It's American Idol season, which means that most of my conversations with family and friends get short-circuited with outbursts of "Why was Allison in the bottom three!?" or "How come the judges won't call Kris Allen a front-runner?!" or "J'enough with this fourth-judge business!" To help stave off these ugly incidents -- not to mention my bastardization of French contractions -- I've been on a particularly voracious reading kick, ripping through eight or nine books over the last six weeks. Currently sitting on my nightstand -- while I try to find room on my heinously overcrowded bookshelves -- are completed copies of Cormac McCarthy's The Road (unbelievably good, and unbelievably harrowing), Armistead Maupin's More Tales of the City (a breezy chaser to McCarthy's tale from the post-apocalypse), Lee Child's The Hard Way (action-packed jaunt that kept keeping me up past my bedtime) and Michael Palmer's The Second Opinion (trashy-ish, crowd-pleasing medical thriller), as well as my current project, Hilary Mantel's Beyond Black (I'm 90 pages in...and it's pretty hard to put down!). Which brings me to my question: What's sitting on your nightstand right this second? All must be revealed, people! And no substituting Shakespeare if there's a Harlequin romance novel next to your alarm clock: Nightstand Inspection is a judgment-free exercise!
To me, one of the great joys in life is picking up a trashy thriller at the airport and channeling any flight/travel anxiety into said book. During a recent vacation, and with only a few minutes left before boarding, I popped into the airport newsstand, where a big red sticker on the cover of a Brian Freeman's Stalked caught my eye: "As good as MICHAEL CONNELLY or your money back," it blared, and my mind was made up. So what if I've never actually read a book by Michael Connelly? I mean, dude's name was in ALL CAPS, and hello, who doesn't love a money-back guarantee? The good news is, Stalked did the trick: Moved along at a rapid pace, scared the tarmac out of me, and never once forced me to think deeply (an activity that's strictly verboten during vacation travel).
This got me wondering: What was your most recent book impulse buy, what factors actually prompted you to part with your hard-earned cash, and most importantly, were you satisfied with your purchase? Spill the beans, PopWatchers!
There are three books sitting on my nightstand right now. Last week, I finished E. Annie Proulx's lovely Pulitzer Prize winner, The Shipping News, but I still haven't figured out a way to make space for it on my overcrowded bookshelves. (Donate some not-so-classic tomes, or buy yet another bookcase? That is the eternal question.) Of course, after finishing such a thoughtful, well-crafted feast, I immediately craved junk food, and I am currently midway through the literary bag of Cheetos known as Secret Diary of a Call Girl (by the Artist Formerly Known as Belle de Jour, and now just credited as Anonymous). Honestly, the new Showtime series (starring the fabulous Billie Piper) is a lot better than the source material, which is why I've already got Meera Syal's Life Isn't All Ha Ha He He queued up and ready for reading, hopefully by mid-weekend.
So that's my current roster of books: What's on your nightstand right now, P-Dubs? All must be revealed... even (especially) if you're in the middle of some trashy/delicious beach read.
"No one in novels watches TV," a character declares early in Jane Austen Book Club author Karen Joy Fowler's Wit's End, by way of explaining why she no longer thinks printed literature is a truly living medium. There are several levels of irony included in that casual dismissal: This character happens to be a wildly successful novelist herself, for one. And Wit's End happens to be a novel in which lots of people watch a lot of TV. Fowler's characters chat casually about Lost, Prison Break, 24, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Battlestar Galactica, Bones, and more. She really does capture what it's like to be a post-millennial pop-culture junkie without beating the theme into readers' heads, and that alone makes me respectfully differ with the solid B that Wit's End received in EW recently. I wolfed it down over the course of two recent plane flights, and I can't recommend it highly enough.
Wit's End has also gotten much attention for the way its plot turns on characters' use of Wikipedia, LiveJournal, and fanfic sites. The websites themselves come to life practically as vividly as some of Fowler's secondary characters. As io9's Annalee Newitz has put it, this makes the novel a kind of "science fiction in the present": "While there are no aliens here, or artificial intelligences who come to life, Wit's End
manages to skirt the edges of science fiction themes beautifully,
hinting at the ways our lives have become the stuff of science fiction
without us noticing." And these big, explicit nods to the world that Web 2.0 has wrought aren't so different from those incidental TV references, are they? In both, Fowler is playing with the communities created by a popular medium — the incredible collective experiences shared by people who watch a series or user-edit a website.
I think the reason I like Wit's End so much is because it fits into one of my favorite kinds of entertainment: pop culture about other kinds of pop culture. The Truman Show was a movie about TV; the fourth-season finale of Curb Your Enthusiasm was a TV episode about Broadway (Mel Brooks' The Producers). Have any of you out there read Wit's End? And even if not, do you have any other favorite cross-media works of art like this?
So I finally finished reading Special Topics in Calamity Physics — not bad, but really needed a good editor to dial back the irritating excesses, no? — and after an Idol-heavy week where my nighttime reading consisted mainly of backlogged issues of EW, Everyday Food, and the Blood-Horse (What can I say? I'm a pedigree buff!), I'm now about a third of the way through Thomas Mallon's Fellow Travelers. So far, this wistful historical novel about clandestine gay lovers in the McCarthy era is doing the trick of keeping me up well past my bedtime, and I suspect I'll be finished by this time next week.
With that in mind, it's time for all y'all to reveal what's on your nightstand right this second. I'm thinking it might be fun to pick our next reads from the comments section below. Fun!
I got handed a lot of random stuff at the free-for-all that was SXSW last month. Everywhere I turned, some dude was offering me a CD, a flier for his band's show, an ill-fitting promotional t-shirt, a cocktail made using the super-expensive new liquor brand sponsoring the party I was at — it was a tough assignment, lemme tell ya. (I also caught a musical performance or two.) But of all that swag, practically the only thing that was truly worth lugging home from Texas was a book about music called The Boy Who Cried Freebird. Author Mitch Myers gave me a copy when we met through colleagues toward the end of the festival, promising it'd make good airplane reading on my return flight. He was right, and I'm still making my way through its pages almost a month later. It's not that it's a particularly long book (just 300 or so pages) — there's just so much in there that it'd be a shame to rush through.
The Boy Who Cried Freebird explores rock history through a strange blend of journalistic investigations, speculative rumors, solemn appreciations, and flat-out fiction. In one chapter, a kid from the future travels back in time to see the Grateful Dead play the Fillmore West; in another, Myers waxes philosophical about the true intent of Lou Reed's infamous Metal Machine Music. It's a weird little treasure trove of a book — funny, moving, and informative — and now that it's come out in paperback this week, it's even easier to add it to your nightstand rotation. In the meantime, what are some of your favorite books about music (fiction or non)?
We've had a lot of fun the last few months with our iPod inspection feature — I always get a gajillion ideas for new songs to download — and over the weekend, I wondered why we hadn't tried the same idea with books. So without further delay, let's get the party started: What's currently on your nightstand (or, you know, wherever you keep your reading material)? I just started Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl, and also sitting next to the bed is the recently completed (and pretty terrific) The Chatham School Affair by Thomas H. Cook, which hasn't yet found a spot on one of my brutally overcrowded bookshelves.
Okay, your turn...
