What I read: the unexpected pleasure and disappointment edition

I have long expected to like Sarah Vowell's essay collections. I had liked her work as a Salon columnist, and I had liked the odd article that popped up elsewhere. That it took me this long to read Take the Cannoli: Stories from the New World and The Partly Cloudy Patriot is due to a murky blend of irrational conditions. I am generally too cheap to pay for collections of essays. I am always afraid of being sideswiped by pure, reptilian jealousy -- how come this funny, thoughful, articulate person gets paid to talk about whatever they want? Where is the market for spiteful, half-baked, muddled commentary? Where is MY slice of the commentator dream? -- and I can only take so many brushes with the ugly id per quarter. I had a lot of other stuff to read.

The pleasant thing about a delay is that it eliminates all sorts of external and internal doubts. I didn't read something based on a wave of acclaim, only be stranded on a metaphorical sandbar, suspciously thinking, Well, it's not THAT good. I read it because I wanted to, not because I felt like I should. Maybe this explains why my little reptile jealousy was nowhere in evidence.

Instead, I could just admire Vowell's clear, intimate prose, her graceful and humane way of putting forward a thesis, her ability to step back and observe the absurdity of a situation while also depicting what it feels like to be fully immersed in it.

The Partly Cloudy Patriot is such a great collection of essays, because it sums up how it feels to love a country that drives you to distraction. In these times, it's a balm.

The third book I read this week was one I expected to love, yet ended up only mildly enjoying.

Regular Rage Diaries readers know that I am fascinated by shopping -- it is like a collision of economics, aesthetics, psychology, statistics, comedy and tragedy all in one. Like reader Mike postulated in an earlier post this week, I dig the Paco Underhill. I like unscrewing the "Why?" of shopping from the "How?"

So I was totally looking forward to reading I Want That! How We All Became Shoppers by Thomas Hine.

I freely admit that one of the appeals of this topic is that it tends to attract some lively writers who do a great job of translating economicspeak and 10-Q forms into human stories. For all my carping about the humorless dogma soaking through the Baffler's compendiums, it really is engaging reading at the core. I thought Virginia Postrel's The Substance of Style was a bright and engaging read, I liked Fast Food Nation, and LowBrow, and Trading Up, and a few others I can't recall instantly off the top of my head.

Unfortunately, I had a harder time keeping focused on I Want That! Hine is a well-organized author, to be sure: I always read the TOC and note how the book's going to progress (per How to Read a Book), and the way he organized his subject material makes sense. Shopping fills a lot of basic needs: power, responsibility, discovery, self-expression, insecurity, attention, belonging, celebration and convenience. Explaining how shopping came to fulfill these needs should be engaging.

Except it's more of a slog than it needs to be. Hine tries mightily to make his material relatable by sharing his own anecdotes about Wal-Mart shopping, etc., but even in these, it seems that he's more the analytical observer than the immersive participant. And that's fine -- many of us are incapable of turning off the little observer in our head -- except that it creates a little gap between the observational explanation and the reader's need to understand how shopping gets us on a gut level.

In order to succeed as an outside observer of anything, you still have to master the sleight-of-prose trick of making the reader think that you and he/she are looking at the world through similar eyes. It's a contradiction you have to embrace before you even write a lede. Sarah Vowell has that knack. And on any other week, I may not have thought that Thomas Hines did not.

Comments

[mike]

I will further postulate that you are interested in Charles Fishman's "The Wal-Mart Effect" (http://www.walmarteffectbook.com/). (Perhaps you've already talked about it and I missed it?) Any investigation of retail must at some point turn to that particular behemoth, I suppose.

[Lisa]

I read the original article in Fast Company years ago, and wouldn't mind reading the book. However, I have to wait and see if our library is going to get it, or if it'll come out in paperback first.

After all, I can't keep up the book-a-week habit if I don't watch the bottom line!

[hannah]

Oh, phew, Lisa. I thought from the intro you were going to say you didn't like the Vowell collections.

Which would have made me have to suit up for a beat down. And which also would have made as much sense as Homer Simpson declaring he doesn't care for crullers.

[VanillaBean]

mmmm...crullers