Between the Covers

I should read...what?

At 8:30 p.m. Tuesday, I will be joining an illustrious panel at Books & Books in the Gables to discuss book recommendations. Of way more interest than me are the other panelists: writers Edwidge Danticat and Diana Abu-Jaber, columnist Ana Menendez (who deserves special mention because she is a veteran of the Herald's Neighbors sections, as am I, which is kind of like being a veteran of foreign wars, only more bloody) and Chauncey Mabe, the book editor from That Paper That Shall Not Be Named to the north.

I'm not sure how successful this will be, since people tend to yell at me about my recommendations and tell me I'm an idiot and there's a good chance Mr. Mabe and I will sit around discussing The Wire, with which we are both obsessed. But I'm hoping some fun will be had.

In the spirit of recommending good books, I will pass along two that readers keep recommending to me: The Road, by Cormac McCarthy (yes, I know I'm the only person who hasn't read it yet) and The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls. Should I read them? Should I skip them? Should I tell the people recommending them to me to leave me alone, that I have more than enough to read?

You have GOT to be kidding me

So Oprah has picked the new book for her book club, and it's a doozy: A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose by Eckhard Tolle is the new choice. Yes! A self help book! To hell with all the fine fiction and important non-fiction out there. Let's gaze at our navels some more! Heaven knows we don't do enough of THAT.

Now I hesitate to be too hard on Oprah; she's done a lot for reading in this country, which as we all know is filled with idiots who think American Gladiators is a legitimate form of entertainment. Oprah has made some questionable choices - James Frey comes leaping to mind - but she's introduced legions of readers to all sorts of interesting writers (Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, Joyce Carol Oates), even (maybe) tricked some into reading classics like East of Eden. Her last choice was Ken Follett's Pillars of the Earth, which is a great tale of medieval England and the building of cathedrals.

But...self help? Bleah. I don't need to awaken to my life's purpose. Come on, Oprah. Champion books that really matter.

Next up: Newt

I'm going to attempt to report this as straight-faced as I can, no irony or snotty comments:

At 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, as you are enjoying your post-primary election glow, you can meet former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich at the Borders at 9887 Glades Rd. in Boca Raton, where he'll be signing copies of his book Real Change.

No word on who might actually want to do such a thing, but hey, it's free...

Why is this man smiling?

It's surely not because he co-stars in Over Her Dead Body, one of the worst romantic comedies I've seen in a decade. It may even be worse than Music & Lyrics, and that's saying something.

There are many horrible things about OHDB, and if you want to learn about them you can see my review of the movie, which should be online Friday. But here's one random thing that bugged me. Cute Paul Rudd is wooing a psychic (Lake Bell) who is being hounded by the ghost of his dead fiance (the truly dreadful Eva Longoria, who needs to be shipped back to Wisteria Lane immediately). He brings her a present, a book of short stories by David Foster Wallace, because he sees the psychic has a copy of Infinite Jest lying around and assumes she's a fan. She confesses she only got 10 pages or so into it - that's further than most people did, actually - and that she just leaves it around so people will think she's smart.

Note to the screenwriter: Nobody thinks you're smart if you have Infinite Jest lying around. The nineties are over, for God's sake! They'll just immediately assume you're a pretentious jackass, one who's completely out of touch with the literary world, and they'll know you never made it all the way through that 1,000 page primer on self-indulgence. Throw around a little Dave Eggers or something if you simply must convey trendiness and substance.

Assault on Grisham

Read it and yell at me, and then try and read The Appeal and tell me I'm wrong:

http://www.miamiherald.com/tropical_life/story/396191.html

Call me Ishmael, but don't call me a liar

The war of words continues in the ongoing saga of Ishmael Beah, whose memoir A Long Way Gone traces his life  from peaceful days with his family in a small African village to his conscription as a child soldier in Sierra Leone's brutal civil war. According to PW Daily, an Australian newspaper raised questions about some of the dates in the book, saying that if Beah was indeed wrong about them, he was only in the army for two or three months, instead of the two or three years detailed in his memoir.

Beah, says PW Daily, has issued a statement defending the dates in his book, offering as proof two other Sierra Leoneans to support his version of the events. He also talks about a lengthy back-and-forth discussion with reporters for The Australian, who found a man who claimed to be Beah's father, who was supposed to be dead, according to the memoir.  The guy was not Beah's dad, as it turns out. "I was right about my family. I am right about my story," Beah wrote in a press release sent out by his publisher, Farrar Straus Giroux. "Sad to say, my story is all true."

I guess I wonder: Does it matter if he was in the army killing people for a few months or a few years? Either way it would scar a child forever, I would think. Or is that simply too much poetic license for a writer to take?

A Long Way Gone has sold around 700,000 copies in hardback, according to FSG and PW. A paperback edition is due out in early August; it should see excellent sales because the subject matter makes it a natural for book clubs.

Another perspective on recorded books

In his latest Entertainment Weekly column, in which he test drives amazon.com's new Kindle device, Stephen King offers this observation on books on CD:

"I have never been able to understand the prejudice some people seem to feel about recorded books, for instance. Not only are good stories better when they are told out loud; bad stories declare themselves almost at once, because the spoken word is merciless. You cannot, for instance, listen to one of the later Patricia Cornwell novels without realizing how little feel she has for the language, or to a Sue Grafton without appreciating her divine eye for the minutiae of ordinary life."

King goes on to explain that he kinda likes the Kindle, but it won't replace actual books in his heart. Read the entire column here.

Breaking news: Books don't make you queasy

So I'm hearing a lot of griping about the movie Cloverfield,* and I have to weigh in: Listen, all you people complaining that you felt queasy due to handheld cameraphobia, you're just not getting to the heart of the problem.

The real problem with Cloverfield was that the monster *SEMI SPOILER ALERT BUT ONLY A LITTLE* did not eat people or bite their heads off or generally rend them limb for limb (though 30 minutes in I had really started to root for him to do so). The movie was NOT gory enough. Now the parasite thingies were pretty awesome, and I liked how you only glimpse the monster at first, even though J.J. Abrahms would rather DIE than let us see anything on stupid Lost, and the fact that everybody getting messed up in NYC was under 30 and good-looking. In general I liked the movie for those reasons and the fact that it was barely an hour and a half long.

But you all need to stop being such crybabies about the handheld camera. Listen, I felt woozy when I walked out of the theater, too. But I sucked it up and went over to TGIFriday's and had a BIG glass of chardonnay and some fried macaroni and cheese, and the upset stomach disappeared like the residents of Manhattan in that movie.

*Cloverfield is not based on a book but if it had been, I would read it.

Unappealing

I tried. I really did. I opened John Grisham's The Appeal with no prejudices - or rather, with the prejudices  shoved firmly to the back of my mind - and yet I fear I must report that I did not like the book at all.

The Appeal, which comes out Tuesday, is a legal thriller, only it thrills are somewhat non-existent. It's a slog and a half, no excitement, no escapism, just plodding.

I know there was a time when everybody read Grisham, and clearly they still do; his last novel, about a football team in Italy eating pizza or some such thing, made the bestseller lists. But it feels as though it's been a really long time since anyone got excited about a new Grisham book, eons since every other person you saw reading in an airport was lugging around a copy of The Firm. Which I too read a thousand years ago. I think I liked it. I don't remember much about it. But it was distracting, light entertainment. Nothing wrong with that.

It's just, who cares anymore? If we want to read legal thrillers there are so many other places to turn (many of which, I would assume, provide something better than The Appeal). I finished the book and will post a review of it Tuesday but...is his name alone enough to grab readers anymore?

Why is the Broward County Library system torturing me?

Remember a long long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, I proclaimed that I was going to read (or at least listen to) more nonfiction books? And that I put in a couple of requests online for books on CD at the library, including Freakanomics, which spurred a brief discussion?

Well, the library STILL doesn't have any of them for me. It's been a month and a half. More! Where are my books? I was first in the HOLDS list for Geraldine Brooks' Year of Wonders. How long does it take to drive a book from Fort Lauderdale to Hollywood, I ask you???

I NEED these books on CD. It's not so bad on the way to work - if I hit it right, I get most of the first hour of the Diane Rehm show on NPR - but on the way home I'm stuck with either Panthers hockey or NPR's News and Notes, which is usually good for the first half hour but then tends to veer toward interviews with R&B acts and other assorted entertainment that I'm not terribly interested in.

I'm going to remember this, Library, when I'm doling out my meager charity donations for the year.