The World According to Garp by John Irving

Whew, done!

Just about four months after starting, I can stick a fork in this one. And then return it to the library and pretend to be mystified by the four lined-up holes that have appeared in the book. Maybe it was one of their machines?

I would be remiss in talking about this book without talking about the Best Chart Ever (rivaled possibly by the McDuck family tree http://duckman.pettho.com/tree/v_american.html)

After noticing that Garp and the main character in Owen Meany were really short, I started wondering if John Irving were no short, short man. So I looked it up.

To my amazement, Wikipedia gave me the following chart:

If you’ve ever doubted the wonders of Wikipedia, be here converted. How hilarious is this? Maybe I’m just unjustifiably enamored, but I happen to think this is a stroke of genius, particularly the “Bears” column. Some of the others don’t so much float my cookie or whatever, but that column will be the one I use as a guide in picking any future Irving books.

So what the hell took me so long to finish this book? It was long, but even at nearly 700 pages that puts me at a rate of about 7 pages a day. Not too impressive.

There were a lot of factors. Have you guys heard that Nintendo Wii is a thing that was invented?

But there was something else that made it even more difficult.

I visited with an old teacher from college. She was (and is) a fantastic teacher, as evidenced by the fact that she always asks “What are you reading?” I told her that I was working on Garp. She told me that one of her professors brought Irving to her school and that he was a short asshole who was trying to nail every student on campus.

It was kind of an awkward moment, made worse by the fact that she dropped a grape on the ground, and after I nudged it into the sewer with my foot she suggested that I could have left it out for a squirrel or a bird.

Does it matter if the author is an asshole?

It shouldn’t. I think that I enjoy the music of Metallica the same amount as I would have regardless of their dislike for Napster, although that’s kind of different because though what they were doing seemed a little greedy, it wasn’t morally reprehensible. Plus, you can’t take the most extreme example. I’m sure that if Hitler had written the Cat in the Hat it would have seen a pretty sharp decline in sales in the mid 1940’s, spiking somewhere around the release of American History X, and then falling back into the red.

Here’s the big difference I see, however:

Garp, in the book, is a writer, and if you do a little digging you’ll find that the writing paths taken by Garp and Irving are pretty similar. Whether or not the book is autobiographical, and I hate to confuse the author with the narrator, it sure as hell FEELS autobiographical, which I think is no accident. Now, that in and of itself isn’t an issue, but let me pose this:

As an 18 year-old kid I went with a buddy to Chicago ComiCon. This has a point, I swear. Among the things to do at ComiCon, such as meeting Lou Ferrigno or being very saddened when the original Green Lantern artist is trotted out as a symbol of the way comic companies screwed creators, you can meet some of the big writers and artists of the day.

At the time, I was enjoying the hell out of a title called 100 Bullets by Brian Azarello. He has become a pretty big name in the meantime, but at that time he wasn’t one of the people with a long line waiting to see him.

I wanted to bring books for him to sign, but because I was traveling from Colorado to Chicago, I figured I’d leave my comics at home. So when I got to Brian Azarello, I just asked for his autograph on a blank piece of paper in a journal. He looked up at me like I was a fucking idiot and said, “Just sign this?” He sighed, signed, and handed it back without saying anything else.

I understand that it’s not the best thing to go to a signing and not bring the proper book. But I came so far, was a genuine fan, was only 18, and I was pretty saddened by the whole thing. It was so depressing that I tore the page out of the journal and threw it away, hoping that I would forget the whole thing. That was…coming up on 10 years ago, so obviously I didn’t forget.

After that, it was tough to read his stuff. I knew that I shouldn’t let it bother me, but I didn’t want to support someone who treated me like shit. I haven’t bought an Azarello book since.

Contrast that with James Kolchalka, who not only signed, but even drew his signature elf character in my book without me so much as asking. Since then, I’ve followed his work, and have recommended American Elf to anyone with even a subtle interest in comics.

I’m not saying that the one encounter turned the tide for Azarello, or Kolchalka for that matter. But hey, if you have 100 interactions like that, and someone else across the convention floor is having 100 positive interactions, you’re putting yourself in a bad place.

And to authors and artists who do signings and whatnot: If you don’t want to be there, we don’t want you there. Period. I’d rather miss out on seeing you entirely than have a bad experience that taints all your future work.

Let’s bring it back to Garp.

Garp felt autobiographical, and I heard from a trusted source that Irving was an ass. It made it really hard to not read it as the main character being Irving, which made it hard to get through. Which is why I put it down for a solid month.

But, bolstered by the fact that I had made a vow to try some long books this year, and further bolstered by the fact that this was only number 2, I pressed on.

Based on the two books by Irving that I’ve read, I can say a couple things about them. They can be long, and they can be a bit of a slog, but they often pay off in a lot of ways. I’m not an ending guy, and flipping to the end of a book has never been a satisfying experience for me, but the endings of Irving’s books always seem to happen in the right place and at the right time.

It’s also notable that his books tend to be pretty long. What I was looking for in reading long books this year was that sort of cumulative effect, the emotion that was heightened by spending what amounted to three times as long with a set of characters. And for me, it worked.

If you like Irving, you like him. If you pick this up and get 200 pages in, you will finish. If you’re not a fan, I’m certainly not the person to convert you.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid

Things that are for kids are not for me, with the exceptions of Life cereal and anything from a 25-cent machine with a crank.

So it was with a lot of fear that I tried out the Wimpy Kid books.

Honestly, there's a weird throwback, nostalgia thing that people about my age seem very into at this point, and it's not working for me. I can't really get into Finding Nemo. It's not because I think there's no way to hit those emotional points in animation, but because when the emotional low-point is blunted by an elephant hitting a camel with a surfboard, it's pretty hard for me to take seriously. If you took a good sad movie, like the Wrestler, and added in five seconds where he meets a little kid who runs up and punches him in the nuts for comic relief, it would kill the entire movie. But if a cartoon old man's wife has a miscarriage, it's somehow still okay to watch him use a flamingo as a sword.

Movies, TV, books, anything that is intended for children is almost always unsatisfying for me.

Calvin and Hobbes was always an exception. That never felt like it was for kids, to me. It felt like it captured what it was like to BE a kid, something that had been done before, but usually in a schmaltzy way like a dumb little kid asking his mom a question about whether or not god has a better beard than Santa.

Maybe it had something to do with the kind of kid it captured. Maybe there were kids out there who liked going to school and who played baseball b choice. But that wasn't me.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid definitely pushes those same buttons for me, too. It makes you laugh a little, the drawings are funny, and it's doesn't sound like someone speaking to a child and explaining everything.

Also, and this is a big one today, it doesn't take itself too seriously. We don't have to learn a life lesson along with the main character every time. Sometimes he pulls off a stunt and gets away without consequences, sometimes not. The main character can be a complete asshole sometimes, and he's not tied in to modeling perfect behavior all the time.
And you know what? He's right. Maybe it's not good for kids to play a prank on one classmate where they all pretend he's invisible, but if that's the behavior kids are modeling, oh well. I think we'll be fine.

Notes for Publishers of Cookbooks

Far be it from me to tell anyone their business* but some of these cookbooks are shit. I'm sorry, but they are. I have a few pieces of advice for you that might help sales a little bit.

1. Pictures, motherfuckers!
I don't know if you've noticed, but people have two eyeballs. One brain, one mouth, one penis or vagina or combination of the two, but TWO eyeballs. This should give you a hint that something important is going on with this whole vision thing.
I need the pictures. How else are you supposed to know if your shit turned out right? Okay, I know what a chocolate chip cookie is supposed to look like. But pozole? I wouldn't be able to pick that out from the center of a lineup unless the item on the right was chocolate chip cookies and the item of the left of it was chocolate chunk cookies.
Give me some hints. If children's books can waste page after page on pictures of some dope kid figuring out that he's not an idiot and just needs glasses, then you can spare the ink.


2. Multi-Use ingredients.
If only one of your 50 recipes uses Marjoram, then skip it. I don't want to spend five bucks on some bottle of crap that I'm only using once. Make it worth my while. They all look like either crushed up green shit or powdery brown shit, so throw me a bone and put the same ingredients in a handful of recipes.


3. Tell me the amounts the way they are at the store.
Don't tell me how many ounces of garlic. Tell me how many cloves. Don't say 4 cups of chopped carrots. Tell me about how many large carrots I need. I'm not a chemist. I don't even know what a "kg" is. Just pretend like you're at the store and tell me based on that. You're supposed to be the expert, so when you tell me "2 Cups Milk" feel free to add which size carton is cool.


4. Bullet Point Procedures
None of this paragraph bullshit. Save the flowery prose for your novel about a chef who solves murders. Just give me the basic steps. If there's something important, put it in a paragraph at the top of the page and if I skip it it's my own fault.


5. Don't get too specific
I like burgers, but I don't need a 90-page cookbook on how to make burgers, especially when most of the variations consist of putting different shit on top of the same kind of burger. A mushroom and swiss burger is not an entirely different recipe from the same meat with onion and lettuce on top.
















*Note, when I typed "anyone" I accidentally typed "Antone." I would tell someone named Antone his business, which would either be a name change or putting out a record immediately.

Sleepwalk with Me by Mike Birbiglia

A lot of comedians’ books pretty much feel like their sets with a little more framing and context. Which is how this book felt.

Mike Birbiglia is a hilarious stand-up, and he has a long-form style that’s pretty hard to match. But if you’re at all familiar with his act, the small asides are clearly his bits with not a whole lot of change.

It’s kind of strange to read a larger piece with bits you already know contained within. You know the bits are coming, you like them, but somehow they feel deflated.

There was one section that stood away from the rest of these, a chapter remembering and eulogizing Mitch Hedberg, which is a must-read for any Hedberg fan.

This book was sort of the opposite of the Sh*t My Dad Says book. I expected that to be a long list of one-liners. Instead, you get these longer stories that lend the whole thing a lot of extra humor. They enhance the jokes rather than squeezing them for every drop of laughter juice drink.

If you’ve heard Birbiglia on This American Life or The Moth, get his albums first. If you STILL want more, then give this book a shot. But the order is still firmly Album, Book.

Stories by Scott McClanahan

This was a really mixed experience.

The stories were good. Fast-paced, interesting stuff. Very rural, good for fans of Cormac McCarthy or Robert Olmstead.

The bad, and this seems to be more common with self-published and small press books, was that the editing was a little lacking.

It’s kind of a sad situation, really. It feels often like you have to make a choice, Do I read something that is mainstream and well-edited, or do I go outside the norm a little and read something different, but that likely could use a good once-over?

A misspelling here and there doesn’t really bother me. That’s not the issue. The issue is that I think it’s sad that good stories, like these, don’t find a home with a publisher who would give them the care and consideration they deserve.

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.