What books "Gossip Girl" viewers will be begging for this Christmas

Now here's something a little different, a best-of-'09 list from fictional character Dan Humphrey, who began life in the YA series by Cecily von Ziegesar and lives on in a form on the CW. If you don't watch "Gossip Girl" I won't bother to catch you up but suffice it to say Dan is the sensitive writer guy; in an earlier season he met Jay McInerney (playing himself). To the list, then:

First, he might have read THIS IS WHERE I LEAVE YOU but it wouldn't be at #1.

Second, THE HELP? I've missed a few episodes this season, I must have skipped the one where he joins a middle-aged woman's book club in the South. Can we blame Hilary Duff for this?

Third, I have never heard of THE BLONDE OF THE JOKE, but now that I've looked it up let's drop something well above his pay grade in there like GENEROSITY: AN ENHANCEMENT. No, wait, come to think of it, Dan would totally be an Infinite Summerer. Takes one to know one.

Fourth (and somewhat related to the last) is that while I believe he would read THE BELIEVERS, I doubt he'd really be able to grasp the subtlety of same. Despite everything the show writers do to convince us he's smart (having him, for example, publish a story in the New Yorker of the exploits of one "Charlie Trout"), he's basically Finn from "Glee" with sideburns. Let's just say I don't have a picture of him on my fridge.

Despite all this, as presented I believe he would wade through all these books, consider it due diligence and go back to moping. And if loyal viewers are moved to get these books, that can only be good.

Finite Summer

"Choosing Gertraude to love as my wife was necessary for the others, these other choices. Without the choice of her life there are no other choices. I tried leaving at the commencement. I got only very few revolutions of the fauteuil."

--Remy Marathe

"It's obvious everything's pointing towards getting you in a cell belting out Mermanalia."

--Michael Pemulis

I finished last night. I'm confused about the ending, but sorry that it's all over.

ETA 9/22: In catching up on IJ blogs and whatnot, I have found a pretty convincing explanation of what happens at the end, which I will link to in the next sentence even though it is purposefully spoilery. You have been warned: the ending of the book is discussed in detail. More about the ending in a general sense later.

Infinite August: In which you will now address me as The Darkness (1)

I'm recording my experience reading INFINITE JEST along with the Infinite Summer project. There are no spoilers for the book in this post.

I spent most of this month not reading INFINITE JEST. It's not the book's fault: I had a lot of other reading to get through for various and sundry, and that has been my passage through the book, all chutes and laddery. I had a decent lead from taking the book on vacation and I didn't think about it much, just caught up posts from Infinite Summer and occasionally admired my bookmark-stuffed copy.

Then I hit the landmark I should have seen coming: I reached a passage that took me from "Well, I'm having a really good time, even if I don't get the hype" to "...wow, that resonated with me on a level I didn't expect." It was part of a long conversation, almost a tossed-off explanation of something, over the page-600 mark(2); I was reading it on Commerce Street in the West Village, standing in line for a Fringe show, and I looked up from the page and the world looked different.

I don't even think I could explain to you what that felt like, in which case, why am I writing a whole entry about it? Well, this is why: I can remember the first time I read some books that would become my favorites. Mostly, I can remember how I felt when I finished. But I can't think of another book in recent memory where a particular passage clanked like a bolt being turned in a lock. It was like someone had highlighted the entire section and, for good measure, written in the margins Hey Ellen!!! Straighten up, this is for you! All along this book was poking around for the chink in my intellectual armor, and when its aim was true the blow knocked me backward.

Even with all this messy metaphor and sorry simile, I don't know if INFINITE JEST will become one of my favorite books. I still have just under 300 pages to go, and even then, there will at some point have to be a re-reading. What I know is that after I hit that "wow" point, I didn't want to put the book down any more. I began to invent excuses to take it along as a back-up book on outings that did not require one; I lugged it to all sorts of inappropriate places; I got a little Linus-and-the-blanket about it, frankly. I still can't focus on it exclusively (3) but I'm going to try and carve out some longer blocks for reading it, because I just have to.

That said, I haven't completely lost perspective. I still understand how people could get massively frustrated with this book and quit before hitting that "wow" moment. It's all well and good if you reach the "wow" marker on page 248 (4) but there's no guarantee you ever will. What matters as I move into the last month of my Infinite Summer is that DFW served an ace, and I got to watch.

---
Obligatory DFW/IJ footnotes:
(1) No one in my civilian life would take this request seriously.
(2) To throw a bone to those who have finished the book, it is completely unrelated to the Big Event that happens between p.600 and p.700, whose narration I found quite confusing. I don't doubt that it was intentional, but I had to read it over twice to be sure that what had just happened, had just happened.
(3) If you're new here, I talked about crowding the book in at length in this post.
(4) Happened to someone I know, and even that is a fair piece in. For those who have read, it's the phone call between Hal and Orin when Orin asks for help on his interview with Steeply.

Post-Its: Representing at least three of the seven deadly sins

Entertainment Weekly's Shelf Life: EW recently started a books blog and at first I was underwhelmed, but I appreciate that after the authors posted a trailer for Thomas Pynchon's new book INHERENT VICE, they did some research and found the narrator is Pynchon himself. (He sounds like a cross between Allen Ginsberg and The Dude.)

S.F. Chronicle's City Brights: I want to read all 100 books on the Modern Library list; John Gilkey wanted to steal first editions of all 100, according to the new true-crime thriller THE MAN WHO LOVED BOOKS TOO MUCH. Yup, that's too much all right.

GalleyCat: Julia Roberts was spotted filming a scene yesterday at Brooklyn's BookCourt bookstore for the forthcoming adaptation of EAT, PRAY, LOVE. (Still haven't been there; what is wrong with me?) Between that and the Strand dollar-cart cameo in "Julie & Julia" -- about which more tomorrow, but I believe that scene was also shot on location -- the gesture is appreciated.

Slate's DoubleX: The death of chick lit has been wildly overreported, but usually not from an author working in the genre. Sarah Bilston's first book came out before the credit crisis; in editing her second, she questions what yesterday's blithe heroines need to do to still be relatable for readers.

Infinite Summer corner! Huffington Post: Mike Miley finished INFINITE JEST ahead of schedule (well done, sir). Now he shares what it's like to have finished and be "free to play the field and flirt with all those other books on the shelf that had been giving me the eye."

Post-Its: Better than direct mail from John Grisham

I received a charity letter "from" John Grisham on behalf of the Southern Poverty Law Center in the mail while I was gone. Putting "Author" as part of your return address is a great way to get me to open your unsolicited mail; thank goodness spammers haven't caught on. (J.M. Coetzee wants to help me with the ladies? Sweet.)

• Because a lot of people are winding up here looking for it, my Frank McCourt note from a few weeks ago has been updated with public memorial information, as current as I could find. Not afraid to be servicey!
  


• My copy of LOLITA which I admitted to re-purchasing several months ago has still not turned up. I think it either has been lent out for a long time or got mixed in with another family member's books. I may even have been the forgetful lender; that's where my copy of THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER AND CLAY was all this time, on the nightstand of the West Coast bureau (who has since finished it). Meanwhile, another book has pulled a disappearing act when I most wanted it, which is why you're not currently getting "Incomprehensible Notes From My Adolescent Copy of LEAVES OF GRASS."



• This Times article on how serendipity is becoming extinct has so many techspletives in it it's practically unreadable. But I'm posting it because "serendipity" is one of my favorite words, and I see no reason that we have to let the concept or the term go. Now get off my lawn.


• "If Nora Ephron had been born buxom, what else besides that article might she not have written?" I'm just catching up to Ariel Levy's profile of Nora Ephron in the New Yorker from a few weeks ago, whose second paragraph can only be described as an equal-opportunity offender for the ladies, but if you can make it past that there are some nifty tidbits about her life as a writer. Related: Tina Fey's forthcoming book (!!!) was described at deal time as being "in the style of Nora Ephron."
  


• INFINITE JEST corner: What the hell do you say when people unfamiliar with the book ask what it's about? This has happened to me several times and my latest answer was the best, but I feel as if I owe people more than a shrug and a smile. (Let us not speak of the back-cover copy, which is atrocious.) My latest answer incorporated the current situations of the various Incandenzas and, since I passed Interdependence Day a while back, a smidge of the alternate-reality politics going on behind them. The last thing I want to do is deter anyone from reading it, which a vague answer or an "It's extremely complicated" might.


• Finally, shamelessly, self-promotionally: The AV Club's latest Wrapped Up in Books round begins Aug. 17 on John Crowley's LITTLE, BIG. That's two weeks from now. It is possible that you have not started the book yet, and I am not judging you, promise. But now would be a good time to start it!

He who ought to be made to do Pukers during the Interdependence Day feast while wearing his celebratory hat

I don't yet feel equipped to compete with the wildly hyperbolic blurbs on the first few pages of my copy of INFINITE JEST, but how's this? I can think of very few books which I would rather have when stranded at an airport for an indeterminate length of time because some (alleged) asshole decided to throw a bomb scare at my destination.

Photo of JEST on a plane: Alex S. via Infinite Summer Flickr pool

Off to the beach today

...putting the "summer" in Infinite Summer. (Photo taken yesterday while packrastinating.) It's probably not a suitable book, but after I factored in the travel time it seemed to make sense. New Jersey here I come!

Infinite July: Why

(Second part of a two-part post on my INFINITE JEST experience so far; here's the first. Again, carte blanche to skip this, it's mostly for me.)

So as I mentioned, I started INFINITE JEST the weekend of the Wimbledon semis and finals, which seemed like a cosmic "This Way" signpost to keep me reading. (I haven't gotten tired of the tennis stuff so far; it reminds me of John Feinstein's HARD COURTS, a great piece of nonfiction despite being extremely dated now.) For a spell there it felt like I kept hitting all these references that said move forward, move forward, but I realized about 50 pages ago that there are so many references in this book, to movies or other books or bits of cultural detritus, that naturally as you read it you will pick up pieces that seem targeted just to you.

At the same time, these pieces more than the development of plot have pulled me into the book thus far. What has happened so far in terms of "action" would be extremely hard to describe; I'm not sure why the jacket copy doesn't just say "Nice try, sucker! Read the damn thing!" I keep reading because I'm sure those pieces will all lock into place someday, but for now I'm enjoying the exuberance of something so rich and playful in language.

I was beginning to despair of finding an example of Wallace's prose till I hit this one which some of you may recognize. Take it away, page 226:

The Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed was unofficially founded in London in B.S. 1940 in London U.K. by the cross-eyed, palate-clefted, and wildly carbuncular wife of a junior member of the House of Commons, a lady whom Sir Winston Churchill, P.M.U.K., having had several glasses of port plus a toddy at a reception for an American Lend-Lease administrator, had addressed in a fashion wholly inappropriate to social intercourse between civilized gentlemen and ladies. Unwittingly all but authoring the Union designed to afford the scopophobic empathetic fellowship and the genesis of sturdy inner resources through shame-free and unconstrained concealment, W. Churchill -- when the lady, no person's doormat, informed him with prim asperity that he appeared to be woefully inebriated -- made the anecdotally famous reply that while, yes, yea verily, he was indeed inebriated, he would the following A.M. be once again sober, while she, dear lady, would tomorrow still be hideously and improbably deformed. Churchill, doubtless under weighty emotional pressures during this period in history, had then proceeded to extinguish his cigar in the lady's sherry and to place a finger-bowl napkin delicately over the ruined features of her flaming visage. The laminated non-photo U.H.I.D. membership card Joelle showed the interested old black gentleman related this data and more in a point-size so tiny the card looked somehow both blank and defaced.

(I had to type that whole thing up because it wasn't Googleable. You're welcome, Internet.)

That's perhaps a third of a paragraph, and well, just look at it. Is it overwritten, especially compared to the original joke? Absolutely -- any newspaper editor would strike the repetition of the word London in the first sentence first without batting an eye. But it's not the periphrastic scramble of a student trying to finish a paper; it's all deliberate. How different a world the characters of INFINITE JEST live in from our own, I'm not sure, but Wallace has created it and I'm just living in it.

New Yorker critic James Wood coined the term "hysterical realism" to describe this kind of prose as seen in the "big, ambitious" novels of Zadie Smith, Salman Rushdie, Jonathan Franzen, Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon and DFW himself. Know what those authors have in common? The ones I've read deep enough into to know, I love. I came across the term a while ago but never have I thrown it around with such loving abandon as I have in my Infinite Summer. I want to buy that T-shirt and join that team. I am that which Wood fears! What a feeling.

In mentally preparing myself for the Long Book, I didn't stop to contemplate why people read INFINITE JEST. I anticipated that it would "get good" eventually. I didn't realize it was going to be funny almost from the beginning in the wry vein that I love. I actually laughed out loud where Hal says to Orin, "Everybody said you'd regret not coming to the funeral. But I don't think this is what they meant." And that's in one of the most harrowing sections so far! (And if I explain it, it will not be funny any more.)

Even amid those torrents of prose, little gems like that turn up. The one bit of DFW warming-up I did was reading his Harpers essay "Shipping Out"(PDF version available here) which became the title essay of A SUPPOSEDLY FUN THING I'LL NEVER DO AGAIN. In a passage about cruise-ship dining options, Wallace describes one as offering "the sort of coffee you marry somebody for being able to make." I carried that phrase around with me for weeks. I can dig a long, long way for phrases like that.

ETA 7.27: Welcome to everyone coming over from Infinite Summer. Tonight I had dinner with a family whose three children are nationally ranked tennis players, and it was all I could do to not start spouting off about the Enfield Tennis Academy and Eschaton. I'm sure you can relate! Anyway, thank you so much for reading, please make yourselves at home.

Infinite July: How

It's been a month since Infinite Summer began. How am I doing? ...I am in the thick of it. Specifically, page 259 of the thick of it, slightly behind the group, not quite a third of the way -- but I think we can all agree, definitely in the thick.

There are so many ways I could write about my experience with this book so far; the Wallacean method would be to write about all of them, but I have a lot to get through yet! So instead, today I will comment on the process of beginning this long book and where to find the time. Tomorrow I'll talk about narrative and style a little bit with an eye to exposing those of you who haven't read the book to what it is, in the most general sense, "about."

(Also, I give you carte blanche to skip this post if you truly don't care; somewhat more so than others here, I'm getting this down so I can remember and go back to it later.)

xxxxx

The truth is that even after living on my bookshelf for two and a half years, INFINITE JEST then spent two weeks on my nightstand being slowly buried by magazines and library books, just another sedimentary layer. Then I was heading home for the Fourth of July, and well, what was the point of bringing it, I had so many other things to read, who brings a 1000-plus page book on a 3-day trip along with other stuff?

I took the book. I read the intro, in which Dave Eggers wrote that he read it at the same age I am now. I will not be defeated by an Eggers! I started reading, and then a glorious thing happened: I really enjoyed it. It didn't hurt that I had a few blocks of unscheduled time or that I hit a tennis section just after watching the Epic Battle of the Andies from this year's Wimbledon. (More on that later.)

Yesterday on the Infinite Summer blog, Brittney Gilbert, who blogs for a living, wrote about the immersive experience she had had in reading the novel, which she strove to "really commit to... the way one commits to a college course or a part-time job or a new lover." She describes taking it into a quiet room, closing the door, lighting some candles. That's her approach, whereas mine, to extend the metaphor, is dragging the book into a coat room at a party for a couple of pages. (Not that I've literally done that with the book. Yet.)

What I'll do is take it with me everywhere for a few days when I don't have an imminent review due, and get as far as I can in those few days. The night I did the biggest chunk was the night I got home from a concert with my ears ringing past the point of sleep. I have read it in a number of morally indefensible public places, including on the subway during rush hour and in the lobby of a movie theatre before watching "Brüno." (There's probably a law against that.) At some point, I wanted to read it more than I wanted to not be self-conscious, and it's amazing when a book can do that, isn't it?

I haven't lost the romance of reading, but to treat this book differently from everything else I read would go against the plot of this blog. Of course I worry about whether the book is being polluted by giving it less than my full attention, but I have determined to draw the line when that worrying cuts into my reading time. My fellow Infinite Summerers, how are you coping?

And the rest of you, what was the last book you wanted to take with you everywhere?

ETA 7/27: Welcome to everyone coming over from Infinite Summer! Here's a funny story: I told my mom about the project a few weeks ago and today I found out she had picked up a copy of INFINITE JEST on vacation, only she hadn't started it yet because "it's not the sort of book you can read in 2 minutes here or there." I was still proud. Anyway, thank you so much for reading and make yourselves at home.

And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence, are more to me, and more in my meditations, than you might suppose.

Thoughts while reading the Brooklyn Paper's slate of nominees for Brooklyn poet laureate:

1. Who the heck are these people besides They Might Be Giants? I don't follow poetry with anything resembling diligence, but I was hoping at least one of them would ring a bell.

2. I can't decide whether I'm surprised or not that Brooklyn has a poet laureate, and I mean that in the best way possible. Why shouldn't every city have a poet laureate? Never hurt anybody, and if you can find evidence contravening that, I'm sure it will be hilarious.

3. Still, TMBG vs. "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry"? Two men and a poem enter, one poem leaves.

Infinite Summer: It begins!

I'm going to go ahead and tempt fate by saying, it's not the length I'm worried about, but the complexity and the effort to balance this book with the other stuff I'm reading. Long books and I, we have a history. You don't become the kind of pretentious person who lists ANNA KARENINA as a favorite book overnight, oh no! (WAR AND PEACE isn't even close, just sayin'.)

A short list of long books I also haven't read:

DON QUIXOTE. I carried a sunny yellow paperback two-volume set back from Spain, only to have it sit on my shelf through 4 moves unopened. I read an abridged English version for a school project, but that doesn't count.

ATLAS SHRUGGED. I didn't skip it deliberately because of the hordes of people who love and hate this book, but that certainly didn't help. I liked THE FOUNTAINHEAD all right. I imagine once I get around to it I will suggest it for the most commented on ever Better Late Than Never entry (title currently held by WATCHMEN).

REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST. I imagine if I were in some kind of work situation where I was going to be posted somewhere remote, Afghanistan or Antarctica or Archangel, I would take these with me and Discover Many Things About Myself. (Then, I would naturally write a memoir about how Marcel and I became best friends forever. Possible title: MY YEAR IN SWANN'S WAY.)

A DANCE TO THE MUSIC OF TIME. This one's on the Modern Library list, so I will have to get there someday, although I have read the first volume, A QUESTION OF UPBRINGING. (Do I think it's cheating to list a 12-volume cycle of novels as one entry on that list? Yes, yes I do.)

FINNEGANS WAKE. And if I want to finish the Modern Library list, I have to tackle this bad boy -- I imagine with much scholarly assistance.

Raindrops keep fallin' on my head...

but I'm all about Infinite Summer today, because New York will eventually dry out. I just started a Goodreads group for it, so if you use the site and are planning to tackle the book, come on over. Wouldn't you rather get through it with the "loving" "support" of the Internet than by yourself?

Plus, reading a Big Book this summer will leave you more to show than, say, trying to find out if Neil Gaiman is really dating half of the Dresden Dolls, a piece of gossip I certainly did not just spend 10 minutes trying to verify.