Books Ben Read

Hello, diligent blog-followers! It saddens me to say this, but I am not very good at keeping a blog....

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 14:36:46 -0400

Hello, diligent blog-followers!

It saddens me to say this, but I am not very good at keeping a blog. I haven’t updated Books Ben Read in a very long time, and in the interim I’ve read some 40 or so books that I just don’t have the patience to write silly things about. Is this blog over? Probably. Its future is certainly in peril.

Unless…

Sell Your Boobs by Lisa Hanawalt It should be well known to you...

Mon, 10 Dec 2012 12:01:10 -0500

Sell Your Boobs by Lisa Hanawalt

It should be well known to you by now that I have always quantified humor by measuring the rate of Giggles per Animal Boob. The G/AB in Lisa Hanawalt’s Sell Your Boobs mini-comic is high— unprecendentedly high!!! I’ve been a devotee of Hanawalt’s drawings since her comics started running in the Believer. I’ve been a devotee of her writing since she started reviewing movies for the Hairpin. I even have a framed Giclée print of hers hanging over my desk. I know that I’m rarely as critical of artists as I am of writers on this blog, and I apologize for that. But I concede: pictures are better than words. There. I said it. I said it, and I’m never taking it back.

Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion I’m going to be straight...

Fri, 07 Dec 2012 12:00:58 -0500

Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion

I’m going to be straight with you: Play It As It Lays didn’t make much of an impression on me. It’s a sliver of novel. I may go so far as to call it a novella, although I hesitate to argue the bold claim running along the top of its cover. Putting “The Most Brilliant Novel of the Year” on the cover of a great author’s weakest effort reminds me of the bus benches back home. Anyway, pontificating upon this book is making me tired, so, like in my last few posts, I will leave you with a reference to the David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ: Did you know that the internet is obsessed with Jennifer Jason Leigh’s feet? How fucking weird is that???

Ojitos Borrosos by Inés Estrada Fucking Christ, I love Tumblr....

Wed, 05 Dec 2012 12:01:08 -0500

Ojitos Borrosos by Inés Estrada

Fucking Christ, I love Tumblr. I love Tumblr more than Twitter. I love Tumblr more than Facebook. I even love Tumblr more than LinkedIn. I love Tumblr. I’ve been using Tumblr since I was 18 years old, and had we had babies without ceasing from that moment until now, me and Tumblr would have had six babies by now, with a seventh on the way. Beautiful internet/human babies, full of code and apps and guts and eyeballs and social networking resources and hair and teeth and stuff. I love Tumblr so much that minutes ago I was reading a book from 1936 in which the author refers to a “tumbler of wine” and my immediate reaction was, “he spelled it wrong.” I fucking need Tumblr.

I follow three categories of Tumblr: about half of the Tumblrs I follow are “IRL” friends. Another half are the Tumblrs of booksellers/book publishers/cute baby animals/ironic television parodies/blogs referent to my hometown of Baltimore. The final half are the Tumblrs of artists and people who draw comics and cartoons (which I consider to be comics that you read really, really quickly), most of whose work I discovered purely through the fully immersive, visceral, eXistenZ-ian medium of Tumblr. Inechi.tumblr.com is among that third half. Her comics and drawings are really great. Check it out right now! Okay, now come back here and finish reading this paragraph! Ojitos Borrosos is an anthology of Estrada’s weirdo beautifully rendered vignettes, which range in content from Aimee Bender-whimsical to oops-I-clicked-on-the-wrong-porn sleazy. And they’re all really cool! And they’re all in two languages! Just like Tumblr!

Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez John...

Mon, 19 Nov 2012 11:00:00 -0500

Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez

John Cusack is a total charmer. Check it: I got hyped over two John Cusack movies when I was pretty young, High Fidelity and Grosse Point Blank. They stained me right up in my brain parts and now I think John Cusack is incapable of wrong-doing. He’s even played a worthwhile part of two or three other movies. And have you seen his Twitter account?!? The man is a fucking god.

Here’s something you may not have known about John Cusack: the man has laid down in some major turds in his day. Like, pretty much everything on this list. And yes, to answer your question, that list includes Serendipity. Before receiving a college-level literary education, Serendipity was responsible for the only awareness of Love in the Time of Cholera I had. For the uninitiated, after John Cusack and Kate Beckinsale share a magical winter evening together, Beckinsale writes her phone number in a copy of Love in the Time of Cholera, then sells it to a used book store. Ideally, and should the pair be destined to spend their lives together, Cusack would find the copy and give her a call, then (spoiler alert) they would get married and have, like, a million babies. Serendipity is a bad, bad movie. Love in the Time of Cholera is not a bad, bad book. But it is a mediocre one.

On my famous, trademarked Jude Law Quality Index (in which eXistenZ = Excellent and A.I. Artificial Intelligence = Poor), One Hundred Years of Solitude ranks eXistenZ and Love in the Time of Cholera rates A.I. Artificial Intelligence. Memories of My Melancholy Whores hovers somewhere in the vicinity of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. And there you have it; the JLQI never lies.

William Blake: Selected Poetry by William Blake Through two...

Wed, 31 Oct 2012 19:47:03 -0400

William Blake: Selected Poetry by William Blake

Through two years and three apartments this book sat beside my bed. Not because I have any particularly fond feelings for it, but because I had started it, placed it there, and just got used to seeing it there. For almost an entire year it was tucked at eye level in the metal frame of my loft bed. Every three weeks or so I would see it and think, “I should finish that. Or put it somewhere else.” So I finished it. I could go into detail about how much cooler Blake’s poems are than any of the holy texts of any of the world’s religions (and thus much more reliable), or how fabulously complex his mythology is, but most of you probably read all of this stuff when you were teenagers so I’m going to skip all that and link you to some of the poems I earmarked:

-Proverbs of Hell

-The Nature of Infinity (from Milton)

-Jerusalem: The Emanation of The Giant Albion, Object 69

BONUS: Below, links to a few of my favorite Blake plates:

Ubik by Philip K. Dick Classic Dick: great story. Mind-blowing...

Wed, 24 Oct 2012 11:00:15 -0400

Ubik by Philip K. Dick

Classic Dick: great story. Mind-blowing mechanics. A psychedelic thrill ride. Horrible writing. Read Ubik!

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins I can be a real dick...

Thu, 18 Oct 2012 16:39:00 -0400

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

I can be a real dick sometimes. Case in point: I was in the fourth grade when the first Harry Potter book was published. I should have loved it; I was a voracious reader and I had a total latent hard-on for magic, but for some reason the whole thing stunk of fad to me. That it was being cast upon me by adults, and that all the other kids were reading it, also, and that it was being discussed by everyone, and that it came with a whole slew of merchandise attached to it, and that it was about wizards and wizards are fantasy creatures and I only read sci-fi because sci-fi is awesome and fantasy sucks, and for many other reasons (I’m sure) I did not read that book. Nor did I read the six that came to follow. In fact, the only passages I have ever read in any Harry Potter book come from the final two of the series. The first was a single page from Book 6— the one in which (spoiler alert) Snape kills Dumbledore, one of the biggest reveals in the series— which my friend scanned in and posted on every HP Livejournal community the day it come out. The second passage was the epilogue at the end of Book 7, which I skipped to after crashing on my friend Jen’s couch. She had pre-ordered her copy and I just happened to be the one to answer the door when the FedEx guy brought it. So now I know Harry Potter isn’t worth my time, because Dumblebore is dead and everything turns out okay for Harry in the end anyway. And sixteen years later, the whole thing still stinks of fad to me.

But guess what: The Hunger Games are totally different!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! This book kicks ass. Fuck Harry Potter. He sucks and everything he does is complete bullshit!!!!!!!!!!! Katniss Everdeen is fucking boss and if they ever met in real life (humor me) she would shoot Harry Potter in the chest with an arrow and he would bleed to death and that is SICK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Kids have it way better these days. Yeah, I saw the movie first. But the movie was great! And maybe (keep in mind here that I can be a real dick sometimes) I scoffed at all of those adults I saw reading a YA novel with a dumb bird on the cover on the train. But I was wrong, and those adults are American Heroes! I only wish this book were three times longer.

…OH, WAIT!

The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury I had the weirdest...

Tue, 16 Oct 2012 13:58:00 -0400

The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury

I had the weirdest fucking dream, you guys. I had just finished reading The Martian Chronicles for the first time since I was in middle school and I guess I had “Mars” on the “brain,” because in this dream I was writing a short story and it took place on fucking MARS. In the story within my dream, a family like this lazes around their terrace. But this is no ordinary terrace because this terrace is on FUCKING MARS!!!!!!!! And the attached building is retro-modern, a la the Farnsworth house, and the whole structure is towards the peak of a long sloping hill of red dust at the bottom of which is the shore of an endless blue lake. Anyway, the husband is barbecuing on the terrace while his wife sunbathes (No silly Mars pun here; it’s the same sun as always, you dumb-dumb!) when suddenly she’s all like, “What about the fireworks?” and he’s all like, “Of course!” and slapping himself on the head or whatever the fuck I don’t know it’s a fucking dream I can barely remember it gimme a break you guys. So then he grabs this small tin drum and runs as fast as can down the slope of the hill. When he reaches the water, he jumps in and swims out about two hundred feet. Then he flails around like he’s drowning until a helicopter swoops down and the pilot grabs the tin drum out from under his arm. While the helicopter flies off, the husband swims back to the shore and returns to the terrace as quickly as he can, arriving just in time to watch the tin drum explode, killing the pilot and reducing the helicopter to smoke and ashes. The family gathers around the barbecue, hugging and smiling. Then I wake up…

0…ON FUCKING MARS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! :0

Not really. But I did wake up. And my question is this: WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?

MORE INCIDENTAL STORIES ABOUT MY RE-READING OF THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES:

-At the moment in the last story when the Earth explodes, a bolt of lightning shook my house and we lost power and for about five minutes, if only for my familiarity with the ramblings of Glenn Beck, I thought an EMP had been detonated.

-Because I read this book as a child, I know where all the Indians went now.

-Ray Bradbury died.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz Am I an...

Thu, 04 Oct 2012 13:58:36 -0400

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

Am I an expert on matters concerning the Pulitzer Prize?

No.

I am not.

I am not an expert on matters concerning the Pulitzer Prize.

Now that we’ve cleared that up, I would like to explain to you everything there is to know about the Pulitzer Prize. Founded in 1918 as the “Pulitzer Prize for the Novel,” the Pulitzer Prize has been awarded to one exemplary work of fiction each year and carries with it an air of prestige and the respect of the literary and (in some cases) pop-cultural world at large. There have been, like, ninety-something Pulitzer Prizes awarded so far I think. Of those ninety-something books, I have read three since I began keeping this blog, twenty-one months ago. They are A Visit From The Goon Squad, Middlesex, and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. A Visit From The Goon Squad is an examination of time and story; it jumps from scene to scene, character to character, and moment to moment spasmodically, jolting backwards and forwards in clever and unexpected ways. It peeks into the lives of characters from different worlds and generations bound only by a shared, little-observed cultural experience. Likewise,Middlesexis an experiment in both narrative structure and the passage of time. It moves between a “present-day” frame story and anecdotes from the lives of the central character and members of his/her family. It covers three generations and an entire century. As with Egan’s book, its focus is a group representative of an esoteric monoculture, in the case of the former, Punk, and in the case ofMiddlesex, Turkish-born Greek immigrants living in Detroit, Michigan.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but here is a summary of Oscar Wao: A narrator examines the lives of three generations of a family from a very specific, oft-overlooked heritage (Dominican immigrants who eventually settle in New Jersey; nerd culture), jumping backwards and forwards in time in order to point out similarities and differences in their lives. Of the three Pulitzer books I read these past two years, this is far and away the least compelling.

If I ever had a point when I started typing this up, it was probably this: there may be a formula for winning the Pulitzer Prize, and I have a meager serving of anecdotal evidence to back up my claim. Whatever. It’s my blog. I can write anything I want here so fuck you.

La Capital: The Biography of Mexico City by Jonathan Kandell I...

Mon, 10 Sep 2012 12:02:00 -0400

La Capital: The Biography of Mexico City by Jonathan Kandell

I went to visit my friends in Mexico City! I had a great time down there for reasons including but not limited to the fact that you can buy desiccated bat corpses by the pound down there. Here are a few more of my observations about the largest metropolis in Latin America:

-It’s not as dangerous as people say it is. However, it has a bad reputation and few Americans vacation there. For that reasons, most of the Mexicans I spoke with assumed that I am from Italy or Germany. Most Europeans I met thought I was Mexican, which I find odd because I look like this.

-It’s similar to New York City, but with way more mangy street dogs. Also, everyone in el DF speaks Spanish, unlike in NYC, where only most people speak Spanish.

-Punk (“Ponk”) is very popular in Mexico. Popular “Ponk” imagery includes but is not limited to safety pins, emo-hair, mall-goth bondage pants, the Rolling Stones logo, Doors/Beatles album covers, and swastika arm bands. I even saw a pudgy teenage girl working behind the counter of a cyber cafe near Salto del Agua wearing a t-shirt that said “SKINHEAD” in big, bubbly letters.

-The marketplaces are wonderful. I bought a mirror with the illuminati’s “Holy See” image printed on it for twenty pesos! Other strange ephemera available for sale in markets: live peacocks, hypnotism cream, luck juice, dried monkeys, etc.

-The ultra-wealthy neighborhoods in el DF smell like trees. The regular wealthy neighborhoods smell like car exhaust. The slummy neighborhoods smell like sewage back-up.

-Don’t flush toilet paper down the toilets. I questioned several people as to why this was the case, and every answer was the same: “the pipes just can’t take it.”

-I took a shitload of pictures and uploaded them to Tumblr. They have since been liked and reblogged by dozens of Mexican teenagers, because that is Tumblr’s target user base. Look through them here. I also filmed a pretty crazy fight between some cats on the terrace of Frida Kahlo’s family estate and put it on Youtube.

Because I have severe Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (self-diagnosed), I took it upon myself to read this hulking, out-of-print history that I found at The Strand before embarking on my trip. Here are a few half-remembered facts I sort of recall reading:

-Aztec clerics kept strict birth records of their citizens. They divided the year into twenty astrological signs, of which four are considered “slave signs.” When they needed bodies to sacrifice, they would flip through the records, find citizens born under those signs, arrest said citizens, and rip out their still beating hearts. Another way they chose sacrificial victims: cowlicks.

-Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata are often considered peers, but Zapata was a pretty cool guy, and Villa was uncool (KEY: uncool=commits arbitrary murders/skirts genocide).

-One Mexican president was assassinated by a struggling revolutionary artist who was trying to impress w omen.

-Most Mexican presidents are assassinated by their own security detail.

-Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo housed Leon Trotsky and his wife at their estate. Diego Rivera slept with Leon Trotsky’s wife, so Frida Kahlo slept with Leon Trotsky. The Trotskys left the estate on bad terms, and it is hypothesized that Leon Trotsky was then murdered by a gardener who had also been sleeping with his wife.

-Diego Rivera died from cancer of the penis.

The Woman in the Dunes by Kōbō Abe Man, Japan is a weird place. ...

Sun, 26 Aug 2012 18:08:27 -0400

The Woman in the Dunes by Kōbō Abe

Man, Japan is a weird place. Despite harboring a deep hatred for animu in my adolescence (which I overturned upon devouring Tekkon Kinkreet: Black and White, which you are now powerless not to read), I’ve always been confounded and mesmerized by Japanese culture. How many flavors of Kit-Kat Bar do you think they have in Japan? 1? 2? 3? FUCK YOU THERE’S LIKE 200 OF THOSE SUMBITCHES!!!!!!!

Clearly I have forgotten how to blog, and for this I apologize. Here is a brief summary of The Woman in the Dunes, as if my description could possibly be better than Wikipedia’s. A bug-collecting hobbyist (dual nod to Kafka and Nabokov) journeys off to a remote fishing village in search of a rare insect. He finds that the town is contained within a series of sand dunes the walls of which are inescapably high. The village elders lower him into single home occupied by a lone woman. He discovers that he cannot escape. The sand dune is his prison. From there the story has all of the elements of Japanese literature, being

1.violent sex

2.rope symbology

3.meandering passages about the fleeting nature of memory

4.(spoiler alert!!!)inevitable submission.

There is only one important topic that this book neglects to touch upon (although it very nearly does). JAPANESE BUG FIGHTS.

X’ed Out by Charles Burns There is no air conditioning in...

Sat, 11 Aug 2012 14:21:17 -0400

X’ed Out by Charles Burns

There is no air conditioning in my home. But not so in my old college library! So I went there and I read this and basked in coolness. I recommend it (air-conditioning). The same cannot be said for legionnaire’s disease, which is why I use a fan. (Thanks to Jackson for the tip on avoiding legionnaire’s disease.)

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides Who lent me this copy of...

Fri, 10 Aug 2012 13:17:00 -0400

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

Who lent me this copy of Middlesex? Zoe, was it you? It appeared in my massive “to read” pile about three years ago and for the life of me I cannot recall the source. Seriously, I never bought it so who gave it to me?

Anyway, whoever you are, I read that book you gave me. It was slow at first, but there was a satisfying pay-off. And it propagated many unsettling Google image searches.

The Third Reich by Roberto Bolaño Alright, Paris Review,...

Mon, 09 Jul 2012 22:13:28 -0400

The Third Reich by Roberto Bolaño

Alright, Paris Review, here’s my gripe: my home address has the letter “a” in it. So put to paper (or text bar) and without getting too specific, the top line of my address appears as “133a ________ Street.” This was apparently too much for you guys to handle. I bought a subscription last fall during a promotion you offered which started me on the Winter 2012 issue, but also gave me the previous three, thus allowing me to read your serialized publication of Bolaño’s ne’er-seen novella The Third Reich in its entirety. A few days later, a manila envelope appeared in my mailbox here at 133a ______ street holding all but the final installment of the story. And I really liked it. I read ahead, skipping all of the other content for later in the process. But how does it end? How could it? That would have to wait until the winter issue arrived.

…In May. Only after I called your offices to inquire as to why it never came. When I was told that my address wasn’t valid, so the post office returned it. And no one bothered to clear it up. Everything is straightened out now; I’m not upset, I’m just vent-blogging (blog-venting?). But I can’t seriously be the only subscriber with a letter in his or her street address, can I? Maybe I am. Anyway, the only real tragedy was that I had to wait seven months to find out what happened.

But I’ve read it all now, and I like it! I’m a big fan of the Giovanni’s Room/Tender is the Night/Death in Venicemeandering Mediterranean vacation novel, and The Third Reich offers an exciting twist to that convention.

Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence I just finished...

Thu, 31 May 2012 12:22:23 -0400

Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence

I just finished reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover last week, so I could easily write one of my old-timey blog posts about whatever I used to write about. But I won’t. I’m not busy. I just won’t. Just go read it and form your own opinion, okay? Do you really need me to hold your hand through this process? Jesus, grow up. #Book dump over.

The Dark Knight Strikes Again by Frank Miller and Lynn...

Thu, 31 May 2012 12:19:19 -0400

The Dark Knight Strikes Again by Frank Miller and Lynn Varley

Batman is old… with a vengeance.

The Female Man by Joanna Russ I bought The Female Man at a nice...

Thu, 31 May 2012 12:17:42 -0400

The Female Man by Joanna Russ

I bought The Female Man at a nice little bookshop in Philadelphia where, if I’m not careful, I may spend all of my money in the future.

Epileptic by David B. I wrote all this last month. Thanks for...

Thu, 31 May 2012 12:12:11 -0400

Epileptic by David B.

I wrote all this last month. Thanks for doing all the work, past me! Sucker.

You may recall that among the first books I read while keeping this blog was David B.’s Epileptic 1. Epileptic 1 was the first half of a run of six autobiographical comics about the author coping with his brother’s severe epilepsy. I vowed to read Epileptic 2 one day, but there is noEpileptic 2. Instead there isEpileptic, a complete collection of the run which I was lucky enough to pick up for two dollars at a stoop sale near my bank.

While the first half focuses almost exclusively on his brother’s illness (and is replete with doom), the parts of the tale I hadn’t read are refreshingly abstract, with long passages detailing the histories of certain hermetic orders, Swedenborgian theology, etc., as well as an assurance that the author’s life isn’t as ruined as you think by new age thinking.

The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem This book is sick. ...

Thu, 31 May 2012 12:11:00 -0400

The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem

This book is sick. I’m tired of this. Have you been reading my parenting blog on VICE.com? Happy birthday, Lina & Mac.