Ya burnt, John O'Hara

Of the many delights of LIFE ITSELF, just one for now: Roger Ebert recalls a college professor who deemed John O'Hara a "first-rate second-rate author" -- fine with young Roger whose tastes leaned more toward Thomas Wolfe instead. Ebert would later review his professor's book badly, and then be capsized with guilt over it, but appreciate his words sometime later when he almost flunked out of study-abroad eligibility.

It's a great book, is what I'm saying, and I'm glad one of my coworkers (hey, P.!) is reading it simultaneously so we can talk about it later.To be a little unfair to a writer I otherwise like, this is the kind of nostalgia book THE LIFE AND TIMES OF THE THUNDERBOLT KID wishes it was.

TIME's 100 Best Nonfiction Books: A real smattering.

They really try to bury it (gotta get 'em clicks!!!) but here's the complete list on 1 page so you don't have to endure through a Slideshow of Doom.

Assorted notes in vague list order: 

• First, if excerpts counted I could add another 10-15 easy to my count, but I'm stuck here at 20. Not great, considering that this list is far less moldy than the Modern Library one. 
• Happy to see Stephen King's ON WRITING and Bill Bryson's A WALK IN THE WOODS on there.
• I read THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MALCOLM X when I was way too young. Waaaaaaay too young. 
• True library confession: I reserved AND THE BAND PLAYED ON at the library after seeing "The Normal Heart" on Broadway but balked because of its giant hardcover size. Bad ally. I'll buy it on Kindle, I promise!
• Most recent pick that I saw: Siddhartha Muhkerjee's THE EMPEROR OF ALL MALADIES. Highly recommended.
• I would have thought THE BIG BOOK of AA fame was not available to purchase wherever, but so it is.
• Was very surprised by the sports section, including the fact that there is one. 

Read it again, for the first time.

The A.V. Club posted a call for the books people have most re-read as adults. My knee-jerk reaction was to start naming off the paperbacks I read over and over when I was young, before I noticed the phrase in the original question, "not counting books read in childhood" -- and honestly I don't know how books in my adulthood will ever catch up to those anyway.

I wish I had time to do more re-reading than I do. It's sort of like eating out: You eat at a restaurant, and it's really good -- the kind of place where you would like to be a regular and be friends with the waiters and everything, sort of a kitchen-away-from-home. But hey, look at that new cafe over there -- don't you want to know how it is? Maybe you'll like it better than your regular place! In the end, though, there are a limited amount of meals you can eat out a week even if you are a billionaire or Adam Richman of "Man vs. Food."

I find this metaphor appropriate because in writing reviews I sometimes think of not just reading the latest and greatest but, in a gut sense, of digesting them. (Definition 3, not 5.) I love getting through the stack of "What We're Reading This Summer" and being able to see the big picture; it's why I am generally obsessed with best-of-year lists, even the kind that come out in October and include books that aren't even out yet (ahem, PW). I have no regrets about this, but I have to balance some other stuff in order to keep current.

That said, here are a few books I find myself reading over and over again recently, maybe because I think they will make me wiser, but we'll see where that goes: 

• Margaret Atwood, LADY ORACLE
• Bill Bryson, THE LOST CONTINENT
• Gail Parent, SHEILA LEVINE IS DEAD AND LIVING IN NEW YORK
• Rona Jaffe, THE BEST OF EVERYTHING (although I haven't in at least a year; I guess it's that time again?)

A few twists on this question which I'm pocketing for future posts:

1. Adult books you read and re-read when you weren't quite old enough 
2. First books or book series you remember re-reading (beyond picture books) (again with the limitations)
3. Books you were forced to re-read in school
4. Books that fell apart on re-reading (a sad list)

Care to share your re-reads?

Bill Bryson is not getting my postcards

Uh, Bill. We talked about this. You haven't published a travel book since 2002, and now you've come out with... a 512-page travelogue taking place inside your own house? From your site:

Bill Bryson and his family live in a Victorian parsonage in a part of England where nothing of any great significance has happened since the Romans decamped. Yet one day, he began to consider how very little he knew about the ordinary things of life as he found it in that comfortable home. To remedy this, he formed the idea of journeying about his house from room to room to "write a history of the world without leaving home."

That is not what I meant! You'd better have your bag packed tonight because I'm coming by with the truck at 5AM and we're going to reenact "The Great Race" with a cab full of pugs! Don't forget your towel!

(Still deeply looking forward to it. October 5.)

(And not actually going over to Bill Bryson's house.)

(Unless invited.)

How Times Have (Not) Changed

While digging around in my e-mail the other day I found a list of 10 favorite books which I'd written about three years ago. I only vaguely remember having written the descriptions that came with them, mostly that I didn't find the list that hard to pull together -- ah, callow youth! I ought to do this every year, such was my surprise and delight at finding it.

I like to think that my list of favorite books is ever shifting; at the same time, seven of the 10 books on that 2006 list I would still defend as being favorites, and I'm not sure when that would change. Here are my thoughts on the other three:

Bookmarked: Reinaldo Arenas, BEFORE NIGHT FALLS
What I wrote at the time: "An astonishing and heartbreaking memoir about nationality and freedom, from a gay dissident writer persecuted by Cuba's Communist government."
What I'm thinking now: As a comparative lit concentrator in college*, I took a lot of Spanish lit courses, and this was a salute to one of my favorites. I was really moved by it at the time, but I would have to go back to it to allow it back into the category of greats. (Read it first, but there is a great adaptation as well starring a pre-Anton Chigurh Javier Bardem.) Perhaps I don't trust my tastes in Spanish because I feel this way about a lot of books I read in the language, though the ones I have made the time to re-read have largely stood up. Of the ones in translation**, I recommend Carmen Laforet's NOTHING, if you have to read it in English (she says, assholically).

Bookmarked: Judith Kogan, NOTHING BUT THE BEST
What I wrote at the time: "What better way to write about passion and desperation than, as in this work of creative nonfiction, profile several students and student groups at the prestigious Juilliard School of Music?"
What I'm thinking now: I still really like it, but I think it was more of a right-place-right-time read. The book made its mark on me in high school when I was deeply involved in performing music (although let's be clear, I was never on the conservatory track let alone Juilliard-bound). Its reporting is great but not ground-breaking; it has some very awkward scenes where you get the feeling the author is pressing the subjects or situations for a particular point she's trying to make. Still, if you love music or studies of the 10,000 hour rule, you will probably enjoy it.

Bookmarked: Bill Bryson, THE LOST CONTINENT
What I wrote at the time: "It's the rare travel book that takes place in the U.S. and can look at it unsentimentally***; perhaps it took this long-time expat's meandering road trip to reveal the explosively funny and the painfully true about America."
What I'm thinking now: This is a placeholder because I couldn't make all 10 books Bill Bryson books. Not really, but seriously, I love this book, I love all Bryson, and at the same time don't know how I would decide among them if pressed today. It would probably make the top 3 along with NOTES FROM A SMALL ISLAND and A WALK IN THE WOODS, and be my most often re-read of those three, but beyond that it's just how I'm feeling that day. (Incidentally, Bill, your last travel book was published in 2002; time to get back on the road.)

What are some books that used to be your favorites?

---
* Brush your shoulders off.
** If you really want to hear me carp on, buy me a drink and ask me about the state of Spanish literature in English translation. It's my personal grassy knoll.
** Dear Firefox spell check: Justify to me why this is not a word.