Spotted on the subway last night

Pink pinstriped shirt. Black pinstriped pants. Not a hair out of place. Reading the most ludicrous movie tie-in edition ever. I mean, wow, Ted Danson, wow. (Yes, it's available to stream on Netflix.)

Of course this is far from the first adaptation of the Jonathan Swift classic; early film pioneer Georges Méliès adapted the Lilliput episode for a silent short. And if this one doesn't amuse you, there's another due out this December in 3-D, starring Jack Black, Emily Blunt and Jason Segel. Not sure if Black will be donning that super awesome hairpiece though.

Image: moviezmobile

49. D.H. Lawrence, WOMEN IN LOVE

Farewell, emo daffodils! This is without question the novel I enjoyed the least since I started this project. Granted, it wasn't racist like TOBACCO ROAD, but at least that was shorter. Okay, well it's a draw, and an uncomfortable draw.

Regular readers will have seen this coming with updates like five passages that made me roll my eyes and the Emo Daffodil Alert. Here is my struggle with regard to Mr. Lawrence: He's influenced so many writers I like in his obsession with the interiority, in his single-minded focus on the struggle inside the mind. His fingerprints are all over other books I've read and loved. And there are some passages in WOMEN IN LOVE that are truly moving... when taken out of context. Those passages, however, serve to buttress a tedious and uninteresting narrative, the story of two sisters struggling to overcome their bourgeois upbringings through Free Love with two men who, while not even close to the most homoerotic pair in literature, are by and large closer to each other than to the women with whom they are in love.

When I read SONS AND LOVERS, my first exposure to Lawrence, I struggled but with the sense that my intellectual and emotional problems with the book were somehow purposeful -- that upon further reflection I would recognize Lawrence's genius. Rereading it for a class on the modernist novel in college reinforced that feeling. Maybe it's because in the intervening years I have drifted away from academic reading (as a result of not having to do it) but I feel that I lack some essential patience with it now. I have gone over to where I can say "Yeah, but so many authors have done it better since then -- what's the use?"

In efforts to convey emotional truth among his characters, Lawrence elevates every single moment among them to eleven, forcing the narrator to play teenager's diary with their internal conflicts. I posted and laughed at this passage about Rupert and Gerald's relationship before I realized that would be one of the more restrained moments. Everyone in this book sounds like a person Philip Carey drinks with in Paris in OF HUMAN BONDAGE -- only he eventually leaves Paris. (To bring up another ML book, for a second I thought longingly about how Arnold Bennett wrote an entire novel about women without ever talking about their feelings. And I didn't even like that portrayal either.) This novel was published after the Maugham, but still feels like a step backward.

This book did, however, furnish fodder for my never-forthcoming monograph on how Lawrence killed Sylvia Plath, at which point this blog will become a dry promotional machine directed at forcing you to buy it. Given that she hadn't even been born when he died, this seems impossible, but it's not, and my Work of Brilliance will convince you that in fact he is a murderer. I'll be a freakonomist, but for literature!

Ellen VS. ML: 52 read, 48 unread.

Next up: I've started #85 LORD JIM on Dailylit, because otherwise I'll never finish the Conrad section of this venture -- that's the third of his four slots, which seems excessive. But I'd like to open it up to suggestions. Is there a non-crossed out book on this list that you loved and you can't believe I haven't read yet? I need to pick up steam if I'm going to finish this before I am 100.

Some thoughts on the trailer for Gary Shteyngart's SUPER SAD TRUE LOVE STORY

1. Generous is the man who allows himself to be upstaged multiple times, by other authors in his own book trailer.
2. That said, if you think he's funny here I urge you to see him in person, where he is organically hilarious. See his tour dates here.
3. One person who doesn't upstage him: The celebrity cameo. Without giving away anything, and to sound like a teen magazine briefly, I am so over this celebrity popping up everywhere. I thought what this celebrity was doing was kind of cool and contra-Hollywood, but now it's all starting to look stunty and frankly, I will be happy to leave that person to it and not read any more "What will X do next?" pieces. I can say this with impunity because someone I know has a MASSIVE crush on this celebrity but never reads this prestigious blog.
4. Despite that, and for what it's worth, the trailer accomplishes what it ought: I want to read the book more. Set and match. Whether it will get people not so immersed as I (who perhaps don't recognize the name of Shteyngart, for example) to buy the book, is questionable -- but it sure worked on me.

NYC: To do : LUSH LIFE show on the Lower East Side

The only not-awesome thing about this multi-gallery show based on the Richard Price novel is that there is no way for one person to hit all 9 stops in order on a weekend. Gallery summer hours are for the birds. As for the logistics of hitting most of them in some order, stay tuned.

As a reader, I am always looking over the binding thinking about the next read, in some instances, longing for it. Some books, like some highs, are better than others. But even with not-so-good books–and there where two this past year I did not see to completion–I will come back to the drug, seeking the next high. I will always be a reader. Of this I am certain.

--Doug Bruns

What Christina Hendricks was reading

According to the Los Angeles Times, this woman was born a blonde but went redhead because she loved ANNE OF GREEN GABLES so much.

Good choice.

Photo: PageSixMag

You're all fired

The news is not that author Marilynne Robinson is going to be on "The Daily Show" tonight, although that is certainly new to me. The news is that Marilynne Robinson has a new book out and this is the first I'm hearing of it!...?!?!???

It's a short work of nonfiction called ABSENCE OF MIND and the Washington Post really liked it.

I too like wine, but I wouldn't consider it my brand

Entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk admits about a third of the way through CRUSH IT! that he doesn't consider himself a good writer -- fair enough, if he didn't go on to admit that he dictated this entire book to a better writer to fluff it up a bit. This isn't dishonesty, it's saving labor... yet CRUSH IT still sounds like a long and shouty lecture, so maybe not money well spent.

Vaynerchuk's secret to business success lies in the development of one's "personal brand," a self-statement that will allow you to decide what to go into business for and that will become your calling card for investors and customers. For Vaynerchuk, that driving passion was for wine -- convenient, since his parents managed a wine store as he was growing up, leading him naturally to move into selling wine online and then starting a video podcast about wine that also seems to contain a lot of comments about the New York Jets.

This concept of "personal branding" is everywhere now, bordered by precepts like "never comment online without using your full name" (...oops) and making your blog earn you money and so on. That it has been adopted by a fair number of assholes doesn't mean it's an unsound business strategy, and yet... Well, I would happily monetize the concept of not being an asshole, but that is a crowded space. Vaynerchuk admits that not every personal brand is scalable to the point where you can live off it, but is wisely silent on what to do if you discover this to be true about your brand. (Cut your hair and get a job, I guess.) Or what if you are interested in a lot of things that don't coalesce into a mission statement? What if young Gary's parents had owned a beer warehouse instead of a wine store?

I fear I'm coming out more negative about this book than I really feel in my heart. The chapters on using social media to drive business were not new to me, and a little lacking in useful example, but they're a decent introduction. Still, at 131 pages this is basically a puffed-up magazine article.

Photo: oc.metblogs.com

Author Blog of the Week(-ish): Lev Grossman

Title: just Blog.
Location: levgrossman.com/blog/
Books for which proprietor is responsible: THE MAGICIANS, which comes strongly recommended from a number of friends although I haven't read it yet (just picked up a copy over Memorial Day weekend); also WARP and CODEX.
Features: Tongue-in-cheek Q&A posts like So Lev Grossman What Is The Deal With You And Time Magazine; "Simpsons" stills; categories quoting '90s rock songs.
You'd never know this author... Well, I didn't know before reading the blog that THE MAGICIANS was not his first book; read all about that in How I Got Published By Lev Grossman; Or, A Series Of Unfortunate Events.
Why you should read it: His frankness appeals to me; maybe it's because he has a hand in journalism but it seems that he strives for transparency. I arrived at this blog via a Salon article on antidepressants pointing to his post on same, and it's pretty frank too.
Sample passage: "I would never suggest that there should be a comparable 40-and-up writers list. But I do think there should be a list of writers who are exactly 40. I would have a shot at that one. Me and Kelly Link (b. 1969). And John Scalzi (also b. 1969). David Anthony Durham. David Mitchell. Huh. Actually it’s pretty competitive."
A great recent post: Why They Don't Do Behind The Music for Books
Bit of trivia I'm shoving in here at the bottom 'cause I can: Grossman is married to a writer (Sophie Gee, THE SCANDAL OF THE SEASON) and his twin brother Austin is also a writer (SOON I WILL BE INVINCIBLE).

Dear Borders

It's like we don't even know each other.

Waking up

Whenever I pass through Milwaukee I try to make a point of stopping at Alterra, a local chain (I don’t think there are even any outside the city) with the usual racks of fair trade and organic coffees. For a short trip there’s always the kiosk in the Milwaukee airport that took over a former Starbucks -- I want to say there was a lawsuit, but I might be exaggerating -- from where my much needed dark chocolate mocha came from as I sit here drinking and experimentally wagging my eyebrows up and down in a desperate attempt to snap to. (A woman just asked me where my flight was going and I said “Milwaukee… blaaaaat… New York,” blaaaaat apparently being the voice I make now when I’m buzzing myself for an error.)

My love for Alterra is pretty recent; I wasn’t cool enough in high school to hang out there and I definitely never insisted my mom switch to fair trade. I would love them to open in New York so I could do that, but they would probably get killed. I worry a lot more about the fate of my favorite local coffee places since I read GROUND UP, Michael Idov’s novel about a doomed-from-the-start Lower East Side café. The author makes clear that it was ill-fated, as his optimistic narrator and his wife take out a loan against her trust fund to lease a space once occupied by a gourmet hot-dog seller (!!) to create a coffee shop like the ones they loved in Vienna, where a drink would be an experience. They would do it right, not bend to what the clueless consumers think they want. They comparison shop for their blend and court the neighbors. They go broke at first slowly, and then rapidly.

Idov wrote the novel following a well received piece in Slate about, yes, his ill-fated Lower East Side café and why it was doomed to fail. I hadn’t read it recently before I started GROUND UP and I don’t really want to believe it’s autobiographical, particularly as the failing shop takes a painful toll on the owners’ marriage. At times it must have been a painful book to write, but the sheer volume of information he feeds into the plot, perhaps useless to him in his daily life now, allows him a second wind of expertise.

I liked that GROUND UP was a sort of rallying cry for the idea of independent coffee shops, while establishing that connoisseurship and entrepreneurship are two different animals, that some enterprises fail due to dumb chance and that some people have no business with business. It was also a very funny book, considering how bleakly it ends. (In a subplot, a coffee chain suspiciously similar to Caribou opens up across the street, and its manager, frequenting his neighborhood store, develops a pointed crush on the narrator’s wife.) And if I needed a reason to drink more coffee, well, here it is.

Best Books I Read In 2010 So Far

Joshua Ferris, THE UNNAMED

Julie Klausner, I DON'T CARE ABOUT YOUR BAND

Meghan Daum, LIFE WOULD BE PERFECT IF I LIVED IN THAT HOUSE

Brady Udall, THE LONELY POLYGAMIST

David Mitchell, THE THOUSAND AUTUMNS OF JACOB DE ZOET

David Foster Wallace, A SUPPOSEDLY FUN THING I'LL NEVER DO AGAIN

Notes

1. I think it's inevitable that I will reach the midpoint of the year and effectively say, "Is that all?" I do the same thing for movies (would struggle, in fact, to put together a comparable list of 2010 films of note, there's been so much dreck). That's why I only chose the six superlative ones and left off half a dozen more that were very good, but not great.

2. Biggest disappointments so far, proportionately, have been all the books I've read this year that weren't published in 2010. Stupid free reading, be more engaging!

Reading on the Road: Don't Bring Me Down Edition

I'm going home to the Midwest for the weekend -- a short trip, but a relatively long to-do list. I have four goals: see my family, locate my copy of CLOUD ATLAS, enact vengeance and get a few good nights' sleep. (Kicking ass and chewing bubblegum will have to wait till next trip.) By the time you read this, I'll probably be working on one of those objectives; time is precious.

I'm taking Allegra Goodman's THE COOKBOOK COLLECTOR, EIGHT MEN OUT and David Foster Wallace's EVERYTHING AND MORE. That's 2/3 library books, which probably shouldn't happen but I'm not taking much with me so I still have room. The Wallace book would probably rank in the top five hardest books I've read since college, so why am I enjoying it so much?

Have a great weekend, whether it's your Independence Day or just the 4th.

One of the best books of the year, given one of the worst leads of the year. Maybe I'm just grumpy and exacting, I was surprised to find out those were Eggers' words; I'd have guessed they came from a newsletter compiler who hadn't actually read it. HARRUMPH.

That reminds me that I should be working on the best of the year so far; look for it on Sunday-abouts, and bring your own list so we can fight about it.

Bulwer-Lytton Contest: Best Bad Writers

Another spin around the planet, another batch of winners from the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest who promise to stretch the boundaries of the English language in ways it should never be stretched, like an elephant in Spandex. Wisconsin represents again with Adam McDonough of Reedsburgh (southwest of the Dells, northwest of Baraboo), but here are my favorites:

She Wasn't Wearing Pink Memorial Award: "His chest glistened like a pumpkin seed, either one fresh out of the pumpkin but with all the orange strands of pumpkin flesh removed, or one straight out of the oven after being coated in just the right amount of oil and then baked; the point is that it was smooth, fairly shiny, and that color." --Jesse Kolman

Worst Image: "The wind whispering through the pine trees and the sun reflecting off the surface of Lake Tahoe like a scattering of diamonds was an idyllic setting, while to the south the same sun struggled to penetrate a sky choked with farm dust and car exhaust over Bakersfield, a town spread over the lower San Joaquin Valley like a brown stain on a wino’s trousers, which is where, unfortunately, this story takes place." --Dennis Doberneck

Best Reversal: "Leaning back comfortably in a plush old chair, feet up, fingers laced behind his head, Tom Chambers inventoried his life and with a satisfied grin mused, 'Ah, marlin fishing off the coast of Majorca, a bronze star for that rescue mission in Jamir, the unmatched fragrance of pastries fresh out of the oven at Café Legrande, two sons who would make any father proud . . . I’ve never done any of that.'" --Ernie Santilli

Read about my take on last year's here and an interview with a previous Bulwer-Lytton winner.