Between the Covers

Does it count?

After reading that last post, someone emailed me and said they'd had an argument with someone over whether listening to an audiobook was the same as reading it. I mention this because I had the same conversation a few months back - or one like it, anyway - with a friend of mine.

Why wouldn't listening to a book on CD or downloaded to your iPod count as reading it? You're still absorbing the information. You're still (presumably) enjoying it. Why would you have to qualify it? Can't I say "I read Devil in the White City," when in fact I listened to it on CD in my car? I listened to the unabridged version, so I got it all. I know what happened. I can discuss it. What's the difference?  I even have a hard copy here to refer to should I need it while writing another review. Why isn't this reading?! I don't get it.

Signed, Confused

I think of you when I'm in a blimp looking down from up above you

I can't say enough good things about the audiobook version of I Am America and So Can You, by Dr. Stephen T. Colbert (the T stands for Truthiness, naturally). Mr. Colbert behaves like a True American and reads his own book, even though as we all know he disapproves of books in general as a Liberal Plot. (Most things ARE Liberal Plots. Like Starbucks peppermint mochas. Listen, you coffeenistas, we KNOW we can get them year round, don't try to act like they're only for the holidays. We've seen the peppermint syrup behind the counter.)

Anyway, listening to him read as I manuevered around today's hefty helping of overturned semis, flipped SUVs and Really Annoying Drivers Who Go 45 in the Left Lane of I-95 Because They Are Yakking on Cellphones Like a Jackass was almost a religious experience. Especially because he was talking about religion! Signs and wonders. In Chapter 4 he breaks down Protestantism (or, as he also calls it, "heresy") and revels in the beauty of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, the best religion because it has the advantage of marble and saints, God's "customer service representatives." Amen.

Meanwhile, production of The Colbert Report - along with The Daily Show - starts up again Jan. 7. Not sure how funny Colbert and Jon Stewart can be without writers. But I Am America is more than enough to make up for any fall-off of humor. A bonus: A shout-out to Mr. Jellineck and an appearance by Amy Sedaris!

Also, I fully support The Associated Press naming Mr. Colbert as its Celebrity of the Year. He's totally better than J.K. Rowling and Al Gore. Have either of them written anything as transcendant as Charlene (I'm Right Behind You)? I think not.

Haiku update

For those who wish I would stop writing them: Haikus are hip! Don't believe me? Click on wine expert Fred Tasker's column on champagne and see for yourself!

Tidings of great joy

It seems like it has been years since Leif Enger's first novel Peace Like a River found its way onto my desk. OK, it definitely was years - Peace came out in 2001, charming everybody with his story about a motherless family in the Great White North, making us weep openly and forcing us to admit that there just may be something to this business of writing rhyming cowboy poetry.

But it's 2007, and we haven't heard a peep from Mr. Enger. Did he have writer's block? Had he turned into a Leifsicle up there in Minnesota? Had he thought: "You know, I wrote a darn near perfect book that even included miracles in it, and it wasn't hokey in any remote way, so I think I'll quit while I'm ahead"?

Clearly, he did not quit. The galley for his new novel So Brave, Young and Handsome has landed in my hands. I may have screamed aloud with joy when I pulled it off the stack of spring books awaiting my perusal. This is the best Christmas present I could possibly get (though I will not turn down either a red Mini Cooper or an aqua Nano, should anybody still be shopping for me). The book won't be released until May, at which time I promise you will read more about it here.

Can't stop what's comin'

Thanks to everyone who insisted I see No Country for Old Men before voting for the Florida Film Critics Circle; the movie definitely lived up to the hype. That so rarely happens to me anymore. I have not yet read the book - I got off track with Cormac McCarthy sometime after All the Pretty Horses and have not yet righted myself - but I hear much of the dialogue is taken directly from the book. True?

And much as everybody loves Javier Bardem and his heinous haircut in this movie, I have to say my favorite character in it was good ol' reliable Tommy Lee Jones, acting as a Greek chorus in cowboy boots to cluck and marvel over the pure force of the evil in the land.

And, as I stated to a backpacking buddy right after I saw the movie: Next time we are out in the desert, and we come across a bunch of dead drug runners and a suitcase with $2 million in cash in it, I am perfectly OK with just leaving it and getting the hell out of there.

Some occasions just cry out for poetic rhapsodizing

25 cheating

FSU academics

Nice job, Bobby B

(If you want to know what I'm on about click here.)

"People of the Book"

I am hearing good advance reviews of Geraldine Brooks' People of the Book, due out on Jan. 1. Brooks  is the author of March and Year of Wonders. What I know of the plot involves a rare book expert who is attempting to unravel the mysteries of the Sarajevo Haggadah.

Books about rare books have always intrigued me; I am a longtime fan of John Dunning's suspense series about Cliff Janeway, Denver rare book expert/ex-cop, although I will admit his last book wasn't all that great. The early ones are a lot of fun, though. Michael Gruber sent me on a fabulous wild goose chase with The Book of Air and Shadows, about a variety of shady types scrambling to uncover the existence of a lost Shakespeare play (pro-Catholic at that! Would that ever tick off Queen Elizabeth.)

Even better news: Brooks herself appears Jan. 14 at Books & Books in Coral Gables, so if her new novel is as intriguing as its promise that will be a reading to remember.

I drink your milkshake!

OK, now, if you had told me that I would be completely mesmerized by a film version of Upton Sinclair's Oil, I would have said: "That is unlikely to happen." Or perhaps something even more colorful involving the words "crack" and "idiot."

But Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood is spectacular, with a performance by Daniel Day Lewis that blows away any other contenders. Sorry, Mr. Clooney. I love you but. Sorry, Mr. Washington. Liked American Gangster, but it's not in the ballpark.

There are no female characters to be found in this movie - a pet peeve of mine - and yet I didn't mind for one second. Unrelentingly cynical in its portrayal of humankind, There Will Be Blood actually makes me want to read an Upton Sinclair book. About oil and the greed that lies in the hearts of men. I'm shocked. Shocked!

A gridiron haiku

No oh-and-sixteen

Take off the bags, Dolphins fans

At least till next week.

Looking ahead

This time of year everybody's looking back and debating what the best books of the year were. I'm going  to do that too - sometime at the end of the month - but right now I'm thinking ahead. December is usually a fairly quiet month in the book publishing world; most of the interesting end-of-the-year books come out in September or October, or possibly early November. But come January, a whole new crop awaits.

Here's what I'm looking forward to most: Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth. Lahiri is author of the novel The Namesake, which I think everyone I know has read, and she won the Pulitzer Prize for her short story collection Interpreter of Maladies. The new book is a short story collection as well; it's out April 1.

Also intriguing and on the horizon in February: Chip Kidd's follow-up to The Cheese Monkeys, entitled The Learners, about "advertising gone mad," as Augusten Burroughs writes on the jacket blurb. Kidd is an associate art director at Knopf, where he has designed some of the most famous book jackets ever (remember the iconic dinosaur on Jurassic Park back in the day?). He also designed an extremely cool Miami Book Fair International poster a few years ago. But he's also a terrific writer, so The Learners should be a blast.