Read This: Ten (or so) Favorites of 2009

These aren’t the best books of 2009; I’m not widely read enough to make that particular assessment. But when I was thinking of my favorite books from the last year, they’re the ones that sprang to mind first. It’s mostly non-fiction because that’s what I read professionally for Publishers Weekly all year, but every now and then I did manage to sneak in a novel for fun (or at least find a way to get a Beatrice or GalleyCat post out of it)…

• Appetite City: This “culinary history of New York” by William Grimes, the former restaurant critic for the Times is sprinkled with fascinating facts about long-gone restaurants and culinary subcultures, all of it making a strong case for New York City offering its residents the most diverse food options of any major metropolis.

• Blues and Chaos: Robert Palmer (the critic, not the guy who sang “Addicted to Love”) set out to create an overarching definition of American music, “a set of procedures that will allow us to evaluate Charles Ives and James Brown” as he put it back in 1979. It’s a daunting task, perhaps an impossible one, but his best essays and feature stories made it seem achievable.

• How to Live: I had the pleasure of interviewing Henry Alford about his “search for wisdom from old people (while they are still on this earth)” late last year for PW, and that conversation really underscored for me the empathy that he brought to his own conversations. This is a warm, honest, and heartfelt story about one man making a sincere effort to learn from others.

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31 December 2009 | read this |

Read This: How to Do Nothing with Nobody All Alone by Yourself

David Mamet was born in 1947. He was eleven years old when Robert Paul Smith’s How to Do Nothing with Nobody All Alone by Yourself was published in 1958. I’m not able to get in touch with Mamet to ask him if he read this book, but I am willing to bet folding money that he did, then or shortly after. Basically, this is a book that gives young boys ideas about how to entertain themselves when they don’t have anybody else to play with, starting out by making a spool tank and ending with a spring trap constructed from a wishbone, chewing gum, a burnt match, and a rubber band. Of the hundred or so pages in between, at least a dozen are dedicated to the rules of mumbly-peg; you can understand why this new commemorative edition features a huge legal disclaimer on the back cover flap.

Here’s an example of why I’m pretty sure David Mamet read this book growing up:

“One of the things that I found out when I was writing this book was that an artist can’t draw a picture of something without seeing it. I talked my wife into doing the drawings, and I’ve spent about a month now in making all the things in the book so she could draw them. Fortunately for me, I was doing this in the fall, and I could tell her that the reason I couldn’t make a willow whistle was because the only time to make willow whistles was in the spring. If you want the real truth, I never even knew a kid who could make a willow whistle. But there were books in the lbirary that told how to make a willow whistle, and I used to try. The only reason I’m even mentioning this is that people I’ve talked to claimed they knew a kid when they were kids who was able to make willow whistles. Maybe I’m just a dope about willow whistles and you’ll be very good at making them. But everything else in the book I’ve made. I made them when I was a kid, and I made them again as a grownup, and they work. This is a guarantee.”

Hell, after reading this book, I want to go out and get a penknife and start playing mumbly-peg. Which, oddly enough, I never did do when I was in the Cub Scouts and had a penknife. Boy, did I miss out. Also, I want an old shoelace and a horse chestnut so I can make a conker. And I wouldn’t be averse to making that spool tank. It’s a really wonderful book, and one of the great things about it is that Smith is constantly telling kids that “just plain going to the library and getting out a book is a swell thing to do,” and that they’ll learn a bunch more things than the things he teaches them, and they should look forward to that. Because the greatest skill How to Do Nothing with Nobody All Alone by Yourself teaches isn’t mastering the various levels of mumbly-peg, it’s about learning how to be content with yourself without anybody else around.

(Officially, from what I can tell, this book isn’t coming out until next March, which is funny because I’ve got a finished copy right here in my hands, but go figure. Just mark the date on your calendar already.)

7 December 2009 | read this |