Recently by onehourtoread

How exactly did this country elect Richard Nixon president twice? It's a difficult question to answer, but this book written after the 1968 election shows in some way how it was done. His handlers that year packaged him as if he were some household product, and it pretty much worked. (I'm glad I was able to purchase this book used at The Strand in New York, so that I got the original cover with Nixon's face on a cigarette box.)

Those running the Nixon campaign (including Roger Ailes, very young then and now the head of Fox News) were convinced that television could help Nixon. After the Kennedy-Nixon campaign, that was an unbelievable claim to many, but the Nixon team were able to show carefully edited pieces on television that showed only the best of Nixon. Their commercials were also rather groundbreaking -- often just a series of powerful still images with a Nixon speech in the background. One of the most powerful depicted scenes of violence and chaos, all while Nixon spoke about the need for greater law and order in America. 

The Nixon team was also obsessed with how much the media were against them. They were convinced that the television networks would pick only the worst shot of Nixon each day, so they purposefully had Nixon make just one televised event a day. That way, the networks would have only one shot to choose from and couldn't screw over Nixon, as was their alleged wont.

Nixon speechwriter Ray Price said this about Nixon's "spontaneity" in November 1967:

We have to capture and capsule this spontaneity -- and this means shooting RN (Richard Nixon) in situations in which it's likely to emerge, then having a chance to edit the film so that the parts shown are the parts we want shown.

Ah, yes, that spontaneous Nixon!

This quote comes from the last quarter of the book, which just contains a series of memos written by the Nixon staff. I'm not sure why they would allow these memos to get into the hands of McGinniss, but in many ways this is the most fascinating parts of the book. Here, for example, is what Nixon aide Harry Treleaven said in one memo about magazine advertising:

Rich, warm advertising in a woman's own medium, the service magazine, next to her cake mixes and her lipstick advertisements will go a long way, I believe, toward making Mr. Nixon acceptable to female viewers.

The Nixon people seemed to be good at what they did, but they didn't exactly have the best candidate to work with. Nixon aide Harry Treleaven explains one issue:

Then we had the basic problem of Nixon's personality. There were certain things people just would not buy about the guy. For instance, he loves to walk on the beach, but we couldn't send a camera out to film him picking up seashells. That would not have been credible.

I'm not entirely sure about this book. It's an awesome read, but I do have some questions about its authenticity.  I mean, all these Nixon people wouldn't have wanted to be quoted by him. How could they have been that naive when everything else in the book shows them so professional?  

I used to be more of Kennedy guy than a Nixon guy. I would read all sorts of stuff about JFK, but now I've come to be more fascinated with Nixon. He's such an incredibly odd and unlikely politician. He should have been the power behind the throne, and yet somehow with the most awkward personality he was elected twice.

One final note: The author is in the news this week. That's because McGinniss moved from Alaska this week. This is the same Joe McGinniss, who is writing a book about Sarah Palin and rented the house next to her. Sarah Palin, of course, reacted by building a large fence, and you get the feeling the Nixon people should have done that as well.

I haven't been around these parts lately because, like last summer, I decided to tackle a several hundred page book for the summer. This time, it was a 700-page book about the rise of the modern media. Like "War and Peace," this wasn't such a great beach read either, but it was enjoyable. I'm a sucker for any book about people like Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, Woodward and Bernstein, and John Kennedy.

This book is especially interesting because it was written in 1979 about the rise of modern media, and coincidentally that's about the time the fall of modern media began. Halberstam charts the course of four major media companies from the 1950s through the 1970s -- CBS, The Washington Post, Time, and the Los Angeles Times. Among other things, the book seems to be about the consolidation of modern media and its massive influence on the country, which in some ways has become deconsolidated since then. Sure, we have much larger media monopolies now, but with all the online platforms the power any one of these news outlets wields seems to have diminished. 

Halbserstam alternates between the four organizations. I found I really loved the parts about CBS and the Washington Post, while I didn't always care about the Los Angeles Times and Time.That's probably just because of my personal tastes though.  I have to admit that I didn't know the latter two were such conservative beacons. Back in the 1950s, Time seemed to be far more Republian than Fox News is today, while the Los Angeles Times practically invented Richard Nixon. It's interesting that 1960 was really the first challenging election Nixon ever had since the Times made his California elections so easy.

While it was interesting, I think that 700 words was a bit more than I needed to know about all this. I just didn't always need to know about all the obscure editors of these newspapers. I was also a little disappointed in the book when I did some research online afterwards. For example, are news anchors in Sweden really called Cronkiters? Um, no, though Halberstam seems to think so. This came up again when Cronkite died recently and that little tidbit made it into all the obituaries, even if it was news to the people of Sweden. Halberstam was apparently the first source for this misinformation.  

Also, the "Cronkite Moment" is a bit disputed. Lyndon Johnson allegedly said that if he lost Cronkite he lost America right after watching Cronkite's unfavorable documentary about the Vietnam War. Others have shown that Johnson could not have seen it because he was in Texas giving a speech at the time of the broadcast. It's a good story though, and personally I like to think that LBJ would have Tivoed the program.

Finally, I always enjoy a bit of synergy in my reading, such as when Halberstam writes about Teddy White's career at Time. Earlier this year, I read White's "The Making of the President." Also, while at Harvard in the 1930s, Teddy White received a Sheldon Traveling Fellowship, "highly prized among his peers," to go to China. One of our students actually won this fellowship last year to study in Belgium with his advisor, though I had no idea at all that it was highly prized. I thought it was mainly just convenient, since it meant that we wouldn't have to cover his stipend.

This is basically a book about English professors getting laid. If you're into that sort of thing, well, then this is the book for you. Granted, if I were an English professor, like David Lodge, that's just the sort of thing I would want to write about too. Note to self: Add more sex to novel about college administrators.

Okay, I'm being a little too flippant about a book that I actually did enjoy. Lodge always sucks me in. This is the second novel in the Rummidge trilogy, and I've now accidentally read all three. I like Lodge, so I just keep picking up his novels, and gradually I've read a trilogy without knowing it. I started with the third book, then read the first book, thinking that the characters all seemed rather familiar, and now I've read the second book. I don't think there are any more in the series, but who knows?

The book also seems rather Dickensian in that it's full of coincidences. Pretty much everyone is running into everyone all over the world. I can go several days without running into my roommate, and yet these characters are constantly running into each other in Switzerland, Turkey, Amsterdam, Hawaii, and all sorts of other exotic locales. Just as with Dickens, there seem to be about 50 people in the entire world, and they are always bumping into each other.

Not so much like Dickens: they're screwing each other lots too.

Fathers and Sons in the New Golden Age of Baseball

I was skeptical of this book at first. I'm not a fan of syrupy books about baseball, nor about fatherhood. I don't think Leitch is either, and it's not what he did here, despite the title making it sound like that and despite its release near Father's Day. This is mostly a memoir of a baseball fan with an entertaining father who is also a baseball fan.

Some of it feels familiar, if only because I've read so much of Leitch's writing. He's mentioned some of the same stories in "Life as a Loser" and on his many autobiographical posts on Deadspin. That's okay. For someone who writes as much as Leitch, it's only natural that he repeats some stories. They're good stories too, so it's not like he's retelling anything dull.

This is basically the second book in a row I've read about one baseball game. The last one was about one of the greatest games ever and turned out to be a sort of a lackluster book. This is about a rather lackluster game that turned out to be sort of a great book. It took some time to grow on me though. As much of a fan as I am of him, I wasn't sure what I thought in the early innings.

I kept looking for some grand, overarching theme. I don't know that there really was one. In interviews, he says that the book is about his belief that this is the golden age of baseball, and how baseball is the way he communicates with his father. There's more than that here though. It's really just a meandering baseball memoir of a fan, and that's great.

It also feels like the type of book only an established writer can write. If I were to go to a publisher and ask, "Hey, I'd like to write a book about my observations as a fan," they would laugh at me. Luckily, they didn't laugh at him. In fact, you can tell how much the publishers like Leitch in that they let him keep in one chapter which was essentially a list of all the interesting baseball games he has ever attended. I want a publisher to like me that much.  

Cincinnati, Boston, and the 1975 World Series: The Triumph of America's Pastime

Things I learned while reading this book:

Someone named Squeaky tried to assassinate Gerald Ford.

The first game of the 1903 World Series was probably fixed.

Eddie Futch, Joe Frazier's trainer, wouldn't allow Frazier to start the 15th round against Muhammad Ali in the "Thrilla in Manilla."

You'll notice that none of these are about Game Six of the 1975 World Series between the Boston Red Sox and Cincinnati Reds, which is what this book is presumably about. This is a book of tangents. For example, Gerald Ford's son was at the game, which somehow led not only to a discussion of the two assassination attempts on Ford but also to a page and a half about Patty Hearst. It became maddening at times.

I love the whole notion of a book based on one game. Daniel Okrent wrote a wonderful one called Nine Innings, and the next book on my baseball docket is Will Leitch's latest, which is set during one Cardinals-Cubs game. Still, I can't help but feel that Frost is padding this book. I mean, this book is about what some would call the greatest baseball game ever. I don't need to be reading about Spiro Agnew, "stagflation," and the Boston Red Stockings of 1882.

Having said all that, it wasn't an awful book, just frustrating. It was basically a not-so-great book about a great game, so in the end I still enjoyed reading it.

Incidentally, my parents were at this game. Unlike so many others, they really were. My father had season tickets, in the roof boxes above the third base line. However, because the Red Sox needed extra seats for the press, they made him move down below on the third base side, about twenty rows behind the visiting team's dugout. He was pretty happy about this, because in exchange they gave him three times as many tickets.

As the game was winding down, with the Reds winning 6-3, the owners of the Reds left their seats, presumably to get ready for the celebration in the locker room. One of the ushers who usually worked in the roof box seats was nearby. He recognized my parents and asked if they wanted to sit in those seats for the end of the game. ("I never really tipped him during the season, but I guess the people I sent down to use my seats tipped him really well, and he knew that.")

And so, they were in great seats to see Bernie Carbo's three-run homer, Dwight Evans' famous catch, and Carlton Fisk's game-winning home run. For my father, Dwight Evans' catch in right field, the one that stole a home run from Joe Morgan in the 10th inning, was the biggest moment. From his vantage point on the third base line, it seemed utterly impossible that Evans could catch that ball, and yet he did.

Oh, my father also enjoyed the part about the 1882 Boston Red Stockings.

I got this book through Swaptree, and the person who sent it to me included a sticky note that read, "Enjoy, or read it and weep." This is not exactly a happy book. I will read Michael Lewis about anything, but I think I prefer his sports books, rather than his books about the horrible collapse of the financial world. That might just be me though.

Many of his recent books have been about market inefficiencies. Moneyball was about how Billy Beane of the Oakland A's discovered that other teams were ignoring players with high on base percentages and decided to invest his dwindling resources on them. The Blind Side was about how, when free agency started in the NFL, teams suddenly started paying more for left tackles -- until they became the second highest paid players in the game -- all because they protected the quarterback's blind side. Or at least it was about that until almost accidentally the book became about a plucky Academy Award winning Mom who adopts a kid from the wrong side of town.

Here though, Lewis is writing about an entire market that is inefficient, and the few people who were smart enough to notice this and short it.

Still, he does find an interesting group of people who predicted the collapse of the housing bubble and were wise enough to short the market and make millions. It was a group that included a money manager incapable of censoring his thoughts and a one-eyed investor with Asperger's Syndrome.  I'm sure there are other people who shorted the market too, but Lewis probably found the only ones who weren't boring.

I love Michael Lewis, but I was kind of happy when I finished the book. And frankly -- despite the fact that the writing was great, the stories were entertaining, and the characters were amazing -- the ending kind of sucked. It's not really Lewis' fault. That's just what you get when you write about the collapse of the worldwide financial markets.

I feel like I have been missing out on P.G. Wodehouse all these years. I've long meant to read him, but I just never got around to it. I've always known he's supposed to be funny, but to be honest I didn't really believe he would be this funny.

I think I will just give him the Trollope treatment and throw up a few of my favorite quotes:

Blandings was sheltering a certain Miss Aileen Peavey, the mere thought of whom was enough to turn the sunshine off as with a tap.

Liz... when it comes to doping out a scheme, you're the snake's eyebrows!

Miss Clarkson, unless firmly checked, would pirouette round and round the point for minutes without ever touching it.

When it comes to the smooth stuff, old girl, you're the oyster's eye-tooth!

A depressing musty scent pervaded the place, as if a cheese had recently died there in painful circumstances.

The title character Psmith (the p is silent) for some reason reminds me of my friend Matt from high school. I'm not sure why, but Psmith just seems always to be taking bold chances with a calm confidence that all will work out well in the end. For example, in just a few seconds, Psmith decides to impersonate a Canadian poet in order to get Lord Emsworth to invite him to a country estate where a charming and beautiful woman he fancies will be staying. Seriously, that's just the sort of shit Matt would pull back in high school. Ah, those were the days.

It's interesting to read about Psmith in the same month that I read about Duddy Kravitz. Both are schemers, though Psmith is a whole lot less calculated about it. He always seems to be in the moment, as if he is practicing the zen of scheming.

A while back, I decided to have a Trollope novel going at all times for bedtime reading. I think I will amend that and have either a Wodehouse or Trollope novel going.

And finally, this is the first novel I have read to include both the words lalapaloosa and rannygazoo. That right there is worth the price of admission alone. 

I almost bailed on this book after thirty pages, but I kept at it, you know, for Canada (seeing as it's a bit of a Canadian classic). I think it was worth it. Duddy Kravitz is, after all, one of the more memorable characters I have come across. He reminds me a little of my father, although, whereas most of my father's schemes are no more than light gray on the black and white scale, Kravitz's schemes are more of a dark gray. In some ways, it was tiring to read the book with all the maneuvers young Duddy had going on. It was tough to keep up with them all.

Duddy is not exactly a likable character, except that I still found myself rooting for him at times even when I probably shouldn't have. There was one climatic moment where I felt happy that he had succeeded until I remembered, "Oh, wait, didn't he just screw over that other guy."

It's thanks to Stuart McLean of Vinyl Cafe that I read this book. On one episode, he talked of his favorite humorists, which included Richler, E.B. White, and Stephen Leacock. While I wouldn't exactly describe this book as humor, it was funny at times, and I'm anxious to read some of Richler's essays.

All Trollope novels I have read seem to be very dull at the start, and then slowly begin to fascinate me, even though, well, they should still be dull. There is always a point around page 200 when he just floors me, and the novel seems just amazing, even though again it should still be dull. Although fascinating, this book never quite reached that amazing point, but that might be because it (at least my copy) was only 165 pages long.

"The Warden" is the first of the Barsetshire series of novel, all about the life of clergymen. I much prefer reading about the politicians of the Palliser novels, so I think I will return to that series.

I still have this strange plan of reading all of Trollope's novels, although I have quite a ways to go.

My Worldwide Quest to Find My Best Childhood Friends, Knock on Their Doors, and Ask Them to Come out and Play

I'm not entirely sure why, but Danny Wallace's stunt books seem more authentic than other people's stunt books. More than others, he really seems to live the projects that he undertakes. In this case, he has the goal of meeting twelve friends from childhood, dragging him all the way from Los Angeles to Tokyo.

In other hands, much of this would seem staged. I mean, I know it's a book project. The impetus for this journey back to his childhood is his fear of turning thirty and becoming a grown up. Of course, another impetus is probably the fact that he had a book contract. Still, Wallace is so utterly open in all his books that it's easy to forget this. I get the feeling that he would still be going on these adventures even if he didn't have a book contract.

Danny Wallace is always entertaining, though I'm not sure how I would feel if a friend from grade school showed up at my door! I've forgotten grade school, so I probably wouldn't even know who they were. "Paste? We used to eat paste together? What are you talking about? Who are you?"

This book was written over thirty years ago, and two of the three umpires primarily featured in it haven't spoken to the author since. One of them, Harry Wendelstedt, denies he even talked to Gutkind for the book, which is impressive since Wendelstedt is such a frequent presence in it.

Of course, you'd deny having anything to do with the author too, if you were depicted running around the locker room butt naked, except for a small t-shirt with a swastika and the words "Super Kraut" on it. (As bad as that sounds, it wasn't meant maliciously, in that he was making fun of himself for being German, but, you know, still...)

This is a different kind of book than Bruce Weber's, depicting the hard-living life of an umpire. While I enjoyed it, I don't entirely blame the umpires for hating Gutkind. In the afterword, he explains all the lengths he went to to get his stories, such as pretending to be passed out drunk during critical conversations between umpires. Much of his method involved getting the umpires drunk, while only pretending to get drunk himself. It feels a little seedy at times, and yet the result is fascinating

Finally, here's an important life lesson courtesy of umpire Doug Harvey in a discussion with a fellow umpire:

What I'm going to say now is the most important thing I have ever tried to tell you. This is the key to being a good umpire. This is what separates the men from the boys. This is what makes a man's man out of a mortal man. Now listen to me, Art . . . . I tell you now like I was your father, I talk to you with the warmth of a brother, so you listen to me closely and you listen good 'cause here it is: Don't let anybody ever call you horseshit.

This week has been all umpires all the time, on the reading front. I wrote a column partly about this book, so I will refrain from saying too much here -- except that this book was a revelation. It truly was, because up until reading this, I had never even thought about umpires -- unless I felt they were screwing over the Red Sox. In this young season, I've already been concentrating on umpiring more than I have ever done before. 

Here's something I learned about the strike zone, which I had never really thought about:

The zone as it is represented on the television screen has a number of obvious shortcomings. One is that it isn't adjusted for the stride of the hitter. Second, the television strike zone is two-dimensional but the strike zone is three. Usually, the represented zone is set on a plane at the front edge of the plate, which means that any pitch that doesn't pass over the plate's front lip won't show up on the screen as a strike; in the big leagues especially, pitches break so sharply that they frequently go around the front of the plate but enter the strike zone from the side.

My only real umpiring experience came in fourth grade when a few friends needed someone to call balls and strikes. The whole thing is a bit foggy and frankly doesn't make a lot of sense. We were eight.  Were we even tall enough to have strike zones? And yet I have a clear memory of messing up a call when I called a clearly foul ball fair. It was such a bad call that even the beneficiary of it was a bit embarrassed, and everyone on one team ended up hating me.

Of course, as an umpire, I knew I could not admit I was wrong, and so I didn't change the call even when I knew how bad it was. What I did was calmly wait a minute and make an excruciatingly bad call in the other direction to even things up. This only resulted in everyone on the other team hating me too, and I knew even then that I couldn't be handle the pressure of being an umpire. It would take a few more years for me to figure out that I couldn't handle the pressure of being a ballplayer.

They say never judge a book by the cover, which is good because my copy of this book had what looked like a Wookie on the cover. It was also listed as science fiction. I had been recommended this book on good authority, but the cover made me hesitant.

Luckily, I enjoyed it. I loved all the tales of the Nepalese bureaucracy, although oddly I wasn't as interested in the part about climbing Mount Everest. I think that's because the Nepalese bureaucracy seems to give the main characters a lot more trouble than Mount Everest. And it's not a Wookie on the cover, but a yeti, who the main characters rescue from some scientists who smuggle him out of the wilderness. Jimmy Carter's somehow involved too, but I won't even attempt to explain that.

What I'll remember most of the book are the dueling narrators. Three of the four stories are told by George, who seems like a cool guy, with a wild and crazy friend Freds. The third story, however, is told by Freds, who seems like a cool guy, with an incredibly uptight friend George. This is a great touch. I'm not sure what it says about me, but I liked the book a lot more when the uptight/cool guy was the narrator.

Finally, I think all the parts about bureaucracy in Nepal really affected me. Somehow, I didn't sleep very well last night because I kept dreaming about Nepalese red tape. It seemed like I was waking up every few minutes thinking about the bureaucratic horrors of the book. I'm hoping that doesn't happen to me again tonight. Like I said, climbing Mount Everest didn't seem all that bad. 

I seem to have a thing lately for history books that were written at the time. This study of the 1960 election was published in 1961, and I love how I can read about Kennedy and Nixon without having to think about Kennedy's assassination, Watergate, Vietnam, or anything else that was to happen later. This book is so firmly in the moment, and that's what great about it.

It's something of a classic. Whereas now it seems that just about every reporter came out with an instant book about the 2008 election, this was really the first behind the scenes account of a political campaign. It helps that 1960's race was one of the most interesting in history. White had access to all the major players, well, except Nixon himself, but that's understandable. Nixon didn't seem to be talking to anyone.

Speaking of Nixon, from reading this, it doesn't really seem that Kennedy won this election as much as Nixon lost it. Throughout the book, Nixon comes across almost as a sympathetic figure. He never recovered from an infected knee for which he spent part of the fall in the hospital. He forced himself to campaign in all fifty states in an insane schedule that practically destroyed him. That's part of the reason he looked so sick in the debates with Kennedy. He also refused to consult with his staff much of the time, insisting on making decisions without consulting anyone. Some of the odd decisions he made seem to have  doomed his campaign, and it feels surprising that he came so close to winning. 

White talks a lot about each candidate's all-purpose speech, the one each trotted out at every ordinary campaign stop. Every day, Kennedy would talk about how he wanted to get the country moving again and Nixon would talk about Peace and Prosperity. It made me realize how much tougher it is for candidates these days. With so many of their events on cable news, there must be an incredible pressure to come up with new material each time. 

I remember watching Obama and Clinton's primary speeches every week in 2008 and feeling bored because they were saying the same thing each week. Well, they're supposed to do that. Back then, the candidates seemed more like stand-up comedians, using the same trusted material each night and only gradually working in new material.

I skipped enough stories in this book that I think I barely read it. I'm not entirely sure that I should even mention it here. Thurber is funny, but this just doesn't seem as interesting a collection as "My World and Welcome to It." The humor here just seems a bit too topical to remain funny today. Some funny pieces are scattered within here, but overall it was a little disappointing.

If you're ever inclined to read 70 pages about radio soap operas, however, this then is the book for you.

This was quite a gripping espionage story. This isn't one of my normal genres, but the novel was very entertaining.

My mother read it before me. She liked it too, but she had one complaint. She didn't like what the author Noel Hynd (who I know) said about Vladimir Putin. She didn't think he was necessarily wrong. However, she felt that he shouldn't have said such bad things about Putin, because Putin might come after him. I tried to explain to my mother that Putin probably has many other enemies on his list ahead of Noel Hynd. Personally, I think Noel's quite safe, but she's still worried.

For her sake, I won't say anything bad about Putin here. Such a nice man, that Putin. 

Of course, J.D. Salinger died a few weeks back, and like so many others I decided to reread one of his books. I remember liking "Franny and Zooey" a lot back in my impressionable college years. This time, though, I wasn't so thrilled by it. In fact, I almost didn't finish it.

The book is wildly uneven, which is really the worst thing a book can be. If it had been awful throughout, I would have never bothered finishing it. In this case, it had the occasional moment of greatness amidst all the tedium, just enough that I kept reading.

The first story "Franny" is really quite good, but "Zooey," the much longer story, could be infuriating at times. For example, it took about 80 pages, just for Zooey to make his way out of the bathroom. First, there was a letter from his brother to read in the tub, then a long conversation with his mother, and eventually some shaving.

And if you're ever wondering what was in a typical 1955 medicine cabinet, just turn to pages 75 and 76, where there is a 190-word sentence describing the contents of the Glass family medicine cabinet. (Note to self for Nanowrimo: Describing the contents of a medicine cabinet is a great way to pad your word total.)

At times, Salinger just seemed a little too clever and wordy for his own good. "The Catcher in the Rye" had many of the same problems, but there was also something magnificent about it. This book, though, just wasn't interesting enough for me to overlook the flaws. </speaking ill of the recently dead>

"Frankenstein" turned out to be a great novel, even though I almost bailed on it after the first hour. It doesn't really get going until page 28. Before that, we have a tedious author's introduction on how the story came about. Then, there's a preface. Then, there are a bunch of letters from some character who is definitely not Victor Frankenstein or the monster. And then finally, Frankenstein shows up and tells his tale.

I will say this about the monster: Man, does he have a good vocabulary. He's only been alive a few years when he starts talking to his creator, and he puts me to shame. Some words he used in his tale include: viands, recompense, imprecate, and scourge. He devours copies of Milton and Plutarch that he finds lying around. He may be a monster, but he is a monster of letters!

He's also grotesque, so grotesque that no one can look at him. The monster that we see in movies is ugly, but almost in a comical way. I found myself wishing I didn't have an image of Frankenstein's Monster in my head already when I read this. It felt like when you read a book that has been made into movie, and you can't help picturing the actor whenever reading about the character. (This can happen to me, even if I haven't seen the movie. For example, Freakin' Sean Penn almost ruined the book "All the King's Men," never mind the movie,  just because my copy had him on the cover.)

And so I wish I hadn't seen the monster before reading about him, and I found I envied his intellect more than his brute strength.

This is a very strange book to be reading while you have a head cold. It's about a lawyer who has episodes where he loses control of his legs. His legs will just carry him off on mammoth walks, and he's powerless to stop himself. This can happen at any time -- in the middle of the night, at the office, during a trial. He will walk for miles and miles, and then at the end of the walk he'll collapse wherever he is and sleep outside for hours.

Needless to say, this isn't conducive to a healthy life, a good marriage, a successful career, or pretty much anything else. As the book proceeds, the main character (as well as his wife) becomes a wreck. His body is ravished by the long walks. He suffers frost bite, loses fingers, and almost gets killed. He's also pretty much crazy by the last half.

In general, it was very odd to read this book about a man who can't control his legs from walking, when I really couldn't control my nose from running. The book had a very intense, feverish pace, and, well, I had a fever.

I loved Ferris' first book -- "Then We Came to the End" -- because it was funny. This one, not so funny. It's not exactly an uplifting comedy, but it's very well-written, and I couldn't put it down. I even liked it once I had recovered from the fever.

This is really a very enjoyable book, but I just have little to say about it. It's really just a series of short stories featuring the same character. Great book, relaxing to read, but I don't have much to say about it.

I Saw It on the Radio with the Boston Red Sox

Red Sox radio announcer Joe Castiglione seems like a really nice guy, so I feel bad saying this, but here goes: This is not a good book. In fact, as they say about movies, it's often so bad that it's good. It's just a weird little book that seems to be in desperate need of an editor.

Sure, he occasionally has some interesting things to say, but there are also long sections where he talks about his favorite restaurants in the cities he visits. (In Baltimore, he actually recommends a food court.) Granted, the book is chock-full of behind-the-scenes details, but those details are often about the hotels he stayed in while on the road and the food in the press boxes of stadium which sometimes don't exist anymore.

Here, for example, are the last two paragraphs of the book, in which he discusses his participation in the Hall of Fame exhibit for the 2004 Red Sox, surely an exciting day:
 

I was honored to cut the ribbon for the exhibit, which included Curt Schilling's bloody sock. That night, I stayed at the beautiful Otesaga Hotel on Lake Otesage, within walking distance of the Hall of Fame. I was one of eight guests. I had the Otesaga's great brunch the next morning, then drove onto Franklin Pierece for a class.

November. We are still basking in the glow of the series victory and the trophy's tour. I hope we can repeat it next year.

Okay, maybe he did have editors, because you just know that the first draft listed all eight of the other guests and what he had for brunch.

By the way, it may seem like I'm on a baseball kick lately, having finished this and the Simmons book this week, but I really started the Castiglione book way back in the summer. It just took me six months to get through it.
 

Yeah, pretty much.

How ESPN's Sports Guy Found Salvation, With a Little Help from Nomar, Pedro, Shawshank and the 2004 Red Sox

In the approximately 421 Red Sox books that came out after they won the World Series in 2004, I somehow forgot about this one. That's too bad, because it's one of the best. For some reason, I instead read the horrible diary by Stephen King and Stewart O'Nan, a book that managed to be about the Red Sox winning the World Series for the first time in 86 years and yet was somehow boring. Before reading it, I didn't think that would have have even been possible.* 

Simmons, meanwhile, is not at all boring and also very funny. He's great at capturing the spirit of a fan. His columns are strangely much better to read in book form, if only because they don't seem quite so long. Online Simmons' columns seem so long that I get discouraged from reading them. I just don't have any patience reading online. But they were really just a few pages in a book. I think it will be much easier to read his columns in the future, if I think of them as chapters instead of columns.

And it's amazing to relive those games. The four-day stretch at the end of the Yankees series is something I will never experience again. There were so many ways that the whole thing could have ended in shambles, and yet they somehow still won.

Like many New Englanders, I made a lot of ridiculous purchases after the Red Sox won, including the 12-disc collector's edition of the 2004 World Series with all 7 ALCS games and all 4 World Series games. Of course, I've never had enough time to watch any of it, but I'm thinking now that I might pop a few of the games in.

* I also read Johnny Damon's "memoir," which was not my finest moment in reading.  

I'll be honest. I didn't really enjoy this book, but I think that might have been because I read it through Daily Lit. This is only the second long work that I've read on Daily Lit. The first was "Around the World in 80 Days," which seemed to be ideal for the format. As this was another adventure novel from the time period, I expected it would be just as enjoyable.

I think Daily Lit is a little like listening to audio books. For me, I've found that I can only listen to certain types of books on audible. Non-fiction works much better for me than fiction, since it's easier to recover if you miss something in non-fiction. I imagine there will likely be certain genres that work better for me on Daily Lit too.

Here, because I was bored for the first third of the novel, I tended to skim a bit. (Hey, it was sent to me by e-mail, and who doesn't skim e-mail?) And then, even though the rest of the novel picked up, I still had trouble getting into it, because of what I missed earlier.

And so overall, it wasn't a bad novel, but I never really recovered from my bad start with it. I still wonder if I would have liked it more in book form. The answer may be no, but I'm just not sure.

I'm not sure why, but I'm still on my Watergate kick. The cliché about Watergate is that "it's not the crime, it's the coverup." But you know, the crime was pretty bad. Or rather the crimes were. There were years of dirty tricks, and I wonder if even now it's all out there.

This classic by the reporters who broke the story was endlessly fascinating to me. The only problem was that for the life of me I couldn't keep track of who everyone was. There's Haldeman and Ehrlichman, John Dean and John Mitchell, Colson and Clawson, Liddy (wait I know him! He's the one with the mustache), Macgruder, McGregor, McCord, Nixon (name rings a bell, but I can't quite place him), and so many others.

I almost feel as if I need to read the original Washington Post articles in order to figure it all out, but that probably wouldn't work either. The amazing thing about the Nixon Administration is that Vice President Spiro Agnew had to resign for crimes that had nothing to do with Watergate. In any other administration, Agnew would be all that we remembered, and here he's barely mentioned.

I think this is A.J. Jacobs' best book, and that's mainly because, instead of one big stunt, he does nine small ones. His stunts are somehow far more tolerable when they are chapters (or more likely magazine articles) rather than entire books.

There is a natural progression to his books. His first book was about reading the encyclopedia, which was funny but had some drawbacks because it was essentially a book about reading a book. His second book was about following the tenets of the bible for a year, which was better. It was still a book about reading a book, but at least he got out of the house a little with various experiments. Here, he seems to be a whole lot more active, and that makes it a much better book.

As whiny as I may sound here, I'm actually a big fan of Jacobs. He's always funny and interesting, though for his wife's sake I sure hope he writes a non-stunt book soon.

It's a little strange writing about this book, as it's partly about an obsessive fan of a musician. And I'm an occasional obsessive fan of Nick Hornby. Well, to be honest, I'm far from obsessive, but I have read all of his books and will often cite him as my favorite author. He even partly inspired this blog.

Much like how Duncan in this book eagerly awaits the new release from musician Tucker Crowe, I was eagerly awaiting this new novel from Hornby. I can't help but think that Hornby might be mocking people like me in here. Then again, many of his books are about obsessive fans. And here the twist is that the book is more about the woman who has to live with the obsessive fan and the subject of the obsessive fandom. At times, it's like High Fidelity in reverse.

There's even a part in here in which the obsessive fan writes a review of the new release by Tucker Crowe right after listening to it for the first time, so this entry is beginning to seem very meta.

Here's what for me was the most striking passage:

The truth abut autobiographical songs, he [Tucker] realized, was that you had to make the present become the past, somehow: you had to take a feeling or a friend or a woman and turn whatever it was into something that was over, so that you could be definitive about it. You had to put it in a glass case and look at it and think about it until it gave up its meaning. . . .The truth about life was that nothing ever ended until you died, and even then you just left a whole bunch of unresolved narratives behind you.

Here, Tucker has always hated his most renowned album, because he felt it wasn't authentic. That's sort of how I feel about writing humor columns now, like I'm trying too hard to catalog life in a snappy 750-word column. Many of my old columns all seem vaguely inauthentic to me. I seem to have been striving too hard for an opinion on which I could hang some jokes. When someone would write to me angrily about my opinion, a part of me would always be confused. I didn't mean anything by it. It was just a humor column, and they want to debate me?

It's a little similar to how Tucker feels about his songs. Unless, of course, it's not. On an unrelated note, the obsessive fan later decides that his initial review of the Tucker Crowe album was completely off-base. He's soon a little embarrassed by it, in fact.

I picked this book up to see if I still liked James Thurber. I hadn't read him for about twenty years, and the book itself is about sixty years old. Humor generally doesn't have a long shelf-life, so I was a bit skeptical. Still, much of this book was funny. His work doesn't hold up quite as well as that of Stephen Leacock, but there were times I laughed out loud.

The book is a bit uneven, but that can be said of most humor collections. One of the highlights is a piece at the end about all the strange translations Thurber found in a French-English "pocket interpreter" for travelers is one of my favorites. I'm hoping I never need to know the French expression for "he has burnt his face."

The collection also contains perhaps his most famous story, "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty," which I still love. It always amazes me that it's only nine pages long. This is probably one of the shortest stories ever on which a movie was based.

Finally, I can't help but think of David Sedaris when I read Thurber. It's partly because they happen to be next to each other on my bookshelf and because both wrote extensively for The New Yorker. Still, the last section where Thurber wanders around France in a mostly bewildered state reminds me very much of Sedaris' articles about living in Paris. Sedaris just works a little more blue. That's all. 

This was the novel about academia I decided to read while trying to write a novel about academia. Well, reread, as I had read this first about seven years ago.

It's an entertaining book, and I've always loved David Lodge's novels. There's something so relaxing about reading his books, even if they are not about anything relaxing. My only quarrel is that everything wraps up so quickly in the novel. It's as if Lodge suddenly realized he had hit his word count, and decided it was time to tie up all the loose ends and get the book to the publisher.

I suppose I'm thinking like this because I just finished up Nanowrimo for a second year. (That's the main reason there wasn't a whole lot of reading being done around these parts lately.) I know my 50,000 word novel came to a sudden end once I had hit my word count. I had no more patience for character development as I neared the very end. It was time to finish up the plot, and get the thing over with. I get the feeling Lodge felt the same way. 

Disturbing thing I learned about this book: Morris Zapp, a smaller character here who plays a larger role in other Lodge novels, was played on television by John Ratzenberger. Great, now, whenever I come across Morris in other novels, I'm going to envision Cliff Clavin. 

I read this book in about a day. I don't say that to brag. It's just that kind of book. This story about the founding of Facebook will glide by. It's a quick read, but it's also tough to put down.

It's non-fiction that reads like fiction, because, well, parts of it may well be fiction. Ben Mezrich is a controversial figure, because he is one of these creative non-fiction types. There is a long note at the beginning on how he employs "the technique of re-created dialogue," and throughout the book we are also treated to the inner thoughts of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, even though Zuckerberg wouldn't talk to him.

There's this disclaimer from Mezrich:

Some of the conversations recounted in this book took place over long periods of time, in multiple locations, and thus some conversations and scenes were re-created and compressed. Rather than spread these conversations out, I sometimes set these scenes in likely settings.

Rather than spread these conversations out, I sometimes just make stuff up, I almost expected him to say. But who cares? It's still a great read, and as an added bonus it might even be true. 

I especially enjoyed it because I work at Harvard, and so it was interesting to read about all the secret societies at Harvard. There's also one moment where the company co-founders talk about trying to have sex in the stacks of Widener Library, which was very exciting, not so much because of the sex talk, but because I had actually checked this book out of the stacks of Widener Library. Alas, little of interest was happening in the stacks when I checked it out, but it's not often that your library book mentions sex taking place in your library.

This is a great book that I had never previously heard of. Allen Drury wrote this in 1958 about the United States Senate, and is it ever about the United States Senate? There are amendments, long-winded oratory, points of order, committees, subcomittees, censures, and even more long-winded oratory -- all with a little dirty politics thrown in. It's about the nomination hearings for a Secretary of State at the height of the Cold War and takes place over about one week. I know it doesn't sound that exciting, but it really is -- you know, in a mundane kind of way.

I loved it. It was like reading fantasy politics. Drury created this whole make-believe United States Senate, with a cast of 100 Senators. I loved learning about all the mannerisms of imaginary Senators. By the end, I was thinking things like, "Well, isn't that just like the junior Senator from Wyoming? I sure hope he doesn't get reelected."

I'm also a sucker for alternate history books. This one functions in the same way in that it's written in 1958 about the future. Because of this we're treated to an entirely different race to the moon. All I can say is: Those darned Russians!

I found this book because I was searching for classic novels about politicians, and there are surprisingly not that many. .When it comes to American politics, the one that seems to be mentioned most is Robert Penn Warren's "All the King's Men." I consider myself a fan of that book, but it's also maddening in the way it meanders all over the place. "All The King's Men" is only partly a book about politics, but "Advise and Consent" is all politics, all the time. It is in many ways the C-Span of political novels. 

I was thinking a lot about Daisuke Matsuzaka while reading this book on Japanese baseball. Whiting wrote this profile of Japanese baseball in 1989, but there's so much in here that makes me understand the debacle that has been the Dice-K signing for the Red Sox. (I know he was good in September, and I know he could be better next year, but he hasn't exactly ridden the gyroball to the promise land, as we were led to expect.)

 This year, it was learned that both sides are unhappy. Matsusaka doesn't like how the Red Sox like him to train, and the Red Sox don't like his incessant throwing between starts. After reading this book, though, it makes sense that Matsuzaka would want to throw often between games. In here, Whiting describes the history of Japanese baseball, in which practice has always been almost as important as the game. One manager's system "came to be known as shi no renshu (death training)."

 At the turn of the century, the training regimen for one university baseball team "was nicknamed Bloody Urine, for it was said that the players practiced so hard they urinated blood at the end of the day." Trust me, it sounds a lot better in Japanese.

 According to Suishu Tobita, a legendary manager through much of the 20th century who was known to some as the God of Japanese baseball: "A manager has to love his players, but on the practice field he must treat them as cruelly as possible, even though he may be crying about it inside. . . . If the players do not try so hard as to vomit blood in practice, then they cannot hope to win games." It's really sort of the anti-Manny approach to the game.

 I also was reminded that the strike zone in Japan is an inch wider on each side, which would explain Daisuke's frustrating nibbling around the corners of the strike zone. Then again, the fact that he keeps reporting to spring training out of shape cannot be explained at all by this book.

 Moving beyond my Boston-centric reading , this is a great book, a fascinating look into another culture. Baseball in Japan and the U.S. may seem like the same game, but it really isn't. The Japanese game is so cautious and slow. Americans who played there often complained about how the fear of making mistakes seemed to be the driving force behind every decision. Practice and hard work were emphasized so much that players were often exhausted by the last weeks of the season.

The Americans who played there mostly seemed frustrated. A few openly challenged managers which caused serious cultural problems. Well, it did, if they didn't have a savvy translator. I love this account from one of the translators: "If a gaijin says something like 'I don't give a fuck!' well, I'll say, 'I'll try harder' instead. It avoids trouble."

Finally, the Japanese were ahead of us in some respects. For example, this 1989 book contains this quaint quote about Japanese television:

Graphics during televised games show the inning, score, number of outs, and the ball-strike count on each batter after every pitch. Some stations even indicate the speed of every pitched ball as well as its location on a superimposed strike zone.

 Back then, they probably had announcers who never stopped talking too.

Overland from Cairo to Cape Town

I don't have much to say about this book on Theroux's travels through Africa, but that's not a bad thing. Like many of Theroux's travel books, I made it my own travel book. I read it on the train to my parent's house, while waiting for the start of a health care town hall meeting with John Kerry, on the subway for a visit to the JFK library, and more often than not at the cafeteria at work during lunch. I still love reading his books slowly. In some ways, I like to read them almost as slowly as he travels.

This was in some ways a sadder book than his others in that he is traveling through areas of such poverty. There are also gripping accounts from various dissidents who had been thrown in jail and tortured by past oppressive governments. Theroux was essentially meandering through Africa, and he sees much that those who fly in quickly will miss.

This also seems a little more political than his other books, if only because he had spent so much time in Africa with the Peace Corps in the 1960s. (As he describes, he was actually kicked out of the Peace Corps, which somehow makes me like him better.) He spends much time bemoaning the Western aid workers who seem to be hurting Africa more than they help it. He mocks them for their big Land Cruisers, their hypocrisy, for always refusing to give him a ride, and essentially for creating a society that is far too dependent on foreign aid money.

Africa needs to help itself, I think he would say. In some ways, it all reminded me of the classic Sam Kinison bit about world hunger.

If you're looking for a book about Americans who happen to be Senators, you could be excused for thinking you had hit the jackpot here. Despite the title, though, the American Senator is but a minor (though wonderfully bombastic) character in this book about life in the English country.

There are many other larger characters, including the scheming Arabella Trefoil, who is desperate to ensnare a husband and who almost succeeds in capturing the witless Lord Rufford. All Lord Rufford wants to do is to hunt foxes, and he almost ends up married to a woman he barely knows or likes! A little kiss in the back of a carriage, and the next thing you know a massive letter writing campaign is embarked upon to marry you off. It was clearly a difficult time to be a man back then.

Even worse for poor Lord Rufford, at one point, a fellow hunter falls off a horse and lays near death in Rufford's house on the very night a ball is to be held there! After much hemming and hawing, it is decided to have the ball anyway, on the utterly sensible premise that, "Though the man were to die why shouldn't the people dance?"

And then there's this passage:

And nobody in that house really cared much for Caneback [the man who was dying]. He was not a man worthy of much care. . . .  he had loved no one particularly, had been dear to no one in these latter days of his life, had been of very little use in the world, and had done very little more for society than any other horse-trainer! But nevertheless it is a bore when a gentleman dies in your house.

And indeed it is a bore. It's the sort of thing that can put a damper on your entire day. I was reading much of this while reading "War and Peace," which was great because Tolstoy would have long passages describing ghastly battle scenes. Meanwhile, Trollope would have long sections about party etiquette. It was a wonderful contrast. Trollope has become my bedtime reading of choice. His books are an entertaining and frivolous way to end that day, and I mean that in the best possible way.

And here's just one more quote to conclude this, because I love quoting Trollope. This is what one character says to her stepdaughter who just turned down a marriage proposal:

You are an idiot . . . an ungrateful idiot; and unless you think better of it, you'll repent your folly to your dying day. Who do you think is to come running after a moping slut like you?

So far, this has to be the classiest insult I have ever read with the word "slut" in it. Granted, it mainly meant "an untidy person" back then, but Trollope's characters clearly knew how to tell somebody off.

This is the first book I have ever read entirely online. I did so through the web site DailyLit.com. Every morning, I would receive a short installment of the novel in my e-mail, and in 81 days, I was finished.

There has been a lot of talk lately about the death of books. Between Kindles, audio books, and now a service like this, some are beginning to doubt the viability of the written word. There is even a prep school near me that has completely dismantled its library, replacing it with a fleet of Sony Readers lent to students.

Despite all this, I don't think books are going to die. In fact, now that I have enjoyed this book, I will probably buy a used copy somewhere just to put on my bookshelf. After all, I like looking at the books I have read, and I like being able to flip through them occasionally. Even if books were to die, the written word isn't going anywhere. Books, after all, are just an advanced delivery system for the written word, and I don't think a site like DailyLit will hasten their demise. 

If anything, DailyLit will help, making it easier for people who don't have time to read to fit it into their schedule. The installments are set to take about five minutes to read, and everyone has five minutes to spare, no matter how busy. In the end, this was an interesting way to read. As when I read David Copperfield, I loved the serialized nature of it, and it's nice to read a few paragraphs of a novel before starting your day. There were even a few cliffhangers along the way, though you can always ask to be sent the next installment, if you can't wait a day to see what happens. 

For me, I'm still planning to read physical books, but I want to use DailyLit as a way to read books I wouldn't normally read. It seems like a great way to read those intimidating classics that I never get around to. Also, not that I'm cheap or anything, but classics tend to be free on the site, since they are in the public domain.

Oh, as for the book, I have to say it was a rousing good time, and Passepartout rocks. However, balloon aficionados be warned: Despite the cover I chose to display, there is no balloon. (He also doesn't travel over the Great Wall of China.)   

I decided to read War and Peace not for any lofty reasons, but simply because it has come to define literature, at least in the world of clichés. "Well, it's not War and Peace, but. . ." is, after all, a common expression.

For example, there's a paint commercial currently running where the parents are busy working and for comic effect a 7-year-old boy and girl are seen reading "War and Peace." No other book would have been funnier. Even at the Harvard library, the woman signing it out to me said, "Some light summer reading for the beach?" (More on that later.) I laughed. That's exactly what I would have said too. In short, "War and Peace" has become a symbol for all long, difficult, and dense literature.

And so I had to read it, and it wasn't nearly as cumbersome as I had expected it. It takes about 100 pages to really get into, and Tolstoy's 100-page epilogue nearly killed me. (It's not often an epilogue is split into parts one and two.) Aside from that, I enjoyed it. There's a strangely liberating feeling when you're reading a book this long. One ceases to worry about finishing the thing. It's so long that I just read it at a meandering pace, because what difference would it make if I rushed?

Now that I have finished it, I find that I miss dipping into this different world every night. The novel in many ways defined my summer, in that it took most of a season to read. I find that I miss all the characters, and there were so many. It's one of these strange books where there doesn't really seem to be a protagonist. I suppose Pierre or Natasha come the closet to being protagonists, but there are long stretches where they are nowhere to be found. And there are even longer stretches where Tolstoy just decides to go off on a rant about something.

As with "Crime and Punishment," there was so much of the book that seemed odd to my Western sensibilities. So many times, the characters did things that completely surprised me, and that doesn't happen much when I read American or English novels. There's also this wonderful Russian notion of fate that runs through the novel: Everything that happens is meant to happen, so screw it.*

Still, is it sacrilege to say that Leo Tolstoy could have used a better editor? Actually, it may just be inevitable that I would think that after reading any 1,215 page novel. About that epilogue, I wish I had just skipped it, because it left a sour taste with me. The last 35 pages (all of Epilogue, Part 2) feature none of the characters. Instead, it's just one long treatise from Tolstoy on history, and how most historians are just idiots. **

I felt a little cheated. Normally, when you're reading a book, you're gearing up for the final page, knowing that it will be the last time you read about the characters. Their words and actions take on added significance. Here, though, I kept expecting Pierre or Natasha or someone to make one final curtain call over the last 35 pages, and I never knew until the end that I had seen the last of them.

And finally, it is true that one cannot read "War and Peace" at the beach. I took it with me one day to the beach to test this theory. The result: A grand total of three pages read over a half hour. And that's a generous estimate, given that the chapter I read started on the bottom of the first page and ended in the middle of the third page.

I find "War and Peace" works best in a dark house late at night with only one light on. I didn't try candlelight, but that would be good too. It does not obviously work at the beach. I felt like screaming at people, "Will you stop with the frivolous beach conversations. And put that  Frisbee down. Don't you realize that Moscow is falling? And you in the bikini, I'm trying to concentrate here. Will you stop with the frolicking? Prince Andrei has been injured, and I need to know what will happen to Count Bezukhov!"

Some people just don't get it.


* Slight paraphrase of thematic elements present within Tolstoy's master work.
 
** Slight paraphrase of thematic elements present within the epilogue of Tolstoy's master work.  

Talking My Way into the Big Leagues at 40

Sorry, I haven't been around these parts lately, mainly because I'm on page 840 of this. But I have been reading this Ken Levine book occasionally while watching baseball. It's nice to have a baseball book going for when you need a break from Russian literature.

At different points in my life, I have wanted to be both a writer for "Cheers" and a baseball announcer. And so, it's a bit odd to discover that Ken Levine left his day job writing for "Cheers" to live out his dream of being a Major League baseball announcer. It's one thing when someone leaves a boring desk job to fulfill his lifelong dream, but it's entirely different when that person leaves one of your dreams to fulfill another of your dreams. It doesn't seem entirely fair.

Nevertheless, Ken Levine seems like a good guy, so I can't complain too much. This book is a diary of his first year in the Majors in 1991 when he did radio play-by-play for the Baltimore Orioles with the venerable Jon Miller and Chuck Thompson. I loved reading the stories of the announcers, as well as players like Cal Ripken Jr., Dwight Evans, and all the other journeymen who starred on a 6th place team. Sometimes, when you decide to do a diary of a baseball season, you end up with a championship team like Stephen King did in 2004. Other times, you end up with the 1991 Orioles.

I definitely recommend it, and I feel a little guilty having paid only a buck for it at a used bookstore. My only complaint is that I have been reading this book about the 1991 season while watching the 2009 Red Sox. The parts about David Ortiz testing positive for steroids and the Red Sox getting swept by the Yankees really need a lot of work, but the rest was excellent.

Finally, after 19 months, I have finished "David Copperfield." I had my doubts at first about how this would work, but I have to say it was quite enjoyable to read a novel in installments. I liked having a set group of characters I could check in on every month, although I think I would have preferred shorter weekly installments instead of having so much time between sections. It was easy to forget some of the minor characters, especially so in this final installment when so many were coming back for a final visit. There were a few I didn't even recognize, until I thumbed back through previous chapters.


After all that time, I really did savor the last section. Normally, when you get to the end of a book, you're racing through to the final page, either desperate to find out what happens or just to finish the book and move onto the next one. Here, I read slowly, not quite ready to let everyone go. I can't say I loved this book all the time. Some of the weird digressions could be maddening, but they worked much better when read over an extended period.

There were some great moments in these last chapters. Finally, Copperfield gets the (right) girl. We learn that Mr. Micawber actually finds success abroad. (Thank God for Australia, a country that like Mrs. Micawber can properly appreciate the interesting talents of one Wilkins Micawber.) And lovable Tommy Traddles finds happiness and even a modicum of his own success.

Traddles gets married and is now constantly surrounded by his wife's many sisters, prompting this telling observation, "The society of girls is a very delightful thing, Copperfield. It's not professional, but very delightful." Words to live by, indeed.

We even have a wonderful comeuppance chapter in which Copperfield tours a prison and -- Coincidentally! -- discovers that two villains of the book happen to be locked up there. It's a good thing David suddenly decided to tour a prison at the most climactic moment of the book, isn't it? Luckily, after some 800 pages, I came to enjoy these coincidences and accepted that all of Dickens' England is populated by about fifty people.

Finally, here just once is the way I would like to be greeted when I come back after a long trip. This is from Traddles when Copperfield visits him after three years away in Europe.

My dear fellow.... My dearest Copperfield, my long-lost and most welcome friend, how glad I am to see you! . . . How glad I am! Upon my life and honour, I never was so rejoiced, my beloved Copperfield, never!

These days, such a speech is usually replaced by a "Dude, long time, no see!" Still, you have to admire such enthusiasm. In twenty years or so, when I pick up this book to reread, that's just how I expect I'll greet David Copperfield again.

I find David Lodge to be a rather comforting author to read, so it was nice to read this as a break from "War and Peace," which I'm also trying to tackle. In his latest, Lodge again is writing about an academic, although this academic is a retired professor who is going deaf. There are some interesting insights into deafness here. And some funny ones too. Lodge's narrator, who is constantly fumbling with hearing aids, likes to claim that while blindness is tragic, deafness is comic.

For me, the most interesting part was a stylistic one. Lodge tended to switch his story from the first to the third person, and for someone who is trying to write a first person novel, this was fascinating. Mostly, the book is told in the first person, but occasional sections are done in the third person. For my taste, he's a little too clever with this ("I feel a fit of the third person coming on."), but it did help the novel.

When I started writing a novel, I never thought of doing it in anything but the first person, but now I constantly find myself asking, "Well, how the hell did my narrator know that?" It does get maddening occasionally, so I've begun to focus on the voice that novelists use.

Here, Lodge seems to use the third-person to explain extremely embarrassing moments for the protagonist. Our protagonist is constantly getting into awkward situations because of his deafness, and the third person is a much more civilized way to handle these situations.

This is a strange book. It's probably the only book in existence whose plot hinges on an attractive 27-year-old woman marking up a library book with a highlighter. In this case, our fussy narrator is highly agitated by this piece of vandalism and tells the woman exactly how horrible her behavior was.

Eventually, this leads to a suggestion from her that he should punish her by spanking her, while she's naked from the waist down, which is just the sort of thing that doesn't happen when I complain about someone writing in a book -- no matter how fussy I might get. Still, this is David Lodge's world, and apparently sometime while seeing yet another library book vandalized, he thought up this rewarding plot twist. His is a creative mind, no doubt.

All in all, it's a very enjoyable book -- and not bad at all for a fifty-cent purchase at a yard sale.

A Life in Journalism

This is the second book I have read this year by former CBS reporters who worked in Washington. First Roger Mudd, and now Daniel Schorr. I'm going to have to come up with a "CBS Washington" tag before long.

Frankly, I picked this book up, because the author seemed to be kind of a jerk. That's not my normal reason for buying books, but I was curious about Schorr after reading Roger Mudd's "The Place To Be" about his time at CBS. In that book, Schorr seemed to be such a controversial figure, rather than the grandfatherly commentator who has occasionally woken me up on NPR.

Mudd's book about CBS News didn't exactly attack Schorr, but much of the CBS bureau seemed to take great offense at Schorr's aggressive behavior towards his colleagues. He was widely suspected of stealing stories from others. And when he released the classified Pike Report to the Village Voice, it was felt by many that he tried to frame the whole thing on Lesley Stahl. Stahl still seems to despise him.

Not surprisingly, Schorr doesn't seem like a jerk at all when he's the one telling the story. All his actions seem perfectly reasonable. That's what's so great about autobiographies. He doesn't sidestep any of the controversies he was involved in, but he isn't apologetic for any of them either. After reading both books, I don't even know if he should be.

Despite all this, it was exciting to read Schorr's tales of Khrushchev, the Berlin Wall, and Watergate. Famously, he was also on Nixon's enemies list and had the surreal experience of reading out his own name (#17) when he revealed the list live on television for the first time.

Interestingly, Mudd's book devotes entire sections to his colleague Daniel Schorr. Meanwhile, Schorr mentions Mudd a grand total of four times, and only once in any detail. Mudd may have been more successful at the time -- and has probably written the better book -- but Schorr, jerk or not, is by far the more interesting figure.

After this, I have just one more month to go on David Copperfield. Strangely, after all the excitement of last month, this month's installment was a bit of a letdown. It was still entertaining and even quite dramatic at times, but Dickens also seems to be wrapping things up at this point

There is much here about the Micawbers getting ready to make their departure to Australia, along with Mr. Peggotty and Emily. However, both their storylines seem to have ended last month, and it feels like Dickens is just looking for a way to keep them in the book for a few more chapters.

However, he does resolve the storylines of both Ham and Steerforth in a thrilling and sad manner. Never to shy away from hyperbole, Dickens begins Chapter 55 this way:

I now approach an event in my life, so indelible, so awful, so bound by an infinite variety of ties to all that has preceded it, in these pages, that, from the beginning of my narrative, I have seen it growing larger and larger as I advanced, like a great tower in a plain, and throwing its forecast shadow even on the incidents of my childish days.

Well, then, I figured this ought to be good. And it was an exciting chapter, but these characters don't seem quite important enough to warrant such a buildup. The events were awful and somewhat indelible, but not quite bound by an infinite variety of ties.... Sorry.  

I think I may just be grumpy because the book is ending soon. I've compared Copperfield to a long-running television show before, and I think there is a similar disappointment now that one of my favorite books is ending. A lot of the enjoyment of these characters is just to have them there; I don't necessarily want to see a concluding story arc for each one.

As with television shows, I wonder if there were readers at the time who said things like, "Yeah, I used to read Copperfield all the time, but it's really gone downhill since Chapter 33." Was there a moment when David Copperfield jumped the shark? We'll probably never know.

This is just a wonderful book, although it is a bit odd. The plot seems almost incidental to the novel, and the most dramatic parts aren't even at the end. For me, the villain Ferdinand Lopez ("To give him his due, he did not know that he was a villain.") is far more interesting than the titular character, the Prime Minister, the Duke of Omnium. And to be honest, I don't even know who the protagonist is. There are about three or four different possibilities, although if it's the Duke he must be the most passive protagonist ever.

Perhaps the book seems so strange to me because it's the fifth in a series of six novels, the Palliser Novels. I didn't realize that when I picked this up. The story itself is compact enough, but many of the characters come from other novels. The Duke of Omnium, Plantagenet Palliser, was already a much-loved character when this was written, so it makes sense that Trollope doesn't waste a lot of time setting him up.

And yet, despite all this, the book is completely delightful. There's a subtle, wry humor in here that made me want to be Anthony Trollope when I grow up. Therefore, instead of writing about the book, I'm just going to quote some of my favorite parts.

I especially love the Victorian insults. Next time I'm in an argument, I want to remember this: "I think, Sir, that your proposition is the most unbecoming and the most impertinent that ever was addressed to me." Yeah, well, F you too.

And here's the Victorian way to tell someone that you're about to kick his ass, in letter form:

Sir,
Before this election you were guilty of gross impertinence in writing a letter to my wife -- to her extreme annoyance and to my most justifiable anger. Any gentleman would think that the treatment you had already received at her hands would have served to save her from such insult, but there are men who will never take a lesson without a beating. And now, since you have been here, you have presumed to offer to shake hands with me in the street, though you ought to have known that I should not choose to meet you on friendly terms after what has taken place. I now write to tell you that I shall carry a horsewhip while I am here, and that if I meet you in the streets again before I leave the town I shall use it.

Personally, I don't know if I could hold a grudge long enough to write a letter about it. I suppose this technique would help in reducing violence. It's like homework for your grudges. If you had to write a letter every time you wanted to beat someone up, you would probably think twice about it.

And finally, here's Anthony Trollope on the current financial crisis:

Sexty's fears were greatly exaggerated by the feeling that the coffee and guano [they were trading] were not always real.... His partner, indeed, was of the opinion that ... there was no need at all for real coffee and guano, and explained his theory with considerable eloquence. "If I buy a ton of coffee and keep it six weeks, why do I buy it and keep it, and why does the seller sell it instead of keeping it? The seller sells it because he thinks he can do best by parting with it now at a certain price. I buy it because I think I can make money by keeping it. It is just the same as though we were to back our opinions. He backs the fall. I back the rise. You needn't have coffee and you needn't have guano to do this. Indeed the possession of the coffee or the guano is only a very clumsy addition to the trouble of your profession."

This amused me even before I learned that guano is fertilizer, essentially bird dung. One man's guano is another man's mortgage-backed derivative.

The World of Baseball Scouting

This is a wonderful book, but I don't know if I can quite explain why. As a study of baseball scouts, it's a great work, but the book really shines when Kerrane allows the old baseball scouts to speak for themselves. There are long passages of oral history included here that rival anything in Lawrence Ritter's classic "The Glory of Their Times."

Kerrane spent the entire 1981 season with baseballs scouts. Admittedly, the book does seem a bit dated now, and I have a feeling that it may have seemed a bit dated even then, as it was in many ways a book about a bygone time. Scouting changed dramatically after the institution of the amateur draft in 1965. In the old days, scouts would spot a prospect and then be able to sign him on the spot. After the draft started, the personal connections made between the scouts and the players mattered much less when the team had a 1 in 30 chance of drafting the player.

In 1981, starting salaries were still somewhat reasonable, but now a player's signability matters almost as much as his talent when being drafted. Even the term "dollar sign on the muscle" has become obsolete. This referred to the dollar amount a scout placed on a player, "the highest figure you would go in order to sign a player if he were on the open market."

It was usually a number below $100,000, but when, for example, a number one draft pick like Stephen Strasburg is expected to get a $20 million bonus from the Washington Nationals after being drafted tomorrow, these numbers begin to mean nothing.

Perhaps the most enjoyable chapter is the one on the language of the game where I was able to learn several important items such as the distinction between horseshit and bullshit.

Horseshit: A universal term of disparagement in baseball -- Any baseball talent, body, body part, effort, action, player, team, city, or scouting assignment can be horseshit. The term covers everything but the world of words -- the world of stories, explanation, and scouting reports -- at which point bullshit takes over.

A real sentence spoken by a scout discussing a former colleague: "His written report was all bullshit, and that's when I knew he was a horseshit guy."

Bullshit can be a verb; horseshit can't. ... Novices sometimes elide the word into horshit, but the veterans get the first s down deep in the throat, with the tongue at the back of the palate, lots of air whistling past the lower teeth, and then they follow through for full emphasis. Horsse-shit!

Now, that's scouting. So to summarize: Kevin Kerrane, definitely not horseshit; this post, possible bullshit. That is all.

It seems wrong to read a book by Scott Carrier, but that's only because he is such a distinctive radio voice. Many of the pieces included here were first done for the radio. The book is still good, but the stories don't feel the same when not read aloud by Carrier. For this reason, I think I enjoyed the second half more. This part includes more of his pieces for Esquire when he went to Cambodia, Kashmir, and Mexico. Esquire hired him because they were looking for a writer to "go to really fucked-up places." If that's what you're looking for, then Carrier is definitely your man.

Like many, I discovered Scott Carrier through the radio show "This American Life." Along with Sarah Vowell and David Sedaris, Carrier was one of the fixtures of the early years of the show. Carrier is like a weirder version of David Sedaris, which is, um, weird considering how weird Sedaris himself can be. Still, with Sedaris, a lot of the weirdness seems like an act. With Carrier, it never seems like an act.

Bonus link: "This American Life's" recent collection of Scott Carrier stories is here. 

One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible

I had some qualms about A.J. Jacobs' previous book "The Know-It-All," in which he read the entire encyclopedia and wrote about the experience. The whole thing seemed a little staged, as if he was only doing it for the book deal. I suppose I could have a similar complaint about this book, in which he follows the tenets of the bible for a year.

However, this book feels like more than just a stunt. It's possibly because the Bible is a far more important book than the encyclopedia. Even if you don't believe anything in the Bible -- and that seems to be where Jacobs is coming from at the beginning -- the Bible at least has had a major impact on the world. There's nothing wrong with the encyclopedia, of course, but it's still just list of random facts with no central theme.

The best parts of "The Know-It-All" were when Jacobs would go on an encyclopedia-related adventure that took him away from the book. Here, there are many more options for interesting adventures. It's the difference between writing about reading a book and writing about living a book. That alone makes this a much more exciting project.

Jacobs goes on several adventures. He visits a snake-handler in Tennessee. He attends Jerry Falwell's church in Virginia. He even travels to Israel to reconnect with his Judaism, as well as a crazy ex-Uncle who was once a cult leader. And, of course, he walks through Manhattan with a long beard and a white robe for much of the year. Along the way, his wife also gives birth to twin boys.

As Jacobs is Jewish and as the Old Testament is by far the longer Testament, the book mostly revolves around Judaism, although in the last third he does study Christianity in detail.

Religious readers may be disappointed that there is no great life change here. Jacobs began the project as an agnostic, and that's the way he ends up, though he does seem to feel he's a better person from the experience. He spends an entire year praying and doing good works for the people of New York and beyond. At times, he's worried that he's only doing all this for the sake of a book, but one of his spiritual advisers calmed him with this thought:

"C.S. Lewis said the distinction between pretending you are better than you are and beginning to be better in reality is finer than moral sleuthhounds conceive." In short, pretending to be better than you are is better than nothing.

Lewis and Jacobs might just be onto something there.

A Story of Race and Inheritance

Historically, this is a fascinating book. I can't think of another President who wrote a memoir before becoming President. Obama wrote this in 1995 when he probably would have laughed if you had told him he would be President one day. I imagine that if he had any inkling of the future, he would have probably left out some of the more personal passages. In the 2004 introduction, he describes these passages as "inconvenient politically, the grist for pundit commentary and opposition research," but the book would have been much the weaker without them.

"Dreams from My Father" is split into three sections: Origins, Chicago (about his work as a community activist there), and Kenya. The last third about his summer in Kenya is where the book really takes off. There, Obama meets the paternal side of his family and comes to grips with his history, as well as his deceased father, a largely mythic figure in his life who he met only once.

If anyone should write a memoir about his family, it's Obama who has one half-sister on his mother's side, one half-sister on his father's side, six half-brothers on his father's side, a couple of stepparents, and was raised largely by his grandparents. As an only child, I kept getting confused, and I wish I had this family tree in hand while reading the book.

This is a book by the President, so I feel as if I should say more. However, this isn't really my genre of choice. I usually don't read the deeply personal memoir, so it's safe to say that I wouldn't have bought this book, if Obama was still a community organizer in Chicago. Nevertheless, he has an inspiring story -- even before running for office -- and he's a great writer.

I know I'm entirely biased here, but I just like the idea of having a writer in the White House.  It must be a little like what the plumbers thought about John McCain.

In the middle of this month's reading, I suddenly realized that I had made a miscalculation. The goal of this project was to read Copperfield as it was originally released. For the most part, the book was released in three-chapter installments each month, but there were a couple of months with extra chapters that I didn't notice. It turns out that I was two chapters behind, and so I had to read five chapters this month to catch up.

For that reason, and because I am nearing the end, a lot happened this month. Now, this is where I would normally put up a spoilers alert, but it's getting impossible to write about David Copperfield without revealing all that has happened. Read on at your own risk. There were three major resolutions this month.

Emily is found. Although I've never been enthralled with this particular subplot, I have to say this was one of the more dramatic chapters in the book. Dickens goes all out in this section, and he had me on the edge of my seat. I suppose my main problem with the Mr. Peggotty-Emily subplot is that it seems so peripheral to David's life. This is Dickens where the periphery is often more entertaining than the central parts of a book, but still this seemed a little too beside the point, especially since David's role in the search for Emily has been minimal.

Uriah Heep gets his comeuppance. And he does so in a very satisfying manner. I suppose one could make the argument that this is a peripheral story too. However, David is much more involved in the events, especially since Agnes has been one of Heep's victims. Besides, HEEP (as Mr. Micawber calls him) is an entertaining villain, so for the most part these sections are just fun.

Poor Dora passes away. It was obvious that this would be happening soon, and in a sad but short "retrospective" chapter at the end of this installment, David finally loses his "child-wife," as she called herself. I've never exactly liked Dora, but she really was one of the more entertaining caricatures in the book.

With all these resolutions and with just two installments left, I feel as if I am embarking on a whole new book.

I picked up this book about Ronald Reagan because I greatly enjoyed Marc Eliot's biography of Cary Grant. This one, though, isn't nearly as good. The problem is that the subject himself is not nearly as interesting as Grant. Yes, Reagan is, overall, more important and fascinating than someone like Cary Grant. However, Eliot focuses only on Reagan's movie and television career, and the book ends in 1964 just as Reagan decides that he wants to run for Governor of California.

It is as if Eliot went to his publishers and said, "Hey, I'd like to write a book about the most boring part of an interesting person's life." At times, the book feels like an endless list of awful B-movies starring Reagan and nobody else I've heard of. The best that can be said is that Reagan at least pals around with some famous people. Granted, there are important sections on Reagan's presidency of the Screen Actor's Guild, which clearly had an impact on his later career, although to be honest some of the labor history was a little over my head.

Admittedly, the book's not all boring. On the lascivious side, Ronnie does seem to sleep with a lot of actresses. At one point after his divorce to Jane Wyman, Reagan was sleeping with a different actress every night. Meanwhile, the main reason he married Nancy is that he had gotten her pregnant. Now, this is the type of material we need more of in Presidential biographies!

I also had one other problem with the book. I started to doubt its accuracy, which can be a problem when you're reading a biography. This is mainly because of Eliot's section on "Casablanca." Eliot writes, "Bogart was cast in the role that [Jack] Warner had originally designated for Reagan, whom the government insisted could not make for-profit movies while in the military."

This is a theory that seems to be discredited in several places, such as here. I don't know enough to say that Eliot is necessarily wrong, but it seems suspect that he states something so commonly thought to be a myth without a more thorough discussion. 

One final note: The lack of updates here is mostly because I have, for some unknown reason, decided to read five books at once (six, if you count Dickens). I'm not sure if I would recommend this, but it is interesting to switch randomly between several books. I imagine I'll be finishing all five at once and will eventually have a flurry of entries here.

The end is in sight, and there seems to be a resolution forming in the L'il Em'ly saga. Two whole chapters were devoted to that, and then in the last chapter (helpfully titled "Domestic") we gain some insight into David's home life. Unfortunately, there's not a lot of happy news there. David seems increasingly frustrated with his marriage, and then we also learn that Dora seems to be in bad health.

As I've made clear, I've never been a big fan of Dora, but I don't wish disease on her. I fear that we may end up losing Dora, and that David will end up marrying Agnes. I want to Dora to be out of the picture, but I don't want to be rooting for her demise. Perhaps a nice little divorce would be the solution, but of course we are in Victorian times, so consumption it'll probably have to be.

On the positive side of the ledger, it looks like next month's installment will start with a little excitement. Chapter 49 is titled "I am Involved in Mystery," and I can't wait. By the way, "I am Involved in Mystery" is something I definitely plan on stealing for an e-mail subject line, preferably one that is work-related.

Here's another book I reread in order to help my writing, so it was fitting that at one point David Lodge quoted from an imaginary (well, I assume imaginary) 1927 book called "Let's Write a Novel" by an A.J. Bemish. The excerpt contained some remarkably simplistic yet wonderful advice, which I feel compelled to quote in its entirety:

Every novel must tell a story. And there are three types of story, the story that ends happily, the story that ends unhappily, and the story that ends neither happily nor unhappily, or, in other words, doesn't really end at all.

The best kind of story is the one with a happy ending; the next best is the one with an unhappy ending, and the worst kind is the story that has no ending at all. The novice is advised to begin with the first kind of story. Indeed, unless you have Genius, you should never attempt any other kind.

Well, make of that, what you will.

I've always liked David Lodge. His novels are mesmerizing, and they suck me in, even when the material doesn't seem overly exciting. This one, however, does get exciting. It's a comedy about two Professors of English, one from England and one from the West Coast of America, who trade jobs for a semester and end up trading just about everything else, including their wives. It takes place in 1969, a time of upheaval on the campuses of both universities. What seems mundane at first gradually becomes anything but mundane.

As a college administrator, I may have a weakness for books about academia. There was one point where it looked like someone was about to fill out some paperwork, and I was quite excited. I do have to say, however, that the administrative details of appointing a visiting professor were sorely lacking in this book, an opportunity clearly missed by the otherwise dependable David Lodge.

Having said that, I do have a serious piece of criticism. This book often gets far too clever for its own good. One chapter is told as a series of letters, another is made up of clippings from the newspaper, and it ends with chapter done as a film script. Lodge is a great writer, but this book feels rather gimmicky at times, and for me the stylistic flourish often detracts from the story itself.

I'm guessing that A.J. Beamish would not have approved. Actually, considering the book "doesn't really end at all," Beamish would have likely hated this one.

I actually finished this book quite a while ago, but it has taken me forever to write about it. That surprises me, because this is such a great book that I expected to write about it right away. For me, it's possibly Hornby's best. Still, I find I have some trouble writing about books I've already read.

I wasn't even sure I was going to read this whole book when I picked it up, and then suddenly it was the end of the weekend, and I had finished it. I chose it because I was looking for a strong first person narrative to study while I try to write a first person story of my own. Of course, you may have realized that this isn't actually a first person novel. I just remembered it that way, probably because Hornby captures the inner life of both a 36-year-old rich bachelor and an awkward 12-year-old boy so eloquently.

After reading this, I finally saw the movie, which was surprisingly good. The first half was very faithful to the book -- almost too faithful, in fact. It's a strange feeling to watch a movie of a book you love. You almost sit there with a checklist keeping track of what did and did not make it. Much of Hornby's material was kept, though I was in no condition to tell if it did indeed work. I'm still not sure how someone who hadn't read the book would have appreciated the film, but for me it worked well.

Eventually, the movie goes in another direction, because, well, the plot of a 2002 movie couldn't really revolve around the suicide of Kurt Cobain. The ending is completely different, although very satisfying and certainly in the spirit of the novel.

Speaking of Hornby, upon his recommendation, I started another young adult novel. This one was Skellig by David Almond. Alas, it seemed to be a lot closer to the young part of the young adult spectrum than the adult part. It wasn't a bad book, but I just couldn't make myself care about a little old man with wings who lived in the garage of a young boy. After getting halfway through it, I just decided I had had enough.

And that was a liberating feeling. I always forget how good it can feel just to give up on a book.

Tom Perrotta is a funny writer, and this is a well-written book. The only problem is that this novel about the culture wars is also a little annoying. I know that, as a comic novel, its characters are supposed to be over-the-top, but do they have to be quite so unbelievable? Just about every character here struck me as a little bit off.

"The Abstinence Teacher" is about Ruth, a high school sex ed teacher under pressure from the school board to promote abstinence in her teachings, and Tim, a former addict turned Christian mortgage broker struggling with his inner demons. And can I just say that, here in the midst of a real estate-fueled economic crisis, I have somehow accidentally read two books this year about people who work in real estate? (I wonder if I need to add a Realty tag to this blog.) Luckily, Perrotta's section on this is brief, and he even seems to foreshadow the bursting of the real estate bubble. Well done.

In the end, the worlds of these two gradually collide, and they come to treat each other with tolerance. This is all very uplifting. Of course, one could argue that the only reason they do treat each other with tolerance is that most everyone else in the book is so annoying that Ruth and Tim are the only ones who deserve tolerance. In a world of bombastic caricatures, the relatively grounded Ruth and Tim are quite obviously meant for each other.

Here's one major problem with reading a novel only three chapters at a time. One tends to forget about certain characters. I talked last month about my lack of interest in Mr. Peggotty. I feel the same way actually about Doctor Strong and his marriage, which are the focus of Chapter 45.

I confess that I wasn't all that interested in the Good Doctor when he first showed up, and so I don't really remember all the details about him when he periodically pops up. It's not that I mind the sections about him. It's just that I seemed to have sat his first chapter out, so to speak, and I have a lot of trouble remembering everything about him. I suppose it's somewhat understandable in that he was introduced to me sometime last May.

At any rate, the other chapters were enjoyable, as Copperfield has now grown up a bit. This section begins with a chapter called "Another Retrospect," which is a great technique that Dickens uses. Every once in a while, he gets bored of what he's writing and just forges ahead. In this case, David gets married, buys some property, and embarks upon a career all in just a few pages.

Dickens introduces this with the following passage:

Once again, let me pause upon a memorable period of my life. Let me stand aside to see the phantoms of those days go by me, accompanying the shadow of myself, in dim procession.

In modern day English, this translates directly to: "Wow, this next section is pretty boring, so let's just skip it, shall we? You were probably going to anyway."

One wonders if the previous month's edition hadn't sold all that well, and Dickens decided he had to switch things up a bit.

I will remember this book mostly for the snotty bookstore in which I bought it. It was a tiny store near Harvard Square that seemed to specialize in out-of-print books. I was browsing and remembered that I was looking for a copy of Jerome Holtzman's excellent sports classic "No Cheering in the Press Box," which is out of print. And so I asked:

"Do you have a sports section?"
 
You wouldn't believe the sneer on the man's face as he told me that they dealt mostly in books about philosophy and that they certainly didn't have a sports section.

As I was leaving, I spotted this Theroux book on the $2 shelf and decided to buy it. Now, at that point, I was willing to believe that I was just being paranoid. Maybe I was just being sensitive and he wasn't looking down on me for my interest in sports books.

Then, I went to the cash register, and he asked, "Oh, did you find your sports book?"

"No, you fucker, I've found a collection of short stories by Paul Theroux about an American diplomat set in post-colonial Malaysia, a dreamy surreal book about an odd group of characters living on the edge of civilization that to me seems strangely reminiscent of Sherwood Anderson's 'Winesburg, Ohio,' even if the two books are set in different eras on different continents."

That is what I should have said, but instead I mumbled no and gave him my two dollars.

These are the types of things that happen in Cambridge. Earlier, I entered another two-room bookstore and had this conversation with the proprietor:

"Welcome. By the way, all the books in this room are about architecture."

"Oh, thanks. Are there more general books in the other room?"

"No, all those books are about horses."

"Oh."

Incidentally, "The Consul's File" is excellent.
 

Washington, CBS, and the Glory Days of Television News

As possibly one of the most boring people in the world, I decided that I really needed to read a book about television news reporters in the 1960s. Roger Mudd was Walter Cronkite's primary backup on the CBS Evening News, and later he anchored the NBC Nightly News aside Tom Brokaw. Now, in his 80s, he's written a book about his experiences. So, in short, I am not even interesting enough to read about primary news anchors.


Here's the odd path that brought me to Roger Mudd. Someone on the Slate Cultural Gabfest recommended Timothy Crouse's 1972 book "The Boys on the Bus" about the media.  I couldn't find that, so instead I read Hunter S. Thompson's great book about that campaign. I eventually did find the Crouse book in which he mentions Roger Mudd, at which point I remembered spotting Mudd's book in a bookstore a few months earlier.

And, of course, I loved it. It's not always the most well-written book. He jumps around from story to story at times, but it's a nice look at what television news was like back in its glory days. It's part memoir but also part a profile of the CBS Washington bureau. He interviews every major reporter who worked in that bureau, including even Dan Rather -- a bit awkward as the two were at times fierce rivals for Cronkite's anchor chair. Mudd is passionately proud of the work that CBS News did back then, and it's fascinating to read his stories.
 
I tried to find some clips of him on Youtube, but there aren't many. When it comes to old CBS News clips, it's mostly Walter-to-Walter coverage. Still, there is his famous interview with Ted Kennedy, in which Kennedy does not seem to know why he wants to be Presient.

And then there is an especially creepy broadcast of the 1969 draft lottery, which must have been horrifying to watch. As a commenter there pointed out, it was just like the NBA draft lottery, but with lives.

That clip is somewhat gruesome, so here's a blooper with Chris Wallace from his NBC days. Ol' Roger is really cracking up at this.

Update: He's also featured twice in news montages during the excellent "Frost/Nixon" which I finally saw. 

It turns out that not only do I love gossip about today's journalists, but I also love it about the journalists of yesterday. Timothy Crouse's "The Boys on the Bus" is full of it, as this is a book in which he followed around the media on the 1972 presidential campaign. For example, for some reason, I delighted in learning that CBS reporters felt Walter Cronkite was such an air hog that they used to say CBS had "Walter-to-Walter coverage."

1972 seems to be a pivotal year, because this book is full of people who would go onto more fame later. And some of the sections are particularly telling. After Memo-gate, this passage about Dan Rather shouldn't be too surprising:

He was famous in the trade for the times when he by-passed these formulas and "winged it" on a story. Rather would go with an item even if didn't have it completely nailed down with verifiable facts. If a rumor sounded solid to him, if he believed it in his gut or had gotten it from a man who struck him as honest, he would let it rip.

I also like this quote from Brit Hume because it seems to sum up much of what Fox News claims to stand for. The Fox News anchor was then an assistant to columnist Jack Anderson:

"Those [reporters] on the plane ... claim that they're trying to be objective. They shouldn't try to be objective, they should try to be honest. And they're not being honest.... They report what one candidate said, then they go and report what the other candidate said with equal credibility. They never get around to finding out if the guy is telling the truth.... What they pass off as objectivity is just a mindless kind of neutrality."

The print journalists are well represented here as well with long sections on legendary journalists like David Broder, Woodward and Bernstein, Jack Germond, Robert Novak, and others.

In short, this is just a great book, and some of the issues from 1972 are still relevant today. You'll see a lot of Barack Obama's campaign in McGovern's campaign. Unlike Obama, McGovern never did figure out how to transform an outsider primary campaign into a successful general election campaign.

And journalism seemed a lot more, um, entertaining back then. Here's Crouse's description of the "Zoo Plane," the overflow plane for the press who weren't quite important enough to travel on George McGovern's plane:

The excitement of riding the Zoo Plane sprang from the fact that all rules had been totally suspended. As the plane took off on the first flight of the morning, half the reporters crowded into the galleys, mixing themselves Bloody Marys from the endless supplies of free booze.... As the FASTEN SEAT BELT signs still flashed their warning, other reporters worked their way up the aisle to fetch their own breakfasts and make more drinks....

There were drugs on the plane too, pot, hash, MDA, cocaine. And those who indulged in such stimulants swore that there was no greater thrill than standing in the cockpit as the plane came in for a landing, listening to the crackle of the radio, surrounded by green and orange dials, watching the bright blue lights of the runway rush up at the window as the powerful engines cut back.... Every night, the pilots played to an overflow crowd in the cockpit.

Ah, yes, the golden days of journalism.

On the Dickens front, it has been a bit of a lackluster month. Usually, I read it right away, but for some reason I kept putting my Copperfield off this month. I had to rush this week to finish it before month 14 had ended.

Last month's installment was as good as any other, so I don't have an explanation for my lack of enthusiasm.

Perhaps the problem was that it started with a chapter on Mr. Peggotty updating David on his search for L'il Em'ly, a part of the novel I have no interest in. Luckily, after this was a chapter on the delightfully odd aunts of Dora followed by a chapter featuring the nasty Uriah Heep.

I flew through the last two chapters in about one night, while the first chapter (8 pages!) took me most of the month. I suppose the problem is that I have been using this as a bedtime reading, so when I ran into a slow patch it was always easier to turn the light out than just to plow on through it.

I enjoyed this book throughout, yet it didn't seem particularly special until the end, when several interesting elements all came together. More often, I have the opposite feeling. I will thoroughly be enjoying a novel, until it just fizzles out with an ending that doesn't match the quality of the previous 300 pages. In this case, it was a pleasure when the last 20 pages suddenly made this book a keeper, rather than something I was going to exchange at a used bookstore.  

Speaking of exchanging books, I've lately been trying out (read: addicted to) a service called Swaptree.com, where you can trade books and other media with other users. It's free, except for postage, so I was quite thrilled to trade the rather tedious "North Dallas Forty" (which I gave up on after about 80 pages) for this very satisfying novel.

"The Ghost" is narrated by a ghostwriter to a former British prime minister accused of war crimes. As a writer, I could certainly identify with the narrator, but perhaps a little too much. At one point, he has two weeks to ghostwrite an entire memoir, and for some reason he goes off to investigate a bunch of war crimes instead of writing. Dude, you have a book to write, I kept thinking. What are you doing? I may be quite the procrastinator at times, but I'm proud to say that I have never ever gone off on some war crime investigation lark when I had a deadline looming. That's because I'm a professional.

Last week, I went to the library to pick up a copy of this book. While I like David Sedaris, I just didn't feel all that compelled to own this book, partly because I had already read a number of the essays in The New Yorker. On the way, I ran into a colleague who asked me where I was going. When I told her, she seemed amazed at the very concept of the library.

At first, I thought she was amazed that as an employee she could use our university's library, but it might be more than that. Later, when I walked her through how to use the online catalog, she asked such questions as:

"If it says here that the book is not checked out, does that mean I can just go and pick it up?" Yes

"Do I need to write down this number?" Yes, you need that to find the book.

"Are the books just listed alphabetically?" No, you need that number.

Considering she was getting a Graham Greene novel, she is definitely the most well-read person I've ever met not familiar with how to use a library.

This is, of course, a tangent, which is fitting because Sedaris' book is one long series of tangents. That's sort of the point with him. With a lesser writer, you'd wonder why the hell he's writing an entire essay about the guy who sat next to him on an airplane, but with Sedaris you don't really mind.

"When You are Engulfed in Flames" is as funny, odd, and interesting as any of his other books, although I have to admit that I'm a bit worried about what will happen when he runs out of crazy stories from his family.

And so I decided to read another 1995 novel about politics by a television journalist. First up, Jim Lehrer. Now, I'm onto Jeff Greenfield. What can I say? I'm on something of a politics kick -- mainly because of a writing project I'm doing. Let's just hope Sam Donaldson didn't write a novel in 1995, or I'll have to read that too.

Jim Lehrer may be the better novelist -- Lehrer's written over a dozen of them compared to one for Greenfield -- but this may be the more interesting story. It's about what happens when the President dies two days after being elected, and the country is stuck with a Vice-President-Elect clearly modeled on Dan Quayle. Not surprisingly, complete chaos emerges, as everyone realizes exactly how shaky the Electoral College is. In short, if this were to happen, there's no real way of knowing who would be President. Thanks, Founders!

I actually read this back when it came out, which is why in the 2000 election I listened to everything Jeff Greenfield said about the Bush-Gore race. The man clearly knows the Electoral College after doing the research for this book. I decided I wanted to reread it shortly after last year's election, though I figured it would be bad luck to read it before Obama was inaugurated.

Like Lehrer's book, this is more of a thought experiment than a novel. At times, it reads like a news report, but that's just fine. Many of the characters seem based on real people, which makes it especially fun. They're likely just composites, but, for example, it's tough to read about the network's "Distinguished Commentator" throwing fits about his lack of airtime and not wonder if he's supposed to be David Brinkley, who was working with Greenfield at the time.

As with Lehrer's book, there are a few times when floppy disks are mentioned, and I always enjoy reading about technology in older books. Because this was written in 1995, there are no bloggers mentioned, although we do get a wonderful moment when Greenfield describes the people who call in to complain to the network: "They are young men finding sanctuary in their parents' finished basements."

It's nice to know that the Mom's basement meme predated blogging, though before blogging the young men apparently took the trouble to change out of their pajamas.  

This is a novel about both politics and journalism, and I think I enjoyed the politics a lot more. It's about a moderator of a presidential debate and three panelists who decide to hijack the debate, in order to go after the one candidate they think will ruin America.

It's especially interesting when you consider that the author Jim Lehrer has moderated 10 presidential debates. At the moment he's moderating a presidential debate, he may be the most powerful man in the country.  But, unlike his characters, when he moderates a debate, all he does is ask responsible questions and promote a healthy discourse on the important issues of the day. Freakin' PBS!

The first part of the book is about the politics. The second part is about the journalist-narrator piecing together why the people did what they did, which in the end is not nearly as interesting as what they actually did. At one point, there is a pivotal character who is not revealed, because our journalist-narrator won't reveal his sources. The narrator won't even reveal whether the source is a man or a woman. And I felt like saying to him, "It's okay. You can tell me. I won't tell anyone. And besides you're fiction." But that would mean I was talking to a fictional character, which would be bad.

Still, this is a highly entertaining book, especially the first half. It's a nice little thought experiment of what would happen if journalists acted completely biased in a campaign. (Insert your own MSNBC/Fox jokes here.)

And Lehrer is obviously having a lot of fun, poking fun at the media, politicians, and at one point even Robert MacNeil. My favorite part is that in this book the three Sunday News shows have been taken over by new hosts Ross Perot, Norman Schwarzkopf, and Jack and Jill, an obvious parody of James Carville and Mary Matalin. Plus, it's fun to read books from 1995. It's always exciting to see the plot turn on the delivery of a 3.5 inch floppy disk!

And finally: I can say with complete certainty that I was the only person reading a Jim Lehrer novel during Bruce Springsteen's Super Bowl halftime show.

A True Tale of Hollywood, Golf, and Armed Robbery

It says a lot about Leigh Montville that I read a book about golf just because he wrote it. I have no interest in golf at all, but luckily this is more than a book about golf. It's also a book about 1930s crime and Hollywood stars. John Montague was thought by some to be the best amateur golfer in the world, yet no one could figure out why he never played professionally. That had something to do with the fact that he was wanted for armed robbery and didn't want his pictures in the paper. Despite that, he was a friend of Bing Crosby, Humphrey Bogart, Oliver Hardy, and other famous Hollywood stars, all because he could play golf like nobody else.

Montville's previous books were bestsellers about Ted Williams and Babe Ruth. Now, he's decided to write about an obscure golfer from the 1930s that few remember. I hate it when authors pander to the public like that to make a quick buck.

I first read Montville when he wrote for The Boston Globe in the 1980s. My father would pick me up an hour late from school, so that I could spend the time in the school library doing my homework -- or, as the case may be, read The Boston Globe sports page instead of doing my homework. The Globe back then featured an all-star cast including Gammons, Ryan, McDonough, Collins, and Montville. Montville was not as heralded as the others, but he may have been the best. He wasn't strictly a humor writer, but he nevertheless taught me how to write a humor column. Alas, he didn't help quite so much with algebra.

He now writes biographies, though they always have funny moments. And the man clearly loves to tell a good yarn. His books are full of little nuggets that often have nothing to do with the book as a whole, except that they are entertaining. He'll even occasionally include stories that are probably not true -- with proper warning, of course -- just because they are good stories. And that's just the kind of biography I like.

I was a little skeptical of this book at first. It's not often that I read a young adult novel, though this one was recommended strongly by Nick Hornby in his last collection on reading. I was also skeptical because it's set in the future with a teenager as the narrator. Anderson said that he spent months reading teen magazines and eavesdropping on cell phone calls in the mall to get the voice just right. This was worrying. It sounded like it would be some middle-aged guy's version of what teenagers are like. Besides, it's always a little dicey when you have an essentially stupid narrator telling a story, which is the case here. But in the end it actually works.

"Feed" is about a future world that is falling apart except that all the rich kids have a "feed" of information directly planted into their brain. And by information, I mean mostly advertising. What if your brain could play you commercials when you went to the mall? That's what life is like in "Feed."

As Titus our narrator explains:

Everyone is supersmart now. You can look things up automatic, like science and history, like if you want to know which battles of the Civil War George Washington fought in and shit.... But the braggest thing about the feed ... is that it knows everything you want, and hope for, sometimes before you even know what those things are. It can tell you how to get them and how to make buying decisions that are hard.

This is a funny book, a great parody of the consumer world we live in today. While it's partly satire, it soon becomes what some would call a crying book. I didn't expect the sadness and potency of this book. There's a great story in here that just sneaked up on me, amidst all the silly lines and young adult-ness of it. And so I conclude that it's an excellent young adult novel, though I know a young adult I'm going to test it out on.

Having said that, it was a little weird reading this concurrently with Richard Ford's "Independence Day." "Independence Day" is about the most adult book I have read; there are long paragraphs about mortgages, for example. I would read that during the day, and then at night I would read about teenagers of the future getting wasted on the moon. It's no wonder that the next book I'm reading is non-fiction.

At around page 45 of this sequel to "The Sportswriter," it suddenly occurred to me that I was reading a book about real estate. You see, the main character, Frank Bascombe, has given up his life as a sportswriter to become a realtor. It's supposed to be an improvement, but I'm not that sure. You can title a book "The Sportswriter," and it has a chance to sell. There's a reason this one isn't called "The Realtor."

But fear not, fans of real estate: this book has all your favorite realty moment, short of someone actually buying a house, of course.

Still, this sequel is as engrossing as the first book, even if at times it seems to be about nothing, Let's just say that this is a slow book told by a narrator obsessed with memories and minutiae. It takes Frank 450 pages to tell us about just four days in his life, and so there's a lot of detail.

For example, on page 195 (just past midnight on day one!), we have a long description of his drive up the New Jersey Turnpike. Frank's far too tired to drive, but he wants to get out of New Jersey and into Connecticut, so he keeps driving. A little boring? Yes, but I don't know if I've ever been able to relate to something in a book quite so much as this. Seriously, everyone on the east coast has probably been in this situation -- just trying to get the hell out of New Jersey and off the stupid turnpike.

Amidst all this, we get this wonderfully boring passage when he considers an alternate route:

Though there is no truly alternate route, only another route, a longer, barely chartable, indefensible fool's route of sailing west to get east: up to 80, where untold cars are all flooding eastward, than west to Hackensack, up 17 past Paramus, onto the Garden State north (again!), though eerily enough there's little traffic; through River Edge and Oradell and Westwood, and two tolls to the New York line, then east to Nyack and the Tappan Zee.

Well, it's not exactly "The Road Not Taken." I was a little surprised I didn't get to read about the drama of fishing for change at the Tappan Zee Bridge toll booth.

At this point, I'm going to include a big spoiler, so you might want to stop reading. As the book went along, I found myself liking Frank less and less. This is a very strange book, in that Frank's son gets hit in the eye with a baseball, and that somehow becomes a life-affirming moment for Frank.

The last 100 pages of the book take place in the 24 hours after this major event, and, because of it, Frank seems to be able to put the pieces of his life together. He figures out that he might want to marry his lady friend. He decides his son is going to live with him. He even rents out a property of his to a tenant. It's all very nice, and he seems much happier -- except that his son is in the hospital after getting hit in the eye with a freakin' baseball and all Frank is writing about is Frank. Luckily, the surgery on the eye goes well, but Frank isn't even there for that.

It's just a little annoying, though maybe that's because I've spent four whole days with the guy, and we need some time apart. I know I bitched and moaned about the first book, and I bitched and moaned about this book too. I just found out that there is a third Frank Bascombe book, and I'll probably end up reading that as well at some point.

After all, there is something slow and methodical that I like about these books. It's almost relaxing to read a book that moves so slowly, even if the main character can be a bit too self-absorbed. 

All right, so I don't have a whole lot to say about this book. I said recently that Miriam Toews was a trusted author. Well, Mil Millington is like that too, except that he is also a comfort author. I don't know that this is a great book, but it is a highly enjoyable book. It's funny in that sarcastic, British way that I always like -- hopeless Anglophile that I am.

For me, this is one of those books where the plot is somehow irrelevant. I was interested in the characters throughout, and I thought the writing was very funny. While the plot raised some interesting ideas, it wasn't really the high point. And towards the end, it is almost as if the author's Mom called and told him he had to wrap it all up and come in for dinner before it gets dark. But that didn't entirely matter, because it was still fun.

Oh, and an unlikely couple falls in love, which causes one major problem. It's just not all that believable How exaxctly did they end up together? I kept wondering. For it to happen, one character has to exhibit a major change, but not so much in the cathartic sort of way, but in the "Wow, is that the same person as in chapter thirteen?" sort of way.

And yet despite all this, I probably enjoyed this more than many of the "better" books I've read recently. I took it with me to work. I always take a book to work so that I can read during lunch. I would feel naked without taking a book to work, but I seldom get around to reading it. With this one, I did -- during lunch, on the subway, though, alas, not at my desk where I probably could have used the entertainment.

For some reason, I just love this passage:

"She had no other relations than two aunts ... who had not held any other than chance communication with their brother for many years. Not that they had ever quarreled ... but that having been, on the occasion of Dora's christening, invited to tea when they considered themselves privileged to be invited to dinner, they had expressed their opinion in writing that it was 'better for the happiness of all parties' that they should stay away. Since which they had gone their road, and their brother had gone his."

Isn't that wonderful? It seems such a very civilized way to have a feud. I wonder what the modern day equivalent is. "You know, it's really better for the happiness of all parties if you would just piss off."

At any rate, I wouldn't want to be the people who were not invited to tea. I can only imagine how aggrieved they must have felt.

This was one of my favorite months of Copperfield. It was full of all the most compelling characters. The humbly evil Uriah Heep was in this section, as was lovely Agnes Wickfield. (And I know Copperfield keeps saying that he thinks of Agnes almost as a sister, but Copperfield ought to wise up and ask her to marry him instead of the annoying Dora.) Dora, with her rich girl's life and her little yapping dog, for some reason, keeps reminding me of Paris Hilton. Minus the sex tape, of course, unless there's a blue side of Dickens that I don't know about.

Valuable insights like this, of course, are yet another reason why I never could have been an English major.

Din-witted, adorable, pampered Dora has a tough month. Her father dies, though to be honest she seems to show the most stress when Copperfield suggests that she learn how to cook because he might not have enough money to support her extravagant lifestyle. I may pick on Dora, but she has a great attitude to life.

"My love," said I, "I have work to do."

"But don't do it! returned Dora. "Why should you?"

It was impossible to say to that sweet little surprised face, otherwise than lightly and playfully, that we must work to live.

"Oh, how ridiculous!" cried Dora.

"How shall we live without, Dora?" said I.

"How? Any how!" said Dora.

She seemed to think that she had quite settled the question, and gave me such a triumphant little kiss, direct from her innocent heart, that I would hardly have put her out of conceit with her answer for a fortune.

Oh, that Dora. I think she might be onto something.

I have enjoyed Miriam Toews' writing ever since reading her X Letters in Open Letters back in 2000. There was something very raw and personal in those letters, and that comes across in her novels as well. In those letters, she writes to the father of her 13-year-old son all about what the boy is up to. I was thinking of those letters a lot while reading this, mainly because the teenage boy in The Flying Troutmans reminds me very much of her son (at least the one I know from those letters).

What I like best about Toews is the tone of her novels. She reminds me of Nick Hornby, not in subject matter, but in how both seem to be masters of the first person narrative. In Toews' case, she captures perfectly the sort of confused melancholy in which we all occasionally live our lives. Her narrators usually don't know what they are doing, which is nice to read, because I don't usually know what I'm doing either.

For some reason, I don't really like summarizing fiction here. It's partly because I enjoy not knowing anything about a book before reading it. I know that most of you aren't like that, but, on the oft chance that you are, I don't want to ruin the book by revealing some intricate plot detail. This isn't the type of novel to use lots of plot devices, so I will say that the book is about a road trip a 28-year-old aunt takes her nephew and niece on while their mother is in a psychiatric ward. It's a very strange, but always interesting, family. (The last name of the family is Troutman, which is the reason for the odd title).

It's rare that I'm able to go into a book blindly like I did with this. I've usually at least read the little blurb on the back or have seen some book review. In this case, I knew nothing about the book. I knew I liked Miriam Toews, added the book to my wishlist, received it for Christmas, and then just read it without knowing a thing about it. It's one of my favorite reading experiences, though it's something you can only do with a trusted author, and I guess that's what Miriam Toews is for me. A trusted author.

(Note: A trusted author was very much needed after trying to read Peter Gent's North Dallas Forty, a rather annoying novel that I may or may not get through.)

Along with possibly Charles Dickens, Nick Hornby may well be the patron saint of this blog. Shortly before starting this site, I had read the two previous collections of his "Stuff I've Been Reading" column for The Believer magazine, and I admit that I've patterned some of what you see here on this column.

This is the latest, and unfortunately, the last collection. In each monthly column, Hornby begins with a list of Books Bought and Books Read. That they are often so different reveals how we all read. You buy something in the bookstore and then it often sits in a pile for several months. Occasionally, by the time, you get around to it, you no longer even remember why you buy it.

Like I try to do on this blog, this collection is as much about the experience of reading as about the books themselves. It helps that Hornby can make just about anything interesting.Frankly, it seems a little too meta to review a book about book reviews, so instead I'll just list a few  books he mentions that piqued my interest. You may or may not see these here in the future.

The Ghost - Robert Harris
The Abstinence Teacher - Tom Perrotta
The World Made Straight - Ron Rash
Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences - Lawrence Weschler
Skellig - David Almond

I picked this book up because someone recommended a book by somebody else. That's how it works sometimes. I was planning to read Tim Crouse's "The Boys on the Bus" about the reporters who covered the 1972 presidential campaign when I came across this one instead. Both Crouse and Thompson covered the 1972 campaign for Rolling Stone, and so it made sense to read this when Crouse's book was checked out of the library.

This is where I confess that I have never really liked Hunter S. Thompson. A long time ago, I tried reading "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" and just couldn't get through more than about 20 pages. I didn't really expect to read more than 20 pages of this book either. I figured I would give it a try and then -- since it's a library book -- just cut my losses when it got too weird. And yet while it did get too weird at times, it still hooked me. I loved reading about McGovern, Muskie, Humphrey, Wallace, and all these other political figures of whom I was only vaguely aware.

I was occasionally on the campaign trail myself this year for the New Hampshire primary, so that's part of the reason the book appealed to me. At one point, Thompson writes about driving from Cambridge to New Hampshire to go to some campaign events. Hey, that's just like what I was doing, I thought. Key difference: He was writing for Rolling Stone, while I was writing for my web site. Also, I didn't have an open bottle of Wild Turkey on my lap while making the drive.

There is even someone in here that I have met. That would be Missouri Senator Thomas Eagleton, who was McGovern's vice-presidential pick, until it was revealed that Eagleton had been previously treated for nervous exhaustion with electro-shock treatment. Eagleton was later dropped from the ticket and replaced by Sargent Shriver.

I met Eagleton, because after he retired from the Senate in 1987, he went on to be a political science professor at Washington University where I took a course he offered. And, wow, would this ever be a more fascinating entry, if I could remember anything about the course. I think it had something to do with the New Deal, but I'm not quite sure. I do remember one session in which a student actually asked him about the shock therapy and how he thought it affected his career, but I may not have heard his response because I was too busy cringing.

Sadly, from our perspective, the course might as well have been called Political Science 345: Advanced Study of Crazy Ex-Senators Who Might Have Been Vice-President if not for the Electro-Shock Therapy.

At any rate, I seem to have gone off on a tangent, but that's fitting because this whole book is full of tangents. In some ways, Dr.Thompson is blogging here years before blogging even existed, though I'm sure many others have already made that same observation.

Finally, on the long list of things only Hunter S. Thompson could get away with, we can add doing a Q&A with the editor for the end of a book because you were too stoned, drunk, sick, or whatever to finish writing the damn thing. It's an interesting literary technique, having your editor come in to interview you because you can't finish your book. And so most of the last 50 pages read like so:

Ed: Do you have any more to say about this book before we wrap up this entry?

JDL: Not really, though I did like the part about the venerable NBC newsman of my youth John Chancellor being addicted to LSD.

Ed: Is that really true?

JDL: No, I'm pretty sure Thompson made it all up, but I still enjoyed the image of Chancellor on LSD while delivering the news. I was slightly disappointed not to read about Walter Cronkite being addicted to cocaine or something.

Ed: This technique tends to work a lot better when Hunter S. Thompson is doing it, don't you think?

JDL: I would have to say yes.

One of my pet peeves is the phrase "in a word," mainly because it's so seldom followed by just one word. It's especially amusing when someone truly wordy uses it. Here's my favorite sentence of this month:

"In a word, although we took great care that he should have no more to do than was good for him, and although he did not begin with the beginning of a week, he earned by the following Saturday night ten shillings and nine-pence; and never, while I live, shall I forget his going about to all the shops in the neighbourhood to change this treasure into six pences, or his bringing them to my aunt arranged in the form of a heart upon a waiter, with tears of joy and pride in his eyes."

Well, Dickens can be, in a word, verbose. 

That paragraph, incidentally, is about Mr. Dick, a wonderful character who is a bit of a simpleton who still manages to be insightful. Mr Dick is a constant companion to Copperfield's Aunt. Mr. Dick reminds me a little of Chauncey Gardiner. 

At one point, Mr. Dick moves into a room in which "there wasn't room to swing a cat," he doesn't seem to mind though:

You know, Trotwood [David Copperfield], I don't want to swing a cat. I never do swing a cat. Therefore, what does that signify to me?

And he clearly has a point. Unlike Chauncey Gardiner, I don't expect Mr. Dick to become an important adviser to the Prime Minister, but who knows? I still have another 300 pages to go.

It's not really fair to call Will Leitch a loser, at least not now when he's a successful writer for New York Magazine. I tend to look up to him a bit, so I'm also not comfortable with calling him a loser. You know, it's not at all good when you're looking up to a loser.

So, while he's not a loser now, I suppose it is possible that he was one back in 2004 and earlier when these essays were written. Will obviously thinks so. Still, I think it's important that this book is called "Life as a Loser," rather than "Life of a Loser." "Life as a Loser" makes the book sound like some sort of undercover journalistic investigation on what losers must endure, as if Will is simply playing a role as a loser while waiting for bigger things to come along.

Of course, it's tough to say he's not a loser when he writes about his fiancee dumping him on national television. (It actually happened the night before he appeared on "Win Ben Stein's Money," but that didn't stop Jimmy Kimmel from mocking him about it during his appearance on the game show.) It's not so easy either when he writes about being homeless in New York, jumping from couch to couch. Or about trying to live for a week on $1.73 after screwing up his finances and accidentally bouncing a check to his roommate.

Still, the book is so revealing that it's tough not to side with him in all these events. He's brutally honest and funny, and I could certainly relate to some of the events. Strangely, this is the first book I've read whose marketing blurb on the back actually insulted me. It says, "But don't lose perspective; when you look close, you'll realize that this life as a loser is a lot like yours." It's true -- But hey, I think the book just called me a loser.

By the way, apparently, my girlfriend has a crush on Will. I would probably be annoyed about this, if not for the fact that her primary reason seems to be that Will was nice to me once.This all meant that I read some of these pieces to her. I stress "some," because at times she needed me to stop in the middle of a piece because she couldn't take whatever embarrassing situation that he had gotten himself into.
 
What I envy most about Will Leitch is the sheer quantity of his output. It's all good stuff too. He seems able to write about anything at any point. As someone who often grapples with writer's block, I admire this quality. There is one essay in here called "Null Set" where he writes about not having anything to write about. Admittedly, every columnist has written one of these at one point, but his is strangely compelling, and it contained an incredibly helpful line:

I highly doubt handymen sit there whining, "You know, I just can't put together this shelf today."

Somebody remind me of that line the next time I can't seem to write anything.

I have a book shelf that, while big, is no longer quite big enough to fit all the books I like. This means that every time I finish a book, I find myself having to decide whether it is worthy enough to make it to my main book shelf. Periodically, I'll pick a book at random from my shelf and reread it to see if it's good enough to retain its most favored status. You know, it's sort of like the playoffs for books! If the book loses, it goes into my closet, or gets exchanged for something else at a used bookstore.

 

And that is how I ended up reading Notes of a Nervous Man. I expected this book of essays from the early 1990s by James Lileks not to make the cut, but surprisingly the humor held up well. If you can find it, I would recommend reading it. It's a collection of humor columns from Lileks' work with the St. Paul Pioneer Press and other papers. It turns out that the 1990s angst isn't all that different from today's angst. Angst is angst.

 

I'm not quite sure if this will make it back into the main book shelf, but I'm not ready to sell it either. I think I may instead need a second bookshelf (sort of an NIT to my main bookshelf's NCAA) for books like this.

 

At any rate, enough madness. Lileks is funny. You should read him.

On The Tracks of the Great Railway Bazaar

When I reread Paul Theroux's Great Railway Bazaar, I was disappointed that I was not able to read it on a train. This time, I made sure to read his sequel to that book on the rails. In fact, I saved Ghost Train specifically for a train trip to Maine, on which I read the first 100 pages or so. That was back in October when the leaves were changing, so I spent as much time looking out the window as I did reading. Somehow, that seemed fitting.

When I saw him speak at the Harvard Book Store in September, Theroux pointed out how few travel writers have ever gone back to the places they wrote about, and that was part of the appeal for him to take this trip again over thirty years later. I like the idea of that, and I spent part of my time with this book daydreaming of revisiting foreign cities I've visited.

This is a far more personal book than The Great Railway Bazaar, which is odd because I always thought that book was incredibly personal. It turns out that Theroux's marriage was falling apart during that trip, but he never included any of those details in order to make it "a jolly book." This time, he writes much about how he has changed during those years, and overall he is a much calmer traveler.

Ghost Train is also a more adult book (and not just because he visits a six-floor Tokyo porno shop at one point!). Because of who he is now, Theroux meets Arthur C. Clarke, Pico Iyer,  and other writers. He also partakes in more activities off the train than in the first book, whether it is going to a call center in India, visiting a gulag in Russia, or exploring the weird totalitarian state of Turkmenistan. That chapter alone, in which their leader Turkmenbashi makes North Korea's Kim Jon-Il seem well balanced, makes the book worth purchasing.

Most of all, Theroux remains foremost a reader. Towards the end, I thought this was an interesting quote:

I think most serious and omnivorous readers are alike -- intense in their dedication to the word, quiet-minded, but relieved and eagerly talkative when they meet other readers and kindred spirits. If you have gotten this far in this book, you are just such a singular person.

Theroux spends a great deal of time on this trip, talking with people about books. And in many ways, this is an extremely literary travelogue. Many of the sights he points out are literary landmarks, and often he writes about the books he's reading on the train. This really is as much a book about reading as it is a book about traveling.

Finally, it may be a cliché to say so, but this is a book to be read slowly. Theroux always travels slowly, and I find it best to read his books that way as well, preferably over a few months.  That's why I started this in October and just finished now.

A Low-Stress, High-Velocity Guide to Writing a Novel in 30 Days
 
This book might be part of the reason why I didn't have as many entries in November. I tried to keep up the hour of reading last month, but I wasn't always successful. On the bright side, however, I did write a novel.

As in previous chapters, when David Copperfield falls in love, well, he really falls in love. For example:

I had loved her every minute, day, and night, since I first saw her. I loved her at that minute to distraction. I should always love her, every minute to distraction. Lovers had loved before, and lovers would love again, but no lover had ever loved, might, could, would, or should ever love, as I loved Dora.

So take that, lovers of the world! Your love is nothing, compared to that of David Copperfield. If he had lived in the 1980s rather than the 1880s, Dickens could have written some excellent power ballads.

Other things do happen in this section, including some intrigue with L'il Emily and Steerforth, but for me it is the chapter in which Copperfield gets engaged that is the most memorable. As they say in sports, Dickens really leaves it all on the page in this chapter.

The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero
 
Continuing on the theme of place in reading, I read the majority of this book in exactly one spot: on my couch in front of the television during the commercials of Red Sox playoff games. For those of you whose teams make it into the playoffs, I highly recommend reading a book during the games. Obviously, it's not good if you're watching with others, but if you're watching on your own, reading during the commercials can be a very calming influence.

There are many benefits to this, including:

1. You will not have to listen endlessly to the same commercials over and over again. I may be the one Boston or Tampa fan who doesn't want to kill Frank Caliendo after all his Frank TV commercials. I'm not saying that I want him to have a career, but if I happened to see him on the street, I would not accost him, unlike the majority of baseball fans.

2. When the umpires make a bad call and the networks go to a commercial without showing a replay, you will at least have a way to simmer down.

3. All those brain cells killed by your drinking of beer during the game and/or listening to Chip Carey or Tim McCarver can be magically revived through the power of reading.

Obviously, a sports book works best, though I've found any non-fiction book works well. For me, fiction doesn't particularly work, simply because the constant interruptions don't allow me to get immersed into the story, but your mileage may vary. And don't worry. I wasn't stupid enough to try to read Crime and Punishment during a baseball game.

As for the book, I picked it up because Roberto Clemente was probably the best player who I didn't really know anything about. I'm glad I read it, because Maraniss is right that Clemente may have been baseball's last hero. I can't see today's players doing as much for the poor as Clemente did.

Unfortunately, for me at least, the Red Sox did not make the World Series, or else I would have finished this book a lot earlier.They were eliminated with about 100 pages left, and it took me awhile to get around to reading those final 100 pages. While the book was well done, I have to say that I was disappointed at times.

Maraniss seems to be primarily a political reporter in his work for The Washington Post, and he sometimes goes off on tangents that I didn't particularly care about. For example, when I picked this up, I have to say I wasn't thinking, "Gee, I wonder what Richard Nixon thought of Roberto Clemente?"

He also spends a lot of time going into the background of the owner of the plane Clemente died in as well as the pilot. It makes sense, as Clemente's tragic death was due to the negligence of these people, but sometimes I think I just wanted to read more about baseball. 

 

As predicted, it took awhile for me to come back here after starting Crime and Punishment, the occasionally cumbersome but still fascinating novel by Dostoyevsky. I didn't spend the entire last month reading Dostoyevsky. In fact, somehow I managed to have five books going at once, though much of October was indeed taken up with Crime and Punishment. I finished this novel about a week ago, but for some reason it has taken me quite some time to write about it here.

Even if I knew nothing about this book ahead of time, I think I would be able to tell it wasn't a Western novel, simply because all the time the characters are doing things that I just don't expect or understand. "What are you doing?" I constantly found myself asking these characters. I suppose the majority of what I have read in my life have been by British and American authors, and there's obviously a different sensibility here. These Russian characters are always doing things that I don't really see coming.

My favorite parts of this were the actual murder and the frequent inner monologues of  Razkolnikov, the main character who was not quite as comfortable with committing murder as he expected to be. The murder scene itself is one of the most gripping things I've read, though there are other parts of the book that are rather mundane. There will be long sections where Dostoyevsky leaves Razkolnikov behind to concentrate on other characters, and I don't always care about these characters. Like with Dickens, you can sometimes sense he was getting paid by the word.

Lately, I have been thinking a lot about place when I'm reading -- not so much the place where the novel is set, but the place where I'm set while reading the novel. With Crime and Punishment, I tried many different spots, including:

The Subway -- not good. This is a book that you need to immerse yourself in. There are some paragraphs that last longer than the time between subway stops.

The Laundromat - It shouldn't work, but it does, probably because there is so much about the main character checking his clothes for evidence after committing the murder. Also, my laundromat tends to be dank and empty and deserted much of the time. If laundromats had existed in 19th Century Russia, I have a feeling they would look like mine.

Out in the sunshine -- Definitely not appropriate for this book. It's not the summer, so I didn't try the beach, but I don't think that would work either. 

At home with all but one lamp out -- This is the best spot. I also started listening to classical music while reading this, and that certainly put me in the mood for it. I didn't listen to anything in particular. I just turned on the local classical station. At one point, they played something by Tchaikovsky and later there was another selection by someone whose name sounded Russian. Both worked especially well, though the constant advertisements for the "commercial-free workday from 9 to 12" didn't exactly help take me away to 19th Century St. Petersburg.

Here's my favorite passage from this month, when David Copperfield returns to Yarmouth and sees the undertaker Mr. Omer:

"Why, bless my life and soul!" said Mr. Omer, "how do you find yourself? Take a seat. Smoke, not disagreeable, I hope?"

"By no means, " said I. "I like it -- in somebody else's pipe."

"What, not in your own, eh?" Mr. Omer returned, laughing. "All the better, Sir. Bad habit for a young man. Take a seat. I smoke, myself, for the asthma."

Well, that's one method to combat asthma. It reminds me of those "More Doctors smoke Camels" commercials about cigarettes in the 1950s. Then again, in Mr. Omer's defense, with the pollution of Victorian England, maybe smoking a pipe was better than breathing the air. It's either coal smoke or tobacco smoke, I guess.

Much of this section takes place on the road, as Copperfield travels to see Steerforth at his home in Highgate and then travels to the seashore at Yarmouth to see Peggotty. (There is some serious vacation time in proctoring!) The scenes in Yarmouth are always entertaining because they seem so strange, what with some of the major characters living on boat that has been converted into a house.

I don't know why this is, but I imagine Yarmouth to be similar to the town of Sweethaven in Robert Altman's version of "Popeye." All the characters there seem so very odd, especially Little Em'ly and Cousin Ham.  In some strange way, these chapters seem like a vacation from the rest of the book.

At any rate, after ten months, I now seem to be more than halfway though the book. It's all smooth sailing from now, with only nine more installments left.  

I wonder what Will Leitch thinks when he looks at his 2005 novel and sees the James Frey blurb on the cover. I'm thinking that James Frey doesn't give too many cover blurbs these days, and it probably doesn't help when Frey says that Leitch's book "rings with authenticity and sincerity."

And yet it does. At times, it might be a little too authentic, in that I don't always want to read about 18-year-old boys doing stupid things. Still, this is meant to be a coming-of-age novel, and Leitch's writing does capture perfectly that sense of urgency we all feel at that age. On top of that, it's a pretty funny book too.

I should warn you that I'm a little biased in favor of Will Leitch. I've always been a fan of his work on Deadspin and now at New York Magazine (not to mention Professor Barnhardt's Journal). Despite my biases, I think you'll find that this is a very good tale of growing up. The story covers the summer before college for a Midwestern jock, who is about to leave the town where he is king to go to college where he'll be just another guy. As he comes to grips with all this, he also has to handle a tedious summer job, a bitter brother, and a confusing relationship with an older woman.

And if that's not enough, how many novels will you get to read in which Julian Tavarez is mentioned? I suspect this is also the only novel in existence in which St. Louis Cardinals General Manager Walt Jocketty plays a role, albeit small. Leitch, of course, is a big St. Louis Cardinals fan, and the book is set in Leitch's home town of Mattoon, Illinois, where just about everyone follows the fortunes of the Cardinals. Write what you know, they say, after all. I'd like to think that if I wrote a novel, it would include references to obscure Red Sox players.

At any rate, I'm now going to attempt to read "Crime and Punishment," in which I expect there won't be quite as many references to Julian Tavarez, not to mention Colin Farrell, Jessica Simpson, and Tony La Russa. So you might not hear from me for awhile, as I wade through 19th century Russia. I find it's always best to follow up Will Leitch with some Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

There are some who say the book is always better than the movie. I don't entirely believe that, though I do think that some stories are better suited to books and some are better suited to film. When a movie is based on a book, the book isn't automatically better, though it definitely has the home field advantage.

Having said all that, as I read "Being There," I started to think that this might be one case where the movie is actually better. They are at least very similar, I thought until I realized: Of course, they're very similar. Jerzy Kosinzki wrote both the novel and the screenplay, which I didn't know until I was halfway through the book.

For those who don't know the story, here's a brief summary. The mentally-disabled Chance works in the garden of a rich old man. He has never left the man's house and can't even read or write. He can, however, watch television, and his imitation of what he sees on TV is what helps him function in life. When the old man dies, Chance is forced out of the house.  He has nowhere to go, but soon by, well, chance, he is taken into the home of a wealthy business leader. When he says his name is "Chance the Gardener," it is mistaken for the WASP-ish Chauncey Gardiner.

He eventually meets the President, and his simple talk about the garden is mistaken as a cogent analysis of the economy:

In a garden, growth has its season. There are spring and summer, but there are also fall and winter. And then spring and summer again. As long as the roots are not severed, all is well, and all will be well.

One appearance on television makes him the talk of the nation, as he continues to talk about his garden. This illiterate but well-dressed white man is somehow mistaken as a powerful financier with important insights into the world's economy.

In some ways, the story seems to be more a visual one, which might be why I think I prefer the film. I saw it about 15 years ago, and I remember most the scene where the immaculately dressed Chance, played by Peter Sellers, is walking down the island of a highway, as well as the last scene of the movie, which I won't reveal. Even more, what makes the movie is watching Sellers so perfectly imitate what he sees on television.

Nevertheless, there are some nice touches from the book that I don't remember from the movie. For example, the reason Chance allows everyone to call him "Chauncey Gardiner" is that he knows people on television usually have two names (the actor's name and the character's name). He is also confused when he is asked to be on television for the first time:

He wondered whether a person changed before or after appearing on the screen. Would he be changed forever or only during the time of his appearance? What part of himself would he leave behind when he finished the program? Would there be two Chances after the show: one Chance who watched TV and another who appeared on it? 

In both versions, by the end, Chance is amazingly being considered as a vice-presidential candidate. Previously, such satire seemed a little bit too over-the-top for me. This year, not so much. 

My only disappointment in rereading this book is that I wasn't able to read it aboard a train. I did occasionally try to read it while in motion, but alas the MBTA is not exactly the Trans-Siberian Express.

This is one of my favorite books, and I'm not entirely sure why. For a book about such a long trip, not all that much happened. At times, Theroux barely got off the train, but it was still captivating. I shouldn't really be fascinated with all the strange conversation he had with fellow train travelers, but I was just about every time.


Theroux has written a sequel to this called "Ghost Train to the Eastern Star" in which he retraces his original route thirty years later. That's the main reason I decided to pick this up again. I also was lucky enough to see him at a reading earlier this week, though "reading" might be a little strong. It was mostly an entertaining though rambling talk by Theroux, with a little bit of reading at the end to justify the name of the event.

Theroux has written many travel books beyond this one. He says he tries to write them all while traveling. The idea is that just as he finishes his trip, he's also finishing the book. It's a wonderful idea, although I've never been able to make it work myself, even on a small scale. He says he carries a small notebook around with him and takes notes all day long. He then transfers the notes into a much bigger notebook at the end of the day.

It's all very orderly and makes me really think I should have taken notes while reading this book. In that case, I might have had more to say here.

It's a little disconcerting to realize that I'm on page 392 of this book which I started nine months ago, and I'm not even halfway though the thing. It may be that this three chapters per month policy isn't the greatest idea, after all. Perhaps there is a reason why books are not serialized as often these days.

Again, there are only about twenty or so people in Dickensian England, and David Copperfield keeps running into them all. As always, there are many blasts from the past in this section, but it's always entertaining to see all these characters keep coming back.

The highlight here is that Copperfield falls in love. Here's how he describes meeting the lovely Dora Spenlow for the first time:

All was over in a moment. I had fulfilled my destiny. I was a captive and a slave. I loved Dora Spenlow to distraction!

She was more than human to me. She was a Fairy, a Sylph, I don't know what she was -- anything that no one ever saw, and everything that everybody ever wanted. I was swallowed up in an abyss of love in an instant. There was no pausing on the brink -- no looking down, or looking back; I was gone, headlong, before I had sense to say a word to her.

You know, I think he might just like her.

Confessions of a Last-String Quarterback

I finished this over a week ago, but for various reasons I hadn't gotten around to writing about it here until now. One of those reasons may well have been a lack of enthusiasm on my part, which is a shame, because the book is actually pretty good.

In retrospect, it was a mistake to read this right after Stefan Fatsis' book about NFL training camp. I liked the idea of reading these two similar books back-to-back, but in the end I got a bit sick of football. It's sort of like how movie theme nights often seem a little better in principle than in reality. I guess I can only read so much about football game plans in one month.

I did read some of this while watching a football game. It's not exactly the most masculine of things to read a book during a football game, but you can actually get through a lot of pages during all the down time in a game. People complain about baseball being slow, but I get through as many pages in a football game as I do during a baseball game. Sports don't exactly lend themselves to deep literature, but it's not bad watching football while reading about it.

It was also good to have the game on in the background, if only because it puts into focus how different today's game is. In Plimpton's book, it seemed that regular people could actually play the game. Flipping through the pictures, the players look like people you'd see in everyday life. Sure, they are big guys, but not the 300-pound behemoths of today.

And then there's the money aspect. The players of the 1960s had a grueling life, and they were still paid about the same as those in the stands. Even after reading Fatsis' book, I wondered why some of today's players bother with the game. Even with all the money today's players make, the life of an NFL player doesn't always seem worth it. That was, of course, doubly true in the 1960s.

The Plimpton book is probably better in that it gets deeper into the game. Plimpton is obsessed with learning everything about being an NFL player. He had his few weeks in the NFL, and he was determined to take full advantage. The Fatsis book is probably more enjoyable, simply because he leaves some stuff out. Unlike Plimpton, I may not want to know everything about life in the NFL, just the good stuff.

 

A 5-Foot-8, 170-pound, 43-Year-Old Sportswriter Plays in the NFL

Not that I need it, but here's more proof that I could never make it in the NFL. I already knew about my lack of talent and athleticism. Also, I always figured that not liking to get hit by big men might be a problem too. But Stefan Fatsis' book about being a field goal kicker in NFL training camp makes me realize one other problem: I might be too stupid to play in the NFL.

I'm being facetious -- well, sort of. However, every time Fatsis started summarizing some play that the team was running, my mind would just gloss over. "And the funny thing is, people think we're pretty dumb," fullback Kyle Johnson says at one point while explaining what seems to me to be the world's most complex play. 

I read this just in time for the NFL season, because, after all, I'm psyched for the upcoming season. Or maybe not. In actuality, I read the last 40 pages while the Redskins and Giants were starting the season, though I didn't even have the game on. It's a strange fan perhaps who chooses to read a book about the NFL instead of watching the opening game of the season.

In truth, while I enjoy football, I'm still a very casual fan. With this book, I was more psyched that Stefan Fatsis had written another book than I was at the start of another football season. "Word Freak," his book about joining the world of championship Scrabble, is one of my favorite books. It even inspired me to take up the game of Scrabble when I had never played it before. "A Few Seconds of Panic" isn't quite as good, if only because it hasn't inspired me to go out and kick field goals, but it's close.

I love participatory journalism like this, and Fatsis is really good at it. It was exciting to read about his attempts to kick field goals for the Denver Broncos, and all the stress that entailed. One of the most harrowing parts of the book is when Broncos Coach Mike Shanahan has Fatsis kick in front of all the players and tells the team that practice will end a half-hour early if Fatsis makes the field goal. And so, all the players line up to watch this writer kick a decisive field goal. Screw the Super Bowl. That's real pressure.

I've written in the past about stunt books, but I don't think I would consider Stefan Fatsis' books to be stunt books. "Word Freak" was more than a stunt book, since he actually became an expert-level Scrabble player. In this book, while Fatsis doesn't actually become an expert-level field goal kicker, he does manage to go behind the scenes and show us the life of players and coaches in a way we seldom get to see.

That may be Fatsis' strength. He shows us the real life of an NFL player which is far from glamorous. Most are just worried about making the team. They may be overpaid, but they also have a tough life. It's not just the injuries, but also the assembly line feel of the NFL where there's always another better player coming up. The players understand this and in fact usually seem more grounded than the fans. Surprisingly, NFL players seemed a whole lot more normal than the Scrabble players Fatsis profiled last time. 

Strangely, I bought this at the same time as I bought George Plimpton's "Paper Lion," in which Plimpton wrote about playing with the Detroit Lions in the 1960s. It just happened to be on sale, and I never even considered the connection between the books when I brought them to the counter. And somehow, despite being more of a baseball guy, I also have two other football books in my pile of books to read. I'm not sure how that happened. Are you ready for some football reading? I guess I'll have to be.

 

This is the third time I've read "The Catcher in the Rye." The first time was when I was around Holden Caulfield's age. The second was when I was in my twenties, on or around February 17, 1997, which I know because of the bookmark I found in my copy. And now I'm reading it again at age 37, when, alas, I can no longer be expected to identify with young Mr. Caulfield.

And it's true. I do not identify with Holden Caulfield. At times, he seems like a bit of a jerk, to be honest, but that doesn't really matter. I don't think I've ever identified with Holden. He has never really been the reason I like this book. I like this book because of the way Salinger writes, and the way he captures the tone of Holden. Salinger captures the tone of the aimless teenage boy just perfectly.

People compliment actors for staying in character, and here Salinger stays in character as well as any other writer. There isn't really a point in here where I feel as if Salinger is writing; it's all Holden Caulfield to me. Jody feels that Holden is just like every 17-year-old boy, and she's probably right. I think it was meant as a criticism, but it may also be the reason Holden Caulfield remains such a popular character. A whole lot of people can identify with him.

For me, this is actually a great book to reread. I always tend to forget what happens and can read it with a fresh mind each time. Admittedly, this may be because not a whole lot does, in fact, happen.

I'm also glad that there was never a movie based on the book. Salinger apparently had a bad experience when one of his earlier stories was made into a movie and vowed never again to sell the movie rights to his stories. So many books of the 20th century are remembered more for their movie versions that I'm glad it didn't happen to this book. I'm sure Holden Caulfield would be glad as well.

Well, so much for this book. It's time to find something cheerful to read....

I've spent most of August reading this book, and I wish I had something interesting to say about it. Unfortunately, I really don't. That's not to say that it's a bad book. It's a dense, well-written novel, detailing several generations of two families in London. Let's just say that it was good enough for me to read the whole thing, but not quite good enough for me to care about the characters.

I think this may be more my fault than Zadie Smith's fault (It's not you, Zadie. It's me.) I felt like the book was strong enough that I should have cared more, but I just didn't. It certainly grabbed me at times, but it was also the kind of book that was easy to put down. (n fact, I did stop reading halfway through to start the Holtzman sports book, which needed to go back to the library.) Even with two pages left and in the midst of an incredibly dramatic moment, I found myself putting it down to do something else.

I suppose I started reading this because I had heard about Zadie Smith for so long. I even saw her do a reading at a McSweeney's event in Boston in 1999 or 2000. John (I'm a PC) Hodgman was also there, and I have to say that he made a much more lasting impression.

Like many McSweeney's writers, Smith can be just a little too clever at times. There was a flippant style here that made it feel that she didn't care all that much about the plot, and so I didn't always care about it either. I enjoyed the writing, but I just wasn't at all concerned with what happened to these people.

Oh, and the final page includes this line: "The end is simply the beginning of a longer story."

That's the type of line that really gets on my nerves, because sometimes I would just prefer the end to be the end.

There are many things I learned in this book, including:

In addition to being a football coach, Knute Rockne also taught chemistry at Notre Dame. No one could motivate someone to study a molecule quite like Knute Rockne.

Maury Povich's father, Shirley Povich, was a famous sportswriter in Washington who wrote for over 60 years. Because of his first name, he was also the only man listed in the 1962 edition of Who's Who in American Women.

Not only did most teams pay for the travel of reporters, often the reporters shared hotel rooms with the ballplayers themselves. Imagine Dan Shaughnessy rooming with Curt Schilling or Manny Ramirez!

In the 1920s, when he was covering the St. Louis Cardinals and Browns, Ray Gillespie says he had a half-dozen roommates who were players:

Some of them would watch me while I was writing. Once a player said, "That's not correct. That's not what the argument was about." So I changed my story.

This is a great book, if you like sports history. Like Lawrence Ritter's "The Glory of Our Times," it is an oral history of the golden age of sports, but the people interviewed here are the reporters rather than the players. In the 1970s, Holtzman interviewed 24 sportswriters who wrote between the two world wars. It's fascinating to read about the life reporters led back then.
 

Sure, there was as much alcohol as you would expect. New York sportswriter Richards Vidmer starts his interview by saying, "Hell, I should have been dead twenty years ago," and, well, he should have been. He talks about one night when he wanted to see a guy in the hotel room next to him:

I'd been drinking. Instead of going around the corner and walking in through the door, I climbed out my window and crawled from one ledge to the other.

This was on the 12th floor! Obviously, "I'd been drinking" may be the biggest understatement in the entire book.

Reporters then were much closer to the players. Even if they weren't sharing hotel rooms with players like Gillespie did, they did take long train trips with the players, and often spent time socially with them. If a reporter wanted to rip a player -- and many still did -- they couldn't hide from the players quite like they can today. More than one of these newpapermen have stories of a ballplayer threatening to beat him up because of a story.

In some ways, it was also a more genteel life. The games were played during the day. Reporters could crank out their stories in the early evening and then have the rest of the night to themselves. A few in here even said that night baseball ruined the job of the baseball reporter.

While there are many different opinions offered in here, a few themes do emerge. There is too much of a focus on statistics today, rather than the game itself. Reporters also spend way too much time writing about the personal lives of athletes today.  (In the words of Al Abrams: "What they did on their time didn't have anything to do with their baseball careers.") And, finally, reporters rely too much on "wooden quotes" from the participants, rather than just writing about what they saw at the game. (Al Laney had a good quote about how quotes can clutter up a story, but in deference to him, I'm not going to use it.)

Interestingly, I recognized stories in here from other sports books I've read that obviously used this as source material -- most notably Leigh Montville's "The Big Bam" about Babe Ruth and Brad Snyder's "A Well Paid Slave" about Curt Flood and the fight against baseball's reserve clause.

Those are just two examples I noticed, but with all the great stories in here, I'm sure there are dozens of others that also used this as source material.

I learned a new word this month: dissipation. That's because the title of Chapter 24 is "My First Dissipation,"  and to me the word sounded vaguely like a legal term.

Now, this came right after a chapter in which Copperfield decided to choose a profession. By the way, it turns out this profession-choosing wasn't all the difficult back then. Copperfield's aunt suggested he should become a proctor, and after minimal thought Copperfield decided that he liked the idea "exceedingly." No worries about what color his parachute is, Copperfield is quite content to be a proctor, even if he didn't quite know what it was before then.

I wasn't entirely sure what a proctor was either, though when I looked it up, I discovered that it was a type of solicitor in Victorian times. And so when the next chapter title included the word "dissipation," I assumed this was just some sort of legal phrase and didn't bother looking it up. This was a mistake.

I soon learned that it actually means roughly "a bender." To adopt a decidedly non-Dickensian phrase, this is the chapter in which David Copperfield gets wasted. Wicked wasted. Perhaps even exceedingly wasted.

While a drunken Copperfield disturbs a play with his loud talk, Dickens has this wonderful description of drunkenness: "The whole building looked as if it were learning to swim, it conducted itself in such an unaccountable manner when I tried to steady it."

Eventually, Copperfield wakes up with a monstrous hangover, or as Dickens writes, "But the agony of my mind, the remorse and shame I felt when I became conscious the next day!" In this one chapter, Copperfield seems to experience everything about drinking excess, except the throwing up, which disappointed me a bit. I was really curious to see what Dickensian turn of phrase would be used to describe that.

My Life as a CIA Spy

To say this book is a disappointment is in some ways a compliment. Lindsay Moran writes a book about spying that, while funny and entertaining, is also somewhat mundane. I was pretty excited to read a book by a real-life spy, but it turns out the life of a spy can be pretty routine at times.

For example, at one point, Moran complains about how all the time talking with informants in parked cars and restaurants and typing up reports in the office has caused her to get fat. This is not the sort of thing that happened to James Bond. (Well, except maybe during the later Roger Moore years.)

Her work was dangerous at times, though honestly Moran doesn't seem to make a big deal about the danger. This is perhaps because of the mostly light tone she uses throughout the book.

Despite that light tone, she was not a happy spy. She quickly grew disillusioned with the Agency. The agents the CIA encouraged her to recruit never seemed to know anything important. The actual work she did seemed useless. And too often her bosses were stuck in a Cold War mindset. It didn't help that she also had ethical qualms about the whole process of recruiting agents, in which one preys on the weaknesses of foreigners in an attempt to get them to turn over information about their country.

The biggest problem with being a spy, however, is the loneliness. When you're a spy, you can never tell people too much about your life, and it's tough to have a lasting relationship with someone when you can't even reveal what you do during the day. (Bond, obviously, wasn't too bothered by this.) And when she did decide to date someone, she needed to divulge everything to the CIA on long, bureaucratic forms, so that they could determine whether the man in question was a spy or not.
 
Of course, there were exceptions. Men didn't need to report any encounters with prostitutes, as long as they made sure not to go back to the same prostitute twice. That apparently is not a security risk. Just in case you were wondering.

For the second time this year, we are reading a book about working in an office, which is told partly in the first-person plural. First, there was Joshua Ferris' "Then We Came to the End," which was published in 2007. Now, 2008 brings us Ed Park's "Personal Days." Like Ferris' book, the narrator is unknown, and it's set in an office where everyone is slowly being let go. Ferris' book is a little more dramatic at times, and Park's book is a little funnier. Both are well worth reading.

We feel bad for Park, because we already felt that Ferris' book was one of the best books we have read about office life, and now we come across this book which is very similar and could even be better. However, we can't help thinking it's just a little derivative.

That's hardly fair. Ferris' book was published about a year before Park's, but it takes so long for books to be published that Park would have had no idea about Ferris' book while he was writing his own. Sometimes, people come up with similar ideas at the same time. It just happens. It's like when one studio decides to make a killer snake movie, and another studio comes out with a killer snake movie of their own at about the same time. Since we all spend so much time in an office, office comedies are part of the zeitgeist, and, hey, we love the first person plural. In this case, Ferris might have just gotten there first.

Nevertheless, here's our favorite line from "Personal Days:"

"Jack II says that when you feel a tingling in your fingers, it means someone's Googling you." Your fingers just tingled, didn't they?

Jack II is called that because another Jack (known as The Original Jack) used to work in the same office until he was fired. Meanwhile, the boss is known as the Sprout because his name is Russell which sounds like brussels, which come from brussel sprouts. Hence, the Sprout. This is the sort of absolute nonsense that goes on in offices all the time, and Park captures it perfectly.

To be fair, only the first part of Park's book is in the first person plural. After that, (grammatical SPOILERS ahead) the second section is told in the form of an outline. You get the feeling that if Park could have written a chapter in the form of a PowerPoint presentation, he would have done so

The last section is an e-mail from one of the characters, in the form of one 40-page run-on sentence, all because his "craptop" which the company won't replace, doesn't have a working period key, a literary technique that causes us to have just a little less interest in the book, partly from being old-fashioned, partly because it seems just a little too clever, and perhaps most importantly, because our pacing was all off without the paragraph, a grammatical element of which we had not realized we were such a fan, to guide us through the reading.

And so a big shout-out to the paragraph!

Despite the snaky tone of this entry, we would recommend this book. It's entertaining and hilarious at times, the kind of book with sections you'll want to read out loud to someone.  As for the other parts, we imagine you're not nearly as finicky as we can be at times.

By the way, Gary Shteyngart, whose novel "Absurdistan" we found mildly annoying, says this book contains an "odd, buoyant hope." This would seem to be hope that floats, rather than the kind of hope that sinks to the depths of the sea. We are not entirely sure that this book is at all hopeful, but if there is hope in it, it's definitely of the buoyant variety.

The Uncomfortably Candid Diary of Kevin Smith

When you start reading a book called, "My Boring-Ass Life," I suppose it's not really fair to criticize it for being boring. Kevin Smith is pretty upfront about that in the title. Still, these entries, which are reprinted from his online diary, are sometimes completely dull.  It's as if Smith sets out to prove that his life really is incredibly boring, and at times Smith shines in this endeavor.

As for the ass portion of the title, he's got that covered too, as we learn entirely too much about Kevin Smith's bowel movements. It seems that the bathroom is where he updates much of the journal, getting the most portability out of his portable computer. Whether that's where you should read this, I'll leave you to decide. And if there's just one book all year that you read containing the words "anal fissure," well, this may as well be it. Let's just say Kevin Smith, for better or worse, is not a private person. "Uncomfortably candid" is right. 

I got this book for Christmas, and I'm just finishing it now. In some ways, I read it in real time. Well, not quite, but the book incorporates 21 months of Smith's life, and it took me about seven months to finish it. And it's not bad in small doses, but by the second half of the book, something interesting happens. It's no longer boring... at all.

It's as if at this point Smith no longer feels compelled to prove how dull his life is. He writes about making "Clerks 2." He writes about taking a small role in "Live Free or Die Hard" with his idol Bruce Willis, and in one of the most gripping parts of the book, he tells of helping his friend Jason (Jay) Mewes kick his heroin habit. There are over 50 pages detailing Mewes' struggles to stay clean over several years, and it's tough to put the book down at that point.

It's fascinating, touching, and funny stuff. My advice is to skim the first half, and then begin to pay more attention once he starts filming "Clerks 2." For the second half, it feels like Smith finally realizes he has a forum to tell stories. He doesn't have to talk about what he watched on his Tivo. He's got tales to tell. Seriously, it took me about six and a half months to read the first 300 pages, and then two weeks to read the last 150 pages.

To be fair, I was reading many other things during this time, and I tended to use this book to cleanse (or sometimes dirty) the reading palate. It's nice to have something like this going when you're trying to read Dickens, Fitzgerald, and other classic authors.

Oh, and finally here's one of the strangest things I learned: In "Mallrats," the studio almost forced Smith to cast Seth Green in the role of Jay, rather than Jason Mewes. I wonder if in "Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back," any thought was given to having Seth Green play the role of the Hollywood Jay, rather than James Van Der Beek.

19th Century England was a big place, and yet David Copperfield keeps running into people purely by accident. It's amazing. Seriously, if David Copperfield were around today, he'd be running into his 10th grade geometry teacher every time he went to the mall. "I say, Mr. Bloom, whatever are you doing in The Gap!"

This book is set in a wonderful, random world where all sorts of characters from the past just show up. "My God, it's Little Copperfield. I haven't seen you since Chapter 7, and here we are in Chapter 19. Look at you, you're all grown up."

I've come to the conclusion that David himself isn't the most interesting character. The excitement in this book comes from the other characters, so it's nice that the entertaining ones keep coming back. You can sometimes tell that this was written in installments. I can almost imagine Dickens saying to himself, "Well, he was a popular character. I think I'll bring him back for another chapter." 

Actually, it's fine that David isn't always interesting. He doesn't need to be. If Copperfield himself were wild and wacky, the other characters wouldn't seem nearly as intriguing. On the back of my nineteen-cent copy of this book, Dickens says that this was his favorite of all his novels, and I suspect this is because he got to create so many interesting characters here.

Despite this, these three chapters went slower for me than other chapters. I find I don't like the mostly adult Copperfield as much as the child Copperfield, and I'm starting to wonder if the book is going anywhere at all. Then again, maybe that's genius on the part of Dickens. Copperfield is suddenly nineteen-years-old, his character is getting a bit annoying, and the book of his life seems aimless. That makes perfect sense when you think about it.

Perhaps it's a good thing that Dickens skipped over the adolescent years, because that would have been really tough to read. "Chapter 16: The Girls Tell Me I Look Good With a Mullet, and so I Run With It."

Literary Lapses
Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town
Winnowed Wisdom

I'm not sure whether to write about this in one entry, or three entries. However, as the three books are all in one volume, I'll do just one entry. Stephen Leacock has been called by some the Canadian Mark Twain. It's not a bad description, though Leacock was writing a little later, in the first half of the 20th Century. He's also gentler than Twain, which I suppose is what you would expect from the Canadian Mark Twain.

On the CBC radio show "Vinyl Cafe," Stuart McLean talked about Leacock recently. My favorite story about him was that he wasn't very good on radio, because he tended to laugh at his own jokes. Laughing at your own material, how unprofessional! But most of it is funny stuff, even today.

To be honest, I'm always a little skeptical of old humor. It seems to me that it's tough for something from another era to seem funny decades later. I remember hearing English teachers in high school explain jokes from Shakespeare ("See, it's a fart joke. Don't you get it?") in order to convince us that Shakespeare was funny. That never worked, and I didn't really expect to laugh out loud when I read Leacock either. And yet I did. 

I should start with his first book, "Literary Lapses," which is a collection of humor pieces. It was originally self-published, so you get the feeling Leacock would be all for the Internet now. It's an entertaining book, and many of the pieces "reminded" me of comedy that was written much later. For example, he does a whole story on the adventures of A, B, and C (those well known characters from math quizzes ) that felt like the types of jokes people were making about the SAT in 1980s teen comedies.

In "Winnowed Wisdom," the third book in the collection, there's a piece about how we are running out of all our natural resources, like gasoline, and it reads like something that could be written this month. Well, except for the complaint about "the rise of 2 cents a gallon in gasoline which hit us hard and shortened our investigations by about ten miles a day."

Nestled between the two humor collections is his most famous work, the novel "Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town." In some ways, I think his fiction is better, though this may be because it's tough to read a 200-page book of humor pieces and still find the pieces equally as funny throughout. His columns are stand-alone pieces, and in many ways it's best not to read them too quickly, as I did.

"Sunshine Sketches" is similar to Garrison Keillor's "Lake Wobegon" or "Winesburg, Ohio", by one of Leacock's contemporaries, Sherwood Anderson. "Sunshine Sketches" is about the inhabitants of a fictional town. In this case, it's Mariposa, Ontario. Like those others, there really isn't a plot in "Sunshine Sketches," just a series of chapters about all the quirky  inhabitants of the town. This quiet innocent little town is home to maritime disaster, suicidal lovers, raging fires, financial speculating, bank robberies, crooked elections, and quite possibly insurance fraud. But, you know, in a good, wholesome way.

At times, Leacock's humor is so dry that I didn't realize I was in the middle of a joke until he hit me with the punchline. And sometimes it wasn't until well after the punchline that I figured out I had just read a joke.

So it may seem like I gave up on this reading experiment and this blog, but that's not at all true. Instead, I picked up Winter's Tale, a dense 688-page book by Mark Helprin that seems to have taken me forever to finish. Before that, I attempted to read some Graham Greene, which I just couldn't get into, and I spent a little time with Stephen Leacock, of which there will be more later.

As for Winter's Tale, there were times I loved it, but unfortunately more times that I did not. Frankly, this book seems a little too mystical for my taste. I admit it. Whether it's good sense or just a lack of creativity on my part, I like my novels to be a little grounded in reality. I tend to avoid hobbits and warlocks. No hobbits or warlocks here, but there was a magical flying horse, which didn't exactly win me over. There was also time travel, which in general I enjoy, but it was weird time travel that occasionally involved the aforementioned horse flying into the clouds. No fancy time machines here, alas.

There are a large cast of characters as well, and that's part of the problem. This reminds me of why I've never really liked short stories. Honestly, it takes me a long time to get into a book. I have to read about characters for several pages before I really start caring about them. WIth short stories, the story is usually just about done before I start to give a damn about the characters. Here, Helprin jumps between characters enough that I always feel like I'm starting the book over. Major characters just disappear for 200 pages at a time, and it gets infuriating to start a new chapter only to discover that the next 40 pages will be about yet another completely new character.

I know I sound grumpy, but I'm serious that I did love parts of it. Beverly Penn really livens the novel up, and I love the parts about the newsroom. I'm not shy about giving up on a book, but here there was just enough to keep me interested. For me, it really takes off around page 400, which is an odd thing to say about a book.

Sadly, though, it peters out a bit around page 600. A lot is set up for the ending, and I can't say that the resolution was all that satisfying. I closed the book thinking, "Huh?" What's worse is that by that point I wasn't really disappointed. At no point did I expect there to be an ending that made any sense, and yet I kept reading. I suppose that says something about Helprin's talents as a novelist. In some ways, I might have been disappointed if it did all make sense at the end. A logical ending to this would have seemed completely out of place.

Jody, who liked this novel enough to read it more than once, convinced me to read this, in part, I think, because she wanted to see if I understood what the hell it was all about. (Or maybe it was just revenge for telling her about one too many baseball books.) Well, damned if I know what Winter's Tale is about. If anyone out there would like to englighten me, well, I'd love to know.

This part has perhaps the most accurate chapter title I have ever seen. Chapter 17 is titled "Somebody Turns Up." I don't want to give away any plot spoilers here, but let's just say that Dickens doesn't disappoint at all. Indeed, somebody does turn up. It reminds me of Joseph Heller's Something Happened, another accurate title, although some could argue that not a whole lot really did happen in that book. But in chapter 17 fear not. Somebody definitely turns up.

This section feels like an ending, and it seems that a new book is about to begin. By the end of the last chapter, Copperfield is suddenly seventeen-years-old, which came as a bit of a surprise to me. When my father read this to me as a child, I think we only made it a few chapters into the book. I believe I read this as a teenager, but I don't really remember any of it. In fact, I may not have finished it. At any rate, I always thought that this was a novel of childhood, and so I'm a little excited that I'll get to read about a relatively adult David Copperfield.

This month, I learned that there is a movie version of the book coming out next year. I happen to know that Simon Pegg is in the movie, but I'm trying my best not to learn who else is in it. I don't want to end up seeing some actor in my head whenever I read about a character. I remember reading "All the King's Men" a few years back when the film version came out, and unfortunately Sean Penn was on the cover of my book. And so whenever Willie Stark was speaking, I kept imagining Sean Penn in the role. This was nothing if not annoying. I try my best to avoid Sean Penn movies, so I didn't really want to see him playing a role in my head too. I don't think Sean Penn is in the Copperfield movie, but I wouldn't put it past him.

During these six months, I've been reading this slowly as bedtime reading, and it's well-suited to that. That's how I read the Harry Potter books, and this is really the first book I've read since then that works as well as bedtime reading. I suppose that's fitting, considering that's how my father used the book.

In some ways, Rowling reminds me a little of Dickens. They both include many characters who border on caricature but are interesting nonetheless. And both the Potter novels and David Copperfield are easy books to jump into, even if only for a few pages at a time. With both, there are, of course, dangers that you'll get engrossed in the plot and stay up half the night reading. Luckily, I have the strict three-chapter-a-month limit to hold me back here, something I probably could have used back when I was reading Potter.

At any rate, I can't wait for next month, when I get to read Chapter 19: "I Look about Me and Make a Discovery." I bet there will be some serious looking about and discovery-making in that chapter!

This reminded me a little of Truman Capote's "Breakfast at Tiffany's" which I read recently. Both are set in New York and have fashionable, larger-than-life protagonists: Jay Gatsby and Holly Golightly. In fact, the two might have made a good couple.

And both are told from the perspective of outsiders. Actually, the narrators in both books remind me of each other as much as the main characters do. It occurs to me that it would be tough to write a book about The Great Gatsby if Gatsby were the narrator. You need an outsider to tell the story properly. Here, you have to wait 47 pages before Gatsby even shows up, and I admit that the book didn't really take off for me until he did appear. Perhaps, though, he wouldn't have been as compelling a character, if he had been there at the very beginning.

This is the second time I've read this book. The first was in high school English, in which the teacher (a different one from the one I mentioned in the Winesburg, Ohio post) talked a lot about Jay Gatsby representing America itself. I suppose that's possible, but the idea didn't really make me like the book all that much. I find I'm enjoying it a lot more now that I'm not particularly worried about who or what Jay Gatsby symbolizes.

This teacher was wonderful when teaching writing, but he tended to teach literature by drawing geometric shapes on the blackboard. I will always remember that "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" is nothing but a circle. I think "The Great Gatsby" may have been a circle too, but I can't quite remember. Personally, I prefer to read parabolas.

This is a classic, but for me it was a little uneven. There were sections I loved, sections that seemed like the finest writing ever. (The chapter about Gatsby's first party pops to mind.) Other times, I grew impatient and was tempted to skim. But Fitzgerald does capture a time and a place beautifully. Part of the problem may be that his time and place aren't always all that appealing.

One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World

This is getting a little strange. As part of my plan to read for an hour a day, I'm reading a book by a guy who is reading the entire encyclopedia for four hours a day. I think I'm becoming derivative. I wonder if anyone out there is reading my blog as part of a project to read blogs about books for fifteen minutes a day.

In some ways, this is sort of like reading a Cliff Notes version of the encyclopedia. As Jon Stewart jokes in the cover blurb, "I've always said, why doesn't someone put out a less complete version of the encyclopedia. Well done, A.J." In some ways, this is an easy read because of all the short sections. In other ways, it's a struggle, thanks to the constant parade of information.

Still, there is a story here. Along with all the facts (Did you know they have a braille version of Scrabble?) we do get to see Jacobs grow, as his knowledge, facts, and possibly even wisdom expand. Jacobs' various attempts to use his newfound knowledge -- at a Mensa conference, taking on the Columbia Debate Team, even interviewing Alex Trebek -- are entertaining. The book is also part memoir, as he delves into his relationship with his father and his wife's struggle to get pregnant. A lot can happen in a year when you're reading the encyclopedia. You can even make it on "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?"

I have a nagging problem with the book. It just seems like too much of a stunt. Part of me wonders whether Jacobs got the book deal before or after deciding to read the encyclopedia. He has a similar book about living biblically for a year. When did he get a book deal for that? There is this whole type of stunt non-fiction, this "I'm going to do this wacky thing and write about it for a year" genre. These stories are always presented as personal journeys. I enjoy them, but they often seem a bit artificial, as if the goal of the book was just to write a book.

But really does it even matter? Perhaps I'm being unfair. Jaocbs is an entertaining and funny writer. The book is chock full of quirky facts, which I enjoyed. And by the end, he does seem to have broadened his mind, which was his goal. Still, at times, it does feel a little too staged. I probably worry about this more than others, because I would like to write one of these stunt books myself someday -- only ideally mine wouldn't be just a stunt. For the most part, I think this book is more than a stunt, though sometimes I'm not entirely sure.

My Mother, Nancy Dickerson TV News' First Woman Star

John Dickerson is one of my favorite political reporters, meaning that I read all of his articles in Slate, listen to him on their weekly podcast, and am actually excited when he appears on "Washington Week in Review." Lest I seem too nerdy, I don't actually watch "Washington Week in Review." No, I listen to the podcast version. Okay, never mind, that makes me more nerdy.

This book is about his mother Nancy Dickerson, one of the first woman correspondents in TV news. After a few years as a producer, she became a correspondent for CBS News in 1960 and then worked for NBC News for most of the 1960's. I confess that I hadn't heard of her before. Admittedly, I wasn't alive when she was a star correspondent, though she was enough of a star that I'm surprised that I didn't know about her.

Her specialty was politics, and she was close to members of the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, sometimes a little too close. She was often criticized for having too close a relationship to Johnson especially, though this was mostly because Lyndon Baines Johnson seemed to have a crush on her. It doesn't seem that there was any romantic relationship between them, though not for lack of trying on LBJ's part. At one point, during the 1960 campaign, Johnson had a few drinks and wandered into her hotel room in his pajamas to proposition her. She politely turned him down, and so he stayed in her room and talked about politics instead. Somehow, the pajamas make this story slightly classier than otherwise.

Later, during his Vice-Presidency, he was in Sweden, and knew that Nancy Dickerson was in Vienna on vacation. He then had the White House operators track her down, so that he could invite her to dinner in Paris. Again, she politely turned him down, but it's an amazing story. Ah, those were the days. Now, I don't think the Vice-President could be flown from Sweden to Paris in order to meet an attractive reporter for dinner in Paris. I think there has to be another reason for an Official State Visit.

Of course, I'm making the same mistake that others did at the time, by focusing on only the gossip. She was a remarkably hard-working reporter, as her son makes clear. As you can imagine, she didn't always get much respect from her colleagues in the press, though she did have important backers like Edward R. Murrow and Eric Servareid. She was a solid reporter, though she also tended to rely a little too much on her social connections to aid her reporting.

Dickerson is a great writer and writes a book that is also about himself, in addition to being about his mother. Some might complain about this, but I think it's interesting when he explores their relationship. He wasn't at all close to his mother during his teen years and tended to think she was a bit of a phony at the time, though he grew closer to her in her later years. In all, he handles some occasionally difficult material with ease. You try writing about the fact that your mother dated JFK. (They only went on a few dates in the early 1950s before Jackie.)

I've been meaning to read this book for a long time, and I'm not sure what took me so long. It's by a writer whose work I enjoy. It's about TV news, and I'm always a sucker for books about TV news. And it contains all sorts of behind-the-scenes material about JFK. Throw in some baseball and a little time travel, and it would have been just perfect.

I first heard of Sherwood Anderson because of a high school English teacher who said that my writing style at the time was reminiscent of Anderson. I told this recently to a friend, and she responded, "Wow, he must have really liked your writing." The thing is, I don't think he did. My English teacher from the year before had given me A's on all my short stories, and then suddenly this guy started giving me C's, if I was lucky. Mr. Hughes was a genial man, but I don't think he particularly liked my writing. I suspect that he might not have liked Sherwood Anderson either. His suggestion seemed to be more of a "Well, your writing reminds me of this author who I really hate, so you might as well read his books" type of recommendation.

To me, Sherwood Anderson's stories feel like fables. They have a very simple style. In writing, you hear a lot about showing the reader events instead of telling the reader events, but Anderson is all about telling. For him, it works. I think my writing in high school was also all about telling instead of showing, and for me, it didn't always work quite so well.

This is a book with a town as the protagonist. It is really a collection of short stories all set in Winesburg. The newspaper reporter, George Willard, shows up in many of the stories, but you can't really call him the protagonist, even if his decision whether or not to leave Winesburg is a driving force behind the book. In fact, many of the people here are dreaming of leaving town. I was tempted to compare Winesburg to Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon, but the people of Winesburg don't seem nearly as happy. Most seem to be dreaming of different lives, hoping for a way to escape. They seem to like the small town, but they also want more.

This dreamy element is aided by Anderson's whimsical writing style, which I love. He'll often spend a few paragraphs on something that has little to do with the story. I know this because he usually tells us, like in this paragraph:

But this is not the story of Windpeter Winters nor yet of his son Hal who worked on the Willis farm with Ray Pearson. It is Ray's story. It will, however, be necessary to talk a little of young Hal so that you will get into the spirit of it.

Well, okay then.

I had forgotten about Sherwood Anderson until I found Winesburg, Ohio with some of my old books at my parent's house last year. I started to read it a few months ago, but it's such a strange, little book that it's tough to get into. I only made it about 20 pages in before I moved onto something else. This month, I decided to give him another try, and I'm glad I did.

All my life, I've been against the concept of assigned reading. If I don't want to read something, then I'm not going to read it. (That's why I don't like joining book clubs.) However, I've noticed that this plan to read one hour every day really does make one more patient with books. Instead of thinking, "Well, I'll give it a few pages," I find myself thinking, "Well, I'll give it an hour." An hour or two was enough for me to get into this book, and eventually for me to be sucked in. Just a few pages, though, wasn't going to do it.

One final note: Because of this book, I've decided that any novel I ever write will have a character index in the back. There are so many characters that wander in and out of this book that it's tough to keep track of them. I would have loved an index where I could have quickly found where Anderson first introduced them.