couldreads

Bubba’s words of wisdom

Shows-is-a-scanned-book-jacket-image-from-Back-to

Although I’ve written on this blog of my appreciation for book recommendations, I can say that I’ve never actually immediately read and reviewed something simply because someone told me to—until now.

In the interest of savoring Steve Jobs (which is still so very very good), I took a little break from Walter Isaacson’s opus this week for a 200-page detour with Bill Clinton. Yes, gigantic nerd that I am, I actually read Clinton’s oh-so-enticingly-titled Back to Work. (You’re welcome, Aunt Mary.)

Although I suspected this book would be far from riveting, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t go into it intrigued. After all, imagine being Bill Clinton these days. Not recovered-from-heart-surgery Bill Clinton, or my-wife-is-the-secretary-of-state Bill Clinton, or OK-maybe-I-did-have-sexual-relations-with-that-woman Bill Clinton. I mean imagine being the Bill Clinton who left the economy in relatively good shape, with a surplus no less, only to watch it slowly—and then rapidly—deteriorate in the decade after you leave office. Imagine spending eight years building an amazing sand castle, only to have a linguistically challenged Texan come along and stomp on it, send a bunch of sand to Iraq and Afghanistan and then remain notably silent as his cohorts tell everyone that the government sucks at building sand castles anyway, that the entire sand business should be left to the free market, which would never—never—be unfairly advantageous to sand purveyors at the top, at the expense of those at the bottom.

(That analogy didn’t really work but I was committed to it.)

Barefoot, fruitarian, genius

For weeks now, I’ve been mad at the Internet. Not for its usual follies—I’m all about animals riding skateboards—but for making it nearly impossible to avoid at least a dozen or more spoilers from the new Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson.

I suppose it’s weird to consider tidbits from one of the most widely anticipated books of the year “spoilers,” but as someone who knew very little about the Apple founder outside of his job title and health status, I had been looking forward to the Isaacson book as a way to learn everything about the man in one fell (500-page) swoop. So you can imagine my frustration when every fifth Tweet (actual proportion exaggerated) for the last three weeks has contained some unanticipated factoid, some “aha” moment from the book that I might have otherwise savored for the first time when I cracked its spine last week.

…Alright, that’s kind of a lie. The truth is I started reading the Jobs book not because I found myself so truly interested in the world’s most interesting man, but because all the cool kids were reading it. (While we’re being honest, I don’t really like biographies. There are very few people about whom I care enough to read their life story, especially when a Wikipedia entry and a few well-researched magazine articles will suffice.) When a book attains a level of commercial success that makes it unavoidable, I simply feel compelled to jump on the bandwagon, slave that I am to pop culture.

The future will be plagiarized

There are two primary types of book scandal—either you write something that isn’t true and say it is (James Frey, Margaret B. Jones, that “Holocaust survivor” who said she lived with wolves) or you say you wrote something that you definitely didn’t (Kaavya Viswanathan). A fairly epic example of the latter came out this week, when it was discovered that Q.R. Markham’s mystery book, Assassin of Secrets, was actually lifted from something like a dozen other books, forcing publisher Little, Brown to pull it from the shelves and Markham to conspicuously fall off the face of the planet.

The Assassin of Secrets story is extra interesting because, unlike some of his plagiarizing predecessors, Markham (the pen name for poet Quentin Rowan, who also happens to be a part-owner of Williamsburg bookstore Spoonbill & Sugartown) made what seems like zero effort to hide his ripping. Here are two sample paragraphs (a comprehensive list is available here).

From Assassin of Secrets: “The boxy, sprawling Munitions Building which sat near the Washington Monument and quietly served as I-Division’s base of operations was a study in monotony. Endless corridors connecting to endless corridors. Walls a shade of green common to bad cheese and fruit. Forests of oak desks separated down the middle by rows of tall columns, like concrete redwoods, each with a number designating a particular work space.”
From Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency: “In June 1930, the boxy, sprawling Munitions Building, near the Washington Monument, was a study in monotony. Endless corridors connecting to endless corridors. Walls a shade of green common to bad cheese and fruit. Forests of oak desks separated down the middle by rows of tall columns, like concrete redwoods, each with a number designating a particular workspace.”

In the age of Google, I find it downright amazing that people still think they can get away with this kind of stuff. Which isn’t to say that I expect publishers to spend all their time googling various paragraphs from manuscripts they receive, but rather that authors, whose entire goal is to get their work distributed to as many people as possible, don’t realize (or choose to ignore) that someone somewhere is going to pick up on similarities as blatant as these.

We’re all in Kansas now

My high school history teacher once told us that politics (or I suppose history in general) is a pendulum—that the order of things is one way until slowly it isn’t anymore, and that this new order is only temporary until the previous status quo comes back again. At the time I thought this a rather interesting way of explaining the trajectory of existence, and a fairly straightforward factoid to remember for the midterm. Only a decade later do I really get how much it also happens to be true.

Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas? came out in 2004, but for all intents and purposes could have been written today, or five years from now. While the book focuses primarily on the last few decades, it indirectly hammers home the pendulum point; history will, for better or worse, repeat itself. We just happen to currently be in a particularly disappointing part of the pendulum swing.

There’s a part of me that feels like I’m the last person on earth to read this book, but knowing that’s never actually the case, here’s a brief summary: Basically Frank set out to assess how middle America in general, and his home state of Kansas in particular, has transformed itself into a bastion of Republicanism, even though conservatives’ belief in the infallibility of the free market is exactly what’s resulted in a reduction in quality of life for the very people that populate middle America. (Whew.) I wish I could sum up every point Frank makes in a few easy-to-read/entertaining paragraphs, but the reality is that this is a heavily researched book, with a lot of interesting points and a lot of infuriating realities. It answers a question (or at least attempts to) that I think many of us have been asking ourselves for the last few years, and in such a way that at the end you feel simultaneously informed yet depressed, knowledgeable yet resigned. This may be an at-times infuriating phenomenon, but it’s not a new one.

Scary Stories 3: still scary

So my original plan for this week was to read What’s the Matter with Kansas?, Thomas Frank’s 2004 book on middle America’s confusion over which political party has their best interests at heart. But then I figured that, as a serious lover of Halloween—costumes and candy; what’s not to love?—I shouldn’t miss an opportunity to read something more seasonally appropriate. I mean, Kansas is scary in its own way (the way everything about politics is scary right now) but not “boo” scary, not ax murderer scary, not hold-your-pee-for-hours-because-you-don’t-want-to-get-out-of-bed-and-get-your-ankles-sliced scary. For that, I turn to Scary Stories 3.

People tend to have one of two reactions when I describe this book—general apathy/lack of recognition, or sheer terror. For those in the latter category, Scary Stories 3 (and in all likelihood its two prequels) is the incarnation of childhood fear, and of the power that stories about ghosts and monsters and spiders that lay eggs in people’s faces (!) had over us. For me personally, Scary Stories 3 is the book that I wouldn’t let my mother keep in my room because I was afraid of its actual physical presence. It’s also the book I convinced myself changed color overnight, and whose illustrations I can still remember today, more than a decade after first being introduced to them. Scary Stories 3 doesn’t remind me of trick-or-treating, or the time the “sunflower” costume my mom made for me was too hot to wear and I basically asked my neighbors for candy wearing a green sweatsuit. Nope, it reminds me of being freaking petrified of things as a child, in a way that’d be hard to replicate today unless I was approached by a demon or knife-wielding homeless man who swore to kill me and/or made that throaty noise from The Ring.