Bookshelf talk

Books recently finished, bought, borrowed, or browsed:

Gary Benchley, Rock Star by Paul Ford. Paul's breezy first novel about an ambitious indie rocker trying to make it in the big apple is a wiseguy kind of funny, hip to the silly pretensions of post-adolescents longing desparately for idolization. If you don't see a lot of yourself in Gary Benchley, you're not really being honest with yourself!

How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton. Just got it and am enjoying as much as the other book by de Botton I've read to date: Status Anxiety. His style shuttles between Roland Barthesish dilettantism, PBS documentary lucidity, and stoic self-help advice. At times, it's an awkward blend, but there's a light irony laced throughout, which keeps it entertaining, bouncy, even syncopated. And he's really making me want to read Proust, which is all to the greater good. Proust, like Guinness, is good for you.

All in the Timing by David Ives. I've taught his play "Sure Thing," which always rouses the sleeping giants when we perform it in class. Ives's absurd, snappy skits and one acts are stoked with outrageous wordplay. I thought I might want to assign more of his plays for my Intro to Lit classes as a tonic for the dark and serious dramas we always read, but I'm not sure there's enough in there that's usable for classroom purposes. Would be great in an acting or humor writing class though.

The Iliad by Homer. I'm reading the new Penguin Classics translation by Robert Faigles, and it's great. Probably the most readable verse translation I've come across: well paced, dramatic, and intense. This is a candidate text for Intro to Lit. too. With the Iraq war in our faces, the parallels to Troy might be easy to draw. The Iliad, after all, is the greatest anti-war war story out there. Achilles and the other larger than life heroes interest me too. I think there might be modern analogues there as well: so many isolated primadonnas, mopey movie stars and sulking athletes. It's lonely at the top. And then there's Helen of Troy. All that love, passion, jealousy and beauty. It's tempting, especially since I can't settle on a novel, much as I'd like to do one.