Lillinandra
copyright 2005 by Soren Narnia
In kindergarten our teacher
would read to us as we sat around her in a semi-circle. She would hold the book
on her lap, speak the text on each page, and then turn the book around to show
us the pictures. I glanced at them briefly, but I was more compelled by the
visual image of the small block of words she had just read, the way the lines
from a distance seemed so neat and
even, and how I could predict how large or small that block would appear based
on how long our teacher had spoken. If two people or animals in the story spoke
to each other, the perfect block would be broken somewhat by something I didn't
know then was called indentation. I liked it best when the block of lines was
big and perfectly square. And when only one or two straight lines of text
appeared on the page, I felt cheated somehow.
There was this pretty funny book I was reading in study
hall. It was pretty good. It was about this bunch of aliens that come down to
Earth one day and they're super-advanced technologically. They come in peace and
say, "Everyone come aboard our giant ship and take a look around at the
marvelous wonders we've invented and whatnot." So people go on and take a look
and their eyes bug out because these aliens have invented everything there's
left to invent, seriously. They have machines and gadgets that can do everything
and their ship travels at about four million miles an hour or some ridiculous
number like that. After everybody's seen the ship the aliens keep hanging
around, just not doing a whole lot, and after a while people are like, "Um, why
are they still here?" They actually get kind of annoying after a while, and
people start to notice that they don't talk very well, they're not so good at
doing really simple things, and whenever we Earth people try to explain anything
to them they zone out and fall asleep. Then this one Harvard guy does all these
calculations and figures out that since the aliens have been around for billions
more years than Earthlings have, it's no surprise that they've invented all this
great stuff. The Harvard guy says that actually, they should be way, way beyond
the technology they already have, and that they're really pretty damn stupid, to
tell the truth. Just dumb as rocks. So the President has them all wiped out and
then we take their ship and start figuring out all that technology, but the
whole ship is made so badly we don't learn much of anything. That's how it all
starts. I'm about fifty pages in. I'll read the rest of it next study
hall.
·
We were nosing through this
used bookstore on
·
I read one about a guy who's trying to get over a drug
addiction and he's looking for any kind of job, anything. He sees on a bulletin
board in the library that someone needs a security guard on his farm, and the
pay is pretty good, so he gives the dude a call and goes out for an interview.
The farm is way out in the middle of nowhere, and it's not even a working farm.
The man who owns it is a software engineer who just liked it so he moved in, and
all he wants is someone to wander around the two hundred acres or so all day and
keep dogs and kids out of the place, because he has kind of a phobia about
people being on the property. He knows it's weird, but that's the way he is. So
the recovering drug addict says Sure, I'll do it, and he starts the easiest job
in the world, which is wandering the two hundred acres all day. He never sees
anybody on the property, either. Never. So he assumes the guy is just nuts, but
he'll gladly take his money to get lots of exercise and drift around this great
piece of property with its huge fields and stretches of woods and such. Then for
a good forty pages it's just this guy's thoughts as he roams and slowly
rehabilitates himself, muses about his life and how he got here, and is slowly
beating the drug addiction thanks in large part to the peace he finds on that
farm. I was okay with that kind of story, I believed
it.
There's some
weirdness after about two weeks on the job, though. The guard starts to think
he's going nuts because there are things on the landscape that he doesn't
remember seeing before, just trees and little slopes, that sort of thing. He
thinks they've moved somehow. Then he decides to go over a hill on the border of
the property to see what's on the other side, and it's a field that just goes on
and on and on into the distance, perfectly level, not even any bumps, and it's
lined with perfect rows of trees on either side. The guard walks and walks and
it never changes. When he looks down, the grass seems too perfect. Finally he
stops and goes back, not knowing what to think. The next day, he goes back to
the field and veers off into the woods. The trees are perfectly spaced, and they
just seem flawless. Through the trees there's a perfectly round lake, and beyond
that a hill that goes up and then slopes down, then goes up and slopes down
again, ten or fifteen little slopes, a complete freak of
nature.
Can you figure
out what's going on? Yeah, it's not real. The original property is real, but the
rest is a virtual reality thing the guy who owns the property is creating and
re-creating, and he's hired the guard because he wants someone to unwittingly
drift around the property so he can see what effect a human presence will have
on it all. He's tricking this poor guard and he doesn't tell him what's going on
because he frankly doesn't know what will happen if the guard explores too much
or in the wrong place at the wrong time. He watches the guard through a roving
camera and realizes that he must know something really bizarre has happened. He
didn't expect the guard to roam out so far so soon. Before the guard returns and
tells the engineer about what he's seen, the guard becomes trapped in the big
field. He keeps walking but it keeps scrolling because there's an unexpected bug
in the program. So the engineer has to fix it, and he loses sight of the guard
and night comes, then dawn....it takes the engineer two weeks to fix the bug,
two weeks of twenty hour days because he's afraid the guard will die, he can't
see him or hear him anymore. When it's all ironed out, the guard is just plain
gone.
Then you have the
big twist ending which I wasn't crazy about, because it turns out that the
engineer himself is part of a game that someone else is playing, a complicated
video game called Loss Prevention, where the goal is to keep creating a virtual
reality atmosphere that a hired guard won't suspect is fake. The man playing the
game is screwing up, he's not good enough, and the guard is catching on, and
finally he loses him entirely in the fake part of the farm. I guess it's
supposed to be a story about how reality is individual to every person or blah
blah blah. It really was better when it was just dealing with the drug addict's
thoughts about his life. I give it two and a half
stars.
·
I met a girl at this goth club a couple of weeks ago and
she told me I had to read this book, so I bought it, it's just a little
paperback. Oh man, let me tell you. This book will mess you up so bad. All I can
say is, don't read it in public. Don't read it with anyone around at
all.
The plot is, this
guy wins a contest that a local radio station puts on, and they'll give him five
hundred dollars if he spends the night in a supposedly haunted house out in the
country somewhere. He just has to call the station every couple of hours that
night with live reports that go over the air. The whole thing's a joke, but he
wants that five hundred so he drives alone one night to the house, which people
call the Sex House because of its history. Twenty years before, a writer and his
painter wife lived there, and they were total perverts. They had threesomes,
they had orgies, they invited people off the street over for sex parties, they
got arrested two or three times for having sex in public. Absolutely crazy,
these people. Then one day they were found dead in their bed, both of them naked
and done up on drugs, and the rumor got out that basically they screwed each
other to death, just kept doing it until the guy died of cardiac arrest—he was
only about thirty—and then the woman just fell over dead right after that. The
house and the property it was on stayed abandoned after that, so of course the
myth started that their ghosts haunted the house. The guy that wins the contest,
Powell, shows up and the place is totally decrepit and burnt out with all the
windows broken and trash everywhere. It's down at the end of a long dirt road,
totally cut off. He gets the creeps pretty fast but he goes in with a
battery-operated TV (no electricity in the house) and sits on the ripped-up
floor (no furniture anymore either) and calls the station from his cell phone to
check in, then just waits for the time to pass. It starts to rain and the
atmosphere of the house creeps into him. It's described pretty well. So at this
point I think the book is just a cool haunted house story, because the back
cover doesn't say much otherwise. Well, wait and see. Powell's girlfriend calls
him and she tells him she's on her way over to the house to keep him company. He
tells her to stay away, that it's against the rules, it's too far, plus it's
started to really rain hard, but this girl is kind of nuts, she's a perv and she
wants to do it in the house. Plus, she says, she just finished reading a book
about the house and she has some spooky stories about it, things Powell didn't
realize had happened there. He doesn't want to hear them, he's mad at her and he
tells her to stay home but to change his mind she starts telling him what she
did that day. And what she does is tell him about this stuff she was doing in
the shower to herself, and suddenly she's got him involved in some really hot
phone sex. And it's as graphic as you could ever want. My eyes almost fell out
of my head. Needless to say, this Powell guy's defenses get broken down real
quick as she's talking to him, saying these amazingly filthy things, and not
only does he forget about warning her away from the house, but he starts getting
the urge to....you know. What he does as she's going on and on with this fantasy
she has, is go up the rickety stairs to the bedroom where the writer and his
girlfriend were found. And in there is their original bed, still there, nasty
and bug-ridden but intact. So because there's nowhere else to lie down, he lies
down right there as he's having phone sex and starts to....yeah. He feels really
weird about it but he does it anyway. And after he's finished talking to the
girl, to Amy, he gets up and gets the hell out of there.
Well, at that
point I knew I had a very interesting book indeed. From there, it only gets
better. Powell's sitting in the dark and noticing how the house seems more
rotted away than even twenty years should have done when there's a knock at the
door. He opens it, and there's a woman there, a gorgeous woman, long black hair,
the whole deal. She says she's from down the road and she saw a car and was
curious and a little worried because people came to the house sometimes and
messed with it. Powell explains to her what the deal is and she laughs and says,
Well, if you get attacked by ghosts, I live nearby, just scream. And she leaves
after telling him she'll listen to the radio station to hear him give his
reports. On her way back to her car she gives him this little look....he thinks
it's almost a leer, because there was some flirting going on. He's turned on
like you wouldn't believe. The woman is hot, no question about it, a little
older than he is, very sophisticated. But she goes. During Powell's second call
to the station, the deejay asks him if he's seen anything eerie, and he says
Well, no, but I did have a visitor, and he finds himself telling the deejay
about how hot the woman was—because he knows she's listening now, see, and he's
thinking maybe, just maybe....the thing is, he's not usually a dog like that,
but he thinks the vibe inside the house is doing something to him. The place is
disgusting and scary but he can't stop thinking about
sex.
Meanwhile, his
girlfriend, Amy, is still driving along through the countryside toward the
house, and she swerves in the rain to avoid hitting a deer and she gets two flat
tires when she goes off the road. The very first car that comes along stops to
help her. The guy that gets out of the car is the best-looking guy she's ever
seen. Instantly she's thinking about doing him. That's the kind of chick she is.
Smart, but always looking for some action. He tells her he'll drive her up the
road to wherever she's going because he's got nothing else to do. She says okay,
and they start out for the house, and she figures she'll call for a tow with
Powell's phone when they get there in about twenty minutes or so. They talk a
little, totally flirting.
Now it's about
Back on the road,
meanwhile, Amy realizes that the hot guy who's driving her to the house is
completely into her deal, and they start trading some really suggestive
comments. They're maybe five miles from the house when she considers just
telling him to pull over and take her. There's one sentence in there that makes
you think, though, that there's something up with this guy. Something about his
eyes and one little thing he says to her, and also the fact that he seems to
know exactly where the house is without having to be told. Amy doesn't even
notice.
While that stuff
is going on, Powell calls the university woman as she's ten, fifteen miles away
and he tells her he's sorry that he lied a bit when he told her he wasn't
worried at all about the house. He tells her about the woman who came to check
up on him, and he tells the researcher that since that first woman left, he's
had an almost uncontrollable urge to have sex. The researcher asks him to tell
her more, and he decides to get kind of explicit. And he does this just to mess
with her head. It's like having phone sex with this woman. He tells her he can't
control his thoughts suddenly, and that while they were just standing there
talking fifteen minutes before, he couldn't stop himself from becoming totally
aroused, and he kept having unwelcome visual flashes of the two of them doing it
on the bed upstairs. Powell keeps saying how sorry he is to be so graphic, but
he's freaked out. He even throws in something about how he wanted to do her in
these violent ways that he had never even dreamed of before. And of course it's
half a lie, he just wants a sexual thrill from talking this way to her and
seeing how she responds. Of course she's still really icy, and at one point he
goes too far, he says something really nasty, and she hangs up on him. But he
loved it, drawing her into this conversation about how some invisible force was
making him want to do all this stuff to her. But then he realizes that it really
was only half a lie, that some of those thoughts, as disturbing as they were,
did really come to him. He had imagined himself basically raping this woman and
she loving it and screaming and when it was over throwing her out into the rain.
The house is obviously inside him somehow now, and he suspects it and wants to
go home, but he has to wait for Amy. He figures if she's here he'll be all right
and as soon as he makes that last phone call to the station they can get the
hell out of there.
Well, Amy and the
guy who picked her up do get to the house, but she tells him to stop halfway up
the long dirt road, which they can barely even see because of the rain. She
makes her move on this guy, figuring it's now or never, and he responds to it.
So there they are, making out, getting more and more into it just a couple of
hundred yards away from where Powell is, out of sight, blocked by the trees.
As it's getting
really intense with them in the car, Powell gets one last visit. It's that first
woman who visited him. She's come back. She doesn't even knock this time. She
comes right in. She thought he might be bored so she brought over some wine.
That's pretty much all it takes for Powell to start obsessing over having sex
with her. Plus she's changed her clothes and she's wearing these tight pants and
a revealing shirt. They exchange a few words and she tells him her name, and
when Powell hears it he has this horrible shiver run down his back, because he
thinks—he can't be totally sure—that it's the same name as the painter who died
in the house. His mind is in such a state, he can't remember, so he asks the
woman if it's true, and she says she doesn't know what that woman's name was.
He's staring at her, she's a little wet from the rain, drinking this glass of
wine, and eventually she shocks him half to death by telling him she's always
wanted to seduce someone in this house. The book cuts from her saying that right
to the car where Amy and her new friend have started to do it, they're having
sex, and it's so intense that after going at it in the back seat the guy pulls
her out of the car and takes her into the rain and they rip each other's clothes
off and start doing it in the grass where Powell could probably see them if he
looked out. Amy doesn't care, she's having the best sex she's ever had, totally
animalistic, and it goes on and on, five pages, six pages, God knows how long.
The guy gets rougher and rougher with her. Doesn't matter to Amy. She digs it.
She's naked, getting rolled around in the rain and the grass like a crazy
person, until in the end the guy actually hits her, once, in the face, which
shocks her bad and sort of snaps her out of it. The guy on top of her looks
totally possessed by something and not even able to control himself. Inside the
house, the woman's taken Powell upstairs into the bedroom, which seems twice as
creepy and filthy as it was before. He's ready to go, he doesn't care that Amy
is due to arrive at any minute, doesn't care that he missed his next phone call
to the radio station. He thinks he'll die if he doesn't have sex with this
amazing woman. But then she starts saying things. Things about the writer and
the painter who died, how what she'd really like is to be them and have sex like
they did, and she talks about the fantasy she's had since she read about them a
long time ago, and it seems to Powell that she has way too many exact details
about what their lives were like, she might be nuts, but she's got him half
undressed and she's walking around the bed real seductively while he lies on top
of it, and then out of nowhere she starts talking to him as if he's really the
dead writer and she's really the dead painter. She's saying the things she wants
done to her tonight, and she gets such a scary look in her eyes that Powell
believes it all suddenly, he believes this woman is a ghost, and that she's a
murderer. And he's paralyzed, he wants to get away but his lust is so extreme he
just lies there, wanting it. He's completely suspended his concern for his life
out of overwhelming lust. The thing is, as you're reading this, if you're a guy,
you've suspended it too because it's so intense, the desire for this woman. And
what the book does is make you feel so helpless by this point that you realize
how weak you are, how you might gamble with your life too if you were put into
that spot. You see that you may think you're a logical human male, but in the
end, you'll do anything, risk anything, for an experience with a woman that
seductive. So Powell loses it and pulls her down to him and the sex starts,
absolutely the most phenomenally described sex scene ever, but while it's
happening there's also stuff about the graffiti on the walls someone left and
the filth encrusted on the windows and the spiders in the corner and how Powell
thinks this could be the end of his very life. It could be that this woman is
just sick, that she has this dark fantasy of being that painter woman, or that
she's really a ghost, it's impossible to tell.
All the sex
eventually ends. Amy out there in the grass is wiped out, and so is Powell.
They're nothing more than bodies drained of everything. They both sort of pass
out, and when they wake up their
lovers are gone. Amy is lying totally naked in the rain, and she gets up and
just kind of wanders up to the house. The fact that the guy vanished makes her
feel like she finally went too far and became something kind of unclean. Powell
gets up off the bed and comes down the stairs, feeling like he just played dice
with his life, and it was all over a half hour of lust. So they finally see each
other, just before dawn. They're different people now because of what happened
to them, they've seen what lust can do to someone. The last paragraph of the
book is about how they couldn't be with each other a single day after that, they
just had to go their separate ways without saying much of anything, and then a
year or so later Powell sent her a book with the pictures of the writer and the
painter in it, because he finally needs to know if those people came back as
ghosts that night and had sex with them. But Amy can't ever bring herself to
open the book and look at the photos, and neither can Powell. So they never,
ever know.
Like I said, if
you want to read it, read it alone and, ah, be prepared, because Jesus Christ,
the sex is huge. Don't read it late at night, either. Too scary.
·
Joyce at work is always
giving me books to read. I mentioned exactly one time that I occasionally, just
occasionally, like to read odd
things, and since then she's been forcing these insane books on me all the time.
Last week she topped herself. I have to give her credit for this one. She walked
into my office and gave me a novel that had the front and back cover ripped off.
She said she didn't want to ruin it by me knowing what it was about. I took it
home and started reading. The very first page of the book shows the starting
roster of the 1976 Tampa Bay Buccaneers, a list of all the players. I thought,
Okayyyyyy....then the novel begins, it's in this strange oral history format cut
up with newspaper articles and diary entries and so forth, and it starts to
track the miserable failure of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers during their first
season in existence, remember when they went 0-14 and scored about fifty points
the whole season? In the book people are reminiscing about how awful they were,
it's really funny, there's articles about their lousiness, there's a box score
in there from a game....then the book focuses in on one man in particular, a guy
who's not even a sports fan, a very strange guy named Sinpath Freer. Sinpath
Freer gets an idea one day eight weeks into the season that he's going to get
down on the ground and log-roll his way across the state until the Buccaneers
win a game. And he does it. He goes outside, lies down on his side, and begins
to roll. This guy has no real friends, no family to speak of, people barely know
of him, he's just a cashier in a hardware store somewhere, but the next thing
anybody knows, he's rolling along like a crazy person across
People in the
novel are reminiscing about their brief encounters with this freak as he rolls
across the state that first week, and talking about how weirdly he spoke, and
how Sinpath Freer said he was "changing the world" or some such. This is
interspersed with passages from the diary he kept when he was rolling. Suddenly
the book's not really a comedy anymore because it becomes more and more obvious
that the guy is kind of disturbed. When he's done rolling for the day he writes
about how he's doing the greatest thing ever, which is summon the will of one
human being to raise up an entire team of men. He believes that his dedication
and sacrifice is so great that karma will have no choice but to alter the future
of the Buccaneers. Then he writes about how inside the heart of every man is a
quest waiting to be born, and until it's born and pursued, that man does not
truly exist. You have to have a quest and you have to act on it, and the only
acceptable outcomes are complete success or death.
Freer rolls and
rolls and the Buccaneers, meanwhile, as you know because their part of the story
is completely true, keep losing. They're just terrible. Furthermore, they
couldn't care less about this Freer weirdo, they've never even heard of him, and
no one else has either. He reads the paper as he rolls and keeps believing it's
only a matter of time before the Bucs have to win—the force of his effort
dictates it! Meanwhile, the
The ending of the
book cuts back and forth between Tampa Bay's final game and the way they can see
the writing on the wall but keep fighting anyway, even as they're getting
beaten, and Sinpath Freer's thoughts as he gets within a half mile of the
Atlantic Ocean. It's impossible to even follow the train of his thinking by
then, but you can figure out it has something to do with the fact that he's
insane but happy, because in dying he'll enter into history in a way he couldn't
have if he had succeeded, just like the '76 Buccaneers will somehow always be
more special in people's memories than even the team that won the Super Bowl. Their failure
and his failure are both so cataclysmic that neither one of them can be
forgotten. So in the end Sinpath Freer believes he's immortal. The last page is
this kind of funny, kind of tragic, kind of pretty description of him rolling
right into the waves and disappearing as the Buccaneers drag themselves off the
field after the final gun of the season goes off and they're 0-14. The sun
eventually goes down and Freer is gone forever beneath the
ocean.
As far as sports
novels go, I would say it's definitely one of the odder ones out
there.
·
I was at Sam's birthday
party and Wesley gave her a really funny book for a present. We were all looking
through it for a half hour or so. It was a coffee table book, just color
photographs, no text at all. It was called Dollar Store of the Damned:
·
The best book of photographs I ever saw was just called
Break Room. It was, I don't know,
sixty, seventy pages, and on each page was a photo of an actual empty break room
at some company or in the back of some store somewhere. They're all completely
sad. The photographer didn't even have to do anything with the lighting or put
fake props in there. You'd think after you've looked at four or five of these
pictures you'd be done, but the cumulative effect of turning page after page and
seeing all these bleak break rooms is pretty amazing. It makes you not just want
to quit your job immediately, it makes you want to track down and kill the
people who employed you.
·
The funniest book I've ever read was about a man who won
the lottery, and he decided not only to never work again, but to spend most of
what he made buying all the businesses where he used to toil for minimum wage
and shut them down out of spite. He also spent thousands of dollars on
billboards defaming the companies he couldn't legally buy or which were too
expensive to buy, and he got into a bunch of lawsuits because of them, and he
finally lost the last of his money trying to buy a landscaping company where he
worked for three weeks ten years before and which he despised because they
always shorted him on his breaks. He was so wrapped up in his hatred for the
time he lost slaving away for other people that he finally went bankrupt trying
to redeem it. In the end he became homeless instead of going back to work, and
jumped out of an airplane without opening his parachute, and tried to land on
the offices of the landscaping company, but missed by about a hundred
feet.
·
I got a book from the library called The Masterpiece Project. It was written,
or I should say compiled, by a writer who was never able to get anything
published, so he decided he'd let other writers write a book for him. He started
out with a single sentence: "Markbit hated every kind of fish known to man, but
the only thing left to eat inside the apartment was a can of salmon, so he faced
his destiny calmly and with dignity." He wrote it down and then started driving
all over Chicago finding writers who would tell him where the story went next,
without actually bothering to flush it out in prose. Over the course of six
months he tried to find everyone who had ever published any kind of fiction and
sat down with them and said, "Okay, what happens next?" The entire book consists
of transcript after transcript of
his conversations with the people who tried to further the story line. They were given
absolutely no limits. They were just told what generally had happened so far and
then given a half hour or so to muse on it and suggest the next few plot points.
Needless to say, after talking to sixty-eight different writers, the story of
this guy Markbit went in a thousand different places, the genre kept changing,
he went into outer space, got married, started a civil war, came back to Earth,
got a botched sex change operation, bought a McDonald's franchise which burned
down, became a spy and finally died, at which point the story just kept going
with new characters. The story itself was completely ridiculous but it was kind
of funny to read the conversations with the writers and see how their thought
processes skewed things. Meanwhile the guy who came up with the original
sentence is having coffee with every single one of them, meeting dozens of
people and obviously having a lot of fun, and the best part for him is that he
never has to sit in front of the computer and write anything. The book ends with
no conclusion to the story in sight.
·
I had to look the word caesura up after I finished reading the
last book I read. It was the title.
The definition did make sense in terms of the story. It took place almost
entirely in a hospital, it was about a not-quite-successful novelist, a real
young guy, thirty maybe, who's stuck basically living in the hospital because as
he was driving across the country with his girlfriend, she had a heart attack
and fell into a coma. It was a terrible congenital thing. Every day the writer
kills time in the small town where the hospital is, waiting to see if his
girlfriend will ever wake up, and it happens that this town they were going
through is just a few miles away from where the writer grew up, a place he
doesn't really ever want to see again. He calls a lot of old friends whose lives
all seem to be stagnating, he plays with kids on the street. There are
flashbacks which reveal that he's a strict free spirit, and he actually
"kidnapped" this girl from her parents' house where she was living and ran away
with her. Even though she was twenty-five, she was really attached to her folks
and he forcibly broke her from them for her own good, and then the girl's father
tried to track them down again and again until he finally gave up. The girl was
very happy with the writer but there was always this sense that they were doing
something wrong, and her relationship with her parents had been severed. Then,
in the hospital, the writer is forced to call them and tell them what happened,
and the novel actually begins with him waiting in the hospital lobby for them to
come in from their car with their ten year old son, dreading it and wishing he
could fly away and vanish forever. When it finally comes to the scene where he
speaks with them, it's just brutally awkward and painful. It's tough to
read.
The theme that
ran through the book is about how it's one thing to believe you value the time
you have on earth and another thing to really act on that. The writer took the
girl away from her parents because he thought they were keeping her from being
the things she could be, and they started driving across country to get away
from people who were stealing his time away from him. Every day he spends
waiting in the hospital is agony for him, both because of his grief and the
sense that all the time they rescued for themselves by running away toward some
unspecified goal has been lost. Another theme is the question of how much we owe
to other people when our lives have stopped because of them, or if they're no
longer with us. What eventually happens is that the girlfriend dies one night,
just passes away quietly. The writer goes into her room, sits with her for
twenty minutes or so, then in a daze he walks out to his car, takes her luggage
out, goes back inside the hospital and places it all just outside her room. Then
he goes back out to the car, gets in....and drives away. He just leaves. He
makes the choice to go forward right then and there, putting himself above
everything else in the world. At first I thought it was a horrible thing to do,
but looking back through the book, I saw that maybe he did what we all yearn to
do when we're stuck in that weird twilight zone where we desperately want to
leave a lot of agony behind but it's not deemed acceptable to do it by the
people around us. To make them happy and not be cast as a pariah, we put
ourselves through some awful rituals and sacrifices because of it. Not this guy,
though. So it's sort of a think-about-it book. Very
sad.
·
Speaking of photography books, have you seen this one
which is filled with pictures of the most beautiful women who live in the
smallest, most nowhere towns in the country? It has a clever title, I forget
what it is. Here these women are, they're just amazingly, hauntingly lovely, and
for whatever reason their lives are mostly confined to tiny burgs and the
outside world never gets to see these knockouts. They're interviewed about why
they never left or how they wound
up there. I can't say I understand the point of it all, but it's interesting.
How did they find these women? How did that work?
·
About ten years ago, I had a
very strange experience. I was walking around
The hundred pages
of writing detailed one thing and one thing only: the destruction of the Earth
over the course of fourteen or fifteen hours, beginning with a series of
earthquakes under the
I finished the
book on the train and I kept it for two years. I never showed it to anyone. And
then I lost it somehow. Last year I was in
·
Okay, you want creepy? I
found this book once when I was poking through that dented-up cart they always
keep outside Tabbinger's for stuff that's seventy-five percent off. It starts
with a teenaged kid finding a bunch of old photographs in his grandfather's
study when they clear it out after he dies. The photos show a gigantic empty
steel room with no windows and only one door, and nothing inside of it at all.
There's bloodstains on the floor and the walls, and the stains are in different
places in almost every photo. What happened was, during World War II the
To this day, I
have this feeling that I wandered off with that book and never paid for it. I
seem to remember reading the first few pages as I stood beside the cart and
never actually going into the store.
·
I read a book once about a man and a woman who work for a
huge pizza chain, they work in the taste lab at corporate headquarters and
they're the ones who are under constant brutal pressure to come up with new
pizza concepts. They're stressed to the limit twelve months a year trying to
figure out some new damn way to jazz up pizza with topping combinations and new
cheese patterns and so forth. They both have advanced degrees in chemistry and
such and this is where they wound up. They fall in love eventually, it's a
comedy. The book's out of print. I'm pretty sure it was called The Difficult Lives of the Pizza
Scientists. It got thrown out accidentally. I wish I still had it, it was
amusing. There was a great scene where they've completely run out of ideas so
they start seriously experimenting with just serving the pizza upside down and
calling it "The Tijuana" for no particular reason. I still remember that
part.
·
I went to a yard sale last week and came away with some
good finds. You know how they have lots of books like The Making of
Such-and-Such where it's a journal of the shooting of a movie with all the
behind-the-scenes stuff and tons of stills? Like they had one for Titanic and Batman Begins. Well, I bought one that
was exactly that, a glossy thing complete with color photos, except what it was
seriously documenting was some movie two guys shot with their parents' video
camera in their back yard. They were trying to make a horror movie and the book
is completely serious. But it's hilarious. All the problems they had, the little
fights, and then they have the "storyboards" in there, which are just little
stick drawings in a notebook, plus the accounts of the "production delays",
which were mostly caused by the fact that they had to wait for their paychecks
to clear so they could go out and buy thirty dollars worth of videotape. The
kicker is that they finished shooting this piece of garbage after ten or twelve
weeks of shooting an hour here and an hour there between playing Risk, then they had no way to edit it
because they couldn't afford the computer hardware, and at some point in time
they just lost interest in the whole thing and it was never completed. How
perfect that I found the book at a yard sale. Fifty
cents.
·
It wasn't a book, really, it was a play. I was going
through the stacks at the college trying to find something suitable for my
dialogue project for acting class and I dug out a musty old book called Modern Plays for Modest Budgets because
it had ten different plays in it, and I figured there'd be something in there I
could use. It was pretty old, it was published in 1961. The second play in there
was called Men Against Women. I
started leafing through it because of the title. The whole play takes place in
the year 2007 in a huge meeting hall where men and women have been summoned to
take part in the debate to end all debates, which is to decide once and for all
which sex has to leave the planet entirely for the sake of world peace. They've
finally just plain had it with each other, they can't stand the sight of each
other anymore. It's like they've decided to break up collectively, the entire
world. One by one, men and women alternate coming up to the podium with prepared
arguments, and one by one they absolutely lay into the opposite sex with every
possible complaint and gripe everyone has ever had. Men complain about how long
women take to get ready to go out and how they like things too clean, and women
scream back at them for being selfish and obsessed with cars and westerns,
etcetera. They start out fairly civilized but it breaks down fast. It gets
funnier and funnier and more and more vicious, with profanity I didn't even
think they had back then. The whole
debate has to be declared null and void at the end because it's discovered the
two lead debaters, the main woman and the main man, started making out
backstage. All those vicious insults completely turned them on and they couldn't
keep their hands off each other. I decided to look the play up online and see if
it was ever actually performed. No record of it. No record of the author except
for one other play he wrote, also which there's no record of. Even the publisher
of Modern Plays for Modest Budgets is
extinct. For all I know, no one ever put this play onstage once. I am so tempted
to pass it off in Playwriting 2 as my own. Who's ever going to
know?
·
The worst book I ever read was a self-published thing
that I bought from the library off their 25 cent shelf. I had a collection of
bad self-published books for a while but I finally got rid of it. The king of
them all was called Comedy Graveyard.
In it, a man gets an inheritance of a million dollars from his aunt and with
part of it he opens up a cemetery just for people who died in embarrassing and
funny ways. The reason he decides to do this? Never really explained. The reason
why anyone would want to be buried there? Never explained. Typographical errors?
About five per page.
·
For years, I had a novel in
the back of my mind because I wanted to buy a copy of it before it went out of
print. I just kept putting it off and putting it off until it was too late. Part
of the book was based on a story I actually heard about on the news once. A man
was called and told that his son had died in a car crash. As he drove to the
hospital, wanting to die himself, he passed the site of a different car crash
that had taken place just ten minutes before. He recognized his other son's car,
destroyed, and knew right away that he had been killed as well. The two crashes
were completely unrelated. When the father realized what had happened, he
blacked out. His mind snapped and went into utter shutdown, the way it does so
often for people involved in sudden devastating accidents. They don't remember
any of what really happened to them. When he awoke, he didn't remember the last
three days of his life. His mind was protecting
him.
But it did more
than that. The trauma to his psyche had been so crushing, and came at such an
enormous speed, that his brain suffered a permanent imbalance, an enormous jolt
that had a side effect that no one had ever heard of: it doubled his
intelligence. Over the course of the next few years, he slowly found that his
cognitive abilities were light years ahead of what they had been before the
trauma. He became creatively brilliant. Instead of just writing occasional
travel articles for magazines, which is what he used to do for a living, he
found himself bombarded by ideas for novels and plays, and he was able to finish
them all, and they were all terrific. The creative part of his brain was
completely set free. He was smarter in other ways, too, he could feel it, so he
had his IQ tested and it was well into the genius range, far higher than he had
tested in college. The tragic part came when he started to use his genius to
write a long, long novel about grief. He was still devastated by the loss of his
sons, and he just couldn't get past it. He kept working and working on a massive
epic novel about a man who suffered tragedy after tragedy, and it consumed him,
and his publisher thought it was amazing and kept after him to finish it, but he
couldn't. It got to be more than fifteen hundred pages long before his wife saw
what was happening. He was losing it. She made him stop writing and go into
heavier therapy. In the end, the man just couldn't drown out the depression he
suffered over what had happened eight years before. No amount of brilliance in
the world made up for it. So he committed suicide, never having finished his
final novel. The whole story was told as a flashback by a doctor who was
assigned to write up the man's case for a medical
journal.
I liked the book
enough to think about it from time to time, and I really did mean to actually
buy it instead of just checking it out of the library again. Then last year I
was in Barnes and Noble and I saw the title jump out at me from the shelf, and I
went to grab a copy, but the cover was a movie tie-in thing with the face of
some actor I don't like. It was coming out as a movie made for cable. That
changed everything. Somehow not having a copy with the original cover, which I
had really liked, ruined it for me. I couldn't look at it in the same way. The
original can't be gotten anymore for any kind of reasonable price. I suppose
I'll never own it now.
·
I tried to read this book which had a fairly good
premise, it switches back and forth between three different policemen in three
different time periods of American history. The first cop is a homicide
detective today, the second is his great-grandfather who's a beat cop during the
Depression, the third is his
great-grandfather, who's the chief of police in some small town during the Civil
War. You see how they each did their jobs and how they're very similar in some
ways because of the family bloodline. They each have to deal with a huge case
that has some intriguing similarities with the ones the other men have to deal
with. So, not a bad idea. But this book was eleven hundred pages long, and every
few days I would put it down and think, Okay, this is good, but not good enough
to throw my life away on. It got a
little bit weaker as it went on, just incrementally, and every day I would
think, No more, I'm done, but I kept getting closer and closer to the end and
for the sake of closure I kept bulling my way through it. Finally though, I was
within fifty pages of the end and I just said, Enough—what am I trying to prove
by finishing this book? So I didn't. I read over a thousand pages and I refused
to do the last fifty. I took a stand!
·
What I really like is
science fiction. There was one I read about a psychologist who worked for years
and years on the problem of recovering very old memories, like when people need
to remember things from long ago for court testimony, etcetera. He started to
find that certain verbal cues aligned certain functions of the brain, for
example when I say "tomato", it causes a very certain microscopic adjustment in
your mind, and if I say "ripe tomato", bang, there again in the blink of an eye
there's another tiny change so it can figure out what a ripe tomato is, and
because I said "ripe tomato" it has something to work with and starts
anticipating certain words that might go with it, so there's another change,
etcetera. The psychologist eventually found that by making eight very specific
statements to a person in a specific sequence, it would align their thought
functions perfectly so that when a question was asked at the end, their synapses
or whatever they're called would be in perfect alignment to access the functions
of their deepest memory. The statements that set it all up were almost all
nonsensical, like "
I heard they're
going to make a movie out of that book. I'm sure they're going to throw out all
the subtlety and the moral dilemmas brought up in it and focus on some kind of
distracting special effects. I'll be avoiding that
one.
·
A book did change my life once. I changed some things in
my life because of it. It got into me. I couldn't stop thinking about it and
after a while I realized it wasn't because of the writing but because so much of
it was about me. There were two main characters in the story, and the painful
part was that they were both
me.
The first one was
a reporter for a small newspaper in
One day Maurice
is going about the research to prepare for the next interview. He finds out
there's a one hundred and four year old man living within fifty miles of the
city, but when he digs for an address, he's confused, because it seems that the
man is in a state prison. Maurice makes some calls and finds out that he has the
right guy, but the age is completely wrong. The man they have locked up in
prison is ninety-four, not one hundred and four. It was Maurice himself who made
the stupid mistake. But he's totally intrigued and thinks he can at least write
a good human interest story about this man, whose name is
When
Something in
The news of
In the last six
months of his life,
Maurice returns
to the newspaper eventually, and the last pages of the book follow his thoughts
as he tries to take what happiness he can from
I saw myself in
them both, over and over again. Since I read that book, I keep seeing
You know what,
there was something else in that book that affected me. It was a little subplot,
almost not even a subplot, about the fifth oldest man in the prison, who's
fifty-seven. The other prisoners talk about him but Maurice never gets to meet
him. The guy was a doctor who had been in jail for six years for a murder he
probably didn't really commit, and while he kept trying to prove his innocence
he also developed a theory that he could still live a meaningful life if he just
kept challenging himself in the same ways he used to challenge himself in the
outside world. He had been trying to visit almost every country on Earth when he
lost his freedom, so what he does in this enormous prison is set a long-term
goal to keep "exploring" new territory inside it. He sets his sights on areas of the
prison where he's not allowed to go, the off-limits rooms, the wings prisoners
never see, and one by one, he marks them off as he achieves them, making his
"destinations" more and more difficult. He doesn't count a place in the prison
as "visited" unless he can get there without being caught. After two years of
constant planning and two or three successful explorations, he writes in his
letters to his family that there's absolutely no difference between the moments
of happiness he gets from achieving a new level of travel inside the prison and
the feeling he used to get landing in a new foreign country. From this he
deduces that as long as a human being can keep challenging himself on any level
throughout his life, he can have a tolerable one no matter what his
circumstances are.
You'd think I'd
read that part and take some heart in it, but no, I found it almost as
depressing as what happened to
·
One day a man invents a new color. An entirely new color
which no one had ever seen. He's able to do this because of some new industrial
process that extracts a certain element out of tungsten or something, and by
hitting what's left with UV light he's able to slowly create a paint-like
substance that has a color that's entirely new to the world. In the book people
try to describe it and they just can't do it of course, it's like nothing
previously known. The man who invented the color calls it Lillinandra. What
happens is that the world is changed in all sorts of ways by the new color when
it's able to be mass-produced. You can imagine. Fashion is completely thrown for
a loop because everyone wants to have things in that color, both for itself and
for the way it sets off other colors, and of course interior design is rocked
pretty well too. In the art world, Lillinandra makes a huge impact because it
can be used to depict sunlight in a completely new way, and people's complexions
too, and because the paint is so expensive in the beginning, art that uses
Lillinandra is more coveted and higher-priced.
What the book's
really about, though, is the dark side of what happens when this great gift is
given to the world, because the legal ramifications are just astounding. There's
court battles over whether the inventor has the rights to the color, how much
money he deserves from every little use of it, whether it can be used on flags,
on the jerseys of sports teams, on corporate things, how much the industrial
process that can create it needs to be tied in with all the profits, whether or
not any human being can claim any ownership of any aspect of color even though
its inventor worked for years to create it. There's even a lawsuit to stop a
hate group from using the color for its logo. Then it turns out that the process
by which Lillinandra is made actually produces a very harmful substance when the
color is extracted in its last stage, and there are groups who want to stop it
from being made. All the while you see how Lillinandra impacts every little
facet of life, the mood it creates in people and the associations that become
tied up with it like the way black means sadness and red means anger and so
forth. Because it's a neutral color like green, different people have different
takes on what it should "mean," and because so much money is at stake in the
world over how it's perceived, it gets spun and spun in print and in the media
and by big corporations and even the government. The inventor dies about ten
years after Lillinandra's creation. From his notebooks they find out that
through it all he remained glad that he had found this incredible new thing for
the world, and he believed it would outlast all the craziness that surrounded it
and prove one thing was certain: that the universe is infinite in the
discoveries it holds, and that 'mankind should never cease exploring the rooms
and corridors of creation in case the doors we always assumed were locked can
suddenly be opened'. That's from the back cover. The actual book isn't written
that elaborately. Funny, the cover is totally
white.
·
You've never read Candy Party? You have got to read Candy Party. It says right on the back
cover that it's the most boring book ever written, and it does not disappoint. It's hilarious. It's
nothing but page after page of completely uninteresting people telling you
unbelievably vapid anecdotes about their pointless lives. You start reading any
one of them and you think, "Okay, this person is an idiot and why are they telling me this?" And then
they go on and on and on and they just don't shut up, and you have to start
laughing at some point because it's so easy to imagine this type of person
telling you all this in real life. There's always a danger that when someone you
don't know real well opens up their mouth, a totally pointless, stupid story
will fall out. It doesn't say anywhere in the book how they got all these
stories. The best—and I guess the worst too—is one guy's explanation of his
experiences with drying his clothes in the oven because he's always trying to
save money. That takes up four pages. No, actually, even better is the guy who
describes the fight he had with his best friend when they were editing a
friend's wedding video, because they disagreed over which Billy Joel song to put
over the credits in an attempt to impress the bride's sister, who they both
thought was hot. They got into such a violent fight about it that they started
shoving each other and a bottle of ginger beer spilled all over them both. Now
imagine three hundred pages of stories like that. None of them go anywhere. It's
all just total verbal sewage.
The genius of it
all is that you're supposed to (and of course no one would ever actually do
this) circle the part of every story where you had to stop reading because you
got so irritated with its pointlessness.
Oh God, there are
some classics in there. The title story is about a planned group drunk a bunch
of guys were going to have on a Friday night, except one guy showed up with a
giant bag full of various kinds of candy, so everyone there sampled all the
candy and had such a great time eating it for hours and hours that they almost
forgot to get drunk. But in the end, they did.
No, I'll tell you
the very best one. I just remembered it. It's someone describing for three pages
their constant attempts to avoid a nerdy clerk at Office Depot month after
month. You get about halfway through it and it's obvious that the person telling
the story would be far more irritating to talk to than the clerk
himself.
Why go see a
movie when there are such gems like this to be discovered?
·
I don't know if this would be considered genius or
cruelty, but some publisher once paid a guy to write the true story of his life
as a complete, freewheeling, unrepentant drunkard, on the condition that he
would write it totally in longhand and only during the times he was drunk. I
read it—what I could make out of it. Some of the writing got completely
illegible because he really was wasted when he wrote. But he sure was funny. He
would start pages normally and lucidly and after a while you couldn't even tell
what the hell he was talking about.
·
This bank in Kentucky gets robbed....no big deal....a guy
just walks in and robs it....but then the next day he does it again, completely
unexpected, who would rob a bank two days in a row....so the cops keep an eye
out for him the third day, just in case he's nuts enough to try it
again....nothing happens, so they take off eventually, but then the bank robber
accosts the manager and three employees on their way out of the bank and he
forces them back in and gets the money....this time he just barely, just barely
gets away....it becomes a national story at this point....on the fourth day, the
place is totally under surveillance....but this time, the trucks bringing the
money into the bank are robbed two miles away in some incredibly complex
setup....obviously there's some incredibly sophisticated crew targeting this
bank, and they're out to stun the world with the ways they can get its
money....so then the bank just plain doesn't open the fifth day....they shut it
down....grill all the employees about what's going on....guess what....they open
it back up on the sixth day and find out the place was tunneled into the night
before and the safe deposit boxes looted....the guys are five for five....and
this time they left a note saying that the sixth time's going to be the best of
all....all the money's immediately removed from the bank and it's roped
off....there's just nothing to steal anymore....and nothing happens the next
day....it seems to be over....no one knows what their note meant....until six
months later, when it's revealed that some strange fictional land development
company somehow sold the strip mall whose parking lot the bank sits on for eight
and a half million dollars but the deeds and the contracts were completely phony
and a mysterious group of three lawyers made off with four million in cash and
disappeared just before anyone got wise and the actual bank building technically
doesn't belong to the bank anymore, and the date the papers which made the
robbers all that money was, of course, the sixth day of their scheme....when
these guys are caught a decade later, all ten of them who were involved in the
whole thing, one interesting fact is revealed....the very first day the bank was
robbed, it wasn't robbed by any of them....it was some completely unrelated
guy....so they had to wait till the next day to begin their
plans.
·
I was at a party and someone brought out this book and we
tried to use it, but all it did was make the party weird. It completely sucked
the life out of it. Just lifting this book is an effort, it's got about a
thousand pages, and it's called You Were
Only Dreaming. It consists of twelve thousand dream fragments, each a long
paragraph, and all of them told in the second person, like "You're standing in a
cornfield...." or "You see a dolphin jump in the ocean...." Some of them are
completely bizarre, some are fairly normal, none of them seem to have much to do
with any other. You're supposed to pick one at random and read it aloud, then a
second person does the same thing, and a third person then tries to find a
connection between the two fragments, to find some way they make sense with each
other, some strong commonality, but it has to be metaphorical, not literal, and
if that connection can be made, another fragment is read, and someone tries to
connect it to the one just before it, and on and on and on. After thirty minutes
of this, we had all gotten too quiet and were thinking too hard and that ended
the party fairly resoundingly.
I asked the host if I could take
the book home. I did, and I stayed up and poked through it at random, reading
fragments one after the other, not even playing the game. After doing this for a
while, I started to feel like I really was dreaming. My mind drifted from one to
the next. I finally had to stop. It was as if I were being put under hypnosis.
The size and weight of the book got a little frightening to me, like it was
going to swallow me up if I didn't stop. For some reason I began to feel
compelled to go home at night and pour myself a glass of wine and start reading
it all. It bothered me that there are fragments in there I'd never get to.
Thousands, probably. I became addicted. One minute the book would have me
standing in the Library of Congress with the all the books beginning to shake,
just slightly, barely noticeable, and the Rolling Stones song "Angie" beginning
to play in the building, and I'd be picking up an old edition of the New York
Times and getting a paper cut that wouldn't heal. When I flipped to another page, I was
holding hands with Boris Yeltsin and skydiving out of an airplane, or trapped in
a pie-eating contest in
I finally forced myself to stop and give the book back. Go buy it and see
what happens.
·
My mother bought me a book for my birthday once, which is
rare enough, but it turned out to be an "epic poem," stranger still. The author
was mentioned on PBS and somehow my mother figured I was smart enough to read
this thing, and I gave it a shot. I really did. I blame the back cover and
everyone quoted on it for this debacle. It's why I never buy books. The back
cover said this poem was "A MONUMENTAL ACHIEVEMENT" and "UNFORGETTABLE" and
"COMPLETELY RIVETING" and, my favorite, "EMOTIONALLY DEVASTATING." Plus it was
"CAUSE FOR CELEBRATION." Really? Did the critic who said that actually rent out
a hall and throw a party because of this poem? And was the guy who said it was
emotionally devastating not able to get out of bed the next day because he was
emotionally devastated? Was he unable
to deal with people for months? Did he break down and weep in the middle of
lunch because of it? And don't tell me something is unforgettable. Are you
saying it's guaranteed to etch itself into my consciousness and no matter how
hard I try I won't be able to forget it? I can't remember the names of my best
friends from elementary school, but this crappy book will latch onto me forever?
I see these same words on the back cover of every stupid serial killer novel and
legal thriller and it's just so obvious there's a conspiracy going
on.
The poem, as far as I can tell, was about a single mother doing something
and discovering herself and then becoming a drug addict, something like that. I
made it about halfway through and then it became so confusing and baffling I
just stopped. So as for COMPLETELY RIVETING, no, I would say it was not, since
there were many times when I was physically able to set the book down and do
something else, like, say, watch the Spurs game.
·
There was one I read that
took place entirely inside an apartment building in the week leading up to the
stock market crash of 1929. There were really only two characters. The story is
told through their diaries. One was a financial analyst who lives alone and is
starting to think something really bad is going to happen to the market. He
doesn't know quite when it's going to happen, he thinks before the end of the
year, and he is starting to go about getting all his money out of risky ventures
and into some much safer things, and he's calling everyone he knows to do the
same thing. Meanwhile, he's just days away from the worst happening, and it's a
race against the clock. We know how awful it's going to be but he doesn't. While
he tries to figure out just what the possibilities are, something strange is
happening five doors down the hallway. A fairly insane man is locked inside his
apartment day after day, spending eight and twelve hours a day doing one thing:
training a pit bull he bought from someone on the street. He's training it to
kill, trying various things to make it more and more vicious, abusing it
sometimes. It's very scary. Only about a third of the way through the book does
it become totally clear why he's doing this. He's been deluded somehow into
thinking that the man down the hall, the financial analyst, who he doesn't even
know, is trying to bankrupt him. He believes the man has secret access to his
bank account and is pilfering the puny amount of money in there little by little
in various ingenious and evil ways. It's obvious this guy has been insane for
several years, but now he has a real fixation, and it's incredibly dangerous. He
doesn't know what he's doing with the pit bull, and he can barely control it as
it gets more and more cruel and nasty. At one point the pit bull bites one of
his fingers off. But the man goes forward with the "training program." You can
see how the dog is struggling in a strange way to hold on to some semblance of
its own sanity, but it's being destroyed. All this time, the market crash is
getting closer and closer and the analyst begins to panic forty-eight hours
before it because he suddenly sees exactly what's going to happen. He's too late
to save a lot of his money. There's lots of interesting details about his
attempts to save some of his old clients from his trading days from the crash.
He spends two nights in his office and we see that the next time he goes home,
it may be the last day he ever lives. The man with the pit bull is almost ready
for the dog to mount an attack.
When the crash
happens, there's chaos everywhere but the crazy guy doesn't even notice it. The
dog gets out of the awful harness it was shackled into and attacks him. He
manages to get behind his sofa and he lies pinned between it and a wall with the
dog trying to get at him and rip him apart. He has to stay like that, a foot
away from certain death, for eight straight hours. Even when the dog retreats
and leaves his sight, he's terrified to move. When it gets dark he decides to
take a chance and escape the apartment, and the dog comes after him but he
manages to shoot it dead. After that, he goes out onto the street and pieces
together what's happened across the country. He just walks the streets, holding
his gun, totally nuts. What he believes right away is that the analyst is such a
brilliant dark genius that he's managed to defraud and bankrupt the entire
country, not just himself. So he hopes to come across the analyst on the street
and shoot him dead. But he never sees him. He wanders off into the night and
sleeps in a field and his last diary entry is so crazy it's indecipherable. The
analyst's last diary entry is about how a strange man who lived down the hall
from him jumped out his window after shooting his dog. Everyone assumes the guy
committed suicide because, like everyone else, he was hit so hard by the market
crash.
Not much of an
ending, but up until that point, it was very suspenseful. I just don't
understand what the point was of having both the characters have the same last
name. I couldn't tell if it was supposed to be funny or creepy or ironic. Then I
had to look through the book again to see if maybe they had been related
somehow.
I'll always
remember that book because I finished with it for good the night we all went
camping in the Shenandoahs, and it rained and rained and when I woke up in the
morning a lot of our things were soaking wet, including that book, and when it
dried out it ballooned up to three times its size, and I had never known that's
what happened to books when they get really wet. I put it on my shelf for a
while so people would ask about it, but then I got a little guilty because after
all the work and research that went into writing it, it felt odd to use it as a
conversation piece like that. No one ever asked what it was about. They just
wanted to see and touch the Freak Book. Shame.
·
Our book club broke up because of a book somebody chose.
It had gotten nice reviews so we gave it a chance. It was about a completely
sad, basically invisible human being, a guy in his late thirties who delivers
newspapers for a living and lives alone, doesn't have any friends, has one
sister who lives outside of the country and just sends him Christmas cards.
There's nothing even really wrong with this guy, he's not mean or obnoxious or a
criminal, he's just totally alone in the world and not terribly smart, he makes
a lot of dumb decisions and can't make any money, and doesn't understand that
the things he does irritate people, and all he really wants to do is go home
from work and watch TV. The book makes it seem fairly easy to become like this,
you have a lot of sympathy for the guy, it's very sad. One day a doctor tells
him he has liver cancer, and it's extremely serious. When all the treatments are
explained to him, he goes home and does something kind of incredible, which is
decide he doesn't want any of the treatments. He wants to do something heroic in
his life, just once, and facing death is going to be that thing. He sits down at
night sometimes and writes fake newspaper articles in a notebook about himself
and what bravery he's showing dealing with the pain, which becomes extreme. But
he almost never leaves his apartment. He takes Tylenol for the pain, and very
soon it does nothing for him. But amazingly, he is committed to being brave, and
as the pain gets worse and worse his mind gets fuzzy and he imagines parades
being held for him, all the people from his past throwing parties for him
because he's so daring. And in the end, he dies in his little room, totally
alone, no one even noticing, having gone through six months of the cancer, the
last two being horribly painful. Before his mind is completely run over by the
physical pain, he is almost content in a way, because he's become a hero to
himself, doing one brave thing he never thought he could. The book really makes
you think about what the definition of a hero is, but what it did for the people
in the book club was depress everyone so badly and make everyone feel so guilty
about ignoring all the lonely people in the world that I was the only one to
make it to the end of the story. Two other people faked it and I sort of caught
them, and then it became a big argument over how terrible a choice this book
was, something that made everybody so sad. The next thing I knew, there was no
more club.
·
I want to say the book was
called The Currency of Dreams, but
that doesn't sound right. It's about a girl, she's twenty-three when the story
starts, and it starts funny, with a montage of her telling various customers at
various awful retail jobs she works that what she really wants to do is paint,
be an artist. She says this to everyone, and at some point she realizes how
ridiculous it is to keep saying this, and she just freezes up in the middle of
ringing up a customer at Target and walks right out the door. She can't take her
life anymore and she's determined to go off and be an artist, only an artist,
nothing else. Since she was seven all she ever wanted to do was be in a room and
draw and paint. So she buys a van with the little money she's saved and puts all
her paintings into it and prepares to drive off from her parent's house in
So off she drives
up the
Her name's Nadia.
One day she has her stuff set up at a street fair and next to her is a scraggly,
dirty-looking guy who's selling his self-published novels on a blanket spread
around him. He writes them and prints them up at Kinko's and tries to sell them
and he works odd jobs only when he desperately needs money for food and to print
a new book. He and Nadia strike up a friendship and she takes pity on him, even
though he's a few years older than she is. She lets him sleep in her van once in
a while when she occasionally breaks down and spends the night in a hostel. His
name is
They rely on each
other for moral support as the days and the weeks go by and no one really buys
either one of their works. Nadia learns a lot from
A little while
after that, the man who bought Nadia's painting comes back, and he invites her
to go to dinner with him. She's not sure what to do so she says yes, and
Nadia fixes
herself up as best she can and she goes out to dinner with the young guy who
bought her painting, and it turns out he's on the board of a major art gallery.
He thinks Nadia's paintings are quite unique. He tries not to talk about his
work much, since he never really chose it. He does it because he inherited his
rich father's position on the board and though he's good at the job he has
dreams of doing other things. He just never seems to be able to break away from
the good life, though. Obviously he's interested in Nadia romantically. She can
sense it. When she goes back to her van that night, she feels horribly guilty
because she doesn't feel anything for this guy but she realizes it's possible he
could make something happen with her work. She makes the mistake of explaining
this to Kent, who's the ultimate artistic-integrity-at-any-cost type, and he
insults her and stomps away and once again he disappears, this time for a whole
week. During that week, Nadia finds out from the homeless man who knows a little
about
Nadia gets
horribly lonely during the week with no
She lies one day
to
The next day she
meets her brother at a cafe near the van, and after some small talk she starts
crying, and he holds her hand and tells her to stop, because something amazing
has happened. The reason he needed to see her was that his cancer not only went
into remission, but it apparently vanished entirely, gone, totally. There's just
no sign of it anymore. He's elated. He's so happy that he says he wants to start
a new life right there on the spot, to go do the things he's always wanted to
but was too afraid to try. As they sit in the cafe, he realizes he wants to do
it all now, at this very moment. They decide this would be a great defiance to
the universe, so they leave and walk down the street to the train station, and
Nadia's brother buys a cross-country ticket, and he gets on board the train with
just his wallet and the clothes he's wearing, both of them laughing and
celebrating. And the train rolls out of the station with her brother on it, and
it's the nicest part of the book. It's like a happy ending snatched away from
one that seemed like it was definitely going to be quite the opposite. The thing
that does make it a little sad is that when Nadia is leaving the station, she
sees the art gallery guy waiting for his own train, just another trip down to
Out on the
street, Nadia decides to splurge and take eight dollars and buy herself a big
lunch, and by doing that she misses a scene with
He's not there
when Nadia gets back and so she locks the van and takes her own walk. She takes
her paint supplies to a stream nearby and starts to do a painting of her
brother, one of the art gallery guy, and one of a particularly sad-looking
waitress she saw. She's no good at portraits and these are just for her. When
she comes back to the van, though, it's gone.
She almost loses
her mind. Her whole life was inside the van, her paintings, her supplies, her
clothes, everything she owned. She walks around in a panic, then heads to a
phone to call the police, but she only gets a block or so when she sees a couple
of police cars and an ambulance up ahead, and her van, driven off the side of an
embankment, totaled. And she sees
Nadia goes into
his room, and
Her parents come
for her that night to take her home, which is the only place she can go. She
sleeps in her own bed and stares at the ceiling, and the next day the van is
towed to her, in terrible shape, and she salvages her paintings from it. Some of
them were destroyed. She spends the next few days in bed, basically. She calls
the hospital every day and finds out that nothing is seriously wrong with
Near the end of
the book, there's a scene with the art gallery guy. He's sitting in a meeting of
the gallery board as they're deciding on new exhibits, and he shows them a slide
show of Nadia's paintings, completely unbeknownst to her, and he argues in favor
of giving her a show, because what he sees in the paintings is so unique. And
the book makes it clear that he might be right, but he might be wrong too.
Because you can't see Nadia's stuff and some people on the board just yawn when they see it, it isn't clear
whether she's great or not. That's not the point, really. The point is that the
art gallery guy has finally stood up a little bit and is fighting for something
he believes in. He makes a nice long speech to the board about their ability to
maybe change a person's life by giving their art a chance, and that person
should be Nadia, who he admires more than anyone he's ever met, because she's
been able to summon up a courage he doesn't understand. It's courage from
nowhere. Nadia never had it in her to leave her home and live on the streets,
but she somehow did it anyway.
The last scene is
of Nadia sitting in her kitchen at two in the morning, and her mother tells her
how glad she is to have her back, and whatever she wants to do, as long as it's
"constructive," is fine. She leaves Nadia alone then, and when she goes out on
the front porch,
I like to think
that she made the right choice. It almost doesn't seem like it. But maybe that's
not even important. Maybe it was just the act of driving away. I guess I can't
ever know.
·
I'll never forgive the guy who wrote that book Just a Little Taste. I remember I bought
it for my mother for Mother's Day, because she likes to read about food and
cooking and it was presented nicely, a slim little book, and the author was some
hotshot, and three days after I got it for her she called me up and said,
"Did you read this book?" And she gave it to me
and do you know what it is? It's seventy-seven pages about one single meal, from
beginning to end. The writer imagines himself sitting down with some friends at
a stranger's house and the host bringing out appetizers and wine and then a
bunch of little dishes and then three, three main courses and a wheelbarrow
full of desserts to choose from, and all the writer does is describe every
unbelievable mouthful of this gourmet dinner so well that you can almost feel
all that great food going right into you, and in the middle of it he begins to
reminisce about an amazing barbecue he went to the night before, so all of a sudden
he's remembering this phenomenal hamburger he ate, and the best french fries of
all time, and someone brought out chocolate milkshakes as a surprise, and hello,
there's a flashback within the
flashback about a time he went to Italy and hiked all day and wound up at a
little bed and breakfast where the owners sat him down and starting bringing out
plate after plate of homemade Italian food....mind you, there's nothing but
nouns and adjectives and verbs in this book, but it will drive you out of your
mind with hunger. It's nothing but food porn, and it's intentionally cruel. He's
talking about savoring this veal and he's describing how everyone around the
table is drooling and spacing out because it's all so fantastic, and the next
thing you know there's crab dip and french bread and some things that don't even
make a whole lot of sense, like spaghetti with a cognac sauce followed by some
kind of teriyaki lamb....it took me about three weeks to get some of those
descriptions out of my head. What a deliberate act of cruelty. Instead of eating
one last strawberry to finish the meal like he does, he should have just
described himself smearing cherry pie all over his head, because the book is
basically that self-indulgent. Food porn.
·
I remember one day a couple of years ago I was staying
home sick, and for some reason I got bored with the Internet and I just started
looking through my parents' bookshelves in the den, because they have about a
gazillion books, a ton of old ones too, so I figured there must be something
there which could kill some brain cells for a while. Eventually I found a little
green hardback book called The Argument
for Evil. It looked like it was printed in the thirties or forties, it was
pretty musty. It was one long essay, long long, about three hundred pages, by a
scholar who started off by saying that all our lives we've been conditioned to
think that the purpose of life is to be good and honest and loyal and nice, but
if we just stopped to consider it, life was totally about survival and survival
meant being stronger than other people. He said if you got past all the nonsense
about religion, you'd see that we were totally alone in the world, and the
purpose of your existence was whatever you made of it, no right and no wrong.
And the more power you have over other people, the bigger you become in the
universe, which really doesn't care either way what you do. And if you want to
have the most intense experiences in life, to live every day to its fullest,
well, being completely evil was as good an option as
any.
I really got into
this book, although for all I knew the guy was insane. He didn't write like it.
He didn't even say he was evil himself. He just wanted to lay out the case for
doing unbelievably horrible things to other people. He said that if you took
some time to imagine what the lives of the supervillains in movies and books
were like, you'd see that they were constantly challenged and excited by life
all the time, while the rest of us do-gooders could only dream of being so
intense. And if there was no God to judge them when they died, then Caligula and
Jack the Ripper and so forth got away with everything they did and enjoyed the
world on a higher plane. He didn't mention Hitler, so I guess maybe the book was
published before Hitler came along.
I read the whole
book. That's the fanciest one I've ever read. The guy was so interesting. He
never said, "Oh, I'm joking, by the way." The last few pages were one long
disclaimer, but you could tell he had spent years thinking this all through. For
about two weeks after I finished the thing, I considered going the evil route.
The guy was even able to explain how getting torn apart by an angry mob for
being evil was a victory of some kind. It turns out my father bought the book at
a garage sale with a thousand others and he had no idea what it was about. So I
never told him.
·
There's a book I love, I just absolutely love it, I read
it at least once every couple of years. I can't even say what's so great about
it, but it sends my mind going. I take it on every long trip I have just in case
things get really slow and I run out of things to do, I take the book out and
start reading it. If I tell you what it's about, you'll say, "That's the book you love out of all the
books you've read?" but I do.
It's about a guy
who lives outside of
So he reads the
whole book without telling his wife about it, or anyone else, and he's so
freaked out he doesn't mention it to anyone. There are long passages in which he
reacts to things he reads in the novel, concepts about the future, hints of
inventions that no one knows about yet. He reads the book ten, fifteen times,
always in secret, because he's honestly afraid he's losing his mind. It's
obvious his wife knows nothing about how it got where it was. He does a lot of
research to find out where the book came from and if it's some kind of a crazy
prank, but of course he comes up empty.
The book isn't
trying to be funny. It's very literal, it's about what this guy's life becomes
when he finally decides the book is from the future and he's not mad. He still
doesn't tell anyone, because he's very analytical and he knows it might upset
people, scare them, or at the very least cause him lots and lots of headaches if
it got out he owned this thing. He's forced to see life and the world and time
in a totally different way, and he becomes one of the great secret philosophers
of all time. He never writes anything down, though. He reads and re-reads the
book over the years and finally he decides to take it halfway across the country
and bury it somewhere, because it's had too profound an effect on him, he's
obsessed with it, naturally, and people have noticed that for some reason he's
not like he used to be, no longer all that good-natured and funny. He gets rid
of the book so he can reclaim his life somewhat, and we're led to believe he
will, he's going to be all right.
Just ten years
after he found the book, he finds out he's dying, and he goes back across the
country to unbury it. (Lots of great detail about what such a trip would have
been like around that time. The whole story is filled with details like that,
it's as if you're really there.) The book is exactly where he left it. He just
makes sure of that, and then he writes a note to his son, to be read when he's
grown up, about where the book is and how it might change him if he decides he
must see it. The story ends with the attorney going back home slowly to his
family.
I love that book.
It's so vivid in the way it shows how a person's mind can awaken, how hard it
would be to get caught in a position to have this secret knowledge, to find out
the universe is more mysterious than you ever knew....obviously there's some
deeper reason I'm so connected to it, but I really can't explain what it is, I'm
sorry.
·
We had to reject quite a
riveting novel fairly recently. You're familiar with the Deborah Lipstadt case
of a few years back? She's a historian and she found herself being sued for
libel by another historian, David Irving. She had implied that he was a
Holocaust denier and he sued to try to clear his rather dubious name. It was
quite a famous trial in England at the time; Lipstadt had to hire a team of
lawyers to go through all of Irving's writings looking for the ways he had
distorted truths about Hitler and the Holocaust, and I think I remember that a
survivor or two from that time had to take the stand, and all sorts of evidence
from Auschwitz was debated in open court. This book that was submitted to us was
a dramatization of the case, taken from the court transcripts, and it was very
compelling and gripping, but there was a twist in there to make it far more
so. The main story of the trail was
intercut with another story, that of a young woman caught by the Nazis in 1942
and sent to Chelmno to die. Her story was brutal and the descriptions of her
days in the camp were realistic and horrifying. The author switched back and
forth from her ordeal to the trial and
·
I Poked Nicole
Kidman was
about a real guy out in
·
There's a very creepy
non-fiction book I read about a man who spent a month or so taking the very last
subway train home at night, every night, all the way on the longest part of the
line, just to observe people's behavior. He watched the drunks and the homeless
and the night shift types, and the people who seemed strange or just bitter for
no real reason. On weekends it was almost funny and crazy, and on weeknights it
was usually just sort of depressing. The first half of the book was pretty
hilarious, he recounted all the loopy people stumbling home from the clubs and
the bars, and I was laughing out loud through a lot of it. What the author did
then was pack all the unpleasant stuff in the last half, and it got more and
more uncomfortable the more I thought about what it's like on that last train of
the night. I've had a few odd moments on those myself, when I was bartending.
The last forty pages are just completely depressing, it's just incident after
incident that you realize could have gotten very dark and strange and dangerous,
and you start to really wonder about people and what the middle of the night
does to them psychologically. Seems like the author was suggesting that it
wasn't always just alcohol and loneliness that caused these blips of behavior,
it was the fact that we primally change after
·