It's Always an Adventure

So, yeah, I lived in an apartment without power or hot water for about 4 months recently. And I still got a lot of reading done.

By far the best book was The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay by Michael Chabon. So good I next bought a book of his short stories entitled A Model World. Really good. Excellent at presenting and navigating characters through a narration of life's most universal yet subconsciously endured awkward moments.

Best of the Rest:

Franny and Zooey, JD Salinger - Apparently Fairfax County graduates a higher share of culturally ignorant hayseeds than I would have guessed prior to reading this book. It seems the rest of the literate world was exposed to this book before receiving their drivers license and I can only express gratitude that I did not. This tale of two Glass siblings would have done serious and lasting damage to my highly impressionable teenage brain. I may even have become a rabbi. I definitely would have stopped reading the Celestine Prophecy sooner than I did.

Motherless Brooklyn, Jonathan Lethem - It's understood that this book propelled Lethem to be "the king of a four-block radius" in dwntwn BKLYN. The book is very Brooklyn. Many of my friends swear by it. I laughed at the main character's Tourettic (?) outbursts (Eat me Bailey!) but didn't find myself engaged by the characters or the plot moving them forward. Definitely suffered from my constanct internal comparisons to Kavalier and Klay.

Naked & Me Talk Pretty One Day, David Sedaris - Very funny. I didn't fall on the floor and wet myself like the jacket reviews suggested I might but I did laugh often and took away some quality nuggets of advice for living, such as "When shit gets you down, just say 'fuck it' and eat yourself some motherfucking candy". Say word, son. Keepin it realer than Mary J's love.

The Polysyllabic Spree, Nick Hornby - Author of High Fidelity and About a Boy writes a monthly column for The Believer mag on which books he's bought and read in the past month and the two lists often overlap. Dude reads a lot and this post is inspired by his column but I don't get paid to write about the stuff I read or feel any of Hornby's admitted insecurity about having a shallower literary appetite than my readership. I have no readership. Except for you. And you are loved for being here. But seriously, Hornby loves books stronger than the word bibliophile can convey and, despite making you sit through his thoughts on a biography of an obscure biographer of obscure people of questionable renown, he makes you seriously consider quitting your job so you can devote a more civilized amount of time to reading. Even if it's in the dark.