The One-Man Book Club has been meeting in secret for quite some time over at Goodreads, if you ever feel like following along. I’ve been slowly going back through my shelves and adding thoughts and reviews of books I read years ago. For some reason, all this time I’ve managed to never notice a neato widget where I can add my Goodreads reviews to this blog. Here are some recent reads, and there are plenty more where these came from …

Blood, Bones, and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef by Gabrielle Hamilton

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

An embroidered and loose-with-facts (see her disclaimer all the way at the end of the book) highly-creative memoir from someone that a more charitable person might call “difficult.” (I believe another word for it is a–hole.) I found it almost impossible to enjoy her yarns about food and restaurateur-ship through all her bitterness and cultural snobbery and necessity to blur/alter years, facts and people in service to the “momentum” of her memoir. On page 29, she gets the year and album title wrong for a Barbra Streisand song (“What Kind of Fool”) which she claims her father listened to “over and over and over” — more than a year before the album was on sale. It’s a little thing, true, but the little things matter. If the confabulation doesn’t matter to you, and you aren’t alienated by her personality and style, then there are several chapters here about food and professional kitchen stress that anyone can enjoy.

Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted: And all the Brilliant Minds Who Made The Mary Tyler Moore Show a Classic by Jennifer Keishin Armstrong

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Books about TV history are hard to do; the risk of being boring is pretty high. Also, I tend to think that there’s sometimes no faster way to ruin the pleasure of a good TV show memory than to read a 300-page book about it. There’s a lot to juggle — the story of How It Was Made + the reader’s (and writer’s) nostalgia + the Social Meaning and Historical Context + all the insidery network poop about ratings, executive decisions, Emmys, etc.

While reading Jennifer Keishin Armstrong’s history and analysis of the impact of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” I kept coming back to that dreaded book-review word: “uneven.” There are some great stories in here, well-reported, clearly organized. It’s sort of enthralling to read along as the MTM Show (and the subsequent MTM juggernaut of sitcoms and drama) comes together and recovers from a disastrous start.

But the writing is often clunky, especially in long passages that try to put the whole thing in a social context. There is also a lot of stating-the-obvious. The book recovers near the end when detailing the afterlife of the show and its actors, then dips back down into term-paper talk and pop-contextualizing. This book felt like it was one more edit away from finished, but it was worth reading.



View all my reviews

Oh, ranger! Summer is over!

And so the One-Man Book Club reconvenes one last time* (more on that down below) for its summer vacation extra-reading credit. Books came along on a lot journeys since early spring: Out to Kansas and back, out to Albuquerque and back, on a train to Staunton, Va., and back, and — for 11 days in late June/early July — a 2,100-mile road trip through New England with the One-Man Book Club’s favorite traveling companion, the One-Man Photo Archive. Then the One-Man Book Club took a 16-day business trip out to Los Angeles to ingest the upcoming fall TV season, with books offering the only salve from long days of press conferences and network spin about bad pilot episodes. Then a quick trip to Jersey for a wedding in the family.

Carrying books around is starting to become more of a drag on these old bones, mostly because I notice how many people aren’t doing that anymore. (The tote-bag industry is doomed by the cloud.) Even the One-Man Book Club’s household has an iPad in it now, and one eyes it warily if curiously, from the other side of the bed. My concerns are all ephemeral at this point, sounding like nonsense to engineers and techno-consumers alike: What about the feeling of having a book with you? The object itself, not just the characters that make up the words that make up the sentences that make up the chapters. The pleasure of a book wasn’t only about words, was it? (Or was it?) What about the glee of buying a book on vacation? What about typography, cover art, the smell of a new book? What about sand and Coppertone and potato chip grease — all proof that you and this book had something going on together, a brief fling?

Ecch, the club has been over this and over this. Eventually, the tablet may win anyhow, just for being light.

Too much preamble. One-Man Book Club, report!

I share the sentiments of many a Bossypants reader, including this review in The Washington Post by Nicole Arthur. Basically it goes like this: There are laughs a-plenty from the brilliant Tina Fey here, but with no fixed destination. Here you have one of the great funny minds of Generation X, nicely situated between her youth and her old-ladyhood, at a career pinnacle, and she has nothing of much value to tell us. She “reveals” moments of self-loathing and anecdotal hilarity in order to not reveal much of herself at all. She transacts in one sort of market-friendly honesty in lieu of another that would have been more true. She has sold squillions of books by now, so, as the highly-paid pro-basketball players say: it’s all good. I read this book so long ago — early May — that I can’t even remember what I liked about it. Here’s all I recollect: When you are on an airplane from Kansas City to Washington Reagan National Airport, this is the book you’d want. I started it at lunch, resumed once the flight was airborne, laughed out loud, and hit the last sentence as we taxied in. Perfect and forgettable.

* * *

On a trip to Albuquerque, I picked up a copy of Caleb’s Crossing, the new novel by the incomparable Geraldine Brooks, which turns the true story of a 17th-century Harvard student (historically among the first American Indians to attend a colonial college) into a beautifully anguished fiction of early America’s perceptions of gender, race and culture.

Brooks’s other novels — March and Year of Sorrows — remain two of my favorites; but People of the Book, not as much. Caleb’s Crossing is somewhere in between, and it did achieve something her first two novels did so well: It made me want to leave work and come home and get on the couch and keep reading it. The Club highly recommends it, even though the pace and story falter slightly in the latter third. I was intrigued by something one of the reviews brought up, about how Caleb’s Crossing indulges in a bit of wishful feminist fantasy (the narrator is a young woman who conceals her intelligence from the men who control her life, managing to pick up Latin and Hebrew while toiling in the kitchen adjacent to the classroom), but you know what? FINE. Exactly how much wishful feminist idealism are we being exposed to these days? On Real Housewives of New Jersey? In teenage vampire novels? In Bossypants?

* * *

Iphigenia in Forest Hills is Janet Malcolm’s latest little book that is, as always, actually about something deeper, bigger and more elusively arcane than the thing it’s about — this time reported from a murder trial in New York’s outer boroughs. I liked it and recommend it.

And no sooner had I finished it than a weird spat broke out on Gangrey, in which people who’ve never really read Janet Malcolm took umbrage at Janet Malcolm’s first sentence in The Journalist and the Murderer — about 20 years too late. It was bizarre. You can read the exchange for yourself, which clearly brought out some of the hissy in me. This episode cured me of having any more online discussions about journalism for a good long while. If little ol’ mid-list intellectual Janet Malcolm can, well into her 70s, still produce work of this caliber and cause such a fit among a couple of puffed-chest male feature writers, then what better validation of one’s work is there?

Iphigenia in Forest Hills still puzzles over some of the same eternal qualms of the journalistic process. I identified strongly with this passage:

“Journalists request interviews the way beggars ask for alms, reflexively and nervously. Like beggars, journalists must always be prepared for a rebuff, and cannot afford to let pride prevent them from making the pitch. But it isn’t pleasant for a grown man or woman to put himself or herself in the way of refusal. In my many years of doing journalism, I have never come to terms with this part of the work. I hate to ask. I hate it when they say no. And I love it when they say yes. …”

I imagine that this might strike some of the outraged commenters on the Gangrey thread as further evidence of Malcolm’s weakness — journalism takes balls, lady!, etc. — but I would be willing to bet that more writers of nonfiction can relate to this than not. I always compared the task of asking complete strangers to cooperate with my reporting to having an entire trunk of band candy and only a day to sell it to complete strangers, and then discovering that everyone has put up NO SOLICITING signs.

* * *

A lotta people say 'What's that?' (It's Pat!)

The One-Man Book Club went off on a surprisingly difficult though ultimately successful ebay quest for a copy of the 1975 memoir Pat Loud: A Woman’s Story (by Pat Loud with Nora Johnson) after becoming immersed this spring in all 12 episodes of the original An American Family docu-series that aired on PBS in January 1973. I was reviewing Cinema Verite, HBO’s tragically mediocre dramatization of the Loud family’s experiences during the making and aftermath of An American Family. It’s my good luck that I was sent a complete set of the original series from WNET — they aren’t available on DVD and probably never will be, for a variety of legal reasons. I wrote a long piece about both the HBO show and the original, which ran in April.

Anyhow, having watched it all, Michael and I wanted to know much, much more. Pat Loud’s book is an interesting study in a lot of things: What a media circus looked like in the mid-’70s, for one. What a quickie memoir was in the publishing realm in the mid-’70s. It’s completely written in her meandering, Stanford-smart-but-SoCal-dopey voice. As an artifact, Pat Loud’s memoir is really about arriving at one’s middle-age in the freshly liberated but utterly depressing 1970s. She was on the verge of something, which she thought had to do with feminism, perhaps, or post-divorce self-awareness and self-satisfaction. (Fun fact: Pat and Bill Loud reunited years ago. They’re now 90 and 85.)

Now we all know what it was that she was really processing when she wrote this book: tragic, instant celebrity in the earliest era of reality TV.

* * *

Back in April, this blog gave away free copies of my friend Louis Bayard’s new novel, The School of Night — which I finally got around to reading and enjoyed very much. It’s about a lonely man named Henry — a divorced, failed academic who specialized in the Elizabethan era, who lives on Capitol Hill. A friend and mentor of Henry’s with a sizable Shakespearean-related archive has mysteriously died and Henry is hired by another collector to help track down a special document missing from the deceased’s collection, and soon enough, Henry is embroiled in a deadly race. The novel bounces back and forth between the now and the then, then being England in 1603, where we learn about Thomas Harriot (“England’s Galileo”) and Sir Walter Raleigh’s legendary “school of night,” a clandestine group of thinkers on the verge of dangerous ideas. And guess what? Harriot’s housemaid has been eavesdropping all her life, learned to read on the fly, and is now gleaning much about physics and – HOLY MOLY, IT’S MORE WISHFUL FEMINIST FANTASY! Just like Geraldine Brooks. We are so onto a theme here today.

Lou says at lunch, back in March: Don’t read my book. Don’t. No really, don’t.

Hank says: Oh, I’m gonna, Lou. I’m gonna.

Without putting words in his mouth, I think Lou perhaps feels that he caved too much to commercial pressures while writing the book (do you have any idea how many historical novelists get the Da Vinci lecture about marketability and sales from their publishers? It sounds like the sort of thing that would give me an ulcer), but I really got into The School of Night, even though it is not my usual genre. I read it on vacation — on a deck chair, in Bar Harbor, Me. — and briefly understood what so many other readers (i.e., customers) look for in a summer beach read. He makes it seem smarter than it has to be.

As I said, I gave away free copies of The School  of Night back when it was released. I have since rescued another one from a life of freebie pile doom in the Post mailroom — would YOU like to have it? E-mail me and I’ll send it to you, free.

* * *

There’s really nothing left for me to say about Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad that a gazillion online reviews haven’t said already. Huzzah for its Pulitzer! I’m a year late in reading it!

Except to say: How nice, in this era of hammered-flat, super-linear novels (not yours, Lou!) to encounter a true crazy-quilt sewn from meticulous scraps, an assemblage of parts meant to evoke a whole, a novel about everything and nothing except the ways a set of lives can glance against one another over time. Though I’d be hard pressed to recall (or envy) a single sentence, I am in love with the structure.

For those who don’t know, it’s about a bunch of people who had something to do with a punk rock band in the Bay Area — directly or peripherally — and it just gently but darkly ripples outward from there, back and forth through time, from the 1980s well into the 21st century. It ends up in much the same place Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story wound up — foreseeing a future generation’s rational response to the chaos of the techno-renaissance, a calming down on the other end of a cultural revolution, in which future generations break through the traditional formats of narrative and reject this generation’s tattoos, coarse language and emotional vacuity.

Nice thought, but, you know, probably not how it really ends.

* * *

While in the Maine woods for a few days, I picked up a copy of The Maine Woods by someone named Henry Thoreau. You know, because. (The loons, Norman — you old poop! The loons.)

“In the middle of the night, as indeed each time that we lay on the shore of a lake, we heard the voice of the loon, loud and distinct, from far over the lake. It is a very wild sound, quite in keeping with the place and the circumstances of the traveller, and very unlike the voice of a bird. I could lie awakefor hours listening to it, it is so thrilling. …Like the hallooing of a man on a very high key, having thrown his voice into his head. …”

Oh, ranger!

After the first 100 pages or so, I found it more helpful to skip around and look things up by index (mosquitoes; blueberries; Penobscot; loons). This is a remarkable travelogue, reported in 1846, 1853 and 1857 and  (before-ish Walden, the first excursion began when Thoreau was 29; the last was when he was 40). This was back when pushing deep into the Maine woods really meant exploring the boonies.

I myself read it while thoroughly spritzed in Deep Woods Off!, enjoying my pre-dinner cocktail on the porch at The Birches lodge at Moosehead Lake, which Thoreau visited. The boonies, I guess, are in the eye of the beholder. An excerpt:

“The moose is singularly grotesque and awkward to look at. Why should it stand so high at the shoulders? Why have so long a head? Why have no tail to speak of? for in my examination I overlooked it entirely. Naturalists say it is an inch and a half long. It reminded me at once of the camelopard, high before and low behind, — and no wonder, for, like it, it is fitted to browse on trees. The upper lip projected two inches beyond the lower for this purpose. … The moose will perhaps oneday become extinct; but how naturally then, when it exists only as a fossil relic, and unseen as that, may the poet or sculptor invent a fabulous animal with similar branching and leafy horns, — a sort of fucus or lichen in bone — to be the inhabitant of such a forest as this!

“Here, just at the head of the murmuring rapids, Joe now proceeded to skin the moose with a pocket-knife, while I looked on; and a tragical business it was, — to see that still warm and palpitating body pierced with a knife, to see the warm milk stream from the rent udder, and the ghastly naked red carcass appearing from within its seemly robe, which was made to hide it. The ball had passed through the shoulder-blade diagonally and lodged under the skin on the opposite side, and was partially flattened. … At length Joe had stripped off the hide and dragged it trailing to the shore, declaring that it weighed a hundred pounds, though probably fifty would have been nearer the truth. He cut off a large mass of the meat to carry along, and another, together with the tongue and nose, he put with the hide on the shore to lie there all night, or till we returned. I was surprised that he thought of leaving this meat thus exposed by the side of the carcass, as the simplest course, not fearing that any creature would touch it; but nothing did. …”

Speaking of, we had wonderful food in Maine.

* * *

From loons to ducks.

Like its Melvillian namesake, Donovan Hohn’s nonfiction book Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them takes far too much effort to get through. I lugged this thing around all summer. It’s based on the author’s original Harper’s article, which reported the already-reported (and widely misreported) tale of a shipping container full of rubber duckies that toppled off a freighter in the stormy Pacific in 1992 and loosed a squillion packages of bath toys.

The packaging eventually dissolved and the toys floated free, en masse. Not just rubber duckies (that’s the legend taking over) but also other varieties of bath toys, made in China, on their way to America. This rather apocryphal scattering of plastic took on a narrative meaning all its own, as the toys turned up all over the globe and are believed by some to still be a-swim out there, metaphorically representing mankind’s trashing of the planet — and just about anything else you want them to stand for: lark, economy, waste, happiness, loss, civilization, geopolitics, global warming, etc.

This is that rare, super-ambitious work of nonfiction that in almost any other writer’s hands would become tedious. I admired it, but Moby-Duck certainly didn’t win me over the way it won over most of the book reviewers, whose praise convinced me to climb aboard. It’s a pretty nifty book — elegantly reported; sincere and glib on the same page — but it is almost certainly too long, even if the writer is attempting to match Melville’s breadth, verbosity and his reach for universal themes. As a way of turning a single magazine article into a doorstopper-weight book, it’s a smashing success, but it’s also a slog — and like Moby-Dick, at some point the goal is just to endure it and finish it off. I like how Hohn manages to be Ishmael, Ahab and Starbuck all at once –which, in that order, means naive, delusional, and homesick for his wife and kid. The futility of the hunt becomes clear in the first 30 pages; it’s up to you if you decide to press on.

Be prepared — like the ducks in the book — for seemingly endless drift.

* * *

My reward for finishing Moby-Duck was picking up a copy of Wayne Koestenbaum’s wee little Humiliation on the day it came out. I’m such a fan of his insights and his words — last summer, after reading Hotel Theory, I declared in the One-Man Book Club that anyone who could read Hotel Theory and talk excitedly with me about it would be considered a lifelong friend.

Here, Koestenbaum tackles an abstract but important concept in a way that only he can. The book is a series of ruminations, research and conclusions about the feeling and essential power of humiliation in the human character. He looks at it from every possible angle, in 183 tight pages — everything from Abu Grhaib photos to Google searches to throwing up in front of classmates in the third grade. Humiliation, like humiliation, is best taken in small doses, so it humiliates me to say I read it in one feeding frenzy, while sprawled on the big white bed in my room at the Beverly Hilton (my own Hotel Theory), deliberately forgoing a network’s big red-carpet party for its fall television shows, all of which (the stars of which) are certain to be humiliated once the shows air.

Koestenbaum — I want his brain. Here’s a taste:

“The newspaper, too, is humiliating — a viper’s den, a circle of hell, alive with lamentations. The victim, a prominent socialite, a chemistry student, a working mother, a drug addict, an accountant, a morbidly obese boy with severe mental disabilities, a jogger, an underpaid au pair, a chauffeur, a hotelier, a diet doctor. Photo of a suspect, with hoodie, with Down’s syndrome features, with a face like the young Sean Connery’s, with a scar above the lip, with a face like the young Jennifer Jones, with a beard, with surgically augmented lips, with a shaved head and radical fringe tattoos on the skull, with a yarmulke, with a charity-gala coif. The accused killer’s shocked family, congregating outside the house. Embarrassed or depleted eyes of the murderer’s mother, in the courtroom, after the verdict.”

* * *

I think weddings can often be humiliating — if not for the key players, then for someone. Popularly, it’s the bridesmaid who is in for some level of emotional debasement, though I’d also nominate certain guests. There’s also the standard-bundled humiliation formats of weddings: the “insulting” toasts, the groom’s ritual smearing of the cake on the bride’s face (and/or vice-versa), the desperate grab by maiden hands for the tossed bouquet. The cost of some weddings is certainly humiliating; the process of staging one must feel that way too. Sometimes, I mean.

So, a little comic book. Adrian Tomine, usually so great, humiliates himself here in the autobiographical Scenes from an Impending Marriage, in which he reveals that even he, with all his hipster cred and ability to sniff bullshit from far away, is no more immune to the bridal-industrial complex than anyone else. I quickly grew bored with his and his betrothed’s first-world, well-trod dilemmas encountered while planning their “simple” wedding. Ultimately the book winds up endorsing that which it purports, half-heartedly, to oppose. But as always, the art and mood of his work pulls us through.

* * *

Okay, it’s cruelty time! These are the books that failed THE FIFTY-PAGE TEST, which means that at some point near or past the 50-page mark, they fell off my Chinese shipping freighter (perhaps tossed?) and scattered to sea. They’re humiliated! But keep in mind, often as not, it’s the One-Man Book Club’s fault for choosing something the club did not, it turns out, want to read.

Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work! by Douglas Coupland. Well, this should have been a slam dunk. A writer I’ve liked a lot in the past, lasering in on a subject I want to know more about, in a very cool-looking (and once again tiny!) book. But right from the start the writing seemed murky, padded. I quit the book early in, after noticing that Coupland had two different birthdates (a day apart) for McLuhan, within a couple of pages of one another. If that’s not a typo and instead an inside joke or some other expression of irony — McLuhan was so ahead of his time that he was literally born ahead of his time! – then I just didn’t get it.

This Life is in Your Hands: One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone, by Melissa Coleman. It’s sad to give up on a memoir early in, because it basically says to the writer: “your life story is boring me.” This is another book I picked up in Maine on a Maine bookshelf display, being as it’s the story of how Melissa Coleman’s parents moved off the grid in the late ’60s and took up residence down the road from Helen and Scott Nearing, who’d became sort of culturally famous for articulating and exemplifying the “back to the land” movement that attracted (and still attracts) so many idealists seeking to live deliberately (a la Thoreau) way out in the sticks. Though the writing is lovely enough in spots, I have an issue with basic structure here, in that — through a collusion of jacket copy and intentional foreshadowing — we learn the book’s big reveal too soon. (The little sister drowns.)

Stolen World: A Tale of Reptiles, Smugglers, and Skullduggery by Jennie Erin Smith. This got some good reviews for its quality of reportage and level of writing. Twenty or so pages into the book it hit me: I don’t give one shit about people stealing reptiles for some larger underground commercial gain. Coldblooded, but there it is.

Cleopatra: A Life, by Stacy Schiff. Also highly praised, and a boffo bestseller. I was eager to read, despite Judy’s warnings that Schiff assumes too much of the casual reader who has no firm grasp on ancient North African civilizations. Twenty or so pages in it hit me: I don’t give one shit about Cleopatra. (Well, maybe a little tiny singular shit about Cleopatra? So it sat on the desk forever and a day. I tried once more and now I give up.)

(Yes, I do realize that the time to arrive at these opinions is before I bring the book to the cash register. I’m working on that.)

Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Our Own Past, by Simon Reynolds. Brand new summary of a decades-old plaint. I started nodding in assent as soon as I read the title of the book, bought it, and kept nodding in assent for 30-40 pages or so. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Then I just nodded off. After you’ve made the case, why go on for another 2oo or 300 — yow! 400! — pages?

* * *

Finally, a motion to adjourn. (So seconded.)

I’m going to retire the One-Man Book Club, right now. It was fun while it lasted (two years!), and a small group of loyal readers seemed to really enjoy it. And I did too, but here’s the thing. A few things, actually:

– I’m a TV critic for a living, writing a crap-ton of reviews and essays. As such, books are a refuge for what’s left of my Kardashian-addled mind. I need to go back to reading books without the self-added burden of writing about them. I started these book reviews as a way to keep a conversation alive on this blog (and in my head) about my own frustration as a book writer and reader and my eagerness to belong to a bookish world. The initial fun of One-Man Book Club has come to feel like an obligation to a nearly non-existent audience. (Imaginary friends are so demanding.)

– I seem unable to make these entries into a quick and riffy experience that I can just dash off and post. Look at how grotesquely long this entry is. Look at how much time I wasted, first putting it off, then finishing it. The One-Man Book Club is something I would love to hone and post more frequently if I was, say, unemployed. Maybe one day I will be. Until then, I am quite intellectually occupied with writing the criticism I’m being paid to write.

– I’ve recently become more fond of Goodreads, the book-review social network. That’s where I’ll be filing any thoughts on what I’m currently reading and what I read long ago — pithy, just a sentence or two, starred reviews, which will be attributed to me by full name. I also have an Author Page at Goodreads now, synced to this blog. The One-Man Book Club, in other words, is joining a club of thousands. (Millions?) I’ll occasionally link to my Goodreads reviews here and I’ll still do book giveaways when friends publish new books.

– I’ve got other writerly stuff to do with my spare time — some of it pressing. Specifically, I am working on an overdue essay for a friend’s photo book. I’ve also started reporting and writing a long contribution to a very intriguing group project in L.A. that may one day become a book. Both of these need to get done by year’s end.

– And without getting into it, I will tell you (and only you! You’re the only one here!) that I’m in the pre-conception stage on two new book ideas of my own. One might be a novel and one is nonfiction. It’s time to see if either has any pull.

Now … who wants more wine?

At this rate, the One-Man Book Club will soon be meeting at St. Elizabeths. (And no, Mr. Hinckley, we’re not going to read any books about Jodie Foster.) I actually had a fantasy during all the deadlines for fall TV reviews: If I could get just sick enough — something that required convalescence but not, you know, pain — I could read more. Books have been my only mental refuge from television lately (as opposed to what, exercise??), but you’ll notice the One-Man Book Club choices have been rather lite. Television eats your brain.

I’m about to dive into some weightier tomes, so lets get these summer fuckers out of the way, and I mean fast this time. There will be no refreshments at One-Man Book Club tonight. We are all business. Some of these I read as far back as July and I’m sick of looking at the stack.

Dear Money, by Martha McPhee: Pretty good novel about a (wait for it) New York novelist with her head pretty far up her arse, constantly measuring herself, her marriage, and her financial worth against others, who always appear to have more. Finally she takes up an offer from a hedge-fund wunderkind to come join a big Wall Street trading firm and learn how to get rich. What I liked about this novel was how skillfully the author made sure we would never, ever, ever like the main character, even if we tried to sympathize with her. She just won’t let you. What I didn’t like was how much the author uses “indeed” as a transition. Indeed, sometimes it happens twice on page. Indeed! (Indeed is to erudite New Yorkers as dude is to skateboarding Californians or snow is to the Inuit. The word has multiple meanings, depending on inflection, even in type!)

Imperial Bedrooms, by Bret Easton Ellis: He got the first 20 or so pages exactly, totally perfect — starting with Clay telling us about how they made a movie about him and Julian and Blair (the dreaded Less Than Zero screen adaptation) but that the original novel had actually been written by some other kid that nobody liked. (Whoa!) But the magic of being back in that sense of Less Than Zero nihilism wears off as Imperial Bedrooms becomes a mystery — like an actual shadows-and-darkened-car-windows mystery, a stalker story with unknown bad guys. Yet, Imperial Bedrooms is truly a sequel to Less Than Zero in this way: Its middle third is just as boring as the first book’s, and its ending is just as unsatisfying. And, oh Lordy, if you liked American Psycho you should stick around for the really dark twist near the end.

Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and the Dawn of the Modern Woman, by Sam Wasson: Breezily non-academic examination of all things Breakfast at Tiffany’s — Capote and his work habits, the invention of an ideal, the ways books used to get made into movies (which doesn’t seem to have changed all that much); the nefarious Hollywood code that turned Holly Golightly into Something Altogether Else; Adurey Hepburn, dragged kicking and pleading into the role that sealed her deal with American culture; Edith Head’s private tantrums … Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M. is the sort of film book I usually love. It’s like a hybrid of the playfulness and riffing of David Thomson and the primary-research rigor of Mark Harris, but Sam Wasson has some weaknesses too that pop up here and there, mostly in tone. Also, I’m not sure he ever comes close to delivering on the final promise of the subtitle (“the Dawn of the Modern Woman”). Nevertheless, I found it a fascinating and cinchy go-along. I gather the only people who don’t like this book already know too much about the subject or don’t like the imaginative way it’s assembled.

Slake, No. 1: This is the long-awaited journal of life in Los Angeles by the former editors of L.A. Weekly. It’s supposed to be the real, unfiltered deal, packed with surprises by some known and unknown LA writers and artists, proving once and for all to the world (New Yorkers, mainly) that the West Coast is where it’s really at. It’s also supposed to be a celebration of the power of print, with no Twittering or Facebooking come-ons. Slake is indeed fer-shur pretty to look through, but there’s too much material here, by about half. I was surprised, given the pedigree, at how amateur and art-schooly most of it comes across. Now that it’s been two months since I read it, I can’t remember one single piece in it, except for one guy’s story about how his arm made a cameo in a San Fernando Valley-made porno film.

Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void, by Mary Roach: Mary Roach is a very smart lady science writer, but I’m not convinced she’s smart in the way everyone thinks she is. What she is smart at is marketing and making gross things seem fascinating and funny. She is smart at survey-subject journalism, dipping in and pulling out of broad subjects in specific ways, and then summing it all up in the style of no-style. She’s like one of those rare people who makes people laugh when she farts. (In fact, people will pay a lot to go to TED conferences and laugh at her brilliantly scintillated farts about science.) I read her book about dead bodies, which was delightful enough, but skipped her books about ghost-hunting and sex. I wanted to read this one because I’m that kid who used to subscribe to Discover magazine, watch Doctor Who and file lovely Time-Life illustrated book reports on the Voyager missions for science class. Packing for Mars, which is about the science of space travel and the many physical limitations therein (thereout?), merely advances the Mary Roach brand. I found this book admiringly cynical; it’s about how to get to people to Mars, but it’s mostly about how to get Mary Roach to the bestseller list again. (Bitter!)

THESE LAST THREE KINDA GO TOGETHER, so the One-Man Book Club is going to pretend that it held a thematic meeting with fancy eats, and discussed all three in erudite ways…

Gunn’s Golden Rules: Life’s Little Lessons for Making It Work, by Tim Gunn: Total, page-turning delight for people who, like all of the members of the One-Man Book Club, are just astonished every single day by the lack of good manners around us.  Once you get used to Gunn’s tangential tendencies (the whole book seems to be organized around a “that reminds me of this one time” series of fleeting segues), this is a fun and revealing read. Sure, he disses a few celebrities for their bad manners and/or outrageous senses of entitlement, but I double-dog-dare any of them to complain publicly about it, because TIM GUNN DOES NOT LIE. More interesting, I thought, is the relentless positivism at the core of this strangely solitary man who’s become so gregariously famous. He’s been celibate for decades! Never goes on a date, not since he got his heart broken by his first love, 30 years ago. And he makes staying resolutely single sound like the healthiest choice in the world, and maybe he’s right. It’s sort of like having a One-Man Book Club…

True Prep: It’s a Whole New Old World, by Lisa Birnbach and Chip Kidd: Speaking of middle school science projects … I just had to read this, because I’m one of those people who — even way out in the middle of Oklahoma in 1981– fell hard for The Official Preppy Handbook, mistook it as a guide to living and dressing, and have been trying to recover ever since. Looking back, what I owe most to the OPH was the way it reconciled my “new wave” tendencies (B-52s, Devo, Go-Go’s) with my purple Polo shirt and plaid shorts. From then on, Everything Made Sense. (Everything, that is, except my homosexuality, which OPH was weirdly silent on and True Prep mostly is too.) True Prep, of course, can never be the revelation that the original was. But it’s a handsome sequel, thanks to Chip Kidd, who seems to have been similarly afflicted by the original. That said, True Prep is also borrrrring. Consider yourselves warned.

What you really want, and what the One-Man Book Club more heartily recommends, is Take Ivy, by Teruyoshi Hayashida, et al: This is a legendary book, originally published in 1965 in Japan as a marketing field study of menswear fashion trends at American Ivy League campuses back then. Starting with its Engrish-y title and text, this photo book is the ur-source of all male preppydom, as viewed by alien visitors from a faraway land. For years Take Ivy was mostly a rumor, something that was Xeroxed and passed around among hardcore preppy designers and enthusiasts. It was re-released this summer and it is utterly dreamy and fascinating — and sure, disturbing in a master-race sort of way. In fact, when paging through Take Ivy I can’t help but do the math: Here it was, a mere 19 or 20 years after the U.S. bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Japanese marketers were transfixed by the insouciant style and confidence of young men America’s most elite institutions. Somewhere in the background faces here, you’d have been as likely to glimpse college boys such as George W. Bush or Al Gore or Bill Clinton. Hayashida and his team were fetishizing the sons of the very power structure that their own fathers vowed to destroy.

But anyhoo, back to the madras! Here’s a peek, courtesy of the NYT:

That’s it from the One-Man Book Club, which makes no promises about the date and time of our next meeting. All I know is there are HEAPS of books sitting here, waiting to be read. Send your recommendations, thoughts, etc…

Okay, everyone, settle down, and stop your goddamn clickety-clicking and distracted surfing!

I have analog media to promote (look, a book!), or, if you must, some kindling for your Kindle, an iBook to get your little greasy fingerprints all over. This is the full Tonsil blog endorsement of Hamlet’s BlackBerry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age, by William Powers. It just came out. I got to read a galley a while back. You’ll soon be reading about it in all the right places.

‘Cause there’s a movement afoot, and books to go along with it (such as the slightly, faintly similar The Shallows by Nicholas Carr), and it is this: Everyone slow the fuck down. Where are we going in such a hurry? Are we sure want to go there? What will happen when we get there, besides the death of thinking, writing, keeping, knowing? Is it too late for our crazybrains? Have we already lost contemplation, rumination?

This book gets at all that. It’s a combination of essay, history, and some smart suggestions for unplugging just enough to breathe and consider. William Powers is a friend I’ve never spent time with. I know his wife, Martha Sherrill, better. They both served in the trenches of The Washington Post Style section and wrote tons of great stories, and even long after they left, came to my aid when I had to write “The List” of ins and outs. They now live this tranquil-sounding life on Cape Cod (year round) with their son. From the snowdrifts, they send lovely hand-drawn Christmas cards that cause in me a sort of longing and admiration for their happiness. (It’s okay, I love it.) Check out Martha’s ongoing blog about the local neighborhood dump. No, don’t! Focus on THIS. Stop being so skittish and webby.

Hamlet’s BlackBerry offers a window on life at the Powers-Sherrill household, where there’s an “Internet sabbath” in effect from Friday night to Monday morning. I think a lot of people are able to (or try to) manage that sort of habit — blogger culture has been especially good about upholding a weekend and holiday ethic (“blogging will be light — I’ll be making apple pies for the holiday and swimming in the river and you shouldn’t be online anyhow! See you Monday” etc), if only to project an image of holistic living, i.e., I’m too busy kayaking to blog now.

Alas, for me, too many weekends are spent in some terribly pointless web surfing, blogging, e-mailing, YouTube watching, etc.

William Powers

One of my favorite things Bill wrote (and apparently one of David Carr’s favorites, too) was about the onslaught of “Did You See?” that infected our culture in the mid-2000s. (I like to write it as Didjusee?) It was about the beginning of the Internet all-you-can-eat buffet and the end of people actually reading or considering all the links they were clicking on or re-linking (now called retweeting). It no longer mattered. The question was only  “Didjusee what so-and-so wrote on Slate?” “Didjusee the Lindsey Lohan video on TMZ?” “Didjusee what Mitt Romney told the Times?” Didjusee? Didjusee?

Ah, but did you read it as well? Usually no.

This is a gentle book that describes what’s happening to paper and to life. It starts with Bill musing on what the Internet has done to us, and can any of it possibly be undone, or done better?

Then he even-more-gently walks us through some moments in history when thinkers and writers had to accept technological changes: Socrates had to accept that Gen Y’ers like Phaedrus liked to keep discourses and speeches on scrolls, so they could carry them around read them again and again, without all that talking. In Shakespeare’s world, people had to get used to the new annoying habit of everyone carrying scratch pads around, to take notes and jot down information. (i.e., Hamlet’s BlackBerry, which sort of sounds like one of these.) Gutenberg gave us a world where we could disappear into books and newspapers and tune out the world. (Are you even listening to me? etc.)

Finally, Hamlet’s BlackBerry seeks some ways in which we can make use of our new technologies and still have a life with one another. It’s a beginner’s guide for training oneself to survive the current renaissance — a tumult I think won’t be settled until long after we’re all dead. Forget jobs and media and making a living; I would just like to survive this revolution with my brain intact. Wouldn’t you?

So, hooray for Hamlet’s BlackBerry. I was sent two copies from the publisher and have pressed them into the duties of book promotion. However, I’ve purchased an additional two copies, one for me to keep AND ONE THAT I’M HAPPY TO GIVE TO A DESERVING SOUL. Simply e-mail me here (go to “contact” in the nav bar) before July 16, 2010 and tell me why you want it. (Like we did with Kim Severson’s book.)

PS: Bill’s on tour. If you live in Washington, go see him at Politics & Prose on July 20!

No intro, no explan, nothing but books. Just trying to just say, yep, read ‘em and here’s what the entire book club (still just the one member) thought. Need to clear it all out before the real summer vacation reading starts later this month.

First up, Less Than Zero, by Bret Easton Ellis. This is a re-reading, 25 years or so after the fact.

Actually, 23 Julys ago, I think? Here is the cover of the very same copy I read back then and have kept on various shelves in various apartments and dwellings all these years — still smelling faintly of Bain de Soleil and Sun-In and a waft of one’s completely manufactured angst on a semesterly break home from one’s gruelingly existential life at a private college…

You know what? It’s kinda good. It might even be better than you remember it being — even though the final third of the book is a real drag, which I believe may have been the point: the monotony of drugs, wealth, clubs, palm trees. I wasn’t surprised to find it feeling fresh; I was and still remain one of those American Psycho apologists, who admire that novel for its indictment of ’80s consumer culture, or as satire, or as anything besides something worth staging a Take Back the Night march for. Less Than Zero really deserved everything it got, including the haters and the pans, and especially including the bad movie. (Really, an egregious act of adaptation.) I decided to re-read it after all these years, mostly because I’m thinking of reading the overwhelmingly poorly-reviewed Imperial Bedrooms, Ellis’s Zero sequel-of-sorts, when I go on vacation soon. I wanted another looksee.

This time I was struck by how Clay and his world functioned without computers and phones. It’s like reading about pioneers. They were all about instant gratification — the point of the novel is that instant gratification had ruined them (all of us!) forever — and yet they spend pages waiting for one another’s phone calls, pulling over to use pay phones, checking answering machines. I really feel someone should make an incredibly faithful movie version of Less Than Zero now, with 1980s L.A. replicated down to every last detail (using David Fincher Zodiac-style CGI if need be). Sort of the way Rich Linklater did Dazed and Confused and nailed the ’70s in an overlooked way. I guarantee you this time, done right, a Less Than Zero movie would look almost like a comedy. I’d laugh, anyhow.

The only other thing you’d find, reading it now, is the way that Less Than Zero presupposed a world of Kardashians, Lohans, Hiltons, Bachelors and Bachelorettes. Dig this little bit from Ellis’s interview in Details last month:

Q: Years ago people could have read some of your books and said, ‘Oh, this is just nihilism. These people don’t exist! There’s nobody that rich and stupid and narcissistic!’

A: Ha ha ha! Surprise!

• • •

Up next, two books that got reviewed together somewhere — I forget where; Salon? Well, feel free to look it up — but here’s proof that a twinned review of two different titles can actually sucker the book consumer into buying both!

Both of these books try in different ways to get at our national obsession and heartbreak around home ownership, mortgages, domesticity, debt. One’s a memoir, one’s a novel.

The memoir: Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House, by Meghan Daum. I thought this book moved along okay up to the point where the author settles down with a nice man and buys a house she really seems to like, and we’ve still got 75 or 100 pages or so to go. Then it becomes sort of like watching HGTV every night. (Which Michael and I often do. Aren’t we all more interesting when we don’t have what we want?)

So, the first half was much more engaging — after all, the tale is always taller when you’re broke in the big city and living in shitty apartments and working at shitty jobs and all of the sudden feeling … shitty. People have said this book is good because of Daum’s “courage” to tell it like it is.

But, as a reader, I was miffed by one area in which she held back on telling it exactly: a memoir like this cries out for actual numbers, personal financial data — and I’ve noticed that a lot of these Great Recession and real-estate boom/bust memoirs expect readers to be satisfied with phrases like “mid six figures” or “some money I had in a savings account.”

From Daum, I wanted not only the prices of the L.A. dream houses taunting her from the real-estate listing websites, but her own history of depressing equations, with all the plus signs and the minus signs. Such as: her salary of that first job in the 1990s? The monthly rent on her fondly and not-so-fondly remembered apartments? Credit-card balances at life’s nadir? The precise amount of the advance she got for her novel, which enabled her (at last) to buy real estate? (For a first novel? Does not compute.) I’d even consider putting copies of her tax returns for all the years discussed in this memoir in the back, as Appendix A.

You want to write a memoir about real-estate envy? We need to see the paperwork. Otherwise, it’s like writing a sex memoir with the covers pulled up to your chin.

Meanwhile, the novel is called The Hole We’re In, by Gabrielle Zevin. I stuck with it, even though I started disliking it midway. The author digs herself quite a hole here. It’s got an epic scope that reminded me of Michael Cunningham’s Flesh and Blood, stretching from 1998 into the 2010s. It’s about a religious family in the suburbs, who are up to their eyeballs in McMansion-style credit-card debt. One daughter is a bridezilla; the son runs away to New York for film school; the youngest daughter is disowned and winds up serving in Iraq, and eventually comes home to the ruburbs, where she ends up working in a Walmart analogue. It’s called (unfortunately) “Slickmart.” And Slickmart is locally-owned, instead of being a corporate box store. Slickmart is just one of many wha-hunh? sort of botched details in The Hole We’re In. Zevin’s observational lapses  on details like these disturbs the careful reader, or anyone who’s ever driven across America and paid attention.

Also, the family’s religion is off, in terms of believability. They’re not megachurchers, but instead the author calls them “Sabbath Day Adventists” (which is actually the name of a black church started in New York, sez Wikipedia) and so, instead, they’re a mishmash of evangelical vegetarians who preach an anti-consumerist streak (refusing to shop at Slickmart, e.g.), but are in credit-card debt all the same? It doesn’t add up. Even for a novel. It felt like the author had only read here and there about modern American Christianity and consumer culture. Back to the writers’ workshop for The Hole We’re In, with a suggestion to cut about 10,000 words.

But also? I read The Hole We’re In to the end, so that’s a form of praise. As demonstrated by the cruel, Fifty-Page Test, the One-Man Book Club is fickle.

• • •

Couldn’t help myself, ’twas too curious, and picked up a sale copy of The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption and Pee, by Sarah Silverman. (I’m allowed! Look, if the rest of the world can sequester itself with Stieg Larsson mysteries and Twilight novels, can I not spend a day or two reading a half-good celebrity memoir?)

I didn’t want this book for any great reason other than she has intrigued me — funny sometimes, strange always, and willing to say stuff no one else says. I appreciated this spunk, on the fourth page:

I’m not a literary genius. I’m not Dostoyevsky, whoever that is — I’m pretty sure I just made that name up. I’m only thirty-nine years old, with most of my final two years of show business still ahead of me. … I have never struggled with addiction and I was never molested. Tragically, my life has only been  moderately fucked up. I’m not writing this book to share wisdom or inspire people. I’m writing this book because I am a famous comedian, which is how it works now. If you’re famous, you get to write a book, and not the other way around, so the next Dave Eggers better get on a TV show or kill someone or something. …

She’s right, you know. Let’s have another look at some of the list of top-selling nonfiction books (with sales numbers) as of late last year, shall we? Amid all the self-help and Sarah Palin and Teddy Kennedy sales, the eye scans downward, through the top 100 …

Time of My Life. Patrick Swayze and Lisa Niemi (320,000 copies)

Official Book Club Selection: A Memoir According to Kathy Griffin. (201,000 copies)

Are You There Vodka? It’s Me, Chelsea. Chelsea Handler (200,000 copies)

High On Arrival. Mackenzie Phillips. (170,000 copies)

Mommywood. Tori Spelling (146,000 copies)

Here’s The Deal. Howie Mandel (100,000 copies)

You ask: Are those good sales numbers? Let me assure you: FUCK, YES, at least for book authors. Good money for semi-famous comedians, too, I would guess.

Anyhow, the first half of The Bedwetter is as good as any weirdo-girl memoir I’ve ever read, and the back half is exactly as padded out and aimless as any celebrity book I’ve ever read. I loved her guiding moral principle of “make it a treat” (i.e., a modern twist on “everything in moderation”) and there’s a remarkable dose of honest storytelling about her family, especially her funny father. Oh, and she included a photo of a writer from her TV show wearing a co-worker’s hair clip on his dick.

But she really lost her nerve, though, when it came time to describe her relationship (and breakup) with Jimmy Kimmel. She decides, it seems, to turn it into the strangest little two-page allegory about putting a pet cat down. (Pussy euthanasia?)

Best not to think it through too much.

• • •

Wilson, by Daniel Clowes. I hadn’t enjoyed an expensive, hardbound comic book in a while (graphic novel — does it really apply here? I guess so), and Clowes is still pleasingly misanthropic. And, I’ve always liked his strong, commercial-art styleline. And Wilson is jam packed with angry observation.

Like when Wilson is waiting for a flight and asks the man next to him:

What do you do?

Man: Hmmm?

Wilson: Your job? JOB?

Man: I’m in senior management at a small equity firm. And I do some consulting for various–

Wilson: Glaze. No, I’m just kidding. Go ahead.

Man: Well, I–

Wilson: But not with all the mumbo-jumbo. I want to know what you actually DO. Like the physical tasks of your daily life.

Man: Well, like I said, a lot of it involves consulting, with a focus on how to best implement managerial strategies in–

Wilson: Jesus! Listen to me, brother — you’re going to be lying on your deathbed in 30 years thinking “Where did it all go? What did I do with all those precious days?” Some shit-work for the oligarchs? Is that it?

Man: Look, I’m proud of what I do, and I work very hard to–

Wilson:

Wilson‘s great, but I wonder if David Boring, a copy of which I gave away ages ago, was a tiny bit better. All the reviews seem to agree that Wilson is Clowes’s masterwork — and there’s something deliciously mean about it. All those New Yorker covers really pay off — probably no better way for a comics artist to achieve legitimacy. Even Michael Dirda seemed taken by it, but his review makes it seem dull, as only Dirda can do. Might do better to enjoy Sam Lipsyte’s review from Sunday’s NYT on this one.

• • •

Finally, Hotel Theory by Wayne Koestenbaum. This 2007 book is two books in one, really, printed side-by-side in a two-column page format: On the left side of the page is Hotel Theory, which is Wayne Koestenbaum the essayist, doing a brilliant rumination on, and deconstruction of, the idea of hotels (life in hotels, what are hotels, who are we when we check into hotels; hotels in literature, cinema, television; hotel as a state of mind). Koestenbaum is always a dazzling read on this kind of thing — like his book about opera, or his book about Jackie O.

Then comes the other book, on the right-hand side of each page, called Hotel Women, which is written by Wayne Koestenbaum the experimental poet. It’s a darkly comic novella imagining Lana Turner and Liberace and some other folks trapped for life in a glamorous but terrifying place called Hotel Women. Koestenbaum wrote this part without ever using the words “a,” “an” or “the.” Which makes it all the more beguiling to read.

An excerpt, from the Hotel Women side:

In Hotel Women, Lana Turner and Wallace lay together on mussed sheets, windows open.

“You’re impotent,” said Lana.

“I know,” said Wallace.

“I came to Hotel Women to revive our love life. I brought along your pornography. What else can I do?”

“I’m despicable. I’m more impotent here than in your hacienda.”

“Your impotence is no joke. It’s not cinema, carnival, or concept. It’s genuine tragedy. It’s something wrong with you and therefore wrong with me.”

“If we talk about my impotence, maybe it will go away.”

“We’ve tried therapy, we’ve tried vacation.”

“Do you think this place is bugged?”

She put Wallace’s useless penis in her mouth. Lime Naugahyde furniture seemed powerful in comparison.

“You needn’t continue,” said Wallace. “Maybe I should reciprocate.”

“Don’t bother. It’ll depress me.”

She planned compensatory assignations tomorrow, one man after another, at MGM.

Do you ever get done reading a book and have the realization that, no matter how much you’ve enjoyed it, there is no one to share this particular book with? Sure, I can (and did) go online and find like-minded reviews of Hotel Theory in places like the Believer and Bookforum. But it has recently occurred to me that those people are never my people. Not anybody I actually know, anyhow.

I cannot think of a friend who would want to read Hotel Theory or talk with me about Hotel Theory, but it’s just as well. I can’t think of anyone I would foist Hotel Theory on and say “you must read this and we will talk about it.” Because then they’d have to avoid my questions about whether or not they read it or liked it, and then I’d “owe” them, in a sense, and have to read something they like that I’m not interested in. Sometimes reading Koestenbaum is like reading Gertrude Stein — or Rebecca Brown, D.J. Waldie or George Trow — or one of those authors I’ve just had to puzzle out and find delight in all on my own. Too much has to happen. I might not even recommend Hotel Theory to myself, but I’ve already read it, and thought each little piece of it was exquisite or almost-perfect in one way or another.

And that’s why this is a One-Man Book Club.

• • •

Vacation looms! For the summer dip, I’m considering the aforementioned IMPERIAL BEDROOMS, HITCH-22, DEAR MONEY, THE ROUTES OF MAN, and STATE BY STATE. Any other suggestions?

The members of the One-Man Book Club have been reading ‘em faster than all the members (total: one) can get on here to blogscuss ‘em. I’m going to try to clear out all the One-Man Book Club recent selections this week, and include some selections where the membership couldn’t finish the book. Ready? Chug!

To start, here’s a book I liked very much and recommend to others: Nothing Happened and Then It Did: A Chronicle in Fact and Fiction, by Jake Silverstein, which came out in the spring. I dug it deeply, starting with the title and alluring jacket. But another journalist I know (someone who is really keen about innovation in nonfiction), said he dropped out after page 40 or thereabouts. So there’s that.

Silverstein is the new(ish) editor of Texas Monthly. This book ingeniously and even bizarrely weaves together some of his longer non-fiction pieces (from Harper’s magazine in the ’00s) and short fiction stories (all new), which are all essentially about a young man who’s just trying to find great stories and sell them to big New York magazines.

What is true? What isn’t? I know that sounds like a dreary exercise made for journalism ethics seminars, but there’s something subtly original in how he makes it work, and I’m sad that this book didn’t get a lot more attention when it came out.

Silverstein turns himself into a narrator, a “Jake Silverstein,” who is in his early 20s circa 1999 and, having given up on dreams of becoming a poet, moves to far West Texas to work at a small newspaper and learn to be a journalist. The eight chapters in Nothing Happened and Then It Did are evenly split (and labeled in the contents) as “fact” or “fiction,” and Sliverstein stitches them into a dreamy recollection of what it’s like to be a wannabe writer stuck way out in the middle of the nowhere. My favorite chapter is a fictional one, where the narrator accepts a job driving a famous photographer around the Midland/Odessa landscape that defined presidential candidate George W. Bush; the photographer (irritable, European) has to make one singular photo that will run with an campaign-related story in the New Yorker, which has already been reported and written by a Susan Orlean-like writer whom Silverstein envies from terribly afar.

And I especially admired the tight introduction, in which Silverstein recounts how the Spanish explorers — e.g., Franciscan friar Marcos de Niza, circa 1530 — were so mesmerized (or intimidated, or mentally dislocated) by this landscape that they returned with fabricated accounts of what happened to them on their journeys through it. Silverstein writes:

Why did the friar lie? Historians have chewed on this for centuries. … “Since the rarefied atmosphere of the southwestern deserts is very deceptive,” explained a pair of New Mexico historians in 1928, “it may be that the pueblo appeared much larger than it really was.”

A long sojourn in the Southwest provides another explanation. It is unquestionably true that the desert is deceptive, but this may have more to do with its giant solitudes than its refractive atmospheric phenomena. To travel for hours over hundreds of of miles of treeless flatland without seeing a soul is to be forcefully reminded of your inherent aloneness in the world. … I can confirm that is not unusual, in such situations, for the curtain between the real and the imaginary to lift. …

Same goes for <<”Jake Silverstein,” who comes down with a case of gringo-style magical realism and inherent aloneness. He leaves the newspaper job in West Texas for New Orleans, then Mexico, then back to West Texas, always in a clunker Toyota: He is taken with the desolate world around him and half-motivated by a comically deluded sense of self. It’s Don Quixote, cub reporter, adrift on the highway.

There are stories about searching for Ambrose Bierce’s grave site, the grand opening of a McDonald’s in the Mexican interior, a hunt for doubloons in the Louisiana gulf islands and a cross-country road race in Mexico. It’s not trippy, hallucinogenic gonzo journalism stuff in the Hunter Thompson sense.  I’ve never met Silverstein, and now I want to, but my hunch is he may be only somewhat like the “Jake Silverstein” of this book — a castabout who is clearly not on his way to becoming the editor of Texas Monthly.

Halfway through, I no longer cared what was real and what wasn’t and stopped checking the table of contents for confirmation. Biography? Journalism? Coming-of-age novella? Nothing Happened and Then It Did is the first time I felt willing to throw away the carefully tended fences between fact and fiction. His prose isn’t highly stylized (it could be more so), and I skimmed through a couple of the “real” stories I’d already read in Harper’s, but Silverstein’s writing has great momentum. As it went along, I related to his loneliness and his drive (literally, miles and miles) to get a story he never gets. The better stories are the ones he makes up. By the end, as “Jake Silverstein” is deciding to give up journalism, I wanted to know the author a little better than he reveals. This recent Austin Chronicle profile helped with that.

• • •

Next, an example of a journalist doing rural Texas much more straightforwardly and therefore a bit more tediously: Welcome to Utopia: Notes from a Small Town, by Karen Valby.

Valby is a reporter for Entertainment Weekly. In 2006, in an uncharacteristic break from its wall-to-wall Harry Potter and Lost coverage, the magazine asked Valby to find a “town without pop culture,” or, at least, a town without the steady bitstream/shitstream of celebrity-logged pop culture that was quickly taking over American society in the mid-2000s.

Valby wound up in Utopia, Texas, which is up in the hill country near San Antonio. I sort of remember that story when it ran in EW; one of the great failings of Welcome to Utopia is that it doesn’t include the full, original article for us to see how this all began, which is the whole reason for the book. True to form, the townsfolk weren’t too pleased with what happened when a big-city magazine writer came to their town to write an arty-cull about them. Once again the great middle-of-America inferiority complex announces itself — we are so offended that you would take time out of your life to come write about ours, you good-for-nothing writer from somewhere else, you.

But Valby decided to return to Utopia (which I think translates to: she sold a book proposal based on the article) and sit among the Utopians for a longer spell. She’s determined to understand Utopia for reasons never quite known. The original premise (a town without pop-culture addictions) quickly dissolved with better phone coverage, Internet access and satellite TV. Without that, I didn’t ever sense what the real theme of Welcome to Utopia is. All books should be able to answer that question, in two parts:

A: What is This Book About? The answer to that should be a couple hundred words, very detailed, sort of like a slightly less advertorial version of the flap copy inside a book jacket and THEN …

B: What is This Book REALLY About? That answer needs to be one very short, very amazing sentence.

I don’t think Valby really gets a handle on part B of the question. Her discoveries aren’t profound, though she does respectfully portray her subjects, including the group of old men every small town has, who meet for coffee in the local convenience store at the crack of each dawn; a black teenage girl at the mostly white local high school; a mother whose sons have all gone to war; a restless teenage boy. Valby either transcribed a mountain of taped interviews and ride-alongs, or she’s extremely good at taking dialogue down in her notes. This is all a lot harder than it looks, and no matter what you end up writing, it will always be the tale of the outsider who visits the natives. I salute her determination to spend several months in Utopia and get to know those people on an intimate level.

But I could only admire that for so long. Welcome to Utopia can be moving, but it starts to drag as it fails to find or make a statement. An old-school editor would say it’s a very long feature story without a nutgraf; Augusten Burroughs compares it to To Kill a Mockingbird. (!!) I wonder if Valby was too worried about projecting a too-strong of point of view — which is my main criticism of so many works of nonfiction. I started skimming along in the last 100 pages, even as Utopia grapples with the idea of a black president. At the morning coffee group, the lone liberal in the bunch regretfully announces he’ll have to vote for McCain. He just can’t vote for a black man.

• • •

SIDE RANT: Like all books about or set in Texas, including my own, both Nothing Happened and Then It Did and Welcome to Utopia must work extra hard to seem “interesting” to people in, let’s just say, New York.

Notice how it never works in reverse; we non-New Yorkers are required to remain eternally interested in (and purchasers of) novels, memoirs and non-fiction books about: New York, Manhattan, a whole lot of Brooklyn; New York real estate, the New York immigrant experience way back when and right now, the rituals/customs/experiences of New York Jews, and, less frequently, the rituals/customs/experiences of New York Catholicism, especially in the Italian and/or mafia sense; recollections and roman-a-clefs about East Coast college days followed by a move to New York; the New Yorker; New York media, the world in relation to New York; New York food, New York business, New York garbage, sewers, bridges, sex, marriage, divorce, children, politics, crime; New York history; What Would Happen if There Ceased to be New Yorkers on Manhattan island?, etc.

But don’t get me started on this. It’s a big bugaboo right now, and if I get going on it, we’ll be here all fucking night.

• • •

So much praise and <<bestseller glow (and now an Alan Ball/Oprah Winfrey/HBO movie deal) has been heaped on The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot, that there’s little else I feel I can add or should hurt my fingers typing here. So, some general thoughts:

• It’s as good as the reviews say it is. It’s a scientific page-turner that is also a heart-wrenching family epic. And while it’s perfectly organized and manages a chronology that goes forward and backward, some of us in the One-Man Book Club wondered if the prose sometimes falters. Frankly, too much stylishness probably would have gotten in the way of the story, and the bestseller list would indicate that it hit the sweet spot between literary journalism and CSI.

Skloot made all the right choices, including the parts where she details her quest to get closer to Henrietta Lacks’s children and grandchildren. As much as anything, it’s a book about a determined reporter and a determined batch of cells.

• More than once, the story of the HeLa cells (and the woman who unwittingly donated them) made me think of batty Eileen Welsome and her unstoppable devotion to uncovering and telling the “Plutonium Experiment” stories when we were both working as reporters at the Albuquerque Tribune. Eileen spent, what, seven years or so on that story, plus another six or seven working on a book version. Skloot’s got her beat by a little — 21 years passed between the biology class where Skloot asked her first questions about the origin of HeLa cells and the publication of this book.

• Finally, my biggest overall thought was this: Waitaminnit. I was a terrible biology student, but I was surprised, about midway through The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, to realize the obvious: the HeLa cells are CANCER CELLS. They are the cells of the disease that killed Henrietta in 1951. They are part of her, as cancer insidiously took over her body on a cellular level, but they are not “her,” at least not the same way that her blood cells are.

And anyhow — all human genome mapping developments to the contrary — I don’t easily draw a line from my “cells” to the essential “me”-ness of me. You can clone me, but here I fall back on the philosopher Heraclitus talking about the same-foot-in-the-same-river thing. There is such a thing as a soul, or whatever you want to call it, and it eludes the Petri dish.

I was therefore sort of saddened by all the mythological thinking — the premise of this book — that orbits the origin story of the HeLa cells as the years go by: Her family thinks the cancer cells are their mother, almost in a Frankenstein sense, and who can blame them? But, in a way, the scientists also speak strangely (for scientists) about immortality here, of Henrietta’s ongoing contribution to science. They hand out awards to honor her and her family, mainly in order to minimize the fact that Johns Hopkins took Henrietta’s diseased cervical tissue without her permission and started reproducing the cells and selling them.

The scientists (and Skloot) seem all too willing to play metaphorical make-believe about a poor black woman who, in a way, posthumously travels all over the world, helps science cure diseases, and even takes a ride to outer space. (Also worrisome is how the HeLa cells, unchecked, contaminated other samples and possibly set cancer research back several years in the 1960s; it slightly negates the principal narrative of a book about HeLa’s contributions to science.)

Whether talking to researchers or to Henrietta’s daughter and sons (who struggled with the basic science), Skloot makes that thematic point over and over: Henrietta lives on. I don’t quite see it like that. A form of Henrietta’s cancer lives on. Or did I miss something?

• • •

Before I knock off for the night, let me get three books off the table that failed the One-Man Book Club’s FIFTY-PAGE TEST. That’s right — the books that failed to keep me going after page 50.

Never the fault of the book, of course. I rarely let a book into the house that didn’t interest me in some way — either from a review, or publicity (an NPR interview, e.g.), or an attractive jacket, or the recommendations of people I trust. So failing the Fifty Page Test is almost always the fault of the fickle, difficult One-Man Book Club…

<<The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz. So sue me. Tried FOUR TIMES since 2007 to get into this novel and just can’t. But it’s so wondrous, you say, and it won a Pulitzer. Fine. But I need to move on.

Beg, Borrow, Steal: A Writer’s Life, by Michael Greenberg. See my rant above about New Yorky books by New Yorky New York writers. This was wrongly touted (to me, anyhow) as a moving memoir about the ups and downs of the writing life. It’s actually a collection of short columns the author penned for the Times Literary Supplement. Redundant themes in p. 1-50: He didn’t get along with his tough, workaholic father. There’s nothing like New York. He’s just a man, a man making his way every day in the word-business of New York. Writing is a bitch but he can’t let her go.

Etc., etc. Zzzzzzz.

<<American Voyeur: Dispatches From the Far Reaches of Modern Life, by Benoit Denizet-Lewis. My thinking here was that, if I read Denizet-Lewis’s feature stories collected in once place, I would see something special about them that had eluded me when they ran in the New York Times Magazine. After a rather dry and perfunctory introductory essay, the stories all started to feel like homework and I checked out. This book is in every way the opposite of Nothing Happened and Then It Did, which for me has set the new gold standard for getting people to read one’s old magazine pieces.

The House of Tomorrow, by Peter Bognanni. It came highly recommended and I set it aside for a rainy Sunday when I was free and needed to jump into a good debut novel. This one is about a kid and his grandmother who live in a Bucky Fuller dome and museum. I didn’t get too far past p. 50. It was just going too slow for me; the characters were exhibiting a weirdness that seemed too much like fiction-class weirdness. It’s a real bummer when someone you admire and like insists you read a new, very good novel, and she even arranges to have it sent to you from the publisher; then I let down that trust and enthusiasm by not being able to get into it. Part of my deep guilt complex is feeling somehow responsible for that, which is crazytalk.

This is why we drink at the One-Man Book Club.

MORE TO COME THIS WEEK, if there’s time: Sarah Silverman’s THE BEDWETTER! Megan Daum’s LIFE WOULD BE PERFECT IF I LIVED IN THAT HOUSE! Gabrielle Zevin’s THE HOLE WE’RE IN! Daniel Clowes’s WILSON! William Powers’s HAMLET’S BLACKBERRY! And a 25th anniversary re-reading of LESS THAN ZERO!

ST. LOUIS: What you’re about to read happened days ago, and I’m just getting around to filing a blog report. I’m on a train right now to New York to do a reading tonight at the Half King bar in Chelsea. It starts at 7 p.m., if you’re anywhere nearby.

But backing up: I have to say, my stop in St. Louis might well have been my favorite. Nikki and Melissa at Pudd’nHead Books have been enormously supportive of Tinsel. They’ve been everything you’d want a bookstore to be — local, quirky, helpful and they get it. Nikki put my book on a list of her favorite books of the year and has been working on getting me to come out there since July. I’m so glad I did. Curtis Sittenfeld, newish St. Louis resident and also a Tinsel champ, came and got me Wednesday afternoon at the hotel and we went out to Pudd’nHead to say hi, shop for books and – this was really the most delightful part – gab about books we love and books we don’t. There is nothing more satisfying than two writers browsing a good store and really slagging on some overrated other writers. Whom did we agree that we despise? Oh, wouldn’t you like to know. Not to worry, neurotic literati: we did a lot of kvelling, too. We probably spent more time talking about what we lurve.

The Puddn’Head-ers, along with Curtis, put on an excellent event at COCA that night – we had cookies, egg nog and a super-smart audience of 40 or so people. I got to hang out with my friends John and Mary Pat O’Gorman at their house for a while beforehand – and get just a sample of life with their all-girl band: Lucy, Edie and Alice. At the COCA event, people had excellent questions and several had read the book already and wanted to know more, more, more. One woman needed to talk to me about her theory that I really am a “believer” and I just don’t know it. (“You believe in things,” she persuasively scolded me. “You believe, for example, in journalism ethics. …”)

Hank defends his beliefs to Inquisitor Donna, while Curtis Sittenfeld greets more fans.

Another woman brought me her homemade monkey bread, the delectable poppin’-fresh dessert that makes a cameo appearance in Chapter 15. How wonderful is that? I can’t believe someone actually made me monkey bread and I also can’t believe I forgot to get her name and e-mail so I could properly thank her. But these things move really fast when the Sharpie is out and the line is forming. While I signed copies of Tinsel, Curtis signed her 1,000-times-more-superior novels, American Wife and Prep.

Hank and Curtis, radiating holiday warmth in our black peacoats, but ready for pizza now.

After that, a gang of us adjourned to Pi, which, as I was told a few times, makes President Obama’s favorite Chicago-style pizza. (I believe it!) I am ready to move to St. Louis just to hang out forever with Curtis and her husband Matt and their daughter (whom I saw only via iPhone movies, but still). I’m sure this is not at all what they had in mind, but I hope that they had fun.

And not hours after I left did Curtis pick Tinsel as her favorite book of the year in this Salon round-up of writers’ favorite reads of 2009. I mean, gosh.

And that monkey bread? It was perfect. I ate some on the plane back to D.C. and saved the rest for Michael, as instructed. Man, I was glad to see him when I got home. I was gone 11 days this trip. What will we ever do in a few weeks, when Tinsel isn’t hogging all our time?

RESTON, Va.: Tinsel went back to the exurbs on Saturday. My friend Tamara Jones threw a sweet little get-together at her NoVa house that afternoon for old friends. Then some of us went on to the Reston Barnes & Noble for my reading at 5 p.m., smartly bribing customers with Tammy’s famous brownies. I think the combination of free sweets and my (ahem) reading style may have attracted a few new fans. Thank you, Tammy, for the good times.

REVIEWS AND MORE: They’re still coming, and they’re still pretty good, thank Baby Jesus …

• A San Jose Mercury News review is here.

• A San Antonio Express-News review is here.

• The West End Word (that would be St. Louis’s west end, cue Pet Shop Boys) had this to say here.

• And the Canadians have a look, in Maclean’s, here, and that lady who reads a book every day had this to say, over on Huffington Post.

• The less said about Steve Blow, the better, but still, what fun it is to ride in his one-horse open slay. (Har.) Especially with the Frontburner chatterers coming so swiftly to my defense. (Because frankly, I was stumped: How do you tell — or do you even bother to tell — a guy named “Steve Blow” to go fuck himself? I decided you just don’t. But, as it turns out, they’ve been doing it for years in Dallas. And when they do, he takes his football home.)

• Moving on to cheerier things, yes? Such as Debbie Gallagher of Cedar Hill, Texas, who read the book and then had something incisive to say about it.

• Also, the ol’ Life & Times section at The Maroon (my alma mater) wrote this story. Thanks to the reporter Ashley Stevens, who kept me company on the road to Bellingham, via a phone interview. Not to make myself feel superold, but this would be the equivalent of me getting assigned to interview an alum from the Class of ’70, which might not have interested me in the least. But Ashley did a great job of humoring this old ’80s-era Maroon-ie.

All these books-of-the-year and books-of-the-decade lists are out now. I’m too far behind on ’09 to make any sort of guess about what book I liked most. But I can feel some coalescence about the decade by just looking around my study. If a book stuck around from my circa-2000 apartment and made it here to my 140 square-foot retreat in 2005, and is still here today, it must’ve meant I thought it was a pretty freakin’ good read. Here are faves from the ’00s, I think. I’m sure I’ve left something out, likely because I gave my copy away to someone else to read. There has to be more to this list, and I’ll realize later “Oh, no, I left off [blank]!” but I also like the pop-quiz nature of this blog post, on which I’ll spend no more than 15 minutes throwing together a list. No particular order…

FICTION:

• “Harbor,” by Lorraine Adams. Best 9/11-era novel, in my opinion, and really gripping. Also, if you’ll notice (which you shouldn’t), fantastically researched and reported.

• “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay,” by Michael Chabon. More like this, please, and less of Chabon mucking around on collaborative comic books, children mysteries, unfilmed screenplays and essays about fatherhood. Get to work, genius.

• “Gilligan’s Wake,” by Tom Carson. The 20th century as reimagined through the prism of TV’s castaways. I am a freak about this book. I think it is amazing and re-read it every couple years.

• “American Wife,” by Curtis Sittenfeld. I know, I know — enough with the Hank/Curtis lovefest, but I think this is a brilliant, towering novel by a writer who is really going to last. (“Prep,” too!)

• “Everything is Illuminated,” by Jonathan Safran Foer. Hard to not be jealous of this one.

• “Home Land,” by Sam Lipsyte.

• “Pastoralia,” by George Saunders.

• “March,” by Geraldine Brooks. Still gobsmacked by how good this one was. (Also her “Year of Wonders.”)

• “The Blind Assassin,” by Margaret Atwood.

• “Dear American Airlines,” by Jonathan Miles. Heartbreaking and hilarious. Made even better by the fact I read it on a nice vacation.

• “Lying Awake,” by Mark Salzman. Gorgeously spare novel about cloistered nuns. Amazing. I still laugh about the sin of “wasting Joy.”

• “Shopgirl,” by Steve Martin. The movie was kinda meh, but the first time I read this, I thought it was so beautiful. I still do.

• “The Road,” by Cormac McCarthy. On the afternoon I finished it, I just stared at the ceiling for an hour and mourned for a world that was not yet technically gone, but felt gone. That’s what I call good.

NON-FICTION:

• “Nickel and Dimed,” by Barbara Ehrenreich, a shining example of two things, I think: morally conscious journalism and hilariously illuminating feature writing.

• “The Woman at the Washington Zoo,” by Marjorie Williams, someone who has been dead almost five years and whose work I still hear about (or think about) all the time.

• “Where I Was From,” by Joan Didion. She finally became household-namous in 2005 by writing about her husband’s death (“The Year of Magical Thinking”), but I think this book, two years earlier, was better — it’s about the death of her California notions and ideas.

• “The Whole Equation” by David Thomson (and also his “Nicole Kidman”). I’m late to the game when it comes to savoring Thomson’s film writing, but I really do.

• “Pictures at a Revolution,” by Mark Harris. Loved this book, which was well-assembled and fascinating and not only explains a lot about our movie culture, but scintillates the ’60s as well. (The actual ’6os, and not “the Sixties,” if you know what I mean.)

• “The Beatles,” by Bob Spitz. I read someplace that the original draft of this book was twice as long as the 800 pages that were published. I would have happily kept going. It’s still amazing, after all these decades, to have the story of the Beatles told in a linear way.

• “Heat,” by Bill Buford. You don’t have to care about cooking or Italy. This is just an amazing work of reporting and synthesis and good writing.

• “Dog Man,” by Martha Sherrill. Made me cry. Such a strangely inviting and determined little book about living and aging in a faraway place.

• “The Fabulous Sylvester” by Joshua Gamson. I think this book has one of the most amazing opening chapters I’ve ever read. And I’ve never read such a compelling biography of such a marginalized celebrity. An excellent book made possible by deep, deep reporting from primary sources.

Inara Verzemnieks

Portland: Recuperative in an odd way. But sort of downbeat, too. I guess that’s what that place is all about. At the Powell’s reading Friday night, I drew about 25-30 people, and for some reason I decided to come across like a full-on Snarky Claus. About five minutes in, one woman got up and left. I picked parts of the book that were gloomier (why?) and my “funny parts” landed with a thud. Something in the delivery — and the crowd. Never fear, though, for I always have friends: across the very back row were some grinning, lifelong fans, including Randy Cox, Mike and Fran Arrieta-Walden and the great Inara Verzemnieks. The Q&A perked up. My readings are always enhanced if there’s a couple of kooks in the crowd, especially if they’re of the Bill McKibben-type and/or peak oil paranoia variety. I can go right along with them until I have to steer them back onto the subject at hand: Christmas, hearts, family, retail, American identity. It seemed to work. One self-confessed atheist and Christmas crank (“I celebrate solstice!”) bought SIX copies for her family, and seemed wickedly delighted to give them the book — their first Christmas presents from her in years. I told her to let me know how that goes over.

After that, dinner at a restaurant a block away from Powell’s called Clyde Common, with Inara and — at last! — Nancy Rommelmann, one of Janet Duckworth’s favorite journalists, which makes her someone I would totally want to meet. Great chatting, good wine. I’ve long thought Inara was a true beacon of great writing in newspapers, since I first met her when she was the Albuquerque Tribune‘s summer intern; the Pulitzer jury darn near agreed with me in 2007, and should have given her the prize. Well, now guess what? Still in her tender thirtysomething-ness, Inara is saying farewell to the Oregonian next Friday (a buyout!) and going after her MFA. She already has a little bit of The Glow. (Mike Arrieta-Walden, who’s left newspapering to teach high school, has The Glow too, the I-don’t-work-in-a-newsroom-anymore Glow.) Inara has been enormously complimentary about Tinsel and sent me an e-mail Saturday morning that has pushed me to go on. Thank you Inara, and know that I will always pay very close attention to whatever you’re writing.

And, as I knew I would, I totally dug Nancy. Someday (in heaven? On some space colony?), Janet Duckworth will be editing features written by Nancy Rommelmann, Inara Verzemnieks, and me.

Bellingham: Cold wind blowing in off the bay. Twinkly Christmas lights in downtown historic Fairhaven, but not a lot of shoppers braving the bluster for my Saturday-night reading at Village Books. It’s a wonderful store full of great books and staff recommendations, the perfect indie ambience, and almost no audience until 7:04, when, miraculously, seven people showed up, separately. I’ll take that. I sat down among them and we just chatted for an hour about the holidays, America, the future, the economy, the past, our families, my book, Black Friday, the history of Christmas, and the fraught psychology of giving and getting presents. I like it when this happens.

Total books sold here: Zero. I signed a bunch of stock and did get the clerk to recategorize my book in their inventory (they had it under “Christmas books” and “biography”), so that when the holidays are over, and Mssrs. Burroughs, Sedaris, Huckabee, Beck, Keillor, et al have their holiday books boxed up and put away, Tinsel will go live in the “American Culture” section, which is near the front of the store and seems to have a dazzling array of nonfiction.

Author then takes himself across the street, to Dirty Dan Harris’s Steakhouse for two glasses of wine (more perfect Oregon reds) and a seared filet tips with asparagus. Mood: Lonely, but weirdly blissful. Stops at the Barnes & Noble to sign “stock” (which consisted of um, one book, so he passed), and then buys a peanut-butter cookie and adjourns to the La Quinta where he sleeps ever so deeply, serenaded by a magical December howling and rustling outside, what Nell would call a “tay-yay inna win.”

So long, Bellingham. (And yes, Elaine, the Shangri-La motel is still there! Did not stop to see if there’s been any updating in amenities since 1995.)

I have some more Tinsel press and reviews to share today:

• Book Reporter has weighed in affirmatively, with a lot of (strange, but appropriate!) referral to Joel Garreau’s indispensible Edge City. I’ve checked in with Joel and neither of us know this critic personally, but we are happy to be linked together in theme and spirit. (Or at least I am.)

• AOL’s Holidash blog did a little story about the book. Who knew AOL has a whole site devoted to Christmas?

• Tan Vinh at the Seattle Times has written this review, which seems to like the subject okay but feels Tinsel is trying to be two books instead of one (a bargain at any price!) and calls it “uneven.” Sigh. (Also uneven: Vinh’s spelling of Stuever/Steuver. Gets it right, then wrong, then right again, then wrong.)

• And Anne Rodgers, who just left the Palm Beach Post, and is also now probably bathed in The Glow, didn’t get out the door before filing this review.

So, another long week of book promo ahead: TV and radio tomorrow (Monday) morning and then a reading at Elliott Bay Books in downtown Seattle. Starts at 7 p.m. if you know people in Seattle. For those of you sending e-mails of the hang-in-there variety, do not worry about me or my book sales: This trip has been worth the breakfasts alone. This morning, at Diamond Jim’s diner in Bellingham, I almost went into a gravy coma. My book is doing one last thing to me: making me quite fat! (And, yes, perhaps, happy.)

How’s the book doing? Meh, is my overall hunch. I felt a bit down about that for a while yesterday.

Landed in Seattle right after sunset, rented a car (sporty little Pontiac G5) and drove down to Portland in heavy traffic on I-5, with fog and some rain and a sense of vintage Pacific Northwest foreboding, getting here around 10 p.m. Checked into the hotel and was immediately lured into the cozy restaurant. Two glasses of wine and my whole perspective changed. This is fun. This is what I wanted to do. My life is fine and my book’s not bad either.

On the drive, when the Olympia NPR station began playing the Terry Gross show about Afghanistan that I’d already heard twice in two different time zones that day, I realized I had something else to listen to: Tinsel!

The audiobook version, as read by Ray Porter. He’s a Shakespearean-trained actor (according to his bio) with a nice deep voice. It’s a little surreal to listen to the book read in the voice of God (a gentle, folksy God) but I have to say I was charmed within just a few pages. He does wide range of people and tones, and he seems to get the book. He even does a pretty good Tammie. Of course, as he’s reading along I keep thinking, wow — I wish they could make an audiobook of a draft of the manuscript, so that the writer can come behind it and change a few things. And cut! Dialogue really is the magic thing, whether on the page or in the ear. I keep hearing parts of the narration/prose that I would trim, just a little. Sigh.

Off soon to Powell’s (aka CITY OF BOOKS) for tonight’s reading, and then, when it’s over, I’m off to what I’m sure will be a great dinner out with the megatalented Inara Verzemnieks. Portland is cool and it knows it, though I know in my heart of hearts I’m not nearly Gore-Texy and/or tatooey enough to live here.

Let’s play catch up to some of my recent hype, shall we? Look, I also wish this blog didn’t always resemble some proud mom’s refrigerator door, but I’m trying to enter the Tinsel media ops into the permanent record, before I forget to clip-and-save.

• Rick Rogers from the Oklahoman did not only a video, but a story, too. I had a great time visiting the newsroom and meeting Joe Hight, Jenni Carlson and some of the paper’s staff in an informal Q&A session. (And I got an Oklahoman duffel bag, a set of coasters, OPUBCO ball cap, and a T-shirt: boo-tay.)

• There was this great review in the Cleveland Plain Dealer last weekend that I missed. And on Thursday, Tinsel was one of the “12 Books of Christmas” in USA Today (“This isn’t a Norman Rockwell view of Christmas. It’s both laugh-out-loud funny and oddly depressing. Stuever’s keen eye misses very little”), and Paul Constant had some nice things to say in The Stranger.

• Wendy Shortman at the Vanguard (Portland State U.’s newspaper) did this nice little story. Not only did Wendy keep me company for a few minutes by phone when I drove from Dallas to OKC on Monday, but she managed to get everything right, especially the names: Stuever, Tammie, Cavazos, Caroll, Trykoski, Bridgette. This seems like no big deal, right? Well, some people in the business longer than her haven’t managed to get all of them correct. Someone hire her.

• Radio, radio: I’ve lost track of what sort of radio I’ve done, but I will say that the hour I spent with Celeste Quinn on “The Afternoon Magazine” on WILL, the public radio station in Urbana, Ill., seemed to go really well. I haven’t gone back to listen to it, but I thought she and her audience had the best questions so far. It was my pleasure to appear on her show. And this morning I got up super early to go to the studios of KPOJ-AM, the progressive talk station in Portland. Right before I went onto the “Carl + Christine” morning show (no Carl today, we had Tom) they were bitchin’ about the wealth gap in America. Completely uncaffeinated and all riled up, I slid right in to a chair in their sound booth and became this lefty, liberal chatterbox. By the time my 15 minutes were up, I’d pretty much portrayed Christmas as Everything That’s Wrong with Capitalistic America. Hey, you have to work your audience. Glenn Beck, if you’d like to see another side of me and talk about, oh, I dunno, your Christmas book and the reason for the season, well, brother, I stand ready.

Look at the time! I need to: change clothes, figure out what to read at Powell’s tonight, and, most important to a fun and tolerable booksigning event, have another glass of Oregon wine. More later.

If you know people in Bellingham, Wash., well wontcha pretty please ask them to come to my reading at Village Books, Saturday night at 7? Do they have anything better to do? Prove it.