The Tonsil Blog’s One-Man Book Club is back together, this time at Hank’s place. (Okay, every time at Hank’s place. Isn’t a book club so much nicer with one member?)

It’s been long enough since the last meeting that the beverage of choice has switched from a wintry red (malbec) to a nice, crisp white (vinho verde). Although it’s been a long time, the club has been busy reading a buncha new books.

I’ve admonished the One-Man Book Club to try to be more capsule-y this time, but no promises. If it goes too long, that’s the vinho verde typing, I want you to know.

The Ask, by Sam Lipsyte. I was gobsmacked on just about every fucking page by some painfully beautiful or hilarious or otherwise perfect sentence in this novel. I loved Home Land, too, and The Ask did not disappoint me — in fact, I feel like it surpassed Home Land.

Any writer who’s plumbing the aging issues of so-called Generation X (or wishes to observe our already-very-observed monster-stroller, overpriced-coffee, real-estate-yuppie-envy era of almost evil self-interest and hurt) will read this and want to just give up. It’s that good.

It’s about a guy, Milo Burke, who works in the development office of a mediocre college (which Milo actually refers to each time as Mediocre College). He loses his job because donations and big gifts are way off in the recession and he’s not producing any new “Asks.” Also they don’t like him. But they bring him back to facilitate a big gift from a wealthy donor (aka “the Ask”) whom he went to undergraduate school with. This is a very dark satire more than a nuanced novel — Lipsyte skewers marriage, aging, money, Internet culture, selfish elderly parents, and the way that Gen Y’s utter swiftness and hipness can get under the skin of guys my age. Oh, and there are so many wickedly uncomfortable scenes. Such as when you wake up and your wife is breast-feeding your 4-year-old, who is kicking you in the chest while he slurps away:

“Baby,” I wishipered. “What the hell are you doing? You weaned him. He’s weaned.”

“I know he’s weaned.”

“What are you doing?”

“We’re snuggling.”

“He’s sucking.”

“No, he’s not.”

“I’m not,” said Bernie.

“Maura, come on, stop it.”

“It’s okay. It’s just a little regression. It’s normal. I read about it. I don’t have any milk anyway.”

“That makes it worse.”

“Go back to sleep, Milo.”

“Yeah, Daddy, go back to sleep.”

Chilling, awkward, hilarious, sad, and extremely well-crafted. A One-Man Book Club Top Pick.

• • •

I don’t have a whole lot specifically to say about Still Life: Adventures in Taxidermy, by Melissa Milgrom. But I should say that it was co-edited by Amazing Andrea, who edited my book, so that right there made me want to read it.

It’s exactly what it says it is, though I’m not convinced the “adventures” label quite applies. The adventure sort of finally comes near the end, when Milgrom attempts to stuff a dead squirrel and see if it’s anywhere near the standards of pro taxidermists. Still Life is  one of those books that tries to get a handle on a broad subject by traveling to and writing about a lot of examples of the subject and people who are obsessed with the subject, which can wind up seeming like a series of magazine articles on the subject.

Critics have given Still Life pretty good notice, but it seems like everyone (including the One-Man Book Club) was hoping to read more of Milgrom’s deeper thoughts about the allure and mystery of taxidermy. The writing and sense of voice is always trickiest part of a book like this. It’s a lovely book to hold and look at, though — what a terrific cover and paper stock, all around. It opens with Milgrom’s profile of David Schwendeman, the last official taxidermist for the American Museum of Natural History, and his son, Bruce, who run a taxidermy shop in New Jersey. Milgrom could have stayed put and built a book around them, perhaps. Instead, the author is off in different directions: to England to talk about all that Damien Hirst stuff (haha, no pun intended) and then follow the auctioning off of a bizarre, Victorian menagerie of taxidermied creatures that have been assembled into 19th-century domestic scenes and dioramas. She also goes to the world taxidermy competition. (Of course there’s a world taxidermy competition. In these sorts of books, there’s always either a world competition of the [insert Weird Subject Matter here], or an annual convention of [People Who are Obsessed by the Weird Subject Matter].)

The facts and quotes and history and scenes start to stack up, and it’s really up to the writer to either do something entirely new or stylistically provocative with the prose. For all its reporting and research skill, I didn’t feel like Still Life quite did that kind of thing, but I did keep thinking it was tightly sewn, which seemed metaphorically apt.

>>TANGENT ALERT!<<

This isn’t Still Life’s fault, but reading it made me think of countless other books that are shelved in “cultural studies” (hello, make room, I’m squeezed in there too) that each try to be a broad survey of something Big and/or Odd, in order to prove that it is … Big and/or Odd. I’m thinking here of that disappointing Rebecca Mead book a few years ago about the wedding-industrial complex — One Perfect Day — where she went all over the world and gathered examples of the Bridezilla culture and then didn’t say anything. Mead’s book had an amazing cover (it was a receipt stapled to an engraved wedding invitation, see?) and yet it just fizzled and pooped all the way through. It was about something outrageous and bizarre and hilarious and heartbreaking and yet it was no fun.

These are books of reportage. Most of them lack full narratives, and instead provide glimpses and partial narratives in the form of topical profiles. They always look like they might be absorbing and strange and then often aren’t. They’re always coming out, though — books about NASCAR, about garbage, about sushi, about Chinese food, about poker, about competitive-eating contests, about beauty pageants, about spelling bees, about toilets, about interstates, about everything. My friend Mike Schaffer did a very good one about the pet industry. I maybe could have done my book about America and Christmas that way — traveled the country more, given shorter glimpses of more examples, hopping from here to there for a more “complete” and straight-journalistic picture of the holiday industry and economy. Instead, I chose to hunker down in the same place with a few people and do the story that way.

I don’t think a case can be made that one way is more right or not, because it really depends on the book. But I do wonder what convinces publishers to greenlight these sort of “a journey into the world of …” or “dispatches from the strange world of …” proposals from authors, which are basically built around a writer hitting the road to explore a subject in a survey approach. If I was an editor considering those kinds of proposals, I’d want to know what the underlying thread will be. I’d want point of view — which is different from and more nuanced than a book that will be opinionated. It’s about voice. When people pay $25 for a book (or $10 for the e-book), I feel like they’re giving you permission to write the hell out of it and have something to say.

• • •

All right, everything I just said? About books needing more style, more voice, more viewpoint, more artful writing? And what I posted on this blog earlier this month, Michael Brick’s screed about those readers and editors who complain about something being “overwritten”? Well, get ready for the radioactive blast of my contradiction bomb. Get ready for About a Mountain, by John D’Agata.

Oh, how I scowled while reading this PATHETICALLY OVERWRITTEN book, all the way to the very end. (It’s not very long. I kept throwing it across the room in disgust and then had to go retrieve it, so I could continue not liking it. So that’s actually kind of a compliment.) I am fascinated by John D’Agata’s writing, and, clearly, so is John D’Agata.

Also, there is a blurb on the front, transmitted from the grave of David Foster Wallace: “John D’Agata is one of the most significant U.S. writers to emerge in the past few years.”

One of. The past few years.

Well, I don’t think so, but I do think he is one of the most egregious Joan Didion imitators I’ve ever read, and that’s saying something, because it takes one to know one. (He who smelled it, dealt it. Smeller’s the feller. Etc.) And I don’t mean the ’60s-style “Goodbye to All That” kind of Didionesque prose that everyone equates with “writing like Joan Didion,” but the later Didion; the post-Miami/pre-Magical Thinking Didion; the ’90s Didion of all those dense New York Review of Books articles, who piles up statistics and figures and half-quotes taken from deep down in news articles or beneath layers of official reports and sculpts it all into long, lush sentences of ominous doublespeak. That’s the Didion that D’Agata is mimicking here. Really, this whole book is Didion karaoke.

The mountain in About a Mountain is Yucca Mountain — the much maligned, questionably unsafe, and recently derailed Nevada site chosen to house the nation’s nuclear waste into eternity. Yucca is always an interesting subject, I guess, but this is more about how D’Agata learned about it, read it about it, visited it, and then wrote 200 pages of dreamy, spooky, I-just-discovered-the-West, essayistic words about it.

D’Agata teaches creative writing at Iowa. He’s part of that wide world of “creative nonfiction” that I know very little about. Since I’ve worked in newspaper journalism all my life, I’m usually surrounded by people who get grouchy and prickly around the idea of “creative nonfiction,” where the rules of reporting and attribution appear to be looser, because adhering strictly to the “facts” has a way of inhibiting the art of fluid prose. I sort of straddle the fence. I like nonfiction that is diligently reported, cuts no corners, and is as accurate as humanly possible, and THEN has the courage to be imaginatively written and provocative in form and structure.

About a Mountain has, if nothing else, helped me decide where to draw the line. Here’s what you learn from D’Agata, once you get all the way to the “Notes” at the end:

“Although the narrative of this essay suggests that it takes place over a single summer, the span between my arrival in Las Vegas and my final departure was, in fact, much longer. I have conflated time in this way for dramatic effect only, but I have tried to indicate each instance of this below [in endnotes]. At times, I have also changed subjects’ names or combined a number of subjects into a single composite ‘character.’ Each example of this is noted.”

Why he had to do all this, I’m not sure. Why he chose this subject, I’m not sure — other than he had to help his mother move to Las Vegas and the place creeped him the fuck out. Clearly he was somewhat interested in the unsolvable dilemma of nuclear waste, but not too terribly much. Why he thought it would be a good idea to bother the parents of a teenager who jumped to his death off the Stratosphere hotel, so that their son’s death could work as some clumsy metaphor for Yucca Mountain, I don’t know.

I keep hearing that we’re leaving journalistic diligence behind; that creative nonfiction is really where it’s at in this era of Truthiness. It’s starting to feel more uppity and old-fashioned to complain — and anyhow, just look at all the kids who still, 40 years later, wave Hunter S. Thompson around and claim his hallucinogenic journalism is the truest thing ever written.

About a Mountain did fascinate me in its later-middle chunk, which artfully rehashed the ongoing debate among linguists, artists, and scientists about how to design a way to warn humans or other future beings to stay away from the Yucca waste tunnels. Maybe they should leave a quote from David Foster Wallace on the lid?

• • •

We’ll there’s more, but not tonight. I hogged all the time and drank all the wine. The One-Man Book Club will be back soon for one-sided discussions of the following: WILSON by Daniel Clowes; NOTHING HAPPENED AND THEN IT DID by Jake Silverstein; THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS by Rebecca Skloot; and THE BEDWETTER by Sarah Silverman. YES, all of those, plus three books that failed to pass the 50-page test!

And anyhow, what are YOU reading? Give me some good recommendations. Nothing written by anyone named Stieg.

Colony Palms Hotel, Palm Springs, Calif.

I’m back. It’s been more than a month, I know, and I hope I can get people to come visit the Tonsil blog again. Last I left you, I was Tinsel-ed out (and so you were you) and Michael and I made a getaway to California for the (un-)holidays. I’m getting some thoughts together about the book experience, but still haven’t quite got them together. Hang on for another entry. It’ll come in short takes.

The California trip went splendidly, really. And by splendid, I mean we did nothing much at all. Michael pronounced it the best Christmas ever, sans cockney Tiny Tim accent. We were in Palm Springs for a few days, which means something to a certain kind of homo, but we just don’t make that grade. We stayed at this ultra-quiet refurbished motor lodge (no, not the trendy ACE motel) called the Colony Palms. Michael read the literature on it more closely than I did — I think it said somewhere it used to be some sort of gangster getaway in the desert. Now it’s just an enclave of not-overly-trendy rooms, a big pool, a pretty good restaurant, lots of trees and flowers, a nice hot tub, and an outdoor fireplace — where I did a lot of reading. Although the food in Palm Springs is legendarily mediocre, our best meals were breakfasts — check out Cheeky’s if you’re ever there, and order the tamale and eggs, with a side of homemade maple sausage.

Oh, and we saw mediocre movies, like the drecky It’s Complicated — and later that week, in LA, we saw Sherlock Holmes, The Road, The Lovely Bones.

Fast reviews:

It’s Complicated: My medium Coke Zero was spiked with estrogen. D-

Sherlock Holmes: Minus the CSI-style f/x and clue review, I mighta liked it better. The haberdashery saw me through. C-

The Road: Honored the book and yet missed the point? Also, for all that praise, I thought the kid wasn’t very good. B-

The Lovely Bones: My new Exhibit-A when people talk about how good books become bad movies. This was really awful, sappy, stupid-looking and boring. D+

Anymore, it almost seems I’d rather talk books than movies. (And if I could keep up, and people still cared about records, I’d love to talk about records.) It’s no fun to keep throwing yourself at the movies with holiday optimism, only to have them not catch you as you fall — those four movies are $100 in tickets, and I’ve never resented ticket prices, ever, even when I couldn’t afford to go to as many movies as I wanted. I’ve always felt like it was important to go, to take the good with the bad, and just enjoy movies the way they’re meant to be, in a theater. I never treated the movies with some Consumer Reports-like expectation that my money never be wasted. But these movies? Thud, thud, thud, thud. It’s Complicated probably annoyed me the most, not for the menopausal mania but for the outrageous wealth in which the characters obliviously dwelled, free of traffic and hassle (other than, well, the complicated sex stuff), where a woman just “owns a bakery” and lives on an estate and is remodeling her woefully small (read: huge) kitchen, and picking ripened tomatoes in her garden on a day which we’ve been lead to believe is late spring. I mean, I can only take so much of that sort of Hollywood fantasy where conspicuous wealth is passed off as normal, upper middle-class. Do we really go to the movies for this kind of escape? Not me. Not in THIS ECONOMY.

The Monday after Christmas we relocated to Los Angeles, checked into the Sunset Tower (no conspicous, complicated wealth for us — they had really cheap rates over Xmas!), and we did even more than nothing than we did in Palm Springs. (At least in Palm Springs we went horseback riding in the mountains for an afternoon.)

We ate and slept and drove around in our rental (Mustang convertible) with the top down and the floor heater on, which is sort of the perfect combo, the environmentally unfriendly version of salty and sweet.

Here’s me in the Arclight Cinema, waiting for The Lovely Bones to start, but first, waiting for more food.

The food! The night before New Year’s (Dec. 30), we had what I think is one of the best meals of my life (I’ll let Michael make his own decisions about his own best-meals-evah), at Gjelina in Venice. It’s one of those totally 21st-century California Alice-Waters-is-our-Jesus places. Reclaimed wood, bare Edison blubs tastefully dangling from the ceiling, firepit out back on the patio; staff undoubtedly sporting some pig tattoos among them. Here’s what we ate (I typed it out in an e-mail to Janet Duckworth almost as soon as we got back to the hotel) …

Gjelina

Starters:
>> Roasted beets with burrata cheese and sherry toasted walnuts. (I am in the fan club for beets these days, even the bland ones at the Post cafeteria salad bar, but when they’re great — oh boy oh boy)
>> Grilled seckel pears with grilled treviso, burrata, prosciutto and vinaigrette (the burrata cheese is just — wow. How great that we picked two items with it.)

Then we had a pizza: eggplant, tomato, oregano, mozzarella

Then we ordered some vegetable dishes:
>> Charred Brussels sprouts with dates, bacon and vinegar
>> Wood-roasted Tahitian squash with sea salt and rosemary

Small plates:
>> Crispy Niman ranch pork belly with corn grits, mustard greens and apple cider (I’m STILL thinking about how good this one was. It just dissolves on your tongue, with a perfect charred crunch…)

>> Grilled peruvian octopus with charred escarole, fingerling potato and saffron aioli

>>Grilled lamb chops with rapini-mint pesto

I know it sounds like we ordered every goddamn thing, but the servings were just right, and there were many more items I would have tried if I was slated for execution the next morning. But the governor called, and gave me a reprieve, so we had to call it quits, but not before…

Desserts:

>>Pear and blackberry crisp with pistachio gelato (this was great and it  would have been perfect if I didn’t know how good the other dessert was going to be…)

>>Butterscotch pots de creme with salted caramel. This last thing was so good that I lost my mind with each bite. I still think about it. Big flakes of rock salt on that caramel with that butterscoth creme underneath. I always thought people were sort of exaggerating when they compared sex to dessert. I don’t now. (See? See? It’s Complicated DID make me grow a vagina and then it made me nutty about a dessert. Woman, thou art cursed.)

Also we had a scrumptious bottle of rosé wine — forget the name. Will have to look. It was French.

We had other fun. Some nice drives around L.A. (Michael got up two mornings in a row to go make some Mulholland Drive photographs.) Some excellent breakfasts. New Year’s Eve over at Janet’s apartment for a while, and then to the Mint to see a band called Dengue Fever. I think it’s safe to say we would move to L.A. in a heartbeat, with the same insufferably daffy optimism of all newcomers, if there were jobs to be had. I’ve been extraordinarily lucky to spend at least a week or two in L.A. every year for most of the ’00s. I was hooked at 21, when I moved there to be an LA Times summer intern. At 33, I made a promise to myself to find a way to move to L.A. by the time I turned 40. That didn’t work out. Maybe 45?

Sorry for this disjointed, rambly post. If I don’t post it now, I might never get the blog up and going again, and I want to; I just have to rediscover that loosey-goosey bloggy voice again. Speaking of California and Californians, I’ll leave you with the Cold War Kids’ new song, “Santa Ana Winds.” This is the acoustic version. I highly recommend you check out the studio cut on their new EP. Finally, finally (and not to drag out an LA cliche)  — someone has namechecked Joan Didion in a pop song!

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.