Month: December 2010

2010 in Review

This post originally appeared on I Read Everything

In review… Get it? Hahaha.

Anyway, this year I read 102 books, which may seem like a lot to people who have real jobs and kids and active social lives. I have none of those things so I really feel like I could have read more this year. I tell myself that my discussion sites have caused me to slow down and read more carefully but even so, I hope to read at least 125 books in 2011.

I reviewed 75 books between I Read Odd Books and I Read Everything. Having never done this sort of thing before, I’m not sure how much better I could have done, but if this number is low, I take comfort that most of my discussions average around 2,000 words. Many are longer. Had I crapped out 75 one-paragraph reviews, I would definitely think that number too low. But given the depth I try to engage in when the book warrants it, I’m actually surprised I managed to discuss so many books. If I can beat that in 2011, that would be wonderful. Let’s see what happens.

It seems no “year in review” is complete without some sort of list, so here’s my 2010 list: Books I Thought About the Most in 2010. Not the best books I read in 2010 and not the worst – simply books that, for whatever reason, stayed with me. These are books from both I Read Odd Books and I Read Everything and cover a lot of ground.

10. The Membranous Lounge by Hank Kirton
I have yet to discuss this book but it definitely makes the list of books I am still thinking about. I received this in the mail, no explanation or entreaty to review it, and had some trepidation before reading it. I’m very glad I read it because the stories were amazing, both harsh and ethereal, gritty and dreamy. It was a surprise that such a tight, well-written, fascinating collection would come to me so stealthily. Two stories in this book – about a serial killing pair of women and a carny sideshow act who exacts revenge upon men who ill use her – were so shocking, interesting and unexpected that they likely will have resonance with me for a long time. I look forward to reviewing this one when it finally comes up in my queue.

9. How to Eat Fried Furries by Nicole Cushing
This book has the rare distinction of being one of the few books I have ever read that raised the hair on the back of my neck. Literally. There is a scene in this book that is so very eerie that I still don’t know if I can explain its power because the scene is merely a group of women trying to passively coerce another woman into doing something she does not want to do. Don’t be led astray by the title. This book is not about furries as they have come to be portrayed in media, but rather is a reference to society’s attempts to become more comfortable with cannibalism. A pack of demented ferrets fighting crime, the Angel Uriel in a prop plane helping the last few humans in the squirrel armageddon, people choosing to live without skin – this book is grotesque, funny, weird and upsetting. It was also Nicole’s first book with Eraserhead Press, in the New Bizarro Author Series, and is a stunning first effort.

8. The Source: The Untold Story of Father Yod, Ya Ho Wa 13, and The Source Family by Isis Aquarian
I have yet to discuss this book but have still managed to annoy the author as I spoke of it in my personal journal and called it a story of a Jesus Freak cult, a position I defend but one that nevertheless can seem flippant and derogatory as neither word in common parlance today conveys anything positive. But The Source were Jesus Freaks and cultish in the truest definition of these descriptives and the reason this book has stayed with me is because Isis Aquarian, the person who was assigned the role of documentarian for The Source Family, shows a fascinating look at fascinating people during a tumultuous time in American history. But it has also stayed with me because after coming across as a jerk to Aquarian, I looked hard at what makes a cult, what makes a malignant cult, and how it is that a cult can be both benign and malignant in the same ways traditional religious groups can be both. All in all, a deeply interesting book and another one I look forward to discussing in depth.

7. Naive. Super by Erland Loe
I was recommended this book by a clerk at Book People when I asked him to tell me the strangest book he had ever read. And it was strange. Sweetly strange. It was both accessible and unlike anything I have ever read before. I loved the protagonist of this novel, a kind and simple young man who wants to know the meaning of life, and again, this is a book I have yet to discuss and cannot wait to talk about it here.

6. Perversity Think Tank by Supervert
An attempt to determine and define what perversity truly is, this book is an intellectual look at sexual perversion and what separates it from basic human depravity. The book is arranged in a manner that forces the reader to interact with the content in a way that transcends the often passive nature of reading and this arrangement is why I am still thinking of this book as I had to look up the pictures Supervert references and think if my interpretation of them matched Supervert’s. I still find myself from time to time musing on where our interpretations were similar and not at all alike. This is a pretty little book, too. A treasure to own and an interactive experience to read.

5. Pearl by Mary Gordon
I loathed this book for the most part but the reason it still niggles in the back of my brain is because I am still shocked that a literary icon like Gordon wrote a book that by my own objective standards is so bad. The often pointless repetition of words and ideas seemed like Gordon assumed anyone reading the book had suffered a literary lobotomy. But most objective of all, I disliked the rarefied air occupied by all of the characters, which is not my usual response. I can read books about the idle rich without feeling like I want to grab a hammer and a sickle and run through the streets but Pearl aggravated me. Perhaps it is because I read the next book on my list so soon after reading Pearl but this book alienated me and forced me to examine why.

4. Last Night at the Lobster by Stewart O’Nan
I read this soon after reading Pearl and the nature of the characters in this book underscored why Pearl irritated me. The leisurely life of Pearl and her high-minded moral struggles seemed ridiculous after reading Last Night at the Lobster, a story of people who work too hard for too little money and yet engage in their own moral struggles while trying to keep food on the table. I think this book proved to me that excessive leisure seldom leads to better thoughts. Reading about work, the kinds of work I have done (though I have never worked in a restaurant, most of my jobs centered around serving people, either by cleaning their toilets or by selling them shoes or books), appealed to me and while I missed rereading this at Yule, I will reread it around this time next year, as this story takes place at Christmas time at a dying mall in a town that is a lot like mine and probably a lot like yours.

3. The Woman Who Walked into Doors by Roddy Doyle
This book broke my heart, telling the story of a lower-middle class Irish woman, Paula, who has been failed by the men in her life. Her father abandoned her emotionally when she was in her teens, her husband beat her relentlessly. Her society failed her too, calling her stupid and putting her into a school where she was tormented by boys and made rough in order to endure their treatment. Part class struggle, part feminist struggle, part addiction story, this book is most notable because it was so well-written and so deeply moving even as it refuses to give the reader a sense that Paula will eventually be okay. When I saw a sale copy of the sequel to this book, Paula Spencer, I grabbed it with delight. I cannot wait to read it and see what became of Paula, to see if there will be true transcendence for her.

2. The Franklin Cover-up: Child Abuse, Satanism and Murder in Nebraska by John W. DeCamp
The details in this book, horrific though they were, did not resonate with me because aside from some of the bad acts of Larry King, the man who committed financial fraud and likely sexually abused children in Omaha, very little in this book had the ring of truth. Yet this book still pings the back of my brain because it generated the most personal e-mail responses I received from any book I discussed on both of my sites. The missives worry me, not because I fear they are right, but because I am concerned that there are so many people who still believe the Satanic Panic was real and that Bush 41 countenanced children being flown around to be defiled by debauched members of the GOP. But mostly this book is still hammering in my brain because of the sheer flood of human misery it has revealed to me. Whether or not I believe in the Satanic Panic, there are clearly people who sincerely do believe. People who believe terrible things happened to them, things that should have killed them by any objective analysis, and that teachers, doctors, politicians, police and preachers are all involved in a nation-wide cabal to beget, rape, murder, sacrifice and eat children. No matter how little I believe in many of the stories I received by people who wanted to counter my lack of belief in this book, the people who wrote me were filled with genuine pain, fear and horror and it is nothing short of heartbreaking.

1. House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski
This book nearly drove me insane reading it, because while in the past I had flirted with the book, I had never sat down and read it carefully word for word. I wonder now if there is a mechanism in the way words and pages are arranged that can make a reader go mad because I really did feel as if my mind was being manipulated as I read this book. It was, beyond a doubt, the most involved book I have ever read and even as I sit here, writing this up, I am going over details in my head, trying to make ends meet, trying to remember which clues led me to places that seemed rational. People either love or hate this book. I fear it because I worry that I will dive in again and go to that strange mental place wherein Johnny, Will and Karen occupy my every thought and each little detail takes off into a place where it has meaning that I come close to deciphering but never quite manage.

So now you know which books still occupy my mind. Please share with me the books that didn’t leave you this year, the maddening, beautiful, frightening, enlightening books that were a cut beyond all the others you read.

Have a lovely New Year’s Eve and may your 2011 be productive, interesting and full of books.

2010 in Review

This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books

In review… Get it? Hahaha.

Anyway, this year I read 102 books, which may seem like a lot to people who have real jobs and kids and active social lives. I have none of those things so I really feel like I could have read more this year. I tell myself that my discussion sites have caused me to slow down and read more carefully but even so, I hope to read at least 125 books in 2011.

I reviewed 75 books between I Read Odd Books and I Read Everything. Having never done this sort of thing before, I’m not sure how much better I could have done, but if this number is low, I take comfort that most of my discussions average around 2,000 words. Many are longer. Had I crapped out 75 one-paragraph reviews, I would definitely think that number too low. But given the depth I try to engage in when the book warrants it, I’m actually surprised I managed to discuss so many books. If I can beat that in 2011, that would be wonderful. Let’s see what happens.

It seems no “year in review” is complete without some sort of list, so here’s my 2010 list: Books I Thought About the Most in 2010. Not the best books I read in 2010 and not the worst – simply books that, for whatever reason, stayed with me. These are books from both I Read Odd Books and I Read Everything and cover a lot of ground.

10. The Membranous Lounge by Hank Kirton
I have yet to discuss this book but it definitely makes the list of books I am still thinking about. I received this in the mail, no explanation or entreaty to review it, and had some trepidation before reading it. I’m very glad I read it because the stories were amazing, both harsh and ethereal, gritty and dreamy. It was a surprise that such a tight, well-written, fascinating collection would come to me so stealthily. Two stories in this book – about a serial killing pair of women and a carny sideshow act who exacts revenge upon men who ill use her – were so shocking, interesting and unexpected that they likely will have resonance with me for a long time. I look forward to reviewing this one when it finally comes up in my queue.

9. How to Eat Fried Furries by Nicole Cushing
This book has the rare distinction of being one of the few books I have ever read that raised the hair on the back of my neck. Literally. There is a scene in this book that is so very eerie that I still don’t know if I can explain its power because the scene is merely a group of women trying to passively coerce another woman into doing something she does not want to do. Don’t be led astray by the title. This book is not about furries as they have come to be portrayed in media, but rather is a reference to society’s attempts to become more comfortable with cannibalism. A pack of demented ferrets fighting crime, the Angel Uriel in a prop plane helping the last few humans in the squirrel armageddon, people choosing to live without skin – this book is grotesque, funny, weird and upsetting. It was also Nicole’s first book with Eraserhead Press, in the New Bizarro Author Series, and is a stunning first effort.

8. The Source: The Untold Story of Father Yod, Ya Ho Wa 13, and The Source Family by Isis Aquarian
I have yet to discuss this book but have still managed to annoy the author as I spoke of it in my personal journal and called it a story of a Jesus Freak cult, a position I defend but one that nevertheless can seem flippant and derogatory as neither word in common parlance today conveys anything positive. But The Source were Jesus Freaks and cultish in the truest definition of these descriptives and the reason this book has stayed with me is because Isis Aquarian, the person who was assigned the role of documentarian for The Source Family, shows a fascinating look at fascinating people during a tumultuous time in American history. But it has also stayed with me because after coming across as a jerk to Aquarian, I looked hard at what makes a cult, what makes a malignant cult, and how it is that a cult can be both benign and malignant in the same ways traditional religious groups can be both. All in all, a deeply interesting book and another one I look forward to discussing in depth.

7. Naive. Super by Erland Loe
I was recommended this book by a clerk at Book People when I asked him to tell me the strangest book he had ever read. And it was strange. Sweetly strange. It was both accessible and unlike anything I have ever read before. I loved the protagonist of this novel, a kind and simple young man who wants to know the meaning of life, and again, this is a book I have yet to discuss and cannot wait to talk about it here.

6. Perversity Think Tank by Supervert
An attempt to determine and define what perversity truly is, this book is an intellectual look at sexual perversion and what separates it from basic human depravity. The book is arranged in a manner that forces the reader to interact with the content in a way that transcends the often passive nature of reading and this arrangement is why I am still thinking of this book as I had to look up the pictures Supervert references and think if my interpretation of them matched Supervert’s. I still find myself from time to time musing on where our interpretations were similar and not at all alike. This is a pretty little book, too. A treasure to own and an interactive experience to read.

5. Pearl by Mary Gordon
I loathed this book for the most part but the reason it still niggles in the back of my brain is because I am still shocked that a literary icon like Gordon wrote a book that by my own objective standards is so bad. The often pointless repetition of words and ideas seemed like Gordon assumed anyone reading the book had suffered a literary lobotomy. But most objective of all, I disliked the rarefied air occupied by all of the characters, which is not my usual response. I can read books about the idle rich without feeling like I want to grab a hammer and a sickle and run through the streets but Pearl aggravated me. Perhaps it is because I read the next book on my list so soon after reading Pearl but this book alienated me and forced me to examine why.

4. Last Night at the Lobster by Stewart O’Nan
I read this soon after reading Pearl and the nature of the characters in this book underscored why Pearl irritated me. The leisurely life of Pearl and her high-minded moral struggles seemed ridiculous after reading Last Night at the Lobster, a story of people who work too hard for too little money and yet engage in their own moral struggles while trying to keep food on the table. I think this book proved to me that excessive leisure seldom leads to better thoughts. Reading about work, the kinds of work I have done (though I have never worked in a restaurant, most of my jobs centered around serving people, either by cleaning their toilets or by selling them shoes or books), appealed to me and while I missed rereading this at Yule, I will reread it around this time next year, as this story takes place at Christmas time at a dying mall in a town that is a lot like mine and probably a lot like yours.

3. The Woman Who Walked into Doors by Roddy Doyle
This book broke my heart, telling the story of a lower-middle class Irish woman, Paula, who has been failed by the men in her life. Her father abandoned her emotionally when she was in her teens, her husband beat her relentlessly. Her society failed her too, calling her stupid and putting her into a school where she was tormented by boys and made rough in order to endure their treatment. Part class struggle, part feminist struggle, part addiction story, this book is most notable because it was so well-written and so deeply moving even as it refuses to give the reader a sense that Paula will eventually be okay. When I saw a sale copy of the sequel to this book, Paula Spencer, I grabbed it with delight. I cannot wait to read it and see what became of Paula, to see if there will be true transcendence for her.

2. The Franklin Cover-up: Child Abuse, Satanism and Murder in Nebraska by John W. DeCamp
The details in this book, horrific though they were, did not resonate with me because aside from some of the bad acts of Larry King, the man who committed financial fraud and likely sexually abused children in Omaha, very little in this book had the ring of truth. Yet this book still pings the back of my brain because it generated the most personal e-mail responses I received from any book I discussed on both of my sites. The missives worry me, not because I fear they are right, but because I am concerned that there are so many people who still believe the Satanic Panic was real and that Bush 41 countenanced children being flown around to be defiled by debauched members of the GOP. But mostly this book is still hammering in my brain because of the sheer flood of human misery it has revealed to me. Whether or not I believe in the Satanic Panic, there are clearly people who sincerely do believe. People who believe terrible things happened to them, things that should have killed them by any objective analysis, and that teachers, doctors, politicians, police and preachers are all involved in a nation-wide cabal to beget, rape, murder, sacrifice and eat children. No matter how little I believe in many of the stories I received by people who wanted to counter my lack of belief in this book, the people who wrote me were filled with genuine pain, fear and horror and it is nothing short of heartbreaking.

1. House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski
This book nearly drove me insane reading it, because while in the past I had flirted with the book, I had never sat down and read it carefully word for word. I wonder now if there is a mechanism in the way words and pages are arranged that can make a reader go mad because I really did feel as if my mind was being manipulated as I read this book. It was, beyond a doubt, the most involved book I have ever read and even as I sit here, writing this up, I am going over details in my head, trying to make ends meet, trying to remember which clues led me to places that seemed rational. People either love or hate this book. I fear it because I worry that I will dive in again and go to that strange mental place wherein Johnny, Will and Karen occupy my every thought and each little detail takes off into a place where it has meaning that I come close to deciphering but never quite manage.

So now you know which books still occupy my mind. Please share with me the books that didn’t leave you this year, the maddening, beautiful, frightening, enlightening books that were a cut beyond all the others you read.

Have a lovely New Year’s Eve and may your 2011 be productive, interesting and full of books.

Downtown Owl by Chuck Klosterman

This post originally appeared on I Read Everything

Book: Downtown Owl

Author: Chuck Klosterman

Type of Book: Fiction, literary fiction

Why Did I Read This Book: I was mentally tired from reading so much bizarro for my other site and needed a break. I had purchased this book when I saw it in a Borders sale bin and grabbed it impulsively. It sat in a to-be-read stack and I read it only when the outrageousness of my odder books left me bleary, searching for something more prosaic.

Availability: Published by Scribner in 2008, you can get a copy here:

Comments: As I said above, I bought this book on impulse because it was on sale and read it because I was overwhelmed after reading a string of bizarro titles. There was no more thought in purchasing it and no more in reading it. Reading this book filled me with a sense of intense dread, a sad realization that I am doomed. Despite my self-admitted bibliophilic tendencies, despite my willingness to buy a book I know nothing about and read it, despite the fact that I am blessed with a relatively demand-free schedule and can read several hours a day, I will one day die without having discovered some amazing authors.

I haven’t recorded the final tally of what I have read for 2010 but it’s around 100 books. 100 books in a year. I admit I now read pretty slowly because of my review sites so maybe I can read more but let’s assume I can’t. Let’s assume two books a week is more or less my expected tally every year. I have maybe 30 years left if I am lucky. That’s 3,000 books before I die and that’s nothing. That’s not even the fiction section at my local Barnes & Noble. How many books like this one will I not read, books I may overlook or not buy on impulse? How can life be this cruel, this ridiculous, allowing so much talent and so little time to enjoy all of it?

Yes, this book was amazing, a revelation, a book so good it forced me to look at my own mortality and wonder if I can find a way to read more and absorb more because if I am only just now reading my first Chuck Klosterman book, what else awaits me? What other gems have I not discovered? What else will I miss before the end inevitably comes? Quite a bit, evidently.

This book is indeed a revelation because I can’t remember the last time I read a book and realized that the author not only got everything right, but also cooked up a novel so smoothly blended that at the end, it doesn’t really register that you have read a slice of small town Americana told with deft humor and clear love for the characters and town, a gentle character-driven yet plot heavy book and a modern naturalist novel with an environment cruelly and randomly shaping the lives of people whose wills should have been enough to sustain them in the end but cannot stand in the face of stronger, impersonal forces that act against them. Yes, I may be wrong as hell on this, but I really do see strong naturalist elements at work in a novel that is also steeped in sentimentality. And this is a very good reason to love this novel because to have pulled this off speaks of a talent that I could kick myself for almost missing.

Set in Owl, North Dakota in 1983-1984, this book discusses all the people in the little town by telling the stories of Julia, a recent college grad who teaches at Owl’s high school, Mitch, a high school football player who loathes pop music, and Horace, an elderly widower whose wife died from fatal familial insomnia and whose life revolves around getting coffee with his friends. While this novel shows Klosterman has a clear affection for Owl and the sorts of people who live there, he doesn’t slip into the role of a fawning admirer of bucolic small towns and the “quirky” people who live there. The pedophilic coach and literature teacher. The anti-government weirdo who lost his mind when his dog got shot. The bartender everyone thinks is too fond of his dog. Cubby Candy and Grendel, two outsiders whom all the teen boys want to fight each other and speculate endlessly about which loser would win in the brawl. The drunks, the cheaters, sadnesses, secrets. We all know everyone in small towns knows everyone else’s business but Klosterman shows the reader the collective mind of Owl.

The notion that there is far more to small towns than meets the eye is nothing new. That they are filled with quirky people, hard-working people, slackers, racists, drunks and high school football stars still basking in their glory days is also nothing new. But Klosterman’s synthesis of all that is obvious about small towns, combined with his gifts for characterization, his finely turned phrases, his insight and ability to capture so accurately a period in time, make the obvious seem utterly worth reading and the mundane new via his clever, precise presentation.

Because this novel is really the look at an entire town mainly via the stories of Julia, Horace and Mitch, it is almost impossible to discuss the plot because all those tiny plot lines and stories culminate in one horrific blizzard, a meteorological anomaly that hits the town and changes everything forever in the last ten pages of the book. It’s almost a punch in the gut, how quietly and determinedly without sentiment this novel ends, how neatly this novel refuses to let the reader believe in a world where death is just or even makes sense. This is when I realized that I had read a book that hinted at a naturalist philosophy. All these characters were shaped by their environment, that is almost too obvious to state, but there is no way that this book could have ended as it did unless Klosterman was detached from the story, letting events happen as they would and crushing the idea that free will plays much into how the lives of people end. The individual in this novel is presented as important and the book revolves around the various interesting natures of the people in Owl, but at the same time, the individual is powerless in the face of certain forces. The will to survive, personal strength or even intelligence means little at the end of it all. This is a book that despite the fun, the wonderful prose, the richness of characters, ultimately shows that life is harsh and the blunt and abrupt end of the novel were naturalistic to me. Of course, this is not a true naturalist novel – but the elements are there.

The real reason to read this book is because Klosterman is a fine writer. Let me present you with three passages about Julia, Mitch, and Horace. Julia, a recent college graduate who is a high school teacher, is befriended by a fellow teacher who is a bit of a barfly and the shy Julia finds herself the belle of the ball for the first time in her life, and she is often a belle with a terrible hangover as she descends into heavy drinking because that’s where all the men are – bellied up at the bar and, in Julia’s mind, clamoring for her drunken attentions. She eventually sobers up a bit and looks like she might be heading toward a real relationship. But before that happens, Klosterman treats us to a soused Julia, a Julia who spends a lot of time sprawled in bar booths and in the backs of cars, having the sorts of conversations immediately recognizable to anyone who has spent time sprawled in bar booths and drunkenly declaring themselves in the backs of cars.

“I want to smooch Vance Druid,” Julia said. “I’m so serious. I want to walk to his house, knock on the door, and just smooch away. I want to enforce the Smoochie Rule. I’m serious. Nobody believes me but I want to smooch him hardcore.”

Julia said this from the backseat of Ted’s car. Ted was behind the wheel and Naomi was in the passenger seat. They had been drinking for seven hours. Ted was trying to drive off his buzz.

“You don’t wanna kiss that guy,” Naomi said in response. “That guy . . . you don’t need that guy. You can do better than that. He’s just a small-town drunk who needs new pants. You deserve a real man. And what the fuck’s the Smoochie Rule?”

“The Smoochie Rule is in effect!”

“You’re a crazy woman, you crazy woman.”

“Don’t tell me who isn’t crazy,” said Julia. “I’ll tell you who the crazy woman isn’t.”

Ted turned onto a gravel road. A fox ran across the path of his Chevy Cavalier, but no one inside the car noticed.

“Kissing is a problem,” slurred Ted. “Smooching, kissing, human relations, whatever you want to call it. It’s complex.”

“What are you talking about?” said Naomi. “You don’t know how to kiss people? Is that why you never kiss me? Because you don’t know how to kiss people? It’s not like driving a speedboat. It’s easy. A child could do it.”

“No, no. Shut your mouth, woman.” Ted drove with his knees while lighting a Camel with the car’s cigarette lighter. He shook the still-glowing lighter and threw it out the window. It was that kind of night. “That’s not what I mean. You don’t even know what I’m talking about. You never listen to me.”

“Then what are you talking about?”

“Here’s what I’m talking about,” said Ted. “I had a kissing problem when I was in college. Before I quit college. It was complicated. I still think about it.”

“What is this regarding?” Naomi demanded. “If you’re homosexual, I’m going to shoot myself. And you. And Jules probably.”

“What the fuck did I do?” screeched Julia.

We get so much in this passage. It may seem like it is just a perfect distillation of what a drunk conversation sounds like but it is so much more. First, we get the nostalgia of a time when three people didn’t think twice about getting into a car, one of them driving hammered. We get the sexual tension between Naomi and Ted. We get the loneliness of Julia and her desire to bag the enigmatic former high school football star. It is subtly and wickedly funny.

Here’s a passage from a Mitch scene. Mitch is in a car with five other teenage boys, all with specifically appropriate nicknames that will make zero sense unless you read the explanations, which is as it should be, and they are discussing the recent bad acts of their football coach and other matters.

“You know what would be cool?” Zebra asked rhetorically. “It would be cool if we could somehow plant cameras all over the school, or maybe even inside random houses. Then we could use the photographs to sexually blackmail people.”

“I heard,” said Curtis-Fritz, “that when Laidlaw’s wife left town for three days to take care of her dying mother, Tina McAndrew stayed at his house for the entire time. She would get up in the morning and make him pancakes.”

“That did not happen,” said Mitch. “There is no way that could have happened. He’s got three kids. Don’t you think the kids would notice that there’s a different woman in the house, having sex with their dad and feeding them pancakes?”

“I don’t know,” said Curtis-Fritz. “Maybe she she stayed in the basement.”

“I think you should get to play more,” Weezie said to Mitch. “I don’t care what Laidlaw thinks. You’re way smarter than Becker or Groff, even if you don’t always throw so good. And if you do play tonight, and if we run Flood Right 64, throw it to me in the flat. I’m always open in that play. Always. Every time. But they never throw it to me.”

The opening riff from “Band on the Run” came over the stereo.

“You see what I fucking mean?” said Zebra. “Q-98 is terrible. Wings? Who are these queers? I don’t like old songs.”

It was at this specific juncture that Ainge’s Oldsmobile passed a 1974 Plymouth Barracuda. The ‘Cuda was clean and the ‘Cuda was yellow. Its driver looked straight ahead, oblivious to the six people staring into his vehicle’s interior.

This was the point where five conversations became one conversation.

“Don’t even start with that shit,” Drug Man said to Curtis-Fritz. “We are not having this argument again. I’m only warning you once.”

“We don’t have to have it,” said Curtis-Fritz. “We don’t need to have an argument, because you know I’m right.”

“Not it’s not because you’re right. It’s because you’re a fucking cum receptacle.”

The one uniting conversation was who would win in a fight between Cubby Candy and an enormous kid named Grendel (which is the name of one of my cats, I feel I need to say). And in this conversation, we again get so much. The bizarre tendency among male teenagers to rename themselves. The chaos that ensues when so many young men are in one car. The obsessive theoretical conversations. The musical snobbery and tendency to see anything older than ten years in the past as old. But the best part is the fact that in this novel wherein some of the kids are interested in the fact that 1984 was around the corner and they had all read Orwell and even in their disturbing musings on what their future held, they still fantasized about a school with cameras everywhere. Now, of course, most schools have cameras and no one gets any sexual blackmail out of it.

Finally, let me share some Horace with you. Horace is gathered with his friends, drinking coffee, complaining about a woman who is running rough-shod over other women in a Bible study group. It degenerates in a manner that is both topical and typical.

“I can’t take it,” he said. “I just cannot take it. It’s like I’m living with the goddamn Ayatollah. From the start of supper until the end of Carson, all she does is rant about how Melba Hereford is a witch who needs to be thrown in the river. I keep telling Vernetta to just quit the goddamn Bible group if it causes her so much suffering, but she refuses. She thinks that’s what Melba wants. As if Melba cares about anyone who isn’t named Melba! The crazy old biddy. That goes for both of them. I don’t know which biddy is loonier. I’d really like to know if my wife is crazier than Melba.”

“If it’s a horse apiece,” said Marvin, “who gives a damn?”

“No shit,” said Gary.

Horace smiled and blew his nose. Marvin Windows knew what he was talking about.

“So, what are our thoughts on Grenada?” asked Horace. “Do we have an opinion on our situation, Marvin?”

“Do I have an opinion on what?”

“On Grenada,” said Horace. “We invaded the island of Grenada yesterday.”

“Where the Sam Hill is Grenada?”

“East of Central America,” said Horace. “They only have twelve hundred men in their entire military. The war is already over. Reagan just made the announcement. We won.”

“Why did we invade Grenada?” asked Marvin.

“We had to rescue some American medical students,” said Horace.

“There was a Marxist coup,” said Gary. “The Marxists are against medical students.”

“Huh,” said Marvin. “Well, I don’t have any opinion on the matter. I didn’t see the newspaper.”

Again, excellent topicality in this conversation but in it, we see that nothing really changes. The boys in the car, if they are lucky, will grow up and bitch and bicker like these old men in the diner. And some of them will be well-versed in current events and some will be clueless and despite their life experiences, they will still seem slightly like boys. And I was sure Mitch would become Horace as he aged, smarter and slightly deeper than his peers. I wonder if anyone else saw the similarities between them.

I think this book will become a part of the few books I re-read periodically. I read this book and the truth of all these people rang true to me from the first page and despite all of the marvelous dialogue, all the point-on descriptions, despite the overall mastery of this book, I think the real reason to read it is because it is so true. I intend to read everything from Klosterman I can get my hands on. I want to see how much more truth he may have to convey to me.

Darkness Walks by Jason Offutt

This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books

Book: Darkness Walks: The Shadow People Among Us

Author: Jason Offutt

Type of Book: Non-fiction, paranormal, paranormal squick

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: I tend to think most examinations of the paranormal are odd, and this one was no exception.

Availability: Published by 2009 by Anomalist Press, you can get a copy here:

Comments: Oh, lord help me, I love books like this. I love reading people’s accounts of the bizarre and how they filter their experiences through their own beliefs and fears. This book satisfied several book urges of mine at once. Paranormal tales, people telling their own stories, high pathos and low humor. Despite the fact that I had to create a category for this book called “Paranormal Squick,” that is not the fault of the author. Offutt structures this book in a manner wherein he categorizes the stories people have to tell. This book is not an advocacy – it is mostly Offutt’s attempts to sort and label people’s experiences. At no point does Jason Offutt attempt to say that he has a line on an explanation of Shadow People and since he does not have a specific advocacy, the at times horribleness that can come from books about paranormal were not his fault – but more laternon why I got a definite squick from a few of these stories, squick that could be avoided with a judicious application of science and reason.

According to this book, Shadow People are not really ghosts. They are a phenomenon that have occurred in various cultures yet are hard to pin down, definition-wise, as they manifest in various ways and impact people differently. In America, they’ve only really started being discussed in earnest in the last couple of decades but parapsychologists like Brad Steiger believe that Shadow People have always been around. They generally appear as black, opaque, and two-dimensional. Many report having seen Shadow People with red, glowing eyes. Most reports of these entities are negative, as in the person who saw the Shadow Person was scared or felt dread. There were some reports of the Shadow People as a sort of Watcher element, looking over people but not in an evil or negative manner, but the vast majority of Shadow People are reported to be negative entities.

Offutt, who got lots of examples of people’s experiences with Shadow People via his website, divided the stories he was told as best he could, categorizing them in obvious ways, like benign Shadow People and negative or demonic Shadow People. But he also has less obvious categories, like Shadow People wearing hats and Shadow Animals. In the face of the amorphous quality of the experiences and the varied details, Offutt does a pretty good job sorting it all out.

Offutt, who clearly has a belief in the paranormal, does his level best in one chapter to discuss the science of Shadow People, though the science chapter invokes quantum physics, which never fails to evoke a serious eye roll from me because it is, no matter what any True Believer says, a theory attempting to explain a theory and as such is not doing anyone much good as a solution (and Richard Feynman admitted that no one really understands quantum mechanics, so take it to the bank that all those people using quantum anything to explain ghosts, psychics and prosperity theology likely have no friggin’ idea what they are talking about). And to be frank, the other science sources Offutt uses generally back my guffaws but it is interesting to think about string theory and how it could explain seeing Shadow People.

In those ten pages of science, Offutt discusses the most likely explanation for the vast majority of Shadow People sightings: sleep paralysis, which in my mind also edges into the hypnagogic tendency to see and hear things that are not there when one is in a state where one is not entirely awake. But then Offutt starts to discuss archetypes, which is not really a hard science, but rather a soft science, as psychology is a very uneven science at best. So don’t put a whole lot of faith into any of the science in this other than people see things and experience things when they are asleep and just waking up.

And, without belaboring the point too much, it is my assertion that 99.75% of everyone who experiences a paranormal event in the middle of the night says immediately and without any hesitation that what they experienced was not sleep paralysis or hypnagogia. It was too real, the terror too palpable, the vision too clear. But it is my belief that almost all the Shadow People and Animals discussed in this book can be explained via sleep paralysis, hypnagogia and the often overlooked alcohol. In fact, the book contains perfect examples of people refusing to entertain the idea of sleep paralysis or hypnagogia (the latter is not a topic Offutt discusses in depth in the book, just to be clear). Here’s one example from a woman who claims she was attacked by a Shadow Person:

One possible explanation for her experiences is sleep paralysis, but Cathy quickly dismissed this possibility. “I know that sleep paralysis is something that many people would think happened,” she said. “All I can say to those is, unless you have actually been attacked in this way, I wouldn’t chalk other people’s experience up to that. Having experienced this, I know that I was attacked by something.”

So yeah, know that as you read this, Offutt doesn’t really try to force people into a reasonable frame of reference – and I don’t think he should have as letting people’s stories tell themselves is a fine approach – and that seldom does anyone who experiences Shadow People want to consider the idea that these things could have happened for any reason that is not supernatural. (And if there is a heaven, I wish it would preserve me from ever again reading this argument, that until one experiences something one cannot judge the experience. It is a plea in earnest from people that we take them at their word and I am sympathetic to a point but extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. “Take my word for it because you haven’t experienced it” isn’t extraordinary evidence.)

Only a handful of sightings reported in this book were positive. Most of the people who saw the Shadow People were scared, but not terrified. But a few were outright terrified, felt the shadows were demonic entities, or that their safety was in peril. And this is where I come to my sense of Paranormal Squick, because any point of view that rejects outright reasonable explanations and embraces a frame of mind that causes them terror and fear is squicky. As I said above, Offutt does not advocate this position. He simply relates the tales but in these tales lies the squicky sense that if people would embrace notions other than an evil presence out to hurt them, their minds, hearts and lives would improve.

Take this disturbing example from Anne Williams from Australia, who was “roused at 3:00 a.m. one day” by a Shadow Person. She felt a presence standing over her, saw a figure that sounds a lot like descriptions of the Grim Reaper. Suddenly Anne felt pinned to the bed, locked down in fact. Then it gets really bad for Anne:

Anne lay on her back, trying to scream as the figure leaned into her. “I felt that it shoved its arm down my neck and was choking me, as nothing came out of my mouth,” she said. “Like no noise. I could not even hear myself scream, but I was.”

Tears ran down her face, soaking her pillow as she tried to scream but couldn’t. “I was trying to get up, which I could not,” she said. “I felt that it was trying to scare me to death.”

Anne invoked the name of God and drove the Shadow away for the night but it returned the next night. She prayed again and again it left. It returned again much later but finally disappeared. Though this woman was eventually rid of her Shadow Person, she was absolutely terrified when she experienced what she experienced and felt she was in peril. The belief that there is a shadowy, not entirely definable presence out to hurt you, rather than accepting that sleep paralysis combined with hypnogogia was likely the best explanation for this experience, left this woman in a state in which she was terrified.

Then take the case of Pat. He has seen Shadow People his entire life and sees them during the day as well as at night.

“I have seen these things in various places and they seem to have been following me around everywhere,” Pat said. “The feeling of pure evil is what scared the crap out of me because there were other instances in my life growing up where my mother or I also felt that strong feeling of pure evil. They have followed me most of my life.”

Although Pat tries not to think about these Shadows, he can’t truly stop. “I’m still curious to what exactly they are and why they are following me around.”

This is utterly heartbreaking to be sure, to spend one’s life feeling as if one is being tracked and stalked by Shadow People with evil intent. And maybe Pat has undergone all kinds of processes before he immediately settled on the notion that he is being stalked by evil supernatural entities. But if so, that wasn’t presented in his story. I really want to know if Pat or his mother ever underwent cognitive tests to see if they process visual stimuli in a manner that might cause them to see Shadow People. Have either undergone psychiatric testing to see if there is some sort of disorder that would cause them to feel a sense of paranoia that evil is stalking them. I wonder if both were exposed to some element in their homes together that could have permanently altered their cognitive processes. There are a lot of questions people should ask before settling on the idea that events are paranormal but often, those questions get pushed aside in the horror of the moment and you end up with a young man like Pat who has spent a life feeling as if true evil was just over his shoulder. Maybe Pat has done all of this. Maybe the paranormal is the only option left to explain these events but I wish I knew more about him.

This book is full of examples of people who are scared, terrified, uneasy and sure that evil lurks and no real sense that much was done to explain those terrible feelings without immediately focusing on the paranormal. That is squicky to me, the idea of people suffering when there could be a very reasonable explanation of what happened to them.

Then, in the midst of all the terror, there was this inadvertently hilarious gem from the chapter on Shadow Cats and other animals.

Max and his cousin sat in the darkness on the back steps of the house. The sounds of laughter poured from inside the house, a party for Max’s uncle nearing full crescendo. As they sat in the tungsten glow from windows that bathed the yard in a dissipating yellow, they could make out the fence that lined the property.

But Max and his cousin wished they hadn’t. “We noticed a Shadow creeping along the fence,” Max said. “I guess it noticed it was being watched and stopped. It was hunched over like it was trying to be covert.”

The boys stared at a black, cat-shaped Shadow in curiosity, but the curiosity quickly faded into terror. “It turned its head to look at us,” Max said. “It had bright yellow eyes. As soon as it looked at us, it turned and ran into the shadows.” They ran inside.

What was the creeping Shadow in the back yard? Max didn’t know…

I’m gonna venture a guess that the creeping Shadow was a neighborhood cat stalking small bugs attracted by the yellow light. The slinking cat noticed there were humans on the back porch and the yellow light reflected off the cat’s already amber colored eyes and made the eyes seem like they were glowing yellow. The cat, realizing there were drunk humans nearby (no one said they were drinking but the idea of a raucous party lends well to the idea that a beer or two may have been consumed), slunk off into the shadows. So… two paranormal-impressionable young men who may or may not have been drinking saw a cat-shape hunched over near a fence line late in the evening, illuminated by yellowish light and immediately assumed it was a terrifying visage of a Shadow Cat. Oh my…

Despite moments of low humor, or maybe because of it, this book is well-worth reading. I appreciate that Offutt wasn’t pushing an agenda, that he let people tell their stories as they interpreted them, and while I was troubled by the fact that people lived in terror rather than examining the ideas of sleep-paralysis or investigating to see if there was a carbon monoxide leak in their rooms, none of that was Offutt’s fault and is an unavoidable by-product of almost all paranormal examinations. All in all, as a skeptic I got to recreate in my head explanations for some of the tales and as a person drawn to tales of the paranormal, I got to wallow in the weirdness. A win-win.

And how can I be both a skeptic and a lover of the paranormal? Though I am a skeptic in all matters paranormal, my mind is still strangely open. Mr. Oddbooks and I had a sustained paranormal experience that lasted for several years and still, from time to time, manifests. We tore each experience apart and could never find any explanation that did not venture into the realm of the paranormal. Mr. Oddbooks is a computer programmer. He is a man ruled by the rational. And I am an atheist who to this day cannot really reconcile the idea that a spirit might have attached herself to us. For if I don’t believe in god, souls, or the afterlife, how could a benevolent soul have come into my life? I am to this day challenged theologically by what happened to us.

But it must be said that when we experienced paranormal activities, we did everything we could to explain them rationally. First, we determined we were still sane (relatively speaking). Then we checked air vents, made sure there was no gas leak, tested sound, determined if there was anything in our environment that could create specific odors. We determined whether or not neighbors were home when certain events occurred. We wondered if our home was accessible to a prankster. We even grilled each other. We mulled every possibility. We could never find an active cause for the activity. But more importantly, we never determined a passive cause for the activity. We never once felt the activities at night. We did not hear voices or smell odors as we were about to fall asleep. We did not waken in the night to be confronted by phenomena. All the events and things we experienced happened during the day, when we were awake and active. The events occurred in multiple dwellings. One of my experiences happened when I was surfing the web and I could have been in a borderline hypnagogic state. Other than that, we were always clear minded, awake, alert and physically active when the events occurred.

But because the experience was overwhelmingly positive, I don’t worry too much. The feeling we had after the events was of comfort, that the Universe is largely benevolent and that there was a force we could not understand that was looking out for us. This is a huge stretch, I know that, to assign such feelings to something we cannot explain, and this is a gray area for us. We ultimately decided that the sense that there was maybe a spirit looking out for us in no way affected our common sense or provoked us into to feeling anything but a warm sense of kindness. The experience did not lead us to think we are bulletproof nor did it cause us to alter our behavior so settling on the idea of a benevolent spirit in no way harms us but also in no way makes us feel powerful. Perhaps one could argue that false comfort is a bad thing but in this case I tend to disagree. So in a sense, it is easier for me than the people who feel they have been attacked or stalked by evil because it seems as if it may be less important to explain lovely experiences than those that terrify you. But having been in a position wherein I could not then (nor can I now) explain what happened, I have a decided preference for looking at all options and exhausting all possibilities before settling on the paranormal. I don’t think I’ll ever have an answer but I keep hoping I will one day and I think that desire to find some explanation is why I continue to read books like this, even when I suspect they will end up worrying me or making me laugh.

So if you have an interest in this sort of thing, you can do much worse than reading Offutt’s work. I think I will be checking out other titles from him. Here’s hoping your holidays are calm and free of malignant spirits, unless you are a Scrooge and need a Marley to come and set you right.

Proof for bibliomania

This post originally appeared on I Read Everything

Okay, this is why I think I could be considered a legitimate bibliomaniac. In the last week, I have combed a local book sale twice and if I didn’t have a to-the-penny tally on our checking account, I’d probably go back. We bought so much the first time the girls recognized us when we walked in. Anyway, I thought I’d share the books I have purchased over the last week, selected purely on impulse though I did manage to score a few items from my Amazon wish list. I also am often conflicted about buying remaindered books because the writer gets no proceeds from the sale but a good majority of these books are out of print. The rest are titles I would never have read unless the price was so amenable. In a couple of cases, a new copy of the book was 10 times more than the price in front of me and when you are a crazy book person, sometimes you just have to buy a book on sale and be glad your principles stand firm 90% of the time.

Anyway, I like seeing books other people have bought and figure there must be others like me. Enjoy! (Also, this does not include the titles Mr. Everything purchased, mostly books on how to build stuff and piracy on the high seas…)

1. Girl Trouble: The True Saga of Superstar Gloria Trevi and the Secret Teenage Sex Cult That Stunned the World by Christopher McDougall

2. How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World: A Short History of Modern Delusions by Francis Ween

3. Art and Sex in Greenwich Village: A Memoir of Gay Literary Life After Stonewall by Felice Picano

4. Hatred: The Psychological Descent Into Violence by Willard Gaylin, M.D.

5. I, Goldstein: My Screwed Life by Al Goldstein and Josh Alan Friedman

6. Jesus Land: A Memoir by Julia Scheeres

7. Fear: A Cultural History by Joanna Bourke

8. Foreskin’s Lament: A Memoir by Shalom Auslander

9. The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History by Jonanthan Franzen

10. Angel of Vengeance: The "Girl Assassin," the Governor of St. Petersburg, and Russia’s Revolutionary World by Ana Siljak

11. The Miracle Detective: An Investigation of Holy Visions
by Randall Sullivan

12. An Elegant Madness: High Society in Regency England
by Venetia Murray

13. Living at the Movies by Jim Carroll

14. All For Love: The Scandalous Life and Times of Royal Mistress Mary Robinson by Amanda Elyot

15. Bumping Into Geniuses: My Life Inside the Rock and Roll Business by Danny Goldberg

16. Chick Flick Road Kill: A Behind the Scenes Odyssey into Movie-Made America by Alicia Rebensdorf

17. A Shining Affliction: A Story of Harm and Healing in Psychotherapy by Annie G. Rogers, Ph.D

18. Simone Weil by Francine Du Plessix Gray

19. Revenge of the Donut Boys: True Stories of Lust, Fame, Survival and Multiple Personality by Mike Sager

20. When the Husband is the Suspect by F. Lee Bailey and Jean Rabe

21. Outside the Gates of Science: Why It’s Time for the Paranormal to Come in from the Cold by Damien Broderick

22. Shriek: An Afterword by Jeff VanderMeer

23. Rumpole and the Reign of Terror by John Mortimer

24. The Casebook of Forensic Detection: How Science Solved 100 of the World’s Most Baffling Crimes by Colin Evans

25. The Forger: An Extraordinary Story of Survival in Wartime Berlin by Cioma Schonhaus

26. Annie’s Ghosts: A Journey Into a Family Secret by Steve Luxenberg

27. Death Sentences: How Cliches, Weasel Words and Management-Speak Are Strangling Public Language by Don Watson

28. Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles
by Jeanette Winterson

29. The Politics of Psychopharmacology by Timothy Leary

30. The Restless Sleep: Inside New York City’s Cold Case Squad by Stacy Horn

31. Bind, Torture, Kill: The Inside Story of the Serial Killer Next Door by Roy Wenzl, et al

32. Hubert’s Freaks: The Rare-Book Dealer, the Times Square Talker, and the Lost Photos of Diane Arbus by Gregory Gibson

33. Rat Scabies and the Holy Grail: Can a Punk Rock Legend Find What Monty Python Couldn’t? by Christopher Dawes

34. Panic in Level 4: Cannibals, Killer Viruses, and Other Journeys to the Edge of Science by Richard Preston

35. The Mammoth Book of Celebrity Murder: Murder Played Out in the Spotlight of Maximum Publicity by Chris and Julie Ellis

36. Hunger: An Unnatural History by Sharman Apt Russell

37. The Bone Lady: Life as a Forensic Anthropologist by Mary H. Manheim

38. Her Husband: Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath–A Marriage
by Diane Middlebrook

39. Never Mind the Pollacks: A Rock and Roll Novel by Neal Pollack

40. The Templars by Piers Paul Read

41. Charles Fort: The Man Who Invented the Supernatural
by Jim Steinmeyer

42. Muses, Madmen, and Prophets: Rethinking the History, Science, and Meaning of Auditory Hallucination by Daniel B. Smith

43. Loose Girl: A Memoir of Promiscuity by Kerry Cohen

44. Provenance: How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art by Laney Salisbury and Aly Sujo

45. Hoax: Why Americans are Suckered by White House Lies
by Nicholas Von Hoffman

46. Wish I Could Be There: Notes From a Phobic Life
by Allen Shawn

47. Cosmopolis: A Novel by Don DeLillo

48. Transmission by Hari Kunzru

49. Paula Spencer Roddy Doyle

50. Oh, Play That Thing (Volume 2 of The Last Roundup)
by Roddy Doyle

51. The Ten-Year Nap by Meg Wolitzer

52. All the Sad Young Literary Men by Keith Gessen

53. After the Plague: Stories by T.C. Boyle

54. The Mammoth Book of Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘N’ Roll
edited by Jim Driver

55. Consequences by Penelope Lively

56. Rumpole Misbehaves: A Novel by John Mortimer

57. Becoming Eichmann: Rethinking the Life, Crimes, and Trial of a by David Cesarani

This is what the experts call a “clue”

This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books

Okay, this is why I think I could be considered a legitimate bibliomaniac. In the last week, I have combed a local book sale twice and if I didn’t have a to-the-penny tally on our checking account, I’d probably go back. We bought so much the first time the girls recognized us when we walked in. Anyway, I thought I’d share the books I have purchased over the last week, selected purely on impulse though I did manage to score a few items from my Amazon wish list. I also am often conflicted about buying remaindered books because the writer gets no proceeds from the sale but a good majority of these books are out of print. The rest are titles I would never have read unless the price was so amenable. In a couple of cases, a new copy of the book was 10 times more than the price in front of me and when you are a crazy book person, sometimes you just have to buy a book on sale and be glad your principles stand firm 90% of the time.

Anyway, I like seeing books other people have bought and figure there must be others like me. Enjoy! (Also, this does not include the titles Mr. Oddbooks purchased, mostly books on how to build stuff and piracy on the high seas…)

1. Girl Trouble: The True Saga of Superstar Gloria Trevi and the Secret Teenage Sex Cult That Stunned the World by Christopher McDougall

2. How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World: A Short History of Modern Delusions by Francis Ween

3. Art and Sex in Greenwich Village: A Memoir of Gay Literary Life After Stonewall by Felice Picano

4. Hatred: The Psychological Descent Into Violence by Willard Gaylin, M.D.

5. I, Goldstein: My Screwed Life by Al Goldstein and Josh Alan Friedman

6. Jesus Land: A Memoir by Julia Scheeres

7. Fear: A Cultural History by Joanna Bourke

8. Foreskin’s Lament: A Memoir by Shalom Auslander

9. The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History by Jonanthan Franzen

10. Angel of Vengeance: The "Girl Assassin," the Governor of St. Petersburg, and Russia’s Revolutionary World by Ana Siljak

11. The Miracle Detective: An Investigation of Holy Visions
by Randall Sullivan

12. An Elegant Madness: High Society in Regency England
by Venetia Murray

13. Living at the Movies by Jim Carroll

14. All For Love: The Scandalous Life and Times of Royal Mistress Mary Robinson by Amanda Elyot

15. Bumping Into Geniuses: My Life Inside the Rock and Roll Business by Danny Goldberg

16. Chick Flick Road Kill: A Behind the Scenes Odyssey into Movie-Made America by Alicia Rebensdorf

17. A Shining Affliction: A Story of Harm and Healing in Psychotherapy by Annie G. Rogers, Ph.D

18. Simone Weil by Francine Du Plessix Gray

19. Revenge of the Donut Boys: True Stories of Lust, Fame, Survival and Multiple Personality by Mike Sager

20. When the Husband is the Suspect by F. Lee Bailey and Jean Rabe

21. Outside the Gates of Science: Why It’s Time for the Paranormal to Come in from the Cold by Damien Broderick

22. Shriek: An Afterword by Jeff VanderMeer

23. Rumpole and the Reign of Terror by John Mortimer

24. The Casebook of Forensic Detection: How Science Solved 100 of the World’s Most Baffling Crimes by Colin Evans

25. The Forger: An Extraordinary Story of Survival in Wartime Berlin by Cioma Schonhaus

26. Annie’s Ghosts: A Journey Into a Family Secret by Steve Luxenberg

27. Death Sentences: How Cliches, Weasel Words and Management-Speak Are Strangling Public Language by Don Watson

28. Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles
by Jeanette Winterson

29. The Politics of Psychopharmacology by Timothy Leary

30. The Restless Sleep: Inside New York City’s Cold Case Squad by Stacy Horn

31. Bind, Torture, Kill: The Inside Story of the Serial Killer Next Door by Roy Wenzl, et al

32. Hubert’s Freaks: The Rare-Book Dealer, the Times Square Talker, and the Lost Photos of Diane Arbus by Gregory Gibson

33. Rat Scabies and the Holy Grail: Can a Punk Rock Legend Find What Monty Python Couldn’t? by Christopher Dawes

34. Panic in Level 4: Cannibals, Killer Viruses, and Other Journeys to the Edge of Science by Richard Preston

35. The Mammoth Book of Celebrity Murder: Murder Played Out in the Spotlight of Maximum Publicity by Chris and Julie Ellis

36. Hunger: An Unnatural History by Sharman Apt Russell

37. The Bone Lady: Life as a Forensic Anthropologist by Mary H. Manheim

38. Her Husband: Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath–A Marriage
by Diane Middlebrook

39. Never Mind the Pollacks: A Rock and Roll Novel by Neal Pollack

40. The Templars by Piers Paul Read

41. Charles Fort: The Man Who Invented the Supernatural
by Jim Steinmeyer

42. Muses, Madmen, and Prophets: Rethinking the History, Science, and Meaning of Auditory Hallucination by Daniel B. Smith

43. Loose Girl: A Memoir of Promiscuity by Kerry Cohen

44. Provenance: How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art by Laney Salisbury and Aly Sujo

45. Hoax: Why Americans are Suckered by White House Lies
by Nicholas Von Hoffman

46. Wish I Could Be There: Notes From a Phobic Life
by Allen Shawn

47. Cosmopolis: A Novel by Don DeLillo

48. Transmission by Hari Kunzru

49. Paula Spencer Roddy Doyle

50. Oh, Play That Thing (Volume 2 of The Last Roundup)
by Roddy Doyle

51. The Ten-Year Nap by Meg Wolitzer

52. All the Sad Young Literary Men by Keith Gessen

53. After the Plague: Stories by T.C. Boyle

54. The Mammoth Book of Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘N’ Roll
edited by Jim Driver

55. Consequences by Penelope Lively

56. Rumpole Misbehaves: A Novel by John Mortimer

57. Becoming Eichmann: Rethinking the Life, Crimes, and Trial of a by David Cesarani

You Had Me At Woof by Julie Klam

This post originally appeared on I Read Everything

Book: You Had Me At Woof: How Dogs Taught Me the Secrets of Happiness

Author: Julie Klam

Type of Book: Non-fiction, memoir, book about animals

Why Did I Read This Book: I saw this book on an endcap at Borders and the dog on the cover just shouted out to me, “Buy this book, buy it now!” Googly-eyed animals suck me in every time. The dog on the cover reminded me of my long lost Daisy (her Christian name was Daisyheadmaisy), a bug-eyed cat who began my love for creatures with bulging eyes.

Availability: Published by Riverhead Books in 2010, you can get a copy here:

Comments: This is going to be one of those insufferable reviews wherein I process my reactions about a book using examples from my own life. In this case, I really can’t help it. While Klam is a dog-woman, I am a cat-lady and generally one would think the two might not have a lot in common. But a rescuer is a rescuer and people who love deeply creatures with googly eyes are cut from the same cloth, and that cloth is one that talks a lot about its experiences. It was fascinating to see the lessons Klam learned rescuing dogs and how they were at times eerily similar to the lessons I have learned, but I think the lesson that is the most universal is that loving animals makes you a better person. Yeah, there’s a lot more to this book than just that sappy reduction, but it just make me feel sort of warm inside to realize that my eventual impression that Klam is a good egg was further reinforced.

Klam rescues Boston terriers (I thought the little dogs were pugs of some variety but no, they are Boston terriers and I sort of want one now…) and in the course of rescuing dogs that were not well cared for, that were abandoned and had behavioral problems, she came to a lot of conclusions about her own life after interacting with the animals she saved.

Like me, Klam got her first real pet relatively later in life. Klam’s first Boston terrier, the love of her dog life named Otto, came into her life when she was 30. Well, Otto didn’t come into her life – she sought him out after a dream and Otto proved to be her animal soul mate. And while Klam says within six months of adopting Otto she grew up, I think rather that adopting Otto proved to her that she was far more capable of selflessness and responsibility than she thought, traits lacking in a lot of adults.

…I had practically restructured my life for Otto, without even realizing it. I didn’t order spicy foods because he couldn’t eat them, and I always ordered enough for two. If he got up during the night, I got up and took him out. If he had an accident on the floor, I gave him Pepto-Bismol. I never resented anything I had to do for him… It took time but my relationship with Otto made me realize that if you love someone, you’re more than willing to compromise to meet their needs–whether it be more nights of roast chicken than you would ordinarily choose, skipping an evening on the town, or not watching a television show with a barking dog.

My first real pet came to me when I was 24. Adolph, the most epic cat who ever lived. I had no idea how to care for him at first and fed him yucky food until he developed crystals in his urine. Even after I put him on a strict premium diet, I would give him small plates of whatever I was eating. I knew he didn’t want any, he knew he didn’t want any, but he needed to know he had the right to decide, and he always refused. I fashioned a bizarre pillow for him out of a half-empty kleenex box, or rather he took over the box when he realized he could set his head into it and nestle neatly into the kleenex. I was not as noble about cleaning his messes as Julie was with Otto as Adolph was a bad cat and frequently did very gross things on purpose – ask me one day why I cannot eat guacamole – but I too learned that if I could share a space with that cat and so quickly adjust my life in ways that seemed absurd, I was less set in my ways than I thought. I also came to understand that I was never likely to be a good mother – I am, in fact, far better with animals than people.

I loved reading Klam’s experiences with pet psychics and her attempts to determine if she could become a psychic herself. It was a thing of humorous beauty, but I admit I approached pet psychics after a rescue. You see, we couldn’t determine if Patchwork Sally’s kittens were still alive out in the nasty field where we found her (she was lactating when we grabbed her). The pet psychics all assured us they were dead but we found them all alive and that was when we really wished we could communicate with animals because that was a trapping mission that redefined frustration. But it was a nice comfort to know that another reasonably sane person wondered if she could indeed walk with the animals, talk with the animals. Klam’s lesson? It’s always a good idea to try new things because in trying to be an animal psychic, she learned she loved telling the stories. My lesson? I will always end up in a field during a Texas rainstorm searching for lost kittens even if verified psychics tell me not to bother.

Sadly, Otto passed away when Klam was pregnant. She later felt that Otto had been looking over her during her pregnancy, and I often felt like Adolph lasted longer than he should have because I descended into the weakest place in my life the last year he was alive. Immobilized by a leg break that exacerbated a prescription pill addiction, my husband and I spent a year in hell as I pulled myself out of the hole, and Adolph was my constant companion the entire time. I came back better and stronger than I could ever have hoped, and I always wondered if Adolph could sense we would be okay, that he didn’t need to stay here as the cord that held us together. Of course, I romanticize him at times, as did Klam with her Otto, as she searched through puppy pictures to see if maybe Otto was reincarnated in another dog. But luckily Julie found dogs who answered her emotions, dogs whose lives she made so much better. I already had rescued hundreds of cats before Adolph died, and had lost precious cats before he died so I guess I had a slight emotional advantage but like Klam and her Otto, I wonder if there will ever be another Adolph. The answer is no, but I still wonder (and hope) anyway.

And while I am not going to touch on all the lessons Klam learned because I think you should buy this book and read it for yourself, her experiences rescuing dogs with a rescue group closely mirrored the nonsense I encountered in my rescues. Owners who didn’t tell the unvarnished truth when surrendering animals, citing the continual “My kid has allergies!” excuse when really it was “I haven’t put an ounce of effort into training this animal/I resent even minimal vet expenses/I found an animal I like better/I procured this animal knowing I would need to change my lifestyle but am too much of an asshole to change/My boyfriend told me to get rid of it.” Oh yes, they promise to help with expenses and then you never hear from them again. Note to all who genuinely need to relinquish an animal for legitimate reasons: Irresponsible pet owners have ruined it for everyone. If you tell a rescue group that you will donate money to the cause, you will be surprised how quickly the group will respond, not out of greed but because I don’t know a single rescuer who has not spent so much money on animals that even a tiny donation given in earnest doesn’t make them feel like their efforts are at least appreciated.

So much of this book was a reminder to me of my own time in rescue: watching as Klam got her dog legs and learned how to negotiate with dogs that needed more help than others; reading as she suffers the heartbreaking loss that we all feel when we feel responsible for not doing enough to prevent harm from coming to our animals even though, as we all know, accidents happen; the deep bonds we develop with animals as we learn about their personalities and they learn about ours.

The part of the book that made me cry the hardest (and I began to cry when I read the dedication Klam makes to her husband because I too am married to a man who would never say no to an animal in need) was the chapter about Dahlia, an older dog for whom life had been very unkind, a dog who was not particularly attractive and whose personality seemed blunted.

There was something about her expression, her eyes, that reminded me of Migrant Mother, Dorthea Lange’s famous portrait of a farm laborer in the dust bowl of the Depression. The woman, Florence Owens Thompson, was thirty-two in the picture, but she looked to be in her mid-fifties. Maybe Dahlia was younger than she looked: maybe she’d been beaten down by life, too.

Yet, as Klam and her husband did not see the magic in Dahlia, their daughter Violet did.

I felt very sorry for Dahlia, but I wasn’t in love with her. But someone in the family was. Violet would sit by Dahlia in her bed, set up tea parties for the two of them, and sing long, made-up songs about Queen Dahlia and the magical fairies of the enchanted wood. She read Dahlia books and selected videos for Dahlia to watch. Paul and I looked on, trying to figure it out. Dahlia was the least charismatic animal either of us had ever come across and yet Violet saw her as the belle of the ball.

Kids are smart like that. But the reason Dahlia’s story resonated with me so well was because I knew what would happen the moment Klam mentioned that Dahlia’s tummy seemed bloated. The vet wanted a sample of Dahlia’s urine because they thought she had Cushing’s Disease. Yeah. The second Klam speculates maybe Dahlia is younger than she appears, we were on the right track, but then with a swollen belly? Oh yeah. You know what’s about to happen if you’ve been in the rescue game any length of time. Cue the puppies. Though when the inevitable started happening, Klam was sure it was Dahlia preparing to die. She woke in the middle of the night with a strong feeling Dahlia had died but instead found two little creatures in Dahlia’s bed. And like all of us who have had this scene go down in our homes, she realized that the vet in question was probably an idiot and that the trite saying that all life is a miracle is true, especially when it is unexpected life. Since Dahlia was an older dog, Klam also ended up doing that marvelous thing every rescuer will end up doing at some point – she bottle fed the puppies until Dahlia’s health was sorted out to the point that she could reliably nurse.

Then Klam did the thing that has most assuredly won her a place in the heaven where happy dogs go – she kept Dahlia together with her two puppies, Wisteria and Fiorello. Dahlia had likely had her babies wrenched from her in all her previous pregnancies yet despite her history and her age, had been a doting mother. The puppies were closely bonded. Klam wanted them to remain a family, an idea that many people dismiss, but having seen what happens when cats who are siblings or parents-offspring are permitted to remain together, often the bond is visible even to people who do not know the cats are related. Dahlia got to stay with her puppies until she died, and passed knowing her puppies were with people who love them. That seems like an extraordinarily sentimental and presumptive thing to say because who really knows what animals think? Except you do know. The instincts that drive humans drive animals too. They don’t want a flat-screen TV or the latest smart phone, but like humans, animals want their offspring safe and happy.

This all reminded me of pretty Sweetness, a cat who surprised us with stealth kittens. She had been a stray in Dallas. My mother fed her and begged me to come and get her when Sweetness showed up with a litter of kittens. So we drove four hours one way in a poorly air conditioned truck in the Texas summer and fetched Sweetness and her kittens (well, four were hers – mom, in her zeal, grabbed a completely unrelated kitten who was at least four weeks younger than Sweetness’ other kittens). Sweetness’s kittens went to the Austin Humane Society and found a home, but since Sweetness had not finished lactating yet, we held onto her for a couple of weeks. We would get her spayed, then take her so she could get a new home, too.

Sweetness was a large, strange girl. She liked humans but loathed all cats, even her own children once they became old enough to qualify as cats. She mostly wanted to be left alone. She over groomed her stomach, she sounded cranky, she looked cranky. We felt she would be happier in a home without other cats. We made the spay appointment with our vet (whom I also later judged to be a moron), but the appointment got screwed up and we brought her home, intact. We rescheduled the appointment in two weeks and before that date came, we noticed Sweetness was resembling a bowling pin. Surely not. Surely we had not transported a pregnant cat across county lines. But we had. She gave birth before the spay appointment came due and gave birth to the most superlative litter of kittens I have ever known. We kept the runt, Clementine, because she seemed fragile and because the Humane Society was up to their eyeballs in black kittens, and the rest went to the Humane Society. I still miss The Goose and Portnoy. But after that litter, Sweetness made it known to us that she wouldn’t mind staying if we would leave her alone, so we did and she would come to see us periodically for attention, then would slink off to her hiding places. She proved to be so nervous that we knew being at a shelter would have made her miserable and would have broken her odd spirit.

Sweetness could be kind to her grown baby but she mostly wanted to be left alone and her reclusiveness made it hard to know when she was ill. She developed renal failure and passed way in 2009. And while she never really liked the other cats, she was a part of their extended family. In fact, it was Tabby-mama, dancing around outside whatever room Sweetness was in, that alerted us to her being ill. Tabby was bereft when Sweetness died. We all were. But we took a certain amount of comfort knowing that all of her babies, including her foster kitten, all went to wonderful homes and that her silly girl Clementine is here reminding us of her, for like her mother, she has no use for other cats and is extremely nervous. But that didn’t stop Tabby-mama from tailing her for days after Sweetness died to make sure Clementine would be okay without her mother.

Also, Sweetness smelled like Fritos, as did Klam’s beloved Otto. One of many little cross-species coincidences. In one scene, Klam describes picking up her dog Moses and singing Cole Porter’s “Cheek to Cheek” as she danced with him. We sing a very bastardized version of this song to Noodle, our most defective cat.

Noodle, you’re my Noodle,
And I love you so much I can hardly speak.
‘Cause you’ve got too many toes on your four feet. (Alternate last line: Even though you have a tendency to leak.

And clearly, like Klam, I like telling the stories from my Island of Misfit Cats.

This was just a great book, pure and simple. I loved as Klam discussed the people she worked with to rescue dogs, the merely whackadoodle and the outright creepy and negligent, yet she never became shrill and overly judgmental. I loved reading as her family negotiated their way around new dogs, and how the dogs reacted to one another. I was especially grateful that Klam didn’t sugar coat the fact that some of the dogs just weren’t… her kind of dogs. But that never stopped her from doing her best for them, and that is how it should be. Klam respected deeply the individual dignity of each dog she encountered, beginning as a neurotic mother to Otto and becoming a source of salvation to Dahlia.

That she very clearly tells stories that will resonate with all animal lovers should be clear from the amount of remembrances she evoked from me. This book, humorous and touching, bordering on sentimental in a way that makes sentimental work without cloying stickiness, was simply amazing. I read it in one sitting. I think you should read this book and then maybe go volunteer at your local SPCA or rescue groups and then tell the stories of the animals you meet. See what lessons you learn and how they correspond to Klam’s. I tend not to read heartwarming books but I am very glad I read this one.

It’s Mawdsley by David Baker

This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books

Book: It’s Mawdsley

Author: David Baker

Type of Book: Fiction, indescribable, contender for the grossest book I have ever read

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: Because if one were to go strictly on the basis of this book, one would have a hard time determining if David Baker is completely insane or an utter genius.

Availability: Self-published by Lulu.com, you can get a copy here:

Comments: Okay, I have to be blunt. I can’t imagine you want to read this book. I’m not saying you shouldn’t and I’m not saying you should, but mostly I sense that you, gentle reader, might run screaming into the hills if you did read this. And I am not saying that because I think you are somehow weak or unwilling to read rough content. I mean, you’re here reading. Clearly, you, like me, are into the outre. Rather, I say that I can’t imagine you would want to read this book because Baker doesn’t just push the envelope. He takes the envelope, pukes on it and shoves it up the reader’s ass.

On the most basic level, I think Baker is on to something. I think the extremity of this book is daring and in some places, a thing of beauty. There are places where the book is so self-indulgent and poorly written that I wanted to throttle Baker on general principle. It was all the more sad then that Baker often strayed from his strengths because when he can be arsed to write well, he has an amazing ear for accent and dialogue, a gift for dark and foul humor, and his willingness to write some of the most disgusting content I have ever read shows a bravery that is either foolhardy or could, with some restraint, result in books that everyone who likes the grotesque would want to read.

The plot of this book is deceptively simple. A young man who has no real place in the world goes on a voyage, though it is not a voyage of discovery. It is a voyage of mayhem. But it is a voyage nonetheless. If Holden Caufield had been aggressively stupid, smelly, violent, a human trafficker, a pedophile, a rapist, a racist and completely without any sort of redemption, Catcher in the Rye might have resembled It’s Mawdsley. Both of them certainly hate phonies. Mawdsley, who cannot keep a job in the UK, travels and rapes and vomits and sells his half-siblings to sodomite priests, ends up at the Academy Awards in the USA, and through a series of misadventures via the trip back to the UK, ends up looking like Osama bin Laden and paralyzed from the waist down. Thankfully, he dies and goes to heaven and shits up the afterlife. And oh yeah, Mawdsley has issues with the number two. Not sure what that was about but there you go. And also it is important to know that Mawdsley longs to utterly befoul and defile Victoria Beckham, aka Posh Spice. His repellent longing for the singer is, in fact, an important plot point in the book.

There is no real way to discuss the depths of depravity and mayhem that Mawdsley engages in without discussing the fact that this is a novel that begins as a subversive adventure into absurdism that quickly descends into anarchy, bordering on complete fucking nihilism. Nothing wrong with nihilism but the way that Baker arranges this novel makes it difficult to know what his point is at times. Yes, he’s telling a disgusting tale of one of the most despicable human beings ever to live, yet given the speech of other characters and in some places an utter lack of accurate detail, I honestly have no idea if the degeneration in writing is due to a point Baker is trying to make, a lack of attention to detail or simply fatigue and oversight on Baker’s part.

Craig Mawdsley, in the guise of a chav, isn’t really a symbol for the perceived degeneracy of those who embody such a label because Mawdsley is beyond even the worst mankind can generate organically. He is a superhuman cartoon caricature of horrific impulses. Initially, it simply seems like Mawdsley is a gross reprobate who cannot hold a job, seldom showers, walks around in his own puke and has sex with anything vaguely female who is willing. The beginning of the novel shows a clever wit, an attention to language and seemed like it was going to end up a subversive story of one chav who conquers all despite his hideousness (and in a sense, that is exactly what happens). Let me quote some passages from the beginning to show what I mean. Taken from chapter 1, called “SUDDENEPIPHANYHAVINGCUNT:”

The week previous I’d had a really hard time dealing with not being able to sign on anymore. After 3 fucking years on the Billy Joel I was suddenly being forced to get a fucking job. I’d seen all the ads for this Job Drive wank on the tele but for some reason I thought I’d never be put on it.

“You can’t do that,” I told the Job Centre dickheads. “That’s, like, the biggest cunts’ trick ever.”

“It’s what the government wants,” they said.

In other words, tough fucking tits, yeah?

Okay, yeah, it’s totally gonna be like a mix of Trainspotting and Onslow from Keeping Up Appearances. I am on terra firma with this, but Baker has no intention of staying on roads I expect and, frankly, it would have been too easy had Baker continued in this vein. But it was fun while it lasted. And it was fun, reading a merely degenerate and violent Mawdsley wreck his vengeance against more privileged and productive members of society. Take this excerpt, as Mawdsley takes offense to a student on a bus:

So what I did was, to make the nightmare more real for the wankstain, I leaned across me seat and str8 up mugged the Backstreet Boys bastard. He didn’t even try and stop me. He just watched me hand calmly weaselling about inside his coat pockets and bring out his wallet, “You want to look after this, m8,” I said. “I tell you what, I’ll look after it for you, yeah?” I didn’t even check to see what was in it. I just put it in me tracky bottoms’ pocket and ignored the prick for the rest of the journey like.

Now, you might feel sorry for the student loan re-payments tit. Now I’ve got 3 words for you, yeah? Bellend. The thing about them StudentCunts is, when they’re older and turn out to be the SmartCunts of the future like what they’re fucking supposed to be, it’ll be them what’ll be RobbingCunts. Trust me. They’re LongRangeCunts, them student dickheads.

Seriously, I loved the first 30 pages or so of this book. I found it ridiculously funny in some places. Like here, when Mawdsley is looking for his numbered time card so he can clock in on his first day on the job.

When I got to the front of the queue I searched the rack for me number but it wasn’t fucking there, was it? If the lights and the noise weren’t bad enough, all the queuing up dickheads behind me proceeded to batter me head further telling me to hurry up, the ImpatientCunts.

“YOU’RE COSTING ME MONEY, YOU PRICK.”

I looked over me shoulder and there was this sweaty fat fucker what looked like a fucking farmer, ready to kick 1 off on me.

“I CAN’T FIND ME FUCKING NUMBER,” I said, showing him this bit of paper what some Job Centre muppet gave me.

The dickhead grabbed a card out of the rack and flapped it about in me fucking face. “HERE IT IS, YOU DICKHEAD,” he shouted. “333.”

Written along the top in ballpoint was the number 333, not 333 like I told the fucking prince me number was. So I told the nobhead, “THAT’S 333, YOU FUCKING NOBHEAD. MY NUMBER’S 333.”

“YEAH,” he said. “THIS IS 333.”

“NO,” I said, “LISTEN VERY CAREFULLY, YEAH? MY NUMBER IS 333. THAT’S 333, YOU ABSOLUTE DICK.”

He looked at me like I was a fucking prick or something. “IT’S RIGHT HERE, YOU FUCKING PRICK. 33-FUCKING-3.”

I was about ready kick 1 off on the dickhead when this other dickhead showed up. I sussed he was the gaffer because he was wearing a better class of apron and shower cap than every1 else, bright red instead of the standard white to prove how shithot he was compared to all us LowerDownCunts.

I asked the jumped-up prick where me clocking-on card was but he was having note of it.

“NEVER MIND THAT,” he said. “YOU’RE HOLDING UP THE QUEUE, YOU LAZY SHITHEAD.”

Chances are you may not have found this passage funny but I did. I laughed like a snorting hellbeast when I first read it but when I shared it with Mr. Oddbooks, he sort of looked at me like I was a fucking prick or something.

The first day of the job ends about the way you think it might: pissing into the brown vat of whatever he was hired to stir. The reader finds out that Craig Mawdsley is a known quantity in the British press, called “Craig Cunt” in sensationalist headlines about his antics. We learn he owes money and will likely get hurt if he does not pay. We learn he has to report to a meeting on New Year’s Day in order to keep getting benefits. But it’s right about page 31 where the… what can I even call them – descriptions of orgy filth so bad it couldn’t even be recreated on the Internet? Litanies of sexual horror and violence so appallingly cartoonish in their scope that after a while, the words stop making sense and ultimately you sort of find yourself reading the words and hearing them phonetically but no longer know the meaning? Not sure, but that happens, a celebrity name-dropping orgy happens, only a paragraph long, but a horrible foreshadowing of what is to come.

Let’s skip a lot and get to chapter 8, called HAPPY FUCKING NEW YEAR, YOU ABSOLUTE FUCKING PRICK. He goes to the New Year’s Day meeting he has to attend to go back on the dole and meets a woman. He proceeds to have really gross sex with her only for her to tell him she has full-blown AIDS. Certain he is going to die from AIDS, Mawdsley kills the woman and then goes to a Diseased Dick and Fanny Clinic to get tested and it is here, on page 54, where the content goes to a place from whence it can never come back, one degenerate, horrible situation after the other. The real horror is how funny the book continues to be as it descends into depths too foul for me to feel comfortable quoting. An AIDS counselor masturbates as Mawdsley tells her all the things he would like to shove up his ass and when Mawdsley gets home, he has mistakenly been given a Platinum Card with an improbably high limit. It is with this card that Mawdsley begins to travel. Convinced he will be dead from AIDS in a month, he begins his world jaunt of rampage.

He has sex with a prostitute and puts a Posh Spice mask on her face. He flies to Ibiza and drinks and wallows and tries to rape a drunken woman. He wanders until he accidentally comes across his dad’s house. In this section is the most irredeemable passage I think I have ever read. Mawdsley’s stepmother is nine months pregnant and is evidently annoying so Mawdsley’s dad hits her over the head with a skillet and goes off, leaving Mawdsley in charge of the unconscious pregnant woman and his two small half-siblings. Mawdsley puts the Posh Spice mask on his stepmother and rapes her as she lays on the floor. Her water breaks and she begins to give birth as Mawdsley violates her. The baby is born sucking Mawdsley’s penis and he throws the newborn through a window. He eventually steals his father’s Smartcar, burns down the house, and sells his siblings to pedophile priests and it just goes on in this manner until Mawdsley ends up at the Academy Awards in Los Angeles.

It was here that I no longer had any idea what Baker was up to. The horrific content aside, at least Baker’s accents were on mark. At least he culturally had his ducks in a row. At the Academy Awards, Baker either gives up or is making a point I am unable to discern. For you see, he seems like he is describing an Elks Club Roast if it were hosted by sex fiends and celebrities. The audience is sitting at tables, eating and drinking. Okay, maybe he’s never seen the Academy Awards. But then he has George W. Bush address the audience, because, you know, sitting Presidents always address the Academy Awards, right? Right?

But then you read what he has Bush say and you wonder, along with me, what the fuck:

“Ladies and gentleman,” he said, suddenly doing the biggest fucking fart I’d ever heard. “Excuse me…”

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said again. “Being the biggest, most powerful bellend in the world has brought loads of shithot things into me life, yeah? It’s got me money, minge, shithot nose gear. But the thing I like best about this President bollocks… is the violence, yeah?” Every1 in the room applauded and nodded like they had total respect for the tosser. “I can kill muthafuckas at random and no muthafucka can do owt. Coz I’m the President. The Big Man…

Bush recounts horrible things he has done to Muslims and the crowd goes wild. The Awards show is essentially live action pornographic acts between currently relevant American stars, like Julia Roberts and Brad Pitt with socially irrelevant actors like Macauley Culkin and for some reason, the rap star 50 Cent and so many more. Even better is the mix of British stars the average American would have no idea about, like Noel Edmonds. Cyndi Lauper makes an appearance. Spielberg. Someone named Hilda Ogden. So many names, current, old, and completely without any applicability to an awards show, do horrible things to each other on stage. Then the after party begins, the orgy continues and Mawdsley loses his chance to defile Post Spice. The whole terrible thing goes in for 20 pages or so and it means nothing, all those acts, all that depravity. It has no significance and it was tiresome as all hell to read.

Because if it did have any significance, I can’t tell what the hell it was. And there’s the rub. Baker is clearly a talented writer. He began strong and the point began to splinter for me. Is the point that everyone, even the leader of the free world, every actor, performer and musician (and God, though I don’t want to get into God right now, really), is as degenerate as Mawdsley? If so, he approaches this sort of class commentary with a brick rather than a pen as the scope is too blunt and all-encompassing. Is the point just to be disgusting and therefore using appropriate accents and usage as well as details are beyond the point? How about a look at racism and how Muslims are handled in the press? Hard to see given that everyone in this book is horrible and the press is all too willing to call it as they see it with Mawdsley. Is the point a nihilistic exercise in literary mayhem? Honestly, I don’t know.

And that’s problematic. Because if you are going to combine a gross out with a social message, if you are subverting the traditional “coming of age” novel, if you are going to lambaste every element of society, it’s going to be hard to pull all that off in one book. I applaud Baker for being audacious enough to try but it didn’t really work. At the end, I had such novel fatigue and the atrocities had come so loose and fast that they no longer carried a punch. I guess I can say that if Baker’s goal was to render the appalling mundane, in that he succeeded.

The novel continues apace, with Mawdsley becoming a “handispaz” and ending up looking just like Osama bin Laden. He does some more appalling things – being confined to a wheel chair doesn’t slow him down. He dies, finally, and winds up in a department store in heaven wherein God shows himself to be a chav and not even as smart as Mawdsley. It was a relief when it ended.

But as much as this novel made me want to roll up a newspaper and smack Baker across the nose and scold, “Bad writer!” the fact is, this is a daring book, it was entertaining in unexpected ways and Baker has a decidedly clever wit and managed to create the worst literary character ever. Ever. You will never read a character as horrible as Mawdsley and for many of us, that is reason enough to read this book. I still cannot say to you specifically that you should read this book and I can tell you I will never reread this book, but I will be very interested in what Baker does next because despite the problems I had with this book, Baker is clearly a very good writer. Also, because I am a pedant, I have to say it is one of the best edited self-published books I have ever read. It was better edited than some books from actual publishing houses, so do not be put off by the self-publishing taint many use, snobbishly, to dismiss independent books. David Baker took care and effort with this grotesque and outrageous book and I feel a certain fondness for him. I really do look forward to seeing what his next effort will look like.

A rare I Read Everything and Odd Books Crossover

This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books

I am pretty good at making the call on whether or not a book is “odd” enough to be reviewed on this site because my criteria for oddness is so flexible I can pretty much just do whatever the hell I want and not think twice about it. However, I reviewed a book, Clown Girl by Monica Drake, that straddled the line between Everything and Odd pretty neatly so while I reviewed it over there, some readers here may find the discussion worth reading. So check it out if you are so inclined.

Also, if you find yourself shopping on Amazon this holiday season, consider entering the site using my link. I’ll get a cut of whatever you buy and the last time I actually made money from my Amazon link, I used the proceeds to buy the books I gave away for Bizarro Week. I have an “Alien Intervention Week” and another Bizarro Week in the offing so if you’re gonna be shopping on Amazon, consider supporting my book giveaways by using my link.

Hope December is treating everyone who reads here well!

Clown Girl by Monica Drake

This post originally appeared on I Read Everything

Book: Clown Girl: A Novel

Author: Monica Drake

Type of Book: Fiction, literary fiction

Why Did I Read This Book: I initially purchased this thinking it would be a good idea for my other site devoted to odd books. But while this book has an unusual heroine living in an unusual subculture, it skirts the criteria I use to determine an odd book.

Availability: Published in 2006 by Hawthorne Books, you can get a copy here:

Comments: Nita is a clown. She lives in Baloneytown, waiting for her boyfriend, Rex, to return to her. She is a tenant in a house with a pot-selling burnout and his hostile and clever girlfriend, living in a tiny room with her beloved dog and her clown accoutrements. Nita loses items precious to her and longs to get them back, and dreams of a time when she can combine high art, literature and the profession of being a clown. Also, she meets a policeman who is clearly smitten with her though he has no idea what she looks like under her makeup because she lives her life completely as a clown. In Nita’s tale, Drake manages to tell a very familiar story but employs such unusual elements that one does not wholly realize that Nita could just as easily been named Bridget Jones or might easily have come from Marian Keyes’ Shopaholic series. Nita is feckless, self-absorbed, head in the clouds, in love with a cretin and her job is often in jeopardy. She has a bitchy nemesis, there is a strong, kind man waiting for her in the wings, and it takes her entirely too long to pull herself together, though she manages it after tumbling into one unlikely situation after another.

Drake spins a marvelous tale but the real reason I think I loved this book so much is not only that Nita speaks to me in an almost eerie way, but also because Drake inverts the traditional chick-lit story by stating outright what it is that makes these clumsy, clueless, grandiose, insecure women appealing. She makes it clear from the very title what Nita is. She’s a clown. No mincing words. Nita is a clown and Drake shows how hard it is not to be a clown when hiding behind makeup, clothes, images and pie-in-the-sky ideas is all one has ever known. I’m a clown, though less clownish (I hope) as I get older but if you began as a clown, bumbling your way through life, you will find much to like about Nita and her slapstick life. In Nita, using the raucous background of clowns and her inversion of the modern chick-lit novel, Drake creates a character who tells a story we are familiar with but have not wholly heard before.

Though this book is a riff on familiar plots, I don’t want to give an outline of the book because the fantastic disaster as Nita’s life unspools is one of the reasons I think you should read this book. But I will hit on some plot points as I share some of Drake’s writing and parts of the book that truly resonated with me. The novel begins with Nita collapsing, suffering from the effects of a terrible loss – a miscarriage. She is working as a clown at an outdoor event and the heat and likely the effects of her recent miscarriage cause her to pass out. She is taken to the hospital and the thoughts in her head as she navigates being in a frightening place all alone spoke to me and I immediately felt a kinship with Nita. I have no idea if her paranoia would translate to people who have have had excellent experiences with doctors and nurses, but for me, I could have written Nita’s thoughts (and it wasn’t lost on me as I read many of Nita’s thoughts that often the first letter of my own name is seldom pronounced by my fellow Texans, rendering me a de facto “Nita”).

Don’t tell doctors your dreams, ever. Don’t tell them your menstrual cycle. Don’t say you felt anything in your head, or that you might’ve known. If they ask about street drugs, which they will, say no, no matter what. If you say, I feel anxious all the time, you’ll get Valium. Otherwise you’ll get what they call “mood equalizers,” daily doses of who knows what, a gambler’s crapshoot in tinctures of chemicals.

As a clown on the street, I had to keep my wits. I couldn’t take their chemicals.

Don’t tell doctors anything.

This is a cluebat of sorts. Nita suffered a miscarriage before this trip to the ER, but it is also clear she had some frightening experiences with doctors trying to help her correct her brain, a brain that seems very common to me but might seem to others like the kind of skull space that needs tinctures of chemicals. I also relate to this fear of authority’s power more than I care to admit. Also, in this chick-lit inversion, it is refreshing that Nita does not want the drugs that would have just led to another humiliating escapade for a traditional heroine.

Nita takes being a clown very seriously but through the descriptions of the tools Nita uses in her craft, as well as the way Drake describes Nita’s thoughts about the artistic routines Nita wants to perform, we see the utter ridiculousness of Nita’s life. We don’t need Nita sliding down a fireman’s pole showing her panties or putting eyeshadow on in the place of blusher, all visually very clownish actions, to show Nita’s true inner clown. Take this passage about Nita’s approach to balloon animals, bearing in mind that later in the book she wonders about creating The Last Supper in balloon form and feels there is an important message inherent in such an act.

Swollen Sacred Hearts, shrunken wise men, and bloated angels bobbed at my feet, the fruits of my labor. On the shopworn dedication page of Balloon Tying for Christ it said “With appreciation and gratitude for my wife and six lovely children who have borne with me through twelve long years of deprivations while trying to complete this work.” Such martyrs! Balloon Tying for Christ was maybe all of seventeen pages long, with one blank page at the end. The tricks inside, by corporate accounting, were worth hundreds of dollars, Matey, Crack and me, that’s what we earned when high-end work came in. But work didn’t always come. We had to promote and deliver. That book was my cash cow.

It’s hard to think of anything more ridiculous than a 17 page book about making balloon figures for Jesus and how such a book could become the bread and butter to any person, but Drake shows us. She shows us clearly the absolutely insane pieces that make up the whole of Nita.

Nita above may demonstrate how she understands her profession is one of money but she longs to be an artist, a clown interpreting great art and literature (her final blowup with her despicable boyfriend Rex concerns him pirating her Kafka interpretation as told via a clown), but she resents the fact that she is a comedic act or worse, that she should be sexually appealing in her clowning. When one of two female clowns she occasionally works with spells it out for her, it’s not clear that it really sinks in to Nita. Nita simply wants to be a clown artiste and doesn’t like to think of how what she really does applies to what she really wants to do.

“Pssst,” Matey said, in a stage whisper and knocked a hand against her head. “Here’s a clue: Women wear makeup, right? But a man in face paint, people see aahh-rt. You and me, we top out at birthday gigs, and that hurts more than anything I’m doing now. That’s the meat o’ the matter.” She tipped her Chaplin hat. Was it true? Was there a latex ceiling, made-up makeup finish line?

Despite being a clown, and supporting herself, after a fashion, being a clown for parties and even engaging in sexier acts for corporate parties, Nita bitterly resents the way that money destroys what she considers beauty.

Leonardo da Vinci said water was the most destructive force on the planet. Water corrodes metal and eats through rock. But da Vinci forgot about the corrosive power of cash; when money came into a neighborhood, the buildings toppled. Even people disappeared.

Like any stereotypical artiste type, Nita wants purity. She wants pure love, pure work, pure happiness. Just like her grandiose idea of herself interpreting art as a clown, her ideas about what life can really be are just as grandiose and unhappy about settling for anything less. She says:

In a world of clown whores and virgins, I’d cling to the integrity of art.

That doesn’t happen, but even as she is descending into the world of clown prostitution, Nita still has lofty and near-risible goals.

Traditionally, there’s been no delicacy to balloon art. That’s where I’d revolutionize things. Chiaroscuro, sfumato: I’d find a way to translate da Vinco’s painterly tricks into rubber and air.

Maybe I’d pioneer a line of designer balloon colors in da Vinci’s palette. Why stop there? I could have a van Gogh line, a Gauguin line, Toulouse-Lautrec and Tintoretto.

Nita’s delusions carry her to strange places, to strange actions, to stranger results. She wants to be more than a juggling clown at a kid’s party. She wants to be a performance artist, a portrayer of truth. But she is a clown and she proves it over and over again, that her perspective of being a clown will never match up to her dreams of artistic relevance. And like the heroines in chick-lit, she decides to alter her body but instead of dieting or buying clothes she cannot afford, Nita decides to don a sand-filled fat suit to turn herself into a face-painted voluptuary. And what fine slapstick would be complete if she did not, in fact, juggle fire in such a get-up?

I’d be a sassy, busty clown girl juggling fire. Of course–why not? I’d play to crowds high and low. I’d find the fine line between Crack’s clown whore and my own comic interpretation, work both sides and move easily from the comedy of burlesque to striptease, slapstick to sexy. I’d graduate from Clown Girl to Clown Woman.

Then we go from a padded body suit to the sublimely ridiculous.

I’d do a new silent, sexy version of Kafka: Gregor Samsa wakes up, finds he’s metamorphosed into a woman with an hourglass figure–where every second counts!–and his world’s on fire. I’d do a busty Beef-Brisket Dance, on fire. Two Clowns in a Shower on fire. And Who’s Hogging the Water? –that’d mixed genre, soft porn plus fire. Even an ordinary bodacious bod and the pins on fire would be a new show altogether.

But Nita is still deluded. She can’t make it from being a clown girl to a clown woman as long as she is a clown. As long as she clings to her outrageous ideas, she will never be able to find any real truth. Given what a fabulous disaster she is, it ends about how you sensed it would as soon as you read the word “fire.” Nita sets herself and the yard on fire. And oh yeah, she’s fire juggling in the middle of the night. This is also a very good example of the both extreme and subtle humor Drake wields, making Nita a borderline caricature but never stepping completely into a place where the reader cannot respond to Nita’s plight.

“Crapola! Crapola!” I ran in a circle and threw myself down. I rolled on the grass where the grass wasn’t on fire, but the Pendulous Breasts resisted my momentum, and everywhere I rolled sparks flew. The Pendulous Breasts duck-quacked and chirped a cacophony of party sounds. I was guilty and now I was on fire. Who would’ve known hell was so efficient. A few mistakes and hell came to me faster than room service.

Because she is burned and experiencing heart problems, Nita returns to the hospital, where she again tells a terrible tale from her past. Without telling the reader the reasons for Nita’s paranoia, Drake makes it all too clear what happens to some girls who enter the maw of a hospital when they are alone, weird and full of self-delusion.

Here’s what I know now: never let a misunderstanding go unclarified in a hospital, same as in a school, jail, or prison. Never carry a diary with you, not even a day planner if you write notes in it. Don’t say, “Yes, that’s mine,” to any old scrap of nothing, to what might have been interesting in the free world.

The hospital, it’s a gateway, The path to incarceration.

Your best bet is don’t even write anything down. Ever. Most of all, don’t go near the hospital unless your problem is obvious as a bullet or a broken leg, and don’t go more than once. Otherwise you’ll learn about a two-doctor hold. Doctor Two-Hold, a seventy-two-hour detainment–and seventy-two hours can be longer if it’s late at night or over a weekend.

A deus ex machina in the typical chick-lit form of a man saves Nita from the probable 72-hour psych lock down that awaits her after coming into the ER burned, wearing an exploding fat suit and in full clown regalia.

…Jerrod had seen me inside and out, burned and in the psych ward. And still here he was, beside me. But the blood and the burns were all circumstantial, a string of bad luck, the anomaly. I didn’t want to think that was me–a wreck, a mess, a mortal.

But she is a wreck and a mess. You want to despair of Nita but you can’t, not quite. She periodically shows glimmers of insight that peek out when she is daydreaming about her despicable boyfriend and making an art show out of balloons tied to resemble Renaissance paintings. This scene, for example: Nita has lost her rubber chicken, whom she calls “Plucky” and put up reward posters all over her low-income and crime-infested neighborhood, resulting in dozens of people coming by with various rubber chickens trying to collect the reward.

“Maybe your Plucky jus’ fell in with the wrong crowd, maybe she was looking for love and thought she’d found it…but you can’t trust nobody round here, that’s what Plucky knows now. Uh huh.” The woman’s eyes were flat and dull. She’s quit looking at me. “Plucky maybe learned a few things, and you say, ‘No way, no second chances,’ and jus’ like that, man, turn her ass back out on the street.”

I said, “Who are we talking about here?”

And who were they talking about? The worn down woman at the door or Nita herself? It’s hard to tell here, but later revelations show Nita is far more in tune with herself than even she would like to admit.

I was good at pool. Physics, I understood. I knew all about vectors. That was my original goal in clowning–to create the illusion of defying physics with muscular comedy. I wanted to be able to stand when it looked like I should fall, to spring up when gravity would pull down, and to balance at impossible angles. I wanted to win, or at least stay on my feet, when it looked like I was losing.

Losing is a thing Nita understands so it stands to reason she wants to be able to look good doing it. But she also knows that she is not ever going to be able to make it in a more rarefied world.

One lone lobster beat a claw against the glass wall of a small tank. The lobster’s narrow, empty world was perched over a frozen sea; blue Styrofoam tray after tray of Dungeness crab, leggy purple squid, and bundled smelt rested on chopped ice below. Tick, tick. The lobster knocked, as though to flag down help. Across the aisle what had once been a herd of grass-fed cattle now lay silent in bloody pools of iced New York strip steak, flank steak, ribs, tongues, and burger. Edible flowers bloomed on a small green stand, a miniature field ready for harvest. Tap tap. Tap. Tap tap. A lobster S O S. Get me out of this dead heaven. I knew the feeling.

Yeah, and this inversion of the chick-lit rang the truest to me because unlike her counterparts, Nita can’t just pick the right guy, clean herself up, lose a few pounds, get her credit card debt under control and she’ll suddenly find herself living the good life when the author rewards her feminine will to change with the perfect rich man to pave her way. Nita would feel even more like a clown in a monied world of privilege.

My heart, ready to burst, spoke in the fast Morse code of biology: you’ll die or go crazy, die or go crazy, die or go crazy, die or go crazy... I had seconds to live. My heart was too big for my chest, my head hummed. I couldn’t move fast enough, had to get out of there.

As Nita shows how her damaged heart is telling her what to do, I could not help but think of Sylvia Plath’s Esther, whose heart beat, “I am, I am.” Nita’s heart tells her she has two options, both horrible, and given the hints of diagnosed craziness in her past, this passage was terrible because despite the loony ideas Nita had concerning her work and her art, at the core of her, the heart, so to speak, in times of grave stress her only options seemed to be to go crazy or die.

I like to think Nita’s heart went to such dark places not because she was indeed depressed (though she is definitely desperate) but rather because she knew on a very basic level that her dreams of clown artistry were hogwash, an attempt to cloak herself in dreams so she would not have to look at the real problems in her life. Nita has no family, she lost her baby, and she has no allies.

Emancipated minor? I’d been one for years–emancipated but no longer a minor, and I was ready to have a team, a side, a family. Somebody to back me up. A person shouldn’t be emancipated so long.

Sadly, the person she pins her hopes on, Rex, is not worth her care, even as a clown girl. Here’s a quote from Rex:

Rex laughed then, a mean, sharp snort. “Impossible? You want to talk impossible? This is all bullshit, babe. Youw ant to think you’re not a hooker, just a clown on a private date. Think you’re an artist, working a new car lot? I’ll tell you something–that’s not art. It’s just a story you’re making up. Maybe the same story you’d tell our baby, if we still had a baby. Mommy’s not a hooker, she’s a corporate party girl. No wonder the kid bailed. Christ, maybe the thing’s lucky you dumped it.”

As horrible as this was, as horrible as him rubbing her face in her miscarriage could ever be, he has a point. Nita’s no artist. She tells herself stories to get herself through and had created a fantasy about being a family with Rex as she had about her work. It hits her hard.

A deus ex machina reunited Nita with her rubber chicken and her lost dog, and once she has the dog back, she has to do something to save her dog’s life. Her roommates like to feed the dog pot and to keep the dog from becoming deathly ill, she needs peroxide to induce vomiting. However, she shows up at the convenience store wearing the ragged remains of the fat suit, her clown makeup smeared, and she cannot get anyone to take her seriously. Because she is a clown, she cannot impart upon anyone that she is in the middle of an emergency and she finally begins to see how she is hindering herself by imbuing her odd ideas with a patina artistic endeavor.

There was my face in the aluminum rim of the hot-foods incubator, around jo-jos and chicken, I was reflected in the glass of the Coke cooler and the grease-smeared deli case, all powdery makeup, black liner and big red lips, the face of a clown hooker right out of an old-time jail-time act. My one Caboosey boob hung free.
[…]
The only show was my life and it was a bomb. The only routine was the daily one. I’d been in clown costume so long, I wasn’t an artist. I was a freak.

She takes a good look at herself, where she lives and the people she knows and she realizes it’s time to change.

They, my friends, were hucksters, drug dealers, and bullies. But in that world of defeatism, I was the jester, the fall guy, the rubber chicken. I was the one who put on face paint and shades, limping in one big shoe.

And if this was a regular chick-lit novel, there would be another deus ex machina that would help Nita wipe off the clown makeup, would help her find two regular shoes so she could walk tall and proud, a job would magically fall into her lap and the new man who was lurking at her side unnoticed would sweep her off her feet and Nita would realize she could stand on her own two feet again, though she wouldn’t have to since the new guy would be rich and ready to marry her. That doesn’t happen in this chick-lit inversion but the ending is satisfying in its own way.

This book surprised me. I didn’t expect to love it as much as I did. I think it managed to walk down the path of mainstream chick-lit novels to satisfy my occasional need for glurge, but it also did truly invert the real goal of such novels and their well-worn paths by giving us a heroine whose hidden past remained hidden, whose life really was ridiculous, whose world resembled places I am familiar with and whose transformation showed herself she could not remain a clown and achieve any of the goals she wanted in her life as a person. I highly recommend this book and hope Drake is writing new novel. I very much would like to see what she says next.