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The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists by Neil Strauss
By turns revolting, titillating, informative, touching, and depressing, this story of a NYT writer transforming himself into the best pickup artist in the world is never boring. The techniques used by the PUAs, though discussed in great detail, are ultimately revealed for what they are: a set of life-hacks, psychological ploys used as a substitute for real interaction. The scary thing for ME to realize while reading this book is that I am what they call a "natural." My pathological need for attention, approval, and love made me develop a frighteningly similar toolkit to make people like me -- except that I do it all unconsciously. Also, and this is important, I don't actually need to sleep with the people I seduce; I get my validation after ten minutes of talking, and I move on. It's still sick, but I hope it's better for my soul.
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Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis
So I guess I'm the last baseball fan to read this, but goddamn is it exciting. Statistics are fucking awesome, and old-school jocks are LAME. Like we didn't know this already? The best thing about reading this is that it indirectly led to my discovery of
Fire Joe Morgan, the web's abbatoir of bad sportswriting, where the tenacious, but usually incorrect, body of conventional baseball wisdom is vivisected.
One-Upmanship: Being Some Account of the Activities and Teachings of the Lifemanship Correspondence College of One-Upness and Games Lifemastery by Stephen Potter
I could not stop giggling like my 13-year old sister as I read this on the goddamn G train. It's the third book in a series about how to triumph over everybody you encounter in the little status games that make up your life. Of course, I'm WAY ABOVE such petty positional trivialities because I am already the winner of every game I play. Apparently it's well known by LITERATE fans of DRY British humour, but I had never heard of it -- if you can imagine that -- until it was recommended to me by two people who love laughter.
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Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
This sounds retarded to say, but recently I'm really into books that I can carry in my pocket so I don't have to carry a big dumb bag. I recognize the potential problem with selecting books based on their physical characteristics, but I've dragged enough big books around to have earned some respite: I want knowledge, not luggage. Still, once you decide to read small books, there are still plenty of good ones. This seemed like a one. I wandered around Williamsburg looking half-heartedly for a copy, and there it was, smack in the middle of a street vendor's table.
So this book is a classic, I suppose, and maybe I was expecting too much of it. It's a great story of enlightenment earned through a lifetime of... well, living. It's kinda stilted and written at a 5th grade reading level and I got confused because I thought there was gonna be a suprise twist ending like
Sixth Sense and it was gonna turn out he was actually THE BUDDHA THE WHOLE TIME. Alas, not so much.
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Cloud Atlas
by David Mitchell
I am love love
loving this book. Sometimes a novel with a gimmick works (
Time's Arrow) and sometimes it doesn't (
Hopscotch). Initially, the too-too clever structure (which it's better if I don't reveal) seemed
gimmicky and pleased with itself. But each successive section is so amazingly beautiful that the narrative oddities not only enhance they story, but make it possible.
(UPDATE! I am boycotting the last 20 pages of this book because I refuse to let the experience of reading it come to an end. I will ALWAYS be reading this book, bitches!
Shut up!)
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The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
If you've got a free day or so, just read it. It's everything perfect about a good detective novel but, like, better. Philip Marlowe has a special place in my heart because I've known him for a long time, but I wouldn't actually enjoy hanging out with him. Nick and Nora, however, know how to throw a party.
American Tabloid by James Ellroy
Punchy and hard as a skillet, this story about three FBI and CIA types mixed up in the Bay of Pigs and the Kennedy assasination is scary, sordid, nasty. It's also really enjoyable, in its horrorshow way. The stagnant backwaters and basements of American criminal life are really as terrible as they are anywhere, and we spend a lot of time trying not to look at them.
Blink by Malcolm Gladwell
A book about how humans have evolved the ability to make important, even life-saving decisions without really thinking about it. It explores how sometimes this is really great, and how sometimes it results in really bad things. It uses examples to illustrate each of these. Enh. It's too short, but long-winded and repetitive and the same time. It's nowhere near as good as
The Tipping Point. Basically I'd say that if you really love MG, you can read this, but you shouldn't
buy it -- just borrow someone else's copy.
Swag, then
Stick by Elmore Leonard
Two books with the same main character, Ernest J. Stickley, a likeable criminal in a sea of less likeable ones.
Both books are fun. There are a whole bunch of menacing criminals, pulse-raising setpieces, social commentary, and lifelike dialogue all strung together with complicated but plausible plot twists that basically hinge on the imcompetence and pettiness of the average human being. So, you know, it's Elmore Leonard. Pick a book by him at random off the shelf of your local used book store. 80% chance it's great.
Villa Incognito by Tom Robbins
In the sprit of open-mindedness I decided to give TR another chance when I found this book, written in 2003, at my friend's house. Despite the fact that it starts by talking about a character's nutsack for a couple of pages [not kidding], I found myself enjoying it. Robbins seemed to have settled into the act of writing; it's less self-consciously show-offy than
Still Life with Woodpecker, and he's learned to let the comedy come from the story instead of inserting slapsticky one-liners every other sentence. (I dunno, maybe he's been getting better for years, and maybe
Woodpecker is uncharacteristically awful. But I don't think so; people love the fuck out of that book, call it his masterpiece. I think of it as another good example of how I don't need to read a book to know I'll hate it.)
Villa Incognito is a light book whose characters think they're living in a heavy one. Despite painstaking physical description and copious detail, those characters come off as fuzzy and insubstantial, not people so much as jerry-rigged bundles of eccentricities, vocations, clothing, and identifying marks. The plot is shallow and abritrary, which might not have been a problem if the characters were interesting enough, but they're not. A pivotal character is supposed to come off as a Falstaffian version of Brando's Colonel Kurtz, but Robbins fails to demonstrate the character's charisma convincingly; it's like a movie whose main character is supposed to be a world-class artist, but when they show you the art on screen, it ruins it, because it was just made by the art department.
In terms of the narrative style, I kept feeling like he kept a stitched sampler over his writing desk that said SHOW DON'T TELL instead of HOME SWEET HOME, like he internalized the cardinal rule of college creative writing classes and carried it with him into his professional career. He takes the doctrine to a chilly extreme, so the book contains an awful lot of
what and not much
why. I'm not saying that Robbins
should explain every character's actions, but I'd prefer it if I believed that he
could. As it was, the characters just did stuff, and might as well have done the exact opposite without a reader even batting an eyelash.
So far this review may seem negative, but I did enjoy reading this book at the time, maybe because I kept expecting it to be horrible, and it was just mediocre. Faint praise, I know. But it means that there's hope for him -- having learned to quell the awful stylistic tendencies of his misspent (though lucrative) youth, all he has to do is learn to create characters that people care about, and he'll be on his way! Wa ha ha!
Still, two things in the book reminded me of the older Robbins that I really hate. The first is the scrotal obsession of the first chapter, which I won't belabor. The second was a three-page reverie about mayonnaise. It starts as a description of a character's love for mayo (he's from North Carolina, and has been living for years in Laos without access to it), but when Robbins gets impatient, the omniscient narrator takes over and spins a wordy tribute to Hellmann's that's too clever by half, and feels totally out of place. It seems like just the kind of thing that you'd see mentioned in a review, like: "Look for the side-splitting elegy to America's favorite spreadable condiment, mayonnaise -- that section alone is worth the price of the book! Bravo, Mr. Robbins, you've done it again, with your keen observation of American culture and its obsessions!" Yarf. [by the way, imagine that made-up quote but stick DeLillo in it instead. Seems totally plausible, doesn't it? Double yarf.]
All right, I've said enough. I can't really recommend it, because there are too many other important things to read in this life. But I honestly can't give it less than a 5. And that's pretty good!
The Benchley Roundup : A Selection by Nathaniel Benchley of his Favorites by Robert Benchley
This collection of short humor bits by one of the original members of the Algonquin Round Table is fucking hilarious. I always wondered if those Algonquin assholes were as witty as they were hyped up to be, and so far, in my experience, Oscar Levant is a genius and Benchley's looking pretty hot, too. His powers of observation are razory sharp and use all five senses; He's fiercely witty, but laid back and folksy, too, like
Ambrose Bierce on
Prairie Home Companion
(Here's a tangential biographical bit about his grandson, Peter Benchley. PB's CV goes like this: Harvard University. The Washington Post. Editor at Newsweek. White House Speech-writer. Author of
Jaws.)
Pattern Recognition by William Gibson
The first of WG's books to take place in the present instead of the future, this one starts sometime after 9/11 and follows a trendspotter named Cayce (not to be confused with
Neuromancer's protag Case, but I pronounce them the same despite a textual hint to say it "Casey." Pbbthht!) as she chases down the shadowy auteur of a net-based piece of viral, guerilla filmmaking. Hmm. That sounds stupid. But surprisingly, it's not. Or maybe not surprisingly, depending how you feel about Gibson. I love
Neuromancer, and I've read it more times than strictly necessary, but you know how it is: certain books, if you read them at the right age, resonate so violently that the harmonics ring throughout the rest of your life whether you want them to or not. I first read
Neuromancer when I was like 13, I was totally taken in by the adolescent power fantasy, with its clever elevation of the pasty, useless computer nerd to all-powerful wizard/warrior (the obvious prototype for
The Matrix's Neo) who has a hot kickass girlfriend (Molly, later known as Trinity) and -- shit, sorry about the digression here. The point is, I tend to give WG the benefit of the doubt, so I can't discern how much that bias taints my assessment that
Pattern Recognition was pretty damn good.
Many works of Science Fiction (or as some authors prefer, Speculative Fiction) take an interesting idea and spins a what-if narrative around it (what if we could clone dinosaurs; what if monkeys ruled the earth; what if a secret race of lizards ran the government blah blah blah). This book doesn't take place in a speculative future, but Gibson is still in love with ideas, so it's full of them, and a lot of them are pretty cool. After the first few chapters, in which he seems to want to make you really
feel Cayce's jetlag, the story moves along at a jolly clip, and it drags you all over the place. The characters are all memorably well-drawn and a bunch of them show Gibby's low opinion of businesspeople in general, with which I couldn't agree more. The central mystery is satisfying, and he's good with atmosphere, conveying foreboding and paranoia especially well. Hell, it's fun, and I've read it twice and recommended it to a bunch of people. So why not you?
The
His Dark Materials Trilogy, by Philip Pullman
(
The Golden Compass,
The Subtle Knife,
The Amber Spyglass)
Okay, now I know I'll get in trouble for this. Unlike Jonathan Strange, this trilogy shares so many superficial characteristics with Harry Potter that you guys probably think I'm deliberately trying to piss you off by reading/reviewing it. But I read it six months ago; I just forgot to review it before now. Anyway. This is an improbably dark (for "children's books") trilogy about a little girl who has an adventure in which she jumps across various parallel universes in an attempt to keep them from being destroyed. It was written at the same time as HP, and the similarities are numerous: The coming-of-age of a magical orphan with allies and enemies of various fantasy races and species. Reader identification with powerful, independent hero (i.e. pathetic and kind of tawdry emotional manipulation). Page-turning cliffhangery addictiveness. Enh, the list probably goes on, but at least there were no homicidal trees. So why did I read this?
Well, a cursory examination told me that it was more serious and better written -- and I still found the prose a little too fussy and self-important. But even if it was grandiose at times (like so many books that are trying to be BIG) it never explained things that it could show, giving young readers credit for perceptivity and even worldliness. If the trilogy had been written for adults, I'd say it didn't have the intellectual rigor or emotional maturity to earn the adjective "great." But as a children's book? Sheeit. I loved the story, which was determinedly original and so tremendous in scale that to use the word "epic" would belittle it. I admired the depth, richness and complexity of the metaphors on which the entire trilogy was founded (I could write a separate essay about "dæmons," and the way religion is treated is pretty fucking outrageous for a kids book). It was at all times respectful and honest, lacking any trace of condescension towards its presumed young readership. It was refreshingly realistic in its relation to the physical world (injured people remain scabbed and in pain; traveling is tedious and uncomfortable; princesses are not beautiful and intelligent and clean). Death is presented in all its awfulness and banality (chapters don't end with noble death scenes that fill their witnesses with resolve; when people get shot, they usually die, and their corpses smell bad), and the fact that no death is presented in sterile nobility makes life seem all the more precious. Most importantly, the story is unflinching in its portrayal of the immense range of human motivation, flaws, and the capacity for betrayal, hypocrisy, evil in even the best of people. The plot was delightfully baroque, but this story had complexity where it mattered, which is to say everywhere else.
Sorry this was so long. But it will serve as a useful comparison point when I finally post the damn Harry Potter essay.
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke
I read this before I heard I was supposed to be disdainful of it. I thought it was really good. Very dry, though; I don't understand why it's so popular. Unimaginative and greedy marketing-type people call
Jonathan Strange "Harry Potter for adults (or whatever)" when the only similarities are that both are about British magicians. Ignore such marketrisms and read the book.
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Ubik by Philip K. Dick
The best book PKD ever wrote, which is saying a lot. He somehow managed to maintain the superficial trappings of bad "science fiction" -- spaceships and robots and ray guns and so on -- without ever writing a science fiction story.
Night Train by Martin Amis
This genre exercise exercise in spartan prose was totally different from his usual style, but the motherfucker pulls it off: it's really good. It's short, ugly, and mean, and it's a mystery novel in the same way that
Watchmen is a superhero comic (and if that doesn't mean anything to you, go read
Watchmen now).
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The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett
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The Know-It-All by A. J. Jacobs
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Confessions of a Yakuza by Junichi Saga
Dull memoir of early 1900s Japanese gang lifestyle back before they learned how to really do the shit right, probably by watching
Scarface or
Little Caesar after the war. Prewar Japanese gangsters spent a lot of time running dice games and apologizing to each other for perceived slights. Duty this, honor that. The only punishment necessary was shame, which did lead to the occasional jolly act of
seppuku, but even that wasn't enough to get me jazzed about this grey little book.
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5 is the Perfect Number by Igor Tuveri
A very stylish Italian mafia revenge story that left me feeling a little empty afterwards. The art made me think of Dave Mazzuchelli, but maybe that's because I haven't read any Mazzuchelli in a while. My life is not significantly improved by having read this.
Dracula by Bram Stoker
Really drives home the problems of the epistolary form. The idea that every single character in the story keeps a diary that they update faithfully every freaking night (if not several times a day) strained my ability to suspend disbelief too far -- even in a fucking vampire story! Seriously -- everybody transcribes Van Helsing's speech the exact same way? Did they have a meeting about that? Enh. The story itself is fine, and it's funny to see an early manifestation of the horror movie convention that characters within such a story are almost universally dull and unable to perceive the obvious facts of their situation.
The End of the Road by John Barth
The Fermata by Nicholson Baker
Oh my god this book is soooo dirty. A pretty accurate depiction of what your typical guy would do if he found himself with the ability to stop time, it should rightfully horrify anybody who is
not a typical guy. I wasn't totally sold on this book until the narrator, bored by the more obvious things he can do while time is frozen, starts writing pornographic stories so he can watch people read them once he starts time again -- his desperate attempt to have a two-way relationship. It's -- this book is fucked up. Heh. I dunno. The only person I ever recommended this to never looked at me the same way again.
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Louis Riel: a Comic Strip Biography by Chester Brown
This story of an early Canadian folk hero who gets royally fucked over by the logic of colonialism is beautiful, bloody, and criminally sad. I want to teleport a copy into your hands, because so many of you will never read it otherwise. BUT I CAN'T TELEPORT SHIT.
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The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell
Everybody's read this shit by now, so I don't really need to say anything about it, right? I thought it was pretty engaging throughout, peppered with ideas that seemed fresh enough. Damn, why am I fronting? I loved this book when I read it, and now I'm reeling in my praise because it's gotten too popular. That sucks. Just so you know.
The Spy Who Came In from the Cold by John Le Carré
This is early JLC, and like its main character, it's lean, paranoid, and kinda nasty. Like most people, I prefer the later "Karla trilogy." It seems to me that as the cold war mellowed, so did JLC's books. But this one was written during the height of it, and the stakes feel very high. Spooky.
A Perfect Spy by John Le Carré
They say this book is semi-autobiographical, and if even a third of it is true, JLC had a fucked-up childhood. As a character, the protagonist is interestingly flawed, conflicted, dramatic. But as a real person... he's almost unbearably sad. Otherwise, the book is a little to long on childhood memories and short on cool spy shit.
The System of the World by Neal Stephenson
As this is the third book of the "Baroque Cycle" trilogy, recommending it would be kind weird. Basically, if you've read
Cryptonomicon, you loved
Cryptonomicon, because everybody loves it. It's impossible not to love. I DARE YOU TO PRETEND YOU DIDN'T LOVE IT. If you loved it enough, you started reading the Baroque Cycle. So basically, you already know if you're going to read this, because you will already have slogged through the first two volumes of the trilogy and maybe you loved them but maybe you're just stubborn and can't stand not finishing the set. The BC is a lot more diffuse than
Cryptonomicon, which was spastically digressionary but still dense as fudge. And although the BC is also riddled with historical figures, Samuel Pepys (rhymes with
Peeps!) is nowhere near as fun as Douglas MacArthur. Dig?
Oblivion by David Foster Wallace
I went bonkers for the first story, which is worth the purchase price alone, but I never finished the rest. I don't like short stories in general. When is this motherfucker going to write me another novel?
