Tag: USA

WISE BLOOD by Flannery O’Connor

Here is a book that involves a man in a gorilla suit using an umbrella skeletron as a weapon, a hit-and-run accident that is not an accident, and some self-blinding with lye. Unsurprisingly, it is in fact a book about religion.

It’s a strange, Gothic Southern story, that I did not enjoy but some how admired for its insanity.

I guess what I took from this book is that human beings have a very high level of baseline crazy. Sometimes this comes out in belief in god, sometimes it comes out in belief in ghosts, sometimes in QAnon.

WE ARE NEVER MEETING IN REAL LIFE by Samantha Irby

Here is the third book I have read by a vetrenarian’s receptionist in Chicago. I liked the other two but I LOVE THIS ONE. Like, get ready, because when I really like a book I like to quote from it AT LENGTH.

It’s a series of comic essays about what is a fairly difficult life. Where most people dedicate their book to a spouse, her’s is dedicated to her anti-anxiety medicine, Klonopin.

We learn about what goes on in a vet’s office. Sample

Question: Why is there a worm coming out of my dog’s penis?

Answer: That is his penis.

She is “fiercely private IRL. Which is to say that . . I never want anyone to see my actual pores or clothes.” Eventually therefore she meets the woman who will be her wife online . . on Twitter (do people meet people on Twitter?):

We moved the conversation to DM, and I really need you guys to know that it physically pains me to both have participated in something called a DM and to recount what happened in one to you now.

MWAHAHAHA. Why is this hilarious? I don’t know. She has never been with a woman before, and it is not as easy as she had thought:

I expertly slid my female hand under her bra and unhooked it with the flick of a wrist in one smooth, effortless motion. JK, FOLKS. I wrestled with that clasp like an alligator, finally resorting to the use of a chain saw and my teeth.

Eventually she agrees to move to rural Michigan with her. I love this vision of country life:

I could wake up to the sound of crowing roosters or methheads at sunrise, consume a platter of buttered carbohydrates, hitch up my overalls, and grab my watering can from the shed. That would be a dream. I’m sick of news, and buying stuff, and trying so desperately to have fun all the time.

 I think what I most admire though is the honesty of the book, even among the jokes. Here she is on being fat:

I wish that I was an emotionally healthy human without years of accumulated trauma, one who just decided to be a fat caricature of a person perched gleefully atop a mountain of doughnuts, shoving candy bar after candy bar between my teeth while cackling demonically over how much money my eventual care will cost taxpayers or whatever it is comments-section trolls always accuse fat people of doing. And I don’t need sympathy or special attention because, ultimately, who even cares? You hate me, and I hate me too. We are on the same team. I guess what I’m saying is that maybe we could all just mind our own fucking business for once, and that when you can actually see a person’s scars, maybe be a pal and don’t pick at them.

Who knew so much went on inside receptionists. Of course, so much goes on inside everyone. But we rarely get to see it

MODERN ROMANCE by Aziz Ansari

Here is an audiobook about dating. It is written by a comedian, Aziz Ansari, so I thought it would be funny. It’s not especially funny, but it is very informative about dating. And specifically how-to, as studied by actual scientists. I get the impression that Ansari thought this would be a good way to get fact-based advice on how to improve his odds.

Here is the most interesting part: indeed, having lots of choice does make it harder to make a choice. In one famous study, some researchers went to a grocery store offering jam to sample. Some days they offered six, some days they offered twenty-four. On the days when they had six, they had far fewer people sampling, but . . get this . . about ten times more people actually buying. This has obvious implications for Tinder. And also for why I don’t seem to get further than ten minutes into most shows on Netflix.

Second most interesting: indeed, texting someone unpredictably does make you more interesting. As we long suspected, game playing works.

So there you go. Keep a short list and don’t text them very often.

THE DUD AVOCADO by Elaine Dundy

Here is a book about how we should all be grateful to the women who came before.  It tells the story of a young American woman on what is basically  a gap year in Paris in the 1930s (funded of course by family money, try not to feel too enraged).  It is just incredible what goes on.  People make her dance with them when she has told them no, they expect her to ‘know how to cook,’ some guy announces that:

All tourists are she

And she still falls in love with him.  Wtf.  Later we find out he was trying to traffic  her into sex work but she still has fond feelings for him (?).  I mean how did these girls get anything done?  The issues are plenty. 

The book is fun and insightful. Try this:

It’s amazing how right you can be about people you don’t know; it’s only the people you do know who confuse you

Or this, which I think is true about many people who begin, but do not finish, a career in the theatre:

The thing about him, though, was that he thought he was in the theater for Art, whereas he was really in it for laughs.

Apparently Dundy’s husband, theatre critic Kenneth Tynan, encouraged her to try  writing a novel, as he thought her letters good, but was then horrified when THE DUD AVOCADO was a bestseller and instructed her to never write again.  Meanwhile he was cheating on her left and right and spanking her though she was not into it.  She began her second novel immediately.

I mean I didn’t enjoy this book that much but I am just amazed and impressed this lady held it together for long enough to get it written. Truly earlier generations were fighting some battles. 

MEATY by Samantha Irby

I avoided Irby for a long time, having some impression that I was going to get a lot of self-important lecturing about everyone’s wokeness levels.  I have no idea why I thought this, and I was totally wrong.  I enjoyed her most recent book WOW, NO THANK YOU so much I immediately ordered her first one, MEATY.  It’s not quite as fun as the other, because I think she was herself much less happy.  This is the book of her rough twenties, the other of her much happier forties. 

I have been struggling to articulate for myself quite what is so appealing about these books. I think it’s partly that’s its very freeing to have someone be so honest about themselves.  I am not sure I need to know about her diarrhoea or about how she eats her dinner over the sink while masturbating or about how she sucks her thumb during sex, but it makes you feel like it’s possible to tell the actual truth about your own life without exploding. 

I think it’s also the almost perfect contemporariness of the tone.  I’ve never read anything quite like it.  For example, here is part of a cocktail recipe:

Mix everything together in a punch bowl, then drink.  And I feel you, I DON’T HAVE A PUNCH BOWL EITHER.  But I do have a set of those nesting mixing bowls, so what I like to do is wash it really well, to make sure all the cookie dough crumbs and dried cereal milk is out of it, and let it double as a vessel for the booze.

Like, what is that CAPS LOCK?  I love it. 

Side point, she refers to her largish under-chin area (she’s on the bigger side) as her meatbeard.  I am scarred and know this word will stay with me forever

THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE by Philip K Dick

This book presents an alternate reality in which the Germans and Japanese won the second world war. It has some interesting parts: for example, it imagines the internal struggles after Hitler dies (who would it have been: Goebbels? Speer? The mind boggles); it imagines what the Nazis would have done to African people; it imagines what it would have been like if Japanese culture became American culture; and so on. Sounds like a good book, right? But actually it turned out kind of boring. It covers a bunch of characters who are doing a bunch of things, but you don’t really believe in any of them and they all seem kind of the same person.

While the book was dull, the Wikipedia entry on it was certainly not. Philip K Dick led a wild life. First off, there is the five wives. That is always a red flag. The third one (who he later involuntarily confined to a psychiatric institution, but never mind that), was the one who inspired this book, largely because he needed her to think he was working, so he needed her to hear him typing, so he started typing, and ended up with THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE. He never made much money, and took a lot of speed, and then when he tried to get off speed didn’t go to NA or whatever like a normal person but entered a sort of cult (Syanon), and all this was before he started to have religious visions (triggered by light glinting off a stranger’s necklace). When he died he was buried under the tombstone pre-prepared for him 53 years before by his parents, who determined he should be buried next to his twin who died in infancy. None of the wives ojected. I mean: it all went on.

CROSSROADS by Jonathan Franzen

Okay: I am about ready to give it up for Jonathan Franzen, and concede he may indeed be America’s greatest living novelist.  Because this thing is LIT.

It tells the story of a nuclear family, over a period of about a year, from each of their perspectives (mom, dad, son, daughter, other son).  From pg1, I was in. We open in

. . . the nursing home in Hinsdale, where the mingling smells of holiday pine wreaths and geriatric feces reminded him of the Arizona high country latrines. .

MWAHAHAHA.  The father is a deputy minister at a Protestant church.  He feels a sad kinship with the “dusty creche steer,” and is conducting an awkward flirtation with a parishioner.  He is generally terrible at it, though he does get her to accept some vinyl records from him.

 “He was not so bad at being bad as to not know what sharing music signified.”

Later he finally manages to get it together with his parishioner.

With a sigh, she closed her eyes and put her hand between his legs.  Her shoulders relaxed as if feeling his penis made her sleep.  “Here we are.”

It might have been the most extraordinary moment of his life. 

The book is so incredibly well observed (‘that type of disinfectant unique to dentist’s office’ I mean god does he carry a notebook EVERYWHERE), so impressive in its creation of different points of view, so successful in concluding everyone’s arcs, I am just like DAMN

According to my blog, when I read a previous novel of his, FREEDOM, I was so overcome that I stopped on p38 to write a blog post about how much I already loved it.  This was back in 2011, and it’s probably a good thing  it was a while ago, because that book, like this, is a novel of a single nuclear family.  I’d probably be able to see more of the authors tricks and obssessions and so be less impressed. As it is, let me just say again, DAMN.

STAY SEXY AND DON’T GET MURDERED by Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark

Here is a book by Karen and Georgia. I’ve never met either of them, but I feel like I know them. This is because I listen to their podcast MY FAVORITE MURDER every week.  It’s a true crime comedy podcast (don’t ask).  This is their spin-off book about their private lives.  Karen and Georgia moaned a lot in the podcast about how hard it was to write a book, and that does kind of show a bit.  They’ve added lists of stuff, a sure sign you are struggling to fill those pages. I was only surprised there were not recipes.  (In fact Georgia did try to add her dad’s bbq chicken , but then he revealed it was just whatever generic bbq sauce happened to be on sale)

Reading this book did make me realize how much MY FAVORITE MURDER’s magic sits not in either host, but in the relationship between the two.  There is some kind of special sparkle that makes those two add up to three or even four. I find it interesting when that happens, like it did for Simon & Garfunkel.  Of course leaving aside their special chemistry, it’s also true that we live in a lonely age, and are hungry for friendship, even if it is the friendship of other people. I suspect that’s a big part of why the podcast got to be so big.

The authors mention how when they met they had both coincidentally been reading DARING GREATLY by Brene Brown.  This is a book about the power of vulnerability.  They both say reading that book made them more open to new people (and thus each other), and to new projects (and thus MY FAVORITE MURDER, the project that took them from struggling to millionaires).    I also see how it translates into their show, which is often surprisingly open about all sorts of topics (mental health, pets, fat).  I had thought this was just ‘how they were,’ and its interesting to find how much it is actually a choice. 

SH*T MY DAY SAYS by Justin Halpern

In this book I supported someone in monetizing his Twitter feed. I didn’t object. I’m always in favour of people other than Twitter making money off Twitter.

The author of this book got unexpectedly dumped, and so did what you get to do if you are not an immigrant: move back in with his parents. He was inspired to start a small Twitter account for his friends where he posted various things his dad said, and it went viral. Publishing deals followed. Meanwhile, in London, the Amazon algorithm noticed I had been buying lightly comic books, and here we are.

The book was funny, and I often laughed reading it. Most appealing, however, was the obvious love between father and son. The dad’s advice is blunt but caring.

“Sometimes life leaves a hundred-dollar bill on your dresser, and you don’t realize until later it’s because it fucked you.”

And:

“The baby will talk when he talks, relax. It ain’t like he knows the cure for cancer and just ain’t spitting it out.”

It’s a perfect mix of chuckles and heart. Well done Amazon algorithm, well done.

FOREIGN AFFAIRS by Alison Lurie

Here is a Pulitzer winner, pitched as a novel about the love lives of plain women. I was ready to love it. It even had a very excellent opening sentence.

On a cold blowy February day a woman is boarding the ten A.M flight to London, followed by an invisible dog.

But things go down hill from there. It tells the story of two American professors on sabbatical in London. One is a handsome man, the other a plain woman. The man has some romantic problems, but basically everything works out great.

The woman finally meets someone to fall in love with but is so hung up on past rejections that she doesn’t even notice. I don’t know. I just found it super bleak. I guess I don’t really believe there is any such thing as ‘plainness,’ outside of edge cases (e.g., extreme obesity). Some people are pretty, that’s for sure, but even the not-that-pretty can make themselves appear at least reasonably decent enough for some other reasonably decent person to want them. The competition’s just not that steep. Even if you don’t look that good, it’s not as if most of the others do either. I guess I just found the whole idea of some unchangeable quality of ugliness kind of distasteful and ridiculous.