Reviews – Page 42 – couldreads

Being a zombie is cheaper

A coworker stopped by my desk earlier today and got a glimpse of this week’s newly finished read: Jessica Mitford’s The American Way of Death Revisited. “Oh you know,” I said sheepishly, surreptitiously trying to stuff the book under some papers. “Just some light summer reading.”

Indeed, it is appropriately Kira that I spent most of July 4 alternating between watching A&E’s Hoarders, peeking at the haphazard and totally dangerous fireworks being set off by my neighbors and finishing up a book about our country’s determination to profit off of our respective unavoidable deaths. Yay capitalism! Yay America!

The American Way of Death may sound familiar to you detail-oriented readers: I mentioned it a few weeks ago in my review of Mary Roach’s Packing for Mars. See, I first bought this book back in college after reading Roach’s Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers and despite what at the time seemed like a suddenly insatiable need to learn more about the topics raised in Roach’s book (embalming, decomposition, grave-robbing…you know, the usual), I seem to have given up on The American Way of Death around July 2007, just 100 pages shy of finishing. The book then survived one apartment move and multiple bedroom reconfigurations before I discovered it this weekend. (“Casket price gouging and funereal regulatory intervention? Sounds like Independence Day reading to me!”)

Aggressively marketed nachos

I know I joke around a lot about having only one or two readers and, for the most part, I’m not joking. Like seriously, I see the numbers. There are about five of you—six on a good day—and I’m grateful for every one. But on this lovely day in June, I find myself particularly grateful to one reader in particular (no, not you mom) who by virtue of her totally enviable job in book publishing, sent me some freebies in a very official-seeming package that arrived at my office yesterday, forcing me to gloat to my coworker (another reader, bless her) about how totally awesome I am and how probable it is that in the not-so-distant future I will be far too famous for my book blog to bother with a regular 9-to-5 and she should probably get on my schedule now if she wants to still be friends in 2012.

So thanks, new favorite reader (I am withholding your identity because ~~I don’t want to get you in trouble for sending books to a reviewer with a 5-person audience~~ one cannot predict the magnitude of attention you would get if I mentioned you by name.) It’s nice to write book reviews; it’s even nicer to think that someone, somewhere out there is enjoying them.

On to The Ask! I first heard about this book sometime last year, when it was reviewed not once but twice in the New York Times. (Seriously NYT, something like 200,000 books are published a year and you can’t bother to limit it to one review per? I just don’t know how my imminent memoir about growing up an upper-middle-class suburban white girl will ever break through.) Since I am criminally awful at summarizing the actual plots of books—have you guys noticed?—I’ll just steal a paragraph from Lydia Millet’s review:

“The Ask” describes a crisis in the life of one Milo Burke, a deeply cynical academic development officer, earnest binger on doughnuts, avid consumer of Internet porn, and devoted father and husband. Detailing the meltdown of Milo’s career and marriage, “The Ask” takes place in an exhausted and passive institutional workplace—the kind of futile office space we know from such cinematic offerings as, well, “Office Space.” … When Milo loses his job, then gets a chance to have it back if he can reel in a big fish—a major gift from an old college friend who’s now a Machiavellian tech millionaire—he starts down a grim and spiraling path.

That’s enough (unlike the Times, I don’t believe in giving away a novel’s entire plot in a review.) The bottom line: The book is about Milo, a definitive sad sack with artistic aspirations but limited motivation, who alternates his time between grandiose ruminations on “the meaning of it all” and just run-of-the-mill complaining. “We were stuck between meanings,” he writes. “Or we were the last dribbles of something. The fall of the Soviet Union, this was, the death of analog. The beginning of aggressively marketed nachos.” (Confession: This was the easiest quote to pull as it was referenced in not one, but both Times reviews. SERIOUSLY NYT, GET IT TOGETHER.)

$#*! my grandma says

If there were an alternate title for I Remember Nothing, it would be #whitepeopleproblems.

It’s funny that Nora Ephron’s latest book reminds me of a hashtag, since Twitter is one of several things Ephron swears in an introductory essay that she will never take the time to understand (also see: Jay-Z, the Kardashians, soccer). Funny since I’m sure Nora Ephron objects to Twitter for the same reasons so many people who’ve never used it do: it’s frivolous, indulgent, emblematic of a global case of ADD, full of people tweeting about their breakfasts. Why is this funny? Because I Remember Nothing is basically 150 pages of Ephron’s brain farts, piled together in a hardcover and sold for $23. At least on Twitter it’s all short, sweet and free.

Now before I tear into this book, I should pause for a moment to respect my elders. Ephron’s essays here are very much about being old, and she’s 69 so that’s fair enough. I don’t know the point at which you’re allowed, as an adult, to throw up your hands and give in to the stodgy bitterness that comes with old age, but I am willing to grant that it’s probably somewhere around 70. In a way, I Remember Nothing feels a lot like a goodbye book—the last two “essays” are devoted to things Ephron will and won’t miss, ostensibly about life. So I sympathize. When you’ve had a 40-year career, maybe you reserve the right to fart out your last contribution to nonfiction. I just don’t think you should actually do it.

Nostalgia is a seductive liar

So I was perusing Tumblr this week and stumbled across a question from one person I follow to another: “Curious about something: I often have this attitude towards contemporary fiction. I’m reading Steinbeck now with great joy. Are there current writers that are worth it?”

Now, this isn’t the first time I’ve come across this attitude from fellow readers. I suppose there’s something natural to looking back on books written fifty or a hundred years ago—let alone Shakespeare—and seeing in them something you want to believe hasn’t been replicated or improved upon since. At the same time, really? Should it not strike all of us as ludicrous to suggest that the art of writing fiction somehow disappeared in the 21st century, or that people born after, say, 1975 are somehow inherently incapable of producing literature of the same quality as John Steinbeck?

I could also argue the other side here—that upon reflection, books like The Great Gatsby, or Catcher in the Rye, aren’t really that good. (Confession: I couldn’t even get through Catcher in the Rye. I know; I’m sorry!) But that’s not nearly as important as the fact that even without shitting on traditionally celebrated classical authors, the 21st century has still produced some bombass fiction, and some incredibly talented and prolific people upon whom I can only hope silver-clad space-dwelling humans of the 23rd century will look back and say, “Man, remember when people could write like that?”

Which brings me to Jonathan Franzen.

Intergalactic, planetary

Imagine pooping in a plastic bag about six feet away from a good friend. Now imagine doing it in space. Now imagine imagining scenarios like this one while packed into a train crammed with commuters you hope won’t notice the frequency of the word “feces” in the book you’re holding, and you’ll get a sense of how truly awesome it is to read Mary Roach.

I first got into Roach in freshman year of college, when her debut book, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, made me legitimately interested in what happens to our bodies after we die (no really, legitimately interested. I subsequently read Jessica Mitford’s The American Way of Death, which was just as fascinating, though far less hilarious). Since then, I’ve read each of Roach’s three subsequent books within a month of their release: Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife, Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex and most recently Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void. The last of these I finally finished over the weekend (after realizing that the chances of my polishing off 550-page The Corrections in time for this week’s review were slim to none).