Brief Book Blog

Dear Reader:

I will assume that since you are reading this, you like to read. If, like me, you are needing new authors to read, I would like to take this time to recommend a few of my very favorites. (I am addicted to reading. I need to read while eating. I’ve bought books with money I should have bought food. I never said I was well-adjusted, now, did I?)

Here’s a brief list of authors I think everyone who loves books should at least try to read and why. I’m deliberately leaving out writers like Kurt Vonnegut that I think most of my readers are already familiar with. Vonnegut, however, recently wrote a new book about a journalist who hooks up with Dr. Kervorkian and through controlled after-life journeys interviews the recently dead. (You should read it. You really should. Drop those Cheetos, turn off your laptop, and do it right now.)

by Italo Calvino

This charming book begins with the main character, You. You are reading this book, and you tell the others in your house not to bother you. You have a good book you want to read. (Self-reference is a characteristic of Post-Modernism, but I think that self-referential literature goes back before the beginning of the post-modern period. An artist friend of mine says Post-Modernism (or Po-Mo, as he likes to call it), is dead, out-of-fashion, degenerated into cutesy self-reference and has proposed a new style, an art-ethic, to revive art as a field of human endeavor. I read a book once called The End of History, which makes me wonder if there will ever be another period name. In an age of increased global awareness, no particular culture is dominant enough to get to write history for itself, thus naming everything.)

Back to the book: You, the reader, start a chapter of If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler, which is the second chapter of the book. It stops at a place that leaves the reader (the real reader, not the character reader) wanting to know what happens next, but You find that there was mistake at the book binder and the rest of the book is missing (I can’t remember if the rest of the book is blank pages or the same chapter over and over again, but the result is the same) and You go to the bookstore to get another copy.

The story continues, alternating chapters of books that aren’t the book You want to finish. In fact, You never find the rest of If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler, or the rest of any of the book chapters You begin in the story, while going on an incredible adventure. At one point You are imprisoned by a dictator and given the job of reading all the banned books.

Lest this all seem confusing and turn you off, Calvino writes in a simple style and makes the story (mystery?) so compelling you (and You) are drawn along effortlessly. you’d (not You’d) think that a series of endless, unfinished book chapters would be unsettling or at the end leave you dissatisfied, but no. (No? Hand to cheek, arched eyebrows, mocking me, “No, really, you’re putting me on.”) I remember wanting to read it again and again.

[Now that I think about it, maybe I don’t need a reader to be a writer. I could just write stuff and then write stuff to myself from imaginary readers, just living in a fantasy world of my own forever and ever. That’s not a recipe for winding up living in a run down shack, collecting guns and cats, wearing nothing but underwear and a bathrobe all the time, no no no…]

by Edward Eager

{and}

by Norton Juster

These are my two favorite children’s books. I hope you haven’t grown up so much you won’t read books for kids. There’s a wealth of good books for children and young adults being written right this very second, and many of them actually make it to library shelves. Young adult fiction authors write more realistic, gritty novels with fascinating characters and never seem to be as formulaic as some adult authors’ books. Maybe I’m comparing apples to oranges, but I think that because they are for children, writers and publishers take more care with their product. My fave YA (or juvenile literature, depending on the library) author is M.E. Kerr, author of Gentlehands (the story of a blue-collar boy who falls in love with a rich girl one summer, and whose grandfather might be a notorious Nazi concentration camp officer titularly nicknamed, and Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack (no, she doesn’t, that turns out to be a graffito because Dinky is not one of the popular kids).

For younger children, Half-Magic is funny, the characters are engaging and realistic (for its time period), and I’ve read it many times. The book is so popular that it was recently republished with a thin, red ribbon bookmark attached.

The story concerns a group of children, bored for the summer who stumble on a magic coin that grants half of what you wish for. They encounter real magic when Jane shocks her brother Mark and sisters Katherine and Martha by exclaiming that she’s so bored she wishes there would be a fire while sitting unknowingly on the coin. Instantly, a child’s playhouse catches on fire and the children follow the firetrucks to the scene.

My favorite episode in the book is the time the coin gets lost in the closet, and Martha, the youngest, feeling sorry for herself takes the cat in and sits down, wishing the cat could talk. Then the cat begins talking sensibly in English every thirty seconds and garbles nonsense in between. The cat becomes very angry and the children try a variety of wishes to fix this, one of which is to wish the cat could only say “Music.” The desired result is that the cat will say “Mew,” instead, the cat says “Sic, sic, sic” in a very angry tone of cat.

The Phantom Tollbooth is a fantastic tale with a moral about boredom and self-discovery through love of learning. Young Milo wishes he were home when he’s at school and yearns to be at school when he’s at home. One day he walks into his bedroom to discover a large, mysterious package containing a phantom tollbooth, a small car just his size, and a coin for passage. After assembling the new “toy” he instantly finds himself driving in a mythic kingdom. The first character he meets is the Watchdog, a large St. Bernard-like creature with a clock embedded in his midsection named Tock. “Why is your name Tock when your clock goes ‘Tick, tick, tick?’” Milo asks. The dog sadly tells the story of how his parents named him Tock in hopes that he would make that noise, but were dismayed to find him ticking. They named his younger brother Tick when he was born, hoping to correct their mistake, but unfortunately he went “Tock, tock, tock.”

The central heroic task facing Milo is that the Kingdom of Wisdom is in a shambles since King Azaz of Dictionopolis and the Mathemagician, King of Digitopolis had a fight about whether numbers or words were more important. Being brothers, they went to their twin sisters Rhyme and Reason to settle the matter. Their answer, of course, was that both were equally important to the human soul, but the Kings cared not a whit for that response and banished them to the Castle in the Air in the Mountains of Ignorance.

Milo sets off to rescue the sisters (having read plenty of fairy tales and knowing just what to do) and meets the Spelling Bee and the Humbug who join him on his fabulous adventures. When the four of them (including the dog) meet King Azaz, the king invites them to dinner. The other diners look expectantly at Milo, crying “Speech, speech.” Milo beings pedantically and nervously with a few words about how grateful he is for the invitation or some such (I forget), but the King interrupts him with “Enough.” Then next diner stands and pontificates, “A hamburger with relish and…” (etc. you get the point.) After everyone has finished announcing their menu choices and dinner is served, Milo looks sadly at his plate of cardboard bits and says, “I didn’t know we were going to have to eat our own words.”

The entire book is based on visual puns or proverbial ideas realized literally, which probably make more sense to the adult reading the book than the younger child listening. Thus, it could be used to teach your children, if you don’t mind stopping to explain the jokes. My favorite joke is when the Undersecretary of Understatement invites Milo to get in the car and go to meet King Azaz. Milo starts chattering immediately when inside. “Where’s the steering wheel and the motor? How does it work? I don’t think we’re going to get anywhere without…” But one of the King’s cabinet interrupts, “Sssh! For it goes without saying.”

by William Kotzwinkle

Mr. Kotzwinkle writes endearing, loveably quirky characters and stories that are apparently too quirky to support him, so he wrote the novelization of E.T. (I was originally going to write “Mr. Kotzwinkle is an endearing, loveably quirky author,” but I realized in mid-type that I don’t know him personally. For all I know he could be an old cranky convenience store clerk shouting “hey you kids, get away from those magazines,” {which is a character from a Robin Williams comedy recording “Reality: What A Concept.”})

In The Fan Man,

[Okay, major interruption here. (1) This is boring writing. I feel like I’m writing “What I Read On My Summer Vacation” for a high school essay, and (2) here’s a stylistic question for you writers and typists out there: Do you italicize your commas after a title or not and why? I personally turn off the italics after the last letter of a title and know not the reason, but I do love an absurd, answerless question. Fills up the time and keeps me from thinking about the big, important unanswerable questions like, “What is the meaning of life?” and “Where are the socks disappearing to that get lost in the dryer?” Being the know-it-all that I am, however, I boldly answer them for you, knowing that you can perfectly well figure them out for yourself. My answer to the first is that the question is framed incorrectly. It’s a meaningless question. Meaning is for sentences and purposes are for beings. What is the purpose of life? To be and to grow, of course. That’s what everything else in nature is doing and so should we. The reason that question exists at all is that humans need to know how to do these things and have to make answers for ourselves. The rest of nature instinctively knows what it is doing. The answer to the second question is: You lost them by not paying attention while carrying the laundry. If it’s that important to you, wash them in the sink.]

(ahem) , Kotzwinkle’s main character is a major pothead whose dream is to gather underage girl singers for a concert in Central Park to be televised by NBC. He stumbles through toward this goal, acquiring a saxophone player friend and one girl. He is constantly distracted by the need to get high and other strange goals, but manages to do things like get to the NBC offices. Out of the elevator, he realizes he looks like he just fell down an elevator shaft, so he gets on his hands and knees and pretends to have just fallen down the elevator shaft. The receptionist freaks out, gets him some water, and a producer agrees to do the show hoping not to get sued.

I’m giving away the ending between a bunch of brackets so skip this part if you intend to read the book. I don’t think I’m destroying your possible enjoyment of it, however. There’s so much more to it.

{{{{{The Fan Man, who gets his name because he carries around a miniature electric fan all the time in case he gets hot, winds up far away and lost, chasing another dream while the concert goes on. He misses the fulfillment of his dream as a result of his tragic yet comedic character flaw: he’s always distracted by the next Big Thought. He doesn’t ever realize that he’s missing anything, including the concert, so it’s not sad, just a perfect end to a wonderful book.}}}}}

I’m going to guess that you read that part anyway. I would have. Don’t tell me what I can and can’t do! My favorite chapter is called Dorky Day where the Fan Man spends all of his day in his apartment, cleansing his aura of whatever by chanting “dorky” all day. The entire chapter consists of the work “dorky” repeated over and over with bracketed statements by his sort of girlfriend and the sax player talking to each other about whether he’s alright and what they ought to do about him. Oh, and when he needs more room because he’s claustrophobic from his mania of collecting things, the Fan Man just burrows into the empty apartment next door. I like this guy.

My word processor is kindly telling me that this is page five and I must go, so long, farewell, auf weidersehn good niiiiighhht. If you know German, please correct what looks like a horrible misspelling of auf wiedersehn, auf weederzane, oh to hell with it. Bye.

[Not yet. Did you really think I was finished?

You probably know that “Goodbye” is a shortening of “God be with ye,” but did you know that “Blimey” means “God blind me”? I assume my readers are all Americans, so please excuse if you’re a well-read, handsome British man with a good job who likes piña coladas and seventies pop music {call me}. I just came across this in a book called A Guilty Thing Surprised by murder mystery writer Ruth Rendell. She do good book.]

And one last point, I promise, this near constant updating of my computer programs whenever I get on the internet is cool and all - I’m glad it gives a reason for the computer programmers to get up and go collect a payczech - but, if the pace of life and learning gets any faster, I’m taking out the bananas at the fruit stand with a BB gun, and I mean it.

Now, God be with you all. For real this time. Sincerely, Me.