49. Love is a Mix Tape by Rob Sheffield (3/16/2012 - 3/18/2012)
This is one of my favorite books of all time. The love story that Rob Sheffield shares is rich in detail, full of odd humor and depth and the ideas of what makes love possible for everyone. I read this book about once a year because I like being reminded that I am not the only one who experiences love like this; I recognize that others do, of course, but the story that flows forth from these pages is truly incredible.
Rob and Renee Sheffield got married relatively young, in their mid-twenties, after an unusual friendship and about two years of dating. They lived a happy, full life on almost no money for about five years, exploring life, comparing their upbringings, and battling each other over everything from which words are banned in fights to why they should wait til they were more stable to have kids -- in other words, just about every major and minor topic that most loving couples also fight over. A little more than five years after getting married, Renee stood up one Sunday afternoon, and fell over -- dead, from a pulmonary embolism. She had no warning signs whatsoever; one moment she was there, the next she was gone.
The book is not just this tragic story; it is also the story of how one begins to move past the loss of the love of his life. Sheffield does not sugarcoat his grief. He explores every facet of it, from his sudden obsession with Jackie Onassis Kennedy to driving for hours with Renee's dog, a pet he no longer knew what to do with.
I like this book so much because there is so much in it for me, as someone young and in love and desperately afraid of losing the love of my life. There are so many circled, underlined, dog-eared passages in my copy of this book, so many shared moments between my fiancee and myself in its pages, and so many ways that Sheffield is able to perfectly and simply capture love.
I cannot recommend this book more highly. It truly is amazing.
Saturday, March 17, 2012
Friday, March 2, 2012
48. Eating the Dinosaur
48. Eating the Dinosaur by Chuck Klosterman (2/27/2012 - 3/15/2012)
This book upset me. I love Chuck Klosterman, I really do. I have read all but his most recent book, and Killing Yourself to Live, his non-fiction account of traveling across the country investigating the deaths of rock stars, is one of my favorite books of all time.
But not this book. Too many of these essays are just out and out boring -- they almost feel like Klosterman is being intentionally dense and boring just to fuck with me as a faithful reader. The voice is still entirely his, of course, but he seems to have lost some of the clever humor that made me love his nonfiction in the first place. What remains is the voice of a self-indulgent guy who enjoys thinking deeply about just about anything that's not actually relevant.
For example, the first essay in the book runs about 40-50 pages and discusses, at length, why people feel compelled to answer when they are being interviewed. I'll grant that there is probably deep psychological reasoning behind why we do in fact answer intimate questions from strangers in an interview setting, but I suspect that it can be summed up in just a few words about most people's inherently self-promoting outlooks. I'm not saying that all people are selfish; I'm saying that people like to talk about themselves. Isn't that an established fact? I seem to encounter it a lot as a great way to get to know someone on a date when I happen to flip through Cosmo in a checkout-line. Look: people like to talk about themselves. I just saved you from reading this awful essay.
While I skipped the essay on why football is essential to American society, I do have to say that there were several awesome essays in this book. In one, Klosterman delves into the scary-true predictions made by the Unabomber's manifesto about technology, and the results in this essay are fascinating. Additionally, while writing about Alfred Hitchcock, Klosterman asserts that "learning should be the primary goal of living," an idea that, as a educator, I tend to agree with. So the book is overall not without its gems, but I suspect that if you just google "Hitchcock's Vertigo Chuck Klosterman," you'll turn up with that essay and you can skip the rest of the book.
Finally, I'd like to recognize that the most memorable part of this book was when Klosterman states that, as far as he's concerned, the best possible result of time travel would be being able to eat a dinosaur. Awesome.
This is a fairly confusing book -- I'd prefer to re-read Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs instead.
This book upset me. I love Chuck Klosterman, I really do. I have read all but his most recent book, and Killing Yourself to Live, his non-fiction account of traveling across the country investigating the deaths of rock stars, is one of my favorite books of all time.
But not this book. Too many of these essays are just out and out boring -- they almost feel like Klosterman is being intentionally dense and boring just to fuck with me as a faithful reader. The voice is still entirely his, of course, but he seems to have lost some of the clever humor that made me love his nonfiction in the first place. What remains is the voice of a self-indulgent guy who enjoys thinking deeply about just about anything that's not actually relevant.
For example, the first essay in the book runs about 40-50 pages and discusses, at length, why people feel compelled to answer when they are being interviewed. I'll grant that there is probably deep psychological reasoning behind why we do in fact answer intimate questions from strangers in an interview setting, but I suspect that it can be summed up in just a few words about most people's inherently self-promoting outlooks. I'm not saying that all people are selfish; I'm saying that people like to talk about themselves. Isn't that an established fact? I seem to encounter it a lot as a great way to get to know someone on a date when I happen to flip through Cosmo in a checkout-line. Look: people like to talk about themselves. I just saved you from reading this awful essay.
While I skipped the essay on why football is essential to American society, I do have to say that there were several awesome essays in this book. In one, Klosterman delves into the scary-true predictions made by the Unabomber's manifesto about technology, and the results in this essay are fascinating. Additionally, while writing about Alfred Hitchcock, Klosterman asserts that "learning should be the primary goal of living," an idea that, as a educator, I tend to agree with. So the book is overall not without its gems, but I suspect that if you just google "Hitchcock's Vertigo Chuck Klosterman," you'll turn up with that essay and you can skip the rest of the book.
Finally, I'd like to recognize that the most memorable part of this book was when Klosterman states that, as far as he's concerned, the best possible result of time travel would be being able to eat a dinosaur. Awesome.
This is a fairly confusing book -- I'd prefer to re-read Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs instead.
No # -- The Love of Stones
The Love of Stones by Tobias Hill (2/20/12 -- )
This book was downright awful. I was less than 30 pages in before I stopped reading it. In theory, the plot sounds fairly interesting: a women is searching for an infamous brooch worn by Elizabeth I that has been lost in history. The brooch consists of 3 gigantic rubies framed by 3 perfect pearls -- it can actually be seen in some portraits of Elizabeth I, which is really cool.
But, unfortunately: the writing is terrible. The book is super dense and -- remember that I have a degree in English literature and am in graduate school to teach English -- I had an incredibly hard time even deciphering the plot. The story switches back and forth from present to past from paragraph to paragraph, and frankly, the past isn't very interesting. It's something about the first guy who wore this brooch but who ultimately lost his land and life to a battle with the French king in somewhere between 1400-1550. The text is so dense that I actually couldn't figure out when this even was taking place.
Once the story gets into the present tense and stays there, it does not, unfortunately, get more interesting. The main character has an in-depth knowledge of gems and their value, origins, black market trafficking, etc. But she is thoroughly un-empathetic; she is written as cold and presumably calculating. The author was probably going for gem-smuggling bad-ass female protagonist, but he just didn't pull it off. I felt nothing for this character and when she meets with failure in her first underground jeweler meeting, I had no thoughts or feelings of empathy whatsoever -- actually, no feelings of sympathy either, which is an extra-bad sign in literature. Great authors evoke empathy; good, even just decent, authors evoke sympathy. Here, I had nothing.
I put this book down within a few days and I will not be picking it back up.
This book was downright awful. I was less than 30 pages in before I stopped reading it. In theory, the plot sounds fairly interesting: a women is searching for an infamous brooch worn by Elizabeth I that has been lost in history. The brooch consists of 3 gigantic rubies framed by 3 perfect pearls -- it can actually be seen in some portraits of Elizabeth I, which is really cool.
But, unfortunately: the writing is terrible. The book is super dense and -- remember that I have a degree in English literature and am in graduate school to teach English -- I had an incredibly hard time even deciphering the plot. The story switches back and forth from present to past from paragraph to paragraph, and frankly, the past isn't very interesting. It's something about the first guy who wore this brooch but who ultimately lost his land and life to a battle with the French king in somewhere between 1400-1550. The text is so dense that I actually couldn't figure out when this even was taking place.
Once the story gets into the present tense and stays there, it does not, unfortunately, get more interesting. The main character has an in-depth knowledge of gems and their value, origins, black market trafficking, etc. But she is thoroughly un-empathetic; she is written as cold and presumably calculating. The author was probably going for gem-smuggling bad-ass female protagonist, but he just didn't pull it off. I felt nothing for this character and when she meets with failure in her first underground jeweler meeting, I had no thoughts or feelings of empathy whatsoever -- actually, no feelings of sympathy either, which is an extra-bad sign in literature. Great authors evoke empathy; good, even just decent, authors evoke sympathy. Here, I had nothing.
I put this book down within a few days and I will not be picking it back up.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)