6. Half Empty by David Rakoff

I bought and read this book on my Kindle, so I had no idea what the cover looked like until ten seconds ago when I did an image search. It would have really coloured my opinion of the writing if I had. Badly.

Due to my ongoing love affair with This American Life (six years and counting!) I have read a huge number of books by TAL contributors. Everything by David Sedaris. Everything by Sarah Vowell. Everything by Dan Savage. Curtis Sittenfield. Mike Birbiglia. Anne Lammott. Sandra Tsing-Loh. Chuck Klosterman. I have read at least one book by each of them. I seek TAL-adjacent essays, podcasts, blogs, short stories, journalism, and movies whenever I can. I've seen at least six TAL speaking tour show things. Um, what was the point of this detour? Oh yeah, I was ready to love this book.

And I did! David Rakoff is amusingly self-loathing. "Beloved by all and yet loved by none" might be one of the most savage (self) put-downs I've ever heard, and as a piece of personal insight, maybe up there with another Rakoff bon-mot I heard, live on tour in 2007, on his agreement, via the US citizenship pledge, to take up arms against the enemy: this is grass soup. If we get to the point where 45 year old asking-and-telling gay Canadian New York Jews are required to join the army, we are well beyond fucked. Might as well be a recipe for delicious grass soup during a famine.

(I would like to circle back here, and point out once again how completely awful Marieke Hardy is when in relief against a really funny, really revealing author)

This book makes me think I almost want therapy now, just to see if I have hidden depths. I bet I don't. I think I have hidden shallows. But I do have "issues", and hoping that I might one day be as wise and honest about myself as David Rakoff is in this book is a pretty high commendation.

Trying to read some fiction next, but I'm mostly in a "flicking though" stage. That's where I just read and re-read chapters from old faves, magazines, or various makeup, fashion and parenting guidebook type things I have lying around the house. But since I'm working on a project (this!) I'll try and snap out of it.

5. Fixed Ideas: America Since 9.11 by Joan Didion

I wanted to read more Joan Didion, and this is all they had at my local library last week. It's more of a book-lette, however. A slim 60-ish pages, set out with generous margins. I've read longer articles in the New Yorker.

So, America has hardened and become more conservative and insular since September 11, 2001. "Fixed ideas"- the politicization and co-opting of nationalism, the suppression of dissent- are common place and suffocating. Well, I think I knew that. That it's so obvious now perhaps speaks to the foresight of this book, which was published in early 2003.

But I was really reading this book just to see how JD writes. She writes well. That's the answer. I was transfixed by this really short, inconsequential description of her activities on a book tour:

"You fly into one city or another, you do half an hour on local NPR, you do a few minutes on drive time radio, you do an "event", a talk or a reading or an onstage discussion. You sign books, you take questions from the audience. You go back to the hotel, order a club sandwich from room service and leave a 5AM call with the desk, so that in the morning you can go back to the airport and fly to the next city"

It's hard for me to pinpoint what I like so much about that. Is it the monotonous run-on sentences that evoke the tour itself? No, I think it's the intimacy that exists within the phrase "a 5AM call with the desk". We don't need further description of the desk. We know the desk. We know "the desk". We are there. On tour. Serious writers. Bored by hotels.

I had to Google the essay she reads an extract from on tour, the one about "the shining and perishable dream itself." The essay is "Goodbye to All That" from 1967 and it's perfect. Short enough that you can read it here.

Please read it.

4. The Uncoupling by Meg Wolitzer

I can't wait til I have something to post about a book that it universally positive. I had really high hopes for this book. I read and really enjoyed Meg Wolitzer's book from 2008, The Ten Year Nap. That novel was insightful; kind of sharp and world-weary in a way that I also thought myself at the time, despite that I was one year into what could have been my own ten year nap. I was weary before my time. So I did expect a lot from her follow-up look at the suburbs. Especially with the premise that the grumpy women of the suburbs have stopped having sex with their husbands. That's interesting! But * spoiler alert*, it turns out to be a spell? Led by a teenager? That ends with renewed understanding and hand holding? Boo. Let these adult women have some agency at least.

The terrible irony is that the self-determination and ferocity contained in the play of Lysistrata, performed in the town and which sparks the spell, just vaporises when Wolitzer transposes it onto her characters. The mirroring between the acting and the doing is so weak. I really felt so cheated.

On the strength of The Ten Year Nap, I still plan to catch up with The Position and The Wife, Wolitzer's earlier novels. Let's hope this one was an aberration.