A Place to sit and read

Over at the LBC, this week’s topic of discussion is Stephen Graham Jones’ post-modern horror novel Demon Theory. It’s a must read for anyone who likes footnotes with their hockey masks and chainsaws.

Now that Thanksgiving weekend has finally come to a close, I have a bit of time to let you know about one or two odd and interesting books I’ve noticed lately. I happen to think that Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is one of the more enjoyable books I’ve ever read, and I also loved reading about Kesey in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (which, by the way is fantastic if read back to back with Hunter S. Thompson’s Hell’s Angels since the books tell essentially the same story but with different points of view and writing styles). So, I was rather intrigued when I came across Kesey’s Jail Journal. It’s a colorful amalgamation of collages, drawings, and text that he created during various stints behind bars over the course of thirty years.Another interesting looking book is Six Feet Under: Better Living Through Death which is a companion book to the HBO series. I’m not a big fan of TV show companion books. They are nearly always hastily produced assemblages of screen captures and mind-numbingly idiotic text, but this one appears to break the mold a bit. The book isn’t an episode guide; instead it meanders through various backstories in an appropriately eerie sort of way, with lots of odd photos and ephmera related to the show. In that sense it’s interesting for what it is, but it’s also a triumph in book design. The book slides into this odd, plastic, vertical slip cover that is faintly reminiscent of a coffin, and the book itself lacks a traditional spine, and instead appears to be a series of booklets artfully woven together.Finally, I’m sure all the Mcsweeney’s watchers have seen this item, which for me falls into the annoying “weird for the sake of being weird” category. Projects like William T. Vollman’s Rising Up and Rising Down keep me interested, but it bugs me to see McSweeney’s squandering the advantages they have over other independent publishers with so much forced silliness and ironic posturing.

Rex Sorgatz (who runs the excellent Fimoculous) has noted a trend in the accessible non-fiction category: the “My Year As…” book. The author spends an entire year reading the OED or gorging on the competitive eating circuit, all to provide a window into a subculture, give the author an opportunity to poke a little fun at him or herself, and ultimately provide fodder for a book. Were I to trace the genesis of its trend, I would speculate that it’s the offspring of Morgan Sperlock’s gluttonous and popular experiment Super Size Me and the proliferation and popularity of reality television, wherein a regular Joe endures a contrived concept and the world watches. Sorgatz has compiled a list of these books, which at 22 strong, inclines this observer to think that the “year” may be nearing its end for this type of book.This trend, of course, replaced an earlier trend, “biographies of things,” which had “changed the world,” according to the assertions of the authors and publishers, perhaps achieving its apotheosis with Mark Kurlansky’s Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World. This trend was succinctly dismissed by Richard Adams in the Gaurdian, writingIn a sense, yes, all these things have changed the world, but only in a general sense that everything that exists changes the world.