Back in March, I talked to you about THAT IS ALL, John Hodgman’s final volume of complete world knowledge. If you’re interested in that book, it might be worth your while to check out the audiobook instead, because it is brilliant.

The link there goes to a review that goes into detail about the evolution of Hodgman’s voice, which is something I had intended to do in my blurb but ended up leaving off, largely because I wasn’t sure how much of what I thought I was seeing was in the text, and how much was colored by casual interaction with Hodgman on JCCC3 (where, obviously, he wasn’t “in character” all the time).

This is spot on, though:

Without giving too much away, you should know that That is All makes its crucial Turn when Hodgman stops writing as a familiar character, and begins writing as what we might guess is “himself,” whatever that means for a writer who is so aware of his changing status and thus his changing voice. Taking on a new voice, one that is so unselfconscious, is surely a vulnerable place to be after so many years occupying jokey versions of himself — we’ve heard Hodgman as a Former Professional Literary Agent, Resident Expert, Famous Minor Television Celebrity, and finally Deranged Millionaire (if you aren’t familiar with these, read your history). Now we are hearing from the post-post Hodgman — in other words, beyond the narrator-in-character writer there is a Hodgman voice we’ve been waiting to hear from again (I remember this voice from before his first book), and boy does it hit home. The book’s brilliant conclusion, telling the story of the metafictional Anne Darling Egan, serves as a transition not just in the book, but in Hodgman’s career — it suggests what Hodgman will do next, after the end of this series of postmodern characters. I have no inside information, but listening to the long segment preceding the closing song, I couldn’t help but think — Hodgman has a novel in him.

What I conclude from That is All is that Hodgman’s Deranged Millionaire character was gaslighting us the entire time. The truth, of course, is that Hodgman himself is a genuinely kind person who uses character as a way to express himself with a kind of wry, safe detachment. His recent Derangement is a fun side-note in the arc of his career, but careers aren’t what matter. What matters is that we do what we love, that we are with the people we love, and that we do our work surrounded by friends — that is what Hodgman has been doing by bringing in Paul Rudd and Jonathan Coulton and running gags that span dozens of hours of audio and years of work — he’s demonstrating to us what is most meaningful isn’t the jokes, it’s that those jokes are shared.

If you (a) enjoy good writing, (b) enjoy Iain Banks, and are sad he’s gone, or (c) just love Formula 1, then you should definitely go read this. Here’s a bit:

It’s all about the power, and weight transfer. The F1 cars weigh 600kg. In a Lamborghini Diablo – a maniac, kaka off-a-shovel device if ever there was one – each bhp has nearly three kilos to move around. In what we’re to be driving, each horse only has to shift 800 grams. Under acceleration drivers get hit with 2.5gs, under braking it’s four gs.

[…]

‘Allez! Go!’ Clutch out.

The sound assaults. I feel like a shell in a gun. The car leaps forward like a Navy fighter slung from a carrier. Feather slightly, pull back on the right paddle for second, exit pits. Assume the line. First gentle corner again, burst of – Holy shit! – power, then the counter-intuitive braking. It’s not really counter-intuitive, it’s just counter to anything I’ve learned in a road car, apart from how to do emergency stops. You stamp on the pedal. And stay stamped. It’s 40kg of pressure called for in the F3s; 80 in the F1s.

‘I brake, I wait’ Stephan said. The first part of the braking zone is the one place in each corner you have even the most microscopic amount of time to think, because initially, brake is all you do. Meanwhile, having just rearranged themselves after acceleration and then cornering, your internal organs struggle to find yet another novel configuration. I suspect bits of my insides that didn’t know the other parts existed have found themselves on term close to intimate, all jellied up together like passengers in a tube train. I start changing down (not too fast, or the engine blows up). Apex. Push the accelerator delicately, smoothly, trying to keep the whole foot on it, not just the ball. The LCD screen swings the revs on a ballistic curve from left to right, starting at 3000 and ending at 13,000rpm. The power…is crushing, awesome, frightening, dazzling. And synesthetic; over-spilling to invade and co-opt the sense that don’t appreciate it from first principles, obliterating divisions in the mind, searing tis impression forever into the deepest places in the memory. The car reacts instantly to every input like it’s responding to intentions, not actions.

Author Joe Hill decided to try out one of those “You Write Like ____” sites. Madcap hilarity ensued.

Look, Steve, we love you. The American reading public, I mean. You’ve sold millions upon millions of books, had ’em adapted into films great and small (and sometimes more than once), and gathered enough publisher mojo to publish a fairly noncommercial epic in The Dark Tower.

But goddammit, man, you need an editor. And by this I mean someone who can tell you when your shit stinks — or, at least, when you’ve bloated out a book so far that it begins to collapse in on itself.

11/22/63 is King’s take on time travel. That as an elevator pitch was enough to get me to bite, even though the obligatory pivotal event was yet-more-baby-boomer-bullshit, but I should’ve given it a second though, and a third one if necessary. King playing in speculative fiction is trouble, and he fails utterly to do anything interesting with his premise. It’s telegraphed from the start that, obviously preventing JFK from leaving half his noggin in Dealey Plaza would have butterfly-esque effects that result in an unrecognizable dystopia in 2011 (“now” for the book). Shit, even if that wasn’t a tired and overdone trope in time travel fiction, you’d KNOW that was going to be the case just because of the name on the spine. It’s not like King is known for giving us ice cream and puppies, right?

But because he’s not (apparently) a student of the prior work, he goes there anyway, and gives it only a smattering of pages. He’s way more interested in the “detective story” of how his protagonist determines Oswald’s the real killer, and establishing how much his GenX hero loves the 1958 – 1963 world he’s transplanted to. Baby boomer wish fulfillment much, Steve-O?

The book’s a turgid mess, I’m sad to say; even his shout-outs to his own mythos — we start in Maine, naturally, and the time tunnel opens in 1958, so our hero’s in Derry during the 1958 portions of It — mostly failed to amuse me. He’s also dragged down by the amount of research into the assassination he clearly did, and which he by-God clearly had to get into the book regardless of cost. I’m reminded of one aspect of Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, as explained to me by a college prof twenty years ago: Dreiser’s book lopes along pretty well until the last third or so, when it slows to a crawl as we move through every tiny bit of legal minutia Dreiser could cram in — because he’d done the research, too, about a notorious crime and resulting trial in upstate New York, and he was hell-bent on using that material, too. It hurt Dreiser, but it’s one of the fatal flaws for King.

Oh well. At least we’ve got Joe. Plus, my “three Kings” reading project still has one entry to go: Owen’s novel, which has garnered high praise. He’ll be on deck this summer.

Oh, one more thing

This makes 25 books from 1/1 to 6/7 (when I finished it), so the “50 book year” thing still seems on point.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, all of what I said before stands. What do you want from me? I was traveling.

I almost skipped this one, as the reviews on Amazon are pretty bad, but given that Child tries to build at least SOME continuity into his books I figured it couldn’t be TOO awful.

Well, yeah, it kinda was. It’s a narrative mess with all sorts of shallow stock characters; one gets the idea Child’s heart just wasn’t in this one. Mark this one “devoted Reacher fans only.”

This one’s kind of a gimme: the author is a family friend (my brother and I went to high school with his kids) in addition to being my stepfather’s former medical partner. Pendergrass is about 10 years younger than my stepdad, and has always been substantially more athletic, so to say people were SURPRISED when he announced he’d start doing triathlons in his sixties would be incorrect. What surprised them was his plan: to do six of them, at the big-boy Ironman level, one on each (populated) continent, all before his 70th birthday.

N.B., if you didn’t bother to click that link, what “Ironman” means in this context:

• 2.4 miles of open water swimming, followed by
• 112 miles on a bike, followed by
• a goddamn marathon, i.e. 26.2 miles running.

Yeah. Right. I’m 43, and can’t image one of them, let alone six, but John nails it. In Arizona, Brazil, Switzerland, New Zealand, and South Africa, he finished well ahead of the official cutoff time. Only in his last outing — at a miserably hot site in China — did he come up at all short. But even then he finished the race. That’s amazing and incredible.

The story is interesting, and it’s a fun read, but it also shows that the author is a physician by trade, not a writer. That matters less when you’ve got something clear to tell, and John certainly does. Obviously, too, this is the sort of thing a man in his sixties can really only contemplate if he’s already pretty well off — tri bikes are very expensive, to say nothing of the travel involved. It’s hard to gauge if this would be fun to read if you don’t know John, but obviously enough people think so that Random House bought the book, so there’s that.

Wow, I’ve gotten behind on the posts, but at least I’m still keeping pace on the reading.

Drinking with Men somehow found its way onto my Kindle several months ago, probably after reading a review somewhere that suggested I’d enjoy it. Past-me is pretty good about that sort of thing, and I’m usually right.

I mostly was this time: Schaap’s memoir takes the form of a sort of bar travelogue: from her days sneaking into the cocktail car of a New York commuter train to her early adult life in Manhattan, she’s regularly become a regular of this or that local haunt. I understand the appeal, and have done it several places myself — hell, back in the 1990s, we used to invite Cecil’s to our parties, and it was a year or two after I stopping hanging out there before I finally stopped getting a Christmas card from the owner.

People who’ve never been regulars think of this as sad. They don’t know what they’re missing.

Anyway, Schaap is a talented writer, but a few times I felt the bar-to-bar structure of the book kind of limited it. She hints at, but never explores, her life outside these bars; it appears only inasmuch as it serves the story of her relationship to each watering hole, so to speak. Her courtship and marriage to her husband, for example, is only discussed as it connects to her bar life.

She’s not without circumspection about this tendency of hers; it troubles her more than once, and I wonder if it’s still something she does. I also wonder what she’ll write next, because — narrow focus aside — Drinking with Men is a great read.