Books About Books. Meta.

Since I’ve spent the better part of this week trying not to cry on the subway because of Beautiful Boy, I thought maybe I’d cheer you guys (and myself, since I am, I imagine, my blog’s No. 1 reader) up by recommending an author astronomically less likely to put you in a funk and make you stare resentfully at everything from beer to cough syrup, muttering things like to yourself like “stupid drugs.”

Now, if you haven’t heard of Nick Hornby, back up. Because you have. He’s the bloke (he’s British, so I can say that) behind About a Boy, High Fidelity and Fever Pitch (the book, on which the Jimmy Fallon abomination is based, is far superior). His books are almost compulsively readable, sort of like what David Sedaris might write if he took a Valium and/or developed a generally more upbeat (though still sarcastic) outlook on life. Which, again, not a dig at Sedaris. My idea of upbeat is assuming the world won’t end in my lifetime.

Lesser known, however, than books like High Fidelity and A Long Way Down, are Hornby’s essays in The Believer, a mostly literature-focused magazine published by McSweeney’s (the brainchild of Dave Eggars, who is unto himself another blog post for another day). Fortunately for us, these essays have been compiled in a series of short books: The Polysyllabic Spree, Housekeeping vs. The Dirt and Shakespeare Wrote for Money. These, almost as if to counteract the accessibility and general ease of Hornby’s novels, are books for book nerds. You see, in the beginning of each chapter, Hornby lists two columns: the books he has bought that month, and the books he has read. …It should come as no surprise that Hornby’s ratio of books books bought to books read is as skewed as mine. The rest is a hodgepodge of reviews, anecdotes and general musings, which sounds…vaguely familiar.

The upside of these books is threefold: 1) Although they aren’t novels, and although creating fictional characters is a Hornby strength, they still indisputably have his wit and style. 2) If you’re looking for book ideas, they are a great place to start; I would venture a guess that they’ve added 20+  titles to my own Amazon Wish List. And 3) If you, like me, need the consolation that there are other neurotic weird book-buying freaks out there, well, look no further.

Come On, Get Happy

Sometimes I just know a book is going to make me cry. I think for many people this is true with movies–who didn’t spend 75% of Million Dollar Baby trying to stifle sobs in a crowded theater? But I have equally strong, if not sometimes stronger, reactions to writing. Maybe it’s because I’m free to visualize, maybe it’s because reading one book written by one person makes you feel so much closer to whatever emotion they were feeling, or trying to convey; there’s no army of screenwriters and props people and best boy grips making it difficult to suspend disbelief. Either way, there have been a number of books in my lifetime that have reduced me to tears: Dean Koontz’s Watchers, Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife, Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones. Actually, everything by Alice Sebold. I’ve thrown books across the room because of how much they’ve upset me. I’ve skulked around the apartment for hours. I’ve questioned the direction and value of my life. I’ve essentially felt all the emotions of a 13-year-old Panic! At the Disco fan, just from reading. Put that in your marketing, Scholastic.

So considering Catch-22 was a comedy, albeit a dark one, I thought maybe this week I’d pick something on the other end of the spectrum. A few years ago, my mom gave me Beautiful Boy, a memoir written by a father about his son’s addiction to crystal meth. I put it on the shelf. You see, when one is in college, experimenting with all manner of friends, substances and …study techniques, naturally, a book about a 20-something’s descent into addiction just doesn’t fit the bill. I didn’t want to read a particularly grueling chapter about young Nic’s first transition from marijuana to cocaine and then try to go out partying; I didn’t want to take a shot of tequila and spend the subsequent four hours crying in the bathroom of a bar and questioning all of my life decisions. The book had to wait. Until this week.

Now, I’m only 25, so there’s still a distinct possibility I could read this and find myself crying on the floor of a bathroom this weekend. Worse, this Sunday is Halloween, which means I’d be crying on the floor of a bar bathroom while dressed as Buzz Lightyear. Hilarious? Yes; but after losing my Blackberry two Halloweens ago and riding the subway back and forth for five hours at 4 a.m. dressed as Uncle Sam …well I think I’d like to keep that on record as my epitome of All Hallows’ Eve shame. Just to be safe though, no tequila.

Yossarian Lives

This week at work, I was looking over a reporter’s story, about the recent death of the inventor of the MetroCard, and stumbled across this: “15 cents of every fare dollar collected goes to collecting that fare.” Huh? I asked him to change the line, for the sake of all that isn’t meta about business reporting, but it stuck with me, as this is how pretty much all of Catch-22 is written.

Keeping that in mind, you can imagine the nerves I’ve had this week over finishing what is only the third book in my endeavor–so I’ll take my pats on the back now for having done it. The truth is, Catch-22 was the perfect type of book for this project—entertaining and compelling but without being a page-turner, the kind of title that in another time (i.e a month ago) would have languished on my shelf after the first 100 pages, just because.

There’s a lot to say about this book, which it seems most people I talked to have either never read or can’t remember because they haven’t picked it up since high school. I’m pleased to report that, for me at least, Catch-22 lived up to the hype that comes with picking a modern classic. I can see why the book has its reputation, which isn’t something I can say for every equally reputable thing I’ve ever read.

So, I would take this time to pause and outline the plot, except…there really isn’t one. Catch-22 primarily follows Yossarian, a World War II bombardier stationed off of Italy, as well as a dozen other reappearing characters. There’s the colonel who keeps increasing the number of missions his squadron needs to complete to be discharged, so as to impress the higher-ups and potentially earn a mention in The Saturday Evening Post. There’s the mess hall operator who starts what’s essentially an international cartel of fine foods and military equipment, whose business acumen goes so far afoul of his patriotic duty that he is at one point paid to bomb his own men. There’s the dead man in Yossarian’s tent, killed during a mission before he even reported for duty (a sitcom-level fluke) and subsequently reported by officers to have never reported for duty at all, lest they take the blame for his demise. And so on — the cast is utterly absurd, and the way the book is written highlights that absurdity perfectly. Sort of like an endless loop of that “Who’s on first, What’s on Second” baseball skit.

Indeed, what you come away with after Catch-22 is the sheer absurdity of war itself, which is I imagine what made it so subversive in 1955. The details with which history concerns itself–the enemy, the battles, the victories–are almost wholly absent from this book. It could be any war, anywhere, fought by anyone. The men involved in the military are more caught up in the politics of success, posing for photo ops and vying for the possibility of promotion, than they are concerned with victory over the Germans. And Yossarian, who is painted by the other characters as a loose cannon with potentially crazy ideas about war and patriotic duty, is in many ways the sanest one. One exchange, between Yossarian and another soldier about Colonel Cathcart’s yet again increasing the number of missions needed for discharge, sums this up perfectly:

“You know very well that I don’t approve of Colonel Cathcart any more than you do.” Clevinger paused for emphasis, his mouth quivering, and then beat his fist down softly against his sleeping bag. “But it’s not for us to determine what targets must be destroyed or who’s to destroy them or—“
“Or who gets killed doing it? And why?”
“Yes, even that. We have no right to question—“
“You’re insane!”
“—no right to question—“
“Do you really mean that it’s not my business how or why I get killed and that it is Colonel Cathcart’s? Do you really mean that?”
“Yes, I do,” Clevinger insisted, seeming unsure. “There are men entrusted with winning the war who are in a much better position than we are to decide what targets have to be bombed.”
“We are talking about two different things,” Yossarian answered with exaggerated weariness. “You are talking about the relationship of the Air Corps to the infantry, and I am talking about the relationship of me to Colonel Cathcart. You are talking about winning the war, and I am talking about winning the war and keeping alive.”
“Exactly,” Clevinger snapped smugly. “And which do you think is more important?”
“To whom?” Yossarian shot back. “Open your eyes Clevinger. It doesn’t make a damned bit of difference who wins the war to someone who’s dead.”
Clevinger sat for a moment as though he’d been slapped. “Congratulations!” he exclaimed bitterly, the thinnest milk-white line enclosing his lips tightly in a bloodless, squeezing ring. “I can’t think of another attitude that could be depended upon to give greater comfort to the enemy.”
“The enemy,” retorted Yossarian with weighted precision,” is anybody who’s going to get you killed, no matter which side he’s on, and that includes Colonel Cathcart. And don’t you forget that, because the longer you remember it, the longer you might live.”

Coincidentally, Clevinger dies.

There is only one downside to reading Catch-22, and that would be that the type of war highlighted in this book is somewhat anachronistic in 2010. The central message–that the men behind American military strategy are besieged by the same petty bullshit that the rest of the world is, they just happen to be playing with life and death–still resonates, but the specific circumstances of planes and bombings and a war in which America is playing the part of backup support, is a little removed from the wars we’re fighting today. I’m not sure what Joseph Heller would write if he could re-imagine Catch-22 for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but some part of me very much wishes he could (he died in 1999). Given the news last week about our use of third-party security companies, I think it would be something about the irony of a war fought out of (essentially) revenge and greed, yet executed by a very impersonal and inefficiently complex network of hired guns. In any case, just a thought.

THE VERDICT:

Catch-22 is timeless, as the topics of war and authority are wont to be. The length is somewhat intimidating, even if you’re not trying to get it knocked out in a week, but I’d say the payoff is there. Having not spent an inordinate amount of time considering the mindset of men at war (which I’m also not entirely sure is the same today as during wars of the 1940s) Catch-22 was incredibly thought provoking for me.

Even though there are literally dozens of quotes I could share, I’ll leave you with one, from a conversation between an old Italian man and Nately, a young American officer; because in between all the scenes of painfully dark comic relief in this story, are the kinds of truly poignant moments that make a book great.

Nately was instantly up in arms again. “There is nothing so absurd about risking your life for your country!” he declared.
“Isn’t there?” asked the old man. “What is a country? A country is a piece of land surrounded on all sides by boundaries, usually unnatural. Englishmen are dying for England, Americans are dying for America, Germans are dying for Germany, Russians are dying for Russia. There are now fifty or sixty countries fighting in this war. Surely so many countries can’t all be worth dying for.”
“Anything worth living for,” said Nately,” is worth dying for.”
“And anything worth dying for,” answered the sacrilegious old man, “is certainly worth living for.”

THE FACTS:
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TITLE: Catch-22
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AUTHOR: Joseph Heller
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PAGES: 463 (in paperback)
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ALSO WROTE: Closing Time, Picture This
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SORTA LIKE: Fahrenheit 451 meets Stripes
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FIRST LINE: ”It was love at first sight.”

Video Saved The Book Review…Star

Ron Charles

Brosefs! I have barely had time to read this week, let alone write about reading (TBD whether I’ll finish Catch-22 in time, but I remain optimistic, even if it means spending Saturday in a windowless room with nothing but my book and a vat of coffee.) In any case, I had to take a quick second out of my very busy and incredibly enviable life to jot down some thoughts on the Washington Post’s newfangled video book reviews.

If you’re like me, you care about national newspapers cutting their book-review pages with the same intensity that other people care about like, I don’t know, sports or something. At this point, the vast majority of major papers (excluding the Wall Street Journal, who recently launched a book review, which unfortunately deals in primarily mind-numbingly boring titles) have slimmed their coverage of the book sector, minus repeated front-page stories on the swiftly progressing transition to e-books (which is for another post entirely, one I’ll have to write in a room in which I’m free to sob). Even Kirkus Reviews, arguably the industry standard after Publishers Weekly, bit the bullet last year. Sad times.

In any case, Washington Post fiction critic Ron Charles has started doing video reviews, mildly bizarre and generally amusing shorts summarizing a book and highlighting some of its strengths and faults, much as a regularly written review (which Charles still does and WaPo still publishes) would. And you know, they’re pretty fucking good.

On To The Next

So I’ve never read Catch-22. I’m not sure how, except I know that my high school had the kind of worldly approach to literature that had me analyzing obscure African books without ever having picked up Animal Farm (no seriously, I’ve never read Animal Farm either. I know!)

So considering my success over the last two weeks, I’ve decided it’s time to challenge myself. Which isn’t to say that Catch-22 is particularly difficult as a book, or burdensome to get through. In truth, of the 50-odd pages I’ve read so far, it’s fairly hilarious. But this will be my longest book to date, more than 450 pages, and I don’t mean that senior-citizen-size font you sometimes see in modern paperbacks. This is legit. I’ve got my work cut out for me.

Truth is, there are plenty of literary classics, modern or otherwise, that I’ve never actually gotten around to reading, many of which I want to: The Scarlett Letter, Gravity’s Rainbow, On The Road, pretty much everything Dickens has ever written outside of A Tale of Two Cities. So perhaps, whenever I’m feeling particularly ambitious, I’ll take a week out–like this one–to tackle the kind of book you can typically find on the Summer Reading table at Barnes & Noble (speaking of which, am I the only for whom this table is a source of constant guilt?)

So if you’ve got suggestions, which is to say, if there’s some book you’ve always “wanted” to read but fear is in truth much more boring than its reputation suggests (worry not, I feel this way about both The Great Gatsby and Catcher in the Rye), well, here’s your chance to foist it on me, an unsuspecting third party, who will not only have to finish it, but in a week no less.

Bring it on. All two of you.