Paternity Leave Reading

I'm currently wrapping up my paternity leave. My brand spanking new daughter is awesome, but let's face it, infants are kind of boring. She has about 20 minutes a day that she's awake and not nursing, and I enjoy those minutes. I've used some of the other time to catch up on some reading.

I recently finished Steven Millhauser's short story anthology, Dangerous Laughter. It was my first book by Millhauser, and I wasn't even halfway through the 13 stories presented here before I knew I'd be reading more of him. Millhauser's biggest claim to fame, outside literary circles, is that the relatively recent movie The Illusionist was based on one of his short stories (the story, "Eisenheim the Illusionist," is not in this anthology). It was a pretty decent movie, and Millhauser is a very clever, thought-provoking writer. Many of the stories force the reader to consider some aspect of the world that we take for granted--a Tom and Jerry cartoon, laughter, words, household objects, our sense of touch--from a completely new, slightly skewed perspective.

"History of a Disturbance" made me incredibly self-conscious about the words that came out of my mouth for days. Even as I think of the story now, weeks after I initially read it, it makes my mind feel kind of itchy. In the story "The Other Town", which isn't so much a story as it is a narrative description, we are introduced to a town that has created an exact doppelganger of itself; a copy that is kept updated minute by minute whenever a fork is shifted in a drawer or a leaf falls from a tree. How the town maintains this replica is vaguely interesting; why the town puts forth such an effort is much more intriguing.

Some of the stories feel like sci-fi or fantasy, but none fall easily into either genre. Some are character driven, some don't even have characters. Nearly all the stories were entertaining, and all of them made me think. Dangerous Laughter was easily the best anthology I've read in ages and I would highly recommend it.

On a much, much lighter note, I also finished John Hodgman's The Areas of My Expertise (or if you prefer the complete title, An Almanac of Complete World Knowledge Compiled with Instructive Annotation and Arranged in Useful Order By Me, John Hodgman, A Professional Writer, In The Areas of My Expertise). Most of the world knows Hodgman as the PC guy in the Mac vs. PC ads. He's also a frequent contributor to This American Life, for you NPR fans out there. I remember hearing an interview with Hodgman a few years ago when this book came out and thinking it sounded cool. I promptly forgot about it, then found the book relatively recently and decided to check it out. I'm glad I did.

A book consisting of entirely made-up facts probably won't appeal to everyone, but I found it highly amusing. Consider one of Hodgman's favorite topics, hoboes. He devotes several pages to a list of 700 Hobo names. And in one of the more amusing passages, he describes part of Hobo history:

At his inauguration in 1933, a new crippled president named Roosevelt addressed the nervous crowd: "The people of the United States have not failed. In their need, they have registered a mandate that they want direct, vigorous action. An so I will kill all the hoboes, and together we will gnaw on their bones." It was time for a comprehensive Hobo Eradicaiton Plan called "The New Deal."

And so on. He also expounds upon facial hair, how to win a fight, failed palindromes (e.g. Slow speed: deep owls), and eels, among several other things. It's all very absurd, but you have to actually be somewhat well-read and reasonably intelligent to understand just how absurd some of this stuff is. In other words, you might appreciate the book more if listen to NPR (or its Canadian equivalent). It's not something I would recommend reading in one sitting--or even 10 sittings--but it's a fun book to pick up once in a while for a good chuckle.