NON SEQUITUR – Page 3

Some words of wisdom from Joe Queenan

This is a blurb from the Wall Street Journal’s most recent Saturday essay, which is awesome and you should totally read in full. Author Joe Queenan’s forthcoming One for the Books, from which this essay is excerpted, comes out on Thursday.

“A case can be made that people who read a preposterous number of books are not playing with a full deck. I prefer to think of us as dissatisfied customers. If you have read 6,000 books in your lifetime, or even 600, it’s probably because at some level you find ‘reality’ a bit of a disappointment. People in the 19th century fell in love with Ivanhoe and The Count of Monte Cristo because they loathed the age they were living through. Women in our own era read Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre and even The Bridges of Madison County—a dimwit, hayseed reworking of Madame Bovary—because they imagine how much happier they would be if their husbands did not spend quite so much time with their drunken, illiterate golf buddies down at Myrtle Beach. A blind bigamist nobleman with a ruined castle and an insane, incinerated first wife beats those losers any day of the week. Blind, two-timing noblemen never wear belted shorts.
Similarly, finding oneself at the epicenter of a vast, global conspiracy involving both the Knights Templar and the Vatican would be a huge improvement over slaving away at the Bureau of Labor Statistics for the rest of your life or being married to someone who is drowning in dunning notices from Williams-Sonoma. No matter what they may tell themselves, book lovers do not read primarily to obtain information or to while away the time. They read to escape to a more exciting, more rewarding world. A world where they do not hate their jobs, their spouses, their governments, their lives. A world where women do not constantly say things like ‘Have a good one!’ and ‘Sounds like a plan!’ A world where men do not wear belted shorts. Certainly not the Knights Templar.”

A(nother) blog you should read

You know when you find someone who does something you love, but does it better and you’re completely enamored but also kind of sad and infuriated because it solidifies all your worst fears about never really being truly good at something you consider yourself moderately good at? YES. OK.

Earlier today a friend of mine hooked me up with Books I Done Read, a book blog whose totally awesome caterpillar ranking system is second in awesomeness only to my papercuts system. This blog is hilarious and irreverent and uses GIFs, so it’s clear that you should all just kill your Sorry Television bookmark and replace it with BIDR (not you, mom. You stay with me.)

The BIDR reviews are what my reviews sound like in my head, before I think too much and get bogged down in sounding overtly intellectual, or like I spend fewer than a third of my life on ill-advised reality shows (I don’t). So it stands to reason that if you think I’m even mildly entertaining, you’ll find BIDR far more so, and I should know because Klout says I’m influential about blogging (also beer, Justin Bieber, Glee and sneakers). So if you fall in love with BIDR, and find you have time in your life for only one person’s irreverent book musings, then…well, I understand. To that I say, it’s been fun, guys. It’s been fun.

Sad Face

Big book news this week. Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc. said Tuesday that it will stop publishing print editions of its encyclopedia for the first time since the sets were originally published more than 200 years ago. They swear it’s because the digital version of EB is doing so damn well that there’s no real need to keep printing them (rather than, say, the company as a whole being felled by competitors like Wikipedia and um…Google) and I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt. OK Britannica, your digital encyclopedias are selling like hotcakes, so there’s no real reason to keep producing the massive book version. Sure. Whatever you say.

In any case, if you’ve been daydreaming about that 32-volume set since you were a kid (and they are ‘spensive, something north of $1,300) now’s your chance. After the current supply runs out, that’s it. (Me, I always thought it’d be fun to build a fort out encyclopedia volumes. A FORT OF KNOWLEDGE.)

And if you couldn’t care less because you haven’t paid money for an encyclopedia since the days of Encarta, then take this opportunity to instead read my review of A.J. Jacobs’ The Know-it-All. He may become the last living person to have the read the EB, in print, in its entirety. Here’s to small victories.

Culture and shit

I’m here! I swear.

The last week has been kind of crazy, a flurry of long-awaited vacation days, GOP debates and the restarting of approximately 647 of my favorite shows. I do have a book review to pen at some point—my humble opinions of an amazing little novel called Geek Love—but in the meantime thought I’d hold all four of you over with a fun fact. Because who doesn’t like fun?

Amid all the lowbrow distractions this week (one might even say in spite of them), I also managed to do something vaguely intellectual. And it’s only Wednesday! Last night, Walter Isaacson, whose biography of Steve Jobs I link to or praise at least once a day, spoke at the 92nd Street Y, which, if you’re a non-New Yorker, does not mean signing books next to a pilates class. For whatever reason, YMCAs here are sometimes gyms, residences and cultural institutions all in one, and I decided last night that it’d be in my best interest to figure out how to live in one.

In any case, the session—a casual conversation between Isaacson and Time magazine’s managing editor, Rick Stengel—ended with questions from the audience. It’s worth noting that this was an eclectic group, lots of older people who I might have otherwise (perhaps unfairly….definitely unfairly) judged as unlikely to be interested in technology.

Anywho, brown-nosing lecture-goer that I am, I submitted a question to Isaacson about what he personally had taken away from Jobs’s life, or, more specifically, from his interactions with the Apple CEO. I’ve written, somewhat facetiously, that one of the book’s perhaps unintentional lessons is on the benefit of pursuing perfection. I even suggested that I might begin approaching my own professional life a bit more asshole-ishly, so that I could one day invent the next iPod and transform a half dozen industries. …I am still waiting for that to pan out.

If you give a mouse a book…

…he totally won’t understand because mice can’t read (with the exception of Ratatouille, Fievel and possibly Stuart Little.) But if you give a person a book, well, that makes way more sense.

I will be the first to admit: Gifting books can be something of a stressful task. A book is a large time investment (relative to movies and music); plus, what if you’re wrong about what someone might like? What if they ultimately hate something you loved? What if they already own the book, or don’t like reading hardcovers or have been secretly illiterate for 20+ years and survive only by memorizing restaurant menus and pretending to hate the Internet? These are the things I worry about.

Now, I have yet to read every book in the known universe, but I’m obviously getting pretty close and it’s time I put my knowledge to use. So here are Sorry Television’s recommendations for this year’s book gifting. Because if your friends are secretly illiterate, you should at least give them something good to not understand.