I'm noticing this book because Instapundit did one of his "IN THE MAIL" posts that acknowledge the receipt of a free book but express no opinion. Sending one free book is a frightfully cheap way to buy publicity. I get free books, but I wouldn't post about them unless I took the time to form some kind of opinion about them, and sending me a free book is a frightfully cheap way to buy my time, the time it would take to form an opinion of a book.
But I don't even need to look beyond the author and title of Ron Reagan's "My Father at 100" to form an opinion. It annoys me. I've seen too much — not all that much — TV commentary by Ron Reagan to want to read a book he wrote about the iconic conservative President. Example:
Reagan: My father knew what he stood for, you can agree with it or disagree with it, he knew how -- what he stood for, he could explain what he stood for. He was conversant in domestic and foreign policy -- [Sarah Palin is] neither! She can't explain where she stands on anything!
Geller: Your father would love her, and frankly I don't think you can speak for your father, because you -- you don't even espouse --
Reagan: No, Pam, actually, have you ever met my father, Pam? Pam, did you ever meet my father?... Did you ever meet my father? I'm asking you a simple question. You can't answer that because the answer is no. So why don't you rely on someone who knew him very well to tell you what he would think of Sarah Palin.
Yes, the 100th anniversary of his birth is an occasion, an excuse, but the birthdayness of it also says: twaddle.
Wow. Does that ever resonate with me! I just paid $25+ for a 300+-page book that was an expansion of an article from The Atlantic. I did that for a Bloggingheads diavlog, and — you'll see when it's up — the author scolded me for skimming. Did that open the door for me to scold her for padding? Readers and writers — we all have our tactics and must guard our own interests. You pad. I skim. Or I take a look in the bookstore and put that thing right back on the pile. Unless I'm scheduled for a diavlog. In which case, I tough it out. Up to a point. Then I just scream. On my blog.
• The Way Home by George Pelecanos, a crime thriller based in Washington; • Lush Life by Richard Price, a story of race and class set in New York's Lower East Side; • Tom Friedman's Hot, Flat, and Crowded, on the benefits to America of an environmental revolution; • John Adams by David McCullough; • Plainsong by Kent Haruf, a drama about the life of eight different characters living in a Colorado prairie community.
I never believe Presidents are actually reading the books their people tell us they're reading, so, for me, the only question is what they thought they were saying with these titles and why they thought it was a good idea to say that.
If you could pick a book for Obama to read — actually read — what book would you pick? If he could make you read a book of his choice, what do you think it would be? If you picked political books or history books or economics books, please pick again and be more out there so this late night discussion isn't too boring.
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I'm just noticing that all Obama's books are written by men. Maybe these really are the books he's reading. If it's PR, his PR people have a big blind spot.
ADDED: Didn't everyone who wanted to read that bloated John Adams book already read it? And wasn't Obama supposed to be reading that Tom Friedman book last year?
Friedman’s dumb books full of “I went golfing somewhere in India, reminding me of the Asian pizza I ate at the airport in Dubai” globalization-fellating idiocy are Required Reading in certain middlebrow circles....
[O]nce “going green” became so safely uncontroversial that motherfucking Garfield was eating solar-powered lasagna, it was time for Tom Friedman to incoherently rebuke everything he ever wrote before — about Earth and how for some insane reason he thinks saying it’s “flat” is some deep enigmatic statement of the times rather than, really, just an idiot trying to make up a catch phrase. So, once the carbon-farting global golfer hitched his tortured prose to the Green bandwagon, everybody in every management situation had to act like they read this awful book.
But they didn’t. Nobody read the whole thing. Of course it’s still on Barack Obama’s fake reading list. And there it will stay, year after year, just like back in the 1990s when Dan Quayle comically claimed that he tried (and failed) to read Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince each summer, because that seemed — to Dan Quayle, anyway — like the kind of thing a politician maybe should’ve know about, 20 years ago.
Well, there's some interesting detail in those categories (along with some boring humor — e.g. "a $4 half-soy-half-decaf-latte-with-a-shot-of-pretention").
I found that 7 types of bookstore customer post via an Ezra Klein tweet. Ezra parks himself in the category "Browser."
I think there's an 8th category, into which I'd put myself. "Reminiscer." This is someone who used to hang around bookstores all the time and leave with a pile of miscellaneous books, but now drops in only occasionally, looks around, and remembers when she didn't spent nearly all of her reading time on line. Now, all those book covers look like front pages of websites. She might click on a few — i.e. open them up and read a few lines, maybe even a few pages — and then she contemplates the way she used to feel that she needed to make these blocky objects into personal possessions and proceed through them systematically, front to back. Then she shakes off that reverie and goes somewhere else, somewhere where the WiFi is free.
