Where We Read
There were some great responses to the question from a couple of weeks ago, “Where Do You Read?”
Kitty mentioned a fantastic place I never would have thought of: the wind-free pocket of air directly behind the driver of a motorcycle. That has to be the ideal place to page through a well-worn copy of Hunter S. Thompson’s classic Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga, but I’m really curious if there are any other unusual and unlikely genres that make for good reading on the back of a tricked-out chopper. Can you leaf through a cookbook? Would you unnerve fellow motorists by perusing a helpful volume of Motorcycling for Dummies?
Kitty also mentioned two of my favorite spots I’d forgotten: grocery store checkout lines and the pharmacy waiting area. I’d really appreciate a more varied and interesting magazine selection in both places, though. Since the unfortunate demise of the print edition of Weekly World News I’m much more likely to just bring along my own reading material. Happily, copies of Bat Boy Lives! are currently available at deep discounts from your favorite online retailers.
Other transportation-reading venues were raised by both Kitty and Reggie, including one I’d especially love to try out. It must be awesome to read on a train, especially if you could mysteriously peek at fellow passengers over a handsome leatherbound edition of Murder on the Orient Express. On the other hand, I’ve attempted to read on an overnight trip on a Greyhound bus and was sternly admonished by the driver for distracting him with my reading light. I honestly thought “Leave the Driving to Us” meant I’d be free to knock out a few trashy paperbacks along the way at my leisure.
Carly noted the possibility of reading in a car, a practice at which I used to be a world-class expert. On trips with my parents as a kid, long before the age of backseat DVD players, iPods, and handheld Nintendos, I was perfectly happy to work my way through Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing for the twelfth time on the way to see the Grand Canyon or the world’s second largest ball of twine.
I never even considered the possibility of carsickness until much later in life when a friend mentioned her surprise that I could read in a car without getting nauseous. She helpfully explained in exhaustive detail exactly what the sensation felt like to her, and as a consequence I’ve not been able to make it through so much as a paragraph in the passenger seat ever since.
Just what I didn’t need
Like a junkie looking for his next fix after a dramatic, once-a-year weekend bender, I recently used the awesome NoveList database to, *gulp*, search for more book recommendations.
NoveList is a diabolically useful tool available through the Metropolitan Library System website to any of the half-million or so Oklahomans with a valid MLS library card. Once you’ve logged in at the “Catalog and Databases” tab with your card number, you can proceed to the “Databases” link to the tab labelled “Readers Advisory.” From there, a quick click on “NoveList Plus” opens up this fiendishly helpful guide to great reading.
I recently finished Dennis Lehane’s gripping psychological thriller Shutter Island, which I picked up after learning Martin Scorsese is currently filming an adaptation of it for release later this year. The book didn’t disappoint, with stomach-churning twists and turns that seemed movie-ready from the first page. The director of Cape Fear and The Departed, among his other masterpieces, should knock this gothic noir tale out of the park with a seriously great cast including Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, Ben Kingsley, and Patricia Clarkson.
I was so fired up by the novel that I turned to NoveList to see what else it would recommend along the same lines. The database allows searches by author, title, series, or plot description and can also be limited by age group. Among the wealth of book information it provides is a list of “similar authors” as well as “author read-alikes,” while an extensive list of subject headings is also provided to search for similar books. A collection of full reviews from Booklist, Library Journal, and Publisher’s Weekly is also available for most titles.
A helpful and extensive essay on “author read-alikes” for Dennis Lehane described the writer’s themes, settings, and characters before thoughtfully linking him to other authors like Pete Dexter, S.J. Rozan, and Archer Mayor, none of whom I had even heard of before, much less read. (Great, juuuust great.) The “advanced search” option allows users to refine their search by means of targeting genres, nationalities, and even number of pages, among many other categories.
NoveList is exactly what I didn’t need — another source of book recommendations to add to my already overstuffed pile. For readers who’ve exhausted the complete works of a beloved writer or genre fans who are looking for expert opinions for where to turn next, it’s a pretty great resource.
The Booksale to End All Booksales (until next year’s Booksale)
Some random thoughts after three-plus days of the 30th annual Friends of the Library Booksale:
–My favorite part is coming home with multiple bags of books and unpacking them on the living room floor like some alternate-universe Christmas morning when I’ve picked out all my own presents. For research purposes I calculated the original value of the books the wife and I spent 44 bucks on, and I came up with a conservative estimate of $750. What a bar-goon!
–My least favorite part is dragging those bags through the admirably swift-moving checkout line that wraps its way around the inside of the building at the Friday night “pre-sale.” I vow this is the last year I’ll be too proud to bring a wheeled implement to carry my books, as my arms were more sore from lugging my bags through the line than I was last Sunday after helping move thousands of boxes of product into the Fairgrounds.
–It’s fascinating to pay attention to recurring themes among the hundreds of thousands of titles that have been donated to the sale. My unscientific survey results reveal that many readers have tired of hating and fearing the Clintons, particularly based on the staggering number of copies of Dick Morris’s Condi vs. Hillary: The Next Great Presidential Race that were available. It is comforting to know there will be plenty of kindling on hand for the next cold snap, though.
–I also saw a ton of copies of Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex, which I’m guessing a number of book clubs may not have especially appreciated. There were an awful lot of William Faulker novels lying around as well, perhaps left over from Oprah’s 2005 “Summer of Faulkner”?
(On the other hand, maybe I’m just a jerk who too-possessively hangs on to books he’s already read.)
–The reaction of the super-helpful volunteers who rang up my purchases perfectly explains why I can never volunteer for that particular job at the Booksale. Upon seeing my pristine $1.00 copy of Stephen Colbert’s I Am America and So Can You and frantically inquiring what section I found it in, the volunteer cashier asked his partner, “How soon do we get a break?!” There’s just no way I could see all the fantastic titles pass me by without sprinting back out to the sale tables to hunt for more.
–Finally, I’d like to offer a general apology to any friends or colleagues I may have inadvertantly passed by without acknowledging during the sale. I suspect most of you, like me, were too busy with heads down scanning book titles to look up and have time to socialize, and it’s a wonder more people don’t get brained by head-to-head collisions during the Friday night frenzy. My own wife sadly gave up trying to make conversation with me while we waited in the checkout line that wound its way tantalizingly near the Humor, Fiction, and Magazine sections.
So it’s another Friends Booksale gone by, and another fresh set of challenges to find room to shove the dozens of books I brought home. I do have to admit I went back on Saturday while I was out “running errands,” and sure enough I came home with about 10 more fantastic titles. As I type this on Sunday afternoon, I’m also damn tempted to head back to the Fairgrounds to catch the “All-You-Can-Shove-In-A-Bag-For-$2″ red-light special . . . .
Yes, I Am, Who I Am
Writer and activist Michael Owens is a recent transplant to Oklahoma City whose new book, Yes, I Am, Who I Am, is a fascinating and provocative examination of the past, present, and future complexities of Black identity.
Owens grew up in a segregated community in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, but his experiences in a predominantly White, Catholic high school gave him a unique perspective on issues of racial identity and their effects on Americans’ worldviews. During his career in the United States Navy, Owens was named the USS Los Alamos’s “Sailor of the Year” in 1990 and also served as an instructor at the Great Lakes Training Station. Owens later completed a Master’s degree in Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, the same college where his father worked as a custodian for many years.
Owens’s book has been described by one critic as “part history, part memoir, part reflection,” and ”ultimately a hope-filled summons to Blacks to embrace and claim their full identities as Americans.” His critical examination of the term “African American” is a particularly thought-provoking element of the book, which also presents solutions to the challenges all Americans face to, as another commentator describes it, “become who you are.”
This compelling YouTube video is an excellent introduction to the book’s themes and the broader question of “what it means to be Black in America.”
Michael Owens will be appearing at Full Circle Bookstore this Saturday, February 21, to discuss and sign copies of Yes, I Am, Who I Am from 3:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.
Profiles in Insignificance
With centuries of warfare, slavery, and struggles for civil rights to chronicle, there’s usually not much room for cheap laughs in the annals of American history. Perhaps the most reliable source of comedy comes somewhat surprisingly from the second-most powerful office in the land, the scandal-plagued, mediocrity-ridden, largely irrelevant position described by its first holder, Vice President John Adams, as “the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.”
This is the tawdry, tragic, often hilarious tale told by Veeps: Profiles in Insignificance, by Bill Kelter and Wayne Shellabarger. From Aaron Burr’s arguable treason to Charles Dawes’s notorious napping to Spiro T. Agnew’s cash kickbacks in the White House basement, the legacies of the men the authors describe as “a heartbeat or lower intestinal obstruction away from the Presidency” are revealed here in all their dubious splendor.
One of the more shocking facts revealed in Veeps is the number of years our glorious nation has managed to survive with a literal empty chair where most often there simply sat an empty suit. Since the death of James Madison’s Vice President, George Clinton, in 1812, the United States has somehow muddled along for a total of 37 years and 290 days without a Veep in office. Keller and Shellabarger’s chronicle convinces readers that this was not necessarily a major bummer for American democracy.
Veeps is handsomely illustrated with a series of slightly caricatured portraits that, like the cover image of William Almon Wheeler, reveal the frustrated ambitions and utter hopelessness of so many of the men tabbed for second place:
“Theodore Roosevelt planned to enroll in law school to fill the time he would surely have on his hands. Wheeler, of course, donned his displeasure like a death mask. John Nance Garner would have traded the job for a tepid receptacle of an expelled bodily fluid had he not thought the lopsided bargain would have been unfair to his fellow barterer.”
While Garner famously described the gig as “not worth a bucket of warm piss,” Kelter and Shellabarger’s entertaining account of this rogues’ gallery of American history ought to convince voters to pay a bit more attention to the second name on the Presidential ticket. After all, a rather impressive number of these “incompetents, empty suits, abysmal spellers, degenerate golfers, and corrupt Marylanders” have ended up assuming the highest office in the land thanks to assassins’ bullets, the odd case of food poisoning, or on exceedingly rare occasions the will of an actual majority of American voters.
Where Do You Read?
I was so excited on a recent trip to one of Oklahoma City’s finer fast food establishments to notice a woman a few booths over reading a massive novel while immersed in her burger and fries. At the time I was balancing my tray of food and a hardcover novel and trying to scope out my own quiet corner to eat and read. I probably get the majority of my reading done during one-hour lunch escapes like this, and I’m always curious about other people’s reading practices.
I’m guessing most folks don’t retire to their personal wood-paneled libraries to recline in an overstuffed chair while perusing leather-bound classics, puffing on a pipe, and adjusting their ascots. Personally, I’m way more likely to drag my book along on solo dining-out missions where I try to prop it up against a convenient sugar-and-Sweet-N-Low holder. It’s another good reason to read used books or well-thumbed library copies — a nice loose binding makes it easier to keep pages open while negotiating with knife, fork, drink, and napkin.
As for home reading, even though we have a couple of designated reading chairs with handy lights in a TV-free room, I usually find myself sprawled on the floor with an overdue library book and a cat who likes to try to turn the pages for me. I’m also likely to stay up way too late in bed trying to finish a chapter while awkwardly arranging a pile of pillows to bring a book near eye level.
I have a friend who makes sure to have a book in the car at all times to sneak in a few pages at extra-long stoplights. I can also relate to another friend who really doesn’t mind long waiting room delays at the doctor’s office because she can knock out a few more pages of reading in the meantime. One technique I’ve never perfected is reading-while-walking, which I sometimes see downtown workers attempting in hallways or on the sidewalk with mixed, occasionally life-threatening results.
My dad lives in Florida and has staked out a particular spot at the beach in the shade of a sea grape tree where he alternates reading and staring out at the ocean. There might not be a better venue for reflecting on anything from a philosophical treatise to a trashy paperback. I’ve never perfected outdoor reading in Oklahoma, where the wind can rip a hardcover right out of your hands and the red dirt lodges uncomfortably between pages like peas in the princess’s mattresses.
Public transportation is immeasurably improved by bringing along an appropriately sized paperback or an easily foldable magazine, and multi-taskers like my wife can easily read while the TV is on or the stereo is providing an ambient soundtrack. I should also look into one of those bathtub devices on which a book can be rested while turning pages with pruney fingers.
I’m pretty dedicated to the reading-while-eating lifestyle myself, although certain titles like Eric Schlosser’s brilliant and horrifically graphic Fast Food Nation don’t exactly lend themselves to enjoyment over a plate of genetically modified, biologically hazardous, chemically altered cheeseburger and fries.
Oklahoma Book Awards
Thanks, Kitty, for highlighting the finalists for the 2009 Oklahoma Book Awards.
Among the worthy nominees in the Children/Young Adults category is local author Jana Hausburg, whose It Wasn’t Much: Ten True Tales of Oklahoma Heroes is a really interesting and informative read for adults, too. Ms. Hausburg is a Cataloger for the Metropolitan Library System, and she’s currently working on a new book about Oklahoma outlaws and lawmen.
Another nominee in the Children/Young Adults category is Tim Tharp’s The Spectacular Now. I’ve already raved at length about this excellent novel that chronicles the high school senior year of a troubled Southside Oklahoma City kid, and Tharp’s previous two books are also well worth checking out.
Congratulations also to Jim Chastain, whose Antidotes & Home Remedies is a finalist in the Poetry category. Jim describes his book as “a collection of health related poems and other ‘greatest hits’ poems from my journal.” The special newsok.com site “Life Is Real” is a really remarkable effort by Jim to relate his ongoing battle with cancer, and it features blog posts, poetry, and video from this terrific Oklahoma writer.
Friends Booksale Update
For 51 weeks of the year, the Friends of the Library painstakingly sort through endless boxes of donated books in preparation for one of the greatest used book sales in the United States. Starting February 15, delivery vehicles will descend upon the State Fairgrounds like landing crafts at the Normandy beaches, and a furious week of on-site set-up begins.
This amazing event is entirely driven by volunteers, and all proceeds from the February 21 & 22 Friends Booksale help fund library facilities, services, and programs at the 17 Metropolitan Library System locations all around Oklahoma County. The rock-bottom prices make it an unbeatable shopping experience for readers ($1.00 hardbacks and 50-cent paperbacks! Come on!), but the sheer volume of merchandise on offer has allowed the Friends to donate almost $2.2 million to our community’s libraries over the last 30 years.
It takes a small army of book lovers to set up the sale in the Fairgrounds “Oklahoma Expo” hall. Between 700 and 1,000 volunteers are involved, moving the carefully categorized boxes of books from the Friends “Sort Site” to the Fairgrounds, setting up the well-organized sections for every conceivable genre, working at the holding area where hardcore shoppers can store their treasures while seeking out more, and serving as cashiers at the efficient check-out line. Comparisons to the Allied preparations for D-Day are far from hyperbole.
Not only is the Friends Booksale an essential destination for regional book lovers, but it’s also a really fun event for volunteers. Anyone age 14 and up can spend a few hours helping to set up, run, or take down the whole amazing undertaking.
Volunteer applications can be submitted online, and Friends Membership forms are also available on the website. Not only is it a great way to support Oklahoma County libraries, but an added benefit to membership is admittance to a special Friday night pre-sale on February 20th. The lure of hundreds of thousands of wildly inexpensive books at this special sale draws “Friends” from all over North America — seriously, check out the license plates in the parking lot and you’ll think you’re at Disney World waiting for a tram.
I’ve said it before, but if I had the necessary carpentry skills I could make a killing in the weeks after the Friends Booksale. Enterprising bookcase-builders should be handing out their business cards at the Fairground exits for all the Oklahomans who easily add dozens if not hundreds of books to their personal collections. I know I’ll be bringing home a box (or three) and wishing I had several more shelves on which to store them.
Oklahoma Author Tim Tharp
Oklahoma author Tim Tharp reached a rarified level of acclaim when his 2008 novel The Spectacular Now was one of five titles nominated for the National Book Award in Young People’s Literature. His two previous novels, Falling Dark and Knights of the Hill Country, raked in their share of honors as well and are equally compelling reads.
Falling Dark chronicles a struggling small-town Oklahoma family dealing with a legacy of violence, substance abuse, and broken dreams. Its poetically spare language echoes with the realism of all of Tharp’s writing, and it’s clear the author has spent a lifetime carefully listening to the cadences and quirks of his native state’s dialect. While the novel is inhabited by ragged characters at the margins of society, it holds out a few shreds of hope and redemption amid the falling darkness.
Tharp’s second novel, Knights of the Hill Country, is categorized like The Spectacular Now as a “Young Adult” novel. That complicated audience deserves its own share of great writing, but Tharp’s books are powerful reading for any fiction fans.
Knights is the story of an Oklahoma high school football hero who is gifted with the rare ability to slow down time, but only between the sidelines. On the field where his 6′4″ linebacker’s frame hones in on helpless ballcarriers, Hampton Green is a hero and small-town legend in the making. Off the field, the speed and complications of life aren’t as easily grappled with, and Hampton is caught between the identity his town and teammates have boxed him into and an uncertain future he fights to control for himself.
Like his other novels, Knights of the Hill Country employs the unmistakeable twang of Oklahoma dialects. Tharp also has an especially sharp sense of the kinds of adolescent challenges that often aren’t overcome simply by blowing out 18 candles on a birthday cake. His characters deal with issues of race, class, and sexuality at least as complicated as those in their parents’ worlds, and as in The Spectacular Now, they face the stark reality of graduation with a mixture of tentative hope and fear of an unknowable future.
Tim Tharp is a native of Henryetta, Oklahoma, and in between his time as a student at OU and Brown University he explored the United States as a hitchhiker and worked as a factory hand, construction worker, and psychiatric aid. He is currently a professor in the Humanities Department at Rose State College in Midwest City.
The Spectacular Now
Oklahoma author Tim Tharp’s National Book Award-nominated novel The Spectacular Now lives up to its title, both as a spectacular read and as a story of the beauty and perils of holding on to a slippery moment in time.
The narrator is Oklahoma City kid Sutter Keely, who careens around Tharp’s piercingly recognizeable renderings of Bricktown, Heritage Hills, and the vast suburban sprawl of the Southside in a haze of of alcohol and testosterone. The moment described by the book’s title is Sutter’s final semester of high school, when adulthood can only be delayed for a few more precious months.
The likeable, troubled Sutter exists in a Charlie Brown world where adults are either incomprehensible or totally absent, and it becomes clear that his budding alcoholism won’t be masked by rebellious charisma for much longer.
Unlike many of his peers, Sutter isn’t especially looking forward to college or career plans. As he drifts from girlfriend to girlfriend on woozy weekends (and weekdays), he asks, “How are you supposed to know when you’re not a kid anymore in this society?” Soon an intriguing and unlikely new friend opens the door to an answer and one possible way out of the numbing suburban maze.
Tharp is a master at drawing young adult characters who are both more sophisticated than adults would think and a little less together than they believe themselves to be. While Sutter mixes martinis and holds philosophical discourses with his friends, he’s also crushingly oblivious to the ways his behavior affects the people who care about him.
Reviewers have both praised and criticized the matter-of-fact way Tharp illustrates high school drug use and sex. Rather than glorifying the thrills of late night partying or mixing in a pious sermon about the perils of pre-marital sex, the book honestly presents the life of a teenager the way it’s lived not only in Oklahoma but in every suburb and city in America. It’s reminiscent of the bluntness of Trainspotting, whose narrator allows that being a junkie surely involves “misery and desperation and death . . . but what people forget is the pleasure of it. Otherwise we wouldn’t do it. After all, we’re not @#$%-ing stupid.”
Sutter is far from stupid, but he’s hurtling toward a destructive or meaningless end all the same. It’s a testament to the quality of Tharp’s writing that the reader wants so badly for the kid to pull out of the spiral, to recognize what we and a precious few people in his life can see about his promise.
SPECTACULAR UPDATE:
Variety reports The Spectacular Now is being adapted into a feature film by acclaimed music video director Marc Webb, whose debut movie 500 Days of Summer premiered at last month’s Sundance Festival. The film’s producer hilariously describes it as “somewhere between ‘Sideways,’ ‘Catcher in the Rye’ and ‘Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.’” I only hope the filmmakers are as true to the vivid Oklahoma City/Moore setting as Tharp’s novel is.
