A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

Title: A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

Author: David Foster Wallace

Pages: 378

Genre: Essays

Grade: D

Synopsis: The book is a collection of essays on topics from a Cruise Ship in the Carribbean to the Illinois State Fair and from tennis in the hot and humid Midwestern summers to a long analysis of the films of David Lynch.

My Review: The first essay wasn't too bad, and neither was his essay about the Illinois State Fair (although it was quite long), but I could barely make it through the other essays in the book before giving up entirely.

How to be Alone

Title: How to be Alone: Essays

Author: Jonathan Franzen

Pages: 278

Genre: Essays

Grade: B

Synopsis: This book is a collection of essays, all by the same author.  The essays cover a huge range of topics from the fate of the American novel to supermax prisons in Colorado and from the story of his short time as an Oprah book-of-the-month author to the workings of American post offices in big cities such as Chicago.

My Review: This collection was published in 2002 and I would be interested to read Franzen's writings on more recent topics.  His writing has a liberal slant (don't let that scare you) that gave me plenty of food for thought as I read.  Most of the essays were easy to read and didn't digress into too much babble, although there were a couple that could have been trimmed by a few pages.  I was reading this book during a late lunch break at Rich's Mighty Fine Burgers and Grub (which is one of my favorite SLC restaurants) and the cook that brought out my food saw me reading this book and mentioned that it was one of his favorite collections of essays.  Needless to say I was surprised.

Cultural Amnesia

Title: Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of my Time

Author: Clive James

Pages: 800+

Genre: Biographical Essays

Grade: B

Synopsis: This book is a collection of historical biographical essays penned by the author, Clive James.  Preceding each essay is a short biography of 2-4 pages or so about each individual.  The essays are about a wide range of 20th century artists, politicians, entertainers, writers and more often focused upon those who were a part of the cultural scene in Vienna, Austria in the 1920's.  In total there are 106 essays from Anna Akhmatova to Stefan Zweig, including essays about the following:

Louis Armstrong
Dick Cavett
Chamfort
Coco Chanel
Charles Chaplin
Alfred Einstein
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Charles De Gaulle
Josef Goebbels
Adolf Hitler
Ernst Junger
Franz Kafka
Nadezhda Mandelstam
Thomas Mann
Mao Zedong
Marcel Proust
Margaret Thatcher
Dubravka Ugresic
Isoroku Yamamoto

My Review: This book was too smart for me.  I enjoyed the essays and especially the short biographies, but I was overwhelmed with the scope of the book (and the slowness of my reading of the essays). After I made it through the A's, B's and C's, I ended up only reading the biographies about each person and the essays about the people that I was interested in.  Still, it was a very interesting book and I wish that I was better able to retain the things that I read about.

 From the Book: p. 88, Albert Camus

"Tyrants conduct monologues above a million solitudes" --Albert Camus, The Rebel

"When I first read The Rebel, this splendid line came leaping from the page like a dolphin from a wave. I memorized it instantly, and from then on Camus was my man. I wanted to write like that, in a prose that sang like poetry. I wanted to look like him. I wanted to wear a Bogart-style trench coat with the collar turned up, have an untipped Gauloise dangling from my lower lip, and die romantically in a car crash. At the time, the crash had only just happened. The wheels of the wrecked Facel Vega were practically still spinning, and at Sydney University I knew exiled French students, spiritually scarred by service in Indochina, who had met Camus in Paris: one of them claimed to have shared a girl with him. Later on, in London, I was able to arrange the trench coat and the Gauloise, although I decided to forgo the car crash until a more propitious moment. Much later, long after having realized that smoking French cigarettes was just an expensive way of inhaling nationalized industrial waste, I learned from Olivier Todd's excellent biography of Camus that the trench coat had been a gift from Arthur Koestler's wife and that the Bogart connection had been, as the academics say, no accident. Camus had wanted to look like Bogart, and Mrs. Koestler knew where to get the kit. Camus was a bit of an actor--he though, in fact, that he was a lot of an actor, although his histrionic talent was the weakest item of his theatrical equipment--and, being a bit of an actor, he was preoccupied by questions of authenticity, as truly authentic people seldom are. But under the posturing agonies about authenticity there was something better than authentic: there was something genuine. He was genuinely poetic. Being that, he could apply two tests simultaneously to his own language: the test of expressiveness, and the test of truth to life. To put it another way, he couldn't not apply them."

Naked

Title: Naked

Author: David Sedaris

Pages: 3 discs (abridged)

Genre: Autobiographical Essays

Grade: B

Synopsis: This book is a collection of autobiographical essays by comedian David Sedaris. He writes about his strange urges to lick things (light switches, mail boxes, etc.) growing up and when his teachers would stop by to discuss his quirks with his parents, his mother would serve drinks to the teachers as she empathized with their struggles. He also wrote about many other dysfunctions of his family ending with his self-deprecating visit to a nudist colony.

My Review: I didn't realize that this was a collection of essays until I sat down to write this review. Everything seemed to flow well together, but there didn't seem to be a climax or highlight of the book (which I now attribute to it being a collection of essays). The essays were funny without being dirty or mean, although the language is poor.

Disclaimer: As mentioned, swearing in the book is quite prevalent.

This I Believe

Title: This I Believe

Author: Varies

Pages: 5 cds

Genre: Inspirational, Essays

Grade: A+

Synopsis: This I Believe is a collection of essays by people from throughout the United States. Rich, poor, white, black, southerners, northerners, straight, gay, famous, not famous, female, male, essayists from all walks of life participated in describing their personal credos. These essays were all read by the authors themselves (with the lone exception of Albert Einstein, whose audio has been lost). Mixed in with the present-day essays were essays by people from the early 1950's. The authors included well-known people such as Colin Powell, Newt Gingrich, Bill Gates, Helen Keller, Albert Einstein, John McCain, Dr. Ben Carson, Eleanor Roosevelt, Jackie Robinson and Wallace Stegner. The essayists espoused their personal beliefs on everything from barbecue to family to forgiveness to America.

My Review: As you can tell by the rating I gave the book, I really, really liked it. I found myself laughing, crying and laughing again all within the space of 10 minutes. I couldn't get over the fact that these essays were written by regular folk like me and you and the crazy lady walking along the sidewalk and the compassionate lady driving by in her car. As I listened to these essays, I was proud to be an American, proud to live in a country where we are able to live freely with people of all beliefs and lifestyles.

From the Book: I have uploaded two of my favorite essays below. Have a listen!

Gift from the Sea

Title: Gift from the Sea

Author: Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Pages: 138

Genre: Essays, Inspirational

Grade: B

Synopsis: The book is basically a collection of essays that focus on Anne Morrow Lindbergh's (Wife of Charles Lindbergh) meditations on the different stages of life. She compares each stage of life to seashells that she found when meditating on a small island.

My Review: It took me a little while to get into this book and to understand what all her ramblings were about. I think that this is the type of book that would become more enjoyable the more that you read it. Probably one of the reasons that it was hard for me to get into the book was because much of the advice from the book didn't really apply to me.

From the Book: "(p. 26) For life today in America is based on the premise of ever-widening circles of contact and communication. It involves not only family demands, but community demands, national demands, international demands on the good citizen, through social and cultural pressures, through newspapers, magazines, radio programs, political drives, charitable appeals, and so on. My mind reels in it, What a circus act we women perform every day of our lives. It puts the trapeze artist to shame. Look at us. We run a tight rope daily, balancing a pile of books on the head. Baby-carriage, parasol, kitchen chair, still under control. Steady now!"

"(p. 83) I am very fond of the oyster shell. It is humble and awkward and ugly. It is slate-colored and unsymmetrical. Its form is not primarily beautiful but functional. I make fun of its knobbiness. Sometimes I resent its burdens and excrescences. But its tireless adaptability and tenacity draw my astonished admiration and sometimes even my tears. And it is comfortable in its familiarity, its homeliness, like old garden gloves when have molded themselves perfectly to the shape of the hand. I do not like to put it down. I will not want to leave it."

things I learned about my dad (in therapy)

Title: things I learned about my dad (in therapy)

Author: Heather B. Armstrong

Pages: 230

Genre: Essays, Parenting

Grade: B+

Synopsis: This is a compilation of 17 essays edited by Heather B. Armstrong (the writer of one of my favorite blogs, dooce.com). The other essayists include her husband and a slew of other bloggers from the infamous worldwide web. While I haven't read much by any of the other authors, I ended up really enjoying most of the essays. They all have to do with being a father, what they learned from their own fathers or just fatherhood in general.

Why I Chose This Book: I've been a big fan of dooce for a long time. Alison knew this and had Heather B. Armstrong sign my book (by sending it in) and gave it to me for Father's Day. She was having a book signing at a bookstore near our apartment but we got there just a few minutes after it had closed. We were bummed that we didn't get to meet her. As fate would have it, the last Saturday that we lived in the village I met her, her husband Jon and their daughter Leta at Dan's on Foothill Boulevard.

My Review: I really like the essays by Heather B. Armstrong and a few of the other bloggers. Unfortunately there were a couple essays that just seemed disjointed and unrelated. I laughed while reading most essays and got a bit teary-eyed during a couple of others. It really was quite interesting to get so many different viewpoints in one little book.

Disclaimer: These essays range anywhere from G-rated to a strong PG-13. Be forewarned.

From the Book: "(p. 23 from "Sam I Am" by Matthew Baldwin) The other contribution I made to the pregnancy was accompanying my wife to childbirth classes. As we live in progressive Seattle, nearly all the women in attendance were accompanied by the fathers, even though we didn't really do much beyond gawp in horror at the delivery videos and exclaim, "Holy smokes! That's going to totally suck for you, honey."

"(p. 36 from "A Girl Named Spike" by Matthew D. Laplante) She was one of those sadly conspicuous, middle-aged Mormon closet lesbians, so common in our fair city, who for reasons of either devout piety or deep self-loathing, wind up spending a lifetime like Eleanor Rigby, living vicariously through the mundane lives of others rather than succumbing to the sinful charms of another woman."

"(p. 108 from "Peas and Domestic Tranquilty" by Greg Knauss) One thing that I used to believe that has stuck with me is, of course, that farts are funny. Burps, too. Sneezes, even. Pretty much the whole gamut of bodily noises is a treasure trove of ready-made comedy. You gather a handful of small boys together and let them entertain themselves and there will be more sharp honks than an angry L.A. freeway. But there's a time and place for such fun, and every second of every day, no matter the location or company, turns out not to be the appropriate venue for a gastrointestinal symphony."