About a week ago, after manic amounts of book-reading this summer, the One-Man Book Club unanimously approved a moratorium (1 in favor; none opposed) that prohibits even the cracking-open and general perusing of any book on the “to read” stack until the club confronts and discusses the entire backlog of already-read and partially-read books.

This is sort of a relief. Many of the One-Man Book Club’s members are employed as full-time television critics and are getting ready for a heap of nonsense known as FALL TELEVISION. Brains must rest, or try to.

Oh, the books: It’s a 60-mile Chinese traffic jam here. Let’s get things moving, quick, before the “fall books” start doing their dances of the seven dustjackets. Also, the One-Man Book Club is going to experiment this time with a ratings system, based on the concept of “lurve.” (Do we lurve the book? Do we sorta lurve it? Do we un-lurve it? Hmmm.)

• • •

First up, You Never Give Me Your Money: The Beatles After the Breakup, by Peter Doggett. The author is a British music journalist and the book is about the Beatles. It was released last year in Britain and now it’s here, with such a better jacket design. (And an Annie Lennox blurb! Sweet dreams are made of that.) (Would she lie to you? Would she lie to you, honey?)

Maddeningly, it arrives with Brit punctuation intact — periods and commas outside the quotes; single quotes used when someone is being quoted, double quotes for a quote within a quote. (Insane. ‘Copy editors’, he said, ‘proceed cautiously, or “bring Advil” ‘.)

Let me tell you about books about the Beatles: They aren’t just written for Beatles nuts, who will just quibble them to death anyhow. A lot of Beatles books are dulllll, written by men who can’t see the Norwegian Wood for the trees and therefore sacrifice story to trivia and second-hand news. I don’t know what it is about hefty tomes about the Beatles, but for some reason I can’t quite convey, I’m drawn to them. It’s not like I’m any more of a fan of the Beatles, than, say, the rest of the world. I don’t rush out to buy reconfigured and remastered albums or any of that.

What it is, for me, I guess, is the naive improbability of it all: How John knew George and George knew Paul and eventually they had to hire Ringo; how fast they became so, so famous. But mostly I remain stunned by how much work they accomplished between 1963 and 1969, and on drugs, no less.

I like the world they inhabited: communiques by Telex, airplane tickets, rotary telephones, escapes through kitchen entrances, susceptibility to Maharishis and other whack-jobs, women who were called “birds” and “luv,” press conferences, flashbulbs going off, gallery openings, haberdashery, sunglasses, Abbey Road sessions (EMI recording engineers in white labcoats!), publicity stunts for peace staged in four-star hotel rooms. All of that.

My friend David Segal, when he was the pop critic at the Washington Post (he’s now a marquee business-section writer at the New York Times), said something at lunch one day, about six years ago, that has always made perfect sense to me. I don’t know if the insight belongs to him originally, but maybe it does, and it goes something like this:

Elvis fans desire memorabilia. Beatles fans desire information.

That is not to say that Elvis fans don’t like information, and at the same time, many Beatles fans can go cuckoo for memorabilia rarities. But Beatles fans most want to know every last thing there is to know, to the point now where almost every hour in the Beatles’ lives between 1962 and 1970 can more or less be accounted for — travels, recording sessions, meetings, acid trips, etc.

So if a Beatles book looks interesting, I’ll give it a shot. The last one that I got really absorbed in was Bob Spitz’s The Beatles: The Biography; I’m sure someone out there can list all sorts of problems with that book, but I thought it was a great epic for the casual reader, and really brought out the good, bad and ugly of the band’s life. I got through all 992 pages (even the notes!) and wished there’d been another 300 or so. But not all Beatles books are created equal; I tried to read Philip Norman’s Lennon bio last year (snore) and also bailed on a McCartney bio recently — books about individual Beatles aren’t as good.

Caught celebrating the filing of another lawsuit, no doubt.

Now, You Never Give Me Your Money. What’s brilliant about this one is that it begins in 1969, when everything is going to shit for the Fab Four. We just skip the Irish immigration stories, no motherless John, no public art schools, no skiffle jams, no Hamburg, no Ed Sullivan, no Sgt. Pepper sessions. We start with the disastrous (but wondrous!) Abbey Road sessions and the stillbirth of Let It Be; the insinuation of Yoko and Linda; the slammed doors and lack-of-quorum meetings in executive suites.

Meet the Beatles: Manic tax evaders.

The book really dissects the horrible Apple Corps business idea that ruined the Beatles and went on ruining them (financially, emotionally) forever. Though the writing is not perfect, the reporting is about as sincere as you can hope for in a Beatles tome. By the time you get done (in present day) you won’t like the Beatles, personally. Just when you think you hate Paul more, you’ll decide John’s entire story and reputation (and talent) has been way overblown. Peter Doggett is especially good at examining the ways Lennon’s murder created a St. John Lennon who never quite existed. And you can tell this was hard for Doggett, who loves them as we all do, making this is a true work of critical analysis and fair reporting.

It’s taken almost 40 years (and counting) for the Beatles to break up. They and their survivors still — still! — can’t come to terms on everything. If you want a taste of that, simply go try to buy a Beatles album on iTunes.

You Never Give Me Your Money: A big LURVE. (Lurve is all you need.) Someone option the movie! Lawyers be damned!

• • •

Next up, Hitch-22, a memoir by Christopher Hitchens.

H E  I S  P O I S O N wrote a friend, when I told her what I planned to read on vacation.

Which might well be true, for people who’ve had to drink a whole vial or two of him over the years. (And these days he’s literally filled with poison, undergoing aggressive treatment for cancer. Which he just wrote a very nice and frank column about, as he enters the whole cancer culture and quickly advances to the most frightening stage of it.)

I am one of those so-called Washington media elites who happily elude each and every one of the circles in the Hitchens Venn diagram. There’s no possible way I could ever be invited to play with that crowd. Hitchens lives nearby and yet he is no more or less real to me than he is for Vanity Fair readers in the Midwest.

Anyhow, I like his poison in tiny drops on the tongue. I also like his courage to take on organized religion and some of God’s more egregious poseurs. (Yes, like Mother Theresa. And Pope Benedict.)

And Hitch-22 is a pleasure to read, just for the language alone. It’s basically a report from another planet, as delivered by the spongiest, most erudite plant-form on the surface. Suicidal mother, cold father; homoerotic encounters in boarding school, dalliances with socialism; falling for America, learning to write, the life of a professional intellectual … all sustains me for about exactly as long as it ran. Minus the chapter on Salman Rushdie, because, I’m sorry about the fatwas and all, I don’t care about Salman Rushdie. People who’ve read Salman Rushdie and think he’s a genius are all over there somewhere, in another room, having a drink and a smoke with Christopher Hitchens.

I marked one thing that has really stuck with me for the last few weeks. It’s about Israel and Palestine. This passage is a trademark example of the Hitchens way of being at once inflammatory and yet totally, gently sensible. Here it is:

Suppose that a man leaps out of a burning building — as my dear friend and colleague Jeff Goldberg sat and said to my face over a table at La Tomate in Washington not two years ago — and lands on a bystander in the street below. Now, make the burning building be Europe, and the luckless man underneath be the Palestinian Arabs. Is this a historical injustice? Has the man below been made a victim, with infinite cause of complaint and indefinite justification for violent retaliation?

My own reply would be a provisional “no,” but only on these conditions. The man leaping from the burning building must still make such restitution as he can to the man who broke his fall, and must not pretend that he never even landed on him. And he must base his case on the singularity and uniqueness of the original leap. It can’t, in other words, be “leap, leap, leap” for four generations and more. The people underneath cannot be expected to tolerate leaping on this scale and of this duration, if you catch my drift. In Palestine, tread softly, for you tread on their dreams. And do not tell the Palestinians that they were never fallen upon and bruised in the first place. Do not shame yourself with the cheap lie that they were told by their leaders to run away. Also, stop saying that nobody knew how to cultivate oranges in Jaffa until the Jews showed them how. “Making the desert bloom” — one of [my mother] Yvonne’s stock phrases — makes desert dwellers out of people who were the agricultural superiors of the Crusaders.

In the mid-1970s, Jewish settlers from New York were already establishing second homes for themselves on occupied territory. From what burning house were they leaping? …

That may or may not be sort of how I feel about it. Actually, you know how I feel about that issue? I feel like it’s going to eventually kill us all — especially those of us who have to occasionally put on our serious hats and read op-eds about it, in a struggle to “get it,” or pick a side, because we were raised white and Christian and oblivious in Oklahoma and would just as soon not be part of a nuclear apocalypse caused by who gets to vacation in Tel Aviv and who doesn’t. All over some real estate that, frankly, from the pictures on the news, looks to me like either end of El Paso.

If Israelis and Palestinians could just work it out, you know what a one-state solution would look like?

I know, because I’ve been there, many times: It would look like any afternoon at the Grove/Farmer’s Market in Los Angeles.

Drop til you shop.

Hitch-22 gets a qualified LURVE, and strong hopes (not prayer) for Hitchens’s improved health.

• • •

And now, briefly, the dreaded list of those who failed the 50-page test: four books I started and ditched this summer (and some reasons why). I promise you, this is not my favorite part of One-Man Book Club.

The club has even thought about killing this feature, but the authors in the group (one, me) ultimately felt that he, er, I would probably, in most cases, like to know at what point (and why) potential readers bailed on my own book. Yes, even if it’s hard medicine to encounter into during a self-Googling.

[I find pooh-poohs of Tinsel pretty frequently online, btw. And if it hurts, then it's my fault for asking Google and Twitter to go look for them.]

So then … the theme this time is DRYNESS. Note to all editors at New York publishing houses: do something about dryness, won’t you?

<< The Routes of Man: How Roads are Changing the World and the Way We Live, by Ted Conover. Wonderful idea but stultifying execution: Conover explores ancient and modern roads on several continents and talks about their immeasurable contributions to civilizations, then and now. I gotta start paying closer attention to books in the store and less to the jacket copy and NPR mentions. I snapped this up because it looked interesting — though the too-earnest subtitle should have shooed me away. About 70 pages in, I realized I was reading a collection of magazine pieces that have been padded out, in a prose style that was weirdly disengaged, by a writer who seemed interested in stories about all the things he saw that wouldn’t interest me.

Seven Pleasures: Essays on Ordinary Happiness, by Willard Spiegelman. Seems like a perfectly nice man (English prof at SMU in Dallas) and I’ve enjoyed his pieces in D magazine before. His book explores these seven simple joys: reading, walking, looking, dancing, listening, swimming, and writing. I’m for all of them. But the book reads like a term paper, which I do not count among even the top 100 pleasures, and I wasn’t getting any smarter as I struggled to find his groove. Bailed out after p. 56, skimmed around, then bailed for good.

The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, by Nicholas Carr. Completely and totally unobjectively, I like and recommend Hamlet’s Blackberry a lot more. In an effort to recover braininess, this one discovers dryness.

In fact, cardboard prose is the real bugaboo overall. The other book I ditched was How to Be a Movie Star: Elizabeth Taylor in Hollywood, by William J. Mann, which is such an interesting idea — a Liz Taylor book that is not a biography but instead an examination of the ways she set the template for modern celebrityhood and the self-maintenance of stardom.

But gosh, does the writer prefer the sound of dead leaves. The wit, when it comes, is that sort of obvious, unoffensive wink-wink humor you get from watching Robert Osborne on TCM. It’s a fussy sort of entertainment-biography language; makes me think of stale popcorn and Rex Reed. So I really started skimming it, well beyond page 50, but not in a way that I can claim to have thoroughly read it all.

I paid closest attention the chapter about the making of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which very nearly approached the kind of engagement one gets from reading Mark Harris’s excellent Pictures at a Revolution. But soon enough I was skimming again, and left the book for future readers, on the living-room shelf of our vacation rental in Provincetown, where I am sure it will find a new (and truer) friend.

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!

What seemed like half the freshman class of Bishop McGuinness High School went to see the Go-Go’s on their Vacation tour at the Oklahoma City Myriad Center University of Oklahoma Lloyd Noble Center (speak, memory! Or speak, Derba! Or, you know who would really know — Andrea Martinez). Thanks to the interwebs, I can at least confirm that this happened on October 2, 1982. We had the beat.

A couple days after that, this kid named Mark Marron — who was an ADD thug with a frightening overbite; one of those total assholes who always shows up in movies about how awful high school is — declared the Go-Go’s to be lesbos and called me a fag because I had the Rolling Stone cover of the band (the Annie Leibovitz photo of them in their bras-and-camis) taped up in my locker. I took it down. What a horrible feeling, even now.

From then on, none of the boys (except me) openly liked the Go-Go’s, and all of the girls did. You could write an academic paper on 1980s Bible Belt adolescent gender identification rituals about that — but do include the whole boys-who-play-Ms.-Pac-Man thing as a corollary. (A happier memory: The crisp air of the October 1984 evening the Go-Go’s came back, junior year, on their Talk Show tour and played the OKC Zoo Amphitheater. Utter bliss — dancing around with the cool girls. By then I did more or less what I wanted. What a difference two years makes.)

I stuck with the Go-Go’s even after they broke up. I liked Jane Wiedlin’s Blue Kiss album in ‘85, and I might have (might have) sang along into a hairbrush with Belinda Carlisle’s “Mad About You” a time or two. Svelte, redhead Belinda’s Heaven on Earth is surely one of my all-time guiltiest pleasures, so out of tune (and actually out of tune, on some cuts) with the 120 Minutes aterna-guise I tried to latch onto in college. I stick with them even now: Four tickets to see their “farewell” (yeah, right) reunion tour next month at Wolf Trap. That’ll be $188, please.

What a long way to get around to telling you that the One-Man Book Club seized upon a copy of Lips Unsealed, Belinda Carlisle’s new memoir, upon spying it the other day on the new-releases table in Borders. I had no idea it was even in the works. (I haven’t paid Belinda any attention in years, except to watch her gay son’s YouTube videos.)

Look, I’ve got my own deep nostalgia trip going on lately. I threw my 20-year-college-reunion invite in the trash. I’ve been making a massive playlist of “college songs” and I’m thisclose to dragging out my Mac Plus one of these nights, to plug it in and read all the old letters and musings stored on its hard drive. I don’t need a Belinda Carlisle book just right now, thanks, but …

Well, if you insist.

Here’s the thing: I’ve always wondered why Belinda became so successful, post-Go-Go’s, for doing stuff that is so mediocre. (And actually, the Go-Go’s are not arguably brilliant, either. That was more about a moment and a look and a pop-culture shift from the ’70s to the MTV ’80s.)

Guess what? Belinda wonders the exact same thing.

This book is a horribly wonderful study of the essence of mediocrity, told by someone who’s just as baffled as you and I are about it. I read the book in a night. We go from her mildly unhappy childhood in the San Fernando Valley to the punk heyday in Hollywood, where she lived in the legendarily filthy Canterbury apartment building and knew all the seminal punk and new wave rockers of the “Rodney on the ROQ” era. That’s where the Go-Go’s started — all the stuff you’ve heard before; the dresses made of trash bags, the boozin’ and floozin’; the evolution from unskilled girls with guitars to bubblegum rock group. Who doesn’t love a drug-fueled rock memoir? Once again, I had to get up and go to the kitchen spice rack so I could remind myself: How much is half a gram?

Well, those grams add up. Belinda put so much toot up her nose over the years — to hear her tell it, for pages and pages and pages, it sounds like it stopped being fun around 1985, but she was just getting started. Count me as one of those suckers who believed, when we saw the video for “Heaven is a Place on Earth” or saw her anti-drug “Rock Against Drugs — RAD!” public-service ads, that Belinda looked so good because she kicked drugs. See?

That is not the case. She marched to Bolivia for another 20 years; went on a three-day coke binge as recently as 2005, in a London hotel room. But, she writes, she’s been sober since then — thanks to the usual discovery of Jesusless spirituality, including trips to the river Ganges and dinner parties with Deepak Chopra. Eh, whatever works. Belinda, you’ll understand if we wait and see?

More intriguing is the undercurrent of showbiz that pulls Belinda along as an unenthusiastic celebrity who barely qualifies as a musician — from one bad solo record to the next, through the years, most recently finding herself quickly eliminated on Dancing with the Stars.

The refreshing (and depressing) part is how much blame she’s willing to take. Every time she heard a new recording of her voice — from “Our Lips Are Sealed” on down — she cringed. (America cringed, too, eventually; but Europe loves her.) There’s a great scene when the young Go-Go’s first hear a tape of their debut album, Beauty and the Beat. It was so not the edgy, punk record they set out to make. They were mortified. But the deal was done. Mediocrity worked its ineffable magic. Hank Stuever spent his allowance on it, many times over.

You know what she’s good at? Being a Go-Go. Michael and I went to see them four years ago at the 9:30 Club. They played every track from Beauty and the Beat, in order, to celebrate the album’s 25th anniversary.

I looked around. All the new wave girls from everyone’s high school were there, along with their very best gay male friend. Everybody get on your feet / We know you can dance to the beat…

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.

Where were we? The one-man book club (which shall now be written as One-Man Book Club, after a unanimously ratified amendment to the One-Man Stylebook) is adrift. Members keep offering excuses: “I have too many TV reviews to write.” “I’m too goddamn tired.” “I feel too fat to blog.” “I would rather drink a little and read these magazines.” Etc. etc.

Be we (me) are back. There are three books left from the Great Reading Binge of Late ‘09 and Early ‘10 — and one book to give a friendly shout about.

First up, The Room and the Chair, by Lorraine Adams: The author, a Pulitzer winner for reporting, used to work at the Washington Post. I didn’t know her, but I did wind up at a New Year’s Eve party back in the very early aughts at the nice, big house she used to live in on 19th Street. She was a great newsroom character, and now she’s written a novel about some great newsroom characters. But let me back up for a minute to her first novel, Harbor (2004), which I had on my list of my favorite books of the ’00s, and is, I think, among the very best novels to come out of the immediate vibe of the 9/11 era. I strongly recommend Harbor.

As for The Room and the Chair, I’m much more ambivalent. It’s a vivid (often too vivid) story of a female fighter pilot (who barely survives the crash of her fighter jet, which lands in the Potomac River between the Kennedy Center and Roosevelt Island); a spook (aka “The Chair”) who works for one of those No-Such-Agencies out in an office park in McLean; and a young, black reporter who is assigned by the night editor of the Washington Spectator to look further into the plane crash, long after the rest of the newsroom (”The Room”) cares about it. Based on all that, you’d think it’d just be another Washington potboiler AND a Post roman-a-clef. But Adams has a whole lot more ambition than that. The writing is often amazing and she clearly means to bend a lot of Washington cliches (actual and literary) into some new form of art. The first 100 pages are maddeningly lush — it’s hard to know exactly what’s going on, which is partly the the intent of the story. The theme is not “You can’t handle the truth!”, the theme is more there is no such thing as truth. To achieve this, Adams has thrown a lot of gauzy language in front of the reader’s vision.

As for the Washington Spectator, I couldn’t help but gobble up the details of a very Washington Post-like environment, where some of the characters definitely possess traits that any Post-ie will recognize. There are some delicious analogues; a Bob Woodward, who in this weird parallel realm, seems to have married the Sally Quinn. A few pages in, I started taking notes, if for nothing else than to save Amy Argetsinger the work of having to read it herself! I don’t wish to slag on The Room and the Chair — there’s something lovely and cool about it, but I don’t expect many people will find it a satisfying read. It’s far too arty for people who like Washington thrillers and it’s not fully realized enough to score with the highbrow reviewers. And for those of us who loved Harbor so much, it’s a teeny bit of a comedown. Want to read something far more articulate and spot-on about this book? I point you now to Louis Bayard’s review in the Post.

After that, I took on You Are Not a Gadget, a manifesto by Jaron Lanier. This is one of those books that gets talked about a lot when it comes out; sometimes you can probably get what you need to know about this kind of book from the reviews of it.

But I was intrigued by his central premise, which sort of goes like this: the Internet revolution got off to the wrong start, constrained by fixed ideas that were part of the initial software designs of the 1980s and ’90s, and biases of the people who fashioned together the World Wide Web, and then ruined by the anonymous bad manners of its users.

There’s a lot more here too, much of which had me nodding along in sound agreement. I especially liked a mini-rant midway through that bemoaned the ultimate result of the Internet: people went to things that comfort them in a nostalgic sense, looking up old friends and enjoying long-gone cartoons and songs — instead of creating something new. The whole thing is trapped in cultural “retro economy.” Lanier makes a compelling argument that the music of the post-Internet generation fails to sound unique, in the way that music from other decades clearly does.

That’s just one example. I feel like if I’d been reading Wired all these years (I havent; have you?), I would have followed Lanier better down some of his rabbit holes. But on the whole, I enjoyed this book because it validated a lot of my heartache about the Internet, which is not a Luddite response (or the death bleats of a newspaper employee), but just the sinking feeling that this renaissance we’re in is in fact a false start, and is destroying more than it invents. This is one book where I wish my One-Man Book Club actually had another member, because I want to talk about it with someone who’s read it. Also, though, it’s been about three weeks since I finished it, and I have to admit, much of it has already left me. Hmmm.

I read Union Atlantic in one long day, a day in which I absolutely needed a book like Union Atlantic, a day which I spent waylaid in Memphis — a missed flight connection, a night in a Hyatt, and then most of the next day spent reading on a sofa in the Hyatt lobby, ordering diet sodas and waiting to go back to the airport for an airplane. (Does that sound awful to you? Let me tell you, I love those sort of days. File under: I’m really not hard to please.)

Union Atlantic is a novel by Adam Haslett, and it’s being hailed by some as the best novel yet about the economic excesses of the 2000s. It weaves together several stories, set in and around Boston. Union Atlantic is a big, Wachovia-like banking institution, at which Doug Fanning runs a big hedge fund. Doug is a former Navy officer who served on the USS Vincennes when it shot down that Iranian airliner in the 1980s. Now (middle ’00s) he’s a cutthroat hedge fund asshole — and he’s just built a fittingly ostentatious mansion in a wealthy little burg outside Boston. This brings the wrath of his neighbor, a kooky old lady living in squalor next door, with her two dogs (who talk to her). She also happens to be the older sister of the head of New York Federal Reserve Bank. The old woman, a former history teacher, is hired to tutor a young man who (I’m going to keep this short) winds up having an inappropriate (but pretty damn hot, if emotionally abusive) affair with a character I’ve already mentioned. There’s more, but that gets us started.

I voraciously liked this book, if only because I was hooked. In hindsight, the last 50 pages get somewhat ridonkulous plot-wise (and a little obvious), but so what? It delivers a strong dose of catharsis to the BS that’s gone on with our economy AND Union Atlantic has the added bonus of knowing what it’s talking about. Haslett’s done his research and it feels right, down to the elegant descriptions of the economic hocus-pocus that ruined the American economy. He’s not an elegant prose stylist; the thing to admire is his (no pun) economy with words and images. For all its sprawl, this novel comes in at 300 pp. I’m not sure it’s the be-all/end-all novel that captures our era and will therefore last for the history of western lit, but I got a real bang out of it.

• • •

Finally, you’ve been to Hawaii, right? Actually, have you ever been to any place that tries to put forth a “tropical” summery vibe, up to and including the place that rents innertubes at Harper’s Ferry? Then you know the sound of Iz.

That would be Israel Kamakawiwo’ole. (Everyone called him Iz.) He’s the one who recorded that ukelele version of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” which appeared on his album “Facing Future,” which was released in 1993. (The “Over the Rainbow” cover was made one drunken night in 1988.) Millions of record sales later, that song has been used in commercials — especially commercials aiming to make yuppies feel more ethereal about their purchases and vacation plans — and basically anyplace you’ve ever ordered a daiquiri. As much as it makes me think of the Sheraton in Kona, it also makes me think of the Internet bubble economy circa 2000.

Ah, but the story behind it: Who was Iz, the imposingly large Hawaiian who, long after his death in 1997, has come to be such a revered icon in Hawaii?

That’s where my friend Dan Kois comes in. He’s written Facing Future for the 33-1/3 book series. (The series of books pairs a writer up with a legendary album and has the writer do a pocket-sized book-length essay about it.)

I had the pleasure of reading Facing Future in manuscript form last summer. Of all the friends who’ve ever asked me to read their book for them, this was the one I put the least amount of red pen marks on. It’s an engaging and tragic story, quite well told, about a darker and more wistful side of life and death in Hawaii. Do my bruddah Dan a solid and pick it up. It’s a bargain.

It’s one-man book club week here in Tonsil-land, where I say all the things I would say if I was in a book club (and the selections were all up to me). Monday and Tuesday I blogged about seven books.

But today is the dark-interlude portion of the one-man book club meeting, where a moment is taken to grieve for the misfires — those books that did not pass the FIFTY-PAGE TEST.

Let me explain. I give every book I buy or borrow the first 50 pages (one sitting) to get me in there. Sometimes I’ll push it to page 75 or 80. But if it’s not happening, I give myself permission to put it down and move along. Nobody’s fault. That’s important to underline. I’m not going to take the book back and demand store credit or anything. I just read until hooked, or until I make a decision that it’s not for me and I move along. On the chance that these authors self-Google (and who doesn’t? Dave Eggers probably doesn’t), I’ll keep it brief so as not to upset karmic literary balance.

Fast farewell to these, and I’m sorry there’ve been so many lately:

Memoir: A History by Ben Yagoda. My fault. I didn’t want to read “a history” of memoir, I wanted to read more about the psychological impulse (nowadays, especially) to commit the act of memoir. And there it is plain on the cover: “A history.”

Next Stop, Reloville: Life Inside America’s New Rootless Professional Class by Peter T. Kilborn. Loved it as a New York Times story however many years ago. This book-length extrapolation was recommended to me by a few people who got the same vibe when reading about Frisco, Texas, in my book. But 60 or so pages in, it just felt spun out (and stretched out) to me. Too dry and newspaperly about something that can also be absurd, odd, funny.

Zeitoun by Dave Eggers. Sorry, McsWeenies, I gotta save my Katrina interest so I can review Treme on HBO in a month or so. This book comes from the calculated enterprise that is Eggers’s earnest effort to save society through literature. Although journalist pals at Gangrey were excited to delve into it, I was corn-fused by the reporting process as spelled out in the acknowledgments. Zeitoun is intent on being matter-of-fact. Frankly, it struck me as boring. (I know: how can a flood be dry? You’ll see.)

Finally: This Is Where I Leave You, an angsty-comic family drama novel by Jonathan Tropper. That is where I left it, right around page 50.

• • •

More one-man book club on FRIDAY, with reviews of THE ROOM AND THE CHAIR, UNION ATLANTIC and YOU ARE NOT A GADGET. Plus a little ukelele.

We continue today with More Things I Would Have Said if I Was Actually in a Book Club (and If The Club Chose Books That Were Exactly the Books I Want to Read) … By now I’d be a little drunk on the very excellent wine we serve at my book club. It appears I’m going to drink the whole bottle. In a one-man book club, there’s always plenty to eat and drink.

Yesterday I turned in my book reports on Sweet Thunder and Gutshot Straight, which I read in the darkest days of January, under blankets. Let’s time warp a bit, back to middle-late November, when I headed out on the Tinsel tour and needed some books to read that were:

a.) not about Christmas and

b.) slender.

I’m a bit of a David Thomson fanatic. Got there late, “discovering” him in 2005, when The Whole Equation came out; then I marvelled at the no-net trapeze act he did in 2006 with Nicole Kidman. Now he’s one of my favorite film writers. His new one (and he just bangs them out, apparently, both fat and thin) is The Moment of Psycho: How Alfred Hitchcock Taught America to Love Murder. It’s a succinct gem of Thomsonian filmthinking, and exactly what the title promises. He starts by artfully capturing American character and social thought in 1960 and then walks us through the film. I don’t get to the museums enough, but I was really glad, some years back, to catch an exhibit where an artist had slowed Psycho down frame by frame so that the movie took 24 hours to play. When I was at the exhibit, the movie was sloooowly clicking through the scene was where the detective is questioning Norman Bates. (But Hank! The shower scene! Yes, I know, but it was hard to catch it just right. I would have had to build my day around it.)

Fellow Thomson fan Dan Zak didn’t like this book as much as I did (and it does drag a bit in the wind-up), but it was just what I needed as I went from one Hampton Inn and Hilton Garden Inn and Hyatt Place to the next, where I showered every time, happy as could be.

The frigid Saturday night I read at Village Books in Bellingham, Wash., (yes, the night seven people showed up and didn’t buy a single copy of my book) I bought myself a book I’d read about in The Stranger: Rebecca Brown’s collected essays, American Romances. This book was published by City Lights, the venerable San Francisco bookstore, and clearly by someone who thinks Rebecca Brown writes the real good shit. Her essays are about herself and popular culture and literature (and history), but they basically work as almost hallucinogenic collage. The first essay connects Brian Wilson and Nathaniel Hawthorne across American history, and every word is perfect.

That’s not to say these are all easy to read dispatches. Later she gets into Gertrude Stein (Brown is a total child of Stein) and here things get wobbly and clouded. Her writing about her parents is painful (good painful) and I get the stuff about John Wayne, but there are some boulders on this trail, too. Brown writes uninhibited (but precise) essays, full of something quintessentially Western, that I once longed to do, if I’d been … hmmm. If I’d been crazy. Or crazy enough to not, like, need to be employed by newspapers so that I could have things like paychecks and health plans.

There was a phase, when I was working in a somewhat more free and unhinged way at the Austin American-Statesman, where I approached some similar neurotic-confidence that Brown seems to have; a trust in joining together oddly connected themes in madcap ways. (At the Post I did it in a much more linear fashion; crazy but not nutty — plastic chairs, or Sheetz v. Wawa.) Everyone spends so much perfecting their writing so that it is clear, spare, direct, show-don’t-tell, etc. It feels like Brown completely trusts herself to be beautifully odd in her sentence structure and thinking. I encourage people who would like to write weirder than they currently do to give this book a whirl. I’d bet 60 percent of the people who try to read it will just go “hunh”? (I’d bet that 98 percent of the people who read my blah-blah-blah about it here — all three of you — will also go “hunh”?)

• • •

When Michael and I went to California for Christmas and New Year’s, I took along these three (slightly heavier) books:

Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife by Francine Prose. I was drawn to it by an intriguing review in the NYT, but also by the cover: There, with the usual schoolgirl picture of Anne Frank that we’ve come to know on millions of book covers, are outtakes from the same photo session. More Anne. It’s always spooky to know there’s more.

I read the diary itself in seventh grade, like everyone else, and haven’t looked back. Of course, there’s usually a pretty constant shitstorm occurring just off the coast of Anne Frank — from school boards that still ban the diary to Holocaust deniers claiming the whole thing was cooked. Frank scholars (Frankies? Frankenfolks?) have done heaps of work comparing the original to the revision and then comparing that to the version Otto Frank edited and sold to publishers. The movie and play are a travesty of happifying impulses to tidy up the Holocaust for American audiences in the 1950s.

All of this is really fascinating to me, and Francine Prose is exactly the kind of tough but reasoned writer I want to read on the enduring allure of Anne Frank and the puzzling ways people have appropriated the diary to their own thinking. Here’s what I didn’t know: Anne revised and polished two years of her original, way-too-girly diary with the hope that it would win a contest and get published. All this time I (and maybe you) thought the diary was purely a found document, a naive work of genius. Rather, as Prose walks us through it, we can finally see it as the intentional work of an emerging writer who is in a way much more aware of her audience and market.

And a week or so after I read it? Miep Gies died. I felt so up-to-date on it all.

And just yesterday, I got a screener in the mail of a NEW dramatic film adaptation of the diary, which will air on PBS in April. I’m looking forward to watching it.

Madly shifting gears, as Michael and I relocated from Palm Springs to LA, I started reading Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby. Ten years later, here’s the novel we all wanted after High Fidelity. It’s about a woman named Annie, a museum curator who lives in a dreary coastal England town with her irritatingly selfish boyfriend, Duncan, who has an unhealthy obsession for a once-successful American rock singer named Tucker Crowe.

Crowe disappeared in the late ’80s, walked away from fame and his career, leaving his fans to obsess forever and ever about why he quit and where he now lives. They are particularly obsessed with his last and best album, Juliet. If you’ve ever known anyone who thought there was something to gain by discussing music in online forums and chat rooms, and who supplements that with tedious collecting of bootlegs, memorabilia and other ephemera, AND (this is key) you don’t think the music in question is really all that great to begin with, then you have to read this book.

Some reviews said the plot was too thin or predictable, but I was right there with it, merrily reading along and laughing a lot. Some books are excellent vacation enhancers — smart and light all at once — and this is one. I love the hard work Hornby put in to the language of liner notes, Wiki entries, obsessive fan chatter, and strange e-mails. I’d also happily pony up to see whatever movie version is (inevitably) made from Juliet, Naked. I was trying to cast it in my head.

Finally, on the long flight back to cold and gloom of a D.C. winter, I read The Kids Are All Right: A Memoir, by the siblings Welch: Liz, Diana, Amanda and Dan.

Strange thing: While I was on book tour, the Welches were too, and it seems like I was always a few days ahead of them or a few days behind them — at bookstore events, or on public radio shows, etc. The more I heard (or read) about this book, the more I wanted to read it.

Basically, they were growing up fine and classy on the East Coast in the 1970s and early ’80s — handsome Dad was a businessman (in a somewhat suspicious and ultimately debt-deep sense of the word) and lovely Mom was a soap-opera actress. Then Dad died in a car crash. A couple of stressful and crazy years later, Mom died of cancer. The kids — ages grade-school tyke to high school — went to live with a variety of family friends or acquaintances/guardians, with widely different results, slight traumas, and an overall sense of abandonment until years later, when they reunited and formed a more cohesive sibling bond. The first couple of pages really sing, right from the first sentence:

Our mother died three times. We have the first death on tape, recorded the day it aired in 1976: Morgan Fairchild, wearing a trench coat and pale pink lip gloss, shot her in the back. Over the past thirty years, we’ve each watched the tape several times, pulling it from the dusty cardboard moving boxes and crossing our fingers it doesn’t get eaten by the VCR. It’s our only copy.

… There is a loud bang. A tiny circle of dark red appears on the back of her pink satin robe. The next shot is a close-up. Our mother’s face fills the screen in a death snarl revealing upper teeth.

I was so with them from the introduction, but the book quickly strays from that lyric quality. That’s not to say I don’t recommend it; I did follow along right to the end, as tedious as it got. Most of it is written by Liz (the second oldest) and Diana (the youngest), in alternating chapters told in first-person singular, as opposed to Our mother died three times. …

The oldest, Amanda, chimes in every so often with very short chapters, mostly to call B.S. on Diana’s and Liz’s recollections or add her own perspective; the brother, Dan, drifts in and out to demonstrate how detached he was through their adolescences spent apart. Some of the online reviews have really pounced on the book, calling it whiny and spoiled. Yes and no; their “struggles” are a tad oversold. When the Welches lost their parents, the upper-middle class inhabitants of their world stepped in to keep them afloat in a certain status. The untethered emotions they describe aren’t quite the sob story that the book’s marketing material describes. I think other readers might have gone in expecting a really incredible story (read: unbelievable, a la Running with Scissors) and got bored.

In a strange way, the things that work about this book are the same things that drag it down. Liz is and always was the star of this family, and she seems to have the most detailed memories — especially about her own achievements in school and do-good travels abroad. Reading her is like being trapped at a dinner party with a guest who won’t shut up about herself and yet also wants you to hire for some job you didn’t know you’d posted, and when you learn more (from interviews) about how the book came about, it’s clear that this is Liz’s book proposal, brought to fruition by the innovative idea to get her siblings to chime in.

Diana had a much more painful life after the parents died; she was taken in by a family that seemed to resent her presence. She turned out very earthy, laid-back. Her prose is more slack, especially compared to Liz’s, which feels overly self-centered. I actually liked the bluntness of Amanda’s and Dan’s contributions better — which seem to have come about in response to reading Diana’s and Liz’s early drafts? Messy as it may have been, I kind of wish they’d worked harder to create one draft written in a plural voice. We. Our. She. He; Our mother died three times, with _occasional_ forays into first-person by each of them.

This is what’s alluring about The Kids Are All Right — it’s a study in the pitfalls of memory (especially among siblings) and writing a memoir. If you asked my three sisters and me to write a book about, say, our parents’ marriage and divorce, you would get back four different accounts that would bear a passing resemblance to one another, with big and little details in constant dispute. That’s why I admired the experiment here, if not necessarily the result. I guess I’m like other readers who plowed through this book, got to the end because I wanted to see what happened, and thought eh, big deal. That’s it?

Nothing helps one grieve for the demise of one’s own sad little book than … reading other people’s books!

And knowing, as you read them, that every single one of these books may well nearly have killed its author and also knowing that somehow, someway every single one of these books is also someone’s letdown. (The author? The editor? The author’s mother? The marketing department? The accounting department? Michiko Kakutani? The Millions? The Pulitzer committee? There’s no end to the disappointment a book can bring.)

So here’s a long overdue report from my one-man book club — brief reviews of books I’ve read since mid-November or so.

Oh, the books. The books! Last month I did a huge purge of books from both my newsroom cubicle and the overflowing shelves my home office. I unloaded probably 250 books. Things are much tidier in the home office now — but still (still!) the “to read next” pile is high — about 30 books. 

I just did my tax stuff for 2009 and it turns out I spent more than [exact figure tastefully deleted] on books last year. The amount would sound obscene to some of you, yes, and I am luckier than a pile of luckypants to have the means to wander through the store and buy four or five books at once. (No kids to feed. No tuition to pay.)

I buy books because I believe in them. Six centuries of printed matter can’t be wrong. I buy books because I think of the authors (and the editors, and the jacket designers, and the independent booksellers, and the big-box sellers, and everyone else), and how hard it is to get a book right.

Of course they’re not all good.

Laura Miller, the book critic par excellence at Salon, had a great resolution essay back in January, about how all of us need to try to read books outside of our usual preferred genres. She lays out her own hilarious (but valid, I say) biases:

“I will resist any book set on a ranch like a cat fighting a bath; likewise, memoirs by women obsessed with their mothers. If I happen to flip through a graphic novel and see a scene in which 20-something characters complain about their relationships in a cafe — back on the display table it goes posthaste. Historical fiction set in early 20th-century America, especially the silent movie business? No, thank you very much. …”

Ha! She also avoids novels about “stage magicians” and “rabbis in Prague” and has to force herself once a year to try to a novel from the French contemporary fiction scene.

My biases just as bad — probably worse. This New York Times story about the James Patterson empire did nothing to persuade me that I somehow need to be keeping up with the latest airport thrillers. I also can’t do addiction-recovery memoirs, and try mightily to steer away from “a year spent [blanking]” memoirs. Also, I pretty much say no to any books that started out as blogs.

And if it looks like it has anything to do with India, I’m out.

Books about sports and biographies of sporting legends are hard for me. I find so much sportswriting succeeds with sports fans (it employs the dreaded Morgan Freeman Voice when it wants you to feel emotion) and fails to connect me to what anyone involved is actually feeling. Hate’s a strong word, but while we’re on the subject: books about cards (poker, gambling) and Las Vegas and the big con and the wheel of fate and the Strip and the strippers and the criminals and the neon and the Bellagio fountains and so on and so on. Pass.

• • •

So, having said all that, I now bring you: A book about a sports legend, followed by a book that is not only a thriller (and has been described as a combo between Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiassen — oh, jeez) but also has as its title something to do with poker.

The good news? They were both written by friendly acquaintances of mine so I dove in with mind wide open. (And by the way, I am not going to link these to any one bookstore. If you want them, go get them from your usual retailer, but do kindly think of the independent stores as you shop. I will link to author sites, if they’re there.)

First up, Sweet Thunder: The Life and Times of Sugar Ray Robinson, written (sweated over, I can attest) by the man who sits in the newsroom cubicle next to mine, Wil Haygood. (I just found out the other day that Wil is headed upstairs to the National desk. Good for him, drat for Style.)

Sweet Thunder is a dense biography of the ups and downs of the famous boxer. It’s not just about boxing, of course — it weaves together darn near the entire 20th-century Negro experience. It’s about jazz, Lena Horne, Langston Hughes, nightclubs, New York, the media, transcontinental hype, discrimination, civil rights, hero worship and that eventual human frailty that claims us all.

Every sentence reads with the resolve of incantation; a prayer, part of a poem. The style of the book is likely to seem musical to the right ear, and as likely to sound too purple for some readers. I had the benefit of being able to hear the voice of the writer himself as I read along. The book is total Wil, and it is about depth. I loved Wil’s book about Sammy Davis Jr. several years ago — equally epic in scope — and if I knew or could appreciate boxing even a little bit, I might have liked this book even more. Simply from the black American history contained within, I’m glad I read it. It’s sad for me to say that I could not have been in more foreign territory with something so American (so guy) as BOXING. But there it is.

Speaking of guys, let’s talk about Gutshot Straight. Yes, that refers to a poker hand, but I gave it my trust. This was written by Lou Berney — we’ve been friends for 20-plus years and only met two months ago. (It sounds like something out of Lost, but here you’ll find a simpler explanation.) Lou is a screenwriter — one of those screenwriters who gets paid to write movie screenplays that never get filmed, which must take a certain zenlike ability to let it go. During the 2007-’08 writers’ strike, Lou banged out the manuscript that became this — and I’m not giving out free ass-smooches here — really absorbing, really fucking funny novel. It’s about a nice, kinda Lou Berney-esque (in my mind) guy who gets out of prison and immediately accepts a job from an Eastern European crime boss (who used to be his girlfriend). The orders are: deliver a car (and whatever’s in the trunk) to some undesirable, even badder bad guys at a Vegas rendezvous point. So what’s in the trunk? A pretty woman. A tough pretty woman who says she’s a nice Mormon housewife, but turns out she works as a stripper and a thief. There’s a whole scheme — schemes within schemes. There are some wonderfully rendered bad guys.

So I was reading along in Gutshot Straight and very much enjoying just watching it go pop, pow, zip, zing (I read this book in three rollicking nights) and then I stopped and wondered: Is this why people read thrillers by the same authors over and over? Because if Lou had five more of these, I’d probably read them. It made me think of the first time I saw Romancing the Stone — which was a giddy, teenage, mid-’80s Saturday afternoon at the North Park 4 with my cousin. It also made me think of Scott Smith’s A Simple Plan, not sure why, but weirdly enough, Smith’s book The Ruins makes a cameo quasi-appearance later on. There’s some seriously good writing going on here. My favorite character is Jasper, the major domo, the go-to thug who works for Mr. Moby, the bad guy. He’s heartbreakingly sensitive:

But Jasper felt a special kind of bad for Lucy, and not just because Mr. Moby was a special kind of evil boyfriend, which most certainly he was. Jasper had read a newspaper article once about a river in the jungle that flooded, and how the tops of the trees drooped heavy and black with tarantulas. That had made him — he didn’t know why — think of Mr. Moby.

I am still thinking about trees filled with tarantulas. Buy it, people.

• • •

TO BE CONTINUED … TOMORROW: I’ve already read them (seriously, it’s a dull winter and I haven’t been doing much else besides escaping into books) so up next, THE MOMENT OF PSYCHO, AMERICAN ROMANCES, and ANNE FRANK: THE BOOK, THE LIFE, THE AFTERLIFE; plus JULIET, NAKED and THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT.

Between work and Tinsel pre-pub jitters and promo stuff, I keep forgetting to develop the part of my brain that can think of anything remotely worthwhile to type here and send off into the ether. So, until I get things rolling again, how about some book reports? I have three quickies…

Finished reading Lorrie Moore’s new novel, “A Gate at the Stairs,” on Saturday. It was great and yet it was … hmmm. I think this review, by Stephanie Zacharek in Salon (with the excellent headline “People Like Lorrie Moore Are the Only People Here”) sort of sums up my thoughts:

>>Moore is one of those writers we should theoretically be grateful for, a craftsperson who never wants to bore her audience, and for the first dozen or so pages of “A Gate at the Stairs,” her patter is lively and entertaining. At first Moore’s rat-a-tat puns and witty turns of phrase, her knowing banter, give her prose a sense of forward movement. Tassie describes the turn-on of being at school: “My brain was on fire with Chaucer, Sylvia Plath, Simone de Beauvoir. Twice a week a young professor named Thad, dressed in jeans and a tie, stood before a lecture hall of stunned farm kids like me and spoke thrillingly of Henry James’s masturbation of the comma. I was riveted. I had never before seen a man wear jeans with a tie.

Zacahrek is right. It’s pages and pages of amazing interior dialogue from a narrator who thinks and expresses her inner thoughts like … Lorrie Moore. Every bare winter tree and glint of January frost gets amazingly described. Some things happen. Some more things are described. Every. Thing. The people — especially the working mother who hires the narrator as a nanny — speak in wondrously sardonic ideas and blunt quips. Between p. 100 and p. 200 very little happens except that Lorrie Moore unleashes all the pent-up, usually topical, writing she has not been sharing with us for a decade. There are asides on everything: Starbucks, Whole Foods, strollers, mommies, race, 9/11, locavore restaurants, the taste of good wine, university life, bass guitars, e-mail, terrorism, etc. It’s not that it isn’t good writing, but it’s just … amorphous? I need a Lorrie Moore word for it. No doubt, there’s something devastatingly funny every few pages. I loved it on p. 237 where a character says this:

“I’m worried about all the precious culture that comes now from nowhere: that is, it comes from trust-funded children’s book authors. ‘The Adventures of Asparagus Alley’ and such things. Adults are living increasingly as children: completely in their imaginations. Reading Harry Potter while every newspaper in the country goes out of business. They know so little that is real.”

There’s a lot to say “amen” to (and “hahahaha” to and “yow” to) in this novel. But the novel itself — the plot — doesn’t kick in until the last 75-80 pages. Then I couldn’t put it down and lost what was supposed to have been a seriously productive Saturday to it — happily so. I will say she really turned me off with something that happens in a scene near the end, something that is so gross and weird, and didn’t have to be. I totally recommend this book only because I want to know what others think. Also, technically, the writing really is something to behold.

I also recently finished Drew Gilpin Faust’s “This Republic of Suffering.” I’d been wanting to read this since last year, when all the good reviews came out. Was moved to finally do it after so much driving around in search of Sheetz of Wawa stores. I am soooo not a Civil War nut, but once in while, you can’t help it when you’re driving around out here, to think of all that death and heavy wool uniforms in summer, and disease and hate and loss and all that. I have an okey-dokey college degree and an omnivorous but casual interest in history, so every third or fourth book I read is about something I’m not technically interested in, but the right combination of my own curiosity and a good history book come along and spin me for a loop.

What I’m saying is: this is my favorite Civil War book.

Because it’s really about a profound social change in the way Americans started to view death and heaven and the funeral industry and memorials and heroics and military procedures for notifying next of kin, etc. And it’s hauntingly graphic, and does all I ever want from a history book: puts me there, in that place and in that time with those people, with details drawn from primary sources and with the crispest possible writing and thought. Without treading into dangerously sexist generalities (which is to say,  “I mean it as a compliment!”), I wonder if women often write better history books because of a certain eye for a certain kind of detail. There’s nothing feminine about this book, except, in an intriguing way, there is. It’s in the caring. Maps and battleplans and Lincoln’s speeches don’t make me feel sad about the Civil War. This book did.

Finally, I’ve been enjoying, here and there and almost finished, Janet Malcolm’s “Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice.” (As in Stein and B. Toklas.) Like a lot of people, the first Janet Malcolm book I read was “The Journalist and the Murderer,” which spooks me still, but I could read her on anything, really (and have! on Freud, or on Sylvia Plath, or on arcane legal cases), because of the precision of the sentences. This time I thought, well, she’ll probably lose me here because I have read about these two old ladies before, back when I was Patty Hearst in the closet getting my indoctrinatin’ from Cinque and Fahiza. But darn if Malcolm’s sentences don’t still do the trick. And reading her is a hell of lot easier than reading Gertrude Stein. You know’m sayin’?