My friend Jeff Frank's hilarious new comic novel about the travails of a Washington hostess, Trudy Hopedale, is out now and I've been happily devouring it over the last two days. Jeff's previous two novels, The Columnist and Bad Publicity, are also about Washington, media and the social dynamics intrinsic to both, and they're screamingly funny. If you like Chris Buckley, this is probably up your alley.
Update to the previous post: Slate liked the TAM article and chose it for their weekly syndication to the Washington Post, where it appeared yesterday. Reaction to it has been mixed: Fray readers hate it (or more specifically, hate me); WaPo emailers love it. Interestingly, emails from Brazilians were overwhelmingly positive, which is not what I expected, but a pleasant surprise.
A while back, my friend Tom Dolby asked me to contribute to The Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys anthology he was editing with his friend Melissa De La Cruz about friendships between straight women and gay men. So I wrote a piece titled "Life Before Gays" about growing up in a conservative environment that was not exactly welcoming to gay people and the sort of dialog (if you can call it that) that existed around the subject when I was in middle and high school.
The book has a fantastic cast of contributors (Simon Doonan, Mike Albo, David Ebershoff, Gigi Grazer, Ayelet Waldman, Chiny Chupak, Alexandra Jacobs, Andrew Solomon and the wonderful co-editors, to name a few), a foreword by Armistead Maupin, and a portion of the proceeds from the book go to The Trevor Project, a suicide and crisis prevention line for gay and questioning youth. You can buy the book here.
I tend to read several books simultaneously. And by several, I mean 20 or so. I'd feel weird about this freakish behavior except that people have been paid to write about doing the same thing in the New York Times Book Review, which means that I am not alone. (I am alone with Joe Queenan.)
At any rate, I haven't updated the "Currently Reading" category on the sidebar here because that requires clicking the "template" button, then clicking the index link, then typing some stuff, then clicking the "republish" button, and that's just too much clicking and typing for me. After all, I'm a very busy person. I'm trying to read 20 books at once, for god's sakes.
I put the category in the sidebar in the first place in the hopes that people would see it and send me new recommendations based on what I was reading, but the only recommendations I've ever gotten were (A) blog more, (B) blog less, or (C) start writing about Christopher Hitchens again. To which I say: (A) no (B) no, and (C) no.
But I'm looking for book recommendations. After the jump are 8 of the 20+ books I've been reading lately and particularly enjoying:
The Royal Flash by George Macdonald Fraser - My book editor was reading the Flashman books a while ago and recommended them. He says they get repetitive after the third book or so, but I'm still finding them hilarious.
The Soccer War by Ryszard Kapuscinski - Kapuscinski's book on violent conflict in Africa. It's first-person reportage and beautifully written, with a depth of emotion you don't normally see in this sort of non-fiction. I can already tell I'm going to have read everything else he's ever written.
Hilaire Belloc by AN Wilson - This one's out of print and I got it for research purposes, but am enjoying it immensely. Belloc horrifies me in many respects, but I like his wit and he was a great rhetoritician.
The Man that Time Forgot by Isaiah Wilner - Dana Vachon recommended this to me on the basis that I reminded him of Britton Hadden. I'm almost through it and I'm still not sure it was a compliment. The book is about the founding of Time magazine and while the idea of comparing it to birth of blogging strikes me as inherently repulsive, there are some funny parallels. (p. 65: "Instead of gathering his own news--an arduous and expensive chore--he would assemble the most interesting information from newspapers... the main problem was not a lack of information, but too much...")
A Circle is a Balloon and a Compass Both by Ben Greenman - Ben's a pal and I like his writing so I went and got this when he told me it was out. I love George Saunders' stories and as one of the reviewers noted, Ben's have a very similar feel.
A Distant Episode by Paul Bowles - My boyfriend demanded that I read this, and I haven't been able to tear myself away from it. It really is stunning. The stories are set largely in Morocco and other parts of North Africa, and they're beautifully dark with an economy of writing I wish I had.
The Elementary Particles by Michel Houellebecq - Also a recommendation. When the blurb on the back says "novel of ideas" I usually assume that means there's no plot or no character development. Not the case here. I think there's a reluctance to incorporate science into fiction on the basis that it might suck the romance out of the emotional, physiological and philosophical underpinnings of life that are the basis of great fiction. Sheer speculation, of course, but I don't see it done often or well. TEP is technically brilliant in general, but particularly in that respect.
The Friend of Women and Other Stories by Louis Auchincloss - Also in the research vein, I'm reading a lot of American novelists who write fiction about upper class Americans who are not inherently sympathetic. Auchincloss wrote almost exclusively about them, and quite prolifically. His moralism is a little heavy-handed for my tastes, but I've been accused of being too nihilistic, so maybe the problem is less Auchincloss than me.
I'd like to interrupt my usual program of relentless Mergers & Acquisitions promotion to point out that Kurt Andersen's new novel, Heyday, hits bookstores this week. I think Kurt's a genius and I loved Turn of the Century so I've been eagerly anticipating his next book for quite a while now. Even though I pre-ordered it on Amazon, I couldn't resist swiping a copy at the book party last week because I absolutely HAD TO READ IT NOW. (Delayed gratification is overrated anyway.) Not surprisingly, I'm thoroughly enjoying it.
Related: Kurt's reading from the book next Wednesday (March 14th) at the Lincoln Center Barnes & Noble at 7:30 PM.
Several months ago, the Idea Festival organizers asked all of the conference speakers to recommend a book that would be useful in thinking about what the future will be like in art, technology and politics. I recommended Stephen Johnson's The Ghost Map, which I had just finished reading in galley, and sadly it wasn't out yet when the conference was happening. So I'm recommending it again now. If you're interested in urban planning and/or epidemiology, in particular, it's a great read.
Speaking of book-ifying other mediums, someone gifted me with a copy of this last week and it looks amazing. (As you would expect. Alex Isley designed it.) They reproduced my all-time favorite cover story, "What Passes for Friendship," in full and several of my favorite front-of-the-book bits--i.e., Henry Alford's "What if Jean Paul Sartre Had A Little Imaginary Friend Named Sneakers?" I was going to do a five-monocle Walter Monheit review of it, but Vanity Fair beat me to it.
[Ed.—Carter, my co-conspirator and lead investor, was an Assistant Art Director at SPY during the Kurt/Graydon years (under B.W. Honeycutt). He's an incorrigible mischief-maker and, I suspect, may disappear my copy when I'm not looking. Carter is also responsible for me insisting that everyone I know watch this.]
Le cheval mort gets a few kicks from Gawker this morning with a slightly hysteria-tinged post about bloggers with book deals. In summary: STUPID PUBLISHERS! WHAT ARE THEY THINKING?! (To reiterate: a group of people who have a book deal based on their blog are suggesting that giving people book deals based on their blogs is stupid.) They're not the worst offender, and probably not even the most frequent offender, but in all the talk about whether these deals will earn out, there's a failure to distinguish between book deals given to people who happen to have blogs (Jami Attenberg's book, Dana Vachon's book, etc.) and books that are based on blogs (Gawker's book, Stephanie Klein's book, etc.) I was at mediabistro when I sold my book, and needless to say, it isn't a novel about media job postings and the freelance journalists who respond to them.
That said, if we're going to keep repeating the false analogy, I'm first in line to refer to Malcolm Gladwell's next book as a "blogger book."
Just because.
I'm happy to see that the book I shoved down everyone's throats last December, Edward St. Aubyn's Mother's Milk, made the Booker Prize shortlist. I read it last November and loved it so much I went out and bought several more copies and gave them to every friend I ran into. (Sometimes misguidedly, in fact. One friend, not exactly known for his love of literature, looked at me incredulously and said, "you're giving me a book?")
My friend John Hodgman's hilarious book, The Areas of My Expertise, is now out in paperback.**
** With all new material!
A few weeks ago, my ex-colleague, Boris Kachka, wrote that Frederic Beigbeder's Windows on the World had the year's best first sentence in a novel: “You know how it ends: Everybody dies.”
Because the title of my novel is AND THEY ALL DIE IN THE END, I'm collecting references that remind me of it, for some yet unspecified purpose. (Know of any? Email me at espiers AT earthlink dot net.)
I just ran across another last night, while reading Julian Barnes' Love, Etc.:
Stuart: I read more than I used to. Non-fiction. History, science, biography. I like to know that what I'm being told is true. From time to time I'll read a novel, if there's one people are going on about. But stories aren't enough like life for me. In stories, someone gets married and that's the ending—well, I can tell you from my own personal experience that this isn't the case. In life, every ending is just the start of another story. Except when you die—that's an ending that's really an ending. I suppose if novels were true to life, they'd all end with the characters dying,, but if they did, we wouldn't want to read them, would we?