Holiday Fever: The Sunday Loser Edition

Since I have to play loser (*coughsniffcough*) today while Team Angas watches this movie over at the Diva’s, I figured I’ll just weigh in here with my book list. Sa Team Angas, enjoy your movie and the rest of this holiday fever.

2003 Best of American Erotica. I borrowed this one, my Book # 10, from Tamadita and read it on the way to and from Romblon. I can’t really remember much about the book right now, except that it had an excerpt from Chuck Palahniuk’s Choke. The book also contains selections from the past BAE books from the last ten years. My favorite is “Two Cars in a Cornfield” where high school kids park their cars (guess where?) in the middle of a cornfield and fuck the heads off each other. But it’s all so innocent and free and they graduate and go off to different directions but they’d meet once in a while and have that “remember when?” conversations. Geeze. How come Team Angas doesn’t have anything like that, huh?

One Hot Second. Book # 11 is edited by Catherine Young. This is the other book I brought along with me to read during Holy Week. It was subtitled “Stories about Desire.” Was so happy to find it in a Booksale bin, and for thirty five pesoses! I had high hopes for this one, but it turned out that the hottest thing there was when a girl finally decided to be kissed by her new boyfriend, but the boy was this manyak type who did it in front of the lockers in the hallway where everyone could see. So girl got reputation as a slut, got hauled to the principal’s office, and her parents were informed about her alleged slutty behavior. What’s the lesson here? Good girls who try their hands at sluttiness get creamed. And not in a very nice way at that. But one story in this collection lead me to pick up my next book, which is..

Parrot in the Oven: Mi Vida. Victor Martinez. Book #12 has a sticker which proclaimed it as the 1996 “Winner of the National Book Award for Young People Fiction”, and I had previously read a short story by the author, “The Country Fair,” which I liked very much. It’s a coming of age novel about this down and out Latino boy named Manny whose dad believed that people were like money. There are thousand dollar people, people who are worth a hundred, or you could be worth ten, five or one. Manny’s dad believed they were pennies. I was expecting something like City of God which caused me a headache but it was all worth it. Parrot in the Oven gave me a headache and a huge question mark hanging over my head. For a novel, it’s too episodic and dare I say it—boring. All the reviews I read about this book are glowing and point to the "lush description;" but lush just doesn't do it for me. It’s okay to be episodic if it’s leading to an overall impression or if it means something. But this one takes an episode and drops it with no resolution and moves to another episode and everything that happened before was thrown out the window, never to be brought up again. I read the book on my daily commute to school for a week, and I swear the only interesting thing that happened in the book was when Manny’s sister showed up on their doorstep bleeding. It turned out sister was pregnant, and their hysterical mom dragged the girl to the bathroom and did something unmentionable with the use of a clothes hanger. That’s about it. It was all downhill from there.

Bee Season. Author Myla Goldberg looked funny in the photo at the back of the book. She wore striped knee highs, she was Jewish, and the novel was about a loser girl who surprises her family by winning the spelling bee. I was under the impression that my 13th book would be funny, sort of Woody Allen-ish, but the book was so earnest in its discussion of meditation, the Kaballah, Eastern religions. The religious aspect was just too much for me. And in the second half, I found myself looking forward to what the mom would do. Could have been better if the author just stuck with the spelling bee premise. Should be paired with that documentary about kids in the spelling bee.

Tw7sted. Jessica Zafra. I like the book cover—it’s green and hot pink and it totally went with my outfit when I attended my brother’s graduation along with my mom. Was very useful for staving off extreme boredom because the damn grad ceremony started at 5pm and ended near midnight, in the humid outdoors. So I pretty much finished the book right then and there. The best part of the book is from the "Journal" section, mostly the parts wherein she wrote about the death of her mother. You can read an excerpt from that essay here. Also, this is the only Twisted book I have that was signed by the author. The event was held at Powerbooks in Greenbelt. When it was announced that the author was ready to sign the books, people peacefully lined up with their copies and the author wordlessly signed the books. This gay guy at the head of the line tried to chat Jessica Zafra up, but she only stared at him, mouthed that she was sick and couldn’t speak. Bluekessa, who was supposed to go to the booksigning with me but ended up attending the Powerbooks Mega signing alone, has this theory: Jessica could have spoken with the people if she wanted to, but maybe she didn’t want to. Then the girl ahead of me at the line brought all twelve books for the author to sign, and I was afraid that the author would end up throwing the books at the audience. You could drop a pin in there and hear it fall. After the last person in the line had his book signed, Jessica Zafra remained at her table, reading and scribbling something in her notebook. The fans were are milling about, sitting on the chairs, sipping their iced teas, and whispering to each other. They were pretending not to watch, but they were all watching her read quietly. It’s like there’s this unofficial rule: Talk or die. She sat there for like another thirty minutes. During that entire time, the author pretended to read, and the fans pretended to do everything but let on that they were watching her. It was fascinating to watch: So this is what happens when you put an antisocial author with an antisocial audience. Or maybe the fans were just afraid they’d be disemboweled. Tw7sted is Book #14.

Never Mind the Pollacks. It’s sort of like Citizen Kane for the rock and roll set. It’s all about the life and times of the eponymous character, legendary rock critic Neal Pollack. Very tongue in cheek alternative history starting with Elvis and Memphis and ends with Kurt Cobain and She Who Shall Not Be Named For Fear of Lawsuit in Seattle. Read only if you actually care about rock and its many weird characters. This is Book #15.

Diary. I’m starting to decipher Chuck Palahniuk’s formula for book writing. In Choke, it was medical school anatomy class facts + loss of memory + museum village thing + sex addicts. Diary = art school freaks + the theory of eternal recurrence + mass hysteria + self-fulfilling prophecies + graphology. The good thing here is that since you now know his modus operandi, you can do the same with your writing, if you’re into that sort of thing. Put together any number of things you want to do your research on, prop it up with an assortment of really weird, lonely people, and you’re off. Book #16 was graciously lent to me by Gwen.

Me Talk Pretty One Day is Book #17. David Sedaris is my new writing hero. He’s so funny, they should pack him in a box and ship him to me in Manila. The book is divided in two parts: Life in America and life in France. He writes mostly about himself and his family, and he makes the most mundane things sound hilarious. In the first part, there’s this one essay about his stint as a creative writing teacher, and how he made all the students watch a soap opera. My other favorite essay is called “Youth in Asia” which is about their dogs and losing them and how he was afraid that when his mother died, his dad would run out and get a new wife and name her Sharon iI, like what he did when their dog died. In part two, I really enjoyed his “trying to learn French and failing” series. “Jesus Shaves” is an attempt to explain what Easter is all about to this Moroccan Muslim girl who claims not to know what it is all about. Since the class still has a very limited vocabulary, they ended up bringing down the cornerstone of Christian faith to the level of chocolates, bunnies and, sweet bejeezus, bells.

I still have a bunch of books I want to finish, but alas, it's now school season. So loser me will probably use the unexpected holiday making syllabi. Blech. I can't believe I've turned into a school marm loser.