Humor
You have to give Laurie Notaro credit for some fun book titles. Her latest one “The Idiot Girl and the Flaming Tantrum of Death” (Villard Books, $20) ranks with her other classics “I love Everyone (and Other Atrocious Lies)” and my personal favorite: “We Thought You Would be Prettier.”
Her book is a collection of random stories from her life. A few are hilarious. A few are dull. Some are downright disgusting. There are chapters that should be skipped or at least read when you aren’t eating or about to because they are about some nasty topics such as poop. Read the rest of this entry »
Humor
Former Commercial Appeal columnist, Rheta Grimsley Johnson, greeted a receptive standing-room-only crowd last night at the opening of the Memphis Public Library’s Adult Summer Reading program. Admirers packed the largest meeting room at the Central Library and waited patiently in line to have Rheta inscribe copies of her new book “Poor Man’s Provence: Finding Myself in Cajun Louisiana.” (NewSouth Books: $23.95)
She seemed glad to be back in Memphis, opening her comments with the quote: “It’s nice to be remembered in a place you can’t forget.”
Rheta began working for The Commercial Appeal in 1980 at its Greenville, Miss., bureau. She started writing a column for The Commercial Appeal in 1982 and left for The Atlanta Journal Constitution in 1994. Upon her departure, she commented: “”I think when you start recognizing the names on the angry letters, maybe you’ve been there too long. I’ve had a real good run in Memphis. I enjoyed it. I just wanted to try something different.”
She explained that she went into journalism because she thought it was a profession that would never require her to speak in public or wear panty hose. Unfortunately, she said, only one of those things was true.
However much she might despise speaking in public, she’s good at it, and the room rang with laughter as she recounted entertaining tales of her adventures in journalism. Read the rest of this entry »
“The Sukoku Puzzle Murders:A Puzzle Lady Mystery,”
By Parnell Hall
St. Martin’s Minotaur
Hardback, $23.95
308 pages
I can stomach the occasional cozy/comedy mystery, but this ninth Puzzle Lady mystery was definitely not my cup of tea.
This series is about a merry divorcee named Cora Felton, who maintains a public persona as a composer and solver of the wordgames many of us find delightfully aggravating — or vice versa, whatever.
The McGuffin, though, is that Cora finds herself at a loss for words whenever confronted by a crossword. It’s her niece, Sherry, who solves and composes them, with Cora serving as the charmingly deceptive face of the operation.
“Curse of the Spellmans,”
By Lisa Lutz
Copyright 2008
Simon & Schuster
$25 hardback
409 pages
One of my rare pleasures in listening to the radio in Memphis is the hour from 2 p.m. to 3 p.m. weekdays when WYPL-89.3 FM (the library channel) broadcasts the reading of current mystery novels.
While going to pick up my son from White Station High School one Monday afternoon, I heard a delightful reading of “The Spellman Files,” the first installment of this series by Lisa Lutz. I don’t know the name of the young woman who read the book aloud, but she does a great job.
“The Spellman Files” was a big hit for the author in 2007, and this sequel, I hope, will do as well or better.
The Spellmans are a family of San Francisco-based private investigators: father Albert, mother Olivia, daughter Rae (who turns 16 in this book) and daughter Isabel Spellman (30), who is the heroine of the series. Rae and Isabel’s brother, David, is a lawyer who occasionally sends business to the family firm.
After a witty introduction by Rhodes College’s Dr. Dan Cullen, New York Times columnist and author David Brooks quipped that he’d agreed to speak here during this busy presidential campaign year as long as the introduction wasn’t funnier than his own speech.
He needn’t have worried.
Brooks had spoken at Rhodes before, back in 2000, when he was touting his first bestseller, “Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There.”
A University of Chicago history grad, Brooks coined the term “bobo” as a contraction of “bohemian” and “bourgeois,” signifying how the cultural descendants of the yuppies had acquired a patina of faux outdoorsy, casual, peasant authenticity as they simultaneously scaled the economic heights via their new economy careers.
Rather than buying expensive furs or cars, as the yuppies of the 1980s would, bobos bought “working” farms in gentrified rural areas and acquired the most expensive versions of common items (think Viking good, Kenmore bad).
If you’re a Food Network junkie or can’t get enough of “Top Chef,” you’ll relish “Deep Dish” by Mary Kay Andrews, the Atlanta author who wrote “Savannah Breeze” and “Hissy Fit.” She was in Memphis Tuesday, March 4, for a signing at Davis Kidd, and you can read about her experiences in her blog http://www.marykayandrews.com/blog/2008_03_01_archive.asp
“Deep Dish” is a romantic comedy which pits Regina Foxton, the host of “Fresh Start,” a cooking show on Georgia PBS against Tate Moody, the star of a hunting, fishing, cooking program called “Vittles” in a reality TV “Food Fight.” I liked the way Andrews respectfully pays homage to all those Junior League and church circle cookbooks that line the shelves of Southern cooks. (From my own collection, the most dog-eared and food-spattered are “Out of Our League” by the Greensboro, N.C. Junior League and “Bountiful Blessings” by the Munford Presbyterian Church.
Here’s a link to an interview with the author from the Atlanta Journal Constitution which includes the book’s recipe for “Reggie’s Simply Sinful Tomato Soup Chocolate Cake.” http://www.ajc.com/living/content/living/food/stories/2008/02/26/trocheck_0228.html
If you’ve spent even a fraction of a second on the internet, you’ve likely stumbled across a Gawker Media blog (check out the full list of them here). Nick Denton’s empire of niche blogs has come as close to conquering the internet as possible.
Which is, presumably, why Gawker Media felt the need to ride the wave of their success and put out a dead-tree edition of industry secrets: The Gawker Guide to Conquering All Media. 
The Guide is a parody business/self-help-type book, supposedly brimming with secrets that will help any hapless schmo climb and backstab his way to the mountaintop of media mogul…hood. Yeah, mogulhood.
Secrets like:
- • Editor rejection letters and what they really mean
- • An NPR pledge-drive wishlist (Fresh Air fresheners, Crate+Barrel compost hutch, Sharper Image electronic chin stroker, haw haw)
- • What “TK” means in a newsroom lore
- • Professional thank-you card ideas (such as “Your wife was all over me at the company picnic. … Thanks for making that possible.”)
And so much more. Except, sadly, the vast majority of the jokes fall flat. They’re not particularly insightful or clever, and the whole tone of the book seems to fall short of Gawker’s trademark witty irreverence.
That’s not to say that the book is without redeeming moments. The listing of magazines and which of them best reflects certain personalities (”People: Do you actually care for celebrities, like do you cry when something bad happens to them?” or “Elle: What’s your absolute bottom line for scented candles? Is it $35/candle?”) is pretty funny.
Gawker’s strength seems to exist most strongly in pixel form (The Shelf Life already covered a book by the author of Gawker sports blog Deadspin). The bar is set pretty high when The Daily Show crew can churn out a textbook parody and have me guffawing at every page. Which, for Gawker, should mean stick to what you know: the interwebs.
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