I’ve been meaning to keep track of books I read again. Since I’ve experienced some form of brain-death that has kept me from coming up with anything of any use to say (duders, castro resigned! duders, muhsin muhammad got cut! duders, i’ve got gutter twins tickets for thursday!), I may as well start now. It’s been a good year for reading, so far, in that my attention span hasn’t yet deteriorated to the point where I read two pages of a book at a time, put them down, and f5 the same four webpages over and over again, or go outside in miserable weather to wander around and wish I was in Texas, if only so I can look forward to trying to read again. Instead, for the most part, I’ve finished the things I’ve started and enjoyed them.

smells like dead elephants, Matt Taibbi
war without death, Mark Maske
who hates whom, Bob Harris
the league of extraordinary gentlemen: the black dossier, Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill
how the water feels to the fishes, Dave Eggers
take the cannoli, Sarah Vowell
silent music, Katherine Craft
the shock doctrine, Naomi Klein

That’s the list. I’ve both started and finished all of them since Christmas, except for the shock doctrine, which I started about three weeks ago and abandoned earlier this week- Kat was reading it at the same time I was, and she’s a much faster reader than I am. At the end of each chapter she read, she was so worked up about it that she wanted to talk about everything she had just learned, and it kind of spoiled the reading experience. I gave up halfway through, and let her spoiler alerts (hint: everybody loses) take me through the final couple hundred pages. It was, and is, a terrific piece of reporting that I will probably finish at some point, but it’s an awful lot to take in.

silent music doesn’t really count, either, since I published it. But it’s a good book, and I did read it, plus it makes me look even more studious to list it. So there you go.

The Sarah Vowell book had been on my shelf for over a year, and I don’t know why I never got around to it until now, or really why I brought it to England with me. I must have planned it somehow. I loved her other books, but this one was kinda slight, except for a pretty spectacular piece on the Trail of Tears. Otherwise, it’s very much a portrait of a writer finding her voice. assassination vacation is one of the more remarkable personal history books I’ve ever read, but take the cannoli is kinda rambly by comparison. It’s her debut, and it reads like it.

how the water feels to the fishes is a bathroom read, less than a hundred pages and itty-bitty, so not many words fit on each page anyway. It’s all flash fiction, the sort of crap that Dave Eggers comes up with as a warm-up before working on something serious, and it’s not really worth talking about. Some of it’s clever, some of it’s dumb, a lot of it reads like he got really high and just started typing for three minutes. The packaging is cool, though- it comes in a slipcase with two other flash-fiction mini-books, by Deb Olin Unferth and Sarah Manguso. Unferth’s book is her debut collection, and Manguso’s first book of non-poetry… and I haven’t read them, of course, even if they’re just sitting there and it’d only take about half an hour each. Which isn’t to say that they’re not good, but I wasn’t excited by them. It’s cool of Eggers to bind them all together, and I will probably get around to them eventually, but the good intention of packaging a small new book by a hot-shit author with two debuts doesn’t pay off if the reader is as arbitrary as your narrator. And now I feel guilty because, like, what if one of those books was mine?

black dossier is totally unreadable. I guess it’s good to know that even Alan Moore is capable of putting something out that feels like a complete fucking waste of money, but I rather liked his previous work, which was usually successful in getting its point across, or at least interesting in its failure. This one’s garbage, and only Kevin O’Neill’s artwork makes it worth glancing at. Even the 3D sequences are crappy and stupid.

But I loved who hates whom. This one my sister ordered from my Amazon wishlist for me for Christmas and, when it came in, my brother-in-law, who’s very nice but with whom I have as little in common as two humans from the same general landmass are capable of not-having in common, checked it out and immediately wanted a copy. Which is to say, if it appeals to both me and Chad, it’ll probably appeal to you, too. It’s a handy guide to every major conflict in the world, all of which are summed up within about five pages, including a couple of dick jokes here and there. Somehow the book’s classified as humor, which is bizarre, but it’s funny and really informative. Baluchistan, man… who knew? And so on- I try to keep relatively well-informed regarding world affairs, but keeping the information within Harris’ book in my head makes me seem way smarter than I am. Remember, the key to impressing people with how smart you are, particularly if your knowledge base is often expansive but shallow, is to change the subject frequently, so you never get caught up talking about something you haven’t read about yet. People will assume that, if you have so much familiarity with so many things, clearly your knowledge on each subject must be deep, and bouncing around keeps them from testing that. It’s also why you only really need to read the first thirty pages of most major novels, if you’re capable of memorizing key passages and reciting them in casual conversation. as dostoyevksy says on page thirty-two of crime and punishment, clearly we… Yeah. Write this tip down, kids, especially if you want to lead members of the opposite sex who wear glasses to believe that you are someone whose genitals they should be touching. Or better yet, commit it to memory.

Wow, dangerously off track there, huh? Here I am talking about books, and suddenly I detour to getting handjobs from smart people. What can you do? The mind wanders.

How about war without death? This book’s totally nerdy, but I read it for research purposes. It follows a full calendar year, from February through to the following January, in the life of the NFC East. It’s mostly interesting, because there’s a lot of stuff about the way the NFL really works, and how it involves players and coaches as a job, rather than as a thing that, you know, I watch on TV. As far as I’m concerned, football’s a thing that happens on Sundays for four and a half months each year. Of course if you’re actually involved in it, it’s a year-round job, and during certain parts of the year, it’s long hours for six days a week. Which is what I wanted to find out about when I read it, as one of the characters in weathered is a professional quarterback, and I wanted to make sure my account of what his life might be like wasn’t completely out-of-whack (it mostly was, so I guess it was a good find). I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone without a burning and passionate interest in professional American football, and even then it’d probably be mostly interesting to Cowboys, Redskins, Eagles, and Giants fans. But, hell, we’re all Giants fans a little bit this month, so grab a copy and check it out quick. Or don’t; it’s a little unfortunate, but given that the book is rooted so firmly in the 2006 season, it’s got a pretty short shelf-life, and the year Maske spent writing it is ultimately just a fraction of the time the thing will remain relevant. It’s too bad, because it’s sharp writing and insightful about the game, but it’ll be outdated and boring by the time the new season starts, in a lot of ways. I tend to be pretty steadfast about these things, and I was ready to skip the pages and pages about player labor unions.

One thing the book does drive home, though, is how socialist the NFL is. Which is funny, given the stereotype of the rabid American football fan, but it’s also why it succeeds on most levels. The idea of parity, a level playing field, keeps the game interesting and profitable to fans. I wouldn’t try to broaden this metaphor to real-world economics, but the way profits are shared from the most successful teams to those with the least money would have a lot of people who hate sports because they were never good at them and got body-checked by the football team in high school nodding in approval. Hell, the hated Green Bay Packers are even owned outright by the proletariat… Interesting stuff to read, genuinely, but I doubt I’d have ever picked it up if I weren’t researching the book.

smells like dead elephants is just a collection of Matt Taibbi’s rolling stone column. Taibbi is definitely the most insightful and readable political writer working the US scene right now, and definitely worth reading. He has some self-hating tendencies sometimes that get boring- we get it, man, you hate reporters and feel guilty for being one of them- but he’s also whip-smart and like nobody else with a similie. He spends much of the book in New Orleans, and he has a lot of useful, truthful things to say on the subject. There’s a long, not supe-iinteresting, stretch near the end where he goes to Iraq that’s skippable, but he also writes about Washington in a more direct and informative way than any of the beltway insiders who you find talking about the horse races. And of course Taibbi flogs the corpse of Hunter Thompson a bit in his style and turns of phrase, but it’d be hypocritical of me to complain about that too much… (If you’ve googled yourself and found your way here, Matt, don’t be defensive.) It’s a serious and smart and funny book, worth checking out immediately.

And that’s it so far, but I’m now about halfway through dreams of my father by that guy who’s running for President. It’s terrific, much better than I expected; thoughtful and literary and insightful, the sort of thing that you read and think, man, why can’t somebody like this be in charge, and then you realize that he probably will be, and America starts to seem pretty fucking cool again.

And now it’s 1:30 in the morning, and I haven’t yet started on this week’s edition of the thirtying. I’ve still got nothing to say about anything anyone wants to read about, but there are hours to figure it out, I guess. Wish me luck; I will probably need it.