Pick My Next Book

My house is a veritable landfill of read and unread books. I sometimes dread purchasing a book out of fear that I already own it. My backlog of unread books is probably over fifty. At my average monthly rate of two to three a month that is nearly two years worth, yet I continue to buy more. Out of town this week, I dragged coworkers to an antiquarian bookstore in Austin where I bought an autographed Kinky Friedman novel and a Brett Easton Ellis first edition.

To help me clear the pile, I am dedicated to reading at least one dust collecting tome a month, but I need your help. In the comments, list up to three of the books in the following list that I should be reading as soon as possible.

Fiction
Ridley Walker by Russell Hoban
Florida Roadkill by Tim Dorsey
Shadow of the Giant by Orson Scott Card
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
Jonathon Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clark
Heydey by Kurt Andersen
The Bridges of Madison County by Robet James Waller
The System Of The World by Neal Stephenson
Jittebug Perfume by Tom Robbins

Non-fiction
Fat Man In The Middle Seat by Jack Germond
Googled by Ken Auletta
The Grand Idea by Joel Achenbach
Collapse by Jared Diamond
The Eden Express by Mark Vonnegut
Under the Banner Of Heaven by Jon Krakauer
I'll Sleep When I'm Dead by Crystal Zevon
Let Freedom Ring by Sean Hannity
Fiasco by Thomas Ricks
The Battle For America 2008 by Dan Balz and Haynes Johnson

This is by no means an exhaustive list of the books occupying every horizontal surface in my house, but they are the ones I feel most compelled to read or the most guilty that I haven't read yet. Obviously, I should read all of them, but what I want to know is which I should read next. Use any criteria you want and pick up to three in each category. For extra credit, name one book I should just plain avoid. I haven't quite decided how I am going to count or weigh votes, but I'm likely to be persuaded by impassioned pleas. So help me out, please.

Anthem Ani

It took me until I was 45 years old to see any shows at the legendary 930 Club in DC, but in the past six months I have seen two very different acts play the same stage. Here is my side-by-side comparison.

Band	Gaslight Anthem October 22, 2009	Ani DiFranco March 2, 2010
Blurry Cell Phone Picture
Synopsis	Gaslight Anthem is punk band with strong Jersey Rock roots. They hit my radar screen when I saw a YouTube clip of Bruce Springsteen guesting with them. If they have The Boss's seal of approval, I have to check them out.	Ani DiFranco is the patron saint of DIY feminist folk rock singers. I've wanted to see her in concert for years because Living In Clip is one of the greatest live albums ever recorded.
Opening Act	There were three other bands on the bill: The Measure, The Loved Ones, and Murder by Death. All of which were very good in their own way. The Loved Ones were the best band, but Murder By Death had some great songs.	Ani runs her own record label, Righteous Babe, so she brought along Erin McKeown who seems like a very interesting performer in her own right, but came off a little as Ani-lite. She did do a hilarious folk version of 'Single Ladies'.
Stage Presence	Brian Fallon is a very charismatic front man. He has got all those rock star moves and a flash of his neo-greaser smile just lights up the stage. The full sleeve ink and the 50s era crew cuts just scream Punk That Know Their Roots.	Ani is both self-effacing and earnest at the same time. Fumbling after her opening number she said "At least I got my stage patter going for me."
Stage Show	Clean straight ahead rock and roll. The 930 Club is not the place for flashy pyrotechnics.	Lots of crowd interaction. The audience loves her and is very vocal about it, which seems to embarrass Ani just a bit.
Audience Demographic	I was nowhere near hip enough to be in this audience. Everybody was at least ten to twenty years younger than I was and dressed in denim and tee shorts from whatever show they had seen last week. I had come straight from work and still had on khakis and a button down oxford shirt. I bought a Gaslight Anthem tee at the concession and went back to my car just to change into it so I wouldn't stick out worse than I did.	I kept trying to gauge how much of the audience was male. Ten percent might be a tad low. Twenty percent would be way high. Like Melissa Etheridge shows, this makes the bathroom waiting line very short. At least for me. Agewise, it ran the gamut. The lesbian couple standing next to me that nuzzled the whole show were nearly my age, but it was still a young crowd.
Crowd Demeanor	Pretty rowdy. For the first band, a mosh pit broke out for a brief time. I had gotten there real early and worked my way to within four people of the stage, but by the end of the show the crush from people behind me was making it hard to breathe.	Respectful. I was also about six people from the stage, but the crowd gave everybody plenty of personal space. Groups ahead of me kept sending out forays of people for beer or bathroom breaks and they all were able to work their way back to their spots.
Amusing Anecdote	In the talking part of the show, Brian tells about getting some famous local tattoo artists to come to the hotel to give him some new ink on his leg. So he apologized in advance if any bandages or blood got knocked into the audience. It's amazing there was any place left on his body to tatt up.	The whole show was goofy and low key with a lot of stage patter. Ani got the biggest 'Awwws' from saying that she had been apart from her baby for a few days and had been writing up a storm.
Tap On My Shoulder	Just before Gaslight Anthem took the stage I got tapped on my shoulder. It was a guy I knew from an Internet group who is about my age but has much better taste in music. He is a 930 Club regular and had seen a couple of the other bands before.	There were big "No Cameras, No Audio Recording, No Videotaping" signs taped up at the entrance. The girl ahead of me had a tiny digital camera in her purse that got confiscated. I waited until near the end of the show to pull out my Flip camera and was recording Ani's big pre-encore folk song closing number (available on YouTube from a different show here) when a beefy security bouncer tapped me on the shoulder. He stood there while he watched me erase what I had recorded.
Show Length	The Gaslight Anthem set was just a little over an hour, but each of the opening acts had gotten 20-30 minutes so the show didn't let out until after midnight.	Ani only played a little over 90 minutes which surprised me since she has such a reputation for being a great live gig. I guess it's quality not quantity.
Noticeable Omissions	None. Gaslight Anthem only has two albums so they pretty much played everything they have ever recorded plus a cover or two.	Ani is prolific to the point of self-parody. She has never had an unrecorded thought, so there will always be something missed. I was surprised that she omitted her biggest 'hit' "32 Flavors". I would have liked to have heard "In Or Out" or "Letter To A John" but the songs she did play, even the stuff I had never heard, were all uniformly good.
Verdict	Gaslight Anthem has unique blend of energy and talent that can energize the punk crowd but the lyrics are full of clever allusions that can appeal to a classic rocker like me. This group deserves a big break-out hit so that I can say "I saw them when..."	After missing her year after year, perhaps my expectations were too high. While I was a bit disappointed with the length of the show, several days later her songs are still buzzing through my brain. After all, as she sang at the show: "If you're not getting happier as you get older, then you're fucking up."

As I mentioned above, security for AV equipment was very tight, but since cellphones are ubiquitous, there is only so much they can stop. Here is a brand new song she played that as best I can Google is a world exclusive to me:



From the setlist that I took a photo of, I believe the song is called "Zoo". The video is a little dark, but the sound quality is amazingly good for a Droid being held over my head. I posted the clip on YouTube to not much fanfare and it already has over 150 views. That's hardly going viral, but it shows she has a fan base out there.

BooksFirst - February 2010

Books Bought
none

Books Read
SuperFreakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
What The Dog Saw by Malcolm Gladwell

Commentary
There is a whole sub genre of non-fiction that I call Contrarian Sociology. The whole purpose is to demonstrate how conventional wisdom is wrong using some sort of analysis. By a publishing coincidence, the two masters of the form, Steven Levitt and Malcolm Gladwell each had have a new book out.

Steven Levitt in Freakonomics combined economic analysis with pop sociology to explore topics not normally associated with the dismal science. In SuperFreakonomics, Levitt and his writing partner Stephen Dubner take the same method and tackle topics even further afield. In a counterpoint to their original essay on the economics of drug dealing, this time they tackle prostitution. Only they don't come up with any insights that couldn't be gleaned from HBO's Hookers On The Point. They also interview exactly one high class hooker and she isn't any more enlightening that Showtime's Diary of a Call Girl.

Most of the chapters don't even have a single unifying theme and are just pastiches of various blog entries that sort of link together. Many of their 'findings' are very glib and not all that shocking. And when they venture out of the realm of economics, they get into deep trouble. Their chapter on global warming has come under particularly extreme criticism. I think because they spend so much of their time in the social sciences where the same data sets can have equally valid interpretations, the realm of hard science escapes them. They have a hard time distinguishing contrarianism with crackpotism. Just because something flouts the established thinking, that doesn't mean it is in inherently right.

More coherent is Malcolm Gladwell's What The Dog Saw which is actually a collection of his New Yorker articles. Part of the advantage is that these articles have all been vetted by the vaunted Bright Lights, Big City fact-checking department. The best items are the biographical essays where he goes into how someone created or changed an industry. These vignettes are insightful and clever.

That doesn't mean the book is flawless. Gladwell also tries hard to be contrarian even if it doesn't fit the facts. He makes a big deal over choking versus panicking which seems like a distinction without a difference.

In the latter part of the book Gladwell delves into more subjective territory. He spends several chapters discussing that traditional measures of talent and aptitude are poor indicators of actual success. These are themes that he will explore further in Blink and Outliers (reviewed by me here).

The problem with both of these books is that they try too hard. They are so determined to upset the established paradigm that they stretch facts, misconstrue data and leap through logical hoops to come up with new and exciting theories that don't always pan out. Sometimes the conventional wisdom is there for a reason and no amount of clever writing can turn some facts inside out.

What's worse is that these books are intellectual cotton candy. They taste clever and deep, but when you are done, the empty calories just run away. The books are good for some cocktail party conversation or water cooler talking points, but they really don't illuminate the universe.

Wasted At The Wine Festival

Last weekend we braved the icy pit that is post-Snopocalypse Washington DC to go to the D.C. International Wine and Food Festival. Held in the lobby of the Reagan Trade Center (ironically, the largest government office building in the district), there were over a hundred wineries pouring samples.

Knowing that I had no hope of remembering how many wines I sampled or even what they were, I took to videoing a short clip of me sipping each wine I sampled. Count along as I go through them:



As you can see, there was more than wine there. The food portion was on the balcony overlooking the main floor and was the most disappointing portion of the show. But the wines were the draw. Spain was the most prominent exhibitor with several tables and dozens of wineries.

Our favorite was Red Cat from Hazlitt 1852, a winery on the Finger Lakes. They served their wines over ice with a fruit garnish billing them as picnic or hot tub wines. I don't have a hot tub, but I will definitely hunt down a few bottles this summer.

And while I didn't feel any less sober after three hours of wine sipping, we did take the precaution of riding Metro back to our hotel. Definitely the way to do this type of event.

Chin-chin.

Doraville!

For about six months after I got married (and the three months before, shhh, don't tell my parents), my wife and I lived in the delightful Atlanta suburb of Doraville which was immortalized in song by the Atlanta Rhythm Section. Truer words have never been spoken than "New York's fine, but it ain't Doraville."

In Tom Wolfe's overwrought sprawling 1998 novel A Man In Full the Stoic (literally, he reads Epictetus) hero finds himself working as a dishwasher in a Vietnamese restaurant in Doraville. Wolfe goes into his trademarked level of detail about this Asian-American enclave. This came as a great shock to me since when I lived in Atlanta the only Vietnamese restaurant was a lonely outpost in Midtown. During the interim a thriving multi-ethnic corridor had erupted along Buford Highway.

Also, when I lived in Atlanta, the MARTA rail system had two lines, the East-West line and the North-South line which then ended at Brookhaven. Since then the North-South Line has been expanded and split to include a line north along the Georgia 400 corridor to Sandy Springs causing the original North Line ending in Doraville to be renamed the Northeast Branch. With there being another spur on the East-West Line, MARTA decided to ease the confusion with the compass point names and go with color coded lines similar to those used by Washington DC's Metro system or the Bay Area's BART.



Only when they picked the colors, they called the route ending in Doraville the Yellow Line, causing Asian-American advocacy groups to howl in umbrage. It seems the Powers That Be Were tone-deaf to the racial implications of the color. Other places haven't had this problem. For example D.C.'s vestigial and shrinking Chinatown is served by the Yellow, Red, and Green lines. But under a hail of bad publicity, the City Too Busy Too Hate has renamed it the Gold Line.

It's just funny to find my former little sleepy burb engulfed in such controversy. All I know is that when I am trudging down I-85 towards the Tom Moreland Interchange, aka Spaghetti Junction, I just can't keep myself from humming:

Doraville, touch of country in the city
Doraville, it ain't much, but it's home

NaJuReMoNoMo Wrap-Up

National Just Read More Novels Month, or NaJuReMoNoMo if you like tongue twisters, had a great year and lots of people read tons of books.

It's very heartening to see so many people participating for the third time or more. The biggest boost this year seems to have come from J. Kaye's Book Blog who was phenomenal at spreading the word. I also seem to have inspired a much longer challenge called the 12 x 12 Reading Challenge which lasts all year with a different blog hosting each month. If you love NaJuReMoNoMo, I strongly recommend visiting these other fine blogs.

It has literally become impossible to keep track of all the participants, but here is a partial list of blogs I'm aware of that took part. I also want to recognize all the non-bloggers that take inspiration as well.

Book Dragon - 1 book
The Lost Entwife - 30 books
Bookwormygirl - 20 books
Diva With A Budget - 10 books
Sandra of Fresh Ink Books - 12 books
Jules - 10 books
J. Kaye - 15 books
Helen - 5 books
Sharon - 12 books (her third year and her second gold year)
Sharon's Garden - 12 books
Barbara Maller - 10 books
Shewbridge
My Spring Snow
The Black Cell - 16 books
CMash - 7 books
Lab Cat - 4 books
Maureen
Hannah
Musings of a Book Addict
Reading Schtuff - 8 books
Jo - 19 books
Eating Y.A. Books - 13 books
Steena Holmes - 10 books
"Quote"topia - 6 books
A Chick Who Reads aka The Mistress of the Dark
New Century Reading
Vasilly - 20 +/- books
Veggie Mom of 2 - 6 books
Bibliophile By The Sea
The Book Zombie - 10 books
The Book Czar now at Review From Here

So until next year, keep up all the good reading.

Snowpocalypse

I survived the 2010 Blizzard but it was a lot of work. My yard already had a base on it of nearly a foot. The snow started about noon but nothing stuck until I got home from work shortly after 4 p.m.

I decided to take a photo out my front door every hour, or as close as I could get to it. The snow started slowly but built steadily. Just before midnight I decided to go out and give the drive a quick shovel so there would be less to do the next day. As soon as I got in the gale force winds kicked in. At about 3 a.m. I turned in for a few hours sleep.

When I awoke the next morning, it was as if I had never shoveled at all. The snow had drifted and blown to create a perfectly level surface across my entire yard. So I changed strategies. I decided to wait out the storm. About 3 p.m. things were tapering down so I give it my first try. I dug a path to the curb and cut some markers side to side so I could find the edges of the driveway.



Sunday morning the shoveling went faster than I expected and I had the driveway clear to the curb within about an hour. Some neighbors were digging a walking path to the garage door of our local elderly lady, so I helped out there. The single mom next door to us threw in the towel and got a guy to come over with a snowblower.

Next up was digging my SUV out of the parking lot. It was nearly completely buried. Once I got in unburied, it was time for a nap. My strategy all weekend was to not shovel anything in the street in hopes that a snowplow would come through and clear the ice dam at the bottom of the drive. At 3 p.m. I gave up and cleared enough of the slushy goop to get my car into the driveway.

Within a half hour of finishing that, a snowplow did come by and iced me in. I guess I have to pick up the shovel again tomorrow.

So here is a bonus video of a Bobcat clearing snow from my street.

BooksFirst - January 2010

Books Bought
none

Books Read
The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
The Forever War by Joe Haldeman
The Confusion by Neal Stephenson
The Doll's House by Neil Gaiman

Comments
For National Just Read More Novels Month, I decided to go for quality over quantity. The goal was to read the best books I could instead of just the most.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo doesn't count towards NaJuReMoNoMo since I started it way back in October. This book by the now deceased Stieg Larsson is huge word-of-mouth hit. At least part of it is the oddly exotic Swedish setting. Another factor is the slightly kinky narrative and the titular OCD fantasy girl.

A disgraced business journalist, Mikael Blomkvist, is lured into investigating a decades old disappearance. As with most murder mysteries, there is more to the tale than what first appears. The original title translates from the Swedish as Men Who Hate Women and there are plenty of them in this novel. We are talking some world-class brutal misogynists in this book. The creepy sado-masochistic scenes are more than disturbing.

I'm not quite sure what really explains the runaway success of this book. While it is a thriller, it is hardly taut. There are sub-plots that go nowhere. Blomkvist and the tatted up researcher don't cross paths until half-way through the book. Among the major characters are dozens of similarly named red herrings floating around. The novel could easily be a hundred pages shorter and not lose much. It was a good book, but didn't quite live up to the hype. Perhaps I am missing some clue, but I'm just not seeing what everybody else does.

Recently I have been running across lots of greatest science fiction lists and one of the books that kept coming up was Joe Haldeman's The Forever War. I'm not a big fan of military science fiction so I've never given this book a shot, but in a way it's the anti-Starship Troopers. Rather than glorify combat, it emphasized the random futility of warfare. Written in the Vietnam era, it has remains just as relevant today, if not more so. The edition I read has much longer, bleaker middle section than the original novel and it adds much to the tone.

Only now do I realize how much other novels owe this book. The relativistic time dilation that made the gap between Ender's Game and Speaker For The Dead plausible was in here. The detailed spaceship battles of A Mote In God's Eye resemble the maneuvers detailed here. I imagine nearly every book with a hint of interstellar combat owes it some amount of debt.

The book is not without its flaws. The sexuality is painful even when it is trying to be hip and open-minded. The minor characters are flat and often have a whiff of red shirt on them. But overall, this book is thought provoking. With a canvas of centuries, it paints an interesting panorama. It's a haunting book. One that drifts back into your periphery even when you think it's gone.

The real goal of the month was to make it all the way through the middle volume of Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle. Taking place just after the events of Quicksilver, The Confusion follows the separate exploits of Jack Shaftoe and Eliza as they maneuver through pirate infested waters and the courts of Europe respectively. Tying it together is a MacGuffin load of mysterious gold.

For an eight-hundred page book that deals with banking and international commerce, the narrative is riveting and compelling. About half way through the book when I realized where the narrative arc was going, I became fascinated with the epic scope of the tale. Way more than a picaresque tale, it became a dissection of the world at a specific moment in time. There is real ambition here and for the most part, Stephenson pulls it off. It is more than a compliment to say that the undescribed interstitial episodes are probably more fascinating than other entire novels.

Despite being the middle book of a trilogy, it has very satisfying conclusion while still setting up the conclusion. After racing to the end I had to face the grim realization that there are nearly another nine-hundred pages in the saga. It won't take me until the next NaJuReMoNoMo to tackle them.

Having completed The Confusion a day earlier than planned, I still had time for one more book if picked the right one. For a fairly johnny come lately fan of Neil Gaiman (goth-lit rock god), it is perhaps surprising that I am unfamiliar with his magnum opus, the Sandman series. I read the first two volumes from the library but hit a dead end. Since then I have been picking up later books at locally run comic-book stores when I am near them.

The second true volume, The Doll's House, except for a single interesting sidebar story, tells of Morpheus hunting down some of his wayward minions. Along the way there are plenty of disturbing nightmares about abuse and torture and obsession. In the middle there is also an odd meta-swipe at the delusions of the traditional superhero type. Visually dense, the story requires careful attention to track the imagery and symbolism that are as important as the words.



So my final count is two novels and a graphic novel, so I'm giving myself the triple winner badge.