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A review by helpfulsnowman
My Ideal Bookshelf by Thessaly La Force, Thomas Keller, Nancy Pearl, Miranda July, Michael Chabon, Dave Eggers, Chuck Klosterman, Jonathan Lethem, Alice Waters, James Franco, Alex Ross, Patti Smith, David Chang, Maira Kalman, David Sedaris, Nico Muhly, Jennifer Egan, Thurston Moore, George Saunders, Rosanne Cash
2.0
I thought it would be really interesting to see what a bunch of different people would put on their bookshelves. And it was. Sort of. Sometimes.
This book is a fun idea, but there were two big disappoints for me.
The first was that, as with any collection where multiple writers contribute, the writing was really uneven and the reading experience suffers.
Half way through this book, it hit me: Is this why people are always telling me that they don't get into short stories? Is part of the problem that most people are reading collections based around a theme or distinction (Best Southern Women with Yankee Husbands Written Exclusively in October Short Stories) as opposed to a collection by one author?
If you do that:
No. Bad! Bad reader!
I'm not one to say how one should read all that often, but trust me on this, almost every collection by different authors is going to delight and frustrate you in equal measure.
This book, having one page by all different people, was like reading one of these collections.
If you haven't done it, pick a collection by a short story author. One voice comes through, and you'll probably feel differently. I can highly recommend Tunneling to the Center of the Earth by Kevin Wilson, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower, and the Ice at the Bottom of the World by Mark Richard.
Okay, back to the bookshelves.
The biggest surprise? The part I probably enjoyed most?
James Patterson.
Yep, old Mr. Ampersand himself.
I know he gets a mound of shit because he writes what many of us consider garbage. When he even writes it himself. However, given one page and talking about books, the man was entertaining, made me laugh a little, and impressed me. If the assignment was, "Here's a couple hundred words. Use them to convince someone to pursue your work" he would have made the top of my list.
Now, I'm not going to go read any of his stuff because I'm confident that I wouldn't enjoy it much because thrillers don't do a lot for me, and I'm already reading Modelland by Tyra Banks. I can only read one book that I'm hating at a time. But if I hadn't heard of any of these people, I might have considered him near the top.
The other thing is, the other problem I had with the contributors to this book? They basically convinced me that anyone who considers him or herself a designer is kind of a shithead. Oh, and chefs.
Maybe Shitheads is a bit strong. What I mean to say is, their perspective on books is very boring.
What kind of books did most of the designers have? Books about design. What kind of books did the chefs have? Cookbooks. Instructional materials related to their trades.
Now, this sort of makes sense, but what did writers have on their shelves?
Novels. Books that exist as books as opposed to a means of communicating information.
For the most part, the writers didn't seem to feel that instructional, how-to books belonged on their ideal shelves. That made a lot of sense to me. You get good at writing books not by reading about books, but by reading books.
A fun game I played was to flip through this book and see, without looking at the author name, if you could determine whether the person was a writer or not. I went about 90% accuracy. A few editors threw me off, and a couple other creative types were also very impressive in their reading.
The designers were the worst. A lot of them would point out a book and then talk about what an inspiration this or that Swiss guy was. Boring. Then they would expound on their own design philosophy. Double Boring.
It was disappointing, really. To go the other way, me being a book person, if you asked me about my favorite design work, I don't think I would point to book covers right off just because that's the world I'm in. If you asked me about my favorite movies, they wouldn't be ones that are about books just because I deal in books all the time.
I would think that designers would want to draw inspiration from a variety of sources, but instead it seemed like they only wanted to talk about design.
And I'm sure that some of the designers in this book are highly respected and classy and all that horseshit. But I'd probably still take James Patterson's ideal bookshelf over most of theirs.
This book is a fun idea, but there were two big disappoints for me.
The first was that, as with any collection where multiple writers contribute, the writing was really uneven and the reading experience suffers.
Half way through this book, it hit me: Is this why people are always telling me that they don't get into short stories? Is part of the problem that most people are reading collections based around a theme or distinction (Best Southern Women with Yankee Husbands Written Exclusively in October Short Stories) as opposed to a collection by one author?
If you do that:
No. Bad! Bad reader!
I'm not one to say how one should read all that often, but trust me on this, almost every collection by different authors is going to delight and frustrate you in equal measure.
This book, having one page by all different people, was like reading one of these collections.
If you haven't done it, pick a collection by a short story author. One voice comes through, and you'll probably feel differently. I can highly recommend Tunneling to the Center of the Earth by Kevin Wilson, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower, and the Ice at the Bottom of the World by Mark Richard.
Okay, back to the bookshelves.
The biggest surprise? The part I probably enjoyed most?
James Patterson.
Yep, old Mr. Ampersand himself.
I know he gets a mound of shit because he writes what many of us consider garbage. When he even writes it himself. However, given one page and talking about books, the man was entertaining, made me laugh a little, and impressed me. If the assignment was, "Here's a couple hundred words. Use them to convince someone to pursue your work" he would have made the top of my list.
Now, I'm not going to go read any of his stuff because I'm confident that I wouldn't enjoy it much because thrillers don't do a lot for me, and I'm already reading Modelland by Tyra Banks. I can only read one book that I'm hating at a time. But if I hadn't heard of any of these people, I might have considered him near the top.
The other thing is, the other problem I had with the contributors to this book? They basically convinced me that anyone who considers him or herself a designer is kind of a shithead. Oh, and chefs.
Maybe Shitheads is a bit strong. What I mean to say is, their perspective on books is very boring.
What kind of books did most of the designers have? Books about design. What kind of books did the chefs have? Cookbooks. Instructional materials related to their trades.
Now, this sort of makes sense, but what did writers have on their shelves?
Novels. Books that exist as books as opposed to a means of communicating information.
For the most part, the writers didn't seem to feel that instructional, how-to books belonged on their ideal shelves. That made a lot of sense to me. You get good at writing books not by reading about books, but by reading books.
A fun game I played was to flip through this book and see, without looking at the author name, if you could determine whether the person was a writer or not. I went about 90% accuracy. A few editors threw me off, and a couple other creative types were also very impressive in their reading.
The designers were the worst. A lot of them would point out a book and then talk about what an inspiration this or that Swiss guy was. Boring. Then they would expound on their own design philosophy. Double Boring.
It was disappointing, really. To go the other way, me being a book person, if you asked me about my favorite design work, I don't think I would point to book covers right off just because that's the world I'm in. If you asked me about my favorite movies, they wouldn't be ones that are about books just because I deal in books all the time.
I would think that designers would want to draw inspiration from a variety of sources, but instead it seemed like they only wanted to talk about design.
And I'm sure that some of the designers in this book are highly respected and classy and all that horseshit. But I'd probably still take James Patterson's ideal bookshelf over most of theirs.