Vintage, 284 pages, $15

I often sit around and talk to my TV, so I thought why not talk to the books I read too. Their content might even answer:

JOHN: Here’s a book that’s kind of Steve Martin’s The Lonely Guy meets 12 Angry Men. Why should I care about a cellist who can’t perform, the jury trial of a Buddhist who kills his guru, a forty-year-old guy virgin who is clueless around women?

THE SOLOIST: Because I pull you into music by having the narrator teach a young Korean boy (and you) something about it, because the murder (the narrator is on the jury) mirrors the psychological state of the cellist and because most guys reading a book a book at night are clueless around women.

JOHN: Can you give me a specific example of how this works.

THE SOLOIST: Listen to this and see if Renne doesn’t ask questions a reader wants answers to that stand up outside the story:

“Maybe if you starve yourself and don’t talk or move for a long time you do go into some kind of trance, but what would the point be? Sleeping is an even better trance because you disappear completely for a few hours. We all do that every night, so why try so hard to do it in the daytime? Then there’s the fact that we all die anyway; no matter what we do, we’re all going to experience the ultimate trance, so what’s the rust to imitate it? You don’t see animals forcing themselves into unnatural postures and then trying not to move for hours.”

JOHN: So how can this book (no matter how enjoyable) come to some kind of resolution?

THE SOLOIST: With the cellist playing for his new cat in the dark each night. Who cares if it makes sense, isn’t that a wonderful image.

Buy this directly from Amazon for $14.35: The Soloist

244 pages, The University Press of Kentucky, 27.99

The emphasis is on “philosophy” but some of the essays, such as, “The Darker Shade: Realism in Neo-Noir” and Jerold J. Abrams take on the different kinds of mazes and how they are reflected in various stages of Noir make for insightful reading. Plus there are the endless titles that will send you to your library’s on-line catalog.

Here’s my own take:

To order this book driectly from Amazon for $24.95, click: The Philosophy of Film Noir (The Philosophy of Popular Culture)

Life Itself: A Memoir

448 pages, Grand Central Publishing, 27.99

Usually our “butting heads” approach to books is pitting one of them against another, but in the case of this Roger Ebert autobiography, we thought it might be interesting to invite our movie review critics, John and his dog. Spanky, in from the other room to get their take.

JOHN: Well this long book has some ups and downs, mainly because I think a reader goes to it for some specific interest (behind the scenes on his relationship with Gene Siskel or Ebert’s take on famous movie directors) and then has to wade through the rest. I did find his Catholic upbringing (which parallels mine and Martin Scorsese’s—not to mention James Joyce’s) got me to thinking, but his stuff on being a “newspaper man,” true or not, just seems kowtowing to the old stereotypes.

There were a few surprises. Russ Meyer, for whom Ebert wrote “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls” apparently was reliving his military experience with old cohorts on film locations—in any case it resulted in a suprpise ride for the author through the British rock ‘n roll scene. Siskel comes across as a very private person (and of course he died), which makes us cheer all the more for Roger’s wonderful wife, Chaz, who’s been so important to him through his bouts with cancer.

SPANKY:  Parts of this book, the star stuff—interviews with Lee Marvin, Robert Mitchum, John Wayne—seem like filler to me. But when he gets to the directors…we get depth and insight. For me his sections on Scorsese, Woody Allen, Ingmar Bergman and Werner Herzog make this worth reading , and make their movies worth another viewing. For example, he mention that Robert Altman in his last picture, Prairie Home Companion, is really personified by Garrison Keillor in Keillor’s portrayal of himself. I watched the movie again with new eyes.

Ebert isn’t us, but at times he takes our place, giving us up-front details and behind the screen glimpses at the movies which have defined (his and) our lives.

Buy this book directly from Amazon for $13.95. Click here: Life Itself: A Memoir

Buy the book directly from Amazon for only $8.81. Click: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel

Order Walden directly from amazon for only $3.50. Click: Walden; Or, Life in the Woods (Dover Thrift Editions)

I have read this book at least five times (at various stages of my life), but, as I was telling my friend Rod, a real classic is one that mirrors different things in you each time you read it. Usually I am in a Nick Caraway mood, but this past holiday, I felt more like the disillusioned Gatsby. Why doesn’t matter, but the book was there for me, and that does. Rather than write an essay that states the obvious I thought I would indulge myself with a poem that is my take on the classic. See what you think. John

Hot Rod Magazine, All the Covers by Drew Hardin

Motorbooks,  2011

256 pages, $35 (hardback)

It is hard looking at this to not remember those days, years ago, standing in a drugstore, reading car magazines for free. Fantasies of revved up cars are as close as most of us ever got to hot rods. Though I did know one guy who sold his Harley Davidson a few years ago to buy one—it never left his garage.

Skimming over the hot rod’s history, it all seemed to begin on those dry lake flats. Then it was the phantom-like Mercury and Lincoln customs, muscle cars, and finally…automobiles became too expensive to mess with. They were no longer every boy’s dream, but rather family vans.

Forget all the hot roadsters and hopped-up engines, the magazine cover from May 1952 embodied every young man’s ideal. It is a pointed breast co-ed crossing the street in front of two guys in a souped-up red, V8. This was sex appeal. If you were of those teen-age years then you might get a kick of this retrospective (there’s even a cover of Dragnet’s Jack Webb admiring the engine of a “big rod”). But times changed (even though they launched a swimsuit edition long before Sports Illustrated).

I dunno, maybe we grew up.

Buy this directly from Amazon for $23. Click: Hot Rod Magazine All the Covers

Terrace Books (University of Wisconsin Press), 2011

284 pages, $26.95 (cloth)

This is the kind of book that you are glad when it is finished. Not because it isn’t good—murder in prehistoric caves, hidden French/German collaboration, endless meals and a cooking school—but because you’ve had enough. The cast of characters is OK and it is interesting how a book written by a couple focuses on the perspective of the female character.

Let me add that the parallels between modern family members and those of the past give the reader some first- hand involvement. And the last sentence of the book is one of the best I have ever read.

Thoroughly researched, I would recommend this for those attracted to historic writing or writing about place. Though there are surprises to keep you wondering, the story lacks a dramatic arc. I fault the fastidiousness of the authors. Had they played even a little looser with events Murder in Lascaux might have proved a more exciting journey.

Order directly from Amazon for $17. Click: Murder in Lascaux

1008 pages, $12.99

World Almanac Books

Adele and Derek Jeter Grace

This telephone directory of facts offers, well everything. But let me give you a sample of what you might not expect:

1. David Nelson died at 74; the last surviving member of The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet.

2. “There may be no greater tribute to Steve’s success than the fact that much of the world learned of his passing on a device he invented.” – President Obama in a tribute to Steve Jobs

3. 50 years ago the discount retail chain was born; K-Mart, Target and Wal-Mart all opened up their first stores.

4. McDonald’s now has 32,805 locations and a franchise costs $1.1 million to $1.9 million dollars.

5. A group of alligators is known as a “congregation.”

The World Almanac has included record-setting events and has chronicled interesting people, events  and places for the last hundred years. It is impressive to see in one inexpensive volume how much you don’t know and, once you read it, will soon forget.

Well, I just lost my review of The Humbling—how’s that for being humbling—but I think I have a twist that makes up for this. 

A friend tells me that Al Pacino has optioned the Phillip Roth novel and it is hard to think of anyone else in this role of a passed-his-prime actor who is wondering how to make it all happen one more time. He is also toying with suicide and the climactic performance is his death at his own hands (very Chekov). He is trying to find his old self through a series of younger woman and it is hard to imagine that this isn’t also Roth stomping the stage, remembering his own bravado, literary performances of the past. 

Which reminds me of  my own “twist.” 

I am also reading the journals of monologist Spalding Gray. He did commit suicide, jumping off the Staten Island Ferry in 2004. We quickly find that he was a compulsive writer and his entries (these are from his journals, and are not his monologues though they comment on incidents that are the basis for the theatrical pieces). They are intriguing in a credible way that Roth’s character’s are not. For one thing Gray’s mother did kill herself, so this is always an ongoing possibility for him. As in his monologues he hides nothing. Whereas The Humbling reveals some acting techniques, Gray is more concerned whether he is living or performing, whether one can be too truthful to an audience or too dependant on their accepting that truth. These are subjects essential to acting, to writing and even to “preparing a face to meet the faces that we meet.” 

The editor of the gray book, Nell Casey, does a masterful job of tying the pieces together, and the two books present a wonderful opportunity to ponder the differences and similarities between life and art. Toward the end of the seventies, he had had flashes of worry about the consequences of exploiting his intimate life and neuroses for his work. As his career gained traction in the eighties, this worry developed into a darker and more fixed sense of destiny, one that  left Gray feeling trapped and afraid. This anxiety—that he had gambled his privacy for fame—would haunt him for the rest of his life. 

What do we take away from this, we who can’t even hang on to a couple-sheets-of-paper review? That we are shit living in the shadows of these bigger than life geniuses—thank god.