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New York state of mine

I have a handful of “first New York” memories. In one (the true first, I suppose), I’m in maybe ninth grade, sporting braces and what I must say was a pretty fly windbreaker, looking down from the World Trade Center. In another, I’m arriving at Fordham for freshman orientation, toting a carefully curated collection of posters and knickknacks into my dorm room.

But it’s really the last memory, the last first if you will, that I consider my real introduction to the city.

It was ~~a dark a stormy night~~ a nice May afternoon, shortly before college graduation, and my soon-to-be-roommate Lou and I had just driven to our new apartment in Brooklyn (Bed-Stuy, to be exact) from my mom’s house in Pennsylvania, bringing back both the contents of my bedroom and a selection of other items my mother was willing to part with (lamps, a toaster, her entire silverware set.) We parked the U-Haul in front of 904 Greene Ave.—a pleasant brownstone that for two years afforded me the ability to say I lived off of Malcolm X Boulevard—and set about unloading the truck so we could return it.

After piling all of my worldly possessions on the sidewalk, Lou and I realized that we were in a bit of a pickle. The U-Haul needed to be returned within the next half hour, and we both needed to be there (I can’t remember the logistics of this, but it was something about the truck being in his name, but me being the only one with a driver’s license.) So we did what any logical person would do: asked the kindly older gentleman sitting on the stoop next door to watch our stuff while we disappeared for the better part of a half hour.

King for a week

Rarely in writing this blog do I stop to consider the intellectual implications of my book choices. Do I come across as well read? And not in the sense of saying “Yup, read that shit” to 75% of the books in Barnes & Noble’s “Buy 2, Get 1 Free!” pile (which I can, and do, say) but in the sense of actually using books to improve upon my understanding of the world, or to expand my horizons or whatever.

The short answer is: probably not. I do, on occasion, read books tied to current events, or on subjects about which I hope to learn more. But for the most part my choices are made in the interest of sheer entertainment. In all media really, I’m more MTV than PBS.

So it’s with that enormous disclaimer that I admit how much I fucking love Stephen King. Which isn’t to say that King isn’t smart, or that his books don’t stretch the mind—they certainly stretch the imagination—but only that I feel a certain guilt whenever I start out the week with a fat King paperback, sort of like sitting down to a dinner comprised entirely of chocolate.

I started Bag of Bones, a 1998 King novel, a few weeks ago because I was heading home for the holidays, and love nothing more than to scare the shit out of myself in my mom’s amazingly silent suburban house. Scary stories that struggle to make an impact through the unceasing din of Brooklyn street traffic have an entirely different effect on me out there, which is to say I spent each night over the Christmas weekend convincing myself that various unfamiliar shadows weren’t intruders/ghosts/mystical beings from another dimension.

The end of the world as we know it

Christmas morning at the Bindrim household brought with it many surprises this year, chief among them a conspicuously shaped package that turned out to be the item I’ve simultaneously dreaded and anticipated recieving for months now: my very first Kindle.

I should say right off the bat—lest I come across as spoiled or ungrateful—that not even a prolonged resistance to e-readers could lessen my appreciation for my mom’s gift-giving. Whether or not I was ready to fork over my own money to join the reading revolution is beside the point. Which is to say that I don’t know if I could successfully identify a gift horse (like, scientifically speaking), but word is you’re not supposed to look them in the mouth.

To my mom’s credit, the Kindle I received is also lacking all the bells and whistles of the newer versions. It’s pretty much just books on a screen, with acess to the Amazon store. Also, no ads (thanks Mom!) As technological transitions go, she took it easy on me.

So before I get into the pros and cons of pressing buttons to turn pages, this week’s read was The Night Eternal, the third and final book in the vampire/plague trilogy co-written by Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth, Hellboy) and Chuck Hogan (The Town, book version.) Considering this is the first book I read on Kindle, it’s kind of fitting that The Fall, the second book in the trilogy, was the first book I reviewed on this site. It stands to reason that next year, Twilight 5: Winter Solstice will be the first book I read from the comfort of a flying car. It better be.

Grandmas gone wild

Well I had an interesting weekend.

I do not refer here to the culmination of two months of Christmas shopping (thank you Union Square holiday market,) or my time spent intermittently watching trashy television and drinking spiked punch with friends. Rather, my weekend was illuminating in the revelation that my grandmother—mentioned on this blog before in reference to her self-published novel Vision Quests—has released another book, this one a 410-page tell-all memoir outlining everything from the most mundane to the most intimate details about my family.

A copy of said memoir is waiting for me at my mom’s house in Pennsylvania (yes, my grandmother had whatever the opposite of presence of mind is to send each of us individual copies, the authorly equivalent of spitting in someone’s food and then proudly telling them about it) so I have yet to peruse the book in its entirety. But through the powers of Amazon, I managed to glean that it’s full of the kinds of details, anecdotes and personal correspondence that I typically only share with my closest confidants, things I confess to girlfriends and significant others over multiple bottles of wine, not stuff I generally shout from the rooftops.

As I’ve mentioned, this is not my grandmother’s first foray into self-publishing, but it is the first time her books have focused on anything vaguely resembling reality. My family’s shock (limited by the fact that Nana is and has always been a slightly crazy person who does slightly crazy things) is tempered by the reality that this book cannot possibly sell. Not only because it’s surely one of the worst-written things Amazon has ever permitted to appear in its inventory, but because what the memoir has in completely unnecessary and torturous detail it lacks in marketability to literally anyone who isn’t in my family. A detailed list of everything I’ve eaten in the last 30 days would have greater public appeal.

Anyway, my point here is not to add to the exposure, however minute, that my family faces by virtue of my grandmother word-vomiting 30+ years of irrelevant observations, in a tome to which I refuse to link. I suppose a more rational person would find a discreet way to cope with the sudden publication of intimate details of their childhood, something less foolhardly than referencing said publication on the Internet. But having spent the last few days speculating on how strange it must feel to read yourself as a character in someone else’s book, I suppose I felt the irony was too great to overlook, or to leave out of this review.

In the garden of beasts

In the grand scheme of things, it’s unsurprising that I’ve been interested to read In the Garden of Beasts. For one, it’s about Nazis (indirectly; it’s about the U.S. ambassador to Germany and his family, living in Berlin during Hitler’s ascent to power) and for two, it’s by Erik Larson, whose ability to turn nonfiction into compelling narrative I praised in my review of Devil in the White City. For three, the book was moved to the top of my list after my mom demanded I return it to her over Christmas (I borrowed it from her husband.) Because nothing puts my mom in the holiday spirit like Hitler.