Slowly Going Bald

This is the third year I've kept tabs on what I read (here's 2009 and 2010). My number's down from last year, when I read 30 books; this year, I finished 22 and abandoned two at various stages. And that decrease becomes more stark when you realize that quite a few of my choices this year were graphic novels, which take much less time to read than traditional ones. I'm not totally sure why the number went down, or even if that's something I should be concerned about. I was always working on one book or another, and (typical for me) I'd start a new book immediately after I'd finished the one before. I think it's because I traveled more in 2011 than ever before (both for work and myself), and because I finished the year with Justin Cronin's The Passage, which runs 800 tightly scripted pages and is not a journey to be taken lightly. Yet I'm not doing this as a contest, and my goal isn't to set a new personal record every year (if only because I'd eventually have to stop working, eating, and sleeping to squeeze in more titles). I just like keeping the list because I enjoy watching patterns emerge in my reading habits, whether it's seeing recommendations from certain friends appear with more frequency or uncovering certain genre patterns. I sought out more humor writing in 2011 than ever before, and I also explored more memoirs and nonfiction. Picking a favorite is almost impossible, but for sheer emotional power and ambition, The Pale King was hard to beat.

Anyway, here's a chronological list of what I read in 2011. As always, suggestions for future reads are welcome.

The Somnambulist (2007), Jonathan Barnes
There's a ton of potential in Barnes' historical fantasy-thriller, including the pleasing device of having the reader experience time travel from the perspective of the characters who aren't traveling through time. (So our narrative moves forward as progressive meetings with the time traveler are earlier in his life.) But the final product was too cute by half, and suffered from some of the pacing and dialogue issues that trouble first novels. I finished it out of sheer commitment to the project.

And Here's the Kicker: Conversations With 21 Top Humor Writers on Their Craft (2009), ed. Mike Sacks
For a comedy nerd, this is a fantastic read. Sacks talks with a smart group of comedy writers to pick their brains about how they got into the industry and what they think is funny. The interviews are introduced with biographical chunks that are a little too cheesy, but the talks themselves are worth it.

Sleepwalk With Me: And Other Painfully True Stores (2010), Mike Birbiglia
Mike Birbiglia is a hilarious comic who's found success by shifting away from typical sets and telling longer narratives that weave in jokes; when I saw him a couple years ago, his show was nothing but a few stories drawn out to epic length. Those stories work wonderfully on the stage, but they don't translate that well to the page because Birbiglia commits the sin that many stand-ups do when they write a book: he assumes that a transcript of his act will work as a humorous essay. But humor written is far different from humor spoken and performed. What feels natural out loud reads as choppy and far too short, meaning much of Sleepwalk With Me reads like half-formed pieces. There are some good punch lines in here, but you're better off hearing them than reading them.

The Likeness (2008), Tana French
I really dug In the Woods, French's first novel, and The Likeness is just as good. It's not a sequel exactly, but a sequential novel involving a supporting character from the first book and now told from that character's point of view. It's a solid device that lets French poke around in whole new personalities while keeping the story rooted in the world readers have come to enjoy. Great literary mystery.

I Found This Funny: My Favorite Pieces of Humor and Some That May Not Be Funny At All (2010), ed. Judd Apatow
The title doesn't lie: some of these stories are bitter, weird, and intentionally off-putting, while others are plain anti-humor, anti-drama, and anti-enjoyable. Still, there are some highlights, including Paul Feig's piece about his brief flirtation with sports announcing (imported from Feig's Kick Me) and Conan O'Brien's "Lookwell" pilot. Some of the dramatic pieces are good, too, but overall the collection is pretty hodgepodge.

The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop (2010), Dan Charnas
Dan Charnas used to be a talent scout for Profile Records and later the head of the rap division for American Recordings, meaning he had a front-row seat to the rise and bloat of hip-hop as a cultural force. His book is a dense but readable history of hip-hop from a business perspective, charting the path the music took from blowing out New York basements to dominating pop culture worldwide. Great read.

Kick Me: Adventures in Adolescence (2002), Paul Feig
Now this is humor writing. Feig has worked on a number of TV series and films (he directed Bridesmaids), but it's his role as creator of "Freaks and Geeks" that earned him a place in TV history. His personal essays about growing up as a weird, repressed little geek are heartbreaking but hilarious, and anyone who's seen "Freaks" will recognize many, many story lines in Feig's own childhood. A fantastic memoir.

In which I wrestle with the divide between books and the movies they inspire.

Reading by the Light of the Screen: Thoughts on Adaptations

I read 30 books this year, which is a pretty satisfying number for a man with several jobs and the various commitments that come with being newly married. I started and quit on three more, and though I get into the specifics on those below, the bottom line is that life is far too short to waste it reading bad books. Books require a time commitment unmatched by other media, so while I'll usually push through a film to see if it can redeem itself, there's a world of difference between losing two hours and forfeiting two to three weeks. It's remarkably liberating to live like this, too. I'll die not having read a tenth of the books I want to read or should read, so spending extra seconds with bad ones is foolishness.

Here's a chronological list of what I read this year (based on order read, not publication date), with more after the jump. As always, I'm open to suggestions about what to read next.

The Disappointment Artist (2005), Jonathan Lethem
A solid collection of essays and reflections, if not quite as good as his earlier Men and Cartoons.

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (2006) (unfinished), Max Brooks
Brooks takes the Studs Terkel approach and creates an account of a zombie war told through the eyes of those who survived it. It's a neat idea, but it starts to fall apart after a while. For one, the people all talk in a kind of melodramatic prose that might've been more acceptable as narration, not dialogue. The book's also too long, and the fragmented narrative never really builds momentum. I quit reading when the choppiness of the presentation and lack of a propulsive story became too much. (Not to mention Brooks' melodramatic prose, which reads like hundreds of pages of jacket copy.)

Eating the Dinosaur (2009), Chuck Klosterman
Klosterman's one of the best pop culture writers out there, and his latest essay deals in fewer absolutes than earlier collections. He's more willing to explore causes and effects than finding support for impossible arguments, and the resulting work makes him feel more human.

Chronic City (2009), Jonathan Lethem
Lethem's a deceptively good writer. Much of Chronic City is told in first person through the eyes of Chase Insteadman, and I made the mistake of conflating the character's insubstantiality with Lethem's skill as a storyteller. Late in the book, when the action shifts briefly to a different viewpoint, Lethem's own style came roaring back, and I realized just how much work had gone into crafting an entirely different feel for his narrator. The story's a classic Lethem mix of pop culture and surreal fantasy, and definitely worth checking out.

Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip into the Life, Work, and Mind of David Foster Wallace (2010), David Lipsky
A friend of mine slipped me a review copy before this hit shelves, and I devoured it. Wallace is probably my favorite author, and I was so saddened when he committed suicide in 2008. Lipsky's book is one long transcript of his time interviewing Wallace over the course of several days at the end of the book tour Wallace undertook in 1996 to support Infinite Jest. The men talk about fiction, emotion, stories, love, family, music, everything. It's a fantastic volume because it captures the immediacy of the long talks that animate road trips, as well as the mundane details that come with schlepping across the country in an old sedan. Wallace speaks in the same rambling, aspirational style that marked his prose, and reading this book was like getting him back, if only for a few days.

Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood (2008), Mark Harris
One of the best books about Hollywood, period, as well as a fantastic examination of the way films affect culture and vice versa. Harris tracks the five films that contended for the best picture Oscar in the spring of 1968 from their inception through the awards and aftermath, and his copious research is supported by dozens of personal interviews. A fantastic look at the relationships and economics that drive art.

From M.T. Anderson's YA novel about a future in which commerce and relationships are driven by a chip in everyone's brain. It's a quick, sharp read, full of dark humor and incisive observation about the ease with which culture erodes:

Marty had also gotten a Nike speech tattoo, which was pretty brag. It meant that every sentence, he automatically said "Nike." He paid a lot for it. It was hilarious, because you could hardly understand what he said anymore. It was just, "This fuckin' shit Nike, fuckin', you know, Nike," etc.

Everything was not always going well, because for most people, our hair fell out and we were bald, and we had less and less skin. Then later there was this thing that hit hipsters. People were just stopping in their tracks frozen. At first, people thought it was another virus, and they were looking for groups like the Coalition of Pity, but it turned out that it was something called Nostalgia Feedback. People had been getting nostalgia for fashions that were closer and closer to their own time, until finally people became nostalgic for the moment they were actually living in, and the feedback completely froze them. It happened to Calista and Loga. We were real worried about them for a day or so. We knew they'd be all right, but still, you know. Marty was like, "Holy fuckin' shit, this is so Nike fucked."

I love reading, and I don't get to do it nearly as often as I'd like. (Between a full-time job and three freelancing gigs, I tend to run out of free time if I don't plan well.) Just putting this meager list together made me regret how much I didn't get done in 2009, and it strengthened my resolve to read more books in 2010 and beyond. In fact, if I hadn't been unemployed for a certain part of the year, I would've read even less. That's criminal.

Anyway, here's what I read this year. I omitted a couple minor titles I reread to kill time as I was boxing up my stuff and preparing to move from California to Texas, since I was only picking out excerpts from certain well-loved books (e.g., "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" from David Foster Wallace's collection of the same name, a hilarious and wonderful essay I could read every month). But I have included a couple of titles that I reread in full, and noted them accordingly. So with all that said, here's what I managed to read in 2009:

How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken (2008), Daniel Mendelsohn
This was one of those purely lucky finds. I was browsing through nonfiction when I came across this collection of essays and criticisms from Mendelsohn that have appeared in the New York Review of Books. He filters most of his criticism through a classical lens, analyzing modern takes on Greek myths and asking important questions about art, film, and theater. His essay on United 93, titled "September 11 at the Movies," is flat-out fantastic.

Black Hole (2005), Charles Burns
A wonderful graphic novel, collected from individual issues that were published over a decade. It uses the premise of a disease ("the bug") that inflicts victims with weird mutations as an examination of youth, longing, and the great and terrible things that are impossible to explain. Burns is amazing at telling a whole story by only showing small parts of it.

The Yiddish Policemen's Union (2007), Michael Chabon
Chabon is great at creating parallel universes, and this is no exception. It's a mystery set in a world with an alternate history in which a Jewish refugee camp was established in Alaska during World War II, and the story takes place in present day. Not his best work, but still worth reading.

Ender's Game (1985) (reread), Orson Scott Card
I grabbed this off the shelf in a fit of nostalgia in the spring. I read the same battered copy I've had for years, which I bought in the third grade at the school's book fair. It held up pretty well, and is still a fun and entertaining sci-fi story.

Speaker for the Dead (1986), Orson Scott Card
Almost daringly awful. Card's follow-up to Ender's Game was the first of several sequels and spin-offs set in the story's universe, but it's horribly plotted and choked throughout with unbelievably terrible dialogue. Halfway through, I found myself skimming, hoping things would get better but knowing that they probably wouldn't.

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000) (reread), Dave Eggers
I hadn't reread this since the first time I read it, in the summer of 2003. It was inspirational then, coming along at a time when I was just starting to convince myself I could eventually be a writer, and the story's just as moving now.

A People's History of the United States (2003 edition), Howard Zinn
Zinn's examination of American society is a powerful one. He delves into some of the lesser known moments of the past couple centuries, and makes a compelling and believable case that the country has been built on a pattern of degradation and manipulation.

The Time Traveler's Wife (2003), Audrey Niffenegger
I picked up the sci-fi romance in anticipation of seeing the movie, and though I never got around to the film, I enjoyed the book more than I thought I would. It's an interesting concept — boy meets girl, boy is unstuck in time, tragedy ensues — and Niffenegger pulls it off pretty well.

Consider the Lobster (2005) (reread), David Foster Wallace
Wallace is my favorite author, and I can always pull down his books and dip back into the fiction and essays with ease. This was his last collection of essays published before his suicide in 2008, an event that still breaks my heart to think about. The book is thoughtful, probing, funny, and committed to examining all the truth underneath everything.

The Swap (2007), Antony Moore
A solid little story that feels a little bloated as a small novel but still packs a punch when it wants to. Fun mystery, good jokes, and killer ending.

City of Thieves (2008), David Benioff
Benioff's phenomenal second novel is a moving, engaging story about war and love, and the worthwhile risks of friendship. I devoured it.

Columbine (2009), Dave Cullen
Cullen's exhaustively researched book is awesome for the way it meticulously re-creates the prelude, shooting, and aftermath of what would be the deadliest school shooting until the horror at Virginia Tech in 2007. Cullen reconstructs the 1999 killings and lays out a decade's worth of research, though much of what he knows was established just months after the event in the reporting he did for Salon. For a member of the generation directly affected by the shootings at Columbine High — I was 16 and finishing up my junior year — it's a powerful reminder of what it was like to watch it happen. It's a gripping book.

Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned (2009), Wells Tower
Good grief, did I hate myself while reading this. Sure, Tower ties the group of bitter and unfriendly stories together on the last page of the last story, but I don't agree with his conclusions and I barely survived the journey to get there.

Zeitoun (2009), Dave Eggers
Eggers' nonfiction narrative about the persecution of a Syrian-American man in the days following Hurricane Katrina is gut-wrenching in its detail and jaw-dropping in the way he lays out the atrocities and incompetencies inflicted on a man by a paranoid government that placed a higher premium on caging its citizens than on helping its wounded. It deserves to be read.

Blackwater (2007), Jeremy Scahill
Scahill's indictment of Blackwater USA (now Xe Services LLC) is a worthy one, though he occasionally slips into a pissy and partisan rhetoric that dilutes the power of the facts at his disposal. Private contractors working for Blackwater in Iraq did some bad things during the war, and when Scahill focuses on the truth of these violations of justice and ethics, his book is a damning document that recounts the lengths people can go to when responsibility is no longer an issue.

It's the worst nightmare I've ever had. I say that because though it's possible that since then I've had dreams more legitimately frightening — sometimes my subconscious really lets loose — this is the one that's stuck with me.

I was 11 years old, and had borrowed Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark from the school library. Although I was only in 6th grade, I was a pretty advanced reader with a hyperactive imagination; I had read Tolkien in elementary school and would curiously pluck Stephen King's It from the racks at the public library a year later. On top of that, the Scary Stories books were extremely popular among kids my age, taking root in the kind of groupthink that can sweep through schools and create weird sub-universes throughout the city. (There was also a hardcover Encyclopedia of Dogs that was weirdly but powerfully beloved by the student body, so much so that the librarian classified it as a reference book and wouldn't lend it out.)

Anyway: The stories are moderately creepy, especially if you're in middle school, but the real killer is the artwork accompanying them, these disturbing and haunting images done in some combination of ink and watercolor and pure unfiltered terror. One image shocked me more than any other, and I'm not quite sure I remember correctly which story it accompanied, but it scared me. It was a woman with no face, just a worn skull and stringy hair, and jagged black holes where her eyes should have been. I hated it on a deep level I could barely define. That's what caused the nightmare.

In the nightmare, I was reading the book in my English class and came across the disturbing art, so I walked up to my teacher's desk to show it to her and complain about how frightening it was. "But why?" she asked. "We're all like that, Daniel." And I saw that her face had become the dead woman's, limp hair plastered to a gleaming skull. I looked around the room, and the rest of the students had turned into the same stark horror. I couldn't escape.

That's when I woke up.

I searched for that image online and found it right away; I've attached it below the fold for the morbidly curious, but I can barely look at it. I squinted or shielded part of the screen when downloading and then uploading the picture. If I'd just come to the image now, I'd find it unsettling, but because it's so inextricably tied to a childhood memory of pure fright, I can't look at it without beginning to breathe heavily and feel the slow creep of fear, like I'm still 11. I guess that's the point, in a way.

Craig Thompson's Blankets is almost frustratingly good, a sharp, brutal, heartbreaking story about growing and falling in love and learning your place in a world whose joys and cruelties you are only beginning to understand. Over the course of 600 black and white pages, Thompson lays himself completely bare, working through an autobiography that touches on everything from sexual abuse, fundamentalist dogma, and the kind of heartache borne of the obsessive love practiced by broken youth.

One of the many glories of the book is the way Thompson masterfully mixes art and dialogue to maximize emotional impact and achieve something that would not be possible in either a filmed or pictureless medium. The words skate across the page, blasting in jagged edges when the boy Craig is admonished by his father, or curling through snowflakes and archangels when the teenage Craig begins to fall in desperate love for the very first time. Thompson's graphic novel is just that: A prime example of what the medium can be, and the way it can lay you low.

The author shuttles back and forth between childhood and adolescence but traces a narrative that spends most of its time in high school, when Craig comes to grips with the extreme Christianity in which he was raised and realizes that the world is a more complicated place than Sunday school would have him believe. Thompson's exploration of this theme is never cliche or trite or easy, and the details of his struggle to unite his faith and humanity are honest and sad and sweet and full of the kinds of revelations perhaps only those who grew up that way will understand. The book isn't cruel toward the misguided people whose zealotry perverted the gospel; if anything, it's a yearning look at what it means to really believe. Thompson's story is a beautiful, intelligent, and engaging one about what it means to fall in love and get a little older and discover that, scars aside, you'll come out the other side. It's shattering, uplifting, and unforgettable.

_{(Photo by Steve Rhodes via Flickr)}

David Foster Wallace killed himself over the weekend, and I'm still figuring out how to process it.

I spent the summer after I graduated college reading Infinite Jest, which is really the only way to read it. I turned 22 that summer, and spent my days waiting tables at a steakhouse for cowboys who tipped poorly, most likely out of resentment that fate had given me them instead of the blond in the denim skirt. But with everyone I knew having moved away and my own departure for sunny Southern California still a couple months off, I had little else to do with myself than plow through David Foster Wallace's massive, sprawling, gorgeous book.

I loved everything about it. The story burned itself into my central nervous system as few had before or ever will. If a great film is one that keeps playing in your head long after the lights have come up, then surely a great book is one whose characters and situations never stop resonating and whose worldviews become tied into your own. I still see Joelle Van Dyne, and Hal Incandenza, and Bimmy. I still see them. The book was huge, and dense, and footnoted to a ridiculous degree with an appended section of everything from clarifications to conversations to whole flashbacks. Reading it was finding something new and wonderful.

And that was what made me fall in love with Wallace's writing. More than just enjoying his short stories, novels, and narrative nonfiction, I can usually remember where I was or what was going on in my life the first time I read a given book of his. (E.g., I remember reading A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again when I went home for my sister's college graduation, and also trying to bite my tongue in the airport while reading "Getting Away From Already Being Pretty Much Away From It All," a piece about Wallace's trip to the Illinois State Fair that made me convulse with quiet laughter so much that people actually looked at me funny.)

His stuff was sharp, and big, and he felt like mine, you know? Films are communal things by virtue of the nature of their consumption, but a book is a private thing, and no two people will read something or take it to heart the same way. "Big Red Son" is a glorious essay, and "Authority and American Usage" rubbed the grammar nerd in me in all the right ways. Wallace was fiendishly smart, and he used that intellect both to strive for a higher quality of writing and to joyfully break the rules when he wanted to. I know Wallace was lauded for his ambition and skill and genius, all of it deserved, but while on one level I mourn the loss of a great author, on another I'm brokenhearted that that part of me will never get anything new. Rereading his books now will bring with the act a sense of sadness and regret that the words I'm reading are part of a finite supply.

Wallace's books are complicated and challenging affairs, but they're also rewarding: You're ushered into a world so thoroughly realized and so painfully real that the story becomes more meaningful than you'd have guessed. Infinite Jest (and The Broom of the System, and others) builds toward a frantic ending that stops short of where a more conventional narrative would end, but to have gone on longer would have been to serve character over the need to create a certain style and kind and way of story. I can't help but reel at the sad parallel between Wallace's life and that kind of tragic pre-ending some of his stories offered, but I can't help but smile weakly at the way it all came out. I will miss this man and his works, but damn if he didn't change my life.

Here are a few links I've found. They offer a fractioned glimpse at the man's style and thoughts, but for newcomers, I'd recommend Consider the Lobster and A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. And of course, Infinite Jest. It's worth the time.

• Profile of Roger Federer
• "Host"
• "Consider the Lobster"
• "Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley"
• "Certainly the End of Something or Other, One Would Sort of Have to Think"
• "Authority and American Usage"
• Some of the above can be found in this round-up of pieces Wallace wrote for Harper's, available as PDFs.
• "David Lynch Keeps His Head"
• "F/X Porn"

UPDATE:
• There's also John's wonderful appreciation of DFW.
• Additionally, KCRW's Bookworm has added a pair of DFW programs to its archive and will be doing one in memoriam that will undoubtedly find its way there before long. The first is from May 1997, the second is from August 1999.

I'm looking for a good used book store. I had my pick of them in major Texas cities, but I'm having a tougher time finding them out here, and when I do come across one it's usually overpriced and really just there to sell antique coffee table books that Westsiders buy so they can beat off over them and think about how cool they are.

So I need help. I'm looking for places to buy used books. It doesn't matter how big the store is, I just want it to be a good one. I used to live in Glendale, and remember going to a couple places down on either Central or Brand (it's been a few years). I also try and swing by the Iliad when I can, though its Cahuenga store can't live up to its old Vineland digs. Also, I live in Sherman Oaks, so it'd be nice to hear of some places in my corner of the Valley or in Hollywood/West Hollywood, since that's where I work, but I'm willing to make a longer journey if the place is worth it.

OK. Help me out.

I love it when Amazon's brain gets fried and suggests things based on misinterpretations, misspellings, and homophones.

Over at Pajiba, I've got a review of Things I've Learned From Women Who've Dumped Me, an essay collection that's definitely worth picking up.

Things are now up and running over at Titlepage, a site dedicated to "passionate conversations about books." Just going there will make you smarter, and once you're there you can sign up to receive updates about the show. There's also Loud, Please, the site's blog. Really, you should stop reading this and go check it out already.

Stephen King's latest, Duma Key, is one big steaming pile of letdown.

Click here for the review.

interesting
mysterious
maybe a little pretentious
intelligent
slower
slower
slow
she should've hired a more aggressive editor
slow
slow
boring
damn it what's with the similes
quicker now
intriguing
better
really good
really good
well done
back to slow
still a little slow
okay, back to good
finally good, just took an inexcusably long time to get there

I know I'm slightly late with this, and that in the 24 hours since it's gone up the original post has received something like ~400 comments, which is insane/amazing, but over at Pajiba we're taking votes on your favorite novels of the past 15 years. Why the past 15 years? Because it's our game, and those are the rules. The goal is to come up with a list of 5-6 books people would most like to see discussed on the site, meaning we'll actually have to read them and then talk about them, so try not assign us anything too horrible. It's tough to limit myself to five, but the timeliness factor helped a little. Here's what I came up with:

1. Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace
2. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Michael Chabon
3. Everything Is Illuminated, Jonathan Safran Foer
4. The Memory of Running, Ron McLarty
5. The Fortress of Solitude, Jonathan Lethem

I know, I'm like a giant walking stereotype of modern twentysomething reading habits. Anyway, we're taking votes for the rest of the week, so feel free to post your own list. I think the results, once tallied, will be pretty interesting.