The Greatest Story Ever Told About A Type-A Obsessive-Compulsive Living The Bible's Teachings Literally Told By A Type-A Obsessive Compulsive Living The Bible's Teachings Literally

A few years ago we had one of our epic debates that as time goes on I'm not sure what was really about, or who took what side, or why it mattered in the first place. Some things I remember well: It happened in a borrowed car on our way down to the shore. I remember it lasting from somewhere in Staten Island to somewhere along the Garden State Parkway. I remember it being very intense. And I distinctly remember registering my extreme disdain for a then-relatively new crop of "Year Of" books in which an earnest protagonist contrives to write a book about doing something idiotic for a finite period of time.

I think the first kind of book in this batch, or at least arguably the first, or at least I will argue it was the first I can think of, is Julie & Julia, which was about a lady making a Julia Child recipe each day for a year. The "Year Of" project that I'm pretty sure started the car debate was No Impact Man, about which the less said the better.

I don't know that I thought much about Year Of projects before we had our great debate, but by the end the debate my feelings had coalesced around a visceral distrust of people doing stupid shit in order to write a book. One, I think the notion that one can simply parachute into a lifestyle for a year is inherently absurd — most of the things you could imagine doing would be superficial stunts. Two, I think I reflexively react against obsessive-compulsive Type-A stunts where the point is the discipline. I don't know or care what happens to people who crave strict boundaries in order to express themselves, but it should instinctively freak people out because it's just not normal. Living without electricity may make for a solid Nightline segment, but the takeaway for most well-adjusted people probably involves turning to one's spouse or significant other and asking him or her whether they'd immediately divorce/break up with you. And then there's the pitiful dancing monkey facet of a book project that revolves around a year's worth of discomfort and/or humiliation. Jesus Christ man, be better than that.

I remembered hearing about The Year of Living Biblically when it came out. The idea seemed interesting enough — following the bible as literally as possible is a decent thought experiment, if only to underscore how absurd and/or logically incoherent following anything literally can be. So the author grows a beard, wears white, follows Old Testament dietary laws, etc., etc. He'll surely get into some pickles. But then there's the issue of having to do something for a year, because simply pointing out screwy bible passages wouldn't be much of a book. Except I'm not totally sure why it needs to be a year, or why it can't be once a month, or why not ten years, other than it's a Year Of book.

In fact the Year Of artifice is kind of a running tension throughout The Year of Living Biblically, mostly when the author visits others who are "immersed" in the world of biblical living. For the author this is all a gonzo journalism project, but for those who he seeks guidance from — people like the Amish, Orthodox Jews or Evangelical Christians — it's their entire life. At the very least it seems silly to derive any sort of wisdom from doing something for just one year. Somewhere north of that is the implicit condescension of the author deigning to do something, but just for a year — and just for a book project. Imagine a book like "My Year As A Baseball Fan." Wouldn't most of us be like, If you want to be a baseball fan, be a fan — don't bother thinking about the idea of baseball fan.

The effect is really like Semester at Sea, that mushy middle ground between a semester abroad and a six-month long cruise vacation: Sort of fun but kind of silly and not particularly rigorous sounding.

But like I said, as a thought experiment, it's not too bad — Living Biblically is more germane to the American cultural discussion than baseball fandom. Biblical living affects political discourse. Not the same for baseball fandom.

So what is it then — besides of course the not insignificant obstacle of simply wanting to hate the Year Of genre — that makes Living Biblically so fucking tedious?

Part of it is that — for me at least — the book lacks an edginess that I think is important in this masochistic endeavor. The thing actually reads like a Nightline segment. The insight after living "biblically" is pat and mushy and right down the center. He sets out to prove the Creationists wrong and ends up appreciating the impulse to live by some sort of credo beyond what most of us apparently default to. Stuff like coming up with dopey ideas for a book project perhaps. It's the kind of book I would give my son, once he's old enough to think about it, and not worry that he would learn any bad behaviors from reading it, except for maybe weird obsessive-compulsive control issues that is.

Part of it is the superficial way the author traverses through his year. Hours or days with different religious people are distilled into a page or two. The journal-like construct of "Day [X]: I did [X, Y and Z]" is not only tedious but also a format ill-suited to a coherent narrative; there's little room to compare and contrast what you've learned or discerned along the way if you're barreling through a year day by day. The daily lessons learned or epiphanies about religion come off as superficial or rushed or pat or all of the above. It also feels like he's being supremely lazy — like he clocked in each day for 500 words and by the end of the year had a book. Nothing makes you want to hate the Year Of genre like the idea that the author literally spent just one year writing it. That's a journal or a blog, not a book.

To that previous point, so much of the humor seems so . . . easy. Or thoughtless. Here is an example from a passage about how the author requested a visit from a Jehovah's Witness, and the Jehovah's Witnesses being skeptical about such a request: "Yes, I'm aware that it doesn't make much sense. It's like volunteering for jury duty or paying to see a Vin Diesel movie." I'm picking on this passage in particular because, for one, it's just not that funny. I mean, it's "funny" in the sense that, sure, jury duty and Vin Diesel movies are two profoundly unfun chores or activities, but there's a laziness in those two examples that seems too obvious to just let slip by (which is hard to do, given that most "good" writing is supposed to slip by or wash over you). It just feels like lazy writing. The kind of quip you might write while doing something else, like listening to your spouse or watching Jeopardy. See? I just did it. It's too simple to write in this format, like shuffling a deck of cards or picking your nose. And when you fall into this rut, it's hard to stop, like or Sudoku or methamphetamines. My point, in part, is that he seems like an engaging guy, but so much of the execution seems so lazy.

That's not to say that there aren't some real insights in Year of Living, it's just that those moments are dimly sketched out and lost in the typing. There's a paragraph on Page 80 that justifies the whole endeavor in a meaningful, understandable way but which is tacked on at the end of Day 47 as almost an afterthought about the meaning of Sukkot when the author feels guilty about not building a proper sukkah:

But that guilt, in turn, is relieved by this epiphany: This holiday is all about living biblically. God, if He exists, is ordering everyone — not just those with a book contract — to travel back in time and try to experience the world of the ancient Middle East. God created "immersion journalism," as my friend calls it. Maybe god approves of my project after all.

Talk about "burying the lede"! That's the introduction right there, not the Dave Barry humor about spending a year growing a beard! Religion is "immersion journalism." That's smart. But the book just seems so cobbled together that an actual personal insight gets lost in it all.

Another part of why Living seems so tedious is how much of a pussy the author comes off at times. The edict to stone sinners, for example, he sort of punts on by tossing a pebble in a grumpy man's general direction. If nothing else, Year Of martyrs are meant to suffer for our sins of wanting to see supposedly intelligent people act like buffoons. And if you're not living up to that end of the bargain, then you're getting one over on all of us who have invested precious time and limited resources on a half-assed book. In other words, you seem like a decent enough guy, but we need a real prick. Another time the author shows kindness to strangers by buying a beverage for a man standing behind him at Starbucks. When the man says that makes him feel uncomfortable, the author gets flustered and basically runs away. We needed him to engage with the man, not scurry out of there; I would scurry out of there; you would scurry out of there. The author is the one who we pay to stay and engage.

(A not-so-small additional point: More than once the author goes off on a tangent about reading some sort of online criticism of his book and feeling upset by it in some way. Usually this in the context of how he's not living "biblically" in the sense that he's vain or something. In addition to being really unbecoming, it's also kind of offensive: Look, people on Amazon spend precious time and resources reading what you have to say. If they don't like it, either don't care or write better. They've taken your body and eaten you up — Christlike! You are now a part, and maybe not an insignificant part of their lives. That's a big responsibility. Instead of pouting that they didn't like something you wrote, give thanks that they somehow included you in their lives. I know you were busy interviewing so many snake handlers and chicken swingers that it was hard to include them all, but I'm somewhat surprised this never occurred to you during any part of those 12 months; maybe if you slowed down a little that point would have been clearer. And then there's the guilt trip — oy vey! — how am I supposed to hate your book when you make such a stink about getting so worked up about criticism?)

But of course one day ABC will cancel Nightline and then there will no longer be a venue to explore Year Of projects. And the meek shall inherit the earth back from the overzealous Type A obsessive-compulsives who reduce all of human existence into an easily digestible tear-off calendar.

If You Have Kids, Prepare To Shed Them Now . . .

So we read Christopher Hitchens' Hitch-22 for book club last month. It was my choice, this being right after Hitchens died, so I used him as a theme (the other possible choices were a Martin Amis book — not this one — and an Ian McEwan book, those writers being two of Hitchens' favorites).

I think it's funny to respond to his writing by saying whether I "liked" it or not — I can imagine him not wanting to respond to writing like it's a pop song you "like" or "don't like." Which is to say, "I liked it." (Or, "What did you think?" "It was good." "Anything else?" "No. It was good.")

Not everyone "liked" it as much — Goober thought he was too pompous and celebrated the fact that he put it down after 400 pages. All of us couldn't believe that he read all the way to page 400 and refused to read the last 22 pages. Goober shrugged, "It felt pretty good, actually."

Maybe it's just because the last seven weeks have been an endless string of sleep-deprived days and our newborn is such a feature of our lives, but I was pretty surprised that Hitchens talked so little about his family. I was convinced he wasn't going to at all, but he sort of addresses it in the fifteenth chapter (not until page 330), when he basically says that he was a shitty father. It's kind of brutal to read him talk about it: "There are days when it gives my inexpressible pain, and I know that such days of remorse also lie in my future." The language sounds like how cancer victim talks about daily pains and aches; it's interesting to think that when he wrote this he was probably living with the cancer that killed him only a year or two later.

You start to wonder about his family because so much of the book focuses on his colleagues — whole chapters about Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie and Edward Said — and nothing about, say, his wife. I don't even know her name — I think it's Carol, but I'm not positive — I don't believe we were ever formally introduced over the course of the 422 pages.

I shouldn't say "colleagues" because Hitchens counted them all as "friends." He had so many friends — Susan Sontag, James Fenton, half of the boldface names listed in the index — that you start to second-guess your own choice in friends. Should I be camping with Charlie Rose? Did I miss out not inviting Nick Kristof to our holiday party? But by the end of the book you don't get a sense that he had friends outside of the supercharged intellectual atmosphere in which he worked.

Sure, all of us have work friends, but something's amiss when you devote more of your memoir to Paul Wolfowitz than your own brother. Nothing against Paul Wolfowitz, but your own brother, you know? Not to mention your wife and daughter — who is still only hazily sketched out — at least I think he has a daughter.

That said, you're probably not reading Christopher Hitchens to hear about his family — which is to say, obviously most people are going to be more curious about Martin Amis getting a handjob than other stuff — but the thing becomes a little strange after a while.

(Post-script Google: So I'm just now seeing this and this, both of which put a lot of his family life in perspective.)

Of course there was an arc to the book — simply stated, Hitchens' "break" with "the Left" and how that happened — and there was a motif he returned to, what he called "keeping two sets of books." And maybe one's kids aren't easily shoehorned into a "two sets of book" motif. So in some ways it's refreshing to read a memoir that's not too "personal," but the feeling you get over the course of the book that there isn't a personal part of Hitchens — I can't believe that's true, or that that's the impression he'd want to leave people. At some point when talking about how the Left lost him, he derides the concept that the "personal is political," but Hitch-22 sort of tweaks that somewhat in that there's no "personal" to speak of. It's at least notable, if not kind of — like I keep saying — strange.

There's something to this book that's painful in parts. The "remorse" about being a bad dad (that's as opposed to "regret," which he thinks should be reserved for something you haven't actually done). The other part is the dramatic irony imbued in the book — you know that he's dying (or in fact dead) while the writer himself had no idea; at the same time, he often talks about his death (and in fact uses it as a lens to open the book). (He addresses his cancer in a preface to the paperback version.) One moment comes when he talks about his dad dying of esophageal cancer, which is the same kind he contracted. You read that and you're kind of like, dude . . .

There is one point in Hitch-22 where the fourth wall breaks down. It comes at the end of the chapter on Iraq, which is one of the issues that set him apart later in his career. As such, it's an obvious thing to write about — people want to know, right? — but it's not until he brings up the story of the guy who volunteered to serve in Iraq in part because of Hitchens' writing where the personal and political intersect. So much of his career seems so suited to debate club — if not an actual debate then topics that don't seem to go beyond the intellectual bubble he mastered — that it's notable when this soldier's death penetrates all that and Hitchens is forced to own up to his role. The moment is pretty devastating (wasn't I just making fun of this word the other day?), and only slightly compromised by his tell-don't-show warning that "if you have tears, prepare to shed them now . . ."

To go back to the kids — there's another part where he talks about how having children sets the stage for your own funeral. I can't actually find the exact part, but the idea is that children are the first inkling of your own mortality. Maybe that's why he didn't want to think about them! I think I understand what he's getting at — Animal made me consider what I see as a sort of through line for my family history. But death? Seems a little severe, no?

Of course, once he said that it bummed me out. It reminds me of a friend back in high school who liked Jim Morrison enough to read his book of poetry. I couldn't abide Jim Morrison's poetry, so I made him show me one poem that didn't read like high school English class. He pointed to the one Jim Morrison wrote about his cock, something about the death of his cock, followed by a short defense of the sex-death simulacrum. And I was just kind of like, "Sex and death? Huh?"

Which is to say, leave it to Hitchens to make me start to see how I'm getting ready to die. Dick.

The Price Of Hunger In The Garden Of Beasts: In Which Three Recent Books Are Lumped Alongside Each Other And Sort Of "Reviewed," Except This Is Not Exactly That

I always liked the type of book review that I think is referred to as an essay review — the kind of critical piece that compares one or more similar or thematically similar books in a way that allows the reviewer to sit above both works in judgement.

There's a great moment in all essay reviews where the reviewer brings the hammer down. It's that moment when a review goes from praising the really wonderful, insightful first book to making you feel badly for the person who had to read the second one. It goes something like this:

The climactic ending of [Insert Title] is as gripping as it is long, as unrelenting as it is buoyant, and as quietly devastating as it is unforgettable.

And then there's [Insert Other Title], which labors to get going, is unenjoyable when you finally get there and ultimately reads like it was written by a committee of monkeys . . .

I would like to do the same thing with Jeffrey Sachs' The Price of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity and Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games. I would also like to throw in Erik Larson's In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin.

I think that I could almost pull this off with the first two. The third would be a stretch, I imagine.

These, I should add, were the last three books we read for book club.

Maybe at the very least I could think of a unifying theme. OK, let's sketch this out . . .

We've read many books in the fantasy/sci-fi/young adult genre (and I understand I'm lazily lumping it all together) and each time I think that I'll finally understand what people like about those kinds of books. And each time I'm disappointed. We've tried some supposedly good ones, too: Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card (October 2007), The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick (June 2008), Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson (May/June 2009), City of Saints and Madmen by Jeff Vandermeer (October 2009) and The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman (January 2011). I feel like I've given it the old college try. (An aside: I finally thought to Google the origin of this phrase; I didn't realize there was an ironic twist to it.)

It's not that I don't like the philosophy or moral underpinnings of these books — on the contrary, they're interesting, or at least interesting enough to build a story around — but maybe too much of the writing is lacking some artistry. Sometimes, as in the case of City of Saints, the fantasy is too unmoored from real life. Sometimes there's a moment in an otherwise perfectly good book that takes me totally out of it, as is the case of the bizarre (no, really bizarre!) sex scene in Snow Crash.

Which is to say, when I started reading Hunger Games, I expected to eventually find something about it that I didn't like. And then that moment never happened. While reading it, I kept thinking that it would make a good movie. I found out later that that is exactly what's going to happen. A friend in book club who couldn't participate that month asked what I thought and I told her. Then I lent her the book.

My only real familiarity with Jeffrey Sachs was through William Easterly, whose The White Man's Burden we read in December 2009. I didn't think I was going to like Sachs' The Price of Civilization but my mind was open. Those who know me would snicker, but I know what I felt and I'm telling you that my mind was open. Even after I started it late in the month, which gave me the opportunity to talk to fellow Club members who reported that the book was tear-your-hair-out galling, I was still open minded about the book.

So then I started reading The Price of Civilization and damn it if the thing didn't come off like an 18-hour-long Bill Moyers episode. It's fine to "polemicize," but reading an academic do it is depressing and hollow; not only simplistic, but cynically so. Maybe he intended to appeal to the mass market, but the bigger sin here is making someone care less, or worse, not at all. Though that in itself is an achievement. I guess.

Civilization is now helping to prop up the baby's "co-sleeper," in the hope that if we angle the crib slightly then the baby will be less likely to spit up. I wish I could say that this was my inspired idea but the truth is that Jen just grabbed a few hardcovers that looked sturdy enough. Now you understand why I don't have any concrete examples of what I disliked (though I do remember one oversimplified explanation of Sun Belt political demographics that made no sense if you stopped to consider that maybe East Coasters move there at least in part because they don't want to pay more taxes, not that they'll bring their tax-happy ways with them — but again, I'm going from memory here).

As for In the Garden of Beasts, it was pretty good. I was hesitant to read another Erik Larson book (we read The Devil in the White City in August 2005) but he's good at pulling you in and getting you interested in stuff — even stuff that you assume you don't care to know any more about. Nazis, for one. In Beasts, he smartly focuses on the one aspect of Nazi Germany that's still interesting, which isn't the pornographic violence but rather the dramatic irony that continues to serve as the best "lesson" of that horrible point in time. And the lens he chooses — an American diplomat — is a smart one for his American audience. It's an interesting quick read, even if it skips around toward the end; it's the kind of popular history that works, as opposed to Sachs' attempt at "popular policy."