Impressionists paint women reading

I couldn't really think of a creative way to incorporate these into the design of my blog, but I liked them so much I thought I would save them for a separate post.
It looks like Renee Zellweger, but it's actually a Renoir.


I've never heard of this painter before (Fragonard) but I have to admire the woman's posture while sitting in that squishy armchair. And the sleeves!
I sit like this a lot when I'm reading, although my hair is not awesome like this.

Chemical Ambition

The first chapter of John Niven's KILL YOUR FRIENDS details a painful meeting (more painful because it's so ordinary) in the life of Steven Stelfox, record-company employee. Steven likes porn, looking great and Schadenfreude. Steven does not like his job, his friends, his coworkers or, so it would appear, any kind of music whatsoever. Working in A&R does that to a person, apparently.

If there's anything Steven truly loves, besides himself, it's cocaine, but he comes down from his high long enough to realize he wants the job up for grabs in his department, and his best office politicking alone isn't going to get him there. This isn't the point at which Steven and I parted ways with how we saw the world -- that happened much earlier -- but it is where KILL YOUR FRIENDS goes from exquisitely foul to actually diabolical.

The world described within this book and the man describing it are so completely debauched that a lot of readers may be put off before the plot kicks in, and not just because Steven takes his sense of entitlement to a scary new level: There is literally nothing redeeming about this guy. Yet I still wanted to follow him into the depths of this world because, to reference TRAINSPOTTING (a book this has been compared to, although I've never read it), Steven doesn't choose what he does because he's particularly happy: He chooses his own survival in order to screw other people.

It's the diametric opposite of an A&R memoir I reviewed earlier this year by Dan Kennedy. Kennedy, like Niven, worked in the music business, but his book is shaded by this kind of creepy naivete about what he does, so he can affect horror when one of his artists gets a song placed in a major commercial campaign (I believe it was Jewel he was speaking of), or be forced to cut loose bands he loves and replace them with the next fly-by-night pop sensation. The absence of self-awareness in his account of it made me somehow suspicious. Granted, Niven is working in fiction, which gives him a lot more leeway, but Steven's illusions are much more cynical: He believes he deserves that promotion and finds the discovery that he has to work for it distasteful. He signs on a Spice Girls-type girl group, Songbirds, with whom he abhors working, for the sole reason that he can make lots of money off of them and prove he's a hitmaker.

His opinion of coworkers who believe themselves to be indie tastemakers is similarly low, and since the book takes place in the mid-'90s, an era current music executives undoubtedly reflect on wistfully, he proves himself thoroughly rotted to the core once again. Maybe it's just because I'm a cynic, but I preferred the depravity on offer here, even when it was most offensive, to its shiny alternative.

NB: I got this book for free from the good folks at Harper Perennial. Thanks, guys!

RIP Michael Crichton

The author of JURASSIC PARK, CONGO, SPHERE (my personal favorite) and many other books died amid the voting excitement on Tuesday, his family announced.

I think Crichton's books were the first literary "fad" I ever picked up on. I wanted to read them because other people at school were reading them; I thought they were "cool" and I needed all the cool points I could get at that stage. (Another middle-school literary fad I can remember: Richard Preston's THE HOT ZONE -- similar to some of Crichton's books, but true.) I think they caught on because they were so cliffhanger-friendly, but also carried the tag of "adult" books,

Crichton came under fire last year for introducing a very unflattering portrayal of someone who had criticized him into his book NEXT, but I'll always remember late nights under the covers trying to figure out what the gorillas were up to. So what literary fads have you noticed recently around you? Here's what I've got:

• Picking up TWILIGHT just to see what the fuss is about (I'm speaking of adults here) and racing through the Meyer series
• Tana French -- her name seems to be popping up everywhere I look.
• Microbooks rushed into print like STUFF WHITE PEOPLE LIKE (blog born 2008, book published mid-2008) and BARACK OBAMA IS YOUR NEW BICYCLE. As fast as a reprint, but more topical (although maybe more people will read ...IS YOUR NEW BICYCLE now, to see what other things Barack Obama is).

And by the way

With the new president comes a slightly different look for Wormbook. (Actually, it's a complete coincidence; I remember I had tried to update my template weeks ago but put it off and decided to do so today.)

I'm still using one of the classic Blogger templates, but if you see something that's super broken, won't you let me know? So far my only known issue is I seem to have lost my delightful Goodreads widget.

Incidentally in searching for new photos I have discovered there is a demand for scantily clad women with books as props. Search "woman reading" (though not at work!) and you'll see what I mean. I was thinking something a wee bit more decorous; this Picasso is saucy enough.

What I'm reading today

I probably should have read it earlier in order to be a more informed voter, but it's not too late.

Talk of the Town Tuesday: Try Something New

My next book review for "Talk of the Town with Parker Sunshine" will go live next Wednesday, November 12th -- but you won't hear it when you tune in.

Instead, Parker will be airing an interview I'm doing with Dawn Jackson Blatner, author of THE FLEXITARIAN DIET. My review of the book will go live on parkersunshine.com after the show.

I've done long-form interviews before, but never specifically for radio, so I am excited and nervous! This isn't a forever format change, but we got the opportunity for the interview and jumped on it.

In any case, I encourage you to tune in on Nov. 12th, even though I won't be live on air that night. We will also be making the full-length interview available for you to listen to after the show has aired.

Since the polls are already open in New York State...

This Election Day, enjoy this nonpartisan adorable message:

Discover the bookstore that isn't!

I'm a Time Out NY subscriber, but it's hard not to mock their article on why you should use the New York Public Library. All the points they make are great -- they even tout the online request system I've crowed about -- but calling it "the cheapest bookstore" just reminds me of this FAILblog item. Still, the library is a great resource... if only hipsters could figure it out by themselves.

(I was holding my breath waiting for TONY to name-check my personal "coolest branch," but they didn't.)

All Souls

Before Michael Patrick MacDonald even knew the dangers of his own neighborhood, he was a living testament to them: He was given the names of his brother, Patrick Michael, who died of pneumonia when he was just a few weeks old because he was turned away at the hospital. Michael went on to lose 3 more brothers, and after a fourth was tried for his best friend's murder on incomplete and outright false evidence, MacDonald stopped running away from the neighborhood and decided to stay and fight for it.

Despite its vivid depictions of violence, MacDonald's memoir ALL SOULS is really the story of the decline and fall of South Boston. When Michael's mother Helen moved into the Southie projects with her 9 children, she had no illusions about the roach-infested, overheated and overcrowded apartment she was getting, paid for (like most of them) by welfare benefits. But Southie was known as a place where people looked out for each other -- until Boston busing efforts created violent opposition and a new strain of racism directed at nearby neighborhoods like Roxbury.

Too young to understand the epithets thrown around, Michael thought the protests were exciting; as an adult, though, he can see the irreparable damage they did both to the kids who dropped out rather than be bused and the neighborhood's reputation in the city. (He doesn't defend the racism that drove these protests, though.) After the attacks on other neighborhoods, drugs took over thanks to Whitey Bulger, a local gang leader who virtually ruled the neighborhood with his network of thugs, local ne'er-do-wells and corrupt cops.

Helen tried to raise her kids to "get out," but they fell prey to the local siren calls: Frankie escaped jail time by joining the Marines and then making a living as a boxer, only to be lured in by cocaine; Kevin started dealing before he turned 13 but couldn't give it up even after his daughter was born, and Kathy went from a disco lover doing a little angel dust into a coma. The author himself spent his teen years alternately hiding in the downtown punk scene and trying to protect his two little brothers from stray bullets and crazed addicts.

It's rare to read a memoir like this in which a clear villain is singled out, and compared to THE CORNER MacDonald's explanation is pretty simplistic: Whitey sold out the neighborhood for profit, taking advantage of its unrest, and abandoned it in shambles when it suited him.* At the same time, he doesn't zero in on the drugs themselves, only their effects on families like his. Sometimes it seems as though the power to "get out" is so close, but the urge for self-destruction -- or destruction at the hands of your neighbors -- is closer. The death of Michael's brother Davey is extremely acute even though it has nothing to do with Whitey. The question you're left asking is, why didn't anyone try to save Southie?

*Whitey, a partial inspiration for the Showtime program "Brotherhood," is currently on the lam after escaping in 1994 when he heard the FBI would be making arrests around Christmas. Have you seen him?

Unbookening Month 9: The Great Library Meltdown

3 books gotten on Bookmooch
9 books checked out of the library
10 books received for review
Bought 4 books (including, Elizabeth, my very own copy of TOO TOO SOLID FLESH to review)
Received 2 books from my mom (THE ELEGANCE OF THE HEDGEHOG and WOMEN ON THE VERGE OF A NERVOUS BREAKTHROUGH)
= 30 books in.

3 books given away on BookMooch
17 books returned to the library
Gave 7 books away
= 27 books out.

Hey, it's all right: I forecast November will be a big month for giving books away, as I stay in a bit more and try to save money for holiday fun.

The other books I bought, by the way, were Michelle Goodman's THE ANTI 9-TO-5 GUIDE and her follow-up, MY SO-CALLED FREELANCE LIFE as well as STATE BY STATE.

Books read in October 2008
139. Louis de Bernieres, A PARTISAN'S DAUGHTER
140. Torsten Krol, CALLISTO
141. M.T. Anderson, THE ASTONISHING LIFE OF OCTAVIAN NOTHING
142. Julia Glass, I SEE YOU EVERYWHERE
143. Jim Bannister, ADDICTIONARY
144. Heather Armstrong (ed.), THINGS I LEARNED ABOUT MY DAD (IN THERAPY)
145. Twyla Tharp, THE CREATIVE HABIT
146. Kera Bolonik and Jennifer Griffin, FRUGAL INDULGENTS
147. Laura Lippman, HARDLY KNEW HER
148. Richard Alther, THE DECADE OF BLIND DATES: A NOVEL
149. Leslie Bennetts, THE FEMININE MISTAKE
150. Peter Gosselin, HIGH WIRE
151. Janice Erlbaum, GIRLBOMB
152. Mike Walsh, BOWLING ACROSS AMERICA
153. Michael Patrick MacDonald, ALL SOULS
154. John Niven, KILL YOUR FRIENDS
155. Shawna Yang Ryan, LOCKE 1928

Get back to work!

I have no way of verifying this, but I'm pretty sure I saw Jonathan Safran Foer last night.

I happened to be at Joe's Pub for Mike Daisey's new show, "If You See Something Say Something." (I have to write a proper review of it, but in short: Go see it!) He passed by me while I was standing in the line for the bathroom afterwards; he looked straight at me and I almost did a double-take.

I was tempted to call after him "Hurry up and write your third book!" But I didn't, because honestly I was too shocked to see him. When I moved to New York I expected the streets would be thick with writers, but they manage to stay pretty well disguised.

ToTT: I Was A Child Flexitarian

This post ties in with my forthcoming review of Dawn Jackson Blatner's THE FLEXITARIAN DIET -- tune in November 12 to "Talk of the Town with Parker Sunshine."

Last week I mentioned the word flexitarian, which as far as I can find surfaced sometime in the early oughts to describe an eating pattern that is partially, but not completely, vegetarian. But the concept was not new to me -- in fact, even though I didn't know it, I've been a flexitarian most of my life.

As I mentioned in my review of the diet book SKINNY BITCH, my mom is a vegetarian, and as the primary (really only) cook in the house she incorporated a lot of veggie-friendly dishes into our diets. Mom gave up meat in college and, over the protests of my grandmother, stayed that way through 3 healthy pregnancies and never looked back. She never tried to get us to become vegetarians, and she still made hot dogs and chicken nuggets and so on, but we probably ate veggie more than half the time -- I wasn't exposed to the classic meat-and-potatoes meals except at my grandparents' house.

These days my siblings and I are all content omnivores: I gave up meat for a summer and swore off most red meat for 8 years, but right now I would consider myself a flexitarian of circumstance: I don't make meat very much because it isn't convenient. It takes longer to make than a PB&J and, if you forget about it in the fridge (as I am wont to do), it spoils faster. But I don't think I was adversely affected by eating less meat as a kid; I didn't always like my mom's cooking, but we were all well fed.

Previously:
Announcing the next Talk of the Town pick

The Feminine Mistake

Can we be frank? This book scared the shit out of me. But in a good way, I think.

In THE FEMININE MISTAKE, Leslie Bennetts argues that too many women are willing to give up on their careers and become "full-time mothers," to their detriment later in life. (The quotes are employed because as one of Bennetts' subjects points out, what mother isn't a mother all the time?) Because women traditionally have not worked while raising children, young married women are all too willing to give up careers they don't love (instead of finding work they like better) to stay home.

If women stay home, they normally don't keep up with their fields or add to their skill set, so if something should happen to their husbands (death, career-ending injury, divorce) they won't be prepared to re-enter the workplace. Even if they want to, the workplace might not take them back in, dramatically decreasing their earning power over time. Yet society still looks askance at working moms, some even going as far to say that women shouldn't have any children if they won't "raise them full-time," i.e. stay at home to take care of them.

The real scariest part of this book is the first 150 or so pages, in which Bennetts reveals interview subjects who have made what one might call "the feminine mistake": By staying at home they placed their economic trust in their husbands, and that was a Big Mistake. These middle- to upper-class women belong to the demographic for whom staying home is a choice, but now they have no choice, and it scares them.

As a twentysomething I don't normally dwell on my career in 20 or 30 years. (Or 20 or 30 months, for that matter.) But while I was reading this book I could not stop thinking about issues like housework parity and maternity leave. I really got the sense that this book was for me, partly because of Bennetts' invoking of a 2005 New York Times story in which a very small survey of Yale undergrads led to the conclusion that most women in my generation would prefer to stay at home. The claims the article makes have since mostly been debunked, but I still got something out of this that a woman who has already made kids and made some of those hard choices might not. (There are some chapters for them as well, including one to reassure working moms that their job gets easier when their kids, like Bennetts', become teenagers.)

It's not a perfect book by any means; I would have liked Bennetts to find more subjects like the woman who was able to re-enter the workforce after 3 years out by continuing to stay active in her field. And she might have further addressed one of the key components to why so many women, and not just doctors and lawyers, find it so difficult to work and raise a family: That workplace policies, traditionally been written by men for men with wives at home, fail to take into account the needs of two-income families and working moms in particular. And okay, some of her advice amounts to "Stop feeling sorry for yourself!" but on the whole, I would recommend this book to all of my female friends (and some of my male friends as well). Even if they violently disagree with it, I think it would lead to a great discussion.

Unbookening update: Victory!

...or rather, a willingness to admit defeat on the small scale.

I won't have time to get to the library for the rest of the month, but I reached my goal of getting my number of books out down to 3. Didn't have time to read all of my returned volumes, but they will always be there if I want them.

And now, my stack of unread magazines whispers, "Recycle me!"

Finally! Read Like Sarah Palin

About two months ago I e-mailed the Republican presidential campaign on a lark. Late in August I wrote about what Democratic vice-presidential candidate Joe Biden liked to read, and I was hoping to do the same with Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin, who was even less well known to me than Biden. (Much less; I believe my response to the announcement was an "Arrested Development"-style "Her?") Unlike Biden, Palin didn't have a Google-friendly answer, although I found evidence that at some point her Facebook page listed "favorite books."

I never heard back from official campaign brass, but I suppose they have many more important tasks than dealing with impertinent bloggers with no political influence. But I discovered today that Palin was saving the exclusive on what she likes to read for People Magazine, which is why she ducked Katie Couric's question about her favorite periodicals last month like so:

Palin: I've read most of them, again with a great appreciation for the press, for the media.

Couric: What, specifically?

Palin: Um, all of them, any of them that have been in front of me all these years.

Couric: Can you name a few?

Palin: I have a vast variety of sources where we get our news, too. Alaska isn't a foreign country, where it's kind of suggested, "Wow, how could you keep in touch with what the rest of Washington, D.C., may be thinking when you live up there in Alaska?" Believe me, Alaska is like a microcosm of America.

Here's the scoop from People:

SP: I'm a voracious reader, always have been. I appreciate a lot of information. I think that comes from growing up in a family of schoolteachers also where reading and seizing educational opportunities was top on my parents' agenda. That was instilled in me.

What do you like to read?
SP: Autobiographies, historical pieces – really anything and everything. Besides the kids and sports, reading is my favorite thing to do.

What are you reading now?
SP: I'm reading, heh-heh, a lot of briefing papers on a lot of issues that are in front of us in this campaign.

What about for fun?
SP: Do we consider The Looming Tower something that was just for fun? That's what I've been reading on the airplane. It's about 9/11. If I'm going to read something, for the most part, it's something beneficial.

Not for nothing, but I haven't read THE LOOMING TOWER. Maybe I should get on that.