LAMB

Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal, by Christopher Moore, is A’s favorite contemporary novel and I’ve been promising to read it forever. Luckily for our household harmony, I loved it. You should really just read the book, instead of listening to me try to explain why I loved it, but here goes: It begins with an additional apostle named “Levi who is called Biff” being raised from the dead by an angel and locked in a hotel room in modern-day St. Louis to write his gospel, and it just gets better from there. Some of the humor is a little crude (really, I would have been fine with fewer bestiality jokes), but then, the narrator, Biff, is a pretty crude guy, which is kind of the point—that Jesus (or Joshua, as he’s called) needs an average Joe to look out for him in the human world and keep him grounded. What’s so great is that the book walks a fine line very well—it’s awfully funny and irreverent and sometimes downright dirty, but not offensive. There’s never any doubt in it that Josh is the Messiah, son of God, performing miracles, etc. He’s just got a little more of a sense of humor (my favorite part is when he walks on water and then convinces Peter to do it too, and Peter walks out from the boat and is like, “Hey guys, look at me—” and then promptly falls in, and Josh cracks up and says, “Man, I can’t believe you fell for that!” And then he says, “Peter, you’re as dumb as a box of rocks. But you have a lot of faith. On this box of rocks I will build my church.”). It’s a very smart and well-researched book—like all good satire, the more you know about the original source, the funnier it is. (In that respect, it reminds me of Monty Python’s Life of Brian, which combines ridiculous jokes with more detail about the sociopolitical conditions of Jesus’s life than you get in most Sunday School classes and actual good points about the nature of organized religion.) It’s also surprisingly heartfelt and poignant in parts; you care about the characters, and the story, of course, does have its drama. But still, mainly comedy, nothing too deep. After all, in the afterword the author says he wrote the book to answer the all-important question, “What if Jesus knew kung fu?”

NEVER LET ME GO

I just finished Kazuo Ishiguro’s new novel, Never Let Me Go, and can’t quite decide what I thought of it. Most of the book was slow and quiet, with the narrator reminiscing about her youth at boarding school, and I didn’t really care for the characters—the narrator’s voice rubbed me the wrong way, her best friend seemed like a huge jerk, and the male component of their friendship/love triangle never had much personality. But there were these dark hints and undercurrents that made me keep reading as fast as I could, because the book takes place in a dystopian version of the present and *SPOILER ALERT* the characters are all clones who have been created solely as organ donors. After a brief and happy time at school, they become donors in their 20s and perform repeated donations until they die. This is of course an extremely chilling and disturbing thing to read about, but it’s always in the background of the book, rarely in the foreground—the characters never actually try to question or escape from their fates, which I think bothered some of the readers whose reviews I read on Amazon, but to me that’s the point of the book, like all Ishiguro books, that the narrator has internalized the norms of a repressive society and is to some extent deluding him/herself and the reader. I think Ishiguro is trying to portray the characters and their lives as ordinary, except for the One Big Thing, which is cool, except as a reader you keep thinking the One Big Thing is such a cool concept, you wish there was a lot more of that in the book and less about the petty schoolyard drama with the jerky best friend. Still, it’s beautifully written in parts, sad and moving, and there’s a lot to think about. I need to read something happier now.

THE POLYSYLLABIC SPREE

So suddenly I’m addicted to reading. OK, I was always addicted, but now I’m like the smack addict who has to start shooting up into her earlobes or between her toes or wherever (sorry, all I vaguely know about heroin I learned from movies), and when I’m not reading I might as well be seeing that creepy baby crawling on the ceiling and spinning its head all the way around, because I am that distracted by the desire to be reading. In addition to Assassination Vacation and The Men Who Stare at Goats, last week I also read the newest No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency book, In the Company of Cheerful Ladies (those books are always light on plot, but they make me happy); and Ruth Reichl’s newest memoir, Garlic and Sapphires, about her career as the restaurant critic for the New York Times. You know how much I love reading food books (especially reading about food while actually eating food, and I do much of my reading while eating breakfast and lunch), and this one was delicious. Her tales of having to dress up in elaborate disguises (entire new personas, really) to avoid getting special treatment when dining out were fascinating, and the food descriptions were delicious.

Then I read a very appropriate little book, The Polysyllabic Spree, a collection of Nick Hornby’s columns from The Believer in which he simply writes about the books he’s bought and read each month. I could pretty much read Hornby writing about watching paint dry (except I hated his most recent novel, How to Be Good, and so I’m slightly apprehensive about the forthcoming one), but in particular I love reading his criticism—even if he’s talking about a book I’ve never read or a song I’ve never heard. I folded down so many corners of pages with great quotes on them, the book looks like I’ve been chewing on it. I nodded right along with this:

I don’t reread books very often; I’m too conscious of both my ignorance and my mortality….But when I tried to recall anything about [a certain favorite book] other than its excellence, I failed…. And I realized that, as this is true of just about every book I consumed between the ages of, say, fifteen and forty, I haven’t even read the books I think I’ve read. I can’t tell you how depressing this is. What’s the fucking point?

Although I like that a few months later, he decides, “if I’ve forgotten everything I’ve ever read then I can read some of my favorite books again as if for the first time.” I also liked this:

Being a reader is sort of like being president, except reading involves fewer state dinners, usually. You have this agenda you want to get through, but you get distracted by life events, e.g., books arriving in the mail/World War III, and you are temporarily deflected from your chosen path.

This is precisely how I feel right now (well, how I always feel, but now more acutely). There are so many separate reading initiatives I’d like to embark upon—rereading my favorite books I can’t remember, reading the books I own but haven’t read, reading big fat classics I’ve shamefully missed, reading the complete works of authors I’ve sampled and liked. But then they keep putting out these shiny new books, and I put them on hold, and the library brings them to me. I’ve decided to try to cut back on my library use (except for my most coveted items), so I can concentrate on the first two initiatives above—but then the hold list keeps disgorging new trinkets (including this entire recent spate of books) that have to be read immediately, and other things get tossed aside. Right now I’ve got two more books in at the library and five more on hold, but when that subsides, I’m hoping to finally read A’s favorite book, Lamb, and satisfy my hankering to revisit some old kids’ books, because summer makes me want to read the kind of book I can finish in one sitting.

THE MEN WHO STARE AT GOATS

I just finished the newest book by another This American Life contributor, Jon Ronson, The Men Who Stare At Goats, and amusing, yet scary and mind-blowing examination of some of the more bizarre pursuits of the U.S. military—including trying to train soldiers to be “psychic spies,” walk through walls, and kill goats just by looking at them. Everything in the book sounds totally crazy, but then it’s corroborated by other sources and becomes downright disturbing—especially when Ronson details how a lot of these new-agey enterprisies, begun in the ‘70s, are now reemerging in the War on Terror. It’s a disturbing prospect, but, like Sarah Vowell in Assassination Vacation, Ronson focuses more on his own experiences tracking down the story, which still keeps everything somewhat humorous and entertaining. I wouldn’t ordinarily be attracted to the topic, but it’s all in the way Ronson handles it.

ASSASSINATION VACATION

I adored Sarah Vowell’s new book, Assassination Vacation—oddly, because although I’ve read all of her other books and moderately enjoyed them, I always find them a little disappointing (especially Radio On, such a good idea but so annoying somehow in execution), or at least not compelling enough to want to own them. But Assassination Vacation seems to have more substance to me, and it taps into my love of other people’s geeky obsessions, as well as my appreciation of odd historical factoids and my fascination with visiting random historical sites. Anyone who wishes they could tour every presidential library, shares an affection for the brown-on-white National Park Service font, or wants to be a docent when they retire will enjoy following Vowell’s stories of her travels visiting every site related to the first three presidential assassinations (Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley). The book is funny, but also informative and surprisingly moving—it makes history real in the best way, as well as post-modernly examining the endeavor of trying to experience history through the buildings and artifacts left behind. It was one of those books where while I was reading it, I was already looking forward to reading it again.