Is It Friday Yet?

It is? Sweet. Here are some things to read over the weekend.

• Maud Newton recommends catching up on your Kate Christensen backlist before the release of her new book Trouble (due out in June). I probably don't even have to say this at this point, but I concur.

• It's clearly "Blog About Our Favorite People Day," so with that in mind, I found this post by Julie Klam about her role as a recess monitor both hilarious and quite touching. Just like her book.
  

• Nobody seems to want to talk about Cory Doctorow's Little Brother with me, so I may just have to write a long blog post about it. Expect that sometime next week.

• Larry Wilmore, The Daily Show's "Senior Black Correspondent," will be at Vroman's next week supporting his book I'd Rather We Got the Casinos, and judging from this Pasadena Weekly interview, he's psyched: "I’ve always been in love with Pasadena since I was a kid. I didn’t grow up here, but a couple of grandmas lived here, my dad and his dad too. I always wanted to live here and I finally moved here in 1997." We're happy you're here, Larry, and we can't wait to host your event.

Have a great weekend. Stay dry, Los Angeles!

My 2008

I held off on writing this giant summation post for a couple of reasons. Others have done it better than I, and I had to see if I could finish 2666 by December 31 (I finished it on December 30, sucka). But now I feel the need to look back and remember the year in reading for me. I thought about going about this a bunch of different ways, from recounting everything I read (I can't, as I didn't write everything down, I'm ashamed to admit) to focusing on books published in 2008 exclusively, to listing the best books, etc. In the end, in keeping with the intimacy of the blog, I thought I'd just talk about what I was into this year, what books I loved, what interested me. Maybe that's useful to some people, and maybe it isn't. Either way, I'm taking the plunge.

For a little bit of structure, let's split the titles into fiction and non-fiction.

Fiction:

I think, if pressed, the book that most impressed me that I read this year was actually the first book that I read this year (or one of them), The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz. Not a terribly original pick, I know, but I just loved this book. Funny and heartbreaking, with the most original voice I'd read in a long time, it's a book that I still think about a year later, and that says something. One of the best books of the last five years, and a great book to kick off a year with (A not-so-subtle hint to those of you looking for something to read right now).

Speaking of original voices, I found Joshua Ferris' Then We Came to the End to be so entertaining, so funny, and also so, so sad that I can't recommend it enough. I read it as I was just starting in my new job, and this paragraph about starting a new job jumped off the page at me:

"All those new faces and names to memorize, the strange coffee pots and unfamiliar toilet seats. We had new W-4s to fill out and never knew if it was zero or one that would give us more money back. HR was there to assist, but they were never as good as our old HR. We spent the first two or three weeks, and some of us more like a month or two, in isolation and anonymity. For an unbearable spell, lunch was a solitary affair. Only slowly did we get folded into the mix, only slowly did the new political realities start to dawn."

Man, that takes me back.

Another incredible book I read this year was Tom Drury's The End of Vandalism. Drury might just be the most underrated author in America today, and this novel is a little miracle. Here's what I wrote about it on my Goodreads page:

"There's no good reason it should be as wonderful as it is. The plot meanders all over the place. It jumps from character to character with little reason, and it has what would be described as "tone problems" if we were all sitting around workshopping it. Yet it's perfect. I can't decide whether it's the funniest sad book I've ever read or the saddest funny book...Just read this guy already."

And I still believe that. I've now read three of his novels (The Driftless Area would also be in my 2008 top 10), and loved every one of them. I haven't read The Black Brook yet, and I'm trying to hold off, the way you try to make the candy last all movie long. We'll see how long that lasts.

The Brothers K, by David James Duncan, was always one of those books that I saw in bookstores and wondered about, but never really heard anyone talking about. But then my friend Robert gave me a copy of it, and I read it on my trip to snowy Ohio, and I completely fell in love with it. It tells the story of the Chance brothers and their father, a onetime baseball prodigy turned mill worker in Washington. The term 'page-turner' gets thrown around a lot; here's one instance where it actually applies. I couldn't stop reading this book, and I highly recommend it.

I think I've said plenty about Kate Christensen on this blog, so I'll just remind everyone that they should read The Great Man, another of the best novels I read this year.

The same goes for City of Thieves, which I read in a heartbeat and haven't stopped thinking about since. For more on City of Thieves, listen to my interview with David Benioff.

Other great works of fiction I enjoyed in 2008:

The Coast of Chicago, by Stuart Dybek
Look at Me, by Jennifer Egan
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, by John Le Carre
Girl Factory, by Jim Krusoe
The Driftless Area, by Tom Drury
Black Sabbath's Master of Reality (33 1/3 series), by John Darnielle
The Baum Plan for Financial Independence, by John Kessel
Blood Kin, by Ceridwen Dovey

And of course, 2666 by Roberto Bolano. What to make of this enormous, mutli-generational, multi-continental tome? I think The Inside Flap had some good things to say about the strange readability and urgency of the book, especially the first 200 pages when it isn't obvious yet what the story will be about. I absolutely tore through the first half of this book.

Then I hit "The Part About the Crimes," and everything slowed down. The violence was too much for me to take (I've read some Cormac McCarthy, and I've never read anything like this), and at times, I wanted to stop reading. It's not that I don't see the point of this section of the book. On the contrary, I don't think the book could exist without this. It's the moral center of the book. A never-ending series of murders in the desert, so gruesome that it turns the stomach, and the people of the city are powerless to stop it. But the reader, numbed from rape after rape, murder after murder, starts to tune out...or at least I did. While narratives emerge, they lacked the urgency of the other sections of the book. While I remember the grizzly ends the women met with, I couldn't, if pressed, remember a single one of their names. That's the point of the book, I think, and it's well-made, although hardly pleasant.

But the brilliance of putting it into a larger narrative about literature, the role of the artist, and the role of the critic. That's what makes 2666 so memorable, and, in its own way, so confounding. I'm not done thinking or writing about this book, but for now, I've got to stop. I'm curious to hear what other people have thought of it. On to the non-fiction.

Non-fiction:

I've probably lost all credibility when discussing Julie Klam's memoir Please Excuse My Daughter, as I've been flogging it for months on this blog, but I will flog it once more, regardless. I don't think there was a book I enjoyed reading more than Klam's hilarious and poignant memoir about being smart and a little bit lost in the years between college and adulthood. Listen to our interview, read her very funny blog (now with even more cute dog photos), and read her book already.

Tim Wiener's Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA is well worth your time, and provides plenty of insight into the sorry present-day state of the agency. I'm kind of an intelligence junky, but I think it's a book that the casual reader can enjoy as well.

As something more than a casual fan of Sonic Youth, I'd been thrilled to get a copy of David Browne's Goodbye 20th Century: A Biography of Sonic Youth. There are so many interesting stories in this book, and a fine biography that manages to avoid seemingly like a tombstone to a band that continues to evolve and to challenge.

The award for the weirdest book I read this year was a hard fought battle between Jim Krusoe's Girl Factory (a man discovers that there are women floating in a bacteria solution underneath his frozen yogurt shop), The Driftless Area by Tom Drury (what starts off as a whimsical love story turns into something like No Country for Old Men like that) and The Mystery Guest, by Gregoire Bouillier. In the end, I think this one wins. The Mystery Guest begins with a phone call from an ex-lover, inviting the author to a party. What ensues is the strangest story I read this year. The book is only about 125 pages, so I don't want to give anything away, but suffice to say that it involves an expensive bottle of wine, a famous artist, some literature, and turtlenecks. Yes, turtlenecks.

Speaking of turtlenecks, Dan Kennedy's Rock On is the funniest book I've read in many years. I think I actually read it in late 2007, but it was so long ago and this post is rambling on so long that I'm just going to lump it in with 2008. Kennedy, author of Loser Goes First, gets a job as a big shot marketing guy at Atlantic Records, just in time for the demise of the record business. It's kind of like a good episode of The Office, one where there are cameos by Simon Le Bon, Jimmy Page, and Ice T, but, you know, they all fit and make perfect sense.


If I forgot anyone, I apologize. It was a long year. And an incredible year. I talked to David Sedaris and the Booker Prize winner on the phone, wrote 273 blog posts, hung out with James Frey and a bunch of crazy metal kids, had my chart read for the first time, discovered Twitter, and met so many great people at BEA. For 2009, I think I'm going to try to read more books in translation and a couple of books by dead authors. Don't worry, I'll keep you posted.

An Assortment of Greatness

My head feels as if it's suspended in a jar of jelly, so you'll forgive me if I don't have something meatier to offer this fair morning afternoon. In lieu of substance, I offer a few things that have gotten me through the day so far.

• Daily Routines catalogs the daily habits of "writers, artists, and other intersting people." How else would I know how Emily Post wrote Etiquette:

  "Post worked on “Etiquette” for nearly two years. Claridge describes her daily routine as follows: she woke at 6:30 A.M., ate breakfast in bed, and began to write. Midmorning, she took a break to give instructions to the household help; then, still in bed, she continued to write until noon." (via Jacket Copy & Kottke)
  

• Avery is running a series of gift ideas for bookish types like me. I especially liked this list of books for someone who likes to watch sports on television. I remember when I used to watch sports on TV...I would add Moneyball and The Blind Side, by Michael Lewis to that list, as well as The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, which is the best book ever written about sports, and so much more than "a stat book."

• Fellow Bill James fan Julie Klam is going to blog about her favorite people of 2008. I'm guessing Obama might be on the list, but who knows? Stay tuned.

• Speaking of Obama, The 10 Worst Predictions of 2008:

  “If [Hillary Clinton] gets a race against John Edwards and Barack Obama, she’s going to be the nominee. Gore is the only threat to her, then. … Barack Obama is not going to beat Hillary Clinton in a single Democratic primary. I’ll predict that right now.” —William Kristol, Fox News Sunday (Of course, this prediction was made in 2006, so...) (via The Morning News)

• I got a kick out of this NY Times article about contentious book clubs, although this is a touch snide, even for me: "It was bad enough that they wanted to read 'Da Vinci Code' in the first place," Ms. Bowie said, "but then they wanted to talk about it.

Vroman's Podcast 2: Julie Klam

Regular readers of this blog know that I love Julie Klam's memoir Please Excuse My Daughter. It so perfectly captures what it's like to be smart and cool and young, and yet somehow unable to find your way. It's a book that's consistently funny throughout but never at the expense of real emotion. Everybody should buy it (from Vroman's) and then buy it again for their friends.

And now Julie Klam is the subject of our second podcast (or, as I'm tentatively calling it, "The Inquisition with Patrick Brown"). In our interview, we discuss balancing writing and parenting, David Letterman, Titlepage, the Kindle, Goodreads, and much, much more. The running time is roughly 45 minutes.

Again, there's no music (still working on that), and if you notice a few edits, it's because I had to edit out a section where we talked about AP tests and the movie Diner for about twenty minutes ("Oh, Modell, my blood is boiling!"). Anyway, thanks to Julie for putting up with my slightly amateurish interviewing style, and thanks to all of you for listening.

Click here to download the podcast to your computer.

So About That Blood Oath...

I haven't been doing very well on my summer reading list. If you'll recall, I posted an ambitious list of titles I was going to tackle this summer. So far, I've read one of them. Julie Klam's Please Excuse My Daughter (which was terrific, and you should listen to her on Blogtalk Radio. It's an extensive interview...more on this book later).

I think I'm not very good at predicting what I'll want to read in the future. Look at my Goodreads page. I put things on "To Read," and then they just sit there, like the bunch of Japanese Broccoli I got at the Farmer's Market, convinced I'd make it into something delicious and wonderful, only to toss in the trash, wilted and gray, a week later. It just never went with anything I was making. It's depressing.

I will still get to a few of the books on this list (it is only July), but I've been reading other stuff. What other stuff? Thanks for asking. I'm reading David Browne's engrossing biography of Sonic Youth, Goodbye 20th Century. I'm also reading a bizarre and stimulating collection of short stories called The Baum Plan for Financial Independence, by John Kessel.

So why can't I stick to my summer road map? Does anybody else have this problem? Maybe I distract easily, or maybe working in a bookstore just provides too many choices, too many options. I'd be curious to know how people decide what they're reading next, and how far off they plan in advance. Do you have a list? Do you have a full-fledged "Reading Queue" like Max? Or do you just grab whatever catches your eye at that moment?

Tuesday Round Up

A few links to help ease you through Tuesday.

• Wrapping up our "all things Frey" week, Scott Timberg has a profile of Frey and the LA life in the LA Times. At The Elegant Variation, Jim Ruland brings the snark in a piece about Frey's writing process.
  

• Vroman's getting some love from Shrinking Violet Productions. Thanks!

• Anne Applebaum thinks we need to stop injecting the Nazis into our political debates, and I agree.
  

• At n+1, Keith Gessen has a thoughtful piece about how to survive, financially, as a writer:

  Once the book is published it only gets worse: the writer proceeds to the Cavalry of publicity. Advances on first books vary—about $20,000 to $60,000 for a book of stories, though sometimes higher; between $50,000 and $250,000 for a "literary" novel, though also, sometimes, higher. Even the top figure—$250,000—which seems like so much, and is so much, still represents on both sides of the writing and rewriting, the pre-publication and post-publication, about four years of work—$60,000 a year, the same as a hack lifestyle journalist in New York. But the costs! The humiliations! No one will ever forgive a writer for getting so much money in one lump—not the press, not other writers, and his publisher least of all.

• Julie Klam hearts my blog. You can't see me right now, but I'm blushing.