Given this, I spent most of time in the book looking for the places where the wool was being drawn over my eyes. When Irving mentioned that the records of a gallery which allegedly purchased some of de Hory’s fakes are no longer extant, it rang the same alarm bells in my head as the clumsy conman trying to derail suspicion by airing first. When a car rolled down a hill and burst into flame, I was tempted to cry aloud, “Aha! Fiction!”

Unfortunately, the meta-textual aspects of the book were perhaps its most consistently compelling. Elmyr de Hory’s story might’ve made a great long article for The New Yorker or Harper’s, but there’s not quite enough there there to sustain a whole book. The catalogue of de Hory arriving in some city, peddling his wares, wearing his welcome out, and moving on is too repetitive, and Irving’s approach — working hard to convince us that this is fact, not fiction — is too flat, too reportorial.

Irving only flirts with concepts that could have given his book weight beyond de Hory’s personal tragedy. He never suggests complicity on the part of any of the gallery owners who bought de Hory’s forgeries — he only provides circumstantial evidence, alleged queries as to whether the “small, private collection” which de Hory is allegedly liquidating might “happen to have” a work matching the interest of a specific potential buyer. And Irving observes but doesn’t analyze (or even judge) the strange climate that briefly allows de Hory to prosper: new money trying to legitimize itself by purchasing works of art it knows nothing about.

Irving doesn’t even go so far as to shoehorn de Hory into one of the classic plot arcs: de Hory rises, but not very far, and falls, but not very far. Irving brings the curtain down on his book before (but not much before) de Hory brings his own curtain down, after several previous botched attempts. Perhaps Irving even has some slight complicity in that, as the notoriety accompanying Irving’s book must have destroyed the only livelihood de Hory had ever known.

I learned about de Hory and Irving watching Orson Welles’ odd, fascinating/infuriating pseudo-documentary F for Fake, and I wonder if Welles’ interest might have been sparkled by this phrase in the book:

One must imagine swift cuts between shots, rapid pans of the camera and certain herky-jerky quality in the movements of the two heroes

Ironically, if sadly predictably, there is now enough interest in de Hory’s forgeries that they themselves are forged.

needs more demons? a bit.

Braun has a particular fondness for debunking headline-making research that is not supported by following studies or where the headline soundbite misses important qualifying aspects of the research (perspective is applied to the factoids “alcohol kills brain cells,” and “red wine reduces risk of heart disease,” for instance).

On a personal note, I’m entering day six of my attempt to ratchet down my own caffeine consumption. A key fact from Braun’s book that the “half-life” of caffeine in the body is roughly 5 hours has helped me establish my transitional caffeine schedule.

One caveat: Buzz was published in 1996 and has not been revised; I’m certainly not qualified to assess how scientific understanding has changed in the intervening years.

Dept.-of-neither-here-nor-there: Buzz is the first book I’ve noticed that is available for the nook but not the Kindle, but it’s a whopping forty-one bucks in Barnes and Noble’s e-book format. Can you say “hello, library!”? I can.

needs more demons? Not really, but a glossary might not have been amiss for readers who (like me) have a smidge of trouble keeping receptors and organic compounds straight after a while.

Joe Pernice, if you don’t know the name, has one of the most honeyed voices in all of indie rock and a heaping helping of songwriting skill, displayed for the past several years/records in his band Pernice Brothers. Joyce Linehan is Pernice’s partner in Ashmont Records. This book is literally culled from Joyce Linehan’s twitter stream, mostly focusing on communication to and from Joe, about the business of being in a touring/recording band (although Massachusetts residents might note a few poignant moments not directly related to Ashmont Records).

I read Pernice to Me compulsively in a single sitting — not hard to do, it’s short — and while it certainly entertained me, it left me a little sad.

Pernice to Me has a mean side in more than one sense of the word. I couldn’t help but be reminded of seeing excerpts of Johan Sebastian Bach’s correspondence with the great composer whinging about shillings and farthings. And if you’d have a mental image of Pernice as a “gentle, fragile sad sack”, that you want to keep intact, you should avoid Pernice to Me, because that’s the perception that Linehan explicitly sets out to destroy. She presents Pernice as epically grumpy, a quintessentially high-maintenance and self-involved artist.

But the format of Pernice to Me dramatically reinforces its artificiality. It may be generally acknowledged that reality show editors can paint any cast member as either the villain or the long-suffering hero, but when the stuff from which a work is assembled is exclusively 140-character-or-less soundbites, it really hammers home how very much the selection of exactly which tweets to include or exclude affects the shape of the work as a whole. I was also keenly aware how much I was lacking anything that might put the tweets in context: how long Pernice had been on the road, how much sleep Linehan had, what tone of voice the words were spoken in (many of the tweets are transcribed telephone exchanges).

It also implicitly makes the point that the music industry wasn’t wrong back in the days of Napster: the sky really is falling. Something is wrong with the picture if an artist with all of Pernice’s gifts finds it difficult to eke out a living. And if releasing one of the first books based on a Twitter stream helps Ashmont get some media attention and helps Pernice sell a few more records, more power to them.

needs more demons? not exactly.

It mixes critical discussion of the albums music and lyrics with an exploration of “dangerous” music as a tool for coping with adolescence.

I’d never actually listened to Master of Reality before — the only song I knew from it was “Sweet Leaf,” not my favorite Sabbath tune by a long shot. Turns out it’s a pretty fantastically weird record. It delivers a lot of what you might expect from Black Sabbath — some of this record is so proto-Metallica it’s almost spooky. But it also contains some positively pastoral moments (flute? flute!) and, the opening love song to Mary Jane aside, you could more-or-less label it Christian Rock.

Darnielle is a perfectly suited writer to delve into these seeming contradictions, and he’s found a wonderfully authentic voice to use. Very, very, cool.

(I’m hardly the first person to draw a line between Master of Reality and “Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton” but John Darnielle says I’m wrong, in a very nice, but spoileriffic, piece at Nerve.)

needs more demons? nuh uh.

• half-page half-tone snapshots
• a purported multi-page e-mail* thread between Handler and her siblings
• a purported multi-page letter of complaint from a tenant of her father’s rental property
• whining (in multiple chapters) about the need to write another “stupid book.”

Otherwise it was sometimes amusing and often offensive. And of course it’s been solidly lodged in the bestseller lists since its release.

* I live in Boston.

needs more demons? here’s what’s needed: if I show signs of reading another one of these, I need somebody to stage an intervention.

The Secret History of Star Wars is an exhaustive — and sometimes exhausting — investigation into the evolution of George Lucas’s Star Wars saga>, from two primary perspectives.

First, it examines Star Wars‘ influences, with an emphasis on Lucas’ tendency to incorporate aspects of properties that he unsuccessfully tries to license. Much has already been made of Star Wars‘ debt to Joseph Campbell, Flash Gordon, Dune, and The Hidden Fortress (and Samurai culture in general). Kaminsiki goes deeper, asserting the influence of E. E. “Doc” Smith’s Lensmen and Edgar Rice Burrough’s swashbuckling sci-fi, among others.

Second, it examines the changes the saga itself has gone through. Practically since the initial release of the first film, Lucas has claimed he had the whole saga worked out. Kaminski demonstrates — citing primary sources like Lucas’ own notes and draft scripts, as well as numerous secondary sources in interviews — that this was true only in the vaguest of terms. He gives particular attention to some of the films’ biggest twists. He makes the claim that when Ben Kenobi said, “a young pupil of mine, Darth Vader . . . betrayed and murdered your father,” in the original film, he was not dissembling, nor speaking metaphorically; in fact he asserts that the merging of “Father Skywalker” and “Darth Vader” happened during the script revision cycle of The Empire Strike Back. Likewise he explains that Luke and Leia did not become brother and sister until Return of the Jedi was written. Kaminski suggests that their siblinghood was introduced explicitly to tie off the loose end of “the other” potential Jedi knight mentioned by Yoda in Empire, and thereby exclude the possibility of sequels. Kaminksi devotes the most time to undermining the revisionist conception of the six films as “The Tragedy of Darth Vader.”

Kaminski provides insight not only into Lucas’ creative process, but his process for getting the films made. I had always assumed that Lucas was financially independent on the strength of Star Wars. (Famously, he had in insanely favorable merchandising deal, since the studio didn’t think the merchandising would be worth anything.) But Kaminski reveals that Lucas more-or-less bet the farm (Skywalker Ranch) on each successive picture.

The Secret History of Star Wars is thoughtfully organized and assembled, but it suffers from redundancy and some clunky phrasing. Kaminski mostly adopts an academic tone, with his sources diligently footnoted, which juxtaposes oddly with his use of geeky terms like “morph” and “port” to describe Lucas’ assorted artistic appropriations. But if you’re the sort of person for whom 600-odd pages about Star Wars sounds like an inducement, you’ll probably overlook its flaws, and — like me — read all the way through the appendices.

I’m enough of a geek myself to point out that Kaminksi makes one minor factual error that I found surprising: the first indication that Star Wars was “Episode IV” was earlier than Kamisnki says — it was first seen in the title crawl for the summer 1978 theatrical re-release, which we fanboys all went to in part for the Empire teaser attached to it.

needs more demons? where is that demon editor?

I liked My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands much better than the other one, partly because it’s raunchier, but mostly there’s something approaching character development. I also thought it was funnier.

needs more demons? I do find it kind of amusing to imagine a smallish demon horde materializing at one of Chelsea’s parties and giving her more significant challenges to overcome than a shortage of Ketel One vodka*. And you know what? I think she might think it was funny, too. That is, if it happened to somebody else.

Hopefully she got some free cases for all the product placement.

“The United States of Huck” was written as introduction to Huckleberry Finn, but it goes beyond insight into Twain’s controversial classic (Saunders in particular has some very interesting thoughts about the novel’s problematic conclusion). It’s also a heartfelt plea for us all to be our best selves, to be Huck Finn rather than Tom Sawyer.

“The Great Divider” also made me want to stand up and cheer. It’s about tension along the Mexican border and the vigilante border patrol groups who call themselves The Minutemen, and it’s written with the verve and snap that characterizes Saunder’s fiction. It’s clear where Saunders’ own sympathies lie, but Saunders doesn’t demonize anyone in the essay — he struggles, as does the reader, with the essential contradictions of the circumstances. If these are basically decent people, why are they doing this? Why are they so much more rational in one-on-one conversation? (I had the fortune to read “The Great Divider” shortly after seeing the stunning documentary 9500 Liberty, which deals with some similar issues, and which I also unhesitatingly recommend).

* and, I’d quibble, two short pieces that are really epistolary fiction

needs more demons? no way.

Klausner also seems to feel compelled to imbue I Don’t Care About Your Band with some sort of social relevance. Sometimes I think she hits on a genuine insight, but scattered throughout are cringe-inducing bits of armchair sociology derived from from observing a small population with an intrinsic selection bias. Few things get my dander up like sweeping generalizations about gender and sex role behavior, e.g., the “only women can be bisexual, men can only be in the process of turning gay” trope, which gets aired here.

* some versions of this pull-quote substitute Cat Power, which would have made me somewhat less likely to read the book.

needs more demons? just a few

(He also ignores some commands about disposition of bodily waste that I can’t locate after a few minutes’ search, but am pretty sure I read at one point.)

There are few interesting aspects to this — he’s doing an experiment on himself to see how following biblical precepts affects his own attitudes. But he also demonstrates the impossibility of following all of the Bible’s instructions. He makes a pretty strong case that as much as some hard-liners decry the “cafeteria” approach to living by the Bible, it’s actually the only viable approach. The questions, he asserts, are of where you draw the lines on one hand between interpretation and literalism, and between continued relevance and outdatedness on the other.

In the course of his year he talks to everyone from Orthodox Jews to right-wing evangelicals and snake handlers. When I wrote about The Guinea Pig Diaries I paid it the somewhat left-handed compliment of being more entertaining than educational. I’ve felt slightly guilty since that I didn’t emphasize the entertainment value by mentioning how many snorts, chuckles, and outright guffaws the book inspired. The Year of Living Biblically also repeatedly made me make noises, and I learned more from it to boot.

I also thought it dragged a bit (although I can’t imagine how I would have felt trying to live through the year it took Jacobs). Jacobs spends most of his time on the Old Testament before switching to the New, and I was distinctly impatient for the change of focus — although toward the end of the Old Testament section I found probably my favorite passage, in which Jacobs discusses the inconstancy of his faith, or lack thereof, with a clarity and honesty that struck me as very uncommon. (It reminded me of one of my favorite David Bazan lyrics, which is in no way a left-handed compliment.)

This book also dovetailed oddly with my own life. One of the most profound and lasting effects on Jacobs is that he find himself continually and deeply grateful for the good things in his life. My experiences in January of 2008 and in May and June of last year changed me so fundamentally that some people have begun to describe me as an optimist. (That notion inspires a lot of cognitive dissonance, but I have to concede I see where they’re coming from.) Jacobs never literally expresses the words that have become my mantra — “every day is a gift” — but I think he might agree, even if he, like me, doesn’t think of the giver in particularly concrete terms.

needs more demons? (for once, not going there)