Reviews – Page 41 – couldreads

Arsenic and old lace

Well it’s the final week before I go on my first legit vacation of the year (as in the kind where you leave your city of residence) and God, when not busy crashing the economy and unleashing natural disasters, is seriously testing my patience. Work-wise, everything that could go wrong has, and technologically the Internet is hellbent on making itself only functional enough for me to stare longingly at various “page loading” screens and error messages while tallying up the hours I’m losing.

Well whatever God, go back to combing your beard and hanging out with Rick Perry, because I refuse to be thwarted. I will go to the beach next week, during which time I will not so much as open a laptop, because I’ll be too busy exposing my sensitive skin to its first rays of summer sunlight, and/or eating french fries and funnel cakes.

Fortunately, I’ve managed to limit my Code Red freakouts to office hours; at home, I’m soothed by the boisterous return of Jersey Shore and Bad Girls Club and on the train I’ve been gratefully lost in the world of We Have Always Lived in the Castle.

Now, you may not think it right off, but chances are high you’re familiar with Shirley Jackson. Despite having written numerous books, she’s easily most famous for one—The Haunting of Hill House, which has creeped the shit out of people for many years. Jackson is also known for The Lottery, one of the most celebrated short stories of all time (and also the basis for a kind of hilarious 1996 movie starring Keri Russell), which takes place in a town where (spoiler alert) an annual drawing of names leads to a climactic ritual stoning.

Better late than never

Well I think it’s safe to say I’m running behind this week. For good reason! I’m in the middle of a huge project at work, my bathroom was being redone (which I realize has no tangible effect on my ability to read or write in a timely fashion) and, perhaps most importantly, the season finale of The Bachelorette was on (that’s a one-hour reunion, a two-hour finale and a one-hour “After the Final Rose” special; big obligation guys). But here I am, better late than never.

I picked up Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club because of what I like to call a glitch-in-the-matrix moment: It came up, either online or in casual conversation, at least three times in the course of two weeks, so I figured the reading gods were all but asking me to pick it up. More importantly, it seemed to come up as one of those books everyone has read but I somehow missed the memo on (in fairness, The Liar’s Club came out in 1995; I had not so much availed myself of the memoir genre at that time, as I was 10.)

In any case, the book is praised for its combination of Mary Karr’s story—she’s a Texas-born problem child with a penchant for fights and a soft spot for her two alcoholic parents (including a deeply troubled mother)—and her writing; Karr is a poet as well as professional documentor of life’s calamities. Whatever the combo, it seems to strike a chord: The Liar’s Club was selected as one of the best books of 1995 by People, Time, The New Yorker and Entertainment Weekly (the latter perhaps not the best barometer of fine literature, but I’ll let it slide.)

“Time’s a goon, right?”

It’s a big day in the Bindrim household: my birthday, which makes this post my very first as a newly minted 26-year-old. I feel the sage wisdom of mid-20s adulthood flowing to my brain already.

I wish I could say I read some aging-oriented book this week, maybe one of those multi-generational dealies (a la The Joy Luck Club), or if I were feeling dark, The Picture of Dorian Gray. But I’ve spent years grappling with the occasional misfortune of having a summer birthday—(“No I don’t think your family vacation to Hawaii is more important than my party”)—which for the most part means ignoring it for as long as possible, and then closing out my procrastination by haphazardly choosing a bar at which to drink away my mortality-related sorrows among friends.

So A Visit From The Goon Squad may not have been a choice tied to the chronology of my life, but it hardly matters. Because what it lacked in personal relevance, it more than made up for in being pretty fucking awesome.

And then we came to the end

I suppose this week was a bit of a cheat, sort of like saying you ate a pint of ice cream for the calcium (something I have obviously never ever done.) After all, I didn’t read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows all that long ago. But rereading it seemed apropos; once I see the final Potter movie—in approximately six months, when I’ll no longer have to step over wand-carrying 9-year-olds to find my seat—that’ll be the end. No more Dumbledore or Hermione or horcruxes or thestrals. A decade of fiction, over at the closing credits.

But what could I possibly write about this week’s book? Harry Potter is pretty good? Best 700-page young adult novel since Harry Potter 6? Spoiler alert: Snape kills Dumbledore? There’s not much you can say about a cultural phenomenon that hasn’t been said in the last 10 years, or even the last 10 days. Except that there’s a bittersweet finality to closing the door on these kids right around the time I’ve finally accepted not being a kid myself.

All the facts fit to print

Major victory this week, guys. A book I’ve had on my shelf for no less than five years finally got read. This may not seem like a big deal, but when you buy books like I do—a ratio somewhere along the lines of three new acquisitions for every one completion—it’s nice to reassure myself that even though I may not get to that memoir I just had to buy until say, 2016, at least it will get read. Someday.

On to the disappointing news: A.J. Jacobs’ The Know-It-All wasn’t exactly worth the wait. Which is to say that, shockingly, a book documenting one man’s mission to read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica isn’t quite as riveting as you might think.

I have to admit, the concept intrigued me. Jacobs is (or at least was at the time of the book) an editor at Esquire, where he primarily focuses on pop culture news and the latest celebrity gossip. His goal with the Britannic: fill his brain with slightly more intellectual fare, and/or know everything there is to know and/or become the smartest person in the world. You know, the usual.