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In Which Tina Fey Brings Out My Inner Therapist
2011 at 5am Posted by Rebecca Schinsky
Published April 2011 by Reagan Arthur Books
Weirdly disturbing cover aside, Tina Fey’s Bossypants is pretty great. Not perfect, but very enjoyable, and if it’s an indication of what’s to come from Ms. Fey in the future, I’ll happily subscribe to the mailing list for her next couple books right now.
Described most often as a memoir, Bossypants is not so much a narrative as it is a collection of vignettes about Fey’s (mostly awkward) life, her career in comedy, and her take on the working mother’s balancing act. Her voice is authentically present from the very first page—how refreshing, a celebrity book actually written by the celebrity!—and it just wouldn’t be right to discuss it without sharing some examples. Behold:
- On women’s responses to the question of when they knew they were women (asked during research for writing Mean Girls): “Almost everyone first realized they were becoming a grown woman she some dude did something nasty to them.”
- On supposed diversity in the definition of beauty: “All Beyonce and JLo have done is add to the laundry list of attributes women must have to qualify as beautiful.” And who can live up to that? Well, “The person closest to actually achieving this look is Kim Kardashian, who, as we know, was made by Russian scientists to sabotage our athletes.”
- And what about the idea that if you hang out with gay people, they’ll try to make you gay? “Gay people don’t actually try to convert peole. That’s Jehovah’s Witnesses you’re thinking of.”
- Words of wisdom for women working in male-dominate fields? “Don’t be fooled. You’re not in competition with other women. You’re in competition with everyone.”
It’s Eclectic! *woogie woogie woogie*
2011 at 5am Posted by Rebecca Schinsky
This week shall henceforth be known as Rebecca-attempts-to-put-her-ducks-in-a-row-because-she-cannot-imagine-going-to-BEA-with-a-review-backlog Week. Thanks to some new (and very good) things happening in my professional life, I’ve been awesomely sucktastic at managing the whole “reading books and writing about them” thing. I know that if I don’t write about a bunch of (mostly great) stuff I’ve read this spring before I leave town next week, I’ll never do it. Book Expo leaves me happily exhausted and desperately in need of a week of hermitude (yeah, that’s a word now), so it’s time for me to put up or shut up. And I think we all know that shutting up is not an option.
To start: a threesome of nonfic quickies for your reading pleasure. (Or: further evidence that this will never be a niche blog.)
Kraken by Wendy Williams (Abrams, March 2011)
I never expected to become fascinated by giant squid, but I can pinpoint moment it happened for me. One Sunday in the second half of 2005, the husband (then boyfriend) and I were observing our lazy Sunday ritual of not getting out of bed until at least noon. He had long since won the battle over having a TV in the bedroom, and we were watching a Discovery Channel documentary about a scientist whose life’s work obsession was finding and studying the elusive architeuthis. His name may as well have been Ishmael.
Maybe it was the Sunday morning happiness washing over me, but I was captivated. In Kraken: The Curious, Exciting, and Slightly Disturbing Science of Squid, Wendy Williams takes all the goodness of a Discovery Channel special and wraps it into a fun and engaging book that plumbs the depths of squid lore and profiles the scientists who chase and study them. Kraken is jam-packed with information—squid-related discoveries that led to advances in human medical technology, quirks of squid behavior that reveal previously unknown truths about life in the deep, explanations of what, exactly, scientists do to capture and study these animals—and the thrill of the chase is palpable. Kraken is the kind of single-subject nonfiction that proves that good writing can make anything interesting—even if you don’t think you want to know about squid, trust me, you want to read this book. Read more
MATTERHORN! Paperback! Puppies!
2011 at 5am Posted by Rebecca Schinsky
This time last year, I was deep in the throes of a love affair with a very big book. So taken was I with Karl Marlantes’s Matterhorn that I even convinced myself I would make time to read it during Book Expo week. Really. A 600+ page book during a week when I’m lucky to average three hours of sleep per night. Matterhorn is that good.
And if it hadn’t been published the same year as A Visit from the Goon Squad (and don’t get me wrong—I loved that one, too), I’m willing to bet it would have won a couple of 2010′s big fancy book awards.
I. Loved. This. Book. Here’s what I said in last year’s Memorial Day feature:
Marlantes has written a phenomenal book that takes readers into the depths of the soldier’s experience and reminds us at every turn of the sacrifices many young men made for their country and their friends…[he] makes it impossible to forget that, whether we agree with the principles that got us into a war or not, the war is fought by individuals who decide, each day, to do what is asked of them, if for no other reason than that they want their friends to live. Not since The Things They Carried has a war novel affected me so deeply.
And, oh yes, I actually took Mr. Marlantes a pair of army green panties when he visited Politics & Prose. Pantyworthy is usually more of a figurative thing, but Matterhorn‘s awesomeness left me no choice but to deliver.
Good news: if you were all “A 600-page hardback is heavy, yo,” then you’re in luck now because (wooohoo!) Matterhorn is now available in paperback.Even more exciting news: Karl Marlantes has a new book (a nonfiction one, this time) coming out this fall! And yes, it took every last bit of my restraint not to use multiple exclamation points at the end of that last sentence.
Seriously, folks. Read it. If not for me (and Karl Marlantes’s abundant awesomesauce), do it for the puppy.
The Bare Necessities—Timothy Schaffert (THE COFFINS OF LITTLE HOPE)
2011 at 5am Posted by Rebecca Schinsky
The Bare Necessities is a series in which authors and book industry professionals share annotated reading lists of books they love.
Timothy Schaffert’s new novel The Coffins of Little Hope is the latest on my list of a million and one reasons to love Unbridled Books. Schaffert has written the rare novel that succeeds in not only having something to offer just about every type of reader but does so without compromising on depth, language, or literary merit. It’s a fantastic read I’ll be saying more about soon.
At the heart of my novel “The Coffins of Little Hope” is a novel called “The Coffins of Little Hope.” The book within the book is the last book in a series of books, children’s books, and the enormous fuss surrounding the conclusion of the series propels the little town of my novel toward a frenzied collapse; meanwhile a child, a real child, may have gone missing among all the hubbub.
Though my novel belongs to its narrator, an 83-year-old obituary writer named Essie, I did find myself drawn to the characters in the children’s book series, and I began to write about them, creating their world, their villains, their ghosts, their perils. Most of this didn’t fit in my novel (though I did create an online novella, which is posted at http://rothgutts.com), but I enjoyed contributing to the body of “fictional literature” in the tradition of Borges and Orwell, and J.K. Rowling too (all those Hogwarts textbooks she has her characters studying). An impressively comprehensive list of fictional books within books is compiled at Wikipedia.
With this in mind, I recommend here books that are real… you just can’t read them yet. These are works in progress (or soon to be published) by contributors to the upcoming Brown Issue of the Fairy Tale Review, which I guest-edited. The issue will be out in the fall.
Kate Bernheimer, “Goodnight”
I begin not with a Brown Issue contributor, but with Fairy Tale Review’s editor and founder. I’m hoping, in this blog post, to be the first and the last to proclaim Kate’s own writing neglected. (In other words, I hope I appear savvy in noting that her brilliant writing has not received its rightful celebration, but I also hope, and anticipate, that such neglect will expire soon.) While Kate tirelessly promotes the fairy tale tradition and the work of other writers, she has also written the stunning Gold Sisters trilogy. Each of the three novels (The Complete Tales of Ketzia Gold, Merry Gold, and Lucy Gold) exists in a landscape imbued with the sensuality and poetic mystery of adolescence and young adulthood. Her current novel-in-progress, “Goodnight,” is a tragic, haunting love story about the power of fable, in which children’s books, and the hypnotic reading of them, become life-or-death, in a way. The characters connect and disconnect in a calm, steady, yet heartbreaking manner, reminding me of the marathon dancers in Horace McCoy’s “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” And the very design of the book proves as poetic and innovative as the story’s telling; but I won’t say anything more, so as not to give anything away.
Owen King, “Reenactment”
When Owen recently sent me a draft of his novel-in-progress, I wasn’t expecting it to have so much physical heft; I know Owen mostly from his short stories. For this, his first novel, he’s created something quite mythic, packing both a literary wallop and also one of stature, standing at 2.5 inches in height (manuscript pages). This height includes a 25-page appendix of “Special Features & Deleted Scenes” (the “features”: an interview, dictionary fragments, budget sheet) inspired by the aspiring filmmaker at the novel’s center, a man named Sam Dolan. Sam Dolan’s father is also a filmmaker, a B-movie titan named Booth. (The first sentence of the current draft: “When the fullness of betrayal was at last made clear, when he finally grasped the continental size of the catastrophe and the insolubility of his predicament—once he understood that he was ruined—Sam Dolan did something surprising: he called his father.”) The cast of characters includes a man haunted by an invisible documentary crew, a cuckolded baseball player, and a satyr. (It also includes the 2008 election, weddingography, and stuffed animals left at grave sites.) Read more
