Throbbing Hearts, Throbbing Parts, John McClane and Books That Eventually Become Michael Cera Movies

Book Read: Youth in Revolt: The Journals of Nick Twisp
Author: C.D. Payne
Pages: 498

In a half-hearted attempt to relate this post to current events, I write this post in light of J.D. Salinger's recent passing. C.D. Payne's 1993 novel Youth in Revolt follows a Catcher In The Rye sort of formula, in that a young man gets disillusioned with his life and goes on a journey of sorts, and there's some girls, and some troubled familial relations, and so forth. Not an uncommon trope in this day and age. But what distinguishes Youth In Revolt from other nostalgic boy-to-manhood stories is that it completely and totally lacks a conscience. But let me bring in some more examples of boy-novels for comparison(Please let me. I'm tired.)


The novel's protagonist, Nick Twisp, is like the titular character in The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole if Adrian Mole was a donut-guzzling, solipsistic, zit-addled, sex-crazed deluded asshole. Twisp is fourteen and has a shitty life that he recounts faithfully in his daily journal. His mother parades her sex life in front of him through a string of gross boyfriends, his dad torments him by dating a beautiful "bimbette" and pretending Nick doesn't exist and Nick himself is pimply, overeducated and undersexed. (You'll see the initials T.E. often in Youth in Revolt---refering not to the more famous diarist T.E. Lawrence, but instead standing in for "Throbbing Erection".)



The book starts off tremendously, with Nick's narcissism and penchant for melodrama used to great satiric effect. For the first 200 pages or so, I have to admit, it's really funny---especially when Nick meets a girl who he's convinced is the true love of his life: the effortlessly cosmopolitan, Satre-quoting, pretentious-as-hell, stunningly gorgeous teen Sheeni Saunders. Sadly, Sheeni's parents violently disapprove of Nick, and this fuels an increasingly ridiculous series of events that culminate in Nick exposing himself to a sex-maddened octogenarian in the shower.



Sheeni's parents squirrel their daughter away from him, throwing her in an all-girls private school. Forced into a long distance relationship defined almost solely by Sheeni's over-the-phone coquetry, our teen pervert realizes he needs to adopt a devil-may-care alter ego to keep the interest of his sweetheart. Enter "Francois Dillinger": one part Jean-Paul Belmondo in Breathless, one part Rico Suave, and one part John McClane at his yippie-kay-yay-motherfuckingest. He grows a dirty moustache. He learns to embody insouciance in a single gesture. He crashes cars and lights things on fire.




It's at this point that the book's T.E. goes overwhelmingly flaccid (I know, sorry.) The ribaldry continues, the horrible characters do horrible things to each other, Nick runs from the law, commits grand larceny, and after various plot points too twisty (and twisp-y) to mention, he eventually ends up living as a woman in disguise. But the bitch of it all is that at no point does Nick Twisp develop any sort of conscience or deepening to his personality. There's no remorse for the lies and treachery he commits in the name of Sheeni-lust. There's no reflection. There's just hijinks, and penises, and zits, and literary references, and while it's all kind of amusing at the time, it ends up being sort of ephemeral and forgettable. Maybe I'm just a girl and I don't understand boners and blowing things up, but ultimately I found Youth in Revolt to be a just-okay diversion that ultimately blew its load a little too early.

My Retinas Burn With Failure

What I Read In 2009:

1) JPod - Douglas Coupland
2) Running With Scissors - Augusten Burroughs
3) I'm With the Band - Pamela Des Barres
4) Da Capo Best Music Writing 2008 - Various
5) Helpless - Barbara Gowdy
6) House of Meetings - Martin Amis
7) Three Day Road - Joseph Boyden
8) Flight - Sherman Alexie
9) Twilight - Stephanie Meyer
10) New Moon - Stephanie Meyer
11) Eclipse - Stephanie Meyer
12) Breaking Dawn - Stephanie Meyer
13) The Year of Magical Thinking - Joan Didion
14) Heart-Shaped Box - Joe Hill
15) I & I - George Elliot Clarke
16) Colours Insulting to Nature - Cintra Wilson
17) The White Tiger - Aravind Adiga
18) From Hell - Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell
19) The Road - Cormac McCarthy
20) Half the Sky - Nicholas D. Kristoff and Sheryl WuDunn
21) Special Topics in Calamity Physics - Marisha Pessl
22) Our Band Could Be Your Life - Michael Azzerad
23) Wonderland Avenue - Danny Sugerman*
24) John Steinbeck - Cannery Row*
25) Black Water - Joyce Carol Oates*
26) Youth in Revolt - C.D. Payne*
27) First Love, Last Rites - Ian MacEwan*
28) Dance Me Outside - W.P. Kinsella*
29) Whiteman - Tony D'Souza*
30) The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For - Alison Bechdel*
31) Morbid Curiosity Cures the Blues - Loren Rhoads (editor)*
32) The Glass Castle - Jeanette Walls*


* blogs pending

Of the 100 books I swore to read by the end of 2009, I read 32.

How do I feel about it?

When I learn about the efforts of people like this woman , I feel sort of crappy about it. But when I look at the cumulative effects of this blog and the book reviews I logged, I feel better. It sparked a lot of great conversations, if nothing else. I figured out a little more about my personal tastes; distressingly, I also had to confront my lack of focus and especially my lack of conviction (and conciseness) when it came to actually blogging about the books I'd read.

I've decided to continue the blog in order to firstly, complete the reviews that are still pending (I think I need a new word limit) and secondly because I read more when I blog about reading than when I don't. New challenges and new features are on the horizon. Recipes. Fan fiction. Trash. Pictures. Videos. The internet.

In the meantime, more reviews, and suggestions for new books are, as always, welcome. Thanks to the devoted few who followed (and continue to follow) along.

Love, Lang

20-22) I Am Not Ashamed

Book(s) Read: New Moon, Eclipse, Breaking Dawn

Author: Stephanie Fucking Meyer
Pages: 1,937


Five Feminist Rules to Live By in the Twilight Series:

---If your boyfriend suddenly up and leaves you in the forest one day, the only recourse, obviously, is to try and kill yourself by riding motorcycles and jumping off cliffs until he hears that you're trying to kill yourself and tries to kill himself.

---If you are freezing to death, you can make your vampire boyfriend jealous by asking your werewolf friend to "come and warm me up" in your sleeping bag. Because werewolves are extremely hot and comfortable. Fuck Snuggies. Get me a werewolf.

---Girls don't care about awesome vampire-on-vampire fights that result from tensions that have been simmering for thousands of years. No, girls don't even care if the werewolves and vampires form an ALLIANCE for the fight (heretofore unheard of, as we all know vampires and werewolves are MORTAL ENEMIES.) No, all girls care about is being whiney in a tent and willfully trying to freeze themselves to death while forcing their vampire and werewolf boyfriends to hang out in a tent while they miss all the awesome fighting going on in the woods. Yep---in the Twilight universe, girls are kind of shitty.

---Having babies is very important, even if your baby is quite possibly a gross, dirty monster!

---It is perfectly okay for an 18-year-old werewolf to fall in love with a baby.


---It is not at all terrible or embarrassing to combine your mother's name with your mother-in-law's name and give it to your firstborn. (An aside: According to this Yahoo! Answers entry, many fans of the series are indeed weighing the pros and cons of "Renesmee." My favorite quote from a contributor: "One last suggestion: the name Renesmee is proving not to be very popular with fans, which could add to teasing when your daughter grows up.")

---It is clear that as the literary leviathan known as the Twilight series continues to lurch forward, immortalized in books and films and magazines and makeup and dildoes, teenage girls and their moms will now officially rule a huge chunk of popular culture for probably the next two to five years. I don't know whether to rejoice or flee in the corner to hunch, shuddering with fear and remorse--for vampires, for gender, for literature, for the world---until the trend falls out. But hey. Three more "books" to add to the total. Okay!

19) Music is My Boyfriend

Book Read: Our Band Could Be Your Life
Author: Michael Azerrad
Pages: 522 (incl. index)
Music to Blog By: Grinderman, "Depth Charge Ethel"

Method of Acquisition: During my honeymoon this past May, my husband and I made a stop in Kingston, Ontario. We both lived here for four years attending undergrad and met during our final year (I know. Awww! Retchhhh!) Like most former Kingstonians, we retain an eternal fondness for the Limestone City and our favorite haunts within.
Along with drinking pints of 50 at the Toucan, Brian's Record Option ranks as one of the most quintessential Kingstonian experiences. Basically, it's like a pack rat's basement vomited all over a tiny shop. You can navigate it yourself, stepping over treacherous piles of records, stickers, posters, cats and assorted detritus, or you can ask the impressively-bearded Brian, who somehow knows where everything is and is happy to jaw your ear off while he searches. (I was amused to discover that the store---and its owner---have been immortalized on Youtube.

OK, so the point of this unnecessarily long and indulgent introduction is that we went there and asked Brian for good music books. He recommended Our Band Could Be Your Life and Last Night A DJ Saved My Life. It's hard to say no to Brian. He once encouraged me to buy the CD version of the Pump Up the Volume (!?) soundtrack because it featured Henry Rollins and Bad Brains doing a cover of "Kick Out the Jams." (Last I heard, my dad now uses it as a coaster, and Christian Slater's sly mug is now buried by a thin, omnipresent coating of cigarette ash.) But this time, that bearded pack rat steered me right.

A lot of books about bands and scenes and music history are dodgy. For every Hammer of the Gods or The Dirt you'll get a This Must Be the Place (where author David Bowman succeeds completely in draining all vitality and wit from the story of the Talking Heads) or Ray Manzarek's blah-tastic book about the Doors (although I did enjoy one bit where he called Oliver Stone a fascist.)

When it comes to music books, dear readers, it would seem you're better off if you stick to a) Cultural critics and historians, who are generally pretty good at situating an artist's place in a particular historical context (and hopefully with a bit of literary flair) b) Nick Hornby, or c) Pure, unadulterated trash. Tell me about the record label tangles, the drugs, the babes, the overdoses, the near-fatal car accident, and the subsequent detox and relapse(s) and resulting incorporation of Ashtangi yoga, Kabbalah and psychotherapy into your Much Better, Arguably Less-Rockin' Life, with an afterword that features you sitting in your mansion with your Playboy Bunny-blonde wife, six absurd toy dogs, and plans for a VH1 series to hire a successor. Hire Neil Strauss to edit it all and you're set.

Our Band Could Be Your Life is a perfect mix of all these things. It's a book that tells the following bands' stories, in about a chapter each: Mission of Burma, Butthole Surfers, The Minutemen, Sonic Youth, Big Black, Black Flag, Fugazi, Husker Du, Mudhoney, Minor Threat, Beat Happening, The Replacements and Dinosaur Jr.
And it's amazing how much he's able to pack into a single chapter. I thought I knew most of the important stuff about these bands, but every chapter held at least one revelation. (Literally every hardcore punk band in the book lists Creedence Clearwater Revival as a major influence! Greg Ginn is kind of a prick! Lydia Lunch once propositioned Steve Albini in a newspaper column!) The whole book is wonderfully researched and about as complete as any book on the subjective history of the American underground scene from the mid-to-late '80s could possibly be, ha-ha. He talks to all the surviving members from these bands as well as associates, old friends, parents, ex-girlfriends: You name it, he's spoken to them---and managed to make even the most tight-lipped players spill it. (The Big Black chapter, featuring Steve Albini's trademark I-don't-give-a-shit bluster, was hugely entertaining---and more than a little disturbing.)

Azerrad is also honest with us from the get-go, and I liked that. He admits as much in the introduction: He's not trying to do something comprehensive. (That's why, for example, there's no chapter on Bad Brains or D.O.A., even though many would argue they're equally as important in punk as Black Flag and Minor Threat, or why the Pixies have been left off the list.) He's just focused on a group of interesting bands who had a lot of crossover, supported one another through labels or just word of mouth, and who remain influential and relevant to this day. And without sounding gossipy or salacious, he presents the break-ups, the inter-band conflicts, the sordid road tales (the Butthole Surfers chapter actually made my hair stand on end) and the drugs and drink that, in some cases, led to a tragic downfall (like The Replacements! Well, shit!)

The best thing about reading Our Band Could Be Your Life, though, is that it encourages you to re-listen (or discover) these bands and form your own personal soundtrack alongside the book. Azerrad's writing has an infectious, Lester Bangs-type quality that makes you want to buy these albums and listen to them, right now.
Here's an excerpt from his description of Husker Du's Flip Your Wig:

"Except for two instrumentals tacked on to the end, every song sounds like a hit in some alternate world where the rivers run with an equal mixture of battery acid and honey."

I know, some may scoff. But for those of us who regularly struggle with music writing, trying to make it artful but not pretentious, trying to balance astuteness and wit with YOUR ACTUAL FEELINGS ABOUT THE SONG, that phrase is a fucking beautiful thing. I listened to the album (I had previously not heard any Husker Du except for the brilliant album everyone already knows/owns, Zen Arcade) and he was right. It was amazing. So was reading about the sad and abrupt end of The Minutemen (NO SPOILERS!) while listening to Double Nickels on the Dime. And after reading the Sonic Youth chapter and then listening to this year's release, The Eternal, even though everyone and their mother has written a book or an article or made a movie featuring Sonic Youth, the chapter somehow helped me understand them a little better.

Okay. Most boring review ever. What I'm trying to say is that I enjoyed this book because music is an enormous part of my life. Quite a few of these bands had a huge formative effect on how I feel music should be--sound-wise, business-wise, appearance-wise, all of that. Azerrad's book is not only a useful time capsule for fanboys and girlies. It also hearkens back to a day when DIY was just starting and it wasn't yet feasible to go out on your own, manage your own tours, and press and mail your own records on your own label. But people like Fugazi and Minor Threat and Black Flag did it. The Butthole Surfers, in their early days, toured on their own terms. They were all dirt-poor, but they had control over their destinies in a way that some of their peers didn't. And that's kind of exciting. In a climate where music is more of a commodity than ever, Azerrad's book is an excellent primer on how to find your own way in one of the shittiest businesses of them all.

18) Do You Like Women? Read This Book.

Book Read: Half the Sky
Author(s): Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn
Pages: 294

For the sake of context, I will precede this review by saying when it comes to aid, I think Westerners should fuck off.
The reason: Two years ago, I spent eight months in Ghana working for a Canadian NGO called Journalists for Human Rights. I lived in Accra, the capital city, which also happens to be the hive for most major local and international NGOs in West Africa. And yes, I had a wonderful time and made some solid friendships, but I also learned that most Western notions of aid are fairly ridiculous. Most Ghanaians I met told me they felt Westerners were on holiday under the guise of volunteerism, living in luxurious conditions while working at orphanages and NGOs and radio stations, doing work that would ultimately not be sustainable because they'd leave after a few months.

With a lot of foreigners I spoke to, volunteering was sort of an ego thing---who doesn't want to be a "hero" roughing it in the big bad African bush? (Accra, like most African cities, is of course much more developed than most media reports would have you believe.) It seemed to be a case of glamour over goodwill. Most Ghanaians were right. And this is a microcosm of what happens when Western forces attempt to intervene in third world countries on a larger scale. At best, it's a short-term solution. At worst, we leave with things in shambles. A few Westerners have managed to create some lasting changes (Stephen Lewis and his work with AIDS, Jimmy Carter and his tireless---and fairly successful---attempts to wipe out guinea worm) but for the most part, I left my time in Ghana feeling like local solutions must be effected by local people.

The authors of Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity For Women Worldwide (who actually know what they're talking about) echo these feelings. Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn are Pulitzer Prize winning journalists who spent years in China covering human rights abuses. (They're also married.) Kristof in particular has devoted his career as a New York Times Op-Ed columnist to exploring women's issues all over the world. Half the Sky shares stories of women Kristof and WuDunn met during their travels all over the world, with the purpose of sharing their struggle and the importance of female education.

All of the women the two journalists spoke with faced extraordinary challenges, and not all of these stories have happy endings. Some will make you blanch (like the young woman who is forced to abandon her children in a Thai brothel, or a woman who is ostracized from her village in the Congo because she was raped and developed a fistula, which is basically when a woman's vaginal and anal tissues are so torn that urine and feces run nonstop down her legs.) Some are incredible---like the group of women who took mob justice in their own hands and murdered a known rapist, killer and druglord in a public courtroom.

But most of all, many of the stories are purely and wholly inspirational. I hate that word---"inspirational." It brings to mind Richard Simmons, or Dr. Phil. It's used to describe well-to-do celebrities who visit villages ruined by typhoons in smock shirts and Wayfarers.

That's not inspirational, my dear friends. Inspirational is a Burundi woman who went from having no say in her household's income to growing an entire farm's worth of crops, contributing food and wealth to her neighbourhood and giving handouts to her husband. Inspirational is Angeline from Zimbabwe, who grew up not having enough money to buy underwear to wear to school and ended up becoming the executive director of the NGO that funded the remainder of her schooling. Or the soft-spoken Afghan woman who risked death over and over to start a chain of girl's schools at a time when female education was banned by the Taliban. These were the stories that made me sneak into an airplane bathroom and cry silently to myself---the ones of the women who succeeded quietly and humbly to change their surroundings. Inspirational is having nothing and defying the odds, the law, your culture, your religion, and more often than not, your own family, in order to do what you think is right.

That's the best part of Half the Sky---these women did what they did because they had to. They had no interest in being celebrated, or being heroes. They simply could not remain silent and continue living in the situations they were given---and so they changed them. The book will inspire you to do something, anything---and thankfully, WuDunn and Kristof do not lecture, but instead give some options for ways that you can help if you feel inclined.

Off the soapbox now, with one more point: I loved this book, and I hate pretty much everything. Really. I'll lend it to you. Read it.

17) Marisha Pessl's "Literary Pyrotechnics"

Book Read: Special Topics in Calamity Physics
Author: Marisha Pessl
Pages: 514
Method of Acquisition: Harrison was over one night. We were pre-drinking some lousy wine left over from my wedding (Vat #7, if I recall correctly.) She passed me Special Topics ("I liked it! I want it back!" she said) and What is the What? ("Blegh. Just keep it," she said.)
As I Write This Hasty Blog, I Am Listening To: The Wind Whistles.

Blue van Meer is a reclusive, brilliant teenager who moves to a mountain town in North Carolina with her eccentric, mysterious literary giant of a dad. She develops a strange and instant connection with her beautiful, mysterious English teacher Hannah Schneider, who invites her to her own personal version of the Algonquin Table with a quirky cabal of kids she quickly dubs "The Bluebloods." The events that follow are rendered in joyfully reference-laden language (every chapter is named after a Great Novel and references to both high and low culture are sprinkled through the narrative like blueberries on cornflakes, and yet the story never feels dated---an impressive achievement in itself.) I found that mentally I needed to be firing on all cylinders in order to unearth the intriguing plot---this is a novel where truly nothing is as it seems. Although the end of the book is a little unsatisfying (MAYBE SPOILER ALERT: After nearly 400 pages of buildup, I was expecting some bigger revelations about two of the book's key characters) the journey is rich and delightful, and you'll linger over some of the book's more humorous and elegant passages for long minutes, wishing you had the same ability to turn a phrase so cleverly.


I've reached my word limit, and I think this was kind of a sucky review in terms of letting you know what you're in for, so I will let a passage from Pessl's tome speak for itself. Here, Blue describes her childhood crush on her dad's gardener, Andreo. Here, you will see an example of the embedded referencing that takes place throughout the novel (using both real and invented books by experts.) You can see how it would be exhausting, but it's also wholly unique and kick-starts the reader into wakefulness.

His name was Andreo Verduga, and he was the most beautiful creature I'd ever seen (see "Panther," Glorious Predators of the Natural World, Goodwin, 1987.) He was tan, with black hair, gypsy eyes, and from what I could deduce from my upstairs bedroom window, a torso smooth as a river rock. He was from Peru. He wore heavy cologne and spoke in the language of an old-fashioned telegram.
HOW DO YOU DO STOP NICE DAY STOP WHERE IS HOSE STOP.


It's cute, right? Special Topics is for all the weirdo, bookish girls who wore the wrong clothes in high school, and the pale boys who made fun of the jocks but still secretly wished they had more friends. This book will make your fine hearts sing.

This Slow Tomato's Gonna KETCHUP!

I realized if I keep writing these long essay-style reviews and boring you to death, I will never get caught up on the hideous backlog that trails me around this apartment like my cats when I forget to feed them. It's a prison of expectations, people, and I'm getting locked in by FAILURE. So I decided it would be best to do bunch of mini-reviews in order to play catchup. I decided I would limit myself to five sentences per book - a bit like Ten Word Reviews, but more long-winded, completely unedited, and emphatically BLARGH-y. I hope to have them all posted by Thursday. There will be an update about where I'm at, reading-wise, at the end of the last mini-review, because I know you're hanging on tenterhooks in WAIT. OKAY. LET'S DO THIS.

16) Life Is A...Highway?



Book Read: The Road
Author: Cormac McCarthy
Pages: 287
Favorite Line: "You're kind of weirded out, aren't you?"

I won't bore you with a plot summary (you can Google it) but everyone I know who has read this has loved it. I suppose, in regards to The Road, love isn't the right word. As you trudge bleakly through McCarthy's ruined, ashy landscape full of cannibals and people blinded by their own need, his twisting, broken, glittering prose will hypnotize and save you. His similes float up to the surface of this black, gory mess like bits of carrion, and bring you to the surface, fortifying you just as you reach the brink of your own horror and despair as a reader. It doesn't matter if the forthcoming movie adaptation doesn't work, because The Road is one of those very specific reading experiences that will be burnt into my brain forever.