Bookpusher

Not exactly fishing, but I’ll be away from the blog for a bit. Next week is our fifth anniversary, and my wife and I are going someplace warm that involves sand and salt water. I will post suitable-for-viewing vacation photos on the flickr account upon my return.

On the flight over, I’ll be reading Daniel Silva’s new book, The Messenger. Anything Silva writes is gold, particularly his Gabriel Allon series.

In the meantime, let me know what you’ve been reading.

Ever since switching over to wordpress, I’m fascinated that I’m able to see how people get to my site, including search engine terms that point here. My old stomping grounds, livejournal, never did that. This morning, while checking my stats, I see that someone visited who typed in “Rachael Ray shoe size” into Google.

Bookpusher: a site for foot fetishists who are addicted to the Food Network! Welcome!

(For the record, she wears a 10 1/2. Little known fact.)

Aside from the sublime Project Runway on Bravo, the reality show that’s hooked me in this summer is the perfectly trashy Rock Star: Supernova. I say perfectly trashy because there’s enough talent on the show to be watchable and entertaining, but it also has enough trashy elements that you can feel justified by sitting back and watching the awkwardness unfold. It’s not quite car-wreck television on the level of America’s Got Talent, but it ain’t Runway, either.

What makes it awkward is the co-host, Brooke Burke. A surgically-enhanced model who has all the charisma and personality as a pile of cold mashed potatoes, Burke’s job is to wear revealing clothing, handle the introductions, and to throw the show to commercials. She also makes clumsy banter with the other co-host, Dave Navarro, who’s far more at ease with the proceedings and doesn’t take himself nearly as seriously. The Supernova of the title is a ‘band’ made up of Tommy Lee, Gilby Clarke from Guns ‘N Roses, and Jason Newstead from Metallica, who all judge the contestants on who is best-suited to lead their ‘band’. (Note that I use quotation marks around the word ‘band’. This is intentional. If they last longer than a few network promotional gigs, I’ll be shocked.)

I don’t need to explain the rest of the show to you. It’s all standard reality-show fare – each week the contestants perform, one person is eliminated, Tommy Lee acts like an idiot. Those who are left:

Josh, Patrice, and Ryan. None of these are even remote contenders – Josh and Ryan are boy-toy filler and Patrice looks more like a soccer mom than the lead singer of a band. I won’t even bother linking to them.

Dana: the ingenue. Too young and inexperienced to be a serious contender. Give her a few years of singing in smoky, badly-lit bars, and a stint or two in heroin rehab, and she’ll be ready.

Jill: the slut. She has marginally more talent and a decent voice but she’s far too short and perky to lead a rock band made up of forty-something burnouts. Has already angered Gilby Clarke for grinding on him while performing onstage – he called her actions tiresome. I’m assuming his reaction to that would have been different had the cameras been off.

Zayra: the nutjob. A lanky, mentally unstable Puerto Rican woman who CANNOT SING, Zayra’s been a Black Widow who’s lived in the bottom three ever since the start of the show, but always escapes elimination for some reason. My theory is that the producers like that she talks back to the band members and want her around for the entertainment value. She seems like the kind of woman who will gut you with a broken beer bottle when you’re not paying attention to her.

Toby: the sure thing. Handsome, talented, and speaks with an Austrailian accent that all the girls love. Pros – sings well, is articulate, and will attract backstage groupies like nobody’s business. Cons – will attract groupies away from Tommy Lee, which will ultimately be his downfall. Even though his singing style approaches Creed at times, he’ll be tough to pick against, and is probably a top five candidate.

Storm: the dark horse. She’s got two strong things going for her – she’s pretty, and the girl can sing. Good energy, too. Last episode, when she really wanted to make a good impression, she was winding herself up before going on stage, looking as if she was about to be fired out of a shotgun. Her one problem is her theatrics – she sometimes sings expansively, as if she’s on a Broadway stage. Good candidate for the top three.

Delana: the witchy woman. Her look can best be described as punk voodoo priestess. She has more ink and piercings on her body than everyone else on the show put together. Her singing ability is suspect – her voice sounds as if she’s smoked cigars and drank bourbon since the cradle – but she has an undeniable charisma. Despite her looks, she is actually supportive of the other contestants, coming off like a bit of cub scout leader to all the young’uns. Also, she could probably drink Tommy Lee under the table. She could win it all in an upset if she gets lucky.

Magni: The pro. Quiet, studious, and intense; ideal qualities if you’re looking for someone fronting a band full of aging prima-donnas. He has an excellent, versatile voice and never seems to make a mistake. Could be flying too far under the radar, though – he needs to appear dangerous. Also, he’s Icelandic, which will count against him, the general assumption being that the island is too small to have anybody from it who is more talented than Bjork.

Lukas: the favorite. The man’s got a unique and undeniable charisma, almost a swagger, and at times seems like a man among boys. He’s got his own style, is self-confident, and has the most expressive eyebrows you’ll ever see. It’s pretty obvious that the rest of the contestants don’t like him and see him as their primary threat, while he seems not to care less. He sings well but forces his voice into a gravelly tone, which others have called him on. If he loses, it will be because of his own arrogance, but he’s my pick to go all the way.

One of the best things about my job is that I often run into good books when I wasn’t expecting them. I’m signed up with a site called dearreader.com that emails an excerpt of a book to you every day. The site has several different genres you can subscribe to and it’s designed for people who say that don’t have time to read. Reading the emailed excerpts only takes a few minutes a day – just long enough to give you a taste of the book and to see if it’s worth following up on. I use it as a reader’s advisory resource. The quality of the reads are scattershot, but every so often I stumble across one that surprises me.

Empress Orchid is a novel based on the true story of the Empress Dowager, a woman who ruled China roughly the same time as England’s Queen Victoria. She was born into a poor family, noble in name only by the thinnest of margins, and lucked into the Emperor’s court as a concubine and worked her way up the ladder. She’s reviled in Chinese history, blamed for the nations’s widespread opium addiction and crippling trade concessions to the British, French, and the Russians. Min, who’s from China, paints her far more sympathetically.

Empress Orchid is a rich historical novel, brimming with narrative details about court life that draws the reader in without ever going overboard. We follow Orchid’s rise from a young girl, nearly begging on the street to the Emperor’s throne itself, using her wits when she doesn’t have the bloodline or the schooling to fall back on. Minor characters play crucial roles in her life, like the shoemaker who used to be a dancer for the Emperor who first shows Orchid how to dress, act, and how to catch the Emperor’s eye. There’s the loyal eunuch servant who has eyes and ears everywhere in the court, and the Empress who is both her partner and her main rival. Orchid uses whatever she can to provide for herself, her royal son, and for her beloved nation that is blind to its own decline and corruption.

This is not a novel I would have normally picked up, but I’m glad I stumbled across it. The writing is intoxicating – it’s the kind of book that you think about long after your bookmark leaves it – and I will certainly track down Min’s other novels. Well worth getting.

A list of premiere dates of television shows I’ll be watching for the fall season.

House, MD. Tuesdays, FOX. Premiere: 9/5.

Family Guy. Sundays, FOX. Premiere: 9/10.

Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. Mondays, NBC. Premiere: 9/18.

Nip/Tuck. Tuesdays, F/X Channel. Premiere: 9/19.

America’s Next Top Model. Wednesdays, CW. Premiere: 9/20.

Grey’s Anatomy. Thursdays, ABC. Premiere: 9/21.

Heroes. Mondays, NBC. Premiere: 9/25.

Smallville. Thursdays, CW. Premiere: 9/28.

Veronica Mars. Tuesdays, CW. Premiere: 10/3.

Lost. Wednesdays, ABC. Premiere: 10/4.

Battlestar Galactica. Fridays, Sci-Fi Channel. Premiere: 10/6.

The Amazing Race. CBS. Premiere: Sometime in February.

Survivor. CBS. Premiere: Sometime in February.

That’s not counting all the other new shows I’ll invariably be sucked into, plus other regular shows of mine that I’ve forgtten. And grad school. Yes, I will have absolutely no time this fall.

On Monday the 24th of July, I turn 34 years old. I don’t feel all that old. I don’t think I look it, either, but I have a few gray hairs that beg to differ.

As a birthday present, my wife took me to a shoe store and we bought a pair of running shoes. Really good ones, not like the pair I picked up for ten bucks at Costco that made my shins hurt if I’m going at any speed over a slow trot. I discovered that for most of my life I’ve been wearing the wrong size shoe; I have small feet but very high arches, so a size 9 sneaker is long enough, but it takes an entire team of engineers to get my foot inside one. I end up buying a size 10 1/2 for comfort, but my big toe is an inch from the tip of my shoe, and after a while the ends start curling up as if I’ve just been selected for Santa’s workshop. So I had my foot properly measured and I now have a size 9 that’s a bit wider than normal. I tried it out today and it felt wonderful.

My only real annoyance at getting older (besides high cholesterol and lower back pain) is that I’m starting to feel as if the world is not catering to me any more. My age puts me solidly in the middle of Generation X – my generation was test-marketed and over-commercialized almost from day one. Throughout my entire life, the world wanted to know what we thought was cool. They wanted to know the music we liked, the clothes we wore, the catchphrases we said to each other, the breakfast cereal we begged our parents to buy. Our fashions and our thought processes were what the rest of the world wanted.

Not so much any more. But that’s cool. It’s the way of things. Soon, my wife and I will have children and we’ll get to see the world from their younger, newer eyes.

Meanwhile, I’ll be telling kids to get off my lawn. And trying to convince those who are in the library that authors like Sarah Dessen and Scott Westerfeld are far, far better than those games of Runescape they play endlessly.

There are some books I won’t read just because other people make such a big deal out of them. For some reason, the popularity of the thing drives me away. I realize it’s a stubborn and elitist thing to do, but sometimes I can’t help it. Television shows are like this with me, too. For example, to this day I’ve never watched an episode of Seinfeld all the way though, no matter how many people tell me how funny it is. And even though I was one of the biggest SportsNight fans around, I avoided the creator’s new show, The West Wing, like the plague, even as it piled on award after award.

When it comes to books, Phillip Pullman’s ‘His Dark Materials’ trilogy were the garlic to my Dracula. I got tired of people telling me how much I would enjoy it and just avoided the thing altogether. Again, it’s the elitist in me. But ever since I came to work in a library, I realized very quickly I had to get over that particular hump, suck it up, and read the damn thing.

And, like everyone else predicted, I’m glad I did. The Golden Compass, the first book in the trilogy, is a worthy successor to high-fantasy book like Lewis’ Narnia books or Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising series. Pullman creates a fully-realized fantasy world as his setting – not the generic swords-and-sorcery, Dungeons-and-Dragons-lite world that you find in many modern fantasies. This world is different in fundamental ways - almost alien - and yet it becomes  familiar and comfortable to us.

The book has a plucky young girl as the main character, different from other fantasy heroines in that her most valuable skill is not to wield magic or become a master with weapons. No, her main skill is lying to others. It’s refreshing, really, to have a hero in a fantasy novel do something so… ordinary. It works.

The novel is a bit slow to get started but the plot kicks into gear quickly enough. Pullman writes best when his characters are in the thick of battle, and heroes and villains are clashing with the fate of the world in the balance. Like the best fantasy novels, simple quests evolve into titanic things, and the mother of all cliffangers leads us into the second book in the series.

Which, incidentally, I won’t be avoiding this time.

Even though I will always and forever be a Raymond Chandler fan, you can’t deny Mickey Spillane’s place in the pulp pantheon. A great and under-appreciated writer who forged his own way in an industry where writers of dime novels were looked down upon as gatecrashers and pretenders of true “literaturah”. 

Go punch a mook in the kisser in his honor today.

One of the sections of the library I’ve really tried to familiarize myself since I’ve worked in a library is the children’s section. Being 33 years old, I haven’t been exposed to kiddie lit since I was a young ‘un myself. If a bright-eyed eleven-year-old ever comes up to me looking for a recommendation for something to read, I might give them a Stephen King book to read since that’s what I was reading when I was eleven. (This probably explains a lot about me.) So I’ve been dipping my toe into the Js and the YAs of late, wanting to get a feel for what’s out there.

Once that I was really struck by is The City of Ember by Jeanne DuPrau, a fictional tale with some sci-fi elements that really worked well for me. Ember is a city in perpetual darkness – there is no sun, no moon, or no stars. Twelve hours a day light is provided by electric lamps dotted throughout the city. Citizens are assigned jobs and get food and supplies from the city’s massive storerooms full of items left to them by the Builders. However things are decaying in Ember - supplies are running out and the electricity fails more often than not. No one is looking for solutions for the city’s problems, because that’s the way things always were and always will be. Two children who wonder what is beyond the darkness are at the heart of the story, and they discover a secret that might lead to Ember’s salvation.

The story has a modern fairy-tale quality to it that’s not patronising, which makes it interesting to adults as well as kids. The children have no special abilities or magical beings that help them – they use their intelligence and their curiosity and their ability to see a broader picture to work their way toward a solution, and as they get closer, the reader is pulled into the story right alongside them. It’s great stuff, meant for 9-12 year olds but adults can enjoy it guilt-free. The book wraps up with a satisfying ending that leads right into the sequel (which I haven’t read yet, and will probably review here once I do.) Well worth checking out.

Kitchen Confidential is a sort-of biography and peek behind the curtain at the New York restaurant scene by professional chef and cranky raconteur Anthony Bourdain. I first encountered him a few years ago when he wrote an article about outdoor grilling for a men’s magazine. Then there was an ill-fated Fox sitcom last season based on his kitchen experiences that was cancelled after only a handful of episodes, and then his excellent series on the Travel Channel, No Reservations, about eating exotic (and often disgusting) things in foreign countries while mixing with the local culture.

I really like the guy. Tall, thin, handsome in a rough-hewn way with a grating New York voice that comes out of a mouth that always seems to have a cigarette parked in it, Anthony Bourdain is the very picture of a world-weary cynic with an amused twinkle in his eye. I had to pick up the tell-all book that kicked off his career, Kitchen Confidential. And even though I have absolutely no culinary skills beyond peeling back the foil before placing something in a microwave, I found this book to be a fascinating, if sometimes unfocused, behind-the-scenes look at the life of a professional chef.

The book works best if read with frequent breaks, as Bourdain is all over the place. Chapters range from his years toiling in school studying to be a chef, to his young professional career as a grunt worker, to his rise and participation in several failed ventures, to owning and running his own successful restaurant in New York City. Interspersed in stand-alone chapters are cynical observations of his craft, mocking investors who want to open a restaurant with no experience, and searing rants on what not to order in a restaurant (I’m never ordering Eggs Benedict again. Two words: bacterial apocalypse.) All the while he’s taking gleeful shots at made-for-television celebrity chefs like Emeril and Rachael Ray.

Even if he’s all over the map, the book is absolutely fascinating. He writes in a conversational tone, as if he setting next to you at a dimly-lit, smoky bar, trading war stories from the kitchen inbetween shots of Jaeger. Kitchen Confidential is the rarest of things: an honest look at what a person does for a living, clearly defining his passion for his craft without the need to make the author look good in the process. Fabulous read.

UPDATE 07/15/06: Apparently Anthony Bourdain is trapped in Lebanon this week doing a taping for his Travel Channel show.  Details thanks to Off the Broiler.