Book 06 - Exley - Brock Clarke

As I mentioned in my last review, this book makes extensive references to the book I reviewed last, A Fan’s Notes (click the link for my review). Reading it is not a prerequisite for this book, however I think that for me, reading it enhanced my enjoyment of Clarke’s book.

Book 06 - Exley - Brock Clarke

In his latest book, Exley, Brock Clarke tells of young Miller Le Ray’s quest to find out what happened to his father, who walked out on the boy and his mother some time earlier. Miller’s father’s favorite book is A Fan’s Notes, a “fictional memoir,” written by Frederick Exley in the late sixties. The father’s love of the book seems quite obsessive: he owns multiple copies which he keeps stashed in various places so that he can always have one available and he frequently applies quotes from the book to various situations. The choice of the book as a guidebook for life is an odd one, as the book is filled with vulgar sexual references, misogyny, homophobia, and alcohol abuse. In fact at his mother’s behest, Miller’s father has instructed him not to read the book, but it is immediately apparent that the boy has not obeyed this instruction. He seems just as obsessed with the book as his father, perhaps more so, quoting from it himself, and adopting some of the books idiosyncrasies, such as replacing the names of people with their initial, and blanking out dates.

The story alternates between two equally unreliable narrators. The first is Miller himself. As a young boy of about 9 or 10, Miller’s account of events is limited by his understanding of the world, but it also seems to be affected by the trauma of his father’s departure, as well as by his obsession with Exley’s book. Miller believes that his father has gone to fight in Iraq, something his mother insists is not true. Miller will not give up this belief, leading his mother to seek the help of the second narrator, a psychiatric therapist who Miller has christened Dr. Pahnee. In A Fan’s Notes, Dr. Pahnee is the name of an alter-ego employed by Exley while picking up women in bars, and the name itself is a phonetic spelling of the French word for the male member. The name seems somewhat appropriate, as Dr. Pahnee seems more interested in wooing the boy’s mother than with professional ethics or the boy’s well-being. In fact, his behavior throughout the book is unprofessional and unethical: he breaks confidences: he spies on Miller, he spies on Miller’s mother, he interrogates Miller’s friends, he even breaks into Miller’s house.

Shortly after starting his sessions, Miller comes to believe that his father is back from Iraq. A trip to the Veteran’s Administration Hospital leads him to an encounter with a man he believes is his father. The man has suffered a serious brain injury and is lying in a coma. Miller decides that if he can find Frederick Exley, and bring him to his father's hospital bedside, he will wake up and get better. Miller’s quest is futile, because Exley died in 1992. However, between Miller’s search for Exley, and Dr. Pahnee’s obsession with curing the boy and thus winning the love of the boy’s mother, we gradually learn what really happened with his father.

Like Brock's other book, The Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England (click the link for my review), this book is at the same time both comedic and tragic. Dr. Pahnee's unprofessional behavior is hilariously infuriating, but still manages for the most part to bring about the desired result. Miller's precocious absorption with Exley's book is amusing, but watching the boy struggle with the pain of missing his father is heart-wrenching. Miller's mother seems lost and unwilling to admit to her role in her family's situation, choosing rather to shift responsibility for helping Miller cope to the questionable skills of Dr. Pahnee.

Overall, I thought it was a good book, although I think I liked both Clarke's debut novel and Exley's "memoir" a bit better.

Book 05 - A Fan's Notes - Frederick Exley

I stumbled upon this book while preparing to read the latest book by Brock Clarke, an author I discovered in last year's 52 book challenge with The Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England (click the link for my review). Clarke's latest book is called Exley, and is about a young boy who is looking for his father. The father's favorite book was A Fan's Notes, by Frederick Exley. The boy thinks that by finding Exley, he can find his father. I had never heard of A Fan's Notes, or Frederick Exley for that matter, so I decided that before I read Clarke's book, it might be a good idea to at least familiarize myself with Exley's work. The more I looked into it the more I wanted to read A Fan's Notes. I learned that Jonathan Yardley, the famous book reviewer from the Washington Post was a friend of Exley's and a fan of the book, and had even written a biography of the author. My copy of the book, which was part of the Modern Library collection of great books, sports a glowing blurb from none other than Kurt Vonnegut, one of my favorite authors of all time. I knew that I was not going to be able to read Brock Clarke's book until I tackled Frederick Exley's.

Book 05 - A Fan's Notes - Frederick Exley

In a note to the reader at the beginning of the book, Exley proclaims A Fan's Notes to be a fictional memoir. However, if one digs a little bit into Exley's life story, one learns that this declaration probably springs more from a desire not to be sued than from a lack of authenticity. While it may not accurately name places, dates and people, the reader is left with the impression that the story captures the essence of Exley's life and his struggle with his work, his sexuality, his alcoholism, and his sanity.

Exley grows up in Watertown, NY, in the shadow of his father's hometown celebrity. His father, a high school football phenom who seems destined for greatness in college sports, decides instead to marry his high school sweetheart, but remains a hometown favorite. Exley does not share his father's gift for the game, but possesses a fan's love for the sport many times over. His affection is directed generally at the New York Giants and specifically at Frank Gifford, who was a star running back and wide receiver for the team. Exley obsesses over Gifford, who he met when he was at USC, and throughout the book he contrasts Gifford's successes with his own failures. This obsession is of interest, because it seems to be the only thing that he remotely cares about, except perhaps where he is going to get his next drink. His work, his relationships, and his mental health all seem to take a back seat to Frank Gifford and alcohol.

I would say that Exley struggles with the bottle, but it doesn't seem to be much of a struggle. He drinks frequently and prodigiously, and surrounds himself with enablers who put up with it far longer than anyone might imagine they would. He seems to struggle with his relationships with women and possibly his sexuality. At one minute he is with great bravado and vulgarity discussing his many supposed female conquests. The next minute he is telling us of Bunny Sue, supposedly the love of his life, with whom he is unable to consummate the relationship due to his impotence. Also the level at which he loathes homosexuals makes one think he "doth protest too much." He definitely struggles with his sanity, frequently coming across as delusional. He tells us he was diagnosed as "either a paranoic-schizophrenic, or a schizophrenic-paranoic." This diagnosis was delivered during one of several times he was institutionalized for his drinking and his behavior, and while locked away he received insulin shock and electroshock therapy (this was the 1950s). His state of mind, combined with his deep-seated insecurities and the fog of alcoholism makes him such a quintessentially unreliable narrator, that he has been compared to Nick Carraway, in The Great Gatsby. This presents us with another possible reason for the memoir being "fictional" - Exley just can't keep his facts straight.

I definitely found this book to be quite entertaining. Some people may be taken aback by Exley's homophobia and misogony, but there is also great humor to be found in Exley's disdain for society's expectations of him. I can't speak to the rest of Exley's work, however. His mental problems and alcohol addiction seems to have seriously affected his literary output. He only wrote a few other books, and none of them seem to be very highly regarded. Exley definitely seems to be a literary "one-hit wonder."

Book 04 - Homer & Langley - E. L. Doctorow

Once again I write this many days after finishing the book and many weeks after I should have read and blogged about it. I know I keep saying I'm going to catch up, but other things just keep getting in the way. Anyway, here is book number 4.

Book 04 - Homer & Langley - E. L. Doctorow

Long before there was A&E's "Hoarders," there were Homer & Langley Collyer, the eccentric recluses who in the late 1940s were found dead in their New York City brownstone among vast labyrinths of newspaper and junk, including a Model T Ford that occupied the house's dining room. The house was so bad that they found Homer, but didn't find Langley until more than two weeks later, even though his body was only 10 feet from where they had found his brother. For many years after that, mothers admonished their children to clean their rooms, lest they meet the fate of the Collyers. E. L. Doctorow's book Homer & Langley is a fictional re-telling of the lives of this eccentric duo, and although a factual account of their story might be interesting enough, Doctorow takes great liberties, telling it through the sightless eyes of Homer Collyer, and changing history such that they continue to live on into the 1970s.

Homer starts to slowly lose his sight in his late teens, and while his brother is off fighting World War I in Europe, both of his parents are taken by the the Spanish Flu epidemic, leaving Homer in the care of the house servants until Langley finally returns home, a man changed physically and emotionally by the ravages of war. Their journey towards eccentric reclusiveness is a gradual one, however. Early in their lives they are quite social, making the rounds of nightclubs, and even throwing open their house for tea dances during the great depression.

Langly's experience with the war has lead him to develop a rather unique world view, and he begins to obsess over the creation of a "universal newspaper." He goes out on daily excursions and brings home a copy of every newspaper he can find. As Langley's hoarding starts to worsen, he returns from his newspaper runs with various junk items: typewriters, pianos, and the aforementioned Model T, to name but a few. Langley is convinced that these are useful things that he needs for various projects and inventions, and Homer's admiration for his brother allows him to ignore his concerns about the mountains of junk that are piling up throughout the house.

Doctorow expands their lifespans considerably, taking them up through the sixties, where their house becomes a crash pad for hippies. Eventually they slip into isolation: Langley does battle with the utility companies, and becomes increasingly paranoid, setting booby traps for would-be burglars he thinks will steal his junk; Homer meets a woman who becomes his muse for writing this "memoir," but gradual hearing loss eventually isolates him even more than his lack of sight ever did.

This is my second book by Doctorow. I read my first, The March, in last year's challenge (see my review here). Doctorow has a wonderful way of making history come to life, even if the life he gives it is not entirely accurate. He takes you into the mind of the hoarder, and allows the reader come to some understanding of how the Collyer's came to live the way that they did.

Book 03 - Green Gone Wrong - Heather Rogers

I am the King of Procastination! I finished this book over two weeks ago, but I'm just now getting around to blogging it. The only reason I forced myself to do it today was that it needs to go back to the library by the end of the day. So much for my resolution to stay on top of my reading and writing!

Book 03 - Green Gone Wrong - Heather Rogers

In Green Gone Wrong, Heather Rogers explores how economic factors taint the current offering of supposedly "green" products and services that are widely available, as well as how these factors prevent goods and services that are truly sustainable from finding a place in the marketplace. She explains how many of the labels such as "Organic," "Green," "Carbon Neutral", and "Fair Trade" are often more about making western consumers feel good about themselves than they are about creating sustainable practices, and how good-intentioned efforts to create sustainability are often perverted by the marketplace to a point where they actually may do more harm than good. She shows how a lack of appropriate standards and regulation allow corruption and fraud to run rampant, and shows that when regulation does exist, it is often ineffective and poorly funded.

Rogers starts off with local organic food, explaining the problems that farmers raising sustainable grass-fed meat have in gaining access to slaughtering services, due to the massive consolidation of the business by conventional industrial farming. Someone going to the trouble and expense of raising cattle that aren't wallowing in their own feces does not want them slaughtered in a facility where most of the cattle fall into that category, however USDA rules, written by and geared toward the owners of large slaughterhouses, make it prohibitively expensive to open a smaller facility dedicated to these hormone-free and generally disease-free animals. She explains how lack of access to supply chains, as well as land price inflation and sky rocketing tax rates from exurban sprawl make sustainable vegetable farming expensive as well, to the point where often the only people who can afford to buy locally grown food farmed with sustainable methods are the very wealthy. Meanwhile the ever-growing desire for "Organic" products is fueling the destruction of rain forests and other diverse biomes in the third-world, replacing them with monocultures that may be pesticide free (or maybe not), but certainly not sustainable.

Rogers exposes the sham of the "Organic" labels as well as those indicating "Fair Trade," especially when it comes to third world food production. Standards and regulations, if they exist, are geared to the advantage of large producers. The certification process for permission to use these labels to describe one's food is too expensive for the local peasant farmers, so large corporations apply for them, and then engage the farmers in a sharecropping arrangement where they are forced to sell their product to the corporation for whatever the corporation agrees to pay, regardless of the market. In the case of "Fair Trade" farmers, they often receive "Fair Trade" prices for only 20 percent of their crop. Certification for these labels is performed not by government entities, but by private companies, who are direct clients of the corporations they certify, creating serious conflicts of interest. The companies that perform certifications are not anxious to alienate the companies they work for, for fear they will be replaced with another certifier. Furthermore, the more the certifiers spend performing their task, the more it cuts into their profits. The combination of these factors make for an environment in which fraud and corruption can and does flourish.

There is a brief section on "green" architecture, showcasing several communities in Europe that have had varying degrees of success and failure, and a lengthy section about transportation, which seems to encompass some general energy concepts as well. She explains how in the mid 20th century car, tire, and oil companies banded together to buy up transit systems and dismantle them, in order to foster the growth of the automobile business. She tells us the simple economics of why American car companies make more SUVs than green automobiles (it's not necessarily because the public wants them). She talks about the fraud that runs rampant in the trade of "carbon credits", as well as the unintended consequences of these "carbon offset" projects. In addition, she explores unintended consequences of biofuels: food shortages, destruction of rain forest, etc.

But the news is not all negative. In addition to the success stories of sustainable architecture, there is a section which outlines things that work, and actions that could put the ineffective strategies on the right track. However, this won't happen without effective policy decisions at the national and global levels, and if the market is left to its own to bring about these changes, they will likely come too late or not at all.

This is a well-written and thought-provoking book. It should be read by anyone who thinks that just because something is labeled "Organic," it means that it is good for you or for the planet, or that thinks that anything labeled "Free Trade" means that a peasant farmer is guaranteed to be receiving anything close to what we would call a fair price for their goods. It should be read by those who think that florescent bulbs and driving a Prius is a substitute for effective sustainable energy policies. And it should be read by those who think that the free-market will solve our planet's environmental problems before it is too late.

Book 02 - Eating the Dinosaur - Chuck Klosterman

I know it doesn't seem that way, but despite my sputtering start, I am committed to the challenge. I thought after my marathon finish last year, I would maintain a similar pace and therefore be ahead rather than behind. Instead, I've been distracted by other things, and have been neglecting my reading. I hope to catch up soon.

Book 02 - Eating the Dinosaur - Chuck Klosterman

I have to admit, the thing that most attracted me to this book was the title. In fact, it was the name of this and an earlier book, Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs, which drew me to Klosterman's work. Despite the fact that he's written for the The NY Times, The Washington Post, Esquire and Spin, I had never knowingly experienced his work. However, I had an eleven hour train ride last week, and I had just picked up the book at the library, so I decided to dive in.

In Eating the Dinosaur, Klosterman writes mostly about popular culture and sports. I had heard from others about the pop culture part, but I was unaware of the sports element. Klosterman is a basketball and football fanatic. He spends almost twenty pages explaining why despite his failed career, Ralph Sampson was the best basketball player that ever lived, but he ties it to the satisfaction we get as a society when a celebrity - sports or otherwise - fails. He spends another twenty pages on the game of football, but he does so by exploring the dichotomy between football's image of conservatism, and the fact that the game is constantly evolving due to out-of-the-box thinking by radical coaches.

But the essays are not all about sports. The enigmatic title of the book comes from what Klosterman feels would be one of the only practical uses for time travel - to eat a dinosaur. In the book's opening essay, he interviews interviewers in order to explore the nature of being interviewed. In another essay, he explores parallels between David Koresh and the Branch Davidians of Waco, and Kurt Cobain and Nirvana. He explains why the critical irrelevance of bands like AC/DC and ABBA is irrelevant itself, and he uses Vertigo, Body Double, The Real World, and personal experience to explore what he feels is the true nature of voyeurism.

It's funny what kind of preconceptions you can form about an author when you've heard of him or her but never read his or her work. Based on the title, I thought this would be a funnier book. While it is quirky in its subject matter, and the writing is not devoid of humor, Klosterman's insights are often more thought-provoking than they are laugh-inducing. The reader might chuckle a bit before realizing he or she had never thought about a particular subject in that particular way.

I'm not sure I'm going to run out and grab another of Klosterman's books right away. For one thing, his bibliography seems a bit jumbled, running the gamut between novels, essays, and memoirs. Also, the other book of pop culture essays (Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs) might be a little dated (2003). However, I think I'll keep my eyes open for his magazine pieces, and hope they share the same level of insight as the essays of this book.

Book 01 - The Big Short - Michael Lewis

I'm baaaack. I know I'm off to a slow start, but I am committed to doing the challenge again, and seeing as I read more than 20 books in 3 months last year, I hardly think being 3 books behind is that bad.

I don't think I've been paying enough attention to non-fiction, so I think I'm going to start off with a few books of that genre, before I get back into some more literature. So without further ado, lets kick this off.

Book 01 - The Big Short - Michael Lewis

When I reviewed The Ascent of Money last year, I think I mentioned that in a previous life I worked developing software applications to model financial transactions called securitizations. These transactions take loans such as mortgages and turn them into securities, which can be sold to investors. This type of financial instrument initially created unprecedented liquidity in the mortgage market, allowing easier access to mortgage credit and making it possible for many hard-working Americans to realize the dream of home ownership. It was of course ultimately twisted by greed: greed of potential homeowners wanting houses they could not afford; greed of mortgage originators that took no responsibility for the creditworthiness of the people they loaned money to; greed of the investment banks, who packaged loans of decreasing quality, and sold them to investors; greed of the so-called rating agencies, who in a massive conflict of interest were paid by the banks issuing the securities, and therefore granted investment grade status to these securities to keep the gravy train rolling; and the greed of the investors, whose insatiable appetite for these supposedly safe securities and their high yields fed this financial mess. It was this cycle of greed, combined with some other factors that ultimately brought about a financial crisis of such magnitude as to rival The Great Depression, and which left waves of economic turmoil that are still being felt many years later.

Michael Lewis' book, The Big Short is not really about any of these players - at least not directly. Instead, Lewis turns his attention to those who saw the impending crash, and positioned themselves to capitalize on it. These people saw that these instruments were growing so complex that not even the banks and the rating agencies could understand them, much less the investors, and that the Triple-A ratings the agencies were handing out like candy to Trick-or-Treaters were basically meaningless. They saw that the financial engineers who designed these transactions used this complexity to obfuscate the true risks involved in the quality of the underlying loans, and that the continued health of these transactions hung on two suppositions: housing prices will always go up, and defaults will be manageable and localized. What the banks and investors seemingly didn't realize, was that it wasn't necessary for housing prices to go down, or even to completely flatten out. A simple slow down in the rise of prices was enough to bring this money machine to its knees.

Lewis profiles several of these supposed visionaries who saw this impending crisis when the rest of Wall Street did not. He chooses for the most part to romanticize them for their foresight and for the trials they faced by going against the common wisdom, rather than demonize them for being bottom feeders preying off the economic collapse of the United States for their own financial gain. In some ways he may be right to do so. Some of them were indeed trying to shine sunlight on this dark Ponzi scheme, but others were just quietly gaming the system, and all of them walked away rich. They used Credit Default Swaps, "insurance" policies that trade relatively small premiums for large payouts in the event of default, in order to "short" or bet against securities backed by sub-prime mortgages. Many of these contrarian investors also shorted the stocks of banks that were heavily engaged in these transactions, and made money when the bank stocks collapsed as well.

While my background makes this book particularly interesting to me, I think it can be enjoyed by anyone who wishes to better understand one of the principal causes of the current economic crisis. Lewis does an excellent job of explaining these transactions and the underlying motives for engaging in them, and therefore makes an extremely complex subject very accessible to the casual reader. Lewis is also a former Wall Street bond salesman, who chronicled that time of his life in the book Liar's Poker, so he has a personal insight which lends to his telling of the story. FYI - he also wrote The Blind Side, from which one of the story threads was used for the recent Sandra Bullock movie of the same name.

2010 Wrap-up and 2011 Look-ahead

I know this is late, but I needed to take a break for a few days.

I did it! 52 books in 52 weeks! Well, 52 books, anyway. I didn't do very well at staying on the one book a week schedule, so coming into October I still had yet to read at least half of the books! I buckled down though, and started reading two and three books a week, and finally finished my last book December 30th.

I performed even worse at staying current with my blog, sometimes waiting a week or more before I wrote up the books I read. For example, I wrote my last three blog entries the morning of the 31st (I posted four that morning, but one of them had already been written and just needed editing). I wrote an entry for every book, though some entries were more substantial than others. I averaged almost 600 words per entry though, so I think that's pretty respectable.

For the most part, the books I read were pretty substantial too. Yes, there were some short books - eleven books I read were less than 200 pages. However, twelve of the books were more than 400 pages, with half of those being more than 500 pages. I did not do any audio books, although I don't have anything against them. I didn't read any e-books either, but that was simply because nobody has bought me a Kindle or an IPad yet (hint, hint).

I read every word of every book. That includes prefaces, epilogues, glossaries, appendices, and informational notes, though I drew the line at indices, reference citations, and acknowledgments. I read from a wide variety of genres: popular fiction, classic literature, science fiction, biography and non-fiction. I did not work from a predetermined list. For the most part, I chose the books, although several of the books I had to read for a literature class I was taking. I also accepted recommendations from friends and/or people following my blog. I got most of the books I read from the public library, although several of the books had been on my shelf prior to the challenge, and I had to buy the ones for my literature class.

Fifteen of the books could arguably be considered classic literature. The exact count depends where you draw the line. Four of those were books I had to read for my American Literature class. They were: Nature and Selected Essays - Ralph Waldo Emerson, Moby Dick - Herman Melville, The Blithedale Romance - Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Walden - Henry David Thoreau.

Four authors had the distinction of appearing twice on the list: John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, Albert Camus, and Carl Hiaasen.

Two authors made the "three-peat," appearing three times on the list: David Sedaris and Stieg Larsson.

Inexplicably, two books featured a character named Zenobia: The Blithesdale Romance and Ethan Frome. I'm guessing the name was a little more common in the 19th century.

I encountered many authors that I had never read before: Albert Camus, William Faulkner, Edith Wharton, Voltaire, Stieg Larsson, David Sedaris, and Bill Bryson, to name but a few. In fact only about a dozen of the books were by authors whose work I had read prior to the challenge.

I liked almost everything I read. The only notable disappointment was Snow Falling on Cedars. I felt it was a bit too much like a Harlequin romance. I also struggled with Emerson's essays, finding him to be overly wordy and preachy, but at the end, I still felt like I got something out of his work, so I can't say I hated it.

So that's it! Or is it? I have accepted the 2011 challenge! I'm planning on doing it again, and keeping the blog going. I'm going to try to do a better job of keeping on track, but it's already the second week of January, and I haven't finished my first book yet, so I guess I need to try harder. I'm also going to try to follow some of the other blogs of people doing the challenge, and see if I can't scare up some more readers for my blog. I know there are a few of you out there, but for the most part I feel like a voice in the wilderness.

I will continue to read from a variety of genres, both fiction and non fiction, and to read from both modern and classic authors. I'll try to get to some of the books that have been languishing on my "to-read" list. One thing I've noticed is that I haven't read a lot of English Literature, so I might try to get to a little more of that this year. Maybe I'll try and fit in some Hardy or some Dickens, or something by one of the Bronte sisters. If you have any classic English Literature titles that you think I would be interested in, please let me know. In fact, feel free to offer any suggestions for future reads, or comment on my entries. You can leave your suggestions or comments here, on Facebook, or even on Twitter. I will be keeping the previous year's blog entries online, so don't be afraid to go back and check out some of my old entries and comment on those as well.

Thanks to everyone who cheered me on!