A Slight Delay

Another post that Phil suggested, whether he realized it or not. After this, I’ll stop writing about books for a bit. Okay. A day, at least. Here’s my top fifty-two books. I picked 52 of them since you could read one a week and have a year’s worth of good books. The reviews, if you want to call them that, are by no means comprehensive; they’re meant more to give you a small taste (like those tiny little spoons you get at ice cream shops) of what the book’s about. Hopefully you’ll get a good enough idea to want to score a pint copy. Here (in no particular order) goes nothing…

1. Dave Barry’s Complete Guide to Guys, by Dave Barry. One of those books that you should probably be careful of reading in public; you’ll laugh out loud, getting all sorts of funny, or dirty, looks from those around you.
2. High Fidelity, by Nick Hornby. The author’s first book, and still my favorite of the buch. The film, which featured John Cusack and Jack Black, is one of the few that wasn’t a disappointment after reading the novel.
3. Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About by Mil Millington: mines some of the same territory that Hornby did in High Fidelity, but will also be familiar to anyone who’s seen “The Office,” or that’s worked in a terribly dysfunctional work environment.
4. Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole: The author committed suicide some time before the book was published; in the years since, there’s been speculation that it was finished by his mother. Whatever the case may be, by the time the book’s over, you’ll wish that one or the other of them had written another. Ignatius Reilly is literally an unforgettable character.
5. A Crack at the Edge of the World, by Simon Winchester. Winchester first gained acclaim for The Professor and the Madman, a page-turner about the writing of the Oxford English Dictionary (I shit you not). In this work, he turns his attention to the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire. As with his other works, he examines the history of the event, along with a fascinating explanation of the geology that caused the disaster.
6. The Benchley Roundup by Robert Benchley. Benchley is, sadly, a largely forgotten figure. From the 1920’s ‘til his death in 1945, though, he was a star, writing witty short pieces for his newspaper column, contributing to the New Yorker in its early days, reviewing theater, appearing in vaudeville, and acting in countless short subjects and feature films. This anthologizes the best of his writing over the course of his career. (more…)

One thing life should teach everyone, sooner rather than later, is never to say, “Now I’ve seen everything.” I was reminded of this when I made the mistake of answering a question posed to me during an everyday conversation. I was asked if I’d ever read Rhonda Byrne’s insipid and insidious The Secret (the insipid and insidious part wasn’t part of my interrogator’s question, merely my own editorializing).

I answered that I hadn’t, but that I’d once been subjected to the movie, because someone at my last place of employment apparently thought it was so deep and insightful, we should all be subjected to it. Normally, I would never take the movie over the book; this is one time I gladly made an exception. Hell, it’s bad enough I’ll never get those 90 minutes of my life back.

You would think that I’d just told Billy Graham that I thought the Bible was crap. (more…)

An  essay worth reading in this week’s New York Times Book Review by Rachel Donadio. In brief, she writes about how people’s literary tastes can be a deal-breaker when it comes to romance. She writes:

We’ve all been there. Or some of us have. Anyone who cares about books has at some point confronted the Pushkin problem: when a missed — or misguided — literary reference makes it chillingly clear that a romance is going nowhere fast. 

It reminded me of something I’d read a long time ago in Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity: A Novel (okay, not that long ago… I read the book about once a year. It’s just one of those things). Rob Fleming, the book’s main character, says at one point: “[T]he truth was that these things matter, and it’s no good pretending that any relationship has a future if your record collections disagree violently, or if your favorite films wouldn’t even speak to each other if they met at a party.” (more…)