The Useless Books

I had an idea a few months ago to start a collection of books that will one day be pointless. It was inspired by a conversation with my friend over at The Sedentary Vagabond about Y2K. I remember as early as 1998, looking at a table of books in Glastonbury, England during my semester abroad, and seeing a treatise on this terrible, looming apocalypse of Y2K that everyone was afraid to talk about. I didn't buy it, but less than six months later, the general tone of the book would have become obsolete, as everyone was talking about it by then.

It spawned many, many successors. By 1999, Barnes and Noble was offering entire tables of Y2K books. You could read about any aspect of the coming disaster: how it happened, how to prepare for life afterwards, how it could be averted, how to avoid similar catastrophes, should we survive this one. Obviously, it didn't come true. But someone worked hard on all of those books. What became of them?

I wondered that anew the week Barack Obama produced the original copy of his birth certificate. I happened to be in Barnes and Noble again, and saw a hardcover copy of a book called something like "Where's the Birth Certificate?" on the new release table. Unfortunate timing, though I felt less sorry for the author once I learned that he was behind the Swift Boat book, too.

I can't help but feel a little sorry for the authors of all of these books that are current now, but will soon fall out of favor. Those who write books like the 300-page guide on finding information on the internet (c. 1997) that I saw at my library in Central New York, at least know that they are not necessarily writing for the ages. But I feel bad for those who spent a lot of time formulating and researching a thesis, only to be entirely off-base with it.

Apparently I'm not the only one who does. I checked out one of my favorite book humor websites, Awful Library Books, and they too have a white elephant book featured in a recent entry.

Bliss Incorporated: One Perfect Day

Though Mr. Library Diva isn't a big reader, he usually enjoys hearing about whatever I'm reading. During the course of reading "One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding" by Rebecca Mead, though, he didn't seem to want to hear about it. I found out why a week later: he asked me to marry him, and admitted that anything wedding-related had been making him really nervous!

So, since I will soon be in the throes of wedding planning myself, I was glad to have read this book, depressing as it is. I had the feeling it would be, just didn't realize how depressing. Its central thesis is that as the symbolism of a wedding has eroded, the weddings themselves have gotten bigger and bigger and more out of control. I guess Mr. Library Diva and I are the perfect example of how its symbolism has eroded. We're both in our 30s and have been out of our parents' homes for a while (no transition to adulthood here). We've lived together for four years, so our lives together have already begun in a very real sense. And without being too graphic, let's just say that if asked what my main concerns about marriage were, I wouldn't answer "adjusting sexually," which was the top concern cited by brides-to-be in the 1940s.

So it is kind of a depressing book, but it's a fascinating book, too. Mead runs down trends in weddings and dissects the (often surprisingly recent) origins of things we believe to be "tradition". For example, it was likely that your great-grandmother didn't receive a diamond from your great-grandpa, unless he was a cutting edge kind of guy. That concept was introduced in the 1920s. The unity candles started to be seen in the 1970s. The popular "Apache wedding prayer" is actually from a 1950s Western film.

She also takes a look at how things are sold. We see the cynical, unflattering portrait of brides-to-be and their parents painted by the wedding industry: easily manipulated saps who will buy anything with minimal convincing that it's essential to make the day more special. Videographers quote one client who said that she feels watching her wedding video will help her marriage in the future, should she and her husband hit rough waters. Wedding planner trainers encourage the planners they're teaching to offer free "plan your own wedding" seminars to scare brides with how much work it is to get everything right. One wedding expert compared a bride to a "drunken sailor: everyone's trying to get at her."

She travels all over in the course of the book: to a wedding dress factory in China, to Las Vegas, to Sandals resort, to a small church in Kentucky or Tennessee that is trying to market itself as a wedding destination, through the merchants participating in Bride Magazine's Wedding March on Madison, to conferences of videographers and wedding professional associations, to a seminar for young women who want to be wedding planners. She meets a woman who planned her friend's wedding on a $200 budget. She talks with a wedding minister who has an arsenal of several hundred services, whether you want Orthodox Jew or Wiccan. She interviews the man behind David's Bridals, and a woman who is a giant in the wedding industry and has her own line of champagne flutes, ringbearer pillows, and the like.

I'd definitely say this book is a must-read for anyone who's starting the wedding planning process. She writes all of this in an engaging way, and allows the reader to draw many of their own conclusions without totally failing at providing analysis.

TV Obsession: American Horror Story-

I have never really been much of a television person. There was a two-year stretch where I didn't have cable at all (and may be heading back there if Time Warner keeps raising its rates). There are things I'll watch when I catch them, like "Scrubs," "Daily Show," "Colbert Report," "Keeping up with the Kardashians," "Real Housewives of Atlanta," etc. But for the most part, I'm not into it and generally just sit there when people talk about television at work.

Until I started watching "American Horror Story." I caught the first 15 minutes of the third episode a few weeks ago, and it just wouldn't let go. I've seen most of the rest of them since then. For the first time in years, I actually planned to watch the newest episode last week. I'm obsessed. I check in on FX regularly to see if "American Horror Story" will be on, and I hate all of their other programming for not being "American Horror Story". In fact, I hate everyone's programming for not being "American Horror Story."

The show is extremely weird in a lot of ways. The difficulty in understanding what's going on is what's hooked a great many of its fans. "American Horror Story" concerns the Harmon family, Vivian, Ben and Violet. Vivian had a late-term miscarriage and Ben had an affair approximately a year before the show begins. To start over as a couple, they move to a suspiciously cheap mansion in California. Turns out, it's so cheap because it's extremely haunted. A weird supporting cast of characters make their appearances in the show, at least some of whom are most likely dead (debate rages online about this, and it's never spelled out).

Each episode, you get a little more backstory about the house and what happened there. It was built by a doctor and his socialite wife in the 1920s. The doctor was a drug addict with a "Dr. Frankenstein complex" who became an abortionist to support the family. His own child was kidnapped and murdered in revenge, and he "did things" to the body. Jessica Lange, the strange next-door neighbor, lived in the house at one point, and shot her maid and husband when she caught the latter raping the former. We see the maid again, sometimes she's young and hot, and other times she's old and has a cloudy eye where she got shot.

A man named Larry was recently released from prison because he torched the house with his family and himself in it, and he has only half a head of hair and burns over 70 percent of his body. Two boys, often referred to as the Weasley twins because they look exactly like them, broke into the house during the pilot, smashed everything and got savaged by a monster in the basement. There were murdered nurses, apparently (this was in the episode I still haven't seen). Most recently, there was a gay couple who died in a murder-suicide.

It's a strange show, but it sucks you in, determined to keep watching until you figure it out. As other people have noted elsewhere, better, the show also deals in more mundane horrors. Adultery. Fertility problems. Getting swindled by your investor, and trapped somehwere you don't want to be by a down economy and depressed real estate market. Bullying, teenage mental illness, and the worries that your own child will go astray and you won't even be aware. It all makes it pretty compelling. Wednesdays at 10 p.m. on FX. Try some if you dare.

The One I Wanted to Hate

Whenever I'm working late, covering a government meeting of some sort, Mr. Library Diva spends his evening making fishsticks for dinner and renting a Redbox movie. But he doesn't just choose something I wouldn't want to see. He chooses something NO ONE would want to see. Typically, they are smaller-budget knockoffs of a big-budget sci-fi/action or fantasy/action film. WHen I ask him how it was, there's always a note of surprise in his voice when he says it was terrible. At first, I used to try and understand the impilse, and ask him what precisely about the movie made him think it would even be worth $1 to rent? Then I gave up. Then, I checked out "The Baby PLanner," and I thought I understood.

I fully expected this book by Josie Brown to be dreadful. It had all the hallmarks of it, certainly. Any "baby planner," I figured, would by definition be dealing with irritating, whiny clients who never learned to distinguish between a real problem and one they made up. Furthermore, the baby planner in this book (in a refreshing twist) is in her 30s and wants a baby herself SO BAD, while her husband waffles and her sisters reproduce like Xerox machines. And yet, I totally did the Redbox thing: "OMG, this book looks so shit...I'm getting it, I'm totally checking this one out."

And it was actually a pretty enjoyable read. Brown is a clever writer, and dispatched my main objections early on. Katie, the "baby planner" heroine, fell into the job after her position at a consumer safety agency was lost to budget cuts. A mom-to-be sees her helping her own sister figure out which cribs are the best, asks how much she charges, and she's in business. Two of her early clients genuinely need her help: one has suffered several miscarriages and is on total bed rest and literally CAN'T do any of her own baby planning, and the other lost his wife in childbirth and is now trying to solo-care for their child while his company is getting ready to go public. See, these people NEED Katie!

Katie's husband is also -- how to say this politely? -- a douchebag. There are some clues to this early on, so I'm not exactly revealing anything shocking, and he only gets worse as the story rolls on. Her birth-control sabotaging and his stonewalling are less about a potential baby than a marriage. This adds a lot of interest to the story, and his opposition to parenthood comes from a very different place than the stereotypical "I like my freeeeeeedom!" sentiment. The tension between them culminates in The Worst Day Ever for Katie, which has a twist you spot several miles down the road, and one you're very unlikely to guess at, ever.

Katie's very likeable, which helps keep the whole "baby planner" notion palatable. Most of her clients are fairly sympathetic as well, and the unsympathetic ones are funny. It helps that she herself doesn't take the notion super-seriously, either. It's her business, and she clearly gets satisfaction out of it, but doesn't pretend that she's saving the world or anything. She doesn't make it more than what it is. As surprised as I am to say this, I enjoyed this book a lot. No, it's certainly not a tale for the ages, but it's a fun read.

Telling Herstory

Even when I signed the papers to become a women's studies minor, I despised stupid cliches like "herstory". I even hated how the feminist group was called Center for Womyn's Concerns. It made us look unnecessarily angry, when we mostly passed out condoms, and sponsored speakers with an "admission charge" of personal items for the battered women's (sorry, womyn's) shelter.

But "The Girls Who Went Away" is an important piece of women's history that hasn't been examined much. During the 1950s and 1960s, a solution was imposed on the thousands of teenage girls who got knocked up: have them stay with a "sick aunt" at a home for unwed mothers, put their baby out for adoption, and then return to the community, with the secret kept. Many kept the secret for the rest of their lives.

Ann Fessler interviewed women who were "the girls that went away". Their stories are interspersed with a comprehensive look at what led to the rise of the homes for unwed mothers as a way of dealing with teenage pregnancy; what life at one of these homes was like; what drove the demand for adoptable white babies; and the lasting effects on everyone.

It's a very sad book. One of the first things that jumps out at a reader is how much the women in the book fail to conform to any stereotype about unwed mothers. They weren't all poor, or even mostly poor. They weren't all promiscuous: many got pregnant during their first time having sex, and others got pregnant by their boyfriends. And most of them wanted very much to keep their babies, but weren't allowed to.

That part was also very depressing, and what messed with the mothers the most. One woman compared the psychological pressures in the home for unwed mothers to those exerted on a soldier in basic training, explaining that they broke you down to rebuild you into what they wanted, a woman who would give up her child. They were reminded repeatedly how irresponsible they'd been, how much their stay was costing their parents, and how much better off their child would be with a "decent" family. Almost no one resisted. When they were back to their old lives, though, they were left to wonder why not.

Another notable thing about the book was how shockingly restricted information about sex and contraceptives were, so very recently. One woman said she wasn't worried about pregnancy, because she knew that pregnancy was for married women, so since she wasn't married, didn't think it'd be a problem. Another woman asked her mother how the baby was supposed to come out of her stomach. Condoms were kept behind the counter at pharmacies, and their use wasn't encouraged. It wasn't until 1965, with the Supreme Court case of Griswold vs. Connecticut, that some state laws banning the use of contraceptives were struck down. It wasn't until 1972 that that right was extended to everyone, not just married couples.

This book is compelling, important, and destined to become a classic. It's a powerful reminder, too, of how far women have come. Read it, and you'll have another reason to respect your mother's generation.

Two new from Jennifer Weiner

I've been thinking for the past hour about where to start with tonight's post. Now that I'm writing it, I'm still no closer to an answer. I read so many books this summer and fall that it's hard to figure out where to start.

But I settled on the two Jennifer Weiner books I read recently, "Fly Away Home" and "Then Came You". These are her eighth and ninth books. I've mentioned before some of the things I like about her books: they're funny, entertaining stories about "the rest of us", without the extensive materialism that plagues so many books aimed at women (we don't ALL live to shop, you know...)

Both are present in her latest two books, although I liked "Then Came You" much more than "Fly Away Home." Although she says "Fly Away Home" wasn't inspired by a particular event, it had a vague, ripped-from-the-headlines feel, heightened by the unfortunate coincidence that Weiner shares a last name with a recent philandering politician. That's the subject matter of this book: what happens to the wife and two adult daughters of a respected senator after his affair with a girl young enough to be a daughter herself is revealed.

I hate to say it, but it was kind of dull. The characters felt rather stock: the kooky, screwed-up youngest fresh from rehab, her love interest, the uptight, little-miss-perfect-with-a-secret older daughter, her schlubby husband, and the wife who's repressed her own personality for a very long time in service of her husband. In fact, I bet you can guess a few key things about the plot just from the character descriptions here (what do you suppose the older daughter's "secret" is?). It wasn't bad overall, but not her best one.

Certainly not as good as "Then Came You." This book deals with the subjects of surrogacy and egg donation. It's told from several points of view. Julie, the egg donor, is a college student who sells her eggs to fund rehab treatments for her father, a depressive who lost everything when he turned to drugs and alcohol. Annie struggles to stretch her husband's small military salary and becomes a surrogate mother. She's carrying the baby of India, the new wife of a New York City financier. But his daughter Bettina doesn't trust India one bit, and even has her investigated. Each of these women have their own chapters in the book, and it's interesting to see how the story weaves together and how the characters develop.

Julie's goes in a fairly surprising direction. India, it turns out, is hiding a sad past behind her face lift and fake first name. Bettina and Annie are both struggling with their socioeconomic status: Annie has everything she ever wanted but enough money to allow her to live a decent life, and Bettina is so worried about being seen as spoiled or entitled that she overcompensates. The baby that Annie's carrying, along with an unexpected tragedy, brings everyone together. In fact, I'd say this is one of her better books.

What's this? A blog post?

You might question the wisdom of someone who hasn't blogged since July doing NaBloPoMo. Or you might not question it at all. You might forget about it in five minutes, the way you forget about the schemes of that one cousin or friend of a friend who's totally moving to Vegas next month, or developing his own video game, or going back to college and this time I even have an application, but whose commitment to those things has never lasted beyond boring people at parties.

So why'd I quit? Why'd I leave you guys dangling with "The Women of Westeros, Part I" back on July 13, nary to return until all the leaves were gone? It was simple. I became rather convinced that there weren't any of "you guys" out there reading this. The longer I was away, the more out of the blogging habit I got. I write about four articles a week for people who do actually read them, and I get paid a princely sum for it (not like Prince Charles...more like a four-year-old boy who is Prince of Bedroomia). So, writing at night seemed to pull me less and less.

But why'd I return? That's also pretty simple: I was asked to. I'd like to flatter myself and pretend that my gmail account was overwhelmed during my absence and I finally decided that it would be easier to write blog posts than respond to the thousands of emails a day about how much I'm missed. But I was asked to return by a friend, who's doing NaBloPoMo and wanted company. She's an awesome writer and an awesome person, and I know how important support is for NaBloPoMo, especially around mid-month. So check her out at thesedentaryvagabond.wordpress.com.

And keep visiting me during the month of November. If you've read this far, you're awesome too. I'm looking forward to getting back into this, and I'd love feedback on what I can do to make the blog better. I certainly have lots of good material from the past few months!