#52 Model Behavior Jay McInerney

Jacket Copy: Jay McInerney's first novel, Bright Lights, Big City, helped bring about a revolution in contemporary fiction in trade paperback. But more importantly, its publication brought us a major writer of great literary talent and incisive perception. 
In his latest novel, Model Behavior, McInerney offers us the portrait of a doubting devotee of the city where vocation, career, and ambition (which only occassionally coincide) run head-on with friendship and love--or merely desire. We see Conor McKnight's well-earned ennui fast becoming anxiety as he tries to protect himself from the harrowing fate that unfolds before his bleary eyes. McInerney is at the peak of his craft in what is sure to become a classic at the end of the century. 

Similar to: McInerney's Bright Lights Big City, Delillo's Falling Man, Bret Easton Ellis' Imperial Bedrooms


Highlights:
I enjoyed having  a version of Bright Lights Big City that was more updated for the new millenium. As usual with this type of book, my favorite part was the pop culture references, and the disillusionment and ennui of people living superficial lives. The thing I like about McInerney is that he manages to tell just as real and raw of a story as Bret Easton Ellis, but without the gore and disturbing scenes that haunt you (in a bad way, not in a Joan Didion-esque way). He's able to do something that few people can do--tell a relatively clean, PG-13 story that still manages to pack a punch. 

#51 The Gum Thief Douglas Coupland

Jacket Copy: Douglas Coupland’s ingenious novel—think Clerks meets Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?—is the story of an extraordinary epistolary relationship between Roger and Bethany, two very different, but strangely connected, “aisles associates” at Staples. Watch as their lives unfold alongside Roger’s work-in-progress, the oddly titled Glove Pond. A raucous tale of four academics, two malfunctioning marriages, and one rotten dinner party, Roger’s opus is a Cheever-style novella gone horribly wrong. But as key characters migrate into and out of its pages, Glove Pond becomes an anchor of Roger’s unsettled—and unsettling—life.

Coupland electrifies us on every page of this witty, wise, and unforgettable novel. Love, death, and eternal friendship can all transpire where we least expect them…and even after tragedy seems to have wiped your human slate clean, stories can slowly rebuild you.

Similar to: The Office (U.S. television show. maybe the British one too...haven't seen it); Joshua Ferris' "And Then We Came to the End" 

The Part Where I Write A Paragraph (or a few) which may or may not be about the actual book i'm supposedly reviewing and will most likely end up revealing more about me than it will about said book:

Wow that was incredibly post-modern of me. The first time I actually write anything that lives up to my blog URL-name. Yay me! So as you can probably tell from where this entry has gone so far, I'm changing the nature of this blog a bit. I got bored with it. I want a new format that lets me write more... cuz when i try to write a review and limit myself to talking about one specific piece of writing, I end up hitting a dead end pretty quickly. And that's no fun. And very self-defeating. I like to write. So i'mma write a blog in a format that actually lets me write more than 2 sentences. Yay me squared! So yeah I'll talk about that book, but then I'll digress to other things that occurred to me/were brought to my attention over the course of the day. Then maybe I'll circle back around to the book and try and tie it all together. That will be a fun (and uber impressive) feat of bull-shitting. 

So... the book. After reading several mediocre---and some just plain crap---books by Doug Coupland, this was a pleasant surprise. In fact, after Generation X, its my favorite thing he's written. We'll see if that changes after I read Player One, Dysfunctional Family, Girlfriend in a Coma, and the one about the beauty pageant queen. But rather than telling you why its great, I want you to find out for yourself by actually reading it. 

The one thing I will say about it is that the way it has the guy writing his own novel within the novel (and we get to read both of these novels) would be cliched by most other authors, but Coupland does this narrative device justice. Which brings me to random conversation of the day that I had #1: Don Quixote. But actually, no I'm tired. I'll just leave it at that a comparison can be made between the two books in their "meta" nature. 

#50 The Sense of an Ending Julian Barnes

Jacket Copy: By an acclaimed writer at the height of his powers, The Sense of an Ending extends a streak of extraordinary books that began with the best-selling Arthur & George and continued with Nothing to Be Frightened Of and, most recently, Pulse.
 
This intense new novel follows a middle-aged man as he contends with a past he has never much thought about—until his closest childhood friends return with a vengeance, one of them from the grave, another maddeningly present. Tony Webster thought he’d left all this behind as he built a life for himself, and by now his marriage and family and career have fallen into an amicable divorce and retirement. But he is then presented with a mysterious legacy that obliges him to reconsider a variety of things he thought he’d understood all along, and to revise his estimation of his own nature and place in the world. 
 
A novel so compelling that it begs to be read in a single sitting, with stunning psychological and emotional depth and sophistication, The Sense of an Ending is a brilliant new chapter in Julian Barnes’s oeuvre.

Similar to: Virginia Woolf, Michael Cunningham, Philip Roth

My Thoughts: This book had a much more pessimistic view on life than I (and i think most of us) like to consider... and I think that was the point. He wants to shake us out of our complacency and make us question what we're doing, instead of just blindly going along until one day we realize we can't really take responsibility for our own life--either credit or blame--because of how few choices we have really made, how few things we have actively made happen rather than just passively allow to happen to us. I think to an extent this way of thinking can be beneficial, but to dwell on it too much will only lead to being trapped in the past and a paralysis on further action. That's why the short length of this book--in addition to being ideal for those of us readers with rather short attention spans--suits the book's purpose very well. It was good to think about the questions Barnes raises, within the context of this story, and then go on with my life and leave that 2 hours of reading the book where i was deeply anxious but also stirring myself to productivity, behind me. 

#49: The Fault in Our Stars John Green

Jacket Copy: Despite the tumor-shrinking medical miracle that has bought her a few years, Hazel has never been anything but terminal, her final chapter inscribed upon diagnosis. But when a gorgeous plot twist named Augustus Waters suddenly appears at Cancer Kid Support Group, Hazel’s story is about to be completely rewritten.

Insightful, bold, irreverent, and raw, The Fault in Our Stars is award-winning author John Green’s most ambitious and heartbreaking work yet, brilliantly exploring the funny, thrilling, and tragic business of being alive and in love.

My Thoughts: While this book is darker and more depressing than some of John Green's others, it still has the trademark john green touches. It also surprised me with how uplifting it was; but at the same time, it didn't follow the cliche of being a cancer book that tries to paint an optimistic picture--it was much more realistic and honest than that. 

#48: The Road Cormac McCarthy

Jacket Copy: The searing, postapocalyptic novel destined to become Cormac McCarthy's masterpiece. A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don't know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food-—and each other.The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, "each the other's world entire," are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation.


Similar to: T.S. Eliot's Waste Land; Joan Didion; Bret Easton Ellis 


My Take: I loved this book. Its subject matter and content were okay but what I really liked was its form. The prose made an economical use of language, using words sparingly. This crisp prose style that is Didion and Easton Ellis' trademark has been given its own spin by McCarthy. The moral questions that the book brings up about what to do when you're in a situation where there are no good alternatives are useful for philosophical discussion. I think that's probably why its an Oprah's Book Club book. 

#47: Paper Towns John Green

Jacket Copy: Quentin Jacobsen has spent a lifetime loving the magnificently adventurous Margo Roth Spiegelman from afar. So when she cracks open a window and climbs back into his life—dressed like a ninja and summoning him for an ingenious campaign of revenge— he follows. After their all-nighter ends, and a new day breaks, Q arrives at school to discover that Margo, always an enigma, has now become a mystery. But Q soon learns that there are clues— and they’re for him. Urged down a disconnected path, the closer he gets, the less Q sees the girl he thought he knew.


A Few Thoughts: When I first started reading this, I was annoyed by the fact that it seemed to be so much like Looking for Alaska. By the end, though, I saw that it wasnt just a copy of his previous books. As in his other novels, John Green really hits you over the head with the message he's trying to say, blatantly spelling it out rather than leaving it to the reader to infer exactly what they are supposed to take away from the story. He makes it work, though. In other writer's books it might be annoying, but for him, its a large part of the appeal of his writing style. There's a lot to be said for being heavy-handed with your message instead of going to the opposite end of the spectrum and obscuring your message so much that its like homework for the reader trying to make any sense of what looks like random gibberish. 

#46 Eleanor Rigby Douglas Coupland

Jacket Copy: Eleanor Rigby is the story of Liz, a self-described drab, overweight, crabby, and friendless middle-aged woman, and her unlikely reunion with the charming and strange son she gave up for adoption. His arrival changes everything, and sets in motion a rapid-fire plot with all the twists and turns we expect of Coupland. By turns funny and heartbreaking, Eleanor Rigby is a fast-paced read and a haunting exploration of the ways in which loneliness affects us all.


My Thoughts: The thing that's stuck out to me as a pattern as I read more and more Douglas Coupland is that he likes to explore that loneliness that overtakes you when you grow up and leave "home"--that struggle to ever really find a place that you can call home and people you can call family again. He writes about how finding other people in a similar situation and bonding with them over trivialities of pop culture and the ironies and tragedies of modern life (dysfunctional families, one night stands, etc.) can be the best way to feel less alone. 


Similar to: Don DeLillo's White Noise

#45: Shampoo Planet Douglas Coupland

Jacket Copy: Shampoo Planet is the rich and dazzling point where two worlds collide -- those of 1960s parents and their 1990s offspring, "Global Teens." Raised in a hippie commune, Tyler Johnson is an ambitious twenty-year-old Reagan youth, living in a decaying northwest city and aspiring to a career with the corporation whose offices his mother once firebombed.

This six-month chronicle of Tyler's life takes us to Paris and the ongoing party beside Jim Morrison's grave, to a wild island in British Columbia, the freak-filled redwood forests of northern California, a cheesy Hollywood, ultra-modern Seattle, and finally back home. On the way we meet a constellation of characters, among them: Jasmine, Tyler's Woodstock mom; Dan, his land-developer stepfather; "Princess Stephanie," Tyler's European summer fling; and Anna Louise, his post-feminist girlfriend with an eating disorder.

Tyler's dizzying journey into the contemporary psyche -- a voyage full of rock videos, toxic waste, french-fry computers, and clear-cut forests -- is a spellbinding signature novel for a generation coming of age as the millennium comes to a close.

Recommended if you enjoyed: Pynchon's Vineland; Bret Easton Ellis' Less Than Zero; Nabokov's Lolita

Why?: As the late Richard Rorty liked to say of Lolita, the thing that these novels have in common is that they serve a vital purpose in that they make us aware of the cruelty that we ourselves are capable of. In Shampoo Planet, Tyler ends up committing an act of cruelty and then not being quite sure how or why it happened. He has always thought of himself as a good person, and is forced to re-evaluate his initial estimation of himself after this life-defining moment. 

#44 Microserfs Douglas Coupland

Jacket Copy: Narrated in the form of a Powerbook entry by Dan Underwood, a computer programmer for Microsoft, this state-of-the-art novel about life in the '90s follows the adventures of six code-crunching computer whizzes. Known as "microserfs," they spend upward of 16 hours a day "coding" (writing software) as they eat "flat" foods (such as Kraft singles, which can be passed underneath closed doors) and fearfully scan the company email to see what the great Bill might be thinking and whether he is going to "flame" one of them.

Seizing the chance to be innovators instead of cogs in the Microsoft machine, this intrepid bunch strike out on their own to form a high-tech start-up company named Oop! in Silicon Valley. Living together in a sort of digital flophouse --"Our House of Wayward Mobility" -- they desperately try to cultivate well-rounded lives and find love amid the dislocated, subhuman whir and buzz of their computer-driven world.

Funny, illuminating and ultimately touching, Microserfs is the story of one generation's very strange and claustrophobic coming of age.

My Take: I was pleasantly surprised with this book, after reading JPod. It was nice to have a fun-to-read novel with a good message to it and an optimistic tone, rather than the dark humor-filled moral grey area that was JPod. In that sense, this book is more in the tradition of Generation X than JPod was. I think my favorite part was the way in which each character was able to find their own soulmate, who was unique and the right person specifically for them. That's really what love is about---not about finding somebody you think will impress other people, just someone that suits your needs and wants, someone who is what you're looking for--even if they're not what is traditionally thought of as "attractive." 

#43: J-Pod by Douglas Coupland

Jacket Copy:  A lethal joyride into today's new breed of technogeeks, Douglas Coupland's new novel updates Microserfs for the age of Google. 
Ethan Jarlewski and five co-workers are bureaucratically marooned in JPod, a no-escape architectural limbo on the fringes of a massive Vancouver video game design company. 
The six JPodders wage daily battle against the demands of a boneheaded marketing staff, who daily torture employees with idiotic changes to already idiotic games. Meanwhile, Ethan's personal life is shaped (or twisted) by phenomena as disparate as Hollywood, marijuana grow-ops, people-smuggling, ballroom dancing, and the rise of China. JPod's universe is amoral and shameless - and dizzyingly fast-paced. The characters are products of their era even as they're creating it. Everybody in Ethan's life inhabits a moral grey zone. Nobody is exempt, not even his seemingly straitlaced parents or Coupland himself. Full of word games, visual jokes, and sideways jabs, this book throws a sharp, pointed lawn dart into the heart of contemporary life. JPod is Douglas Coupland at the top of his game.

Don't Read It: Unless you enjoy reading about people who seem inhuman, in that they have no sense of right and wrong. I guess I'm just not a fan of dark humor...

#42: Tolstoy and the Purple Chair Nina Sankovitch

Jacket Copy: Nina Sankovitch has always been a reader. As a child, she discovered that a trip to the local bookmobile with her sisters was more exhilarating than a ride at the carnival. Books were the glue that held her immigrant family together. When Nina's eldest sister died at the age of forty-six, Nina turned to books for comfort, escape, and introspection. In her beloved purple chair, she rediscovered the magic of such writers as Toni Morrison, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ian McEwan, Edith Wharton, and, of course, Leo Tolstoy. Through the connections Nina made with books and authors (and even other readers), her life changed profoundly, and in unexpected ways. Reading, it turns out, can be the ultimate therapy.

Tolstoy and the Purple Chair also tells the story of the Sankovitch family: Nina's father, who barely escaped death in Belarus during World War II; her four rambunctious children, who offer up their own book recommendations while helping out with the cooking and cleaning; and Anne-Marie, her oldest sister and idol, with whom Nina shared the pleasure of books, even in her last moments of life. In our lightning-paced culture that encourages us to seek more, bigger, and better things, Nina's daring journey shows how we can deepen the quality of our everyday lives—if we only find the time.

My Review: I think it's pretty obvious from the book description why I love this book: it's a book about reading books. How could I not enjoy that? More specifically, it's a book about the healing power of reading, about using literature as a kind of therapy to help you find your way in life when you get lost or find yourself in a dark place. In this way, it differs from the usual "love letter to literature." 

But even more than it is an homage to reading, this book is an insightful and emotionally charged memoir, as well as a tribute to those strong men and women who lived through the horrors of World War II in Europe, and continued to find a way to hold on to their will to live and optimism for the future. 

Whether you're looking for some wisdom and guidance for making the most of your life and living it to the fullest, or you're simply looking for some recommendations of good books to read,  you should pick up this book and try it. You'll be glad you did. 

#41: Cinderella Ate My Daughter Peggy Orenstein

Jacket Copy: The acclaimed author of the groundbreaking bestseller Schoolgirls reveals the dark side of pink and pretty: the rise of the girlie-girl, she warns, is not that innocent.

Sweet and sassy or predatory and hardened, sexualized girlhood influences our daughters from infancy onward, telling them that how a girl looks matters more than who she is. Somewhere between the exhilarating rise of Girl Power in the 1990s and today, the pursuit of physical perfection has been recast asthe source of female empowerment. And commercialization has spread the message faster and farther, reaching girls at ever-younger ages. But how dangerous is pink and pretty, anyway? Being a princess is just make-believe; eventually they grow out of it . . . or do they?

In search of answers, Peggy Orenstein visited Disneyland, trolled American Girl Place, and met parents of beauty-pageant preschoolers tricked out like Vegas showgirls. The stakes turn out to be higher than she ever imagined. From premature sexualization to the risk of depression to rising rates of narcissism, the potential negative impact of this new girlie-girl culture is undeniable—yet armed with awareness and recognition, parents can effectively counterbalance its influence in their daughters' lives.

I liked this more than I thought I would. Here's why: When I read the book jacket, I thought "a book about preschoolers--how interesting could that possibly be?" But what you realize once you start to read the book, is that all age groups are connected. The experiences we have as toddlers shape us perhaps more than any other time in our lives--they determine to a great extent who we will become as adolescents and adults. Although the idea of writing about "Toddlers and Tiaras" is pretty overdone, Orenstein came at it from a different angle, one I found engaging to read. She talked about it from the perspective of the parents who choose to enter their young girls in pageants--not entirely justifying their choice, but also showing us the extenuating circumstances they experience that might make us more sympathetic to them than the "monsters" they are portrayed as on TLC shows. 

As someone with a great interest in studying the effect of new media and technology on teenagers, I found the chapter about Facebook to be the most interesting. As I've gotten older and seen more and more of Facebook, I've come to realize on my own the conclusion that she came to: Facebook culture creates a dynamic where each child has to sell him or herself as a "brand" who likes certain products. 

What this book, and Back to Our Future, taught me more than anything else is how pervasive an influence advertising is--and how deliberately this type of advertising is done with the single-minded purpose of profit in mind. Advertisers are not concerned with the psychological effects their ad campaigns are having on children, who are at an impressionable age. This is where journalists need to come in and make parents aware of what's going on behind the scenes and the consequences of advertising for children's health and well-being. 

#40: Molly Fox's Birthday Deirdre Madden

Jacket Copy: It is the height of summer, and celebrated actor Molly Fox has loaned her house in Dublin to a friend while she is away performing in New York. Alone among all of Molly's possessions, struggling to finish her latest play, she looks back on the many years and many phases of her friendship with Molly and their college friend Andrew, and comes to wonder whether they really knew each other at all. She revisits the intense closeness of their early days, the transformations they each made in the name of success and security, the lies they told each other, and betrayals they never acknowledged. Set over a single midsummer's day, Molly Fox's Birthday is a mischievous, insightful novel about a turning point--a moment when past and future suddenly appear in a new light.


IMHO: The beauty of this book is that it captures the experience of being in a familiar setting or looking at an object you've seen before, and being reminded of past memories and people you've known. The many layers of recollection that can accompany such experiences are part of what makes life so rich and beautiful. The pioneer in this type of writing was Virginia Woolf, and Madden continues the tradition in good faith, following in her footsteps, while adding certain of her own touches to the genre as well. 


Similar to: Virginia Woolf, Michael Cunningham, Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg Ohio

#39: Back to Our Future David Sirota

Jacket Copy: Wall Street scandals. Fights over taxes. Racial resentments. A Lakers-Celtics championship. The Karate Kid topping the box-office charts. Bon Jovi touring the country. These words could describe our current moment—or the vaunted iconography of three decades past.

In this wide-ranging and wickedly entertaining book, New York Times bestselling journalist David Sirota takes readers on a rollicking DeLorean ride back in time to reveal how so many of our present-day conflicts are rooted in the larger-than-life pop culture of the 1980s—from the “Greed is good” ethos of Gordon Gekko (and Bernie Madoff) to the “Make my day” foreign policy of Ronald Reagan (and George W. Bush) to the “transcendence” of Cliff Huxtable (and Barack Obama).

Today’s mindless militarism and hypernarcissism, Sirota argues, first became the norm when an ’80s generation weaned on Rambo one-liners and “Just Do It” exhortations embraced a new religion—with comic books, cartoons, sneaker commercials, videogames, and even children’s toys serving as the key instruments of cultural indoctrination. Meanwhile, in productions such as Back to the Future, Family Ties, and The Big Chill, a campaign was launched to reimagine the 1950s as America’s lost golden age and vilify the 1960s as the source of all our troubles. That 1980s revisionism, Sirota shows, still rages today, with Barack Obama cast as the 60s hippie being assailed by Alex P. Keaton–esque Republicans who long for a return to Eisenhower-era conservatism.

“The past is never dead,” William Faulkner wrote. “It’s not even past.” The 1980s—even more so. With the native dexterity only a child of the Atari Age could possess, David Sirota twists and turns this multicolored Rubik’s Cube of a decade, exposing it as a warning for our own troubled present—and possible future.

The sources of my ambivalence about this book: Although I enjoy books that try to relate pop culture to other aspects of society, this book just tried a little too hard--to the point where it started to read like one big conspiracy theory. I think he had a really good point about how the messages being spread in the media since the 80s have definitely affected the way we all think about Wall Street greed and the Military. His argument about nostalgia for the 50s is cool, but I'm not really sure what larger significance it has. It's just a random chapter thrown in there that the book really could have done without.