With most of stories, there are points that remind us of our own life experiences.  Often these are things that are broad enough that they could elicit such feelings in a huge portion of the population.  Chuck Klosterman’s “Downtown Owl” hits very specific notes from my life.

Take the case of Julia and Vance, two single people talking in a bar.  Vance is enigmatic, and during a conversation in which Julia tries to draw him out, they talk about music.  He says he likes the Rolling Stones, and only the Rolling Stones.

“That’s impossible,” Julia says.  “No one only likes one band.”

This is possible.  My college roommate Shawn L. liked only one band: Megadeth.  He does appreciate others, and I’m pretty sure he listens to more now, but at the time if you walked into our room and he were playing music, it was Megadeth.  Vance also mentions in this exchange that he doesn’t like female singers.  Same with Shawn L.

Vance is a former football player in this tiny North Dakota town, and despite the fact that he made exactly one good player in his entire career, he is revered.  Julia tries talking about football, and mentions that she’s a huge fan of flea-flickers.

There is not a play I enjoy more than a flea-flicker.  When I was in high school, we had Madden ’98 for Nintendo 64, and nothing made me happier than discovering that the Green Bay Packers had a flea-flicker in their playbook.  I ran that play over and over, no matter how often it failed.  It’s just that much fun.

Julia teaches at the local high school.  She mentions that before classes began, teachers would stand outside their rooms to monitor the hallways, and she noticed a pattern:

“Every morning from 8:10 a.m. until the first bell at 8:35, certain students walked laps around the halls in a continual loop, half of them moving clockwise and half in the opposite orbit.”

Freshman year of high school, my friend Dan and I did this every day.  Every day.  There was no rhyme or reason, just chatting and roaming from hallway to hallway until it was time to head to our 1st period class.

Monday is a holiday here in the U.S.  There will be no mail delivery.  Like many such days, I will check the mail anyway.  Klosterman’s story has a group of older guys who hang out in a diner discussing many unimportant topics.  One of them is Columbus.  This sentence is probably the best thing I could ever hope to say to anyone who asks why I never remember to avoid the mailbox on national holidays:

“I just think it’s idiotic that we don’t get mail today, simply because Columbus was a bad explorer.”

Speaking of great sentences, I’m not sure why I find this other one so amazing, but I’m sure the other passengers on the Metro who saw me chuckling thought there was something wrong with me when I read it.  One of the high school students, Mitch, is talking about his English teacher, Mr. Laidlaw, who constantly makes fun of the kid.

“‘He doesn’t hate me,’ Mitch replied. “He just knows I don’t care what he says.’ As he said these words, Mitch imagined how wonderful it would feel to jam a screwdriver into Laidlaw’s eye socket.  He imagined pushing Laidlaw down a flight of metal stairs, possibly toward a bear.”

The threat of bears is always hilarious.

Finally, if you’ve read any of Klosterman’s non-fiction work, you know he often discusses the way people interact with media and pop culture, and what effects those interactions may have.  He sprinkles those kinds of thoughts into his characters’ minds in this story.  Vance has a profound moment explaining why he has no business being “famous” for his one good football play (which ended up on television):

“It’s hard for Americans to differentiate between talent and notoriety; TV confuses people.”

Truth.

I have good news.

In a future world in which the United States is a crumbling mess of single-party, military-obsessed paranoia, Taco Bell still exists.

Gary Shteyngart’s “Super Sad True Love Story” envisions a not-too-distant time in which China and Norway have become dominant nations while America tries fix after fix to restore its former standing in the world.  It is in that world that Lenny Abramov goes to work at a company catering to the rich who want to live forever.

How do I know Taco Bell is alive and well?  One day Lenny goes to assess his net worth and examines his holdings:

“My AmericanMorning portfolio, even though it had been pegged to the yuan, had lost 10 percent of its value because, unbeknownst to me, the idiot asset managers had stuck the failing ColgatePalmoliveYum!BrandsViacomCredit albatross into the mix…”

Yum! Brands is, of course, Taco Bell’s parent company, and while I’m sure the people of this America will still enjoy some KFC or Pizza Hut, there’s no way they survive without Taco Bell.

The story at times reads likes excerpts from the movie “Idiocracy” with a population of people who think books are ridiculous and speak in what today we see as the downside of an increasingly texting-based communication system.  In fact, everyone wears a device called an apparat, which they use constantly to view streams of information, shop and see instant data on everything and everyone around them.

Of course, we see elements of that culture all around us today.  I will also not absolve myself of that at all.  Yesterday at the grocery store I answered several emails, sent a text and checked the weather all on a device that also stored my virtual shopping list.  I was there for 10 minutes.

Lenny has a love interest — the “love story” part of the super sadness.  Her name is Eunice, and she’s a younger, hipper member of this new society that the older, dorkier Lenny has trouble fitting into.  She also has a habit that reminded me of Washington Capitals star Alex Ovechkin.  While walking in New York, Eunice comments on the distance between Lenny’s apartment and the available services nearby.

“‘Looks like I’ll get some exercise walking to the train,’ she said. ‘Ha ha.’  This was what her generation liked to add to the end of sentences, like a nervous tic. ‘Ha ha.'”

Ovi’s Twitter feed is a thing of absolute beauty, and frequently includes English messages that end in a hail of laughter:

For as much as this book deals with sadness and people struggling in a world that seems more and more devoid of humanity, it does feature strong messages about what it means to keep going and not give in.

Lenny at one point attends a religious gathering with Eunice’s family at Madison Square Garden, where he sees an arena full of people he thinks are feeling undue pressure to be perfect.  He imagines addressing the audience:

“‘You have nothing to be ashamed of,’ I would say. ‘You are decent people.  You are trying.  Life is very difficult.'”

Indeed.

Seeing that a book I’ve been meaning to read for a long time is being made into a movie is a tremendous push for me to actually remember to read it.

This time, it’s Stephen Chbosky’s “The Perks of Being a Wallflower.” 

The book came out more than a decade ago and I’m pretty surprised it’s taken this long to become a movie.  I know several people who really connected with it — enough for one to say to me last week, “I hope they don’t f@%& it up with the movie.”

Now that I’ve read it, I have to agree.  There are lots of characters we all feel a kinship with, but sometimes a story keeps throwing at you experiences you’ve had, lines you’ve had people tell you and a narrator who might as well be reading archives from your personal thoughts.

I’m not saying my formative years mirrored those of the main character, Charlie, but we certainly had some similar experiences.

This story is about what it’s like to be a little different, to be in view of the mainstream but not inside.  Charlie wants to be like he perceives everyone else.  He wants someone to tell him “how to be different in a way that makes sense.”  But he thinks and reacts in ways that are outside of what his friends and classmates do naturally.  What’s normal and easy for them sometimes seems like a Herculean challenge.

The story begins with him starting his first day of high school, friendless and anxious about what is in store.  He’s got a popular older brother who just left for college and a sister at the same school.  They help him when they can, but they’re so busy with their own lives that those conversations are rare at the beginning.

He makes friends at a football game with step-siblings Patrick and Sam, whom he initially mistakes for a boyfriend and girlfriend.  He’s almost immediately in love with Sam, who quickly tells him not to think of her like that.   

But despite her words, his feelings for her only grow as they become close.  He knows nothing is going to happen, but he can’t help it.  “I wish I could stop being in love with Sam.  I really do.”

Is there a worse feeling?  To understand — to really know — that you shouldn’t feel that way, but you can’t help it? 

There’s so much more I want to say about this book, but that would definitely be veering into the range of things that are far too personal to post here.

Let me say that I knew before I started reading that Sam was played in the movie by Emma Watson, which I don’t think is a bad choice.  But even knowing that, I still pictured Sam differently.  More like Lily Collins.

The story itself is written entirely in letters, which is something I actually once was considering for my writing project.  Since this book came out long before that, I’m glad I went in a different direction.  That wouldn’t have seemed very creative.

My friend Brooke includes a relevant song with her book posts and I’m totally stealing that here.  Out of coincidence, I happened to be listening a lot to a Missy Higgins album with the song “Sweet Arms of a Tune” around the time I was reading.  I think it nails the tone of large parts of this book so well:

“What law says you can’t love a maniac?”

I’m becoming convinced that’s the quote that may one day appear on my wedding announcement, just below an artsy black-and-white photo of my fiancee and I staring longingly at each other over a Taco Bell dinner.  I’ll let you decide if the maniac is me or her.

Actually, it’s a line from Paul Auster’s novel “Invisible,” the latest in a string of his books that I’ve thoroughly enjoyed.  One of the things I like so much about his writing is that his stories are so distinct from one another — there’s no “thing” he does that makes his books seem like interchangeable stories.

In “Invisible,” one of the defining style characteristics is a complete lack of quotation marks.  It’s amazing, as if he decided to write the whole thing and go back to put in the quote marks later, but never did.  It takes a few pages to get used to, but then becomes completely transparent.  I’d be interested to know why he made that choice.  Auster also nails a dual-narrator, changing tenses thing that is way harder to pull off than he makes it seem.

Part of the story takes place at Columbia University where the main character, Adam, is a student who aspires to be a writer.  At one point he’s discussing his potential with an older guy he met at a party and mentions that he writes for the school newspaper.

“Do you get paid for your articles?”
“Of course not, it’s a college paper.”

This exchange actually made me laugh.  When I wrote for the newspaper at my undergrad school, we also didn’t get paid.  It was an issue I explored in the documentary I made about the paper during my senior year, and the editors I spoke to then were very split on the issue.  Some thought paying writers would lead to more interested writers and better content.  Others argued that aspiring journalists should, you know, want to actually try writing for a newspaper.

Another section that has little bearing on the plot, but made me think of my college days happens later after Adam has a frightening night with the man.  He recounts the two of them walking in the city, being approached by a mugger with a gun, and then watching as the man stabs the kid.  He’s reading the paper in the student center when he finds out the kid’s body was found in a nearby park with many more stab wounds than seemed necessary.

“I chanced upon the article while drinking a cup of coffee in the Lions Den, the snack bar on the ground floor of the undergraduate student center…”

As important as this stabbing tale is to the book, I couldn’t help but be distracted by the awesomeness of the snack bar’s name.  Where I went to school, the similar-sounding establishment was called the Encore Cafe.  After a renovation, it’s now known as Benny’s Bistro. 

I would have been much more enthusiastic about going to a Lions Den.

I went more than four years between reading books signed by the author (according to my book reading spreadsheet…#nerdalert).  Winning a contest put an end to that streak.

Last fall, my friend Brooke interviewed Erika Mitchell, author of “Pwned” and ran a contest with the winner receiving a copy of the book.  The story at one point involves the main character ducking the FBI to fly to South Korea in order to take part in a computer game tournament.  Brooke wanted to know how we would skip the country if we had to.  Here’s what I said:

“First, I would put on a clown costume with full makeup. Not sure yet if I’m going sad clown or happy clown, but that may be a spur of the moment choice. The costume would not only obscure my face to lower the chances that someone recognizes me from a flyer, but would also give me a sort of natural cover since people are either indifferent to clowns or really terrified of them. Whatever the case, they’re taking at most a quick peek, then looking away.

“Next, I climb on a moped and make for one of the borders, which would be decided by whichever I was closest to at the time. I think the plan works for either Mexico or Canada, and really, who wants to be mopeding for longer than they have to? The moped is so small the border inspection would be very quick, thus getting me out of the country that much faster.

“In this age of social media and people taking pics/video of everything, the last thing a border guard wants is an extensive flow of posts showing them frisking a clown, so I would definitely get only a cursory examination. Plus as someone who has been described as able to come up with “extremely credible nonsense,” I dare the guards to challenge me to take off the face makeup and see how long I can argue it’s necessary to wear on religious grounds. Long story short, clown = no questions, no heroes, quick exit.”

A few weeks later, an autographed copy of the book showed up in the mail, though it took me a few months to get around to actually reading it.  The story is definitely a thriller, the kind you hate having to pause when real life interferes.  It didn’t hurt that the main character was a writer during the day and spent nights playing video games.  I gueeeess I could relate to a guy like that.  Of course he also happens to spend some time with a super hot gamer chick, which isn’t as close to my current life, but anything’s possible, right?

Another way to get me to like your book?  Drop a reference to the show Arrested Development on page 3:

“Sean closed his eyes and rubbing them with the knuckles of one hand before taking a look at the messages from his teammates.
Serenity: gg newbs wp
BOBLOBLAW: TYVM
ProfPlum: I thought you were a goner, Captain.  That was pretty gosu.”

(For those lame enough to be unfamiliar with the show, Bob Loblaw is a lawyer played by Scott Baio who makes a few appearances.  To enjoy this name, read it as quickly as possible.)

I told her about her success on Twitter (she’s @parsingnonsense), and she replied that “Arrested Development references make just about EVERYTHING better.”  So true.

I also had one slight moment of feeling sorry for the antagonist in the story, Norman.  Strained by the stresses of his world potentially crashing down around him, he has trouble sleeping.

“His mind, overworked, overvexed, overstressed, spent time in a comfortable limbo that was less restful than sleep but better than nothing.”

When I used to work a crazy split schedule of roughly 4 a.m. – noon Wed/Thurs then back again at 9 p.m. Friday night for a 12-hour overnight shift, I spent most of Friday in that state.  I wanted to sleep before work, but flipping that abruptly does not play well with the human body clock.  Most Fridays I felt lucky if I relaxed in a dark room for two hours watching a movie.

But that’s where my sympathy for Norman ended.  Much better to be the benevolent nerd than the evil one.  If you want a little more about the story itself, I’ll let Brooke handle that.

I run across coincidences in my reading life all the time, usually involving an author referencing something I just saw in another form or was just talking about with someone else.

A few weeks ago, my friend Brooke wrote about her latest read on her blog, and in the process randomly mentioned Jeffrey Eugenides.  That was only a few days after I began reading his Pulitzer Prize-winning book “Middlesex.”

This is one of those stories that was so engrossing, I barely paused to highlight anything.  The narrator, Cal, describes his family’s multi-generational journey from a small town in Greece, to struggling immigrants in America, to thriving in the heydays of Detroit before bad luck and bad decisions changed everything.  Amid all of that, Cal grew up as Callie, the product of a gene mutation and an incompetent doctor who never noticed what made her different from other girls.  Callie didn’t find out until she was 16, and shifted into a new life as Cal.

Growing up is hard enough when you’re “normal,” and slowly learning the detailed history of Cal’s differences that were never his fault is heartbreaking.  It’s a drawn-out “woooooooow, that’s tough.”  Yet no matter what you look like, how popular you were in school or what your family life was like growing up, there’s so much in his story that relates.  That process of learning about yourself, absorbing disappointments and finding your way happens to everyone, and that’s the hook that I think makes it so easy to put yourself in Cal’s shoes.

One of the few pages I did flag had this great section about one of Callie’s high school friends, who seemed completely disinterested in the classroom, but came alive as an actress.

“Talent is a kind of intelligence,” he writes.  “Far away from her cigarettes and her snobbishness, her cliquish friends, her atrocious spelling.  This was what she was good at: appearing before people.  Stepping out and standing there and speaking.  She was just beginning to realize it then.  What I was witnessing was a self discovering the self it could be.”

I think Eugenides captures so well that feeling of looking on as someone you care about finds their “thing.”  You see them take steps toward something that could be great, and as they begin to succeed, the whole process feeds on itself, growing exponentially as ambition feeds back on confidence.

A friend recommended this book to me and described it as amazing, but heartbreaking.  I would agree with that assessment, but would add in the incredible power of seeing someone overcome those circumstances.  Not every story is happy, but neither is it sad.  There’s a spectrum to life, and Cal’s story encompasses many of its parts.

I have to admit that I was about a quarter of the way through “On the Origin of Tepees” before I totally realized the title was a pun.

Part of that is because I completely glossed over the first word and thought of it only as “The Origin of Tepees.”  Essentially the wheel that spins this story along would be the same with that title, but the real one does a much better job of explaining the context.

In short, this book is about how ideas evolve, as examined through the way tepee adoption and technology changed over time.  Author Jonnie Hughes takes a trip across the United States, tracing the paths of different American Indian tribes across the plains (where tepees were in use) and noting differences along the way.

But the trip is a way to explain the idea that although idea evolution shares some characteristics with biological evolution, there are major differences made possible by humans.  Other organisms can teach each other things, but as Hughes says, humans are the best thought-swappers:

“Mother Nature achieved a design first, the goal of any technical engineer: she created a future-proof product, a product with “hardware” so sophisticated that it required no further work.  All it would ever need to take on the future was upgraded “software.”

As long as our “software” keeps going — and the capacity of our brains is astounding — then our culture will keep growing.

An earlier theory of biological evolution posited that acquired characteristics would be passed down to offspring.  That description sounds a lot like what we think of when considering culture and the learning that goes along with the distribution of ideas by humans.  But as Hughes writes, there’s a very key difference that makes this idea evolution different:

“Individual ideas go in to a mind, change their traits over several generations in order to adapt to the selective environment they discover inside that mind, then come out different from the Ideas that went in.  This means that the adaptation that happens within a mind is the same as the adaptation that happens between minds.”

The idea of idea evolution itself is not new, but rather what Hughes describes as the “goggles” through which he is viewing his particular quest.  The makers of his “goggles” include Richard Dawkins who coined a word we are all familiar with these days:  meme.

It’s “a body that secured its passage into the future only by building successful ideas that could leap from one mind to the next.  [Dawkins] called this new replicator the meme.”

Some memes ended up as the most advanced tepees.  More recently, they became this:

Yes, the one on the right is my niece.  Yes, with the help of my younger brother I did make an entire book of these.  Yes, they are all hysterical.

Some books I love and barely flag anything I want to talk about in these posts, while I end up highlighting tons of things in others I think aren’t so great.  Not sure why that is.

“Way of the Peaceful Warrior” by Dan Millman is one of the latter.  It’s by no means the worst book I’ve ever read, just for some reason one I didn’t totally get into.  Maybe it’s the writing style, or the underlying feeling that the entire story can be explained by thinking the characters ingested massive amounts of LSD, but let’s call it two out of four stars..

The story follows Dan’s experience as a college student who stumbles upon an old guy working at a gas station who becomes his mentor.  The old guy, whom Dan nicknames Socrates, puts him through all kinds of training and tests to change the way Dan thinks and approaches the world — things like meditation and changing his diet.  Sometimes he presses on Dan’s forehead, sending him on some sort of dream-like, seemingly hallucinogenic journey.

I am not Dan Millman and I can’t say what he did or didn’t experience.  That said, I think most people would say some of the things he describes with Socrates are a little out there.

He becomes infatuated with a woman named Joy, and late in the story Socrates does one of his tricks, touching Dan lightly at the base of his skull:

“The lights went out, and I immediately forgot I ever knew a woman named Joy.”

Maybe the most off-putting thing for me is Dan’s portrayal of Socrates as basically all-knowing.  Dan is a world-class gymnast, and wouldn’t you know, Socrates shows up at his practice one day and gives him perfect tips on perfecting his form.  Again, I’m in no position to question the facts of his life, but taken together it was hard for me to believe parts of the story.

That’s not to say the book doesn’t have interesting points.  If it were a collection of phrases or short parables, I may have liked it better.  For instance, there’s this piece I think describes what a lot of people go through in the struggle to figure out what to do with their life:

“Everyone everywhere lived a confused, bitter search.  Reality never matched their dreams; happiness was just around the corner — a corner they never turned.  And the source of it all was the human mind.”

At some point many people have a hypothetical conversation about what they would do if they learned they were dying.  But as Millman writes, we’re all dying:

“You DO have a terminal illness:  It’s called birth…So be happy NOW, without reason — or you never will be at all.”

Socrates tells Dan a lot about valuing action and being in the present over being paralyzed thinking about the past or the future.  One of his final lessons is to teach Dan that the answer to the questions “What time is it?” and “Where are you?” are “now” and “here.”

One of the pieces I did very much connect with is something I think about all the time.  Socrates says that “everything has a purpose…there are no accidents.”  Of course it’s easier to look at any negative or setback and frame it as a lesson or some other meaningful event.  But there have been lots of times I’ve truly felt this idea was real.

Take my trip to work a few weeks ago.  I barely missed my normal train and ended up on one that broke down after a few stops.  We sat for 45 minutes without moving, meaning I was 45 minutes later to work, and missed out on that much sleep the next day.  But when I got out of the station and walked toward the building, I ran into a family of what sounded like German tourists who were lost and looking for the Metro station.  Without the delay — during which I read a big chunk of this book — I would have been sitting inside a few blocks away and not there to direct them down an otherwise deserted street.

Sure, that could have been a totally coincidental event, but even so, does that mean it had no purpose?

I can see how a lot of people would find this book life-changing, and as I said, I did get some things from it.  But I’m not about to seek the path of becoming a warrior anytime soon.

I’ll close with one last bit from Socrates (which may or may not be a reason to embed the video it reminded me of): “Love is the only reality of the world.”