BooksFirst - June 2006

Books Read

jPod by Douglas Coupland
Digging To America by Anne Tyler

Books Bought

A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby
The Amateur Marriage by Anne Tyler
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
Fried Green Tomatoes At The Whistle Stop Café by Fannie Flagg
The Lexus and the Olive Tree by Thomas Friedman
Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowel

Comments

I’m stealing an idea from LabCat, which is okay because he stole it from Nick Hornby. Hornby put together a book called The Polysyllabic Spree from a series of columns where he list the books he had read and bought the previous month. Strung together they make an interesting profile of a bibliophile.

In perhaps the only way I can be compared to Nick Hornby is that I buy a lot more books than I read. I'm sure I have bought more books in June than I’ve listed here, but I do know these were definitely bought in June. We were at BigBoxOfBooks™ the other Friday night on our family activity and we had a 10% off shopping day from buying too many overpriced highly caffeinated milkshakes at the café. I perused the Buy 2, Get 1 Free table and got carried away. All these books were bought at discount. Now all I have to do is decide which one to read first. I’m open to suggestions.

I am a huge fan of Douglas Coupland going back to Generation X, but my favorite book of his is Microserfs. I am not in the IT profession, but my background is geeky enough to relate to these people. jPod is Microserfs set in a computer game company and played for metafictional absurdity. Coupland is a deus ex machina character in his own book and he deliberatley writes himself as an evil manipulator. The book is decidedly post-modern and suffers from the formatting absurdities that the digital typesetting revolution has unleashed. There is a mish-mash of font styles and types everywhere.

I think Coupland is trying to snapshot the state of pop culture in a way John Updike did with his Rabbit Angstrom books. Every chapter has at least one pop cultural simulacrum of a snack food label or an eBay auction. It’s fun and quick and makes you feel smarter than you really are if you get even half of the inside jokes. For a truly zen experince try the official jPod website.

I started reading Anne Tyler in college when the girls in the apartment two doors down all went through a binge. Now that I live in Baltimore, reading Anne Tyler is as much de rigueur as watching John Waters movies. This time around her emphasis is not so much on quirky Baltimorons as it is quirky ethnic characters, and nobody does quirky better than Anne Tyler.

The story involves several years in the lives of two families that adopt Korean orphans on the same day. One of the couples is a modern Iranian couple that still has strong ties to their home country through their reluctant matriarch, Maryam Yazdan. Much of the book has to do with the “will they or won’t they” courtship between her and the other couple’s widowed father.

I wonder if Anne Tyler has ever written an explicit sex scene in any of her novels. [Spoiler Warning:] In Back When We Were Grown-Ups, Rebecca Davitch goes so far as to put on some new lingerie in anticipation of getting busy with her new beau, but they get in a fight and she nearly literally kicks him to the curb. I think that is nearly as close as any Anne Tyler main character gets to having sexual urges and acting on them. [/end spoiler]. I’m not expecting hot and heavy prose from Tyler, but for a writer that specializes in borderline dysfunctional families, an awful lot of the family-making happens off-screen.

Since I stole this blogpost idea, that makes it officially a meme. My contribution is the catchy title. I like BooksFirst because it plays on my intent to make it my first post of every month while also editorializing about my feelings towards literature. Feel free to steal, adapt, and play with the idea. If it catches on I may have to invent some logos and buttons and ribbons. Until next month, remember to keep BooksFirst.