About Alice by Calvin Trillin

I know Trillin is famous for his witty essays in the New Yorker, but I'm only an occasional reader of that magazine and somehow his stuff has escaped me thus far. A few weeks ago, however, I saw Calvin Trillin on the Daily Show  He was delightfully funny, and I realized that I was probably missing a lot by not seeking out his work. His new book Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin (even that title is funny) has a long queue at the library, so I picked up About Alice instead. What a sweet book! It's an homage to his late wife and is touching and hilarious at the same time. It's a very short read and a perfect introduction to Trillin. If, like me, you have never quite gotten around to reading anything by him, About Alice is a good place to start.

I've pinned a link to the Daily Show broadcast to my Pinterest board.

(Book 33, 2011)

Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde

I imagine if you are fan of Jasper Fforde, creator of oddball alternate-universe mysteries like the Thursday Next series, you might like this book. Several years ago I tried to read The Eyre Affair and abandoned it in exhaustion. In the intervening years Fforde has cranked out five more Thursday Next books and a couple of Nursery Crime novels, and now he’s begun a third series, the first of which is this one, Shades of Grey.

Shades of Grey is part dystopian tale, part social satire, and total fantasy. The world has undergone some unspecified disaster, destroying civilization as we know it, and damaging people’s ability to perceive color. The society that has evolved organizes people into castes by what colors they can see, and (as you can imagine), some colors confer more status than others. The Purples are at the top of the heap; the Greys are at the bottom. The world is controlled by the Colortocracy, complete with rigid rules and arcane traditions that combine the worst of North Korea with English public schools. (Prefects are in charge, everyone must play a sport, there is much singing in praise of someone called Munsell.)

This book is very funny (a la Douglas Adam), but it’s also very complicated and difficult to follow. Fforde’s world is so enormously complex that huge portions of the book are just explication. The story (about Eddie, a naïve Red, and Jane, a subversive Grey) is constantly interrupted in its forward progress by whimsical asides about the black market value of lingonberry jam and the abuse of the color green, for example. Fforde’s total infatuation with his own cleverness is his undoing. In the end I was overwhelmed by detail and lost track of who was who and why it mattered.

(Book 46, 2010)

The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson

Yesterday I finished listening to The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson on a device called a Playaway. Have you heard of these? They are little digital audio devices (smaller and lighter than a deck of cards) that come preloaded with an audiobook. The Madison Public library has recently begun lending them. They come complete with a battery and headphones (along with polite instructions about cleaning the earbuds with alcohol before using). The Playaway takes all the bother out of listening to audiobooks; no more bulky cassette players, no more ripping CDs to your iPod. The Playaway Web site says that the universal headphone jack allows use with different kinds of output devices including FM transmitters, so perhaps you could use one of these in your car. It even comes with a handy lanyard for hanging around your neck. I felt a tiny bit dorky wearing it this way but not enough to make me not do it.

Bryson reads this book himself; it’s his memoir of growing up in Des Moines, Iowa in the 1950’s and it’s totally entertaining. In truth, it’s more than a memoir, it’s a history of the 1950’s from the point of view of a child. Thus for example, atomic air raid drills are remembered not for the horror of possible nuclear annihilation but for the sight of the teacher (Mrs. Enormous-Bosom) taking shelter under her desk, her large behind not quite fitting underneath. Bryson avoids maudlin self-indulgence by anchoring his personal story in the larger world. He includes longer sections about U.S. society in the 1950’s: race relations, foreign policy, and an endearing portrait of his mother who worked full time as a reporter for the Des Moines Register back in the days when few women worked outside the home.

Bryson’s childhood sounds idyllic. He describes with delight the days spent on his bicycle, the hoards of children in his neighborhood, the endless road trips in the back of a station wagon, and the sights and sounds of downtown Des Moines before it was leveled for redevelopment. Bryson enjoyed the kind of freedom that was so common in the 1950’s and so uncommon now. While I am younger than Bryson, I too remember being kicked out of the house early on a summer morning with a peanut butter sandwich in my pocket, instructed not to return until dark. This book evokes great memories for baby boomers, but I think anyone of any age would enjoy it.

The book is (like all Bryson books) extremely funny. If you happened to see a woman walking around Madison wearing a weird square thing around her neck and giggling hysterically, that would be me.

(Book 17, 2009)

Him Her Him Again the End of Him by Patricia Marx

Don’t you just want to punctuate that title? I keep looking at it hoping that commas will appear.

I thought this might be okay to listen to and for a while it was. The book is funny in a chick lit kind of way but without the constant references to shopping and shoes. Then it got dull, but I wanted to find out how it ended, so I ditched the audiobook and checked out the hardcover from the library. Neither was really worth my trouble. It’s kind of clever at the beginning, where the unnamed female protagonist (“Her”) goes to Cambridge for graduate school and falls for an intellectual cad named Eugene (“Him”). I liked the academic jokes and her constantly changing thesis topic (possibilities include “The Relation Between Racial Tension and the Influx of Better Cuts of Meat to Great Britain”), but once Eugene dumps her (for the first time) and she returns to the U.S. (sans finished thesis or Cambridge degree) the book really starts to drag. Eugene is so shallow and annoying that it’s difficult to buy the continuing hold he has on her, and his ultimate demise could have come 50 pages sooner.

Patricia Marx is a humor writer with a good resume, including work with Saturday Night Live and the Harvard Lampoon. A reviewer on Amazon noted that the book is just like one of those Saturday Night Live skits that starts out funny, but just goes on and on and on…. I think that’s an accurate analysis.

(Book 9, 2008)

Bad News by Donald E. Westlake

This was another outing with John Dortmunder and his gang. I love these guys. These books are ostensibly crime novels (from the POV of the criminals), but the crimes never go as planned, and the guys spend most of the time trying to get back on track when things go awry. Really, these are relationship novels. The capers are just an excuse for the fellows to spend hours together holed up in a motel room or a car, waiting for something to happen and bickering. In this episode, John and his pals (Andy Kelp, Tiny Bulcher, Stan Murch, and Murch’s mom) get involved in a convoluted plot to rip off an Indian casino in upstate New York. As you would expect, it’s one disaster after another, complete with dug-up dead bodies, stolen snow plows, false DNA samples, and crooked casino bosses.

Westlake was born in 1933 and has been writing Dortmunder novels since 1970. I have read 6 of them, out of a total of 13. Dortmunder is like a cartoon character in that he seems to never get any older; thus he’s been about 40 for more than 35 years. Later books contain grudging references to cell phones and computers, but this one, published in 2001, makes it clear that Dortmunder wants nothing to do with them. The books have a timeless feel, which I really enjoy.

(Book 57, 2007)

The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett

This is the most delightful book I have read so far this year. I loved loved loved it. It was delicious. Am I revealing appalling ignorance by admitting that, heretofore, I knew nothing of the author, Alan Bennett? How can I call myself an anglophile, and still admit this in print? But there it is for all to see: I never heard of him before I came across a review of this book in the New York Times book review a few weeks ago. Apparently he's quite a busy man so now I have much to look forward to!

This slim volume, really a novella, tells the charming story of a woman (known only as the Queen) who becomes an avid reader late in life. It chronicles her growth as a reader, guided at first by Norman, a palace kitchen worker she meets in the traveling bookmobile, then later by her own intelligence and natural curiosity. The banter between the Queen and Norman is brilliant, and the Queen's progress through literature is joyful and endearing. The reaction of her family and the public to her reading is mixed; her ministers feel neglected, and the public is initially baffled when the Queen asks them, during walkabouts, what they are reading. Even her dogs get lonely. It's all very very funny.

I love the Queen, the actual British queen, I mean. I suppose if I were British, I would feel obliged to have some opinion on the relevance of the monarchy in the 21^st century, and all that, but as a U.S. citizen I feel free to just enjoy her. I admire her dedication to her job, her professionalism, her unflagging energy, her sense of duty, and her lack of frivolity. I know, I know I don't really know her. Watching Helen Mirren play her doesn't count. And neither, really, does reading this book. But if the real Queen is anything like the character in this book, then we have a lot in common! For example, we like a lot of the same books and authors, and share a lot of opinions about books and about reading! Several times during this book I thought "Yes! That's so true!" Here is one example:

"Can there be any greater pleasure," she confided in her neighbor, the Canadian minister for overseas trade, "than to come across an author one enjoys and then to find they have written not just one book or two, but at least a dozen."

Nothing delights me more than a discovery like that. And here's another:

As a reader, she was brisk and straightforward; she didn't want to wallow in anything.

Yes! How many times have I said this here! No wallowing! The Queen likes Anita Brookner, Joanna Trollope and Nancy Mitford. She thinks Henry James goes on a bit too much. She even likes Lauren Bacall's memoirs, which I too thought were great. She looks at a stack of books on her desk and thinks that they look good enough to eat. How can you not love this woman?

(Book 47, 2007)

The Pirates! In an Adventure with Communists by Gideon Defoe

This is a really silly book. It sat on our kitchen table for several days while my son Miles and I took turns reading it over breakfast. We resisted the urge to give away the jokes to one another, though it was tempting. It’s also tempting to give away the jokes here, but I will try not to.

I found this on the new fiction shelves at the library. I had seen references to it, and to the two previous volumes in the series, and had always meant to pick one of them up. It doesn’t really matter if you start with the third one (which this one is) or either of the others. You catch on pretty quickly: There’s a pirate captain and a crew, and they get up to some adventures. In this book they go to Paris with Marx and Engels, and encounter Friedrich Nietzsche at the opera; Nietzsche spends most of the book encased in a tin robot costume. Marx is exceedingly vain about his beard, and Engels is a sycophant. The pirates lack names, and are known instead by descriptive monikers such as “the pirate with the scarf,” “the pirate with the nut allergy,” and “the pirate who used to be a mailman.” It’s funny, but it gets a little old after a while. (Note: Miles disagrees, and has instructed me to procure the other volumes ASAP.)

This book reminded me of the Series of Unfortunate Events books by Lemony Snicket, only for grown-ups. And maybe not even for all grownups. I have to admit that whatever is funny about Nietzsche disguised as an evil robot went right over my head.

(Book 46, 2007)

44 Scotland Street by Alexander McCall Smith

The denizens of the flats at 44 Scotland St., Edinburgh, are a funny bunch, and I liked getting to know them. They get up to some things that lurk just this side of ridiculous, and sometimes cross over into farce. McCall Smith wrote this book in serial form for The Scotsman, an Edinburgh newspaper, an episode a day, each one only a few pages long. I get the feeling there are a lot of Edinburgh in-jokes sprinkled throughout the story. But it didn’t bother me, or reduce my enjoyment. It just made me envy the readers of The Scotsman and wish my newspaper would do something similar.

44 Scotland Street features mysterious tunnels, secret societies, Presybterian fatwas, an abstract Vettriano, a winking dog, unconventional child-rearing techniques, stolen underwear, Ian Rankin in a hot tub, and lots of hair gel. I didn’t think this book was as funny as his series about the German philology professor, or the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency books, but it was still good, good enough for me to look forward to the next volume, Espresso Tales.

This was an audiobook, and it took me forever to finish – months, I think. I wasn’t crazy about the reader. He used a high thin voice to read the women’s parts and I found that to be distractingly artificial, and resulted in the women characters all sounding naïve and unsure of themselves. In the case of Pat, a young woman "on her second gap year” this approach fit her personality, but the other women characters (who were supposed to be older and stronger) were disserved by it.

Someone spilled milk on my laptop computer (I know who, I'm just not saying). The damage seems to be confined to the keyboard, and I’ve ordered a new one (a keyboard, not an entire new laptop). The laptop computer stores all my ripped audiobooks, so I can’t begin another until I get this problem sorted out. It’s been too hot to walk to work anyway, so my available listening time is pretty minimal.

(Book 35, 2007)

Jetlag Travel Guides

I said in my post the other day that I would write about these books, because Stephanie Pearl-McPhee’s book made me think of them. I haven’t read one recently, but I enjoy them so much that it’s fun to talk about them. Jetlag Travel Guides is a series written by the Australian team of Santo Cilauro, Tom Gleisner, and Rob Sitch, and they are send-ups of the culturally sensitive adventure travel guides of the sort offered by Lonely Planet, for example. The books are brilliant satire, employing time-tested travel book formulas like “Where to stay” (the Holidaj Injn in Bardjov) and “Where to eat” (NOT at the Svateho, unless you want to eat sheep scrotum) along with color photographs of the locals (with captions like “When dining in certain parts of Southern Molvania it is considered rude to ask for cutlery”) and detailed maps of the region. Even the tiniest details are correct, and hysterical, like the tag line for Jetlag Travel Guides: Taking you Places You Don’t Want to Go.

We own two of the titles: Molvania, about a pretend Eastern European country, “a land untouched by modern dentistry,” and Phaic Tan (say it out loud), about a fictional Pacific rim nation: “sunstroke on a shoestring.” I see now that a third one has come out: San Sombrero: a land of carnivals, cocktails, and coups. I can't wait. It’s the job of our 13-year-old to read these books aloud, cover to cover, to anyone who will listen, often following family members from room to room saying “listen to this, listen to this.” We can’t get enough of them.

Stephanie Pearl-McPhee Casts Off: The Yarn Harlot's Guide to the Land of Knitting

This book was not nearly as funny as her earlier endeavor, Yarn Harlot: The Secret Life of a Knitter, which I read and reviewed back in February. This one is supposed to be a travel book, where we travel to the Land of Knitting. It pales in comparison to other travel book parodies: the best of these are the Jet Lag series of travel books (more about these later). But writing a travel book parody wasn't exactly what Pearl-McPhee was setting out to do: the format is just a framing devise that allows her to write more about her favorite topic: knitting and knitters and why knitters "get" one another in a way that non-knitters do not (they speak the same language, enjoy the same customs, etc.; thus the knitter-land metaphor). I'm sure there are similar books out there for other sub-cultures that like to stick together, golfers maybe? (Anyone know of any golf-land books?)

I kept waiting for Casts Off to get as funny as The Secret Life (or as funny as the daily content delivered on Pearl-McPhee's blog) but it never did. It did, however, provide a strange sort of comfort as I read it at bedtime. Try as I might to go back to the two novels I've got going, I kept picking this up instead. Pearl-McPhee makes a strong case for the power of community and shared values of knitters everywhere, and I kept feeling like I wanted to be part of it.

But speaking of travel book parodies, has anyone else read and enjoyed the Jetlag Travel Guide series (written by the team of Santo Cilauro, Tom Gleisner, and Rob Sitch) as much as my family has? I’ll write another post about them tomorrow.

(Book 23, 2007)

Yarn Harlot: The Secret Life of a Knitter by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

Stephanie Pearl-McPhee writes the excellent blog Yarn Harlot. This book is not a collection of blog posts, or a blog turned into a book, a la Julie and Julia. Instead it's a standalone collection of essays about – you guessed it – knitting. Also about parenting, passions, staying true to yourself, dealing with change, etc. It's moving in places, and very funny. Knitters will love it, and so might other obsessive crafters or collectors. Her essays about dealing with her ever-growing stash of yarn are a scream; this is a woman who, when she runs out of storage space, hides yarn in her freezer. (I know compulsive book-buyers who hide new books with similar zeal.) Pearl-McPhee is a popular speaker on the fiber-arts circuit and author of several other books about knitting. I visit her blog every day for a good laugh.

(Book 6, 2007)

The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs by Alexander McCall Smith

These books are little delights. This one follows Portuguese Irregular Verbs. Professor von Igelfeld’s mishaps and calamities (all self-inflicted) make for very funny reading (or listening, as I did). He manages to get himself mistaken for a veterinarian (and thus must perform emergency dachshund surgery), entangled in the schisms of the Orthodox Church (complete with smuggled relics), and mobbed by German widows of a certain age who believe he is looking for a wife. It's all just sillier and sillier.

(Book 31, 2006)

The Road to Ruin by Donald E. Westlake

Donald E. Westlake is a prolific author of mostly detective fiction. He’s been writing for years (since about 1960), and has published 75 books, or maybe more. He uses several pseudonyms, and his work ranges from hard-boiled crime stories to farce. He’s an excellent writer with a gift for plots twists and a light humorous touch.

His series about John Dortmunder, and his hapless buddies falls into the sillier category of Westlake’s work. Dortmunder is a small time crook, a nice fellow, a smart guy who is always the brains of an operation. His friends Andy Kelp and Stan Murch make up his gang, along with the ironically named Tiny, who is ostensibly in charge of breaking heads, though very few heads actually ever get broken. Sometimes accompanied by Dortmunder’s better half, Mae, and occasionally by Murch’s mom (who is never referred to by any other moniker), these guys cook up capers, and carry them out with varying degrees of success; no one ever gets hurt, and it always works out in the end. Just my kind of thing.

The Road to Ruin was like a visit with old friends. I wouldn’t say that it was the best Dortmunder book I’ve read – the ending was something of a letdown, but it was still fun and refreshing. Westlake’s web site is interesting, and I think is a good example of his humor and warmth. In its current incarnation it features Dortmunder, whom I believe must be Westlake’s most enduring character, though I guess some would argue that that honor belongs to Parker, about whom Westlake writes under the Richard Stark pseudonym.

(Book 27, 2006)

Portuguese Irregular Verbs by Alexander McCall Smith

At first I didn't know what to think of this. I love his books about the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency, but I tried his other series, The Sunday Philosophy Club, about the woman in Scotland, and didn't like that at all. I was afraid maybe he was a one-hit (or one-series) wonder.

So this series was a big question mark for me. But it's wonderful; very dry, very droll. I think McCall Smith's strength is in his gentle sense of humor. The Sunday Philosophy Club wasn't funny, and clearly wasn't meant to be. This series is really kind of outrageous in the way it pokes fun at a certain type of German academic. It's a quick read, and very enjoyable.

More information is available here.