February is the month for lovers, and so this month’s reading is dedicated to love, sex, and matters of the heart. With some other stuff sprinkled in (for spice!):
This is Literary Lollapalooza, February Edition.
Books Read This Month:
Matched by Ally Condie
And the Heart Says Whatever by Emily Gould
My Horizontal Life by Chelsea Handler
Bonk by Mary Roach
John Constantine, HELLBLAZER: All His Engines by Carey and Manco
Look Out Whitey! Black Power’s Gon’ Get Your Mama! By Julius Lester
The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things by J.T. LeRoy
Y: The Last Man Vol. 2: Cycles by Brian K. Vaughn
Books Acquired:
Fiction: Election by Tom Perrotta, Porno by Irvine Welsh, Dear American Airlines by Jonathan Miles, Prayers for Rain by Dennis Lehane
Non-Fiction: And the Heart Says Whatever by Emily Gould, A World Lit By Fire by William Manchester
E-Books: John Brown by W.E.B DuBois, The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Where There Is Nothing: Being Volume One of Plays For an Irish Theatre by W.B. Yeats, The Wind Among the Reads by W.B. Yeats, The Tempers by William Carlos Williams, The Poetical Works of Lord Byron, The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins, The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Complete Poetical Works of John Keats, The Poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens, The Songs, Poems, and Sonnets of William Shakespeare, Songs of Innocence by William Blake, Selections from Wordsworth, The Poetical Works of Jonathan E. Hoag, Milton’s Paradise Lost Books I and II, Little Masterpieces by Benjamin Franklin, Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain, Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman, Democracy in America by Alexis De Toqueville, A Tramp Abroad by Mark Twain, A Book of Poems: AL QUE QUIERE! By William Carlos Williams (They were all FREE!)
Books Borrowed: John Constantine, HELLBAZER: All His Engines by Carey and Manco, Y: The Last Man: Cycles by Brian K. Vaughan, Procession of the Dead by Darren Shan
Currently Reading: Procession of the Dead by Darren Shan
Reviews of This Months’ Books:
Matched by Ally Condie
Matched garnered reviews linking it to The Hunger Games, a series of books I absolutely love. I didn’t love Matched near as much as I did The Hunger Games, but I can see why my wife did. Oops. That might sound sexist. I assure you I mean no disrespect.
The Hunger Games was about survival and rebellion, and was full of action. And then there was the love triangle. I found that somewhat annoying, but so what? It happens to serve the story, so I can get over it. Even enjoy it a little bit.
Matched is The Hunger Games without the action, survival, and rebellion. Basically it’s just the love triangle. If I were a teenage girl this would probably be one of the best books I’ve read. It’s well-written, and the world created here is fully-fleshed, something I think is essential for a dystopic novel. However, it just didn’t grab me the way The Hunger Games did.
The story is based on a future society where arranged marriages are the rule: every teenager gets “matched” with someone else. People can choose to be single for life, or they get “matched” and get married. Love doesn’t really enter into the equation.
Cassia is our main character and the story begins with her matching ceremony. She is nervous and giddy; excited to find out who she’ll be matched with. When the time comes she is astounded to be matched with her best friend Xander. Almost never do girls get matched with boys from their own town, much less someone they already know. But then things go awry when Cassia discovers a mistake in her “match” materials: Xander’s photo is momentarily replaced by the picture of Ky, another boy she knows vaguely from school. Ky has a secret and a painful past. Cassia starts to fall in love with Ky, the quiet loner she hardly noticed before. But the powers that be will make life difficult unless she falls in line and marries her match, Xander.
Again, it was a good read, but it was a little too love story-ish for me. A fitting beginning to the Valentine month, and I will be excited to read the second book in the series when it comes out, but my wife will surely read it first…and probably enjoy it more than I do. (This is me sticking out my tongue.)
And the Heart Says Whatever by Emily Gould
Emily Gould is the former editor of Gawker.com and is a contributor to The New York Times and The New York Observer. She grew up in nearby Silver Spring, MD (where I work!) and now lives in Brooklyn. I met Ms. Gould when she did a reading and signing at my store. At the time I hadn’t read or had any interest in reading this book. Then I met her and heard her read and I was sold.
This book is a collection of autobiographical essays chronicling Ms. Gould’s young life: from stories about childhood, teenage rebellion, into twenty-something slackerdom, she writes with unflinching honesty and heart-breaking clarity.
A beauty of a book, this is some of the most intimate and revealing writing out there. Perhaps it’s because of my own drug-addled formative years, but Emily Gould writes her life like she’s describing mine, each bad decision and wrong turn a shared memory of loss and redemption.
Powerfully self-aware, Emily Gould transcribes her twenties and all the heartbreak those important years entail. It is a document of a time and place, but one that transports the reader easily not only into Emily Gould’s past, but their own, as well. I highly recommend this book. She’s a great young voice, but one full of confidence.
My Horizontal Life by Chelsea Handler
This is also a collection of autobiographical essays. But that’s where the similarities end. Handler, a well-known comedienne, TV personality, and best-selling author burst onto the scene with this raunchy accounting of her history of one-night stands.
Like a female Tucker Max (minus the giant asshole quotient), she regales the reader with story after story of her many bedroom conquests and does so in hilarious fashion. This is a very funny book. Chelsea Handler is honest in a very self-deprecating and cynical way. These stories may be overtly about her sexual exploits, but in the end they reveal more about the author’s family and friends than it does titillate the reader with erotic ephemera.
I enjoyed this short read very much, and will most likely read her other two best-selling memoirs. My Horizontal Life is good reading, to be sure.
Bonk by Mary Roach
Mary Roach is a science writer who is funny as shit. I previously read her book Stiff which educated me on the history of the uses of the human cadaver in science research. I laughed throughout, but ultimately learned a great deal about a fascinating subject.
Bonk is Mary Roach writing about the history of the scientific study of sexual intercourse. It’s amazing. Hilarious and informative, this is science writing the only way I can take it: entertaining. Roach is a devout researcher, and goes to any length to dig a little deeper into her topic (here it includes duping her husband into a sex-experiment in a laboratory setting), and the results are always fascinating and often cringe-inducing or laugh-out-loud funny.
The history of scientific sexual study is relatively short, and carries with it a stigma of perversion. The scientists that study sexuality are often ridiculed and cast-aside by the public and even the scientific community, but this book does them all a great justice: it takes them seriously. In short and specific essays Mary Roach runs the gamut of scientific sexual research, but like Stiff, does so in an informative, easily readable way. Roach’s writing is like your favorite college professor: warm, engaging, exciting, and often funny and accessible. Great non-fiction for those of us without analytical minds, it makes me want to learn more. J
John Constantine, HELLBLAZER: All His Engines by Carey and Manco
Okay, so this has nothing to do with any monthly themes or ideas. This is the result of a last-minute and unexpected visit to the library.
I love John Constantine: HELLBLAZER. It has been my favorite monthly comic since it was it was first introduced by DC Comics in 1988. However there have been years of absence when I haven’t been a constant reader, so now I’m trying to catch up.
All His Engines is a stand-alone original graphic novel written by Mike Carey with art by Leonardo Manco. This is obviously most intended for fans, but even those unfamiliar are welcome, since it never appeared in single numbered issues, and therefore doesn’t fit into a strict timeline.
It centers on John and his best mate and chauffeur Chas confronting a world-wide epidemic that is causing children to fall into comas without apparent cause. The case brings them from London to L.A., and puts Constantine in the middle if a giant war for power between demons (or gods); where in usual Constantine fashion he plays them all against each other to get what he wants.
The writing is top-notch, and the art is some of the best I have seen in the series, right up at the top with original series artist, John Ridgway. This is a standalone story but it put me right back into the Hellblazer world that I love.
Sorry folks, this one was for me.
Look Out Whitey! Black Power’s Gon’ Get Your Mama! By Julius Lester
Aside from Valentine’s Day, February is also Black History Month. This is in honor of Black History Month.
I had to special order this book from a used book vendor because it is now out of print. I was first introduced to this book when one of my fellow crew members at Utah Shakespearean Festival (NATE!) bought this book at the gem of a used bookstore in Cedar City, UT. I remembered the title (how can you not?) and years later ordered it for my own library.
Julius Lester was the former field secretary of SNCC, and this is his manifesto on race relations as they pertained to America circa 1968. This starts out as a piece of angry black writing (i.e. Malcolm X’s “We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock…Plymouth Rock landed on us!”) and turns into a fascinating look at the history of the black civil rights movement. Okay, it doesn’t really ever stop being an angry black book, but it does stretch out of the box of crazy ‘60’s era propaganda and becomes pretty damn informative about black history.
As a college student I took a history of the African-American course and loved it (it was one of my favorite classes in the ever) and so this was right up my alley. Granted I started reading it because of the insane title, but I actually ended up really enjoying this angry little piece of American history. Julius Lester has a point: It’s not enough to say there is no more racism and move on in our happy white communities: we have to live with the black man, understand his history and the ways the white man has (and continues to degrade him), and fight everyday to undo the horrors that our ancestors inflicted.
This is not a happy book. It was written by an angry man at an angry time. But the good news is that this is now a piece of history, and one that is outdated enough to almost to be irrelevant. We should be ever-mindful of our past, and keep our eyes firmly on the future, vowing never to repeat our past mistakes. I am happy to say that this book that predicted a race war in the U.S. in the coming years was wrong. I am also disgusted by the fact that there are still people out there who can hate another person because of the color of their skin. (And there are many of them. And not just in the south.)
I suggest everyone take a moment to acknowledge the horrendous history of the United States and black people. You don’t have to read this book (you may not even be able to find it), but read some book, any book that explores the black experience in the United States. We need to be reminded. Constantly.
Y: The Last Man: Cycles by Brian K. Vaughn
This is the 2nd collection of the serialized single-numbered issues of this popular and ground-breaking comic book series. This is also because of that last minute and unexpected trip to the public library.
I read the first volume of this a few months back and I really enjoyed it. However, it took me awhile to get back into it after such a long time away. I think this is a story that will work best if I read straight through, like I had been doing with The Walking Dead.
The writing is great, the characters are flawed and layered, and I’m really intrigued about where it’s heading.
Obviously, you have to read volume one first. So…yeah: Those of you who have read part one, probably have also read part two. If you haven’t read either, you should read part one. Unless you don’t like comic books: Then…erm…yeah. Don’t.
The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things by J.T. LeRoy
Okay, I read this because I was trying to keep to my Valentine’s theme, and it has “heart” in the title. Lame, I know. But this actually ended up being a great end to a month of autobiographical essays.
The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things is published and sold as fiction, but the harrowing short stories collected here are thinly-veiled accounts of the author’s own fucked-up childhood.
LeRoy is an exceptional writer, but I almost can’t recommend this book, because the true stories contained herein are so awful and terrible, that it is almost too painful to read.
From very early memories, we see LeRoy raised by his drug-addicted, prostitute mother, who abuses him, neglects him, raises him as a “pretty little girl” and often abandons him (only to be raped by an angry ex), only to be rescued by his strict, abusively religious grandparents. His is a tale I wouldn’t wish upon anyone: childhood rape, abject poverty, forced drug-use, this is white-knuckle reading. It’s awful, but it’s real. And it’s heart-breaking and life-affirming at the same time.
There’s no wonder he wrote a book about it. What else could you do, to even process the awful shit that happened to you, other than expel it, put it down on paper, so that it’s a real, solid thing.
This is a great, terrible read. It’s heartbreaking, and it often made me shudder, and a couple of time I wanted to hurl. But it is fantastically written. And sometimes reading about somebody else’s fucked-up life puts our own in perspective.
That's all for February, check back in a months' time and see what March has in store! Also, as always, I appreciate your comments, notes and most importantly your suggestions! Please leave me a message letting me know what you think I should read! Happy reading,ya'll.
What is the What by Dave Eggers
Into the Wild by Jonathan Krakauer
Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach
Medium Raw by Anthony Bourdain 
Funny Misshapen Body by Jeffrey Brown
The Audacity to Win by David Plouffe
The Next 100 Years by George Friedman
Morbid Curiosity:
Bedwetter by Sarah Silverman
The Book of Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb
House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami 
The Hunger Games—Suzanne Collins
The Magicians—Lev Grossman
Scott Pilgrim V. 1-6—Brian Lee O’Malley
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
The Angel’s Game—Carlos Zafon-Ruiz
Point Omega by Don DeLillo
Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem
The Great Perhaps by Joe Meno