Inappropriate Content: 50 in 05©

So it's been a couple of weeks since I swore to lay off the political blogging until Bush nominated someone to fill O'Connor's seat. Well, I've been enjoying the opportunity to read some, y'kno, books. In fact, I've been enjoying it so much that I've been avoiding today's papers. I don't know anything about this Roberts guy.

I hope he's nothing like Bob Roberts.

I'll spend plenty of time reading and posting about him the next few weeks. But before I dive into the SCOTUS craziness, I'm going to take this chance to update my 50 in '05© list.

15: Light Before Day by Chris Rice
I love all the New Orleans authors: Anne Rice, Chris Rice, Condi Rice, fried rice. There's no reason to group Chris Rice's novels with his mother's, though; he's grown further from her, in style and substance, with each new book. Light Before Day, his third book, is a pulpy detective noir, a latter day Dixon Hill. Virtually all the elements of hard-boiled detective fiction are there. The hard-luck private eye with an office on Santa Monica Boulevard is now a hard-luck journalist at an indie weekly with an apartment in West Hollywood. The sex kitten femme fatal with a thing for the detective is now a Hollywood Hills kept boy with a thing for the reporter. The damsel in distress is a missing ex-boyfriend; the woman with a secret is now a closeted marine. The detective's tough guy friend who'll knock some heads is, of course, a motorcycle enthusiast lesbian from San Jose who'll knock some heads. And the evil gangster blackmailing the mayor? Now a dot-com millionaire pedophile blackmailing the mayor. That list could go on for pages, but all in all, the book's a lot of fun, and Rice gets bonus points for working some stuff on how bad the crystal meth problem is in the gay world into an otherwise escapist novel. And as I've mentioned, Rice is funny as hell:
He grabbed the remote, found an eleven o'clock news broadcast, gave me a look, and raised the volume. The two of us sat there as an eighty-one-year-old woman described what it was like to have her arms ripped off by her nephew's pit bull. When the reporter asked her what the worst part of the experience had been, the woman replied, “Losing my arms.”
16: Hollywood by Gore Vidal
Once you've read the other books in Vidal's American Chronicle series, this penultimate novel seems a bit, well, penultimate. After Burr, Lincoln, 1876, and Empire, I've gotten used to excellence in this series. Blaise and Caroline Sanford and Senator James Burden Day, the fictional protagonists of Empire, are getting on in years, and while there's a burning curiosity to see where their lives go, they aren't quite what they were at the turn of the century. The same is true of Vidal's real-life characters, such as Henry Adams and the Roosevelts. It's just not quite as good as last time. The same can be said for Vidal's window into the White House: while Edith Wilson's regency and the rise and fall (and murder) of Harding hanger-on Jess Smith are enthralling, they don't quite have the power of Empire's climactic confrontation between Teddy Roosevelt and William Randolph Hearst. Was it a bad book? Hardly; it was merely crippled by my own high expectations.
17: Messiah by Gore Vidal
Of course, sometimes expectations can get you. I was expecting a book in the style of Myra Breckinridge or Duluth, the kind of book described by Italo Calvino as "the hyper-novel or the novel elevated to the square or to the cube." Now, that quote is somewhere on every edition of Myra, Duluth, and The Smithsonian Institution ever printed, and while I've never quite figured out what a "hyper novel" is—the books in question are still printed with regular, two dimensional words—or who Italo Calvino is, I have certainly associated a certain style of novel with that quote. So here, too, I had expectations. And again, they weren't met. This time, though, it was great: instead of using fluffy, wordy, run-on sentences to disguise a vicious satire, Vidal wrote an almost Vonnegut-esque plain-spoken, gentle but firm rebuttal to religion in general and apocalyptic cults in specific that, when you finish it, turns out to have been simple story of an old man looking back at a life lived. In fact, what seemed while I was reading it to be Vidal's most nihilistic, cynical book, was, looking back, his most emotional and bittersweet.
18: Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut
I read through this book in a day. I slacked off at work, didn't eat meals, and even paid $40 for a towel that's the wrong size, simply to have more time to read this book. And I don't regret any of it, not even the towel thing. It's that good.
19, 20, 21: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J.K. Rowling
You know, I really enjoyed the Narnia books growing up—and still do—but there was always something about them that bothered me. When I first realized they were such an allegory for the Bible (it took me a couple books, but c'mon, I was twelve) I thought that was it. I thought that for a while, but at some point I realized I still hadn't put my finger on what was bothering me. And I didn't put my finger on it until I read this interview with J.K. Rowling in Time:
There's something about Lewis' sentimentality about children that gets on her nerves. "There comes a point where Susan, who was the older girl, is lost to Narnia because she becomes interested in lipstick. She's become irreligious basically because she found sex," Rowling says. "I have a big problem with that."
This is why we love Harry Potter. I mean, just look at it:
"I was trying to subvert the genre," Rowling explains bluntly. "Harry goes off into this magical world, and is it any better than the world he's left? Only because he meets nicer people. Magic does not make his world better significantly. The relationships make his world better. Magic in many ways complicates his life."

And unlike Lewis, whose books are drenched in theology, Rowling refuses to view herself as a moral educator to the millions of children who read her books. "I don't think that it's at all healthy for the work for me to think in those terms. So I don't," she says. "I never think in terms of What am I going to teach them? Or, What would it be good for them to find out here?"

...(Interestingly, although Rowling is a member of the Church of Scotland, the books are free of references to God. On this point, Rowling is cagey. "Um. I don't think they're that secular," she says, choosing her words slowly. "But, obviously, Dumbledore is not Jesus.")

I've missed writing 50 in '05© posts, and not just because it's a chance for me to dwell on something that doesn't involve politics. You see, several weeks ago, I got an e-mail from a woman who works for a New York publishing firm. She had somehow gotten the impression that a fair number of people who read books also read my blog. Now this was before Howard Dean was leaving comments on this blog (well, one comment, immediately after he spoke at a fundraiser my father attended, where I think it's safe to assume money changed hands—but I'm sure that the Governor just likes my blog, and the timing was pure coincidence) so there was really no excuse for her to think I have more than four readers. But I never shatter anyone's delusions when they're offering to give me free stuff. And so, sitting on my bookcase, is a copy of the new spy thriller by, of all people, former Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, along with a glowing press release. (Unfortunately, they didn't include a copy of the poem Weinberger wrote for Bloom County in the 80's, nor the strip it was published in. Pity.)

It's actually been sitting on my bookshelf for a while now, and I won't get to it until I've finished Cat's Cradle and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. I'm sure the good folks at Atria publications have now learned that my to-read list is not the fastest-moving list around. (Although if by chance you do read this blog, Dr. Dean, you should know that I'm very punctual with work I'm being paid for. Very punctual.) I myself have learned one thing from this little adventure: my boyfriend does a hilarious impression of Al Haig.