Reviews – Page 34 – couldreads

Santa! I know him!

I should admit right off the bat that I have a rather substantial bias when it comes to this week’s read. Modern New York, a veritable handbook for the state of the city’s economy over the last 50 years, was written by Greg David, onetime (and longtime) editor for Crain’s New York Business, where I’ve spent the last eight years of my employed life. Not only was Greg instrumental in the shaping of Crain’s—stories of his reign, laced with professional admiration of his unique management style, still circulate the newsroom—but he was fairly instrumental in my career, which is to say that without his faith in a completely inexperienced Fordham grad (who majored in the rather vaguely labeled “Media, Culture & Society”) I might not have the writing chops/Internet knowledge/general confidence in my own awesomeness that make it possible for me to ramble to you people today. (Also, I was footnoted!)

Dead boring

Given that it’s almost True Blood season, I found myself moderately excited—moderately—for the newest Sookie Stackhouse book, Deadlocked, which came out earlier this month. I say moderately because I am of the humble opinion that Harris has been phoning it in for a few years now, and/or ran out of supernatural creatures to cast in her increasingly redundant series.

Phoning it in can be a death knell for any author—to be discussed further when I review the latest Augusten Burroughs book, whose lack of substance is depressing me greatly. But Harris—as much as I love the fact that she’s inadvertently generated one of the most ridiculously fun shows on television—didn’t have much room to fall. The Sookie Stackhouse books are like Anne Rice for dimwits, and rival Twilight for the title of worst-written vampire series of all time (editor’s note: I have read about three vampires series and thus am wildly unqualified to make this claim.)

In a nutshell, this is how a Sookie Stackhouse novel goes:

A f@*k in the road

A few sentences into The Post-Birthday World, I stopped to watch some TV. Sometimes you just know a book is going to suck you in, and I figured it’d be in my best interest to get the DVR to a manageable capacity so it’d be able to withstand a few days without me.

Sure enough, the DVR is now rocking 82% and I’m too emotionally wrecked to deal with it after 500 pages in the mind of Lionel Shriver. The author of We Need to Talk About Kevin—which I LOVED, despite its rather tragic subject matter—has such an on-point grasp of the reality of human existence that I never seem to finish her novels particularly happy or sad, so much as resigned to the fact that all situations in life have good and bad, and few offer definitive answers or conclusions.

From 9/11 to kids with cancer

Advance apologies if my syntax and otherwise generally awesome writing skills are off today: I’m in Day 3 of Operation Don’t Be a Fatty, which is the code name I’ve given my 345th attempt to lose weight this year. Whilst daydreaming about bagels and buckets of cream cheese, I’m finding it harder than usual to sound insightful.

What does ODBAF entail, you ask? (Or didn’t ask, but it’s my blog and I do what I want.) Give or take a few other minor changes (like alternating sides of the couch so as to more evenly distribute my butt indent) it primarily involves a) going to the gym more than once a year b) eating less candy and c) not always choosing the gnocchi at Italian restaurants. Just sometimes.

Though this is, as I mentioned, the umpteenth time I’ve gone down this path, it is not without reason that I bring up my renewed interest in health here, on a blog ostensibly about books. After finishing The Fault in Our Stars over the weekend, which focuses primarily on the lives of two teenagers with cancer, I came into Monday feeling particularly shitty about my inability to take care of my perfectly functional 26-year-old body.

Extremely sad & incredibly morose

So I got a lot of reading done this weekend. Like kind of an absurd amount. And even though I could totally space these reviews out over the next few weeks, affording myself some much-needed time to, I don’t know, go outdoors or socialize with other human beings, instead I’m just going to blow it all this week and feel like an idiot come June. Because that’s how I roll.

Up until about last year, I actually had no idea that Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (ELAIC) was a novel about September 11. Which is fitting since up until last week I had never sat down and watched 9/11 footage, or listened to the recently released audio of air traffic controllers and others who were on the planes. I may be a sick voyeur when it comes to reality shows and celebrity gossip, but plugging in my headphones to hear the dying words of some unsuspecting flight attendant was not my idea of a productive afternoon.

Unfortunately, after reading ELAIC, I felt it was time to bite the bullet. The novel is so wrapped around the tragedy of that day, and the loss of an individual (though fictional) life in it, that it felt weird to not relive the moment in reality, especially since I had never really done so. Naturally, I saw the towers fall in 2001—though I can’t say my 11th-grade self had any real idea of the event’s impact—but afterwards, with the exception of unavoidable news broadcasts and one overblown Oliver Stone movie, I didn’t pursue September 11. There was no need to: Not a week goes by that the tragedy isn’t invoked in some political conversation or happenstance facet of New York City life—bag checks on the subway, liquids refused from air travel, construction delays in lower Manhattan. To spend even a minute proactively pursuing the now decade-old news broadcasts or man-on-the-street footage felt unnecessary, masochistic even.