Anthony Holden is a British journalist. He has worked on a number of biographies of the British Royal family and world-famous artists. In 1990 he decided he wanted to write a book about being a professional poker player. He did, and he did, publishing Big Deal: A Year as a Professional Poker Player in 1992. Fifteen years later, Holden returned to writing about professional poker and has recently published his follow up book: Bigger Deal: A Year Inside the Poker Boom. Holden wanted to write about the changes poker has undergone since the game has become so popular: The Chris Moneymaker Effect.

Whirl reads most of the poker books in our house. And she was the one who learned about this new book and went looking for it. She tore through it in short order and encouraged me to read it as soon as I could. From the Publishers Weekly review:

Long before poker had achieved today’s stratospheric level of popularity, British writer Holden chronicled the challenges and frustrations of a year on the professional poker circuit, in 1990’s Big Deal. In this enjoyable sequel, he revisits the poker world, playing in card rooms and tournaments in Europe and America, in home games in his native London and online during 2005 and 2006. The result is a rich account of how the game and its players have changed over the 17 years since he tried (and failed) to become a professional poker player. He profiles a range of people, from poker’s living legend Doyle Brunson to the new breed of young professionals, schooled on the Internet and ruthlessly aggressive, and explores the reasons for poker’s recent, unprecedented boom. Holden is particularly good in charting the meteoric rise of online poker (and its ambiguous legal status in the United States). He’s also adept at articulating his fascination with the game: “The thrilling sense of triumph when you sense something that turns out to be right; the disproportionate despair when you’re wrong or the poker gods are against you.”

Kevin Smith likes to talk about himself. His first movie was about himself. I could argue that every movie he has ever made has been about himself in some way. He has maintained a level of communication with his friends, family and fans throughout his career– again I might argue those three categories often blend together for Smith. He likes to talk and will use just about every medium available to him to do so. Movies, lectures, comic books, mail– and the open diary. My Boring-Ass Life: The Uncomfortably Candid Diary of Kevin Smith was born out of an attempt to answer the rather pedestrian question from a fan, “What do you do all day?”

One year and 480 pages later– roughly– and we just may have something of an answer. The book contains entries Smith has written on his blog. It details mundane, daily activities. It chronicles the making of and release of his film Clerks II. And it relates the story of his friend Jason Mewes’ heroin addiction. Candid, earnest and funny in Kevin Smith’s particular style– it is a look at a year in the life of a man I view as quintessential Generation X.

Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story is the third book by Chuck Klosterman. This non-fiction piece was first conceived as a magazine feature about death: death involving rock stars. To this end, Klosterman embarks on “epic” road trip. He wants to visit the death sites of rock stars. Klosterman rents a Ford Taurus– make that a “Ford Tauntaun” and tours the country to stand where 119 rock stars have fallen. Almost all of them unwillingly. If you are familiar with Klosterman’s work, you know that nothing he does is ever simple. Things happen to Chuck Klosterman. Sometimes banal, sometimes bizarre, often neurotic and most of the time quite entertaining.

Another through-line to the book is Klosterman’s attempt to reconcile people, places, things and ideas that he loves with, well, women. Oh, and of course the recreational drug use. Sex, drugs and rock n’ roll. Or cocoapuffs. Take your pick.

I’ve enjoyed a couple of Klosterman’s other books and when selecting something to bring with me while I did networking support for coverage of the two political conventions I picked this one up. I don’t think I’ll be disappointed. Just listen to the back cover:

For 6557 miles, Chuck Klosterman thought about dying. He drove a rental car from new York to Rhode Island to Georgia to Mississippi to Iowa to Minneapolis to Fargo to Seattle, and he chased death and rock ‘n’ roll all the way. Over the span of twenty-one days, Chuck had three relationships end– one by choice, one by chance, and one by exhaustion. He snorted cocaine in a graveyard. he walked a half-mile through a bean field. A man in Dickinson, North Dakota explained to him why we have fewer windmills than we used to. Chuck listened to the KISS solo albums and the Rod Stewart box set. At one point, poisonous snakes became involved. The road is hard. From the Chelsea Hotel to the swampland where Lynyrd Skynyrd’s plane went down to the site where Kurt Cobain blew his head off, Chuck explored every brand of rock-star demise. He wanted to know why the greatest career move any musician can make is to stop breathing … and what that means for the rest of us.

I enjoyed Survivor so much that when I was at the bookstore looking for something to take along with me on my business trip at the end of this month I picked up another novel by Chuck Palahniuk. This time I picked up Choke. Choke is another example of transgressive fiction. Transgressive fiction follows the premise that knowledge is to be found at the edge of experience and that the body is the site for gaining knowledge. Victor Mancini serves as protagonist by way of being a delightfully degenerate grifter. Not just for money– the major crux of his con being the reason for the book’s title– but sex and drugs and happiness as well.

From the back cover:

Victor Mancini, a medical-school dropout, is an antihero for our deranged times. Needing to pay elder care for his mother, Victor has devised an ingenious scam: he pretends to choke on pieces of food while dining in upscale restaurants. He then allows himself to be “saved” by fellow patrons who, feeling responsible for Victor’s life, go on to send checks to support him. When he’s not pulling this stunt, Victor cruises sexual addiction recovery workshops for action, visits his addled mom, and spends his days working at a colonial theme park. His creator, Chuck Palahniuk, is the visionary we need and the satirist we deserve.

It has been over twenty years since I read the Sprawl trilogy by William Gibson. Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive— these combined with the short stories in Burning Chrome to form the basis of my first opinions of cyberpunk literature. Now, twenty-plus years later I am working for a large corporation building networks and recovering from a brain injury. Granted, the injury did not come from jabbing a plug into my skull to try and communicate with Wintermute.

While browsing at the bookstore last week, I ran across the paperback edition of William Gibson’s latest novel, Spook Country. I have not read any of the novels Gibson published between the Sprawl trilogy and now with the exception of The Difference Engine. It was my disappointment with that book that dissuaded me from trying again. Spook Country intrigued me in the idea that it was no a science-fiction novel, but a thriller set in modern day: a modern day at least hinted at early in Gibson’s career.

In 1990 I interviewed Dan Simmons. Cyberpunk was on its way out as a genre. I didn’t know that, but Simmons did. Nonetheless, Simmons was a gentleman and indulged a naive sophomore a few questions about the particular genre. While we were talking, Simmons related a story about William Gibson that has stuck with me. Simmons asked Gibson over dinner about his foremost experience of futureshock. Gibson answered, “Well two weeks ago I was in Tokyo and I got lost. I got off the train, the metro, in the wrong part of Tokyo, which was about thirty miles from the right part of Tokyo. And here I am wandering at 3 a.m. down some quiet street, bathed in neon and rain. And I come across a street corner dispenser of liter bottles of scotch. And the thing is humming and talking to itself in Japanese.”

And that is what I appreciate about Gibson. His critics are ruthless as they rant about his inability to present a compelling psychology, or to answer any big questions about the world in which we live. I think that misses the point. But what I like is that almost myopic view that defines the trend of intense specialization and its inevitable destination: vast swaths of blank ignorance. When he’s on, there’s nothing quite like that tiny, intensely personal mirror he can hold up.

I’m hoping Spook Country follows that trend.

Survivor is the second novel by Chuck Palahniuk. You may recognize the author’s name from his first novel, Fight Club. Like the first novel, Survivor satirizes contemporary commercial culture. The setup for the story is obscure: the protagonist has commandeered a Boeing 747, emptied it of all its passengers, and flies it randomly until it runs out of fuel and crashes. The protagonist does this in order to tell his life story into the “black box” flight recorder.

From the back cover:

Tender Branson– last surviving member of the so-called Creedish Death Cult- is dictating his life story into the flight recorder of Flight 2039, cruising on autopilot at 39000 feet somewhere over the Pacific Ocean. He is all alone in the airplane, which will crash shortly into the vast Australian outback. but before it does he will unfold the tale of his journey from an obedient Creedish child and humble domestic servant to an ultra-buffed, steroid- and collagen-packed media messiah.

Unpredictable and unforgettable, Survivor is Chuck Palahniuk at his deadpan peak: a mesmerizing, unnerving, and hilarious satire on the wages of fame and the bedrock lunacy of the modern world.

Bookworm‘s Michael Silverblatt defines this genre of writing as transgressive fiction. This literary genre graphically explores taboo subjects– drugs, sex, violence, incest, pedophilia, crime– and dysfunctional family relationships with the underlying premise that knowledge is to be found at the edge of experience and that the body is the site for gaining knowledge: “Subversive, avant-garde, bleak, pornographic — and these are compliments.” With that definition I am reminded of a number of books and authors I have enjoyed over the years: Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, Girlfriend in a Coma and Generation X by Douglas Coupland, Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille, Lolita and Ada by Vladimir Nabokov. That Palahniuk’s writing style was turned on by the aesthetic he heard in punk bands like the Germs and Generation X, and he admires the works of Shirley Jackson and Stephen King— these bits do not surprise me. They excite me. I look forward to reading this book all the more for learning them.

I think I’m going to take this book on the plane with me to Colorado, tomorrow. Somehow, that just seems right.

Some time in May I ran across a description of this book and wrote down the name as something I might be interested in reading. When I read the jacket cover to Whirl she responded that it did not sound like my typical choice in books. I’m not exactly sure how to take that. Is that a good thing that I’m branching out into a different style of writing? Is that a bad thing that my choices are rather predictable? What does that say about me, exactly. I believe choices and their consequences are fundamental elements to the development of personality and I believe that one of the benefits of reading is that it allows us to hold up a mirror to ourselves to judge the effects of our choices.

It is with those sorts of questions at the back of my mind that I have begun to read Will Lavender‘s first novel: a psychological thriller set in a small liberal arts college in rural Indiana. I have some familiarity with the small liberal arts colleges of rural Indiana. I graduated from one of those. I also have some familiarity with puzzles. I married one of those. Or rather, my child bride has a passion for solving puzzles and logic problems.

Just the superficial clues about the book and the setting I find intriguing. The title itself is a bit of a mystery, particularly coupled with the statue of statue of Stanley Milgram in the middle of the Winchester University campus. Stanley Milgram was a psychologist. The Milgram experiments demonstrated the average individual’s willingness to subject others to painful electric shocks when ordered to do so by someone identified as an authority figure.

So we have logic and philosophy, college, murder, mayhem and Man’s inhumanity to Man. Sounds like an interesting time to me. Oh, and for those of you wondering what the text on the cover reads, here it is:

When the students in Winchester University’s Logic and Reasoning 204 arrive for their first day of class, they are greeted not with a syllabus or texts, but with a startling assignment from Professor Williams: Find a hypothetical missing girl named Polly. If after being given a series of clues and details the class has not found her before the end of the term in six weeks, she will be murdered.

At first the students are as intrigued by the premise of their puzzle as they are wary of the strange and slightly creepy Professor Williams. But as they delve deeper into the mystery, they begin to wonder: Is the Polly story simply a logic exercise, designed to teach them rational thinking skills, or could it be something more sinister and dangerous? The mystery soon takes over the lives of three students as they find disturbing connections between Polly and themselves. Characters that were supposedly fictitious begin to emerge in reality. Soon, the boundary between the classroom assignment and the real world becomes blurred—and the students wonder if it is their own lives they are being asked to save.

I decided to return to the classics of science fiction. I have read science fiction for a number of years but there are some standbys that I missed the first time through. Most noticeable on the list of works I missed on the first go is Isaac Asimov‘s Foundation trilogy: Foundation, Foundation and Empire, and Second Foundation. Alright. That is not entirely true. I did not miss it entirely. I attempted to read Foundation when I was eleven. I remember it being promoted as “the most important work of modern science fiction.” The Foundation series collection of novels and short stories won a special one-time-only Hugo Award for “Best All-Time Series” in 1966.

But here is the thing-the thing that I could not get past at the wise age of eleven. The premise of the series is the fall and renaissance of a galactic empire of astounding scale. Quadrillions of people scattered across tens of thousands of worlds, the plot moves forward at a pace of approximately a hundred years per chapter. The characters I just met in the last chapter are all dead at the beginning of the next. Asimov’s humans do not live much past eighty. But I wanted a hero! I wanted someone who was there from the beginning and would ride off into the sunset at the close of the last page-to return in the next sequel. This business with the main characters dying every chapter just would not do.

So, after about eighty pages it was out with Hari Seldon and in with John Carter. John Carter and the princesses, the gods, the warlords, the chessmen, the master minds, and the swordsmen of Mars. Edgar Rice Burroughs knew how to tell a story for young boys! Because what I wanted was pulp fiction not this psychohistorical drama played out over a thousand years. Besides, the editions I read all included fantastic covers illustrated by Michael Whelan. I remember those covers, alone, were worth the price of admission.

So it is more than twenty-five years later. Asimov wrote four more books in the series: two sequels and two prequels. In addition he worked to tie in his Robot series and his Empire series into the same fictional world. After Asimov’s death other science fiction authors added an additional six books to the whole endeavor. I decided that I owed it to myself to read the original trilogy all the way through.

And that is exactly what I have set out to do. It is amazing what a little personal history can do for your perspective.

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