Books of the Teens: Recommended Commentary and Personal Essays

Dear Reader, I may be parsing my non-fiction categories too finely, but this decade saw more non-fiction than fiction in my reading - 52% to be exact.  As you know, I posted about the memoirs I liked yesterday.  Today's post collects social commentary and personal essay collections I enjoyed in the twenty teens.

Best Commentary/Analysis

The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg, 2012, read in 2012

A fascinating book unlocking secrets (hidden in plain sight) about how habits work in our lives.  Unfortunately, I didn't write this review right after I finished the book (as is my habit), so I had already forgotten some details by the time I did.  This is disrespectful treatment for what I would call the most memorable non-fiction book I read this decade.  The key framework is that habits work via a three-step process: a cue, followed by the routine, followed by a reward.   Duhigg applies this framework to everything from an afternoon cookie habit to alcoholism and gambling addiction.  Along with negative habits, Duhigg recounts how exercise and better eating habits can be cultivated and maintained.  He also covers organizational habits and how changing habits can change the fortunes of a company.  For this material, he cites Paul O'Neill's focus on safety when he arrived at Alcoa.  He also talks about why 12-step programs seem to work even though they lack any essential scientific soundness.  The author even tries to turn the book into a self-help book by publishing a "how to use this framework" section for the reader to attack personal habits or form new ones. If you pick up no other book from these recommendations, pick up this one.  That's what someone tells you when they mean it.

The Geography of Nowhere; The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape, James Howard Kunstler, 1993, read in 2010

My good friend, Jason Hansen has generally different reading tastes than mine, but he recommended this book, and I'm glad he did. Kunstler may be a little crazy (he declared the end of the automobile age in this book 27 years ago), but he's smart crazy. The book outlines how land development evolved in this country and how we ended up with the crappy suburbs we have today. Kunstler grew up in Manhattan and now lives in small-town Saratoga Springs, NY. Because I also listened to his podcast (the Kunstlercast), It can be hard to remember what I heard there and what's in the book, but the book lays out what makes traditional urban fabric work and what makes the suburbs so dysfunctional. It's a seminal book by a unique thinker that will make some people muse "oh yeah" and others fling the book across the room. A the end of the decade, I still think within the framework Kunstler provides for evaluating a built landscape as I pass through it.  This can be a little tedious for my friends and family.


How to Be Black, Baratunde Thurston, 2013, read in 2014

Although I had heard Baratunde Thurston on Fresh Air, it didn't register that he'd written a memoir in the form of a parody self-help book called How to Be Black.  I happened upon the book at the library on a "staff picks" shelf.  I'm really glad I picked it up.  Thurston, the online editor of The Onion, is very funny and brings social commentary in the most delightful way here.  In chapters like "How to be the Black Friend" and "How to be the Black Employee," he delves into the current and recent state of race relations in our country with acute observation, warmth and heaps of humor.  In addition to his own thoughts and experiences, he assembles a panel of black comedians, performers and writers (as well as Christian Lander of Stuff White People Like fame) to weigh in with their own insights.  An enjoyable read that made me think a lot and taught me some things about the black experience that I didn't know.  Reading this at the beginning of 2014 turned out to be significant timing.  The events of 2014 proved to be tragic for black men especially, and the decade did not improve form there.  In 2014, I also took in Dear White People, which frankly was not as cogent or straightforward as How to Be Black.

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking, Susan Cain, 2012, read in 2013

This book got lots of press when it came out, and I finally managed to get to it on my reading list and pick up a copy from the library a year later.  Now that I work in a software firm with lots of introverts, this book means more to me than when it made its initial impact.  It's a very interesting read in the vein of good business bestsellers with a tinge of self help.  Starting with research about how introverts and extroverts differ (chief takeaway - introverts are more sensitive to stimuli), she eventually touches on what you should do as a manager, spouse or parent of an introvert if you're an extrovert.  She makes compelling arguments that the world is tilted in favor of extroverted traits and that "shy" is a bad word.  She argues for making space for individual processing of ideas.  Split the tables apart in classrooms.  Let people work alone to generate ideas and then submit them.  This form of crowdsourcing is kinder to the introvert's pace of processing, but more importantly, it empirically produces more good ideas than group brainstorming.  

Against Football; One Fan's Reluctant Manifesto, Steve Almond, 2014, read in 2015

Pittsburghers hear all kinds of creepy things about Ben Roethlisberger, especially earlier in his career.  Things that fall into the "Don't leave your daughter alone with the dude" category.  Then, of course, it really appears he got away with a bar bathroom sexual assault.  When that went down, I started finding it hard to root for the Steelers.  Then we saw first-hand disturbing abuse in the case of Ray Rice and Janay Palmer and the even-more disturbing light suspension initially imposed by the NFL.  Other examples followed.  Concussions have been ravaging current and, especially, retired players.  All of that made me essentially sit out the 2015 NFL season and then give it up altogether.  Since then, I've watched a game here and there to be social, with my boys, extended family or neighbors, and I've watched the Super Bowl.  After reading the book, I went on to write what may be the most-remembered post in this blog's history.  Steve Almond would probably call me a hypocrite for not giving it up completely.  In this short book, he lays out everything that's icky about football, starting with the NFL but also reaching into the college and high school games.  And there's a ton that's icky.  The writing is crisp and incredibly frank.  With this ammo, I have taken back my autumn weekend hours from football and skip all articles about the f-word in the paper.  That leaves more bandwidth for baseball and basketball, which I enjoy more in my forties anyway.  

Best Personal Essay Collections

This is the Story of a Happy Marriage, Ann Patchett, 2013, read in 2016

Having previously read an Ann Patchett novel (Bel Canto) and being married to a huge A.P. fan, I was intrigued by my friend Cassie Christopher's recommendation of Patchett's collection of essays.  This is one of those books that gets produced after an author has written enough magazine articles to collect them into a bound volume.  Except this may be the best.  One.  Ever.  Reading this book brought me so much pleasure.  It didn't really feel like reading.  It felt like listening to an interview - that's how completely Patchett conveys her own voice in simple, straightforward, unguarded writing.  More than that, it felt like sitting in the backyard talking with a good friend one has only just met.  I loved it.  The title essay is terrific (and cagily placed towards the end, its loaded title beckoning the reader).  Also memorable were:  "My Road to Hell was Paved," which starts as a cheesy magazine assignment to rent an RV, drive around for a week and write about it.  That could be a disaster or a bore, but not in Patchett's hands.  Also, "The Mercies" about Patchett's adult relationship with her first grade teacher.  She's such an interesting person and such a fabulous writer.  This book was a joy.


Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates, 2015, read in 2016

Having enjoyed and learned a lot from Ta-Nehisi Coates's work in The Atlantic, I was really interested to read his book.  Framed as a letter to his son, it's a frank mixture of memoir and advice to him.  Coates deploys language so masterfully that the book feels like a 150-page poem.  The violence and lack of control Coates describes in being a black boy and man in this country can be devastating.  A friend who read this before I did said she needed time to process what she was taking in while reading it.  Between the World and Me can bring outsiders into the experience of being a black man in America without the hallucinatory pretension of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man.


Liturgy of the Ordinary; Sacred Practices in Everyday Life, Tish Harrison Warren, 2016, read in 2018
 
Tish Warren wrote this book before she joined the clergy of our church.  Then it won Christianity Today's book of the year.  These events have made her arrival - job sharing with her also-ordained husband - pretty exciting. The book - with the first edition's evocative peanut butter and jelly cover art - steps the reader through the day in 11 chapters, starting with "Waking," discussing in Warren's open, confessional tone how we can worship and celebrate in the midst of everyday life.  The theme is that although we have liturgy to guide our worship on Sundays, each day has its own liturgy of things that we should be careful to notice and embrace.  Actually, some of the items here, we need to exercise caution that we're not taken over by them.  Other chapters include "Losing Keys," "Checking Email," and "Fighting with my Husband."  See, I told you her tone was open and confessional.  I read this book one or two chapters at a time between other books, and I enjoyed consuming it that way.  Warren's writing is clear as a bell.  Simple word choices making up clear sentences building into well-structured paragraphs.  I took great pleasure in the quality of the writing, and it enhanced what I got out of the book - which is that this life is fleeting and that a default mode of focusing on the negative or self-seeking will make it flee that much faster and less satisfyingly.


We Were Eight Years in Power; An American Tragedy, Ta-Nehisi Coates, 2017, read in 2018

Clearly, if I could only take the works of two authors to a desert island, it would be Patchett and Coates.  Now, I kinda want to go to a desert island.  As a category, books that compile previously-published materials have an uneven track record.  In this unique volume, Coates, a modern-day prophet, selects eight essays and long-form articles he wrote for The Atlantic during the eight years of the Obama presidency.  Rather than just publish that group by itself, though, he has written an introductory essay for each of those pieces in which he remembers and analyzes the events of his personal life during that period and/or what it took to create the work we are about to read.  Or, in my case, re-read.  But actually, in my case, not re-read.  I had read all of the original essays/articles contemporaneously when they were published in the Atlantic, so I gave myself permission to read the intros but skip the essays and still count it as rereading the book. As a completist, this was both death-defying and rather satisfying.  Reading these essays and remembering the pieces and the period in which they were written was moving and throught-provoking.  I call Coates a prophet because he interprets what's going on in the culture in a way that I don't hear others doing it.  And yet, he's a prophet for our time because his writing tends to the personal and sometimes confessional.  Reading him feels like having a very smart, interesting friend, and that's never more true than in We Were Eight Years in Power.

Books of the Teens: Top 5 Memoirs I've Read This Decade

Finally, some positive reviews for books I would recommend.

Although I would not think of myself as an avid reader of memoir, looking back over the teens, I found that I read several and that five have stuck with me over the years.  The authors form a diverse set of people, which is cool.

Best Memoirs

The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance, Elna Baker, 2009, read in 2011

I heard Elna Baker on an incredible live episode of the incredible Marc Maron's WTF podcast.  And that was sometime in or before 2011, for all you Johnny-come-latelies to Maron and his podcast.  That appearance came a few years after this book was published, but it made me very curious to read it.  In this memoir - yes, it's a memoir with that crazy long title - Baker details her life as a Mormon in New York City.  Baker is a standup comedienne, and the book is funny, but that's not what made it so gripping for me.  She went on to work at This American Life after publishing the book. Baker details her struggles and questions with her Mormon faith in the midst of her lively social life in New York City.  Mormonism as much as any other faith enforces social norms of behavior that are understood to manifest in a long line of "no's".  No drinking, no drugs, no sex.  And caffeine is a forbidden drug.  Baker shares incredibly frankly her hopes and fears in relation to remaining committed to her church while being pulled toward life outside of it.  The real action comes (not really spoiling here) when she meets an atheist whom she really, really likes.  Her family members definitely play their roles in her narrative a la David Sedaris; she lives with her older, more beautiful sister in New York.  Her parents sound like generous, awesome people.  I've been highly recommending this book for its honesty and page-turning narrative.


Fist, Stick, Knife, Gun, Geoffrey Canada, 1995, read in 2010

I became aware of this book long before I read it, and I can't remember exactly where I first heard about it.  I've heard Canada interviewed several different times on public radio shows and seen him speak once.  I have a total intellectual man-crush on this guy.  He approaches urban strengths and challenges with such unique insight.  The subtitle "A personal history of violence in America" gives the title its context of progression.  Canada talks about growing up in tough neighborhoods of New York City and almost reminisces about how simple violence was before most anybody could carry a handgun.  In hand to hand combat, even with a stick or a knife, violence had limits, and the herd enforced those limits.  Gun violence privileges the rogue and creates the possibility that any argument could escalate to the deadly without a moment's notice.  From this background, Canada has done an impressive amount of work in Harlem since the publication of this book with the Harlem Children's Zone to create a path out of violence and despair for today's families who live there.  A terrific read and a must-read to understand how Canada got to where he is today.

Orange is the New Black; My Year in a Women's Prison, Piper Kerman, 2010, read in 2013

With the Netflix television show being discussed at every gathering of late summer 2013 and NPR fawning over it, I heard that the book on which the show was based was really very good.  This memoir is flat out fantastic.  An unlikely prisoner, Kerman describes her experience over a year in primarily a minimum security prison with some additional time at different facilities.  She has no idea what to expect, living among women who are largely of a different class from her.  What she discovers horrifies and heartens her and her readers.  I don't want to give away too much more.  If I have a quibble, it's that she sometimes stops short of describing why certain aspects of prison life were terrible, leaving the reader to fill in the blanks.  A friend who has read the book said she turned off the TV show after five minutes because it's "too raw".   Perhaps Piper was saving her dear readers by being oblique.  My Competent Wife and I watched several seasons of the show, and I really adored the narrative gadget of flashing back to the characters' lives before prison and showing the circumstances that put them there.  We quit watching, however, when the narrative and market demands of keeping the show on the air distorted the narrative so that the Piper Kerman-based character had to keep doing implausibly stupid things in order to stay in prison.  Because it's a prison show.  I heard the last season is really fantastic.  But the book is still better.


The Long Haul; a Trucker's Tales of Life on the Road, Finn Murphy, 2017, read in 2018

I read this fantastic book in a most unusual fashion for me.  Essentially in one sitting.  We were flying back to Pittsburgh from Washington state, where we'd been on vacation.  I'd just barely started the book - I believe I was still on the introduction - when what was to be a 75-minute layover in Dallas turned into 3.5-hour lightning delay.  At the gate, I set to reading the book and found that I was gobbling up pages quickly.  The infotainment on the flight consisted of free wifi if you downloaded the American Airlines app.  By then, I was well into the book, and I just kept reading.  I finished the book in bed after we arrived home at 2:30 in the morning.  So, sort of one sitting.  It's terrific.  I heard Murphy interviewed on Fresh Air.  He confesses in the book that he's always had a crush on Terri Gross's voice and because she asks interesting guests interesting questions.  He's a long-haul mover of the high-end executive type, and he just describes how he got into that field in the first place, what it's given him, what it's barred him from, and the interesting things that have happened to him over a decades-long career.  He was basically an educated middle-class guy who decided that a job job was not going to be for him and that manual labor wasn't all bad.  I loved it.  It made the whole travel nightmare feel like a boon.  I think about and recommend this book regularly still.

 
How About Never?  Is Never Good for You?; My Life in Cartoons, Bob Mankoff, 2014, read in 2015

This book had been on my list for a while, since I'd heard Mankoff interviewed on Fresh Air in 2014.  It's very cleverly assembled.  I choose the word "assembled" advisedly because this memoir combines text and New Yorker cartoons (both accepted and rejected) and other illustrations.  Apparently, Mankoff has worked out this format on his blog.  By the time it got to book form, it was humming.  Of course, it would have been impossible to write about cartoons and what makes them funny without the visuals.  Fortunately, they didn't have to be lumped into a center section and numbered - they can just be sprinkled throughout the text.  Mankoff is funny and has thought a lot about what makes things funny, but he hasn't thought about that so much as to not be funny about it. He comes across as pretty honest in this memoir, which includes some moments of arrogance and chutzpah.  A really enjoyable read that I looked forward to picking up every time.

Books of the Teens: Fiction Stay-Aways

Of the books I read in the teen years, I only really disliked 20%.  These are among that portion, rated in order of dislike.

The teens were the decade when I stopped reading short stories.  The form is broken; it relies too heavily on magic to fit a plot in a short space.  Sorry, emerging authors.

I don't like how yesterday's and today's posts start the decade off with negativity, but, hey, bad books get published, and time is too precious a resource to waste. I promise: sunnier posts are coming.


Worst of the decade: fiction

The Giver, Lois Lowry, 1993, read in 2015

Sometimes, a book disappoints by failing to fulfill expectations.  Other times, a book flat out makes me angry.  Take this steaming pile of misanthropy, for example.

Lois Lowry must hate children, or possibly all people.  Now, that's harsh language for the author of the impeccable A Summer to Die, but to be fair, in that book, there's a dying child.  The Giver's dystopian hell made me angry and confused all at once.  We read this for family bedtime reading, and I soldiered through it because the whole family was reading it.  I also, though, dearly hoped (and expected) that Lowry would eventually explain why the neutered, colorless, feelingless society would have been created in the first place.  Alas, (spoiler alert spoiling an absence of something), it never comes.  Things just happen in the unnamed community, or rather, they happened a long time ago, and the characters we meet inhabit this totally messed up world.  No doubt, The Giver is a comment on something, but God knows what.  Maybe air conditioning.


The Last Boy and Girl in the World, Siobhan Vivian, 2016, read in 2017

This is a young adult novel, that's OK and 25% too long.  That's what I wrote about the book in 2017.  As the decade ends, I can tell you that I'm still angry that I read this awful book.  It was for a team trivia contest sponsored by our library system.  That's the only reason I started it and finished it.  The story unfolds through a mist of vaguery, but basically, it's the story of teenagers in a town that is threatened by an environmental disaster.  It's not entirely clear how preventable the disaster is and to what extent its true cause is mother nature or politics.  In the heightened atmosphere of a looming potential sudden end, friendships are tested.  Relationships are formed and tested.  The possibilities of mass advocacy are tested.  And my patience was tested.  I hate-read the last 100 pages both to find out how an early plot tease resolved itself and to fulfill my duties to my teammates in the Carnegie Library's reading trivia contest.  Siobhan Vivian lives in Pittsburgh; Last Boy and Girl is set in a fictional city and an unnamed state that bear some resemblance to Western PA towns and our commonwealth.  For reasons unknown, the pizza place in the book is named Mineo's, Pittsburgh's most famous pizza shop.  This book is the novel equivalent of Sbarro pizza.  Technically, it checks all the boxes of being a thing in its category, but I wouldn't recommend it to my sworn enemy.


The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley, Hannah Tinti, 2017, read in 2018

I don't remember how this book got on my list, but it was on my competent wife's list, too.  I do know that national treasures Meg Wolitzer and Ann Patchett blurbed it.  I don't know why.  It's a good yarn, I suppose, told in a theoretically realist fictional fashion.  The problem is that characters don't behave in a realistic fashion.  There's a level of violence that becomes literally unbelievable.  Literally.  I don't mean it's a lot of violence or more than one might expect.  I mean that I don't believe people actually live lives that are that violent or that if they set out to do so, they wouldn't live as long as the titular protagonist does.  It's not giving away too much to say that the "twelve lives" refer to this character surviving twelve bullets.  Come on.  Also, his dark and murky life of crime stretches credulity.  The family story that gets told in inverted order is somewhat interesting, but there are too many distractions.  Too many characters who emerge from a plot smoke machine.  There's enough plot teasing to keep even a reader who came to hate this book as much as I did reading in order to see where the teases lead.  Begrudgingly, I can give Ms. Tinti that.  But wait! There's more to dislike.  The omniscient narrator turns seriously omniscient - nay, pedantic - on all manner of topics: constellations, whales, dyeing and weaving yarn, fishing, first aid.  This is an author who knows how to do the work of research but lacks either the skill or the will to weave it in without announcing "I did some research!"  Tiresome in the extreme.  Don't waste any of your one life on these twelve.


In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, Daniyal Mueenuddin, 2009, read in 2011


First of all, who gives a rip about stories in a collection being linked?  This book falls into that rash currently afflicting literary fiction, the linked story collection.  As LitCritHulk tweeted: 

"HULK SMASH TREND OF HIP NOVELISTS WRITE 'LINKED' SHORT STORIES AND CALL IT NOVEL. YOU WANT WRITE SHORT STORIES, FINE. IT NOT A ####ING NOVEL"  

The stories in this collection link together very tenuously with the names of some characters repeating.  They jump around in time so that we're to understand we're reading about a couple of generations of the same family, but the fact that one character is another character's son has so little bearing on a particular story that it doesn't matter.  I fail to see the point.  But that's not the big problem.  The big problem is that more than half of the stories in this collection have the same plot.  No joke.  One story in which a woman of modest means decides to "give herself" sexually to a financially successful older man only to have it end badly when he returns to the wife of his youth might have been interesting.  Six in a row can only be considered bizarre.  It's a shame because the stories at the back end of the collection when he sheds the single plot are actually pretty good.


Follow Her Home, Steph Cha, 2013, read in 2014

Steph Cha graduated from Yale Law School and, as such, got her first novel reviewed in the Yale Alumni Magazine.  She loves Raymond Chandler's novels, and she refers incessantly to him and to his detective hero Philip Marlowe.  I probably shouldn't even review her book without knowing more about Chandler's novels.  I know that LA Noir is a thing, and this is a self-consciously noir novel.  An interesting twist is that Cha, a Korean-American woman, incorporates Korean-American women into her plot as more than femmes fatales or victims.  They play integral roles, including the amateur sleuth protagonist, and relate to others as sisters, daughters, mothers, friends and lovers.  But back to whether I should review a noir debut with little knowledge of the genre.  To my eye untrained by the genre, this book is ridiculously overwritten.  Sentences are jammed with texture.  No simple verb is used when a more descriptive one can be substituted.  This is clearly part of a style tradition into which Cha is determined to fit, but it can make the reader feel starved for air.  An example pulled relatively at random:  

"Her long, dark eyes squinted as her wide red mouth gaped with silver laughter.  Loose curls dyed a toasted honey brown fell past her shoulders, ends trembling on a modest bosom.  She crinkled a nose that could hide behind a penny.  One crooked incisor poked just a couple millimeters ahead of her front teeth - this would be her moneymaker, the Cheshire detail, the bite mark in your memory." 

Oh and the (apparently Chandleresque but reachingly so) similes:  

"My tongue felt like a dead oyster in my mouth and my voice passed through the thick sieve of air around my ears like piano music smothered by a stuck pedal."  

It's a mystery, and it's gripping.  I read it at the beach and despite its overwritten nature, I had no hope of putting it down.  Cha structures two loosely interwoven plots that keep a reader in suspense effectively.  But it's a guilty pleasure; I'm not proud to record that I read it. 


Train Dreams, Dennis Johnson, 2011, read in 2012

What is wrong with the short story form?  Why must all short fiction depend on magical events to drive the plot sooner or later?  I'd heard lots about Denis Johnson's Train Dreams, and right on the front cover, it says "Winner of the National Book Award,"  But that's Johnson, not this book.  He won it in 2007 for Tree of Smoke.  This book starts out normal and interesting, the tale of a small life lived quietly in western Canada.  Then, for no apparent reason, late in the book turns to this dreamlike, magical plotting that just pissed me off.  Don't read it, unless you go in for that sort of thing.



The Diver's Clothes Lie Empty, Vendela Vida, 2015, read in 2019

This book had been on my list for a while, probably from a review on Fresh Air.  It's hard to classify.  I guess second-person thriller is the best description.  It received much fanfare when it was published, and its unusual voice and bent probably explains that.  The plot was propulsive, but I personally found the book unsatisfying.  It's clever, and it's well-written, but that doesn't mean I have to like it.  It's hard to say much without giving away too much, but a story that starts with a woman traveling alone getting her backpack with everything meaningful and important to her stolen in Morocco is just too stressful for my blood.  The stress wrought by her cascading decisions never lets up.  Wanting to know where a story lands is not the same as enjoying the story.

Alice Adams, Booth Tarkington, 1921, read in 2016

Alice Adams is a bleak book that I would never have read absent my goal of reading all of the Pulitzer Prize winners for fiction.  That project sometimes has me dipping back into the deep past for a title like this.  Tarkington won in 1919 for The Magnificent Ambersons, a story that captured the moment when a family's grip on power in its town gets overwhelmed by the growth and progress of the town and the culture.  That story had shadows but not like the delusional shadows of the striving Alice Adams and family in this book.  Reading about people being deceitful can be stressful.  Reading about people deluding themselves while deceiving others is downright squicky.  I will say that it's no wonder Tarkington won the 1922 prize for this novel; it both captures a moment in the culture and feels modern enough now that it must have really appeared ahead of its time when it was originally published.  Unfortunately, a depressing and unsettling book is a depressing an unsettling book. Hollywood liked, it too; it's been made into a movie twice - once in the same year it was published and later in a more well-known version with a young, dewy Katherine Hepburn playing the title role.

Books of the Teens: Non-fiction Stay-Aways

People in my circle read way more books than I do.  Looking back from 2010 to 2019, I read 183 books.  While I will recommend books from that period over the next few days, it's important for friends to warn friends about books that just stink.  So, we shall start with the seven non-fiction books I hated most this decade with the worst at the top.  Let's see if all of my friendships survive the airing of these opinions.

Worst of the Teens: Non-Fiction

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, Barbara Kingsolver, 2007, read in 2012

Ugh.  Barbara Kingsolver.  Having subscribed to a community-supported agriculture farm for over a decade, I was interested in Barabara Kingsolver's family's experiment with eating locally-grown food for a year.  I borrowed this book from my then-boss and dragged my feet before reading it.  Maybe it's because I knew that Barbara Kingsolver - so popular with some - would drive me absolutely bats.  I remembered that my boss finished this book angry and confused that she'd been told for years that organic dining would save us all.  Now, it turns out if it's organic but from far away, it might as well have been pesticidally factory farmed.  Kingsolver loves her own writing most of all and her personal virtues second best.  It's enough to make the reader puke.  I can see her finishing a sentence and then stepping back to admire it, polish it with a white cloth and then move on. An example: I'm glad I read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. I'd heard a lot about it, and it's interesting to learn what it takes to really eat locally even for just a year. But then I come upon this description of her daughter with clementines:

"No matter where I was in the house, that vividly resinous orangey scent woke up my nose whenever anyone peeled one in the kitchen. Lily hugged each one to her chest before undressing it as gently as a doll. Watching her do that as she sat cross-legged on the floor one morning in pink pajamas, with bliss lighting her cheeks, I thought: Lucky is the world, to receive this grateful child. Value is not made of money, but a tender balance of expectation and longing."

Too precious by half for the likes of me. And it gets in the way. Her sanctimony clouds the narrative and her worthy points.


The Code: Baseball's Unwritten Rules and Its Ignore-at-Your-Own-Risk Code, Ross Bernstein, 2008, read in 2011

Although this book was published in 2008, it started popping up various places in my environment in late 2010. The title and premise rock. The book...not so much. Start with the author bragging about the 30 sports books he's written in the last 20 years. That reminds me of a Pennsylvania winery I visited that produced 54 wines, none of them quite drinkable. The good Mr. Bernstein takes the volume approach. He also starts the book with three forewords by current or former baseball players. I love baseball and baseball players, but three forewords on the topic of the game's unwritten code by player types produce an unappealing drumbeat of repetition about respect and not throwing at guys' heads. It's not as if the book itself isn't littered with player quotes. Bernstein interviewed lots of people. While I admire his hard work, i wish he hadn't showed quite so much of it. The narrative, especially early on, is interrupted as much as five times on a page by block quotes in gray boxes. Obviously, players, managers and umpires have to be the source, but take a little more time and weave them into a narrative. Some of the block quotes are more than a page long. For good measure, he gives the last word to a player, block quoting Dave Winfield, saying something that doesn't really put a button on all that went before. I don't know if it's good or bad policy, but Bernstein saves his best stuff for last. The stuff about throwing at guys gets dull and goes on a long time. Summary: throw at guys when they "disrespect" you or a teammate or the game; don't throw at guys' heads. Second summary: throwing at a guy is easy, and it is really difficult. The stuff about bench-clearing brawls is better. Where he really shines, though, is in talking about stealing signs. The best part of that material, though, focuses less on the code and more on how signs work, which I, as a fan, didn't really know. I wanted more out of this book. Perhaps John Feinstein could rewrite it from Bernstein's notebook (which it felt like I was reading anyway) and come up with a worthy book.


Present Shock; When Everything Happens Now, Douglas Rushkof, 2013, read in 2013

I hate Douglas Rushkoff.  I'd never heard of him before hearing about this book on Marc Maron's podcast, but I hate him.  There was a sign outside my sister's high school that said "Much good work is lost for the lack of a little more."  Douglas Rushkof never saw that sign.  He is quite brilliant at cultural observation and synthesis.  He can name what's happening in a way that I have not seen other people do.  The problem is that in this book he just proceeds to name what's happening over and over again in multiple ways ad infinitum without ever getting to the "so what?" questions; without ever getting to what I as a person might do about the phenomenon he labels present shock.  It's relentless, this book, and then it pays off almost not at all.  He does coin the word "digiphrenia" to refer to when a person is physically in one place but mentally and emotionally is elsewhere thanks to a digital connection to that other place.  His example of a young woman at one party texting and Facebooking the whole time to figure out what better party she should be at crystallizes the phenomenon beautifully.  Beyond that, he never gets to a worthwhile point despite all of his pointed observation and analysis.  Grrrrrr.


The Breaks of the Game, David Halberstam, 1981, read in 2014

Bill Simmons calls this one of the best sports books of all time, so I felt I had to read it. 

Because I like Simmons, Halberstam and the NBA, saying I didn't like it feels like sacrilege.  Although Halberstam did an incredibly exhaustive research job, authors have learned in the last 33 years what stays in the notebook and what makes it to the book.  The print and margins are very small, and the narrative is super-dense.  Halberstam may have established the modern sports book with Breaks of the Game.  

Oh yeah, it's about the Portland Trailblazers 1979-80 season, two years removed from their meteoric championship year.  Although he traveled with the team that year and covers that season in particular, a reporter only showed interested in that season because of the two that had gone before, in which Portland stormed to a championship and then stormed to 50-10 the next year before Bill Walton's feet betrayed him and the team.  So Halberstam covers those seasons as well as the transformation occurring in professional basketball throughout the 70s - the ABA, college basketball getting better TV coverage, the beginning of eye-popping salaries.  Of course, the salaries would not pop any eyes today; some of the "what's happened to this humble game?" stuff comes off as rather quaint from this distance.  He also reaches up and down the ranks of the organization from the owner to the execs to the scouts and coaches to the nascent union and the players' wives.  Halberstam worked his butt off for this book, and I learned things I didn't know and was sometimes gripped.  By the end, however, it felt like work to finish it.  I'm glad I did, but I can't in good conscience recommend it to anyone who's not a hoops junkie goner.  It seriously might have been more interesting if I'd read it in a less interesting, stimulating time, like, say 1981.


Basketball (and Other Things), Shea Serrano, 2017, read in 2018

There's a lot about this book that I seriously disliked.  I'm not talking about the writing yet.  I'm talking about the physical object.  The book collects Internet-column-style essays about NBA basketball written by someone with a level of basketball junkie-ness that I can appreciate.  Serrano worked at Grantland with Bill Simmons and now works for The Ringer, his HBO-backed multimedia sports and culture empire.  To supplement the essays, there are lush drawings by Arturo Torres.  Many of them are cool and evocative.  The thing is: the soft cover book is printed on square, heavy paper to support the drawings.  I mostly read in bed.  Heavy, oversized paper with a soft cover means that the heavy book flops and drops when trying to read it in a reclined position.  Fault 1.  Also, every fifth page or so is printed on a page that is covered completely in an often-dark color.  Who commits this kind of crime against legibility?  Shea Serrano, Arturo Torres and the Abrams Image corporation.  Fault 2.  Finally, a combo platter: the font of the main text of the book is pretty damn small, and then Serrano fleshes out or clarifies points in a lot of footnotes.  Footnotes can be cute or helpful, but when they are adding to what is already an illegible, physically difficult book, they're just annoying.  Fault 3.

Now, to the content.  Too cute by half.  The thing about Internet opinion pieces is that they’re usually meant as quick hits, to be easily consumed on a screen.  Also, they should have arguments or ideas that make people want to share and/or argue over them.  Serrano's essays have many of those features but not the brevity.  They can be dense, and their cuteness wears thin.  He writes in a very self-conscious way at points that I would classify in the Lena Dunham Millennial vomit-inducing category if that weren't such a broad and negative brush. Any collection of essays will have winners and losers.  You may not be surprised to know that the essay formed on the premise "Who would do better if you swapped their environment?  Karl Malone or a bear?" drove me absolutely batshit crazy.

It doesn't help that I read the majority of this book while marooned in my bed suffering through and recovering from the flu.  But actually, I'm pretty sure I would have been just as angry and dismissive if I'd been well while reading it.  The book may have induced the illness.


The Last Job; The Bad Grandpas and the Hatton Garden Heist, Dan Bilefsky, 2019, read in 2019

Sometimes a story is too good not to write a book about it.  I can only guess that this book got stuck in some publisher scheduling issue and rushed to print.  That would be surprising, considering the book was published 4 years after the heist in question, but I found myself searching for an explanation for why the book was not super well written and even more poorly edited.  Bilefsky is a NY Times reporter who covered the heist for the paper contemporaneously.  I might have expected better.  The book itself and its chapters are structured strangely.  Information gets half told and then told in depth.  There aren't that many straight-up typos (although they do appear), but lots of places made me ask myself if anyone had read the draft before it all got hard bound and sold.  The true story - a bunch of senior citizen thieves undertaking an audacious heist by drilling through a concrete wall into a safe deposit box full of jewelry and other loot - is pretty amazing.  The book is rather awful.



Grit; The Power of Passion and Perseverance, Angela Duckworth, 2016, read in 2017

Angela Duckworth made the rounds of my favorite nerd media outlets when Grit came out.  She gave great interviews, and there was a lot to learn about grit in the space of 20-45 minutes.  Namely that grit is equal parts passion and perseverance.  Gritty people love what they're doing so much they don't necessarily realize how much they're putting into it.  And yet, real accomplishment derives from deliberate practice of that skill, trade, art, or sport.  That's what takes perseverance.  Ten thousand hours yadda yadda.   Actually, the ten thousand hours guy is the source of the deliberate practice idea.   

I really wanted to like this book.  The problem is that when she tried to take 30 minutes of interview fodder and turn it into a 270-page book, she ran out of interesting material.  Many business best sellers do a better job of staying interesting by combining results of multiple different social science research studies.  Duckworth relies mostly on her own research, some interviews, and collected quotes from profiles of "gritty" people.  Lacking the necessary quantity and variety of sources, she goes to the same wells too often.  Lots of swim coach quotes, for example.  Also, I called this a business best seller (aspirant, anyway), but I'm not super clear who Duckworth thinks her book is best for.  There's a "parenting for grit" chapter, but it's not a parenting book.  There's the social science research, but it's not really an academic book or a business manual.  Finally, there's a section on building one's own grit, but it's not prescriptive enough to qualify as a self-help book.  All in all, not enough there there.  It took a certain...perseverance to slog through this so so book.

Update: 2019 Pirates Win Predictions

The Pirates season has limped to a close.  Charlie, Teddy and I got to see the final indignity in person from great seats.  I don't know what saw the boys through a 3-1, 93rd loss of the season, but for me, it was the sweet satisfaction of having prognosticated the most accurately just how things would wind up this year.  Pessimism, for the win.

Pour one out for Clint "Walking Serenity Prayer" Hurdle.  I, for one, will miss him.  On the other hand, Lonnie Chisenhall, ye bum, we hardly knew ye.