Reviews – Page 43 – couldreads

The quick and the dead

I am alive!

I know you were worried; to be honest, so was I. A six-day bender with two friends/former Marines in town for Fleet Week meant not only was I not getting the enough reading done—about 12 collective pages last week—but there were moments when I thought not enough brain cells would survive for me to ever read again. At least not anything outside of Goosebumps.

To add insult to injury, said friends were staying in my apartment which, as I’ve mentioned, is fairly covered in unread books, many of which interested said friends and spawned conversations that made me stare longingly at my bookshelf and wish I were curled up with a novel instead of arguing with bouncers in the Meatpacking District over the merits of jorts as a fashion statement (I am decidedly in favor; they, not so much.) Long story short, my brief sojourn into the life of an actually sociable person was exciting, but I see myself at no point in the immediate future becoming the kind of girl who changes bars as often as I currently change positions on the couch.

Fortunately for us all, this week’s book was…let us just say, not so much a challenge. I mean, what does one say about the Southern Vampire Mysteries—(they’re called the Southern Vampire Mysteries, for fuck’s sake)—the 11-and-counting titles upon which HBO’s True Blood is based. They’re vapid and simplistic and, only a hop, skip and a jump away from erotica. They take the intellectual capacity of a 9-year-old to read, or dog of above-average intelligence. They’re repetitive—about 25% of each book is devoted to retelling the events of the book before—and undeveloped. Oh, and they’re prettay prettay good.

Sex and drugs and house

I suppose it’s appropriate that I would be reviewing Brave New World during a particularly stressful week at work. After all, in Aldous Huxley’s faux-utopian novel, there is no stress. Everyone’s happy with their station in life and during those brief moments when they aren’t, during the hours one might otherwise ruminate on daily obstacles, there’s government-approved and -distributed soma, as close an approximation to Xanax as one might have conceived in the early 1930s.

I don’t know how I managed not to read Brave New World up until this point, but just in case you haven’t either, here’s the basic idea: The novel is set in a future society where women no longer give birth biologically; couples aren’t married, “everyone belongs to everyone else.” On the social level, this means that everyone sleeps with everyone else, women and men are discouraged from forming relationships longer than a few months (and should never be exclusive). On the biological level, this means that birth has become a science. Embryos, created and brought to term in what are essentially human-producing factories, are split into different castes—Alphas, Betas, Gammas, etc.—and conditioned based on their predetermined station in life. Moreover, the lower the caste, the more humans are created from one egg, a scientific achievement knows as the “Bokanovsky Process.” So while an Alpha is a one of a kind, a human conditioned only to respect the values of this new society (togetherness, happiness, tranquility, consumption), an Epsilon may be one of 40+ identical “twins” created from the same egg, and created to be of lower intellect and expectation, the ideal humans to …man elevators, or work in factories, without even the ability to want something better for themselves.

Bossypants and mom jeans

I mean, it’s not like I wasn’t going to like Bossypants. Chmon. I pre-ordered this book the minute I heard about its existence, as I’ve spent the better part of the last few years idolizing Tina Fey as both creator and star of 30 Rock. Friends of mine know I’ve long felt a kinship with Liz Lemon. Frumpy dresser? Check. Devoted fan of junk food, with an emphasis on items whose key ingredient is cheese or cheese-flavored? Check. Inability to translate motivated responsible work persona into personal life? Check. Unabashed fan of reality television? Double freaking check.

So I was a little surprised when about 50 pages into Bossypants, a subtle theme was emerging. This book was…kind of about being a woman. About being a woman in a traditionally male-dominated field (comedy, not television) a theme I’ve only recently read about in another enjoyable lady memoir: Kathy Griffin’s (who, ironically, is given a bit of a shout-out in Bossypants: “If you could turn gay from being around gay people, wouldn’t Kathy Griffin be Rosie O’Donnell by now?”) Yes, this book was just a little bit about how even the suggestion that Tina Fey being a successful boss is something worth highlighting inadvertently separates her from the legions of unhighlighted male bosses who have come before her, as though signing paychecks with a vagina is like a dog walking on its hind legs.

A book not about dentistry

Now I know you’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover, but I’ve never really heard the policy on judging one by a randomly selected page, so for the sake of argument, let’s assume it’s an improvement.

One of many neurotic tendencies I have when it comes to books—other examples: always buying the second or third book back on the shelf, never lending books I haven’t read yet, dog-earing the tops of pages to mark my place and the bottom to mark favorite quotes—is reading a random page from a book I’m considering buying, and basing my decision almost entirely on that page.

Now I realize this isn’t entirely fair; every author is entitled to a decent amount of exposition, and certainly to a fair shake at having their words consumed in the context of…all the other words. But given my extreme inability to not buy at least three books a month, cuts have to be made somewhere, and I’ve found that one can tell a lot about a book by picking it up in the middle, if only for a few paragraphs.

Which brings me to my point. In developing this bizarre little habit, I’ve found that some of the best books—certainly not all, but some—are good on every single page. Some books are so beautifully written that even though it’s obviously advisable to start from the beginning and end with the end, any glimpse, however brief, into the title’s center, offers a preview of the greatness. Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, well, it’s that kind of book.

(Sidebar: Not to make it seem as though Smith is more of a writer than a creator, it’s worth noting that some of the best books are also very “book”ish, which is to say that even as you appreciate the depth of their characters and sincerity of their scenes, you’re hard-pressed to envision a movie or other visual adaptation that would even hold a candle to the hundreds of pages of text. White Teeth is that kind of book as well. …It’s a really fucking good book).

It’s the tweaking weekend

Whenever I’m feeling a bit frustrated with one of my own vices, I like to read about drugs. Now, before you get all high (pun intended) and mighty, I’m not saying it’s an ideal personality trait to be comforted by the struggles of others, but hey, the entire reality television genre is predicated on this kind of schadenfreude.

In a way, what appeals to me about the genre is that drug addiction is an equal-opportunity affliction. Certainly, upbringing and socioeconomic status all play a role in one’s predilection, or lack thereof, for addiction – but at the end of the day, anyone can be an addict. The problem transcends generations, geography and politics (to the extent that anything can).

So I had been looking forward to Nick Reding’s Methland, which I bought after reading Beautiful Boy, a father’s memoir about his son’s addiction to methamphetamine. Here is a drug with which I have no personal experience but, for all intents and purposes, is one of the worst, one of the addictions from which few recover. While Beautiful Boy focused on one family’s experience, Methland promised a broader overview: How it’s produced, where, by whom, and most importantly, the scale of the meth problem and the severity of its fallout.