Big Love for BIG MAGIC

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If you're looking for a book that truly invigorates you into doing something with all those brilliant ideas swimming in your mind, Elizabeth Gilbert's latest brain-child is just the thing. Not quite a self-help book, BIG MAGIC hits and exposes the nerve what prevents people from creating, which--unsurprisingly--is fear. Creating is a big responsibility, and it's one that no one else but ourselves really beholds us to. As soon as it gets tough or scary, dropping and running away from the idea becomes a far more pleasant choice over grooming it into the book, or movie or small business we've dreamt of. Carrying the seed is a piece of cake--carrying the tree... not so much.

Gilbert believes that leaving an idea is not so simple, though. To her, ideas are invisible beings that float among our heads and collide into the cranium of a person they think will do something spectacular with them, almost as if they were people who spot us from the other side of the room and build up the courage to ask us out to dinner. Take a story someone told her about a jungle literally swallowing up abandoned construction equipment in the Amazon:

"... chills ran up my arms. the hairs on the back of my neck stood up for an instant, and I felt a little sick... I felt like  was falling in love, or had just hears alarming news, or was looking over a precipice at something beautiful and mesmerizing, but dangerous... this is what it feels like when an idea comes to you."

And, just as is common with romantic relationships, the opportunities for self-sabotage are plentiful--a million poisonous spines of self-doubt and fear that shut us down from the inside. Here are some reasons she lists for why we might cut ourselves at the knees in the face of something with big and magical potential:

You're afraid you'll be rejected, or criticized or ridiculed or misunderstood or--worst of all--ignored.
You're afraid somebody else did it better.
You're afraid everybody else did it better.
You're afraid you won't be taken seriously.
You're afraid you're too fat (I don't know what this has to do with creativity, exactly, but experience has taught me that most of us are afraid we're too fat, so let's just put that on the anxiety list, for good measure)
You're afraid you're too young to start.
You're afraid you're too old to start
Etc.
"Creative living," she says, "is a path for the brave."

And it is, but oddly enough, Gilbert also let's us off the hook by reassuring us that the world will not punish us so terribly if our ideas and projects are not the greatest things ever. The spotlight that shines on us shines brightest when we're operating it, so to say. In other words--no one is looking so critically at us as we think. Our motivation, rather than pleasing and impressing others, should be providing ourselves with the pleasure of creating something we genuinely enjoy.

Perhaps the most refreshing chapter in BIG MAGIC is the one in which Gilbert unabashedly admits she wrote the book for herself--not you or me. She wrote this because she "truly [enjoys] thinking about the subject of creativity." She goes so far to tell us not to create or take on a project to help other people--to martyrize creativity as a means to shoulder the the burdens of those who are meek and voiceless (gag). She uses a great line from Katharine Whitehorn to help explain why: "You can recognize the people who live for others by the haunted look on the faces of the others."

Glibert is glad she might help someone but really, she's doing this for the sake of her own delight, first and foremost. Isn't that fucking great? How validating to hear a professional writer assure us that, as human beings, we can "appreciate the value of [our] own joy." This, I think, is the operative concept in eradicating any fear we have in the face of living creatively, for fear is not as complicated as it feels when compared to the expansive relief of happiness. Fear is painful and debilitating, but really, compared to the potential of inspiration and pleasure, it is punitive, and a sorry excuse for letting a great opportunity wander off. Just like a potential lover, an idea won't stick around forever while we get our shit together. Attention must be paid! And not out of fear or doubt. As Gilbert says, "We simply do not have time any more to think so small."

On sale 9/22/2015

Two Books That Will Change How You Think and Behave Forever

SO YOU'VE BEEN PUBLICLY SHAMED

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I loved this book before I picked it up. The cover is brilliant in its quiet complexity and neon smears, and the title makes it sound like a self-help book for villains. And, delightfully, it kind of is. Only, Ronson isn't only trying to sell this to the bad guys wallowing in the mud. The book's message is also, if not, more so for everyone else. He's holding up a mirror to you, me, the millions of Twitter/Facebook users, and--at an arm's length away--himself. He is, after all, a self-proclaimed shamer. Though the title appears to address those who have fallen from grace (see Jonah Lehrer, Lindsay Stone, and Justine Sacco), what it might also say is, "So you've fallen in with the anonymous, millions-strong crowd of online commenters who make their jabs and carry on."

By interviewing those who have royally screwed up, and those who exposed and shamed them, Ronson reveals one of humanity's most wicked tendencies: frisson. But it's not just regular frisson, which is our desire to stare at a car-wreck on the side of the road. When it comes to shaming, and in the case of this book, publicly shaming,  we take this desire a step further. We're not only watching the car wreck; we're throwing stones at the people crawling out from beneath it.

Though Ronson isn't telling us to be more understanding and sympathetic, he is strongly suggesting it (and very convincingly at that). He doesn't come off as scolding, or reprimanding. He simply asks hard-to-ask questions and in so doing, takes away our privilege to remove ourselves from the public demise from a transgressor. He's not telling us to love transgressors or to stand between them and the stones. What he is telling us is that we can do whatever we want, but now, we can't do it without our own impunity. By sharing the stories of lives that have been ruined by public shaming, he leaves us with no choice but to dip our feet into their shoes.

In any case, there isn't a slow or benign moment in this book, and the last line is the best line--the hook-in-cheek phrase that drags our attention through our protective bubbles and toward the places we don't want to look, the margins where the results of our actions tend to rot.


THE PSYCHOPATH TEST

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Read this and you'll question the sanity of everyone you know--including the author's and your own. You won't be able to help it. Ronson gives us actual symptoms in psychopathy throughout his journey through the madness industry, each one relatively plain in description. As I read them, I had to wonder, "Do I do that? I think I do that! A lot actually!" I have to admit, this was kind of horrifying to read, and I would have stopped had it not also made me starvingly curious. At points, Ronson tips the scales with his subjects, not once allowing his readers to make any easy decisions about criminal minds and psychotherapy as a practice. I found myself wishing everyone else had read it so I could say, "This book, right?? Are you not losing your mind?" I dare anyone to read past the first few chapters and try not to diagnose at least five other people in their lives as psychotic, or at least semi-psychotic.

In lieu of causing us to suspect we and everyone around us might be a secret murderer, Ronson also does a good job in humanizing those who have actually been deemed psychotic. He takes away our lazy privilege of making up our mind about people and shrugging off their existence. Whether or not he intended it, he has pieced together a kind of narrative that reads like a house of mirrors: simple, yet beguiling in its many directions. The sides from which to see the people in this book are more numerous than you'd think. The close-up encounters with ruthless, violent and charming psychotics more than just dangerous--they're complex. They are the objects of an entire industry of medical and psychiatric research. It's a world that I've given little thought to, and one that I'm now very intrigued by.

On a personal level, Psychopath Test, has an introspective effect. Since it will no doubt cause you to worry that you yourself are psychotic, your attention will be brought inward, to a point of reflection. By seeing these extremes in psychological behavior, we have a backdrop we can compare our own behavior against. I guess it shouldn't come as a surprise that a book on the madness industry would cause its readers to consider the nuances of their own minds. Ronson deserves credit for the obvious things: excellent writing, brave journalism, and relieving self-deprecation, but his crowning achievement is instilling in his readers a curiosity they didn't know they had.

You Will No Longer Avoid Short Stories After This

You'd think with how impatient we all are, short stories would be more successful. Why I had only learned of this collection by discovering it in a store, is a surprise to me. Well, I guess with a cover like this, you'd have to be the least curious person on the planet to not pick it up and give it a spin. What repels me from short stories is the lack of epic proportion, I've decided. As readers, we gravitate toward the book that offers the largest story with the biggest bang and the most satisfying pay-off that can be absorbed in the quickest amount of time. Short stories don't promise much of any of those--or so my bratty, coddled perspective had thought. I bought this for the cover, but trust me, the content underneath is just as compelling; each story a jolt to the mind and heart.

Within the first story, McCracken propels you through multiple narratives that graze and miss each other like a loose knot. With expert subtlety, she amps the tension and the terror, putting us in a position that we don't want to be in, but have no choice but to continue reading regardless. The story's end relieves the tension, but not without feeling like you've just pulled your finger from a live outlet.

McCracken gives us both closure, and opportunities to draw our own understandings. She sets us up for a read that is simultaneously challenging and just plain fun. Not for a moment did I feel uninterested in the myriad characters and their ruthless circumstances. Her insight into the human mind shifts its expertise from parent, to child, to sibling, to rival. Each story feels more intimate and devastating than the last--a constant, pleasurable pull between one extreme and the other. She does exactly what any author should do, which is to make us fear and love the world unconditionally.

I Was Told There'd Be Cake: Essays for the Young New Yorker, and Everyone Else

What makes this book worthy of our time as readers is an unabashed will to write about what we think no one else wants to hear about. Anyone who ever hated her job, lived near or with another human being, or has ever, even only once, used the phrase "intensive purposes," will love Sloane Crosley. The stuff we blab on about (read: complain about) over coffee is written here with a sense of humor and understanding that, if she were to actually tell you about it at brunch, you wouldn't feign interest, or raise your eyebrows in false surprise; the interest and alarm would be down right genuine.

Crosley digs into her experience as a human among humans in one of the most humanly busy cities on Earth, hitting all the corners and sides of what it is to be alive. That sounds endearing and lofty, but rest assured, she's anything but. Her frank and honest approach to her essays will make you seek out those locales where people can read without impunity, like the subway, or an abandoned warehouse. She writes in a way that is neither dumb, nor high-brow, yet her high level of brain and heart is unquestionable. Take the essay about her one night stand for example:

In the middle of the story, she explains that her suitor lived very close to her. A lesser writer would say just that: "I hooked up with a guy who lives in the same building as me. Crazy, right?"

Wrong! That's not crazy, It's boring! To spare us such tedium, Crosley puts it this way:

"He lived two apartments down from me. In fact, our apartments faced out to the same courtyard, and if we wanted to communicate through tin cans and string, we could have."

I have to hand it to Crosley for successfully calling on the childish game of telephone to illustrate the awkward concomitant tension after a one-night stand with someone you could very well see everyday. Her technique is original, intelligent, and comes from the heart. What many of us find too tangled and emotionally messy to explain, she presents with classy self-deprecation and a firm grip on what it means to keep it real.

This book is a success. I wasn't half way through by the time I considered Crosley a rockstar, and someone whose presence would turn me into a giggling pre-teen if I ever had the pleasure of being in it (this is me winking, dear Universe).

I Feel Bad About My Neck: Why haven't you read this yet?

Seriously, why not? This is my first Ephron book I've ever picked up and I could kick myself for not enjoying it sooner.

My dad actually recommended this collection of essays to me when I was in college. This is important because my dad doesn't read. As I've mentioned in my modest little bio on the side, he finds it "laborious." So, for that matter, does my boyfriend, my brother, my cousin, my cousin's boyfriend, several close friends, my cat and pretty much every teenager spark-noting Grapes of Wrath. My boyfriend put it plainly in a discussion about his favorite books. "Mmeeehhhh," he said, "books are long." I was unamused at first, but that's just it. Books really are long. In the pentagon of entertainment: movies, TV shows, songs, plays, and books, books take the longest to finish. Movies and plays can be knocked out in a few hours. Whole albums can be listened to in even less time. A novel or memoir requires long-distance focus, which is not common--and for the gosh damn record, is not the fault of Kids Today. I'm tired of Kids Today being pinioned as an army of jackasses who can't focus long enough to get past five whole pages without so much as a doodle in between. People have always purchased more books than they've read, and started more books than they've finished. Human nature dictates a struggle with long-distance. Well, my marathon fearing friends, fear no more.

 I Feel Bad About My Neck is immediately funny, consistently insightful, and evokes a range emotions from amused, curious, bereft and ultimately, satisfied. What's more, you'll finish it in less than a day. Seriously, it took me eight hours total, and I've been tested for A.D.D. twice. Ephron's one of those authors we've all heard of, and have no reason to believe her books won't be worth our time, yet we droll out, "Yeah, sure, I'll get to it." Well, get to it, damnit.

As the almighty New York Times said, "Nora Ephron can write about anything better than anyone can write about anything." There are whole fractions of me that believe this. The woman writes about her neck. Her neck! How can that possibly be interesting? She didn't get it slashed in a knife-fight, there's no snake tattoo coiled around it hissing the cursive name of a lover and for all we know, there aren't even any hickeys. Somehow, though, her neck is amazing--outstanding in its intricacies and nuances (I don't know what a nuance is, but what the hell). She may not write about anything better than anyone can write about anything, but I'm sure that no one has surmised the neck like one, Nora Ephron.

She writes well about other non-assuming things. For instance, the phonebook:

"I miss the telephone book... I miss what it stood for. Self-sufficiency. Democracy. The belief that you could find what you were looking for in a place that everyone in the world had access to."

Ask a crowded room what they think represents democracy, and you'll hear not an utterance about the phonebook. Especially not now, since phonebooks are scary and foreign next to our amazing little phones you can yell someone's name at to make a call.

Anyway.

Ephron, a writer I very much wish was still among us (not that I would meet her, nor know what to do if I met her), left us all a fantastic book you'll finish in what feels like one sitting, compared to the fat novels and bios resting on the coffee table. I zipped right through it and it takes me a whole morning and better part of the afternoon to get through the side of a cereal box.

Chances are, someone has recommended this to you, and you have not read it, like me until now. Instead, we reached for the flashier cover, or the more popular fantasy kick. Having finally read it, I can assure you, we were missing out.

I'll Give You The Sun: The next Fault In Our Stars?

I don't say that lightly. You remember reading John Green's The Fault in Our Stars, right? You probably finished it thinking, oh God, what now? You despaired, wondering how anything else was going to even come close to that good. I was there, friends. I know those feels. Of course, we found other books and enjoyed them like the soul comfort-food they are. Maybe we happened upon one that grabbed us by the collar just as fiercely as TFIOS, and instantly told our friends, neighbors, and bank tellers, "YOU MUST READ THIS." Or, perhaps nothing so wondrous has fallen into your hands; you're still browsing your personal library and the shelves of indies, guessing at which of the myriad covers contains the next story you won't ever want to finish.

Well, get the gosh-damn ready, because this is it.

Jandy Nelson's second novel, I'll Give You the Sun is so consistently good, you'll be plowing through it well past midnight. One might call it a "realistic" novel, which is to say that no one's going to magic school, or leading a resistance against a dictator. Without the flashy back-drop of evil-doing, this one's about love, loss, beauty, creating beauty, the vitality of art, and the courage of owning your own life. We've got two heroes, twins Noah and Jude. They are raised in a nuclear home with two parents: A stoic father and whimsical mother. Together, they provide opposing backdrops against which the kids develop, abandon and rediscover their creative potential among other qualities that blossom in hazardous fashions in that ever-loved coming of age period of life.

The characters are as captivating as real, breathing people. Each one is composed to feel immediately familiar despite their stranger-ness--the kind of people you lay your eyes on for the first time and know right away they'll be with you for life.

Noah is a wonderful, scattered boy. Nelson's imagination flows from her to him like a bloodline. His lines contain small bombs of wild thinking, describing the world around him as if covering the black and white pages with a mess of color and gashed lines. The text hits your head in the way some paintings hit your ears.

Jude blooms later than her brother, artistically speaking. The trope of the sibling-in-shadow takes on an interesting dynamic here, as Nelson places Jude's story three years into the future from Noah's. It's as if her story literally follows in the wake of her more gifted twin. The temporal jumps between chapters are crafted excellently, leaving us unconfused, yet just clueless enough as the two siblings appear throughout each other's narratives. The stark difference between the Jude in Noah's stories and the Jude in her own stirs curiosity the way a tragic accident sells papers. At thirteen, Jude is a thrill-seeking, surfer babe with hair so long "everyone in Northern California has to worry about getting tangled up in it." Three years later, it's gone, and her surfer friends have been replaced by a ghost--a couple actually. As if she anticipated her readers' incessant need to know what the hell happened to her, she teases us with more and more info as the chapters progress. You won't be disappointed with the delivery.

With this book, we see through the eyes of two deeply gifted and troubled artists. Except, rather than bore us with the ineffective, emo, look-at-me-don't-look-at-me tortured soul, we get Noah, who turns his sister's hair into snakes, a boy's face into pure electricity, and a calm home into the center of a hurricane. Jude's art is un-discovered throughout most of it. Despite significant resistance, she evolves into a voracious sculptor, able to chip at the edges of rocks to reveal the petrified life-form within. Both she and her brother follow treacherous paths in and out of each other's lives in an attempt to bear witness to the merciless, yet gorgeous reality of their lives. A search for truth that delivers pain and understanding in perfect tempo.

That's what Give you Sun is really about: the tedium of truth. The weaving, temporally jumping narratives stretch over 370 pages to explain how reality has far more than two sides, which proves an incredible obstacle for Noah and Jude, since there are only two of them. Truth becomes multi-faceted and its sides multiply so fast you'd have to start numbering them backwards.

I can't help but see the hopefulness in such an overwhelming number. For lack of a better reason, it promises that our curiosity and appetite for exploration of unknown things will always be satiated, since the sides of what's really there will be countless. Nelson's shape-shifting, and dazzling narrative explodes forward with imagination, spinning humor, beauty and mental bedlam in its wake--a cosmic stew concomitant to a life filled with indulgence, whim and the dripping desire to connect with those who send thunder through your chest.

Grasshopper Jungle: What the Hell Did I Just Read?

You'll finish this book with the same look on your face you'd have if your parents told you they're trying to get pregnant with the neighbors. Though it's fiction, Andrew Smith's latest novel edges into a realm of outrageousness you have to pause and digest, before compulsively turning to the next chapter. 

The story follows 16-year-old Austin, a teen boy with a handful of issues that are common enough:

- distant from parents

- bullied by idiots

- easily aroused--like, everything sets him off.

And some not-so-common issues:

- In love with his best friends, Shan (girl) and Robbie (boy).

- Obsessed with recording his own history and that of his ancestors

- Inadvertently unleashes army of man-eating insects that only want to eat and have sex with everything.

I can't help but see the humor in the latter. Smith's 7-foot-tall mantises are really just exaggerations of the teenager, a creature whose penchant for clearing out a food pantry is rivaled only by locusts, and whose sex drive is rivaled only by caged hamsters. Teenage years are a formative mess in which erections and metabolisms are at full-speed, and keeping up with those two championing gems is physical growth. Teenagers are what happen when you throw something reactive into a petri dish of unstable chemicals. In that light, Smith's monsters are the perfect metaphor. They hatch from the bodies of human hosts, start out small, grow feet over-night, and continue an existence of eating, fucking and sometimes, eating and fucking (if you know how to do this easily, let me know immediately). That right there's the over-arching metaphor to life in this book, and it works well. For all it's grotesque delight, however, that's the easy way of describing Grasshopper Jungle.

At its heart (yeah I said it) the book is about adolescence and the trifling honesty found even in young people who hardly know the world around them. Austin, our leading teen, connects his arousals, his memories, and his streaming consciousness. With a voracity that matches the mantis-soldiers' appetite, he records everything in a journal, weaving the present with heartbreaking stories of his ancestors--men and women who tried hard to live happily and were met with both joy and devastation. His compulsion to record life--to put paintings on his cave wall, as he puts it--makes history itself more appealing, and maybe even a little sexier than I remember it being in high school. 

Austin is a complex boy whose intelligence is crafted with honesty and precision. He unabashedly reveals romantic feelings for two close friends of different genders, and as if under oath, informs us of whenever something makes him think about sex, which is damn near everything. Don't be deterred by that--what he has to say about what he sees is far from the gutter. Sex is not a consistently attractive event in this explosively weird narrative, giving the idea of sex a dynamic shape. This is especially so when Austin and Robbie are trapped in a mysterious room filled with jars of odd objects--the sort you find in a sci-fi horror show--and a pack of bullies breaks in, forcing our two heroes/best friends/potential lovers beneath the shelter of a desk.

As the two boys hide, the bully pack, lead by alpha ass-hat, Grant, observe a dismembered penis in a jar of liquid. Sex swiftly goes from teenage dream (hey, Katie Perry) to Frankensteinian freak-show. The shift is used as an opportunity for Austin to lament about the life of this boy, who not too long ago, kicked the crap out of him and Robbie for being "queer." In one line, Austin sums up every bully known to man: 

"I desperately wished they'd stop talking about the penis in the jar, but Grant and his friends were like lonely parakeets in front of a mirror."

A lesser writer would not be able to capture the sad and repulsive nature of mean people so easy. If Smith can do anything, it's pack a lot of substance into a small amount of words. He doesn't leave much room for boredom, or for cheap tricks. Smart, funny, delightfully grotesque, and with an ending that will make you go What in holy hell just happened? I recommend it right away.