Book review - When You Are Engulfed In Flames

Book: When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris, 323 fast pages

I went to see Up recently, the latest in the brilliant run of Pixar films. I enjoyed the movie immensely - it was moving, creative, beautiful and funny. When I got home, I read a few of the reviews and was surprised to find a somewhat tepid response from several critics. The general gist was: It's another Pixar film, blah. More happiness and individualism, blah.
I don’t dismiss their complaints about the company (though I do disagree), but more importantly: what does WALL-E or Finding Nemo have to do with Up? It felt a little like Up was a victim of Pixar’s success. If it had come out first, it would have been ground breaking and revolutionary. Even if it had come from another studio, it may have gotten a different reception.
I was reminded of this as a I read When You Are Engulfed in Flames, the latest book by David Sedaris. I love David Sedaris. Me Talk Pretty One Day is the funniest book I have ever read. He wrote a story about finding a turd in his friend’s toilet that somehow was not gross and had me laughing so hard I was crying. That is very rare.
Then I read his follow up, Dress your Family in Corduroy and Denim, which I thought was, well, brilliant. It was funny and had a depth that inspired me. I didn’t know you could be so moved while laughing.
So, of course, I grabbed his latest book. Again, it is a series of essays or short stories about his life. He writes about a nasty woman who lives across the hall, accientally insulting the woman sitting next to him on the plane, becoming friends with a sex offender, becoming friends with a spider and buying a skeleton. Each of the essays are true or mostly true, I assume.
I’m not sure there’s much to unify the stories in terms of content other than Sedaris's sense of self, which is the voice that brings you from story to story. He’s insightfully open about his faults and is therefore honest about the faults we try to hide from ourselves.

And Sedaris is a great writer. The way he ends the story about a truck driver propositioning him left me lingering over his words for days.

The clincher for me was the last essay about going to Japan to quit smoking. It was honest and insightful, never dull, and often hilarious. (The title of the book comes from this part, although I agree with his publisher’s sentiment that Sedaris is trying to be willfully obscure with his titles.)
And yet…I found myself not blown away by this book. It wasn’t as funny as Talk Pretty. He wasn’t as insightful and moving as Corduroy. I realized I was falling into Up syndrome: Sedaris has been so good that he set the bar impossibly high. If I had read Engulfed first, I would have been wowed by how funny and honest and touching Sedaris is in each essay.
The point is that this is a wonderful book and I recommend everyone read it. And I promise never to let Sedaris bias me against him again.

Good for: Everyone, really. But, specifically, people who have enjoyed David Sedaris' books or commentary. You're looking for a truly funny book, rather than a stand-up routine turned into a book. (Cough, Tim Allen, cough, Ray Ramano.)
Skip it: If David Sedaris isn't your taste. If you're looking for a novel, rather than a series of unconnected short stories.

Book review - God Save the Fan

Book: God Save the Fan by Will Leitch, 295 pretty-good-then-not-so-good pages

By Matt

For full disclosure I should say that the author of this book, Will Leitch and I went to the University of Illinois at roughly the same time and overlapped briefly at the Daily Illini student newspaper. I read his work in college - awesome - but I never knew him,and he wouldn't know me from Ron Zook. Also, my boss, and friend, is very good friends with Leitch.
I should further admit that I was in no way biased by the fact that I thought it was awesome that on page 138, Leitch mentions - for no reason I can find - the Aurora Beacon News. Booya! All of which really had no impact on this review being posted for six people.
I started out wanting to dislike this book. Leitch is the former editor of Deadspin, an interesting and addicting sports blog that, of course, makes me uncomfortable because I work for a little newspaper that is being eaten alive by blogs. I don’t hate blogs, at all. (Obviously.) But I’m alternately amused and disgusted by Deadspin, which reports rumors and wallows in the mud too often for my taste.

But, on the other hand, I know Leitch is a fantastic writer, a funny guy and very smart. And for the first quarter of God Save the Fan I was hooked. The book is divided into essays about players, owners, the media and fans.
In the players sections, Leitch is fantastic, combining personal experiences, anecdotal evidence and strong logic into insightful essays about sports. I couldn’t stop reading and I was learning about the sports I love. He took on owners and players in insightful, humorous ways. He told me steroids didn’t matter and I was with him. The reason people actually don’t like most blogs (outside of anonymity and no accountability) is that they’re boring. Being an essayist - which is what many bloggers are - is probably the hardest form of writing. But for the first quarter of the book, I was ready to concede that Leitch was the great sports essayist of this generation.
And then he fell off the tracks, in the strangest of places. He went after sports media. Where there had been logic and insight, there was contradictions and pettiness. Consider the chapter called Beware Those Who Come Bearing the Tag "Experts", where he declares there are no experts. To summarize, Leitch says no one knows what they’re doing and no one really has any more information than any other person who wanted to research a topic. Sorry, that makes no sense at all. Someone who studies the subject material, talks to other experts is an expert. This kind of weak logic is littered through the second half of the book, along with petty barbs and no-duh conclusions.
The worst comes out in the chapters about ESPN. I watch ESPN for the game scores, maybe a game, then I move on to other things. But both Deadspin and this book have a full-out obsession with ESPN’s anchors and programming. Leitch clearly delights in embarrassing these people. For what reason, or purpose, he never articulates. (Is Scott Van Pelt's love life really interesting to anyone, including Scott Van Pelt?)

The worst part is that the ESPN stuff is neither well-sourced nor well-thought out. Leitch picks the worst ESPN analysts and eviscerates them, then dismisses the real experts (like Ron Jaworski) with a brush off - “no one cares about experts”. Weak and inaccurate.
Leitch is quick to dismiss sports reporting because - I swear this is in the book - he once had the penis of University of Michigan’s fat center Robert “Tractor” Traylor’s in his face during an interview. It depressed Leitch and so, therefore, sports reporting is dead and irrelevant. Well, bad sports reporting is dead and irrelevant. But I read Mark Tupper of the Dectur Herald and Review because he tells me things about Illinois basketball - and college basketball - that help me better understand and appreciate what I’m watching. I listen to Peter Gammons of ESPN because he knows about baseball and helps me put players and games in perspective.
With great intensity, Leitch tells us ESPN is a big corporate empire that is mean, protects its brand and likes to make money. Well, duh.
The ESPN rant goes on and on. And on and on. (At one point, he watches 24 straight hours of ESPN programming in what’s supposed to be an ironic experiment, but you have to wonder.)

By the end, I came back to the cover of the book, which is a foam finger that is putting up the middle finger rather than the traditional “We’re No. 1” indexer. It was be provocative, surely. It was clever, of course. But what was the point of that image? I sort of felt the same way about this book.

Good for: Fans of Deadspin, although some people say this book is a rehash of what's been up there. (I don't read faithfully enough to know for sure.) People who live on ESPN, fantasy sports or their favorite team. People who want to poke fun at the often too-serious world of sports and sports journalism. People who want to read the first half of a book. Checking out of the library.
Skip it if: You don’t obsess of the sports media landscape. You want in-depth, new reporting on sports.

Good morning, ma'am, you must be Bubba.

Thursday morning, Lynne shook Matt gently.
"We have to get going soon, honey," she said.
Now, it is well known that Matt - for whatever good qualities he might possess - is not the morning's most reliable thinker. Spoken words escape him and flutter into confusion. Talking and walking at the same time is nearly impossible. Comprehension, elusive.
So, when Lynne offered her kind little reminder, Matt somehow heard: "Did you let in a woman named Bubba?"
Matt could have sworn that's what she asked. In his sleep addled brain, early Thursday morning Lynne must have woke up and met an odd but harmless woman. Lynne introduced herself. Bubba introduced herself. They talked for a few minutes about the bailout and the White Sox, before the conversation led to the obvious question: So, Bubba, how did you get in here? Bubba, of course, said Matt had let her in. While Bubba seemed reliable, Lynne wanted to check out her story.
So, Lynne gently woke up Matt and asked, "Did you let in a woman named Bubba?"
Matt was sure that's what she had said.
But, the strangest part was not that Matt thought she asked that question. And the strangest part was not that there was a woman named Bubba.
The most peculiar part of this whole episode was that after hearing a rather bizarre question such as, "Did you let in a woman named Bubba?", Matt answered: "Yes."

The Day The Baby Moved

The other day, Matt felt The Baby move. This time for real.
You see, what happened was Matt actually felt the baby move for the first time about a week ago.
Lynne had been feeling The Baby squirming around for weeks. She'd call Matt over, he’d put his hand on her stomach and … nothing.
Stage fright, perhaps.
Matt was so, so jealous Lynne could feel The Baby. And they'd go through this routine over and over. Movement! Hand on stomach...nothing. Movement! Hand on stomach...and so on.
Then last Sunday, Matt actually felt something in there. Lynne said, "Squirt (our pet name for the baby, pending finalization) is really moving in there!" Matt put his hand on her now noticeable belly, expecting disappointment.
But there it was: movement. Very, very subtle movement.
To Matt, it felt like a hiccup. He tried to be excited, but it felt very abstract.
How could Matt be sure that Lynne wasn't just digesting a big lunch? Or that she wasn't burping, just to make Matt feel better? Matt leaned on his background in science. Matt knew he saw some movement on his primitive hand Richter Stomach Scale, but could he rule out all other possibilities?
Then this Saturday, they were on the couch, watching TV and Lynne started staring off into space in a way Matt could tell she was feeling The Baby. Matt scooted right over and put his hand on the belly.
And...The Baby gave his hand a wallop. It was genuine movement. Stomachs do not jump like that, in Matt's scientific opinion.
It was amazing. And it made Matt wonder what the heck Baby was doing in there.
Was Baby trying to get settled? Was Baby dancing? (That’s what Lynne and Matt always imagine.) Was Baby practicing a golf swing or a pitching motion?
I guess we’ll never know since the cell phone reception in Lynne's stomach is crap.

Name! That! Kid!

There's just three days left to vote for The Hanley Child To Be Named Later.
<-----Just vote over there. It's easy!
Seven votes are in, but lines are already forming outside the polling places.
We wouldn't want you to be sitting there, years later, saying, "If I only I had taken the time to vote online that day, I wouldn't have to remember how to spell Hortense."
And remember: the winning name is legally binding. So vote carefully!

Book review - The Areas of My Expertise

Book: The Areas of My Expertise by John Hodgman, 230 very odd pages

The Areas of My Expertise by John Hodgman is certainly the strangest book I have ever read and maybe the strangest book ever written. But I can’t say that I didn’t enjoy large parts of it. Who wouldn’t want a list of the 700 hobo names? (And really, if the names hadn’t been written down in this book, these heroes of the Hobo Wars may have been forgotten forever.)
Hodgman has collected an encyclopedia of facts known to him alone, which he is kind of enough to share. I got on to this book by seeing Hodgeman - who you probably know as the PC in the Mac vs. PC commercials - on a local news channel where he told a very dumbfounded newscaster about the facts he had gathered in his book. Hodgman was very funny there ,as well as during his frequent appearances on The Daily Show, so I had to check out this book.
I think I wasn't disappointed. This book was funny. But would I recommend it to you? Well, let me ask you:
- Are you looking for a list of nine U.S. presidents who had hooks for hands? (Jefferson designed his own.) If yes, you will like this book.
- Are you looking for facts on all 51 states, including Hohoq, the floating state? If yes, you will like this book.
- Are you curious about the seven U.S. phone numbers that have 666 as a prefix? If yes, you will like this book.
- Are you curious to read the brief timeline of the lobster in America? If yes, you will like this book.
- Would you be interested in five jokes that have never produced laughter? (Sample: “A duck goes into the pharmacy. He says the pharmacist, “I need some ointment for my beak. It is very chapped.” The pharmacist says, “We have nothing for ducks here.”) If yes, you will like this book.
- Do you require hints on building snow forts? If yes, you will like this book.
- Have you been searching for some brief biographies of well-known hoboes? If yes, you will like this book.
Otherwise, look elsewhere.

Good book for: People who thought the above list was intriguing. (Which it kind of was.)

Skip it: If you thought the above list was ridiculous and stupid. (Which it kind of was.)

Cinematic stunner! Ads for boffo gangster film axe main movie man!

HOLLYWOOD - The cinematic community was stunned by a prominent omission in the recently released commercials for the upcoming summer blockbuster Public Enemies (coming out in one month - get your tickets now).

Neither the film's trailer, which was leaked on the official site for Public Enemies (you can go on almost any website and start planning which theater you'd like to go to) nor the three commercials planned for television feature one of the key players in the film: Matt Hanley. Hollywood insiders were stunned.

"I was stunned," said co-star and three-time Academy Award nominee Johnny Depp. "Just stunned."

Likewise, Christian Bale, an up and coming actor who also has a role in Public Enemies (July 1 isn't that far away, really) echoed Depp's thoughts.

"Like Johnny, I could only say that I am wholly stunned," Bale said. "This is stunning."

Academy winning director Michael Mann, who directed Public Enemies (seriously, tickets are going fast - this movie is going to be big) says the oversight was not only planned but intentional.

"We're trying to stun people," Mann said, while cutting Hanley's name out of the opening credits of the film. "Stun them!"

Reached for comment at his palatial Naperville estate Hanley declined comment.