Literary Lollapalooza April 2009

This month’s Literary Lollapalooza is a short one featuring a book many of you saw me gush over on Facebook. Besides that one, I started reading The Idiot which would take me through most of May as well, so not a lot to report. I had the fortune (or misfortune, if you ask my bank account) of happening upon some really terrific book sales and so this month is a little heavy on the acquisitions side. Lord knows when I’ll find the time to read them all…

This is Literary Lollapalooza, April Edition.

Books Acquired:

Fiction: The Boy Detective Fails by Joe Meno, The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Body Artist by Don DeLillo, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers, Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri, Impulse by Ellen Hopkins, God Is Dead by Ron Currie, Jr., Interred With Their Bones by Jennifer Lee Carrell, The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly, Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut, The Night Gardener by George Pelecanos, Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift

Non-Fiction: The Year of Living Biblically by A.J. Jacobs, Outcasts United by Warren St. John, How to Win a Cosmic War by Reza Aslan, The End of Oil by Paul Roberts, The Day the World Ended at Little Big Horn by Joseph M. Marshall III, Popism: The Warhol Sixties by Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, Candy Girl by Diablo Cody, Champlain’s Dream by David Hackett Fischer, The Secret War with Iran by Ronen Bergman, Books by Larry McMurtry, The American Way of War by Eugene Jarecki, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer

Books Borrowed:

Books Read:

The Boy Detective Fails by Joe Meno.

My friend Ryan had been touting this book for quite some time as his favorite book and encouraging all his friends to read it. I ignored him. Or rather, I added it to the dustbin in my mind reserved for odd pieces of information I’ll probably never put to good use. Then back in February he reminded me again (undoubtedly in one of those silly web surveys) that this was a book that I MUST read. I took him up on his suggestion and read the damn thing.

First, of all: I loved this book. It’s not my favorite book, sorry Ryan. But I did love the hell out of it. And I would be willing to bet that anyone who remembers reading the “Encylopedia Brown” books, or The Hardy Boys, or Nancy Drew mysteries, reveling in the finely drawn sets of clues, the simple solution sussed out amongst friends, and the glory as the evil candy factory owner gets hauled away in cuffs will find much to enjoy here.

The titular Boy Detective, Billy Argo, is a childhood crime-solving phenom much like the above mentioned “Encylopedia Brown”, solving simple mysteries with the help of his sister and pudgy friend, vanquishing evil villains and garnering accolades. There’s only one major problem: life goes on, people grow up, and life gets messy. There are no simple solutions, no masked villains causing our collective misery. Just plain, old everyday fear, self-conciousness, and doubt. As the years pass and young Billy heads off to college, his world is destroyed when his younger sister and crime-solving partner Caroline commits suicide, sending him into a spiral of fear and helplessness.

Cut to ten years later and young Billy is being released from St. Vitus’ Hospital for the Mentally Ill. The world he encounters is foreign and frightening. He can barely draw the courage to leave his room, much less go to his new job as a telemarketer at a wig company. What’s even worse? There are people and buildings that are vanishing everyday, evil villains live next door, and animals are losing their heads. What’s a boy detective to do? With the help of two neighborhood children, and a lovely pickpocket named Penny, Billy begins to put the pieces together, and come to the greatest realization of his life.

The story is funny, cute, odd, disheartening, uplifting, and sweet. But what puts this book over the top in my opinion is the sense of childhood wonder and joy that it instills through its interactive features. That’s right: interactive. Readers are encouraged to use the decoder ring (thoughtfully included on the back book jacket) to solve clues throughout the book, helping Billy closer to his resolution, as well as additional fun items like a recipe for Angel Food Cake, and mazes and word-searches. This is a book for the dreamer in all of us, for the latent child detective in each of us, still searching for our own happy endings.