couldreads

“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.

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.)