Inappropriate Content: 50 in '05©

I remember a passage from a book—I think it was Q-Squared—that went something like this: “she threw herself into her work, pulling more shifts than she had since med school. ‘Sleep’ was something she used to do, but gave up for the sake of her career.”

I'm not exactly throwing myself into TCU. It's more the other way around. But when you combine the schedule with the lack of easy computer access, my opportunities to blog are far fewer than I'd like. On the plus side, I have managed to blow through a couple of books:

Number Four:
A Shortage of Engineers
By Robert Grossbach

The comic strip Dilbert had a hard time making the jump to a television series. The painful ironies that flourish in modern day cube farms easily translate into a three panel comic strip or a one paragraph e-mail (or a blog post). But when UPN turned Scott Adam's comic into a thirty-minute animated series, they had to come up with something generally lacking in the chaotic randomness of the corporate world: a story.

UPN went the wacky route—what my old drama teacher would call “lots of squiggly lines” humor—escape tunnels, Mothra and lots of Simpsons-style randomness. It didn't work particularly well. In his novel, Grossbach faces some of the same problems.

His setting is slightly grander and more specific than Dilbert: an engineering firm with DOD contracts at the end of the cold war. It's fascinating and funny, and every little detail is engrossing, from the absurd lengths the firm will go to in order to please an Air Force colonel to the day the protagonist, during his morning commute, hears a radio report that Bush has invaded Panama to get at Noriega. And Grossbach is very good at pacing himself; the good stuff doesn't taper off or come in bunches, but comes at you evenly and authentically. In fact, ‘authentic’ is a good word to describe most of the book. I wouldn't want to accuse Grossbach, an engineer himself, of being at all autobiographical, but the project being worked on throughout the book sounds, to a layman, suspiciously like the Air Force's real IFF transmitter/receiver system.

Then Grossbach bumps into the same problem that Dilbert bumped into. Once you've got the cool setting and the funny stuff, you need a story. Grossbach picks a classic: the young man, just out of college, trying to figure out this whole ‘real life’ thing. And that's where the authenticity breaks down. Virtually all the character development and plot points take place outside of our protagonists job. And none of them are as real or engrossing as the stuff that does take place back in the lab.

Number Five:
Aunt Erma's Cope Book
By Erma Bombeck

Growing up, there were a few books on my family's bookshelf I kept making little mental notes to read, but never got around to sitting down with. Now there's a little checklist in my head with those names: X, Oscar Wilde, P.J. O'Rourke and a few others. Erma Bombeck is the first name I've checked off the list, ant it was purely by chance. A copy of Aunt Erma's Cope Book was sitting in the magazine rack in the entrance stairwell to the building my classes are held in.

Taking aim at self-help books and their cult-like following is hardly a new subject. But this was published in 1985, which might just make Bombeck the first to devote a book to the subject. I can't quite figure out if the Cope Book is a collection of essays or a narrative. The chapters are far more thematically similar than you'd usually find in a collection by, say, E.B. White or Gore Vidal. And they're in chronological order. But most of them stand up by themselves as a comment on a particular self-help book Erma Bombeck read at one point or another.

Essay collection or novel, Aunt Erma's Cope Book is still extremely funny. You'd think it'd be hard to make a 150 page book out of “people need to take it easy and laugh a little.” Then again, self-help books can turn “take responsibility” into a five-hundred page tome.

So there you go.

Number Six:
The Caveman's Valentine
By George Dawes Green

I know the Samuel L. Jackson movie based on this book is crap. Not because I've seen it—I haven't—but because of my rule:

Good movies make bad books, and visa versa.

And this book is a very, very good book.

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I once took a very good picture of a homeless man looking much like an ancient shaman come to life to play chess with an accounts manager in the shadow of Philadelphia's city hall. While The Caveman's Valentine is set in New York, not Philadelphia, and the Caveman is a pianist and not a grandmaster, I kept coming back to that image as I read this book. The man who is smart enough and polished enough to play chess during the lunch hour, but too out-of-step to secure even a basic shelter for himself. What causes this?

Romulus Ledbetter would tell you what causes this: Cornelius Gould Stuyvesant, the man who transmits Y-rays of dispair from his secret lair at the top of the Chrystler building. Green takes us deep into Ledbetters damaged psyche of Brian Typhoons (which some insolent psychatrists have misdiagnosed as “schitzophrenia”) while simultainiously weaving a complicated detective story. And it's funny, too.

Without question the best book on my list so far. This book was phenominal. And has made me very greatful to the magazine rack in the enterance stairwell.