Is Belief in God Good, Bad or Irrelevant by Greg Graffin and Some Asshole

I saw this book come across the shelves, and it caught my eye. I recognized the name Greg Graffin but couldn't place it right away. It turns out he's the lead singer of Bad Religion.

Not that books by musicians are usually awesome. Or even readable. But Graffin is a little different. He has a PHd, and if you listen to some of his songs you pretty quickly pick up on the fact that he's not really hot on the whole churchy thing. It's kind of a natural match that he express his opinions on god, sort of like George Clinton writing a book about weed or Toby Keith writing a book about bad beards.

The book is pulled from an email correspondence between a college professor and Graffin. The professor (a god-y guy) contacts Graffin by email, and then keeps contacting him until he sort of badgers him into discussing religion.

After a short time, it's pretty cyclical. Not that the correspondence itself is poorly written, but all you see here in book form is the same stupid discussion that's been going on forever.

For example:

Professor: Why would people tip at a restaurant in France, where they will never be again, if not for God?

Graffin: I can't answer definitively, but likely there is some brain chemistry going on that makes us be nice to each other.

Professor: It can't be explained, so it must be God!

Graffin: No! Just because it's not explained yet doesn't mean it's god.

In the portion I read, Graffin did make one pretty solid point. He said that science has come so far in the last 100 years that the only thing left for religion to handle is morality, which is why they spend so much time on it.

I guess these sorts of books just don't do much for me. Richard Dawkins, clearly an atheist, doesn't really help the atheist cause, in my opinion. He just sets up a bunch of hurdles, which are overcome and then used as further proof of god=great. At some point you have to pick your battles, and when you are talking to someone who genuinely believes that a bearded man in the sky created dinosaur bones and buried them in the ground in order to be uncovered and to test our faith, you're probably wasting your time.

I recommend listening to this WTF podcast where Marc Maron and a couple comedians visit the creationism museum. In fact, I recommend listening to that instead of reading this pretty much as a rule. Now THAT’S entertainment.

What is the What by Dave Eggers

My first book of the year that qualifies under my Long Books Program.

I'd been reading a lot of ho-hum books lately, so I decided that maybe the answer was to violate my rule against reading long books.

Generally, I'm not a huge fan of anything long. Books, movies, drives, pretzel rods. Most of that stuff just needs a good editor. If they'd just hired an editor at the pretzel rod factory we'd be living in a very different and better world right now.

Anyway, because things weren't working out, it was time for a change. So then plan is to try and read four or five long books this year, keeping in mind that a long book for me is anything over 500 pages.

Some candidates:

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

Sunnyside by Glen David Gold

Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson

Instructions by Adam Levin

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

A Miracle of Catfish by Larry Brown

Moby Dick

At any rate, here's book one.

What is the What is the fictionalized version of Valentino Achak Deng's life story as one of the Lost Boys of Sudan. This is kind of a problem for me.

After using my library skills (aka Relentless Googling) I couldn't figure out exactly which parts of the narrative were real and which were fake, or at least massaged in for the sake of creating a cohesive narrative and a compelling story.

The best explanation is on the McSweeney's website, where an FAQ says that Valentino's life and events in his life were the structure of the story. He wanted to tell his story, but didn't feel that his written English was up to the task at the time. Perhaps most telling:

Valentino and Dave decided that the best way to tell the story would be to tell it in Valentino's voice. But because Valentino was very young when many of the book's events took place, there is no way he can recount his life with a degree of detail necessary for a compelling nonfiction book. In a book that is classified as nonfiction, for instance, there can be little or no dialogue, for it's impossible for anyone to recount conversations from 20 years ago with the accuracy necessary to call it fact. A book without any dialogue would make for a different, and drier, reading experience. There are many other art forms that take facts from life and weave them into a more artful form, including historical fiction. Historical fiction takes the dry outline of history and fills it with color, with a level of novelistic detail and specificity that's impossible when conforming strictly to the dictates of nonfiction. To get beyond the brief accounts of the conflicts in Sudan and to humanize the country's suffering, it was necessary to include all the elements of effective storytelling—detail, dialogue, and a comprehensible narrative.

Okay, so we have to guess from there, which drove me a little bit insane, I'm ashamed to say.

I do, however, have a theory on the whole thing.

It's notable that the whole James Frey/Oprah scandal happened only nine months before the publication of What is the What. For those who don't remember, this was partly James Frey's part, partly the fault of Oprah viewers who don't really understand books. I'm sorry, but it's true. It's unfortunate that Frey lied, but on the other hand, so does every memoirist. Nobody remembers exact dialogue. We trust a memoirist to recreate things as near to truth as they can, and any deviation that comes from it is accidental. So he was wrong to put in stuff he knew damn well wasn't true, but to go through a memoir with a fine tooth comb kills the magic of it and scares people off the genre.

Which brings us to Valentino and Dave. My theory is that they may not have originally planned this as a work of fiction, but after this whole scandal erupted, they felt it best to go under the fiction banner. If you publish fiction and just happen to hit the truth, no biggie.

The thing is, it still made me wonder constantly what was true and what wasn't. Was the boy William K. truly a teller of tall tales, or was that a character trait added by Eggers to keep things straight? Was Valentino really robbed in his own apartment in Atlanta? There are a lot of Lost Boys standards in there, such as boys taken by lions and bombings. But those, for whatever reason, feel very real. I think this ultimately stems from the fact that pieces of the story that seem to frame the narrative well feel manufactured, regardless of whether or not they are, while the events themselves have a good feel of realism to them.

For example, the story is structured so that Valentino is always telling his story to someone who is not really listening. There is Michael, a boy whose parents tie up Valentino and rob him. There is Julian, an orderly at a hospital. And then there is a series of faces on the computer, faces that come up when Valentino swipes their gym membership cards. All of these are targets for the story, and except for the last set, the idea of Valentino creating his own witnesses works pretty well.

What didn't work so well for me were the more drawn-out political portions. Reading about the Lost Boys was pretty gripping, and hearing about their adjustments to American life were also very revealing and the sort of thing one doesn't hear about too often. But the portions that discussed the in-group politics once the Boys (now men) were in the United States tended to drag on a little.

I'd say that if you are interested in the story of the Lost Boys, this is a great choice. In a way, it feels more genuine than some of the non-fiction accounts as it's not attempting to sell itself on any of the more terrible and morbid aspects of the whole trip. Because hell, who knows if it's real anyway?

The biggest piece of advice I would give is to not get too worried about following the politics of the Sudanese civil wars. There are so many names, so many dates, and so many differing opinions on exactly what the hell happened that it's nearly impossible to parse, and the book doesn't help too much on that end either.

N*****Berry Finn

Lots of you have probably heard about the new version of Huckleberry Finn with all the n-words taken out.

To the left you'll see one of the guys responsible, Alan Gribben. I picked this red-eyed photo because the news has taught me that when you're going to disagree with someone, you should find an unflattering picture of him. Gribben figures that, because it's such a controversial word and causes trouble in classrooms, he could go through and clean it up, leaving an alternative for people who don't want to have to deal with naughty words.

The most reasonable point made is that there are still many, many publishers who will continue to publish the unedited version, so all he's doing is creating another version available for those who want it. But to be honest, I think that's sort of defeating the point of reading a book.

For one thing, who the fuck is Alan Gribben? He's an English professor who has written a couple articles and one book, the biography of Harry Huntt Ransom. It's somewhere around the six-millionth most popular book on Amazon with exactly zero reviews. The original Huckleberry Finn is somewhere around 20,000.

What I'm saying here is that we have a guy who wrote what I highly suspect is a boring -ass, research-heavy book about some guy that nobody even knows, and this guy has decided to go ahead and edit a book that is widely considered a piece of Americana and a masterpiece. I feel like he's a little out of his depth here. He's an expert on Twain, apparently, but that doesn't make him any sort of artistic force. So who is he to say that this word, which appears over 200 times in the original text, is not an important part of the text itself.

If Mark Twain were alive today, and if someone asked him whether he wanted to release a clean version, that would be his decision. He could stroke his insane mustache for a while and think it over. But after the dude's dead, he's dead, and cutting it out changes the text. Why not go through Moby Dick and change all the character names? Why not have them harvesting crops as killing whales is controversial and different in today's context? I understand that Eminem releases a clean version of an album because he knows half his fans are 12, but I don't think that's the case with Twain.

Which brings us to another point: Not everything needs to be for kids. There's a comepletely misguided idea that classics are the books that kids should be reading. This is absolutely untrue. There is really no reason to read classics until maybe, MAYBE, late high school, and even then it is my opinion that you'll actually get something out of them if you wait a little longer. The problem isn't that there's this great kids' book out there, if only it didn't have bad language. The problem is that there is a book out there with contextually-understandable language that is being presented to an audience that's too young.

And how are we supposed to understand the context of the time if things are presented unrealistically? A big draw for that book is that it's a look into a time and place that none of us will ever experience first-hand. To change that view would be like changing a book about 1980's New York to reflect a cleaner, more friendly New York of today. It loses meaning and purpose.

In the last few years we've been treated to a lot of updated classics, specifically ones that feature monsters, like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies here. I think you could make a lot of the same above arguements against these types of books. They remove the context, they try to appeal to an audience that is not of best fit, and they are written by a team-up between a respected author and a nobody.

What's the difference? Well, for starters, as someone who thinks that context DOES matter, this is comedy. This is not an acedemically-minded attempt to stop giggles from the back row. When you see the cover, you can pretty much guess what you're going to get.

Furthermore, the changes are very obvious. Pretty much anything concerning zombies or kung-fu sticks out quite a ways from the thrust of the original. In the Huckleberry Finn update, the idea is to make the change seamless, which I find to be silly and disrespectful at the same time.

The really odd part of the whole thing, which I will never understand as a white male who has yet to hear an effective racial slur against himself, is why removing that one word is supposed to make things better somehow. Because is it really the word that's the problem, or is it the context in which the word referred to someone who was paid no money and whipped to do work and could never escape? If I could choose between continuing my current life while being referred to as "Asshole" all the time, OR being a slave, I think I would make some calls to get business cards changed. The point being, changing the word doesn't really change anything, and in fact softens the harsh reality of the time.

Finally, by softening the book for the classroom, you are removing a difficult and important conversation. How are we supposed to understand our past if we remove catalysts to its discussion?

Book Review of a Book I Refuse to Read (Except for Money)

Lately there's been a big publication surge in memoirs by youngish, attractive-ish women who write comedy. The prototypical example is, of course, Chelsea Handler, or possibly Sarah Silverman, both of whom had books on the bestseller lists recently.

I have to say, after trying to read one of Handler's books, I wasn't super-impressed. The writing is fine, but I'm just not amused when a woman says dirty shit that is traditionally the field of men. That in itself isn't enough to make a book hilarious. As knee-slappers go, my knee wasn't sore in the least, or as she would probably say, Not nearly as sore as a cheerleader's outer labia after prom.

See, it's not that hard.

But the real crime of this whole situation is that, as much as I am not a big Handler fan, publishers start scrambling to publish shit imitations of books that are bringing in big money.

That brings us to You'll Never Blue Ball in This Town Again by Heather McDonald. Please allow me to share a bit of the summary:

You'll Never Blue Ball in This Town Again is the laugh-out-loud story of an attractive Los Angeles woman who found herself in the predicament of being an unwilling virgin. As an actress, writer, and stand-up comedienne, Heather McDonald passed up ample opportunities to have her V-card revoked by handsome, rich, and sometimes even fabulously famous men, but she could not bring herself to do "it" until well after her friends had been deflowered.

Okay, let's take a minute here.

First off, how bad do you feel for this person? Let's see: hot, good career, pursued by desirable members of the opposite sex...yeah, I think she'll be just fine.

Where is the conflict in this story? My understanding here is that she was doing fine, wanted to get rid of her virginity, and had the opportunity to do so. What the fuck is the problem?

And for a laugh-out-loud book, there wasn't one fucking joke in that whole paragraph, the first paragraph that people are likely to read. Why wouldn't you throw them a bone? She's supposedly a writer AND comedienne, so how about a little punch-up on the script here? Watch:

"...passed up ample opportunities to have her V-card revoked by handsome, rich, and sometimes even fabulously famous men..."

Becomes

"...passed up ample opportunities to have her V-card revoked by handsome, rich, and sometimes even fabulously rich men..."

Okay, it's not solid gold or anything, but changing one word turned an unimportant plot point into at least some semblance of comedy. It took all of two seconds.

Next we get a quote from Handler herself, which is fine, but begs this question: Why would you bury the Handler quote in the middle of this thick summary, meanwhile a quote attributed to all three Kardashian sisters (somehow, as if they were speaking in unison) is highlighted in its own offset bubble? Since when did we ever give a fuck about the Kardashians opinion on BOOKS. If you want to talk eye makeup and how easy it is to bounce back physically from having a baby when you're 24, that's one thing, but I'd rather leave the literature to someone who isn't famous for starring in a sex tape. Why not highlight the quote by Handler, someone who is respected in this particular field, and bury the Kardashian quote in the text, or off in a quarry somewhere?

Finally, we get to the author bio. Pardon the length, I had nothing to do with it:

Heather McDonald is a stand-up comic, and full-time writer and producer on E!'s top-rated show, Chelsea Lately. She appeared in the Wayans Brothers' White Chicks and Dance Flick, was a regular on MTV's Lyricist Lounge, and had guest roles on hit television shows like Frasier, Malcom in the Middle, and Reno 911. Heather and her husband, Peter, have been married for nine years and have three children. Follow her at [twitter and facebook URL's removed because fuck that shit]

Okay, long. Too fucking long. It's an author bio, not a fucking resume. Jesus christ, I wouldn't have a bio that said, "Pete worked at McDonald's, Target, Wal-Mart..." and so on. Maybe you're trying to convince me that you must be funny, but if everyone from a Wayans movie was funny...well, no one from a Wayans movie is funny.

And what the fuck, you killed all the suspense of the book. You've been married NINE years? So we can assume that this dry spell ended with your marriage, and has been over for nine years?

According to my sources over at the google, that would have made you 27 when you lost your virginity, assuming that you didn't bang anyone, including your husband, before marriage. Is that terribly shocking? Is that blowing someone's mind? It's outside the norm, sure, but not so much so that I'm curious as to your insights about it. And getting married at 25 probably puts you on the other side of that particular curve. Losing your virginity at 25 is a little on the late side, but getting married at 25 is a little on the early side, so do the math and decide whether or not it's super bizarre.

Not to get too far off track here, but this feels like that book Nickeled and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich in which Barb takes on a number of America's shittiest jobs in order to see how the other half lives. The fundamental problem with this book that Barb doesn't understand is that the shitty part of working at Wal-Mart isn't working at Wal-Mart. The shitty part of working at Wal-Mart is depending on it to survive, knowing that this is about the best you're going to do, and taking massive amounts of shit from your boss because you NEED this job. Need it. Corralling carts isn't a means to an end for book writing. It's your career.

Here's the shitty thing about having your virginity: Wanting to get rid of it and not having the opportunity. Not having any possible chance is very different from having the chance and waiting for the right thing to come along. Ask any 16 year-old boy.

McDonald was being picky, not unbangable, and that's okay. That's great. Anyone besides someone trying to get in her pants would support that decision because what the hell is the difference? Nobody is begrudging your ability to make that choice, but that choice doesn't interest me.

I'd much rather read a book by someone who was a 25 year-old virgin who had no real possibility to lose it, where you look at a picture and think, Good luck, motherfucker. That's some compelling shit.

As a book, totally uninteresting. I'm just not interested. I didn't even bother to come up for two different words for "uninterested," that's how bored I am. We all got relationship issues, and a lot of them are more fascinating to me than the decision to not fuck.

The book could be great. Maybe there's some angle on this whole thing that would really help it make sense, but shouldn't that be included in the summary? And shouldn't the summary have some fucking jokes in it? It's like having a trailer for a comedy movie that only shows the stupid last thirty fucking minutes where we win the big game and learn a little bit about ourselves. Fuck you, Dodgeball! Everyone talks about how hilarious that fucking movie is, but what about the last half hour where we have some dumb fucking uplifting story where there are almost no jokes, they win the big game, get the girl, and you might as well have a voice-over that says, "Well, things turned out pretty okay"?

Anyway, back to the book.

Here's what you're selling me: An attractive woman, dressed nicely on the front, and an explanation that she lost her virginity somewhat later than most because of choices she made, although what those choices are is unclear. Whoop de shit.

To conclude, the magic number for this book is

57

which is the number of dollars someone would have to pay me to make me read it.

By the way, if you check the Amazon reviews, you'll see a lot of 1-star reviews that cite the same problems almost universally, which is that the book is not funny, not interesting, and spends a good portion talking about sorority life.

If you also check the 5-star reviews, you'll also notice that most of them are brief, and that somehow this book was so compelling that it was the only review many of these people had written. Fascinating...

The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch

Okay, this was a book club's holiday pick for an uplifting story. They didn't like my pick from last year, David Sedaris' Holidays on Ice because it was "too dark." But, assuming my news is up to date, David Sedaris didn't die of cancer. Go figure.

It's not without it's charm, and there are some decent pieces of advice in here, but overall I would say it's aptly titled. Listening to it in audiobook format is kind of like taking a long car trip with your dad right after you did something dumb, like burning down a chicken coop or running with a screwdriver and falling on it and puncturing your lung. He sort of goes on and on about the right way to do things, dad-style. He makes a good point about him being a lecturer and therefore the lecture is his final act, but I would say that's why you should just watch the original lecture on Youtube. It's not as polished, but I think it's a closer representation of what he did. Plus, that way you don't have to read these awkward descriptions of physical things he did during the lecture.

The topic of his lecture being "Achieving Your Childhood Dreams" was also a little unappealing to me, as that would mean I would either be currently testing water slides, which seems hazardous, or be a ninja turtle, which involves being exposed to mutagen ooze, which seems equally hazardous.

Something he left out of the lecture but mentions a bit in the book is his religious beliefs and ties. He doesn't lecture on them so much, but does mention what a great help the church can be in these tough times. He's probably right, the church and its ideas must be comforting when you're on your death bed. But he didn't mention them in the original lecture, and I think his instinct was right in that case. Anyone can talk about the church, and this was his opportunity to give a talk that no one else could give. No need to waste it talking about the most-debated topic of all time.

This book brings up the really interesting point of whether the circumstances surrounding a book change our feelings about it. Does this book get more gravitas because we know the guy was dying, and he did in fact die about a year after the lecture? Does a Charles Bukowski poem mean more because we know he lived every line? Does a Raymond Carver story change if we know which parts are drawn from real life and which parts are invented?

A writer talking about fiction said that people think writing is a way of confronting issues, when in fact it's often a way of avoiding confronting things head on. You can use style to work your way around your main issues, and if you came at them head-on you'd end up destroying yourself. I think there's a lot of truth to that. I don't think a lot of effective prose is written from a place where authors have the answers to their own personal issues.

That said, I don't know that the circumstances surrounding a particular work are all that important. Raymond Carver writes a lot about poor and middle class folks, which he was, but he was also very well-educated. Denis Johnson writes with an easy, very blue collar feel, but he holds an MFA from Iowa. I'm not by any means attacking them or their writing. Both are excellent writers. But what I'm saying is that I think that Carver growing up the way he did doesn't make his writing good, it just confirms what we suspect already.

James Frey, a personality I find myself talking about often, is another good one to discuss. People were disappointed by his lies or omissions or additions or whatever you want to call them. But truthfully, I think he wrote a couple excellent books, and the space separating the fiction and non-fiction shelves is so small that I could care less. But, as evidenced in his case, the circumstances surrounding a book DO matter to a lot of people.

I think that's the case with the Last Lecture as well. I honestly do not think it would be the freight train of the self-help-ish genre that it is if it weren't for the fact that we all know what a labor of love it was for Randy Pausch, his final act. As a part of the whole story, it works. But as something to read, it doesn't offer a whole lot, not a whole book's worth, of good, sound advice.

Three Books About Writing

Here smashed together are three books about writing.

There's probably some truth to the idea that books about writing are a waste of time because whenever you're reading a book about writing, you're not writing something. It's kind of like how for every book about management you own, you're probably 5% shittier at management. Because if you knew what you were doing, how many books would you have to read about it?

And I read these. So hopefully I've been successful at convincing you I know dick about writing, which is my main qualification for blogging.
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Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing

This book takes about three minutes to read through. Which is kind of what makes it work.

The book itself is kind of a handsome devil with a leather outer binding on the spine and thick, cardstock pages with illustrations on the inside. The back cover even suggests that it makes a great gift for readers and writers, which might b true. It might make a better gift than it does a read.

That said, the advice is all good stuff. Basic, but good. You certainly get a lot of stuff like, "Don't talk about the weather. Unless you're Barry Lopez." Leonard has a good set of rules, and without killing the point, mentions that the rules will be broken, citing specific respectable authors who break one or more of the rules with the regularity of a vegetarian drinking a 2-liter of Metamucil.

His main rule, and probably the best, is "If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it."

Good gift. If you're curious about the rules, you could stand and read the whole thing in no time and then decide on it.
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The Secret Miracle, ed. Daniel Alarcon

This book has an interesting take on the classic How-to writing book.

There are a couple dozen authors interviewed, everyone from Stephen King and Amy Tan to Chris Abani.

The format of the book is a displayed question, followed by the short answers of several of the authors. So you might see, Do you listen to music while you write? followed by answers from a variety of different authors.

I can't say I read this one word-for-word, and I don't think it's meant to be used that way. If you read through, you can get a good profile of an author you like, and you also see the huge variety of answers provided, the overall message being, "Everyone does this differently, so you probably better just do what works for you." Not too helpful as advice goes, but a nice kickstarter for a writer who's feeling stuck or unsure of their process.

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What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami

Of the three, this one is the least oriented towards writing. Murakami, a great novelist, spends a lot more time talking about his life as a distance runner, drawing some parallels between writing and running.

This feels like a niche book to me. It might be of interest to aging athletes who are wondering how getting older changes a person's relationship with his body, and it is likely of interest to runners who write. But other than those two and Murakami super-fans, I don't know how appealing it would be.

BUT, if you belong to one of those groups, give it a shot. It's a fast read, and in a lot of ways it really leans well towards Murakami's reflective, meditative style.

Oh, and anyone who translates the works of Raymond Carver and then asks Carver's widow about borrowing the title is okay by me.

The Maze Runner by James Dashner

This is a book I read for a book club that I help out with at a local middle school.

I just felt that I should add that in because, being such an advocate of not finishing books that you don’t love, I thought I should explain why I finished a book that I didn’t love.
The story is pretty simple, a bunch of kids trapped in a giant maze for no apparent reason. It reads like a sort of cross between Lord of the Flies, Battle Royale, and the Hunger Games.

The thing to not like about this book is that all of the plot points come out way before they are executed.

For example, the main character wants to be a Maze Runner (not too important to explain, but they’re just the people in the maze with the coolest job). But instead of just becoming a maze runner, the first third of the book shows him doing other jobs, screwing around, and pining about how he should be a maze runner, how he somehow knows deep down that he’s meant to be a maze runner.

Alright, well just be a damn maze runner already. As a reader, I wasn’t absorbed with the story enough to ignore everything going on and flow with the story. Okay, the book is called the maze runner, the kid wants to be a maze runner, and all the excitement seems to be with the maze runners. Somehow, I think he’s going to be a maze runner, so get to it. It would be like titling a book, “Detective Wabash’s First Case” and then spending the first third of the book with a cop named Wabash who really wants to be a detective for no discernible reason, nor is there any reason for him not to be a detective, and only after some serious work does he become a detective and start in on the story.

I had a roommate who started watching the show 24, and after a couple seasons he did a pretty accurate impression of the show’s main flaw, which consisted of yelling, “No time to explain!” and then cutting to commercial. This book felt a little like that, like there was a lot of information you could feel the author purposely withholding. It felt more like the characters were engaging the author than the story, badgering until he finally gave in and gave them a revelation.

Also, it ends on a complete non-ending, setting you up for the second book. So again, knowing that before I finished, I wouldn’t have gone all the way through just to get to an unsatisfactory ending. Plus, the second book just came out a month ago, so god knows how long you would have to wait for the third, and alleged final, part of the series.

I'm a big fan of this type of book. I don't know what the genre is...survival fiction? But I would say skip this one in favor of:

Battle Royale by Koushun Takami

The Crimson Labyrinth by Yusuki Kishi

and the movie Cube. You gotta love Cube.