Why four? Because sometime soon I'll be back with my top six novels of the year and this saves me from shuffling them together into a top ten.
4) About Alice, Calvin Trillin (2006) - This expands a lengthy essay Trillin wrote for the New Yorker about his late wife Alice. He recounts a letter he received after the original essay's publication from a young woman worried that her fiance doesn't love her "the way Calvin loves Alice," which sums up the feel of the book. About Alice is an ode to love itself. A bone-deep sadness pervades this humorist's book. Although she led a long, full life, this is not a "well, at least she led a long, full life" eulogy. What happens after you lose your soulmate? About Alice will give you empathy for those old couples you see shuffling along. And it will make you, like that young letter-writer, want to eventually become one of those old couples shuffling along.
3) Friday Night Lights, H.G. Bissinger (1990) - This book is ridiculously good. In any other year, it would top my non-fiction list. The TV show, even in its superb first season, is no substitute. And forget about the movie. Written before "A Year in the Life of X, Y or Z" books became a cliche, Friday Night Lights is more about the locale than the kids and more about the kids than about football. The chapter about the use of "nigger" in Odessa should be essential reading in American high schools. With the corrupt and arrogant boom and bust oil business of west Texas as a backdrop, Friday Night Lights also marginally qualifies as the first in my string of anti-Bush books.
2) Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone, Rajiv Chandrasekaran (2007) - It's amazing this book could be so readable when it's basically the same story over and over. Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld again and again picked loyalty over experience, ideology over practicallity, and P.R. over reality when it came to choosing leaders to rebuild Iraq's health-care, business, education, industry and government. And then they stumbled supporting these Bushies who were already doomed to fail. Guess what? It didn't work. Again and again. The chapter about a handful of guys trying to privatize Iraqi factories is this close to being a living Tom Tomorrow cartoon.
"Yeah, we've got this factory for you to buy and privatize. We think it makes olive oil. Hard to tell, because of the bombing. I bet it'd be real productive too, once the electricity gets turned on. Now, you can't visit it because of the security situation and there's a good chance that whatever government eventually runs this hell-hole will just nationalize it again. You also have four times the number of workers you need but if you fire anybody, they'll blow the place up, but other than that, you're good to go! Two hundred million sound about right?"
1) The Greatest Story Ever Told: The Decline and Fall of Truth in Bush's America, Frank Rich (2007) - There are a lot of anti-Bush books out there and I've read my share. If you're looking for screeds, rants, insults, etc. they're out there and many of them are certainly justified given the tragedy that is the Bush administration. Rich's book tops my list first of all because of the scope. There are good books about the military mistakes (Fiasco), the intelligence manipulation (Hubris) or the rebuilding incompetence (see above), but The Greatest Story Ever Told covers a lot of the flim and the flam behind selling the Iraq war in succinct fashion. It's also well-written. It's easy to fall into hyperbolic rants and cheap insults when discussing Bush (again, many justified). Rich lets the facts do the damning. Even if you have scandal fatigue and wish to ride out the last 385 days with low blood pressure, you should check out this book.
All I Want for Christmas ... Here's a great gift idea that can't be beat, but can't be given because it doesn't exist. I want a remote control more special than the one I have. Mine has approximately a hundred and fifty buttons. I use maybe nine. But if there were a button that you could point at the screen and get a pop-up window telling you who an actor is, what he's been in, and where you know you know him from, I'd use it all the time. The mental energy saved by this button would be enormous, and you could return your concentration to the show instead of going, "Was he that patient on E.R. that time?" Also, I have a button that skips a recording or paused TV ahead thirty seconds at a time. I use it a lot to skip commercials. I also use it during football to skip ahead from one play to the next. If I hit the button just as the tackle is being made I usually land right on the snap of the ball. (Thirty second play clock.) However, I often miss and land two or three seconds into the next play. How cool would it be if you had a twenty second skip? Or if you could adjust the time of your skip button? There are probably other set intervals for other sports that viewers are dying to skip. Forget Marv Albert and Phil Simms, I want a button.
(I should add the idea for the "That Guy" button was Mrs. BoneDaddy's, the play clock button was mine.)
Mike Huckabee will not be our next president. He will probably never be president. But just in case you encounter anyone suffering from Huckabee fever, familiarize yourself with the name Wayne Dumond. Dumond is a serial rapist who had his sentence commuted by Huckabee at the urging of anti-Clinton freaks. Bear with me, this is fairly sordid. See one of Dumond's victims was a seventeen year-old named Ashley Stevens. Because Stevens is a distant relative of Bill Clinton, Dumond is innocent.
Did your brain just make a TWAAANG sound like a rubber band stretched aaall the way across the kitchen? Good. You're still sane and not a conservative activist. See, Dumond became a cause celebre among right wing types. As a new governor Huckabee was petitioned by many anti-Clinton types to grant Dumond parole. Huckabee was also advised by the parole board and several of Dumond's victims not to release him. Guess who he listened to? I need to know nothing else about Mike Huckabee.
Read the articles. I apologize for dragging something so depressing here, but I don't really see who the Republicans will eventually stagger behind. It really could be Huckabee and everyone should know the name Wayne Dumond. You've probably already guessed but yes, when released, Dumond raped again and this time murdered one of his victims.
Dropkick Murphys - "The Meanest of Times": I can't imagine any Battle of the Bands format the Murphys wouldn't win ... and I'm not only imagining formats where the band members have to do shots of whiskey chased with Guinness between songs, where success is measured by the vivacity of the mosh pit, where the bands play in front of a soused crowd of laborers in the sweaty basement of a union hall, etc...
Tim Armstrong - "A Poet's Life" : I don't know if Armstrong is more than thirty years old but, even if not, he might want to take Mencken's quip to heart. As much as I like this album, the title makes me cringe. Once you get past his "I'm a poet and a sex-drugs-and-rock-n-rolling party man" posing, there's no denying the wickedly danceable ska-inflected groovealiciousness.
Books (Read for the First Time Regardless of Year Published)
A more macho list of manly-men movies would be hard to imagine. I'm really not trying to exclude female filmmakers (nor authors, nor musicians) ... but, wow, take the Y chromosone out and you're not left with much here. Although, I actually thought China Mieville was a woman until I saw his picture in the back of "Perdido Street Station".
Heinlein's Star Fading? I keep rereading Starship Troopers, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and some of the "juveniles" (Have Spacesuit, Will Travel, Citizen of the Galaxy & Podkayne of Mars) every year or two and I still think he's miles better than Asimov or Clarke. Still, I haven't even thought of going back to Stranger in a Strange Land, Friday, To Sail Beyond the Sunset (any of the Lazarus Long novels, actually) and -- long separated from the wild libertarian to fascist swings of my teenage years -- I don't have much stomach for his "hairy-chested" prose, as this LA Times piece dubs it. (Nice synchronicity, btw, with Mark over at Cheek nominating R.A.H. for membership in the Manly Writers Corps.)
Also in the LA Times is a list of fave sci-fi novels of 2007 that'll make it's way to my library hold list.
Update: Heinlein's (manly) optimism in an essay on thisibelieve.org -- he's popping up everywhere these days as his Centenary year winds down.
