Just Kids by Patti Smith

Finally, by the sea, where God is everywhere, I gradually calmed. I stood looking at the sky. The clouds were the colors of a Raphael. A wounded rose. I had the sensation he had painted it himself. You will see him. You will know him. You will know his hand. These words came to me and I knew I would one day see a sky drawn by Robert's hand.

-Just Kids 

I can't say I knew much about Patti Smith before beginning Just Kids. I could have picked her out of a lineup, sure, and I knew of Horses. I'm pretty sure I've heard "Gloria." That's about all I had.

And I wouldn't have done much better with Robert Mapplethorpe, frankly, despite having majored in Art History. I knew photographs of flowers, and knew of some others that were somehow scandalous (though I don't know if I saw any slides of those ones, to be honest). I knew he'd died young.

So there was a lot to take in in Just Kids, which traces the relationship Smith and Mappelthorpe had, both romantic and artistic. It's also a portrait of New York City at a very particular time, a time of The Factory and the Hotel Chelsea and automats. I warmed quickly to Smith, but I especially loved reading about the city--a place I know--in a totally new way. It was really amazing to watch how Smith grew as an artist, from poet to rock and roll star, and how she encountered all the bright lights of that era in New York.  I loved hearing about her place in Brooklyn, about her going to Blick's Art Supply, about the bare-bones spaces she shared with Mapplethorpe in Chelsea (no bathroom, for one). In addition to recounting her history with Mapplethorpe quite beautifully, she also captures a moment in time. And I must say, I got teary when I read the passage I quoted above.

Up next: Almost nearly caught up! Drop Dead Healthy by A.J. Jacobs, which I just finished this afternoon.

Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? by Mindy Kaling

Bren and I befriended each other early on, became inseparable through a shared sense of humor, a trove of nonsensical private jokes, and had the same enemies within the Drama Department. We clung to each other with blind loyalty, like Lord Voldemort and his snake, Nagini. I, of course, was Nagini. If you messed with one of us, you knew you messed with both of us, and Voldemort was going to cast a murder spell on you, or Nagini was going to chomp on your jugular. It was such a good, dramatic time.

-Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? 

Oh, dear. I am disastrously, disastrously behind here. Things have been fun & busy here in real life, which has left me with slightly less time to ruminate about books. Still, I hate to abandon things, so I'll try to scrape together some--probably abbreviated--posts.

I wanted to come up with some cute intro for Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?, something to explain how much I like Mindy Kaling or how much I'd been looking forward to reading her book. Unfortunately, all I seem to be able to come up with are cliches and anecdotes about cupcakes, which I'm going to skip in the interest in keeping things moving.

I read this book quite quickly--I think I read the first chapter before going to bed one night, then finished the rest the next day. It's light and (unsurprisingly) funny, the tone conversational and very engaging. Kaling writes about her childhood, her college life, and her struggle to make it in New York post-graduation. She has the killer combination of being both extremely funny and extremely dedicated, so (spoiler alert!) even given the difficulty of the industry, it's easy to see why she's been as successful as she has. If she didn't seem so awesome, I'd have to be a little jealous. Instead I'll just content myself by enjoying her Twitter feed and looking forward to her new fall pilot. I could definitely see rereading this one in the future, especially if I were in need of a pick-me-up.

Up next: Got on a little comedy kick and went with Pawnee: The Greatest Town in America.

Bossypants by Tina Fey

Why is this book called Bossypants? One, because the name Two and a Half Men was already taken. And two, because ever since I became an executive producer of 30 Rock, people have asked me, "Is it hard for you, being the boss?" and "Is it uncomfortable for you to be the person in charge?" You know, in that same way they say, "Gosh, Mr. Trump, is it awkward for you to be the boss of all these people?" I can't answer for Mr. Trump, but in my case it is not. I've learned a lot over the past ten years about what it means to be the boss of people. In most cases being a good boss means hiring talented people and then getting out of their way. In other cases, to get the best work out of people you may have to pretend you are not their boss and let them treat someone else like the boss, and then that person whispers to you behind a fake wall and you tell them what to tell the first person. Contrary to what I believed as a little girl, being the boss almost never involves marching around, waving your arms, and chanting, "I am the boss! I am the boss!"

-Bossypants 

So I decided I needed to take a bit of a breather from Little Dorrit, which I hate to admit is fairly slow going so far. I'm nearly halfway through, and I'm hoping things will kick into high gear soon. In the weeks I've been reading it, a dozen books from various sources have piled up on my shelf, and I thought it might be better to take a break and read a couple of those. Thus, Bossypants, a birthday present from my most excellent brother.

I've loved (and identified with) Tina Fey since she first came into the spotlight as co-anchor of Weekend Update. I always have solidarity with ladies who wear glasses, but beyond that she seemed both funny and incisive, which is about the best you can ask for in a comedian. Also, she went to my alma mater, which means I was lucky enough to see her perform on stage with a touring company of Second City during my time there.

All of this led me to believe that I would be a great fan of Bossypants, and I was absolutely right. Tina (I feel like I can call her Tina, right?) starts with a self-deprecating look at her nerdy childhood, which is always a good start in my book. She covers everything from her college years* to her time running 30 Rock, with enough room in between to share the story of a honeymoon cruise gone wrong and the travails of working at the YMCA. Tina has that enviable talent of a great writer to take a fairly mundane situation and make it both funny and engrossing--you just want her to tell you about everything. 

It's a very quick read--ideal for bringing along on a plane trip or to the beach if you don't mind risking looking a bit crazy while stifling laughter in public. I'm quite pleased to have a copy, as I can definitely see both rereading it and lending it out in the future.

Up next: I am quite behind in blog posts, so I've already finished Spoiled by Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan.

*I was pleased when she took a line to explain a bit of the terminology we use at Mr. Jefferson's University. It's absolutely pretentious of us and I love it so.Wahoowa!

Born Round by Frank Bruni

I have neither a therapist's diagnosis nor any scientific literature to support the following claim, and I can't back it up with more than a cursory level of detail. So you're just going to have to go with me on this: I was a baby bulimic.

Maybe not baby—toddler bulimic is more like it, though I didn't so much toddle as wobble, given the roundness of my expanding form. I had been a plump infant and was on my way to becoming an even plumper child, a ravenous machine determined to devour anything in its sights. My parents would later tell me, my friends and anyone else willing to listen that they'd never seen a kid eat the way I ate or react the way I reacted when I was denied more food. What I did in those circumstances was throw up.

I have no independent memory of this. But according to my mother, it began when I was about eighteen months old. It went on for no more than a year. And I'd congratulate myself here for stopping such an evidently compulsive behavior without the benefit of an intervention or the ability to read a self-help book except I wasn't so much stopping as pausing. But I'm getting ahead of the story.

-Born Round

"Born round, you don't die square." So believes Frank Bruni's grandmother: that kind of change isn't possible in a lifetime. What does that mean for Bruni, though? He's a born eater, a self-professed baby bulimic who has struggled with food issues his entire life. At the beginning of the book, he's working in Rome as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. After a rough period during which he covered the 2000 election campaign of George W. Bush and piled on the pounds, he finally seems to have his weight under control. A life-changing opportunity comes his way: the position of Times food critic is open, and he's up for consideration. But can he handle the intense commitment to food that the job requires without falling back into his old habits?

Having posed the question, Bruni travels back to the beginning of things. He details a childhood filled with food and love, with the former seen as an appropriate way to express the latter. His beloved grandmother, born in Italy, never makes anything short of a feast for her family, and Bruni is happy to partake. He does notice that his appetite outstrips that of his siblings, and even at a young age he's bigger than his older brother. His mother begins to devise diets for the two of them to try, but it breaks his heart to turn down one of his grandmother's fritti.

Bruni is able to (temporarily) leave diets behind when he finds he has a natural affinity for swimming. His rigorous practice schedule keeps his weight in check, although he still finds himself eating more than anyone around him. When he goes off to college and quits swimming, he scrambles to prevent his overeating from affecting his weight, eventually turning to bulimia. Although he manages to recover from that, his weight problems continue to plague him. He's intensely self-conscious about his weight, going so far as to repeatedly postpone dates so that he can lose just a few more pounds before he's seen. It may come as no surprise that these dates often never happen.

Things change for Bruni, but slowly, and they get worse before they get better. Born Round is not only a very personal account of  his struggle with weight, but also a moving story of his family life and the sweetness of his professional success. He really lays himself bare before his reader. It breaks my heart to think back to one story he tells, of a family gathering when he was at his heaviest. The siblings are sniping at one another, and one of his brothers calls him fat. It's everything he fears and hates about himself, and he flees the room, finding an out-of-the-way place where he can cry. It's hard not to be drawn in by a writer who is willing to show such vulnerability.

I very much enjoyed Born Round. I spent awhile reading it, but I could easily see how someone could delve in and read for hours. Bruni is a very likable narrator, and in addition to all of the personal stories, he also has some good inside dirt about being a food critic. I think it would be an excellent book to travel with. I would love to read more by him—maybe I'll dig up some old reviews, if I can find them. I'm pretty jealous of his facility with words, I must say. His prose seems effortless. He was a Pulitzer Prize finalist before he was thirty, and you can see why. Pretty remarkable.

Up next: The Best American Mystery Stories 2008, edited by George Pelecanos (Wire shout-out!).

Lit by Mary Karr

That's pretty much how the reading went, one balled-up page after another, mingled with lyric poems of great finish and hilarity. The audience hooted in wild and rolling waves. Guys in the front row started throwing the paper balls back, which made Knott hump even deeper in his oversize clothes as if dodging hurled tomatoes. 

At the end, a guy in a tie next to me said, I used to think poets shouldn't get public grants, but this guy really can't do anything else. 

When Knott left the stage, people hollered for him to come back.

I sat on the hard floor almost aquiver. Writers had heretofore been mythical to me as griffins—winged, otherworldly creatures you had to conjure from the hard-to-find pages they left behind. That was partly why I'd not tried too hard to become one: it was like deciding to be a cowgirl or a maenad.

-Lit

Lit is author Mary Karr's third memoir, following her hugely successful account of her childhood, The Liars' Club, and Cherry, in which she recalled her teenage years. I haven't read either of those books, and it did occur to me before picking up Lit that it might not be ideal to drop into the middle of Karr's story. Although Lit might have more resonance in some places for readers who are more aware of the particulars of Karr's background, I found that it worked extremely well as a standalone book as well.

I stumbled upon Lit at the library, where it was shelved opposite Stephen King's On Writing. I had been craving some high-quality nonfiction and, based on some dimly-recalled reviews, I thought that Lit would fit the bill. In Lit, Karr picks up her story on the cusp of a sea change in her life: college. It's a big step for her, a decision she grapples with, and one that will help set her on the winding path to becoming a bestselling writer and award-winning poet (Guggenheim Fellowship!). It's a tumultuous journey in which she is both buoyed by love for her husband (and later her son) and dragged further and further down into the murky depths of alcoholism. The latter takes a wrecking ball to the fragile stability she'd wrought with the former, as you might imagine. Recovery is a slow, halting process.

William Faulkner once famously wrote, "The past is never dead. It's not even past." Karr's past pops up continually, from the ongoing drama of her relationship with her parents (Mother and Daddy, as she calls them) to her unease at fitting in with her husband's patrician family to her concern about righting the wrongs of her childhood in raising her own son. The glimpses of her childhood that we get in Lit are traumatic, not the kind of thing that it's easy to make peace with. Karr struggles long and hard, and, surprisingly (to herself most of all), begins to find solace in prayer. She's cynical at first, refusing even to get to her knees as she mutters two sentences of gratitude. Through contemplation and discussion with many people around her, particularly those she's gotten to know through AA, her thoughts on religion begin to change. This can be a tricky subject to address without becoming overly preachy; luckily, Karr is an adept writer who always maintains a humanizing, almost self-deprecating element when recounting her conversion.

Karr's training as a poet is evident throughout Lit. She has a gift for finding the perfect word, and her choices often recall her hardscrabble childhood (people tend to holler instead of yell or shout, for example, as you can see in the excerpt above). It wasn't a difficult read in terms of language, but it was intense, which makes me think I'll wait a bit before picking up The Liars' Club. Based on Lit, though, I know I'll want to read it at some point.

Up next: Continuing the memoir streak with Born Round by Frank Bruni.

On Writing by Stephen King

[B]ooks are a uniquely portable magic. I usually listen to one in the car (always unabridged; I think abridged audiobooks are the pits), and carry another wherever I go. You just never know when you'll want an escape hatch: mile-long lines at tollbooth plazas, the fifteen minutes you have to spend in the hall of some boring college building waiting for your advisor (who's got some yank-off in there threatening to commit suicide because he/she is flunking Custom Kurmfurling 101) to come out so you can get his signature on a drop-card, airport boarding lounges, laudromats on rainy afternoons, and the absolute worst, which is the doctor's office when the guy is running late and you have to wait half an hour in order to have something sensitive mauled. At such times I find a book vital. If I have to spend time in purgatory before going to one place or the other, I guess I'll be all right as long as there's a lending library (if there is it's probably stocked with nothing but novels by Danielle Steel and Chicken Soup books, ha-ha, joke's on you, Steve).

-On Writing 

When I was about 15, I went through a Stephen King phase. It was summer, I remember, and I'd picked up a sheet from the public library with spaces to record everything I read (a habit I picked back up in college, and basically just expanded upon when starting this blog). The Stand, Thinner, The Shining—just a fraction of King's bibliography, but a pretty good run. Somewhere along the way, though, I decided his books were too scary for me and moved on to other things (I think this was also around the same time of my ill-fated foray into Oprah's Book Club books, oddly enough). On Writing is the first Stephen King book I've read since, and I'm glad I finally got around to it.

On Writing is subtitled A Memoir of the Craft, which tidily sums up the different sections of the book. In the first section, C.V., King lays out his history and details how he got from the four-page stories he wrote as a kid to nailing rejection slips to his wall to publishing his first big success, Carrie. King has a special talent for developing an instant rapport with his reader, and I was with him immediately. He's plain-spoken but clever, honest about criticism he's received, and, heck, he just seems like a cool guy. It's hard not to be in his corner.

In the second section, On Writing, King gets into advice for aspiring writers. He covers everything from grammar to dialogue to editing, with some nifty examples included. His biggest piece of advice is simple but undoubtedly true: if you want to be a writer, you need to read a lot and write a lot. (I don't have the book with me right now, but I believe King stated he read 50-60 books a year; a list of his reading in the years he was working on this book is included at the end). I first heard the advice about reading more to write better from my 9th grade English teacher. As a voracious reader since childhood, I could always handle the "read a lot" part. "Write a lot" is harder. King recommends at least 1000 words a day (he himself writes 2000 daily). Whew. While not impossible in the least (you have to average 1700 words a day to make it through NaNoWriMo), it's a definite commitment. Which is good, really—you should be committed to something if you want to get better at it. But coming up with the words yourself is harder than reading them, that's for sure.*

The third section of On Writing is the most affecting. In it, King covers the 1999 accident in which he was hit by an out-of-control van. As someone who has been in the hospital pretty recently, I was wincing in sympathy. The extent of his injuries is actually difficult for me to fathom. I know how awful it is to break your leg in one place. King broke his in nine places; his doctors seriously considered amputation. Plus there was the broken hip, broken ribs, collapsed lung, etc. Really horrifying.

King was in the midst of writing On Writing when the accident occurred, and—unsurprisingly—it took him a while to get back to it.  Thank goodness he was able to. I enjoyed On Writing thoroughly. It even left me open to idea of trying a little more of his scarier works in the future—Misery, for one, sounds pretty gripping. It might be a good Halloween-y sort of read...

Up next: Continuing on the memoir kick: Lit by Mary Karr, whose book The Liars' Club is said to have started the memoir craze.

*This entry (minus the excerpt and this aside) is 610 words, just as a point of comparison, and took me a good hour to write.

Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

Generally speaking, though, Americans have an inability to relax into sheer pleasure. Ours is an entertainment-seeking nation, but not necessarily a pleasure-seeking one. Americans spend billions to keep themselves amused with everything from porn to theme parks to wars, but that's not exactly the same thing as quiet enjoyment. Americans work harder and longer and more stressful hours than anyone in the world today. But as Luca Spaghetti pointed out, we seem to like it. Alarming statistics back this observation up, showing that many Americans feel more happy and fulfilled in their offices than they do in their own homes. Of course, we all inevitably work too hard, then we get burned out and have to spend the whole weekend in our pajamas, eating cereal straight out of the box and staring at the TV in a mild coma (which is the opposite of working, yes, but not exactly the same thing as pleasure). Americans don't really know how to do nothing. This is the cause of that great sad American stereotype-the overstressed executive who goes on vacation, but who cannot relax.

I once asked Luca Spaghetti if Italians on vacation have that same problem. He laughed so hard he almost drove his motorbike into a fountain.

-Eat, Pray, Love

It took me a long time to get to Eat, Pray, Love, and I picked it up with some misgivings. I was concerned that it seemed a bit New Agey, perhaps a little treacly, like some other bestsellers that I've found underwhelming in the past few years. I saw the movie a couple of weeks ago, however, and found it pretty enjoyable, so I thought I'd give the book a fair shot.

I think most people are familiar with the premise of the book by this point: an American woman travels around the world in order to learn how to live a balanced life. It's a lot more entertaining than that little summary suggests, though (which I guess explains why it's been so popular, yeah?). Writer Elizabeth Gilbert starts her story at home in New York, where her marriage is falling apart and she's coping—well, not at all, really. She quickly finds herself in another relationship, but that, too, turns sour before long. She falls into a depression, finding comfort only in reading words from an Italian dictionary.

The comfort of these words becomes part of her inspiration to travel around the world. She begins in Italy, to discover the art of pleasure. This was my favorite part of the book, simply because I cannot get enough of all things Italian. (I really want to read this, by the way.) There are a lot of descriptions of amazing food, as well as many tales of how Italians live. After Italy, Liz moves onto India to learn how to live a spiritual life. There are some entertaining anecdotes in this section (I love anything with Richard from Texas) as well as some thought-provoking ideas. Sometimes she lost me entirely, particularly in describing her most successful meditation sessions—but she herself acknowledges how difficult it is to relay such an experience and how she had trouble reading accounts until she'd experienced it herself. It was interesting, regardless.

Liz finishes her journey in Bali, where she tries to achieve balance between a life of pleasure and one of devotion. She listens to a wise (and often entertaining) medicine man named Ketut and makes local friends. (As she does everywhere she goes, by the way. Quite a talent.) One of these is a divorced Brazilian man named Felipe; despite her best intentions, the book ends with Liz once again in a relationship. It's not a bad ending—it also marked the beginning for her more recent book Committed—but for whatever reason I found the Balinese section of the book to be the least engrossing of the three.

Overall, though, I really liked the book. Liz has a great voice and the ability to make you feel like you're a pal along for the trip. I even laughed out loud a few times, which is always lovely (unless you're in public, so fair warning, I suppose). Although Committed received somewhat lukewarm reviews, I think I'd be interested in reading it as well simply because I enjoyed her writing style that much.

Up next: Medium Raw by Anthony Bourdain. Love me some Tony! Speaking of Italy, I recently saw his No Reservations episode from Rome and it was awesome. Made cacio e pepe with la mia mamma the next night!

Moab Is My Washpot by Stephen Fry

Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry play chess - Cambridge, 1980

The story of a sensitive young weed struggling to grow up in the robust thicket of an English public school is not likely to arouse sympathy in the breasts of every reader. It was a subject done to death in the earlier part of this century in novels, memoirs, and autobiographies. I am a cliché and I know it. I was not kidnapped by slave traders, forced to shine shoes at the age of three in Rio or sent up chimneys by a sadistic sweep. I grew up neither in circumstances of abject poverty, nor in surroundings of fantastic wealth. I was not abused, neglected or exploited. Middle-class at a middle-class school in middle England, well nourished, well taught and well cared for, I have nothing of which to complain and my story, such as it is, is as much one of good fortune as of anything else. But it is my story and worth no more and no less than yours or anyone else's. It is, in my reading at least, a kind of pathetic love story. I would prefer to call it pathétique or even appassionata, but pathetic will do, in all its senses.

-Moab Is My Washpot

When I wrote about Jude Law's Hamlet, I mentioned that I had first come to notice him when I rented Wilde as a teenager. Wilde was also where I first came across Stephen Fry. I find it funny in retrospect that I have known of him for so long, whereas I only discovered his comedy partner Hugh Laurie, now much more famous here in America, about five years ago. * I assume, after House, it's much more common now to discover them the other way round.

Anyway, I've long liked Fry. If he'd done nothing but Jeeves and Wooster, he'd be in my good books, but that's only one of his many accomplishments. He's immensely, almost unbelievably clever, in a way that makes one despair about one's own education. To read Moab Is My Washpot, Fry's account of his youth and coming of age, is to delight in the company of someone who loves language and plays ever so nicely with it. The man can wield a word. It's actually quite difficult to carry on about well he writes without noticing that my own writing looks so lumpish and ungainly put next to his. Oh, difficulties.

Fry, in addition to being a clever-clogs - he wrote an epic poem in his teenage years in which he rhymed "Hitleresquely bad" with "picturesquely had" - is also disarmingly frank. His life story doesn't play entirely as one might expect. Oh, some of it does, yes - the public school**, the house in the countryside he takes care to describe as not too "Bridesheady." And even his schoolboy penchant for nicking pence from the pockets of his classmates might not seem too out of the ordinary. It starts to become evident, though, as time goes on, that things are starting to go awry - and this is long before he tries swiping credit cards, though it does come to that.

Clearly I have no idea how honest Fry is being in his account, but it certainly feels quite heartfelt. The shame he recalls at some points just radiates off the page - as does the love he feels for one of his classmates, the beautiful Matthew Osborne. Fry's love for Osborne (a pseudonym) was the all-consuming passion of his teenage years - and, in his recollection, possibly fuel for his increasingly reckless behavior.*** In any case, it's hard for a reader to stay indifferent in the face of any of it - even if you were otherwise totally unfamiliar with Fry, I don't see how you could come away unsympathetic.

I met Fry once, at a book signing last year - a little different from meeting him at a cocktail party, of course, but still exciting for me. As with every author signing I've been to, I found it a rather intimidating experience. He was very kind, though, and all the fans I saw walked away from meeting him with their signed books clutched tightly to their chests and smiles on their faces. Just another reminder of how lucky we are to have him around.

Up next: P.D. James's Talking About Detective Fiction, which I suspect I will breeze through quite quickly.


*Heck, I even knew about their fellow Cambridge Footlights member Tony Slattery, little known here, before I'd ever heard the name Hugh Laurie; I was a huge devotee of Whose Line Is It Anyway? (UK) during my senior year of high school. Tony Slattery in any Party Quirks sketch was always the best - especially the one where Rory Bremner plays Tony Slattery.

**It's amazing to me how much of Harry Potter is really true, minus the magic - just swap in double Maths for double Potions and rugby for Quidditch.

***Although his late-in-book spending spree, for instance, is classic manic behavior, and Fry has been diagnosed with manic depression. (He actually made a documentary about manic depression that I should seek out, as it sounded interesting. Quite interesting, even.)

My Booky Wook by Russell Brand

I'm incredibly sentimental about animals. It's the only opportunity I get to occupy the moral high ground: when I got clean, after chatting with some Krishna conscious devotees, I gave up fish as well. They said if you put death into your body you will emit death, but I'm mostly in it for the high ground. "You're vegetarian?" comes the inquiry. "Yes." Then the inevitable, "Do you eat fish?" This is where they catch a lot of people out: the inquisitor is already at this stage anticipating a "Yes" and loading up with, "Ah, well, you're not a proper vegetarian then are you because fish are incredibly sensitive and some of them write haikus." That's why I have to stifle a smug grin when I reply, "No. No, I don't eat fish because it's cruel to them, the lovely little things." And on particularly smarmy days, "If you put death into your body you emit death." Even as a junkie I stayed true - "I shall have heroin, but I shan't have a hamburger." What a sexy little paradox.

-My Booky Wook

Russell Brand is an excellent subway companion - too good, almost. There was more than one day last week that I was loath to get off at my stop because I didn't want my time with Brand to come to an end.

Of course, I only had him in book format, but that was pretty good as far as those things go. (If I'd traveled with the real Brand, I think we can all assume there's no way I would have made it to work without some kind of rannygazoo* ensuing.) My Booky Wook is an eye-poppingly candid account of Brand's rocky childhood in Essex, his ascent into the world of show business, and his simultaneous descent into full-blown heroin addiction. He also deals with his slightly too, ah, spirited pursuit of ladies, which results in a stint in a New Jersey sex rehab. You can see how one might regret having to close the book every morning.

Russell Brand is one of those people I just knew that I'd like - I mean, just look at that hair. How can you not love him a bit?** He stole the show in the (mediocre, in my opinion) Forgetting Sarah Marshall, but I didn't really feel compelled to read his memoirs until I watched The Big Fat Quiz of the Year (search for 2006, 2007, and 2009 on YouTube if you need a laugh - and have a fair amount of time at your disposal). He's just so clever, so cheeky, and especially such a delightful teammate to Noel "King of the Mods" Fielding. (The Goth Detectives. I rest my case.)

"You just give us 48 hours and we'll get the job done - if we weren't so bloody miserable."

I don't think I have much of anything in common with him - but it doesn't matter, because the man can really tell a story, and My Booky Wook captures his distinctive voice perfectly. It's an affecting memoir, really. He tries to make light of things often, but at a certain point you can't help but go, wait, his father's taking him to a strip club in Southeast Asia? He's cutting himself while someone is calling 911 (well, 999)? Clearly things were not ship shape. He's told at one point, right before choosing to go to rehab, that in six months he will be in jail, a mental institution, or dead. It does not seem like an exaggeration. He did some things that I found horrible (or horrifying), but it is a testament to his charm that I still can't help but like him. He's really a singular man, in the end.

Up next: Working on Keats, as I indicated in the previous post. I imagine it will be slow going, and I may take a break as I'm traveling next week, and I can't bear to lug this 600-page behemoth on a plane.

*A Brand word if I ever heard one. Well, a Wodehouse word really, but Brand really has a flair for language. It means nonsense, incidentally.

**I'm sure tons of people have jerky things to say about his hair - I know not everyone shares the love. Tough for them, I suppose.

My Life in France by Julia Child with Alex Prud'homme

In Pasadena, California, where I was raised, France did not have a good reputation. My tall and taciturn father, "Big John" McWilliams, liked to say that all Europeans, especially the French, were "dark" and "dirty," although he'd never actually been to Europe and didn't know any Frenchmen. I had met some French people, but they were a couple of cranky spinster schoolteachers. Despite years of "learning" French, by rote, I could neither speak nor understand a word of the language. Furthermore, thanks to articles in Vogue and Hollywood spectaculars, I suspected that France was a nation of icky-picky people where the women were all dainty, exquisitely coiffed, nasty little creatures, the men all Adolphe Menjou-like dandies who twirled their mustaches, pinched girls, and schemed against American rubes.

I was a six-foot-two-inch, thirty-six-year-old, rather loud and unserious Californian. The sight of France in my porthole was like a giant question mark.

-My Life in France

I love Julia Child. I didn't know this before reading My Life in France, but it turns out that it's absolutely true. I totally understand where Julie Powell was coming from (although now that I can compare Julie with Julia, it doesn't do Julie any favors).

I don't see how you could read this book and not love Julia. My Life in France commences with Julia moving to France with her husband, the artist and diplomat Paul Child. She falls in love with French cuisine immediately, but it takes some time for her to develop the idea of cooking herself. She enrolls in Le Cordon Bleu, and takes to it with what one quickly discovers is a characteristic zeal. This is Julia Child becoming Julia Child.

As Julia takes on cooking, she meets Simone "Simca" Beck and Louisette Bertholle, who are writing a cookbook on traditional French cuisine. Julia gets involved, and the book quickly becomes a new obsession. Cookery-bookery (as Julia refers to it) involves enormous amounts of time spent developing, testing, and writing up recipes, then conferring with her co-authors (mostly Simca, as time wore on). Although the book did not originate with her, over the years it becomes Julia's baby. She brings stacks of manuscript with her when Paul is transferred from France to Marseille, then again to Plittersdorf, Germany; Oslo; and finally back to the States. We follow her throughout this epic undertaking, sharing in her delight at a recipe perfected as well as her disappointment when her publisher does not want to produce the finished work.

When I think of Julia, words like "pluck" and "moxie" and, inevitably, joie de vivre come to mind. Although her life was privileged, it wasn't always easy - particularly in the way her husband was treated by the government (he was interrogated during the McCarthy era). She always made the most of it, though, and I loved reading about her journey.

As much as this book is about Julia's love of food, and of Paul, it is about Julia's love of France. Although I am no cook*, I wholeheartedly identify with this love of France, which I've shared almost as long as I can remember. When I was in high school, I used to take most of the money I received at my birthday and Christmas and put it in a jar marked "Money for France." I spent it in college - not in France, alas (though I did go to Italy). I still haven't been to France, but reading this book was a lovely vicarious experience. I highly recommend it.

A note on the film Julia & Julia: In my review of the book Julie & Julia (which I linked to above), I recommended the film over Julie Powell's book. My Life in France provided the inspiration for the Julia sections of that movie, and although Meryl Streep is delightful as Julia, this book is the most essential of the three works.

Up next: Land of Lincoln by Andrew Ferguson, a study of the ways in which Lincoln is still part of our lives today. I love Lincoln, so I'm excited for this one.

*I do think reading books about food is inspiring me to experiment a bit more, though. This weekend I made an apple pie - it had plenty of butter in it, so I think Julia would have approved. This is the next thing I want to try:

YouTube - Julia Child Makes an Omelet.

Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain

I took a fateful cab ride many years ago. Rolling back from the Lower East Side with a bunch of close friends, all of us fresh from scoring dope, I jokingly remarked on an article I'd seen, detailing the statistical likelihood of successfully detoxing.

"Only one in four has a chance at making it. Ha, ha, ha," I said, my words ringing immediately painful and hollow as soon as I'd said them. I counted our number in the back of that rattling Checker Marathon. Four. And right there, I knew that if one of us was getting off dope, and staying off dope, it was going to be me. I wasn't going to let these guys drag me down. I didn't care what it took, how long I'd known them, what we'd been through together or how close we'd been. I was going to live. I was the guy.

I made it. They didn't.

I don't feel guilty about that.

-Kitchen Confidential

Tony Bourdain is not a rock star, although it would be an easy mistake to make. He's a (now-famous*) chef, and reputedly quite a good one. Kitchen Confidential details his misspent youth as a cook-for-hire, and how he cleaned himself him up, got serious, and started running Brasserie Les Halles here in New York.

Kitchen Confidential also, famously, tells some tricks of the trade - I've been hearing the "never order seafood on a Monday" advice for years now, based on this book. That's really only one chapter, however, as Bourdain mostly hops from kitchen to kitchen, giving a behind-the-scenes look at some of the many places where he has worked. I especially liked the chapter in which he takes the reader through a day in his life at Les Halles, giving a comprehensive look at every thing a top chef must juggle, from ordering food to managing staff issues to, of course, actually cooking. It only reinforced my belief - initially brought on by reading the excellent Heat by Bill Buford and by watching bits and pieces of Hell's Kitchen - that I would make a lousy chef. Not only because of my absolute lack of culinary skills, although certainly that would be a problem, but because of the lightning-fast pace. Also, the yelling. I prefer slower, yelling-free environments. This is one of many ways in which Bourdain and I differ.

Despite the fact that I find the prospect of ever encountering him in real life slightly terrifying (the man is intense), I really enjoyed having Bourdain as a guide in the world of cooking. Kitchen Confidential is actually not the first book I've read by him**, so I knew to expect the cursing and the chain smoking and the jibes at vegetarians. I assume many people are also familiar with his persona from his show No Reservations which I, not having cable, have never seen. I mean, it took me this long to read the book. Clearly I'm a little behind.

Up next: Although I have My Life in France by Julia Child sitting here, I've decided I need a little breather from cooking. I'm rereading North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell. Another reread, I know. Why, you might ask? Surely it's not just an excuse to post pictures from the miniseries, like this:


No, of course not. That would be terribly shallow of me. You'll just have to wait a bit to see why I think Mr. Thornton is perhaps a better catch than Mr. Darcy. Oh yes, I said it.

*He passes the dad test: If my dad knows who someone is, that person is really, truly famous (as opposed to Us Weekly-famous or only-on-music-blogs-famous).

**A Cook's Tour, which follows Bourdain around the world as he seeks out the perfect meal, is highly entertaining and informative. I believe it was also a tv show on the Food Network, which I'd love to see, if only because in the book he'd occasionally go off on great tangents about the hazards of filming.