A masterful biography of a mobster folk hero that disentangles his convoluted history

Some Bostonians used to like to paint James Joseph “Whitey” Bulger, Jr. as a wicked-awesome folk hero. “He robbed and murdered drug dealuhs and mobstuhs!” they said. “Whitey kept Southie safe!” They seemed to forget Bulger was a mobster himself, a man who robbed and killed lots of regular people, burying them all over Beantown since the ’60s.

The authors of this masterful new biography, Boston Globe reporters Dick Lehr and Gerard O’Neill, dispel the modern-day-Robin Hood storyline early, kicking things off with the sickening strangulation of the young and happy Debra Davis — just a lady who got in Whitey’s way. That kind of thing sticks with you, even as the book loops back to the beginning to trace his immigrant roots, working-class upbringing and cruel treatment as a guinea pig in the CIA’s program testing LSD on prisoners. Once he’s out of jail (thanks in part to his politician brother Billy Bulger), Whitey becomes America’s most wanted man — part criminal genius, part reckless psychopath. And the most amazing thing? Until going on the run in the mid ’90s, he was moonlighting as an FBI informant. Turns out the feds were almost as crooked as he was.

Lehr and O’Neill have made a career out of mining Boston’s colorful criminal underworld; in Whitey they make equal use of the official paper trail and anecdotal interviews to turn a would-be procedural into a thriller. Clinical and precise, they lead you through every confrontation, close call and corpse disposal, right up to the worldwide manhunt and his heart-pounding arrest in 2011. By now even Southie has to be happy about that.

Spanning the band's career to create a lovely and peculiar listening experience

Rilo Kiley had a Hollywood sort of beginning: Two ex-child actors somehow found each other in the smog and smarm of Los Angeles. Jenny Lewis, the charmingly idiosyncratic songwriter with a country-strong voice, and Blake Sennett, the blue-collar guitarist who cuts his pop hooks with noise and swagger, started a rock band. And the music they made together was pretty, and pretty weird, for a rock band.

But after a decade of musical bliss, they robbed us of the happily ever after by breaking up in 2010. In one interview, Sennett cited disloyalty and greed as the causes. In another he compared Rilo Kiley to a corpse in a morgue. “Now, I see movies where the dead get up and walk. And when they do that, rarely do good things happen.”

rkives — the Rilo Kiley estate’s new odds ‘n’ sods collection — is hardly a full on Walking Dead situation, but it is proof that this zombie will still hunt. Mostly unreleased or barely released, these tracks span the band’s career to create a lovely and peculiar listening experience. The antsy, lo-fi demo of the Sennett-sung “Rest of My Life” from 2001′s Take Offs and Landings can’t be from the same planet as this clubby remix of the Lewis-sung “Dejalo” from 2007′s Under the Blacklight — and, hey, Too $hort just popped up for a verse about tapping asses, just in case you weren’t confused. Good old “Frug,” meanwhile, a favorite from Rilo Kiley’s earliest self-releases, returns sweet and untouched, a marvel of meet-cute pop from the pre-ass-tapping era. “Emotional” roars with thick, blunt bravado.

rkives‘ most stunning standout is a road-tested favorite finally getting the studio treatment. Once known as “I Love L.A.” (suck it, Randy Newman), “Let Me Back In” is Lewis’ sweet and sour torch song for her hometown. Basically, she’s Jenny and Los Angeles is Forrest Gump: “When the palm trees bow their heads/ no matter how cruel I’ve been/ L.A., you always let me back in.” Kinda-sorta hopeful. Maybe we’ll get our happily ever after, after all.

Seeking a plan for the end of the world

Sam Sheridan could have been Batman. The dude is a former wilderness firefighter, merchant marine and EMT who graduated from Harvard, studied with a muay thai master in Thailand, and did construction work in Antarctica — and all of that came before he started working on The Disaster Diaries.

A renaissance man’s guide to surviving the end times, this book depicts Sheridan jumping through all kinds of hoops in pursuit of preparedness — not just shooting ranges and firebuilding, either. We’re talking stunt driving, knife fighting, bugout-bag packing, elk hunting, igloo building and more. He traipses through bleakest Arizona with primitive-living expert Cody Lundin. He learns how to steal cars from an ex-con in Los Angeles. He gets some long, hard lessons on dog sledding from Inuit guides in Nunavut. Still, The Disaster Diaries transcends its straight-up usefulness at every turn. A skilled storyteller with a journalistic mindset, Sheridan is always sneaking in some telling details about this survivalist’s paranoid monologues, or that thief’s regret, or some tough guy’s considerable ego. And the author’s own wild flights of fancy — chapters frequently begin with him battling zombies, escaping super-quakes, beating back mutant gangs, or dodging alien spider robots — give the book an occasional touch of the surreal that’ll either heighten your own paranoia or put your mind at ease.

As readers, we can enjoy the book as a true-life first-person adventure story while taking solace in the fact that Sheridan is preparing for an apocalypse that will probably never happen. Probably.

A gripping, fast-paced, determinedly hardboiled detective yarn

There’s no easing into Gun Machine — Warren Ellis’s ferocious and deliciously twisted crime novel aims for the solar plexus from the start. The moment weather-beaten New York City detective John Tallow peeks his head through the busted tenement wall, it’s clear that playtime is over. What’s in there? Guns. Lots of them — Berettas, revolvers, rifles, even a freaking flintlock — arranged in strange configurations all over the place. Curiouser: The forensics lab insists every single one of the firearms was used in an unsolved murder over the past two decades. And, oh yeah, one the guns belonged to the Son of Sam, stolen from an evidence locker for one last kill, apparently.

So who’s the killer? Some shadowy wraith called the Hunter, a guy meticulous enough to pull off hundreds of murders without dropping a clue but primal enough to treat Central Park like his personal Habitrail, and batshit crazy enough to imagine himself a reborn Lenape warrior looking to reclaim Manhattan for his supposed people.

Now it’s finders-weepers for Tallow — a loner made doubly lonesome by the death of his partner and his outcast status in the force — who’s tasked with cracking the behemoth case and bringing in the psycho perp. Dude never should’ve stuck his head into that apartment.

In Ellis’s gripping, fast-paced, determinedly hardboiled detective yarn, Manhattan is wonderfully grimy and gas-slicked again, the kind of place where one sad-sack good guy can make a difference or honorably die trying. The old-school noir charm is only heightened by narrator Reginald E. Cathey — veteran of another chunk of modern urban crime mythology, The Wire — whose Orson Welles-via-Jurassic Five baritone strikes just the right (bass) tones.

Title: Volume VI – Gloria
Total tracks: Eight
Standout track: “Lumberjack Christmas / No One Can Save You From Christmases Past.” This indie-pop/Appalachian hybrid makes smart use of a wandering fiddle and one of the least annoying “ho ho ho” chants in music history.
See also: Stevens prides himself on diverging from classical Christmas carols, but the version of “Silent Night” that kicks off this collection is spookily, churchily old-school. Is that a choir of angels or cartoon ghosts backing him up? Voices waver and a singing saw warbles as Stevens pays proper homage to the original reason for the season. His take on of “Coventry Carol” also stays true to its earnest, 16th-century origins. And then there are tracks like “Carol of St. Benjamin the Bearded One” which starts out with an acoustic/pointillist take on “Carol of the Bells” before morphing into a folksy, uplifting original. And let’s face it, that song needed a morphing.
Sample lyric: “You, you must be a Christmas tree, a Christmas tree/ You light up the room,” from “Barcarola,” a real heartbreaker.
Good-Cheer-o-Meter: 7/10. Parental units will allow this to be played during the consumption of food and the exchange of benefactions.
Sacrilege rating: 1/10. Get behind me, Santa.
Preciousness gauge: 5/10. Totes adorbs, but not douchey about it.

Title: Volume VII – I Am Santa’s Helper!
Total tracks: 23
Standout track: “Christmas Woman” is a zig-zagging rock tune that mixes jingling bells and skronking guitars, heavenly voices and peppy synths, dissonance and euphoria. Nice shout-out to the pagans in this one, too.
See also: A lot of bang for your buck here: Some Bach, three versions of “Ah Holy Jesus” (regular, a cappella, extra reed-organy), and some crazypants song titles that only look like Tolkien references: “Lift Up Your Heads Ye Mighty Gates,” “Break Forth O Beauteous Heavenly Light,” “Mysteries of the Christmas Mist” and so on. Lively numbers like “Mr. Frosty Man” (an alternate-universe Daniel Johnston gem) define this volume, but don’t sleep on the warm and fuzzy instrumentals, including traditional Jewish hymn “Maoz Tzur” (sounds like a school piano recital) or the ethereal original “Even the Earth Will Perish and the Universe Give Way” (they have Christmas on Saturn, right?).
Sample lyric: “Baby Jesus is the king/ Jesus is the king-a-ling-a-ling-a-ling.” That’s from “Ding-a-ling-a-ring-a-ling,” a completely nutballs sing-along that embraces the spiked-eggnog silliness of the season. You can’t pull these sorts of shenanigans around Easter.
Good-Cheer-o-Meter: 9/10. Mazel Tov!
Sacrilege rating: 3/10. Nobody’s going to Hell for this, but you won’t hear it at midnight mass, either.
Preciousness gauge: 3/10. Charming and mysterious. More Dancer than Prancer.

Title: Volume VIII – Christmas Infinity Voyage
Total tracks: Nine
Standout track: Usually, “Do You Hear What I Hear?” is the black hole of the Xmas mall playlist: grim, inescapable, joyless, endless. Which is what makes Sufjan’s version – souped up with glitchy beats and robo-vocals – so brilliant. Once you accept the song as a self-perpetuating and godlessly sentient machine, well, it’s kinda fun again. Of course, our artificially intelligent narrator keeps wondering if we feel what it feels – all of creation is new to it.
See also: The retro-futuristic take on “It Came Upon A Midnight Clear” is mostly instrumental (just a brief Cylon speaking part at the end). “Particle Physics” sounds like a Dot Matrix printer trying to order itself more toner. “Good King Wenceslas” is full of alto angels and laser effects. Skrillex is so jelly right now.
Sample lyric: “No traffic jams/ No ice and storm/ Far in the house the fire is warm.” “Christmas in the Room” is a blissful and occasionally wayward anti-carol that dreams of a winter’s night spent snuggling up in front of the TV. (Just a heads up: Stevens was kind of understating the nature of fire. It is actually very, very hot.)
Good-Cheer-o-Meter: 6/10. This EP is exactly the sort of daring holiday highwire act we expect from Stevens. Older relatives will not approve. (Here’s where I remind you that Christmas is one of those things one might be accused of “ruining.”)
Sacrilege rating: 5/10. The “Angels We Have Heard on High” rewrite gives a shout-out to flying saucers, an offense specifically verboten by Vatican II.
Preciousness gauge: 1/10. Nothing too cutesy here.

Title: Volume IX – Let it Snow!
Total tracks: Nine
Standout track: Brooklyn indie-folkie Cat Martino, usually up in the clouds with the rest of Stevens’s angelic choir, swings low to sing the lead on a couple quietly fetching songs. “Ave Maria” is spellbindingly spacey while “The Sleigh in the Moon,” a Martino original, is utterly divine and peaceful. We should send her to the front lines of every war to sing this song. Later we can name a rec center after her or something.
See also: “X-Mas Spirit Catcher” is a wonderfully idiosyncratic pop number that spices Stevens’s smooth voice with spacious reverb. This volume also finds room for a few respectfully rearranged classics like “Let it Snow!” and “A Holly Jolly Christmas” to warm your heart and soften your nips.
Sample lyric: I’m not quite sure what guest singer/songwriter Sebastian Krueger means by “your holly hair and tinsel eyes” (on the final track, “Christmas Face”) but it’s wicked pretty. He’s making a golem out of old ornaments, maybe.
Good-Cheer-o-Meter: 9/10. This one’s lovely, light and deep.
Sacrilege rating: 2/10. Upping the moodiness on “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” is only a venial sin. Let’s go wallowing through the snow!
Preciousness gauge: 4/10. Gutwrenching sincerity cut with pangs Glee-ful buoyancy.

Title: Volume X – Christmas Unicorn
Total tracks: Nine
Standout track: This volume takes its title from Silver & Gold‘s most unflinchingly weird song. “Christmas Unicorn” is insane. It’s mesmerizing. It’s 13 minutes long and narrated by a mournful (and a bit deranged) mythical creature. What begins as a gentle lamentation evolves into a grand sing-along epic in the vein of Song of Roland or Snaildartha: The Story of Jerry the Christmas Snail. Strains of Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart” are mixed into some lush orchestral maneuvers, piling on the drama as we pick up steam. This unicorn has some grievances, man.
See also: The melancholic and minimalist “Happy Karma Christmas,” which delivers a real punch in the nuts of your soul. Similarly spooky is “Justice Delivers Its Death,” which summons the Lord’s wrath over acoustic pointillism. Good to see the vengeful Old Testament God get a walk-on.
Sample lyric: Gotta go back to the title track for this one: “Oh I’m a mystical apostasy/ I’m a horse with a fantasy twist/ Though I play all night with my magical kite, people say I don’t exist.”
Good-Cheer-o-Meter: 5/10. Sometimes Rudolph’s nose is a blacklight.
Sacrilege rating: 6.66/10. The false idols were hung by the chimney with care.
Preciousness gauge: 6/10. Unicorn mentions automatically set off the presh-o-meter.

One of our funniest comedians reveals the fine art of Twitter boasting

Twitter has made great strides in the field of famous/non-famous-people relations. Now not only can we make our tiny voices heard – in 140-character-or-fewer bursts – by the once-unreachable movie stars, rock gods, athletes and models we adore and despise, we can also hear directly from them, often utterly unprovoked and unfiltered.

It’s there that Harris Wittels – a very funny comedian and a writer for Parks & Recreation – first noticed the phenomenon he’s come to refer to as the humblebrag. It’s exactly what it sounds like: a ridiculous boast disguised as self-deprecating complaint. Here’s a classic from Snooki: “Damn sick mansion party! Huge lights and I forgot to wear white @ a white party. Just my luck. You here Ludacris?”

Tweets like that are a goldmine to Wittels. His book, Humblebrag: The Art of False Modesty, contains hundreds, if not thousands (OK, probably just hundreds) of these self-promoting-slash-effacing mini-missives along with some hilariously deadpan retorts. His quips rarely come off as mean-spirited, just funny and frank. When supermodel Trisha Cummings humblebrags about modeling a wedding dress but not having any real marriage prospects, Wittels is consoling: “Aw, c’mon, Trisha. There’s someone out there for everyone – even models.”

Wittels finds humblebrags are funniest when they’re tweeted by red-carpetbaggers and VIP partiers, though hangers-on have produced some gems, to be sure. Among those who take their lumps in the book are Greta Van Susteren, Dane Cook and Kevin Smith – plus some likeable people, too.

Reading the book behind the classic movie is like discovering Muddy Waters after a lifetime of Rolling Stones.

Listening to Jean Shepard’s A Christmas Story is a little like discovering Muddy Waters after a lifetime of Rolling Stones. Ah, so this is where that came from. The question is: Does the original – necessarily simpler and subtler than the pop culture monster it unwittingly created – still have anything worthwhile to offer modern ears? Yes, of course. The movie is wonderful, hilarious, a classic. This, the unabridged audiobook version of A Christmas Story, is all of that, too.

Nostalgia’s a tricky thing, so easy to oversell, but Dick Cavett winkingly leads the listener through the post-Depression-era adventures of Ralphie, the poor Indiana kid who just wants a Red Rider BB-gun, and whose old man wins a gaudy leg-lamp, and whose mom accidentally (?) breaks the lamp, and so on. Separated into digestible vignettes and bolstered by memorable bits Hollywood had no use for, the story is funnier and fresher than you know.

Arguably the most memorable non-Jesus-related Christmas story of all time.

Chances are you’ve already heard, or read, “The Santaland Diaries.” David Sedaris true-but-ridiculous memoir of his stint as an elf named Crumpet in Macy’s holiday dystopia is, arguably, the most memorable non-Jesus-related Christmas story of all time. It was written in 1992 and still holds up, still rings true in its gentle criticisms of our wayward consumer culture.Holidays on Ice collects all of Sedaris’ snarky essays and short stories on the season, and each is worthy of repeat listens, thanks to the fast-paced, charismatic readings (sometimes bolstered by cameos by his sister Amy). It’s really his greatest hits. Oh, and you need to check out “Front Row Center with Thaddeus Bristol,” in which a small-time theater critic unleashes his vicious wit on the hapless children in grammar school Christmas pageants. A sixth-grader cast as Tiny Tim leaves him unimpressed beyond the child’s ability to “sustain a decent limp.” He writes: “The program noted that he’d recently lost his right foot to diabetes, but was that reason enough to cast him?” God bless us, everyone.

Raising questions (among other things) about the science of human sexuality

Jesse Bering is sort of the Michael Pollan of boners; he’s read up, studied up, sought out, asked around and second-guessed all of the available research, but remains wise enough to know there’s a lot we still don’t know about human sexuality. The joy of Why Is the Penis Shaped Like That? comes as much from the questions it raises as the answers it provides. And Bering’s fearless curiosity (and affinity for juicy tidbits) has led him to some interesting places in this collection of essays: the adaptive function of the female orgasm, “fag hags,” zoophiles, gorilla pubes, the relentless pursuit of autofellatio and more. If somebody’s doing lab work on female ejaculate or determining the R.E.M. sleep factors that lead to morning wood, this man is on the case.

A former psych researcher and professor whose byline you’ll find in Scientific American and Slate, Bering’s got a place in his heart for hard science and nerdspeak. But he’s also a funny dude. Humor is a useful lube, intellectually, and Bering’s willing to get playful and personal. It helps that he’s the narrator; it’s much easier to gauge his confidence in his jokes this way. Now we know that his centaur sex dream was serious business.

A media con man proves there's a sucker blogging every minute

As epiphanies go, Ryan Holiday’s came pretty late. By the time the self-styled media manipulator decided to come clean, he’d already spent years bullshitting his way onto television as an “expert” guest, creating puppet web identities to spread rumors, stirring up outrage to incite false flag protests, flat out lying to journalists, preying on the weaknesses of sweatshop bloggers and brand-handling infamous douchebags like Tucker Max and Dov Charney. Actually, I don’t even know if those guys are really douchebags anymore, or if that’s just something cooked up by Holiday’s reverse-psych-pop subterfuge. That’s the only thing old-school about the man: He’s still into the ol’ any-press-is-good-press thing.

Yeah, it’s easy to hate Ryan Holiday. But it’s hard not to respect the guy, too. He’s not quite in the same league as phone-freaking pioneer Kevin Mitnick when it comes to balls, but he’s got the same penchant for delicate and amoral exploitation. Put another way, Holiday is frustratingly, frighteningly good at what he does. News outlets of all kinds have apparently fallen victim to his charms and spells.

As a journalist, I can honestly say this is one of the most spellbinding and infuriating books I’ve come across. Evil baby geniuses like Holiday – it’s a sure bet there are more out there; I just hope they’re less prolific – know how to work the system and bait the gullible. If I take any solace from the “confessions” in Holiday’s playbook, it’s that maybe the media will learn from them.

Of course, the whole thing could be a clever fake. I doubt it, but, you know, it was written by a guy who lies for a living.

Still crazy after all these years: Cuckoo's Nest turns 50

Now a half-century old, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest remains a powerful chunk of American literature. Informed by personal experiences with LSD in the MKUltra program (Google that shit; totally cray) and as an orderly in a mental ward, Ken Kesey spins the riveting, almost-allegorical tale of an Oregon psych ward getting turned upside down by a brazen new patient. A description like that might make you think we’re in life-affirming, Awakenings/Patch Adams/Dead Poets Society territory, but no. There are bigger things at play here, darker things, and not even the movie version of Cuckoo’s Nest — which deserved all of its Oscars — could quite grasp the psychological machinations Kesey has constructed.

Know what else?

After spending so much time among these motley mental patients, I’ve developed something Google has informed me is a common delusion: Imagining One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest as a dystopian novel. True, the present-day (well, recent-day) Pacific Northwest bears little resemblance to George Orwell’s industrial ant colony of Oceania but, like 1984, Cuckoo’s Nest is the story of little nobodies pitted against a force that has immense cognitive sway over them; instead of Big Brother we have the all-seeing, all-controlling Nurse Ratched, whom our narrator, Chief Brompton, refers to as “Big Nurse.” As with Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, the subjects are kept in line with drugs and groupthink. Alone time is emphatically discouraged. And, like those murderous kids in The Hunger Games, the mental patients might actually have a shot at taking the whole system down.

Hope, if you can call it that, comes in the form of Randle McMurphy the rambunctious and gregarious new guy on the ward who challenges the status quo daily, often with hilarious and/or dire consequences. He’s sort of like Huxley’s John the Savage, a dude who acts out against the system because he hasn’t had the ego scared out of him (yet). Nurse Ratched, of course, runs rules with an iron fist, and methodically emasculates the men in her care, one way or the other. One patient, Dale Harding — whose only “psychosis” may be his homosexuality — warns McMurphy that Ratched’s not above playing the lobotomy card. “Frontal-lobe castration,” he calls it. “I guess if she can’t cut below the belt she’ll do it above the eyes.” Sorry, Patch, there’s no room for a guy like you in a place like this.

“It is sort of weird,” young Billy observes. “Being honored for the worst day of your life.”

All the meet-and-greets and photo ops that come with being an accidental spokesperson for a war you don’t understand have left the men both jaded and hyper sensitive. They’re jittery. They’re drunk whenever they can be. They’re tired of being thanked.

Their last big public appearance, at a Cowboys game in Dallas Stadium, is a total shitshow: open bar after open bar, followed by a bit part in the loud, flashy, pyro-enhanced Destiny’s Child halftime show. All the while, the Bravos’ agent is working the cell phone, trying to lock up a deal to turn their story a into Hollywood blockbuster that’ll make them all rich. On top of all that, Billy has just fallen hard for a Dallas Cheerleader and suddenly going back to war seems like the worst idea ever.

Ben Fountain’s debut novel is a sometimes humorous, and often heartbreaking look at the disconnect between the young men who fight our wars and the people whose freedom they’re allegedly protecting. It’s also an important book, one that examines the Bush administration’s selling of the war(s) and our eagerness to buy in, tune out or move on.

In her recent book, Drift, Rachel Maddow, wrote about how Americans have found a way to sort of tune out the war. Unlike it was with Vietnam, people seem to be able to go about their daily lives. I was wondering if you agree or disagree with that.

I haven’t read her book but I do very much agree that…Vietnam touched everybody in one way or another. I was too young for Vietnam but I have an older sister, she’s six years older than me and so all of her guy friends, they were looking the draft right in the face. And so it becomes, war becomes much more real when it affects you or your family or could potentially affect someone in your family. And I think that’s really, with certain exceptions, that’s the only time it does become real and even with all the technology we have now, all the ways that war and conflicts come to us via computers and TV, there’s still this disconnect or distancing that makes it not real. No matter how graphic and vivid the images, there’s still a gap between our experience and what’s going on out there.

After reading your book, I realized the gap, it goes both ways. Like when the people talk to Billy, he kind of tunes them out because he knows they’re not speaking the same language. Those passages are really striking, almost minimalist. Billy only hears the buzzwords: 9/11, War on Terror, etc.

When people say things to the soldiers like, “Thank you for your service, you’re a hero, thank you for your sacrifice,” they really mean it when they’re saying it. They’re trying to express something genuine that they feel or feel like they should feel but you know, how much can their words mean when they really don’t know what they’re talking about? And the war has been…The war was sold in this country as this virtuous and just crusade to bring democracy to Iraq, but what Billy knows and what citizens don’t know or won’t even try to acknowledge is that war is necrophilia. War is about who can produce the most death. I mean, that’s the most extreme human situation you can conceive of. Their words of praise and appreciation can only go so far because they don’t know what they’re talking about.

The body count is especially the kind of thing we tend to tune out.

Well and it’s the civilian deaths…Even the most conservative estimates at this point, they’re what, 100,000, 200,000? You know, the enormity of that. We just can’t comprehend that.

Did you speak to soldiers when working on this book?

Yeah, I talked to a lot of soldiers.

What were some things that they said that sort of opened your eye to the things that you didn’t know?

Several things. They tended to view civilians with a mixture of pity and condescension. Because the soldiers, when you start talking about war, they are the insiders. And like insiders anywhere, it’s only natural for an insider to feel superior, you know? In everything from jazz musicians to athletes to chess nerds, you’re going to view the outsider with a certain amount of patronizing. And also, they seem to have a profound sensitivity to the disconnect between their experience and most Americans’ conception of the war and what the war involves.

This has not been a collective effort. This has been a very selective effort on the part of the country. World War II was complete mobilization of the country. Vietnam, even though LBJ tried to soft-sell the war, his strategy was, well we’re going to fight an all out war but we’re going to sell it to the public as we aren’t really fighting an all out conflict. And yet there was the draft and…therefore it penetrated the public, the collective consciousness a great deal more. In this war, it’s a relatively small segment of the population that’s fought the war and been directly affected by the war, and so I got the sense that there’s a profound sense of alienation on the part of the soldiers towards mainstream society.

Everything is way more complicated than stand and shoot and follow orders.

My feeling is there’s no such thing as a simple human being. We all have complex inner lives. You know, it depends on the individual, some are more aware of these various levels of interiority than others and some are more able to articulate the complexity of their inner lives than others, but in one way or another I think we’re all registering everything that goes on in human experience. In any one experience there’s going to be levels of past and present and awareness and unconsciousness and drift and motive and desire and fear and so I think these soldiers, they’re as human and alive as anyone, and maybe more so. You know, the experience of combat, especially in Billy’s case, has made him…extremely alert and attentive to the world around him. He’s trying to figure things out.

And he’s so young.

Yeah, he’s 19 but his experiences of the past year, they’ve woken him up and he’s actively trying to figure out what’s going on and why things are the way they are.

One thing you think about is how, when Billy was still sort of a young punk, I bet being a war hero and getting with a Dallas Cowboys Cheerleader would have seemed like perfect simple dreams, and all he’d need in the world. But now everything is fraught with complication.

Oh, yeah. And that’s the nature of experience. Romance novels — that’s when everything is pure and uncomplicated. I’m talking about the romance novels for women where, you know, the bodice-rippers. And I’m also talking about the kinds of romance novels that, say, Tom Clancy writes for men where they’re heroes and the bad guys are clear cut and there’s a clear course of action and you know what you’re supposed to do.

So you went on a publicity tour for the book, right, recently?

Yeah.

Did you feel any of what Billy felt on his “victory tour?”

No. Writers bitch and moan about book tours, “they’re so tough.” They aren’t work. I define work as digging ditches or putting in plumbing, but on book tours you get to go around and meet book people and talk about books. …And no, the level of attention I got, I’m just a little writer and it nowhere near approached the level that’s depicted with Billy and his comrades.

I guess I was thinking along the lines of everyone who came up to Billy thought they were saying the right thing but readers are bound to have their own interpretations. And you just have to nod and say, “Okay, that’s your opinion,” you know?

Yeah, that cuts both ways. Sometimes people will make a striking insight that reveals the book in a way that I’ve never thought of before. But yeah, people are going to make of it what they will and when you put a book out there, that’s just going to happen. But what really struck me, what’s really struck me through the whole reaction to the book is a lot of people feel like I exaggerated things, and I suppose I can see why they would feel that way. But to me it’s straight realism. All the excess, all the over the top stuff that goes on in the book, all you have to do is turn on the TV and it’s there.

There’s a blurb on the front that compares Billy Lynn to Catch-22 and I get the comparison because putting a war in a very sort of distinct light that makes people really think about all sides of it. But along the same lines, that was a satire and that was cartoonish and while your book’s a lot more subtle…

Heller was depicting the uncertainty of war by going at the bureaucracy of it, which I think is an absolutely valid way to approach it. And I was more interested, once I started writing the book, I realized what I was interested in was exploring the marketing of the war. You know, the corporatization of the war and how it becomes part of the media marketing vortex that all the rest of America has been sucked into.

Beyoncé makes an appearance in the halftime show, and becomes a symbol of American frivolity excess.

Well, she must have something going on, to do the things those kinds of things people do and to maintain — they must have pretty strong wills and must be pretty smart people. And so it’s not nothing what they do, and when Billy actually encounters her up close, even though it’s fleeting, he thinks well, she’s one of the top human beings on the planet. To do what she’s doing, carry the show in front of 40 million people, it’s not nothing. So I do have respect for those people.

Has Jay-Z had words with you yet?

I’m sure the book is on his bedside table, he just hasn’t gotten to it yet.

You grew up in North Carolina. And now you live in Texas. Are there like sort of 50 shades of red state?

I think in Texas, and especially in Dallas, you get the purist strain of certain aspects of you know, American culture. And here in Dallas, and especially in North Dallas where I live, the free market is, like, that’s the religion. Free market evangelism. That’s the answer to everything and you know, people really do believe in the rhetoric. Democracy, freedom, capitalism, the American way. I believe in all those things too [ he laughs] but I maybe approach those words with a bit more skepticism and wariness. …When somebody starts talking about these things I don’t accept them at face value, I always wonder, what is the agenda behind it? I just feel like in some ways Dallas is the most American city in terms of dedication and belief in certain mainstream aspects of American culture.

And how is it different than North Carolina?

Well, it’s a difference of degree, I feel like. I’ve been away from North Carolina for 29 years and it’s gotten more conservative over the years. But…in Dallas you just get a purer strain of it. It’s not so much that people believe in the stereotypical American way, it’s that there’s very little awareness that there could be a different way.

I’ve wondered, especially in recent years, what’s George Bush’s legacy in Texas? Are they defenders of Bush still?

Yeah, his house is less than a mile from mine.

Oh, wow.

And early 2009 when he was finishing up his time in Washington all these yard signs appeared in this part of town. They were like campaign yard signs except they said, “Welcome back, Mr. President and Laura.” And I think you know, he’s a much respected, much beloved figure in this immediate area. My wife was at a restaurant with some of her friends one night and he and Laura came in and people stood up and gave them a standing ovation.

Huh.

So I think he has a lot of good will in this area.

Seems like Dallas is an ideal place to set this book then.

When I first came here I thought it would be very similar to the place where I grew up. You know, kind of Southern, kind of conservative, but with progressive elements. And I started to realize pretty quickly that no, it’s a lot different. One example was when I got here people would ask me, “Who’s the richest man in North Carolina?” And it never occurred to me to wonder, number one, and number two, in those days anyway the richest man in North Carolina made damn sure to keep it a secret, whereas here it’s a point of pride and it’s uppermost in people’s minds, wealth, consumption, material status.

Billy and the rest of the Bravo Company want to get paid, they want their story to become movie deal.

My expectation, even though the book doesn’t go into this, is that that was the furthest thing from their minds when they embarked on their military service. And it wasn’t until it started being dangled in front of them that it even occurred to them that they could get a windfall from this. And who wouldn’t want a free $100,000? But Billy does approach the whole notion with a good deal of skepticism. You know, karmically, he thinks that $100,000 might be bad luck for one thing, and for another thing he is really skeptical about whether it’s going to happen.

And it just keeps changing. One cell phone call and a whole different picture can emerge and that’s just crazy to have like a fortune sort of hanging in the balance.

Yeah, well you know, it’s $100,000 which in one way is a lot of money but in our society in terms of what it takes to be actually rich it’s chump change.

That’s true. Have you had much experience with sort of the Hollywood machine?

A little bit [laughs]. Enough to really wonder about the mentality out there. Although we do have a movie deal for this book, and I have to say I was very lucky. I’ve fallen in with a group of, they seem like very solid, very fine people and they get the book and they’re serious about making the movie. So I always figured there were good people in the movie business and it just took me a while to find them.

When they read your book were they like, “We’re not like that”? Were they offended?

No, they weren’t offended. I think my sense was that they felt like it was an accurate depiction of the movie industry.

What about people from Dallas? What’s the reaction bee like there?

There’s been a thundering silence.

Oh yeah? Interesting.

I mean, the Dallas Morning News gave it a really fine, really positive review and they did a nice feature. And D Magazine, which is the city magazine, they gave it favorable coverage. And Texas Monthly. And Texas Observer. …Obviously there’s a segment of Texas that welcomes this kind of examination. [But] the group in Texas or the groups in Texas who wouldn’t welcome or appreciate this kind of examination, they just ignore it.

I would say the book is not mean-spirited towards Texas but it is frank about things.

I appreciate that. I didn’t want it to be a mean book or a cynical book, you know? I was hoping that there would be a soul in there, that it wouldn’t be taking cheap shots. …I do take shots, but hopefully they aren’t cheap.

His masterpiece finally gets the audiobook treatment, and it's a doozy

If you’re reading Infinite Jest, you’re not fucking around. Nine-hundred eighty-one pages, plus endnotes. Or, in audiobook terms: Two days, eight hours, 12 minutes and 10 seconds. It’s a three-pound, 1.51 gigabyte behemoth, a book you need to make room for on the shelf, in your hard drive, in your daily routine.

Still, David Foster Wallace’s 1996 masterpiece is just as amazing for its depth as its breadth. Indeed, despite its quasi-dystopian political machinations (those wheelchair-bound Quebecois separatist assassins have a point) and batshit crazy corporate culture underpinnings (years are no longer referred to by number, but their by their sponsorships, i.e. Year of the Perdue Wonderchicken, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment, etc.), this is a novel about small things, personal things: addiction, desperation, nervousness, our reliance on technology to keep us close, but not too close.

The plot concerns the overworked, self-medicated young athletes at the Enfield Tennis Academy, including our ostensible protagonist, nervous wreck/tennis prodigy Hal Incandenza and his severely deformed and relentlessly upbeat brother Mario. But it also concerns the psychologically and physically tormented addicts in recovery at the nearby Ennet House Drug House. Some concern is also paid to the feral hamsters that stampede across the desert, the movie so beautiful that everyone who watches it goes insane, the woman (supposedly) so beautiful she has to wear a veil, the guy who only eats Toblerone and so on forever and ever amen.

It’s true, Infinite Jest isn’t easy. It’s gigantic, and slippery, and serpentine. And just watching those 56 files slowly download can be daunting. But it’s also one of the funniest, most moving and most unforgettably insightful books ever written.

His masterpiece finally gets the audiobook treatment, and it's a doozy

If you’re reading Infinite Jest, you’re not fucking around. Nine-hundred eighty-one pages, plus endnotes. Or, in audiobook terms: Two days, eight hours, 12 minutes and 10 seconds. It’s a three-pound, 1.51 gigabyte behemoth, a book you need to make room for on the shelf, in your hard drive, in your daily routine.

Still, David Foster Wallace’s 1996 masterpiece is just as amazing for its depth as its breadth. Indeed, despite its quasi-dystopian political machinations (those wheelchair-bound Quebecois separatist assassins have a point) and batshit crazy corporate culture underpinnings (years are no longer referred to by number, but their by their sponsorships, i.e. Year of the Perdue Wonderchicken, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment, etc.), this is a novel about small things, personal things: addiction, desperation, nervousness, our reliance on technology to keep us close, but not too close.

The plot concerns the overworked, self-medicated young athletes at the Enfield Tennis Academy, including our ostensible protagonist, nervous wreck/tennis prodigy Hal Incandenza and his severely deformed and relentlessly upbeat brother Mario. But it also concerns the psychologically and physically tormented addicts in recovery at the nearby Ennet House Drug House. Some concern is also paid to the feral hamsters that stampede across the desert, the movie so beautiful that everyone who watches it goes insane, the woman (supposedly) so beautiful she has to wear a veil, the guy who only eats Toblerone and so on forever and ever amen.

It’s true, Infinite Jest isn’t easy. It’s gigantic, and slippery, and serpentine. And just watching those 56 files slowly download can be daunting. But it’s also one of the funniest, most moving and most unforgettably insightful books ever written.

Who does Augusten Burroughs think he is, writing a how-to guide to life? I mean, after devouring a short-stack of his harrowingly brilliantly hilariously harrowing memoirs like Running with Scissors and A Wolf at the Table, we’re well aware of his messed up past: drugs, alcohol, suicide attempts, all kinds of family issues.

It’s true, he’s not your average guru. But he is a survivor, and an eloquent (if unrepentantly blunt) truth-teller. “I am a complete and total fuckup,” he writes in the early pages of This Is How, “which is exactly why I’m equipped to write this book and tell you how to live.” Chapters include: How to Feel Like Shit, How to Remain Unhealed, How to Be a Good Mental Patient, How to Lose Someone You Love, and a ton more.

While the advice is occasionally abstract, this isn’t a book of go-get-’em, hang-in-there aphorisms and time-worn witticisms. Burroughs has no patience for pithy affirmations, willpower or AA. There are some things you get over, and some things you don’t, but there’s almost nothing you won’t get past, he says with the confident, sympathetic countenance of a man who knows a little something about life. “If you hate it, you haven’t seen enough of it.”

Still quirky, but whipsmart and breathtaking

This is not the album where Regina Spektor breaks free of that “quirky” tag. There are too many playful tics (she’s sort of a homeschooled McFerrinite when it comes to puff-cheeked drum sounds) and impish impulses (if anybody can get away with saying “Bronxy Bronx,” it’s her). And “Oh Marcello” — which calls for a Super Mario Italian accent in the verses, then steals the chorus verbatim from “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” — yeah, that one’s particularly insane.

But, as we’ve come to expect from the Russian-born, classically trained, Bronxy Bronx piano player, What We Saw From the Cheap Seats is whipsmart and breathtakingly gorgeous. The tense and trip-hoppish anti-museum manifesto “All the Rowboats,” the blissfully tipsy toe-tapper “The Party,” the amber-tinted wake-up lullaby “Jessica” — so many of these songs are just total knockouts. Even the downers; “Call Them Brothers,” a duet with Jack Dishel of Only Son, is exactly the kind of maudlin you can slowdance to.

Sometimes it’s the unexpectedly plainspoken and barely quirkified moments that really get you. “Today we’re younger than we’re ever gonna be,” she insists on the snowballing pop tantrum “Small Town Moon.” Spektor really knows how to sell you on hope. “Firewood” is the world’s most delicate nut-up-or-shut-up power ballad: “Rise from your cold hospital bed. I tell you you’re not dying/ Everyone knows you’re going to live/So you might as well start trying.” Tough love? Sure, but it’s mostly love. She’s just a soul whose intentions are good.

Nick Harkaway is a master of wordy, straight-faced silliness. If you want a hint at what you’re in for with his marvelous second novel, look no further than the first appearance of the mysterious Rodney Titwhistle and Arvin Cummerbund. “Those are our actual names, I’m afraid. Life is capricious. If you should feel the urge at any time to chuckle, we’re both quite big enough to share the joke.” The man they’re addressing is our accidental hero Joe Spork, a person who knows a thing or two about name baggage. Being the son of notorious London gangster Matthew Spork doesn’t help. (Harkaway, meanwhile, is John Le Carre’s kid; read into that what you like.) Joe’s attempt at a quiet life — he fixes clocks and other intricate mechanical doodads — gets a spanner in the works when the comically spooky Titwhistle and Cummerbund drop by in search of clues as to the whereabouts of the Angelmaker, a doomsday device of the highest craftsmanship. (You know, the type of rare antiquity that turns up in sleepy London clock shops.)

Suffice it to say, this is where the ball gets rolling, with Joe always pursuing one set of enigmatic men while barely dodging another. Soon we’ve got secret societies, spies, automatons, a swarm of steampunk bees, a Bond-worthy supervillain and one of the funniest, nerdiest and most awkward sex scenes in literary history.

Following up 2008′s post apocalyptic The Gone-Away World, Harkaway proves he’s just as adept at moving his chess pieces around a still-here world. Thick with deadpan British humor, inventive plot twists and memorable visuals, Angelmaker is a smart, wild, calculated joyride.

All utopias fail (seen one around recently?), but the undoing of the titular hippie commune in Lauren Groff’s fantastic second novel is exceptionally spectacular and heartbreaking. Of course, there are cracks in Arcadia from the beginning: the endless influx of Frisbee-tossing d-bags, the shady weed deals, the labor disputes, the charismatic guru whose teachings on equality are undermined by his own weaknesses. It’s a hot mess.

Still, for little Bit Stone, the first kid born on this secluded stretch of upstate New York farmland, the place is a verdant wonderland stocked with fresh produce, fresh air, an extended family of oddball characters, and sexual awakenings at every swimming hole. It’s also the only home he knows, so when the real world finally drops by to tear Arcadia apart, it’s devastating — for Bit, for his wayward crush Helle, for all the dirty ol’ bohemians and new age types who’d worked so hard to build the place, for the readers who’d half-seriously started daydreaming about life off the grid.

Groff, who turned heads with 2008′s wonderfully cockeyed family drama The Monsters of Templeton, has built something unassailably beautiful in Arcadia. Her sentences are lush, vivid, sensual things that twist and sprout in surprising but natural directions. Like Bit, the story goes where it goes, leaping forward in years and leaving familiar places for scarier frontiers. And when the world at large seems ready to collapse the way Arcadia did, it’s tragic and truthful. Lots of dystopias succeed, after all.

“It’s not a conspiracy, there aren’t rogue elements pushing us to subvert our national interests to instead serve theirs. It’s been more entertaining and more boneheaded than that.”

For the better part of a decade, pols, pundits and wingnuts have all but held séances to make it look like their side was the one our infallible founding fathers had in mind back in the day. It’s been more truthiness than truth, which is a shame because a lot of this stuff can be put to rest with solid research and a little perspective. For Drift, Rachel Maddow — a Rhodes scholar best known for her lefty news shows on MSNBC and Air America — did her homework, dropping James Madison quotes the way Skrillex drops the bass.

This carefully researched and unimpeachably reasonable book examines the way this country has lost control of its military. It’s sometimes funny. It’s often funny-sad. In the beginning, the United States had no use for a standing army, and everybody liked it that way. “America’s structural disinclination toward war is not a sign that something’s gone wrong. It’s not a bug in the system. It is the system,” Maddow writes (and reads; hooray for author-narrators).

Or it was the system. But, after two-centuries-plus of warfare, we’ve somehow become a country proud of its standing army and military-industrial culture. Drift is about how we got here, how we allowed each mile marker (Vietnam, Grenada, Iran-Contra, Iraq, Afghanistan) to steer us off the path. How we became a nation more eager to go to war even as our distaste for it was growing. How the legislative branch has demurred to the executive. How we’ve managed to tune out the wars our country is involved in today.

Maddow’s approach is a bit drier than Sarah Vowell’s, but she has Bill Bryson’s skill for making the complicated feel accessible. Above all, although Maddow makes no bones about her liberal predilections, there’s a sense of fairness to Drift that has won some unexpected hearts and minds. The Ron Paul people are down with it, as is Roger Ailes, president of Fox News.

Attention, black people. Listen up, white people. Hey, everybody. Baratunde Thurston — author, political blogger, cable-news talking head, comedian, tech nerd and the digital director of The Onion — knows what you know and what you think you know about black people in America. He’s got 30-plus years experience as an African American. He’s heard the same things you have, from the stereotypes and the sad-but-trues to the diluted history lessons and popularly accepted narratives. And he’s not buying them.

“In the age of President Barack Obama, all of them are limiting and simply inadequate to the task of capturing the reality of blackness,” he writes in the introduction to this funny, poignant, biting (and a little bit baiting) memoir/satire. “In this book, I will attempt to re-complicate blackness.”

From there he intertwines his personal journey (raised by his mom, simultaneously enrolled in a mostly white prep school and a “black power boot camp,” cleaned toilets/took classes at Harvard) with sometimes silly, but more often straight-faced and subtly scathing, chapters like “How to Be the Black Friend,” “How to Be the Black Employee,” and “How to Speak for All Black People.” Along the way he solicits input from a “Black Panel” of experts, mostly fellow writers and comedians (and all black except for that dude who wrote Stuff White People Like). There are plenty of tiny heartbreaking and hackle-raising moments in How To Be Black — race is serious business in America, after all — but the book is also funny as hell.

A rough estimate: King’s written works have been stretched onto one screen or another more than 125 times. That’s counting TV mini-series, short films, both incarnations of Carrie and No Smoking, and the Bollywood interpretation of his short story “Quitter’s Inc.” Yep, Stephen King via Bollywood. I’ll wait while you put it in your queue.

And since his successes outside the bookstore (i.e. The Shining, Stand By Me, It, etc.) are so legendary, nearly his entire catalog has been optioned and adapted, sometimes with craptacular results (like Lawnmower Man, Thinner, Apt Pupil and Maximum Overdrive, for which King the writer can only blame King the director). In fact, putting together this whimsical little list proved somewhat difficult. His IMDB page thwarted me at every turn.

The Dead Zone? Dude, that was a movie and a TV series.

The short story “The General?” Sorry, that was part of the 1985 cinematic triptych Cat’s Eye.

How about that novella Riding the Bullet? Apparently that was a blip on the big screen in 2004, starring David Arquette and the chick who played the swim fan in Swimfan.

Still, like those intrepid langoliers in Langoliers, I pushed through and eventually came up with this list of five killer King books that, to the best of my knowledge, remain pristinely untainted by Hollywood (or Bollywood, for that matter).

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On Writing

Stephen King

2008 | Unabridged

On Writing is a strange literary chimera, a hybrid of bald-faced personal memoir and blunt, text-bookish lessons on proper composition. When he's not unspooling his rags-to-Redrum career path — the liquor, the novels, that time a van left him crumpled and bleeding in a ditch — King's pulling back the curtain on what he sees as the tricks to good writing (keep the first draft to yourself, read a lot, study the... psalms of Strunk and White). He's certainly figured out what works for him; several of his major works start with a very simple, very conscious formula: Mix two things. High school outcast + telekinesis = Carrie. Possessed car + frustrated loner = Christine. Huge family dog + superbad strain of rabies = Cujo. It's a little more complicated, but that's the germ of it. On Writing also lays bare the most telling (and occasionally frustrating) facet of King's creative process: He hardly ever maps things out. Once you know this, that the author is along for the ride almost as much as the reader, you finally understand why so many of his plots are unpredictable and his conclusions so often run counter to known literary, thematic and cinematic blueprints. Kind of a ridiculous thing to say about a guy with so many "based on the novel by…" credits, but it's true. His plots usually don't build to glorious and meaningful climaxes; they end when the story's been told. Read by King himself, On Writing is a thoroughly entertaining and thought-provoking audiobook experience.

Can it be a movie?
Yeah, but I doubt it ever will. A story this personal and rooted in the real world, can only be done justice in an American Splendor sort of way, with the author playing himself. I see King stepping in and out of the main action to address the camera directly, and I see new stuff added, behind the scenes goings-on from the sets of Dreamcatcher, Pet Sematary, etc. Now, we've witnessed the man take on several bit parts on the big screen, and so far his acting proficiency ranks somewhere between Kevin Smith and Stan Lee. But he'd have to really have his heart in it to make this one work (and of course the title would have to go).

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The Long Walk

Stephen King

2010 | Unabridged

Worried that his name was a bigger seller than his storytelling, and frustrated because his publisher had him on a silly one-book-a-year regimen, Stephen King concocted the Richard Bachman nom de plume and started cranking out paperback originals. From the beginning — 1977's sickly prescient school-shooting novel Rage, which King has since lobbied to keep out of print — it was obvious Bachman was a different kind of horror author. "Dark-toned, despairing... even when he is laughing (despairing most when he's laughing, in fact), Richard Bachman isn't a fellow I'd want to be all the time," King writes in the intro to the audiobook version of 1979's The Long Walk. No kidding. This novel — about a government-sponsored contest that has 100 young men walking across the U.S. until 99 of them drop dead — is decidedly ambiguous in its morals, and contains no reassurances for readers that it's set in a just and sense-making world. It's way more Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" than The Running Man (Bachman's 1982 gameshow-gone-nuts yarn that seems to foretell the rubbernecking reality TV era). The Long Walk is brilliant in its simplicity, introducing us to characters, some likeable, some not, and then running each of them into the ground regardless of how we feel about them.

Can it be a movie?
Well, sure. Not a blockbuster, mind you. Just a bleak indie psycho-thriller content with keeping its audience wonderfully bummed out (on par with the film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, let's say). And it's possible The Long Walk will trudge onto the big screen one day; director Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption, The Mist, The Walking Dead) bought the rights back in 2007 and said he envisioned something low budget, with "a ragged and loose and documentary kind of feel." Sadly, that's the last we've heard about it.

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Cell

Stephen King

2011 | Unabridged

Don't get me wrong — Cell runs with blood and is littered with corpses, and definitely belongs in the horror section — but it's also the closest Stephen King has ever come to straight-up science fiction. Almost cyberpunk, except not at all, really. The cock-eyed apocalypse adventure starts with most everybody getting a cell phone call that uploads a new operating system into their brains. First it turns them into animalistic psychos;... later they're more like douchey worker bees controlled by some unseen evil force. The lucky few who missed the call are hunted and converted and/or killed. So basically, it's like the Windows ME launch all over again.

Can it be a movie?
Oh, hell yeah. And now's a good time, too. While these baddies aren't straight-up zombies, they're probably close enough to cash in on modern pop culture's undying affinity for the undead. So let's do this — a mid-budget B-movie. Put out a call for blank-eyed extras! Summon a halfway decent CGI crew! Order 100 barrels of Karo syrup and red food coloring!

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11/22/63

Stephen King

2011 | Unabridged

For such a hefty novel — the audiobook is (and don't be discouraged) 30 hours long — 11/23/63 is actually pretty straightforward. Present-day English teacher Jake Epping goes back to 1958 (via wormhole, or some such thing) and sets about thwarting the assassination of JFK. It sounds easy, but Jake quickly learns that "the past is obdurate" (English teachers. Am I right, people?), which basically means that history doesn't want to be... rewritten. All manner of setbacks and obstacles (a stomach virus, a car crash, a steady girlfriend) pop up to sidetrack Jake from his appointment with destiny. And even though he briefly finds himself in the godforsaken town of Derry, Maine (the cursed setting for It, if you recall), 11/23/63 is pretty much a non-supernatural, barely sci-fi edge-of-your seat thriller.

Can it be a movie?
Can it be stopped? The word is that director Jonathan Demme (director of Silence of the Lambs, Philadelphia, Beloved) was going to turn 11/23/63 into a movie, to which I say: It's not too late to walk away, JD. Sure, there's romance and time travel, and Lee Harvey Oswald would get some juicy screen time, but the book is actually pretty subtle for a historical suspense yarn. Jake has no confidants in his quest, so all his plotting is done via internal monologue. And all those times where the obdurate past throws up roadblocks? Yeah, at best it'll look like Final Destination. At worst, it'll resemble plain old bad luck. If you are reading this in the future, and you are Jonathan Demme, and you've already made this book into an awesome movie, good on you. Sorry I was/am so pessimistic about the possibilities. If I could go back and change it, I would. Except I could have, but I didn't, so I guess I stand by it. The reviewer is obdurate.

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Faithful

Stephen King

2011 | Unabridged

Whoops. Stephen King accidentally wrote a resilient, hopeful, feel-good story that leaves us thinking the world's not so awful after all. But it's not his fault. Following the Boston Red Sox during the 2004 season should have been an exercise in self-flagellation, a diary of the damned for Beantown boosters King and co-author Stewart O'Nan. The franchise had spent almost a century as Major League Baseball's most loveable sadsack franchise, a team... of cursed, bad luck losers who could only be counted on to come up short when it mattered most. Then, under the daily scrutiny of our narrating diehards, the Sox somehow went and won it all in dramatic fashion — defeating the evil empire (aka the Yankees) in the greatest comeback in the history of the game along the way. But, you know, that's okay. Seeing these longtime foul-weather fanboys finally find joy is a singularly infectious experience. Congrats, dudes.

Can it be a movie?
For old-school fans of the game — the ones who believe in pre-Moneyball hokum like "heart" and "guts" and "clutch" — this is a guaranteed winner. But it would probably come up short at the box office. Pardon the expression, but Faithful is way too inside-baseball for a mass audience. There's plenty of drama, sure, but lots more stats and lingo and Google-requiring names from bygone days. Plus, it's essentially a book-length conversation between two guys. If Richard Linklater or Wallace Shawn want to give it a shot, cool. Otherwise, Hollywood should steer clear. You listening, Demme?

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"A substance of such prestige and volume, the ancient world's answer to sweet light crude, naturally attracted criminals."

This is one of those books. You know the type. Maybe you’ve seen the ones about bananas, or tomatoes, or tea? It’s one of those fascinating “food biographies” so bursting with facts and vignettes that you adopt more than a newfound respect for the subject — you start to think it’s the most important thing in the history of the world. Okay, beg your pardon, that’s a wild hyperbole, but Tom Mueller’s sensuous storytelling stimulates the romantic mind. Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil makes the case that its slippery subject has been capturing imaginations and greasing the wheels of progress since Athena planted the first olive tree way back when. Indeed, olive oil has been used as a cure-all, an aphrodisiac, a religious ointment, a perfume, a preservative, a lubricant…hell, some people even cook with it. But real-deal extra virgin olive oil, the pure stuff, is so precious and so often swapped out with low-quality, deceitfully labeled impostors, you may never have tasted it. As Mueller’s marvelous chorus of oil-swishing taste experts gripe in the opening chapter, the industry is hopelessly corrupt. Olive oil is constantly being diluted, counterfeited and sullied by greedy and unscrupulous heathens, and no international laws or standards are forcing them to live up to their labels. I wouldn’t wanna be them when Athena gets back.