Currently Reading Tripwire By Lee Child see related

Good, Bad and Boring

Lee Child has me reading for fun again.

I wouldn’t have said I ever really stopped reading for fun, except now that I’m reading Child’s books I realize I’ve been missing something. I used to flip pages voraciously as a child, going through the Hardy Boys books and the Sherlock Holmes stories and the Agatha Christie novels as if they were my reason for living. As far as I can remember this continued to some extent in high school, but when I reached college the reading stopped. I could blame this on any number of factors (my acquisition of cable television, my almost immediate addiction to instant messenger, my discovery that college was full of attractive women), but the main problem was that my classes all used a lot of books. Suddenly reading went from something I liked to do to something I had to do, and when I’d spent an evening reading about political history or something as inane as lifetime wellness, I didn’t particularly feel like following that up with another book. It wasn’t necessarily that I didn’t enjoy the activity anymore, but even my favorite series characters took a backseat to “MacGyver” reruns if I had a choice.

I’ve hardly provided an excuse for not picking up a book now, though. The more astute among you have probably already noted that I’ve been out of college for three years, though I can hardly believe that myself. Wouldn’t I have found time to pick up a book sometime after graduation? You know the answer is yes, or else I wouldn’t have reviewed any books on this site. My problem now is that I’m just too darn picky. Having a degree in Creative Writing is a wonderful thing (despite being apparently useless in the job market), but there are days that I want to get back some of the innocence I’ve lost. Just as I’ve come back to television shows I’ve loved as a kid and found them to be a little hokier than I remembered, I’ve returned to some favorite books of my past to find that the dialogue is cringe-worthy and the descriptions give me a headache. Being a guy (and please pardon the broad generalizations that will follow), I enjoy mysteries and action thrillers, those books where the good guy hunts the bad guys and gets the pretty girl in the end. Unfortunately for me, I’m an action/thriller junkie with a Creative Writing degree, which means I’m often unable to enjoy a fun plot if it’s awkwardly worded.  This hasn’t just poisoned books I used to read, but most of the hardcover bestsellers I pick off the shelf at Barnes & Noble as well. I was reading a thriller by a very popular author not so long ago, for instance, and he had created a villain whose primary skill was the ability to blend in and look natural nearly everywhere he went; wherever he was, whether infiltrating a military base or an ice cream shop, he could fool anyone into thinking he was exactly where he was supposed to be. An admirable character trait, to be sure, and one that is likely to work well plot-wise, but if you’ve established the skill in chapter one, there is no need to mention it over and over again in each subsequent chapter! For the love of all things literary, at least mix up the wording a little bit! I’m telling you, if I had a nickel for every time I read something sounding very much like, “Nobody noticed him, because he knew how to blend in so that nobody would notice him,” well then, gosh, I’d have a lot of nickels. I realize that this doesn’t irritate a lot of people, though I can’t fully understand why. Ultimately, the opinions of millions of readers are not going to make me any more eager to turn a page.

You’d think the obvious solution to this problem would be to switch genres, or at least authors. For quite some time I chose the former, and for a great deal of that time I encountered some brilliant writing. This was prose that flowed straight out of a pen as if the writer didn’t have any choice in the matter. In fact, the writing was often so good that it went a long way toward silencing the little voice in my head, the one that sighed as I got to the end of every sentence, paragraph, page, and book, the one that gamely hung in there as I searched for a better novel. Sooner or later, though, I had to face the truth. There was just nothing happening in these books.

You know what I’m talking about, because this shows up a lot in award-winning movies as well. Done properly, I’d call it a character study. You have a story that avoids the whole “good guy saves the world” routine in favor of something a little closer to “good guy comes to terms with his personal inner demons through deep and often tragic soul searching.” I’m not saying that’s bad material for a novel. I’ve read and loved The Virgin Suicides, High Fidelity, and A Long Way Down, and while things happen in those books its not as if the world moves along at a breakneck pace. I certainly think that there’s a place for books with minimal action and lots of soul searching, and I’ll probably write some of them. It’s just that I’ve come to the end of too many books depressed, bored, searching for the author’s point, or—and this is the worst of all—more than a little irritated by the feeling that the author used far too many pages to brag about how many big words he could usefully incorporate. One of the editors of our college literary magazine had a clever term for this, but while it got the point across quite well, it was also slightly perverse. Send me a message—I’ll fill you in.

All of this is to say that with the exception of my favorite series characters (chiefly Bernie Rhodenbarr and Lincoln Rhyme), it’s been a little aggravating to vacillate between the well-plotted and the well-written. Then I discovered Lee Child. Child is an English writer who has been writing about Jack Reacher for eleven books now, with another one due out this summer. Reacher used to be a military policeman, and a darn good one, but after military funding was cut he became a little disillusioned and decided to quit. He then started to wander the country, because although he’d been defending America in uniform for a dozen years he’d never had occasion to see the sights. And if seeing the sights was all that Reacher did, the books would very likely be very boring. Fortunately for me, he happens to have the worst luck in the world. In Killing Floor, he passes through a little town in Georgia and gets arrested for a crime he didn’t commit. In Die Trying, he’s an unwilling victim of a kidnapping just by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. In The Hard Way, he’s sitting in a coffee shop when someone recruits him to solve a kidnapping. I’ve read four of the eleven novels, and so far they all have two things in common: Reacher is always alive at the end, and the bad guys are always dead.

This may strike you as a little outlandish or unnecessary, and I can’t really blame you. The odds of one man getting in and out of so much trouble in a lifetime are astronomical. But I’m too busy loving the fact that I’ve found some new escapist literature to object to any of it. Sometimes books can serve to teach us things about ourselves and others through fictional situations, and when I’m in the mood for that sort of thing I’m more than happy to track down another Nick Hornby book or more of Tom Perrotta’s work. When I want to ignore the life I find myself living in favor of one where the good guys win and the bad guys get a bullet in the head (or an elbow to the stomach, or a sharp piece of ceramic tile to…oh, never mind), than Lee Child happens to be my choice. And when I run out of Reacher books, I very much hope there’s someone else out there who can write about adventure this well.

Currently Gaming Grand Theft Auto IV By Rockstar Games see related

Staplers and Testaments

For those of you who want to skip past all the “thanks for commenting” and “I promise I’ll get back to you” stuff, you’ll find that today’s post starts after the next paragraph. As for the rest of you:

First and foremost, an enthusiastic thanks needs to go out to all of you who read and commented on my posts over the last week. Suddenly having featured content could not have been more unexpected for me, and it’s a thrill and a pleasure to have to deal with more than a hundred comments when I’m used to three or four. I hope you’ll understand and pardon me when I tell you that time constraints force me to make some generalizations. Primarily, I’d like you to know that I make a point of reading every single comment left on my site, and I’m very grateful for each one. Secondly, you’re more than welcome to subscribe to the blog—I started writing here in anticipation of an audience, so as far as I’m concerned more is better. Thirdly, if you’d like to hear from me, just tell me so. If you leave a question or a message (as opposed to a comment), I’ll do my best to get back to you within a week at most, and I see no problem with accepting friend requests, though I’m paranoid enough to reserve veto power if it becomes necessary. You’ll have to give me a few more days to sort through the comments that have already been left, but I promise I’ll get to them. Again, this is a wonderful problem to have, and I couldn’t be happier that you’ve found my writing worthy of discussion and response.

I now present to you my regularly scheduled post, hoping frantically that it can live up to last Tuesday’s:

I’m not one to find much humor in death, but I will say that I still can’t get over the irony of hearing a will preparation seminar announced by a man who looked like he’d probably be having his own last wishes read any day now. This was part of a church service I attended on Sunday, which meant that I could also get a chuckle out of seeing “free will clinic” printed in the bulletin. Mostly I was intrigued by the concept. Better to do this immediately, he said. If you don’t think you have assets, you have assets. I didn’t really think I had assets, but I wanted to have them, just so I could put them in a will. This compulsion would’ve seemed odd to me if not for my love of office supply stores.

Seriously, it makes sense. Have you ever crossed the threshold of Staples or Office Depot? During my last visit, I walked through the front doors intending to buy two tote bags. I came out the door with two tote bags, a Scotch tape dispenser and twelve rolls of tape to fill it with. Why buy the tape? Because I thought I might have something that needed taping. Furthermore, in the process of getting the tape and the bags I narrowly avoided the temptation of one-touch staplers, a GPS system and an “easy button.” Some men escape to hardware stores to buy screwdrivers and saws while dreaming of the projects they’ll never get around to building. I go into Staples and become thoroughly enchanted with folders, highlighters, staplers, tape and envelopes. It’s not really possession of the object itself, but what it says about what I already have. If I have files, I might have documents worth filing. If I have highlighters, they can make my printed words more important. If I have Scotch tape, I can convince myself that I’ll soon be using it to take the plot ideas I’ve scribbled on scrap paper and stick them onto the pages of my notebooks. The purchase of a safe is much more thrilling when I know I have something worth protecting. And just like that safe, writing a last will and testament would mean that I’d have wishes that were worth communicating, and possessions worth leaving behind.

If I’m completely honest with myself, I can admit that there’s a little bit of a sensationalistic mentality left in me from reading one too many Agatha Christie novels. Everyone who’s ever read a Victorian murder mystery knows that a will is the place to put all your surprising revelations about your life and your beneficiaries, so as to reach out and startle the heck out of them from beyond the grave. There is definitely a part of me that wants to write a letter to be opened in the event of my death, just so I can say all the things I’d never have the nerve to say while I was alive. The problem with that idea is that I inevitably find myself at a loss as to what to confess. Yes, I have secrets, no, I don’t always say what’s on my mind, and yes, I could probably find ways to shake people up a little, but when it comes to telling the truth about a first love or a friendship that meant the world to me or family members I’d hate to live without, there’s really not much left to reveal. Once you say “I love you,” I’ve found it’s sometimes a bad idea to try and restate it in a number of colorful and poetic ways. The impact and importance of three little words can often be lessened when you take the risk of falling into cliché and redundancy. Better to just say what you need to say during this lifetime. If nothing else, at least you get to see a reaction.

So startling revelations are out, but that doesn’t take care of all my stuff. The guy said I have assets, after all. I get to decide who drains my checking account, who gets to divvy up my movies, and who gets to claim proud ownership of the huge box of old Entertainment Weekly magazines under my bed (they’ll be worth a fortune, I tell you!). Yet even as I enjoy the thought of having the power to give out what’s mine, it’s hard to stay excited when I start my mental walk through the distribution process. Is my brother really going to remember me fondly every time he casts misty eyes upon my laser printer? Is my sister really going to make a ritual of watching my treasured two-disk special edition Spider-Man DVD on my birthday every year? Maybe they will (who doesn’t love Spider-Man?), but there are so very few objects that really have lasting significance after a person is gone. Maybe my ring, or the silver cross I wear around my neck, or the pen I never leave home without, but even then all of those items are special because of the memories that go with them, not because they look good or write well. I may really want some special people to have some special things of mine by the time I make a (hopefully) graceful exit from this world, but if I can’t take it with me, I can’t see it very often making a difference who gets to use it once I’m gone.

Now I can’t find many last words to be shared, and I can’t find many possessions that I care enough about to make sure I know where they’re going after my funeral. Is the appeal of a will as fleeting and elusive for me as the allure of that power stapler?

Maybe, maybe not. Here’s the thing about office supplies: If I buy a binder in the hopes of filling it with a manuscript, that says much more about my desire to finish a manuscript than it does about any sort of need for a binder. If I work hard and stay disciplined, I can attain the kind of success that might have room for the possessions I think I need to own. I may one day really need that great big wooden desk with all the compartments, and I may publish enough writing to fill an impressive-looking filing cabinet. But when I get to that point, I’m pretty sure I’ll be much more proud of the contents of the cabinet than the cabinet itself. A will is a tool. It’s a way to provide the people you care about with the possessions and truths that will help them and make them stronger, but it’s useless without having people you love and things to share. So maybe I’ll keep wandering into Staples, and maybe I’ll spend a few spare moments mulling over who gets my stereo after I’m done with it. But I’d like to hope I spend much more energy on what I already have, right here and right now.

Currently Watching Juno (Single-Disc Edition) By Ellen Page, Michael Cera, Jennifer Garner, Jason Bateman, Allison Janney see related

Seeing the Piano Man

There’s always that moment when I’m thinking it’d be better to skip the whole thing. Not that I’d ever actually bail out—even if the tickets hadn’t been a pretty expensive birthday present, I’d forever hate myself for passing up a chance to see my favorite musician of all time. It’s just that he’s my favorite musician of all time. What if I’m left at the end of the evening with nothing but a feeling of disappointment?

I’ve written about the concert jitters before; you may or may not recall that I’ve mentioned my experiences with Mandy Moore, Rachael Yamagata and Chris Stills this past August, and before that Schuyler Fisk and Joshua Radin came through Columbus last April. There was apprehension then, too, but nervousness of a different sort. Those shows featured performers closer to my own age, and in addition to liking their music I could develop crushes on the girls and wish I could hang out with the guys. I cared about actually seeing the musicians in person as much if not more than I cared about hearing their music, so I wasn’t really worried that the song set would be less than thrilling. But this time I was going to see Billy Joel. The Billy Joel. The man whose music I knew forwards and backwards, the performer on the albums I had discovered with joy, one after the other. It was going to be fantastic to see him perform, but what if he’d lost his touch? What if he was a jerk? The voice telling me not to doubt my musical hero was the same voice alerting me to Sequel Syndrome: he was fantastic when I saw him with Elton John a few years ago, but would this show even remotely be able to measure up to the last? This wasn’t just some pretty girl with a guitar. This was the man, the myth, the legend. How could I even be expected to enjoy the concert under this much stress?

I was being ridiculous, of course.

I’d been given two floor seats, and I’d been optimistic enough in February to envision taking an attractive woman to the show with me. My outlook had become considerably more realistic and depressing by April, but I was able to salvage the situation by taking my brother Mark, who happens to be taller, smarter, and so much funnier than I am. You’d think this would be depressing as well, but Mark loves music as much if not more than I do, and while Billy is far from his favorite performer, he respects him as a musician and was excited to see him live. We came to the arena with plenty of time to find our places, and we were on the edge of our seats when the lights finally dimmed and a grand piano came up from under the stage.

Well, okay—we were standing up, and I’m taking my brother’s word about the piano thing.

See, the one disadvantage to floor seats is that they are not stadium seats, and your view is completely determined by your height and the height of those in front of you. So you can imagine my dismay, and really the dismay of all of those around me, when Cleatus the trucker guy decided to get to his seat about a minute and a half before the show started. This guy had it all—John Deere cap, a Harley Davidson t-shirt and more than enough flab to spill out of the cut-off sleeves. Did I mention he was over six feet and probably three hundred pounds? Because of him, I spent at least the first minute or so of the concert feeling like I was in Raiders of the Lost Ark: I could tell from all the lights and sound that something majestic was happening up ahead, but I couldn’t look directly at it. Then the music began, and I knew exactly what was happening.

I can’t say that I had a great view of the stage the whole time. I can say that I could sometimes see Billy from where I was standing, sometimes I could see him on the monitor above my head, and sometimes I couldn’t see him at all—but regardless of my view, it was really a great time. He hadn’t even remotely lost his touch, and he proved it by starting the concert with “Prelude/Angry Young Man”, a song to which that I cannot do justice in describing other than to say that it has an incredibly fast piano introduction, and that watching his hands fly up and down the keys was as thrilling as it was the last time. He was charming, witty, and thoroughly self-deprecating throughout the show: “You’re probably realizing, ‘That’s not Billy,’” he said at one point. “‘That’s Billy’s dad. Billy must be at home, combing his (indicates bald head) hair.” It was as if he realized he was just a guy playing the piano, and a guy who wasn’t getting any younger—and yet he was simultaneously able to remember he was the guy who was able to pack an arena full of people and keep them thoroughly entertained for a solid two hours. I was also delighted to find that this concert seemed to be tailored to long-time fans. With Elton, Billy probably figured he had to confine his limited set list to more major hits, but he made a point of noting in the outrageously overpriced tour book this time around that he and his band specifically rehearsed as many songs as possible, so as to be able to mix it up every night and play stuff that might not have made the Top 40. For someone who owns all his albums and likes 99.5% of the music on them, this was a wonderful thing. He played not one, but two songs from my favorite album, went all over the stage for the electric guitar portion of the show, and even included a gem that I’ve always enjoyed called “Summer, Highland Falls”. And just when everyone began to think he might neglect the big stuff, he finished up the show with a three-song mammoth trifecta of an encore: “Scenes From An Italian Restaurant”, “Only The Good Die Young,” and, of course, “Piano Man.” How amazing it must be to get up on stage every night after more than thirty years and still hear the screams of adoring fans every time you play the opening chords of that song!

So, was it a great show? Absolutely, both because of who I saw and whom I took with me. What was my favorite part? In the midst of all the performers who are catapulted to artificial stardom through “American Idol” and MTV only to get up on stage and lip synch while dancers try to look cool around them, I thoroughly enjoyed being reminded that there are still true musicians out there who simply love to get up on stage and have a ball playing their hearts out.

Currently Reading Die Trying By Lee Child see related

Solitary Movie Man

I suppose there had to be a time when I was much more concerned about going to the movies alone. The fear is still there in the back of my mind, the cautionary tone that warns of a future as a Man Who Goes to the Movies By Himself. With the label being capitalized and all, you’d think that it would indicate a problem with the action it describes, but you’d be wrong. Much as a woman owning cats is not necessarily a Cat Lady, I hope that slipping into a theater all by my lonesome does not transform me into Solitary Movie Man, guaranteeing me a future full of dinners for one and nights spent wondering how so many satellite television stations can yield such a paltry harvest of worthwhile programming. No man should always take in the cinema by himself, you understand. Still, I’m finding there are advantages to traveling solo.

The freedom of it is a big incentive, for one thing. I don’t want you confusing this with spontaneity, because to do so would be to credit me with a very big and very false character transformation. I just mean that checking the movie listings on Thursday night affords me some options on Friday. Ever since I started employment with the federal government way back in February of 2007, I take it as a personal point of pride that I have never had to put in a full eight-hour Friday. How I’ve managed to accomplish this feat is entirely too complicated and brilliant to go into here, so I’ll leave it up to your imagination—the more colorful among you will conjure up a tale of how I bribe or evade the building’s security guards, while the spoilsports will simply assume that I work extra time during the week to put toward the weekend. At any rate, it’s always a wonderful feeling to find myself motoring down the freeway in the early hours of a Friday afternoon. Both my schedule and the roads are clear, and recently it’s occurred to me that there’s no reason I can’t drop by the ol’ theater and see a movie that I know I’ll be in time for. This is only after attending to my lunch needs—a man has simply got to eat—but over the last couple of weeks it’s felt really good to know that there is absolutely nothing stopping me from indulging myself with a couple of hours in one of those really cushy red chairs.

There is really no one to discuss this good feeling with upon walking into the theater, and for someone more extroverted this may be a problem. Personally, I tend to find advantages. There is no one hassling you to get to your seat. There is no one you have to wait for while they insist on getting more popcorn than the Food and Drug Administration could sensibly recommend the both of you consume in one sitting. Also, a lack of conversation means a lack of conversational obligation: instead of trying to find witty tidbits to keep the ball rolling, I can be content with strolling in, finding a seat in silence, and savoring some quiet contemplation. This is the ideal mindset and position for people watching. In the last two weeks, I’ve yet to be completely alone in the theatre. I count that a goal of mine, as there’s something really cool about surveying so many empty seats, but so far, there’ve always been people to slip in at the last minute. Furthermore, for reasons that I can’t fully comprehend, these people always tend to be old. Okay, I can see that going to the movies at 1:30 in the afternoon is not typically a hobby of the young, at least not prior to summer vacation and certainly not for those braving the nine to five. Still, the last three movies I’ve seen were an R-rated comedy aimed at 20-to-30-somethings, an R-rated thriller aimed squarely at anyone who overlooked plot as long as there was sex and violence involved (although I didn’t realize this until afterward), and a PG-13 caper film about a bunch of college kids scamming Vegas. Maybe I’m not giving senior citizens enough credit, or maybe I’d rather not find myself in the same target group with them quite yet, but I’ve always found myself sitting through the previews wondering if these guys know what they’ve paid for. And then there’s the inevitable conversation going on around me, and it’s pretty loud on account of the fact that most of these patrons need a little help hearing. Yet sooner or later, when the previews end and the movie begins, they’re there and I’m there and we’re sharing the experience together, even as we never acknowledge each other’s existence.

It might be precisely the feeling I sometimes loathe that captivates me in those red seats, the sense that I’m completely disconnected from the people nearby, from the room itself, from the theater and the very world around me. I can arrive and not be noticed, I can leave and no one particularly cares, I can go absolutely anywhere I want without altering anyone’s plans in the least. And while sometimes I run from that feeling, sprinting toward significance and clawing desperately for any sense that what I do matters to anyone else, sometimes going unnoticed allows me to sit back and watch the world. Not just the world on the silver screen, but the world I’m still trying to fit into, a world made up of innumerable lives and passions and goals and motives, a world where it seems people can miss each other by inches or miles and never realize it, a world where those same people can just as often stumble into each other’s fields of vision without ever meaning to or planning to or even remotely being prepared for the consequences. In a world like that, sometimes it’s good for me to put on the mantle of Solitary Movie Man – especially when I decide to walk out of one screening room and stroll right down the hall to another.

I know, I know...

Yeah, yeah. I said I'd be back, but I'm tired, and it's hot in here, and I don't wanna write! Hopefully I'll snap out of this reversion to my elementary school maturity level sometime next week, because I really do have a concert I want to tell you all about. Have a great weekend!