the cool table: we meet again

Cool things I discovered while in Ottawa, thanks to my brother and his partner:

1. Ted Leo.
2. A handful of cool, laid-back pubs in the capital.
3. I like Nick Hornby.

I know, you're rolling your eyes at me. You're thinking that anyone who has the patience to read Helen Fielding probably has the patience for High Fidelity. Turns out you are right.

Sometimes I make quick decisions, quick judgements. (Eh? Emma? Okay, I'll stop.) So if a guy at a bar makes a lame joke, or stares at a girl's breasts for too long, I assume he's an idiot. Similarly, I read the first two or three chapters of Hornby's Fever Pitch, and I jumped to a conclusion about his writing in general....

But High Fidelity is really something special. And not because I feel like I'm hanging out with John Cusack, and he's quietly reading to me, or perhaps we are sitting on a couch together and he is listening to utterly cool indy music on his headphones while I read a novel on which a movie he starred in was based.... (Who wouldn't want to hang out with John Cusack? Honestly.)

To be honest, I have little else to say on this topic -- yes, it's written by a man. Yes, it's popular. Yes, Hornby's actually quite a good writer. But it's still fluff. So I'm not going to bore you with a full-out dissection.

I will bother you with some prose pulled from the pages, however:

"What came first -- the music or the misery?.....

"People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody ever worries about kids listening to thousands -- literally thousands -- of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss. The unhappiest people I know, romantically speaking, are the ones who like pop music the most; and I don't know whether pop music has caused this unhappiness, but I do know that they've been listening to the sad songs longer than they've been living the unhappy lives." (p. 25)

*Additional notes: Stay tuned for my giddy, over-the-top, yes-I-clapped-my-hands-all-through-it review of film based on The Jane Austen Book Club. Really. I clapped my hands. Also, I am still reading Blindness. But I was on vacation, you understand.

for the boy

For the first time ever, a boy is picking the next selection for our book club. This is not as big a deal as you might think, as our book club has only met five times in about nine months.

But still. Guys do think differently than girls do. It's really exciting. That's why sometimes we (me, just me) treat the lone boy in our ranks as some sort of circus animal who will do tricks for us (again me). We (I) insist on pausing about half an hour into the discussion and turning on him. "What is the male perspective?" Suddenly, he is thrust into the position of speaking on behalf of men everywhere. (My fault. All mine. No other women in the group are responsible for this.)

Poor guy. Of course, not a lot of guys without English degrees have had to read Persuasion, so really he's not having to speak on behalf of that many people.

Anyway, one way men and women think differently about book club is that women have a tendency to send out the uber-nice "anyone have suggestions?" e-mail. This e-mail is an invitation to passive aggression, since the woman who next hosts book club will just pick what she wants to read, or what she thinks the majority of people will take the time to read. Responses to the e-mail really just serve to stress her out, and make her worry someone might be offended she didn't select their book.

Our man in book club has bypassed this, but to be honest he was unlikely to feel that bizarre guilt anyway.

So here is his discussion of a short list (edited for brevity):

"Catcher in the Rye
My theory behind this one is that it is probably the quintessential masculine book and up until this point the books have leaned toward the girly....
War Reporting for Cowards
OK this book would be different for the group because it is non-fiction, but it also touches on the form of literary non-fiction or new journalism, which would be a good topic of discussion.... but not along our usual vein of what does he mean by this?....
Fever Pitch
Nick Hornby, who wrote High Fidelity and About a Boy, both books I thoroughly enjoy, also wrote Fever Pitch, which I have always meant to read.
Love Monkey
There is a TV show I like that is allegedly based on this book. The show is very smart and amusing and I am working under the assumption the book might also be. This one is fairly low down the shortlist on account of I know nothing about it really, but I am thinking about it mostly out of curiosity.
A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali
I was thinking about this one because it is so tragic and vivid. To the point where it is really hard to read and at the same time hard to put down. It is the kind of book where at the end you just want to blow your brains out or drink heavily or drink heavily and blow your brains out, so we'll see.
I was also thinking about another Stephen King (I am not sure Different Seasons was the best way to open up to him) or a John Grisham book...."

See what I mean? Men and women approach book club in completely different ways. I say this mostly because I would never choose any of these books, so a more accurate statement would be that this man and I approach things very differently.

Except Love Monkey, which of course I'm excited about because the man selecting the books is least excited about it. I'm contrary that way, but I love the description, from one of the reviews, of a man calling his interest in a woman a once-in-a-lifetime thing, like cleaning behind his fridge.