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Monster storms and monster monsters, or the time I read Frankenstein during a hurricane

Five days and 900 bags of potato chips later, I am back in business.

To clarify: I suffered no real damages from Hurricane/Tropical Storm/Superstorm/Royal Pain in the Ass Sandy. The No Parking sign across from my apartment blew down, as did the scaffolding hiding the construction site next door and the gate blocking off entry to an abandoned lot across the street. In short, when you live in Bushwick, epicenter of mostly defunct manufacturing facilities and empty plots of land, there’s not much to destroy. (And the potato chips mostly just reflect my poor grocery choices in the face of adverse weather conditions.)

But Sandy did wreak havoc on my neighbors (in the New York City sense, not my actual neighbors, who spent most of the storm playing really loud music and screaming whenever the lights flickered) and my heart continues to go out to people still dealing with power outages, ruined homes, lack of food and water and more. If you haven’t already, I highly encourage you to visit www.redcross.org and hand over some of your hard-earned dolla billz. It is the second-least you could do, after the actual least, which is nothing.

I should also thank those non-NYC peeps who reached out to me via phone or text or Facebook to make sure Godzilla and I fared well in the storm. Other than the brief panic attack I had over whether or not to take out my window AC unit, I got incredibly lucky in all of this, and Godzilla mostly just slept. I don’t think he even knows anything is amiss, except that I’ve been working from home for a week and so he can’t invite all his friends over, or whatever it is cats do when their owners aren’t around.

Some words of wisdom from Joe Queenan

This is a blurb from the Wall Street Journal’s most recent Saturday essay, which is awesome and you should totally read in full. Author Joe Queenan’s forthcoming One for the Books, from which this essay is excerpted, comes out on Thursday.

“A case can be made that people who read a preposterous number of books are not playing with a full deck. I prefer to think of us as dissatisfied customers. If you have read 6,000 books in your lifetime, or even 600, it’s probably because at some level you find ‘reality’ a bit of a disappointment. People in the 19th century fell in love with Ivanhoe and The Count of Monte Cristo because they loathed the age they were living through. Women in our own era read Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre and even The Bridges of Madison County—a dimwit, hayseed reworking of Madame Bovary—because they imagine how much happier they would be if their husbands did not spend quite so much time with their drunken, illiterate golf buddies down at Myrtle Beach. A blind bigamist nobleman with a ruined castle and an insane, incinerated first wife beats those losers any day of the week. Blind, two-timing noblemen never wear belted shorts.
Similarly, finding oneself at the epicenter of a vast, global conspiracy involving both the Knights Templar and the Vatican would be a huge improvement over slaving away at the Bureau of Labor Statistics for the rest of your life or being married to someone who is drowning in dunning notices from Williams-Sonoma. No matter what they may tell themselves, book lovers do not read primarily to obtain information or to while away the time. They read to escape to a more exciting, more rewarding world. A world where they do not hate their jobs, their spouses, their governments, their lives. A world where women do not constantly say things like ‘Have a good one!’ and ‘Sounds like a plan!’ A world where men do not wear belted shorts. Certainly not the Knights Templar.”

J.K. Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy: Accio excitement?

As book titles go, The Casual Vacancy is pretty appropriate. Not only because a casual vacancy — a seat on a local city council made suddenly available by the unexpected death of its holder — is the circumstance around which J.K. Rowling’s latest novel revolves, but also because somehow this particular turn of phrase seems to define book itself: unceremoniously lackluster.

In light of the array of negative reviews that have already been written about TCV, I feel like I should start off with two editor’s notes. The first is that I’ve spent a fair amount of time daydreaming about what it would be like to be J.K. Rowling (like circa 2005, not during all that poor-person business) and so I sympathize with how difficult it must have been (in a first-world-problems sort of way) to even consider writing another book after the conclusion of the Harry Potter series. In Rowling’s place, I would have been sorely tempted to rest on my laurels (my $1 billion laurels) and hang it up Harper Lee style. I mean, we’re talking about the literary equivalent of Adele’s sophomore album (ignoring for the purposes of analogy that 21 was actually the sophomore album) — I’d at least have considered writing under a pen name.

I also want to note that I did not go into The Casual Vacancy expecting some sort of reprise of Harry Potter. I like to read about books before I buy them, and it was fairly widely reported that TCV was to be Rowling’s first grown-up novel , and therefore ostensibly not about magical candies and invisibility cloaks. (In other words, not like when R.L. Stine wrote Superstition, and it was basically just a longer Fear Street book with sex scenes.) I appreciate that Harry Potter will always be a thing unto itself, and that perhaps Rowling might have wanted to get as far away from the fantasy genre as possible, to forestall any potential murmurings about trying to best her own series.

So long and thanks for all the fish

The Death and Life of Bobby Z is about impersonation. Written by Savages author Don Winslow, the novel follows Tim Kearney, a small-time criminal who, in the interest of saving himself from a prison death at the hands of gang members, agrees to impersonate legendary (and deceased) dope smugger Bobby Z so the DEA can trade him for one of their agents, who has been captured by a cartel. As can be expected when one decides to impersonate an infamous drug lord, Kearney finds himself in over his head, plopped in a desert compound with Z’s former employers, employees and lover. Adventure ensues.

The great fake front page my coworkers made for me, a Crain’s farewell tradition to which I have always aspired.

I’m behind on my reviews lately because tomorrow will be the final day in my own eight-year impersonation of someone else. Not a drug kingpin, mind you, an impersonation at which I would fail miserably (do kingpins own cats?), but rather a convincing impression of someone who knows anything about journalism, financial news, digital strategy or management. In short, I will be concluding my tenure with Crain’s New York Business.

I call my stint at Crain’s an impersonation not because I drove the thing into the ground, or because I think I’ve done a bad job in any of the four roles I’ve held at the company since 2007. Rather, I have since Day One (which in this case was my sophomore year of college, when I joined Crain’s as an intern) been surrounded by high-caliber journalists who taught me more in the first six months than a communications major did in four years. Some lessons I learned sneakily—eavesdropping on senior staffers to figure out how one successfully rejects a PR pitch—while others were offered up freely. Sometimes I learned by doing things right, but just as often by doing them wrong, leaving some poor editor to, for example, sort through my pathetic early attempts at feature writing. Basically, I’m a rookie who managed to sneak in with the pros, and somehow never got caught.

No easy life

I was aiming for an upbeat post this week, a break from financial tomfoolery and doomed teen romance. Maybe a fast-paced psychological thriller, or some indulgent chick lit buried at the bottom of my shelves. …Or maybe I could just decide to read about the death of Osama Bin Laden and screw all that.

I picked up No Easy Day—the Pentagon-condemned military memoir by Navy SEAL and Bin Laden mission participant Matt Bissonnette—out of, well, sheer curiosity. So rarely are we afforded the privilege of transparency when it comes to the military that it seemed an awful waste not to take advantage of this book’s release. Moreover, the Pentagon’s overwrought reaction to the whole thing made it sound as though Great and Powerful Secrets were contained within.

If I’m being perfectly honest—with you all, with myself—I found No Easy Day less interesting than I probably should have. Bissonnette (who wrote the book under the pen name Mark Owen) is clearly an experienced and talented SEAL, but a professional storyteller he is not. The book, which skips around between the Bin Laden mission, preceding missions, a bit of military history and Bissonnette’s own experiences in training and combat, is straightforward and matter-of-fact, filled with the kind of practical detail that would be entirely mundane if it weren’t related to wildly important foreign policy decisions, and some of the most secretive and technologically advanced military missions in recent history. It’s sort of like Sookie Stackhouse (the narrator, not the TV iteration) quit her job at Merlotte’s, became a Navy SEAL and then wrote a book about it. While No Easy Day provides a wealth of information about the preparation that went into Operation Neptune Spear (seriously), it also provides a substantial amount of background on things like…what Navy SEALs wear, how they pack their gear, the intricacies of helicopter rides, the use of hammocks, and so forth.