Some people talk to themselves, others talk to their dog or cat, but in Nick Hornby’s “Slam,” the main character talks to a Tony Hawk poster.

It’s a storytelling quirk that becomes less and less necessary to move the plot as the book goes along, but every time Sam talks to TH (as he calls him for sake of not having to write it out over and over) I couldn’t help but laugh.  He doesn’t hear words he would imagine coming from TH, but rather quotes from the autobiography that skating-obsessed Sam has read a thousand times.

Take, for example, when he breaks up with his girlfriend and asks TH if he did something wrong by ending things:

“‘If something in my life didn’t revolve around skating, then I had a hard time figuring it out,’ said T.H.  He was talking about Sandy again, his first real girlfriend, but it might have been his way of saying, ‘How the hell do I know?  I’m only a skater.’  Or even, ‘I’m only a poster.'”

That’s the beauty of the Sam-TH relationship.  It’s like thinking about Stewie on Family Guy and why sometimes the adults can understand what he’s saying and sometimes they can’t.  When it’s convenient for Sam (TH agrees with him) then he totally buys in, but at other times he’s very quick to point out the lunacy of the whole thing.

Sam needs all this advice from TH because he’s prone to getting himself into trouble, which isn’t all that unexpected since he’s 16.  Sure that the ex-girlfriend, Alicia, is pregnant, he runs off instead of actually hearing the news in a plan that unravels spectacularly from the beginning.  When he comes back, he vows to be smarter, but knows that’s easier said than done.

“It’s not enough, though, just to decide not to be stupid.  Otherwise, why don’t we decide to be really clever — clever enough to invent something like the iPod and make a lot of money?”

Later Sam and Alicia have an argument in which she accuses him of thinking he has a future for himself, while she is destined for a dead-end life.  He responds by bringing up her stated aspiration of being a model — something she told him in a flirty manner when they first met to gauge his interest.  Naturally, that only made things worse for Sam, who realized his error in mixing a good moment with this one.

“You should never drag stuff out of a nice conversation and chuck it back in the middle of a nasty one.  Instead of one good memory and one bad memory, you’re left with two shitty ones.”

Hornby has been one of my favorite authors for a while, and while this is far from my favorite book of his, he did toss in something I’m sure was just for me:

“I didn’t call Alicia’s dad Mr. Burns anymore.  I called him Robert, which was better, because every time I said Mr. Burns, I thought of an ancient bald bloke who owned the Springfield nuclear reactor.”

I want a Milhouse reference in the next book, Nick.

Book two of the “Divergent” series: done.  Well, I finished “Insurgent” a month ago, but let’s use my blogging procrastination for some sort of good.

In early June, Nationals outfielder Bryce Harper was still healing from a thumb injury that cost him much of the first half of the season.  He returned to the lineup Monday and caused some stirs when he suggested he should be playing center field instead of manning his former home in left.

This became one of those annoying sports “debates” that bounced around talk radio and among people who take this kind of thing way too seriously.  I may have unfollowed a few people on Twitter.

I’m going to use his honest statement to quickly point out that he is Divergent.  Anyone who watches Bryce play for two seconds can see that he has a whole lot of Dauntless pulsing through his veins.  The guy is fearless in the way he throws his body around the field.  Ask him a question, and the Candor part of him comes out.

As with Tris in the books, having multiple faction aptitudes can be a great thing.  In “Insurgent,” she is forced to undergo interrogation under a truth serum at the Candor headquarters.  She admits in front of her Dauntless brethren that she killed one of their friends, a piece of information that causes huge rifts with some of the people with which she used to be the closest.

“The Candor sing the praises of the truth, but they never tell you how much it costs,” she says.

We all appreciate truth and having people be straightforward with us, but there are times where we say completely true, completely honest things that cause nothing but problems.  In time, these things often work themselves out (like the Nats winning every game since Harper’s return), but the intermediary steps can be tough.

Tris wants to move on from shooting her friend Will both because it has messed with her former confidence in her abilities and because she doesn’t like being a social outcast.  She does all she can, including basically deciding to sacrifice herself for the sake of everyone in her faction.  In the end, even Will’s girlfriend, Tris’s good friend Christina, understands and forgives her.

There’s still one book left in this series, and I’m wary of what is next.  Coming into “Insurgent,” my friend and I who are reading them together wondered where the story could go after the first book and were generally pleased with how it went.  But we’ve also heard that the third book is a total letdown, so it’s hard to be super enthusiastic about it.

This is why I usually try to avoid hearing/reading about either a book or movie I’m going to check out for myself.

At one point during “Insurgent,” Tris and the leader of her former faction are at Amity headquarters where they see a water filtration machine at work.

“Both us of watch the purification happen,” she says, “and I wonder if he is thinking what I am: that it would be nice if life worked this way, stripping the dirt from our lives and sending us out into the world clean.  But some dirt is destined to linger.”

As much as I want to go into the third book fresh, there is that bit of dirt that’s going to make me start looking for points at which I think the story is about to go into disappointing territory.  Maybe I’ll just choose to believe that everyone was purposely lying to me and I’ll be pleasantly surprised.

Gillian Flynn’s “Gone Girl” is one of those books I will not be able to say much about, except that you have to read it.  Just do it.  It’s phenomenal.

Flynn has crafted a story with so many twists and turns that to talk about the plot at all would be criminal.  When I finished, I wanted to talk about it with someone, and in this digital age I can share that exact moment:

@lb_423 YO, you’ve read Gone Girl, right? #holysmokes
— Chris Hannas (@cjhannas) May 3, 2014

Flynn writes the story with two narrators who alternate chapters, a husband who gives his side from the day the book starts and a wife who begins in the past with their first meeting and slowly catches up.  I’ve always been drawn to this type of storytelling, with its inherent tension and anticipation of the payoff moment when the two timelines converge.  And when they do, #holysmokes.

At its heart, the story is about relationships and the complexity that comes with each person pursuing individual and collective interests.

The wife, Amy, talks about her struggle in living her life with husband Nick, and what we’re all seeking in someone else.

“Because isn’t that the point of every relationship: to be known by someone else, to be understood?” she says.  “He gets me.  She gets me.  Isn’t that the simple magic phrase?”

 “So you suffer through the night with the perfect-on-paper man,” she continues.  “…And you go home to a cold bed and think, That was fine.  And your life is a long line of fine.”

I can’t speak for everyone, but I’m guessing we’ve all been in that relationship at one point or another.  The “long line of fine.”  It’s the type of situation that makes you wonder if you’re being too picky, if that person should be enough, or whether you’ve realized that fine is not fine.

Later describing her unhappiness, the kind that stems from misaligned priorities, Amy says, “I just wish he thought about me as much as I do him.”  We all have different styles and needs, and that’s one of the great challenges of relationships, right?  How do you get what you need, while at the same time giving what they need?

Flynn is supremely effective at using specific imagery to pound home certain points.  Nick describes himself and the way people perceive him — a key part of the story — by saying, “I have a face you want to punch.”  Eight words and you can’t help but to see that face for the rest of the book.

On a related note, it’s kind of funny that in the movie version, which comes out in October, Nick is being played by Ben Affleck.  Did they even have to audition anyone else?

In summary, if you haven’t already brought up your Amazon or Barnes and Noble account, or grabbed your keys to head out to the bookstore, I question your priorities in life.  Get reading!

I make absolutely no secret that I am a user of the Internet who is fully comfortable sharing information, interacting with others — even complete strangers — without a second thought.  For some people, that’s completely normal, while others are incredibly guarded about their digital lives.  That’s okay too.

In his book “The Circle,” Dave Eggers presents a story that I’m going to dub a reductio ad absurdum argument for the Internet.  That’s where you take an idea, and to expose it’s shortcomings, you argue it to its farthest conclusions and comment on that result.

“The Circle” follows a young woman named Mae who gets a job at the hottest tech company in Silicon Valley (called The Circle), one that has basically brought together every big social media platform under one roof. 

She’s a tech neophyte when she arrives on the kind of campus we’ve come to expect from these companies.  She has email and a few social media accounts, but she doesn’t use them much.  As she gets settled into her job in customer service, she gets gentle reminders from her bosses that she is supposed to be using the products a certain amount.

At one point, she gets called in for a talk that definitely reminded me of Jennifer Aniston’s character being scolded for not having enough “flair” in “Office Space.”  People were upset with Mae for not commenting on or liking their posts, and for ignoring invitations to the nearly constant events on campus.

“I asked you to come in just to, well, to square that with your social behavior here, and the message it’s sending,” her boss says.

Mae vows to do better, and throws herself into a flurry of social media activity.  This is the beginning of the kind of digital creep we’ve all experienced going from the same zero point to wherever we are now.  Think about the times you flip over to Facebook for the first time in a day or two and feel like you’ve missed a mountain of stuff and have to catch up.  It’s not important in the least that you do, but I know I’m not alone in feeling the pull to try to look at it all.

That creep, the acceptance of a new level of connectedness, is pervasive in the book.  It’s Mae’s entire journey as she ascends through the ranks of the company, which gives its employees scores on a wide variety of their activities and an overall ranking based on how much they participate.  She arrived unaffected by social media, but quickly becomes obsessed.

The Circle was founded with good intentions, things like eliminating anonymous online comments to promote more civility and bringing together your million different social media accounts into one spot that would be easier to manage.  The key thing about the book is that it is rooted in reality.  We’ve seen a wave recently of companies ditching anonymous comments, like Google requiring Google+ accounts on YouTube and HuffingtonPost making people sign in with Facebook.  It’s a great idea in itself, but what Eggers does is take those pieces and build on them, showing that when Mae accepts each new thing as normal, they just add a higher level of connectedness and another after that.

The company pioneers things like a series of small cameras placed all over the world.  The goal espoused by one of the bosses is for every bit of information to be available to everyone at all times.  At a company event, the words “All that happens must be known” are shown on a screen.

That evolves to people, including Mae, wearing cameras around their necks every waking hour, streaming their entire lives over the Internet.  Mae talks about certain benefits, like giving up soda knowing that people are watching and being influenced by her actions.  Politicians flock to use the system to show they are not corrupt.

As one of the bosses puts it, “Who would do something unethical or immoral or illegal if they were being watched.”

But as with every other move in the book, what has you nodding in agreement one second has you questioning the other side the next.  Sure, people would be less likely to commit a crime in a world completely saturated with cameras.  But at what point are we giving up our ability to be humans?  I’m not saying I need to carjack someone, but isn’t your ethics a big part of who you are?  Is not robbing someone because there’s a camera fake ethics?

And what about private conversations?  At one point, Mae takes part in a presentation that utilizes the phrase “privacy is theft.”  Should we not be able to have personal secrets, secrets among friends, private moments that are ours?

A few years ago I did a post with audio tapes that my mom’s family sent back and forth to her dad while he was deployed overseas in the army.  In one of them, my grandmother is talking directly to my grandfather (through the tape) and says that while she loves their children and their life as a family, she loves the world they inhabit just as the two of them.

Whether we think about it or not, we have those private lives with a lot of people.  We have moments just being with each other that would be unquestionably altered by a camera around our necks and someone out there in the world somewhere watching on their laptop.  Think about all the things you would never ever say to certain people, either because you don’t want to be seen in that level of vulnerability, or because you fear embarrassment.  Imagine a website where you could go to just watch person after person ask someone on a date and get shot down, or another where you could see every disastrous job interview.

We need to be able to fail at things, to show ourselves to both the people who matter to us and to random people we meet without the fear of having our natural human emotions and experiences turned against us, or even witnessed by others.

Mae’s obsession takes on a new dimension after the company develops a system for full, direct democracy, and tests it out by asking everyone at the company if Mae is awesome.  Hundreds say no.  She is completely unraveled wondering who and why.  Remember all those rumors you’ve heard over the years about Facebook potentially adding a “dislike” button?  Maybe there’s a good reason for that not happening.  While Facebook does portray a certain “best of” for people’s lives that inevitably makes us think everyone else is happier and more successful than we are, I’m okay with people saying why they dislike something in a comment or just ignoring it.  I could be wrong about that.

Eggers uses Mae’s ex-boyfriend Mercer as the counter to her acceptance.  He wants no part of The Circle or any of its services.  So, while Mae is saying things like, “I want to be seen.  I want proof I existed,” Mercer decries what he calls a “sickness” for people like her to need not only their own data, but his and everyone else’s too.

“Like everything else you guys are pushing, it sounds perfect, sounds progressive,” he says, “but it carries with it more control, more central tracking of everything we do.” 

I’ve preached my love of Eggers’ work a lot over the years, but other than “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” this is his best.  I’ve barely scratched the surface in this ridiculously long post.  If you think at all about the way our digital lives are now and will progress and all the issues and implications, you have to read it.  It will make you think a lot about how you interact not only with the online world, but the vast expanse of humanity that is not wired.

Sitting in a coffee shop in the basement of a bookstore in northwest Washington, my friend flipped around her phone screen on the count of three.  It read: “Erudite.  Abnegation.”

We looked at each other, and a smile crept across my face.  Slowly I set my phone down on the table and slid it over to her.  Her face lit up and we both began laughing as she saw the message written on mine:

The main reason for our breakfast meeting was discussing Veronica Roth’s book “Divergent.  In that world, people belong to one of five factions: Abnegation, Erudite, Amity, Dauntless or Candor.  Props to Roth for making the names of the factions describe the basic idea of each one.

The exercise my friend and I did was to write down which one we would pick for each other, and then also predict what the other person was going to say.  So if you were at Politics & Prose a few weeks ago and saw two people WAY too excited about showing each other their phones, it’s because we both gave the exact same answer about me (we picked a primary and secondary faction).

We initially slightly disagreed on my top choice for her, but after I explained my reasoning, she was on board.  The lesson here is that close friends are cool to have.  They get you.  She also pointed out a few specific things she flagged in the text, and of course one of them was one of just three things I had highlighted to that point:

“My father used to say that sometimes, the best way to help someone is just to be near them.”

Must have been the Abnegation trait in both of us that gravitated to that idea.

Kids grow up in one faction, but at a certain age take a test that’s supposed to identify where they really belong.  Then they choose.  The main character, Tris, starts in Abnegation but opts to join Dauntless.

Of course, it’s hard to singularly define humans, and as Tris discovers, the various factions have strayed from their original mission/definition.  Dauntless is supposed to be about “ordinary acts of bravery” and “the courage that drives one person to stand up for another.”

But Tris finds a faction led by people who push recklessness and doing whatever it takes — often at the expense of others — to get ahead.  She likes the way Dauntless is supposed to be, and while those around her may not care, she decides to not let the current state affect her behavior.

“No matter how badly the leaders have warped the Dauntless ideals, those ideals can still belong to me.”

In the course of her Dauntless training, Tris becomes kind of a badass, leading to one of my favorite lines from the book:

“The bullet hit him in the head.  I know because that’s where I aimed it.”

If that’s not confidence in what you’re doing, I don’t know what is.

I’ll leave out any potentially spoiling details for those who haven’t read and either plan to or see the forthcoming movie.

Now to finish the trilogy.

One more thought:  Can we find a way to say to skip seeing movie trailers if we PROMISE we plan to see the movie?  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve scrambled to change the channel in the past few weeks so I could avoid any possible spoiler before I finished the book.  Also, I’m apparently reading every book in which Shailene Woodley will later play the main character in the movie.

A few years ago, I declared a book the most entertaining I had read about suicide.  Today, I give you the funniest book I’ve read about cancer.

Don’t get me wrong, John Green’s “The Fault In Our Stars” is incredibly sad in some parts, but the main character, a teenage girl named Hazel, peppers in phrases and observations that cut beautifully through the cloud of seriousness and sadness that linger in her world.

At one point she is talking about how she has a scan coming up to see the progress of her cancer, but says she has nothing to gain by worrying about what it might find before it actually happens.

“And yet still I worried.  I liked being a person.  I wanted to keep at it.  Worry is yet another side effect of dying.”

Part of the story involves her favorite book, called An Imperial Affliction, which is also told by a girl with cancer and which abruptly ends.  Like most of us when we finish a book, she wants to know what happens later to everyone involved, including the girl’s hamster.

She shares the book with her boyfriend, a fellow teen cancer patient, which leads to him saying something that made me laugh probably more than most people.

“‘I have been wanting to call you on a nearly minutely basis, but I have been waiting until I could form a coherent thought in re An Imperial Afflicion.'” (He said ‘in re.’  He really did.  That boy.)”

Why is that extra funny to me?  Because I have a friend who says, out loud, “re” in conversation.  It goes something like, “Oh hey, re what you emailed me about this morning…”  It is never not entertaining.

There’s a part later where her team of doctors is meeting to talk about the direction of her care.  The main doctor asks how they should proceed.

“And then she just looked at me, like she was waiting for an answer. ‘Um,’ I said, ‘I feel like I am not the most qualified person in the room to answer that question?'”

Out of the heavy, Hazel brings the levity.  But again, there is a lot that speaks to how we process people with cancer, especially when it comes to kids.  One of the things Hazel is very concerned about is not being seen as A KID WITH CANCER.  She does not want that to define her.

At one point, she is looking at the Facebook-like profile of her boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend, who died from cancer.  The girl’s wall is filled with posts you absolutely would expect, saying how much she’ll be missed and how heroically she fought.

“She seemed to be mostly a professional sick person, like me, which made me worry that when I died they’d have nothing to say about me except that I fought heroically, as if the only thing I’d ever done was Have Cancer.”

Her boyfriend, Augustus, was a star basketball player before cancer took one of his legs.  He became less of a fan of basketball, and after a comment about how in heaven he could play as much as he wanted, Hazel imagined his reaction.

“If I am playing basketball in heaven, does that imply a physical location of a heaven containing basketballs?  Who makes the basketballs in question?  Are there less fortunate souls in heaven who work in a celestial basketball factory so that I can play?”

A great question.  And a really exceptional book.  Also, soon a movie:

On January 1, 2012, my friend Felecia sent me a text message.

It wasn’t “Happy New Year!!!” like several others that day, but rather a very specific instruction: “Read ‘Lush Life’ by Richard Price!”

I keep a .txt file on my computer with the names of books I want to check out, either because they were recommended by friends or just something I happened to come across that looked interesting.  When I don’t have a specific next read in mind, I go to the list and pick one.

Two years after Felecia’s message, I can delete “Lush Life” from the list.

At first much of the dialogue made me feel very un-cool, whether it was the plethora of copspeak or teenage kids from the projects in New York.  After a while though, I really appreciated how immersive and distinctive it made the story, which follows the run-up to a random murder and what happens to all of the parties involved afterward.

Example:

“What the fuck is a dolgier?”
“A dolgier? A do-anything soldier.”

I’m going to start dropping “dolgier” into conversations now.  Get ready.

Price does an amazing job of taking the reader through the experiences of the shooter, a key witness, and especially the detectives trying to solve the case.  It’s not a murder mystery since you know up front who did it, but rather an exploration of how people handle stress, the pressure/fallout of making a name for themselves, and how “doing the right thing” can mean different things to different people involved and at different times.

It’s impressive how he jumps from one person to the next as the story unfolds, almost as if he’s listening when you’re thinking, “I wonder how the investigation is going,” and then flips a switch to take you there.  He also brings up a lot of social issues, especially those of class/racial disparities and how those affect the investigation and how each of the major players interacts not only with each other, but with the city.  Highly recommend this one.

Things I should not do: drink so much soda, sleep so little, wait a month to blog about a book.

The consequences of the first two are evident and possibly related.  The third one results in me not remotely remembering what to say about it.

This example comes courtesy of Tim Tharp’s “The Spectacular Now,” which while a good read did fall a tiny bit short of my expectations.  It follows the story of a SUPREMELY confident — at least outwardly — high school kid named Sutter who has a love for alcohol, himself and a girls who tire of his antics.

As the title suggests, his main focus in life is the present.  He acts accordingly with little forethought or consideration for what those actions might bring.  One afternoon he’s sitting on the hood of his car drinking with his best friend and notes how the day’s nice weather probably means a hot summer is coming, but that he’s not worrying about that.

“I was never big on the future,” Sutter says.  “I admire people who are, but it just never was my thing.”

This is the only section I actually remember highlighting.  I’m not present-focused like Sutter, but I’m also not someone who has peered far into the future with a blueprint for how it’s all going to play out.  I’ve never had a five- or 10-year plan.  I don’t make New Year’s resolutions.  I don’t have a bucket list or a piece of paper listing my life goals.  I have plenty of friends who do all of these things, but whenever I think about them, all I can picture is the last five or 10 years and how utterly unpredictable most of it would have been.

What I do know about the future is that I won’t wait so long next time so that I have more to say.  To make up for it now, enjoy this picture of some ducks:

My second book blog post of the day either means that I crushed through the second one in record speed, or I was really behind on blogging and finally got around to writing about both of them today.

I strongly advise you not wager money on the first scenario.

After highlighting a ton of things in “Quiet” I found myself barely flagging anything in Dave Eggers’ “A Hologram for the King.”  That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy it, but the story didn’t bring out a ton that I felt would make for good discussion here.

In fact, the only thing I picked out that wasn’t some sort of personal reminder to look something up is this idea about a very specific role some people play in our lives.  Alan is the protagonist, a consultant trying to help a big American IT company land a contract at a new city in Saudi Arabia.  He’s divorced with a daughter, and during a trip overseas to try to seal the deal he writes letters to his daughter, Kit.

In this one, he’s talking about Kit’s mother and how whatever the daughter thinks of her, the mother wasn’t always as awful as Kit thinks.

“Whatever she’s done that has displeased you I want you to know that you are who you are because of your mother because of her strength.  She knew when to be the tugboat.  She coined that term, Kit.  The tugboat.  She was the steady, she navigated around the dangers lurking below.”

Just as there are anchors who weigh us down, I like this idea of someone who pulls us along, navigating us through the waters with their strength and knowledge of the environment.

I’ve read several of Eggers’ books, and what I like about them is the way he latches onto and really develops the main character, whose eyes are the ones through which we see the story.  It’s like Eggers is walking down the street, sees someone interesting, then shrinks himself down small enough to jump inside the person’s brain and starts narrating the view.

That said, this was not my favorite of his — “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” is the clear leader — but certainly an interesting story to dip into.