Monday, November 03, 2008

Bus reading

Idiot city

I inherited The Royal Nonesuch: Or, what will I do when I grow up? from my brother. He reads a lot. Sometimes, I'm not sure how, but he does. Sometimes, he reads good books, like the ones I recommend, and sometimes he reads unbelievably technical and unceasingly empowering books on growing your fortune, living the life you want, and playing the stock market just so. Then he reads books magazines tell him to read, like this one...I think. I honestly have very few positive things to say about this book, so I won't. I found it to be vapid and painfully name-droppy, without emotion, and completely unrelatable. It is tiresomely self-involved without being self-aware and pervaded by a false-sense of entitlement born of past success rather than current merit. But it's about L.A. And it's a memoir of a gifted twenty-something who becomes a prozac-swaddled failing thirty-something. So maybe it sucks, but maybe it's just accurate. What undoubtedly is accurate and good in this book is this single phrase describing L.A. from above:


I felt pleasantly adrift up there in the sky, floating with my forehead pressed against the glass over the sunstruck idiot city.
[An added note on entitlement/pretension/douchebaggery, The Royal Nonesuch is apparently an allusion to Huckleberry Finn, something I wouldn't have known without doing a google image search for the cover art, but something that now knowing makes me dislike the book and the author even more.]