This paperback has been SACKED!

I got to yell out "DONE!" last night, launching my newly-finished copy of The Blind Side across the room.

People might try to tell you that you don't need to know anything about football to like this one (and by "people", I mean the back cover of the book), but it sure as hell helps. The true (aka "non-fiction") story of a poor black kid named Michael Oher who was taken in by a wealthy white family and came to be one of the most sought-after left tackles in the nation contains a lot of analysis on how left tackles came to be sought after in the first place. If you don't have a good concept of the weight around names like Walter Jones, Orlando Pace, Lawrence Taylor and Dwight Freeney, a lot of the book is going to go right by you like Chris Doleman.

But if you have the patience to try and understand the game a little more, and especially if you have any kind of understanding of the game, you should read this book. Now. No, no. There's no time for that. Just start it now. The dramatic moments are incredible, the analysis of the value rise of the left tackle is something that should educate even the most die-hard football fan, and the story of how a kid with barely any school, a fractured family and absolutely no money could have such a dramatic life change at fifteen. Very highly recommended.

Last Saturday, my good friend TV was nice enough to show the LSU/Ole Miss game, where I could watch Michael Oher in action. Now, I've seen plenty of football in my time, but I can't claim to be well-versed in what makes a good left tackle, but I tells ya: no LSU defensive player got past Oher on the left side. He was a wall. I didn't watch the whole game, so maybe he's inconsistent, but he was perfectly consistent when I was watching him. I can't wait to see him in the pros.

If you want my copy of the book, talk to Christian. He has first dibs.

Be-Labored

Ever since I shuffled off the shackles of that last job, I've been having great weekends. I don't know if those two things are related, but it feels like they must be, because every night's been filled with activity and a wide variety of friends who keep me thoroughly and constantly entertained.

Labor Day weekend set the bar even higher. Vodka with multiple groups on Friday, a baseball game whose Teddy controversy was shared with some fantastic folks that I see too rarely, dinner last night with The Best Friends™ and also...well, this weekend I got to do something that I haven't done in a long time that I can't tell you about because I don't tell you about those sorts of things, but me not being able to tell you is probably pretty telling. That's all I'll tell about that.

One thing that I did do on Sunday that I can tell you about is the movie I saw on Sunday, The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters. It's a fascinating documentary about the all-time high score of Donkey Kong, and while you'll be tempted by it by the possibility of seeing levels of social awkwardness and nerdiness that defy imagination (and will not be disappointed), what you'll be amazed by is the sheer obsession of everyone involved. Donkey Kong's role in the film is secondary; the focus is on selfishness, arrogance, and pure competition. It's an incredible film.

And for those of you keeping score at home, I just picked up a couple paperbacks that I can't wait to read: Spook by Mary Roach, who also wrote the fascinating and hilarious Stiff, and The Blind Side by Michael Lewis who wrote Money Ball. I'm going to try to read them both simultaneously, one with each eye.

I also made a bet in which I claimed that every single coastal state has a town called Surf City. I will probably lose that bet.

Done!

When I was at the beach last June, I had a fun moment when I finished reading Bringing Down The House. As I finished the last line, I slammed the book shut, yelled out, "DONE!" and launched the book back over my shoulder into the sand.

I would have done the same thing when I finished Harry Potter And The Blair Witch Project just now, but the size of the book combined with being in my own living room would have added up to a level of destruction that I wasn't willing to clean up. So I just closed the book and sat in that feeling of an ending: half contentment, half sadness. Though, because I had just finished the final line to the final Harry Potter book, the sadness was pretty deep.

There's still the movies to look forward to. Judging from the sheer number of times the word "torture" is used, I'm assuming they'll be contacting the directors of Hostel and Saw to make this seventh episode.

Anyway, now that I'm done with Book Seven, I need to discuss it, and I'm still trying to decide if this site is appropriate for it, or if I don't want to burden anyone with having to avoid spoilers, and should just send out an email instead. So readers: are you done with it?

Scary thought: what if Google bought J.K. Rowling?

Citizens! Be warned! There is a phenomenon sweeping the world in a green-and-yellow hardback! It's everywhere! Take cover! Or, well, just notice it. It's hard not to.

Yes, it's Harry Potter official release day. I bought mine and started right into it in an attempt to not have yet another ending of a cultural touchstone ruined for me. And I knew it was a big deal. And I knew that a lot of other people were excited for it.

But I wasn't quite prepared for just how ubiquitous it is. At Kramerbooks, every single person in line ahead of me and behind me was buying a copy. I asked the cashier if he had the SKU number memorized yet and he almost did. This was at noon.

In Rose Park where I went to spend the summery afternoon, the other three people in the spot I was in were reading it. When Weston and I went to Teaism, a woman sitting outside was reading it, and in a quick count, almost half of the people sitting on the patio of the Starbucks next door were reading it, some of them already more than halfway through.

I can understand why people who don't read the books would be a little creeped out by this, but personally, I think it's really exciting to be smack dab in the center of a massive cultural phenomenon. There's very few moments that are quite like this, when something is so pervasive.

So on your Metro ride into work or just walking around town, look out for those covers. They're freaking everywhere.

Done with Everything, I need something

I saw a horrifying thing this morning: I saw that I only have two pages left in A Short History of Nearly Everything. The length of non-fiction books can be tricky to judge because of all the notes and appendices, so while my right hand kept reporting that there was still a hefty amount of pages left, it clearly didn't have the full story. So I'm just about bookless.

Here's where you come in. I need a book recommendation, preferably a page-turning non-fiction book in the same lines of Into Thin Air or Devil In The White City. I'm not at all picky about the subject, but the more I can learn, the better. Fiction is okay, too, but it should be really, really good fiction.

What do you recommend? Beyond recommendations, what are you reading?

The three r's: reading, relaxing, and relaxing some more

I'm going to throw in one of my "Request for Comments" cards, where I shamelessly hit up my readership for thoughts and recommendations:

I need a book for the beach.

This sounds like a simple task at first. But to really find a great, engrossing book that'll take up my days sitting on the porch and keep me entertained after the rest of my family has gone to bed at 10:00? It's a trickier find than you'd think.

Plus, I'm picky about these things. Bad and/or bloated language makes me retch, so that makes me nervous about a lot of fiction, but I get easily distracted, so that keeps me away from a lot of non-fiction books that have fascinating subjects, but with writing so monotonous that I trail off after two sentences and my subject-jumping brain goes off. It's like college all over again.

So what do I like? What's made up some quality beach-reading for me? Ideally, I'd love some really well-written non-fiction. The Devil and the White City and all of Jon Krakauer's books fit that bill perfectly, and if anyone knows of something else in that style, suggest away. I've gotten more into non-fiction lately, because even if it's bad non-fiction, you still get some kind of learning out of it. But bad fiction is almost a complete waste of time.

But...the good fiction is amazing. It's just hard to find. So if anyone knows of a really good book, with a great plot and clever language and nothing with long paragraphs of unnecessary description ("Regina delicately placed her long, graceful, bony, aged, experienced fingers on the hard, white, hot, steaming porcelain of the small, dainty, also-hot, china tea-kettle...", etc), suggest away. I love fiction; I'm just picky about it.

So whatcha got?

You made me remember my dreams

I don't get a chance to be creative that often in my waking life, so it's always a relief when my dream life takes up the slack. I love it when I'll hear a song in a dream and think it's really great only to realize that it wasn't a song that exists. Which means that I wrote it. In my sleep. I'm sure that if I could actually remember these songs that they'd be terrible, but it's still nice to think that I can write decent songs, at least in my sleep.

Last night, sometime during the five hours of sleep that I managed to get, I had a dream where I went to a bookstore in Dupont Circle (which didn't really look like the real Dupont Circle, of course, and the bookstore didn't look like any of the bookstores) where a bubbly, makeup-smeared chick-lit author named Jess O'Neill was giving a reading of her new book Après, which told a story around the conversations that a couple had after sex. I was at this bookstore just by chance, but I was eager to see this author since my little sister had known her in college and hated her for some reason. Instead of a reading, though, the author was doing some exercise where she was going to be free-writing on a subject given to her for fifteen minutes and then would read it out to the crowd of women gathered there to see her.

I woke up angry but impressed. I was angry because it was four o'fucking'clock in the morning and I knew there was no way I would be getting back to sleep. But I was impressed with what I had dreamt. Après, a book around the conversations that a couple have after sex? That's not bad! I mean, it is pretty terrible in a cheesy way, but it's my terrible (I think), and more importantly, a completely realistic premise and title for a chick-lit book.

So with hours until I needed to be anywhere or do anything, I got up while I could still remember it and see if the stuff in my dream was something real I had seen before, but just didn't remember, or was my own creation.

The book checked out, at least on Amazon. No books called Après. Then I googled the author name, and this was really odd: Jess O'Neill is actually a guy, and he went to my college and not my sister's, and I never knew him at all and therefore have no opinion of him. So why was his name somewhere way at the back of my mind, and why did it get translated in my dream as a name used for a heavily made-up, made up author? So weird.

Anyway, I just wanted to give a public thanks to my dream machine. You do good work. I'm a big fan.