Author Archive
So, it’s Banned Books Week. I’ll withhold — reluctantly — the Sarah Palin jokes.
According to the Banned Books Week site, more than 400 books were challenged in America in 2007. The top ten?
1. And Tango Makes Three by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell
2. The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
3. Olive’s Ocean by Kevin Henkes
4. The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman
5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
6. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
7. TTYL by Lauren Myracle
8. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
9. It’s Perfectly Normal by Robie Harris
10. The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
Banned Books Week is set aside at the end of each September as a time to reflect on the importance of the freedom to read.
The University of Memphis’ University Libraries will be getting in on the fun by staging readings from books that have been banned or challenged throughout history. The readings will be Monday (Sept. 29) through Friday (Oct. 3) from noon until 2 p.m. in the rotunda of the Ned. R. McWherter Library.
To volunteer as a reader, contact Tom Mendina at 678-4310 (e-mail tmendina at memphis.edu), or Kay Kroboth at 678-2209 (e-mail kroboth at memphis.edu).
Mary Roach is my hero. First she wowed me with Stiff, an exploration of dead bodies and what happens to them. Then she gave me goosebumps with Spook, a scientific look at the afterlife.
And now? Now she’s forged into what is, perhaps, science’s true final frontier. No, not space. Sex. (Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex, 319 pages, $25, W.W. Norton & Company.) 
Roach, a fearless and often self-deprecatingly klutzy reporter, traces the recorded history of sex research and condenses much of it down into the more entertaining — and unbelievable — bits. She pores over reports, and visits scientists and doctors all over the world to gain insight into their life’s work, which she finds is often done just this side of the brink of financial and cultural peril (take Dr. Ahmed Shafik, who must try to find research subjects in Egypt, a Muslim country that you could fairly describe as sexually repressed). Most governments don’t like to spend a lot of money on sex research, and sex researchers have to contend with the fact that many people just assume that they are voyeuristic pervs just waiting for the chance to observe test subjects going at it.
Quick — take a look around your computer. What do you see?
Coffee cup stains, post-it notes, photos haphazardly taped to the wall, a cube wall overflowing with colorful leaves of paper, newspaper clippings, stickers, schedules and calendars, super hero action figures, photos and printouts of your favorite musicians, Far Side comics ripped out of a date book and taped to the wall, unopened bottles of juice, an ancient jar of peanuts, a bottle of body spray, a Mardi Gras mask and beads, fingernail clippers, a bottle of eye drops, an empty bottle of lotion, a tray of pennies, lots of dust, a stray ring and bracelet, a handwritten list of phone numbers, a stack of yellowed newspapers, an empty Altoids tin, an Apple sticker placed on top of a Dell logo, and wires wires wires everywhere you look?
Or do you see a pristine desk with a manicured inbox, push pins neatly aligned along your cube wall, a few carefully placed framed photos on your computer, and not a speck of dirt or dust to be found?
Or something completely different?
Sam Gosling, super snooper and author of Snoop: What your Stuff Says About You ($26, Basic Books), could look at your surroundings and tell you a lot about your personality — way beyond whether or not you’re a compulsively slobby hoarder (ahem) or an anal-retentive neat freak. Gosling has formulated fairly scientific ways of observing people’s surroundings — especially those they control and take pride in — and uses the data to determine a person’s level of openness, friendliness, neuroticism, originality, agreeableness, and more.
And best of all? He outlines lots of ways to help the common observer become an expert snooper, which can help anyone who cares to pay attention to the clues navigate the choppy waters of personal interaction.
David Sedaris has made his life’s work by writing about the random stuff that happens to him. Most reviews of his books will laud the way in which he makes the mundane so hilarious. This blows my mind, because there is rarely anything mundane that happens in a David Sedaris book. Working as one of Santa’s elves? Having OCD? Trying to quit smoking by vacationing in Japan? Moving to France and trying to learn the language? Sitting in a doctor’s waiting room in nothing but underwear? Hitchhiking and being asked by a trucker perform sexual favors? Dealing with the death of a darkly hilarious, chain-smoking mother? 
Maybe I lead an exceptionally boring life, but none of that stuff sounds the slightest bit mundane to me.
And yet, I see where that particular bit of praise originates from. The events in Sedaris’ books are themselves quite fantastical and off the wall. But his delivery is so deadpan that the reader is, in effect, duped into thinking of them as mundane, everyday occurrences, viewed through a particularly sharp and witty lens. And maybe it’s just me, but that lens is so sharp that it results in books that make me laugh out loud. That’s pretty rare.
Sedaris’ latest book, When You Are Engulfed in Flames ($26, Little, Brown and Company) follows the same basic formula as his past collections: Several essays of varying weight that self-deprecatingly chronicle his life and the people around him, spanning his entire lifetime. It’s a great read, and a quick one, especially if you skip the bits you might have already read (the story about his being on a plane seated next to a Polish man who wouldn’t stop crying ran in The New Yorker earlier this year) or heard (the bit about the Stadium Pal and shopping with his sister Amy were included on a recording of him reading at Carnegie Hall several years ago).
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Within about twelve hours last week, I had seen the latest Pixar masterpiece Wall E as well as read the bulk of Jeanette Winterson’s newest tome, The Stone Gods (Harcourt, $24).
That’s a lot of heavy, bleak post-apocalyptic themes to process on a lazy Sunday. I was a bit surprised how similar the animated tale’s vision of the future is to Winterson’s, though maybe I shouldn’t have been; both stories concern themselves with some pretty typical sci-fi themes: isolation, loneliness, over-consumption, a dying/dead planet, space travel, robots. And both, of course, are about love.
I’ve been a big Winterson fan for a while, so I was looking forward to digging into her latest book. And sure enough, it’s every bit as Wintersonian as I could have expected — visceral, descriptive, nearly poetic narration; crackling banter; stream-of-consciousness observations on the nature of existential things; one story told in many different stories. And so on.
So why did I get to the end and feel disappointed by the whole thing?
Eric G. Wilson is a sad man. He’ll tell you so himself. He says he’s born to the blues — the type of morose soul who prefers solo walks through mossy forests to group outings to the mall. He cherishes things that are old and steeped in decay over things that are new and shiny. He has an immense reverence for the inherently macabre traits of life itself. As a melancholy soul, Wilson, author of Against Happiness (Sarah Crichton Books, $12 at Amazon.com), is fed up with the American Happiness Industry, that chirpy machine that informs us that our true dual nature — up and down, back and forth, elated and depressed — is by definition defective and that we are entitled to feel nothing but unbridled joy at all times.
The American Happiness Industry, you ask? Surely you’ve heard of it. It’s linked arm in arm with Big Pharma, pumping experimental mood-altering drugs into the perturbed of all ages. It keeps the advertising world humming along on our borrowed cash. It keeps us only marginally informed of the, uh, uncomfortable goings-on in the rest of the world (”People don’t want to read about about that over their morning Cheerios!” is a cliché-but-true newsroom refrain that keeps certain stories off the front page). It keeps that little bouncing smiley-faced idiot knocking down prices at Wal-Mart. It keeps the self-help-book industry afloat in rivers of its own psychobabbling nonsense. It keeps that smug bastard Bob on the television, peddling his little blue pills while he has that slightly desperate plastic grin plastered on his face.
The American Happiness Industry is annoying, sure, Wilson argues, but it’s much more sinister than that. Eradicate melancholy and you eradicate the creative spirit, the pulsing foundation of life itself — which is inherently based on decay, destruction, and general lowness of spirit. After all, without the depths of despair, how are people to measure the soaring heights of joy?
If you’re a bookaholic, chances are it’s not just because you like stories. You probably also just love the physicality of books themselves. Those papery book smells: the crumbly mustiness of old library tomes as well as the glossy mass-produced fragrance of the new volumes lining the shelves of the local book megamarket. The way it feels to run your hands over a fancy embossed book jacket. The array of colors and shapes books come in, and the designs emblazoned on their covers and backs. Books are art.
But some creative people build on that concept, further pushing the idea of book as art — both of the folk and high variety.
After the jump is a brief roundup of book art links for your weekend perusal.
When I was in high school and fully submerged in my angsty adolescent phase (that still hasn’t quite worn off), I took to carting around shockingly weird, very adult books to show how hip and edgy and literary I was. Heh.
Sure, the teachers could make us read A Separate Peace or The Great Gatsby during summer vacation, but you better believe that from August until May, I’d have A Clockwork Orange, Jim Carroll’s poetry, or anything by William S. Burroughs (or the other Beats) tucked under my arm for the trek between classes. (My aunt gave me a copy of Naked Lunch for Christmas my senior year after my mom told her that’s the novel I’d been hinting at wanting to read next. I don’t think either of them had ever read it or else they probably wouldn’t have let it come within a hundred feet of my impressionable eyes.)
Here I am several years later (I won’t say how many) and I still remember being quite weirded out by the grotesque imagery in Naked Lunch. Plus I couldn’t for the life of me tell you what that book is about … except Mugwumps. Yep. Boy, do I remember the Mugwumps. I suppose a re-reading is in order to see if the weirdness still stands.
Anyway, my point is, the weirdness of that novel has stuck with me all these years. Up until this past winter, I’m pretty sure that was the weirdest book I’d ever read. That was prior to my encounter with The White Hotel, a novel by D.M. Thomas recommended to me by a friend.
The White Hotel is one of the most interesting, depressing, randy, confounding books I’ve ever read. It features several narrative forms, and includes erotic surrealist poetry, clinical letter correspondence, straight-up fantasy narrative, and a depressingly authentic Holocaust story arc. So much about it is so ridiculous, yet so much about it is so amazingly profound. And quite beautifully written. It’s a complex book.
And it’s weird.
So what’s the weirdest book you’ve ever read?
The love letter is dying.
Okay, okay, I’ll back off and try not to be such an alarmist.
The love letter as we once knew it is dying.
Once upon a time — so the conventional wisdom goes — love letters were penned by heartsick, ink-stained wretches who would enclose their deepest thoughts on parchment paper inside bottles or wax-sealed envelopes, leaving the fate of the letters themselves up to the whims of waves or over-burdened letter carriers. Romances were stoked carefully from a distance, heated by imagination, absence, and longing.
All too often these days, the florid language of courtship gets condensed to 160 characters so it can fit into a text message. The written proof of love and desire gets digitized and deleted. There may always be room under your bed for your shoebox of high-school love letters, but your hard drive only has so much space.
So, how nice it is to see a book that celebrates the love letter as the wholly imperfect and idiosyncratic art form that it is.
Wrap your mind around this: I’m about to write a review of a book about blogs on a blog about books.
Whoa.
Ultimate Blogs, edited by Sarah Boxer, is an anthology of some of the web’s most popular and well-done blogs. I’m not really sure who the target market for this book is, though. Is it people who know nothing about blogs and therefore need an introduction to them? At times, the way Boxer interjects explanations for internet slang suggests that yes, maybe she is writing for the uninitiated. Or is she compiling various blog entries for blog-savvy readers who are just looking to expand their digital-reading arsenal?
The good news, I suppose, is that this book can serve either type of reader. I’m a fairly seasoned blog reader, and there were blogs in this book I’d never heard of and have now added to my daily rounds.
