Month: February 2018 (Page 2 of 3)

I have a few more books to share, but this time I will do something a little different: write about a book I have not finished yet.

I looked into the site’s archives and couldn’t find a direct reference, but I’m pretty sure one of the reasons I started writing about the books I read here is because of the influence of Nick Hornby’s “Stuff I’ve Been Reading” column in The Believer magazine. The Believer is an art and culture magazine I would pick up occasionally back when I traveled for work. As I was already a fan of Hornby, I always looked forward to his columns both for suggestions on new things to read and for his delightful accounts of what he purchased and read each month.

A few weeks back I was hanging out in Barnes & Noble while M was at volleyball practice.[1] In the Essays section I found Hornby’s  Ten Years in the Tub, a collection of his columns for The Believer. I picked it up, flipped through it, and realized I probably hadn’t read one of his columns since I stopped traveling for work in 2004. I put the book back on the shelf, but added it to my library list. On my library trip the following week, the book was in, so I grabbed it. I decided this would be a very casual read; I’d only get through a column or two at a time in between other reading projects. If I needed to renew the book, or even return it and complete it down the road, that would be fine.

I’m right at halfway through the book as I type this. Thanks to it, I have a new sub-list within my master To Read list of books Hornby has written about that interest me. The rest of this entry will hit on three of them.

It’s been fun to read through Hornby’s columns. He is a voracious reader – sometimes knocking out over 10 books a month – and even better, still buys a lot of books each month. For that alone he is inspiring. He also tends to read good books, which makes my To Read list better. And his writing remains sharp, funny, and personal, all elements I’ve always tried (with varying levels of success) to infuse into my writing.

Y: The Last Man, Book 1 and Y: The Last Man, Book 2 – Brian Vaughn, Pia Guerra, José Marzan Jr.
My once-per year crack at a graphic novel/comic book. Hornby actually reviewed the first three books in this series but I’m only through two so far. Comics often revolve around some kind of catastrophe, usually involving radiation that mutates normal people into super-beings, and the resulting ramifications for society. This series is built on a catastrophe but then focuses on how regular people react to it.

The catastrophe? Something – no one knows what yet – has abruptly killed every living male mammal. Except for two, that is: Yorick Brown, an unemployed recent college graduate who relies on performing magic and escapes to make money, and his pet monkey. Brown’s only goal is to conceal his identity until he can somehow make his way to Australia, where his girlfriend was on a research trip before men were wiped out.

But the surviving women of the world have other plans for him. The US government, including his mother who in a representative from Ohio, wants to lock him away in a protected location where his genes can be studied to see if he holds the key to the survival of the species. A group called The Amazons, who see the destruction of man as a moment of liberation, want to hunt him down and kill him. His sister just happens to be part of this movement, and is intent on being the Amazon that captures him. And a group of Israeli soldiers seek him for, well, we’re not sure yet. It could be to use his DNA to build up a bigger army to continue rolling over their Arab neighbors, something they’ve done easily since so many Israeli women have military training. Or it could be to destroy him before an Arab country snatches him and gets working on their own new army first.

The story is pretty solid: A post-apocalypse story is always good in my eyes. The writing is good. And, as with stories like The Stand, there is the built-in hook of making you want to read until you learn what it is that wiped out almost every man on earth. I’ll be going deeper into this series.

Citizen Vince – Jess Walter
I had not read, nor heard of, Walter’s books. But Hornby is a fan, reviewing several of his books favorably. And this one is really damn good.

The main character is Vince Camden, a man in the witness protection program living in Spokane, WA. He runs a donut shop in the mornings. In the late night hours he gambles with the local riff-raff, sells a little weed, and also dabbles in his old racket: selling stolen credit cards. Life is a lot slower than it was for him back East, before he informed on the Mob, but he’s also alive and not doing too bad.

In late October 1980, though, two things happen to change his life dramatically. First, he receives his voter registration card. By his reckoning, in his former life he was always either in jail/prison, on parole, or a convicted felon on election day. This will be his first opportunity to vote, and the responsibility hits him hard. He begins badgering anyone he talks to about who they’re going to vote for in the upcoming election. He doesn’t just want to know how people are going to vote, but why. He feels an immense responsibility attached to his vote, and he wants to make sure he’s considered every angle before punching out a candidate’s chad.

The second turn in his life is running into a guy, known as Ray Sticks, from back east. Ray is not the kind of guy you want to run into. It shakes Vince to his core and soon he is back in New York, trying to figure out who sent Ray west and if he holds a contract on Vince’s life. This trip ends in a late night card game with boss John Gotti and his crew, from which Vince escapes with his life in exchange for doing Gotti the proverbial favor.

Much of the book revolves around Vince, and other characters, trying to figure out who they are. Does his moving across the country, taking a new name and occupation, change who he is? Will his potential girlfriend become a different person when she gets her real estate license and moves in with Vince, giving up her life as a prostitute? When a cop turns dirty after his child dies, is he the same person or someone completely distinct from his earlier self? All of that, along with the standard mob and crime angles, make for a good enough book.

But where Walter really shines is in a thin section in the middle of the book. Here, he briefly jumps into the heads of both Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan on the Sunday before the election. Carter has just received new conditions from the Iranian parliament for release of the American hostages. He grapples with the appropriate response while looking back on the past four years, and what will happen the following Tuesday. Carter comes across as weary and resigned to the inevitable, worried most about doing the right thing for the hostages, but also concerned at his inability to connect who he is today to the man he was in 1976. Reagan, on the other hand, is light and buoyant. He knows he’s going to win, and is quick with one-liners that convey his optimism. There is a simpleness to him that suggests he does not understand how profoundly becoming president will change his life. Or, perhaps, it suggests that because of his age or his refusal to waste time thinking about such things, he will remain the same person when he leaves office that he is going in.

I loved this section, not just for grounding the story firmly in a distinct moment in time, but for how showing Carter and Reagan on opposite ends of the same moment reinforces the theme of how experience, location, and outlook change who we are.

A couple very different books completed over the past week.

Blue Highways: A Journey Into America – William Least Heat Moon
I came across this in an odd way. In Nick Offerman’s Paddle Your Own Canoe, the actor/comedian/writer mentioned this book as having had a large influence on his life. He offered a blurb that it was about traveling across the backroads of the US and that was enough for me to place it on my reading list.

Offerman pretty much nailed it with that brief description.

William Least Heat Moon was a professor at the University of Missouri. In the early spring of 1978 he was told that his position was being eliminated because of decreasing enrollment. He was also separated from his wife. Since his whole life seemed to be falling apart, he decided to jump into his Ford van and start driving. The gimmick was that he was sticking to the so-called Blue Highways – the smaller state and county roads that show as blue on maps. Unless he absolutely had to, he would spend no time on the broad interstates and four-lane state highways that make crossing our country easy.

Over the next four months he made a slow circle of the US. The highways he traveled were often so blue you could call them black. At times the road that showed on the map completely disappeared and he followed an unpaved path through woods, mountains, and countryside that had first been cut by Native Americans or animals centuries earlier. He did his best to avoid chain restaurants and frequented small, locally owned diners, picking up regional gossip and travel tips in the process. He only used hotels or rooms offered by friendly people often enough to get an occasional shower. The rest of the time he would park his van in a safe spot and spend the night in it. He talked to folks that were becoming more disconnected from the core American culture: life-long residents of the deep woods who clung to their unique ways of life; Native Americans who resisted assimilation; and groups like the true Cajuns of Louisiana who were the final reminders of a blended culture that was disappearing.

What I found most fascinating about the book was how it sits right on the edge of my own clearest memories. I have these vague memories of what life in the US was like in the 1970s, no doubt jaded both by selective memory and the images of that era that have been pushed by pop culture in the decades since. My mental picture of Least Heat Moon’s stories were all drawn in muted, Kodachrome colors, because that’s what the 70s looked like, right?

That fading culture aspect of the book really appealed to me, too. The rise of cable TV in the 80s and the media conglomerates of the 90s made our country much smaller, culturally. As pop culture spreads from coast-to-coast almost instantly, many of our regional variations have faded. People from opposite corners of the map have far more in common today than they did 40 years ago. It was interesting to read about the final years of that old era, when folks who lived in the valleys that are tucked into the Smokey Mountains still made trips to the locally owned general store not just to buy the necessities of life, but also to learn about what was going on across the county line, in the state capital, and around the world. The people who live in those same locations today sit in their living rooms watching Fox News, drive 40 miles down paved highways to Wal-Mart, and are less tied to local gathering points than ever before.

Least Heat Moon did not make any great discoveries about himself or life on his trip. In fact, there’s a section where he becomes depressed when he realizes there have been no epiphanies on the road and that the problems he left behind in Columbia will still be there when he returns. In some ways, the book reminds me of my favorite travel book, Paul Theroux’s The Happy Isles of Oceania. Theroux was also in the midst of an unraveling marriage and the first Gulf War was about to begin when he started paddling through the Pacific. Unlike Theroux, who is famously cantankerous and not always sympathetic to the people he meets, Least Heat Moon treasured his encounters with the locals he met. Only when their redneck-ism careened into overt racism did he have any sharp words for the people he interacted with.

Because of that warmth, this ranks right up there with The Happy Isles as one of my favorite travel books I’ve read.

Don’t Put Me In, Coach: My Incredible NCAA Journey from the End of the Bench to the End of the Bench – Mark Titus
I have no idea why it took me so long to read this. I read Titus’ weekly college basketball columns on The Ringer every week, listen to his podcast most weeks, and have been following him since he first launched The Most Important Rankings in College Basketball on Grantland five or six years ago. This book was his second or third step down a path that led to that gig.

In it he tells how he went from a token shooter on one of the best AAU teams of all time[1] to walk-on at Ohio State to cult favorite based on the blog he wrote about being a walk-on.

His stories about Greg Oden, Evan Turner, and other guys he played with at Ohio State are often hilarious. His coach Thad Motta comes off as one of the best guys to play for ever. I found the book to be way more Bro-ish than his columns are. But he also wrote the book when he was younger and, arguably, aimed it at a different audience than his columns are aimed at. It’s a quick, fun read if you’re into college hoops.