And Another

After thinking about it, I would like to revise my book-recommendation strategy.

When people find out I read a lot, they often say something like, "Oh, man, I wish I read more. I've been wanting to read, but I don't know what to read. Could you recommend some books to me? Like, if I only read one book, what book should it be?"

To this I say: "Read whatever book you really want to read." What I mean is that, since there are more books than anyone can possibly read in a lifetime, it's no use worrying about and apologizing for all the ones you haven't read. It doesn't matter if you read Moby Dick or Hank the Cowdog; the point isn't what you read, it's that you read. Besides, reading is supposed to be enjoyable first and foremost, especially if one expects to continue doing it. The kind of people who ask me for recommendations are the kind of people who haven't been swept away by the joy of reading, so if they obsess over reading the right book rather than a book they are interested in, they're likely to continue hating reading.

Thus I tell them, "Go out and read whatever book you've always wanted to read, and don't worry whether it's Mark Twain or Anne Rice. And if, halfway through, you lose interest, pick up another book." Sometimes we aren't ready for books, even when we are interested. Just because I read Huck Finn like a comic book, laughing aloud the whole time, doesn't mean it'll jive with you. You can always come back to a book later and see if you've become ready for it (for example: how I couldn't read Wuthering Heights to save my life in high school but I flew through it last year just for fun [you're next, As I Lay Dying]; how the Book of Mormon all of a sudden started making sense to me sometime in late high school—now I didn't have to decode the language of every verse bit by bit; the book opened up for me and I could enjoy it for the first time).

However, I would like to revise this policy. From now on my recommendation is thus:

"I recommend you go to the library and get a copy of the one book you've always felt obligated to read—something big and scary, preferably—Atlas Shrugged or Uncle Tom's Cabin. Take it home and read it for a few days, and then pop in to a book store and browse around until you find a book that really interests you, preferably paperback and short (feel free to judge by cover). Then read that book instead of and in sight of the first book, thinking often of the impending due date."

A Few More Things To Say About Books

1. The smell. I smell my books. They smell great. Two examples:

1. This Father Brown book smells delightful. You know that decades-old mass-market paperback paper smell? Well you should. It's one part library, two parts older couple's house, and another part mismatched art supplies. It smells like the Fifties—not the fins and curves themselves, but pictures of them done on card stock with a dated color palette and propped up on a rickety old easel. It's the lampshades and carpet that decorated the church you grew up attending. I think you can find this smell in some of the less-frequented stacks of the Harold B. Lee Library, down in the subterranean floors near the faded photos of smart people with horn-rimmed glasses.
2. On Sunday I was hanging out after church with the elders and this guy James from the local newspaper who is doing a piece on them, and I found myself once again smelling my scriptures. They're the mini size, smaller than the normal ones but bigger than the military ones, but they aren't a quad (that's right, be jealous, cuz they're discontinued). I got them in Korea when I was a missionary. Back then, for the first month or so I had them, I was constantly smelling them to soak up that leathery smell of the cover—like new shoes only without the thought of funk to come. Now, years later, the leather smelled has mellowed and mixed with the ultra-thin paper smell and the gilt-edge smell. Delightful. James got plenty of pictures of me sniffing it up.

How to smell a book: open the book to a good page in the middle somewhere, bring it up to your face so your nose is right in the crevice of the pages, close to the binding, and inhale. I like my nose to be near the top of the page so I can open my eyes mid-whiff and look suspiciously at any gawkers. Like opening your eyes to look around at whose looking at you kiss someone.


Hmmm, the words are backward but my part is on the right side
(unlike in that last picture).
Well, this is plenty long for now. More things about books tomorrow!

All, or Nothing at All

Today I had a Zero bar and it occurred to me that it was pretty much the polar opposite of a Snickers. I mean, Snickers is pretty much the candy bar, the archetype and all that. But a Zero, it's like the anti-Snickers. Take a picture of a Snickers and then look at the negative and what would you see: a Zero. Throw a Snickers in a black hole and what would you get: a Zero.

Crazy, yeah?

Turns out the real difference between the two is that Snickers has an advertising campaign. I looked around the internet for some Zero stuff, and I found zero stuff. When I looked for some Snickers—you guessed it—I laughed. Here are some of the good things:

    I pity this commercial.
    Pilgrims and Vikings?
    The Feast
    This one is made by superb facial expressions.
    I'm impressed by this website.
    And this seems to be an entire Spanish-language campaign devoted to Snickers.

Stolen Time

It turns out there are few joys that can rival the joy of reading a book you know you shouldn't be reading. Allow me to explain.

Last week I was sitting in a class—Romanticism and War, if you must know—which is held in the Graduate Student Library, a room on the second floor of Ellis Hall that is one side all bookshelves crammed with books in no readily-discernible order (sometimes they appear to be chronological and other times topical), one side all windows looking out on big trees and freedom, and between them both a large table that fills the room. I was sitting in the back corner on the bookshelf side, and as I squirmed a little in my chair, my eye caught on a book quite a bit more slender than its fellows. It was G. K. Chesterton's The Amazing Adventures of Father Brown.

I knew immediately that I must read this book. On the one hand, it was written by G. K. Chesterton, who was a fantastic essayist (even though no one today has ever heard of him). He was also a writer of many other things including 52 Father Brown short stories, 10 of which are compiled in this book, and he was a great popular Christian thinker, like a pre-C. S. Lewis C. S. Lewis.

On the other hand, the book was short, falling apart, and printed on yellowing, mass-market pulpy paper; it was a book you might find on the paperbacks rack at the library, crammed between a Star Trek novel and a beat-up Grisham, while looking for something much more respectable. I couldn't resist the temptation.

The thing was: I knew I shouldn't be reading this book. Not that isn't worthy—I just have so many other books I should be reading. For Romanticism and War alone I was supposed to be reading Byron and Austen, not to mention several articles and chapters on Shelley I needed to be skimming for a paper that's due soon. On top of that there's a stack of books in my room that have just come in from amazon (thank you economic stimulus), half of which are meant to further my career and the other half of which I just wanted to read. On top of that there's a desk full of books bought long before and still waiting to be read, and a list of books to check out when I get the time tacked up on my wall. Of all the books I should be reading, The Amazing Adventures of Father Brown was not one of them.

Which is precisely why I had to read it.

Father Brown is a Catholic priest who has an uncanny ability for solving mysteries, mostly murders. In each tale he applies his unfailing reason to the case and discovers the killer, his method, and his motive. It's a little bit Sherlock Holmes, a little bit Poirot, and a little bit Encyclopedia Brown, and I've been eating up every word, savoring every minute I'm reading this instead of anything else.

And as if that wasn't enough, this book actually incorporates one of the other great joys: the joy of found things. Everyone knows that the best clothes are the ones you didn't buy but found—the t-shirt you borrowed and never gave back after getting wet at your friend's slumber party, the hat you swiped from your cousin on that visit, the jacket left at work that no one claimed. Well it works the same for books. My first one was The Further Adventures of Batman, which I found in a used book shop in Lincoln, Nebraska, and recently I read that Will Smith autobiography that Dave came across. Both were similarly pulpy and brittle, both were stealing time from nobler pursuits, both were awesome.

And so my friends, to bed, where I will be reading the tenth and final case in Father Brown, appropriately titled "The Blast of the Book."

Crazy Hair Day

Last week I got to cut ten-year-old Abe Ogles' hair for Crazy Hair Day at his school. He had purposely let it grow long so he'd have something to work with, and he planned to shave it all off the next day, so nothing was out of the question. Normally his brother Max would do it, but since Max is off at school this summer, I was the replacement. I was honored.

After being treated to a hamburger dinner at Abe's house, I sat with him and his brother Sam and we sketched out some possibilities on a slice of scratch paper. Stripes, mohawks of various persuasions, the Shaolin monk—we even browsed a book called The Mullet: Hairstyle of the Gods. But in the end we decided on a simple design that was sure to shock. Ladies and gentlemen,

the Half'n'half:

 
Simple, effective, and gutsy. I heard he spiked the long side straight out for school the next day. And even though there isn't an actual winner of Crazy Hair Day, I'm pretty sure everyone over at The Plains Elementary School knows who won.

Me and the winner

Short Paragraphs for Emily

Early this morning I dreamed was bus driver in New York City, which is perhaps the scariest, toughest job, since you have to drive in Manhattan. In my dream I was rolling and tumbling all over the road, slamming on brakes and gunning it to keep up, and I always seemed to be a block away from a major construction site.

Then I woke up and found that someone had been jackhammering the road outside my window for the last half an hour and that some very large vehicle just out of sight had been idling—is still idling, actually—loudly, like a snoring dragon.

I went back to sleep and dreamed I was visiting an old Irish Republican Army friend and his wife and small kids in rural Russia where they had taken refuge away from the conflict. We sat and didn't talk and smoked a cigarette each; I lived every drag in real time. Then he and I and a dozen of our mates dressed up in old fashioned baseball outfits and jumped on a bus; we were on our way to blow something up and this was our cover. I forgot my hat and his wife sent it up to me with one of his kids just as we were leaving.

On the Street Where I Live

And, in case you forgot