A humanist railing against how "being American" is a dehumanizing force, a treatise teetering on the edge of unhinged rage. Good thing I didn't really get into Algren when I was younger. Because if I did I would probably now be dead—I didn't really need an avowed nonconformist to fan my flames; if so, I would have exploded. Three stars.
"Nickel and Dimed - On (Not) Getting By in America" by Barbara Ehrenreich (2001)
Something irked me about the book back when it was prominently displayed in all the Borders, and I never picked it up. But over the course of 20 years I became a bit of a fan (her take on breast cancer was the kicker) and after she died I figured, sure, why not read her most popular book. Well, I find it irksome. I won't bore you with the obvious reasons why it's irksome, and in fact I won't even mention them. I'll just say that, given the subject matter of the book, of all the lives I've come across in these pages the one I least care to be around all the time is hers. Two stars.
"New Yorkers - A City and Its People in Our Time" by Craig Taylor (2021)
Makes Humans of New York seem like one long series of sentimental, cloying lies. Three stars.
"Natural Causes" by Barbara Ehrenreich (2018)
You would imagine a book that tries to marry biology with religion, psychology with philosophy, quantum physics with selfies, astronomy with medicine, oncology, sociology, holistic wellness, immunology, history, exercise, cellular anatomy, diet, and humanism to be a bit of a mess. And it is, very much so. But I will say after reading it, the everyday behavior of many people I know now and have known then seems flat-out moronic. Four stars.
"Letters on the Short Story, the Drama, and Other Literary Topics" by Anton Chekhov, Selected and Edited by Louis S. Friedland (1924)
I picked this up because I assumed it would be filled with insights into his writing process, a distillation of his much larger collection of letters into select, juicy nuggets of creative wisdom. It's not. The vast majority of it, actually, reads like gossip. In fact, you get the sense that Chekhov wrote these letters believing that there was no way in hell his survivors would ever approve the commercial publication of his private correspondence,* which can be characterized by their emotional erraticism, the sense that he found the state of modern culture entirely stupid, and his hatred of seemingly every other human being on earth (I laughed out loud at the harshness he doled out on this female writer for saying, "The aim of life is life itself," calling it bafflingly insincere, and then ending his tirade by basically saying, "Ah, she's a good lady"; there's also a very memorable exchange where he tells the head of a young writer's association that, no, he won't join their young writer's association because young writer's associations are stupid.) There's a much more recent collection of his "writings for writers" which edits things to give you only a spiritually uplifting picture of an esteemed, moral thinker, which is pretty much wholly anti-Chekhov, and which seems to me a book to cherish only if you happen to be dumb. As for this one, there are perhaps loads of grand statements (he really hated grand statements) to be made connecting his realistic fiction with the stunning emotional range of what is said here (in turns: wise, scared, demanding, childlike, mean, kind, horny, ascetic, probably drunk.) Though, for the purposes of writing instruction, maybe this should simply be considered an endorsement for the energizing, even inspiring, power of creative hatred. Three stars.
*I’ve read Flannery O'Connor's letters and in comparison, in hindsight, they now feel very, very, very carefully controlled.
"Kieślowski on Kieślowski" Edited by Danusia Stok (1993)
Basically an oral autobiography, which ends while he's in the middle of making Three Colors. If you come here looking for insights into films that are notably *not* passive entertainments, then you might actually find them—it's a little refreshing when someone is talking and you can sort of tell that they're not trying to sell anything, or burnish their reputation, or relive past glories, or even merely turning themselves "on" for the crowd: they're just talking, trying to be as sincere and as in the moment as possible. How can you tell? Well, at one point he starts musing out loud about how, if none of us individually believes that we have an ounce of evil within us, how is it possible that evil can exist in the world? And later he goes on a long, somewhat sloppy, cigarette-fueled rant about how terrible Polish people are. Three stars.
"It's Not Easy Bein' Me" by Rodney Dangerfield (2004)
If you didn't have a Rodney Dangerfield impersonation before you started this book, you will have one afterwards. It's jarringly odd to hear him talk about bouts of severe depression. Oddly, the most I laughed out loud was the chapter he talked about his best friend, the funniest guy he knew, a non-comedian named Joe Ancis. Two stars.
"If Only We Could Know! - An Interpretation of Chekhov" by Vladimir Kataev, Translated and Edited by Harvey Pitcher (2002)
One: Someone at the College of DuPage Library clearly has a hard-on for Anton Chekhov and, as far as I can tell, I'm the only person living in the district who appreciates it. Two: Yes, it's an academic book. So let me just say that the only reason I feel I should highlight it is because, as far as my experience goes, the interpretations of Chekhov's works are ALL OVER THE PLACE. And part of the reason for this, as far as I can gather, is that Chekhov's irony is bone-dry: for instance, in "The Student" a depressed character by the end reaches a grand, uplifting epiphany, struck by the eternity of human beauty, which leaves you the reader feeling pretty good unless you ask yourself, "How is a 22-year-old student supposed to confidently know all that?"; but you're barely force-fed the question, and if you miss the question it's easy to miss the point of the story. So the reason I'm highlighting this book is because I think (naivety pending) Kataev probably gets closer to what Chekhov was actually trying to do through his work than anyone else who has tried to explain him. Which is, basically, point out that not one person living on Planet Earth could ever possibly know what the hell they're talking about.* Chekhov, I imagine, died a lonely man. Four stars.
*Excerpt: "'Why should a little one have to suffer so much before dying?' the grieving Lipa asks the old man 'from Firsanov' (In the Ravine) / 'We can't know all the whys and wherefores,' he replies. 'A bird's meant to have two wings, not four, because two's enough to fly with; same thing with man, he's not meant to know everything, but only a half or a quarter. He knows as much as he needs to know for getting through life.' This is a very rare example in Chekhov of a character who accepts not knowing 'everything' calmly, as the inevitable lot of human beings."
"Having and Being Had" by Eula Biss (2020)
As far as meditative, book-length nonfiction prose poems about capitalism go, as far as I know this is the only one. Four stars.*
*Biss spends great deal of time ruminating over what is actually expressed through a single word.
"Go All the Way - A Literary Appreciation of Power Pop" Edited by Paul Myers and S.W. Lauden (2019)
My best guess as to why power pop never exploded in popularity is that a lot of people don't necessarily love the music they listen to, they just sort of use it to prop up some image of themselves, usually a mirage. Four stars.
"Flyboy in the Buttermilk - Essays on Contemporary America" by Greg Tate (1992)
What's truly shocking as you go through the essays, some full of jazz-like riffs and others more baldly academic, is how little cultural criticism I've read over the years was written with a proudly Black voice (in one essay, he criticizes an Afro-centric art book for assiduously excluding white influences: "Black art historians shouldn't just talk about how the massive mandalas of a painter like the Africobra school's James Phillips draw on Coltrane's modal solos and African textile patterns, but how he proposes fresh uses for African-inspired geometry in painting when Cubism and Constructivism were thought to have exhausted them.") Though this may explain why I had never run into the work of Greg Tate before he died last year. It's hard to explain how this realization makes me feel. Kind of like I've been duped. Like I've been had. At one point he laments the lack of a cohesive Black artistic community because white corporate America is offering them enough money to work as a Creative Director and buy a suburban home. Probably an oversimplification. Then again, no mainstream outlet would ever, EVER, publish great, insightful, perspective-shifting stuff like this. Unfortunately, white people got the money. And they prefer their edges smooth. Three stars.
"Fire on the Prairie - Chicago’s Harold Washington and the Politics of Race" by Gary Rivlin (1992)
An imperfect book, only because occasionally it gets muddled telling an extremely complicated story with many ancillary characters. But for the most part it's clearly written, and not at all hagiographic towards its subject. It's a book forged from old-school, objective journalism. On a personal level, the book upset me at many, many points: it helps me understand why I so desperately hate a city that I can't help but love (Why do people from Chicago tend to have great bullshit detectors? Because, if so many people are trying to fuck you over from seemingly all sides, you learn to develop a good sense of the kinds of people you should trust. Also, no one who has ever grown up in Chicago knows what "controlling your emotions" means, for better or for worse.) Four stars.
"Fiction and the Figures of Life" by William H. Gass (1971)
I suppose if you have no interest in how literature is created, there's no reason for you to read this book, a collection of essays and book reviews straddling literature and philosophy. But there's something so thrilling about his writing style, to me, it's a bit of a shame if people don't experience it at least once. The best, most succinct way I can describe it is: it doesn't ever feel cheap, or chintzy or mass produced or even triple-gilded, overadorned, and when you run into writing that doesn't feel cheap your awareness of the sheer amount of cheap writing that surrounds our lives actually begins to feel overwhelming, in a somewhat suffocating way. And! If you happen to already have an interest in how literature is created, what you'll find are a number of stunning insights, too many to list, often philosophically spiked, that avoids aphorism, grandiloquence, inspirational cant, or even equivocation—you really get the impression of a person who's very thoroughly thought through something in an attempt to get as close as possible to the heart of the heart of his subject (he's basically what David Foster Wallace would be if David Foster Wallace were actually as intelligent as he taught himself to sound.) And if that seems somewhat trite—praising someone for actually thinking deeply about something before writing it down—again, you come out of the book feeling like that kind of approach, for whatever reason, isn't actually valued by anyone with a pen. After all, putting on a cheap show, as we've all seen by now, is a fairly easy thing for anyone and their mother to do. Five stars.
"Dancing in the Streets - A History of Collective Joy" by Barbara Ehrenreich (2006)
I suppose all books like this bend the truth, it's only a matter of degree ("The Dawn of Everything" apparently bends the truth quite a bit in service of its ultimate point.) So, was public celebration really discouraged by the rise of Protestant discipline-fed capitalism? Was ritualistic dancing really seen as a threat to public order? Do we really live according to the dictates of a culture that sees benefits in our separation, that celebrates individualism and identity both as a triumph of selfhood and as a method of organization (if you identify as "gay" then I know what to sell you,) that peddles products to alleviate the dismay that the culture itself causes? Is what we're experiencing now the result of centuries of human repression at the service of power, control, and money? Beats me—most of the relevant information I know comes only from personal experience and this very book. Once again, Ehrenreich starts by examining something simple, in this case "joy", and spins it out into all sorts of enormous threads—Why do we, as humans, relentlessly seek out so much pointless joy? And why do people seem to find this so threatening? I can't tell you if she's onto something for certain. But it's something to think about, for sure. Four stars.
"Creating Fiction - Instruction and Insights from Teachers of the Associated Writing Programs" Edited by Julie Checkoway (1999)
Imagine my delight upon seeing someone's recommended list of writing books and discovering that I had already owned five of seven—a validation of my instinctive ability to sniff out quality writing advice! That included this and the benefit of this book over others as far as writing instruction goes is you get a variety of teaching styles in one sitting—you don't just get one person's theory, you get about thirty of them! Some very insightful and high quality, some of them asinine: the advantage of confidently declaring yourself an "expert" in a field like creative writing, a field that very few people actually understand, a field highly susceptible to wistful, windswept sentimentality, is that the chances an impressionable young hopeful will listen to you with unquestioning, shining adoration are very, very, very high, which is an attitude that’s remarkably easy to exploit. Some of these writers seem guilty of that. But, because of the book’s scattershot nature, the chances you'll run into unusually considered and highly worthwhile wrinkles of narrative craft are also very high. So, on the whole, I think it's rather good. At the same time, I've read this book before, as an unquestioning, shining, young idolator. And I think I wrongly took away lessons from the more flashy, inspirational teachers than from the ones who preached classical, grinding restraint in a minor key. Now that I look back, I think it's their fault. Three stars.
"Contagious - Why Things Catch On" by Jonah Berger (2013)
It's written in that extremely annoying "This American Life"-inspired conversational style which was in vogue during the (awful, just purely awful) 2010s. Plus, it's directed towards people who work in marketing and advertising. Nevertheless, the ordinary person gets a breezy, Wharton-kissed explainer about six major ways people try to manipulate your behavior. For instance, "Stories thus give people an easy way to talk about products and ideas. ... They provide a sort of psychological cover that allows people to talk about a product or idea without seeming like an advertisement." Read it, and maybe you'll be able to see through a lot things that typically slip past your bullshit detector. Now, if you happen to be an evil person, (1) you've likely already read this book; and (2) I'd think a person who had committed themselves to evil would be able to handle much more sophisticated reading material. Three stars.
"Commodify Your Dissent - Salvos from The Baffler" Edited by Thomas Frank and Matt Weiland (1997)
Its attacks on 90s pop culture—from Details Magazine to Donna Tartt to Henry Rollins to Quentin Tarantino to Wired Magazine to alternative rock (geez, how the hell did they set up Q101 just six months after Nirvana "suddenly shocked the world"?)—are still pretty thrilling, at least perhaps to me, someone who lived through it all as an impressionable teen, some of it I ate up, some of it not. The attacks on everything else are kind of boring, as if the pop culture stuff were the things the writers were most familiar with. Some of it seems dated, some of it seems hyperbolic, but mostly a lot of it just seems like precursors to issues we still deal with (there is an advertising executive here who preaches "disruption".) Most strikingly, they call out how we spend money on things that feel liberating or purposeful or rebellious or even meaningful to our identities when, all along, we're doing exactly what a bunch of people in a board room had planned and budgeted for. It may sound a little simplistic, but are our movie theaters filled with comic book blockbusters because that's what we as an audience demanded? Or did a corporation steer us towards a product that was highly addictive and, thus, easier to predict and reproduce? Three stars.
"Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student, Fourth Edition" by Edward P.J. Corbett and Robert J. Connors (1999)
It's a 500-page book about classical rhetoric, so I'll try to keep this brief. Maybe it's too late for you to become a stronger writer, but in the event your child shows a knack for words it might be a good idea to get this book on their radar. For some reason, I went through most of my life never once hearing about it, until it was referenced in an academic paper I was reading about advertising. Which means either the state of the humanities had been in decline for much longer than we thought, or narrow-minded parents were desperately dissuading their children away from writing as a career. I've found, if you dissuade a talented, budding writer away from a writing career, you're pretty much sentencing your peculiar, creative child to a long, sad, unfulfilled life (an unusually large number of these children grow up to be financially secure, emotionally damaged Asians.) So if you want to spare those kids a future, decades-long SSRI/Xanax dependency, just know this might actually be the best book on the nuts-and-bolts craft of writing I've ever read. (Sidenote: I can now recognize, thanks to this book, the advertising agency Fallon McElligott, in their heyday, more than anyone else, made use of classical rhetoric precepts in their work.) Five stars.
"Chicago: City on the Make" by Nelson Algren (1951)
I suppose I should feel affinity towards someone whose sweeping love letter to his hometown spends a great deal of time shitting on it mercilessly, but I don't. Two stars.
"Chicago - A Literary History" Edited by Frederik Byrn Køhlert (2021)
I sure am glad this book was good, because I paid over a hundred dollars for it: it helped me understand why the city is full of complete bastards. Four stars.