So Many Books, So Little Time

by Sara Nelson

  One early Saturday morning a couple of weeks ago, Charley announced to me that he wanted to go immediately to the bookstore to buy the complete Captain Underpants oeuvre, a collection of six quasi-comic books by Dav Pilkey, who has made a fortune by recognizing that little boys can’t get enough of the word “fart.” It was the first time he’d ever spontaneously made a reading request, and if one of the online bookstores had had a one-hour delivery service, I would have jumped out of bed to log on. As it was, I hopped in the shower, threw on some clothes and practically pushed him into a taxi to the bookstore. When later, with Captain Underpants and the Wrath of the Wicked Wedgie Woman safely purchased, he asked—asked, mind you—if he could sit quietly by the cash register and read while I went about the important task of buying deodorant and toothpaste and shampoo for the family, I did what any ambitious, readaholic Jewish mother would do. I qvelled. This is a kid who gets the whole concept of reading for pleasure, I thought. He’s actually enjoying himself with a book!

  A couple of hours later, Leo came home from the studio. “Guess what I did today, Daddy?” Charley announced. “Mommy bought me five books today. I’ve read three of them already. That’s 150 pages in five hours!”

  So much for appreciating quality over quantity.

  When I took on this project of reading a book a week, it sounded like pure pleasure: reading whatever you want whenever you want to is the closest thing I can think of to a fantasy fulfilled. But suddenly I was in a different place, as Lamott would say. What had been a pleasure, an enjoyment, was now a project, and projects by definition have deadlines and goals. All last week, I was obsessed not with the process of reading and finding enjoyment in what I read but with the fact that I was falling behind on my schedule, that I was blowing my deadline. I was definitely suffering from what I call White Rabbit syndrome, after the character Alice meets in Wonderland: I was hurrying, rushing, so worried about being late for an appointment that I lost sight of why I’d made the appointment in the first place. And it took Anne Lamott to slow me down.

  When I read Bird by Bird this time, I wasn’t conscious of really reading it. I mean, I didn’t sit down on Sunday night and choose it as my book-of-the-week, which is what I’ve been doing every Sunday night since beginning this project. I didn’t set the usual schedule: (1) Read book-of-the-week Sunday through Wednesday after work on the bus and at night. (2) Write about it on Thursday and Friday. My process this time was far more desultory: I’d leaf through a chapter or two, wander around the apartment, read a little more, have a Diet Coke, read, do an errand, and on and on. But guess what? By the end of the day I’d finished the book and was fairly bursting with ideas about it. This time, I hadn’t had an agenda, I’d had a journey.

  Life is what happens when you’re making other plans, John Lennon once wrote. Put another way: Any writer who’s honest will tell you that she usually comes up with her best lines or her important transitional paragraph not when she’s sitting in front of the computer, watching the clock, or using the word-count mechanism in her word-processing program, but when she’s stepping into the shower, making dinner, or cleaning the cat litter. Getting lost in a book works the same way: try to force yourself to get engaged with something, and you surely won’t. But take your time and have patience, and you’ll slide almost unknowingly into the right thing. You’ll accomplish your goal without even knowing it.

  That’s what Bird by Bird did for me this time, just as it did all those years ago. Remember I said I spent the whole day reading it instead of doing the assignment that was on its way to being overdue? Well, I didn’t actually finish that column until the next day. But a funny thing happened as the sky darkened on that spring afternoon. I closed Bird by Bird and went to the computer and wrote a long, funny note to the author, thanking her for this wise and understanding book. I don’t have a copy of that letter, and it surely wasn’t the writing project I’d gotten up that morning planning to do, but I remember it fondly as one of the best pieces of writing I’ve ever done, before or since.

  April 15

  Even Greater Expectations

  On a rare Saturday night out together—rare because the

  designer at Saturday Night Live is almost never available on weekends—Leo and I decided to go see A Beautiful Mind. Leo was interested in it because it stars Russell Crowe and because it had gotten good reviews. I had a double motive: there’s the Crowe-is-beautiful factor, of course, plus the movie is based on the Sylvia Nasar bestseller, which I had just started to read.

  Then a funny thing happened on the line to the ticket booth. A Beautiful Mind was sold out. It only took a minute—and a minor argument over whether or not we could handle the violence of Black Hawk Down, another movie-made-from-a-book I hadn’t yet read—and we settled on The Royal Tenenbaums. It didn’t start for an hour and a half, and the dinner we grabbed at a nearby noodle house ate up only forty-five minutes.

  To kill time, we stopped at the Virgin megastore that is conveniently located right next to the Union Square theater. Single-minded as usual, I immediately grabbed a DVD of X, yet another movie made from a book, but this one, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, I had actually—and recently—finished. As we waited in line, I began fidgeting with a pile of books on the counter. Straight from the Fridge, Dad: A Dictionary of Hipster Slang read the fifties-like script on the paperback cover that looked a lot like a pulp novel from that time.

  “Buy this for me?” I asked. Leo handed it to the cashier.

  “You’re not going to read it at the movie?” he said in a tone that sounded more like an order than a question.

  He was kidding. At least I think he was, since he wasn’t with Charley and me the one time I tried to read in a theater. That was last fall when Charley had dragged me, for the third time, to see Harry Potter—another movie made from a book, of course—just as I was reaching the denouement of The Bird Artist (which has not yet, as far as I know, been made into a film). I’ll admit I maneuvered us to a row under one of the dimmed lights, and sneaked in a few pages just as Harry got to Hogwarts. But no one, certainly not my enthralled seven-year-old, was any the wiser.

  Even so, Leo takes my weirdness in stride. I surely would have divorced him by now—or maybe it would be the other way around—if he freaked out every time I woke up and turned on the bedside lamp to read for just fifteen minutes before I turned it off again, convinced I really would be able to fall off this time . . . until, fifteen minutes later, I turned it back on again.

  But there are some behaviors, as Winston Churchill would have said, up with which Leo cannot put. Reading while walking down the street is one of them. (“You’ll fall down one of those open cellar-door things!” he wails.) Another is reading at the dinner table, which, thanks to our insane schedules, is rarely a problem, since I usually eat with Charley around six and getting him to concentrate on his meal is a full-time job. And while I occasionally do try to read in cabs, a lifelong tendency toward carsickness, rather than anyone’s plaintive requests, mostly prevents me from doing so. I’ve decided to consider myself lucky that Leo’s not one of those people who disapproves of reading in front of the TV.

  “Of course not!” I say, faking umbrage.

  Actually, Straight from the Fridge, Dad, with its bite-sized entries, is exactly the kind of book you could read in the movies, but out of deference to Leo, and to The Royal Tenenbaums—which, you might remember, starts every scene with a shot of the chapter of the “book” on which the story pretends to be based—I didn’t crack it. But I wasn’t sorry when Leo suggested we head right home instead of stopping for a nightcap.

  I’m sure A Beautiful Mind is an important biography and I’m sure I’ll get to it. But that night, it was all about Straight from the Fridge. The book was published in late 2001 as a paperback original by Broadway, home to Gerry Howard, an editor known for his off-kilter baby-boomer sensibility; this is the guy responsible for Chuck Pahlaniuk’s Fight Club, as well as the little-known but bleak and hilarious sa
tire The Subject Steve, by Sam Lipsyte. Straight from the Fridge is not something anybody would read all the way through in one sitting, but the kind of book that will have everybody quoting from it. Who doesn’t want to know that “to boil one’s cabbage” means to have sex, even if proper usage cannot be determined since it’s never completely clear which gender has a cabbage that can get boiled. (That it comes from several blues songs, sung in the twenties and thirties by Bessie Smith, suggests the vegetable is womanly.) Another of my personal favorites: “Harlem sunset,” which means, apparently, “bloodletting” or “knife wounds.” I’ve had the book for only a few days, but already I’ve begun quizzing my friends. What do you think “fresh fish special” means? I ask, delighted that nobody knows. Then I tell them, triumphantly: it’s “a bad prison haircut given to recent arrivals.”

  At this rate, Straight from the Fridge, Dad could become the basis for my own personal revival of Trivial Pursuit.

  To work as a true parlor game, however, Fridge should have been published more as a thesaurus than a dictionary. As it is, the 187 pages here list the hipster expressions alphabetically, along with their meanings. How much more useful it would be to have the listings go both ways, so that when, say, you were looking for a word that means supercool, you could just flip to the S pages and find “hip to the tip” and “sharp enough to shave.”

  But usefulness was surely the least of compiler Max Décharné’s concerns. In his four-page introduction, the Berlin-based editor displays the same “deadpan cynicism” he says describes the hipster mentality. In prose that can sometimes be self-consciously anarchistic—he refers to the Third Reich as “Uncle Adolf and his playmates”—he credits books, movies, and music as his primary sources. Authors Raymond Chandler and Jim Thompson are particular favorites, it seems, as are blues singers and the whole genre of entertainment known as film noir.

  In other words, I set out to see a movie based on a book and ended up with a book that got its inspiration from the movies.

  But I probably would never have found it at all if I hadn’t followed Leo into the music store that night. Straight from the Fridge, Dad isn’t ever going to be on the front tables at Barnes & Noble (I went this week and checked). It’s slugged “Language Arts,” which I’m sure rates a shelf or two in the back of the bigger stores, but it’s not an area I or anybody I know frequents regularly. The unexpected way I came upon it seems like kismet: my list is loaded with “serious” books, “good” books, “worthy” books, but it’s this one that appeared to me. Like the longtime dieter who finally learns to stop counting calories and let her body tell her what foods it wants, I instinctively opened this Fridge.

  Or maybe I’m just the object of smart marketing. According to the Book Industry Study Group consumer-research data on book purchasing, such retail establishments as the Virgin store fall into the “all other outlets” not encompassed by such categories as “large chainstore,” “independent/small chain,” and “food and drug” stores. And the numbers of books purchased there are tiny compared with, say, the numbers purchased at Borders, down the street. But for specific books, with specific audiences, there’s the Virgin megastore, the clothing chain Anthropologie, and even Blockbuster (where Simon & Schuster last year adroitly marketed Sumner Redstone’s autobiography, since Blockbuster, like S&S, is owned by Viacom, which is run by—you guessed it—Redstone). Whoever comes up with these ideas is what Décharné tells us is a “wig tightener”—someone very impressive. These are marketing geniuses who actually pay attention to who their readers are: in this case, shoppers more likely to cruise record and video outlets than bookstores.

  Reading snobs, of course, would call Straight from the Fridge, Dad a “nonbook.” By extension, its fans would be “nonreaders.” Your snooty neighbor isn’t going to talk it up at cocktail parties, and it’s not going to be reviewed in The New York Times Book Review anytime soon. And yet, like those smart diet strategies, it understands that even the most committed weight watcher occasionally needs a bit of chocolate. Straight from the Fridge can satisfy in a way that all the John Adamses, Theodore Rexes, and Naguib Mafouz novels of the world cannot.

  So what if it’s not A Beautiful Mind? At least it’s the work of an amused—and amusing—one.

  April 22

  And the Oscar Goes to ...

  Okay, so I did finally both see and read A Beautiful Mind, and I have to say that while the movie was entertaining for what it was, it annoyed me no end that it was so bowdlerized: this is 2002, for God’s sake; is it not possible that the general movie audience could handle some of the facts that Sylvia Nasar covers so beautifully in the book? I’m completely in sympathy with the protesters who lined up to complain about the absence of any reference to John Nash’s bisexuality, and I’m shocked—shocked!—that his marital troubles, not to mention the fact that he has a whole other child by a woman not his wife, were so glossed over. But that’s entertainment, I guess.

  I’m no movie critic, but I know what I like. And ninety percent of the time what I like is the book on which a movie was based, a lot more than I like the movie itself. That said, when I came back months later and looked at what I’d written here, I realized there are some good adaptations out there; I’m thinking About Schmidt, which couldn’t be more different from the Louis Begley novel but still works, and, I guess, Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, though the Bloomsbury-manqués may come after me for admitting that I didn’t think the book was all that great in the first place. And then of course there’s Adaptation, one of the wackier movies made from an equally, if differently, wacky and charming book, Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief. Generally, though, I prefer to draw my own pictures of the characters and situations I’m reading about; in the movie, you get the screenwriter’s take on the author’s take on the character. It’s all one too many steps removed for me, like a fax of a fax.

  Still, I’m glad I saw A Beautiful Mind. It made me think about some other book-to-movie adaptations I’ve seen over the years and the awards I would have given out, if—if only!—I ruled the world. Some examples:

  GOOD MOVIE MADE FROM AN EVEN GREATER BOOK

  Compromising Positions. Susan Sarandon and Raul Julia were impressive as the housewife and the detective trying to unravel the murder of a local dentist. But the 1978 novel by Susan Isaacs is even better at addressing the universal question : Who wouldn’t want to kill the guy who mucks around in your mouth—and gets paid for it?

  MOST HOLLYWOODIZED VERSION OF A SURPRISINGLY DARK BOOK

  Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The original narrator in Truman Capote’s masterpiece of a novella was obviously gay. In the movies, he’s a hyperheterosexual pretty-boy gigolo played by George Peppard? Makes for a better love story, I guess, but a lot of the depth gets lost in the process.

  MOST CONVOLUTED MOVIE MADE FROM A CONVOLUTED BOOK

  The English Patient. I loved both, but come on: did anybody understand the whole thing in either format?

  WORST MOVIE MADE FROM A GOOD BOOK

  A Civil Action. In Jonathan Harr’s book, I could read page after page of information about toxic waste. The John Travolta movie was more like garbage.

  MOST IMPROVED MOVIE OF A TERRIBLE BOOK

  A tie: Robert James Waller’s The Bridges of Madison County (Thank you, Meryl Streep) and Nicholas Evans’s The Horse Whisperer, a long novel that very obviously falls apart in the middle. The author sold the film rights to Robert Redford on the basis of a partial manuscript and clearly ran out of good ideas immediately thereafter.

  I guess that’s why they say Hooray for Hollywood.

  April 30

  Dear Mr. Robert Plunket:

  You don’t know me, but I know you. In fact, I am your biggest fan.

  I love your book Love Junkie and I’m writing to tell you that from what I’ve noticed about the publishing business, you and your book are poised to become the next great (re)discovery. It’s my prediction that in a couple of years, at dinner parties and in bookstores and p
robably even on NPR, you are going to be one very hot writer—you might even get to appear on Charlie Rose. I know this because I’ve seen this happen with many of my favorite out-of-print authors whom nobody ever heard of until some bored magazine or newspaper editor or TV producer got the brilliant idea to rerelease and repromote their books. I mean: look what happened to Dawn Powell, who was pretty obscure until old Gore Vidal started running up and down the country praising her. Look at Paula Fox, who, I’ll admit, has the added cachet of turning out to be Courtney Love’s long-lost grandmother. (Do you, by any chance, have any famous or infamous relatives with tragically dead spouses?) I know you’re next because you have all the right stuff: your book is irreverent and funny and, well, peculiar. It’s not for everyone—it’s too raw and vulgar and silly. And there’s nothing like a book that’s not for everyone to make everyone want to read it.

  You’re going to be a major star.

  But I want you to know something: I was there first. I also read and loved My Search for Warren Harding, I’ll have you know. And part of why I’m writing to you now is that I know I’m not going to be any too happy when the whole world “discovers” your work and acts like they’ve known about it all along. Don’t you hate when that happens? To me, it’s like finding out that the great guy you met on a boat trip through an obscure South American rain forest, a guy you thought you’d conjured up out of your own imagination and need, ups and marries your best friend and then her sister and then her aunt. Suddenly, your secret love turns out to belong to everybody. You feel robbed.