Nonfiction Readers Anonymous

Now, anyone who knows me at all knows that headline is hilarious.  I hate, fear, and resist change.  The one change I’ve tried to implement over the past year (no Pop-Tarts) didn’t work out at all.

We’ll hope for better things this time around, shall we?

The new blog is up!  It’s called Citizen Reader and it’s available at http://www.citizenreader.com/citizen/  I know I’ve put you through a lot already, but I would love it if you’d stop in at the new blog and/or update any links from your page to it.  Within the next few days I hope not only to get back to regular posting there (I’ve really been missing it) but also to get a new blogroll going with all my own favorite sites listed (Books Are My Only Friends, Bookstorm, RickLibrarian, I’m looking at you…)

Nonfiction Readers Anonymous is now officially defunct.  I would be remiss if I didn’t thank you all for a good time, though.  Please consider stopping in at the new site–It’s been lovely talking with all of you and I hope we can keep that up.  (Unlike when I wrote “keep in touch!” in high school yearbooks, I really mean that.)

It’s been a long, long time comin’…but a change is gonna come.

Ever heard that song (originally by Sam Cooke, also sung by Aretha Franklin)?  One of my favorites, along with “Bring it on Home To Me” and “The Dark End of the Street.”  Good, mournful soul music.  Please consider watching the movie The Commitments if you think you don’t enjoy soul music.

But anyway.  A change is comin’.  New site, new name, new fantabulous book reviews.  I feel like I can’t ask you for any more patience, or to move to a new site with me, but I’m going to ask it all the same.  And it’s coming next week!  Stay tuned for further bulletins…and have a great weekend.*

*Oh, and if you’re looking for something to read about reading?  The Solitary Vice: Against Reading, by Mikita Brottman.  They weren’t crazy about it over at Bookslut, but I thought it was a pretty rollicking good time.

I never thought I’d see myself typing this sentence, but: Reading Candy Girl by Diablo Cody made me appreciate the great work of literature that was Jenna Jameson’s How To Make Love Like a Porn Star.

Although I am not good at doing “Digested Reads,” like the Guardian newspaper (hilarious, one-page synopses of new books), I can give you a one-paragraph synopsis of Cody’s book, which is subtitled “A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper.”

Girl with regular suburban upbringing moves to Minneapolis to be with new boyfriend.  Gets boring office job, walks by strip joint, decides to strip at an amateur night because she’s curious about stripping.  Becomes a stripper at various Minneapolis strip joints (lookit me: stripping in Minnesota!  Did you know they have strip joints in Minnesota?  Isn’t that crazy?  Because, it’s like, cold there.), makes some money, gets some gross stories (including one about a man who likes to lick a certain something off glass porn booth dividers, yummy!), insert two hundred pages in which we learn nothing interesting about Cody, her fellow strippers, or the icks she’s stripping for, and…we’re done here.

Yeah, yeah, I know, I pick up a book on stripping, what did I expect?  Maybe there’s nothing interesting to learn about the men who do stop in at strip joints.  But you’re telling me there’s no interesting stories about the strippers?  I maintain: Jenna Jameson did this a lot better in her book, and included a hilarious (albeit sad) cartoon about all her stripper injuries.  If you need a book on stripping and/or the porn industry, hers is the one you should read.  If you’re in the mood for something lighter about Minnesota, but still “bad girl” in an enjoyable and interesting way, try Petal Pusher: A Rock and Roll Cinderella Story, by Laurie Lindeen.  Leave this book on the shelf, or circling the pole, or whatever else it wants to do, as long as you don’t have to watch.

I looked at two very interesting books this week:

When Technology Fails: A Manual for Self-Reliance and Planetary Survival, by Matthew Stein; and Back to Basics: A Complete Guide to Traditional Skills, by Abigail Gehring.

I learned several things: how to build a cabin (well, not really, but I looked at the pictures), I am a complete weenie, and I will be completely screwed when, as Stein predicts, a time comes when we may “see significant disruptions in the flow of electricity and goods at some point in our lives.” 

Both books are going back to the library.*  When those disruptions of electricity and goods come, I’m going to save everyone some time, curl up into the fetal position, and give up.  I just don’t have the ambition to build my own cabin, after all.

*Today’s caveat: I just don’t have the energy for these books right now, but they were REALLY interesting.  Both are frighteningly comprehensive, well-written, and nicely illustrated.  I’d highly recommend looking at one or both (Back to Basics is particularly good if you’re thinking of getting a pet: namely, a nice pig or cow to raise for food.)

We interrupt our regularly scheduled programming to bring you a short public service announcement: never, ever order shoes from a company named Aerosoles.  (Note I’m not providing the URL, as I don’t want you to go to their site and order their shoes.)  I’ve recently been through a two-month struggle to the near-death with them about refunding my money.  In a nutshell: I ordered a pair of shoes in two sizes, kept one and sent one back.  Waited for refund on credit card.  Waited for refund.  Waited some more.  Waited a month, to be exact.  Called; was assured I’d get a refund.  Waited some more.  Called again, was assured I’d get a refund.  Waited.  Got a letter in the mail that I didn’t return the shoes in time and would get credit.

Oh, no, no, people.  They pissed off the wrong person.  I watch my bank account and credit card statements like a hawk.  I also expect to be screwed by every company with which I do business, so I had written down dates of all transactions with Aerosoles.  Ordered March 11.  Returned March 26.  They assured me they got shoes back on April 3.  I called three times on…well, you get the point.  So I called yet again and explained the credit was unacceptable, and was told…I would get a refund.  When I asked if our talk had a tracking number, the woman got snippy with me, at which point I had to explain I’d been told three times the refund would be forthcoming and it never came, so she’d have to forgive me if I doubted her word.

Yesterday, the refund came through.  YAY!  But my grudge lives on.  Don’t buy anything from Aerosoles.  Unless you feel like getting to know their customer service staff extremely, extremely well.*

*I did have a book to talk about, but this is already too long.  Back to book news tomorrow! 

I really enjoyed Hillary Carlip’s A La Cart: The Secret Lives of Grocery Shoppers.

It’s a gloriously simple but weird premise: Carlip, a performance artist from L.A., loves collecting people’s discarded and lost grocery-shopping lists.  And then she takes it one step further: she imagines what the shoppers who lost the lists would look like, and then she dresses up like them, has her photograph taken, and writes a chapter from their point of view.

Believe me when I say: it is awesomely awesome.

My favorite “shopper” is Woody, whose shopping list was written on the back of a matchbook, and consisted entirely of “Coors” and “Oreos.”  Now that’s a grocery list I can get behind!  The picture of Carlip dressed as Woody is genius (really; very convincing for a woman dressing as a man) and his chapter is written as his online dating profile:

“About Me: I’m a Lady’s Man and that is true until now.  Today I am ready to meet just one Special Lady with NO KIDS and try to make something work.  I’m hard working and have NO BANKRUPTCIES.”

It’s good stuff.  Check it out.

…and into the fire.

I offloaded Our Daily Meds onto my sister before I could get the whole thing read, because it was just too depressing.  So what did I pick up instead?  The China Price: The True Cost of Chinese Competitive Advantage, by Alexandra Harney.

I did not move in the right direction.  Here’s what I learned on page 2 of this one: “Cheap Chinese goods have made shopping more affordable.  By one estimate, products made in China have saved the average American family $500 a year.”

Are you kidding me?  Now, I like $500 as much as the next person, but that’s all we’ve sold out our trade balance and manufacturing sector (not to mention the health of Chinese workers and the environment) for?  Fantastic.  Hey, sis?  I think I’ve got to hand this one off to you too.

In other depressing news, have you seen Google Maps lately?  Go to Google, click on Maps, and then search for your home address.  Using their new “street view,” you’ll probably be able to get close enough to your house to look in your front window.  That is CREEPY.  My brother said it best on that one: “is this really necessary?”

I picked up and set down a lot of books this weekend.  Novels, memoirs, exposes, fiction favorites.  None of them stuck.

So why, oh why, did the most interesting book I started have to be Our Daily Meds: How the Pharmaceutical Companies Transformed Themselves Into Slick Marketing Machines and Hooked the Nation on Prescription Drugs, by Melody Petersen?

I didn’t want to read it.  I just picked it up because it’s been getting good reviews and I thought I should look into it.  I already have no trust in the medical establishment,* so it’s not something I should be reading anyway.  But now I’m fifty pages in and I can’t stop.  Why?  Statements like this:

“Why do the pharmaceutical companies need to spend 25% or more of their revenues on promotion?  Because for one thing, the drugs don’t work for large numbers of people who take them.  The industry’s own scientists, executives, and clinical studies confirm this.

‘The vast majority of drugs–more than 90%–only work in 30 or 50 percent of the people,’ Dr. Allen Roses, a top executive at GlaxoSmithKline, said at a meeting in London in December 2003.’” (p. 46.)

Oh, nice.  What’s also scary to keep in mind: the cost of manufacturing and raw materials for the drugs only accounts for 10% of the price of brand-name drugs.  Add that scary 25% for marketing, and what are you left with?  That’s right.  Pretty much pure profit, to the tune of 65%.  And how big a market are we talking?  “Americans spent more on prescription drugs in 2003 than they did on gasoline or fast food.”  (p. 5.)

So, no, I didn’t need another depressing book.  I’m reading it anyway.  This is a popular publishing area right now–with books like Shannon Brownlee’s Overtreated and Marcia Angell’s The Truth about the Drug Companies heading up the competition–but this is one of the best books (along with Peter Rost’s The Whistleblower) on the subject I’ve seen.

*I’ll say this for working customer service: it pretty much trains you to accept that everyone’s lying.  Oh, you returned your books on time?  You’re sure you returned that book?  You don’t know how that book got soaking wet on the journey from your car to our return bin?  Liars.  So I guess I’m not all that shocked that the drug companies and most doctors are lying to me as well.  C’est la vie.

Vonnegut has a posthumous collection of essays and stories (mainly stories) out, titled Armageddon in Retrospect.

Of particular note here is the essay “Wailing Shall Be In All the Streets,” which is the nonfiction account of Slaughterhouse-Five and Vonnegut’s experience in the city of Dresden, where he was a prisoner of war during the Allied firebombing.

Holy Christ.  You thought I was depressed before I read this essay?  Now I’m not only sad about firebombing and man’s inhumanity to man, but I’m more sad than ever that Kurt Vonnegut is gone.  And he LIVED through it.  How?  I ask you, how?

“Our leaders had a carte blanche as to what they might or might not destroy.  Their mission was to win the war as quickly as possible, and, while they were admirably trained to do just that, their decisions as to the fate of certain priceless World heirlooms–in one case Dresden–were not always judicious.  When, late in the war, with the Wehrmacht breaking up on all fronts, our planes were sent to destroy this last major city, I doubt if the question was asked, ‘How will this tragedy benfit us, and how will that benefit compare with the ill-effects in the long run?’…

The occupying Russians, when they discovered that we were Americans, embraced us and congratulated us on the complete desolation our planes had wrought.   We accepted their congratulations with good grace and proper modesty, but I felt then as I feel now, that I would have given my life to save Dresden for the World’s generations to come.  That is how everyone should feel about every city on Earth.” (p. 44-45.)

Oh, I miss Vonnegut.  No “maybe you should feel this way.”  No “we should think about loving our cities.”  Only “that is how everyone should feel.”  The end.  And it’s not just the city Vonnegut bemoans: he also describes trying to clean up after the 100,000 dead in the city after the bombing.  Unbelievable.

Wow, sorry to end the week on this note, but I don’t even know what else to say. 

Okay, I was going to go completely cold turkey on the old blog until I got things figured out, but I had a little thing with a book today so I can’t NOT share it.

Yes.  Some people have things with their friends, or their co-workers, or their families.  Not me.  I have little relationships with the books I’m reading.  Primarily because they can’t really talk back, or ask me to work their shifts on Saturday.  Whatever little things I have with books are almost certain to go my way.  There’s nothing I like more than a stacked deck, particularly on the rare occasions when the deck is stacked in my favor.

The book in question is Sloane Crosley’s I Was Told There’d Be Cake: Essays.  I started it last night and didn’t find a whole lot to love in the first few essays, so I put it down.  Mr. Nonanon wandered through the living room and asked how it was, and I said (I’m not proud of it now but we like to quote accurately here), “Eh…pretty dull.  Even with all the press Tina Fey’s getting, I maintain, women just aren’t funny.”  Mr. Nonanon took that in stride, and smart boy that he is, refrained to comment except to say “Too bad…it’s got a good title.”

Dear reader: I was wrong.  Today I picked it up again and read “You On a Stick,” Crosley’s essay about being in a former high school friend’s wedding.  If you are a girl and you’ve ever been in a wedding and you’ve ever wanted to cry at the amount of money you’ve spent at weddings over the course of your life, you must go buy this book just for this one essay.  It’s hilarious.  It’s right on.  And, if essays are meant to get at some universal truths, it’s got that too: “Weddings are friendship deal breakers if the friendship is weak.  There are too many favors, too many tasks, too much required devotion and Aqua Net for imposters like me.” (p. 178.)

Ms. Crosley, I owe you an apology.  I will never lump you in with the likes of Tina Fey again.