Best American Short Stories 1998

Book: Best American Short Stories 1998
Editor: Garrison Keillor
Where I read it: See, this is another one of those books that I know I read, but can't remember. So, for the sake of argument, let's just say that I read this one at home with dinner, probably a grilled cheese sandwich or maybe ham and cheese.

What I thought: The hardest part of this entry is that I honestly remember none of the stories in this collection. That's not to say that the works weren't memorable or that the talent was non-existent, as that is certainly not the case. How do I know this? Because if I hate a book, I won't finish it. I have no problem dropping it like a rotten potato dipped in sheep dip. I know most people working with me here at the library feel that it is necessary to treat every book, even ones they don't necessarily like, as if they were god's snowflakes. I, however, know that while books are ultimately better than people in most respects, they do not have feelings, and will not spend a month trash talking me to their shitheaded friends in some dive bar if I take them home with me after work, try to get into them and just can't. They won't mind if I drop them in the book drop unread. This is why I love them so. And it says right here on my list that I finished this one, and not being the kind of person who feels the need to lie to herself about her accomplishments, I can't imagine that I would have made that up. And so, this book was read cover to cover, and then promptly forgotten. Oh, well.

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

Book: A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again
Author: The illustrious DFW
Where I read it: on the couch, curled up with the cat, and also on my lunch breaks, which consisted of me eating from a huge tub of cottage cheese, an untoasted bagel, an apple, a roma tomato, and sometimes a banana.

What I thought: See, now this is a good collection of shit. My two favorite essays of all time are included in this book, and a hilarious breakdown of David Lynch as well. The title essay is a postcard snapshot of DFW's trip on a cruise ship, paid for by Harper's magazine, and is long long long. Unbelievable in it's length, considering that the author is a severe agoraphobe, and can barely muster the strength daily to leave his tiny cabin. And the detail. Oh the detail. My god, it's so nice to read something written by someone with the observational talents of Sherlock Holmes. My other favorite is a piece written in the same way about the Illinois State Fair.

Really, these essays are so funny that I can't reread them while I'm eating for fear of shooting partially masticated food bits and/or liquid all over the table. And I already know what's going to happen.

This book is in my personal top ten, along with the other Davids: Sedaris and Eggers. It's one of the rare tomes that have tons of underlining in the first half, and then I realized that I was underlining more than I was leaving blank, and so I stopped.

Brief Interviews With Hideous Men

Book: Brief Interviews With Hideous Men
Author: David Foster Wallace
Where I read it: In the car on the way home from the bookstore after purchasing, and then well into the evening at home, wrapped up in bed, trying to digest it all in one sitting

What I thought:
Hmm...as DFW has often occupied a place in my intellectual fantasies as the sexiest man alive, it came as a shock to me that he could have written such a completely disjointed, incomprehensible collection of stories. Most of them were difficult to get through, not what you'd call easy listening, more like the Throbbing Gristle of literature.

I personally still find his long, rambling footnotes quite funny, at least most of the time, although sometimes his twisting, parenthetical references can just go on and on to the point of grammatical incorrectness.

There were a few stories, the title piece, and Forever Overhead, that were less irritating and just plain funny, which is what I'm looking for in a sexy intellectual. I don't like it when he goes over everyone's head just because he can. Nobody likes a show off, and frankly, why show off if like, 2 people on the planet are going to get your joke?

But as a disciple of his magnum opus, Infinite Jest, I will continue to try to crack the code he writes, even if it means getting a headache.

(sic)

Book: (sic)
Author: Sean Landers
Where I read it: A little here, a little there. Didn't quite finish the whole thing, if you must know.
File under: Artsy and clever, for the sake of
What I thought:
Whoa, what a solipsistic guy! If it weren't for his large, possibly affected vocabulary, you might think he was like, 10. Evidently, this book is now out of print, and used copies are selling from $50 and up. So, in my decision to ditch the copy I bought for $2.99 by giving it to Goodwill several years ago, I made a poor financial decision. Who knew that one man's desire to see if he could handwrite 1000 pages in a month in a sloppy, stream of consciousness manner that is almost too scripted to really be totally random would generate so much demand?

The worst part for me was where he was so tired of writing everyday that he had to come up with elaborate little fantasies to keep going. For instance, he pretended that his mother was kidnapped and the abductors' ransom was that Sean write 1000 pages in a month, or else they'd kill her. Based on the dysfunctional relationship most people seem to have with their mothers, is this really an incentive?

There was also much pontification about his sex life, and sexual acts, past, present, future, and imagined.

His fights with his girlfriend seemed pretty petty.

There was one funny bit where he drew his penis, full size, and then rambled on about how he realized that when the book was published, that the legal pad he was writing on would be necessarily shrunk to fit the size of the book page, and that it would appear that his dick was like, half as big as it was in real life and the implications of that.

Overall, just too much like what I fear the inside of any man's head looks like.

Handy Physics Answer Book

Book: Handy Physics Answer Book
Author: P. Erik Gunderson
Where I read it: Bend Library, escaping from the goddamned juniper pollen that infiltrated every cubic inch of breathing space.

What I thought:
Again, I was going through this phase where I thought that if I read a bunch of popular science books geared towards the layman, that I might be considered smart. And sure, I actually learned some stuff, as I circumvented physics and chemistry in high school by volunteering to take a new curriculum that centered on human physiology and environmental studies. Basically I wanted to skip the safety goggles and the stinky Bunsen burner experiments in favor of field trips to national forests and tests where all you had to do was fill in the labels for the muscles of the body. Much easier than doing math. Whah ha!

So, there I was, reading, and understanding, this played down physics book. It was great. If only it would have been the text book in high school, I might not have opted out of the class.

And whenever people go by their middle name but leave the first initial on, like P. Erik Gunderson has done here with his fantastic book, well, I can't decide if it's totally hot or totally irritating. What does he think, that he's a character on Dynasty? Is his first name really that bad? What could it be? Something too banal/common for him to like, like Peter or Paul? Or is it a twisted example of his parent's latent sadism? Pumpernickle or Pumice? Hmmm. I thought about this long and hard, right after I absorbed the implications of an inclined plane working together with a pulley and a screw.

Best American Essays 1995

Again, I can't remember reading this, although I know I did. Perhaps this was the volume I bought because it had a David Foster Wallace story that I hadn't read in it. The cover might have been purple?

Oh, well.

Best American Essays 1994

Wow, I can't remember reading this one, like, at all.

Hmm...

The cover might have been yellow?

Lying on the Couch

Book: Lying on the Couch
Author: Irvin Yalom
Where I Read It: At work, in that undefined hour between opening the coffee shop and when normal people begin to want coffee.

What I Thought: Good effort on the part of one of the most sane and creative people working in the mental health field today. Having read some of his non-fiction, I often fantasized about becoming his patient. He would be able to save me for sure! Not the most convincing of characters, they seemed a little too two-dimentional, but I still made it through the whole thing.

Earnest Lash is a therapist who convinces a man to leave his wife, Carol. She decides to become his patient and seduce him, to the ultimate end of ruining his professional reputation and his life, just as she felt he did to her. Earnest's mentor, Marshall, plays into a con-artists scam, and then finds himself enlisting the help of the aforementioned Carol, who happens to be a lawyer. Small world, huh?

Pretty good, although his non-fiction is far more well-crafted.

Girlfriend in a Coma

Book: Girlfriend in a Coma
Author: Douglas Coupland
Where I Read It: Hmm.. this one throws me a little. I don't remember reading it, although, I know I have. It was probably read while waiting for my then-boyfriend to get off work from his early morning coffee shop job so we could go out for breakfast.

What I Thought: Not much. Although I adore Douglas Coupland enough to sort of wish his first name was David so he could be inducted into the David Trifecta(but of course then it would have to be the 'David Quad,' or the 'David Rhombus' or something), I didn't feel like this was his best effort. In fact, it was his weakest.

Story is, there's a ghost of a jock floating around for the first little bit. Then, two teenagers, Richard and Karen, do what teenagers will, and did it. But in the freezing cold of winter outside, which I didn't really buy, and then Karen unknowingly ODs at a party and slips into a 20 year coma. She also happens to get pregnant from the first and only time she has sex, and gives birth to a daughter.

Then she eventually wakes up and everyone else on the planet except for this pocket of loser friends of hers falls asleep forever.

Post apocalyptic panic grips them, and eventually someone realizes they are going to have to make a sacrifice in order to make things right.

Large attempt to be whimsical, perhaps, just comes out as confusing. Would probably not read this again.

The Hippopotamus

Book: The Hippopotamus
Author: Stephen Fry
Where I Read It: Sunriver Coffee Co., where I worked. It was the off season, a few months until summer, and after setting up and opening the doors for the few locals who stopped in at that ungodly hour of the day, I had about an hour before normal people started rolling out of bed and staggering to the store. So I read. This was recommended to me by my boss, Kim, who is one of my favorite people.

What I Thought:
Ted Wallace, a drunken, divorced, drowned in whiskey poet/critic is asked by his god-daughter Jane to check out, detective style, this rich kid named Davey, to see if he really can deliver on his promise of being able to faith heal.

Bestiality, incest, and free-flowing libations are the background for Ted's adventure in Norfolk. I remember vaguely a scene with a horse or a cow that supposedly dropped Kim's mouth open, but now I'm not at liberty to say what happened. Hmm... It's been so long.

It was funny. There was lots of pontificating about life while knocking back whisky shots, and when is that ever a bad time?

Naked

Book: Naked
Author: David Sedaris(part of the indispensable "David Trifecta" that consists of Sedaris, Eggers, and Foster Wallace)
Place I Read It: On the red-eye back from Kauai to LA, where the turbulence wasn't quite pants-crappingly scary, but it was pretty bumpy. Like a hay-ride where the horse has gotten into the cider barrel or something. My sister-in-law was sawing logs beside me as her daughter made whimpering noises. I turned on the air blower above my seat and only a small trickle of stale recirculated cabin air came back at me. I probably looked green. My husband slept most of the way back, although heavily into hour three, when I thought I would rather die than stay on the plane for one more minute, he opened his eyes and said, "I need a cigarette," and then went back to sleep.

What I Thought:
I have read this book, cover to cover, five times. My paperback copy that I purchased under the recommendation of a flamingly homosexual man at the airport is tattered and bubble bath stained. I love this book. Mere words cannot describe how this book makes me feel when I read it. I howl with laughter until I cry tears of mirth every time. David Sedaris should be declared a saint, or maybe be knighted, or something.

His first essay is about his obsessive-compulsive behavior as a kid. As I excitedly turned the pages and started shaking with recognition, I thought, "This is me! He's writing about ME!"

My favorite part of the book is when he discovers that someone in their house(one filled with many siblings, his parents, and his grandmother) is wiping their ass on the bathroom towels. They happen to be brown, so you'd go to dry your hair and not think anything, but notice, too late, that unmistakable smell...

He also spends the title essay taking a stay at a nudist camp, and who wouldn't want to read about that?

This is one of the best books of all time. I don't know anyone who doesn't love this book, nor would I want to.

Probability One

Book: Probability One
Author: Amir D. Aczel
Place I Read It: In my tiny house with no air conditioning in the high desert of Oregon while pretending that the juniper pollen wasn't ruining my life by coating my throat and lungs with a disgusting tasting yellow paste.

Drake's Equation:
N=N/* f/p n/e f/l f/i f/c L

N : the number of civilizations in the galaxy currently capable of communicating with other civilizations.

This number depends on the value of the seven factors on the right side of the equation that I couldn't seem to type in scientific notation. But then, how many blog nuts are trying to type out scientific notations? Aren't most of us just whining about our jobs and our love lives? Mostly, I complain about how crappy my asthma is making me feel or my latest trip to urgent care.

But I digress.

N* : number of stars in the galaxy
This number may be as high as 300 billion. That's not even that many when you consider that there are like, 100 billion OTHER galaxies.

f/p : the percentage of stars with planets
They estimate this to be like, .5.
n/e : the environmental factor
The number of planets with environments favorable to the formation of life.
f/l : the fraction of planets with life
The actual proportion of planets on which life forms.
f/i : intelligent life
Ditto the previous but add in the word "intelligent" before "life"
f/c : communication
This is my personal favorite, because, since we have received no radio signal or other sign from space, we have no data "for any statistical estimation of this parameter." Ha!
L : longevity
My second favorite; intelligent civilizations may eventually destroy each other.

"Interplanetary travel for the armchair explorer..."

I loved this book because Mr. Aczel told me what I wanted to hear, that we are not the hot shit species that we think we are, and he threw in a bunch of scientific evidence to convince me that I am even more justified in my beliefs.

To quote Fox Mulder while Scully rolls her eyes: "I want to believe."