did, and I believe you all know how I feel about that. For five, it was okay, I guess. Sometimes it was jaunty and pleasant.

SECOND: have you ever read The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen? Sometimes that as well is jaunty as pleasant and sometimes it is soul-deadeningly boring. If I want to read about England in the thirties, I will read Evelyn Waugh, thank you very much.

THIRD: because The Death of the Heart is so boring, I couldn't read it before bed, as I would mistake my boredom for sleepiness and get my falling-asleep all messed up. So I started the next book on the stack: Donald Antrim's weird 1993 novel Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World. It is WEIRD, guys. There is a scene in which the protagonist (Pete Robinson) is walking around with the former mayor's foot in his backpack because just before the mayor was drawn and quartered by compact cars driven by the townspeople, Pete promised him that he would scatter his body parts and make those places holy, except the foot has been in the freezer and is sitting on top of the fig bars he packed for a snack, and the foot is thawing all over the fig bars, which he doesn't realize until he gives someone he meets in the minefield of a local park a fig bar to eat and the dude vomits all over the place. And that is only PART OF IT. It's kind of insane. But really the point here is this:



A giant post-it, precisely cut to the dimensions of the front leaf, asking me what I think about the book. Am--am I really supposed to do that? Is this something the Niles Public Library tried briefly in 1993 but discontinued after no one could figure out if they were really supposed to write there? If the book had been more frequently checked out, would someone have written something there in the past fifteen years? Is this something a wily patron stuck in there, just to see what would happen? I have so many questions!!

FOURTH: I think Anathem is due in a week. Wish me luck!

Fuck! Fuck. I had a post planned out about how I keep reading young adult novels even if they have names like Boy Heaven (but also have blurbs from Joyce Carol Oates of all people and also are awesome), and also how great the newest Wondermark is but I am so fucking furious and sad about David Foster Wallace and I'm not going to say, "Well I'm not going to judge him, I'm not here to judge," because a) I fucking AM here to judge (and if I have ever said to you in real life "I'm not here to judge," that means I am judging you) and b) GOD FUCK HOW FUCKING STUPID.

I think I'm going to continue to carry Infinite Jest around with me as a totem, like I did last night. It's so weird to think that I'll never again be rambling around the internet or the magazine section and say, "Oh hey! A little David Foster Wallace thing." Also I will never again care about tennis. Take that, tennis.

Shit.

Also I asked Kyle if this was how people felt when Hunter S. Thompson killed himself, because Kyle likes him and I don't, and he said, "Well, kind of. I mean, he was old and decrepit and crazy, so it kind of made sense. But a lot of people called me to say they were sorry, and I was like, '...yeah?'"

Sometimes I almost want to read Twilight et cetera just so that I can have a more informed hatred of it. I read things like this and I go, "Yes! Totally!" but she could just be making this up! How would I know. But then I think about the time and brain cells I would lose to that when really I could be reading (hold on let me think about my stack of library books) Continental Drift! Or Zombie Blondes! I am pretty sure reading them is a terrible idea, but mannnnnn.

Anyway. I finally got around to reading Blindness. I felt like I should at least read one thing off the summer reading list I prodded Kyle into making for me. I'm still not sure if I enjoyed it? I mean--clearly it is of great literary value and so forth, but what is the deal with writing dialogue in one giant paragraph with no quote marks? With a new speaker indicated only by a capital letter at the beginning of their sentence, which doesn't help at all if their first word is "I"? I dunno, man. Also the book itself was extremely horrifying and upsetting and I guess I can't say I enjoyed that. My personal jury on Jose Saramago: out! Kyle's got more, and the library has more, and after I make up my mind on him I can move on to making my mind up on Fernando Pessoa.

Also Black Swan Green is gorgeous and David Mitchell is fantastic, and The Learners is horrifying and hilarious and SERIOUSLY can I PLEASE hang out with Chip Kidd?

Dear whoever marked up the library copy of The Recognitions I'm currently reading,

OH MY GOD. It is one thing to underline or put check marks next to passages you like. That is pretty standard. But circling the word "recognition" every time it appears because that is the title of the book? OH MY GOD. KNOCK IT OFF. RETROACTIVELY. I also like how you underline every reference to Bosch because the jacket copy compares the novel to the work of the painter. That's pretty crashingly unnecessary, book-marker-upper.

Regards,
Karen.



The tome itself is pretty all right, though. I've been creating a chart of characters and their relations as I go, which is working out well for me. Nine hundred and fifty six pages are pretty trying on the ol' memory, and I'm only three hundred and forty eight in. Sheesh.

Here goes, I guess (comprehensive, but seven words apiece):

Seven Types of Ambiguity by Elliot Perlman: Totally intense and addictive, but a tome.
Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather: Kyle would like this, because it's boring.
Oblivion by David Foster Wallace: Compelling, wordy, weird, and very FosterWallace-y stories.
Peace Like a River by Leif Enger: Minnesotan magic, heartache, and teenage outlaws. Gorgeous.
City of Thieves by David Benioff: Heartbreaking young Russians on an impossible quest.
Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife by Mary Roach: Science is so weird! A bit...clever.
The View from the Seventh Layer by Kevin Brockmeier: Is Kevin Brockmeier ever not totally amazing?
The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron: Powerful, disturbing, not what I was expecting.
One Foot in Eden by Ron Rush: Sometimes narrative shifts work beautifully, as here.
Superpowers by David J. Schwartz: Totally delightful, then totally depressing. Still lovely.
His Illegal Self by Peter Carey: Hippies! Shut up, stupid hippies! Engagingly infuriating.
War by Candlelight by Daniel Alarcón: SIGH. Devoured in a day. Worth savoring.
The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead: If Pynchon wrote about race and elevators...
The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie: Not my favorite Rushdie, but still gooooooorgeous.
The Shadow Year by Jeffrey Ford: Creepy creepy creepy creepy creepy creepy creepy.
The Monster of Florence by Douglas Preston and Mario Spezi (the two Florence books were not related!): Serial killer(s)!! Italy is crazy and weird.
Open Line by Ellen Hawley: Kind of mediocre political, cultural satire.
Atmospheric Disturbances by Rivka Galchen: I dunno, it didn't knock me over.
Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison: Apparently Soylent Green isn't people after all.
What Happened by Scott McClellan: Ha! Ha! Oh man we fucked up.
London Calling by Edward Bloor: Time travel, ghosts, and revisionist history. YES.
Not in the Flesh by Ruth Rendell: Wexford is even crotchetier than I am.
Chip Kidd: Book One, Work: 1986–2006 by Chip Kidd and a jillion others: Can I hang out with Chip Kidd?

And that...that about brings me up to speed.

Dear Entertainment Weekly's list of 100 new classics of the past 25 years,

What the fuck, you guys! A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again and no Infinite Jest? No Salman Rushdie AT ALL? I...I do not understand. Is this because you have short attention spans and haven't read Infinite Jest or The Satanic Verses or anything like that? No, that can't be; there's some frigging gigantic history book I've never heard of that doesn't even have a Wikipedia page (Taylor Branch's Parting the Waters? I don't know). Also: Underworld.

Also: The Ruins? The...one with the plant that mocks you and then consumes you? O...kay.

IN CONCLUSION: what the fuck, you guys.

Regards,
Karen.

ps: good call on the Eggers, though, I guess. I am obligated to say.

I'm not sure how I never got around to reading Veniss Underground, but I never got around to reading Veniss Underground. It is so good that even when someone killed a kitten on page 33, I kept reading it. And then grosser and more horrifying things kept happening and I was still reading it thinking, "THIS IS SO AWESOME." And then I tried to describe it to my parents because they said something about mongooses, which are like meerkats, which feature prominently in the book, and it came out like, "Oh man I just read this book with genetically engineered meerkats that can be your servants or whatever but also assassins and the ones that are assassins are specially made so that their heads can live independently of their bodies for a couple days and this one meerkat killed the girl this dude was in love with so he cut off its head and glued it to a plate and named it John the Baptist and carried it around in his pocket until it died." Which was met with silence! "It was a weird book." "You...read a lot of weird books." "It was really good though!"

ALSO I am currently reading E.E. Cummings' memoir/novel and holy smokes, it is awesome. Never has a French concentration camp been so hilarious! Well, mostly. Sometimes people die, but what are you going to do.

Somehow I totally missed this when it happened, but apparently somebody reissued a bunch of Philip K. Dick's really really early novels, the ones that are like Richard Yates* books. So I was reading Humpty Dumpty in Oakland, and man it is WEIRD. It is so clearly a Philip K. Dick novel. There are the same themes of paranoia that maybe isn't paranoia, and conspiracies, and dudes who never made anything of themselves getting mixed up with things and people they don't know anything about--except that in this book, nobody is a cyborg, or on seriously mind-altering drugs, or anything. And you keep expecting someone to be a robot! IT IS SO DISORIENTING. Like--like reading a Philip K. Dick book.

*By the way, have I ever told you about the time I read Revolutionary Road and was seriously distraught for days because it was like someone wrote down my own personal worst fears for my own personal future, and then handed them to me in beautifully written novel form? Because seriously.

Dear LibraryThing,

I was told you were better than Shelfari (which, by the way, has gotten way better lately--hello, bulk edit! how are you! AWESOME, THAT'S HOW), so I went over and signed up. What the fuck, I can only have 200 books before I have to pay? Oh, no no no, LibraryThing. No. Booooooo.

Regards,
Karen.

Anyway. Have you heard about Beginner's Greek? Probably. It was on Very Short List like three months ago. It is kind of plotted according to Murphy's Law of Romantic Comedy, but somehow it is also extremely charming and likeable. It is a good summer read. I would say "good beach read", but man I don't go to the beach. I sit on a blanket in my backyard and hope bugs and birds don't poop on me. It is a good book for that.