monday book review: i was told there'd be cake, by sloane crosley

I don't know about you, but this last week was a bit of a kick in the gut for me.  A variety of things combined to get me feeling rather lousy, and it didn't take very long for me to realize that the Dick Cheney book I was reading wasn't exactly helping my situation. In search of something to lift my spirits, I turned to Sloane Crosley's I Was Told There'd Be Cake, a collection of essays you may remember being reviewed over at "Chasing Paper" by the lovely Ms. Carrie.  And wouldn't you know, Crosley's light and airy essays - written on subjects ranging from summer camps to bridesmaids to vegetarianism - proved to be just what I needed. 

Though not hilarious exactly, Crosley's stories are cleverly amusing, odd enough to be entertaining but universal enough for most anyone to find them relateable, and the storyteller herself comes across as being witty, charming, and just self-deprecating enough. After reading her collection, Sloane Crosley has officially secured herself a place on my list of 'famous chicks I'd like to have beer with.' (Which is really quite the little honor, I'll have you know. It's a fairly short list.)

And since this is one of those times when I feel examples speak louder than descriptions, here's a passage that made me chuckle. It comes from a essay titled "Bastard out of Westchester", in which Crosley describes a childhood spent growing up in a bland suburb and the subsequent disappointment she feels over the news that her family will not be moving to Australia after all:

If I ever have kids, this is what I'm going to do with them: I am going to give birth to them on foreign soil - preferably the soil of some place like Oostende or Antwerp - destinations that have the allure in which people are casually trilingual and everyone knows how to make good coffee and gourmet dinners at home without having to shop for specific ingredients. Everyone has hip European sneakers that effortlessly look like the exact pair you've been searching for your whole life. Everything is sweetened with honey and even the generic-brand Q-tips are aesthetically packaged. People die from old age or crimes of passion or because they fall off glaciers. All the women are either thin, thin and happy, fat and happy, or thin and miserable in a glamorous way. Somehow none of their Italian heels get caught in the fifteenth-century cobblestone. Ever.

This is where I want to raise my children - until the age of, say, ten, when I'll cruelly rip them out of the stream where they're fly-fishing with their other lederhosened friends and move them to someplace like Lansdale, Pennsylvania. There, they can be not only the cool new kid, but also the Belgian kid. And none of that Toblerone-eating, Tintin-reading, tulip-growing crap. I want them to be obscurely, freezingly, impossibly Belgian. I want them to be fluent in Flemish and to pronounce "Antwerpen" with a hint of "vh" embedded in the "w."

Why go through all the trouble of giving a ten-year-old an existential heart attack by applying culture shocks like they were nipple clamps? Because, ten-year-olds of the world, you shouldn't believe what your teachers tell you about the beauty and specialness and uniqueness of you. Or, believe it, little snowflake, but know it won't make a bit of difference until after puberty. It's Newton's lost law: anything that makes you unique later will get your chocolate milk stolen and your eye blackened as a kid.

And I can't help but think that my Grandpa Nestor, himself a Belgian immigrant whose uniqueness was largely lost on the playground bullies of his youth, would have whole-heartedly agreed.

I Was Told There'd Be Cake

Sloane Crosley

230 pages, 2008

monday tuesday book review - things i've learned from women who've dumped me, edited by ben karlin

Getting dumped sucks. No matter your age, gender, or the size of your emotional investment, there’s little worse than listening to someone tell you that she’s tried you out, found you to be less than favorable and would like to return you now. And although we’d all like to be able to claim that we’ve never been dumped - that we’re far too desirable to ever be the dumpee, it’s an experience that’s happened to the best of us at one time or another, and one we can all relate to regardless of race, religion, or sexual persuasion. (And if you tell me that you’ve never been dumped, then I’m calling you a liar. Also, your pants are on fire.)

But being dumped - although very painful - can also be very funny, especially after traveling a comfortable distance of time. And so, with a list of contributors that is nothing if not promising, Things I’ve Learned From Women Who’ve Dumped Me, a collection of relationship-based essays compiled and edited by Ben Karlin (former editor of The Onion and former executive producer of The Daily Show), certainly had potential. Unfortunately, and as was the case with all my ex-boyfriends, potential isn’t enough.

Just like any relationship, the book certainly had its high points. Tom McCarthy’s recollections on the Christian Camp girl who got away in “Don’t Leave Too Much Room for the Holy Spirit” made me laugh out loud and was my personal favorite, while Neal Pollack’s “Don’t Come on Your Cat” and Patton Oswalt’s “Dating a Stripper Is a Recipe for Perspective” were also particularly enjoyable, but I found these occasional gems to be too infrequent to sustain the entire collection. Many of the essays were fine enough, however not great, and some – like Stephen Colbert’s gimmicky contribution – were downright disappointments.

Overall, Things… is an easy, breezy read that is sometimes funny, sometimes poignant, but sometimes falls short, making it a bit too spotty for my overall taste.  So I dumped it.

Things I've Learned from Women Who've Dumped Me
Edited by Ben Karlin

2008, 223 pages

monday book review: when you are engulfed in flames, by david sedaris

With this, his most recent collection of sardonic essays inspired by his life, I am officially starting to worry that David Sedaris may be running out of ideas.  

Undoubtedly, fans of Sedaris will eventually pick up his newest collection.  Unfortunately, fans of Sedaris are already long-since familiar with his family, his boyfriend Hugh, and his humorous struggles to learn the language while living in France.  And since When You Are Engulfed in Flames includes several essays about his family, his boyfriend, and his struggles to learn the language while living in a foreign land (Japan this time, but even still), I was left with the unmistakable feeling that Sedaris was scraping the bottom of the barrel. Furthermore, all of the essays in this collection have already appeared in either The New Yorker or This American Life, so for hard-core Sedaris fans there's probably not a single new piece to be found.

For those who haven't already read the essays in this collection, they are standard Sedaris - witty, dry, the mundane turned humorous.  Like the Van Gogh on the cover, some of the stories here are downright creepy - Sedaris' retelling of his brief stint in a morgue, the story of his awkward friendship with a Normandy neighbor who turned out to be a pedophile, and the one where he recalls various pervy experiences gained while hitchhiking to name a few, and reading these is more of a uncomfortable experience than a humorous one.  Certainly, there are some gems to be found, and "The Smoking Section" where he writes about his attempt to stop smoking by moving to - of all places - Tokyo was, for me, the most enjoyable.  But even still, I felt like I had heard it before.  Like the novelty had worn off a bit.  

But this isn't to say I didn't enjoy reading When You Are Engulfed in Flames.  It may be spotty, but for my money spotty Sedaris is still better than a lot of the crap that's out there.  It's just that we're often hardest on the ones we love the most, you know?

When You Are Engulfed in Flames

David Sedaris

323 pages, 2008

books: the world without us

Alan Weisman's The World Without Us was born from a deceptively simple question: what would become of the world if all of humanity were to disappear? From that single premise comes what is arguably the finest work of nonfiction released in 2oo7, comprised of a series of surprisingly engrossing scientific articles. He starts with examining the fate of something so commonplace as our home without us (see these pictures of New Orleans' 9th Ward for an idea). Weisman then moves to the metropolis of New York City (after two days it immediately floods and fails), and then on to the farm, to our nuclear legacy, to the sea, our art and beyond.

His findings are sobering. In the chapter on nuclear energy, Weisman looks to the self-healing happening in post-nuclear Chernobyl when he writes that "typical human activity is more devastating to biodiversity and abundance of local flora and fauna than the worst nuclear power plant disaster," and after considering that since the human migration out of Africa and into the Americas and Australia we have left a trail of massive extinctions in our wake, it's easy to deduce that we've been a blight on the planet since our earliest hunter/gather days. But, of course, in many ways modern man is much worse.

I was absolutely terrified to read his chapter on plastics, which for me was the most startling part of the entire book. I knew that plastics don't break down, but I never really gave much thought to what happened to them beyond landfills. His description of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch - a garbage dump floating in the middle of the Pacific THE SIZE OF AFRICA - was thoroughly alarming. Comprised of 3 million tons of plastic, 80% of which "had originally been discarded on land...blown off garbage trucks or out of landfills, spilled from railroad shipping containers and washed down storm drains, sailed down rivers of wafted on the wind, and found its way to this widening gyre," this blight floats in the center of the ocean where it waits for evolution to create a bacteria capable of breaking it down.


(A dead albatross found full of plastic)
Needless to say, after reading up a bit more on polymers and nurdles I'm swearing off of plastic water bottles and buying my own canvas grocery bags.

I could go on (the fate of songbirds at the hands of powerlines, deforestation, feral cats and plate glass windows was also particularly disturbing to me), but I'm sure I've already depressed you enough. The funny thing is The World Without Us - although certainly grim - was also surprisingly hopeful. After all, history shows that despite our human arrogance we will eventually disappear, but our planet will adapt and move on, that "life will go on. And that it will interesting."

In sum, I recommend this book to everyone. In fact, (and at the risk of sounding preachy) it's an essential read.

Up Next: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz

books: 8 down, 16 to go: the areas of my expertise

For the unfamiliar, John Hodgman (who most would recognize if nowhere else, as PC from the Apple commercials) created a completely absurd and thoroughly silly almanac of absolutely pointless fake trivia and titled it The Areas of my Expertise. In his almanac, Hodgman includes sections named "Beard Manual," "How to Raise Rabbits for Food and Fur: The Utopian Method," and "Basics of Snow and Ice Warfare," to name a few.

Although it should not have, it seemed to take me an absurdly long amount of time to read The Areas of my Expertise. And I can't even blame it on all the time I've been spending recently grading papers, finding a cure for the common cold, and inspiring millions of poor, repressed villagers to rise up and overthrow their cruel android dictators. No, it took forever to read because nearly every single sentence in Hodgman's fake almanac is so gosh-darn funny. In fact, I fear I was terribly annoying to be around while I was reading it because I would frequently break down into hard-to-control fits of giggles, and would make anyone who was near listen while I read sections aloud. I'm sure I was tiresome, but Nathan did a very good job humoring me. For that I am thankful.

As if you even care:
-My favorite individual sections were "Secrets of the Mall of America," "Films in Which I, John Hodgman, Have Made Cameo Appearances," "Hobo Matters," and "Common Short and Long Cons."
- My favorite chapter was "What You Did Not Know about Hoboes"
- My favorite hobo names (of the 700 provided) were as follows: Colin, that Cheerful Fuck; Pantless, Sockless, Shoeless, Buster Bareass; Experimental Hobo Infiltration, Mr. Wilson Fancypants; Ol' Barb Stab-You-Quick; The Unanswered Question of Timothy; Rex Spangler, the Bedazzler; Skywise the Sexual Elf; Feminine Forearms Rosengarten; Abraham, the Secret Collector of Decorative China; Socks Monster; Tom the Gentle Strangler; and Nick Nolte.
- And, although I used to think otherwise, I now contend that I would choose flight over invisibility

And were you aware that there is a website displaying artistic renderings of 800 of the 700 hoboes named in the novel? Because there is.

Up Next: The Dead Fathers Club, by Matt Haig